I'd like to clarify something I said yesterday.

I realized not long after I wrote a nice chunk about Street Fighter IV that I implied that the game is bad. I'm not sure I want that to be the case in your head, but there has certainly been a trajectory to my opinion on the game:

1. This is new and good!
2. This is the fighting game norm
3. This has helped me make new friends
4. This is slow and plodding
5. This isn't what I want

Now, this still seems like I'm being overly harsh, but that isn't the case. In fact, I'm something of a proponent of the game even though I don't ever want to play it again. It's brutally obvious to anyone that reads this that, to me, the fighting game sun rises and sets with Street Fighter III Third Strike, and it would take both a similar masterpiece of a game and the time that I used to have to dump into it for me to be so in love with anything else. The cruel realities of both business and adulthood are against me on that one.

Maybe one of these days I'll write something about all of the good that's come from Street Fighter IV and its many upgrades, but I feel it's more important at this point to qualify yesterday's statements. I'm pretty sure you got that I was using Dhalsim as a metaphor for both fighting game development and the health of the current gaming industry (if only the large developer/ publisher side). But if you didn't, there you go, I guess. Street Fighter IV isn't really that far removed from what we're seeing currently with the new Star Wars movie; it's what you love intimately about the old ones, but with a few new characters and a couple of slight twists. During the previous console generation, things were awfully lean for companies that were swimming in money from the generation before it, and market-tested surefire hits were more the creeping norm than a sense of innovative adventure. Street Fighter IV is a clear product of that, though to its credit, it evolved into something much grander over time.

Comparing that to the Street Fighter III games as I did, which were almost a full reboot from a character and mechanical perspective (though, again, many of those character archetypes still exist), was meant to drive the point home. Maybe it also perpetuated a feeling that SF3 is better than SF4. Well, I guess personal biases creep in sometimes no matter what. Whatever. You're smart people. I think you get it.

Let's Meet Dhalsim

This is Dhalsim.

Meet him. Shake his hand. Study his movements and question his methods. He's sort of new around here, after all.

Ok, of course you know who Dhalsim is. He's a mainstay of the Street Fighter series; a perennial fixture of the roster lineup, and the Patient 0 of what has collectively come to be known as "zoning gameplay." Dhalsim is as new around video games as Sonic the Hedgehog.

But in about three weeks, Dhalsim won't be the yogi you know, and this is both as profound as it is assuring for the direction that both fighting games and maybe gaming as a whole will go.

They say that all successful sequels are the sum of the following equation: 80% old + 20% new. Street Fighter IV, the 2008 sequel that dragged the head-to-head fighting genre into a new found renaissance, practically had this tattooed on its metaphoric neck. Of the 25 playable characters (in the eventual home release in 2009), 19 were from previous games in the vast Street Fighter series, and of those, 15 were lifted straight from Super Street Fighter II Turbo, the final iteration of the seminal 1991 title. Of these 25, 10 were all derivations of the basic "Ryu concept:" that is a character that can throw a projectile to bait an opponent into a jump, and then counter that jump with upward attack (like a Shoryuken or a Somersault/ Flash Kick). Street Fighter IV was a game with new mechanics that was fashioned to play comfortably with old ones, and your nostalgia was the primary selling point. It was a game meant for you to comfortably slip into that old t-shirt, and maybe add another layer on top for fashionable effect. By design, you already knew how to play Street Fighter IV.

By design, then, that will not be Street Fighter V. Sort of. We'll get to that, though.

Comparing sequels to Street Fighter II is like comparing sequels to Ridley Scott's Alien. On the one hand, they are competently-made science fiction films in that they all share the same conceit that whatever is happening, and it is happening to (and around) a woman named Ellen Ripley in some distant future. In practice, it is a horror movie followed by an action movie followed by a suspense movie followed by gobbledygook. Much like Street Fighter II, the first Alien movie was not the first movie of its kind, but it was a masterpiece of synthesizing what inspired it. Sure, there were probably other haunted house movies in outer space, but this was the haunted house movie in outer space, and all sci-fi horror flicks will be measured against it until I am cold and in the ground. 1997's Street Fighter III and the updates that followed it took these elements and altered them in a way that broke how fighting on a 2-dimensional plane is played. The fighting was more tactical and measured, and precise play was rewarded with easy wins. It's not a 1:1 comparison, but like Alien to Aliens, Street Fighter III took the foundation of its predecessor and rejiggered it into a superb video game (at least, by the time they got to Third Strike). Again, like your preferences in sci-fi film franchises, your palate can appreciate the tastes of both of these meals, but whichever you might consider "best" is up to the person whom experiences it.

