Wake up. Go to work. Take a lunch break. Send emails. Repeat.

Run errands. Clean the apartment. Repeat. Take care of the cat. Get woken up by the cat. Repeat.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Sometimes life is about repetition, especially when major change looms overhead. Retreating into the routine is a common phenomenon when you’ve been thrust into figuring out the new requirements that come along with a major change in the way you live. I have become routine incarnate. Repeating the same days. The same actions. The same nighttime Yuki (my beautiful little orange princess girlboss queen cat) screaming sessions that act as my alarm. I’m awaiting change, meaning I have entered a state of stasis.

Because of this, the anti-doomscroll write em’ up will be a bit different this week.

We’re not content-pilled, we’re now doomed by a new narrative:

Prepping for a move.

Relocating is a bit of a bitch. Having to assemble the sum of your life into boxes is, unsurprisingly, a weird experience. Each tool has a different story. Every trinket with its own tale etched into your mind. The little drawings you’ve lost to the annals of a junk drawer surface and force the memories to flood in, whether you want them to or not. It’s a cascade that makes you catalog everything that’s happened to you over the course of your life in the concrete box that keeps you warm at night.

You re-experience things over and over again as you pack them away. Everything you’ve done, everything you can do, and everything that you will do conquers your mind, just to get planted firmly into cubic cardboard. The years spent locked away until you confront them again in a new place.

Prep the pieces. Put them in a box. Pack them away. Repeat.

Coordinating your moving day is a bitch. Call after call with people who aren’t paid enough to do what they do. A call to the corporation that owns the truck you need to borrow. Another call to a new place and person to schedule the day you arrive. Another call to the old place to set up the day you leave it behind. Another call to the people who have volunteered to help you because they care about you.

Pick up the phone. Make another call. Hang up. Rub your eyes. Reset. Repeat.

The day hasn’t come, but it looms overhead like a rain cloud, ready to find a way to derail your plans and throw it all into disarray. You can’t plan for everything, no matter how hard you try. The plans are fated to change even if they’re fully etched into stone; nature, and by extension, life, erodes all, eventually.

Make a plan. Put it in the calendar. Worry about the future. Repeat.

You coast until you can move in and start the next chapter. The words might end up being similar. The sentence structure may stay the same. The style could remain unchanged.

There’s no way to know, so you bide your time and wait for the next wave.

Wake up. Go to work. Take a lunch break. Send emails.

Prepare for the future. Repeat.

Anyways, I’ve been playing nothing but a shitton of Guild Wars 2 and that’s been pretty rad, I think.

Have any new stuff you think I should check out? I’d love to hear any suggestions. Feel free to leave a comment (and subscribe, thanks ❤), message me on Bluesky, or hit me up in my Discord server. Get these posts early by subscribing to my Substack!

If you’re a Western TV head, you’ve probably heard of something called the bottle episode. As the concept of a bottle implies, these little self-contained stories are lower-budget affairs shot in one place with a limited cast. They’re little pieces of filler that, overall, aren’t super relevant to the main plot but pad out the episode count for when shows had to run 24 episodes no matter what.

My life is currently in its bottle episode phase; we’re low budget, in one place, and running the same storyline over and over.

There’s nothing wrong with it, and I’m pretty content; a constantly changing, bombastic life arc isn’t sustainable for a guy like me. While being a chill little guy for a bit is cool for me, it doesn’t lend itself to giving y’all a great narrative strand to follow to really get the weekly grind details feeling spicy.

That doesn’t mean I’m not gonna try, my reading enthusiasts. Despite the lack of grandeur, there is a simple beauty in this bottle, and sharing those little moments of media enjoyment with you hopefully perks up your day a bit.

I was on my phone the least out of any time during this journaling experiment, which means I’m throwing out a loud and boisterous “hell yeah, brother”.

When The Guilds are Wars-ing and the Death is Stranding

We’ve been on the same two games this week, but there’s been some developments: shit’s happening and it’s pretty cool, I think.

Death Stranding 2

Death Stranding 2 rocks, man. It’s a perfectly paced walk through an important question:

Should we have connected?

As usual, Kojima has the gift of prophecy, and it sucks for all of us in the real world. The game is tackling things like advanced AIs making decisions for all of us based on what they think is right. Why have democracy when an AI can simply intuit what president the people want? Themes of loneliness and the complications of connecting together are also center stage. The connections we make strengthen all of us, but they also can hurt; we’re all connected, but that doesn’t mean we’re all friends. There are some messed-up things happening in the plot, but it’s all delivered in a mature way that doesn’t try to make things goofy; when it’s bad, it’s bad. We’re not lacking in that classic Kojima goofiness, it’s just not inserted in places where it shouldn’t be.

So far, the game is an utter triumph. I plan on showcasing the rest of it live on my twitch dot tv live stream here in a few weeks, and I’d love to see you there.

Guild Wars 2

Playing MMOs alone isn’t fun, so I’m slowly trying to convert my friends into Guild Wars 2 fans. Like a traveling missionary, I’m spreading the good word to my close fellows and fellowettes, showing them the light of exploring the digital world Arenanet has created. It’s been great; everyone’s really been enjoying themselves so far, and it’s filling up my joy reserves. Nothing beats showing your friends something new and hearing them tell you how much fun they’re having. Brings a real smile to my face.

Death Stranding 2 may ask, “Should we have connected?”, and recruiting a squad to do dungeons has given me the answer:

Uhhhhhhhhhhh, yeah.

While I have you here:

Have you heard of the hit MMO phenomenon Guild Wars 2? It’s completely free to play up to level 80, enjoy your journey through Tyria as you fight off th-

Welcome to Night Vale, MF

I was a casual Welcome to Night Vale enjoyer back in its heyday. I loved the way the writers could casually mix Lovecraftian nightmares with government psy ops spiced up with a little goofiness; sometimes they do it all in the same sentence, even. I haven’t kept up with it recently, mostly because I thought it ended years ago, but I literally just googled it and learned that it’s still going. I might have to dive back into a random episode now.

Damn.

I started up their full-length novel aptly named Welcome to Night Vale, and it’s pretty enjoyable. Their style is on full display in the novel, so if you’re a fan of the podcast, it rocks. I do think it’s a little harder to follow in text form, strangely enough. You can still comprehend what’s going on, even if you can’t comprehend the horrors. It’s been a pretty good read so far, but it’s hard to recommend to just anyone; you definitely should feel the vibe out via the free podcast before you run out and buy the book.

That was it for last week—the continuation of continuations of the same old, same old. I want to get more mobile and out there in the real world; I want to get away from being so digital content-piled. Maybe it’s time to bust out the ol’ camera and start snapping pics again; creative outlets can be pretty sick, highly recommend.

Have any new stuff you think I should check out? I’d love to hear any suggestions. Feel free to leave a comment (and subscribe, thanks ❤), message me on Bluesky, or hit me up in my Discord server. Get these posts early by subscribing to my Substack!

Content-heads, we are so unbelievably back. The small screen time is the lowest it’s ever been. I’ve been implementing a few new strategies to keep that lil’ shit in my pocket where it belongs and they’ve been working pretty well. The current plan of attack is:

• Yell at myself internally and sometimes externally if I pick up my phone out of habit instead of intent.
• When that glowing box does get picked up, it gets thrown down face down like I’m Jaden Yuki fighting for my life immediately after I’m done. If I can’t see the notification, then it cannot tempt me into the abyss.
• Simply doing things I enjoy instead of things I don’t. World-shattering for me, unfortunately.

