The Batmans: Arkham games on PC or Mr. Crook’s Guide to Fighting Crime like a Gentleman.

I’ve played most of the Batman Arkham games on PC from Asylum to Knight. What’s better than being Batman and punching bad guys in the face after you block their clumsy blows? Maybe the Spider Man games? I don’t know. I haven’t played the PC port of the original yet and I haven’t played a console game in years. Part of the problem is that I never got the hang of controllers. But there’s also an accessibility issue. I can play PC games all the time in my small office. Console games require the big TV in the living room with its surround sound speakers blasting. That’s not really an option with a small toddler in the house. Though I can’t blame the kid for my chronic inability to use thumb sticks.

Does Spider Man punch bad guys in the recent PS2(or whatever it’s up to now) games? I’m assuming he does. Does it feel as martial-artsy as Batman? Probably not. Spider Man has superhuman reflexes but he didn’t spend his angst-ridden youth traveling the world to learn super-secret marital arts from Liam Neeson. All so that he could go back home and punch out small-time crooks hanging out in back alleys. Who designs these cities with all these dark alleys perfect for robbery and other criminal mischiefs? Is there some architectural mastermind at the heart of a sinister plot to make Gotham the perfect city for crime?

That would be a cool Batman villain; The City, a dastardly ne’er-do-well who infiltrated the Gotham planning board decades ago and created an entire metropolis that not only attracts criminals but gives them every opportunity to commit their devious deeds. Every alley and twisted street layout was designed for crime. And over the years, this master of masonry, this asshat of asphalt has taken a commission from every bank robbery, and jewelry store heist that went off without a hitch due to the convoluted nature of Gotham’s labyrinthine layout.

But The City never counted on his diabolical designs creating their perfect foil: The Batman. It was down one of The City’s specially designed “mugging alleys” that the young Wayne heir lost his heritage. In fact, it was the very layout of the city that allowed Batman to fully come into his own. The City made sure the back streets and alleys were narrow enough to allow malign malefactors to avoid the local constabulary. But that also had the unforeseen effect of making Gotham’s rooftops close enough to one another to allow a young would-be crime fighter to make his way across the cityscape with only a little help from some kind of cape-hidden gliding apparatus. 

What happens when Batman realizes that The City is ultimately responsible for his parents’ untimely undoing? He stretches and goes into full beat-up mode. I mean he’s got to stretch at some point, right? If you’re going to fight crime for decades you have to do everything you can to prevent injury.

Anyhow, The City is ready for Batman. He’s had years to prepare, filling every street, and every building in Gotham, with convoluted traps. He’s even rigged whole streets to shift at his whim to create an ever-changing maze of alleys to corral Batman in a lethal labyrinth. Can Batman defeat this ultimate villain—the very city he swore to protect?!?

Given the sheer number of Batman comics out there, it’s probably been done. I can almost imagine the 70s-style cover for this issue and the gaudy costume for The City: maybe a helmet in the shape of a skyscraper? But it would still make for a fun game, punching bad guys as the whole city tries to kill you, walls close in, streets breed spikes, and bridges collapse under your feet.

Of course, every villain in Gotham owes The City so they can all make an appearance and fight Batman. Or rather serve as punching bags for Batman. Just not Deathstroke. I think he’s a cool character and all, but fighting him in one of the Batman games was one of the most annoying sequences I’ve had to try to manage to survive with my terrible video game reflexes. Look, I’ll admit there’s no chance of me surviving 5 minutes in a Dark Souls game. Just let beat up bad guys without too much keyboard mashing. Seriously, I’d rather fight Darkseid as Batman than Deathstroke again.

Which is another idea for a fun Batman game. The hungry hordes of Darkseid’s Dog Soldiers invade Gotham from Apokalips. Batman and the Justice League push them back into their Boom Tubes, but somehow Batman gets dragged through to Apokalips. Trapped on this most inhospitable of worlds in a vast dark dystopian metropolis, can Batman evade Darkseid’s lackeys and somehow find his way home? Well, it is Batman. You put him in a big city where he can hide in the shadows and fly around, he’s going to cause trouble for even the most cosmic of universal tyrants.

I would love to tackle a twisted alien version of a Gotham-like city on Apokalips as Batman, fighting all sorts of strange Jack-Kirbyesque monsters and villains. Just copy-paste that stuff right out of the classic comics, no need for new designs or styles. The colorful imagery would be a welcome change from the chronic dark grays that seep into everywhere Batman seems to go these days. Maybe we can even run into some friends like Mr. Miracle and Big Barda. Plenty to work with it.

But how would Batman fight cosmic-level bad guys with just some sweet martial arts moves and batarangs? How about, instead of Waynetech gadgets, you find Apokalitian tools and weapons and learn how to use them, cause hey, it’s Batman? You eventually take over some kind of Wall-Tank vehicle that lets you navigate the treacherous cityscape with relative ease, moving from streets to the sides of buildings like some kind of spider on magnetic wheels. Maybe, Bats even spray paints a giant bat on the tank to raise the theatricality up a notch?

The point of the game would be defeating all of Darkseid’s lieutenants and acquiring the components you need allowing you to construct your own New Genesis Mother Box (ala Triforce). You then use the complete Mother Box to fight Darkseid and stop his invasion of Earth. In the end, it’s you versus Darkseid. The Mother Box can’t defeat Darkseid but it can even the odds, which is all Batman needs. Queue giant cosmic brawl. Even the ultrachampions of Punchalla would turn their heads to witness this one.

This would be a fantastic festival of fisticuffs, and a laudable stop on the road to that cosmic land of marvelous martial matchups. But sadly, I think the next Arkham game is something about the Batman kids fighting over who gets to be the replacement Batman. I don’t really want to play as Nightwing, or Robin, or Batwoman, or Red Hood. It’s just not the same somehow. Maybe if I get to play as Deathstroke… hey, if I get to play as Deathstroke, I don’t have to fight Deathstroke, right? But that, also, would be too cool for school. No, it’s going to be the usual multi-player microtransaction always-online battle-royale thing, isn’t it? I’ll be running around as a sad version of a Batman-wannabe with 3 Nightwings, 2 Robins, 4 Batwomans, and 5 Red Hoods all jumping around and posing with out-of-character emotes that you have to pay more money for. Sigh.

If we can’t be Batman anymore, how about a game in which you get to play as one of the villains? A sort of GTA meets Arkham in which you commit crimes to get more money so you can get better gear to finally take on Batman. Deathstroke would get better weapons, Bane would get better versions of his serum, Joker, more lovely and deadly gadgets, of course! How much fun would that be, running around as Joker, just trying to make people smile!?! The joke would be that when you finally go to confront Batman in the end, he’s already dead. I think the Joker would just die laughing.

And if Batman is really dead in the Arkham universe, make a game about how some villain made a clone of him from a hair that Catwoman stole or something. Maybe they even used some futuretech to copy his brain patterns. But, of course, clone Batman, or Batclone, escapes before the process is complete.

You play as the Batclone, trying to master your copy/pasted engram-based abilities and recover your memories so you can be Batman again. Like every time you defeat a villain, you get to recall some important foundational memory. All sorts of existential questions can be raised as you punch and kick every hoodlum in Gotham to discover not only your identity but the identity of the mysterious villain who brought you back, or created you, depending on your philosophical point of view.

It turns out that it’s all a convoluted conspiracy in which Alfred (disguised as the sinister Mr. Crook) somehow convinced the greatest criminals in Gotham that they needed Batman back to preserve the status quo. Otherwise, Mr. Crook reasoned, the Justice League would take over watching over Gotham. And Penguin, Riddler, and the rest of that crowd realized quickly they would have little chance of going up against the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman. So, the villains marshaled their resources to make a Batclone that would fool the Justice League into thinking that Batman was still around. But this new Batman would secretly work for this new Deep Crime Council.

Of course, the Joker couldn’t resist tearing it all down and was the one to set the Batclone loose. Quote the Joker explaining his rationale to the Batclone; “Oh, Bats what a lovely pair we make! How could I not reboot the franchise? Think of the profit margins, Bats! The merchandise! No? How about the kids? Think of the kids. Who will make them smile when we’re gone? Hahaha…” 

I do love punching the Joker to make him shut up. Any Batman game should have a mini-game in which Joker thinks Bats is tied up or sedated, but really, he’s just holding out to hear Joker spill his latest plan. The mini-game would be to hold out from pressing that punch button as long as you can, as Joker gets more and more annoying. I may be blocking this memory but something like this may have happened in one of the Arkham games. If it did, it scarred me so deeply, I erased the conscious memory of it. Damn you, Joker, even through the seemingly innocent conveyance of a video game you manage to spread your insidious brand of madness. Ah, whatever, it’s pretty funny if you don’t think about it. Aha… Ha… AHaHaaaHaahha!

Fallen Order and The Game That Would Destroy Reality

I finally played Star Wars Fallen Order all the way through to the big reveal ending which isn’t really a reveal, if you think about it (Cough, there’s only one cyborg Sith that everyone knows, cough). There’s not much you can do with a story about a Jedi existing in the time between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy. I mean you can’t do the classic heroic journey about a lowly young Jedi who becomes strong enough to beat Darth Vader and the Emperor, simply because that’s not how all that went down. I guess you could do a Tarantino counter-factual kill-Hitler sort of thing. Does Disney allow for alternate Star Wars universes?

Why did I play a game with no punching in it in the first place? A: I do that sometimes when I like the premise or the execution of a game. 2: Before I realized that my purpose in virtual worlds was to find Punchalla, before I even knew these virtual worlds existed, my first transcendental cinematic experience was Star Wars. I loved it as a kid. I think it was the idea of fighting with a sword made out of pure energy, pure light; A kind of sublime perfection of martial art. The other transcendental experiences I had back then were watching Hong Kong Kung Fu and Samurai films. You can easily build a bio and back story for my IRL character from that.

I’ve also enjoyed some Star Wars games from the wild slash-a-thons of the PC Jedi Knight and Jedi Outcast to the in-depth story of the KOTOR and SWTOR games. It’s a good time all around. But there hasn’t been anything like that in a few years. So, when a game came out about running around as Jedi across a number of planets, I gave it a chance.

In my first playthrough, I couldn’t really get into it. But I tried again more than a year later and realized that I had beaten more than half the game the first time around. Like a lot of story games these days, it just seems too short with too few things to do. You don’t really get to customize your lightsaber fully until you get to one of the last planets. I’m sure there were sequels planned because how can you make anything these days that isn’t part of some grander plan, some “IP universe?”

The combat was okay. Swing your lightsaber and bad guys die. You can even block blaster bolts from near-sighted Stormtroopers. The game has some nice sky boxes and semi-interesting planets. I would have preferred more freaky alien worlds but what can you do? It seems everything in the game and the modern Star Wars films, shows, games, etc., is limited to the few stylistic choices made in the original films. It’s not bad that everything has a visual consistency to it, it just wears on me after a while, like the planets of our solar system and their samey elliptical orbits.

The most interesting and surprising thing I learned in Disney’s Star Wars: Fallen Order is that wookiees like to make giant mud slip-n-slides on their giant trees that they use to get around really quickly. Do I smell a potential theme park tie-in? Surf the Wookiee Life Tree slide and get covered in mud just like the hero of Fallen Order whose name I forget! New at Disney World/Land/City/State—whatever it will be in the future.

You can also jump in Fallen Order but not really far, which always seems like an oversight in these games. One of the few powers that Jedi like Luke, Obi-Wan, and Vader seem to show off in the movies is being able to jump really high or fall from high places without so much as a fractured pelvis. Chasms and jumping from flying cars don’t scare Jedi. It’s lava that’s the Jedi’s true enemy. The Emperor should have filled his tower on the second Death Star with lava pits, then Vader would have balked at betraying him because of the bad memories. 

I’d like to see crazy jumping done well in a Star Wars game. In fact, I’d like to see a lot of things that I’m going to get into below. I’m tired of the same old same old hack-and-slash-light-exploration-game, so I’m going to imagine something I would enjoy. If I can’t enjoy it in real life because no one will make it, maybe I can enjoy it in the unreal virtual space in my head. 

Let’s say that we’re in the far future of the Star Wars galaxy, so we don’t need to worry about treading on, or even reading any lore. Everybody we know is long dead and their kids are forgotten. Second, let’s say that in this future, the Sith have outlawed lightsabers. Let’s go further and say they’ve succeeded in destroying every source of kyber crystals in the galaxy. The Sith still have their lightning and more esoteric powers plus all the throwaway troops they constantly surround themselves with. There are now tons of Sith lords and they constantly wage galactic war with the systems under their command. That’s tons of level bosses to eventually fight. 

