The Most Important Games Critic of All-Time

Anonymous asked: What is your opinion on Jordan Mechner and Eric Chahi?

I like them both, but I don’t think I’ll be able to handle the latter’s next game — shit looks way too depressing.

Anonymous asked: I thought the great critics were the ones who DON'T moralize like old women?

At this point, I can shit out better criticisms than you can write.

Misogyny on the internet? That’s unpossible!

Anonymous asked: derp derp

I don’t understand what this means.

Anonymous asked: あんたが馬鹿だけじゃないの?

Se habla espanol?

Anonymous asked: How's it going?

Well.

Anonymous asked: "Given the amount of Batman books, I am going to guess at least once a villain won by revealing Batman’s identity."

Probably the guys point. The villain would have given an answer, not a question.

All of the Batman movies are terrible.

Anonymous asked: What do you think of insomnia.ac?

Boring D-list blog of no merit.

Anonymous asked: Would you be willing to write reviews for another publication as a paying gig? Do you have any contact info?

I like money.

I am not going to give out that sort of information publicly, but if you want to leave some contact information, you can do so by click “ask” and leaving it as if you are asking a question. I won’t post it obviously, but if I find the offer appealing, I’ll give it some consideration.

NBA 2K11

I am of the opinion that NBA 2K3 is most important, if not the greatest, game ever made — it’s mediumistic perfection. After iterations of attempting to virtually encapsulate the greatest athletic activity ever known to man, Visual Concepts cemented their spot as the first auteurs of virtual sports; they became Terrence Malick overnight and that game was their Days of Heaven.

Unlike the bizarrely heralded arrested development in Fumito Ueda’s interactive eight-grade poetry, VC had a deep understanding of the potential of games as art and the maturity to competently realize those ambitions wholly. The player-defined narrative gave penetrating insights into the crises and the triumphs of contemporary masculinity and the nature of modern athleticism.

It is impossible to ascend past the zenith, and Visual Concepts’ downfall came from attempting to do such a thing. It was as if they managed to intercourse Fabio in his prime and ditched him in favor of finding a greater ideal of male beauty, only to end up giving fellatio to Stephen Tobolowsky.

With each following, all of the company’s sports franchises became increasingly stagnant until they were at the point of regressivism. After last year’s gallingly atrocious NBA title, VC realized they were waddling through self-parodic territory and the only solution was to course correct.

NBA 2K11 is the first time in eight years the franchise has felt genuinely fresh; it is the has-been musician’s the comeback album. A comeback album produced by Rick Rubin — they snatched Michael Jordan, who became Earth’s post-religious cultural deity after the death of John Lennon.

After landing the presence of the basketball’s Jesus Christ, Visual Concepts could have been completely complacent and thrown together any old mode with a Jordan avatar, but they opted not to. Inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s multilayered historical revisionism in Inglorious Basterds, VC opted to create the first meaningful narrative-based campaign in a sports game, but swapping Tarantino’s use of transplanted action movie tropes of American triumphalism as the fulfillment of cultural fantasy for asking the player what they would do when placed in the greatest moments of a man’s career. Do they merely do as he did, exceed such greatness or turn one’s finest hour into anomalous mediocrity?

Unfortunately, for all of the greatness in the game’s Jordan-based mode, the second year of My Player mode massively disappoints. While EA Canada perfected the role-playing game with their own thoroughly satisfying “Create a Player” mode in the NHL series, VC was aloof on how to give the player the profound sense in agency in dictating a single career. After last year’s halfhearted attempt, VC refocused their efforts on recreating the quintessential difficulty in the career of the typical professional athlete by making it nearly impossible to succeed in the mode.

Ultimately, there is too little for the mode to be anything other than evidence that intended frustration is decidedly masochistic. By limiting the player’s agency to that on the court, VC never really gives an adequate understanding of the hopelessness of being subpar. You don’t develop any complexes, you don’t begin to do drugs to fill a void in your life, you don’t go to a psychiatrist for your depression resulting from your uneventful trajectory, and you certainly don’t struggle with a marriage or the responsibilities of fatherhood.

Yes, there has been attempts to create a singular player-based narrative in basketball games, particularly “The Life” in Sony’s discontinued NBA series or Midway’s wannabe streetball game NBA Ballers, but those were insipid, overly linear glamorizations of stereotpyical celebrity in barely playable games.

The game’s on-court limitations make the series’ signature Franchise mode similarly disappointing. Sure you can select the players you want and trade and whatnot, but you never quite feel in charge of a team. And you don’t deal with the players in meaningful way, like if one were make an anti-Semitic gaffe at a press conference but you needed to attempt to explain to them why that was wrong or else they would continue to make anti-Semitic remarks. You also cannot emphasize to your star player that recording an album will ultimately undermine their ability to prepare for the next season. You also cannot deal with fines levied against you, players on your team or even the team itself. You also cannot with the other miscellany in team ownership — ticket prices, television coverage, press coverage, et cetera. I can’t say I ever felt like I was managing a team in this year’s Franchise mode.

Also, there is also ultimately a misogynist devaluation of feminine athletic merit with the continued exemption of a WNBA mode. By denying virtual representation to the most institutionally relevant and ubiquitous female sporting institution, VC is essentially approving of gaming’s feminine ideal of the implausible buxomed vixen rather than an inspiringly healthful image of female fitness exemplified by women’s basketball.

With NBA 2K11, Visual Concepts might not be fucking Jon Hamm — but they’re giving it to Vincent Kartheiser, and that is a start; a mixed bag is better than a shit bag. If they continue at this pace, John Slattery could be in sights for next year.

Anonymous asked: I think you somehow lost your inner child. You sad, sad person.

My inner child grew up into an inner adult, and I don’t see anything wrong with this.

Anonymous asked: You gave praise to Brain Training. The title of the game is a lie. The only way your mind, or anything else for that matter will develop, is by being challenged. By doing difficult tasks! Brain Training does not do this, as it is even easier than the thinking games children play.

Then again, maybe it is challenging for you, as reading anything on your site gives away that you are completely a brainless buffoon.

It’s like jogging for the mind, which is entirely different from eyefucking Tolstoy. Masochistic game difficulty does not lead to mental gains of any sort, and only an apologist would suggest the contrary.

Anonymous asked: Team Ninja is misogynist? If you glorify women as sexy or beautiful, you are a misogynist? As a gendered species, we are sexual by nature, so sexualization is by no means a bad thing. It is, if anything a form of admiration. Also, it is the job of an artist to brings us beauty in an exaggerated and unreal form, in a way wich we cannot enjoy it in real life. So where is this "hate of women" that you speak of?

I’m sorry I missed the feminism of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball in the studio’s softcore pornographic reduction of an entire gender into mere fetish objects with no intellectual merit. And Sasha Grey is the Mary Wollstonecraft of the twenty-first century.

Anonymous asked: "utterly sublime Wii Sports boxing mode"

... what

Did you not play the mode? It perfected the boxing game.

Metroid: Other M

I have no plans to play Metroid: Other M because it looks absolutely awful, and that is not just because Nintendo decided to hand their franchise noted for it’s semi-respectful treatment of a female protagonist to Japan’s most famously misogynist development house. Metroid: Other M is part of an overall trend of Nintendo’s “core” offerings for the Wii that makes the tired, cliched foundations of the company’s franchises even more evident than the previously were.

Nintendo has kept the undiscerning zealous group of gamers salivating at its modus operandi of beating a dead horse by passing off a mixture of stolen ideas and unwarranted nostalgia for long-running properties as some sort of Disneyesque, quasi-proprietary magic. It’s boring; I have better things to do than play the game I played years ago, so I stopped falling for it.

Based on my vicarious sensation of gameplaying from the fifteen minutes or so of the game I watched on YouTube, the ham-handed retro fetish of Metroid: Other M has been attempted far more successfully in a litany of downloadable titles for all three consoles.

Still, it is less shameless than Punch-Out!—Nintendo and Next Level Games’ total rip-off of Digital Fiction and Majesco’s truly masterful and extremely underplayed boxing title Black & Bruised that didn’t even bother to use the utterly sublime Wii Sports boxing mode as any sort of inspiration. Or Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2’s combination of a ham-handed critique of colonialism nicked from IO’s masterpiece Freedom Fighters and the briefly interesting galactic platforming novelty taken later PlayStation 2 entries of Insomniac Games’ Ratchet and Clank franchise. Or the company’s Animal Crossing franchise, a repulsive, preschooler-targeted bastardization of Maxis’ tour de forces in the life simulation genre.

Self-identifying gamers like to pretend Nintendo’s casual push is tripe that makes it safe, but the only real creative bankruptcy is the garbage they eat up uncritically. However, Nintendo’s casual titles like Nintendogs, Brain Age and Wii Sports Resort are unquestionable art that are deservedly writing the company’s legacy in the twenty-first century. And it’s not a coincidence that casual third-party titles for the Wii and DS artistically and commercially triumph over the half-assed “core” titles; it is too bad that some gamers are too childish to face that truth.