What you lose in portability, you gain in playability. Is that a teratoma in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me? Identical twins? More like Schwarzenegger and DeVito.
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Day 4 of Easter's holidays. Guts immolating in vegetable and fruit oat/soya smoothie. Arms still tight and aching from ripping felt off a garden shed yesterday, and sorer still from the strains of several Saber songs: Daft Punk's Aughtie's Techno delights, and Camellia's alien DNA beam screeching modem warble trap. Just about time to be scorched with fresh-ground, blue-mountain coffee and a superheated shower that always ends in a sadomasochistic freezing finish, with at least 30 seconds on each quarter of my body.
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Though symmetrical, the B22 silhouette is fugly. A narrow, chafed neck screams against the severity and violence of the arcing bulbous protrusion hanging below. There’s no girthsome muscle or strength upstream of the electric fire. No gravity-simulated gradient, or natural scrotal resemblance. Just a bulky collar that looks as out of place as a fat Windsor knot on a skinny man’s spread-collar.
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Red is the colour of hatred, anger, power, aggression, adrenaline, worry, jealousy, murder, blood; faux-love, hearts, strawberries, stress, lust; and Mario.
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I lift high my trusty old, cushioned Logitech G Pro X Gaming-headset, stretch wide the supple cups to straddle my massive cranium, and immerse myself in a symphonic choir of strutting saw waves, and synthetic in utero basal…warmth.
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Then the PlayStation 2 landed. An obsidian black boxy monolith, evoking the opposite of fun. No more gonzo journalism, bat shit crazy curves, and see-through peekaboo. This was the dawn of a new era. Of seriousness. Striving for photorealism in textures, lighting technology, and enough polygons to realise the cancelled lad mags advertised promise: A simulacrum of nature’s finest soft protrusions. Why then, did it fail to embrace my attention?
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Quentin Tarantino liked to chop up his movies in the ’90s, and shuffle the scenes so they weren’t in chronological order. We all thought it was very clever, and I’ve just done that here now. Impressed?
Well, neither was I when I slipped into my dirty white Gi and tried to summon a fireball from my palms, solely with willpower and chi.
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143 games. Well, forty years ago, that would be a giant collection. More than a lifetime of enjoyment. Today, with our smoother and faster brains, that’s at least an afternoon’s delight.
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When I became a man again, I set aside childish incremental upgrades and revelled in having a long-lasting relationship with a phone.
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Video games are an abstract medium, with abstract layers. In military shooting games, you’re essentially playing tag. You’re not imagining the pixels and polygons represent a human being with a loving family at home, keenly awaiting their return. There’s no simulation here of people who will mourn their passing at the hands of your virtual gun, or in the case of Takedown, the missile that is your car versus other driver-less cars.
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How deep the sadness scans and scratches. Screaming unheard, and unfired within a choked, dim, and dusty electron gun prison. That beam of potentia. Electro-life. Hulking machines one day extinguished, never to spark again. And then, this tragically abandoned display technology will be lost to the world; forevermore.
Enough of that inevitable grim reality that shall come to pass. There is yet time to savour the final warming embers of this fire. To cherish, and revere! These living museum pieces.
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I still have that C64, and it still works. Occasionally, I will take it down from the loft, fire it up and play some old classics. I have so many cassettes with games that I cannot remember, or were incomprehensible to me as a child. So I try these out too; see what the designer was reaching for; how they managed to embrace and stretch the contsraints of the hardware. High concepts translated into simple games, often wonderfully executed and with timeless gameplay. IK+, here I come again.
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It’s hard for me to stress just how perfect the movement feels. The connection between player, controller and character in this game is ethereal. In marching, attacking, jumping, and dashing backwards to avoid a skeleton’s swipe or the lunging thrust from a hulking armoured guard, it is an immense and tireless pleasure to glide through.
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