for the little things you might have missed
In the end, Black Mesa draws power from that limitation; it clarifies and rewires Half-Life's undercooked tale of invasion and colonization — one that continues with humanity itself colonized by an unimaginable cosmic empire. In that sense, Gordon arriving to Xen with his arsenal of weapons feels fitting; in a year like 2020, it should be clearer than ever that the mistakes, evils, and constraints of the past always ripple forward into the present and future.
And after hours and hours of moving those bodies around these chessboard grids, leveling mountains and razing forests with powers of the kind usually attributed to gods, the game's subtext begins to emerge. For all its smoke and flames, Into the Breach isn't really a game about cataclysm itself — it's about what led us there, and the increasingly invasive, disastrous measures needed to prevent a final slide into extinction.
Both Death Stranding and Animal Crossing imagine a kind of ending. The former: a more traditional vision of apocalypse, with a fractured society on a track to extinction. The latter: a more abstract ending — an end of needs and wants, replaced with something that one might be able to call "honest" work.
For all its complexity, summing up Deus Ex in a single word is simple: conspiracies. The game's plot features a series of nested conspiracies, all run through one central, iconic switchboard: the Illuminati. By way of government organizations and private industry, the Illuminati pulls the world's strings from the shadows, directing the future by influencing the present. And the present — of 2052 and, as it turns out, 2020 — features a deadly respiratory virus sowing fear and death across the globe.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
I remained silent for a moment. “Yeah, I guess that sounds like me.” Those were the words running through my head when the train came barreling down the deserted tracks and slammed me into the air. In one brief moment of dissociation, I registered that its headlight was flickering and broken, a massive crack running down the center of the bulb, and that something that looked very much like my body had just hit the ground beside the tracks. Then, everything went black.
Superhero comics, as it is, are usually a far more complex medium than their adaptations let on. But as with Spider-Man, comics are typically at their best when their focus narrows and becomes more intimate — when writers focus on characters and their relationships, and on the idea that these are real people behind their costumes and masks. At its best, that's exactly what Spider-Man does; it feels like a comic book not just in its action, movement, and sound design, but in the way it approaches its heroes and villains.
It's just a shame that, in the end, it also insisted on being so unfailingly, unflinchingly, a Video Game.
If you are one of those visitors, happen upon this post, and, like me, believe that the current order is brutal, unjust, and fundamentally broken—please understand that this is not the way things have to be.
Another world is possible.
It all feels like The Get Out Kids intended itself to be a fairy tale. Or at least, it mashes a fairy tale ending onto the skeleton of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, without ever quite checking to make sure the two had fit together. It at once wants to be a grim, spooky horror story, a lonely fable about a pair of outcast kids, and a fairy tale about found family. But—in the same way it never quite commits to a clear point-of-view for its player—it never quite ends up being any of those things either.
Myles Garrett's violence created a flashpoint for that mindset—it evoked the reaction that it did because, in a game where multiple players were taken off the field with more damage to their skulls and brains than Mason Rudolph received from Garrett's helmet-slam, it revealed just how transparent that line of thinking really was. It revealed complicity and, in doing so, a wash of cognitive dissonance from everyone from nameless twitter eggs to Adam fucking Schefter himself. It revealed the sheer absurdity of football, starkly and plainly, and people just couldn't handle that.
Sunset Over Ithaca 