Having one of those ‘I’m not the only one’ moments. This, all of this.
However, I think TSA is still an interesting beast for being trapped in antinomy. I feel like it’s about loving the spirit of games whilst also acknowledging how crap the games we grew up playing/idolising actually are, for the most part.
i understand being frustrated for meaning in engagement a lot but i feel like the fundamental impasse is here, i used to feel like this or try to do this but over time i realized looking for “the message” or like the holistic “point” a media object is supposed to serve as the vehicle for is distracting and not generative towards actually understanding it or having a relationship to it. i always look for coherency and unification in art in it’s construction and delivery, how moving parts and elements are specifically placed to create an effect and context, and i really feel like emotional/tonal unification of a work’s formal building blocks produces an actual live digestion of it’s themes and ideas that is a lot more powerful to me and imo goes a lot further aesthetically and intellectually and prompts a LOT more generative reflection from me than when a work is just leading me to it’s thesis statement.
it’s like, the difference between a conversation that’s happening in front of you that you can participate in and actually take something out of versus a conversation that has already occurred and concluded definitively, existing as it’s own recursive argumentative loop. i feel like this kind of prioritization of formal language in a work is more what Astromech was gesturing towards in bringing up Ico and less “aesthetics can be good too”.
like, Akerman’s documentaries D’est/From The East and News From Home are almost entirely visual and without narration, there’s not really a driving point to unify scenes communicated to the audience outside of the effect created by the way scenes are arranged. are those movies incoherent or messes of aesthetic signifiers because they prioritize formal communication over guiding the audience with editorialism? i wouldn’t ever call D’est a meaningless exercise just because it never steps in to tell me how to think about what it’s showing me.
i just know that right now i’m working on a long form comic project, and while i have an idea of the themes and emotions i’m trying to digest, if i was going INTO it already having a conclusive idea of what my take on all of it already was, it would already feel like a Dead Thing to me and like i’m just throwing into a goalpost that i set up myself. there’s nothing aesthetically enriching or progressive about that to me.
hasn’t microsoft tried to buy sega like 15 times
I do think the lack of reckoning with the material reality of commercial game production can harm artistic coherency. I’m not saying ‘meaning’ isn’t found in all sorts of ways, but , like, that NoClip documentary skims over all of Cactus’s pre-Hotline Miami work. The unstated agreement being that all of that was ‘practice’. Hotline Miami = Finally, a product! Artistic expression worth historicizing.
And really, between it & Hakaiman i don’t necessarilly see the issue being imitation, Hotline Miami is openly derivative of a diverse enough set of ideas that I would say it constitutes something new. But I do think it’s maybe a disservice to discuss it without engaging with the fact that a big part of it’s cultural resonance is due to it, unlike Hakaiman, firmly presenting itself as a product. Cutscenes, music, combos, items, menus, unlocks, saves, troubleshooting, legally licensed material, etc.
Not on a self-distributed website auto-translated for downloading and finding the right EXE through the file tree as Windows freaks out a lil, but on a storefront for “installing” via prompts and pressing play on.
And by that same token, I do think there is a certain limitation to expression for something like Hotline Miami that’s funneled through this market equation. It does shape form to a non-negligible degree, and I think in terms of game “saying” something, unthinking adherence to that sort of commerciality can hurt.
I completely forgot that cactus did hotline miami
I completely forgot that TLOU2 has perhaps the clumsiest Hotline Miami nod in its commentary on ‘violence bad’
yeah, i think part of why the metatext plot parts of hlm1 never did much for me is that they ended up feeling like part of the commercial wrapper, the intermediary layer thrown around a work to make the whole thing feel bulkier / more purchasable rather than a point reached by some kind of dynamic working itself out. never finished hlm2 due to a bug but i did remember appreciating how it seemed like it was trying to step back into the swampier, less cleanly bundled realm of level packs (“LV110: Avoid The Teeth”) and throwaway game modes. like i don’t remember the explicit text of hlm1 having much to say about that game’s best element, the willingness to just let itself be carried by the music, other than to regard that music as some kind of moral snare - the second one came closer for me in that both game and characters as sequels, things defined by the need to keep circling around something which remains outside of the game’s own limits, caught something about the uncertain relation of these things to their own soundtracks.
I lost all interest after I found out that it wasn’t actually a PS1 game 
I’m just glad Nightmare Creatures III finally has a release date
haven’t felt that disappointment since gbears of war
Here’s something else to be disappointed in:
After the Titanfall scare and this I wonder if we’ll see more aggressive sunsetting for old server infrastructure. I can’t imagine publishers proactively addressing their security
Entropy!
The true Dark Souls starts here
Was this an exploit discovered by white hats, like other software receives? Have people been doing much of that for games? I have to imagine games, as enormous and full of one-off code as they are, present vast attack surfaces. Or are they hardened because they are in constant evolutionary struggle with cheats and cracks?
Kind of white hat? It was discovered by the developers of an unofficial anti-cheat for the game
They let the Elden Ring community manager know because it’s likely present there as well
I saw that – that’s a fuller picture, though: because the game is already open and they’re working, effectively, as add-on antivirus software, they proactively find issues they’re not capable of fixing.