I’m happy we’re on the downward trend here, but the path to uncoupling is long and filled with insidious pitfalls that want to keep me trapped forever attached to the box that makes your mental health worse. I’m not falling for that shit though; I’m gonna power through this metaphorical phone dungeon and come out the other side feeling like I’ve actually done things with my life.

Gaming 2: We’re Walkin’ Here

Hopped into a gaming relationship with an old love and a new flame at the same time, and I’m splitting time between the two while they’re none the wiser.

Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2, my beloved. Every time I visit yo,u it’s as if I never left. It sounds like I’m waxing poetic, but it’s actually true; the progression system the game prides itself on letting you pick the game up and not find yourself grinding the gear treadmill to catch up so you can get back to doing the fun things. Almost all progression is horizontal in nature; you level up your masteries, which grant you new abilities. Playing through the Heart of Thorns expansion powers up your glider skills so you can traverse vertically, while sifting through the sands of Path of Fire lets you collect mounts and teach them new tricks. There are a million different masteries that all contribute to an overall mastery level that shows how dedicated to the Guild Wars 2 hustle.

Seriously, if you’re looking for an MMO, I cannot recommend it enough. The combat is so incredibly frantic and fun. Each class can do any variety of tanking, healing, or DPSing, and they all do it in different and thematically coherent ways. The world design and intentionality behind it are revolutionary in the MMO world in my opinion. People do events and the maps actually react to it with dynamic changes that adjust what they do based on how well you and the other schmucks do in certain encounters. Top all of this off with the game being a masterclass in the “respects your time” category and you’ll find yourself coming back every year to get addicted for a month or two.

Death Stranding 2

Kojima superfan #1,567,248 reporting in; Death Stranding 2 is good. It’s real good. I’m only a few hours in, but it already feels like Sam Porter 2 is leaving Sam Porter 1 in the dust. The minutiae is where it matters here: movement feels better yet still retains the challenge from DS1, the gameplay loop still hits, and the environments feel so much more alive due to the new geographical variety and little creatures added to the flora and fauna pool. This is a world that’s healing after the Death Stranding, and every design choice feels intentionally done to make you feel that way.

I’m entirely too early in to make a sweeping call on how good it’ll be, but unfortunately, I’m a Kojima glazer, so I’ll be doing it anyway. The game is gonna be in my top three of the year, easily.

Books 2: Half of a Good Time

Had a whiplash of a reading experience last week. I finally locked in and finished a book I wasn’t enjoying too much, and then immediately found one I loved so intensely that I read 456 pages of it in two days.

Long Division by Kiese Laymon

Sitting down and writing an entire book is really, really hard. It takes a lot of talent to be able to create your own world and make it believable. I commend anyone who gets to the point where their words go from their headspace to their physical space. That’s a shining achievement, man! Anyone should be proud of that.

I hate shiting on books, so I’m not going to do that and I’ll just focus in on my tastes.

I didn’t enjoy Long Division at all. It wasn’t for me. There’s a story in here that’ll resonate with someone, and I can nearly guarantee that. Unfortunately, I was not that person. There were too many ideas swimming around on the pages that couldn’t find their own time to breathe and really coalesce into anything substantial. There are some fascinating concepts in here, but I wasn’t into how they were executed.

It’s tough to recommend you read this one if your tastes are like mine, but if you find yourself disagreeing with me constantly and going “this guy’s a dipshit what the hell” constantly then Long Division may grab you and take you for a trippy ride.

Dungeon Crawler Carl #1

I’ve finally found a new series to obsess over and it’s Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. Part fantasy, part science fiction, and part fucked up lil’ isekai, Matt Dinniman combines the genres in a way that shouldn’t work, but guess what? It all fits together perfectly. While the setting and concept of a mega fantasy death game is incredibly compelling, the book really shines when it comes to its characters. Everybody has their own motivations, wants, and needs. You’ve got everything from loveable little scamps like Princess Donut, the talking wizard cat who has a refined side and small smattering of disdain that masks a genuine care for the main character, Carl. Juxtapose that against everything from tv talk show hosts with ulterior motives to a player killing mom with a complicated past and you’ve got a recipe for a compelling journey. Reading through this has been the most fun I’ve had reading in a very long time, and I’m picking up the 2nd of currently 7 books in the series as soon as I can.

Costco Hits Hard

I went to Costco at 12pm on a Saturday and let me tell you; I messed up. That place is a Hunger Games-esque battle royale where you’re fighting against soccer moms with a gaggle of eight children for a five pound carton of muffins and trying to navigate past crowds of people who are scared, confused, and lack a sense of spatial awareness that makes you wonder if they’ve actually been to a grocery store before. My war against the warehouse was all worth it in the end for one singular reason:

I’ve seen the light of god, and it comes in the form of a $3.99 sandwich in a big stick of bread.

Costco Chicken Bake

The chicken bake was unbelievably good dude. Filled to the brim with chunks of chicken, a three cheese blend of mozzarella, provolone, and parmesan, bacon pieces, and a caesar dressing that makes the pocket punch above its flavor weight.

The chicken was well sized and had a great texture to it. The cheese trifecta added a gooey, smooth flavor to the overall package, and the bacon was subtly there to add a bit more oomph. I’m a caesar dressing hater, but this Costco concoction added so much tastiness to the package that I wouldn’t be afraid to drink this stuff by the gallon. Throw some perfectly baked bread around it and you have a 840 calorie treat that I could scarf down every day.

The EP of the Week: Burst and Decay Volume III by The Wonder Years

You know me by now; I’m into that sad boy shit. The Wonder Years were one of my favorite middle school to early high school sounds. Those songs about sitting in Philly and fighting against life really resonated with some kid from a mid-sized midwestern town whose only late-night attraction was sitting in a Taco Bell parking lot at 3 am. I recently learned that the band does acoustic releases of some of their bigger songs, and as an avid acoustic conversion fan, I immediately dove into Burst & Decay Volume III and loved every second of it.

The Wonder Years takes their tracks of yesteryear and completely flips them on their heads. Instead of abject anger at the world, many of these have a somber hopefulness to them now that elevates them to a different plane. Junebug, one of the new tracks on the EP, is utterly beautiful. Focused on the feelings of being a dad, the track oozes with the warm love that a parent feels for their child, both vocally and on the instrumental arrangement. My personal favorite from the past, I Don’t Like Who I Was Back Then is changed from a feeling of “Fuck, I suck, I’m mad, and I might fuck this up” to a more “Fuck, I suck but I’m hopeful that I can do better” type beat. This song also features Ryland Heagy from Origami Angel for a verse, and he nails it. The last track, Doors I Painted Shut, hits a more somber note that fades the album out in a great way.

A total winner, and if you like a good ol’ symphonic arrangement, you’ll love it.

Last week was a winner for me, so I’m excited to see if I can finish out this week strong.

Have any new stuff you think I should check out? I’d love to hear any suggestions. Feel free to leave a comment (and subscribe, thanks ❤), message me on Bluesky, or hit me up in my Discord server. Get these posts early by subscribing to my Substack!

