In the opening scene, when Lara is being born, her sisters already know that she’s going to be a princess, but argue about if she will be a blue or red, as if mermaid gender is colour-based, and her father seems like the only clearly male mermaid around. Grace, witch, social outcast, is both red and blue, and in fish form she appears to be a male betta fish and while the show can’t use anything owned by Disney, Grace’s heavy makeup feels suggestive of Ursula, famously based on a drag queen Divine. Even the name is suggestive of a connection. And similarly, Kota, judging from his size, appears to be a female anglerfish, while being very small as a human. It’s not really textual, but there are strong trans undercurrents flowing through the story. And that’s not even to mention the obvious parallels of suitors being disgusted when they find out the biology that Lara and Grace were born with, and learning to be vulnerable and open yourself to love despite fear of hurt and hatred and defiance of what the world says that you should be.

The show in general is gorgeous, funny and sweet. I really love Lara and Mari. I was expecting the ending to be much more harsh considering some comments I’ve seen about it, though I must admit it was strangely flat compared to what came before it, refusing to give the straightforward happy ending that was obviously being promised. Lara rejecting having to be defined by orthodox ideas of “true love” does make sense for her, but as Mari herself points out it’s a strange turn for Lara to say all that cringe shit about wanting to live in a world with her and then just fuck off to find herself afterwards instead. The final tension is never really resolved, just left to sit until we cut to black, with the audience feeling as lost as Mari is, with her own heart having been pierced through with neither the closure of the love being fully consummated nor having her heart completely torn out.

I think that I’ve seen this film too many times to even have thoughts about it anymore.

I did not realise that this was going to be a comedy. It is very funny but in a way that I am not convinced will hold up on a rewatch. Doesn’t really have the tone or style of Resident Evil that much other than throwing in a bunch of visual references and some of the mutations made me think of Slither more than the games, but there’s already been enough bad attempts at putting Resident Evil’s cast on film that doing its own thing well was a much better idea.

I am disappointed that Capcom did not go with my idea of calling the game Resident Evil: SⅨ, but RE9uiem will have to do instead. The next one should be called REⅩ: Dino Crisis.

Before I started playing this game I knew that it was divided into playing as Grace in first person and playing in Leon in third person, but I did not know just different the two experiences are. Leon Scott Kennedy, now pushing 50, is a zombie-killing veteran, but Grace Ashcroft, the world’s most timid and pathetic FBI agent, is having a very bad time of it. In gameplay terms on top of the different perspectives they also have different controls, inventory systems and even save systems. Grace, by and large, is playing by the rules of RE2make: Eight inventory slots with item boxes for extra storage, ink ribbons to save, makeshift knifes only as emergency measures to use when getting grabbed. Leon is playing the rules of RE4make: Parrying chainsaws and roundhouse kicking zombies to his heart’s content when not just blowing them away with an arsenal of guns in his big attaché case inventory.

My only experience with first person Resident Evil prior to this was the teaser demo Resident Evil 7: Beginning Hour, so skulking around as Grace was new for me, or rather something that at first feels something more like Penumbra than Resident Evil, and not because of the first person perspective. As the player initially begins exploring the Rhodes Hill care centre Grace has no means of defending herself from the recently zombified staff and patients, and even when weapons are acquired, ammunition is very, very scarce. There is a satisfying power curve as one explores, opens up new areas, new resources and slowly gains the means to fight back. The crafting system is made a bit more interesting in this game by the fact that he primary crafting ingredient is zombie blood, which as well as being gnarly also makes every enemy a resource rather than just a drain. Zombies bleed more if you shoot their limbs off which means going for the head is not always the best option if you are low on blood but have plenty of bullets. I would like to say that this also turns the series-stable bloodstains that leak out from defeated zombies into not just an indicator that they are going to stay dead, but also a resource, but unfortunately the harvestable bloodstains are a second, different type of bloodstain that appear in addition to the normal one, making it feel very arbitrary.

Complicating matters further is that zombies don’t actually stay down. The crimson heads from the original REmake make their return in the form of blister heads; mutated, more dangerous zombies that arise from enemies you have killed but failed to destroy their head. Disposable anti-zombie juice injectors can be made and used to destroy bodies or sneak attack unsuspecting deadites, but they are a drain on limited resources and zombies killed this way never don’t leave usable blood behind.

After thoroughly exploring the care centre as Grace, Leon steps in to clear the place up. Playing as Leon is all about empowerment. Playing as him it is a breeze to mow down a room full of zombies in the time it would take Grace to deal with a single shambler. If he is sneaking around it is not to avoid fighting but to land a easy stealth takedown, decapitating a zombie before it even realises that he’s there, and while Grace might want to avoid killing enemies lest they come back as blisterheads, Leon is rewarded for killing as much as possible. I complained that the RE4make hardcode mode was a little more difficult than I would have preferred, but RE9uiem’s classic difficult, the hardest available before completing the game, often felt a bit too easy. Getting to explore the same space again in this radically different style, clearing up everything Grace left behind, is really interesting at first. It felt like it might be the perfect evolution of RE2’s A-side and B-side campaigns—going through the same space again not just with a new character and story, but going into the aftermath of the previous playthrough exactly as you left it, every zombie exactly where you left them as Grace, recontextualised with a new gameplay style and incentives. Unfortunately it quickly becomes clear that Leon has very little to do in Rhodes Hill other than open a handful of doors that Grace couldn’t and go straight to the next objective. It is not a second playthrough, just a short addendum where you can mop up all the zombies that you left behind as Grace if you want. The game is not divided between playing through the same areas as Grace and Leon, instead the game is divided between playing primarily as Grace in the first half with occasional interludes as Leon and playing primarily as Leon in the second half with occasional interludes as Grace, and their ranges seldom overlap. And, while Grace’s exploration of the suspiciously and obligatorily Spencer Mansion-esque care centre was obviously returning to the style of the old games and particular RE2make, the real nostalgia tour starts once we fully swap over to Leon exploring the ruins of Raccoon City, still infested with zombies and T-virus mutants twenty years later.

There’s a lot of fun choices in how this is handled, in how it tries to honour both RE2 and RE2make. There’s a lot of nice little details that the game doesn’t rub in your face. Leon drives past the petrol station from the intro on his way into town and Leon explores the RE2make police station with a suitably post-apocalyptic makeover while music from the original RE2 provides a perfect, melancholy atmosphere. Plant 43 and a giant spider, cut from the RE2make, make their return, upgraded to full boss fights. I do think that there is a missed opportunity here, though, to reuse more assets from RE2make. In general I think that game developers should be less shy about not reinventing the wheel and just reusing what works, and I was surprised, when scavenging the ruins of Raccoon City, that the game did not switch to the RE2make models for things like boxes of ammunition found scattered around. Sure, maybe first aid sprays have been replaced by med injectors at some point in the last two decades, but why are we still finding modern looking med injectors here instead of the old spray bottles? Asset reuse would actually make more sense. Why does ARK, Umbrella’s second double secret base that was apparently under the city the whole time, look nothing like NEST? Surely they should resemble each other more than they do.

And oh yeah apparently Umbrella had a second even more secret virus research lab under Raccoon City the whole time that has never been mentioned before. Of course they did. And it has an even more awesome ultra secret virus that the bad guys have been trying to unlock for twenty years but they don’t know the password. Also there’s a guy here who looks and sounds exactly like and has the same powers as Wesker. Except don’t worry at the last minute the real final boss calls him a cheap imitation and kills him before he can do anything or have any backstory explained. Like, yeah, having another replacement Wesker was stupid and I’m glad the game backed away from that, but you could have just not had him in the game in the first place. The game becomes over-indulgent in general towards the end. Some of this is, I grant, very gratifying: A rematch with a Mr. X where Leon can now parry what was an instant kill attack in RE2make, Hunk of all characters showing up out of nowhere for a knife axe fight, being able to unleash a licker on Umbrella goons and then do a silent takedown on it, but it also has that Resident Evil brand of over-complicated conspiracy nonsense.

