marginalgloss

Yeah, this is definitely a thing, and I think it's semi-deliberate. There's a tendency throughout all the MGS games for them to reflect and comment on what's come before, in terms of what you've just been playing in this game, and what you've played in previous games (both MGS titles and otherwise). In basic terms it's usually framed as a plot twist - 'you thought you were the good guy but you were getting played all along!' - 'you thought this guy was on our side but they're actually a double agent!' - or in MGS2, it goes so far as to suggest MGS3 does it from pretty much the first cutscene in the game. It's a tendency which leads to accusations of manic incoherence - most of which are entirely fair. But for me, I think the stuff which falls out of this wilful inconsistency is varied and interesting enough to justify the sprawling excess of the storyline. Also, re: themes expressed through mechanics, I wrote this thing a while ago (spoiler free, I think?) about the use of music in MGSV: TPP, and how it's an example of that in a very subtle but entirely self-conscious way.

I guess one thing that's always impressed me about Metal Gear is the extent to which the plot is ultimately subject to the play of ideas, rather than the other way around. It's not so much that the characters are 'good' or believable or well-rounded as individuals -- most of them are entirely ridiculous -- but what's great is the way in which the game uses them as a movable perspective for what the game as a whole is about. And MGS is about a lot of stuff! Nuclear proliferation, pacifism, the military-industrial complex, the horrors of war, genetic manipulation, all wrapped up in a basket of Pynchon-esque conspiracy theories. If you think about where video games were at in 1998, nothing else (that I know of!) comes close to the kind of thematic ambition displayed in MGS. Of course it's often pretty dumb too. But even when those games are dumb, they're often dumb in interesting ways. Like the famous sequence where you've got to identify Meryl in disguise from the way she walks: you're basically looking at a bunch of different butts and seeing which one moves with a wiggle. But again, I can't think of another game from that era which so earnestly asked players to consider the difference between the ways in which men and women move in 3D space.

Just thought I would heartily second this recommendation. I believe the author/narrator/host of this podcast said he was going to stop making these a while ago, but a new episode* just went up a day or two ago, so perhaps it's not been entirely forgotten. Either way, it's worth going back through the old episodes if (like me) you have an affinity for ghost stories and weird fiction. The tales themselves aren't entirely free from conventional horror tropes - sometimes there are vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc - but they are highly atmospheric, and the author has a great talent for creating a series of memorable, haunting, original images. I could point to a handful of moments in some of the old episodes which I still think about all the time, even though it must be a year or more since I first heard them. I don't think I've ever heard a podcast quite like it. I've also read some of the author's self-published fiction, which is equally idiosyncratic but highly absorbing. Song of the Living Dead and A Listing of the Holdings of the National Museum of Romance are well worth a look if you like the podcast - IIRC I think I got the ebook versions from Amazon, hard copies may be out of print. * - incidentally the new one, unlike most of the others, is told using several different voice actors instead of just the one voice. I'm not sure I like this approach as much, but it's worth your attention regardless.

Oh man I liked that movie a lot. A rare sighting of Nicholas 'hey that's Xander from Buffy' Brendon in a good film!

Does anyone else feel like the recent updates to the Streetpass stuff have...kind of broken Streetpass? Some context: because I'm a Cool Guy, I carry my 3DS back and forth to work to work most days, even if I'm not playing it. Here in London you don't often see other people with portable consoles on the tube, but until recently, I could still pick up at least ten hits a week. But recently I've got absolutely nothing - even on occasions where I know I've walked by other 3DS players. Apparently Nintendo have quietly shut down all Streetpass Relays in the UK, so I'm sure that's part of the problem - I used to get a lot of hits just from walking by McDonald's. But I'm wondering if the recent updates have split the 3DS audience as well. I think the problem is that if you update to the latest version of Streetpass Plaza, you can no longer get Streetpass hits from people who haven't updated. The same goes with the Animal Crossing Amiibo update - once you've installed that, the game tells you that your village is no longer compatible with users who don't have the update. That strikes me as a great shame because with ACNL in particular, it was always a pleasure to check out the houses I collected via Streetpass; some of those could be fantastically strange, and it was nice to think that you were having a little glimpse into the life of somebody you might have passed in the street. And who knows, maybe somebody enjoyed my extensive clock collection... I would guess there's a significant proportion of 3DS users who will never update either of those things - perhaps because they're just kids who might just only own a few carts and never connect the thing to the internet, and partly because I don't think the Streetpass Plaza prompts you to install the update. Unlike 3DS system updates, which are pushed to you, you have to go in to the plaza and select the update icon from within the software. Of course I don't begrudge anyone who neglects to do this - why should they care! - but it does feel to me like things just aren't working so smoothly as they were before. I'd be curious to know if others have encountered this too.

