BPM++ and Last Load Save have each selected three garbage gems from the seventh generation of gaming. Games that wanted to swing for the fences but fell on their faces trying to stand up. For Three weeks we’ll make our case for why our selected games deserve just one more chance before dying quietly in the eighth generation like they deserved.

As the audience, you hold all the power! Read both arguments, then vote for your favorite using the poll at the bottom of the page. The losing game gets eliminated from the bracket until only one busted, overlooked, abandoned survivor raises the trophy.

No do overs. No mercy. Just two writers going hand-to-hand over games the internet have largely agreed are ass, and you deciding who wins.

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FINAL ROUND - FIGHT!

Load Last Save - ‘Red Faction: Armageddon’

Armageddon sick of all these shooters.

Armageddon is the disappointing follow up to Red Faction: Guerilla. Instead of being an open-world destruction sandbox, it’s a linear third person shooter. Play as Mason- no, not Alec Mason, Darius Mason- as he goes on a cave expedition to rid Mars of its cricket infestation. If someone promised you more Red Faction, but instead gave you a pest control simulator, you’d be pissed, and rightfully so.

WTF is Red Faction: Armageddon?

Even the game’s plot is disappointing. The Red Faction series has always been about power struggles between the underclass and powerful corporations. Armageddon artfully sidesteps this tradition and gives players a story about ancient monsters and planetary takeovers. There’s an evil cultist who looks like Quan Chi from Mortal Kombat, who wants to take over Mars. To do this, he’ll use a giant drill, bore straight into the planet, releasing ancient demons from their sleep forever spell, so they can walk upon Mars and get resituated, and undo all the progress that the humans have created. It’s DOOM again. Our hero, Darius Mason, must use his wits, guns and millennial writing quips to stop this dastardly plan.

The game itself is a bog-standard 3^rd person shooter. Enter a level, shoot some aliens, listen to audiologs and radio chatter, follow the waypoint down the hall. NPCs that yap about ranks, sitreps and all that military jargon. It has regenerating health- but no cover system, cooldown-based abilities, a crappy progression system and of course plenty of turret sections. All wrapped up in brown and grey graphics. It’s as seventh gen as it gets.

There’s also a gun that makes black holes.

Why Vote Red Faction: Armageddon?

This game might be just like the others we’ve talked about in this Clash of Clowns, but it has one key difference: It’s good. Okay, maybe good is stretching it. It’s decent. Pretty alright. Not just when compared to the atrocities we’ve played here, either. It’s hard to find a game that doesn’t look good when put next to Kane & Lynch, or God forbid Quantum Theory, but Red Faction: Armageddon is a solid game. It’s just that it was horrifically disappointing.

I think this game could have used a second shot. It was billed as the next Red Faction game, just after Guerilla. That game was a huge hit. It was a technical marvel of a physics engine with a mediocre third person shooter stapled on. No one cared that the shooting mechanics were basic, the vehicles handled like crap, the enemy AI was awful, that the missions were tedious or that the world was 98% rock. It let you destroy a massive building with explosives, and it simulated all of its bits and pieces falling in real time. That alone was worth $60.

Armageddon doesn’t do that. It still has an impressive physics engine, and it uses it well, but it’s not free. You can’t drive a car into an apartment building and watch it collapse. You’re trapped in a tiny stone hallway surrounded by aliens. There are vehicles, but you can only use them in certain levels. It’s a third person shooter, and that was the worst part of Guerilla.

Thing is, this game does the shooting bit well. The guns are varied and fun. You can shoot lasers and melt your enemies or shoot a black hole at them. There’s a magnet gun, which lets you slam enemies into the environment. The destruction engine isn’t always used to destroy huge buildings, but it makes every explosion look incredible. Hitting something with a rocket blasts it into hundreds of tiny pieces, like you just roundhouse kicked a jigsaw puzzle. Gunplay is a two part equation: how a gun feels to shoot, and what happens when you shoot it. Most games focus on part one, but Armageddon excels at the latter by making every shot feel fantastic, as every bullet rips apart bits of the background and, oftentimes, the floor you’re standing on.

If this game is as good as I say it is, then why was it such a disappointment? It sold poorly enough to kill the entire franchise. That must mean no one wanted it. That much is true, no one wanted it at the time. The simple fact that it wasn’t more of what people wanted from Guerilla was enough to kill this game’s momentum. It doesn’t matter if the game is fine, if no one cares enough to even try it out. The game’s horrific marketing didn’t help, either. It made a big deal of Mr. Toots, a hidden weapon that was a unicorn that shot rainbow lasers from its ass. OMG, rainbow laser unicorn? WTF, that is so freaking random. What will they think of next? Mayhaps a waffle cannon?

The fact that it was yet another 7th gen third person shooter, combined with the millennial cringe marketing made a lot of people, myself included, think this game was a massive pile of shit. A quick cash-in on Guerrilla’s previous success.

A straight sequel to this game would be great. They could iron out some of the wrinkles in Armageddon, like some of the weird physics interactions. Make the levels a bit more open, add more than three enemy types. Make some sections that take place on the surface, so that you don’t spend every waking second in that game staring at rocks. Make it so that the last fourth of the game doesn’t suddenly turn into Dynasty Warriors with 300 enemies coming at you at once. Armageddon’s last two hours deserve every ounce of hate the rest of the game gets. That one’s justified.

They could even combine Armageddon and Guerrila. Have each stage be a large map with open-ended objectives. Let the player tackle them however they want. A mission-driven sandbox without the need to drive across a barren wasteland for minutes between every task. Plop the player in a giant EDF base with a few vehicles begging to be hot-wired and rammed into an office. Have some side objectives, hide explosives and weapons around to encourage exploration, let the player think outside the box and blow shit up like they want.

Donkey Kong Bananza already proved that you can have big, destructible levels and structured challenges. The next Red Faction game should look to that for inspiration and turn Mason into a giant ape. Or make more interesting levels.

Either way, vote Red Faction: Armageddon. Worst case scenario, we get more Red Faction.

VOTE Red Faction: Armageddon!

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BPM++ - ‘Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013 ’

All Rise for the new Baboon King!

Let me give you a little lesson about the writing biz. If you tell writers they can pen, they’ll deliberately write the fun outta EVERYTHING in favor of producing fancy prose. Fortunately, I’m more of a children’s birthday magician than a writer; I know my audience, and I know they love misdirection and gimmicks, and the rabbits in my hat are continuity and trash-taste. A while back, told y’all that “BPM++ can easily spend hours on end telling you why some game you’ve never heard of is actually a misunderstood masterpiece,” and god, do I have a heater for you. Since the beginning, I emphasized that to win in this generation, games needed to BE PROVOCATIVE and GET THE PEOPLE GOING! As the 7th generation wound down, the hits were still stacking up, the gears of war had finally ground to a halt, and every player was accepting the Call… of Duty.

In the same year that Mike Vick famously tweeted “only the survive.” Cabelas, a hunting brand known for lightgun cabinet games that filled interstate truck stops and the breakroom of Amish markets, asked a question that would put their entire series into the grave: “What if hunting endangered animals was as EXTREME as killing terrorists?” Well, I have returned from this game’s brink of insanity as the new baboon king, as I introduce to you, BPM++’s Final Round Champion, Cauldron and Activision 2012’s ‘Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013.’ Released on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Windows, and Wii.

WTF is Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013?

Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013, aka Call of Duty: Fauna Warfare, traded in their “prestigious” reputation with southern grandfathers for the chance to ingratiate themselves with COD players in hopes they’d use whatever leftover pocket change they had to purchase the opportunity to shoot digital Big Game species with a lightgun. On paper, Activision saw this as a lay-up; a demographic of men who enjoyed shooting terrorists would probably like the opportunity to roleplay as 19th-century ecotourists. However, a larger issue loomed on the horizon. Cabelas had previously existed in two forms: one, an arcade lightgun game where a white-tailed doe would jumpscare you, resulting in players performing their best Dick Cheney impression to player 2; and two, a slow and methodical hunting simulator. If Cabela’s wanted to pivot to the modern age, they’d need something to GET THE PEOPLE GOING, which they had covered with a heart-monitor lightgun! So mission accomplished! But PROVOCATIVE? That would be a harder mountain to climb, especially now, since every game felt it necessary to have one of those big piles of papers with words on them called stories. But as stated earlier, writers are losers who’ll deliberately write the fun outta EVERYTHING in favor of producing fancy prose. Thus, along with Cabela’s iconic shooting gallery mode, they scraped together a few letters and shipped Dangerous Hunts 2013 with a STORY MODE!

Dangerous Hunts 2013 follows the Egomaniac Hunter trope of Jacob Marshall, who, as a teen, watches a scar-faced grizzly bear and his father die in each other’s arms/paws while trying to protect him and his brother Luke. This sparks REVENGE in Luke, and he grows up to be a Big Game hunter, killing every animal that moves. At the same time, Jacob becomes a conservationist who also kills every animal that moves. However, the brothers have decided to reunite for a big game hunt on the eve of their dead daddy’s birthday in Uganda. But who would have guessed that all the animals in Uganda have heard about their trauma and decided to reignite their daddy issues for funsies? I believe this to be canon because, when it isn’t doing Family Guy-style flashbacks, the story writes the animals as having developed some sort of inter-species communication device that informs them when Jacob will be rolling through their side of the jungle.

Luke immediately abandons the hunt because our African guide over the radio tells us that a mythical BLACK LION killed somebody else’s dad, and now it’s PAYBACK TIME! Jacob, who also does not want to see another daddy die, decides to kill Lions and leopards and baboons, OH MY, as we wage war against the entire animal kingdom in an attempt to not lose another human to these GODLESS four-legged creatures. Jacob even fights a Baboon king! A monkey that traps YOU, a higher brain functioning human, into a ‘kill box’ centered in a jungle ruin while he sends lesser baboon gladiators to duel you to the death, preparing to relinquish the throne ONLY in exchange for shotgun shells into the chest… which left me shouting my own corny movie line upon finishing the boss fight: "The Monkeying Around Ends Now!"

Eventually, after three hours of personally depopulating the African continent, Jacob finds Luke about to be ravaged by the mythical BLACK LION! Summoning the strength of his dead father, Jacob resists the urge to kill and instead saves his brother. They share a tender brotherly moment, before teaming up to fuckin’ murder that BLACK LION. With their newfound respect, they stare longingly into each others eyes and mouth the words they both been waiting years to say to each other: “Now we can begin our hunt.”

NOW?! You can start hunting. I’VE BEEN KILLING ANIMALS FOR THREE HOURS. WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE CAN START?!

Why Vote Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013?

Since 2013, every hunting game has returned to its roots. Real tracking. Real patience. Real simulation. Games made for people who want to feel like they’re actually hunting. Love that for them. But nobody asked the important question: Who else is gonna give you this unhinged, low-brain battery light gun shooter? Who else is gonna deliver you a Theodore Roosevelt power fantasy of killing every animal on a continent to process daddy issues when simulation reigns king?

There are games in this world that screenshots and reviews cannot convey their absurdity; most of those games existed in the 7th generation. Games like these are meant to be experienced, archived, and laughed at later by someone like me. Cabela’s feels like a game that was expected to fail, and so they doubled down with nobody there to see them act a fool. You can look at these screenshots and laugh at my prose. Still, you will NEVER be able to fully comprehend how ‘bananas fosters fuckin bonkers’ playing an hour of this will make you feel. Throw everything you know about a mid-generation shooter out the window because you won’t need it once you double-tap the circle button and realize that they also put a Dark Souls dodge roll in the moveset for Big Cat boss fights.

Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 didn't need to shoot every animal in the world; we can agree on that. It's a bad look for the brand AND the animals. But for every king, a clown, and Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2016: Deadly Tides could be that clown. Bring the insanity of 2013 to the 8th gen and take it to the ocean. Let me hunt a BIG SHARK. Descend into the Mariana Trench and fight strange alien sea creatures that killed my mommy, maybe battle it out with a certain billionaire giving Titanic tours with a Logitech controller... These are just ideas, but the technology exists to get completely stupid with this, and nobody is doing it because nobody is willing to double down on their foolishness. So I plead with you, vote for Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 not because it was good, but because the void it left behind is real, it is vast, and it is shaped exactly like the illuminated weak spot of the OLD Baboon King. LONG LIVE ME, THE NEW BABOON KING!

VOTE Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts 2013!

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It’s all up to you! Vote for your favorite title of this round!

The ultimate clash between two of the 7th gen’s mightiest titans! At least, that’s what BPM++ and Roger Renfro seem to think. No one else knows what they’re on about, but they seem to be having fun.

Will the winner be franchise killer, the cave connoisseur, the otherworld Orkin exterminator, Red Faction: Guerrilla?

Or will it be the walking extinction event, the anti-Noah’s ark, the one who crowned then dethroned the Baboon King via a 12-gauge… Cabela’s Dangerous Hunt 2013?

Either one can take the crown! Vote for now!

Penned by: Roger Renfro & The Homie Big Picture Mode

BPM++ and Last Load Save have each selected three garbage gems from the seventh generation of gaming. Games that wanted to swing for the fences but fell on their faces trying to stand up. For Three weeks we’ll make our case for why our selected games deserve just one more chance before dying quietly in the eighth generation like they deserved.

As the audience, you hold all the power! Read both arguments, then vote for your favorite using the poll at the bottom of the page. The losing game gets eliminated from the bracket until only one busted, overlooked, abandoned survivor raises the trophy.

No do overs. No mercy. Just two writers going hand-to-hand over games the internet have largely agreed are ass, and you deciding who wins.

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ROUND 2 FIGHT!

Load Last Save - ‘Quantum Theory’

Mmm… ammo…

In the far-off year of 2030, the Earth has been destroyed. Giant, sentient towers known as Arks have sprouted across the globe, spawning hordes of mutated soldiers. There’s only one man edgy enough to stop them: Syd with a Y, the human tribal tattoo. He teams up with an anime woman, and together they take on the Locust and save the world. At least that’s what I think happens. I couldn’t focus during the cutscenes. Everything in this game looks like it’s made of scabs, and it made me too itchy to pay attention.

WTF is Quantum Theory?

Syd is a contender for one of the videogame protagonists of all time. He’s supposed to be some stoic badass, a man of few words. He has one-liners that are meant to sound creepy or edgy. When he kills enemies he goes “ha… splat”, or sometimes he just says “bye-bye”. His catchphrase is great. Whenever he picks up ammo, he goes “mmm… ammo”. He sounds like a psychopathic toddler. Maybe they can play into that in the sequel, and give him voicelines like “Naptime…” and “Me make boom boom”.

You can tell by the screenshots and trailers that Quantum Theory is trying to be Gears of War. It has a bulky main character, cover-based shooting, evil monsters, exploding heads and a color scheme that covers every shade of brown and gray. It even has the Boltok pistol. Even the name Quantum Theory sounds like it’s a placeholder they kept because they couldn’t call the game “Gears of Battle” or something equally as copyright-infringing.

It’s an undeniable clone, but that’s not its true form. That’s just a surface-level observation. If you play the game, you’ll see that the shooting is the least of your problems. The game is full of cheap instant death traps. You have to make precise jumps that look like they’re automated quicktime events, but they’re not. You have to find the right spot to do them. If you press the button when the game tells you to, there’s a good chance you won’t be in the exact right pixel, and you’ll jump to your death. Things explode and kill you, the floor turns into moving platforms that you need to escape. One time I was sitting behind cover and the floor opened up beneath me in a perfect silhouette of my body and I fell through the hole. It was some Looney Tunes shit. I could practically see Bugs Bunny sawing a hole underneath me. In reality, this game is a Kaizo Gears hack. It’s I Wanna Be The Guy, but uglier.

Why Vote Quantum Theory?

This game needed to be seen by more people. It shouldn’t have died as an unknown niche game in a sea of clones. It should have been given another shot, to go onto the next generation and shock a whole new crowd. I want people to get nostalgic for Gears, try Quantum Theory 2 in its absence, and get jumpscared by genuine seventh gen jank. They come in expecting a regular shooter, but end up having to deal with split-second instant kills, and a visual style that looks like what Limp Bizkit sounds like. I think the weird kids call it “Cyber Sigilism”.

