Sticks, Stones

A few years ago, my brother and I decided that we wanted to try building our own arcade sticks to play Street Fighter online with each other. I went so far as to get a stick and buttons, and shipped these things to him so he could cannibalize some old PlayStation controllers for use. Then, well, stuff just got in the way; he moved his family to South Carolina, I wound up buying a couple of sticks on my own, he went pro-Nintendo with a Wii and Wii U and, well, I didn't.

My brother, though, is a serial hobbyist; the kind of guy that gets into something full steam and then slowly forgets about it for his next big adventure. I envy people like this sometimes, actually. I get the impression that they constantly feel like the world has something to offer them while guys like me are waiting for their own hobbies to wow them again like they used to. Anyway, the joystick thing was something he never really had an opportunity to get into like he normally would, so he recently decided to modify a Madcatz SE stick that I gave him for Christmas a few years ago, and asked for some art.

Now, I'm not a spectacular artist by any stretch (we've known this for a long time), but this was something small enough in scale that I didn't mind lending a hand. It also gave me the opportunity to try out some digital coloring, which is something I've always wanted to mess with.

The process was pretty painless. I downloaded a template for the SE stick pretty easily found all over the internet. He told me that he had some colors in mind because he was planning on painting the stick casing. The buttons and joystick that I sent him all those years ago were red, and he wanted to make them match the illustration, too.

From there, and after some doodling to get my hand back into sketching shape, I printed a small stack of them and drew the image right on the template. This turned out to be really hard, actually. Since you're dealing with whole chunks of the right side of the image being obscured by the stick and buttons, managing the composition was a lot more challenging than I thought. Once I get used to that, though, I settled on one that I thought was fine:

Knowing that I was going to color it digitally, I left the background blank planning on adding text and color later. I inked it traditionally with pens and a brush, and scanned it.

That's when I went a little crazy. I couldn't stop making these. I had three more sketched out, and two more inked, so I scanned one of those, too:

I wasn't totally thrilled with having a joystick where his nose would normally be (but now that I think about it, I can totally do a holiday image and make that red ball-top stick Santa's button nose. The possibilities!), but the prospect of coloring without traditional media meant that larger objects like the bicep and the forearm might be easier to practice with than what I had planned for the "kick" image above. Same thing with the inking- paintbrush and some pens.

I met some cool folks a few weeks ago whom gave me some advice into the digital process. Upon their recommendation, I scanned it them at 600 dpi as a tiff image, which I eventually exported to a bitmap. This set me up for the next big challenge: the actual coloring.

I used Gimp and scoured the internet for tutorials on how to color using a mouse. Since I don't have the setup that most people that do this seriously have, I needed to find a decent tool to use that I could navigate without dropping some money into actual hardware. Gimp is a really great free product, though. With my limited understanding of Photoshop (which has all faded away in the 10 years since I've actually used it) I didn't need anything with extensive bells and whistles, and the tutorials I found on the internet made it pretty clear that Gimp is an amazing facsimile for the price of admission (which, again, is the low, low cost of absolutely nothing).

Here's how things went:

I wound up coloring this one first because I thought it would be easier for some reason. I went a little overboard with the layers of gray in the gi (I think there are four altogether), so I scaled it back for the skin, gloves, and headband. I'm actually happy with the way it turned out, and it was a nice confidence boost for the second one, too. Here's how that one turned out:

This one I'm on the fence about. The colors that I was given were gray, black, white (natch), red, and yellow. That's two warm colors with one cool one, which I didn't find that easy to translate without ditching one or the other. We can chalk that up to my lousy use of color theory, I guess. For this one, I wanted originally to make it look like an old poster with some text, but that didn't wind up working so well. The text is in Japanese and came from Google Translate, so if any of you speak it fluently and catch mistakes you can go ahead and give the internet the old stink eye, not me. The bottom reads "Devote yourself to your training," which is something I lifted off of some old Street Fighter III promo art. The top reads "punish their mistakes," which is a reference to the use of this mule kick move in the SFIII games, which is primarily to make people pay for whiffing big moves.

