#483

 Some nameless beast, some vile and base interloper (a friend) accosted me on the street like some vagrant churl to accuse me of being a bad Bat-nerd and a bad gamer--shit, if I'd managed to reproduce, my parenting skills would very probably have been raked over the coals--for not putting Batman: Arkham Asylum on my Factual Top 25 Games of All Time list.

As a person of dignity, I will tell you exactly what I said. I said that yes, Arkham Asylum was a labor of love and one of the greatest things that ever happened in my life, and also revolutionized games on many levels but especially in terms of melee combat. Rocksteady made something that I turned on and didn't turn off until I had solved every single riddle, collected every single profile, every last piece of lore--I explored and admired every last inch of that island.

I was Batman, motherfucker. Started on hard mode and stayed kicking ass the entire time. Absolutely not a single detail escaped my detection.

And I am here to say that I hated that final boss fight enough to disqualify it from the list. I am not sorry and I am not taking it back.

*

Barely even wanna fucking talk about what makes me feel that way, but. But. It's bad form, bullshit really, to say something is inimical to the quality of an effort without explaining. So.

My suspicion, born of projecting my feelings and based on nothing else, is that they didn't want to stop making it any more than I wanted to stop playing it--that they knew, as I do, that the game's only true flaw was its finitude. As such, the pain worked its way into the tail end of the story, dulling their blades. The end is where many stories thrash madly anyway because endings are incredibly difficult and a truly unassailable one is rare. 

Also it may be that physical exaggerations of Joker simply set my teeth against each other and makes them spin in place. I loathe entirely that horsehit where they chop Joker's face off in the comics and he's running around with his face stapled to his skull, and consider the perverted maniac in charge of those storylines to be a fucking morlock that crawled out of the depths of the earth. So, after all that genius level shit with Mark Hamill's utterly unhinged and perfect Joker, Venom Joker, to me, was stupid, and gross, and dumb, and I stopped caring completely in that moment, plus the way you had to kill him was stupid and it took me two tries because his ferocity exceeded by far my willingness to unleash on his ass. It was a stupid ass. I hated it so much it didn't feel worth handing back to the guy, but I did, partly out of spite I guess. To see the credits and hear the music, as is traditional.

The end was also good after that. But no game on my admittedly imperfect and idiosyncratic list ever made me feel the way that boss fight did, so. My decison stands. It also stands because I am insane enough about Batman to disqualify the most singular Batman experience ever created (though I guess I barely started Arkham City or ever get a chance to play the third one) based on a what is basically totally irrelevant and certainly proportionally miniscule issue. I mean this game had no other problems, man. It is still a mystery to me how they did that good of a job. Probably all of them are crazier than I am about Batman by a startling degree, like, even the janitors and the security guys. 

*

Totally made up the scenario in the first paragraph. Been thinking about hunting down an old copy of the game and thought I'd explain why I didn't put it on the list. When I approached the text field, the hilarious conversation I might have had with a buddy if they'd read my post seemed to bloom in my mind, and I thought it would be a funny indulgence.

Now that I've explained it though...hm. Maybe I would be a better writer if I were a better liar.

--JL

#472

To round of Factually Game Theory 2024, I thought it might be interesting to explore some of the negative space on the subject, i.e. what I don't play, even actively avoid. Also it's probably best practices to stress that I know what game theory is and that none of what I have said resembles it. I possess this awareness.

Jokes. They happen sometimes, in your vicinity, whether you appreciate this truth or just drool onto yourself a bunch while you wait for someone to wipe the drool off.

*

One must exercise caution, because the exploration of negative space too quickly becomes "I don't play these games because they are the byproducts of rot and the minds they issued from are morasses of putrefaction aqnd disease". That would be a moribund and sterile effort, noise without meaning, and if you disagree, I have excellent news: there is more of this kind of writing being generated about games per second than there is any other kind of writing on the planet, except pornography involving characters not generated by the author. You can be reading fresh ideas from brave new voices with only a nominal amount of clicks and keystrokes.

*

In my fecklessness and lack of self-regard, only Fallout 3 ever made any purchase on me among all the houses of its throbbing, radioactive lineage. I don't know, it's just true. Never played the ones that came out before 3; think there's two, seems reasonable to guess two, but I have been burned before. Never played any of the ones that came out afterwards.

It is as though I am trapped in my own chronoshard, where 3 condensed from total intangibles and never reproduced.

Anyhow. It is clear, no matter the internal particulars, that this Fallout thing makes me a heretic in the ways that I think are actually suboptimal, instead of making me smile. If I weren't me, I would respect me less--the objective facts of the case speak to me of a person of low character.

Because the person is me though, I give myself a pass. Maybe it's you who might consider that 3 is in fact enough Fallout, an island of sufficiency.

Skyrim is pretty much the only Elder Scrolls game I play, also. This sweeping away of the cape reveals that I merely like Bethesda games developed and released within a particular span of time and at a particular scale and resolution.

Still play Fallout 3 sometimes, and my blatantly unhealthy relationship with Skyrim is something I have had to face quitting the way one quits drinking. I should throw both the 360 disc and the Switch cart in the fucking garbage, today. But I know I won't. Might make the disc into art, though. 

*

Man, this has been like pulling a struggling wombat from the living earth. Well, I can't physically do that and would be surprised if it could be done without a tractor hitch, but I digress.

Long story short: I don't tend to play a lot of shooters or hyperrealistic games, with Halo* being a strong exception, plus the occaisonal spy thriller. Pure puzzlers are not a big one for me, I become completely obsessed, but only with a very few. However, puzzles should be everywhere in all games. If you could do a puzzle every time a chess piece moved in order to secure the move or gain bonus effects, for example, that by itself would be a great game. I don't play games that stress live disembowelment or active rape mechanics or whatever the fuck it is that breeds at the bottom of the barrel of human endeavor. I don't play games where you do nothing but kill without context, or engage in power fantasies for the sake of power fantasies, or engage in the extermination of the Other; I am not opposed to violence in media, but beyond a certain threshold it just makes me sick. Games which are not specifically fighting games that are purely competitive, dating sims, granular-type sims, gem-matching, cookie-clicking-type things are no, and games which do nothing but PvP until the very earth cracks with age are out for me; Overwatch and Unreal Tournament for example, feel to me like just big balloons of nothing. No MMO's. Bounced off WoW instantly and failed to engage with The Old Republic. Whatever Fortnite is, I don't care about it, to the point that I can't even pay the kind of attention it takes to define it, even though I've read a lot about it. 

Anyway. Enough of that negative bullshit.

Let's just wrap this with a story instead. Stories are better.

*

My parents were reticent to provide me with video games, and thus, a large part of my memories of childhood is the waging of a relentless campaign of propagandistic attitition in the pursuit of digital entertainment. My case, almost from the get-go, of course, was that it was digital literature I was after, just like books and movies, which in fairness and praise to my parents, they provided in spades. I grew up reading and watching literally whatever the fuck I pleased basically on my own recognizance. Encyclopedias, young adult literature, and the shorter classics were all part of my repertoire before I turned seven, shortly before I would start on philosophy. Also Quentin Tarantino and Mel Gibson movies, and stuff like The Ghost and the Darkness, Congo, Predator, and of course--of course--Jurassic Park were all included my video diet, along with more regular, defensible stuff like Willow and Star Wars and The Dark Crystal. I had seen Blue Velvet and Silence of the Lambs before I turned six, though. Lmao!

No video games of my own, though. No Mario, no Zelda, no Donkey Kong. Perhaps you knew someone like me in your own game-filled childhood--pathetic wretches, rain running down their faces as they pressed their hands against the glass of your window. The only games they got to play were at your house, man. You'll never know the pain.

Not that I was truly suffering under any real deprivation. Toys--yes. Everything else a kid could have or want? Yes. Only games were dangled out of reach. Well, console games--the PC as a platform was tolerated, and edutainment software was played into the ground, as well as some early browser games, and, for some odd reason, Command & Conquer: Red Alert. So, really, it was primarily console games I didn't have access to.

