2023: The Definitive Review
Holy Jesus. What is that?
After taking a long and involuntary break from writing, it feels somewhat fitting to return with the most predictable content imaginable; a seasonal end-of-year review. However you can rest assured that my gaming year was definitely divergent from the mainstream, especially given that 80% of mainstream AAA output is physically poisonous to my soul. Rather than comment on the comings and goings of the industry and its output, instead I have compiled a diary of what I played in the hope that it offers some insight into my increasingly niche and over-specialised interests.
JANUAREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Moving from Deathloop to Cyberpunk 2077 is quite the combination. And what a privileged step it was. I kinda reviewed Deathloop within my piece on Panam Palmer, and then did it again (with far more pretension) in my Arkane retrospective. Cyberpunk’s curious humanity was the core of my Panam piece, and I wrote very briefly about the wonder of the Night City environment in another piece about wasted worlds, and yet I still feel like I haven’t written enough about Cyberpunk. Don’t worry though, I have secret plans to play Phantom Liberty in the new year, so I’m sure something will come up. But of the two, I am much more haunted by Deathloop’s Blackreef as a dreamlike space forever seared into the retina of my mind’s eye1. Cyberpunk failed this ascendance by refusing to have skies the colour of a TV tuned to static. Deathloop simply excelled in all of its environments by singing a song that connects geographical nostalgia for the primordial igneous shores of Northern Ireland with a personal affinity for 60s sci-fi freak aesthetics, Victorian architecture and brutalist cold-war military infrastructures. But it also captured weather with a certain panache; it was a game that frequently had me tugging at an imagined scarf to avoid the cutting winds that blow across a northern coastline. Perhaps you need to have felt that specific style of coldness to get the in-game resonance. But for all its obvious non-reality, Deathloop brought me a lucid and tangible sense of geolocale that I find myself treasuring more and more, perhaps even superceding my beloved curves of acquisition and the material satisfaction they bring. But hey, I still really loved Cyberpunk, OK? It was just a touch too sunny.
On eBay, I bought Sensible Software’s first (?) professional release, Galaxibirds, for the Commodore 64, Mercenary for the ZX Spectrum (jewel case), separate tapes of Mercenary and Mercenary: The Second City for the Atari 400/800 (clamshell, instructions) and Tetris for the DMG-01 Gameboy (loose cart).
FEBURENNUI
Think I was still deep in Cyberpunk for Valentine’s Day. In fact, I was! I’d spent a lot of January on side content and levelling, and then committed to finishing the main story for Feb, including nearly all of the final mission run variants, all of which were fucking awful2. This included immensely painful and sustained photo-mode sessions involving Panam looking stoic while waiting for me to commit to something or other. For Phantom Liberty, I have already sworn an oath to spend at least 50% of my playtime as a wandering paparrazo-cum-street-photographer, having been inspired by a handful of actually quite nice shots I took of random NPCs. I suspect this utterly inconsequential frippery may be considerably more rewarding than the DLC’s main story, immaculately modelled Idris Elba notwithstanding. February also brought Hitman’s freelancer mode, which I played with a bit but struggled to find the right approach for its obsessively punitive escalations. Parking it for a while, I ended up going fully weirdo with it in the summer.
I did not buy anything from eBay in February. Clearly, something terrible had happened to my bank balance.
MARCHANE
Fuckin’ Dishonored playthrough innit. What a wonderful journey, to return to something really quite old and find it functionally as adroit and satisfying as anything modern. An indictment of the stagnation in game design or a mark of Arkane’s greatness?3 But the harmony chimes so wonderfully - the game’s impressionist lens remains visually as exciting and deliciously stylish as it was on release. No vogue-to-cringe ageing here - Dishonored’s painterly style can be certified as wonderfully timeless, flattering the reduced geometry to an unexpected degree. It was also a particular delight to have Cyberpunk as this AAA colossus sandwiched between two Arkane titles, bringing a real nourishment for a player who is frequently bored and uninspired by the relative safety of much of modern AAA fare. In period, I never got the DLC for Dishonored, so leaping straight into the Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches episodes carried the momentum for a farewell to Dunwall that left me with a wider sense of the game’s remarkable achievements.
