Internet Shows

"I'm most let down by [Beyond a Steel Skys] visuals. It's got that Borderlands-y "cel-shaded but in an open relationship and can still see other graphical styles" thing that looks like arse and chips, and the animation is very jank; every time the engine has to none-too-subtly glide Foster into place to interact with something, it's like he's standing on a tea tray on a string. The real tragedy here is that, back in the days of 2D art and animation, Revolution Software were fucking killing it! Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword; for their time, they were like tongue kisses for the eyeballs. Then, suddenly, they decided they had to do 3D graphics like everyone and their greengrocer and it was like a master violinist feeling like they had to take up the ukulele. I mean, fuck me, Dave Gibbons worked on Beneath a Steel Sky! A really good 2D artist; the artist of Watchmen, for fuck's sake! They brought him back on for this one, and then did most of the game in 3D; that's like hiring Professor Stephen Hawking to make YouTube essays about how Rey should've porked Finn."

"My problem with Shreets of Shrage Shfour is that it's a game designed for confident people; your devastating special moves cost health to use, but you get the health back if you can land the next few hits without getting hit yourself, meaning that you become more effective the more confidence you have in your skills, and I doubt that this is the arena for a breakthrough where several years of therapy and alcohol abuse has fallen short. But I'd replay the level enough times, memorize enough encounters, and dodge enough devastating enemy attacks by move-walking six inches downwards, and I'd eventually struggle through and defeat the boss, whereupon the status screen would usually very grandly award my performance a "D" rank, which is always a buzzkill; it's like I finally collapsed into my tent after a long day of successful Arctic exploration, whereupon one of the huskies trotted over and pissed on my head. And this was only Normal difficulty! Talk about a skill ceiling; this is the Sistine Fucking Chapel!"

"Through a linear series of encounters with unique characters, Cloudpunk builds a well-realized world of human-A.I. tension, inequality, corporate oppression, and all the usual bollocks cyberpunk goes on about, and at various times, Rania has to make moral choices which have the usual long-term effect on the story, i.e., little, if any. But the story really falls flat for me around one major central point like a six-inch nail in a soufflé: I just don't like Rania as a character. She's come to this city she knows little about and openly hates from some kind of small nation of hipsters that you probably haven't heard of, but trust me, it's much better; half the characters she meets are obnoxious in some cartoonishly overdone way just so she can get all judge-y at them, and they keep foisting important missions and major life decisions onto her because they watched her drunkenly banging into lampposts and doing very unpleasant things to the handbrake for two minutes and decided she had the wisdom of the ages. I might've preferred Cloudpunk if it were Euro Cyber Truck Simulator and just had me randomly deliver stuff while I listened to podcasts, and it told its story more covertly through background details rather than make me sit and listen to what Rania thinks about something that's none of her sodding business."

"If you enlightened viewers in the modern age of less blurry screenshots are seeing some eerie parallels between the Corrupted Blood incident and certain real life current events, you aren't alone! In fact, academics took an interest in the incident for what it might tell us about real-life pandemics, particularly the sociological effects. But others argued that it taking place in a video game with zero real-life consequences limited the usefulness of the data. After all, it's not like people in the real world would just casually blow off an official quarantine order when there’s honest to goodness life and death on the line. Dear me, no! And as for the people who'd get the infection and try to pass it to others deliberately, why that would require nothing less than a fundamental breakdown of education and governance. Surely people understand that there are no hard resets in real life... unless you count tactical nuclear strikes. Yes, I suppose this episode was more of a "let's all laugh at a humanity that never learns anything, tee hee hee," but for me it's nice to see something confirmed that I could have told these academics at any time - that if they want a case study for the most irrational behaviour of which human beings are capable then a good place to start might be the people who willingly pay a monthly subscription to waste their free time scraping up imaginary Murloc bellends."

"I was having fun when I was in the gambling town and Cloud had to dress up as a lady and becomes somehow irresistible to men, despite looking like a frumpy Amish spinster who spent last night sleeping with her head in the feeding trough. But that's a cultural thing; I'm English, and therefore, the funniest things in the world to me are men dressing as ladies and the concept of social mobility."

"If you saw the title "Final Fantasy VII Remake", and from the words "Final Fantasy VII" and "Remake" are now expecting a remake of the game Final Fantasy VII, then you might be disappointed; Final Fantasy VII Remake ends at the bit where you leave the first city, or about one-third of the way through the first disc of the original PS1 game, although it takes about forty more hours to get there, 'cos it's padded like an A-cup on School Picture Day. So there's been some contention over whether this is false advertising or a new take on the subject matter with better character exploration. I think a lot of this could've been cleared up if they'd titled the game "Final Fantasy VII Remake: Episode One". But maybe they didn't want to commit; I mean, at the rate they're going, by the time they get to the last episode, it'll probably get pushed back by the heat death of the universe. I hope they are doing more episodes, 'cos the plot, as it stands, is painfully unresolved; the bulk of what we get might as well be re-titled "Cloud Strife vs. The Manic Pixie Dream Girls"."

"I guess 'spectacle' is all that matters in JRPGs these days, that's why half the time in combat the deep shadows and particle effects mean I can barely tell what the fuck's going on. You know what was really spectacular, viewers? An epic three-disc adventure on the PS1 that was long because it had lots of stuff in it. And Final Fantasy VII Remake only managing to be as long as it was because a lot of it's copy-pasted like a suspiciously well-written undergraduate thesis feels like a slap in the face to those of us who remember a time when we could have nice things. And isn't that the story of my fucking life right now. Hey, remember when games had actual depth? SLAP! "No you don't!" Hey, remember when you could go out to that frozen yoghurt place you like? SLAP! "No more of that!" Hey, remember when you could get off on light BDSM? "No slap!" Oh, you tease!"

"You remember "Cockup Cascade", right? The term I came up with for an unfortunate feature of many stealth action games where the slightest misstep means getting caught in a pile-on of escalating fuck-ups, so you might as well just reload the instant you get spotted? Well, Desperados III is the patron saint of Cockup Cascade; the cocks barely have a chance to come down again. The enemies all have visibility cones spread wider than your mum's legs when she hears a bottle opener, and you can only see one guard's cone at a time; on top of that, a lot of guards who look like they're staring straight ahead are, in fact, glancing back and forth like a nervous gazelle at a tennis match, covering an area the size of a conservatively-proportioned aircraft hangar. So half the time, you'll settle into the nice, long "slitting a throat" animation, and only then be informed that someone offscreen is looking at you from their table at a delightful Parisian-style street café on the surface of Mars. And thus, the cascade begins. Everyone on the map is alerted and rushes your position, more guards spawn in on top of the existing ones; it's like the fucking fight scene at the end of the original Casino Royale. And while you do have a gun, you fire it once and then can't fire it again until you've remembered all the lyrics to "The British Grenadiers", and your special power to pause the game and queue up your next few actions, at this point, provides nothing besides the chance to take a moment and really drink in just how completely fucked you are. So don't kid yourself about making a stand; you're just going to fucking quick-load. It's not so bad in the early game, but before long, levels are absolutely packed with enemies and overlapping patrol routes, and it turns into a sort of ultra-violent puzzle game, where the objective is to figure out the precise sequence of actions to pick off every enemy in ascending order of gregariousness, quick-saving with every inch of progress. An experience like untangling a huge ball of Christmas lights, turning it over and over, picking on loose bits, occasionally pulling on the wrong thing, getting electrocuted and making all the children scream."

"One time, I was in the final round, and someone got declared the winner when everyone else was still halfway up the hill; don't tell me people are actually hacking this fucking game, or finding physics exploits? That's like rigging up a sophisticated concealed vacuum device to cheat at Hungry Hungry Hippos; seems like a lot of misplaced effort to win something that other people win fairly reliably just by flinging themselves at the controls for long enough."

"I wasn't going to bring up the coronavirus thing again; I mean, the site's called "The Escapist", not "The Constant Reminders of Our Inevitable Hubristic Doom". Besides, it'll pretty seriously date the video in a month or two when the virus goes away forever and everything returns to normal and all the dead people come back to life and there's a rainbow. But now I have to talk about Resident Evil 3, a game about society descending into chaos because of a viral pandemic. It could only have been less fortunately timed if the zombies ate toilet rolls instead of brains."