I have no bitterness about this anymore; my childhood was totally rad, even if bitterness about games was a big part of it. It's not like I sat around pining. You know me: into many things at once. Plus, DK3D and C&C:RA? Pretty sweet groundings in gameplay and design. Disney Interactive games also slap harder than they need to, specifically, The Hunchback of Notre Dame Interactive and Ready to Read with Pooh. Math Blaster is also cool, but Reader Rabbit...I dunno anymore.

Eventually, of course, faced with the twin suns of my long-fought campaign and the birth of my feverish Pokémania, my parents finally cracked and got me a yellow Game Boy Color and a Pokémon Blue cartridge. 

Man, I can still smell those objects new out of their boxes. What a memory.

Of course, human beings are what they are, and this taste meant I needed more--the very outcome my parents had bulwarked themselves (and me) against for so long. I needed an N64. I needed Pokémon Stadium, duh, but I needed Starfox too, so badly. I needed Goldeneye and Super Smash Bros. I wanted Ocarina of Time so bad it almost scared me. Being given Gameboy carts of Tetris and Super Mario Bros Deluxe only stoked my ardor, as well as refining me in the classic senses as a player of games. 

My education about games was piecemeal and patchy. I didn't have access to or even knowledge about many of the periodicals and news sources that would have informed me more broadly about the space and its history. It was mostly commercial and hearsay, sources in their human forms--a buddy who had a lot of games showing me Civ II, the overhwelming presentation of arcades, knowing Sonic was a thing but never really playing the games, etc. Bingo balls rolling in a basket. So it was that it was years and years of life and games and all that stuff and somehow, at the age of eleven, I had not yet heard of Final Fantasy.

Knew about Cloud, sure. Had seen pictures of Cloud and Sephiroth. But I didn't know what game they were from. Incidentally, at this time in my life, all I knew about Samus Aran was a story invented mostly out of whole cloth by an Italian friend. Basically, he said her name was Metroid, and the bakstory he created for her was, shall we say, graphic. The armor, in my mind, did not encase a blonde beauty with all her fingers and toes. There were scars, missing pieces everywhere, in my mind. A cheek that was just teeth.

Our neighbor heard me and my little brothers were into games and she gifted us her son's old collection of game stuff he'd left behind. At last, we had a Super Nintendo and library for it, as well as a Sega Genesis (ah, so you're Sonic! Gotta go fast, you say? I see) as well as bolstering our library for the N64 we'd gotten for Christmas that year.

One of the Super Nintendo games had fancy golden script over the hilt of a sword on a red field, declaring itself to be Final Fantasy II. I didn't try it out for a while, because, well, abrogations of logic tend to confound me, and I know you can't have a second final. Little did I know that this was in fact the fourth final, but that hardly would have improved matters.

Teaching myself to play this game all the way through to the end, exploring every pixel all by myself, securing every weapon and extra boss, all the summons and secret places, ranks as one of the greatest things I have ever done. Pokémon built itself enough out of its bones (the D&D/Ultima bones) to render the source stock instantly legible to me, and so I was able to enter through that little archway into a world I had theorized was possible, a world I had confidently assured my parents existed and was worth exploring, and which blew my mind wide open with its living, breathing actuality.

Digital literature. Yes. I took it up on its promise, and was blessed; now I bear its rod and staff, and its holy word is ever upon my lips.

*

Literature, that is, art, is the Prime Good of All Existence, as is well understood. Video games are a part of it, so, you know, they make life better, a lot better. So, I think they're all right.

I like 'em.

--JL

*Halo's setting--in scale and magnitude--is too powerful. There was a point when I had seen lots of stuff from the game and thought it was merely ok, like, yeah, cool jeep and shit. Nice energy bolt you made there. But seeing the ring, Halo itself, from space shifted something deep inside me and lit my brain up in brand new places. A top-tier game memory.

#468

There are certain things about you, dear reader--and not even you as an entity, let alone you personally, I should be clear--there are certain things about potential readers that I know with perfect clarity and have known for a long time that I refuse to take advantage of purposefully with an aim to manipulating this blog's numbers (they are, and have always been, terrible--even worse since I stopped using other social media to link it like five years ago). On occasion I might employ a rehetorical device or stress certain elements of my position to enhance the viability of a post, but by and large I don't think about shit, jack, fuck, or Larry when I write. Just pursuing the bright, clear thread in front of me.

For instance. Just for instance, it is my nature to criticize, vivisect, excoriate, and scour--all in the service of a theoretical, bright, and shining Truth. This is the element in me that operates under and embodies the sigil of the hierophant--it is my spiritual inclination to reveal, specifically, to illuminate with sacred flame. This means it is also in my nature to drive away shadows, to banish darkness--and in this holy task, it is easy to let one's fire burn overzealously. 

I received this wisdom about myself when a dear friend performed my Saturn Return at the age of 27. I have had lots of cards pulled and values assigned to those cards, but these stand out indelibly. A powerful witch performed the magic, which is significant, but also, she and I are gifted with an ability to understand each other that is damn near preternatural. The reason I am not an actual priest is that I operate under the reverse hierophant, which is to say, I am more on the order of a heretic; my freedom to think and feel as I please being just as important as any Truth. Voltaire and I share a birthday, by the way.

All this to say that it is easy for me to skew negative, and negativity drives about twice the engagement that positivity does. People investigate and engage with each other over negative assertions, whereas they will nod sagely in response to a positive assertion and move on with their lives--and thank the lord, honestly. But I always try, always make a certain effort--though often I may fail--to be positive, and even when very negative, I try to leaven the experience with reminders of the universe's impassivity regading moral positions and exhortations towards mercy in all things, which do not sell well. 

Rest assured--the posts in which I am an unmitigated asshole do quite well in comparison to many. But I do not celebrate, encourage, or pursue this. I am much prouder of any other type of post that manages to break ten actual readers.

*

What does this have to do with video games, Joseph, you ask--since of course, all comers are chomping at the bit for the next piece of FACTUALLY GAME THEORY 2024--and who could be blamed?! 

A lot, though, since whether or not and how people choose to skew positive or negative about games, from just people hanging out in their basements to developers and critics to the people arrayed around the gleaming oak boardroom tables has always had and will continue to have a huge impact on whether people are transformed or passed over by interactive events of absolutely vital importance. Because games maybe change people more completely than other art forms, a truth which is both touted as a reason to destroy all video games and a reason to abandon our physical bodies in pursuit of the Infinite Ludic, and if so, then our attitudes towards and faith in the medium--and as such, our interactions with its apparatus that are able to influence its trajectory--are loaded with significance, and therefore, a type of responsibility.

Naturally, this is true to an extent for all media. But in games, young and powerful as they are, the question is particularly vital and bound up in the shifting sands of the present moment.

Another direct relation is simply that this post is all about things I love a lot, and it is important to think about why such material matters and resonates--this joyful relation of interactive experiences, digital adventures, and potent revelations regarding the nature of the universe. It is important also to establish for you, dear reader, where I am coming from. This list, being a list, is an exercise in exclusion. By highlighting these 25 experiences I am in essence cutting infinite experiences out of the purview, and in a sense this is an act of violence inescapable. But I am in no way prizing material I have selected over material I have not in any kind of subjective or critically exhaustive manner.

As I take great pains to enunciate often, I am interested in many things at once--this blog overall is mainly about books I read, in the end, as they are my primary source of life, but everything else that I am is bound up in the reader that I am, and the reader that I am informs everything about how I see and understand the world. Also, as a phenomenon in a contiunuum, I have physical and chronomatic limits. Believe me when I say that if I could read every book, be they novels or nonfiction or fairy tales or comic strips or operator's manuals or pamphlets or zines or companion booklets or plays or experimental linguistic "dhecontructions", and look at every painting and sculpture and piece of design and architecture, and play every game of every kind, and listen to every scrap of music every composed, and then, say something definitive, and also learn to work and fight and fuck and be a person, I would--but I can't. I am just a point in spacetime, with a beginning and end, and demands on the whole process. So it goes.

These are my games. Some may be your games as well--that is a blessing. If none are, or I have omitted a game that seems to you better than any I have included, let that be a blessing also, and don't fuck with me or anyone about it. Make your own list; you are free, and if you are somehow suffering under my perceived lash, know that the hand holding the whip is your own.

