Battletech AAR: July 31, 2024

At the end of July, I went to my first in-person Battletech event at a store in Toronto. It was a King of the Hill-style battle royale set on Solaris VII (the Battletech universe’s version of Vegas). I had a lot of fun (though it legit took me several days to recover) and wanted to put together a quick after action report for posterity. Instead, some real life stuff got in the way and this sat in draft for way too long.

I won’t get into the details around why and how I wound up at this event. My partner and I went through a pretty quick move (in terms of timelines, we were long overdue to move) last August and it left me reeling. My usual hobbies weren’t helping with the anxiety and burnout. I could barely bring myself to get to the final-ish missions of the first playthrough of Armored Core VI, a game that I’d been looking forward to for ten fucking years. So I did what any completely reasonable person who went through a major life change after the age of 40 does: I purchased a book on military history and devoured it. Early in 2024, a friend suggested I look at Warhammer and I got into Kill Team, the skirmish-focused version of Warhammer 40,000, and then into Battletech this past May – a tabletop game and setting I’d admired from afar, but hadn’t realized it had been so thoroughly revived in the past few years (though I’ve played basically every PC release of MechCommander, Battletech, and Mechwarrior).

I’m writing this from the assumption that the reader knows roughly what Battletech is as both a tabletop game and general setting. This timeline from Polygon that came out around the release of the Harebrained Schemes Battletech PC game gives a great overview of the setting up until the start of the Clan Invasion era. The general pitch is: it’s a science fiction wargaming setting focused on mech-on-mech violence. There are two major rulesets for Battletech right now (Classic and Alpha Strike), both enjoying a decent growth in popularity after several decades where the IP seemed doomed to wander the intellectual property hinterlands. In a lot of ways, it’s amazing that Battletech continues to exist as a going concern at all, much less thriving.

Classic Battletech (sometimes referred to as Total Warfare) is some grognard-ass grognard wargaming. Think of it like a super-detailed WWII wargame that’s set in a period of history that never happened. A game between two players with four mechs apiece can take several hours to play out. Larger engagements featuring a more combined arms approach would usually take an entire weekend to play. These rules are very much a product of a particular simulation-first design acumen that was super popular in wargaming through the 70s and 80s. The rules have seen some updates over the years, but there’s plenty of rough edges and any given turn, you’re probably rolling on four or five different tables every time you attack with more than one weapon on your mech. It’s cool as hell if you have the time and patience for it. It produces some spectacularly cinematic moments. It just, y’know, doesn’t fit into the lives of most mortals.

The other ruleset is Alpha Strike. This has been around for a while in various forms but now has a dedicated starter box. Alpha Strike abstracts a lot of the crunchy simulation-first aspects of Classic in favour of streamlining the rules to either let you finish a regular 4v4 mechs-only game in a reasonable amount of time, or to accommodate larger combined arms engagements over the span of a few hours. I love Alpha Strike so much. It’s such an elegant design that still evokes some of the best moments of Classic Battletech, but does so in a way that feels so much less exhausting to play. I love artillery mechs, I love infantry, I love weird tripod mech designs. I will never have the patience to coallate all the rules for those individual things to have handy as a quick reference for a pickup Classic Battletech game. If I want to run them with that ruleset, I’d just use something like MegaMek to automate a lot of that stuff (MegaMek fucking rules by the way). However, all of those things are pretty simple to put on the table in Alpha Strike. Also, because Alpha Strike uses a different balancing system, mechs that are actively shitty in Classic Battletech (some mechs just have bad variants for Lore Reasons and I love them) can be decent or even excellent. By the same token, absolutely broken mech variants are much more balanced in Alpha Strike.

Alright, let’s get into the AAR. I’ll probably do some follow-up posts to get into the weeds on the distinction between these rulesets and getting started with the game at a later date.

The Format

Ruleset: Classic Battletech (specifically anything in the Battlemech Manual – this rules out bringing vehicles or infantry).

List requirements:

  • Minimum 2 mechs.
  • Inner Sphere technology only.
  • Clan Invasion era (the year 3061 or earlier).
  • Total value of the force may not exceed 2000 BV (including piloting and gunnery adjustments).
  • Custom mechs weren’t overtly banned but from the wording, seemed to be discouraged.

Terrain and Setup:

  • There will be a three-hex raised summit in the middle of the board. When a mech ends a round on one of these hexes, the owner scores one point. For two consecutive rounds on the summit, the owner scores two points, then three, then four, and so on.
  • One point will be scored each team for each enemy mech killed. To receive credit, one must have done damage to a mech during a turn in which it died.
  • No teams allowed.
  • Mechs are available if you don’t have any to bring.

Optional Rules Used:

  • Playing Card Initiative
  • Movement Dice
  • Sprinting
  • Backward Level Changes
  • Floating Crits
  • Careful Stand
  • Active Probes Targeting
  • Enhanced Flamers
  • Retractable Blades

List Building

My main consideration is that I wanted to use mechs I liked and had painted to a reasonable standard. When designing a list, I normally pick the heaviest mech I want to bring and design the list around that. However, I flipped this approach on its head because 2000 BV isn’t a lot to work with and I don’t have a lot of miniatures for light mechs that would make sense in this format. One of my favourite light mechs is the Spider and I genuinely love the new Catalyst sculpt, so as much as I normally pick the anchor first and work cheaper from there, I decided to use the Spider as my starting point. I had two general concepts in mind going into this:

  • Brick Shithouse + chaff. This feels a little cheesy, because the secondary mech is just there to fulfill the list-building requirements to have two mechs.
  • Jumpy Pulse Bastards with melee capability. There’s a lot of upside here. An all-energy loadout means I don’t have to worry about ammo bin explosions. Part of why I love the Spider is that its lasers are in its torso, meaning it’s free to punch with both fists during the physical attack phase (not that the punches do much damage, but getting a chance to get a head shot is worth it). Plus, the similar profile between the two mechs will cut down on the cognitive load. I won’t need to track ammo, either.

Trouble in the Brick Shithouse

One of my favourite assault mechs is the Banshee. For one, I was very swayed by the Goonhammer Overview, but I also love the sculpt for the Banshee in the Inner Sphere Heavy Lance box. I’m not super fond of how the canopy for this guy came out, but this might’ve been a good incentive to try to correct that. I looked at the 3Q, which would’ve been a prime slab of cheap beefcake to plunk down (foreshadowing). With standard stats (gunnery 4, piloting 5), a 3Q comes in at 1394 BV, carries an autocannon/20 (usually shortened to AC/20). Autocannons are weird in that it’s not always clear if the number afterwards refers to the number of shots fired per volley or if it’s denoting the size of the rounds fired. In terms of game mechanics, the number refers to the damage done to a single location if the weapon hits. So an AC/2 does two damage per hit. An AC/20 is the finger of god in early Battletech. Technically, gauss rifles exist somewhere out there, but they’re not at all easy to come by in this era and certainly not on a mech with a sub-2000 BV price tag. An AC/20 shot will reliably take a limb off most light mechs. A head shot will take out just about any mech I can think of, regardless of the era. They’re short range, but that’s an ideal weapon to bring to a fight like this. We’re all eventually going to fight over that summit and it’s going to be close range. In hindsight, I’m a little surprised nobody brought a Hunchback (one of the more popular/cheaper ways to put an AC/20 on the table).

The Spider I most had in mind for this mission is the 7M, a 3051 update to the 5V that replaces the stock medium lasers with pulse lasers. Unless I get up to some fuckery with my pilots to make them *worse*, the Banshee BNC-3Q and Spider SDR-7M come in at 2016 BV – too expensive. I didn’t really have a Locust variant I was in love with at a sub-600 BV price point and really felt like I needed jump jets on the light if they were going to be worth a damn. I could have gone to the local shop near me that stocks IronWind Metal minis and picked up a Dart. It doesn’t have jump jets but moves fast enough and has an all-energy/single weapon type loadout. I looked at the Firestarter, Mongoose, and Wolfhound, and found that basically all of them were more expensive than the Spider. I did have a Wasp, but it was *way* cheaper in terms of BV and I wasn’t loving how the Wasp’s paint job was coming out. I didn’t want to have to go through the trouble of stripping and repainting it followed by figuring out how to rejigger piloting and gunnery skills to make the list make sense. Okay, so let’s bench the Banshee for now.

Meet the Jumpy Pulse Bastards

The rationale behind this list has its roots in what Solaris VII is supposed to be. But first, the thing you need to understand about the Battletech universe is that the IP has changed hands a fair few times, but its foundations were laid in the 80s and not with a great deal of care. The writers didn’t quite know if it wanted to be a Saturday morning cartoon or a Serious Political Drama or a bleak satire of the excesses of monarchist rule and the seemingly inescapable pull of fascism (the answer is probably: whichever one was making money). You can make the same claims about Warhammer, but Games Workshop has been more willing to jettison whole sections of its lore and history if they didn’t think the vibes fit. I’ve been reading through the Michael Stackpole warrior trilogy books lately and hands-down, the best sections are set in the gladiatorial arenas on Solaris VII. Stackpole is very good at describing mech-on-mech combat without it feeling like he’s “that’s chappie”-ing his way through a list of weapons and mechs in the universe. Outside of that, most of his descriptions of adulthood (specifically the behaviour of adult men) reads like a list of 70s and 80s men’s magazine cliches: brick-jawed guys in turtlenecks and corduroy drinking brandy from a snifter at a ski lodge in space Aspen and they all smell like English Leather cologne.

However, during one particularly fun encounter in the arenas on Solaris VII, I clocked that Stackpole is basically describing a laser tag maze. Don’t get me wrong, I loved laser tag. That shit was cool as fuck in the 80s and 90s. I still think it’s a great way to kill a half an hour, but there’s a certain familiarity that’s crept in over the years. Put another way: these books were written by someone who probably looked at American Gladiators and was like “this is the future of televised gladiatorial spectacle” (and it was, even if the world disagreed) but the intervening years have rendered what might’ve felt edgy and novel in its day kind of quaint. However, that’s kind of the vibe for Solaris VII. It’s simultaneously an extremely seedy underground cage fight business where people are frequently killed on screen and a cartoonish televised spectacle watched throughout the Inner Sphere by the young and old. That tension is, to my understanding, never really resolved. However, one uniting tendency between these orthogonal tonal landscapes is that people like it when mechs punch each other. So that’s what I wanted to give the assumed audience of this grudge match: mechs who are strong and can punch (or hatchet).

The Spider 7M isn’t the most mobile or heat efficient Spider (and often pays for that with its life) but it has two medium pulse lasers (which are pretty efficient from a heat-to-damage ratio) situated in the center torso. Pulse lasers add a -2 bonus to your chance to hit (reducing the difficulty of hitting whatever target you’re aiming at) and jumping adds +3 to your difficulty. You roll your chance to hit independently for each weapon you’re firing, so the pulse lasers mostly negate the shooting disadvantage you get from jumping. In Classic Battletech, you declare physical attacks in the phase after the shooting phase. This means if you shoot a weapon located on an arm, you can’t punch with that arm (or use a hatchet, which we’ll get to in a minute). For this Spider to even have a shot at doing a decent amount of damage, I’m going to need it to be able to jump around to make itself harder to hit, ideally get some shots on the rear armour, and connect with its punches for bonus damage. This gets hairy if you’re jumping as far as possible every turn and trying to shoot both pulse lasers, but it would be a good lesson in managing heat and learning to play cagey.

Hatchets in Battletech have an uneven history. They look cool as fuck, but a lot of hatchet mechs aren’t well-designed. Mechanically, hatchets do more damage than a punch, can roll on the whole mech location table (meaning you have a chance at hitting the head) and are a little easier to hit than punches. However, kicks have an even easier to-hit chance than hatchets, and if you connect, you can force a piloting roll to see if your opponent topples over. Unless there’s a level difference and you’re standing above your target, your kick isn’t going to have a chance to hit your target’s head or torso. Also, if you miss with a kick, you get to make a piloting roll to see if you get to spend a turn flopping around like Joel Embiid. The first potential hatchet mech I could pair with the Spider is the Hatchetman, an okayish medium mech. A lot of its variants have a bunch of weapons on the hatchet arm, meaning every turn I’d need to decide if I wanted to shoot or hatchet someone. There are way better variants in the line, but most of them show up in later eras than the one we’re playing in. I love the look of the Hatchetman and want to run them more frequently, but that also means convincing people to move past the Succession Wars/Clan Invasion era. I don’t have an Axman, which is a heavy version of the Hatchetman, and the era-appropriate versions are all only a little cheaper than the Banshee 3Q. The one I’d want to take (AXM-4D) pops up in 3071, so outside of the range of this game. I do, however, have a Nightsky, a mech that could be charitably described as Slenderman crossed with a fighter jet. The Nightsky NGS-4S has a large pulse laser, two medium pulse lasers, and a small pulse laser if I happen to have some spare heat and want to do a lil extra damage, as a treat. It has respectable jump capabilities (but nothing compared to the Wraith, another jumpy pulse bastard that doesn’t have a hatchet – more on that one later).

With the Spider and the Nightsky, I also have enough BV left over to bump up their piloting stat to match their gunnery at 4. This makes doing melee attacks a little easier and might help save my ass when I get kicked by someone else. Was this a good use of BV? Who could say. I suspect gunnery would’ve meant I hit even more often than I already did, but I was a little invested in my theme.

A Quick Brick Shithouse Interlude

a Victor 9B miniature from Battletech
Not 100% happy with it, but it’s the closest I’ve come so far.

Alright, so I’ve only been painting minis for a little over six months now and I’m still learning a lot. One technique I’m really interested in learning is Object Source Lighting (OSL for short). Basically: how do you make it look like the mini is being lit by a lantern they’re holding (or some other light source). Last week, I was painting a Victor and the model’s right arm is just the barrel of an autocannon. It has some exposed heat sinks right next to the arm, so after doing my usual quick base coating steps, I pivoted to trying to make it look like it had just recently fired the autocannon and the glow from the heat sinks is still lighting up the side of the torso.

The thing about the Victor is that it’s designated as an Assault mech (one of the heaviest mech classses in the setting, known for being big, slow, and heavily armoured). Except its armour is much closer to that of a Medium mech. For reference, the stock Victor 9B is 1370 BV (assuming 4/5 pilot stats) but only has a few extra points of armour than the Nightsky does. Sure, it has more rear armour and internal structure, but it’s also packing ammo bins for its Short-Range Missiles (SRMs) and its AC/20. There’s enough ammo for the autocannon that I could load it up with precision or armour piercing ammo, just to make things hurt a little more. I ultimately brought the Victor as a backup because this is my first time going to an event with this group and every Battletech group seems to be a little different. If someone objects to me bringing this much pulse laser to the table between my Spider and Nightsky, I can sub the Victor in instead of the Nightsky. The 20 point differential between the Victor and the Banshee gives me just enough room to squeeze my jumpy lad into the list.

A quick note on balance in Battletech. Classic Battletech uses a points system to assign a general value based on a mech’s loadout, armour, and other capabilities (Alpha Strike has a totally separate balancing/points system that seems to be a little harder to exploit – another reason why I quite like AS). This is expressed as the mech’s battle value or BV. The BV system is remarkably robust for something that came out in 1997 and last saw a revision in 2007.  It can, however, be exploited in some ways. Battletech is a complicated and often time-consuming game to play, and the easiest way to ensure you have a stable pool of folks to play with is to not be a tryhard dickhead at pickup games. For more about how not to be a tryhard dickhead, see: Battletech: BV and The Code. The pulse lasers referred to in that article are Clan pulse lasers and not available on the variants I’ve chosen, but get a few Battletech players in the room and ask them what they think is completely broken in the setting and you’ll usually have four or five completely different opinions. I didn’t want to be the player who happened to pull up with a list that led to a shouting match the last time they ran this match type.

At any rate, I double-checked to see if my lists needed to be submitted before I showed up to the event (they did not, as this was just a casual game) and let myself make the call right before the start of the game. After chatting with the organizer when I got there, I ultimately opted for the Jumpy Pulse Bastards and let my Victor rest in the tupperware container I brought the squad in.

With that overly long setup behind us, let’s get to the After Action Report.

The After Action Report

Upon arrival at the shop, I was asked who my sponsor was for the Solaris VII fight. I hadn’t even considered this and was a little frazzled from the drive in to Toronto. After collecting myself, I went with Yoyodyne, the only too-precious-by-half big-L Literature reference I’ll allow myself. I realized afterwards that there was a wealth of Netrunner corps I could’ve used or, hell, even a better Pynchon reference than that. But whatever, Yoyodyne is also the name I give to my Etrian Odyssey guild, too. The sponsor wound up being the shorthand they’d use to refer to the different players around the table. There were about five of us. Nobody brought more than two mechs. I was heartened to see that a lot of folks were rolling with mech variants that I quite liked: I saw a Wolverine WVR-7K in there, one guy had a Centurion CN9-AH. As I am always pleased by the overall aesthetics of the Axmans and Hatchetmans (sorry, this is just how plurals are handled in the setting – I hate it too) I was happy to see that the organizer brought an Axman. There was also a Wraith (a mech I like almost as much as the Nightsky) and oh fuck oh no somebody brought the Banshee 3Q (they used a Wasp to fulfill the two-mech requirement).

Initiative was handled with a deck of cards rather than having players roll off. I liked this approach. Everyone took turns cutting the initiative deck between shuffles and that established the order. Then it would reverse order. So whoever moved their first mech last got to move both mechs one after the other. If one of your two mechs were dead, you automatically got to skip the first mech movement because everyone wants to move as late as possible to avoid giving someone the chance to get into their rear arc. We all rolled off to see who would spawn where on the map (your starting point was randomized by rolling a 1D6 and moving clockwise around the table to the correct spot).

This photo was taken after the game, but should give you an idea of the forces and their composition.

A photo depicting mech miniatures on a hex map. From left to right: Shadow Hawk and Centurion, Nightsky and Spider, Banshee and Wasp, Wolverine and Wasp, Axman and Spider, Wraith and Spider.
mechs on mechs on mechs

From left to right:

  • Corean Enterprises (Shadow Hawk and Centurion)
  • Yoyodyne Ltd. (Nightsky and Spider) – it’s a me
  • Venu Corporation (Banshee and Wasp) – oh no
  • Cool Guy Industries (Wolverine and Wasp)
  • Cyberdyn Systems (Axman and Spider) – the TO
  • Lunar Gambit Inc (Wraith and Spider) – this was a very close contender for my lineup, too.

Turn 1: Getting into Position

a close up photo of a Nightsky and Spider in woods. In the distance, an Axman and Spider run by Cyberdyn Systems
My Nightsky’s main job was to try to keep up with my Spider. I spent a lot of time leapfrogging between wooded areas (the green hexes).

We were playing with sprint rules, so you could choose to sprint for twice your walk speed, but would not be able to shoot or make any physical attacks. I’m pretty sure I just jumped to the woods rather than sprint. I didn’t fire anything this turn, though. You can see in the distance Cyberdyn’s Axman and Spider. That Axman looked cool as hell and had a sick freehand logo on it.

Turn 2: First Blood

Lunar Gambit’s Spider jumped onto the summit alongside Venu Corporation’s Spider. I was still getting into position and saw an opportunity to get a rear

a close up photo of a Nightsky in woods. A spider is perched behind an Axman, one level up. On the summit of the mountain, a different Spider lies on its side, dead. Beyond that, another spider, also on its side.
I figured I’d try to get a cheeky rear armour shot on the Axman. A little shocked my Nightsky managed to get first blood.

armour shot in on the Axman with my Spider, but that wasn’t going to do an awful lot. Just wanted to get some shots in. I also unloaded into the rear armour of Lunar Gambit’s Spider with my Nightsky and cored it (several other folks were taking potshots at it, too). Spiders can be fragile, even with decent difficulty-to-hit modifiers. A lot of light mechs will rely on the “to-hit” difficulty increasing as they move, but if enough people are pouring shots into you, someone’s going to roll boxcars and take off a leg.

 

 

 

Turn 3: More Blood

A Nightsky and Spider on the summit of the mountain, with an Axman lurking below, and the ponderous advance of the Banshee in the distance. In the far distance: a wraith takes potshots.
Having both mechs on the summit for a turn got me an early lead on the rest. It didn’t *feel* like folks were going easy on me, at any rate.

I jumped my Spider and Nightsky onto the summit, scoring a point each. Vanu’s Banshee managed to get a shot in on Cyberdyn’s Spider with the AC/20, which ended that mech’s run. I got a point for taking some shots at them, too, if I recall correctly. Then Vanu’s Banshee kicked Corean Enterprises’ Centurion’s head off during the physical attacks phase.

Turn 4: Coolant Flush

I hopped my Nightsky and somehow unscathed Spider off the summit. My Spider had been building up heat over the past few turns and I wanted it to cool off a bit. Cool Guy Industries put his Wasp on the summit (it promptly had a leg shot off) and it looked like next turn was going to be a bloodbath. Cyberdyn’s Axman got behind Cool Guy’s Wolverine and dismantled its right torso.

Turn 5: Violence Ensues

My Nightsky put some shots in on Cool Guy’s Wasp along with help from Lunar Gambit’s Wraith and Venu’s Banshee. Lunar Gambit’s Wraith also got a headshot on Corean Enterprises’ Shadow Hawk, meaning both of their mechs went out with headshots.

A Spider cooling off in the woods as violence ensues at the summit.
As my spider cools off in in the woods as violence ensues at the summit.

Turn 6: Repositioning

My Spider got back on the summit, my Nightsky tried to hatchet someone but missed. A lot of folks jockeying for position and taking potshots.

A Banshee and Axman are on the summit, a Spider lies broken on the ground. A Nightsky watches from the woods and behind it, a Wraith takes some opportunity shots.
My Spider took a beating while the Banshee and Axman duked it out. My Nightsky took potshots at them while taking hits from the Wraith in the background.

Turn 7: Death From Above

My Spider took an AC/20 shot to the arm and sundry other fire to the leg. Still around but it’s not getting up. I was just hoping it would last long enough to get two points. Then Lunar Gambit declared a death from above from their Wraith. The Axman and Banshee were getting into it next to my Spider. The Banshee also made a push attack, so we had to figure out a lot of displacement order-of-operations. The Wraith landed on my Spider, which was badly damaged and knocked off the cliff (the fall finally killed it). Then the Banshee pushed the Axman into the Wraith, pushing the Wraith off the summit.

