Selected Historical Games Reviews - 2023

(11/3/2023)

Some people say, wrongly, that Go is a board game. Luckily, as a coder nerd, I have the intellectual know-how to see otherwise. Go is something we 'hip kids' who are 'in the know' call a "cellular automaton". The confusion is understandable.

The most well-known cellular automaton is Conway's Game of Life. Not coincidentally, the Game of Life is the most mathematically beautiful game I know. "Mathematical beauty" is kind of a dumb phrase, but I can't think of any other one to describe the thing I feel looking at the Game of Life. But, while I love watching it run, my attempts to get into it have been halted by the small problem that it's not possible to actually play it. Technically, it's a 'zero-player game'; all the player does is turn it on and watch the squares dance. Once the beauty dries up, the Game gets very boring very fast.

Go manages to sacrifice only a smidge of mathematical beauty in order to fit in two coarse, bumbling, greasy humans who worry about dumb things like 'scoring points' and 'winning'. The rules are simple. Well, the rule. There's only really one. Put vaguely: "fully surround your opponent's territory to capture it". The player who has captured the most territory at the end of the game wins. The exact meanings of surround, territory, capture, and end of the game demand a little more specificity to really follow, creating tiny holes into which little asterisks and nitpicks can seep. I played under territory scoring, with the 'ko' rule (no repeat moves) active, but without the 'komi' rule (handicap for black, since it goes first). Other weird nitpicky ambiguities, luckily, were rare enough that I didn't have to think about them.

A cellular automaton is a pattern formed entirely by a set of individual cells on a grid, each following a few easily-understood rules, and each only considering their immediate neighbors. The beauty of the resulting pattern is partly about seeing a bunch of dots come together to form nice lines and shapes, but it's also about watching something mind-bogglingly complicated emerge naturally from something much simpler. Every ten to fifteen minutes of a (60-90 minute) Go game, I would let myself lean back and stare at the emergent pattern of the board. Somehow, my opponent and I had MADE this thing without even really trying to. All you need to do is try to win, and the intricate patterns seem to form themselves.

An interesting consequence of this emergent pattern is that it's often hard to tell who actually won at the end of a Go game. This is true even though small-scale battles play out with the rigid inevitability of Tic-Tac-Toe. Sometimes the two sides will mutually decide to leave a half-finished battle alone, not bothering to play it out, when its final result is already obvious to both. But there are so many of them, and they are so densely intertwined, that it takes a few minutes of counting and number-crunching to figure out who the overall winner is. Another consequence of the setup is that it's harder to explain the rules than to follow them. The way 'surrounding territory' works is a little awkward to translate into words, but when you're actually looking at the board it's immediately, intuitively obvious where 'territory' begins and ends, and whether or not it's 'surrounded'. This is still true even if you've never played before.

Much like the Game of Life and its beehives and gliders, there are a few patterns in Go so common they become iconic. The ur-pattern of Go is the 'eye' - four pieces of the same color, arranged diagonally. Any piece of the opponent's color placed in the middle is immediately captured, unless it can take out one of the components of the eye first. In one of my games, I managed to create an arrangement of two attached eyes smack in the middle of his territory. Neither of us were sure if the territory was his or mine, so I showed a picture to a professor and asked him what to do with it. Without skipping a beat, he said "oh, yeah, that's the Eyes of the Dragon. That territory's yours." I had constructed an advanced icon - an icon with a name - without even knowing what it was.

Another Go pattern is 'seki' - mutual life. This name describes the contrived situation wherein territory is technically controlled by both players at once, but where neither of them can break the deadlock without immediately sacrificing their position. This one happened to us once too. Luckily I'd seen it on Wikipedia, so I knew that seki territory was officially counted as neutral and neither of us had to make the sacrifice.

Contrast Go with the LEAST mathematically beautiful game I know: Magic: The Gathering. I can think of no experience quite like watching my roommate try to explain the rules of MTG to his girlfriend. "No, see, alright, you can't use this land yet, it says here it starts tapped - alright, you played the card, but no you can't attack yet, it has summoning sickness -- no, MY card can attack on the first turn, see how it has Flash, it's DIFFERENT --- yes, I can defend even though you're Flying, see, because my card is Flying too ----" and on and on. Even Chess falls victim to this; just think about explaining 'castling' or God forbid 'en passant' to someone. The rules of Go aren't exactly perfect, but they get damn well closer than that.