Now, if you take issue with the concept that their order is not precisely linear, that I have placed a hard limit one sentence of commentary per entry, or any example of that sentence's content--well, there is always that point at which one must accept responsibilities for one's feelings and actions with a smile. It is our shared obligation to meditate on this relation.

*

hon. mentions: Unicorn Overlord--the love, titanic and impossibly passionate, is simply too fresh to assess for a place on the list. 3D Mario games, especially Sunshine and Odyssey, Fable Series, Divinity 2: Original Sin, Ico+Shadow of the Colossus, Guitar Hero III, Sonic, Contra, Mario Kart, a bunch of Star Wars games, I could go on forever though, let's gooooo

• 25: Ninja Gaiden (2004): Sometimes, apropos of either nothing at all or the texture of basement carpet, flashbulb memories of moments within this game overtake me--moments which assured me beyond doubt that I am capable of incredible, adult feats with a controller in my hands, which is an important moment in a young person's maturation.
• 24: Duke Nukem 3D: The Compaq tower my uncle gifted us, his younger brother's family, in 1997 had been largely wiped of programs he had installed on it--but this remained, a winking gift, and as it has been with uncles and nephews since time immemorial, I was shaped by this program's illicit thrills thereby.
• 23: F-Zero GX: I don't know that any racer even really matters to me except this one--others are games, or sims, or Mario Kart, only one of which interests me at all (ok, ok, Star Wars Racer)--but F-Zero represents something else to me, and of all the F-Zero games this F-Zero is my F-Zero, and this is the geometry I personally require from racetracks, and you cannot fucking beat me at these races, so it's my favorite.
• 22: Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones: Possibly I am the only person for whom Sands of Time was not a relentless joy attack--indeed, despite it being actively stupid, I was fifteen enough to enjoy Warrior Within and preferred it overall--but Two Thrones made mincemeat of both its predecessors and represents redemption on every conceivable axis, which I am a sucker for.
• 21: Banjo-Tooie: For scale, humor, persistence, writing, variety, color, and sheer joy, this gargantuan adventure represents a high, smooth wall for games that try to operate in this space--rare in and of themselves.
• 20:  The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past+Oracle of Seasons/Ages+Minish Cap+Echoes of Wisdom: Isometric Zelda has that OG piquancy that never gets old; here is my slice of the greatest in that category.
• 19: Street Fighter II: This game is Street Fighter II.
• 18: Tomb Raider (2013): I didn't give a fuck about Lara Croft, since raiding a single tomb in 1994 at age 5 and finding it about as distasteful a virtual experience as I had ever endured, but when SquareEnix does anything, I pay attention, and presented with this platter, I devoured even the bones and feathers with abandon and great satisfaction.
• 17: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Maybe it's better just to keep my ideas to myself--though I will say this: teasing me with the concept of bardic abilities and not delivering is something I still bash my skull against in this game.
• 16: Eastward: Fuck man, all I can say is you should play this game, at least to try.
• 15: Resident Evil 4: God bless the Gamestop guy was willing to break the law in order that I might be able to play this, my first M-rated purchase--going to Gamestop was second only to going to the library or the bookstore as a leisure destination, and I like to imagine he'd seen me play the demo ten times and figured the damage was done, though it wasn't--this game expanded my notions of the possible with real psychic violence, which I appreciate wholeheartedly.
• 14: Soul Calibur II: The traditional fighter I have sunk the most hours into, the only one in which I have true combos* for most characted locked properly into the muscle memory.
• 13: Donkey Kong Country 2: In games, unlike in other sequential works, a sequel often represents the glorious culmination rather than the bastard scramble derided as the sophomore effort; DKC is great, but the sequel just slaps harder, and if you disagree, I refer you to the fact that 2 is the one with the pirates.
• 12: Kingdom Hearts II: Another example of the sequel principle; I literally cannot get through the first KH despite honest, bare-knuckle effort, but II is a blessing from heaven. 
• 11: Pokémon RGBYSV Versions: Those who sneer at this franchise really are missing out on amazing mechanics and incredibly rich strategy--but as it is known and proven that I am an actual crazy person when it comes to these little guys, I'm just going to stop myself here.
• 10: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time+Majora's Mask+The Wind Waker+Twilight Princess+Skyward Sword: These 3D Zeldas speak for themselves; their currency across the culture is as near to absolute as we get, maybe, except for Mario and Sonic and Cloud.
• 9: Halo 4: And this guy, maybe.
• 8: Starfox 64: Still waiting for any game of this type to materialize that can equal its polish and verve.
• 7: Super Smash Bros.: Yes, the original--even with everything that follows, perhaps because everything that has followed actually somehow informs the progenitor as the progenitor sets their template, this game is still as exciting and hilarious and awesome as it was when it came out, and it even remains interesting--the only shortcoming is the short roster and the few stages.
• 6: Metroid Prime: It would belong here because it is perfect in and of itself and because I love so much a game that allows you to literally read as much of your environment as this one does--but it is also a game which takes its subject matter on a massive conceptual leap and lands, as its protagonist tends to, on both feet and with incredible heft.
• 5: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance+Radiant Dawn: The great epic, the beginning of 3D in FE, the fully orchstrated soundtrack--games not without their problems, but which stand unequaled in scope and are in fairly high standing in terms of difficulty--clearing the last chapters of Radiant Dawn took me four tries and the winning try took like two hours and change.
• 4: Final Fantasy IV, VII, VIII, IX, X, & Tactics Advance: The temptation to write "The Final Fantasy Fractal" after entering zero on the list--implying a position unattainable by numbers which are not imaginary or undefinable, which is more correct--was powerful but I took the more quotidian route in order to expose myself to attempts at incineration.
• 3: Tetris: I dunno, do I have to explain what is perfect, elemental, and eternal about Tetris?
• 2: Super Mario World: After playing it for my entire life, having never been without a copy for twenty years, I can still talk about this game for indeterminate periods of time, periods which indeed might extend with no limit if not interrupted.
• 1: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild+Tears of the Kingdom: Perfect video games, maybe one big perfect video game, perfect works of art, perfect in every way and the more so because the key to this perfection was assembling development teams composed of gamers who live and breathe many other things besides games--certainly an elegant explanation for its sheer insurmountable glory, from my perspective.

*

Hm. I don't know how happy I can be with that, in fact; I seem to be leveraging many unusual statements. Suppose also one could honestly accuse me of cheating and copping out in many ways, but I make the rules here, and I shall leverage whatever tricks I please in order to craft the necessary implications. The Final Fantasy problem strikes me as the thorniest, but this is the compromise I have struck. When so many competing realities can realistically vie for the number-one spot, actually parsing and splitting them can be incrediblly difficult. 

Maybe it would help overall, interpretatively speaking and as a reminder of ineluctable reality if I created a sort of shadow list, here on the spot, of games and series which I haven't gotten the chance to play (for myriad potential reasons, but usually lack of hardware or somehow stymied access can be blamed) but I suspected had every chance of making the list.

Xenosaga

Odin Sphere

Valkyria Chronicles

LittleBigPlanet

The Last of Us

Ratchet & Clank

Killer7

Heavy Rain

and probably a bunch more I'm forgetting, but seeing them listed like this is filling me with a longing so profound that it begins to claw at my breast. Enough! Enough.

*

The overarching problem remains, though: quantifying and ranking experiences is a fool's errand. Diverting as it may be, any truth such an endeavor is able to communicate is adjacent to the thing itself.

--JL

*Smash  has combos, but I do not think of these as "true" combos and at any rate Smash is certainly no traditional figher, with some exceptions present in very specific matchups at very specific percentages which are essentially immaterial. SSM did have true combos which could take a stock from zero percent, but these represent a fluke in overall design and honestly, as fun as Melee is these combos are, I think, a flaw.

#467

This blog has been updating, interrupted by the occasional hiatus, since 2018, and I do quite like the idea of making a Factual Game of the Fucking Year Retrospective, so that is the program for the day--with a Factually Top 25 All-Time Games appended for good measure. Ah, the madcap hedonism of writing lists, and the devil-may-care yet earnestly delicious thrill of commenting on the lists! A dense sandwich cookie of joy and satisfaction.