The Banshee charged the Axman, displacing them off the summit. The Wraith completed their Death from Above attack on my spider, displacing it off the cliff to its demise. My Nightsky stands next to the summit, mostly helpless.
The Banshee charged the Axman, displacing them off the summit. The Wraith completed their Death from Above attack on my spider, displacing it off the cliff to its demise. My Nightsky stands next to the summit, mostly helpless.

Turn 8: Back on Top

Vanu’s Banshee is still on the summit. Cool Guy’s Wasp tried to charge the Banshee off the summit but took an AC/20 to the leg and Cyberdyn’s Axman finished the job with a hatchet.

Turn 9: Endgame

The newly-resurrected Centurion from Corean Enterprises finally got back into the fight in time to shred the rear armour of Axman with an AC20 shell. It’s now hanging together with duct tape and a prayer. After two turns of sustained fire from several other mechs, was the victim of *another* Death from Above attack from the Wraith. This displaced it off the top of the mountain. The pilot decided to eject, ending the match (for the game to be called, three players needed to lose all three of their mechs). My Nightsky and Cool Guy Industries’ Wolverine exchanged a perfunctory salvo of fire and shook hands at having ended the match still alive on the summit.

The Wraith stands imperious over the fallen Banshee, bracketed by a Nightsky and Wolverine. In the distance, the Axman, Centurion, and Shadow Hawk watch in frustration.
The Wraith stands imperious over the fallen Banshee, bracketed by a Nightsky and Wolverine. In the distance, the Axman, Centurion, and Shadow Hawk watch in frustration.

Final Thoughts

My main lessons so far:

  • Use Flechs record sheets (or ideally, get a decent tablet or e-ink setup to handle record sheets). Cognitive load is a real threat and the less brainpower you spend thinking about basic mechanics, the more you can use it making better choices. At any rate, the stock record sheets from Catalyst are pretty low on details. I should also take a closer look at the Fancy Record Sheets.
  • You are going to forget everything you thought you knew once you play your first game. I am super grateful to everyone at the table for being chill and helpful as I mostly stumbled through just about every single phase.
  • For this particular format, armour is king. Your point totals increase exponentially and with the BV limitations, you need to be able to reliably tank multiple AC/20 shots. I get that there’s a lot of hand-wringing about the balance of the game after the Clan Invasion introduced a lot of higher-level tech, but that Banshee was basically unstoppable. Nobody had an answer for it. I think if we’d allowed at least some early Clan tech, someone might have had the requisite DPS to really stop that thing, especially considering the player dumped half its ammo bins at the start. This is a very specific inside baseball tip to anyone looking to pick up a Banshee – you might want to avoid the one in the Eridani Light Horse Hunter Lance Pack. The way it’s posed on the base makes it extremely hard to figure out its facing. Compare the Inner Sphere Heavy Lance mini against the Eridani Light Horse one. The second Banshee is explicitly not aligned to the flat edge of the hex. Unless you’ve marked the facing side of the hex, it’s impossible to tell from looking at the table.
  • As I get better at the game, I could also see taking a very different approach to this format if I just wanted to fuck around with artillery. I wouldn’t be able to bring Urbanmech AIVs, unfortunately (they show up in the 3070s). However, I could fuck around with some kind of Catapult C3/OstScout force. Five shots with Arrow IV ammo isn’t enough for a full engagement, but it might be funny to just rain artillery shots down on the summit in the late game. If I were to run this format on my own, I think I’d consider opening up the option of providing players with battlefield support points, a much easier, rules-lite way to introduce artillery and fire support to the game.
  • In the intervening time, the recent Battletech: Mercenaries Kickstarter has started shipping. I missed out on the chance to back it, but I’ve devoured every bit of coverage I can find about how the new rules handle support assets as well as rolling your own mercenary company. It seems like there’s some really elegant ways to roll a scenario up to play a quick pickup game with an opponent. A more expanded version of those rules should be coming out in the Hot Spots: Hinterlands book at the end of November, so I’m excited to check that out. A local place near me has started having semi-regular Alpha Strike drop-in sessions, so I might pitch a couple folks on rolling a contract and playing a quick match.
  • It is endlessly funny to me how many lance packs have one or two assault mechs in the box. It’s super rare that I’d ever throw more than one in a force if I’m playing Classic Battletech. What I’m starving for is decent Heavy, Medium, and Light mechs to fill out a force. My entire conundrum around finding a light mech to pair with the BNC-3Q that I wanted to run would’ve been solved if I had an Ostscout or Javelin. I may also die mad that my beloved Vindicator (a very good Medium mech) is locked to the Beginner Box, so I need to hope I get lucky with a blind box or spend $25 for that mech, a spare Griffin, some new hex maps and streamlined beginner rules… hey okay maybe that’s not too steep a price for all that. God damn it. [Editor’s note: they did, in fact, decide it was not too steep a price for all that. This post will be updated with a photo once the painting’s done.]
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Categorized as AAR, Games

My List of Bullet Hell Shooter 1CCs

Got (back) into bullet hell shooters/shoot ’em ups/shmups/STGs in 2022. A 1CC is a one-credit clear, or beating a mode without using a continue. These aren’t in alphabetical order, but I’m adding games as I 1CC at least one mode.

I’m not quite at the point where I’m chasing super high scores, but I did want to take note of the final score if it was available.

Espgaluda II

  • Black Label Novice (July 20, 2022) – 238,449,631 points (Switch)
  • Novice (July 22, 2022) – 110,463,772 points (Switch)

ESP Ra. De. Psi

  • Super Easy (July 25, 2022) – 13,316,760 points (Switch)

Ketsui Deathtiny

  • Super Easy (August 10, 2022) – 36,099,059 points (PS4)

Battle Garegga

  • Super Easy (August 24, 2022) – 6,126,790 points (PS4)

Deathsmiles II

  • Arrange (August 27, 2022) – 634,413,004 points (Switch)

Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo

  • Standard (September 25, 2022) – 3,415,320 (PC)

Like Dreamer

  • Casual (August 11, 2022) – This was just playing through individual stages one after another, but I used no continues. I’ll take a proper crack at a 1CC soon, though.
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Categorized as Games

Jams in 2022: A Quarterly Report

  1. Vince Staples – Ramona Park Broke My Heart
  2. PUP – The Unraveling of PUPTHEBAND
  3. Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems
  4. Zeal & Ardor – Zeal & Ardor
  5. Earl Sweatshirt – Sick!
  6. Pusha T – It’s Almost Dry
  7. Camp Cope – Running With The Hurricane
  8. Venom Prison – Erebos
  9. These Arms Are Snakes – Duct Tape & Shivering Crows
  10. Hot Water Music – Feel the Void
  11. Health – DISCO4 :: PART II
  12. Vein.FM – This World is Going to Ruin You
  13. Napalm Death – Resentment is Always Seismic – a final throw of Throes
  14. Dream Widow – Dream Widow
  15. Deaf Club – Productive Disruption
  16. Papa Roach – Ego Trip
  17. Various Artists – NORCO Original Soundtrack
  18. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – all lights fucked on the hairy amp drooling
  19. Absent In Body – Plague God
  20. Abbath – Dread Reaver
  21. Konvent – Call Down the Sun
  22. Comeback Kid – Heavy Steps
Published
Categorized as Music

Music in 2021

Yeah, I was going to do my usual write-up but had a booster shot late last week and now I’m too tired to write more so y’all just get a dang list.

  1. Garbology by Aesop Rock
  2. Life in Your Glass World by Citizen
  3. Bloodmoon I by Converge and Chelsea Wolfe
  4. Radical by Every Time I Die
  5. G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
  6. Sour by Olivia Rodrigo
  7. LP! by JPEGMAFIA
  8. Vince Staples by Vince Staples
  9. MONTERO by Lil Nas X
  10. Violence Unimagined by Cannibal Corpse

 

Published
Categorized as Music

GOTY Lists for a Decade

Saw this prompt making the rounds and thought it might be a fun way to take stock of things from 2011-2021.

