DOOM (2016)

DOOM is a welcome throwback to the shooters of old, benefiting from all the technical advances of today. The game does away with pre-rendered cut scenes and heavy exposition. Instead, it goes with dynamic story-telling and heavy demolition. Remember at the beginning of Half-Life when they made you sit through a train ride and really set a mood before you shoved a piece of stool through the fan? DOOM does away with that too. Straight and to the point like a shotgun blast to the head seems to be the agenda here. The game simply hands you a gun and throws you into a playground populated with toys for you to blow up. And boy, is it fun.

The general idea is that guns go BANG and make the demons go SPLAT. The guns and the demons get more impressive as the game goes on, but I found that the SPLAT peaked a little early. This is probably the harshest criticism I have for DOOM: the way the demons die gets a bit boring. It's both a genuine unsettling problem and an easily overlooked detail, depending on where and how closely you look and I intend to explore both angles. I wanna get the SPLAT out of the way now, so I can gush all about the BANG later. The combat is dynamic and encourages a good mixture of long and short range tactics. Bringing enemies' health down to a bare minimum stuns them and creates an opening for one of the finishing moves, which is a short cut scene where Doomguy obliterates a demon. There's a small variety of these based on the angle you take on your victim but I only really remember maybe five different ones.

Using these finishers almost always yields health packs, encouraging players to be aggressive and dive right into the hordes of hell. Add to that movement speed three times that of an average modern shooter and you have a recipe for infernally fun mayhem. Everything happens at neck-breaking pace, so it's lucky really that Doomguy has no neck. It's also lucky that the finishers merely punctuate a symphony of death and destruction. Thanks to a high damage yield and relatively small amount of placed health packs, the player is forced to either dodge bullets or punch the shit out of demons and both are as fun as they sound but one without the other soon becomes tedious.

The bad, then. These cut scenes can take up three or four seconds at a time and even though every demon type gets its own personalised death, the sheer volume of enemies means you'll be re-watching the same cut scene hundreds of times. Note that I keep calling them cut scenes and not animations. See, the game kind of stops for a moment while Doomguy does his thing, removing player agency – I felt more a spectator than a participant. Sure, DOOM is just a dumb shooter and not an artsy game designed to make you feel as one with the character and force you to think about how difficult their job is (hint, hint). It's just a game that asks you to point the crosshair and pull the trigger. Still, whenever it wrested control from me it felt like the protagonist rebelling in some way, really letting his anger out. I felt that Doomguy was annoyed with me for going easy on these arseholes from hell and just blowing them up, like they deserve to be dismembered instead. But every time Doomguy raged out and had his fun, mine briefly stopped. The SPLAT becomes a mere formality somewhere along the way and what early on in the game would bring a massive maniacal grin on my face, within about six hours wouldn't even merit a smirk. You kill a lot of demons in DOOM, and I appreciate that resources were needed elsewhere, but just a few more (say, twenty or so) death animations for the hell-fiends would have made all the difference for me. When the SPLAT ceases to be a distraction, you might pay more attention to the gunplay and that is lacking in many aspects from hitboxes to damage output. Probably the reason why the game hasn't been a massive multiplayer hit.

The good, then. The BANG. It starts with a laser pistol and ends with a total annihilation launcher. The shotgun becomes a machine gun, the machine gun becomes a rocket launcher and the rocket launcher becomes a better rocket launcher. All weapons in DOOM are customisable, although that customisation only extends to two predetermined mods per gun. I'm underselling here, a shotgun that shoots explosive shells or a machine-rocket-gun never boring. This is the area where DOOM truly shines, taking mundane, been-there-done-that, run-of-the-mills guns and making them exciting.

Your first proper weapon – the shotgun – can become a rapid-shot shotgun or an explosive shotgun and I don't think I need to tell you which I went with. You get a Plasma rifle that can have an AOE shot that stuns or damages enemies and both come in handy at different times. The assault rifle can either get zoom or a mini rocket launcher (a mini rocket launcher that after a few upgrades doesn't need to reload and basically has the same rate of fire as the default setting of the rifle). You do, of course, get a rocket launcher. But DOOM's rocket launcher isn't just your regular RPG – no, no – DOOM's rocket launcher lets you detonate your rockets mid-air and even add splash damage to them. The sniper rifle is a super-powerful laser cannon that can also be turned into a turret if you ever get tired of the running around. The only two 'boring' guns are the Super Shotgun and the minigun. Now, the Super Shotgun has some redeeming qualities (mainly the fact it's an absolute beast of a cannon) but I must concede that the minigun was genuinely boring. And then comes the BFG. Ah yes, this one gets very limited special ammo, no more than three shots at a time and obliterates basically everything in view. There only four kinds of ammo for all these guns though: shotgun shells for the two shotguns, plasma for the plasma rifle and the gauss cannon, assault rifle bullets for the rifle and the minigun and rockets. Once you've run out of ammo it's chainsaw time – the classic melee weapon makes a return as a special one-shot-kill weapon that also makes its victim drops ammo.

DOOM has a plot if you're into that. It's about how demons are shit-scared of Doomguy and how he hates their guts. Or loves them. Loves ripping them out, anyway. It's also about authoritarian manipulation, fanaticism, dangers of experimentation and GUNS.

Level design and level art fall somewhere between the good and the bad. The art is beautiful throughout and Hell is really pretty to look at but the skeletal design isn't always great. Each level has its own secrets, some better hidden than others. These secrets can often be found just by looking at the mini map and there is an unlockable perk to have all collectibles and secrets revealed on the mini map from the beginning of a level which does kind of defeat the whole 'explore to find goodies' angle. Each level is fitted with a secret area taken straight from the original Doom, 480p graphics and all. These are fun to find but a couple are nothing but dead ends with a bit of ammo and I can't help but feel like Id really missed a trick there.

DOOM is the most fun I've had with a game released in 2016 – it's fast, brutal, unpretentious, humorous and, most importantly, fun. There is still much I haven't tried (because I don't really care) like the map building mode, Snap Map, which is basically Mario Maker but DOOM. The game brings back memories and creates new great ones of its own, I won't be forgetting DOOM (2016) anytime soon.

DOOM is: your 25-year-old dog finding its long-lost childhood toy/10

All the things Red Dead Redemption 2 should have been called

Rockstar recently announced Red Dead Redemption 2 and a portion of the Internet exploded with complaints about the title. Red Dead Redemption 2 is set to be the third game in the Red Dead series and a sequel to Red Dead Redemption, having the Internet argue that Rockstar should've kept up their titling convention of naming the games Red Dead R...
So I've decided to explore the possibilities and here are the titles Rockstar should've gone with:

READ DEAD RELOADED starring Keanu Reeves in the role of Jack Morston, realising that the entire affair was just some video game made by cruel, evil Scotsmen. Kind of Mogworld meets Matrix meets Unforgiven. Jack realises everyone whom he murdered was just an NPC and his scruples disappear, letting him go on an absolute rampage. The game ends in a glitch sequence similar to Pony Island or Undertale.

RED DEAD RESURRECTION where John comes back to life as an undead necromancer, realises that having a wholesome life wasn't for him after all, resurrects his old partners and sells his soul for a ghost ship called Black Pearl to sail the seas and plunder. Kind of a Black Flag affair, seeing you sail the waters of the frontier and terrify anyone you encounter. John could even have Shang Tsung-like soul-sucking powers to make currency more interesting.

RED DEAD REFERENDUM where Jack Morston campaigns for a complete overhaul to the taxing system and for free health care and education for all white people living in the West, ultimately getting murdered by multiple gunmen for being 'a poncy lefty'.

RED DEAD ROASTING where instead of guns, all characters use witty insults to hurt each other. The entire game plays out like a political debate or a comedian's birthday party. Saints Row special effects included.

RED DEAD REVOLUTION where Jack Morston moves to Canada, learns French and begins beheading the upper classes. Filled with romance and existentialism, the game features dialogue options and branching paths. A healthy cross between a working Assassin's Creed Unity and Mass Effect.

RED DEAD RING where Jack finally gives in to his unwholesome urges and commits a series of anal rapes. Extra points are scored for attacking bandits and politicians.

RED DEAD REVEANGANCE sees the series make a shift from its traditional third-person shooter genre into the fast-paced and demanding world of spectacle hack'n'slash. Jack dies a death akin to his father's but is brought back with a fantasy frontier technology and goes on a quest for revenge spanning with pistol and sabre in tow.

RED DEAD REFORMED sees Jack Mortson lead a quiet family life. Each passing day tests our hero's patience and the challenge comes from not murdering all the pricks you come across. Satisfaction not guaranteed.

RED DEAD REALITY a VR Western shooter with more gimmicks than your hands will know what to do with. Would come with VR pistol for shooting, VR reigns for horse riding, VR dice for dice throwing, VR knife for playing five finger fillet, a deck of VR cards for playing poker, a pair of VR sneaking shoes and a Fleshlight for the brothel gameplay.

RED DEAD ROULETTE a roguelite version of RED DEAD starring Jack as a functioning alcoholic mercenary who decides to stare the Grim Reaper dead in the eye and only load five bullets into the drum. All duels would be pot luck and the game would feature finishing shots that would see Jack aim at his temple, Persona 4 style, and then off his victim.

RED DEAD RUSSIAN same but in Siberia.  

Reigns

Platform: PC
Price paid: £1.99

Reigns is a strange game. It's also a strange game to describe. It's not a difficult game to describe: it's a text-based dual-choice resource management game with roguelike elements putting the player in the role of a monarch. But that is strange. It's another one of those really inexpensive little indie games with Satan in it.

Steam is overrun with humorous, gimmicky indie games and most of them have some form of a devil. There's never much in the way of gameplay and there is always a moment that's designed to mess with your head and make your jaw drop. There is always a girl and there is always a lighthouse type shit. What sets Reigns apart is the fact that it is actually funny and challenging. As king, you must keep the kingdom's resources in the balance. These resources are the church, the people, the army and the treasury. Throughout the game you are faced with situations demanding you make one of two possible choices, either supplementing or depleting your supplies in varying degrees. The game is nice enough to let you know how big an impact your decision will make with a little circle above the concerned resource but you're left in the dark as to whether it will be going up or down. You might think it adds a degree of strategy. It doesn't. There are only about 50 different situations and you'll see them all within an hour. If variety is the spice of life, Reigns was cooked by white people. The challenge lies in the fact that you lose when any one of the resources is either completely empty or completely full. Reigns is probably the first game I've come across to punish me for doing too well. Narratively, they are all very different types of failure and you should definitely try to max out the people and the money resources.

Reigns is more suited to quick, short plays than to hour-long sessions. It is literally just text and weird, blocky portraits. And jokes. Haha. Admittedly, some of the humour is bang-on but a lot of it is just random stoner nonsense and I get the feeling the writer(s?) was trying to tick too many boxes. It's a very LOLRANDOM kind of game but has just enough charm and clever design to be endearing like a blind dog pissing on your feet rather than painful like a blind bloke shoving his walking stick up your read end. The player starts off completely blind (I was always going somewhere with this, even if you couldn't see it) and gains more and more insight into just what is going on until we meet the devil himself. Every 666 years. Haha. Now, I can't in all honesty tell you whether there is a point to it all because I stopped playing after meeting the devil for the second time and it being, for all I could tell, identical to our first meeting. Except that he told me the game would end after 1998 turns, or in the year 1998. That's probably a reference I don't get. Probably something to do with Windows 2000 and ME, the two OS following Windows 98, being an absolute pile of shit. But then again, it all plays like something made and especially written by an 18-year-old. So who knows?

Reigns is cheaper than a large bag of chips and infernally fun with friends and alcohol, maybe not so much on your Jack Jones. If you've got an evening free and some friends round, it's a two pound game that will probably offer you two hours of fun and with the state of Steam as it is, Reigns falls into the top 15% of games on the storefront in terms of overall quality.

Reigns is: going to the pub with Philosophy students/10

10 Things They Should Throw Into Pokémon Go

So, Pokémon Go has had its second update and will now have them bi-weekly according to Niantic. It's as good a time as any, then, to make some suggestions as to what should be added in the next few. Bear in mind that some of these may be things that have been confirmed and a lot of these ought to be things you too thought of adding.

1. Working Pedometer 

Number one was going to be working servers but since the casuals are back to playing Candy Crush, this hasn't been much of a problem. It would be nice, however, if the game actually tracked the distance you cover and hatched eggs accordingly. I've walked 12+ miles to hatch 5km eggs and 3+ miles to hatch 2km eggs. While you might say I'm getting fitter, I'm also wasting a lot of time and growing to resent walking and Pokémon all at the same time. Ain't nobody got time for that.

2. A Pokémon Tracker 

Wouldn't it be great if Pokémon Go had some sort of feature that would let you know what kinds of Pokémon you can catch in the nearby area and where you should head to find them? Imagine, instead of wandering aimlessly, you could be decisively heading to find that 101st Magikarp you're so desperate to find. As it stands, we're left with the "nearby" which just shows random pictures of Pokémon in a random order.

3. Better Spawn Rates 

I'm literally tired of walking literal miles with literally nothing spawning. The app is very temperamental, it has its good and bad moments; bit of a shame that I usually experience its bad moments. Using lures and incense has little effect and usually only attracts the commonest Pokémon to me. I understand that Niantic wanted some coherence with water types spawning near water and grass types spawning in parks but in practice, we just get Pidgeys and Rattatas everywhere. Where are we supposed to look for fire types, anyway? In the dessert? In a volcano? I have walked along power lines hoping to find an Electabuzz and came away with a Poliwag.

4. Working Catching Mechanics 

Again, the game just decides when it wants to like you. I can sometimes catch a 800+cp Pokémon with a single Pokéball and other times I'll have a 50cp Pikachu break free from a great throw with a Greatball and instantly run away. I've had the game show me the "Excellent!" message and not score me the excellent 100xp bonus. I've scored "Nice!" and "Great!" with a throw off-centre and nothing with perfect throws. All I really ask here is some consistency so that I can learn how to play the game.

5. Mewtwo 

I mean...

JUST LOOK AT IT

LOOK AT THIS GORGEOUS BEAST

LOOK!!!

It's the most powerful Pokémon to ever exist and my personal favourite. How great would it be to find one at 10cp? 

6. Gen 2 Pokémon 

I am not the first and I will not be the last to ask for this. I've seen rumours here and there that Niantic are planning to start fazing in the later generations of Pokémon into the game but since they haven't even added the gen 1 legendaries yet, I don't suppose this is happening any time soon. They'll probably make a big announcement when the player base drops low enough. What would you have to name your Eevee to get an Umbreon though?

7. Trades 

This has been confirmed but only as a thing that will happen, no details as of yet. There are obvious issues at hand with trading in Pokémon Go: can you trade a low CP Pokémon and receive one much higher? Would the CP be swapped, i.e. if you trade your 10cp Charmander for your friend's 970cp Jynx would they receive a 970cp Charmander? Should there be a CP gap restriction for trading? What about other perks of trading? Traditionally trading a Dragonite or a Rhydon for a Kadabra is a decent move since you receive an Alakazam; sure, you trade a really strong Pokémon for an average one but the end product is equal to and in some ways better. What about xp for trading? Should a player trading the stronger Pokémon receive bonus xp? Should trading potentially earn you candy or poké coins? We will just have to wait and find out.

8. Local Battles 

Another confirmed feature, local battles should be arriving soon. One would hope that with the addition of local battles, the battle mechanics can be fixed and made something other than just tapping the screen. See, the game claims you can swipe to dodge but it never really works. It seems to me that the game adopts the old Bioware style hidden-turn-based system where it all looks like real-time actions but the game secretly takes turns. It manifests in invisible cooldown periods which last longer for slower, usually harder-hitting attacks. The only strategy to battling right now is picking a Pokémon with attacks that are strong against the opponent's type.

9. Rewards for Milestones 

Other than the "Well done, you've walked 200km!" medal you get now. These medals have a ton of potential. Hatching loads of eggs should give you a second infinite use egg incubator. Walking 5,000km should give you running shoes which count each step as two so you only have to walk 1km for a 2km egg. Catching loads of Rattatas should give you character customisation options to look like the youngster sprite. Catching 200 steel types should let you carry a katana on your back. All I'm saying is, Pokémon Go is basically a free-to-play MMO - it should act like one.

10. A Second Pikachu Evolution

Pikachu is the Pokémon icon and that's thanks to the 90s Anime. Now, Ash's Pikachu in the Anime is special, it is unnaturally strong for its species. The ultimate Pokémon in the game shouldn't be Arceus or Dialga or Kyurem, it should be Ash's Pikachu. Imagine you evolve your Pikachu into a Raichu and see a "Devolve" option costing 10,000 Pikachu candy. Try and tell me that wouldn't be hella cool.

10 Things You Should Know About Pokémon Go

So I succumbed to curiosity and finally downloaded Pokémon Go. My partner and I decided to have a quick look at it while we pop out to the shops for some wine and ended up walking around the area for two and a half hours. At the time of writing, It's been a week and a day since I started and I am a level 18 trainer and I thought there are a few things everyone should know, so here goes.

1. The game chats shit about your ends

There's a 'Nearby' bar which often claims there's a Pinsir or a Lapras about. There isn't, don't waste your time holding out hope and carry on catching Pidgeys and Rattatas. The location tracking is a bit broken anyway and so when I come indoors it jumps me about 400m away into a whole different post code but my 'Nearby' remains identical. Also, I've seen some claims (Forbes, WhatCulture) that the paw symbols under the Pokémon sprites indicate distance from the listed Pokémon but I've never ever ever ever ever ever ever seen any fewer than three paws and I've caught over 500 Pokémon by now.

2. Your balls are wonky

There is literally no consistency to the throwing mechanic. I've thrown Pokéballs right in the middle of a Drowzee's stupid face and it didn't register as Nice or Great but I've missed a Horsea's ring and got an Excellent. I get random curveballs which I suspect (but cannot confirm) come down to me not holding my phone straight, since the game uses the built-in gyroscope. All I can really tell you is keep throwing those balls at those stupid faces and hope for the best.

3. The game thinks you're a mug 

It will freeze. It will not load from noon until about 1:30 and from 8:30 until about 9:30 on most weekdays. It will hatch a 10km egg and then freeze without saving so you've walked for nothing. It will throw a 1080cp Mewtwo your way only for it to run away after breaking away from one of your balls. You'll finally catch that 1080cp Mewtwo and the game will freeze without saving. (Disclosure: not true story)

4. You're not sad for playing it

And anyone who claims otherwise is sad. As long as you're still being responsible and not walking in the middle of the road or mucking about at work to catch a Pikachu, you're not sad. There's nothing sad about going for a jog because you got your first 10km egg and are super excited except the egg hatching and the game freezing and cheating you of your prize because it thinks you're a mug.

5. It's not as good on your Jack Jones

Grab a friend. If you don't have a friend, make a friend. Make sure it's a good friend, too. I've played with three different people and really enjoyed playing with one, relatively enjoyed playing with another and the last one was useless. The game's success is greatly owed to its social aspect, the way it brings people together talking about fictional monsters.

6. Don't expect to make actual friends 

I mean, we're all just playing a silly game and talking about Pokémon on a really shallow level, we won't suddenly start going to Bryan Adams gigs together. I'm not saying people haven't become genuine friends because of Pokémon Go, I'm saying don't expect to make life-long friends playing the bloody thing.

7. The teams literally have no relevance

Once you reach Level 5 you can join Team Instinct (the Yellow one), Team Mystic (the Best one) or Team Valor (the Red one) and start battling gyms. The game claims Instincts are interested in Pokémon's nature and finding different Pokémon, Mystics are interested in Pokémon evolutions, and Valors are interested in bringing out the true power of Pokémon. Now, presumably, this would mean that Instincts have the most varied spawns, Mystics get the most repeat spawns and Valors get the spawns with the highest CP (Combat Power) but that just doesn't seem to be the case. Another red herring.

8. Don't get too attached to early Pokémon

You'll be milling them for spare candy soon enough. I've kept my starting 12cp Charmander just as a bitter reminder of how stupid the game is in the starter regard. I had a Raticate and Pigeotto called BorisJohnson and MikeGove, respectively, whom I transferred for candy about two days in. I recently transferred my NickFrost Raticate too and decided to no longer nickname my Pokémon unless they're over 1,000cp. I've got a Magmar I called Darnell.

9. Time is not on your side

The game tracks NOTHING while it's closed or minimised or your screen's locked. Nothing except for your timed bonuses like lures, lucky eggs and incense. It's Tauros crap and we all know it. If you're gonna use a lure or an incense or even a lucky egg, make sure you have a half hour spare, you're willing to do a bit of walking and that you're not playing during one of the times when the servers are particularly bad.

10. No one really knows anything 

I've seen conflicting statements on some aspects and some of the things published about this game are just not true. Niantic haven't been particularly good at explaining how the thing works and so it's all a bit trial-and-error. If you do think you know anything interesting that should be on this list, let me know.

Is Pokémon Go elitist?

I don't know. It is still too early to tell just yet. Also, I haven't played it.

Pokémon Go is available on the Apple store and on the Android playstore and therefore requires you to have a smartphone or tablet. If you don't have a smartphone or tablet, my friend, you cannot play Pokémon Go. Even if you have a smartphone or tablet, Pokémon Go requires you to have free space on your mobile device so you can install it. If you don't have enough free space on your mobile device, my friend, you cannot play Pokémon Go. Even if you have a smartphone or tablet with sufficient free space, Pokémon Go requires you to have an internet connection to play it. If you do not have an internet connection on your smartphone or tablet with sufficient free space to install it, my friend, you cannot play Pokémon Go. That makes three categories of people already excluded from Pokémon Go and we haven't even started actually playing it!

To play Pokémon Go, you must physically move around the real world in search of Augmented Reality Pokémon creatures scattered around with your phone as your window into the Augmented Reality (AR). We all know where this is going, right? To places some people might not be able to reach. In having to cover great distances, people without vehicles are disadvantaged and unfit people are disadvantaged furthermore. If your nearest Pokémon is 7 miles away and all you have are your three-year-old Nikes, your experience is unlikely to be as enjoyable as that of the dude driving around in his sports car, catching Dragonites and Mewtwos left, right and centre. If you're also not physically fit, covering great distances can prove to be incredibly tiring and your enjoyment of the game diminished. Some might say that Pokémon Go promotes exercise in this way but too much exercise can cause joint or heart problems, especially to people who aren't used to it. What about physically disadvantaged people? People who can't walk or even move around very much; aren't they missing out on the great craze of 2016? This is clear-as-day elitism and it is downright wrong.