I have a couple more unscanned images that I might mess with just for fun, but they need some work first. Still, not bad for a first attempt.

Book Update

I know that I mentioned this months and months ago, but the tome that I'm writing that's dedicated to parsing through two of the wackiest years of my life + video games is still a going concern. The original time table that I sort of laid out for myself is, of course, blown to hell, but that's just the way it is when you're doing creative work on your own schedule.

But that's the problem; since I didn't have a set deadline, I let it slip away from me for...reasons. But we're back at it now, so here is a quick update with how things have gone and where it's all going in convenient back-of-the-box bullet points:

• Now that my obligations in the Fall are all but a very strange memory, it's been really hard to get my writing mojo back. I'm guessing everybody that writes will tell you this, but putting words together on (virtual) paper is a muscle that must be exercised or it will atrophy (a phrase that I'm sure I heard in a workshop someplace). The work that I've been doing on the current chapters is total garbage, and I'm not saying that because everyone's their own worst critic. I know that it's going to take some bootstrap-pulling to get back to a level I'm comfortable with, but I see now that a lot of what's been coming out in the weeks since the New Year are going to be slavishly rebuilt, and then probably thrown the fuck out altogether. I keep telling myself it's better this way, and it is, but I'm at the point now that when I look at work I did a year ago, it seems that I had a supply of liquid genius flowing through my body that I've been slowly urinating out and now I'm just a dude with too much gin in his system. I need to get those levels back in check.
• That was really gross.
• Before I took the break in the Fall, I compiled what I had in a single document (unformatted), and I feel like I'm at roughly 60% what I want from a content perspective. At the time when things stopped, I had hit a point in the narrative where things take a drastic turn, but I knew for a fact that the tone of the chapters was going to change and they would probably wind up being shorter, so the 60% number feels accurate for now. That said, there is a lot of stuff to fix and change in what's already there (as you can imagine), but I'm thinking that there is now more to add than I originally thought to make certain things make sense, and a few sections that are going to be edited out and rejiggered into the second section of the book. Sure, this should all come through during the editing process, but it's still worth pointing out.
• The working title is A Clever Adversary. I'm sure this won't last
• I've been debating whether or not to place a sample working chapter online. I know other writers have done this to sort of drum up interest, but since this blog isn't exactly an airport, I'm guessing that's not a good enough reason to place something like that here. I'm going to continue thinking this over.

So that's that.

See you tomorrow.

A Blog A Day

...might keep readers away...maybe.

When 1Up.com (may it rest in peace) was still a thing, the large, passionate community would take it upon themselves to elect February as the month where you would write one blog per day. A lot of good stuff was cranked out by those cats, but it all came to a halt last Feb. when the site's corporate Nether Lords decided to shut the place down. Drag.

So, in an effort to pay tribute to what was a very good idea on a very good website, I'm going to do my best to keep the tradition going this year. How am I going to start? Well, by being a few days late, obviously (much like the 1Up days, now that I think about it).

We'll keep this light and flow-y by making today brief, but if you want a personal recommendation that will take you much longer to read, go check out Matt Loene's off-the-chart-amazing oral history of Street Fighter II over at Polygon. It hits kind of close to home for me because of how much I loves me some Street Fighter, but the amount of work that went into this is really staggering, and it's a fascinating read even if you don't dig the Dragon Punch.

See you tomorrow.

The Last in Line

You may be wondering (though probably not) about why there hasn't been another episode of our trip through the Last of Us. Well, part of that is that my wife and I just haven't had a lot of joint time to sit down and play it. The larger reason, though, has to do with one Sony Computer Entertainment.

