Fully Ramblomatic

"Alan's game takes a more Silent Hill-y approach where we systematically explore an abandoned hotel or dog grooming salon, looking for the locked doors and the keys to open the locked doors like a janitor on his first day whose supervisor isn't answering their phone, with the added twist of Alan's power to rewrite the story to alter certain rooms and open up new doorways. It gives a rather effectively creepy feel of being trapped in a surreal, introspective world with a sense of reality as reliable and permanent as a career in corporate tech journalism."

"I won't spoil anything, but if you're wondering why Alan Wake American Nightmare is no longer canon, it's because it had a satisfying ending that tied up all the loose ends that might have kept the DLC and sequel train a-rolling indefinitely, and you can be fucking well certain Alan Wake 2 is determined not to repeat that mistake."

"[after thanks for the support received following the launch of Second Wind] Don't worry; I'm not going to have an impassioned talk like this every week. I think next time we'll go back to the smash cutting to the overly loud credits music right after the final gag. It's just 'cause this is the first. Don't want anyone to think I'm getting sincere all of a sudden. And furthermore: Bum balls wankity-wank, labia flatulent gush."

"But the cultural vogue is constantly adapting, and that's presumably why, with RoboCop: Rogue City, developers Teyon are pioneering a new interesting counterpoint to the "movement shooter." Namely, the plod-around-like-you've-got-tea-trays-strapped-to-each-foot-and-two-pounds-of-rapidly-cooling-shit-threatening-to-leak-out-the-legs-of-your-underpants...-shooter. Or, to use its original name, Gears of War."

"It is very cute. I want to pinch RoboCop's little cheek and jiggle it 'til it makes a sound like a metal mixing bowl being cleaned with a chamois leather. Because it's totes adorbs the way RoboCop: Rogue City thinks it's a real game. It's trying so gosh-darned hard with its accurately modeled likenesses of the original actors that animate so awkwardly, you can practically hear the squeaking of gears as their mouths flap up and down."

"In Talos Principle 1, we were an AI in a virtual world going through a process to develop our sentience which, for reasons I wasn't entirely clear on, involved solving a hundred million line-of-sight laser reflecting puzzles... "Do you want us to explain it to you, Yahtz!?" That's okay, Talos Principle 1... "It's no trouble! We wrote like nine hundred in-universe text logs explaining the philosophical link between sentience and filling the backs of cereal boxes!" I'm sure you did, Talos Principle 1. I don't have time to read them now; could you pop them in my novelty inbox that's designed to look like a dustbin?"

"Did I already mention the entire vacuum-cleaner-seducing city of intelligent robots you can entirely optionally explore before you even get to the puzzle-y bit -- full of jaw-dropping architecture and deep conversations and a memorial to cats for some reason. And even while you're slogging away at the puzzle coal face, you continue to get a larger sense of the world you're part of because you're plugged in to in-universe social media -- full of bored, hyper-intelligent beings with nothing to do all day but watch what you're doing through your eyes and argue about the implications. It's like streaming, except the audience consists entirely of Greek philosophers rather than incoherent shit-pipes who keep donating small amounts of money to make you say the phrase "willy-fiddlers" over and over again."

"I think it was during the third kingdom that my boredom with the combat reached critical mass, and I decided it probably wouldn't make a splash in the scandal press if I were to just kick it in the head and watch the rest of the cutscenes on YouTube. After which, I discovered I'd successfully predicted all the reveals and twists in the plot, including that at the very end it would turn out that the mastermind was a hitherto unintroduced corrupted faux benevolent god, and we defeat them with the power of friendship. But not that I have the power of prophecy. It was primarily my profiency in Persona pattern perception."

"American Arcadia is a fairly short narrative indie game in which protagonist Trevor Hills -- nebbish middle-manager and boring twat -- discovers that his entire life is a reality TV show being watched by the people outside the thinly-disguised Disney World resort in which he dwells, and is forced to go on the run when he learns the powers that be are about to disappear him for not being interesting enough to watch. Certainly hits close to home for someone who makes a living on YouTube."

"...Last I checked, James Cameron's Avatar: The Last Smurfbender is a fucking red-hot piece of pop-culture IP. The last Avatar movie did gangbusters in theaters. Apparently. I mean, I didn't see it, and I've never met anyone who has, or is enthusiastic about Avatar, or even gives it much thought at all, unless they're watching Dances With Wolves on a TV with dodgy color correction. Which makes me suspicious. Maybe there's an unknown subsection of humanity living among us -- presumably dwelling underground and subsisting on rats and stray dogs -- who emerge from the sewer drains at night to watch Avatar movies and send phone votes in to America's Next Top Model. Or maybe James Cameron is buying up millions of empty theater seats to pad his numbers when he's not buggering off to the bottom of the ocean to scrape bits of dead billionaire off the Titanic."

