The illness started a month ago. An increased gravity pulled down on my limbs. I looked longingly at sinus trephination diagrams. I discovered that the one ingredient that makes cold medicine expensive, phenylephrine, is no more effective than a placebo. And though the fog has lifted from my brain, a clawing cough remains, placated by either salt-water gargles, spoons of honey or the whims of the demiurge.
This is all to say that I was in the perfect state to play a Pokémon ROM hack.
Emerald Seaglass is a modified version of Pokémon Emerald for the Gameboy Advance, part of the third generation of Pokémon. Though post-Pokémania and my introduction to the series with generation two's Pokémon Gold on GameBoy Color; Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald are a nostalgic flashpoint, being games that my then jet-setting uncle got me early from America, and also being the last non-remake Pokémon games I loved. Seaglass is a particularly lethal dose of nostalgia due to its primary gimmick- emulating the look of generation two, which includes translating 447 Pokémon into Gameboy Color style sprites, while retaining the snappiness of the Emerald engine and the GBA's wider 3:2 aspect ratio. Were I in the business of consumer advice, I'd give the game a positive review- after all, Emerald was already a good game, refining Ruby and Sapphire by utilising both of their respective villain teams, and Seaglass retains all of its post-game goodies. It's remarkable that only the cycling road had to sacrificed in the translation to the new-old style, and given that it adds many other activities in its place (the scuba safari is a particular highlight) and is entirely free (providing you legally rip your legally owned Pokémon Emerald cartridge, naturally), it is hard to complain about.
Let's try anyway- because nostalgia aside, this is a deeply weird game, one full of aesthetic contradictions and kludged together "quality of life improvements" that chip away at what was good about Game Freak's design, leaving us with a hyperreality of convenience and a monument to arrested development. If that all sounds really mean, that's because it is, but given my Maladies I've had little else to think about. None of what I'm about to say should take away from Nemo622's efforts, since a lot of the implementation here makes a lot more sense when viewed as project based learning for their even more ambitious Pokémon Lazarus. Rather, I worry that with the prominence of these hacks (and the not even vaguely commendable vibe-coded slop versions), they are becoming the de facto way a modern user approaches these older games, and that they offer a parallel world where art becomes a have-it-your-way fast food experience where no one ever has to grow up.
First, we must address the elephant in the room- why do these ROM hacks exist? Including spin-offs, there are almost a hundred Pokémon video games, with nine generations of the core RPGs. Surely this is enough for even the most rabid fan to contend themselves with, as even the original games with a mere 151 creatures to catch will take almost a hundred hours to fully complete. Ah, a somehow even larger elephant in the room- though Scarlet and Violet were Nintendo's biggest game launch of all time, the fanbase remains divided by dimensions, with large numbers preferring the pixel art abstraction of the first five generations. A huge component of this is nostalgia- your favourite Pokémon game is almost certainly the first one you played, but there's more to it. Even if the modern games were afforded as much time and money required to convincingly deliver a fantasy ecology of super-powered monsters, cutting to a random encounter in tall grass is far more efficient in selling the illusion.
This transition functions similarly to the gutter in comic books. As Scott McCloud describes in Understanding Comics, that medium relies upon the reader to "fill in the gaps between panels as an animator might", but in an RPG battle transition it is not merely a matter of us imagining The Thing extending a punch before an impact panel. Instead, when we find a random encounter in the tall grass, we shift into an entirely different perspective, with large creature sprites and a debatably first person or at least third person over the shoulder view. We are asked to imagine that this is what our player character is seeing the whole time. We meet the developer halfway and believe that we would see it too, were we not at a top-down remove.
In Pokémon there's even more abstraction going on, more bargaining of our imagination. Fighting is presented to us as turn-based, but this is a concession of the medium, an opportunity for strategic play. There's no mention in game that trainers take turns, and even if they did it's unlikely a wild animal would limit themselves to fair play. The moves themselves are in the realm of the conceptual, as the generations go by the animations may get more detailed (or less, debatably), but we're still asked to imagine there's a difference between the healing moves Roost, Recover, Soft-Boiled and Slack-Off, despite being functionally identical. Moreover the backgrounds are further abstractions, if present at all, depicting pixel forests or deserts or seas that necessarily repeat across multiple locations. The classic Pokémon games rely upon what McCloud refers to as "closure", our minds desire to fill in the gaps, with greater abstraction requiring more of our imagination. With this in mind it's not hard to understand how the 2D games have a greater hold on those that grew up with them, and how they may even cast the same spell on the younger generation.
If you're screaming at me that this applies to Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, Bodycon Quest and an inordinate number of other RPGs, J or otherwise, then yes, you've identified the off-ramp. Pokémon is a young person's game, and if you wanted another game in its style you have plenty of grander, darker or even hornier places to go. Or indeed, if you feel that's enough, then it almost certainly is, and you can become one of those normal people I hear so much about. ROM hacks kick that ramp away and suggest that no, you don't want any of that stuff, because we can put that stuff in Pokémon. Old games are new again. New games are old again. It never has to end. If you enter this parallel world you'll find theres a new hundred hour passion project with follower Pokémon and hard-modes and a new original region/revamp of an old one with all the mons you could ever want every month or so.
The passion is extraordinary, and from a developer perspective I can see the appeal. You get a strong framework with excellent tools and a community that has broken these games into the smallest constituent parts and may know more about them than Game Freak. You also get a cottage industry of YouTubers who will hype your game, review it, and record commentated runs of it with ever more gnarly self-imposed challenges. You even get influencers who will photograph the title screen of your game and mysteriously never comment on it again. Unlike with other fan games, Nintendo has long since given up on smacking them down, presumably not just because of their quantity but also because they are niche enough to not be serious competition to the staggering sales numbers of the mainline games, and if anything constitute free marketing for the cute little guys, so why not give it a go? It's on the player end that we have searching questions to ask, since unless you're in the frankly bizarre situation of playing these for your livelihood, why play these?
Seaglass includes a lot of concessions that may or may not matter to the type of person who plays these games. The typings and the way they work reflects the more modern games, including the Physical/Special split. Every mon in the Pokédex can be caught in game. Nowhere is safe from your running shoes. That's before we get into the dozens of opt-ins, tweaks and features that can be set in menus or by new items. The DexNav from the Ruby and Sapphire remakes is here, along with optional charms that make finding the super-rare shiny mons a great deal easier. A modern-styled ExpShare that divvies earned experience across your entire party ensures no mon is left behind. I'm not a huge fan of that, since I think it shifts the player from maintaining a relatively consistent team that covers all bases to constantly shuffling in new members to maximise levelling potential, but this is a by now quite old Game Freak addition.
The one that infuriated me enough to write this is the Pokémon Box Link, an item that lets you access your Pokémon storage anywhere. This I gather is present in the newer mainline games, though I refuse to believe it could be as egregious as its implementation here. Not only can you swap out fainted for healthy mons anywhere on the field, you can do it dungeons, including the gruelling Victory Road and yes, even in the Pokémon league. Pokémon, in its vanilla form, is never very difficult, with even its meaner games susceptible to brute force and ignorance. But they are punishing- whether its in a labyrinthine cave or a trainer gauntlet, failure offers you two possibilities: you made a tactical error, or more often than not, you were not prepared, in levels or items or team composition. This friction is what helps us build attachment to our six little guys, and is the primary motivation for the development of the Nuzlocke challenge runs. Freely swapping out allows you to be unprepared and disengaged, to treat every Pokémon you catch as gristle for the optimal completion machine. This is optional, much like the bizarrely one-sided Z-Moves you can opt into, but optional isn't really optional. These are not accessibility toggles, these are in-game mechanics.
Soren Johnson, lead designer on all time banger Civilization IV, said as much in his Game Developer magazine column:
"Many players cannot help approaching a game as an optimization puzzle. What gives the most reward for the least risk? What strategy provides the highest chance – or even a guaranteed chance – of success? Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
There's no reason for me to pick on Emerald Seaglass for this beyond me actually having finished it, the others I've flirted with have many of the same suite of quality of life improvements, regardless if they actually improve things or not. I can't help but feel that these are just massagers for boredom, the same as the insidious autoplay on every online video platform, a way to mindlessly keep going, a pillow pressed down on your brain. Games, video and otherwise, are paradoxical in that though we do them for leisure or camaraderie, they by necessity irritate and bore, because learning things is hard, focus is difficult and failure isn't optional. And yet we play. But playing isn't optimal, it doesn't fit into any Protestant work ethic. My friend Oma has been sharing sections of a book I really should read, Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, and this snippet really caught my attention.
"In her preschool child studies, for many years Greta Fein has maintained that more attention should be paid to these affective issues rather than to the reigning cognitive focus (Fein and Kinney, 1994). In a note to me, she writes: "I do not think play is about cognition and I don't think playing makes kids especially smarter. It most likely makes them happier... Little kids who do not play are usually very unhappy."
