What makes Crimson Desert feel like an embodiment of the age is its fundamentally contradictory nature. Its mixture of ambition and appropriation is maddening on the one hand, delightful on the other. It’s a game that shamelessly lays out its influences, and in doing so shows how it directly copies them - but crucially, it does so because it’s fun. Breath Of The Wild and Tears Of The Kingdom are immediate and obvious, then suddenly you’re thrust into Cyberpunk 2077’s Braindances without any warning whatsoever. Other sections recall the tutorial bits of Control and the void space of Dishonored. There’s a sense of directly sampling videogame culture of the last 20 years and re-arranging them in a grandiose facsimile of Sicily. I can’t escape the bone-white ruins in the hyper-green countryside evoking deep memories of Oblivion, or the weapon combos feeling like they’re pure Platinum Games or Musou lifts. The sheer vibe of the thing is almost the point; that to enjoy it to the fullest, surrender must be total. You acquiesce to the vibe-based thinking that seems to underpin its general structure and find a wanderer’s delight. In its opening hours, it’s a game of idle discovery, of uncovering multitudes of under-explained micro-features that would be ruined if they had an exhaustive tutorial for them. Their existence works almost like ludological pokemon, randomly appearing in the wild to challenge you as to which button sequence you must now add to the list of sequences you’re already failing to adequately memorise. That is the befuddling yet delightful path that Crimson Desert lays before you and being part of the social media ARG to figure out what the fuck all these systems do has been surprisingly entertaining.

The thing that amuses me the most about Crimson Desert is the reaction to it. Again, seemingly by accident, it directly spears the complacency and laziness of the stereotypical AAA gamerbro. Bereft of a strongly-corridored narrative, they’re left having to resort to the horror of using their imagination to decide what to do. And when they want to do it they find, appallingly, that the beloved context-sensitive ‘press X for everything’ button doesn’t work, and are instead faced with control combinations that haven’t been seen for over 20 years.1 There’s a complexity of interface that matches the complexity of the systome, and that matches the visual complexity of the environment. It was fascinating to watch this play out across TikTok and Reddit, as players discovered that this is a sandbox-first game, where exploration and acquisition has primacy over any character or plot arc. In the modern AAA context, this is practically iconoclastic, if not seditiously subversive. As such, it fuels the kind of divisiveness that separates out the gamer factions into those fools who really should be reading more books from those who should be playing more games. I like to think Crimson Desert throws down a gauntlet of sorts for the open-worlder, and raises a particular bar that hasn’t been challenged since the likes of Skyrim or Fallout 4. With GTA VI looking to carry on the same 20-year-old interactive design of its predecessors, the arrival of a gameplay-first, greatest-hits open-worlder feels markedly important.

Of course for me, Crimson Desert is a real gift from the heavens. A vast place full to the brim with stuff and things and activities. The dress-up alone is dizzying in scope, and that’s before I consider an army of pets and customising my house. Going in fully aware that jankiness is a core feature, it was only a couple of hours before the vibes-based vibes had me utterly convinced of the game’s greatness. It’s powerfully seductive in that sense, and has a unique charisma that comes from the complexity of that systome; there’s so much to find, so much to learn, so much to explore. For me, it’s incredibly heartening and the evolution of user scoring ratifies my unreasonable credo that main stories are shit and worldsim complexity is everything. Crimson Desert accidentally proves my point for me. When it works, the games that a systems-and-exploration-centred philosophy creates are deeply and richly rewarding because of what narratives they allow you to create, and not because of what narrative they tell you. In essence, the greatest story they can tell is your own personal one of discovery and development, which can be a far richer tale than any authored yarn. And of all the modern vogues it deploys, perhaps the most pastorally valuable is its walking-sim sense of place. The opening region is absolutely lovely - I went off for an hour looking for rosemary plants and had the most delightful bucolic dander since Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture. Only instead of well-disguised corridors masquerading as English countryside, Crimson Desert lays out an entire land. Foreboding peaks in the distance make all the difference when you know you could walk there if you wanted, only with the wisdom to know that you need a good 20 hours of experience and acquisition to have fun when you get there. It’s in those conventions, which Crimson Desert is happy to uphold, that I find the security to know I can plot out my own little arcs of business. And this is where that transcendent joy is to be found. I’ll do some exploring to find more fast travel bits, maybe do a mission or two, think about going to a new town to see if I can find some new weapons or clothes, try and win over some more cats etc etc etc. Being so nicely decoupled from any sense of narrative urgency happily promotes the sense of leisure to be had - the game really is ideal in that respect. Especially with the idea that it’s fucking enormous, so there’s an awful lot of player-directed activity on the menu. Fuck. Yes.

Crimson Desert’s status as a near-figurehead for an as-yet undetermined phase of videogame culture might sound incredibly nebulous thanks to my lack of articulation, but I can’t shake the feeling of Asian developers and global AAA debuts being something of a theme for the current generation. Sitting alongside the creative stasis of Western AAA, the arrivals of Black Myth: Wukong, Stellar Blade and more pointedly, Palworld shows a contradictory compliance with and defiance against the AAA status quo. They obey particular entry requirements, but then go beyond the boundaries of acceptability or quality or sensibility and as such, mark themselves out as different by some indefinable metric. I really don’t want to claim it’s a simple difference of cultural background, for there’s something in the fundamental madness at the heart of Crimson Desert that seems to chime with the deeper spirit of the age in general. It feels like an AI hallucination at times, and the game’s ability to utterly confound and confuse you with weird information or oblique controls only serves to make it feel alien, as much due to its non-compliance with the frictionless AAA standards for such things. It also feels incredibly vibes-based, in the sense that the vast cohort of humans that worked on it came to act as some kind of gestalt wet-ware LLM, and just as we recoil in horror at genAI video of some imagined fantasy open-worlder, we can also be utterly transfixed and beguiled by it. Crimson Desert can genuinely feel like that for real; that its entire shape and form was spewed out by AI in a 30-sec Reel and humans simply reconstructed an entire game from it. But this is the oddness and madness that fuels the whole thing, what makes it so deliciously exciting. There is a whistleblower post claiming that the game is shit because of Pearl Abyss’s internal culture, only the whistleblowing doesn’t ring true at all - the game is fucking amazing. I’d love to think that’s by accident, as it would suggest a guiding hand of the online culture zeitgeist just spirited the magic out of AAA games and social media trends. A kind of Gibsonian Wintermute going self-aware and leaving Crimson Desert as the sole piece of evidence for that happening, as it really does feel substantially different from those other Asian titles. Wukong and Stellar Blade were firmly traditionalist, but Palworld was decidedly iconoclastic, being both a celebration and a perversion of the Pokemon template.2 And of course, Palworld had its own gen-AI palaver, much as Crimson Desert has (for the crime of having an AI-generated painting in it or something?). We should take that as the clarion call for the new flesh that Crimson Desert exemplifies - it ain’t even modern if ain’t had an AI scandal. This is the hallmark of the new modernity, and I kinda embrace the mess of it, the chaos underneath. There’s a bubbling vivacity here that feels so much more valuable and interesting than a by-the-numbers committee AAA. And I just love that it always feels accidental.

As a nice footnote, it’s worth mentioning that Crimson Desert is currently the final disc-based release I bought on day one. I’m absolutely proud of that fact, as it feels almost ridiculous to say it, but nonetheless in the short time I’ve been playing, I feel like I’ve had value for money. Having done so much Game Passing over the last four years or so, to come in with a game that feels so startlingly modern by buying it in the most traditional way is yet another contradiction that upends any sense of dull equilibrium around Crimson Desert. In a grander view, it feels like the 30-year tradition of the MMO being crystalised back into single player with a triumphant array of content and systems re-tooled for solo, and perhaps its air of freshness is down to my lack of MMO play. But to compare it to another new release, Bungie’s Marathon, we find that after a week, Crimson Desert looks to have double the sales. Marathon’s beautifully bold visual style and infographic design sings to me like the fawning Designers Republic fanboy I really am, but its multiplayer focus kills any enthusiasm dead. And that’s the tragedy of Marathon as the service game’s potential terminus; gimme a service game for single player and I might put years into that shit too. Crimson Desert works as an illustration of sorts for how that might look after a couple of years. Those piles of systems feel like an MMO after a shitload of content updates, with the crowded control methods betraying how they had to be crowbarred into a gamepad setup. But at the same time, it suggests what could be possible. The world is the star here, and you can always add characters to the world if you’re not hell-bent on changing it forever with some terribly impactful and important story. Instead, consider my creaky desires for Cyberpunk - to be a container of biographies, not narratives. No AAA game has come closer to fulfilling that dream than Crimson Desert, for it would seem so easy to make new playable characters and drop them, literally from the heavens, into its world of bonkers-grade environment and systems. And what a world it is! I sincerely hope the content updates don’t spoil the magic by shackling the player back into main-story orthodoxy, as suggested by comments from a shareholder call. I hope the game is simply too wild to be constrained by such a thing, but if that does ever happen, at least we had that time where Crimson Desert felt as wild and as free as the world it gave you.

[21]

Commercial Breaks: The Battle For Santa’s Software is a true gem. It’s so good that it forms the basis for just about any YouTuber look at the era, including Kim Justice’s thoroughly decent overview. What it accidentally captures is the genuine spirit of the age; an industry in transition to professionalism, but one filled with genuine characters and a healthy dose of arrogance and hubris to compliment its diligence and worthiness. This was the UK videogames industry of the mid-80s, and what’s of particular interest is the geography. Aside from shots of a computer show presumably in London, the entire documentary takes place in the upper half of England. It goes no further south than Birmingham, lending a curiously class-free picture of a dazzling new industry. One cast in the Thatcherite dream of independent commerce, but showcasing the North’s ability to leap from the smoke and dust of post-industrial collapse, as it was happening, by harnessing new consumer technologies. With the description out of the way, I will now lazily devolve into listing bullet points about things I really love in the documentary.

Everyone’s Northern

The preponderance of regional accents in Commercial Breaks tells its own story about the curious democracy that home microcomputers brought to the industries that grew around them. With only Ocean’s David Ward and Chris Hedges voicing anything approaching middle-class RP, we get a vocal celebration of Liverpool and Manchester as focal hubs for the UK videogame industry, a status which to some extent they maintained well into the 21st Century. Of course the youth of many of the people on the development side is a given, but less expected are John ‘grandad’ Gibson and Steve Cain,4 who seem far older than the bedroom whizzkid Joffa Smith or the (sadly not featured) Eugene Evans who, along with Matthew Manic Miner Smith, were used to forge the millionaire teenage coder mythos upon which Imagine leaned. Special award goes to Tony Pomfret's outstanding lancs (?)5 accent, which is as broad as it gets - particularly when saying “Quasimohdoh”.

Mark Butler’s Extraordinary Claims

A pivotal segment in the show is Mark Butler explaining why Imagine must commit vast sums of money and resources to making ‘megagames’. Mark claims that in just two years, they have reached the limit of what is possible on current hardware and, incredibly, selling games with a hardware add-on to boost capabilities is the only viable step forward. Even better are further claims that this add-on will make characters you can do ‘literally anything’ with. This is such an extraordinary claim that in the modern age, you’d suspect cocaine addiction or mental illness was necessary to allow yourself to be filmed saying such a thing. I watch this documentary a lot and his segment still makes my jaw drop. I would have loved to see a contemporary coder’s perspective on his comments but even by the standards of the day, it would have been obvious that Butler was absolutely full of shit. However I suspect the documentarians had likely seen this kind of brash hucksterism before and gleefully included his monologue early in the episode to give Imagine all the rope it needed to hang itself.

Legit Red-Hot 8-Bit Dev Team Action

Butler’s ludicrous sales pitch segues into office life on the development side of Imagine, showing us John Gibson struggling with a movement bug as we get an actual glimpse of Bandersnatch in action. The fact it looks exactly like any normal ZX Spectrum game is one of the greatest comedic contrasts possible against Butler’s monologue, but rather than pressing the point we get a look at the developers toiling away. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, we’re actually looking at key members of Denton Designs, one of the most innovative and interesting development teams of the 8-bit era. Read more here. Denton were responsible for all-time standouts like The Great Escape and genuinely radical experiments like Shadowfire, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Mutants. What this proved was Imagine’s downfall wasn’t due to any lack of development talent, meaning the suits were fucking the creatives before the industry was even five years old.

Sylvia Gets Combative With Chris

Sales supremo Sylvia Jones meets with Imagine’s distributor in Birmingham. Pulling up in an immaculate Ford Escort (XR3i?) with iconic alloys, she sits down with Chris Hedges to try and convince him that Bandersnatch is the greatest thing ever to happen in the history of videogames. From a monologue in her car just before arriving, it doesn’t sound like Sylvia is in the most positive mood, and her meeting with Chris presumably does little to alleviate that. It’s unclear if Sylvia is giving Chris genuine information or if she’s making it up on the spot, as she makes claims that the game will be launching 6 weeks from their meeting. Considering there is absolutely nothing of substance to show of the game, this would be alarming on its own, so we can imagine Chris’s incredulity when Sylvia announces that the game will also come with as many as 25 items in the box, “That sounds complicated”, Chris replies. Sylvia replies “it isn’t, really”, in a manner which seems defensive, to say the least. It’s at this point that Chris discovers the game will come with a hardware add-on, an audio tape soundtrack and a follow-up LP vinyl record with ‘famous names’ on it.6 Oh, and it will cost more than seven times the average retail price - £40 instead of £5.95. While you could blame Sylvia for handling this disclosure badly, as it could seem like she’s just made it all up in blind panic, but it has echoes of Mark Butler’s grandiosity that betray its likely source. Chris’s closing remark that “You’ve now taken the product, in my mind, beyond understanding” is one of the most sensible observations made in the entire documentary.

David Ward Doesn’t Mind Home Piracy

Upon finding a commercially-pirated copy of Hunchback at a market, Ocean founder David Ward talks frankly about the threat to his bottom line that comes from the commercial knock-off industry, while absolving the home copyist. It’s a fascinating stance to take and perhaps underlies the sensibilities and professionalism of him and his business. Wonderfully, David chalks up the bedroom pirate to being part of the hacker culture, which no doubt plenty of his coders have come from. As we will read shortly, piracy was a common bogeyman for the flailing-fortunes software house in the 1980s, attributing all sorts of financial shortcomings to the spectre of lost sales. When I worked in PR in the mid-late 2000s, a lot of the senior staff I met were from the 1980s and many had opinions of the leading lights of the era, but none had a bad word to say about David. And he comes across in Commercial Breaks as a sensible and professional business man. My boss back then told me that David had actually made his fortune in property during the 1970s, so Ocean was a kind of playful, exciting venture for him, running it for the challenge. It’s probably that spirit that led to him contributing to Anne and Geoff Brown’s publisher, US Gold, who in turn part-funded smaller studios and publishers like Sheffield’s Gremlin Graphics, and the consolidation of UK games distribution with Centresoft.7 The interesting thing here is with pivotal figures like David Ward taking such a prominent role, Commercial Breaks works as a superb introduction to the UK videogames industry of the mid-late 80s and early-mid 90s, for so many of the major players in that era can draw connections to the people interviewed in it.

The Accidental Formation of Psygnosis Without Bruce Everiss

The knockout moment of documentarian reportage in Commercial Breaks is the board meeting when the news comes that the bank will not lend Imagine any more money. Unfortunately, this turns out to be absolutely catastrophic. The meeting starts with cutthroat razor enthusiast and general oddity Bruce Everiss8 explaining that they’ve fatally overhyped Bandersnatch to the media, and desperately need something of substance to stop the hype train from derailing. Ian Hetherington then gets the deadly call and the company grinds to a halt, just as Paul Anderson’s team are filming. Ian soon resigns, as do most of the other directors, leaving a lone Bruce Everiss to hold the fort. Bruce cuts a semi-tragic figure in Commercial Breaks, seeming to be both the voice of reason and ‘the one who got left behind’. Ian Hetherington would form a company with David Lawson and Jonathan Ellis that fought a reasonably petty battle with various parties to obtain various IPs and assets of Imagine. That company eventually became Pysgnosis, the company that defined the British 16-bit computer game, including packaging and branding, with Shadow Of The Beast, Hired Guns, Lemmings etc. Psygnosis was in turn acquired by Sony to become SCEE Liverpool, famed for Wipeout et al, which itself was eventually closed in 2012. It’s absolutely wild to me that the moment that Ian Hetherington decided he was finally ‘out’ was probably captured on film. It’s impossible to understate how important Psygnosis was in creating a premium tier of high-end games on the 16-bit Amiga and ST, and in helping the UK industry transition into 16-bit and through to 32-bit modernity. As the previously-linked Crash article reveals, it seems that Hetherington and co-conspirators may have been making moves behind the scenes prior to Imagine’s formal collapse, but I still reckon the pivot is right there, in the boardroom, when he answers the phone to a big ‘No’ from the bank. That leads to Lemmings and Lemmings leads to Grand Theft Auto, motherfuckers.

The PCW Show, September 1984

Immediately after the infamous bailiff scene, where, spoiler alert, Imagine staff come back from lunch to find the office closed and everything inside seized, we leap into the PCW Show 1984. This really serves to showcase both the commercial calendar that the professional breed of games publishers work to, but also underlines the contrast between Ocean and Imagine. David Ward is there, selling products and selling them well. Imagine is not, and its directors - delusional or otherwise - are equally absent. The footage here is invaluable to my own nostalgia, as I have incredibly warm memories of visiting those shows. They were absolute wonderlands that I feel are sorely missed in the modern age.

The Rest Of The Documentary Is Cool But Not That Important If I’m Honest

The bailiff scene happens at 18 minutes, and with 10 left in the show, it leaves a whole third to Ocean’s professional path to seasonal sales success. This charts the development and release of Hunchback 2, showing the surprisingly progressive idea of using a school computer club for QA and focus testing, as well as documenting the nuts and bolts of tape duplication and distribution. It’s procedural stuff, but you can’t begrudge the makers for letting the fireworks go off right in the middle. Ocean has a particularly natty line in blue Ford Transit vans emblazoned with the Ocean logo. Imagine had leased Ferraris and Porsches. I’ve read testimony that the bailiff scene shows some of the altercations at the front entrance that allegedly distracted the bailiffs enough that Imagine staff were able to sneak dev hardware down the back stairs, though how much of that is true is up to you to decide. As for me, it's always going to be print the fucking legend.

Commercial Breaks: The Battle For Santa’s Software is absolutely the greatest single document of the era. As I’ve mentioned, googling the people featured will lead you all over the history of UK videogame publishers and developers, right up to the current day. As such it’s completely invaluable as a piece of history and we should be praising the uploaders for those early copies and the BBC for adding such a magnificent capture to their permanent YouTube archive. I like to imagine that the show only came to light in the 21st century thanks to the scans of Crash and other magazines of the era finding their widest audiences. Those issues that directly mentioned the show were somehow bringing it to the right person’s attention. And that by some luck, VHS archives were scoured in search of it. Perhaps someone’s memory was jogged that they had it, or maybe it just randomly came to light. But that is the delight and serendipity of lost media, that hardly any of us even knew was lost, being suddenly found and made available to all. We have all the magazines and games of the era to hand, but video footage from the time is incredibly rare. If you haven’t watched it, you really should. It does accompany the standards like Making The Most Of The Micro and The Computer Programme and Micro Live, but it conveys so much more density of the culture compared to those drier in-studio magazine shows, and that’s the most important preservation of all. It's the sheer fucking vibes of the thing.

