marginalgloss

For some reason my first thought when I read this was 'oh of course they're doing Metal Gear Solid 4 next!' Which would not be totally outside the realms of possibility, given that they did such a great job on the MGS HD collection. MGS4 would certainly present some unique challenges - not least the frequent, loving and totally gratuitous references to the power of the PS3 - so I'm not sure it'll ever happen. It is perhaps a bit too niche, too expensive, too weird. More likely answer is Demon's Souls. Which is weird in its own way but people do love those Souls games - and there's a lot you could fix if you went back to that one. Ico could happen but I find it hard to imagine them putting that out as a full-price remake again.

I'm so pleased that Captain Toad is coming to both Switch and 3DS. The game's an absolute belter. Okami and Crash Bandicoot HD coming to Switch really feels like a bit like Nintendo thumbing their nose at the dream of the PS Vita. I've no interest in those games but they'll probably sell a lot of copies. I was very excited to see the first Luigi's Manse coming out on 3DS. Dark Moon was fantastic; a rare example of a 3D-ish game that my girlfriend and I could get enthused about. AFAIK the first game isn't quite so well-regarded by comparison but I'm sure they'll have tidied it up a bit. One thing everybody seems to have forgotten about is that Nintendo originally announced a brand new, full-fat Fire Emblem game to be released in 2018. They've kept very quiet about it since. I guess with Smash coming this year we have to assume it's been delayed? I mean, I don't care too much, but if that were coming out tomorrow I'd march out and buy a Switch right now. (So I suppose I do care a bit.)

A brief addendum: here is Emily Wilson on Twitter, offering a brief lesson on gender biased trends in translation regarding the figures of the Sirens in the Odyssey. The internet is good sometimes!

I don't really watch South Park any more. I watched it all the time in the early days and thought it was brilliant, and I remember watching the movie and thinking it was really funny. I wonder if it would stand up if I watched it again today. Little of what I read about the current direction of the show makes me want to do any of that. But I was thinking the other day about Isaac Hayes in relation to South Park. It's so weird that one of the most important funk/soul musicians of his era had this second life as a character in a TV show where a big part of the audience probably had no idea who he was. And for a while it was great but then I remembered how he left and I felt very depressed by the whole thing. After he quit it felt like they threw him under the bus by killing off Chef in a particularly gross and egregious way when Hayes wasn't in the best of health and there was still some confusion about exactly what he had and hadn't said. Was that punching up or was it just making some quick comedy capital out of a bit of controversy? I don't know. Everything about it just seems really sad to me now. People will still be listening to the Theme from Shaft in the ashes of our new society when South Park has been forgotten about, so I guess there's that.

I finished INSIDE. My partner and I played it all the way through together. She likes platform games but I was a little was worried the morbid tone would put her off. But she was totally engrossed throughout, from the moment you have to pause in front of that car to keep from getting caught right at the beginning. (The game doesn't tell you what to do - it doesn't even tell you you're being hunted - but when I saw her pause, and the little boy just tuck himself against the vehicle, with that beautiful animation - god it's so good.) It is one of the few games I can think of where it stands alone, so confidently, as a complete work of art unto itself. The ways in which it is 'about games' are certainly there but they're also not especially interesting. You might as well say that Mulholland Drive is 'about movies' - it's not wrong but there's so much else going on there. I almost can't believe that this is from the same team who made Limbo. Comparing this to that is like that bit in Amadeus where Mozart takes one of Salieri's compositions and does the 'wouldn't it be better like this…' thing to it. A magical reinvention that takes everything that made that earlier game quite interesting and, effortlessly, turns it into something really, really great. One of the best games I've ever played.