I’ve learned that being an adult in the modern era is… an interesting emotional experience. There’s a low level of constant anxiety that permeates daily existence. The mundanities erode my mind slowly and in new, insidious ways. The grocery store trips call for a sacrifice; my limited after-work time is spent fighting against the crashing metal wave of mechanical beasts piloted by others who live and see entirely different worlds than I do. How do these people work? What truly drives them? Where does the light (or lack thereof) behind their eyes come from?

All thoughts I have as they cut through five lanes of highway gridlock to get to the exit they somehow forgot was coming up in .01 miles.

Absolute bastards.

US car-centric infrastructure existentialism aside, I did some stuff last week, I think.

The Gaming Grind: Hitting The Mountain Range and Hitting Balls

I’ve just been hitting the play button and seeing what happens on Steam. It’s a pretty cash money play for when you’re drifting between distractions, and it’s been hittin’.

Rematch

I hopped back on the digital soccer grind in Rematch to try and improve, but doing solo ranked in a team sports game with a huge mechanical ceiling like this is a Sisyphean act. Since it’s relatively new, everyone’s skill level is absolutely all over the place. You’ll have people doing crazy trick shots from midfield that bend the space time continuum to enter the goal at the one specific angle that even astrophysicists couldn’t calculate, while you’ve got a teammate that’s never even seen a controller before chewing on their wires.

I love the skill expression in this one, but I’m getting super hesitant to play it solo at this point. The amount of Gamer™️words I’ve heard and been called while solo queueing has been absolutely egregious, and I’ve hit the point in my life where I just don’t want to hear that shit anymore.

We shouldn’t have to be fighting and telling people to fuck off with that noise in 2025, its ridiculous.

It’s also got some hilarious technical issues. Make sure you hit your barber, only short hair is allowed, buddy.

Peak

Peak is the collab project recently released by Aggro Crab (Another Crab’s Treasure and Going Under) and Landfall Games (Content Warning and Clustertruck, to name only a few), two very cool indie studios in the space. Lemme tell you; it’s riveting. Getting together a group of four scouts and fighting the wild geography the developers have crafted has been some of the most fun I’ve had in a multiplayer game recently. It’s incredibly hard, and runs are more of a marathon that usually last over an hour than a short sprint. It’s an incredible design decision; instead of evoking feelings of a typical game session that lasts 20–30 minutes, you get a genuine sense of adventure and feel for the struggle these silly little campers have to go through.

On top of that, it’s just goofy, man. Seeing friends careen off a sheer cliffside into the bottom of the abyss while their screams fade out will never not be funny.

The Jorpen Experience and the Art of Learning How to Drop Books He Doesn’t Like

I’ve been reading a singular book, and I’ll be straight up with you; it’s been a very long time since I’ve actively disliked a book this much, and I’m strugglin’.

Long Division

I was really hoping I’d get more into Long Division once I got to the halfway point, but man. I’m straight up not having a good time.

The book is all over the place. It’s actually a dual time-traveling story where you read “book one,” which follows City, the main character who constantly refers to himself as fat, and that’s about where the character description ends. The second book follows City, the main character who constantly refers to himself as fat, and that’s about where the character description ends, but he’s a different dude in the 1980s. The book is trying to tackle too many things at once, and it really, really suffers for it. You’ve got subjects like race, religion, Christianity, being a young black man in a society that doesn’t support you, love, time travel, and about a million different other things pulling you in different directions. It almost feels Murakami-esque without understanding why the Murakami style is as good as it is; instead of the dream-like haze of being lost, City is constantly there to drive a whole lot of nothing forward, except for his complete lack of understanding of the events he’s experiencing. Sure, that’s the Murakami special, but there’s a special sauce to it; it all feels so positively hazy and dream-like, while Long Division feels like it’s trying to be confusing for the sake of being confusing.

I’m not gonna drop it, but I really should’ve by now. I just want it to be over so I can try and enjoy reading again.

The Inner Reviewbrah Cometh: Another Fast Food Fiend Shows Thyself

Get the five star restaurants out of my face; its time for the real foodie shit to hit. I’m a big fast food head, and I love tryin’ all the new promo items I can. Can Taco Bell really hold a candle to a legitimate, hole-in-the-wall Mexican place? Hell no. Does it tickle my brain in a special way that only a Cheesy Gordita Crunch can? Hell yes.

A bunch of new places are trialing out new chicken recipes and combos, so I hit the pavement to chow down.

Culver’s New Chicken Recipe

I’m contractually obligated to like Culver’s as a midwesterner, I’m afraid. That first bite into a Butterburger makes me ascend into a different plane every time. I whisper to my lactose intolerance, “Not today,” as I inhale a Concrete Mixer. You just can’t take the meat, cheese, and milk out of the midwestern boy, even if my insides hate it.

Culver’s dropped their new chicken recipe last week, and I was eager to dive in and give it a shot, but I’ve got bad news to report: it’s as decidedly mid as the old one.

I tried the Spicy Chicken Sandwich, and the amount of flavor and kick to it surprised the heck out of me. Most fast food spicy chicken sandwich recipes tend to be the non-spicy version (now with our special spice: black pepper!), but Culver’s new recipe is pretty flavorful without hurting the midwesterner “mayo is just too spicy!!” sensibilities. While the flavor was good, the chicken itself was not; the sandwich I tried was rather anemic, with the breading making up the majority of the sandwich. When I did get actual chicken bites, it was great, but if this is the regular patty size, then it’s best to just stick to buttering up a burger and going to town.

Taco Bell Crispy Chicken Strip Burrito

Taco Bell’s fried chicken obsession continues with its new Crispy Chicken Burrito, and it’s solidly okay. The tenders themselves were crisp and had a nice crunch. Luckily, I rolled high on the Taco Bell fried chicken gacha machine this time around and got some larger pieces that made my burrito much, much better. It’s the other additions that bring down the totally not a snack wrap for me. Their cabbage blend wins a participation award in every menu item it’s in, and the pico de gallo has always tasted a little… off to me. The Spicy Ranchero sauce did rock pretty hard, though, and I’d love to put that on something that’s less wrap and more burrito.

Overall, solid if you win the chicken lottery at Taco Bell, but that doesn’t happen often; their fried chicken can be so strangely small.

Growing Up Angsty and Evolving Into A New You: Modern Baseball to Slaughter Beach, Dog

Changing as a person is inevitable, and what you’re into changes alongside that. Little me would see my now 29 year old ass and wonder: what the hell happened? That’s okay; he’s young, dumb, and has no idea what life even is. Like us, the music we like evolves and changes. A lot of the time, the bands or artists themselves don’t; they are a time capsule we unearth every once and a while to relive a bit of who we were. Most don’t change, but there are exceptions to the rule, and one of them is Slaughter Beach, Dog.

Slaughter Beach, Dog is formed out of a few of the remnants of Modern Baseball. Comprising Jake Ewald, one-half of the vocal duo, and bassist Ian Farmer. The project is unabashedly not Modern Baseball, and that’s what really fuckin’ rocks about it.

The band is an evolution from the angsty, angry days of being poor and lost in life. Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling could not be farther from what the original MOBO is. The angry odd guitar tunings are intentionally replaced with the country twang of a good ol’ Stratocaster. The in-your-face lyricism is exchanged for a more elegant, story-driven narrative that feels slightly hopeful and a little somber. It’s wholly and entirely different in a beautiful way. Slaughter Beach, Dog almost feels like they’ve grown up alongside me and changed with me. Even though we’ve taken different paths in life, and I don’t necessarily enjoy this album, I respect the hell out of it. It’s like meeting up with a long-lost friend after ten years; you’ve gone on different paths, but there’s an unspoken love that fills you with hope for their success.

I do like their older albums, but if this is the new direction, then I support them 100% of the way, even if we’re growing in different directions.

Have any new stuff you think I should check out? I’d love to hear any suggestions. Feel free to leave a comment (and subscribe, thanks ❤), message me on Bluesky, or hit me up in my Discord server. Get these posts early by subscribing to my Substack!

We beat some of our demons last week, fam. The phone time has gone down, even if you factor in the average from the week before. It’s been tough, but a combination of little tricks I’ve learned and a lot of active mental scolding has helped me break the “hear notification check notification” infinite doom spiral, and if I never open my phone, I never actually click on any of the usual time wasters!

I’d post the graphs of my screen time change over the weeks, but we’re keeping those numbers secret until they look a little less… depressing.

On That Grind: Clair Obscur

Clair Obscur is about wrapped up and holy shit has it been an experience. I can confidently say that I’ve enjoyed nearly every minute of my journey against the Gommage clock. The game has been perfectly paced with exceptionally deep emotional beats that had me feeling several emotions, and some of them were even happy, sometimes!

I’m currently on Act 3, right before the point of no return, and I’m clearing up all of the side content. I anticipate myself going for the 100% completion, but I’ve got one primary blocker: the secret mega boss. Holy shit are they rocking my ass back to the stone age. I ended up beating their first phase on my second try, and I knew my Verso Lune Maelle super squad was about to instantly get rocked. The difficulty won’t stop me, though; I love the game so much that I’m willing to slam my head into the wall until they’re dead.

I’m hoping to finish it up this weekend so that I can finally get back to writing some longer-form reviews. Spoiler alert: it’s going to be nothing but praise, except for one singular thing that you’ll have to wait and read about. 😘

Sprinting Around Linveld In Nightreign

Nightreign, my beloved. You are still as beautiful as the day I met you two weeks ago. I’ve secured a semi-cracked squad, and we’re slowly securing each boss’s proverbial bag. I love how different each major fight is, and I think the choice of giving each boss an elemental weakness that not only increases damage but causes something special to happen (on certain bosses) was an amazing design choice. It creates an interesting dynamic; do you try your luck and full send it towards an area that has equipment with that boss’s weakness to try and get lucky enough to exploit it? Do you focus on boss rushes to level up fast and potentially get weapons that are higher rarity or statistically better without the element? We love a game that lets a fella make impactful choices on gameplay.

Combining these mini decisions with finding out each and every little janky quirk the game contains has me reminiscing about old PS2 games that didn’t have things fully figured out. I mean that in the best way; we need more video games that aren’t completely polished out the wazoo; it gives them character!

The Book World

I’ve been making it a goal to finish more books over the next couple of weeks; I want to get off any screen, large or small, a little bit more. I’ve been struggling a bit due to finishing a great book and going into what is, so far, a not-so-great book. Despite the trials and tribulations of enjoying a book slightly less than usual, I’m powering through it so I can get to something that’ll be more my speed.

Sally Rooney’s Normal People

Hole-e-shit. This book hit m hard, but the hit was so delayed that it was like a late Amtrak train hitting straight to the heart after an eight-hour delay. Seriously, I had to sit and stare at a wall after I read the final line.

Normal People takes place over the course of a few years and follows two high schoolers whose lives end up intertwined by happenstance. It’s a tale of loss, love, and the situations and emotions in life that derail us from what we think we want. To be honest, I wasn’t feeling it super hard in the first half; a lot of the decisions felt a bit unrealistic, but when I thought about it from the frame of mind of a high schooler still trying to figure it all out, it made a lot more sense to me. Once we got past that, whoo boy did that second half hit.

The mid-point ramps up the drama and issues, and the pay-off is so, so worth it, if you love feeling crushed, that is. I don’t want to spoil things, but sometimes destiny has other plans for us, no matter how much we want something and how much pain that destined path puts us through.

A beautiful full package. Just get through the first half-ish of it, and you’ll start to really feel entirely too many emotions all of the time.

The Book of Elsewhere by China Mieville and Keanu Reeves (Yeah, The John Wick guy)

After reading a star-crossed lovers’ story, I decided to go in a completely different direction for my next read. The Book of Elsewhere by China Mieville and Keanu Reeves is based on the BRZRKR comics (also by Keanu Reeves). It follows the life of the immortal B, a revenant of death and destruction who has seen it all over the course of the Earth’s lifespan.

Quite frankly, I’m really struggling through it. I’m about 200 pages in, and I still feel like nothing major has happened outside of the initial events that kicked everything off. Even then, the descriptions of what exactly happened were pretty confusing, and I’ve been trying to backfill events to piece together where we’re even going here. I don’t mean this in the “it was esoteric and strange” way, but in the “the words didn’t really explain what happened well” way. On top of that, the book has two very, very distinct voices running in different directions. You can tell who has written each chapter, and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it feels a bit incoherent. The main story chapters are pretty simply written (this isn’t a complaint, they’re just more straight to the point) while the backstory chapters are filled with crazy prose and a lack of coherency that very much so feels like it was done on purpose. It’s giving me a bit of tonal whiplash, and I think a bit more of a consistent voice would help me enjoy the ride a lot more.

I think I see how the central conflict is gonna end, and if the landing sticks, then maybe it’ll have been a good read, but so far I’m just not into it.

Still not the worst celebrity book I’ve ever read. Steve Martin’s Shopgirl will eternally top that list.

Last Week’s Listen

Better Oblivion Community Center’s Self-Titled

I dove into Better Oblivion Community Center for one reason: I’m a certified Phoebe-head. I’ve been a back-to-back top 1% Bridger boy on Spotify for the past two years, so you better back off, buddy. While it’s not my favorite collab band involving Phoebe Bridgers, I did enjoy it overall.

That classic straight-from-the-heart lyricism hits with the first track Didn’t Know What I Was In For, which was the highlight of the album for me. If you like that type of melancholy that centers around the ennui of life, then it’s definitely the type of heart hit you’ll enjoy. The other banger was Dominos, led by Connor Oberst, the lead singer of Bright Eyes. I enjoy his vocal work a lot on this album, even if his tracks on other projects don’t usually do it for me.

Outside of the intro and ending tracks, I felt the rest of the songs were a bit forgettable. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed the album listening experience and the kind of emotional drifting it does, but I’d be lying if I said I could pick out specific individual tracks I liked outside of the two previously named.

Listen for the album experience; don’t expect to have any singles to throw onto your “drifting through life” playlists, but throw it on on a rainy day and enjoy a little bit of window gazing.

Gotta show the credentials.

Hopefully next week I can stop being so Clair Obscur-pilled and dive into something new. Not that I’m not enjoying it, I’m just itching to pick up Deadlock again or start a new single-player game.

See you next week no-phoners, lets hope the screentime report doesn’t kick my ass this week.

Have any new stuff you think I should check out? I’d love to hear any suggestions. Feel free to leave a comment (and subscribe, thanks ❤), message me on Bluesky, or hit me up in my Discord server. Want early access to my writing? Subscribe to my Substack!

