Developed/Published by: Blendo Games Released: 28/08/08 Completed: 05/07/25 Completion: Completed it.
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Blendo Games’ Skin Deep was released this year, and as is often the case, a new game makes me go “oh yeah, I haven’t really played much or anything by that developer” and I therefore feel like I have to start from the beginning. In this case, I’d previously played this and Blendo Games’ Flotilla (which I believe I still have on Xbox Live Indie Games?) but Gravity Bone only takes twenty minutes so I thought I’d run through it again (I don’t think I’m going to get the Xbox out for Flotilla, though it’s also still on Steam.)
Anyway, Gravity Bone is still well worth running through in 2025 (you can too if you like, and then come back.) It worked fairly well for something made in 2008 even if it did crash consistently if I went into the menu and I was never able to get the graphics looking right in full screen (I wouldn’t even bother trying to get it working on a Steam Deck. But, again, it’s twenty minutes long.)
What strikes me about Gravity Bone now is actually similar to what Kieron Gillen said about it way back in 2009–the confidence it has. A tiny spy thriller with blocky characters, designed with intentionality. The janky nature of playing it now could be detrimental, but the work shines through–like pulling up a scratchy digital transfer of an old short movie that was never matched.
To get into spoiler territory (again, for a game that’s twenty minutes long) I love that the game breaks the “rule of three”. You complete your first easy mission. Your second mission is a little more complex, featuring tools to use and in a very “2000s FPS” way, some tricky jumping. And then, before you can move on… you get shot.
Suddenly everything you expect from a game is broken. You can’t just follow what you’re being told to do. You’ve got to get up and chase your assailant, surely you’ll catch them. But then… you die.
But as you die, you “remember” everything that brought you there. Suddenly you are no longer just in control of an avatar doing as you were told–you understand you were playing a person, as you see their life flash before their eyes. It’s… surprising. And then? Truly? It’s actually quite moving.
You are taken from a pure video game experience to an emotional one, something that few games have managed in experiences that number in the tens of hours. I don’t want to oversell it too much, but while they say brevity is the soul of wit, Gravity Bone has wit and soul in its brief run time.
Will I ever play it again? If you haven’t heard, it’s only twenty minutes. But even at that…
Final Thought: Spoilers: in the time between starting to write this article and finishing it I did in fact decide I just had to play Flotilla after all. What am I like.
When introducing Evil Puddle as the first film in his pre-TIFF Midnight Dankness screening (which raised over $4000 for PCRF and Islamic Relief Canada!) Peter Kuplowsky compared it to Eddington as a work of post-COVID cinema, and it is, I think, an excellent lens to view it from.
Eddington is a cynical film that, if it argues anything at all, argues that we are all deeply alone–enveloped by our solipsism so completely that there is no such thing as community, and catastrophe only exposes our urge to self-preservation above all. That we are, ultimately, trapped in our own minds. Unable to see that we’re prey for higher powers and forces that we don’t–and couldn’t–understand.
To me, this is the worst kind of satire–the kind that allows you to be smug because you’re clever enough to know how bad things are and clever enough to know there’s nothing to be done about it. A self-fulfilling inaction.
Evil Puddle argues, instead that community is very, very real, in both narrative and form. From Matt Farley, Charlie Roxburgh and the cast of locals and fans that pitch in to play roles in their movies, Evil Puddle is a 1970s folk-horror disaster movie by way of community theatre in which some unlikely events lead to a small town’s water supply becoming, er, evil.
Heavily featuring a magic rock, I’m unclear if after Magic Spot Farley and Roxburgh are creating a new thematic series of “magic rock” movies to follow their earlier, triumphant series of Druid movies, but the water which kills you instantly but otherwise looks completely normal and benign (you know, like, say, air with a virus in it) is the key factor here. Like classic disaster movies, the film flits between disparate characters who all face peril in different ways due to their predispositions. So, for example, you see some kids who have been using a hose to clean off rocks for a new tranquillity garden. You see a group of ne’er-do-well’s who seem to do little other than hang around a pizza parlour complaining about the free tap water. You see, er, a dance instructor and his student who happen to be learning close to a sprinkler (I think you get where this is going.)
The movie doesn’t linger on punishing characters for their hubris–refusing to trust experts, or attempting to exploit others in their time of weakness–instead choosing to celebrate the characters who work together in even the smallest ways. Evil Puddle is unique in making one of its most rousing sequences about how sometimes the best thing you can do is accept some mild inconvenience rather than put yourself or others at risk.
That this movie has been made by a community is what makes it all so dense with meaning. If you’ve followed the Motern Media universe for any length of time, it’s genuinely moving to see how the actors you know have aged and changed but that they’re still showing up, because that’s what people do.
It’s easy to be cynical. It’s unarguable that the tools that we use every day are being warped by big tech to isolate us ever more. But AI ain’t going to show up when you need help and it ain’t going to make a movie a tenth as good as this one, made with friends and family when they’ve got spare time, where it’s obvious when they’ve shot several scenes in single afternoons. Because you can’t replace community, you can only participate. Rather than inviting the audience to wallow in their smug inaction, it inspires. You could do this too. You can do anything you want. Someone probably wants to help!
And the beautiful thing about Evil Puddle is that just by watching it, even if you have no idea where to start, you already get to join a community: the community of Motern Media fans. Hell, you can call Matt Farley right now if you want (his phone number is 603-644-0048. Give him a call, tell him this review sent you.) Why be smugly alone? Join us, it’s much nicer here.