Indeed, there may be no better way to kick off the criminally titled

FACTUALLY GAME THEORY 2024

*

The Factual Game of the Fucking Year Restrospective

Well, here's the deal though. I don't really play new games all the time, particularly not all year long--I am not that kind of hobbyist, or, gamer, as the wicked parlance of the vagrant youth would have it.

The Factual Game of the Fuckin Year, then, is not a list intended to assay or compass the industry or the form in any way--no, like all the factually pointless lists featured here on Factually Pointless, it is about me and what I am up to and my reasons for it and my feelings about it. Indeed, of little use to anyone--simply an amusement for myself and a record of my deeds. Therefore, a game released in 2016 might be my game of the year 2020--simply because that is when I got around to it. 

However! If, belatedly, I played a game that came out, or some other special modifier on the framework, I shall nest the retroactivity and award it the same award in a different tier or category. I may use several such disparate labels as context demands. You'll see what I mean with the first entry and as we go along. Plus, honorable mentions! That should populate this space with some notable videos game.

There are many reasons I might miss a game, finances and the limitations of time itself and competing demands for a share of my supply presenting the main hurdles. Also I might simply not care, or live fated to miss a game I might have loved through apathy or inattention or other sad chance. It's the same with books or movies, and there is no point in allowing this absurd breed of the fear of missing out to taint one's life. Global cultural production is overhwelmingly valid, and there was more culture produced in the last decade alone than a person could reasonably hope to take in during their whole lifetime even if they devoted eight hours a day seven days a week to it for eighty years. And you couldn't even do it, because how would you play every MMO ever produced at the same time as having the experience of taking your game to the professional level in first-person shooters and also reading the length and breadth of Western and Eastern literature and also becoming conversant with all the podcasts and reading every new book that comes out? It should be clear that one cannot, however delicious the fantasy of being the kind of extradimensional entity that could take it all in and suspend the completeness in the intellect like a perfect crystal.

Look, man. You have one span in which to exist. Get used to the idea, relax, and set your own agendas at your own pace designed to maximize your own pleasure by your own standards. That is all. Thanks for enduring my ted talk (me, talking to my younger self in actual paroxysms because absorbing all extant human knowledge is a tragic impossibility). Now, the list!

*

TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHTEEEN

Played In The Moment: Fucking Nothing!: The year of the blog's inception was, it is safe to say, one of the lowest points in my life and a time when I didn't even have the spiritual energy to listen to music, a long illness chronicled in some detail through the course of the blog. If I was playing games, it could only really have been on my handhelds--I didn't have a Switch yet, I pawned my Xbox 360 and a bunch of other shit at one point, and I wasn't plugging my N64 or my PS2 into jack shit--woulda sold those too, probably, if anyone had offered any money for them at the time. 

Came Out, Played Later: Chasm: As a rule, I don't need to explore metroidvania-style dungeon descenders outside of the definitive series entries in themselves, but I do love it when a game exaggerates a genre to the extent that it becomes its avatar--see the 2024 winner, the impeccable Unicorn Overlord. Chasm excels as homage and gold standard in one, loved every little second of playing it (2021). It really just does every last aspect of itself to exacting perfection, and it has infinite replayability, which I value highly. It's on the "'vania" side of things; if the same team made a twin game called, say, hypothetically, "Station", to honor the Metroid side, I would also love that. I see myself tucking both games into bed at night, laying a loving, gentle kiss upon each brow.

Honorable Mentions: Celeste (amazing music, great writing, awesome raw platforming for which it has deservedly attained great fame) Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (it is fucking Smash Bros Ultimate, motherfucker, it is BEYOND REPROACH IN EVERY WAY. It is just always silly to make it game of the year, since Smash made the bulk of its potent and evergreen statement in 1998. It's kind of like how Final Fantasy is, to this day, Game of the Year. Anyway I have all the spirits and I have played over a thousand multiplayer matches on just my own cartridge. What has Super Smash Bros. as a series asked of me in return for its thousands of hours of peerless entrtainment? Only a valuable chunk of my own soul.)

TWO THOUSAND AND NINETEEN

Played In The Moment: Pokemon Shield (and Sword): People bitched so much about this game before it came out that I thought to determine whether it was an organically originating strife or, as is the way of all things in time, the seedy tentacles of underhanded corporate mechanisms had been at play in the neighborhood. My findings indicated to me very clearly that the brouhaha was evidently the same breed of malfeasance we are accustomed to seeing in the way of discourse manipulation but whose payload is assured, playing as it does on our basest emotions and leveraging raw capital and for the research and the bandwidth to occupy the precise real estate and rhetorical space needed to muddy discourse, just enough to posit that your company was able to hurt Nintendo this much of a percentage or whatever this quarter. Again, this is accomplished by pretending you are a regular consumer in order to aggravate reasoned thought and plant outright fabrications. There was never any goddamn Chinese knockoff that could do a million things Sword and Shield were not allegedly willing to do because the companies are supposedly too greedy to pay enough programmers to make a decent game. I mean it was the kind of baseless rhetoric and straight-up whole-cloth fabrication that I was used to seeing xbox and playstation people level at each other back in the days when the console wars raged white-hot.

Never has such cock and bull raged unchecked. I mean it probably has, but never has such devious goblin-work taken place around something I cared about so deeply.  The Pokemon fanbase has proven highly resistant to these assaults in the past, and I guess I'm not sure what changed.There's always assholes talking shit, they're like weak gravitational force. The universe seems to require them in order to achieve base cohesion at various field levels. It behooves one to learn to merely tune them out and get on with the business of one's work and leisure. But damn. I didn't like seeing that. I am talking as much about the Sword and Shield Conspiracy as I am talking about Console War 3.0, which was only one installment in a conflict that has been fought over uneven ground with many participants staying constant and many fading in and out, known currently as the Forty Years of Periodic Conflagration.

Anyway, I played this game too fucking much. Too many times through. Christ help me, I love it still. If I won't be playing it much anymore, it's only because I acquired Sword Version much later, and will naturally favor that instead next time I wish to return to Galar.

Came Out, Played Later:  Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Have I talked enough lately about Fire Emblem itself, and games like it, on this post in general and especially lately, with the Unicorn Overlord hyperfixation? Hey, guess what I did the other day: instead of anything reasonable or improving, I went out and purchased Fire Emblem Engage. Do you get it yet? Another reason I don't game constantly, or do any one thing constantly: if I really stopped giving a fuck and let myself, I am a person who could spend every cent they possess and even go into bankrutpcy just buying every new thing I think I desperately need. It's everything I can do stagger things and force myself into fast periods so I can have some semblance of a healthy life. To that end, I actually avoided Three Houses till 2022. About the same span I made it on Engage, I see. Good. The wards and charms hold, for now.

Honorable Mentions: Feudal Alloy (charming, amusing, haven't beaten it yet but the Czechs make a great game--I love the premise and the art and the feel of jumping around and swinging a sword, and to do so as a robot is a sheer good I need not explain, like a piece of hard candy when you haven't had anything sweet for a long time) The Eternal Castle Remastered (this game fucked me up so bad the first time I played it I almost hyperventilated. It is fucking too much to look at. If you are a person who didn't think we were done exploring the pixel stylings of the video games of the eighties, and you don't know this game, I reccomend it passionately--and not in a classy, top-flight style like Hyper Light Drifter or No Place for Bravery or something like that. I mean fat, thick lines of choppy pixel in two colors over a black background that sometimes uses a shade of one of the colors as a texture. Someday my mind will be ready to come back to it, maybe. It was also pretty high-difficulty, as these feral, frontier games knew no other way, and this is a high-fidelity project [it is not actually a remaster])

TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is the Game of the Fuckin Year 2020. As the only new video game I really purchased that year, it sort of automatically slides into this tier. Not that I didn't love it, because I did, very much. Ever since I lost my cherry ro the series with Soul Calibur Warriors*, though, I've needed a little something more, personally, from the Warriors games if they should decide to go futzing around with a property I am invested in. I have even managed to resist the Fire Emblem ones! Being able to say this makes me want to write and subsequently sing a new and joyful song. But the way this one ties into Breath of the Wild (I mean, in a way), the incredible drama of the setting (yes, the Age of Calamity, or to be more [sort of] precise, some type of interdimentional rift that exists in a "compressed" moment in the spacetime of the actual canon) and the period they describe in the canon, and the way they just crammed the thing as full as it would go with the stuff--it simply stated itself as necessary, and I never looked back. Super fun, super beautiful, deep and satisfying, and again, simply full of stuff.

