Bayonetta vs the bible: what can teach us more about perversion?

Normally there’s a process to all this, some kind of brainstorm occurs. Yet all i have to work with today is a light drizzle. Call that a peak behind the curtain if you will. I however will call it what it is, a stalling tactic while i try to think up some crumb or otherwise underwhelming morsel to moan about… how about bayonetta? I mean i haven’t actually finished it but that hasn’t stopped be from forming judgements about my own life to this point.

The thing is there is some baggage about the portrayal of women from last time, and this game is probably the one to use as a case study in video games (bear with me here). There are some very articulate people that make a lot of points explaining the complexities of women’s portals that are often insightful to the native view, there is also a lot of inarticulate shouting that is somehow less coherent than I. Note how i haven’t ascribed these characteristics to any side of the debate and yet you're still decided my rough position and whom i would label with descriptors.

The easy thing to do would be to disavow the debate, or wade into it so cack handedly as to piss all sides off with my misconstruing the points being made; but, and i feel this is the true master stroke here. i could spend half my review discussing the topic but only in an entirely facile approach to the issue in what i imagine to be a fairly dry read for a punchline that is too weak to justify the investment, leading to one's ultimate dejection and isolation from the text therein as the simple accessible lexicon is swapped out for a more alien thickset vocabulary to drive the hitherto prose…

‘Live and let die’ was the title song for the eponymous james bond film of the same name, moonraker. Heavy drum motifs and a accelerated instrumentals are played off against slower more violin centred sequences, the latter corresponding to easy going optimistic past and the heavier, faster sections used as a representative of the confusing and ethically murky present. The change of one's own beliefs from live and let live, to live and let die. Paul mccartney himself having recently taken up piracy on the high seas could be a literialsation of the transformation. Do anything for long enough and you’ll have the niggling urge to address the complexity of more serious aspects of the topic even if your forat forbids you to do so. Meaning one must mature and incorporate more complex elements into the repertoire of revert to a fundematist view in a total rejection of this call.

After much soul searching i have found a truly satisfying answer: No one cares about what i have to say. My major problem when playing the game was the looming fear someone would walk in on me playing the game, and immediately judge me, an anxiety made manifest in my long and dreary paragraphs above. I sat watching a tightly clad dominatrix figure beat her way through hordes of enemies while dancing as if on a stripper pole.

The only thing is i’ve seen enough explicit, that is pornographic, material before that the titillation of the game itself is mild. The real perversion is the knowledge i’m engaging wholly unironically with questionable media and finding that complication exciting. The act of debasing my own rather perfect morality an antecedence to the possibility of further taboo acts. Recognising the problematic aspects that leak into one's sexuality as being a source of confusion; Frankly that's quite hawt.

Anyone trying to make it okay is therefor trying to kill my boner in service of their own boners, meta rhymes with better and that's what my boner is. A more self aware boner, a boner that refuses the simple basal pleasures as an end unto themselves and seeks to build upon them to reach new heights. Mine is the inevitable march of progress, a tower of babylon. Would the violence in game of thrones be better if we didn’t feel for those being slain? No of course a that’s rhetorical question, why would you answer it knowing i just did right now by writing this. Plato took the high road on this and thought that by not playing bayotta we’d ourselves not come to view women as titninjas in the first place but plato was building society from the ground up. Working with what we have it’s better to try and get off on the fact that what we’re doing, while not explicitly wrong, is questionable like watching a schlocky horror flick, or a rocky horror pic. To become a pervert and getting off on moral complexity, to live and let die, is the calling of the socially conscious gamer. 

7/10 - made my fingers sore... from button mashing.

Mount and blade: True leadership

The quality of leadership. In a recent speech given by the prime minister of the united kingdom she said the following, “When the global rules and standards that keep us safe come under threat we must take a stand and defend them,” all the while ignoring the legislative and international bodies that set those standards to begin with. Leadership so it would seem is not a clear cut thing. You either run out of things to say quickly or keep speaking long enough to see yourself referencing the dark knight.