[21]

It’s obviously a joke, as the name gives that away immediately, but it’s a very serious one. JFK Reloaded is cut from the same cloth as British satire’s long history and as such, is perhaps the first videogame to do satire successfully with such a specific focus. This is the Brass Eye Paedogeddon Special of gaming and perhaps just as important in pricking pomposity, especially given the similar howls of incandescent outrage from the establishments that claim victimhood from its attack, an act just as audacious as the game itself. JFK Reloaded is principally, and is repeatedly stated as such by its creator Kirk Ewing, about the truth. Or rather, it’s about disarming an attack upon it. Kirk states in many interviews that the project was about dismantling JFK conspiracy theories by giving the player the opportunity to recreate Oswald’s shots. It does this with a surprisingly rigorous simulation of Dealey Plaza, the presidential motorcade and Lee Harvey’s Mannlicher-Carcano. And surprisingly, players found it was entirely possible to precisely recreate the Warren Commission’s account of the assassination. In fact, the game’s analysis and scoring debrief is just as rigorous as the ballistics simulation, going as far as punishing the player for firing the wrong number of bullets and hitting the wrong people, while rewarding trajectorial accuracy and even shot timings. The specificity and accuracy of the simulation is part of the joke - and wonderfully so - but it’s also the core virtue upon which the game’s validity hangs. Without that soberness, its absurdity becomes too acute. And yet, upon seeing the trajectories1 in the post-game analysis, you gain an understanding in how videogames repeatedly lie about what firearms do to humans. This constantly-missed fact is one reason why this game is incredibly important - it teaches you that bullets can indeed enter forearms and exit via buttocks to cause life-changing injuries to people behind. It teaches you the real consequences of your actions.2

JFK Reloaded has an option to turn up the motorcade behaviour to ‘chaos’, which adjusts the simulation to make NPCs react more wildly, which in turn can force the whole affair into slapstick carnage. I wonder why this was included as it breaks the kayfabe, so to speak. Maybe it’s there to defuse the sombre seriousness of the piece, or simply to add more value to the commercial proposition by allowing it to become a mayhem simulator.3 Perhaps it’s just acknowledging the cosmic joke. Or perhaps it’s actually deeper and more textural; a means of allowing the satire to explode into parody, particularly given the JFK assassination’s place in popular culture and how it validates the perverse psychology of conspiracism. It’s worth remembering that JFK Reloaded is from 2004, just a year after Operation Iraqi Freedom, a fallaciously-justified invasion of Iraq that leant heavily on conspiratorial thinking to promote its validity. It’s also a year before the release of Loose Change, which gathered together 9/11 conspiracies in a package palatable to wider audiences than the forums and blogs where such theories were coalescing. 2004 is also the year of Adam Curtis’s The Power Of Nightmares and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The fact that both documentaries are about perversions of the truth means we can draw a tentative circle around JFK Reloaded as a way of non-extreme creators establishing a sanctuary of sorts from politically-motivated attacks on the truth from all sides of the political spectrum. It’s interesting to note that Kirk’s previous game, State Of Emergency, was accused of drawing on the 1999 WTO protests which were organised, in part, by conspiracy-theorising anarchists.4 Again, this sociological context places JFK Reloaded into a unique position, one that only becomes clear if you understand the evolution of the paranoid style in American politics.

Initially a lecture from 1959, The Paranoid Style’s publication in 1964 posits how the right leverages conspiracy theories as a means of obtaining and maintaining power by conjuring imagined, evil forces working against the good. Whether this is done with belief or not in said theories is largely irrelevant - what matters is the destruction of the singular truthful narrative in pursuit of malleable, politically-utile misrepresentations, of which the JFK assassination is a canonical root. Consider that in the neoconservative melee of post-9/11 US politics, paranoid conspiracies flourished in part due to the deregulation of media brought about by the most recent idol for Neocon authoritarianism, Ronald Reagan’s administration.5 The lack of consequence for lying in broadcast media undoubtedly fuelled the conspiratorial 90s, a decade hallmarked by the rise of the conspiracy theory to pop-culture phenomenon, thanks in a large part to The X-Files, which happily mixed and matched real and imagined conspiracies as if they were all true. In a series where a character called Deep Throat sits alongside a trio called The Lone Gunmen, we see the consolidation of JFK and his assassination as a conspiracy as a standard feature in global pop culture. Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie may have ushered it into the decade specifically as a conspiracy, but it was The X-Files that atomised it, and conspiracism itself, as a pop culture phenomenon.

In 2004, this was no doubt still fresh. In a way, 9/11 was so unavoidably a giant shock to the global psyche that previous atrocities, like the conspiracy-led Oklahoma City bombing, would fade in comparison. That conspiracy theories thrived in its wake is hardly surprising. In this sense, Kirk Ewing’s attempt to take us back to the very root of the modern US conspiracy theory and attempt to establish a viable truth, or a faith in the objective analysis carried out by the state, makes JFK Reloaded something far more significant than it would first seem. It’s interesting that in researching for this piece, I googled to see when the last article was published about it, only to find that JFK Reloaded gets talked about quite a bit. Vice interviewed Kirk about it as recently as 2022, and you find it popping up all over the place. And yet, it’s not lauded at all. This is mostly because the majority of the commentary is on the reaction to it, rather than what the game itself is actually saying. Perhaps the truth of that is too difficult to parse, or too complex to easily relay in the modern age, or too boring in comparison to the emotions it stirs by simply existing. For it to be a Scottish game is particularly acute - it sits in quiet opposition to another Scottish game about America, and almost silently shames it with its rigour and purpose. But this makes JFK Reloaded all the more important, and we really need to consider how subtle the joke is, how great the idea actually is, and how well it was executed. The fact it’s now legitimate freeware is fascinating. Much like Jason Rohrer, making it freely available is an important part of the statement. That said, the fact it was originally a commercial product, and offered a prize for nailing the ‘full Oswald’ based on revenue, is an almost genius act of deliberate cultural vandalism. It’s a pity Kirk Ewing didn’t keep it up and do more games with as fierce a purpose and humour, as I’d say this places it easily alongside the most biting of Chris Morris’s work. Given the amount of shit piled upon him by the US media, it’s understandable why he didn’t go further.

Naturally, JFK Reloaded failed miserably - JFK conspiracies are just as alive as ever, but in the modern age just making the fucking gesture is an act of defiance that we must absolutely support. Its heroic mission is all the more important with contemporary US politics the way it is. Where originally it baited arch-assholes like Ted Kennedy and Jack Thompson, now it serves as the slimmest of weapons against the psychology of RFK, an absolute monstrous creation of the conspiratorial, paranoid right. As he sets about tearing down the institutions of American health with Ivermectin and antivax supremacism, we find the links back through the monsters created by the 90s; Alex Jones and the supplement-selling model for lying fucks grifting the vulnerable and under-educated. The way shock jocks on independent talk radio were freed of consequence for their dishonest conspiratorial rage-baiting in the 80s lead to the politics of Fox News’s alternative facts and the dominance of MAGA, all of which shows how badly and tragically the odds are stacked against those that just want the objective truth to be shared by all. What we really needed in the post-Reloaded melee was a sequel of equal rigour to show how crashing a passenger plane into the WTC Towers could bring them down, and not the pleas for a Diana crash-sim in Paris. What we need now is a Pandemic with research-grade accuracy, one that lets you choose between MRNA vaccines or worming tablets to compare the death rates. The precedent that JFK Reloaded set was all too easily lost in the furore about the reaction it caused, perhaps because the point it really makes is too hard to swallow. When a game condenses the core of the modern FPS into a tight simulation of a real event, the truth is perhaps too uncomfortable to contemplate in that hyperfactual context. The ugliness of our glee in killing too naked for us to bear, it’s easy to understand why we’d only remember the fuss it caused.

[21]

I have very urgent and committed plans to do another episode really soon, as well as actually interviewing people. You can interpret that as a promise or a threat, depending on how you feel about a) my ability to monologue and b) my inability to schedule recording times with other people.

So yes, please listen, please comment, please share. If only so I can get over 1K listens and apply for adverts. Such is the joy of the modern age!

[21]

My love of the Orochi titles was unconditional. I bought them all, even Warriors All-stars and went full max-grind on most of them. My one and only 1000g was in Warriors Orochi 2. Yet there was always a sense that Orochi was still a bit too trapped by the architecture of the mainline Dynasty Warriors orthodoxy to really explore the limits of what it could do, or how hard it could push the player. They relied on the same map styles and scales for the action, which felt both restrictive in terms of laying out enemies for combat and as a means of differentiating Orochi from the Musou mainstream - a massive issue in terms of the series’ PR1. For me, far too much time was spent running between the mobs and as each sequel arrived, this never seemed to change. It was something you simply had to accept, even if I went full bonkers and developed an elite-level RSI-inducing jump-dash technique to eliminate the excruciating 2-second anims for getting on and off horses. Such are the demands of the true Musou flow. And as far as Musou goes, Orochi is where the flow state is finest. Of course, that’s when you’ve maxed the difficulty to get the biggest, toughest mobs and have the characters and equipment to tear through them, but when the game is humming along at its peak, there’s a kind of supreme gaming umami from its relatively simplistic combat system that’s wonderfully addictive. That joy of repetition in pursuit of clearing the battlefield has the primal delight of chomping on some joyously flavoured and textured mouthful, or in scything away a vast thicket of tall stingy nettles.2 If only, I wished, there was a Musou game that did away with all the running around and let you just get on with the killing.

Imagine my surprise and delight when it turns out that Warriors: Abyss is precisely that! It’s nothing but the killing, and it’s absolutely superb as a result. Well, it is for this old Musou fan, but with Abyss, Omega Force has almost defined the ultimate correct Valhalla for its suite of heroes to find eternal battle. Thanks to a fixed isometric projection camera and compact arenas for each stage, the game has been labelled as a Hades-alike in some quarters, but that feels a little lazy. It actually takes the edge of the old Gauntlet mode and modernises it into the most tightly-focused Musou title to date, and it does this by learning the best lessons from Hades and its contemporaries. Gone are the re-tellings of ancient legend and attendant fan-fic melodramas of the Dynasty and Samurai Warriors mainstream, and even the more off-kilter and playful Orochi narratives are flung to the wayside. Warriors: Abyss is freebase Musou, as if it needed Hades to give it a camera angle and a vaguely similar superstructure to contain its naked wildness. It’s weirdly generous too. The full traditional rosters are all here, with a set of Dead Or Alive/Ninja Gaiden characters backing them up as well as three explicitly manga ladies from the Atelier series. Imagine Hades with 100+ characters to try and you’re almost there. Only it gets to a fizzing, savage intensity pretty quickly. The game’s structure is cleanly straightforward. There are regions and there are rounds in each region. Rounds are governed by a KO count to reach and sometimes, additional mission objectives. Once a round is complete there’s a rest phase where you pick randomly-offered characters to make alliances with, in order to bolster your mega team musou attack. These alliances also increase your battle rating, which does something very important but I have no idea what that actually is. You just want to make the number as big as possible. After a bunch of rounds there’s a boss, and after that you hop to the next region which comes with a step up in challenge. Then at the end of the fourth region, there’s a big boss. Then you’re done for that run. After this there are additional tiers of the same run to complete which obviously get harder with each successive traversal, rounding off with a set of additional modes that offer Disgaea-like depths to plumb. It’s all beautifully neat compared to the sprawling story arcs of previous Musou titles and, once again, a nice development of the barebones structure of the original Gauntlet mode.

Character progression comes from a trad levelling system, but one that only offers permanent increments to base stats every 50 levels. However, outside the main game there’s an entire screen dedicated to unlocking characters with one of the game’s internal currencies. There aren’t any arcane story-derived unlock conditions here, just a big web of warriors with a range of prices to unlock them. Beautifully, once you’ve unlocked the entire roster, the currency can be spent levelling them up. Even more beautiful is that each character unlock comes with a permanent stat upgrade for all characters, so by the time you’ve reached the far ends of the warrior web, your base stats are improved to a surprisingly decent standard. In battle, you can level up traditionally3 but each run’s dynamic, roguelike nature is built from picking up attributes as you play. Certain enemies drop attribute orbs, and on collection you’re given choices of which attributes to pick, so you can direct your development along particular lines. This is fucking great. You also get nifty rewards from the boss fight treasure chests that persist through that run as well as the occasional offer of buffs and bonuses in between stages. There’s a great deal of variability offered to the player throughout the game and hence a real sense of choice in the style of your character’s development. You can specialise in speed and elemental damage, or tank up with defence and lethality attributes. Or you can expedite charging the team attack and your own Musou special. It’s all delightfully free and plentiful, lending the whole affair a real sense of playfulness. My only gripe, particularly as an Orochi head, is the lack of character swapping. I’d love to pay some in-game currency to switch lead characters, and given the game’s roots in Orochi, it seems a bit mean that you can’t.

In general, the game starts that fizzing hum around the third region. Then it really steps up the enemy densities and it’s here that the game’s biggest mechanical change comes into play. It has a dash, only it’s a cooldowned dash. This is a source of quite venomous criticism for some, but I absolutely love it. Abyss has a very polite system of painting the floor with purple wherever an enemy’s AOE can damage you. Initially, it’s easy to thread your way around them and in boss fights, they’re extremely obvious for sorting out attack windows and whatnot. However as the intensity increases, the amount of purple does too. This makes your battle traversal all the harder, and places more strain on your observation skills whilst slogging through mobs. With the dash having a cooldown, it means you can sometimes dash into danger with no way of dashing out again, although I’ve found that kicking off a combo string can get you out of peril fairly reliably. Some characters on my runs have been configured in such a way that dashing is barely required. A particularly monstrous Ayane build saw her absolutely tearing through mobs with frightening leaps of speed and savagery and as such, she was well away from any charging-up attacks before they could hit, and in fact comboing the very same motherfuckers up the ass before anything landed. It’s this kind of primal command of the mob, while under real pressure, where Abyss really shines; the umami is strong, the sense of power is tangible and the core Musou delight is flowing in abundance. It’s deliriously gleeful shit, as the need to keep moving is absolutely paramount. The tempo is therefore as ferocious as your combos. In that heat, the game becomes the absolute peak of Musou play. I fucking love it.

It’s interesting that its fans fucking love it too. Community comments are full of people discovering Warriors: Abyss and professing their adoration. It’s a solid 7/10 with 10/10 heart. A spectacularly harmonious focusing of the entire Musou proposition, with all the fat trimmed away. A real joy of the old Orochi titles was building up weapons with attributes to suit your playstyle, but here there’s none of that. There’s just one extra weapon to unlock or buy, but I don’t feel cheated by that at all. There are no fucking horses, there are no bullshit vulnerable officers to defend. There’s just fighting, and it’s some of the best fighting to be had, full stop. I always had a suspicion that I don’t like Soulsbournes because they are, in a sense, the diametric opposite of Musou. With Abyss, the entire Musou proposition finds a kind of ascendancy, a novel respectability. It would take quite some effort and investment to refine a Orochi run to the point where you can feel the grandeur of taking out mobs on Chaos difficulty, but with Abyss, you’ll get there in 45 minutes. A straight run through one traversal is under an hour and, deliciously, the game autosaves between stages, meaning you can put down and pick up runs at your leisure. And again, there’s such a generous abundance of choice. I have a list of characters unlocked, which I want to take for runs, that’s so long I could be here for months. Considering I bought the game from the Xbox Store for £11.99, that’s fucking good going. It’s always baffled me as to why I haven’t been clamouring for Dynasty Warriors Origins. I do scour the preowned shelves for it whenever I’m in a CEX, but I’ve not felt the tug. Little did I know that was because my destiny lay with Warriors: Abyss. It was there the whole time, just waiting to make my Musou dreams come true. Fucking yes.

[21]

Deathloop’s ‘problem’ is nothing of the sort. I’ll link it yet again, but the 2022 Develop Conference making-of chat tells you why; it was specifically made for a very specialised audience. What makes it interesting is its AAA status in spite of that intent. Scratching my head, I can’t think of many AAA-budgeted titles that can claim a similar spirit of strident elitism. I suppose you can say that Kojima’s Death Stranding is a similarly contradictory example, a game that seems to be fuelled by elitist thinking that nonetheless finds popular appeal. Perhaps mystifyingly so in comparison to Deathloop, although much like Kubrick, Kojima’s reputation engenders a more diplomatic approach from the general audience. There’s a recognition perhaps that ‘genius’ labelling makes the hoi-palloi more receptive to wilder ideas. Yet Deathloop’s ideas aren’t at all wild, nor are they coloured with the trademark strands of profound obsession that Kojima proudly stamps into his work. Deathloop, as I contended, was much more of a celebration of the mature Arkane mode. In the post-Redfall era, I believe with increasing fervency that the French studio felt everything could be at stake, so went all-in on making Deathloop the ultimate statement of what Arkane could do mechanically and environmentally. It was an act of supreme focus in that regard. I also think it has some of Arkane’s most fascinating characterisation, but the narrative - beyond the framing conceits for the gameplay and world - is a disappointment. But then, I don’t think the story was really the point anyway. Something which the Reddit thread missed was how Deathloop is resolutely about resolving a multitude of threads into a single path. This is the point of the game - players weaving their own yarns to thread a universally constant needle. Commenters suggesting the game was forgotten because there was only one solution baffle me when the game’s intent is so obviously about building the one golden run.

I recently realised that Deathloop’s singular path can be seen as an expression of the classical stealth triumvirate: observe, plan and execute. Much like the donor of its skeleton, Dishonored, the game is most satisfyingly played as a stealth title so for me at least, there’s something profoundly rewarding in finding the game’s overall path is in symmetry with its fundamental gameplay. Interestingly, we’d normally consider such thinking as part of the arthouse Indie sensibility, or something closer to other videogaming esoterica. The process of rehearsal and final performance has more kinship with the Shmup, but also has a passing familiarity with the speedrun in general, and Deathloop’s rewards for exploring every corner of environment and systome definitely align with the totality of knowledge that the speedrun demands. Hence, you fly through your ultimate run at speeds that were unthinkable in your early hours. Naturally, there is no definitive reading here, the point is that Deathloop’s conceptual depth allows it to dance across multitude strands of the culture it operates within. And it does that in a uniquely playful way that its stablemates do not. Prey is a celebratory continuation of a gametype that was criminally left in the 1990s, but is so wedded to that task that it’s culturally confined by it. Dishonored is a distillation of various imsim mechanics into a peerless setting, but from that setting comes a grit that absolutely serves the game’s tangible mood, but restricts its spirit from soaring beyond the envelope. Deathloop is a distillation again, of the culture and of both its predecessors, but with a broader license for anarchy that comes from an island gone mad, leaving a game that’s deadly serious about its nonseriousness. That is how it’s able to push beyond its confines with real charisma.

I think that to really dig Deathloop, you need to have been through the hoops of its stablemates but also done plenty of its ancestral history. The tweaking and exploration for alternative routes of entry from Deus Ex, the distinct references to extremely specific bits of Half Life, the exploration of environmental mechanics and looping schedules of a Hitman and of course, the wide variety of problems and solutions from the Arkane catalogue. The proportion of the playerbase that has done all those things, or more importantly exhausted all of those things, is likely to be pretty small. It maybe explains why critical acclaim was so high, why it deserves a 10 from some, when the public at large seems to greet it with a bemused shrug. There’s a definite invitation in Deathloop to soak it all up if you like what you find and, perhaps more crucially, there’s an invitation to solve all the mysteries. Only, the game isn’t going to hand you any of that on a plate. So many moments of delight in my playthrough came from making sense of the oddities by working through them. A lab full of lasers with a crazy weapon in a corner is utterly confounding at first, but once you get the timings and the loadout right, you gain knowledge and power and solve a mystery. Given the modern vogues at the high end of the market, it’s almost an act of iconoclasm to deliberately confuse and frustrate the player before breadcrumbing them to enlightenment, and Deathloop pulls off that trick several times. Perhaps it’s this pricking of the player’s ego, along with its constant dangling of metroidvania-esque doors to who-knows-what that only open if you make the right kinds of progress, born of the right kind of curiosity, that nudge Deathloop into glorious failure territory. Of course, all this is part of Arkane’s grand plan as explained eloquently by Dinga in that Develop Conference chat. The kind of high-minded obstinacy that you can easily associate with the stereotyped national spirit of its country of origin.

