Annotated Appendix: Finale

So here we are.

For the final episode, I actually had much grander plans for how the last few minutes would play: a montage of Richter Mode with the "thank you!" voice over. But, oddly, I had tons of time between the endings playing out and I Am The Wind's interminable running length. In an effort to keep this episode to a respectable running time, I thought the montage would be overkill, so I scrapped it in favor of tightening things up. See? You guys told me that you didn't like silence, so I kept it to a minimum.

It tugs at me, though, that the finale of the video series winds up with I Am the Wind, but it just doesn't make sense to elongate the episode. Sorry if you may have found it slightly anticlimactic, but I hope you understand the reasoning now. If anything, this is the only episode where I wished I had more to talk about. Maybe it was just the grieving process for it ending starting to take hold or something, but I really wracked my brain (and my notes) to include anything else I possibly could, but everything left was stuff obviously read in-game (like how large the dev team was, which is clearly indicated in the credits that you would be watching).

And there we have it. One major project in the books. To answer some questions that I've gotten about this all happened, here's...

How Some of the Sausage Was Made, Part 1

The voice recording was done with a Blue Snowball microphone. I have a friend that freelances as a voice actor and some other pals that podcast, and they unanimously recommended it to me for the quality it delivers at the price it sells for. It really did a hell of a job for a USB mic, and I can't say enough good things about it. I'm sure I could have done more research and found something better, but I'm not an audio engineer, so it was perfect for me.

I recorded all of the voice overs using Audacity, which is a freeware program that anybody can download and use. At first, I found it kind of obtuse, but since I wasn't really doing anything super fancy with it other than recording, editing, and then exporting into .mp3 format, it did the job. I would generally write a script first and then edit it a bit (not a lot, which is a flaw of mine that other editors probably hate about me) before launching into the recording, and then I would edit the recording immediately after. The recording process probably took a little over an hour per episode based on how many mistakes I made that needed to be corrected. I'm not a professional narrator or anything, but I've taken a handful of acting classes when I was in college (English majors could do that as electives, you see), and recalled some of the golden rules when I needed them most. The best, in this case was "slow down," because, like everyone else, the faster you do things the more likely they are to turn out rough, and this includes reading a script that you wrote yourself.

Generally, after editing the sound, I would walk my laptop over to my PlayStation 3 and jump right into the game footage capture, which was done using an Elgato Game Capture HD and Elgato's capture software. This was generously loaned to me by a friend, and not a moment too soon. At first, as I was trying to do this whole thing on a budget and decided to simply emulate everything. The problem is that I'm using a laptop that's a little more than three years old now, and wasn't even close to top of the line when I bought it. Though I was still using a disk to play Symphony using ePSXe, the frame rate would drop at very inconvenient times, and after doing a test run of the game, I just knew in my guts that it would be compromised if I did the final videos this way. Thanks to the good will of a good pal, the Symphony footage in the series was taken off of a PS3.

Everything else you see is emulated, though. Even though I own all of these game in one form or another (except one of them. No, I won't tell you which) (ok, it's Kid Dracula) (Kid Dracula sucks), I didn't have the Elgato handy during the early research period, and found it best to just download roms off of the internet. At first, though, I still didn't have a clear idea how to capture the footage. After a little research, I settled on FRAPS, which is a free software specifically for game capture, but a small fee gives you a few extra bells and whistles, as well as the removal of a FRAPS watermark on every video. It may sound kind of snobby, but having a billboard for computer programs all over most of my videos was not something I was happy about, so I spent the $37 on the full version of the program.

This is where things get stupid, though. When the laptop was new, it was loaded with the horrendous Windows 8 with the promise of a free update to 10 sooner than later. Since I never wanted to deal with 8, I never did a lot of experimenting with it, and when 10 finally came, I had no idea that the on board Xbox software had native video capturing, so most of the older games and side bits of Symphony were captured using that when I finally realized it was there. FRAPS was still useful, though, as some things didn't play nicely with the Xbox software, so the money was still well spent.

Lucky for me, though, I never throw anything out, and boxes full of old-ish stuff really helped me save a bunch of cash on this. A few years ago, a friend of mine gave me his old PlayStation 2 (I had traded up for a backward compatible PS3 when they were new. When it died a noble death,  I was stuck with a mountain of unplayable PS2 games for years), but with a busted controller. I went ahead and hunted down an OEM PS2 controller, and just happened to have a USB adapter for it that I had bought on a work trip to Cincinnati when I wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII on my work laptop (maybe around 2008? I can't remember). As my wife and I are people with thousands of compact disks sitting digitized on a hard drive, we looked slightly ahead and bought a 1TB external drive to back everything up a few years ago, and this is where all of the captured video was stored.

All of the video editing was done using Sony Vegas Pro 11, which is now a pretty old version of the program. This was also gifted to me by the friend with the Elgato, and it took some work to get it to do what I envisioned with this series. The learning curve was steep, but not as bad as it would have been without YouTube and the ocean of tutorials on it. I've come to find later that while SVP may not be as ubiquitous in the editing community as the Adobe suite of products, it worked great. I've also found that it's very affordable for what it can do (at least, for what I used it for), so it gets the thumbs up from me.

Finally, yes, I was using the copy of Symphony that my parents gave me for Christmas just after my 18th birthday. It will never leave my possession if I'm still of sound mind.

Tomorrow, I'll post what is a photographic tour of how this all came together.

Thanks again for watching!

A Thing of Beauty

On Saturdays, I like to do what's become known in my house as "long cardio day." This means that I go to the gym and run on the treadmill like the boring 30-something that I am and then, and then, do another 30 minutes on the elliptical machine. 60 minutes of cardio! That's long, man!

But life, as it does, is starting to wag its finger in my face about that. Minor and subtle aches creep into my legs more often than they used to these days, which is something I once thought was major problem and is now just one of those normal things you accept. I used to think that I was an 80 year-old guy trapped in 28 year-old's body. Now, I'm just some dude.

Whenever I actually stop to give these little pains some real thought --which, kind of never happens, I guess-- I'm always reminded of my time in college training in Kyokushin karate. Mostly, I'm reminded of how often I would come home from practice with my bell rung because I never kept my hands up during fights with one of the Japanese students (whom were goddamn Kyokushin wizards). "Minor aches and pains" were often sore shins and bruised chest muscles from taking a few training beatings. We're talking 2000-2002 here, which means that MMA was still very much a niche thing, and it wasn't as easy to find a gym that taught hard-contact fighting as it might be today. Dumb-lucking into it on my own college campus at such a time was kind of spectacular. I stopped training in martial arts after I graduated from college because I was broke and couldn't find a suitable Kyokushin replacement in the Cleveland area (though it was the broke thing, mostly), but these are times I remember fondly; ass beatings notwithstanding.

Ok, then. Look at this. I mean, really, skip to the 54 second mark of this video and gaze upon this poetic thing of beauty:

Really quick, I'm not a violent guy. I'm very even-tempered, and my full time job requires that I maintain that kind of disposition. But, man, this combo. This is a pre-programmed chain (the Street Fighter games call them "target combos" now) that originated in Tekken 4. No, I don't mean the dumb uppercut/ sidekick thing at the end, I mean the four kicks and punches that came in such a succinct and brutal manner beforehand. Tekken 4, in all honesty, is a piece of shit in Tekken terms, but this combo is not. From a fighter's perspective, it looks like it was made in a laboratory full of mad Kyokushin geniuses. In a stand-up fight in a ring, these four hits, aligned in such an economical symphony of body movement, is at once startlingly efficient in its systemic ways of butchering an opponent as it is fluid in its seemingly simple mechanics. I can't not talk about this combo.

Piece-of-Shit-Tekken 4 came out at a time in my Kyokushin training when we were taking a break from learning the often useless perfunctory of katas so we could focus on why most of us were in the class: to train for and compete in tournaments. What makes it unique compared to its far superior predecessor, if only to two or three males in Bowling Green, OH at the turn of the millennium, was its copious inclusion of Kyokushin tidbits. From an attract mode kata to story mode implications to combos like this one, the ghost of Oyama's style looms heavily over the game, and it was impossible for someone training in the form to miss it. Naturally, we even tried to replicate what we were playing while sparring, at least as best we could. In the game, the combo in question isn't entirely useful compared to other ways of closing the distance and finishing someone off. IRL, though. if I can get off that first kick to your head, even blocked, then you would remember it. It is as gorgeous and perfect as the Spring sun upon a flowered meadow. I swear to God I'm not joking about this.

So let's break it down, movement by movement. It certainly looks simple enough to perform, and it's relatively short length is deceptive in the damage that it would deal to a human body, but that's part of the beauty. The reality, here, is that these are all pinpointed movements to shorten the space between you and the target before quickly attacking individual locations on the body to cripple them and end the fight.

It starts before the high round kick with the left leg to the head. In the video, right-handed Kazuya deftly switches his stance to the left while inching forward (or "kosa," and if he were rounding the side of the opponent subtly to do it --which would have only made to make this combo that much fucking crazier-- it would have been a "sabaki" movement). This looks like he's just taking a step forward with his right leg (and, in a way, it is), but this takes planning and forethought in a real fight to dope an opponent into letting their guard down to pull it off. From here, the kick comes to the side of the head, as roundhouse kicks are meant to do, but isn't intent on going through the target as roundhouse kicks normally should. While certainly designed to hurt, the kosa movement and then kick scoots Kazuya forward for one of two mutually useful effects: either it hits the guy in the head to daze them, or gets their hands up to block the kick. The payoff of the latter will come soon.

It's here that we need to take a quick second and swoon like the child I am at Kazuya's form with this kick, because that leads us into the next movement. Like most Japanese fighters, the mechanics of his round kick form a motion that resembles a person running: left foot forward/ left hand back/ right foot back/ right hand forward. This is intentionally taught, because to get this seemingly easy concept down in execution takes a substantial amount of practice. And for good reason, too, because if you're doing it right, you'll obtain the maximum amount of force for the kick. But we just discussed that force wasn't the point of this particular attack, though it would certainly be handy here.

Now the left hand comes as the left leg returns to the floor. However, Kazuya didn't wheel his hip backward after his left kick like most people would after the connection. Instead, he drops his foot to the ground after the strike snaps to use it as his final movement forward so as to ease into the range of the left punch, which was already in the chamber. Though it's just a guy kicking and then punching, doing both from one side of the body in succession is something of a counter-intuitive movement without having practiced it extensively. But carefully looking at how Kazuya pulls it off makes it deceptively seamless. The reality of it is simple body mechanics, like the rest of the combo: as his hips are turned for the kick, placing the foot down and forward after the strike readies the already-cocked left arm for quick release.

Most novice or intermediate opponents probably know that this isn't a common movement, this punch off of the kicking leg's side, and indeed it subverts the typical left/right/left/right techniques that are common to a student's early training. It's actually hard to notice without slowing down the video or pausing at the right moment, but the eventual punch goes slightly downward into the collarbone or top of the chest, implying that this wasn't meant to be the real breadwinner of these four movements, either (although the dummy in the video is just bending backward for effect). But imagine this combo like a four syllable word or phrase, and where the emphasis is placed is a decision for the speaker. One could really get some force out of that punch, but judging by what you see from next two moves that follow, it doesn't feel totally necessary.

For that, we're going back to basic body mechanics. With clever movement, Kazuya is now re-positioned back to his original right-handed stance. This happened concurrent with the punch, which readies his hips with ample amounts of torque for the back right leg to throw a devastating low round kick. This is a somewhat short ranged move that the first two attacks placed Kazuya in perfect range for. In the gym, the kick would strike on the side (or top) of the opponent's thigh, with the point of impact being the bottom of Kazuya's shin --something harder than the fragile arch of his foot-- into the meat of the leg. But that's the nice guy way of doing things. In a combat situation where Kazuya's life might depend on it, he would nail the other schmuck on the side of the knee to try to blow out the joint which, if it connects, is about as cruel as it sounds. Even if that's not the case, a full-speed kick like this to the quad is a real bruiser, even if it's not the most common way of turning someone's lights out like a roundhouse to the back of the head might be. The low kick snaps back to ready Kazuya's hips for the final blow.

Now, if you grew up watching martial arts movies as a kid, you easily condition yourself into thinking that real hand-to-hand fighting has a secret vocabulary of enchanted movements. When it comes to actual training, though, this gets demystified for you pretty quickly once you get passed learning specific techniques and logistical movement. From there, it's just practice, practice, practice until you get your body able to do things that opponents flat out don't see coming or can't react to. Basically, once you move out of the newbie stage, there aren't any secrets anymore.

Except one.

I'm writing this on a Monday. Before I had my kid, Mondays were often the day of the week that meant an apology note should be sent to my liver. Maybe even a large, though tasteful, bouquet of flowers. I would do terrible things to my liver on the weekends, and if I were still training in Kyokushin, Mondays are the days that I would pay for them the worst. The liver, you see, is located on the front right side of the body just outside of the abdominal region, but not quite to your profile. It is soft, and easy to target. It will also make a grown man crumple to his knees when given the right kind of shot, and it's a shot that takes even less effort depending on how much this grown man drinks. The liver is the great, mythic hot spot in a martial art that doesn't typically allow punches to the face during open tournaments; it can do the most amount of real punishment with comparatively minimal effort in terms of energy consumption (round kicks to the face, unsurprisingly, take a lot out of you). At the risk of sounding even more meatheaded than the rest of this blog already has, one good smack to the liver hurts like a motherfucker. It's the best.

A good left hook would do it, and our buddy Kazuya had built the previous three movements to carefully worm his way there. Though painful, the first two attacks set up a perfect sleight-of-hand misdirection to take the opponent's defense away from the tender right side of their body: a blocked high round kick gets the arm up, which will try to defend the left straight punch, which wouldn't even see the fast low round kick coming at that range (which is gravy here), opening up to a perfect drill to the chops. Conversely, if the first kick really lands, the subsequent techniques would render a body limp enough that no kind of arm flailing would sufficiently block that last hit. The opponent crumples in a heap before him, and this fight's over. After taking my share of liver punches, I can tell you with perfect confidence that this is the natural conclusion.

I cannot stress enough how difficult it can be to make your body do these things with this kind of fluidity. But after a certain amount of practice and a little bit of forethought, it's an amazingly economical way of beating the snot out of someone. It's a stone cold beating with absolutely zero wasted movement. Each technique is at the ready even during the first step, and it simply needs the correct speed and follow-through to put someone on the floor. I could never get all four shots off at the speed in which video game Kazuya pulls it off, but it was good enough for me to try, and strangely spectacular to have video game Kazuya show me the way. The Japanese guys in class eventually sniffed it out and nailed me for it. But like I said, those guys were Kyokushin maestros anyway.

Curiously, further Tekken games would alter this perfect sonnet of human movement to make it less realistic; the final blow blasting an opponent backward like they were being pushed out of a helicopter. Judging by how this combo video follows up the movement with the (dumb) uppercut/ sidekick connection, it seem like that was probably the most balanced way of handling things with the total amount of damage that it can incur. But that's just video games. This is a perfect combo.

This Is Good, Isn't It?

Earlier today, I posted a comment on USGamer.net --a very cool website that's been publishing a lot of my work over the last few months (all of which will renew your faith in whatever you lost faith in)-- that ran along the lines of what you're about to read. After a little more thought, though, I've decided to expand on that because of how important this particular moment in history really is for me. I guess we can couple this with that monstrous write up on Final Fantasy X I did a little while back as another nerd compass-altering moment in my life. Anyway...

In about four hours, which would be midnight Eastern time, Metal Gear Solid V will have completed downloading and will be unlocked for my verbose cut scene-watching pleasure (as if I could stay awake for any of them at that point). As the media has been reporting close to nonstop for months now, this will absolutely be series director Hideo Kojima's final game in a franchise he's shepherded for 25ish years now, and will (maybe) bring the nutty sci-fi saga of a group of cloned soldiers and their genetic "father" to a close.

Equally nutty is how buying this game for me was far from a no-brainer with what I'm about to tell you. I soured on the series a bit over time, and Kojima's quirks and odd personal obsessions have gone from charming, if a little obtuse over the years to grating and often childish. I agree that he's a very intelligent guy that's done some really great things, but having nearly absolute control over that which he had made was slowly turning Metal Gear into a shell of itself. But that's an argument for another time.

What's important is this:

Without Metal Gear Solid, video games would no longer exist to me.

Hyperbolic, sure, but from where I'm sitting --especially this far after the fact-- it's no less true. I have a friend that likes to tell me that he simply gave up on playing video games after he played Super Mario Bros. 3 as a little kid. In his mind, nothing would be as great ever again, so there was no point in continuing on. Yes, I certainly find this to be defeatist reasoning, but I can't really call him out on his choice; Mario 3 is pretty much a masterpiece by all accounts, and if you're going to hang it up somewhere, that's as good a place as any.

After many, many mowed lawns and shoveled snow, I had owned a PlayStation since its launch. The first year or so was kind of rough, really. Only the first Wipeout was a standout game to me (and I'm not into racing games), while Toshinden and Jumping Flash, however swell they may have looked, just weren't really good games. After the languish of the launch window had ended, though, legitimate, great games were starting to trickle out before the deluge of spectacular software arrived that the PSOne is now known for. Resident Evil. Tekken 2. Final Fantasy VII. All good, and even one or two deservedly revered games (though I've warmed to FF7 over the years). This was a pretty exciting time, really. Studios and publishers could still make high quality games relatively cheaply, and the advent of accessible 3D technology for consumers meant that it was the dawn of the gaming medium's angsty adolescence --one we're just on the verge of moving past now, sort of. By the end of '97, though, none of that heady shit mattered.

Castlevania Symphony of the Night, set up next to its contemporaries, looked old as frozen dog turds thawed from a late spring. It had the nerve to a pixel sprite game in an age where it had no business sitting on the same shelves as most other releases during such a monumental year. But that's just what the publishers and certain corners of the gaming press wanted you to believe at the time. History has proven my, and I suppose the entire world's opinion valid in saying that it is a strikingly beautiful game, then and now, with a soundtrack that just about any video game since Spacewar! would kill their mothers to have. I don't need to get into what makes SotN such a transcendent masterwork (though I probably have before) since it's been universally praised these last 18 or so years. But it's not a joke when I say that if a gun was held to my head, Symphony of the Night is probably my favorite video game of all time. Full stop.

It was also a game that was released during the middle of my final year of high school, though. So, for as optimistic as I was for the future of gaming at a time when astounding evolution was happening at such a rapid pace, life for me was changing right along with it, just in its own, almost mundane way. I played through it at least five times before my prom, and once or twice more over that terrifying limbo summer leading up to moving into a dorm, so I was firmly entrenched in SotN and made no bones about telling whomever that would listen how much of a goddamn buffoon they were for not playing this game. But, you know, life isn't all about that when your comfort level is blown all to hell during your first few months of college.

Honestly, games were starting to kind of leave me cold when I was a confused college freshmen in 1998. I had plenty of other things to deal with, like school work, meeting new people, trying to meet girls, hoping I didn't gain the Freshmen 15, freaking out that I didn't belong where I was, and wishing that life was back to the way it had been 12 months earlier. I had brought my PSOne and my Genesis with me to school and still lived on a steady diet of Tekken 3 with the poor saps on my floor that dared throw down with me, but new games weren't that exciting anymore. I had given up reading magazines, and only checked the Imagine Games Network site once in a while when I was bored. By then, I was getting comfortable with the idea of letting go, and finding other hobbies to fill my time, like, you know, college.

My roommate, though, contended with his own home sickness in the polar opposite way. A nice guy, and not a really hardcore gamer, he came from a somewhat affluent background that meant that if he needed or wanted something, it was only a phone call and a UPS box away. This included games. Normally, I wasn't interested; they were mostly N64 games that nobody gave two shits about (ok, until Mario Party came out and the entire end of our campus flooded into our room for nightly screaming matches that, to this day, makes a vein pop from my forehead. I hate Mario Party). But when Metal Gear Solid found its way to our disproportionately small PO box that October, our poor post-high school brains were blown all over the dorm room walls. Nobody had seen a game like this before, with its cinematic production value and sweeping, well-voice narrative. Word got out around the rest of the floor, and long, nightly parties playing MGS began in earnest; jumping from room to room, an ever growing crowd of guys following a couple of CDs and a memory card from one PlayStation to the next. It was all anyone wanted to talk about. But not for me.

No, for me, Metal Gear Solid was downright seismic. I resigned to play the game on my own, with nobody else present, and between the larger sessions that were happening all around me. I was so entranced with the game and transfixed with playing it on my own terms that I would avoid conversations about it, and even proto-internet spoilers that happened in the campus rec center or in the cafeterias were met with loud grunts of displeasure and looks of savage disgust. MGS was something that we could talk about, but we will talk about it after I finished it on my terms, and in my own way. This made me something of the dorm floor asshole for a minute, but the fury of mostly drunk 18 year-olds was a repute I was willing to accept. Metal Gear was changing me. It made video games mine again.

I don't often think about this, actually, which is really sort of strange for how important it turned out to become in the long term. I mean, college has plenty of pivitol memories attached to it no matter who you are, so when I think about that 4ish year stretch of my life, for whatever reason, MGS gets a little lost in the shuffle. Whenever I read a retrospective, though, my heart flutters a little bit, and  I drift back to punching Liquid in the mouth and going toe to toe with Ocelot. Getting the unlimited ammo bandanna for my next playthrough where I would intentionally save Otacon instead of Meryl. Killing Raven with claymore mines and not conventional weapons around the corner. I don't really love military-based games, and again, haven't been too psyched about the rest of the series for a long, long time, but Metal Gear Solid spoke to me in a way that was profound enough to drag me back into video games by the scruff of my neck.

Last week, my wife and I had our first baby. During the five days we spent in the hospital, I finally got a chance to steal about an hour or so of silence (at roughly 4:00am on Thursday) to listen to my early backer episode of this week's Retronauts retrospective on the series leading up to tonight's release of Phantom Pain. And I sat there, stupid grin from ear to ear, taking stock of not only the moment in time I found myself in, but how far I had come since 1998. It wasn't nostalgia, it was legitimate, bittersweet growth. All in the span of a podcast. It's been a long, strange, sometimes brutal and absolutely irreplaceable 17 years.

I have a different problem now compared to then, I suppose. Where I was getting to the point that I was fine with giving up on playing video games altogether --Symphony of the Night winding up being my Super Mario Bros. 3-- I'm in a place now that I want to play games more than ever, and one of them in particular. But who knows if I can anymore? I'm guessing probably a lot less, but I suppose you never can tell. I have something else going on for the next 17 years.

I'll let you know what happens.

Ahoy, January

Another year, another year. These things sure happen like clockwork, don't they? Life's been busy these past few months. Bought a house, taught a class, stopped writing, etc. Some of those things were fine. Others, less so. The whole house-buying thing was pretty stressful (like everybody says), but the payoff has been worth it. Sooner or later, I'll have a whole room to stash my stuff instead of pockets of space inside of a tiny apartment. Not being able to write, though? Pretty lousy, but let's not kid ourselves; I had a lot on my plate in the fall (and a lot more in the hopper now) and that can get in the way of writing for personal fulfillment, but I've been a little lazy these past few months.

So, what do you say we clean out some cobwebs? Like last January, here's a brief list of what I played these last few months in order of which I can remember them:

Catherine: See, the funny thing about Catherine is that I really wanted to play it, but I never wanted it in my house. The marketing for the game was a little on the salacious side, mostly having to do with the cover art it's accompanied promo materials. Now, my spicy wife is not a judgmental person and I'm certainly no prude, but even though I knew that the game wasn't that pervy from everything I heard about it, I never jumped that hurdle. Lucky for me, I have friend that will buy any video game if it's cheap enough, and he loaned me a copy of it roughly eight months ago. So, yeah. The irony that I never wanted to buy it because I though it might be sleezy never mattered because it sat firmly in my home for close to a year unplayed is not lost on me.

This same friend loaned me a stack of other games in October, so in an effort to clear the backlog of stuff that I didn't actually own, I bum rushed through all of them between December and last week. Of them, Catherine was the undisputed champ. A great, complex puzzle game and goofball anti-dating sim rolled into one, it was the unholy union of two genres I don't really care about made into something kind of brilliant. Sadly, it was the last of this round of borrowed games that I went through, so I forced myself to ratchet down the difficulty to Easy so I could finish it, but this might also wind up being the rare video game that I end up buying anyway because of how unique the whole thing was. I'm all talk, so we'll see about that, but still. I call that a good recommendation.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: This is Catherine's counterpoint in just about every way. An action game made by Platinum set in the Metal Gear Solid universe, it is both absurdly precise in its combat and stupidly verbose in everything else; a combination that made me want to turn it off for good more than once. Still weirdly satisfying until right at the end of the game which featured a final boss that was close to being another deal-breaker. I get that action games like this, especially ones made by the mad scientists behind Bayonetta and Godhand, want you to have intimate knowledge of their systems and mechanics and be able to prove that with a challenging final encounter. What I don't get is the spike in difficulty from tough-but-fair to do-this-right-the-first-time-or-tough-shit. This was a late night that should have been an early evening. To me, Platinum's games have always been like a glass of wine: I'll drink one if it's in front of me, but I'll never order it myself. Revengeance is a stupid name, but it was an ok game. And I'm Platinum-ed out for a while.

Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes: Is there any way to make Master Miller shut up? This is a serious question.

Tales of Graces F: Holy shit. This game was actually pretty good, and nobody is as shocked as I am. For all of the flak I can throw at JRPGs, this wound up being a good time. FULL DISCLOSURE: I skipped probably 85% of the cutscenes, and during the ones that I did let play I was probably fiddling with Spotify or something, so this might have played a significant factor in my enjoyment, but fun is fun. I didn't wind up completing the post-game epilogue before giving it back to my pal, and I kind of regret it. That's ok, though, because...

Dragon Age: Inquisition: Pretty much the first game to come out for current-gen systems that I couldn't wait to buy, it was my sole purpose for the month after it was released. My first run clocked in at some big dumb number like 85 hours, but being a nutcase, I cranked up the challenge to Nightmare and started over immediately after finishing with a new character so I could get that equally dumb platinum trophy. Truth time: I was a little underwhelmed, even after all of that.

Ok, I loved The Gaslight Anthem's breakout album, The '59 Sound. It was unquestionably the best record I had heard that year, and I eagerly awaited everything that came after it. Of course, nothing will ever come close. Being the first album I had heard from the band, and something of a renewal of my vows with the fickle mistress that is post punk, it was everything that I needed in my musical life without knowing it. Great works of art blindside you that way. Their next album, American Slang, went noticeably mid-tempo. This wasn't a bad choice, but it wasn't exactly what I was expecting, and ultimately wound up being a letdown because it didn't re-bottle that lightning from the previous record. Everything they've released since has been a mixed bag of genius and garbage. Would I feel this way if I had heard Handwritten first? I can't say. Dragon Age: Origins, then, was my '59 Sound. It came out at the tail end of a particularly great year as far as my personal gaming tastes are concerned (Street Figher IV! Borderlands! Demon's Souls, for God's sake!), and was so consuming that I spent hundreds of hours digging through every square inch of content. Dragon Age II has gotten a lot of poop on the internet for being a lesser game, and it definitely was. But, like American Slang, it did its own thing for better or for worse. There are certainly things to hate about it, but there was that much more to love. DA2 is not a terrible video game, but it would never have filled the hole in my heart for more of the exact same thing --which I know that I don't really want anyway-- no matter how astounding it could have been.

Inquisition, then, is actually that kind of astounding. The characters are great, the world is bafflingly big, and the whole things is stunning to look at. But the magic isn't there anymore; at least, not like it was. Still a great game by most means, and I certainly have the hours put into it to prove that I must have enjoyed it somehow.

I took a break from games for a little over a week after it was over and I obtained the platinum trophy to ponder it. I wondered if this was indicative of something larger. Is this it, I would posit. Is the thrill really gone? Of course I went back, but the older I get, the more this gives me pause. It's hard to be as excited for new experiences as I was as a younger man, and I have become more interested in preserving that which gave me pleasure a lot more often than I used to. The fact that I'm still regularly playing Third Strike every week with friends (gentlemen's game that it is) is proof of this all of these years later. For now, it's nice to know that I'll always have interesting things to play, whether they're new games that come down the line or old stuff that will rekindle my interest in the medium. There's comfort in that.

I've been forcing myself to play through Resonance of Fate over the last week or so on the recommendations of the internet as a whole. It is not without its problems, but I think that, now in its final two thirds, I've hit enough of a stride that I get why people like it. It's the kind of RPG I would have been all over about 10 years ago. Now, it's a bit of a chore, but I'm finding myself perversely happy that games like this still exist. This past weekend, my friend and I met and exchanged the usual stack of games that we've finished, and now I have Shadow of Mordor, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Darksiders II waiting for me when it's finished. I'm not expecting any of them to really blow my hair back, but hey.

It's a new year. You never know.