I'm decent at Go, but I think being good at it is less satisfying than sitting outside yourself and just watching it play out. This game is an engine that transmutes the human competitive instinct into mathematical beauty. The only kink in its rigid structure is the meat-sack placing down the pieces. Smudging the stones with their finger oils. Still, it makes things more interesting.

Last thought. I played my final Go game of the month against a mid-level AI - not AlphaGo, just a random browser bot on the highest difficulty setting. I got DECIMATED. Every move I made was perfectly anticipated, every choice I made was the wrong one. I was always one step behind. My professor told me he used to run the Go club at our college. He also told me no member of the Go club was ever even allowed in to any of our state's actual Go tournaments - not a single one of them, himself included, reached the point where they could even have a ranking in the game. This terrifies me. Sometimes I like to flatter myself by imagining I understand anything about the patterns of the world on any deep level. If you ever find yourself considering this notion, trying to play an expert (human or AI) in Go is a great way to disabuse yourself of it fast.

This is an atheist's game; there is no God, no higher authority to appeal to for victory. There is no random chance into which one might put their prayers. At bottom, it's all just dots on a grid. 'Just chemicals', as they say. There is only one rule, running at all times with ruthless determinism. Any confusions, failures, or misplays are on your part and your part alone. The game isn't perfect? Well, it's more perfect than you. All you can do is try to be slightly less imperfect than your opponent.

No score this time. You do not judge Go. Go judges you.

(7/6/2023)

(This review contains approximately one billion spoilers, and MGS2 is one of those games that leans heavily on the element of surprise, so you might not want to read it if you have any intention of trying the game yourself.)

Hideo Kojima is surely a Historical Gaming Figure if anyone is, but I mostly knew him for "controversy" until now (the few hours of Death Stranding didn't tell me much). I picked Metal Gear Solid 2 because its story seemed to cause the most Discourse out of a guy mainly known for creating Discourse through video games. I didn't know any of the details, but I knew that some thought it was a brilliant opus of Games As Art and others thought it was a boring, stupid, pretentious nonsense fest. Having finished it, I don't agree with either group. Metal Gear Solid 2 is an extremely funny pretentious nonsense-fest and a golden turd of Games As Bad Art. It's consistently entertaining and never lets the momentum drop for a second, and all the bad and stupid parts are the grist that keeps the mill churning.

There is definitely some kind of interesting theme lurking within the guts of this incomprehensible plot-shoggoth, but it might take some digging to excavate it. To start with, the one plot twist I knew going in is that you only control Snake for the first couple hours. After that, Snake "dies", and you spend the rest of the game controlling this guy named Jack (codename 'Raiden'). Unlike Snake, Raiden has never been on a real mission before, only being trained on "VR Simulations" (= video games = he's a gamer). Where Snake is a Bad Dude who cracks wise with his wacky nerd sidekick, Raiden is a whiny, insecure bumbler. To save the game, Raiden has to call up his girlfriend - whose name is Rose, like Jack and Rose, get it (audience groans) - and she guilt-trips him about how he's not honest enough with her, or that he never buys her flowers, or how he's been eyeing the underage hacker girl, or whatever. This happens EVERY TIME YOU WANT TO SAVE THE GAME.

For the whole second act, MGS2 can be summed up by the classic TvTrope: "This Loser Is You". Raiden, as an avatar for the player, is extremely disempowering. You're given a taste of the good life as Manly Badass Solid Snake, only to have it yanked away. Now you're stuck in the shoes of an ineffectual goofus; you're constantly disrespected by your superiors, laughed at when you mess up, and each new quest is another opportunity to watch Raiden endlessly fail to do anything useful. This really gets obvious when Snake comes back into the story almost immediately after "dying", wearing the equivalent of a fake mustache and Groucho Marx glasses, and pretending to be a guy named "Iroquois Pliskin". From there, he has what's strongly implied to be a bunch of Manly Badass Adventures just barely offscreen, which you, the player, never get a chance to participate in. Pliskin treats Raiden like an embarassing younger brother, so even your opportunities to work with him feel cheap and patronizing.

