Mason is a jewel thief, yes, but also a “watcher of buildings”.
He’s pretty much a reader of buildings.
“I liked buildings,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in 2005.
Why does he like them?
Because, “you could go in and achieve something, bypass a lot of security.
A reader of buildings!
Mason would wander, often at night, reading the faces of the buildings he passed.
He was looking for useful ledges, easy windows, rooftops he could reach at a push.
It was a process of finding useful details, and then chaining them together to create a path.
I know this feeling.
I was doing it last week.
Millennium Square, New Amsterdam, in the pitiless mid-day sun.
But maybe, as Mason would suggest, I’m starting with the wrong building.
I’m starting with the target.
A run of low offices, suspended over an entrance to the square itself.
Where do they lead?
What leads to them in the first place?
And working back, how do I find a way tothat?
I love this stuff, and I also remember it well.
A game that was a colourful, sweet-natured blast of noise and movement straight from the Y2K aesthetic.
You travelled around busy streets on rollerskates avoiding security forces and tagging graffiti to take back the turf.
You learned, as Bill Mason might agree, to love it.
I would sketch each journey in my mind like this, before painting over it with the actual movement.
I suspect they made this game primarily because for the last twenty years, Sega hasn’t made it.
As such what I got from Bomb Rush was an endless series of deja vu moments as I played.
But most arresting to me was the small stuff.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk renders grating the same way.
There are the sun-worn buildings with their leaning billboards advertising sheer enthusiasm as much as any specific product.
There’s the soundtrack, which comes in part from the great Hideki Naganuma who worked on Jet Set.
It was disconcerting at first, all of this.
This game is a game that others love so much too.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is hard to untangle at times: similar, too similar, not similar enough?
But ultimately, it’s one of the more explicit acts of love I have ever encountered.
And I’m probably saying this too late, but it’s good, too.
you’ve got the option to tell.
We are one more step removed.
Crucially, though, these new spaces all offer a nice sense of place in their own right.
It’s the poetry of space revealed in the gaps between the action.
Another level down: it’s also, again, one big reference.
Midnight urbanism and shopping, but also these weird golden statues that hint at mankind’s ancient past.
Sheer height creating a sense of isolation.
It doesn’t try.
It doesn’t want to.
And this in turn is why the new stuff doesn’t interrupt the nostalgic flow too much.
These are all nice additions, but I barely noticed them moment-to-moment.
Or else it matters and it also improves things in a harmonious way.
Best of all is the new graffiti system, something the two Jet Set games could never decide on.
Should it interrupt you or not?
Bomb Rush’s solution is ideal.
The energy of it!
You’re Jackson Pollock!
I have left stuff out, I know it, but that’s a reference too.
I will never forget the night I first discovered Jet Set Radio Future.
Reader, I was gone.
I lost time in there, and I’ve lost time in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk too.
But it’s a subtly different kind of time, perhaps.
This is a game about rediscovery, about remembering, about seeing things again that you had almost forgotten.
It has to be less - that’s the point, the glory of it.
Selflessly, it points the way back towards a gaming experience that was unprecedented.
It’s a picture frame, the perfect bit of hanging and staging in a gallery.
Its rich, energetic imagination is mainly spent on recreation and refinement.