On eBay I bought the Usborne book Understanding the Micro4, Mercenary on tape for the Atari 400/800 again AND another copy of Mercenary for the ZX Spectrum (clamshell release).
APRI-SKI
Having thoroughly rinsed Dishonored and its DLC and ending with commendably low chaos, it was onto another Arkane masterpiece, Mooncrash. I had actually skipped this, despite adoring Prey with a burning passion. Something about the roguelikery put me off, plus its release timing just didn’t fit. I think I may have been ultra deep in Yakuza 6 at the time, which may go some way to explaining things. Thankfully, April meant I could throw myself at Mooncrash with extraordinary vigour and as such, I fucking loved it. I was immediately ravished by the beautiful retrofuturist environmental design, and found even more joy from the hyper-utilitarian NASA realism of the orbital capsule. This was a cause of much regret as I didn’t namecheck this in my review of Starfield, but I did credit Cyberpunk for much the same deployment of highly realistic space hardware. SHAME ON ME.
On eBay I bought yet another Mercenary and Second City on cassette for the Atari 400/800, but an actually rare double-jewel case example, using box art and labelling that was far more common for the retail 16-bit releases. I suspect there are other Mercenary double-tape packs for the other formats, and I recall missing out on a Spectrum +3 disk version in the same packaging. I also bought another clamshell of Atari 400/800 Mercenary because I accidentally bid 99p and fucking won. I also got a genuine Mercenary pin badge and, after more than a year of searching, a retail copy for the Atari ST5. This is how you pay tribute to a completely undersung and forgotten masterpiece, you fucking assholes.
MAYBE?
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh, Redfall. When the greatest crime is mediocrity, Bethesda and Arkane must have issued quite the sigh of relief when Forspoken set the bar for drab non-excellence and shortly after Redfall’s release, Gollum arrived to fall on its sword with considerably greater public reaction and howling mockery (across a thousand vertical video clips) than a bunch of YouTube critics complaining that Arkane’s latest was a bit average. As glitchy and thin as the game was, I played Redfall right through to the final two boss fights, for which I really could not be fucked. I was left with the sense of a thoroughly decent world that was robbed of a really promising first-person adventure in favour of a mandated co-op lootershooter that was doomed to fail. I still suspect some internal subterfuge at play to make sure Arkane was never mandated to attempt a Destiny ever again. Redfall carried haunted whispers and echoes of what could have been. Not just in the single set-piece story mission that everyone talked about, but moreso across its representation of a Carpentarian suburbia, of the universes of experience in each enterable dwelling and local business. There remains the potential for blending Carpenter’s grandest tropes and peerless talent for dread-laden atmospheres into the Arkane mode, but we have to remember that Carpenter really fucked it when he got too deeply into vampires. LET’S HOPE ARKANE DOESN’T MAKE THAT MISTAKE TWICE, EH?6
Turns out I went fucking bonkers on eBay in May, so here’s a list:
Armalyte on cassette, C64. £13! This fucker is often listed at £40 starting prices and nabbing this completed my ‘early cycle’ set Thalamus tapes, all of which still load. Glorious beyond words.
PAL SNES with 2 pads and Streetfighter II for £58
SNES Super R-Type and Cybernator, loose carts, £26.59
SNES Super Mario World, £12
Amiga Mercenary and Second City, in the same double jewel pack as the rarer Atari 8-bit one from last month. £1!
DMG-01 Gameboy Gradius, Japanese. £9.95
PAL Megadrive Truxton, £9
PAL Dreamcast Bangai-O , £34.99. Purchase of the fucking year.
PAL Wii Madworld, £5.99
I have no regrets.