I've been watching Atlanta, and I like it a great deal. It's funny and clever and touching, and it's directed with style without being showy. It's satirical without being cruel. I'm not sure it's an especially deep show, but as a character-driven comedy (dramedy?) it's really impressive in a lot of ways. It has some of the trappings of the actor/comedian-as-writer/director show that Louie and Master of None had, which is that you can't quite believe that Donald Glover is anything like the hapless schlubby guy his character is portrayed as. And sometimes there's individual sequences which seem like great little skits that have very little to do with story or character. But I like both of those other shows a lot as well so whatever!

I haven't read anything from the 2016 Booker shortlist yet, although I did read pretty much everything on the 2015 and 2014 shortlists - mainly because I have relatives who seem to have decided that those books would make for really nice xmas/bday presents. My favourite winner of recent years was The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, but I think that one is too long (and perhaps too devotedly formal?) to recommend without reservation. I did love it, though. There's a weird protectionist logic creeping in to some of those arguments in that article - one might as well declare 'British prizes for British writers!' and be done with it. I think the book industry has bigger problems with getting people to read literary fiction in general, and to me it seems a little churlish to be worrying about whether a select few British writers might lose out in this way when writers on both sides of the Atlantic are having such a hard time of it. A while ago I had a look at some of the figures once for Booker winners, before and after the prize; there's often a significant bump in sales, of course, but literary fiction sells so poorly as it stands that those writers are still miles away from competing with the most popular writers of YA, crime thrillers, etc.

I haven't read this yet, but I'm curious to know if this being the first book by an American author to win the Booker Prize has got it (and the prize) any more attention for that reason. Was the Booker ever afforded much attention in the USA before now? It's interesting because until a few years ago, the Booker was only open to works of fiction written in English, published in the UK, written by citizens of UK or (ex-)commonwealth countries. As I understand it, this was mainly because the British and American markets for literary fiction were considered to be very different beasts. I wonder about the extent to which that's still the case today. It feels to me like there's a lot of big American writers who find it easier to get media attention in Britain, often through widely-shared writing in prestigious online outlets like the New Yorker and the Atlantic - though I'm not sure the reverse is always true. Some authors, like Julian Barnes, have been quite vocal in expressing their discontent about the change in the rules. I don't have strong feelings about it, but The Sellout certainly seems like an interesting choice for a first American winner.

Sounds good! I'm sure there's a joke to be made about bringing a hydroponics lab to the most chill game of this year but I can't think of a punchline.

EDF is great. I mean, the games are very badly made, but they are also great. They offer a level of spectacle which is probably without equivalent in video games. I played quite a bit of the last one on PS3 before I got sick of the giant spiders ensnaring me with webs that glitched straight through the walls of whole city blocks. Also the coop multiplayer in EDF is supposed to be amazing. You can summon a giant robot and put your buddies in the turrets and stomp very slowly around the city levelling everything in your path. I don't know who could ask for more from a video game. I haven't played Dishonored 2 yet but I had strong and deep feelings about the first game. It was one of the few games where I've felt basically fine about killing everyone (and I mean everyone) in the game on my first playthrough. The world is just so deeply sordid, and almost everyone in it is so far beyond redemption -- and to be honest I have a lot of thoughts/doubts about how meaningfully different the game is when you choose not to kill anyone. That said, my second playthrough was non-lethal, and on a harder difficulty, which made it a lot more satisfying because I'd so extensively scratched the itch of wishing I could just play the game like it was Hotline Miami.

