Now that ThisIsMyJam.com is no more, I must submit my jams to the universe manually, which is bullshit.
Nevertheless, Way Yes’ song “Colerain” is my jam, and I must share it with you. Those guitar lines are pure distilled melancholic longing, and they feel true and ache accordingly.
I am lucky enough to have both a PS4 and an Xbox One, which means I got to try out the Star Wars Battlefront Beta twice last night. I didn’t have a ton of time last night to devote to it, so I just did the single-player mission on Tattooine. My intention had always been to get this game for the Xbox One, since I know more people on that system who might potentially play it, but I figured I might as well compare the two systems just to see what’s what.
And, um. The PS4 version kicks the shit out of the Xbox One version. It’s a direct hit from a laser blaster to the nuts. Digital Foundry will give you a more thorough examination of this if you’d like the hard data, but even my untrained eye could see drastic differences in image quality; the XB1 is jaggy all over the place, has an inconsistent frame rate, and makes far-off enemies much harder to spot since everything that’s far-off is somewhat jumbled together. The PS4, on the other hand, is buttery smooth and looks absolutely gorgeous. And I think I actually prefer the PS4’s controller over the XB1, which is not something I’m used to saying out loud. So, there it is. I’ll be playing Battlefront on the PS4.
I also got the new Xbox One dashboard last night, and, well… I kinda hate it? It took me several minutes to figure out where my actual games are located, which is the whole point of the device – and when I finally found their location (which is below the main homepage stuff), I felt a bit stupid. The rest of the redesign just seems unnecessary. I’ve never really minded previous Xbox dashboard updates, because they at least made some sense. This one seems to be there for the sake of being there, and it doesn’t have any coherent purpose as far as I can tell. It’s also a bit sluggish, especially if you click the left menu from the main homepage; hopefully that will get fixed soon.
In other news, I’ve completed my 2015 Goodreads challenge, which was to read 30 books. And it’s only the beginning of October! Hell, at this rate, I might very well get past 40, unless I decide to only read gigantic stuff (like the forthcoming City on Fire and any further volumes of Karl Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle memoirs). I finished Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman, which I liked very much; he’s a hell of a writer, and his dialogue is so good it makes me want to start acting again just so that I can adapt his books into screenplays and then say this stuff out loud. I’m now about halfway through Daniel O’Malley’s The Rook, which I can’t recall buying, but which is pretty good – sort of a supernatural James Bond sort of thing. Apparently it’s book one of a larger series; the second one comes out in January, I think.
This weekend is primarily about recuperating from this relentless headcold/stomach thing I’ve had all week. There may be some Uncharted, and there really ought to be some serious music stuff happening; I’ve got 5 songs that are, like, this close to being finished, and my buddy and I really want to get this stuff out before too long. So that’s the plan. Lay low, get healthy, get busy.
1. It’s funny; now that I’ve handed in my MGS V piece, I’m no longer feeling pressured to play it all the time. And when I do play it, I’m much more relaxed and far less over-analytical. So I try to steal a truck and suddenly stone-golem-soldiers appear out of nowhere and teleport out of the way of my bullets? Hot damn, Kojima, well done. I’m enjoying the side-op stuff a bit more if only because it’s more tactical and less ridiculous and the rewards are tangible. (Not sure why some of them still appear lit up in the menu selection, even though they’re finished, but, well, Kojima!)
1a. I’ve been using Quiet as my mission buddy, and she’s been more or less totally useless. In fact, I finally realized that she’s the source of this bizarre humming sound that I hear whenever I prepare for an infiltration; I thought it was some sort of animal cry, or a sung prayer, but it was just her mumbling what appears to be the first few bars of “My Way”, or possibly “Danke Schoen“. In any event it’s super creepy and distracting but at least now I know where the hell it’s coming from.
