The Millennial Burnout Conversation Also Applies to Gamers Me

New year, new you. I’m still me. 

Cameron Kunzelman beckoned in 2019 with a paean to all the games. Specifically, how it’s a strain to play so many of them, but he carries on because he gosh darn loves ‘em – and it’s his job. And I can sympathise with him, I really can. Whether it’s true or just my imagination, big games seem to keep getting bigger (and longer), and smaller games that are really, really good come out far more often. So where’s the time to play them all?

In my case, there isn’t. But over the last few years I’ve developed quite a canny strategy for dealing with this:

1. Buy a game
2. Play the game
3. Become distracted by life events or another game
4. Never play the game again

What’s that past the end of my nose? Nothing.

I like writing for a couple of very practical reasons. First, you can do it alone. Waiting around for other people is an inevitability of life, so I appreciate that I can splurge something out privately at the back of the bus should I choose to. Second, it’s quick. Short form writing doesn’t take too long — the clue is in the name. You can usually get a couple thousand words out on a topic of interest if you just put your mind to it. The words are already there, after all, the trick, as a wise man once said, is putting them in the right order.

This isn’t because I’m lazy. No, I like the quick turnaround because it gives me freedom. A failed experiment only holds you for a matter of hours, then it’s consigned to the festering research log. The penalty for failure, especially when the spotlight of the zeitgeist isn’t shining on you (me), is almost nonexistent. If I write something inflammatory and nobody reads it, did I actually ever say it?

But this is good, because if you’re lucky you’ll improve quickly. Like learning a guitar riff, do it enough and you’ll probably get better. You might never develop the skill to write one of those riffs yourself, but you can still make a decent living in a good cover band — there’s truly is no shame in that. After all, going to watch The Beattles (sic) can’t be any worse than seeing a septuagenarian Paul McCartney, can it?

So what does all this mean? I’d like to think it gives writers — columnists, reviewers, James Patterson, whatever — a degree of necessary distance from their work. I’m not suggesting people don’t care about what they write, simply that it helps us to not be too precious about it. A 1000 word bimonthly bit for The Guardian would be dream come true for me, but I’m sure that by the second year I’d remember my early pieces about as well as I do my own childhood. The constant forward motion of writing unshackles us from ugly defensiveness.

Once upon a time a game was released as an early access product — it was done, but changes were still being made and things were still being added. Shortly after that, reviews began to appear on the Internet. One of the people who made the game read some of the reviews and didn’t like them. So they verbalised their disdain for the words, the people and the outlets wot had talked about their game. It wasn’t pretty.

“Why do people read anything [Journalist X] writes? He’s a jaded game reviewer. My game is a brand new thing. [Journalist X] can’t handle games like that — read their other reviews and you’ll see — if it can’t be easily pigeonholed it’s cack.”

“Don’t mix up my difference of opinion and a personal thing. I don’t know [Journalist X] at all or their work.”

“It makes me dejected that five years’ work ends in a "4/10", I mean, that's a really, really ridiculous score. It rubbishes the unique and beautiful experience. Look at Metacritic. I don’t even understand how you’d get to 4/10. I mean, it’s an insult.”

“[Outlet Y] gave us a 3/10 lol. Looking forward to a 1/10 from someone now, it's almost funny. I mean, our analytics show players coming back again and again. Clearly we’ve made a game a load of people really like.”

(These quotes were rephrased, btw, but the content is pretty spot on; emphasis my own.)

I think the biggest standout for me is the mention of time. Five years is ages. It’s about as long as I’ve been writing, and I was atrocious when I started. This isn't to state that a game started years ago will pop out bad, that would be ridiculous. All I’m saying is that in the same timespan I’ve written well over 100 pieces, totalling something like 150,000–200,000 words. I’ve jumped around, experimented, failed, and hopefully improved. But that’s all by the by. The most important thing is that I've not had to look at any one of those bits of writing for more than a few days at the most.

When I’m drunk I go searching through my archives. I read back over my past exploits, things I was super proud of a couple of years ago, and I often cringe. Sometimes the ideas are there but the execution is terrible, sometimes it’s the inverse. Sometimes it’s actually quite good, but more often than not it really isn’t. Occasionally, when I’m writing something I already know its meagre worth but plough on regardless, just to excise it from me so I can move on. Most of the time, though, I think what I’m committing to public record is pretty great. It’s only later I can see its true worth, and it’s the distance that helps me look at things more objectively.

Now, imagine I didn't have that luxury. Imagine I was forced, through circumstance or choice, to sit on the same thing for five whole years. Reading and rereading; tweaking sentence structure, word choice and subtext, until everything was just perfect. In the end, I’d still have produced a short piece of prose The Guardian no longer wanted (“we thought you were dead”), but to my bleary eyes it would be the greatest piece of cultural commentary wot the world had, and would, ever see. The labour of love doesn’t validate the end product — it just makes it harder for us to judge it on its own merits.

I can’t begin to imagine how hard it is to hear that something you’ve worked on for a long time is, to some people, utter rubbish. I reckon it'd feel pretty bad, though. Still, the worst thing you can do in that situation is to just petulantly discount the critique in public. Shout and scream in private all you want; tell friends, colleagues and loved ones Journalist X is wrong about everything (even if you disingenuously purport to not know of him (srsly?)). Do it: you’ll feel better. But don’t stand on a roof calling out a critic's views as being wrong, ill-informed or simply bs just because you disagree. It’s a really bad look.

I think this is a symptom of a larger issue, however, rather than isolated put-upon developers having mini public breakdowns. Early access, with all its ‘behind the scenes access’ and ‘help decide the game’s direction’, has fundamentally changed the act of making games. I’m all for the money up front aspect of it (it’s expensive to make stuff, I geddit), it’s the allowing people to shove their fingers in your pie that I can’t understand. The letting armchair designers have a say in how you make your game. Why would anyone want that? (And no, I’m not confusing this with QA.)

Playing a game before it’s done attracts three types of people: those who want to see you fail, those who are curious, and those who are already sold on your concept. Group one will tire and leave quickly. Group two will also leave, or they’ll join group three. Group three will likely dwindle over time, calcifying into a contingent of diehards.

If, after a few years in early access development, there are early-adopters left with you upon your soft-release, they will have nothing useful left in them. They are far too emotionally invested in the project to say anything objectively useful. Too many hours spent playing a work in progress has rendered them incapable of rational thought. They will make do and mend; they’ve been doing so for months, if not years. You might get tidbits like “maybe you could let me carry more stuff, but, having said that, it might break the balance, so actually I’m happy to just walk backwards and forwards for 10 minutes, k thx”, but really, what’s that worth?

Early access throws open the doors to all the yes-men you’ll ever need. Those who don’t like your game left long, long ago and might, of you’re lucky, swing back around to watch your baby disintegrate — if, of course, they still remember who you are. Listening to your remaining early access audience is like listening to your initial pitch idea: great, but far from what you’ve ended up with. Don’t listen, it turns you into this guy:

PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMER
I don’t really like sliding puzzles, especially lots of them and with a time limit.

DEVELOPER

The time limit is there to stop you getting in other players’ way. You’ve plenty of time to complete them, though.

INTERNAL MONOLOGUE

Nope, not even going to acknowledge that concern. Nobody’s ever mentioned not liking the sliding puzzles before, so it can’t possibly be an issue.

And nobody really wants to end up this shortsighted, do they?

Also, sliding puzzles are the worst.  

I'd Rather Starve Than Eat Video Game Food

In its most superficial forms, video game food has its place. A giant ham, whether it’s consumed whole there and then, or tantalisingly rubbed over your sweaty, rippling musculature, will undoubtedly make you feel better—it just will. Likewise, a can of energy beverage will totally boost your reaction times and pain threshold upon its contents dripping down your gullet and into your churning stomach. Which is fortunate, because you’ll need the added spryness to avoid cracking your head on the kitchen counter when the inevitable heart attack arrives, as your innards evacuate your abused body through a series of slightly less painful hernias. Beyond these and a couple of other instances, video game food is rubbish.

It normally occupies the role of placater; constantly wrestling for control with a hunger mechanic. Like weapon degradation and encumbrance, hunger has no place in civilised society. All of these things seek to derail whatever fun is taking place and force you to stop and fanny about in menus. With the possible exception of sharpening your weapon (to maintain damage output) mid-battle in Monster Hunter, which I’ll admit does add to the tension, ‘depleting meter’ mechanics are just an annoyance. They offer nothing but a mild, momentary distraction from your current task.

Food, or whetstones, or whatever else we choose to call them, all do the same thing. They refill a little hourglass that then immediately starts ticking down again. In a game with lots of stuff going on—i.e. a fabulous diversity of moving parts—we just end up hoarding the item we need to keep the sand topped up. In those survival games that are inexplicably super popular nowadays, hourglass flipping is the whole thing. In both cases I cannot abide it. Either as a minor roadblock to progression or the core of an experience, I just don’t see the point in expending my genuine energy to refill and maintain my computer self’s pretend energy. Chopping down trees to make a fire, to cook a pig, to eat a ham, to allow me to do it all again isn’t my idea of a good time. As might be clear already: I like my pork treats to arrive fully-formed, that way I can spend all my time dreaming up increasingly greasy ways of introducing them into my body.

My annoyance runs deeper, though. Beyond them being tragic wastes of time, depleting meters and their effects, and hunger in particular, are just plain inaccurate. Take that most blindingly of-the-moment game, The Sims, as a perfect example—though this applies for pretty much any food mechanic going. Little digital Leigh becomes really, really whiney if he’s so much as a tad peckish. He throws strops worthy of legitimising infanticide as he gurgles all over his anachronistically multi-storey home, moaning to anyone who’ll listen that he hasn’t been allowed to make a hoagie in the last ten minutes. If I do the right thing as his legal custodian and leave him to tire himself out, he’ll soon dramatically throw himself through a wall and drop dead. Digital Leigh is a stunted, entitled little brat and I’m glad he more often than not expires from neglect and starvation. One day I’m certain I'll produce one made of sterner stuff, and he’ll certainly thank me when he’s an older, wonderfully well-rounded member of society—just like I’ve finally been able to do with my own parents.

The little Leighs shouldn't drop dead from an afternoon without food, and they shouldn’t start feeling hungry again the moment they wipe the spittle from their collective chins with that final morsel of omelette. That isn’t how big Leigh works. He is perfectly happy not eating for about 18 hours as long as there are better things to do, which there normally are. He’s like this because the human body is riddled with a nuance that no amount of steadily decreasing meters on a screen can ever hope to replicate. Yeah, maybe my ability to work a bar decreases towards the end of a 15 hour shift, but I don’t collapse into a puddle and frolic with all the other liquids down there on the floor. No. I run over the road for my 20 minute break, drink two pints and smoke four, maybe five cigarettes, chew some gum, use the bathroom and get back at it.

All these things have, in descending order of importance, proved useful in the past for a little pep-up. But none is vital, and it’s this that video games never choose to convey. The illicit beers and the cigarettes weren’t necessary because I was a puckish problem drinker who’d die without them—the way a depleting meter would portray it—they were a hard-earned moment of respite from a crushingly mundane job. They were me thumbing my nose at a management hierarchy I had no respect for, and a means of holding onto some semblance of self-determinism. These are the sorts of reasons most of us eat, drink, smoke—consume. Not to avoid some near-death exhaustion and follow it up with a sudden and complete resurrection.

If you’re playing a video game you haven’t a clue what starvation feels like. But then that’s maybe why so many of us are thrilled by a simplification of a fairly nuanced, painful process. ‘Look: my video game is adding depth and challenge!’ When really we should be saying ‘this is a massive waste of time and actually fairly disrespectful to the many people who, right this second, are genuinely starving to death around the world. God, I, along with this video game exploitation of human suffering, am terrible.’ And while you’re at it with epiphanies: you should probably let ‘the boy’ out of the basement, if he’s not already dead from ‘learning to be a man’, that is. I guarantee he’ll thank you when he’s older.

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The above prose is proud to be associated with Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:
 

Channel 5's Poor People

For the longest time I was unaware of Channel 5’s generous policy of not showing ads on its Demand 5 streaming service. Because of this, it has now usurped Channel 4 as my go-to source for trashy shit aimed at simultaneously shaming the working class subjects of its scrutiny and the working class me wot watches it all.

Scott Shelby is a Bad Man, But That's Totally Fine

There’s a trophy you can unlock in Heavy Rain called ‘Perfect Crime’. This exists because one of the game’s four main characters is both protagonist and chief antagonist—though you of course don’t know this until the very end. This means that getting the trophy on your first time round comes down to either luck or some gross personal lust for ruining stories in the name of accumulating hollow achievements. Having said that, there are people I know who insist they saw this particular twist coming well before its gestation period was through. That makes them incredibly prescient or big smelly liars.

Big Boss Isn't a Very Good Boss At All

What follows is a frank and honest discussion of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. It includes intimate details of its woeful and misguided ending.

Big Boss. The clue is in the name I suppose. The greatest warrior of the 20th century, trained by the previous greatest warrior of the 20th century. Bloke with a mullet and an eye patch. Physical carbon copy of his own clone—thanks entirely to Metal Gear Solid’s protagonist, Solid Snake, being hugely popular and existing in a 3D form long before Big Boss. He’s worked for the US government. He’s been betrayed by the US government. Now he operates for himself, seeking to set up an independent state made up entirely of men who fight wars, presumably as a way of thumbing his nose at the notion of nuanced geopolitics. He’s a madman, by all accounts. But he’s also the flawed protagonist of a few video games, making his tortuous way to becoming the antagonist of a few other video games. He’s sort of a big deal ‘round here.

No Wonder the Cool Kids Didn’t Like Me: Teenage Years, Societal Fears and Brewed Under License Beers

I went through a curious transition from being a child to a teenager, the same one that, in our own unique ways, I suppose we all must endure to a varying extent. Mine, it must be said, was on the more benign end of the scale. I loved LEGO growing up (buy your kids a massive box of bricks and you'll save a small fortune on toy purchases throughout their lifetime), and I found it really difficult giving it up as I grew older, so I just didn’t. This led to strange juxtapositions like my fifteenth birthday party, which saw a group of similarly aged adolescents in my room all drinking Skol lager (just like at Dave’s party a few months previously) and watching The Evil Dead, surrounded by LEGO models and the echoing sounds of ‘don’t touch them please, they’re fragile.’ They touched them, of course, because LEGO is universally fascinating and they were probably a tiny bit jealous of me having the wherewithal to still have it proudly displayed in my boudoir. Or maybe they just wanted to laugh at me. Regardless, I was enraptured by those bricks long after my peers had passed them by.

Games of Future Past - or - We’re Skating on Thin Ice Here, Why Would Anyone Want to Play a 'New Classic Point & Click Adventure Game'?

There’s a very real danger involved in mulling over our own yesteryears. Care about a particular era too much and you become the type for whom, for example, constantly talking about the ‘good times we had at school’ is completely acceptable. They were indeed enjoyable, those days when we worked weekends up the shopping village for four quid an hour, spending all our pay on nights out in the ex-mill towns of West Yorkshire. But they were also full of horrible stuff like puberty, a lack of personal autonomy and terrible, gel-based hairstyles. Dismiss the merits of your past too forcefully, however, and you end up in a perpetual cycle of snorting ketamine and hunting out craft brewery taprooms, attempting in vain to prove to yourself that ‘I am undeniably an adult: butterscotch shots and dancing to Pantera are for the kids.’

Shopping On A Hangover: Sorry, I Can’t Carry All These Swords

“If everything is fun, is anything truly fun -- how do we know?” - Geralt of Rivia

Context is inescapable when it comes to most things. Take, for instance, a beer being enjoyed at three in the morning with your live-in beloved. It's a frosty Corona, fitted with a generous slice of lime. It comes as standard with a helping of 90s dance music, something like, I dunno, Dr. Alban. Now, in isolation this is one of the most wonderful of situations I could ever hope to find myself in. I'm dancing in my living room. I'm maybe having a small snack in between sips of beer. I'm jumping up and down, as if I’m really back in the throes of clubland delight. I'm reminded of why, for me, a good, well maintained, mutually respectful and -- of course -- loving long-term relationship is preferable in every way to actually being in a club --  in the 90s or any other period of time -- and trying to find that special someone. I already have. And I'm drinking a beer and dancing with her in my living room at three in the morning.

Patching Up Geralt Of Rivia, The Last Action Hero

There's always a catch. When a Witcher asks for "what you find at home yet don't expect" in return for saving someone's life, neither party really knows what form that reward will take. It being an unknown quantity, one can usually be safe in assuming it will be somewhat meaningful. There's always a catch, after all. I like ambiguities like this, and The Witcher 3 is full of them. You've got your more standard video game ones, like not truly understanding the wider consequences of your actions, or never having a complete grasp of your companions' intentions. But it's home to many more, ones that are much more specifically, well, Witchery.

Playing Puzzle & Dragons: Pints of Guinness Make You Strong

I've got a hamster called Mr Jibbers. Every day I get in at about six thirty and have my tea (dinner to Southerners). After that he wakes up and starts banging about, flinging his food bowl around and raking it across the bars of his cage in a way reminiscent of my memories of the pound scene in Lady and the Tramp. I'm generally a perceptive kind of guy, so I take this to mean he'd like to come out of his little prison. I oblige of course, every time, and so open the little hatch on top and wait. After about thirty seconds he'll grab a hold of the bars and pull himself up onto the roof, much like a Michael Myers surprise from the ceiling (where he appears behind his victim, lowering himself down from a pipe), just in reverse. His speed and grace in dragging his furry little body weight what would be about seven feet for a human is wonderful and astounding to watch. I do so every time. 

Wrestling With The Issue At Hand

I watch professional wrestling. There: I said it. I also play video games, and sometimes wonder why I do either of these things. Come with me while I try to justify myself.

At this point I'm left interacting with video games in the same way I do professional wrestling. Every Tuesday I watch Raw, WWE's premier showcase for its roster's talent. It's about two and a quarter hours without commercial breaks and airs every week. Every single week of the year. The promotion also broadcasts Smackdown!, which I could watch on a Friday. That too airs 52 weeks a year. I don't because five hours of wrestling each week is a lot of wrestling. Also, Raw is the show generally used to tell the stories, with Smackdown! existing as more of a runty sibling to be constantly overshadowed. Indeed, anything meaningful that happens on it is carefully edited down into cruelly efficient recap packages to be broadcast four days later on Raw. It's as if even the people at WWE know they're just going through the motions. Beyond the weekly stuff you've got an ad-free pay-per-view spectacular at the end of every month. Chalk it up: three more hours. These are meant to be super special but are normally only slightly more impactful than a regular TV show. AND, ever since the launch of the WWE Network streaming service, you're also sporadically gifted a second one of these in the middle of the month. All told, on a bad one you're looking at 26 - twenty six - hours of wrestling a month. I get by with 16 at the most. And it's a slog.

Ain’t Nobody Fresher Than My Click: I’m Not Really Getting Better At This, Am I?

Clicker games, or Incremental games to the initiated, are bits of software where you click on a screen and things happen. Popularised by the big daddy of them all Cookie Clicker, they appear to be going through a renaissance of sorts at the moment. As Nathan Grayson off of Kotaku told me this week, an Incremental called Clicker Heroes is super popular on the PC. Almost as popular as Grand Theft Auto V, which I gather is somewhat surprising. Or is it?

Sorcery! On My Phone is Great (And I'm Not Embarrassed to Say So)

Preface

I self-consciously balked at the stuff deemed goofy by my peers. As a kid you listened to Papa Roach, talked about football, watched the late night softcore on Channel 5, ate your end of term lunch at McDonald's, played football, chased girls, skipped homework, watched football and stole booze from your parents. I only actually liked two of those things - the nu metal and the blueys, obviously - and so spent a fair bit of my time pretending to be into the others outside of school, where, conveniently, no one could see me not doing them. I don't think I fooled anyone, but at the time it seemed I just about passed the societal conditions necessary to be a cool kid. For one to maintain this status you couldn't really like more fringe pastimes. Magic cards? Not a chance. Dungeons & Dragons? Ha! Warhammer (40K or otherwise)? The only little figures you were allowed to play with were of the Subbuteo variety (football again). Acknowledging the other kids who liked these things? Big no no. By the age of about fifteen I’d had enough of this sham personality and jumped ship (let's be honest: I was pushed), but I'd already missed out on many an enlightening formative year. It is for this collection of customarily awkward adolescent reasons that I have never sampled a Fighting Fantasy book.

Tunnel Vision: Taking Care of Business (TCB)

Getting aggy in the dark.

The first few hours are a right blur. Just a collection of scattered little moments really. Trudging ever forwards through the darkness. Peaking at Bad Men through the gap between a stack of barrels. Cowering in dark corners of rooms, trying to hide myself from the dangerous flicker of campfires. Shaking, shotgun in hand, as enemies walk past me a few yards away, hoping beyond hope that they won't spot me. Being armed with dangerous looking guns but not really knowing how to use them. And that's about it.

One Hit Wonder: Double Dragon Neon and Miriam…? Muriel…? No, it’s Marian!

Does just copying someone else's mistake afford you unaccountability?

The new Spider-Man isn’t going to come with an origin story, apparently. I’d hazard that this is because the lovely people at Marvel/Disney/Sony are finally sure everyone knows why Spider-Man is Spider-Man. He was bitten by a scientifically fiddled-with spider and inadvertently let his hubris hurt those closest to him. Essentially, he learnt that “with great power comes great responsibility”. This kind of stuff is, I think, built into the Western, movie-hungry consciousness, so it's nice to hear it isn't going to be forced upon patrons again.

Less widely known, but still tiresomely unnecessary, is the origin story of Double Dragon. Its complex tale of two men beating up lots of people is set in motion by the heartbreaking scene of a woman being punched in the stomach, thrown over a burly bloke's shoulder and having her almost bare arse shown off to all who'll take a look. The lady in question, Marian, is (bizarrely) the joint love interest of protagonist brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee, but also all the sexualised MacGuffin 80s players needed to go and bonk some bonces. ‘It were a different time’, you see, so that's about as complex as narrative justifications got.

Double Dragon received a reboot in 2012 in the shape of Neon. It added numerous extra levels of mechanical complexity and a good ol' dose of persistent character progression - things deemed necessary to bring the aged beat ‘em up into the modern era. Marian, by contrast, still gets a smack in the gut for being a woman, and remains merely a hollow trinket for players to follow. While how one plays the game is deemed important enough to warrant an overhaul, moribund gender representations and a morsel of respect for narrative are clearly not.

The genre is, of course, largely defined by its mechanical purity. It harks back to the days of arcades, where getting through combat challenges was a thrill unto itself, buoyed along by skill or sheer fiscal determination. Completing the game efficiently and without spending a small fortune was a player's aim, and this tension is largely lost once continues are stripped of their monetary value. What we're left with, then, is a relatively rudimentary collection of inputs; combinations of punch, kick and block are tiresomely anemic when compared to newer, more complex games. Something as simple as Double Dragon cannot possibly compete with the likes of contemporary Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden games. They offer hugely deep combat experiences, where positioning, stance, weapons and combo strings affect the very core of one's offensive and defensive capabilities. A 2D beat 'em up, by virtue of its own design tenets, can't possibly feature comparable depth. Yet Neon is preoccupied with augmenting its mechanics within the strict generic template it is confined to, chasing an unachievable complexity while developing very little else. Neon is, essentially, a flashier copy of the original.

