POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEWS #-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

Two words . . .

 . . .BALLISTIC POLYPS . . .

This is one of the most sought after special attacks in Original Recipe ReDumption Earth.

Basically, this devastating maneuver broke the game in the original release, and was replaced by the Host Displacement Party Combo, which was considered a low point of ReDumption Earth: DX: Death Xtra Edition. 

The Host Displacement Party Combo involved spending time as the writing staff for a late night talk show host. You've got to mine monologue materials from the depths of a snorted Adderall mania tunnel; you gotta grind out an appropriately dense number of topical jokes and one-liners to keep pace with the spiraling coruption of an increasingly idiotic and authoritarian political fuckedscape; add in just a dash of self-awareness to lampshade the host's preening narcissism; make sure the diction is friendly to the alcoholic slurring people have been noticing of late; weave in some plugs'n'panders for the network's various garbage fire sitcoms, cop shows, and talent contests that just go on and on and on season after season; and, most importantly, contain your bile at being forever below the line while the hack-master catches all the glory-

If you can do all of that, and not get fired for a five year stretch then you unlock the Host Displacement Party Combo, which allows you-via teleportation-to switch places with the host during filming hours in order to unleash a devastating salvo of burns'n'roasts upon your Enemy. 

Now, these attacks don't do damage, per se, and it's not actually possible to attain victory over Enemy with this special attack. However, certain Enemies have unusually high Media Consumption stats, and so the shock of recognition of being mildly razzed by someone from TV that they've watched clips of on YouTube causes them to rank down in various obscure effectiveness metrics. The rumor has long been that these systems are actually non-functional in the official release, but the surrealistic spaghetti code revealed by hacking tools has neither confirmed nor debunked anything for certain.

The only thing that can be said for certain is that the Host Displacement Party Combo is a very poor substitute for the beloved, if game-breaking, Ballistic Polyps of Original Recipe ReDumption Earth. 

And it wasn't a cakewalk to unlock Ballistic Polyps. 

Oh, no, friend.

In fact, you had to walk the Ripped'N'Torn Doom Colon Path. Not a cake in sight anywhere along this desolate stretch. 

First of all, you had to get your Cussed, Ornery, and Irascibility stats maxed out. Secondly, you had to willfully skip doctor appointments and annual check-ups. Thirdly, amp up your intake of jet fuel analogue grain alcohol, raw red meat, and bitterness over relationships gone bad. The bitterness is difficult to track precisely, but a good rule of thumb is that anytime a dialogue choice involves saying, "She fucked me," or "That asshole fucked me over good" or "This whole world is run by assholes that fuck you nonstop" you're on the right path. Fourthly, you had to adamantly refuse every single colonoscopy opportunity. If you get even one buttscope then all of your other efforts are for nothing. You may as well start eating right, swear off the sauce, and embrace forgiveness of all the people that done you wrong 'cause everybody's got their reasons in this life. 

But if you remain true to the Ripped'N'Torn Doom Colon Path, then you will eventually be offered the Ripped'N'Torn Sheriff of Spite questline, where you must bring Law and Order and Shotgun Headshots to the mean old Texas town of Spite, wherein you must blast and buffalo your way through a tangled tale of Mexican cartels and gringo gunrunners and ex-CIA hitters gone bank robbin' and the one seniorita who stole your heart once upon a sultry August moon and if you survive all of that . . . a strange sensation shall be abornin' inside your asshole . . . something's just gotta cut loose, pardner!

The elaborate Kingsglaive level cutscene that ensues basically involves a counterattack by the leftovers of the ex-CIA bank robbing gang, a bunch of gunsels looking to get deep into the payback. But you're so done with this town of Spite. You just drop your pants and shotgun those reprobates with a load of self-sharpening polyp shrapnel. Maybe one of the gnarliest depictions of grotesque full body obliterations since the original Parasite Eve.

The Ballistic Polyps are yours, pardner!

Now you can start walking that cake forever!

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEWS #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

COMICS REVIEW: DAD'S WEEKEND (2016)

 by Pete Toms 

Published by Hic and Hoc in 2016.

. . .

"I had this dream one time where I hung myself with my own DNA strand."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

This-Dad's Weekend-is 24 pages of dialogue-driven comics evoking the depressing truth of how living in  cyber-reality makes insufferable children of us all. Doesn’t matter how old you are, how young, how smart, how creative. Internet pushes a glowing god-finger deep into the pleasure centers of your brain to induce non-stop chemical rewards for the overshares, the hype, the exhalations of rancid conspiritosis, the hot takes. It's not about money or fame, even. Dad's Weekend takes as given the internalization of online discourse, and spins its yarn from that basis.

Our protag is a young woman named Whitney. She's between high school and college. She's smart enough to know that adult life is one of drudgery fully albatrossed by oppressive student loan debt. The only relief shall come from prescription medications and the virtualized sense of belonging to be found on social media. If she were a dude, she would be socially authorized to be an asshole who quotes Fight Club and yammers at length about various unlikely film projects. Kinda like one of her IRL male frenemies who pops up to monologue like a weirdo from an unauthorized sequel to Slacker. 

(In fairness, the guy doesn't directly invoke Fight Club, but give him a few more panels . . .)

Whitney's spending a weekend with her father, a middle-aged conspiracy theorist who obsessively posts embarrassing videos of himself and his deranged speculations on YouTube. As the story goes on, his breakages with reality put him in conflict with avatars of other sketchy systems of reality organization: a priest, a cop . . . Whitney's dad gets into some deep shit here. 

Whitney herself interfaces reality through a set of problematic filters: pop culture tropisms, ironic detachment, the memes, uncompromising cynicism . . . but can you blame her? Internet is the Oracle of our times, reflecting back at us our own subjective truths. Whitney's working off the basis of her experiences of a world of endemic misogyny, racism, and a self-cannibalizing infotainment Blob that amoebically expands and eats up all bandwidth Tetsuo-Shima-style 'til only a singularity of distraction and economic determinism remains. 

But Dad's Weekend keeps it lively. It's funny. The visuals have a tenderness that suggest the human frailty that frightens people into donning the mecha suits of church, state, consumerism, and/or conspiracy theories. The dialogue is sharp. There’s an impressive reveal from Whitney's dad at the end where he confesses the ecstatic terror of fatherhood. But his confession only confirms what Whitney had already pieced together for herself. And his cyclical breakages from reality will, perhaps, only continue apace.