When Dinga Bakaba described Deathloop as cuisine, he’s absolutely implying that many of his contemporaries are merely making food. And by and large, they are. They make smashburgers. Loads of them. Deathloop in that analogy is on some rarified level in comparison. I was insanely privileged enough to enjoy a 3-star Michelin meal last year. Prior to that, I couldn’t imagine that food could be so exceptional that it deserves a new term to describe it. And yet, I’d never tasted bread like that before - or since. And that was just the bread. I won’t bore you with the details, but it was like encountering a new dimension of food, a grand explosion of my horizon for flavour, but also for the theatre of the restaurant setting, for how a course of food unfolds on the plate. It was all extraordinarily pretentious and precious, but it was fucking glorious. And it absolutely ratified all the acclaim you can be forgiven for thinking is excessive or unfounded around haute cuisine at the highest level. The personal experience was so spectacular that the elitism earned both its validity and its value. A common theme on Affectionate Discourse is my disdain for the homogeny and safety of the modern AAA, and the deliberate elitism of Deathloop is the antidote. I reject the idea of elitism as gatekeeping, for the practice of opening all the gates to the widest audience is what leads, in the commercial context, to the kind of stagnation I can smell across videogaming’s contemporary high end. As I said earlier this year, I am bored by it all, as I am bored by all the smashburger outlets. And I fucking love a smashburger! Only the few weirdos can pierce the ennui and these are the elite few of which Deathloop is a spectacular member. Last year, I’d say Atomfall came closest and I found so many traces of Deathloop in its ambition and structure that it can’t be coincidental. And there were plenty of critics and players alike that found some beguiling charisma in Atomfall, even if it was mechanically bereft compared to Deathloop. I felt lucky and privileged to have Atomfall unfold accidentally in the way it did for me, and for its systome to be just enough to keep my acquisitional appetite engaged. I feel even more privileged to have found the same, in quite some excess, with Deathloop. Perhaps that is the game’s greatest tragedy - that not enough people will access it in the way I did. Joyously, eagerly. But at least it failed on its own terms, and with plenty of glory. For we lucky few,1 it’ll always shine so much brighter than anything you’ve got left.2

[21]

Thus the story of GAME and its final, whimpering demise closes a particular circle, one which the Boomers and Gen-X can claim full experience of. But for me, the nostalgia of 80s game retail is absolutely about the romance of that era and the coalescence of a social phenomenon, whereas the death of GAME feels more like a slow-motion tragedy with grave implications for the future of that very same culture. The dissolution of high-street videogame retail reminds me of the morbidity of the physical videogame itself, for surely its death is closer than we’d perhaps like to imagine. And yet, we allowed single brands to monopolise the high street2 in much the same manner as platform holders have steadily monopolised the supply of content for their own domains. Looking ahead, particularly at Microsoft’s thawing of relations with Sony, I find a distinct and almost cruel comedy in deciding to buy Forza Horizon 6 for the PlayStation 5 instead of getting it ‘for free’ on my Series S, but I utterly despise the naked profiteering on digital, seeing prices go up even though costs to distribute have almost disappeared, relatively speaking. Likewise, pointing out the absolute madness of paying top-whack for five-year-old games3 because they’re suddenly on Switch 2 feels like screaming into the void as a mad old man, surrounded by happy consumers consuming things they’ve already consumed, just because it’s on a smaller, newer screen. It highlights the idea that videogame retail coming under the total and complete control of the platform holders is building virtual Palaces of Versailles, a testament to the decadence of the wealthy providers and the fealty of the sycophants blindly and deferently supporting them with day-one purchases at maximum cost for maximum convenience. In essence, a near-perfect capitalist machine. If the platform holders could just AI-generate the games, it’d be game over, so to speak. In this sense, the lone corridor of legal retail resistance is to only buy pre-owned, an act of defiance that itself faces the same erasure should physical media cease to exist.4 There’s something of an absurdist joke in CeX becoming the sole videogame retailer on the highstreet, and entirely thanks to it being a reseller. There’s what, Argos? Currys? Places where you, yes you, have the honour and privilege to pay just £90 to preorder yet another fucking set of fucking Resident Evil remakes.

There’s a CeX that I visit weekly and as with most, it’s a place haunted by the implicit misery of the pawn shop and the challenges of the financially-deprived. You have to wonder how much of the stock is there because of lifestyle choices and co-morbidities that represent grand failings of society, of a welfare state retooled into a silent hand of oppression to force the weak, abused and under-supported into zero-hours purgatories, perpetually failing side-hustles and petty crime. The retail palaces of old had none of this, but there’s a flat honesty in CeX that can’t be ignored or denied. You can divine the state of the market by what’s on the shelves. The games that people keep, the games they dump after a week. It’s all there, and in a kind of stark objectivity that no industry news site or retail association report can improve upon. Current-gen Xbox games in the single digits, shelf after shelf of PlayStation 5 tells the stark story of this generation. Switch 2 games in a cabinet, Breath of The Wild still over £35 for Switch 1. The history of the 21st Century is there: the blocks and blocks of PlayStation 2 crowding out the single shelf shared by GameCube and XBox. The dizzying shovelware of the Wii section, the almost 1:1 parity of X360 and PlayStation 3, and the obvious dominance of PlayStation 4 over Xbox One. And also the DVDs, which persist as much the same call to resistance over digital distribution and its hegemonic monopolies in the post-Netflix era. CeX is perhaps the endpoint of retail when platform holders jettison their obligations to long-standing bricks and mortar. Once the discs and carts stop, CeX will still remain, precisely because it relies on the old and discounted instead of the current and premium.

As I mentioned earlier, the almost comedic nature of UK videogames retail being dominated by a newsagent and a chemist in the 1980s5 conjures nostalgia of extraordinary romance for me, but it’s not what the death of GAME signifies. It instead reminds me of a second golden age when living in London, single and carefree. Working in the centre, I had a glorious hunting ground that could be covered in a lunchbreak or a brief sojourn on Friday evenings. This is between 2004-2012, from the end of PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox, through to the era of 360 and PlayStation 3. GAME was a bastion of the videogamer’s life, a regular haunt. Earlier in the 2000s, GAME had become the place to go for those Friday releases, to inspect the shelves, look at the newly discounted stuff, then flick through the preowned bins. I’ll forever associate the 90s with Electronics Boutique and our local Software Plus quasi-indie, but the 21st Century was GAME, HMV and Gamestation. From my office in Covent Garden, it was a quick hop to Oxford Street to tour the giant Zavvi and HMV megastores with a reasonably-sized GAME in between them. You could then nip up a sidestreet to one of the original CeX shops, and then off to Game Focus on Goodge Street for imports and even more preowned. This circuit could be bolstered with trips to Piccadilly for the GAME in the basement of Hamley’s and a quick tour of the Trocadero’s arcade, or running the gauntlet of street-hawking Scientologists to reach the basement of Casino, where I spent many a quid being spanked by uprights of Muchi Muchi Pork!, Ibara and Mushihimesama, all to the soundtrack of teenagers trash-talking through Streetfighter Third Strike and Guilty Gear X battles. The death of GAME is the grim end of that glorious era. There’s no Casino anymore, there are no Virtua Fighter cabs at the Trocadero. There are no 2-for-£30 videogame deals in the modern HMV.6 7And now I’ve done my latest pre-owned trawl at GAME without ever realising it was actually my last. But then, I don’t recall my final lunchtime purchase of the latest X360 release I wanted, or my eager dash home to marathon the fuck out of it over the proceeding weekend.

If you haven’t noticed, it’s about videogames being part of the outside world, of participating in offline society, and of them having a geographical location that wasn’t your machine’s storage or an anonymous data centre, and the fact that you could find out about them, see them even, without a screen or an internet connection. This was a time when videogames felt integrated into your life just as food was, or clothes, or books and movies. It was about how browsing for videogames was part of the overall experience of leisurely wandering around the shops, which in itself could be a lovely social pursuit with like-minded friends. And it was in that kind of experience where the eternal golden braid back to the 80s held its link. There were times with the 8-bits where I’d do just the same on occasional Saturday mornings when I’d saved up the pocket money, bussing into town to pick up a new arcade conversion, or a Last Ninja, or some grand compilation, to blow the whole weekend playing. That cycle, that specific ramp of anticipation, acquisition, access was the behavioural loop I enjoyed for decades, and one that now seems to be gone without any of us really noticing. In its extinction lies an inevitable change in the culture itself, much like how the death of the videogame magazine and more recently, the videogame website, has fundamentally altered the culture of anticipation, confirmation, reflection and critique. There was an interplay between media and retail that mutually funded and supported each other, and for the consumer, it provided the skeleton upon which a culture could thrive. None of this is to paint GAME as some kind of heroic good in the machine of the videogames industry. It was as nakedly capitalist and exploitational as the platform holders, but by virtue of its existence it at least held particular balances in place. There are plenty of stories of greed, weirdness,8 stupidity9 and incompetence to contrast the passionate ambassadorial assistants that introduced naïve kids to superb games, or informed parents wisely, or kept some pre-owned gem under the counter for you. But all in all, the mere existence of GAME as a place for people to go to because of games contributes to the culture in ways we’ll only be able to estimate once the full repercussions of its loss can be felt. Already in this post-retail, post-print wasteland, we have morally-questionable, affluence-baiting boutiques like Limited Run Games. Concerns whose largesse and ostentation matches the coffee-table journals that while delightful and meaningful, are nonetheless luxury items for those privileged enough to afford them. Great and valuable as the output may be, they can never redress the social loss the culture has already had to bear.

The populist democratisation of videogaming, which high street retail fostered for 40 years, seems under a new kind of threat as physical sinks into a luxury pursuit for those who have enough disposable income to participate. That failed Service Game push by Sony and the likes of Ubisoft et cetera was the harbinger of what corporate wants for the masses, and perhaps will rise again - F2P platforms that can be microtransacted for decades are actually what the profit motive would prefer. Under the constraints of late-late-stage capitalism and fascistic governments serving billionaire oligarchies, perhaps a mild investment in some Service Game or other will be all that the populace at large may be able to afford. As such, our last line of resistance is to abandon the day-one digital download and just frequent CeX until what you want emerges on its shelves. But, of course, the size of the modern AAA biggies often outstrips BluRay capacities, and that’s not a trend that’s likely to reverse. Even though flash storage is demonstrably cheap enough to be economically viable at scale for physical console games, the fact that the PlayStation 5 generation was still on disc shows how much Sony is milking the last drops of its investment in BluRay plants, rather than how eager it is to transition to solid-state storage for individual releases. With the next generation’s storage options still unclear,10 we can perhaps begin to prepare for CeX’s grand unified catalogue of possible purchases to move closer to the finite, closed list. The fact that of the approximately 62 available titles from this list of the Switch 2 catalogue, only 19 - a third - have the full game on the cart should be a sobering realisation, particularly as it unfolds in cohort with collapses of videogame retail and media. Even though it laboured too long as a comatose brand under the Mike Ashley zombie universe umbrella, the final nail hits with real resonance. The death of GAME is an omen of a fundamental change in terms of consumer freedom, just as much as it marks the death of a long-beloved part of our videogaming culture.

[21]

There’s a reason why Eugene Jarvis’s first game carries a cachet that precedes most people’s experience of playing it. It’s not just Martin Amis proclaiming it a masterpiece, as I doubt there are that many gamers who know that even fucking happened. As a game, Defender is notoriously difficult and ruthlessly unforgiving. Can we say the strict demands of Danmaku actually start with Defender? It’s also wildly intense. The challenge, the explosions, the booming audio. In many ways, it encapsulates a stereotypical notion of the dangerous videogame with genuine aplomb - it’s a savage assault on the senses, not to mention your ability to compute, to react. And it’s like that from the off. It’s the kind of game that concerned parents would think emanated a miasma of digital neurotoxicity, that its ferocity could damage the minds of those playing it. Of the ‘golden age’ arcades, it’s the one game I most wish I could master, for its flow state is uncannily thrilling. Riding Defender is like being strapped to a missile you can barely control; a kind of sublime union with the custom control scheme and the demands of the rapid, demanding systome that sees your best prospect as that of temporary survival. The goal isn’t to overcome, but to fend away for as long as you can until you’re inevitably killed. This remains the case for the most high-end of players on the game’s highest difficulty. You may be able to rack up enough extra lives to go to the loo lower down the scale, but at 99-99 you will never be free to own the gamespace as yours alone; the enemies will get you even if you’re the best in the world.1

Being roughly aligned with 1978’s Space Invaders and 1979’s Galaxian, as games where a lone ‘hero’ destroys alien invaders, Defender has a unique position temporally. It’s straddling the vogues of late-70s videogame designs, and the culture’s notable lack of convention, with the brighter aspect of a far-horizoned future and capabilities of improving hardware as a herald of the decade ahead. It counterparts beautifully with Battlezone as harbingers of what’s to come. The 1980s brought standardisation to the Arcades and was where the shooter transitioned from the static screens of the Space Invaders mould and out into the defence of lesser and lesser abstracted places, or in Defender’s case, initiating the sense of the shmup as a geographical journey as much as a battle against the odds. In a sense, Defender is the game that breaks the Space Invaders dogma and asserts, for a short while at least, the idea that the American arcade game is every bit the equal of its Japanese equivalents. Williams might not have enjoyed the same riotous catalogue of diverse splendour that Atari2 delivers throughout the decade, but in some ways its biggest hits are all the more iconic considering how few duds Williams had compared to its bigger, far more corporate rival. So much of that is down to the staff, and Jarvis/DeMar in partnership would prove themselves capable of defining two of the American golden age icons with an almost effortless grace.

Robotron is, of course, the little brother to Defender that’s wildly more popular, leading to a game template that survives today. The twin-stick shooter begins at Robotron, although its immediately-accessible control scheme must be a reaction to the hyper-quixotic technicality of Defender’s. And therein lies the rub - Defender is difficult in play, yes, but it’s also difficult to play. Well, as long as you’re the kind of try-hard heathen that was indoctrinated on 8-way joysticks and single-button interfaces. Worse are still the filthy masses that expect twin analogues, shoulders, triggers and a multitude of face buttons, who would recoil in horror at what I’m about to describe. A massive part of Defender’s beguiling uniqueness is its now-bonkers control method. Shoot, thrust, reverse, hyperspace, bomb. Five buttons. And a lever! That moves the Defender up and down on the screen, meaning all horizontal movement is via thrust and reverse. It’s astonishingly counter-intuitive for anyone used to the post-JAMMA, post-8-bit standards for controls, and yet it’s a scheme specifically designed to fit the game and perhaps more importantly, vice versa. There’s a symmetry there, as with a lot of the early golden age titles, where the interface and the design are in a kind of creative harmony that isn’t quite the same when everything must adhere to the 8-way stick and a bunch of buttons. Defender is from the era of Missile Command’s trackball, of Tempest’s spinner, Pacman’s sole joystick. It raises the question: was the ‘golden age’ golden because game and controls were designed together, to work together?

Defender’s controls meant anyone who learnt to battle the systome on home hardware, from the Atari 2600 to the home 8-bit computers, would be useless when faced with the real thing. From this, it’s understandable how the cachet grew. To compete at arcade Defender meant doing time on arcade Defender, which meant doing *a lot* of time on Defender. With that in mind, you can understand how the game gets its cool points by means of its barrier to entry, and how those who can wrangle the machine can command kudos and respect from those who tried, but couldn’t. Having never attempted the game in the arcade, I struggled enormously when I got Williams Arcade Classics on CD-ROM for a bargain price in the mid-90s. PC keyboards are no substitute for a real panel.3 Various attempts at configuring something passable via M.A.M.E. fared no better. However, it was when I was unbelievably lucky enough to get a Vectrex for £50 that I finally got some sense of mastering the beast. There was a beautifully calibrated homebrew version4 for the vector wonder that transposed the buttons-and-lever scheme onto the Vectrex stick-and-four-buttons controller. The real core of the Defender controls lies in the thrust and reverse options. Thrust propels you with a bit of inertia on button lift. Reverse swaps your horizontal direction but also displaces your vertical position, moving you towards the opposite end of the screen as you flip. An intuitive grasp of the distance and speed of that displacement is utterly critical to survival, and where the real mastery lies. Deployed correctly, the reverse is amazingly powerful in tight dodging situations as a stacked swapping of positions to avoid player-targeted bullets - or precisely the kind of play that Defender will rapidly escalate to if you make any progress. You can move up and down during the displacement and, naturally, you’re completely vulnerable to bullets or enemy collisions the entire time. What’s interesting is that it’s digital control in both senses - an on/off switch pressed by a finger. It’s not a directional move, and that abstraction seems to define the entire manner by which the player can deal with the game’s more extreme enemies. This was the stumbling block I had to triumph over to get to the game’s heart and with enough grinding on the Vectrex, I had managed to acquire a reasonably passable flowstate wherein I could play with the tiniest dash of confidence.

I love games that subvert your initial expectations, and I was suitably delighted to realise Defender isn’t about systematically clearing the stage of baddies but instead making sure you’re in the right place at the right time. The game’s central play, which is killing the cannon fodder Lander enemies to prevent them from kidnapping humanoids and turning into much more erratic and shooty Mutants, is more about patrolling with a seek-and-destroy mentality until you get the audio alert that a Lander is making a grab for a humanoid. You then need to get to wherever that is happening and make sure the kidnapping isn’t completed, for Mutants are much more of a handful than Landers. Achieving this without overshooting, crashing into enemies, being shot etc, is the chief thrill of the game. The destruction borne of the game’s amazingly-represented laser cannon is merely a component of that sense of dashing around. It’s the importance placed on position and movement that separates Defender from the Space Invaders lineage. Throw into that the spawning Baiters, which actively hunt you down, and you get a second dimension of distinction from the general thrust of ‘kill the flocking alien baddies’ arcade games. This is the key divergence: Defender expresses a real, tangible sense of machine malevolence.

In this clip from the 1982 mini-documentary, Arcade Attack, a youthful Defender player expresses his disdain for both the limitations of the Space Invader’s mechanistic march of descent and the ‘snidey’ behaviour of Defender’s Mutants. For him, he isn’t playing a game as much as he’s battling another mind - the game is operating on that intellectual level as far as he’s concerned. It’s a fairly baroque anthropromorphisation for the humble Motorola 6809 at Defender’s heart, but it underlines the impact the game had in presenting itself as an opponent actively working against you. Even the likes of Galaxian had the sense of automatons going through the motions in their balletic swoops towards the player, and Pacman’s ghosts seemed to be mindlessly homing in on you, not working in cohort. Berzerk’s Evil Otto comes closest perhaps, but Defender’s active enemies carried that extra magical weight of perceived malign intent. With that notion, Defender aligns more with the murderous HAL 9000 and the T-800 that’d arrive three years later than the processional baddies of Space Invaders and its offspring. Many people would cite Defender’s horizontal scrolling as the key innovation it brought, but I think its ability to make you feel as if you were being played as hard as you’re playing the game that makes Defender so uniquely valuable. It was interesting that Defender’s conjuring of malevolence would carry over to Robotron with considerable ease in translation, only to emerge as a literal personification with 1983’s Sinistar.5 Williams, it seems, went the whole hog and the legendary status is rightly deserved.

Defender now exists in the culture almost purely as an icon. A symbol of the best of a lost age rather than a peer to the contemporary melee. And yet its challenge remains just as daunting now as it did in 1981. The game isn’t any easier despite the inherited wisdoms of forty-five years hence. But sadly, it faces a kind of erasure. It exists as an occasional logo on some merch here or there, and lives more in the shadow of Robotron thanks to Geometry Wars’ singled-handed revival of the twin-stick shooter. It remains, however, a vital touchstone in the Gen-X experience as a game that only needed to live by virtue of its reputation as one of the very best, only to be mastered by the very best, even if so few ever got to appreciate its true majesty. And majestic it is - the bitterness of the battle, when your fingers actually know how to fight it, is more fraught than skirmishing a legendary Elite in Halo, or whatever example you’d use for human vs computer battling in the modern videogame context. The sense of valiance in shooting a Lander just before it converts to a Mutant and catching the falling humanoid while killing the enemies that surround you is supreme, every bit as thrilling as the best that contemporary games can offer. I love the game so much, I tried to pitch a retrospective to Eurogamer once, only to be told, off the record of course, that one Christian Donlan wanted to do it because he had the best fucking interview with Eugene Jarvis that you’ve ever fucking heard. Respectfully I re-tooled my retrospective into something else, but I’d still love to read that Defender retrospective, Christian!

To compare to other media, Defender is not quite Train Pulling Into A Station, as for movies the most contemporary exponent of the best of cinematic craft doesn’t go that much further than the very first action sequence. Rather, Defender is more akin to ancient cave paintings, being in possession of a necessary form that’s required for the true experience. You have to go into the cave and feel the rock where 250,000-year old hands put pigment to surface by torchlight to truly experience those images. To experience Defender you might not need the CRT or the classic arcade speaker for the audio-visual glee, but you absolutely need the controls. In my lottery-win dream arcade, Defender is absolutely the first cabinet I’m buying, and if it was the only one I owned, I’d be more than satisfied. I admire the game that much, and I’d be honoured to keep one alive. And it’s a wonderful thing to encounter for real. I had a chance to do that at Arcade Club in Bury, happily communing with a real machine in its own cave of sorts. I wondered if I could fire up those old Protector neurons and get my Defender control schema up and running again. And you know exactly what happened? It fucking kicked my fucking ass.

[21]

At the time of writing, Ubisoft has just announced a seismic restructure that closed studios entirely and cancelled several popular and much-anticipated projects. Coming off the back of convictions for its former Chief Creative Officer (psychological abuse, complicity in sexual harassment), the Vice President of its in-house creative direction enforcement department (sexual harassment, psychological abuse, attempted sexual assault) and one senior Game Director (just old-fashioned nasty bullying) in July 2025, it’s perhaps best to see Star Wars Outlaws as a product of the company’s internal turmoil and the negligent incompetence of its upper echelons.2 As the case played out during 2024, Far Cry 6 floundered and drew accusations that the format was tired, Assassin’s Creed’s next entry gets delayed as its fortunes become an existential threat to the company, and Outlaws unwittingly becomes the company’s key Q3/4 saviour to maintain Ubisoft’s position as a AAA publisher.3 And yet, it was doomed to fail because of its fundamental disposition to the player’s relationship with the license; its broken application of the IP perhaps serving the egos of its creators rather than the audience.

Given the outline, ostensibly the closest you could get to a Star Wars GTA, the final product is both a grievous disappointment and an embarrassing squandering of perhaps one of the most dead-cert licenses to print money in the entire entertainment sector. Here is Ubisoft’s chance to lay out how its stock-in-trade machinery of action-oriented open-world third-person games could be conformed to any entertainment IP. It’s not just the branching trees of possible Star Wars spin-off sequels the template can accommodate, but the opportunity to prove that this kind of omni-game can adopt any IP dressing, and to do so profitably, while satisfying loyal fanbases. Given this ticket to fortune, Ubisoft fails partly by virtue of its conservatism, but also by a kind of egotistical overconfidence. A mistaken belief that its creative stasis represents a perpetual constant it can always extract revenue growth from, combined with a misjudgement of the quality of its creative vision.

It’s not hard to see why. The staff at the top include the directors of archly-misanthropic and cruelly mercenary lootershooters The Divisions and the narrative genius behind the archly-insulting Far Cries 5 and 6,4 joined by a head writer for the archly-mediocre Watch Dogs: Legion, aka How To Fuck Up A Pretty Good Idea By Clint Hocking.5 Given the weight of the license in hand, it would seem to be an act of corporate negligence to have given this lot the reins of a Star Wars game with the kind of budget that Outlaws must have enjoyed. What’s actually infuriating isn’t the trust in the above people, who are certainly capable, but the lack of excitement in the design. My early hours were filled with groaning at what I was being forced to do. There felt like a flimsy spell of false choice being cast over the player, presenting a game that on the surface looked more complex than it actually is. There’s a particularly galling smell of creative bankruptcy that emanates from the first map. The assets are great, the layout fine if unexceptional, but the content bland and lightweight. Much-vaunted features like a magic and invulnerable pet that can do things for you are relied upon as one as very, very few strategic options from the beginning to the end. Much like the mandate of one ship, one bike, there’s one style of play for the most part. This singularity, and the dogmatic commitment to it, is the fundamental flaw in Star Wars Outlaws.

There’s a real irony in the title being a plural when the game is so blinkered into one linear playstyle for the single, canned character you’re allowed to inhabit. This thinness is what gave me that sense of the creators being so utterly lacking in generosity. They won’t let you define a character in this universe, even though that would be amazing. They won’t even let you whip about on a speederbike, even though it would be trivial to implement. It highlights the maddening combination of creative arrogance and cowardice, or hubris and ignorance, that’s become my general sense of the Ubisoft AAA proposition in its darkening, post-reckoning years. As mentioned in my Splinter Cell lament, that series’ descent from principled espionage to sociopathic murdersim was emblematic of Ubisoft’s internal culture, and Outlaws is, hopefully, a terminal exclamation point.

Reviews and community commentary at the time tried to draw parallels with Uncharted, but I sense something far more basic as the core inspiration. Even though segments feel like a serving of Ubisoft’s least-popular challenges, such as enforced and utterly joyless clambering sections recalling the worst padding excesses of Assassin’s Creeds, the general impression I got was that Star Wars Outlaws is Ubisoft doing its best to pressgang Traveller’s Tales’ Lego Star Wars into the Ubisoft template. It’s playing it that fucking safe. Only, Lego Star Wars lets you be lots of characters and drive lots of things! This is because Lego Star Wars is fundamentally a parody. It is not a vanity project from a team of fairly average videogame writers with the chance to assert themselves upon the Star Wars canon. I do suspect this is why the game is so obsessed with telling this one story about one person, but in combination with the risk-averse, meanly thin interactive design, actually creates a videogame that just feels old. And not old in the ‘reliably serviceable’ sense.

The game actually plays fine. For a stealth game, it’s laughably limited but with enough patience you can work through its challenges with the meagre tools provided. The game looks lovely, the Star Warsiness is very Star Wars, and is cod-Macquarrie to a suitably acceptable degree. However, artifice abounds. Your one, singular upgradeable pistol can shoot lethal bolts infinitely, but overheats. Yet the stun shot, which traditionally is less powerful than lethal, has a single shot that takes ages to recharge. This is fucking stupid, but it’s there to protect the overly-minimal stealth design. Otherwise there’d be no challenge, you’d never use Nix etc, but rather than feeling like sensible balancing, it just feels mean. Old. Unimaginative. Amateurish. Likewise the secondary weapons, which you collect from dead enemies. These last until the magazine is exhausted, so Kay just drops them! No recharging like the magic pistol. No opportunity to own or upgrade. Then there’s the upgrades for equipment and skills which are all tied to finding materials.6 Once again, fucking stupid in terms of the world logic we already know of Star Wars, which never once mentioned anyone needing to find 5 materials to become better at crouching. Further on, having Nix doing his thing on an Imperial space station and not being immediately exterminated as soon as he’s seen is, again, fucking stupid. Sure, when planetbound you could believe a little animal just wandered into your massively-defended high security camp, but on a space station it stretches credulity, even by Star Wars world logic. Do the Imperials assume he flew himself there in a little ship? Darker still, and far more damning, is the artificiality of the player’s impact on the environment. As early as the very first tutorial missions, I stealthed through a section with perfect takedowns on all the guards, reached a checkpoint save. Next bit, triggered the alarm. Load the checkpoint, yeah? Well, all those immaculately KOed guards were suddenly back up and patrolling again. The game had literally done an enemy reset! In the context of a modern stealth game, this is completely unacceptable. An insulting blunder of idiotic proportions, and proof for me that the fundamentals of the interactive design, of how the player is going to engage with the world and its content, has been lamentably under-developed.

To put the degree of failure that Star Wars Outlaws represents into context, consider that its peak on Steam is just 3,797 players. This is better than the AAAA colossus Skull and Bones, but disastrous compared to Rainbow Six Seige X’s peak - that game enjoyed 60k players in the last 24 hours. But that is multiplayer only, so how about another grand 7/10 luminary, like Assassin’s Creed Mirage? Well, that peaks at 7,837. And what of my much-maligned beloved forevergame, Ghost Recon Breakpoint? 14,335. That’s nearly four times as many players. Breakpoint peaked at 3,713 in the last 24 hours! Of course, Outlaws wasn’t on Steam for launch day, but that’s ultimately irrelevant. Games that have value build persistent reputations that drive long tails of engagement, and Outlaws is no old dog on the platform. It only arrived on Steam in November 2024! This was the game to command the biggest ever marketing spend from Ubisoft and yet, by any objective metric, it absolutely flopped. In typically wise fashion, Yves put this down to Star Wars being less popular than it once was. Because of course, it’s never his fault. Much like the culture of sexual and psychological abuse three of his senior staff were convicted for. Yes, I am going to keep mentioning that because it was a persistent culture of sexual and psychological abuse by senior staff and Ubisoft needs to remember that on a daily basis, even if its CEO considers the matter closed.

There is a perspective that can be taken where Star Wars Outlaws is perfectly fitting for the modern Star Wars mode. That being mostly vapid, mediocre entertainment leaning so heavily on the goodwill of its IP that the only thing of real value is the basic audiovisual experience and the presentation of the IP itself - as found in the Kennedy/Abrams sequels and the lesser-loved TV series. Outlaws finds a certain kinship perhaps with the sloppier and badly-conceived peers like Obi Wan or The Book Of Boba Fett. And of course, as with so many other Star Wars videogames, it only serves to degrade and cheapen the Star Wars universe. What’s interesting to note is in terms of both movies and TV, the entries that gained the most praise from critics and viewers alike weren’t those conservatively gunning for universal audiences and broad appeal, but the riskier, tightly-focused Rogue One and Andor properties. The ones that chased the adult enthusiast. I mean, I’ve heard people who weren’t even Star Wars fans proclaim Andor as one of the best TV series they’ve ever seen. Thinking of how a Ubisoft open-worlder could support a Rebel spy concept flies so much closer to the things Ubisoft used to be really good at that it makes you question why the hell it went for an interstellar scoundrel idea in the first place. Especially when that interstellar scoundrel is functionally Han Solo without ever admitting it’s just trying to be Han Solo, as if Han Solo is the only kind of interstellar scoundrel the Star Wars universe could support. I have legitimately read that as a defence of Outlaw’s lack of charity; Han Solo only had one pistol, so that’s why Kay does. You can probably guess my reaction to that kind of logic.

Given Ubisoft’s current fortunes, we can safely assume that for now at least, Star Wars Outlaws will be the only Ubisoft open-worlder to draw on that IP. Given Ubisoft’s current output, we can safely assume that’s actually a good thing. I don’t have much experience of EA’s recent games, because I don’t do multiplayer (apols to the Battlefronts) and I fucking hate Jedis. This means that the pinnacle of Star Wars videogaming remains, for me, the X-Wing series. I’ll grimly plug away at Outlaws, but I already know I probably won’t finish it. It’s just too shit. A friend of mine, who was reviewing across three or four mags at his peak, remarked that he could tell a bad game from how quickly he stopped seeing the assets as the developers wanted the player to see them, and instead was just seeing the matrix underneath. Polygons intersecting polygons to change numerical values. I have to say that this idea haunts me as a kind of videogaming dementia from playing too much mediocrity. Worryingly, I found the matrix pushing through Star Wars Outlaws at a very early stage. I’ll grant it some charity, though, and persist until I bore of this slop,7 despite the constant reminders of how little charity its creators offer me.

[21]

There is a sense across videogames as a whole that the arc of progress is curving flatly into an evermore-gently inclined plateau. It stamps out thinner and thinner margins for deviation between the poles AAA third-person action games with RPG elements and themed combat-heavy Metroidvanias. This is a bite at the culture I often (and baselessly) proclaim is the fault of business, but it feels more tangibly true in the light of things like Star Wars: Outlaws, where some kind of creative paralysis over how to most safely win back the license cost resulted in something that falls short in every marker aside its desperate, cloying aspiration to be a real Star Wars product.1 The key driver of financial growth expectations plays a huge role here; those companies with the most budget and, arguably, the most creative expertise, are the most constrained by risk management and the need to deliver returns. It’s this notion of safest bets that stagnates the monetarily rich end of the culture. Why, for example, do I give so few shits and lacked any FOMO at all about Ghost of Yōtei? Probably because I don’t get what it offers beyond Ghost of Tsushima, a game I didn’t didn’t give a shit about because I fatally exhausted my rōnin appetite banging away at the Way Of The Samurai series and Koei’s Samurai Warriors2 entries. As a result, Sony and Sucker Punch’s ultra-glossy, exorbitantly-produced games fall somewhere between the two, in the safest circle of what exhaustively consulted, mock-reviewed, ultra-balanced, super-refined videogames dare to be. Contradictorily, games like this turn me off because of their over-wrought professionalism, like Marvel movies or Ubisoft in general, where an assumed level of competence is the default, but so little beyond that is offered in terms of interactive design. I suppose its their studious capability and tedious conservatism that makes the grand risks and interesting visual styles of games like Deathloop or Returnal shine all the more brightly.3 My fondness for Deathloop only grows with time as first parties usher more and more ruthlessly capable product into the market, for its peculiarities and hyperspecific glories stand out against the homogeneity of games that seem to strive for little more than to be saleable enough to deliver sufficient return on investment, or even worse, to fulfil a checklist of IP obligations for an audience pleased by seeing such things ticked off in accordance with their beliefs about said IP.

In a world where 007: First Light exists, I don’t have to wonder why I’m not able to play a futuristic Hitman set across space stations, colonised asteroids and interplanetary cruise ships, with all the magnificent opportunities for expanding and improving the Hitman fundament that would bring. Likewise, having all of Arkane’s eggs in the Blade basket means I’m not getting my grand Deathloop vs Prey open-worlder before 2030. I’m also fairly sure First Light is going to be a disappointment (at least, for me if not everyone else). IOI excells at its core concept. It does not need to do driving sequences, or account for canon-correct lore with a beloved and utterly contrived and confused IP, yet expectations are already being voiced. When I think of what could be possible with a James Bond pallette, what’s laid out in First Light feels like the least interesting concept imaginable. But then, it has to be safe. And yet, IOI’s greatest gambit, the original World Of Assassination, wasn’t safe at all. It was a pretty stupendous risk on paper and yet it saved the company and its IP - and funnier still, the most popular maps across all three modern Hitman titles are the first two from the ultra-weirdo episodic pay-per-stage era. Likewise, I’m not going to be getting a revised Ghost Recon: Breakpoint from Ubisoft, set on a Tyrell Corp offworld colony planet, where the team of Blade Runners is taking down an entire population of skinjobs gone rogue after the replicants took over the means of production - the manufacturing of themselves. And even if I did miraculously get such a thing, it’d never let me become sympathetic to the enemy and execute the squad members under my command who didn’t share my sympathies, and then set about freeing that colony from Tyrell rule, would it?

I think it’s a deflating statement of defeat to admit my gaming dreams won’t come true, and it’s something of a realisation that only really hits home when you’re truly middle aged. I have maybe 3 or 4 more GTAs to despise with every fibre of my being, but I’ll bet none of them will ever stop to implement any kind of reactive psychological effects on the player character from player-led choices made in free play. I’ll bet not a single one will come close to interrogating the problem of masculinity in an urban criminal setting with the heart and soul of Mean Streets or The Wire or Oz. And I doubt Bethesda will ever conjure up one of its glorious open-worlders themed around historically rigorous simulations of partisan survival in the forests of WW2 Belarus. Nor will it offer up an asteroid-hopping Expanse tribute where you play classes of interplanetary criminals taking down a big-pharma conspiracy by force or by subterfuge. I might get a few more Fallouts, though. Possibly a few Elder Scrolls as well. But they will most likely be even safer than the Fallouts and Elder Scrolls that we have now. Hell, we might even get the whispered Starfield 2.0 update that dramatically alters the game’s reputation and fortune, but I don’t expect it to have anything daring or wildly imaginative at its core.

Of course, we can attribute a lot of the above to new year blues and a seasonal affectedness perhaps, only I never really suffer from that. It’s actually down to a stunning sense of ennui about the year ahead. I look at the rosters, the schedules, the breathless 50 pieces of formulaic, generic shit we’re pretending to be excited about in 2026 pieces and find so very little to actually get excited about. I shouldn’t be too aggrieved about this, as 2025 delivered in absolute spades for me. I had a riot, being deluged in open-worldish action RPGs of various flavours, with plenty of glittering sparkles sprinkled across the gaps. My curmudgeonly beef remains true to me, though. I anxiously await the prospect of being proved wrong, but I can tell you a dev-hell Fable and the next Forza Horizon increment aren’t helping my urge to quit Game Pass altogether.4 But of course, I already know what I should turn my 2026 into - the year of catching up on shit I really should have already played.5 That at least carries some hope of discovering magic and maybe, just maybe, will stop me starting my fourth run at fucking Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.6 But at the same time, while I languish in a familiar forest and look down my well-loved sniper scope at some hapless PMC that’s about to be callously killed without any emotion whatsoever, I’ll still dream about this being on Mars or some shit. Guess this world needs its dreamers. May they never wake up. Alright.7

[21]

It was a real disappointment, and perhaps the reason why The Outer Worlds 2 was being bashed as a 7/10 no-mark in a year dominated by swaggering AAA excesses facing off against rabidly-adored indie darlings. I have to say, the game’s biggest fault is that main story resolution, which is made all the worse by how beautifully The Outer Worlds 2 unfolds in its fat middle.1 As you’re exploring densely-packed landscapes for all they contain and ushered around ultra-cool secret labs and underground facilities, all stacked with fabulous opportunities to go stealth/hack/engineer bonkers, the game’s post-opening bulk is absolutely wonderful. I lapped up every second, thrilled that the game had stepped well beyond the confines of its debut. The last two planetary maps feel just as rich in content as the first two, which is an admirable achievement given the obvious curtailing that’s gone on with two of the game’s factions. It seems that an immovable release date forced some very strong decisions, but given what was probably a devil’s bargain, I’m happier that we got playable content at a density that kept me extremely happy, rather than lots of lore exposition and special missions for two unfulfilled groups. The lore we do get is pretty fun, if sometimes mystifyingly ‘meh’ in terms of impact. In a swerve/shocker seemingly snaffled from Skyrim, it’s possible to meet some very high-up high-ups indeed and the circumstances surrounding that would logically seem geopolitically catastrophic, yet it’s all saved for a passing comment as a desperate last-gasp (at least for my build) in that final, climactic chit-chat.

That conversation is where all of your choices lead, and it’s one that’s fundamentally affected by your skill allotments. You can read plenty of guides to where you should dump your points for maximal outcomes for whichever faction you want to triumph (or otherwise), but this compromises the fun in play. My monster-loading of stealth had next to no bearing at all on the final chat, but gave me hours of hooting at the alarmingly huge stealth damage bonus I was accruing. Other skills I scattered around to acquire particular perks that, once again, were great during play. But for the narrative, they were an absolute waste. One of my skills, Engineering, was levelled enough to let me do shit to help me out in missions, but not enough to sway big conversations in the late game. I can’t say I cared that much, as the point share between Engineering, Hacking and Lockpick set up a great build alongside Stealth, especially by the time you’re romping through the final two planets. I suppose this is the greatest of all hidden dualities in The Outer Worlds 2’s joyous celebration of the 50/50 choice; go for the ludological, experiential joy or save for the narratological, resolutory freedom and satisfaction. Freedom of choice in play, or freedom of choice in ending. Regular readers should know how fanatical I am about one side of that coin, but I still feel that being dumped to main menu like it’s 2010 wasn’t the actual ending I’d hoped for, especially when lacking a NG+ in a game that’s purposely built for multiple, multiple runs. This feels a bit cheap, a bit lacking in thought or perhaps a bit cruel in the sense that as with Avowed, NG+ is being deliberately withheld for commercial purposes or something. It doesn’t feel very Obsidian, dare I say it. But then, of all the games Obsidian has produced, none stands in the shadow of New Vegas quite like this one. And for my money, mistaking the conversational wanglings and factional jostles of New Vegas for the true value of the game is a crime. It criminally ignores just how much fun there was to find in the Mojave of the neo-Fallouts. That’s my enduring memory of it, at least - exploring and finding a constant stream of brilliance and fascination alongside all that beautiful acquisition. In a sense, the factional politics was a mere skeleton upon which I found my treasures, moreso than the vital arc that brought the game to some satisfying conclusion. As I wrote well over 10 years ago for Edge Online and Eurogamer, my New Vegas ending was one I chose - stasis. I left the Hoover Dam in perpetual anticipation of the final battle, for I found a far more rewarding ending as a lone wanderer for justice, cleansing the wasteland of Legion goons and violent criminals. It’s a bit of a shame that The Outer Worlds 2 just doesn’t support such a thing.

There’s no Boone in Outer Worlds 2, but unlike a vocal population of Redditors, I had no problem with the companions in this game. I found the two I ran with most to be much more fun than my favourite duo from the original. And it was even better that I stumbled across one of them in pure exploration. That kind of managed serendipity was a real joy in the Outer Worlds 2 journey, as I felt as if I’d casually bumped into companions through organic play. The deft weaving of that through the worlds you explore felt like an area where Obsidian was stepping beyond its New Vegas shackles. Although the maps just weren’t big enough to capture quite the same sense of exploring a true expansive world. Where Avowed succeeds with smaller maps by deploying a subtle guiding hand and actively shaping available content, The Outer Worlds 2 feels like it has only just enough to satiate, despite its more persuasive argument to get out there and explore. Once again, there’s a sense of clipped ambition, of forced compromise. I’d probably argue in favour of reducing those four planets into one that blended between two of them as regions, with much more terrain and much more to find, and only offering new planets as DLC episodes. There’s something of the Starfield or Borderlands 3 in its offering of planets with little point in treating them as separate worlds. It’s more of a faffy annoyance to move between them, and I never had a sense of hopping through some fantastic alien system.

As I dwell on the idea of how The Outer Worlds 2 unfolds, I’m reminded of a gracefully elegant unfolding of the game’s dramatic conceit: the rifts. Initially presenting as odd hazards, the main story succeeds in opening up the concept as you work your way through key missions, to the point where they become sources of joy2 rather than the weirdly irrelevant anomalies they initially appeared to be. This is perhaps the key strength of the main story here. Much as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s story set you on a glorious tour of the zone, The Outer Worlds 2 takes you on a journey of discovery and mastery with the rifts, a suitably Star-Trekkian dose of chewy Sci-Fi that I genuinely enjoyed. But as with the trek across the Zone, this wasn’t demanded by a main story, nor could it only work if it was part of one. In fact, there’s a tantalising notion that if the rift stuff had actually been hidden as a secret questline, it would have been all the more exciting to pursue, especially in the way it chimes so neatly with your similarly unfolding familiarity with one of the key factions AND one of the lesser sideshow ones. There is a lovely sweep in the way the rift stuff dovetails into the climax, but once the apogee is reached you’re kind of stranded there, with nowhere to go but a fucking conversation. And it was here that the fundamental duality broke down to a singular choice. There was no option to abandon the whole thing and whizz off to a safe haven, you simply had to see the conversation through. Thankfully, the game was respectful enough to inform me of the points of no return. I know when a game is truly great when I reach such a point and refuse to go further until I’ve rinsed everything that came before. I’m not stepping over that threshold until I’ve hoovered every map, and that’s exactly what I did with The Outer Worlds 2, - because I fucking loved it. With nothing left along the non-committal path I’d taken between the factions, I had no choices left. And in a game that seemed to celebrate the very idea of choice and consequence, all I had left was the consequences of my actions. While there is a peculiar symmetry and a not undelightful poetry to that conclusion, did it really have to be arguing with a man in a room, yet again? I guess war isn’t the only thing that never changes.

[21]

Music League is a web-based voting competition wherein the season runner sets submission briefs for however many rounds they want the season to run for. Players then submit songs via their linked Spotify account and can add in a comment about the submission. A playlist is generated for Spotify for listening, or you can preview a snippet of the submissions inside the Music League voting interface. However, the identity of the submitters is hidden until after voting has been completed. While assigning votes you can leave an optional comment on each entry and once that’s done, it’s on to the next round. All of this is configurable, from the number of rounds to the timings for submission and voting, the number of songs per brief and the amount of votes and/or downvotes to be awarded per round. As I will describe later, I took an extreme and experimental approach to running Music League, which left me with the firm conviction that I should never, ever attempt to DM a tabletop RPG. In general, our seasons would consist of ten rounds, which in most cases were all revealed at the start of the season. Some players loved this, as it meant they could plan out their choices in advance and have themselves set for the ten weeks, only having to remember to make their submissions at the relevant times. I opted to take the complete opposite route, which meant only revealing the next round’s brief once voting had started for the current round in play. This was a lot more hands-on in GM terms, but meant I could be much more dynamic with my planning, not to mention being able to control an element of surprise, for I had a couple of rounds that weren’t so much experimental as they were savagely iconoclastic. Having to announce those briefs weeks ahead of submission would have ruined the drama, so to speak. And if there’s one thing to know about Music League with middle-aged men, it’s that drama will always happen. Hence, I opted to engender as much drama as possible with the way I wanted to run the season’s structure, and dynamic briefing was just part of that. Dynamic briefing meant I could also tweak briefs to suit the mood of the players and/or work on ideas that came to mind once the league was in play. I’d recommend all Music League admins follow this lead - it’s much less stress knowing you need two or three briefs to start the season than it is coming up with ten of them, and the ability to swap the sequencing, amend texts (etc etc) gives so much more freedom. I’m certain that in talented hands, this is the true path to full Music League enlightenment.1

There is a class of Music League briefs that allow any genre to be submitted, and therefore allow the wildly clashing tastes of the combatants to interact with unusual ferocity. Sometimes you can get great results and good playlists by specifying genres in the brief, but it’s not guaranteed. I’d seen seasons where the goal was to generate ‘good’ playlists for actual listening, but I thought that was a fool’s errand given the distinct rifts in music tastes amongst the playing victims. I opted for other criteria for all but one round, sometimes playing more with the idea of soundtracking made-up events for people we all knew, such as one of our Discord going for a walk to the shops. That member’s music preferences are easily found, so it did suggest particular genres, but that wasn’t demanded by the brief. Instead, the idea was to pick a tune that was the ideal musical accompaniment. I felt that by demanding the use of imagination rather than musical knowledge or simple genre ransacking, we’d get playlists that were more varied and fun. This had mixed results 🙁. But I certainly got plenty of drama, as planned. My genre-specific round was Classical, but I perverted it by specifying popular Classical, with the goal being a playlist of pieces that everyone would know. A previous Jazz round suffered somewhat by being an exercise in extreme personal tastes, so I figured we should go for broke. I also hoped several players would pile onto the same classical tunes, creating immense drama, but amazingly this didn’t happen. Turns out there are a fucking shitload of very popular classical pieces. And what’s worse, five of my faves didn’t even get submitted and I fucked myself over by taking a comedy route.

The real metagame of Music League is in the commenting and the forum side-discussion. This is where the real entertainment lies, in the trading of jibes and abuse, love and praise, between a friend group that’s know each other for decades but never really explored each other’s tastes in music. And this was an absolute blast for me. I demanded every submission included a submission statement, which was a way of making sure there’d be plenty to discuss in the sidechannels and the all-important voting remarks. This was a way of making sure the submissions were properly thought-through and not simple googled kneejerks, which is what you have to suspect is happening if someone posts a tune without any comment to give context or justification for their appalling musical taste. However, a major source of drama came from the scoring, wherein I made the most spectacular fuckup in the history of our Music Leagues that resulted in some of the most delicious forum drama possible, which would have been impossible if I’d tried to engineer it.

I’d opted for a radical scoring approach. Previously, there’d been variations on simple upvoting, with five or ten available. Recently, we’d had downvoting added, but in small amounts. I opted to go extreme and allow just one upvote and one downvote for the entire playlist. The idea here was to make the players really think about which tune deserved the upvote and given the general animosity between all of us over music tastes, an equally tortuous decision over which one they hated. Initially, this seemed fun. But it developed into a maddeningly limiting scoring method that left just about everyone frustrated that they couldn’t reward submissions that they liked. It was just too binary - it generated good results in the sense that generally speaking, the most popular tune would still win, but it made the whole game less fun to play. Masquerading under the fiction that I was running an full-on experimental program, I held fast until the midpoint of the season. However, in testing a change of vote allowance that I will return to later, another player started voting and suddenly found themselves with 9 upvotes instead of 1! That’s what you get for fucking with the live deployment instead of running a dark secondary league for testing. This created amazing drama on the Discord, and given the generally unhinged nature of the briefs and my running of the game up to this point, it was unclear to my subjects if this was intentional or not. However, it did cause legitimate distress to the victim, for which I am very sorry. But I can’t apologise for the fallout as it was frankly hilarious to watch.

A classic maxim from our Music League history is “it’s just a bit of fun, lads”, which I took entirely to heart from my first season. This was actually the second season our community had run, but I missed the inaugural one. Shame, as it was full of drama from the off, going as far as seeing one member leave the league and the forum itself for a brief period of time due to personal feelings over various submissions and voting patterns. Wading in with a total disregard for other players’ behavioural quirks, I made a comedy submission for a brief about submitting WWE entry music for a community member. I submitted Rotterdam Termination Source - Poing, as the visual of said member pogoing to the ring to the sounds of this novelty proto-Gabber hit brought me too much joy, only to find out that the majority of players had listened to the tune in its entirety and as such, fucking hated it. This made two things clear to me:

1) The popularity of the tune is paramount, relevance to the brief is secondary.

2) These fucking fools have obliged themselves to listen to the whole fucking thing for each submission.

Point 1 should have been obvious to me from the start, but point 2 was actually a bit of a shock to discover. I’d never considered for a second that anyone would listen to Poing all the way through. Surely you just need to get the gist to get how it fulfils the brief, right? This was, after all, my entire philosophy for voting. I don’t need to listen to a 10-min thrash metal workout to know I’m not giving it any votes. But it seems that for the majority, Music League voting is a quasi-religious act of faith, devotion and subservience to the playlist. I was told that you must listen to the entire submission to honestly judge it. I found this both:

1) Somewhat weird and overly serious for something meant to be fun.

2) Patently absurd and open to terrible, terrible abuse.

I never did abuse this to the fullest,2 but it did form the basis of a brief for my season, and one that I truly agonised over. I shall disclose this later.

So by round five, I knew I had to change the scoring. I had planned to go off the rails a bit with the briefs in the second half, but the universal frustration with the minimalist voting meant I could go properly mental. My Music League was now about testing the boundaries of the game and the tolerance of the audience. They were very much trapped in here with me. It’s an odd thing to have that level of control, and to know that you can genuinely upset people if you get it wrong. Despite my in-forum insistence that this is supposed to be fun, people were determined to take it so seriously, it became highly personal. But then, that should be expected when you’re asking people to expose their tastes to public scrutiny, but also under the aegis of an extreme and unreliable master. I suffered a protest drop-out, which saddened me, but given that someone had already dropped out from not being able to fully commit to the schedule, it felt par for the course in some ways. I can only apologise for any suffering I caused and once again, I AM VERY SORRY, but the maxim remains: it’s just a bit of fun, lads!

My decision was to ramp scoring up to the maximum that Music League would allow, which is 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes. I thought fuck it, let’s go right to the fucking edge - and what a way to finish the season. By incrementing from 10 votes for round five and adding 10 as each round passed, the scoring became both wildly unpredictable and fascinating to watch. Music League voting is always about getting in as early as possible and watching the voting unfold. Once you’ve voted, you can follow the results as they roll in. With traditional, sensible voting allotments you can see the trending winners and losers emerge quite predictably, but once you get into the 20-30 votes range, dumping all your votes into the song you love most and the song you hate hardest can completely tip the balance if other voters have gone for spreads. The fact that the voting is blind in terms of being able to see who submitted each song and what score it has makes this all the more hilarious when big upsets occur. As such, I would recommend setting high vote allotments, although downvoting can be optional. Personally, I love downvoting shit I don’t like, or submissions I feel are lazy or don’t fit (or comedically contradict) the brief. Seeing massive downvote totals on an entry is hilarious in and of itself, and then finding out who submitted it can be a real chef's kiss moment when the group dynamics are as fun as ours.

Another unwritten rule of the group that I callously ignored was the naming of songs for the brief before voting had started. It’s seriously taboo to mention any song while the submission period was open lest you tread on toes or mention a song someone wants to secretly submit, so I decided to smash this wide open by naming each round title with a tune. The cunning part of this was I got to do two playlists, with my sacred cows for each round immune to the ravages of the crowd, while also giving clear examples for the intent of each brief. I loved that aspect, so I’d heartily recommend budding Music League admins follow suit. A key example was in a brief I made to break out of Spotify’s cursed shackles and ride into the wondrous realms of YouTube: submit a song that has a video that’s as good, or better, than the song and put the YouTube link in the submission statement. I titled this Aha - Take On Me because, well, that’s the obvious winner innit.3 This was deliciously meta for me as the GM, for it let me submit my own winners before anyone else was able to snag them. And yet, I think it only worked for that single round! All my other picks weren’t remotely in contention.

Running Music League is a very different experience to participating in it. Likewise, winning Music League is like entering a unique endgame in some complex RPG, where suddenly you’re in charge of the game and curiously, are not really allowed to win it. It means that you don’t feel pressure to compete as much as you do to provide, which is a fascinating shift in motive. Having now run my winner’s season too, I feel much more excited about playing future seasons without any need to compete. I’ve reached a level of nirvanic purity, where my submissions can be purely for the brief, not for the win. I think the greatest moment of Music League theatre I pulled off was for my penultimate round, which I gauged would be the right time to exert maximum control and extract my revenge on the group.4 Given the furore I’d caused over submitting songs intended to be skipped, and my general belief that it’s totally fine to skip through songs when voting, I submitted a round with the title Star Trek TNG HD Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 12 hrs).

Star Trek TNG HD Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 12 hrs) was the title of a legendary YouTube sleeping aid, which I’d used as an example during a skipping-is-fine argument to show how absurd the ‘must listen in entirety’ argument actually could be. Literally a reductio ad absurdum, I said that I could quite easily post that as the submission and going by the steadfast rules of the majority, they’d have to listen to the whole 12 hours or be hypocrites. Luckily, Spotify is so shit that I couldn’t find the 12 hour version, so instead demanded submissions that were at least 60 minutes long. This was met with a reaction I loved, but it could only work if I’d withheld the round briefs. Amazingly, all but one of my remaining victims fulfilled the brief, though they were very silent about whether or not they’d skipped the entries. Of course they fucking did. And of course they fucking loved skipping shit.

In closing, only play Music League if your ego can handle it. And if you win and run your own season, remember that you’re in for a hard time no matter what you do. But it is a joyously simple game of social dynamics and blind popularity. I maintain that its biggest crime is being tied to Spotify. It genuinely limits what you can submit, which is especially galling considering YouTube has fucking everything, even if the niches are covered in less-than-legal fashion. But if you have enough friends willing to put their music tastes on the line, it’s a fine enough diversion for a few weeks. But don’t fuck with the timings. I went with a four-four method of four days to submit, four to vote, but this is cut short when all submissions or votes are in. This meant that deadlines were sprayed all over the place, which several victims found incredibly challenging to deal with.5 Stick to rigid timings. Of course, I was fine. And you know why? Because to me, it was just a bit of fun, lads.

[21]

It’s funny to consider what the 360 offered out of the box, on launch day, that we now take for granted as the fundamental features of a modern machine. It’s funnier still to consider that was twenty fucking years ago and the 360’s featureset was so perfectly defined that almost nothing has changed in the two decades since. When you consider the difference between 1985 and 2005, it’s hard to not come to the stark realisation that what we may call ‘maturity’ might also be thought of as ‘stagnation’, but that’s a different argument for a different day. Being in a more celebratory mood, I’m happier to think of the Xbox 360 as being astonishingly correct, perhaps in a similar way that the Commodore Amiga was in defining the boundaries of the 16-bit, disk-based mode. Yet the 360 was so much braver in asserting its present as a specification that’ll reign for decades. It wasn’t just in the obvious, in the online integrations of multiplayer, persistent and transferable player profiles at the dashboard level, or its complimentary and ever-available online shop. It was in the leaps forward in the user experience. I still remember the night of December 2nd, 2005, and seeing Project Gotham Racing 3 in the flesh. Mesmerising as that was, it was the ability to turn the 360’s power off from the wireless controller that gave us the warmest cheer. The massive uplift in graphical quality was amazing, of course, but it was expected. This quality of life improvement, this fantastic evolution from the Wavebird and shonky third-party wireless controllers to a new default was part of the real juice of the 360’s modernity. There’s a forehead-slapping obviousness to its utility, and it underpinned a sense that the machine had been properly thought through. The 360 was a maturation of the modern videogame console, but also of Microsoft’s Xbox concept.

The OG Xbox always carried the weight of compromise and inarticulate branding on its shoulders. Being quite literally a PC in a rectangular box, its shape has a utilitarian obliqueness that makes it look more like an adolescent toy than some high-end consumer electronic appliance. You could maybe argue that that the Gamecube is more toylike still, but that purposely ignores the sophisticated styling that the Gamecube curiously enjoyed all to itself. It is toy-like, sure, but those lines, panels and ports are far too well-proportioned to be a mere child’s plaything. The Xbox on the other hand is an absolute brute, with its almost laughably gauche incorporation of a giant ‘X’ in the case’s shape taking design literalism way too far. The green circle that bears the console’s name looks particularly cheap and garish. The original ‘Duke’ controllers are bafflingly huge and bear a different circle with different colours for branding. But then, it’s a naïve debut for a company not renowned for making physical products at all, let alone compete with consumer electronics legends like Sony. Given that background, the Xbox 360’s launch form was a revelation.2 A slim, elegant tower in a creamy white, the 360 looked dazzlingly modern, with the alpine colourway of green and white for much of the 360’s branding offering a leap into the Fruitiger Aero era.3

Better still was the evolution in controllers. From the comedic Duke to the 360, the development via the much-welcomed stopgap S-controller lead to a pad that for the first time, felt better and somehow more solid than the PlayStation 2’s Dual Shock. I always felt there was something too light and brittle about the Gamecube controller, and something fundamentally weird about the Dreamcast’s that left the PlayStation 2 as the de-facto ruler. But the 360 changed that overnight, and set the template that today feels like it’s almost the norm. The PlayStation 3’s SixAxis felt cheap, hollow and lightweight in comparison. Even the PlayStation 5’s DualSense seems to be merging with that 360 idea, despite trying to cling to the legacy grammar of the Dual Shock. And Sony’s controllers are perhaps a Porsche 911-like exercise in spending 30 years trying to correct a mistake. The 360 controller, on the other hand, was so perfect that it barely changed over successive generations. Like the console itself, somehow Microsoft had simply got it right.4

If there’s a sociological insight to be drawn from 21st century videogame corporate culture, it’s one of explosive success followed by hubristic collapse. Nobody escaped it - Sony’s allowance of Kuturagi’s excesses led to a late, bulky and expensive PlayStation 3. Nintendo’s confidence in a bubble for casual gaming on specialist hardware leads to the WiiU, and Microsoft’s trust in Don Mattrick (lol) leads to the Xbox One. It’s the spectacular implosion of the core Xbox ideal from a bright, connected-gamer future to an omnivorous digital content revenue hub that stings the most, as the collapse can be pinpointed on that single Mattrick-lead presentation in May 2013. As much as ‘Giant Enemy Crab’ undermined Sony’s ideological position as king of the gaming roost, Mattrick’s celebratory landgrab for territories the audience had no real interest in, at the expense of gaming itself, was baffling. Combined with the always-on, phoning-home enforcement of digital rights preventing the sharing of game discs, Microsoft’s mask had slipped, greed was fully exposed and 12 years of gamer goodwill was poisoned overnight. With an open goal and a supremely easy shot to land, a somewhat humbled Sony took the opportunity for a cheap PR win that, yes, did hit the weak spot for massive damage.

This stings hardest because of how great the Xbox 360 was. Outside the racing titles I adored like the Forzas and Project Gothams 3 and 4, I didn’t care that much about the platform exclusives but as my format for third party brilliance in the 360/PS3 era, the machine brought me stupendous amounts of joy. From early proofs of the new horizons this generation afforded in Test Drive Unlimited and Dead Rising, through to my run of Bethesda open worlders from Oblivion to Skyrim (with both Fallout 3 and New Vegas included), the Xbox 360 completely succeeded in keeping me happy. It was here that I played Dishonored and Resonance of Fate. 50 Cent - Blood on the Sand and the brilliant, criminally under-appreciated Saint’s Row 2. But it was also the cult fringes where the 360 seemed to follow the PlayStation 2’s lead with a joyous run of Musou titles and, by the end, even a lovely suite of Cave shooters. That’s not to mention weird shit like Capcom’s forgotten space shooter, Project Sylpheed or the Bujingai replacement El Shaddai - Ascension of the Metatron. I didn’t get a PlayStation 3 until the launch of Gran Turismo 5 in 2010, meaning I’d spent a straight four years as a solo Xbox 360 player and even after that, it remained just as strong a contender for my gaming time. My later memories of the X360 as a workhorse for Afterburner Climax and Forza Horizon 2 still linger. After many years of hardcore grinding with Musou titles, my last grind was, quixotically, the lovely Tenchu Z. Luckily, my fond memories of the 360 weren’t sullied by slogging on as an Xbox One owner. I was purely PlayStation 4 for that entire generation, and I don’t feel like I missed that much. The saddest thing about it, perhaps, is how Xbox 360 showed that under the right approach and attitude, Microsoft could make great hardware into a great platform. Quite how the giant managed to fuck it up twice in a row afterwards is definitely a lesson in corporate mismanagement, so perhaps the 360’s star shines a little brighter because of it. Like the Dreamcast, it feels like lost glory, a legendary hero for which the owner didn’t fully appreciate the riches it hosted. In Microsoft’s case, the real tragedy is that it’s not only the corporation that paid the price for its sins thereafter.

