In short, TNNS can be described as Super Pong Bros. 3, and can only be played on a touch-screen.

TNNS is a decision-engine, but not for you. Your decision is a question with one answer that is asked every half-second.

Is the ball coming at you? If "yes," put your paddle on it.

If "no," then the question will be asked again in 0.5 seconds.

If you can answer that question, The Game Will Continue To Exist. The objective is to continue. Right? Right! Right. People with salaries are looking at spreadsheets right now (probably in California!), trying to figure out how game-ify things that people would rather not be doing. The theory goes, those some people might be alright doing those undesirable things if their actions were being quantified with numbers. They're ostensibly trying to make "continuation" more tangible -- to make it a finer grade of sand.

Being is boring. The infinite number of decimal points between integers 1 and 2 is not. Right? Right?!

"[The Last Story] is Gears of Swords."

Sometimes, when you're walking along in the cobblestoned Lazulis City early on in The Last Story, the princess Calista might get careless when she's following you and whack her head on the sign hanging above the blacksmith's shop. It looks like it hurts. She winces the same way anybody would.

You helped her give some guards the slip. She is following you because she likes you. She hurt her head because she's a person. The Last Story is going to teach you how to love.

Some modern games have their auto-pilots set to: "cruise," a plush rug that's nice between your toes and looks good next to a Metacritic score of 86. Final Fantasy XIII-2, however, has its auto-pilot set to: "beautiful," or, at least, beautiful to somebody that has stared at the moon for too long. Whatever Final Fantasy XIII-2 was intending to make you "feel," it has failed, because nobody would try to mass-distribute a sugarcane-enema-simulation for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 on purpose.

The following is a transcription of a telephone conversation with my father concerning Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a movie by the man who directed WANTED.

Killzone 3

| | |

(originally published May 18, 2012)

"It's just your gun occupying Killzone's world. If the gun was a more fun person to pal around and goof off with, then this would be acceptable..."

Put down your vaporizer and that bottle of Quaaludes, we're going to deconstruct concept of "winning" at online videogames. Killzone 3 does not do this. It does not win at offline videogames either. It's the expensive chew-toy that your dog perpetually ignores because it's spiky and it makes her gums bleed. It mashes its terrible haircut, let's say, for example, a weave, into a discolored biomass. Interacting with this world is a joyless affair.

T

"Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is simply the illusion of control via the illusion of simulation."

Before there was cleverness in videogames, there was cruelty. Metal Gear Solid 2 is a game made by Hideo Kojima, a man that doesn't like you. He doesn't you, he doesn't like his fans, he doesn't like making Metal Gear games over and over. He tried to quit a bunch of times, but then Japanese people rioted. He probably wanted to just produce games instead of directing, throw some good ideas at hungry developers so they could make things like Zone of the Enders (* * out of 4) or Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (* * * out of 4). He's an abstract and an "ideas man." He's too resentful to expect the player to understand his message when he speaks his mind within the context of a game. Kojima likes messing with people, offering a co-worker a handful of M&M's, and then laughing at them when they bit down on what were actually painted pebbles that he'd stayed up after lights-out to prepare. His is a character with no motivation -- he just does.

". . .an adventure set within the architecture of a sub-human mind."

"It's bad parenting."

". . .(it does not turn) escapism into algebra."

". . .the sequel to youth."

In a mixture of moods, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword's first hour contained abundant, bizarre sexual innuendo, and a fully-orchestral soundtrack that sounded like an actual French horn trying its hardest to mimic a bumbling 8-bit Famicom chip-tune. We had arrived at an unanticipated challenge. Well, we thought we had, but then we were rescuing agreeable seed-creatures from piggish malcontents in the forest fifteen minutes later, cementing Skyward Sword's status as a veiled insult from an old friend, a notion that probably has its own word in German or an older Russian dialect with no direct translation into English.

Saints Row: The Third

| | |

(originally published November 30, 2011)

". . .[Saints Row: The Third] a super-deformed, weaponized-speedball that knows the difference between good and evil."
 

There has been serendipitous fun in videogames for more than 25 years. Beating The Legend of Zelda in one sitting is serendipitous fun. Running through a grand prix cup in Super Mario Kart with the always-tiny cheat is serendipitous fun. Juggling a velociraptor with a quad rocket-launcher in Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is serendipitous fun. Doing backflips off the highway median in a stolen Yakuza sportscar in Grand Theft Auto III is madness and all-consuming and fun. These things are special because we discover them within a defined, but easily violated, set of rules that the videogame has laid out before us (. . .rules like gravity). This madness becomes ours and becomes true, golden escapism. Even if we are told somebody else discovered that exact same bar of gold, it's never theirs, it's ours. As far as we're concerned, dad invented speedruns when he accidentally beat Super Mario Bros. in 1989 in eight minutes.

Saints Row: The Third was probably made by a covenant of college students that spent a lot of time avoiding responsibility for their actions in Liberty City, probably the GTA3 version, and they learned where serendipitous fun came from, challenging us now with the question: "Why brew our game from anything that isn't instinct, projected?" That's freedom -- not being given the ability to do anything and told to find your fun, but rather anticipating what people will want to do with the dark materials given to them.

ExciteTruck

| | |

(originally published November 9, 2011)

"ExciteTruck is the best game created for the Nintendo Wii."

With the grace and civility displayed by a boxcar dweller performing "King Lear" while on acid, the Nintendo Wii, despite its side-show freakery, did not need to exist. It was an inelegant success for a year and a half. You could control it with a bathroom scale and pretend to ski-jump with Bowser and Sonic the Hedgehog. The best thing about the Wii was that it reminded lapsed videogame players that they had once been children that were capable of grinning. The system's design had the word "nostalgia" written on top of every brainstorm document and it was always written in pen. Lines shot out of that one big word, leading out to smaller bubbles that held words like "Mario," "Mario Kart," and "Your Older Sister." The system was based around the same idea that Brad Pitt's character, Tyler Durden, thought up in Fight Club -- level the playing field and take everybody back to zero.

Dark Souls

| | |