Metal Monday

Youtube Obsession

I have been enjoying MetalCanyon’s recent Let’s Play of the incredibly interesting game Infection Free Zone. The map creation in Infection Free Zone looks wild.

But I also want to shout-out MetalCanyon’s Let’s Play work in general.

I fell in love with his delivery and style during his System Shock 2 LPs. His first LP of SS2 was on normal difficulty: In this LP you can really see his love for the game¹ by anticipating its every move. His second LP of SS2 he plays on impossible difficulty and chooses the hardest starting class: This is a really interesting LP because he has to use every exploit in the game just to get past the opening levels. You can hear his appreciation for the game deepen every time he has to relearn this game that he has played a 100 times. This LP helped me change my own outlook on how I play games that I love.

Also, it’s fun to hear him yell at monkeys.

Watching

My partner and I recently finished the anime Cowboy Bebop² series and we thought we should check out director Watanabe’s follow-up Samurai Shamploo.

Will give a full review when I finish the series but it’s good, like really good. Watanabe pushes the envelope with style, structure and editing. Cool and likeable anti-hero characters loosely band together in Edo period Japan. While watching, I found myself wondering why didn’t latch on to this show back in 2005 like I did Bebop. It has a unique style, the art is fantastic and it subverts the samurai genre, a genre that I absolutely adore.

This was a time when anime release schedules in the US would best be classed as “sometimes” or “whenever”. For a teen in southern Indiana at the time, I didn’t have many alternative options to track down episodes. I had already collected the Bebop DVDs which were $30 a pop³ with 4 episodes per 6 DVDs that I had to drive an hour to the nearest Sam Goody to order them to the store, come back in two weeks (to a month) to pick them up. To be blunt, I was burned-out on anime fandom.

It’s remembering stuff like this that really helps me put in perspective the access to media we have today.

Reading

The Houseguest by Amparo Dávila is a collection of melancholy short-fiction/Prose, meditations about death, anger and grief. It is good.

Bit of truth about me; Though I appreciate most forms of fiction, I absolutely adore prose. Good prose is able to pull a feeling out of me without dragging on for 64,000 words. My love of prose is why I particularly like to read literary journals. I don’t know if it’s the subject matter or the translation but The Houseguest did not grab me.

I would like to share my favorite piece of prose that really got me interested in the medium and lit journals in general. From a 2008 physical edition of the New York Tyrant.

There is a very thin line between affective and goofy prose and that line moves depending on my mood.

Playing

Because my partner is a rad person, they remembered how much I love Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, so for my birthday they got me a copy and loaned me their GameBoy Advance SP.

It’s been a real trip playing FFTA on an actual GBA; No backlight, beautiful graphics and hand cramps. It’s funny how nostalgia shaped my memory of this game. Before replaying I would have told you it was the most complex and intricate battle/class system, when it is actually baby’s first tactics game. Which is fitting because it was my first tactics game back in 2003. It led me to great and more intricate games like Disgaea, Front Mission, XCOM and -most recently- BattleTech⁴ . The class system is a really unique and truly deep mechanic of FFTA that sets it apart even from others in the genre.

I must admit a large part of my enjoyment of the game came from the official Nintendo Power strategy guide that I held on to long after I stopped playing the game because of its beautiful art.

I highly recommend FFTA even if you don’t have an actual GBA. There’s a great free GBA emulator and ROM of FFTA.

Other Notables

** “Meta Platforms and its subsidiaries spent a record high $7.6 million on lobbying the federal government in the first quarter of the year as the U.S. Congress advanced legislation that could ban Instagram’s chief competitor, TikTok.”

** Beautiful hi-res uploads of Goosebumps covers

1  And how many times he has played it.

2  I have to qualify “anime” because the live action Cowboy Bebop exists now.

3  Which is about $50 in today’s money.

4  More on BattleTech next week.