Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition—Lost at Sea, Grounded in Time

A Polygonal Finisher—or "Classic" mode in its full glory. (Captured in Handheld Mode)

Nintendo Force ran a Player’s Poll survey in their forty-eighth issue asking readers about their favorite third-party titles and companies. I decided to write in—having almost nine months time with the Switch—saying that the company I loved the most at that moment was Square Enix for putting their back catalog of late 90’s (and early 2000s) Final Fantasy titles onto the Switch. When I first got the Switch and jumped onto the eShop, one of the first titles I bought from that set was Final Fantasy VIII after recalling Kim Justice’s in-depth review and narrative analysis of the game. Then a couple weeks later, I decided that I also wanted to see what all the fuss was about with Final Fantasy VII and Louis Rossmann’s YouTube AMAs (ask me anything) are to blame for my purchase of Final Fantasy IX when it went on sale. I have yet to finish any one of these, but to be able to experience some of the best Japanese role-playing games that I could only experience previously via YouTube walkthroughs is an incredible thing.

That Nintendo Direct announcement of Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers in February took me by surprise. My only exposure to its prequel, Chrono Trigger, was with the port on the Nintendo DS shortly before I graduated high school in 2009. I remember, more than anything else, turning it on just to listen to the soundtrack, but the game itself pulled no punches. It was a time travel story, but it managed to keep things simple with a memorable cast of characters, a tired and true battle system, and a small world map which made every place matter—even the optional ones. 

Chrono Cross ideally would follow a good opening act with a grand show, right?

Minimalism is Radical Dreamers's greatest strength. (Captured in Handheld Mode)

Before we answer that question, let’s tackle the other game in the Radical Dreamers Edition—the collection’s tagline namesake. Radical Dreamers: Le Trésor Interdit—which translates from French as “the Forbidden Treasure”—was an obscure visual novel  that required a Super Famicom and Satellaview peripheral so you could download it via a series of well…satellites—occupying a strange space between Sega’s Mega Modem and high-speed broadband. Visual novel may be a bit of an overstatement here as most of the screens look more like a text adventure game or MS-DOS, but the blackness in and of itself makes up for it.

Radical Dreamers puts you in the shoes of a Serge, a musician who finds himself teaming up with a thief named Kid and her partner, Magil, in order to infiltrate Viper Manor and nick a jewel called the “Frozen Flame”. The game is not shy in letting you know that you are back in the world of Chrono Trigger as many players who played that game, or are familiar with the story, will already make a connection in the opening scene where the trio mucks around the manor’s perimeter. Upon entering the manor, the screen goes black, you go down one end of a corridor, a somber track plays while Serge narrates their journey, and a Griffin screams at you with its claws ready to tear you apart.

That last part is one in a possible series of random encounters you will experience in sneaking around the mansion. Sometimes, it’s a skeleton who is usually easy to deal with, a goblin that takes pride in its combat training, a ghost who whooshes in with the wind…or its the griffin. The creature’s 16-bit shrill, which comes out of nowhere, always made me jump, but many of these encounters do require you to be alert and ready to choose your next move. If you do nothing, the monster might come out on top and force you to go through the entire game again. If you know the right path in the manor, it is only a minor inconvenience, but your first few heist attempts may be slightly frustrating.

Thing is, these encounters add to the already foreboding atmosphere of Viper Manor. There’s barely any music in the game and the track which plays while you sneak around makes the place more like something out of a horror movie. Most of the rooms, which do have proper backdrops, are dimly lit. If the griffin was not scary enough, the development team made excellent use of the Super Famicom’s sound chip to make the manor seem haunted for its strange emptiness and odd architecture.

For a game you could easily complete in an hour’s sitting, Radical Dreamers does a bang up job of making the trek worth it. This was easily my highlight of the collection, both as someone who played Chrono Trigger and a fan of little gaming oddities, and I might go through this again one day to see the multiple endings for myself.

In Which a Fisherman Deals a Possibly Fatal Blow to a DRAGOON (Captured in Handheld Mode)

Chrono Cross, however, is a different matter which started out as a promising trip in one of Nostalgia’s newly constructed side streets. You start out as Serge, but instead of treading around a well-guarded mansion in the cover of night, you find yourself ascending an ancient, ornate building. Kid is still with you and your mission this time is just to take down a character called Lynx—who was also Viper Mansion’s owner in Radical Dreamers—with some other person who is one out of a myriad number of party members you can recruit. Upon entering the chamber that sits way above the building itself, Serge witnesses himself, blood dripping from his dagger with a sly grin on his face as the screen flashes to Kid lying on the ground, dead.  It gets stranger from there as this whole sequence was merely a dream and the Serge of Chrono Cross has no idea who Kid is.

The game’s opening moments do a genuinely decent job at introducing the story and core gameplay mechanics, but the battle system feels very unwieldy. Instead of the Active Time Battle system used in Chrono Trigger—where using Techs was as easy as casting a simple spell—Chrono Cross makes an attempt at making its fights stand out from similar games. Attacks take a certain amount of stamina, meaning that you can put a good amount of oomph into a strong strike, or chain a flurry of weaker attacks to keep your party from completely wearing down. These attacks also help to fill up an “element” grid for each character so they can cast a particular set of spells—you will want to keep fighting so you can belt out your strongest hexes. Trouble is, if you bypass the village chief at the game’s onset, this whole system will not make any sense whatsoever. The inclusion of field effects and summons complicate things a bit further—I hardly used any of the latter in my play through—and winning battles feels more like doing so in one of the SaGa games (Romancing Saga 1-3 and SaGa Frontier) where instead of experience, you get varying stat boots. Defeating a boss does net you a star—which you can use for summon elementals—and a few extra spaces on your party’s elemental grid, but it hardly feels like your getting stronger. 

It gets more complicated from there as your team does not learn “element” spells—aside from at least three unique attacks per person—but you either find them scattered about throughout the world, or you can buy them off particular vendors. Some of them are exclusive to party members whose “innate element” aligns with the color of a particular spell, but thankfully those ones only come up in the late game. Allocating specific spells could either be a simple matter or a micromanager’s worst nightmare since there are options to automatically add or remove elements and that leads us to the biggest wrench in the works: your team.

One of the More Eccentric Recruits on your Journey Through Sea and Space (Captured in Handheld Mode)

There are so many characters that you can choose to recruit…or decide to join you because they have nothing better to do, which seems like a good selling point. The execution leaves much to be desired…and that is putting it lightly. In one word, it is overwhelming. The thing with the elements is just the start of it since all of them have their own weapons and armor that you have to gather materials in order for the blacksmith to forge them. The easy thing to say, and my best advice, would have been to concentrate on Serge and your two other favorite teammates—or the ones who would oppose a particular boss’s innate element—but near the end of the proverbial “part one”, you are forced to build a new squad after a dramatic event. In another word, or rather two, it is a mess.

There is a reason why I started this review by looking at Radical Dreamers first and it is not because of the fact that Chrono Cross is a bad game. The soundtrack is beautiful, the locales are stunning in concept (more on the graphics later), and it’s partially an adaptation of the Satellaview game. Kid plays as much of a pivotal role in Chrono Cross as she did in Radical Dreamers, at least in theory anyway. The game has its own version of the Viper Manor with an updated rendition of the “Snakebone Mansion” track to go with it. Even the key heist remains the same, mostly. After that sequence concludes followed by another fetch quest, Kid can easily be forgotten with Serge being the party member you can not change out. Even with barely a legion at your disposal, you could put the pivotal thief on the backbench in favor of a popular rockstar, a lab technician, a priestly Luchador, or even a literal voodoo doll (and the bizarreness does not end there). The majority of them barely make any dents in the story outside of about thirty-five percent of the cast—if you decide to play the game in full, it is easy to figure out who the big narrative players are. 

The saving grace of this remaster is the little tools that, with a press of a button, you can become invincible to even the most powerful foes, avoid random encounters altogether, or just breeze through the entire game on fast-forward. However, they just make the flaws in the story more apparent with the huge absence of Kid between two narrative strands and in that void is where my interest in the game dropped. Or rather, I took the tinted-glasses off upon realizing that this was not the harbor I thought it was with tools that were less like brandishing a Swiss Army Knife and more like trying to fix a modern-day laptop.

An attempt at showcasing the "New" graphical mode. Notice the details on his clothing. (Captured in Handheld Mode)

The last niggle about the entire collection is the assortment of display settings—which are almost solely a Chrono Cross affair. I have no right to comment on the comparisons between the remaster and the original Playstation game seeing as my only experience of the game was a bunch of YouTube walkthrough videos. The different display and graphic modes leave much to be desired though with “full” being way too stretched out all all ends and “zoomed” being slightly longer on the big screen along with readable onscreen text. The 4:3 option was the one I stuck with throughout my playthrough which was perfect on portable along with the “classic” graphical style, which feels like a CRT filter, but merely pixelates the text and keeps the original artwork and character models, “New” seems like the binary opposite with good intentions—the backgrounds feel more like a series of murals, the text is made clean and spotless, and everyone gets an updated model…which weirdly introduces tremendous slowdown. I had the luck of testing out the “New” graphics at the worst possible moment in which a tank, built and driven by dwarves, drives onto the battlefield and brings the game to a sluggish pace—it is worse when it attacks the party. 

On its own, Radical Dreamers would earn an easy nine out of ten from me. With it being bundled with Chrono Cross at a twenty dollar price point it is an entirely different story. Those who loved Chrono Trigger to bits might want to give this a go to see how everything plays out and if the references make any sense. Otherwise, I would sail far away from this maelstrom. 

In Sum: A collection with an odd gem and a sequel to a well-loved game that distances itself from it in almost every aspect aside from name-dropping and musical lemotifs. A presumed classic which wants to be a more detailed adaptation of said gem, but gets lost due to the staggering number of party members who unintentionally stomp all over the story that was. A treasure chest of interesting ideas that, in execution, do not exactly sparkle or earn the appraiser's full attention. 

A piece of history stuck in time and floating aimlessly in space.

Score: 6.0 out of 10 

Additional Notes: Some of the answer's from the Player's Poll were published in Nintendo Force's following issue.

Ink for May 18th, 2022 (And a slight change of plans...)

An Unusual Sequel to a Classic SNES Epic (Captured in Handheld Mode)

This is going to be a brief update as there's a big, personal thing happening later in the week—as in, I won't be able to access Blogger for a couple days. I posted a Twitter thread last month* laying out an update regarding what happened to the Axiom Verge 1 & 2 review, or rather what my future plan was considering that I ignored my initial deadline of late February to early March.  

It's smack dab in the middle of May with the same old song and dance. However, I'm changing things up a bit.  I started writing out a review for Chrono Cross, a game that I started playing in the first week of April. When Nintendo did their Direct livestream in February, I took to Twitter to post how excited I was since the announcement came out of nowhere. 

The big question is this: Is Chrono Cross a classic gem worth revisiting (or in my case, visiting for the first time)?

My plan is to have it finished and posted by next Friday, which shouldn't be an issue this time. It will be similar to the one I did for Shin Megami Tensei V, but I might bump up the word count to around 1250 words so I can better explain aspects like the combat system and the visual novel, Radical Dreamers (pictured above).

Until then, have a great week!

Shin Megami Tensei V: A Mystical Marriage of Knowledge and Life (Nintendo Switch)

No, this is not verdict by a long shot, but there's a lot of grotesque demons on your journey to Godhood. (Captured in Handheld Mode.)

One of the things I learned getting back into video games was that sometimes, sniffing the roses too much might take away from the actual experience. A simpler version of this occurred when I first started playing Shin Megami Tensei for myself with the forth mainline entry in which a medieval kingdom discovered the smartwatch before the steam engine. I almost stopped playing partly because of this weird disconnect, but additionally because medusa wiped the floor with me while I was trying to make my way down to Tokyo. 

A little over a year later, I decided to give that game a second shot and told myself, “I’m not going to worry about why the calvary can operate an advanced digital watch without any trouble.” It worked, I defeated medusa and discovered that underneath that unusual detail was an interesting world and a game that focuses on both theological figures and philosophical matters. Simply put: Gods, angels, and demons get tossed into the post-apocalypse and the player tries to figure out their own ideological leanings while fighting them off.         

Shin Megami Tensei V continues this trend where you play a role of a high school student who, upon investigating a tunnel in search of someone’s older brother, finds himself in another world called Da’at at the pointy end of a daemon’s spear. In flash of light, a humanoid-like figure shows up by the name of Aogami, fusing with you to become a god-like being known as a Nahobino in order to help you strike down the daemon and start your journey to reshape the new world. 

One of the game's strength-based attacks. Or alternatively: Nahobino claws a cryptid in Konan. (Captured in Docked Mode)

Gameplay-wise SMT V is an all-around joy to play in which the classic “press” turn system gets emphasized even more with strength-based, elemental attacks and the new Magatsuhi gauge where upon filling it, all of your attacks deal critical damage until your next turn. Recruiting demons feels more straightforward than in previous games where you could end up losing precious resources because of a simple difference in opinion. Fusing new demons is even easier. No longer do you need to do advanced searches or take a gamble on a fusion since the game allows you to look up all possible combinations with a tap of a button—either for the demons in your stock, or them plus the ones registered to your Demon Compendium. 

Sophia, the deity who rules over the World of Shadows, also allows you to perform another type of fusion called “essence fusion”. This new mechanic blends the Magatama ingestion from Nocturne and the Demon Whispers from IV into another layer of customization for you and your demons, You can use essences that you find throughout Da’at in order to provide yourself and your team with skills that could turn the tide of future battles, or just to gain back a skill lost when fusing a new demon. However, once you fuse an essence, you lose it forever and unless you provide the Nahobino with Miracles, the entire essences’s skill set won’t be available to you. 

Miracles, much like the App Points system from IV and Apocalypse, provide you with additional quality-of-life improvements in exchange for Glory—which you can find throughout Da’at. Many miracles, however, are sealed until you prove your worth as a Nahobino by vanquishing demon nests on the map called Abscesses.

Not the best money shot by any means, but the Miman prove to be excellent tour guides for the Tokyo of yore. (Captured in Handheld Mode.) 

That’s the other major change about SMT V: Exploring Da’at. Previous entries took a more traditional, JRPG, approach where there Tokyo was the overworld and the districts acted as a “town” which sometimes had more monsters between shops than on the streets. With Da’at, the game takes an open world approach with four huge urban wastelands where you can encounter monsters in the open and find treasures within geometric gold alongside Glory crystals for the afermentioned miracles. Terminals from previous games are replaced with leyline crossings which serve the same purpose and then some—saving, fusion, healing, and shopping are all under the same roof.

There are also other things to scour in the post-apocalyptic wasteland—relics that are stuck inside vending machines, the Miman that somewhat reminded me of the Koroks from Breath of the Wild, and the afermentioned Abscesses which blot out any nearby markers until you destroy them.

Between the exploration and the gameplay, Shin Megami Tensei V lives up to the excitement I had for the game when they announced it. The series is one of the very few roleplaying games where I enjoy grinding out levels and this game just makes that experience even better. 

World-building from familiar territory featuring the game's two allegorical stand-ins for law and chaos. (Captured in Handheld Mode) 

The story? This is where the game falls short. Not in the “smartwatch samurai in the middle ages” sort of way, but in the game’s philosophical and theological dealings. The transition from voice-acted visual novel to full-on cutscenes, and the major changes to gameplay mechanics, meant that the narrative as a whole took the backseat. Considering how the combat and exploration turned out, this is far from a bad thing.

When it comes to trying to persuade you to go with one alignment or the other though, the game has a bad case of tunnel vision. There’s a major focus on one particular character through quite a large chunk of the game to the point where he gets more cutscene time than any other. The other main characters, who also act as alignment allegories, barely get the same amount of time on camera. One of them even sits out for an entire section of Da’at. Even if it’s not exactly how the alignment system works, the lack of arguments for or against a particular world vision make the overall story much weaker. Sure, near the end they do have a brief tit-for-tat, but that’s it.

Things is, much like the weird nature of the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado in Shin Megami Tensei IV, Shin Megami Tensei V finds ways to shift the focus from the elements which don’t exactly mesh together to what works. It's a turn-based roleplaying game with battles that are fast-paced and challenging, but gives players enough to work with in order to make their journey to Godhood a smooth one.

    

In Sum: A game that brings a lot of changes to a series, putting gameplay and exploration center stage, but making the story and philosophical debate second fiddle. A mystical marriage which values life a little more than knowledge, but remains a strong candidate as a potential god for the new world.

Score: 8.5 out of 10 

Additional notes: The nods back to Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne are really cool whether it’s the sandy nature of Da’at, the monster designs that carried over, or other little references scattered throughout the game. 

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.   

Ink for August 25th, 2021

Hurricane Henri made landfall as a strong tropical storm on Sunday morning and my neighborhood managed to survive the storm without losing electricity. There was little to no flooding damage on my street and the local utility company manage to get the power restored to the town by midnight on Monday. I was talking with Mayor Hedrick at work on Monday who confirmed the last point alongside Aundré Bumgardner's Twitter feed on Sunday. 

I probably should've wrote this blog post around Monday as it's a retraction of the blog post I wrote on Saturday announcing a delay in posting. I feared the worst with Henri, as I did with Irene and Sandy, and I panicked over the weekend—at one point I was moving some of my most valued belongings into bags that would end up in the basement. 

I'm glad I was wrong and feel fortunate that this was the case. There were a few people in Rhode Island I was worried about once I read about the sudden shift in trajectory—extended family and friends—and I'm glad to hear that they're doing okay with the utility and associated crews working tirelessly to restore electricity and clear any debris. 

It goes without saying that the Twitter thread last night is a placeholder at this point—which mostly reiterates the information I mentioned above—and will be deleted by the time you're reading this. 

Mentally, between my worries and work, I'm exhausted. I may take it easy for the rest of the week to recuperate. There are some ideas for future blog posts that I'd like to try out—a combined review of Axiom Verge and its sequel for one—and I ideally want to get back into the (semi) daily entries. Right now, I need to relax a little. 

Hope you all are having a wonderful week!