Imagine a sequel to Quantum Theory, one where it lives up its potential as an anime Gears of War. This game was made by Tecmo, the guys who published all the Ninja Gaiden games and would then go on to make Nioh. What if they took their action game skills, and applied it to the cover based shooter formula? Vanquish came out a month after Quantum Theory. I like to think the devs saw Vanquish, then they spent the next year kicking themselves in the head wondering why they didn’t do that instead. With a second shot, they could have used their Sly Cooper stealing powers to copy Gears and Vanquish, and made some unholy synthesis of them, like making cheeseburger flavored Monster. Maybe it was too powerful to exist in our universe.

Even if they made a straight sequel, a boring Quantum Theory 2: More Quantum, it would be better than the first one. This game is so ass that, even if you tried to make something as bad, you wouldn’t be able to. Even the worst game dev would have learned one or two lessons from shitting this thing out, and their second go would have been at least crappy instead of actively offensive. If anything, it’s worth it to introduce Syd “Mmm… ammo” to more people.

Quantum Theory is like a shock image. It’s ugly, baffling and should be seen by everyone. Vote for Quantum Theory: It’s like getting goatse’d.

VOTE QUANTUM THEORY!

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BPM++ - ‘MINDJACK’

in the techno dystopia. straight up “jackin it”. and by “it”, haha, well. let’s just say. My brian.

In the previous round, I prefaced the two foundational rules of the 7th generation of gaming as: it’s GOTTA BE PROVOCATIVE and it’s GOTTA GET THE PEOPLE GOING! Nobody exemplified that design language better than Cliff Bleszinski and Microsoft Game Studios when they introduced the world to ‘Gears of War’ and put the testosterone pedal to the floor by grafting a fucking chainsaw onto a machine gun. While Cliff’s rock n’ roll frat boy persona oozed NOS Energy drink spittle, Gears of War gun play dismembered enemies so satisfactorily that it made my high school friend drop out in his junior year to lock in on his dream of going “MLG Pro” in the game. This desire to chase Gears opened up the gaming industry to a horrible affliction that still haunts us today, “the chest-high wall curse.” I once famously said, “Once you’ve played an action game after 2007, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Cliff Bleszinski to death with your bare hands,” and I meant that shit. Problem was that too many cover-based shooters came after Gears, trying to chase that success. Still, if you didn’t want to be a Gears clone, you would need a PROVOCATIVE mechanic, and what could be more provocative than a chainsaw machine gun? BPM++’s Round 2 Champion, Feelplus and Square Enix 2011’s ‘MindJack.’ Released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

WTF is MINDJACK?

MindJack’s gameplay can be summed up as “shoot first, ask questions never.” The Seventh Generation of gaming had moved from flirting with escort missions and follow quests to talking about settling down with them and making a game where you only did that called ‘The Last of Us.’ Feelplus was also responsible for these issues. Having only shipped ONE game before, Ju-On: The Grudge (a haunted house simulator), a wiggly-wagglily-Wii game where you shine your flashlight in the ghost’s face and say AHHH, found themselves responsible for polishing up SquareEnix’s B team of RPGs, so getting called up to the plate to make their own title would be a feat! But like procrastinating students trying to submit their homework at the last minute, Feelplus hastily scribbled all the wrong lessons from Gears, big refrigerator man, cover shooter, multiplayer component, and the PROVOCATIVE mechanic? Umm… MIND CONTROL, no MIND HACKING! Feelplus checked every box, slapped MindJack on a shipping label, and sent it to the UK for British writers to pen a story that could appeal to westerners. Unfortunately, they shoulda shipped that shit right back to Japan, because the story is as unappealing as British cuisine.

Jim Corbijn, a Federal Intelligence Agency agent, with a dead wife and over 300 confirmed kills, trained in chest-high wall warfare and a top MIND-HACKER in every branch of the United States armed forces. Meets his match when he’s instructed to pick up another agent, Rebecca Weiss, from the airport. Jim, who is actively being double-crossed by his old war buddy and best friend, Lyle Fernandez, realizes after several hours of gameplay that maybe his mind isn’t his own and he’s actually being MIND-HACKED, but by who?!? Could it be Rebecca? His Dead Wife? Maybe the MIND-HACKED chimps we fought in the last room? However, in a shocking turn of events it turns out to be Lyle, who is only double-crossing Jim because the creator of MINDHACK built the technology to bring his dead daughter back, and Lyle knew that Jim’s sob-story ass would rather use it to bring his dead wife back, instead of collaborating with Lyle on a plan to shoot everybody in the world.

So now it’s up to Rebecca and Jim to kill Lyle, but the dead creator of MINDHACK has an ace up his sleeve. To protect his dead daughter’s digitized soul stored in a capsule, his lab’s security system MIND-HACKS every dead soldier’s brain and integrates them into a fucking Iron Man suit to kill you. Once Jim and Rebecca triumph over every soldier in the world’s brain capacity, Jim realizes his dead wife is dead and shoots the capsule holding onto the creator’s dead daughter’s soul. Overcome with joy, the creator of MINDHACK reveals he has actually been MIND-HACKING Jim and now must MIND-HACK Lyle for REVENGE, forcing Lyle to jump off the tallest building in the world. Roll Credits.

Why Vote MindJack?

Imma keep it a thousand with y’all. MindJack plays like a toddler trying to describe ‘Time Crisis’ to you. A game built on rail shooter techniques with a script as deep as a welcome center pamphlet. The difference is that developers had the decency to put those games in an arcade cabinet and charge you quarters. MindJack looked you dead in the eyes, handed you no light gun, and said, “$50.00, please” with no shame. Listen, I’d rather dump a down payment on a Hyundai Elantra into a Virtua Cop machine, than having to witness Jim Corbijn stumble through the global conspiracy he incited by fumbling an airport pickup. MindJack deserves another chance because MindJack owes everybody who bought it an apology, and that apology has a name: MindJack 2: CyberShot.

Imagine giving us MindJack 2 as an arcade light-gun cabinet! MindJack already built an experience that plays like an arcade game with its worthless point system, nonsensical story, and BIG CYBER GORILLA Boss fight. Now apologize to all us by becoming a light-gun rail shooter and let divorced dads douse your peripherals with Miller Highlife in exchange for Dave and Buster card swipes.

Ultimately, the 8th generation had enough cover-based shooters, but what it didn’t have was enough light-gun games. So I say, let Jim, Rebecca, and that BIG ASS CYBER GORILLA grovel for forgiveness as they beckon you to come over and break that twenty-dollar bill inside: MindJack 2: CyberShot!

VOTE MINDJACK!

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It’s all up to you! Vote for your favorite title of this round!

There’s no way either of these games are real. These guys must have gone scuba diving in an EB Games dumpster to find these gems.

Do you think Syd deserves a second chance to rip-off Gears of War, and do it right? Or should Quantum Theory go chug Monsters in the big Limp Bizkit concert in the sky?

Could Mindjack MINDHACK a new generation of barcade goers with its light gun reincarnation, or should Jim stop jackin’ his mind and go wash his hands? Disgusting.

Only YOU can decide the fate of these two baffling, forgotten turds.

Next Week:

These next games may stink, but at least they’re not MindJack or Quantum Theory.

First, is a game you’ve seen in every bargain bin, but never bothered to pick up. A heart-pounding shooter that puts you up against the deadliest killers.

Versus a game that was so disappointing, it killed its franchise dead on the spot. You’d have to be a real clown to run defense for this one.

It’s the battle of the Hear Me Outs, next time on Clash of Clowns, ROUND 3.

Penned by: Roger Renfro & The Homie Big Picture Mode

BPM++ and Last Load Save have each selected three garbage gems from the seventh generation of gaming. Games that wanted to swing for the fences but fell on their faces trying to stand up. For Three weeks we’ll make our case for why our selected games deserve just one more chance before dying quietly in the eighth generation like they deserved.

As the audience, you hold all the power! Read both arguments, then vote for your favorite using the poll at the bottom of the page. The losing game gets eliminated from the bracket until only one busted, overlooked, abandoned survivor raises the trophy.

No do overs. No mercy. Just two writers going hand-to-hand over games the internet have largely agreed are ass, and you deciding who wins.

ROUND 1 FIGHT!

Load Last Save - ‘Kane & Lynch’

The 7th gen was all about being raw, bleak and gritty, and there isn’t anything bleaker than playing Kane and Lynch.

WTF is Kane and Lynch?

Kane and Lynch is a third person cover-based shooter. You play as Kane and/or Lynch, two freelance criminals who screw up multiple times and end up in a spiral of disaster. Kane gets busted out of jail by The Seven, a group of criminals he worked with, and then betrayed. His wife and daughter are taken hostage, and he must complete one last job for the seven, if he ever wants to see his family again. To make sure he does as he’s told, he gets saddled with Lynch, a schizophrenic mass-murderer who’s somehow less stable than Kane. The two fumble their way through dozens of long, tedious shooting galleries to rescue Kane’s family from the consequences of his many avoidable mistakes.

I’ll be saying this a lot for all these games, but this really is one of the most seventh-generation games of all time. There’s cover-based shooting, a two-weapon limit, regenerating health, turret sections and even a helicopter boss fight. Now, this isn’t an ordinary shooter. It’s a tactical, squad-based shooter. That just means you have some guys that follow you, and you can boss them around. They don’t do much. They can’t even kill most of the targets you tell them to shoot. If you’re wondering why a crime game has squad tactics, it’s because Kane forms a small army and goes on a paramilitary operation in Cuba. If you can’t see the logical progression from petty crook to overthrowing Cuba’s government, then I don’t blame you. Neither can I. I just know the developers were itching to have that section take place in the middle east, as was the style at the time.

Why Vote Kane and Lynch?

Kane and Lynch, unlike the other games in this tournament, got a sequel, but I still want to see a third entry. These two games were infamous for being grimy and unpleasant. The gameplay is generic, not even very interesting, and the characters are scummier than an abandoned pool, but I want to see what insane lengths they go to to justify a sequel. The first game had Kane and Lynch get in the worst situations possible, all because Lynch kept killing everyone. They start off with a bank heist, but Lynch screws up by killing all the hostages. Then, to make up for that, they go to Japan and kidnap someone else. Kane leaves the hostage with Lynch again. Guess what happens. Instead of doing his patented betrayal-no-jutsu and leaving Lynch to die alone, Kane sticks with him. He even comes back for round 2 in the sequel, after he managed to save his daughter and evade the law somehow.

The third game would be another generic third person shooter, but they would have to really up the ante in some disastrous way. First, they’d have to justify why Kane would want to work with Lynch again. That’d be like explaining how someone would accidentally drink an entire gallon of anti-freeze three times in a row. As for the gameplay, there are three options: keep the same third person shooter, which would be boring. Go open world, which would be a huge mess, or go for a more “mature” story and have a hairy dad game where Kane spends time with his daughter. Probably not in an active war zone like in the first one.

This game deserved a third chance. I want to see Kane and Lynch team up again for some stupid, tasteless adventure. I want them to get the flimsiest excuse to have them team up again. I want Lynch to get asked to smuggle some drugs, and he ends up kidnapping the President of Guatemala or something. The devs said they made Kane and Lynch 2 to be transgressive and uncomfortable. The third game could be the bleakest shit ever, and have it be about how Kane’s daughter is hunting him down for revenge. I want them to bring this series back in the weirdest way possible, so everyone can witness the slimiest and most infamous shooter of the 7^th generation be reborn, only to crash and burn a third time, and I know you want that, too.

VOTE KANE & LYNCH!

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BPM++ - ‘WET’

“Didn’t know you like to get WET tho...”

If you were to ask video game historians (adults who were teens in the early 2000’s), what the seventh generation of gaming represented, you’d probably hear a lot about Doritos Loco Tacos, double XP weekends, Mountain Dew Voltage sweepstakes, and a cacophony of slurs pouring out of duct taped Xbox Live mics. This was the generation where publishers erupted into studios in a sprint to build a winning original franchise. Something so enticing it could spit in the face of the greats and rake in more money than Shiggy Miyamoto and those Wii-mote waggling boys from across the Pacific. Which translated into, throw everything at the wall and whatever gets Gamestop preorder numbers jumpin’ means we’ve got a hit on our hands. Success was determined by two rules, it’s GOTTA BE PROVOCATIVE and it’s GOTTA GET THE PEOPLE GOING! Some of those swings connected. Most became Gamestop bargain bins. Six of them ended up in this tournament. Enter BPM++’s first chosen fighter, Behaviour Interactive Inc and Bethesda Softworks 2009’s ‘WET.’ Released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

WTF is WET?

Following the previous design laws of Seventh Generation games, WET’s gameplay is built off a very simple premise: “If it looks cool in slo-mo, then it’ll probably look even cooler if a hot lady with swoop bangs and double exploding crossbows is doing it.” While every other title of 2009 poured on the GRITTY BROWN color grading, WET threw red into the mixture and layered on grindhouse film effects, scratched film reels, and fake cigarette burns in the corner of the screen to spark your neurons into remembering that time you watched Kill Bill and made it your whole personality for a few weeks. Modern peanut brained gamers would call it ‘Woke Max Payne’ but while Max was too busy monologuing about his dead wife and cemented oxy habit, Rubi was shouting action movie one-liners, guzzling whiskey, and backflipping off walls pistols akimbo goin’ Rubi-Rage-Mode for the low-low price of REVENGE.

The story isn’t important, but out of respect to this masterpiece here’s a rundown; Rubi Malone is a freelance acrobatic assassin with the slo-mo time disease, but OH NO, she’s been double crossed by one of her clients, so she’s off to get revenge until OH SHIT, she’s double crossed again, so she’s gotta find out who quadruple crossed her by performing a triple double backflip off walls while shooting enemies in the dick. Fortunately, all this double-crossing comes to an end when she finds the real guy behind all of this trouble and slices his fucking head off with a samurai sword before hitting a perfect 1980’s one liner. Also she kills Mei-Ling from Metal Gear Solid. I mean, a villain voiced by Mei-Ling’s actress. Same thing. BUT OH FUCK she might not even be dead and she just SEXTUPLE CROSSED HER FROM THE GRAVE. And That’s All Folks!

Why Vote WET?

Now you’re probably saying to yourself, BPM++ this sounds fucking stupid! Where is my gritty realism? Where is my sad dad story? How is this game going to teach me to love again? Well bucko, it ain’t. The 8^th Generation of gaming is where goofiness was forced into the little backseat goblin role while despondent daddy took the wheel. WET deserves another chance because games were too worried about seriousness instead of funmaxxing or being sillypilled in the 8^th Generation, and WET could have been that breath of fresh air. Would it have survived as a strong franchise? FUCK NO! WET 2 would have broken up the monotony for about fifteen minutes before dying a quick and dignified death to a Ninja Gaiden sequel. Because Ninjas are cooler than hot girls with swoop bangs and crybaby drug addicts with dead wives. That’s just science.

But WET never even got that chance. A sequel was even teased because the game ends on a cliffhanger with Fake Mei-Ling coming back to life. However, that sequel was cancelled, and you want to know what they made instead? Naughty Bear. They cancelled Rubi Malone’s revenge arc for a fuckin’ FNAF Manhunt Mod. Unforgivable.

So given these points, WET deserves your vote just to spite Naughty Bear, and because absurdity will always be cool. In this tournament, I know there’s a lot riding on your vote, so don’t do it for me, and don’t do it for WET. DO IT FOR FAKE MEI-LING!

VOTE WET!

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It’s all up to you! Vote for your favorite title of this round!

Do you think the balding bastards Kane and Lynch deserve a third chance at turning their life around, or should they rot in 7th-gen jail?

Or maybe you think Ruby’s quest for revenge isn’t done, and she should live to get septuple crossed. Should Fake Mei-Lin live, or die like the grindhouse theaters that inspired her?

Next Week:

We reach deep into the bottom of the 7th gen barrel to bring you two incredible games that are so unknown, you’d swear we made them up.

First, is a game that critics describe as “Oh fuck, they remade Geist!?” A truly terrible third person shooter where you can possess others. Should it be summoned back to posses a sequel, or should this ghost get busted?

Up against that is an unabashed clone of Gears of War, that’s worse in every way imaginable. A game so ugly, that publishing screenshots of it is a bannable offense on Substack. Why would anyone want it back?