Is it too much fucking stuff? Damn, I mean, maybe. I love Zelda, and specifically Breath of the Wild, with such a burning intensity--it blazes like thermite, vaporizing plates of steel a foot thick--that I bought the Hero's Edition of the Breath of the Wild: Creating a Champion book with the special cloth binding and the clothbound case and the special picture of the champions from the Champion's Ballad expasion and the cloth fucking map of BotW Hyrule and the fricking laser-etched glass model Spirit Orb. Even to consider that I possess such a thing gives me a thrill like no illicit sex could possibly replicate, and my hand tingles, remembering the perfect shape and weight of that flawless glass sphere.

So, you might not feel the way I feel about this game. There are times when even I find it merely tolerable, so. I mean, IP Prefix: Warriors games. They require a certain mood and mindset, is part of it. I would, of course, love to hear from a person for whom playing this style of game is always choice number one, which naturally I have mad respect for.

Also, I guess you know what to expect near, or, y'know, at the top of the next list. Ha!

Honorable Mentions: I sure kept playing a lot of Pokémon! This is common for me, this thing of going nuts on Pokemon a few times a year. Longtime readers may know this. I also played a lot of Smash Ultimate.

TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY-ONE

Eastward & Disco Elysium: The Final Cut tie for Games of the Fuckin Year 2021. Everyone knows everything about Disco by now, even invertebrates with no possible way of playing or even sensing the game, so I won't spend too much time on that except to restate that it opened up my brain, walked inside of me, and drove me like a meat gundam, and in doing so, allowed me to operate it it with fully-loaded S-tier triple-overcharged maniacal-ass drive, leaving nothing of the game but a rind and some stringy remainders. I'm thinking of something on the order of a mango here. Indeed, once I had finished, I felt distinctly sated, a feeling of having feasted on succulence till the juice ran down my chin and my eyes rolled up into the back of my head. Man, I built the crazy fucker just the way I'm built and went fuckin crazy on those mysteries. Felt good, man. Felt god damn beautiful.

Anyway. 

Eastward is a game that hit me so right from the moment I laid eyes on its artwork in a thumbnail that I feel because it did not shatter the very foundations of this corrupt earth and burst from its shattering crust in a torrent of white light, redeeming all of our sins, that it was criminally slept on. The truth is it might really not be for all comers, and that makes sense. Not to me, not at all, but intellectually, it makes sense. In many other contexts, I can see how things just like this make sense, so I get that it makes sense, but it makes no sense to me. Eastward is damn near the perfect story in damn near the perfect video game. I have never felt things like I have felt playing this game and receiving its visual, aural, textual, and mechanical payload. I can't believe something like this even exists, and that I can just play it, if I want to or need to. My breathing has grown shallow. Know simply that if you are lucky, and open, here is a piece of art that can fucking destroy you in a way utterly its own. 

Honorable Mentions: Metroid Dread (as with Disco Elysium, it is not certain how much I need to elaborate on how much ass this game kicked. I shall be plain: this game kicks enough ass that we here at Factually Pointless had to fetch more ass for it to kick, and could not secure sufficient supply to meet demand) Pikmin 3 (this game is special in my heart because it was the first Pikmin I really played, because it is wonderful in every way, and because it is the one game Ezra and I have played together and beaten from start to finish, and we had a blast) Death's Door (If I haven't beaten it, it is simply because it is one of those meals so tasty you wanna save about forty percent for later. I love being a little dead crow, and music is so good, and to look at it and move through its world is to know a special, mineral-rich pleasure) Inscryption (didn't play it myself, but when a video game truly seizes Ezra, I take note. Usually it's not something I'd write about on its own merits, but Inscryption looks so much like itself and is so unabashedly cruel and with such good sounds that I have thought about it a great deal. Don't really feel like playing it, but very glad I've gotten to spend time around it) Resident Evil Village (the last thing that happened to me in a Resident Evil, after not liking 5 as much as 4 and not playing very much 6 because indeed they made them impossible to play alone, was I was finally playing some 6 with a buddy and we were in this boss fight where this giant guy charges at you in this huge room. We've tried this thing like twenty times: the room's full of guys and stuff, there's ways to hurt the big guy with the stuff in the room. fighting the rgular guys it's full of is a whole thing. We try a bunch of different strats, we do a bunch of different clever shit, new ideas, regroup, retry, whatever. Kept dying. Finally, exasperated and experiencing a growing feeling of dread as I realized the one thing all of our plans had in common, I told my buddy to grab his magnum and we would both concentrate fire on the big guy's head and face instead of getting out of his way. It worked, but, it didn't just work. It was fucking pathetic. We dropped him like you drop a cow in a slaughterhouse chute, the door opened, and the regular enemies never even spawned. We moved on to the next cutscene. So, yes, as I say, it worked, but guess what?

We really didn't feel like playing any more. So we didn't. And for my part, I kept right on not doing that for four years solid.

Look. It's one thing to force a co-op focus. I like playing games by myself over anything, but I also love co-op and one-on-one stuff, even the occasional free-for-all. I couldn't beat RE5 for a long time because I had no one dependable to do it with, but when I did, the game revealed delicious flavors and textures. That it was no longer really scary is a separate matter. It is another thing entirely to make a puzzle whose solution is not to solve it, but instead, to shoot it in the head until it dies. On that day, they told me in no uncertain terms they wanted nothing to do with me, or "my sort". So, it worked, but it didn't work, unless it was a clear message from the designers: this is no place for the faithful. Something bad has happened here. Go, and be free. So I did. Left the franchise to toil under the sigil of the beer bong and the Greek letters, or whatever the fuck it is that makes a series literally lobotomize itself. It was also even less frightening than 5, to the point that it wasn't, not at all. I guess in one of the sections I fought a zombie all alone in a dark, empty parking structure, which is something I'm afraid of in real life just because of the aesthetics and the echo of the sound and the prevailing quality of the light. So that wasn't complete bullshit, like the whole fucking university after that, after which I quit from sheer not giving a fuck anymore. Games rarely drive me to this point because I rarely pick or toil through games that aren't any fucking good. That's what happens when goodwill built is counteracted by incrementally enshittified product. My natural defenses for my own time and quality of leisure experience a critical delay.

Well. I guess after that, they felt that way too, maybe, because while I was either actively turning my nose up or merely not paying attention, they released a completely terrifying new RE that took place in some hideous goddamn Louisiana backwater fen. It looked good, people said it was a returm to form, but I wasn't ready to open my heart yet. "Swamp people, huh?" I sneered, well after it was out. "What, they have a sleepover, binge True Detective season 1 and get really into the Deliverance soundtrack?" 

However! However! When I saw that Village [and I did write about this, I think] took place in or near a castle, and would feature some kind of [potential] lycanthrope, my whole body shook. The shaking was the thud of a harpoon sinking into my blubber. Fuckers had me again. I know now that I was quite wrong about 7 and playing Village was indeed a return to form and perhaps even the foundation for new heights)

TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY-TWO

Games of the Fuckin Year: Pokemon Violet/Scarlet/Pokemon Legends Arceus: Perhaps the most flasgship year for the series that I can think of as it related to releases which affected me personally, but also, it can be objectively stated. This is the year Pokemon HOME functionality really came into its own, as the depth and breadth of games it serves reached comfortable operating mass. The Pearl/Diamond remakes also dropped! Crazy. I had fun, but they weren't like, FPGotFY level. 

People complained about how Arceus looked but I have no idea what they're talking about. I'm not saying that to be iconocalstic or deliberately obtuse, though I would completely understand if you didn't believe me about that because it pretty much sounds like I am, and also because it is known that I enjoy being iconoclastic. I don't even mean that as a person who came up straight up RBY graphics is all the Pokemon there is to see, so everything ever since has been a stairway to a constantly rising heaven. I am sure that this effect I am describing has a piece to do with what I actually mean, but it is not central to the point. 

Here it is: like Skyward Sword before it, Arceus is not attempting to astonish with the kinds of HD fidelity other games and indeed trends in gaming seem to take for granted as a sign of baseline functionality, rather than aesthetic aim. I mean, if you want me to be the one to say that there are literally PlayStation 2 games that look better than Arceus, I'll say it. What? It happens to even be true! The people that make games like Gran Turismo or Metal Gear Solid or Mass Effect--series which jump out in my mind as really accomplishing high fidelity in significant, full-spectrum ways that serve the piece as a whole--deliver the kind of polish and fidelity to realspace that they do because that is the one of the pillars of their mission, because it is critical to the presentation and feel of the game. That pillar does not exist in the House of the Electric Mouse, so the cars in Forza 2 still look better, in a way, than anything in Arceus, or Violet/Scarlet. That can matter to you or not matter; it does not matter to me. 

I love looking at the new Pokemon games. They are a feast for the eyes. They make my eyes happy. I love inhabiting the worlds they've created, they way time passes and light changes, the way things glitter and flash and reflect, the waterfalls, the woods, the paint, the color balance, the movement and life all around you as you traverse this amazing topography in varied and interesting ways and interact with vibrancy at every turn, at every level, and around every corner. The original cartidges, holding the very first Pokemon games, through some form of alchemy, marshalled their pixels in order to look interesting--every frame, every place, every 'mon interesting. All these places and people endure in the mind. Gran Turismo, by contrast, is showing me a real-life transcription of something I don't give a fuck about. In essence, they are saving me a trip I was never going to take to do something I was never going to do. In their defense, I would, at least, take them up on their offer before I took the actual trips.

I guess cars and guns should look perfect in racing and shooty games, but this is an adventure game ensconcing a strategy RPG rooted in little pictures of creatures a person drew. 

Just ask yourself, as a perceiver: when I look, when I look to see what is there, do I see what is not there? And then, do I blame what I see for not being what I see?

Let us meditate on this, re: games, re: culture, and re: all aspects of life. Amen.

These Pokemon games give me hope for the future. They are some of the only things that do! Amen, amen, amen.

Runner-Up: Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Most fun I've had looking at Kirby and playing Kirby since The Crystal Shards! This game is funmax to the limit.

Honorable Mentions: Sonic Origins (3d Sonic--well. Much ink has been spilled upon the bosom of internet detailing exactly what is and has always been wrong with Sonic games. I don't play the sport myself, I just love Sonic when I can, when they let me. So the GBA Sonics, those were all awesome and I played and loved them, but Sonic Adventure 2: Battle was the only half-decent 3D one, and I think this position is buoyed by various subjective criteria that don't even really hold water. Frontiers, though, brought me only joy, joy complete and condensed and entire--until it proved it was still a fucking Sonic game by making me play pinball so shitty I walked away from the game. Why the fuck didn't anyone stop that shit from happening? Maybe someday I'll come back and finish it) Tunic (wow) Dying Light Platium Edition (all I ever wanted was a zombie game where you could jump around and do parkour shit like a person actually might, instead of running and stopping in any one of four exciting directions--but first, you must turn, hestiatingly, on the spot. When I was playing it, I had a lot of Game of the Fuckin Year thoughts, but it's really just that it did something I have needed video games of this kind to do for more than decade. Fucking awesome, great game, everyone should play it)

TWO THOUSAND ND TWENTY-THREE

Game of the Fuckin Year: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: Presented without comment. What comment could be necessary?

Runner-Ups: Super Mario Bros Wonder & Cocoon. As should be common knowledge out there by now, Super Mario World was the first video game I ever played. The second or third video game I ever owned, however, along with a copy of Tetris, was a copy of Super Mario Bros. Deluxe for the Game Boy Color. So, the basic Super Mario formula is of enormous significance to me. This, the latest entry in that hallowed lineage, delivered such potent, delicious play in this vein that I don't think I was ever unsmiling as I played it. I cannot verify for certain, but it is possible that I may even have been grinning like a loon the whole time. Did I giggle? Did I sing little tunes, in between short gasps of delight? Maybe.

Cocoon was as short and deliciously sweet a time as I have ever delighted in. Pennies Arcade Guys talked perfectly about it and it is why I checked it out, so I refer you to said write-up. 

Honorable Mentions: Pizza Tower (while I have not personally played it--yet--even watching a buddy play this game for thirty seconds tells you how fucking great it is, period, no disambiguation. Any player that spent time in their torrid, prurient youth with Warioland 4 will know what I mean when I say that I don't need to play it to know that it is like a crack rock of pure, hilarious, white-hot fun) 

TWWENNYYYYY TWENNYYYYYYY FOOOOOOOOOOOOORE

Game of the Fuckin Year: As you know, Unicorn Overlord snags the top notch this year. It's okay to just get it out of the way, as nothing else is coming out this year that would register on its axis. This was a flagship year for me personally playing tons and tons and tons of video games. I wonder why I felt such a pressing, urgent need to be a fully transported into a simulated reality as possible.

Special Case: The Final Fantasy games I played, VII through XII, probably saved my life, as things do sometimes. They are each unqualified masterpieces of the highest order. I guess I really didn't feel like going though XIII again, or listening to it again is really the issue, because I sure love looking at it and playing it. But I really want to play XIII-2 and Lightning Returns. So we will see what the future holds. Also I need to go back and play I though VI soon. Maybe sometime after 2028 I can buy the system I'll need to play XV and XVI, or get a real computer or something.

Balatro gets an honorable mention on the same order as Inscryption--have not played it, probably won't, but the aesthetics, design factors and the enjoyment and fascination I have seen it bring to Ezra and to others secures it a place. Violet/Scarlet (the bulk of the hours I put into these games actually clocked in after the expansions dropped, so beginning roughly January 2024 I ran them into the fucking ground. They were already world-class in my estimation, but know this: the full and complete editions of these games is like the erection of a Pokémon Babylon. This is the pinnacle of a civilzation, and tales may one day be told of riches and wonders that the world no longer holds.)

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Ok! Next thing next time here on Factually Game Theory 2024! My little comments, having turned into several lengthy treatises and digressions, have made today beyond unwieldy as it is and may have finally crossed into the territory that even I, and not in jest as usual, might say uses too many words.

Ok peace, think about how I have maybe played over one thousand five hundred hours of video games this year, I know I will

--JL

*Having managed to bring Soul Calibur into this, I may as well admit to you that I bought Soul Calibur IV as well. All right, all right. Also Bravely Default for the 3DS and Guitar Hero III. Might have to return GHIII, though. Apparently any random fucker is entitled to a pound of my flesh as entry to the exhange for one of those fucking plastic guitars for the 360. Think not upon the true, actual asking price.

#466

Damn, people. Last post was longer than propriety would dictate, probably. I mean fuck's sake.

 

Today's, well, today's is probably gonna be too long as well, since I locked myself into the breakdown of what happened by posting about the damn thing in media res. Really I'm only interested in talking about video games, but whatever. Shouldn't really take that long.

I guess here is the problem: that great ability I have which I discussed last post, with the plates and the spinning and the keeping things real, well, it gets a lot more complicated if the torches and pitchforks are already out. And plus, we don't live in a world where like, you're ever alone anymore. Everywhere you step, physically and digitally, the hot beams emitted by a million palantíri pierce your entire self and every shadow you have ever cast, the clicking insect brains nested at their root transmitting vital data to the pulsing, bevatted brains ranged in a great circle round the Black Pillar. 

What kind of data? It doesn't mater anymore. Stuff you wouldn't even think a person could use to fuck you up, but believe me--regimes like the one whose installation we are facing do not in any way need a legitimate reason or avenue for fucking people up. They will write the forms that say they give themselves permission to execute you in the street because you posted, oh, say, the wrong opinion on your blog one time, or purchased a product from a blacklisted company, or turned the wrong dude down for a date, or because a large language model made a profile of you and gave that profile a number and that number was either too high or too low, no one knows what makes the numbers be what they are but the numbers do not, cannot lie.