Real talk: I’ve got a pretty bad small-screen addiction problem right now. My dopamine receptors are shot, and my brain craves the bite-sized validations of Bluesky skeets (I still hate that they called them that, oh my god) and TikTok how-tos on things I don’t even want to do. This rewiring of my gray matter to a form that obsesses with bite-sized, attention span altering content has genuinely started to affect my life in so many ways, and I want to fight back against my issues and get my noggin back to a place that makes me happy and is less susceptible to minor distractions. This addiction has seriously been harshing my mental health, and, in an attempt to fight it, I’m trying to re-squeeze the creative juices out by keeping a journal of what I’ve been doing and want to do, other than sending Instagram reels to my friends.

My new weekly fight against my newly identified dopamine demons went well this week, and I made some good progress towards things I’ve been meaning to do, both on the content and life side of things.

I Got Gamin’

Gaming is my eternal ride or die, so there’s always gonna be something I’m playing. Luckily, we didn’t just play my “filler” games this week. I branched out and took the chance on playing some new stuff that has me feeling excited about Content™️again.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

I was a bit pessimistic on and wary of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 before launch, but holy shit am I glad to be proven wrong. This Dark Souls cross Paper Mario cross Netflix drama has a vice grip on my psyche and has my plot conspiracy theory neurons firing. I’m about five hours in, and I’m so, so curious about where this story is twisting and turning. One of the main characters just went on an involuntary nightmare trip that has me questioning what in the hell is even going on. The theorycrafting engine in my brain is going crazy, even if my out-of-left-field “Lune isn’t actually alive and is just Gustave’s hallucination” ended up being completely wrong.

Not that I’m complaining; I love it when I’m wrong about where a game is going.

Deadlock

I’ve got an addiction to Deadlock, I’m afraid. No multiplayer game has scratched the itch in my brain I didn’t even know existed like Deadlock has. It’s got everything I want in a game: crazy movement mechanics, arena shooter-esque fast-paced shoot em’ upping, and an incredible amount of strategic depth that will have you calculating harder than a grandmaster chess player.

The newest patch re-did all of the in-game items, and has the game feeling decidedly less alpha-ish and much moreso beta-ish at this point. The new visual filter is subtle yet clean, all of the new environmental assets rock, and, in my opinion, the balance has never been in a better spot.

I’m 500 hours deep right now, and I think I’ve got another 500 in me, bare minimum.

Risk of Rain 2

My (relatively) new Steam Deck has been getting a workout courtesy of Risk of Rain 2. Roguelikes just hit different for me, and Risk of Rain 2 is one of the best out there, at least in my humble opinion. I’m still very early on; I only have a few characters unlocked, and I’m trying to internalize what each item does so I can focus on crafting a build that can actually beat the game.

The game performs great on Steam Deck, and getting to do 10–20 minute chunks of a run while I’m busy fighting for my life in the throne room is a nice reprieve.

Reading “Normal People” by Sally Rooney

I’ve fallen off the proverbial reading horse a bit recently, so there haven’t been any marathon reading sessions. I did end up start up Normal People by Sally Rooney and now I’m getting a few too many targeted reels talking about dudes going full “pick-me” reading it in public performatively. I’m only 60-ish pages in (so roughly 25% of the way through) and I’m not sure what I think about it. That’s not a statement that’s indicative of its quality; there just hasn’t been a ton going on. It’s a bit of a slow-burning teenage romance so far, and I think I see quite a bit of star-crossed lover boy/girl dynamic happening, but we’ll have to see where it goes before I can form any opinion on it.

Might just read it in a coffee shop and live up to what my short-form content has diagnosed me with.

Hitting the Guitar Again and Enjoying Arm’s Length

I’ve had one singular focus in the music world this week: the new Arm’s Length album There’s a Whole World Out There. I found Arm’s Length at the end of last year, and they quickly catapulted onto my top 10 favorite bands list. Never Before Seen, Never Again Found resonated entirely too hard with me on a personal level, and because of that, I’ve had pieces of it on repeat for six months, give or take. I try to keep my hype levels pretty low for new releases, but after listening to You Ominously End, one of their singles, I knew this one was gonna be special.

There’s a Whole World Out There is a fantastic road trip through the complicated struggles of relationships and grief, and it hits the asphalt hard. Tracks like Fatal Flaw are a double-edged sword cutting between the hopes and joy of childhood that are contrasted by the pieces of you you’ve internalized and hacked off as an adult. On the other end, bangers like You Ominously End sit there and belt out the anger of dealing with someone who just doesn’t care as much about you as you do them. There’s some beautiful lyrical work in here that you don’t always see in the 5th wave emo mega genre.

I know it’s early, but its more than likely going to be my album of the year.

Unrelated but I picked up guitar again, because what’s a “fuck phones” phase without picking up an old hobby?

Entirely Too Much The Bazaar and Deadlock YouTube

Don’t know how it happened, but I’ve suddenly exited my livestream watching arc and entered the YouTube guy phase of my life. I’m dipping my toes into watching long-form gaming content via the best to ever do it: Northernlion. Dude’s hilarious and definitely a goal for any content creation I’d do in the future in front of the camera. The Bazaar is one of my recent addictions, so seeing him commentary his way through some runs has been entirely too entertaining and entirely too good at acting as a lullaby. Besides him, I’ve been watching random Deadlock VOD uploads from Zerggy and MikaelS, two of the top players in the EU. On the essay end, I’ve been enjoying a lot of Memoria’s recent stuff; she’s absolutely hilarious and I love the weird ass games she covers.

If you have any good YouTube creators to recommend, I’d love to hear about them! I need more stuff to vegetate to.

That sums up my week! It’s been a relative success; my embarrassingly high screentime has dropped to a much less embarrassing number that is still entirely too high. The goal for next week is to dive into some new bands I’ve found, suddenly remember how to play guitar, and hopefully try to slowly get back into livestreaming.

If you have any cool things I should check out or do, let me know! I’d love to hear any suggestions. Feel free to leave a comment with anything that's on your mind, chat me up on Bluesky, hit me up in my Discord server, or subscribe to my Substack to get these pieces in your inbox a lil’ early.

Let’s see how next week goes!

Year sucked but at least we got some bangers

2024 has been the year where I finally realized that finishing video games is hard. It’s tough to commit to completing a game when you’re constantly being assaulted by adult life and all of the batshit insane things that this hell Earth makes you deal with when you’re sane and normal-ish. Bouncing around from tragedy to world calamity to the general level of insanity we’ve all, unfortunately, become accustomed to makes it hard to start or finish literally anything. Despite all of this, I still managed to find comfort in a few games that consumed what little brain-ordered mandatory fun video game time I was allowed to have.

I won’t be ranking any of these in a particular order, but if you want to see some short-form reviews with ratings assigned, check out my Backloggd account.

Deadlock

Holy shit dude am I addicted to Deadlock. Valve’s newest multiplayer game has an absolute vice grip on my day-to-day thoughts. My MOBA days were long gone after contracting carpal tunnel (don’t worry, I’m okay now, mostly.) from daily 14-hour League of Legends sessions in high school, but Deadlock dragged me back in. Everything about Deadlock is so perfectly tuned to my hyper-specific interests to the point that I can’t find a molecule in my body that wants to put the game down.