2011

  1. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  2. Deus Ex: Human Revolution
  3. Dark Souls
  4. Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening
  5. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Retribution
  6. Mortal Kombat (2011)
  7. Terraria
  8. Dead Island
  9. Magicka
  10. Pokemon Black

On a whole, I can probably still hang with most of this list. I remember thinking I might want to switch Dark Souls and Skyrim back then, but I’d been playing Skyrim for well over a month and got a PS3/Dark Souls for Christmas that year. Considering how quickly I really fell off Skyrim into 2012, I think Dark Souls is probably first in my heart. I’m fine with Deus Ex where it landed. I’d probably shift DAO Awakening a little further down the list. My affection for it was borne of how disappointed I was with Dragon Age II. I don’t actually remember much of the storyline.

Some other honourable mentions for me:

  • Goldeneye 007 for the Wii
  • Aliens: Infestation for the DS
  • Dungeons of Dredmor
  • Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City
  • E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy

2012

  1. Borderlands 2
  2. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
  3. The Walking Dead Season 1
  4. Diablo III
  5. Crusader Kings II
  6. Trials Evolution
  7. Journey
  8. Resident Evil: Revelations
  9. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
  10. Far Cry 3

Look, 2012 was an absolutely shitty year for me and mine. My partner and I played through Borderlands 1 together and while the highs of Borderlands 2 never matched the highs of Borderlands 1, there were fewer lows to speak of. Borderlands 2 was the thing we did to disconnect from a particularly stressful year. The rest of the list, I can pretty much back except my putting Far Cry 3 at the end of the list was conditional on that game delivering on any of the narrative trappings it was playing with. It did not. Also egregious is the fact that Dragon’s Dogma does not appear on this list. If I were to shuffle some stuff around, I’d find a way to get Tokyo Jungle and Armored Core V on there and get Dragon’s Dogma at the top.

Some other honourable mentions for me:

  • Dragon’s Dogma, obviously.
  • Tokyo Jungle
  • Wargame: European Escalation
  • The Secret World
  • Armored Core V

2013

  1. Howling Dogs/SABBAT (and Twine)
  2. Papers, Please
  3. Etrian Odyssey IV: Legends of the Titan
  4. The Last of Us
  5. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
  6. Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen
  7. Shin Megami Tensei IV
  8. Fire Emblem: Awakening
  9. Teleglitch
  10. DmC Devil May Cry

This was another weird (but pivotal) year for me. Howling Dogs technically came out the year before, but it wasn’t until early 2013 that I encountered it (and Twine). SABBAT was probably the more influential of the two for me in terms of tone and design, but I loved them both. I’m mostly fine with the lineup here. I’d probably switch Dragon’s Dogma and The Last of Us at this point, but I played The Last of Us in a rush during my only vacation that year, which led to that game taking up more space than it ordinarily would in my life. Superhot also apparently came out this year and probably deserves to be on this list somewhere, but I fell off of it the moment I finished the campaign. Also missing from this list would’ve been Hoplite.

2014

  1. Diablo III: Reaper of Souls
  2. Dark Souls II
  3. Destiny
  4. Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth
  5. Persona 4 Arena Ultimax
  6. Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball
  7. Abyss Odyssey
  8. Crimsonland
  9. The Wolf Among Us
  10. Dragon Age: Inquisition

Not much to really complain about here. Reaper of Souls turned Diablo III into the game I really wanted at launch. Dark Souls II might be one of my favourite souls games (even though I was a little let down by the lack of interconnectedness/verticality of the world from the first game). Persona 4 Arena Ultimax is one of my favourite fighting games (and probably my favourite persona game?). Abyss Odyssey is the only game I might have subbed out for Toukiden: The Age of Demons or Freedom Wars. 2014 was the year that I started to really understand and get into hunting action games and both of those helped me figure out how to love Monster Hunter.

2015

  1. Life Is Strange
  2. Her Story
  3. Splatoon
  4. Bloodborne
  5. Monster Hunter 4
  6. SteamWorld Heist
  7. Nuclear Throne
  8. Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold: The Fafnir Knight
  9. Invisible Inc.
  10. Xenoblade Chronicles X

I excised the two repeat games from 2014 (Diablo III and Destiny) to better account for some of the other games I played. Mostly hang with this list and this order. I think I probably put more time into EO2U than Nuclear Throne or SteamWorld Heist, though. I didn’t get Xenoblade Chronicles X until the holidays, so I wasn’t able to get deep enough into it to push it higher. Can’t wait for a remake on the Switch.

2016

  1. Titanfall 2
  2. Doom (2016)
  3. Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor
  4. Brigador
  5. Hackmud
  6. Devil Daggers
  7. Quadrilateral Cowboy
  8. Stellaris
  9. The King of Fighters XIV
  10. Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate

I graduated and had to change jobs in the same five-month period over the summer, so this list probably reflects how fragmented everything was. Missing are some games I adore to this day but were too stressful to deal with when I was going through all that (e.g., XCOM 2 and Stranger of Sword City). It’s also why Shiren was so far down this list. Obviously, my love for Brigador cooled once one of the developers revealed how much of a shitty edgelord he was. Hackmud captured my attention but I was never interested in learning to code to the point where I was ever going to be much more than a casual player. I stand by that top three, though. That’s a good-ass top three. Wish I could’ve found room for Hadean Lands on that, too.

2017

  1. Unexplored
  2. Haque
  3. Subterfuge
  4. Persona 5
  5. Destiny 2
  6. Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth
  7. Toukiden 2
  8. Absolver
  9. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
  10. Cinco Paus

Yeah, I’ll mostly stand by this list. Cinco Paus came out on December 25, but it was such a delightful experience that I needed to acknowledge it. Technically, Hades’ Star should be on there, since this was the year I started playing it, but I don’t think I quite appreciated how deep a hold it had on me.

2018

  1. Extreme Meatpunks Forever
  2. Vampyr
  3. BattleTech
  4. Monster Hunter World
  5. Dusk
  6. Life is Strange 2
  7. EXAPUNKS
  8. XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
  9. Frozen Synapse 2
  10. Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock

Yeah, I’ll probably stand by this order and this list. I fell off on LiS 2 after I saw a certain plot point involving a puppy play out exactly as I predicted it would. I might have subbed that out for Into the Breach. I’d probably move Battlestar Galactica higher up my list, considering the amount of time I dumped into it relative to the rest. That top 4-5 list of games is pretty solid, though. Exapunks is great but got to be too much for my mortal brain to process at a certain point.

2019

  1. Daemon X Machina
  2. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
  3. Resident Evil 2
  4. Etrian Odyssey Nexus
  5. Remnant: From the Ashes
  6. Pokemon Sword
  7. Samurai Shodown (2019)
  8. Apex Legends
  9. Mortal Kombat 11
  10. Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth

Ahh, the last of the pre-pandemic years. I love Sekiro a bunch but absolutely got stuck earlier than I’d like. I want to believe it’s due to performance issues with the PS4 and not that I suck *that* bad. I didn’t have the time and space to play Disco Elysium until 2020, otherwise it probably would be up right behind Daemon X Machina. 2019 was just The Year of Daemon X Machina and Resident Evil 2, with bits of Etrian Odyssey Nexus scattered between.

2020

  1. Animal Crossing: New Horizons
  2. Final Fantasy VII Remake
  3. Blaseball
  4. Phasmophobia
  5. Crusader Kings III
  6. Hades
  7. Spelunky 2
  8. Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock
  9. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
  10. Hardspace: Shipbreaker

The closer we get to the present, the less I really have to say about these lists. Conspicuously absent from this list is EVE: Echoes, a game I played a *lot* of, and then one day, just stopped playing. It did lead to me picking up Eve Online for a month or two, but I just couldn’t fit it into my life anymore – not with Hades’ Star taking up my daily attention span. Spelunky 2 is another game I could probably ditch from this list.

Others I just kind of lazily tacked on at the end of this list:

  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon
  • Streets of Rage 4
  • Mutant Year Zero
  • Disco Elysium
  • Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children
  • Circle Empires
  • Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II
  • Receiver 2
  • Doom 64
  • Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia
  • Gears Tactics
  • Treachery in Beatdown City
  • State of Decay 2

Restless year, as you can see.

2021

  1. Battleship Apollo
  2. Dungeon Encounters
  3. The Longing
  4. Wildermyth
  5. Resident Evil Village
  6. Monster Hunter Rise
  7. Aliens: Fireteam Elite
  8. Trials of Fire
  9. HighFleet
  10. Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector

A couple quick notes about this list:

  • Battleship Apollo has to top this list because it was the Hades’ Star killer for me. I still play Hades’ Star, but when it came down to very limited mental space for a daily check-in space strategy game, Apollo won out every time. Everything from the capital ship design to the different build strategies based around the different modes, Apollo scratches an itch in my brain that seems to find no satisfaction.
  • Dungeon Encounters was an absolute revelation for me this year. The fact that Square Enix just… put this out and refused to market it is absolutely wild to me.
  • I had a torrid month-long affair with The Longing on the Switch and enjoyed every minute of it. What a tremendous melancholy slow-moving idle/adventure game.
  • I didn’t spend as much time with Wildermyth as I’d like this year, but what an incredibly special experience. I’ll be coming back to it for a good long while.
  • RE: Village did for me what I hoped RE7 was going to do (but I’m a big baby and got too scared playing RE7).
  • I burned bright and hot with Monster Hunter Rise this year but once I got close to the endgame, there just wasn’t much road left for me. I needed to grind hunter levels to get to some of the new monsters and I just wasn’t feeling it. Maybe I’ll go back at some point. Loved what I played of it, but it also led to me just reinstalling Monster Hunter World, too.
  • I thought Back 4 Blood was going to be my go-to “I just want to shoot stuff” game this year. And for the most part, it was. My main complaint was that all of Back 4 Blood’s ambitions didn’t always add much to the core Left 4 Dead formula (or in some cases, actively hindered it). Aliens: Fireteam Elite is clearly working with a much smaller budget, but the care they put into the smaller details: the writing, the worldbuilding, the audio cues when your mag is starting to run dry, the little orchestral stingers when you land a crit? Aliens just did more for me than B4B did.
  • In a year of roguelike deckbuilders continuing to flood the market, I had to pick between Trials of Fire or Inscryption. Since everyone is already talking about Inscryption, let’s give a neat little deckbuilder that folds in some Heroes of Might and Magic-esque combat design some respect.
  • HighFleet is a mess. It’s a visual novel, a lunar lander clone, and a sort of Altitude-like side-scrolling aerial combat sim all mashed together. It feels like a game that could’ve come out in the mid-90s that nobody ever heard of or talked about but my mom saw it in the bargain bin, liked the cover art, and gave it to me for Christmas. Her track record for pulling absolute gems from those bins was damned impressive. Yeah, the games weren’t *perfect*, but the highs were tremendous, even if the lows were dismal. I get why the reviews were so tepid – the game explains very little of itself to you without reading the manual. The community has also done a lot of great theorycrafting to make the combat less of a slog, too. The fact that folks can export ship designs and it’s *very* easy to import those ships into your game is a brilliant design decision.
  • Battlesector was done by the Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock folks. I wish they would figure out why the “stream this game” function in Steam isn’t working, since it doesn’t run well on my laptop. It’s not quite as amazing as Deadlock was, but I thoroughly enjoyed what I was able to find the time to play.
  • I got Shin Megami Tensei V, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, Hitman 3, and Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi over the holidays. Haven’t spent enough time with any to speak to their presence on this list quite yet.

Some other honourable mentions I either didn’t spend enough time with, or didn’t like as much as the other games on this list:

  • Tactical Nexus
  • Jupiter Hell
  • Loop Hero
  • That Quake re-relase
  • Stirring Abyss
  • Slipways
  • The Ascent

 

Published
Categorized as Games

Games are weird tiny things that teach us

And it all comes down to the knowledge that we’re gonna die/Find comfort in that or be scared for the rest of your life”
Camp Cope – “West Side Story”

Games can’t help but teach.

You do a thing, another thing happens and you know a bit more than you did before you did a thing. Sometimes you do a thing and something happens that surprises both you and the game. Those moments are wonderful and silly, but sometimes the game just stops.

Games are entirely, enthusiastically, irrepressibly arbitrary and in spite of themselves they say things about the world. Lots of things say things about the world even (and especially) when their creators claim to not want to. Some games model the world (or a different version of the world) they’re one way to gain access to other experiences. They’re ways to experience pain and hardship and emotional strain in a space that you can control. They’re ways to learn processes and understand carefully constructed, simple causal chains.

Games are an unwieldy, struggling, squirming, imprecise way to teach things, access truth, and challenge yourself or others.

Games are tiny.

Even the biggest, sprawlingest, most expensive games are only a tiny slice of our imaginations, over-colonized and crowded. Yes, even the games that contain whole worlds all packed into their algorithms, trembling like a dog that’s anxious to please, they barely render a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the exhilarating welter of our worlds, of emotion, of compassion.

They are sometimes tiny in scope out of necessity. Games are hard to make and this means they are tiny out of raw necessity. They are tiny because they require a catastrophic amount of time and patience and it is difficult to justify that cost when you have to make rent, to make food, to take care of yourself and others.

Big publisher games are  tiny because they are afraid of saying difficult or profound things and not making money. Competition does not produce better games. Say it out loud with me: competition does not produce better products: it produces safer products. 

Games are weird: they stir and shift.

Every year, whole genres are transmuted into spice, whole assemblages of mechanics tossed into a bubbling mulligan stew. Familiar but demonstrably different.

Games aren’t ours (however you define the us necessary to get to ours). They predate our species. When you take on the temperature of the room, games will still be here. They will change over time, they will take on new meaning along unthinkable timelines. Whole swathes of the industry can disappear in a month or a year.

This is the biggest problem with games: attached to them is a churning Moloch that feeds on precarity. The thing you do for fun is often made by teams of talented, brilliant humans like you that are caught between the thrashing jaws of an always-hungry beast and it will consume more of them than it will spare. If they’re lucky, they will simply change careers and not think about that lost time as wasted. If they’re not, well, that’s a lot of life to lose so that some stranger can pretend to shoot whatever looming spectre the West has conjured up that year.

The cost of big publisher games, these strange arbitrary boxes of rules is such that they shy away from saying anything particularly challenging. They exist as hard armature, smooth and shiny and clean. When they do say something even vaguely profound, it’s almost always an accident: someone getting something through, a missive from within the whale.

Games push and press; they coalesce with our always already infolding flesh.

Games are inseparable from our lives and our ability to imagine new and different worlds. As such, they are inseparable from death.

Every day, we leave. Every day, we realize–and desperately try to forget–a departure that lurks and skulks ever closer. We have a vested interest in forgetting how tiny, pale, and insubstantial these shuddering juggernauts of capital and technical fuckery are.