Wholesale reproduction-with-bells-on has proved genuinely effective in the past. Evil Dead II is a slapstick take on Evil Dead, which sees the absurdity of the original’s low budget aesthetic being played for laughs within the framework of what is essentially the same story told again. Aspects of Hulk Hogan’s fight with King Kong Bundy at WrestleMania II were reworked to great effect the following year. At WrestleMania III he picked up and slammed the 520 pound André the Giant, creating what is still one of the most enduring images of professional wrestling. Nirvana’s follow up to Nevermind, In Utero, was consciously created to appear similar to their mainstream breakthrough in terms of basic composition and sound. It was, however, produced in a very raw and stripped-back way, and in parts features many abrasive and contradictory elements. Ultimately it is very difficult to compare the two, and upon release In Utero accomplished the band’s desired goal of alienating casual listeners. Skillfully created reproductions, those with a real intent, tend to work out quite well.

Neon seems to tacitly acknowledge that Marian's depiction is outmoded. Right at the end of the credits, after the men have spent the whole game beating on others to protect her honour, and while she has been held prisoner and (surprise, surprise) brainwashed into being a momentary adversary, it is Marian who strikes the final, lethal blow to chief-antagonist Skullmageddon. She is, ultimately, the only one strong enough to bring the story to a close after so many false endings and mid-stage boss battles. The men on the title screen spent hours whipping Ol' Skullers and were still only able to subdue him for a few minutes. Marian truly gets it done though, Neon tells us. But her victory is hidden right at the end. Admittedly, there is a catchy song playing over the entire credits scroll to hold people's attention, but even so, some will miss this token gesture. It's past the end after all, can you blame them? It's like - to go back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a moment - Nick Fury popping up right at the end of Iron Man. Him doing so is a lovely little wink to diehard fans, but the average moviegoer will be queueing for the toilet by that point. He isn't part of the plot; he's outside of it, something to look forward to or get you thinking, but he isn't integral to anything that came before his tiny scene.

So why does Marian still need to get a slap?

The answer to this, in my mind, is because the experience of playing is usually held above anything else a game might have to offer. It’s why addons to Bioshock Infinite tout a “combat experience [that] has been rebalanced and reworked with a greater emphasis on stealth and resource management” (woop woop), right up there with the main draw: a continuation of its story. It’s why Titanfall’s entire single player portion is a series of offline multiplayer matches you play against your Xbox. It’s why Shadow of Mordor’s numerous expansions all take place in entirely the same location as the main game and simply tweak the mechanics a bit. It’s why Far Cry 4 is Far Cry 3 and then some (but not much more). If it's fun to play does anything else really matter?

Neon lets you counter attacks, share lives with your co-op partner and pull out a high five at a moment’s notice. It, in many ways, plays more smoothly than previous Double Dragon titles. And while it is still a bit clunky to move about and perform these maneuvers, it at least pinpoints the deficiencies of its inspiration and works to sort them out. It also gently pokes fun at 80s machismos; painting the Lee brothers as unintelligent, air guitar-wielding, dudebro-ing fools. It sort of does a lot of things right when it comes to updating the template it is - by virtue of being a flashy copy -  beholden to follow. Which makes it all the more of a shame that the single most outdated aspect of the series, Marian’s place within the whole mess, is left almost intact. Neon might be intentionally dumb fun, yes, but it isn’t by any means clueless. Perpetuating this kind of tasteless, backward-looking representation - especially when it changes so much else - isn’t done out of ignorance, it is done out of indifference. And that, to put it lightly, just isn’t very fun.

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The above prose is proud to be associated with Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table, an initiative which seeks to bring the diverse voices of video game criticism together about the person of a once again monthly topic. I think it's dead good, and so do these lovely individuals:

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It isn't just women who face a glass ceiling when it comes to monetary income. I, even as a white male living in one of the most expensive cities on the planet, still manage to earn a paltry sum every month. If you're thankful in any way for my free written gift to you, maybe consider making it ever so slightly less free by donating to my lovely Patreon, it resides here: patreon.com/ashouses. Chrz.