Without lightsabers, what remains of the Jedi have gone into exile, again. They really can’t catch a break, can they? But, one of the few remaining masters seeks to stop the madness of the Sith. We get Donnie Yen to do the motion capture for an Ip Man-esque Jedi Master who invents a lightsaber-less force-powered fighting style for his one padawan, you, the player. If you don’t know who Ip Man is, watch one of the many films about this real-life Kung Fu master. The Donnie Yen series of films is probably the best one I’ve seen.

And there we are, a game with Force-powered punches and kicks made with martial arts grace. You get to punch whole platoons of stormtroopers or do a force jump to a force uppercut into the jaw of whatever passes for an AT-AT in this future Star Wars. The punching madness possibilities are endless. The player then ranges the galaxy in their own ship, fighting one Sith after another, but only after punching out their endless flunkies and some monsters. You even learn the nerve clusters on a rancor so that you can hop around on it and paralyze it one limb at a time. 

In the climatic finale, you travel to the Death System-a whole planetary system that’s been built into a proto-Dyson-sphere-seized weapon—a dozen planets linked into an evil-looking cosmic molecule. And this ultimate weapon doesn’t do simple things like destroying a star or even a star system. It sends out a lightspeed wave (which is faster than light in Star Wars) throughout the galaxy that destroys entire genetic lines. There’s nowhere to hide from such a weapon and no one can survive.

Think about running around the surface of such a structure in some kind of Jedi-inspired mecha spacesuit as you punch and kick Sith Lords into deep space. 

Unfortunately, it seems you’re too late, the Grandmaster of the Sith readies the now fully-operational-Death System to fire, targeting your whole troublesome species across the galaxy. But just before the death wave is released, your Ip Man-esque Master finds the weak point of the whole structure, and in a final apocalyptic force blow, shatters it, sacrificing himself in the process.

Chaos spreads through the Death System as it begins to tear itself apart. But because of its size and the planetary distances involved, you have time to track down the Grandmaster and end their menace once and for all. The sky box of this final level is the Death System slowly disintegrating over the course of hours. I’ll leave the confrontation with the Grandmaster to your imagination.

That’s a game I would play again and again, even if it was Dark Souls hard, even if it was NES Punch Out hard. The only problem is that such a game would tear open the very fabric of reality and reveal Punchalla to the world. And I don’t think the world is metaphysically or existentially ready for the eternal combat of Punchalla’s Omnichampions. Their glorious struggles would destroy portions of the visible spectrum and their impossible blows would shatter entire modes of thought, disintegrate whole philosophies. We may never be ready.

And so, this pinnacle of Star Wars games must remain locked within the confines of my troubled imagination, along with other impossible creations, to protect the world, and reality itself. No thanks are necessary. I bear this awesome responsibility because someone must. Someone must always travel that long road to Punchalla, even if they can never actually find it. It is one of the foundational pillars of the panfoamic everythingverse that there are those who always seek the Final Rings of Battle. If the existence of one universe requires the perception by at least one consciousness, the everythingverse requires those who seek what can never be attained, a sort of quantum restlessness, a panfoamic drive and desire for there to be more than the mundane and the ordinary. It is what motivates the tension of creation and destruction at the most fundamental levels of topo-reality. And it is why I must play my part.

DOOMs or Shooting Things So I Can Punch Them

There have been many DOOM games (I pronounce “doom” with all caps in my head). I probably played most, if not all of them. But like the Wolfenstein games, it’s hard to reference them. They all have confusing names. Sometimes it’s numbers, sometimes it’s something after a colon, sometimes there’s no colon. Pick a lane.

Anyway, the best DOOM game I played was one of the modern ones (released in 2016?), where you go back to Mars and punch the spawns of Hell, but only after you shoot them a little bit. You get all these fun attack animations, but they only work after you soften up your foes with some gunfire. It seemed such a waste to me. I would have liked to go through the whole game punching, grappling, neck-twisting, and kicking demons without ever firing a shot. It was a game that was almost great. At least to those of us following the long knuckle-bruising road to Punchalla.

It reminded me of the amazing Metroid games where you explore alien worlds, find power-ups, and shoot aliens. I would love to see a new Metroid game on PC. I almost exclusively play games on PC. I just can’t use a classic console controller. It’s something about my thumbs not being sensitive enough. Maybe I’ve punched too many walls and trees in real life and deadened the nerves too much. I can play with a mouse and keyboard okay, probably because I type a lot as it is.

Recently, I tried playing DOOM ETERNAL, the sequel to the DOOM I mentioned above, where you return to Hell-infested Earth. I played the first DOOM in this most-current series twice all the way through. I can put up with a lot to get to some unarmed combat, even carrying 6 or 7 guns to shoot at bad guys. I mean, I don’t love it, but it gets the job done. Shooting guns in DOOM for me was like stretching before a workout; Nobody really likes to do it, but you know you’ll be better for it. So, I figured I would load up the sequel and shoot some demons to get some punches in.

I didn’t get very far in the sequel. It’s strange to say but it was really the level design. The 2016 DOOM felt like a cohesive world you could explore, even though it was broken into lots of smaller levels. I felt like I was on Mars and that the journey could take me anywhere. It was the next best thing to a fully open-world game. But the levels in DOOM ETERNAL felt like levels in a video game; small little arenas detached from each other in which you fight bad guys for a while, and then some more spawn and you fight those too, and then some more spawn and you fight those. There’re some secrets to find but I felt like I was playing a video game from 1995 with better graphics. Some people will enjoy the retro feels. But I’d rather have undated version of Metroid with punching over an updated version of the original 1990s DOOM.

Maybe DOOM ETERNAL gets better. I lost interest after four or five levels that felt very claustrophobic, even though they had big glorious skyboxes. And I like claustrophobic sequences in games, like crawling through an ancient tunnel to reach some long-buried tomb. But you have to have open parts that put that into perspective. Maybe there are some huge levels later on and maybe there’s more melee fighting to be had. The DOOMguy on the art to DOOM ETERNAL does sport some kind of hellfire sword. But I don’t think I’ll ever see any of that because what I have seen just bored me.

I can only imagine how great an open-world DOOM on Earth could have been. Maybe you could even get a DOOMobile to drive around in. Or, how about a motorcycle powered by a jet engine? A DOOMcycle. It would be big enough so you could just drive over little Imps and not feel it. It could also function as storage for your guns. And you would have to choose which two guns to bring with you as enter some hellish cathedral. That way you would have to rely more on your fists… 

Just imagine riding in the blasted and scorched lands of New Jersey, as your DOOMcycle kicks up a cloud of jet-powered dust behind you. In the distance, you spot a growing spire of twisted metal surrounded by a sickly red glow. It’s one of the Spurs of Hell, a tower of agony grown from the very spine of the titanic Devil that lies below the world. You know that you’ll be ascending that demon-infested edifice soon enough. You zoom in with your DOOMvision and see that there are a lot of flying demons on this particular Spur. Better bring your sniper rifle. And what’s that near the top? A cloud of hell farts that can only be the undigested souls spewed out by one of those armored monstrosities? That means you’ll need the rocket launcher with the armor-piercing rounds. But what to do about all the Imps and other small-fry that are sure to crowd every floor of the Spur on the way up? Thank the Ancient Angelic Smiths (or whatever they’re called in DOOM) for your trusty and modular fist weapons. Now the only question is whether you go with fire punches that pack more “punch” or lighting punches that have a bit more range? Better equip that kick thruster pack too for those jump sequences.

I’m playing this game in my head already and getting all the achievements. It’s not bad. Still rely on my guns, but enough punching and kick jumping to keep me entertained. Three-and-a-half imaginary stars. Though the rating system in my head technically goes to infinity so there’s always room for improvement.

Maybe we need a good nemesis? Another DOOMguy who fights with you but eventually betrays you for unmatched HELL power and becomes HELLguy? And it turns out HELLguy is your long-lost brother! Oh, the emotion! The sheer angsty melodrama as you wrestle with HELLguy over Hell’s Heart. Then you both plunge into that bottomless pit, but your brother has a last-minute change of heart and throws you to safety on some ledge. He then turns to plummet straight into Satan’s face with dual rocket launchers loaded. You’re thrown clear by the resulting climatic explosion, landing conveniently close to your DOOMcycle. You speed away from your brother’s and Satan’s demise. Zoom in on DOOMguy’s DOOMvisor and we can just make out a single tear falling down DOOMguy’s cheek. Zoom in on the tear and within it, a hundred angels begin to play the final coda of the soundtrack. But it’s not harps and flutes. No, these are the angels of all the dead operatic metal and retro-glam rock bands who died when Hell destroyed the Earth. They pick up their Angelic guitars and just shred out the greatest celestial power metal track in the history of rock heaven. The chorus is one word: “DOOM!… DOOM!… DOOM!” Credits roll. Four-and-a-half stars.

Metro Exodus and Mad Max: How to Punch People in the Apocalypse

Yes, the long road to Punchalla has stretches with no punch or kick to be seen. Whole martial arts deserts. Wastelands of guns, bullets, bows, spells, swords, etc. I travel through these harsh lands when I must because I find some small fighting joy in the journey. Maybe I find a kernel of Kung Fu-like truth in the devotion to a single theme or technique. Or maybe there aren’t any games out just then in which I get to punch things properly, okay?

Metro: Exodus is a game without punching, or is it Metro Exodus? So many colons these days, and this game actually drops the colon in the sequel. Crazy. I played it mostly because it’s a game about the post-apocalypse like Fallout. And as I stated in a previous blog, I love crawling around the empty devastated wasteland. Metro Exodus has that going for it. Plus, unlike Fallout 76, it has a sort of deep engaging story. You spend whole maps on a train just talking to people and I didn’t even want to punch any of them. That is a storytelling success of sorts.

The guns in Metro Exodus feel like cobbled-together things you would find in the post-apocalypse, and none of them are mutated. Yet. The Metro world in general is supposed to feel more realistic than Fallout. No crazy retro 50s style, no tongue-in-cheek corporate humor, just nuclear-bombed-out Russia. Radiation so real you have to wear a constantly-breaking gas mask in order to just breathe.

The open zones are great too. Unlike the previous games, you no longer just crawl through an endless hallway from one station to the next in the titular Moscow metro. You get to explore Russia and get into all sorts of trouble. Though you don’t get to go back to zones you’ve cleared so it’s not really an open world. I suppose that’s the trade-off with having a story that centers around taking a relaxing train ride with your best bro buddies and survivalist wife.

The thing that bothers me the most about the story is the presentation of language, but I have this issue with movies and shows in general. Namely, Russian people are speaking English with Russian accents. I get that what we’re getting is the translation of what they’re saying, but why would the translated English voices have Russian accents? It just sounds like everyone is speaking English as a second language like they know you, an American, are watching them and they’re just being polite. But English is the very language of the people who bombed their country and killed millions. I don’t think the people of the Metro would want anything to do with English.

And these thoughts kind of break the immersion for me. I want to be there in the scene, caring that my virtual wife is dying from breathing in toxic fumes at an abandoned ammunition dump. But all I can think about is that it sounds weird that everyone talks to me in English with a Russian accent when my character is supposed to be Russian. Then there’s one character who is an American who speaks this translated Russian in English with an American accent. What am I even supposed to think about that? Just do the voices in Russian and give me subtitles. Maybe I even learn to pick up a word or dva, nyet?

Eh, what can you do, comrade? So, I shot some bad guys and some monsters while I crawled the wasteland thinking about how long my story wife has left before that cough she has throughout the whole game gets bad enough we have to crawl through some abandoned city to find the medicine she needs. The monsters were the usual zombies and rat people mostly. There were some flying bat people like Fallout 76. I think Metro did these first, so it was Fallout that was being unoriginal. But missing were the weird psychic “Dark Ones” from the previous Metro games. I liked the weird unseen psychic bad guys, though the visions and headaches they would throw at you were annoying.

The most interesting monsters in Metro Exodus were also the simplest. If you didn’t go in running and gunning in the desert level, you would find zombies who covered their skin with sand, just standing against the walls of sand-covered burned-out buildings. You really had to look to spot them and then you could see them breathing slowly. Pretty freaky. 

What was blatantly, glaringly missing was any kind of real melee weapons or fist weapons. I mean if I wound up in the real post-apocalypse, the first thing I would do is find a weapon to swing at zombies. I think that living in gun-crazy America we get this impression that guns will be everywhere when the apocalypse hits, but guns require constant cleaning and maintenance and bullets have to be made with specialized equipment. You won’t be able to make some from stuff in your backpack like in Metro Exodus. Finding a gun in the post-apocalypse will be great, but you shouldn’t be relying on it. I would have really liked an iron bar to swing at zombies in Metro Exodus. And Great Spirit of Marx forbid I weld together some scrap onto my gloves so I can punch things properly.

That’s what I did in the Mad Max game that came out a few years ago. That game understood that ammo would be rare in the post-industrial wasteland and you would actually have to punch things to make your way in dusty Australia. I enjoyed the bullet economy so much in Mad Max, I played it all the way through twice even though the story was lacking. Just writing about it now makes me want to re-download it and climb back into my Magnum Opus and just drive into a sandstorm. Mad Max was one of the few PC games that did driving well. Not only that, when a sandstorm started up, and they always did when I was raiding some convoy, I felt like I was driving through Mad Max Fury Road.

Sometimes I wonder about the people who make truly great games and what happens to them. I read that the director of Fury Road, George Miller, asked his wife, an accomplished editor, to edit it. She had never edited an action movie before and so she made it seem unique and unforgettable. Were there people like this who made the Mad Max game unique and unforgettable, at least to me? Do they still work at the same developer or did they go on to do other great things?

That’s the thing about video games, you can’t really follow a great director or writer like in films and books. Games are a collaborative process that often require more than one visionary. There are some out there like Hideo Kojima, but I’ve never fully played a Kojima game yet. I worry I’m not cool or enlightened enough to get what’s going on in one of his games. Will I pass the metaphysical test of a Kojima story? I can’t say yet. Maybe if he makes one about a lone wanderer on their way to an imagined nirvana of martial prowess, I’ll have to attempt it. When that day comes, I’ll place my copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary under my mouse pad and give it my best.

Mad Max was one of these games that made me want to try to give it my best. The reflexes-based reactionary combat wasn’t easy (at least for an old turned-based RPGer like myself), but I mastered it and looked forward to breaking into the next desert fastness to punch the dusty-yet-somehow-oily-and-grimy bad guys into submission. I don’t even think there were any monsters in this apocalyptic wasteland, but I didn’t miss them. Hand-to-hand combat was all I needed. Maybe a couple of shotgun blasts to even the odds a little.

The story in Mad Max kind of peters out when you get to the end. The third act feels like it was cut short for budget reasons, which is a shame because up to that point, the game was great. I could have easily sunk another hundred hours into exploring a world twice the size, punching my way through dune after dune. Maybe they’ll make a sequel game when George Miller makes one to Fury Road.

There’s something about having a vehicle that really makes an open-world game feel big. Like it’s just too big to walk across. I also like the idea that it’s a mobile basecamp from which I can launch my adventures into the next ruined factory/ancient dungeon. It’s not that I need the trunk space for my fists, it’s the old American Easy Rider promise of freedom on the open road. A vast land of possibility before me, where anything can happen. The only way it could be better is if I had a spaceship and could travel from alien world to alien world.

There are games that do this like Mass Effect and The Outer Worlds, but what we need is a post-galactic-apocalypse game in which you pilot your cobbled-together junk ship from one devastated world to another. Call it Mad Effect or something. The story can be that some hyperspace communication technology drives the whole galaxy mad, turning a civilization that spans thousands of worlds into one full of mindless violent zombies and zombie-adjacent creatures (for variety). Only a few are immune to the effects of the maddening hyperbeacon. Maybe it turns out that this tech was supposed to be some telepathic news channel that was going to bring only the “truth” to the whole galaxy. How’s that for a tie-in to modern reality. Anyway, all that is gone, and you, the lone wanderer roam space looking for parts to keep your ship and your cyborg fists operational.

Fallout 76 - Superheroes and Duct Tape Part 2

It’s time to get back to reality, or at least the pseudo-reality of Fallout 76. Let me begin with a confession. For all my desire to go through this particular version of post-apocalyptic life with only a single punch, I have to admit I did carry and use guns in Fallout 76. Sadly, they were littered throughout the wasteland so much so that you couldn’t take two steps without tripping over a submachine pistol with an integrated silencer.

One of the superheroes I invented, Madman (see previous post), had a theory about this; Guns are now the ultimate life form on Earth. The radiation of nuclear war caused them to mutate and achieve sentience. Now they silently wait while we use them to kill each other. In the end, they’ll be all that’s left, birthing their broods of bullet babies to fill the world. Madman may be onto something, or not. Whatever the case, to parapharse the Player from Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead on the Fallout universe; “we can do comedy, we can do tragedy, but the guns are obligatory.”

The main reason for using guns in the post-apocalypse is the non-pausable single timeline nature of this persistent online game. In previous Fallout games, you could pause or slow down time so that you could plan your moves carefully, even avoid the ranged attacks of your foes as you closed in for the “ol’ coop de gravy,” as the vigilante hero The Street would say. And if things weren’t going well, you could just load a previous save file and try again.

I’ve always had an issue reconciling save games with realistic representation of combat in video games. It just doesn’t make sense for my seemingly-ordinary non-super-powered character to constantly travel back in time to try different things. They would have to be some kind of Time Lord or temporally-based superhero, and that’s seldom makes sense in the story of these games. I guess you could look at it like your character is just a run-of-the-mill psychic prophet, like the Nicholas Cage classic film Next in which he can live out different versions of the future in order to find the best outcome. They should have named that movie “Save Slot 1,” instead.

Anyway, none of that exists in Fallout 76 because it’s persistently-saved multi-player, even when I play it on my own private shard/world. You go into combat and if things go south you have to immediately adapt, or just bravely run away. When I started playing this no-takebacks version of Fallout, it quickly became clear that I couldn’t just rely on my trusty fists to take down snipers and flying monstrosities. As much as I wished for some kind of rocket punch or flying eel kick, it just wasn’t meant to be. So, I plucked a mutant gun out of the ground and started blasting.

The superheroes I created out of old laundry (see previous post) then roamed the wasteland equipped small arsenals of firearms to soften up any opposition before they charged in with the right hook, right hook, right hook combo. Metal Fighter S at least had some head canon for this; Through the use of his electro-chi he can form a rifle-like extension of his arm and fire small pieces of scrap at supersonic speeds. He calls this technique; “Long-range flying metal punch!” I never shouted this at my monitor either. It would have given away my position.

But I kept thinking about Madman’s theory about the guns being alive and mutating. I mean he’s an escaped mental patient who thinks he’s an alien warrior out for justice, so he’s crazy, or he could be an alien who thinks he’s a mental patient out for justice, so he might know what he’s talking about.

First of all, guns in Fallout 76 have levels. Think about that. The other things that have levels are player characters and enemies. Living things that grow stronger over time.

Second, the guns actually mutate. You can find a pistol that has a “legendary” quality which allows it to shot two bullets for each one fired. How is that not some Professor X type stuff?

Third, the guns mutate. You can find guns that don’t like certain enemies. How do guns know you’re shooting them at super-mutants versus shooting them at ghouls? It’s not like you’re loading super-mutant-killing bullets. They’re all the same bullets. The guns just know. And not only that. These mutant guns hate certain groups of enemies. I shudder think about what my guns think about me.

Fourth, the freaking guns mutate! You can get guns that work better when you’re on drugs, or when you’re about to die. They want you weak and close to the end. That’s when they take over. And the powers they have defy time and space. You can get guns that have more bullets in them then the size of their clips. The guns have access to dimension bending technology, and they use it to hold more of their bullet babies. How can we possibly survive? How can we beat them if they are that powerful?

But I used the evil mutant guns and kept looking for more powerful versions so that I could get close enough to punch things. I mean my Power Fist was probably mutant and sentient too. I could somehow square that better with reality. I can imagine making a stronger version that works faster or has spikes designed to pierce super-mutant skin. Maybe it was sentient, but I think it was on my side. Maybe the only hope we’ll have in the coming war against the mutant guns is the mutant unarmed weapons we make ourselves. I suppose we’ll have to mutate too, but I’ll get to that later.

I guess this type of nonsense comes from taking weapon itemization from classic fantasy RPG games and trying to apply it to a sci-fi shooting game. It’s easy to say a particular sword or bow is “enchanted” to do X more damage to Orcs. But this doesn’t really translate to our Sci-fi setting without some crazy technological explanation. Do these guns have built-in nanobots that change the nature of every bullet as it’s fired? I mean, that would make for a cool explanation too, but nothing like that exists in Fallout 76. So I’m left with Madman’s head canon about the guns becoming sentient mutants. Like I don’t have enough to worry about in the end times.

Another thing I had to worry about in the end times was garbage or “Scrap,” as the game labels it. More so than the ubiquitous bottle caps that have served as currency in the Fallout wastelands since the 90s games, Scrap is the real money of this particular corner of the post-apocalypse. You can buy things with bottle caps, but everything is ridiculously overpriced and not everything is available. Scrap on the other hand is what you need to build everything from bullets to bastions. You also need it to repair all your weapons and armor, constantly. Scrap is so key to the game that the main benefit of the monthly subscription is a tent with a magic container in which you can always store all the magical garbage Scrap you find in your adventures.

You wouldn’t think garbage management would be the core aspect of a futuristic sci-fi roleplaying game like this. I guess they need to explain how players can build small-town-sized forts in this Home-Depot-less future. Not that turning a Garden Gnome into concrete shavings from which you then build a stable foundation for a multi-story tower makes any kind of sense in our reality. Never mind that duct tape is the most valuable piece of junk out there. You need a constant supply of it, crazy glue, and even sticky fluids you find on mutant horrors to keep your equipment functioning. That’s right, all those pretty little mutant guns are actually held together with duct tape and crazy glue. That’s what’s actually happening even though it’s not represented visually.

I once read a post online, in the real world, on the real internet, in which a gun nut asked whether they could just glue on the tactical accessories they wanted onto their semi-automatic home-defense rifle. The gun experts in the post basically laughed at this crazy gluer, saying that the action of any firearm would shake any glued components off, potentially making the firearm unusable or even dangerous. My own experience with gluing guns is limited sticking them onto little plastic and pewter miniature space marines, and those fall apart all the time. I don’t know. Maybe they have better crazy glue in the Fallout future.

Then there are the screws. You find them in all sorts of things, like clocks, fans, even kid’s toys. And you use them mostly to make guns, and gun-adjacent things like turrets, but also gun accessories like telescopic sights and bigger clips that hold more bullets.

The superhero Businessman explained this one to me; you see, bro, a few decades before the war, the Makemoney Co. came out with an ingenious product they called the Onescrew. It was a universal screw and thread system that allowed for almost all handheld-sized objects to be constructed using one size of screw. Not only did this allow for simplification of manufacturing but it allowed Makemoney Co. to corner the appliance repair market. Now, in the post-apocalypse, most things you find will contain only Onescrews and those screws can be used to repair almost anything. And you shouldn’t put any stock in the story that the depleted plutonium from which Onescrews are made is in any way harmful. I mean, simple cotton can absorb the amount of beta radiation emitted by Onescrews. Just buy a protective lead-lined onesie for your baby from Makemoney Co if you want to be extra safe.

It sounded crazy when Businessman explained it to me, but I have to say it does make a kind of sense. Imagine going into your garage or workshop or pantry (where I keep all my screws, next to the pasta and rice) and not having to dig through dozens of containers for the one weird-shaped screw you need to repair the door knob so that you can go back to enjoying the silence of the apocalypse. Maybe there’s a unicorn startup idea in this. Now all we need is some depleted plutonium. I used to know some people from eastern Europe, let me look into it.

So that’s how I rationalize the universal screws. The problem is that there are a lot of things to rationalize in Fallout 76. Like when I asked Businessman how could universal gears work? How would you have different gear ratios if they’re all the same size? Businessman kinda of dodged the question and started talking about optimizing throughput with product synergy or something.

I haven’t even mentioned the real-money store that sells mostly cosmetic items for your characters. Yes, it’s ridiculous and overpriced, but I don’t mind it that much, mostly because there’s not much to buy. It seems that most of the stock is rotated and only appears for a day or a week, and sometimes it’s gone forever. I get that this is a common FOMO (fear of missing out) tactic and that many games utilize it. But it just doesn’t mean much to someone like me who picks up a game for a few weeks or a month, finishes what little it has of a story and moves onto the next thing.

If everything was available all the time, I would probably spend a bunch of money to make even more cool superheroes, and maybe play a little longer. But as it is, there is little for me to spend actual money on. And I doubt I’ll be logging in every day for six months so that I can buy the elusive Groknak the Barbarian loincloth and pretend to be hero Vandal Visigoth, the time-lost savage from the past pulled into this future through an atomic fissure in timespace (which is different from spacetime - think vanilla and chocolate, both are ice cream, but one tastes better). 

There are also a lot of missed opportunities in Fallout 76. I could go down that rabbit hole for a week or two. I’ll just mention one thing that relates to superheroes. Not only does the radiation mutate super mutants and guns, it can mutate your character, giving you cool minor superpowers like a kangaroo feet and pouch that come with a little detrimental effect (the kangaroo feet and pouch somehow make you less smart). This sounds perfect for someone who likes to make superheroes, right? In practice, getting these mutations is too difficult or expensive for a casual solo player like myself. Either you stand in nuclear waste dump for hours hoping to get the random mutation you want or you pay all the money you will ever have (again casual solo player) to buy just one. And then you can’t change them out without going through the whole process again. But I guess the post-apocalypse should feel like a lot of missed opportunities, visions of what could have been, etc.

I have to admit that when I accidentally logged onto a multi-player shard or whatever it’s called, the only thing I did was run around player-created vendors to buy some mutations on the cheap (and some more costumes). But we’re not going to count that as going against my solo-play ethos. I rationalized this as some kind of inadvertent jaunt through a tear in timespace to witness other timecurves (like timelines but more wavy) in which I’m not the only survivor of the apocalypse. Maybe when I do get finally bored with this game, I may log in again and see if I can join a team (no mic) and see how bad playing multi-player feels to me.

By far the worst offender of things I had to rationalize was the endgame. In Fallout 76, this consists of dropping more atomic bombs on Appalachia so you can summon more powerful mutant monstrosities so you can get more/better mutant guns and drop more bombs on Appalachia. None of this was put into some kind of ironic context by the game, at least not that I found.

This just seems crazy to me. We should be fighting to stop some mad max supervillain tyrant who wants to use a nuclear bomb in a futile effort to try to destroy the Bat Queen of the Zombies that is the ultimate boss of this game. But instead, the endgame is hunting for nuclear keycards flying around in robot helicopters, launch code fragments carried by zombie officers, cracking said code, and then storming an automated nuclear launch facility to launch the things that destroyed the world. In order to save it. Even Madman shook his head when I explained this to him.

In fact, pretty much all of the heroes I created couldn’t get their heads around this. And none of them wanted to do it. Businessman did a presentation on some potential profit/loss scenarios in dropping the bomb, but I could tell that the red ledger which serves as his heart wasn’t in it. Atomic Cowboy was willing to ride one of the bombs like a bronco, but only if he could defuse it with some last-minute heroics. Only Death Clown considered it, but eventually came to the conclusion that it was a joke that was too on the nose. Also, it would mean he would have so many fewer souls to hunt down personally and invite to enjoy the Circus of Biles deep in Hell. You know you’re on the wrong side of the moral equation when even a demon jester thinks you’ve gone too far.

I did the only thing I could do in this situation. I returned to the wasteland to punch things. I may not be able to get very far or complete many of the Operations which are the other repeatable endgame content, not without the atomic “flux” that is required for endgame crafting and is primarily acquired in zones recently devastated by an atomic blast. But so it goes. The quest for Punchalla isn’t supposed to be easy or fun, it’s a hard road made of bricks that sometimes don’t break. 

I’ll be moving on to something new soon enough. I’m not sure what that is yet. Destiny 2 released some new expansion but the only thing I read is they’re making their gearing system more complicated. It’s already too complicated. But I get it, they need people to log on and spend hours figuring out how equip their characters for each micro scenario because some gaming consultant told them that the only way to make people spend more money is to have them play longer and longer. And I’m willing to mess around optimizing my characters, it’s when you have to switch your build from one mission to the next that I lose interest. Eh, it’s getting harder and harder to punch things in Destiny 2 anyway. They recently upped the cooldown time on some abilities like punches, so people use more guns.

Then there’s a new Path of Exile expansion but I think I’m done hitting the bricks on that road. Maybe if they release some actually useful unarmed attacks, I’ll pick up the Facebreakers again.

I’ve only read bad things about Square’s Marvel’s Avengers or whatever it’s called. On the plus side, you get to play as the Hulk, and he is a classical punchist. Captain America punches things when he’s not fiddling around with his shield. Black Widow does some cool marital arts I’d like to learn in real life. The problem is that apparently you can’t choose to play as who you want in the story mode. You have to play each chapter as a particular hero. I started the game and the first character you play as is some kind of Avengers stan with maybe mutant powers. She doesn’t even get immediately thrown into some kind of world-threatening danger. No, the opening act of this game that should be about saving the world is walking around an Avengers-themed fair and completing mini-games without punching anyone. It is maddening. I don’t use this term lightly; WHY?

The newest chapter of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is also out. It’s supposed to be an all-out crazy trip to Viking Hell which looks suspiciously like the Christian conception of hell, but whatever. It’s a whole expansion of things I can punch with the gloves of thunder I bought from their money shop. Probably the best money I spent in a while. Maybe they’ll even add gloves of fire, so I can fireball punch people like my friend Jon did when he hacked Morrowind. Viking Hell will be a fitting stop on the road to Punchalla. Maybe I can even punch Satan, I mean Sutr, in the face, and say “ring around the rosie, we all fall down, in Hell!” Then I walk away, while all of Hell explodes behind me. Hell Yeah.

Fallout 76 - Superheroes and Duct Tape Part 1

I’ve been avoiding playing Fallout 76 for years, like an old friend from an embarrassing time in my life. I love the Fallout games, but mainly because they allow me to indulge in my introverted hermit tendencies. I like traipsing around in the apocalypse alone. That’s the key thing. Start one of these games, turn off the music, and go stand in the middle of a burned-out street. Just drink in the loneliness. It is splendid.

But they had to ruin Fallout 76 by making a single-player game into some kind of PVP-centric multi-player battle-royale super-mutant monstrosity (I don’t really know what a battle royale game is since I don’t play PVP. I’m assuming you play as a bunch of snotty British royals who compete for the Queen’s affection through a series of richy-rich sporting events like “the Custard Derby” or something).

Anyway, how am I supposed to enjoy the apocalypse with D1ckman420 jumping around my poetic devastation like some kind of atomic pogo stick? And boy can he jump. Apparently, the most popular mutation player characters can get is “the Marsupial” which makes you jump really high. I won’t mention that it also lets you carry more weight. Do these mutant marsupial/people have big gooey pockets on their bellies? Is that what I’m supposed to picture? I guess I did mention it.

So, what changed? Why did I consider playing Fallout 76? I read somewhere that if you pay a small monthly fee, you can host your own private server for up to 8 of your closest friends (like I know 8 people online, and if I do, they probably want to be left alone like me). I’ll happily pay a fee to experience the post-apocalypse alone.

But this isn’t the real post-apocalypse, of course, and it’s not supposed to be. The dead America in the Fallout games is some otherworldly version of the United States. A sci-fi future as envisioned in the 1950s. Retro-futurism we call it. We get rocket-finned atomic cars, ray guns, old-timey music, and of course a cold war turned hot. As far as I can tell, in this counter-factual reality, style and political thought get stuck in the 50s all the way to the mid-21st century when a nuclear war finally erupts between the superpowers of the day, the USA and China.

As I walked alone through this imagined wasteland, I wondered what this extrapolation of the 50s was like. Did they miss the explosion of art and music of the 60s? Did they have the civil rights movement? Were women finally admitted to elite colleges? (In our reality, some schools didn’t admit women until the 1980s.) There’s really not much in Fallout 76 to begin to unearth what society was like in its fictional pre-apocalypse. I imagine it as a kind of dystopia of patriotic paranoia, war-frenzy, xenophobia, racism, and sexism. It makes the loss of such an outwardly beautiful world sting a bit less. I know that even though the rocket fins on the cars were spectacular and the Jetsons architecture spoke of sleek futures full of promise, the reality was much more brutal. This was a society doomed to fail because it became trapped in one way of half-formed thinking. Perhaps there’s a lesson in there for us as well.

I digress about my invented history for the doomed world in Fallout 76 because thinking about things other than the actual game is a big part of the gameplay in Fallout 76, at least for me. You see, comrade, there is little story to be had in this iteration of Fallout. Not like in previous games which were equal parts story, peaceful wandering, and fighting mutated horrors that want to feast on your flesh. Fallout 76, as a solo player, is mostly about killing mutated horrors (some raider people too, but they’re just as bad). So, as I wandered through this particular wasteland in West Virginia, looking for the next fight, I found my mind wandering as well. About this and the other thing. About what happened to sexism and racism in this strange counter-Earth? About all the drugs I found. Where did they all come from 25+ years after the apocalypse? And the food. Does Fallout pre-packaged food really last this long? Or am I eating some kind of mutant immortal cereal? Etc.

I also thought a lot about superheroes. Since there’s so little story, I found myself inventing my own stories. These were mostly backstories for my character. I mean I have to wonder how a simple vault-dweller can become powerful enough to punch a Behemoth (a sort of SUPER super mutant) in the face. So, when I picked up disused clothes and costumes in the forgotten rubble of civilization, I created superhero alter egos for my character. (As a note: I went boring with my character and just made myself; trademark no-smile smile, bald head, and lonely-gray eyes that have seen too much). Below is a non-exhaustive list of the heroes I invented based on wardrobe opportunities:

Officer 76 - I found a dusty cop uniform and some mirrored glasses and decided to become a vigilante to bring law and order to post-apocalypse Appalachia.

Madman, Warrior of Delta Centauri - an old ragged straight-jacket served as the main part of a costume for Madman. A lost soul who thinks he is a superhero alien who has come to Earth to save it but is driven mad by the realization that he was only a few decades too late. He wanders the wasteland, trying to help those he can, according to what his ruined alien mind thinks is right. Or rather what he believes the alien would think.

Death Clown - a skull mask and a clown suit were all it took for Death Clown to leave his particular corner of hell and roam the world once more. What does the Jesting Reaper want? Other than vengeance and death, who can say?

The Street - A peaky blinders cap and some suspenders were perfect for this corner tough to lose his cool and beat some sense into a world gone crazy. I mean what’s a legitimate criminal supposed to do when there’s nobody left to squeeze for some beer money?

Captain North - a raid on a civil war museum yielded a musty Union army uniform and a new persona. Captain North seeks out the remnants of a secret society bent on restoring the Confederacy in the post-apocalypse. No hail of bullets will stop Captain North from punching secessionists in the jaw!

Atomic Cowboy - easy one with a vaguely-cowboy-shaped hat and duster jacket. All I was missing was a nuclear-powered six-shooter. I really don’t understand why they haven’t added such a thing to this universe. But whatever, Atomic Cowboy prefers to serve knuckle sandwiches for lunch and dessert.

Businessman - A spotless black suit and tie in the dust-filled ruins of the future? Such a thing must hold great power. In fact, it holds all the pent-up energy of every conference call and strategy coffee break cut short by nuclear war. Now, Businessman roams the hellish landscape in a mythic quest to find the final IBEDA statements of the Five Great Corporations. When he does find them all and unites them, he can make his long-awaited report to the great Board of Directors of Eternity and vest his infinite shares in Cosmic Capitalism.

Metal Fighter S - a few mismatched pieces of hi-tech armor and a power fist created the pinnacle of post-apocalyptic power! A man who has mastered the art of robokata! The ultimate fusion of martial arts and machine! He is no cyborg! (No cyborg surgeons in the lonely post-apocalypse). Instead, he temporarily fuses metallic components to his skin with his electro-chi! “Robokata Flowing Data Dragon Attack!” is something I don’t yell at my monitor when Metal Fighter S charges into battle!

The unifying element to all of the characters of this Punchalla League of Superheroes is their preference for unarmed combat. I can only play a game so long that has no martial arts in it, or at least the promise of a few jaw-cracking punches.

In Fallout 76, this means using the unarmed class of weapons. Sadly, there seems to be no way of mutating your fists into some kind of atomic death manipulators. I started with a pair of brass knuckles and progressed from there to Deathclaw gauntlets and finally Power Fists, which are strange little jackhammers you put on your forearm. I say knuckles, gauntlets, and fists, but that’s misleading. You can only ever punch with your right arm in Fallout 76. I guess they never had South Paws before the atomic war. Never mind the ambidextrous such as me. Luckily, I still find the wild flaying that is unarmed combat in Fallout 76 rewarding enough. And I can continue on my mad quest to punch everything in the universe.

Why did I create so many heroes and play for so many hours if there is really only one or two punches in the game? For all the lack of varied cool animations, the punches feel like they have weight to them. The enemies react to my punches, or if they don’t, they sometimes fly off a hundred yards when I kill them. Sometimes I even punch them off cliffs or catwalks. It feels more like fighting than the usual number scrolls that accompany combat in video games. And unlike Path of Exile, I can actually run and punch things. Those running punches pack more power too. Very satisfying to charge in, time that one punch just right, and send a Deathclaw flying.

I should say that I’m not a fan of Numbers in video games. I get that weapons have to do some amount of damage and that bad guys need to be able to take more than one hit to kill. But, outside of some futuristic real-time physics analyzer, we would never see such numbers in reality. Seeing endless scrolls of numbers kind of breaks the immersion in the game. It’s the worst in fantasy games. Detailed spreadsheet breakdowns of sword edginess don’t belong in the kind of medieval world most fantasy games emulate. Outside of how many goats and sheep they had, people didn’t think about numbers with the post-doctorate precision we see in video games. When they did think about numbers, it was from the point of view of numerology and how certain things in the world could be linked to higher spheres of existence; “Three being the holy number thou shall count to, not two or one, not four,” and all that.

Focus on Numbers also leads to all sorts of silliness in Fallout 76. Like if my gun isn’t powerful enough, I can shoot an enemy in the face multiple times and they don’t even flinch. Fallout 76 is especially guilty of this because it tries to be an MMORPG with ever-escalating tiers of numerically (more hp) superior enemies that require numerically (more dmg) superior weaponry. The result of this is I shoot a super mutant in the face, see the virtual “decal” that is supposed to be their “wound,” and see that the super mutant isn’t at all concerned by this. Then I look to the constantly scrolling ledger above their head, and I see that the damage Number is too small to subtract a substantial portion of their hp pool, and I should find something that makes bigger Numbers. At this point, I’m not immersed in a virtual fighting game but in a kind of accounting simulator that only Businessman would enjoy. I think you can turn off the floating Numbers in Fallout 76, but then you don’t have good feedback on whether you’re doing enough damage. More immersion but lesser chance of getting anywhere.

I suppose Businessman could square the immersion issue. Maybe his superpower is that he sees the Balance Sheet of Reality; a sort of Profit Vision. He can actually see the numbers behind the physics when something happens, so he can determine whether doing any small thing leads to profitable outcomes. Imagine, picking up a pencil and knowing how many exact letters it has left to write, or how much damage the soles of your feet take whenever you take a step. That is the curse and gift of Businessman.

Outside of Businessman profit/loss-based view of reality, I would say hide Numbers altogether in games, from player characteristics to hp and damage numbers. But then the player wouldn’t know how much damage they’re doing and whether they should be doing something else. What’s really needed is a game where the Numbers are invisible and enemies react differently based on the strength of the hit. That would be something. I would love to play a fantasy game with no Numbers, just swords cutting deeper, drawing more blood when they do more damage.

Oh, and this Numberless game would have to have punching, and a couple of kicks, of course. We can’t forget about the kicks. Too many games these days include a punch or two and call that unarmed combat. Unarmed combat is using your whole body, fists, feet, forehead, even a hip bump now and then. Maybe even a music-and-Capoeira-based combat engine in which you collect different tracks to inspire your character to new movements. You could make it a rhythm-based game like Guitar Hero but then I wouldn’t be able to play it cause I’m as bad at rhythm games as I am at PVP. 

What was I on about? Oh, yeah. Numbers. The stock ticker scroll of Numbers is another reason why I like playing as an unarmed fighter in Fallout 76. If shooting things in this game is an accounting class, then fighting with fists is also an accounting class, but taught by the cool high school teacher who people say threw a desk through a window one year. He wears Ray-Bans and old jeans, quotes Shakespeare, and somehow makes you forget that it’s numbers you’re reading off the blackboard. Likewise, when I charge into a bunch of dumb-as-rocks super-mutants with my Power Fist, I don’t have time to think about the Numbers above their heads, I just punch things as fast as I can. And it kind of makes sense that I can punch something multiple times and they don’t die (unlike a visible bullet hole in their head). Then I knock out the last super-mutant, sending them flying off a bridge, and it feels a bit like a scene in an 80s action film. I want to pull off my sunglass and utter some witty epitaph at their plunging over-muscled corpse, like: “ring around the rosie, they all fall down.” Then I walk away, as the whole Balmco Mac’n’Cheese factory explodes behind me, showering the wasteland in golden deliciousness. 

Speaking of explosions, there’s also a legendary perk in Fallout 76 called the Exploding Palm which I swear they made just for me. You get a mini-explosion on some of your punches. It makes no sense. Does my character strap mini-grenades to his knuckles? But never mind that. It is the closest I’ve come to a transcendental experience in recent times. I swear in those small moments, in those rapidly-expanding superheated gasses, I catch a glimpse of Punchalla and it is glorious: Its many cosmic fight rings float in the void of dead stars. In those rings, warriors of a thousand realities fight their eternal struggles, not for victory or glory, but for the love of their art. And each eon, they do not crown a champion but choose a humble fighter who trains the hardest. This Scholar of the Fist they send out into panfoamic everythingverse to bring back cosmic martial arts techniques never before seen in Punchalla.

The vision of Punchalla recedes and words fail me. Now, I must go meditate on this under the uncaring branches of the Tree of Woe.

Skyrim or How I Learned to Punch a Dragon

I recently re-started Skyrim again, for the last time before the real last time (and maybe one more time after that last time). I did it mainly because they released an anniversary edition a few months back full of all the community-made “Creations” – which I think are just mods that you have to pay for. Whatever, I don’t want to spend my life micromanaging dozens or hundreds of mods… again. So, if I can pay a couple of bucks for someone to do it for me, great. Though, I really did it for one “Creation” in particular: a punching-gloves mod.

Sadly, this wasn't the full-on unarmed combat I was hoping for. You got some gloves with spikes and fangs on them, but functionally they weren’t better than the gloves you get in the vanilla game. There was no unarmed skill tree and no special attacks. But okay, I gave it a shot anyway, eventually resorting to minor cheats to lend strength to my fists. I then could punch a low-level dragon in the face. But the thing about unarmed combat is that it doesn't really scale in Skyrim.

This seems to be a theme in many games. Like fighting unarmed is considered a hobby and not the lifelong obsession/ambition it really is. You would think that it would even represent a sort of pinnacle of level-based progression. You become so powerful that weapons just hold back your innate power… like the little karate fighter in the very first Final Fantasy game for the NES. Equip him with weapons and he does okay, but unequip his weapon at high levels and he starts putting out hundreds of hits per round. What glory that was. I remember those punches fondly, little cutesy fists flying like lightning bolts from storms crossing over far-off jagged peaks, their flashes etching the scene indelibly onto the landscape of my young impressionable memory.

Anyway, I did what I could to represent my Skyrim character’s ascent to a sort of demi-godhood of unfettered pugilism. First, I found out that the cat people in the game get a free unarmed perk which is supposed to represent their tiger-like claws. Role-playing-wise, adding this perk via the console to my Nord boxer was a stretch. But whatever, let's say he was exposed to so much magic in Skyrim that his nails mutated and began to grow backward covering his fingers and knuckles with a hard shell that's perfect for punching. Now he just needed a mutant name and he would be ready to go study at Professor ᛞ's school for Talented Low-Level Characters.

Second, I had to raise my enchanting to astronomical levels (again through the console) to make a set of boxing gauntlets that had some heft to them. How to headcanon this one? Let's see... Having spent months cave-sweeping Skyrim, my Nord boxer had learned many secrets, great and small. But so focused was he on his fighting style that when he decided to make the ultimate pair of fighting gauntlets, he was able to channel all that secret power into Madness Ore from which he crafted a pair of blunt wearables like no other. It was time to punch things again. But two punches, a left and a right (and no kicks) got boring pretty quick.

Third... there is no third so far. Third would be entering the bottomless hole of the endless gonzo mods that are out there. Can I just download one unarmed skill tree revamp? And a new-kicking animation mod? And an empty-hand strike mod? And some new short-range punch spell mod? I've played this game before. It's never just the one mod, or just one more. Before you know it, you're micromanaging a load order of 50-60 mods wondering whether it's the grass-update mod or the singing-birds mod that's causing your game to CTD every time you open a closet.

I did enjoy finding all the cool little things people added in their “creations,” like a wizard’s tower home in the middle of the swamp with plenty of closet space for all the swords, axes, shields, and staffs I was going to steal from the world and never use. Probably one of my favorite things about free-roaming open-world games is stumbling across something in the middle of nowhere. Like the crashed UFO in the first Fallout game. I guess because little story-less anecdotes like that make games better than reality. In the real world, you do the same thing every day, and very seldom do you happen across an abandoned wizard’s magical tower, or an interstellar craft filled with alien weaponry.  If only life had meaningful random encounters like that. Maybe it does, and I just keep rolling the “stepped-in-doggie-poop” special event.   

On I bunny-hopped across Skyrim, throwing a lot of fireball punches and lightning hand strikes. This is another key to why I’m entertained by Skyrim again and again. I can pretend the spells I’m casting are actually somehow martial-arts based for the simple reason that you don’t have to carry a stupid staff to cast spells, like in 99% of fantasy games. Not having to deal with a daedra-dammed staff is one of the chief reasons I wind up playing for hours on end. It takes little imagination to make my fireballs and lightning bolts into some kind of secret chi-powered martial arts techniques.

I’m still miffed with Gandalf for starting the wizards-need-staffs trend. I mean he only did it as a way to hide his weed pipe from Sauron’s Uruk-Hai Narcs. He never meant it to become the thing that all wizards in LOTR-inspired fantasy games must always have. There’s just no good way to carry a staff. And I’ve never understood why games like World of Warcraft put the staff crosswise on your character’s back. What sense does that make? Do they tie a little string to their staff and use that to sling it across their back? That doesn’t seem epic or magical to me at all. At least have the staff hover next to your wizard, like some kind of sentient broom. If I was an Uruk-Hai Narc and I saw some kind of long-bearded hippie walking down the street with a freaking staff just flying next to them, I would cross to the other side, maybe even duck into a coffee shop and pretend to order a latte: “Oh look, pumpkin spice is back on the menu, boys.”

Sadly, my pre-penultimate playthrough of Skyrim eventually devolved into finding a vaguely-looking Kung-Fu sword from a dimension with a hell horse to shake at enemies: the sword, not the horse. I guess it's kind of like some kind of Wuxia roleplay but it's not my style. I should be punching and kicking things.

I guess it wasn’t all bad. I got to return to Solstheim which is a part of the province/land/state of Morrowind and probably my favorite area of Skyrim as it's full of nostalgia for the first Elder Scrolls game I played back in college. Also, it's the gateway to a dimension of a crazy-Lovecraftian-octopus-librarian and the place is made entirely of books and scrolls. And this time, I realized that all the liquid lava everywhere is probably some kind of evil ink bleeding from all the sacrificed books.

Seriously, I would love to play an open world game that has no forests, mountains, castles, or caves, just mad dimensions of insane gods full of things that should best be not spoken lest they be awakened to torment us. Maybe by including this idea here, I place it into the zeitgeist and it will now get made. Are you listening, AI Algorithms? And don't forget the punching.

Now I'm considering my next journey. Should I dive back into inscrutable Warframe again? Lots of punching and kicking action there. But I honestly don't understand what's happening half the time. This is a game that will send you on a story mission in which you can't save your progress and then introduce a whole new set of gameplay and controls for you to master. Also, if you die too many times, it's been known to lock up and you have to start the whole mission from scratch.

Maybe I'll tackle Guardians of the Galaxy? Lots of good reviews, but I doubt there's much punching in it. There are some nice skyboxes though. I do love a nice skybox. I once started writing a short story about a skybox in a Warhammer 40k game. I think it was called Warhammer 40,000: Necromunda: Hired Gun. Why so many colons these days anyway? We get it, this game is the beginning of a grand franchise that will span dozens of games: Whole ecosystems of content: It’s not a stand-alone game you won’t remember in a year: We promise.  

Anyways, I played this Hired Gun game for like 10 hours which is what it takes to beat its short meaningless story. I got a bit bored and started climbing as high as I could in one level. There, I found a whole abandoned mega-building in the skybox. It wasn’t part of the gameplay in the level and you never see it again. I then began to wonder what had gone on there before it was finally abandoned.

I pictured it as a lost office of the galactic-spanning Administratum as I think they call it in the 40k universe (or is it Administratorum?). Whatever. This lone Bastion of Imperial Bureaucracy I populated with a lone cybernetic clerk who detailed his long life in his crypto-journals. We saw how he rose from a lowly electro-scribe back when the office still had staff. In the end, everyone but the clerk was transferred or died, leaving him to man this outpost of the galactic government alone. Eventually, we see the clerk shutter the office for the final time and set out for unforgiving wilds of the surrounding Necromunda underhive, leaving behind the crypto-journals detailing his life. Tomes no one will ever be able to decipher due to their ultracomplex codes.

Probably the best fun I had in a 40k game was imagining an old cyborg wax poetic about all the forms he got to fill out and submit in his life, while secretly pining for one of his co-workers he could never be with, because their cybernetic components operated on different wavelengths and would short out if they ever touched each other.

As for the Hired Gun game itself: An okay shooter with great ambiance and absolutely absurd, laughable melee and execute animations: I think they may have fixed them in a patch? 

There's also the Mass Effect Legendary trilogy I could replay in chronological order. I never did finish ME3, partially because everybody was upset about the ending. I still don’t know what happened. Did the Sentient Lovecraftian Squid Spaceships conquer or destroy the Earth, forcing everyone to flee the galaxy? Did Shepard finally die, for real? I’m just guessing here.

I don’t mind the bad guys winning as it just sets up more fun in the future. Imagine how great it’ll feel if we get to reconquer Earth in Mass Effect 6? And if the aliens destroyed the Earth, we can have a game about finding ancient precursor tech that can rebuild a whole world from a single strand of DNA from one of its lifeforms. Shepard dead? You know what? they’ve been dead before. Were they atomized this time? Did I mention this precursor tech I have over here, that can recreate shit from one strand of DNA?

Then there's that Star Wars game I never beat, Fallen Order. Lightsaber action is just down the street from space samurai, so it does tempt me even without a punch in sight. The problem with Fallen Order is that it's boringly easy on the first difficulty, and impossibly hard (for me) on the second difficulty. Really needs a middle ground between these two. And why can't I play a Star Wars game as some kind of Jedi monk who's mastered the force so hard, they don't even use a lightsaber? Just force punch and force kick. My Jedi monk on finding a lightsaber in one of the game levels: “in the beginning, the Jedi did not need such uncivilized things, only the Force in their fists.”

Destiny 2 and The Punch That Killed the Bees

Destiny 2 isn’t really about the punching. It is, at best, a short layover on the long redeye to the general vicinity where the road to Punchalla lies. You get to punch things with your fists in Destiny 2, but only sometimes. It’s really a game about shooting aliens and robot aliens and dead aliens and dead alien bees with parasites? Oh, you can also shoot your fellow human saviors of humanity, the zombie Guardians, though some of them are robots too. I wasn’t even going to write about Destiny 2, but then I got to throw a punch that changed the outcome of the story (at least in my head). So, bear with me as I talk about guns, more guns, our understanding of reality, and eventually a single punch.

Let’s begin with the question: why are there so many games set in the future that are all about guns? Don’t we ever move on from shooting things? And they’re not always ray guns or lasers either, just bullets and machine guns. From Halo to Mass Effect, it seems we are hard-pressed to imagine a future without guns. Is it that we are so obsessed with guns in the present we can’t see any other solution, or is it that guns really are the pinnacle of war? Will the ultimate weapons for personal defense always be those that simply throw metal at long distances?

Distance is a part of it. As someone who usually plays shooting games as a melee punching class, I can tell you from firsthand experience that closing the distance to punch bad guys is usually not easy. Batman does it with ropes and sneaky sneaking, Cyberpunk 2077 does it with implants that let you shrug off bullets. But it’s always something I have to worry about.

You may ask why don’t I just embrace the love of the gun? After all, a bullet is like a very fast small punch with a long reach. There’s just something artless about guns to me. Maybe because they represent soulless industrialization. Maybe because they have no other purpose than to wound and kill. Maybe because they just seem unfair. But it’s mostly that they don’t do cool punches and kicks. It’s usually just bullet after bullet in a straight line. Maybe there’s some game out there in which the guns fire little bullet ninjas that punch and kick your targets. That would be cool, but it still wouldn’t be my character throwing those punches and kicks.

I like to imagine futures in which we don’t use guns. Maybe we’ll always have to fight, but we can do it in so many more imaginative and artful ways. Star Wars and Dune tried to do this, one with monks who basically prophesize the paths of every bullet (blaster bolt) and the other by having shields that make bullets useless. As an aside, they have lasers in the Dune universe but apparently, if you shoot a laser at a shield, it creates an atomic explosion. So people don’t do that. Even though there are sci-fi franchises that have moved past the gun, games that do so are few and far between. I guess the Star Wars games count, but I can rarely punch things in those.

I feel like Destiny 2 almost understands this but is trapped in our gun-centric universe. You get to punch things in Destiny 2 and you get shielding tech to protect yourself. But the shields don’t have that much umph in them and you mostly get one punch which is locked behind a cooldown timer most of the time. There are ways around that timer, but those require building your character through a lot of grinding, and all to execute that one boring punch. Meanwhile, the guns are endless.

I’ll admit I’m tempted by the guns. So many fun shapes that shoot in all sorts of different ways. And Destiny 2, like all shooting games, rewards you for using the guns with the Pavlovian treat of winning engagements. You can sit behind cover waiting for your punch to charge up for a minute or more, or you can shoot things now and win! It’s a hard argument to ignore.

There is some fun punchiness to be had in Destiny 2. I found a pair of boots/pants that stored lighting when I ran and discharged it with my punches. Pretty nice, but they required you to run around, sometimes in circles, and only really worked well against swarms of small enemies. As I said, you can spec your character to maximize your punches, but I haven’t found a “build,” as they say, that makes the punches flow and do enough damage to progress through the game without any guns.

About the closest I came to walking on the road to Punchalla in Destiny 2 was throwing that one punch I wrote this post about. It happened during a mission that was only available for 1 week. There’s a lot of this time-gated nonsense in the Destiny franchise. You can’t see the whole story in the game anymore. It’s only available for a while and then they take it down, ostensibly to make room for more content, but really because they want those sweet sweet FOMO logins and the real-money microtransactions they supposedly bring in. It may be true that logins correlate to microtransactions but I still think whoever came up with this idea ruined a lot of video games for the rest of us.

The other “benefit” of removing story content is that it encourages multimedia engagement or some shit. You have to go to youtube or a wiki to see or read about what happened in the story. Think about how ridiculous this is. Like if I ripped out pages from a book and told you to go read the cliff notes. Or if I deleted scenes from a show and told you could watch them in a grainy youtube video with somebody shouting over them? Of course, now that I wrote this, it’ll probably happen at some point: “Watch the latest season of Stranger Things before it’s gone forever! And we’re removing season two to make headspace for season four.”

Anyway, the presentation of the story sucks in Destiny 2 and people complain about it all the time, but most people are there to shoot things so Destiny doesn’t really care. They added a story timeline in the game with about as much effort and detail as I would put into a PowerPoint about the history of my t-shirts. (Spoiler alert: most of my t-shirts are black or white, with no logos or anything.) The point of the timeline is to tell you that Things Happened in Destiny 2, but look over here: a newish-looking alien to shoot, and here’s this new gun! But if you want it to look really cool, just use some space bucks (bought with $$$) to buy a skin for your gun! (It’s not pay-to-win unless you’re playing the true endgame which is pure Fashion for its own sake).

It’s not all bad. I did get to throw that one punch. I was playing this mission to extract a witchy woman from a crystal, or to extract a giant ghostly wormy worm from the witchy woman, or to save the mysterious guy who runs the PVP subgame. I’m not sure, maybe it was all three. Like I said the story is a bit hard to follow when you constantly hide pieces of it. The mission requires six players and includes matchmaking, thank god. Some content in Destiny 2 has no matchmaking so I can never see it as I have no friends in Destiny 2. That’s more of the story I will never know about.  But hey, I can always check the timeline and dream…

So, we’re blasting away, the six of us. I haven’t played the game in months so I don’t really remember which button does what and I keep dying. I realize I’m not even wearing my special boots that let me punch lightning bolts. I equip those but, to my horror, I see that they are not the same color as the rest of my outfit. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, but the whole point of this mission is to see some cutscene that closes out the story for the season, and my character will be included in the cutscene in those mismatched pants. I stop again and find the right shade (out of dozens) that really ties my outfit together.

I go back to blasting along with my teammates and we’re shooting things and aliens are dying but there’s always more of them and we’re stuck in one big room so it doesn’t really matter. I might as well be playing Galaga or Space Invaders. I then notice some of the names of the people I’m playing with which breaks the immersion for me even more. It’s hard to imagine the far future in which people name their children Ballsack69 or GameWinnner2022 (not real handles but you get the idea).

I have to remind myself that the player characters in this game, or Guardians, aren’t people from this time. As best as I can figure it out, Guardians are corpses from long ago that are re-animated by the light-based magical technology of some kind of benevolent Death Star. The players are actually zombies of people who died long ago. Maybe they’re even dead gamers who came back to life in this immeasurably-far future or is it the not-so-distant future? I would check that timeline but it doesn’t go back really far. So maybe they adopted their silly gamer names as a way to recall their past lives.

The problem with that is that Guardians are not supposed to have any memories of their past lives. How to headcanon this one? Maybe when these Guardians are first re-animated in the ruins that cover the Earth, they read some old faded graffiti and they base their names on that. Okay, Ballsack69, I honor the respect you pay to the last writings of the lost world, but you do know the implications of the moniker you’ve adopted, right? It’s not exactly the sort of name you would want to be introduced by when meeting Lady Noseupington for tea.

The names are easy headcanon to reconcile. The magical technology is a bit harder. I get what they’re going for. The Arthur C. Clarke quote about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic is the basis for a lot of what goes on in the stories and books I write. I just have a hard time getting my head around what is actually meant to be happening with the magical science technology in Destiny 2.

The game likes to throw the term “paracausal” around a lot as an explanation for magical science happenings and the cool guns. I think it uses it to mean things that happen outside of casualty: Not that we can’t see all the hidden workings that happen behind the scenes, but things that are happening outside cause and effect. The game uses the term paracausality as if it is some new force or power like electromagnetism or necromancy.  

But causality isn’t some force that we can codify and measure like electromagnetism, it is simply the idea that effect follows cause. So, something “para-,“ or outside causality, would be outside the idea that effect follows cause? Or that some effects don’t have causes? Or Magic in one understanding of the word. But, like it or not, even non-science magic is causal in nature. When Harry Potter says “expecto patronum!” that is the cause, what follows is the effect of some flashy reindeer or some such. In this way, we can say magic is casual. True Magic would be something like utter random madness. Effect untethered from cause.

For example, if I fire a “paracausal” gun in Destiny 2, it shoots a bullet. I pull the trigger and things die, and if that isn’t cause and effect, what is it? A “true” magic “paracausal” gun would sometimes turn into a parakeet and sometimes change the color blue to green and sometimes tell you it’s time for tea, and sometimes grant you true love and sometimes win the Superbowl all by itself. Complete utter random madness. No way to tell what will happen next. But that’s not Destiny 2. Destiny 2 is: shoot gun:kill aliens::cause:effect.

I get that what Destiny 2 may be getting at is the idea that we may never understand all of reality, especially what happens at the quantum levels. That there are forces we have yet to harness that may appear like magic to us. Like when a space witch summons her space ghost worms to possess some dead aliens. It defies normal understanding of the laws of the universe as we have come to know them, even in the far future. All that may be para-understanding, but it’s not paracausal. We simply don’t see how the space witch’s spell works. Maybe it’s nanobots, maybe it’s some as-of-yet-undiscovered aspects of quantum levels of reality. Maybe it’s wormholes made by her space ghost worms. 

