Adele - Send My Love (To Your New Lover)

Making video games is difficult you know. Never mind all the different stages & components that need to go into it, perhaps the hardest part of it all is to sufficiently program it so it works. Sure you learn how to do so, but it's never that simple, and requires acute concentration & planning to make it come together. Not only do you have to make sure every individual component works correctly on its own, but often you have to consider interactions between the components. This can be as simple as a character standing on the ground, or perhaps something complicated like a character being stunned mid-animation and immediately having to assume a different position in a way that isn't jarring to the player. As complex as that may be, it's still just one interaction, and depending on the environment, it might be necessary to put into consideration interactions between a substantial number of objects and every combination between them.

As of late I've taken a liking to roguelite games. It's a very niche and specific subgenre that hosts its fair share of big hitters. Roguelites are often characterised by procedurally generated dungeons with all manner of enemies and weapons/upgrades that can be found. Also permadeath meaning you to an extent start from scratch every time you play. Designed well, and it can prove an excellent ratio of content to replay value because it's always different.

Something that happens with this is that you get a plethera of weapons/abilities as you do your run, and they often have diverse and creative effects. Depending on what the set up is, you can often have these abilities work in tandem to potentially gamebreaking effect. If I may link a gif from Enter The Gungeon (some unlock spoilers) https://i.redd.it/t3xxt97iwu5x.gif You can see an ability, item & weapon working together. The ability works with firing a bullet at any instance your item is active. The item in question is a grapple hook, and the weapon in question is the Quad Laser from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which is slow moving/reloading but very powerful. The combination of the 3 provides a ridiculous wall of bullets which cannot be stopped, and can be reloaded reasonably quickly. One wonders though if the developers ever considered such a lethal combination.

To tie all this together, imagine if you were playing a game where you run a record label/studio etc and you're in the interest of making hits. It works by giving you an array of different things you can do concerning different aspects of the hitmaking process. Presumably by some way of combining economics of money, time, timing, fatigue, what have you, you have an algorithm working behind it to weigh up all your decisions and thus decides the outcome of it in terms of audience/artist reaction and sales. For instance you could put in the effort to come up with a dynamite track that will sell well, but offset it by not promoting it to save money, and thus it doesn't sell well. I want to make this game now.

Thus my point is that the world is not a very well programmed simulator, or maybe it is. Because synergy isn't always just a straight addition game, specific situations have their own specific behaviours because that's how the world works. If you try to ignite a frozen Pokemon, you don't ignite it and in fact you'll unfreeze it, because duh. In that vein, you can make the observation that yes having Adele's name on something will likely be a good selling point, and likewise, having Max Martin & Shellback behind the production decks is often a reliable source of hits. But combine the two together and you do not get a godly hit single because the two just don't sound right together on paper.

They don't sound right together on record either. I've advised myself against reviewing more recent hits because I've been on an oddly negative tilt lately, but I didn't like this the moment I heard "25" last year. It's just a clunky mess of a song that feels like it's desperate to find a hook, and as a result you get an incredibly forced chorus that just takes me out of the narrative completely. It doesn't help that it's already built on a clunky phrase, and instrumentation that probably sounds even more synthetic than it probably is. 2.5