Just after Christmas, I switched on my PS3 to see what was new on the putridly run PlayStation store for that week. Even though it was late and I had a few beers in me, I noticed a certain lack of hum from my little black supercomputer. After the requisite 45 years that it takes to boot the system up and log into the store, the PS3 gives me one of it's kindly warning messages that, hey, your system's about to cook itself, and it's shutting off now. Sorry for the trouble. This has happened before, so I was only mildly alarmed. It shut down, I waited a few minutes, and flipped it back on to make sure that everything was on the up and up. Not even five minutes in and it was back to overheating. My cooling fan, friends, has slipped its mortal coil, and lo, My PlayStation 3 is inoperable.

And this is the third time.

No, I'm not saying that this particular PS3 has ceased to bestow enjoyment upon me three times. I'm saying that this is the third effing PS3 that's died on me in the last several years. My first was a 60gig launch model (the kind that was fully backward compatible), and I loved it like a son. I don't get rid of anything anymore, and even though I don't play PSOne or PS2 games on the regular, I will pull a couple out a few times a year. The loss of this machine was a serious hit to my perverse need to make sure I can do whatever I want, whenever I want (which, I suppose, is a problem). So, I called Sony, and $150 later they swap one with me; another 60gig fat bastard of a PlayStation sent right to my door. That love didn't last, either. We were living on borrowed time, this backward compatible PS3 and I, and so I called them again when that one died, too. "That'll be another 150 clams," they said, much to my protest. I'm a very loyal Sony customer, and had even sent back a PS2 on the fritz about ten years ago. Can't you guys help me out with this? Mitigate the cost at all? Stupid, stupid broken-video-game-console-owner. We're Sony. We don't do that shit. I wasn't willing to spend another stack of money on a console that they basically assured me over the phone they'll never replace. The PS3 Fat is dead, and my one-fiddy would only be buying a refurbished Slim. Nuts to that. I convinced myself to get a brand new Super Slim, which was just about to launch the next week.

So, you can probably imagine my fury when all of this was going down a few weeks ago. If you've done a little research and a little math, you've determined that this PS3 Super Slim is only a year old, but just over a year, so the warranty is expired (of course). After waiting for their customer service staff to come back from whatever year-end break they were on, I called them yet again to complain about the fact that this thing they built don't work good or nuthin.' The guy on the phone did what he could, but it had to be sent back to them for repairs, and that was going to cost me $100. He begins his rote spiel about how this is quality service from Sony's own staff and that they'll replace the system if it can't be fixed and ahhhhhh BULLSHIT. Stop right there, friend; this is my third freaking PS3, and you need to help me with this, I tell him. What happens next is truly baffling.

"Yes, I absolutely get it," he says. "Let me connect you to one of the accounts people, but let me tell them what's going on with you, first." Fine. This happened during the end of the Second Era, but it was just an operator "asking her manager" if it was ok to help me with the repair fee. That didn't work then, so I had to prepare my response carefully for when it wasn't going to work now. About five minutes later, I find that I actually am talking to another person on the phone, a very sweet-natured woman whom wanted me to go through the whole thing again. As calmly as I could, I lay it out for her, and ask her if she would kindly help mitigate the cost of fixing this thing.

"Sure," she says without even letting me stop. "As a one-time show of good faith, we'll waive the cost of repairs for you. We're shipping you a box tomorrow." What happened after that was about 15 seconds of shock-fueled silence to the point that she thought that I accidentally hung up on her. I am back to being a happy Sony customer.

So what did we learn here? If you buy more than one stupidly expensive piece of entertainment hardware, the third one can be fixed for free. Less cynical than that, I guess, is that sometimes, the little guy gets his way. So there.

Your homework today is to check out Kat Bailey's preview of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, a game that's dropping in about a month or so. Now, I do this with reservation for a few reasons, but mostly because this is the only preview of the game that I've seen that points out a key situation from the demo that she played and how unsettling it is for all of the wrong reasons, something nobody else seems to mention across the internet. The comments that follow the piece are some of the worst that the internet has to offer, but it's a unique perspective and calls to mind other debates that gaming has to start paying closer attention to from now on. Read the article with interest and the comments with caution.

So This is the New Year

Look, I knew for years that we were never going to have jet packs by now, but dammit, 2014 being here makes me feel that we should be further along or something. Just look at this, for God's sake. Where's my bio suit and seedy intergalactic watering holes? Where's my instant wall climbing wall-breaking laser blasts? Science is bullshit.

So it's been a while, right? Yes, internet, it has. Dry your eyes, though; a new year means new beginnings and other spastic lies that I'm prone to breaking. Still, now that certain months-long obligations are taken care of, it's time to get back to my fighting weight writing-wise. That was an absurd and stupid thing to say. Resolution 2: we'll keep that jive to a minimum.

So let's use this precious time that we have together at the moment for a bit of catch up. The last few weeks have been a typhoon of lousy weather, vacations from work, on and off illness, and mmmyes a few holidays. Now that my family has finally figured out that video games aren't something I'm going to eventually outgrow, they've succumbed to years of reminding that it's perfectly fine to bestow nerdy gifts for Christmas as opposed to a Christmas tree and nativity scene, monitor cables, and place mats.*

Since the whole month of December is typically written off as a gluttonous mess not unlike whatever goes down at Pizza the Hut's place, and I just mentioned that I wasn't exactly feeling tip top the whole time, gym hopping was kept to a minimum over the past several weeks. Typically, that drives me a little nuts, but you can't fight Mother Nature when she says, "you know, you should be throwing up right now. Go do that." Naturally, this left plenty of time for the interactive digital entertainments. A few of them were wacky or fun or stupid or smarmy enough that I wanted to write about them individually, but I thought I'd save you some eye strain and just run them down as a list.

Behold, then, what I've been doing for the past three weeks:

Batman: Arkham Origins
Full disclosure: I love Batman perhaps more than I love my parents (and they know). But, you know, I'm just not in to the open world Batman games. Akrham Assylum was totally my thing, though. It did the whole "metroidvania" schtick better than recent Castlevania games had done at that point, and it just felt like playing as Batman, which pretty much no other game starring the character had ever pulled off at that point since most of them were either platformers or brawlers. Arkham City was still a good game, but the explorability of the city seemed to step on what made the first game so good; the focus. So I wasn't really super psyched to play Arkham Origins, especially after some kind of middling reviews.

Annnnnd....I was kind of right. Still a good game, but I found that I was only interested in the story missions, which was basically a series of indoor levels that you simply had to traverse a large city to find. I suppose it's fine to have Gotham as a large backdrop for things to do between plot-driven adventures, but everything that I was given to do was just busy work. Blow up 40 of these. Find sixty of those. Beat up some guys and then disarm a bomb. Now do it over there and over there and over there. Snore.

The stuff that I wanted out of it was really good, though. The Joker stuff was great, and the inclusion of a couple of other irregular DC characters in the world of video games was handled pretty well (I'm talking specifically about Deathstroke). It was a fine looking game, too. The facial models were kind of lousy, but since pretty much everybody whose anybody wears masks in Gotham City, it wasn't really that distracting. There was a few things that pissed me off, though, but that's mostly due to common problems with free-running games and the unreliable combat.

Batman: Arkham Origins: Blackgate
The overuse of colons in the title should alarm you. Eff it, I'll just answer the question running around your head for you: Yes, Blackgate actually came from a man's colon. Ostensibly a more "true" metroidvania game, Blackgate did its best to cram all of the controls of it's console sibling into a 2.5D environment, which means that the player must have the finger dexterity of a concert pianist to play smoothly. Or it would, if anything actually worked according to plan. The control and button inputs were about as responsive as screaming at a deaf person at a Mastadon concert, and Batman would routinely take bullshit damage from randomly-placed strips of spikes in the ground when he should have rolled over them. The Dark Knight would recover his health after a second, though, so it was all good. Why were the spikes on the ground at all, then? You're not seeing this, but I'm shrugging my shoulders and making obscene hand gestures right now.

Structurally, the game was a total mess. Boss fights were less of a visceral feeling of accomplishment and more a series of trial and error stumbles until I figured out whatever puzzle-like nature the game all of a sudden decided to throw at me. Some of them were timing-based, so the lack of reliable control was sort of a thing. Others were riffs on previous environments and encounters so left field that if they weren't handled with surgical precision than it would spell instant Bat-cadaver. Let's not even talk about the least intuitive map in video game history, either. Jeeeeeebus.

Ni No Kuni
People that I like hate this game. People I don't like love it. If I didn't get it for a song, I would never had formed an opinion either way. As it stands it was actually alright. Pretty, but really kind of shallow, it was as close as I'll probably come to playing a Pokemon game since it's big draw was the monster taming and training (which I thought was handled weakly). It had been so long since I've played a console JRPG, though, that everything just felt comforting; the grinding, the dialog, the tiny mental benchmarks you make for when you know it's time to put it down and go to bed. It felt good to be immersed in something like that, even though most JRPGs make me feel totally detached anymore. If you had met me ten years ago, that last sentence would be kind of a shock.

Probably what helped me keep up with it to the end was the plot, though. Now, let's be clear here in that it in no way is good, but Ni No Kuni's biggest strength was it's noticeable lack of anime stupidity. You can probably hand that to developer Level 5's partnership with Studio Ghibli, but this could have fallen apart under a lot of weight, and it really didn't. To be honest, I'll never, ever play this game again. But for a modern console semi-real time menu-based RPG, I was as satisfied with it as almost any game in my PS2 library. That's a compliment, right?

Guacamelee!
People, you should be playing Guacamelee! Then you should finish it and play it again. Luchardors out to save El Presidente's daughter from the undead in an interconnected metroidvania game makes sense. Hell, even just simply that sentence just feels right. If there was an official winter jam, it would be Guacamelee! So let it be written.

Bravely Default demo
If Ni No Kuni was comforting, the now week-old Bravely Default demo for 3DS was warm post coital cuddling. I get that Square Enix, in it's weird Square Enix way, didn't want to name it a Final Fantasy game (but I'm a little baffled that it's not picking up the label now that it's coming West), but that's exactly what it is: job systems, Firaga, phoenix downs, the whole bit. If that tickles you the same way it does for me, than you've probably already played the demo or need to start paying better attention to release dates.

I played through the demo to its most ludicrous extent. All of my characters maxed their job levels, the social town-building mechanic had no place left to build, and no single creature in the game was any kind of threat when I finally closed the book on it. I don't really dig the fact that I had to wait hours (days, actually) for me to build a quasi-village to get strong enough gear to take on the demo's final boss, and I use that in the present tense because I'm hoping against hope that this doesn't surface in the full version of the game outside of optional boss fights. In no way does mean that I'm taking a pass on the game when it hits in February, but if there had to be a criticism, that would be it.

Street Fighter III: Third Strike
I'm playing this all the time. No, I'm not in front of it. You and are squaring off right now in my head. You just lost.

*All actual gifts. For real.

The Two of Us: Part 2: Killers

Let's talk about murder for a second.

Video games are well-tread territory for general kicking and screaming over violence in the media, and I'm not going to touch that. But I can see how the accusing side gets up in arms over it, especially as graphics have come to the point of photo realism. In fact, when we were playing Tomb Raider, my wife and I were both physically taken aback when Lara Croft gunned down her first cultist, just as she was onscreen. It looked every bit as brutal as a killing would be, and both our reaction and hers showed the weight of actively choosing to take another person's life. The Last of Us is a different kind of game, and doesn't pussyfoot around that. In Joel's bleak post-disaster future, violence is mandatory for survival, it seems, and the first few hours are making a clear implication that the rest of this story is going to be chock full of it, and it's going to be nasty. A man was killed in cold blood by someone I can only still assume is a NPC protagonist very early on, and Joel didn't flinch as other innocuously nice guys would (the Nathan Drakes and Lara Crofts of the world). I can also only assume that this person's execution is a sign that violence and its horrors are part of the point of this whole experience, especially since it's obvious that Joel doesn't exactly shit rainbows while figure skating. But that's not what's interesting about our first controllable moments after the intro.

There was lots of talking, and obligatory tough guy posturing. Joel and his female companion snuck out of whatever quarantined encampment in the beginning stages, which serves as a useful enough tutorial for the stealth and combat functions. Joel can crouch, aim, punch, switch on his flashlight, and "listen" (which is this game's term for his very video gamey sixth sense that lets the player know what's around the corner) without any sort of context. The triangle button does close to everything else when it pops up on the screen; it's the catch-all button for boosting your friend, sliding open a door, and picking up handily placed med kits to keep him healthy. All of these movements and more were dolled out a steady pace which wasn't overwhelming, but was certainly a lot file away, even for me. Typically when this happens, though, I feel reassured that the game will force me to use all of these tactics as it moves forward, so I don't spend a lot of time trying to practice and re-learn each individual technique. But this doesn't change the fact that The Last of Us is a complex beast, and definitely more convoluted than Tomb Raider's early hours.

At first, I was just fine with it. The Last of Us is a tough teacher; there's a lot to learn and seems cruel to the student if they don't pick up on it fairly quickly. Sort of like violence, there's plenty of talk in gaming circles that modern games over-train the player before setting them free, and I like that Joel was not treating me, the player, like an idiot. On the other side of the couch, though, was someone just a little bit baffled. Previous to this moment, my wife would dispatch her gaming nemeses by jumping on their mushroom-y heads. Eventually, she moved on to pumping them full of cultist-killing arrows. Joel, though, could punch, shoot, throw a brick at a guy, and strangle them if he was clever enough, and he could do all of this from the word "go." To me, it was an embarrassment of riches. To her, it was a tidal wave, and one that washed over her one doubt at at time. Do I shoot that dude? Do I punch him in the mouth? Should I pick up this bottle and break it over his head? Is it worth it to me to try to get around him? It was simply too much too soon. Killing by itself was no longer an issue. "Which way should I kill" had turned into the question.

This lead to the point of today's entry. Joel and his trigger happy friend had enemies, but they weren't stupid. Being outnumbered and out-gunned in this game was the last situation you wanted to find yourself in. Dialog between the two frequently prompted the player into sneaking around adversaries, and if the scarcity of ammunition and medical resources were any indication, then this was the preferred method of dealing with opposition. I found that it made perfect sense (especially since friends of mine had told me that it was more of a stealth game than a shooter), but not for my wife.

As she walked right up to a guard and clubbed his head into gooey mush with a wooden plank, I was nonplussed. We were just told to avoid these guys! What the hell are you doing?! I kept it to myself, but it didn't take long for two things to dawn on me: First, she was just given an arsenal of ways to kill an enemy. While she probably couldn't reliably toss a rock at a guy's head, she can sure as shit shoot him in the chest and finish the job with a baseball bat. I can only assume that this was empowering. Second, and more importantly, is that this is a matter of programming. Certainly not by Naughty Dog, but my wife's gaming vocabulary doesn't include Metal Gear, or Deus Ex, or Dishonored. An enlightened way of pacifism was never a concern before, only to throw the pickaxe, toss the fireball, and knock the bow. You can't blame her for such a binary response; she saw bad guys, and bad guys needed to see the business end of the stick. It was all against her earlier-set conditioning.