The distribution of the Pokémon shows further elitism from Nintendo. I've seen people in South London complain about a lack of interesting Pokémon, whereas people in West London seem to be enjoying a wide variety of fan favourites. This could be coincidence, in fact there is a strong possibility that it is, but it's definitely not because it's elitism. What about the Gym that was placed in the ocean? Sure, some people went out on a kayak and claimed the it, but how many people can afford a kayak?! ELITISM!!! You could argue that it creates diversity in the player base and makes things more interesting, also making for fun anecdotes about kayaking to claim a Gym, but it's still elitist. What if there's a super rare Pokémon like Zapdos on top of Mount Everest? How many people will be able to go to the top of Mt Everest and claim it?

A thing I've seen come up quite a bit is people reuniting with friends they hadn't seen for a while over Pokémon Go. What about people like me who don't have any friends? Who can I reunite with over Pokémon Go? Why should I go to the park in the evening with my phone out just to watch people excitedly catch up while I'm there, by myself, trying to get that fucking Blastoise in the Leicester Square fountain but kids won't get out of my way and I don't have other nerds with me to laugh it all off and say "sorry, we need you kids out the way so we can play this kids' game ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah..."

As far as I'm aware, each player is given an amount of Pokéballs with which to catch the found creatures. This number replenishes on a daily basis but can also be supplemented by paying Nintendo for more Pokéballs via microtransactions. That is to say, you can give real-life British Pounds Sterling to Nintendo Co. Ltd for virtual Pokéballs with which to catch virtual Pokémon in a non-canon, "free"-to-play Pokémon game. Therefore, those with more spare money have a better chance at catching more and/or better Pokémon than those who do not. A lot of people have complained about servers crashing, too. I suspect this is the case on cheaper devices, further shutting out those who are not as well-off.

So I think we can all agree, as much as Nintendo would like to pretend that its latest concoction serves to unite people around the world with the love of adorable animals and their enslavement for entertainment, it's actually an elitist game for the rich, fit and popular and not for the real Pokémon fans.


[Note from author: Yes, I am being facetious.]

White Gamer Privilege

I'm not racist, some of my best friends are white.

FULL DISCLOSURE:
I'm a Caucasian, Arian even, Polish British (or British Polish) male and therefore fall under the white privilege bracket by default so take anything I say (write) with a pinch of privileged salt.

This isn't exactly a current topic but it's one that crops up every so often, so considering how often I post, it may well be a relevant discussion again by the time you read this. See, video games mostly feature white men as their protagonists. I have 181 games on my Steam account, 78 of which feature a single player character as their protagonist, of which 51 feature a human in that role with 7 being customisable and 45 of them are white males. The others, if you're curious are Tomb Raider, Fist of Jesus, Cloudbuilt, Contrast, Hyperdymension Neptunia (sort of counts, right?), Mark of the Ninja (I'm assuming the character is Oriental), Life is Strange, Her Story, Shadowman, Gone Home and Sword of the Samurai (I'm leaving Vanishing of Ethan Carter off that list because I actually have no idea what race the protagonist is in that). Now, the ratio could be, theoretically, put down to my taste - I'm a white male so I naturally prefer games featuring white males in leading roles (which is why I play every Fallout game as a black or mixed-race female and every Elder Scrolls as an Argonian)- but one look at the Steam/Origin/Uplay[LOL]/PSN/XBOX Live Store/GOG/Nintendo Network(?)/Windows 10 Store[ROFL] reveals much the same thing - video games are mostly white dudes, and usually grizzled. This isn't just because developers tend to be white males, the last two games I wrote about were made by Japanese teams with Japanese directors and still featured white dudes as their heroes.

This is all particularly true in the AAA industry which still sees college brodudes as their target audience (even though from my experience they will play every CoD and FIFA and maybe two other games in a year) and less so in the AA indie scene which tends to try and tap into the tired-of-always-playing-a-grizzled-white-dude-and-that's-not-how-you-use-hyphens-you-heathen crowd. The AAA has noticed the AA's success in that particular cabbage patch and decided to take a stroll themselves only to receive a massive backlash from its privileged consumer base. Granted, this is probably a vocal minority of white hermits with not much else to do than pretend to be a superhero in games and a hardass online but nonetheless, their concerns have been vocalised and discussed. This is why I would like to just take this moment to express how utterly ludicrous I find it that someone could say they won't buy Mafia 3 or Watchdogs 2 because they feature black protagonists; that these games have been ruined, based not on any gameplay footage or new features but purely based on their covers featuring black faces; that a community that accepts £3.99 skins and £50 multiplayer titles with £15 DLC a month after release is willing to boycott a game because its creators decided it should feature a black man as its hero. Now, I'm not gonna say that it's racist (it is though, it's incredibly racist; we're talking 'Daddy takes me lynching every first Sunday of the month' racist, the type of inbred imbecile that probably thinks that 'white is right' and God appointed white people as his chosen lot) but it's incredibly elitist. It's like complaining that a new sports car is far too cheap. It's like complaining that Hispanic people are ruining fajitas by making them too spicy. It's like complaining that there's a ladies' toilet at a football stadium. It's like Northeners complaining that foreigners can't speak English. Ludicrous.

I didn't really get into all the hatred and racism around Mafia 3 but I did take a closer look at the Watchdogs 2 discussion. A thing that popped up was that apparently black people can't use technology and I'm reminded of a joke by a Muslim French comedian whose name I can't remember:
"So I went to withdraw money and there are these two old ladies behind me, talking loudly: 'Oh look!' one says, 'She can use the cash machine.' Yes, madam, AND she understands French."
And in that vein I feel that a lot of those comments are goading from lonely people stuck in their mothers' basements. I think some of the racism is much like a little boy pulling on a little girl's hair - bigoted, privileged and wrong. Oh, you thought, 'just a sign that he likes her'? Well, if a girl shat in your food as a sign she liked you, I don't think you'd reciprocate the feeling. I'm growing to find that a rather large, though marginal, portion of our society roams the interwebs and virtual realities so carefully crafted over years at a time with not so much as an ounce of decency or responsibility. If you're a white boy who hates everyone who isn't white and only wanna play as grizzled white men, DON'T WORRY, YOUR GAMES ARE GOING NOWHERE. Please, just let the rest of us enjoy something new.

Would the Witcher be a worse game if you were playing as Ciri? Would Final Fantasy VII suffer from Garret being the main dude? Could Uncharted 4 not have been Elena saving Drake's inexplicably flat ass? If Kojima had a Japanese protagonist, would that be so bad? Watchdogs 2 and Mafia 3 won't be shit games because they'll have black protagonists, they'll be shit because they'll be downgraded, broken borefests with millions of microtransactions. I'm not asking for tokenism, because tokenism is a form of racism itself. I'm asking for Elena to be saving Drake, for Ciri to have her own story and Garret to have his. I'm asking for more Remember Mes and Transistors. I'm asking for a really good Kill La Kill game. I'm asking for characters who normally act as comic relief or romantic interest to gain agency and feature more heavily as believable human beings. If East Enders can do it...

As a side note, it's quite revealing what Nintendo thinks its audience is, considering all the recent pandering to the white knights of gaterland.

Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - a Hideo Kojima game by Hideo Kojima

Platform: PC
Price paid: £24.97

It was definitely made by Kojima. This might just be my favourite game of all time and the ultimate Metal Gear Solid experience. It isn't perfect and it isn't Snake Eater (which is damn near perfect) but it's the most advanced and polished one with just a few snags that Snake Eater managed to avoid. I spent 78 hours across 5 months with the game and I enjoyed almost every second of it.

Phantom Pain combines some of my favourite features of the previous games in the series, including Peace Walker's mother base and Fulton recovery. There's something really enjoyable about hunting staff for your imaginary military nation. Stalking larger bases at night-time searching of soldiers worthy of joining the ever-growing and ever-improving Soltaires Sans Frontiers makes for great fun as your arsenal of non-lethal weapons grows more effective and more extravagant with each capture. You start off with just a simple tranquliser pistol and Big Boss' Close Quarters Combat abilities but before long you're wielding non-lethal shotguns, riot SMGs and even tranq sniper rifles in the effective and rocket and tazer arms in the extravagant bracket. The arsenal extends to explosive, stun and sleep grenades and mines as well as EMP ones letting you set all manner of traps and the new Reflex Mode lets you react quickly to a guard discovering you. This new addition accounts for Big Boss' superhuman reflexes and gives you a five second or so window in slow-motion to down a guard who has just discovered you before he alarms his companions. All of these together allow for (at least) two very different approaches: the slow and the gung-ho.

When playing the slow approach, I found that a good, hour-and-a-half long session could be centred entirely around doing a single Side Op or conquering just a few camps. I'd creep up to a camp on the way to my objective and observe it from afar watching for the guards' patrol routes, taking notes of where they meet and what's in their view at any given point while marking them and making a note of an order I'd like to concuss them in. The safest method was a silenced tranq sniper followed by running over and taking the unconscious body far from view before extracting the soldier via Fulton recovery. The most enjoyable method was planting numerous mines and C4 leaving one or two guards to be sniped off at the end and using the C4 to lead guards into the mines. Time-consuming and risky as it was, it was a thing of beauty the two times I pulled it off right. The fast approach was a lot more Jack Bauer: simply jump into the throngs of enemies and quickly off them using the pistol and CQC with the help of Reflex Mode. Now, when this method backfires, it almost guaranties death, whereas with the slow method you're entrenched and are just facing a shootout. I found both methods to be equally valid and more or less useful depending on circumstance; there's utterly no need to set traps on a camp of four and absolutely no way I could conquer a base of thirty rushing in.

The game's perfect for when you have a couple of hours free and wanna take a stroll through war-torn Afghanistan, the 80s variant. When you wanna get a few side ops or a chapter done between dinner-time and bed-Time, though, you soon realise you're being subjected to Kojima-time. A lot less time is sacrificed towards cut-scenes in Kojima's endless audition as a Jollywood director/producer but that time is sacrificed in other, more frustrating, ways. MGS is open world now and with that comes the necessity of travel and fast-travel. Travel is bleeding awesome: you get given a tireless horse to start with and even without the horse at hand, Big Boss can sprint at an inhuman speed indefinitely without so much as panting. Must be all the tai-chi he does on the weekends. You get all sorts of vehicles as time goes on too: jeeps, trucks, bipedals. The driving is about what you'd expect from a Steal&Drive title ala Saints Row about a decade ago but it's serviceable enough and truly not necessary; in all honesty I Fulton recovered almost every vehicle I came across and only drove three times outside of the mission where it's mandatory.

Then there's the fast-travel (and fast it certainly is not). To move great distances across the map the player has to use the Mother Base helicopter piloted by Pequod which only allows travel between the safe landing zones scattered around the map. Now, I get the idea behind these - it's two war-torn areas in Africa, littered with enemy bases and Big Boss is all about stealth and picking off whole units on his own. Regardless of that, I still think the safe zones are too scattered, especially on the way out. It would've made sense to have landing zones far from the target on the way in but having a lot more escape routes once you clear the enemy bases - it's a helicopter, for goodness sake, not an Imperial Destroyer! Once you do finish your great pilgrimage to the promised 'copter you're rewarded with about 4 seconds waiting for lift-off, another 4-5 manning the cannons and enjoying the view and then. Loading screen before being transported to the interior of the helicopter (which is also the main menu background). Now, if you're trying to travel quickly between two points on the map, couple all that with another loading screen, another short sequence enjoying the view before being able to jump out (apparently Big Boss skimped out on parachutes) and crack on with the mission. All in all, moving from A to B in this manner costs about a minute and that's accounting for the loading screens only taking 3 seconds each. It's laborious and slow and breaks up the rhythm of the game in all the wrong ways, pretty much why it's taken me 5 months to get through 78 hours of it. Having to "fast-travel" more than twice in a day was painful, I was reminded of public transport too much, and twice a day is quite enough of that, thank you. I do completely appreciate why it's been done the way it has and Kojima is a true artist. The scenes of Big Boss approaching a low-flying helicopter and covering his face from the dust it kicks up, then climbing on and looking visibly relieved never fails to marvel a little; but seeing it ten times might've been enough. You might be thinking, "How can you dedicate your longest paragraph so far just to fast-travel?" But I dedicated a whole article to audio logs. Fast-travel was invented as a means for saving players' time, cutting out the boring part or at least giving them the option to get from A to B to C to Z instantaneously (bar loading screens). Here the process takes about a minute and a half each time, travel about 40 times and you've wasted an hour just on the faffing about with the awkward system. Now, think that you've fast-travelled for each of, say, 50 main missions and 72 side ops: you've "fast-travelled" 122 times, using up 183 minutes. Three hours and three minutes spent purely on seeing the same animations and the same loading screens that could've been spent dropping guards from high points on top of other guards to knock them out.

Time, then. I've already mentioned the two hours dedicated to audio logs and three hours dedicated to fast travel, I also have to account for Steam Time. I often left the game paused and had food or went to use the loo, I even left it on overnight a couple of times waiting for Combat Deployment missions to finish. All in all, I think (probably rounding down a lot again) about 15 hours of my playing time were idle. Therefore 78-15-3-2=58 hours of actual gameplay. That's more gameplay hours than the original three altogether including cut scenes (10+12+15=37) and narrowly less gameplay hours than all hours in the original four games (37+24=61). So you definitely get a lot of shooty bang-bang for your buck, even if a lot of it isn't much else than shooty bang-bang. At £50 full price, that's just under a pound per hour's play which is pretty decent in and of itself but more importantly, I never once grew tired of it or got bored with it even if some later missions caused frustration so I suppose we could chalk that one up as 58 quality hours. Even if they are surrounded by 20 hours of Boris Johnson grade faff.

The base management element from Peace Walker is a fitting addition here and expands on the old. Big Boss gives his Militaires Sans Frontier another go and this time you can even go sight-seeing. It's still not terribly deep though and I've not really seen any effects from languages spoken or quirks like troublemaker and peacemaker. As you progress through the game you literally expand your base until you need cars to get around it efficiently. Different deparments do different useful things and they all justify the non-lethal route where you capture your enemies instead of blowing their brains out. The only paradox in all this was that upgrading my R&D team rewarded me with ever deadlier assault and sniper rifles and rocket and grenade launchers. Getting around the base is a bit of a joke and this being a Hideo Game it may well be a deliberate one. Whenever the game required me to reach the top of some tower back in Mother Base it wouldn't be as simple as climbing a few flights of stairs. Instead, I always found myself climbing pipes and leaping between platforms in what I suspect is physical commentary on 'gaminess'. See, most games (Assassin's Creed ilk) will have you literally jumping through virtual hoops to get places and as ridiculous as that is, we just go with it. It could also mean that MB is doomed due to bad design, or that the work is never complete on it and we are traversing a building site. I've probably given this a lot more thought than I need to but Kojima is known for doing crazy hipster bullshit for his artistic vision and I think Mother Base is no exception.