Finished this today. Some thoughts: This is the first time I've read The Odyssey from start to finish. I've never really read or studied much in the way of the ancient classics, aside from the occasional foray into extracts from Aristotle and Plato as part of studying English Lit. In my case most of my prior knowledge of The Odyssey probably came from reading Ulysses. Joyce's novel is perhaps more generous with its interpretation of Homer than is commonly supposed, but in a strange way I think it helped. Although trying to map one directly on to the other is mostly just an exercise in frustration. At any rate, I know very little about prior versions of The Odyssey in English. Reading the translator's note - which is a wonderfully passionate piece of writing in itself - I was struck by Wilson's insistence on producing a translation which was both proper, in the sense of presenting the truth of the original text as far as possible without unnecessary embellishment; but also right, in an ethical sense. (This is touched upon in the interview posted above as well.) She's very precise, for example, in referring to characters as 'slaves' when they might once have been called 'servants'. These are deliberate, thoughtful decisions. And she doesn't shy away from depicting the immediate brutality in the story, even when this might affect the sympathies we hold for the characters. I think this idea that an author or translator might have an immediate moral duty towards their audience is perhaps the most modern thing about this translation. I found it easy to imagine earlier translators who might subordinate what is right or what is correct to what is beautiful, but Wilson puts this the other way round. There is no sense here of a writer who has tried to imagine themselves into the moral codes of another era by framing something awful as something righteous. A rose is a rose is a rose: a slave is a slave is a slave. Wilson seems to be operating on the idea that art is no longer entirely for art's sake; some of it might be morally good or bad after all. That this translation has been so positively received is a sign perhaps that it's entirely fitting for our era, in which we seem to expect a higher moral standard from artists (or at least evidence of some moral standard). We don't want the author to be dead; we want them very much alive, and responsible for their texts. Ideally we want them to be good people as well. And yet I never had the sense, reading this, that this ethical imperative was overriding the aesthetics of the text. It's kind of the opposite: first we have the ethical choice, and what proceeds from that is aesthetic effects that might have unexpected resonance. Wilson has a remarkable talent for creating imagery that lingers in the mind as it might in a particularly affecting horror movie. There's so many wonderful scenes here but the one that haunts me as I write this is the ghastly picture of the slave women brutally hanged by Odysseus and Telemachus near the end of the story: At that, he wound a piece of sailor’s rope round the rotunda and round the mighty pillar, stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground. As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly home to their nests, but someone sets a trap – they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime; just so the girls, their heads all in a row, were strung up with the noose around their necks to make their death an agony. They gasped, feet twitching for a while, but not for long. But she doesn't loom in judgment over the text. The translator isn't here to tell the reader how to feel about what happens every time Odysseus does something reprehensible. It is just there, plainly. 'A bitter bedtime' - what a phrase. The whole thing is very beautiful. Did I mention that? It's very beautiful.

I remember thinking Dharma Bums a much better book, though it's been a very long time since I read that and On The Road. Desolation Angels had its moments, too. I've always found Kerouac very difficult to go back to. His stuff can be patchy in the extreme, and there's a lot that could be said, and has been said, about quality vs quantity in his work. He was probably an important writer for his time but for me his thing just isn't quite interesting enough compared to some of the other more considered writers of mid-century American fiction. Truman Capote was being a bit mean when he said 'it's not writing, it's typing', but...

The comments on the Eurogamer review have inevitably devolved into a total cesspool but this detail from one of them made me laugh quite a lot: Some top notch squat systems at play here.

So I just tried virtual reality for the first time in maybe twenty years via the Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire experience which is currently parked in the atrium of the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd's Bush. (It is also available at various Disney parks, I think?) This thing is operated by The Void, which is a bespoke multi-room immersive VR system – I think I heard about it previously on a podcast (either Giant Bomb or Idle Thumbs) where they did a production based on Ghostbusters. Basically you are divided into teams of four, and you put on a VR headset which is attached to a little backpack and a haptic vest. You then wander through a series of little rooms which become the VR environments around you, and at various times stuff vibrates and blows hot and cold air at you. At one point you pick up a blaster (which is an actual working prop) and you can blast stormtroopers with it. It's very impressive. That said, I now understand what people talk about when they talk about the 'screen door' effect, and the noticeable limitations of the field of view of these headsets. I had an odd problem throughout with my left eye, which didn't seem to be focussed properly. But the immersion worked in spite of all of that. At one point I was walking along a little bridge over a lake of lava, and I really had that feeling of 'don't fall into that lava!' even though I was only ever blundering around a mostly-empty room in a West London mall. The motion tracking worked pretty much perfectly, aside from a bit of weird dithering when looking at my teammates. And yes, picking up that blaster and actually putting it to my eye and shooting stormtroopers was really fun! Who knew! These are probably old stories for anyone who is into VR at this point. Judged by the standards of a video game, it would be a pretty terrible game. You're just kind of blundering around a series of small rooms which look out on bigger rooms (which aren't really there, of course). There's not a lot of detail, and the graphics are just about good enough to carry the whole thing. 'Impressive' feels like exactly the right adjective: I wasn't truly engrossed, or awestruck, or fascinated. It was just really fun and kind of silly. I think I would have enjoyed it more had it been a solitary experience. As it was, I had to go in with a couple of strangers who were chatting and chuckling together in French the whole time; but it would have been equally distracting had I gone in with friends, too. I was highly aware throughout of having to keep up with them, not bump into them, etc. But I think what I want from games in general is, essentially, a solitary experience. Overall I'd recommend it if you have the chance to give it a try, though perhaps moderate your expectations. It left me feeling like VR is certain to become a popular attraction in theme parks and arcades, but also kind of doubtful that it's going to find a wider audience in homes anytime soon. It still feels to me like we're paddling in the shallows of what's possible in terms of VR software. I've looked once or twice at picking up the Playstation VR but the games still seem super limited, the setup seems overly elaborate, and now I'd worry about getting the focus right for my eyes as well. But I'm still intrigued by VR. I remember being a kid, trying VR rides the first time round, and thinking: this is definitely a thing I want more than pretty much anything else in the world, and it's definitely going to be the future of everything. There's still a bit of me that wants that, but it still feels like there's so much in the way.

So there's some interesting little things I've learned that they've added (!) in this remake, which I wasn't previously aware of: There are DLC weapons now. Boo! Boooo!

Same here - I already have a PS4, I'd just really like to see how good it looks in 4K/HDR. Unfortunately I don't have a 4K TV either so this will probably be postponed indefinitely until my current TV breaks. (This is a weird thing which is stopping me buying a lot of new PS4 games right now; I decide it'll look much better on the Pro, but I don't want to get a Pro, so I say to the game: no.) It's interesting to me that there's no option in this remaster to swap between old/new grafix, as they've done with the new versions of Halo, Grim Fandango, etc. Perhaps that would have been an overwhelming technical challenge. Still, I think it's this, combined with the lack of backwards compatibility* for the older versions of the game, which makes it feel like Sony saying 'this is the definitive edition of the game now'. I have mixed feelings about that. I would like to have the option to feel what that game felt like on the PS2. But it's clear that Bluepoint have once again done a smashing job on this remaster. * - Apart from playing the PS3 HD edition through Playstation Now, but...

A couple of noteworthy films I saw recently: Sausage Party is kind of trash, but it is weird, interesting sort of trash. I can't quite understand how it got made, not because it's crude but because it just isn't very well written. So the jokes are kind of one-note, and they often fall flat - but the grim existential implications of the scenario were enough to keep me entertained for its 90 minute duration. Certainly it carries off its horribleness with a certain amount of flair. Perhaps the nicest thing I can say about it is that it made me think a lot about Nier: Automata. I had no idea what to expect from Personal Shopper before I saw it, but what a peculiar, remarkable movie this is. One of the best ghost stories I've seen in a long time. Kristen Stewart is superb throughout; it might as well be a one-woman show. It's mysterious and inscrutable and incredibly compelling.

Glad to find the podcast has returned! I read NW some years ago and remember enjoying it. It's a good specimen of the modern novel of voices, and as a thing about London it feels right, I think. I remember liking some parts more than others, and some of it felt very direct (politically); as if Smith would sometimes lean out of a character-specific narrative to write something that feels like the start of a non-fiction essay. But I quite like that approach. I'm looking forward to reading that new translation of The Odyssey. I already bought a copy to give to someone else as a christmas present, but before it left my arms I read the introduction and the first few pages and that was enough to convince me I need to have it for myself. Tote bag and all.

This is less an endorsement from myself and more a call for endorsements, but - does anyone have a book light that they would particularly recommend? The only ones I've owned before have been the kind you pick up when lingering at the checkout in a bookshop and they've been profoundly unsatisfactory; usually they have a too-wobbly flexible stem that's trouble when you turn pages, or they have cheap wiring inside that comes apart at the slightest provocation. I just want something of decent quality that'll clip on to a paperback for darktime reading. Amazon is full of things that are likely trash - anyone know of any good ones?

I finally saw this movie. I liked it a lot, far more than I was expecting to.

Just wanted to say thank you for taking the time and effort (and probably $$$?) to keep the podcast rolling with Nick on board via telepresence. The end result is genuinely impressive and I really don't think I would have noticed any difference in audio quality if you hadn't mentioned that it was a thing. I really quite liked The Bone Clocks, though it's probably not for everyone. What differentiates it is not so much David Mitchell's tendency towards a single fictional universe in his work - that stuff is easy to overlook or ignore. It's more that The Bone Clocks very much feels to me like a work of high concept political/fantasy genre fiction, rather than literary fiction in which mysterious/magical things happen. In that regard it has something in common with writers like Ursula LeGuin, China Mieville, or even Philip Pullman. I really like this tendency, even though it does demand more in the way of internal coherence and, like, lore; some readers understandably find this insufferable. That said, if Mitchell announced that all his future books would be also set in the same world (he's already written one!) I'd be a little disappointed.

I can't let any mention of In Our Time slide without linking to this excellent tribute to Melvyn Bragg's incomparable ability to segue smoothly through the word 'Hello' to a semi-cold introduction to the podcast without a comma, parenthesis, or pause for breath. It's always so good.

Twitter is the only social network I use on a daily basis. I remember the author J. G. Ballard once saying something to the effect that he wished he could have one of those old ticker-tape stock price machines that would feed him a steady stream of concentrated information about the state of the world: that's partly what Twitter is for me. Another part of it is following creative work by people and teams I admire. Another part is personal self-expression: a place to put dumb thoughts, bon mots, hot takes, pictures of my cat, and so on. It's where I tweet exactly once about things I've written, and then never mention them again (I am not good at self-promotion). I almost never use twitter for conversations, or to reach out to new people, because I find all of that to be quite intimidating. The thought of @'ing even a long-term mutual follower is painful at the best of times. Bunging someone a notification feels like a very mild analog to phoning them up – like I know that somewhere out there a buzz, a light, has gone off, because of something I did! – like I'm grasping for their attention. I'm not comfortable with that, but I think this is exactly why a lot of people love twitter: you can spend all day grasping for the attention of that guy with bad opinions, and for Jennifer Lopez, and from your point of view the network factors it as the same kind of interaction. I have pages on LinkedIn and Facebook but they're basically just friends-only placeholders at this stage. Facebook in particular I find almost overwhelmingly unpleasant to use. I'm aware that for many people it's essentially their Operating System for the internet, and perhaps that's why I'm so wary of it. Opening Facebook is like looking into another computer that lives inside my computer. It's weird. I use tumblr to host my blog. When I first started on that site many years ago the attractions were obvious: it was one of the easiest ad-free ways to host a free website, and they made it ridiculously easy to share a variety of content. But ever since the Yahoo buyout they’ve added next to nothing in the way of useful features except a slurry of 'promoted content' that clutters up my dashboard. It has the same problems it always had – in particular that it's really hard to find interesting, unique stuff, among stuff that is just insanely popular – and nobody seems to have any idea how to fix it. Most of the great writers I used to follow there have since migrated to other platforms (e.g. Medium). I cling to it because it is still easy(ish) to post new writing, and because the thought of migrating years of content elsewhere leaves me really scared. I should probably just make a clean break of it but also: that seems, like, a lot of work? Oh, and I also use Goodreads, but mainly because it is such a useful tool for cataloguing my reading. The social aspects are kind of awful, but given that I write a lot about books, more people seem to read that stuff here than anywhere else. Oddly, nobody has ever said anything especially mean about my reviews, but some of the Goodreads commentariat are quite strange. I'm over 30 now so of course I don't understand Instagram or YouTube or Snapchat or Twitch.

I am suitably intrigued. Some of the swooshy head motions made me think of VR? But it might just be the fossicking about in first-person (a core part of the Firewatch aesthetic). The IGN article sent me down a wikipedia rabbit hole reading about Nefertiti. Apparently her tomb has never been found, which means it's definitely full of ghost.

I just finished listening to the Dirty John podcast from the LA Times. It's the latest thing in the true crime reportage / documentary subgenre, and owes a great deal to Serial and S-Town and all that stuff. I don't think is quite as good as either of those but it's worth a look if you have any interest in such things. It's a story about a woman who marries a man who turns out to be...a very different kind of person to who she thought he was. As the title suggests, he's not a very nice man. The story is horribly gripping, with an emphasis on 'horrible'; if you find it difficult to listen to stories of emotional abuse or domestic strife, you might want to give it a miss. The 'adult content' warning at the start of each episode is barely sufficient. Or, if you're like me, and you're quietly afraid of most people (especially men), you'll probably find it fascinating and anxiety-inducing in equal measures. At times I think the production lays it on a bit thick - with the squeaky Southern Gothic music, and literary turns of phrase that make it feel like a cheap crime thriller - but I think it's the kind of story that deserves to be brought to wider attention. It's a truly shameful, galling reminder of the myriad ways in which men can be awful to women.

I've only finished a few games this year, and I've bought even fewer new games. I guess 2017 has been a strong year but for the most part I found myself feeling very little urgency to catch up with the latest thing. Still, I have opinions! I've attached links to longer things wot I wrote about some of these, in case anyone is interested: Breath of the Wild stands on a mountaintop, comfortably above everything else I've played lately, waving its little sword in defiance. At the beginning of this year I really didn't know if Nintendo could do it. They'd never made an open world game before, and much as I like the Zelda games, well – I got quite far through Skyward Sword just before this came out, and so much of that game feels awfully tired now. But BotW is entirely phenomenal. I don't think I was expecting anything nearly so good. For all the ingenuity of its systems, it stimulates a very primitive sense of wonder in a way anyone can appreciate. The Wii U was my first Nintendo console, and it's somehow fitting that after introducing me to so many classic titles, it should be this faithful machine which ushers in what feels like a real next generation moment. Dishonored 2 I liked very much. I still think it's essentially a portfolio of brilliant immersive sim ideas in search of a story; the stuff which holds it all together is a bit lacking. But when it's on form, it's frequently stunning: A Crack in the Slab in particular might be the single best example of the 'sneak around a big mansion' level type I've ever played. I haven't played Death of the Outsider yet – though I literally have a copy sitting in my drawer – but I'm excited to see that it seems to be ranking here in front of the main game. I am playing Nier: Automata at the moment. I've not got far but I feel it's going to be something kind of extraordinary. Baby baby baby. Other notable mentions, for older games I finished this year: The Last Guardian. I really think this is something special, and it's kind of a shame it got such a lukewarm response. At a time when most story-driven games seem to be striving to get away from asking the player to establish their own relationship with some kind of systems-driven AI, this game's singular focus on that (for all the ensuing flaws!) seems so remarkable to me. Nobody's ever made anything like this and I don't know that anyone will ever make anything like it again. It is, by some distance, Ueda's best game. The Beginner's Guide. One of the most thoughtful, affecting, disturbing games I've ever played. All the games I've mentioned here are funny in their own way but this is the best joke among them all. A minor metafictional masterpiece. Fire Emblem: Fates and Hitman. I've poured countless hours into both of these; both are immaculately polished, both are somewhat lacking in the plot department, but both are full of character, and mechanically peerless. If I haven't bought one before then, when the next proper Fire Emblem game is released I shall happily lay down the price of a Switch.

I've recently been really enjoying the first two seasons of the BBC series Inside No 9. This has been around for a few years but I'm only just encountering it now via Netflix. It's a 30 minute anthology show where each episode is entirely different in style, story and format. The only thing they have in common is that each one takes place in a single location with a number nine in its title - often a house or an apartment, but sometimes something else, like a sleeper compartment of a railway carriage or a dressing room in a theatre. I guess you could file it under 'unsettling horror comedy' - something akin to a very British take on the Twilight Zone. But each episode is very different in tone. Some of the stories are small and silly and some of them are really wild. Some of it is quite gentle and funny, and some of it is really, really horrible. Sometimes it's quite affecting as well. Sometimes it is all of these things within the same half hour. One of them is entirely silent! But the ones which are not silent are generally written really well. It's the product of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who have somehow both written and starred in all the episodes thus far. They are part of the team who made The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville, but it's a very different thing from those shows (which I never fully enjoyed tbh). I think No 9 is comfortably the best thing they've done and one of the most interesting, imaginative, unpredictable British TV shows I've seen in a long time.

While watching this superbunnyhop video on the 'failure' of Hitman I was reminded of something I'm sure I'd forgotten - that the game was originally scheduled to be released in two big instalments, rather than six episodes. The first would have been everything up to and including Marrakesh; the second everything after; $35 each or $60 for both. It's an intriguing reminder of what could have been. It's an interesting video - food for thought, though I don't agree with all of it. One thing I do think it gets right is the difficulty of marketing difficult, unusual stealth games to a mass market audience via a publisher who is expecting astronomical sales. Hitman is a big franchise - they've made movies out of it! - but the latest game isn't an easy one to explain in terms outside of 'surly man with guns'. I mean, I know what it's about because I'm old and I remember Blood Money and all that - but I think I would get easily flummoxed trying to explain it to a teenager. The game's brief popularity amongst streamers probably did them an enormous favour in that regard. It's only once you see someone playing it that you really start to understand what's going on here.

Several months later and this is still one of the main games I'm playing. I've cleared all the opportunities (and done all the goofy trophy stuff) in all the missions apart from Colorado and Hokkaido. I still have some Mastery to build up, but I'm happy to leave that to give me a reason to come back in future. And man, there's still so much to do - I was staggered to pick a contract at random one time and find myself in a new version of Sapienza, where they were shooting a movie in front of the house - I've not even looked at these alternate campaigns outside of the main story. All this makes me feel a little exhausted to learn that IO Interactive have just released a GOTY edition of the game, which includes all the content released so far plus a new campaign (set in reworked versions of the existing maps) and a grab-bag of new costumes and weapons. You can either buy the whole thing or pay about $15 for the upgrade, if you have previously bought the game. This upgrade seems to have received a fairly muted response, which makes me feel a little sorry for the devs since this is their first package as an independent studio. I've not seen a review of the new stuff anywhere, so I'd be interested to hear if anyone has given it a try. Given how much I'm enjoying the game I might pick it up at some point, but I'm in no hurry at the moment. More exciting for me at least is the news that Elusive Targets are coming back next week. Worth noting you don't need the GOTY edition to play them, but they will only be available for people who missed them the first time around - if you attempted and failed, you don't get a second bite of the cherry. They've also said that they'll have more to show regarding properly new Hitman stuff next year. I wonder if they'll build upon the first season, or whether they'll abandon the episodic model altogether. I wonder if it worked out well for them; I feel like the initial response to Paris and Sapienza was euphoric, with the rest of the maps receiving a slightly more muted reaction. Perhaps a lot of people felt like they had their fill with those episodes. A quick glance at the PSN trophies for Hokkaido shows that only 11% of players ever finished that map - I guess that seems low. But that figure includes everyone who has ever downloaded the game (after they game the first one or two levels away free) is that a big number? I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens…

I finished Beyond Good and Evil (via the PS3 HD edition). This is such an odd, interesting game in the Ubisoft back catalogue. A year ago, I don’t think anyone could have predicted that the sequel to what is now a fairly obscure cult classic from 2003 would be announced as potentially one of the biggest and most ambitious games they will ever make. And yet here we are. Encountered today, it seems like one of the better examples of that early 2000s tendency where video games were starting to develop a ‘mature’ identity, while largely still defining themselves by old mechanics and adolescent tropes. So we had Shadow the Hedgehog, Jak and Daxter 2, the death of Lara Croft, and so on. In this case we get a game with a cute art style, anthropomorphic characters, and whimsical dialogue that wouldn’t be out of place in a kids TV show, alongside a storyline set in a corporate dystopia that deals in some seriously dark conspiracy theories. Though aspects of it feel dated, the combination of a groovy European sensibility with an anti-authoritarian, pro-diversity message still feels fresh. But though it steps away from relentless violence as a way of solving every problem, it can’t entirely answer the questions it throws up at every juncture. You play as Jade, a young woman who lives in a lighthouse on a faraway planet, Hillys, with her uncle, a pig man named Pey’j. Jade’s world is under constant attack from an alien race, a vaguely Geiger-esque bunch called the Domz who’ve been kidnapping the locals for some nefarious purpose. They’re supposed to be defended by the Alpha Section, a local corporate military force — except the soldiers always seem to show up conveniently late to intervene in the attacks. Jade picks up her camera and goes to join a local band of rebels who have devoted themselves to finding out the truth about the invasion. In most games this would simply involve annihilating everything in your path. The solution in Beyond Good and Evil is charmingly old-fashioned: the rebels are publishing a secret newsletter, and Jade’s role is to sneak into suspicious locations and send back photographic evidence. (You point and shoot the camera manually, from a first-person perspective; a delightful side-quest involves taking pictures of the local wildlife.) There’s some combat — Jade is pretty handy with a quarterstaff — but it’s limited in scope. The game owes a good deal to the 3D Zelda games, especially in the way that players will divide their time between exploring a small open world, sneaking through long, complex, multi-layered levels. But unlike Wind Waker (to which it owes the most) the game is far smaller in scope. The overworld is tiny, there's not much to discover off the beaten track, and there's only one or two meaningful upgrades that change the way you play. The dark stuff, though, is pretty dark: I'm fascinated by a comment I read somewhere by Michel Ancel to the effect that the events of 9/11 were a key influence on the shape of this game. I don't know quite what to make of that. The whole thing seems shot through with a deeply cynical distrust of authority: media, politicians, the military. Nobody and nothing can be trusted. It's that conspiracy theory mindset -- Metal Gear again -- but without the cinematic hooks that keep Kojima tethered, albeit on a distant orbit. By the end I kind of felt like the game was done with the world as much as I was done with the game; as if the game wanted to destroy itself, wanted to do away with all its own characters; but couldn't, because it was a big budget video game published in 2003, and not an art movie. It's all very strange. I'm not sure it's the timeless classic I've sometimes seen it described as, but it's certainly worth a look for anyone interested in a unique, offbeat Zelda clone.