The series has stepped away from the zombies as War on Terror framing of the 2000s and 2010s, but it has not left politics behind. The US, turning more isolationist, has pulled out of international anti-bioweapon treaties and the bombing of Raccoon City was revealed to be collusion between elements of the US state and private interests, but it is still firmly in the conspiracy theory mode. The president was definitively not in on it and it all revolves around some kind of new, boring, even more secret conspiracy behind Umbrella called The Connections that was apparently introduced in RE7 and now has to be retconned into everything else. Can you tell that I don’t care for the plot of this game very much?

This is all part of the biggest frustration I have with RE9uiem despite it being mechanically excellent: RE2make drew from across the series to make a complete whole. RE9uiem wants to be a sendoff to and revisit of the REmake series, similarly drawing from what came before, but fails to cohere in the same way mechanically and also refuses to actually close the door on anything. Leon does not, as one might expect, actually pass the torch to Grace to let her be part of the next generation of heroes; her mechanical climax happens halfway through the game and he final act is to enter a password before sitting on the sidelines and letting Leon fight the final boss by himself, any closure with Umbrella is undermines by the reveal of the real conspiracy behind it all, and also, despite it barely mattering to the plot at all, the idea of memory transference is introduced so now Capcom have a built-in excuse to bring anyone back from the dead if they want. And it also fails as a requiem for the REmake series because they’re still making more of those anyway.

I was quite bad at the original Mercenaries and in comparison this feels far too easy, even putting aside the silly mayhem mode powerup win button. But it’s a bit of mindless fun and the different movesets all the characters get are nice to play with.

It’s funny how this works to siphon off Wesker and a few other sillier elements of the main story from the original game away from the slightly more serious RE4make, but it ends up over-egging the pudding in that regard. It makes up for having Wesker mostly absent in the main campaign by having him far too much here. If he’s just going to show up in person and help out on the mission why did he even hire Ada in the first place? It makes him look less like the big, scheming mastermind that he’s meant to be and makes Ada look incompetent.

Otherwise I do appreciate Ada and Luis’ plot both being expanded on a bit and the unique fights on offer here. Ada’s long range grapnel attacks and low health pool help to differentiate her a bit more from Leon than she was in the original, and better use is made of her ability to traverse the environment with the grapnel gun than the original as well, though its still very inconsistent which ledges are flagged as hookable and how much freedom it affords you. She feels like an awkward middle ground between normal RE4make gameplay and a highly restricted Arkham game, a feeling not dissuaded by some rudimentary detective vision puzzles sprinkled throughout her levels.

It might sound strange to say but I think that the Resident Evil 2 RE2make actually felt more true to the original the the Resident Evil 4 REmake does. Part of this is, amusingly, that the RE4make feels like a much more natural followup to the RE2make than the original RE4 did to RE2. This starts with the new intro, which acts as a much more reasonable bridge between the two games than the original did, but continues with RE4make’s darker, somewhat more serious atmosphere. But a large part of this is also that, while RE2make took in elements from across the series to construct something that captures Resident Evil as a whole, RE4make feels much more directly influenced by the modern action game milieu than RE4 is the grandfather of. Parrying, stealth, silent takedowns, crafting, sidequests—RE4 has elements of or precursors to all of these things, but RE4make’s versions of these systems would slot neatly into any pretty much any current high-budget action game. Don’t get me wrong, these are very polished, work well and mostly work very well with RE4’s existing systems, it’s just it can feel disappointingly generic at times, especially diving into menus for the crafting systems (and the treasure system is kind of annoying) or equipping trinkets for dull little incremental bonuses.

The basic plot has not been changed much, less than RE2make’s was I would say, and keeps the B-movie charm while taking the characters more seriously and pushing aside the very post-9/11 America, world police angle. Ashley and Krauser stand out as the biggest improvements. The former acts less like a teenager and is made into a genuinely fun character (her enthusiasm in the shooting range minigame is great), and Krauser is much better integrated into the overall plot and pacing of the game instead of just showing up out of nowhere towards the end, and his awful QTE cutscene boss fight is instead turned into a really great test of the player’s mastery of parrying.

I am not as fond of RE4make extending its attempts to make the plot make more sense extend to the merchant, though. He is (they are?) intriguing as a character in the original in so far as he is a gameplay contrivance that makes no real attempt to justify itself. He is just this weird bog pervert who buys treasures off you and upgrades your guns. RE4make attempts to justify him as an agent actively working against Los Iluminados, cheering you on and giving side quests to clear up various messes made by the cult. This really just raises more questions than it answers, none of which are ever going to have sensible or satisfactory answers. Ada’s new voice direction is also quite jarring.

The game suggested that fans of the original play hardcore mode and I obliged, but I think I might have actually preferred a lower difficultly. It’s a tough game and often much more hectic and reactive than the original. Enemies are more complex and more unrelenting than the original and it feels like different types of enemies with their own concerns and mitigation strategies are thrown at you together earlier and more frequently. While combat in the original was often about careful positioning and crowd management, the RE4make was much more often pushing me into panicked, reactive, survival mode. That is to its credit, it’s in many ways more of a horror experience, but the fear of dying is blunted quite a lot by actually dying over and over again.

It was easy for me to be cynical about this game going in and assuming that it would be taking a wonderful game and throwing out the things that made it special in order to make something acceptably modern, but the RE2make is a wonderful game that doesn’t just update the original game but pulls elements from across the entire series to make a perfectly designed synthesis that feels modern because the DNA of the Resident Evil series runs through modern action games so much. Gunpowder returns from Resident Evil 3 to provide some flexibility in the punishing scarcity of resources, Resident Evil 4’s knife is combined with the subweapon system of the REmake of the original game to act as both desperation weapon and lifeline, and the game blends the basic action controls of Resident Evil 6 with the dark, horror atmosphere of Resident Evil 7. Being generous I could even credit Resident Evil 0 with the convenience feature of showing items you’ve passed by on the map.

That feature does feel quite necessary though, as the densely detailed environments can make it easy to overlook important resources. I tried briefly to play with the heads up display disabled but between missing things constantly from the lack of interaction prompts and it removing crosshairs entirely it was too much for me on top of playing with hardcore mode on. I would have appreciated a little more granular customisation in display elements and difficult modifiers similar to how automatic reloading can be disabled (which I also did). The risk and tension of dying is great but ruined by actually dying constantly. Lack of checkpointing in hardcore mode can also be sometimes frustrating with multi-stage setpieces that include instant deaths. Amusingly in trying to recapture the survival horror experience some convenience features that were present in the original game have actually been removed. Keys and ink ribbons must be selected from the inventory rather than being used automatically and you are no longer automatically prompted to discard key items that have been fully utilised.

That core tension of balancing scarce resources is still the heart of the game. Weapons, ammunition, keys, health, inventory space and (in hardcore mode) saves need to be weighed constantly against known and unknown risks ahead. Zombies are legitimately scary and a large part of that is the uncertainty in facing them. Sometimes a single lucky shot with the basic pistol will be enough to pop one’s head open, sometimes they can take an entire magazine to the face and barely flinch while both you and the player character scream curses at them, and their staggering and sudden lunges can make them very tricky targets when they close the gap, which they can do with surprising speed. It is still possible to weave past them, but is much more to do difficult than it was in the original game, and sometimes they will not notice you at all if you sneak past them slowly enough. Tiptoeing around oblivious zombies, past sleeping corpses, or under the powerful, fast, but blind licker clinging to the ceiling is a wonderfully tense experience, sold not just by the gameplay but the lighting and incredibly detailed animation work that that responds to exactly how much or how little the analogue stick is gingerly nudged forward.

