twenty three reviews

twenty three reviews


new star wars:

the last jedi was how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. as in global warming. the exact connection is hard to tease out - I saw a dark sun behind the real one, riding my bike back home. actually it was a streetlight


neo turf masters golfing:

not much a game vis a vis gamefeel, it’s not Wii Sports Golf, but everything is narrated with a high-energy sounds like vietnamese woman and there’s the pixilated golf swings. it’s weird to see the direct ancestor of Mausland which you had forgotten about


Wii Sports Golf

The putting on this is insane. you have to hold the controller pointing down, it turns out. even then there’s this tiny band of sensitivity out of the whole controller’s movement that responds aggressively and makes you fling the ball off the green. other than that, this game is one of my favorite friend negging tools, for one, but there’s also a demure peace.


infinite jest:

the real “killer diller”, IJ, is like the only book I can read as if it were TV. I remember reading this four years ago and thinking “wow, I bet this is the first step I’m going to take into a world of talented authors” and like, noooooo. You’re gonna give me a reading recommendation for Neal Stevenson and my face is gonna drip off my skull. IJ is the only book I can read as if it were TV


DCC rpg (dungeon crawl classics)

sadly, the most beautiful book in the OSR (old school revolution-- the renaissance of tabletop role playing games) is also bland and sad, much like stonehell (see below). there’s sort of no surprises left


Stonehell dungeon

both this and DCC are written in like, boring fantasy prose (I already said this)


Black Books

I mostly watch Bernard Black to try and pick up on the psychopathic funny bits he does, yelling at people as a sense of humor, most british comedy shows like the IT crowd with just a touch of funny prop use make for good shit


the nintendo switch

the design of the switch is innovative to the point that the vocabulary of video game controllers hasn’t caught up yet. It’s “joy-con”, not “controller”and when I say “hold the controller like this and press this button” it can be confusing especially since the buttons aren’t labelled to work on the individual joy-cons, those are referred to positionally, a position which only fits if you hold the device the right way anyway. ok, so the main screen thing is the “console”, right. if you have the joy-cons attached to the console its the “console, with joy-cons attached”. If the joy cons are separate, they are “separated joy cons” or “individual joy cons” or just “joy cons”, there’s a sort of abstraction that bleeds from the procedure and is associated with the visual language on screen telling you which buttons to press- it’s the “left” button, when you hold the joy con up? down? you hold it in the seperated fashion.


Doll Doll Doll

odd when horror actually gets to the point of changing you emotionally, especially when it’s music. I think something awful got transmitted to me about killing children, like maybe the “cool” side of it? I was like, oooh, child killing is edgy and cool, ya know, like as an edge-of-society thing. maybe society’s edge is somehow linked up to our inner sense of passion? hell ya


Doki Doki Literature Club

odd when horror actually gets to the point of changing you emotionally, especially when it’s like a pop culture sensation jump scare game, but like I knew cute high school people who’s cuteness was a facade for intense psychological disorders, and DDLC does not really derivate from real-ass problems people have. Maybe also something like the snare of anime portraiture does me every time, psychotherapy


Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy

I don’t have anything new to say, except the throughline of frustrating drops away pretty easily and then it is just a tight mouse-platforming game, which will still insist that it’s about frustration. Especially of interest is Bennet Foddy himself playing Getting Over It, and him making the exact frustrated sounds f/x live that he put in the game.


it’s also fucking funny


Devil Daggers

Nice to see perfect things, in every way perfect, that do not assume and merely create a relationship, a weld

welds your brain to your hands, is conspicuous in perfect, as: every part takes up the exact minimum of space, has nuance, tesseracts, makes sense, is obvious, every part refers to every other part: a game about shooting skulls in hell on a stone ledge where if you get hit once you die, high score is 8 minutes 13 seconds, the instant of your death your score is submitted to a complete & international scoreboard.

what occurs to me is that sense of interconnectedness, every part taking up the exact minimum spare to approriate and flair every other part, with an overall vision that complements the thing, is in itself a seamlessness reminiscent of hell. which says good things for hell, honestly


yoon-suin: 

reading this book and oestensibly running it made me realize I shouldn’t use content that I don’t love, in my tabletop rpg games, because then I’m gonna be playing pretend about some stuff I’m not that invested in, and it’s all gonna seem trite. Despite the relatively strong prose and composition, I basically have no interest in the orientalist adventuring the book offers. as with DCC above


vornheim:  there’s a sense I get with a couple lamentations of the flame princess products of a greater project condensed and foreshortened, like I feel vornheim with all the praise it gets is only 64 pages long and the cover which you’re supposed to roll dice onto is pretty small. I feel the same way with Veins of the Earth, maybe, and probably with A Red and Pleasant Land both which I dunno how much I trust the terrain generators thereof. It’s too hard for me to launch a ARAPL campaign what with the geography and endless rooms-- I always imagine some huge procedural generation engine to handle it all for me

I usually want game books to provide, in easy reference, original, interesting content, which is easy to use, not work-intensive.  this is not true for AR&PL and Veins where it’s a campaign book where you have to assemble all the pieces; you have to manage a caves environment/ endless alice-rooms environment (both: dramatically different from normal terrain & therefore possibly much harder to describe), and provide some sense of direction, maybe. Both books are kinda bestiaries with a set of environmental goals added, and some tools. for other people that’s maybe enough but for me it’s a challenge to put it all together. I’m doing it right now with Veins and although it’s rewarding it’s also a responsibility.

but back to vornheim, what is there ?really?to recommend vornheim? a lot of people use it. there’s 2 dungeons, some rules for moving about a city, a bunch of nouns in tables, and a more general sense of what vornehim is supposed to be like. but uh “complete city kit” I don’t know I just don’t know what’s it’s like or what you need or even if my players would like a really high-concept city environment to work with. I feel like you can fit everything you need to know on a page. But I do use the noun list ofdifferent professions.

