Tag: gaming

Spec Ops: The Line after 13 Years

TiberiusLeave a comment

When do I start feeling like a hero?

The draft for the triple comparison between Max Payne 3, Sleeping Dogs, and Spec Ops: The Line has been finished, but before I publish that I first wanted to get my thoughts on the last of these three out of the way. Spec Ops: The Line, a 2012 third-person shooter whose stated-mission purpose was to examine the era of the “modern military shooter,” and knock it down a peg. Unfortunately for it in that regard, the message was very ignored as Call of Duty and surprise return Medal of Honor had both had their releases around the same time. Black Ops II on November 13 and Warfighter on October 5. When did Spec Ops release? June 26 that year. It was released at a time when these types of games were all the rage, wearing the skin of a similar game while also lambasting the Bush administration for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. By my estimate, it was successful at only one of those, but only because so many other media outlets talked about it as it was happening. For a laugh though, take a gander at this:

Channel: Bloomberg News

Right after the Russo-Ukrainian War went hot.

But I’m somersaulting over the howitzer — let’s rewind. The main inspiration behind Spec Ops: The Line aside from the U.S.’s concurrent foreign policy in West Asia and a criticism of the state of the modern military shoot ’em up was the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and it’s very successful(ly troubled) film adaptation Apocalypse Now. The book was written to highlight the controversy of Leopold II outright owning and micromanaging his personal territory of the Congo in 1899 while the film took that, applied it to the Johnson and Nixon administration’s handling of the Vietnam War, very soon after the pullout and the fall of Saigon to the communists. Suffice it to say, not only was Spec Ops well within its own element by critiquing Bush and the war on terror, it follows a time-honored tradition of satirizing current events in a widely popular medium.

If it wasn’t obvious at the outset, there’s going to be spoilers. I’d encourage you to play the game for yourself, but after 13 years and a new generation of consoles and updates to operating systems, Yager Development hasn’t ported it to modern consoles and most digital storefronts have delisted it. It was a hassle for me to even find an emulated version and the one I have is beset with technical issues. None of them game-breaking, but if you’ve ever dealt with emulation before, you know that the game you emulate/pirate, etc. isn’t going to be the same game that would’ve been released years ago. An emulated game isn’t the same as one bought at GameStop or Best Buy. Alternatively, there’s searching endlessly online for a seventh-generation console and then ultimately a hard copy of the game, but as we progress further into digitization, hard copies will simultaneously be a thing of the past and a priceless collector’s item. Apologies for the rant. Now let’s get to Spec Ops.

The cover alone would’ve cost it sales if the gameplay didn’t after reviewers got their hands on it.

The game begins with Lieutenant Colonel John Konrad, commander of the 33rd Infantry Regiment authorizing a relief mission in Dubai after the city get’s blasted with wall-to-wall sandstorms. Trouble starts to sprout with the native Emiratis who take issue with the high and mighty US of A walking around as if they own the place. A peace deal/non-aggression pact is taken, but very soon broken by rogue actors among either the Emiratis or the Americans. Whatever the case, the ceasefire is short-lived and insurgents emerge to take back Dubai and handle it themselves. From what I know of history and geopolitics, this sounds eerily close to a similar problem that Somalia has been facing since the early 1990s, but far less complicated than Somalia’s entrenched clan system. Or more like post-Gaddafi Libya. For a brief overture, the United Arab Emirates, where Dubai is located, didn’t suffer as terribly as its North African brothers in the Arab Spring, so trouble in paradise is somewhat unheard of but still within the realm of possibility.

The 33rd Infantry gets swamped with each of these problems and Col. Konrad declares the mission a miserable failure. He could’ve abandoned ship at the first sign of trouble and allowed his men to go back home, but he knuckled down and kept them there. As a result, the soldiers have gone stir-crazy fighting an unknown enemy, and I have to stop here momentarily. I fully understand what the game is intending, but I’m not so certain the devs at Yager know what they’re talking about. In Heart of Darkness, the Belgians were very much an invasive species meddling in on Congolese affairs, but there wouldn’t be a war to fight in the territory until 1915, because when empires go to war, so too do the colonies. Load up, Taiwan and Korea, you’re taking Tsingtao because Tokyo said so.

For Apocalypse Now, the Vietnamese were an amalgamation of southern Vietnamese communists receiving aid from the North Vietnamese Army, China, Laotian and Khmer communist forces and the Soviet Union. There were also veteran guerrillas who fought the Japanese in WWII, so this is the ultimate conflict where the U.S. wouldn’t be able to tell friend from foe anymore. Come Iraq and Afghanistan… the same problem from Southeast Asia followed into West and South Asia, but looking at the leaders and the countries of the time, stability was the one thing neither country had. Afghanistan had nearly as many civil wars as Rome did in the 3rd century and wouldn’t really have a case for nationalism whatsoever. Iraq, on the other hand, had a tenuous government in the hands of a dictator with an iron fist who would suffer from his own consequences thrice in a row over the years. What I’m getting at is, the situation for Iraq and Afghanistan was a top-down problem. The Belgian Congo had a “government” not much better than Leopold’s personal property, but nothing was threatening the Belgians until 1914; Vietnam had a series of governments from themselves to the French to Japan to the French again until decolonization, so there wasn’t a question of who would lead from where once the guns stopped firing. For Iraq, the cradle of civilization had rough years after Saddam’s capture and execution, but was able to get back on its feet and keep ISIS from rising to prominence ever again. Afghanistan’s last stable government was when it was a kingdom, toppled by communists, invaded by the Soviets, and subject to civil wars in the 1990s that saw the Taliban rise, fall, and gradually rise once again after playing the long game. And it hasn’t really been the same ever since.

I’m more than a little torn on this. On the one hand, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban weren’t an unknown enemy, but on the other, they blended in so well with civilian populations that the U.S. handling it personally was why there were accusations and even admissions of war crimes against an unarmed populace, but then again I don’t recall stories of soldiers rounding up civilians in concentration camp-style living conditions. Not from this conflict at least—the Philippines in 1900 surely but nothing from the Middle East in living memory. And no, Abu Ghraib doesn’t count because no one with the right mind was okay with that. All the soldiers involved have been shamed and disgraced. Say what you will about Bush-era foreign policy but for the love of God, don’t lie about it. Especially now, that we pulled out of Iraq during Obama’s first term.

Sorry about all the tangents, when it comes to myths surrounding the war on terror, I can’t help it.

The entire thing is incredibly complicated, so I look at criticism with an electron microscope. To get back to the meat of this review: 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (SFOD-D), colloquially known as Delta Force sends a squad of soldiers, Capt. Martin Walker, Lt. Alphonso Adams, and Sgt. John Lugo to extract Col. Konrad and assess the physical and mental readiness of the Damned 33rd. They learn that the Emiratis may have been incensed to rise up thanks to meddling from Langley, and allow me this tangent. Every time I hear about the CIA, I get the urge to have sloppy drunken sex with a loaded shotgun. I’ve come to loathe the use of the CIA as a plot device for a lot what goes on in the world. True or not, it’s gotten lazy as hell, and I’m pretty sure it births new myths or perpetuates existing myths, some of which can be dispelled by the CIA themselves, but I doubt they’re allowed to do so, in case the public meddling is ruining an ongoing project.

Certainly would explain their Cold War behavior, eh?

Anyway, CIA perpetuates conflict in the UAE between the Army and the rebelling Emiratis and either neither the soldiers nor rebels are none the wiser or the “rogue” unit knows what’s up, but can’t get it through to the rebelling Emiratis because of high tensions. Meanwhile, these Delta Force operators have declared the unit rogue, their commander MIA, but still have faith that the mission can go on (it can’t), and over the course of the game, things keep getting worse and worse. The culmination of all of this cascades into one of the most disturbing moments in this game. More disturbing than the doctor harvesting organs from the Comando Sombra in Max Payne 3… or the doctor harvesting organs for the 18K in Sleeping Dogs… hmmm…

In Sleeping Dogs’ case, the police missions tend to be optional, but if you want super cop Wei Shen, then get to tagging and bagging!

They screwed up with the chargrill and have to make do with 70% of a burned meal. You know the trope of the traumatic experience being handwaved away with a hasty generalization? Like the one creepypasta where trauma victims, most commonly rape victims, retreat to a fantasy where they’re not being raped, heavily repressing the memory for as long as possible, at times for life? Well, that’s precisely what happens to Capt. Walker in this moment. This virtuous Special Forces officer who makes no mistakes and does nothing wrong f[gunshots]ks up once… colossally so, and admittedly should face a court-martial for the incident. In an admittedly weak defense, all three men weren’t in the right mind to make a sound decision, but to counter that, a period of R&R would be granted so that they could go and investigate the situation properly. For all that’s been going on in the plot so far, even the most bad ass Special Forces soldier would need to rest and Walker (because the plot wants it) doesn’t even rest for a second; and depending on your mindset, this is either a two-cent excuse for shock value or a magnificent pants-pull. Admittedly, I lean more pants-pull-wards, but this was well after the game was out and before my time in the Army. Now I’m towards the middle because I can see how someone would think this was cheap.

And the rest of the mission is almost never the same. The mental games and break from reality, Walker’s gradual descent into mental hell (complete with hallucinations of actual hell); the game stops pretending you’re the protagonist and downright calls you a monster for continuing to play. On the one hand, this can seem manipulative especially towards the end when you finally confront “Konrad,” but on the other hand, it takes “follow the objective marker” and kicks it into high gear. It reminds me of the Milgram experiment where participants were deceived into dutifully obeying atrocious directions. That experiment was one of several used to explain how the Nazis and German society could be complicit in crimes against humanity… though slightly undercut that the penalty was execution, even for the last-ditch militia propped up by Hitler himself, the Volkssturm.

Towards the end, you finally reach Konrad’s HQ, only to learn that he’s been dead the whole time and the voice in Walker’s ear was an auditory hallucination. That circles back to what I said earlier about traumatic experiences being hyper-repressed by the victim/survivor. “I’m not wrong! The world is wrong!!” Yeah, the devs didn’t want anyone to enjoy this, and this may have been where players kept yelling at Walker to abandon ship and declare the mission a failure. Being in the Army, I was doing that at the first sign of trouble, that being when a CIA agent was torturing a junior officer about three chapters in.

The series finale of the TV Show M*A*S*H revealed that the character Hawkeye blames himself for the death of an infant when a Korean woman smothers it, playing it off as a chicken all along. Walker did the same thing, passing off the deaths of civilians on Konrad.

Now there’s two endings in the penultimate chapter: 1. Let the apparition of Konrad gun you down, or 2. Shoot first and proceed to the final chapter which has three endings. Soldiers come to retrieve you and there are three responses: 1. Shoot them all dead and continue to live in the ruins of Dubai as a mad man; 2. Shoot and commit suicide by soldier because you’ve seen enough and this is the closest you’ll get to answering for your sins; 3. Surrender and let the soldiers take you back presumably for questioning and a court-martial. The last of these would see a mental health specialist determine Walker’s mental condition. If able to stand trial, that’s a burial plot 60 feet under Fort Leavenworth. If not, then wherever the line is drawn depends on whether Walker disobeyed orders and took charge of an authorized mission playing vigilante. He did and he did, which would be grounds for conduct unbecoming, though probably means something along the lines of a discharge of either general under honorable conditions or other than honorable discharge if evidence comes up short. As for the use of weapons on civilians, dishonorable. War crimes tribunal. 600 feet under the prison, let the casket melt. To further elaborate on the apparition of Konrad, him shooting you (or you shooting yourself) is an admission that the mission was an even worse failure than what Konrad tried to do by intervening, but shooting the apparition is an insistence that Walker was in the right all along and that every end justified the means, even the deaths of soldiers and civilians. No matter the outcome, Walker’s mind is essentially mashed potatoes. He might have been able to wave it off as Konrad’s doing, but after the shocking moment, the hallucinations, and the search for a golden nugget in a world of s[avalanche]t, there was no way.