Death galvanizes. It can make us do selfless, amazing things. It can lead a person who has lived their life as an open hand close on themselves like a fist. If we die and there is no “yes, and“ that is to say: if our last breath is a period, a full-stop. It can lead some to the conclusion that nothing in particular matters. Not kindness, not compassion, only the raw relief of transient power through violence and domination.

Some games are shining digital armature that keeps our thoughts of death away with spectacle and novelty, like waving a burning branch at the hostile night. Effective in the short term, but doesn’t solve the darkness, and only lasts so long.

Some games are dirty and messy. Broken but still living, whirling in the muck just like the rest of us. These filthy machines, these living weird things that teach us, they’re striving farther than those shining spectacles.

The Moloch that churns out these safe spectacles will turn on those filthy mucky farting messes and will scrape just enough dirt off that they can sell them for parts. To flavour their tasteless broth with that earthen tang. This can be a necessary exchange, but if that exchange does not come with material support for the original creators, it is violence.

Dictums

  • To steal from the Arcane Kids manifesto: stop imposing the label “punk” on weird, filthy games. Punk is a signifier rendered toothless by years of corporate intervention and suburban cishet white boys. (If you want to call your own work ‘punk,’ feel free.)
  • Once more for those in the back: competition does not produce better games: it produces safer games.
  • The status quo maintained by major publishers is a long slow swan dive into an e-waste landfill. Games have bodies and live in the world, and their graveyards are in landfills everywhere.
  • Make messy, filthy things. 
  • Play Robert Yang’s games and then demand better fucking in your horny Steam games
  • Fuck with causality. Break the world. Break your games, break other peoples’ games. Make impenetrable monoliths to your grief and send them into the world.
  • Use content warnings, be kind to people.

(Made for #ManifestoJam)

 

Published
Categorized as Music

Some Music I Listened to in 2020

Alright, a little late on this one, but since 2021 feels like 2020 mk. II, whatever. I didn’t realize how burnt out I was until I had a week off work and couldn’t even bring myself to do the minor stuff I work on through the holidays most other years.

I’m just going to borrow the structure I used for the 2019 list rather than labour over a new one.

Actual-ass albums of the year

It’s pretty much a given that any year in which Aes puts something out, it’s going to land somewhere on my list. Dude’s just been completely on top of his game for the past few releases and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. While Spirit World Field Guide didn’t hit me as hard as The Impossible Kid or Skelethon, 2020 was a year where I just needed something that would keep me on an even keel. That this thing is a meandering 21 track meditation on life, death, and the porous boundaries between means it was the perfect companion for my already wandering mind. That said, this was a relatively late release in the year, which is why I had to absolutely give a nod to illuminati hotties.

If Aes is how I wrapped up the year, FREE I.H. is what kept me balanced through the summer. It only came out in July but for some reason it feels like it’s been with me since the start of lockdown. I’d listened Kiss Yr Frenemies and dug it in 2018 but it didn’t really make a huge dent in my regular rotation. In the intervening years, Sarah Tudzin has gotten more playful and (I’d contend) sincere in her songwriting. At the start of November 2019, she released the absolute earworm “ppl plzr,” a track that confidently flitted between a tongue-in-cheek diagnosis of a relationship in distress and genuine end-of-the-year melancholia that absolutely primed me to devour whatever came next.

 

It also came out as her label was getting into some pretty public fights about unpaid royalties. A subject that looms heavy over FREE I.H. as Tudzin was still on the books to produce another album to fulfill her contract.

 

Reading some interviews with Tudzin, it sounded like she wanted to produce a noisy mess to get out of her contract and save her “proper” second album for a later release. What happened instead is that she produced what felt like a soundtrack to the world burning. For one, everything is way more jangly and distorted than what anything she’d put out before.

 

The lyrics veer wildly between nonsense that just sounds good/would be fun to yell into a microphone (“content//bedtime”) to deeply poignant. In particular, these lines from “free dumb” came to mind frequently through the year:

while the world burns, how could you care about a fucking record?

there was no love lost until you deemed that I was nonessential

I guess it’s my fault for being good at something sentimental

It’s telling that the two albums that came to define 2020 for me are ambitious, confrontational, deeply melancholy, and messy as all hell.

Albums that got me the most in my feels

Shrines dropped at the height of the George Floyd protests through the summer. If Aesop Rock has streamlined his bars, opened them up a bit, Armand Hammer is the other direction, writing lines that curl in on themselves like a fist, each syllable a punch. With production that veers between echoing and minimal to gorgeous loops, Shrines has a density and heft to it that felt right for the moment. It’s the sort of album I couldn’t put on while I was working but would put on when, overwhelmed with stimuli, needed something that demanded all of my attention. I lost track of the nights I’d have a couple drinks and would just sit on the floor (or sit at my desk) listening to “Dead Cars” on repeat, nodding.

There’s plenty of noisy stuff in a later section of this list, but this is the album that straight up made me pissed that I’m probably not going to be able to go to a live show any time soon. My stage diving days are over but goddamn did this make me want to go jump into a crowd of screaming strangers. I can smell the sweat and feel that unique oppressive heat that can only come from a supremely brassed off punk act playing at the peak of their abilities in a shitty dive bar, just blowing the roof off like they were in the middle of a roaring stadium. That they can just casually drop a banger of a hip hop track in the middle and have it fit in so seamlessly is a testament to their skills. Can’t wait for more.

The album I woke up to the most in 2020

Continuing my trend of picking basically one song to play when my alarm goes off in the morning, I had to go with “Good to Be Alive” by PVRIS. It might seem a little maudlin to wake up to a song that makes “feels good to be alive/but I hate my life” into a hook but fuck it, do what you gotta do to get through, y’know?

The Carly Rae Jepsen Award for Newest Carly Rae Jepsen Album in 2020 (Sponsored by Carly Rae Jepsen)

CRJ hit us with the Dedicated B-sides just a couple months into lockdown and for a blessed few weeks, I felt alright.

SOME GOOD GRISELDA SHIT

It turns out a lot of great hip hop came out this year. For me, though, it was all about Westside Gunn’s Pray for Paris and Conway the Machine’s No One Mourns the Wicked. If you’re looking for something that feels like a bit of a throwback to the 90s but isn’t, y’know, fucking weird about it, there’s a confidence and craft to these albums that kept me coming back.

Aw yeah the noisy shit

Not a lot of grindcore bands stick around. There’s a whole host of reasons, but I think it’s telling that the ones that do inevitably start experimenting with their formula. Latter-day Napalm Death manages to balance the heavy shit I’ve come to expect from them with forays into more industrial-based, slower jams and, *gasp* even some melody. Another band I absolutely hope makes it out of this pandemic with the support to keep touring. It’s been too long since I saw them.

Uniform found their way on my radar after the release of The Long Walk in 2018. That they went on to put out some really dope collaborations with The Body only cemented them as one of the better industrial-adjacent acts out there. Adding a live drummer for Shame has only improved their craft, as far as I’m concerned. This might piss off some industrial purists, but I think there’s a dynamism to their tempos now that just makes for a more varied album. Dropping a straightforward punk banger toward the end is the perfect “hey, you still fucking there?” wakeup call.

The old-school screamo renaissance continues with uh, okay well this is mostly a Minority Rule release with Maha Shami on vocals. Is it still a renaissance if it’s 90% of the original band?

Whatever, I’m asking absolutely no questions. This shit just hits hard as fuck.

Fuck the Facts continue to low key one of the best “fake” grindcore acts out there. It’s wild to me that they don’t get more hype.

Killer Be Killed seemed on track to go the way of most other metal supergroups: released one album (of pretty surprising quality) and then nary a mention from any of the other participants afterwards. With Puciato working on his arty solo stuff and The Black Queen, I figured this project was as good as dead. Colour me surprised when he managed to release his arty solo project *and* absolutely dominate the vocal duties on this album. Anyways, I didn’t have super high expectations here but Reluctant Hero is some pretty solid radio-friendly metal that occupied way more of my attention than I ever expected.

