#the designs and personalities also keep tending to be a bit samey to me. . . or like just.. everyone is a gimmick?

[videogameshibas]

Tosuke (?) (Jujustu Kaisen)

My evil rein of everything-shibas returns!!!!!! Look I saw a shiba and caved and cried :( Tosuke deserves a spot here.

At first I was like "I love shibas but why is one inexplicably here???" but then the little story just crushed my heart cause its so real. Granted its of any dogs nature to be there for you when no one else is but it just reminded me so much of my Alphonse who was on my feet at the time 🥹 10/10, Tosuke has done no wrong!!!!!!!

[life-in-the-monster-haus]

Monster Haus Reviews: Super Monsters

Since Monster High (and Ever After High) have no animated specials lined up at this current moment. I’m going to start reviewing Monster High adjacent properties. Today I’ll be reviewing Netflix Original Series Super Monsters!

It’s a show about the children of famous monsters in pre-school learning how to control their super natural powers before they get into kindergarten. This show debuted on Netflix October 13th 2017, I’ve watched a few episodes and the show is pretty much Monster High for very little kids, it’s cute, colorful, inspired and has a lot of heart in it! But I wouldn’t exactly call in ground breaking it’s got some cute lessons in it for little kids (such as encouraging manners and tidying up)  The kids start the day as humans and at night they turn into their true monster selves.

The main cast is 6 kids and 2 teachers.

The teachers are Igor (the most good looking version of an Igor I have ever seen) and his Granddaughter Esmie. She is adorable but it’s hard for me to stomach the idea that Igor reproduced to have grandchildren, even this newer handsomer Igor. But she’s super cute! I like the idea of a gothy Pre-school teacher!

I watched the whole first season and part of the show I do not understand is why the kids start the day as humans, Their parents don’t seem to need to hide or transform so why do the kids? I wouldn’t even mention this is it wasn’t such a big part of the show, every episode consists of two 11 minute episodes and each episode has 2 transformation sequences in it. They say “Sun Down! Monster up!” when they turn into monsters and “Sun Up” when they turn back into humans and go home for the day. They don’t specify why they need to hide as humans at all, I wanna say to avoid prejudice from real humans but they don’t state that, that kind of thing happens in this universe so I’m left a little confused. They go out in public on field trips and to pizza parlors run by humans and no one seems to have a problem with them being monsters...so why the transformations?

The kids are sweet no matter what form they take, human or monster they are both painfully precious.

The designs range from super cool! to super samey.

Let’s go over each kids name, design, personality and super powers!

Cleo Graves is the daughter of the Mummy! she’s adorable and all but we’ve seen her hundreds of times in media, her name is Cleo and she’s an Egyptian princess. I feel like every time we see a female character from Egypt her name has to be Cleo or she loses her street cred. There are other female rulers of ancient Egypt that could be explored here. in Monster High we have our own Cleo after Cleopatra and Cleo's sister is named Nefera after Queen Nefertiti. If I was going to name this little mummy I would have went with naming her Hattie, after Hatshepsut. I’m also super over the Egyptian princesses as a personality trait thing, Where are the ancient Egyptian punks!? brats? athletes? nerds? spooky weirdos? class clowns? None of these concepts are new, they’ve been around as long as school has and I wish we’d take advantage of that more often.

Her super power is perhaps the most unique thing about her, they say in the show she controls wind but she’s been shown making clouds that rain and controlling sand so I think her power is more like control over the weather and not just the wind.

*pinches nose bridge* This kids name is Drac Shadows...Drac... Who keeps thinking this is a good name for anyone but Dracula!? There’s tons of old school vampire names out there, Vlad, Ixion, Vincent, Roman, Sterling, Talon etc etc. and they go for Drac, since it’s a kiddie show I would have kept it simple and went with Vlad or Bram. His personality is he’s very self absorbed, He’s a very gifted flyer and has a tendency to show off.  He also tends to jump into situations without fully considering them first. He’s still growing his fangs in (he only has one) and his power is flying...duh. Not a ton to say about him really.

Katya Spelling has one of the more unique names! She’s a witch and her power is magic (duh) but her personality is very shy, cautious and considerate! Her mother has instilled in her that good witches use their magic to help others and she takes that advice to heart. Shes learning how to fly her broom, no one else is allowed to touch her wand and her familiar is a cat that turns into a plush when she’s in her human form. (pic shown further down)

*rubs temples* a Frankenstein named Frankie...ground breaking, I’ve never heard that one before. Frank and Frankie seem to be everyone's go-to when naming these types of monsters and I get why but it’s also so painfully over done, they could have at the very least named him Hank or Francis. I really wish they would have kept his glasses when he transforms or the unibrow when he’s in his human costume. they’re both unique features and it’s a shame that he has to trade one for the other. His power is super strength, He’s very sweet but very clumsy and doesn’t know his own strength yet, I appreciate that he’s kind and not just some big dumb doofus.

Lobo Howler is a werewolf! His power is super speed! I don’t really understand this trend with making werewolves fast, yea they run faster than humans do but it’s not like they're the fastest land animal (that distinction belongs to the cheetah) Wolves aren’t even in the top 25 fastest, so why is it so common to make them fast??? But that’s the only thing about him that’s predictable, he’s an athlete (he wears a varsity jacket) he’s got ants in his pants, he’s hyper active, inquisitive and confident! I have no beef with his name it’s just wolf in Spanish but at least it’s not super common and it makes his ethnicity un-disputably Latino which as I’ve seen many times in cartoons if a character is ambiguously brown people will just say they’re a tanned white person and its important to all little kids to see themselves in media! I don’t really like that his eyes change from brown to green when he’s in his wolf form, Green eyes aren’t even common in wolves (not impossible like blue eyes are, but still very rare) common eye colors in wolves are yellow, amber, orange and brown. so this design choice seems odd.

Zoey Walker is a zombie! and her power is that she can see and walk though walls! Zoey is by far my favorite character in the group! she is so adorable! She’s an artist (she paints) and she’s book smart! (she likes to read) and she’s considerate of others! I LOVE her design so much! she is so colorful! However what I love the most about her design is also what I dislike the most about it - while she’s very cute she looks nothing like a zombie, as soon as I saw her I assumed she was a living rag doll but they call her a zombie in the show??? I don’t understand it but she’s perfect everywhere else so I’m not going to question it. Zoey the Zombie is a great example of how to name a monster with it being close but not too predictable! Also her last name is hilarious if you are a fan of The Walking Dead.

Like Lobo her eyes also change color when she transforms and just...why!?!?! why green!? is green a more dead-friendly color? it’s cute on her, but why!?

They also have a class pet (Glorb the Hampster) and Katya’s familiar (Henri the cat)

In the season finale in they introduce a new character: Spike the Dragon! He’s only in the finale so we don’t know much about him yet other than he’s Chinese (stated that Chinese new year is a big deal in his family)  and his power seems to be to summon clouds and make waves. He’s a little cutie pie! I love his design!... But I really wish they would have went with a different name.

All in all the show is very cute! I highly recommend it if you have little ones around or if you’re just into spooky cartoons! (like me) It’s a Netflix original show and I really hope it gets picked up for a second season!

The animation is really cute if not a bit boring but that’s kinda the standard of 3-D cartoons these days, I’m not sure if being 2-D would help or hinder this show.

I really wish there was an explanation for why they have to change into humans, I just don’t get it. Monsters and humans seem to peacefully coexists in this world. The werewolf kids dad works for the fire department and his fellow fire fighter is a human woman, They took a field trip to a pizza place run by a human man, Their veterinarian is a human woman (she may not be human he name is Dr. Jekyll ) and so far none of them have freaked out in the company of monsters... In fact They went out trick or treating to human houses to show off their powers to “trick” the humans and the humans seem to love them!?!?

This is not the face of someone whose shocked and afraid of being in front of a zombie. In fact they invite the humans to a Halloween party and they all go, no questions asked, no conflict started. I do not get the transformation sequences at all.

But it’s fun to see what the kids would be as humans. My favorite part of any non-human media!

[tumblunni]

....Man, I think Haunter is my favourite pokemon again. I usually have a brief period of each generation’s best new ghostie temporarily stealing the number one spot, but i usually tend to lose the hype for them around a year later and they join my just Gigantic Pile Of Second Favourites I Cannot Choose Between And then I used to dislike Sableye, Banette and Rotom but they all took the top fave spot as soon as I was like ‘hey if i actually use on on my team maybe I’ll like it- I REALLY LIKE IT’. but I mean, when i love them more because of my personal one i had on my team, or my headcanons or fanfics or etc, I think maybe that’s a dishonest fave cos they’re not my fave on their own benefits? And Rotom stayed in the top fave spot for a really long time cos it not only had a lot of love as my main heavy hitter in platinum but also has a big role as the main mon of one of my fave characters. And like five other fave characters in random anime one off episodes! And then it was a pokedex! EVERYTHING ROTOM TOUCHES TURNS TO GOLD

Buuuuuuuuut.... Haunter was like.. My Original Favourite My first favourite pokemon was pikachu, and then chansey, but Haunter was my first favourite ghost and it says a lot that it still holds up even all these generations later when the type finally got fleshed out with as many members as other types. Man its so funny in retrospect that I’m pretty defined as The Super Ghost Fan nowadays but I wasn’t really into them for the first three generations of pokemon. There just wasnt ANYONE except the haunter line in gen 1, and only misdreavus got added, and then in gen 3 I didnt initially like banette’s design in its first pretty awful sprite so i felt like duskull was the only good one and i didnt like its evolutions. Another reason to love sinnoh: it added great ghosties, evolutions for past ones, and made a lot of past ones available at the same time, and i mean we got our first ghost legendary too! The generation of spoop hype! (until kalos was even more of that, but it was less of a big deal cos ghosts werent so rare now)

ANYWAY Haunter is REALLY GOOD AND GREAT Its design is so simple yet perfect?? Like I know it was designed to be one of the most literal middle evolutions ever, its just meant to be basically.. half of gengar. With its oldest pokedex entries that was back before they really decided what they wanted to do with the ghost type, it was all ‘its a mysterious creature from an unknown dimension and nobody is sure if its a real ghost’. So its unclear whether its design is really meant to be the head pokemon gastly growing its first baby arms, or like.. all three stages are the same pokemon slowly emerging into our dimension, with Gengar being the true form? In any case, I never really felt Gengar was very special, aside from the fan theory it’s a doppelganger of clefable. (I mean its name is literally a mispelling of doppelganger!) like.. it always felt like a letdown of a final form? it would be so great on its own, its just a nice solid silly ‘monster under the bed’ type of ghost, a fluffy bugbear with a lot of sass and the minor original trait of its face being super big and kinda in the wrong place compared to clefable. Makes you imagine it scares people by going full cleff mimic and then just turning around in an alleyway XD I actually had a fan pokemon as a kid called Gambal which was literally just a chansey equivelant of gengar, and had powers of bad luck and stuff. But then the name ended up going to an entirely different fakemon instead who was a rabbit thing that was a game corner prize. Oh and I also had a geng of celebi! Called Tanka just cos that was my name for all my ocs at the time. Its just a type of poetry that i thought sounded Hella Cool for no logical reason. But yeah, I drew like a million pics of every pokemon as a ghost version and its just funny how subconciously i was a ghost fan even before there were more than four ghosts in existance XD

BUT WHERE WAS I Oh yeah, gengar is dissappointing! And its unfair cos if it was an unrelated pokemon on its own, I would like it! It just doesn’t hold up favourably to how awesome haunter and gastly’s concepts are. i mean, look here we have two different quality takes on the ‘floating head’ concept and then its final form isn’t a floating head. HOW DARE YOU. I guess gengar kinda still keeps the aesthetic with its oversized face, kinda? Like its a giant head just mimicing being a regular pokemon? But I mean i think a giant head with arms and legs stops being a giant head. Its why Nanimon and Mamemon aren’t as cute as regular sperical types. I think the only exception is when its a giant head with ONLY legs, and they’re small rabbit legs specifically- like Lotad or Tokomon!

Anyway, nowadays I’ve grown more appreciation for Gengar (again) because I had one in my team and I love him so I can’t not love my best friend. He has an interesting story cos he’s actually That One Haunter, lol! That memorable npc in DPPt who trades you a haunter but its holding an everstone so it doesn’t evolve. I was still equally annoyed at her even though I’d planned to press B and keep it as a haunter anyway! XD But then the cute default name Gaspar made me get really attatched to him, and man i have so many super detailed story and personality headcanons for this little goofball. Eventually he did actually evolve into Gengar, cos I traded him temporarily to a friend in order to transfer him between generations, and i forgot gengar was a trade evo so i didnt tell her to not do it. I still feel really bad that i overreacted about it, i worry that maybe I made her feel guilty! Ultimately, it was probably a good thing, because I kept my other bestie Reaper the Sneasel unevolved forever cos i dislike Weavile, and like.. obviously he kinda sucks in battle because of this. I still love all my pokemon regardless of whether they’re useful in competitive, tho! Oh and mega gengar is pretty sweet, too! It brings back a lot of haunter’s appeal! I just wish that i never saw its feet, seriously. I thought that it was just a head and arms again, but apparantly it just spends 99% of the time phased into objects and its legs just look really awful and unfitting when you see them. It makes it like a top heavy buff design and that really doesn’t work?? It sucks cos i LOVE the other ‘skipped leg day’ pokemon Mega Swampert, so i dunno why I don’t like the same thing on ghosts! Dusknoir and Jellicent are my least favourite ghosts ever. So yeah my opinion on gengar now is like... mixed? i don’t dislike it like I used to, but I don’t really love it on its own benefits or anything, i just don’t dislike it cos i associate it with a sweet and cute bestie who saved me a lot in sinnoh due to his hypnosis attack. But I still think it’s a worse design than haunter, which is The Best Design In All Of Pokemon. Even when I flip flop on what my favourite POKEMON is, I still think it’s my favourite design! Rotom is maybe the most creative design CONCEPT amoung the ghosts, but Haunter is just... so good at what it set out to do.

LETS TALK AGAIN ABOUT HOW GREAT HAUNTER IS I mean just LOOK AT IT, its just SO GOOD Floating heads are great, and gastly was a great way to take that concept and make it ghostly! And its so cool that its basically a hitodama/will of the wisp/generic spooky flame face from every jrpg ever, except made more original because its made of like.. pure darkness smog mist instead. The colour choices for it are really good too, i always really loved the dithering effect they used to make it in the sprite-based games! Its one of the few pokemon where i love the regualr better than the shiny, even though the shiny isn’t one of those terrible neon green ones. It has one of the best shinies and that shade of smoky purple still captures my heart more! i think i would prefer the shiny if regular gengar was bedsheet white though, not blue and only turning white when it mega evolves. That’s weird. AND THEN HAUNTER IS JUST AN EVEN BETTER FLOATING HEAD It loses the cool smoke but it gains these pointy ears/cliche vampire hair shaped head protrusions that just work SO WELL. Like its a floating head that isn’t just a plain sphere! That’s the one part of floating head monsters that generally sucks, a lot of them outside of the creativity of pokemon tend to be super samey generic bald spherical angry man heads. A floating head of a guy with a cliche horror B-movie hairstyle is great! And especially when its a really unhumanoid jack-o-lantern face that’s just like.. replicating that hairstyle without actually being a hairstyle. thats my fave kind of humanoid type pokemon, I love when they’re still animals or monsters or even inanimate objects that are MIMICKING humans, not just a lazy thing that looks like an actual human wearing a costume. I’m probably in the minority but this is why I prefer Mr Mime to stuff like Machamp or Delfox or Incineroar. And then also I love how it takes Gastly’s grumpy eyes and softens them a bit to look more mischeivious instead of angry. Looking always in a bad mood is probably the biggest reason i don’t like Gastly the most, i just feel sad for it. Another reason why I love sinnoh lol, it had a big happy mischief face on its sprite! (shame platinum ruined it a bit, but HGSS was even cuter) And then its just such a creative way of giving a floating head some limbs while not ruining its floating head aesthetic. Floaty rayman arms is such a ghostly thing even though there arent many ghosts that use that design aesthetic!

Honestly thats the biggest reason haunter is so great, really. it just.. encapsulates ghost, even though it doesnt have like ANY cliche ghost design elements! its such a good original concept for like the simplest and most basic pure image of ghostliness in this world. It somehow feels like its exactly what ghosts are, without taking any shortcuts from other popular ghost characters. its so simple and iconic! Its a new thing that could fit in perfectly with all those ancient B-movie creatures and I’d never question it! Gastly is at least slightly based on a will o wisp, and gengar is a bugbear/monster under the bed/shadow creature/doppelganger super combination creature. But in the aim of making something in-between the two, they accidentally made something that doesn’t look very much like ANY of them and stands out miles above them! I think this entire evolution line has had such great staying power because every member of it looks really distinct from the others, while also vaguely fitting together with theme and colourscheme so they don’t seem distinct in a BAD way. Any of these would be equally beloved as entirely separate mons, but linking them together makes them oddly endearing as a weird ragtag bunch of buddies! Its like the addams family!

Oh, but my one and only complaint is that Haunter’s gameboy era design looks better than how it got changed once the graphics got better.

To be entirely honest, I think that the changed version was their intent right from the beginning, and the cooler aesthetic one was just an accident of the limited graphics. Cos I mean the anime had that design from the beginning, after all! BUT STILL, I love it so much more and I wish it could have been proper canon. or at least remained as its shiny form or something! (A mild blue hint instead of a mild purple hint is really boring, this shiny only looks good on gastly...) The glowy outline is probably the best part, though i do also like how the colours stay more matched with gastly instead of the smog colour becoming the body colour. Actually its not even that, its just a random less appealing deep purple, it might have been cooler if it remained that lighter shade of lilac? Also it sucks that haunter retained the glow around its hands at least in the gameverse until we got 3D models. It never had that in the anime so i guess they removed it to remain consistant but like.. WHY! It doesn’t look as cool with red glow on purple as opposed to purple glow on black, but I still really liked it. Like you could have at least kept the glow when it uses attacks or something?

Oh, and isn’t it so weird that so many ghosts have had all black removed from their design as the generations go on? Like.. I mean I don’t think they did this to haunter cos they feared it was similar to Jynx, it isn’t remotely humanoid and it doesn’t have a stereotypical face or anything. And it wouldnt make sense cos they kept it on gastly. But then also banette has gone from black to an increasingly lighter grey, and its EEEEEEEVEN lighter on merchandising! I waited ages for an official banette plush, and it is a really sweet little thing thats so perfect... but then its light grey? I don’t mind cos it makes my plushie feel like more of an individual at least. Also its annoying that mega banette started off as the same dark grey/black that banette originally was, but then its one of the few pokemon that got a big change between XY and SuMo, aside from new animations and stuff. now its light grey too! Booooooo! Other ghosts that’ve experienced The Greying: Duskull, Dusknoir already started off lighter than its pre-evo and then still got more so as time went on, and Misdreavus turned green and then blue instead of grey but its still the same sort of thing. Now the only real black/dark grey ghosts we have left are Yamask and Phantump, and its just.. so weird?? Cos like none of the black dark-types have had big colour changes except Sneasel. I dunno, maybe they’re doing this to make the ghost and dark types more distinct, making it more like purple is the signature colour of ghosts? But I mean its the type icon colour for poison and psychic too so this just makes the colourschemes LESS distinct... Also I just think that the dark grey banette and the black haunter looked so much better, so it sucks that out of all the ghosts it had to be the ones I love! And out of all dark types it had to be my favourite too! (And sneasel is my fave ice type too!)

...anyway GHOSTS and HAUNTER I LOVE THEM and I’m sorry i rambled for like an hour writing all this THEYRE JUST SO FUCKING CUTE AND SWEET

oh and one last thing!! I love how haunter established the trend of ghost types being more mischievious and misunderstood than actually evil Well, i mean all three of its evo line starred in that episode of the anime, but Haunter was the one that went with ash at the end and got one more episode of cuteness afterward. That whole mini arc was the MOST MEMORABLE PART OF THE SHOW for me, I couldnt believe it was so short when i rewatched it! I totally misremembered haunter sticking around for half a season or something, cos it was so endearing to me. And its still so endearing to me every time the games decide to make a new ghost be harmless or sad, or harmless and sad. or even harmful and sad! i mean i cried the most at banette even though its past of being an abandoned toy is supposed to just be a justification why its the most angry and dangerous ghost. I’M SURE I COULD HEAL IT WITH HUGS, yells bunni, as they essentially glomp the pokemon equivelant of a shark...

god i just love ghosts so much and specifically haunter the most much hug your haunter today also your banette also your rotom also pumpkaboo and litwick and phantump and duskull...

[kapanbenernya]

Horizon: Zero Dawn -- There’s Only One or Two Giant Dinosaurs

Did you know that I own a PS4? Of course you don’t, why the fuck should you care? I’m literally a stranger on the internet that communicates to you via an internet post floating on the information superhighway like a piece of turd lost in the everflowing sea of turds in a septic tank. But enough rambling on the subject of human feces and back to the topic at hand, I own a PS4.

I used to own the PS2 and I remember having a CD holder shaped like a thick book that holds all my PS2 DVDs, and I remember it being filled to the brim until I have to double-stack the DVDs or else it won’t fit. So why did I bring this up? Because I want to compare that to my PS4 library which consists of 4 blu-rays. No I’m not fucking kidding, I only got 4 games, two of which are a copy of Bloodborne that I had to buy twice because I bought the wrong fucking region and the DLC won’t connect. 

Maybe right now you’re asking yourself, “What’s with the rambling man?” and well... Here’s the thing, I’m gonna be honest from the start: I wasn’t that into Horizon: Zero Dawn (HZD). I bought it just as a filler, to bulk up my library of PS4 exclusives. So yes, I just wasted two paragraphs explaining that I didn’t buy HZD because I think I’ll enjoy it, I bought HZD just to own it and maybe get a kick out of it or two.

Oh well, let’s talk about the game anyway

In this game, you play as Aloy, a woman without a mother in a tribe that places value on matriarchy, which is why she is branded an outcast by her tribe. Wait what? Doesn’t matriarchal society puts more privilege and power on women? So why was she shunned? She’s a woman! Shouldn’t she be given power instead of you know, kicked out?

Something tells me this tribe doesn’t respecc whamen as much as they think they do

But Aloy isn’t all alone in this cold cruel robotic world, she’s got a foster dad whose name I already forgot. I mean it’s not my fault, he’s not that important anyway. All he does is teach Aloy everything she ever knew so that she can go to the yearly outcast acceptance tryouts, nothing important there. Sarcasm aside, it’s still kinda true that his only purpose in the game is to be the plot advancing sacrificial lamb. No spoiler alert needed! His death flag has been raised ever since he become the parental figure of the protagonist, kinda like Batman’s parents or Uncle Ben. 

But no worries, his sacrifice wasn’t in vain because Aloy finally gets accepted into the tribe! By virtue of being the sole survivor of the test because some tribe of edgy fuckboys killed everybody else. And not long after, some killer robots showed up at the door, late to party and and thrashed the place up some more. With the tribe left in tatters, Aloy is appointed as a scout and sent into the world to figure out the threat that looms over the world. Also, Aloy may or may not have been born from a mountain and now have a personal quest of finding out about her origin. And if she had extra time, probably find out whatever it is the old Shaman smoked until she came to the flawless logic that mountains can give birth to humans.

The threat is, as usual: robots gone apeshit

Have I mentioned that the setting of the world is a post-apocalyptic world where people formed tribes and most animal have been replaced by robots? So yeah, two very important aspect of the HZD world. Anyway, the robots and the humans live happily among each other, and by that I mean they kill each other every time their gaze meet. But so far, things have been manageable as long as the humans stay the fuck away from the robot’s territory and vice versa. 

Let me explain about the robots a bit. The robots are various versions of wild animal replacements: stags, bulls, leopards, hawks, saber-toothed tigers, giant fire-breathing chickens, and 30-foot tyrannosaurus rex with frickin’ laser beams.

We all know the mastermind behind the fucking dino, don’t we?

As you can see from my incomplete list alone, the robot variety is rather robust. And the variety is supported by the uniqueness of each robot species. Every robot has different weaknesses based on elements and since the design of each robots is largely varied, the locations of the weak points can be very different. I can see the love and care that went into designing each species, and it shows. Although I gotta admit the herbivores are kind of boring when compared to the carnivores. The herbivores are kinda samey and lame, all you get to do is maybe ride it to town and turn some primitive heads. Meanwhile, the carnivore’s got all the nice toys. The kind of toys that shoots laser and kills people. And guess what? You can shoot the turret off with an arrow then you can pick it up and fire it up their tail pipes.

Now I gotta say, the first time I see the robots, I was like “fuckin’ sold, this shit is G U C C I”. But then after I actually play the game and have come face to face with a lot of them, I wasn’t into them anymore. I don’t know why, but I find the enemies boring after a while. Perhaps its because somehow I find fighting the animal bots has become a chore and not a fun activity to do. I mean the animal bots tend to flock together, so you’re almost always outnumbered, and the bots usually can kill you in a few smacks. This results in a lot of untimely deaths during what I thought would be a sunny stroll in the meadows. Also I think the big machines have too much health. As you can see, I don’t think this is a good thing, the same way a rubber tire isn’t an excellent snack just because you can chew it longer. However, you can actually make all of these problems go away if you choose to stealth it up and crouch like the little bitch that YOU ARE. Hey, dev-person-man-guy-thing, nobody in their right mind looks at a robot T-Rex and say, “Boy, I can’t wait to stealth crouch around this bad boy”. You know what we wanna do? We wanna ride it, or kill it, or ride it AND THEN kill it. Maybe take down a few rival tribes in the process.

And that’s just the fuckin animal bots, there’s also the war bots that looks like a cereal box that grew spider legs. Not only is it visually boring, it’s also plays like shit. Either you have to go play hide and seek with it or it’ll blast you with piss like you’re a really tough shit-stain on the toilet bowl. But the worst of the worst has got to be the human enemies. Fucking hell, in a world filled with creative animal robots, adding human enemies will just bring the standard down. They’re boring to look at, boring to fight against, and just plain stupid. I hate how the so-called “stealth kill” alerts every motherfucker in the area. I hate how you can’t stealth kill the “elite enemies” until you unlock a certain skill. In short, I just hate humans in general.

Not in real life, mind you, I’m a God-fearing peace loving man of the people, man.

Great, since I’ve run out of places to spank HZD, I’m just gonna randomly list all of its best parts.

I like how we can grab some healing items that can be used on-the-go in an instant, and I like how it can be easily found in the wilds like some drive-through salad. What I don’t think I like is how the plants aren’t that easy to differentiate from one another. I mean if I’m gonna make a jump, roll, tumble, and scoot myself down a goddamn hill while dodging lasers fired from a turret mounted on a 20-foot robot tyrannosaurus, that plant better be the healing plant instead of that useless resist fire plant. 

Another thing I like about the game is the weapons. There are quite a variety of weapons at your disposal, and it’s the good kind of variety. The kind of variety that makes each weapon had a distinct feel and different purpose, and I like them all. My favorite is the the tripwire weapon that’s the greatest thing since the invention of fire. The sleeper hit was the sling that I thought was shit but it’s actually great because it can fire ice projectiles that immobilizes the big enemies and freeze their armor. 

This very very tight weapon system is also supported by your ability to craft ammo on the fly. This might seem like a trivial thing, but hear me out now: by enabling you to craft ammo mid-fight, the game makes sure that the pace isn’t halted by the fucking menu screen and you get to keep your focus and maintain the flow of the battle. Because you know what kills my combat boner when I’m in a middle of a tense fight against robot dinosaurs? Having to pause the game and open up the crafting tab because my arrows ran out.

That’s it, that’s about everything I can say about my experience playing the game. There are some things that I actually left out of my review like the world design, the characters, etc. It’s because I think that it’s not that important to mention or it’s just mildly mediocre and not worth reviewing.

In Brief

What’s wrong with me? Do I not like video games anymore? 10 years ago, all I had to do was fire up my PS2, boot up GTA: San Andreas and just grab a bike and cycle from Los Santos to Las Venturas and I was having fun. 5 years ago I finished Dark Souls after 2 years of git gud, and I didn’t let the difficulty break me. Now I’ve got a game filled with creative and challenging enemies, a big open world to explore, and a fuckin robot dinosaur for God’s sake. Why didn't I have fun with it? I don’t think I have an immediate answer for it, but at least I know there’s two possibilities. One, is that I AM actually losing my touch and I’m not that into video games anymore. Probably all this adult thing and living my life that’s gotten in the way. The other one is that my tastes has actually gotten better with time, and now I notice the intricacies and can distinguish whether a game is good or bad, and I simply did not want to waste my limited time with games that I didn’t really like that much, including HZD.

I guess we can learn something from the animal robot designs. No matter how well you design an element of a game; visually or audibly, it won’t be appreciated as much if it does not add much to the gameplay --or worse-- plays like shit. Because you ARE making a game, and all the elements that you design will ultimately be judged from how it feels as a game. You can paint the robots with naked titties, but if they’re boring to fight, people will still think of them as badly designed. As for the case of the war bots and the human enemies? Dogshit.

9/10/2018

[blessuswithblogs]

Thoughts on The Surge: in the future, nobody has guns

~there are, by necessity, spoilers on The Surge in this post and also a lot of rambling holy cow~

Yesterday, I finished the Surge. It was not something I was particularly expecting to do at that juncture. I was getting very close to beating a boss, but I had about 5 minutes to go before I had to go raid in FF14. I figured that if I beat the thing, I would just save and quit and come back to it and that would be that. Imagine my surprise when it turned out this fairly nondescript monster was actually The Final Boss of the game and immediately after beating it, I beat the game and the credits rolled. I was a bit nonplussed by this, both because the game only had 5 bosses in it and because I had to hurriedly explain to my raid group that I was going to be a few minutes late because I Accidentally Finished A Game, Oops. After some reflection, it occurred to me that this experience was quite emblematic of the whole game: a strong start with good ideas that never really go anywhere and sort of implode on themselves at random intervals without warning.

Let's start with brass tacks. The Surge is Souls-like. Not one of those games that games journalists think are souls-likes because they're fucking awful at video games and they died a bunch, but an actual honest to god "our mission is to make dark souls with robots." product. The systems, mechanics, and level design philosophy are extremely similar to FromSOFT's critically acclaimed action RPGs. The Surge is from the same developers as Lords of the Fallen, which was a putrid mess. Their sophmore effort is much, much better. I quit Lords a few hours in while I'm considering a second playthrough of The Surge. One of the big problems with Lords was that it was seemingly designed from the perspective of someone who played Dark Souls 1 exclusively clad in Havel's armor and the Dragon Tooth and thought that playstyle wasn't quite deliberate enough. The Surge, conversely, is much faster and more responsive, about on par with Dark Souls 3. It also gains a lot from its unique aesthetic sensibilities, at least at first, but more on that later.

The big mechanical selling point of The Surge which differentiates it from other games of its type is the practice of targeting specific limbs and body parts. It's not at all the first Dead Space parallel one might notice, and certainly not the last. At first, it's quite novel, but The Surge never quite leans into it enough to make it very deep or rewarding. Invariably, the strategy is "attack the unarmored parts, idiot." If everything is armored, it's "attack the head, idiot." The only real exceptions to this rule are when you are engaged in the tedious process of farming gear or when the game forgets its major draw and simply throws enemies at you that don't have any limbs to target. Initially, the process of getting new gear is kind of exciting, as to acquire new weapons and armor, you have to target the body part of an enemy wearing it and successfully do a finishing move to cut it off and receive a schematic you can bring to Operations (the bonfire equivalent) and build. This sounds like a reliable and engaging way to improve your character, but there are some issues with it. To build a new piece of armor, you need to use specifically Mark 1 upgrade materials. Which is fine, at first, but as you progress through the game, enemies will stop dropping this teir of materials. They will not stop dropping new schematics, however. After a certain point, to create new pieces of gear, you need to backtrack to an earlier area just to get the proper parts, and then a different, slightly later area, to get parts to upgrade them. It's real bad. Bad enough that I'm doubting my own experience with the game. Surely, there was some way to buy older parts or exchange them that I missed? Please somebody tell me I'm wrong I hate living this world where there are no alternatives.

REVISION: I did miss something!! You can actually just skip upgrade tiers entirely by using higher grade parts, though it costs more scrap. I feel silly for not catching it myself, but it seems that a lot of people didn’t. Either way, this significantly alleviates some of my major issues with the upgrade system! Praise IRONMAUS!

At any rate, the intent is to create a tension between going for easy kills by targeting unarmored body parts and going after armored parts for more difficult fights with better rewards. It's a good idea, theoretically, but the execution of the idea makes it tedious and grindy. The Surge is extremely crotchety about experimenting with new things, both because of aforementioned weird upgrade material scarcity issues and because the game's difficulty curve is a stickler for wearing gear that is up to date, unless you like getting killed in one hit. I, personally, do not. I find it to be quite frustrating. In my theoretical second playthrough I'm going to just stick to one set and not bother with branching out. There aren't very many armor sets to begin with, so it sort of balances out. You tend to have more freedom with weapons because they use a universal upgrade material all enemies carry, though I personally found most weapon types to be way too slow and awkward for my liking and stuck with the Vibrocutter for 90% of the game. That seems altogether too subjective to really count against the game, and is also the focus of my next playthrough: trying to learn weapons I passed up on in my first.

Character progression is done via upgrading your Core Power level with tech scrap that everybody drops on death. Core Power determines the quality and quantity of gear pieces and implants you can have active at any one time. Core Power also gates progress behind overload nodes that require a certain power level to activate, one of the more random and haphazard mechanics in the game. It's usually not an issue, though you will occasionally run into nodes with requirements so high they might as well read "backtrack here later asshole." Progression itself is kind of muddled by the way implants work, which is somewhat too broadly. Implants can provide minor bonuses, but they can also dictate your entire suite of healing options, maximum HP, and your ability to see enemy healthbars (which is quite important when you need to keep them alive long enough to cut off their limbs, because it would be rude to do that while they're dead. You find implants all over the place in various grades. I assume that the idea is to gradually upgrade your older ones as you go along, but I always felt a bit lost about where exactly the Surge wanted me to be at in regards to my implant setup. I would count this against the game less if I didn't consistently run into points where I would find a new enemy that just killed me in one hit from across the room and feel very sad about life.

This brings me to what is one of the game's biggest design problems: enemy variety, or lack thereof. The designs of the enemies are more than a little uninspired. For a good 80% of the game your only foes are Zombie Men in Robot Suits, Small Drones, and maintenance/security robots. There's enough room for variation in the zombie men that it's tolerable, but the god damned leaping security robots show up everywhere, are never any different, and are incredibly obnoxious to fight. High defense, hypertracking, and the ability to leap across the room from any angle and deal what is consistently 80% of your healthbar in damage is nightmarish, and certain areas of the game are just CRAWLING with these fuckers. You can cut off their tails to get some implants you can sell for scrap. That's something. But god I hate these things. The crystalline nanofriends at the end of the game have many of the same problems with unreasonably high damage and absurd tracking, but I found them much easier to deal with because of how easy it was to bait out their railgun attack.

The bosses in this game are a mixed bag, which is usually okay, but there's only 5 of them. I try not to harsh on games for not having enough content for value, so believe me when I say that my criticism here is based on the fact that bosses are desperately needed to cut up some of the monotony of samey enemies. The first two bosses are big robots, as they should be. The camera is a little shitty in spots but they're big and tough and impressive looking. You can also fulfill special criteria to get Super Strong versions of the weapons they drop during the fight, but there's no way to actually know what those criteria are and some of them are eso-fucking-teric. The first boss, the P.A.X., has a mechanic where you can lead its own missiles into it to stun it and make it vulnerable and the game telegraphs it fairly obviously. To get its special drop, you have to not do this. Conversely, the second boss, the Firebug waste disposal robot, has a special weapon you can get by specifically doing the mechanic that is presented to you and cutting off all its limbs. Then the next boss, the Big SISTER construction platform, needs you to not kill any limbs at all. It's extremely inconsistent. These first 3 bosses range from good to serviceable, and are pretty good spectacles. The last two, however, are ffffucking dire.

The 4th boss of the game, the Black Cerberus, is a fight against a human opponent with military grade equipment. It's pretty fun to start out with, requiring different strategies from the huge robots previously fought. Things go south extremely quickly when the boss, after taking some damage, becomes invincible, runs away, locks himself in a room, heals himself, and summons a P.A.X. for you to fight. There are only 5 bosses in this game and they still found a way to recycle them. So you kill the P.A.X. and the actual boss comes back powered up. Fine. Alright. However, you have to do this cycle 3 times. 3. fucking. times. It's actually inexcusable that this is a thing in a game made in 2017 and I get mad just thinking about it. It makes the Bed of Chaos look like a reasonable fight because it at least had the decency to save your progress. You can get a beefed up version of his energy axe thing by cutting off his right arm but who even fucking cares. The final boss is a sort of neat looking monster made of nanomachines but I think it's borderline plagiarizing a bit of fanart I saw once for a Cyber-souls game. It's kind of whatever honestly. You have to kill the parts that glow white until the whole thing glows red, then you have to... hit a button? It's weird and random but I figured it out quickly enough that I'm not going to say that it's bad or unintuitive. Then it turns into a humanoid swordfighter guy with no armored parts at all and you just stab him in the head until he's fucking dead. It's a joke of a fight. You can get some Super Good Claws if you cut off his right arm but at that point I just wanted the boss to be dead so I went for the cranium. All throughout the boss spouts off voicelines from other characters in the game because of some bullshit about nanomachine networks that's extremely underdeveloped and tacked on. It's a fine boss fight, but the fact that it's the final confrontation and the last bit of gameplay in the whole game makes it such a wet fart of a thing I still feel kind of depressed about it.

