I've been playing Burnout Paradise Remastered, and somewhere along the line the act of tearing through those mostly empty streets dug up a cobweb covered tomb hidden in the recesses of my mind containing pure kernels of childhood gaming bliss. Feelings forgotten over more than a decade of "growing up," over college papers and coming to terms with a world which shrouds its intent behind doublespeak, half-truths and unspeakable secrets. My experience of growing up in post-9/11 America was growing up in a world where nothing was clear, a childhood defined by fear that later was replaced by distrust and skepticism. To be frank, it's exhausting.

Burnout isn't like that. Burnout is a game where you drive fast, crash into shit, spin donuts in a baseball stadium, but it's also a game where you sit with your stupid face one centimeter from a far-too-bright display gripping your controller so hard that it's a wonder it doesn't just snap in your sweaty hands. Burnout is the type of game that doesn't have character models driving the cars because it would make the crashes too dark. Burnout Paradise felt to me like a game that didn't give a fuck what you thought. You start it, fucken Slash starts grooving, DJ Atomica tells you what's up in Paradise City, and then you're going, and that song is still going, and that's bliss.

Looking at the moment to moment action of Burnout Paradise reinforces this sense of nonchalance and reverence in its own absurdity that makes and made it such a unique experience for me, as a child in 2008 and as whatever the hell I am now in 2020. It's a game that encourages you to push the edge of what you can do in this car without viscerally ripping yourself out of the action for a brief few moments as you watch your off-brand hot wheels turn into that one hot-wheels you dropped into the garbage disposal that one time, it's a game that rewards you with nitrous for doing cool shit. Cool shit like driving into oncoming traffic, like almost crashing into cars, like kind of crashing into cars, like side checking your opponent hard enough that they careen off the road into a bus conspicuously absent of pedestrians. It's fun, it's fast, it's the pure unfettered joy of being an idiot.

At the time the racing I knew was Gran Turismo. Austere car reverence peppered with easy-listening jazz and a vibe not entirely dissimilar to my dentist's office. That's not to say I didn't dislike Gran Turismo or simulation style racing, but many of the complexities of driving life-like cars were completely foreign to me, a child who didn't drive. Burnout has GN fucken R, it has Girlfriend, it has that Brand New song, that Killswitch Engage song, N.E.R.D. and Depeche Mode remixes, a wide variety of classical music--this game was absolutely insane. It felt like nothing I had experienced until that time, it was a game about the joy of racing games, not the breathless car showroom joy of putting your ears to mufflers and sniffing tailpipes or whatever car people do.

This is all to say, Burnout is engineered for fun, and the late 00s felt like a time where games were less concerned about being... fun. That isn't to say I dislike this period of gaming, but I transitioned pretty hard and fast into being terrified of multiplayer games to being stressed about my KDR in CoD 4 because I was bred to constantly compare myself to my peers. At times games were not fun. They were awful, being yelled at over Xbox Live and constantly feeling pressured to perform. Burnout was my way to relax. Half the time I wasn't doing events I was just aimlessly driving around Paradise city, exploring, trying to do sick shit in the airfield, not giving a damn about doing well in multiplayer because the whole server was just there to chill and have fun in one of the greatest motherfucking video games of all time, and a game I needed then and need now more than ever.

This is a piece responding to this short documentary about a remarkable basketball shot just under 20 years ago now (I JUST REALIZED THE 19th ANNIVERSARY OF THE GAME IT'S LITERALLY TOMORROW AS I'M WRITING I WANT TO DIE THIS ISN'T FUNNY GOD) it is a fantastic video that showcases how some things just really can't be measured or predicted by data and numbers. Jon presents the events far more elegantly than I ever could, so if you're dedicated to the idea of reading this I would recommend spending the 15 minutes to marvel at something that happened. If you're half-dedicated to the idea of reading this, I do a good enough job. carry on.

--

I would call myself a half-active sports fan. I don't have the time or dedication to actively watch games and keep up with news, yet I occasionally find myself enthralled in the spectacle of competition. Sometimes for a season, sometimes for multiple. I loosely adhere to my team allegiances but I'm mostly just there for the ride.

Tell two groups of people to decide who's better and see what they come up with. By whatever boundaries they establish, whatever nebulous game principles, it becomes concrete when agreed upon. It becomes a contract; by these rules we will compete. By those rules they do, yet still we are not omnipotent game masters; we are strictly scoped by humanity's greatest foe, the rules of the physical universe. The universe as we understand it abides by rules just as we do in our games. Unlike the rules we come up with for our games, these rules weren't agreed on, they were forced on us and we don't know why. We weren't even told what the rules were. But we've been figuring it out for a while now, and it seems like we have a pretty good picture, at least within the scope of what's important to daily life.

By our understanding of these rules we can try to estimate how likely any certain something is to occur, the study of probability. Using statistics we can perform operations on data sets and get a pretty good picture about the likelihood of any given event. If you make two teams play each other in complete matches for all of eternity while recording each and every little number theoretically, as time goes on, you will get a more and more accurate prediction of who will win at any given point in the game. Patterns always emerge, because when there is rules there are patterns. It makes sense. Forget all that.

Forget all of it, it's been shattered.

Jon Bois makes videos on the internet. His content is incredibly well-crafted, You probably know him from twitter. He's hobbes. His series Pretty Good is a show about stories that are pretty good. This is a pretty good story. It's also a nightmare that I cannot stop thinking about. I'm not playing up the despondent tone for shits and giggles (I am a little bit). What ostensibly happened doesn't make sense. There isn't any logic to it, it breaks all the patterns, it just shouldn't have happened.

February 17, 2001. Milwaukee. This is basketball, by the way. The third quarter is just short of finished, there are only tenths of a second remaining. One Baron Davis is inbounding the ball, and he plans on making a shot to take the lead at the end of the quarter. Baron Davis is standing 89 feet (just over 27 meters) from the rim. That's far.

That's really far. That would be the longest shot in NBA history and not by inches. How long is a basketball court? Turns out it's slightly longer than 89 feet. His teammate is by the hoop as the ball sails over halfcourt in a pristine parabolic arc, he has his arms raised in the air. He knows it's going in. But he couldn't. But the ball does in fact go in, and it doesn't just go in, it slips effortlessly. I'm not convinced there was any contact with the rim at all.

No one would ever just think, "that shot is going in." Go stand 89 feet away from a basketball hoop and shoot for a while and you tell me it's even possible. No you're not a professional NBA basketball player, but this isn't a skill that professional NBA basketball players have. Back-court shot attempts happen semi-regularly in basketball, though it's widely seen as a mostly futile effort, according to Jon Bois circa 2017 it's 2.4%, and he went and marked the eventual location of the ball. Most weren't even close. You know what the hardest part is? Getting the ball to travel 89 feet; and even if it does, from that distance any minimal changes from the optimal angle of release is going to wildly change where the ball ends up. 89 feet.

Jon went searching for comparable shots, Magic Johnson, notably good at basketball, hit a backcourt buzzerbeater in a playoff game a long enough time ago that we don't have an exact picture of from how far the shot was taken from, but it seems to be around 80-85 feet. Whatever it was, it wasn't 89. Vince Carter, also notably good at basketball, hit a 70 foot buzzerbeater shot in 2016. Not 89, but at that distance it doesn't matter much. But watch the footage. Vince takes the inbound pass, starts his shot, decides he didn't like that look and sets up again to shoot just as time expires. That's deliberate. That's intent.

But it's Vince Carter, who is good at basketball. Understatement aside, these two shots were made by hall of fame caliber players. Actual legends who defined the game during their time. Baron Davis is a good basketball player, he played really well in a playoff series in which his team (the lowest seeded or ranked team) beat their opponents (the highest seed). Oh did I say beat? I meant they wiped the floor with them, and he was a major reason why. They were eliminated in the next round. He does analysis on TNT now.

This is not to disparage Baron Davis, but to say that he was in absolutely no place to be standing 89 feet from a basketball hoop and being certain that you are going to make the shot. Certain enough to say it out loud. Do we know he actually called it? Well, even though the two were standing in the back corner of the court, even though we watch Baron rev up a god damn football pass, his defender felt compelled to block.

Sorry, I think it's important to remind you, I said there were tenths of a second left? Yeah 0.7 seconds. Baron Davis had less than 1 second to inbound the ball, line up his throwing arm and chuck that ball so perfectly that it sails through a hole barely wider than it. He decided to call out his defender, and he was blocked. And it wasn't an effortless garbage time block or joking indulgence of the ridiculousness of the situation; no, he tries his best to seriously play the game of basketball and try to block this shot that by any measure of consistency, of regularity of-

Doesn't matter. That shot was going in. Nothing could have prevented it. You could go back in time, murder a baby James Naismith so he never invents basketball, and something would correct in the flow of spacetime so that Baron Walter Louis Davis would be in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on February 17th 2001 to throw a 9" diameter ball into a 18" diameter hole from 89 feet away while some guy tries his absolute hardest to stop him.

This has to be some kind of inflection point where all of the split timelines in human history converge to a single shared moment of inexplicable greatness. To put it in context, Jon decided to pick up from Vince's shot in 2016. In the year that followed, 57 shot attempts were made from at least 70 feet. At 0 for 57, that gives us a success rate of 0%. 4 shots hit the rim, which is a 7% success rate. This includes perennial distance shooting threats like Steph Curry and Andre Iguodala. Decades of incredible shooters; LeBron James, Ray Allen, Jason Kidd, they all tried long shots, they even hit some of them, but none of them hit one that far. They weren't sure. They didn't know. There was uncertainty, and as soon as there's uncertainty it can't happen.

Jon points out that among players who attempted at least 100 3 pointers (from roughly 24 feet/7m) in the previous season Baron Davis ranked dead last in three point percentage. Dead last. That is to say, no one under him.

But, Baron Davis knew, Vince Carter knew, Magic Johnson knew. That's what matters apparently. If you know you know if you don't then airball.

On February 17 2001 at the end of the third quarter, Baron Davis knew exactly what was going to happen. He was going to make the longest NBA shot in history.

That counted.

November 4th 2015. Time is called and Jae Crowder has the ball on the sidelines,

Okay look, I know I did that really cute basketball court length joke before but it's important now, a regulation NBA court is 94 feet (28.65m). He's outside the court, outside the game, across the court from the game is in fact, because he's passing to his team on the other end of the court, and he's standing 95 feet (add about 30 cm and fuck off) away from them. His plan? Inbound the ball by chucking it and hoping one of his teammates can force someIt went in. Banks off the backboard and in.

From ninety-five feet. The basket doesn't count, you can't score from out of bounds, so this doesn't go down in stat books. It's as if it were erased from history because it was just such an astronomically small chance of happening that the mere fact that it did happen caused some quantum shit to happen and

--

I can't try anymore, I've been trying for hours. There isn't an explanation. This is a thing that happened because it did and it is and that is all.

In 2001 the longest shot in NBA history was made. in the 19 years that have followed, dozens of people tried, the best of the best, to even come close and only one of the very best of the best could even come close.

Then some guy lobbing it into a crowd of dudes pushing each other nails it from outside the boundary of the game itself, shattering the composed reality we accepted as truth when we first starting figuring out what the rules for the game were going to be. For a single moment.

A half-committed roar followed by widespread mumbling from the crowd as players are sheepishly looking about trying to find some kind of explanation for what they just saw. Forget it, didn't happen, keep playing.

Hey folks, a few months ago I wrote this essay on Nier: Automata as a critique of Nietzschean philosophy (don't click away quite yet!). Sounds like some heady pretentious shit, and it is, but I had a lot of fun writing this and given that we just passed the two year anniversary of the game, I thought I would share it and get some thoughts from you kind folks!

Obvious spoiler warning for the game, and because this was an academic paper I assumed zero knowledge of either the game or Nietzschean philosophy. For that reason it might be a bit of a slog to get through, but I would mightily appreciate it if you did and posted your thoughts on the matter!

Those who play Yoko Taro’s Nier will quickly realize that there is much more than meets the eye in terms of how it tackles its themes. I would like to posit that Nier is a conversational piece with the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, referencing some of the concepts he raised in his numerous essays and rebutting the conclusions that Nietzsche drew from those concepts. Nier establishes through its structure and through character development the philosophical concept of the eternal return—that your life, that all of our lives, are being repeated ad infinitum. This concept is central to many of Nietzsche’s writings, and he uses it to support his human ideal of ethical egoism. Nier, after establishing the eternal return, uses it instead to refute those claims. Nier, in direct opposition to Nietzsche’s conclusions relating to self-interest, uses the eternal return as a motivation for establishing communal values and to raise a hope that our world rampant with self-interest can be changed.

To establish this, first I will outline the arguments of Nietzsche. I will then go over the methods that Nier uses to establish eternal recurrence as one of its main themes, the analysis up to this point will be objective; it is important to get an objective look at Nietzsche’s arguments and Nier’s various adaptations of the eternal return before we attempt to understand how Nier brings those two into conversation. Then we will analyze how this adaptation is used within both the macro-narrative and micro-narratives and how those narratives and the player interaction within them contributes to a direct critique of Nietzsche, and on a larger scope, a critique of the over-valuation of self-interest and the despair that brings to us as a people.

Nietzsche first brought up the idea of the eternal return as a question for his readers to ponder. Martin Heidigger explains in the second volume of his discussion of Nietzsche: “The way Nietzsche here patterns of the thought of [eternal recurrence] makes it clear that this ‘thought of thoughts’ is at the same time ‘the most burdensome thought’ ” (Heidigger 25). Nietzsche originally poses eternal recurrence as a hypothetical, a thought experiment. It is part of his rhetorical strategy to attempt to convince his readers of his ultimate argument. From The Gay Science:

What, if some day or night a demon were to…say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence….

Would you not throw yourself down and…curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” (Nietzsche s.341)

There is a lot to unpack in these two paragraphs. We see Nietzsche’s establishment of his hypothetical; a demon comes to you and tells you that for eternity you are going to live the same exact life. Every small detail will be the same, everything “unutterably small or great….” He then poses the question, what would you do? Would you curse the demon speaking these words? Or would you venerate him, wholly thankful for the words you just heard? Nietzsche ends the section with the open question of how one could become disposed to thinking the latter, which he attempts to answer in his following book: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

The overarching concept in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is that of the Ubermensch—the overman. The overman, as Nietzsche (through his character Zarathustra) puts it, is to man as man is to ape: “What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment...” (Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 3). The act of becoming the overman will push man past its current state, to a higher state of being. How does one get to become this overman? Nietzsche says that part of it requires amor fati, a love of fate. The idea that one not only accepts the state of being, does not strive to change the way things are, nor resent the past but one loves this state of being. An uncompromising acceptance of reality. In his own words: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary…but love it” (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo s.10). Acceptance of our reality, and an adoration for it is only the first step to becoming overman though, the other is forsaking your morals.

To Nietzsche, to become the overman we must reject the master-slave morality that started with Judaism and continued with Christianity. In his On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche challenges the contemporary notions of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ as a supposition of the religious in order to assert themselves as the righteous. He instead claims the original meanings of the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ meant to denote nobility and the lack thereof. “Instead it has been the ‘good’ themselves, meaning the noble, the mighty…who saw and judged their actions as good…in contrast to everything lowly, low-minded, common and plebeian” (Nietzsche, “ ‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’ ” s.2). It began with the Jews, for Nietzsche, and their rejection of the “aristocratic value equation” (s.7) this cascaded down, what Nietzsche calls the “slave’s revolt in morality” (s.7). Placing the benefits of the righteous in those who are oppressed, rather than the oppressors.

This flipping of the morality system applies to the overman in the sense that the overman overcomes this supposition of the slave morality and instead reverts to the ideals of ‘good’ of old: noble, aristocratic, warrior-like. Rüdiger Safranski in his biography of Nietzsche argues that Nietzsche saw the overman was embodied by ruthless warrior pride and artistic ambition, embodiments of ruthless leaders like Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia. The overman is not held back by the slave morality system imposed on modern man, rather he is emboldened by his own nobility to do as he pleases. He has superseded morals and lives his own life. Through a combination of his love of fate and re-adoption of the aristocratic morality system, the overman welcomes the eternal return, he relishes in the ability to live his life over again. This ties in to a central ideal of Nietzsche: ethical egoism. The idea that caring only for yourself is the reasonable, and right thing to do for your own happiness. Compassion, Nietzsche says in Genealogy is unhuman. Humans are naturally cruel beasts, and forgoing that makes us miserable. Therefore we as people owe it to ourselves to lack compassion, to be egoist and only act with our self-interest in mind.

Now that we understand how Nietzsche establishes and uses eternal recurrence to posit his philosophies on how man can supersede themselves and become something greater, let’s look at how Nier uses eternal recurrence. The story of Nier revolves around a proxy war fought between the androids created by humans in the image of humans, and other robots (referred to as machines) which were created by an alien race to do combat with the humans. One of the androids is designate 2B(attle), a combat droid who is programmed to remain calm and composed no matter the situation. She treats her partner, 9S(canner) with near-contempt as they proceed through the first part of the game. It is eventually revealed that 2B’s classification is 2E(xecution), and she exists solely for the purpose of destroying 9S when he learns too much. It is explained that 9S, because the S designations were designed with maximum intelligence, always eventually finds out the secret that humanity has been extinct since long before the proxy war even began. To maintain power over the androids, the commanders perpetuate this ruse. After 9S is destroyed, he is created anew with a wiped memory, so 2B is forced to kill him repeatedly (hence her cold attitude toward him, to make it easier to do her job). The cyclical nature of this character relationship is clear. There is an eternal recurrence for both 2B and 9S, 9S goes through the process of figuring out the conspiracy and then is killed by 2B, and 2B is forced to kill her partner repeatedly ad infinitum.

Additionally, the way Nier structures its story plays into the cyclical nature of games themselves. The main story is separated into 5 distinct ‘endings’ which are experienced sequentially. In a sense, the player is forced to play the game repeatedly to get the full experience. Two of these endings, the first and second, are even the exact same plotline played from different perspectives (2B’s and 9S’s respectively). After this the game’s plot does continue, but the core structure of the game’s plot remains the same. The androids go to fight the machines, who don’t want to fight but go rabid because of the control of their masters. More melodrama ensues in the plot thread of these chapters, but that’s at the core of what’s happening in each of them, history repeating itself.

It is here that I would like to bring up the work of Ian Bogost, specifically his writings on procedural rhetoric in Persuasive Games. Bogost defines procedure as the orderly way in which we do things, the way we as people carry things out. 2B’s character is defined by the way in which she follows procedure, and since 2B is the main character we interact with, we identify with that procedure, even when that procedure comes to killing 9S. This makes the emotional effect of breaking procedure, which is when 2B gets overwhelmed with emotion after 9S dies for the umpteenth time, that much more powerful. We can tie this back to the topic of eternal recurrence.

Now that we’ve established how Nier uses eternal recurrence, how does it use its ways to criticize Nietzsche? We see multiple instances of these androids being stuck in an eternal return, and what I would like to argue is that the androids are also very Nietzschean in their behaviors. They exemplify attitudes pertaining to that of the overman, and yet, they are miserable. It is the machines, who begin to adopt ideals of community and altruism, who are happy before the interference of the Nietzschean androids. If we look at the androids as a whole, they have a strict orderly system reminiscent of that of nobility, they are forced to lack compassion, 2B kills without mercy, without thinking of the possible sentiency of the machines (the fact of which is very clearly established early on). But 2B is miserable. 2B welcomes death when it comes to her because 2B can finally end the eternal return for herself. She turns to 9S and smiles because she has finally broken free.

9S as well, is caught in a cycle. A cycle of dying repeatedly and being reborn in the same circumstances but without any of the knowledge he gained. He forgets his relationship with 2B, with the other androids, all he remembers is his mission. 9S exhibits Nietzschean traits in his pursuit of 2B as a romantic interest. The game acknowledges that he only attempts to be nice with her at first because he finds her attractive and wants to be intimate with her. She gives him no reason to be nice to her, she is cold to him, cold to the machines that they are slaughtering, she exhibits little to no emotion, but still he pursues because of his carnal desire, something Nietzsche praises. 9S is also miserable. He sees no purpose in being, even though his purpose is designated to him.

Meanwhile the machines are forming communities and assisting each other. One such community, one run by a machine who named himself Pascal (yes, that Pascal) even welcomes 2B and 9S into the village willingly despite 2B’s clear hostility toward the machines. Pascal teaches the members of his community ideals of altruism, generosity, and community. And ostensibly, it is these machines who are the happy ones. Pascal’s village prospers and grows, they are shown numerous times to care about one another and help each other out, they are just much happier than 2B, 9S, or any other android. Additionally, the reason for the tragic events of the latter half of Nier is explicitly because of those who hold power; the aristocrats for lack of a better term, who command their armies and force them to fight endlessly. Because of this everything falls apart. The very characters who hold the values that Nietzsche defines in his writings, the characters who are closest to being the overman are the ones who are the most miserable and cause the most misery.

The most poignant part of Nier, and the part that cements this game as a criticism of Nietzsche comes with the final ending. To be succinct, the game has you do battle with the credits. Nier turns into a 2D shooter and you must attack the credits before they kill you. This sounds frivolous, but what makes it poignant is that it is impossible to complete… without help. Eventually the credits start coming too fast, and not only that, they are repeated. Forever the credits will come at the player and kill their ship repeatedly. Does this sound familiar? These final credits in and of itself is an eternal return. At a certain point, the game asks if you want help. If you choose to be stubborn and keep at it on your own, whether it be out of pride or simply refusal to get help, the player will be stuck. The only way to get help is to accept the help of a player who has completed the game. But not only must a player have completed their game, they must be altruistic and give up the one physical thing that many gamers find meaning in: the save file. The game only lets you send help if you delete your save file. This sequence exemplifies the idea that we can break out of these cycles. We need not subject ourselves to the misery of striving to be the overman and doing the same thing over and over again. With the help of others, we can break free.

This can be related back to the real world. Ideals of community, of altruism, of forgoing selfishness could go a long way in healing our world. These sentiments are confirmed by the game itself in a post-credits sequence. 2B, 9S, and A2, having been carried away and brought back in time by their helper robots, lay unconscious on a cliff. One of the helpers says to the other: “Won’t the same thing just happen again?”

The other responds: “That may be the case, but we must try.” No matter how many times we bang our heads against the wall to try and fix things, we must keep at it. There is no reason to forsake others and the world and subjecting yourself to striving to be some kind of ‘overman’ which will ultimately just contribute to your misery. By using the concepts of Nietzsche and turning them on their head, and by forcing the player to take part, Nier promotes this kind of worldview, and after subjecting players to hours of misery, ends with that positive outlook: maybe one day, we’ll fix things.

Sources:

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games. MIT Press, 2009.

Heidegger, Martin, and David Farrell. Krell. Nietzsche. Vol. 2, HarperCollins, 1991.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, et al. Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom). Digireads.com, 2009.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and William August. Haussmann. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Digireads.com, 2012.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, et al. On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Safranski Rüdiger. Nietzsche: a Philiosophical Biography. Granta, 2003.

Hey y'all, it's been a hot minute, but I'm working several jobs this summer and there was a bit of a stretch where I wasn't really video gaming, but this past week I got back into the Guilty Gear Groove™ and decided to tell y'all about it. I also felt shitty every day I didn't play or make a post because I'm one of those people who tend to fall off of things they think they would dedicate myself toward, so the fact that I have been playing recently and on top of that am writing this right now. Well it feels alright.

In any case, it all re-started when I started playing Skullgirls with a friend who got it during the steam sale as his first fighting game. I was reminded of how I'm not the biggest fan of that game (tho Peacock is pretty fun ngl) and so I decided to buy him, myself and another friend GGXXACPR (Guilty Gear XX ACCENT CORE PLUS R for the uninitiated) which was like 3 bucks during the sale. I played that with him for a while, lamented over the fact that Bridget isn't in Xrd (Bridget is a boy who crossdresses as a nun with a magical yoyo that summons a teddy bear demon if you didn't know), and remembered that despite my badness I fucking love these games.

So I started playing again. My friend who never played it before (who also for some reason manages to pick up fighting games relatively fast) visited me and we just played it for hours. I pretty consistently beat him, which was to be expected, but I noticed that I was actually doing relatively simple Leo combos and doing my best to set up said combos in neutral. I was feeling good about the wins. I'd love to say I'm hooked but I don't want to speak too soon.

In any case, I loaded it back up the next day and hopped into a lobby. Started to play against another Leo main. Generally I'm not a fan of mirrors, but fuck it, he's probably better than me and I could watch what he's doing and learn a thing or two. First round? I get perfect'd. Wonderful. That confidence I had built up was starting to dwindle out of me like the helium from Ben's welcome to the office balloon. But hell, ain't gonna just quit now. We played match after match. Didn't get perfect'd again, but he beating me over and over. What's nice is that I did notice some things he was doing as far as his Leo mixups as well as some tech that I kept a mental note of (Eisen Sturm, Roman Cancel into that aerial quarters circle HS move). Finally... I won a round. It took a second to register in my head. That particular match was now 1-1. I might actually win a fucking match. We duke it out, both insanely low, some footsies are being played then I throw out a sweep and hit him and win! It felt great. He immediately left for another setup in the lobby (bit of a prick move but whatevs) and I did a victory lap while kicking that soccer ball around.

I'm going to keep playing this game. I can't stop now. My next step is to implement a combo other than some simple string of normals into rekka. Some helpful fellow who watched my stream at some point gave me the tip of RCing heavy fireball as an approach option. My one issue is still not quite being able to do charge moves reliably in the heat of battle, but I'll get there. I know I will. I'm also tempted to diversify my character options (namely into Milia because she seems dope) but at the same time I want to stick to getting some relative mastery with Leo before branching out. In any case, I'm real excited to continue with this game!

Stay Fresh,

~nic~

PS - I'm excited as hell for Evo!

Hey y'all. A quick note before getting to the fighting games, I've yet to figure out how consistent this blog is going to be both in how often I'm going to be posting and how big the posts are going to be. Haven't really done this kinda thing before so I'm just gonna kind and go with the flow and see what happens. That also goes for when I'm streaming my journey, which again to shamelessly plug myself is over here.

So what have I been up to in Guilty Gear? Well mostly practicing tech. I figured after getting reamed in my first real round of matches that I should get the mechanics of the game down and let my fighting game chops come after that bit. I at the very least figured that I would want to know what I was doing before I could figure out why I was losing to people instead of just getting bodied. Leo seemed like a fun character so I decided to stick with him in my quest to git gud, at least for now. What other place to start then by learning some fat combos right? So I managed to complete all of his basic combos (only one of them proved to be a total bitch--namely the one that starts with an air dash, took a hell of a lot of them. I also went into the advanced combos/tactics and learned quite a lot about my German lion-y friend.

I feel like I'm starting to see through the veneer and see the meat of what makes Leo a unique character. His stance switch seemed just like an offensive tool when I started but when I was introduced to the guard in the stance my mind started to wander and think of the possibilities with that guard, not to mention guard out of slash and heavy slash. In fact as I'm writing this I'm thinking about how I should be playing defensively and in neutral which was definitely my biggest issue when I tried to take my BnBs and combos online. If you're curious about how those matches went it's pretty simple--he played Ky, I got bodied. Added him on steam afterwards to hopefully get bodied some more in the future.

In any case, I do feel like I've hit my first wall in the game. Where I've learned some things but when it comes to actually applying them to a real match I'm lost. So I feel like I'm in a weird spot where I could practice my tech and combos all I want, but that won't help me win actual matches, and likewise I could go and get bodied over and over, but I don't know if I would feel like I'm growing at all.

Right now I feel like my best option is to play a lot with a friend of mine who is better, but not monumentally better. When he plays his main (Faust) he can beat me 100% of the time, but put him on anyone else and we go 70-30 or 60-40. So I feel like playing and learning from him would be a good spot to continue my journey!

Any tips hints or suggestions are more than welcome. Felt like it was a hot minute since I updated this so I threw this little thing together. Let me know any thoughts and I'll try to continue to do stuff!

Stay Fresh,

~nic~

I've been a big fan of fighting games for a while now. It started with Smash Bros. Melee--the validity of its status as a fighting game notwithstanding--and gradually grew from there with me getting kind of into Ultra Street Fighter IV and many older fighting games. This mostly consisted of me messing around with friends, never really challenging myself to get really good at any game. Eventually I found myself at least competent in USF4, but I never played frequently enough or really dedicated myself to getting good the way I did with Melee.

Guilty Gear is something that I admired from afar. I bought the first variation of Xrd when it came out and played it a very small amount on my own time (mostly because I knew no one else with a PS3 to play it with), but it all seemed so absurdly difficult to me, with systems upon systems to learn and a community that had gotten so good at the game that I really didn't feel like I had a chance at getting as good as them. For a while I watched a bit of pro GGXRD here and there, in the back of my mind yearning to get to the point where I could parse what was going on in the matches.

Then recently I got the itch

I don't know what it was, but I felt like my competitive spirit was dying. I wasn't playing Melee as much as I had been; I had no desire to buy SFV with what a train wreck it was and continues to be; and I hadn't really found another game that really brought out the competitor in me. So I decreed to myself: Get Good at Guilty Gear.

So I'm doing just that.

I bought the whole Rev 2 package on steam, and spent a lot of yesterday and today relearning all the roman cancels and bursts and whatnot that I had forgotten from my little time spent with the first iteration. As I proceeded through the tutorials I couldn't help but start to feel overwhelmed by it all again. GG is a serious fucking game. At any given time in any given match there is so much that you have to be thinking about. I don't know what it is about this run through but it feels surmountable this time. So after another session of getting bodied by people I don't know and learning about the plethora of different unique characters in this game I decided to start this thing to document my journey in learning this game.

I hope for this to become a sort of... tool to help less experienced players get into fighting games I suppose. They seem so difficult and esoteric from a distance--and they are when you get up close too--but, speaking from my Melee experience, nothing feels quite as satisfying as the growth you feel as a player when you see yourself improving. When you win your first set against someone who you feel like would have destroyed you all but a few months ago. I want to document my mindset and the steps I'm taking so that hopefully if I ever get to that point of competency or even proficiency it's all there for people to read. Also it sounds fun to keep a diary of my progress I guess. Read it or don't, WHATEVER MAN.

So after that needlessly verbose introduction I suppose the documentation begins NOW. I started by playing a bunch of matches against a friend of mine. He is a little more experienced than I am and we both just randomed a bunch of different dudes to try and learn the cast. I remember a few standouts from my time, Potemkin seemed fun (though a little research suggests he's sandbag tier, which doesn't necessarily concern me considering my level at the moment), Faust is ridiculous, Johnny is hilarious, and Milia seems like my kind of character, but also way too advanced tech wise for me to try tackling right now.

After those matches I elected to just hop into the combo challenges and see what I could muster with the different characters I tried out. I messed around with Potemkin, Milia and Ky mostly. Getting a feel for how they roll and seeing if any of them are right for me. With Ky I basically resigned to myself that he's Ryu, which is definitely wrong, but it's the way that I rationalized him in my head and maybe is a good way to get started?

So then I made another stupid decision, let's stream! Maybe some nice GG folks will come in and give me some hot tips. So I streamed myself getting bodied by randoms for a while, played some Potemkin, some Ky, a dash of Milia. Played some people WAY better than I was, and played some people who I felt like were right within reach of me actually being better than. We'll see I guess! Ended up chatting with a dude for a while who seemed pretty knowledgeable. So I got those hot tips I needed. Nice!

The only other thing I really feel the need to mention is something that happened while playing against some dude who was playing okay as Faust. I was playing Ky and there's a brief pause between a couple of our sets. Then suddenly I see the chat bubble: "STOP PLAYING KY LIKE RYU" and I burst out laughing. Yeah. That sounds about right. He proceeded to switch to Ky himself and show me his decidedly mediocre Ky skills. Ky skills so mediocre that I managed to take a round of him here and there. We even double KO'd once. That was fun.

After some more matches I headed back into the lab and my stream friend said I should try out Leo. Got a bit into his combos and I gotta say he feels alright. Lots of juicy mixups plus some dope cross swords, so maybe he's my guy for now, we'll see I guess!

Thus ends the first chapter in my journey. I don't know for sure if this was any good, but I think I'm going to keep doing it. I definitely want to keep playing Guilty Gear, so I guess that's good right? If you want to join me on my journey I'll probably be streaming most of it I guess maybe kinda? Feels weird to plug myself but I'll be streaming it here. Check it out or don't. I also plan on keeping up with this bloggy thingy so maybe stick around for part 2 whenever that happens! Thanks for reading duders.

Stay Fresh,

~nic~

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year. The summer of 2013 was overall a pretty shitty time for me. It kicked off in June with a friend of mine dying to Leukemia. He was only eighteen, and he was genuinely one of the friendliest people that I had ever met. Before that I had never really dealt with death before – my grandparents on my mother’s side are both still alive and kicking, and my father’s father died before I was born. Hell, my grandaunt is in her late nineties and still going strong. This was a new fight, and the first punch hit hard. I remember coming home from school that day, and opening up facebook to see the status of his sister eulogizing him. I just sat there, mouth agape, unable to comprehend what was happening. That day I just felt… alone. I felt like I was stranded in a desert, with no one to help me. Death has always been a difficult thing for me to grasp. I’m not religious in any way; I am an agnostic atheist, so the concept of an afterlife is lost on me. At the same time, it’s hard for me to comprehend the state of not… being. Until that point, the concept had never hit me in the face as hard as it did that day. Someone who I had met and spent a good amount of time with… wasn’t here anymore, and would never be here again.

I remember being very aloof for a couple weeks. I’m not the kind of person who likes to talk out their problems – I like to think them out on my own time. I kind of appreciate the fact that school was in its waning weeks at the time, and exams were looming their ugly heads. The pressure sort of took my head off of all that had happened. So summer came around, and the shock value of losing someone had worn off. I had begun doing volunteer work at a local Boys and Girls Club (I don’t want to make myself seem righteous; I was doing it to qualify for a program). I remember July 3^rd 2013 very well. It was a Monday, and the day after my little sister’s birthday. I had been up late the night before – it was summer, after all – and I had just gotten home from volunteering. I got some take-out from a Chinese place, and was about to settle down in my bed and eat my rice. I remember this specifically: as I got into bed, I out loud to myself: “Hey, everybody it’s Tuuuuesday…” I don’t know why I said this - it wasn’t even Tuesday for chrissakes, but for whatever reason I did.

I booted up my laptop and opened up Giant Bomb and… couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was feeling the exact same way that I had felt a month ago. Alone.

It’s strange, here was a man that I had never met, and for as long as I knew of his existence, lived on the opposite side of the country from me… yet here I was, on the verge of tears. I never met Ryan Davis, but feed me to a pack of wolves if it didn’t feel like I knew him.

I’m not going to lie, I’m only sixteen. Still not lying, I’ve been following these fuckers since I was nine. I remember being in elementary school, and loving Gamespot. The content that they created was just leaps and bounds more entertaining than any other site at the time. I can guarantee you I was the only nine year old in the area that tuned in every week to spend forty minutes watching On the Spot, or a couple hours to listen to a Podcast where people talk about video games. Ryan and Jeff were always my favorite personalities. I always felt like they had such good chemistry, and that they were genuinely friends, not to mention they were funny as hell. Every week I was listening to these people talk about what I loved, and each week I watched them play games that I really wanted to play one day, each week I would count the minutes to On the Spot so I could watch live. I remember being distraught after Jeff’s firing, and Ryan, Vinny, Brad and Alex’s subsequent departures. It felt like my world was falling apart – it was like my favorite show was getting cancelled. Then I saw a comment on some Gamespot review… a comment that told me that Jeff and Ryan were making a new site… a site called Giant Bomb, and I never looked back.

Ryan Davis is part of something special for me. He is part of a crew of people that have supplied me with hours upon hours of entertainment for just under half of my life. His time with us, and his hours on camera will be something that I always remember, and that I will always cherish. His death hit me harder than anything else that has ever hit me, and I’m not sure if I’m over it yet. I never knew him - nor do I know the rest of the GB Crew - but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like I did.

Rest in Peace, Ryan T. Davis 1979 – 2013

Best of luck to the Giant Bomb Crew, and the up and coming Giant BEast crew. Keep doing what you’re doing.