Apparently PSN in the UK are sending out vouchers to some users to get the digital PS4 edition for a little over £30. Xbox might be matching this too. I got one of the vouchers for PS4, and I'm tempted. The single player sounds really great and exactly the kind of thing I want to play, but I got a pretty strong vibe of 'this isn't for me' from the multiplayer beta and from watching the Giant Bomb quicklook. The problem is that I'm somewhat inept when it comes to speed and agility in PvP, and I feel like the relentless competitive pace of the wallrunning and doublejumping and quickscoping in multiplayer is going to become tiresome really quickly. I think Overwatch has somewhat spoiled me for other games in this regard with the sheer variety of roles it offers, but I'd really like to know if I'm missing something here. Are there viable medic or support options that I could be playing, or is it just a case of getting good at vaulting over the heads of other players and nailing them with a bit of the old L2-R2? It's odd: I feel like a lot of people praised the first game as an accessible online shooter for people who didn't usually play online shooters, but the sequel seems to focus more on appealing to a hardcore audience. I wasn't super keen on the new bounty hunt mode, for example, which rewards players with money for killing AI mobs in the level, but then also gives an extra reward to people who can hunt down other players and steal their cash. It felt (at least in the beta) rather awful to be struggling to make some kind of small contribution to the team while the best players were just trying to grind my face into the dirt and take my lunch money.

So the latest patch is now out on all platforms, bringing with it a new hero and quite a lot else besides. I haven't really had the chance to try Sombra yet - and I'm not entirely sure she's my cup of tea - but there's new game modes and a new reward structure which is actually quite exciting. There's a new Arcade section in the menu based around two totally new modes: 1v1, where players are randomly assigned the same hero and fight the best of six rounds in a brand new (very small) map set in the Arctic. And there's 3v3, which is almost the same except it's out of three rounds, and you can pick your hero, but it's on the same Arctic map. I was convinced 1v1 was wild nonsense that surely wouldn't work in Overwatch, but...it kind of does? It's crazy. It strikes a weird balance between being incredibly silly but also unbelievably tense. With two Sombras, for example, part of the problem is just trying to find the other player when you're both trying to play cat and mouse with teleporters and invisibility. But with Dva, you don't have many options other than to wail on each other at short range - though even then there's potential for things to basically turn into Alien: Isolation, as I found out earlier tonight. There's other fun stuff in the Arcade too, like a random brawl playlist, which mixes things up with brawl rules from days gone by. There's weekly challenges whereby winning on a particular game mode gets you a loot box instantly, and getting three wins in any three Arcade modes gets you another loot box. Oh, and in Quick Play, you can't have more than one hero on the same team anymore. But! The old style Quick Play with no limits on duplicates has been moved into the Arcade section as a 6v6 game mode. All nice stuff to keep players coming back week after week, I guess, though these things do feel like delightful little side-dishes compared to the main game.

Two hundred quid sounds incredibly cheap for what they're offering, especially in a post-Brexit UK where the £ isn't doing too great and the prices of consumer electronics (and everything else) will be creeping upwards over the next year. I'll be astonished if they hit that - and if so, I'd expect it to cover only the most basic of basic packages. But it would be nice to be surprised! Battery life is...reasonably concerning. I play a lot of 3DS out and about, and I value its lengthy sleep mode in particular. But I can't think of many cases where I'd be playing for more than 3/4 hours straight without any opportunity of charging. Part of me would like to imagine Nintendo's approach to battery life being compromised by a moral objection, as if it were an enforced approach to taking a break now and again. But I also wonder if, given the widespread availability of external batteries, they might be planning a BYO approach to charging, as they have for storage on Wii U and 3DS.

