No movie review this week, dear readers. While I have quite a few posts scheduled, I was a bit short on time and haven’t watched anything worth reviewing lately, so I figured I’d do something a bit different today.
I was visiting Dr. Girlfriend this weekend, and for some reason, I started to tell her excitedly about the video that got me into history in a major way, Sid Meier’s Colonization.
As much as yours portly loves Halloween and horror movies, I’ve always been too easily spooked to hang with the real test of horror fandom: survival horror video games. They’re games I love to watch other people play, but I’m too chicken to dive deeply into them myself. Not since the old Alone in the Dark games, which were scary even with (and, perhaps, because of) their blocky, polyhedral graphics, have I braved the hair-and-blood-pressure-raising of this fascinating genre (other than a bit of Alan Wake at my younger brother’s urging; a great game worth raising one’s hackles over).
So it is that I have—shamefully! disgracefully!—missed out on the exquisite Silent Hill franchise. Fortunately, my braver brother-from-another-mother across the pond, good old Ponty, has delivered up the vicarious experience that yours portly craves—and fears.
One other note—this review is riddled with Amazon affiliate links. If you make a purchase through any of these links, I receive a portion of the proceeds, at no additional cost to you. I’m required by the Amazon apparatchiks to include that little disclaimer.
With that, here is Ponty’s review of the early 2000s classic Silent Hill 2:
Yours portly likes to make rash, snap judgments. Fortunately, I’m usually right—at least when it comes to video games.
This weekend, I’m looking back at a couple of video games that I assessed to be excellent—correctly!—after only putting in a few hours in each of them:
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
I was talking to a friend recently who recommended I try out the original Fallout video game, which first hit computer screens in 1997 (when yours portly was a doughy lad of twelve). I missed Fallout and Fallout 2, only dipping into the series with the release of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. I never played Fallout 4 or the doomed Fallout 76, the latter I had hoped would do well because it takes place in West Virginia, which just seemed cool to me (I’m still waiting for a Fallout game in the Southeast; West Virginia is the closest they’ve gotten so far). Suffice it to say that, as much as I love this franchise, my experience is limited to the two games in the series that are arguably the finest entries (F:NV being the widely-accepted best installment in the franchise).
But what of the isometric origins of this series? I’ve always wanted to dip my toes into Fallout and Fallout 2, but even having grown up in the era of late 90s/early 2000s gaming, some of the controls and interfaces of that era have aged poorly. Even yours portly has become soft and indolent with the various quality of life improvements abundant in modern games.
That said, clunky controls (and, goodness, Fallout controls are clunky, until you get the hang of them) can’t stop this pudgy dynamo. So it was that, a little over a week ago, I took my first serious foray into the game that started it all.
Yours portly released a new album recently, Heptadic Structure. It’s an exploration of pieces in 7/4, 7/8, and 7/16 time. Each piece is twenty-one written measures, for a total of 149 measures across the seven pieces. Math is fun!
You can listen to and/or purchase the album at the following links:
However, I’m deviating my plan to feature the tracks from that album for (at least) one week, because I am super excited about another album I have coming on Friday, 2 August 2024. It’s called White Boy Summer, and while there are quite a few of my more experimental and modern classical pieces on the release, the title track is a straight-up banger—so much so that I wanted to feature it in today’s edition of Open Mic Adventures.
One of yours portly’s goals for his long, indolent, decadent, self-indulgent, succulent summer break is to play more video games. I am happy to report than my reversion into perpetual childhood is progressing nicely, as I’ve already logged nearly twenty hours (rough estimate) in Stardew Valley so far. This week I am also running my annual Minecraft Camp, so I’m pretty much getting paid to play video games with kids all morning.
Stardew Valley is a farming sim game released in 2016. It draws heavy inspiration from the Harvest Moon series (Story of Seasons in Japan; Wikipedia offers a good overview of the legal reasons for the different names). In addition to farming—planting, watering, and reaping crops; raising livestock; clearing land for cultivation; upgrading and building farm buildings—the game encourages exploration and relationship-building. Your character can spend all day fishing, for example, or exploring a network of caves (with monsters and loot!). You can chop down trees, plant new ones, hang out at the saloon, romance the local singles, donate artifacts to the museum, and on and on. You even have the opportunity to rebuild the dilapidated community center—or throw in with the big box chain store in town and bulldoze it.
A bit of tedious housekeeping before launching into today’s installment of Lazy Sunday: I give this series, as well as several others, Roman numeral designators. It is a bit unwieldy, but unnecessary unwieldiness is, after all, a hallmark of this blog. What is portlier, I ask, than a bloated inefficient numbering system?
That said, I tend to make mistakes with Roman numerals. It’s easy enough to do, especially as the numbers enter the triple digits. I decided to check to see if I have been accurate in my numbering, and I have not. It seems I got off track somewhere in the 140s(ish). It occurred to me to check when I labeled this edition “CL” (150), as I thought, “wait a minute—didn’t I hit that milestone a long time ago?”
So I undertook the tedious task of renumbering all of the titles for past installments of Lazy Sunday on the list below, and changed from a bullet to a number for the list, to give myself an additional safeguard.
What I did not do was go back and change the title of each individual blog post to the correct number. That would take an inordinate amount of time. I may go and correct that eventually, but, goodness—what a dreary task!
So we’re starting fresh today, with CCLXV, or the 265th installment of Lazy Sunday. That means in one hundred more Sundays (assuming I don’t skip any—gulp!), we’ll have year’s worth of Lazy Sundays to enjoy. Maybe I could publish The Lazy Sunday Daily Devotional? Ha!
With that, let’s get on to the posts! To celebrate Ponty’s review of Disco Elysium (that’s an affiliate link, so I get a portion of proceeds from any purchase made through it at no additional cost to you), I figured I’d feature our respective reviews of that legendary game.
Go play some video games!
Happy Sunday!
—TPP
Other Lazy Sunday Installments:
Disco Elysium is quite possibly the best video game I have ever played. It is certainly the most unique. I knew it was something special after only an hour of playing it, and while I have not started a new game since finishing it—“beating” is probably not the right word for Disco Elysium—it is a game that could reveal fresh layers through dozens, perhaps hundreds, of playthroughs, even if it only consists of one “main quest,” as it were.
I’ve never played a game that more accurately reflects the way my own mind is structured, and the way that I think about and dwell upon certain inane details. I don’t have a “Thought Cabinet,” per se, but the notion of fixating upon and ruminating about an idea to the point that it worms its way into your psyche feels true to my experience. As dear old Ponty will point out, the game has a way of seeping into your mind and, therefore, your life outside of the game.
I don’t want to give too much away, as Ponty delivers a brilliant and detailed review, so I’ll turn the controller over to him.
With that, here is Ponty’s review of Disco Elysium:
Summer is tantalizingly close. Today is the last day of exams, which means there’s just graduation and a couple of days of work next week until yours portly is basking in the limitless freedom of summer.
As last week’s edition of TBT discussed, my thoughts are increasingly turning to video games. I don’t have nearly as much time (and, if I am honest, inclination) to play them as I used to, but I am getting the itch to lose myself in some fantasy worlds for a bit. Even with my workday slowing down, this week has been surprisingly busy, which only increases my yearning for digital realms.
Two years ago I spent an inordinate amount of time playing the Nintendo Game & Watch: The Legend of Zelda handheld console (that’s an affiliate link, by the way, so if you purchase anything through it, I get a portion of the proceeds, at no additional cost to you). It is a nifty little unit; I ended up landing a scorching deal on it, but even at the inflated current price of $52.60, I’d recommend it—highly!
I cut my teeth playing Zelda games, and this little unit includes three of my favorites: the original LoZ; the enigmatic sequel; and the Gameboy exclusive Link’s Awakening. Beating LoZ II is probably the pinnacle of my video gaming achievements.
With that, here is 25 May 2023 “TBT: Zelda Game & Watch“:
May. It’s the superfluous final month of school. There’s not enough time to cover any new content, but too much time to launch right into exam review. The result: an odd limbo in which neither students or teachers wish to dwell. It’s the time of year when everyone is in on the game of modern education—we’d all be better off doing and being somewhere else, but we’re still going through the rituals of an industrial-era factory.
Naturally, with summer looming, I’m getting the itch to do some gaming again. Since finishing Disco Elysium a few weeks ago, I have not played any game deeply. I did purchase Planescape: Torment, the spiritual ancestor of DE, but only managed to get in about an hour of playtime. One of my students asked me earlier this week about Stardew Valley, which I played religiously for about two weeks in probably 2013. That’s a modern classic I want to dust off soon.
As for the ostensible subject of this post, my forays into SimEarth have been nonexistent since those halcyon days of May 2020, when America’s love affair with The Virus was in full swing. Being cooped up in the house got me nostalgic for the classics, but I need to revisit the planet simulator soon.
Big plans for the summer. If I play all these games as planned, my eyeballs might fall out.
With that, here is 11 May 2023’s “TBT^2: SimEarth“:
