PVGR: 2020-2022

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEWS: 2020-2022

by William D. Tucker

#1: NINJA GAIDEN 3: THE ANCIENT SHIP OF DOOM (1991)

with or without fear

if one can stand tall in the heart of mecha-madness

a ninja may yet prevail

-July 2020

#2: FRONT MISSION DS (2007)

how many hours murdered

merged with your militarized, fully enclosed throne of contemplation,

this cockpit of your monumental-sepulchral bipedal wandering tank?

mostly thoughts of regret, and vengeance absolute,

even if you’ve been framed for starting this war,

now, you relish being the great fire

spreading out of control.

yours is the only perma-death,

you know;

if you ever decide not to come back,

all your slain comrades sink into the raging-grave with you.

sweet release

from all the cynical-cyclical ruminations of your war-brains

just a few button presses and joystick jerks away.

in theory

you could run nutrient drips

rig up ambient moisture collection apparatus,

load up on tanks of liquefied protein products,

even install a synthetic cell culture meats reactor,

when you feel the yen for the chewy-juicy stuff

-total enclosure,

total negation of the Exterior,

a final rebuttal of any arguments in favor of you unseating yourself from this

the throne of bloody-minded contemplation.

no wonder your name here is Royd

that’s no localization error

you are the name of your own pain

that hideously swollen vein

but is it your heart or your ass

that troubles you so?

-July 2020

#3: SYNDICATE (1993)

At-a-distance-command-and-controlled cyborg hit squad

give them just the right levels of aggression and cunning

load them up with bionic parts and heavy artillery

make sure at least one asset’s packing a cute little brainwash gun

get the enemy worker bees on your side,

light up the whole fuckin’ hive

-not to worry, not when it comes to the collateral damages and such

the whole planet’s been paved over

by all the rivalling, property-obsessed oligarchic factions

everywhere you go

the same architecture, the same infrastructure

all of Earth

is a campus for some New Era Corporate Citizen,

the constituent flunky-shit-work drones that make up the bodies politic

    of the Money Titans of this contemptible era

-so go nuts,

Young Mastermind,

shoot up the hired gunslingers of the Other Side,

and go ahead and nuke the saloon set, too, while you’re at it

it’s expected and encouraged,

    actually . . . sure, sure, sure-sometimes it’s a defector extraction bit,

that requires finesse,

obvi

-but force is pretty much default,

now,

then,

forever,

and all the parts and pieces of infrastructure

and personnel

have been totally rationalized, standardized, and maker-ized,

ready to be vat-grown and secreted,

or assembled-to-spec in sundry micro-manufacturies world-around,

so get your damage on, son!

Fully Militarized Globally Scaled Gentrification of the Earth

makes all the white trust fund hipster-gentrifiers of the recent past look like amateurs

especially nowadays,

since there’s no pretense of “art,” of “starting a band,” or “doing theatre,” or “opening a cute little coffee spot,” or “thinkin’ I’ll set up a micro-brewery to get a couture drunk-on, bro,”

it’s just straight up guns and bombs and brainwash rays and full-on suicide soldiers

when you need some of those;

carnage-on-demand

whenever and however you like it, son,

no slow death of economic apartheid, in-this-the-cruellest-now,

just fast-paced commando death squad dropship action,

24/7

you wouldn’t even know how to close, dude!

it’s the only way you can elevate yourself from a mere Destroyer

to a full-on Decider . . .

Syndicate is-in my mind-a training program for a dystopian cyberpunk future villain-kinda like a next level Bond Villain, or something like that. 

It should have come with a fully functional vat-grown synth-cat to perch on your lap,

making those biscuits,

as you stroke its fur,

the greatest pack-in feelie of PC gaming history,

ordering the next atrocity,

at-a-distance

command-and-controlled,

‘cause the one true executive core competency

you must master

is how to orchestrate the slaughter

with not a spot of blood on you 

secure in your airship

your vicious little godhood.

I’d say it beats minimum wage . . . but what doesn’t?

Really

the more I think about it

you need a prequel to the training program of Syndicate

like what’s the sorting process

to even get into a murderous executive scumbaggery career track?

I mean what with the economic, racial, and social apartheid IRL-

what the fuck does that look like eye-deep into a dystopian cyberpunk future?

Now that one-that would be too depressing to contemplate.

Something like an All-American capitalist version of Papers, Please. 

Probably too much to contemplate even for a pessimist like me. 

-August 2020

#4: CASTLEVANIA III: DRACULA’S CURSE (1989)

1.

The land of Castlevania is invaded by monsters and the undead. 

A man prays at a church, and then sets out to kill all the monsters and the undead making the land unsafe and rather stressful to dwell within, or so it would seem.

This determined man is named Trevor Belmont.
He is one ‘e’ away from being associated with a brand of bananas. 

Trevor Belmont walks everywhere.

Trevor is also pretty good at jumping. 

The dude clearly takes his Leg Days pretty fucking seriously. 

So, like, respect.

 

2.

Trevor kills monsters and the undead as he walks and jumps about, and tries to avoid falling into death pits and deep waters, ‘cause he can’t swim. 

His goal is to eventually make his way to the uppermost chambers of a sinister castle, and kill Dracula, who, apparently, is, like, the dude commanding all the monsters and the undead in the region, and so, I guess, Trevor’s overall strategy is to cut off the head of the command-and-control Dracula Invasion System.

Trevor kills Dracula, and shit settles down in the area. 

Makes sense. 

 

3.

Trevor’s got his whip, which he’s looking to upgrade into a ball-and-chain.

Once he gets the ball-and-chain, he doesn’t wield the whip anymore.

He’s also looking to pick up one other weapon, that is neither a whip nor a ball-and-chain.

He’s willing to pick up a throwing axe, a Molotov cocktail, a boomerang, a throwing dagger, a magical pocket watch that can freeze enemies, 

no firearms, no rocket launchers, no lasers. 

If he picks up one secondary weapon, like, that’s it.

If he comes across another weapon, he’s willing to pick it up, but he’s gonna toss the other one, if he’s got it. 

Now, if Trevor picks up a cross, that’s, like, apparently, some kind of a Mystical Nuke which will instantly obliterate all monsters and undead on the screen in a searing blast of light.

Also: the cross doesn’t take up a weapon slot, which is nice.  

Christianity is some kind of a tactical nuclear weapon in Trevor’s hands,  which is interesting to think about.

It would seem that Trevor was praying for nuclear weapons capacity at his church, at least in some kind of a mystical capacity, which is interesting to think about as well.

4.

As Trevor battles along, he occasionally will run into someone who asks to join him in his one man war against Dracula, thereby making it a two man war.

If Trevor agrees to a partnership, they will shake hands, and this new ally will mystically phase themselves into Trevor’s body, because it’s easier to just have one body walking to Dracula’s castle as opposed to two.

Or so it would seem. 

If Trevor decides that he needs a break he will mystically metamorphose into his partner, who takes up the slack until they get tired, and then they will mystically metamorphose back into Trevor. 

This sounds strange, but this is how Trevor operates.

If Trevor is already in a partnership, and he encounters yet another potential partner, then Trevor may take on a new partner BUT this means ditching the old partner, okay?

This sounds strange-because you would think that having as many people in your crew as possible would increase your odds of fucking up Dracula’s shit proper-but it would seem that Trevor prefers to work with only one partner at a time. 

This may be tied up with some kind of religious conservatism to do with monogamy.

Or, alternatively, it is equally possible that Trevor got burned in a previous polyamory arrangement thus pushing him into radical monogamy. 

The game is not explicit on this point.

However, all available evidence seems to indicate that Trevor is quite serious about only being partnered to one person at a time in his walking war against Dracula. 

And there’s probably something more to it, something in Trevor’s relationship history, something we would all be gratified to know, but since there’s no social media in the land of Castlevania, it’s difficult to ascertain Trevor’s background in this regard. 

But the absence of hard evidence is never a barrier to creative inference. 

Or so it would seem. 

5.

Overall,

Trevor only likes to carry two weapons at a time,

while being partnered to only one other person at a time,

this partnership being confined to a single, mystically variable body,

all in the pursuit of an obsessive war-to-the-death against Dracula and his whole fucking crew,

Therefore,

One Must Conclude,

that this Trevor Belmont guy?
He must be heavy into the Voluntary Simplicity Scene,

in his own way.

Or so it would seem. 

Which is interesting to think about. 

-September 2020

#5: SUPER METROID (1994)

 "The lifeform you save may be your own."

         -Samus Aran, galactic bounty hunter, in conversation with explorer and fashion designer Justin Bailey

-September 2020

#6: THE LEGEND OF ZELDA (1986)

Fourth grade 

this kid drew these elaborate maps of forests and dungeons 

it is, 

indeed, 

an unauthorized paper version of Zelda 

a way to extend the game from screen into physical reality 

I gather my rubbery Monster in My Pocket figures to play the enemy 

and a badass Lego knight in black and gray armor with a sword and a shield bearing the image of a fearsome dragon to play a tougher, battle-seasoned Link

Soon enough this kid was drawing maps of post-apocalyptic city settings and a wrecked subway line inspired by a Planet of the Apes marathon on one of the Ted Turner channels 

We decided not to bring in any modern weapons 

just those Danger Mouse bombs 

keep it to blades and some magic 

We're trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past, I suppose. 

-September 2020

#7: LIBERATION MAIDEN (2012)

100 years into the future

and in response to a foreign invasion aimed at sucking all the spiritual power out of the ley lines coursing through its islands

Japan ditches its parliamentary system of government

and establishes a kind of militarized Shintoist eco-nationalist ultra-presidency concentrated inside a triune structure: 

a flying battleship which contains the executive cabinet;

a flying super robot which finds its home within a hangar aboard the flying battleship;

and the President, who rides on the back of the flying super robot,

obvi,

and, from playing the game, this all seems to work out pretty great. 

You play as the President, who is actually the second president under this new system, and is also the elfin purple-haired teenage daughter of the first president, who was assassinated;

and when you go into battle against the spirit-vampire enemy machines,

you and your super robot can generate a form of super-combo energy

that neither of you, on your own, can create;

but it is only through the mystical union of teenage president and newly manufactured super robot

that you can wield a laser sword of supremacy,

that both obliterates

and purifies.

You see,

as you vanquish the enemy spirit-vampire machines

the decadent cities and industrial complexes of New Japan vanish

and are replaced by verdant forests full of giant trees

like from the poster that came with the original SNES cartridge release of Secret of Mana

and I start to wonder,

“Who is this Enemy? Is it a faction within New Japan itself? Is this a battle within the soul of Japan between Nature and Industry?”
Of course,

as you play the game, you unlock bits of lore-text that characterizes the Enemy as a foreign imperialist invader,

and I observed, “Combat unlocks history. Unlocks technical specs. Unlocks intel about the Enemy. You can only obtain knowledge by fighting.”

You see.

Is this what all those heady, theoretical game design/development blog posts from fifteen years ago were on about when “ludo-narrative dissonance” was all the rage? 

I like the idea of going to the library, and having to fight a hulking mecha-dragon boss in order to be able to check out Silent Spring,  An Inconvenient Truth, The Art of War, A People’s History of the United States, or The New Jim Crow. Gamification has been trendy this past decade-let’s kick it up a notch. You have to survive an actual anime-style battle to the death to unlock substantial knowledge of your world. Nobody could credibly claim the library was boring ever again, that’s for damn sure. 

I’m probably overthinking things as per usual. 

And I wouldn’t have me any other way. 

Especially if overthinking requires that I first put my foot up some multistage combiner mech’s ass. 

Oh, shit.

What if every thought requires victory against some gleaming threshold guardian bristling with ordnance?

Well . . . let the battle be joined.

-November 2020 

#4B: CASTLEVANIA III: DRACULA’S CURSE (1989)

D.I.S.: Dracula Invasion System

Yoke the iconic image of Death-the Grim Reaper-to your unholy desires

This figure is current in the collective imagination of humanity 

Deploy the undead

All the graveyards in the land are full of conscripts-and-saboteurs-to-be

Put ‘em to work: skeletons, zombies, ghosts, monsters manifesting out of some blood-soaked battlefield past, enraged nature spirits taking the form of outsized swamp critters,  

the Dracula Invasion System shows how to employ a rigorous metaphysical logos to call forth beasts of mythos

reshape the land into ruthless gauntlets of traps and strenuous stair-climbs and asshole-clenching leaps-over-deadly-voids

it’s not just about your people in the field

it’s about total dominance of the landscape

which you must make hallucinatory at key moments

suddenly the blighted towns and forests give way to Atlantean ruins

the glories of yore beguile, perhaps things are not so bad, it could even be the Golden Age come again-

-this is the mindfuck you put onto Enemy

with the Dracula Invasion System

as this or that Protagonist Aspirant stumbles dreamily through your custom trip

now sic the fish people and the dragons and loose the flooding waters

break the will-to-resist

with overwhelming illusions

of total battlespace dominance

With

D.I.S.

Dracula Invasion System

-November 2020 

#8: METAL GEAR SOLID (1998) 

Do you think it’s possible to have a heart-to-heart discussion in the heat of battle?

I think maybe that’s the only place to reveal your innermost self.

Because whatever gets said 

no matter how revealing

either you or your enemy will be dead 

so there’s no cause for regret over telling someone a bunch of next-level embarrassing shit about yourself.

I think that’s why Solid Snake and his boss enemies go on-and-on-and-on talking in all those interminable cut scenes when you get right down to it.

Two hearts are revealed, 

but only one has to go on living with what’s been said. 

If real life were like that, I’d be pleased-as-prank about it.

Communication is largely an illusion.

You can’t really relate to a stupid person.

Nor is there any getting along with your local conspiracy theorist or religious fanatic.

You can only connect with someone who, essentially, already thinks the same as you, and this ‘connection’ is, like prayer, just talking to yourself. 

But a deadly Enemy . . . there’s the only Intimacy that can be had with Another.

One of us will die, and one of us will live.

 

If I die, then my problems are over, because I can’t feel embarrassment if my ticket’s been punched.

If I live, then, well, I’ll probably remember what Enemy said to me, but not forever.

Memories fade to make room for new memories.

Like, uh . . . that new item on the Taco Bell menu!

I gotta remember to eat that.

And the pleasure of that worthy event-changing up my Fourth Meal game-that is gonna take up at least one or two slots on my PS1 memory card.

Adios soul-bearing monologue from whosits that I had to kill last week. 

Hello sensual mouth-orgy as I chew up that quadruple cheese pork-steak quesadilla with some of that new limited time only Rectal Napalm hot sauce. 

This is a good deal.

And only at Taco Bell.

-December 2020

#9: NARC (2005)

“Want some shit?”

Remember Narc? It was that 1988 arcade game where you could either arrest drug dealers and drug addicts or you could shoot them with your assault rifle or blow them to burning bacon bits with your tactical grenade launcher. 

You had a choice between a super-pig kitted out in a red catsuit with a matching motorcycle helmet or the same super-pig but in blue.

So, red or blue . . . was this a commentary on the bipartisan support for the ultra-repressive Forever Wars on Drugs that the US-of-A pursued so ardently from Nixon ‘til, uh, well it’s still kind of a thing isn’t it? 

Yeah . . . so along came the XBox and the PS2, and things from video gaming past were resurrected in bigger, bolder, gutsier,nuttier, bustier, beefier, bloodier, ballsier fashion. 

Hence . . . Narc’05. 

“Want some shit?”

Here’s some marketing copy from the back of the insert paper inside the plastic sleeve of a clamshell XBox case:

BIG HIT $19.95 FRIEND PRICES

Which is kinda funny, right?

It’s a clever way to spin a budget release title. 

It’s not cheap because it’s been stepped on by slave labor and cut with strychnine and

polonium.

No, no, not at all.

These are friend prices.

We love you. 

Like Winston loved Big Brother. 

And you’ll love us right back with the same ardor. 

 

“Want some shit?”

Choose your character.

You got two ways to go:

One dirty cop voiced by Bill Bellamy-remember Bill Bellamy? Actually . . . I do remember Bill Bellamy a little bit-MTV VJ, actor, TV host, and a stand-up comedian who, apparently, coined the term ‘booty call.’ Like . . . he’s the guy that first came up with the concept of the booty call. That’s what his wikipedia page says. What? That’s impressive. Did George Carlin or Richard Pryor or Sam Kinnison or Brother Theodore or Joan Rivers or Redd Foxx or Lenny Bruce or Don Rickles or Jerry Seinfeld actually invent a new term and the concomitant idea said term is meant to express? I’m impressed. 

And another dirty cop voiced by Michael Madsen . . . the straight razor guy who cut off that cop’s ear in Reservoir Dogs. 

I’ll go ahead and save you some trouble: Madsen’s the one you want. 

If you played this piece of junk on XBox back in the day, you could press a button on your chunky-ass controller that allowed you to sell some of the illegal street drugs you’ve been hoarding for your own personal use to random NPCs on the street.

When you press this button

you cue up a gloriously throaty voice clip from Mr. Madsen

“Want some shit?”

There’s combat.

There’s a dumbfuck story involving corrupt intrigues from Baldy Ol’ Eagleland, USA all the way to Hong Kong, where everybody knows Kung Fu, natch.

You can ingest your confiscated party favors to get temporary superpowers: Flash-like speed, PCP-style invulnerability, and woozy stonerish slow-mo modes.

This game is fuckin’ dumb.

I vaguely recall that the people who produced it paid to have Curtis Mayfield’s Pusherman and Freddie’s Dead on the soundtrack. 

Like people are going to confuse inauthentic product like Narc’05 with Super Fly.

As if.  

This is the bargain basement version of Grand Theft Auto,

and I never liked Grand Theft Auto in the first place

(Retro City Rampage does GTA better than GTA, BTW).

But every time you press that one button

“Want some shit?”

I believe in the cigarette-burnished voice-strings of Mr. Madsen.

“Want some shit?”

This is, really, the only fun to be had in the game.

“Want some shit?”

I can picture in my mind, the actual Michael Madsen, especially his look from Kill Bill, cruising through some nightclub or some illegal farmhouse rave, cowboy hat and all, 

“Want some shit?”

and I believe . . . that I want Philip Glass to compose an opera around this voice clip, and Madsen’s sublimely dumpy exterior-can’t you just hear that driving, cycling, iterating musical minimalism a la The Grid from the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack? 

BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY

BEEDEEBOODOOBOODOOBOODOO

BEEDEEBOODOOBOODOOBOODOO

BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY

BEEDEEBOODOOBOODOOBOODOO

BEEDEEBOODOOBOODOOBOODOO

DOODOO, DOODOO

DOODOO, DOODOO

DEEDEEDOODOODOODOODOODOO

DEEDEEDOODOODOODOODOODOO

BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY . . .

And then we add to that, at random intervals reminiscent of the voices chanting random sequences of numbers in Einstein on the Beach

“Want some shit?”

And we end up with

BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY

“Want some shit?”

BEEDEEBOODOOBOODOOBOODOO

BEEDEEBOODOOBOODOOBOODOO

“Want some shit?”

BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY

“Want some shit?”

DOODOO, DOODOO

DOODOO, DOODOO

DEEDEEDOODOODOODOODOODOO

DEEDEEDOODOODOODOODOODOO

“Want some shit?”

BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY, BOOPITY-BOPPITY

“Want some shit?”  

. . .

It goes on like that.

Oh, there’s no end in sight.

 

I just need some investors.

 

Philip Glass does commercial gigs, y’know, so I don’t see why he wouldn’t put out for a commission that would exist only to serve my own twisted and capricious whimsies, right?

It just takes a generous fee.

And I can make this shitass lousy fuckin’ world what I want it to be.

These words that I have written . . . here are the most significant thoughts in the global domain of human consciousness at this very moment.

Nothing else rates.

-December 2020. 

#10: POPULOUS 1st Release (1989); SNES Version (1991)

What’s more fun than knowing that God is on your side and will give you all the excuses you need to engage in every kind of abominable act?

Why . . . Being God, of course!

Hey, you paid for the cartridge. 

You worked for every dollar you spent. 

Or, you know, maybe your parent or parents got it for your birthday. 

Hell, even if you just illegally downloaded a ROM-well, shit, that’s an investment of time. 

And time is money. 

Time is way more valuable than money, in fact, ‘cause money comes and goes

but Time?

You never get that back.

No way, no how.

Go ahead: try to get it back.
I’ll wait.

Didn’t get it back, did you?

You didn’t even try,

‘cause you didn’t need me to tell you that,

you already know,

unless you’re just, like, super-fuckin’ eaten up with the dumbass.

So . . . better than being an unrepentant, hyper-aggressive agent of God

is Being the God.

The Universe is an open book to you,

and you get to push your followers this way and that,

so many pieces on the game board.

You raise the land.

You raze the land.

You designate one of your subjects-known as the Good People-as a great Thought Leader, and all the enthralled Good People rally to their side,

if you deem this thing to happen.

And your great opponent is the Devil. 

And the Devil leads the Evil People.

And the Horned One and his gang are eating into your cosmic turf,

‘cause this is a game,

so you can’t God too hard,

yes, I’m taking Bucky Fuller’s advice to use God as a verb here,

you can’t God too hard

‘cause, uh, then you would just win at everything all the time,

therefore no game,

therefore no challenge,

because-comes the twist-to God is to play no game,

it’s just to instantly make everything so,

and this is not any fun,

when you really sit down and think on it.

It’s boring to God, to be God-ing, to have God-ed.

There’s no sense of earned achievement. 

Therefore you’re not really the God, like you would invoke to shut down democratic processes or justify slavery or to give warrant to mass violence or explain the bogus science of your daffy Creationism Museum or to enforce rigid gender roles as handed down from on high,

nope, 

you’re like one of them old Greek Deities or Thor from Marvel Comics,

something like that,

a very humanized Ultra-Powerful Type of Being

maybe like an X-Man or something,

so you have a lot of power

it’s not nothing,

but it’s not all the power,

which,

you know,

you might be a little bit let down by that,

so buyer or pirate beware.

You can call the Good and Evil Peoples to armageddon.

That’s some pretty almighty shit.

You can have some fun with that.

But you don’t quite get to speak the Universe into existence,

with your word being the beginning and all that.

You gotta buy the SNES port of SimEarth for that.

This is really a kind of mystical strategy and infrastructure building game, where you gotta have homes and food for your Good People, and then you gotta make their way of life just sustainable enough to eliminate all of the Evil People, and, in so doing, put Holy Egg on the Devil’s face. 

Two Supreme Beings,

manipulating desperate humans

waging Proxy War Eternal,

‘til one wipes out the other.

I think the idea is that if you whack out all the followers, then the God or the Devil has no more Faith Power to draw upon-

-notice how there’s no Atheist option?

That would fuck up the whole game, wouldn’t it?

If the people-who are doing all the work-decided they were tired of just being cannon fodder for the endless struggle, and they just stopped believing, then both God and Devil would disappear, and then maybe the Good and the Evil People would realize that they have their toils and their needs and their wants in common . . . and later for all this religiously enforced mental servitude, eh?

I don’t think any of that is permitted in the actual game.

Maybe if you input the Konami Code?

I haven’t actually tried that.

5 minutes later

Nope. Doesn’t work. 

So . . . like . . .  there’s no hope?

Big shrug

Yeah.

-January 2021 

#11: MEGA MAN X (1993)

1.

If I were a pro-wrastler, the Sigma Select Screen Theme would be my entrance music. 

It captures the arrogance and the swagger of a conqueror. This music puts across the peculiar charisma of authoritarianism. You get a sense of why people would grovel before such a ruthless character as Sigma. You can see all the other robots cheering and howling at vast hate rallies wherein Sigma would give jokey, long-winded speeches about how he’s the Risen Robo-Christ, and how all robo-journalists are fake news, and anyone that disagrees should be disassembled. 

Maybe I would even shave my head and modify my body with robot parts. My pro-wrastling name could be something like ‘Roid-Bot DX: Death Xtra.’ My backstory could have something to do with being an experimental cyborg entity who was accidentally dropped into a vat of Neo-Steroids, and when I swam back to the surface I was overcome with a desire to become a champion pro-wrastler and I would let nothing stop me from that day forward.  

Pro-wrastling is all about celebrating the Stupid. 

I think I could swing that.

I know about the Stupid.  

2.

Now, when you get to Sigma-the final boss-he sics his robo-hound on you. That’s what an evil bastard Sigma is-he wants to fuck with your revulsion at killing an adorable canine. I mean, there are people that are super-triggered by depictions of dog-death in movies. They won’t even blink if you mow down a bunch of human civilians in a Vietnam flick, or something like that. But kill one dog? Shit, if you even kick a dog, okay, that’ll fuck their shit all the way up into the stratosphere. And, I guess, Sigma knows that, so he tries to psych you out by making you fight a robo-doggo. So you’ve gotta deal with that.

And once you’ve dealt with that, Sigma himself steps out of the shadows, throws off his cape, and comes after you with a lightsaber. In retrospect, Sigma should have also had a glass of fine wine which he could have tossed aside with aristocratic disdain. Or, since he’s a robot, he could’ve had a glass of fine motor lubricant. I would’ve been satisfied by either one. But they didn’t do that. I had to wait a few more years for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. But by then,well, I certainly appreciated the gesture. It was very sweet. But, honestly, I’d kinda moved on.

The music is driving and frantic. It’s a proper final boss battle theme. 

There’s something cool about Sigma. He lives up to the hype of his Select Screen Theme. Sigma’s lightsaber is cool. It’s always cooler when a guy comes at you with a sword, even in a modern or-as we have here-a futuristic setting. Sigma’s putting himself at an intentional disadvantage against your Buster Shot. That’s how much confidence this Robo-Mussolini-looking motherfucker has in his fighting skill. There’s something cool about that. I wish I were that cool . . .

You and Sigma bounce off the walls. You bust off your shots where you can. 

If you have the patience, and you can keep bouncing off the walls, you’ve got this. 

You blow up Sigma’s body. His head is all that remains. 

But wait, there’s more.

The head flies up to the top of a giant robo-demon body that has a kind of robot wolf’s head. Sigma’s head is a kind of crown upon the wolf’s head of the robo-demon body, which commands both lightning and fire to try to destroy you. Behold, Sigma, Master of the Elements, your Destroyer! Why not grovel and pray to Him . . . for a swift death!

The music is different, now. It’s . . . lugubrious. We are now on a grim march, one that’s losing steam. The wily drive and power of our first round against Sigma are gone. We are smaller than our newly re-bodied enemy, but we are quicker, and we leap onto one of the flailing hands of the robo-demon wolf’s head body, and, if we have patience, we steadily blast Sigma’s faces into robo-hell. 

Sigma overplayed his hand. Sigma thought brute strength would win him the day. Sigma never considered the possibility that we would use his arrogance against him. 

This is Sigma’s downfall. 

This is the fate of the Robo-Asshole who thought he could never lose. 

Adieu, Sigma.

Perhaps, we’ll meet again in Robo-Valhalla, or something. 

3.

I’m still sitting here, thinking about my future as a pro-wrastling cyborg.

Have I been infected with the authoritarian fantasy embodied by the Sigma Select Screen Theme?

Do I desire to trade my humanity to be worthy of that ominous, arrogant music?

I know Enemy when it’s outside of me. Not everybody can see the Enemy of the Exterior. It’s not easy for everyone. And so many people live in the presence of their oppressor-Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, Boss, Deity, Religious Leader, Political Figurehead, Envious Colleague, Jealous Lover, Abusive Partner-because they find confrontation too traumatic. But bridge-burning comes naturally to me. This is a kind of strength.

But strength has its peril-the hubris of Sigma-in the blindness to an Enemy Inside. Festering within my so carefully up-armored body, showing no hint of weakness or sentiment.

Truly . . . if it came down to it . . . do I have the tears to stop ambition? 

No, I’ll not fall into evil.

I’ll stop obsessively exercising and training in lethal forms of mixed martial arts and eating right, and sacrifice my hunky, diamond cut battle body that the world might be spared the evil and oppression of my Supreme Merciless Strength Form unleashed.

I’ll sit so hard, so long, so deep into this cushiony chair until the distinction between Me and Chair ceases to exist-much like the rope of the swing and the tree to which it has been tied. 

I’ll resist the terrible power of the Sigma Select Screen Theme with an endless stream of frozen pepperoni beefsteak cheesy crust pizzas, two-liter bottles of Generic Cherry Cola, family packs of chewy chocolate chip cookies, tub after glorious tub of French Onion Dip, and all of this drizzle-drenched in sour cream, nacho cheese, and roast chicken juice-and just the juice. I find roasted chicken to have a rather vulgar texture. But I let nothing go to waste. I have the actual chicken delivered by courier to an abandoned house adorably squatted by a gang of rambunctious stray cats down the block.

(Sidenote: Did you know that you could dip your cookies in French Onion Dip? You’d be shocked at how good this tastes. And then you add in some pancake syrup-ooo wee! That’s good eatin’.)

For the price of Human Freedom . . . is the loss of my Beauty. 

This loss . . . is the only ward against Global Cyborg Wrastler Dictatorship. 

And so I give up my diamond cut battle body . . . gladly.

You’re welcome, People of Earth.

You’re welcome. 

-February 2021

#12: SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI IV (2013) 

The theme of ‘Aboveground Urban Area C’ pounds and drives and I feel like the coolest motherfucker of all times striding through the demon-haunted streets of post-nuke Tokyo.

A Bulgarian cyclops bull known as a Stonka whispers in my ear and uses ‘Me’ instead of ‘I.’ Stonka’s adorbs Muppet-talk changes my life, demonic words as spiritual steroids, getting me jacked for this or that gruelling boss battle.

And once I put on that Black Demonica Suit?

I never took it off.

Even if it put me at a disadvantage in the late game.

That was my look.

Usually,

I walk the Neutral path

to express my atheism,

to signal to all angels, deities, devils, and demons

that my ass needs smooches,

and that the line forms on the right, my Dears;

but this time around I was drawn to the Chaos

because the game starts me off in a weirdo Samurai-Christian theocratic dictatorship

and that shit

made Horned Chaos make too much damn sense to me.

I needed to obliterate the Homeland,

because I was double-done-with-its-shit.

And so I fought the Law.

And the Law ceased to be.

Yeah.

It kinda snuck up on me.

And despite my Megatenist Neutral Ideals,

SMT IV reminded me all too well

how often Enemy begins and ends in the Home.

In my mind’s newly mutated cyclops eye

-the demon whispers are working-

I fantasize the movie version as a Tokyo-based version of Escape From New York,

directed by Takashi Miike,

with special EFX by Jim Henson-Meets-Rob Bottin.

The Stonka’s fierce,

and fiercely kawaii.

-February 2021

#13: CYBERPUNK 2077 (2020)

. . . I fall out of the world . . .

A questline does not trigger despite all conditions being met.

I am driving a sports car when my avatar floats to the top of the vehicle and assumes a T-pose. 

My pants are gone. 

I am still driving a sports car.

Heads of NPCs float off into the air like the Woodsman from the third season of Twin Peaks.

My hands clutch an invisible sidearm.

Now the firearm is visible.

My avatar assumes a T-pose.

I fall out of the world.

I paid for the game. 

I do livestream.

I get taken down for uploading footage with licensed music.

I switch off the licensed music.

I do livestream.

There’s still licensed music.

I get taken down for uploading footage with licensed music.

I paid for the game.

Livestreams are great free advertising for video game products.

Why does video game company insist on fucking me?

I do livestream of different game.

I climb building.

I jump back.

I keep going one hundred or so feet.

This was not supposed to happen.

I fall into body of water.

I sink.

My avatar assumes T-pose.

I fall out of the world. 

NPCs lack animations.

Characters do not respond to the right in-game switches.

The ending I was working toward as per the strategy guide is no longer accessible.

You follow the official steps and you still get fucked.

Is that something to do with the ‘punk’ ethos at work here?

I uninstall software.

I smash disc.

I wipe my ass with pages from the strategy guide.

But the pages are printed on paper that’s too slick-they got no ‘shitgrip’ as it were.

I eat a large amount of Taco Bell.

I clench pages of the strategy guide between my booty cheeks.

I assume-voluntarily, this time-a strong T-pose.

I blow a chunky, wet fart that ignites due to the impressive quantity of Rectal Napalm hot sauce with which I adorned my quadruple pork-steak quesadillas.

The strategy guide pages burn up with a flourish, 

crackling gold motes in the air.

Still in my strong T-pose

. . . I fall through the earth . . .

. . . and out of the world . . .

-April 2021

#14: FINAL FANTASY VI (1994)

In the end 

everyone has to become an Ultima dispenser 

'cause that final multistage boss battle . . . how many times you want to fuck with that?

best just to nuke 'em

loose that expanding cerulean obliteration sphere, and be done with your day

mm-hmm

and that's why magic has to disappear from the world

that goddamn arms race logic

just turns everyone into a living weapon of mass destruction 

yeah

it's  a tough scene

a shame 

it really is

but that's the price of peace, I guess 

-May-June 2021

#15: CONTRA (1988)

I’m after the Red Falcon, right?

Not much context, no cut scenes to glaze me with that sweet, sweet exposition head-to-toe.

Am I even a soldier?

I kinda think-just based on the kinda jaunty way I run-that I must’ve been a-what do you call it? One of those guys who goes running across the football field naked-

-a streaker!

Yeah.

‘Cause the guy, the little guy on the screen-

-the player character?

-like, the little guy . . . he’s just got that obvious confidence, you know?

-lotta people disdain a streaker, but, and this has been born out in various research studies, but your average streaker . . . they actually have above average confidence,

which is interesting.

Anyways.

That’s just me gettin’ a read on the basic body language, tho’, you don’t have to be too impressed with that. 

And we have

uh

We just have machines merged with monsters

You got, like, an alien monster sorta built into the military hardsite.

Or maybe-I dunno-maybe the Red Falcon’s critters

maybe they just 

like

grow all of their weapons and infrastructure and supply lines right outta their bodies.

Like imagine if you had animals

like cows or horses or chickens or what have you

and you could get ‘em to birth, um, automated gun emplacements and, um, rockets,

you would maybe need a rhinoceros or an elephant to birth a tank or an armored personnel carrier-for the really big things you’d need big animals-

-but we have these, uh, these looming-huge extraterrestrial beasties

-they just, I guess, up and stole all of H.R. Giger’s shit, this, uh, this whole biomechanical grisly abomination routine

-fuck, dude, you can flog any damn thing into a cliche, can’t you?

Yeah . . .

But, um . . .

-oh, so . . . I guess when we get deeper into it

I guess these could be ultratech facilities for vatgrown organic entities, they just grow their personnel, then, okay, that’s probably what I would do

-I think, uh, I think that’s a steal, as well,

wasn’t that in Neuromancer? With the vat-grown ninja? 

-and Aliens with the huge queen alien squeezing out her whole operation, which is a pretty awesome path for evolution to take, I think,

I wish,

Uh,

I wish cosmic evolution

would shape my ass

so that I could just secrete or birth or shit or whatever

an entire occupation military force

-for that . . . I would definitely trade the carefree life of a streaker.

Depend upon it, dude!

I’d take over the whole operation.

But, okay . . . this is the really weird part.

You get your power-ups for your gun from those capsules that sort of fly through the air-

-so . . . you just . . . why would Red Falcon do that? Just allow such open access to the arsenal like that?

-’cause the weapons capsules are clearly, uh, they’re just very clearly branded with that Red Falcon logo-maybe I’m not supposed to have access to those-but you just shoot ‘em and they drop whatever kinda weapons-

-seems like a serious security lapse-

-but, maybe, I dunno.

Maybe ex-streaker dude is, uh, is a disgruntled member of the Red Falcon army, and so this whole game is about a former cog in the machine deciding to strip some fuckin’ gears, y’know?

-or, it could be the case . . . that just the way the Red Falcon is running this whole place is just . . . I don’t even know . . . just super irresponsible-just, like, making lethal military grade weapons not just available, okay, but the guy-this Red Falcon guy-he’s literally sending his killing implements flying out and among the population-his own people-and saying, “Here you go, have fun!” Which sorta sounds like a-like the NRA’s Ultimate Dick-Beating fantasy-is that what’s going on with Red Falcon? I dunno. Could just be that he’s a-uh-that he’s just a deeply troubled person with too many death-toys, y’know? I dunno . . . 

. . . wait-a-minute.

Maybe

What this is

Is the Red Falcon

Has a death wish

He’s sending out the hardware

In the hopes that someone will load up on the toys

And bring down the house

‘Cause Red Falcon can’t bring himself to do himself

There’s still some residual survival instinct

And so that’s where the ex-streaker enters the death picture

‘Cause this whole system is just crazy-fucked

Anybody who would run their world like this

Must be on a death-trip-to-the-max

Maybe

Maybe we could’ve worked things out with Red Falcon

Maybe it didn’t have to be this way

Just a little bit of arms control

Could’ve gone a long way

Y’know?

Well.

I feel kinda bad for Red Falcon, now.

The Guy was just trying to make sense of his shit.

All he had to go on was power, right?
The pursuit of power.

Who doesn’t want some power?

Red Falcon just took it over the top.

I pity this guy.

Clearly . . . he wanted power, and he thought it probably would make him look cool if he copped all his style and his, uh, all his accessorizations from that freaky H.R. Giger shit and Soldier of Fortune magazine and, uh, and the scary matte black tactical end of the cyberpunk shit and, you know, I get it-you gotta live your inner vision. But this is just, uh, this is just incredibly dysfunctional. 

And so goddamn rigid, too.

You play this game enough times, and all of the Red Falcon’s shit-his whole operation-it just has these repetitious patterns to it-everything has a schedule. Red Falcon is clearly an authoritarian efficiency and routinization nut. The dude has no give in his, uh, his whole existence. But there’s a fatal flaw in that-’cause once you know the patterns, the routines, the rigid over-and-over-and-over-againness of it all-

-ah, man, I just-

-if only someone could’ve talked to Red Falcon-

-but would he have listened?

Guys like Red Falcon . . . they don’t listen to anybody.

They listen to someone . . . they think they’re being weak.

But we all need a little, uh, a little friendly advice along the way.

Fuck, dude.

The Red Falcon’s . . . uh . . .  it’s like he had an auto-destruct fate inside him.

It’s a downer to come up against that one. 

But when the war is done . . . I guess my onscreen dude can go back to being a streaker. Strips off his clothes and runs jauntily into the horizon.

John Wayne never did that. If John Wayne had tried to strip off at the end of The Searchers? Where he’s all forlorn and cast out of the space of domesticity and he’s babying his arm-the guy, like, he would’ve been forty-five minutes just trying to get out of that fuckin’ girdle he wore to control his huge-ass gut. So no stripping off for that guy. 

But we can do it. 

We’re quick and leanly pixeled and done with all the bullshit.

It’s time to run naked and free into horizons of glory. 

And as we run, we shake off the ashes of auto-destruct Red Falcon.

Maybe end up as the player character of some obscure adults only game where no one’ll be freaked out by our streaker routine.

Maintain that confidence.

We’ll find home.

Or home’ll find us. 

-July 2021

#16: FAXANADU (1989)

now look

if you play Faxanadu

you will find

that it contains neither a fax machine

nor any trace of a ‘can-do’ attitude

despite the title

which clearly promises some combination of these two elements

I would have even settled

for the two promised elements presented all on their own,

serially, 

with no hint of combination or collaboration between the two promised elements

nothing doing

you really gotta wonder

‘bout the people

who worked so hard

coming up with such a clever title

that clearly promises a fax machine and a ‘can-do’ attitude

most likely in some form of combination

the very title 

Faxanadu

is so clearly a combination of the two elements under discussion

and we have a game that does not live up to the title

what we get is a cryptic fantasy medievalist wander-maze full of hostility and occulted paths forward,

just try to advance in a speedy fashion,

don’t even bother calling ahead because you can’t,

everything’s in-person,

no communications network,

items and information must be sought out, obtained, and delivered laboriously,

and one can argue that “Hey, there’s your can-do attitude!”

but such an outlook is surely ground down to nothing by the damned wandering tedium, 

I disdain every last bit of this,

and I can only wonder

at the depths of disillusionment

those who created the title

must feel

for surely

if it had been up to them

the game would’ve lived up to its title

but no

not a bit

and so we continue to live in a world of shit

-July 2021

#17: THERESIA DS (2008)

this

is one of those games

where you play all the way through the game

and then

you get to play through another game 

which takes you back in time

fills in the backstory of the first game

so it's a two-for-one deal

okay

which is all right

it's an all right deal

the second game

comes down to a series of choices

about whether you want to

continue

to survive

in a difficult world 

of plagues and duplicity 

or not

you gotta decide if you're going to inject yourself with a vaccine 

which you should definitely do

but it's a choice you're obliged to make

in the absence of any kind of government that's worth-a-fuck

or any kind of social connections or bonds

 

up-to-that-point

you

the player 

have been wandering in the ruins of plague and war and institutional disregard for life

so it really is a stark choice:

do you jab yourself

because you think there's any kinda future;

or do you not jab yourself because you don't, 

you accept oblivion, 

and that is that is that

next

you have to light a fire

which you then must fight your way through 

the fire

that you yourself have lit 

and then

you are confronted with a mirror in the center of a room of shadows

do you like what you see

can you live with what you see

can you live with all that you have seen

can you live with the fire you have lit

can you live with what you will see

if you can move past the mirror 

you find your way to an autumnal room

but there's a window

looking out on May flowers

as it were

climb out the window 

and

ah

well

then you have to decide if you can live among flowers

but that's cushioned a bit

I suppose 

by the cut scene that kicks in

which I do not mind

I needed a break by that point

-May 2018,May 2019,

May-September 2021

#0:THE CRUNCH. 

yeah

home is where the office is

it's done when it's done 

a maze of our own making

hmm

or it's the fate spawned

by market forces

interpenetrating 

consumer desires

birthing terrible chimeras 

birthing new desires

bet you can't remember the time when your sense of self wasn't so connected to this maze

yeah

younger generations don't like to work as hard

prattle about 'work/life balance'

as though 'life' isn't 'work'