Lovecraftian-esque old gods fighting for supremacy in a unique low-level mysticism-based New York setting is an incredible artistic choice that’s right up my alley. Cool-ass characters ranging from crazy fire demons from otherworldly planes of existence to regular old dudes with bows and everything in between are on the roster. Every single one of the heroes brings a new and possibly infuriating mechanic to the table. Deadlock’s biggest strength to me is its focus on being relatively simple to learn (as far as MOBAs go, at least) while maintaining a level of mechanical complexity that lets my optimization-fueled brain go wild. The movement mechanics are the true shining star. You’ve got sliding, rolling, dashing, dash jumping, animation canceling zip-line jumps that preserve momentum, wall bouncing, and so many more micro movement optimizations that fuel the inner child GuNZ the Duel addict that is still animation canceling around somewhere in my heart and soul.

Seriously though, I have 300 hours in this game over six months. I can’t stress enough how crazy that is at this point in my life.

With Valve and Icefrog steering the ship, I have zero worries about the future of Deadlock. The full release of this game is gonna go incredibly hard.

Mouthwashing

I’m a huge fan of games, movies, and music that tackle The Horrors™️. Instead of indulging in media-based escapism, my brain has apparently decided that we’re just gonna fight for our lives constantly. I think doing things this way helps me rationalize the insanity, but it may also be because I’m just a little freak. Who knows!

Mouthwashing is a digital manifestation of dread and hatred, and it may be the best narrative experience we’ve gotten in the past five years.

The journey of the Tulpar and its crew is a character-driven nightmare that absolutely hates you. Each of the characters are incredibly well written, nuanced, and have so much more character development going on below the surface of what happens in the game’s story. If you’re willing to connect some dots and do a bit of research, you can find horrible things bubbling beneath the surface of the crew’s minds.

I cannot stress how well-written these characters are. Each of them have very distinct personalities that make them genuinely feel like regular people stuck in the worst possible situation. They all deal with their grief and impending doom in their own ways: whether its the hopeful naivety of Daisuke, the resignation and descent back into alcoholism of Swansea, or the quiet anguish of Anya, the entire crew lives their remaining lives in constant conflict aggravated by pure malice and dread.

I did not feel good playing through Mouthwashing, and that’s exactly why I think it's phenomenal.

Silent Hill 2

I’m a huge PS2 horror head, and the Silent Hill series has several of my favorite games of all time. On the opposite end, Bloober Team (the developers of the Silent Hill 2 remake) have some real stinkers I can’t stand. The Medium was their attempt at imitating a Silent Hill game, and I couldn’t name a singular thing I liked about it. The ending of The Medium and the way it handled mental health issues all but assured me that they wouldn’t be able to handle remaking Silent Hill 2; you need to be able to tell a story with a bit of nuance to make a great Silent Hill game, and The Medium beat you over the head with narrative themes hammer. Because of all of this and Konami’s horrendous track record with the Silent Hill franchise in the modern era, I was ready to completely write off the remake and just wait for the new entry in the series.

Luckily, I’ve never been more wrong in my life; Their rendition of Silent Hill 2 may just be the best remake of a game that’s ever been made.

Bloober Team manages to make a game that keeps the spirit of the original intact while also turning it into an experience that feels completely different to long-time fans. The original was a nightmarish sequence of events where everything felt slightly wrong. The proportions of the town weren’t quite… right. Every character felt like someone you met in a dream; their speech patterns were off, their actions seemed floaty and offputting, and they knew something you didn’t. The combat and navigation were like trying to run in those restless dreams; sluggish and frustrating. All of these, combined with the best atmospheric experience ever crafted in a video game, cemented the original as one of the greatest games of all time.

Bloober keeps that original story intact, but makes everything in between feel different, and makes the experience more akin to a real, living nightmare. The characters feel more real with very subdued and authentic performances. The town of Silent Hill feels alive in the worst possible way, and don’t even get me started on the amount of care they put into the smallest things; there are so many little nods given to long-time fans that have the fan theories going wild.

My singular complaint is that the game feels a little bit too long now. Outside of that, Bloober Team has nailed perfection where it was previously thought impossible.

Persona 3 Reload

To say that Persona 3 is important to me would be an understatement. I booted it up on a PS2 emulator back when I was 19, bored, and utterly lost in life. For some reason, I had an intrusive thought: Man, I’m so bored, I should stream this.

That decision irrevocably changed the course of my life for the better.

Through Persona 3, I found a group of lifelong friends, gained the ability to actually socialize and come out of my anxiety-fueled shell, and crazily enough, secured a job with the things I learned doing content creation in the years that followed me booting up the game for the first time. This game is so important to me and my growth as a human being to the point where I got a tattoo of Thanatos’s coffin to memorialize what it did for me and the lessons I learned from my first go-around with the game.

Persona 3 Reload let me re-experience a game I’ve put hundreds and hundreds of hours into with a fresh coat of paint and some major systems changes that made the game feel more fast-paced and exciting to play. The new performances breathed an entirely different life into each of the characters even though the story beats were the same. I loved every second of the experience I got with the remake, and I really need to get around to playing The Answer at some point so I can once again finish the journey I started ten years ago.

Crow Country

If you can’t tell from my glowing Silent Hill 2 opinions and my previous writings on Resident Evil and The Medium, I’ll let you know now; survival horror games are kinda my jam. Games and series like Silent Hill and SIGNALIS frequently occupy my gray matter. There’s just something about the existential dread and stress of resource management that makes my neurons fire, and Crow Country made my brain fire on all cylinders.

Crow Country is a quirky, stylish little romp through an abandoned theme park with a dark past that feels like a love letter to the genre. You can see the influence of Silent Hill in its menus and the chokehold Resident Evil has on its puzzles and combat system. While it revers the titles that came before it, it never strays too far into actually becoming one of its predecessors; Crow Country carves itself out to be something wholly unique within the genre with its beautiful art style and focus on a more goofy (until things get pretty serious towards the end, at least) protagonist and environment.

I’m due for another run of Crow Country with my new game plus items; that S+ rank is calling my name.

Hades II

I’m about as Hades-pilled as you can get. I’m 200 hours deep minimum over two platforms, and I’d been feeling the itch to dive back down into Tartarus just so I could repeatedly climb back up again. When Supergiant Games announced Hades II, I was hyped up to the 100th degree. Now that I’ve put about 37 hours into the early access release, I’m tentatively ready to say that Hades II has done the impossible; it blows its predecessor out of the water in the quality department.

Melinoë is very much so not her brother Zagreus. Her slower, more methodical fighting style is in direct contrast to her brother’s fast-paced flurry of infernal arms. Zagreus cracks jokes and is a bit more hot-headed while his sister is much more serious, demure, and mindful. Their personalities mirror the tone of their game’s stories, making Hades I & II feel similar yet very distinct at the same time.

The craziest part? Hades II already has more content than Hades I does, and it’s in early access.

I had to forcibly stop myself from playing more just so I could save the rest of my impending hyperfixation for the full release. I’m counting down the currently unknown amount of days until I can sink another 200 hours into a Supergiant classic.

There are a few games I really wanted to throw on the list that I either haven’t beaten or really fully experienced. They still rock though, so I’m throwing them in.

Webfishing

I’m incredibly nostalgic for the long gone days of of IRC channel chatting and MSN Messenger nudges. Spending all day messaging friends and talking to random people on the internet more than likely wasn’t good for my developing brain but we’re not gonna worry about that one, okay? Webfishing feels like the modern-day equivalent of those message boards, just with a little bit more gameplay.

Sometimes it's just nice to sit around with some random people on the internet, shoot the shit, and share just a little bit of the limited time we have on Earth learning about each other’s lives. While Webfishing does exist as a vessel for chatting, it’s also a solid cozy game with a pretty good progression system and gameplay loop. There are lots of secrets to find, cosmetics to collect (I ❤ Peeing hat my beloved I will get you one day), and an infinite void to explore, and I’ll be hopping on every once and a while to say stupid shit on the docks.

Path of Exile II

I have spent entirely too many hours of my time on this planet playing ARPGs. I’m glad Blizzard doesn’t provide playtime stats for your games because I’m genuinely afraid to see what my Diablo 3 hour count is. Even though I love the genre, there’s always been one game that I just couldn’t get into: Path of Exile. I fully recognized how great the game is but I just couldn’t ever get it to click. That’s why I’m surprised at how much I love Path of Exile II; the game is terrific and it’s not even finished.

While I haven’t gotten to the end game yet, I really enjoy the gameplay loop on a foundational level. Things like the addition of dodge rolling make combat feel infinitely more intentional in comparison to the other games in the genre. The slower pace makes me feel more connected to the game and what’s happening on my screen. After a while I stopped having to think and participate in Diablo III, turning the game into a machine that turns big numbers into huge dopamine hits. PoE 2 (at least in the early to mid-game) focuses more on slower-paced map jaunts and tough boss fights that require you to stay engaged and do quasi-MMO mechanics to survive.

Metaphor Refantazio

I haven’t found an Atlus game I didn’t enjoy on some level, and Metaphor Refantazio isn’t the exception to the rule so far. I’m only roughly 15 hours into my playthrough because being a grown-ass man with a job makes it hard to play 100+ hour-long video games, but I’m confident enough in my current enjoyment levels to be able to say that it’d rank on my list if I finished it, assuming the quality doesn’t randomly nosedive off a cliff.

The combat evolves the Shin Megami Tensei/Persona formula, bringing a different level of depth to it via the job system. The writing grows from the more juvenile (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way) Persona beats to a world-spanning tale focused on political intrigue and societal injustice. As an aforementioned grown-ass man, I personally resonate with the fucked up shit that our entire societal system throws at us more than I do high school coming-of-age stories at this point in my life.

My only complaint is the soundtrack but I’m apparently the only person in the world who doesn’t like it so I’m just gonna keep that rant to myself and suffer in silence.

With 2024 down, it’s time to look forward to 2025. I plan on spending my time catching up on and actually finishing a lot of games I’ve missed over the last couple of years. I’ve gone too far into the “collecting games” end of the hobby, and actually playing them might be a good idea I think. There are exceptions of course (Monster Hunter my beloved hurry up and get here) but overall, I just want to retreat into my little video game hole and hope that 2025 isn’t going to be as insane as I think it will be.

We’ll see what happens! Hopefully a whole lot of nothing.

Hi! My name is Jeremy and/or Jorpen and I write about video games sometimes. You can catch me livestreaming every once and a while on my Twitch channel. If hearing a dude’s opinions in the written format is more your style, you can check out my BlueSky or Twitter accounts. If you want to chat me up, join my Discord!

Phenomenal concept, an uncomfortable amount of “what the fuck” story decisions

Time loops are an underutilized concept in video games. There are miniature examples of unintentional time loops everywhere; nearly every failure state sends players hurtling backward through time to the beginning of a level or encounter. The purposeful, plot-relevant looping of time is left to Bill Murray and muscular men named after rock stars.

Twelve Minutes brings the restarting day to the world of video games, and it brings some really weird shit with it.

Twelve Minutes is a solid attempt at an enticing time-turner that actually manages to craft a really fun gameplay loop. The player character is locked into a loop that lasts twelve minutes (wow!). The loop resets when time runs out, or the main character finds himself close to the sweet embrace of death. The loop itself is easily the best and most interesting part of the game. There are a myriad of different objects and knick-knacks that can be used to solve puzzles or gain more information about the other characters. While it's easy to forget exactly which puzzle levers you’ve pulled, the game does a good enough job of giving you incredibly vague breadcrumbs that lead to nuggets of plot development.

Things were going great with the game until it showed what it was really about, and whoo boy…

The game’s main focus is a disgusting pseudo-intellectual essay on “letting go” that delves into the weirdest shit.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE PLOT OF THE GAME BELOW

The game’s focus on intense personal relationships and their dynamics completely fall flat. It has the classic problem of making its main characters unlikeable pieces of shit. James McAvoy (the characters don’t have actual names outside of a vague “dad” or “wife”) is absolutely awful to his wife Daisy Ridley. Daisy Ridley constantly lies and belittles James’s concerns and problems. Willem Dafoe is overly aggressive and doesn’t even have a Death Note in this one, so what’s the fuckin’ point dude? This trio of unadulterated shitbags are the subject of 90% of the dialogue and “character development.” The unlikeableness makes solving some puzzles incredibly frustrating. I remember finally convincing DaisyWife to believe that I was stuck in a time loop; hell yeah! I confronted her about killing her father and asking about her dad’s pocket watch, saying that not only did I already know that about both of these things, but that I had actively even seen them in person at one point and could prove it. DaisyWife did what she does for the majority of her dialogue: get mad, refuse to say anything worthwhile, and storm off into another room. A lot of the character interactions are just as frustrating and laced with what essentially amounts to the creator of the game saying “lol you didn’t do this puzzle right idiot, try again.”

The story cannot save it. It makes things even worse. This is your warning; Twelve Minutes delves into some disgusting subject matter, and it doesn’t do it well either.

Well… here goes.

So James McAvoy is stuck in this time loop, right? Being stuck in a loop is great for gathering information, so Mr. McAvoy says screw it, why not? Through his super-sleuthing, he uncovers the many plot twists that were in store for him:

He murdered his wife’s dad.

Also, his wife’s dad is his dad.

Also, his wife is pregnant.

They have an incest baby.

Yes, the pivotal moment, the climax of the game’s twists and turns, the very thing the entirety of the story leads up to…

… is incest.

I wish I could say it was done well or with nuance, but it wasn’t.

Pain.

Twelve Minutes tries to make a tale of incestual relationships and psychotic memory-based breakdowns into something thought-provoking but utterly fails in every single way. You’re supposed to care about the plight of James McAvoy and his “oopsie whoopsie” moment of forgetfulness that leads him to marry and IMPREGNATE HIS SISTER, but you're given absolutely no reason to. He’s irredeemable as a character. At best, he drugs his wife to interrogate and stab a cop for information on her past, and at worst he repeatedly kills the other two main characters and progressively gets better at it with every loop. Generic Man’s personality is only elaborated on through the lens of what the player does in-game, and holy shit, he’s kind of a bad dude. In every sane story, you’re not supposed to root for an incestual, murderous, lying, manipulative, and timeline manipulating shitbag, but Twelve Minutes tries to evoke feelings of empathy from the player towards poor ol’ James’s familial issues. It fails horribly in that area. You can’t feel empathetic towards a guy who fucked his own sister, and proceeds to have an “oh, did I do that?” moment in which he suddenly remembers the problem due to some time shenanigans.

That felt insane to type out, but it is the actual game.

