Also I didn't really play any games that got me in the mood to write about them, although I did go back to Sunset Overdrive for a while there and it was nice. I wrote this and posted it somewhere else last night, and now I'm blatantly using it as my weekly blog here so I can get back to the important business of watching more GB videos while my laundry dries.

Last night, I agreed to lease a new car and see off the battered old 2000 Honda Accord SE (green) that had been my companion through three states and, if I’m remembering properly, at least four different jobs. I replaced it with a 2015 Nissan Leaf S (white), because after extensive research it became apparent that I fall into the (regrettably) small number of drivers for whom the limited range of the Leaf doesn’t matter—I never bothered to make many friends out here in Illinois, and the few I have aren’t far away (and my naturally reclusive nature means I don’t really drive out to their places of residence that often anyway—once or twice a month, tops), so who cares about range? I was already in the habit of renting a car for longer road trips anyway (the Honda had, at time of sale to the dealer, 203,340 miles on it, and adding large chunks of mileage on for trips home seemed like a bad idea).

I did my research, and talked over leasing vs. owning with friends and family, and yesterday walked into a dealership thinking I would have to haggle more than I did to get the deal I wanted. It was all budgeted out meticulously, and I made sure that I could still have money to set aside every month for savings, because there’s always shit you don’t plan for and it’s good to have money to fall back on. I learned while doing my research and planning that I have an excellent credit rating—a far cry from back in 2011 when I had to pay a ridiculous amount of money as a security deposit on a shitty apartment in New York because my score was in the toilet. At some point in the last four years, I became responsible enough to merit higher credit limits on my cards and about 250 additional points to my credit score. That helped get the deal I wanted in one day, so last night I drove home in a different car than I left the house in.

Replacing the Honda was a responsible move—the winter was hard on the engine, and it was burning oil, plus the A/C was perpetually on the fritz, and the engine’s efficiency was dropping so I was filling the tank more than I used to. It was best to shop for a car now, when I could walk away, than to wait until the car stopped working. I did a whole lot of thinking and researching and planning on the topic, because that is what you should do when you sign a piece of paper saying you will pay x amount of money to a man every month in return for having a car (and when that money is all you have to pay for the car, because you do not need to buy gas and can charge for free down the road, it’s a bit easier to swallow). I have now made a commitment to keep up on these payments until I don’t have to anymore, at which point I will probably pay them again for a new model.

I had to tell them my birthday and age. I will be 30 in July. I have very few memories of being in my 20s, and still feel like I only just got back from college—but even my Master’s degree is five years old now. I’ve held down a job writing marketing material now for two years and two weeks, which is the longest I’ve ever held down a job as long as I’ve been alive.

Today, I let my insurance agent know I’d bought a new car and submitted a request to have my insurance transferred over. I registered my car on the little transponder I bought that pays tolls for me so I don’t have to go through tollbooths. I went shopping for a blue dress shirt, because I have to work a trade show in a few weeks and it requires a blue dress shirt. I was very boring and adult. I sat down and decided I would play some games, because I had been responsible and earned the right, but Xbox Live was down (again), so instead I finished re-watching FLCL.

A lot of people will tell you the best song from FLCL is not Last Dinosaur. They are fucking liars.

If you happen to follow me on twitter, you might’ve seen me talking about this a few weeks ago—I picked up the blu ray of the series on a whim and decided I would see if it held up. When I was in my second year at college, a staggering ten years ago, I saw the show for the first time, and because everyone in college is either attempting to become an adult or mourning the end of being a kid (or maybe just wishing they could shake themselves off what felt like a pre-ordained path), I loved it. It had the sort of profound effect on me that art can have on the overly dramatic (so essentially anyone in their early 20s), and I distinctly remember getting up and leaving the common room when we finished the series to walk around campus at night smoking a cigarette and thinking what I’m sure were very profound thoughts about who I was and who I wanted to be and where I was going and whether I should ask the girl I liked out on a date (she declined, because bless her heart, she could probably tell I was a fucking mess).

The show didn’t feel as profound this time around—I am not who I was, obviously—but the moment where Haruko offers the chance to drop everything and strike out on their own still managed to fill me with a deep longing to do the same. I’m a Responsible Adult now, of course, and disappearing with no notice would carry severe repercussions (and inconvenience people at my job who I would prefer not to inconvenience, because I feel obligation), but there remains a part of me that wants desperately to set everything I’ve built for myself here on fire and run far, far away to… I don’t know what. Drink myself stupid somewhere I’ve never been, I suppose. To immediately prove to myself that I’ve not settled down, because I never wanted to settle down, I wanted to be a rockstar writer living out of my shitty broken down Honda writing the sort of shit that would have a profound effect on people, or just drifting from town to town, wandering the wilds on foot. Or leaving the country and going back to England to do who knows what. You know, the sorts of things you tell yourself you’re going to do in high school but only like 2% of people ever do, because the rest of us have to make the world actually run?

I’m feeling restless, is all—I know that, and I know that in less than a month I’ll be on a plane to England for a business trip (so important! such an adult thing to do, to travel to a country and tell the man at passport you are there for Business) that I’ve extended into a vacation back to my old stomping grounds in England, where I can see all the friends I’ve not seen in five years, and this will be enough, I think, to scratch the itch.

This all makes it sound like I’m secretly miserable, but that’s not the case (or maybe I’m just trying to convince myself that’s not the case?), not really. Adulthood is not an awful thing, and while certainly a younger me might express some shock that I would ever consider something likeleasing a car or living out in the middle of nowhere, working a regular-ass job (ah, but I am paid to write, I must remind myself now and again, and there are very few people who can make the same claim. There was a time where I was resigned to working in human resources, andthat me would’ve done anything to have a job that paid him to write, up to and including breaking a lease and saying goodbye to everyone he knew to move to the middle of nowhere, Illinois), younger me was kind of a fucking idiot anyway. I have writing, and I have my stupid, stupid podcasts, and I still spend most of my free time playing games, and that is pretty fucking good as far as life goes. That someone thought me responsible enough to allow me to obtain a brand new robot car is icing on the cake.

I think I still like the end of FLCL. I like the whole thing (all six episodes). It doesn’t hit with the same force it used to, but there are parts that still resonate with me, and make me remember being younger and dumber, and I smile.

Occasionally, I’ll forget about games I’ve bought, because after so many years of being poor, having actual steady income has caused me to become the worst kind of impulse-buyer when it comes to Steam—seeing anything even remotely resembling a game that might intrigue me means there’s a real chance that I might pick it up, especially if it is $20 or less. Abyss Odyssey, with its $15 price point, was always going to be on my radar, especially after I’d watched the Quick Look and basically decided that yes, this was something I could get behind. I bought it, my brother and I played some co-op for maybe a half hour, and then I forgot it existed for the next like six months.

Then earlier this week I found myself in the mood for a roguelike—spurred in part by the Unfinished of Catacomb Kids, which lead me to firing up Legend of Dungeon for the first time in a while. I’ve got a lot of love for Legend of Dungeon, particularly the bit where you have no idea what the hell a potion will do at any given time (perhaps my favorite part of most roguelikes that hew closer to their progenitor than others). After spending some time enjoying myself and dying a couple times after some substantial runs (“substantial” for me means “I made it to the eighth floor once and was promptly torn apart by a necromancer,” in case you were curious), I thought I’d fire up Abyss Odyssey again and see if I couldn’t get my brother to join me for a little multiplayer.

My brother, however, has children and a wife and all the sorts of thing that make picking up and playing a game on a whim a bit more difficult, so he was busy doing something else that didn’t involve running about a nightmare abyss conjured by the troubled dreams of a warlock, which left me to my own devices. I thought I would put perhaps a half hour into the game and then do something else. It’s a common enough twist, but two hours later there I was, having unlocked the Ghost Monk and, long story short, the majority of my week was spent with this game. I’m not sure why the game failed to grab me initially, though I suspect my initial assumption that I would not need to learn the combat is the prime offender (that and if your co-op partner is the same character as you are it can get real confusing real quick).

So here are a few things that I really like about the game, and a few things that the past week has taught me in terms of a good way to approach the game:

1. The music is fucking great. No really. No really. You can even buy the soundtrack for a fiver if you want to on steam—I don’t know if it is that great to where I’d want a copy to play at all times, but it’s real good. The soundtrack also changes when particular enemies are about, which is a great way to know when to keep an eye out for the ghostly fucker in the poncho with a penchant for curses. I hate that guy, and not just because he interferes with the galloping groove the soundtrack gives you—mostly because he flies and you have to use all air attacks to get his ass to die, unless you are able to catch him as he swoops at you (Katrien is better against him than the Ghost Monk, in my experience, because she strikes a bit faster. Plus her fireball is a bit more straightforward and doesn’t require bouncing around).

2. It is vital that you get a good feel for how each character plays. I’ve not been fortunate enough to unlock the final character (getting to the gold fountain room has been…challenging the last few playthroughs I’ve done) so I’m not sure how well she plays, but Katrien and the Ghost Monk are completely different in speed and overall feel, so it can take some getting used to. I’ve gotten most comfortable with Katrien at this point—her attacks are faster and I feel like I’ve had more luck dodging with her than I have with the Ghost Monk—but her weapons tend to be weaker and she has significantly less health (my level 8 Ghost Monk is only about 100 HP from where my level 16 Katrien is, healthwise, if that helps illustrate it). I’m willing to make the tradeoff in damage for speed, although I dunno I might spend a little more time with the Ghost Monk. I like that most of his attacks do damage ahead and behind, even his basic attack, so that’s something to consider. The training mode has been super-helpful to me, especially when it comes to getting a feel for the souls you’ve captured. Which leads to…

3. Being able to change into a giant bull and fuck shit up is pretty great. That’s kind of all there is to say on the matter.

4. If the game says a floor is hard, it is not fucking around. You will get wrecked if you are not careful, and sometimes being careful will not be enough. I have gotten my ass absolutely handed to me almost every time I’ve gotten into a hard floor, but to be fair there’s a great sense of satisfaction that comes from making it out alive that can’t be described.

5. I’m a huge fan of the randomly generated levels. It makes the game different every time, and when you spend as much time dying as I do, it’s nice that you’re not running through the same shit every time. There’s also the agony of being SO CLOSE to the golden room and dying and having the new map place it right before the final boss so GOOD LUCK FUCKER, HA HA HA HA, which is… less nice? But still pretty good.

6. The art style is great—the character portraits (particularly the Ghost Monk’s portrait) are fantastic, and I for one am a huge fan of the dead guy with a guitar, even if his bits of wisdom don’t always give you that much in terms of XP. The environment design is similarly nice, with jungles and ice areas and I guess like an underground volcano thing? The enemy designs are also great—I believe I mentioned the giant bulls once already, so I don’t know that I need to really go into further detail.

It’s not super surprising that a game with such a unique style should be the product of ACE Team, because I mean come on they made the Zeno Clash games and those are depicted in the dictionary right next to the definition of unique. The use of Chilean mythology to inform the setting and storyline of the game is also really cool, as I don’t know about y’all but I know next to nothing about Chilean mythology, and the little the game’s doled out has been pretty damn interesting. I never was too hot on Zeno Clash, mostly due to being kind of terrible at its combat system, but Abyss Odyssey’s combat feels tight and lends the same kind of weight to each enemy encounter that so many other games lack. It’s never a quick fight, and it’s never something you can just blow through—there’s always a little strategizing involved, trying to figure out how to use the surroundings to your advantage, wondering if you should pop a potion or tough it out a little longer, because if you can kill these guys their health drops should get you up to a point where you’ll be okay and you’ll still have a potion… there’s enough meat to the game’s combat that it never gets old for me.

It has been six or seven weeks since I arrived at the Dank Dungs, aka my ancestral home that was apparently built upon a temple of 100% pure fucking horrors because that's just how things happen in video games. Progress has been slow--my initial group of adventurers proved unable to make it through the first quest alive--RIP, plague doctor whose name escapes me! You turned masochist and jumped in front of a mace, as if unaware that you had no health left. Farewell, young healer who grew too scared to heal and subsequently stepped in a spike trap!--save two: Another healer (whose experiences left her with a fear of the dark and a hatred of humans), and Ser Reynold, who all things considered made it out pretty okay! His stress levels weren't even that high, which is why I sent him back in immediately along with a few new recruits while the aforementioned healer visited the brothel to get her head back on straight (it wouldn't work--she wound up deciding that she could only recover by self-flagellation when we returned).

I'm not sure how far in the dungeon we were this time when Ser Reynold snapped, but it was surprisingly early on. We had plenty of food, and I'd even sprung for some bandages and potions (at great personal expense--I was out of money as we passed the threshold), but perhaps the four or five trapped cabinets we encountered proved too much when combined with the encounter with the cultists. What is certain, of course, is that within a few rooms Ser Reynold had been reduced to a paranoid wreck--albeit one with excellent health and what remained a powerful attack. So with no money to afford another expedition (and an unwillingness to waste all the provisions I'd bought), I decided we would press forward, because I mean come on how bad could a little paranoia be? Sure, Reynold might refuse healing now and again, but he was of hardy enough stock that I reckoned he would be okay.

This was a terrible assumption to make. I was unaware, at the time, that the real cost of a paranoiac is not in the occasional refusal of healing, but in the nigh-constant stream of bullshit that comes out of their mouths--an act which increases the stress levels of the whole party who, to be fair, have had to listen to someone rant about movements in the shadows for the last ten minutes. By the time we reached the final battle, my jester (Corneilles is his name, and apparently swinging sickles at things is his game) had become abusive, my graverobber who, again, shall remain nameless because well I'll bet you can guess what happens to her, had become terrified and spent a lot of time pleading with monsters not to kill her instead of attacking, and my replacement healer, Grauchet (what the hell kind of a name is Grauchet, anyway?) was the only one who had not lost her mind (although she was very close). Meanwhile, Reynold had become a kleptomaniac as well as a paranoiac, which meant he stole about 1,000 gold and some bandages from a chest which, for once, was not trapped. Typical.

We reached the final room of the dungeon, somehow, held together by a few hit points from a lucky crit of a group healing spell. The final battle began with the almost immediate dismemberment of the graverobber, who, it should also be mentioned, was of weak constitution (meaning she took a penalty to every death's door roll). She stayed alive for several more rounds because I was able to heal her every round for a few HP which would then promptly vanish as soon as the next attack happened. Eventually, she died, and in that moment Grauchet's stress levels maxed out. That, I figured, would be that.

Except Grauchet became valorous, instead of anything bad, and promptly dismantled the enemy herself with a few well-rolled attacks while Reynold muttered to himself and Corneilles slung insults at his fellow party members. The quest completed, and I rejoiced at the several thousands of gold paid out as a result.

Which then immediately were dumped into various therapies for my party members, so they'd actually go in the dungeon next time. Darkest Dungeon don't shiv.

It is my hope, my desperate hope, that we keep seeing games like Lost Constellation as the year moves forward. I know I gushed about Kentucky Route Zero last week, and I’d actually intended to write something about Far Cry 4’s hilarious co-op this week, but instead I was reminded by the appearance of the Lost Constellation QL yesterday that I’d not checked this out, in spite of being a backer of Night in the Woods. Of course, I had to remedy that mistake immediately, so it was off to itch.io to hunt it down and spend the hour and a half or whatever to run through the simple enough puzzles and check it all out. By the end of the game, I’d become unwittingly invested in it so much that the final sequence left me feeling all warm and fuzzy inside.

Similarly to Kentucky Route Zero, there’s a lot of discussion of loss and death in Lost Constellation, which the cynic in me notes is just shorthand for aspirations of profundity. Those wishing to make a piece of art that speaks to the human condition or gains a reputation of being “deep” need only approach the subjects of death and loss and people like me will naturally be drawn to it and want to talk about it. Where Lost Constellation diverges from KRZ is in its tone—there’s a stubbornness in Adina Astra’s dogged refusal to do what everyone tells her to do and die in the forest (which is the first thing you are told will happen), but there’s also a message about memory and its ability to keep those gone alive, in a way—Adina is told she will not be able to see the constellation again, but she can remember where it is in the sky. Similarly, Mae’s grandfather comments that her own grandmother is kept alive, in some way, by their memory of her (when Mae asks if her grandmother is also a ghost, his response is essentially that on a good day, she is). Mae’s interjections into the tale give a certain humor and provide some characterization of her personality which, I suspect, will give insight into her actions in Night of the Woods.

You are out to keep a promise to use the holiday of Longest Night to reconnect with the dead—a sort of pilgrimage to honor your colleague’s memory (or to meet with your colleague’s ghost, as the case may be). While in the course of your quest, you wind up forcing others to face up to their own mortality. You also maybe cause a massacre, or at least some kind of curse? There’s a blundering quality to your actions, as your dogged determination to reach your destination (the Frozen Lake) winds up killing gods and men and the odd forest witch. Of course, you also free some trapped ghosts, or at least you think you might have done, and you create a being of water and garbage who seems pretty unhappy, or at least confused, about his status as a being of water and garbage. Most importantly, I think, is Adina’s final encounter with her friend, where the two are able to say goodbye to one another again—Adina’s comment that she will be hurt and miss her all over again carries such a bittersweet tone to it that I was surprised, again, to have been moved by it. It is a small, unassuming game which carries more of an emotional punch than nearly any other game that I’ve played—indeed, had I not been playing Kentucky Route Zero last week, I daresay it would have been an even bigger surprise to me. This is the sort of storytelling and resonance which games are capable of possessing, and I’d love to see more like it in the future (I will probably get my wish when Night in the Woods releases). It’s hardly what I’m in the mood for 100% of the time, but knowing games of this sort exist alongside a big, dumb, hilarious open world game like Far Cry 4 is delightful and more than anything else shows how mind-boggling diverse video games are capable of being.

It is possible there is more to the game than I saw—I picked up several items that I wound up never using, and I don’t know what that might mean—but I don’t know for sure. I could probably stand to go back and run through it again to satisfy my curiosity; the game controls well with a keyboard and mouse, the visuals are charming, and the music is superb, so it’s not exactly a chore to play. Plus you can save pictures of your snowmen! You know, for whatever reason.

WARNING: There are going to be spoilers for Kentucky Route Zero’s first three acts. I don’t know if that will make a difference—you should play this game anyway, your experience will probably not be my own—but hey, it takes about four or five hours to get through it all, so go buy it, play it, and come back if you think not being spoiled is important.

A Beginning

There are some things we should get out of the way, before going any further. I was born and raised in Cincinnati, with extended family down near Louisville, KY. I’ve spent some time in Kentucky, is what I’m saying, and I’ve experienced firsthand the sort of folks in the really rural areas, because they are what you might call kin. So it’s possible that a story set in Kentucky, dealing as it does in decline, might hit me more than it hits you.

Growing up, I heard stories about my ancestors—how three brothers fled England to France during its civil war, and wound up booking passage as indentured servants to the New World sometime in the late 17th century. We’ve been here since before there was a country, or so the story goes, and since then our tale has been one of rising power and steep decline. I don’t doubt my ancestors have done reprehensible things, but I also don’t doubt there were acts of bravery as well. Certainly at least one section of the family fought in the Revolutionary War, and was gifted land in return—land which was, of course, located in Kentucky (although at the time it wasn’t Kentucky, you understand). There was a vast acreage, once upon a time. It was to stay in the family for generations, in perpetuity, if they had their way. Meanwhile, my other ancestors ditched their indentured servitude and wound up somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains, poor but at least not beholden to anyone. They would eventually wind up in Kentucky as well, and Ohio, and one large group would convert to Mormonism and decamp to Utah—but this isn’t about them. This is about the Kentucky clan, and their dreams of perpetual landownership.

Their dreams were doomed from day one. Part of Kentucky’s history is one of decline as well—one I am reluctant to cast as a tragedy, given how the state was built on the backs of slaves—yet that my relations experienced a significant downturn in fortunes is a fact stated here for the record (I should probably also note that I have no idea if my relations had the necessary wealth to own slaves—it’s not something that comes up at family reunions, you know? Plus that side of the family’s genealogical records are…somewhat incomplete, so I’m not sure anyone’s sure. But they owned a sizeable farm, and sizeable farms usually mean slaves, so the assumption is there). Hard times followed hard times, and the once vast acreage shrank, dwindling down to a single farmhouse owned by a great uncle’s cousin (I think. It’s all a bit muddy, and said great uncle’s been dead for years so I can’t fact check). That single farmhouse was, I believe, sold off (or repossessed, more than likely) back in 2007 or 2008. A corporation owns it now, and that long history drew to a close. I don’t remember the farmhouse that well myself, to be honest—we held a family reunion there when I was younger, and what I can remember are only brief flashes of imagery. A white barn, a fenced-in field, a few cattle which seemed disinterested in their surroundings. Even then, I remember a feeling of melancholy, the idea that once upon a time this had been greater than it was now. A broken pride.

There’s something like that everywhere in Kentucky, these days. A psychic wound, a background radiation of loss which infects young and old alike. Everyone has a feeling they’re getting away with something, that the other shoe is set to drop any moment. Many pretend not to notice, or pretend that the past is the past and cannot possibly influence their present—but nobody is fooled. Sooner or later, everyone is going to lose everything, and it is in that moment they’ll find out what kind of person they are.

Reactions to Loss

In the face of an inevitable defeat, some will continue to go on as if nothing is wrong. That’s essentially what Conway (I guess he’s the main character?) is doing. There’s one final delivery to make—the last delivery—and no matter what else happens, that last delivery is going to happen. The difference is there’s no delusion in Conway’s quest; he doesn’t believe nothing is wrong, and in fact is trying to come to terms with the fact that his life, such as it is, has fallen apart completely—has been in the process of falling apart for years. There’s nothing else for him to do—Lysette is old and shows signs of senility, he is too old, perhaps, to find another job—so Conway does the only thing left to him. It is also, of course, a sort of penance in a long act of penance that has extended from the day he was too drunk to work and Charlie paid the price. That he believes himself to be the direct cause of that loss is perhaps part of what drives him to perform this last errand as well, as a way of closing out the account he opened with Lysette all those years before, a long act of grieving

Shannon is facing a different loss—her shop, perhaps, or Weaver’s house, or Weaver herself—and is stubbornly carrying on in spite of it. At least, that’s how she seems to have been, until the reappearance of Weaver shakes her out of the pattern, and she latches on to Conway’s quest, thinking that perhaps she can find Weaver, or at least some kind of closure, by aiding Conway. Or perhaps having nothing left to her, she too is taking the path of least resistance, and sees helping Conway as something which will somehow wipe out her own debts. There’s a deep need for some kind of reassurance with Shannon, that she hadn’t fucked everything up, that it is possible to do everything right and still wind up on the losing end of something. Always—always there is the loss of her parents, like an open wound, perhaps the thing that drives her to look for a way out, to look for a way to beat Them, The System, The Strangers, whatever it might be. Shannon is not angry, necessarily, but she has a fighting spirit to her that Conway has long since put to bed. It is Shannon, indeed, who reminds Conway of their delivery while the two are subjected to the Stranger’s patter and offer of a drink (which I’ll get to in a moment).

Finally, there’s Ezra, who has lost his whole family and carries on, hiding behind a child’s façade while helping those who he decides are in need of his help, along with Julian the giant fucking eagle. Ezra recognizes the danger of the graveyard/distillery and its lure of more responsibilities and more adulthood concerns (like debt), and elects to remain outside of the matter entirely, though he can’t help but be pulled into Conway and Shannon’s orbit, because he recognizes their loss mirrors his own. The three form something like a family unit, and Ezra desperately misses family. He replaces his lost family with Conway and Shannon, which makes the end of act III, where it is revealed that this too will be lost—Conway is doomed to the distillery—such a harsh blow to take.

Junebug and Johnny, contrasting the other three, have lost nothing—indeed, the only thing the duo have “lost” is their former identities as (literal) corporate drones. They’ve built their own identities as an electropop duo who can describe loss, but have yet to really experience it. This is perhaps why of all the characters, they are the ones able to navigate the dense bureaucracies and baffling geographies of the Zero. The two exist above it all, having long since cast aside the demands of the world in order to forge their own existence—and while this tempts the player to view them as heroic, they also are forced to hustle endlessly to survive (Conway and the others can barely get a word in edgewise and are all but shanghaied into service as customers for the bar, which in turn gives them leverage to demand payment from the bar’s owner). Their decision to tag along afterwards is seemingly done out of boredom, although it is equally likely the two also desire some kind of greater purpose than their lives possess—helping Conway achieve his delivery seems as good a purpose as any.

The Crushing Weight of Obligation

Debt drives the machine of Kentucky Route Zero, debt to faceless corporations, or parents, or colleagues. Professional debt. In the old days, stories were told in the South of young men who could sell their souls to the devil for skill on the guitar—now Doctors sell their souls to pharmaceutical corporations in order to learn the medical trade. Those doctors, in turn, are able to help their patients, sort of. Said patients are now saddled with obligations to the medical machine, complete with incoherent payment schedules, and all sorts of fine print that can’t be fully understood. Conway loses his leg—it belongs to the pharmaceutical corporation that provided the drug—and as a result it becomes a skeletal form, a shadow of its former self. Its identity subsumed into the crushing bureaucratic gears of Debt.

The Zero, indeed, seems to function primarily on debt, and repossession, and reassignment. The power company takes churches and converts them to offices for a department to manage repossession and reassignment. The dead are disturbed so a distillery built on chaining its workers to the company through debt can be built. The Strangers have lost everything to the company, caught in a web of debt that strips the meat off their bones. The story of the miners and the company script is horrifying specifically in the way it completely removes any way of escape for the employees (also, in the way that it is 100% a real thing that happened—and in some twisted form continues to happen, across the country). Once the company has Conway, once it has gotten him to drink and in so doing allow his alcoholism to come roaring back to the fore, it is willing to allow him to complete his final delivery, because it has a hold on him now from which there’s no escape. Conway is obliged to return in the morning, because Conway drank. The player, in this case, is powerless to stop it, and all efforts to do so only serve to cause the final drink to happen.

Xanadu as well is powered by obligation. The interns and various academics caught in its pull stick around because they signed on to help, and cannot conceive of a world in which they are able to escape. Donald’s obsession drives away Lula, but it also binds Roberta and the other research assistants to his cause, even though he’s long since forgotten what Xanadu was supposed to be and spends his time lost in memories of what could have been. Nobody seems willing to abandon the project, because they cannot remember a time where they weren’t working on it. In this case, it’s not a monetary debt, but more of a reluctance to admit the whole thing was a waste of time—even though they’ve all lost whatever spark allowed them to make Xanadu work in the first place.

This Will End. This May Not End Well

Conway’s delivery is the glue that holds everyone together. It cannot last forever, because when morning comes, Conway has to report to work at the distillery. Julian will finish moving houses and probably come looking for Ezra. Shannon will need to get back to her shop, though she’ll probably wind up losing that too. Junebug and Johnny will go do whatever it is they do when they aren’t performing. No solution to the problem of Conway and Shannon’s debts seems readily apparent, unless the delivery of the antiques results in a massive, mind-boggling amount of money to pay everything off.

Kentucky Route Zero is all about the inevitability of loss, but more importantly it’s about how its characters react and prepare for that inevitable loss. Conway’s dogged determination to do this last thing right is noble, in its way, as is Shannon’s decision to help. The group will continue to navigate the geographical oddity that is the Zero until their task is done, and that will be a victory. It will not, I think, stop the inevitable loss they are all slated to experience, but this bizarre quest of theirs, and the memories of it, will perhaps allow them to handle it. Better to experience a loss with some form of support, after all—and if nothing else they have formed a group united by their having lost something (deliberately, in Junebug and Johnny’s case), or been lost. Indeed, they are all lost, in the geographical sense, and it is their attempts to find reasons to continue on that gives their lives meaning. It’s what makes their story worth experiencing.

That and the bears on the third floor.

I’ve had a whole week to sit and let the hate for this next round of arcade games fester, or at least the hate for two of these games to fester—or really just the one. The others range from totally inoffensive to surprisingly fun, even though… well, I’ll explain why when I get there. No pictures this week, because I'm feeling lazy and don't feel like looking all that shit up. Plus I mean four of these are racing games, and you know what those are. Here's a picture of outer space to help you deal with the trauma:

So I’m going to knock all the racing games out quickly, pausing here and there to point out something relevant along the way, including, yes, the worst game in the whole fucking arcade. But we’ll save that for last, because I’ve got a good amount of bile. Let’s talk about the two Namco offerings that were available for the young man with racing shit on the mind, because they were completely inoffensive:

Dead Heat NOS Street Racing

This is a pretty straightforward racing game. Namco’s whole thing is they’ve developed GHOST TECHNOLOGY, which is to say they’ve caught up with every racing game since like… 1995? The cabinets are all linked so you can RACE STRANGERS, and the cabinet has a camera that takes a photo of you before the race and links it to your car on other folks’ screens. The other ghosts in the race will have the faces of those who raced previously (provided you gave permission), which means that you can tell how few people are passing through the arcade because it will just be four cars with the same guy’s face in there. Sometimes, it is my face. The seat is hard plastic and sucks. The steering wheel lacks any sort of actual feedback and just sort of flops around, which is just depressing. There is no shifter, so everything is manual transmission whether you want it to be or not. Not the best racing experience (that would be Daytona 2000, thank you very much), but not the worst thing I experienced. There are only like… four tracks, if I’m remembering right, so I hope you like repetition if you happen to find a group of people to race with.

Dead Heat Riders

The other racing offering from Namco, which is completely identical in every way to Dead Heat NOS, except you sit on a fake motorcycle which happens to be slightly less awful than the Dead Heat NOS seat. The courses are the same, the driving physics feel the same, and literally everything feels the same except you’re leaning to turn and there’s a finer degree of control. This game was my favorite game at the whole damn arcade—not because it’s particularly great, but because two complete strangers and I wound up spending a solid hour and a half racing and swearing at one another, complete with high fives and a not-insignificant amount of trash-talking. This was the one moment that made me miss older, less shitty arcades more than anything else; you don’t get moments like that any other way. I have memories of vacationing in Garden City, South Carolina, which had multiple arcades on its boardwalk, and almost all of them were jam-packed full of people playing TMNT or Street Fighter II, and you just fucking walked up and played with strangers. There’s internet multiplayer, sure, and that’s okay, but it lacks the physicality of being able to look over and high five the dude next to you. I’m not an outgoing person by any means, but fuck if an arcade does not make me far less anxious around strangers. My only regret re: a decision to live in the middle of nowhere (I really don’t like meeting people) is that I can’t get into Chicago to check out the few barcades down there on anything like a regular basis. Anyway, DHR isn’t actually that good, but I got lucky and had some cool dudes to play with.

Winter X Games SnoCross

Because everyone wants to race snowmobiles! These blow cold air in your face too, and there’s a snowball button you push to throw snowballs at other racers which has no discernable effect. The game allows you to upgrade your snowmobile with successive plays—like the snowballs, there was no real discernable effect on the actual performance I could see, but it was an interesting effort to get you to keep playing. You could also log in with a pin number (like the Batman cabinet, there was a pin pad on the cabinet) to I guess save your progress? Or carry over your stats? I don’t know, it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Oddly, this game still relies on FMVs of scantily clad dancing women (actually just the one woman in different outfits) as part of its attract mode, and she shows up at the end of every race too. It was weird, in the way that staring into a time machine set to the worst parts of 90s video game culture is weird. Fuck this game, the physics didn’t make any sense and there was a “trick system” which was really just “go off a ramp and you’ll do some random shit you can’t actually control but we’ll give you points like you just did something,” so really I guess fuck that noise. The two strangers I rocked Dead Heat Riders with showed up to play some of this as well, but the tracks are less fun and it wasn’t quite as enjoyable.

Fast and Furious™ SuperCars™

The single skeeviest game I’ve encountered in a long time. It’s not just that it has the exact same scantily clad woman from the SnoCross game (I assume it’s the same developer but I’m too lazy to check), but it has microtransactions. You can upgrade your car before a race (just like in SnoCross), but this time, adding credits can give you more parts. It’s one of the worst fucking things I’ve ever encountered, and I say this because I sat waiting for a race to start while the kid next to me dumped about $10 worth of credit into his game to max out all his upgrades (he would go on to finish last, because the upgrades don’t actually do dick). It was brutal, not just because I just wanted the fucking game to start, but also because this kid was not like me, who was wandering around with $80 in company money to burn, dude was there with his friends and wasting his money on shit that gave no actual benefit. It’s depressing, and it’s misleading, and the driving physics sucked balls, but at least you could have a manual transmission! Fuck this game. Fuck everything about it. I was able to sit through one race and then I just got up and left with some credits still in the machine. It was joyless, and not to hammer home a point about old sexist shit sticking around in a modern-ass video game, but really? FMV scantily clad ladies (who again, is just the one lady replicated multiple times across the stream)? Fuck that. Fuck everything about that. Christ.

Operation G.H.O.S.T

The one light game that actually involved picking up a light gun instead of using a mounted turret! You even reloaded by aiming off the screen, just like old times. Audio came out of your gun, which could be a little tinny, and the vibration from gunfire was fucking insane, so I wound up switching hands a couple times because I couldn’t feel my hand anymore, but it was a decent enough light gun game. Some input lag when it came to fast movements (you could watch your cursor sort of drag behind you), and the boss fights were poorly designed (or well designed, since they were meant to force you to spend more money). Also, it kept claiming you could get body armor but I never saw how or where or indeed, when that was ever possible. I played through the whole thing with one of my co-workers, and we both agreed the story was dumb (but in a good way—the Sega way), and sort of just ends with the bad guy getting away (maybe you have to get a better score to have it turn out differently? I don’t actually know), but it was enjoyable enough. There were also some “sniper” missions that were dumb, because there was no scope and if you’re going to not build a scope on your goddamn gun, don’t bother having a sniper mission, okay? Okay.

Well, That Was Okay I Guess

At the end of the night, I’d managed to burn through most of the $80 I had been given, mostly thanks to G.H.O.S.T and Dead Heat Riders, which were the two games I probably enjoyed the most. There were a couple iOS games that had been blown up to full size and put on giant touch screens (Fruit Ninja and Jet Pack Joyride, to be exact), but those don’t count as actual arcade games, so fuck them I’m not going to talk about them. The most fun I had was playing with random strangers, which is sort of the point of those sorts of arcade games, and the least fun I had was trying to suppress my gag reflex at every part of that god-awful Fast and Furious game. Christ.

The lack of a 2D fighting cabinet was fucking unconscionable, and given the chance I’ll never set foot in that particular arcade/entertainment complex again. The only thing this whole experience did was made me miss the arcades of the mid-90s (and consider how fucked up it is that the bowling alley I went to as a kid had more arcade cabinets (even pinball!) than an entire fucking building claiming to be an arcade. At least they had an MKII machine). I might go on a quest into Chicago for a thoroughly enjoyable arcade experience (my boss has been bugging me about a few places in her neighborhood I should check out with her and her husband at some point), but let’s not hold our breaths, shall we?

NEXT WEEK: I finally picked up some of last year’s games that I’d been meaning to grab for ages, as well as Capsule, which is super stressful. Maybe I will talk about those, or maybe I’ll have some other thing to talk about. Certainly if you’re dying to know what I think about Capsule, this week’s podcast will have some thoughts on it when we get around to putting it up. You can also hear my opinions on Kentucky Route Zero! Won’t that be fun?

The company I work for recently (by which I mean like yesterday) held its annual holiday party, and this year said holiday party was held at the local arcade/bowling alley/laser tag arena/bar, which had me pretty goddamn excited—arcades are mostly dead, it’s true, but I’ve yet to enter an arcade that didn’t at least have a forgotten Tekken or Street Fighter cabinet tucked away in the back corner, along with maybe a Gauntlet Legends cabinet for when I tire of getting my ass absolutely handed to me by the computer, 5 year-olds, the blind, and people without any actual hand-eye coordination to speak of at a fighting game (I am really bad at fighting games, but they maintain a place in my heart tied to memories of the one time I played through the majority of Soul Caliber in a movie theater lobby, before getting my ass handed to me by Cervantes at the end. It was a magical run). This particular building masquerading as a proper arcade, however, lacked anything but a shocking number of driving games, a couple of light gun cabinets, and (this was the real shock to me, anyway) a number of iPhone game ports blown up on large screens masquerading as arcade games and, what’s more, designed to dole out tickets.

It has been said by basically anyone with even a passing knowledge of the topic that arcade games’ primary concern is getting money out of the pockets of those who would dare to set foot inside their gilded halls, much in the way that a casino is designed with the vacuuming up of money in mind. Normally, I give myself a $20 limit in any arcade setting (i.e. the few times I go back to Cincinnati and hit up the Dave & Buster’s there), but last night was on the company—and part of it being on the company involved some $80 worth of credit which I was keen to spend, because if it wasn’t spent it was wasted, and that would have been a tragedy. Even so, the selection was so sparse—and indeed depressing, on first glance—that I nearly spent the whole evening shooting pool instead. Alas, there were only three goddamn pool tables in the whole facility, so while waiting for one to open up I and another member of the party found ourselves looking for some sort of entertainment in the arcade.

We settled on a game which seemed to be a House of the Dead knock-off called Dark Escape 4D. The 4D part was because you could turn on a 3D mode (rubbery glasses included!), and you sat in a small booth which vibrated and blew cold air in your face for EXTRA TERROR. The guns were swivel mounted, and you spent a surprisingly small amount of time actually shooting them—there’s a lot of whirling camera and JUMP SCARES which you have to sit through, and while that’s going on you can’t shoot—plus the guns have heart rate sensors in the palms which see how PANICKED you get. Unfortunately, my heart rate is naturally high (unhealthy! Part of why I took up exercise again!) so it always thought I was panicking. Somehow that factors into your score? I don’t know, we played one chapter and then, even though we were still alive, it requested additional credits to proceed the story and we bailed out. NOT GREAT. The visuals were kind of rubbish, the 3D effect was just annoying, and the vibrating seat just made it seem like someone was farting the whole time. I doubt very much anyone would be willing to shell out $1.50 per credit (which was the average cost of a game on the floor, are you fucking joking), especially as I’m pretty sure the levels were designed to make it impossible to make through without having to burn at least one continue—boss creatures are given impossibly small windows to prevent insane amounts of damage, and the responsiveness of the guns never seemed to be quite all there to begin with. A thoroughly unpleasant experience when compared to the next game I wandered over to, which was Aliens: Extermination.

Aliens: Extermination is a beauty of a game where you reload by tapping the front of your gun. Again, it’s a swivel-mounted gun (which I hate, by the way. Whatever happened to giving you the ability to pick the gun up and move it around? Why did we stop doing that? Out of the six light gun cabinets I saw available, only two let you pick up the damn gun, and one of them was Big Buck Hunter, which seemed to feature a lot of shooting fish and not a lot of shooting big bucks, but whatever. The other we’ll come to in a moment). Unlike Dark Escape, I actually felt in control of my own fate on this one, and could almost forgive the gun’s incessant vibration (so it feels REAL, I presume). Almost. Plus, you could just spray bullets and there were only a few bits where you were not shooting Aliens in the face. It also had some semi-decent boss fights, which was as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I managed to get through the first chapter and a half before the game turned to shit (underwater shooting section! Just what I never wanted!) and I opted to just let the continue timer run out. I should also note that you carry your health between chapters, because of course you do, it would be too easy to allow you to regain health at checkpoints or anything—they want your goddamn money, after all. So much for that one—the shooting felt more responsive, and I’ll wager the plot was better than Colonial Marines’, so there we go.

Next, I played the Batman driving game, which apparently exists in the real world and not in some fever dream. You are Batman, and you drive your pick of the Batmobile (I chose to drive the Batmobile from the animated series, though I was sorely tempted by the one from Batman ’66) around blowing up cars full of criminals (Batman has clearly relaxed his stance on no guns and no killing) in the service of foiling plots by Bane, Mister Freeze, and the Joker. I played through the Joker missions, continuing a few times because again, there is no way to actually avoid damage in these games, you will take damage and you will run out of health before you run out of levels. Still, I’m a sucker for Batman and the Joker scenario was interesting at least in that you at one point have to enter in a cancellation code for a nuclear device while also driving (there’s a keypad on the cabinet, as seems to be common in driving cabinet design now), so that was something at least? Otherwise it just reminded me vaguely of Vigilante 8 while committing the sin of not being Vigilante 8. As far as Batman games go, it’s no Arkham Asylum, I tell you what (also their voice for the Joker is no Mark Hamill, I tell you what).

There are more games to go, but this has gone on a bit long and it seems like I can stretch this into two entries rather than just the one large entry, so let’s stop with Batman. Next week, the most grossly exploitative game I’ve ever seen (hint: IT HAS MICROTRANSACTIONS! LITERAL MICROTRANSACTIONS ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS), and a good reason to play a racing game. Plus, the one light gun game that actually let me pick up the goddamn gun!

Woof, it's tough getting back on the horse, let me tell you. A little vacation and all of a sudden I forget how to write about video games and the like almost entirely. Still, it was a good break--I had a nice vacation, and debated with my brother about the best game of the year a little, and now that we're nearly halfway through the first month of the new year (time flies, man) I figure it's time to saddle up and ride recklessly into Video Game Talk again.

Here's the thing, though: I've done very little in the past two weeks that wasn't playing Persona 4 Golden. I'm up to 13 hours of playtime on that particular title, and while that's nothing in the grand scheme of thing (I mean the consensus is that at least 80-90 hours is what it takes to put a Persona game to bed), understand that for someone who flits from game to game on a regular basis this is a pretty Big Fucking Deal. To put this figure into perspective, I've had an OG Persona 4 game running on my PS3 for months, played as a part of my regular gaming diet (which is to say I pick it up now and again in between bouts of playing other stuff), and in the three weeks I've owned the VIta edition I've caught up to where I am (but in better shape and with better equipment, because I actually beat the shadow at the top of Yukiko's castle this time around). I never thought I'd say it, but I got nostalgic and started another viewing of the P4 ER, and Chie's old voice gave me a moment of sincere confusion, because I'm so used to the P4G version of her voice (FORGIVE ME, CHIE). I mean, it didn't last too long, but still!

Anyway, apart from the lack of a save point outside boss rooms (really? REALLY?) and the fact that the group rush attack doesn't feel as powerful as it used to (seriously, that shit is like a guaranteed victory in my PS3 playthrough, but here it only sometimes works out and that's weird), I've gotten accustomed to all the changes they made to the mechanics; Chie and Yukiko keep doing team-up attacks, which are kind of neat, and while part of me misses the skill element of SHUFFLE TIME, part of me likes being able to just fucking pick the card I want. Cutting the guesswork (and repetition to get the right skills) out of Fusion is just straight-up a convenience factor that I am 100% on board with, although again part of me liked experimenting to see what would come out. P4G does a bunch of stuff to save time, which makes sense as it's on a portable system, but some things could have stayed the same. At any rate, I can't stop playing it. I'm gonna fire it up when I'm done writing this, probably! I've drained my battery in a couple of days because I just come home, work out, and boot it up on the handheld until I go to sleep.

I've probably put a nearly equal amount of time (a quick check shows seven hours, forty-five minutes, which is crazy because I spent so much time farting around that I only just got the ability to register Personas like a half hour ago, gametime-wise) into Persona 3 Portable as well, which makes no goddamn sense, because you'd think one Persona game would be enough but you would be wrong. There are, as I mentioned, plenty of differences between the two games to make it worth playing (in my mind, at least). I only just got past the first big full moon event thingy, and the game has opened up considerably since then (more social links are available now (or I've gotten around to them, anyway), the aforementioned ability to register Personas has appeared, Junpei is an even bigger fucking moron, etc.). I'm curious to see where the story on this one goes, although it's not grabbed me quite as much as the Persona 4 narrative did. Bouncing between Persona games is probably not for everyone, but I've found it keeps me from getting too frustrated or bored with either (also the clock is WAY CHEAPER than Fox is. Fox wants so much goddamn money out of me! Damn, Fox, cheer up! I will fulfill some goddamn wishes soon enough, jesus christ).

There's probably a post to be made about the Halo 5 beta--I like it well enough, I guess? I've probably spent a total of three hours playing Slayer, and I am terrible at it. It looks pretty, and I like the controls and the speed of it, and uh... yup. That's about all I've got on the subject of Halo 5. I wish there were more maps, because I got pretty bored of the three maps available (particularly Truth).

Also, the other night I was thinking about Hotline Miami, so I fired up Hotline Miami, and it is precisely as fun as I remember it being. There are few games where saying "aw fuck it" and deciding to just charge in swinging a lead pipe can pay off, but this game does it! I got stuck in an office building and was close to rage-quitting until the exact moment I decided I would just charge the guys who kept killing me and hope I swing faster than they pulled the trigger. Turns out that was the solution all along, and the rush of adrenaline that came with the final pipe swing got me to whoop out loud--and I very rarely do anything of the sort (although Shadow of Mordor has me doing that from time to time, particularly after taking down an especially meddlesome Captain). Then of course the game proceeds to deliver a massive mindfuck, all the while pulsing neon and blaring its exquisite soundtrack, and I remember why it is I am so excited for Hotline Miami 2. I've also considered getting the Vita port of Hotline Miami, although I'm on the fence as, you know, I've already got a copy on my PC. I generally try to avoid buying multiple versions of a game, although sometimes it is inevitable (hi every Bioware game in the last decade! Hi, Dark Souls I and II!). Still, portable puzzle murderin' seems mighty tempting...

Anyway, I reckon that's all I've got this week as far as video games goes--although as far as movies go, it is worth your time to see Inherent Vice if you have any love of Thomas Pynchon, Paul Thomas Anderson, or maybe you just thought that Altman's The Long Goodbye was really fucking good! I know I did, and Inherent Vice proves a worthy successor (don't listen to anyone who tells you it is like the Big Lebowski, it is nothing like Big Lebowski and it will just leave you disappointed if that's what you are expecting. It is, however, really fucking good).

Next week: Checking in with Pathologic, maybe? Shit, I dunno, I don't make plans.

This week, full of the holiday spirit, I made the move and decided I would buy myself a PS Vita (it’s cool, technically I bought my brother a Vita, and he bought me a Vita, we just…bought them for ourselves. This is the sort of shit you do to rationalize purchases when you have a twin brother). So this week, I obtained a Vita, and with the Vita I picked up three games immediately, which are going to more or less be how I roll for a while. Here’s a quick rundown of the three games I bought, and my impressions of each. Bear in mind that I’ve played one of these more than the others, but basically I have spent at least three hours with each of these.

Olli Olli

I picked this up because I needed to pick up at least one game that was released this year. Devolver Digital is quickly getting to the point with me where they can do no wrong when it comes to what they publish, and as a kid who fucking adored Tony Hawk 2 (although it might be more accurate to say that I adored the soundtrack to TH2. I never owned a copy of TH2, but two of my friends did, so there you go) I’ve been desperate for a skateboarding game with good music ever since. Olli Olli satisfies that desire in a way that nothing has even approached since then.

The controls are super-simple, and without adding the complexity of the shoulder buttons (which let you do flips and spins) you can do very well. You can grind basically forever, and that’s the most important thing for me. I do have a habit of hitting the grind button when I need to hit the landing button, which can get a little frustrating, but when you get in the zone on this game it is basically the most wonderful thing you can do with your time. I’ve found the levels to be really good for killing a quick five minutes here and there (I’ve pulled it up waiting for Destiny to contact the server sometimes, or waiting for Steam to update), assuming of course that you’ve got it running—there’s a stunningly long load time otherwise (I say “stunningly long” but it’s probably just under a minute).

I’m also quite partial to the soundtrack—the sort of chillout tunes a fellow requires if he wants to relax while busting out some sickass grinds that are just unreal. I’m a huge fan of this game, it definitely did what I hoped it would do—i.e. gave me the sort of skateboard game I can just play forever.

Persona 3 Portable

So this one is the game I’ve spent the most time playing, by far. Those who are even vaguely aware of my doings on these forums and such are completely unsurprised, because I have gotten intensely fascinated with the Persona series (thanks, Endurance Run!) and Persona 3 seemed like a good idea. I was also attracted to the concept of being able to have a lady protagonist, because I like having options to be a lady protagonist whenever I can.

Again, the music is crazy-good—I keep bobbing my head along to the beat and it is probably the number one reason I’ve been wearing headphones. It plays a lot like Persona 4, obviously, but with enough little changes that I don’t feel weird having a P4 game going on in parallel. Not being able to register persona is kind of weird! Also, I’m on my second day in Tartarus and I can’t seem to get any cool Personas to drop. I like the dungeon grind of it—I guess eventually people get exhausted and refuse to continue on, but so far I haven’t run into that. Supposedly there’s a barrier in there so I won’t be able to continue past a certain point, but right now I’m fucking killing it on like level six or something. The fighting is that good ol’ Persona (or really Shin Megami Tensei) combat that I’ve been a fan of for basically a decade at this point, and the social linking I’ve done (which isn’t a lot, because I went into the dungeon as soon as I got the ability to do so and haven’t come out yet) has been pretty entertaining. I’m curious about the story, which is the important thing for me, anyway. Currently it’s my go-to game on the Vita, which is weird when you consider the third game I bought which is….

Persona 4 Golden

Hey, another Persona game! Are we surprised? No, not really. The hilarious thing is that now I have two Persona 4 games going on, because obviously I’m gonna continue playing through my console P4 game as well.

This is pretty great so far—I’m barely past the introduction (Saki just disappeared but her body’s not been discovered yet), and the updated graphics look real good. The sound is also real great, except the change in Chie’s voice (you probably already know this, but they didn’t get the same voice actress) which is taking some real getting used to (and is also why I’ll keep playing my console version of P4 as well, obviously. The lack of her iconic delivery of AHA! IS THIS OUR CHANCE may prove to be too great an obstacle to overcome for me. Still, it means I can play Persona 4 on the go, so that’s worth my time.

Bouncing between Persona games has actually been kind of fun—I like checking out the older systems in 3 and how they fixed (or failed to fix) them in 4. Plus, I mean, the music in P4 is fucking stellar. You and I both know that.

Anyway, having a Vita means I’ll probably wind up slowly working through the million odd titles (Danganrompa is on the top of my list as “thing I need to check out as soon as possible” because it just seems batshit insane and I need to know all about it). I’m happy with my decision to snap up a Vita, and I guess now the clock is ticking down to the moment where something really interesting shows up on the 3DS and I have to pick that up (although Persona Q is really tempting me e’en now).

I might have something short next week (gotta get on that GOTY hype train, I suppose) but I’ll be traveling back to the land of my birth and probably just sitting on my ass playing Persona games so I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it. Sometime next week, I guess!

Back when I wrote my initial post about Pathologic, which was come to think of it quite some time ago, I’d considered continuing a sort of ongoing diary of my experiences in the game. I almost immediately forgot to do anything about it, of course—a lot of great games dropped shortly thereafter, so this desire almost immediately fell by the wayside. Still, I can only go so long without checking in on everyone’s favorite doomed and shortly-to-be-plague-ridden town, so here we are again. Let’s review where I’d gotten the last time, shall we?

Two deaths to plague, a spate of “mysterious disappearances,” which I’m beginning to think are just ways to refer to people getting their faces caved in by muggers and madmen (eleven, I think), and none of my friends/acquaintances dead (apart from the one fellow who’d written the letter which got me to come to the town in the first place). My landlady/woman I’m sleeping with (SCANDALOUS!) begged me to help her get out of town so she could die in the steppes rather than in the town, and I agreed to do what I could. The leadership of the town refused to believe there was a plague, even though I fucking told them there was plague coming. It’s a beautiful, sunny day in wherever-the-hell, Russia. Let’s go fight the inevitability of our own failure!

I was at a bit of a loose end—I needed proof of plague in order to get the administrative powers required if I’m going to have a chance of saving townsfolk, but I’ve got no idea where to go to get that information. So instead I focused on getting my landlady out of town, figuring that the rest would sort itself out. Julia (i.e. the other educated person in town, although her insistence on demonic activity as the culprit has cast doubt on her qualifications as “educated”) suggested I visit the local hostel, as I might find allies who believed my whole “guys this Sand Plague shit is gonna fuck y’all up if you don’t let me do my job” line.

Anyway, I wound up in a weird bar playing basically the best music in the game. As it happens, the guy who could probably get me and mine out of town was present—and he was super-into­ the idea, provided that I manage to get his brother, the (probably mad) architect responsible for the weird-ass spire on the west end, to leave with us. Only his brother wasn’t into the idea of leaving, so I had to figure something else out—or, as I eventually decided to do, give up and tell my landlady that escape wasn’t happening. (Un?)Fortunately, my landlady was not to be denied, and gave me some dirt on the architect in order to scare him out of town—the fellow I’m trying to help seize emergency powers, you see, has beef with the architect. Once I help him seize power (and I will, because I fucking need someone on my side in this batshit town), it’s likely our noble architect will wind up on the wrong end of a firing squad for…whatever reason the fearless leader thinks of. So now he’s ready to go, but I still need evidence of plague to ensure things move along as they should, and thus, it’s off to talk to Lara, who runs the hospice.

Lara believes me completely about the whole “we’re all gonna die” thing and informs me that she’s made arrangements for a safe house of sorts—a “house of life” that she needs supplies for, and could I help? She also tells me that she knows of a kid who knows another kid who knows something about a “Silent house” which, from the sounds of it, was probably hit by plague. So I go off to collect donations for the house, while also tracking down this kid. It’s easier than it sounds, because the game map is surprisingly helpful—the tooltips might be a bit unreliable (because they don’t go away as you complete objectives), but if you head for red buildings you will generally get results. I talk to the kid, and she points me to another kid who points me to the silent house, and the whole time I’m doing that, I’m also trying to buy provisions in a town that is rapidly running out of them. Everything got really expensive, and I wound up pawning off some of my drugs in order to get some dried meat, because I needed the food more than the drugs.

Somewhere around this time I also realize that I’m near the architect’s house, so I get him to agree to flee town while I’m at it. Then, it’s time to enter the silent house, and wow, for a game that looks like garbage they sure know how to scare the shit out of me! You can watch the sequence that got the hair on my arms to stand right the fuck up here if you want, but there’s a LP’s voice over it all and frankly it probably isn’t as effective that way (also you might really want to save that little gem for yourself, should you ever decide to pick up Pathologic and play—although the remake will come eventually (probably in another year) so maybe hold off? Anyway, I get my evidence, and also punch a sick lady in the face. As a reward, I am infected, and my immune system is severely compromised, but hey, I got my proof and now I just need to get this guy out of town and deliver the goods to the safe house and oh yeah present my evidence to the town magistrate…guy, and holy shit is it really 20:00 already?

Also, it’s raining again and also, I am dangerously close to passing out from hunger, exhaustion, or both. My health has started to wane as well, presumably because of infection, and my immune system might as well not exist for all the good its doing. So I deliver my evidence, am told to go give more evidence to another guy immediately, and deliver my goods to the house of the living….except there’s this guy waiting for me there, which is, I quickly learn, a bad sign.

Everyone in the house is dead. Lara is not, because she hadn't gone there yet, but if you stay in the house you can hear nothing but moans and screams of the dying, and the Executor just staring at me like I've fucked up, and occasional dark clouds of what I assume are plague whirling through the hallway making me feel even worse. I stumble out of the house, the screen doing all sorts of “YOU ARE HALLUCINATING AND PROBABLY PRETTY ILL” effects on me and immediately see a guy with a knife just murdering the shit out of some other dude. This time, unlike last time, I draw my gun and fire—and an unseen child laughs as the murderer falls over, dead. I didn't manage to save his victim, of course (because you cannot save anyone, ever, no matter what), so I frisk their pockets and come away with some extra weapons and money off the murderer, and…nothing at all off the victim. He didn’t even have anything worth stealing, apparently. Christ, Pathologic, you throw dark.

I give the provisions to Lara while breaking the news of her companions’ fate, and she gives me some nuts, explaining that I probably shouldn’t eat them but children like to trade stuff for them, so there’s a new wrinkle to the economy I’d not known previously. By this time my exhaustion is nearly complete, so I make one final stop to the other two town leaders to get them to surrender their powers and collapse into bed for six hours.

Day three starts with the news that I forgot to finish making arrangements to escape town, so the architect of mine? He’s dead. So are some fifty other civilians (of plague and other maladies), and some more disappearances although I didn’t quite catch the number. Day three starts with me looking like this:

It’s going to be a rough week.