'work' isn't 'life'

both ceasing upon death

they're not serious 

they make unearned demands

but

we have only ourselves to blame

we made strangers of their fathers

no thought given to future neuroses 

we service the debts

of our collective dysfunction 

well

it can't be helped

the junkyards rise 

with cast-off desires 

the sea levels rise

with meltdown glaciers 

the samsara hampster wheel turns faster

every heart shall explode

the blood rises

from every mouth

we create the hothouse atmosphere 

no part of the Sun shall escape

spew our burning blood forth upon the Altar,

spew our burning fear and regret upon the Altar, 

the Oracle,

what used to be Gaia's

say

didn't Apollo slay the Delphic Python

to seize the Oracle from Gaia

sure

but a Serpent must always return 

chasing a tale

okay

but is it Deity or Beast

or

just a hungover dream beneath the break room couch

y'know

generations

of Apollo

and Python

dialectic eternal 

this or that corporate chimera seizes only the stolid Present 

hopes it grasps the quicksilver Future

even if it's 'Gaia not included'

a shame

die at your workstation 

sad sack minotaur decomposing in the heart of the cubicle warren 

maze of our own making 

-September 2021

#18: SHADOWRUN SNES (1993)

closest we got

to a proper point-and-click adventure/mystery 

on Super Nintendo 

in the North American market 

amnesia

conspiracy

shamanic magic

spirit dogs 

cyborg technology 

project your consciousness out of your body

and into computer networks 

Dr. Strange by way of Neuromancer 

of course it's all orchestrated by a greedy red dragon

tabletop kitbash of Tolkien, Gygax, and Gibson

orcs with mini-guns

vampire lord gentrifiers 

yuppiefied combat mages

you got to talk with every damn NPC

to hunt down all the relevant keywords 

think on that

you start out as a trenchcoated gunman

but if you wish to prevail

against the bloody dragon of capitalism 

and get the sexy kitsune fox woman to pay you any mind

ye must use your words

my dog

use

your

words

-January-October 2021

#19: NINJA GAIDEN II: THE DARK SWORD OF CHAOS (1990)

a heavy dude named Ashtar

sets it all in motion

I don't know if Ash is supposed to be a cyborg or a demon or a devil or an angel

-I tend to see demons, devils, and angels as the enforcers for different styles of spooky authoritarianism, BTW-

but he’s got schemes afoot,

he's standing tall upon the battlements of a Dracula’s Castle, 

he's got a messenger ninja kneeling before him with portentous news,

-the music of Chaosium Sword is maybe one of the most ominous opening themes on the NES-just feels like a gate of evil opening upon the Majesty and Mystery of World Annihilation-

lightning bolts, fer shoot'n'darn's fuckin' sakes coming out of boiling shadow clouds,

this Ashtar dude's got all the atmosphere backing him up,

but let's get back to the message

which is that the occultist maniac big bad of the previous installment has been killed,

and this defeat

is just a part of Ash's own secret scheme

or something 

so right off the bat

this Ashtar dude is making like a Puppet Master Supreme 

like

this is the dude that was secretly trying to fuck up all of our shit

or something 

and as we go along

Ashtar reveals that he's packing a Dark Sword of Chaos 

and he ain't afraid to put it to deadly work

okay

so we know who our big bad is for number two

and we gotta endure levels and field commander boss fights

'til we can put our Dragon Sword of righteousness through Supreme Commander Ashtar's fearsome skull

but 

when we finally kill Ashtar

the Chaosium Sword disappears 

and we have more danger road to travel

before we can nod our heads to the Staff Roll theme 

okay

so

like

was it the Chaosium Sword Itself that was in charge this whole time?!?!

maybe

the soul of a warrior is said to reside within their sword, right?

our protagonist is the Ninja Dragon Ryu Hayabusa, himself just the latest in a lineage of shadow warriors wielding the bodacious Dragon Sword

so you could say that the Dragon Sword and the Chaosium Sword embody opposed souls of Good and Evil 

persistent cosmic forces that outlive the Individuals who carry the battle forward 

to whatever outcome

fated or random or brought on by the prowess of those who

by choice or destiny or chance

take up 

whichever blade

something along those lines

of course

in the end

Jacquio 

our enemy from the first game returns

enhanced'n'mutated by his time in hell

into a fanged and metamorphic screenfilling multiform pain-in-the-ass 

and when we finally 86 Jacquio all over and again 

we know he's vanquished for true

when the blood drinking Chaosium Sword 

shatters 

like a cheap prop

but what of Ashtar?

who or what the hell was he?

was there behind-the-scenes drama that required him to be written out of the big bad spot?

maybe Ashtar was the 8-bit version of some insufferable Method Actor fuckstick that the devs couldn't stand

so they were like, "To hell with it"

and they just brought in Jacquio to reprise his big bad routine from the previous game

or maybe Ashtar stormed off the cartridge 

refused to do any more levels

I don't know 

but it's always struck me as strange they spent so much time building up Ashtar

but then he's not the guy

y'know?

maybe

Ashtar 

was an unwitting projection of Jacquio 

who was still burning in hell

and so Ashtar was

like

Jacquio's video game avatar way of being In the World, and getting his claws on the Chaosium Sword 

even as his soul was roasting 

but maybe Ashtar didn't even realize he was an ersatz big bad, y'know?

you wake up

realize you're just a pawn

even tho' you absolutely believed 

you were the Puppet Master 

kind of a bummer for Ash

and he had a cool look

I thought

but looks aren't everything. 

-October 1999-November 2021

#20: WIZARDRY: PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD/OVERLOAD (NES VERSION) (1990)

stalking dark corridors

the treasure can't be trusted

if it's not booby trapped

it's a monster in disguise

our greed turned against us

gotta go slow

embrace the methodical

speed kills 

ten floors deep

wireframe and theatrical flat suggestions

of blando corridors 

you'd think the domains of some maniacal wizard would be more flamboyant 

but this monotony could all be to a purpose:

drive the enemy out with confusion and tedium 

leave theatrical evil to Count Dracula and his aristocratic indulgences 

Werdna's austerities of form and place have their own anti-distinctive protective mojo 

leave the seductions and the spectacles to the pretentious bloodsuckers of this world 

maybe this is Werdna's Way

of evoking a monstered community

ravaged'n'hollowed out

by capital-as-per-usual

fuck the hero quest

this is some kind of an eviction, 

ain't it?

play it with a homebrew OST

of sounds of demolition 

chatter of trash-out crews

heroic dungeoneering no more

now the party's doing a slow motion tear down

of some unwanted, unauthorized Labyrinth

that the state has turned a blind eye to

for far too long

no doubt the Mad Overlord's gonna turn it all into a shopping mall combined with underground Apocalypse shelters for all his oligarchic friends 

THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF PREMIUM RETAIL SURVIVALIST LIFESTYLE IMMERSION 

brochures come to mind

you

the player character 

ain't even really playing at anything

you roll up a crew 

you're gathering workers 

you

the player

are just some form of

uh

what?

a . . . spooky supervisory consciousness 

that'll do 

minimal interface

strip out the human

rationalized processes of erasures 

the hardcore gamers are like "fuck the story" 

which is good basis

for trash-out supervisory consciousness 

Werdna

or so I hear

got rehoused

inside that blazing bland low-cost development 

Werdna's pension's just enough to cover it

better than getting disappeared by the Mad Overlord's secret police,

I guess,

but His Madness is trying to put on a happier global capitalist face

and Werdna's not making a stink

and he's got Murphy's Ghost to keep him company,

now there's a sad sack spirit,

the Murphy's (Law) Ghost

wandering the blazing blando development 

mutter-composing some endless letter

chronicling his great unrecognized Protagonist-hood 

to some fanbase 

that only exists inside Murphy's spectral skull

well,

least Murphy's still got that hustle

however much of a Godot Routine it might be

Werdna's just staring into television 

drinking beer after beer

likes them microwaveable Santa Fe rice and beans

and the Swedish meatballs are just fine,

too

heard that the Mad Overlord's in talks with Count Dracula to do something special with the newly renovated underground 

say,

player,

they're gonna need you 

to crew-the-fuck-up 

put on some security theatre for the influx of oligarchs and fugitive war criminals 

looking to occupy

some newly valuable space

pays well

or so I hear

-June-December 2021 

#21: ULTIMA: EXODUS (NES VERSION) (1989)

This is another one

where you wander all over the land

getting killed 

not being able to afford resurrection 

you probably don't have the instruction manual or the official hint book 

you get to a point where you start fighting smart 

grinding it out close to the save point

if you're 8-bit authentic

or working those save states

if you're contemporary 

you start socking away those golds

buy horses for your crew,

so now you can get around quicker 

and you did manage to get a seaworthy vessel

you're excited to escape the continent 

but the sailing's just too realistic

you feel like you're constantly fighting the wind

you seek the land, all over again 

but then you were surrounded by pirates

before you could dock 

and it went poorly for your people 

killed to the last hero 

back to the character creation menu

I suppose I could've stuck with the save

but I wanted a fresh crew

a fresh reality

you can do that right-quick in these sorts of role-playing games,

y'know,

delete the old family

roll up a new one

if only something something real life something something 

. . .so I download a PDF of the hint book, and I discover that the first sixteen pages are a beautiful sorta watercolor looking comic book summary of the 'story so far' in the Ultima Franchise, featuring vivid depictions of a messiah wandering between dimensions via mysterious woods and gatherings of stalwart heroes and onslaughts of slobbering beasts and swirling undead miasma hordes and tyrannical villains Mondain and Minax wielding terrifying sorcery and I just wanted it to go on and on-

-but it doesn't. 

The rest is a perfectly functional, if incomplete, guide to the equipment the weapons the classes the differences between the Magic Power system and the Will Power system-like just have one magic system, okay? This is an NES cartridge. Don't overtax shit, all right?

Let me quote

what ended up being

the most consequential line

for me 

from the Hint Book: 

"Four great adventurers challenging Exodus by order of Lord British. What is Exodus? Is it human? Is it a monster? In order to prevail, the adventurers must solve many mysteries and increase their own natural abilities." 

Oh. 

That's what I'm about.

Okay.

I thought that EXODUS was an event,

but in this game it's an entity,

a . . . final boss, even?

Well, now.

The hint book is just a stripped down walk-through with no story content beyond the comic book 'Previously on Ultima' opener. I gather from its pages that I should talk to priests, talk to prisoners, learn to bribe, learn to pray, and visit holy sites suffused with mystical power in order to learn how to pray and/or bribe . . . or do I learn how to bribe by bullshitting my way past the jailhouse guards? I might've got some of that confused. 

Oh, yeah! You can also bet on games of Rock-Paper-Scissors! That's what passes for gambling in the mystical realm of Sosaria. (Now I want Paul Schrader to write and direct a gritty film about an isolated loner who develops a perfect system for winning just enough at Rock-Paper-Scissors so as to contain a mysterious trauma from the past, but not so much winning as to get hustled out the door by the pit bosses. Call it . . . The Finger Counter.)

This is one of those games where important items of mystical potency have been brought into being that can vanquish Ultimate Evil . . . except they've been scattered all throughout the land, and, on top of that, people's awareness of them seems spotty, like different people have been told different things about what's actually going on . . . even though the method of vanquishing Ultimate Evil is relatively straightforward and procedural to the point where it would've had to have been a protocol established by a group of engineers-

Look, Exodus is an evil computer. That's the twist. Okay. Even though this is a sword and sorcery reality, it's a computer running the show. In order to shut it down, you gotta collect punch cards to insert into the four terminals that comprise Exodus, and these punch cards crash the system-so to speak-and all is well in the land. 

I guess this could be a 'breaking out of the program' moment like in The Matrix, or a 'fictional character busts loose of the fiction' like in those Grant Morrison scripted Animal Man comics. Ultima:Exodus got there a bit earlier, in any event.

I was going to criticize the usual video game absurdity of having the punch cards scattered all throughout the land. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the punch cards all in one place? Or, um, you encounter an engineer who worked on the Exodus project at one point? They've still got a bunch of junk in their garage from when they hired on with Mondain and Minax? 

But maybe it makes more sense that the punch cards are scattered all to hell. 

Video game companies are notorious for discarding source code. They grind out a product, ship it, clear the deck for the next cycle. Maybe Mondain and Minax were similarly sloppy once they finished Exodus. Mondain and Minax were the villains of previous Ultima games, and presumably they built Exodus as a way to carry forward their legacy of evil in a rationalized, fully automated form. This suggests that they concealed the punch cards to maintain control over Exodus . . . but maybe they just got lost in the shuffle. 

Or maybe Mondain and Minax lost interest in their pricy mechanical boondoggle once it was all designed and done and, in the end, disappointing. 

Perhaps, Mondain and Minax saw their own obsolescence wthin the machinery of Exodus, and therefore scorned it, even as they let it operate, a pitiless doomsday cheat in the event of their deaths at the hands of party-pooping heroes. Sorcerers make mistakes, lose battles, are all-too-human . . . but an evil machine just keeps on grindin'n'cyclin'-

-until it, too, gets trashed by heroes.

The ending is worth reheating.

I think it is.

In the NES version, the Exodus terminals are called 'altars' . . . oh, so these psuedo-mediavalist Advanced Dungeons and Dragons types-your player characters-don't grok computers but apprehend them as sites of religious offerings, a way to interface the divine or the diabolical or what have you,

I think that’s an amusing detail.

You input the punch cards in just the right sequence,

and the altars sink into the ground,

an ankh appears, which you must collect so it can be all significant in the sequel Ultima: Quest of the Avatar,

the castle housing Exodus shakes and shudders as it collapses all around you,

pulling a total Dracula’s Castle Routine,

now's the time for a horseback escape by the skin of your teeth,

ABRUPT-ASS CREDIT ROLL.

If you played the game with no reference to external sources, you might very well be perplexed. 

If you played the game with reference to external sources, you might very well be perplexed.

If you are unfamiliar with Ultima:Quest of the Avatar-

If you don't know what an ankh is-

An ankh is that cross looking thingy with a sorta oval teardrop shape at the top. If you were a goth kid in the 1990s, you probably read the Neil Gaiman scripted The Sandman comics, and you probably remember that Death was personified as a goth girl who wore an ankh necklace. 

