Bayonetta 
Stroke me, Jubileus. "Bayonetta's characterization of a slinky leather-skinned witch is an exploitation of sexual prurience. But it's also an absurdist soap opera that inverts the inherited myths of Western religious dogma that have encouraged the historical abuse of women, from the stoning of brides who weren't virgins to the gynophobic insistence on a messiah born of a virgin. In this context, it's doubly gratifying to see a woman who embodies sexual lasciviousness headed into bloody combat with the gold-crested angels and a rogue's gallery of chimera-like boss figures with upside-down faces, gilded in the feverish icons of Revelation."
Mass Effect 2 
Terms of space endearment. "Why, in a game with loyalty missions, isn't there a loyalty system based on Shepard's squad commands during combat? If I make smart choices for my party members in the middle of an ambush, wouldn't that be a better way of creating loyalty? Wouldn't moments like the crew conflict between Jack and Miranda be even more powerful if they were based on my actual gameplay performance? … That could have been a way to personalize the combat and tie it into the same system of consequence in the dialogue. But instead it's just the part of the game where you are level grinding. It's fun in the way that Space Invaders is fun, which is to say that the combat remains quite detached from the thematic core of the game. Which makes it a kind of interactive pandering. It's there not because it contributes to BioWare's thematic meaning, but because games have to have combat. How can a game be a game without combat? "
BioShock 2 
Conveyor Belt of Murder 2: Sea of Communism "I did feel a terrible conflict killing Big Daddies, even more strongly in the second game. In this moral toilet world of brutality, they were the only creatures that didn't want to kill me. I could walk by them and they didn't care. They offered a glimpse of co-existence. But to get to that pretty few seconds of rescuing the baby vampires, I had to become a Splicer and attack a docile creature. It's a much more incisive mechanic than the actual harvesting, all the scripted double-crossing, or the dramatic hucksterism of "Would you kindly?" … The encounters with Big Daddies are neither manslaughter nor self-defense. They're first-degree murder and I chose it every time, and I didn't even care about the upgrades. In BioShock 2 I did it for the delusion that the fleeting relief was something I could keep with me, like a homeless man tending to a beloved rat. Maybe, I'm alone in this, but I'd rather play a homeless man with a rat than a brainwashed killer."
Heavy Rain 
The end of winning. "One of the great leaps of faith in Heavy Rain is that emotional consequence can be as dramatic and satisfying as mechanical consequence. I definitely feel a sense of relief in Modern Warfare 2 when I finally work myself through the unforgiving favela after having been assaulted on all sides. But I also have a feeling when, after considering for a few minutes, I choose one of my children and then spend a minute lifting him overhead and flying him through the backyard, holding down buttons throughout to simulate the holding on to his little body, while tilting left and right to move my character's body…. It's beautiful, peaceful, and framed by the fact that there will eventually be some emotional effect on someone else in the world, though what that effect is I can't rightly say while laughing and running through the yard."
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 
Facebook for men who don't want to sleep with each other. "There is no trace of apologia in Bad Company 2, shooting exists because it's fun and there is no attempt to oversell it thematically. Shooters are chew toys for our testosterone-powered aggression. Boys like to destroy things, make loud noises, and see the clattering destruction of our own creation. We keep bad company and it feels good… In the same way that Friendster and all of its bastard children pulled me in on the alluring prospect of discovering a pretty woman's stare from across the room, Bad Company 2 offers the promise of catching some angry man's glance form across the room. It's a safe space to hold that stare and return it with a theatrical '**** you.'"
Final Fantasy XIII 
Do unicorns dream of dolphin meat? "More than any of its previous incarnations XIII is a model for that conflict between mathematical ordering and physical instinct. It's like a hallucinogenic spreadsheet made for a Neanderthal. Instead of opaque accounting words to define the interrelation of rows and columns, XIII gives you attack animations with backflips, giant fireballs, and, every once in a while, a massive pagan god tumbles from the sky and squashes your enemies for you. I can almost see the furry twitching fingers of a sleeping caveman, his eyelids fluttering in sleep as he imagines being able to run right up to a mountain lion, kick it in the face and then finish it off with a burst of lightning. All of it accomplished while managing a barrage of moving meters, gauges, numbers, and status effects."
God of War III 
This one goes up to 11. "It's a rare occurrence but, more than any other game in the series, God of War 3 has a sense of suffering in its toysome violence… My heart sank in the second I saw [Kratos] coming towards me, no longer a moody and cool hero, but now a homicidal beast. It was like being in the ocean and seeing a dorsal fin suddenly appear nearby. I realized escape was impossible and instead started wondering about just how badly things were going to hurt. It's easy to gloss over that scene because it's short and there aren't many like it in the rest of the game, but I can't think of any other game that's so forcefully shown the cruelty of the violence it demands for progress. We use the term "badass" in games as if it's supposed to be a compliment, combining all-encompassing negativity with an instrument of defecation. This scene offers a glimpse of the tragic resignation that must accompany the sight of a real badass arriving on the scene. It's time for a ****show. "
Splinter Cell: Conviction 
Bodies for Bowser. "Conviction's game world is split in two parts, the colored-in world where Sam is vulnerable bullet fodder, and a black and white world where he skulks in secret aggression. The visual shift from black and white to saturated coloration marks a contrast between world views; the hopeless imaginarium of the hunter and the disappointingly recognizable detail of another parking lot or office building. The lurking mystery is what connects that nefarious shadow world of corrupt aggression with the workaday familiarity of our opiated lives. At the end Conviction walks up to the edge of that question, stares into the animal dark, and then turns away, leaving a few hundred polygonal corpses in sacrifice for the hungry beast we'd rather not look in the eye."
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