Okay, I’m biased here but I’ve been waiting for a first proper full-length from Mil-Spec since 2016 and boy did they deliver. It’s also pretty dope that any purchases made on their bandcamp will be donated in perpetuity to Black Lives Matter Toronto and Unist’o’ten Legal Fund. If you’re into melodic hardcore with an overtly leftist bent, uh, I have good news for you.

The first time I ever went crowd surfing was during Sevendust at Edgefest 2001. Some huge biker dude asked me if I wanted to go up and just picked my skinny teen ass up and threw me into the crowd. When I came down, a dude I’d known most of my entire life but hadn’t talked to in years helped me back up. Since then, I’ve always had a soft spot for Sevendust. Anyways, if you’ve never really liked their work in the past, this isn’t going to move the needle. Some pretty solid jams on here, though.

In a year where Ulcerate released a new album, it was a mild surprise that this was easily my most-listened-to brutal death album. Thanks for the moment of self-reflection, Last.fm!

 

There’s not much I can say here except that there’s a willingness to play around with the sonic palette that has really stuck with me as far as this album goes. It didn’t quite set me running off to listen to more Afterbirth, but I gotta give credit where it’s due.

Man, I wish I liked this more. I feel like I maybe need to spend more time with it, but honestly this comes across like Greg was just trying to stretch his creative muscles in as many directions as he could and the album isn’t super cohesive as a result. Given my appetite for weird/wide-ranging/incongruous work this year, I’m a little befuddled as to why it didn’t click with me. Keeping it on this list to remind myself to keep coming back to it.


Hot damn, the Deftones still got it. Not much to say here but that I was definitely worried I wouldn’t get into this. I’ve been kinda cool on them since Koi No Yokan.

Howls of Ebb was one of my favourite new-ish metal acts in recent memory and I was completely gutted that they broke up. They wrote this bewildering, textured, and weird-as-hell brand of death metal with song titles and lyrics that look like they were written by an AI force-fed Dark Souls lore wikis. Anyways, Herxheim is one of the folks from Howls of Ebb and while it doesn’t have the same vibe, there’s still some of that magic glimmering in the background.

Also on that old school screamo tip, I haven’t been able to spend as much time with this one as I’d like, but there’s some really promising work here. It doesn’t just feel like a band going “hey remember good screamo? We can do that.”

YOTK got on my radar as some super solid hardcore punk with an immaculate low end. It’s super easy to forget that most hardcore bands even bother with a bassist, but when Madison is given the space to ply her trade, the whole band benefits. While this isn’t a quantum leap forward from Ultimate Aggression, there’s more polish and direction to the proceedings that’s really promising to me.

Yo, lotta EPs this year

Peggy’s keeping on the trajectory they laid out with All My Heroes Are Cornballs. It’s so rewarding to see JPEGMAFIA continuing to experiment with melody, texture, and random pop covers. Sounds like a second EP is in the pipeline, so hopefully we won’t have to wait too long into 2021 to hear more.

PUP has low key become a pretty consistent staple on my playlists over the years and this EP continues to deliver. Stefan Babcock has a knack for just dragging some nightmarish intrusive thought I’ve had into the light and crystallizing it long enough to shatter it with a sledge hammer. I initially dismissed PUP as a more radio-friendly take on what Single Mothers was doing, but at this point it feels like they’ve really mastered their voice in a way that puts them in their own league.

Man, I don’t know. It’s Pig Destroyer. I’m glad they properly released this track, even if the others they paired it with are fine-to-good in quality. Still feel weird about this act after their pretty acrimonious split with Kat Katz.

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Some Music I Listened to in 2019

Actual-ass album of the year

Peggy comes across like someone who is both poisoned by the internet and deeply uncomfortable with how they’re situated in the world, so, uh, extremely relatable content. I dug Veteran and eventually did get around to exploring their back catalogue this year, but there’s something welcoming about All My Heroes are Cornballs. It’s a bit like following someone on Twitter because you like their weird jokes and then also following their private account where they’re more relaxed and just kinda bullshitting with their friends and watching in real time as they switch between a persona and just vibing.

It’s an album that seems uncomfortable in its own skin, but also weaponizes that discomfort, champions it, even: The frequent interludes and interjections, where Peggy is just chatting amiably with their collaborators; the way the beats always seem to be on the verge of falling apart, as likely to stop on a dime as they are to transmute into something wholly different in tone and cadence; Peggy’s absolutely stunning vocal performance that vacillates wildly from pop ditties to shouted chaos. No other album I listened to this year has gotten close to capturing turmoil without losing sight of hope within the maelstrom. (Though, goddamn that 100 Gecs album comes close.)

Albums that got me the most in my feels

Up until All My Heroes are Cornballs came out, I figured Charly Bliss’ Young Enough would have been my album of the year. Their last album was almost pure uncut grungy pop punk throwback, while Young Enough sees them expanding their sound to more fully incorporate their pop leanings. There’s an earnestness here and a thoughtful interrogation of love and gender politics that never failed to cut me to the quick.

I loved Some Rap Songs from last year. My buddy Axel called Feet of Clay “funeral rap,” which is incredibly apt (and also why it’s been difficult to listen to this for any length of time). The way Earl has started experimenting with loops is hypnotic and extremely claustrophobic. Even as the samples shimmer with clarity and beauty, the density of imagery and Earl’s delivery makes it feel less like someone opening a window and more like air seeping into a tomb.

The album I woke up to the most in 2019

I always dig Aesop Rock’s willingness to experiment with his sound and work with unexpected collaborators. While the final product isn’t always as consistent as his solo work, these collaborations always yield some interesting work. Anyways, Aes seems a bit lost in some of TOBACCO’s rangy production in some parts, but tracks like “Corn Maze” and “Tuesday” really shine.

The Carly Rae Jepsen Award for Newest Carly Rae Jepsen Album in 2019

Dedicated is absolutely the most recent Carly Rae Jepsen album to come out in 2019 and it has been in heavy rotation since the day it came out. I was also lucky enough to see her live show this year and it was a hell of a lot of fun. Her work has been a source of unalloyed joy in a year when I desperately needed it.

Aw yeah the noisy shit

If you had told me at the start of the year that I would spend a good chunk of 2019 listening to and unironically enjoying a Slipknot album, I’d have been very confused. At this point, the band has shed a lot of the original members but god help me if they haven’t produced some of their strongest material in their entire career. This is probably the first Slipknot album where Corey Taylor has consistently turned away from penning tropey as shit horror film serial killer lyrics and instead focused on articulating a larger, more collective pain. There’s still just enough insularity that I’d struggle to call this a full-on political album, but it makes me curious to see what Slipknot is going to do next – something I honestly didn’t think was possible.

Chris Colohan and crew continue to put out some excellent brassed-off hardcore. That’s it.

I’m so glad that Caina is back and recording new music. Their work is always difficult and uncomfortable. I had to be in the right headspace to listen to it. But every time I did make a point of ensconcing myself in their particular brand of despair, I felt my time was rewarded.

This wasn’t quite the breakout smash I was hoping it might be after listening to their incendiary split with Vein from a while back. Chaotic screamo from the early aughts seems to be having a bit of a renaissance right now, and I’m hard pressed to find a band that’s doing it with more heart and creativity than .gif from god.

The album I wish I spent more time listening to

1000 Gecs was in rotation for most of the year, but it’s not until I really made a point of sitting down and listening to the album from beginning to end that I really found myself latching onto it. Should have done that way sooner.

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