Find out next time on Clash of Clowns, ROUND 2.

Penned by: &

During my freshman year of college, I learned two valuable life lessons. One: 5-hour energy is a potion for inducing kidney stones. And Two: never laugh at a lady’s Sims mods. Modern-day boy-meets-girl story: we shared a few glances between classes before she invited me to her dorm on Valentine’s Day to “play The Sims.” Now, I had been playing video games my whole life, so that arcane knowledge made this invitation a bit contradictory.

Upon booting up her laptop, she carelessly launched into The Sims, forgetting she had curated what seemed like a Costco warehouse’s worth of body mods. Sculpting virtual humans in the image of the damn Venus of Willendorf.1 Embarrassingly, she turned to me as I lay on her bed, suffocating myself into a laughing fit. Sadly, she would never speak to me again after that night, and honestly, I deserved the ostracization. Funny enough, teehee’ing my way outta titties and chuckling my way outta coitus would later become a motif for my life going forward. Although something about that moment of immaturity iron-branded my cerebral cortex with the question of “what purpose do digital boobs serve if they refuse to alter gameplay?”

Believe me when I say, I am no prude. I’ve been shoving the guys complaining about sex scenes in movies, yelling at women to wear more clothes, or kink-shaming your favorite mommy-dommy ASMR roleplaying streamer into lockers since high school, and I will continue to until behavior improves. But, I feel like that famous EDGE Magazine 1994 review of Doom when those Brit fucks said, “If only we could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try to make friends with them.”

They were a little confused about Doom, but they got the spirit when it comes to this shit. Thus, my compulsory love for the medium of video games has once again hurled me into the ‘thinky chair’ with another goofy ass question. In a medium where we can do ANYTHING, is settling for jiggle physics the peak of EVERYTHING? This time on BPM++, we explore the gap between “Interactivity and Interact-titty.” (That one kills, you don't have to tell me, I'm fucking NICE at words).

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PART 1: Grandpa’s Poker Prizes

On my walk back to my dorm, I reflected on my actions and kept arriving at a self-cynical question: “Why does anything sexual related to video games feel tasteless to me?”

Give a fuck what Princess Peach doing, but if our goals align by the time I stomp this talking lizard for the hundredth time, then cool, let's hang out. Pompous as I was at the time, I knew the gaming industry was (and kinda still is) so immature it might as well be 3 ten-year-olds in a trench coat, but to me, games had become a superior art form that didn’t need cheap lust…right? These technological wonders couldn’t be as unsophisticated as those Marlboro-stained arcade poker machines with lingerie women plastered on them, right?

WRONG! What I was feeling was fucking pretentiousness at its most grandiose. Regardless of what I thought at the time, sex is a part of everything, and especially great art. While I’m not bout to defend ya Grandpa’s idle titty clicker, I am gonna give them their deserved credit and Scottie Pippen Slam City2 anyone’s superiority complex. As games have evolved, so have the armchair auteurs. Fixated on declaring to interested parties as to “where the art begins in gaming.” I show you the image above, and you'd say: “No fuckin’ way I'd spend my time playing that shit. It's got no roguelike elements, and YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE THE LADY!”

Now, what if I told you the lady was actually a shy blue alien, and you were playing poker for the safety of her entire alien race, and you got the illusion of sex afterwards? Y’all would call that game of the fucking year, or a Mass Effect side quest. I’m just joking. But honestly, it ain’t far off.

Your grandpa's desire to see digital titties at the end of his virtual poker hand is the same neuron activation fuel you get from the flames going off in Balatro. That freshman art school pretentiousness starts to crumble even further, after learning that Capcom’s survival was attributed to Akira "AKIMAN" Yasuda and producer Yoshiki Okamoto’s strip Mahjong game, which they cooked up in hiding. Mahjong Gakuen 1988 drops in arcades, and tons of awooga tongue lapping salarymen are dumping Yen in that bitch like my badass little cousin trying to win a pair of Yeezys from a Keymaster machine. The shit was so popular, it saved Capcom from going KAPUT!3 Without Mahjong Gakuen, would Street Fighter II exist? What about Resident Evil? What about Ōkami?! For the sake of my argument, Imma say probably not. AND YES, Monster Hunter fans, I didn't mention y'all, I'd throw y'all into a pit for Ōkami, that's just facts.

So, while we aren’t that far off from our ancestors playing games for the hypothetical promise of some lusty prize, it still read to me like jingling keys. If anything, this was Interact-titty in its purest form, static rewards of sexual content that felt like cop-outs for engagement. It’d be like carrying around an image of a pretty anime lady on my phone and looking at it every time I didn’t swear at someone for cutting me off in traffic. That wouldn’t make driving a more engaging experience; if anything, I’d probably wreck my whip and have an embarrassing phone conversation with Geico later that night.

However, I knew that a genre of games existed that took some lessons from those 'win-a-titty games' and built to something greater. In my quest to understand what the difference between Interactivity and Interact-titty even was, I read the hiragana on the wall and dove headfirst into the void of those Japanese sexy visual novels, the ones that look real cool in those PC-98 Tumblr gifs. But… Fuck. In no way was I prepared for this descent.

PART 2: Playing For The Plot?

Now, I'm an honest man, I'm not finna sit here and pretend I dove into Japanese erotic visual novels fully for academic reasons. MOST of these games were exactly what you'd expect: waifu collector simulators that made me the Moneyball4 Brad Pitt of sexy ladies, winning bit-crushed moans as my championship ring. If researching and playing 'win-a-titty' poker/mahjong games felt like stepping into a puddle, the vastness of 80’s-90’s Japanese erotic games felt like drowning in an endless ocean. These were the games that lived in the minds of "enthusiasts." Ones that exist imprisoned behind glass in eccentric Akiba5 basement shops, where gaijin6 stumble over Japanese as they blow their return flight money for a selfie with the boxes. But somewhere between the pixel perversion and questionable translation patches, I uncovered something the Western industry wouldn't figure out until years to come.

Japan’s adult pc gaming culture of the 80’s was facing a renaissance, but companies like JAST, Elf Co., Ltd, and FairyTale were about to shake up the market with one simple question: “What if there was gameplay surrounding the sex?” Leading to a slew of lusty visual novels with loose gameplay, and fantasy RPGs sprinkled with sex scenes like an impromptu DnD campaign AT the orgy. Programmers were more than happy to flip the ‘choose your adventure’ framework and materialize customers' fantasies while stacking cash off the effort. However, if patrons could choose their adventures, some wanted to see their deepest desires mirrored on their screens, and while those carnal desires transformed the underground erotic industry into mainstream players, it created a runaway petroleum trailer barrelling toward a brick wall.

That wall turned out to be a junior high school student in Kyoto caught shoplifting Fairytale’s ‘Saori - The House of Beautiful Girls’ two weeks after its release. TWO WEEKS! That’s how long it took one kid’s five-finger discount to expose an entire industry to a public that either had no idea they existed or was already on edge and HATED these guys. The shit triggered police raids of multiple erotic game companies, some that weren’t making anything close to Saori, got Fairytale’s company president locked up, and forced the Japanese government to pass legislation requiring R18 labels on erotic games by April 1992. Look, I’m not bout to sit here and act like Saori was misunderstood art, that game WAS dark as fuck, unlike in most Japanese adult games, Saori has zero censorship of genitalia, and a whole lotta triggering topics that I’m not finna mention. But the government’s response was less ‘protecting citizens’ and more ‘we just discovered the wild west existed and lost our entire shit about it.’ Was it heavy-handed? Obviously. Was it necessary? Unfortunately, yeah. Because without some law and order, this industry was headed somewhere nobody was prepared to follow.

Gaming’s horny industrial complex had officially become a matter of national security, and somebody had to build the damn sheriff’s office. Turns out, the deputies were the outlaws themselves. Faced with being censored out of existence, the big players - ELF, Fairytale, Alice Soft, and Gainax (Yeah, Evangelion! Y’all Love Evangelion, right?) formed the Ethics Organization for Computer Software, essentially writing their own rulebook before the government could write it for them. In the end, the wild west didn’t get a sheriff’s office; it got a damn homeowners’ association.

However, cleaning the streets came at a cost. Strip the sex out of these innovative erotic games, and they became an identity crisis showcasing remarkable character art and subpar RPG mechanics. While the Big Four: ELF, Fairytale, Alice Soft, and Gainax pivoted to flirty point-and-click adventure games, sharpening in-game conversation and decision systems that designers would steal for decades (Hideo Kojima fans, do your homework), the ‘talking to girls’ genre was still on shaky ground. The public was monitoring any slip now, and the feds were ready to strike at any sign of a lusty payoff. Enter Konami, bleeding money, watching the subculture crash out from a distance and noticing a through-line that bypassed other industry giants: people kept coming back to these games, even after the sex, because they wanted to talk to these characters. So they bet the house on an outlandish gamble. No erotic content. No lusty cutscenes. No bit-crushed moans as prizes. Just a game where you talk to girls and try to win their hearts. It shouldn’t have worked. It shoulda absolutely bankrupted them.

Konami’s Tokimeki Memorial drops and STRAIGHT UP POSTERIZES the ‘win-a-titty’ industry. Tokimeki wasn’t revolutionary because it was clean. It was revolutionary because it figured out what all those erotic games were accidentally proving: people didn’t just want to sexualize these characters, they wanted to KNOW them. You weren’t grinding stats to unlock some lewd scene; you were spending time with a character until you genuinely gave a damn what happened to them. The relationship WAS the adventure. Konami proved that gameplay surrounding lust wasn’t enough; you needed interactivity that made characters feel real, with emotions that weren’t just para-social lust for the player, but rather compassion, vulnerability, and confidence. THAT WAS THE SYNTHESIS: not sex, not titties, but genuine engagement between player and character. Konami didn’t strip out the interactivity and leave you with nothing; they made the interactivity the entire point and proved that in this medium, the most powerful thing you can give someone isn’t the promise of sexual content but a reason to care. The west looked at all of this and said, “Yeah, cool, but what if we just gave them titties that didn’t look like anime, tho?”

PART 3: Sex, Boobs and The Cocaine Goblins!

Slipping deeper into the void, a sound rang out, pulling me back to my senses like ammonia jolting my nervous system. An auditory hallucination that sounded like Nu metal, and I fucking hate Nu Metal. The opening riff of BMX XXX’s soundtrack smashing through my psyche only meant one thing: I was back, and it was the West’s time to shine. The American game industry of the 2000s had no fucking idea how to handle any topic with nuance; cringe hadn’t been invented yet. It was a culture of American teen boys on a collective adrenaline coma mission. As we smashed into the concrete, our Taco Bell paychecks spilled out and lined the pockets of cocaine-fueled goblins disguised as game designers and MTV executives. We DEMANDED virtual versions of anything EXTREME: sports, violence, sex, and all to the soundtrack of System of a Down.

Acclaim Entertainment answered the EXTREME call back in the 90’s blessing arcades with Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam, so this new market of teens seemed like a SLAM DUNK. BMX XXX, paraded onto the scene promising gameplay so EXTREME that you could make a woman character ride around with her boobies out, and as edgy teenagers, we told them “SHUT UP DICKWAD, Viva La Bam is on!” In less than two years, the game’s financial failure, coupled with Dave Mirra suing Acclaim7 for trashing his name and deterring him as the rightful heir to the Tony Hawk throne, paved Acclaim’s road to bankruptcy. But one bankruptcy wasn’t gonna stop these EXTREME cocaine goblins, who in a frenzy screamed: “QUICK, GIVE EM’ MORE BOOBS!”

The goblins then deployed their horniest soldier with Jeff Spangenberg, the same man who founded Retro Studios, the studio that caught the eye of Nintendo's baddest boy Shiggy Miyamoto8 to produce Metroid Prime. Right up until Nintendo bought out his ownership after catching his dumbass hosting a side site on Retro Studios servers with images of him flexing his playboy lifestyle with ladies in hot tubs.9 Jeff dipped with the settlement cash and created “TopHeavy Studios,” the team that’d make their magnum opus 'The Guy Game,' aka 'Sexual Scene It?' A trivia game released for consoles featuring real women flashing the camera. A concept so aggressively stupid it could only exist in 2004. Turns out, not only was it stupid, but also ILLEGAL, as one of the women featured in the shipped game was a minor.

Ultimately, the game got pulled from shelves, lawsuits started flying, and American teens couldn't be bothered to look up from 'Pimp My Ride'10 just long enough to watch the entire thing collapse. Back-to-back L’s sent the EXTREME cocaine goblins into a freefall. They had recently dropped a Sims 2 knockoff titled ‘Playboy: The Mansion' that was such a failure that episodes of 'The Girls Next Door'11 didn’t even wanna advertise it during commercial breaks. Not to mention, Rockstar's 'GTA San Andreas' was suffering from an “accidental” leftover sex mini game12 that allowed CJ and various women side characters to simulate sex the same way kids slam two Barbie dolls together.

The US was on a generational run of embarrassment, spending a decade comitting crimes and calling it content. That was, until a Canadian video game studio famous for DnD RPGs came along and did the bare minimum. BioWare had no reason to drag Western gaming out of its embarrassing hormonal fever dream. Mass Effect isn’t even a great example of romantic interactivity, let’s be honest. Dialogue and cutscenes were clunky, and the actual ‘sex’, if that’s what you wanna call it, was the same ten seconds of side-boob required for PG-13 movie ratings, but that wasn’t BioWare’s end goal.

Like Konami with Tokimeki Memorial, BioWare got right what every cocaine goblin before them missed, making you CARE first. Mass Effect wasn’t interested in carrot- dangling sex. Instead, you spent forty hours fighting against insurmountable odds side by side with these characters, learning their history, understanding their worlds. The interactivity of these relationships built between player and character turned out to be the real motivator all along. This was the West’s way of fumbling toward synthesis: bad execution but the right instinct. Inevitably, Fox News turned out to be America’s junior high school klepto.

Conservative America looked at thirty seconds of side alien titty and RANG THE ALARM! Mass Effect was called to task on national television under the headline “SEXbox?”13 and slammed on charges of corrupting the nation’s youth. An alien woman’s bare shoulders were about to be the final nail in Western civilization’s coffin. That is, until the Doritos Pope himself, Geoff Keighley, appeared live on the panel, explaining that Mass Effect was the furthest thing from pornography and forced every panelist to publicly admit they hadn’t played a game since Pac-Man. As the industry began dragging its knuckles toward maturity, one man in a donation store sports coat looked conservative America dead in the eye and said, pipe down.

“This isn’t about sex this is about the evolution of a relationship with characters.” - Geoff Keighley.

BioWare’s success with Mass Effect was the killing blow the West needed to drive the cocaine goblins back underground. We found our spines; now the synthesis was next.

PART 4: Interactivity VS Interact-titty FINAL ROUND

As I climb outta the thinky chair, I keep reflecting on how Mahjong Gakuen feels like the original titty mod. Something thrown in to ogle at because the game needed excitement, and naked ladies were the easiest answer. You couldn’t talk to these women; they didn’t know you, just the feigned lustful desire of matching tiles correctly. The industry realized they could hook people in and, for a moment, let Interact-titty take the wheel.

Today, I can scroll through Steam by tags of ‘Story Rich’ or ‘Choices matter’ and discover my next favorite digital masterpiece. The required history lesson made me realize it took crashes, technology evolution, bankruptcies, and public outcry to even get close to the character interactivity of today. But with those industry learned lessons comes a bittersweet side effect. Baldur’s Gate and Cyberpunk built characters that people devote their hearts to; Dragon Age and The Witcher trilogies have changed how people process love. Atlus makes sure you can’t even progress in their games without building friendships. While VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action and Date Everything have made me cry and laugh at their genuine portrayal of emotions. All these titles contain characters that felt so real, so specific, so genuinely human that, as players, we fell in love with them. And every single one of them has a big titty mod.