"Yeah, Avatars nothing if not as subtle as an attention-starved Alsatian in a prison riot. "Eww, humans are huge, greedy, land-stealing bastards, and the Navi are perfect and peace-loving and noble and one with nature..." Now look here, James Camera-Head. It's very easy to be one with nature when nature is as weirdly fucking obliging as it seems to be on Pandora. It's easy to be nice when you live in the garden at the start of Wonka's chocolate factory, and there's food everywhere, and there's a fucking naturally-occurring free Internet anyone can connect to with the ethernet cable stuck up their bum. And you can literally fling yourself off a fucking cliff and count on the pterodactyl Uber service to catch you before you hit the ground. I think the Navi need to check their planet privilege."

"I'm still one of those deviants who likes horror games in months other than October, and it would be remiss of me not to award the one game that actually scared the piss out of my jaded ass (please don't ask what piss was doing in my ass). Amnesia: The Bunker achieves this with its innovative approach to organic recursive gameplay. Threatening my protagonist with death or injury is one thing, but threatening to erase my last hour of progress? Truly traumatizing for anyone who works with regular deadlines."

"Boy, the conversation around Hogwarts Legacy really helped me appreciate new perspectives and expand my world view. Now I know how the mute function works on Twitter."

"With the year behind us, I can now at least be arsed to do a roundup of quickie reviews, 'cause there's nothing quite like an arse roundup when you're in the mood for a quickie... Huh. That made sense when I got up this morning..."

"[On Sanabi:] Pixel art-y, 2D platform-y affair, best summarized as Katana-Zero-meets-Celeste-meets-a-grappling-hook, followed-by-a-whirlwind-romance-and-joyful-marriage-to-a-grappling-hook. But the plot's straight out of the grim middle-aged, murder-man, haunted-by-lost-loved-one, finds-second-chance-at-redemption-while-escorting-innocent-child, hairy-dad playbook. But I can't hold that against it because, hey! Grappling hoooook! One of those would have certainly improved The Last of Us, if it had been used to tether the main characters to a speeding bus."

"[On Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III:] Didn't play it; never will. See, I played the Modern Warfare I remake, but when Modern Warfare II came around, I thought to myself, "You know what? This does not spark joy." And I wish I could bottle the sensation of realizing that I could just not play Modern Warfare games anymore. I'd make a fucking fortune."

"The story starts out with a nice straightforward premise -- slitterheads bad people, eat brainy, ooo scary nasty, kill them all -- then introduces a time loop element to explain why we keep having to repeat the missions. Still fine, I guess. But then the plot feels increasingly like a chicken pot pie got projectile-vomited at the ceiling fan. Turns out some slitterheads are good and are trying to coexist with humanity, oh wait, no they're not, they were pretending, wait! yes they are, there's a good one right there. Are we the bad guys now? Let's go to a fucking parallel universe and fight ourselves. And then come back and do it again but from the other side. Bored now, plane crash, everyone dies. What the fuck are you on about, Slitterhead!?"

"The plot centers around "rarities," specific characters with special upgradeable superpowers we can use while possessing them and whom we bring along on all our missions. And there are several side ones we can unlock from doing optional objectives. Except every now and again the plot stops dead, sits down, sticks out its lower lip like a little toddler, and goes, "I'm not continuing until you find all the optional characters." Well they're not fucking optional, then, are they! And I wouldn't mind, but most of these characters proceed to have bugger-all importance to the plot. It's like if the Beatles held up a song writing session to wait for Ringo to arrive."

"The game kicks off with a very Starship Troopers-inspired... Ooo, if I mince these words any harder, I could top it with mashed potato and call it cottage pie. It literally is Starship Troopers, okay? A totalitarian future Earth fighting a high-tech war against alien bugs on a distant planet we've got no more business on than does a double-decker bus in a swimming pool, using bombastic state media to blind its citizens with promises of glory and appeals to patriotism so it can have a never-ending supply of dumb recruits to throw into the meat grinder. "Rip-off" is a harsh phrase, but you know what? Considering the irony of Starship Troopers went over so many people's heads the first time, probably wouldn't hurt to give it a second crack."

"Feels weird to say, but I guess my tolerance for live service grinds increases when I feel like the story isn't bullshitting me. Thanks, Helldivers 2! In return, I won't bullshit you. I'm going to play your Skinner box grind-a-thon game play with a podcast on to keep my brain alive. Please extend my apologies to your music composers and voice actors who spent all that time in the studio trying to convincingly scream like they're getting impaled on a pedipalp (pedi-paled, perhaps)."

"Look, I'm not shaming the intended audience for liking anime girls with big tits. Across my teenage years, I must have personally expelled enough white wee-wee over big-titty anime girls to immerse a fully grown horse."