What does this have to do with a video game review? I hear you ask. Well before the thermonuclear biological gas attack turns our fused flesh into the a hybrid eldritch abomination i figured i should get around to talking about the best game. Mount and blade: warband is a cultural zenith towering over swaths of mediocrity and filth that make up most video games. It is said that ninety percent of an medium is trash, if that is so then it is the one percent that uses an offshore hedge fund to dodge tax while bloating the price of pharmaceuticals to justify it’s ownership of resources far beyond its own need or want. bit of a mixed metaphor there.

You play as a wanderlust stricken merchant taking up arms to form your own warband and ascend to the kingship of swadia. Alternatively you could play as number of other people, with different goals working for a other nations but then again why would you? swadian cavalry will make their enemies eat shit as they temple their skulls into their equine companions leavings. They are death on the battlefield. 

The game cycles between you moving about the a wide expansive world map, and the battlefield evercetions that take place along the way. The former involves: doing business, talking to people who want you to do busy work for them so you can plough their daughters, like the raiders do to the fiefdoms that you so sorely covert. Yeah that does sound problematic but i’ll come back to that point…

Right away. The game is patriarchal, as was medieval Europe. You can play as a women and at once you’ll be sneered at, denied ownership of land and held to higher standards than your contemporaries. The game’s world is unabashedly sexist towards you, trying to push you into marriage in order to gain land or favour in court, the achievements conversely are often exclusive to a female character incentivizing play. This game is one of the first that made me truly empathise with the world's own social injustice as i knew none of this going in and learnt gradually through play that everyone only valued me based on my cooter’s potential to reinforce blood ties.

Right, i was going to talk about the battles, this isn’t some total war nonsense where you direct the battle from on high, you’re on the ground often leading the charge from horseback while shouting orders and trying not to gain a new orifice at the hands of an enemy polearm. Depending on how you level your character up these engagements can feel very different, i’ve been a charismatic stud in gleaming silver armour having to dodge for my life while my forces do all the heavy lifting. in contract, i’ve been a something akin to a soviet T-26 tank cloaked in black steel and with glowing red eyes as i coat my hands crimson, all the while a couple of peasants chip at the broken remains of those i left behind.

As you level up and gain reputation working for factions you’ll get invited to join wars and formalise your relationship a faction. This means besieging towns, forts and going to lord Harlus’ mid-campaign feasts. Half through a siege to retake the town of Dhrim our wise and noble butterlord decided his 9-5 was a grind and threw a huge ass party with everyone standing around talking about the quality of his butter. The town remains lost to those nordic hooligans.

Once you’ve realised that swadia is the best faction or alternatively succumb to a brain tumour that will tell you something different it’s time to jump onto the mount and blade subreddit and get to shitposting about what trash all the other factions are. This isn’t part of the game per se but does help me to forget the faces of those i’ve killed as their screams haunt my dreams and leave me waking, drenched in my own sweat.

So now you’re a big man in court, you’ve got a swagger and room for a bigger army. Time to INVEST. Buy productive enterprises across the land for weekly dollar payouts, get awarded fiefdoms and forts for your service and start making mad bank, who cares if those peasants are starving you need a new pair of boots and quality cobblers don’t come cheap in an agrarian economy. You can go to tournaments in the hopes of wooing fair maidens only to get knocked out in the first round when they give you wooden javelins to throw against a bunch of angry axe wielding psychopaths.

Best of all you can make friends, something rarely done irl. named NPC’s who you can level up and fill vital role in your party like a doctor or siege engineer. Jeremus is one such man, he comes to you as a simple mender of wounds but underneath his a fearless beast of the battlefield charging down walls of cavillarly with little more than a stick, he gets knocked out a lot but it’s fun to watch. When it comes to defending his fellow man on or off the battlefield jeremus is a true leader, he has good judgement, noble grace and valor outshine us all. So if you play mount and blade, ask yourself what would Jeremus do? Moverover if you are leading a developed western country faced with pressure from your allies to sip the missile strike kool aid, ask yourself twice: what would Jeremus do?

The game has lot and lots of horses, it's even in the title… 10/10 and yes the graphics do look like ass. 

Is fortnite warping the minds of children?

Fortnite battle: royale. Is a JRPG with Spanish elements thrown in for that authentic south american colonial extermination experience, play as Hernán Cortés as you single handedly; with the help of a hundred smelly Spaniards, take over a naive empire by subterfuge and the abuse of trust afforded to them. All so you can turn a neat little profit on that banana republic in the late game.

