PAD #3: Better Late Than Never

Whoops!  Got sucked into watching some Game Grumps and completely spaced on getting a post in today.  I guess technically it's tomorrow as of thirty minutes ago (at time of writing), but I haven't gone to bed yet, so I'm counting it. =P  Bastion did it's fair share as well.  Yeah, after a bit of Transistor, I felt like playing Supergiant's premier title.  Partially for nostalgia, partially because they added a few new achievements that I never got around to earning after 100% it the first time around.  It's been niggling at me for a while, but for some reason I never felt compelled to actually get them until now.  So it'll be good getting that outta the way.

As it turns out (and admittedly this is a few-days-old news), Total Biscuit has been diagnosed with colon cancer.  That is absolutely terrible, but I've seen in discussions that it can be one of the easier cancers to have to deal with.  Silver linings and all that.  Perhaps worse than his condition, though, is that there are honestly people celebrating this.  Really, people?  Like him or hate him (or his work), you just don't celebrate that kinda thing.  There is nobody I loathe enough that I would wish that kinda thing on them.  Certainly there are people where the news wouldn't phase me much, but I still wouldn't be glad to hear it.  There's disliking someone, and then there's just... I don't even know how to describe that level of depravity.  Whatever, though.  They are terrible people, and hopefully TB isn't letting them get to him.  Soldier on, you Cynical Britt.

After listening to the soundtrack a fair bit, I've decided that In Circles is my favorite song in Transistor.  There's just something about the emotion in that song that I love.  You can really feel the contempt towards the character in question in the singer's voice, and it just gives the situation a powerful feeling while you're fighting that boss.  By which I mean that the song actually makes me feel somewhat sorry for that character during the fight.  Without wishing to get into spoilers (even though it's an early event in the game), you definitely understand Red's desire to see this character killed, but at the same time the character has lost so much of her mind that - between In Circles playing in the background, and the boss's only semi-coherent ravings while she fights - the battle almost feels more like putting down Old Yeller than plain old fashioned revenge.  It's probably both my favorite and least favorite part of the game with how well they make the player feel sorry for the boss, but at the same time making it clear that there's no redeeming her at this point.

PAD #1: Introducing the "Post-A-Day" Challenge

Bleh.  Seems every time I want to revive this thing, I fall back off the wagon.  Maybe I was just feeling too pressured to write about relevant content that I ended-up just not writing at all.  I dunno.  In any case, I've decided to start a new challenge: the PAD, or Post A Day.  Basically, I want to start logging onto here once per day and just write.  About whatever (though I'm going to avoid politics as much as possible, because it's just a headache to discuss with most people).  Usually it'll be something nerd-related because hey, I am who I am.  My hope is that I can ramble at least 3 paragraphs-worth of stuff, and that it'll lead to me wanting to elaborate more on something that I mentioned during a PAD, which will lead to me creating more coherent and focused posts about stuff that people might actually want to read.  So I can't guarantee that every PAD will be interesting, but this is a little more for my sake than anything else.

So Transistor finally came out this week, and frankly, I loved it.  Loved it!  I love the music, I love the art design on the levels (just the art in general, really), I love the skill system, I love the story, and I definitely love some of the little touches that technically don't even do anything, like being able to press a button that causes the main character to stop and hum along with the background music.  This isn't to say that the game is flawless, just that the flaws that it does have were smothered under all the other things that I adored.  Seems the big controversy with the game (if you can take games seriously enough to use such a serious-sounding term, but it's a thing being discussed a lot among the community, so the term fits) is that it's a bit short for the price.  Admittedly, yes, it is a short game.  I don't mind that so-much though.  It's one of those things that got smothered under all the good.  Is Transistor short?  Yes, but it's such an amazing experience for the time that it lasts that I'm not bothered by the price.  It's a short game, but it's a game that I've already beaten twice, and am still itching for another run-through.  To me it's a matter of quality over quantity, which is why I always hate when people start talking "time to beat" as a means to measure whether or not a game is worth buying.

X-Men came out today.  Hoping to go see it tomorrow, and my hopes are still on the low side.  On the plus side, MovieBob gave it a not terrible review, though I'll have to see if I agree with his observation of how the X-Men movies have apparently been time-locked in the era when the first movies launched.  His point basically being that despite a decade's-worth of movies having passed between now and when the first X-Men movie was launched, the most recent one feels like it could have been released in that same year.  On the one hand it isn't necessarily a bad thing, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as the saying goes.  On the other, it's worth noting that the first X-Men came out when movies were still too afraid to embrace their comic book nature.  Bear in mind that it predates everything related to The Avengers, a movie that basically proved that comic book movies can look like the comics and still appeal to a massive audience.  So I dunno, I guess we'll have to see.  Maybe I'll be watching the movie and feeling like it looks a little antiquated despite being a brand new release.

And with that, I feel this is a good place to close today's PAD.  With any luck, this will have me well on my way to getting used to sitting down and just typing.  I also hope to improve my spelling and grammar a bit, because I can't be a grammar pirate if my own writing isn't up to snuff.  And if anyone sees a topic they'd like to see elaborated further, feel free to comment and I'll do what I can.