The Patreon Letters - January 13th 2018 (Patreon)

It’s Jackson here, with one of those Patreon letters you’ve heard so much about. Thank you to everyone for being patient with us this month, things are still incredibly tough but we’re moving through it. Em’s busy dealing with the logistics of the death of their father, cleaning out the apartment and various other tasks that are hard enough without losing a loved one. Thank you to everyone who has donated to or shared their gofundme so far, and as ever if you are able to donate or share it any further every little help is appreciated <3.

Meanwhile, on my side of the atlantic, I had a terrifying Doctor’s Appointment yesterday where the guy was like “well you probably don’t have cancer... but we need to run some more tests.” Being as I am someone who has an anxiety attack when the Bus is late, I’ve been taking this non-news well and having an endless panic attack in my room for the last twenty four hours. I should be fine. I’m probably fine. Oh god.

Anyway, that’s the state of things right now. Things are scary, and bad, and while we plan to be back in business soon, we don’t really know when soon is. I should be recording Amory Score today though. Please be extremely excited, because it’s time for Good Apollo.

Now that that’s all taken care of, here’s my #takes on some things I’ve watched and played recently. There’s not been much because it’s been hard to find a spare moment but, we got something. Here you go.

Tangerine

My first Essay for my final year of Film Studies was on, of all things, trans representation in cinema. It was a weird essay to write because the assigned question was actually on “the transgendered body,” because nobody has taken the time to sit my lecturer down and explain to her that you can’t fucking say that anymore, oh god.

Anyway this essay meant watching some bad bad movies, like The Danish Girl, which somehow sucks even more than you would think it does. The ending of the movie is like a sketch from Tropic Thunder. I’m not even exaggerating, it is hell on earth.

But in addition to some bad films, I finally used this as an excuse to watch Tangerine, which honestly feels like the first actually great film I’ve seen in months. I do like movies after all! I do! Hooray!

Tangerine is absolutely hilarious and moves at a breakneck pace. After suffering through a bunch of movies for school that were trying hard to be capital I Important it was the most refreshing to just watch something concerned with a sense of place and a sense of character. There’s an early scene where this guy underpays Alexandra just to watch him jerk off, intercut with Sin-Dee loudly barging into every room she can find and looking for Chester (it’s a long story). Every so often it cuts back to Alexandra, who with every shot is pushing how hard you can Jim Halper without technically breaking into the fourth wall as this guy gives the most pathetic wank of his life. It’s hilarious.

I don’t really want to say more mostly because I think you should watch it. Films are good and it turns out that doing Film Studies is a really easy way to forget that. I’m only a few months from being done, and we have plans to watch more movies this year, so I’m very, very excited.

Never Stop Sneakin’

I like Metal Gear Solid.

I know this might come as a shock to some of you, but it is an opinion I hold that Metal Gear Solid is an incredible series, and I spend my every waking hour just desperately looking for something to come along and capture just what makes it so good. So... what is that?

Metal Gear, culturally speaking, has somewhat of a bad reputation. By which I mean, the reputation it has does a terrible job of telling you what it is and why someone would actually enjoy it. Mario jumps. Sonic goes fast. Samus gets a missile, the rocket can open the purple doors. These things are known. It is very easy to look at a Mario game and immediately identify its Mario-ness. Not so with Metal Gear. 

This is partially because its defining characteristic, the idea of your power growing in tandem with your knowledge of the space, a true infiltration mission, hasn’t been present in a Metal Gear game since 2004. And the so the series’ identity has come to be defined by the superficial, by the craziness of its lore and its obsession with superfluous mechanical details. There’s a fucking whale.

It was only a matter of time before someone released an indie game with blocky PS1 graphics and a top down perspective, planting its flag on going back to the old Metal Gear. I suppose it was inevitable that game would also be a roguelike.

Never Stop Sneakin’ is lovingly made, it’s a broad parody (someone’s kidnapped all the presidents!) but it’s actually funny in ways I didn’t expect, and the cutscenes have some choice details - the fake Colonel catching the coffee cup is spot on. The look nails what you remember about MGS1 while adding in modern lighting.  But then the game itself is an endless series of procedurally generated levels, and a control scheme so simple it allows no room for experimentation.

I can see the logic behind these decisions. First off, MGS1 has about seven to ten actual stealth rooms in the whole game. It’s about eight hours long. Designing a stealth encounter in this style takes time and if you wanted to emulate that you’d be an idiot who was gonna lose all their money. Getting close enough with procedural generation, however, means your game can be more than an hour long. It’s a no brainer.

The simplified control scheme - all you do is move your character and every action is contextual - also makes sense from the idea of streamlining stealth to its core. Everything is about position, and there’s no denying a certain satisfaction when you line up behind multiple guards and turrets and find the correct path to take them all out in one smooth movement. But it moves so fast, and the endless treadmill of near identical levels is so long that the tension between these two decisions essentially tears the game apart.

I’m 10% in and I think I’m done. It’s not bad, but it gets repetitive so fast and the loop isn’t enough to keep me going.  I recognize that I'm probably never gonna get a game that truly captures what I love about MGS ever again, because they're so damn wasteful and metroidvanias scratch the same itch without being so needlessly extra. But I'll still try every one and see how close it gets.

And that's it for now. Thanks for reading, I'll see you next week when - knock on wood - some new disaster hasn't derailed everything.

Jackson <3