Do I recommend the game then? Like I said, it was a struggle to find it as it’s since been delisted from digital stores, leaving emulation as the only way to experience it firsthand. And I don’t recommend it for the gameplay. It’s purposely clunky and cumbersome as an overall critique on the genre at the time but learning that neither CoD nor BF nor even Medal of Honor, belching its last before indefinite hiatus, took that lesson particularly to heart. Or rather the first two put their battlefields elsewhere while, as said before, MoH, went to sleep for the time being.

Also keep in mind that it was a critique on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which began under Bush Jr., continued under Obama (who by many accounts droned more people than his predecessor and successor), kept on under Trump’s first and officially ended under Biden, though to clarify, Obama saw the end of Iraq and Biden saw the pullout of Afghanistan. Being 13 years away from the release of the game and long after both conflicts have concluded, the message of the game has certainly aged. It’s not like a WWI-based game where warfare changed, but wars didn’t. The war on terror isn’t the same as a war against a nation where POWs are expected to be repatriated at the end. Knowing how Iraq ended, if the message was to end the wars or at least get out of Afghanistan at the time, it kind of falls flat with how complicated the whole ordeal was. Unless the message was, don’t make it America’s mess, we don’t need to keep seeing to it personally, there’s better ways to go about this, then fair enough, we didn’t need to commit as many to either conflict as we actually did. But would we still be Americans if we didn’t watch the tower fall in person?

America after winning a war, confident that the ideas died with the men…

Yahtzee Croshaw reviewed the game at the time and may have put it more succinctly as an outsider of sorts to American boondoggles in the sand. Now that all of that is done, to look at three 2012 releases and how well they tackle corruption.

Channel: The Escapist

Semi-Lost Media

Tiberius2 Comments

A Tragedy of Media

The title of this post is meant to have two purposes: to highlight how media can become lost and the modern era’s means of recovering lost media. There isn’t always a perfect method to prevent lost media nor is there a perfect means to recover lost media without sacrifice to the media in question. I’ve faced this problem personally while gaming and emulating games, but I’ll get to that soon.

A brief overview of lost media is any piece of media whose preservation methods were either nonexistent or severely compromised to the point that part, most or the entire medium is effectively ruined or destroyed. Surviving copies can’t be located or recovered because they either don’t exist or sometimes won’t be released publicly, even after the copyright expires or the original author dies. For the longest time for obvious reasons, this has mostly applied to film, like so:

This film was released in 1927. It was kept in the MGM vault for decades until all surviving copies were destroyed in the 1965 vault fire. As of this writing, it only survives in posters like this and surviving still shots.

Yet as time has progressed, more and more forms of media have been created, to include video games which can also become vulnerable to media destruction. In one extreme case, Adobe Flash.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Adobe_Flash_Player_32.svg

Five years have passed and I still miss it.

This critical piece of software was launched in November 1996 and has formed an important cultural touchstone on the internet ever since. Countless creators, new and veteran, have used it to make everything from videos to short films to even video games. There used to be countless flash games and even websites hosting those games. They were inescapable, until Adobe ceased support for the software on New Year’s Eve 2020.

A not insignificant portion of these games couldn’t be saved and are thus forever lost outside of admittedly s[dial-up]ty videos recorded in 144P in 2007. Yeah, they were hard to look at and aged really terribly, but having aged media is better than having no media. It shows the technological progress between, say, VHS tapes and Blu-Ray discs.

The crux in the custard I’m getting to is that efforts to preserve media have been undertaken for over a century, and while not perfect, as an advocate of piracy and emulation, I also advocate the preservation and, by extension, re-release of old media in as many forms as possible, especially when the format in question begins to deteriorate due to age. My grandmother clung tightly to old VHS tapes and while they may have been endlessly playable in 2005 for example, they had problems at the time and have considerably gotten worse since. Same for all the old floppy disks she never threw away.

In my documented experience on this blog, in order of difficulty from easiest to find to Raiders of the Lost Ark, video games have been fairly easier compared to movies. And movies are still easier to search up compared to TV series. I say fairly and not absolutely because digital stores like Steam and Epic Games Store have delisted video games before and will nonetheless do so again for a variety of reasons. MMORPGs are most vulnerable to destruction when the devs can no longer support the servers due to something like acquisition, shutdown, or “cost-cutting measures.” That last one is less excusable because video games haven’t had a better time to be profitable than the modern day. You can pick your favorite examples of this, but my pick for one of the best-selling video games ever goes to:

Once RockStar realized this game s[gunshots]ts platinum, it hasn’t turned the faucets off ever since. Notice the gap in time between this and Red Dead Redemption 2.

Time and tech is another factor for this. Games released on arcade cabinets or 16- and 32-bit consoles are merely a collection of pixels and a third party emulator is seldom needed. In some cases, they function the same as a browser game. Sixth-generation video games do require a third party emulator but I’ve yet to face any problems downloading them. Just needed to make space. Seventh-generation has proven the most difficult to emulate. On average a PS2 game can be downloaded to PCSX2, for instance, in several minutes to an hour or two, but PS3 and Xbox 360 games can take double or triple that, especially with a spotty connection. Maybe a signal booster would help, but the area of El Paso is surrounded by mountains, so the servers in this part of the country may be considerably weaker than more densely populated areas. Testing this out myself would cost me money and resources I don’t have.

I made mention at the end of the last post that I was planning on posting in the future a comparison of three underappreciated 2012 video games that tackled corruption in different aspects, one of those being Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a store front that was carrying the PC release as it had been delisted ages ago. I’ll elaborate on that in the post, but in order to play it, I had to download a console version for four hours.

This is what I mean when I say it’s important to preserve as much media as we can. Spec Ops: The Line was one such example of a hard to find piece of media. I was worried it was only available in YouTube playthroughs from years ago, but digital libraries keeping the files available online were a godsend for this endeavor. For other games, this isn’t going to be the case. All traces of the game in question could be lost forever.

This wasn’t the sole inspiration for this post. Actually, region-locking of movies was the inspiration, but with the Stop Killing Games initiative going viral, I might as well include it here.

Going back to MMORPGs and similar online games, if a developer goes under or gets eaten by another dev, it’s not their fault if their efforts to stay afloat don’t work. And as I said earlier, the argument of keeping the servers up is too expensive faceplants epically when video games continuously make tons of money.

Although not the original victim of media destruction, the earliest films were most vulnerable to it due to attitudes towards them since inception. A lot of the first examples from the late 19th century were admittedly glorified experiments consisting of multiple still shots giving the illusion of a picture moving independently, but these early examples helped to perfect the craft. Science yesterday, artform today. But a lot of these old films were made with hazardous materials, notably cellulose nitrate. It could catch fire easily and long before the marriage between sound and sight, many of the silent films of a century-plus ago can no longer be recovered. At first, the reasons for preservation were balked at, but efforts to try and preserve it have been made. I consider the zenith of home releases to be the VHS and succeeding DVD-Video eras as both formats have re-released tons of TV and movies with estimates in the hundreds of thousands.

Then we progressed to digital streaming after some time and my main concern with that has to do with licensing and even region locking. If the license expires, you might find yourself unable to view the series you paid for. And if you move from one region to another, you might have to invest in a VPN to see the series you paid for. In a more perfect world, this wouldn’t be the case, but now that buying is no longer owning, piracy is no longer theft.

I do make some concessions with this. I don’t pirate modern games because of the risk of anti-piracy software. Some of the games I do pirate are from dead developers.

No matter the form media takes, it’s always important to save it for the archives. Allow future generations to be able to engage with it, even if it hasn’t aged well graphically. Ed Boon may be perpetually embarassed by Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, but it’s not like nothing was learned from that. Yesterday’s mistakes make for tomorrow’s masterpieces.

I’m still in the process of drafting up that comparison between Max Payne 3, Sleeping Dogs, and Spec Ops: The Line, but I want to preface that with a review on Spec Ops: The Line first. Now that I’m able to play it on RPCS3, I’m in a better position to give my thoughts on more than just its plot.

Разве это не то, чего ты хотела?

TiberiusLeave a comment

Forgive me for using Google Translate for the title

Advanced weebs reading this are all too familiar with the Yandere trope, also known as “If I’m not the only woman you know, I will do things that will put me on a watchlist in multiple countries~!”

“You mean… you weren’t already…?” wondered the Wonder Bread male MC before he gets assaulted and threatened with snu snu.

To catch the newcomers up to speed, a yandere is any character (the most common ones being female) who’s so obsessively infatuated with the object of their lustful desires that they will cross legal and physical boundaries to be one with them. I made a joke in my Taste My Saliva post that Mikoto Urabe was Yandere-shaped what with the hentai protagonist haircut, her detached attachment (oxymoron?) to Tsubaki-kun, and her black belt in scissor-fu, but a common trait shared by many Yanderes is that they almost always follow through on the threats of violence and in more ways than one double as serial predators if not outright rapists. The objects of their “affection” rarely get a chance to consent, everything is a weapon if their creative enough, and short of a horror movie scenario, even if the object of their affection died naturally or by their hand, it doesn’t necessarily mean death would stop them.

I wouldn’t put it past NHentai or another such sight to have a tag in the same vein of “post-mortem erection.” Please do not introduce me to such a thing, I already have a hard time accepting Revenge of the Molesting Mage despite the decent, if formulaic, plot progression.

Now, with the knowledge that the Yandere is essentially a horny for romance horror monster archetype, I humbly introduce you to the horror game that took the Internet by storm at launch and has birthed a dynasty’s worth of memes: MiSide!

Awww, look at her! Look at how cute she is. Almost makes gore-y sex with your bloody, mangled corpse worth it…

…is what I would say if the rational part of my brain was missing. Her top is red and so are her flags. Developed by a pair of Russian coders forming the group, AIHASTO, MiSide is about a nameless, generic male protagonist getting suckered into an interactive video game about being a loving boyfriend/husband/significant other type to a fictional girl with a dark side that makes her the star of nearly any given true crime documentary and an average Tuesday in Rossiya.

After days of playing the game, you get literally suckered into the game to potentially live the rest of your life (trapped depending on how you look at it) with Yandere antagonist Mita. If you do certain actions beforehand, you can unlock the prerequisites to live a false life in the Matrix as the prized plaything of this drop dead gorgeous sociopath. Do something else and down the rabbit hole you go where you specifically are the rabbit and Mita the wolf on the prowl.

Fans of Beastars, erase this from your mental imagery right this second. The romance exhibited in the series is in no way comparable to the absolute horror in MiSide.