Joel was quickly, and unceremoniously, gunned down by these guys. Lesson learned. Even on the Easy difficulty, it's better to avoid than to engage, but that will take a little bit of unlearning for it to completely sink in. My wife, the butcher, received some early comeuppance, like trying to swipe honey from the hive, but I have a feeling it's going to take a little bit more reminding that you know, we should probably leave those dudes up ahead alone. Now that we've gotten a little girl to protect along for Joel's ride, it's probably going to be safer that way.

The Two of Us: Part 1

Tomb Raider was an experience. Not the emotionally draining, perception-altering Experience that a developer or publisher would want you have with such a large budget major release (those few and far between), but a quiet, sometimes meditative, and often humbling experience shared between two people: myself, the practiced-hand "core gamer," and my wife, the silent observer and rare participant. I never truly understood her motivation for wanting to play the Tomb Raider reboot, really. I guess I never asked, now that I think about it. But what would have been a routine week or two controlling an English woman through a terrible coming-of-age ordeal (but a good one, the game was pretty great) became a study of, in my mind, game mechanics, accessibility, interactive storytelling, and in it's own way, marital politics. It was frustrating -on several levels- to watch my wife, a person unaccustomed to controlling both an onscreen avatar and the camera which dictates how that avatar operates, struggle to come to terms with modern game design.

There was an obvious cycle of development happening right in front of me not unlike a child's own evolution; mechanics were learned in a safe environment, were then tested, and consternation would set in right before abandonment, then followed by a noticeable mustering of drive to relearn and overcome the obstacles. My wife, in her own way not dissimilar to Lara Croft, didn't leave the Island of Misfit Cultists a pro, but there was certainly some self-discovery happening there from campfire to campfire. If there wasn't, she wouldn't have immediately requested to play The Last of Us.

So, it seems like she's into the more cinematic, big budget stuff out there. I'm chalking that up to being a gateway drug (I hope). Months had passed from completing Tomb Raider to now, but she was consistent in her interest in playing the game, which I found a little surprising. I honestly thought that it would be out of sight, out of mind and that if I didn't bring The Last of Us home, her interest would have waned. This wasn't the case, and now that it's close to the end of the year and every video game website on the planet is arbitrarily choosing what "their favorite game" of the last twelve months had been, we've finally started to play what will undoubtedly wind up being one of the contenders. The opening sequence did enough to show us why.

Yes, I suppose that in the spirit of full disclosure, this first entry does reflect our first time playing the game, but we've played it more since. It was a few weeks ago, late at night and ready for bed, when we decided that we would at least go through the intro to the game after I assured her that action games like this never have multi-hour opening sequences (like the dozens of JRPGs stacked around our apartment). We were not quite prepared by how hauntingly affective it was, though, which is something I choose not to spoil for you if you haven't played it yet.

These first 45 minutes or so did little to show us what the rest of the game would be like, though. Protagonist Joel could only mosey slowly through environments and interact with the occasional door or key item. For us, this was a good method for re-introducing my wife into using both thumbs in concert with what's happening in front of her. Occasionally, I could hear an exhale of exasperation until I would offer a gentle reminder that she should adjust the camera (we'll come back to this), but this fell by the wayside quickly enough in this first sequence. It was a fast 45 minutes with everything going on in the game, but it served its purpose, and the stage was set for what our next few weeks would become.

Like Tomb Raider, we're playing the game in short chunks of hour-long increments. Tomb Raider was, basically, a short season of Lost for us, and The Last of Us will probably be no different. It gives us a chance to play a little and regroup afterwords. During the day, we can send each other messages to parse through radical theories about the plots of the games and what the next sequence might be like, and this is a feeling I haven't had since, well, Lost left the air. It can make the wait agonizing for the next time we both have the opportunity and energy to play together, but the act of playing the game is all the more sweet because of it. That is, until you actually get into the game.

But let's talk about that tomorrow since this is getting long. Your homework is to read Playboy's interview with Rockstar co-founder and Grand Theft Auto mastermind Sam Houser. It's safe for work and fun read, if a little less illuminating than the first interview with a total recluse should be. Still worth it, though.