I am not one to gush about graphics too much but I must admit the game does look fantastic. Locations are redesigned in a way that feels true to the original game while being more detailed and realistic while still being being readable gameplay spaces. The changes that are made are interesting and almost all contribute to a more serious, even more tense atmosphere than the original. The original FMV intro is expanded and reworked into a slower, more tense tutorial area and the original opening gauntlet repurposed as an interstitial space that is traversed after leaving the police station for the first time and some of the sillier and more annoying enemies in the original game have been replaced with things that are much scarier. I do miss the grungier, more industrial version of Umbrella’s labs, though. Other elements that were a little half-baked in the original get expanded on, with Sherry and Ada getting more unique locations for their sections, though Ada’s detective vision puzzles are the one thing in the game that felt quite derivative.

What scant characterisation there was in the original game has been focused on, with Claire’s optimism and Leon’s naïveté emphasised, Annette made into just the worst mother, and Ada being genuinely manipulative. One odd note in the story is that Leon and Claire run into each other even less than in the original game, leading to them barely interacting at all. I suppose that in a story that is trying to be more grounded them splitting up for no good reason after meeting up again would chafe a bit.

Overall just a fantastically stressful reimagining of a classic game.

Assignment: Ada is a funny thing to exist to Separate Ways of which it is sort of a prototype version of: A mini-campaign staring Ada that ramps up the pressure and difficulty to deliver a very condensed version of Resident Evil 4. It does have a few things going for it: Short and sweet and with Ada dressed in something less silly than her normal dress, I also like how rather than your inventory expanding as it progresses the samples you collect take up space that could be used for healing items and grenades, forcing you to rely less and less on them as get out of jail free cards and feels in some way like a welcome callback to the earlier games. The final boss being Krauser who appears out of nowhere running towards you in a short cutscene because they didn’t want to record new voice lines for this is also very funny and jarring and reminds me more than anything of watching my friend Ruby play through the main campaign with a randomiser and having Krauser repeatedly show up to replace various minibosses, including a dozen of him showing up in the garrador cage match room, though I did struggle with how much damage he takes to put down without having an upgraded revolver to blast him away with.

Separate Ways itself is a fun little condensed version of the game, but its attempts to tie itself into the main story are comical more than anything else. Having to do puzzles in reverse and place the items that Leon will later find is cute, but also calls attention into all the other ways in which Ada running through these areas and clearing them out immediately before Leon comes along to do so again. Sure, there was another gigante there that Ada killed before Leon arrived to fight one in the same place. Even worse is the areas where you can see or hear Leon in the next room fighting off hordes of ganados, while Leon and by extension the player were completely obvious to Ada doing the same thing. Her grenades apparently explode at a frequency that Kennedys cannot hear. Being a side story in a series that doesn’t tend to treat it female characters very well also means that beating the final boss of course results in getting captured anyway and your final moment is running to grab a rocket launcher to throw to Leon.

I appreciate there being a couple of new areas but the level design relies on Ada’s contextual-sensitive hookshot points for navigation that are not very clearly signposted. The battleship area in particular is a nightmare of being unclear where to go while being absolutely bombarded with bullets and bombs that make stopping to take in your surroundings quite difficult.

It’s amusing how Resident Evil 4 starts with a recap of the previous games when absolutely nothing that follows has anything to do with those plots at all other than the name Umbrella getting occasionally thrown around towards the end. The plot actually makes far less sense if you have played the previous games in the series (and, like me, not played any of the spinoffs). Why is Wesker not dead, why is Leon not reacting at all to Ada not being dead, and who the fuck is Krauser? If you’re coming in without prior knowledge you can assume these characters and their dynamics with Leon are well-established and not bafflingly out of place.

Coming straight from Resident Evil 2 had another problem: Run being on ⨉ and fire being on ◻ kept messing with my muscle memory and for a while when enemies were about to grab me my instinct reaction was to aim and slam the reload button, locking me in place while they were free to get me. Other than that the gameplay, while an obvious departure from the previous games, does, I think, have more commonality than is immediately obvious and that did not necessarily carry over to the general, still-ubiquitous third person action game formula that Resident Evil 4 established. There is still the tension of resource management and balancing supplies of ammunition and healing against current threats, picking off enemies with precise targetting and knife attacks and managing crowds with careful staggering and mêlée attacks, or just blowing crowds away with grenades and and shotgun blasts. It’s a more fluid and dynamic ebb and flow of tension, the game trying to keep you hungry but not starved with its random drops and dynamic difficulty, but trying to figure out how to handle the relentless pressure of hordes of ganados is not a completely alien calculus compared to trying to clear a hallway of zombies by baiting as many as possible close at once and them aiming up with a shotgun blast to try and decapitate as many as possible at once. And while the fixed camera is (mostly) gone the tight field of view still creates large blind spots that need to be accounted for and manage. It’s quite easy for enemies to sneak up on you if you’re not listening out for them. Keys no longer take up inventory space and don’t contribute to inventory management concerns, but keys and puzzles still play an important part in pacing and allowing movements of rest between big fights.

Even tonally the game isn’t as much as a departure as is often stated. As silly as Resident Evil 4 is the first game had mutant sharks, plenty of cheesy lines and a boulder to dodge right out of India Jones and the series had already been trending towards interminable conspiracy nonsense and too much character lore references. Early rereleases of Resident Evil 2 included teasers for Residents Evil 3, 0, and Code: Veronica and was already including intra-Umbrella espionage and double-crossings. Resident Evil 4 just has absolutely no grace about any of it.

Obviously it is still a very different game to its predecessors, but I think the ways in which it is inkeeping with them is what make it stand out from the action games that came in its wake and what makes it so enduring and the HD Project mod does an unbelievable job of giving a fresh lick of paint to the game while being true to the original game. The modders went so far as to track down the original sources of texture references in the game and take new photographs of them in order to recreate the original assets in a higher resolution. The bundled tweaks mod also fixes a lot of bugs and allows a few adjustments to me made for the game, including restoring the fixed camera perspective in the section of the game where Ashley is playable, something that was removed from every version after the original Japanese Gamecube release. It’s a cute little throwback but having just played Resident Evil 2 the controls here definitely don’t feel as good or work as well as the original games. I can see why they changed it in subsequent versions, but without the callback that section feels a bit more pointless.

The only other major tweak I applied was disabling quick time events purely to get past the Krauser cutscene knife fight, which is a pain in the ass and I re-enabled them afterwards. I do actually quite like the reactive QTEs that are used for dodges in boss fights in this game, it’s only the cutscene and button-mashing ones that I have a real problem with.

No one can do anything without the backup of the American government.

Perhaps the apex of Resident Evil’s post-9/11 degeneration into bizarre, international, political conspiracy, featuring a confused Ukraine standin called the Eastern Slav Republic, a former Soviet state that seems to be simultaneously an unrecognised polity that is not a member of the UN, struggling for independence from… presumably Russia?, but also has a US embassy and its own army separate from Russian forces. Within the Eastern Slav Republic’s border there is also a very ill-defined armed rebellion against “the oligarchs” fighting for independence from the republic itself, which has started using bioweapons in its fight against the state.

The confusion about what exactly is going on in this country may be because most of the film follows the perspective of Leon Scott Kennedy, an American anti-bioterrorism agent sent into the state to investigate whose understanding of the delicate political situation he finds himself in is such that he doesn’t know who the president of the ESR is. At the start of the film Leon is told that the US has cut diplomatic ties with the ESR and that he is meant to evacuate along with all of the embassy staff. Leon, being a cool guy who isn’t afraid to commit a few war crimes in order to do the right thing, decides to ignore his orders and fight a one-man anti-bioweapon war.