Slight spoilers for the specifics, there’s a few moments where you can poke around in the beginning when Mita says you don’t have to or even help her with more than what she asks for, as a sort of obedience test. Thanks to my gentlemanly behavior, I failed and was witness to real terror. So, the game contains more than one Mita and the one advertised on the game on Steam is Crazy Mita. The other variants have multiple different shapes and personalities and if I were to scrutinize more heavily, I’d say, they absorb elements from different genres and, dare I say, different horror movies; some of which I might have seen and some others I really need to, even a second viewing. I s[blyat]t you not, there’s a Playable Teaser reference in the game.

Never mind looking at legacy British and American horror movies and games, AIHASTO looked at Japan for this one.

This part also reminded many that Konami can’t get f[yarou!]ked hard enough for cancelling Silent Hills. But anyway, the carnival horrors gets progressively disturbing, surreal, and at times paranormal. That’s the most I’ll speak of on the plot because I wish for you to experience it for yourself.

How’s the gameplay? Well, looking back on it, I figure some extra inspiration came from Resident Evil 7’s and Outlast’s use of first-person POV. Jump scares come up in the select bits that they’re supposed to, but what else is implemented is the destruction of the 4th wall. Not dissimilar from the likes of Eternal Darkness or Doki Doki Literature Club (or even the nightmare sections in Max Payne plus its fourth wall break), Mita in her many forms talks directly to both the protagonist and the player. Although you choose the protagonist’s name, he still has dialogue and is as involved in the story as any other character, one of Mita’s several victims and the next on her impromptu serial killer list. Not content to mess about with the player, Mita also interacts with the environment in some manner. It’s not as extensive as tricking you into thinking you’re suffering from an audio problem or asking you to create a new folder in your files. But there was a clear inspiration from elsewhere.

For you the player, since the framework is a dark twist on a dating/life/social sim like… The Sims, the horror elements make a lasting impression, but so does the down time with some of the other Mita variants. Puzzle gameplay, dating sim gameplay, PvE co-op; all these elements would conflict with each other in a worse designed game, but for an indie, they play so well, that AIHASTO hasn’t just cooked–they have a whole recipe and MiSide is their beef stew. Please, sir. May I have some more?

Channel: Movieclips

Knowing Mita though, it’ll be my own still-beating heart or pumping veins…

You’re not entirely limited to running the f[gong]k away, as select sequences have you engaging in puzzle gameplay or even interacting in a playful way with some of the other Mita clones as the game by this point wants to still believe it’s a dating sim, even if Mita wants to harvest your organs for even worse purposes than making a couple thousand on the black market. Frankenstein’s monster…?

Horror is one thing, but some kind of horror comedy video game would be appreciated even slightly.

Suffice it to say, MiSide pays homage to all the old tropes within whilst putting its own spin on what it brings to the table, sort of like the video game equivalent of the Scream franchise when it debuted in 1996. Taking the piss out of every horror movie as the respective franchise lost favor to trends at the time and pumping it full of blood it harvested from a pig farm. For MiSide, I can’t say for certain whether horror games have lost their knife edge since, like isekai anime, I don’t particularly gun for it exclusively nor can I say that MiSide was trying the same thing here. For all I know, AIHASTO have been working on this brainchild for yonks before they decided to show the world what they were making. Add me to the list of other reviewers when I say that they succeeded.

Even post-release, it was still a work-in-progress of sorts what with all the patches since it released in December. Nevertheless, praise should go to all the voice actors who could convey the emotion in each of the featured languages. As an American, Russian anything can sound intimidating to me even if I’m just looking to get some pizza. With the devs being Russian, it was the first language patch to get the voicework. Down the line came the Japanese voicework and a quick clip of Japanese-speaking Mita vs Russian-speaking Mita, my American ears quickly applied different levels of dread on Mita in that one example. Finally, English-speaking Mita who finally translated the weight of the emotions in her scenes. Language, tone of voice, or merely silently reading the text as it appears on screen, the dialogue lines do well to translate the weight of a given scene to the player, and when it goes hand-in-hand with the gameplay, I can’t help but line up for seconds.

Chibi or not, this smug aura emits superiority… I am compelled to defeat her in a competition!

Roguelike NSFW II: Erect Boogaloo

Tiberius1 Comment

There’s a market for everything these days

Earlier this year in February, I wrote about an Adults Only game called Scarlet Maiden, about a scantily clad heroine on a quest to defeat the Prime Evil one lewdening at a time. Once again, under the Critical Bliss publishing flag, I’ve found another AO-rated 16-bit game about slashing mooks and exposing boobs but with an emphasis on magic. The game in question: FlipWitch – Forbidden Sex Hex:

Should’ve known there’d be a bunch of fanart when looking for the title screen for this game, short of booting it up for the screenshot…

As the Flip Witch under the tutelage of a great witch named Beatrix, you’re main objective is to defeat the Chaos Witch, an Egypt-themed triclops witch messing with you and all the creatures of the land from her very own castle behind a door with six unique pyramid-shaped locks. To get them all, you have to traverse different realms and defeat the bosses to get the keys. Depending on your level, you’ll either eat dirt and be shown a game over screen where the monsters of a specific realm have their way with you, or you’ll blaze through relatively unscathed. This time, I’m torn over whether to conclude that this game uses permadeath as a feature since it doesn’t have a lives’ system, but on the other hand, there’s designated save points where you gain everything you used during your playthrough, crystal teleporters to fast travel between places you’ve been and a health restoration-like system in the form of a peach that gets upgraded with each quest you complete.

Speaking of quests, Beatrix’s secondary focus is to partake in such quests for health and magic upgrades. Some of these are found interspersed across the game enlarging your health and magic bars so that you can use more, to include the more taxing magic items, and others are gained by completing a certain number of quests. Reaching said number adds a little notification in the form of Beatrix’s sprite in the upper righthand corner to let you know that upgrades are available.

More quests mean more upgrades until you max everything out and steamroll the monsters like a one-man army. Or more like one man and one woman, both of which are you. The “flip” in FlipWitch refers to your ability to switch genders at will, an acquired skill that factors both into the quests and the game over screens, so male or female, something is gonna rise and ain’t gonna be a shield hero.

Didn’t even have to censor this one.

Combat this time around doesn’t give you the option to sex up a monster for upgrade points like Sin in Scarlet Maiden or even to add to the bestiary. For the most part, the monsters are more or less segregated to their own designated parts of the game map. For instance, only goblins roam the woodlands, demons stay in the demon realm of Jigoku, mermaids are in Umi Umi, etc., etc. and they all have their own unique game over screens for when you die and for what gender you were when you died.

The weapon variety is also limited to just your wand as opposed to any number of swords and other fantasy weapons like in Scarlet Maiden. Not to mention, the only enemy-types that do show genitalia are the female enemy types. The males do show d[spurt!]k, but often after the game over screen. So unlike Scarlet Maiden, the BDSM term “switch” has a different context. A more literal context. Where the game lacks weapon variety, it makes up for it in magic variety, by giving you more magical powers to use against enemies. The wand is capable of firing projectiles and select characters of different types that don’t give you quests give you different magic powers to use which require short tutorials to get the hang of.

As for the quests, the standard format they use is go to place, get quest, deliver thing to X, get sexy rewards. Like so:

The one twist these types of quests use is that specific costumes need to be bought with the coins you acquire through gameplay. Different costumes unlock different quests for different variations of a similar reward (sexy times), which ties into the whole Metroidvania aspect the game advertises. Nonlinear gameplay allowing for backtracking to important locations with new knowledge and more rewards and potential upgrades to finally defeat the Chao Witch…!

…which I’m very close to doing as of this writing. I’m so close!!

Recommendations? Give it a go. There’s keyboard controls like in Scarlet Maiden, but unless you’ve got the fingers for it, plug in a controller. Do what I did and program a PS3 controller to read like an Xbox controller; it’ll work the same. The fact that I’m very close to 100% completion and very close to defeating the Chaos Witch should all the recommendation needed for this game. The controls will feel slightly more sluggish at the beginning, but once you get used to it, especially after Scarlet Maiden’s fluidity and — for lack of a better term — bounciness, it’s pretty much a breeze. Currently on sale for the Summer Steam sales, but even not, $15 is a pretty good deal.

Mortal Kombat HD Continuation

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The continuation of a legacy

The final part of this Legacy Video Game Trilogy concludes with a hard reboot that still has the sensibilities to pay homage to the most awkward yet charmingly nostalgic part of its existence. So to recap: MK Deadly Alliance gave us an ungodly pairing in the two sorcerers Quan Chi and Shang Tsung, whose combined strength and abilities gave them the leverage to revive the Dragon King’s Army and wreak havoc on all the realms, without Shao Kahn f[screams]king them over or Liu Kang stopping them.

Not without Raiden’s intervention and before I continue on that, I had time to watch some MK 4 endings and in both Raiden’s and Fujin’s endings, Raiden accepts ascension to the position of Elder God while Fujin replaces him as Protector of Earthrealm. Raiden chose him as a successor and Fujin accepted it. But in Deadly Alliance, Fujin doesn’t appear until 2006’s Armageddon. Plot-hole? Not so. On the production side of things, the devs didn’t think Fujin had the recognition and popularity as the Thunder God so they put him back in this game in arguably one of his better looks.

Canonically, 7 feet tall.

Lore-wise, the death of Liu Kang made all the difference. Fujin hasn’t been demoted by way of a performance review; it’s just that Raiden’s attachment to half of his Shaolin Monk disciples influenced his decision to step down and see the fall of the Deadly Alliance personally. I don’t completely see this as an official source, since it came from r/MortalKombat and I wasn’t there when they were developing the game for release in 2002, but I’m glad I did.

Anyway, Raiden saw to it personally to essentially raise a militia of Earth’s best allies and defenders to destroy the Deadly Alliance. They failed, so much so that nearly all of them had become sacrifices for the undead army. Come Deception time, Raiden stood as the final bastion between freedom and conquest. At his defeat, the partnership between Quan Chi and Shang Tsung effectively evaporated and with the holder of Shinnok’s amulet (namely Quan Chi) being the one who can control the army, the two fight in Shang Tsung’s palace… and are immediately greeted by Onaga himself, coming to reclaim his rightful army that he knew was in the hands of the sorcerers.

The wiki explains that the Amulet has control over the army somehow (Boon and Tobias must’ve skipped that step), but its power and influence are superseded by Onaga’s heart. So you know you’re f[metal clanking]ked when the undead soldiers you painstakingly spent so much time and effort to revive, bow to their original master and not you. That reminds me of a Martin Mystery episode where an evil wizard attempts to revive Qin Shi Huang and the terracotta army only to realize that Emperor Qin was the furthest thing from a stable ruler and that in the show the terracotta army was created to keep the old emperor from getting out.

Misplaced balance of power and all that, Quan Chi, Shang Tsung, and Raiden temporarily work together to destroy Onaga, but two sorcerers and a temporary Elder God aren’t enough to destroy Onaga. Raiden’s last ditch effort doesn’t even dent him and worse he has the Kamidogu and Shinnok’s Amulet. He doesn’t need that for the army, but he does need it to merge the Kamidogu into one and morph into the One Being from which the realms were created. Oof, heavy stuff, huh?