Ah, Segaworld. They had one in London too, in a massive building near Piccadilly Circus called the Trocadero. Again, the rides had nothing to do with Sega characters, but they had some pretty cool stuff regardless. There were hundreds of arcade machines, laser tag, etc. There was a weird ride where you could drive dodgems around and shoot rubber balls at each other. But most notably Segaworld gave me my first (and so far only) experience with virtual reality: they had a space flight sim ride which involved sitting on one of those hydraulic platforms, much like a video coaster, but with a VR headset which allowed you to look and shoot in any direction. There was also a networked version of what I think must have been a modded version of one of the Mechwarrior games, where each player sat in a little self-contained pod with their own set of joysticks and array of buttons. The pods would rumble and shake as you moved and fired your weapons and got shot. And for some reason there was a walk-through experience called Alien War, based on the Alien(s) franchise. You would get split up into little groups and be guided through a little experience by actors dressed as marines, while other actors dressed as xenomorphs burst out of the walls to scare you. (I never actually went on this one - I was too young at the time, I suppose - but I was always told it was terrifying.) It closed in the early 2000s, though they kept the arcade parts open for a while longer. For the most part the Trocadero is derelict today. I think they're trying to turn it into a hotel or something. It's strange to recollect this stuff now; because it existed in an era that almost predated the internet, it's really quite hard to find any actual photo/video documentation of any of these rides. There seems to be no footage at all of the VR game, for example, and I can't find many accounts of Alien War, let alone any pictures. For a while I used to dream that one day they just locked the doors and forgot about everything -- for some reason, the idea of all those old headsets and alien costumes gathering dust is fascinating to me...

I'd really like to play this but it seems to be Windows-only at the moment. I'm hoping it'll come to Mac or Playstation at some point. I have no idea what it's about but the art looks unspeakably gorgeous. Also, in a weird twist, the official twitter account of noted beef-monger Arby's was very excited about the game.

That's a really fascinating article about the coded (in this case literally) ideology of social systems. By the time I finished it I thought 'well, this is all extremely odd and problematic, but I'm sure it would be possible to have a civilised conversation about it and fix it'. But the dev's response...well, I really wish someone had exerted some editorial control over that... I'd be interested to read a lot more of this kind of journalism and I'm pleased to see RPS running with it. It's probably impossible for a game to model relationships in a way which would be entirely free from gendered political assumptions - but those assumptions are certainly deserving of scrutiny. And to be honest, I'd be happy to see games displaying a lot more in the way of individual positions on gender politics than they have until this point. I've always found the old approach of 'anyone can get off with anyone' -- adjusting any NPC's sexuality to serve the interests of the player -- kind of an easy get-out clause. At the same time, it's disappointing to see a game which tries to pass off some half-baked assumptions about gender preferences as universal truths about the laws which govern human nature. And it's further disappointing to see someone who, when questioned about those assumptions, can only double down on them. I guess therein lies the problem: in any systems-driven game like this, there must be 'laws' of some kind. You have to pick your prejudices carefully. But in real life there are no laws; you could spend a lifetime trying to balance the probabilities behind human attraction and never come up with a fully convincing model. Part of me wants to say that the whole business of trying to model the unknowable workings of the human heart in IF and THEN statements is a fool's errand, and that only narrative media can attempt this convincingly. But perhaps it's just that nobody has got it right yet.

I finished Steamworld Heist on 3DS yesterday. It turned out to be a perfect game for my commute on the tube, given that most missions can be completed in around 30 minutes (plus it saves almost constantly). I liked it a lot! The turn-based squad combat mechanics are extremely satisfying and tense in a way that rivals the likes of Fire Emblem and X-COM. The plot feels kind of disposable, but the art and characterisation are enough to bring a smile. The whole thing is just a really solid and compelling experience from start to finish. Apparently the developer are already working on something for the Nintendo Switch, and I'm keen to see what they come up with - this is exactly the kind of high quality mid-tier experience that I can imagine playing at home and while out and about. For the most part I was actually surprised how easy I found it. I'm not especially good at strategy games, but it took me just under 20 hours to finish the game on the first difficulty level above 'Normal'. (That's with 100% completion of every mission, and most of my roster at the highest level.) Aside from the old problem that many procedural games have of sometimes screwing you with a 'bad roll' (remember FTL?), for the most part I didn't find it an especially challenging experience. Perhaps I should have picked a higher difficulty level - and I know there is a NG+ - but I'm not entirely sure the mechanics would change up enough to offer anything different. And I really should get on with finishing the second part of Fire Emblem: Fates...