Kojima's artistry manifests in the most interesting ways. We all know he's an over-writer by nature and his dialogue tends to be overbearing but I found that to not be the case in Phantom Pain. Instead, he manages to create an atmosphere that's consuming and a character whose sole trait seems to be heroism. When I first played Ground Zeroes and saw the amount of names accredited with 'lighting' I laughed; I must admit I laugh no more. The use of light in the two MGS V games is masterful and pleasing. Glare dances on the screen like a magician's glamorous assistant and there are a few pivotal scenes where a quick blinding flash truly opens yours eyes. The dark is gritty and groggy and the light is focused and fresh; when the two play together we're treated to a dynamic visual relationship that accents many scenes perfectly.

Kojima continues his habit of mixing realism with the fantastic here. Some fantastical things are typical video game conveniences like health regeneration and infinite stamina, dead-eye accuracy with all weapons, near sighted and hard of hearing guards, vehicles that never run out of petrol or acquire mechanical faults (well, except for blowing up), head shots being 100% fatal, tranquiliser darts working more effectively if the target is shot in the face, guards dropping from 20-foot-tall towers unharmed but unconscious, all recovered soldiers eventually agreeing to work for Big Boss, and obviously respawning and retrying. These exist to make games playable, our minds do a decent job of ignoring their downright ridiculousness. But then there are the ridiculous things that fail to serve such purpose. Some fall within reason, since MGS is effectively science fiction, like Huey's robot legs and Skull Face's skull face. Others are, well, inexplicable, like Quiet's get up and Eli's Londoner accent.

The plot of the game is a topic all of its own: we could go on for pages and hours about how well the retcon works and what the game is ultimately about but in this review I just want to discuss how the gameplay marries up with the plot. There will be no obvious spoilers but I will be including heavy, bipedal hints. So, now that we're in gear, let's start at the beginning. The first mission stands far out from the rest and feels most akin to the original trilogy: Big Boss (and we with him) is thrown straight into the action with little preparation and no equipment, and is tasked with saving the world (or at least himself, for now). We're introduced to Punished Snake, Big Boss' latest incarnation, skinny, scared and just barely crawling. After this short infancy, Snake starts slowly limping and eventually expertly sneaking around and headshotting the baddies in his maturity before being rescued by a mysterious friend and the game beginning proper. As tutorials go, this is one of the most exciting, fullfilling and justifiable within its own universe. It serves to set up within our minds just how important Big Boss is in this universe: there's a small private army and basically a demon coming to kill him and willing to level a hospital in the process. All missions after that are carried out from the New Mother Base with the help of Ocelot, Miller and Big Boss' private army. As the game goes on and Mother Base expands we're witness to a growing Big Brother-esque propaganda surrounding Big Boss. MB soldiers are excited to be manhandled by Big Boss and put up no resistance and there are numerous posters with his likeness and the slogan "Big Boss is watching you!" Depending on how you play then, you might see Big Boss' transformation into a despot or the slow process of him being painted as one. Pertaining to your moral choices (whether to kill or not to kill) Big Boss' shrapnel horn grows or shrinks in a hidden karma system. Personally, I went non-lethal for most of the game and my horn was tiny throughout the game so the ending cut-scene was all the more poignant for me, especially with Punished Snake now being out of my hands. I also didn't bother naming Punished Snake anything other than Big Boss so one of the big naming twists near the end was lost on me, again (MGS 2 blindsided me also).

Snake faces off against supernatural enemies again, including walking corpses, a burning, walking corpse, ghosts, the ghost of a swimsuit model and an adolescent androgynous cosplayer. Since the game is set in the 80s, these can't be explained away with secret advanced tech so instead they're explained away with secret advanced bio-tech. This aspect of the story is like Swiss cheese: full of holes and stinks but still somehow enjoyable. I guess a lot of the enjoyment is owed to that characteristic Japanese quirk that the likes of Deadly Premonition or Resident Evil also enjoy. Whole portions of MGS V play like a survival horror, especially early encounters with the Skulls. Even later on, when Snake has adequately powerful grenade launchers to deal with the beasts, the encounters are tense and unsettling but some of that is owed to their bullet-sponge (or even grenade-sponge) nature. Unfortunately, only the Sniper Skulls are enjoyable enemies; all the other Skulls break up the gameplay and turn it on its head more than tank or helicopter encounters do. The Skulls' source of power is also the vehicle for majority of the plot - parasites. I have no idea how parasites turn certain people superhuman but they do. They also infect and kill based on the language a person speaks and feature in a mid-game challenge which manages to raise the stakes, drive the danger home and make it personal. Mother Base suffers an outbreak and the soldiers you've been collecting are starting to get sick and die. Effectively this means that some of them are quarantined and die slowly until you finish enough plot missions to find a cure. Who gets infected seems mostly random and you can suffer some immense losses - I lost a fair share of my best Intel staff.

Phantom Pain is the most complete Metal Gear Solid experience but not the most gratifying one. It has virtually everything the other games before it had and improves on many mechanics but the more I continue to think about it the colder my heart gets. It could be the circus surrounding it. It could be the fact nothing can ever live up to Snake Eater expectations. I like the final twist and see it as Kojima's thank you note to the fans who helped make Snake the hero he is. I think this is Kojima's greatest work and yet not his masterpiece. I suppose Phantom Pain is the greatest subtitle the game could have had partly since there'll be a void left after the franchise leaves and partly because something is unmistakably missing from this latest iteration.

Metal Gear Solid V: the Phantom Pain is: watching your second favourite pet perfectly replicate your favourite pet's favourite trick/10

Audio vs Text Logs

I like to think of audio and text logs as wooden logs used as pillars to hold up the fictional constructs of a game - they're not pretty, they're not always practical, but they're cheap(er). Cut-scenes are expensive and environmental story-telling is difficult so plenty of otherwise ambitious games resort to the use of logs, mostly RPGs. Another reason for logs is supplementation of information for the keen; the 'average gamer' doesn't want to be bogged down with tens of hours of cut scenes and exposition but would rather get on with gameplay - bloomin' right 'n' all! But for those more curious about the world they're exploring logs exist. 

To some extent, I suppose, logs can sometimes serve the same purpose as unlockable concept art - we paid people to make this, we own this, we might as well use this (as is the case in most BioWare RPGs I remember playing). As an optional extra tidbit, logs are more like firewood for the brain - quickly consumable, practical if used right, resources. Although, when playing Mass Effect I remember thinking that Shepard is painted as an ignorant twat by the "TELL ME ABOUT YOUR RACE" dialogue options which all could've been neatly slotted in the codex, what with being things Shepard ought to have known. 

Logs can be a waste of time though, I remember playing Final Fantasy XIII (*shudders*) and reading through the logs clumsily trying to explain the fal'cie and the l'cie only for a cut scene later to make it all crystal clear (ha, crystal). I don't think I ever found reason to read R&D reports in XCOM - it's a plasma rifle, which is better than the laser rifle because it's four times the price. 

So, why am I wasting my time writing about all this? Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain. It took me 78 Steam Hours (Steam Hours are the amount of time a game has been opened through Steam, starting with 1 minute and rounding down to the nearest hour after 3. So trying to boot a game up brings your playtime to 1min and having it turned on keeps the clock running. Basically, I don't think I spent 78 hours playing MGS V) and at least 2 must've been spent listening to audio logs. 

The Shock series is known for employing the audio variety of log. These would be scattered around the world, offering background and vital information. In the Bioshock games, these logs are easy to play and don't interrupt anything. Audio logs also have a feel of being more compulsory so generally there are fewer of them and they're shorter, easier to consume. Not in MGS V though. Sorry, mate. 

