The sands shift, the wheel turns, and time marches onwards: the PS2 is officially so old it's cool again. Sorry. But also, deal with it? Because look at the games we get to play now: El Paso, Elsewhere is the latest of so many various, vaguely 00s-inspired games to emerge from a new generation of developers' new wave of nostalgia recently, but it's also, from what I got to play out at GDC, an absolutely shining example. Everything was better back in my day, of course, whenever my day is for you. But this one's for real.
El Paso's elevator pitch is Blade plus Max Payne, plus an actual elevator, taking you down through the bowels of some Texas non-place hotel to its own pumping, neon-hued underworld - all 46 floors of it. This is Xalavier Nelson Jr's latest thing, the lead at his Strange Scaffold studio who was also behind viral jokes like An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs and the meatier, frantically clever Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
Nelson Jr is surging to the front of the pack of the new cool kids of game dev, just 25 and with an effervescent kind of intelligence to go with all the youthful charisma - as I played, he relentlessly peppered me with over-the-shoulder thoughts on game design and reasoning behind the finer details of El Paso's dodge rolls and bullet-time mechanics, while absent-mindedly snacking in a few spare seconds and juggling his next appointments.