By Armageddon time, it’s become apparent that the warriors in the realms are too aware of the forces that created them, and the Elder Gods consult with Argus and Delia, the Protectors of Edenia, to seek a solution so that none can threaten existence again. Argus suggested death, Delia suggested annulment, and so millennia ago, they created the firespawn Blaze so that his death in Mortal Kombat could bring about one of these outcomes, but a cascading effect seen over the course of the games led to an unintended outcome: even distribution of power. Not to mention, part of this plan was a quest which would test which of Argus’ and Delia’s sons, Taven and Daegon, would handily succeed them. The rules of primogeniture determined Taven the successor as the older brother, but Blaze was kidnapped and enslaved by Onaga’s holy men to guard the last dragon egg.

Blaze kept constant mental contact with their guardian dragons, Orin and Caro, but when he was kidnapped, that contact was lost and Caro mistakenly revived Daegon earlier than expected, kicking off much of the plot of the 3D era of games. At this revelation, Taven’s quest morphed from competition to a race to become the successor of Argus, seeing as the alternative was the Edenian equivalent of Shao Kahn. And they already had that… in the form of Shao Kahn!

Some of the endings, once again, connect as Taven is rewarded while Daegon is punished in Daegon’s ending. Raiden’s is a culmination of what he endured from Deadly Alliance to this, and Shao Kahn’s ending flows nearly seamlessly into the intro for Mortal Kombat 9. Rather than Taven become a full-god and see the failure of the quest, Shao Kahn ascended to the top of the Pyramid of Argus to defeat Blaze. In Armageddon, it was shown that Dark Raiden struck a deal with Outworld to spare Earthrealm if Raiden stopped Taven and Daegon from completing their quest. Something Light Raiden would NEVER do, even in desperation.

The opening cinematic of MK9 shows that this didn’t pan out as he’d hoped, seeing as Shao Kahn unsurprisingly reneged on that deal and used his newfound godhood to pummel Raiden before Raiden used his last moments to relay a message to his past self. The overarching crux of the message being “don’t become me,” but the most important one being “He must win,” where Past Raiden spends the game finding out who “he” refers to.

Thus, this game in the HD timeline redoes the first three MK games. The first third of the game is a near-mirror of the previous 1992 one, even with Sub-Zero’s death at Scorpion’s hands. And like the original it ends with Liu Kang’s victory in Mortal Kombat, but the intended outcome worsens the damage in Raiden’s amulet. It cracked when Raiden received the original “he must win” message and the course of the game shows it getting worse and worse.

The second third of the game is essentially a different Mortal Kombat II, and much so. Shang Tsung still got reduced to that of a fighter like in the original, but rather than it being simply a punishment for failure, the sorcerer convinced Shao Kahn to move the tournament to Outworld and fight on their terms. Raiden obviously said no, but this was less of an agreement between equals and more of a demand from a tyrant who forced his hand by unleashing Baraka’s Tarkatan horde on the Wu Shi Academy.

And that game is fantastic if you ignore its writing.

Forced to compete now on Shao Kahn’s terms, Raiden and the gaggle of Earthrealm warriors he’s recruited go to Outworld but also to investigate the real source of the cracks in the amulet and discover why Raiden’s efforts are failing fate. One of several notable changes here is that instead of Smoke becoming a cyborg like before, that becomes the fate of the new Sub-Zero Kuai Liang. If you recall, in the old timeline, Noob and Sub-Zero were brothers. Noob the more ruthless of the two when he was Grandmaster seeing as he led the charge against the Shirai Ryu and slaughtered them wholesale, but was further blamed for the murder of Scorpion’s family.

This didn’t change in the new timeline and Noob (originally Bi-Han) is still brutal, and is still innocent of the death of Harumi and Satoshi Hasashi. Nevertheless, Quan Chi pulling the strings from the sidelines once again birthed Noob Saibot and, in this timeline, Cyber Sub-Zero. Meanwhile, the tournament in Outworld commences and if you’ve ever played the original MKII and made it that far, you’ll notice that Kano and Sonya Blade are shackled in the background of the arena. This time around, Kano has no reason to be Shao Kahn’s prisoner since he’d sold him the Black Dragon’s service and arsenal, and Sonya was freed by Johnny Cage, Raiden, and Jax. Kitana, though, getting ideas from the Thunder God, investigated Shang Tsung’s flesh pits to discover her hybrid clone Mileena. With Kitana being the last remnant of Edenia’s ruling family, Shao Kahn’s plan in this and the other timeline was to replace Kitana with a loyal daughter.

Shao Kahn loses his Outworld tournament, but the future remains unchanged largely because of Quan Chi and his hidden agenda seeing as he hastens Shao Kahn’s recovery, revives and essentially reprograms Sindel to be evil, and kicked off an invasion of Earthrealm itself. Previously, Shao Kahn could never do this due to Sindel’s ward keeping him from setting foot there, but her revival and Quan Chi’s spell over her psyche making her more receptive to Shao Kahn’s tactics, lifts that barrier.

Raiden recruits even more warriors to defend Earth and repel the invasion, but finds failure after failure in the last third of this game’s glorified HD remake of Mortal Kombat 3. Kabal joins up, Cyber Sub-Zero is reprogrammed, Noob Saibot is defeated, but Raiden’s attempts at repelling Shao Kahn’s advances fail each time. Finally, he goes straight to the Elder Gods themselves who prove equally worthless in this timeline, barely batting an eye at Shao Kahn’s atrocities quoting: “Invasion itself is not a transgression, it is the merger of realms that is proscribed.” A distinction without a difference fallacy that the almighty Elder Gods fail to see themselves. Sort of like granting rights based not on race but on wealth.

In the time it took for the Elder Gods to heroically sit it out until the eleventh hour, Sindel herself decimated the defenders in no time, even her daughter. Johnny and Sonya got through with only bruises and so Earth’s final defenders were reduced to a four-man team, very much to Liu Kang’s growing resentment at Raiden’s ad hoc decision making.

Remember how I said, Light Raiden would never strike a deal with Shao Kahn to spare Earth? Well, those words are looking mighty delicious right about now as it seems that he’s about to bargain for Quan Chi’s participation to stop Shao Kahn, offering his soul and those of the fallen. But Quan Chi being a necromancer, he already has their souls in possession and after battling their revenants, Raiden realizes once again at the apex of destruction that evil needs to get within a stone’s throw of victory before the Elder Gods show themselves. “He must win” meant Shao Kahn merging the realms illegally. Mortal Kombat being the magical arbitration to decide this, violating it through conquest finally gets the Elder Gods to pass judgment and punishment.

This comes with protest from Liu Kang, who falls for the same pitfalls, as the original Raiden and doggedly vows to stand against Shao Kahn even in futilely. It costs him his life and true to his vision, Raiden does allow Shao Kahn to enter Earthrealm undeterred, feigning submission in an effort to get the Elder Gods to act, though not without taking his hits. Fans have called out Raiden for this foolishness, but across the game it shows how much he’s being put to the test. You can’t pass malice onto him for trying so hard to keep everyone alive and Earthrealm undamaged by Shao Kahn’s poison.

The pyrrhic victory gives us a glimpse into what comes in the next game. Mortal Kombat X (technically Roman numeral for 10) immediately follows the post-invasion chaos of Shao Kahn’s entry into Earthrealm. With Shinnok and Quan Chi leading coordinated attacks, Johnny, Sonya, and Kenshi (who made a glorious comeback in the new timeline even for a guest appearance in the last game) lead the charge from the ground while Raiden and Fujin intercept Quan Chi and Shinnok at the Sky Tower, home of Earth’s energy forces in the form of the Jinsei chamber.

They even meet the remnant versions of friends long passed, under the service of Quan Chi. With Shinnok now freed from the Netherrealm and facing the Earthrealm forces personally, like the other games we reach the apex of near destruction, but in a deus ex machina twist, Johnny Cage follows up from his character arc in the last game and becomes the unlikely hero we didn’t know we needed.

Yeah, one thing you’ll notice over the course of just MK9 is that while Johnny understands the gravity of the situation before him, writing it off as but a simple competition, his tone and attitude changes with each chapter. Meanwhile, Liu Kang is the one who grows further disillusioned and rightfully so. Witnessed the death of his best friend, tended to his wounded comrades, saw the Elder Gods sit by and let s[neighs]t unfold in unflattering ways, and he was witness to Master Raiden reach desperate levels to save Earth. I can’t say whether he would’ve had the same reaction in the original timeline if he lived to see it all since Shang Tsung killed him in Deadly Alliance. But if Taven’s reaction in Armageddon’s Konquest mode is any indicator, Dark Raiden was brilliant in how unexpected it was at the time, and it was after the sixth main installment where Raiden went off the deep end. Does he show up again here outside of a flashback? We’re getting to that.

After his defeat at Johnny’s hands, Shinnok is sealed within his own talisman, begging the question somewhat of why he’d have it, but going by the rules of a gun, it’s not designed to have any loyalty. The amulet is also incapable of being destroyed, so the most they can do is closely guard it round the clock, which they continually do for the next 25 years, after which the remaining combatants have moved on with their lives and the like.

Trauma bonding pushed Johnny and Sonya close enough to marry, reproduce, and divorce in that time frame over which we learn that their daughter, Cassie, has felt stuck between two worlds: Hollywood brat or military brat? Which seems like a really unique childhood to have though not necessarily envy. One lifestyle has you hounded by paparazzi for room temperature IQ tabloids, and the other has you moving at the same time as your parents depending on the needs of the branch of service, provided the marriage is strong enough to get through the military.

Then again, Jax’s daughter may have the comparatively more enviable of these two. Jacqui Briggs isn’t explicitly stated to be a military brat herself, but she more than likely has the hallmarks of one if we dissect the finer details. Unlike Cassie, Jacqui’s mother is simply an unseen NPC who most likely passed away long before the start of the game. For Jax, he, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero were the revenants who helped to defend Quan Chi’s lair during a raid by the Special Forces. In that particular mission, Johnny nearly died, but Sonya beat the piss outta Quan Chi while Raiden reversed the spell that would’ve created remnant Johnny Cage. Quan Chi’s defeat brought Jax, Scorpion, and Sub-Zero back to life and already this quasi-Mortal Kombat 4 is markedly different from the original in more ways than simply graphics.

Kenshi himself had a son named Takeda, and from the Kung family comes Lao’s cousin, Kung Jin. The MK kids are meant to be the new bloods though the fan reception was mixed to put it lightly. They’re tasked with assuring all of Earthrealm’s bonds and alliances and aiding Kotal Kahn, the new ruler and admittedly usurper of Outworld causing a civil war between himself and those loyal to Mileena who was chosen to succeed Shao Kahn after the Elder Gods ate him.

I personally like his portrayal and physical appearance, being Aztec inspired. Character-wise, he’s not a conqueror like Shao Kahn or power-hungry like Onaga. To use real political terms, he gives me “populist, isolationist” vibes. That said, he doesn’t really do away with Shao Kahn’s old policies like the liberal use of execution. He also keeps his own cabinet of characters old and new. The civil war between him and Mileena revealed everyone’s true colors. Without his original masters, Ermac defected. As did Reptile, suggesting he never respected Mileena very much as a construct of Edenian flesh and Tarkatan blood. The ones willing to serve Mileena as Kahnum of Outworld boil down to Tanya, who returns (yay!), Baraka, who doesn’t (boo!), Rain who isn’t DLC this time around *throws controller into next week*, and Kano, who’s loyalty is for rent. He’s still a treacherous money-hungry thug, but I doubt he’s as foolish as last time, even after a quarter-century sending Black Dragon-brand brutality to both sides to come out on top regardless… like Simeon Weisz in Lord of War.

