Games You Played Today V: The Phantom Play’n

[toups]

yeah I had no idea about that lars von trier business but I agree that that kind of behavior is way more serious than making “problematic art” whatever that means. but I also think that kind of criticism is essential and I don’t want it to go away – I just think there’s an understandable tendency to go overboard with it in today’s political climate.

david lynch is an interesting example because the original twin peaks was often deeply problematic with its portrayal of women and it’s interesting to see how the return attempts to remedy this. but you can also give the original twin peaks a feminist reading that is pretty compelling (I think this video and its sequel do a great job of exploring that angle). this is also part of why I love fire walk with me so much, because it rejects how the TV show immediately fridged laura palmer, lets go of questions of “what happens next” after the finale, and instead dedicates itself to exploring her personality, agency, heroism, complexity, etc. that’s a really bold move! and I think it makes for a terrific movie, even if it’s disappointing for people expecting a followup to the show. but as a whole the first two seasons definitely fall into many of the same pitfalls of the deeply sexist 80’s soaps its reacting to. everything about diane in the return feels like an effort to make up for that and I think it’s more successful than not overall.

[TheGrimCorsair]

Vampire Survivors is a pretty nifty addition to my phone.

Made it to just shy of 30 minutes last night. Feels like the Library is much easier than the forest, though.

[drastic_bb]

david lynch is way more racist than hideo kojima is anything if u ask me tbhhh… not that its a competition

[iguferon]

vietcong multiplayer 18 years later is a strange, lonely experience

[MimeParadox]

Well, I guess I’m joining the “died literally one step away from the end of a dungeon” Shiren the Wanderer club. I’d been using clone staffs on the exploding urchins to make it through the final few floors of the Heavenly Lake dungeon (gimmick: dropped items immediately disappear if you’re not inside a shop) through the skin of my teeth. I arrive at the final floor between a bow shooty guy and an urchin, like three steps away from the stairs. I cloned the urchin. Problem one: The bow shooty guys have no problem shooting through me in order to try to get to the person they’re actually aiming at. Problem two: Eventually, the urchin blows up in my face. Problem three: if the enemy you’re trying to turn into a decoy is in water, they are automatically warped out of it, making them disappear and no longer serve as decoys, which is precisely what happened when I tried transforming a second urchin.

[HOBO]

Try not to cry . . . hot young babe you were just peepin’ on gets absolutely wrecked by torture . . .

Liking problematic media rocks, discussing it is cool, I just feel like I am losing it whenever I have to read multiple “well, these elements aren’t as bad as . . .” posts whenever this dude’s shortcomings are brought up. Like, that’s an impulse I have at times too with other artists but…I don’t think it’s a good one.

I am talking about an issue separate from “why would women like X?” here okay, I am talking about how I get so damn irked whenever I gotta see “it’s bad, but not that bad,” as if that really matters. I hate being irked!! Sorry!!

Need to purge this from my system, just need to sloppily, quickly list a bunch of things I don't like about this dude!!

Have also been playing Yakuza 5 and reminiscing about all the times I enjoyed Kiryu getting horny in past games and how much I get a kick out of that while being embarrassed by Kojima’s attempts at offering up some cheesecake and I gotta say it’s largely due to Kojima’s shameless hucksterism, the way he seems to be pandering to (what he believes to be) the worst expectations of his fanbase, how he is still offering up this fan service that his peers have mostly abandoned, how it is almost always unavoidable and I must engage with it, how “this is the young virtual flesh you’ll get to ogle/date/harass/sexually assault” has been part of the hype machine for his games in a way very similar to “Check out this product placement” or “Here’s the Hollywood b-lister Kojima snagged this time!”, the way this pandering rubs up against the bits where he seems to actually be working through some shit and creates some of the most embarrassing scenes I’ve ever seen, ok there’s a lot!! I just needed to get this off my chest!! I usually love wild tonal shifts – half of you have probably heard me blather on about my love of Tezuka’s constant need to undercut any tension with some of the worst jokes in history (or, like, been around me during any kind of serious moment) – but this shit drives me nuts cuz it seems so fucking cynical and maybe there’s value in that for some of you but I hate that shit so much, I hate it with my life.

Also yes Death Stranding is more restrained than the others but big whoop, many of these elements are still there and they still fuckin’ stink, doesn’t change shit.

Thanks I hope I never post about this again!!