Okay, that might have been a bit much for an opener, let's try to keep this all nice and gentle. Fort night: battle royal. Is a game where the rapidly increasing alienation of the french elite lead to a people uprising in Paris, which was then presided over by a shy guy who decided the best way to deal with their expensive and fancy wigs was to take a little off the top. They also turn notre dame into a rave house which when you think about it means this game had base building elements. The feature that allows you to feed your citizens with cake is conspicuously absent.

The fortnightly trip to get a royale with cheese. Is a gamemode set in cuba where by your boss, and one time about to nuke Florida guy, Fidel Castro attempts to guard his beard from the CIA while also attempting to produce the best dairy cows in the world. Unfortunately for you Cuba's climate isn’t conducive to dairy production so you’ll have to make the cows fuck until they produce a cow that can make milk.

Battle of the winter palace: October edition is a paid DLC for the the Russian revolution adding yet another revolution to the game that takes place a few months later. This time you play as a well educated man who’s been reading this cool new fantasy book called das kapital and wants to see if he could crowdfund Minas Tirith IRL but watch out your allies are probably going to try and icepick each other after your dead so don’t, whatever you do, create an authoritarian cult of personality that your successor can exploit to give everyone else in game GU latency issues.

fort nite: battle at sea. Is a Chinese mini game where; while failing to capture a bunch of pirates lead by a former prostitute, who knows her way around an oar better than most sailors, aye; your British allies suddenly realise that you’re not very good at dealing with the boats attacking your long and extended coastline. you point out what a fine navy they have as they sail their ships up to said poorly defended coast and they agree, it is a very nice set of boats. ‘You know what else is nice’ they ask while handing you a opium pipe…

The Armenian genocide is, No, No; NO! we are not going there. This has gone far enough, you’ve proven to everyone you’re very edgy and have too much time on your hands to learn all this shit. This is very very silly. Normal programming will now resume.

Fortnite: battle royale is a colourful and exciting free to play video game to help that takes social darwinism to its second most brutal extreme. The first being the appropriation of large scale germanic industrial frameworks to facilitate the mass… Are you trying to make a point here? Fortnite is benign and popular with children, easy to lampoon for it’s prominence and low bar to entry. Do these references add anything of value to review?

No, but i’ve gone and tricked people into thinking about history with, what is essentially a shitpost. April fools.

What can video-games tell us about socialism?

I’ve tried to review Far cry about three times now, and have failed on each time. It really says something about a game when one can’t think of anything interesting to say about it. This is the level of detachment from the game required to make myself capable of utterance in it’s regard. So instead i’ll talk about something very similar, city skylines. The joke is that their not similar, bet you never saw that one coming.

It’s never good to explain your jokes, explaining would increase the knowledge pool of your audience or might cause them to consider a situation from a different or novel angle, this goes against the very heart of comedy which is all about savaging those you disagree with and berating people for being different. Speaking of and: And city skylines is a game where you build a city and manage it’s policies and infrastructure. Since communism has never been attempted i felt his was the perfect petri dish with which to experiment.

I started by building a shopping district, not a great star admittedly. So i evened things out by cutting off their water supply, haha take that bourgeoise dogs. Everyone complained because their small businesses had no running water and all the designated drivers who ordered tap water were getting pissed, in both senses of the word. The resulting increase in car traffic collisions sent insurance rates for the locals soaring and forced everyone to reply on a public transport network that i hadn’t yet unlocked.

Feeling this wasn’t quite provocative enough i began a campaign of racial segregation only to find such core features had been scooped out and made into DLC. Disaffect by my unethical treatment at the hands of petty capitalists attempting to increase my spending to drive their machines of economic growth, i decided to double down on my communist utopia. A park was placed in every suburb, at this point however that was only a single suburb and then all the people were mad because i demolished their homes to do so.

Next came another problem with the water supply, some joker had placed the sewage output upstream of the water abstractor. People complained that they came home from working in the flower shops for a shower only to come out lathered in their own excrement. Other complained they couldn’t tell when their coffee had brewed and found its new nutty and full bodied flavour disconcerting. Most people agreed it was shit.