This has been out for a while, so pretty much every position on it that can be taken has, and I don’t think mine is going to be that revelatory. But still.
To start with the de rigeur “me and Superman” background, as a British person who didn’t get into American comics until they were a teenager and holds all the usual boring opinions about him (“he’s too powerful! Where’s the peril! Get me a loser like Peter Parker, etc.”) my entire experience of the lad is (obviously) almost completely All-Star Superman, but probably less obviously that one issue of Hitman and then that Superboy arc where he’s an apartment super (get it?) because that was drawn by Hitman artist John McCrea.
Interestingly (maybe) if you’re really into comics you’ll already have clocked why Superman (2025) has really worked for me, because “that one issue of Hitman” where Superman shows up dwells on Superman failing (badly) and then being picked up by having it spelled out pretty directly that he’s an immigrant trying to make the best of it, and there’s really nothing more you can do than your best.
I mean… James Gunn has to have read that one, right? Because he gets it. Superman is made as real and as vulnerable as possible here, understanding that just because you’re invincible doesn’t mean you can’t be beaten, and that Superman has no more emotional armour than anyone else. While I’ve read some criticism over just how badly Superman gets his ass kicked in this, that it comes from both directions and that Superman reacts so genuinely–so humanly–to it all is what makes it work. There are stakes: you feel your fist tightening because they stole his dog. You are right there with him all the way.
Some of Gunn’s predilections are a bit unbalancing to the movie as a whole though. Some of the gags fall flat. He can push peril a little too far when it comes to the defenceless, and his penchant for eye trauma rivals Lucio Fulci’s. But the real issue with the film is that the big action climax doesn’t work. It’s obvious that the thematic arc of the movie is always going to end in a (largely) non-violent confrontation between Superman and Lex Luthor (played with a genuinely incredible seething hatred from Nicholas Hoult) but the other villains (well, bar one) fall completely flat, and the big “why can this guy beat Superman?” mystery is concluded in the most boring way possible. For a movie that digs up so much stuff from the DC Universe (look, I’ve got no idea who Mr. Terrific is) it’s weird that they resorted to the kind of thing we’d expect at this point from the completely shagged-out MCU. But it doesn’t put too much of a pallor on things, because in every other respect, this movie’s heart is in the right place.
Speaking of, the movie’s much talked-about Israel/Palestine allegory is… astounding. It’s absolutely not the center of the movie, but it goes so much harder than you could ever expect when it appears. Look, we’ve all learned by this point that satire doesn’t do much. But Superman said free Palestine, and in this miserable fuckin’ world, that means something.
Developed/Published by: Nintendo R&D1, Intelligent Systems / Nintendo Released: 06/08/1986 Completed: 28/08/2025 Completion: Killed Mother Brain in less than three hours.
I hope it was obvious from the conclusion of my article on The Legend of Zelda that the game I was referring to was this, Metroid, but I suppose the real heads might have been like “well, The Mysterious Murasame Castle is pretty good, I guess…”
Metroid is a game I was absolutely certain I was never going to beat. After all, I’ve beaten Metroid: Zero Mission, isn’t that good enough?
But the original is a game I’ve picked up and put down a few times out of my urge to really understand the Metroidvania genre’s beginnings, and the reason I’ve put it down is probably the reason most people do: the obvious lack of any sort of map (never mind an automap.) That would be bad though, but when you combine that with the game’s reliance on completely hidden paths for progression, and an early difficulty that is, I think, worse than The Legend of Zelda… Metroid just isn’t very enjoyable. It doesn’t seem worth the effort.
Sadly, unlike The Legend of Zelda, there isn’t a wee hack in pulling up the manual, because it doesn’t offer the kind of help you actually need. While it does offer lots of useful hints on what Samus and enemies can do, the included map is very vague. With the graphics in each area quite samey (look, you tell one corridor or shaft apart from the other) you really need to therefore either have a map already to hand or be mapping the game out as you go, and I think my resistance to the original Metroid has always been that while in a game like Wizardry or The Bard’s Tale you can take your time to draw out maps, here you’re stopping during an action game, which apart from just being sort of annoying, is an active flow breaker.
Thankfully, it’s 2025, and I again have to thank two people–romhacker Infidelity and Hand Drawn Game Guides artist Phil Summers–for making Metroid manageable. Infidelity has ported Metroid to SNES creating what is easily the ultimate version of the game, with the Famicom Disk System saving, the addition of a mini-map(!) and even the ability to combine the wave beam and ice beam like later games. And Phil Summers’ Hand Drawn Game Guide for Metroid might be the perfect thing to hand for a player who doesn’t want to just follow a walkthrough beat-by-beat: it offers a route through the game, but the maps and tips leave a lot of the exploration and discovery up to the player.
It’s a shame, to be honest, that even with all of that, I still just don’t like Metroid all that much. In fact, I’d argue that the Metroidvania “vision” here is still so far off that this is very much a fish with limbs flopping about gasping for air compared to an actual amphibian. Er… Metroidphibian.
When you start playing Metroid, there is some familiarity outside of the franchise signifiers–the opening area gives you some rope, but works to funnel you towards the necessary early pickups before the game opens up. But quickly you realise Metroid is far less interested in the now de rigueur “I can’t go there / unlock ability / now I can go there” loop than just killing you as much as possible and getting you lost. The upgrades which are required for progression act generally as just “keys” to new areas and don’t provide you the means to solve puzzles or allow you to interact with them in interesting ways (even the morph ball goes strangely underused) so you mostly find yourself shooting/bombing walls or hoping lava pits have a false bottom when stuck after you’ve got them all. And like other games of the era, Metroid makes sure to often punish you for doing that, giving you plenty of pointless dead ends that just sap you of health as you try to survive.
In fact, I’m struck by how the game poorly rewards exploration beyond getting the necessary upgrades, and then how short the game actually is once you have them outside of forced backtracking–kill two minibosses and then head to the final section to kill Mother Brain, a section which is completely linear.
As a result of all of this, you realise familiarity with modern Metroidvanias is really a hindrance when playing Metroid. For example, beam upgrades (ice or wave) don’t seem to actually increase your power much if at all, so unlike later games, Metroid seems tuned around using your missiles on regular enemies. You’d think therefore that missile upgrades would make exploration worth it, but you end up getting bogged down just to have five more missiles in your quota, where if you beeline to the bosses, each one gives you an almost absurd 75!
And you’ll want to do this because the drop rate on health and missiles is so miserable that every trip down a dead end (or worse, a corridor you’ve forgotten you’ve seen already) requires what feels like never-ending grinding of the game’s infinite spawners. When you first see them, you think “that’ll save me sometime” but after your first ten, twenty minutes waiting for enough health to fill one tank, you realise you’re far better just running through the levels trying to rely on screw attack jumps to avoid combat (which does, generally, work.)
That even goes for the last section of the game which should be tense and exciting as you finally face off against the Metroids, but no, you’re better off… freezing them and running past. To add insult to injury, Mother Brain is just a complete pain in the arse. It’s an endurance test–have enough health that you can survive being shot the whole time while you pound her with missiles.
I suppose that the escape is a fairly-exacting platforming challenge is kind of funny, though.
Much like The Legend of Zelda, though, Metroid feels like a product that makes more sense in its original context of players with bags of time and nothing much else to play. Bar one very annoying thing–that you have no way of shooting things shorter than Samus, which really makes the opening of the game frustrating and much harder than it should be–Metroid controls well, and I assume the players willing to map got a lot out of it, and those who didn’t probably just eventually got Samus powered up and to the end by sheer effort (the zone between “I have the morph ball and missiles” and “I have enough energy tanks and the screw attack to survive to explore” is so miserable, however, I do find it hard to imagine.)
Even if I find that hard to imagine, I don’t find it hard to see how Metroid captured people’s imaginations. I’m not sure it has quite the same completeness of vision as The Legend of Zelda (or The Mysterious Muramase Castle, for that matter) but the visuals and especially the sound really give the game a uniquely lonely feel; a solo decent into a deadly and foreign cave system (I do love that the name of this game is a portmanteau of “metro” and “android”–I can almost imagine one of the designers, lost in one of Tokyo’s many confusing train stations, thinking “there’s probably a game in this.”)
And maybe it’s just the fact that it’s a side-on 2D platformer, but even more so than with The Legend of Zelda/Sabre Wulf, Rare has a case that Metroid is heavily inspired by Underwurlde, if not an outright rip off. Not just the shafts with platforming challenge (which would be enough) but that areas of the map are locked off without using a particular weapon.
Separated at birth??? Alright, this one doesn’t look as damning as the Sabre Wulf one but trust me.
If I was being really harsh, I’d point out there were plenty of platfomers of the era with big maps to explore, things to collect and keys to use, from the obscure to the very well known. Impossible Mission. Saboteur. Citadel. Journey To The Centre Of The Earth. And many of these games play well, too!
So I after playing it all the way through, I do feel like I still have some questions if Metroid really does deserve the crown as originator, but then I also suppose we also live in a world where we don’t play Beneath Apple Manor-likes.
Will I ever play it again? Well, there’s no Satellaview version of this, so I really have played the “best” version of it I could. I’ll play Zero Mission again, though, which I remember as being the peak of the franchise, and I can’t remember if that’s controversial or not.
Final Thought: Of course, there’s also the other side of the Metroidvania… the vania. And the first game in that franchise doesn’t even attempt to be a Metroidvania. It’s even got a new SNES port too…
I think I’m going to settle on the dispatch being biweekly–doing it every week has felt like overkill. I think I imagined this newsletter as just links to the articles of the week, but each time I’ve thought of doing that it’s felt like such poor value for your no-money that I’ve ended up doing more, so this is, probably, better for all involved. Let me know if you feel any different. Onwards!
Hey, do you hate in-line advertising? We do too! We’re only ever going to do it here at the start of our newsletter posts because we want you to get these missives in your inbox a day early. Sorry!
Nice to get to call out Wes Fenlon’s excellent Read Only Memo and Phil Summers’ Hand Drawn Game Guides here. Not the last time Phil’s work will be mentioned at the very least.
Digging this old article up made me realise I never managed to cop that fancy re-release Nintendo did of the Super Famicom original, despite really trying, and then I completely forgot to download it digitally anyway. It’s really bizarre that Nintendo took to these limited releases for Fire Emblem and that Super Mario collection. Why? I guess they did limited Mario and Kirby releases in the days of the Wii, but it just seems so weird to go “you can’t buy that now” in the digital shop of infinite shelf space.
What’s that? I’ve got a digital zine collection that I’ve only ever released temporarily? Uh… shut up.
The Silksong hype is real, man. This article, despite being from 2020, was just about the most read thing on the site in the wake of it being announced. And I don’t even like Hollow Knight!
exp. Capsule Review
Merge Maestro (Stingless, 2025)
Had heard rumours this was the new roguelike-like obsession of the moment, so thought I’d give it a shot–it’s not like I feel like I’m wasting my life as it is. But I bounced off this basically immediately. Of the roguelike-likes it’s most similar to Luck Be A Landlord in that it’s very simple, entirely focused on a core loop–here, playing a symbol-based Threes-like to fight a succession of waves of enemies until you either lose or win the run by beating a final boss enemy. After each wave you get to upgrade one of your symbols, each of which has a special ability, and you’re basically trying to make your deck work synergistically so that as you merge symbols you’re doing massive damage and making your board better.
If that sounds… fine, it… is. I mean it’s really quite generic feeling, probably not helped by the fact that is uses emojis for the symbols, and maybe if you really love Threes this will light your fire, but it’s got the same kind of problem that Luck Be A Landlord does, where there’s a billion symbols (here 300!) that all do different things and you can find yourself heading in the wrong direction based on your rolls or just not being able to pull anything together. You can get Balatro-esque insane numbers going, but I certainly couldn’t be bothered to try.
I don’t mean to beat up on this one too much, because it’s from a small developer, completely competent, reasonably priced and I assume for the right kind of player absolute catnip. If anything I’m surprised at how much this failed to get its hooks into me. Am I burned out on the genre, or will another game draw me back into it? You know what, I’m not in a mood to find out any time soon.
Thank goodness I’m here to keep you up to date with the latest Indian cinema releases. Absolutely why you subscribe to a video game newsletter. But for real though, War 2 is a banger.
“ZINEDUMP is a new Toronto zine fair that aims to provide a venue for the open expression for independent publications, radical art and ideas. The inaugural fest will be held on Nov. 9th between 12-5pm at the Cecil Community Centre.”
Still time to get submissions in if you’re quick–the deadline is August 31st.
The last couple of years have been incredible for shorter narrative video game experiences, and in a weird sort of way, it’s almost like there’s like an unspoken arms race to make them shorter–no, not shorter, more focused, more concentrated. I’m not sure at what point we reached the nadir of games–particularly those of the triple-A persuasion–being a never-ending procession of endless “content”, but there’s something deeply refreshing about the idea that whether intentionally or not, game designers have discovered there’s a value in fermenting a game design, boiling it down into a playable umami. A rich flavour that lingers and sticks with you long after in comparison to the once-prevailing wisdom that players should be faced with an endless chocolate cake and forced to eat it like they’re Bruce Bogtrotter, quality be damned. Games that say, “we’re not just chocolate cake! We’re an endless buffet!” but the entire experience is, as I once said about Horizon: Zero Dawn, like chewing through a gym mat.
By comparison, Many Nights A Whisper gives you one thing to do. One perfect, polished thing. It gives you as much time as you want to do that thing, in a genius and thematic invitation to self-direction, though you’ll probably wrap things up within an hour, hour and a half. And I don’t think it could manage what it does any other way.
In Many Nights A Whisper, you are the “Dreamer”, chosen to practice with a slingshot for ten years in preparation for a single shot at a distant chalice that, as part of a sacred ceremony, will ensure everyone’s wishes will come true–at least, those whose wishes are heard and accepted by the Dreamer. The game begins with the ceremony fast approaching, and as people begin to deliver their wishes, finally the Dreamer’s slingshot range is able to be expanded with hair from the cut braids of those whose wishes are accepted. And so the player is given freedom to practice their expanding slingshot against increasingly distant targets each day, and then each night, they hear and choose which wishes to accept by cutting the braids of hidden petitioners.
And that’s it, until one day, you have to make the shot. And you really do only get one attempt.
In a strange way, the thing that Many Nights A Whisper reminded me most of was The Bear’s incredible season three opener, “Tomorrow.” While the show itself has, ironically, lost focus completely–and to be honest, the very next episode in season three does its best to blow up its thesis, anyway, Tomorrow movingly, non-linearly, shows chef Carmy’s sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful, sometimes awful history intertwined with his work, his process for forming a new menu for the titular restaurant. Layer by layer, the episode offers an affirmation:
You are not simply the sum of what has happened to you. You are what you choose to do with that.
It is an aspirational song of praise to putting everything of yourself into your process. It’s like when you watch one of those NHK documentaries about a factory that hand-produces lacquer bowls, or something. You think, you are reminded, that you are a corporeal being that exists in the world. You can imagine the simple yet deep pleasure of mastering something, putting yourself into it, knowing every movement, until it becomes second nature; the work sings a song you woven not just by your hand but by the life that got you to that point.
In a world that almost feels more virtual than real now–forever interrupted, beauty shortcut with slop, isolation and othering as policy–these things make you face up to how you’ve hardened. They make you long for a honest dialogue between yourself and the world: and make you content with the fact that being honest with yourself is maybe the only thing you can control.
You are not your context. You are what you choose to do there.
Many Nights A Whisper doesn’t give you a world to explore. It gives you the role of the Dreamer–designed clearly to visually reference the modern incarnation of The Legend of Zelda’s Link–in a small courtyard that only hints at the larger world. You’re wearing (and I would love to know the story behind this) an Ixnay On The Hombre t-shirt, your mentor has a big telly… but this otherwise could, if you squint, be Hyrule. Many Nights A Whisper gives you a context you already know, and an interaction you already know. Left trigger to aim, right trigger to shoot. It asks you to consider your process, and engage with just how hard you want to work by giving you a safe, understandable, recognizable space to work in, with no distractions.
And while it does that, each night it ask you to consider why you’re doing it. Is it just because you’ve been asked? Because you want to make people’s wishes come true? Whose? Who deserves it, and who doesn’t? What is the world you want to create by your hand?
Many Nights A Whisper describes itself as an interactive essay, which I think is a little precious. Because it is very much a video game, a visceral video game. At first, you make your little shots into nearby chalices, you accept easy, uncomplicated wishes and enjoy the reward of “levelling up” your slingshot. A few in-game days later you’re making micro-movements and cursing as you miss shots at chalices far in the distance, then trying to navigate the wishes of the selfish and confused. “I need more distance” you think, “but this person is unworthy.”
And then, suddenly, the ceremony is due. You have one last afternoon with which to perfect the shot. Can you? Walk away from the spot you’ve chosen, line it up. Hit. Walk away, spin around, line it up. Was that right? Hit. Alright, if I get it a third time, I’ll move on. Walk away, spin around, put the Steam Deck down, make a cup of tea, dunk a chocolate digestive, fuck half of it broke off, burn your finger trying to dig it out, back to the kitchen and grab a spoon, urgh it’s too soft now, back to the Steam Deck, you know the chalice was right at this point on the screen… wait, move it here. No, there. Miss.
Fuck.
As someone who is extremely free with walkthroughs, save states and the rest–games are to be enjoyed–one of the meaningful things about Many Nights A Whisper is how deeply it engenders an urge to do it right. To give yourself over to the process. To try and try again to make a lacquer bowl with all the knowledge of the history that made it what it was and made you what you were. I played for real. I tried many different ways, I practised. I spent far longer than I’d expect I would have trying to get myself to the point it was second nature. Until I realised I was overthinking it. If I took a breath, stopped, and attempted a shot based simply on what felt right–a shot based entirely on the accumulation of practice, I’d make it. But if I kept trying, I’d get tangled in it. Micro-movements, losing my place. I’d start to miss.
So I stopped practising. There’s only so much you can prepare. I didn’t even make sure my last shot was a hit. I simply trusted in my process.
At the ceremony, I took a breath. I closed my eyes, I thought about everything I had gone through. Was it really just an hour, or was it a lifetime? I pulled back the slingshot, and I fired.
Will I ever play it again? I am somewhat interested in what happens if you do certain things different ways, or if certain things play out differently on different playthroughs. But at the same time, my experience was so singular, and the tension so real, that if I ever play this again it’ll be a long time yet.
Final Thought: It’s a rare video game that I say “this could only exist as a video game” but Many Nights A Whisper is one. The preparation and tension of the shot is pitched perfectly–the game is just long enough that it feels like it matters if you fail, but not so long that it makes attempting it in the first place seem insurmountable. It is to experience, mechanically, the crunch-time moment of an underdog sports movie, layered with all your own effort to get you there, holding, quite literally, everyone’s hopes and dreams with you.
Many Nights A Whisper is, currently, my game of the year. And it ain’t even close.
Oh good lord. I will, of course, refer you to my review of War 2 first (which scheduling, unfortunately, placed first in my double bill of contemporary Indian cinema at the weekend) so I don’t need to go over my entire “what the fuck do people want” line of inquiry again in relation to this, Rajinikanth’s latest slog which has, somehow, outperformed it both critically and commercially.
Look, I’ll admit it–I’m nonplussed by Rajinikanth. I basically haven’t seen anything where he wasn’t at least in his sixties, so I don’t have this long history where I can recognise his every twitch and pop for it, and I can’t really fail to notice that he’s deeply, deeply limited by being an elderly man. I don’t think there’s any shame in this! I mean Robert De Niro couldn’t pull off youthful in The Irishman, he’s in good company.
But listen, with Lokesh at the helm, I wanted to believe. While his films tend to have a lot of build up, they eventually go absolutely bananas, and I loved Kaithi, Vikram, even Leo a lot. But I have never been so thankful that a movie wasn’t in a shared universe. Because this is absolute drivel.
Now, the last Rajinikanth I was able to catch, Jailer, was almost unwatchable, but at least it was genuinely insane. This is just death. The setup is so neat and simple: a guy’s pal dies, so he has to investigate. Based on the title (which… listen, it’s weird that they named the film a slur) and the fact that it all revolves around a dock, you’d assume he’d go undercover as a dock worker and that would be the movie’s backbone.
No. He pretends that he knows how to use the cremation chair(?) that his friend invented(??) but which he couldn’t get a patent for(???) so that he can get close to the baddies, who specifically need to be able to get rid of bodies faster than normal for… reasons. Alright!
Meanwhile, the main baddie’s son is a customs officer in a love affair, and the baddies’ main enforcer is seeking out undercover cops, but maybe he’s also got secrets of his own. Oh and Rajinikanth owns a boarding house for students and his past relates to the docks… sort of.
Coolie is full of these overlaid tangled paths for what should be simple threads and every single one ends frayed and unsatisfying. I legitimately cannot tell you why his pal died. I understand the circumstances surrounding it, but not the why, and I genuinely think everyone making this movie forgot.
Still, it’ll be fine because the songs and action will be good, right? [Padme meme face]
The solution for Rajinikanth’s limited abilities… not elegant. Dancing is reduced to “putting a handkerchief in his mouth and waving it about.” Fighting? They resort to the ol’ “Steven Segal”: he stands still, waves his arms and baddies go flying. This is not entertaining. Well, there’s a couple of other dudes on the poster, right? They’ll be in the movie and do cool stuff?
Well… let me just say I do think it should be illegal to put someone on the poster if they don’t have some sensible amount of screen time, or, like, any character at all. Kannada star Upendra appears to… stand still and punch dudes so they go flying (while Rajinikanth just stands there!) And it’s not so much that you could blink and miss Aamir Khan’s cameo so much as you’ll wish you had your eyes closed during it. Again: they’re on the bloody poster!
Even if I was all in on Rajinikanth’s screen presence, it feels impossible to overlook that his character seems to have absolutely no plan and just dodders about. He basically creates every problem that occurs after the intermission by being a huge dumbass (then gets drunk?) and seems to only get hurt at one point because he’s just standing around looking confused.
It’s not much better when he’s not on screen, though. The most tense and interesting part of this film I can best describe as “What if the Terminator had been played by Danny DeVito in a dog collar?” and it’s really not as good as it sounds.
Coolie is a bloated, confused mess, and I’d have had more fun if I’d just seen War 2 twice in a row. Hell, I’d rather have watched Jailer again than this–and that’s saying something.
Looking at the general opinion of this, which is, at best, middling, if not openly hostile, I’m for some reason reminded of the track KP Snacks, by obscure Scottish comedy rap act Bin Men. The one that’s not Romeo Taylor waxes lyrical about how the UK’s best mass producer of crisps and chocolate dip is “the realest fucking business out there” and concludes: “if you disagree… you’re a fucking idiot.”
I obviously cannot bring across in text how perfectly his tone and phrasing reflects how I feel when people are being fucking idiots, so you might want to listen to 00:18 to 00:21 to understand how I stand in vicious judgment of people trying to dunk on War 2.
Because what the fuck do you people want?
Look, there’s plenty of reasons you might not like War 2, but they’re all the sort of thing where you shouldn’t be going to the cinema in the first place. You don’t like action films. You’re uncomfortable with your sexuality. You hate fun. But if you’re showing up at the cinema for the fucking sequel to a ridiculous, over-the-top bromantic actioner and you walk out of this without a smile on your face… I mean what is actually fucking wrong with you?
And listen, I know what I’m talking about. I sat through Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, which is but three minutes shorter than this, as obsessed with making you believe its hero(es) are godlike via complicated set-pieces, and completely fucking boring.
By comparison, in War 2 everything is at a fever pitch. The movie seems to even rush through its establishing shots to make sure that it never, ever stops being entertaining. The classic post-intermission flashback? You’re in, you’re out, lets you know everything you need to know. The comedy sidekick? Which one? There isn’t one, we don’t need them, NTR Jr’s got the jokes and (for some reason) acronyms for you.
I mean War 2 opens with Hrithik Roshan being so awesome that he tames a wolf just by looking at it, before he fights a bunch of ninjas and a helicopter—a sequence that would be the climax of basically any other film. Sounds too generic? While War 2, like its predecessor, wears its inspirations on its sleeve, it again proves that no country on earth is making action films like India, always providing a twist that I’ve never seen before. NTR Jr—who Western audiences will most likely have last seen in RRR—appears in a rescue sequence where he does something so funny and so clever with a wrecking ball that I legitimately refuse to spoil it. And a sequence involving a plane-jacking is genuinely unique.
So War 2 goes hard. And I mean… hard. Fellas, is it gay to have a male friend? War 2 says: yes. And it’s fucking awesome. If War was a one-sided love story—poor wooden Tiger Shroff’s doomed adoration of Roshan—War 2 gives us star-crossed, uh, “good friends” in a situationship where boundaries are not respected, and everything is driven to the kind of heights that haven’t been seen since Vernon Wells’ Bennett screamed “we don’t need the girl, John” at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s John Matrix in Commando.
If you remember the conclusion to that film—where Schwarzenegger literally “lays pipe” in his opponent—things go exactly as allegorical here, as our heroes take turns penetrating each other. You know, with weapons and that.
There is a sequence in this movie featuring the female lead Kiara Advani, that is so aggressively sexual that I have to assume that censors required it because they feared the lights would come up after the film and it would look like the cinema was a bathhouse.
*ahem*
Wait, what was my point? My point is that War 2 is completely guileless in its attempt to push everything, literally everything, as far as it will go. It’s ridiculous, it’s not even asking you to take it seriously, it’s just trying to entertain you. Sure, maybe it goes a bit too far. Maybe it’s got some blindspots. But ultimately?
War 2 is the realest fucking movie out there. And if you disagree? You’re a fucking idiot.
Developed/Published by: Nintendo R&D4 / Nintendo Released: 21/02/1986 Completed: 17/08/2025 Completion: Beat it for the second time!
Well, I can’t be playing obscure ones all the bloody time.
I have a long history with The Legend of Zelda, as a lot of people do, though like many–if not most(?)–non-Americans/non-Japanese, my history does not begin with the original game. For me it started with Link’s Awakening, and I wouldn’t play the original until 2004 when I was able to treat myself to a Famicom Edition Gameboy Advance SP and a copy of the Famicom Mini Series Legend of Zelda. I remember being so excited to finally play such an iconic game, picking it up, getting completely lost, dying a million times when struggling with the stiff controls, and then deciding the cute little box was just a nice thing to have on my shelf and moving on with my life.
I would go on to finish The Legend of Zelda years later–trading off the controller with BancyCo’s Benjamin Rivers–and even wrote a limited zine about that experience (I keep meaning to do a proper “history of exp.” page on this website, and I will, but today is not that day.) That completion–around 2011–meant I classed The Legend of Zelda as “previously completed” on the big “I’m not neurodivergent I promise” spreadsheet I keep, and I didn’t intend to return to it until I read in Wes Fenlon’s excellent newsletter Read Only Memo (worth subscribing to! As long as you’ve subscribed to mine too, obviously) about romhacker infidelity’s SNES port, which could be considered completely faithful while still featuring a bunch of lovely quality of life fixes. And considering I have a wee emulation device I adore, and found myself with a bunch of downtime due to some work I’d picked up that involved a lot of sitting around waiting for things to happen, I thought… why not? It’d make a nice change, and refresh my context for 1986.
Something that is really important to mention, though, is that this time I came prepared. Now, I can’t remember if the wee Famicom Mini version of The Legend of Zelda came with a reproduction manual or not–I don’t have it to hand–but I’m assuming it didn’t (or if it did, I overlooked it, because what is this, a manual for ants, etc.) but I’ve long learned my lesson since I was downloading Infocom games and being baffled by them–you read the manual. And when you do, well… The Legend of Zelda isn’t baffling at all.
Well, for a bit. And it’s still hard as balls initially, but we’ll get to that. I was shocked when I read through the manual–and this is true of the Japanese manual too–that it literally explains, cleanly and clearly, all the things you can get, all the enemies you’ll face, gives you instruction on what you’re trying to do, and then includes a complete walkthrough on how to get to the first dungeon (and guidance on how to get to the second.) I guess I’d never looked at the box closely before, where it literally says “Includes invaluable maps and strategic playing tips.”
I’m reminded of that classic bit of weirdly banal Shigeru Miyamoto lore, that he likes to learn a city by walking it (who doesn’t) and imagined him going “I mean I do start with a map and a destination though. It only makes sense. I don’t just walk out the door and start wandering. I’d get lost.”
Because, of course, this does all make sense! No one at Nintendo is thinking “well, people will be playing this without the manual in the future.” Back then, the manual was part of the product, and it really does a great job in getting you through the early stage of the game… at which point you can throw yourself into getting properly lost, equipped with more hearts and weapons to survive it.
Historical Aside
Christ, what’s going on here? A boxout? I haven’t done one of those before. Now, despite what I’m saying about the manual here and the game being intended to make sense with it, there is a possible–if unlikely–alternative which relates to a rumoured influence on The Legend of Zelda. John and Ste Pickford are quoted as saying that one of the Stampers, founders of Rare, had referred to The Legend of Zelda as “Miyamoto’s rip-off of Sabre Wulf”. Now, The Legend of Zelda actually does have notable similarities to Sabre Wulf and Rare’s earlier title Atic Atac, and one of the interesting things about Sabre Wulf is it comes with a manual that tells you almost nothing at all–I suspect many players didn’t even decipher that they were supposed to collect four pieces of an amulet from it.
Separated at birth?
So if you take the Stampers at their word–and remember, they were tight as fuck with Nintendo, meeting with the company potentially as early as 1985–the complete bafflement I and many players first met The Legend of Zelda with could have been as intended as anything.
The thing about the opening of The Legend of Zelda though… no matter what, it’s fucking hard. You’ve got three hearts, a weedy sword unless you’re at max hearts (which won’t last long) a shield that barely blocks anything, and you have to get comfortable with moving and attacking only on the four cardinal directions while your opponents seem to move near randomly. Playing it “for real” I died a lot, but the game is also shockingly forgiving for the era, bringing you back to life at the start with everything you’d collected intact–even dying in dungeons just brings you back to the start.
This has the great effect that exploration and experimentation always feels worth it. You can delve into a dungeon just to see what’s down there, wander to a new area to see what you can find, and do “suicide runs” to get a necessary item if you know where it is. It’d be sort of perfect if the game wasn’t so stingy that you respawn with just three hearts filled no matter how many you have, because they have an abysmal drop rate. (I won’t lie, towards the end I did abuse save states just to quickly cheat at the gambling game so I could keep myself stocked up with potions. Life did eventually start to feel too short.)
Because the game is so open, it does resort to (klaxons at the ready?) the Xevious/The Tower of Druaga “find the hidden stuff to progress” design. I am inclined to be a little more forgiving than usual here because of the open world and that the game does drop hints, even if they are obscure in Japanese and mangled in English. Back then everyone had a lot more time, a lot fewer games to get through, and the communal solve experience had continued from The Tower of Druaga in arcades to The Tower of Druaga at home (in Japan at least.) But I’m sure many kids, stymied, just took to bombing every wall and setting fire to every bush, and I can’t really justify that–the game definitely doesn’t drop enough hints, and there are definitely too many moments that can bring your progress to a dead-stop without outside help.
Thankfully, in 2025 I was just able to refer to Phil Summers’ incredible Hand-Drawn Game Guide, which… look, it’s cheating, it’s a walkthrough, but it’s got such an easy, homegrown charm, it’s like your pal is helping you through the game. I can’t recommend it more highly if you’re approaching this game for the first time–read the manual, follow it, then as soon as you get too bored or lost, or just don’t feel like you’re making enough progress, just start referring to it.
And anyway, you still have to beat the bloody thing yourself! If I have a real criticism of The Legend of Zelda it’s that it just doesn’t feel that great to play. The extremely stiff feeling of combat never goes away, and the enemies that require you manoeuvre carefully to hit them like Darknuts and Wizzrobes can absolutely suck a dick. Wizzrobes in particular, which are fucking everywhere in the last few dungeons. Unsatisfyingly, the end of the game does feel like a bit of a sprint as you basically try and dodge as much combat as possible, because it offers no reward. The terrible health drop rate is quite a negative, honestly.
Saying it doesn’t feel that great probably sounds completely disqualifying for The Legend of Zelda, but I do have to mention again that it exists in the context of 1986 in Japan, and was still close to cutting-edge when released just over a year later in the rest of the world. Despite what the Stampers might have said, and even despite the existence of things like Ultima IV, at this point no one has put as complete a package together as Nintendo has. For the second time after Super Mario Bros. they’ve created something new out of whole cloth and no one else even saw it coming.
Will I ever play it again? After all of this, I’m suddenly reminded what I was actually going to do when I intended to “replay” this was to play through BS Zelda for Satellaview. Oops. Well, I can still do that whenever I like.
Final Thought: The craziest thing about Nintendo creating something this new, this different, this polished?
This was a really difficult one to write about, and while I really hesitate to bang on about how exp. needs your support to continue at this level, well, it does, so please consider supporting us on Patreon (preferrably), ko-fi, or pick up a zine or the book. Here, I chose to dig into a banned game with heavy themes that reflect the current moment of moral panic, but which I found… inconclusive. Would love to hear what others thought of it, or what I wrote about it.
Speaking of people getting in touch to say what they thought of a game, I’m still surprised by just how many people have popped up to say they love this one. I hadn’t heard of it before!
Wrote about this one all the way back in 2014 and was surprised to look Signal Studios up and discover that they’d quietly gone out of business in at some point in 2023, their last release a HD remaster of the original Toy Soldiers that no one liked. One of the only things I was able to dig up about the closure actually was a tweet from the official Toy Soldiers account: “TSHD was not handled well by the publisher or me—limited resource, tons of delayed/bad dev caused by idiotic public policy and other unexpected events—deals fell through—over time—resources gone—the rest is history.”
Hey, do you hate in-line advertising? We do too! We’re only ever going to do it here at the start of our newsletter posts because we want you to get these missives in your inbox a day early. Sorry!
exp. Capsule Reviews
Mindset GO! (Magicave, 2025)
Spent some of the last few weeks playing this mobile and web puzzler, and as it’s been made by friend-of-exp Ste Curran I can’t in good conscience give it a “proper review” but I do want to recommend it anyway. In fact I’ll go ahead and explain that I’ve already recommended it to other people as an antidote to a few things–engaging with anything from the New York Times, a propaganda company with a games arm (or vice versa) or playing any of those fucking terrible games that show up when you use any mobile app with ads (more on that on a bit though.)
Mindset GO! is the kind of design where when you play it you think “wait, how have I never seen this before?” as it features an incredibly simple design: you’re just sorting shapes based on one or more feature that they have. If they’re a triangle, or yellow, that sort of thing. You put them into circles, which might intersect as a Venn diagram does–meaning you need to put yellow triangles there, but can put just yellow, or just triangles, elsewhere–and you don’t necessarily know what all the features required are.
This starts embarrassingly easy, but quickly gets… difficult. The Venn diagrams become more complex, and then suddenly you’re sorting (say) wee cat faces instead of big simple shapes. The thing I most appreciated about this game is that you can feel your brain expanding as you work out systems and techniques to beat harder and harder levels. Almost subconsciously you find yourself pre-sorting shapes, or able to keep two concepts in your mind at once that you couldn’t before. It’s deeply, deeply satisfying, and it’s all wrapped up in a terrifically thoughtful UI.
As highly as I recommend it, this is a free-to-play mobile game, and you therefore have to engage with that whole… thing. Meaning mobile ads rear their ugly head here if you don’t quickly stump up the no-ads tax, and if you’re determined to stick to free-to-play while you’re feeling the game out, every single part of this carefully curated puzzling experience is smashed to bits when what feels like out of nowhere you get an ugly, often broken slop advert for whatever the algorithm has decided you would like best (it’s certain I’m a woman in her mid-50s, obsessed with her dying plants but unable to get up from her chair to do any exercise.) This really means that you basically have to spend the $3.99 to enjoy this on mobile really before you get to the point where it gets its hooks into you. As a result, you may wish to play the web version at first, then make up an account to save your progress?
Weirdly, one of the main reasons to play this now is to play and enjoy the real thing before you start seeing its clones advertised in its own ad slots. Some weird AI voice saying how playing “Shape Sorter” will stop you getting Alzheimer’s, or maybe an entire fucking streamed version of “Venn Diagram Royale” you have to play through where you have to shuffle a bunch of diamonds into a circle to stop a king being squashed by, I don’t know, a big Monty Python foot or something. Why the fuck are we supposed to be saving a fucking king anyway? If god chose him god can bloody well save him from rising sand or being dropped in some lava, the sponging prick.
“For the first time in 35 years, COMPUTE!’s Gazette returns to serve the vibrant retro computing community. This premiere relaunch issue is packed with exclusive news, in-depth articles, community stories, and classic type-in programs that celebrate the golden age of computing.”
“I’m launching a weekly newsletter that brings together all my writings, podcasts, videos, and creative endeavours in one place for your unmeasurable pleasure. If you like what I do, you must subscribe. Your life depends on it.”
(Ok, that last one isn’t a zine, but Justin Decloux is one of my favourite people and he does so much incredible stuff, you’re going to want to keep up. I mean you already subscribe to this rubbish, don’t you?)
And Finally…
This article, The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con is, I think, the most important, insightful thing you can read about the AI mania full stop. It’s from a few years ago, but if anything more important to read and understand as AI tries to create a stranglehold over the mainstream. Share it with anyone who might be buying the hype but considers themselves rational. It gets to something really key about AI: it’s not “just” a scam: it’s an illusion that preys on our urge to fool ourselves.