I wish there was kinda a more comprehensive understanding for how to run this just like AR&PL where there’s soemthing vital that remains unsaid. too vague of a criticism. “advice on running a city” too Idk. that all being said I actually feel yoon-suiin is an easier zone to run


maze of the blue medusa:

I’m glad this book has eclipsed into a “rare book”, it’s pretty suited up to be, and like a monumental breath of life into rpgs in general for the most part

like the writing and concepts and very especially layout are enough to present a pristine experience reading this

running it: I don’t like how glossy the pages are and the room shapes are impossible to convey that easily, then again if I just drew them out it would have been fine

also this crowded megadungeon doesn’t always have great dungeon ecology sense relative to zak’s pictures, and patrick’s writing, and the walls and secret rooms, these not always making sense  (maybe a plus, it’s supposed to be crazy). like a witch is supposed to be guarding a room with trapped rune-doors, but there’s another untrapped door off to the side away from the witch so...


edmund’s letters to nabokov:

bought this in the vain attempt to acquire nabokov’s writing re: lenin, at least more than the “bucketfull of milk with a dead rat at the bottom” remark. you’d think I have to read nabokov’s novels to learn what he thinks about communism but I just want the straight dope, son. anyway this book is mostly discussion of russian grammar.

it’s odd I think how hard it is to narrow in on that perspective of like post wwii thought on communism, or at least solely in my google search era capabilities


the killing of a sacred deer:

playful like “the lobster” but has more of a fire under its butt and is a little less dreadful. a sacred deer? the fun part is Barry Keoghan talking like a loon to distressed Colin Farrel


cuphead: Dont deal with the devil

fleischer bros animations have attack cycles if you look

I beat the robot boss with a hack

when I first saw this game I thought the huge, cartoony animations would blow out the gamefeel but playing it it’s tight, tight tight. there’s a certain versimilitude you get when all the sprites are the right size and have good rhythm and it’s especially impressive seeing this in like, the most expansive visual/audio project I’ve ever seen in a video game


caveblazers:

procedural roguelike jumpy games, spelunky, programmer art’s junky, arrows for arrows wasd but the double jump’s funky, mild and wild the game takes a while and I never beat it, seeing as I run out of steam about 45% of the way in, bombarding everything with my super powerful bombs

suffice to say it’s a good game, it’s got perks,probably every design trend since 2000, pretty well done, used to play it all night


hearthstone:

good and fun and yeah I got to hone my mana curve down to one stone, managed to get up to the point of facing combo decks before I went “oh, right” and turned that shit off


breath of the wild:

a series of overlapping & shallow resources, which have the advantage of being easy to refill, and easy to deplete. your horse can die, your weapons explode, but you can make about an infinite amount of food, but if you get in combats where you lose most of your heart meter in one hit, you’ll burn through it all quickly. so you can pick up up fairies at the fairy fountain without it feeling overpowered; sure, they’ll prevent you from dying but you’ll keep on getting hit.

that being said combat does sort of taper off in difficulty reltaively, fast but there’s still that consistent ability for it to surprise you with a couple different enemy types, or all your damage dealing weapons have been depleted, and you just wanna kill this 300h bokobkin for some reason, or you find yourself with an ice spear pushing frozen dudes off cliffs because you don’t wanna wear and tear your normal weapons. at this point in my game all I’m using is elemental arrows because normal arrows are too expensive

but it turned around when I realized hearts weren’t the only thing, it was also _navigation_, which the game takes seriously enough! there’s a couple points where you’d wanna use photos, or the map-stamps, or you have to look at photos and try to match it up and that all encourages wandering around, and thus more random encounters, and therefore more grinding up against the various resource-meters

90% of the art for the game though is not good, but oddly what it is that’s nice is the landscapes, “wild”, huh, which are gradually ruined by giant red laser beams that shoot across the sky the more you complete the game


super mario oddessy

main point of this game is the ass-end opens up like 900 more stars which you’re supposed to collect, it’s all in reference to super mario 64 albeit again it’s that fucking linerarity problem, in sm64 it’s like they didn’t know what level design was exactly so they just experimented and in oddessy it’s all boss battles with rabbits

fuck this fucking game man the colors are so bad and they got that dumb loop of music and like ⅗ of the levels are swimming levels damb… but you can pose mario and take HD pictures and share them and Peach has a different classy outfit for each zone


the relentless picnic podcast

in their earlier days there was the thought, bc of the election, that there was some boundary that had been crossed, and these were exciting times. but things kinda picked up in this wonky-no-worky fashion, all the crisis bled out. I remember the “id queen” episode of this podcast and it became clear that there was this sort of fascism donald was the head of. a feeling of stunned wakefulness in the company of learned friends. but then it kinda drifted off, like everyone did, there wasn’t something so super-insightful as you’d think there’d been, at least, not practically; I’m just worried/notworried/worried


la decimma vittima

the conception of sci fi maybe used to be philosophical and cooly so. what changed it I propse was an obsessive attention to detail, or any kind of fixation on reality. but really reality happens when you let go, when the guidance of things is allowed to exist and not hammered down; you can compare la decimma vittima to the star war prequels, or star trek original to the rest of star trek


overall conclusions: kiling children and satanic material has more to do with inner wellness, RPGS: pick two: [easy to run, good original content I want to run, consistent internal sense], the switch doesn’t have any good games, ultimately a life of pursuit of game-objects is unsatisfying and wears down your eyes