Gearing Up for a Proper Review and a Change of Plans...

Hope you all are having a Happy New Year!  

A Coincidental Fusion (Captured on Switch - Handheld Mode)

With the results tallied, the decision is final: I'll be doing a review of Shin Megami Tensei V! 

Those coming straight from Twitter will how excited I was for this game over the course of two years alongside the Turrican Anthology from Strictly Limited Games. As for the Shin Megami Tensei series itself, I was hooked in the same way I found myself playing video games—watching someone else play through Nocturne on YouTube...

Back in my final semester of college—between losing my eyebrows and sleep over my senior thesis among other things—I would dip heavily into LoadingReadyRun's new foray into streams. This was a part of their "Year of LRR" Kickstarter campaign where they intended to do one more full year of sketches upon reaching their funding goal. I wasn't able to chip in while the campaign was accepting donations because college took priority with regards to room and board, but I was happy and grateful that they were successfully funded.

Alongside their use of the SID chip (and tunes) in some of their videos by composer Bradley Rains, LoadingReadyRun was a comedy comfort food during my college years. When Flash was still thriving, and when I still had it on my computer, I would go to their website and binge watch their back catalog of sketches alongside the other videos on their YouTube channel. Anytime I got nervous over a paper, I could queue up a few sketches to laugh off the stress, then head back to my draft and type up the rest of a hot mess.

Senior year was no different on that front. Their first iteration of streams—where the actors and writers in the LRR crew each hosted shows similar to radio disc jockeys—reminded me of their video series, Graham & Paul Let's Play. They were essentially the only YouTubers in the video game space outside of Chip & Ironicus, Jennyverse, and Steve Benway who I enjoyed watching back in the early 2010s. Graham and Paul brought their comedic style from Unskippable and their sketches into their playthroughs, which they brought over to the livestreams and, more recently, in Running Start where they continue their riffing traditions by focusing on a game's beginning as a whole.

Because of the time difference—they were three hours behind me—I could never catch them live, but I was able to watch some of their past streams on a separate YouTube channel, LoadingReadyLive. Of course, GPLP was huge but I also loved catching up on Beej's Backlog and Kathleen Saves the World. The embedded video makes it rather obvious, but the latter series introduced me to the weird world of Shin Megami Tensei. 

I don't really know what motivated me to look into the games—it's possible that Kathleen naming her character Ford Prefect had an impact—but around a year after I got a 3DS as a gift, I bought SMT IV...and ended up giving it a proper playthrough after finding myself deep in the retro gaming YouTube rabbit hole. I've talked about giving that game a proper review in the blog's archive on the Wayback Machine, but of course, that never happened.

I'm going to make sure that this doesn't happen. I am determined to write a review of Shin Megami Tensei V...

...which brings us to a change of plans. In my December 11th entry, I said I would work on a double review of Axiom Verge and Axiom Verge 2, making it partly a retrospective on my experience with Metroidvanias, before diving into a review voted for by the readers. 

In short, I'm switching the reviews around: SMT V will come first and AV 1&2 will follow. 

Shin Megami Tensei V is not only a game that's still fresh in my mind, it's also one that I haven't stopped playing...

Thus far, with as little spoilers as possible... (Captured on Switch - Handheld Mode)

What I ideally want to do is to complete the game before I write out the review so that I can properly give the story a fair critique. I made a goal for myself to complete the review within January or early February so that I can reach the endgame which, looking ahead, isn't too far off. I'm also going to set a word count limit of 600-850 words so that I focus on covering the bases without diving too much into tangents or digressions. I based this off the goal that Nintendo Force's editor-in-chief, Lucas M. Thomas, gave me for my review of Hypnospace Outlaw which helped me to condense an aesthetic experience into something much more tangible for readers who may also want to play the game. 

I don't think I'll have any trouble distilling SMT V's story and gameplay into a recommendation or a "must-avoid". The story and characters are a bit more allegorical, but everything else is clear cut. 

The biggest concern I have is regarding the screenshots—the ones here and the one that I used for the tweet announcing the review are all from the Switch on handheld. There's some blurriness and I'm hoping that there's a significant reduction of that in docked mode, but if not, I'll see what I can do. 

As for the Axiom Verge review, my worries are mostly the same, but for completely different reasons. I'm not working off a capture card and so I can't properly capture the action in those games. I may end up using the pictures from the press kit and link that instead. Between both AV games, the same word count range feels appropriate, giving each game almost an equal amount of time in the spotlight along with a mini-retrospective. 

My plan is to write out and post the Axiom Verge dual-review within February or March.  

I might do a couple of regular entries next week just to help keep my writing fresh and to remind me that I have work to do. But until then, this blog will be entering the new year on a promising note!

See you all next year and may 2022 be a prosperous one!

  

Ink for December 18th, 2021

 

You may remember me mentioning a regular at work who, after I wrote the letter to The Day about commentator Lee Elci—whether through here or on Twitter.

A couple of weeks ago, he lent me the audiobook version of Where the Right Went Wrong by Pat Buchanan. Buchanan was a commentator I was unfamiliar with until the regular mentioned him to me during one of our conversations—we usually end up talking about what happened on Bill Maher when he's on air. 

In sum: The audiobook details the Republican argument against the Iraq War, noting the influence and role of Neoconservative figures in driving the Bush Administration towards that decision. Personally, this is a new take on the discourse surrounding the War in Iraq, mostly because it comes from a pre-Trump conservative point of view. There are some parallels in both left and right wing points of view regarding the war—a big one being the idea of the US as the "world police", trying to force democracy on a nation through militaristic means. However, that's where the similarities end. Buchanan still retains the past Republican prejudice against gay marriage and the concern that secularism and immigration will lead the country to ruin and so on. 

There are some interesting bits—he apparently thinks that the idea of the free market is a threat and that he has concerns for the Republican party in future. As to whether or not said concerns lead straight to Donald Trump, I can't tell. This is an audiobook that I don't think I'll re-listen to again—I mostly had it on 1.5x speed and I never do that for other audiobooks.

On the other hand, after three years, I'm almost finished with Rachel Maddow's Blowout and it's been a a good run. I think I'll save the lengthy review of that for Goodreads though. My Mother and I had a sort-of competition to see who could finish the book first. I lost, of course.

In some sense, it feels like I've taken a political sabbatical this year, at least online anyway. I do check The Day's website for news along with Twitter when I login. There's also John Oliver and Bill Maher who I watch with my parents when they're on, but nothing much outside of that. I've thought about re-subscribing to the Two for Tea podcast—as in funding them through Patreon again. I feel that, outside of the Heterodox Academy, Iona Italia does a spot-on job at holding lengthy academic and political discussions with various figures. 

The biggest distraction for me this week was surprisingly, writing. There are two works-in-progress that I started this year—one in late April and the other earlier this week. I'm sunsetting the other one, which I've blogged about before as I feel like it's had its due. I personally think, in hindsight that it was never meant to be more than a "slice of life" fiction piece for a class and I've briefly talked about the time surrounding it too.  

I feel more comfortable being myself now than I ever was when I wrote that short story and I'm thankful for the friends I have today (both online and offline) because of this. In a sense, these new stories are a celebration of that fact—ironically, the one I started this week is meant to be a short story. We'll see about that one though...          

Ink for December 11th, 2021

It's been awhile....again. I have yet to fulfill the promises I made to myself to get back into the habit of daily blogging, or even semi-daily, since the last time I posted.

Between then and now, it's been a combination of busy work days and being distracted by good video games. Sometimes, a busy work day leads to me spending a few hours playing through something and escaping from everything for a bit. There's an idea I have for the latter, which I'll explain later in the post.

Nothing much has changed otherwise between August and now—I'm still doing well, work's been busy for the past couple months (as usual for this time of year), and so on. There is a major thing that might help in getting me back into blogging more frequently...

The photo's a bit off center because my desk is a mess...

This was an investment that was worth the wait—both in Apple in announcing the new MacBook Pros and the week that it spent sitting in Memphis. The long, story short as to why I decided to purchase this was mostly due to the battery service warning on my previous MacBook followed by Big Sur, which I installed in case they didn't announce them. Any time I booted the laptop, if the battery percentage was under ninety percent, the screen would black out upon login and I needed to plug in the charger so that I could use it—the computer was fine if I left it in sleep mode overnight. These issues did not occur with Mojave, but many of the programs I used would no longer be supported if I stayed on that iteration of OSX. 

This laptop gives me peace of mind in many ways with the most relevant thing being the battery. It lasts around three to four days before I need to plug it in and the MagSafe charger now has a braided-cable instead of the dangerously thin cord that could easily bend and break. Not only that, but iFixit's teardown of both models reveals the batteries are not so much of a nightmare to remove and replace compared to previous models—especially the one I used before*.

On the software front, everything feels much more stable and smoother than before. I haven't put the M1 Pro chip through its paces yet, but it does feel like a huge leap from my 2015 MacBook Pro. I have a good feeling that this new laptop will stick around with me for a long time to come. 

Moving on...I had this thought in October regarding video game reviews since I mentioned I considered doing a review of Axiom Verge and it's sequel. I spent the previous month falling in love with a game called Eastward. When October hit, it was a combination of Metroid Dread and Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, and in November, it's Shin Megami Tensei V. 

I feel like I can still do a review on both Axiom Verge titles, but make it more personal by incorporating what drew me to games like those—known as Metroidvanias in the gaming sphere. I'll need to give them another spin later in the week just to refresh my memory and remind myself as to how I felt while playing through them.

However, I thought it would be cool to cover other games in the same way I review books for Goodreads. I'm going to leave a poll on Twitter, shortly after I post this, but I wanted to ask you all what games I should cover.

Should I cover Eastward, Disco Elysium, Shin Megami Tensei V, or should I take a look at a game you suggest, good or bad? Comment away with your suggestions! 

Until next time, have a wonderful weekend!

*The linked teardown is for a 2012 15" MacBook Pro with Retina Display, but I don't think there were any staggering differences between it and my mid-2015 model to warrant another. I may skim through YouTube to see if they did a video teardown of the latter and update this post accordingly.