Vanquish

| | |

(originally published October 5, 2011)

"Vanquish is stupid. It is fighting stupid with stupid."

Know this: the “rocket-slide” button in Vanquish pulls double-duty as the “smoke-cigarettes” button.

First released in 2010 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Vanquish joins the Japanese developer PlatinumGames Inc.’s expanding back catalog on Steam. We need to celebrate this. Vanquish volleyed forth a tongue-in-cheek counter-argument to a decade of western action design sensibilities in 2010. In 2017, the joke is finally landing.

It turns out this joke began in 1992.

"[Jane Eyre] That's humanity. It's a time-traveling bullshit-breaking missile, killing insecurities, past and present, with chemical weapons that violate the Geneva Conventions."

This is a creeping story about outdated ideas presented through a modern lens. It's a lady-movie that has a gender-neutral opinion on what it means to be emotionally miserable. Progressive! English countrysides, stupid rules -- mental, emotional, and meta-physical demons crawl the background. It's a chick flick staged as a gritty ghost story. There are old books that were written with the intention to trundle on for months and months, dragging a reader down with them. In many ways, those stories were ahead of their time. You are meant to read them chapter by chapter, digesting them slowly, distancing yourself when you don't have time to read or can't stand the story's boredom or the villains' cruelty anymore. Remember for the entire back half of Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff was donkey-punching every stable emotion he encountered? Urgh. You can only process so much slobbering misery in book-form. As a movie though, you're stuck with it for a limited engagement. Movies are watched in one sitting. You're there from beginning to end -- there's no escape and that's a good thing. You're there, just like characters, bound by stupid rules.

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus

| | |

(originally published July 27, 2011)

"If [Sly Cooper] The Thievius Raccoonus were a real eBook, its marked-down $99.99 price would crash the Amazon servers, this all after a 52-week stint as a bestseller with a sticker price of $firstborn."

The best videogame in the world is a mixture of Red Bull, vodka, smelly ink, velvety poetry, half of those good notes a jazzman isn't playing, and that one girl across the room. Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is several of these things, retold as a music video. It is the best piece of fan fiction that you wrote based on your favorite Saturday morning cartoon, as edited by Paul Krugman. A lot of the time, you're re-enacting Walt Disney's bold, visionary remake of Shigeru Miyamoto's 1996 platformasterpiece Super Mario 64, and the rest of the time, you're Scotch-taping your older sister's cheap scarf to your lower back and waving a lacrosse stick, shouting: "Broken glass! Broken glass is the gift for the man who has everything!"

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

| | |

(originally published June 15, 2011)

"[The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is] the best prom ever!"

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is the day in your life that you look back upon years down the road and say: "That was the last time anybody ever treated me right." Chronologically, Majora stands after your loss of innocence but before the onset reality of adulthood. In Majora, you say goodbye to firefly-questions, and accept that you do indeed have to live in a world where you must consciously accept your ignorance to the universe around you -- a universe that is entirely full of monsters and that you must nonetheless live in until the day you die. Majora is the first and only time you experience genuine, crystal-clear, 1080p, surprising euphoria following the appropriate build-up.

"[Muse's Black Holes & Revelations] makes you question your own ability to kick ass, then gives you all the tools you need to strut across the peak of Olympus Mons like you don't give a shit that you can't breathe methane or carbon dioxide. Go forth and #SLAM_DANCE!"

Human imagination is a horrifying thing. This album's cover features a bunch of REM-looking motherfuckers sitting on Mars drinking tea. Calmly. Something in the artists' lives inspired them (imagining the electrical whirring of the human mind) to make the music that inspired the album, that inspired the cover, that inspired us to listen to the music that made us imagine a Acropolis-themed nightclub housed on a space-zeppelin's lower deck orbiting Mars' second moon, Phobos.

"[Sucker Punch is] like Michael Moore's version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That movie would blow, and so does this."

The titular sucker punch refers to the fact that you, moviegoer, are what powers shallow, exploitative, CGI-soaked power-fantasies that dominate modern Hollywood. And that's why this movie is hard to enjoy, even when its German/orc/robot bodycount is in the hundreds.

Final Fantasy IX

| | |

(originally published March 3, 2011)

“Final Fantasy IX is a videogame, meditating.”

There’s a difference between prolonged self-reflection and cowardice. Not risking anything can be a huge risk. You might stagnate. You might be accused of not caring, of beating a dead horse, or of trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Merely pretending to not take a risk though... that is a legitimate creativity Philosopher’s Stone. Aha, and now we can venture into the realm of satire, a flexible form if executed well. It grants you the ability to toy with critics, lean on well-worn supports, bait, switch, lure, surprise, skew, skewer, parody, honor, celebrate, and prove your understanding of creativity’s contents. If done correctly, that is. It allows you to laugh at your flaws and comment on myth—leaning too hard on self-reference can make art impenetrable though, and fortunately, Square and Hironobu Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy IX’s producer, knew exactly what they were doing when they crafted this timely, retro-piece. In the hive-mind that acts as the capitol city to http://www.ghostlittle.com/, Final Fantasy IX is universally recognized as the third best video game of all time, a position it’s held for 11 years now. Here’s why: