Xator Nova

The good thing about Coppola is that he is insane enough to do anything for the film he wants to make. The bad thing about Coppola is that he is insane enough to do anything for the film he wants to make. I expected weirdness with some kind of entertaining value, given the type of reception that the film was getting as incoherent or incompetent. What I didn't expect was Coppola pontificating what at best seems like nonsense, and at worst seems reprehensible. It is clear that this is the same Coppola that nowadays believes that films like "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" are a victory for cinema, the resistance. One that argues in his film about how demagogues are going to lead to the suppression of art by manipulating easily swayable masses through populism - a perspective that seems reasonable at first but easily shows itself to be cynical and incredibly pessimistic - yet whose response is more demagogy to sell the population a utopia that almost seems made by an art...

It is intriguing how Rohrwacher portrays grave sacking as a means to escape from society. "Not a real job", as the old woman's daughters imply. Yet these diggers exist in a parallel system: if the modern world can't fulfill their own dreams, one might as well look for it into the remnants of the past to pick up anything from those glory days. These sackers enjoy life to its fullest, regardless of circumstances. Rohrwacher puts the perspective of a character who has lost his beloved one in order to approach this analogy through a more precise lens: His entire reason to partake into grave digging, explicitly rejecting the possibility of a normal life within society, is to feel closer to his love, as he remains in contact with death and the afterlife, implied by his supernatural perception. A goddess statue shows up in his life, bringing him thoughts of his love, yet it is only seen by others in the business as a means to earn money, and despairs when the head is severed...

The importance of the original Super Mario Bros. can't be understated: It doesn't have to do with being a genre pioneer, since games like Jump Bug , Pitfall or Pac-Land already included the jump mechanic, and the Mario franchise already had two games behind its back: Donkey Kong and Mario Bros . It isn't about being the sidescrolling game either, since Pac-Land 's and Jump Bug 's also scrolled their screens alongside the player, and a few days after the original Super Mario we had Makaimura on the arcades, which also included the jump mechanic alongside a screen that followed the player. What differentiates Super Mario Bros. from its predecessors is the creation of a world surrounding a mechanic, especifically the jump. Shigeru Miyamoto's focus as an author is the direct perception of the interactive premise for the player's immersion, and for that purpose there is particular care to the tangible effect of the environments. In simpler terms, that you ...

The best new game releases of 2022 were, to me: He Fucked the Girl Out of Me (Taylor McCue, 2022) Into Ruins (Eric Billingsley, 2022) Yars: Recharged (Liudas Ubarevičius, 2022) Automaton Lung (Luke Vincent, 2022) Citizen Sleeper (Gareth Damian Martin, 2022) Know by Heart (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2022) Betrayal at Club Low (Cosmo D, 2022) Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins (Daisuke Inoue, 2022) The best games I played in 2022 for the first time from any year were: Libble Rabble (Toru Iwatani, 1983) In the Psychic City (Hot-B, 1984) Otocky (Toshio Iwai, 1987) Golden Axe Warrior (Okaru, 1991) Heartbeat Memorial (Yoshiaki Tanaka, 1994) Darkstalkers: The Dark Warriors (Junichi Ohno, 1994) Palette (Nishida Yoshitaka, 1998) King of Dragon Pass (David Dunham, 1999) King's Field IV (Rintaro Yamada & Satoru Yanagi, 2001) One Piece Mansion (Hideaki Itsuno, 2001) Nepheshel (Studio Til , 2002) Radio Zonde (Inudon Empire, 2002) Histoire (tk, 2004) Blue Wish Resurrection (x.x. Game Room, 200...

  Microtransactions, archetypal anime girls and an overload of monetary systems are enough alarm signs that the game should be nothing more than a product to shamelessly steal the money from the average otaku. Though since a game is not what it seems to be, but rather what it actually happens to be, a small peek at the mobile game "Gothic Wa Mahou Otome" immediately reveals its quality as an action game, where the tactile control in combination with shooting game mechanics gives birth to one of the greatest exemplars of the aesthetic capability of movement in the genre. The key of its success is in the scoring system. To obtain points, naturally a player has to hit the enemies in a stage. However, numerous variables are added that let the player increase their score. Firstly, the avatar is surrounded by a visible ring for the player, which extends its radius if they keep shooting down enemies. If the target is within this circle, the power of the shot is increased, and with t...

  The game presents itself as a story of a broken heart, with a path to self-realization and self-love, but immediately turns itself into psychedelics as soon as it gives the player the control. It decides to become a rhythm game, except there's no real sense of tempo because the visual cues are treated more as quick-time events, as environmental obstacles in the story, than the player having to immerse themself in the music, like Tetsuya Mizuguchi's "Rez", or having the challenge feel in flow with the story at hand, like Keiichi Yano's works such as "Gitaroo Man" and "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!". It is a fast-paced chase sequence, except that the presence of checkpoints at every corner and an unlimited amount of attempts reduces the weight and intensity of the tracks, as if the game couldn't stand the player losing, unlike high velocity games such as Toshihiro Nagoshi's "F-Zero GX". The psychedelic stylization with rapid camera ...

  An autobiographical story of a transgender woman and her traumatic experiences with sex work.  Personal and intense in its prose, abstract in its presentation.  Defamiliarization and impersonation as representation of the coping mechanism. The game portrays the victim as not herself but other abstract being, a shapeless ghost, as a representation of the mind distancing itself from trauma. A  melancholic, surreal sea of consciousness brings life to fuzzy, drowned memories because it is so difficult to face trauma that repressing it is the instinctive reaction to get as distant as possible from those events. And a fitting pixel-art aesthetic - not just a stylistic choice born from lack of resources but the representation of the raw feelings of an innocent mind. One of the best games of the year so far.