On Plagiarism, IGN's Filip Miucin, and Loving to Write

This past week there were two huge stories in the video game world. One was a damning piece by Kotaku's Cecilia D'Anastasio 'Inside the Culture of Sexism At Riot Games'. This is everything that journalism should be: cutting, exhaustively researched, and deeply important. I feel a natural tendency to support fellow writers in this age of "fuck the media" and "choose your own reality". GamerGate loves to target Kotaku in particular as some conspiracy house creating nonsensical hot takes. But this article is definitive proof they're wrong: Kotaku is doing some of the best work covering this industry. Great job, I'm actually jealous of it.

The other big story is a much more unfortunate one, and that's this shit with IGN. That's the one I'm devoting this entire post to. I just wanted to bring up the Kotaku article because not every journalist is the newly unemployed former-IGN Nintendo Editor, Filip Miucin. Miucin in a single review made IGN look bad and ruined his career forever. I've been obsessing about this case for the past few days, which you'd know if you follow my twitter. As somebody who likes writing, would die to have Miucin's former job, and wants gaming media to be improve, Miucin's stupidity (there's no other word for it) is deeply disappointing to me.

My first reaction to the accusations that an IGN Editor stole a Dead Cells review was to assume it was bullshit. It made no sense to me. The original review was written by a very small Youtube channel called Boomstick Gaming. Not knowing who they were I could see this as being some smear piece or just somebody misunderstanding the situation. As I said, I want to support my fellow writers and wanted to give Miucin the benefit of the doubt. Games media is accused of all kinds of things, and we need to band together. I watched Boomstick's video and for most of it still thought this was a mistake. A lot of the sentences were just standard things you write while making a basic review. However by the end of Boomstick's video it was clear this was not a coincidence. This was a big problem.

The Oakland Renaissance: Sorry to Bother You & Blindspotting

I have never been to Oakland, California. It's a city I know mostly for being the home of the Raiders, a mob of post-apocalyptic Mad Max mutants who are an occasional threat to my beloved Denver Broncos. But in 2018, suddenly Oakland has become more than a hated football rival. It's now one of the capitals of the film world. Oakland-native Ryan Coogler rewarded his hometown with a major subplot in this winter's smash hit, Black Panther. Now in summer you can see two of the best movies of 2018, both created by Oaklanders, shot in Oakland, and set in Oakland, Sorry to Bother You and Blindspotting.

Blindspotting is a dramatic commentary on the city's demographics. Its heroes are struggling with the very old problem of police violence while confronting a new one with gentrification and hipster imperialism. Sorry to Bother You though is a surreal SciFi comedy in an all-out war against capitalism. This Oakland is an arch satire of a real thing, owing a lot to RoboCop. However, don't let Sorry to Bother You's absurdist trappings fool you into thinking it doesn't have a lot of real shit on its mind. Oakland in 2018 is swimming in conflicts between class, race, and culture. Its residents, unsurprisingly, have a lot to say.

I'm from Jersey, about as far from Oakland as you can go without getting wet. Yet what that city is going through doesn't seem very far away at all to me. I've seen fancy condo skyscrapers bulldoze their way through Hudson County. PATH station ads promise a glitzy lifestyle in these soaring palaces. It's nice to be able to park in Jersey City without worrying about my car getting stolen. But this isn't Jersey City anymore. There's a whole different city of steel and wealth that took its place. Newport in the course of just my lifespan was colonized and completely rebuilt for 21st century yuppies. So when the people of Oakland worry about their losing their identity, I know the feeling. Oaklanders, however, are finally getting heard in 2018, and that's what this Renaissance is all about.

Super Mario 3D World vs Super Mario Odyssey

Of all the 3D Mario games, the two that seem the most different are Super Mario 3D World and its successor, Super Mario Odyssey. 3D World is a level-based platformer with a deep love for nostalgia. Odyssey takes Mario to new places with vast open worlds built around hunting for Moons. One is about restricted pre-designed experiences, the other is all about the freedom to make your own adventure. Nintendo shifted gears completely in design philosophy for Mario in just four years.