After that... well, it's hard to summarize the convoluted mess that is the game's third act. But I can at least try. So, here's UUGR'S COMPLETE Metal Gear Solid 2 ENDING EXPLAINED: Stepmom incest; [sounds of exaggerated crying] MR. X WAS OLGA GURLUKOVICH ALL ALONG!! Solidus Snake is Raiden's TRUE FATHER - This is all just a video game! You're not truly in control! The whole thing was a ruse orchestrated by Arsenal GearTURN THE GAME CONSOLE OFF RIGHT NOWbut actually, the entire game was just a ruse orchestrated by Solidus Snake, BUT THAT RUSE was itself a ruse orchestrated by Revolver Ocelot, BUT THAT RUSE was itself a ruse orchestrated by the GW AIFREE WILL IS AN ILLUSION! THERE IS NO SELF! YOU are the only one who knows the TRUE LOCATION of THE PATRIOTS(nothing is real and everything is permissible) "Congratulations!" BUT ACTUALLY THE PATRIOTS WERE DEAD ALL ALONG The End! To be continued...

The mind-melting cesspit is only made more confusing by the game's bizarre pacing. It's not just that the cutscenes are very long, although some of them are in fact upwards of 30 minutes. It's that they feel even longer because they have this bizarre tic of stopping briefly only to immediately start back up again. It feels like it's always about to fade back to gameplay, only to fade right back in on a different cutscene. Or the cutscene ends, and then you walk five feet to the right and another cutscene starts up instead. This, plus the average ratio of 3.68-plot-twists-per-cutscene, makes me wonder if it's intentional or not. It could be that Kojima is trying to confuse you for galaxy-brained thematic reasons, or it could be that there are SUPPOSED to be a bunch of extra stealth sequences stringing everything together. It sort of feels like this 15 hour game is trying to squeeze in 25 hours' worth of content, so it might be a time/budget thing.

If it is a time/budget thing, it would explain the gameplay, which is, unfortunately, not great. There's this thing in stealth games where the combat is kind of expected to be terrible, to incentivize you to avoid it as much as possible. Things like janky auto-aim and annoying combat controls make sense in a stealth game: you're not an unstoppable death-machine like the Doomguy, you're not supposed to be able to mow down the enemies. I understand and accept this. I'm just not sure Kojima does, because he keeps interrupting the stealth gameplay for mandatory combat sections and terrible boss fights! I'm trying my damndest to be a stealthy sneak, and I can't do that if I get spotted in an unavoidable cutscene and then have to kill twenty guys in a narrow hallway!

The core stealth is actually pretty good. There are many different ways to avoid the guards, and their AI is really dumb in entertainingly abusable ways. I was surprised by the layout; there's only two maps in the entire game, and they're both pretty small, but they open up more and more as events progress and you get new items. It's almost like a Metroidvania. The level designs are well-suited to this, full of loop-arounds and secrets that encourage you to learn the layout deeply. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of playtime is spent stealthing around, between all the cutscenes/mandatory combat/novelty sniping sequences/timed challenges/more cutscenes. If I were directing this game, I'd cut out all the terrible boss fights and use the extra resources to make the map bigger.

But I wonder if True MGS2 Stans would tell me that I'm still not thinking on Kojima's level. I can't just go around expecting satisfying stealth gameplay when I'm dealing with a Masterpiece of Postmodern Deconstructionism (audience boos, someone throws a tomato). But look, maybe they have a point. The first act, with Solid Snake, plays into the audience's expectations of "a sequel to Metal Gear". That's the basic construction. Then the Raiden parts ruthlessly tear apart every one of those expectations at their roots until nothing is left but confusion and madness. From there, you're pretty much stuck in flap-jaw space with the famous purple stuffed worm whose tuning fork does a raw blink on Hara-Kiri Rock. I NEED SCISSORS! 61!

