Among us - all star

Somebody once told me the impostor is gonna roll me

I ain't the sharpest tool on the ship

She was looking kind of sus with her finger and her thumb

In the shape of an "L" on her lips

Well, the murders start coming and they don't stop coming

Fed to the rules and I hit the button running

Didn't make sense not to live for fun

Your brain gets smart but your friends play dumb

So much to fix, so much to see

So what's wrong with taking the vents?

You'll never know if you don't go

You'll never vote if you don't guess

Hey now, you're an imposter

Get your game on, go KILL THEM ALL

Hey now, you're a rock star

Get the stab on, get played

And all that lying is gold

Only being seen breaks the flow

Space is a cool place, and they say it gets colder

You're sus right now, wait 'til you get bolder

But the reactor meltdown begs to differ

Judging all the holes in the camera picture

The line we skate is getting pretty thin

The rooms getting warm so you might as well sing

My pants are on fire, how 'bout yours?

That's the way I like it and I'll never get bored

Hey now, you're an impostor

Get your game on, go stab, green

Hey now, you're a rock star

Get lied to, get played

All bullshitters are gold

Only visual tasks break the game

Somebody once asked

Could I vote for red?

"I need to get myself away from this guy"

I said, "Yep, what a concept

I could use a little sus myself

And we could all use an EMERGENCY MEETING"

Well, the votes start coming and they don't stop coming

Voted out for nothing and the votes are still coming

Didn't make sense not to live for stabs

Your friend gets smart but your head gets blow

So much to do, so much to see

So what's wrong with turning the lights out ?

Pink was the impostor

Victory

All in for Alien: isolation. Social distancing the smart way!

A lady bird wanders up along the diamond pattern on my binds. It fumbles, changing approach as it winds this way and that, always moving forwards. It gives the creature a sort of intrepid disposition. I look back up to check on its progress, it’s gone.

Alien is classic horror, if you don’t count the later sequels. HR Giger dreamt of bizarre semi-organic shapes committed to a blended display of erotism and violence… like a funko-pop getting it cock out. The notion of the alien's life cycle is taken from parasitic wasps, and so the alien stands as an aberration of the reproductive process, like being banged by a funko-pop and popping out little john Oliver funko pops, it’s strange at first, almost comically so, then they catch on to what's happened, the manufacturer hooks you up an assembly line and compressing you down in that purely mechanical role of shitting out funko-pops, and you wonder… is this art?

 Anyway, alien isolation is another one of those horror darlings that rears its head every few years and reminds everyone there’s more to life than battle royales and dabbing. It recently went to cheap and I hate myself, so I decided to whittle down the number of clean pants to a starling minus four.

The plot isn’t important, other than: space station, alien, trapped. Though, I found the world building oddly endearing. The style of Alien at the time was vaguely futuristic, so to invoke it now feels distinctly retro, so much so that the last two films don’t really bother. The space station here is directly ripped from the ship in the first film, some sections feeling deliberately shot-for-shot like the crew quarters, it almost  feels like the same stock modules were used for both, replaceable interchangeable parts like nearly any shopping or town centres. Though the slight twist here is that the station itself is antiquated, as are its androids; the whole place is in a state of decay. So this is gothic-retro-futurism. The abandoned shopping centre not yet demolished, that in its turn vastly outstrips our capacity as a species to date… it seems almost fatalistic to see that our future accomplishments are nothing more than labelled boxes waiting to rot.

Isn’t this meant to be scary and not just depressing? You can’t expect me to be scared when I want to die as it is. Now don’t worry my precious rhetorical device, your concerns, though they be imagined, will be addressed shortly, as one might presuppose by your very being a rhetorical device; hence there no greater need of elaboration. We all know this was signposting.

Androids exist on a spectrum with an uncanny valley about ¾ of the way to human. Just before human is the case of superhuman autism that many tropes of androids depict, think commander data from star-trek or that one from the big bang theory, i don’t know never watched the show. This weirdly enough is where most androids in Alien, or its sequels, tend to fall. However keeping up the retro feel the androids on this station have been thrust so far into the uncanny valley it’s become an uncanny Mariana trench.

Glowing eyes, wax skin and voice lines that are all double entendres for beating the shit out of you. The fact they don’t seem to have any idea of the context of what they say is worse somehow, these things make my skin crawl; even before they try and smack me about. An android shouting “you are becoming hysterical” as it reaches over to wack you is the sweet spot for the uncanny valley, it’s acting just close enough to mimic a human but is clearly disconnected from sapient behaviour… like people who buy funko pops just to try and breed with them. When i am attacked by an android, even if the attack is non-fatal i reload a save because fuck having that thing touch me.

The alien by contrast doesn’t mince about, it’s a metaphor for rape and it knows it. It’s all rather fitting as most of the moment to moment it’s stalking you either up in the vents or down corridors forcing you to hide in a locker while to change pants. When it actually sees me I suddenly relax and mellow out. I say out loud “oh no,” or “well that’s unfortunate,” simply because when the creature spots you its game over and not much can be done. The alien doesn’t tell me I’ve been naughty while it stabs by chest with its tail so there’s really not a lot going for it during the kill.

Which is a shame, because it’s menacing as toffee jam while scuttling about hunting me. Even in sections when it cannot reach you it follows you about the level doing a coffin dance out of sight up in the vents. I let my guard down once when I had to redo a section, thinking the alien couldn’t get in (no hiding places) so I sprinted about the place playing the trombone until I heard something drop from the ceiling and begin to hiss; It was at this moment I knew I had fucked up.

There are humans on the station, they’re dicks. They keep trying to shoot me, which i wouldn’t mind so much if the gunshots didn’t summon the black murder squiggle like a dinner bell. This can sometimes work to one's advantage, if one runs in the opposite direction of the gunshot that’s a chance the alien won’t be approaching from the particular corridor allowing one to skedaddle double time.

Each level is structured about the same, at a set point you’ll set off an alarm and then the alien will turn up and dabbing it’s funko-pop goodness all over the place like an ill-tempered Roomba. Though the AI director is well programmed enough to make sure the creature doesn’t linger too long so as to lose its effect. The pacing that the system creates really is something to behold. It's just I wish I didn't know it was there; I base my decisions knowing the system is working in a certain way and that goes some way to blocking immersion. A game which would be improved if i had not watched a half hour video explaining the rules; my fault really. Horror is about what you don’t see, like when the funko-pop fetus starts chewing it's way out your large intestine. 

I'm currently only half way through the game, so I’ll drop a saucy part 2 if my subsequent experiences warrant it. As for now I’ll wack this one with a score of: sounds like my heart beating to try and freak me out, over some sharp violin sounds and a low note on a synthesizer. That was perhaps the worst pun I've ever made.

AOE 2: for a second time but like definitively this time.

still BVGROTI talking aoe2, we’re back.

Age of empires got a re-remaster. It does that thing now where building crumples, causes my boxers to transform into a teepee. Before, in my review of the remaster, I focused my efforts on uncovering the social dynamics around the game and it’s audience; back then I had ideas about what to write about, and didn’t merely do so out of habit or strained obligation to an imagined judge. Mostly the latter. Back then there was an essence of vitality to what I did.

.
When we try to recapture the past there is an element of confusion to it, memory for all it informs us, is a fickle thing; maybe that’s why people can be just as fickle.

Let’s see if we still got it?

Definitive edition, to be justifiable as a project needed to be more than a graphical update and so had to begin tampering with a game that had been going strong to varying degrees for nearly twenty years. The HD edition 7 years prior had significantly expanded the roster, so there was an unlikely route that could be taken again. Without the option of being additive the only route was to tweak.

This raises the motherload of questions, how do you tweak a 20 year old game to bring it up to scratch to today, while still keeping it as the definitive masterpiece it always was definitely agreed to be. This consists of an epistemological investigation into the essential properties of experience that is as much characterised by nostalgia and clunkiness as it is by long bow’s going brrrrrrr.