Just FYI there's no built-in facility on the Wii U itself for streaming -- you would need some kind of external hardware solution like an Elgato to capture the image first. Streaming isn't something Nintendo is totally unaware of but their current hardware is sadly under-equipped to deal with it at the moment. You could stitch together simple video clips and upload them directly to YouTube in Mario Kart 8, but even then you could practically hear the gears grinding in the poor old Wii U... Pikmin 3 is a wonderful game, though. One of the most underrated games in recent years to appear on any platform, IMO. You can tell Miyamoto really put his heart into it.

Related to the discussion about SimAnt on the SNES, and how nothing like that could exist on a Nintendo platform today - you can still buy the latest instalment of A-Train on the 3DS. It's the latest in a long-running series of highly technical Japanese transport simulation games. Digital only, but man, I have no idea how this made it to the EU/US eshop. I think I played the original on the PC when I was very small. I haven't played the 3DS edition but who could fail to be excited by screenshots like this? It's got spreadsheets!!

Eurogamer bringing the hot scoops again today with a few technical details - obviously unconfirmed, but apparently from the same source(s) who pretty much nailed the basic design of the thing. The short version: it's got a 6.2" capacitive multi-touch screen, and a IR zapper of some kind concealed in the right-hand Joycon. So it might not be as divorced from motion and touchscreen controls as we thought; but as the article suggests, it might be wise for them to downplay those aspects at this stage.

I had a couple of misconceptions about ‘I Love Dick’: firstly, I really thought this was a book written and published in the last few years, since I’d seen it mentioned so frequently in glowing terms online; and secondly, I thought it was entirely a work of fiction. Neither of these are true, but I wasn’t corrected until I finally started googling the book about a third of the way through it. I confess that I was amazed to find that the book is actually a collection of ‘real’ documents edited from life, and that it's basically earnest in its intentions throughout. There is a version of this book that could exist as a comic novel about the intersection of academia and the real world, but this isn’t it. Also the fact that Kevin Bacon has been cast as Dick in the TV adaptation seems like a really strange, bad idea. (I haven't seen it.) I reckon Patrick Stewart would have made for a nice Dick.

This looks great. It's interesting that, in terms of managing expectations, Nintendo seems to have hit the bullseye on this on. For the Wii U there was a lot of initial confusion regarding its status as a platform/peripheral/Wii successor. But in this case, there seems to be a general acceptance that 'yes, this is recognisably the thing everyone has been whispering about for a year or more - we get it'. Re: the trailer itself, I was struck by the fact that it focuses almost exclusively on people of my generation, i.e. late 20s/early 30s. I feel like ten or twenty years ago, those would be kids playing Mario Kart in the back of their parents' Toyota Previa, rather than being hipsters in the back of a minivan. But I suppose Nintendo know their early adopter audience well. And I appreciate their continued consideration of people who play a lot of video games but who aren't exclusively 'gamers', and who want to make room in their lives to do other things. I'm very much one of those people. That guy should be walking his dog properly, though. I wonder about how it will integrate into a family. Will it be possible to have a single base station supporting multiple gamepads? I wonder how they would manage internal storage in such a case - would digital games live on a HDD in the base station, or in flash storage on the portable? If they sold the gamepads separately at a 3DS-like price point, that could be great. Either way, the idea of having something like a new Animal Crossing game that I could both take with me on the tube and bring home to play with my girlfriend on the TV sends me into dizzy spirals of anticipation. Based on the conspicuous absence of any touch-based interaction in the trailer, I'd guess this thing doesn't have a touchscreen. At first, that seemed to me like a remarkable omission, but the more I think about it the more I think it makes sense. Consider the difficulties of getting an operating system to work coherently when designed for touchscreen interaction on the go *and* physical controls when jacked in to the TV; and now consider how every game developer would have to essentially build their UI twice to support both methods of input. That's the same difficult territory the Wii U ran into with regards to 'second screen' functionality, and much as I love that console, there's relatively few games which ever made unique and creative use of that feature. I'm worried about a few things. I'm worried about third-party support, still. I'm worried about what'll happen with the virtual console, again. I'm worried about having to re-buy Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon (though not that worried - I would guess those are expanded or new versions of those games?). I'm worried about this thing keeping up with Sony and Microsoft in the hardware arms race. I'm worried this will effectively signal the death of games which are designed around a great handheld experience, like some of the best GBA, DS and 3DS titles. But for the most part I'm excited and optimistic about this thing.

