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Yet Spike Lee's nuanced plotting and oftentimes poetic phrasing yield a promising beginning for sports game narrative, a beginning so affecting that Lee's last scenes left me staggered. It's a cautionary tale that should be refined to become far more interactive in next year's game.
[O]ne of the most emotionally alive games on the market
"Yoshi's Woolly World," won't change how you look at games or lead you to any important insights. It wants nothing more than to perk you up a bit, to lighten your mental load. Life is hard; sometimes a little frivolity is in order.
There's an echo of this sentiment in the sweetly childish tones of "Minecraft: Story Mode," a game that uses the mimetic architecture of storytelling to produce nodes of contemplation and self-inquiry. It's a subtle and sweet work made with an awareness that the best part of a journey comes when you realize that you are the story.
As tired as space marine tropes are to video games, it would mean-spirited of me to deny that "Halo 5" delivers a solid, blockbuster experience best enjoyed with friends.
In a way, "Black Ops 3's" landscape of weaponry and corpses and layers of upgrades and economics signal the game's disposability, something meant as kindling in a bonfire of collective obsession and forgetting. Nothing this big and loud is meant to last, but nothing meant to last could bring this many people together.
"Fallout 4" is best appreciated over time. Play it for ten hours and the game will likely feel underwhelming. Play it for fifty then see if you can stop yourself from playing it for fifty more.
"Cibele" is an important game, not a great one. None of its individual parts are exceptional in themselves. To a certain extent that's a virtue when we reflect on the fact that most video games are constructed around heroics. The game's conceptual force, however, is undeniable, presenting a clear blueprint for how video games can be used as a prop to explore everyday life.
In good moments, it feels like you're heading somewhere promising, halfway to getting a gun you really want. In bad moments, getting what you want is a pleasureless anti-climax, that leaves you even further away from the next upgrade milestone.
Annoying as I found these technical hitches they hardly deterred me from creating new sequences of pyrotechnics. Perhaps, what that says about me is something that I don't want to think too hard about.
Games like "Siege" flatter these desires by letting them play out in simulation, endlessly repeating on the screen. Stripped of the vanities of many other shooting games "Siege" is both unforgivably callow and inarguably satisfying. Like parades or fireworks, it's a vision that's only fun if you can forget where it comes from and where it points to.
"Dr. Langeskov," the funniest game that I've played this year, features voice work by Justin Roiland of "Rick and Morty" fame, and it would be a shame to miss the tale about the attack of pencils that provokes a shedding of clothes.
In hindsight, many of the game's grueling lessons feel remarkably anti-climactic. Getting to the end feels like a definite achievement though the relative uselessness of its rewards make it hard to feel anything but stunned remorse for having gone to such lengths to achieve something of so little consequence. This kind of ego-centric delusion is essential to the spirit of video games, works that are often as terrifyingly wasteful as they are wondrous and energizing. "Xenoblade Chronicles X" manages both in equal measure.
With her powers to rejigger events to save people from accidents and themselves, Max seems like an incarnation of Holden's catcher. Though sadly, her power is not immutable.
"Oxenfree" captures a mood (an eerie night), intensifies it (people get possessed!), and then efficiently wraps things up before anything becomes tedious. This analog, supernatural story unites its characters in a web of guilt and showers them in decorative static.
A daunting, confounding, maddening, and beautiful game
If you note the two main characters' penchant for irony and have been paying attention to the clues in the game, such as the cheap mass market paperbacks scattered about the area, you'll sense that the mystery isn't on the level of some global alien conspiracy, but rather, like "Firewatch" itself, it's something mundane and graspable. In the context of a medium that's normally obsessed with feeding on the outlandish, I mean that as a compliment.
For the foreseeable future, if I'm not reading something, I know what I'll be doing the next time I'm waiting in line.
For the foreseeable future, if I'm not reading something, I know what I'll be doing the next time I'm waiting in line.
"Far Cry: Primal" won't re-wire your expectations of what a game can be but it has just enough energy to pleasurably distract one over the length of its journey.