As an example, consider this philosophical quandary: are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President? The Hideo Kojima answer has four parts. One, it doesn't matter - 'Democracy' is a sham, the Presidency is a joke, so what do you care if he gets rescued or not? Two, it doesn't mean anything, because free will is an illusion. Whether or not you rescue the President is a product of your genetics and environment, so any dreams of a virtuous "Bad Dudeness" are sheer vanity. Three, it's irrelevant, because everything you do is secretly controlled by a dozen different shadowy organizations of people with ridiculous names (ok, maybe this part doesn't mean anything). Four, all that aside, the answer is no - if the President's life hinges on whether or not you are a bad enough dude, the President is definitely fucked. It'd take a really absurd construction (like MGS1, presumably) to convince you that you were an even slightly bad dude in the first place!

Or maybe that's all just stupid. In fact, it's stupid to critique this game at all. Things like story, character, pacing, theming - they all melt away under the sheer spectacle of it all. Trying to analyze MGS2 is like trying to remember a dream you had weeks ago. The details keep blurring together, and the individual components mostly seem like arbitrary nonsense, but somehow under it all there persists a vague image of something beautiful. Besides, what does it even mean for "you" or "me" to like, or dislike, anything? Don't you know that that which you call "self" serves as nothing more than a mask to cover your own being?

7/10

(4/26/2023)

A summary of Jazzuo's Sexy Hiking: you're a guy with a very big nose, and you have a hammer. You move the mouse to control the hammer, and push it against the level geometry to get your guy to the goal. There are four levels in vaguely ascending order of difficulty, and a special surprise at the end for completing them all. It is a very hard game. It's free and not much of a time commitment, but because you spend about 95% of the game's runtime in various states of frustration and failure, most people who try it don't get very far. Of course, this is also why it's interesting. When progress is slow, your mind has time to wander. You start to imagine where the game is going, what happens next, what you'll see when you finish. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When you start Sexy Hiking, you're standing next to this dead tree - it blocks the way to the entire rest of the game. This tree is worth dwelling on. Every level except #2 starts with a different dead tree (#2 has a branch later on), and they're all distinct obstacles. Their geometry is more detailed and interesting than the plain square tiles of the rest of the game, but more importantly, they're attached to a context. A tree is a real object, it has details to it, it implies something about the world. The trees are iconic, in a way that the square tiles aren't; an otherwise contextless opening becomes That One Tree That A Lot Of People Never Got Past. That the context is totally arbitrary (what do dead trees have to do with anything?) only makes the tree more of an icon. It becomes the first symbol in a makeshift mythos, the bottom layer holding up a mountain of trash iconography.

If that sounds too flowery, let me rephrase in video game terms. Sexy Hiking isn't just a funny gimmick. Sexy Hiking is a full-on game world. Not only that, it's a game world with MECHANICS. There is a rope you can hold onto with the left mouse button; there are (extremely janky) vertical moving platforms; there are kill-planes at the bottom of each map. There's even - and this one really surprised me - a walk ability. You can actually just use the left and right arrow keys to move in this game and Jazzuo never tells you about it. It's not very useful, since you can't walk in midair, but he makes a funny little dancing motion as you do it. In fact, I'm not sure I should even mention this, but there are save states in this game too. You can press F5 and F6 to save and load from any position. This felt like cheating, so I never used it, and I'm pretty sure it's just a GameMaker built-in Jazzuo never got around to removing anyway.

It doesn't matter if the mechanics are useful. The best video game is never the one staring out at you from the screen; it's the one implied by the content of the screen, played out in your mind's eye after the computer has been turned off. Sexy Hiking, with its light smattering of mechanics and MIDI covers, holds within itself the dream of a perfect video game. Level 3 is the one that really sells this, I think. The music is a cover of a Donkey Kong Country song; unlike the other tunes, it is calm, pensive, almost beautiful. Not coincidentally, this is the level that introduces the rope mechanic. It has you pull your sexy hiker precariously along a floating rope, endless kill-plane beneath, desperately gripping the left mouse button to keep hold. The MIDI flute reaches a crescendo, and - in a flash - the vision is there. A grand journey through vast wildernesses! Seven themed worlds full of secrets! A moon level with low gravity! A volcano level! You start to visualize a whole new game, set on a mountain of junk, climbing ever higher from the safety of your bucket as-- well, anyway.

Sexy Hiking is like if you took that imagined game, and trimmed out every level that had no chance of making someone fling their computer across the room. Depending on your perspective, this can be both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, games are like pornos*, and Jazzuo is sensibly choosing to cut out all the chaff and skip straight to the good bit. On the other hand, because the obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, the game is uniquely frustrating. In fact, I'd argue that Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game. This sort of thing is a classic obsession of hobbyist developers; it's the same reason so many Flash games were trying to be "The Hardest [x] Ever". Jazzuo, like anyone else on the internet, is trying to make you, a stranger, feel something with crude tools and limited skills. Anyone can make a video game that's too hard, and anger is immediate, visceral, undeniable - real. But aim to engage with anger, and it's easy to overshoot.

Now, suppose you're an amateur developer making a B-game, and a funny thing happens. You have an idea for a new obstacle. You build it, test it. And then it turns out to be unreasonably hard. What are you going to do? You can't bring yourself to make it easier - it's your baby! You couldn't possibly butcher the work you put so much of yourself into. There are a few ways out of this dilemma. You could declare it your fault as a player, rather than a builder; "skill issue" to wipe away the problem. But this only works if you're already kind of an asshole, because it does nothing to alleviate the pain of the human being sitting on the other end of the screen, screaming their guts out. Jazzuo, in toying around with his funny game-creation tool, must have unwittingly found himself staring face-to-face with the understanding that he is causing other human beings pain, because of the things he did, and it is his fault. So he takes another tack.

Consider the text of the instructions screen: "use the humer as if u were really climbing something and ull see". This is placed over an abominably ugly MSPaint menu while a terrible MIDI cover of the X-Files theme plays in the background. Now, I know English isn't Jazzuo's first language, but I'm pretty sure he knows how to spell 'hammer'. Why would he do it like that? The intended effect, it seems, is to mask Sexy Hiking in a layer of defensive, self-conscious jocularity. The ending is the same (spoilers ahead). You're offered a full-on Jazzuo face and voice reveal, with a text scroll and accompanying song that make an exaggerated show of self-aggrandizement. He calls it a "great game", he's "influenced our lifes greatly", and if you look closely at his "beautiful humbeled smile" you will "aswell understand why some people would call him Jesus". Jazzuo is trying, with this charade, to lull you into complacency via sarcasm. He seems to be saying: "you're not supposed to like my game, because it was really just a joke. I'm trying to make it not-fun, that's the bit, you can't attack me for it."

Here's the thing: Sexy Hiking IS fun. Really fun. It's sort of like pinball: you have a very small range of motion to influence the world, and you watch your limited movements cascade into wild bouncings and flingings around. Jazzuo is insecure, not because he made a bad game, but because he put his heart and soul into making a good one. I laughed out loud at the ending to Sexy Hiking; I thought it was sweet and very endearing. You can hear a saxophone playing in the background while Jazzuo sings. I wonder if the sax player is his friend. I imagine Jazzuo asking his friend to help him make a funny song for his amateur video game, and the two of them sitting down with some cheap-ass recording equipment to hash out something that fits. That's adorable. And you know what? He does kinda look like Jesus. I mean it! He does!

I didn't catch it at first, but I see now why I fell so hard for Sexy Hiking. Bright imagination half-glimpsed through crude tools, rough and unpolished difficulty, insecure enthusiasm barely hiding under a layer of clumsy irony. The same texture as a first-time custom level, teenage Nintendo mod, or stick-figure Flash game. No wonder it feels so much like home. No wonder I found it so soothing, so easy to understand, almost more comforting than it is frustrating. I must have played Sexy Hiking three hundred times by three hundred different people. Each time it plays out a little bit different, but the point is the same. A cozy little enclave carved out of the ash-heap of creativity's landfill.

Much like the hobbyist levelmaker, Jazzuo is seeking a way to make his mark, to imprint something of himself onto the digital world. Nothing makes more of a mark than That One Level, so every level becomes That One Level. Every obstacle is Doing Things The Hard Way. With no external force to hold him accountable, he has no reason to compromise. Good. Compromises make games forgettable. Piled up in the landfill, filed in with the bland things. Sexy Hiking is nothing if not memorable. A game with 500 levels might start to have them blur together, but when you've only got four, each one is a keystone. When the tools are so limited, even a dead tree becomes an icon.

In case it's not obvious, I really, really like this game. I planned, at the start of the month, to play Sexy Hiking twice; I assumed it wouldn't be much fun, and I wanted to push myself to understand it anyway. I have now played it enough to semi-consistently complete it in under ten minutes, and my record is six. After writing this, I intend to force myself to never touch it again. It's too powerful a drug. A quick sexy hike during class breaks until it's over too soon and you're back in the vastly inferior real world. Lucky for me, in the abyss of trash culture there will always be more Sexy Hikings to try, more Jazzuos with humbeled smiles looking to make their mark on the world. Some newer thing will beckon. It always does.

9/10

* (according to John Carmack)

(3/1/2023)

moon is a self-described "anti-RPG", the premise of which is that you go around helping monsters and collecting "Love" instead of killing them. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because it's the game that inspired Toby Fox to make Undertale. I also recently found out it was translated into English by a guy named Tim Rogers, who wrote several novella-length internet essays I like. The combination made me curious enough to try the game, plus I thought it would make an interesting contrast with Modern Warfare 2. Unsurprisingly, I like moon better.

In moon, you play a small child who gets sucked into a "GameStation" video game he's been playing. Inside, he learns that the 'hero' of the game is, in fact, a deluded sociopath who goes around killing small animals for basically no reason. A mysterious queen speaks to you in a dream, telling you to stop him by collecting as much "Love" as possible. You collect Love in two ways: by playing little overworld minigames to help the souls of the dead animals, and by doing favors for various quirky characters. The influence of this game on Toby Fox is not subtle; the story is pretty much a Pacifist and Genocide run of Undertale happening in sync, with you controlling the Pacifist half.

One important difference: Where Undertale mixes up its combat with a clever little bullet-hell system, moon eschews it entirely. The only game interface is the top-down overworld. You can 'level up' by collecting Love, but the amount of Love in the world is finite and levelups have harsh diminishing returns. The upside of this is that there aren't any random encounters and there's no such thing as "grinding". The downside is that, without anything solid replacing the combat mechanics, moon is desperately wanting for a primary gameplay loop. The only systems moon can use to express its puzzles are a day/night cycle, a time-based 'energy' system, money, and an inventory. That's not a lot to work with for a 20+ hour game!

Now, that's not to say moon is a walking simulator. It's more like... well, to make up a genre on the spot, call it a "contextual puzzle game". Some puzzle games, like Baba is You or chess, rely on a discrete set of rules, and the fun comes from learning to manipulate them into the outcome you want. But there are many puzzle games that aren't like this. Text adventures, point-and-click games, and talky games like Disco Elysium have puzzles, but they rely entirely on narrative context. They're more like tests to see if you're paying attention to the story, or understand the mindset of the author; you have some set of plot-relevant items or dialogue options, and you have to pick the one that seems like it'd advance the plot. In moon's case, each piece of context is a quirky RPG character, and the puzzle is using context to figure out how to squeeze the Love out of them. Unfortunately, these puzzles are mostly bad. They're either too easy, and feel like a waste of time, or they're too hard, and feel frustrating and unfair. The option pool is, by necessity, limited enough that trial-and-error is always a tempting choice, and if the player doesn't catch the solution after ~2 minutes they've probably already exhausted their tiny set of visible options.

If there's a reason to come to moon, it's the writing, not the puzzles. The writing is great; it has Tim Rogers' fingerprints all over it. This is certainly a loose translation: I'm guessing the line "Bubby, if you ain't got love, you'll fall over and pass the heck out" was mostly Tim's doing, for example, unless there's a perfect Japanese analogue to 'bubby' I don't know about. There are other little quirks, internet-isms that didn't exist in 1997 and language games that couldn't possibly have exact translations, which signal to me that Tim is willing to take the wheel and keep the game fresh for modern eyes. I was worried moon would take a sanctimonious or moralizing tone, but instead he correctly treats the ridiculous premise as a vehicle for tongue-in-cheek self-parody. At one point I went to sleep, and the Queen informed me that I had collected enough Love to reach "Love Level 7: Love Intern". Later you advance to Love CEO and then the President of Love.