Yet the reality of it all is so much worse than that because they just don't need excuses or reasons anymore, which is great for them because it will be increasingly about venting naked id upon their surroundings at all times. The question of what happens when a government declares that you do not, legally speaking, exist, your phemonelogical insistence to the contrary, mute and and incontrovertible, becomes a crime. When existing is a crime, what is your defense? What about when no defense is acceptable once criminality is determined, and criminality can be determined on sight or through the use of an algorithm which is unerring simply because it will always be obeyed?

Some of us live with the prospect of this thought experiment breathing down our necks. I have mentioned this recently. One does not, though, sit any more comfortable when the breathing gets hot and heavy and one can only too easily imagine strong, brutal hands quickly grasping.

Well, here we are. I say it for fun a lot, and now I say it once more, quietly, in deadly earnest, before we move on to other things: strap in.

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And hey! Like I said yesterday. Things may collapse and transform so quickly and radically these fuckers may not have time, wherewithal, or opportunity to do a damn thing. As only one example, if climate change doesn't get paid attention to like fucking crazy here pretty soon, well, Atlantis stopped having political problems of any kind in one fell swoop! Starting to sound pretty good, huh?

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An embarassing confession: sometimes I fantasize about what the world might be like if more people read this blog and were able to intelligently catalyze the hidden (theoretical) wisdom from my cavalcade of tongue-in-cheek bullshit. 

Maybe they would spread my memes in a way that made better sense. Maybe the aggregate effect would be powerful enough that we would chill out a bit, collectively. I guess all writers wish this somewhere deep inside, unless of course they have a similar fantasy, except instead of stargazing and meditating on rocks stacked in little piles, which is the outcome that makes me smile, their readers busy themselves setting the world on fire, which is the outcome that makes them smile. The world is always happy to provide your diametric reverse, in the interest of a balanced universe. And I am not even mad about this, for it is meet that the universe should be in balance. All piles of rock, no matter how perfectly stacked, must at some point come tumbling down.

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Ok, VIDEO GAMES

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Finishing Unicorn Overlord was a great battle, but it only whetted my appetite for the hardest mode the game has to offer. I chose to begin on Tactical Mode, the third difficulty level out of four, the better to move through the story at an even pace. It was precisely what the doctor ordered, but I suppose I thought the last level would punsih me a bit more--it pierced my guard a time or two and I had to make one major strategic adjustment, but I essentially guillotined it.

Well, I mean, this type of game has gotten harder, more hardcore. Gotta admit it. Fire Emblem had to make itself much harder as it went along in order to prevent the "serious" player (in this rare case, I count myself among them) from straying, outraged by the inclusion of things like dating sims (written in to appease a different, but just as hardcore, demographic of the games--here I am situated more in a middle camp). The interlinked pair for the DS, as I recall, were particularly merciless, and they had not yet even graduated to having actual hi-res tea parties in-game, for which I think they put in like a sixth difficulty level and the ability to have like a hundred and fifty people under your purview. I replayed the first Fire Emblem game I ever played, the U.S. version of Blazing Blade, as released on the Switch Online service--a game, incidentally, with very few such frills and stuffed to the gills with great combat--and the sheer violence that I did to that game, and the time in which I did it frankly surprised me. I had no idea the level to which I had taken its education as a young person, nor the extent to which my abilities had surpassed its demands. 

Here's how weird I am with these types of game on the real: I will probably play through Unicorn Overlord at the same difficulty I started with (tactical, not expert) to get really dialed in on my optimization, then jump straight to the True Zenoiran difficulty, which will murder my units and limit my item uses to ten per battle even as it throttles my honors and valor points (not something that will make battles easier). In this way, I become more acclimated to the game, but the shock of the jump in difficulty develops for the experience a unique gestalt. I like it. It simulates being dunked into cold water in your own bedroom, and having to defend yourself from the attacker in the nude. Bracing. 

All told, bearing all this in mind, realizing now that I will have to resist the urge to play Unicorn Overlord as much as I have been. I will try. One ought not just play a game three times in a row. There is too much other stuff to play! Plus one must make an intimation towards sanity, at least, and crack a book on occasion. Balanced universe.

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Anyway, still early to call it, but Factually Game of the Fucking Year 2024. I guess it would be really fun to make a retroactive list of Factual Games of the Fucking Year--I shall think on this.

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Aw SHIT gotta cram some food and take a shower and go to work. Insane that I have to go to work today, but as we have said since time immemorial, the show must go on.

--JL

#464

Oh no! I let October end without filling the seven-post imaginary quota I already absolved myself from when it comes to the chilling, frigid depths that Factually Macabre 2024 potentially represented. I did not properly discuss ghosts, some might say--some people who might try rereading the presented works with more circumspection. Or at the very least, with widened apertures. But at any rate, four is less than seven, and casting the shadow of ghosts is not the same as discussing ghosts forthrightly, and for all this, I don't apologize at all. This is my little censored and redzoned corner of what was once the vast and untamed Web, and if I want a stretch of silence to symbolize a post about ghosts and perhaps allow you to wonder if I have quit or, of course, expired, then I will, no bones about it. 

Or, some bones. Skeleton bones. 

Factually Macabre 2024

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With that out of the way, I'll tell ya: I have suffered severe spiritual, physical, and chronomatic disruptions since last I posted. So I'm just gonna say some stuff about video games, specifically me and video games, like writing about boys I like and why in my diary, because who gives any fuck about any of that shit, or the fact that it's November and here we go with the fucking politics to where like, by the end of the week, will I have to barricade my house against a pack of inbred lunatics whipped into a frenzy by the depradations of AR trolls, con artists, and race war agitators? Who fucking cares. Who gives a shit what plot point kills you in this batshit freaky narrative. As far as I'm concerned, and as far as I have always been concerned, uniformed strangers with submachine guns could murder or deport me at any time for completely fabricated, indeed, feverishly imagined trangressions or potential transgressions. This has been true since I grew pubic hair, basically. Who gives a fucking fuck--who fucking cares. 

If I get deported, I'm just going to walk to the nearest beach and bum there till I die. Full disclosure. I guess I'm assuming I'll get deported roughly in the direction of my geographic origin, though I guess they could as easily deport me to Greenland if they liked. Who would stop them?

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Closing in on the end of the main story of Unicorn Overlord, and while it seems to be promising a rich enough postgame experience and of course has assured me of its replayability every step of the way, I am lingering over the final bite and filling in many tasks, powering up weapons, filling my pockets, leveling stragglers, etc.--the kind of behavior symptomatic of one who is about to walk away from a finish. Or, as is also true of me, getting ready to absolutely subjugate the final hurdle.

It is my preference, and there is much debate in general around this issue, but it is my preference, if given any kind of chance, to go against the final boss or final enagement of an adventure or campaign with the benefits of the kind of maniacal preparation that allows me to take hold of that entity and snap its scrawny fucking little neckbones purely as a gesture of my dominance. It is how I have always chosen to destroy Sephiroth, for example--laughing at him, as I would laugh at a child whose forehead I was holding onto as they swung their clenched little fists madly at thin air.

So yes, I'm going to go into the eponymous final battle of Unicorn Overlord with my weakest characters leveled higher than the average enemy level by at least three and every person kitted in the absolute cream of the available equipment, their nested arrangements precision-tuned to devastate every mix of units that might be foolish enough to ensnare itself in any one of their ten arrangements, ten steel flowers in deadly bloom, ten buffeting gusts of a howling gale I have dubbed DECA-KAZESHINI.

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Unicorn Overlord consumed me entire, as a flame consumes and causes magnesium to flare like a young star, but here in this slowing period at the end I've had a chance to start up Octopath Traveler and New Pokémon Snap. Pleased to have the headpsace to return to playing Zelda, and being able to play Banjo-Tooie on my Switch is nothing but a joy. Looking forward to FFVII: Crisis Core Reunion when all that has been more worked through.

The new music app from Nintendo, distributed free with the online membership I already subscribe to, is an answered prayer. They have modeled their music player and its organizing principles on iMusic rather than something like spotify, cementing once again how perfect Nintendo and I are for each other and what a harmonious marriage we might enjoy. As a matter of shared preferences and shared values--speaking purely in terms of design and philosophy--no company on earth hews more closely to me, nor I to any other.

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As a parting idea, I'd like to discuss playing the Gunner in the warthog in Halo. I love doing that. It essentially consitutes its own game--mainting your targeting reticule and optimizing the lethality of your payloads during every millisecond of the endeavor is to me one of the highlights of the series.

That's all. I have no problem driving the car or flying the aircraft, and will if called upon--but it is the defense of these machines by way of the most withering possible offense that I truly adore.

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Fucking hell I want only to be alone why does anyone ever leave their little area for any reason? I have, despite my fundamental desire to not do so, done many things recently. Even been to the zoo. I must admit I do enjoy the zoo.

--JL

#462

Internet has been colonized and fucked into the ground, its vital natural resources stripped and refashioned into shitty engineering. Just like meatspace. And just like meatspace, even though everything--everything except people and their perishable works, I guess, so you better try hard to like hominids and their fucking antics--yes, though absolutely everything that was once good and beautiful in the life of this planet is currently diminished and dying, there are still ways to have a good day and see some cool stuff, if you're lucky.

I think myself lucky because again, even in this benighted, grasping age, I can go online and just lose about an hour just looking at valid information about things that make sense, like about a specific genus of tarantula, or the longest-running light bulbs in the world (wikipedia rabbit holes) and clicking around to websites about endangered species and materials science newsposts and blogs about information as a self-organizing principle that uses complex phenomena as both vehicle and life cycle--the ark of the covenant, if you will.

Anyway. Glad I'm not so old and broken that I'm not actively down to spend some time following curiousity sparks around the infinite corridors of time.

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Beat Final Fantasy XII, which was just a regular story until all of a sudden it was full on Final fuckin Fantasy and the tears were streaming down my face as I breathed deeply and irregularly. Wow. I mean it was fucking amazing. Beautiful. Astonishing decision to bury almost all the payoff deep in the third act, all the buildup and rising tension so casual and masked in the long long hours of the grind and tinker. But when that game is ready to reveal its flourish--none are left standing. We all must bow our heads to what is on offer here. To what is being said, and how it came to be spoken.

Put it away in single digits over a hundred hours, about when I just wanted to stop doing endgame side content, which seems good for another twenty hours at least. So that's seven through twelve, with XIII, XII: Revenant Wings, X-2, replaying VII: Dirge of Cerberus (maybe), VII: Crisis Core Reunion, and I through VI on deck. Maybe that chibi version of XV. Oh, maybe Legend and that other one. Should I add the Mana series? I was also thinking about the Dragon Quest series.

However, all that stuff has to wait, because I got and will have to beat The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which is absolutely phenomenal--and I can say the basic reason why very simply. Link is a perfect hero with only one flaw: though he has access to spells and magical items and techniques aplenty in his capacity as the all-rounder of all all-rounders, because of this wonderful, apt-to-the-hand sphericity, Link is not a wizard. He couldn't just be a wizard. However! Princess Zelda has all the conceptual space in the world to be a wizard, ample precedent in fact, and thus, we have--at last--a Zelda game where you get to do a bunch of crazy fucking wizard shit and bonkers magical manipulations that Link can but wistfully dream of.

And even that is sort of in a holding pattern on the way to the second main area part in the quest because the other game I started playing for a palette cleanser after five full Final Fantasy games in a row is Unicorn Overlord which, well. It's absurd is what it is. Keep forgetting to eat, and I'm done wasting time here--gotta go play Unicorn Overlord right goddamn now.

--JL

p.s. for today's Factually Macabre 2024 feel free to consider that real-life grownups expose their own children to grasping pedophiles for secondhand fame and easy money. Well, for the concept of those things. Not even the promise of them.

That's pretty good, right? I don't know if I can come up with much worse. Child soldiers. Internment camps. The kind of cheap, cut-rate, shoe-polish-stinking dirty linoleum corruption that's barely worth remarking upon until its logical cosequences string out to an environmental disaster or a case of mass poisoning, with like enormous blistering lumps growing on the necks of schoolchildren and a whole entire neighborhood of babies with brain damage and dead dogs and cats and tall cancer rates for two decades. That's macabre. 

Oh, you mean like pumpkins and bats and candy-apple shits? Scooby-Doo? I dunno. That stuff's fine if you work for a marketing company that is jointly owned by a holding company whose controlling share is owned by a petroleum giant, and a food conglomerate owned by a company owned by an agricultural conglomerate that owns a separate company that owns about seventy percent of the all the corn grown in North America and, somehow, all the sugar cane on this side of the planet. But that's not what I'm talking about. Unless I am.

p.p.s. We didn't do ghosts today. I am, however, fairly haunted, so there is at least that. Ghosts soon.

#458

When it comes to play, the only analog game that really thrills and grips me is chess. Even pinball, which is basically a video game, merely diverts me for the most part. Besides that, by and large, I find manipulating board games, pencil-and-paper games, dice and card games and the like to be more of a hassle than anything else. I dunno. I just don't feel the spark, the galvanized, intent feeling that is so free and instantaneous when I've got a controller in my hands. 

Used to play around with kind of a specially carved wooden chess set and board that my dad had as a children's toy--the pieces were quite big and blocky--and the old man started teaching me around the same time I was learning to read, so like, two and three years old. Chess is one of the first and only tabletop games I ever learned, and I only started getting really serious about learning it when, predictably, my dad found the right book for me to learn out of, allowing me to make studying it and defeating (killing) him a project I could work on in my own time and through my own imagination.

Though I technically learned to play Super Mario World first, and video games are therefore my first love, as I beame older and more capable, chess took over my ideation and sense of the world in a way that few video games--indeed, few worldly phenomena or cultural apertures--ever have. 

That's the crazy thing about chess. So powerful that it is all games, all puzzles, all contests. It is even all stories. 

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Around when I started becoming proficient at chess, so, seven and eight years old, my dad had me start reading Plato and Aristotle, and a text intended to enrich and supplement called Ética Para Amador, by Fernando Savater, a Spanish philosopher who wished to create a philosophical primer for his collegues to use with new students, an intimate instruction in ethics for his son, and a modernized, slimmed-down work in the tradition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, also a text that has been of great importance in my life. Though I did not complete any of these books cover to cover until I was about ten, they put quite a lot of grist into my little mill right away, more than enough to grind on.

Why bring this up? You know me, dear reader--simply reflecting on my childhood. One of my passions, eh? Plus my chess set is near me.

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Also I blame my inability to perform in the modern academy and indeed modernity itself on this early instruction. Once again, like Oskar Matzerath, I had everything I needed early on, and it stunted me profoundly.

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Guess I'll probably read The Tin Drum again sometime soon. It was a really big deal to me when I read it as a teenager. One of the deeper oceans of those years, like East of Eden and One Hundred Years of Solitude and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 

One crazy thing I did book-wise was taking my second-ever recreational Adderalls and staying up all night to read  Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways from cover to cover. Doing this changed my brain permanently. That would have been in college, at age nineteen, which feels at this advanced age like relating some Shakespearean apocrypha; like nineteen-year-old William Blake was in the next dorm room lying on his bed, staring at his ceiling in the dark and weeping silently. 

Another crazy book thing I did was read The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings and Unfinished Tales and The Hobbit every single year. Now its's every few years. Funny how the landscapes change. 

A final crazy book thing is how if I'm having anxiety I might just read like eight thousand pages of George R.R. Martin's words. It is a  warm comfort to me, you see, how very many of them there are. The pleasure of their arrangements and their construction is soothing on top of that, and of course, we circle back to chess--very comforting, the chess of his writing, his books, his mind.

With soothing anxiety, a different remedy is listening to Patton Oswalt routines. Something about that voice of his--he just makes me feel calmer, even when he's agitated.

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Good bet a lot of this post is repeating myself. Well, one is bound to, on occasion. That, too, can be comforting to an anxious turn of mind.

--JL