A hallmark of any great leader is their large scale infrastructure projects. The pharos of egypt built the pyramids for tourism, the athenians built the parthenon as a display of the financial solvency and china built the three gorges dam because they dam felt like it. Hence i too would leave my legacy for all to sea. I blocked off the local river and build a large sea wall around the growing town to leaving the town immune the cruel machinations of the waters. Thinking i had avoided a biblical catastrophe i went to go make dinner. When i returned i found, with no where to send their waters to, the rivers had burst their banks and flooded the town. Drainage being minimal due to the sea wall. This was brilliant progress, we were one step closer to the boy band busted’s manifesto of the future put forward in their song ‘year 3000’.

The trajectory of history is not linear however, some fool accidentally deleted part of the sea wall allowing all but the low lying areas to drain. No one lives there however despite my attempts to sell it as a libertarian wonderland. There were no more building projects. The costs of the build and the payout in court to angry locals claiming i was “negligent” left the town bankrupt losing more to interest than they were gaining in taxes.

This was when the plague hit, no one was sure which struck first the deaths or the disease, with no hospitals or graveyards the suburbs turned homeownership into a death sentence. Their homes became their tombs which caused the people living closest to catch and then succumb to dysentery, cholera, yellow fever and a runny nose. If that wasn’t bad enough the trashmen went on strike when i refused to pay them. While i was busy trying to crush their ILLEGAL unionisation the bodies piled up, those damned bin men would do anything to exploit a crisis.

I watched as the city burned with plague, numbers dwindling down to their hundreds at the binmens behest. When the chips were down they stabbed us in the back. Their betrayal will not be forgotten. Vengeance will be clean and swift. Our sovereignty will go unchallenged as claim our mantle, free of binmen, free of impurity a glorious future for all.

This game has no option to use horses instead of cars. That irks me somewhat.

CS:GO: A fountain of dread

Last night was a tortuous affair, in my excitement at the clementless weather precipitating outside my window, I seized on an opportunity for a little R+R. That is Rum and Raisin ice cream. Only, i ate too much, slurped too hard, caressed the spoon with more passion that could be permissible in even the most debauch pornographic scene. I soon became intoxicated with the thrill, a back seat driver in my own consciousness and when the demons take over, hell will follow….

CS:GO is a gambling addiction simulator for kids and probably the second most masochistic game i’ve ever played. Slightly ahead of Dark souls and just behind bum hair fire fountain boogaloo. I once wrote a review of the game for my dear friend, The Sophititicated gamer. Though i could never live up to his standards of sophititicatedieness, I could name drop him in the second paragraph of my review of CS:GO as a meager attempt at gaining the support and adoration of his fanbase. sophititicatedienessismists are still out of my reach, for now it seems.

In a competitive game one team attempts to commit a terrorism in an improtue strike and the other team then tries to thwart the attempt in a sort of... counter strike. Simple enough. How could such a premise give rise to the infamous behemoth of steam we all know and despise. I could blame pretty much anything from the repetitive structure to Gabe’s love of knives. So i will, clearly this is the fault of the NRA, in the game you can buy guns without any background check or limitations from a catalogue that is clearly inspired by your local walmart. (i stole that joke)

Even if you’ve committed offenses before like using an improvised explosive to destroy part of venice you will not be denied sale. Children, yes young innocent children inspired by violence on the news and on their streets take to the game in droves to reenact the violent and sadistic behaviour of their peers and parents. Lawmakers have failed to act to shut down the violence that is spilling over from the real world into the virtual.

In an interview i made up for convenience with myself. i said a number of things that clearly supported my premise and didn’t at all stretch this sensationalism driven piece out into a extended advert for my political views.
Righty ho, now your all boiled up to some Mccarthyism level paranoia. (Melissa McCarthy i’m onto you) we can now discuss the real game in CSGO: this is my guide on how to BM (bad manners). The true path to victory in any sport is the to undermine the psychology of your adversary. In the old analogue days of two player split screen this was simple.
 “How does social contract theory assume our consent when a small minority will always refuse but are not given way to exercise such action and are then not compensated in turn for the subversion of their inalienable rights.”