Look, I’m not here to tell modders or programmers what to do with their time, but for a moment let me bare my soul. I grew up with Tifa Lockhart and Aerith Gainsborough. Not as pixels, not as character designs, but as people. They felt like real friends to me. I watched them sacrifice everything in a story that broke my heart at nine years old and has never fully healed. When FF7 Rebirth dropped, and I jumped back into that world, I felt that same warmth I feel when I link with all the homies I came up with. Then I saw the mods. And my reaction wasn’t excitement. It wasn’t moral outrage. It was just... confusion. The sentence “Those are my friends. And they don’t look like that” jumped out my mouth, and a sense of embarrassment washed over me for caring. Why do I care that somebody thinks these characters are hot and wants them to have the biggest tits on earth?

I cared because the connection anyone had with these characters proved interactivity worked back in 1997, so you didn’t need the Interact-titty now. Squaresoft figured out how to make these little chibi toaster hand characters feel like humans, so they didn’t need to reel you in with no win-a-titty scheme. Rebirth understood the assignment and gave us more time, more dialogue, more of those little moments that made us care about these characters in the first place, rather than provocative thrills.

It’s corny to underplay sex in relation to any art form. Great art involves sex. When Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, the human body was central to the work. Sexuality, sensuality, vulnerability, all of it was PART of the art. Nobody looked at the Sistine Chapel and said, “Cool ceiling, needs more clothes.” That realization made something else click. Like all great forms of art, video games had to mature as an art form, even if it meant taking multiple L’s in the process.

From the salarymen of Mahjong Gakuen to Tokimeki Memorial proving that people would play a ‘talking to girls’ game with no sex and call it a phenomenon, from the EXTREME cocaine goblins doing crimes in 2004 to BioWare accidentally stumbling into synthesis with a shy blue alien, the lesson was always the same. People want these characters at their fullest, their flaws, their quirks, their strengths; they want to talk to these creatures.

So the question: Does every game need a big titty mod? Probably not. But not because titty mods are bad, but because games are finally giving us something better, someone to care about. And if you’re gonna mod them anyway, and I get it, I’m not judging, just ask yourself if you’re adding to what’s already there, or replacing it with something superficial.

Thus, I stand here with a refreshed mindset and remorse for my actions. To the lady whose Sims mods I laughed at freshman year. I owe you an apology. It took me way too long to understand what you already knew at nineteen: that sex and body and identity are a part of all great art. I didn’t know anything about your Sims stories. Maybe your characters were just finally built the way THEY wanted to be built, living in a digital world and loving their bodies on their own terms, outside of what the default slider decided they should look like, and that’s actually kind of beautiful. But also, you coulda’ warned a guy.

I love you Robert Pattinson, but it’s not a love triangle, and I love Zoë Kravitz for calling out the bullshit. Tifa and Aerith are my friends and so are all of you! Tell me a video game character you’ve fallen in love with below in the comments, and I’ll tell you why it shoulda be Karlach from Baldur’s gate 3. Love all yall. Stay Silly. - BPM++ (Yes, That’s two pluses)

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💻 Sources, references and Fun Stuff 🥳

One of the pettiest arguments I’ve ever had was with my pops, who accused me of stealing his hundred-dollar HSN Belgian waffle maker. Unbeknownst to him, my mother had gifted me the waffle maker after overhearing my father rave about HSN’s upgraded version. When FedEx eventually showed up, my dad wouldn’t shut up about how it made the best waffles he’d ever tasted. A few months later, I visited and asked him to show me this illustrious iron. Plot Twist: It made the same damn waffles his old one did. BUT! It WAS a different color. I bring this up not only to make fun of my pops, but to caution that sometimes ceilings to progress exist and once you hit it, innovation slows to a trickle, and nothing but hype floods out. But, HUMANS LOVE HYPE!

There’s something that lights up our chimp brains like a damn simon when someone tells us there’s an even better version of something we already like. We always fall for it because the dumb department of our brains demands the upgrade, even when logic says it’s the same shit. That same paradox is the crux of a running joke that my wife and I have about one day purchasing the mythical ‘$6000 waffle maker,’ a stupid rumored and coveted item I once heard about in a meme.

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Listen, I have enough self-control to not fuck up my funds balling out on a waffle maker, but, I've thought about that thing more than I should. What does a $6000 waffle taste like? I've been eating waffles my whole life, what could I be missing? I've watched them evolve from Eggos to artisan sourdough nonsense to TikTok girlies losing their shit for bubble waffles like they rediscovered fire. However, I think at some point, we reached the ceiling of waffle technology, and instead we kept adding hype to mask the fact that we've been eating the same shit for eons.

That revelation brings me here today, fully prepared to commit gaming blasphemy when I say: Grand Theft Auto VI will be Rockstar's $6000 waffle maker - expensive, hyped, and fundamentally the same thing you already own. A 'product that represents the absolute pinnacle of refined taste.' But instead of six thousand dollars, GTA holds a billion dollars worth of hype behind it, insisting it will set a new pinnacle of progress. Despite everything at stake, I know at its core GTA has hit its ceiling because MindsEye, the latest failed GTA clone, revealed what Rockstar's hype has been hiding: the quintessential gameplay loop is just cooked wet grain in a grid.

Aim For The King, Best Not Miss.

Off rip, let me come clean. I like Grand Theft Auto a whole lot and I’ve been a fan since their initial release back in 1997. Most of my formative gaming memories come from my older brother and I hatching elaborate schemes to fool our parents into buying them for us on launch. GTA was a staple on every console I ever encountered, but that devotion never stopped me from hoping something would come for its crown. Call it hating, but every gamer feels this way because we know competition combats complacency.

The problem? Nobody can touch GTA. Not because the games are perfect, but because Rockstar built an empire on being the “bad boys of gaming.” The ones who made Hot Coffee a national scandal, turned lawyers into content farms, and had Fox News convinced your nephew was training to be a mass murderer. Rockstar looked good doing it, and that reputation became armor. Any game that tried to compete got branded with the dreaded “GTA Clone” label - the gaming industry’s mark of the beast. Crackdown, Saints Row, Sleeping Dogs - hell, even Lego City Undercover got called a GTA clone, and that fucking game was made for babies (no offense to all the babies in my audience, goo-goo). If you can drive a car and commit minor property damage, you’re a GTA clone. The worst part? As gamers, we never stopped using that terminology. Nobody calls games Doom-clones anymore - we call them “boomer shooters.” Nobody calls platformers “Mario clones.” So why the fuck does GTA get to do the marking? Because they’re the champions of this sandbox shit..

Rockstar knew GTA could slack off because you’d always come crawling back when the bad boy texted at 2am asking for $59.99. And we’d reply ‘omg, omw daddy’ with our credit card already out. Gamers spent years praying in their mind palaces that someone would dethrone GTA, hell, they practically lit candles for CD ProjektRed and Cyberpunk 2077 like it was a religious savior. Then it launched looking like a Philips CD-I game having a stroke, and their prayers went unanswered. Eventually, Cyberpunk grew into something great, but CDPR was never trying to fight Rockstar for the throne - we were just wishing that they would.

At the top, Rockstar saw the writing on the wall and learned from one of their internal “bad boys” that taking GTA online was the only option for total domination. If they could drip-feed you a new car or heist every few months, you’d stop demanding innovation and become a Pavlov’s dog for hype, mouth watering and agape for a re-colored sports car. For all of this to work, GTA Online had to run like a slot machine: swipe card, receive dopamine, repeat until bankrupt. So like spraying Febreze on dirty laundry, GTA V masked its transformation from a game into a money printing machine.

All the while, this gave them time to build anticipation for GTA VI. But the man who architected GTA Online’s money printer was staring down termination. Leslie “the Benz” Benzies - the guy who taught Rockstar how to sell hype over innovation - found himself kicked out the door with a grudge and a game idea. Forget blackjack and hookers - Benzies was building ‘Everywhere,’ a Roblox-style game engine wrapped around it’s debut game, MindsEye: a dystopian sci-fi action game, basically the dreams of GTA and Cyberpunk. Gamers rejoiced at having something better than a promise - one of Rockstar’s own was ready to take on the king, and for a moment they thought God was listening.

God wasn’t listening. He was laughing.

’Everywhere’ spent years in development hell, promising revolutionary user-generated content, but players demanded a tangible product that demonstrated the engine’s capability. Thus, MindsEye finally launched in June 2025 as the proof of concept - the premium experience that would show everyone what Benzies was capable of without Rockstar’s leash. The result? A 28 Metacritic score - the worst-rated game of 2025 - and a month-long layoff of 300 talented devs. But before we all dig another grave for a GTA Clone, let’s evaluate what MindsEye actually revealed in their failure.

MindsEye holds a mirror to Rockstar and forces them to stare at a monster of their own imitation. Nothing made this more evident than the comparisons between MindsEye and GTA’s gameplay loop. For a game that touts itself as the standard for nonlinearity gameplay, every Grand Theft Auto mission sure issues the same stale-ass structure: drive to location, shoot enemies, maybe chase someone, drive away. However, Rockstar hides this monotony from you with the production value that would turn James Cameron into a crybaby. Sweeping camera angles during car rides, wisecracking sidekicks making dated pop culture references over the phone, elaborate cutscenes that make you forget you just spent 10 minutes driving across the map to drive another 10 mins while an npc explains how to use the stock market. Players have openly admitted they’d rather spend copious amounts of money on flying motorcycles that shoot enemies for you just so they can scroll TikTok while the game plays itself. If the gameplay loop got people out here choosing to watch kinetic sand cutting videos rather than engage, then it might be time to reevaluate your Heat-inspired digital Skinner box.

Don’t get it twisted, MindsEye has the exact same mission structure. Drive to location, shoot enemies behind chest-high walls, (Once you’ve played an action game after 2007, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Cliff Bleszinski to death with your bare hands), listen to diegetic radio chatter about content you can’t access yet, drive to next location. The difference? While GTA doesn’t trust you to play the game, MindsEye isn’t interested in you sticking around long enough to finish the story, so it gives you even fewer options. If a Rockstar mission lets you choose between three scripted approaches to the same shootout, MindsEye gives you one hallway and a timer. If GTA hides the rails with a sweeping helicopter shot and a cutscene, MindsEye just... doesn’t. The gameplay IS the cutscene, except someone forgot to hire the cinematographer and instead said ‘fuck it bro, you know what to do here, we gave you the gun already.’ MindsEye isn’t concerned with the cinematic flair to distract you from the fact you’re doing the same thing you did in the last mission, and the mission before that, because realistically you weren’t supposed to be here, you were supposed to be playing ‘Everywhere.’

The secret is MindsEye was never meant to be the real game. It was a beta test for ‘Everywhere’, the real product - just like GTA V was a beta test for GTA Online. Leslie invented this playbook at Rockstar: sell them a $60 game, then hook them into the platform that prints money forever. Build the hype around the premium experience, then pivot to the service that never ends. Leslie tried to pull the exact same heist with MindsEye and Everywhere, except he forgot one thing - that Rockstar leash included a billion dollars worth of hype to make a beta test feel like a finished product. Instead, Leslie only had a pitchdeck and a prayer. But in failure, he revealed Rockstar’s ultimate plan: GTA VI being a $70 early access game for GTA VI Online, the machine that will print cash for the next decade while you refinance the crib to drop real money on shark cards for a ‘Vice City exclusive pink helicopter.’

Let’s not pretend that Rockstar hasn’t spent years building the anticipation, delaying the release until hype has reached religious fervor and making you so desperate you’d pre-order a jpeg of the cover art. But strip away the billion-dollar marketing campaign and the cinematic trailers, and you’re left with railroaded missions, chest-high wall gallery shootouts, and dialogue ripped straight from those annoying ass Guy Ritchie movies your dad loves. Simply put, Rockstar is about to SLAM DUNK Leslie at his own game twice: once by exiling him in 2016, and again by perfecting the exact strategy he taught them. Let’s be clear: GTA VI isn’t going to revolutionize shit, it can barely keep a release date. The difference? Rockstar has a billi’ to spend making sure you can’t see the strings while they reel you into their next money printer, GTA VI: aka the $6000 waffle maker of innovation.

Go On Take The Money and Run.

Some of you are already typing ‘So what? Fuck you man, I like GTA and I’m buying it no matter what your bitch ass thinks. It’s game of the year, go play your stupid low-poly PS1 story games.’ Fair. Do that. I’m buying it too. None of this means you shouldn’t play GTA VI. It just means you should see it for what it actually is. The hype will be deafening. The trailers will be immaculate. Your timeline will be flooded with people calling it the greatest game ever made before they’ve even booted it up, like that shit isn’t gonna take 8 hours to install.

I penned this piece to remind us that while we’re handing over our $70, we can at least acknowledge that we’re paying a premium price for the same product in a shinier package. And maybe we can stop rewarding a decade of stagnation with game-of-the-year proclamations before the main menu hits the screen. Remove the hype from our eyes, and we all realize the emperor’s new clothes are the same ‘Cool Story Babe’ shirt he had on since 2013. You’re gonna buy GTA VI anyway. So am I. But at least let’s stop pretending we can’t see what we’re really paying for: banality.

In the end, MindsEye at least did us one favor: it ripped off Rockstar’s formula so poorly, and in doing so, put a spotlight on what that formula actually is. Maybe Everywhere could’ve been something better. Probably not. As for Leslie? I’m not sorry he lost, he invented the scam, tried to run it himself, and ate shit for it. What I am sorry about is all the developers at Build a Rocket Boy who got laid off because their CEO thought he could simply sell hype. They deserved better. We deserve better, and no matter what my dad says, his HSN waffle maker produces the same tasting waffles. Love you, Pops, but you got finessed by the home shopping network. What a bozo.

Yall can all nominate me for hater of the year, imma go back to playing my low-poly ps1 story games. Love all yall. Stay Silly. - BPM++ (Yes, That’s two pluses)

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It’s holiday time again. The only time of year when you’re obligated to jump through hoops like trained seals, pretending to tolerate your ‘loved ones’ instead of sitting at home plowing through the insurmountable pile of amazing titles that dropped into our backlogs this year. But the games are never far from our minds. As you collectively dissociate over auntie’s cavity-inducing desserts and your uncle’s racist spiked eggnog-induced blackout, someone inevitably asks: ‘So what have you been up to lately?’

Do not fall for this trap. They are asking your opinions of the drama-filled Season 34 of Dancing with the Stars, not what you’ve played this year. But it’s too late. You’ve fumbled the ball. You opened your big mouth and uttered the words ‘Clair Obscure.’

You’re fucked. You don’t even know how fucked you are. And you just kept going… You said it was a video game, and now you’re the family’s patron saint of gaming. All hail the new Doritos Pope. Do you know about the Master Chief show? Do you have opinions on Sonic 3? What about Jim Carrey’s Robotnik dance - funny or cringe? And how exactly do we get little Dustin off Fortnite when they sell those V-Bucks cards at Target?

Wow, you sure are a dumb ass. But don’t fret, because so am I and I have made this mistake and that’s why I’m here to provide a way to help your silly ass navigate through some of those misguided gaming related inquiries from your relatives.

“So, Is the Game Based on the Show?”

So your family watched the Fallout show and started saying ‘okey dokey’ unironically, huh? The in-laws binge The Last of Us and ugly cried over Joel and Ellie like they weren’t watching a show about mushroom zombies eating people’s faces? Gaming is mainstream now, and that means some people won’t give a fuck about the actual games. First step: understand this excitement is water cooler talk.

With Fallout Season 2 out and you uttering the words ‘video games,’ this will obviously dominate your holiday gathering conversation. So when your relative says, ‘Oh I love the Fallout show! So do you play as Walter Goggins in the game too?’ DO NOT RAMBLE. Don’t explain that Fallout has been around since 1997, or that The Ghoul isn’t in the mainline games, or that the timeline is— Stop. Just say: ‘No, but you could make your own character like him, the whole fuckin’ cowboy hat and nose thing, and go on your own nuclear wasteland road trip without waiting a year between seasons. Plus, the games have been out for decades, so you could start right now.’

Meet them where they are, and engage in a conversation about how The Last of Us show and game are SIMILAR, not DIFFERENT. Make the bridge instead of lamenting that it doesn’t exist. And when that inevitably fails because they’re never actually going to suffer through whatever the fuck is happening with the Fallout: New Vegas PC port? Smile, nod, and pivot to literally anything else. like: ‘Well, it’s almost the end of the year, huh?

“So Is that like Fortnite?”