"It's odd to play a Half-Life game where the main character speaks and can tell the people around them to stop being such prannies, but it's still unmistakably Half-Life, with its trademark monsters, linear narrative gameplay, and weird emotional tone. I mean, humanity has essentially been enslaved by the Borg, who systematically subject them to gory, nightmarish body horror, but everyone's really cheerful and yucking it up with their pet headcrabs. Yes, I know humans strive to be upbeat during a crisis, but there's this one very Resident Evil-y chapter in Alyx where we have to sneak around an indestructible monster who's this hideously mutated human who will tear us apart if he finds us and looks to be in immense suffering, and then we're told that their name is Jeff, and everyone talks about him like he's the one asshole in the friend group who keeps hitting on waitresses. "Oh, that Jeff; Jeff sucks." "Hey, I trapped Jeff in a garbage compactor." "Sucks to be Jeff!" Sometimes, Half-Lifes storytelling feels like what happens when an entire game has Asperger syndrome."

"I don't know if it's worth analysing for subtext of a game about a giant, muscular man refusing to leave alone an attractive, under-dressed lady and trying to penetrate her with his big, floppy willy of death; she is, at least, better-dressed than she was in the original, where she looked like an embarrassing single mother accompanying her daughter to a roller disco. But still, 3-make sometimes gives me a Tomb Raider-make vibe when the amount of shit that gets kicked out of Jill Valentine starts to border on the fetishistic. No, I don't think I sound disingenuous when I get finger-waggy about this kind of thing; it's not like I jerked off to it more than once."

"Doom Eternal is the sequel to Doom 2016, in which we step back into the chunky, elephantine boots of THE DOOM SLAYER, and the plot picks up where Doom 2016 left off, give or take an explanation for how we escaped from Mars, and where we got a fucking spaceship from, or how demons have conquered most of Planet Earth. Okay, so maybe it doesn't start where Doom 2016 left off, although the "demons invading Earth" bit, we could probably have safely assumed. Ooh, what has humanity learned from the previous disaster? The usual amount: somewhere in the region between "bugger" and "all". How timely. But as for how THE DOOM SLAYER got here, maybe that was explained in the DLC or a comic book somewhere; and incidentally, I do appreciate how it's now canon that THE DOOM SLAYER does actually talk like he did in the Doom comic book: like an abattoir worker on enough coke to floor an elephant seal."

"Once again the nebulous negative force we’re up against is "the darkness", which has no agenda beyond making all the nice people sad and the local boss monsters bastards, requiring that we help out through therapeutic beating the glowing snot out of them. Look, I know this isn't Tinker Tailor Soldier Cat Rabbit Thing and I shouldn't expect complex plotting from my fantasy animal platformers, but the mythic tone and sweeping soundtrack makes me think that it thinks its story is epic and profound, when it's actually kinda shallow. Drive out the darkness and restore the light? Ooh, good idea, maybe I wouldn't bump into things so much. The game's backed by Microsoft and there's a vibe of corporate committee thinking around it. It reminds me of how Hollywood pumps its most crassly gigantic budgets into movies with no more profound message than "it's bad to murder everyone with explosions" because any more controversial statement would offend the Chinese government."

"THE DOOM SLAYER is an unfettered, chaotic id who only wants to kill demons and find collectible Happy Meal toys; in other words, he's the player of a mindless shooter game. But the central gag of the character is that all the other characters in the plot are looking for meaning and cosmic/religious significance in his actions where none truly exists; he just doesn't give a shit. That's the joke; very funny, ha ha ha. But in Doom Eternal, when there are entire levels devoted to traipsing through empty hallways learning the history of THE DOOM SLAYER and the origin story for how he came to not give a shit, and we're beset by cutscenes and dialogue and codex entries filling us in on the Maykrs of Urdak and their history with the Sentinels of Argent D'Nur and their long tradition of shit and the not-giving thereof, then suddenly, the game itself is the one projecting unnecessary meaning onto the dude who doesn't actually give a shit, and the joke is at the expense of the story-writers!"