On paper at least, last year's Super Mario Odyssey seems like the superior game. It's a big, exciting new direction for this series. Mario is traveling the world, interacting with weird new art styles, and he can wear a sombrero. It's a return to that now-classic Super Mario 64 and Sunshine structure, where the entire game is one big scavenger hunt full of things to discover. Only that scavenger hunt is now on the Switch, so Mario's environment looks more beautiful than ever. The various locales are brimming with unique textures and personality at a scale never before attempted. Odyssey should be everything I could ask for from a new Mario game. In comparison, 2013's Super Mario 3D World should be conservative, retro, and dull.

Clearly then, Odyssey is the bright future for this series and 3D World is your grandmother's Mario. Yet between the two games, I prefer Super Mario 3D World. Twist ending: I was Grandma the whole time!

Mario Odyssey has the most potential between the two games but the worse execution. I'll never not love the idea of Mario wearing a sombrero so Odyssey is still a very good game. Yet it tries to be everything at once with nearly 1000 Moons and doesn't accomplish any one thing particularly well. Meanwhile Super Mario 3D World bleeds every drop of imagination and possibility from its small slice of gameplay. That title knows exactly what it wants to do and does it brilliantly. Odyssey is a decent collectathon, however 3D World is a near-perfect platformer. Grandma knows what she's talking about sometimes.

The North Korean Summit: A Fantasy of War and Peace

One thing I love about E3 is that the sheer volume of gaming news, gaming discussion, and gaming debates drowns out the rest of the world. I could finally ignore all the endless pro-Trump and anti-Trump drumbeats that pollute this planet. Instead I could focus on stupid video games. Children getting thrown into cages? Sorry, I need to think up my Beyond Good and Evil 2 take. Concentration camps at the border? That sure sucks, but so did Square Enix's press conference. My greatest horrors of anti-immigration racism coming true? ...That Tunic game looks cute though! Sadly now it is Tuesday, the distracting circus of hype is over, and the gaming press is currently on a week-long hangover. Time to talk about that other, less fun media circus from last week.

Last Tuesday Donald Trump signed a thing with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I call it a "thing" because I don't still don't know what it was. The whole affair sure looked like a major peace accord. There was a piece of paper with signatures on it. News people took pictures of two world leaders shaking hands. Somebody even cooked up a fake trailer. In some ways, the Singapore meeting was the ultimate E3 press conference. It was a big self-congratulations full of pomp and glitz, with no real substance at all.

I know this post might seem hypocritical considering what I wrote about North Korea last year. In case you've forgotten: I said we should back down because Trump's threats were stupid and dangerous. So from that perspective, I'm fully behind the president meeting with Kim Jong Un, shaking his hand, and turning down the heat. I'm glad he's defusing the very tensions he stirred up, but I still have to ask: "what does this mean?" I can't say "oh, Trump did something good" before I know what he did. Especially when I suspect the entire thing was a sham from the start. [Insert obvious Final Fantasy VII Remake joke here.]

E3 2018 Games I Want to Talk About

E3 2018 was a really good E3. If you like games, you probably now have at least half a dozen must-buy titles. I watched the press conferences while doing some mental accounting and realized that this show will probably cost my future self somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars in video games. All indications are that 2019 is going to be a ridiculous year in gaming, as good as 2017 if not better.

As for 2018... well, it's mostly a holding pattern at this point. At least I have time to go back and play Super Mario Odyssey now. It seems like the gaming industry fled 2018 en mass so now the first three months of 2019 will be jam-packed with electronic riches beyond your wildest imagination. Or possibly it will all get delayed to 2020. Take your time, video games, I still need to play Nioh.

What's really crazy is that by usual standards, E3 2018 should have sucked. Square Enix embarrassed themselves by coming to the show empty-handed. I can name more games that Nintendo should have shown than games Nintendo did show. (Where is Yoshi?? I'm angrier about Yoshi missing E3 than Final Fantasy VII.) Even Sony's conference was pretty bleh. And EA was EA, as usual. Yet there's still mountains of games. E3 2018 is like the greatest Christmas toy catalogue of all time. I have no idea how I'll be able to cover everything I want to talk about. So strap in, because there are thousands of words coming.

Solo Makes Star Wars Unimportant - And Fun

I was not excited for Solo: A Star Wars Story. The Last Jedi exhausted me to a degree I never thought possible with this franchise. I wasn't mad. I was tired of it all. The Prequels ignited a burning inferno of passionate rage in me that lasted over a decade. The Last Jedi quieted those embers to dust and smoke. The problem is very simple: Star Wars is stuck up its own ass! The franchise has become this recursive loop of redefining its legacy over and over. So now it seems to have no legacy. When a work of art stops talking about anything other than itself, it becomes boring. We've spent so much time arguing about why Star Wars is so important that we missed the easy truth: Star Wars isn't important. It never was.

The last thing I want to write is another post about "what even is Star Wars, man?". I've written that same shit like ten times now, and I'm bored. The obsession around keeping the movies true to their heritage has poisoned this Disney reboot. Disney has been painfully insecure with these new movies and it makes everything awkward. I even liked what The Last Jedi had to say about the fandom and (again) the legacy of this series. But I don't see Star Wars for a cultural essay. The new Star Wars movies have put so much energy into proving that they are Star Wars that they didn't have time to actually be Star Wars! So how come Solo makes it all look so easy?

Solo is not a movie that needed to be made. Nobody needs to know how Han Solo met Chewbacca or won the Millenium Falcon or even what the Kessel Run really was. It's a fan service prequel in the most blatant and pandering way. Maybe for that reason Solo is the most relaxed and lightest Star Wars movie in a long time. It knows what it is, and it isn't high art. It's a SciFi heist flick with a touch of old Westerns and a singing space fish. That isn't a cultural touchstone that will define a generation, and it shouldn't be. Because the only thing Star Wars needs to be is fun. Not important. Fun.

God of War Needs More Hugs

God of War (2018) is doing something that a lot of people refuse to ever do: take stock of itself and its problematic past. The game never straight-up repudiates the old God of War series, but it definitely seems embarrassed by its previous entries. Kratos in 2018 is a quiet, depressed man, where the Spartan in 2005 was a screaming asshole. New God of War wants to be subtle, emotionally complex, and to push its character into being a fully dimensional human being. They even removed the sex minigames. I respect the goals here. Maybe we could try to fix Duke Nukem or Shadow the Hedgehog next?

The problem for me though is that Sony Santa Monica still wants Kratos to be "cool". This is the character's origins conflicting with the new game's goals. In 2005, all Kratos needed to be was an angry avatar of teenage boy id. You pressed Circle and Kratos made things dead in spectacular ways. Or he banged naked chicks with repulsive low-poly boobs. He wasn't a real person and didn't need to be one. In 2018, we expect more from our gaming protagonists, so Kratos can't "just be angry". He's got a son now, he has responsibilities. Kratos needs to get the kid dressed and off to school and maybe later, if he's still got energy, our war god can slay a mythological creature now or then. However no matter how much of a real person Kratos can become, he still has to be cool. And nothing is cooler, apparently, than emotional abuse.

In God of War I really enjoyed the gameplay. I appreciate the reasonably-sized world map. I liked the bosses, especially the Valkyrie superbosses which are the best part of an already good game. The whole style is like that bloodier Zelda that I always wanted the God of War games to be in the first place. (The loot and crafting systems however can go die in Ragnarok.) But I hated Kratos. Kratos starts this game sealed-up in his own edgelord bullshit, unable to even pat his son, Atreus (AKA: "BOY!") on the back. He can't apologize, he can't really open up, and he doesn't "do hugs". He's stuck as a bitter authoritarian, unable to crack a smile. Kratos continues to act out this stunted ultra-masculine fantasy, even as this behavior is clearly toxic.

God of War (2018) tries to make Kratos a good father, and it fails. Because it couldn't make him a good mother.

Why I Deleted Bloodborne

I am addicted to Bloodborne. I also hate Bloodborne.

Since Dark Souls and Bloodborne came around, the games industry found the courage to be hard again, to be niche again, and to be weird again. Our 2011 Zelda was Skyward Sword, our 2017 Zelda was Breath of the Wild. One of those games takes an hour to get started, has a trillion tutorials, and sticks you with an annoying helper who will repeat all instructions twice. The new game just dumps you naked and clueless in the woods and is so much better for it. I never directly played a From Software game before, but I have played games with Dark Souls influence and loved them. Shovel Knight and The Witcher 3 are two of the best games of the decade, and Hollow Knight made my Top 5 in 2017. I am grateful to the Soulsbornes of this world.

And yet, I've never liked what I've seen in Dark Souls. It is an entirely personal problem, I admit. I don't know how useful this post is going to be for anybody other than myself. There's a blank misery to these games that really puts me off. A lot of it is the color pallet. Dark Souls games are gray and muted, and Bloodborne has one color: brown. The game worlds are truly joyless. The developers do not create characters or really much of a story, so there's no personal connection I can draw from whatever I'm doing. Everything is doomed anyway it seems, so why should I bother? Plus the difficulty is "fair" but also incredibly cruel. I said before in my Celeste post that I have a low tolerance for cruelty. I like a proper testicle cruncher of a hard game, but not one that's actively against me.

So having played Bloodborne now (thanks to it being free with PS+ in March) my opinion is unchanged. I still don't see the charm to the atmosphere or the design. Bloodborne has no story progression and no arc, everything looks the same no matter where I go. There's incredibly vague lore, but since this setting is full of jerks who hate me, I don't care. Youtubers make hour long posts to decipher the lore, but lore only matters if I care. The mystery is just a mystery for its own sake, not any kind of depth. Hollow Knight was dark but full of cutesy bug people and friendly NPCs with personality. Bloodborne has one personality: deathly dark death dark, which then mutates into deathly dark death dark but now with an H.P. Lovecraft theme.

However the combat is good, which only tortures me more. Because I haven't mentioned the real problem here: the grind.

Beauty, Terror, and Making Sense of Annihilation

(BIG Spoilers for the movie obviously.)

Annihilation is a SciFi film that is as terrifying as it is beautiful. The film is something along the lines of Andrei Tarkovsky meets John Carpenter - The Thing meets Solaris*. It has all the trappings of a B-horror movie complete with expendable cast members and freaky monsters. But then it evolves into this surreal avant-garde showstopper of a finale. The movie has a folksy acoustic guitar soundtrack that slowly mutates into a bellowing synth nightmare. What you're left with is not the movie you started with. Annihilation is the kind of experience that shoves your brain into a blender and asks you to pull your mind back together again. It's weird on an awesome scale.

But what is Annihilation? That's... gonna take some writing. I can tell you up front that I love this movie. 2018 is still fairly young, but this is probably Movie of the Year already. However, I would not fault you for missing the message or maybe concluding that there isn't one at all. Annihilation doesn't have a villain with a goal or much of a shape. And unlike most SciFi films it doesn't have an easy morale like "robot slavery is bad" or "global warming will kill your children". Even a few critics like Inkoo Kang of Slate seemed totally lost at the end of Annihilation. She dismissed it as "just a mindscrew". Well, I think it's quite a bit more than mindscrew for mindscrew's own sake.

I imagine in a few decades, Annihilation is going to be one of those "pet theory" movies. The Shining is probably the best example of that kind of thing, as seen in the bizarre documentary, Room 234. The Shining is basically just a haunted hotel movie set around a badly dysfunctional family. But throw in some Stanley Kubrick touches and some details that don't add up and then you have legions of fans obsessing over it, seeing everything and anything. The Shining could be about Indian genocide or faking the Moon Landing or a really great flapjack recipe. Annihilation once its been dissected can also be about anything you want. The question is, what do I see in it?

Celeste Is a Two-Faced Bitch of a Platformer (That I Still Love)

Celeste tries to be different from the usual ultra-hard platformer. Games like I Wanna Be the Guy or Kaizo Mario World are pure sadism. The developers went out of their way to be as unfair and cruel as possible. They're not games you're supposed to beat, they're games that are supposed to troll you. The devs aren't making an experience you see to the end, they're bullies making a practical joke. Every time the apples in I Wanna Be the Guy fly upward to kill me without warning, I can hear in my mind Nelson Muntz guffawing at my humiliation. Celeste, however, is the rare "splatformer" or Kaizu game that isn't laughing at you. Or so it seems.

For that reason, I think Celeste is the only one of these games I actually like. Things like the legendarily hard Mario Maker levels are all difficulty and nothing else. Celeste is only 70% gaming torture. The other 30% is a surprisingly contemplative and personal journey through a young woman's anxieties. No surprise it's friendly, this game is proudly Canadian. The main story mode is tough, but never merciless, and the atmosphere is inviting instead of mocking. The world is bright and the characters are all decent people. Also annoying buttrock music doesn't blare every time you die. Nobody paints the walls in your blood like Super Meat Boy does.

Celeste seems like it doesn't want to be cruel, it wants to be therapeutic. The main character, Madeline, is only climbing the titular Mt. Celeste to overcome her depression. There are many spikes and pits, but no enemies - that is other than the demons she brings with her. For that reason the game doesn't say "haha, fooled you" it says "come on, don't give up". Celeste even has an Assist Mode where you can slow down time, give yourself infinite boosts, and if you need, turn on invincibility. The devs wrote no shame into that mode - you even earn full Trophies like you would on Normal. All this makes for a hyper-challenging platformer that for once feels like it is on your side.

That is, until you reach the ultimate bonus stages, where the therapy aspect falls apart and the true evil reveals itself.

The Last Jedi and The State of Star Wars

I recently wrote up a piece for Fandom which was actually positive of The Last Jedi. But I kept the scope limited and that was by no means a proper review. I didn't write a proper review because I was more confused than I came off in that piece. I stand by every word, but don't assume that because I liked what director Rian Johnson was going for that he actually succeeded.

The Last Jedi is a strange kind of movie for me. It's easy to praise a great movie and easy to mock a terrible one, it's much harder to review something that's in the middle. All around on an intellectual level I think The Last Jedi was doing the right thing. But in terms of execution? I don't want to watch this movie again.

Now because this is 2017 2018 and the entire universe has gone to shit, The Last Jedi has somehow ended up as yet another front of the endless culture wars that have taken over the entire internet. Men's "rights" "activists" recut the movie without women and random people on Twitter decided to share National Review articles to prove how I was wrong. (And if my take on Star Wars happens to put me on whatever side The National Review is not on, then all the better.) I care deeply about Star Wars but some care a lot more, I guess. It almost makes me want to like The Last Jedi more because a lot of the people who hate it are /r/KotakuInAction scum. But sadly, while those people are wrong, they're less wrong than they usually are. They just hate a mediocre movie for the wrong reasons.

The fact that The Last Jedi blew up into an exhausting GamerGate flamewar exactly the problem. Star Wars isn't fun anymore. It can't be. We won't let it be fun. I said that The Last Jedi might have given the series a chance to live again in my piece. A month later, I think I was wrong. Star Wars is dead and we killed it. Not just the fanboys who can't stand a female Jedi or losing Luke, but you and me. We all killed it. Disney makes The Force Awakens that is pure fanservice from top to bottom. Then we complain that it's too similar to the past. Then they make The Last Jedi which wants to radically remake the formula. Then fans hate it more. Star Wars is an unsolvable problem.

The Best Movies of 2017

I'm only twenty-seven (as of just this Thursday) and yet I feel like I've already seen everything. Actually I feel like I've seen everything three times. 2017 was the I finally had enough of blockbusters. There was a new Fast and Furious last year, there was a new Transformers, there was a new Pirates of the Caribbean. And I just couldn't. It was not mere dislike, dislike takes emotion and effort. I was done. I had nothing left to give for huge Hollywood franchises. When Justice League came out my disinterest was so severe I skipped an episode of The Drew Reviews, a really great movie podcast produced by two colleagues of mine. I didn't even have morbid curiosity left to give.