[21]

No, that isn’t just a brutally forced segue. I did genuinely feel the spirit of Buck Rogers is encoded somehow into the general atmosphere of The Outer Worlds 2 as part of its less-than-serious take on a hypercapitalist dystopian future. It struck me that the 45-minute standalone episodes of Buck Rogers bear more similarity to the game’s typical quest-dungeon structure than you might initially assume, and makes me wonder if our tolerances for those quest durations is because of the episodic formats we watched as children.3 Seriously though - meeting a regional government, getting a task, infiltrating a location, doing some meddling to effect a regional geopolitical result, having fights. It literally is the template of an action RPG mission. Deeper still, Buck Rogers’ core concept - the idea of a human projected forward from the 20th Century to the 25th - is a literal correlation with what the player actually does when they engage with The Outer Worlds 2! Not that we ever get a chance to wisecrack 20th century sayings to the bemusement of in-game companions or whatever, but the sense of being plonked in a wild and bonkers future nonetheless has a certain resonance with Buck’s personal journey. Despite its deliberate cartoony style, The Outer Worlds is actually less florid and fantastical than Buck Rogers.4 It’s tempered perhaps by a certain Gibsonian-noir flavour of cyberpunk in its corporate-militaristic oligarchies and is heeled by stated influences from a run of 90s-2000s sci-fi that sobered a lot of the playful excesses of the 70s into more sensible structures where being cool was as important as indulging in freeform fantasy. Those proudly post-modern arrivals like Firefly, Farscape and Futurama have a certain temperance, no? Certainly The Outer Worlds is happy to indulge in Futurama’s omnivorous ransacking of sci-fi’s past and borrows from it heavily for aesthetics and palettes, although it swerves away from adopting a wholesale Raygun Gothic design sensibility.

More’s the pity, perhaps, as The Outer Worlds universe seems more aligned with upscaling the 90s sci-fi videogame aesthetic as it does mirroring any non-gaming media. This chimes nicely with Avowed’s sense of restructuring and re-rendering the 1990s with modern capabilities and tastes, but I can never escape feeling how the environmental codings for desert or ice or volcanoes or artificial structures all seem built on the progenitor styles of the holy trinity of texture-mapped worlds, Quake, Unreal and Half Life. But The Outer Worlds undoubtedly owes a visual debt to Borderlands in a way that’s so blatant, it’s actually weird how little the two are mentioned in the same sentence. The similarity isn’t just aesthetic either - the two share the same absurdist fundamentals in their humour. For that we only have a few places to look, with the most obvious being Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, which leant heavily on the absurdities of 1970s capitalism for multiple sections of guide entries and certain plot points. Naturally, I see hooks and inklings from 2000ad’s vast catalogue5 all over the place, and in both games. I’d guess that Borderlands has been kept out of any formal discussion of influences because of PR concerns: Borderlands 4’s recent release is direct competition. However Borderlands isn’t the only game that imbues The Outer Worlds 2 with spirit. Obsidian isn’t too shy to take inspiration from its own past.

With the aim of conveying the sense of inter-factional warfare, The Outer Worlds 2 makes a point of laying out actual battlefields on some of the world maps. These have long trenchlines spotted with emplacements and bunkers, but they also have decent tracts of well-dressed and well-mined no-mans-land, giving a tangible sense of a war of attrition in deadlock. What this immediately recalled for me was the minefield between Camp Forlorn Hope and Nelson which, yes, is in Fallout New Vegas. If you’ve followed any media coverage of The Outer Worlds 2, you can’t have escaped the constant referencing to New Vegas, as the formal messaging has made this extremely explicit. Where I thought Outer Worlds 1 fell well short of its predecessor, it looks like Outer Worlds 2 gets close (at least) to capturing the magic. Certainly speaking, the notion of deadlocked factions applying throughout Outer Worlds 2 is a direct parallel with New Vegas’s dam dilemmas, even if the morality of each side isn’t cast in quite the same shades as the NCR, the independents and The Legion. In some senses, Outer Worlds 2’s factional politics and morality plays are more complex and adult. In others they’re far more binary and simplistic, but I don’t think that’s necessarily to the game’s detriment. The Outer Worlds 2 is distinct enough that it doesn’t feel like it’s following in New Vegas’s footsteps, although the interactive design falls just as short of matching the Bethesda Open Worlder, just as it did in The Outer Worlds 1. The progress here is in building out the systems and righting a whole load of wrongs while making the worlds feel much fuller. It’s improvement by increment and as such, isn’t really matching New Vegas as much as it’s telling similar stories in a very different place with everything better, nicer, shinier. Fallout New Vegas suffered in some ways by being tied to the Fallout universe. It can’t offer the wild vistas and grandiose architecture of The Outer Worlds’ frequent excesses. As such the spirit lies in pedestrian carry-overs of narrative and world setup rather than injecting some vital energy that applies across every aspect. Thankfully, The Outer Worlds 2 has the imagination to stand by itself, even if it’ll never escape being a descendent of New Vegas. But then, I never felt that New Vegas was a humorous romp, or a comical farce. It had rompy and farcical aspects, but overall was framed as a gritty quest for answers and revenge that ends in deciding the fate of the wasteland. There was a harder edge in play, perhaps coming from the post-apocalyptica that seeps into every pixel of the game, which Outer Worlds doesn’t really express. Whatever Outer Worlds 2 takes from New Vegas, it’s definitely not the mood nor the atmosphere that gave the game its legendary reputation.

If there’s a point to this piece, it’s to celebrate how complex the underpinning spirit of The Outer Worlds 2 really is. There’s a cultural richness both in play and on display that elevates it beyond other games that might match or surpass it on paper. My great and unending animosity towards the Mass Effect series comes from how incredibly dull and boring it is with its references, how unimaginative its sci-fi is, how flat and pedestrian it all turns out to be. It’s ultimately a grey and tiresome series that longs to be people in boats in some fantasy archipelago rather than actually be spaceships and lasers. There was nothing celebratory in there, just exploitation to create unexceptional Babylon 5 fanfiction for millennials. The Outer Worlds 2 feels like it’s trying to push out something new and vibrant, even if it does feel cast in the same genre of videogame mildly-black comedy as Portal, Borderlands and a host of similar sci-fi jokefests. Yeah, I might even cast my beloved Deathloop into that pool too. But I think The Outer Worlds 2 succeeds in doing that style well. As a result, the vibe is simply fun. And for my money, and much like Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, really that’s all I need.6

[21]

The Outer Worlds 2 only had to do one thing to win my heart, and that was: be better than Outer Worlds 1. Which it most definitely is. Even though I’m only halfway through the second major map, I’m filled with delight and satisfaction, even though we got off to quite a shaky start. A lot of that is down to amassing the kit to have a whole lot of experiential fun, and we all know what an absolutely craven addict I am for acquisition. It should come as no surprise that the nuts and bolts of the game’s quotidian activities are simply great fun. This experiential joy is virtually cordoned off from the larger narrative beats and twists because as is par for the course, this is a game with a main storyline with consequential choices, and having to weigh your choices is a lot less joyous than gadding about on an acquistional arc.1 And it seems it’s the consequences that are driving much of the discourse. Although not as strongly in the narrative aspect as you’d expect. I’ve read much more dissatisfaction and opinion-piecing around Obsidian’s benevolent dictatorship with regards to character development. We live in a post-respec era, where according to some, the fundamental consumer rights of the player are despicably and tragically defiled if we cannot reassign all our skill points at will. I saw this asserted as a blunt fact by several commenters, who demanded the inalienable right to access 100% of the game’s content within timeframes they deemed acceptable. Utterly perplexed, I felt the pall of that bleak comedy descend once more, and wondered if the narcissification of the individual in the modern videogame was perhaps getting a bit out of hand. One commenter, protesting at how little time they have to play and how much they really needed to be able to respec to ‘get the most out of their time’ was sent into an apoplectic rage at the suggestion they could maybe play the game more than once. This intransigence over being locked out of stuff because of choices the player was forced to make seemed novel to me, especially in the context of the free-roaming RPG template that Outer Worlds 2 occupies. Of course I blame servile player-fawning mainstream AAA for this obnoxious sociology, or perhaps the modern vogue of having extraordinarily short memories for how things literally used to be. I remember both Skyrim and its attendant Fallouts doing plenty of content-locking without any controversy, leaving me utterly bemused by any outrage over such a thing happening in 2025. I assume these are the same people who think they can do anything after watching a TikTok tutorial, or more likely, think they should be allowed to.

A regular mention in this vital and urgent culture war was Obsidian’s fantasy counterpart to The Outer Worlds; Avowed. This rang quite clearly for me as I wandered far and wide in The Outer Worlds 2’s opening map. In some part due to curious homologies in the terrain. Both share a wonderful efficiency of space, where subtle pathing makes you feel like you’re in a much bigger landscape. I accidentally fell off one path to find it was packaged neatly alongside a twisting ascent that had been part of a previous side mission. A neat stumble behind the curtain of Obsidian’s skilful staging, which feels far better managed here than in the series debut. But in Avowed we have a real companion game of sorts. Ultimately, Avowed is a superb combat engine wrapped in a free-roaming RPG that seeks to accommodate the player’s whims and frailties with uncommon politeness, whereas The Outer Worlds 2 is a larger and more dictatorial piece. The two work together as answers to similar questions about the modern action RPG and where the focus should lie. Avowed is decidedly streamlined and heavily guided as a compact exercise in sufficiency and sustainability, whereas Outer Worlds 2 feels like one more ladder rung along the grand climb to a mature, luxurious true successor for Fallout New Vegas. It always had a disproportionate grandiosity of ambition that it originally failed to fulfil, but this sequel redresses quite a chunk of the balance. We’re not fully there yet, but the arc seems to be visible and attainable, should Obsidian get the chance to make a third in the series. Rest assured I’ll be noodling at length about the specifics of The Outer Worlds 2’s greatness in future pieces, but the general vibe of the first two maps is more than enough to satiate me. I’m having a blast, and the places are great, much like Avowed’s.

I was initially concerned that the first map, with yet another space-western town and yet another society of steampunkian cowboy victoriana addicts, was a disappointing re-tread of the original. A Force Awakens offence that’d unfold with grim predictability until it didn’t. In fact, it surprised me pretty quickly and my fears were allayed, then quickly put to bed. By the time I was struggling to get into the map’s key mission area, I knew that the signposted glimmers of hope from Avowed had borne fruit. The fact that I found a secret entrance to said area while on a completely different sidequest had me whooping in my seat. On the first map, at least, there’s a masterful interweaving of objective and locale that creates a particular music, one that gets sweeter and sweeter as you accrue skills and equipment to best exploit terrain and combat. Better still was the game signposting that when you fuck it up, you cannot miss how badly you’ve managed to do it. Gloriously so, in a sense that will be spoiled in this footnote,2 but the game deliberately humbles those who’d want to optimally spec themselves away from uncomfortable failures in a manner that seems genuinely brave, if not wholly iconoclastic, in the modern vogue.

After the natty corralling, guidance and momentum of Avowed, I found it surprisingly hard to get into a Bethesda mode of open exploration in Outer Worlds 2 but when I did, I was definitely rewarded. Not just in finding that secret entrance, but in ticking off a visit to every building shown on the map and in tracing a route to get to a companion’s quest locations. All of this was totally worthwhile, even if spurred by an urge to get levelled so I can uprate skills to get me through logjams in the main story. By the second map, I was locked beautifully into a much more freeform trajectory of wandering between main mission, sidequest and exploration that’s always been a kind of nourishing supply of gaming ambrosia for me. The real meat of the Bethesda open-worlder mode, running very nicely under Obsidian’s skies. I was overjoyed, and don’t really care if the game drops the ball later on. As I said earlier, it only ever needed to be incrementally better than its predecessor to win me over, for Avowed had given me plenty of confidence in Obsidian deploying a thoroughly enjoyable systome for my own highly perverse tastes. The fact that The Outer Worlds 2 goes fully bonkers for stealth builds plays a big part in my self-satisfied smugness that the game lives up to my incredibly realistic expectations, especially considering how wonky it was in Avowed. Pushing away from Avowed’s forced companionships, I was glad to do most of my Outer Worlding solo, as it fucking should be, hence getting much more mana from stealthing around. Gaining silencer mods helped a shitload, too.

There was a point in free roam where my mind was drifting back through Avowed and Atomfall to an unexpected memory of Redfall. I was thinking of the landscapes being deliberately artificial, presented in a style that happily departs from the photo-real, yet is rich with lush detail. Redfall was the most recent in Arkane’s fabulous devotion to painterly visual styles, and even though it was definitely the least stylish of its worlds it still carried a washed VHS-like palette that could evoke the moods of Romero and Carpenter with quite some vigour. The Outer Worlds 2 plays to a similar sense of courting themes, even if the two maps I’ve seen have been brightly-lit and gaudy cartoon spaces, they’ve not been so obliquely comic-book to be nudging Borderlands’ aesthetic, even if the environmental theming feels startlingly close at times. But it comes in aspects of the architecture; the second map’s warzone, where a golden-age city lies in fragmented ruins amongst towering crystal formations in a dry desert, easily approaches Avowed’s touches of sublime beauty, with actually exquisite environmental detailing. Wreckage and debris abound in a way that never feels placeholder or copied-and-pasted, as with certain Ubisoft worlds. Instead, the gloriously overblown verticality of the ruins - and their quasi-Deco styling - evokes a post-collapse Dishonored 2. It’s a delightful reminder of places I’ve not passed through for far too long, and I look forward to seeing if Obsidian can keep it up as the game continues. As I’ve mentioned so many times, my growing love of the sense of transportation to a place is almost as vital a reward as pleasing combat and acquisition. The Outer Worlds 2 isn’t letting me down in that regard.

Ultimately, I am glad I didn’t succumb to personal greed and pony up for early access, because fuck you, Microsoft. I’m sorry if that means Obsidian misses my tiny fragment of some vital metric that determines its fate on the Microsoft spreadsheets of psychopathic materialism, but my conscience feels fine with it. Maybe because I was fearing that The Outer Worlds 2 was going to be some exponential expansion in moral dilemmas, where it becomes such a signature of the Obsidian mode that you have to solve one each time you board your ship or enter a town. Luckily it’s cooled off to a degree but in that respect, I did feel dismayed at how often I’d approach a settlement to find, yet again, a group of people discussing some intractable issue for which I was the one and only tract to prevent protracting it, but I guess that is one trope that Obsidian is essentially celebrating with The Outer Worlds 2. It’s a shame that amongst all the wacky-but-weak satire it isn’t wholly capable, it seems, of satirising itself and its form quite as knowingly as it does other targets, but maybe that’s a bit too much to ask. As with Redfall, Outer Worlds 2 feels like a damoclean project for Obsidian, and I wonder if part of the sheer sense of fun that infuses the entire game so far is a Deathloop-style celebration before it all goes tits-up. Is the intent to ram binary dilemmas and loyalty choices at high volume because it’s what this IP’s brand differentiation demands, or is it to get as many in as possible because there might not be another chance to play in this pleasing, quixotic sci-fi universe? I hope it’s the former. And as cliché as they’re becoming, if they’re what Obsidian needs to keep this fire burning, then please, by all means, cliché away.

[21]

Heat Signature was a game I followed closely up to release. Tom had been previewing various aspects as he showed off prototypical segments on social media. It looked amazing. The idea alone, of piloting a little pod to board larger ships to complete nefarious tasks, was utterly tantalising. When I finally got my mits on it, I was thrilled to find it overdelivered on my expectations. Finally! A thinking man’s Hotline Miami in a Brit-Scifi universe. These things are rarer than proton decay, so to find it played so brilliantly was a true chef’s kiss moment. Although for me, I took the cowardly route of turning off Permadeath. Despite the game’s warning of a less interesting path, I found it turned the game into the best kind of collect-a-thon, wherein I was taking advantage of rare items in the game’s hub-shop and in-mission loot to build an absolutely killer inventory of gadgets. For Heat Signature is all about the fucking gadgets. I am more than sloppy enough to have likely found myself lumbered with bargain-basement bullshit and zero credits had I kept Permadeath in place. Instead, being pinged back to the hub (and keeping my gear) whenever I fucked it all up meant Heat Signature steamrolled like a deliciously casual RPG. It built into a leisurely curve of acquisition that utterly delighted me. Going back to it for this piece, I checked my stash to find gear that would blister the minds of anyone starting out and daunted by the bigger ships. Extreme range subverters, self-charging crashbeams and glitch traps, silenced concussive shotguns. All despicably useful in the pursuit of the game’s missions. It’s far too boring to list out what those things actually do - rest assured they’re a lot of fun because like the game, they’re fucking brilliant.3 They’re the tools of your trade as you board a ship and set about the tasks you must complete. Kill someone, kidnap someone, rescue someone. Steal some object, take over the ship. It’s a nicely tight set of objectives and each mission only has one of them. No cascading complications here; the task is clear and singular. Given the right tools, you could conceivably attempt a twitchy Hotline Miami run at some of these, but really the game is one of observation and planning, and finding just the right angle to avoid line-of-sight down long corridors - but with just enough leeway to get the fringes of a shotgun spread to take out a troublesome guard. Heat Signature is all in the planning and the abuse of the space bar to freeze time. But it’s also in covering your bases - knowing where you’re vulnerable, and what contingencies to account for when you inevitably make mistakes. On top of all that, of course, is the pod. The fact that there’s a phase of boarding your pod and travelling to the target spacecraft seems almost redundant given how great the interior gameplay is, but the pod has plenty of its own joy to give once you master its controls and understand tactical uses for it. But really, the piloting aspect performs more as a ritual, a kind of rite of conceptual validity. By forcing you to travel manually to each ship, you’re more versed in the atmosphere of being the kind of character the game assigns you to be. A darker take on Han Solo, or the kind of shadowy operative you’d find in the background of a dystopian Blake’s 7 hubworld.

Heat Signature’s play is a combination of understanding procedures and creatively mitigating them. Use a subverter to turn a defence turret against the ship’s crew. Place a glitchtrap in the right corridor to teleport tricky enemies into space. Crashbeam a Defender to turn off the shields of guards within range of it. You juggle your gadgets as you go, and adapt as situations unfold. All of this is discovered through failure in the most part, hence the leisure in turning off Permadeath. But really, it’s a beautifully balanced set of interlocking systems in cohort with a modular map structure that allows procedural generation to absolutely shine. Heat Signature is almost a hymn to the virtues of having everything generated, with sublimity falling out of that glorious melee with surprising regularity. Commonly it combines incredibly useful gadgets with just the right situations for them, then adds chaos when you get it wrong as you procedurally generate the escape plan in your head. Likewise the universe structure and the ship layouts, all generated uniquely for your pleasure to create a living space for a ludological richness that’s all too uncommon. Like the very best of the best, the game rewards both curiosity and creativity in your approach. But such is the rare, under-appreciated status of the game itself. Heat Signature is yet another seemingly forgotten gem in the eternally savage flux of the indie sector’s relentless deluge. Like a similar Scifi great, Objects In Space, the greatest tragedy is in how easily these kinds of conceptually and thematically brilliant - and mechanically superb - games get lost or forgotten purely because of the sheer volume of the new and the brightly spangled. Hence me championing Heat Signature today.

