media club is dead, long live media club
i'm violently chainsawing it's head off like this mf right cheer
I finished RE4 back in like september, and I was glad i finally made it through it. I think i've started and stopped that game like 80 times througout the years. I had never made it inside of the mansion before until this last playthrough. This is a point i often harp on but I really appreciated the linear, we are just going to tell a story and then fuck off, style. I also played the og one from 2005 which i think is an important thing to delineate, as the remake seems cool but tonally and gameplay wise very fuckin different. People have bitched about the fact that you can't aim and walk at the same time in the OG RE4 but the entire game is also designed around that fact. The enemies all walk slow as dogpiss up to you so you have time to put the big ass laser pointer on their noggin and pull the trigger. I skipped the shooting gallery segments on my playthrough after doing one just because i was far more interested in the actual story than whatever other weird rewards there were.
Lately i'm not one for sidequests or any extraneous bullshit unless it's rewarding in and of itself. The shooting gallery shit only kind of is but just feels like a really weird addition into an otherwise serious(ish i guess) and often fuckin scary game. A lot of the reasons why i put down this game is because with it's limited save points and scarce resources i was terrified i was going to fuck myself and have to redo hours of game progress. I died a lot in this game, mostly to total bullshit, and the checkpoint system is actually pretty generous. As long as you didn't walk into a situation completely fucked and have to reload I think you'd be fine. Towards the end of the game i was pretty flush with ammo which was interesting although I did have like very few healing items. I read on the internet this game has some sort of adaptive difficulty where if you're close to death it will give you healing items or if youre low on ammo it will give you ammo, which definitely helped me actually finish this fuckin game.
le-mao
Another thing about this that was not exactly what it seems is leon himself. I thought leon was like super cool guy, but he is that kind of but also a complete fucking dork. The illusion held up for me until he said "hey it's that dog" and then i completely lost my fuckin shit lol. He says such complete cornball shit through this whole game and it's almost comic relief but somehow not either?? The tone of this game is so fucking weird sometimes but I also think that's what makes it unique. Definitely an aspect of the game I will continue to think about as time goes on.
I haven't played a game from this era in a little bit so I was painfully ripped out of my blissful amnesia of quicktime events. Fuckin quicktime events, dude. I want to go back in time and kick the inventor of dragons lair in the damn taint, because I will go into a cutscene and go "oh sick I can grab a little sip of one of my bevs real quick, as I sometimes engage in homosexual activies and this means I must maintain multiple simultaneous open containers" and then I will get fucking squished by the god damn indiana jones boulder or whatever the fuck. It's fake gameplay and it's bullshit. if you want me to dodge the boulder let me actually dodge the fucking boulder using the buttons you already fucking have for movement. Don't make me mash A like a dickhead to run away from it when there's already a mechanic for fucking running. Either let me do it or show the character doing it so we can fucking move on to something cool that I can actually do and feel control over. Once I got used to that bullshit again, it wasn't that big of a deal, but I would just like to piss on the grave of the quicktime event real quick. Out of all the good shit and lessons we should take from RE4 like good game design with ppl walking slow because u can't move and shoot, unique & memorable, for better or worse, voice acting and or dialog, a narrative story experience w/ a defined beginning and end, we should leave the quick time event in the fucking dust where it belongs.
fuck this boulder specifically
To settle the fuck down and also circle back to my point about not playing side missions and extraneous bullshit, that's kind of one of the reasons why this piece is actually covering 3 media club things instead of one. Media club was a fun experiment but I'm going to end it prematurely without writing a separate piece on nirvana or blast-o. It's somehow become too much work somehow and I think i'm just going to focus on other shit for now. I do still want to do writing pieces like this whenever I feel like it and intend to do at least a handful of writing pieces through a different site i'll introduce you all to when the time comes. I am going to at least sort of cursorily cover nirvana and blast-o just so i can tell myself I did finish media club, even if it's at least on a technicality.
Nirvana (1997), which absolutely requires the date in order for you to find any information on it for obvious reasons, is a lesser known late 90's cyberpunk film, that was shot in italian, and dubbed over in english for me specifically because i don't know italian. It has a bit of gnostic false reality themes, which is a personal favorite of mine, a girl with blue short hair, also a personal favorite of mine, and a part where the main guy does liquid marijuana in his nose, which is not a personal favorite of mine as it has not been invented yet, but i do find the concept of it very silly and entertaining. The movie and it's themes are definitely the type of thing i'd like to highlight more on the next platform i'm going to write for, so i'll save a more in depth analysis for when I do it but i have watched it multiple times and definitely reccomend you watch it yourself. Good luck tracking it down somewhere though lol.
fuck this boulder specifically
Alright blast-o for ps1 is like an old school sort of platformer where you rescue babes and also shoot aliens with your blaster or whatever. wikipedia says that critics said it sucked, but i threw it on the media club list mostly just because i knew it was old enough that people would be able to emulate it on whatever equipment they already had on hand, and also for me to bust out the psVita again. I had a really nice psvita era right around when the pandemic started and missed it and was looking forward to reconnecting w my fav handheld of all time but the shit was just not hitting for me. I blame the game for this, as my vita has never and will never do anything wrong.
Realizing i probably wont play through Blasto has been making me come to terms with the fact that I cannot play every game ever made. Perhaps this just stems from a feeling of overwhelm in general I'm dealing with right now, or maybe my massive fomo complex, but with the just insane amount of media available to experience maybe it's better to not suffer through games that don't particularly interest me too much. I feel like I didn't give it as much of a chance as I did with, say, metroid prime, so maybe i'll revisit it some other day and gleam some sort of useful pattern recognition nugget from it, but for right now i'm just going to move on. It does make me think how when I was a kid before the internet really popped off and you had effectively infinite games, videos, and music at your fingertips you kind of had to just roll with whatever you prepared prior. The unparalleled convenience of instant access is addicting but i think it's much easier to build a deeper relationship with art if the process of engaging with it is approached with some sort of intentionality. This also begets a larger piece for me to add to the pile of youtube videos that are like "woaw i just got an mp3 player and it rox my sox" or whatever.
i got this thing for 40 bucks and it has it's quirks but i'm rly fuckin with it
I'm at the point where I am unfortunately so accustomed to watching random algorithmicly delivered content that to sit down and play a video game, what was once hailed as the alpha and omega of rotting your fucking brain, now feels like viewing a van gogh painting or some other piece of high art. Not to say games can't be art, because they absolutely can, but I'm talking even playing some fucking slop feels more rewarding than the just constant stimulation of whatever shit youtube recommends to me, or god forbid the schedule one digital drug of shortform video platforms. I've also just been watching house md, at varying levels of attention, instead of surfing youtube for hours and that feels like eating a salad for my brain. Algorithimic feeds and not having to actually choose or think about what I consume has made the cognitive load of actually engaging with games as a medium weirdly higher than I think they should be for me, and am looking forward to getting back to where they are ezpz.
Anyway yeah, media club was cool but i'm glad it's over. I'm off to try to do more cooler interesting shit.