2. I had to take a sick day yesterday – these autumn colds are the worst – and because I was feeling a bit loopy, I had an urge to compare the outpost infiltration of MGS V with the outpost infiltration of Far Cry 4. They’re more similar than I realized, even if the controls are completely different; you scope out and mark enemies, figure out their patrol routes, look for things in the environment that might help you – oh, and pick up a few plants along the way. The only real difference is that Far Cry doesn’t care whether you use lethal force or not – indeed, you’re supposed to kill everyone, it’s just better if you do it in such a way where nobody raises the alarm, wheras MGS V gives you added value of going non-lethal by getting added information via hostile interrogation, and being able to kidnap certain soldiers for your own purposes (which sounds way creepier written down like that than it actually is, I suppose).
2a. Again, I was out sick yesterday and so I’m only peripherally aware of the new Far Cry Ice Age game or whatever it is. Far Cry isn’t necessarily one of my favorite shooter franchises; it’s just that there’s been a bunch of them lately and they haven’t been bad. My impression is that this is more of a Blood Dragon side story than a full-blown numbered-entry sequel; beyond that, I know nothing and will continue to know nothing until there’s something substantial to know, like a release date and price.
3. I’ve violated my “no pre-ordering” rule a couple times this year; I can’t remember what the earlier ones were, but I’ve already pre-ordered a digital copy of Rise of the Tomb Raider, and I also pre-ordered the digital version of the Uncharted remasters, which come out on Friday. I played a bit of the demo that came with it, and while it looks good, I’d forgotten just how much I hate the combat stuff. At least the PS4 controller is better-suited for it. Anyway, yesterday I played a little bit of U2 and U3 on my PS3, just to remember what it was that I was getting into (and also so that I could do a little compare/contrast of my own once the PS4 version lands). The PS3 games still look terrific, actually – and U2’s train sequence feels like a special bit of magic, and I’m looking forward to playing them all again.
3a. I’ve not yet pre-ordered Fallout 4, if you can believe it. Part of it is that I expect to spend a lot of time with it, and so I’d like to know which version performs better; console parity has gotten a lot better in recent months and so I don’t think there’ll be that much of a difference, but you never know. I am a bit curious, though, to know if the PS4 version will be getting the same sort of mod support that the Xbox One will be getting; even if I’ve never really goofed around with mods all that much, I’d like the option if it’s available.
4. My rental copy of Tony Hawk 5 arrived yesterday – a few days later than it was supposed to, though that hardly matters. I must confess that even after all the horrendous YouTube glitch videos and impressions had surfaced, there was a small part of me that kinda wanted to play it anyway. But then I remembered that there was a mandatory 7 GB patch I had to download before I could play, and that was enough for me to send it back ASAP.
5. Oh yeah – I almost forgot. I played Davey Wreden’s The Beginner’s Guide last week, and it’s one of those experiences that forces me to stumble upon the limits of my own writing ability; I’m not good enough of a writer to talk about it. (Believe me, I tried writing about it last week and failed miserably.) I found it moving and beautiful and wonderfully meta, and it does as good a job about describing the creative process and the emotional peaks and valleys that accompany that process about as well as anything else I’ve ever come across. It’s hard not to compare it to his previous game, The Stanley Parable, in that in both games you walk through a series of rooms accompanied by specific narration, but that’s about all they have in common. Beginner’s Guide feels much more personal and sincere and refreshingly avoids the emotional shield of detached irony that might ordinarily accompany this sort of experience. To say more would spoil it – it’s a 90 minute experience, give or take, and it’s one you should ideally experience without any other prior knowledge. Just know that the ending took my breath away.
One of the reasons why it’s been so quiet around here lately is that I’ve been working on a gigantic freelance thing about Metal Gear Solid V. I handed in my draft last night; it clocks in at a little over 3800 words, which makes it somewhat long-winded, but also appropriate given the subject matter. The article is ostensibly about my long, sordid history of active loathing and befuddlement of the Metal Gear franchise, trying to figure out just what it is about these games that gets under my skin the way no other game seems to do.
In the meantime, though, I’ve been playing the shit out of MGS V, and I have lots of comments about it that weren’t particularly appropriate for the article I was writing.
Current status:
One of the reasons why I was able to finish my draft yesterday is because I’ve hit a bit of a wall in the most recent story mission, one where I have to extract a moving vehicle out of a convoy of tanks. The game’s checkpoint system kinda sucks, which is why I’m a bit frustrated at the moment. The mission starts by putting you a short distance from a guard post; you take over the post and discover the convoy’s route. At that point you can do whatever you want, and after some trial and error I decided to take a shortcut and head to a camp towards the end of the route, which would give me plenty of time to clear out the camp and prepare to lay siege to the convoy. The problem is, I’m able to clear out the camp with no problem, but the convoy destroys me, and when I restart at the last checkpoint, it puts me all the way back at the beginning of that second camp’s stakeout – which means I’ve lost at least 30 minutes of progress, and which also means that I’ll be a bit more aggressive the second time around because I’ve lost patience.
As far as stealth games go, MGS V is remarkably free of the usual trial-and-error routine – except in situations like this one, where I’ve yet to figure out how to solve the convoy issue, and where I’ll continue to butt my head against the puzzle until I eventually figure it out. It just becomes less fun the 5th or 6th time around, especially since the game doesn’t let you keep all the collectible stuff you’ve found if you restart.
Beyond that particular bit of frustration, I have to admit – I’m having a really good time with it. I mean, 33 hours is nothing to sneeze at, and now that I’m done with the article I might actually be able to relax a bit more and stop hyper-analyzing every single pixel. I’m grateful that the game makes the exposition stuff optional and relatively unobtrusive, especially since the few cassette tapes that I’ve bothered to listen to are dull and awful and absurd in all the usual Kojima-esque ways that normally drive me insane.
I suppose I should start mixing up the times of day a bit more; I usually do my sneaking around at night (because if the game’s going to give me that option, why the hell not), and so there’s only one dark gray color scheme that I get to see. I’m sure the deserts of Afghanistan and the savanna plains of Africa would be a bit more vibrant in the day.
In any event – yes, I’m enjoying it. Normally I get a little annoyed if the game isn’t clear about why I have to get from Point A to Point B, but in this case the instant objective is simple enough to understand, and since I don’t give a shit about the larger soap opera, I can stay focused on the task at hand. And even though the general infiltration techniques that I use remain largely the same from mission to mission, the game still manages to feel quite fresh; each situation is just different enough that it keeps me on my toes. In the early going I felt that the “open world” was a bit misleading, because while there is a gigantic open world, there’s almost nothing to actually do in between each mission area. There’s a lot of running around over empty space, in other words, which can get tedious (until I remember that I can call for a vehicle via supply-drop).
I will never get over the stupid dialogue and the endless, meaningless acronyms; there’s no way around it for me. I get that the melodrama is part of the attraction to fans of the game, and that this franchise wouldn’t be what it is if people didn’t find this sort of absurdity enormously entertaining. It’s not my cup of tea, and it never will be; I’ve accepted that, and I’ve decided to move on. (That’s the ultimate thesis of the other article – spoiler alert!)
In other news, I’m kinda heartbroken about how terrible the new Tony Hawk game appears to be. I had little faith that it would be as good as the original games, but I really hoped that this new one wouldn’t be a giant piece of shit. Alas, it’s a giant piece of shit, and I’m sending back my rental copy as soon as it arrives in the mail.
What else, what else… I finished Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, and promptly started Nick Harkaway’s Tigerman. The Tremblay is… good, not great; everything happens so quickly that it’s hard to get absorbed in anything, but it is awfully creepy, and the ending is somewhat horrifying. I’m still too early in Tigerman to give it any sort of impression, other than to say it seems a bit more serious and a lot less whimsical than his other two novels. That said, once I finish it, I’ll have met my Goodreads goal of reading 30 books in one year, which is awesome.
And speaking of which: this past weekend the family and I headed into Maplewood Village for an “Art Walk”, and we walked into the local bookstore, and before I could even blink, my 2.5 year old son found a Thomas the Train book, and so of course I had to buy it for him, and also a Team Umizoomi activity book, and then I found a bunch of books that I’d actually had my eye on, and suddenly I walked out of the store with a whole bunch o’ stuff under my arm.
I’m in a bit of a blur, and not just because of the allergy medication I had to take a little while ago. I’ve been so focused on writing this freelance piece – currently at a little over 5600 words, and a bit of a jumbled mess at that – that I’ve totally put all my other creative stuff on hold. The album I was hoping to finish is still going to be finished at some point, but in the meantime I’m going to be turning some of it into a 5-song EP – and some of those songs still need some tweaking. Which I need to find time for. Which is time that I simply don’t have.
I think I’d mentioned that I’ve been able to carve out a bit more reading time of late, which has been nice; the morning/evening trains are very conducive to reading without interruption or distraction. And so it is that I finally finished My Struggle, Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgard this morning. It is not the brilliant, earth-shattering book I’d been expecting, and it does tend to meander and wander from time to time – he (or his translator) is very fond of long sentences separated by commas – but it is insightful at times, and certainly very poignant, and his descriptions of places and times is downright novelistic in its specificity and clarity. I suspect I will get around to the other volumes at some point, but I think I need a palate cleanser, so now it’s A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay.
I won’t talk about Metal Gear Solid V here – because that’s what the freelance piece is about – other than to say that I’m enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay far more than I thought I would. The story is still garbage but I find that I don’t particularly care all that much; I’m not paying attention to it. I don’t find myself needing any particular narrative motivation to get from point A to point B beyond trying to execute a mission as well as I can (though I don’t beat myself up if the stealth falls apart and I have to get physical; and I did resort to wearing the chicken hat just to get past a mission that I was too far into to bother restarting). Is it the greatest stealth game of all time, as most of the internet seems to think? I don’t know, and I’m certainly not far along enough to even begin to grasp what my eventual answer might be, but I’ll say this – I do aim to finish it, even if the freelance piece comes first.
I’m very much wanting to play SOMA, though I’m also a bit of a chicken shit and may end up waiting for some sort of PS+ promotion.
Beyond all that, life is good. My allergies are a mess but everything else is good: the job is busy but not inducing panic; the house is always good to come home to; my son cracks me up every time I see him; my wife is the best. I feel good. That’s the important thing.
With every passing day I become more and more happy that we made the move out of the city and into the ‘burbs. I know our house isn’t in the most desirable part of town, and there’s a lack of kids Henry’s age that live near us… but it’s only a 3-minute drive to get to the nearest park, and any time we go to a playground we end up meeting parents with kids around his age, and in any case it’s just nice to be able to do things again. Something in me has changed since we moved; I’m not paralyzed with the same sort of anxiety that made it so difficult to leave the house back when we lived in the city, and so we as a family can go out and do stuff that we couldn’t necessarily do as easily (or as willingly) before.
I don’t know if it’s my memory that’s shot, or if it’s simply that I keep thinking I’ve written something here but didn’t (you should know that even if I’m not posting here every day, I usually spend have a “new post” tab open for most of my available computer time, and more often than not I’ll trash whatever it is I’ve written) but in any event please forgive me if I’ve already said this: Spofity’s personalized “Discover Weekly” playlist has turned me on to more good music since it started than I can possibly hope to count.
As a musician, I suppose I ought to be more conflicted about using Spotify as my primary music service. I used to spend between $600-$1000 a year on new music; now I spend $120/year for my monthly subscription. I know that the artists earn a tiny, tiny fraction on each stream instead of what they’d get in a straight-up album purchase, and that Spotify’s equity disbursements are not actually doled out the way they ought to be (i.e., you’d think that the artist you listen to gets paid based on what you stream, but instead “Spotify doesn’t pay on a “per song stream” model, exactly: the total royalty pie is split among all rights holders based on the percentage of total Spotify streams their songs garner“, and this royalty rate is not necessarily split equally between artists and the labels, and it’s certainly more favorable to big artists instead of indie bands), and if I wanted to make any money from my album, I’d rather people bought it outright than stream it. Of course, at this point in my life – approaching 40, with a wife and a child and a mortgage and a day job I can’t realistically quit to go on tour, especially since I can’t pay a band and nobody wants to see a 40-year-old man with social anxiety on tour – I’d simply be happy if people listened to it, and I know that if I put “Untrue Songs” on Spotify, a great many more people would listen to it. That album sold enough for me to recover my sunk costs and get a few cups of coffee afterwards, but I’m not sure anyone else bothered to track it down besides those initial sales.
Regardless – that’s not even the point. The point of this section is that Spotify’s algorithms are better at finding good music than I was prepared to give them credit for. I now look forward to each Monday’s playlist refresh, and I’ve even started a separate playlist with my favorites because there’s at least 4-5 songs in each week’s list that are keepers.
I bring this up also because some of the stuff I’ve been listening to has been so fucking good that it’s causing me to rethink my own music-making approach. Like I said a few weeks ago – I have a bit of a creative inertia problem; when I’m rolling, I can’t be stopped… but when I stop, I stop, and it takes me forever to get moving again. Sure, I could blame some of that on the move, but we’re all moved in now, and all my stuff is set up, and yet I’m still not quite back in the swing of things. That said, there’s three albums that I’ve discovered this week that are fucking my brain up – in a really good way – and I’m back to wishing I had more available hours in the day.
Maybe I need to find a collaborator. When I can’t get my shit together on my own, it’s often useful to have someone else to bounce ideas off of, and to feed on that collaborative energy to make something brand new. There was a music festival in town last weekend, and it was some of the first live music I’ve seen in… years?… and the bands were quite good, and now I’ve got an itch to play with other people again. This is usually a good sign that my creative gears are starting to turn again, so even if I don’t end up starting a new band, I’m hopeful that at the very least I’ll start writing new music again (or at least finishing the stuff I recorded earlier this year).
I’m already about 1000 words into this Metal Gear Solid V piece and I’ve only put, like, 6-7 hours into the game itself. I can’t say much about the piece – or the game, for that matter – but I can say that I do not hate it, and indeed there are parts of it that I quite like – not the least of which is the ability to play one mission and then turn the game off without dealing with a 45-minute unskippable cutscene.
That said, I do find that I need to cleanse the palate every once in a while, and so I’m very glad to have Forza 6 in my life again. I’d been a Forza loyalist through the first 4 installments, and then I fell madly in love with the Horizon offshoots, and didn’t really feel bad about skipping out on Forza 5 since I had other stuff on my plate at the time.
I’m not a car enthusiast by any stretch of the imagination; I own a car out of necessity and it’s a hand-me-down at that. I like driving games for the same reason I like golf games – they’re usually very pretty, they require minimal focus, and the feeling of executing something well is just rewarding enough to keep on going. This is a way of saying that I don’t come to Forza for the cars as much as I come for the tracks. The first 3 or 4 Forza games reused a lot of the same tracks, so much so that I’d sometimes think I’d put the wrong disc in the tray. Forza 6 feels a lot more fresh in this respect; the tracks aren’t the same old, same old. Indeed, some of the tracks remind me of other games I haven’t thought about in a while – there’s a track in Prague that reminds me of Project Gotham Racing for some reason, and some of the new rain/fog effects make me think of DiRT. (We need a new DiRT game, by the way.)
1. I have many thoughts about Metal Gear Solid V, but they’re not going to be appearing here. I will of course let you know when and where you may find them, but for now, just know that this is happening.
2. I have few thoughts on Mad Max in videogame form; the game is very bad, and I do not like it. I feel very strongly, at this point in time, that there’s no shame in having a conventional control scheme for your third-person action adventure / brawler, and so when I try to play your game and can’t fucking do the thing I’m trying to do because your control scheme is completely insane and backwards and non-intuitive and wrong, then that’s your problem, not mine. I’m not particularly surprised that the game is not very good; I did admit to having high hopes for it, sure, but I didn’t actually expect anything worthwhile. I at least expected a competent control scheme, though, and the simple fact that they couldn’t get that right tells me more or less everything I need to know.
3. It’s been a little while since I did any sort of book round-up. I did end up finishing Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, which was pretty good; and then Edie Investigates!, which is a side-story to Angelmaker that’s so short that I started and finished it in one 30-minute sitting; and then I just finished Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls, which has a really interesting premise (a time-travelling serial killer and the victim who tracks him down) but which isn’t executed as well as it might’ve been. Now I’m reading Karl Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle: Book 1, which I’m still in the early pages of but which I’m already very much enjoying; he has a remarkable descriptive ability, and it’s very easy to put yourself into his perspective.
On a related note, Goodreads tells me that I’ve read 27 of the 30 books I’d hoped to get through by year’s end, so that’s nice. I must say that my new morning/evening commute makes for an excellent reading opportunity. I might even hit 40 books by year’s end, and considering that I’m turning 40 in December, well, that’s a nice little synchronicity that I’m happy to have.
4. I know I don’t really talk much about personal stuff here, and that’s mostly on purpose, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that the move to the ‘burbs was one of the best choices my wife and I have ever made. We’re very, very happy in our new home, and the kid loves it, and we’ve made some new friends already and are hoping to connect with some older friends soon enough, and it’s really a good thing all around. Someday I’ll learn how to grill and then you’re all invited for a BBQ.
In last week’s entry, I sounded pessimistic about the Fall 2015 videogame release schedule. Not much has changed since then; unfortunately. We had company on Saturday and I was laid up with a nasty head cold on Sunday, and so I only had a few hours of game time, and yet I was still kinda non-plussed at the end of it. I played an hour or so of the remastered Dishonored; it looked fine – about on par with my PC – but I’d already played those first few missions a lot, and I wasn’t feeling particularly inclined to play them once more, Achievements notwithstanding. I also played an hour or so of the remastered Gears of War, and it looks very much like how I remember it looking, which is probably the best you can hope for in a remastered port; it’s just that, as with Dishonored, I’m not really sure I feel like playing through the rest of it. Calvino Noir has gotten fair-to-middling reviews in the few outlets that have bothered to write anything about it, which is a bit disappointing, and Madden 16 simply isn’t my cup of tea. So there’s that.
This week is Metal Gear Solid V and Mad Max. I’m going to take a wild guess and presume that the release date review embargo for Mad Max probably means that it’s not going to score all that well, and also that launching it on the same day as MGSV probably means that its publisher isn’t expecting that much of a return.
Review scores are not necessarily the be-all end-all for me, of course; I have been mystified by the Metal Gear franchise at every turn and even though this latest installment has gotten impossibly high scores from nearly every outfit that’s looked at it, I can’t help but feel incredibly skeptical about it. I didn’t particularly care for Ground Zeroes, and if this is simply a much larger version of that, with a plot even more ludicrous and ridiculous, well… let’s just say I’m glad I’m not buying it.
Here’s the thing, though, and it’s maybe a point that I should probably have emphasized a lot more during this last year or so of general gaming apathy; I’d love to be proven wrong. I’d love to sit down with either one of these games and get sucked in and have a good time. That’s why I still write here, that’s why this blog exists. I have precious little time for gaming these days, and so I’d like the time I do get to play to be well spent. I genuinely hope that I can sit down later this week and rip open my rental copy of MGSV and get sucked in – if not to the impossibly ridiculous story, then at least into the moment-to-moment experience of exploring the environment.
Not all is doom and gloom as far as games are concerned, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t throw some love towards some iPhone games that have been kicking serious ass of late. To wit:
While we’re on the topic of enjoying the moment-to-moment experience of a carefully crafted world, I want to pour one out for the dearly departed Hannibal, one of my all-time favorite television shows and which featured as thorough of a mic drop in its finale as one could’ve hoped for. Nobody else watched this show, which is why it only lasted three seasons, but they were three of the most gorgeously photographed and exquisitely acted and straight-up BOLD seasons of network television I’ve ever seen in my life. Not since Twin Peaks have I been so genuinely unnerved by something on a major network; there are images from nearly every episode of this show that I will never be able to get out of my head (the totem pole, the angel wings, the mushroom garden, the increasingly horrible fate of poor Dr. Chilton, etc.). It’s been a hell of a ride, and I hope they can secure financing for a filmed version of the 4th season’s arc. If Wet Hot American Summer can come back as a serialized Netflix show, then anything’s possible.
I’m currently reading Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, which I’m enjoying, though not nearly as much as I enjoyed his debut novel, The Gone-Away World, which is one of the most fun books I’ve had the pleasure of reading in quite some time. I loved that book so much that I ended up buying the rest of his published output, and I suppose I should’ve expected a bit of a letdown after Gone-Away World’s brilliance; I’m not done yet, of course, and there’s still plenty of book left for me to get knocked out by – he has a remarkable way with words, of course, and even if the plot isn’t quite as riveting, his prose is still genuinely fun to absorb.
Today is Madden Day, which also generally marks my obligatory annual looking-over of the fall release schedule. I’m not feeling as gung-ho about it as I usually am, however, and I suppose there are several reasons why.
1. I’m looking over the upcoming releases and there’s not a whole hell of a lot that I’m terribly excited about. We’ll get to that in a bit, of course, when I run over the list in detail, but here’s the larger point: of the 14 games that are in my upcoming rental queue, 3 of them are remasters of last-gen games, and 9 of them are sequels. One of the remaining two is a movie spin-off, and the other is a port of a PC RPG (which I also apparently already own on PC, though I don’t remember buying it – my PC appears to be dying, however, and so if I’m ever going to play it, the console seems like the only place to do it). There are surely some indie/downloadable games that I’m forgetting about – No Man’s Sky comes to mind, though I can’t recall off the top of my head if that was ever guaranteed a 2015 release date – but that’s neither here nor there.
2. Being a homeowner means paying a mortgage, and even though the house is wonderful and the new town is lovely and we’re all very happy, I’m now – more than ever – very aware of my financial flexibility (or lack thereof), and so when I look at this list, there’s not really all that much that I feel that I can commit to, financially. (Nor am I certain that I will have 400 spare hours to play Fallout 4 – I would like to spend some time with my wife and child, after all, and I also need to get back to work on the album.)
3. None of these upcoming games are doing anything to cure my general malaise towards gaming in general. Even my current NG+ playthrough of Witcher 3 is being done in a very half-hearted manner; that game is still my current pick for Game of the Year, but I’m not sure I have the energy to do everything again for another 80 hours, especially since it’s hard for me to make different choices. There are certain large-scale events that I know I’m going to handle differently, but the smaller conversational stuff… I always feel like I need to answer truthfully, especially when the writing is so good, and so I find myself saying the same things a second time.
It’s strange; I’ve got my gaming situation all hooked up, with a new TV and a new entertainment center and a couch and a table and I’m free to play whatever I want without worrying about making too much noise, and this is a welcome return to all that I’ve ever wanted since I was playing my Atari 2600 (and my brother’s Genesis) in my mom’s basement as a kid, and yet… I kinda don’t really give a shit anymore. I’d like to think that some of these games are going to be fun to play, but I’m not really feeling pulled towards any one of them in particular, and that’s an awfully strange feeling to have after all this time.
Before I get into this thing, here’s a general question – should I even bother holding on to my 3DS anymore? I recently plugged it in for the first time in maybe a year, and I was unable to get it to properly update on my home wi-fi (which doesn’t make any sense, but then again, I’ve never had much luck getting a reliable internet connection on that thing ever since I bought it). In any event, the only thing that interests me on the 3DS’s horizon is Picross 3D 2, but according to this article there’s no North American release date scheduled, and I’ve been so out of the loop as far as Nintendo is concerned that anything involving Amiibos makes me nervous; I don’t know what they are, but neither do I want my 2.5 year old kid to suddenly want them, because I literally can’t afford to get sucked into a toy ecosystem vortex right now.
Anyway, here we go – all titles and release dates via Game Informer.
August 25
September
- Starter Packs: $99.99, contains Batman, Wyldstyle, Gandalf, Batmobile, and Lego Gateway
- Level Packs: $29.99, contains an additional new mission-based game level along with a minifigure, a vehicle, and a weapon.
- Team Packs: $24.99, provide two minifigures and two vehicles or weapons, all with their own unique abilities.
- Fun Packs: $14.99, provide a new minifigure and a vehicle or weapon.
October
November
December
Newton’s work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future. A man in need of breakfast.
- Nick Harkaway, “The Gone-Away World”
1. It’s been 3 weeks since the move, and this is the beginning of my 2nd week back at work. Yesterday’s commute was my first of what will apparently be a long series of NJ Transit nightmares, and even then it wasn’t altogether unpleasant; I was sitting down, for one thing, and I had a window seat, and the hopelessness never became the all-consuming anxious mania that it used to be on an NYC subway – I knew there was nothing to be done, and in any event it ultimately taught me how to transfer at Hoboken to the Path, which is something I’m going to be needing to do next year when my office moves downtown.
I am happy. I love our home. Sure, it’s not in the super-nice part of town, but whatever – it’s a 5 minute drive to the super-nice part of town, and it’s a 5-minute drive to everywhere else we need to go, and given that we don’t really go out all that much anyway, it’s the inside part of the house that counts the most, and I’m really happy with that part. There are no more boxes; there’s only the last of the artwork to hang up.
I’m not sleeping well, though, and that’s starting to become somewhat irritating. Haven’t fully figured out why just yet. Some nights it’s been a temperature thing; other nights it’s been an anxiety thing – for example, we had our driveway repaved last week, and as such I had to park the car on the street, and we are in the not-so-nice part of a very nice town, and I was worried about the car getting stolen; instead, I got my very first parking ticket for parking too close to a stop sign, which is a thing I didn’t even know existed. (Indeed, our car – a very reliable sort – is suddenly starting to fall apart, and we need to get it serviced, and I’m sure that’s going to cost an arm and a leg, and I just hope that it can all be fixed in one day. A thing about life in the suburbs that has become immediately apparent is that if you don’t have a car, you’re kinda fucked.)
2. Another, inevitable part of moving – at least in my recent experience – is that things sometimes stop working properly once they’ve been put into their new places. My PC’s USB ports are starting to crap out, which means my wireless keyboard/mouse and wi-fi adapter are hit or miss. The PC is almost entirely meant as a home for my Steam library, and given that it’s 5 years old and starting to die, there’s a part of me that’s inclined to maybe just wait until the Steam Boxes hit in the fall; now that I’ve got a proper entertainment center for the basement TV, it might not be the worst thing in the world to move my PC gaming rig to the TV, and thus give myself more deskspace for music stuff.
More troubling, however, is my PS4. For one thing, I seem to have lost the little USB Bluetooth adapter that worked with my fancy headphones. This is not necessarily the end of the world, given that I don’t really need to use headphones anymore unless I’m chatting with someone, but it does render those headphones completely useless. What is possibly the end of the world, though, is that my controller is no longer reliably staying paired with my PS4. Now, I’m not really playing much of anything with any urgency at the moment (though I’d very much like to check out Volume), but I expect I will be in the coming months, and I’d very much like to not have to worry about this sort of thing once the Big Games start arriving.
3. Now that the move is done, though, I’m going to have to start getting back into the swing of things. I’ve found that I have a bit of a creative inertia problem. This is good sometimes, in that when I’m feeling like I’m on a roll, I keep rolling, and I churn out lots of music and/or blog posts and/or various writings. But it also means that when I stop, I stop, and the idea of getting moving again can feel overwhelming. This is why I haven’t been writing much here lately; I’d put nearly everything on hold for the move, and if I’d happen to find an idle hour I would open up a Wordpress window and end up just kinda staring into nothingness, half-heartedly hoping that words would just show up, given that I couldn’t seem to summon anything. This is why I’m writing this post right now, if only so that I can remind myself that there’s a part of my brain that needs to get active again. I need to get back to the solo album; I need to get into this blog. My feet are on terra firma now, finally, and it’s time for the rest of my body to catch up.
Shouts From The Couch 