There have been, amongst gamer tard circles, some complaints about new aspects added like auto scouting; aspects not there in the initial release of definitive, but which have been added on top of the existing quality of life changes. Some find it distasteful, troglodytes mostly. Regular balance tweaks that keep shifting a meta, like some league of legends bs, when it had been stable for seven years prior.

Whereas I, in my position of enlightened foresight (they buffed goths), feel this is the very point. The re-imagining is not a static thing. The idea of a definitive edition being unable to find a static position, may seem ironic but it captures that very element that made the game feel so good to start with, learning novel techniques that best allow us to take advantage of our existing knowledge, while not invalidating it. Koniks being the cronic.

Still reppin knight rush on franks, Still thinking khmer are a pile of wanks.

Still failing to fast feudal, goth rush is my strudel, tower rush giving me a hard noddle.

Turtle to forty my name is BVGROTI still stealing your sheep yes you know i am naughty!

Still castle dropping, trade cart rocking, my mans economy is stagnant but i ain’t knocking. Just locking down, gold, stone, wood line rolling up to your relic (yeah that is mine) all this shit makes for a real good time. Still!

With this in mind I tried my hand at interviewing the dweeb again.




In summary. Is it worth 15 pounds to get an erection every time a building melts so smoothly i think i might...uhghghhhhghg… Yes it is, now get me a tissue!

The Forest - into the heart of darkness, and then a bit further on.

Looking back on it, all I really see are these fragments of memories, the narrative isn’t clear and my sense of self is so shattered that I don't think I will ever find one, and if I do, I shudder to think what colours now paint me. There is nothing native about this place, so i can’t have gone native; i am left wondering if i have grown into something new or if this is who i was all along.

The wind howls as it prowls through the trees, I'm exhausted, panting for breath as i desiccate my already dry mouth. The light is ebbing away and I can see something out the corner of my eye moving.

Before: Cold, the wet cloths weigh me down, holding close to my unkempt form sucking the heat from my skin like leeches. The world tilts gently as the raft sways upon the shore side waves, a flash of lightning breaks the darkness of the cloud ridden night and we see four hunched forms running up along the coast in tandem.

Bloody gore splatters my face as i swing the axe, they stumble back, tripping as they fall off balance, the world around me has faded to naught as i straddle their grotesque body, i stifle a giggle, a gleeful childlike elation as i bring the weapon down to finish the job. 

Before: It’s my first night since the crash, my friends take me by the hand and lead me to their shelter, lights flicker in the distance, and I'm still covered in my own drying blood. I feel like a newborn, fed and waters then cradled as the night’s terrors begin to encroach, hominid forms charge from the tree line like the last act of Macbeth and throw themselves upon our fortress walls, the fighting is savage, our defenses as much a liability as an aide. A man, clearly untimely ripped, is cut down and carved up for food. Our tyranny goes on another day.

I spend the next day along in silent contemplation, in what feels like a world of my own. I hunt for the first time, and like learning to walk I stumble constantly. I shelter up for the night and sip from an innocent looking pond that quickly clears out the stomach’s contents. While I perch upon a cliff’s edge peering into the forest, watching for shapes moving through the brush. If they see me they don’t approach, which is worse somehow. The singular point becomes a fearful waveform that is pushing me back sure as the tide is washing in along the rocks below.

I soon rejoined the others, safer in numbers. Most of my self was broken away very slowly, eroded like rock, or worn out like old jeans, though that day there was a tear. It had more limbs than one ought care to count; though i did anyway, seven legs in total. A rampaging tree tilting behemoth, full of noise and excitement: signifying nothing. The fight I hardly recall; other than I was staring fixedly upon it, standing like a deer in the headlights feeling it’s strangely leathery skin wrap around my own soft cuticle and slowly begin to drag me down to it’s depths. I heard them shouting behind me, and noticed only then that I'd been pacing towards it.

A friend, far more adept than I had been planting effigies about our fort’s edge. He claimed they would keep away the men that came at night but they never seemed to; I was too sane to even attempt to build something like that then, though they seemed to help in a roundabout way. To calm his fraying nerves even as they sapped my own.

