So it’s quite a high-scoring day today, you know.

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[7.50]

Anthony Easton: It’s shtick — I know it’s shtick, and i know exactly what she’s playing — and I know the little inserts of video game sounds extend the shtick, and, fuck the politics, are a little south of caveman. If she moved her voice a little bit she might be doing the same thing as Newsom, and I hate Newsom, but having Lana singing the lines “Heaven is a place on earth wit U” is harrowing and erotic.
[10]

Michelle Myers: In which our heroine communicates her melancholic resentment towards a lover to whom she gives everything and receives so very little in return, grafted upon a “Clair de Lune” chord progression with guarded words and swollen strings (and swollen lips). This is gut-wrenching stuff, and it makes me regret every single minute I spent perched like a housecat on some bro’s couch so he had something warm to touch between Halo rounds.
[9]

Brad Shoup: I’ve spent more than a few evenings lying on the couch, empties aligned on the living room tile, watching Catherine work her way through levels. I’ve barely picked up a controller since the SNES, but that doesn’t preclude the pleasure I get in observing. Sometimes she gets incinerated, sometimes she falls off the map, but I never know quite where she’s heading, and I don’t mind watching to find out. So I’m setting “HOLLYWOOD SAD CORE” and swiped-footage videos aside and accepting “Video Games” as a fabulously ambiguous take on a peculiar type of immobility. The, er, cinematic arrangement provides cover for Del Rey’s mantra-like melody, although not even the conjured ghost of “An American Trilogy” can scare off some of the more lazy rhymes. Vocally, she switches out masks with an expert’s timing: smiles here, plaintiveness there, cold possession elsewhere.
[8]

Iain Mew: I’ve recently been playing this video game called Bastion, in which you play a survivor of some mysterious calamity. Mechanically it’s a fairly fast-paced action game, but what it’s really about is discovering and rebuilding its magical, precarious world. The best bit is a stunning sequence soundtracked by a female, smoky voice singing a simple, haunting song about building walls, and how one day those walls are going to fall. While you try in vain to concentrate on killing monsters and not on the overwhelming melancholy, the song becomes louder and sharper until, eventually, you find a woman, lost in this wilderness, singing it. You can watch it here although it doesn’t really do the experience justice. I have also recently been listening to Lana Del Rey (on repeat, a lot) using the perceived worthless status of video games to withering effect (“Go watch your football game” would not work the same way), invoking disappointment and non-comprehension of how her man can possibly find those more worthy of his attention than her. This is why her willingness to do all the stupid things he likes is a real sacrifice, it says. I can put up with it, though, because it works so perfectly to illustrate the gaping disconnection that fuels her song. There Lana is, asking questions about the guy’s taste (or otherwise) in bad girls and seeming to barely know him — when she sings that now he loves her there’s not much in the song to evidence it — but she’s still building a magical, precarious world of her own with him at the center, an intoxicating string-glazed place sprinkled with harps and old Hollywood glamor where love is the only reason for living. “They say the world is built for two”, she sings, and hers certainly is. Thing is, while the sentiments might sound romantic, when you’re investing that much in someone, there’s no way that any real human being who has their own life, has off-days, plays video games, could ever actually live up to it for any period of time.
[9]

Alfred Soto: I bet most of our readers haven’t heard the most forlorn song ever recorded about a lover who cares more about TV than for his girlfriend: The B-52’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” in which an insistent guitar strum complemented Cindy Wilson’s quiet hysteria. Its only competition is David Bowie’s manic, Huey Smith-aping “TVC-15.” Del Rey’s vocal — a hybrid of Lucinda Williams’ dragging-vowels-across-the parquet-floor tone and Chrissie Hynde’s high dulcet tones — made my skin crawl after two bars. She sings as if she’s been rendered catatonic by the same video game. The harp, minor chord piano line, and strings just sit there on the couch with her, picking at the bowl of Fritos.
[2]

Katherine St Asaph: What draws Lana’s boyfriend to his games? Does she know? Has she asked? The “tell me all the things you want to do” line would suffice if it went anywhere, but she stops on the phrase “video games,” as pat and impenetrable as her blue dark and perfumed roses and loverless world are to him. This would be a great premise for a song if Lana acknowledged it, but she genuinely doesn’t seem to know that “heaven is a place on earth” belongs to Belinda Carlisle, not Ann Radcliffe. Her reveries seem like retro-bin dressup, her escapism seems alluring only to set him up as man-childish, her romance wilts into irony, and walls are erected that never needed to be.
[3]

Ian Mathers: I’m giving “Video Games” this 10 partly because everything else I’ve heard by Lana Del Ray is so lacking. It’s not as if the origins of “Video Games” are mysterious (it’s basically one part each Hope Sandoval, Richard Hawley, and the gentler side of David Lynch), but the other songs I’ve heard by her manage to fumble their tone. Who cares? It’ll be wonderful if she can replicate the power of “Video Games” again, but if she doesn’t, this song still exists. There’s still something very complicated in her voice when she sings “I heard that you like the bad girls, honey/Is that true?” And unutterably sad when she sings “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you/everything I do” to a guy the song gives no discernible qualities to other than preferring Call of Duty to the woman who just put on his favorite perfume and cracked a beer.
[10]

Jonathan Bradley: “HOLLYWOOD SAD CORE,” Lana Del Rey labels this song on YouTube, evincing an almost repellent self-awareness; it’s usually the listener’s job to make those connections. Del Rey knows her strengths, though; “Video Games” aims for — and achieves — a melodramatic grandeur that is improved by its palpably performed quality. The video, in its rough and ready mixture of Hollywood streetscapes, paparazzo camcorder footage, and billowing American flags, handwaves at commentary on celebrity and capitalism, but is really an expert exploitation of the emotional power of nostalgia, narrative, and exploitation itself. It’s a knowing recursion that could become tedious without a song this good. Del Rey, a character instead of a singer, is an actress fine enough to smear her glazed pipes disconsolately over the lush harps and rolling timpanis like Vaseline on a camera lense.
[9]

Jer Fairall: Can I confess here that I have no clue what to make of this song?  Vocals are a cross between the dusty torchiness of Neko Case and the retro girl-group clarity of Bethany Cosentino, all done up in an ornate orchestral sweep and a tone that calls to mind no less than Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is” (RIP Jerry Leiber), yet she’s dropping Belinda Carlisle quotes and giving him so much passive-aggressive shit over something as trivial as his love of video games. Truthfully, it’s the latter that trips me up the most; I want to hear something dramatic and life-altering in this narrative, yet what she’s on about sounds so mundane.
[6]

Pete Baran: If the reflective camera pullback and fade at the end of Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun-Li had been accompanied by this paean to Video Games, then that might have just qualified as a one-star movie. To whit, read that this is a very nice record indeed.
[9]