Now, in 2017 a lot of good things happened in movies. Horror has never received more prestige. Get Out is going to be nominated for Best Picture. You can't call that movie a "thriller" or "psychological drama" like people did with Silence of the Lambs or Black Swan. Get Out is a dirty horror movie and nothing else. Critics used to be ashamed of horror and that time has passed. Meanwhile people highlight Wonder Woman as this huge progressive moment against the Harvey Weinsteins of the world. But all it showed me is that women can star in movies as bland and pointless as the boys. Yet there were intense, truly unique stories that were written with female protagonists (and often made by female directors) that actually make use of that diversity. Forget Wonder Woman, try The Beguiled or The Shape of Water or Ingrid Goes West or Raw or mother! or Lady Bird. Women have a voice in this industry and it doesn't need to be packaged to appeal to male nerds.

Every year I think I get closer and closer to the pretentious art critic I mocked back in the early years of this blog. The problem isn't that I love artsy movies. As a matter of fact I have a severe upper-limit to how much artsy I can take, thus why I refuse to see A Ghost Story. I like low-brow trashy shit. It's just that the traditional blockbuster has become so stale and repetitive. There was a new Spider-Man this year! Hasn't there been enough fucking Spider-Man already? People complain about too many sequels and lack of ideas in Hollywood, then give mother! an F on Cinemascore. This year, I hope I didn't just talk the talk, I walked the walk. If your movie wasn't special in some way, I couldn't be bothered. So I don't want to see The Post or The Darkest Hour, more boilerplate Oscarbait just as I don't want to see The Mummy or Ghost in the Shell, more bad wanna-be cinematic universes. I didn't see any of those. I saw better movies.

Here are fifteen movies that actually were special in some way:

The Best Games of 2017 (That Aren't Super Mario Odyssey)

I'm going to start my discussion of the best games of 2017 by talking about a game that isn't on the list. It's a game that never really got close to being on the list. In fact it's a game I still have not finished despite three or four serious attempts to get invested in it. And that game is Guerilla Games' open world post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur adventure, Horizon Zero Dawn. Horizon Zero Dawn is not a bad game. In other years this completely solid, very competent title easily fits in a top ten. In a bad year, Horizon Zero Dawn might be Game of the Year. But in 2017, Horizon Zero Dawn is mediocre. I love that Horizon Zero Dawn was forgettable this year.

In 2017 real progress happened in the games industry. I don't mean the usual standards of progress such as frame rates or how many triangles an engine can shove into a single frame. 4K doesn't impress me and I don't believe in VR yet. I mean games have never been better than they were in 2017. Most years have maybe four or five truly great video games in them. 2017 had probably close to twenty. A few games disappointed like Star Wars Battlefront II or truly sucked like Sonic Forces. But for the most part last year, every game was good. Look at the disposable drivel that comes to your local movie theater every week. 2017's gaming didn't have its equivalent of Pitch Perfect 3 or that Jumanji sequel that nobody wanted. It only had Baby Driver. Every single day, more Baby Driver. Masterpiece after masterpiece.

I feel bad for 2018. I don't know when I'm ever going to find the time to play "new" games. It will take me a whole year just to catch up with all the great 2017 games I didn't play. Not least of which because I never managed to accrue enough capital to buy a Switch (besides video games 2017 sucked). I still want to play about a dozen games: Resident Evil VII, Gravity Rush 2, Snipperclips, Yakuza 0, Nioh, Hellblade, Mario + Rabbids, Rime... and of course, Super Mario Odyssey. And because Super Mario Odyssey is absent, this list is completely worthless and I don't know why you're reading. Maybe you just like me.

Anyway, here's a meaningless and incomplete list of twelve truly great games from the best year in gaming history: