the background noise

It's book review time again, real life is on the verge of getting busy in the very near future but I've still found some time to turn the pages on some random reads. This time it's something a bit different and more than a little disconcerting. It's a dose of real life as we get all late-noughties and cover the 2007-08 financial crash in The Big Short by Michael Lewis. It's the book that became the film you may have also seen, or rather in my case its the film what was the book as I watched the big screen version ages ago. As always all words here are expanded and revised from the review I posted recently on Amazon and Goodreads, all ill-judged opinions are, as ever, my own. The short version: a butterfly flaps its wings in Wall Street and the world falls over. The long?

Happy August one and all! It's been a mostly sunny carefree month here. Sunshine, blue skies and a stillness to the air, true peak August vibes all said. So what better way to lean into the tail end of summer as the evenings gently grow darker and the temperature feels a touch cooler, than with another sample of my favourite game music. This time around it comes from a game I may have mentioned around these here parts previously: Hotline Miami, otherwise referred to by myself as  'T rippy Retro Ultra-Violent Hallucinogenic Slash Bang: The Game'. 

I've just completed a game that, in normal circumstances at least, wouldn't generally be my cup of tea. A game remastered and released in 2021 but which originally arrived in 2010 in a somewhat 'adjusted' manner shall we say?. A game I meant to get around to back then but never did and now that I have finally gotten around to both playing and completing it, I'm not entirely sure if I liked it or not. That game is Nier Replicant or to give it it's full re-released title:  Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139... because clearly the game alone wasn't baffling enough....

Once upon a time in the dark ages, in the long ago, in the age before the iPhone and reliable high speed broadband there was the humble video game. You would play it, it would last for a finite length of time and then it would end. You'd move on and play another game, maybe read a book, watch a film, join a ukulele band. You'd cast that game into the realm of memories past, enriched by the experience in some way but no longer actively partaking of it. Now that time never ended as such, those games are still very much around but in the here and now they have been eclipsed somewhat by something else altogether.

Haven't done a book review for the blog in a while, not since the dark days of 2022 and that William Gibson trilogy I endured. Instead here's some assorted thoughts on a book I just finished, 1987's On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers. Expanded and revised from the review I posted recently on Amazon and Goodreads, all ill-judged opinions are my own. The short version: It's a rollicking yarn full of pirates, ghouls, dark magic and bloodshed, I really enjoyed it, thanks for coming! Oh you want the longer one do you?

Picture the scene if you will... It's the early 90's, precise year unclear but possibly 1992? A young boy comes home from school to find that most special of surprises awaits him but not all is as it seems. For you see said boy was indeed myself, and the gift in question was a machine that could play video games but there was a catch... Was it the Nintendo Entertainment System I hear you ask? A Game Boy perhaps? A Sega Mega Drive ? A Jaguar even? No my friends it was none of those, for you see I grew up in a family that was not flush with cash so I had to make do with what I got. What I got was a hand-me-down Amstrad CPC 464 . 

As alluded to in my last post I have some thoughts about the game I have spent most of the last week playing, that game being Paradise Killer , those thoughts being well... these ones.  First up it seems like a minor miracle that I am playing a game like this in 2023 on my PS5 and not on my PS2 in the hallowed year of our lord 2001. it's a game that's quite simple and straightforward in some ways and in others it has a lot going on just beneath the surface. It feels about as removed from the generic high budget videogame as it gets these days without going into the realm of indie low-budget. There's some weird throwback energy going on here is what I am saying and over the next few hundred words I will attempt to put said thoughts in some kind of coherent order. To the commentary...