So what to make of optimised play, play fast-forwarded, play that never ends but also never excites? I don't think it makes us happy. It certainly doesn't make me happy. But it certainly takes up time, and that can be a balm. I don't think rogue-lites and incremental games would be so popular in a world not so atomised, I don't think games offering hundreds of hours of minimally different content would be viewed as valuable were the average human not priced out of basic necessities, I don't think nostalgia would be so intoxicating were the future not closed off and I don't think play will be this anodyne in the better worlds to come.
Emerald Seaglass shares commonality with broader trends in popular culture, it is a symptom, not a cause, but what about that name? Sea glass was almost certainly chosen because of the infamously huge amounts of water in Generation 3, as in real life it is found on beaches. The sea acts as a giant rock tumbler, polishing over years and years, removing all rough edges. In Fort Bragg, there is a beach covered with these pieces of glass, and it looks quite pretty. It's now known as glass beach, but it used to be called "The Dumps", a landfill for the Union Lumber Company. So huge were the landfills that Molotov cocktails were used to set fire to the piles.
After all, sea glass is prettiest when you don't think about it.
This landmark Japanese RPG receives a new or updated translation very often: approximately every 40 months.
Clyde Mandelin, Legends of Localization
There truly are so many ways to play Final Fantasy IV. That's not my excuse for having buried it in the backlog for as long as I have. My first encounter with the series was the Final Fantasy III (3D remake), a game that felt extraordinarily unfriendly to the merely JRPG curious, having only dabbled with Pokémon and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. I loved the music, the goofy chibi characters, and I maintain that the Nintendo DS is the best form factor for JRPGs, but complexity of the job system didn't interface well with my adolescent brain, a to me puzzling degree of freedom with the limitation of required abilities for certain dungeons. It still left a positive enough impression that I'd try again with the Final Fantasy IV (3D Remake), finding some relief in having to play the party the narrative dealt, only to be crushed by mid-game bosses. Almost two decades later, and with considerably more JRPG experience under my belt, I felt it was a good time to revisit the original version, or rather the closest to the original version that wouldn't be compromised by translation errors.
Full disclosure, I did not play the vanilla release on actual hardware, but rather a ROM patched to bring the colours and music closer to the SNES original on the Miyoo Mini+. As with a lot of post-launch lineup GBA games, TOSE opted for a more garish palette to compensate for the dim LCD of base model, and lacking a dedicated sound chip of its own there was no way the music would match up to the S-SMP. Unless you are playing on that delightful blobject of a system I would say the former patch is a no-brainer, and the latter does get a lot closer to the SNES sound, even if replacing epilogue music with a orchestrated version is of questionable enough taste to prevent a full-throated recommendation. Playing it on the Miyoo was a surprisingly comfortable experience, the mismatch of aspect ratio handled tastefully by the Perfect GBA overlay and the quick-resume function of Onion OS certainly made the gruelling floor-is-lava Sylph Cave a more tolerable experience.
All these conveniences do raise questions of authenticity. Save points within dungeons bring palpable relief, but less so if one has an automatic save-state to fall back on. The final area in particular is a brutal test of resources, a seemingly endless descent that taunts the loot-goblin gamer brain with armour and weaponry guarded by boss-tier enemies, a gamble that simply doesn't work with an added safety net. It calls to mind a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe that stuck in my craw in university:
The ordinary novel is objectionable, from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simple cessation in reading would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fulness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer's control.
As a Novel Enjoyer I can't say I fully agree, but the concept of totality is something that gnaws at my brain- I prefer movies to television for that reason, to be at the mercy of the creator, and it's almost certainly why I predominantly write short fiction, to put others at that same mercy. This finds its way into the games I play too- I love arcade games, stages and missions instead of open worlds, fixed camera friction over Player Freedom and Expression. But I'm not interested in a No True Scotsman argument either- when I play Doom I bristle at the thought of saving mid level, but I still play it in UZDoom with a mouse, autosaves and no pistol-starts. That it's taken me thirty odd years to get around to Final Fantasy IV, that it took some compromises to get to the end probably shouldn't irk me, but I'm going to try and let life get less in the way of whichever next one I play, and go with the flow the staff intended.
So no, was probably not the best way to play Final Fantasy IV. The screen crunch of the GBA edition makes navigating some dungeons way more annoying than it should be. The music, even patched, isn't quite as sumptuous as the Super Nintendo, and the Namingway edition received a 2.0 update while I was playing, so that might be the best way to play it? I gather people like the Pixel Remaster and PSP version, but the aesthetics of both and the weird judder of the former don't interest me much. If nothing else the experience has taught me to stress less about the perfect version of something, and any victory against the gamer brain has to be good.
Oh yeah and the game is pretty good. Five outta seven.
I watched The Long Goodbye this morning. I didn't choose it for any particular reason, beyond morning movies being one of the few benefits of the, uh, "flexibly employed", and that while watching Ran yesterday, I was struck by how given all the rectangles I possess for enjoying media, mere stuff makes up the majority of it. Every time I visit my parents I'm bewildered by the television always being on, parades of tepid game-shows no one is interested in, morning, evening and nightly news attended religiously, cooking shows with recipes to not make and adverts and adverts and adverts… just so much fucking stuff. But here I am, child of cyberspace, the millions of lifetimes worth of incredible art accessible, watching a guy with admittedly incredible facial hair teach me how to assemble a model train set, a mild existential crisis brewing, a gnawing at the back of the skull, what the fuck am I doing?
I'm not pretentious enough to suggest anyone should engage with the highbrow. The other thing I watched this weekend was Techno Warriors, a movie in which virtual and non virtual cops fight M.Bison and a guy called Dinosaur, and it totally rocked. And not for nothing, have you seen what my website looks like, I love garbage. But y'know, some garbage is okay to eat, and it shouldn't be the whole thing. So I wanted to keep the train going with The Long Goodbye, and shocker, its great! It's a beautiful film with a palpable distaste for the cliches of the hard-boiled hero, but rather than merely building a cynical take down of Philip Marlowe, it transplants him into a world that has no real use for him, and leaves him to meander while he tries to help those around him with a moral code shot full of holes, as effectual as the absent gods of Ran. It's slow, luxuriant, the antithesis of stuff.
I think Metal Gear Solid Delta might be evil.
I brought it on myself. Because I was never going to pay for it, curiosity got the better of me when it was available by other means. Such curiosity didn't grab me for Bloober's take on Silent Hill 2, paradoxically because that is a work closer to my heart than Snake Eater, which is neither my favourite Metal Gear (that's 2, predictably) nor one I could have possibly had any nostalgia for, given that I didn't own a PlayStation 2. It's also, on the face of it, as far less offensive product. The Delta in the name apparently refers to "'change' or 'difference' without changing structure", which is a bewildering obtuse way of say its prettier with no real major differences. Bits that were missing from other re-releases are back here or remade, and there's some bones thrown to newcomers with a compass that points you where to go and a slightly more MGSV style control scheme, but that's about it. It is hard to be mad at, but in a former life I worked as a teacher, and well, I'm not mad, I'm not disappointed, I'm just depressed. It is possible to have fun, because Snake Eater is an excellent game, dodging the identity crisis of James Bond by letting all of the contradictions play into the narrative in way not dissimilar to the Chandlerisms of The Long Goodbye, but admittedly that film doesn't have a nuclear equipped tank that roars or a guy who can do hornet based telekinesis. But it's impossible to feel that there's any reason for it to exist, because it isn't meant to be enjoyed by humans. It is a safe bet for Konami, fresh of the safe bet of the Silent Hill 2 remake, though even safer given how much closer Snake Eater is to the modern Triple-A mono-genre, so there was less "need" to "fix" it. It is an object you can test your graphics card with, almost a hundred gigabytes of data to fill a hard-drive, a placation of those weirdos that got mad at the MGS3 pachinko machine for having shiny cutscenes, as if it being a machine designed to drain the coffers of aging chain-smokers was besides the point.
There are dozens of half finished articles on my hard-drive. One of those is about the Resident Evil remakes, and how even the one good one irritates me by calling itself Resident Evil, and how Capcom keeps making these without making the originals available in non-compromised form. As the most capitalist medium, you are not expected to treat videogames as serious art, even if they sometimes are. But I can't pretend even the Resident Evil games I dislike are well, evil. They might miss what I value in horror, they might be the bad kind of stupid, but even Resident Evil 6 is worth saying something about. The word that comes to mind with Delta is cosplay, but cosplay can be a charming display of creativity, whereas here I can smell the flies buzzing around Snake's gussied up corpse. Despite the hours and hours of labour, despite the rare earth minerals used up to make it and now run it, despite even the few stupid fucking changes like the fucking theme song now sounding like when freak du jour warbles their way through a national anthem at a sports game, or even the surreal moment of the Boss commenting on it "raining blood" made literal because it reckons perhaps correctly that you gotta be an A-class moron to be playing this, it doesn't manage to rise to the level of stuff.
It's nothing. It does nothing but take up space. It will make you think of nothing. At best it can only remind you that the conditions to make Snake Eater no longer exist. Even Kojima is making open world sequels now. I got up to just after the ladder, so I got to hear the mangled version of the theme song again. But thankfully I can choose. I can say goodbye.
And as Elliot Gould does not say in The Long Goodbye:
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!).
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.