The cold-hard truth is gaming is everywhere now, and your family sees how big it’s become and wants in on the conversation. The problem? They’re realizing they’re painfully late to the party and don’t know where to start. It’s like someone just finding out about movies in 2025 and asking if the train pulling into the station scared you too?

Translation: they don’t want to admit they got old without realizing it. This leads to strange questions and dismissive superiority. For example: earlier this week while shopping for Christmas dinner, my mother looked at me and asked, ‘What’s that game you be playin’, Balonko?’ I stared at her with the look of a man who knew this would probably be the funniest thing she’d say all year and calmly replied, ‘Yeah, Balatro. Why?’ Somehow she’d heard about this silly card game and needed to know why it was so popular. Unfortunately, the last game my mother heard about that was popular was Fortnite, so naturally the question became: ‘So is that like Fortnite?’

This is the question that separates the rookies from the pros. DO NOT fall into the trap of explaining how what you’re playing is different from Fortnite. They’ve already thrown you into confusion and you’re just going to hurt yourself in the process. Instead, try this: Give them a one-sentence summary of what Fortnite is, then tell them what you’re playing in the simplest possible terms. No mechanics. No genres. Just vibes.

Example: ‘Fortnite is a shooter game with Sabrina Carpenter and Bart Simpson, and Balatro is a silly poker game.’ That’s it. Don’t explain roguelikes, don’t mention deck-building, don’t start talking about joker synergies all that shit is too much context for mashed potatoes conversation. They nod, nobody gets hurt, and everybody eats dessert. If they want to know more, they’ll ask.

“How Do I Even Play It?”

By now you’re so close to the end of this ‘interesting’ social interaction, but OH NO! you’ve garnered a captive audience. They’re hanging on your every word, they’ve placed their faith in your guidance, and now they’ve mustered up enough courage to ask the big question: ‘How Do I Even Play It?’ Believe it or not, this isn’t a trap, it’s vulnerability. You now hold all the power to do the funniest thing ever: recommend their first game be Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Jokes aside, you’ve piqued their interest. The mind is willing, but the thumbs are weak. They want to try, but they’ll tell you, ‘Games are too complicated.’ Here’s the thing: I’ve watched Peanut Butter the Shiba play Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball on Super Nintendo. If a dog can figure out a controller, your in-laws can absolutely handle one. Complexity isn’t the barrier, it’s fear, but these are the same people who own those big-ass generic universal remotes with more buttons than a fight stick, so they’ll be fine, they just need permission to start simple.

Therefore Reassure them: modern games aren’t an inside joke of button combinations. They’re designed to teach you while you play. So recommend games with minimal buttons, save points, and short fun experiences. Whatever you recommend, make it something YOU actually like. Your enthusiasm matters more than the ‘perfect’ beginner game. Just don’t hand them something like DOTA or Tarkov. Those ain’t games, they’re abusive relationships with worse matchmaking, and a quick way to find yourself uninvited to every future family function… Unless that’s what your plan is, then yeah, fuck ‘em let ‘em play Silksong.

The Effort Matters.

No matter what bots online say, the holidays are for getting together with people you don’t see often and trying to find some middle ground if possible. Gaming has always been a medium I’ve tried to help new and old generations alike find a middle ground with, mainly because it combines humanity’s desire for both play and art, and what’s more human than sharing something you love with somebody you love.

I started writing about games this year because I wanted to share my love of this medium with my wife, who had never played games until recently. She went from not understanding how a controller worked to now owning a Steam Deck and a GOTY list. It’s all about having patience on both sides willingness to share and willingness to learn.

Because how else are we going to get grandma to stop mentioning that one time SHE BEAT ME IN WII BOWLING? Jesus Christ, quit talkin shit, grow the fuck up, and play me in CS2.

HAPPY HOLI-GAMES EVERYONE! Now go watch all these wack ass WiiU Holiday Ads I found to put you in the spirit of either sharing your favorite games, or keeping your big mouth shut. Love all yall. Stay Silly. - BPM+ (Yes, That’s two pluses)

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One of my first real jobs was as a clerk at a pawnshop. During a conversation with the owner who was deep into video games, he asked me what was one of the hardest games I’d ever beat. My answer? Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. For a moment, he looked impressed before quickly responding with a ‘Yeah… Okay.’ I had never beaten Zelda II. I tried most of my childhood and couldn’t get past the first dungeon, and somehow this stranger knew my whole video game prowess was a lie with just that statement.

I think back on that moment a lot, mainly because when you’re deep into the culture of video games you develop almost a sixth-sense for sniffing out the games that people are most proud of beating and start to take those confessions with a grain of salt. Thus, I present to you 10 games I’m positive people are lying about beating, ranked from ‘I believe some of you’ to ‘absolutely nobody finished this.’ By a guy who is still lying about beating Zelda II.

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10. The Witness. (2016)

The Witness is designed to make you feel smart for the first few hours, then slowly reveals it’s actually testing whether you have the patience of a saint. Most people walk around, solve some panels, appreciate the art direction, and then quietly uninstall when they realize the philosophy lectures aren’t enough to keep them engaged through 600 more puzzles.

I don’t think people finish The Witness. Not because it’s hard, but because it’s annoying. There’s only so many times you can listen to pretentious audio logs about perspective and observation before you realize you’ve been staring at the same panel for 30 minutes and you still don’t understand what the game wants from you, almost like you’re being trolled by someone who thinks they’re smarter than you. It’s a beautiful game. It’s also exhausting, obtuse, and way too proud of itself. And anyone who tells me they finished it are coming off just as much of a pretentious loser as the voice in those audio logs.

9. Heavy Rain. (2010)

I don’t think a lot of people realize what Heavy Rain meant to the PS3 when it came out. If you were part of the PS3 hype cycle, that thing was marketed as a cinematic dream machine, but instead we got the nightmare that was Heavy Rain. Heavy ‘quick-time events: the movie’ Rain blessed us with janky face mo-cap, David Cage dialogue that sounded like it was written by AI, and SAW-wannabe storytelling that thought it was deep. The entire game became the laughing stock of YouTube Let’s Plays with its ‘Press X to Jason’ button prompts, and yet people will say with a straight face ‘Yeah, I beat it, wasn’t that bad.’

‘Press X to DOUBT.’ They watched someone else play it on YouTube while the comments roasted every plot hole in real time. Heavy Rain isn’t even ‘so bad it’s good’ it’s a tech demo that accidentally became a cult curiosity. If you actually sat through all of Heavy Rain’s QTEs and made it to the end, you either have incredible patience or you’re lying. And honestly? I don’t blame you for lying. Nobody actually wants to admit they spent 10 hours pressing buttons to dig their way through David Cage’s fever dream.

8. Silent Hill 2 Remake. (2024)

Everyone ranks Silent Hill 2 as one of the scariest games of all time, but I don’t think people are finishing the remake. Like, genuinely. Yeah, the original was terrifying and hard to navigate, but the remake? It’s LONGER! Bloober Team looked at an already exhausting horror game and said ‘you know what this needs? MAXIMUM content.’ Expanded sections, better graphics - WHY? To make us scared in 4K? No thank you, I’m good. People out here telling me they sat through 10+ hours of psychological torture, navigated those apartments, dealt with Pyramid Head, and made it all the way through? Doubt. Steam’s 20% completion rate calling y’all bluff.

Listen, I’ve seen people quit horror games because a door creaked funny, and Silent Hill 2 Remake wants you to feel miserable for its entire runtime. Back in 2001, I told people I couldn’t beat the game because of the fog, and that was a legitimate excuse. Now the remake is running Unreal Engine 5, and we’re getting jump scared by Windows crash reports. Silent Hill 2 is a masterpiece, but I’m calling cap on anyone who says they beat the remake without at least considering uninstalling it halfway through.

7. MYST. (1993)

MYST strikes fear into me. I can remember sitting in front of my family computer, loading up MYST, and realizing I was too dumb to understand anything on the screen. Twenty years later, I stare at screenshots of MYST and still feel like a dumbass. I still don’t understand what it’s about or what it’s trying to convey.

MYST showed up on every family computer in the 90s. You clicked around an island, stared at some books, turned some valves, and had absolutely no idea what you were supposed to be doing. Then you told people you ‘played MYST’ like that meant something. It felt like we were all given MYST as a deterrent to hogging the family computer so our Dads could spend more time finding ‘hot singles in their area.’ Yet I’ve met people who told me they beat MYST as a kid, and all I have to say to that is: You watched somebody smarter than you beat it. And the fact you’ll lie to my face so boldly means I never want to speak to you again.

6. Any Kingdom Hearts Game. (2002 - FOREVER)

What is Kingdom Hearts? Where is Kingdom Hearts? Who is Kingdom Hearts? These are questions that Kingdom Hearts fans can’t even answer. Believe me, I don’t dislike Kingdom Hearts. I WANT to like KH because I want to understand what the fuck it even is. But the story doesn’t know where it’s going half the time, and I’m almost positive it doesn’t want you to follow it. Just to comprehend the story, you gotta play multiple titles across console and mobile, read different manga entries, follow fan Tumblr accounts with cryptic lore breakdowns, and commit to 5-hour video essays about Mickey Mouse.

Kinda like Kingdom Hearts, I just got lost in my own rambling. But the point still stands: the individuals who have beaten a KH game and actually understand it have committed their lives to the cause, and I salute you. For everybody else? If you tell me you beat a Kingdom Hearts game and understand the story, you might as well hop inside Monstro with Pinocchio with yo lying ass.

5. Disco Elysium. (2019)

GOD, I LOVE DISCO! Disco made me cry, it made me think, it made me fall asleep on my couch one time while playing it. My wife woke me up and said, ‘Aww, did your audiobook put you to sleep?’ I did finish Disco, but I keep my mouth shut about it because Disco fans are BIG NERDS. The type of poly-sci nerds who’ve actually read Marx and can spell bourgeoisie without spell check. Disco is bigger than just a game it’s a way of thinking about art, politics, and why you’re complicit in your own oppression. And if ‘The Final Cut’ with voice acting never came out, I wouldn’t have made it through all that text.

Most people barely make it even WITH the voice acting. Disco is difficult to navigate, nothing is simple, and it’s designed to be experienced from multiple perspectives. So here’s my advice: if you haven’t beaten it, don’t bring it up unless you want a lecture on Marxist theory. And if you have beaten it? Be careful who you mention that around. rather than asking if you beat Disco, fans are gonna quiz your knowledge of Deleuze until you feel like a college dropout.

4. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)

I don’t even know what Skyrim is anymore. In 2011, I played Skyrim every damn day. I did every quest, fought every dragon, and I still don’t know if I beat it. People love Skyrim because of how much endless potential it has for an open world game, but I don’t even know if that’s a good thing. Is Skyrim ever done? When you’re done playing it, are you ever really done? I know people who dive back into Skyrim every few months only to emerge from their living rooms weeks later like roaches after a nuclear apocalypse, and when you ask them if they’ve beaten it, even they don’t know.

So if you tell me with a straight face ‘Yeah, I beat Skyrim,’ you’re lying. That’s like confidently answering ‘What’s the meaning of life?’ anyone who gives you a straight answer is either a con artist or full of shit. We’ve all got 200 hours in Skyrim. We can name every standing stone, we’ve joined every guild, bought a house in every hold. But if I asked anyone what happens at the end of the main quest, we’d all have to Google it. Nobody beats Skyrim. We all just live in its world for a while until you remember you have to shower.

3. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. (2019)

I’m not a souls-type guy. I got maybe 45 minutes of playtime in Elden Ring, but I respect those who love their digital masochism so much that they get off work and wallow in a virtual ass beating. However, souls fans love to brag. They’ll tell you how Elden Ring changed their life and cured their depression. How Dark Souls saved their parent’s marriage and brought their goldfish back to life. How Demon’s Souls taught them to read, gave them discipline, and turned them into productive members of society. But mention Sekiro? Suddenly it’s hushed tones and quick subject changes. ‘Yeah, I beat it’ followed immediately by talking about literally anything else. So somebody’s gotta be lying.

I’m starting to think that ‘I beat Sekiro’ is code for ‘I got bonked by that ape, died to a fart, and then uninstalled.’ Unlike Elden Ring, you ain’t farming your way out of skill checks. Sekiro doesn’t have summons, or co-op, or broken builds. You either learn to parry or you’re going in the grave. And for many of us, Sekiro is sitting in our backlog graveyard. Admit it, once you realized the game wasn’t going to let you brute-force your way through, you realized you had better games to play. But so nobody would revoke your souls card, you watched the ending on YouTube and told people you beat it. That’s okay. Sometimes we beat the game, and sometimes the game beats us. And sometimes you die to a fart.

2. Final Fantasy VII. (1997)

You beat FF7, right? Bet. Remember when Palmer got hit by that truck? What about fighting that Demon Wall? Cloud’s wheelchair era? No? Of course you don’t, because you only played up to Midgar. Look, everyone knows Aerith dies, Sephiroth is the villain, and Cloud is that guy from Super Smash Bros. But if I asked you to explain golden chocobo breeding, where the hell Gongaga is, or what’s happening at Fort Condor, you got nothing. You and I both know you didn’t finish FF7, we’ve all watched the story beats on YouTube.

A lot of us spent 20 plus years nodding along when people called it a masterpiece, and we’ve never swapped the disc. And I can hear the Remake players yelling right now, but take a seat. Remake and Rebirth breathed new life into the story, but it’s not the same. FF7 IS A MASTERPIECE AND YOU SHOULD ABSOLUTELY PLAY IT. But we both know you won’t, because it’s sooo much easier to keep lying instead of fighting three forms of Sephiroth. (okay, two and a half, but you’ll never know because you won’t beat it.)

1. Super Mario Brothers. (1985)

I’m positive a majority of people NEVER beat Super Mario Bros, and are misremembering their childhoods. We all played it as kids, made it to World 4, and died to Lakitu. But I can hear you now saying, ‘I made it to the end!’ The ‘our princess is in another castle’ line ain’t the end, that’s just World 4, genius. Admit it, you spent 30+ years telling people you ‘beat the first Mario’ because it’s so foundational that nobody is gonna press you. And even if you DID ‘beat it,’ you definitely used the warp zones, which means you skipped 75% of the game. That’s not beating it, that’s skipping content.

Nintendo got so fed up with y’all lying that they released “Super Mario Bros. 35” specifically to expose us all. And what did we do? We died to a Goomba in World 1-1 before we even got a mushroom. The entire world watched us get publicly humiliated by the first enemy in video game history, and we were outed. Shook the world so much they turned off the service. What a damn shame.

Sorry if I exposed anyone, Leave a comment and tell me what games you been lying about. Remember it’s all love. I appreciate the 30 Followers. Love all yall. Stay Silly. - BPM+

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Pinned down by gunfire in a dark corridor, my squad mate says over proximity chat, “Sorry! We only shot because we were afraid. But we just want to go home. You want to go home too, right?” The other team responds with a sincere apology and we bond over how fun the game is and how there are good people in these lobbies. Our peace treaty lasted right up until the enemy player mentioned he found the same weapon my teammate had been searching for all day. Proximity chat cuts off. My teammate switches back to team-only and says, “Let’s fuck em’.”

This type of treachery is the punchline to every clip catching virality now that Embark Studios’ has released their multiplayer extraction shooter ‘Arc Raiders,’ leading people to flood Embark’s Discord and subreddit with demands to: ‘PLEASE CREATE A REPUTATION SYSTEM!’ As if a little “good noodle badge” would stop someone from blasting you for your rare-tier rifle. In theory, sure, that would be nice. But let’s be honest, you don’t want a reputation system. Secretly, you want all the smoke.

Players pointed to Arc’s lore as justification: a world where the rich abandoned Earth and left the lower class to live underground while their giant death robots exterminate anyone bold enough to touch grass. We hear this call for reputation systems every time someone plays “unfair.” But back in 2007, one game proved that getting what you ask for isn’t always what you want. A game teeming with savagery. A multiplayer mode where nothing mattered but treachery in pursuit of treasure, and a visible reputation system that poisoned every lobby.

I’m talkin’ IO Interactive’s ‘Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (Fragile Alliance).

Fragile Alliance was simple: you and six other players are tasked with completing a bank heist. Get in. Cash out. The instructional commentary makes it clear: extract with a full team and you’re splitting the loot six ways. This is where the game urges you to get dirty, whatever the cost. That same instructional becomes the devil on your shoulder, stoking the flames with voice lines only audible to you:

“He’s carrying a fortune, don’t leave him alone.”

“Finally I get lucky, why the fuck should I share?”

“Mercs in the alliance split their score…Traitors don’t.”

Within Fragile Alliance existed a reputation system. Each player account displayed a calling card detailing enough robbery records and criminal stats to make a Martin Scorsese crime movie blush. A basic high score ranking system to show off your virtuosity. So how’d it go wrong?

The problem: the reputation system lived outside individual matches. Your backstabbing history became a permanent digital footprint anyone could check before the game even started. Players would gun you down before the screen faded in, all for your crimes of being a “BIG MEANIE.” Even the possibility of betrayal was enough to trigger instant executions. When data was cross-referenced, the fun was over. Knowing who the enemy was from the beginning stripped away the excitement of pulling off a heist or breaking bad.

The result: chaos became conformity.

Today, the servers for Kane & Lynch: Dead Men are long dead, but the feeling of betraying your teammates still runs deep in the psyche of players in online lobbies. Depravity and greed are parts of ourselves we rarely get to indulge, but Fragile Alliance established a playground where they were applauded, until enough was enough. Yet with Arc Raiders, we once again stare down the question of a reputation system. Requesting safety, but also wanting to wallow in the spoils of your fellow neighbor’s inventory.

If you couldn’t tell by now, I dislike reputation systems in multiplayer games, and it isn’t because I’m some blood-thirsty loot goblin. Hell, I got called a pussy and kicked from the team after we extracted for not helping backstab that guy in the opening story. Every multiplayer shooter nowadays has an anti-cheat system designed to separate real villains into their own lobbies so they can cheat against themselves, and even those fumble the ball by banning honest players half the time. So if the security program with the sole purpose of making people play fair ain’t working, what makes you think a secondary personal ranking system is gonna do god’s work?”

As players, we thrive off unpredictability in multiplayer lobbies. With unpredictability comes betrayal. The lack of a reputation system is what makes extraction shooters exciting, every encounter could go sideways. You risk everything: your gear, your escape, your dignity, all for the chance to backstab and extract alive. That’s the tension, that’s the gamble, and that fuels the ‘just one more run’ ethos.

Personally, I don’t expect Embark to add a reputation system, even if the community has a point. The lore of Arc does push for cooperation in the hope of salvation. However, players want that in the real world, not their digital ones. We want the messiness in here because this is where heart-pounding drama feels right. It’s like going to a horror movie, you want to be scared in a safe space. But if you’re reading the plot on Wikipedia beforehand, you’re just ruining the experience.

IO Interactive took that previous lesson to heart, and in 2010 they dropped “Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days.” A grittier, ultra-violent, LiveLeak-esque rail shooter that made reviewers clutch their pearls. Even my mom banned the game from the crib, and she copped us EVERY GTA ON LAUNCH!

Dog Days brought back Fragile Alliance 2, and somehow those servers are still up. Backstabbers run rampant and players aren’t calling for honor among thieves. Maybe they remember what was lost when we relied heavily on the reputation system. Nevertheless, fifteen years later, every match in Dog Days feels like your favorite extraction shooter moment, because the world is built off the messiness that players crave in their digital worlds. So why would Arc players be expected to behave any differently? In a world on the brink of collapse, I’d expect nothing less than someone trying to rob me for a couple tuna cans if it meant they’d become the tuna can king of the wasteland.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is still brutal, and currently $20.00 on GOG! Those viral clips driving Arc Raiders to the top of the charts and pushing players to demand a reputation system? They’re just echoes of what K&L2 players have been doing for fifteen years in the Shanghai criminal underworld and it doesn’t even have a battle pass!

Whether you’re a big meanie or too soft to pull the trigger, one thing’s for sure: the backstabbing will continue even if morale improves.

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“Shout out to my mom for banning Kane & Lynch 2 in the crib. I wasn’t mature enough. I can see that now.” - BPM+

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Around late 2018, “Red Dead Redemption” dropped, then the pandemic happened, and we all kinda locked ourselves inside, becoming galloping horsey girls on a nation-expanding quest to become Tahitians with our gang of colorful cowboys and cowgirls, Yee-haw.

Like all great works of art, Red Dead has taken an effect on the culture, specifically finding a warm place in the hearts of the Alpha “I-Don’t-Play-No-Video-Games” Male. You’ll likely encounter one of these individuals by just speaking about games in public. They’ll scan their surroundings, pull you off to the side, get uncomfortably close to your face, before softly whispering to you that they unabashedly love Red Dead Redemption 2 and would DIE for Arthur Morgan.

And that’s cool. No shade, but looking at it now, it’s funny how Red Dead became the game that broke the veil for them. Arthur Morgan is a strong, written character, a tough guy with a soft side. He’d pet your dog, but he’d also rob your dog, and that’s pretty cool. He’s not like the other mascots of Alpha male gaming that came before him, like Master Chief, who fell in love with Microsoft-Copilot, or John Call of Duty. And yet, guys love Arthur and Red Dead because the western genre is in-inherently manly by default and safe to consume. In their minds, women aren’t going to see Red Dead, NBA 2K, NHL, Madden, or Call of Duty on a screen and say… “I’m concerned for my partner’s tastes in media.” So here’s where my suggestion comes in… “It’s time to get a little weird with it, baby boy, and I’ve got your gateway.”

One year before Red Dead clip-clopped into our hearts. My roommate gifted me a copy of “Yakuza 0” with the elevator pitch of “you’ve never played anything this wild.” Coming into my very own “I-Don’t-Play-No-Video-Games,” era I had a copy of 2K and Black OPS 3, which was all I needed, and my library had no space for some damn Japanese anime game. However, out of mutual respect, I loaded the disc in and fell in love.

Everything I knew about my “manly personified” taste in gaming changed as soon as I found myself spending more time playing dress-up mini games and singing in-game karaoke solos out loud, while balancing my time throwing hands with patriarchs of Japanese crime families squabbling for cash. Don’t get me wrong, I still beat they ass every chance I got, but when I needed a break, you could find ya boy racing toy cars for the affection of man-children and politicking with the chicken I won in a bowling match, and then hired to run my real estate empire.

Yakuza was an outrageous display of Glitz. Glam. Gore, and greed! It was everything I wanted in a story and nothing I expected to enjoy. And absolutely NOBODY wanted to hear a damn thing about it. “That shit, weird.” was the period to every conversation with my like-minded “Male” homies. I was on the other side of the coin and couldn’t believe anyone would feel the same way I felt just a few months prior. Now, this isn’t where I tell you I became scorned by my friends. “We all running the same race, just different horsies.” But I know everybody starts surface-level and discovers different ways to explore the art form. My point here is that since Red Dead’s Launch, more and more men have begun to only scratch the surface of the medium, secretly falling in love with the art form but being too afraid to dive deep.

That’s where we come in. The auteurs. The archivists. The curators and the lovers. We have the ability as taste makers and lovers of this medium to influence the fence sitters to hop over. Which is why Yakuza 0 reigns supreme as my go-to recommendation for these guys. A game that is so unassuming on the surface, but digging down entangles you in enough weirdness that breaks expectations and makes you accept this medium for more than a mirror image of real-life sports or safe male genre tropes.

Since 2015, gaming has remained an opportunity to jump super far outside of my comfort zone, which is the only place one can truly grow mentally and physically. We all need art that challenges our preconceived notions. By the same token, we all need a “just right challenge” to help us comfortably navigate the uncomfortable, because without being challenged, you’re putting yourself at risk of denying all the beauty this medium of games has to offer.

Taste in art is something that is developed over time. In elementary school, children are shown something like “Starry Night” and told, “This is art,” but imagine if everybody stopped there, you’d find that damn IKEA print of Starry Night on everybody’s wall because people would be too scared to explore art that really speaks to them. Growth doesn’t happen overnight, and this piece ain’t the green light to knock other people’s taste. Rather, this is a reminder of the opportunity we have to open the door for those who aren’t into video games or feel embarrassed to explore the medium’s variety due to their own hangups.

So, start encouraging people to step out of their comfort zone more and experience all the beauty and weirdness this medium has to offer. Gatekeeping is and always will be for losers, and we gain nothing by keeping others in the dark. Who knows, your recommendation might inspire the annual Madden buyer to end up modding a PSX just to play a Japanese import copy of Tokimeki Memorial, and find themselves falling deeply in love with Shiori Fujisaki….. I mean… maybe…

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“Rest in Power D’Angelo, thank you for Red Dead Redemption 2.” - BPM+

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Skateboarding is fundamentally cool, and everybody good at it is by default also cool. Don’t argue with me; those are the rules. If you disagree, you’re wrong, or a cop.

But like everything that takes a lot of effort to do and is widely respected, there’s gotta be the individuals that want the perks that come from learning the skills but know they don’t have the talent or energy to take up the challenge. As a result, they receive the demeaning title of “poser.”

Posers come in all shapes and forms, but in skate culture, there is no worse sin than poser-ism. Why? Because skating is built on community effort. In opposition to “polite society,” skating has always been seen as a sport and hobby of aversion.

It’s banned from most public places and subjected to small corners of municipal suburban parks or abandoned lots. While City planners work hard to keep skaters from engaging with their meticulously constructed stone benches, C-suite suits do their best to popularize their products with youthful groups of individuals by ensuring every promotional advertisement features at least one person holding a board.

And that’s where Skate 4, or as EA Games has re-titled it, “Skate.” Comes in. Skate. Is basically a Zuckerberg-esque metaverse Zumiez store released this week on consoles, pc, and mobile. The pitch is simple. “Skateboarding is back,” but it’s really not. Only the concept of it is back.

Yeah Skate. Feels good to play when you’re on the board. But most of the time, the game wants me skydiving, doing parkour, or rolling around in a damn ball like I’m Samus Aran, only in hopes that I stay locked in long enough to drop real cash on a digital thrasher hoodie and some vans. Even going as far as creating in-game quests that prompt me to open the store. Keep in mind, this is the same game that has been in development for over 10 years, and they made people who play-tested still buy the “founders edition cosmetics pack” for $50.00. I see you, EA, out here writing a college course thesis on dark psychology marketing.

Listen, I’m not gonna pretend that making games is easy. Just because I spend most of my days consuming video game media and have an uninstalled copy of Godot on my PC, doesn’t mean I’m a game developer. No hypocrite shit happening over here. So this is no shot at the devs, this is a shot once again at the C-suites of EA. I get it. I love cash too. You wanted to make a Fortnite emote skating sim. A PacSun play place. A game where people who never touched a board could buy the keys to the culture for a few skate coins and a drop in their mom’s credit score. However, my issue is this “reboot” ain’t in line with the legacy of the Skate games you’re trying to impersonate as, in attempt to bring new and old fans back to your series, and it definitely ain’t representing the skateboarding culture you’re begging to be apart of, so it’s coming off as poser-ism

By contrast, Skate 1-3 got tons of people interested in skateboarding, due to its "Flick-it" movement system and authentic approach to skating technique. Preparing your stance, prepping your tricks, that’s all a part of building the skill. The game gave us a board and said, “grind it out and develop some talent.” Fast forward to Skate, and now BAM! You can’t even fail a ground flip trick. (Saw a guy playing it on his Samsung fridge a couple of days ago, and he landed a varial heelflip through a crazy amount of lag). If anyone could kickflip after touching a skateboard, we as a species would probably destroy every tree on this planet in an attempt to make more skateboards.

Look, I love the culture of skating, and I tolerate the culture of video games. However, I do love that games give me an opportunity to do things I’d never do or wouldn’t be capable of, that’s the beauty of this medium. But if EA is gonna be bold enough to title it “Skate” and entirely lose the plot of Skate culture, they might find themselves out of style faster than weed socks, thrasher hoodies, and them damn RipnDip shirts.

“Long live Mike Carroll. He ain’t dead, I just love that guy” - BPM+

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My dreams are not of labor. In the first half of my life, you could find me in the midst of your local Holiday Inn ballroom job fair. Poised in thrift store suits and a Bluetooth earpiece, the overly-eagerness of pseudo-professionalism wafted off me along with the smell of magazine cologne samples. This was my theater, the only place where a firm handshake and a parodied cadence of Leonardo DiCaprio's overrated portrayal of Jordan Belfort might break my stint of surviving on peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches.

When that era of my life ended, it came at the hands of landing the "dream job." The career where all your hard work climaxes. The occupation that made me believe a retirement fund was a real thing and not just an extra charge on my paycheck. While the salary wasn't a dream, nobody bothered me, making it worth more than gold. In those five years, I felt as if I had figured it all out. Everything I sacrificed was repaid to me with a career that astounded my peers and struck envy into strangers. That was until a lightning bolt of stress shocked my nervous system upon receiving a 30-minute HR calendar request on an average Wednesday. This meeting would become the first tremor in an earthquake of transformation I never saw coming.

Fast forward an hour, and there I was, staring down an HR administrator as they feigned tears on my behalf. They explained that my entire department would be laid off due to "upstream decisions", and we would be forced to exit all accounts by the close of business. In that moment, something fundamental shattered inside me. The careful architecture of identity I had built around my professional achievement collapsed with surgical precision. What remained was a person separated by the death of an illusion.

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I. The Rebellion of Form

The next morning arrived carrying the weight of a transformed nervous system. My mind clouded with anxiety navigating the most simplistic tasks as a self I no longer recognized. Taking our puppy out for a walk became an exercise in negotiating with flesh that had declared independence from conscious will. The simple act of manipulating a glass of water required treaties with hands that trembled like leaves in the wind. Stress manifested as electrical storms beneath my skin, currents of panic that traveled through my chest with acute precision. In the recess of night, my eyes traced ceiling patterns like constellations in an alien sky, hoping to find coordinates back to the person I used to be. Sleep, when it finally arrived, brought night terrors that attached themselves to peace like parasites, sending my heart rate racing back into incapacitating pain.

Something had to give.

Self-medication became a ritual of desperate negotiation with my rebelling body. A couple Bayer aspirins in the morning, small white promises that pain could be managed through chemistry. Stress gummy vitamins after breakfast, artificial sweetness coating the metallic taste of terror that persisted in my mouth. Herbal teas for lunch, each sip in attempt to convince my nervous system to calm. Every intervention a prayer to flesh that had forgotten how to home a consciousness, and all to no avail, leading me to seek professional guidance in deciphering my blight.

Lying on that examination table, electrodes affixed to my bare skin felt like communion wafers of a technological religion. The doctor's words landed with the weight of revelation: it was possible that I was in more need of a psychologist than a physician. She insisted that if we couldn't bring my stress under control, things would become tumultuous, as if they weren't already?

Doctor's orders? Relax. But, how? I had lost my career and my body was fighting for survival in a war I couldn't comprehend. But within this dissolution lay something unexpected: time. Time to tackle projects that had waited patiently in the shadows of professional urgency. Time to consider experiences I had postponed in offerings to my pride and productivity. I saw my doctor's diagnosis as permission to return gaming for my health, a prescription more enjoyable than any previous pharmaceutical intervention. Hence, I proceeded into my backlog, searching for something paradoxical, art that could mirror my own despair. Instead, I discovered a meditation on the nature of existence, a digital dimension that would exchange psychological dissolution for conscious enlightenment inside: “GERMS: Nerawareta Machi.” (1999).

II. A Manifestation of Desolation

Upon booting up my MiSTer1, hesitation crystallized in my chest like ice forming in still water. From the screenshots GERMS seemed to be dread in a metaphysical form, as the start screen appeared the title geometrically shape shifted parasitically heightening the apprehension. Nevertheless, I began. Abruptly, I materialized into dejected polygonal office, as a human shaped object with an illustrated face poising as my assistant asked, “Have you read all your emails?” The entity’s foreboding nature compelled me to flee it’s presence and interact with the in-game computer, which provided context that felt less like exposition and more like diagnosis. I was an unidentified reporter tasked to investigate the appearance of an unidentified virus inspiring cellular disbandment and mutant amalgamation within this unidentified city’s residents. So I hit the streets.

When I first entered the monochromatic tomb that is "City" inside GERMS’ game world, it felt like stepping into the digital manifestation of existential dread. It’s empty streets served as silent testimony to the catastrophic events that had transpired. The haunting silence punctuated only by esoteric looping audio fragments, a stark absence of existence where life should be only amplified the overwhelming sense of desolation. The game had ingeniously propelled me into my first uncomfortable, but intimate moment with self-reflection.

In a way, GERMS constructs its open world not as a playground of possibility, but as a void of meaning. Every street corner whispered the same terrible fourth wall breaking question: Where are you really? The game presented this raw terror of existing in a universe that offers no inherent purpose, no predetermined path, a terror I had been living with since my professional identity had been amputated from my sense of self.

The City’s lack of interactivity, wasn't a weakness to be overlooked. It emphasized it’s intentional confrontations with the void, a digital representation of the spaces between thoughts where anxiety breeds. Without the constant stimulation of densely packed content in a game world, I was left alone with my own growing unease. I was experiencing the profound loneliness of consciousness awakening to its own isolation, its own insignificance in the face of forces beyond comprehension or control. The NPCs, which only existed indoors, exclaimed their fears into the void only as a means for me to construct more of the plot, before their bodies decomposed or transformed before my eyes. In this respect, GERMS effortlessly revealed the cold fact that I was not a hero in it’s world, I had arrived here to witness and participate in my personal demise or observe transformation.

Introspection swelled. I dedicated much of my professional life to sculpting a persona that would validate my occupational achievements. Using my career as a power fantasy, I constructed meaning from my struggle, fashioning mental armor from the embers of “bootstraps heroic pride.” But now I had lost my dream job, my personal power fantasy, and in parallel, GERMS had simultaneously prohibited me from applying any indomitable persona onto this silent protagonist. Rather than conventional 90’s video game power fantasy stereotypes, GERMS shrugged at my spiraling and alternatively offered existential insignificance.

There I was. In constant contention with the task of admitting defeat and entombing the persona that had delivered me from that peanut butter sandwich diet.

There I was. Suffering from incapacitating stress pains, that felt like I was combating against my own body.

There I was. Empathizing with GERM’S NPCs that had fallen victim to a comparable existential and body-horror induced sabotage.

III. The Betrayal of Flesh

By the arrival of my third boss encounter, I had become intimate with expletive outbursts regarding the game's controls, a relationship that felt less like "gamer rage" and more like arguing with my own nervous system. GERMS' movement is often criticized and dismissed as technical incompetence, but as my hands trembled from stress, wrestling with the controls, I recognized something profound. What if this clumsiness isn't a flaw, rather, the most honest representation of embodied human existence programmed into a game?

Every moment of struggle with the interface began to mirror the internal battle I'd faced for weeks. As the game resisted my desperation for control something clicked into place with the weight of revelation. The control scheme wasn't punishing me, it was embodying the terror of losing agency over our own bodies, our own lives, our own narratives. This concept is most apparent in the unsettling infection system. Upon succumbing to certain enemies, you don't simply receive a "Game Over." Instead, your character takes on mutated characteristics. Transformations that aren't merely cosmetic changes, but profound reversals of how the protagonist exists and controls within the world. I recognized the infection system as more than a game mechanic. Rather, a representation of how trauma rewrites the self at the cellular level. A direct illustration of my consciousness rebelling against the flesh, leaving me with a body that no longer obeyed, a mind that no longer served, an identity that no longer cohered to my desires for normalcy. GERMS had programmed all of this into a digital form, making empathy almost mechanical.

The virus in GERMS and my consciousness were operating by identical logic; both required change from within, both made the familiar foreign, both demanded surrender to processes beyond conscious control. But where my real-world transformation felt chaotic and meaningless, the game's infection system revealed transformation as a process with its own intelligence, its own patterns, its own terrible beauty. And since I had already lost control of my professional identity, my physical stability, and my emotional equilibrium, I decided for the first time in ten plus years, to give in. Transform, and accept the change.

IV. Making a Monster

In the final hours of GERMS, I came face to face with an onslaught of cosmic figures, mutated humans that had accepted consciousness transformation and were seeking to transcend our corporeal dimension. These beings had embraced the virus not as illness but as understanding, as evolution beyond the limitations that had trapped them in familiar forms of suffering. However, as the protagonist, I had traveled to this adventure’s end with the task of eliminating these monsters. A mission that felt increasingly hollow as I recognized in their transformed state something I was beginning to understand about my own process.

Stepping into an underground mine, I encountered a transformed geometric essence that spoke to me unlike any previous entity. However, this wasn't just the end boss fight, it was a confrontation the metaphorical offering of transformation.

It’s gospel penetrated deeper than dialogue: “This world is amazing, your mind can’t process it. After a few lives you’ll understand. I’m your other self. I will beat you and be one again.” It’s words rippled through my consciousness extending far beyond the game's narrative. This entity wasn't threatening annihilation, it was offering integration. An offering to recognize that the self I was trying to preserve was only one configuration of consciousness among infinite possibilities.

There laid the real conflict: not between protagonist and monster, but between the self that clings to familiar forms and the self that embraces transformation as consciousness's natural state. There I understood that my struggle wasn't with layoffs, but with the persona I affixed to an organization whose decisions were beyond my control, inciting my unwillingness to change. However, now I was ready. I had laid my eyes on GERMS’ enlightenment, and yearned to transcend the restraints of my persona imprisonment.

Unfortunately, the protagonist was sent to kill, and so he did.

The screen faded to black, and in that overlaying darkness, a text box delivered a message: “The door to the other dimension is gone. Was it an illusion? Are we free? I don’t know, but something changed. My consciousness is cleansed, but everyday I go to work it feels like it was very real.” Maybe a narrative conclusion? Maybe a therapeutic breakthrough? Just like the beginning, we materialize into a dejected polygonal office, as the human shaped object assistant asked me; “Have you read all your emails?” But this time there were none. A space emptied of its former power that defined the protagonist’s worth, and my own.

V. The True Horror of Becoming

GERMS' cosmic horror influence operates as profound metaphor for all the ways external forces reshape our internal reality. Those intangible powers that humans could never attempt to understand, influence, or much less control. My professional persona had crumbled apart from forces outside my control, and in response, I had fallen deeper into helplessness, thrashing against the whims of cosmic powers only to exhaust and sicken myself further.

After resurfacing back into the protagonist's role of office worker questioning everything but learning nothing initially, I awakened to GERMS' final revelation: conscious transformation demands every cell of your humanity. Not as sacrifice, but as a conduit to a more secure version of one’s self, whether we participate willingly or not.

In its flawed, experimental way, GERMS achieves something that more polished horror experiences often miss, it makes us afraid not of death, but of life itself. Afraid of the relentless process of becoming what life demands. And in that experience, if we're brave enough to truly engage with it, we might discover something unexpected; that the terror of change also contains the possibility of transformation, that the horror of becoming might also be the pathway to growth, to understanding, to a deeper compassion for the shared vulnerability defining human consciousness.

GERMS hadn't just mirrored my crisis, it had catalyzed my recovery by creating a safe space for practicing surrender, understanding identity, and discovering that transformation could be welcomed rather than endured. In that transformation I discovered the destruction of my old persona. The pride I'd built around my consciousness after being accepted to my “dream job” had been pride in successful self-abandonment, a realization that arrived with the clarity of a fever breaking. Days after finishing the game, I noticed my health had returned. I picked back up my hobbies, new opportunities appeared, but work now felt chosen rather than desperate, a transformation that serves life rather than consuming it.

Through digital horror, I discovered something that months of self-medication and medical intervention had failed to express: transformation is a gift rather than a curse, change as consciousness's natural expression rather than it’s enemy. Accepting the dissolution of this mentality had incapacitated my worldview and forced me to fight my own psychological flesh, but finally morph into something new. Something that refuses to allow “upstream decisions” to reshape my consciousness into the real monster, a human shaped object with an illustrated face, asking, “Have you read all your emails?”

Thank you for letting me share my heart with you. We’ll find each other again somewhere in this digital ether. Until then, remember: Drink more water. Love yourself a bit more. And actually play the games you buy.

- BIG PICTURE MODE PLUS+

Dedicated to my wife, our dog, our kitten, and my twenty year old self.

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Nostalgia is a poison—an intoxicant so strong that when you experience it in the right circumstances, you have no choice but to shelter yourself within its grasp and submit. I tend to engage with nostalgia the way one does with roadside billboards for hamburgers, acknowledging their grandness but diverting your attention back to life’s vehicle, keeping your eyes toward the horizon and waving its attempts to satisfy some comfortable desire that exists only in the rear-view mirror of your mind.

One “cool” thing about getting older is that ignoring nostalgia becomes a daily insurmountable task. Every ad, celebrity, product, or company wants to market something that asks you to “remember a time when things weren’t so tough?” From pizza to pills, corporations have informed me that just remembering the good old days might be enough to cure my weighing existential crisis or an overwhelming sense of dread. However, ignoring that those aforementioned issues were brought on by last year’s pills and pizzas that were filled with microplastics. So the question is, will this product with 90’s retro Chucky-Cheese font make me forget about the bad times? Short answer, no. Long answer, nah, my boy.

Another “cool” thing you often do as you age is convincing yourself that nothing is “cool” anymore if you’ve engaged with it before. Remakes. Remasters. Reimagines, all are trash because you were there for ground-break. You laid your eyes upon the golden age, so why would you waste your time engaging with anything that looks similar to something you thought was original. This results in you beginning to mentally dig yourself into a hole.

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Step 1: Encountering Toxic Substances.

For a moment, you scan the space before you, and you recognize nothing. You've tunneled too deep in your attempt at evading the tender yet smothering arms of nostalgia. How deep? It is so deep that your keen techniques for pointing out aimless attempts at attention-grabbing nostalgia are gone. Now, you can only approximate where you stand in this darkness, but something is clear to you, there is a different type of intoxicant down here. Unbeknownst to you, your attempts at refuge have struck a metaphorical pipeline, and that intoxicant has begun seeping into the burrow. Sadly, you've engineered the perfect environment for irony poisoning to permeate, and now you're suffocating.

Step 2: Recognize the Symptoms of Poisoning.

Recently, I recognized I was suffocating, after hours of dissociating in my home office. As a self-titled digital curator of gaming culture, not engaging with the medium was killing me. Still, I couldn’t persuade my psyche to cooperate. Friends suggested I needed a vacation, but in this economy, that wasn’t going to happen. My family explained I needed time off, but if I couldn’t engage with anything besides the blank wall of my office, I’d feel cheated of using PTO. My wife, who only engages with video games at a distance and is the inspiration for the Substack, curiously asked,

“Whatever happened to that game you were playing last summer?”

Which one?

“The one where you’re a little Japanese boy? you go to an island or something?”

Oh yeah, Boku no Natsuyasumi 2: Umi no Bouken-hen

“Yeah, sure.”

Why do you ask?

“It was cute, and I thought it was funny when I asked you what you did in it, and you said.. nothing.. just relax and be a kid.”

Yeah, they got a new one out I should play it, but it’s probably just the same as the last one.

“And? what’s wrong with that?”

Filled to the gills with irony poisoning, I opened my mouth expecting some dismissive soliloquy to fall out, but I didn’t have an answer. Maybe a little vacation from my office wall could do the trick. The next day, I copped a copy of NATSU-MON 20th Century Summer Kid, plus the associated DLC. I told myself I’d approach it with as open of a mind as possible. NATSU-MON follows a simple story set up similarly to other Natsuyasumi games. You control a young boy, this time named Satoru, whose only job is to adjust to his new surroundings for 31 days of his August summer break. In past iterations of the series, the same summer break would occur in the 1970s or the 1980s, but NATSU-MON’S setting lands right in 1999, mirroring the years of my own memories of summer break.

As the game opens, you’re greeted by the title screen parading about with a whimsical flute theme made for what I’d expect to be in an advertisement for “build-a-bear.” However, the theme alone felt like the refreshing carbonated mist flung from the pop-top of a cold canned beverage on the first 100-degree day of vacation. A smirk of joy crept across my jaded smile, and it was only the beginning.

Step 3: Plan Accordingly.

Off the top, I adjusted the game’s passage of time settings to “easy.” This modification would give me time to settle into the world without rushing and turning my time here into a pursuit of objectives. This was Satoru’s and my vacation, and the number one rule of summer vacation is that there are no rules. The story began with the lil homie staring out the window of an industrial 18-wheeler. The truck carried a colorful shipping container with the symbol of a circus tent painted on the side. The game’s world set before me in all its vibrancy, and in response, irony poising fumed from my eyes as it manifested into physical form, carrying my eyes in an expertly maneuvered eye-roll. The toxicity jolted from my lips, saying, “Seriously, ya parents run a circus? You serious bro. Y’all trying so hard to not be another Natsuyasumi game that y’all start with this bullshit. I’m supposed to be hanging out, not running a damn clown show.”

To my surprise, Satoru felt the same; he had brought a similar hesitation to this new beachside town. Feeling the exhaustive nature of being blood-related to a traveling circus, the lil homie felt the need to reassure himself and, by proxy, me that it would only be 31 days, and somehow that eased my commitment issues. At that moment, I told myself I could commit to 31 in-game days. Best case scenario, I'd have some new Steam achievements for my profile, worse case, I’d take up another extended stay staring at my home office wall.

Step 4: Discuss Treatment Options.

During the first few days spent in the world, the game impressively lays out its time mechanics for getting situated and how you’ll spend your next month. As Satoru, you wake up each morning and have breakfast with some circus troupe members, the guest house owner, and her niece. Afterward, you, as the player, are free to wander the world.

So I began to model my personal vacation mantras in-game. I spent the first few days walking the island and taking in the sites. In the morning, I’d head to the beach and collect crabs for fishing bait; in the afternoon, I’d swim out to the isolated rock formations that I pretended were little secret islands that only I, as a ten-year-old boy, were strong enough to reach, there I would catch fish for our guest-house owner to prepare as unique little side dishes for our evening meals. Near sunset, I’d spend hours scouring hills, searching for buzzing cicadas that hid within the knot holes of towering oak trees that scraped the clouds. In the evening, I was called back home to dine with my circus troupe family, where I recounted my thrilling adventures.

Whereas in reality, I couldn't shake the sentimentality that Satoru's world stirred within me. This contemplation seemed to summon nostalgia’s phantom grip, which comforted and troubled me. The irony toxin fueling this avoidance led me to struggle against appreciating the game's unique, but confusing gift that it held in front of me. I kept telling myself, "I'm only here because the game is slow and lets me explore at my own pace, but once this stops being leisure, I'm logging out.

Step 5: Administer Care.

Around my fifth day in game, one of the performers mentioned over breakfast that the circus was slipping into a financial crisis. By the 15th of August, a sum of 30,000 Yen would be needed to keep things stable. Just like before, the poison recessed from my mouth, but this time with diluted intensity. “That’s a lot of cash! How y’all running this circus into the ground. Look, if I run up against that amount of money, I might be able to help,” is what I said out loud, but my actions led to me stacking more Yen than the GDP of this sleepy seaside town. Something inside me had started to break. I knew the local convenience store would trade you pocket change for recycling bottles found at the beach, the local museum was in the market of accepting fossils and specialty wildlife for cash, and the youthful reporter who I’d run into on one of my nightly walks to catch fireflies had mentioned he’d pay me for crayon illustrations of the local fauna so I had some prospects.

Curiously, I paused the game and asked myself why I wanted to do this? Why did I genuinely want to help these characters? I had only engaged with the game for seven real-world days. I didn’t want to help because it would advance the story or even get a Steam achievement. I wanted to help because, in some way, these characters were helping me. All my actions during this virtual vacation were effortless to me, but somehow, the game was surgically excising my irony poisoning and replacing it with an appreciation attributing to the simplicity of life. This whimsical-ass little game had presented me with the privilege to let myself feel anything other than animosity, and I was too blind to comprehend its offering; in the moment. On the surface I accepted the task, because it’d give me an excuse to explore more of NATSU-MON’s world, but underneath, I could feel something was breaking.

Step 6: Question Your Own Introspection.