This would normally cause the other player to leave out of boredom and this victory was yours forevermore. If you made it through the entire sentence without tearing up you are a stronger Yeti than I.

These days, unlike the better day of my nostalgic youth, the kids don’t have the attention span for anything that isn’t racist vitriol or… the current youtube controversy of the day. #futureproof. I can’t condone using either of those to get their attention because i am too busy writing a review where i teach people how to be toxic in a Videogame…

Okay, it’s half an hour later and after starring in the mirror listening to needle in the hay on loop i can conclude the existential angst the prior paragraphs have caused are somewhat protional to the subject matter. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgNgvCLRqWc)

How can i be a true advocate for a medium or subject while being self-critical or even critical of aspects of the subject. The objective truth is i can’t. If you’re not of higher moral virtue than everyone else your views don’t matter or you are in fact an indictment of things you are a proponent of. Chase the approval of other desperately, avoid introspection and conceal any ernest views you have with sarcasm and doublespeak. Avoid direct cries for help at all cost and you continue to churn out sub par content in a oversaturated medium in a fleeting attempt to gain popularity and for God’s sake! make sure when the cracks in your resolve start to show they think that it was all part of some half baked joke you took too far. LOL!

Csgo: Good if you’re drunk.

What do I have against Terraria?

Pictures the scene, a zuckerbook chat approximately 176 hours ago at the time of writing. My colleagues and I were engaging in a bout of light merriment, when of all things, a youthen delinquent came crashing in through the saloon doors, red faced and clutching a bottle of XXX. he staggered across the dusty floorboards to pester the Barkeep.

“Terraria is a good game,” he stammered. No one deserves to be to talked to like that, the barkeep was a just hard working blue collar joe with a wife and family, and here this chowderhead was trying to take all that away. The posse and I rose to feet pulling out our six shot, single actions.
We took aim at the filth when I stepped forward and said, “this is why you’re wrong, bucko.”

A few years ago after moving house I had to spend a few weeks without internet, a troubling experience for any youth. When I came back online I found a 2 bit 2D side scrolling rpg sandbox had taken the scene by storm. I picked up a copy and hence began a delve into the deluge of paranoid mania and swirling addiction that was, my first terraria playthrough. I’ve never been the same since, i’m a shell of my former self.

The game had more bosses than a meeting of people who are in charge of stuff, haha perfect metaphor. it has more amours than a french love poem. More weapons than a american high… fantasy novel. Over time they added more features like a hardmode, events, and fishing. It could be quiet easy to derdride the for the inclusion of such extraneous elements but how can I be angry when it’s given me an excuse use a gratuitous elephantine utterance.

To call it grindy undervalues the sheer banality of it all. Labouring with keys and mouse: building, crafting and searching past the last points of tangible thought. It feels like the game makes the smallest incremental change possible to gameplay in order to keep one playing, and keep one playing it does. three hundred and more hours of my life i’ll never get back. If I wanted to struggle against such tedium i’d be sat at a desk pounding the keyboard… writing a review of... Shit.

The myth of sisyphus was a greek myth about this the titular character having to push a rock up a hill for daring to try and have a little fun or whatever. Some french smart guy who liked to smoke, descriptive right, called Camus was like,
“yeah, that’s basically my life in a nutshell #relatable.”
lots of smarties agreed so how we have absurdism, Camus thought that we must imagine sisyphus as a happy chappy, which is hard at first until you remember that kid who came into the bar in the first paragraph, he too seemed to have found a way to enjoy in the joyless monotony of tasks that leaves you where you started with its every cycle of progression, he liked terraria.

So if we take progression through the game to be absurd then Camus leaves us with three ways with which to deal with it. First is suicide, bit harsh, we’re not dealing with league of legends here. The second solution is believing in a higher power, something Camus labels as philosophical suicide, how snarky! The third is accepting the absurd, given that he saved it until last and options one + two were, in essence KYS. we can conclude discussing this was a waste of time, but i’m happy about it.

Even though terraria is an objectively bad game that is shit it has the potential to help us to cope with the absurdity of everyday life by being slight less tolerable than talking to your drunk aunt. A quality that makes it more akin to a therapy session, often needed after aforementioned conversations. Then again if I want to do something to help me get on in life I wouldn’t be playing video games now would I?

The boy collapsed with an clumsy thud, the contents of the smashed bottle ran along the floorboards seeping down the cracks in the floorboards going unnoticed before the streak of red that now painted the bar. I gripped by six shot with a furious intensity, my mind was racing. Heart thumping and soul screaming. A thin trail of smoke wafted out from the warm barrel, I was a outlaw now, a bounty for the murder of the mayor’s boy would see all manner of lowlife roused to follow my hooves.

I fled zuckerbook and ran off into the night and spoke my last “,Terraria’s shit m8.”

Faster than light: how one game exposed the lies at the heart of the games industry

The problem with extended caffeine use is the slow but inevitable erosion of one's connection to their calmer self. Even the most innocuous inquires become loud bombastic cries from the steeples of notre dame. The idea of having any thoughts that don’t race through one's mind quicker than they can be scribbled down starts to seem foreign, a experience that only other people have, and the idea of stoppeing brings with it the dread of knowing that for a day or two, one will be transmogrified into a shell-less one inch gastropod. Sounds a bit sci fi really, speaking of which have you played FTL?

I have, engaging with the media in question is a foundational component in forming an opinion about something, along with sacrificing goats and sipping kool aid. Though some just make do with the latter. Speaking of opinions and FTL, i am writing of a review of it. You’re reading that review right now. Ftl- as in Faster than light is a game that’ll make physicists froth at the mouth, namely at it’s unrealistic depiction of space. It’s treated as a cold heartless vacuum filled with meteors, nebula and really hot bright things that they don’t bother to name in game, another example of flabby and poorly thought out worldbuilding, it isn’t even hard: TVtropes.org has all the tropes you’ll ever need, then combine a few with the current thing that you’re really into and you’ll have a fresh new idea.

In this universe your encounters, and hits are determined by chance. But as Albert Einstein said “god doesn’t play dice with the universe” clearly these two statements are at odds with one another, either god is truly dead, or has decided to slack off a bit since Bert’s day. Now that is applied physics if i ever saw it, beam me up scotty.

If god is dead then what limits remain in place to stop us procreating with other more exotic forms of life. Can i mate with a mantis? Should i bring protective headwear? And how will they reciprocate with those sharp pointy mandibles? It was with these questions in mind that i set off on the maiden voyage of Uss lyes.

At the helm the devilishly handsome ziggy stardust. Space commander: bruce willis took over tactical after his recent transfer from the yippee ki yay and his trusty sidekick ben batfleck was in engineering trying to reinvigorate his career as it collided with a meteor, what a daredevil. The crew settled into their roles and got ready for their first FTL jump. They arrived at planet populated by spiders called planet spider, an ill advised colony of robots were in the middle of evacuating so they sent down ziggy to help, in the end he formed a band with the spiders but their practice session conflicted with the crew’s poker night, so he left.

Several jumps later they were boarded a group of mantis men on a stag do. they began tearing up the engineering, were uncooperative when asked to fill in a questionnaire about their mating practices and became demonstratively violent towards to the crew, who bravely hid in sickbay while they vented the air into space. This raises another one of those sci fi questions. Does the Geneva convention apply in space? And does it cover mantis men on a stag do? If their mating practice involves the wholesale slaughter of a bald space primates are we kinkshaming them or introducing them to auto erotic asphyxiation?

Next came a space battle, which were originally modelled, at least in part, on submarine movies. Which are apparently a thing. Wouldn’t the actors get wet during filming? Maybe they CGI them in, but then does CGI work underwater, Questions for a film critics. The point is i’d forgotten to repair the life support system so everyone died after torpedo, space speak for missile blew a hole in the side of the hull, well they were going to die anyway due to a lack of oxygen, but it wasn’t peaceful is what i’m trying to get across here.

This left me with some lingering questions, will these being face a eternity of non-existence? Will they remain stranded in purgatory for all time? Is asking questions all sci fi is able to do? Can i now, having experience this game write something that isn’t a question? What would something that wasn’t a question even look like? How can we come to terms with a eternity of questions? Dunno, but it’s kinda cool to think about.