In the doldrums of anhedonia, when even some beautiful work of art cannot shift the gloopy sludge water of indifference pumping through my shell, I hack a device. Not so much in the console cowboy "I'm in" kinda way, that'd be actually cool. No, it's more just following contradictory YouTube videos until my eyes crust over and hoping I haven't bricked my Wii. The latest victim of my dry-eyed monomania was my girlfriends PS2, in which the modification was even more underwhelming than usual: the purchase of two memory cards, one that would let me load programs in the form of .elf files, the other that would accept a MicroSD card to put ISOs onto. The result- a newfound access to a library of games (plus the ones my girlfriend owns physically) for a console I never owned, all running on original hardware on a CRT (incidentally, feel free to suggest other games via email, the guestbook or on BlueSky!).
decadence
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— cathode ray tubetop (@nightelectricity.com) February 5, 2025 at 3:13 PM
The main impetus was wanting to play Burnout 3, which fucking rocks, but the game I've played most so far is far less famous- Urban Reign, a vaguely Tekken adjacent 3D Namco
brawler in which you beat up endless-but-individually-named gang members with a mix of martial arts in scummy little dollhouse worlds to chugging nu-metal instrumentals, and it
really fucking rocks. After the fun but extremely bloated triple-A pomp of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, its so refreshing to play a capital-V
Videogame. There's some vague set-up somewhere between The Warriors and Escape from LA but it might as well be an arcade machine attract mode, because you're here for the one-hundred individual missions, with objectives as varied as "beat up that one guy", "beat up all
those guys", "beat up one guy from that group" or any one of those with a time limit. If you've played the excellent, brutal and occassionally horseshit God Hand, it's kind of like if the excellent, brutal and often horseshit arena was a full game. Each of the hundred missions are only a handful of minutes long (the game helpfully keeps track of the 1:1 completion percentage for some reason), but they're pretty fucking mean, with enemies able to do everything you can do, and more in the boss fights. So while you could beat it in an afternoon, you'll have to get good at it first, which is a tall order when nothing else I've played feels like it.
The controls are very straight forward- square is dodge, triangle is grapple, circle is strike, but every button can be modified by a tilt of left analogue stick. A simple dodge
becomes a reversal, a grapple becomes a clothesline from hell (or a million other things), and your simple strike can be targeted at your opponents head, chest, or legs, which all
have individual toughness on top of their healthbar. It's a lot, and the game is constantly teaching you new things and giving you new stuff to play with. Triangle and Circle is
your special, and the starting spin kick is incredibly useful, but when you beat special one-on-one boss fights you gain access to whatever signature move they were previously
caving your head in with. Oh, and the X button makes you run, and if you press it while grappling you can accelerate the grapple, and you can use it run up walls, and then you can
do a dive attack...
Urban Reign is a game of ands, an excited child telling you what their cool new Action Man can do and how it combines with all the other toys they have,
it's both limited in scope but imaginatively deep. Which is why it reviewed averagely at the tail end of the PS2's life, lacking any cinematic ambitions or the stylistic panache of Devil May Cry. Boring protagonist, great combat, one hundred levels, off you go. It would never be my first recommendation from what is arguably the best console library of all time, but Urban Reign's lack of fussy bullshit and laser focus instantly commanded my attention and blasted away my anhedonia, and until I get the urge to futz with another device (my GameBoy Color is next) I'm happy to chip away at its hundred levels of increasingly cruel bullshit.
Because sometimes videogames are cool, and Urban Reign is videogames.
This last year I’ve pretty much only played games that are from the PS2 era at the latest or indie games, so the triple-A space has been something I’ve observed with increasing horror, gigantic mausoleum machines of ray-traced void, and in the case of the Astro-Bot, a platformer disguising a marketing engine disguising a tombstone for the only cool things Sony ever let on their consoles. I don’t have anything that would run these games even if I wanted to, except oh wait, I don’t but my girlfriend does, a monster desktop PC that I forget exists because she mostly uses it to play Nuclear Throne (my fault) and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (also my fault). I made a list of the very few games from this year I wanted to play, and skipped over the certainly more interesting Slitterhead and Kunitsu-Gami to play the 120GB franchise behemoth Indiana Jones and The Great Circle. This is because 1) for all their flaws, I liked Machine Games takes on Wolfenstein, 2) for all their flaws, I still like Indiana Jones. I am one of three people who saw Dial of Destiny in the cinema and then immediately retreated to rewatching Raiders again, and then again again recently in another harddrive demolishing 35mm scan:
Little did I know that The Great Circle would begin with an absurdly wanky recreation of the Raiders cold open, but fanservice is fine when I’m being serviced, and having spent the year bathing in hazy phosphors I was genuinely floored by the visual fidelity. This sense of awe would continue into its first luxurious hub, the Vatican, in which it really felt like Machine Games had broken free of triple-A expectation. No endless markers poking me where to go, a commitment to stealth and archaeology puzzles over combat (that the revolver has so little ammunition and is impractically loud remains very cool) and light immersive sim experimentation was definitely not what I was expecting. So I spent ages in the Vatican poring over every detail, discovering mysteries organically from letters and overheard conversations, poking and pulling at this incredible mechanical diorama.
It was, of course, an illusion. Or rather, a complex series of overlapping illusions. There were markers, you just had to look down at your map. The stealth is extraordinarily simple and easily broken by knocking a person out and then knocking out anyone investigating. The puzzles are neat, but if there’s an NPC with you they’ll have barked a hint before you have a chance to really ruminate. Aside from the amusing meta-game of finding the funniest thing to brain a fascist with (a mandolin, in my experience) it’s far less of an immersive sim than even the first Bioshock was. Even the magic of the Vatican itself falls away, with large chunks gated behind main story progression, leading to mysteries that rather unorganically pause until I hang around with the story some more. And the story is fine! It’s very faithfully Indiana Jones, albeit the 21st century conception of Indy that is endlessly pining after Marion instead of being a weird mean asshole. It’s also an Indiana Jones plot stretched by hours and hours, with the Vatican consisting of the first act, before “the chase is on!” in the second locale.
And I understand. What can you do, videogames are illusions, electric shadows of horrendous complexity. Of course the magic will die. But playing all these far more focused older and independent games really draws into focus the spinning plates of triple-A , so focused on selling an image of themselves that they break apart on closer examination. Resident Evil builds a convincing world out of pre-rendered backgrounds, fixed camera angles and meticulously balanced resources. The Great Circle is a technical powerhouse, full of side activities that have their own hours of cutscenes attached, a product of intense research and effort, but it’s simply too much, a mess of so many things that make it feel less than the sum of its parts. By the time I discovered that you could simply buy books in game to add a million markers for all the points of interest, it ceased being a World and became merely a Game. I’ll finish it, because there’s still fun to be had, fascists to be punched, but it’s ceased to hold my interest or imagination.
A little while ago, I watched Tarkovsky’s Mirror first thing in the morning, and it was so beautiful it ruined my day. It felt like the world that supported such an idiosyncratic work no longer exists. I feel similarly about videogames- there’s no reason that big expensive games can’t be interesting, except for capitalism. It’s the reason the Stalker videogames are violent power fantasies in a way not supported by Roadside Picnic or Tarkovsky’s adaptation. Of course I realise it’s absurd to expect more from an Indiana Jones game. But for a few hours it managed to convince me.
Until it all disappeared into electric shadows.