I think an important part of growing up is that first time you consume a piece of media that you know was intended for someone much older than you, be it a gruesome horror movie, vulgar song lyrics, or even, gasp, a naked person on late night cable. When you're young, so much time and effort is spent trying to shield and protect you from such things that are so omnipresent in our adult lives that most of us consider that the moment when we lost our "innocence".

Like most kids here in the States, I was exposed to violence long before sex was even a concept in my young mind, and Mortal Kombat was my gateway drug to such corruption.

It feels strange sitting here, trying to formulate my thoughts on MKX only days after going off about how much I hate nostalgia, since I'm tempted to cite my earliest arcade memory; getting destroyed in Mortal Kombat 2 against a Kung Lao that decided to further taunt me with a friendship. I'll never forget the melodramatic whining that followed, as I kept repeating "I lost" out loud in disbelief, somehow shocked that I wasn't the greatest video game player in the world at the age of 10.

Long after the desire to redeem myself for such an embarrassment quelled, I stuck with MK because I was drawn to the universe and odd characters within. Even if it was really nothing but a amalgamation of cheesy kung fu and action movie tropes, the story stuck with me, and more importantly, it grew with me. Street Fighter, despite being miles better as a pure game, was static. No matter how many games were released, they seemed to all take place within the same 2 year timeline. Chun Li never grew old, never truly got her revenge. She became a comic book character, a symbol that never owned more than one iconic outfit, unchanged through my adolescence and far into my adult life.

Mortal Kombat was different; relationships changed, characters died. Sure, they'd come back, but maybe they'd return as a different person, or on a different side. Make no mistake, Mortal Kombat was an initial success almost entirely due to timing and marketing. Everyone wanted to see the ultra-violent fighting game that sent politicians into a tizzy, but long after that novelty wore off, people stayed for those crazy characters that looked straight out of heavy metal album covers.

Sadly, I don't think the people responsible for their creation ever really wanted it that way. At no point is that more obvious than with Mortal Kombat X.

It's bittersweet really, since MKX is easily the best playing game in the series by miles and the introduction of the variation system is something they can iterate on for years, but MK spent the better part of two decades before that living as a gimmick, outside the realm of legitimate fighting games. The only thing holding it together was that universe; those stories. Fans willingly played bad games to see the fates of their favorite characters, but it eventually became too bloated, too aimless, and those same people felt isolated.

Post-reboot, with a sense that everything was getting cleaned up and the gameplay was finally starting to match the appeal of the narrative, I was more excited for MKX than any other game in a long time. The marketing cycle was exhausting, often going months at a time without any new information or character reveals. This was going to be the game where it finally all came together. It was to be darker, more serious, a changing of the guard, a chance to retell stories that had been such missteps in the past, a new beginning for characters that had been seen as underdeveloped jokes before. As we got closer and closer to release, however, I started question exactly what was being made. I started to wonder if the series that I'd watched grow with me had finally stop moving at the same speed, destined to be left behind.

And here I am, trying to articulate why the best playing and best selling game in the Mortal Kombat franchise disappointed me. I'd like to think that I've been pretty good at avoiding the internet trap of thinking that I have some degree of ownership in the media that I'm a fan of, as if the developers were entitled to cater to my tastes. The whole beauty of creating something is that it can be shaped in whatever way the author desires, but I can't help but look at MKX and lament just how safe it all is, from the roster choices, to the uninspired story, to the pandering inclusion of various guest characters. For a franchise that was built on being this aggressive, in-your-face filth that was supposed to upset your parents, it's now blasé.

It would be easy to say that Boon and the gang simply "sold out" once under the banner of Warner Brothers, and there is certainly evidence to suggest how much they tampered with the final product, but I think the real answer is much simpler than that: Mortal Kombat was created by a crew of guys that liked kung fu and thought ninjas fighting arm-blade men were cool, then it became the biggest game in the world and they never really knew how to handle that. They never thought people would grow to care as much as they did. It explains why they likely don't see how disrespectful they can be to their own universe and characters, often publicly announcing how much they regret or even despise these creations, expecting the fanbase to also be in on the joke, seemingly unaware that same fanbase is the one calling for their returns. It's a WWE level of tone deaf made even more evident by the recent reveal of the second Kombat Pack. It's a far bigger issue than "the characters I want didn't make the game". It's indicative of a bigger issue; the sign that Netherrealm has played the same pat hand one too many times, either blissfully ignorant or blissfully secure in the fact that MK sells on name alone at this point.

As someone that's stuck it out this long, waiting for something to click, I have to stop and wonder if this is the best we're ever going to get, if years from now, Mortal Kombat will be so distanced from that past as a piece of 90s counterculture and just generally regarded as nothing more than a competent fighting game with a nonsense story. And Jax is in it again for some reason.

Maybe we've already reached that point and I'm the ignorant one, unable to let go of what I wanted MK to be in light of what it's become, letting myself fall victim to those same nostalgic trappings that I've dedicated so much time to rejecting. When the next Mortal Kombat game is on the horizon, it's certainly something I'll need to think about.

As I sit here trying to formulate my thoughts on Emily is Away, it’s hard for me ignore the tense pounding in my chest, the clammy feeling of my palms as I try to bring myself down from the half hour of nervous anxiety that I just went through. Perhaps it’s because the subject matter hits me a little too close to home, knowing a few too many girls just like Emily in my high school days. Or maybe it’s because I knew from the start how it would all end, despite my best efforts.

The most obvious feature of Emily is Away is the faux-AIM interface that it uses to tell its story, but the real strength of the experience is how authentic the interactions feel. For that brief time, I was transported back to Senior year, trying to be supportive of a friend I had unrequited feelings for; cluelessly trying to find the right words. But the difference between it and most choose-your-own-adventure narratives is the fact that I didn’t want to revisit it again, no matter strong that feeling was in the pit of my stomach that things may have gone differently if I’d just made better decisions. In a medium that thrives on disregarding and often laughing in the face of consequence, it’s a difficult emotion to stir up in the player, even considering how often it seems to come up in our real lives.

And maybe if I did go through it again, I’d learn an even harsher lesson; some situations are simply unwinnable when emotions are involved, no matter what you do. As it stands, my Emily was someone that I simply never had a chance with, whether it was because I was too much the dreaded “nice guy” or just because she never saw me that way. Even after realizing that, I wanted the best for her, but felt powerless to help. She was already too far gone, too distant.

It’s entirely possible that you could play Emily Is Away and never feel a thing, since it’s capturing, or should I say, recapturing a very specific experience, but one that most anyone has had at least once. As I try to find a clever way to cap off my thoughts, I can really only sit here reminded of those people in my life that stirred such similar feelings. Part of that is because I’m often sentimental to a point of self-sabotage, considering how often I’d already thought about those times, even before booting up the game. I can’t help but wonder what went wrong and never find myself closer to a solid answer.

And that’s the point. Sometimes things just end.

(This is part of an ongoing project of mine to play and write about a different game every day in 2016. It's originally sourced from my blog here, which is updated daily. For the sake of everyone's sanity, I just pick out what I feel are my strongest entries and share them sporadically here.)

I kinda hate nostalgia.

Outside of a few odd examples here and there, I’m pretty detached from most of the media I consumed as a kid. While I’d like to think it’s because I simply matured over time, it’s more to do with how overexposed the things I once treasured had become. We feel like a generation steeped in repetition. We talk about how adaptions of beloved properties “kill our childhood” because it’s different from what we grew up with, as if the expectation is to have that childhood regurgitated to us over and over without deviation. We associate with the decades we were born in and the media that defined those times, as if they also defined us. Nostalgia, to me, feels like an enemy of progress. As long as we continue to crave that comfort food, that familiar name or character, we’re that much less likely to pursue new works, even if they were created under the influences of those old familiar things. Even if they may actually be better than those old familiar things.

So something like Terrordrome leaves me conflicted.

As a love letter to 80s and 90s horror, it’s a delight. As a game, especially one created independently as a hobby, it’s an achievement, even if you ignore that nostalgia that frames it. But that’s the draw, after all. Had these intrepid designers filled the game with nothing but original characters, chances are that it still would have been a good experience, but not that familiar experience that comes with playing as a movie slasher. When you fight Jason, he moves and sounds and feels the way you expect him to, or should I say, the way you remember him. It’s this attention to detail that seems to muddle my bias here.

Where is the line between tribute and exploitation? Considering the non-profit nature of Terrordrome, I sit firmly in the realm of the former. Had it been published by, say, Warner Brothers, I’d probably have a different outlook. When Alien and Leatherface are added to the Mortal Kombat roster just in time for new hits at the box office, it feels like that urge for the familiar is being used against us, but here it feels like the natural progression of romhacks and homebrews; a celebration of an often vastly misunderstood culture and fanbase to be shared with others in that niche. It’s genuine; a 9 year labor of love, even if that thing we love isn’t as great as we remember it being.

Liking those things was never the crime. It’s the fear that looking back often prevents us from looking forward; the sad assumption I have that Batman’s origin story will be retold a half dozen more times before I’m in the grave, consumed primarily by the same people that were around for the previous retelling, never wanting for something new or different. Terrordrome seems to live in that middle ground, where inspiration for creating something spawned a new method with which to embrace the old, but in a way that feels final, because, as luck would have it, Terrordrome 2 is in the works to be something wholly original, spawned, no doubt, from the love of those ubiquitous characters and the worlds they exist in.

Playing it in 2016, as a snapshot of something that can’t truly be replicated again, in a world where Freddy Krueger is no longer scary, it somehow fits.

I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to Sam Barlow.

I mean, we’ve never met. If we ever did, we’d probably get on well and have a lot of things to talk about. From what I gather, he’s a fan of David Lynch and Luis Buñuel, like me, and seems to have the same reverence for Hitchcock and his storytelling techniques. He doesn’t even know who I am or that I exist, but he seems like a nice enough guy.

And I’ve spent the better part of the last eight years hating him.

Something you’re going to learn about me in exhaustive detail at some point this year, I’m a huge fan of Silent Hill. Well, I’m a huge fan of the first four games. Once the series left the hands of the Japanese team that had created it, sequels were commissioned from developers that seemed to have no idea what they were creating, nor any desire to respect the themes established from those original games. It all started with Silent Hill: Origins, which was seemingly dragged out of development hell kicking and screaming, only to go on to be considered the worst game in the series, to this day.

The lead designer and writer of Origins? A guy by the name of Sam Barlow.

Knowing the background behind what a mess that game was, it’s really hard to fully blame him, but as with most things on the internet, my rage needed an easy target, and to be fair to him, he then went on to work on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (which was much better received), but even then, it’s difficult to call Shattered Memories a Silent Hill game. Playing it, you can’t help but feel like it’s work thrown at someone that wanted to tell a different story, like a director accepting a popcorn flick to fund his passion projects later.

Her Story is clearly one of those projects.

It’s not perfect by any means. The concept of a police force, even in 1994, having such an ineffectual way of viewing and archiving their videos is a stretch, and the ending reveal will lead most to utter a very simple “why didn’t they just…?” which causes a lot of it to fall apart, but during the short time it took me to finish the game, I didn’t really care. The story demanded my attention the entire way through, rewarding me for the little things I picked up on. It appealed to my basest instincts as a “gamer”; the need to discover and the need to collect everything. Even long after I’d solved the case, I wanted to make sure I’d seen every video, and when I hit a wall, I found a way to cheat. No, I didn’t look up a FAQ or seek any outside help. I cheated in a way that the game clearly put in front of me since the beginning, and made me feel clever for figuring out.

It was very much a case of enjoying the journey instead of the destination, which is typical in most genres due to video games having a history of dumb endings, but to see it in a game of this type, in an interactive movie that has very little actual “gameplay” to speak of, is rare. Ironically, the game is revered less for the story it’s telling than in how it’s being told to you, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Stories in video games are often mocked for being under-cooked or not to the level of other mediums, but the tools which which to tell those stories are still being defined. We’re still growing, and when creators, like, for example, Sam Barlow, aren’t put in boxes and can not only tell the stories that they want, but how they want, we need to be there to reward them, so it keeps happening, so it can get better.

Her Story isn’t the best game I’ve played in years, but I doesn’t need to be. I think we, as critics, tend to want to give participation medals to anyone that even attempts to be different, but I also don’t think that should invalidate what it’s doing. The questions that we need to ask are “Did I find this engaging?” and “Did I see it through till the end?”. In both cases, it was an emphatic yes, which are perhaps the only questions that we should be asking, regardless of genre or even medium. As someone that aims to make his own passion projects one day in a similar vein, it gives me hope.

Which I guess is something I need to thank Sam Barlow for. That’s going to be an awkward conversation.

(This is part of an ongoing project of mine to play and write about a different game every day in 2016. It's originally sourced from my blog here, which is updated daily. For the sake of everyone's sanity, I'm going to just pick out what I feel are my strongest entries and share them sporadically.)

To understand my reverence for the original Tomb Raider, one would likely only need to explore my DVD and music collection. I’m a weird cat. I like psychological horror, silent films, and just about anything dealing in surrealism, but I also have an odd attraction to saccharine pop music, disposable riffs from the nu-metal era, and chintzy cult works. I adore mysteries and well-crafted narratives brimming with hidden detail, but just as often find myself ignoring vapid characterization in lieu of visual splendor. If I could use one word to describe my taste, it would be discordant. I love contrast. I love watching things that shouldn’t fit together interacting to make something new. I like to look at things that don’t quite seem to fit in their own worlds.

For most people, when they look at the old aesthetic of Playstation games, they see a relic of a mercifully bygone era, a necessary step that the industry had to take to get where we are now, but better left behind. I mean, there’s a reason that so many games still aim to recapture the look and feel of classics from the 8 and 16 bit era, but you very rarely ever see love letters to the blocky, faceless deformities that we all controlled during the formative years of 3D. But there’s something to be said about creating under a set of restrictions. After all, necessity breeds invention. The sheer art of making a cohesive world out of broken pieces is something that’s always fascinated me about game development; knowing where to hide the seams, even if there is nothing but an empty void behind that wall.

Yet, when I revisit Tomb Raider, there’s more to it than that. Don’t get me wrong, I come for the eventual catharsis of realizing that there was a switch behind that goddamn waterfall the whole time, but it wasn’t until years after beating it the first time that I realized why I’d stayed, devoting so many sleepless nights to conquering what ever was put in front of Lara.

It’s because she is an incredibly lonely person.

Now, I’m sure that there’s a captivating college thesis to be written about the link between depression and shooting a T-Rex while doing backflips in hotpants, acknowledging that I’m probably not eloquent enough to write it, but after spending so much time with the character, it’s hard to ignore the subtext.

Lara Croft is an insanely rich, beautiful woman with no friends. She has a huge mansion with nothing in it. She constantly puts herself in mortal danger simply because her life feels empty and meaningless without it. While the new rebooted series is certainly making strides towards more of a narrative focus, it’s an aspect of the character that I now find myself missing. Those games are undeniably very good on their own merits, but they scratch a different itch. When people talk about how they took tombs out of Tomb Raider, they’re not just referring to a gameplay mechanic that they wanted more of, they’re talking about the isolation that came with that, one that Lara used to surround herself with by choice because she found it hard to relate to anyone else. She went from an eccentric thrill seeker to a victim-cum-hero. As someone that hasn’t yet played Rise of the Tomb Raider, I’m hoping to perhaps once again see glimpses of the former.

Even acknowledging that that subtext may be wholly unintentional, it says something about the kinds of stories that can be told in games that are difficult to find in any other medium. You can only come to these conclusions after spending hours with this character, often in cramped, suffocating spaces, where the only other company is silence. Ignoring the way she’s been marketed, or even the quality of some of her later games, this out-of-shape 30-something dude can find a way to relate to Lara Croft.

It’s cool, Lara. I hate water too.