But the heart of the film is J.D., a rebel whose entire personality is that loves American action movies and wants to hang with his bros. He has fifty DVDs and none of them are pirated. He rules. He’s a complete dumbass and every time he is on screen he is doing something funny. I am obsessed with the little nod he gives Leon when he thinks that he’s outsmarted him and the the condescending little nod that Leon gives back. The emotional climax of the film is J.D. crying tears of blood as he dies to the bioweapon parasite that he helped unleash with the rebellion, confessing that he never cared at all about politics and just wanted to have fun with his mates.

The film continues on for a while after this with lots of action scenes of varying levels of quality and misogyny until at the climax everything that Leon and the rebels fought for in the end is rendered entirely pointless because the US and Russian military launch a joint invasion of the ESR and easily walk over all resistance, having already learnt that the ESR’s president was the one developing bioweapons and handing them over to the rebels as part of a plot to wipe them out and gain legitimacy. Leon gives a speech to a suicidal man about how once you’re a soldier you have a duty to live for the people who died alongside you and then shoots him in the spine.

J.D. is so right action movies rock.

Playing old pre-rendered games in a high resolution on a modern display looks wrong. The models rendered so much more crisply than the backgrounds stand out like an actor on a bad green screen. Instead of any PC port I played the Dual Shock version of Resident Evil 2 in Duckstation with a slightly convoluted rendering pipeline: Internally rendered at ×3 original resolution, downsampled back to the original resolution for some anti-aliasing on the models, then displayed at 2,880×2,160 with a CRT Royale shader to help smooth out the rough edges of the picture more and blend the characters and the world together. And the game still looks great, especially with this presentation. I love the messy, run-down, industrial backdrops of the game. Just enough clutter and noise on everything to give it a huge amount of texture while still being readable. There’s some great body horror done with the models as well. G’s transformations are wonderfully gory.

The fixed camera angles and pre-rendered don’t just look good and are not just solve a technological problem as a way of representing a three-dimensional environment in much higher fidelity than would otherwise have been possible on the hardware, they create a bold style that holds up strongly and allow for some wonderful dramatic framing allow important gameplay elements to be highlighted by the camera itself. Catching a glimpse of a licker for the first time crawling along the outside of a window, only to go into the next room and be met with a high-angle shot of the player character through another window from outside, as if being watched and stalked by something, is particularly memorable. There are some awkward angles and cheap out-of-frame ambushes, but it is more than worth it for the experience they bring and clear sound design and characters automatically looking towards points of interest usually gives one more than enough context for what is off screen.

The tank controls are great. I will not wrap this up in talking about them as “of their time” or a compromise. They are not awkward; they are a fluid means of navigation and with some practise weaving through zombies with them is a joy. Not that they are easy or that I have mastered them—they take concentration and dexterity and I still got bit plenty of times. Safe navigation is part of the challenge and part of the tense calculus of the game. Health, ammunition and inventory space are precious resources and every excursion must be balanced against this. You can save bullets by risking running through the horde, you can take health sprays to mitigate any damage you might suffer from a misstep or from getting corned by a mutant you weren’t expecting to encounter, or you can travel light to maximise the amount of resources you can gather in the field. At least one or two inventory slots given over to keys that are needed to progress, one for a weapon, another for bullets. That’s half of your carrying capacity taken up already before you even bring along any healing items and you will want to be able to bring back any extra resources you can scavenge.

I love how this unpacks as you go through the game. Pressing into the darkness, learning what threats might lurk around each corner, building your mental map of the world. Where are the sa[fv]e rooms? Your home bases, points of refuge with a save point, storage chest and calm, comforting piano against a dark, brooding backing. You learn the layout and safe routes, turning from timid exploration to guided, intentional missions with specific objectives. Zombie hordes are not something to be eliminated without thought, but carefully managed and culled to allow safe passage. The zombie-infested police headquarters slowly becomes familiar operating territory, though it also evolves as you do; zombies spilling into once empty hallways, while lickers crawl their way into once-empty rooms.

I was surprised, though, to be reminded of just how much the game immediately throws you in at the deep end. I played this game many times as a child, but this is my first time coming back to it in two decades with the REmake of the original being my more recent baseline of the fixed-camera Resident Evil games. Here you do not get a slow buildup to seeing your first zombie, you are simply thrown straight into a gauntlet and if you haven’t already played the first game then you must quickly learn to dodge past hordes of the undead before you can earn your first bit of respite.

After the police station the game turns more linear than I remembered. Even the Umbrella laboratories, while it has some back and fourth, do not have the interconnected layout of of the police station. There’s generally only a single route between any two points and some key items are simply left adjacent to where they are needed. This was somewhat disappointing and can feel like the game is running out of steam but it does play into the escalation of action that is taking place, which itself is already much heightened from the first game. Even outside of the opening gauntlet I was surprised by how many zombies this game throws at you from the get-go and the sheer tankiness some of them can have—the inconsistency in how many shots it can take to kill things and how often they play dead is also something one needs to take into account in one’s risk calculus.

I played Leon’s A-side campaign first followed by Claire’s B-side. Surprisingly the second campaign starts off much less stressfully. The path to the police station is a gentle stroll compared to the opening of the first scenario and the headquarters welcomes you in the back door like an old friend, opening its now-familiar corridors to you much more quickly than the first time around. Less time is spent juggling keys and the safe combination isn’t even changed; if you remember it you can grab some ammo and the map for free without even finding the corresponding memo again. As you’ve already peeled apart the station layer by layer the game throws a different challenge at you instead: Mr. X, the first of the Resident Evil series’ signature pursuer enemies, who scared the shit out of enough as a child that, although my memories of much of the game were vague, every time I reached a room where he was scripted to crash through a wall I would be filled with a deep, old dread and have to pause for a moment to gather myself. Playing as an adult he’s much less of a threat—another obstacle among many to duck past—but he’s still effective and intimidating.

Conversely to its surprisingly straightforwardness in the A-side, the later levels introduce extra twists and turns as the actions of the previous protagonist complicate the route to and through the Umbrella labs, a wrinkle that I had not remembered and quite appreciated. It’s still less exploration than the early game, but I appreciate that game continuing to throw surprises in what otherwise would be a retread of familiar ground.

There appears to be a consensus online that the Claire A-side campaign followed by the Leon B-side (the opposite order to how I played it) is the more “canon” order and I can also see how the story would fit together better thematically as well that way. Claire’s less-standard, more improvised-feeling arsenal feels appropriate to a first playthrough (as does the grenade launcher not requiring a separate inventory slot to hold its ammo supply) and a stronger focus on the G-virus mutants for Claire and Sherry’s story fits better. And where X feels redundant as a second giant monster chasing Sherry, he fits a bit better into Leon and Ada’s corporate espionage focus. I don’t intend to play through the game again right now, but if I get the urge to replay hopefully I’ll remember to do the other order.

The generator needs a battery¹ to fix it. I run past the capacitor machine, double tap it to grab a capacitor and set the machine going again to make another one. I weave past a green, ghostly flame and skim against the edge of a mine to trigger it while avoiding the blast, clearing it from the floor. A second generator has blown. I tap the coolant machine to grab a case of coolant just in case I need it for something else. I reach the battery machine, tap it to drop the capacitor in and start it generating a battery. I tap the second generator to see what it needs: A heat sink. That’s good, there’s one ready to go. I dodge past more ghost fire and swing past the heat sink machine, tap it to grab the heat sink and tap it again to drop the coolant I was carrying in to set another one going. The generator next to me blows so I check what it needs to fix it as I move on: Coolant and a heat sink. The battery is ready so I grab another capacitor, set the machine going again, go to the battery machine, and grab the battery. I mistime my second tap and don’t put the capacitor in place to make a new battery. I don’t turn around, there’s three ghosts after me and I can get do it on the next loop around. I drop the battery into the first generator to fix it. Another generator blows. Eight seconds have passed.

Awaria is built around a series of tight loops. Generators that need constant repair on a countdown till they explode, machines that make parts on a five second timer and machines that need those parts to make secondary components, ghosts that constantly harass you as you weave through it all and a ten second regeneration timer on your one hitpoint. Everything exists in the moment-to-moment flow of these loops and the constant, small decisions that you have to make to react to everything. The levels are short, the restarts are quick and the music is pushing you forward, making dying and restarting just another that all the others reside in. Being allowed to take one hit every ten seconds means that there is some leeway but doesn’t mess with the momentum of the game, letting you recover from a single mistake but not making health a resource you have to manage across a level, just something else built into the rhythm of the game. Hard mode takes away that leeway, making any hit a failure and really driving you to prefect that state of flow that you need to sink in to survive.

This and Helltaker, with a degree of cheesecake art as a central point, are the kinds of things I might have turned my nose up at before, but I’ve gotten a bit less repressed about and lightened up about sex a lot. I think a lot of things that lean into that are still very steeped in misogyny, but Vanripper puts a lot of style and personality into his art that I appreciate and I think one of the women having a rusted, metal jaw² that makes her look like she has thick stubble is a wonderful choice that I did not expect and looks sick as hell.

This movie is just so incredibly fun. I love the punks, the soundtrack, the effects, the tar man. So many great and funny moments that I was excited to see my partner experience for the first time while watching it with me. So memorable that it managed to single-handedly ruin the idea of zombies in the public consciousness as guys in tattered suits rising from their graves and shouting for brains.

Well whatever they’re here for, it’s turning into a riot. Maybe they are just here for control. If they can turn a campus protest into a shooting war…

I don’t think I noticed how much this film is about the Vietnam War the first time I watched it. The depiction of the military, the imagery of the flamethrowers and the self-immolating priest, the inability to distinguish “civilian” and combatant and the callous disregard for life that makes everything worse. It is, in part, the Vietnam War visited upon home soil.

Let them stay upstairs. Let them. Too many ways those monsters can get in up there. We’ll see who’s right. We’ll see when they come begging me to let them in down here.

A lot of people make the point that Cooper was right, but Cooper was only right about one thing: That the door would hold. A door that would not have been enough to save them. He wanted to shut out the rest of the world and blind himself to any understanding of what was happening in it so that he could be in charge of his own little fiefdom. He is white flight. If they had followed his plan they would not have sat safe and sound in the basement overnight till they were rescued (a rescue that was in no way guaranteed), they would have locked themselves in with no radio, no television, no contact with or knowledge of the outside world, with a dying girl they had no idea could possibly rise from the dead and threaten them from inside, with no knowledge of how to stop it.

Ben throughout the movie is proactive. He wants to bring everyone together, to work together to hold a larger space, not to confine himself to the smallest domain that he can control and shrink away from the world. When he is forced to flee the to basement he understands immediately what has happened and knows how to deal with it and it is only by other’s ignorance that he is killed in the end.

I think this cut may have been longer than versions I have seen before. I certainly didn’t remember quite so many of the television segments, though perhaps I had merely forgotten them. They are oddly out of time with the rest of the film. While the events in the house happen over the course of a single night, it the news reports make it seem like this has been ongoing for at least a few days, with segments that are clearly during the day and a shot of the posse that is about to kill Ben seemingly beamed in from the future. It’s an odd aspect of the film.

Mostly solid but some episodes dragged down by silly gimmicks like the tonally jarring use of Robby the Robot and his boy genius programmer or bringing in Johnny Cash to give a fairly mediocre performance.

Super fun little thing. Dozens of different mechs to pilot each with their own unique little toy control schemes on the touchscreen. Some more practical and straightforward, others more silly and gimmicky. Cars with a steering wheel and gear stick; missiles with their own multi-step launch sequences; a revolver where you have to load each individual bullet, pull back the firing pin, then pull the trigger; a steam-powered robot that is a beast in close combat but must be powered by pulling a lever to open the furnace doors, shoveling in coal, building steam pressure and then finally turning a valve to let the pressure out and power the arms (and don’t forget to close it again to build the pressure up for the next round).

Less endearingly the power creep throughout the game means that fun puppets you get early on are going to mostly stop being useful as you progress through the game and filling out your roster with upgraded versions takes a lot of replaying and grinding out levels, both to earn cash and also to get blueprints that drop randomly from specific missions. There’s also nothing in-game to indicate which missions provide which blueprints either so if you want something specific you’ll need to consult a guide. Late-game missions also become a chore with long slogs fighting waves of enemies that can, and often will, juggle you to death if they manage to knock you over once. And when there are too many robots in a level the frame rate really suffers. Even just trying to find where the next mission unlocked on the world map becomes a pain over time as it turns into a sprawling mess.

With regards to story, tone and presentation the game reminds me a bit of Advance Wars, with this seemingly quite small world culturally dominated by marionation gear¹—the game’s puppet mechs—the strongest of which of course end up piloted by a bunch of thirteen year olds to save the world from the horrors of traditional artisanal work being replaced by soulless automation and mechanised warfare.

To launch a special attack, it needs to pose. That is an unavoidable requirement of robotics engineering.

I wonder how my feelings towards this and Robot Alchemic Drive would be if I played them in the order that they were released in. In many ways Remote Control Dandy feels like a first draft of RAD. A lot of the same ideas are explored. Similar character archetypes, reused scenarios, even a similar selection of maps for the areas that make up Torino and Senjo: The new downtown area, the old city centre, the docks, the power plant on the mountain. Both even have a map of Shinjuku for a mission where you have to defend the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. I definitely feel like a second go at this both lead to a more interesting and compelling story in RAD as well as just a more fun experience. Mechanics that were a small part of RCD get a bigger focus in RAD while a lot of the other concerns fade into the background.

Conversely, while RAD feels like a second draft it actually feels less polished. RAD’s story is more interesting but also less coherent and I don’t think that all of that can be blamed on the rushed (but charming) localisation. In RCD’s favour is that it looks a lot better for a Playstation game than RAD does for a Playstation 2 game. Partly that is aesthetic choices. RAD’s muted palette, Playstation 2 blur and general griminess aren’t doing it many favours, but while it boasts bigger maps and longer draw distances there is a conspicuous lack of damage models for buildings and other details that make Senjo feel a bit more sterile compared to RCD’s Torino. Animated character portraits, a more visual novel-style intermission section and a much fancier and seamless robot selection and launch screen also just make seem like more time and care was allowed in this game than was for RAD.

There is also some more detailed simulationist aspects to RCD that are dropped in its successor. Both games have monetary system to incentivise keeping property destruction down but RAD’s is much more forgiving, simply giving you a base amount of money per mission and then bonuses for protecting key buildings and minimising damage. RCD on the other hand (and somewhat more logically) gives you a larger upfront amount but penalises you for all damage done to the city over the course of your giant robot fights. You can, in fact, lose money on a given mission. The robots available to you even cost variable amounts to send into battle. Do you use the cheap, steam-powered robot that doesn’t have big fancy attacks, or do you send your expensive nuclear-powered model? You can go bankrupt if you spend everything and and smash up the city too much. You can also cause so much property destruction that the populace turns against you. In the second game this has largely been simplified away. RCD has more intricacies here, and that can definitely be appealing, but in the end RAD’s more lackadaisical approach lets one have a lot more fun driving a big stompy robot smashing through buildings without the looming risks of bankruptcy hanging over one’s head (though one is given more second chances than the game initially lets on).

And it’s interesting to see other elements that are somewhat vestigial in RAD having more of a presence here. In both games police cars drive around the city while you do battle. In RCD you have to pay the cost of them if they get destroyed but you are assured that they are automated patrol cars there only to detect and deter people from coming back into the evacuated city to steal while everyone is missing. You definitely aren’t killing anyone so don’t worry about it. The manual for RAD keeps this explanation that the patrol cars are automated drones despite the fact that RAD is more than happy to let you casually crush and mow down crowds of people as they spray comically large clouds of blood. You are not penalised for it at all; it is simply part of the slapstick. Yet it still keeps the excuse that the cars are automated, despite it not serving any purpose.

But for all RAD can feel like a rushed copy of this game, it’s still fundamentally the more fun one. RCD is great in its own right but it feels lacking compared RAD’s analogue stick controls, more engaging mech fights and more fun cast. The battle mode in RCD is also disappointing. While it does allow for playing against computer-controlled opponents it simply gives both players direct control over their robots from a birds-eye view, removing the core dynamic of having to deal with playing as a pilot operating from a ground level.

To end on a compliment, though, Remote Control Dandy’s final boss is much cooler than and has some more interesting unique gameplay tricks than Robot Alchemic Drive’s. Evidently the developers thought that they hit a winner there too, as one of the unique aspects of RCD’s final boss ended up being promoted to a core gameplay mechanic in RAD.

Also the fact that you can combine Vordan’s tornado arms and remote control rocket fist is extremely funny.

I have not kept up with wrestling since the 2000s but I have been recently been getting slightly back into it through my girlfriend (after her flatmate got her back into it), so Alice Bell’s new supernatural murder mystery being wrestling-themed was a nice little bonus on top of a book I was going to read anyway. Might beat out the first one for my favourite in the series so far, though I did cop who the murderer was a while before the protagonist and got slightly impatient waiting for the penny to drop.

A demo for a cancelled tie-in game for a TV show that got reworked into Robot Alchemic Drive. Very interesting to compare it to the final game. The first thing that jumps out is that the map seems much more detailed here than any in RAD. It makes me wonder what kind of budget and time constraints RAD had during its development. That said, RAD also features extensive use of picture-in-picture effects and panicking crowds running around in the story mode as well a split-screen multiplayer option which might have put some more strict resource constraints on its maps than the largely static Tokyo of this demo. The only things moving around are the player character, their robot, the big watermelon kaiju and the buildings that you are smashing apart as you fight it.

Some of the assets from this demo seem to have been reused for the intro cutscene of the third level in RAD, both of which take place around Tokyo Tower, though when the level proper starts in the final game you are actually in a completely different map based on a different part of Tokyo featuring the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. The layouts of the maps in this demo and the cutscene in RAD don’t match up so they didn’t just reuse the same map, but some of the buildings appear to us the same models.

Both demo and final game do not feature a pause menu; the select button in both switching between pilot and robot and the start button showing control reminders in the demo and a map screen in the final game, but in the demo’s free-roam mode a message at the top of the screen informs the player that pressing select and start together will quit back to the menu. This feature is still functional in the challenge and versus modes in RAD but as far as I can tell not documented anywhere in the game or its manual¹.

The watermelon monster is taken from the first episode of Tekkōki Mikazuki it’s just a very fun design. The conceit of controlling the robot from the ground is not from the show, though, and is taken from Remote Control Dandy, a game that Robot Alchemic Drive is very clearly a spiritual successor to, reusing and reworking many of the same concepts. The robot controls in this demo, though, are very simplified, using something like the “easy” control option from RAD for moving Mikazuki and without the different array of attack options present in either game. Perhaps the developers only had working or wanted only to present a basic, less complex version of the control scheme than they had in mind for the full game, but the end result in this demo lacks the clunky, expressive charm of RAD or its predecessor.

I really love a game that is deliberate in its controls. That doesn’t try to make everything as smooth as possible. That has a sense of physicality and realness to it. System Shock’s modular, maximalist UI, Metal Gear Solid 2’s intricate and deliberate controls, the process of discovering and operating your submersible walker in Nauticrawl. I love a game that feels like operating heavy machinery and there is no machinery heavier than Gllang.

Robot Alchemic Drive has such a wonderful conceit. You are piloting a giant robot—a meganite—against giant invading alien kaiju robots—the volgara. You must swap between controlling the pilot and the meganite, but the perspective and camera always stays with the pilot. You are watching from ground level, or from a rooftop, or from the shoulder of your robot, and it’s rarely a simple or smooth process. Judging the distance, the angle, how to aim or throw a punch from a distance. The controls aren’t simple either. Each analogue stick controls an arm, and each pair of shoulder buttons the legs. Just to walk forward you need to alternate L1 and R1 to take each individual step. I’ve wanted to play it ever since watching Videochess playing it a few years ago and the more recent surge in Nanao-posting finally pushed me to jump in myself.

And it’s just a blast to play. It can be a bit repetitive but you do get three meganites to play with if you want to shake it up. I did mostly stick with Thrones-class Gllang the Castlekeep, because if it’s it a game about being a big, stompy robot why would you not want to be the biggest, stompiest robot? Gllang is slow but loaded up with weapons and you can eventually unlock the ability to unload every gun it has at once, which makes for a very satisfying finishing move. He can also transform into fortress mode, a surprisingly fast and slippery tank the width of an entire motorway to compensate for how slow his walk is. On the fast and light side there’s Cherubim-class Airborne Dominator Laguiole who can turn into a V-TOL jet and Seraphim-class Vertical Fortress Vavel as the middle of the road bland main character robot who can’t transform into anything but has a super mode that gives you a time limit of three minutes to finish the mission within or else he’ll explode (though if you pick Gllang or Laguiole at the start they will also get a similar super mode late in the story).

The game is a bit repetitive, throwing you into fight after fight, but it tries to throw in different twists on the formula either as a once-off or in little mini-arcs that explore a particular idea for a few missions. You will have to deal with poison gas, putting out fires, various twists on the enemy units’ Phantom System teleporter that allows them to dodge all ranged attacks until they are on low health, and a various other things. None of these ever really get integrated back into the gameplay in a more systematic way. The meganites can pick things up but it’s only useful in one or two missions (though there is some fun to be had in experimenting with picking yourself up).

There are also missions that focus more on the protagonist’s relationships with various characters, most importantly Nanao, who is a perfect angel who no one is ever allowed to be mean to except for me when I keep “accidentally” blowing up the buildings she works in. Amusingly blowing up various buildings is one of the main drivers of character interactions. Masaru, the stuck-up heir to an arms manufacturing conglomerate, gets more and more character development the more you repeatedly blow up his company’s headquarters. The general campiness, which extends to the gameplay itself, is also enhanced by the localisation, which is charmingly low budget and aiming for the energy of old cheezy dubs of Gamera and Godzilla movies (though they could have left out the bad Japanese accent that they give to the news reporter and no one else). The story does go in some darker directions at times and it put my slightly in mind of Neon Genesis Evangelion but where Gendo died and they just put Shinji in charge (but still did not tell him anything).

It does feel like there was more ambition here than was able to be filled, with dramatic and especially the more dream-like sequences struggling to convey themselves with the game’s fairly simple cutscenes and descriptions of the situation in the city of Senjo and Earth in general getting worse and worse as the war wages on being undercut by every map being completely reset whenever the next mission starts.

There is also a multiplayer mode that is both a little barebones but shocklingly generous with how much it offers. You choose a map and then each player chooses a pilot and a robot to control and then it dumps you in a splitscreen match. First person to have the health par of either the robot or the pilot deplete loses. But it doesn’t just offer the three megatnites; every volgara that you defeat in the story mode gets added to the roster and every map from the story mode is there with all their moves from the story mode. Even the Rome map that only appears in the opening cutscene of the story is here and fully playable, modelled well beyond what was needed for the intro. And with no time limit, no scorekeeping and a match only ending when something dies it leaves it very open to different strategies or even just being a toybox to make up your own game. You can focus on the other player’s robot or their pilot. The robots are giant, slow, targets, but the pilots are small and have a hard time defending themselves directly. You can ride on your robot to not have two targets, but it’s quite easy to get knocked off and find yourself in a very vulnerable position. You can agree to have an honourable robot fight and not attack each other’s pilots or you can forego the robots entirely and just chase each other with grenades. Myself and Ruby had a blast just messing around with it in various ways. We had a match where we tried to pick up each other’s pilots with our robots, first person to get grabbed loses. After that was resolved we just both rode around on her Gllang together in tank mode blowing up Rome.

And it’s also just a game that sets me off imagining how I would tweak it. What would I try to make if I made something like this? Could contextual or once-off mechanics be made more systemically useful or interesting? I think some way to control the pilot and robot at once would be cool; maybe the D-pad can always control the pilot while the analogue sticks and shoulder buttons are reserved for the robot? Or a two-controller mode where one controls the pilot and the other the robot? I just want more of this, different iterations of it. I am already eyeing up the fan translations of Remote Control Dandy and Marionation Gear.

Miscellaneous observations:

• There is only one walkthrough for the game on Game FAQs and the author hates both Gllang and Nanao. They have not been vindicated by history.
• In the famous bread and water soup mission the protagonist complains that 7-Eleven charge too much for vegetables and it’s cheaper to get them at the greengrocer when the smallest unit of currency you work with while upgrading your giant fuck-off robots is ¥500,000,000.
• As well as the hammy acting often being funny there’s a few great deadpan bits that really got me. In an early missions one of the people in mission control tells you to explore the city and familiarise yourself with the area while you wait for the meganite to launch. When the call back a minute later to ask if you’ve gotten familiar with the city the protagonist just responds “Well, yes. I live here.”
• The cutscenes aren’t skipable but holding down the start button fast forwards them which is very funny to watch.
• It’s one of those games with a choice of protagonists where they do not change the script very much if you pick the female hero so her and the love interests just become lesbians, which is great.

No, cuz, listen! We need to inject progesterone for opsec!

I like how, even when Teddy is right, even when Michelle is playing along a bit, they are incapable of understanding each other. Michelle does try to understand him, to reach out, even in a guarded way behind lies and obfuscating corporate speak—open a dialogue. At the dinner she doesn’t comprehend that she is telling him she that she thinks that humans make wonderful slaves. The life of a corporate executive separates you from humanity and wraps you in an alien perspective, as much as being taken in by conspiracy theories does.

Extremely cute little annual event with a bunch of different bits to explore and it’s nice to see everyone else hanging out and exploring and seeing their different ghosts. The puzzles in the mansion are not too taxing but just enough to have a little bit of fun scribbling out notes to help put them together. I was very bad at the obby tower, though.

Thanks to Jen’s guide for letting me double check if I found all the badges.

So much setup to endure but the payoff is great.

I wanted to give this another chance but it’s just not a hugely enjoyable watch. Everyone is giving just a flat, boring delivery and it’s so universal across the cast that I feel like it must be a problem with the direction rather than the actors and some core plot points feel very underdeveloped. Duke’s hypocrisy is core to the plot and messaging of the film but we never really see her that much evidence of it other than fucking Dracula showing up and telling us that she’s apparently been sneakily glamouring everyone and the pretty serious conflicts and resentments between Laurel and her family just get dropped immediately when it’s time for the finale and are never discussed again.

It starts off incredibly charming. A relaxed pace of veteran BBC presenters doing their best at filling time for a live broadcast where nothing is happening and nothing is likely to happen, but still doing a lot of setup for when things eventually start to take a turn.

But there is also an underlying meanness to it. They are here to make television and Parkinson is not afraid to capitalise on this family’s misery to do it, to twist the knife a bit when the girls are seemingly at their lowest, to keep pressing them when they are past the point of breakdown before affably cutting away to another expert interview.

When the supernatural elements start to assert themselves more blatantly it feels like the BBC is complicit in it. Not just inadvertently creating the conditions for this horrible, nationwide séance, but being invested in the misery of a family for the sake of reality TV and eagerly dragging up and broadcasting every unverified, salacious detail they can. The transphobia and ablism in Turnstall’s backstory is an unfortunate blemish on the film but it feels fitting that the BBC’s careless rush to spread it is part of what allows it to be hijacked and torn down.

It is also just effective, creepy horror. Even having seen it several times before I felt my breath catching in some parts.

Yer man didn’t even invite his own son to his wedding.

While the juxtaposition of the digital and cel animation was interesting in Roger the Wanderer it is hard to deny that the digital animation in the second series just looks so much worse when watching it in bluray quality. Every time they reuse footage from the first series it is a jarring reminder of that. I also don’t much like the new robot designs in the second half of the show. The New Batman Adventures to the first series’ Batman: The Animated Series.

I also think the more serialised structure doesn’t work as well as the earlier, episodic stories for the most part. But what the series does with that story is still really interesting. When I was younger I was much more wrapped up in what was “really” happening in the plot but coming back to it with more of an understanding of themes and even simply a stronger willingness to accept vibes-based storytelling it’s much easier to take in and consider the ideas the show is playing with beyond just the bare mysteries.

These people are trapped in a society built by people who even if they had known what they were doing are too senile now to understand it, ruled over by their petulant spoilt children who understand even less and believe they have inherited the right to redefine the world and who deserves to survive. A system that reproduces itself via the people trapped inside it who are acting in accordance to that system and don’t even understand it while trying to hold on to the idea of being independent individuals even as they are shaped and defined by these systems.

Is that what Konaka was going for? Probably not, but that’s art.

We start with cel animation footage of the finale of the first series interspersed with what are ostensibly flashbacks​—​memories​—​animated in the new digital animation of the second series. There’s a wrongness to this. A sense of a new reality being imposed over the old. There are false memories - retcons. Speeches from characters who never gave them before. Dastun suddenly knows that Roger pilots Big O. He already knew. He always knew, perhaps. Though he definitely didn’t know last season. Everything has moved over to the digital animation now. The priorities of the story are realigned. Everyone is concerned about people from outside of Paradigm City, a mystery which the newly more serialised story is going to focus on now. Roger starts to unravel and wakes up in New York and meets the gargoyles from Gargoyles. When he returns to Paradigm reality has shifted enough to set up for the rest of the show. The parts of Big Fau exist smuggled inside the foreign megadei so that the EU can avoid paying tariffs and the Joker exists now.

There are a lot of ways to read this movie and what it might say about the people who built, run and visit this park and what becomes of them when their machines turn on them, but there is a surprising lack of direct raising of philosophical ideas in the film. No muses on the potential interiority of the robots, on why this is happening outside of a purely mechanical level. One could read this film as asking nothing more than “Wouldn’t it be fucked if robots killed a load of people?” and just on that level it is a pretty damn enjoyable movie. The gunman makes for a good slasher villain.

I cannot stop thinking about the guns though. Our protagonist learns from his more experienced friend that the park is made safe via the a system built into the guns that detects the temperature of the target and refuses to fire at anything warm, thus keeping the human guests safe while allowing wanton violence against the lifeless, cold machines that populate the park as NPCs. After learning this information they head to a brothel, turning down the opportunity to do something as everyday as taking part in a bank robbery so that they can enjoy that sweet, refreshing, room-temperature pussy and the caresses of the cold, knobbly, robot hands that the park engineers just can’t get right yet.

This idea that the park is safe because of this safety mechanism hangs over so much of the movie and makes it so sillier. Guests take part in fistfights and sword duels, trash entire buildings. Sure, the robots are meant to pull their punches but what mechanism is there to stop guests accidentally stabbing another guest, or for that matter themselves, while doing all of this?

Even charging $1,000 a day in 1970s money it’s hard to see how anyone could have thought it would be a good idea to let guests constantly shoot their expensive robots with real bullets and blow up the walls of buildings (with them inside) to simulate a fun little jailbreak and then pay teams of people to put it all back together every night. No wonder everything is falling apart and they can’t even properly maintain their control room that was built airtight for no apparent reason.

Anyway that was fun as hell.

Impeccable atmosphere. Moody, gorgeous. It has R. Dorothy in it. What more could you want? The wider lore stuff doesn’t exactly come out of nowhere in the last episode but it certainly feels like the show is trying to rush through it because it doesn’t have any more time. An old man we have never met telling us that the secret history of the metropolis is fake before quickly summarising it for the audience who hasn’t heard it before certainly seems like something that should have played out over several episodes and not a single minute. Still, the finale throwing out as much intrigue as it can at once probably helped the show get eventually renewed.

This game proved to be an extremely welcome distraction during a very difficult time, a lovely way to hang out with a dear friend, and just a really fun game.

A survival crafting game set not in an open world but in an interconnected facility in the vain of System Shock that you slowly unlock over the course of the game. The GATE Cascade Research Facility is, shamelessly, Black Mesa with a coat of paint. The game does not try to hide its influences at all, with one of the two character voice options being Gianni Matragrano doing his best impression of Harry S. Robins as a Half-Life scientist. Thankfully the character creator does not lock any options behind a choice of genders so I was able to pick that voice for my scientist while choosing a more feminine appearance. Look, voice training is hard.

I am not normally one for survival games or a heavy focus on crafting, they tend to be too directionless for me, but the metroidvania-like progression of slowly unlocking more and more of the map appeals to me a lot. Early on the rhythm of it reminded me a bit of the early Resident Evils; having a home base as a save haven to return to and resupply while planning out excursions into unknown dangers, planning out what limited resources to bring with me. Taking more weapons, more ammunition, more healing supplies with me is safer, but means having much less room in my limited inventory to bring things back.

And then your base expands, your toolset expands, your knowledge of what you are up against expands, and you grow more bold and more capable. The crafting elements are more than I would normally enjoy juggling but the structured nature of the game allows everything to be introduced at a slow and steady pace and its up to you how much you push forward into danger versus how much time you spend gathering and harvesting resources and building up your base and supplies.

There were a few frustrating difficult spikes in the middle to late game playing in early access, but the release update added an item upgrade system that should hopefully even that out.

As you unlock more of the base you unlock shortcuts to previous areas, the map is very interconnected, and a fast travel system that is very charming to anyone with a fondness for Half-Life: A series of Black Mesa Inbound-esque tram rides that interweave the sprawling facility (many of which can be traversed even faster with a deliciously overpowered long jump module you can get later in the game).

Unsurprisingly, the GATE facility has gone to hell as creatures from another world have started pouring in. It doesn’t take that long for you to visit this game’s Xen, here called Anteverse II, but after that it starts to reveal other influences. The second portal takes you to something jarring in that it is a much more human setting: Flathill, a small American town blanketed in fog clearly inspired by Silent Hill and The Mist. These self-contained portal worlds serve as linear levels exploring different gameplay concepts within the more open structure of GATE and also as renewable sources of supplies as you loot and clear out more and more of the facility. And as you do that you start to see that labs are taking after the SCP Foundation as much as they are Black Mesa.

The game has its own catalogue of “immurement registry” objects, which encompasses not just the aliens you are fighting but such things as an arcade machine that sucks you into the game itself; a creature that is only visible to the person it is stalking and will disappear if stared at for long enough; a cube that reduces gravity in the area around it and many things that have no gameplay effect and only exist as in readable journal entries or props with no special function such as a table that causes everyone who sees it to hate it or inexplicable yellow paint that seems to manifest to guide people who are lost.

The journal entries and email exchanges that you can read are often very fun, foreshadowing upcoming enemies, revealing plot threads, showing daily life in a mad science lab and often just being very funny. The exchanges between the Gatekeepers—the ostensible security forces for GATE who have taken to using all the various otherworldly and occult resources the organisation studies for themselves, becoming more and more inhuman and strange as they become stronger—and the normal research staff are particularly delightful, as are random exchanges about Doom and the WWF.

I played through this with one other friend and while there is a singleplayer mode I feel that the game would probably drag significantly more without more than one pair of hands and more than one backpack to fill up when scavenging and managing resources. More than two would probably have been ideal but also it’s not a game where you will want to miss sessions where the group is exploring new areas or progressing the story and every person you add is going to make organising sessions more complicated, but if you can get a group for it I highly recommend exploring the Garrick Advanced Technology Enterprises Cascade Research Facility with some friends.

I was watching this show with a partner who moved abroad in 2023 when we were a couple of episodes into the third series. Finally finished it with them while they were visiting this week. It’s still really funny but the resentments festering with the characters is starting to feel a bit too real to the point where I really want a future series to have some emotional catharsis. Collin Robinson has also developed in a weird way that I am finding difficult to put into words. It feels like he’s developed more as a character but also that while the way he was offputting and annoying as a way of feeding has just turned into him being offputting and annoying as a person. I am not sure I would have minded if they had actually killed him off.

🤘🏻Love has no borders, nationalities, or genders🤘🏻

So much fun and energy in this movie. It rules. It feels like it was edited by someone’s cousin. Every once in a while the aliens show up to remind you that, oh right, there are aliens in this film.

Absolutely fantastic. I wish I had know even less about it going in that I did.

A gorgeous little object that I am glad to have a physical copy of. A lot of care has gone into this from the already lovely “base” version. The colourised sprites, the rainbow gradient pages with their dithered backgrounds, the clay models. Just a perfect little guidebook for a game that does not exist.

Unbelievably charming idea done with the same love, care and humour as Samanthuel’s other little creature RPG projects and makes even the little peak into the implied story we get really touching.

Technically I watched a friend play this but I am going to count it. Honestly this was probably the better way to experience it because I don’t like the free roaming randomly generated structure as much as something more directed like Franken. Still an unbelievably charming and sweet little world to explore. I am also very taken with sproutbug in spite of it being one of the more basic creatures. I am a girl of simple tastes.

A lot of cute ideas here but it doesn’t really come together. The mid-century pulp sci-fi aesthetics, the idea of taking the star certificate seriously and Belinda herself are all really fun. The every ninth word idea is cute but only matters at all for two scenes and the incel comparison just comes out of nowhere. Al really needed more characterisation for the one scene he was in at the start for that to work. And another big deal about a character being played by the same actor as a previous one or even just another mystery around a companion in general is a bit tired at this point. Hopefully like Gatwa’s first series this will improve as it goes on.

What the fuck is this movie’s problem with women?

At last we finally know the origin story of a woman who was invented two minutes before the end of a show for a cliffhanger that was never resolved 😌

The inciting incident of this movie is a petty disgraced noble extrajudicially massacring a fifteen men who wandered into a restricted area. To stem any potential backlash a false story of tiger attacks is spread.

Some of the deads’ countrymen come to investigate this just as, by sheer coincidence, a zombie tiger just happens to go on a rampage and kill a shitload of people.

When they finally kill the undead tiger, the world’s most sceptical man cuts open its stomach and finds nothing but rotten flesh inside it, not the remains of anything identifiable, even the two dozen men he has just seen it kill and declares that seeing as the bones of his friends aren’t present in its stomach then the monster tiger story is clearly bullshit.

The world’s most sceptical yet gullible man is then convinced it was actually this innocent group of people by an official telling him “Oh yeah the tiger was a lie but we found this conveniently identifiable box from a tribe you’re related to next the bodies I guess it was them” so they kill the entire village where they make those styles of boxes.

The only survivor of this massacre is a young girl who decides to become the Joker of zombies.