Dead games and pop classics: the struggle for life in the face of modernity.

I just deleted the first paragraph of this review.

Life for rent, released in 2003, was the second album by singer songwriter and mythical queen of Carthage: Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong; performs under the stage name Dido, thank goodness. Unlike fable 3 the album can still be bought by in digital format and is still a classic of the 2000’s. With songs like ‘thank you’ and ‘white flag’ becoming the soundtrack for wine drunk mothers everywhere, and as a result to their children as well.

When i downloaded life for rent i was pleased to see i was not required to connect to an online store that no longer existed as a poorly thought out form of DRM. nor did i have to seek out a website, through the forums, to get a patch that essentially cracked the album by dido: life for rent, that i bought years ago and legally own, (well not really the digital media provider owns it but whatever.)

I recently decided, after years of objecting to it, that i sort of liked Life for rent and that it’s peak tracks do have a certain resonance, especially when wine drunk. The same cannot be said for fable 3, a dead game that killed it's studio and had it’s support collapse years ago and really wasn’t that good to begin with but that at the time i thought was fun.

In fable the third, you start a revolution to take the throne from your brother. Only a revolution implies a change in the state of governance. This, strictly speaking, is a military backed coup by a series counter-industrialist aristocrats, justified by the supposition of the protagonists status as an ubermensch. In life for rent the primary change of power is the codification of one’s inner vulnerability into a thing of artistic beauty by the singer. Not only i am allowed to feel my vulnerabilities but knowing that the shared experience can be a source of strength.

The simplistic gameplay nonetheless feels clumsy and unpolished with connectivity between the elements mismatched at least. Basic at best. Enemies often stand next to explosive barrels, positioned to make the encounter as trivial as possible highlighting their status as things to be crushed under the ubermensch boot and undermining my ability to empathise. Far from trivial life for rent feels like a sense of craft, care and pathos was put into each track, well produced with excellent interplay of vocal and instrumental performances the album maintains a tonal consistency without becoming samey.

The Hobbes, no silly not Thomas Hobbes, although i am here to talk about the monopolisation of force; namely by the protagonist. A short ways into the game you encounter a group of cave dwelling sentients called the hobbes: essentially fat goblins, the character accompanying you levels repeated foul racist accusations deriding their intellect, despite their having a full established civilisation with social stratification, tactics and the integrated use of magic. This reads as some genuinely shocking colonialist bollocks, or it would that was the intent; instead the subjugation and marginalisation of sapient species is played for jokes. Fantasy has stumbled into racially charged elements in the past, like the orcs in middle earth being described as similar the the Mongolian peoples but the ability to overlook it again with the hind sights takes a certain kind of contextual blindness.

If you want clarity of vision and a realisation of its subject matter, look no further than 'Life for rent' by dido. Topics around the everyday struggle for life and love make each track as relatable as it is breathtaking. The struggle to get by is highlighted by the exemplar of the insecurity renting property brings to the tenants life and the extension of that that relationship to other facets. A social commentary that is meaningful and subtle that would undermine in elegance many current pop tracks aiming to do likewise.

On the subject of rent, fable 3 tasks one, once on the throne with ruling and making decisions to decide between arbitrary good and evils to raise the funds to fight and external evil. The solution however is to buy all the property in the country and collect the rents to pay for the coming war. The image of the all powerful external enemy has often been used to justify fascist doctrine in the past, so it’s no surprise to see it here. But seeing the supposed heroic thing is the economic subjection by a seizure of others own security, makes me wonder if perhaps the developers would have been better of listening to life for rent by dido during the design stage.

In the song ‘here with me’ dido puts forward an understanding of the personal costs of love and the reconciliation of self with one's desired partner. ‘Life for rent’ muses on the transitory ephemeral elements of life in modernity. Fable three tries to justify that seizure and subjection of foreign peoples in its second act, in a section that comes close, well more like closer, to understanding the troubles of colonialism but then just defaults to praising you for #bigdecisions. The near-parody epitome of moral decision making.

A degree of self awareness would have gone so far to improving this work especially with it’s comedic edge. A total contrast the the pleasant, but not over overbearing thoughtfulness we see in the must listen hit album: life for rent by Dido. both deal in the life in the industrialised world, guess which i prefer?

The game doesn’t have horses even, wtf is with that? The DLC on G2a costs more than the game did when it was on sale, that’s limited availability for you.

Skyrim: Down and destitute from riften to solitude - the tale of poverty in a fantasy world.

He sleeps soundly; snoring, farting and occasionally murmuring. I tip toe past, my sight set on his wardrobe, yes finally it will all be mine. Charcoal, a cooking pot, also some fresh leeks. I leave with my disappointment, and fresh leeks out into the night, i am the theft of Morthal. More like undeveloped peasant town, hahaha, i can’t even afford to rent here.

I’ve served four stints at the Jarls pleasure, and i’m not talking about his short sword. I have no items, because each and every one of them was stolen, by me. I have no children because i have no home, and i have no home because i am pretty poor at my profession… i am the worst theft in all of skyrim. In a land of endless captive cold, where dragons rule the skies and great civil wars rage, i the main character missed the memo. After the requisite carriage ride and tutorial, which i decided my character was drunk for and so largely believes was a illusion made by Sanguine, the daedric prince of debauchery, during my stupor the quest began.

From there he decided it was too dangerous for him to bare arms and drink ever again. He must give one up. So now he’s a pacifist in a land of sword crazy burly men, and women. Untalent at magecraft the most he can muster is a bright light that gives him away in the dead of night during his lurking. Though he is admittedly otherwise a very talented lurker. His herblore too is rather lacking, gone are the days of cheese sandwich alchemy. This leaves him with one avenue for work. Breaking into people's home and scrounging their shit.

He is very cunning often waiting until people are sound asleep before barging in like a bull in a china shop, and pretending he got lost on his way home. Once he stumbled upon a plot by a powerful vampire to take over the town, only to be chased away by her love crazed thrall as my inebriated thief couldn’t bring himself to fight back, in case the magic sky dragon ever comes back.

His life here was going nowhere, so i got bored and decided that he had decided to go off on a adventure, lacking the fiscal and social commitments to do otherwise. He was not missed… by a stray arrow, which stuck him in the… thigh (close one)
After passing by a guard swimming through the air i decided it was time for a drink. So stopped by the local tavern, a quick conversation with the barkeep later i learn i still had no money and that i wasn’t supposed to just start necking whatever wasn’t nailed down. This earned my first stay in the Whiterun dungeon which unlike the Morthal jail, wasn’t too cold for rats… yay?

I was out in no time, if by no time you mean 4-5 months with good behaviour. Pretty ingenious way to avoid the guards on the front gate if you asked him. Looking for work the local companions guild told be i could join if i could hold a sword. After explaining my misgivings in a calm and careful manner they told me quite precisely to get bent. Taking their advice to heart i hit up the cloud district, which people assured me i’d not get to very often, and managed to find a neat set of fine clothes along with my second stint in dungeon, this time i’d snuck in my copy of the lusty argonian maid; however my character was illiterate, at least it saved using the rats as toilet paper.
Deciding to move on i first sold my only possession, or tried to, turns out my shit smeared copy of a book describing the sexual escapades of a lizard were not in high demand in the ultra conservative, fundamentalist talos loving north men.

Onwards to winterhold, here i was with my own folk, or as the locals had taken to calling them, the dam grey skins. That’s right i’m a dark elf, what of it? I mean really, how can you be so bigoted as to get hung up my race, it’s not like i’m a orc or something. Onwards to the nearest tavern. There i met a orc wanting to punch my lights out, for some reason he didn’t understand i was calling him a pig faced mountain fucker ironically. What is it with north folk and having no sense of humour. So between my pugilistic hesitations and his berserk rage my nose was beaten to resemble my groin which itself was beaten into a bloody pulpy mess… not even the boredom of prison had done so much damage to my genitals. Jokes on him i stole his sweetroll, which is how i earned my first fine in winterhold, which upon being unable to pay became my first stint in the winterhold jail which was both cold and had rats.

After the stumps healed i didn’t stick around, the weather in winterhold was far too racist so i headed south towards the rift and it’s town… riften, home of the thieves guild. I see what they did there. Here i found my calling, the one place i could truly belong: An orphanage! a young boy in winterhold had told me to go there and murder the lady who owned the place and to be fair to the boy he was very polite when asking, so i felt obligated to foster good behaviour, through not foster him specially on the count of being a vagrant vagabond drunkard who was one step away from become a full flown skooma addict.

I had cross by moral code and could never again claim to be a pacifist, which was perfect timing because i was soon recruited by the dark brotherhood, they were so impressed with my kill stealing that i was press ganged into service, their hidden layer was a marvel of treasures and trained killers. Naturally i was caught with sticky fingers and was promptly kicked out until i could pay a fine, which for me meant forever. Skooma is not cheap!

What was cheap were the cloths i was able to strip from a murdered woman on my way into markarth, a town so retro-steampunk-dwarven i was forced to leave, or i nearly did, it turns out there had been a spate of murders and secrets conspiracies going around, a concerned party needed a talented lurker to break into hold and retrieve clues. Honestly i was the best work i’d had in years and nothing quite compares to #monetised-lurking. Unfortunately, my contact was found out an i was thrown into a prison, and not the fun kind, but one where you have to do real work, a mine!

I’ve long since been a hand a breaking out of almost any prison but seeing as the guard just drag one back and i get fed i’ve never really felt the need to spurn my penal sentences, unless it involved the jarls short sword. It was about 20 minutes and a brief montage before i was ready for my great escape. Unfortunately i was shived while wiping my ass on a rat and so ended the ballad of skyrim's worst thief.

Game has horses but i could never afford one and stealing one earned me a stint in prison. 

The PUBG: The ultimatum

From here until the new year it’s all a down hill slide. Nothing good was ever achieved on the cusp of winter. Today is no exception! Splat splat splosh goes the third shower of the morning as i sit in an unlit hovel overlooking the spectacle through a thin veil. One last surge and then it finally lets up. for a moment, thoughts clear i take my mark.

Pace, action, tension and excitement. No room for holding back i need to capture the zeitgeist of human experience and to do so now i must ride at the very forefront of games journalism. To pause on a beat, reflect on circumstance or offer insight would be an insult to just how very hip and happening this post will be. There is no context when you're riding the crest of a wave, there is only you the board and shore line racing towards you. Before we beach ourselves on the metaphor i think it wise to now state, that i, like so many other people with misleading T-shirts, do not surf.

Pugb, pubg, pgbu: player unknown’s battlegrounds. So just battlegrounds then, i guess we say dante’s inferno. Well i do, you say not that pretentious trash literary allusion again bvgroti to which i swiftly and reproachfully announce: i can’t. For this text, has no text, no context and no explicit imperative. What's an explicit imperative? GO FUCK YOURSELF! Although the games been hinting i should do that for a while.

Simply the game does all and tells all through it’s mechanics. Is this a good thing? Well it was certainly interesting the first time i saw a red splodge appear on the map and i decided to go check it out only to find myself promptly saturated in mortar fire. That is to say, i doubt they could have got much more in before it wouldn’t be a cadava anymore, maybe some kind of new experimental smoothie. This would be amusing if true, heck it might be anyway but it’s not my place to judge (but just so we’re clear it ought to have garnered at least a wry smile)

I learn the game the same way most did, through a sequential percolation of information as the pubg wave broke up on shore of the gaming masses. From Twitch, the Youtubes, and other platforms that exist did the videos come. All things to all men. A call to do the thing. We lobbied up and got to it, not as pioneers but as colonists and like colonists, boy did we starve… and leave behind a problematic legacy which mires foreign policy even today. (such a brave thing for me to say)

The soft touch i use for my PC gaming, that is to say all my gaming. Isn’t exactly at the cutting edge. I don’t want to be too mean to the poor dear because she has been a sturdy and reliable thing for many years and i’m fairly convinced she can tell when i’m talking shit about her and will punish me accordingly. My point here, if there is one, is it takes me an awful long time to load into the game.

In earlier builds this meant laying in a ditch for five minutes while the game world loads out an ethereal playdough, but since then with a constant barrage of updates making the game more or less optimised the effects have varied. Ranging from everything working just fine, to the repeatedly crashing upon launch. My favourite of these effects is the ability to phase through solid walls in game. Client side collision detection and the games tendency to take a while fully rendering an asset from the playdough realm allows me to pass through the blobs of shapelessness that will resolve into the building proper a few seconds later. It acts of a counterbalance of the initial frame rates being in the region of somewhere between 5 and -5. This more often than not, gets me killed, as uncle Ben says: Delicious rice ready in 10 minutes, also if you’ve got power you’ll prolly f’ it up so just say home and watch netflix or sumin. One such instance was me ploughing a car half way into a house, only for the house to then render around the vehicle causing it, and me to become a new flavour of smoothie.

Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, some programmer fucks up and we leap forward. What could be more cutting edge than the ability to pass through physical objects. Imagine if you didn’t notice the door in front of you as you walked, so you simply passed through it. What possibilities would that create, a cornucopia of experience at the fingertips being snuffed out by a click of a shotgun as the mic spamming child in the next room spots my reality bending glitch and tastes the coming of his chicken dinner.

Maybe the reason we don’t have super powered people today is because humans show an instinctive desire to snuff out anything they can’t understand. This is doubtful speculation and probably a waste of time to spend much thought considering, but what can i say. While waiting for the game to load i’ve had time to reflect on inane musings that mean little and just fill the gaps. Speaking of gaps, this brings up a fairly unique question, as i report my experience of the game, i figure due to my hardware it’s fairly unrelatable to the average player, so then what purpose does a review serve if i talk about aspects they’ll never engage with and events that were entirely fictitious… again probably best i don’t spend too long on this one in case the answer undermines my authority.

Though at the core, my experience is much the same. Waiting in a broom closet with three teammates waiting for some poor unfortunate to walk in and discover our smoothie selection via shotgun to the mouth. Only to then walk outside to get picked off by a sniper, blown up by grenades, drowned in a river and get caught trying to revive your good for nothing friends while the ever shrinking blue ring bares down squeezing mic spamming gun toting psychopaths into a tight enclosed space and offering them virtual points to slay one another.
It’s like a prisoner's dilemma where the prisoners are all utterly ape shit.


Why do they bother to add vehicles and not bother with horse? 5/10
OH SHIT! I forgot to mention the miniskirts, actually the less said the better.

Halloween special: Amnesia unmasked? you'll never believe?

In the lead up to to the winter months a litany of new titles are released for the gaming masses to purchase with annual titles like: that one you’re sick to death of but which promises to be different this year, to that one you never got into and don’t really see the appeal of. There might even be something new in the mix, though i’d not count on that possibility too strongly. This season of releases ought to be worth covering in depth with a series of systematic and well informed analyses that tell you nothing you didn’t already know and feed into whatever opinion you already had. Unfortunately for those in “THAT” camp, there is a bigger and far more important date that falls soon… the eve of all saints day!

Grease is the word, another set of words is the systematic use of non disclosure agreements to silence witnesses in cases of sexual and racial harassment but that’s neither here nor there what is here is a discussion of the merits of a game i’ve barely played and not for many years. Amnesia, a game i’ve not played for many years: amnesia, game i’ve… amnesia. Wasn’t that amusing, almost as amusing as a legal system allowing individuals to use their wealth and connections to hide behaviour that is unacceptable in modern society.

I’m not trying to make a point here but i keep forgetting that, guess i have a nasty case of… forgetfulness, and also using a framework to protect the personal lives of public figures from journalistic overreach as a means to side step potential legal action. Amnesia is a very tense game, long periods of wandering solving le puzzles about are woven seamlessly with the encroachment of vicious and terrifying monsters that abuse and prey on the silenced and defenceless protagonist… using non disclosure agreements.

The environment warps and twists in unsettling and bizarre ways, often concealing the lurking terrors at a distance in patches of dark. This is placed against and limited ability to illuminate ones surrounding, that game itself is trying to keep you in the dark as a way to make it’s monsters more threatening, which adds to the horror of the experience. I honestly can’t think of any parallels i could draw, even subtextually; so i’ll move on.

I’d never use my powerful peerage as a objective writer of moral rights, a wrighter if you will, to preach to my audience, there’s only about ten of you anyway. I stick to my topics and with laser focus never straying a hair's width away from the raw, crinkle cut, mixed metaphorical truth! That being said i do wish to share my current suggestions for improving the law of this land, in a totally objective and factually way, this isn’t an opinion and if you think otherwise you’re probably quite thick: it should be illegal to die whilst ‘staying alive, by the beegees,’ is playing in the same room, doing so should carry a life sentence.

Instead of byzantine legal protections the wealthy should be forced to build giant mecha suits and go battle over the cities in a glorious display of steel on steel, rampaging around as walking skyscrapers. Turning back the tide of gentrification using their electrified chain swords and flamethrowers. A bare bones darwinistic law of the jungle will emerge where only those with the grit to use their untamed steel behemoths will be able to prosper in battles of untold spectacle and carnage. The hot bellowing fumes of machines drinking city worth's of fuel every second, impacts that’ll drown out those fucking lawnmowers and ground shaking beneath our feet as though being shelled by artillery fire will become a fact of life. All the while everyone else can go on drinking tea and nibbling on scones without having to worry about cases of sexual misconduct. It’ll all be that simple, problem solved!

In summary: amnesia , not a game for the faint hearted.
In summary: amnesia , not a game for the faint hearted.
In summary: amnesia , not a game for the faint hearted.
In summary: amnesia , not a game for the faint hearted.
In summary: amnesia , not a game for the faint hearted.

Cakes and videogames: a tenuous connection poorly thought out to meet an deadline?

When attempting humour on method is to play out the absurdity of taking an extreme position for comic effect. You may want an example to help illustrate my point but i assure you none is necessary, you see the idea is fucking awful! There’s nothing absurd about believing extreme things because thing i saw once on an anonymous comment thread said something about as obscene; I was only looking up the recipe for a cake.

“Bad comics often attempt to dissect the very nature of comedy as their opening gambit. Not only is this an bold but also abstract introduction to a set that is unwilling to anchor itself in an established norm. The true weight of thing becomes felt in the second stroke which leaves the comic with no obvious springboard to move off from and no norm to bring the audience back to.” - anon on the cake comments.
Why this was written on a baking forum is beyond me.

Cake is an opulent food. Marie Antoinette is purported to have remarked upon the revolting french peasantry “let them eat cake,” unfortunately for her their cheat day wasn’t until next Sunday. Following the strands of unjust aristocrats, confectioneries and opulence leads us to mario 64, where the titular character luigi is invited over for “cake,” while many have speculated on the true meaning of this, one hacker who broke into the game files found a .TXT file that clearly explained that “cake” was a euphemism for the systematic exploitation of the lower classes by the wealthy. This was then posted, not to a Nintendo forum but to a Cake forum which explains why it isn’t more widely known.

The video game equivalent of the cubism movement: minecraft, also has Cake as one of it’s items. It being one of the more complex items to craft in game as a symbol of it’s opulence. The player needs: wheat, sugar, eggs, neuroatypical tendencies and milk. No prizes for guess where i picked up that little tidbit.

Later on we’ll discuss the Cake in Portal but first i’d like to mention the function of cake in modern society. You see i didn’t find the recipe for my cake on the baking forums at all but on an mmorpg. You see outside the framework provided, that being the game, much of the ingredients lack any worth. Which is fine it’s a game after all, but it is one that keeps people engaging in menial activity for a reward contingent on their continued investment in a system which would leave them better off, in a monetary and temporal sense, were they to question and then abandon that structure. They are the filling in the cake.

Subtext is open to interpretation, like the layers of jam between two sandwiches of sponge there are many acceptable ways to go about it, there are also some which are clearly mad, nutella for instance. To give an equivalent with subtext, the use of cake as a metaphor or euphemism bakes in a certain assumptions that obfuscate the meaning like a layer marzipan.

In this Cake case for instant it would fall apart when i removed the bottom because the nutella is made equivalent to marzipan as part of the madness, which is demonstratively false because while it is possible to have too much marzipan, any amount of nutella is about as necessary as denying trying to sprinkle social criticism and progressive sentiments in your ramble about cake and then giving up because your having much more fun talking about marzipan. i guess you can’t have your Cake and eat it.

This is quite the challenging dichotomy regarding cake, on the one hand i seem to like the cake because i am emotionally invested in its existence, on the other hand i am hungry and want a larger slice. I guess i can echo the words of Marie Antoinette when i say “let them eat “cake”,”

Pokemon, i choose you! for our topic of discussion.

As a child i seemed extremely shy, my unwillingness to make eye contact with the other kids, teachers or even the milkmen lead people to make certain assumptions about me as a person; furthermore, because using that word makes me sound clever. I was terrified of entering wheat fields, hedgerow or any other kind of tall grass. My insistence that “i didn’t want to get my trousers mucky,” swayed few that heard it, for as many know: children exist primarily to get their trousers and anything else in their vicinity as mucky as possible, this includes their parents relationship, NOT MARRIAGE. We’re not here to force backwards institutions onto people who’d rather smoke pot.

Turns out those worries were misplaced but not entirely without merit. You see i had little pocket money, and no pokemon to speak off. If a stranger had challenged me to a battle i’d not only have to hand over the pittance of a stipend my eight year old self was afforded, but also in my mind i'd likely be stung several times by the person’s killer bee, psychic duck or brother who is a bit on the slow side. i was bound by the way i chose to see the world, fortunately i grew out of it but i wondered what life might be like if i hadn't. So why the life story then? Are we reviewing your entire life today or just a another fragment of experience? Well it’s not like i can review things that have yet to happen, as much as i’ve tried at time; moreover, because write that is me smart. Video games!

We’re talking pokemon, rather i’m typing about them, but if i pretend this is some kind of dialectic you’ll feel your input of staring at some words for a few minutes somehow reaffirmed your supposed intrinsic quality. Enough meaningless distraction filled with false affirmation, we need to talk about a children's video game!

It’s hard to imagine a person reading this without a vague overview of what pokemon is, that’s because i have a limited capacity to envision anything, and assume my experience of culture is uniform with everyone else's. Primarily the source of my distress that not everyone instantly realises that any reference to a bakery is automatically a joke about the great fire of London, which started in a… that’s right! A pokemon centre, you DUNCE!

As a cultural force the influence of pokemon is undeniable, well i mean one could. This was typified in the video where a bunch of pikachu fash march down the street in japan advocating for the establishment of camps to detain and control the squirtles. Citing them as wartortles in waiting and as being bad hombres. Amazing how one can use a magical animal fights to seamlessly bridge era’s in right wing political discourse.

This brings me neatly to my central point, in episode 14 of the animated series, which first aired in japan in 1997. Ash, the protagonist, seeks his third gym badge by facing off against a military veteran turned pokemon trainer named surge. Surge’s primary pokemon is a raichu, the evolution of a pikachu which ash uses as his primary means of ass pulling his way through situations. Ash loses first time around but then after deciding his electric rat was faster for some reason and choosing not to evolve the rat, they then ass pull through the rest of the episode.

Episode 14 sticks with me, not for the contrast and foil provided by surge. Nor the emotionally weight of a discussion around how evolution can change one’s bond with their fighting rats but that maybe surge is ash's dad? Maybe because his pokemon is bigger version of ash’s that means he’s the dad tho? We don’t know who that dad is so it’s possible? Who knows, who can say. Maybe surge got ash’s mum pregnant during the occupation of kanto after the second pokemon war and that with their economy in ruins the only way to get by was by selling convenience items to the occupying troops, not least of all themselves…

Pokemon therefor typifies the aftermath of any great conflict, as the people attempt to leave the past behind and move forward with a renewed sense of positivity. Ash ought never to know his mother is slowly succumbing to last stages of sexually transmitted infections that she acquired around the time of his conception. She can no longer care for him and needs a full time pokemon helper to get by as her mind and body deteriorates. Hence him being sent into the world alone, save for his pet rat. Ash lacks the capacity to process this, so he buries himself in an endless series of distractions as he wanders the world, a vagrant pulled apart from his mother and meeting his father without recognising it. His is the tragedy of man kept forever a child by his own inability to move beyond his stagnated perception, a child with no grounded force to tether him to reality.

I like the way the animals change at certain levels it helps to give one something to aim towards when grinding and gives one a real sense in progression to help flesh out the otherwise standard Rpg experience. The games stick to a rigid formula but one that has served them well, they are a reliably enjoyable if a not samey experience.

My favorite pokemon is the duck because it is silly.

Deus ex: a deep dive into the ghost drive of the human soul.

Once upon a time there was a far greater journalist than myself, shocker i’m sure. They wrote with an unbridled passion and a free beating heart. The stroke of their pen could make or break a game’s release, and for one ascendant moment i found my own work nestled in the bosom of their greatness. The sophiticated gamer, the literal grandfather of video games journalism has, like the buddha, left this mortal coil behind to explore new frontiers of consciousness, a place they called “IRL”

Once upon a time, upon a time, i reviewed deus ex human revolution. I’m not one to repeat myself, but i am one not to repeat myself, myself; however the words i spoke then were those of a child and as a child i thought only as a child, a child. So it think it’s a good time, that being a time where once upon a time is a time constraint that alludes to a time now past; saving time on specific details, i’ll only have mentioned once upon.

Deus ex is a series that has firmly entrenched itself in the cyberpunk genre just to the right of the neuromancer and next door to Ghost in the shell; although the latest entry has tried to dislodge itself from this matrix by being bad. How would i know? i’ve not played it but maybe i’ve had the memories implanted but there’s no unicorn in my dreams so maybe i’m me. Cyberpunk’s ascendancy and main /function, aside from being hard boiled with low key body horror, is posing philosophical and social questions that play on the anxieties of the modern age; or if they’re feeling lazy it can be a race relations allegory.

Deus sex falls hard onto the latter ladder and manages to hit several rungs on the way down by adding: the other guys have superpowers basket, that skewers any hope of a equality being salvaged from the deluge or am i thinking of that other cyberpunk game set in detroit but with fewer memorable lines than. “i never asked for this,”
Hard to know i’ve not played that unicorn either but my recent holiday to mars was lit.

Let’s jack-in and see if we can’t hack the source code of this technovirus. Side note: the idea that the internet would be used for jacking-in is one of those predictions that was just a stroke off being bang on the money shot. I have actually played deus ex, not as many times as i’ve watched bladerunner but more times than the aforementioned sequel that i haven’t played. Which is about as descriptive as i can get without really thinking about it for more than three seconds. According to the omniscient super intelligence, ie google: the world’s faster computer can do 33,860 trillion calculations per second meaning if i were a computer working out how many times i’ve played deus ex would be impossible because i haven’t given it sufficient data to give an exact figure but it would realise that faster… wow!

That computer is located in china and so are the best parts of the game, the time spent in neo-shanghai, or just shanghai for short, is easily the best part of the game. The whole city actually feels like a futuristic hexagonal laden metropolis; unlike detroit that feels like it’s just come to grips with the 20th century, which is still more progress that anyone could really expect it to make, meaning this is technically soft sci fi.

It would be wrong to talk about deus ex without exploring the series’ stance and commentary on conspiracy.

The game has you do the sneaky sneak with a series of cover based mechanics that is buffeted with hacking minigames gunplay when you F’ed up. Pretty standard fare at this point. You’re reading a review of a game while walking through the desert but the review has run out of things to talk about and fallen on it’s back, you try to flip the review into a Voight-Kampff joke but not everyone will get it. Why can’t you review videogames normally like everyone else?

In the future it is likely horses will become obsolete, that means unicorns too but then why do they keep showing up in my dreams; i only found out yesterday one can pay for purchases using their phones and in a near future dystopia the only way to participate in elections will be with a subscription to google vote or going to the ivote store and installing the app into a small microchip that helps dampen deviant thoughts and impulses. The every essence of humanity is dissolving under the microscopic analysis of the military-scientific complex and all we have to show for it is synthpop; maybe that is a fair trade? All this speculation; lost, like piss into garden hedge.