Great podcast — I too have been meaning to read ‘I Love Dick’, so I’m looking forward to finally getting around to that. On a related note, I was reading today this essay by Amit Chaudhuri, which addresses the issue of verbal complexity and how literature once trended towards minimalism — he cites Carver in this regard, and the long shadow of Gordon Lish over his work — but is now swerving back towards complexity and difficulty in novels. The semicolon is permissible once again, etc. It’s worth a look, although the title is really bad, and don’t let the Big Bang Theory comparison put you off. His points regarding the modern novel are well made, but I’m not entirely convinced that trends in television are comparable. I mean, is Bones really all that? And come on: Sheldon is no Professor Pnin. But that said: top marks to this guy in the comments.

This is priceless. Imagine weighing hundreds and hundreds of years of accumulated human misery against a hundred feet of celluloid and thinking 'yup, worth it'. I always thought Dumbo is an interesting example of a film which still maintains the status of a 'classic', but which is also loaded with 1940s attitudes towards race that are...problematic to say the least. But I think in that case, its problems are worth discussing. On one hand, there's some crude stereotyping of black characters as a band of crows (!); but they're also portrayed as a sympathetic group of outsiders, and the film as a whole is basically about the cruelty of being excluded due to matters of biological difference. I don't think that wholly redeems it -- I mean, nobody ever escaped discrimination because they learned to fly. But it certainly places it in a different category to most crude caricatures of that era of animation.

So I bought the new complete edition of Destiny last week for PS4, which contains all the content released up until this point. I’m having a nice time with it so far. My only previous experience of the game was playing the demo in the pre-Taken King days, which I think included all the earth missions up until you align the arrays, but no strikes or PvP stuff at all. So I started from scratch and did all that stuff again to see what had changed; not a great deal as far as I could tell? I never had strong feelings about Peter Dinklage’s voiceover, but at least Nolan North sounds pleased to be there. If anything I think it might be a bit easier now. I remember dying a good few times the first time I did those missions, whereas this time I don’t think I died at all until I was at least level 8 or 9. I’m still not sure that the game does a great job of leading totally new players into the world. Wandering around the tower now — an idiot baby who knows nothing of the world — I feel like most of what’s on offer is aimed at people who have arrived at the level cap, which is fine of course, but I’m left conflicted as to whether I should be working through the story missions as they are presented, or just plugging away at patrols, strikes and crucible to level up ASAP. (And if I’m over the suggested level for strikes or story missions, is it still worth doing them? As I understand there’s some measure of scaling, but again, it’s hard as a newbie to see how that all works.) Anyway the important thing is that the shooting is very good and the overall presentation is immaculate. I do appreciate the sheer potential for strange things in this world, too. I like that there’s weird creatures dotted throughout the world that are way too high above my level at the moment. I like that sometimes a spaceship will fall from the sky and disgorge a bunch of horrifying creatures. I like the hard sf vibe and the environmental art, even if the plot still feels like an irrelevance at this stage. I was told the story was to be found in the Grimoire cards but I have looked at those cards and…that’s a lot of lore, man...a lot of lore...