Is Sonic Prime going to be everything that it could be?

 Prime-time worthy?

It's funny considering that I have such a truncated history with the Sonic franchise as a whole, that the majority of my familiarity of the Sonic character was formed through my attachment to ancillary media, à la the Sonic TV shows. Sure, I mean I played Sonic Adventure 1 back in the day, but the 2D games were ancient history by the time I was picking up the controller, and the Sonic community always seemed so cannibalistic, always fighting itself, that it never really appealed to me to become part of all that noise. And yet with that otherwise passing interest, some shade of child me was ecstatic when he heard about the 4kids version of Sonic X that would be coming to my TV screen. It wasn't because I was a fan of the Sonic games in particular, but because I was fans of games in general, and this was the first time I saw the medium I loved coming to the rest of the world in a serious manner. (Of course it was far from the first time this had ever happened, but I'm equating my own perspective for measurement's sake.)

I was there the night Sonic X first launched for us over in England, and I refused to miss a single episode; I loved that show far more than it deserves to be loved for what it was. (Not that it was bad; but it wasn't 'Avatar: The Legend of Aang' or anything.) So inexplicably, for means I don't quite understand myself, Sonic on TV has been important to my entertainment enjoying life. Since then I've looked back and experienced some of his previous outings from the distant hill of retrospect. The original 'Sonic the Hedgehog' from 93 which was... one of the shows ever made. Sonic SatAM (As it's dubbed by the community to differentiate it from the 93 show) which holds easily the best worldbuilding the franchise has had outside the comics. (Haven't read the comics, can't compare them.) 'Sonic Underground', where they turned it into a musical with instruments and Sonic's two surprise siblings and a royal mother who never features and- look it was bad, okay. And then 'Sonic Boom', the show to coincide with the series reboot which was easily the best thing to come out of the whole affair (before both it and the reboot were scrapped) but it was still... very safe, you know?

After all this time and all these reiterations of the Sonic brand, I guess I'm past the point where the novelty of seeing the blue blur on screen is going to excite me. And so I should be, a lot of these shows have been aimed at younger generations than I, who demand less from their entertainment, I know this. But I'm not asking for 'Teen Titans' quality kids showmaking either, (Although I wouldn't begrudge such a high standard being routinely matched) all I want is the potential we all see in the Sonic brand being met- or at least scratched! We talking about a world full with anthropomorphic animals with crazy colours, personalities and powers; there have been dozens of great fictional worlds built from less than that, from Zootopia to Adventure Time to even 'MLP:FIM', according to that show's fanbase. Sonic can facilitate more than the bottom of the barrel, problem-of-the-week style world and storytelling which has become so lame in the modern TV world.

And my intentions are selfish, I admit. I want a Sonic series to create a world for the timeless Sonic characters to inhabit because I want that world to rub off onto the games that are in constant need of it. The Sonic universe, as it exists currently in the games, is contradictory and paperthin at the best of times, flaccid and utterly uninteresting at the worst. Heck, the series can't even decide on what the population of the world makeup is! 'Sonic Forces' makes direct reference to the fact that it's within the same canon as 'Sonic Adventure' with the appearance and affirmative acknowledgement of Chaos. ("Mom says it's my turn to kill chaos") But then if that's true, why the heck are the streets of Sonic Forces' City lined with only animal people when in 'Sonic Adventure' Station Square had primarily human occupants aside from the main cast? Is there some sort of definitive global segregation between the species of humans and humanoid animals? A apartheid analogy so blown up that the disparate races are forbidden to their own separate cities on other continents? And if so, then what of the human cities? We only see Mobians being saved from destruction in Forces, so did the resistance just sit back and watch the Human population of their world be enslaved and/or exterminated by Infinite's armies? Am I thinking about this way too much and the answer is merely that no person on Sonic Team has spent more than 30 minutes on a script? Yes.

I want a better world for Sonic. I want the bones for a great 3D Sonic game somewhere down the line with stakes and consequence and maybe some level design. (Lord knows after 'Forces' the series could do with some level design!) And is Sonic Prime going to help provide those bones in order to grow a working franchise body from? Probably not, but we can lie to ourselves if it makes us feel better. One of the few original shows that Netflix hasn't abruptly cancelled once it realised that it's trajectory of eternal growth seems to be trailing off several years before they expected, Sonic Prime has kept much of the details surrounding it's content infuriatingly secret in the months we've been waiting for the thing. Even as we sit now, with an officially released preview, it's hard to scourge the slightest morsel of substantive knowledge from this crow's feast of a carcass, but if we're to go cadaver diving in order to pre-empt this show than just let me grab my gloves!

Off the bat I'm not hopeful I'll exactly get the dream I was searching for, but the show does look like the game, which is certainly fulfilling someone's fantasy. The checkerboard texture for the dirt of the hills, the floating rings scattered across the land, and a generally one-to-one depiction of 3D era Sonic. (No inexplicable scarf redesign here.) But they've also taken certain liberties here and there which are no doubt going to be hit or miss for certain sectors of the audience. Namely, Sonic's run cycle which turns his legs into a infinity symbol but leaves the top half his body just hanging limply on top, kind of like Big Wheel from 'Robots'. (Never thought I'd unironically be making a 'Robots' reference literally ever, but there we are.) I think it looks kind of stupid.

Sonic is also undergoing a change of the guard in the voicing department, with this new guy, Deven Mack, being another in a long line of voice actors all attempting to perform the same cocksure, attitudinal-but-still-approachable voice. He sounds fine. Right now the only question I have is what is going to be done with this series in order to make it watchable, because honestly it can go any which way. I've stated my presence for at least semi-serialised stories that build a stable world, but I'm not getting that vibe from the little we've seen. (It is a little, I hasten to add. So I could be wrong.) Heck, I don't even know what genre of fan they're appealing to, what with the background and running sprite being indicative of the 2D era and the bigger spikes and green eyes of the Hedgehog from the 3D era. (Generations and Forces taught us well that the two sides of the fandom can never and should never crossover.)

As such I'm left with a prevailing aura of trepidation, but a general idea of 'who knows'. Sega have demonstrated time and time again that they don't know how to reach the Sonic fanbase, and are maybe even a little scared to try, which could be great or terrible for this show. Either Sega are so scared that they've got their reigns all over this show and won't allow it to do anything not in line with the handful of Sonic games that fans haven't decided that they hate yet, or they're too scared to touch the show and we might get someone with a vision guiding the ship. I'm amenable to being treated with a show I don't expect, and as long as it's good, I'll watch. So please be good, Sonic Prime; the Sonic franchise needs a win right now. 

So... Is Deus Ex happening or what?

 I asked for this!

Portentous news, everyone! Square Enix have lost their damn minds and are going through a midlife meltdown, burning all of their hard won reputation in a bonfire, shaving their head into a Mohican, buying a Harley Davidson and becoming a biker bro for the summer. In their self sabotaging insanity, Square sold off a good chunk of their greatest studios and IPs to a decentralised Swedish holding company that has a name which sounds like the enigmatic faceless corporation funding the tyrannical corporate crony badguys in a futuristic dystopian novel. ('Embracer Group', huh? It's not what I would have called you but if that's your name, that's your name.) What this means is, for perhaps the first time in a dark moon, we might be getting to see a follow up to the long dead Deus Ex franchise now that Eidos aren't required to Weekend-at-Bernie's up the Avengers game alongside Crystal Dynamics anymore!

Of course this is a might, wrapped in a maybe, and garnished with a possibly. Unlike with the upcoming Next gen Tomb Raider game which is confirmed to not have been confirmed yet, no one seems to have word on any clandestine Dues Ex work in the background. (People are pretty certain a new Tomb Raider in the works. I thought 'Rise' was supposed to be the tying off for this new story thread but I guess maybe we are going to go the distance and just remake the original games. Atlantis here we come!) Thanks to the the Harlequins over in the joke-of-an-initiative know as the 'Deus Ex Universe' leaving us on part one of a supposed trilogy; 'Mankind Divided' has been the unexpected final note of the franchise since 2016, and I, for one, have been begging for some content.

In the place of Deus Ex, we got ourselves a pretender to the throne claiming to offer all the narrative complexity and campaign choice of that storied franchise but with open world exploration and hookers. (Actually, Human Revolution did have hookers in it if I remember right...) But Cyberpunk 2077 ended up having many more problems on it's plate than just trying to be a solid Deus Ex successor, and in hindsight the two series didn't really share much of a similarity to one another aside from the genre they operated in and the appropriate thematic visuals therein. I didn't get my 'Mankind Transcended'. And so the candle in the window has burnt ever onwards, hopeful that this would be the E3 where- oh, it didn't show up. Maybe this Game Awards woul- nope, not a whisper. How about this E3- nope the show was cancelled. Perhaps the Game Awards this year migh- Nope, no such luck. How much longer is a Deus Ex fan supposed to endure?

So yes; I glad that the augmented Jesus franchise has been emancipated from the mistreating swine over at Square Enix. I'd even call a toast were I the type to drink. Instead I'm one to dream, and today I'm dreaming that the Deus Ex franchise has just been offered an olive branch to come back at it once more, right back onto the saddle! Maybe the series may be a little long-toothed, and the sci-fi futuristic body-modding novelty might be slightly worn and patchy, but give her a chance and the world'll see that she still got some good miles on her; yes she does! Whatsmore, I consider it an actual crime for a franchise as narratively driven as Deus Ex to leave us hanging after part 1 of a major narrative thread! (I mean maybe they technically did it before with 'The Fall', but no one really played that apart from me anyway so it's not really a big loss.)

For those who don't remember, or who's memory has mercifully expunged all refence to the cliffhanger that lingers. 'Deus Ex: Mankind Divided' worked a significant distance to bridging together the Adam Jensen character who we fell in love with in 2011's 'Deus Ex: Human Revolutions' with the conspiracy ridden Nanobot hellscape that Deus Ex 1 portrays. You know, a world where there's a decent chance you actually team up with the illuminati in order to fell an even more secretive clandestine organisation called Majestic 12. (God, I miss how Deus Ex was just a smorgasbord of disparate conspiracy theories chucked into a narrative so haphazardly that you can literally run into a little grey alien and it won't even rank on the top 5 most crazy things you've bumped into that level. Also they aren't real aliens, but that's besides the point.)

Whereas 'Human Revolution' neatly breezed us through a globetrotting conspiracy through its runtime which concluded in a climatic showdown to shape the fabric of society. Mankind Divided took nearly the same amount of time (minus 8-10 hours) in order to tell a tiny story about an, admittedly important, legislative measure that could possibly have had an effect, but we wouldn't get to experience it until the next game. Oh, and we actually ended up becoming unwittingly close with a member of the Illuminati who's daughter JC Denton works with in Deus Ex 1; the very same Illuminati who Adam Jensen is supposed to be hunting down. (Wow, he's really bad at his job.) So the main plot was kind of lacklustre, sure, but what a juicy little cliff to perch us on. A great vista, plenty of scope, just make sure you come back around to pick us up in a timely fashion guys. Guys?

But this goes for more than just finishing the story which Eidos started. (Not to belittle how important finishing that story is. Because it is important) This is about bringing back one of the leaders in clever roleplay game design, intelligent script writing which is always at least a sliver more nuanced then you are lead to believe, and immersive sim mastery. In an age where genre niches are being granted more room than ever to find their audience and sometimes even crossover to the mainstream, it almost seems unfair that a leader in cyberpunk video games should be so utterly overshadowed by a replacement who made such a pig's ear of the core tenants of RPGs that people have forgotten how broad, branching and balanced Deus Ex really was at it's peak. (Human Revolution and Deus 1 are timeless masterpieces.)

Embracer Group could very well be collecting these studies and IPs to be trophies on their shelves, to dangle on a mantlepiece so that they look nice, and then never think about them again. I'm choosing to believe that's not the case, and some of the early snippets of excitement that Embracer have put out seems to imply there's room for franchise exploration. Heck, they celebrate being decentralised so much, which I think means they prefer to go hands off and just let these studios create, rather than try and twist them into supporting dead-end live services for the rest of their lives. So I'm hopeful, for the first time in a long time, that the story of Adam Jensen isn't quite over just yet. And god it feels great to say that!

Fast times at Square Enix High

This is what it looks like to completely freefall

Sometime you'll see an old friend going through a tough time and spiralling into a pit entirely of their own creation, a piteous, upsetting sight as the person you once knew and respected is swallowed up completely leaving a torn doll of a person behind. A good friend might reach out to such a person, stand by them in their time of triumph or maybe just support them through whatever it is their going through in the knowledge that with the loving hand of another you might just ease their burdens. I am not a good friend. But then, Square Enix was never my friend anyway, so the entirely analogy is a bunch of moot hogwash. The point is that Square Enix have done lost their damn minds and I am utterly fascinated by it. You've probably heard the big thing, but I want to cover all of it as quickly as possible, how Square fell from a paragon of game development into a merry-go-round on fire.

Starting on this year, but acknowledge this obvious goes back further, things were definitely up when Square Enix made it abundantly clear that they wanted to take a look at developing for this whole NFT thing that the kids were talking about. I covered this. Matsuda declared in a holiday statement that the terms NFT and Metaverse were not fad-like buzzwords, destined to blow away with the wind, but ultimate paradigm shifts to the way that entertainment operates that he wanted to capitalize on. Now, despite evidence to the contrary, and the dissent of the public they rely on to make a living, Square Enix was set in this path towards doom; but I don't think anyone out there knew quite just how off the deep end Square was ready to dive, else all the gaming giants would've hosted a serious intervention within the week.

Then Square published their new live service money maker alongside their partners at Platinum Games, Babylon's Fall, which is sizing up to be a legendary AAA flop. But not to worry, they've got 'Final Fantasy Origins: Strangers ganging up on Paradise' to make up the difference! Oh, that's one of the worst selling Final Fantasy spin-offs in Japan. To quote a regional museum manger from a show about a mentally ill Egyptian avatar; "It's all been a bit of a struggle for you recently, eh?" What were their most recent titles? Chocobo GP? Yeah, that was a PR disaster, as I've talked about. Triangle Strategy? Wait, that's out already? Crap, I need to pick that up pronto... The 'Legend of Mana' Remake, that was a little underwhelming. Balan's Wonderland? Oh boy, one of the worst professional games of the decade. Marvel's Avengers? A flop. Guardian's of the Galaxy? Underperformed. Deus Ex? Hasn't been seen for over half a decade. Can Square make any good games anymore?

And circling back on that Balan's Wonderland thing for a moment here, can we talk about all the controversy surrounding that title for a moment? Yuji Naka, former lead programmer on the original Sonic the Hedgehog, ex-head of Sonic Team and director of Balan's Wonderland, came out to declare the state of the game was largely due to Square's machinations. They pulled him from the game a handful of months before launch and refused to allow for any internal course correction even when it was abundantly clear that this title was a steaming turd. Not for a smatter of bugs that made it hard to endure, but for a lack of core gameplay mechanics at all. It was a finished game with no interesting gameplay. An utter failure of an entertainment product. And Square Enix wanted to publish that thing! Plus, in doing so they may have forced Yuji Naka into early retirement, so no thanks for that one, Square.

But somehow all of that pales in comparison to the most recent news. You've probably already heard about it: Square Enix is selling off three of it's biggest western studios, with their IPs, for $300 million, a vast underestimation of their combined worth from the eye of the largely amateur public. That's Eidos Montreal, Crystal Dynamics and Square Montreal (but not DONTNOD for some reason) going to someone called Embracer Group who I've never even heard of before but they seem to be a decentralised agency of some sort, it seems like a very hands-off organisation in this field. And with the sales of these studios Square is losing Tomb Raider, Legacy of Kain (which they haven't made a game for in a decade) and Deus Ex. As well as the studios behind those two prospective Marvel titles that Square tried and failed to make a buck on.

And what is the reason behind this surprise sell? Well typically one can only speculate, but Square have very much outed themselves in the documents declaring the sale. They want to free themselves up from the Western market in order to focus on building their blockchain technology. Yes, ladies and gents: they're going full NFT. What we're witnessing is a full psychotic break from Square Enix's leadership. For the past few years Square has had no idea how to make money from Western games, which is why they've sold off for so cheap in the first place. And with this utter shift into downright ignominy, it's looking like Square are charging directly off the cliff and willing to end their whole dominance in the video game market altogether chasing a fruitless pipedream. 

Make no mistake, this is a sacrificing of their Western audience. Square can try and downplay the utmost disgust that the western world has treated NFTs and unwanted blockchain implementation for 'play to earn' but the numbers don't lie. Of the minuscule amount of the population that even engages in crypto currency, less than a percentage of that group also meddles with NFTs. And within that NFT perusing subset, much of the big money going around is just wash trading, so this is a blatantly futureless bubble just waiting to burst in devastating fashion. I'm no great analyst either, I'm just a hobbyist. This infomation is right out there for anyone to read and people do, or they have it read to them, and it fuels their distaste for this sort of practice making Western fans utterly, diametrically, opposed to Square's new direction. But I can only speak of Western markets given my familiarity, what about the East? 

Again I don't know personally, but my limited understanding always seems to assert that Eastern gamers were largely fans of Mobile games that are free-to-play and feature freemium elements. Titles that bleed your wallet with tiny microtransactions here and there, which build up into huge expenditures overtime, but languish as cheap time savers in the moment. NFTs are not microtransactions. They are expensive investment sinks costing anyway from hundreds to thousands of dollars and technological knowhow to even engage with them in the first place. You need to know what the Blockchain is, how to operate a wallet, what gas fees are. Casuals aren't going to be tuned into this world unless it takes over the niche world enough to become mainstream, and the niche world are too clued up on what NFTs really are to except it. The dumb people are too dumb to operate NFTs and the smart people are too smart to fall for it; so who exactly are Square's new target audience?

What we're witnessing could very well be the beginning of the end for Square's leading position in the gaming industry as they chase that White Rabbit all the way down the hole into obscurity. I only pray that some angel investor swoops Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts from their grasp in case they go truly insane and actually sink the company. (Let them keep 'Dragon Quest'; I never could figure out the appeal of that series) Trailblazers and trendsetters can all to often confuse their delusion for pretentions of grandeur and those too timid to stand up and offer genuine logical criticism are doomed to sink and suffer with them. There are plenty of dreamers, but only a handful of revolutionaries in the world, someone needs to teach that lesson to these NFT dreamers so that one day they may finally be able to look at a metal digging instrument with a wooden handle and successfully identify a spade

The Enclave

 The last, best hope

The political landscape of an openworld RPG is, ideally, a murky and muddy plane with no clear heroes or villains. These are games established on the core principal of feeding creativity and ingenuity, afterall, so it would only makes sense that the creators put effort into ensuring that players don't feel goaded into doing this certain path because these are the good guys and those are the bad guys, you want factions and circumstances that whittle down to nuance and context, where players agonize over each choice and decision with the weight of it's consequences leaning on every breath. Fallout has both flirted with this level of complexity and pulled back at least once or twice in every entry. And somehow despite itself, there's always been a clear bad guy, from the Master and his Supermutant army from Fallout 1 to the destructive wave of the deadly scorched in Fallout 76 to the Legion of Fallout New Vegas and the Institute in Fallout 4. But is there any one group that feels like the absolute apex of villainy? A single reoccurring foe who's presence hangs over much of the franchise like the long wings of a stalking hawk? (Apart from China) Well of course, and it would have to be The Enclave.

There are actually two major post apocalyptic factions in the Fallout wasteland that spawned from the remnants of the US military after the Great War, and both seem almost diametrically opposed to one another whenever they've met in the past. The Brotherhood of Steel came from grunts stationed at the Mariposa military base when the bombs went off; The Enclave were born from the top officials in the military and government who has spent the last few decades quietly turning America into a xenophobic military dictatorship prior to The End of the World. The Enclave were technically a pre-war cabal of agents ruling the heights of government from the shadows towards their own vision of doing whatever it takes to 'preserve America'. Make any parallels to real-world conspiracy theories here that you feel are appropriate, I have a feeling such conclusions are encouraged.

When the resource wars against China started to boil over to inevitable world wide devastation, The Enclave foresaw this end and put measures in place to preserve their personnel in both a custom order congressional Fallout bunker curtsey of connections in Vault-Tec, and a off-shore presidential oil rig. Of course, there are likely countless installations such as these scattered across America we've yet to learn about; for example Fallout 76 revealed that there was an entire test-Vault (51) which was under direct control of an Enclave AI, slowly whittling down all the residents through barbaric battle royale free-for-alls. When the ashes of Nuclear Winter started to clear, the Enclave uncoiled from their slumber in order to spread their talon-reach across the wasteland and 'restore America'. 

Before Fallout 4, The Enclave were acknowledged to be the most technologically superior post-war faction in the wastes. Boasting plasma weaponry, power armour and even functioning V-TOL Vertibirds to fly their troops in and out of the field in organised strikes. The Brotherhood also had their own reserve Power Armour which they lorded about in, but theirs was scavenged from Pre-War installations and thus carries the bulk and wear pre-war machinery. The Enclave invented their very own series of Advanced Power Amour after the war using their superior resources, and specifically designed their series of armours to provide superiority over anything that fledging tribes and scatterings of survived society could muster together to oppose them. And what did the Enclave do with this veneer of authority and dominance, along with their anonymity? Simply, they took to kidnapping folks.

President Dick Richardson and Vice President Daniel Bird, adopting meaningless titles from a dead office, led The Enclave to establish themselves in military bases across the West Coast. They hammered home the fact that 'America is back' by trying to cleanse the wasteland of the mutant threat which had infected it, a symptom of their despotic delusion that their standards needed to be enforced upon the wastes in order to save what was left of the world. Thus began the kidnapping and experimentation. Taking recovered samples of The Master's FEV virus and trying to understand it with human test subjects and a complete lack of basic scientific testing principals. Their goal was to create and release a culling virus in order to eliminate those susceptible to mutation, to ensure the purity of the unirradiated human genome. Real 'genocidal' energy coming from those guys, as you can tell.

Of course that was only the plan during their first appearance in the franchise. Everytime the Enclave's presence has wafted into the series is has preceded a megalomaniacal plan to commit some homicidal act 'for the good of America'. And whilst many of their goals might unintentionally align with that other band of power armoured weirdoes, the Brotherhood of Steel, they've gone to all out war against each other over those similarities. Whilst the Brotherhood want to covet technology in order to keep it out of the hands of wastelanders who would abuse it, the Enclave want that same tech in order to exert it's strength over those wastelanders. One sees themselves as scolding parents, the other as domineering parents. Different sides of the same coin, distinguished by both factions' respective perception of their own moral superiority.

At this current point in the series, the Enclave have had many of their key facilities shut down by the various heroes of the franchise, usually through explosive means. Despite the moral aligning of the player, we always end up blowing up Enclave bases, exemplifying and justifying this faction's de facto position as the one enemy of all to everyone in the series. The first Fallout game to truly let us side with the Enclave will also be the first game to have a drastically restructured main narrative dependent on the choices of the player. So we'll certainly have to be on the look out for the Fallout game with the ambition to go that route and push the 'actions have consequences' of the franchise to and beyond its current limits.

Aside from the Institute, the Enclave represents the pinnacle of technology in the wasteland, which makes them a suitably incomparable foe for any a Fallout narrative to weaponise. With Far Harbour's DLC for Fallout 4 making a slight reference to them, it's safe to say their time in the series hasn't ended just yet and we'll likely see a resurgence come Fallout 5 in the far future. My personal dream would be if we saw not just the Enclave return, but maybe hear tell of their counterpart across the world in the post-apocalyptic remains of China, because you know there just has to be one. And then we'd be able to see all the manners in which the Chinese illuminati is comparable but also fundamentally different to what the Enclave has put together, as always has been in the case in the Fallout lore for some reason. Until then, The Enclave will serve the franchise as the bogey-man in the closet always ready to pounce upon the unsuspecting wastes with their next hairbrained scheme of mutant-poisonous drinking water or weaponised Deathclaws.

The New California Republic

Two men shaking hands covered in blood.

In 2161 a wanderer from Vault 13 would leave the comfort of their home to search the wastes. In their journey they happened upon the small town of Shady Sands and ended up assisting when their leader, Aradesh, lost his daughter Tandi when she was captured by a gang called The Khans. (Not to be confused with the New Khans, nor the Great Khans) Through means of their own choosing, the Vault Dweller returned Tandi to her tiny settlement and carried on their way, never realising the immense effect that single act would have on the wastes in the years to come. Tandi and her Father would go on to become leaders in the local community, eventually proposing that surrounding growing settlements should go on to form a republic. Soon five of the surrounding 'states' would band together to be the founders of the New California Republic. 

Aradesh would be the first president of the Republic, but his rule would be overshadowed by his daughter Tandi who is to date the most popular president the faction has ever possessed. Boasting citizens in the hundreds of thousands, the NCR quickly came to establish laws and structure in the image of the old world that had passed, in hopes of recreating some semblance of order in the post world. NCR citizens could expect a play of democracy, doled out by a central government of democratically elected officials as elected by state representatives. A coherent and predictable journey of hierarchy and red tape leading up to the Vice President and President of the Republic who try their best to keep the people fed and the territories expanding. If any post-war faction could be considered a poster child for having 'Old World Blues', it's the government who based their entire lives on pretending they were still living in it.

In 2271 the NCR would strike a unification treaty with the Desert Rangers, incorporating their number into the NCR's own rangers. These Desert Rangers are the ones who's image adorns the iconic 'Fallout: New Vegas' cover art, making that game the only title in the mainline series to date not to feature a generation of Power Armor. Within the lore, the unification of the rangers represents a point at which the NCR adopts the role of warden in the west, putting them on a collision course against anyone with the strength and penchant to challenge a ruling authority. And in a meta sense, the unification could represent the incorporation of Black Isle Studio's 'Wasteland' world into it's the successor series: 'Fallout'. (Given that 'Wasteland' is literally about a band of ramshackle former army engineers who formed a post apocalyptic policing service called 'The Desert Rangers')  

The union wasn't made on a whim. It was done in response to the expanse of the tribal army known as Caesar's Legion which threated to swallow up all the west if left unchecked, with this new treatise the NCR were obliged to face off against them. Having discovered the potential of the still functioning pre-war installation known as Hoover Dam thanks to the efforts of one particularly archival Frumentarii, the Legion knew exactly where they would face off against the one faction with the force to actually stand against them. Thus on the 200th anniversary of the Great War, Caesar's Legion and the NCR clashed over the power-potential of the hydroponic Dam in a conflict that would lock up both nations in a four year long stalemate. (At least four years. It's really up to the player how much time passes before the next battle begins.)

Serving as the murky mirror of the old world, it's only fitting that the structure of the NCR should carry some of the baggage of that old system of governing too. The American government was absurdly corrupt in the years leading up to the Great War, to the point they spawned a splinter cabal of elitist who conspired to preserve themselves when the rest of the world fell to the war they were goading on. The NCR is similarly corrupt, with bureaucrats, lobbyists, water barons and Brahmin tycoons wielding unchecked powers over the basic pauper citizens. The return of paper money almost instantly ushered in an age of rampant capitalistic greed, resurrecting the mistakes and egos of the past and with the memory and evidence of what the last crazed money hungry republic did to it's citizens, there's a lot of independent settlements out there that just want nothing to do with the NCR's expansionism.