I can’t blame Tom Francis for moving straight into Tactical Breech Wizards and making a brilliant isometric tactical-strat-puzzler, but I can lament the fact that indie obscurity can be overcome (to some extent) by indulgent and flagrant sequelisation. What I mean by that is I would very much like to play Heat Signature 2: The Signaturing and I have plenty of ideas of how such a thing would evolve. The expansion seems dryly logical: add invadable space stations, more stuff, clothing for modifiers, formal RPG character development and so on. I think of a step into first-person ImSim shoes and get seriously giddy. But the fact remains that by itself, Heat Signature is still really, really good. Captivatingly so for me, who’s desperate to finish up this piece so I can jump back in and have a few runs. Much like Hotline Miami, it carries a plausible sense of having been possible for decades and in a real sense, that illustrates how timeless great game design really is when you see it. I can imagine Heat Signature working on an Amiga or VGA PC perfectly well, save the graphical bells and whistles perhaps.

I’m not sure if that timeless quality was ever Tom’s intention, but at least he did a GDC talk about Gunpoint and Heat Signature, disclosing how the wondrous, precious jewel that it became fell out of the rapidly iterative design process of someone who’s really good at this shit. A mark of that talent is found in the game’s warm generosity; the mission select screen offers you a suite of missions across a range of difficulties and for the most part, the mission parameters are laid out for you to inspect and assess. Obviously the more difficult the mission, the greater the rewards, but there’s plenty to be had from going through easier fodder to accrue a bit of average kit alongside piecemeal cash payments. A key aspect in non-Permadeath is how the characters affect the game’s narrative arc of liberation; complete too many missions and you don’t convey the same morale boost to liberation efforts, which eventually grind to a halt. A lovely design touch, this makes you pick up the lesser-famed newbies and take on runs with diminished goodies to choose from to keep the faith burning and you on your toes. After all, a self-charging extreme range subverter is a lazy choice, if we’re being honest. The beauty of Heat Signature is that you could probably do without it if you really tried, and yet it’s so much fun when you have one. That tension, and the fact that the game is such fun whichever side of the fence you fall on, underlines the game’s virtue. And yeah, we’ll likely never see a sequel, no matter how awesome such a thing could be. But then, Kubrick and Verhoeven never did sequels either. You know who did? Ridley Scott. And look how that fucking turned out.

[21]

To kick us off, let’s establish some common terms:

• Sequence

Literally the sequence of events through a stage. The arrivals and departures of enemies, changes in geography, changes in movement and so on. Also, checkpoint locations.

• Traversal

Your physical route through the sequence and your enemy engagement strategies. In the R-Types Final, your choice of craft can have a profound influence on the style of your traversal.

• Craft

Your choice from the 113 ships in the R Museum. Beside its visual appearance, a craft is determined by its type of Wave Cannon (the chargeable mega-shot) and the Force (the type of orb companion your craft uses).

Opening Comments On Difficulty

Play it on easy lol. No, seriously, knock the difficulty down. Hell is filled with idiots too proud to play on a difficulty level labelled ‘Kids’, and I say play one easier that - ‘Practice’. The reason for this is that Craft are locked behind stage unlocks, currency grinds and other Craft unlocks, so to get the most out of the game in the early stages, lower difficulty will give you the momentum to start exploring the Craft roster and accrue the currencies. Practice difficulty starts you off with a Force already attached, which is very handy for trying out new unlocks. However Practice does dramatically reduce the amount of shots flying at you and the enemy density, resulting in a considerably deceptive passage that’ll give you plenty of surprises if you notch the difficulty up to farm more currency. That caveat aside, Practice will teach you the general sequence of the stage and it doesn’t fuck with any of the geographical hazards that are part of the sequence, making it great for learning the shape of each stage and putting together a generalised traversal that’ll be largely the same at higher difficulties.

A Practice run through all stages is a great way to accrue at least one craft unlock per completion, but for specific currency grinding it’s Score Attack that offers the most fun. This is mostly because it starts you off with a fully-powered craft, making it much easier to go in at Normal or above and reap higher currency rewards.

Basic Shmup Technique: Observation

For a complete newcomer, the visual chaos and onslaught of aggression a shmup launches upon you can be daunting, if not overwhelming. To cope with this, engage in a conscious strategy of active observation. This involves moving the focus of your attention from a general scan of the whole screen to the scrolling edge of the screen where new hazards are emerging, to concentrating on your craft and its immediate locality. There is a skill in knowing when to switch - the reality is you could likely complete any given stage by just focusing attention on your craft. Having your vision there means you’re much more alert to hazards that pose an immediate threat and, given a suitable level of power-up, you’ll probably eliminate the majority of enemies without having to look at them. However, you will need to pay attention to the scrolling edge to see upcoming non-destructable geographical hazards and enemies that may have hidden weak spots, meaning a shift in Force orientation may be required. It’s also just good practice to have an idea of the overall screen situation at any given moment. Focusing on your craft is incredibly important when battle is at its thickest - when there’s lots of ordinance on lots of trajectories in play, and when geography is tight and/or enemy population is high. It’s something you may have to consciously force yourself to do when the intensity ramps up, but the benefits are immediate. Not to mention that focusing on the craft, particularly if you have it in the left-hand half of the screen, will alert you earlier to the classic R-Type shenanigan of having enemies arrive behind you (or appearing out of the geography at deliberately inopportune moments).

Basic Shmup Technique: Kill Or Avoid

When fully powered-up, the temptation is to fill the screen with electric death and eliminate every single enemy as quickly as possible. However, a counter-intuitive consequence of that is you may actually be increasing your risk. This is down to craft placement - trying to bump off everything will generally mean moving offensively in pursuit rather than defensively in avoidance. In tight moments, this actually increases your exposure while taking your attention away from hazards. It’s worth breaking out of flow to deliberately take a defensive route, particularly if your craft is underpowered, which will happen to you a lot after dying and checkpointing. Some checkpoints are really unfair in chucking you back into full-on combat with vastly diminished powers, and relying on a ‘kill ‘em all’ strat in this situation can be counterproductive to say the least. Sometimes it’s best to just get out of the way of danger, particularly if you have a fancy Wave Cannon that needs a few loops to get to max. Adopting a dodging, near-pacifistic approach will also hone your movement skills no end, and give you a bit of extra bandwidth to learn the sequencing and geography1 and/or marvel at the beautiful lighting.

R-Type Technique: Shot Or Charge?

It’s a little-known fact that you can easily complete the first stage of R-Type with just charge shots and Force rubs,2 and this charge-sniper technique carries over nicely into the R-Types Final. To shoot or to charge is the fundamental equation to be balanced in your offensive strategy and this is highly dependent on the specifics of your craft. Differences in Wave Cannon and Force really affect outcomes, where certain Craft seem built around a charge-sniping strat whereas others have Wave Cannons that are so shit, they’re barely worth using, even on bosses. It’s worth mentioning that the R-9O2 Ragnarok II, which has the most powerful Wave Cannon in the game, has terrible normal shots, yet it requires seven loops and about 45 seconds of total charge time to get to max. Therefore utilising it effectively is about the darker arts of Wave Cannon management: the partial charge. These have varying effects depending on the specific cannon, but partial charges have been part of the R-Type arsenal since the original and with the right cannon, can be better than the fully-powered normal shots in some instances. Wave Cannons can also have different effects depending on the number of loops charged. Ragnarok II’s first and second loops are the same as a basic R-9, but higher loops gain splash damage factors, with the final loop effectively being a screen-clearing smart bomb as well as an obscenely damaging bolt of death. A real stalwart favourite of mine, R-13B Charon, has a lightning Wave Cannon that dances between enemies as lightning would, with larger charges increasing the damage and range of the dancing. Its partials are fantastic for rapid close-range killing and in low-powerup situations it’s a godsend. R-9DP3 Kenrokuen’s physical pile-driver cannon is only really useful for killing medium-to-large enemies, mid-bosses and bosses, but it’s thoroughly brutal at full charge, making it the ultimate R-Type sniper craft for pacifist stage traversals and quick boss kills. There’s a particularly satisfying parsimony in trying to charge-snipe an entire stage, which will also draw on your dodging and navigation skills to fulfil without dying. However, it’s all too easy to have a Craft with decent Wave Cannon/normal shot balance and lean too heavily on charge-sniping when normal shots are actually the better option tactically. The wisdom to take from this is to experiment in your traversals. If a segment is particularly sticky, it’s worth trying to vary shooting technique.

R-Type Technique: Force Wrangling

The original R-Type blew minds with its innovation of The Force, an indestructible orb that you can use as a shield or as an offensive weapon with a single button press, as well as offering the ability to shoot megalasers from the front or the rear of your Craft, depending on where you attach it. In the R-Types Final 2 and 3, The Force is so central that you can unlock it as a playable Craft. Wrangling The Force is a key skill to master and to this end, I recommend changing the button mapping so that Force launch/recall is on the right trigger. This not only makes it much more fun to pew-pew The Force into enemy gobs, but means you can undertake complex repositionings and tactical Force manoeuvres while charging the Wave Cannon, something that’s a bit unwieldy, inconsistent and prone to error with face button maps.

Knowing when and where to reposition The Force is a key part of any traversal and once again, if you’re finding a section to be really sticky, consider using a different part of the screen and repositioning your Force to suit. There are no general guidelines to follow for Force attitudes - you’ll just have to thrash them out in combat. However, it’s definitely worth mastering a quick change by launching, recalling and moving up and down as appropriate to avoid the Force re-attaching to its last position. This little dance may be clumsy at first, but you can actually pull it off in quite tight spots once your thumbs are decently trained. As an aside, use the D-pad for Craft movement rather than the sticks. The pad is so much better for rapid, incremental movements in small spaces.

The Force has generally consistent behaviour across Force and Craft types save for a few exceptional cases, one of which being the R-13 lineage. This Force has a ‘chain’ linking the Force to the Craft, and the chain does damage. The Force also clamps onto enemies it’s fired at, giving much more reliable behaviour when you want to Force rub enemies to death. Force wrangling develops a unique strategy for this lineage, especially when dealing with big numbers of popcorn enemies with bigger bastards embedded in them.3 As such, I urge you to unlock that lineage as quickly as you can because they’re all brilliant.4

R-Type Technique: Special Weapons And DOSE Meters

Introduced in R-Type Delta, the Special Weapon and its attendant DOSE meter are a smart bomb replacement that has plenty of tactical applications beyond saving you in a moment of crisis. DOSE is the meter that charges up the Special Weapon, which is done by having your Force absorb bullets and causing contact damage. However once charged, the Force gains additional contact damage and an extended area of effect in the form of a red glow.5 R-Type Final play, and particularly in 2 and 3’s case, can be categorised into efficiency and expediency styles. Efficiency is where you are maxing the kills to reap the most currency, but also maximising your DOSE charging to get the meter full. Expediency is going for speed, which means you may well be discharging the Special Weapon at tricky choke points to accelerate your traversal. The Special Weapon also eliminates enemy bullets when discharging, making it useful for fraught boss fight cycles and so on. Now, in the lower difficulties the DOSE meter fills much faster, meaning that some stages can offer more than one opportunity for discharge and still have a full meter for the boss fight if you’re particularly adept at DOSE harvesting. One thing to note, though, is that if currency grind is your thing you can get a 25% harvest boost at Normal difficulty by turning off Special Weapons and extra lives. For the sake of a few extra seconds in restarting a stage and being forced away from rank cowardice, this is more than worthwhile over a seven-stage run.

R-Type Technique: Geography, Navigation And Craft Control

R-Type, perhaps more than any other, is a shmup known for its demand of rote learning its sequence and learning the geography is a fundamental aspect of that. Geographical challenges vary between lethal parts of the environment and obstructions that can kill, should you get stuck behind them when the scrolling leaves the screen. There’s no advice here - you just have to learn them. However, there are sometimes happy accidents in the geography that can offer the nimble player a safe haven or two in sticky moments. This is the skill in knowing when to advance towards the right or retreat to the left, or when to park in the centre. A lot of this is down to specific aspects of the sequence - Stage 5.1 of R-Type Final 2 has horrific death clams that spit out Danmaku-grade laser dashes at fixed angles and the interplay of two or more of these makes for a supreme bullet-dodging navigation challenge, but there are a fair few spots where getting parked at the right time puts you in a favourable place and saves you an awful lot of hassle. The point here is that you should pay attention to the wider geography of the Stage as it passes, as there could be nooks and crannies to stow away in when things are tricky. In combination with well-judged Force shifts, finding the right spots can radically alter your traversal and your chances of survival.

A Note On Craft Speed

The R-Types Final allow you to adjust the twitchiness of your Craft with two buttons, often the left shoulder and trigger. You may consider this fairly redundant as the default speed (2) seems to be fine for all circumstances. However, upping to speed 3 has colossal advantages on certain boss fights and navigation challenges. The Stage 4.0 boss in R-Type Final 2 has its weak spot on a rotating collar that demands you swap sides of the screen to do damage and as it’s a giant swinging ball that takes up nearly the full height of the screen, getting around it is a whole lot easier when you’re moving faster. Likewise, several bosses have phases where they chase you around the screen and staying on speed 2 will make your escape much more difficult than it has to be. Again, this emphasises the need to use the D-pad for movement as precision is everything at higher speeds, especially if you’re trying to whizz through the slim gap under a boss as it defecates an exploding blob onto the floor.

A Note On Checkpointing

The checkpointing in the R-Types Final is frequently brutal. The most lenient are boss approaches, which generally won’t fuck you about and don’t offer too much immediate peril until you meet the boss, but they still leave you seriously underpowered for the confrontation. Other mid-Stage ones can be absolutely infuriating, with one of the final Stages having no checkpoints at all after the first third of the Stage. Yah, you have to grind out 66.6666% of it, even if you die right near the end. Annoyingly, only Score Attack offers the option to restart a stage from the beginning. This would be so much more preferable to more than a few mid-stage checkpoints I’ve had to grind my way out of. So yeah, if you’re doing the whole game runs and aren’t amazing, you’re going to be rinsing a lot of cruel checkpoints. I wouldn’t give up, though. Battling through lets you learn the sequencing, which in R-Type is the real meat of the overall battle.

R-Type Technique: Craft choice

Ultimately, this is up to you. It’s really a matter of taste. Any Craft can clear any Stage if you’re skilled enough, though I pity the grind on some of the more esoteric offerings in the R Museum. As a general rule of thumb, Wave Cannons with more loops make Boss fights shorter. That’s it! The rest is down to what you’ve unlocked and what suits your playstyle. Naturally, I think everyone should want to try a 1CC in the default R-9 Arrowhead, but there are later Craft that are much more fun to use. In general, the lineages will offer increasingly capable Craft as you move along them, so planning out a grind on a lineage you like the feel of is definitely worthwhile, and don’t settle until you reach the ultimate craft of that line.

I’d also recommend buying all of the DLC.6 Obviously you need the Craft to complete the full roster, but these each come with free wads of grinding currency. You need to visit the Shop to get them, and it’s a great way to open up huge tracts of the R Museum once you’ve acquired the stage unlocks. It should be noted that the DLC Craft are pretty badass, too. That might feel a bit unearned and cheaty, but the game is stern enough to make sure it’s not a pay-to-win situation.

Closing Remarks

I fucking love the R-Types Final and sincerely hope this guide helps you love them too. As I’ve tried to mention in this piece and all my previous writing on them, the Final games have this unique quality of allowing hundreds of possible traversals, each with their own difficulty curves and skill demands. Some Craft are so divergent from the R-9 Arrowhead orthodoxy that they almost present a different shmup entirely to the R-Type template. It’s a superb box of delights to explore and, as with nearly all non-Danmaku shmups, the joy increases the better you get at traversing the stages. R-Type has a leisurely pace, which at the lower difficulties means that hopefully, a lot more people can get the joy out of it than they might from something transcendent but brutally impossible like Progear No Arashi. I sincerely hope you’ll join me, pilot, in the endless battle against the evil Bydo!

[21]

The key thing about the Plus/4 was that along with the 1, its split-SKU companion, it had garnered enough attention to get support from several UK publishers. Three in the premium bracket, and a similar number at the budget end. Given that the budget tier was only just coming to maturity by the end of 1985, those £1.99 labels followed a broad spectrum approach, catering for a wider range of formats than you’d probably expect. Given the domination of the ZX Spectrum, Commodore C64 and Amstrad CPC machines, it was surprising to see the likes of Mastertronic2 catering for the kings but also the lower pawns. It wasn’t uncommon to see releases for the Acorn Electron, Atari 8-Bits and so on alongside the C16/+4 offerings, although these would slowly whittle down as the mid-80s drew on. Certainly Atari’s launch of the 16-bit ST, the subsequent UK TV campaigns and blanket all-formats magazine advertising seemingly killed the 400/800 8-bit platform overnight. The Electron and BBC split, a somewhat more complex issue than mere RAM sizes, saw that format leave the shelves of the highstreet retailers around the same time. There was certainly a moment where the lowly C16/+4 shelf (amongst the vast multi-shelf libraries of the big three) grew larger than its lower-tier competitors, although by this point we all felt like a downtrodden proletariat of equally under-supported peers. Somehow, the C16/+4 made it through - possibly thanks to the desperate Christmas discounting of the C16 in 1984 and the Plus/4 in 1985 creating overnight markets of kids eager to buy £1.99 games every two weeks.

But on that Christmas day some 40 years ago, I only had the ten pack-in tapes to pick from. Thankfully, there were some surprisingly decent titles there. Treasure Island satiated my desire for flick-screen adventuring ala Sabre Wulf et al, Exorcist offered an expanded Pac-Man as mazes-in-a-maze adventure and Fire Ant pulled together a passable 2D puzzler themed with insects and underground burrows as a static-screen logic game that could only be worked out with trial and error, but nonetheless was curiously rewarding when you got it right. The real winner, and particularly germane to the season, was Icicle Works, a retooling of the long-forgotten Boulderdash3 format as Santa Claus assembling presents by digging through snow and managing snowballs while dodging polar bears. Coded by Doug Turner,4 Icicle Works was the first Plus/4 game I finished, though by the end of my time with the machine I’d managed to proudly 1CC all four of my favourites. An achievement born as much from the scarcity of releases for the machine as my particular hunger to finish games in that era, but still something I’m oddly proud of. Of course, the real fun started after Christmas when I could get to grips with building a collection. It may have been a mere pauper to the big three, but it was mine and a machine that I could personally invest in. As such, the Plus/4 is utterly foundational in defining the kind of gamer that I would become and thanks to its status as an underling with a hungry audience, it played home to a fair few hand-me-downs that were long in the tooth on the big three.

I had played, fallen in love with and desperately longed for Jet Set Willy and Saboteur on the ZX Spectrum, and naturally lapped them up when the C16/+4 versions came. Jet Set Willy got a conversion via format stalwarts Tynesoft that despite offering a 64KB Plus/4 version, inexplicably fell short of the Spectrum original. Saboteur was even weirder. Released by Durell in 1985, I never saw the Plus/4 version until it was re-released by Alternative as a £1.99 double-header. A frankly bizarre cut-down version for the C16 on one side of the tape, with a near-perfect recreation of the original for the Plus/4 on the other. Naturally, I was delighted. Likewise, we got a perfect version of Manic Miner too, and Firebird - another £1.99 label - brought Thrust. I can’t forget to mention greats like Timeslip,5 Tom Thumb or the Brian Howarth text adventures that taught me to touch-type, but true transcendence came about through the miraculous arrival of Mercenary for the Plus/4; an unlikely port, but a life-changing one for me. I’d bought the game completely blind and was astonished to find it matched the box art with quite some integrity, making it one of the most important games I’d ever play. The stinger being that as a Plus/4-only release, it proved a technical prowess for the system that highlighted just how much the SKU split with the C16 was holding it back. If Mercenary was possible, then so was Elite. And all the other wireframe titles that presage our glorious realtime-polygon future.6

In a mad sense, the underdog Plus/4 did eventually get to shine by playing home to at least a few of the era’s notable greats. A longtime supporter, Gremlin Graphics, even saw fit to release a version of its joyously fun platformer, Monty On The Run. Sadly, much like Jet Set Willy, abiding by the need to accommodate the 16K underling resulted in a lesser experience overall. And yet, Gremlin was behind the release of a platform hero’s best work; Shaun Southern’s7 Trailblazer. Southern’s Plus/4 output is prodigious and varied, having pushed games through premium publishers like Gremlin and budgets like Mastertronic alike. Through him I got to play a very passable Mr Doh! and Pengo hybrid, Tutti Frutti, his take on horizontal bike action Kikstart, a superb Minter-like Centipede shooter P.O.D., a great remodel of Jet Pak as a proto-Tetris in the form of Jetbrix and so on. I saw him as some kind of god, having created such a wide array of different games, and have them be thoroughly decent to boot. He was the first superstar programmer to me, long before I got into gaming mags and learned of the mainstream 8-bit legends.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect to consider about Plus/4 ownership was being in the position of a genuine gaming underclass. There was a mainstream with the big three, where huge licenses would get cross-format triplicate versions and novel IPs would find themselves migrating back and forth, but for the lowly Plus/4 crew, we could only look from afar with envy. I’d get to play just about everything by visiting friends, but I’d always have to return to my Plus/4 and the tidy little collection I was amassing. While I could be distracted into contentment with what I had, the idea that this was a poorer tier than the big three never left me. As such, it left me with burning aspirations and a hunger to explore those other catalogues. Being in a cultural underclass, only seeing the mainstream zeitgeist through friends and magazines, is a humbling experience when your appetite is growing exponentially - but I genuinely think it made me treasure my time with Commodore 64s and Spectrums and Amstrads all the more deeply. And naturally, feel a certain peasant thankfulness for the scraps of greatness I was able to play at home. When eventually I swapped out my Plus/4 for a second-hand Commodore 128 in Christmas 1987, I didn’t quite realise that I’d miss the little dark-grey machine with the white keys as much as I would just a few years later. Looking back now, I can barely believe my Plus/4 ownership only lasted two years. Being so formative, so fundamental to my gaming history, it feels like it was actually some vast chunk of my childhood, and yet I’ve owned a PlayStation 5 for just as long. I had that Commodore 128 for another two years before leaping into the 16-bit consoles early, and it genuinely baffles me that combined, I had Commodore 8-bits for less time than I’ve owned my Xbox Series S.