Like a rat in a maze I'd only feel safe once I'd poked my head into each and every nook and cranny this land had to offer, so to start, we made inroads up the coast. Finding, first a yacht, then a series of containers strewn carelessly along the beach, we were quickly surrounded and pushed back into the sea; from where we made our way home on a stormy night atop a small raft.

The raft was a form of salvation. While I was away they built another larger craft; almost a fort unto itself, with the sloshing waves for a moat. It was from this craft we worked our way to the highlands. A bloody disembarkation became a feast as we carved their bodies and threw them upon a hastily thrown together campfire. This was not the first piece of long meat I had seen nor even the first I had partaken of, for when one hardly chooses when the alternative is starvation; this was the first time I had viewed it as a convenience. Normally prey runs away not towards you and with so much meat to cook a single body was enough to keep us alive, yet the four we gathered made for a sumptuous feast.

One of our number claimed to see a light atop the mountainside as dusk gave way to night, though we all thought nothing of this. Our feet fell through the loosely packed snow necessitating snow shoes and torches to hold off the gnawing cold. Upon the witching hour we found that we had come searching for the plane's cockpit. As we were all near frozen and once again becoming hungry another band of miscreants set upon us, nearly killing one and forcing us to shelter for the night.

As we retreated, heads hung low, at first light, making our way down towards the lowlands we came across a crocodile and while I watched admiring its savage beauty my band set upon it with spear and axe impaling its carcass and carrying its head off as a trophy.  

I heard whispers around the campfire of caves and the things that lay within them, so, foolhardy as I was, I set off to find one. That was the easy part, once inside i found myself trapped in a lobster pot, i crawled around for days subsisting on chocolate and pop left in abundance away from the surface, each time i doubled back i came upon a new pathway so that i ricocheted from one to the other in a pinball-esque fashion. Here alone with my thoughts in the darkness I felt myself ferment, the sweet sugars of mind becoming a pungent poison. When I emerged I moved differently, hunted more savagely, prowled the land dodging patrols and became predatory in mindset. 

The attacks upon the fort had taken their toll; it was hardly a safe space and would often become overrun if lightly defended. It was during their period that a friend and I scouted through the forest looking for an ideal location where to lay new foundations. During a storm that took hold that night we were startled to see one another's fist glowing with grossly incandescent light, loud as a thunderclap, with this fist shattering the night we found our new home.

Taking only what we could carry we relocated to a series of poles atop a goose laden lake. We strung them together with walkways, and a zip line to it. Soon enough we had our own hanging home, a truly safe space where we formed the nucleus of our operation to this day.

I often left to hunt lizards, to use their scales as armour, proclaiming myself to be the dragon man as I charged them, spear draw and bloodlust on my baited breath.

We began to venture into caves more often, moving swiftly as a party unleashing bouts of unkempt violence in stochastic encounters as we came upon yet more twisted forms, some fetal others ogre like in aspect all of which took their tolls on my mind as we set up their bodies. We gathered from those depths the means to proceed yet further into their seemingly endless bowels.

I needed an outlet, a means of creative expression, something simple that wasn’t in aid of survival. One morning when sulking past the washed up faded red cargo containers I found one of the aggressors, standing while looking out to sea. It was trivial to bring my club to his skull and remove it with an axe. I repeated this several more times and in a moment of Pollock-like creativity set about arranging the limbs upon a set of rocks and sticks, forming a Shiva-like figure that I let burn it brightly accentuating its beauty.

We took our gathered means, and made our way down to the bottom of a large sinkhole. Meeting fierce resistance our now well-oiled party pushed on unperturbed. We pushed through caves, leaping from sheer rock faces and landing the otherwise with a hair's breadth to spare. Eventually the cave gave way to a building, a laboratory in which we saw yet worse horrors. A coffee machine, and some processed food held me transfixed for the longest time, they felt like alien objects to me now, the entire building was eerie and unnatural, not for its placement but the manufactured essence of it.

We found a device, a kind of artifact, its purpose still eludes us; but inside we found a boy from the plane crash, purportedly the son of one of our party. We turned on our cassette player and watched, while numbly chewing chocolate bars and listening to the tinny sound of 80’s pop-rock, as the father pulled his dying son from the iron maiden spikes of the device's core.

After another battle with a little girl, during which I was unconscious, we climbed swimming through a flooded cave, though this time the red paint we wore was not washed off, no water could clear us of this deed. No oceans could wash the blood from my hand; no instead my hands will stain seas scarlet, turning green waters red.

On and up we found ourselves at the peak of the mountain. There was a strange device ready to shoot down another plane, just as we had found ourselves done by. A glowing light that if glimpsed could have been seen from the highlands now far below. If we didn’t shoot down the plane our son would surely die.

This moved me not at all. My heart had grown white, and all this was simply a threat to my way of being. I longed to be back in the forest captivated by the thrill of the hunt. A child, a plane load of people; All these were elements that would dilute the closeness I'd found in nature, a form which only my mind could see, even the others held on to too much of the old world. They sat talking about morality, sophists pontificating and ignoring the natural law and it’s simple stipulations. It was with honeyed words I won them round, to let the plane fly on and the boy pass.

In the words of Marlon Brando: I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me.

How i learned to stop worrying about reach and make shitty essays instead.

The advent of Halo on pc was heralded as a return to glory days, and well honestly i’ve had a lot of fun with it even if it’s not hugely polished and story mode coop is bork. That’s my review go away. On the eve of an election under the watchful eye of the full moon I slept but fitfully. I awake to a wet world with my head fastened several notches tighter than i like it.

Coming back to something old made me realise that the way we, and by we i mean fucking idiots, talk about media has changed over the last few years, fortunately i have just the format for talking about such things:

You know what’s interesting, the stream of consciousness rant is all but dead on youtube for now at least. (upbeat open source music starts here) This may sound like a hammer blow to my personal style of exposition but what i say is actually highly scripted. No clue to that tho init.
What I mean is that the filtering down of techniques is such that the video essay format has reached the low production shitpost quality dregs. They emulated it’s style without having any real arguments beyond their stream of consciousness rants as before but presenting it in a more legitimate format... (music stops)

But why is that?

(and resumes)

Well last of all they started inserting questions to direct the flow of their arguments like an essay, in random fucking example of shitty source i used to make it seem like i did research “the exact thing i am attempting to bootleg but it’s a quote now so sue me,” if you catch my drift. But what really makes this interesting, is the Emphasis put on random words in a kind of clarkson-esque style to give Weight to otherwise meaningless. Bottom text.


Then it becomes time to relate it to personal experience: something i did in 2016 when i first really got into the nerdwriter and other short form pop essay’s. It’s light structure, and tightly edited format made for, what was at the time, good entertainment. It’s a shame that i’ve been bamboozled more than once by people emulating the title format, then the entire format wholesale. It’s only three minutes in when i realise i’ve been duped.


Is this them actually learning how to present an argument? well here's the graph I made (stole) to obfuscate my point with bullshit.

Fuck no, it’s pure style, stream of consciousness is hardly a default in it’s self. It’s a style that used to be popular, and people got sick of. Now only talentless hacks who can’t do anything other that steal jokes still use it, heyhowareyou? Actually it’s still used for small channel political rebuttals fairly often because set design is outside the conceptual or budgetary scope for them, but when it comes to commentating on media, the pseudo-essay is currently king.

PS: normally there some smug self aware bullshit at the end telling you your at the end and trying to sound rushed for time, so let me slam you with some advertisement instead. PORN? PORN! PAWNS. Need to get off but don’t want to think? Got an erection but nothing to put it in. watch people fuck on the internet. It’s really kind of gross when you’re not aroused but it exists and it is really abundant, so sign up to a lifetime of unfulfilled desires with…

Dark souls 3: The corner stone of any fully realised S&M lifestyle.

As a video game sophist, a sophiticated gamer if you will, my auteur indie game pallet can never truly be quenched. Namely because I lack the attention span for anything remotely challenging or creative; and prefer instead to sink yet more hours into comfortable, yet, unengaging titles that I have long since stopped gaining any unique pleasure from. Like an amphibian this water is my home and all venturings outside it are but transient and in opposed to my nature as a wet cretin.

So when did these beloved games become so meh? Time and time again the fires were lit only to turn the world around it to ash: ash? Speak not in riddles tale weaver for I am but a simple reader. Rule 1: remember your audience, rule 2: they are basic.

Dark souls, is the story of a dude setting himself on fire to stop the end of the world. 2 doesn't matter and three takes the bioshock approach and say’s “yeah what if that, but a bunch of times,”
So many people set themselves on fire that the world is pretty F’n burnt out by this point and everyone has given up on doing it. So what does the world do? Call up one of the people who burnt themselves before and get them to do it again. Only they have date at nando’s or whatever and CBA, so the world summons up the unburnt ash of one who failed to light the flame to go and cock block them.

So what does this have to do with postmodernism? Nothing but bringing it up is part of what I do as an elite sophist. Anyway here is the story of me weebing out over a katana (the most powerful of blades, (that thing which i, a master warrior (sexless imbicile) have studied))

I named the damn thing, forgotten what. Yet to get it was a trial of fire and steel. Well mostly the latter, I say mostly because the furnace never gets hot enough to make true steel… and blah blah blah, wasn't joking when I said I was a weeb.
After beating the first boss I found him, a withered corpse with rags for clothes gripping the (objectively) greatest tool of humankind's candle like existence.

He approached slowly, pacing towards me without fear nor hesitation as though as his mind was taken with the Sakura fall on a languid afternoons stroll in the zen garden, hand on hilt, blade in the sheath... he cut me down in two seconds. Rinse and repeat, only this time i’m prepared, bombs, knives and all manor of dastard subterfuge. I lob, hurl and spit my arsenal as vitriolic in my attack as a rabid dog... He cut me down again. This is the essence of the dark souls experience. Eventually I gave up, played through the game some and came back a touch more buff and several levels senior, and still barely made it out with a drop of blood left in my ninehundred ninety nine cut bearing body.

The dark souls series has a well established reputation as feeling like a swift kick to the bollocks and it’s players are all serial masochists, but this game is very much a kinky safe space. There is no shame or humiliation in death unless...

 

“Yeah sure, whatever? Why i does it need to be a kink?” well most, many, the more popular games are very much empowerment fantasies; to a degree dark souls three is too, not two, nor one though however, if I had to pick one: definitely three. Dark souls is very much a dis-empowerment fantasy, where you are significantly less able that your opponents and overcoming them is by no means inevitable, combine this with your character being a nobody and you’ve turned things on their head. Upon succumbing to that appeal one realises it is somewhat perverse: Kinky eh?

Well Three isn’t so straight forward, you move with a certain brisk elegance now, you no longer move like a clunky undead, but like embers flicking in the flames updraft. Your character is reviled for being ash, a desperate spurt from a dying world; yet there is hope. a knowledge of past mistakes which can be built on and learned from, if dark souls is depression: then dark souls three is rebuilding your life after the fact. There is a sense of importance as the lands converge and timer runs down of a world at the brink of dusk, you play an undeniable role as you gather the bosses’ remains.

The levels while feeling somewhat more linear, do a wonderful job of obfuscating their gaminess in their architecture and landscaping, they don’t feel like levels as you play, but are places you push through, it’s only when you need to flip a switch and open a shortcut that you realise the illusion that game puts you under. The immersiveness of the scene.

I recently, i mean not that recently, maybe 6 months ago. Got ahold of the DLC’s for the game. Asses of arendelle and the cock ring city. If you even got tired of mistress Ds3 shoving things near your taint then the dlc’s are some hardcore scenes that fulfil some of the playerbases most depraved fantasies. The challenge is ramped up - a certain tightening of the nipple clamps, through both level design and enemy toughness though not to the point of being unplayable; it feels more honed than anything.

The former having longer gaps between bonfires, making each encounter more costly, straining the player to sustain themselves through the harsh cold of the painted world.
The ringed city is a series of puzzles woven into combat, the game is excruciating until you clock the solution, at which point it recedes into just being bloody pedantically tough. There are no safe-words in this place, and I never quite finished it.

In summary: dark souls 3 is a game for kinky weebs, no normies allowed REEEEEEEEEEEE

Star wars: faillen to place my order

Star wars fallen order. It’s time I beat the embargo for that lucrative click currency, reviewing the latest jedi’em up from the george lucas’s transplanted teet. Imagine for a moment if you will the akria-like sprawling mass of disney’s corpus made manifest. The faces of significant pop culture icons popping in and out of existence along it’s flesh meshed with circuitry surface. It howls, growing ever larger until the combined fictional creativity of the human race is folded into a single extended universe, finally becoming self sufficient and breaking away from the human psyche leaving us mindless animal husks once more. A world where emma watson’s self coupled bella has to team up with wolverine in order to erase song of the south and other racist projects form the disney multiverse all the while Goofy and Martin Scorsese tries to stop them for reasons…

 This is starting to sound like kingdom hearts 4.

So what have I learnt having not actually played the game? Well quite a lot, surprisingly. This isn’t the first in between the 3rd and 4th films that has ever been made and it’s a real contrast in tone and presentation. I didn’t mean to blunder into this point but i may as well run with it. A while back, who the hell does research these days, force unleashed came out, and it was frickin edgy. Well not really, it was just you playing as the bad guy, about as edgy as the song about bad persons that was popular a few months ago.

The trailer for which is the protag making a star destroyer do a backflip or some such using some kind of energy field that binds that universe… fricken stupid idea. Any way contrast that with the CAMERON MONAGHAN face being front and centre teasing some back and forth adventure that seems more in line in tone with the star wars in general.

Force unleashed was, nothing more sophist than a crazed power fantasy about being the F’ning stronk. Little emphasis on narrative, and more interest in letting carrie (not the fisher) loose on the various planets of the star wars. Fallen order by contrast seems to play it’s power fantasy more in line with the films and even goes as far as to suggest the protag might be on the backfoot in the proceedings.wow much story very doge meme

What happened in the last 11 years that made this shift happen. When did we stop giving a shit about cardboard cutout characters whose sole defining trait is that they are strong? Is this a shift in political orientation? A recognition of the fragility of hero’s or a storytelling technique to get us invested? I mean one could make a case for any of these but think that would be looking at things too broadly.

Let us taste the porridge i feel to be just right. The raw be strong power fantasy stills exists, just not in the star wars. It’s home is with the also Disney owned marvel form; they’re better at it, it’s what their comics have gotten reasonably competent at conveying it and they sometimes even throw characterisation in for good measure.
Simply i think it’s Disney making sure to keep it’s properties divergent enough so at not to double dip the market too heavily. As such the power level of star wars has been stripped back at least as far as the protagonists are concerned while the marvel films feel no such constraint. The scales of the action is different in each, as well as them sharpening the central hook of the star wars. The dream of you, yourself being a Jedi, a fantasy that isn’t sold on how powerful you’ll be but on it’s accessibility and how people learn to do it. Hence why they ditched the royal lineage business largely and focus on schmucks learning to be heroes. Whereas marvel is about hero’s learning not to be schmucks.

Will fallen jedi be a good game? The hell if i know, i admit i don’t own a copy and have hardly seen the trailers, heck I didn't even have a hot take until I started writing this when I tweeted to my friend about doing so as a joke in less than an hour ago, this is all horrendously un and ill conceived. A foam of the top of the head ramble. Why are you still reading this, go and pine for the fjords, GO AWAY, I’M DONE, RANT OVER. stop reading. I mean it, there’s nothing more to read here. I don’t intend to convey anything else of worth or note. It’s not like i’m just stalling for time before a big reveal because I'm really not. It’s a farce that you’ve kept going this long and it’s really starting to wind me up. I’m not sure epistien killed himself. There I said it now go eat grass!