post #24.1: megalopolis mega mix: act 1. as a cyberpunk 2077-like fever dream
Looking over my notes, I think I have three routes I want to approach Megalopolis from, but I'm not sure off the bat if they can all fit into a single essay. As such, I will split my thoughts into three acts.
ACT 1. As a Cyberpunk 2077-like fever dream
Watching Megalopolis and the circumstances that mediated my doing so reminded me of my experience with Cyberpunk 2077. Although I haven't returned to the game since my first playthrough, I think back to the game often.
I remember there was a lot of hype for the game when it was first coming out -- people apparently had been waiting for this game for a long time, and it was supposed to be some great feat of engineering. I only learned about the game maybe a month before it came out. As much as there was excitement, though, I remember that there were also always doubters -- people who thought the game wouldn't live up to the hype and, even more so, people who were skeptical of the pre-rendered gameplay trailers and claims of what (technically) it could do. At the beginning, these narratives were mostly background noise to me. My immediate social circle was expressly excited for the game's release and a number of my friends even pre-ordered it. People who pre-ordered the game got to play it a couple days early. Since I hadn't done so (and wouldn't buy it for another week or two), I spent the first couple days sitting in Discord calls, watching people stream themselves play the game. I didn't know what I was even looking at, but it seemed exciting.
Prior to the game's release, I was vaguely aware of the concept of "cyberpunk", however, I was never really enmeshed in its cultural zeitgeist. I'd watched Lain in high school (split between bus rides, lunch breaks, and the eerie quietudes that come after finishing a test early) and I'd seen Ghost in the Shell over the course of several days while running on a treadmill for an online gym class, but I never felt like I was there and in on it. And I still didn't feel that way with my over-the-shoulder introduction to Cyberpunk 2077. As I said, my exposure (for the first couple of weeks) happened exclusively through other people streaming the game via Discord. This meant I often came in the middle of what was happening. I never sat down and said, "I'm going to watch/play this thing;" it was always, "I'm in this place, and-- oh, I guess this thing's going on, I'll tune into it." I say this to emphasize my piecemeal exposure to the text. The blitz of the initial release of a game is filled with hustle and bustle. There's a sense that everyone's trying to be the first to do something, to say something (the first to publish a walkthrough, the first to complete a quest, to get an achievement, etc.). At least, that's how it was with my friends for Cyberpunk 2077. Even though they only played for a couple hours each day, everyone was rushing through it as quick as they could (for the sake of being able to brag about their progress when folks reconvened the next day). This eagerness warped my piecemeal exposure only further. I'd seen the beginning-beginning gameplay a couple times, but, after that, all I knew was a wildly chaotic splintering of segments from all over the game's potential trajectories. None of it was contextualized for me (no one explained who a character was, or why they were on a given mission). Often that was because not even the people playing it knew for sure what was happening -- they were too much in the rush of getting to the next thing, of being the first person to reach the next skill point threshold by whatever time the following day. ... And that also meant that, when I tuned in, random side quests and main story quests were given equal emphasis. Everything was everything and everything was nothing. There were webs of connections drawing things together and there was a logic to how things emerged, probably, but I couldn't see any of it. No one could. Not where I from where I was standing.
...
Eventually, I saved up enough money to buy the game on steam. I called my friends on Discord and waited in excitement for my turn to finally get in on a piece of the action (just hoping that the hype hadn't completely died out by the time I loaded in). Well, that ended up being more time than I'd thought. While I could technically play the game at this point -- i.e., the game loaded and I could move my character -- even at the lowest settings, my computer ran at only 2 or 3 frames per second. I finished the tutorial teaching the controls and I played through half of the first mission, but then I had to give up since it was literally unplayable. The jitteryness made me nauseous and I couldn't do anything but get stuck in a death loop since I couldn't see well enough to aim and shoot at the enemies that kept killing me. ... Despite my dismay at being unable to play, I considered this a partially fortuitous turn of events at the time. I had been feeling shameful about my computer specs for a while, and this was finally a crystalization of the reasons as to why I should look into upgrading my pc. Mind you, I still didn't have any money, really, so my ability to upgrade was severely limited. I spent essentially the minimal ammount I could on a GPU that was still technically better than the one I currently had. It took another week or so to arrive, but then, after some struggles swapping it out with my old one and some anxieties about the fact that it had different display port capabilities (meaning I had to change my monitor cables from hdmi to vg8), I finally booted up my new computer and launched the game. I was so excited that I'd finally be able to expeirence the thing I'd seen everyone talking about for the past couple of weeks (by this point the online dissenters had grown more and more vocal). And, yea! I was indeed able to run the game better than I'd been able to last time. While still not great, the game now ran at between 15-20 frames per second. Even though it was difficicult to play, it was playable enough for me. (I'd never played games at 60fps, so, for all intents and purposes, this was as good as anything I could have asked for). I made my way through the rest of the tutorial mission, and burst out into the wide open skies of Night City (I had to look this up again). I was giddy. I skipped throguh the first couple of cutscnes as I'd already watched them, vicariously, several times over. Once the handholding was done, I got off to the races.
...
I played the game as intended for a bit, but eventually demand avoidance kicked in. I have a habit of refusing to play games as designed (e.g., playing minecraft with only stone tools, focusing only on breaking leaves with hoes and replanting saplings; going out of my way to play the lowest tier character in any competitive multiplayer game, etc.), and this was no different. While I could do gunplay with my new GPU, my low framerate (and "skill issues" ; i.e., hands with limited functioning) meant I couldn't do it very well. Additionally, shooting in shooter games is boring. Catch me playing support in Overwatch or playing exclusively melee builds in Borderlands. While Cyberpunk has some melee options -- with like swords and stuff -- and I used them occassionally (speccing into the melee stuff as my secondary option whenever I was locked out of pursuing my main skill tree any further), what I really focused in on was Cyperpunk's hacking mechanic. Ostensibly, it was a gameplay mechanic for doing lock picking-type objectives (sprinkled in occassionally in story and side quests; where you do a little minigame in a pop-up menu to "hack" whatever you're interfacing with and badda bing badda boom); however, as with most mechanics like this, it was tedious and often not well implemented with the rest of the game. There were exceptions, though. In addition to being able hack open locks and vaults, you could also sometimes hack people and other objects. This was to emphasize the "cyber" part of cyberpunk, I guess. In the fiction of the game, people get cybernetic implants to augment their bodies (the player can upgrade their character this way using equipment they buy or loot from enemies; these upgrades include such things as making your jumps higher, giving you wolverine claws, etc.). Well, for whatever reason (i'm sure there is one), characters with cybernetic implants can hacked by netrunners (the made up word for hackers). I vaguely recall the tutorial saying something about enemy netrunners possibly being able to hack into your implants and mess you up but that never happned to me, so idk. Well, through this feature, I found out that if you invest all your points into hacking, you can essentially beat every fight by just standing still. By the end of the game, I would go to an area, press tab, xray scan to see what enemies were in a buiulding, click a button to explode someone's head (essentially), and then that would cause a chain reaction killing everyone instantly. This worked less well on bosses, but the only major difference was that you had to wait a couple more seconds to get your charges back before pressing tab again and killing them. At max level, this approach defeated every enemy, regardless of if they had cybernetics or really anything else. The game clearly was not intended to be played this way because it constantly broke (in ways separate from the bugs people vocally complained about such as glitchy textures or characters phasing through the map). Some of unintended gameplay experiences I ran into were: cutscenes playing when a character in them was already dead, voice lines randomly or skipping when no one was around, sometimes getting softlocked or a trigger getting skipped causing an area to end up inaccessible. That said, even though this stuff kept happening, it didn't effect my experience, in terms of enjoyment, that much. I wasn't playing to watch cutscenes or listen to dialogue anyways -- I skipped most of these when I could. Even though I mapped out every inch of the game, I never spent the time to get down to brass tacks. I figured out a way to engage with the game that worked for me, and I wasn't that interested in figuring out whatever else there was outside of that.
Fast forward to the end of the game. I completed every mission and got every achievement (that wasn't bugged or required me to start a new run). And then, I stopped playing. Even though I unlocked all the prequestiusites to get every ending, I didn't play through any of them (I figured they would just be mostly cutscenes anyways). I remember watching one of videogamedunky's videos on Cyberpunk 2077 where he talked about, despite the bugginess, how he mostly enjoyed his experience with the game -- specifically because he took the time to play some of the rarer endings. "Huh," I thought, "That's interesting 🤷♀." And I moved on with my life, thinking back to the game often, but never returning to it. Cyberpunk was just a fever dream. Two or three weeks of my life that I spent playing a game I could barely play which had a story I refused to give my attention and mechanics I refused to engage with. But I enjoyed it. ... All this while, internet discourses had raged on about the quality of the game where people complained endlessly about it being an unplayable and buggy mess; I just kind of shrugged it off. I played it. It worked for me. I hadn't bought the game to see a million, individually programmed NPCs, or a tippy-top of the line story, or biting commentary, or whatever. I ended up stumbling into a couple neat ideas while playing, but that wasn't why I was there. And that wasn't why I left.
...
This was the same experience I had with Megalopolis. All I knew coming into the movie was that people had many strong, negative things to say about it. My therapist had complained to me after seeing it that Coppolla had fallen off. I'd seen non-contextualized clips from the movie (such as via a Librarian of Letourneau video where Northernlion talked about the movie's meme potential). But I didn't know that much about it. At the same time, that I'd seen so many people calling it an unbearably bad movie made me think that it might actually, secretly be good, and that I'd be the one to find out that everyone else was wrong all along. Now that I've seen the movie, I don't know that I can say this. It was a bad movie, I guess. But I also think it was a great movie. A beautifully ugly movie. I wasn't there for a Coppolla(tm) masterpiece. I was there for a fun thing to do with friends over Discord. I was there to see what those clips I'd been seeing were all about. I didn't see it at a film festival or in a theatre like others had when it first released, I watched it several (many) months later on a pirate streaming site -- on several pirate streaming sites since the first one kept buffering and the second one... Like Cyberpunk, my experience here was also piecemeal. The video buffered-- I had to switch sites-- I accidentally closed the tab-- my sound wasn't working so I had to restart my computer-- I went into the other room to heat up some food-- I got myself a drink of water-- I sat under my desk trying to set up a second monitor-- etc.. I got bits and pieces but I didn't receive anything that would congeal as a story would. But also, I was skipping the cutscenes anyways. I wasn't there for the grand narrative or the whatever else. I was there on my own mission. At once removed from and connected to all that came before and all that would stretch on after. Another fever dream.
MEGALOPOLIS MEGAMIX NAV: ACT 1 | ACT 2 | ACT 3