By August 15th, Satoru and I saved up more than 30,000 Yen. In actuality, we had 254,489 Yen, so you know, little money for the circus, little money to ball out on toys I had been eyeing since the first week of our summer break. Another upsetting news exchange came after delivering that cash to the troupe without any additional questions. For some back story, Satoru’s parents leave him with the circus troupe as his guardians after the first day in town. The only problem is the circus’ show schedule had begun, and Satoru’s father, who is the troupe’s ringleader, still hadn’t made his way home yet.

With no leadership and audiences inquiring about whether the show will go on, Satoru and the player are asked to carry the proverbial torch and become the troupe’s manager. Now if you were paying attention earlier, I was very clear about “not running a damn clown show.” The introduction of this game play mechanic didn’t sit well with the poisoning. The game once again leapt to my cynicism, reassuring me that it'd be okay if I didn’t want to help out. The troupe would survive. They had their money now; besides, I made that money by doing things I wanted. I wanted to go fishing for specialty sea creatures so the museum could have lovely displays for other school children. I wanted to clean up those bottles so people could enjoy the town the way I did. I wanted to hunt for fauna around town so the reporter could have new articles for the citizens to witness their nature's beauty. But Why? What was wrong with me? Why did I do any of this? And WHY DID I CARE?

Step 7: Allow Yourself to Heal.

When I started NATSU-MON, my only goal was to try to play a game that would be bright enough to lighten my mood of despair. I had become overwhelmed with handling the march of time and consumerism’s lust for trying to bottle those transient moments at salary payment prices. Their willingness to sell me and others of my generation the memories of childhood and what we meant to each other before things needed to be remade, remastered, and argued over. Consequently, spending time back in the era of my childhood via the eyes of Satoru, a kid who began cynically about his summer break only to fall into altruism through my own actions, felt like putting a mirror up to my egotistical armor and asking, “What’s the point of shrouding yourself in bitterness, It isn’t helping others, and it isn’t helping you,”

In this final moment of self-reflection, I couldn't ignore my feelings any longer. I had to embrace the truth. My time engaging with this game was not just about completing objectives, experiencing a simulated vacation, or escaping my pessimism. By accepting these requests to help the characters, I was rediscovering the profound impact we have on each other's lives. What started as mild symptoms had transformed into a contamination that had weighed me down for months infiltrating my household, work, and psyche. However, if I was willing to give myself the grace to feel tenderness here in this virtual space, then maybe I was breaking out of my irony poisoned slump in reality and returning to the beauty of human compassion.

So, I ran that damn clown show. After occupying my days lazing around, I’d return each night to moonlight as the youngest circus ringleader in Japan. I dropped cash on new circus props, new costumes, orchestrated new acts, and increased audience attendance from our nightly dinner guests to the whole town filling every seat, and as the audience grew so did the confidence of every member of the troupe. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts we had yet to complete a perfect show. Our headlining trapeze act couldn’t seem to close the distance, resulting in one of the two perpetually plunging into the safety net below, rather than their hand’s meeting in an secure embrace. Nevertheless, I had faith and continued to include them in the performance each night. I reminded myself that if this game had given me the time and space to acknowledge my feelings and rebuild my compassion, I could extend that same support by allowing these performers to step up, even when the obstacles felt overwhelming.

Time marched on, and I found myself in the last week of August. As night fell, I approached the tent and began the show. As the lights sparked to life, I cheered on every performance with earnest enthusiasm, praying in anticipation, for their hands to meet, and achieve the perfect show. But, if it didn't happen, I would start mentally planning the couple’s next attempt. Immediately upon considering the thought, the two clasped hands mid-air, finishing with a fanfare from the audience and a real-world exclamation from me. Witnessing these two fictional characters I’d help succeed dealt a deathblow strike to my irony-poisoned mental veneer, resulting in the intoxicant oozing out of my mind and finding itself in a metaphorical pool on my desk. What began with NATSU-MON’S title screen theme making me smirk had ended with a cut scene entirely shattering my mental arrogance that I had fortressed in chain-linked shrouds of irony.

Step 8: Expel All Substances That Are Toxic.

NATSU-MON: 20th Century Summer Kid; graciously reminded me of the profound strength that video games have. They offer us a unique window into the experiences of others and invite us to reflect on our own lives. More importantly, they create a safe haven for healing, self-acceptance, and limitless adventures, allowing us to embrace those emotions without fear of judgment, when we allow them into our hearts and minds.

I come to you as I reach the end of this “Side Quest” empathically restored. I’ll be honest: I’ve never been the most candid person, and I don't expect to immediately transform completely after playing NATSU-MON. I understand that healing in all forms takes time. That said, the experience I had here has given me a healthier method for interacting with the world and myself. It was a journey, and I’m eternally grateful to have accepted the opportunity to grow from it.

Thank you for letting me share my heart with you. I’ll see you next time, somewhere in this digital ether. Drink more water. Love yourself a bit more. And actually play the games you buy.

Dedicated to my wife, our dog, our kitten, and my office wall.

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TLDR

• Microsoft Shakes down Epic!

• Monster Hunter Wilds vs PC Gamers

• Balatro Jokes Around and WINS BIG!

• THE RUMOR MILL

• Best of The Week!

• Next time on BIG Picture Mode +

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Mom says it’s my turn to pay!

All the best things in life are free. Well, until they can be monetized, and according to Microsoft, Fortnite may have been too free for too long. Courtesy of Redphx, the creator of Better xCloud, who uncovered the information regarding the back-end code of Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service. We learned earlier this week that Microsoft has plans to add time limits on how long players using the service’s “free tier” will be allowed to play as “Ice Spice1” while doing the Tootsee Roll2 after every sniper kill. Since May 2022, Fortnite has been a free-to-play game on Xbox’s Cloud Gaming Service, accessible by players on mobile, console, and PC, making it one of the few free-to-play games with cross-platform3 access. Unsurprisingly, this accessibility resulted in significant success for Epic Games, Fortnite’s parent company, even after being de-listed from Apple’s App Store in 2020. Back then, Epic began allowing players to purchase V-Bucks, Fortnite’s in-game currency directly in the app, attempting to dodge Apple’s 30% commission on in-app purchases. That power move, coupled with Epic Games calling out Apple’s App Store mafioso shakedown commission techniques, got Fortnite bounced out the app store.

However, now it’s Microsoft’s turn to do some shaking. Fortnite is free and popular, so it doesn’t make “cents” for Xbox Cloud Gaming Services. Especially since alternative popular titles on the service are pay-walled behind a $19.99 monthly Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. In contrast, Microsoft is witnessing a large percentage of potential paying customers gobble up their Cloud gaming service bandwidth only to play Fortnite and pay for Epic’s in-game currency, and that ain’t helping Ol’ boy Billy Gates’ subscription numbers. Nevertheless, setting a “timeout” for free users could create a dangerous ripple effect for their service and other cloud services within the games industry.

So once again, Microsoft Gaming finds itself between a rock and a hard place, especially after a recent report from Mat Piscatella, the executive director and video game industry analyst at Circana, who stated, “More than 40% of all time spent playing on PS5/XBS in the US during January went to 10 live service games.” and Fortnite is one of them. For now, we can only wait and see if Microsoft treating every Fortnite player like a parking meter will increase subscriptions or have players packing up their V-Bucks and Tootsee rolling off the platform.

Biggest L: Capcom & Monster Hunter Wilds PC Players.

PC players discovered they were the "monsters" all along. Just last week, “Monster Hunter Wilds,” Capcom’s latest multi-platform action role playing game, dropped a cool 8 million copies onto their financial sheets within three days of it's release, making it one of the best-selling games of the year so far. However, 1.3 million of those total sales were made by PC users, who soon found that the game's performance was, well…monstrous! Steam user's have since flooded the game's review section with complaints describing the game’s constant crashing out due to a typo in the game's code, high-performance graphics looking like clay models, and problems concerning multiplayer connection drops4.

Capcom is no stranger to releasing poor PC ports. In 2023, players encountered a game-breaking issue in Capcom’s well known horror game, "Resident Evil 4, " which prevented them from completing the game due to using a weapon before an on-screen approval icon appeared. Consequently, Capcom responded by giving players a hokey-pokey list of instructions before eventually resolving the issue. PC players are facing a similar situation with the release of "Monster Hunter Wilds." From running benchmark tests5 to discourage players from running the game with less than godlike PCs, to the game outright skipping celebratory meal cut scenes due to performance bugs.

On the back end, rumors are circulating that Capcom intended to address PC issues after the initial sales figures came in, recognizing the demand for the game among PC users. According to a Capcom financial report, the company had an earnings forecast for the fiscal year from April 2024 to March 2025 set at 165 billion yen. However, by December 2024, they had only reached 88 billion yen (Big ups to"Dragon’s Dogma"). Thus, Q4 was Capcom’s last opportunity to release "Monster Hunter Wilds" to boost their revenue and bankroll investors. Those actions resulted in PC players being left holding the bag and hokey-poking their way to a new patch this week, hopefully getting them back on the hunt for monsters and maybe more game-breaking bugs.

On a positive note, Nepali restaurants in Japan are skyrocketing their profits with those who can play Monster Hunter Wilds by offering the same “Cheesy Naan” from the game’s meal cut scenes. Eat up hunters.

Biggest W: LocalThunk & Balatro

It seems LocalThunk, the solo developer of Balatro. Just. Can’t. Lose. Last year, during Balatro’s stratospheric rise, (PEGI) the Pan-European Game Information Complaint’s Board upgraded Thunky and their Joker’s rating from (3+); a rating considered suitable for all ages, to a HARD (18+), which indicates content suitable only for adults. All the commotion had European digital storefronts6 issuing “prominent gambling imagery” warning labels on Balatro’s purchasing page and even expulsion from Nintendo’s UK E-Shop. Balatro’s publisher PlayStack and LocalThunk were shocked waking up to the news, especially since they had talks with PEGI about this same concern before the game was launched in the EU. Despite Balatro having zero in-game gambling mechanics, PlayStack pleaded with PEGI’s review board to appeal the (18+) rating. In that same month, PEGI responded with this statement to the developers: “We have reviewed your product and determined that the disclosure of gambling themes was unwarranted," and then followed up by doing nothing for almost TEN MONTHS! While the entire time, PEGI has been allowing EA Sports’ FC 25 “Ultimate Team” mode to keep their (3+) rating and slip past the dreaded gambling warning. The same “Ultimate Team” mode where you purchase in-game credits, with real-world money, to spend on the CHANCE to win an in-game soccer player to play matches within their multiplayer. LocalThunk even took to Twitter joking that he could get Balatro’s rating back to a (3+) if he added real gambling mechanics like FC25. But it is what it is, and “football is life.”

So February comes, and after Balatro wins multiple game awards, PEGI revealed themselves to be the true jokers by re-adjusting Balatro’s rating from (18+) to (12) with an accompanying statement:

“On the basis of these appeals, the PEGI Experts Group will develop a more granular set of classification criteria to handle gambling themes and the simulation, teaching and glamorisation of gambling in different age categories, which will now include 12 but also keep 18 as an age category for games that simulate gambling typically played in casinos and betting halls."

Ultimately a huge win for LocalThunk, who stated on his twitter

“After an appeal from my publisher, Balatro has been reclassified by PEGI from 18+ to 12+ This is a good step from PEGI - bringing nuance to their ratings criteria that used to be 18+ or nothing. I hope this change will allow developers to create without being unfairly punished.”

Congrats to Thunky and Balatro, may you continue to take multiple hours of our lives and to PEGI "Looks like the joke's on you!"

Rumor Mill: Happy Holidays Hydra!

At Big Picture Mode +, we don't observe any holidays since our offices remain open year-round. However, we always take the opportunity to highlight Amy Hennig, the designer behind "Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City" and the "Uncharted" series. So, you can imagine our excitement when we learned that Amy is leading the new game "Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra" at Sky Dance New Media.

Since the game's announcement 2021, not much has been revealed, except that the studio has brought in Marc Bernardin, a comic book writer known for the "Eyes of Wakanda" mini-series on Disney+, to assist Amy and Todd Stashwick, who served as head writer on the mixed-reviewed 2023 PlayStation title "Forspoken." Uhhh.. you know what... This project will be okay... Nonetheless, Khary Payton, the voice actor for Black Panther in the game, stated:

"We’re still working, but we’re planning on seeing the game in 2025, we’re thinking like a Christmas situation, but I’m so excited.”

Fans of “Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra” have been in a drought for information regarding the title. So hearing that the release could be a Christmas miracle gives us hope that Sky Dance New Media could have a win for the holiday season and establish a strong reputation for their video game brand. Because who knows how that “Wolverine” game is going over at Insomnia studios. Until then we’ll be saving 1994 NBA NPCs from the clutches of Doctor Cranium, “fuck it, we ball.”

Top Games of The Week:

Every week, we at Big Picture Mode + scour the net to keep your bank account empty and buy new games. To accomplish this ambitious task, we interview only the top minds in this creative industry to keep your library expansive. That said, these are the following recommendations this week. Enjoy.

Our Grandma’s Favorite Game of the week: “Jenny Solitaire - Card Games” by Oakever Games.

When we asked what happened to the "Solitare Free" review, we asked for last week? Grandma responded, “This game has a puppy in it, and when you win the game, the puppy gets a bone and does a little wiggle; it’s cuter than that clown card game you talk about so much.” Once again, we appreciate Grandma’s critique for the week; check back next week for hopefully a review of her favorite "Spot the Difference" game.

Hottest this week: Whatever that Death Stranding 2 trailer was about.

Credits: Kojima Productions

Most movie trailers aren’t 10 minutes long, but this new Death Stranding trailer clocks in at ten minutes and 13 seconds, and honestly, it's got us even more confused than we were back in 2016, when Death Stranding 1 dropped its first game trailer at an exhaustive 7 minutes and 55 seconds.

Getting gameplay and story across in a limited time is tricky, but Hideo Kojima has Michael Jordan leaped over the industry standards and is aiming to be a movie director while making video games.

Within the trailer, we're getting all the classic Kojima hits: walking, outlandish weather, eldritch horrors beyond our comprehension, and... SOLID SNAKE… at least we think. It’s tough to figure out what’s going on, and we have a feeling Hideo might be just as confused. Nonetheless, we’re excited about the release on June 26, 2025!

Best of the week!: Blood Typers

Credits: Outer Brain Studios

Developer Website

Most of us here at Big Picture Mode + were weirdo mall arcade lurkers, and what's more cool than spending cash to stomp the illuminated arrows of a DDR machine7 to UKGarage?8 Spending that same money blasting on hordes of zombies plastered onto the screens of a “House of The Dead 2” machine. So in 1999, when “House of The Dead” found its way to haunting Sega Dreamcasts9 with a typing gimmick swapping out light guns for a keyboard, us weirdos thought things couldn’t get any cooler.

Flash forward 30 years later, and “Bloody Typers” must have been lurking in those same arcades shadows with us weirdos because Outer Brain Studios have re-animated our love for the typing horror genre.

Players dive into a spine-chilling haunted movie studio, armed with a unique set of characters, each boasting their own special skills. Your mission? To survive and escape together! Everyday horror premise? Yeah, but the real magic lies in the typing mechanic! You’ll need to type your way through each pulse-pounding level, defend against terrifying foes, reload your weapons, and unravel intricate puzzles—all by typing and teaming up with close friends or daring online randoms. Beware: a single typo can crank up the anxiety more than your favorite horror flick, leading to even more chaos as your nerves take over! But maintain that typing streak, and you’ll reap life-saving bonuses like; enhancing your character’s skills increasing your likelihood of survival. Even alone, Blood Typers has improved our keyboard prowess more than any productivity software could ever while being a fresh take on the new co-op viral stream game. Take that, Ms. Mavis Beacon;10 Did y’all know she’s not even a real person? She was created for marketing purposes. This week keeps getting scarier and scarier.

Coming Next Time.

Next time on Big Picture Mode + we check back with Activision the parent company of The Tony Hawk Franchise and beg them to include Bam Margera as a playable character… PLEASE…. Enjoyed the wrangle up? Drop a subscription, it’s free! Tell ya people! we drop every other Monday. Remember, Drink more water. Love yourself a bit more, and actually play the games you buy.

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