The best part of the game is the "Voice Grunting" (thanks tvtropes). You'd think this wouldn't be important, but you'd be wrong. It's like this: each character has a unique set of real-world soundbites, most in English, some not. Those soundbites play, chopped up and scrambled around, on loop when they talk. Sometimes, a whole sentence comes through; sometimes you can only make out brief snippets in the stew; some characters are too muddled to understand. This is SO FUCKING GOOD. It's like a peek into the chaotic noise of each character's mind, incoherent yet dense with meaning. The thoughts are never directly relevant to the subject at hand, but they always seem to catch my attention just as deeply as the written text.

The Baker's lines are the best. As he tells you he's selling fresh bread, he's also saying "Having a sto-- Satisfy you?-- orial, what, eh-- I'm the reason they wrote it!". That last one is especially powerful. The pompous lilt in his voice expresses a thousand times more personality in under a second than every single character in Modern Warfare 2 put together. Now you know that this baker is someone who would smugly confide that he's the reason they wrote it, that's the kind of guy he is, and that this is true irrespective of the 'it' or the 'they'. The King's lines sound more like a high-pitched "wheeky-whee-WEE-woo-wee-wheeheewoo-WOOwho". Now you know something about both characters: you can see through the contrast that the Baker's mind is verbal, but the King's is not. All this is accomplished ambiently, without interrupting the game for even a second. Jesus, I wish I could come up with something like that.

moon is full of moment-to-moment delights, but it loses a little something in tying them together. The first few hours have you semi-linearly shadowing the 'hero', cleaning up his messes with The Power Of Friendship. But the game stalls when you reach a certain quest where you have to assemble a rocket. The rocket has five parts and there are no hints; you need to scour basically the entire game world, solving every quest you can, hoping one of them will give you what you need. As a result, the second half is open-ended. This is good for a while, letting you can play around in the quirkiness sandbox, picking up whatever leads you happen to find. It feels natural. But past a certain point, poring over every detail of the map with a fine-tooth comb gets frustrating. It's not hard to amass enough money and Love to basically do whatever you want, so from there the game is only as engaging as its ability to keep charming you.

On the other hand, the developers didn't make moon for a world of endless digital novelty constantly screaming for attention. I think if I was 14, and moon was the only new game I'd get 'till next Christmas, it could really hit me. I can imagine slaving over the last couple quests for hours, running the game's obtuse hints over and over in my head. It's not cruel, so I doubt I'd give up; there's no missable content and there's little threat in failure. I'm probably too old now to be a moon cultist, though I was happy to pretend to be one. For a little while, at least.

8/10

(1/5/2023)

Scene: A dramatic snowmobile chase in the dead of frozen Russian tundra. My character, "Roach", has just infiltrated an enemy camp, and is now making his daring escape. Russian soldiers are hot on my tail, firing wildly from their own snowmobiles as we shoot downhill. An entire orchestra assaults my ears as my partner shouts aggressively: "More tangos on the rear! Pin the throttle! Go! Go! Go!" The escape helicopter is in sight, but it is going to land on the other side of a large chasm. The only way across is to jump a natural ramp that has formed at the cliff face. I near the ramp, pressing the W key as hard as I can. The music reaches a dramatic crescendo as...!

...as I slightly misjudge the angle, land a little bit behind clear ground, and get stuck in the snow. The music stops, but my oblivious partner keeps shouting. He tells me that there's no time and they're right on our tail as I spend the next minute or so trying to pull my snowmobile back up to flat ground. Clearly a bit of stuck-out level geometry has caught the front, so I reverse, swerve to the side, and move around it after some fiddling. Immediately the dramatic music resumes, the enemy soldiers jump up behind me, and the game keeps going with its scripted chase sequence as though nothing happened.

This keeps happening in Modern Warfare 2. The campaign, "For the Record", is a perfectly arranged stack of setpiece encounters and explosive spectacle that collapses instantly the second you touch it. It is a game that does not want to be played. You are constantly being told exactly what to do at any given moment - either by objective markers or your commanding officers - and any slight deviation from the intended path is met with violent retribution. At its worst, the "stealth missions" literally involve you sitting in one spot, looking at a guy through a scope, waiting for your partner to tell you to shoot. Then you press the left mouse button and follow him until he tells you to stop, rinse and repeat. It might as well be a series of quick-time events.