The audio logs themselves are fine, they're great. They are well acted and well produced with a few interesting quirks like Miller in the 80s sounding like Ocelot in the 2000s, which I'm 88% Liquid sure is deliberate. There are important informative logs and funny side logs. So, revisiting my wooden logs metaphor, imagine plain logs coupled with ones that have had Willem Dafoe making out with Susan Boyle, or Donald Trump with a toothbrush moustache painted on them. The logs are assorted into separate folders grouping them in various groups: people, events, policies, items and you can only set one folder to play at a time. 

My personal favourite was the outlandish "Kazuhira's Burgers" which sees, or hears rather, Kazuhira Miller make burgers for another character and adapt the recipe several times to suit his companion's tastes. This being a Hideo Game, I'm going to read far too much into this quirky tidbit. A character who doesn't need food to survive asks Miller to make him a burger and when Miller does, it's not good enough. Miller then adapts the recipe and uses finer beef but our friend still isn't satisfied. Miller decides to go left field and make a lamb burger to which the other character replies with interest and curiosity but not satisfaction. Miller is at a loss and his dissatisfied customer throws him a bone by telling him what the burger really needs is chemicals, that our brains react best to a load of chemicals, that's what we really want. Finally, Miller makes a very cheap, almost entirely artificial burger and finally satisfies the diner. I believe that covers Kojima's opinion of big publishers. 

That is, for me, a big part of where the problem lies. I didn't mind audio logs in the Shock games because there weren't that many of them and they were mostly easy to follow monologues; in MGS V, Miller sounds like Ocelot, Ocelot sounds like Channing Tatum and Otacon grovels more but is somehow more evil (okay, it's Otacon's dad). Most of the logs are naturalistic conversations and playing them in the background while doing other things meant I couldn't pay them the attention they needed. Even managing Mother Base didn't work as busywork while listening to them, it required just a touch too much attention. If you try playing logs while doing side missions you'll soon find that radio messages are louder than the logs themselves and that this can't be adjusted. The sheer volume of these logs and the nature of them means that at least 5 minutes to every hour is spent sat down and listening to people talk. And as if that wasn't bad enough, some things locked away behind audio logs could easily have been placed in regular dialogue. There's an instance where Ocelot suspects a member of mother base to be related to Big Boss so he decides to run a DNA test. Once he has run his tests he tells Big Boss the results are in and sends the busy mercenary to the audio tapes. Ocelot makes you navigate through 3 windows for a very simple "yes or no" bit of information that would've taken him 12 seconds to just tell. Who knows, maybe Ocelot just suffers from stage fright, maybe he's not a sadistic bastard after all. 

Ultimately, I would have preferred it if MGS V had given me the option of reading logs rather than listening to them. I'm a fast reader and perhaps not the greatest of listeners, being stuck with hours and hours of audio tapes was agonising. I wouldn't write a whole article about it if it was some small aspect of the game either, this took up a shedload of time. I have no beef with audio logs, I already admitted they're awesome, but for goodness sake give me transcripts as an option - I value my time. 

Audio logs are: listening to your mum/10 

Deadly Premonition

Title: Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut
Platform played: Playstation 3
Price paid: part of Playstation Plus subscription

Deadly Premonition: the Director's Cut is a videogame - that much is a fact. Everything else about it is speculative. Is it a horror or a thriller? Is it supernatural or a story of a mad person? Is it broken or purposely clunky? Is it a rip-off or an adaptation or an homage? I think it walks the line so drunkedly that it's actually impossible to decide for sure, but let's take a proper gander at it anyway. 

I'll leave the story for the end of this review and focus on the mechanics for now. Graphically, the game would be at home on the GameCube. Everything looks a little bit fantastical in one way or another but that too could be on purpose. People's faces are hilarious, imagine slightly off grapefruits with eyes and lips painted on them. People's body language is completely exaggerated and unnatural, they shake their heads for two minutes straight, shake their fists or pull grumpy faces like cartoon villains. And they'd probably get away with it all, too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids. 

Sounds design is equally bizarre. There is a load of terrible laughs and awful cries, exaggerated sighs and weird humming, and then there are the zombies. "Noooooooooo, I don't want to dieeeee!" each one exclaims as you mercilessly kill them and watch them dissolve back into the ground they came out of. Weirder still, some say "Kiiiill meeeeee!" as you maneuver around them only to bemoan the same melodic "Noooooo, I don't want to dieeeee!" which means they're either indecisive or just Tumblr emos. The protagonist, one Francis York Morgan, has a real tendency to tap his collar while he thinks but the tapping sound effect is so exaggerated it's more akin to a slam than a tap. And yet again, it so outrageously ridiculous that I have to assume it was done on purpose and I just cannot hate it because in some twisted way, it's utterly brilliant. What makes it worse, the character models have wide, glassy eyes which makes everyone around York look as surprised as I was at how loud his finger-collar combo is. 

Between the ages of five and eight I used to talk to myself because we both reckoned we were the only people smart enough to understand each other but in fact my logic was so warped and roundabout that people had every right to think I was a weirdo. I mention that because I fear Swery's adult logic is akin to my childhood one. Everything about Deadly Premonition almost makes sense. I'll touch on the plot aspects in a later paragraph but let's look at the game purely mechanically. From quite early on, you're told to drive around the town to get places quicker; the town is believable (I believe it's based on a real place, actually) but still feels badly designed but that gets kind of explained away by the plot. When you do drive, your vehicles are automatically limited to the legal speed limit of 40mph for a residential area but there are long roads which wouldn't be classed as such where the speed limit still applied but that gets kind of explained away by the plot. In the combat sections, you have to stop moving to aim a gun, which I suppose makes sense to some degree but the game doesn't give you a chance of firing blindly which is annoying. Trying to kill a horde of zombies is like trying to piss into a bottle on a conveyor belt. Now, I know Swery's roundabout logic and I know this could be explained away by saying that as a federal agent York wouldn't shoot blindly because he's been trained not to waste his shots and all that but I'll take the first exit, thanks. Being a federal agent, York should also be firing warning shots, although I suppose he is an American federal agent and we know their attitude towards protocol and ethnic minorities. On the other hand, PRICING MAKES NO FRIGGIN' SENSE WHATSOEVER. $27.99 FOR A TURKEY SANDWICH?! IS MY NAME SEAN COMBS?! 

[minor spoiler within next paragraph]

Which brings me onto the little things. There is an unmistakable attempt at making Francis York Morgan a human being. If he runs, he runs out of breath and heartbeat speeds up. If he doesn't eat, he gets hungry. If he doesn't sleep he gets tired. If he doesn't shave, his beard grows AND THEN MIRACULOUSLY DISAPPEARS IN THE FINAL CUT SCENES LIKE THE NEXT SENTENCE OF THIS REVIEW. Lol jk this isn't an actual sentence. York smiles, frowns, screams, loves and really benefits from the bizarre setting. He is an eccentric dude, not the least his tendency to peek through windows and ability to remain unseen despite apparently sticking his entire head through (the game lets you take a 180 degree view of the interior of a building). York loves Emily - he fights it for a while but he loves her. Those are the things you cannot change about him, but other than that there's some room to play with. My York was a bearded vegan who preferred a good night's sleep to caffeine, wore sensible, matching suits and used a wrench as a weapon of choice. The wrench is part of the problem I had with the game. By far the best weapon in the entire game is locked away behind a random side mission. AS IS THE ONLY MEANS OF FAST-TRAVEL WHICH I HAD NO IDEA ABOUT UNTIL AFTER I FINISHED THE BLOODY THING. At first I thought that the driving around was a good way of giving the player some breathing room between the zombie sections but after a while I realised it was just punishment for not doing LITERALLY EVERY SIDE MISSION (okay, not literally, there's just the one, really feckin' obtuse one).

[Full plot spoilers ahead]
So, plot.

Yeah...