See . . . it's ironic . . . because an ankh is popularly understood as an ancient Egyptian symbol . . . for life . . . and Neil Gaiman has Death wearing it . . . that shit is so fucking deep I want to start screaming!!!

Look. Gaiman's got millions in the bank. Who am I to criticize his touching simplicity? Alleged grown-ups-if they are reading anything-are mostly fucking with Harry Potter and a bewildering array of creepy BDSM wealth porn fairy tales . . . 

Gaiman's not so bad, I guess . . .

Hey, I wasn't even a goth kid in the 1990s, so what do I know. 

I did read a lot of Doom 2099 and Hellblazer . . .

. . . okay, so . . .

. . . you destroy the evil computer Exodus 

. . . you get a symbol of life, the ankh

. . . and the ankh goes on to become your symbol as an avatar of virtue in the next game . . .

Shutting down the program of evil was just the beginning. 

Now you must make your way in the world, cultivating your righteousness by dealing with people and situations as they cross your path. There is no more mechanization of evil. No more centralized villain or villainy.

Just a lot of perplexing shit.

You're never quite sure if you're right or wrong.

People stop wanting to join your party.

You've given some offense.

It remains obscure.

And you never quite got to the end of it,

even with the online walk-through, 

and you think back to the conclusion of Ultima: Exodus, 

"Fuck. That was the True Ending. I broke the program, and I shoulda just kept on riding outta the cartridge, away from the incomprehensible intrigues of Sosaria, and into the Perplexing Meaty Now. My confusion remains, but I am always moving forward, even if it is just Pitiless Time hustling me ever closer to the grave. I can vary up the scenery. I'm already better off beyond the clutches of Exodus . . ."

. . . and then along came COVID-19 . . .

"Fuck this shit, I'm getting back in that cartridge! Get the fuck outta my way-!

ABRUPT-ASS CREDIT ROLL.

-November 2021-January 2022

# -1: THE QA TEST RONIN.

. . . sword too sharp

slices the fabric of reality

way beyond parameters 

even if this fuck-up in and of itself 

suggests a far more interesting game

that level of insight

is not what we provide you a life for

we already catch

like

a billion genius accidents a second

it's nothing we didn't already anticipate 

we filter this shit

rigorously 

the ronin

never had such an interaction 

too rogue-cop-motherfucking-the-chief 

to be a real life thing

but the ronin iterates on this fantasy nonstop

fuck you

your games are garbage

your executives are all rapists and capitalist exploiters 

i'm burning this motherfucker to the ground

i don't need money or property

my stats are maxed

i live in a zone of inertia where dumbass action movie fantasy does not work

i-

parameters 

of work from home

could fall down any day

rough timeline gives comfort

but it's gone lights out before

harrowing six months:

am I safe in my home?

will I be evicted?

could I just wander like Yojimbo?

Mifune just throws a stick in the air

stick lands

Mifune walks in the direction that stick points

what will I do instead of depression meds once scrip becomes unaffordable?

do I chew stoically on a toothpick?

does placebo effect touch the depression?

would wandering outdoors be good for my overall health outlook?

that was a harrowing six months

loose talk of unions

"pandemic changes everything"

the ronin tries to stay out of it

here's the internal static:

i have just enough

when you ask for more in this world

that's the signal

for the power to give you less,

maybe just take what you already have,

maybe just make you have zero,

and I got that harrowing six months inside me,

i sometimes call that

"my graduate and doctoral school"

i am finally certified disposable 

call me 

Dr.Non-For-Nothing-Here-Just-A-Minute-Ago-Nope-Never-Was 

suits me

i . . . earned it?

sure

the way of the ronin 

unlike the way of the samurai 

lies not in death

but in the never was

-November 2014-January 2022

#22: EarthBound (1995)

This is the one

where it's overhead

but low-angle

you're children 

looking up at cops, space aliens, cultists, beach bullies, feral animals, pogo punks, armored space warriors, tentacle robots, mobile self-immolating trees, zombies, dinosaurs, flying saucers, giant mutant animals, weird strangers, reeling drunks,

and you use baseball bats, frying pans, bottle rockets, DIY rayguns, psychokinesis powers right out of X-Men or Scanners or Mai the Psychic Girl to vanquish these antagonists,

but it's not always clear who's evil

and who's just under the influence 

of extraterrestrial mind control

'cause that's also a thing

with a behind the scenes villain known as Giygas,

a malevolent Lovecraftian whatsit that hides in a pocket dimension of time-outside-of-time,

or something,

exerting sinister dominions over the deep dream lives of the folks'n'critters who endeavor to put pain into your ass

I encountered it

at the beginning of high school 

so it was a reverse aspirational experience 

"get back into your elementary school self"

which I totally resisted

like it was brain waves from Giygas Itself

I kept reimagining it as a violent action sci-fi thing

Aliens and Blade Runner by way of John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Ringo Lam,

with body horror by Barker, Carpenter, Otomo, and Cronenberg

inside my head cannon fan fictions

making smoking craters out of the arcade where Frank and his gang hold court,

the police station where Captain Strong and his Pigs rut,

and don't even get me started on how I knocked down the Monotoli Tower . . .

but that was fine 

I had no interest in downgrading my adolescent male (spectator's) bloodlust into the kid friendly whimsies-as I (mis)perceived them-of Shigesato Itoi and co. 

I know, I know, I was doing it all wrong. 

Believe me.

Now . . . I get it.

Growing up sucks.

Adulthood consists of realizing friendship is an illusion, that faith is just a political tool, and money and social conformity are all that gets you over under capitalism.

EarthBound is a game where the power of prayer actually saves the day. 

Yes, baseball bats, psionic attacks, bottle rockets, frying pans, and DIY rayguns have their parts to play. Faith is what slays Giygas in the end, but to get to that final battle, ye must be willing to grind away for hour after hour, busting open countless Enemy skulls, blasting apart no end of robo-foes, putting down a staggering number of animals gone feral under the corrupting brain waves of Giygas-

-yes, it is a grindyass JRPG where ye must be empowered by the blood of your Enemy, who has numerous manifestations, yet One Fate:

to fall before your Louisville Slugger,

your cast iron pan,

your death ray,

your martial arts prowess-once you recruit that cool, slightly older kid in the karate uniform-

Now,

sure,

I see the hard-boiled whimsy of EarthBound, 

and I can even understand why people want to burrow away from the Now

into some kind of bullshitological Invented Past,

an Alternative Childhood,

more colorful and heroic 

than any Actual Childhood could’ve been. 

So . . . 7 out of 10.

-October 1996-February 2022. 

#23: CHRONO TRIGGER (1995)

oh, yes, yes, yes,

this was the one that taught me the absolute joy of New Game+, which is the feature that allows you to play through the game again and again, always retaining your elevated statistical strengths and high-end weapons and armor and healing items and such, and I would cycle through until I got all the different Endings, and then my stats were all maxed out to double stars, and I'm hypnotized by the awesome visuals, and the music-I didn't have the Chrono Trigger OST on CD, so cycling through the game was my chance to listen to the music while I scythed Enemy hordes like a very death god, even after I got all the endings, why play another game ever again where you have to start all the way at the bottom, just fuck every last bit of that, and live forever as a perfect death god,

oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Chrono Trigger's a classic!

-January 2020-February 2022

#24: TIME ACE DS (2007)

It's not any good.

It's not even so bad it's good.

It's generically crappy.

It's driving in the exact center of the road.

Which some say is the worst place to drive.

Centrists catch all the hell in times of discontent. 

There's something about time travel.

It's sorta like Starfox, but you're trapped on Earth, no talking animal people that I could find, and the soundtrack leaves no trace upon the memory. 

Do you like games with planes which emit projectiles?

There's a chance

that if human civilization self-immolates

that this could be one of the surviving remnants

of video game culture 

of, y'know, culture in general

and maybe the Space Brothers would find it,

fuss with it,

think,

"No great loss. Maybe such mediocrity is exactly why they chased a nuclear weapon-environmental disaster death wish. Maybe it's an actual flight simulator made by idiots. It wasn't just a symptom of the losing side. Maybe humanity was just a complete, dumbfuck Ultra-Loser

collectively, 

individually,

systematically, 

militarily,

ecologically,

psychologically, 

spirtually, 

politically, 

economically, 

artistically,

poetically, 

literally, 

legally,

illegally,

just a great big pants-shitting Voltronic Florida Man."

In other words,

Time Ace DS is probably too good of a final remnant for us, when you think about it.

The Space Brothers toss Time ACE DS back on the fused and twisted mountains of rubble, and zip off in their psionically powered flying ziggurat. 

Roll credits.

Post credits scene reveals that the Space Brothers all died slow, agonizing deaths due to exposure to Ultra-Loser Florida Man radiation. 

Production logo.

MPAA rating banner in blue and white.

House lights come up.

You exit the theater

into the mysterious night.

-March-April 2022 

#25: IRON TANK (1988)

This is the one

where

with true tank controls

and 

under cover of history

you're the tank 

you the player 

are the tank 

or perhaps you're so identified with your vehicle that you kind of become the vehicle 

you were a man who becomes a tank 

an iron tank 

in order to fulfill your mission to destroy the enemy

as you go along in your tank 

or 

as you go along as a tank 

you collect letters that stand in for different kinds of ammunition for different kinds of weapons including a rare powerup for a super weapon that can wreak destruction across the screen 

obliterate all enemy 

as you go along in your tank 

or 

as you go along as a tank 

occasionally bombs will fall from the sky causing the screen to shake and flare up 

it's hard to see the on-screen display of your life bar when this happens 

it's as though the explosion is so intense that it's messing with your technology 

with your on board sense of yourself 

as a tank as a man 

as a man who is merged with his tank 

as some cybernetic intermediate being 

I'm not totally sure 

but that's the feeling that I get this time around

you've a choice of three paths to victory 

of varying levels of difficulty 

different kinds of obstacles 

different item drops 

once you know the game 

you have a sense of which path you prefer if you wish to get through the game with speed 

as you blitz through the enemy 

you will occasionally encounter boss fights that are basically giant tanks that manifest out of dark voids 

this is a familiar boss fight motif for many eight-bit NES video games 

the screen goes black and a giant enemy threatens you 

it's part of the theater of the 8-bit I suppose 

a convention to draw attention to a dramatic battle with a significant enemy 

as opposed to the hordes of pop-up mooks that you slaughter without a second thought 

well now you're confronted with a huge boss tank in a despairing void of total darkness 

it's weird when this happens in the context of a non-fantasy game 

or what is presumably a non-fantasy game 

where do the surroundings go? 

are we not in physical reality anymore? 

come to think of it 

Iron Tank is a strange game that takes a lot of liberties with the history that it presumes to gamify 

the subtitle is 'The Invasion of Normandy' but this game bears little resemblance to the historical Normandy Beach landings but that's okay 

I suppose this is a kind of semi heroic fever dream derived from what a small boy might think of when they have watched hours of History Channel documentaries about World War II or they've watched some old World War II movies on one of the Ted Turner channels of a Sunday morning or whatever 

a tank is a cool toy when it's small and plastic and in your hands 

and you've got a bunch of plastic enemies to steamroll 

you can even build little bases and obstacles out of Legos and Duplo blocks and all the rest of it 

I vaguely recall as a child constructing some improbable enemy base out of Lincoln Logs 

maybe it was a saga of enemy loggers that I had to massacre,

maybe I'd just seen Ferngully

I no longer recall at this distant date

but I'm sure that was a fun time 

so Iron Tank is not a source of credible history 

surprise, surprise, surprise

but it's a decent fantasy riff on tank warfare 

from the WWII era 

I suppose 

with a quasi science fictional logic to it 

you're piloting a super tank that can just steam roll scores of enemies 

and you're equipped with some kind of top secret screen clearing nuclear weapon 

and icons appear on screen as though you were playing some kind of tabletop war strategy game 

some kind of a kriegspiel with the tedium stripped out

juiced with high doses of mythic heroism 

real life warfare is not fun 

forgive me for stating the obvious 

while people can be awarded individually for valor in the face of death and danger 

the overall effort doesn't usually rest upon any one person or individual 

it's a collective mechanized rationalized standardized endeavor 

in which the individual is but a cog in the machine 

everyone knows this 

forgive me once again for stating the obvious 

but the fantasy of being a lone tank that fucks up all of the enemy for good 

that's fun 

it's easy to gamify 

you're basically managing scarce resources 

shortages of ammunition 

declining fuel reserves 

you've got to fight and scavenge at the same time in order to survive and prevail 

that's kind of how iron tank works 

you're also besieged by enemies on foot 

groups of squishy little soldiers 

that are somewhat comical on screen 

they swarm you from behind 

and if you go after them they scatter

but usually most of them get run down underneath your treads 

it's surprisingly grotesque and funny in a sick fuck sort of way that never fails to tickle my funny bone 

and yet I keep coming back to this fantasy of merging with the tank 

I think this is another childish thing 

playing with little cars little dump trucks little tanks little jet fighters little fantasy vehicles like flying saucers and the knockoff brand x-wing fighters I got in a bucket full of spacemen from K-Mart

and you know 

occasionally 

something really fancy like a Robotech Veritech fighter or a Mechwarrior miniature 

or something along those lines 

the machine is always cooler than the person 

I still kind of feel this way 

I've always been the kinda person

who believes Bruce Wayne is the Lie

and Batman the Truth

equipment more real than character

equipment as character

maybe I'm still just sort of a fucking miserable child at heart 

I don't know 

but I don't really feel too bad about it

the world is a stressful place full of dangers 

if I had the opportunity to slice my central nervous system out of my body 

put it in some kind of armored casing 

and then slap that sucker into a formidable cyborg body 

you better believe I'd go for that 

zero doubts, no fucks given, 

and that's kind of how I process Iron Tank 

yes the opening cutscenes briefly describe a person who is inside that tank 

but you don't actually see the person get out of the tank during the game 

nor is it an option to leave your vehicle of war like you could in Blaster Master 

where you could get out of the jumping futuristic super tank

that's not how that works in Iron Tank 

you are all tank all the time 

which suits me fine 

it's not like you're getting invited to social events over your radio

that would be a whole other game

where you would have to decide if any of these parties are worth going to

gotta manage your wardrobe

feel out the vibe 

dress accordingly

rack up those style and vibe congruence points

all the while you're blasting party-pooper Nazi fucks into pink mist

that would be neat

but

nope

that's not Iron Tank

what it is

is

you're just running a gauntlet 

of enemy 

enemy tanks 

enemy plane's dropping 

enemy bombs 

swarms of foolhardy enemy soldiers who can nibble away at your power bar 

not to mention treacherous roads that lead to obstacles you have to maneuver around 

every once in a while you come up to a large enemy base facility of some kind 

usually with giant mounted guns on it 

and you have to zap that all to hell in order to get inside 

drop into a shadow void 

from which 

manifests a giant mecha mutant tank 

the latest monstrosity pooped out by the self-replicating Nazi death machine of machines 

-Hitler's asshole must be well-stretched and bloody, straining after his dreans like this-

the life destroying mechanism that encompasses all the other mechanisms of death 

that births the sub mechanisms of death 

that's the vibe I get 

you travel from the bottom of the screen to the top 

and destroy everything that gets in your way 

it's all part of that death machine that encompasses the smaller cuter death machines 

no reason to hold back 

no reason to hesitate 

you

the Iron Tank

are just the necessary consequence

manifesting

to obliterate the Hitlerian-Asshole-Death-Machine-Complex

so fire at will

be not troubled

an Iron Tank must Iron Tank

Sure 

there's plenty of reason to maneuver carefully 

you don't want to get destroyed 

and yes 

you do have to rescue prisoners along the way 

but as I recall you can't actually kill any innocent people 

it's just not something you can do 

I'm fine with that 

maybe it's all a part of the experimental technology of the super-duper Iron Tank 

is that it has great friend or foe recognition but that's just something I have interpreted into this 

I don't recall if that was explicitly mentioned in the instruction booklet or not 

in a way 

after experiencing the power of an Iron Tank 

I don't think I want to be anything else other than an Iron Tank 

maybe a man got into that tank 

piloted it to the end of the mission 

and then when people went up to the tank to provide repairs 

or whatever 

and check on the health of the pilot 

maybe 

they opened it up and they didn't find anybody 

oooooooh 

could it be that Iron Tank is a secret spooky game after all?

-May 2021-April 2022

#26: BLASTER MASTER (1988)

this is the one with the jumping future tank

your pet frog runs away from you

into a mysterious underground kingdom of Enemy

you chase your beloved amphibian beneath the earth

only to find a jumping future tank all gassed-up and ready-to-go

fate has given you the tools to obliterate Enemy

or, y'know, we kick things off with an act of Grand Theft Jumping Future Tank

fate or crime

you now get to rampage through the underground kingdom of Enemy

maybe even get your pet frog back

once you're in the kingdom of Enemy

you have to maneuver your jumping future tank around obstacles

and blast Enemy military assets

you even get to drive your jumping future tank underwater

yes, friends

your jumping future tank is a proper Bond Car/Batmobile/S.H.I.E.L.D. hovercar

all-in-one

all-terrain, loaded up with exotic beam weapons and missiles and, eventually, flight capabilities,

of course

you must fight and kill your way into the advanced features

your jumping future tank grows as it is fed the blood and circuits of Enemies 

meats and robo

you have to get out of your tank to sally forth into bleak Enemy bases that resemble Amazon Warehouses: full of bland boxes, mostly automated but with a complement of pissed-off, overworked conscious ones who are compelled to defend their turf unto death,

every now and again

one of these Enemy bases has a room in the back of absolute darkness,

a room of void

and from this void

manifests

a mutant abomination

tentacular, cyborgian, massive,

I guess it's a warehouse/logistics officer

a fight to the death ensues

obvi

I was always frustrated that I couldn't just crash my tank into the Enemy bases. Game forces you to get out of your tank and hoof it into the hostile installations. If you were just able to do what you wanted, and have fun all the time then we would live in Utopia, I guess. It's fine. 

look,

I gotta level with you

I didn't give a shit about the frog

I loved that jumping future tank

I loved its power

I loved its jump

I loved its cannon

I loved its death lightning

I loved its missiles

I loved how it wrecked shit

I got inside that tank

I found home

I never wanted to leave

I would annihilate the underground kingdom of Enemy, gladly, and then find a new Enemy to zap

or

if necessary

find a Friend and just decide they work better as Enemy, and zap them,

it'll be fine

I was the serene obliterator

I was the heart/soul/brain of the jumping future tank

I became the jumping future tank

I never wanted to come back

Maybe I didn't.

-February-March-April 2022

#27: NINJA GAIDEN (1989) 

you're the side story

a shadow 

of a shadow warrior

is the title a cruel joke about being abandoned by your ninja dad?

'cause that's what happens in the game

your ninja dad walks out to do dirty deeds not so cheap for some cackling mad robed occultist

ninja dad even goes Full Vader,

dons a mask,

you gotta strike him down in a one-on-one duel,

tearful deathbed redemption speech,

Full Vader

but ninja

well, 

daddy's little side story swings a sword real good

adios, pops

and that robed occultist asshole?

I guess he was somebody's corrupt daddy object, too?

yeah,

well, 

he died real good, too,

not even his final demon summon gimmick counted for much in the end

robed occultist's crib goes Full Dracula's Castle, crumbling apart, what you get when you go with the lowest bidders

daddy's little side story even hooks up with the hot older CIA agent lady in the final cut scene

heh, heh, heh,

so fuck all the fathers

and for futue reference?

when you walk out the door?

make sure you stay gone

if you enjoy keeping your original head on your neck,

okay?

but, hey

we're all video game avatars around here

gettin' a new head is a zero biggie,

it's fine,

we live,

we die,

we live again,

unless we get super-frustrated with the difficulty level,

in which case

we switch off

return to real life,

meatspace,

the land of the living dead,

the land of the nonheroic,

Middlemarch forever in all directions,

childish things put away,

here comes respectability like a bulldozer,

check out my stain routine,

barely anything left of me,

wholly absorbed into this or that consumer quadrant,

not even a shadow of a shadow,

shadows are too fanciful,

too artsy,

doesn't jibe with the ultracasual Netflix palette/frame/formula,

you must watch

but not watch

ye must distract

from other distractions

ninja dad knows about that

's why you're here

heh, heh, heh-

piercing sound of drawn steel

foley of raw meats sliced

it's a bit much

-January 2021-April 2022

#28: METAL GEAR NES (1988)

self-destruct sequence: engaged

cue the music of desperate escape

the music of ferocious exhilaration in defiance of the Grim Reaper riding your ass

your guns your bombs your blades your stealth your key cards your bullshit

let it all drop

now is the time

for your legs to work'n'pump'n'carry all of your cheeks across the finish line,

there's no one left to rescue,

there's no more ranks to attain,

there's no one left to kill,

there's no place to hide,

there's no more nonsense to collect,

you must run from the annihilating spite,

the sore loser auto-destruct grudge, the final gift of a bitter final boss, 

fuck that guy forever,

fuck his guns, fuck his hardened survival bunkers, fuck his ammo dumps, fuck his mercenary errand boys, fuck his minefields, fuck his tanks, fuck his flag, fuck his memory,

run for your life, for your Now,

don't stop 'til the staff roll,

never feel asleep ever again,

and maybe just never stay still ever again,

there's no Heaven Beyond,

there's only the Now,

don't ever get locked into the Paranoiac's Militarized Happy House: the Siege Fortress,

the mausoleum,

the monumental man,

stay meats,

stay Now,

stay running . . .

-May 2022-July 2022

# -2: LEAKED ENDING.

-a huge battle that obliterates the Flying Ziggurat of the Broken Emperor, but the occultic fallout zaps peoples' brains transforming them into hordes of Velveteen Executioners. A gauntlet of overwhelming foes feeds the player into a final dialogue with Agent Feldsparr, who reveals that the Broken Emperor is already dead. We see that the Emperor's attending physician was corrupted by Feldsparr, and used an obscenely long drill to put out His Worship's eyes. Quite graphic and protracted. Agent Feldsparr further reveals that he has absorbed the power of the Crawling Chaos at the heart of the world and afflicts the player with yet another gauntlet of infernal demon children who spam nonstop combat vomit that is both sticky and corrosive. Allegedly, the demon children were just supposed to be placeholders for the true enemies, since the demon children are the same assets from the substitute teacher minigame from earlier, but the leak made everyone think that the penultimate battle involved slaughtering scores of little kids. Both the phony outrage types and the phony edgelords fired up the hot takes for and against, and Obligate Interactive was 'pressured' to issue a statement that the leaked ending was a 'work in progress and did not necessarily reflect the final form in-game content would take.' Of course, the conspiracy clowns said this was all a staged controversy designed to gin up sales. There was also consternation that Agent Feldsparr-the beloved protagonist of three previous Excellent Blazer installments-was revealed as both a traitor and the final boss. Analysis of a leaked build further frustrated the fans as it seemed that much of Agent Feldsparr's heel turn happened offscreen. Clues were spread throughout, but these were considered too subtle, bending the reliable Excellent Blazer action roleplaying formula towards an unwieldy mix of postmodern science fantasy swashbuckler and hair-pullingly granular police procedural. In an interview with Noncritical, lead developer William D. Tucker said, "So, our overall vision was that Agent Feldsparr was overdue for promotion from protagonist to questgiver, which we thought would present us with so many opportunities to evolve the paradigm of in-game emergent storytelling beyond anything in the previous games and also give us the synergistic leg-up within the 21st century context." Anomymous sources revealed that Tucker was absent for much of the production, and only swooped in at the end when half the creative sub-leads ended up in ICU from toxic overwork and cluster-nervous breakdowns. Tucker allegedly had no interest in sword and sorcery and would often give the surviving staff long, winding, utterly impenetrable discourses about the 'deep metaphysical paralellisms of crime and heroism in This, our post-9/11 Context.' He would then proceed to host screenings of perilously obtuse re-edits of popular television shows such as Miami Vice, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cop Rock, and an apparently limitless number of animatics he had devised for a mecha-themed wholly unauthorized reboot of The McLaughlin Group. An anonymous source said, "William was a lot of fun. But he was out of his depth. Most of the cycle he was gone, attending acrostics themed orgies at various undisclosed locations deep within the suburbs of Illinois, Minnesota, and Atlanta. And he seemed to have an interest in infusing that sort of content into the already convoluted braided questline 'tangle structures' that the previous lead developer-H.H. Brill-had gone thoroughly insane engineering from scratch. None of us wanted to cross the boss, y'know, I mean Brill was a genius but also an utter tyrant. I never had any problems with Brill, since I was one of his favorites, but the guy was a monster. Brill was actually the one who put most of the team in hospital. And so along comes William, also insane, but in a benign way, and now we're losing productivity, we're behind on our benchmarks, looks like the money people are gonna shut us down-and that's when William just bought the whole opearation out from under everybody, which was a shock. I guess those acrostics orgies were raking it in-who would've guessed? And from that point onwards William declared a new phase of development. Oh, what did he call it-it was something like,uh, something like 'The Reinstatement of Timelessness Initiative,' or words to that effect. In effect this was what we now call Permacrunch, so in a sense, you could call William a pioneer, right? And pioneers, if they don't die horrible deaths, then they tend to survive but with a lot of trauma, an abundance of recurrent agonies, and not much joy in living-but the breakthroughs are killer. So, y'know, I'm mostly positive on William. If I were still capable of leaving my secure compound without screaming uncontrollably in irrational panic, I'd love to work on another project with the guy. Like, in an instant. But, well, y'know, I'm not really up for that these days. So . . ."

-October 2021-July 2022

#29: WURM: JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (1991)

Camera pans across people in a science fiction setting inside a letterbox rectangle suspended in an abstracted void

Bridge scenes a la Trek

But your vessel is a mechamorphosing Jules Verne burrowing drill tank that also has a fighter jet mode

Captain of this ship is a beautiful green haired woman named Moby

Who is, um, a pop star?

She's got a great look in any case: green hair, red knee-high boots, shiny red superhero fetish gear all around,

and Moby's got a crew of much less glamorous people all around her,

game wasn't clear who or what these people are supposed to be-scientists? explorers? musicians? college students? 

I assume the instruction manual explains things, 

but I didn't have access to that, 

so I'm going by what's in the game. 

And it's kinda vague. 

I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be scientists, some kinda governmental survey team-their transforming flying drill tank is clearly an output of some kind of pricy military-industrial complex-but maybe they're some kind of private sector outfit? 

I guess that's possible. 

Maybe this world is one in which ultratech military-industrial-scientific complexes exist on the scale of small groups or families or teams, some kind of a post-nation state type of deal,

and/or

maybe the people are the outputs of sentient flying drill tanks who need meatspeople puttering around inside their bridges and cockpits to feel whole

-to fill hole-

some kind of posthuman longing for the creator-bipeds of yore type of deal,

some kinda whomadewho type of deal-

-the flying drill tank can alternate between a fighter jet form and a drill tank-but the drill tank can fly and drill through geological obstacles whereas the fighter jet can't drill through anything

-it's like the drill tank dreams of being a fighter jet, soaring through open skies, as opposed to burrowing deeper into the underworld, deeper into a dark past better left forgotten-

-your journey begins in the middle of things, visuals, terse dialogue, launching into side scrolling shooter action, wherein you lay waste to scores of strange, huge organisms who seemingly just happen to live there, 

or maybe they were bred for war by some secret nation beneath the surface of things,

and all this alternates with first person battles with giant boss monsters which you can only defeat by increasing your POSSIBILITY to 100%

which you do by a combination of communication 

and devastation

the communication part entails consulting your crew members for scientific analysis of the hulking boss beasts

the devastation part entails aligning your targeting reticle over scientifically determined weak spots on the monster's body,

and then Moby disembarks from the drill tank to wander mazelike passages until she stumbles into battles with acrobatic underworlders who flicker in and out of existence until you definitively end them with a combination of your raygun and your martial arts high kicks-

I was never sure if I was fighting high tech enemies with malfunctioning thermoptic camosuits or if they were merely half-ghost/half memories fighting one last hurrah against invading overworlders such as myself,

tedious little final stands

down here in the dark

but sometimes that's all an underworlder's got left-

but it shall all end 

once you've harvested power orbs from the corpses of all the boss monsters

which allows you to unlock a final cut scene

with a spectral hologram woman of yore filling an abstracted void 

with a segmented text scroll revealing a secret history of ancient vendettas sparking off into antediluvian Forever Wars-

usually you get this kind of text at the beginning of a science fantasy saga, but here you have to work for it, exposition dump as final reward-

-and then it's over.