Time dilation and the affordances of youth are one thing, and it’s perhaps a lovely touch of romance that I think my Plus/4 ownership so fondly for a machine that was always so maligned in the media of the time, and which was equally maligned in any playground format debate. You couldn’t even compete, so I never had to bother. I was able to plough my own little furrow with the few friends who had Plus/4s or C16s. As mentioned, I regretted selling the Plus/4 collection in the late 80s, so when one popped up at a flea market for just £15, I snapped it up. I ended up leaving it with my parents and it went on eBay when they moved, as I didn’t have space. A shame really, as I never got to play anything on it as it didn’t have any games. Fast forward to a few years ago and I bought two off eBay, as the first one died in short order and an untested spares-and-repairs saviour arrived to donate the necessary TED chip and keyboard to gain a working system. I immediately ordered The Future Was 8-Bit’s SD2IEC mini-15418 in Plus/4 colours, and I was back in the glory days of 1986. So many of those little games are still great, in a timeless fashion, that it reminds me of the sheer resilience of the underclass. There’s a sense that survival was really fought-for here, that the system’s diet of games could have fallen into famine at any point. It’s probably that idea of being on a tightrope of survival that added an extra depth to how I feel about that little machine and its gems that I treasure. It wasn’t a vast breadbin, it was tight and compact. Like its catalogue of genuinely good games. It wasn’t my first games machine, and it wasn’t the first computer I got to know, but in the most important ways, it was the first one I loved. And I loved it because it, and the games, were mine. And that’s what really counts - to love a thing in spite of its flaws, in spite of its position in the hierarchy. To love what it gave you because it was simply good.

[21]

This is where a timely return to R-Type Final 3 makes perfect sense. With a full month to go until The Outer Worlds 2 and a worry that buying Ready Or Not may now constitute a political act I don’t want to remotely consider undertaking, the vast swathes of locked ships in Final 3 Evolved are precisely the kind of filler-game target I can knuckle down on. Having happily shot for the 101 unlocks in the original R-Type Final, it seems only right and just that I should do the same in this contemporary update and once again, this was spurred by Shmup buddy Spencer getting his suite of full unlocks, not to mention that this goal has been on my mind since purchasing. Suddenly having a convenient gap is an alignment in the stars that’s too good to pass up. This is, of course, greatly assisted by the modern sequels’ gleeful adoption of materials grinding as a chief unlocking mechanic.2 I’m deep in the weeds of trying to extract as much Etherium as I can, while also trying to whip together a passable imitation of being a decent shmup player. The comedy here is that the grind is serious - ships average around 300-500 units each of the three grinding currencies to unlock, with a playthrough on Practice difficulty netting 300 or so, for each currency, per run. When you have 50+ ships to go, it’s a fairly hefty workload but it feels attainable, and that’s perhaps a key quality for a good filler game.

This was key in my younger years as a thirtysomething Musou pervert, forever grinding out XP and weapons across a thousand battlefields as I set about unlocking every Warriors Orochi character I could, across a succession of IP-blending titles. Warriors Orochi 3 Ultimate being a shining star in that respect, it worked extraordinarily well as a filler you could return to for a few weeks at a time, incrementally filling out the grind to peak levelling with battles that became increasingly leisurely the better your characters became. There’s a lovely climb to the plateau with Musou grinds, where you end up hoving through maximal crowds with growing ease as your levelling allows you to crank up the difficulty while keeping the challenge largely the same. Musou becomes a game of efficiency more than a challenge. By the time you’re regularly running at Chaos difficulty, you’re so familiar with the ebb and flow of each stage that failure is a result of your own lazy incompetence rather than the game actually besting your skills (not that Musou ever claimed a high skill threshold in the first place). Instead, speed comes to the fore and the flow-state glory of inputting combos and directions to most rapidly deal with mobs and officers abstracts out into something nearly sublime when you’re well-versed. It takes on the 100-kills-a-second pleasure of the shmup to some extent, but also the satisfaction of puzzle game stage completions; that evergreen reward that comes from diving into raw chaos and tidying it the fuck up. There’s an intellectual music in that which always pleases and just by typing this, I’m provoked to bust out Warriors Orochi 4 and get back to it, for there is an almost Disgaea-like amount of work to do in reincarnation levelling in that motherfucker. BUT NO. We are here to play R-Type Final 3 Evolved, and hopefully become quite good at it.

There’s a bleak slapstick comedy to my re-encounter with R-Type Final 3 Evolved, as I found myself falling into oddly malformed flow-state runs that showcased my incompetence far more than displaying any innate skill born from four decades of commanding the hori-shmup. Having already run a fragmentary campaign with R-Type Final 2,3 there are vestiges of immaculate runs in my fingers, but they’re decidedly wonky. It’s a weird thing to observe yourself doing - I was surrendering to the flow, but that flow often involved making the same mistake over and over again. I was colliding with the same enemy at the same point in the level, often running the same checkpoint repeatedly for half an hour or so. All on the lower difficulties, mind, with a semi-tragic effect. At some points, and despite the best efforts of the game’s RNG, I’d find myself being killed by the same fucking bullet. Such was the comedy of the degraded flow. Shmups are all about memorisation to the point where instinct can take over. That’s where the zen lies, but for my R-Type Final 3 Evolved runs, I needed to aggressively shake off that entrancement to the flow and actually pay attention. Annoyed as I was, I had to actually learn stuff. On the lower difficulties, things like enemy and bullet density are leisurely in comparison to the upper end, but this allows you more mental capacity to plot out the sequencing of each level and begin to trace out various traversals. Much like my Musou days, these R-Type runs in easy mode are prep for the meatier work at the high end. I’ve begun pumping the difficulty up to Bydo to get much more favourable grinding currency harvests and the change in gameplay mood is wonderful. In Practice, you get plenty of challenge but it's laid in the sequence, in conquering each series of events that a stage represents, and that each offer a distinct challenge to master. The peaks of challenge on any given stage in Practice are interspersed with moments of calm, where you can charge up wave cannons and steel yourself. On Bydo, those gaps are all the more shorter as enemy waves fill the space, with their far higher shot counts pushing the play mode, your method of engagement, closer to true Danmaku territory than the meandering procession of Normal difficulty for the R-Types Final.

It’s a behaviour common to Gradius, Darius and even Scramble that the horizontal shmup journey tends to be less fraught than the unrelenting barrages of the verticals. This perhaps is down to the horizontal making much more challenge from terrain, a trait tied to the commonality that horizontals like to be low-level flights over surfaces whereas verticals are high in the sky. There are of course exceptions: Progear being the most notable, but largely the horizontal shooter likes to play with roofs and tunnels and environmental enclosure in a way that the verticals find harder to represent. This could be more a product of the culture than the capabilities of the template; Defender has trivial geography, Scramble does not and as it subsequently defines the form, the geography must continue to play a challenge role. However the verticals barely considered navigational challenges until well into the JAMMA era. This gives a subtle difference in playstyle; the horizontals, when played optimally, become more about clearing the screen of baddies than dodging their bullets, because the route you take includes environmental hazards too. A fully-loaded ship is often more than capable at reducing the challenge the player faces from enemies, so you can focus on the environmental traversal - and this is most definitely true of both Gradius and R-Type. There’s a real comedy in realising that the expert run is the easiest, because you’re carrying the full complement of power from the second or third stage onward. A slapdash amateur faces a far more gruelling slog. If you’re of the opinion that exposure is key to learning, then you’ll grind away at late-stage levels with pitifully low power-ups, and hence experience the level in a completely different way to a pro who sails through with their ship fully maxed. Getting back to the point, Bydo and R-Typer difficulties challenge that mentality altogether. Where a comfortable run on Normal or easier has you sweeping the entire screen visually, the stress-laden Bydo run has you focused on your ship and its immediate surroundings, as you have to be constantly dodging, constantly navigating. There aren’t the blissful moments where you can park your ship mid-height on the screen and just keep firing, secure in the confidence that your powers and arsenal will protect you. It’s like leaping forward a few game-complete loops in Gradius, and the fuckers are aiming right you, all the fucking time. And you have to balance the environmental traversal with the Danmaku vibes. This is the value of doing an absolute shitload of runs on Practice to get those routes cast in dendrites, to get you instinctually fluent with each stage’s sequencing. Naturally, finishing levels on the harder difficulties reaps more currency - but not that much. But of course the challenge is so much more intense above the Normal difficulty that making it through a level feels like a triumphant accomplishment. With Final 3 Evolved’s brilliant affordance of tuneable difficulty options, you can max the grind output by reducing player lives to just one ship and disabling special weapons, giving the whole thing an even greater highly-strung tension. Even if you don’t go for the min-max challenge, it’s nonetheless lovely to be able to pick and choose the intensity of each run just before you start it, something marks out the fundamental concept of R-Type Final 3 Evolved as being a cut above.

Mentioning Gradius, it’s perhaps worth stopping off at Gradius Origins for a compare and contrast session. I bought it for Switch on launch day,4 still keen to definitely master a Gradius 1CC before the end of the year. While that almost certainly isn’t going to happen, I love having so much Gradius in one package, including Salamander III. Or at least I was until I jumped back into R-Type Final 3 Evolved. For Granzella’s tribute to a tribute feels much more the correct celebration of the original, particularly in its DLC stages. Where Gradius Origins is absolutely the historical collection I wanted, it’s not the Gradius I needed, even with the quixotic 90s-fetish pseudo-sequel of Salamander III. Delightful as that is, it falls short of offering the same blend of thrilling modernity and old-school rigour of R-Type Final 3, just as Gradius V fell short of matching the ambition and high-minded conceptual creativity of R-Type Final.5 That’s not to say Gradius V was shit, nothing of the sort, but it’s not operating in the same sphere. And holy fuck, I really wish it would. Only the other day, I was recording a (failed) podcast episode with a friend and we both expressed huge and utterly insatiable desires for Treasure to do an R-Type Final with Gradius VI. It’s not as if the precedent is missing - not only are there variant craft across the Gradius series, there’s all the bonkers delights of the Parodius craft too, as well as the rest of the Konami shmup canon. The less said about Capcom’s cruel abandonment of its glorious shmup heritage the better, though perhaps I need to start a campaign about assembling a Toaplan All-Stars kickstarter should I ever be able to afford vibe-coding and AI-genning such a thing.

It all served to cement my belief that the R-Types Final are special in a way that all the others seemingly cannot even understand. I almost feel bad using it as a ‘mere’ filler game as I await the arrival of my next blockbuster pick. But it’s in that gap where R-Type Final 3 fits best, and with the time left in that gap, the quantified grind job feels very attainable indeed. I guess that’s where much of the propulsion comes from, but I can’t deny the charm and the magic of the R-Type mystique being key to it all. I wouldn’t be so enamoured if it was some unimaginative re-release. I wonder what the upcoming R-Type Delta remake will feel like in comparison to the reworked Delta stages in the Final 3 DLC. I mean, the difference in intent is right fucking there - where any formal remake is a re-tread, in R-Type Final’s purview it’s a repurposing, a re-imagining, with hundreds of ways to play it through. I doubt the Delta remake will connect to your Final saves to allow ship imports, because that would be far too cool and brilliant to actually happen. The saving grace, of course, is that R-Type Final 3 Evolved exists, and that its sensibilities are confident enough to embrace the abstractions and absurdities of spanning nearly forty years of R-Type in a single package. There’s a DLC level where you enter the universe of Mr Heli, and it’s brilliant.6 You’re suddenly in a Taito-esque Rainbow land, but with all the Final ships at your disposal. How daring, and what fun, right? Despite its formal seriousness, there’s a Parodius-like spirit at the heart of R-Type Final 3 Evolved that seems to understand that if the series died and R-Type Final was the funeral, then R-Type Final 3 Evolved is the latest dance through a wonderful, carefree afterlife.

[21]

I found myself uncommonly lucky to have my favourite template expressed across three games that I loved this year, with yet another coming in a month’s time. Avowed fell in between a lull in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and the launch of Atomfall and while those two shared some profound commonalities, it’s the brightness and deliberate artifice of Avowed that underwrites much of its charm. Yet, I struggled to pick up its thread, long after I’d put paid to other games waiting on my slate. Returning from a holiday, and well aware that The Outer Worlds 2 will be arriving shortly, it was perfectly fitting to fulfil my promise to one of this year's most undersung gems. Having felt quite some resistance to restarting it, I picked up Avowed at the final story mission in the game’s third of four major maps, Scattersharp. I had left it there knowing I’d be going to the fourth map in short order and after yet another really nice bit of dungeon-delving, we ended up at the final map, Galawain's Tusks1. What pleased me was how quickly I slipped back into proficiency with my fighting loadout - I carried a ranger’s bow and used a grimoire and dagger combo for close work. This, combined with the rogueish stealth-and-stab special power, gave me plenty of joy in that story mission’s many fights, and that was more than enough to reignite my interest in seeing the game through - and to my delight, seeing it through as a fun activity rather than obligatory chore. Beautifully, the game never flagged into a workmanlike slog for me; the acquistional arc still offered enough upgrades and skill boosts to keep me hungry in the game’s final quarter, but not so much as to be a distraction.

The story was simply fine. There was a fair amount of intrigue in reaching the endgame, which is set up to offer twin confrontations. One borne from the fundamentals of the game’s narrative setup, the other in chase of an emergent antagonist (should you have a moral compass and aren’t roleplaying as a fucking dick), and these are suitably propulsive, even if Galawain's Tusks is the least appealing of the game’s four major regions. And yet that lack of appeal feels deliberate in some mad way; it’s as if the game understands the momentum of the end-stage urge to finish, that it’s aware the player’s interest might wane should you pack that last area with too much beauty, content, loot to rinse. This may feel like a reach, but there’s a definite visual arc to the maps as you progress. They open in a strictly linear sequence, so it’s valid to suspect there’s intent in their aesthetics to increasingly sharpen the point of the player’s goals. From freeform exploration at Dawnshore, through the denser, combat-heavy Emerald Stair and into the barren, hard-edged deserts of Scattersharp, the scenery gets more hostile as opportunities to delve seem rarer. That Galawain's Tusks is a basaltic wasteland pockmarked by ruined citadels and threaded with rivers of lava is fittingly stark, given the obvious progression you’re taken through. By the time I got there, I was definitely moving from exploring the acquisition boundaries for optimal loadouts and pushing into using my loadout to burn through the narrative and its attendant gameplay challenges. Galawain's Tusks doesn’t invite an inspection of every nook and cranny, nor does it offer that many suggestions of a pathway that may end in a fun skirmish and decent loot. Instead, the map feels more aggressively funnelled towards its main story content than any of the others, which fits the hard-edged austerity of its landscape.

Avowed’s gradient of play, its guiding hand feeling all the more forceful as you approach the climax, felt great, nonetheless. It had an assured confidence that seemed less serendipitous than my accidentally perfect ride through Atomfall, but my happiness to trust Obsidian’s taste as it ushered me into its climactic end stages is a testament to how well it’d fulfilled the player/game contract since the beginning. The last of the main story areas, however, fell short of expectations.2 Where I assumed things would get really wild, they felt oddly tepid. Suitably capable, but not quite the grand leap it surely could have been - or maybe should have been? It’s hard to say, yet it felt a little at odds with the opulence of Dawnshore and the Emerald Stair, especially given the story’s signposting and stated parameters for how this last environment could be defined. Naturally, I assume this was a shortcoming of being at the end of the development cycle, a product of the squeeze on time and resources, but there is almost certainly some shortfall in creativity there too. For something telegraphed for so much of the story, its realisation fell a little flat for me. Though mercifully, it was short. Then, after the big choices had been made, there was a lovely coda to tie up some loose ends and reap the true rewards of your journey. Short of issuing spoilers, rest assured it kinda makes up for the slightly disappointing ‘narrative climax’ area, offering a lovely sense of unexpected and uncharted territory lying just a step beyond the confines of the formal main story, a fitting end to the game’s circle, and a final slab of grand battling that reaps what you’d previously sown to great effect.

There was a critical point, just before the narrative point of no return, where I was able to fashion a kickass weapon from special material I’d bothered to acquire. The options were limited to two weapons - a one-handed sword or an arquebus (a rifle, fyi). Having tired of the bow, I went for the comedy musket and was immediately rewarded with a supreme weapon. This really had a Borderlands vibe, as it was the kind of miraculous, over-levelled equipment that lives in your inventory forever, but in Avowed’s case, it came right at the end and fundamentally changed my combat approach. This highlights Obsidian’s greatness for me: an almost iconoclastic invitation to change tack, right as the game reaches its most challenging combat sequences. And what fun it was! It opened up a host of new possibilities for an NG+ run, when such a thing arrives. Though for me, and much like Atomfall, I’m absolutely happy with what I got and feel little urge to go back. And again, just like Atomfall, I’m filled with a warm affection for what it was to me. There’s something fundamentally endearing in Avowed’s heart, and something truly great in its soul. It feels like it’s destined to be the eternal hidden gem of sorts. So quickly forgotten in the flurry of 2025 releases, so quickly drowned in the tidal waves of memes and praise for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II3 that Avowed feels smaller and less prominent by default, it feels like an underdog awaiting rediscovery or a fucking NoClip documentary about its greatness and how everyone should feel bad and stupid for not playing it at the time. Not that I think it matters that much to Obsidian, although maybe it is Obsidian’s Deathloop, if not quite as superbly conducted. Yet it is superbly crafted. Like Prey it’s inexplicably ignored, or consigned as merely ‘mid’, despite its obvious humanity and charms. And yet, it’s not quite the definitive statement that Prey was. And even after finishing it, Avowed carries the air of some preparatory study, a model for similar world-building and systems for The Outer Worlds 2 maybe? I speculated about that way back in my February review - though I can concede that’s probably got a lot to do with my hopes for that sequel rather than any concrete truth. Despite that sense of it being a second fiddle to Obsidian’s actual big games, Avowed commands respect and praise. It’s a delightful game and a genuinely helpful one. A brilliantly adapted adventure that slots with frictionless ease into the timetables and scant affordances of playtime for the over-40s. A special treat for gamer parents, perhaps, but absolutely an illustration of how a good-hearted game should be. A game of maturity, that in some way echoes Obsidian’s own mature sensibilities as a studio that, if you follow the Black Isle Studios lineage, is nearly thirty years old. In that context, Avowed’s qualities and motivations make perfect sense. It’s an expression of three decades, a golden braid woven from the 1990s to here - and this pulls a lot of its oddly 90s vibes into focus. And as I mentioned in comparison to Atomfall, its sage lack of over-ambition and its contentment to simply be itself, unapologetically, without aspiration to that which it cannot attain, is a lesson in humility. One that the grandiose, over-expensive big shots should definitely be paying attention to.

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