Narcissism Disguised As Altruism

I have a confession: for eighteen months, I’ve been addicted to Sixteen Tons Entertainment’s Emergency(2023, a.k.a. Emergency [Free to Play]), the latest entry in a real-time strategy (RTS) series (1998–) created by Ralph Stock. I’ve gone cold turkey twice, and every time the game has haunted my daydreams and nightmares till I downloaded it again. Now I just accept that I’ll have to spend half an hour each day on this thing.

2019 in Games: Babies, Bushido, & Belligerent Geese

Like most years, 2019 was a parade of dizzying highs and disappointing lows for the video game world. Join me, won’t you, as I hand out some oddly specific awards to the games that entertained, enlightened, frustrated, and fascinated me most.

The Rise of the Videogame Aesthetic in Cinema

Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway in Serenity (2019).

This piece contains spoilers for Serenity and Aquaman.

When critics first saw Serenity (2019) they lost their minds. Charles Bramesco of The Guardian calls it a “zeppelin crash of a film”; and it broke Adam Woodward of Little White Lies, who wrote a conceptual review that sees it as a career rest stop for lead Matthew McConaughey. Everyone seems to agree that the acting is clichéd, the dialogue stilted, the style overwrought to the point of camp, and the camerawork just plain weird.

But as a counterpoint, I submit for your consideration the idea that writer-director Steven Knight is not introducing us to a guy named Baker Dill (McConaughey) who, asked by his ex-wife Karen (Anne Hathaway) to kill her abusive current husband Frank (Jason Clarke), suddenly discovers that – spoiler! – he’s a character in a video game. Knight presents us with a video-game world called Plymouth Island whose player-avatar, Baker Dill, discovers the central game plot among the various mini-games.

The difference is subtle but important. If you viewed the movie as the former you invite a traditional critique, as Richard Brody of The New Yorker calls it “a high-level goof, a collection of clichés assembled as a meta-movie.” But view it first and foremost from the perspective of a video-game aesthetic and Serenity starts to make sense.

2018 in Games: Detectives, Dads, & Dang Ol' Cowpokes

There’s no way you could contain 2018 in a list, no matter how long. The year was too chaotic, and too much incredible art rose up to counter the encroaching dark. I’m pretty much done with numbered lists in general – so no "Top Ten" this year. Instead, I thought it would be useful to find new angles to help contextualize and categorize the video games that kept me enthralled. Enjoy, and here's to a 2019 filled with even more game-making and game-playing.

Against All Odds: Into the Breach

Into the Breach by Subset Games was released on Nintendo Switch on August 28 2018. (Photo: Gamespot)

Historically, I’m terrible at strategy games. I can grasp the rules of chess, but I’m never able to think ahead and avoid my king’s inevitable demise. I rule over my fiefdoms in Risk with the same short-sighted bluster as the worst despots in history, charging into conquests that end with me fleeing back to Australia with my tail between my legs. I love the story and graphics and atmosphere of StarCraft, but I can barely complete the main campaign without cheat codes (never mind compete against other players online). So it was a rather big surprise to find myself sinking hours and hours into Subset Games’s Into the Breach, which is one of the toughest strategy games I’ve ever played.

Inventory Management, Vol. IX: Summer Escapism

Adam Jensen in a piece of concept art for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. (Photo: Forbes)

As a creature of comfort – a seasoned indoorsman, to use a colleague’s self-applied title – summertime has always been a challenging season for me. I can only indulge in its bright and scorching pleasures for brief periods of time, before my mind and body cry out for relief and force me to retreat to the cool, crisp darkness from whence I came. Games were my summer escape, a way to splash through the sun and surf that didn’t involve a searing orb in the sky that peeled my actual skin off. And over time, this reinforced a Pavlovian connection between the real, tangible feelings of summer and the virtual adventures I’d enjoy once I’d had enough of them. Sunlight on my skin, beads of sweat on my neck, the smell of fresh-cut grass, warm air through the window, ice cream and sneakers and barbecue and soda – these things make me think of StarTropics and Mario Kart, of Donkey Kong Country and The Legend of Zelda.

When I was young, and this link was first being forged in that sweltering heat, a single game was enough to sustain me for months on end. There was no internet to offer walkthroughs or tips; no guide to follow but my own intuition (and maybe a cryptic word-of-mouth hint from a friend). But now, things are different: summer is known as a slow period for new video game releases, so the torrid days and nights between May and September are a perfect time for playing catch-up on all the titles I’ve missed. And once in a while, I’ll find a game memorable enough to be included as a new link in that chain, whose lineage stretches all the way back to the blue skies and blood-orange sunsets of those halcyon days.

Prose, Poem, & Power: Sony Santa Monica's God of War

Kratos (left) and his son Atreus (right) in Sony Santa Monica's God of War. (Photo: Sony)

Until this year, Sony Santa Monica’s God of War series was the 300 of popular games, like Clash of the Titans as envisioned by a drunk Michael Bay. Its focus on hyper-violent setpieces, which grew increasingly epic in scale as the series wore on, was appropriate for the time in which it was released, and for the audience that eagerly lapped it up. But in 2018, that kind of brainless uber-masculine power fantasy doesn’t really fly anymore. Despite its tendency to constantly shoot itself in the foot in terms of meaningful progress, the industry has indeed grown up a little bit, and so have the people who play – and who make – this sort of triple-A action-adventure fare. If it had any ambitions about competing critically and financially with the best we now have to offer, a new entry in the God of War series would be forced to grow up as well.

Inventory Management, Vol VIII: A Pirate's Life for Me!

Rare's Sea of Thieves, released in March 2018. (Photo: The Verge)

Sea of Thieves is the latest game from Rare, the developer formerly known as Rareware, who changed their name (and lost most of their intrepid founding members) when their company was absorbed by Microsoft Studios in 2002. Once the undisputed ruler of console gaming in the mid-to-late 1990s, with watershed titles like Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye 64, and Banjo-Kazooie to its name, Rare’s acquisition by MS cast a dark cloud over the future of the studio. A series of clunkers in the early 2000s (Grabbed By The Ghoulies, Kameo: Elements of Power, and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts chief among them) followed their '90s hot streak, which tainted their legacy and spoiled the good will they’d earned among fans. (Several key developers responsible for those earlier, beloved titles would splinter off to form their own studios like Playtonic Games, which released the Banjo-Kazooie spiritual successor Yooka-Laylee in 2017 to decidedly mixed reviews.) The Rare logo on a product was once a symbol of definitive quality, a sign that no matter what genre or style the game was, it was sure to have been made with wit, care, and charm. That promise has since lost its credibility, and so Sea of Thieves, which was released in March for PC and Xbox One, had an uphill battle to fight before it even hit store shelves.

Enemy at the Gates: Cline & Spielberg’s Ready Player One

Tye Sheridan in Ready Player One. (Photo: Jaap Buitendijk)

When Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One was released in 2011 to a cavalcade of positive press, its nostalgia-fueled story (commonly compared to The Matrix and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) was understood to be harmless, enjoyable fluff, a beach read for the YA crowd and anyone who enjoyed a good pop culture reference. The book depicts a dystopian future in which everyone escape their depressing lives by retreating to the Oasis, a virtual reality simulation that spans an entire galaxy of artificial experiences. People spend their whole lives plugged in: going to school, shopping, earning currency, customizing their avatar, and engaging in video game experiences, from war simulations to racing tournaments. The creator of the Oasis, James Halliday – a pastiche of late-80s and early 90s tech and gaming gurus from Gary Gygax to Steve Jobs – reveals upon his death that he’s hidden an “easter egg” somewhere in the Oasis which holds the key to a vast fortune and total control of the whole simulation. A community of die-hard Oasis junkies who call themselves “gunters” (“egg-hunters”) dedicate their lives to deciphering the clues Halliday left behind, while a corporation called IOI is also hunting for the egg, using its vast resources to wrest control of the Oasis from the population at large. Gunters, including the novel’s protagonist, Wade Watts (aka Parzival in the Oasis), take it upon themselves to become experts on every single 1980s property that Halliday enjoyed, in the hopes that this knowledge might reveal a clue about the egg, leading to a bizarre situation in which a group of teenagers from 2044 are self-imposed scholars of obscure 1980s pop culture – memorizing dialogue from John Hughes films, obsessing over solutions to Atari 2600 games, and arguing the finer points of Rush’s oeuvre.

Load Checkpoint: Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004) – Virtuous Mission

"Naked Snake" in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

“Light is but a farewell gift from the darkness to those on their way to die.” – The Boss, Metal Gear Solid 3

The release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in 2004 was met with the same fevered anticipation that many franchises experience on their third entry: trepidation about the new material that’s needed to keep the series fresh, hope that missteps from the second installment might be addressed, and general excitement at the property's being back at all. By this point, whatever its perceived flaws, the Metal Gear series had established itself as one of the most singularly creative and expressive franchises in video-game history. Anyone with even a passing interest in the industry looked to Snake Eater’s release with wide-eyed curiosity. How could director and writer Hideo Kojima possibly follow up the expansive, mind-bending experience of Sons of Liberty?

Inventory Management, Vol VII: Battling for Supremacy

Dragon Ball FighterZ was developed by Arc System Works and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment in January.

I’ve had a rocky relationship with the super-popular anime series Dragon Ball over the course of my life. When it was airing on television in the 90s, I never caught enough of the story for any of the shouting and fighting and flying around to mean anything to me, so I largely ignored it. Later, having never really watched it, I nonetheless felt comfortable deriding the series as a brainless assembly of fight scenes broken up by long, tedious stretches of exposition. In my first year of university, however, a group of my new peers – horrified that I’d never given their favourite childhood TV series a fair shake – cemented the early days of our friendship by watching the show with me in our down time, making the shared enjoyment of this hyper-dramatized, aggressively-plotted story a ritualized, almost sacred event. Its quality meant very little in that context, since the social aspect of those viewings was far more important than the show itself, but still I enjoyed it far more than I ever thought I would. To this day I’ve never watched the entire series, but I treasure the memories of those early seasons, and still nurse a great fondness for the world of Dragon Ball.

Another activity that my dorm-mates and I would regularly engage in was the friendly competition of fighting games, from Mortal Kombat to Super Smash Bros. I was never much good at these types of games, not being a terribly competitive person by nature, but again, they were far more effective as a catalyst for fun socializing than anything else. Apart from the occasional indulgence (the Soulcalibur series being a decadent favourite) or the odd title picked up in a bargain bin (like my much-loved Xbox copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 2), I never went out of my way to buy fighting games for myself, much less practice them or follow their competitive scenes. So it must have been a subtle yet potent bout of nostalgia, powerful enough to overcome my general indifference to the genre, that prompted me to purchase this year’s Dragon Ball FighterZ for Playstation 4.

Load Checkpoint: Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001) – Engulfed In Truth

Raiden, in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001).

 “Our beloved monsters . . . enjoy yourselves.” – Colonel Campbell

By 1999, only a year after the release of Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima’s plans for its sequel were already fully formed. Titled Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and developed for Sony’s Playstation 2 console, this sequel aimed to surpass its predecessor in every possible way, offering new gameplay mechanics and technical upgrades that would take advantage of the PS2’s upgraded power, and a narrative experience that would attempt no less than a deconstruction of the medium itself. Prior to its release in 2001, anticipation for this new chapter in the Metal Gear saga reached a fever pitch in both Japan and North America.

Initial reactions, however, were starkly divided. While it was praised for its technical achievements, many players were put off by the game’s lengthy and convoluted cutscenes, some of which were described as “incomprehensible.” Fans of the coherent (if complex) plot of Metal Gear Solid were baffled by the tangled, surreal structure of MGS2, which built up so many betrayals and reversals that it became difficult to separate fact from fiction within the text of the game itself. And most infamously, nearly everyone who had enjoyed the series so far were disappointed when, after an introductory chapter starring Solid Snake (David Hayter), the game’s protagonist viewpoint shifted to a new character, code-named Raiden (Quinton Flynn), whom you control for the remainder of the 12-to-15 hour experience. Many were strident in their criticism of this choice, to the point of refusing to play (and even boycotting) the game.

Load Checkpoint: Metal Gear Solid (1998) – The Real Way To Live

A glimpse of Metal Gear Solid, released in September 1998.

Some games can only be understood within the broader context of the franchise they belong to. Load Checkpoint is a gaming retrospective column that explores the evolving sagas of some of the most beloved properties in the business, tracing their histories and the impact they have on the medium as a whole. – Justin Cummings

Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid franchise started small, beginning with the original Metal Gear on the Japanese MSX2 computer system in 1987. An innovative title for the time, showcasing tactical military action, a unique inventory system, and rudimentary stealth mechanics, it was soon ported to Nintendo’s Famicom system and then overseas to the Nintendo Entertainment System the following year. While the NES port was crippled by poor dialogue translations and unsupervised design changes, the popularity of the brand – which introduced the world to the super-spy named Solid Snake and his nemesis, Big Boss – was clear enough to warrant a Japan-exclusive sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and would eventually lead to one of the watershed titles of the early 3D era in the late 1990s.

Inventory Management, Vol VI: Gotta Go Fast!

Awesome Games Done Quick took places in the Washington, D.C. area, January 7 through 14.

It’s late January, which means another Games Done Quick event has come and gone. This year, the speedrunning community beat 2017’s total by raising almost $2.3 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation over the course of the week-long event. As a colleague of mine so aptly put it, this is one of the few times of the year that we can collectively be proud to be part of gaming society, canceling out the toxicity and pettiness of normal gaming culture with an event fueled by togetherness, commiseration, and hope. I want to celebrate that spirit with this look at some of my favourite moments from this year’s Awesome Games Done Quick.

Best Games of 2017: Anime, Automatons, & Adventure

Yoko Taro’s Nier: Automata was released in February.

The impulse to categorize, rank, and quantify games is a natural one, given the sheer volume that’s available to play in any given year. But it’s also antithetical to deeper thinking and incisive critical analysis; it’s the same petty list-making that has turned film discussion on the internet into a virulent Petri dish of tribal toxicity. “Best of Year” discourse is small-minded, superfluous, and uninspired – but dang if it isn’t a lot of fun, too.

I’m not above a little treat now and then. Here’s a list of the best games I played in 2017. Happy Holidays!

–  Justin Cummings

Inventory Management, Vol V: Pure Refinement

Klansmen get chummy with a Nazi grunt in the alternate United States of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

If you'd like to hear a podcast version of this piece, you can listen to it at this link. Let us know if you want to hear more like this!

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a direct sequel to Wolfenstein: The New Order, picking up directly where that game left off in the alternate 1960s where William “B.J.” Blazkowicz (Brian Bloom) and his band of underground resistance friends fight back against the victorious Nazi Reich, which, as of New Colossus, has successfully colonized the United States. The idea of the “Land of the Free” not being quite so free isn’t new – Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is probably the most famous example of this alt-history idea – but boy, oh boy, does it ever feel like a loaded concept in 2017. And that doesn’t escape the notice of developer MachineGames and publisher Bethesda Softworks, who used this public sentiment to their advantage with marketing material that asked people to “Make America Nazi-Free Again.” There’s never been a better time for a game like New Colossus to come out, because its outlandish conceit has never felt closer to reality.

Inventory Management Vol IV – Boys with Toys: The Battlefront II Debacle

Star Wars Battlefront II was released by EA on November 17.

The past week in gaming was inundated with news about Star Wars Battlefront II, but stories about the game itself were in short supply. Instead, headlines were focused on the game’s internal economy, specifically the “loot boxes” that many modern games use to generate a revenue stream beyond the initial purchase price for the game disc. Battlefront publisher EA was in the crosshairs yet again for what the public has long considered predatory, consumer-hostile practices, but something was different this time. The “conversation” online – though I’m loath to ennoble the childish vitriol hurled at publisher and developer alike by calling it that – had reached a fever pitch. It felt like a dam had burst, despite the fact that we’d collectively chosen to ignore the spurts of water leaking through.

Victory Vindication!: Studio MDHR’s Cuphead

Cuphead was released by Studio MDHR on September 29.

I had been hotly anticipating the release of Cuphead, the debut game from independent Canadian developer duo Studio MDHR, since its very first reveal trailers. I mean, how could you not? At a glance, it’s abundantly clear that the game offers something that has literally never been seen before in gaming: a vibrant visual style modeled after the Disney and Fleischer cartoons from the 1920s and 30s. Cuphead’s animation – and its general sense of polish and pizzazz – is so jaw-dropping that it almost didn’t matter what the game actually was. I didn’t care if the thing was going to be any good or not; I just wanted to bask in its aesthetic.

I was delighted to discover when it finally released last month that, in spite of my low expectations, there is indeed more to Cuphead than meets the eye, and that its pleasures in terms of gameplay precision, retro mechanics, and difficulty are a match for its visual (and sonic) delights. Much ballyhoo is being made about its level of challenge, and whether or not it may be prohibitive to those who just want to enjoy its unique style, but I think the way Cuphead handles its difficulty is exemplary. It’s the same type of punishing, balanced, satisfying design that I find so compelling in some other very different games that are also infamous for their difficulty.

Eyes Up, Guardian: Destiny 2

Destiny 2, developed by Bungie, was released on September 5.

I purchased Destiny 2 under a certain degree of duress. My experiences with the original Destiny, first launched by Bungie in 2014, were strongly mixed; I was often frustrated by its obtuse and player-hostile systems, and many of Bungie's choices in managing the IP prompted a raised eyebrow, and yet I count the shared social experiences I had with my friends throughout the game's multiplayer challenges as some of the best and most memorable in my whole life. I was hardly the only player to feel this way, and though many of the issues the game launched with were eventually patched out in future expansions, Destiny never really felt like the complete online shooter experience we had all expected it to be. The fact that we were being asked this September to purchase a fully-priced sequel, instead of a new expansion on the original game that included improvements and changes, was galling in the extreme.

Destiny 2's reception has been glowing from the jump, which I found surprising (didn’t everyone have the same gripes as me?), but now that I've played it, I understand why. Its changes seem subtle and intuitive on the surface, but actually disguise a bone-deep redesign that streamlines Destiny's systems, excises its unnecessary cruft, and prioritizes player satisfaction. It's far too early to comment on the game's long-term sustainability, but even at launch this is the strongest the IP has ever been, and these things only ever get better as they go.

Inventory Management, Vol III: Indie Darlings

Sonic Mania was released by Sega on August 15.

Sonic Mania is the ultimate exercise in nostalgia. Sonic the Hedgehog never escaped the 1990s the way his rival Mario did, so it only makes sense that he should give up his decades-long struggle to invent a new identity and just return to his roots instead. Sega – Sonic’s irresponsible, absentee parent – made this happen this year in such an unusual, unlikely way that it would have been an interesting story even if the result weren’t an absolute delight.

The name Sonic Mania hints at more than just the excitement of Sonic fans' seeing their favourite gaming mascot back in the limelight (in a positive way for once). One of those very fans, developer Christian “Taxman” Whitehead, took it upon himself to design and program a Sonic game that both recreated and expanded upon the original Sega Genesis titles from his childhood. Whitehead was given the extraordinary chance to present his prototype to Sonic series producer Takashi Iizuka, who reworked Whitehead’s proposed title “Sonic Discovery” into something that reflected the singular nature of this passion project, something that was “by the mania, for the mania.” With help from indie developers Headcannon and PagodaWest Games, and with the blessing and bankroll of both Iizuka and Sega, Whitehead’s dream of creating a Sonic game that was worthy of the original series actually came true.