"The problem with it [the soul mechanic] is, if I want to swap out souls and try out different abilities, I need to go in to the menu, which is like trying to walk through a sausage factory with large dogs attached to each limb. It's not that it's badly designed and hard to navigate -- although it absolutely is that. It's just that I'd go in to check one thing, and notice an indicator going, "You have new rewards to claim in menu 27-F." So I'd go there and claim all of those, and, "Oh! Now you have upgrades to spend in menu 16-Omega-Flamingo." So I'd do that, and, "Hooray! You've succeeded at the 'Spend Ten Upgrades' mission! Claim your reward from menu Trousers-Gazebo-Fishslice! Now go to the convene menu and spend all the tokens we just gave you in the fruit machine, then take your subsequent pile of useless garbage for characters you don't use, and refine them into upgrades for the sword you actually have equipped!" And by the time I stumbled bewildered back in to game play with a whole extra two points of damage, night had fallen, wolves were stalking me, and I couldn't remember where I'd parked."

"So we're in a vaguely Disco Elysium sort of area that's at the midpoint between narrative tabletop role-playing and reading a choose-your-own-adventure book except, unlike Disco Elysium, you're not staring down the receding hairline of substance-wracked car crash on legs. And instead of rolling each skill check as they come up, there's a rather interesting system wherein we roll five dice at the start of each in-game day, and then choose which of the day's activities we wish to apply them to. So we might want to really bring our A-game to an important quest objective and use up our five and our six there, but then we could use some extra cash, but it's not that urgent, so we use our ones and twos to phone in a shift washing dishes or at the phone sex hotline. It rather effectively game-ifies the very human condition of not always giving that much of a shit about what you're doing. And I really relate to that. Yeah, sometimes I, too, have trouble focusing on a task for reasons largely out of my control, like my usual mysterious mid-morning stiffy. And I'm at the age where I might sometimes roll a whole day of ones and twos 'cause I don't get enough exercise, and I fucked my back up yesterday afternoon because I walked across the room wrong."

"...The main reason I fondly remember Citizen Sleeper 1 is because the ending was good, and tied the whole experience together. In fact, I struggled to remember anything else about it, frankly. And, sure enough, the same is Citizen Sleeper True of Citizen Sleeper 2. And I need to talk about it, so here's a spoiler warning: SPOILER WARNING, SPOILER WARNING / GONNA SPOIL THE PLOT / SPOILER WARNING, SPOILER WARNING / LEAVE IF YOU'D RATHER I NOT."

"...I'm aware I'm not making any earth-shattering revelations here; the contours and geography of this particular arse have been well mapped out for weeks. But like I was gonna pass up the opportunity to kick the teeth out of this dead horse. Shittiness this rich and pungent deserves to be savored. I want to have a nice long slow-dance with MindsEye, get its legs all tangled up in the strips of toilet paper that litter the ballroom, then twirl it out on to the balcony under the moonlight, meet its gaze, and shove it over the rail."

"The plot only stops vacillating randomly between characters and tones and themes when it runs out of gas and ends about as abruptly and satisfyingly as a shotgun blast to the lower leg. And I still have so many questions! This billionaire-tech-bro-clit-brisket, thinly-disguised-Elon-Musk-stand-in character, for example. Am I supposed to think he's a spoiled, superficial, manipulative cunt, or a misunderstood visionary genius? 'Cause that's another thing the plot goes back and forth on until, by the end, what we seem to be doing is defending the guy's visionary tech projects from evil government and military people who want to repress him with their evil regulations. Oh, God! You don't actually like Elon Musk, do you, developers? I'll bet you do; I'll bet you're one of those people who defends him at parties until we can politely shake you off and get back to talking with the dude wearing three handfuls of shit."

"The plot concerns famed space bounty hunter and Irish folk hero Seamus O'Ran, who is fighting against the evil space pirates as part of the Space Federation military, 'cause she's still unclear on what a bounty hunter actually is."

"...I need to crowbar in a discussion on the Switch 2's new mouse mode, for finally a console is able to serve up an FPS experience comparable to the PC gaming mouse and keyboard control system. And in this case, "comparable" means "an awful lot shittier than." Mouses (or "mice..." I've never been sure which is right; they both sound wrong to me) have always come in many shapes and sizes -- some curvy, some straight, some nestled in a mousepad designed to look like an anime girl's bum cheeks. But I think there's a good reason they've always been thicker than a Kit-Kat. The buttons are awkward to press, and I have to fold my hand into a hideous claw shape to keep it upright, so my lunchtime wank felt like making love to a Rolodex. I dropped it quickly, leaving me with two control options: Stick-based, or motion-sensor based. Oh, could I use the stick for large movements, and then use the motion sensor for fine-tuning my aim? [changes to parody German accent] "NEIN! You vill choose either stick only and throw all motion controls out of ze pram; or motion only and ze stick shall sit zere doing nothing, like a Protestant's clitoris, in accordance vith ze doctrine of Nintendo, ze control scheme Nazi!""