Maybe I should review movies again, I’ve been watching a handful of them as of late.

I like the intricacies of this civil war so far, but they’re better experienced than explained, especially seeing as Kotal wins out over Mileena and immediately turns on the Kombat Kids for the greater good in his words. Between scares and enemy espionage, Kotal Kahn concluded that Earthrealm can’t be trusted to safeguard the amulet so it’s in the best interest of Outworld and the rest of existence if Outworld held onto it until Raiden could set his priorities straight.

Meanwhile, one of Kotal’s most trusted, D’Vorah, a Kytinn bug woman is revealed to be a disciple of Quan Chi and servant of Shinnok. Sonya resorts to bringing Jax out of retirement as a means to get Earth’s defenders back into the light and out from Netherrealm’s influence. This goes on for the last quarter of the game, though with significant trouble in the way. Jax helps apprehend Quan Chi, but this is short-lived when Scorpion learns from Sub-Zero that the mastermind behind his agony came from within the Lin Kuei. Seeing as the original Sub-Zero was also a victim, the trend of “inside job conspiracies” reappears in this game to haunt Hanzo Hasashi ’til the end of days.

Ever played the GTA IV mission where you bust out one of Derrick’s old friends only to blow his brains out? Similar thing here, Scorpion breaks into a military prison to kill Quan Chi who uses his last breath to summon Shinnok behind enemy lines. With D’Vorah’s aid, they invade the sky temple again, trap Raiden and infect the Jinsei chamber, with less effort than the initial invasion 25 years ago. And since Shinnok is a petty little bitch, he imprisons Johnny too. As Dark Shinnok, the fallen Elder God becomes Raiden’s worst nightmare.

At this point, the Kombat Kids have broken out of imprisonment and returned to Earth right as this all unfolds and stand as the last beacon of hope for Earth, a role Raiden played in Deception before turning dark himself.

Every time Mortal Kombat gets Dark Raiden, they chicken out before they can use him. The most action he gets is his own ending in Armageddon where he obliterates all realms except Earth to destroy all outside threats to Earth. MK X teased him at the end with a stern warning to the Netherrealm under new leadership to not even think about trying anything or they’ll share Shinnok’s fate.

Dark Raiden is a major part of the first two chapters or so of MK 11, but thanks to time travel shenanigans, he’s written out before he can exercise the fullest extent of his wrath. The mission from MK X is more or less complete with Shinnok defeated though I doubt Raiden was forthcoming with his fate. Not to mention, the villain this time around is the titan Kronika who masters an hourglass that writes the fates of all. I’m pretty sure I’ve played this trope before.

Time travel shenanigans aside, MK 11 takes away the heavy lifting Raiden would’ve done to protect Earthrealm by simply bringing everyone back from when they were at their best. This game does have a DLC arc that’s best explored away from the main series even though it flows into 2023’s M1K soft reboot. Re-touched upon in this game, Kronika not only manipulated events, but claims responsibility for driving a wedge in between Raiden and Liu Kang. Timeline after timeline, their power combined has shown to be a threat to Kronika. Using this to his advantage, Raiden stops fighting Liu Kang and they merge to form Fire God Liu Kang who was last seen in that god-awful Mythologies spin-off. Depending on the player, the game can end with human Raiden aiding Liu Kang as he remakes reality, or with Kitana long after she wins big as the new Kahnum of Outworld when a career-ending injury removes Kotal Kahn from power.

I’m not certain on whether M1K is the beginning of a new arc in the Mortal Kombat franchise. It’s the first one for the 2020s and has a hell of a lot of callbacks which thoroughly entertained the legacy fan in me. I’ve seen full gameplay of it, but haven’t experienced the rest of the game for myself yet, so I’ll cap this long post with my thoughts on the HD continuation. It almost follows the beats of the original series but diverges beginning in the third arc of MK9 and doesn’t look back in the rearview mirror. Shinnok still makes his comeback in this timeline’s answer to MK4, but doesn’t fall victim to Quan Chi’s machinations. Quan Chi isn’t even acknowledged as the true mastermind and even when they do treat him as such, the focus goes toward Shinnok who manipulated events from the start. So he’s no different from Armageddon’s Konquest mode, the point of divergence being that Daegon is the one who serves him instead of Quan Chi… or rather he plays them both. Honestly, MK’s biggest flaw is having loyal characters serving untrustworthy villains. Say what you want about Deadly Alliance, but Quan Chi and Shang Tsung understand fully that the partnership is purely transactional.

The villains this time around are aware of this aspect though seem to be blind to Quan Chi’s reach and influence. Not that he’s the most powerful villain or remains so for long as Kronika beats him to the punch in MK 11. It ultimately screwed over the revenants still under Quan Chi’s influence at the time of his death, but I say its for the best that he wasn’t alive to witness Kronika emerge from her chamber. Besides, the revenants can be restored after consultation with the Elder Gods, as long as they don’t take it literally.

All in all, this era in Mortal Kombat history gets a lot of praise in the beginning followed by loads of critique over what should’ve been done by whom during XYZ. All well and good, but it suffers from the same problem exhibited by the God of War series in that the games of the past are written off as weird and off-putting. But as a defender of this era of Mortal Kombat, flawed or not, this was a necessary step toward greatness, and the only regret(s) are that Shaolin Monks hasn’t been rewritten and remastered and we haven’t seen anything in the form of Chess Kombat, Motor Kombat or Puzzle Kombat in the last 20 years. I would gladly do embarrassing things to see this in the modern day again.

Sega’s Goofy Take on the Yakuza

Tiberius1 Comment

It’s literally all fun and games.

The Sega division, Ryu ga Gotoku Studio 「龍が如く」, exclusively works on the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series and has done so for the last 20 years.

An urban modern-day RPG-lite with a gangster skin, Yakuza features characters that are a part of a connected web of Tokyo-based Yakuza groups with the main character, Kazuma Kiryu, AKA the Dragon of Dojima, so called for his dragon tattoo and association with the Dojima family Yakuza group. From what I’ve gathered, the early games have a serious tone coupled with areas of humor and, in the long run, satire. The primary inspiration comes from decades of yakuza media with each game being something of a movie with a nuanced plot populated with characters of shifting motives.

Kazuma is a primary protagonist across the first few games, but since the series follows him throughout his life from his youth to middle-age, some of the later games feature a character-switching mechanic before Kazuma himself is retired in favor of the new face of the franchise: Ichiban Kasuga.

Less complex than Kazuma-san, Ichi-kun is introduced as a sillier character but with a heart of gold, so not at all dissimilar from Kazuma. Full disclosure, I’m still in the process of exploring the series, having emulated the 2005 game on PCSX2 back in 2023. So far, I’ve explored one of its spinoffs, Ishin, a fictional retelling of the life of Sakamoto Ryoma with our beloved Kazuma filling the role of the Bakumatsu-era samurai. Seems Sega really loves to reuse its characters.

I’d explain more about the series from game to game, but the games, though long, are worth the experiences they give you. Even if I was that involved in the games, I’d know better than to spoil them. So instead, the rest of this post will be about the gameplay features between the old games and something fairly recent.

Perhaps its because I started with emulating the first game in the series, I didn’t realize how clunky the controls could get until I bought and loaded up Ishin for the first time. Comparing the two shows how far the series has come since debut gameplay-wise. The first game has a fixed camera when moving that fixes itself closer to Kazuma when in combat. The right analog stick merely moves the minimap in the corner of the screen. The face buttons are all different combat attacks and interactive buttons in exploration and work fine on their own, but the movement in combat coupled with the block/evade functions defaulted to the shoulder buttons makes combat more than a little bit stiff and awkward.

Thankfully, 2005 and the 2006 sequel, Yakuza 2, were given the reboot treatment a decade later, thus revamping, among other things, the combat system. I’d say, the beat ’em up formula was in its prime in this era of video games seeing as Yakuza debuted at the same time the west was gifted God of War and Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. You can’t really go wrong with either the original or the remake, but if you value sturdier controls and a more fluid combat system, I and other Yakuza players implore you to buy the Kiwami games. They’re near-mirrors of the original games with extra bells and whistles to keep it modern along with the textures and graphics while staying true to the original.

Speaking of modern games, the latest installment in the Yakuza series was last year’s Infinite Wealth coupled with yesterday’s spin-off Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.

Before you speculate, this was a coincidence. Nothing more.

The most recent modern release I played is a spin-off, the aforementioned Ishin. I can’t say whether its framework and UI are similar to the main games, but for what its worth, Ishin, being a retelling of sorts of the life of Sakamoto Ryoma, incorporates multiple combat styles from hand-to-hand to swordplay to even gunplay. In real life, Sakamoto was a samurai who adopted several western styles and customs. Western-style loafers, a revolver he used to try to escape the attempt on his life, and light dabbling with western tech like the telegram with hopes that it would change the face of Japan… and it did! Approximately 20 years after his death, so influence still counts.

In Ishin, the character of Sakamoto Ryoma doesn’t change just because he’s wearing Kazuma-san’s face like some Japanese parody of Face/Off.

Insert Spongebob licking meme.

Kazuma’s Bakumatsu fever dream plays like its modern contemporary games with all the modern settings and defaults found in the games, so it plays much better than the PS2 games, but doesn’t sacrifice the difficulty curve. In fact, since the first game’s release, the Yakuza series has always incorporated RPG mechanics, notably upgrading, collecting, potions, and skills; between this and last week’s RPG adventure with tits and ass, I really can’t get away from RPG and RPG-likes. Maybe I’ll put it in the pipeline in the future for review.

Obviously the modern games look prettier with the facelift and play better with the new tools that have defined gaming since debut–what does this mean for me and my enjoyment of the series? Well, I do plan on exploring them all further in some capacity. The pandemic may have ruined console gaming for me with all the scalpers reselling the newer consoles at f[dial-up]k you prices, but I probably might return to console. I’m already emulating my favorites on a console (RPCS3 has more kinks to iron out), which may speak volumes about what I remember as a great era in gaming.

Credit: u/TheUndeadGunslinger, r/gaming

F[button mashing]k modern gaming, these are hard to find in the US these days. As a result, that Xbox is now $800. Well, I’m exaggerating, but these things being collector’s items now, I don’t think I’m that far off from what they’d go for now. Whether you can run them on a modern monitor is another story. At least the Yakuza series is fully available on Steam as of this writing… ‘Scuse me, I have a series to blaze through.

Games I Haven’t Played Yet

Tiberius1 Comment

A part two to anime I haven’t watched.

Last week, I talked about different anime series that have crossed my radar. Popular series that everyone but me has seen. Some of them I was avoiding due to the reputation of their fandoms or a disinterest in the content of the show.

Source*: Anigamme on Facebook

I don’t know if the person who posted this is the same person who made the meme format. Exaggerated or not, I never had an interest in idol culture. I find it too poisonous an industry to support or even look into. No industry is perfect (and anime and video games both have their controversies), but East Asian idol culture (Japan and Korea especially) is the only industry I’ve heard of where the idol has been lambasted for having a normal life or worse driven to suicide or been the victim of assault, deadly or sexually. I admit, these are cherry-picked but my point still stands.

Back to gaming, I’ve been around long enough to recall gaming’s most pivotal moments. The release of GTA: San Andreas 20 years ago (if you didn’t feel old already, here you go); Sonic steadily one-upping the Hindenburg as a 3D series; Lara Croft’s second return in a more grounded approach (as grounded as a series about a British archaeologist can get when thrown against the supernatural); and the first of two Mortal Kombat reboots where smashing together the first three arcade games worked surprisingly well.

But there’s still a few gaps in my library that I haven’t filled yet. Gaps I’ll be sharing in this post. Like last time, the list is not exhaustive; and there are more I’d like to talk about, but won’t be able to for brevity’s sake.

  1. The rest of the Castlevania series (1986-2014)
  2. Metal Gear franchise (1987-)
  3. More RPGs and JRPGs
  4. Metroid series (1986-)
  5. Metroidvanias

Castlevania series (1986-2014)

A series of reputations, one negative one that it managed to break, thanks in no small part to the Netflix series, but another one that it traded in return through no fault of its own. If Konami was in the hands of better people, the series would either have a better send-off or at least a more recent reboot that honors its legacy while roping in new players… like MK9.

My exposure to the series comes from Castlevania: Lords of Shadow on the PS3 and a pirated version of Aria of Sorrow for the PAL region on a bootleg PSP. That’s it, so far. Based on my observations, there’s an old love for the 2D games compared to 3D. Yahtzee Croshaw and the Angry Video Game Nerd both tackled Castlevania games with both wondering what went wrong with the series. Aria of Sorrow and Symphony of the Night get praise compared to something as ridiculous as Castlevania 64, and at least by that time we had over 15 years to iron out good games from bad.

To give credit to Castlevania’s 3D/HD ventures, it’s not like all of them are bad. Enough can be said about the 2D games, but from what I recall of Lords of Shadow, it’s a solid 6/10 game. To pull from Yahtzee Croshaw’s 2010 review of the game, it combines elements of God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, and Dante’s Inferno from weapons to enemies to character design. Hell, it starts off with the main character Gabriel Belmont, a holy knight in the 11th century, who goes on a journey to rid the world of all evil in search of a way to return his wife to the land of the living. Servant of a god fights monsters with a chained weapon as penance for the death of loved ones — God of War comparison made. Some of the bosses are huge hulking monsters you have to climb on whilst pecking away at glowing weakspots — Shadow of the Colossus. And Satan’s appearance draws comparison to his appearance in the Dante’s Inferno games.

Channel: The Escapist

But the main draw of the series back in the 1980s was Dracula as well as open-ended level designs and exploration encouraging multiple runs of the same levels and therefore birthing the concept of the Metroidvania (more on that later). As such, my desire to look into the Castlevania series will have to go to the older games. Symphony of the Night may get all the praise for being one of the best games of all time, but to this end, I’d rather judge it by itself than where it stands in the series or with its contemporaries.

Metal Gear (1987-)

Another historic series getting f[bombs]ked by its Konami Overlords because pachinko and claw machines make a lot of money, as a certain Welsh monkey can attest.

Playlist by: Kim Kalliope, Videos by: CDawgVA, ConnorDawg

Still, Metal Gear is still releasing games to this day with another entry set for release later this year, tarnished as the series may be, thanks to Konami. A strategic stealth game that lampoons the s[blyat]t out of the Cold War, long after the joke died. Though, considering Metal Gear is still doing that, is the joke really dead or is it just on life support?

The best excuse I have for why I never played Metal Gear would probably be due to lack of interest. Sort of like what kept me away from Yu-Gi-Oh! or Pokémon for so many years. What ties these three together for me is that there wasn’t anything physically keeping me from collecting a few of the games. Metal Gear Solid was on the PS2, which I had; Pokémon Red or Green were on the GameBoy, of which I had several (they were fragile or we kept losing them amongst our other stuff in the house); and Yu-Gi-Oh! is a card game. Cards are inexpensive, and they have been for years. But leave it to me to stand out and not get lost in the shuffle back then. Average oddball behavior.

But of course, Metal Gear is neither Pokémon nor Yu-Gi-Oh! It didn’t begin with collectible cards (but might have them as part of a collector’s edition of sorts) and I didn’t know a lot of people playing the games growing up, though I wouldn’t be surprised if I was friends with a long time Metal Gear fan but didn’t know it at the time. Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! were just more visible at school by the nature of the games. With my experiences in games like Outlast, or Sekiro, or the hackneyed stealth sections in numerous action-games, I want to say that it’s in my corner, but I know different games do stealth differently. Sekiro’s stealth isn’t Outlasts and neither compare to the sometimes stealth of Max Payne 3. Metal Gear is a legacy series ripe for the emulating; PCSX2 still works for me and I’ve been getting remarkably lucky with the likes of RPCS3 on another machine that I own (though I’ve still got a bit to learn about extracting games on it).

RPGs and JRPGs

As far as genres go, I have a decent amount of exposure to some RPGs and JRPGs, more so the latter, but largely due to some western games having semi-RPG elements in them. GTA: San Andreas has more of it with the ability to let CJ’s waist expand or shrink; same thing with his muscles which was the approach I took the last time I played it two years ago. It’s more muted in GTA V, but still there even in GTA Online. JRPGs, on the other hand, are another blind spot I hope to fill. How I achieve that will need to be more finely detailed, but for the most part a look through of time-honored series as well as more recent releases can help me out. Octopath Traveler, for instance, is one that’s currently on my radar.

During Army AIT, a few of my classmates played around a bit in a Final Fantasy 14 RPG (and stopped after making a dedicated Minecraft server). I played some of the Naruto turn-based RPGs as a kid as well as a Dragon Ball-themed one. Fun fact, my exposure to Dragon Ball started with the PS2 games. The anime (specifically the Kai dub) came way later. And I feel like I’m selling myself short experience-wise without more JRPGs to call from. I’m starting to rectify this by way of some of the Souls’ games, which are developed by a Japanese studio, but Japan liking medieval Europe for a fantasy setting undercuts the experience aesthetics-wise. Dark Souls is still enjoyable, I’ll never debate that, but I don’t think it’s enough to fill the void. I’d like more to experience, Soulslike or not be damned.

Metroid series (1986-)

The first-half of the Metroidvania genre, the fact that major elements from both Metroid and Castlevania combined to form a new genre is remarkable. It was a groundbreaking game when it debuted in the mid-1980s, and is still going strong with its star character, the tall, beautiful, kick-ass Samus Aran.

Practically, Ellen Ripley’s disciple, both women are space adventurers blasting away at evil aliens. Couple that concept with a Mega Man-esque arm-blaster, the core of Metroid has been a blend of its contemporaries with a few things to make it stand out. Early example of female video game character (though probably not the grandmother of female protagonists in games), sci-fi setting, nonlinear game structure and retraversable levels, different weapons; it’s a great game series that I have limited exposure to.

All my knowledge comes from Wikipedia and I’d rather not have to go to a third party for my education. My s[splash]tbag college days allowed for this absolutely, but I’m not in college anymore. I may not be guaranteed more time to do it, but whatever excuse there is to keep avoiding it is no longer valid. Emulators for the older games (because no one is crazy enough to track down a still working NES/Famicom in 2025) and I can get a Nintendo Switch or wait for the Switch 2 to release and hook it up to my monitor, if that’s allowed.

Metroidvanias

Interestingly, I’m hard at work fixing this gap with a series of Adults Only roguelike Metroidvanias made possible through Steam. Especially one I’ve discovered with permadeath elements in it. But before I cross it off the list, I do still have more to say about these types of games. I really love my narrative driven Max Paynes, Mafias, Spec Ops, CoDs, etc., etc., BUT! A huge but.

Sometimes, I just want to push buttons and make the enemy collapse into a puff of smoke. You don’t need to convince me to boot up a game of Kirby; that itself is the oil. Need I any reason to play it? If it can be accessed by any means necessary, there’s no need for me to avoid it. As for Metroidvanias themselves, never mind games that make you think through their narrative; games that make you think through their gameplay are another favorite of mine. Puzzle games used to get lambasted for being “girl games,” but I still like them as well as physical jigsaw puzzles for helping to prepare me for visual puzzles. Nonlinear gameplay structures meanwhile have their place and depending on the Metroidvania in question, the puzzle elements and level design can be really innovative and creative or boring and uninspired. Or worse, convoluted. But I’ve seen a separate category of randomly generated levels with each separate run. Sometimes this leads to perpetual recycling, but it can still feel fresh if the enemies themselves are varied, especially within the level itself.

Well, now that I’m rereading this before publishing, I think this could apply to any old adventure puzzle platformer, but the distinction between those and Metroidvanias relates to going back with new abilities to get more items, powerful items especially. So while your first run will be predictably terrible (unless you’re a based Metroidvania titan), a few more runs and experience points later, you should be able to get through to the final boss largely unassisted, like a true gamer.

That’s an admittedly short list of all the games and game types I’d like to get into more in the future. Not exhaustive, certainly and not the end, as there are more games I could mention, some of which are on my Steam library for example but I haven’t touched yet (I’m a damn hoarder). The Senran Kagura games, more of the Yakuza series (GOATed series by the way), unconventional shooters (The Suffering is a start even though its a hybrid), horror games, Resident Evil, and even more to follow. F[slurp]k me, my Discord description is too profound when I said my anime and gaming list was an expanding castle…

I might make another list about those games in the future. I filled up the list in my notes for half of this year, but not the rest so I have a backlog of free space to fill. Maybe I’ll bring back the YouTube channel recs, but I’ve been watching mostly Vtubers and I don’t want to only recommend those.

It’s only January, I can make it work.

2024: Blog Review and Anime Releases for 2025

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Hopefully I come up with a better name for next year.

2024 is behind us and we are now in the futuristic year of 2025, as predicted by Call of Duty: Black Ops II. From January to mid-March, I was in Army basic training where access to technology was reduced to 30 minutes a week for training purposes. Too little time for me to organize my thoughts into a blog entry, so to supplement that I had a notebook full of journal (read: diary) entries as training went on. It helped me trudge through training, though looking back, it wasn’t as bad as I dreaded. Keep in mind that your mileage may vary depending on where you do training if you choose to join the military. Most accounts sing the praises of Relaxin’ Fort Jackson whereas Chill Fort Sill is either ironic or on-brand due in large part to the cold winds in that part of the country.

Using it as an energy source is the most praise I’ll give to the Central Plains.

January to mid-March was a blank period for obvious reasons, but I got myself a new machine and made a comeback post where not much needs to be said. On an unrelated note, I learned at the tail end of training that the man, the myth, the legend Akira Toriyama passed away in early March and thus made my own separate tribute to the God of Shonen.

So long, father of Goku and Dr. Slump. You changed and influenced millions of people the world over with the story of a monkey-tailed little boy eating bullets and growing up to be the strongest fighter in the universe. My goal will be to get around to reviewing the new Dragon Ball DAIMA arc. I’m not the biggest Dragon Ball fan, but it holds a special place in my heart.