Scene: My squad and I are storming a gulag. We're trying to free a prisoner who the villain, Makarov, has some kind of history with. At one point, the baddies I was trying to kill get shot down by my allies before I can get to them. A little frustrated, I experiment with hiding in a safe corner and doing literally nothing while my (invincible?) allies do all the work. I make it through two entire checkpoints this way - not pressing a single button - before getting bored. I return to the battle and go back to shooting Russians, but the magic has drained out of it. What am I even doing here?

I feel bad picking on the plot of Modern Warfare 2. I have many nitpicks, like that the only distinguishing traits the characters have are their accents, but I suspect the obvious counter to them is "who cares about the story in a Call of Duty game?" But I picked this one specifically because I expected it, of all possible CoDs, to put the most effort into the campaign. The Steam reviews frequently mention 'the story' as a high point, and the developers obviously want you to pay attention to it (judging by the amount of time you spend in only-sometimes-skippable cutscenes). So I think it's a real knock against the game when I say that, in my opinion, the story is mostly pretty stupid.

It's not ALL bad. There's a cool multiple-perspective thing where you jump back and forth between characters and locations. If I cared about any of the characters, this might have been exciting! There is a lot of dialogue, but it's all gruff monologues about how War is Hell or shouted commands to go here and do this. No time is wasted on trivial things like explaining what's going on or why you're shooting these people in particular. (Or, say, why your allies joined the military, what they care about, if they have families...) I thought this was because I skipped the optional 'intel' collectibles, but I went back to get some and it turns out they don't actually contain any intel. I got the broad strokes of what was happening through contextual clues, but I couldn't follow the why.

Scene: We are attempting to defend the roof of Burger Town for some reason or other. The enemies swarm from below us, attempting to take our position on the high ground. After a couple failed attempts to snipe them one-by-one from the rooftop, I notice that there are only two ways up to the roof, they're both ladders, and they're right next to each other. Crucial: enemies cannot shoot you from ladders. I stand in a position that can see both ladders, wait, and shoot whenever I see a face pop up. A comical pile of ragdoll bodies accumulates on the floor of Burger Town. Oblivious enemies continue to climb up, ignoring their dozens of comrades who just died in the exact same way they're about to. I complete the objective without taking a single hit.

Midway through Act II, I noticed something surprising: occasionally, in the little gunfights seemingly intended as padding between key setpieces, the shape of a video game started to emerge. When the developers take their thumbs off the scale, letting you face down a bunch of guys with nothing but a gun the way nature intended, Modern Warfare 2 can actually be very fun. This culminates in Mission 14, "Whiskey Hotel"; at this point, you've been playing for long enough that Modern Warfare 2 is comfortable challenging you, and the titular hotel makes for an interesting combat location. I was thinking, while playing it, that I wouldn't mind if they made a whole game out of that stuff. A shooter, but in first person? I wonder why no one has tried that before.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the people making the game agreed. Spoilers ahead: After Whiskey Hotel, the game ends with: a monotonously extended base-defense mission; a dramatic escape where the enemies shoot each other (so you don't have to); ANOTHER god damn stealth mission; and a vehicle section where you can barely use your gun. The "final boss", if you can call it that, is basically a cutscene. I understand why you'd want to open with a bunch of big empty spectacle, if you think you need it to hook a player who doesn't understand the controls yet. I don't understand why they keep bringing it back, forcing the core loop of the game to struggle for air as it collapses under a mountain of setpieces.

...Ok, all this is unfair. I picked Modern Warfare 2 because of what I'd heard about the "No Russian" part, which made me think it was more campaign-focused than the other games in the series. But even so, everyone knows Call of Duty is a multiplayer man's game first and foremost. In truth, then, I have no idea if Modern Warfare 2 is any good. In fact, I don't even know what it means for a multiplayer game to BE good, in an existential sense. I feel like the quality of my multiplayer gaming has nothing to do with the quality of the game and everything to do with the quality of the other people. If multiplayer can make even watching The Room fun, does it really MATTER if a game has fun multiplayer? But still, I understand it's a big part of the game's identity. So -

Scene: I am running around the map "Rust". A friend and I are shooting at each other, a 1v1 competitive match. I mostly got my ass kicked, and ultimately lose, 35 to 58. I had a good time anyway.

5/10