"Animal Crossing is an institution at this point, one that requires commitment, and as such I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who thinks they're ready to be committed to an institution. The setup this time around is that you and the predatory raccoon loan shark Tom Nook have come to a desert island wilderness in order to develop it into yet another wholesome capitalist paradise for animal-shaped random number generators. You know, the kind of setup where, if it were a film, you'd expect half the cast to be cannibalized by the end of act two, but don't worry, Tom Nook presumably massacred the native island population before we arrived. The process of developing the island largely entails for your part the transfer of ungodly amounts of Bells from you to Tom Nook's holdings account, and the usual Animal Crossing routine quickly sets in. You fish, you catch bugs, you acquire furniture, you sell it all to Tom Nook for money that you then use to pay off your loans to Tom Nook. It's the all-Tom Nook economy. When Tom Nook dies, this entire society will fucking collapse into anarchy where brightly coloured animal people shiv each other for pears."

"I made sure to leave a like on the small number of games that I felt got into the right spirit of things, offering nice straightforward gameplay loops, occasionally even original ones, and as I looked around at the colourful menus and the careful curation algorithms at work, I found myself thinking "Y'know, it'll be a real shame when this all gets taken over by perverts." These things always are, Media Molecule. The Sonic the Hedgehog fans are the warning sign. Now Sonic fans aren't necessarily perverts, basketball players aren't necessarily tall but it fucking helps. Sooner or later they bring in that one character who's a bat with tits and the furries have got a foot in your door. Remember Second Life? Once a lovely wholesome attempt at a community-created online world of pure imagination, now just zebra dicks and yiff piles as far as the eye can see. The earnest creators will all return or graduate to more efficient systems once the novelty wears off and then all your fancy 3D art tools are so much fantasy penis shaping equipment. What're you gonna do, screen all incoming content for the rest of your fucking life? Smarter and more dedicated people than you have tried to hold back the masturbators, and the masturbators always win, probably because they've got all the stamina."

"But somehow they [the weapons] don't have the same satisfying feel. It's the little things. It's the sound; it's the slides being a bit more finicky. It's the way ammunition doesn't go in to the gun so much as disappear the moment it's vaguely near it: "GUN-TOR ACCEPTS YOUR SACRIFICE! (*om-nom-nom-nom-nom!*) YOU ARE GRANTED A BOON OF SIX MORE DEAD CUNTS!""

"Black Mesas Xen is three or four times longer than the original, which I'm not sure is the solution I'd have gone for. "Oh, you don't want your broccoli? Well here’s three times as much, bitch, and if you don't learn to like it I'm going to start pushing it up your nose." I suppose having worked on it for years they wanted to prove they weren't Duke Nukem Forever-ing that whole time, and that is most certainly proved. The cosmic vistas are spectacular, every inch of effort is on display, and while it is overlong and the quality has its dips, some bits are pretty forgettable and some chug along like the early morning hangover shits, there’s enough of a sense of wonder about it that I wasn’t unengaged. Trouble is, I don't think it addresses the actual issue with Xen – we just spent umpteen hours tactically combatting our way through an ever-evolving narrative about a research facility disaster and military cover-up and this Metroid meets American McGee's Alice bad acid trip at a children's ball pit full of tricky platforming and bullet spongey bosses doesn’t feel like a payoff for what was set up."

"If I'm serious about VR being good and the way forward for immersive gaming -- and I should stress I do genuinely think that; people tell me they often can't tell if I'm being sarcastic because I have what's medically known as Resting Bitch Voice -- then, like the coronavirus, we'd all better get used to hearing about it."

"Wattam's blurb states that it's a game about friendship, but I don't agree that it is. What this game is really saying is that the only way to be accepted by society and your peers is to blindly follow instructions, and that if someone chews you up and shits you out you should just be grateful for the attention. So apparently it’s a metaphor for your first job after leaving college."

"The first area in which The Walking Dead: Baits & Switches exceeds Boneworks is story, because it actually fucking has one. The city of New Orleans has been classically zombie-apocalypsed, and catastrophically flooded as well -- although apparently that was unrelated. That was just, y'know, Tuesday."

"The usual indie arty platformer theme of small innocent child in big scary world is like the missionary position. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, some interesting things have been done with it, but when it's all you fucking do you'll swiftly be desperately hankering to break the monotony with just one suck job or nipple clamp. The thing about small child scary world though is that it rarely does sequels, because the underlying theme of small child scary world is coming of age and/or loss of innocence, and you can’t lose your innocence twice. Well, I suppose you could lose it in stages. Say, lose half when you find out that Santa isn’t real, lose the other half the first time you take it up the arse."

"As for how New Horizons compares to previous incarnations, there's a greater sense in this one that the environment is growing and developing as time goes on. At first it's all tents and temporary housing, no shop, no museum and most of it's locked behind impassable rivers and cliffs, but with time, several large payments to Tom Nook and enough inevitable fucking crafting to soak up more PVA glue than any unsupervised schoolchild could consume in a lifetime you gradually turn this mysterious exotic wilderness into yet another Animal Crossing consumerist hellhole identical to the last one. Tom Nook is the living embodiment of the grey goo scenario!"

"And I thought it might be educational to list some things [Spiritfarer] didn't do to grab me, Games Industry. It didn't put out a pre-rendered trailer six years before release showcasing all its crazy characters with magenta-colored partial buzzcuts. It didn't use an aggressive leveling system to increase engagement the way a drug dealer "increases engagement" by cutting the blow with laundry detergent. And: It doesn't have Batman in it! No. What it did was: It made me emotionally engage with it. I play a game like Gears of War, where I'm in constant life-or-death struggle with snarling monsters that want to exterminate humanity, and I'm more emotionally engaged with the cheese and pickle sandwich I'm taking sneaky bites of between reloads. It kills off a main character; I feel more remorse when my wife notices pickle stains on the dog. In contrast, I played Spiritfarer, got to the part where an old hedgehog with dementia remembers who I am in the brief moment before she disappears, and I cried. (I actually did; fuck you.)"

"...Oh yeah, I've got tons of things to say about Borderlands 3. Wait here, and I'll go get them. *walks off screen followed by the sound of a car pulling away as Borderlands 3 awkwardly stands around in silence*"

"[Outer Wilds]'s nice when you're roaming the skies with a song in your heart. It's less nice you're lost in an underground labyrinth trying to find a fucking outpost you found two loops ago, but couldn't finish exploring because you misfired your jetpack, fell, broke both your legs and then the sun exploded. It's a game that can simultaneously be very chilled out and very demoralizing. Like going bankrupt because you blew all your money on BBC nature documentaries."

"And so ends the year Two Thousand Nineteen / What a cascade of failure and pain it has been / Out came the games to not that much cheer / But lots of hostility, and yawning, and sneers / That made all the publishers recoil in fear / And push back the games that looked good to next year / But no amount of pushback would have been enough / To lift our poor industry out of the trough / Of artless, 'sploitational, grind-a-thon guff / Of loot-box live service, and all of that stuff / But anyway, to close out Two Thousand Nineteen / The best, and the worst, and the blandest I've seen."

"The Obsidian-brand depth of player choice is here; you can even side with the corporations if you want, but they are both evil and failing horribly, so it's like betting on the Nazis to win World War II even as Magda Goebbels is biting down on her suicide pill."

"The problem is, there's a moment in the game - and it's remarkable how finely I can pinpoint it - where an invisible lever gets thrown and the bottom drops out, and it stops being fun. It's about the point when you meet the pirate lesbian, and the world opens up, and you know we're in trouble when a pirate lesbian marks anything but an upturn in events. The problem is in the numbers; I don't know if they were originally making another fighting game and just got bored, but that might explain the ridiculous number of party members you get. This is some Chrono Cross-level shit; the primest real estate in the world is a teenage girl's noggin, apparently, and Ajna's beating the tenants off with a stick. But the combat isn't very deep, and all that really matters is doing the most damage as fast as you can, so you might as well just find four guys you like and stick with them. And post-pirate lesbian, something goes horribly wrong with the enemy's stats; I went into battle with a small, unassuming frog, bum-bounced them between my four lads for twenty minutes, then in that awkward post-coital cigarette-break while I wait for everyone's bars to refill, I realized that the frog still had nine-tenths of their health bar left. I hit that frog 400 times! In a sane world, they would no longer have more than one dimension, let alone health points! And they couldn't do much damage to me, either, so now I'm just disinterestedly doing my super-combo six times to kill one fucking frog! I feel like Rachmaninoff playing for pocket change in a dive bar, and the crowd won't stop requesting "Free Bird"."