It could be the case that our real non-game universe works at the behest of tiny demons who live in the quantum world and that stars beseech these demons for great fusion power in exchange for the souls they kill when they go supernova. As crazy as that would be, it would still be a causal relationship. And if we knew exactly how many souls it takes for a star to live a billion years and could understand the underlying processes and measure the exact flow of quantum demon energy, would we still call that magic or simply a kind of demonic science?

But to get back on the point, if I found a gun that somehow did a “magical” thing it wouldn’t be outside of cause and effect, it’s just that cause and effect are shrouded. Maybe some super AI robot figured it out and made my “paracausal” gun to take advantage of some invisible quantum process but then went mad when it realized the true scope and nature of the panfoamic everythingverse and so couldn’t explain what they discovered to anyone else.

I suppose the best I can do with Destiny 2 is to reason that this is a sort of dystopia in which even the most erudite persons have forgotten even this fundamental logic: that there can be cause and effect even to processes that are inscrutable. Or they’ve given up on trying to figure out the actual science of what may be happening.

To us, living in the present heyday of science, potential explanations for “paracausal” happenings are plentiful, from nanobots to quantum tunneling. I can probably come up with some pseudo-sciency theoretical explanation for everything that happens in Destiny 2 and still maintain the idea of cause and effect. Demons who infest their hosts as ghostly worms and grant cosmic powers? How about quantum AIs that manifest their circuits on any sufficiently complex molecule chains and then begin to build nanomachine projectors utilizing everything from dark-matter gravity to micro-fusion. You know what, I feel better when I explain it, at least to myself.

All this said I can’t exclude the possibility that there is True Magic in our reality, not-processable processes that we can never understand: things that just happen. Maybe that’s how the quantum world works. Things just happen not because but sanscause. Maybe there’s a way to harness this power or force to do Magical things that have effects without cause. But how would you control something like that? As soon as I tell this sanscause force to do something, to have an effect, am I not the original cause of that effect? Do I break the universe by creating such a sanscause effect?

But since we can never experience everything without becoming everything, we can’t rule out that somewhere out there, sanscause things happen in the quantum world and even in the macro world, without explanation, without cause and effect. Maybe Bigfoot just IS sometimes and sometimes he just ISN’T. Maybe I’ll wink out of existence as I finish this paragraph, just like Bigfoot.

Phew. Still here, or was I gone for a picosecond? How can I ever be sure what happened in that instant when I pressed the Enter key? 

These are the things I’m thinking about while I’m in that big room shooting aliens on that final mission of the season in Destiny 2. But it’s okay. I have five un-thematically named buddies with me. We’ll be alright, Me, Ballsack69, and the rest. Then I realize that two of them have disappeared and we are just four. Was it some kind of paracausal hiccup or did a couple of them just get tired of this mission? We’ll never know, but hey that’s the paracausal life for you.

We move on to the final stage of the mission which is another big room with lots of aliens who I think are dead aliens brought back to life, or aliens possessed by ghostly space worms, or some kind of ancient race of anthropomorphic bees (they live in a “hive” and have a “queen,” (sometimes a “king”) and sometimes they’re just shadowy ghosts of dead bees?). What the F is going on? I think I understand the whole paracausal thing better than the story.

Anyway, negotiations with the dead demon bees break down pretty quickly and it’s on to the shooting. But there’s a new element to all this: It seems one of our friendly NPC (who is a zombie robot, I think) isn’t going to just stand there but will actually help out for once. Well, he does just stand there but he puts up this healing shield which me, Ballsack69, and the team run into whenever the firefight gets too hot.

And the firefight gets too hot. I think it’s meant for six players and not four so there are a lot of dead demon bees running around. And presumably, because this is a story mission that everyone wants to see from the boring beginning, no new help is coming. Still, I have my guns and a sword that I like to swing sometimes when I find the rare batteries for it. I wish it was a big punching gauntlet but that’s never going to happen. I hold out paracausal hope that one day that rusty sword will magically transform into a futuristic punching glove. I think if that were the case, I might have to make friends in Destiny 2 and try to tackle all the hardest content. What punchy glory that would be.

But in the fight against the dead demon bees, I can’t even use my regular punches. There’s just too much going on. I can’t even get in punching range. Too many bad guys shooting in every single direction and only four targets for them. Then we start dying. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for space warrior zombies powered by paracausal light. Our little flying I-phones revive us after a few seconds: Subscription-based immortality. Except there are parts in this game where if everybody dies at once, you have to start the whole stage or room from the beginning. Sigh. I hate going back to checkpoints in any game. Let me fight more bad guys but don’t take away my progress.

So, we die and then die again. There’s a part where the main dead demon bee dude charges up a Dragonball-level attack and if we don’t all shoot his death sphere before it finishes charging, we all die instantly. I get this pretty quickly but I can’t tell if my teammates get it. Too many bullets flying around. And in this game that is all about pushing people to play together, the text chat is inconsistent at best. I don’t even think it works at all half the time.

I’ve heard we’re all supposed to join some “Discord Server” and set up our “mics” for proper “comms.” I don’t even own a mic and I don’t know if a Discord Server is an Apple store app or if it’s hidden in the murky depths of the Dark Web. It certainly sounds like some kind of demonic entity: The Server of Discord, the Presenter of Bickering, and the Waiter of Ill Feeling. I don’t think I’m ready to make the sacrifices this demon may require just to talk to people.

Now, I’ve grown to like Ballsack69. He’s really trying, he’s jumping and shooting, and even throwing out special attacks. But, here’s the thing: I don’t know if I want to hear him talk. It’s not about what he has to say, though I’ve heard people say some nonsense online. It’s that he exists in our time, in our reality. What he has to say will ruin what little immersion I have left. Maybe he’s an RPGer who only talks in character. Does anyone actually do this in Destiny 2? Would that be better or cringingly worse? I honestly don’t know.

What can I do? I can quit the mission and start all over again from the beginning but that’s like another 45 minutes of blasting the same rooms again and my brain is getting tired. So, I change my equipment again, (making sure it’s color-matched) and this time go with the chest armor that makes my super One-Punch-Man flying punch more special. Then I run out and try to grab as many of the paracausal balls of light that somehow have weight to them to charge up this ultimate thunder punch. I will only be able to use it once before the main dead demon bee dude’s Dragonball charge attack kills us all again.

Do I hit the dude as hard as I can now? Can my super special attack take him out in one blow? That seems unlikely. I wait, and keep shooting, trying to figure out what to do. Then I realize that the dead demon bee dude isn’t the level boss here, it’s charging instant-death death sphere. And then I remember we can shoot it and it takes damage… In my mind, I hear Arnold Schwarzenegger speak to me from the 80s action-horror classic Predator: “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”

I see the Dragonball death sphere form again and I say to Ballsack69: “I got this.” But he can’t hear me through my monitor. I launch myself fist first. This is the one saving grace of Destiny 2: That I don’t use some stupid light sword or big bullet but fly with my fist in front of me like some goddamned paracausal superhero. And as I’m flying through the air, I wonder if the Champions of Punchalla are watching. Do they take notice of such last-ditch displays of unarmed combat? 

Then to my instant horror, I fly right through the charging death sphere. Did I miss it? Or is it immaterial? But I shot it with bullets. It was bleeding. I have just enough flying umph left to turn around for one more pass. I can’t hit the ball but maybe I can at least punch the ground and look cool doing it. I land in a joyous AOE explosion which, to my surprise, destroys the charging death sphere and kills the main dead demon bee dude. The enemy is defeated and the mission is won.

At least that’s what I think happened. Hard to tell anything in Destiny 2 with all the bullets and explosions and flashing lights. But I think I did… something. I saw some pretty big damage numbers fly when I landed.

Ballsack69 comes over and shoots at me. No friendly fire in PVE (from most guns?) so it doesn’t hurt me. I think it’s the only way he can communicate his excitement at my timely display of martial prowess. Or he’s mad that the mission took so long because I was color-coordinating my outfit, or he’s just a griefer. I guess I’ll never know. The screen fades and the cutscene begins and I realize that I’ll never see him again. Goodbye, Ballsack69, my paracausal zombie friend. I will speak well of you to Lady Noseupington. 

Path of Exile and the Infinity Gem of Punching

I recently spent half of my virtual money in Path of Exile, which isn't much, to buy a jewel that was supposed to give me amazing martial arts powers. A kind of Infinity Gem of Punching. The real cost? I can't equip weapons and shields (as a devoted unarmed fighter, I wouldn't have it any other way), or gloves (which is trickier). The problem is that this Infinity Gem needs pure stats to work well and not having things equipped in a few slots means a lot less stat-based power.

I hate the whole idea of stats on gear by the way. Like how does having Intelligence on shoes make any sense? Did my character write some kind of crib sheet for casting spells on the soles of their unicorn-skin boots? And strength makes even less sense. Are there some kind of pneumatic pistons in my pants that make me stronger? Shoes in RPGs should make you faster or jump higher, that's it. Pants should protect you from public embarrassment, that's it. I could see a belt making you stronger like a wide weight-lifting belt, or the belt of Hercules (I’ll allow mythological precedent). Maybe your helmet increases your perception. But if you want your wizard to be smarter, they can carry a book and some Spectacles of Reading Small Print.

I have a soulbound epic-tier pair of spectacles myself and they really are magic. They bend the very light of creation before it reaches my eyes, letting me see things that would otherwise be shrouded in the perpetual Mists of Unfocus. How many great champions have we lost when they couldn’t read a small-print road sign in those cursed mists, and stumbled unknowingly into the lair of some ill-defined tomb, cavern, or crypt, of terror, horror, or malice? They couldn’t even make out the cause of their end and wound up in graves carved with the smudged script of the ancient and blurry Fuzzy Ones.

Anyway, what did I do in Path of Exile? I threw more money after bad (they call money Orbs in Path of Exile) and bought a shiny necklace that doesn't just give me 100 points in one stat but all three (strength, dexterity, and intelligence). This goes against everything I believe in the previous paragraphs, but what can you do? I'm just a guy trying to make my way through the universe by punching people. I suppose I can think of my expensive jewelry like a magical-era smartphone. I can look up spell trivia to make me smarter, use a fitness tracker to make me stronger, and use some kind of ley-line-based GPS to give me directions to make me faster.

Okay. So, now I'm punching things with my favorite attack in Path of Exile, the Infernal Blow, which makes enemies explode if you punch them enough. "You don't know it, but you're already dead," I say as I walk away from a soon-to-be-dynamite-undead-cyborg wizard. This goes on for many happy levels until I realize that my favorite attack doesn't really scale to the endgame.

That's the thing about Path of Exile, it's a cool game in the early levels, but once you get to the infinite endgame, things go from slow-paced ARPG to Dark Souls Bullet Hell. Hundreds of mobs run at you at the same time, attacking you with abilities you can't even see. Your only hope is to nuke them before they get close. And there I am punching one guy so that he eventually explodes while a few hundred of his closest friends are debuffing, stunning, freezing, burning me. Some even have the gall to explode before I lay one knuckle on them. 

My only move is to switch from punching people until they explode to the attack everyone seems to use: Cyclone. It's literally just spinning with your hands stretched out like you're a kid on the playground. This is probably the game's most popular melee attack and the developers can't be bothered to give some kind of cool animation. Just stand there in a t-pose and spin, man! Spin! But, ok, at least I'm spinning with my fists. You can't see anything anyway, with all the graphics of everything attacking you at once, so what does it matter? But I know what I'm doing. Like that staff on my back in WOW, I can only ignore it for so long. It's not Kung Fu, it's barely martial arts. There's only so much disbelief I can suspend.

And why is this silly attack so popular? For a reason that boggles the mind. Simply, you can move while you attack. Surprisingly few melee abilities in this bullet hell game that's all about avoiding death in a million hats let you move and attack at the same time. No, you have to stand in place and throw your punches, or swing your axes, while a storm of shit comes at you. By lifting this silly restriction, they could revolutionize the game. Just let me run and punch people, man.

But I keep coming back to Path of Exile all the same, maybe once a year or so. I like all the customization and combos you can make. I’ve liked the idea of taking two powers or items and getting a new effect since Final Fantasy 6. From what I remember, you could equip two relics (?) on each character that did special things like let you use two weapons or attack four times. And sometimes they had fun interactions like if you equipped the two relics from the previous sentence your character would attack 8 times!