In that respect, it's good, then, that each fully numbered Street Fighter game is different than the last. Variety's the spice of life, you know. Not so dramatically different as, say Final Fantasy XII to XIII, but comparing Third Strike to Ultra Street Fighter IV is certainly more than apples to apples. However, now that we have a little bit of history behind us and the release of the various "true" sequels, it's important to note these games' problems, especially in regard to our new old friend Dhalsim.

The first is re-acknowledge how fundamentally close Street Fighter IV is compared to Street Fighter II, which we're going to go ahead and cite as a major symptom of a gaming industry problem. Yes, SF4 has it's own complex system that players need to have complete mastery of to play at a tournament strength, and high level matches are littered with attack links that require stupid timing to perform (and absurdly stupid amounts of practice to perform reliably). Yet, at its most base level, it's the same game as Super Turbo with a few added layers to the onion: jump in to attack, hit an opponent with a low normal, and then chain it into a fireball. Not a flashy, high damage combo, but the Old Faithful of fighting game mojo that even a novice can perform rote. But again, this was the plan, and for good reason; fighting games had gone underground in the years between 1999's Third Strike and SF4's release almost ten years later, and the video game world had changed rather dramatically. Development costs for HD consoles had such a well-publicized spike that the middle class, B-tier developers of the world were fading away, and every large publisher of yesteryear were hemorrhaging money from one big budget flop to the next. Even though Street Fighter IV was comparatively modest in its development cost beside other Capcom games of the time like Lost Planet and Dark Void, it needed to be a hit for the publisher so it could be distanced from games like those specifically for their costly thud of a critical and commercial reception. SF4 needed to appeal to the old fan and the new.

Dhalsim, then, fit into this mold like that old t-shirt. His presence was easily recognized by old timers, and his inclusion in the game made him a dramatic shift away from the rest of the cast. He played like always had, though. Fireballs from across the screen used to dope foes into defending while he teleported behind them. Stretchy limbs could keep frustrated opponents at a literal arm's reach at mid-screen. Closer confrontations were handled by a signature Yoga Flame. This is how you could play 'ol Sim in Super Turbo, and once you got used to the movement in SFIV, this is how you could play Sim there, too. It was reliable. It was safe. It was boring. It was the norm of a console generation made manifest.

Street Fighter III was made at a different time with a different staff using different money that was, comparatively, flowing like a river, and our buddy Sim was there, too. Of course, it really wasn't the Dhalsim that we knew and loved, but that's just how SF3 was initially concocted: include Ryu and Ken, and then let's bake this whole thing fresh. But Capcom were already in too deep. They had created the archetypes for this whole fighting game thing, and they did too good of a job. Even if they started completely from scratch without a Ken and Ryu (which, depending on what you believe, was originally in the cards), most characters would hew pretty closely to what had already come before. Sure, Capcom's rivals and contemporaries were making new and interesting characters for their fighting games in terms of play style and mechanics (just look at the mess of characters in the King of Fighters series), but even most of those fall into a few loosely-defined roles that they themselves had created. Just to make it tougher on themselves, they were doing it with a game that fundamentally made "zoning" characters like Sim obsolete: the Street Fighter III series let you swat away attacks, making the risk of jumping over a fireball shot at you from across the screen much lower for an average player and practically non-existent for a pro.

So, while the SF3 games created a handful of players that were wholly unique like Makoto and Oro, it was crowd of reasonable facsimiles of older, better-established characters. Our man Dhalsim, then, was right there in front of you. He just had a new paint job and some reshuffled moves. Oh, and his name was Necro. But that was the beauty of it --Necro was a guy with just about all of Sim's normal attacks (or at least, the majority of the ones you'll recognize) coupled with none of the special moves. No fireballs. No teleports. No goddamn Yoga Flames. All of a sudden, these long limbs don't mean as much as getting inside for spinning punch combos and maybe a Magnetic Story super Hail Mary. Corner juggles were more the norm than distance setups and subterfuge. Necro was Dhalsim, but not Dhalsim. And at this point, not enough people really gave a damn.