JUNO 60
I once borrowed a Roland Juno 60 off a friend when I was 20 or 21. I had it in the summer, so it’s possible it was actually in June. I soon came to absolutely love that synthesiser and explored every slider and toggle switch, finding it to be astonishingly versatile for sound design. I also discovered that it discharged mains voltage through a screw on the side, which was quite the surprise. Sampling stuff into an Amiga, I’d fiddled with such obsessional verve that I’d recreated all sorts of favourite bass sounds, lush pads with beautiful envelopes, amazing synth leads and even discovered how to make a TR-909 kick and snare and TR-808 hats. I saved them all into the Juno’s memory, much to the delight of my friend who’d never got the hang of programming the machine but now had it filled with my presets. He went off to do multi-instrumentalist prog like an ersatz Mike Oldfield while I got on with the serious work of learning how to make techno in Protracker. But I’ll always have fond memories of that synth and my time with it, as some kind of techo-fetishistic holiday romance. In a similar bent, I spent much of the 2023 summer having a holiday romance as Agent 47, grinding out huge swathes of content in the Hitman Trilogy. Having been spurred on by Summer GDQ’s allowance of a Hitman Freelancer run, I went deep on freelancing before turning back to the game’s traditional offerings in elusive targets and escalation contracts, wherein I tried to pull off the (actually quite difficult) escalations with my signature style of peerless stealth until the point where I make a careless mistake, with ludicrously careless slaughter following in quick succession. As a grinding game, Hitman isn’t the first that comes to mind but it’s a total darling if you get into its groove and, naturally, IOI’s absolutely commendable re-use of environments shines as an example to all.
I didn’t buy anything on eBay in June, probably because I was banned after the previous month.
JULIANNA
In July, I constantly started new games of Deathloop so I could bask in the glowing love and kindness of having Julianna stab me to death, over and over again in the tutorial. NOT REALLY. I was still deep in Hitman grinding, probably still doing arcade escalations. On eBay, I bought the ST version of Damocles, the Mercenary sequel only on 16-bits, and my third cassette copy of Monty on the Run for the Commodore 64, which actually loaded! I was absolutely delighted with this turn of events, then absolutely dismayed to find I’d forgotten which escape kit items you needed and was too cross to Google it. Monty on the Run has been something of a white whale in terms of getting a loading copy, but it’s not as bad as Pastfinder. I’ve bought four copies of that and none of them have loaded on my Commodore 64 tape setup (which loads 90% of what I buy, as it goes). It’s reached the point where I’m seriously considering making a supremely Gen-X submission to the Millennial scum behind The Back Page’s Games Court as surely there’s something heroic in my commitment to a C64 tape collection that still loads that the court needs to hear. I’m convinced PS1 Hagrid would be down with that shit.
AUGUSTINE
In what was possibly the shittest August possible for weather, I decided to fill a Clancyverse gap in my gaming history with a £3 copy of The Division on PS4. Now, I have spent a lot of time in Ubisoft’s purgatorial hell-holes of remorseless and endless killing, but The Division as a solo experience is possibly the most depressing and misanthropic videogame I have ever played. There’s a certain sociopathy with how it casts the desperate gangs pushed to violence as vermin to be extra-judicially exterminated, and something extraordinarily right-wing in its meagre allowance of offering single aid items to clearly distressed and endangered civilians, who must then give you material possessions in return. The artificial economies and multivariate paths of exploitation spewed across a bleakly abandoned New York feels like some hollow harbinger for what happens when monetisation challenges artistic goals for primacy. A far graver comment on the company and its sociology than perhaps Ubisoft intended? Maybe I’ll write about it at some point next year.
No games from eBay this month, but a vintage Judge Dredd collection for me and a Star Wars graphic novel for my eldest.
SEPTEMBAR, OCTOBLE and NEVEMBER
Starfield. It’s my game of the year.
This is for entirely quixotic and utterly perverse reasons but as outlined in my review, Starfield met my expectations and laid out months of joyously zen grinding in a template I absolutely adore. I’m still at it, really, but I’ve decided to have a holiday with Far Cry 6 (for completionist reasons) and, like, 30 mins of Returnal (as I just got a PlayStation 5). For most of September I was establishing my Starfield skill set and ticking off two of the faction questlines. I did the other two in October and then spent November on my personal grind to get every skill and acquire materials (etc) to shoot for an ultimate outpost build at some point in an undefined future. And I fucking love this. Shamelessly so. I can’t wait for the new content to arrive and I really hope it introduces a load more bugs and glitches in true Bethesda style. It’s not real if it isn’t fucked, right? On a Discord, a friend who was unexpectedly loving the game said it felt middle-aged, like us. And ultimately, I think that is the point around which the Starfield furore orbits. There is a generational gap at play. Old heads are still thankful for the wild affordances and forgive so much more readily, perhaps. Millennials have far higher standards, but also lionise Mass Effect like a bunch of swivel-eyed imbeciles who couldn’t appreciate decent space opera if pissed in their laps and instead fell hook, line and sinker for a seafaring fantasy game dressed up in spaceships and plasma guns. As a very wise man once said, “when you’re up to your eyeballs in slime and lasers, that’s everything” - but he was talking about his loyalty to an officer on trial for war crimes in a massively corrupted court case controlled by an emperor-in-waiting trying to erase said officer’s relationship from her past, which ends up with a band of rebels attacking the base, killing the presiding admiral serving as judge and allowing the war criminal officer to escape and set off a series arc. Now that’s fucking space opera, you remorselessly uninspiring copyist assholes, not romancing a blue alien space woman before mechanoid tentacle villains destroy the entire galaxy for tiresome reasons, stolen without any real care or further development from rejected ideas J.M.S. accidentally posted on alt.tv.bab5 in 1997.