So now we come to my biggest complaint about the game. The gameplay is mostly good with some tedious parts and some fucking awful parts. The story and setting, however, are just. How do I even put this? Imagine if System Shock, Dead Space, and SOMA got mashed into one thing by a thirteen year old. Let's start with the good, because there is good in here, and it kept me going for a long time even if I was ultimately disappointed. The game starts out with an extremely Corporate Culture advertisement for a job at CREO, which is probably an acronym for something, but hell if I can remember it. What is immediately striking is how true to life that ad is, stuff about cybernetic enhancement aside. CREO ends up as this sort of idea of "what if Apple dealt in sick robot arms and rockets instead of phones", which I feel like is a concept that is going to become more and more popular to explore in the near future. At any rate, the protagonist, Warren, accepts the job offer and goes off to his first day of work at CREO HQ. The first thing we learn about Warren, aside from looking like an average mainstream western video game protagonist, is that he has to get around in a wheelchair. The reveal of this is one of the very few character moments we really get in this game, and it immediately gives us some insight into why Warren was so eager to go work for a company that turns you into a fucked up robot man. Being a fucked up robot man is probably a pretty sweet deal if you get to Ambulate With Your Legs again. So Warren wheels his way into the lobby to check in and get kitted out with his Rig, an extremely Dead Space name for a sort of power loader exoskeleton wot lets you do the cool robot things as happy corporate music plays as a hip young guy on the monitor extolls the virtues of working at CREO, the revolutionary company out to save the world. Then he gets into the Robot Chair and has extremely invasive surgery done on him without anaesthetic because I guess the opening was just too down to earth and needed some fuckin gore.

I personally feel like the surgery scene is ultimately unnecessary and tacky, serving no real purpose in the narrative except to hint to more trusting players that "maybe CREO bad???". That notwithstanding, the opening is very strong because it establishes a very intriguing world. The Surge is set in the 2060s, or thereabouts, making it near-future firm-ish scifi, and the world of 2060 and beyond kind of fucking sucks. Not because of any great cataclysm or alien invasion, but because late capitalism is a hellish, undying force of destruction on a planetary scale and Earth is rapidly approaching a point where it can no longer support human life due to pollution and over-exploitation. That's about as hard sci-fi as it gets. There's mentions of failed nations, wars, riots, famine, and all of the lovelies we can expect in the next half a century. CREO's mission statement is to use revolutionary new technology to save the world and undo the damage with Project Resolve. Project Resolve is a sort of nebulous terraforming initiative involving CREO shooting rockets into the upper atmosphere that release chemical agents that will gradually repair Earth's atmosphere. The science becomes much squishier here but that's honestly fine with me because it sets up the core tension of the game: how can the same institution that destroyed the planet for centuries turn around and save it? Turns out it can't.

After Warren awakens in the junkheap, about to be disposed of for being "defective", he goes on a fantastical journey through CREO HQ to accomplish basically nothing. Everything in the facility has gone completely off the rails, with the majority of employees hooked up to rigs having completely lost their minds due to some sort of technical malfunction in the neural network. Warren is presumably unaffected by this because he wasn't linked up to the system yet when it happened, and so can adventure around and kill lots of deranged construction workers. You learn more about CREO from audio logs (it's a gritty sci-fi game with pretensions of being scary so naturally everyone in the world compulsively records their thoughts on things on oversized PDA things), environmental storytelling (blood on the walls, skulls in the toilet), and more promotional company videos about how great CREO is. The latter is the most organic and believable mechanism of exposition, and provides a strong sense of juxtaposition between Corporate Image and Reality. It's at times a little on the nose, but, well, art imitates life.  The real problems with the narrative occur after you meet Dr. Chavez, a disgruntled former head of R&D at CREO who worked a greatl deal on Project Resolve. It comes out that there's a problem with Resolve that basically makes it poison to living things. Chavez believes she can fix it, but is unceremoniously fired and replaced by another scientist more willing to compromise. This is fine, and is a great illustrative moment of how even something as noble as saving the world becomes harmful when performed by a beuaracratic, for profit institution. The problem comes from what Dr. Barret, Chavez's replacement, cooks up. Instead of just holding steady on the flawed Project Resolve, Barret decides that's not villainous enough and creates Project Utopia, an alternative to resolve that will absolutely repair the Earth with the small side effect of killing 97% of the current human population.

It's at this point that things start straining that suspension of disbelief, both because of the general unbelievability of something that can wipe out the vast majority of humanity by itself, in a short enough time period that no other organizations would be able to counteract it, and simultaneously restore the environment and because it's hard to believe that a profit-oriented organization like CREO would willingly kill off 97% of their consumer base. The mechanism by which Utopia works isn't revealed until the end of the game, and it's a bit of an eyeroller: nanomachines. The game's sudden, weirdly low-key shift from all-too-believable corporate negligence to literal grey goo end of the world shit is jarring and makes a lot of what came before weaker. Warren is no longer just a Guy With a Robot Suit trying to make it, he's the world's last, best hope to not die horribly. This raising of the stakes was honestly quite unnecessary. Simply finding the cause of the CREO-wide malfunction and reversing it was a worthy enough goal, but I guess it just wasn't enough. Also Dr. Barret is a literal mad scientist making human-machine hybrids and waxing philosophical about the necessary evolution of mankind while all this is going on so there's like 4 unresolved plot points sent careening on a collision course with eachother with not a lot of game left to wrap it up, and also like 2 of these plot points are stupid.

The final area of the game, the launch facility for project utopia, is infested with nanite monstrosities that look kind of cool at least. Up until now your primary foes have actually been company security personnel, hilariously enough, who are largely unaffected by the big neuronet hiccup from earlier. I had no problem with this, honestly, because beating up rent-a-cops sounds like a good time to me. Where it gets weird is that the rent-a-cops are seemingly 100% on board with global genocide of everybody ever. ACAB, and all that, but maybe not to that degree. So you get this weird scenario where you can find security guards harmoniously cooexisting with nanite gestalts of an emerging consciousness spreading and repurposing the launch facility. The guard posted at the entrance to the launch site even gives you a verbal warning to back off like there's nothing going on, something that no other security guard has given you since the beginning of the game. It's super bizarre. There is a subplot of an NPC who gradually loses their identity and memories and joins the guard, so there is evidence for some weird neural implant fuckery. I think I might be missing some information, since I didn't get all of the audio logs and shit.

Basically the climax of the game is that you go to the Nucleus launch facility to try and stop Utopia from getting into the atmosphere, or at least slow it down. You get a virus from Dr. Chavez you can upload into the payload to weaken the nanites. You would think that would be the Main Goal of the Game, but it's actually a totally missable side thing you can do if you feel like it. The actual end point of the game is getting to the rocket launch platform and fighting the Rogue Process, who appears to be guarding the rocket. The rocket launches anyway no matter what you do so the whole situation seems forced. The trigger for the fight is overloading a node by the launch panel. Prior to that the Rogue Process just sort of hangs out in noncorporeal form babbling nonsense at you. If you put the virus in the payload, then what are you even doing here? Just let it do its work and don't fuck around with nanites and rocket engines more than you have to. If you decided that you're okay with 97% of the population dying, then what are you even doing here? Just hang out or try to escape. You fight the Rogue Process because the game needs a final boss, and for no other reason. The damn thing doesn't even die if the ending is to be believed. This whole part of the game left me feeling extremely perplexed, like there was a big chunk of the story just missing. Like a conclusion. Or hell, even a climax.

My working theory of it all is that the Rogue Process developed sentience at some point before Warren arrived and started working on getting Utopia into the atmosphere to spread itself, heedless of human casualties because there's no possible way an AI developed at CREO could have any ethical considerations. It needed the board of directors to vote in favor of the launch, and engineered this impossibly convoluted chain of events to kill one of the no-go voters by Doctor Octopusing him to his chair in the board room. Or something. It might have been one of the board members who became unhinged? I'm really genuinely unsure of what actually happened except that Warren basically didn't do anything the whole game. You've got this very system shock style of progression where voices on the other ends of speakers yank you around to do stupid bullshit and you just sort of End Up where you end up. It's not really so much uncovering a mystery as desperately searching for a supervisor to give you some form of employee orientation, which, to the game's credit, is appropriate. I have no problem with vagueness in video games, being a noted devotee of Dark Souls style storytelling. It just feels extremely random and haphazard in The Surge, like part of the game is told one way where Atlas is asking if you would kindly fix the valves on the bathysphere and another part is digging for Lore on the Ancient Board of Directors Who Passed Long Ago to figure out what any of this even means. Except the Lore is audio logs. Some people don't like Lore. -I- don't like audio logs.

In the end, the whole thing starts strong and doesn't, or can't fulfill its promises. I'll say one thing now: the overall package would have been better and more coherent if they had just leaned in on the nanomachines. One of the things that super bugged me about The Surge was the death and recovery mechanic. The currency in this game is tech scrap. Little bits of metal. That's lying around everywhere. It is not precious or special in any way. There is no diegetic reason for why you drop it on death, and why Warren can come back from being bisected. It's there purely for gameplay purposes, To Be Like Dark Souls. And that just drives me up a wall. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls built their entire worlds upon the cycle of Try, Die, Repeat, Succeed. It's engraved upon the very DNA of those games, from top to bottom, mechanically to thematically. The Surge just does it because it feels like its supposed to, and that is a rotten reason to do anything. The timer mechanic, which was present in Lords of the Fallen, which had similar issues with nebulous "Experience Points" being lost on death, adds insult to injury because it's ridiculously Video Game-y. There's no reason why an inert pile of scrap would disappear after two minutes or why killing some random drone halfway across the map would extend the timer. The reason I mention this with the nanomachines is because nanomachines provide an elegant solution to the dilemma. If you're so damned determined to be like Souls, then just use nanites as the diegetic justification for death recovery. Nanites can reconstruct your body after lethal trauma, but it means that the excess nanites you were carrying are discharged or used up to do so. Something like that. Expand on the nanomachine constructs from the end of the game, and the neat adaptive nanite armor some of the endgame enemies wear. I personally prefer the initial approach the game takes with less apocalyptic do-anything technology, but I would totally respect the decision to go whole Metal Gear hog on nanotech to explore some of that Try Die Repeat Succeed theming.

Also did you know that they even managed to stick in some poison swamps? Please. Please no more. Stop. I guess that brings us to environments? They're kind of bad in The Surge. It's all just industrial zones with occasional but extremely appreciated detours to greenhouses (poison swamp greenhouses!!!!), a show floor, and swanky executive offices. I think what really wore on me was the maintenance tunnels all looking identical. So many dark yellow cabley tunnels. Why didn't we ever go to space? The entire game takes place in a rocket production facility. I feel like there's a whole other act that takes place on a satellite or the fucking moon or something that got cut. Let me go to space you cowards. The NPCs are all extremely forgettable, too. They're all bland character archetypes with no agency and they all die. Not that I really cared. But god even in Bloodborne a couple of characters made it through the night! Even if it was only like Suspicious Yharnam Man and the Chapel Dweller. But the Chapel Dweller was a good person, at least. I guess if you don't give The Crazy Widow tech scrap to make a weapon Hobbs will survive. Maybe the doctor also lives? His robot-daughter doesn't, which is a shame, because she was like the one character I did enjoy. The whole game is very soulless, despite best efforts, another problem shared with Lords of the Fallen who in my 4 or so hours playing did not have a single character I did not wish violent death upon. It's a step up that only a couple of The Surge characters fit that criteria. I guess.

In conclusion, I still don't really know how I feel about the Surge. It's.... worth playing? Like I would enthusiastically recommend Bloodborne or Dark Souls 1 and 2 to anybody who likes video games, but I think the only people who would enjoy the Surge are those who specifically enjoy Souls-like games. I think most players would find The Surge needlessly awkward and difficult without much payoff in other areas. You can cut off heads real good, I guess, but if you're really hankering for satisfying dismemberment for some reason, you'll get a lot more mileage out of 2016 DooM. The Surge wants to be too many things at once and seriously Warren just feels so much like off-brand Isaac Clarke after the opening when his one defining characteristic is no longer salient. They're both engineering types, have Rigs, and their arsenals are comprised entirely of power tools being used in the most unsafe ways conceivable by the human mind. That's not really a criticism. More of an observation. I don't know. God I wrote lots of words about this. I hate video games.