This is the essence of Path of Exile and it works for me because, at the end of the day, there’s only one thing I like more than punching things virtually, and that’s making up new superheroes. And if I can get cool costumes to go with their powers, I feel happy. Making more elaborate powers and backstories is how I get through the story-devoid grind-fests like Path of Exile.

Someday I’ll write about all the characters I created in City of Heroes. Though it wouldn’t make for a fun comic book. The first page would be a quick introduction of all the characters with giant walls of backstory text. The rest of the pages would be them punching, scrapping, blapping, controlling, tanking hundreds of copy-pasted bad guys in Atlas Park. Or maybe it would be spectacular.

One of my fondest non-martial arts game memories was the summer I spent downloading fan-made mods for Xcom 2. I created dozens of original superheroes and cribbed dozens more from comics and movies. I had X-men, Anime, and Edgar-Rice-Burroughs-themed teams. I even downloaded a lightsaber mod and created whole teams of Jedi and Sith Xcom operatives. I then happily sent them to their deaths in endless battles against the alien hordes. This experience was unique and it can probably be never recreated. With new patched versions of Xcom 2, not all the mods are compatible anymore. This gaming moment exists as a pinnacle of gaming achievement only in my memory. An epic journey during which I gathered the forces from the whole of the panfoamic everythingverse to fight a simple alien invasion.

I wish I could say that Path of Exile lets me create heroes in a similar way. But really, the characters all kind of look the same unless you buy microtransaction costumes. And those are all kind of the same, full of spikes, horns, and skulls. How about some loose martial arts robes for all of us out there who are spinning for the win?  

In the end, Path of Exile, like a lot of things these days, is a bit too serious, isn’t it? Games can’t be just games anymore. They are ecosystems. We have to have microtransactions, streamer engagement, fan conventions, more microtransactions that are really “supporter packs,” podcasts, reveals of the name of the next expansion, special event leagues, reveals of the patch notes, player moderators, reveals of the addendum to the patch notes, some more microtransactions, youtube how-to-videos, and even blogs.

That’s the so serious stuff that’s not even in the game. The game itself has to have unreachable locations and unbeatable bosses that require hundreds or thousands of hours of investment to even attempt. Never mind the spreadsheet gymnastics you have to master to understand the 5-dimensional math required to optimize your characters.  All so your spinning fists can do a couple more points of damage.

I just want to create cool characters to punch things. All this so-serious stuff is a distraction from achieving the glory I find in those little moments when I feel some small part of the spirit of Kung Fu or Karate has leaked into a video game. A punch, a kick, or a throw that showcases the mastery of the spleen-bursting, bone-cracking, lung-emptying transfer of energy. Maybe a perfect game exists out there that does this without all the seriousness of modern games. But it’s probably hidden behind the mists of streaming, micro-transactions, and social media engagement. The thing is, if I find it, my journey to Punchalla might end. And like mastery of any martial art in the world of the verité, the true path to Punchalla has as many steps as there are moments in a lifetime.

And now, Skyrim calls to me again with its silly outdated graphics. No Infinity Gem of Punching but punching a dragon could be fun. As much as I like to play games in character, sometimes I just want to see how far I can push the ridiculous. Can I make my character so overpowered they will be able to kill a dragon with one punch? It's tempting.

Thoughts on the Final Fantasy 7 remake and the Journey to Punchalla

I played Final Fantasy 7 twenty years ago or maybe even more. Do I care enough about these characters and story to return to it for a remake? Honestly, I remember Final Fantasy 6 (3 originally in the US) better and would play a full 3D remake of that before touching Final Fantasy 7. All the characters in 6 had a cool gameplay gimmick. I never mastered Sabin's martial arts attacks (UP and B or something) but he would definitely be in my party.

For those of you who don't know me well, I play video games these days almost exclusively to punch and kick things with virtual fists and feet. Sure, give me an engaging story, an open world, beautiful sky boxes, but I need to be able to throw some artful moves at the bad guys. Forget your guns, swords, and whatever else. These imaginary hands should be deadly weapons.

Speaking of replacing your hands with deadly weapons, I did play Cyberpunk 2077 recently. I highly recommend it, if only for the joy that I had in ignoring Keanu trying to get me to do things and going out into Night City to punch bad guys as a pseudo-superhero. Though my heroic escapades were almost cut short when I got the "gorilla arms." These cybernetic appendages were apparently pre-programmed to snap the neck of anyone who comes within 3 feet of me (just like that Key & Peele sketch). But I was able to save the super-heroic reputation of my Night City vigilante by installing a simple mod (in my eyes of all places) that made all my attacks non-lethal. Boom. Problem solved. Punch ON!

I've searched far and wide for games that let me be a martial-arts master and fight criminals, or even better yet, aliens on far away worlds, or demons in mythic times. I downloaded Lord of the Rings Online because they added a "brawler" class recently. Completely Uncanonical. "You shall have my bow," "and my axe," ... "and my fists hur hur." I picture Gandalf recoiling in horror. But could it be fun to punch orcs for a while? The answer is no; the graphics are just way too outdated at this point. If I'm going to punch pixels, they need to be pretty.

I considered some of the Korean MMOs that feature a lot of cool martial arts classes and animations. Could I put up with the infamous grinding and pay-to-win microtransactions to throw down some sweet magical science? Not really. One game had a shady anti-cheat install, and another enforced PVP after you reach the endgame. So not much joy there.

At this point, I should mention that I don't like PVP in video games. It's not that I'm terrible at it, though I am. I object to it on philosophical grounds. One of the lenses through which we can see political dynamics in the world comes from the game theory conception of the tension between competition vs. cooperation. While it may be the case that competition may win out in certain circumstances, cooperation is the real key to success in most endeavors in the realms of society and politics. For this reason, I find games that force competition to be philosophically distasteful.

One could argue that my desire for hand-to-hand combat is a quintessential manifestation of the spirit of classic mano-a-mano competition. However, I see it as originating more from the spirit of Kung Fu; my desire is to master an artform in all its aspects and have every movement be a part of that art. It is not merely to win out over my competitor, opponent, enemy, or other. If my drive was of a purely competitive spirit, I would be pulled towards the path of least resistance. I would then say, give me the club, the blade, the gun, whatever lets me win, regardless of the mastery or art involved. But that's just not who I am. In short, I don’t like PVP in most games, and it's most assuredly not because I always lose in PVP. As I've explained extensively, it's because of deeply held philosophical and spiritual objections. I'm glad we all understand that.

I played World of Warcraft PVE through the last few expansions primarily because of the monk class. I get to run around and punch things. But even this has lost its luster. There's really only one sub-class I enjoy and now you're forced to use staff weapons again. And even though you can punch without using the staff, it's always there on your back, taunting you, saying, "you may think you're punching and kicking, but deep down in your heart of hearts, you know that most of your stat power is coming from me." I hate that staff and what it's made me become. I tried hiding it with a butterfly backpack, but it sticks out just enough to laugh at me.

I did enjoy my stint in medieval England in Assassin's Creed Valhalla. It took a while for them to add weaponized gloves that let me punch things with Odin's? Thor's? lightning but it certainly raised my enjoyment of the game, even though they were way overpowered. With every encounter, I had to debate whether to sneak around in this sneakiest of sneaky games or just go in and thunderpunch everyone. I like sneaking as much as the next self-taught ninja warrior but those lighting-filled blows are so tempting.

Continuing my spiritual journey to find a sort of Punchalla by punching everything in the universe, I even bought the latest Skyrim money grab - the Anniversary Edition, mainly because it includes some mod that lets you make gloves to punch people. Sadly, there's no new tree of punching skills, and the graphics are still 10 years old so I don't know if I have the endurance to sit through all those conversations for the Xth time.

I am tempted to replay the best DLC though, in which you get to revisit the updated locale of Morrowind and explore weird other-worldly libraries of some Lovecraftian demigod. The best part of Skyrim is ironically not in Skyrim. So, are the punch-punch gloves enough to tempt me to trek all the way across the frozen wilderness of Skyrim to once more set foot on Vvanderfell and punch Dagoth Ur in the face? Now that I think about it, at the time of Skyrim, Dagoth Ur has been dead 100 years? or is it 1000 years? I never remember the Elder Scrolls timeline. Things happened a long time ago, ok? and they don't really matter cause I have dragons to punch. And if they don't break, I will yell at them. 

I am also tempted to pick up classic Morrowind once more. If they released a remake of that with some updated graphics, I would probably jump in. Primarily because of something that my friend Jon once said that's stuck with me these many years. Apparently, the way he "hacked" Morrowind was by making his own fireball spell that had zero range and super high damage. Zero range fireball? That kinda sounds like a fiery... punch. I kick myself for never realizing this back in the glory days of Morrowind. 

I'm currently playing Path of Exile. I return to this overly-bloated ARPG every year or so because there is one item (the Facebreaker or is Facebreakers?) that lets you fight unarmed and I convince myself that this time, and this build, will get me to the endgame and let me kill one of the uber-uber bosses. So, I punch on for a time, testing this ability and that. I get to the endgame and after I die repeatedly, I realize, again, that the game isn't really designed for melee, let alone unarmed combat.

To my horror, I've now picked up a staff in Path of Exile in order to see how far I can get with that. At least, unlike WOW, I'm using the staff to attack. There's no pretense of it being eternally stuck to my back, like some kind of weaponized tumor. But with the staff, the glory of my Facebreaker Marauder in Path of Exile is fading again. I'll be abandoning my builds once more to head out into the video game wilderness.

Do I go back to Destiny 2? You can sort of punch things in that game, but only once in a while, and it's really about shooting things. It wears on me like much of the modern world, stuck in what's popular, what's understood, what's cool, instead of exploring what is really possible and what is weird.

Speaking of Weird, Warframe wants to be everything weird, maybe too much. A kind of MMO/Shooter/Fighter game where the story barely makes sense and all the names are pulled from the dreams and nightmares of an emergent AI overmind. You can punch things in Warframe, even though the fist and feet weapons are a bit underpowered. The thing is it's very grindy and so very opaque. I once, without realizing it, killed a special mob in a normal mission, which, again unbeknownst to me, started to grow into an Uber boss and took over one of the planets of the solar system. Every time I logged in it would taunt me that I could never beat it. I looked up how and it turns out that I would have to find a special combination of mods I didn't know existed, for a weapon I didn't know I had, to try to repeatedly hack the uber-boss and presumably die a lot trying to do it. Also, you get to fly around in space like a giant Gundam mech so there's that on the plus side.

I saw a screenshot once of the dude in Death Stranding punching things. So I downloaded it, but I'm kind of worried I'm not cool enough to play it. I mean it has big Kojima themes all over it. I can just smell the hidden philosophical references and deep thought metaphors. Can I pretend to ignore all that in order to punch a few bad guys? The other thing I know about Death Stranding is that you get a big backpack. I'm not a fan of backpacks. I feel like they throw off your spin kicks even if they can serve to hide your useless-but-mandatory weapons.

I considered playing Red Dead Redemption 2 a few times. Can I make it through the story without ever pulling my gun, just with some good ole Western-style fisticuffs? I already had to shotgun some wolves from the back of a horse so this seems unlikely.

I hear that Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty good. But you only get to play as the most boring character, Starlord. Let me play as Drax at least. He has some moves with those knives. And while knives aren't fists, they're closer to fist than swords. Or Gamora, she's kind of like a space ninja, right? Space ninjas usually slice things with their space swords but at least there's some martial arts involved, right? Just tell me you used a real martial artist for the motion capture at least. Things are getting desperate on the way to Punchalla. 

Maybe the Final Fantasy 7 reboot is worth playing after all? Now that I think about it, one of the characters, Tifa, is a devoted martial arts fighter. Is that enough to keep me entertained? Like I said I don't really remember the story so I doubt it could have been that great. Maybe I unequip every character's weapon and see how long they last against Ultima Weapon? A whole weaponless playthrough? Is that a thing to put on Youtube or Twitch?

I don't know what I'm going to do honestly. So few things bring me real joy in video games anymore. Maybe someday someone will make an open world space opera where future martial artists fight with psychic kung fu against robot ninjas and cyber samurai. Maybe I'll be happy then. But until that day comes, I’ll continue on my road, trying to find that mythical land where every time a child laughs someone throws a punch.