Which of course, is the other big problem. The NCR are an ungainly large faction within the wastes, playing ward over far more people than they can comfortable cater for. Seizing upon Hoover Dam was a desperate attempt to secure a renewable source of power for the citizens of a nation that was expanding too fast and thinning it's resources. They depended on their size and apparent security to win over any nation-state they happened across, and the second they hit a wall which wouldn't budge, Robert House's Vegas, they stalled and brought the entire train crashing to a halt. Vegas started to bleed the NCR dry, costing them resources, manpower and money as the NCR tried to hold control over a territory that plain didn't want them. Somewhat similar to the problem plaguing the long-term sustainability of the 'White Legs' of 'Zion National Park', the NCR had grown into a beast that needed to consume to sustain itself. Constant annexation, constant 'unification', everything it could to keep bodies and resources trailing back to the capital and the very second those supply lines ceased being constantly supplemented- the nation threatened to starve.  

Caesar, when pressed to justify his decision to face up against a entity as large and ungainly as the New California Republic, fell back on his belief of a philosophy known as Hegelian Dialectics. Now I'm not exactly a philosophical scholar nor a specialist, and many modern laymen have tried and utterly failed to grasp the sheer basics of what this concept even means. But if we take Caesar's own dumbed down explanation, this concept is about thesis meeting antithesis to create a greater synthesis... or something; I don't exactly get it myself. But by manning his viewpoint, we can see the way in which Caesar sees his Legion as the opposite to the NCR and that by colliding with this equal force the result will be something stronger, a belief correspondent to his core principals that struggle refines and betters man. And does this track? Well the NCR is over extended and wrapped in red tape, whilst the Legion is centralised and efficient. The NCR promotes democratic and personal freedoms, whilst the Legion relies on despotism and societal restrictions. The NCR balk from war and seek the annexation through a show of force rather than a use of it, whilst the Legion try to test their mettle against everyone they can in some twisted game to ascend to their highest form. Perhaps then the NCR was always destined to face the Legion as the Moon to their Sun.

Following the war at the Dam the NCR either annexes Vegas or is sent back to California with their tails between their legs, either way it seems doubtful that their reign is set to be eternal. Perhaps through their very nature the NCR has more years on it than the Legion would, (Afterall, having a system for selecting a presidential successor makes the future a lot more certain) but their own greed for land seems destined to catch up with them sooner or later. The resources of Hoover Dam would alleviate that, but only until they annexed the next giant landmass with millions of citizens and find themselves on the brink of collapse once again. Set yourself up as the old world did, and lead yourself into the all the resource shortage situations that sank their society and it seems like you're just setting yourself up for failure. And like a certain dreadlocked former Legion Spy loved to say: "Who are you, who do not know your history?"

Caesar's Legion

 Divide et Impera

Of the many factions of Fallout lore, the New Vegas introduced 'Caesar's Legion' stands out in particular as one of their number that I find perhaps the most fascinating. Born from the old post apocalyptic trope of a post-world society formed in the image of some pre-industrial civilisation like a Kingdom or Holy Church, Caesar's Legion brings a brutalised, twisted image of the Roman Empire to the harsh lands of the Fallout world under the 'necessary evil' clause. The belief that all which is broken in the world is too burnt up to be put together without an equal force of brute strength to match the cruelty of the new world. Only a bigger monster can tame a world of monsters. And though we've never gotten a chance to actually see what a non-warring Legion-created settlement looks like, there is a sort of Pyrrhic logic to that thesis which blossoms this overwise clearly evil-tipped antagonistic entity into a richer, whilst just as moral bankrupt, society.

To explain the history of the Legion we have to first bring up the concept of 'Tribes' as the Fallout universe understands them. In the West Coast games, (those made by 'Black Isle Studios' and 'Obsidian Games') Tribes are descendants from survivors of the Great War who typically didn't hail from Vaults or Military facilities. Those who weren't in populated cities at the time of the nukes, weren't in a part of an afflicted city which was hit so hard, or survived through some sort of other miraculous means. These are survivors who would have gone the rest of their lives dedicating each moment to making it to the next day in a world gone mad. As these people procreated, they would have lacked the facilities to pass on the wealth of knowledge they had the privilege to enjoy in the civilised world and when they were gone some part of the old world would be gone with them. Fast forward 200 years and some of these decedents have regressed entirely into tribalism, totally removed from the civilised folk who bore them a few generations prior. These tribes are actually quite plentiful up the Western coast and make up much of the human population outside of towns and Raider camps.

By the time of the 2240's, many of these descendant tribes have lost the knowhow of basic technology and sometimes even communication, which is why they make such tempting targets for missionary drives from 'Good Sarmatian' organisations like the educated people of the Followers of the Apocalypse. In 2246 a group of Followers, Edward Swallow, Bill Calhoun, and a physician with no name were dispatched to the Grand Canyon on one such mission, to learn of the cultures there, the languages that they spoke and probably find some way to improve their quality of life knowing that organisation's ethics. Edward's group met up with a Mormon in the area, called Joshua Graham, who knew some of the dialectics and was to teach them, but they didn't go very far before a tribe called the Blackfoots captured and held them all for ransom.

The Blackfoots had guts but they were simple and didn't know how to fight so Edward stepped up to teach them. They and the other Tribes from the canyon would raid each other and pillage to the limited capacity they were custom to, Edward changed that. He taught them tactics, organised them and then led them to utter victory against their weakest rivals. That could have been the end of it, but Edward had another lesson to teach. He asked them to surrender and when they refused he ordered the entire Tribe be killed, woman and children too. He went to the next tribe and ordered they surrendered, when they refused he took one of their envoys to the ruins of the last tribe who denied him and they soon joined up. In the words of Edward himself; "They played at war, raiding each other, a little rape and pillage here, a little ransoming there. I showed them total warfare."

As you can likely surmise, Edward went on to rename himself Caesar, basing his image on the many pre-war books he had read on the Republic of Rome. Joshua Graham became his 'Malpais Legate' and Bill was sent back home with a message "Don't interfere with me." What followed was a war of assimilation as the Legion broke the backs of Tribes and then absorbed their number into their own, erasing their individuality and personal histories on the back of a single vision dedicated in their reverence to their god king, the son of Mars, Caesar. These tribes were re-educated, taught tactics and Latin, rearmed, given American Football gear and spears to emulate old Roman battle dress, and reorganised into Legionaries, Speculatores and Frumentarii.

Caesar believed that the only way to bring together the fractures of society was to obliterate the identity and individuality which has driven them apart for centuries and unite them under a hegemonic, totalitarian, homogenous culture which enforces order and obedience to a higher ideal. One point of praise which is always levelled to the Legion is that their wake establishes undeniable structure on an otherwise wild world; caravaners trust in totally safe trading routes with Legion customs backing society. (And Legion punishments threating those who would dare to break it. Up to and including crucifixion.) Of course, the Legion is also prohibitively backwards, punishing homosexuality with death and refusing to allow Women to serve, mostly enslaving and trading them whilst treating them as little more than breeding stock.

Technology was largely frowned upon by The Legion, to the point where many Legionaries would charge into battle wielding spears and short blades, and subsist themselves on homeopathic healing powder recipes in place of Stimpaks. They shunned performance enhancing chems, preferring instead to train and refine their physical bodies to their utmost peak, and beyond bolt-action rifles and brush guns, they mostly left advanced firearms out of their armoury altogether. Caesar saw the trappings of technology as a crutch for humanity, an artificial back-bone which made society complacent and dependent. His Legion were built on the ideals that suffering and hardship forge the sharpest minds and toughest resolves, and learning to stand on their own feet without RobCo holding them up was a important philosophical step in his vision.

The Legion's greatest strength, it's rigidly centralised command structure, is also it's greatest weakness; as without a clear line of succession the death of Caesar would likely lead to the utter break down of it's ranks. Caesar had no children, and as of the events of New Vegas he was already dying from a brain tumour, which all makes it very hard to rely on the stability of a Legion built wasteland. Although perhaps that too is something that Caesar was trying to overcome when he, after a successful conquest of 87 tribes, bought his armies to Hoover Dam in order to fight the NCR for it's bounty. By breaking the back of the New Californian Republic, maybe Caesar sought to create a legend powerful enough to persist past himself and keep the Legion in line even after his passing. Who could honestly seek to rebel against the largest power in the wastes, afterall? 

After the events of New Vegas, the Legion would go on to either solidify their rule in the west or retreat back to Arizona, but either way their fate is never definitively finalised. An optimist could see this an a potential inroad to future tales about the Legion, perhaps of new upstarts staking their own claims to the throne. It seems that Caesar has forever changed the role and dynamic of tribes within the wastes from tiny reservoirs of  typically disparate local isolationists into a powerforce capable of seizing all the wastes with the right power behind them. A conviction demanding that human strength and numbers can overpower technological superiority when channelled through the right focus, and how that same strength can be corrupt into a particular person's grim vision of a wasteland saved.  