Once I was properly back into the fold during AIT, I started April off with a reflection of my first attempt at writing an anime-themed blog. I’ve tried to forget about it, but having this one up reminds me of what I could’ve had damn near four years ago if things went swimmingly, and if I broke it up with an extra focus on other forms of media. Thankfully, this blog has rectified that issue and has branched out many times over to other forms of media, even with animanga keeping me anchored.

Something something lead a horse to water and all that jazz.

Speaking of which, when it came to reviewing animanga I started off with obscure series that flew under the radar. Titles you may have heard but haven’t investigated further, or titles you’ve never heard of until recently, either through me or another medium. This continues the trend I started here from 2023 and continues to be a personal crusade of mine. Not limited to Shonen titles, less celebrated and mostly unheard of titles give room for a few surprises; like how the creator of Prison School also wrote the Robert Johnson manga.

The man who gave us Dommy Mommy Imprisonment wrote a manga about an enigmatic black Mississippi blues artist.

I dare you to tell me that that’s not cultured!

Of course my regular content throughout the year kept to standards, games and animanga kept on pumping through the summer, and I got to writing about two awaited topics: the long-awaited anime adaptation of The Elusive Samurai as well as a Paradox game that couldn’t happen.

As much as I loved Running from the Ashikaga, it really kneecaps itself with a 12-episode run. Fortunately, a second season is in the works and in the drafting of this post, I was gonna say that going without a second season would be illegal. The art direction, the soundtrack, the name behind the series, even the soundtrack and corresponding merch set for release this year would speak volumes of marketing another season. Even if Sprinting Level MAX’s claim to fame is coming from the same mangaka as How to Kill Your Tentacle Sensei, it was enough of a motivating factor for me to check out the manga when it was licensed for an English release in 2021. I admit I was stunned at Japanese Twitter’s reaction to that one scene, and I’m keeping my eyes and ears peeled for the next viral reaction.

Elsewhere, Paradox joined the shortlist of game devs attempting to dethrone The Sims with a life sim of their own under the title “Life By You.” It was announced and showcased in the latter half of 2023 with an early March 2024 release day, later moved to June before it was unceremoniously put to bed for good. In the meantime, people continually string together campaigns connecting Crusader Kings to Europa Universalis to Victoria to Hearts of Iron for a mega campaign. One day, I’ll join those people because it sounds ambitiously fun.

Going further down the list, my entries stepped away from animanga to address other forms of media. I don’t review movies as much as I do animanga and video games, and I really wish I did. The military-sphere said goodbye to Evan Wright who tragically took his own life over summer after years getting raw stories to put into novel form from the widely celebrated Generation Kill to dozens of other publications in magazines and websites throughout his life. I doubt everyone will appreciate his work as much as military and adjacent types usually do, but there’s no denying his work over the years.

And the blog posts after did address more serious topics surrounding the medium interspersed with regular reviews. You know me as the chief advocate of anime piracy as an alternative when streaming decides to get funny. I continue to stand by that claim and I will do so for many years to follow. It was how I watched many of my favorite series over the years, and I continue to do so to this day. There’s no telling when a series will suddenly drop from, say, Netflix or Hulu and sites like Crunchyroll prove unreliable and at the worst of times dangerous. If more news crosses my feed, I’ll write about it as I had back in August.

Going back to regular reviews with more and more interesting titles until it stops making sense, I hadn’t had to reorganize my notes as much for 2024 as I did for ’23, merely putting them in the list set for weeks to a couple months at most down the line. It got messy when I did it like that back in 2023, but it made things interesting personally. It also kept me in the loop before the topic died off, but the consequence of that is some topics had more information about them come out and were at risk of aging rapidly. Such was the case of a couple of YouTube recommendations. I used to do that for channels I like and enjoy from a content standpoint instead of a personality standpoint. So far, only two of those didn’t work out as well with one getting flack for abusive behavior and the other following shareholders and causing a mass exodus of the media team, the latter of which I wrote about a week after it happened.

The last quarter of 2024 was based primarily around animanga, which was fun to write about, but I left a mildly large gap between that and other media. I definitely watched more than anime at the tail end, some of these are gonna get posts in the future. For just January, I plan on covering series I haven’t seen but would like to both in animanga and in video games with that nifty emulator on my devices, as well as another form of manga/comics that is quite celebrated but is mostly slept on. What I mean is, there’s good series from this medium, but I rarely see most anitubers address it. It might be due to its country of origin, but it that doesn’t make it any less worthwhile.

It’s manhwa. I had a whole arc dedicated to this with an interesting start point.

As of writing this, my notes are filled out ’til at least May, covering most of the first half of 2025. After that, I’ve gotta wait and see what I’ll fill it out with.

The Suffering: A Forgotten Horror TPS

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Even Midway can take a break from fighting games

What I’m about to bring you is a video game series that is completely out of season and extraordinary mainly because of the team that developed it: The Suffering and its sequel Ties That Bind.

Yeah, I wasn’t kidding about it being a Midway game.

Released in 2004, The Suffering is set on a former POW island, now a regular civilian-operated prison under the control of the Maryland state prison system, and one with a nasty history. Think of the reputation of Andersonville prison camp or a few historical British or continental European prisons; the age-old “scrubbing a turd doesn’t make it not a turd” approach to refurbishing a place as accursed as this.

The protagonist is Torque and he’s on death row for brutally murdering his wife and two sons. Just one problem, he can’t recall ever doing such a thing, but not much can be done as he’s set to walk the green mile… or he would be if s[metal clanging]t didn’t turn sideways. Not ten minutes into his cell with fellow death row inmates–an Aryan Nations member, a pedophile, and a man convicted of an unspecified heinous crime (for giggles, let’s say he’s perma-banned from 15 states)–the prison island releases the Devil’s cologne and a legion of monsters, possibly created from the mummified remains of those who were executed return to exact their revenge on everything and everyone on the island, because no one can have s[gunshots]t in Baltimore. Not even The Wire.

These supernatural hybrid undead creatures hastily held together by nails, duct tape, and rusty scalpels prances about killing anything that breathes, doesn’t even have to move. The first victims are the prison guards, whom we see in the game don’t have the prisoners’ best interests at heart. Even those with a slated release date get stepped on. Next are the prisoners, and all of Torque’s cellies get sashimied. The rest of the prisoners aren’t as lucky but with law and order sliced and stabbed and even shot at, there’s a chance for the inmates to make their escape and Torque is of the same mindset, though he also spends his escape piecing together the course of events that put him on death row.

The horror elements of the game do wonders for the action and action is how the game was advertised. Critics at the time tried to compare it to Silent Hill or Resident Evil and the Wikipedia page states that that doesn’t work because the game is more “action-horror” than “survival-horror.” I’m not above making the comparison considering the game sets itself up for it, releasing at or around the same time as some of these; then again, the game’s reputation and comparison to other games weren’t why I chose to emulate it.

Its sequel, Ties That Bind, has a demo in the game Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, following on from Deception’s Area 51 demo.

Maybe I’ll emulate this one. Maybe not. Who knows?

The game’s designer, Richard Rouse III, made it clear as crystal in interviews that survival isn’t the focus of the game. Action is, since Torque, despite being a silent protagonist, feels like a twisted version of Ashley J. Williams from the Evil Dead movies. I haven’t finished the first game and I’ve only played the demo for the sequel (many years ago, I might add so what I’m about to say next may be inaccurate), but I believe both games give you a variety of weapons to use. So far, I’ve got a shiv and a revolver in my current run through of the first game. Different weapons will work on different enemies and truth be told, looking at the enemy variety necessitates a semi-strategic approach.

The lore plays a huge part in the enemies that pop up. Contributing to this carnval of carnage and misery, the fictional history of the prison reveals a diverse range of creative execution methods from hanging to firing squad to even lethal injection. The enemies’ appearance is a reflection of many of these and I’ve found that fighting them with the most applicable weapons in accordance to how they died. The ones who died by firing squad are weakest against a gun. What kind? The revolver you pick up off a prison guard is sufficient enough. Sorta like how in Max Payne 1 every cutscene shows Max with his work weapon, even if you shot everyone with the Dual Ingrams.

Interestingly enough, Torque shares the same healing method as Max Payne, the painkiller.

The game also features a moral choice system that gives way to three openings, each influenced by player actions and a trio of spirits who haunt the prison. The three Ghosts of Prison’s Past are a doctor named Killjoy, a former executioner named Hermes Haight, and an executed prisoner named Horace Gauge. Killjoy ran the insane asylum in the 1920s and naturally his ghost wants to comb through Torque’s quirks, discover why he does what he does. Hermes the executioner has killed a handful of inmates in his nearly 30 years at the prison before taking his last victim: himself. To him, Torque is gonna free the beast and he is gonna like it! Lastly, Horace, is himself a prisoner who was also put to death for killing his lover during a conjugal visit, something he blamed on the evil atmosphere of the island. He maintained the regret and professed his innocence up until boarding the Ol’ Sparky Express, and from beyond the grave he believes he has a kinship with Torque, spending his afterlife convincing Torque that he’s not a bad guy. All three work together to influence Torque from within his mind and even drive him to transform into a grotesque Lovecraftian creature, though this transformation is wholly psychological.

The themes exhibited by these three ghosts harkens to a brief health lesson I got from my high school English class on personality traits as explained by famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud: the id, the ego, and the superego. The shortest explanation of that is the id is the force behind your desires, no matter how wicked; the superego is the force that houses your principles, even the naïve thoughts you had as a child; and the ego where reality keeps these ambitions and ideals in your head where they belong. Gauge is the closest to the superego, Hermes is the literal id, and Dr. Killjoy is the ego.

Not a bad video game overall, it did a lot of neat things, some new things and even makes good use of its moral choice system. It screws with canon a little though I’ve yet to discover by how much come the second game. Now that all the good is out the way, let’s discuss the bad.

The 2000s weren’t a good era for Midway. The YouTube channel Matt McMuscles explains in his Wha Happun? series that the good idea fairy invaded the Midway offices and greenlit yearly releases, ramping up in 2004 with this game and Mortal Kombat: Deception and ending around 2008 when the bankruptcy rumors were turning into reality. Here’s a video he did on The Suffering:

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Focusing on Midway’s darling franchise of Mortal Kombat, the magnum opus became a cultural phenomenon in the early 1990s when those arcade cabinets were first hooked up and internal troubles had been slowly boiling since at least 1997 when MK4 didn’t live up to it’s proposed potential. Coupled with that specific game’s subpar induction of 3D technology and it would take a while for Midway to recover from such an embarrassment. Failed spinoffs from Ed Boon and John Tobias’ side, the company drowning in debt to pay off pre-existing debt, and a few small gems buried under layers of s[cow moos]t, it was reported that Midway’s prestige as one of the Top 5 video game developers in 2000 dropped to Top 20 in just a few years. But as we know, it came back like a phoenix with help from Warner Bros. and is f[pimp slap]king with timelines once again.

The anonymous editors of the Wikipedia page for the 1992 game must not have been happy to specify which game having been rebooted a second time.

For what it’s worth, The Suffering is a victim of time, in that better timing could’ve helped it escape cult status, same for the second game. Executive shenanigans also hurt it severely as a yearly release was Midway’s answer to its financial woes. The “Band-Aid on a gunshot wound” approach to solving the issue, and one that if rumors are true, are looking to roost in Ubisoft’s nest. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up to you–I haven’t played a Ubisoft game in years and I know I’m sleeping on a library of peak.