You learn of humanity's cursed nature,

its vindinctive, bloodthirsty desires going all the way back to long vanished Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu,

our forbears constructed the Bomb within our Deepest Background,

our most subterranean selves,

source of all dreams of apocalyptic annihilation,

atomically permafucked from the jump,

only a hologram anime girl left to instill us with our most secret history,

to tell us that love is the only way,

to send us out of subterranean depths of vengeful ghosts nurturing obscure grudges with fading technologies,

maybe now

the drill tank can let go of its nagging dreams of bipedal meatspeople,

loose its supersonic self

to soar through open skies

no more shame in the posthuman

ever again

-May 2014-July 2022

# -3: BAD ENDING.

Congratulations.

You fucked up the timeline. Life failed to evolve human consciousness. Everyone dresses badly. The Monkees eclipsed The Beatles. Eric Stoltz starred in Back to the Future. Oedipus loves his mom. E.T. on Atari became a paradigmatic bestseller influencing gamedev best practices to this very moment.

Congratulations.

Your save file is more corrupt than Congress. You didn't feel like writing down a longass password before the global warming heatwave melted the power grid when you were right at the final boss. Your adult diaper burst right as you were finding your grind-groove in the fortieth consecutive hour of your MMORPG session. Your hand's cramping up as the Second Quest of The Legend of Zelda's gettin' good to ya'.

Congratulations.

Your spiteful roommate deleted all the save slots from your EarthBound and Chrono Trigger carts making you hate original hardware for the rest of your days. No matter how hard and how long you blow into that Double Dragon cart it never says 'I love you' or even gives you a wink or a pat on the head-not so much as a goddamn 'Good job, my dude!' You crash the market in Wall Street Kid at the exact moment an actual stock market crash occurs in meatspace laying the groundwork for both your eventual unemployment and homelessness-impressive how you doubled up on all that, my dude! Most impressive!!

Congratulations.

You were the real monster all along. You were the true final boss but never knew it. The rubbled landscape was Earth all along. In the final cut scene you strip off your powered battlesuit to reveal embarrassing tightie whities. All this time you were nothing but an errand boy for grocery clerks. They were using you to get to them. Your imaginary friend turns out to be a serious asshole.

Congratulations.

You prevailed, you zapped all the bad guys, you saved the fuckin' day, the people owe you their lives, the elders are eternally grateful . . . however, you're too much of the world, you no longer fit in with the gutless normies and conformists, try not to look too fornlorn as you wander off into the vanishing point-

-as you wander away, you walk past John Wayne babying his arm as he halts along; you see Yojimbo throwing a stick into the air; you come across Mega Man's helmet; you arrive at the shore just in time to see Godzilla wading out into the middle of the water tank-

Congratulations.

In the end, Hell was the only reality-now march into the fire.

But if money is made in sufficiently large stacks a sequel becomes an attractive prospect-now march out of Hell, forged stranger and sharper than you ever were in your life, my dude, your quest log is overflowing!

Oh, but they cancelled the sequel when it was ninety percent complete-amble around the leaked build purgatory 'til the code derezzes.

Congratulations.

Victory has become indistinguishable from defeat. You and your nemesis destroy each other. Techno-civilization collapses and everyone's a caveperson all over again. Robots take over the whole operation. Your ass hurts. 

Congratulations.

You've suffered. You've doubted yourself. You receive an ambiguous ending-nothing worse than gnawing doubt. At least a burst adult diaper is an objective phenomenon that must be dealt with concretely. Fuck gaseous philosophizing.

Congratulations.

You lost. You're a loser. Maybe video games aren't really your thing. Your ass hurts. You stand up. You go outside. You almost weep at seeing the sun. You see people walking their dogs. You see couples smiling, holding hands, kissing, petting their dogs, taking selfies, throwing frisbees, all kinds of activities. A dog shits and a human with a repurposed plastic shopping bag over their hand cleans up the dogshit. You see, now, that you don't have to go it alone. People do things for each other, even for their pets. You smile serenely. You drop your tightie whities and take a fat shit in the green, green grass. Police assets arrive and show you no love. But now you know-the world is a braid of lies.

Congratu-

In the end, you become one with the global warming heatwave-you had to level up to 99 to do it-and you melt all the power grids your own self. You become the Power. The TRUE Power. You are now the Dispenser of Congratulations.

Like . . . Good Job, My Dude!!!

-May 2012-July 2022

#30: FINAL FANTASY VII (1997)

you realize

okay

that so much trouble could've been avoided

if Sephiroth hadn't been left alone

down in that secret library

that time alone

fixating on such a bizarre conception of himself

it's a fuckin' dilemma

'cause I don't like anyone looking over my shoulder

and I never had any teachers worth-a-fuck

I had to seek out the Good Shit all on my own-

-hmmm.

Maybe I'm okay with Sephiroth's unsupervised reading time. Sure, he caused a lot of damage, but the Shinra regime was already violent, and thereby provoked responses in kind. Sephiroth just clarified the worldaround situation by igniting the planet's rage, causing it to vomit forth giant monsters and speeding up the collapse of the Mako-extractive Shinra machine, and this in turn puts the Player on the map to intervene. Cloud, Barret, Tifa, Aerith, Vincent, Cait Sith, Cid, Yuffie, Red XIII-just so many cooling rods getting dropped into place, y'know? But without that brush with cataclysm . . . would the people of Midgar get the point?

-I know, I know, I know. 

It isn't fair.

The collateral damage was incalculable.

It really sucks.

But the people of Midgar had to have their asses kicked a bit to wake them up out of their narcotized complacency. Sephiroth crossed every line, sure, but nothing less would hit it, y'know? 

Even the Ending refuses a return to Status Quo, depicting the corrupt metropolis of Midgar reabsorbed into Nature in the fullness of time-all the storm and stress of Cloud v. Sephiroth-just the workings out of so many chemical-metaphysical reactions-

Of course, this all got rolled back quite a bit by subsequent sequelizations/remakes/remixes.

1997 ended up being a lifetime ago, didn't it? More than enough time for millennial zeal to cool out, and the Inevitable Nostalgia Malfunction to seize up the brainworks-

Nothing can be left well enough alone, can it? 

-December 1999-August 2022

# -4: MULTICART.

It is in the nature of the multicart that it is a selection of isolated cells containing ordeals disconnected one from another, with nothing to be gained by completing all of the ordeals within all of the cells. You enter a cell, suffer the activities it contains, and then you back out of the cell so you can choose another cell to enter and partake of some next set of self-abuses. There is a design to all this, yes, of variety and disconnection that shall obtain absolutely, with no hope of interconnection or revelation or meta-reward for enduring all of the ordeals within all of the cells. There is no special order to observe. In fact, there is no reason to enter any cell at all. Not even one reason. Not even one cell. No difference manifests between choosing to enter the cell of cells, or choosing to throw it all into the trash. Even if you paid a considerable sum for the multicart . . . no. You must reckon with the financial loss, with your deep frustration at getting ripped off, but you would do well to shitcan the multicart despite your loss. Chalk it up to experience. Let this regrettable expenditure teach you to choose more carefully in the future. This is the only wisdom to be gleaned from the perfect hell of a multicart. 

#31: FALLOUT (1997)

this is

the post nuclear

new clear . . . the new clear . . .

role playing game

that lets you be

who you want to be 

new . . . clarity . . . The . . .

put points into brains, communications, skill with weapons

New . . . Clarity . . .

you can even dial your capacity to communicate down to zero

most will not do this

the game steers you towards having an intelligence based approach balanced with some weapons skills

The New . . .

but you can be who you want to be

within limits

within the parameters of a violent post-apocalyptic survival game

you won't be taking up cosmetology, semiotics, or site maintenance custodial duties

but think on those Mad Max movies, you'll get the drift

. . . Clarity . . .

your mission is to save your insular community that lives in a subterranean survival complex known as a Vault by finding water purification equipment out in the World, but your adventures shape'n'sharpen you into a stranger by game's end, thus causing you to be cast out from your Vault, accursed to wander the radioactive wasteland

. . . The New . . .

it's a riff on Eden, I suppose

except with a bunch of Adams and Eves choosing to stay in the garden while You get scapegoated for learning of the Good and the Evil out there in the scary huge World

. . . Clear . . . The New . . .

the people of the Vault are grateful

but your ass has to Exit

Status Quo must be preserved

from You

who reeks of the New

. . . Clarity . . .

born of nuclear annihilation

kind of a bummer

but open for sequelization

across the decades

yes

plural of decade

since 1997 A.D. (Anime Domini)

the year of Final Fantasy VII

. . . The New Clarity . . .

that product we already know

must be sold and resold 

perma-wander the wasteland

. . . The New . . . Clear . . .

not so new

-January 2009-September 2022

# -5: GOOD ENDING. 

Title: EXCELLENT BLAZER DX: DEATH XTRA: ADVENT OF COMFORT BLAZER

"The Original Happy Ending"

STATUS: PARTIALLY LOST. PROBABLY DESTROYED . . .

. . . okay, so . . . it's like this.

The Good Ending of the much maligned Excellent Blazer sidequel was all set for implementation . . . but the devs lost all faith in it. 

It wasn't even that it was excessively romantic or naive or idealized or what have you. 

It was going the other way, allegedly.

It was sociological and structural in nature. It had to do with cycles of boom and bust. Virtuality. The elusiveness of truth in the Hyperpostmodern Post-9/11 Universe. In the surviving footage you can see dinosaurs. They look good. People were probably chained to their workstations and fed through tubes to get it looking that good. 

Truth be told, the surviving footage-aside from the awesome-ass thunder lizards-is a bewilderingly tasteless, utterly tentacular hentai riff that most will probably never admit to having seen with their own eyes even though statistical analysis of web traffic tells a blunt truth: a sizeable chunk of humans on planet Earth with Internet access have watched it multiple times from beginning to end.

Go ahead. Shudder for the soul of the species.

The footage in question plays like the most outre aspects of Drakengard going full Urotsukidoji with a sprinkling of the squalid DIY sensibilities of late 2000s SUPERREDACTED videos. Seek out this footage at your own peril. 

Mercifully, there's no audio, though plenty of fandubbers and remix scamps have created their own soundtracks. 

Allegedly, the audio was the most important part, consisting of an extended Platonic dialogue between recurring characters Protagonist and Vigilante Sword Maniac, but no trace of it remains.

I guess some things are better left buried, even if they're "happy endings" . . .

-May 20XX

#32: WILD GUNS SNES (1995)

Hectic gunfire celebration

Inside a science fiction Wild West

Like that old TV show

That got adapted into a Will Smith movie with the music video?

Sort of anticipating the anime Spaceghetti Western cycle

Of Outlaw Star, Trigun, Cowboy Bebop,

That kinda thing I guess,

Satisfying gameplay,

I dart back and forth across the foreground

Zapping Enemy in the middle and backgrounds,

Makes me feel like a real action person,

Hordes of hired guns and automated drone assets, 

Impressive mixture of meats and robos,

Good coordination of flesh and steel assets on the part of Enemy,

But, alas, I have Protagonist Mojo,

Therefore, even though I'm just one Space Cowboy, I get to spray'n'waste hordes of outlaw mercenaries,

I almost feel bad,

But I got freeze lassos,

Nonlethal, I think,

So, this game could have had a No Kill route,

But this was SNES Time, a less sophisticated era, therefore I must massacre,

But Enemy is hyper-aggressive, heavily armed, a military outfit, essentially, a rogue steampunk militia, complete with bigass mechs and well funded by a Final Boss who lives among Scrooge McDuck mountains of gold-

-so light 'em up, Space Cowboy, to the last drone, to the last man,

But no,

About the lasso,

Like you throw the lasso and it induces a quick acting cryonic effect, but it's only temporary, just buys you some time to manage the onslaught from the rest of the screen,

And you've got a limited supply of screen clearing bombs that most folks'll try to conserve for the Boss Fights,

That's what I did,

Oh, but there's this one thing,

A guy with a big knife keeps walking up to me on my plane, and the game will only let me club him with my assault rifle, it won't let me shoot him dead, I guess 'cause he's got a knife and not a gun, but I wish I could shoot his stupid head off, 'cause knife dude keeps coming back for more, a real slasher movie villain that one,

And,

you know,

This might sound demanding,

But it's nowhere near the difficulty of, say, a Contra game,

It's borderline chill,

I play it at least twice a year, just to relax, just to savor the flavor of cozy massacre-

I do the same thing with Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, another absorbing yet undemanding SNES title-

-May 2022

# -6: PRANK ENDING. 

You achieve all goals only to get a too cute non sequitur. It's probably even harder to get than the alleged "good" ending. A cute shock to remind you that no game is worth that level of grind, my friend. Come on. Life's happening out there. Now let an obtuse breed of dog fly you home in this here flying saucer. Sure, sure, it's normal to feel slightly pissed off-wasn't this supposed to be a serious piece of work? Maybe even the much sought after "first truly artistic video game?" Of course it is! You shelled out for the Deluxe Collector's Day One Circular Jerkular Edition. Anything that expensive just has to be Art, my dawg. Yeah. Really makes you think. Like one of them-thar memes. Like the guy meeting the butterfly: IS THIS A PIGEON? Too much time divorced from meatspace, ensnared in a hermetically sealed, arbitrarily bounded non-reality . . . maybe the UFO mutt can give you a ride back . . .

-October 20XX

#33: TETRIS NES (1989)

within

the 40th hour of Tetris

lies

the Bardo Gate

-May 2022

# -7: SECRET ENDING. 

No legitimate way to get it.

You gotta glitch into it, and that's if you're lucky and you got time to waste.

So hacking tools, data mining. 

But now we gotta wonder-is it legit? Or just a discard left in the code? 

Games are complex. Many hands in. It has long been the case in computing as a big umbrella endeavor that programmers will write code with various functions that simply become inaccessible due to unintentional structural errors. But video gaming at this late date comes under a ton of decentralized scrutiny. Countless calories of fan labor devoted to cracking open every last secret. Game devs know this, therefore it is not unreasonable to ask: are deeply buried secrets created by design to keep gamers chasing the high of discovery? Not to mention that long buried secrets brought to light can get a signal boost from media outlets, give sales a lift, burnish dev reputations-secrets have their uses, secrets can be good for business . . .

-April 1, 20XX

#34: DEMON'S CREST (1994)

This is the one

where I get to play

as a muscular devilguy

who is fighting other devilpeople

in a hellish monster world

cutscene backstory

is that I-the devilguy-conquered the fuck outta this damned monster world

collecting a bunch of mystical objects of power

only to get zapped in the back by some slimy, cowardly fuckstick,

and then I lose everything

and I gotta quest'n'kill to get my glory back,

hopefully doubling and tripling my Satanic glory in the process,

which is Next Level Tightness, right?

I get to be a fire-spitting devilguy inside a monster world of war eternal

fighting not for righteousness

but to sate my battle-lust,

to crush my Enemies,

trample them underfoot,

and then revel in the lamentations of their devil-moms,

fuckin' A-thru-Z, my dawg!

Demon's Crest was the hawtness in '94!

This was the Next Level Satan Joint for sure.

And where were all the pin-headed guardians of chaste virtue, family values, and Christian nationalism, hm?

Not a peep from those gibbering clowns on Demon's Crest.

They probably took one look at the box art featuring Firebrand-a leering, muscular red-skinned hunk of devilbeef-and questioned every last bit of their own bullshit. They probably realized if they made a big deal over Firebrand they would lose, because everybody would take a look-"What's all the controversy about?"-and they would instantly be won over to Firebrand's side of the line. Tipper Gore and Pat Buchanan and the 700 Club and all the other paleoconservative phony outrage grifters would just look like a lotta pale farts on the wind. 

Who wants to hold onto sharty weak humanity, with all its ugliness and hypocrisy and mortality, when you could switch on a cart, and get a diabolical upgrade?

Ah, Demon's Crest!

Ah, devilmanity!

-May 2022

# -8: STAFF ROLL. 

Are these the real names?

Are they fake?

Maybe it was just one person or three people, and they made up a bunch of extra names to inflate the company?

Maybe

this is one of those staff rolls

that goes on

for sixty or seventy minutes

printed in tinyass font

to squeeze 'em all in

to fulfill contractual whatevers

but discourage journalists from tracking people down, ask 'em about the crunch and so forth-

-I know, I know

"tiny font conspiracism"

how embarrassing

but I know I'm not the first to entertain such notions

signs

of my own unease

more than anything

that my escapist good times

owe their existence

in whole or in part

to abusive labor conditions

why roll credits anymore

when it reminds me

of the all-too-human element

breakroom campouts across six months or more

asleep at the workstation

-I'm sorry, what was that word you used?

Hm?

home?

is that what you said?

let us have a clarification session

work is the new home

so you needn't bother with the h-word anymore

you're home

or else

-surely, the staff roll will be simply and utterly excised at some point, right?

individual persons

all absorbed

into logo

-heh, the ruthless logos of a logo-

dark side Voltron

full enforcement of capitalist existentialism

merge into corporation

only kind of personhood with any power left

I mean if you're not what you do for your living

then what are you, hm?

oh, oh, oh,

one of them-thar Third Rails-

BZZZZZZZZZZT!

-December 2020-August 2022

#35: MISSILE COMMAND (1980)

you can't win

it's only and always

a doomed final stand

-May 2022

# -9: LEAKED DESIGN DOCUMENTS. 

Holy shit, 

Originally

It was supposed to be Everything to Everyone

You could fight everyone

You could sex everyone

Next level jealousy mechanics

Including sexable jealousy

All environments were fully destructible

You could sex destruction itself

Every vehicle had physics

The physics were themselves sexable

Accurate nutrition mechanics

Featuring sexable rations

You could sex all of the vehicles

Every fightable/sexable tech tree was gonna be infinitely extendable

Accurate dehydration, malnutrition, and starvation mechanics

All sexable

If you sexed too much for too long you could get dehydrated

And if you sexed with dehydration too much you could give birth to weirdo autosexing deserts that would birth glass factories strangely enough

And the glass would shatter as it sexed itself like crazy

All of the vehicles are driveable/flyable/sailable/sexable

Sophisticated economic cycles of boom/bust/boom/bust ad infinitum

You could totally sex the economy

Sexable boom

Sexable bust

Next generation malaise mechanics where your character could become disillusioned after too many Forever Wars and/or failed government responses to lethal pandemics

You could sex all of the destructible environments

You could sex all of the pandemics

You could sex the malaise

You could sex the Forever Wars, totally bust off your Wargasm, dawg

Emergent gameplay would birth wholly unique cutscenes for all players,

and if you wanted to skip the cutscenes

you had to navigate a grindy labyrinth full of destructible and sexable booby traps and robot sentries

Totally sexable grindy labyrinths, natch,

Along with a fully sexable skip once you unlocked it,

with the unlock also being sexable

Accurate orgasm mechanics including fake orgasms

You could sex the orgasms

You could sex the fake orgasms

Day/night cycle

You could sex the day/night cycle

Extensive crafting

Including sexable crafting-

But they had to scale it back

Due in part to toxic crunch-induced work stress

Like

Basically

'Cause 

half the dev team ended up in hospital

Which meant they were short staffed

So they had to reign it in, y'know?

In the end

What got released

Was a perfectly serviceable go kart track management sim

Which some have criticized as falling pretty far short of the original vision

But I dunno

If you squint, right?

A little squinting never hurt nobody.

I bet you had sexable squinting in the original design docs . . .

-May 2022-August 2022

#36: GODZILLA: MONSTER OF MONSTERS! (1989)

can't make up its mind

is it a board game

or is it sidescroller actioner

I'm willing to take the heat

give it credit for both

a hero is me

you play as Godzilla and Mothra

doing battle 'gainst a gang of giant monsters and future war vehicles that appeared in various Toho produced special effects pictures 1954 to 1984,

so no Biollante,

not yet,

but you've got Mechagodzilla, King Ghidorah, Gigan, and the rest,

but no Anguirus,

guess because they didn't know how to make a quadruped playable?

Anguirus would've made it into a proper heroic trio, but alas, it's just a dynamic duo

like I said

it's a sidescroller

and then it's a board game

and then it's a sidescroller

now back to board game

it's confounding, is what it is

I don't know what the thinking was

except it sorta lets you change up the order in which you confront the Enemy boss monsters

since, they, too, are obliged to maneuver across the hex map,

and you can see them coming, adjust your moves as necessary,

but it's so slow and repetitive

I just march headlong into battle,

no need to dance about,

the giant monsters

they just plow right into each other in the movies,

but this game seems to suggest I'm giving orders to Godzilla and Mothra, 

like I'm a battlefield commander or something,

but these giant monsters don't submit to military chain of command,

you'd have to hit 'em with alien mind control beams,

which does happen in the movie Invasion of Astro-Monster,

but I'm not some xtro flying saucer warrior,

I'm an Earth person,

or so I thought,

and where are the fairy twins who sing to Mothra? that could've been a novel mechanic, having to hit just the right notes to get Mothra to fight, but you would need the Famicom controller with the built-in mic for that kind of action,

and I can't sing for shit,

maybe dub the fairy twins' audio off of a movie? replay into mic?

Truly,

this is a vast and repetitious ordeal of a game, 

wherein a limited set of stages repeat over and over again,

you could easily spend over three hours on a beginning to end playthrough

much of that time eaten up by pure traversal

-perhaps that's the point? that huge, lumbering monsters take for-damn-ever to get anywhere? 

most perverse of all

is the truly great soundtrack

full of drive and moment and even passages of mystery

that deserves a far better game than this

I've half-convinced myself that the developers created the game-which they damn well knew was near satirically overblown-and then they asked themselves, "If the soundtrack is sublime, could the music in-and-of-itself hypnotize the player into staying the course?"

and

no

it isn't enough

especially in the Age of Internet

when you can just listen to it directly

skip the busywork 

go straight to the sonic fun

but it's a damn fine score

with the standout track being the bittersweet ending theme

that plays as Godzilla and Mothra wander off into the horizon,

and we are subjected to an extended text scroll full of the delusional ravings of the defeated Planet X Commander,

who darkly alludes to a self-destructive journey to nowhere even while threatening revenge against Earth,

all this culminating in a kaiju curtain call

but this bittersweet music

also invokes the dilemma of our heroes,

our beasts of burden

Godzilla and Mothra

having saved the human race from an army of extraterrestrial beasts and war machines

yet

Godzilla'n'Mothra are still themselves monsters,

outcasts even in their heroism,

doomed by their excellence and potency to inspire hatred and loathing inside neurotic primate minds

-but give the atomic devil apes-homo sapiens-our due: did not Gojira and Mosura terrify us of old in those Toho flicks? Maybe those movies were exaggerated anti-kaiju propaganda-but did not these lumbering beasts wreak havoc accidental and malicious upon us? Is there no logic to our fear, our loathing, our ingratitude, even?!? Are we doomed to scurry and caper at the feet of Powers greater than ourselves? When will humanity come into its own Agency free of deities, devils, and dictators?

-November 2021-June 2022

# -10: DLC CANON ENDING.

Everybody hated it when it dropped.

Time passed.

Everybody loves it, now.

That's how Suck works.

Rush the game to market, patch it in the afterglow.

Make it better, money rains.

Make it worse, money rains.

That's how Suck works.

Money reigns.

Everybody loves money.

That's how Suck works.

-July 2019

# -11: TRAILER.

well

we put the song in from those Batman games

from a few years back?

something about not being a place for a hero?

dude, that song is awesome

'cause

like

you do get to be a hero

you don't get that in life

in life you go to a job, your job follows you home, you do laundry, your laundry does you, you got no time to exercise, but you get all exercised over not having time to exercise, you suck at driving, but you try to drive safe, but you still crash, or someone crashes into you, so you give public transport a chance, but you resent that, even though it's better all the way 'round, and you get used to all this tedium, this over-and-over-again-ness of existence

but all the while

you're looking for the way out

right?

that's what the trailer is

it calls you to a better place

a Batman place at best

but we're not doing Batman

but if we use that Short Change Hero song

I knew I'd remember the title if I gave it a minute

but we use the Batman Change Hero Song

maybe people will think that it's Batman

even though it's not

but you just get 'em through the door

that trailer can be the door

build that sense of possibility, that hype-

look

all things disappoint

ultimately

most people don't finish the games they buy

this we know

even brilliant games

even best games of all times

the best reviewed games

even the tastiest bubblegum

right?

loses its flavor

that's why the trailer

that most potent vehicle of hope and anticipation

is

the truest and most beautiful

deliverable

in this life, at any rate

-May 2021, May 2022, July 2022

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEW #20XX: Q&A.

Q: TRUE ENDING?

There's no way to know by just playing it as a General Issue Consumer. All kindsa crazy shit could be buried in the code. You'll never know unless you burrow deep into the guts. Sure, you could wait for other people to do it, post it online. That'll work for popular games. But if you're playing an obscure title, well, it might come down to you. You might have to be the band. 

or

if you're a True Rebel, you invent your own True Ending inside your imagination, and call it a day. But you've got to be strong to do this. People will give you no end of shit. They'll say you're a cheat, that you're wrong, that you're not a True Hardcore Gamer. They'll accuse you of enjoying flavor text and watching all the cut scenes and actually caring about the story. You'll be an outcast, forever isolated from the global community of Gamers. You'll be cursed to be free to live your life with ecstasy and joy and imagination beyond the bogus values of Hardcore Gaming and the grotesque and exploitative industry that it sustains. How could you possibly live with that much freedom? Your shit will surely spontaneously combust! Beware!!!

A: FINAL BOSS.

A challenge

sufficient

to make the time invested

seem justified

or

the final boss is an arcade con

unfairly dangerous and resilient

just to eat as many quarters as possible

or

is it your desire 

to not let go?

maybe

this time

you win

by letting it drop

moving on with your life

or

you've no choice

but to let it become your life

like Tetris

if you gave up Tetris

what would you gain?

I can't think of any upside to that one

to throwing Tetris in the trash

it's Tetris, buddy!

or

maybe this is the one you can't win

or

it's an anticlimax

it's no wizard

just some dorko at a control console

pulling levers

jerking off by proxy

or

the final boss dies of a bad flu

lotsa people die of flu every year

or

could be heart attack, that happens, too, due to lack of preventive care due to the permanent healthcare access crisis,

or

maybe the final boss is one of these dumbass anti-vaxxers and the COVID-19 zaps 'em before you even get off a shot,

or

it could be a robot whose software mind crashes 'cause it missed an update-goddamn wifi is spotty in some regions

hey

maybe it's not about you, y'know?

maybe you're the one suffering delusions of protagonist-hood, hmm?

maybe YOU are the final boss, just scootin' around, waiting for a heavy blade to fall upon your neck, and you didn't even know it! 

well

it could also be all of the above

multiverses are trendy

but

mostly the odds are

that all the outre possibilities

will simply collapse into Protagonist

why be overcomplicated?

why not stick with the tried and the true, eh?

people get upset when you do new things, weird things,

novelty enrages,

but

it's also true

that familiarity breeds contempt

that same-again lends itself to snark

but fortunately

established franchises keep on truckin'

even the haters go along

catching second hand reputations

by taking their shots

it's like watching YouTubers:

is anyone saying what they actually think,

or is it all dumbed-down Andy Kaufman shit, is it all just iterations of LonelyGirl15?

hard to tell

this deep into Post-Literacy

when inauthenticity isn't just a career path

but an aspiration

a fuckin' dream

how full of shit can I be

and still make a mountain of cash?

no bottom yet detected by advanced instrumentation

-November 2016-November 2022