"[Code Vein] is another Souls-like with combat that's generally FINE and boring level design, but it has one thing that makes it notable: it's the most game I've ever played. This is a game where the character customizer has 90 billion hairdos and two noses; a game where one of the facilities in your home base is a , and if you get in it, female characters will show up in skimpy towels. This is a thing that happens. It built a hot springs episode into its fucking mechanics! And after the second main boss in a row was a giant demonic stripper with their , I made the decision to stop playing before my recommendations became too embarrassing."

"I was hesitant to reward Bloodstained just for being Castlevania: Symphony of The Night, but it isn't that, really. What it is is exactly what I wanted: For Castlevania to stop pissing about and pack all the good ideas it's had into one game that we can finally call good without qualification. "Okay, but I can I make the protagonist wear a silly hat?" Yes, Koji Igarashi, have all the silly hats you want. "I will!""

"Between missions, we go back to home base and have to deal with the "looty" half of "looty-shooty" by laboriously sorting through our latest crop of equips and weapon add-ons that apply completely mystifying upgrades. "+5% defence against generic damage"? What the fuck is "generic" damage? Damage that basically does the job but isn't focused on innovating at this time?"

"Set after the alien wars depicted in the retro Contras, Contra: Rogue Corps is concerned with a mysterious alien city that rises from the ruins, which is supposed to be full of treasure that we assuredly want, but doesn't seem to be doing anything besides sitting there and having treasure and monsters, which is a classic example of a "non-plot." A depressingly common setting for live-service multiplayer video games: A plot with no active villain, or ticking clock, or clear solution, just an environment with a sense of permanent, non-specific peril that can never change or develop for fear that XxNobChopsxX might stop his grindy, 8-hour quest to make themselves able to grind 1.8% more efficiently."

"...Let's not forget, you can buy what's termed "timesavers"; so first we buy your game, Ubisoft, and then you charge us more money to not have to play it? If I paid double price up front, would you just not give it to me at all? Take a step back, people, because this has all gotten way too fucking normalized. When you charge money for something you can produce infinitely at zero cost, like in-game currency, that's not a service; that is the fucking death of economics as a concept. How the fuck did we get here from basic principles of trade?! It's like walking up to a dude in the stocks in the village square and saying, "If you give me three turnips, I'll spit in your face.""

"Well, anyway, the war against the Locust, I mean the Lambent, I mean the Swarm, I mean actually I think it's the Locust again now, continues, and is showing no sign of clearing up because this game ends on an unsatisfying cliffhanger. I guess Microsoft are still paying off the death-ray satellite."

"Remnant (huurk) From the Ashes is a third-person action-adventure with a grim tone set in a dying world- it's a Dark Souls clone, isn't it? "Yes, Yahtzee, that's why we thought you would like it, since you feel about Dark Souls the way a starving tiger feels about something tigers particularly enjoy eating!" Yeah, but it feels like half the original IPs these days are Dark Souls clones. You're like grandparents, you are; I show up to your house in orange trousers one fucking time and now you get me a new pair of orange trousers every fucking Christmas. So come on then, what's this one's gimmick? "Well, it's Dark Souls, but with guns!" So, Bloodborne, then? "NO, SHUT UP! It's Dark Souls with a full-on third-person shooter: over-the-shoulder, iron sights, the whole steaming cow pat." So, it's Dark Souls but combined with the other 50% of every game that comes out these days?"

"Want to know how to do a Gears of War witticism? Step One: Say something relevant but completely obvious, to stir the players from the latest trance the combat put them into. Step Two: Continue talking uselessly until I hate you: "We need to go over there, and by 'over there,' I mean towards that big scary building full of enemies." "Oh, great. So what's the good news?" "Well, the good news is that I'm very handsome and glib and..." SHUT THE FUCK UUuuUUuuUP!! "...Okay, but by "shut the fuck up," do you mean...?" OH, MY GOD!! Why can't you just accept that Joss Whedon will never hire you?"

"The plot concerns the infuriatingly awkwardly-spelled Ajna, a spunky teenage girl in a Ni no Kuni-esque dog's breakfast fantasy world where forest villages and steampunk cities rub shoulders like slightly-acquainted colleagues in an undersized lift, who has been trained as a fighter from birth by her stern dad, and has only just established her protagonist credentials when she returns to her forest village to find it being forest pillaged by an imperialist army of baddies, and her stern dad has been made stone dead. Yeah, I'm guessing you weren't shooting for the "Creative Writing" prize, were you, Lab Zero? Shall I put us down for "Standard RPG Fantasy Package A-12", then? Please direct me to the first of the several teenagers we will be enlisting to aid us in murdering God. Still, we're thrown a bit of a curveball early on when, while fighting the Imperial soldier who stone-deaded our stern dad, said soldier inexplicably turns into a spirit and is absorbed by Ajna's consciousness, 'cause it turns out Ajna has a secret god power that lets her draw people into herself and then get them to fight for her; sort of like Pokémon, but with human beings, and therefore, somehow even more ethically questionable."

"Anthem is mind-numbing live service tosh with fewer original ideas than a BBC daytime television commissioner, but that's not why it's topping my "blandest" list. The real reason? Because while I was writing down the obvious candidates -- Days Gone, Ghost Recon -- I suddenly noticed Anthem on the list of 2019 releases, and thought, "Huh. I completely forgot about that." And that, viewers, is what gives you the edge in a mediocrity contest."

"Sea of Solitude is one of those games that's either going to really speak to you, or completely leave you cold. It'll all depend on whether you personally relate to Kay or not, and the more I played, the more I disliked her. Not because she was an inattentive sister or any of the other reasons the game gives for why she's tormenting herself like this. It's because she's such a fucking self-absorbed drama queen, she'll craft a grand operatic scenario out of her interpersonal relationship issues. "Oh no! I didn't give my depressed boyfriend enough space! Verily must I be clothed in the rainments of the traitor and banish myself to the wine-dark seas of nothingness to dwell forevermore." JUST STOP TEXTING HIM SO MUCH, YA DIPPY MOO!"

"It also does the thing where it goes, "Oh, look, a sewer level. How original." (*roll eyes*) And then proceeds to unironically have a sewer level, that goes on way too fucking long. If you know it's bad, why are you doing it? Surely the comedic subversive thing to do would be to pretend we're having a sewer level, and then go, "Oh, bollocks to this hackneyed shit! Let's have a level where you ride an ostrich through a bouncy castle!""

"It started in 2002 when, in the run-up to the release of horror-themed action-adventure Shadow Man 2, Acclaim announced that they would pay the funeral costs of anyone willing to put a Shadow Man 2 advert on the headstone of a deceased relative, prompting public outcry and the Church of England basically telling them to piss off. Yes, Church of "Tea and Crumpets with the Vicar" England! Takes a lot to upset those lads; they don't even hate gays that much. Now, in my research, the name "Steve Perry" came up a lot; apparently, he was the executive coming up with these ideas, but I find it hard to believe that one person could be entirely to blame. Sure, I can see one executive descending from a cocaine-induced trance to announce, "Hey, I know what demographic we should target: the recently bereaved!"; what I have trouble picturing is the roomful of colleagues that then replied, "Yes, we agree! What a good idea; let's action it!" without subsequently making hasty, sarcastic eye-rolls at whoever was keeping the minutes. Later the same year, Acclaim promoted the resoundingly mediocre Turok: Evolution by offering a sack of cash to anyone who was willing to christen their newborn baby "Turok", apparently shifting their demographic focus to the other end of the scale."