York is a dude and we're in his head. There are weird twins that say cryptic shit to him. The same twins and a dog are being walked by some old dude and they run into a woman that has been crucified to a tree. Francis York Morgan, an FBI agent following a serial killer whose trademark is leaving behind red seeds sets out to the scene of the killer's latest crime, Greenvale. Here, the game gives a slight justification for the speed limit as York inexplicably crashes and has to walk the rest of the way. The first person he meets in Greenvale is Emily WHOM HE IMMEDIATELY FALLS IN LOVE WITH but is in denial about for the rest of the game. York has an imaginary friend called Zach. For the longest time, I thought Zach was meant to be the player but Zach is actually the original persona of the Francis Morgan entity. York slowly discovers that the killer is a local celebrity with a fifty year long career in murdering known as the Raincoat Killer. The Raincoat Killer exclusively targets women which totally isn't sexist because there's totally a good reason for it. See, the Raincoat Killer turns out to be a pawn in a game played by an unassuming fat man who is instantly suspicious because he's the only fat person in the whole game. Now, I'm not saying Swery hates fat people but I reckon he ain't a fan since THE ONLY FAT PERSON IN THE GAME IS ENTIRELY AND UNDOUBTEDLY EVIL. The plot was completely fine by me for the first seven eighths of it. People moved away from Greenvale because of the obvious racism, the only black guy left is a doctor. The sheriff is an insecure bellend with a power trip, his deputy gets off on being the hot chic in a small village and her brother is a full-time poof. There is a weird guy who gives away little trees and has a dog he follows around rather than the other way round. There's a dude who pretends to be a former high-ranking army officer and runs a scrapyard. The other hot local lady runs a gallery with nothing but pictures of trees because she always wanted to live in a forest. And that's great, it has that weird Japanese charm to it where everything is both really serious and utterly ridiculous all at the same time. But the game just decides to turn full-on ridiculous right at the very end.

So George turns out to be the Raincoat Killer and turns into a demon. Kaysen turns out to be the mastermind and a full-time demon. Kaysen plants the red seeds in Emily and a small tree sprouts from her womb. Now, I don't know about you, dear reader, but I would class that as a rape scene. The scene is horrendous and sickening and one of, if not the highlight of the game. It turns what at that point looks like a story headed towards a soppy happy ending on its head and kicks its teeth in. Emily has to die, one way or another she will and it is up to you, player to save her from suffering. Oh, no, wait, Zach's an actual person. Here, at the very end we're treated to the reveal that Francis Zach Morgan witnessed his dad killing himself and telling him to be stronger when the time comes because apparently the Red Tree likes targeting that specific family. Zach then created a new persona called York. For whatever reason, Zach's grey hair turned dark as a result (I'm assuming that's his imagination). York hasn't got the heart(balls) to kill Emily and so he brings Zach back. And we get our soppy happy ending in the most disappointing way ever: York and Emily live happily ever after in a paradise forest that just happens to look evil.

Swery has confirmed certain aspects of the plot and denied others. The zombies the player encounters are "psychological" and not "supernatural" and they are the victims of the original Raincoat Killer. This means that the combat sections are simply Zach going extra schitz. He said Kaysen is "an agent of the Red Tree" and revealed that Greenvale's road design is made to resemble Kaysen's dog, Willie. This suggests that Kaysen was a pawn to an even higher power, one of an evil mastermind dalmatian - William Red Tree IV. And to be fair to Swery, Willie does lead a lot of the characters to do what they do like a good boy. But little do they know, he's a very, very bad boy indeed. I think the Zach/York split is weak. Zach is York with less confidence and that seems to be York's sole purpose in life - to teach Zach how to be confident. Yet again, it's a satisfactory result because Zach becomes confident enough to even start a family and pretend to be emotionally stable for long enough for his daughter to let him live with her. Ultimately, I don't think much is gained from Zach and if anything we miss out on what could've been a really heartfelt and sad ending with York finally letting Emily go the way George just couldn't. And again I'm reminded of my younger self creating grand stories that made more sense in my head than out of it.

Deadly Premonition: the Director's Cut is: having your balls squeezed painfully by a beautiful woman while she sobs heavily at a Richard Prior stand-up routine/10

Velocity 2X

I remember playing the first Velocity for a couple hours, thinking it was really cool and never going back to finish it. What I thought at the time was, "Man, this game could really use a plot to motivate me." And here we are. 

Velocity 2X stars Lieutenant Kai Tana, an augmented human soldier out in the far reaches of deep space coming across a race of slavers and a race of slaves. A can of worms is soon opened and Lt. Kai Tana decides to single-handedly save the universe. Now, this works purely because of the charming little graphic novel parts of the game where Lt. Tana frees the slaves, finds out they're really tech savvy and gets behind-the-lines assistance from them. The art in these cut-scenes is exquisite, marrying the larger-than-life Eastern style of cartoon art with the more grounded traditionally Western style making for a distinguishable sci-fi universe contained in a 10h indie shmup. 

Although, I suppose it's unfair to call Velocity 2X a shmup because that's not really what the game is, it's more of a two-tier puzzle platformer made up of a side-scrolling and a top-down platforming element. Shooting is only a minor part of the experience and more often than not your weapons are used to open the way rather than fell opponents. The top-down element sees you flying an ever-improving spaceship and the side-scrolling element sees you docked and controlling Kai directly to penetrate stations on foot. 

Both elements let you teleport but the side scrolling one lets you teleport mid-jump and mid-slide. If Velocity 2X was a side-scrolling platformer, I'd still buy it - you can chain jumps and teleports in interesting ways: you can throw a telepod, teleport to it mid-flight and then teleport through a wall. A lot of the levels are mazes that require backtracking, made miles (pun semi-intended) easier with the teleport mechanic. But the level design shone the brightest in the side-scrolling sections for me, where it was dynamic, requiring quick thinking and nimble fingers. 

The game is incredibly good at guiding the player and presenting a challenge in a clear way. From quite early on you will find colourful force fields blocking your way and numbered switches with matching colours. The mini-map which you can bring up at any point during a level lists all these switches and their numbers and even shows you what switches are hiding inside side-scrolling sections which have their own mini-map which tells you what switches are found of that section and the thing even tells you which switches you've already done! All in all, the only time I got stuck was due to a lack of skill rather than a lack of information. 

There are two collectibles in the game, each corresponding to an element - escape pods (rescues) for the top-down and crystals for the side-scrolling. These aren't anything other than just Mario coins though, they're not even Sonic rings. I found it odd that no rescues could be made inside the enemy's facilities and crystals occurred out in space. I think it's a damn shame that the two weren't at least put to better use, maybe as resources helping you improve your ship. Rescues should have been used as research points for new gimmicks and crystals could have been the currency for them but instead you just collect them so you have enough 'exp' to play the next level. 

The game gives out experience at three tiers for four different aspects of a level: time finished, rescues, crystals and the ever enigmatic 'points'. Late on in the game, the exp requirements for new levels spike a little and the levels are more difficult so you score less exp on your first go and you have to replay some levels and improve your exp score. Now, on two early levels I had beaten the fastest time, rescued everybody and collected all the crystals, only to be 5 points short of the top target and 10 exp short of 100%. Ultimately that's the reason why I won't be bothering with 100% completion for this one. 

The story is well told, presented excellently and ends with a nice little cliff-hanger, presumably setting up the DLC I don't give an afternoon toss about. See, the story was cool and the game was awesome but with 50 levels, 4 tropes and 2 unmasterable levels, I've had my fill, thanks. 

Velocity 2X is: running through the schoolyard in your new Air Max trainers/10 

(Amazing at first but in less than a week the 'newness' wears off and they're just trainers