[drastic_bb]

having cleared 3-1 and saved sage freke i can trade my tower knight soul for warding! an sl1 character doesnt normally have the magic slots to use it so we’ll unequip the thief ring (hugely useful ofc for managing aggro) and wear the ring that gives you an extra spell slot… ive strugged with old hero bc he can 1-shot an sl1 character easily but with warding on you can take a few hits! he goes down easy this way…

what a big beautiful mothlike creature. we have to kill it…

majula memories… i never actually finished ds2 did i

all we have left is 3-2, 5-2, 1-4, and their attendant archdemons…

pic just in case youve forgotten tower of latria is top to bottom one of the all time coolest videogame levels ever… they all are but this one especially

[Tuxedo]

I’m kind of obsessed about one particular choice in Tactics Ogre (huge spoilers but I’m not spoiler tagging the whole post)

For the majority of the game, Denam the main character has been helped by his sister Catiua

Pictured

But she eventually leaves Denam (or arguably, Denam leaves her) and some guy asks Denam whether, worst comes to worst, he would have the will to fight her if she went in his way. You choose yes/no

Nothing happens for a while until you do eventually meet her again. Now the cutscene is exactly the same no matter which choice you picked, but ironically, if you previously chose you’d fight her, she flees, and if you chose you wouldn’t, she stays in the fight (and if she stays in the fight you could kill her straight away and prove you lied before)

If Catiua survives that encounter, the next cutscene with her has two different choices, and answering « correctly » will result in her joining. She leaves permanently otherwise. But crucially, which answers are « correct » also depend entirely on that first choice earlier on! Like before, nothing else changes about the scene, even the choices are the same.

It’s kind of weird how a choice Denam made when Catiua was absent affects her behavior so much later on, especially when everything else stays the same. It really makes no sense on a surface level. Right? Now I could see two reasonable justifications for it:

1. Denam’s choice has altered his body language and tone in ways that strongly influences Catiua’s choices, but that the player can’t see
2. Your choice for Denam has retroactively shaped his entire past relationship with his sister such that she already knows whether he’d fight her or not, and she reacts accordingly: Flee if she’s afraid of him, stay if she’s not

I’m leaning towards #2 because the two « correct » choice options that manage to recruit her are a bit harsher if you previously said you would fight her before, gentler if you’d said you wouldn’t.
→ she only joins if you pick the choices that are more consistent with Denam’s character (as the player molded him); she’s sensing that he’s being honest with her in that crucial moment

The consequences for her joining or not are equally cool and opaque but this post is already too long, my point is Tactics Ogre rules

[Sykel]

turns out gibbon is like half an hour long so i played through the whole thing and yeah i don’t like it. looks great but i just hated playing it… felt like i had no real control, there was no real flow to the design, it was just really unsatisfying to play. big disappointment. also it runs like ass on the switch

gonna go out and deliberately buy palm oil products out of spite now

[vegetables]

real quick my final note on the whole kojima business- i didn’t mean to indict him as a whole bc of his portrayal of women in his video games. all i was trying to say is that (for me, ldoz) i have reached a point where i’m no longer really interested in exploring his body of work bc what’s there isn’t really interesting to me anymore. i’m not a video game literate enough person (yet!) to really enjoy his game design and i think the stories/ideas he explores are in movies i already like soooo… i’ll just do that instead!

david lynch is way more racist than hideo kojima is anything if u ask me tbhhh…

read this last night and woke up with it on the brain, so i guess i wanna try to talk/think this through out loud. admittedly, my own like for him can be obscuring my perspective on it. but idk, man! i just don’t see it. i get how having very little poc in all of his work can be racist (let’s not forget this real good scene from s3 twin peaks tho EDIT: oops! not original, just listen to the song and imagine a real lovely performance), but i don’t think he thinks about it. not in like that weird “i don’t see color” way, but just like it never crosses his mind to use poc bc i think he shoots from the heart with his stories, if that makes any sense? like… i know what i’m getting into with his work for the most part. he tells pretty squarely, white american stories that (in his minds eye) only take place in white america. i don’t mean that laura palmer couldn’t be poc, but that she exists only as a prom queen in his head. it’s the world he knows best! for better or for worse, i think his art exists solely in the land of lynch.

ofc this assumes that lack of poc is like the crux of the argument. i do think that transcendental meditation teachings he’s such a fan of is like diametrically opposed to any sort of bigotry. but! like i said, i could just not be seeing stuff. anyway, sorry for rambling!!

[vodselbt]

if you haven’t watched that full vid that you linked you have to, it’s not actually the original version, people in the comments are livid, I’m making a fool of myself on the Amtrak laughing

[vegetables]

omg hahaha, my b! d’oh! shoulda checked the length on it

[drastic_bb]

i dont think liking david lynch is Bad or whatever like certainly ive been known to enjoy his work i think mulholland drive is a cool movie and i like twin peaks stuff sometimes… maybe the comparison just comes about cause theyre both named david and started making movies around the same time (and maybe have similar trajectories with digital cameras!) but it feels like the complete opposite of david cronenberg stuff where it’s basically celebratory of how malleable the human body can be whereas i think david lynch thinks thats basically the most disgusting thing in the world (which often takes the form of gawking at characters who just exist to be freakhows!) in a way that feels essentially fascist to me

and i do kind of think the tm stuff is a grift he’s party to whether he personally is aware of that or not

[parker]

it’s insane to me how everyone just settles for david lynch’s “most spiritual movie” eraserhead’s big point being just a “fuck kids lol” joke, which makes no sense in the context of anything else lynch has ever done or said, when actually it’s a movie about not giving in to fear based reactionary impulses when you live in a shithole. eraserhead is about not becoming the guy pacing back and forth in his room looking out the blinds one hand over the speed dial button for the cops the other hand holding a newspaper folded open to the crime section.

remember the part in blue velvet where jefferies meets up with sandy in the diner and tells her about what all he’s been up to and finding out. he mentions he talked to two guys who told him about the murder scene with the drugs downtown etc. anyway, in the script there’s a part where it cuts to jefferies actually talking to the guys and they’re two cringe-ily written black guys. so for having written the scene in the first place but having enough awareness of his limitations or whatnot to not have it in actual film, and given what we know about eraserhead, I have performed the moral calculations and my verdict is: no more racist than any white guy born in america inherently is, slightly less so probably

[Felix]

@drastic_bb

and i do kind of think the tm stuff is a grift he’s party to whether he personally is aware of that or not

I honest to god started doing TM because I watched this video

https://twitter.com/ecto_fun/status/1562182985562177536

and I thought “that’s the mindfulness grift I want, the one with a fan’s panties in his mouth”

and it’s really helped me be calmer and happier! so you can’t put a price on stupidity

[drastic_bb]

you cant deny he really did eat those panties

[vegetables]

ah, man, i don’t gawk. tbh i don’t even think there are freakshow type characters in his work, save the elephant man and i mean goes w/o saying that it’s an indictment of that sort of gawkishness/fetishization- even if it feels a little overwrought with sentimentality at times. i feel like he casts real well and everyone looks and feels like their part. ofc this is hard to say retrospectively bc the magic of movies (esp his) is that they sort of thrust that on you

wrt to the cronenberg vs lynch thing- i dunno. imo, i think that lynch is, if not celebratory, very interested in exploring the malleability of the human spirit which is right down my alley moreso than the body stuff. but admittedly i have my own like body embarrassment issues that i’m trying to work thru (thanks ma and pa!) also! haven’t seen much cronenberg besides videodrome, scanners, and existenz but this is gonna make me watch a whole bunch more

it probably is a grift, but think he definitely full on believes it and it certainly feels less embarrassing and nicer than like being a christian or something

[Tulpa]

Twin Peaks the Return was the most empathetic, humane tv show i had ever seen. His personal shortcomings, to whatever extent they exist, can never lessen how beautiful the return was. I hated the entire yellowface subplot in twin peaks s2, but given the production of that season, I don’t know how much to hold lynch responsible for that. Either way, fwwm and the return absolutely stagger me.

I wish I could feel like that about anything kojima has ever made but kojima works, for me, are always far less than the sum of their parts.

[physical]

i don’t have a good david lynch take but i really appreciate @drastic_bb’s perspective here. dude’s made good movies but he’s still a grouchy old midatlantic white guy, it’s simplistic to suggest his perspective doesn’t have the limits we all get from our upbringings or that audience members further outside his experience might not find as much resonance in his work

[captainlove]

I’m considering getting Elden Ring despite how long and annoying it would be for me to play. I think I’ve realised I just love deciding on a character to play as and crafting them, and then I often feel like the rest of the game is a slog.

I think most Souls games are like this for me and the same is true for tabletop RPGs. I just like imagining and making characters. I should’ve become an artist instead of playing all these games.