Street Fighter III and its updates did fine for Capcom, but they didn't set the world aflame like its predecessors and the various spin offs had. Too little, too late, people cried. The 32-bit era was firmly upon us at home, and we could play our Tekkens and Virtua Fighters without dumping quarters into a "backward thinking" sprite-based 2D game like Street Fighter III. A new generation had looked upon a New Generation and shrugged. Besides, these weren't the characters that we fell in love with, so why bother, right? It was challenging and beautiful and fluid, but even as a Triple-A game of its time, it was just a little too left of center.

So Dhalsim languished. And then he perceived.

On paper (if this is paper), it's reasonable to say on a very base level that Street Fighter V's Dhalsim will be the best Dhalsim of three worlds; or, at least three distinct generations of Street Fighter games. I personally haven't used him in the betas, and we're still a few weeks away from the game's official release, so I can't really tell you for sure. But what a little more navel-gazing can tell us is that this is gross oversimplification. Street Fighter as a series has finally come to terms with its audience, and as a series, come to terms with its market.

This begins and ends with Dhalsim. Yes, he will play roughly similar to his older versions, but subtle adjustments to some of his fundamental attacks evolve him into a different character. Fireballs will now travel in an upward arc toward the opponent, and only by burning precious EX meter will they move horizontally across the screen. This sounds simple, but will be a drastic reeducation for older Sim players. Simple floating options will alter his movement, not unlike Oro from Street Fighter III, throwing off the timing of a defending player or one on the attack as he sails over projectiles beneath him. But he is not Necro. This Sim will still keep his opponents at a distance, and on their toes with misdirection that is classic to the character.

The roster for Street Fighter V small, all things considered. But it is this consideration that makes this new Sim, and every other character present, so measured and well-thought. Gone are the sea of "shoto clones" where now only Ryu and Ken exist. And between the two of them, the gulf between abilities is so much more pronounced that it's highly illogical to play them similarly. Each character, from new to old, fits a specific, purposeful niche, and though each character has their own specific mechanic tied their V-Skill. Most of these are pulled from various Street Fighter games of years past, giving older players something to easily tinker with and new players something to easily learn.

But the characters themselves are what's most telling, and what's most affirming. Though there are only four new characters in the game, each returning character have noticeable changes. Some are less subtle: Cammy isn't as far removed from her life in Street Fighter IV as Ken is. But that's ok. There are more alterations than not, and that suggests a level of trust that Capcom has had in its audience and development staff than it has for a long time. It suggests that, even though you know and love these folks from different games from across the vast Street Fighter-verse, you will be fine with re-learning this new game, character by character. It's a Capcom that learned its lesson from the rebellious Street Fighter III adolescence, but still has significantly retooled characters that a player that may yet recognize.

This is a good sign for fighting games as much as it's a good sign for the larger gaming spectrum. Like the games industry of 2008, the industry of 2016 is evolved and nuanced. It took Sony to bankroll SFV, after all, and this is turning into more of a necessary evil than people seem to be comfortable with. But that's a different discussion. What we're seeing are games that push its audience, like the SFV roster will do. Games that will push technology, content delivery, and DLC options, like SFV will do. Games that welcome community, and player sharing, and competition like SFV will do. All of these are healthy. All of these are necessary.

So. Say hello again to Dhalsim. Learn things from him. Buddy-punch his shoulder like the old friend that he is. He's an important guy.

Actively Hostile with Legend of Legacy

A little less than a month ago, I was presented with what you might call one of those good problems: Should I jump right in to Atlus' newly-released 3DS RPG Legend of Legacy, or wait it out for a few weeks for the PS4 release of Divinity: Original Sin?

Certainly, things like this aren't prone to keeping people awake at night, nor is the fate of a small nation beholden to a decision of this magnitude. But let's consider the extenuating circumstances of having a baby and raising it (and you know, working, too), and start mapping out the pros and cons. On the one hand, Legend of Legacy is a profoundly dumb name, but a recent demo of the game turned out to be pretty good, and it was on a handheld, which meant that I could level grind while baby is chilling out and the wife is watching TV. On the other was a rerelease of a PC game I've been wanting to play since last year. It looks both pretty and complex --things I tend to like-- but it wasn't set to be released for a few weeks at that point, and if I could wait a year, I can wait a little longer. Legend of Legacy it is.

So why has it taken me so long to say anything about it? Well, because LoL is a game I have to actively talk myself into playing. If this were a formal review, I'd call that a bad start. It's got a lot of things going for it, this inanely-named little game, but it's hard for me to shake off a little bit of buyer's remorse at this point.

Briefly, Legend of Legacy is the latest in a string of PlayStation-era throwback RPGs that the 3DS has slowly become known for like Bravely Default and Crimson Shroud, and that implies both nostalgic heart-tugging and genuine head-scratching. It's a game that was obviously made with love, if not the utmost care, and invokes a time in genre's life where they didn't need to be surefire hits to be a little strange.

But notice that by "strange" I don't necessarily mean "experimental," as the fans that this game will undoubtedly spawn will want you to believe when it finally hits cult status sooner or later. After all, LoL is produced by a studio called FuRyu, which is made of members from the team that brought you the often strange and sometimes maligned SaGa games (other than SaGa mastermind Akitoshi Kawazu, whom still has a prominent place in the higher ranks of Square Enix). The SaGa stuff already did the experimental thing a long time ago, and LoL's many unsaid mechanics crib much of it. If you know what I mean by any of that, you either get the SaGa thing or you don't, and had already made a decision on whether to play Legend of Legacy. The rest of the world, I guess, is just supposed to catch up if they're going to drip any enjoyment out of it at all.

So let me help you with that. Though Legend of Legacy upholds the vague tradition of "many characters/ many stories" that the SaGa games have tried to pull off, it also shares in the reality that plot and characterization are basically meaningless here. But that's ok. The point, really, is to explore the many environments and master a compelling combat system. There's a hub town to shop for items and maps to new locations, and the only real direction that the NPCs give you runs along the lines of "get out there and go see some stuff." For a game that's on a mobile platform like the 3DS, this lack of exposition vomit winds up being pretty handy. If you're commuting to work, or killing your lunch break, or waiting for your baby to fall asleep, the simple premise and excised idiotic story winds up being kind of a strength.

As far as the other two go --the exploring and combat-- your mileage is really going to vary. Since they're the bulk of the game, you're really going to want to pay attention to this, too. LoL is set up as more of a dungeon run; every environment outside of the hub is overrun with enemies, and part of the fun of these environments is map all of them and sell this information to the local shopkeeper. This is actually pretty gratifying when completed, and has a practicality past the money made off of maps because the shop will start to offer better equipment the more maps that you sell them. The real problem is the what you're going to run into while you're doing it.

The combat, to be diplomatic, is a real mess here. Your team is a set of three characters, one main character you choose at the beginning and an interchangeable pair of others. Already, you're hamstrung from total tactical control because you cannot pull whichever main character you began with, but that's small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. Often, you are grossly outnumbered, though --sometimes by as much as seven or eight against three-- and the enemy mobs will always, always have the first strike in encounters. This means that to survive, you pretty much always need a tank character soaking up the damage from the majority of the first round, and the fights tend to only be as challenging as the RNG surrounding said tank's defensive abilities.

Worse, abilities for taking on these guys is randomly awarded by some under-the-hood mechanism. While I can see the fun in unlocking a new and wacky attack, the vast majority of them only target a single foe until a significant chunk of the game is completed. And still, since you're patiently waiting for the AI to finish the beating they're administering, you're often left hoping that your team's attackers aren't dead by the time it's their turn or had been hit with stun or confuse effects. Magic AOE attacks are of equally little use when faced with a street mob of bad guys, too; unless you happen to be in a geographic proximity to an element-friendly environmental hub, you have to waste a character's turn making a "contract" with an element, meaning that even if you had an available super attack to wipe out the opposition, you at least have to suffer through both a round of getting hit, and then another round of it before you can start using it.

Here's salt in the wound: you can run away from almost everything in the game, too, which is kind of nice. But if you do, you're stuck at the beginning of every dungeon. This means that if you've been chugging along through several maps of a dungeon trying to figure out your next move, you might accidentally stumble into a crowd of enemies you can't overcome or a sub boss that you couldn't see around the foliage (which is a little bullshitty). It honestly makes the game feel actively hostile toward the player.

But like I said, there are certainly some things to like about this, though. If you have the time on your hands, and you can steel a few minutes here and there to play it, unlocking the random abilities and attacks is a nice little jolt of satisfaction, which can make some of the grinding (of which tends to be copious) a little easier to bear. The art, too, is in that now-quaint low rent polygon way that latter PSOne-era games tend to look like now, even if the game's performance absolutely chugs when exploring environments. But it's pretty in its way, and the character designs are nice and clean.

The real pull here, though, is if you like RPGs of that age. Not the straightforward, plot-heavy stuff of Final Fantasies VII or IX, though. No, no, no; go play Bravely Default if you want that (seriously, go do that). This is more like, well, SaGa Frontier, or the nuttier stuff that's come along in and around its wake. If an RPG to you is a game to both do battle with and decipher all at once, than this might be for you. The impatient or easily annoyed, though, should have probably waited for Divinity: Original Sin.

Two Things You'll Love (If You Love Things At All)

Yes, discerning blog reader, I yet live. That was a stupid sentence.

Anyway, a few weeks ago --because I'm as timely as I am prolific-- USGamer.net published my retrospective on the localization of Final Fantasy XII. This was a big, big story for me, and tons of fun to compile. You should read it and be as enthused over Sri Lanken accents as I was.

The link that's up there, though, is for an episode of Kat Bailey's Axe of the Blood God, which is the world's best-named podcast for all things RPGs. I happen to be on that episode gushing over all things FF12 (and saying "dude" more than I should). You should listen to that, too, because at the end, like an idiot, I let it slip that I'm writing this ego-massaging book about some of the worst times in my life. I've been getting some Twitter traffic about it, so I guess I gotta finish it, now.

Huh.

The Super Psyched Pants

You know who the worst people to work with happen to be? Doctors. Hands down, doctors are the most demanding people I have ever met. You know who's just underneath them? Actors, man. Actors.

Don't get me wrong, I like doctors and I like actors, but from my experience, if doctors are the most commanding, then actors are the flakiest. Sometimes they show up, most times they just don't reply to your emails.

I guess this is an odd way of building hype for a feature I'm trying to compile for USGamer.net over the next few weeks. I don't want to spoil it right now for the two of you that consistently read this, but it was supposed to be a big article from the perspective of lots and lots of people. Turns out that it's going to be a still-big article from the perspective of three people.

Trust me, though, that these three people are the linchpin of the story anyway, so they're really all I needed, but the original plan was something of a grand mosaic. But actors, I tell you. They're just impossible to get a hold of.

Anyway, keep checking back over the next few weeks to those hepcats at USGamer. It's a website you should read on the reg anyway, but since I'm one of their snazzy freelancer dudes, it just makes them that much cooler. You already knew that. What you didn't know, though, is how absolutely smashing this story is going to be if things go according to plan. Make sure you're wearing your super psyched pants when you read it. Trust me on this.

1989 Is Hell

Now that I'm just about a month through Metal Gear Solid V: The Stupid Name After the Colon, I have found that it is both total genius and absolute bullshit on equally profound levels. But we'll get to that some other time. I mostly play it in an early morning somnambulist haze, and I just don't want to talk about it right now.

I spent the weekend internalizing Ryan Adams' wholesale cover of Taylor Swift's 1989 record. It took a treadmill, a few trips to the store, and a walk around the block to really let it seep into my auditory pores. That's probably three solid front-to-back listens, and then a few searched-for songs while sitting on the front porch with a cocktail, because those particular songs stood out above the rest. That's generally bare minimum for me to make a real judgment call on an album, but since most records are short in comparison to other populist media like film or games, this many listens is about what I would put into a movie or short game. It's easy to gloss over some of the deeper layers, even if you're listening intently while purposely cordoning yourself from the rest of the thinking world to run in place for a number of miles that only matter to you and the accountants at your gym. You really got to get in there, people.

I guess since I said that I "bare minimum-ed" it means that it's kind of bad. It isn't. I guess that last sentence is meant to imply that it's kind of good. Well, it isn't either. It's definitely more of one than the other, though, and that depends on if you are goodly enough to agree with the following statement: Ryan Adams' best album by a country mile was Love is Hell. It was his magnum opus, even though he has before and since written several other albums that he himself will consider as such. 1989 is a sequel to the Love is Hell period in just about every way save for who actually wrote the lyrics to the songs. That reads a little weird, but stick with me because like all sequels, it both galvanizes what made the original beautiful and holy and rehashes shit that should have been left well enough alone.

Let's take a quick second to explain Love is Hell, Adams' would-be follow up to his breakout album, Gold. See, Gold was a creative and commercial success at a time where the accursedly-named "alt.country" genre was in something of a stride. Wilco was selling lots of records, and I think people were just good and sick of Dave Matthews once they finally graduated from college, so while Son Volt fans were still wondering when they'd get their time in the, erm, sun, a scrappy egotist that had recently left the band Whiskeytown decided to break out on his own following the strong reviews and mediocre sales of his original album, Heartbreaker (a record that spawned "Come Pick Me Up," a single that pervaded just about every romantic comedy on the planet for a year). This was Adams, of course, and the whole world basically shit themselves over how good Gold was, including and especially one Sir Elton John whom once referred to Adams as" great one;" something fans love to recount when you tell them that much of Adams' output has been found to be overrated.

Anyway, so after Gold hit kind of big, his label, Lost Highway, was all like, hey man, make us another sweet jam like that. He was like, no, baby, I just recorded an album of mope rock songs because that's been my head space for a minute. They came back with more of a nonononononono. So, depending on which myth you believe, over the next month, or the next weekend, or while he waited for a burger to finish grilling, Adams recorded the majority of Rock N Roll, a sort of sweet ode to the music that he evidently likes, because it's chock full of callbacks and shout outs to the Strokes, Pink Floyd, U2 and a bunch of other stuff. Yet, there was overlap on this record with what he had already completed for this now-scrapped mope rock album, which was reevaluated and released in two halves (and eventually, its own standalone album with expanded songs) called, you guessed it, Love is Hell. Adams, then, recorded errant songs when pressed to compile a pretty good album in the form of Rock N Roll while still getting to release a very, very good record in Love is Hell. That's kind of the way he rolls, though. He's a pretty prolific guy.

Another thing about Adams is that he's definitely a cover song guy, too, which leads us back to the present. His superlative retooling of Oasis' "Wonderwall" was the catalyst for all of this (which, yes, was on both Rock N Roll and Love is Hell), and the guy hasn't looked back, dropping stuff like Alice In Chains songs on EPs and deep Grateful Dead tracks at live shows. Having been clear to the listening world that he wanted to do a Smiths-like re-recording of all of those Taylor Swift songs marries both what he did with Rock N Roll and Love is Hell into a goofy, if fascinating cohesion: A mope rock album that pays tribute to stuff he evidently likes.

1989, when stripped of the novelty of being covers of pop songs, sounds every bit like Love is Hell to a fault. Whole guitar parts on latter tracks like "Wildest Dreams" and "This is Love" seem like they were cut and pasted from the earlier album, which is probably the primary culprit for the back end of the record sounding way too same-y than it should have been based on the source material. The album's first three tracks present a great tonal jump from mopey to funk-furious by the time that "Style" shows up, which is maybe one of the better single picks from the whole affair, but the rest of the album never catches up with it, and it settles into being too down-tempo by the middle to the point of being boring by the end. 

When taken as individual tracks, though, Adams does some cool rejiggering with these very dreamy pop numbers, even if they wind up sounding like stuff he's put to tape a dozen times over at this point. "Out of the Woods" is sappy, but ends with a nice, long fadeout that added some texture to the song. Same with "Bad Blood," probably Swift's most idiotic single, when he ripped away its overproduced faux-hip hop sound. Yes, Adams' song wound up sounding like adult contemporary dad rock, but this was probably the only thing from this whole experiment that fixed a problem that didn't really exist; something covers albums always try to do. There's really nothing edgy or dangerous about any of these songs --not that there needed to be-- in Adams' hands, but since they're coming from the prevailing pop princess of the moment, they actually kind of are for her, which is a little weird. Still, a lot of what you'll hear on this album will probably wind up in that many more romantic comedies, I suppose, because their middle-range tempo and calm, syrupy demeanor are custom made for montages that involve rain and the people that silently stare at it. 

What we have, then, is a boring album of mostly good covers which sound nothing like Smiths songs if you've ever listened to a Smiths album. But they sound like Ryan Adams songs of a certain vintage. If that kind of thing flips your lid, then you'll find something to love about 1989, more than just what it might represent. The rest of the world, though, can just listen to the original album and be equally satisfied.

See You in the Morning

Between the hours of 4:30 and 8:30am, when the sun is still just remembering that it can peak its fiery head above the small growth of trees in my tiny, overpopulated suburb, there is a man screaming at me. Short bursts come out of the crackled audio of a two-way radio, getting more intense as he realize that I don't respond. Always it is intense, this other man's screaming, though I try to avoid it as best I can. But being the meticulous guy that I am, sometimes the constant chorus of "Snake? SNAKE? SNAAAAKE?!" just cannot be avoided. Like everything, I suppose, you even get to like it.

Let me briefly point out that I'm not being screamed at in this manner --which we can heretofore refer to as "playing Metal Gear Solid V"-- for the four solid hours that I've listed above. Rather, let's call that a very generous range. As the proud-yet-confused father of a 3 week-old baby, I take these fleeting moments of tactical espionage action when I can, and I'm certainly grateful for them. In all seriousness, I didn't expect to have any time playing video games at all for these first few weeks or so as life goes through the typhoon of finding the best way to rear a child while also letting the people that birthed it retain some sanity. Every parent will tell you the same. On the other hand, I've always been an early riser, so the schedule of me putting her down at midnight, my wife feeding her between 2:30 and 3:00, and then me feed her again early in the morning has been found to be most agreeable to both our sleeping schedules, and also my appetite for sneaking up on an unsuspecting military goon and choking the hell out of him. Wouldn't you know it, when she's off her sleeping schedule, that's gratifying for a different reason, too. Metal Gear, man.

It's hard, this whole parenthood thing, but so is Metal Gear Solid V. At least, it is the way I've been playing it. Though I typically go through most video games in as bloodthirsty a manner as possible, and past Metal Gear Solid games have certainly been no exception, I'm doing my best to be as holy and true a pacifist as my tranq gun will let me through the whole ordeal so far. You can perhaps imagine my frustration, then, when I get through 45 minutes of silence --almost surgical in precision from one interrogated mook to the next-- before getting caught by some idiot that catches me in the act of doing good soldier-y spy stuff and blows my cover. Pause. Restart. Contain my screams. Plenty of right-thinking people have written reviews and articles these last few weeks about just saying "well, fuck it" and going pro-lethal, but this has become a hurdle that I simply cannot overcome. Call it pigheadedness, I suppose, but when I finish that mission, when I get that child soldier on the chopper, when I extract the opposing faction's commander, when I swipe all of the fuel that I need and nobody sees me doing any of that stuff? Elation, I tell you. There's a tickle in my chest that, well, I also get when my kid is awake and has just cracked a smile, however briefly.

The first week of fatherhood, honestly, sucks. Not this is bullshit -sucks, but more like Jesus, when is this going to get better -sucks. It is action packed in all of the ways you wish it weren't; the baby is crying, you're trying to figure out why, and sometimes feeding it and changing its diaper actually won't get your baby to stop crying. Figuring all of that out is rough going, man, no matter how much help you might be getting from the kind folks at the hospital. The last two weeks, though, have been better. You're surprised how quickly life finds its own small routines (in between the sleep when you can get it and the shrieks of a 7 pound human you love uncontrollably). Still, everything is challenge. You begin planning your day in 3 hour increments. Often, you get a half a bag of chips and call it dinner because cooking is a luxury of time you don't have. Taking care of yourself and your home must be meticulously timed, and abandoned immediately if necessary. Everything takes planning and a little bit of forethought to be executed with maximum efficiency. That is, until something out of the norm happens (like a short growth spurt that makes a baby scream and eat --somehow at the same time-- for days on end) and you have to adjust on the fly. You know, like Metal Gear.

I feel it burning in there, this new and perhaps final Metal Gear game. It is searing itself into my memories already, and finding a suitable mnemonic host in the first month of my first baby's life. Ever will the two be linked together, as other games in life-altering moments have been. Metal Gear Solid V, and all of its confounded screaming, will remind me when I took her home, fed her, swaddled her, and tried as hard as I could to get her back to sleep at 6:45 when a pivotal cut scene begins. When I look at pictures of her sleeping in mommy's arms, freaking out over the bottle we've just fed her, and wearing her first "future Batgirl" onesie, I will remember when I attached a balloon to a tank and sent it off into the clouds. Somehow, it all makes perfect sense.

At least, that's how I felt at 5:35 this morning.