Let’s rewrite history a bit: The Suffering releases to such fanfare in 2004 and gets a sequel in 2005. Does it escape cult status? From within Midway, sure. From within the horror genre, not really. It would still have to fight against Konami, Capcom, and Tecmo’s Fatal Frame for attention, and what Raccoon City, New England and Project Zero do that The Suffering didn’t (or probably couldn’t) was have a voiced protagonist. This is what tears me up a bit; on the one hand, a silent protagonist can have character without a tongue, if analyses of Claude from GTA III can attest, but on the other hand, the era the game released in would’ve had more reverence for a protagonist who can voice their opinions. Midway may not have been as ambitious with casting at the time like RockStar was, but even an up and coming voice actor with an impressive range or future could’ve done wonders to guide us further into Torque’s mind.

Don’t get me wrong, I like that the lore of the island speaks for the game itself, but a silent protagonist with a backstory this heavy sells itself so depressingly short that it would need to wait some time before it can ride anything worth its salt at Disney World or Six Flags.

You could argue that it would rob the game of the mystery of the fate of Torque’s family, but it’s not like we’ve never had amnesiac protagonists before and a lot of them are pretty bad ass. Lest we forget:

And his animated forms have always had a beautifully raspy voice to carry those raw, unfiltered emotions. Sure, the cartoons have to be censored because the real Wolverine reeks of other people’s blood, but I’ll take the sacrifice for peak storytelling.

We don’t necessarily need a remake of The Suffering, but a game that does something similar or perfects what it did could be bless us in the future.

If I have time to do so, before the New Year, I’ll do something I’ve never done before and breakdown a 3×3 of my favorite anime characters. I’m still on leave as of writing so I’ll have time to push that out and even a New Year’s Day review of this blog. Anime was king for me this year.

Hashire Sori Yo…

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Kaze no you ni/Tsukimi hara wo/Padoru Padoru!

This would’ve come out on Friday, but I had to pack my two bookbags for the holidays. Thought I was gonna look a gift of two weeks* of holiday leave in the mouth? (Actually, 11 days, but I also have a 4-day pass.)

Veteran weebs know what the image above means. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, and everything else Christmas-y. The holidays are a lot of things: great, awful, a mixed bag, an empty bag, and a bunch of other stuff. While this post is gonna be a happy holidays to all, it’s also gonna be a setup for a New Year’s reflection of this blog as well as a look back at the content I’ve written for this year and the content that was released, continued, suspended, or discontinued. Hitting the ground in 2025 with memories and goals. Knowing me, I may entertain theories with plausibility or significant evidence, but for most things I tend to stick with the facts. You’ll almost never hear or see me make a genuine guarantee unless it’s in my notes or I have evidence and research.

Now I do have plans in my notes to review my content for 2024, but that’s a January thing, and seeing as it’s a day before I return to duty, it’ll either be delayed or published ahead of schedule. Preferably the latter so I can focus on packing up, and New Year’s Eve or Day would be perfect ideally. For a look into the future though, of all the animanga I’ve viewed or games I’ve played, a fair few favorites stand out that have wide fanfare, but I’ve either admired out of respect for the reputation or not directly engaged in myself. Others I plan on writing about after a thorough amount of time. For example, I have a decent amount of time on my emulator with the original Yakuza game, though most fans would implore newcomers to try the Kiwami updates instead.

Still, a plus for Yakuza/Ryu ga Gotoku is that it’s generally easy to get into and the number of games released since 2005 gives newcomers a backlog to play catch-ups should they choose. And I do choose that method, real life responsibilities and desires would be damned, but being a responsible adult comes first.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are series I’ve encountered through osmosis. Memes, lore dumps, wikis, explorations; individual fans have tried to explain and recommend their own series, but from the outside looking in, I feel about it the same I feel about the Dune series, best explained with this meme.

Credit: u/netotz, r/dunememes

The series’ in question that I’m referring to are Senran Kagura, Fate, and Idolmaster. Each of these has a large following, both foreign and domestic, but my previous attempts to jump into the deeper lore and find a starting point has been met with mixed results. From easiest to hardest to understand, it’s SK, Idolmaster, and Fate. And I’ll start with SK.

The series’ Wikipedia page describes it as a multimedia franchise spearheaded by none other than Kenichiro Takaki, launched in Japan in 2011 with developers Tamsoft and Marvelous. The first game in the series released domestically is translated with the subtitle “Portrait of Girls” and was ported in 2013 with the subtitle Burst. So that’s simple, boot up an emulator or track down a still working 3DS or similar handheld and get some gameplay in, right? Wrong…

Opening up a can of worms called backwards compatibility and legalese, there’s a myriad of reasons why that’s not the most feasible way to do it for most. Of course, any potato computer can run a 3DS emulator–I did it myself to play Kirby: Planet Robobot and Triple Deluxe for old times’ sake–but the difference between eastern and western developers shows in the pudding. Eastern game devs will gladly re-release and remake old games for new hardware, such as the aforementioned Kiwami remakes of the old Yakuza PS2 games, whereas western devs can’t or won’t re-release remakes. Unless it’s Naughty Dog patting themselves too hard on the back with The Last of Us.

Narcissism is calling a PS4 port a remaster, when it was only a one-year release difference.

What I’ve noticed with eastern and specifically Japanese creators is that they’re accommodating enough to make their products available to all, though from what I’ve seen it can get hectic sometimes. If done poorly, a series can have numerous remakes or remasters or be disappeared and reintroduced, such was the case with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Domestically, there weren’t many problems with manga releases, but western distributors either got a bad hand or dealt a bad hand with all the bravado and overconfidence that killed Macbeth. Long ago and today, it was considered sinful by the fandom to skip parts and lo and behold Viz Media was the one to ruin it in the mid-1990s. The approach was sound, but the execution necessitated the cancellation and re-release of a western release. To play devil’s advocate, Araki’s playlist disguised as a manga makes things difficult for copyright reasons, but it’s a miracle it was able to work so well, even if it took a quarter century to reach this goal.

25 years, people, 25 years. That’s how long it took for the first volume of Phantom Blood to get a successful anime adaptation. And the series had been through OVAs and a lost movie. If it was released contemporarily, we’d be halfway through a JoJolion adaptation with rumors of a JoJoLands adaptation getting a greenlight for Q3 2026.

For Senran Kagura, the source of confusion can come from the names they have, especially overseas. This itself isn’t a new concept, going back decades with international releases of Japanese anything, games notably; sorta like how Earthbound outside of Japan is known as Mother (which is its own wormhole of naming and releases). Couple SK with a limited anime adaptation in 2018, an OVA, and several spinoff games and it can seem like a lot to catch up to. I’m only one mission into Shinovi Versus thus far and I have an extended topic discussion lined up for February. This time, I’m going to try my best to get through Shinovi Versus and at least start another game in the series. So, does SK have a tricky starting point? Yes, but personally I found it easier than the next one I’ve been trying to find a starting point for: Idolmaster.

What makes this one trickier is that it didn’t start off with a console release, but with an arcade release in 2005, later ported in 2007 to the Xbox 360 in Japan. Clearly, it was successful to get a franchise of its own, but from what I’ve heard, Xbox and Microsoft don’t enjoy wide popularity in the Land of the Rising Sun. Sony and Panasonic have a wider reach on their native soil, but this series’ Wikipedia claims Xbox Live had better hardware. Who else but a computer company to push the limits, right?

So much for Sony, I suppose? The Wikipedia also suggests that that was just a test with subsequent releases getting PlayStation or mobile releases. Though over the course of 11 years, there’s been many releases. Again, spinoffs are no issue, but the volume of them in games like these makes finding the origin point tougher than it needs to be, especially when they’re neither conventionally named nor released in the right order for an international audience. Circling back to the Earthbound series, even if it’s true that the fanbase isn’t big enough to warrant a wide release, the small headcount was dedicated enough to translate the series themselves.

But the blame for that can’t always fall on the devs; copyright law is no joke no matter what part of the world you’re in. It’s part of the reason JoJo’s was so hard to introduce to the west. Let’s award the Benefit of Doubt in general cases and say that if it wasn’t for the corps of copyright and lawsuits, more players would play more games, no matter how obscure they are to the general populace. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s a monolith of a series that has one hell of a reputation. Starting as a visual novel, getting two separate anime adaptations (the latter made to correct the former’s mistakes), and spawning a franchise with more twists and turns than M. Night Shyamalan and Christopher Nolan could think of. Pretzels look at the timeline and think, “Holy knots, guy! The f[crunch]k am I lookin’ at?!” Of course, I’m talking about the Fate franchise.

The emperor of long and convoluted timelines, and the source of upwards of 35 to 40% of all anime-based memes, it started with a visual novel in 2004 and hasn’t stopped running. Even if you messed up the train tracks ahead, the Fate Express continues on through the power of fandom and fanservice. This passage from the associated Wikipedia page says as much:

I’ve wanted to get into Fate for a few years now, but its reputation has held me back from taking the plunge. Also being a seasoned weeb myself, I know how hideous fandoms can get (see the My Hero Academia fanbase for more details, and cleanse yourself afterwards. IYKYK). Thankfully, there’s not much in the way of ugliness for the Fate series, but to quote a Welsh monke, “if Dragon Ball fans are the ghetto, Fate fans are the crack dealers.” Some of the more vocally dedicated types will stop at damn near nothing until every newcomer lives and dies by Fate and has immersed themselves in all the VNs, anime, movies, games, and other merch that a franchise this influential can spawn.

Channel: Trash Taste Highlights

With just this video, I don’t really need to elaborate further. Someone will tell me that Fate is easier to get into than I fear, and I guess I can take their word on that being blinder than Kenshi from Mortal Kombat or Toph Beifong in this regard, but what would help is if there was someone out there who will meet normies and newcomers with some interest at the halfway point instead of leaving us to fight off a pack of wolves with a stick and a book of pressed 4- and 5-leaf clovers. You can expect to see more in-depth opinions about all of these in a post about s[horse neighing] not (yet) reviewed after the New Year.

Going through my notes whilst finishing this up, I realize some stuff should’ve been up at least a week before I thought they’d be (this post included), but life and work had gotten in the way. The holidays aren’t gonna make that any easier for the last few topics, but I’ve been beating the odds for as long as I can remember and come hell or high water, I’m gonna make this work. Figuring it all out will have to come later.

Before I part, why don’t I give you a channel recommendation for the Holidays? Behold, Geopold!

https://www.youtube.com/@Geopoldd/videos

Not dissimilar from Gattsu, Geopold is another YouTube channel that introduces different parts of the world by way of the power of internet memes. Describing himself as “Birmingham’s Travel Agent,” going off of that alone, he’s confident that that he’s well-traveled enough to give an unbiased opinion about the places he’s– okay, I’m joking, he’s gonna meme these places off the map, and keep mememing them. Now that travel agent thing may be a joke, and if that’s what you’re looking for than stop where you are, have a drink of your choosing (Kirin or Asahi for me) and watch him grossly oversimplify white people… or the state of Florida…

The next topic (fingers crossed, it’ll be out by Friday or Saturday night) will be an out of season third-person shooter game that only eight people remember.

If you’re at all curious about the plot, here’s a small hint: the Maryland prison system has been better, all things considered.