"I hope Bloodstained realizes what it has done; all we needed was a few more disappointing fuck-ups, a few more Mighty No. 9s, Yooka-Laylees, Broken Ages, and maybe we could've all been completely soured to the Kickstarted retro callback. "Oh, maybe it isn't healthy to never want to leave our youthful comfort zones," we could've all said. "Maybe we should be open to new thoughts and ideas, for just as the gene pool requires variance, so too does art need a diversity of new concepts to avoid stagnation and producing nothing but the cultural equivalent of harelips and webbed toes." And you fucked that up, Bloodstained, by proving the system can actually work, and now it's going to be Kickstarted remakes of Custer's Revenge as far as the eye can see. If you want a picture of the future, imagine General Custer's lovingly-rendered shiny bell-end slapping a human face - forever."

"But let's get on to some of the bigger stuff, like, for example, the giant dribbling cock that Square Enix tripped and broke its nose on, the one with "Avengers" written along the side. With Avengers: Endgame and the very distinct appearances of the main actors still fresh in public memory, wheeling out a game starring their stunt doubles left everyone a bit nonplussed, at best. "Oh, come on, Yahtz! The cost of the likeness rights for these people could've paid for four more years of mysteriously-silent Final Fantasy VII development!" Oh, fair enough, Square Enix; just show us how the Avengers game plays, then. "Mmmmmm... No.""

"I want to emphasize, though, that the core combat is really good. I smash through a window on a skateboard, kick the same skateboard into somebody's eye socket, backflip over his friend shooting two guys at once, kick a frying pan into the air and shoot at it so the bullets ricochet into three other guys who were in cover and apparently left under some mad idea that it was in their power to stop me, and then, for the first time since initially entering the room, I touch the floor."

"Now, one might reasonably say at this point, "Surely, it wasn't a serious offer to let new parents cash in on their future bullying victims! Surely, these were just shock tactics to grab headlines, the way a graffiti artist just wants attention and doesn't literally want to fuck the police! I mean, to be serious, there aren't enough hours in the day." Well, Acclaim would always insist these were genuine offers when pressed, and therefore, they must've been by the Universal Law of No Take-Backsies, but they also claim that the baby name idea was taken from a marketing expert named Simeon Cantrell who, it turned out, didn't exist; who wrote a book whose ISBN number, in truth, belonged to a book of children's knock-knock jokes. All of which indicates that at least one person at Acclaim was treating this as a big, ironic gag that would send them laughing all the way to the bank, but Acclaim was still losing money, so it was more like a forced chuckle all the way to the dole office."

"Frankly, I think Close to the Sun presents a cautionary tale. If you're going to knock something off, maybe pick something that isn't really good and made by more competent people than you. Why not try to make, say, Ride To Hell, but actually functional, and consequently infinitely less interesting? And then re-name it something like Days Gone."

"Of all the video game protagonists I've been unreasonably obliged to identify with, I struggle to think of one I dislike more than Deacon St. John. Even Jeffrey Cuddletrousers from Hatred at least had some fucking ambition in life. At least he knew how to express himself, and didn't just mumble into his shoes all the time. He didn't sulk and whine every time someone asked him to do something, like a teenager when the bins need putting out. And he didn't passive-aggressively criticize them under his breath the moment their backs were turned; he'd mainly just stab them in the face and shit. But the developers apparently thought Deacon St. John's "dynamic" personality needed to be a constant presence, so he has to comment on fucking everything. "Oh, I picked up a bottle. Another Molotov is it? Yawn!" And another thing; stop second guessing my intentions, Deacon St. John! I walk two feet out of a zombie clear-out zone, and you go "Ooh, I guess I'll finish clearing it out later, then..." You'd like that, wouldn't you, you lazy bastard!? What was your job at that biker gang you used to be in? 'Cause I think it must have been taste tasting the crystal meth."

"So Rage 1 was a pudding-y fart in an overcrowded swimming pool, and Bethesda must've said to id, "All right, fine, just make Doom." So they made Doom, and it kicked arse, and then they were like, "Great! We've figured it out! Now let's make another Rage!" Why?! Why are we still bothering with Rage?! And why do you have a black eye? "I walked into a door. I mean, because it's a post-apocalypse story that desperately needs to be told, that's why! Now, let's make Rage 2, and they're definitely not making me say this!" Well, let's give Rage 2 a chance; I mean, there might be a few things that a shoot-y drive-y post-apocalypse sandbox can do with the color magenta that Far Cry New Dawn didn't already do this year."