On eBay I bought Ballblazer on cassette for the Commodore 64. It didn’t load. Another one for the Games Court submission.
DECIMATOR
Far Cry 6. Very few games have had me disdainfully mutter “this fucking game” during play as much Far Cry 6, which is a real achievement considering how much disdain I can muster for these games, despite their remarkably pleasing gameplay loops. And Ubisoft must be commended for the new innovations the game brings, of which there are hardly any. However the one thing the series really needed after Far Cry 5 were more options for animal cruelty, and I have never accidentally immolated as many horses and dogs as I have in the two short weeks I’ve spent with this fucking game. Obviously this needles me, as I’ve also installed Rollerdrome and am wondering why the fuck aren’t I playing that (or Returnal) right now? What a prick!
I didn’t buy anything on eBay this month but hold tight - there’s still a couple of days left for me to buy another copy of Mercenary.
And lo, 2023 comes to an end. My gaming journey has, by and large, been a very satisfying one. But then I’m becoming such an extremist with my selections that it’s hardly surprising7. Perhaps it’s a testament to the insanely rich catalogue we now have to wander through on our own idiosyncratic whims, with the mainstream to be damned. It’s funny to think that 20 years ago, a player could quite realistically manage to play and complete nearly everything critically-acclaimed that’s released each month. Now it’s utterly impossible, so all we have left is to succumb to the sirens’ call of our prejudices and peccadillos. Or at least try and complete Bujingai, you fucking lightweight.
[21]
Of course, the television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Soon, we will all have television names? How disturbingly prescient was that? Given the gap between Videodrome and everyone getting Internet names, I’d guess we’re actually overdue for sledgehammer truths from Existenz liquifying our brains; or perhaps the clouding of truth and untruth was simply true at the time and we did fuck all about it…
If I was a modern Max Renn, I’d be shooting Barry Convex during a GDC talk about how fucking great his game’s main story was. I’d then shout my credo to the new flesh of AI being used to iterate infinite side content that’s curated by BEN FUCKING SCHRODER, CHELLA FUCKING RAMANAN and EMILY FUCKING GERA and released on a weekly basis. YES, LIKE A FUCKING SOAP OPERA. BECAUSE THAT’S THE POINT.
Both, obviously.
If you think my game collecting is a bit much, wait till you see the fucking non-fiction books I buy in ridiculous quantities.
Getting the ST version of Mercenary rounded off all the hardware formats for my collection, which is a much greater achievement than that perfunctory sentence suggested. I still need C64, Spectrum and Amstrad disk copies to complete the UK set. They are generally as rare as they are expensive. :(
The reveal that Arkane Lyon was working on a fucking Blade game almost reduced me to tears. How awful to have a studio of such vision, artistry and imagination contracted to a licensed IP. I appreciated Dinga’s enthusiasm on Twitter, but I can’t say it feels in the studio’s best interests creatively. At least it’s not out for fucking years, suggesting something secret may arrive in the interim, but it certainly worries me that Arkane without Raphaël Colantonio isn’t the same Arkane I admired with such passion.
I mean, I didn’t go anywhere near Tears of the Kingdom because I’ve barely dented Breath of the Wild, so it seems wrong to leapfrog to the shiny new thing. I can only apologise profusely and promise that I’ll complete them both when my kids give me back my fucking Switch.