Well, I shit the bed this week. Forgot to post stuff. Uhhhhhh... due to not having a clue what to post for yesterday a day late, here are three reviews of games that I can't talk too much about because it would ruin everything if they get spoiled. YEAH! That'll do!
I'm a horrible person
Video games and I have been strangers for the last couple of years. It seems like I always have one on the go, but I never finish a damn thing. In the last two months, I have actually beaten three of my new favourite triple A titles. Are theses the best games of all time? No; Mass Effect 2, The Legend of Zelda, Limbo and FTL are going to stay strong in my heart for a long time, me thinks. These are just the three games that either caught me off guard with how great they really are, or they came out of nowhere and blew me away.
Far Cry 3
Never have I seen a game pull off the idea of a character loosing their sense of being so honestly as in Far Cry 3. You watch your brother die in the first twenty minuets of the game, and not even 200 paces later you are murdering some poor sod. Your character then proceeds to freak out and panic, writhing in terror over what he has just done. A lot of people claimed that the new Tomb Raider game did a better job of showing this loss of insanity, but riddle me this; did Tomb Raider have a segment where Laura was confiding in a recently saved friend that she is starting to love the power that comes with taking a life? Jason, our lead protagonist, begins explaining to a comrade how great it has begun to feel to squeeze the last breath from another human being. You hear the voice actor change his voice from terror at the idea of pulling the trigger, to laughing hardily while burning people alive with a flame thrower. Great voice cast, and even better controls. This game is a must play for any FPS fan.
Persona 4 Golden
Persona 4 is probably one of the most Japanese games I have ever played. The basic premise is that you are just some high school kid who gets lodged into some small town because your parents have taken off for a year or two to work in the states or something like that. When you arrive, you get unpacked, you go to school, and you make friends. Then you find out that someone is using an alternate world that is within the television to murder people in horrendous ways and, for some unknown reason, your misfit collective is the only humans on the planet who can stop the killings. I know this sounds terrible, BUT MY GOD IT'S SO ADDICTIVE! This is one of those games that you play when no one is around but for some reason you still feel obligated to wear headphones. It's touching, coy and surprisingly realistic. I found myself either agreeing with characters or comparing them to friends that I either have or did have at one time. There isn't much else to say about this game: so much of it is in the execution. All I can say is that if you enjoy Anime and JRPG's, please play this game. It's fantastic.
Bioshock Infinite
The hardest game to give any information on without giving something away. It was beautiful, exciting, intelligent and graceful. The characters are beautifully written and the world is brilliantly conceived. The combat is a bit clunky in its frenetic pacing, but I feel like it almost works with the bizarre animation and motion capture. The voice acting is Godly (per usual with the series) and a couple of the twists actually caught me off guard. However, through all this praise, I cannot say that this game is better than Bioshock one. Back in 2007, Bioshock literally destroyed my expectation on story delivery in both video games AND movies. Half the time I actually forgot that the main character was silent. It flowed with mostly due to its almost horror pacing mixed with very cut throat fighting. This game set the bar so high in my mind that few, if any, games could compare.
Well, this blog is going to have a couple of parts to it. It has been a busy week in my head, and in person, not a whole lot has happened.
First off, I spent very little time at home researching things to blog about for Wednesday, thus the no show. I wanted to have an interview done, in all honesty. It's something I think would be neat because I have never done one before. So, on Tuesday morning, I realized that I was 3 days behind in prep, let alone in actual work. Life goes on.
I purchased myself a new laptop this week! By new, I mean my first laptop ever. I picked up the acer Chromebook. It's pretty in it's simplicity. So far I have used it for browsing, a thrilling round of Angry Birds, and now this blog post into starting bit. It is kind of strange; I feel like I'm using an oversized tablet. The screen is small (11.5 inches) and the keyboard is bizarre, but I'm enjoying its company all the same. I think I'm going to name him Ace. Every piece of electronics need a name. Except consoles: They do not have a soul.
Since I haven't pushed this thing yet, I'm not sure of it's processing power. It is hard to push a PC that is a web browser and, therefore, you have to go out of your way to find games.
{Please be kind to the following opinion piece about the music industry}
EVERYONE MUST REMEMBER THAT RECORD STORE DAY IS APRIL 20TH. GO FIND A LOCAL RECORD STORE AND LET THEM KNOW YOU APRECIATE THEM.
Yes, there will be a lot of links to allmusic.com for this next bit. Mostly because I feel like they have some solid information. Partially because I like links.
I have had a few conversations about where the music industry is going this week. I see it either crashing and going the way of the late '80s/early '90s, or the more early '80s. Early '80s being a world of happy people being happy about the everything they think they have, and the early '90s being a world of "fuck the mainstream." Right now it appears to be something along the line of an over saturation of bands who all either sound the same or use the same ideas to convey the popular sound. The underground is starting to swell again to the same capacity like the early 2000s when we had the emo invasion happening beside the semi hip-hop British Invasion-Inspired sounds by bands like The Gorillaz and Danger Mouse making huge waves. Along the sides of all of that, Jack White was getting his start with The White Stripes and Weezer made a come back. All of a sudden, it seemed like those bands started to become background to acts that used those ideas and made them accessible to everyone. Even bands that had been around forever changed their sound just enough to fit in. The prime examples being Kings of Leon having a single (and album) which barely resembled the previous albums.
My personal hope is for the industry to change in every way. We already have had a major upset with things like home recording and self distribution becoming incredibly easy and cheap. This has caused a massive over saturation of sounds and ideas which has a major up (new music always popping up and around) and major downs (a million to one odds to find anything to enjoy). The way I would like to see everything go is either a movement or a community in popular music. From what I have seen, there hasn't been a real mass community built around a band since Death Cab For Cutie circa 2005. Back then, it was rare to know someone who wasn't either gushing over how great Plans was, or how Transatlanticism was better. Regardless of your views, it felt like everyone had some sort of tie to that band. Now it feels like there is a greater segregation between cliques. I will admit, this may be an age thing: although I work at a music store, I haven't been a part of a community that wasn't metal in years. Please, for the love of all that is Holy, let this paragraph be my absence from something amazing, then let me know how to get in.
A movement is something I feel like I have always missed out on. I came in late for the early 2000s punk uprising, but too early for the Emo brigade. I jumped ship from metal just before the death metal revival of 2005 (I say that because Cephalic Carnage had just released Anomalies), and I hated the people jumping into the post-post-hardcore. I only really got into math rock in the last few years and this fucking country has always had shit electro.
I would like to conclude with what I think this current music industry is doing right from my perspective and where they could improve. I think bringing vinyl back to the forefront was a brilliant move. Though I do not have exact numbers (hook ups?), I know that new music sales at my work have increased exponentially since we started carrying vinyl. I sell (on average) a record a day with one record a week being a new release.
Digital distribution is probably a new market standard for top twenty groups thanks to the reinstatement of the single buying ability: it is quite nice to grab that one song if the rest of the album sucks. I do not think iTunes will reign supreme for another decade, but they will try.
BandCamp.com has made everything so beautiful for the independent musician and label. With free download readily available for those who want to do so, plus the introduction of the supplied online store, TuneCore and iTunes actually have a true competitor on the field. I just hope they can keep it up without corruption.