Street Fighter 6 and the art of a bad logo

 You need a new logo? Give me 30 seconds in Adobe...

It's hard to pick out a current, active, and beloved franchise that goes back as far as Street Fighter does. All the way back to the early days in the arcade, defining the competitive fighting genre for decades to come with the introduction of combos in 1991's Street Fighter II, to the absolute apex of the franchise bar none; the Jean Claude Van Damme movie. (Obviously.) It's a franchise with countless entries and a whole much-beloved cross-over sub-franchise with Marvel that I absolutely forgot about until I sat down to write this blog. (To think, only Street Fighter and Fortnite have had the honour of crossing over with Marvel. At least until Kingdom Hearts 4 comes out.) And in all that time never once has anyone really sat back and looked at that largely unmolested series logo. You know, the aggressive font, the loud colours, the uniform layering. I wonder why that is?

"Well" you're probably thinking "Because Street Fighter as a franchise benefits minimally from how the logo is typed out. It's just fodder for the front box, who cares?" And you would be absolutely right in every point. It is just front box fodder and totally inconsequential to what makes a good Street Fighter game, we don't even think about how the logo looks. Unless the game decides to advertise itself and other products during the loading screens between matches, but that's a whole other bag of worms I don't even want to get into right now. But what if we did? What would it take for players to revolt in disgust at the title of the game regardless of whether or not we'd actually seen gameplay? What sort of butchering would need to be done from the design team and who would be insane enough to even attempt to do this? Well the current team helming Street Fighter 6, it would seem; because someone up in the design chair bit the forbidden fruit and shot it right through their intestines onto the marketing slides for all of us to gawk at. Yes, the rumours are true: the Street Fighter 6 logo sucks.

But why does it suck so much? Afterall we've all accepted the fact that a logo is nothing, garnishing on top of the steroid pie. Oh, and Capcom's designers seem to have a fetish for overly beefed-up men, we noticed it in the ugly redesigns of 'Marvel Versus Capcom: Infinite', the hilarious brick-form of Chris in 'Resident Evil: Village' and now the overly muscled Ryu of Street Fighter 6. It's like they hired a child to update all their characters into being the most 'manly' iterations that their underdeveloped minds can conjure up. Maybe that was the start of it, just seeing their deformed Ryu from this trailer put everyone on their guard as they realised "hang on, something's up here!"; only for the title reveal to knock them over and send their world into a tizzy. Yes, I have to say I think the Ryu butchering plays at least 30% of the role when it comes to decipher the fan backlash here. 

Let's ask ourselves for a moment; what is a title supposed to convey? Well on the surface level it has to be eye-catching, stand out on the shelf and against it's peers and look professional enough to subconsciously convince the potential customer that this is a product worth taking seriously, and thus buying. Delve a little bit deeper and we can deduce that the spirit of the game should reflect the choice of colours, sizing and font. The title itself needs to be legible and distinct so that it sticks in the minds of players and, once again, stands out. One could argue that the intricacies of this processes become less important as the series itself grows bigger and the reputation of those games takes on a life of it's own. Call of Duty can happily slap the abbreviation COD on it's box without anyone making the most passing comparison to fish. (Amazingly they never have, but they could) Maybe that exception is what Street Fighter is counting on.

Because as you've likely seen, the Street Fighter 6 logo is... let's say 'minimalist'. Whereas the logo of old was impact-driven, yellow hued with explosive red and white, and typically scratchy and sharp in the tips of each letter; this is a hexagon with the letters 'SF' balanced in it and a slapdash '6' literally plastered in the corner ontop of everything else. There's no denying it; it looks amateur. Graphic designers have come out to draw a comparison between this design and an SF pre-packaged logo on the Adobe Stock Image store which was apparently used as the logo for a French Sci-Fi convention called SF Connexion. You can compare the two logos, remove the 6, and certainly find more than a few similarities.

Of course there are differences, to be sure. The hexagon border has some applied wear and paint smudge to give it a moth-eaten, graffiti look and a few of the uniformly sharp edges of the convention's logo have been smoothed into round curves. Also, the F has been angled downwards in the Street Fighter logo, to further give into the subtle illusion that the logo is embossed or protruding from the middle. It's slight perspective work, very nice. But of course I'm picking at any straw I can find here, the designs are near-identical to one another. The S even features an identical and atypical serif tail in it's type- there's no doubt that one came from the other. If you are a believer, choosing this hill to be your Waterloo, you might have to fall back on the 'it's just an S and an F in a shape; there's only so many ways that configuration of characters can come out, there was bound to be crossover!' Which is true to a point. I think the small details tell a much more intentional story here, and even regardless of intent or not, maybe the generic-nature of the logo is a symptom of the problem!

We'll go back and confer with our stipulations. Is this eye-catching? Not really, it's uniform and bland with a colour scheme of white on grey that might as well melt into the wall. Is it professional? Nope. The design lacks any character or individuality and comes off more as an algorithm generated stock asset- because it pretty much is. Does it reflect the tone of the game? Well that is pretty much a 'wait and see' affair. Street Fighter is usually hand-in-hand with flamboyant and loud stages that take place all across the world and are bathed in explosive, not bloody, violence. This logo tells of a more subdued, realist, street-vibe which is trying to meld with the hip-hop track in the trailer; it certainly isn't indicative of Street Fighter's past, but we'll see how it fares in it's present and future. And is it legible and distinct? Honestly no. The SF abbreviation does not conjure 'Street Fighter' at a glance, the font is a rip-off and if I saw this on a poster I'd have to make the concerted mental leap to associate it with the product. So on nearly every level; I'd call this logo an absolute failure of design and intent.

Now does this mean the game itself is going to suck? No. It probably just means that one of the producers had a kid who wanted to buff up their design portfolio before entering college and so his daddy got him a gig designing for an ultra popular games franchise. That is my best guess for what happened here and I think it's decently believable. We're still in the teaser stages for Street Fighter right now, which means there's plenty of time to quietly shuffle this off and get something more in spirit of the game in. Although, nowadays games companies do have excessively hard times admitting to their mistakes and often posses themselves with a fatalistic hubris that demands they ride each decision until it's bitter demise, so maybe this is the next Street Fighter logo which is going to be printed on all the boxes. If so, then we can chalk this marketing blunder up as another victim of the excessively unnecessary corporate logo redesign age.

Crytpoland has left the building

 My heart weeps.

It is with the most heavy of hearts that I inform you all that the single greatest self-insulting addendum to the NFT crypto ascendency seems to have come to a crashing, and premature, conclusion. What might have once lasted several brilliant months full of that special breed of mockery that's wont to bring an entire community together, has instead capsized in a sudden, seizing, start. We've lost a real one tonight, lads. And with it dies one of the most high-profile face plants that we've seen out of Crypto since, well, the last time some idiot cryptobro tried to seek a mass appeal market. Oh, and the link to gaming is... well I like to think of all NFT negative news as a helpful hand to the gaming market as we all use these disasters as fuel to the flames we erect outside the doors of every two-bit scum-huffing executive who insists on tying our games market up with speculation markets and NFTs. 

If you are unfortunate enough not to remember what I mean when I say 'Cryptoland', it can only be because you haven't been blessed enough to see its big announcement video. Because everyone who has watched that animation can never forget it on account of the fact that Connie comes to visit them in their dreams each and every night, asking them why they haven't bought one of the empty land plots yet. So I'm just going to say 'find a reupload of the video' because I cannot do it justice here. But even then you might be a bit clueless as to what this actually is, so here's a crash course. Cryptoland was a scheme to buy an island in Fiji that would have been converted into an IRL resort paradise for like-minded Crypto-enthusiasts to descend into the utter depths of their hobby like true psychotic masochists until they emerged a mindless husk of catch-phrase spewing 'speculation'. It was also going to be a chance for the lodgings to be sold as NFTs. Literally no reason on earth explains why they needed to be NFTs, but that's pretty much the running gag with all this useless 'innovation', now isn't it?

Cryptoland in particular was utterly doomed to fail. It was obvious from the animated introduction they put together which was just competent enough to where we could it judge as not the work of an actual child (Red Ape Family Episode 1 doesn't even earn that distinction) but plenty bad enough to utterly undermine every single point that Cryptoland was trying to make. Of course, that's implying that the Cryptoland concept wasn't utterly flawed at even a fundamental level, and let me tell you plain how much that isn't true. Even just beneath the skin-crawlingly cringey jokes and the callback memes from 2005, Crytpoland was always a chunk of flotsam steadily and unknowingly drifting towards the rapids of a waterfall from it's inception.

Perhaps the end began before it even began, before they embarrassed themselves in front of the world with the animation seen across the stars. Maybe it was around about the time they spoke about the idea on their white paper (basically a document declaring intent and process so that investments can be made with sound research, as if anyone in the NFT space could be bothered to actually read them) and they outlined the idea of buying an island without disclosing where the several millions needed to do so would come from. The plots of land that they wanted to sell wasn't on their property, and the white paper claimed that the NFT sales wouldn't go towards purchasing the island, so what was their idea? Turns out their idea was 'impress the hell out of everyone with our animation and then angel investors will swoop in to fund all the management stuff.; Which is optimistic to say the least.

Then you have the proposition of the island itself, which the animated advertisement seemed to imply would feature a casino of sorts. It was a pretty significant chunk of the trailer; showcasing a gaudy pyramid with a golden statue of the Bitconncet guy and playing Crazy Frog in the background. (Which showed how the atrocious reference humour was up-to-date enough to note the Crazy Frog NFT trend, but not in-touch enough to remember the subsequent backlash.) And you can probably guess the issue here; gambling is illegal under the jurisdiction that the island would have resided within. Unless these Cryptoland devs were planning to declare the island a sovereign state shorty after purchasing like actual insane people. (I wouldn't put 'anything' out there as 'too crazy' for this team.)

And even after they left their comfortable little echo chamber and faced the mocking masses of the real world, the team slipped further into this shared psychosis with a conspiracy-theory inspired 'investigation' into the real cause of all this sudden backlash. They made a long and ranting post pondering on the nature of those who laughed at them, and pointing out how the people who saw their project seemed to like it before the animation went viral, and after that all they received was mockery and condemnation. 'Coincidence?' they asked, pointing out how several otherwise unrelated internet content creators launched themselves onto the bandwagon despite having little to no contact with the project beforehand. And they're right, none of it was a coincidence. It's more of a 'cause and effect' situation. The video was trash, the idea was laughable, and people like laughing at the misfortune of others so the story spread outside of its usual channels. It's a grim way to look at it, I suppose, but most of comedy is based on laughing at others, the cruelty comes in whether or not the target of the laughs is in on the joke. And Cryptoland was most certainly not in on a single joke.

By the reporting of KiraTV, a content creator who has taken a recent professional interest in the world of Non-fungible scams, the project appears to be in a decline, or at least has entered some sort of hibernation. Their Twitter has been inactive since their attempted exposé, the cryptoland website has disconnected itself from all blockchain activity (which is, you know, kind of fundamental to an idea like this) and the only sale they made was to themselves, which was since refunded. People rushed to defend the strength of this project after they publicly missed their window to buy the island in early January, and now that they have so little credibility that they can't secure investors and no-one, not even the shills of the project, has put up their own money to fund the thing, it seems that Cryptoland is totally dead in the water. Unless...

What if the silence isn't an admittance of defeat, but a commitment to bringing their noses down to the grindstone and putting together all their chips in one last effort? What if, unbeknownst to us all, the cryptoland devs are hard at work on a fool-proof strategy to prove all the haters wrong and switch public opinion back around on their side with the only gambit that can work at this point? What if they're making another animated video? Something so flush with outdated memes, so packed with alien-just-visiting-earth-for-the-first-time tier voice performances, and so stacked with copyrighted songs and covers that they absolutely did not pay rights for, that the community of the internet just has to put their hands together for the sheer gall of it all? What if the Cryptoland people have one last bang to go out on? Why then, if that were the case: I'd say it's all been worth it. Because at the end of the day what is more valuable, than a village clown to entertain the world? Thank you for your sarifice, Cryptoland.

Sonic really isn't having a good Homecoming, is he?

 When will you learn? That you actions- have CONSEQUNECES!

Wow. Sega you really know how to turn a party into a funeral, don't you? One of your most beloved and long-lifed mascots is about to celebrate his anniversary, a grand event that should be dripping with nostalgia, fond memories and the over powering attitude of a little blue hedgehog from the Green Hill zone. This should be a time of happiness! But into the party-hall stumbles uncle Sega, kicking over the coffee table, plastered out of his mind, trying to demand door fees off all the attendees whilst pilfering the gift-table and calling it 'just dues'. It really isn't hard to celebrate one's anniversary, it truly isn't. Most games companies just settle with a plain discount, get people playing the game. Sega have done... pretty much the celestial, intergalactic, opposite of a discount; and in their greed to capitalize off the temporary place of strength that the franchise is currently in, (Which, reminder; is in no way due to their own efforts or talents) they threaten to turn this battered and beleaguered franchise into a laughing stock once again.

When it comes to anniversaries, the classic 're-release your old games with a lick of new paint' is a well-tested successful tactic to score easy points with your fans and the wider gaming community. It plays into the fond memories of the faithful and presents and accessible 'in' to potential newcomers: the best of all worlds. And when the series in question is Sonic, well, then this process becomes even easier thanks to the diligent and excitable fanbase. Just reach out to some of creatives out there and commission them to slap together a remaster of your games and- oh wait, Sega already did that with Sonic Mania, didn't they? Oh, and then Sega management got into some sort of a dispute with the Mania team, causing them to leave the project and costing the creative force behind a potential Mania 2. Is that why we're getting Sonic Origins this year? Is this a hastily slapped together replacement piece to try and fill the void left behind by a proper celebration game? I invented that as idle speculation but now thinking about it, that doesn't actually sound like a total impossibility at all.

What I'm trying to say is that this was an easy 'win'. Making a great anniversary celebration that everyone loves should have been an automatic cakewalk. But then Sega has to turn around and start nickel-and-diming for their re-releases of Classic Sonic games. Really, Sega? Is this how far you've fallen? I've said is before but I can't belabour the point harder, they're literally trying to make us pay for animations in the main menu! So what, does that mean when we start the game Sonic is going to flop out of the logo sash and stare at us dead-eyed, one finger primed for a wagging that never comes? Unless you pre-order, of course! Then you the full disapproving finger wag that we've come to know and confusingly accept as it doesn't really match up with Sonic's core personality in the slightest! And what's more, this little collection is apparently coming in at around the $45 range, just shy of a brand new release. That's not the deluxe version, that's the basic! These games are 30 years old: chill out, Sega!

But what if I told you that this gets worse? What if I revealed that in their infinite lack-of-wisdom; Sega have decided to adopt the lessons of that most cursed of remasters, the 'Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition'? You remember, the single most embarrassing moment in the past ten years for Rockstar; the moment they flogged 'remasters' of their incredibly classic series which were so bad that Rockstar Proper had to dedicate the next 3 months fixing the mess into something of a passable state; within which the games now still reside? Yeah, that's Sega's rolemodel. And we can see this highly insidious inspiration written on the face of their attempt to brute-force interest into this questionable remaster collection with, you guessed it: a full delisting of previously released standalone versions of each game so that they can be flogged in this collection that is, even in its base price, slightly more expensive than the sum of its parts. Oh capitalism, ain't you a peach?

Now on it's face this isn't quite as dire as the GTA Definitive Edition debacle because those games were frankly butchered in their remasters to such a point where they looked like products cooked up for a 'game design' class' group project. Sonic, on the otherhand, is pretty hard to fundamentally screw up like that. Plus, it looks as though some, if not all, of the games in this pack are based on the Christian Whitehead remakes which are, as I've said before, damn near perfect. The only changes from the original to those remakes are HD textures, improvements to world design in order to accommodate cross-character play between games, and the addition of a new, remade, cut level from Sonic 2. So these games in the Origin collection are still fundamentally leagues ahead of the 'Definitive trash' from Rockstar's Grove Street Games; but are they improved enough to warrant the price of a totally new released game just to play. (Ahem, I should say: Just to play with menu animations. Because we all obviously need to pre-order for those animations, that goes without saying...)

The excuses write themselves, because there has actually never been a release of these remade Sonic 1, 2 and CD ports on consoles or PC. Up until now they've only been accessible on the mobile storefront, an oasis of genuine game content stranded in a dead sea of greed-driven time sink abominations of game design. Now they've coming to the PC and that apparently warrants their right to completely replace the Genesis ROMs we've enjoyed up until now. Although is that really necessary? I mean, what makes the Remakes so impressive is their faithfulness to the original Genesis version of the game, with scaled up textures making themselves the cherry topping the trifle, which inherently demonstrates that these iterations of the game offer nothing transformative to the base package. Once again it very much seems like the publishers here are just trying to take away the more cost-effective and easily comparable alternative to try and force buyers their direction, and do I really need to line out why that's wrong?

I'm going to anyway. As a consumer the most powerful tool we have at our disposal to influence the development of the video game market is our ability to choose, with our wallets, what we want to support. Thus it's only fair that to maintain a respectful relationship, developers and publishers need to allow us the right to choose and win over our money through performance and results. Make a better game and I'm going to want to buy it over the inferior game, it's a very simple equation that we're dealing with here. Try to get in the way of that, kill off the competition to funnel attention one way, and suddenly you come across as manipulative and tyrannical. Why am I not allowed to pick up the ROM version of Sonic 3 in order to compare against their remake? If Sega are confident in the product they put together, 20 years after the original, then why do they need to force the hand of the market to make it the only legitimately purchasable product?

Another small cut in this 'Dorian Grey' portrait that represents '30 years of Sonic', and another way that Sega appear to be trying their darn-est to scupper this release. Sonic's brand is enjoying it's recent movie run, not handled by Sega, a recent influx of love for the original games thanks to Mania, not helmed by Sega, and is going to be enjoying a brand new TV show called Sonic Prime at somepoint in the future, not a Sega production. But the brand's name is struggling under the weight of an equal number of screw ups such as the spotty Sonic Forces, a Sega-made game, the near unplayable 'Sonic Colours: Ultimate', another Sega-built product, and now this debacle filled venture, all Sega's making. Why is Sega the worst thing for the Sonic brand right now, and how do we file for legitimate emancipation? Sega really does do what Ninten-don't; because Nintendo couldn't screw up an anniversary this badly in their wildest dreams!

The story of Vault-Tec

 Vault-Tec Calling!

Vault-Tec serves as one of the most recognisable and important symbols of the Fallout Mythos; not only creating the large metal vaults which serves as kicking off points for the majority of the Fallout adventures, but also coining the ever-present 'Vault-boy' marketing mascot who has appeared in every single main-series Fallout game to date and is now a recognisable symbol of the series as a whole. Through Steam his face is literally the default Icon for Fallout Tactics, Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. But despite this important to the Fallout brand, even after 5 mainline entries there are still many mysteries surrounding the structure of this company, what the chief goals were and just who it was they were involved with. Although there are plenty of sources of lore, some of which border on contradictory, and enter destroyed research facilities' worth of speculation.

Vault-Tec famously has no founder yet revealed in the series, which is a huge roadblock when trying to deduce their founding principles, but we do know they've been an active company since at least the 2030's ('Fallout: 76'), decades before the Sino-American conflict which would lead to the disastrous 'Great War'. As such it seems that Vault-Tec was founded as a precautionary measure against the direction America was heading, with it's decades of consumption dragging down the super-power into an impending crisis of scarce resources. ('Fallout 4') We know that Vault-Tec boasted significant ties to the US Government, to the point where the US would eventually rely on Vault-Tec's services in order to construct a Vault specifically to house the unnamed 'Last President of the United States'. (Fallout 2) As such, we might make a solid assumption that the US government themselves might have at least bankrolled this institution into being as a Plan-B, if the desperate grasping measures of 'alternative fuel sources' and 'forced annexation', and eventually 'global war', did not turn out in their favour.

Whatever their origins, Vault-Tec was defined by the production of highly effective, and prohibitively expensive (Fallout 3), underground Fallout Vaults designed not only to resist impending nuclear Armageddon, but to serve as functioning living spaces for the inhabitants to persist within for generations until the radiation levels outside died down enough for those initial resident's descendants to re-enter the atmosphere(Fallout 3). Or at least, this was the supposed purpose that had been fed to public in order to get the rich and influential to sign up for placements in the Vault, the truth would end up being much more insidious and potentially reveal a whole new shade to the Vault-Tec company. Because yes; most all of these Vaults were designed in order to resist the bombs, but most wanted to do far more to their citizens than just keep them safe from the chaotic death of modern society.

Secretly, most of the Vaults actually served as petri-dishes for experiments to be run on their inhabitants, vast, covert, experiments that would play out over the span of decades, and nearly all of which breach the constraints of scientific ethics. Vault 11 featured a sacrificial altar on which Residents were expected to give up their loved ones year after year to study the effects it would have on them as a societal unit, and how long it would take for them to say no ('Fallout: New Vegas'). Vault 111 cryogenically froze their inhabitants without their knowledge in order to study the effects of long-term cryo-stasis (Fallout 4). Or how about when they pumped Vault 92 with constant white noise in order to induce aggression? (Fallout 3) Or dumped a whole mess of Vault-dwellers who were told they were the 'best' and 'brightest' in the country into a plot of the wasteland full to the prim of automatically restocking nuclear missile silos and just waited to see how soon they'd start blowing each other up. (Fallout 76)

This obvious lack of moral operating ethics makes it more than likely that Vault-Tec owned, or at least partially run, by the Enclave. Secretive branch of elitist within the US government who would try to 'take back America' after the bombs fell. This Enclave made use of Vault-Tec facilities in order preserve the upper echelons of government from nuclear fire, and their obsessions with experimentations on human test subjects (Fallout 3) neatly slides into the same sort of wheelhouse as what Vault-Tec themselves were up to. Actually there has never been an explicit canonical link drawn between the Enclave and the management of Vault-Tec, no matter how obvious the connection sounds; so until that changes we just have to except there are two government-tied secretive organisations that treat humanity like silly putty, just with slightly differing approaches. (Kidnapping and experimenting on test subjects is a tad more aggressive on The Enclave's part, I will agree.)

What I always found curious about the whole Vault-Tec concept is thus; if most of these experiments were designed to observe how humans reacted under specified conditions in the context of a nuclear shelter environment, how did the Vault-Tec management expect to collect and make use of this data? Is there some undiscovered observation Vault somewhere full of generational Vault-Tec scientists who have been watching the Vaults secret all these years? Perhaps, but I think the real solution is much more simple. The US government only allowed tensions to spark to the point of nuclear warfare because bad intel gave the brass the impression that a nuclear attack from China would only result in 40% of the country being destroyed, whilst an American retaliation would totally obliterate China. Considering Vault-Tec's ties to the government, and assuming the Enclave funding theory holds water, the Vaults may have been seen as a exploitation measure to conduct unethical experiments on a society of people who thought the world had ended, whilst the US recovers from their disaster on the surface. (Which might also go someway to explain many Vault's super stringent 'don't leave until a specified time frame' rules) Of course, then the world actually ended for real and those plans were sort of scuppered.

One avenue of Vault-Tec, or Vault technology in general, that the series has even flirted with addressing is whether or not China has an equivalent. In the lore there are plenty of examples of China and America trying to ape the other's technology, and they can never perfectly reverse engineer the other's accomplishments. But if China had it's own Vaults, or more likely a different alternative to surviving the nuclear holocaust (like giant rad-free bubble cities or something) then there could be whole societies of Fallout survivors just across the sea which we haven't even begun to explore yet. But whilst the series remains sternly married to Americana, I suppose we never will get to explore this most interesting segment of the Fallout universe.

Vault-Tec is a company of secrets and scandal, buried under wrought-iron, concrete rivers and atomic ash. After 5 Fallout games prominently featuring them, we still don't even have a clear idea of their origins, and so many blank spaces in their motives makes them a curious subject of speculation to this day. I think there's a real space of exploration to be done from this angle of Fallout lore, and I'd love a TV show or webcomic that really fleshed out their role from that fundamental angle we're still missing, to help us frame the bigger picture. Although in that same breath, I acknowledge sometimes the mystery is everything, and never quite knowing why the powers that be decided to clone a guy called Garry 99 times in their Vault (Fallout 3) is better than finding out.

New Vegas had the best DLC

Lets do it again 

A video game has to end at some point. No matter how fun the adventure, how sprawling the world, there has to come a point at which the breadth of creation comes short against the endless desire to explore, because nothing can last forever. At least not in a vacuum. However, we're not always ready to part with the words we love, playing the characters we love and traipsing around a world that we love. And thus these feelings necessitate the call for DLC in our industry. In this post monetisation reactionary world, there has come several cries to do away with all forms of monetisation, from Loot boxes to DLC, but I could not disagree more with that latter sentiment. Because even though sometimes DLC is indeed main game content exorcised in order to be sold on the side of the game, (such as the case was with Mass Effect 3's story-pivotal 'From Ashes' DLC) at other times they have served as great additional adventures that effortlessly take advantage of their status and position to tell a story that they couldn't have if they were just attachments onto the base package. And to champion this, I present 'Fallout: New Vegas'.

'Fallout: New Vegas' cobbled itself together in record time from the remnants of Fallout 3 in order to wow and awe the newly minted 3D Fallout fanbase with an actual branching narrative of differing perspectives and factions where you could define the side you stood for and carve your own path through the story, in ways that Fallout 3 largely lacked. (I mean sure, you could surprise-decide to destroy the Brotherhood at the end of Fallout 3's Broken Steel: but literally why would you do that? There's no logical path to take you there unless you're roleplaying an actual dissociative psychopath.)  It was an elegant thing of checks and balances, answer and response questlines and various independent reputation systems, which chronicled our unique journey through these scorched Mojave wastes. Unfortunately, such a tightly bound narrative made it near impossible to really add anything onto that base game in the form of DLC.

So Obsidian could have gone for totally unrelated side adventures who's sole draw was exploring new lands for a bit, similar to how Fallout 3 acted, and whilst it may have looked like that's exactly what they did initially, those who partook soon discovered that Obsidian were actually planning something far more impressive with New Vegas's DLC suite. Dead Money was the smoking gun. Launching less than 2 months after the drop of the New Vegas main game, Dead Money presented a Spanish-themed resort unlike anything we'd seen from Fallout before, and locked us in a deathly stealth-tipped gauntlet against a deadly cloud, monstrous ghosts and duplicitous teammates. Narratively, the story picked up on a minor mentioned character from the base game and elaborated fully on their fate, not affecting the wider world of the Mojave but still growing upon what New Vegas had established. But it was that ending which stuck with us.

Just when you've reached the climax of your heist, entered into the Sierra Madre and breached it's secrets; the game begins to hint at something more during the last conversations you have with your team. Christine and Elijah hint at their journeys before the Sierra Madre, specifically mentioning never before heard of places like the Big Empty and the storms of The Divide. Each reference would come with a challenge point awarded by the game, ominously called 'Things to Come!'. And just to seal the deal, when you completed the DLC and were rewarded with the customary Fallout 'where are they now?' slideshow, two of the companions reflect on their time with the courier and how they never thought of them again until "(They) heard the legends of the Divide. The Divide, where two messengers, two couriers, fought beneath an ancient flag, at the edge of the world." Now if that's not a cliff-hanger, I don't know what is!

Speculation erupted as to what this could mean, what future adventures this could be referring to, and thanks to the modular nature of DLC, much like a TV show, the community was bought together in the anticipation of trying to decode the clues for where we were going next. With just a few teases, this DLC had established a new continuing narrative, with an endpoint, to fester in the minds of players and take on a life of its own! This narrative didn't have to interact with the war over the Dam, because it hinted at something separate and just as interesting, a personal quest wherein the player themselves is being hunted across DLCs for a reason they don't yet know. What a tool for speculation! For theory crafting! And a way to make us salivate at the mouth for each slowly unpacking snippet of lore thrown our way in the DLCs to come, just so that we could figure out what this Divide even was!

And then we got Honest Hearts, my least favourite of the DLCs. Honest Hearts was a fairly expedient and self contained little story, touching on another briefly mentioned character from the wider world, but not really expanding on the whole 'Battle at the Divide' plot. I mean, there was a 'blink and you'll miss it' mention of some courier working under Caesar's Legion, and I think this might have been the first time it's officially stated that Courier is looking for another courier, presumably you. But we already knew the end goal was going to be us battling under an old world flag at the Divide, nothing new was really granted to us with these lore snippets. Joshua Graham proved a memorable enough character to justify playing the DLC, but it cooled off the burning passion that a lot of fans held for this mystery.

Only to have ourselves puffed up by the bellows during Old World Blues. Some of the silliest content that Fallout has ever enjoyed, Old World Blues took us to a technological crater which housed the various experiments of neurotic super-scientists with their morality dials turned right the way down to zero. Dog brains operating robot guns, disturbing hybrid animal monstrosities, a miniature replica Securitron robot purposefully afflicted with a neurotic obsession for mugs; the creativity of Obsidian really come out for a lot of this insanity. And they did not play it subtle with feeding the wider narrative either. The path carved by Elijah and Cristine is all over this Big MT, as is the influence of this mysterious courier, now officially given the name: Ulysses. (I think I recall that name having been datamined previously, because fans were that obsessed with this whole saga, but this was when we learnt about him officially.)

All of these pieces came together to be the setup for the collision at the end of the final DLC 'The Lonesome Road' and as far as grassroots advertising campaigns go, this was easily one of the most hyped DLC releases I've ever been on the hype train for. In all honesty, Lonesome Road could have been a complete trainwreck and we would have eaten it up. In actuality it ended up being an atypical Fallout experience, similar more to a Half-Life 2 level pack in sections, with quite the subversion of expectations at it's end. At least for me. I was surprised. And did it live up to the 3 DLCs of hype? Well I suppose that is up to you're own tastes, but the journey is what made this count, not the destination. And so I'd argue that for concept, planning and execution; Fallout New Vegas had the best DLC.

120 Hours of Rimworld

 No gods, No masters.

First of all, it might have been about a month after I went the distance and bought it, but Rimworld almost immediately went on sale for what must have been the first time since the conflux of the Earth. So that's just great. (All I need is for the game to be the next free Epic games Store game to complete the 'irony pie'.) So as you may or may not remember, almost a full year ago I picked up a game I had been eyeing from afar for the better part of the last 3 or so years, Rimworld. I penned my thoughts on the game as it was, and you can find those musings here. Today I'm a year frailer, 120 hours wiser, and a couple of complete campaigns through my journey with the game and given how this isn't your typical genre of game I needed an atypical way of categorising my thoughts on it. So here's what I think now that I'm decently familiar with the game and how it works.

Rimworld is an almost entirely complete and functioning framework for telling stories. At it's utmost heart, stripping away all the survivalism, colony management and macabre organ harvesting meta game; (gotta collect all those valuable organs!) this is a game that lives up to it's subtitle as a 'story generator'. Well, okay maybe not 'exactly' and 'entirely' that. The title 'Story Generator' sounds so sterile and functional; like some blocky factory machine operated by one input slot and one output one. Put in request here and get out the story there. Rimworld is designed to allow the player, if they are willing, to create their own stories with narratives, drama, growth and pathos, as long as the player is receptive to doing some of the heavy lifting in their own minds. Which isn't to say the game doesn't support the mind in this endeavour or isn't built for the imagination to take over, the inherently minimalistic visual aesthetic coupled with the modular systems and in-detail dialogue explanations for ever situation from receiving a gunshot wound to falling ill with the cold, is the spark for exactly that level of player extrapolation. Every design decision seems geared to dare you to dream, to experience Rimworld like your own survival TV show that you're directing without a script.

This is personified best in the Storyteller system, which exists in lieu of difficulty modes. I'll admit to not playing around with this too much, as I didn't want to add overwhelming challenge in my journey to master the game systems, but I recognise and understand the premise. By humanising the AI systems that create and dole out simulated events to challenge your colony, the player has a theoretical muse to play off. Everytime you're hit with a raid when half your colony is off doing missions, suffer a cold snap in the middle of an emergency crop-growth season, or experience a solar flare in the winter whilst your best colonists are shacked up in the hospital with hypothermia; you can look upwards at the machinations of Cassandra, or whomever your AI host of choice, as the architect of all your woes. It presents the illusion of deliberation around the random happenstance of your colony management life and serves as the writing to your, otherwise blind, direction.

Characters come with names, histories and quirks that you're encouraged to just endure. These quirks might make some colonists annoying, such as through giving one a short fuse which sets them off at the smallest inconvenience, or overpowered, such as one having a burning passion for crafting when that skill tree is the key to half the midgame development systems. No one pawn is created equal and that's what makes each one of them special and feel alive, even if it's just in your head as you play make believe with their paper dolls. I don't even name my colonists, because I like coming to recognise their computer chosen names and weird pithy monikers with the personality traits that suit them best. I have one doctor who absolutely swears against violence to the point where they won't even pick up a gun? Yeah, I'm going to remember who that is.

I've had a chance to really dive into the extremities of the framework that Rimworld provided by playing around with mods to turn it into the specific sort of game that I would like to play. In this instance: a Star Wars game. Yes, there's enough mods out there to thrown in Star Wars races, factions, armours and droids in a mostly seamless fashion so that you can roleplay a colony of runaway slave Twi'lek's learning to hit back at a galaxy that's wronged them. Only, you know, taking place entirely in the boonies of a smakk single planet. This is where Rimworld shines it's best, in my opinion. Being malleable enough to be moulded into any sort of experience the player wants it to be; even a rags to riches Star Wars adventure.

But even with the years of support and two fleshed out expansions that touch on specific new systems, I still think there's a glaring hole in the core package. For a game that focuses on simulation within your colony to such an extent that they offer three artisanal AI packages for customising that simulation; there's a jarring lack of that depth on the world stage. A huge randomly rendered  map outside of your colony comes littered with factions, outposts and bandit holes, yet each just exist as places to trade and/or forts to conquer. There's little to no simulated autonomy either with or without the player's involvement. And this might be viewed as another avenue for player customisation and I've seen a few mods attempt to create some underlying systems to breath some life into the wider world, but we're talking about fundamental systems that backbone the game here, this really needs baking in from the core developers at a least a basic level in order for creatives to really dig in their nails and have their own brand of fun with it.

It's this alone which stops me short of calling Rimworld a proper Sandbox RPG, which it otherwise fits all the criteria to be. A vast open world fuelled by the conceit of 'be what you want and achieve what you can', RPG-style levelling stats, rarity tiers, simulated economy, it has practically all the trappings; but there's no significant way to change the shape of the world. Take Kenshi. In that game there are several factions, admittedly premade ones, who's dominance around the world is tied to the current political state of the region. Take out a faction by abducting its head, and the world reacts as others seek to take that position and then use their new found strength to force their dominance on others. Sure, these are mostly pre-packaged reactions and Rimworld is invested in trying to be almost entirely simulated, but that is the missing ingredient I think the Rimworld game needs to complete the genre.

I'm quite fond of Rimworld and though I've skipped past the point of 'getting into the lore' and learning the scatters of historical exposition interred inside of esoteric item descriptors and off-game google docs, by making the adventure my own I've still feel developed that deep entrenchment with this world. The expansions are an odd case, I haven't picked any of them up and I don't really feel any want to. Both introduce new systems which is fine on the surface, but whilst the world simulation remains bare-bones they feel somewhat moot and not realised to their fullest potential. Especially the Royalty DLC. What's the point of Royalty without any political power or ramifications? That's small-village despotism at the best. Although don't let my grumblings fool and confuse you; Rimworld is more a treat for what it provides than it is wanting for what it lacks. And still, after hour 120, I feel like there's a bit more to learn until I can call myself an expert. (It might help if I actually finished a colony before growing bored and hopping onto the next one.)