There’s an attempt at intellectual commentary on top of the incestual babymaking and spoiler alert; it does about as well as the incest subplot. One of the major plot revelations that you get slapped in the face with reveals the true nature of the third main character, Willem Dafoe. As it turns out, this cop isn’t actually real; he’s a weird psycho-manifestation of the husband’s dad and his guilt over… forgetting he did an incest?

This is where the game creeps into the dreaded “look at how smart I am” territory. The dad-cop brings you into some sort of book-filled mind-palace-but-actually-in-the-past-but-not room and starts to fly off the handle. At this point, you have two options: say “nah, incest is cool actually. She doesn’t have to know.” or give up on your wife and just forget everything again. The game tries to prop these up as major, life-defining choices with multiple implications towards the present and the future, but why does literally anything matter when every option leads to repressing your stupidity again? These choices may have actually felt important to make if I could bring myself to give a singular shit about the characters. The pisspoor character development and the general unlikeableness of the pair deflates the importance of choosing how the game ends.

It also doesn’t help that the choices don’t matter; you’re thrown back into the loop anyways.

The endings suck by the way.

I finally got one of the “true” endings once I consulted a guide, and of course, it revolves around an overly thoughtful quote from a book on mediation. If you click your wife enough while she’s reading, she’ll tell you a quote from the book she’s reading about letting things go or mindfulness or some other bullshit that my brain completely glazed over because I was mentally checked out of the game at this point. This is where the fun begins.

Once you enter the book-palace with good ol’ dad again, you can click on the book to tell the dad how good you are at reading. Dad perks up with glee upon hearing this, and gives off some serious neckbeard vibes with an “Ah, I see you too, read intelligent literature.” line. Now that dad knows you’re a fellow intellectual, he decides to help you instead of strangling you to death repeatedly. He practices a mindful “oopsie forgettie wettie!!!” technique with you and the game ends. There are 6 total endings to get, but I didn’t get them because I could not continue after seeing how inconsequential and pointless the first two I got were.

The only thing the game truly teaches you is that none of the shit you do matters at all. You either forget everything you did and end up alone or you… forget everything you did and end up alone, but this time you do so as an annoying, well-read idiot.

Jeremy Jorpen on Twitter: "TWELVE MINUTES SPOILERSThe game was... weird but at least I got some good chocolate out of it :) pic.twitter.com/UKDaMbQ3gA / Twitter"

TWELVE MINUTES SPOILERSThe game was... weird but at least I got some good chocolate out of it :) pic.twitter.com/UKDaMbQ3gA

Choices in video games are supposed to be hard to make and feel consequential. Twelve Minutes makes every choice feel like an exercise in futility and frustration. A choice has to have some sort of emotional gravitas or some sort of gameplay benefit to affect the player on an emotional level, and Twelve Minutes provides neither. It actually provides nothing. It makes no attempt to build up these characters outside of one empathetic notion of the psycho-manifestation of dad killing this couple to pay for his daughter’s cancer treatment.

Now that I think about it, what the fuck was that about? They just drop it and never mention it again. Who even was his daughter? Another psycho-manifestation? What the fuck is this game? Lmao?

The husband and wife are insufferable towards each other and have next to no development as characters themselves. This made my final choice easy; end this bullshit with the loop so I can get the hell out of this game.

I wanted to like Twelve Minutes for what it was, but what it is grosses me the hell out. I really did try, but I couldn't bring myself to feel empathy towards any party that was involved in this circus of stupidity. It was absolutely infuriating to call the game’s main plot twist (brother-child yeehaw) and expect some sort of thoughtful or meaningful explanation, but instead I got an “lol I forgot.” I think I would’ve enjoyed any other explanation more than the classic cop-out amnesia trope. Maybe the husband really is a piece of shit and just didn't mention it out of selfishness, or the wife even knew and pretended she didn’t because of love or something. Literally any plot revelation is better than a MacGuffin-esque bout of amnesia.

Twelve Minutes had so many directions it could go, and it chose incest time travel.

Incest time travel is where I check out of anything, forever.

Hey, my name’s Jeremy! I write a bit, make content on Twitter, and stream live video game based commentary (wow!) on Twitch. I appreciate you making it this far, and would love for you to become a fan or check me out on other platforms. I promise it’s good content. I’ll give you virtual kissies if you do mwah mwah

How to play Ninja as of Patch 5.58

Heard some of y’all non-believers wanna learn Final Fantasy XIV’s patented Ninja Way™? Well, guess what, your resident ex-anime enjoyer and Dark Knight is here to teach you a little thing about the class that invented the carpal tunnel jutsu.

The class seems intimidating at first, but in all actuality, it’s relatively simple. There are two points of complexity: remembering the ninjutsu combinations and surviving the BIG BOY APM PIANO CONCERT that would make Starcraft 2 players blush.

The Ninjutsus

The mechanic that puts fear into the hearts of all Final Fantasy XIV players. These mystical arts seem impossible to master at first glance. Do I have to hit multiple buttons to do just one ability? Who decided that was a good idea?

I did. Now it’s time to shut up and (Ninja Gaiden) jam.

The truth is that these moves are incredibly easy. Yeah, I know it's weird to think the highest APM class in the game has an incredibly easy mechanic. The reality is that you have to learn three colors, and how to press them in different orders. This isn’t gonna be any harder than learning what the hell object permeance was as a child. This guide will assume that the world doesn’t completely cease to exist the second you close your eyes.

Now for the baby Ninja moves.

The Section Entirely Devoted To Trick Attack

Ninjas are invited to the lunch table almost solely because of Trick Attack. This nutso skill does a decent amount of damage, but its real power lies in its debuff. Successfully landing the skill increases the amount of damage an enemy takes by 5% for 15 seconds. This doesn’t seem like a lot at first, but the damage really stacks up once you factor in the other 7 chuckleheads slapping the boss across the ass next to you.

This skill should be used in conjunction with your party’s burst windows (if you’re playing in a static) or just off cooldown with randoms.

I cannot stress this enough: Use. Trick. Attack.

Please.

The Basic Rotation

Ninja has a super basic bread and butter rotation that you spice up with Ninjutsus (we’ll get to those later.) You have one Damage Over Time (DOT) effect to keep up every 60ish seconds, an Area Of Effect (AOE) combo, and a single target combo with one interchangeable button.

Single Target Rotation: Spinning Edge -> Gust Slash -> Aeolian Edge (Rear)/Armor Crush (Side)

Armor Crush adds 30 seconds onto your Huton timer. Huton is an incredibly important buff that is absolutely mandatory to keep up, or the ninja gods will find you. I’ll explain it in more detail later. Aeolian Edge does more damage, use that at all other times.

AOE Target Rotation: Death Blossom -> Hakke Mujinsatsu

The easiest AOE combo. They made it two buttons so you have enough time to figure out how to say and spell Hakke Mujinsatsu (this guide will not provide you with either. I don’t even know if this is how you spell it. This is a button guide, not a spelling guide.)

The Notorious DOT: Shadow Fang

Pepper this in as soon as it comes off cooldown The DOT effect lasts 30 seconds, so it doesn’t have 100% uptime, but it does help with achieving big DPS numbers.

Invoking The Ninja Way

Each Cool Ninja Way™ move is invoked via combining three different elements into a nice little death cake. Ten, Chi, and Jin are the aforementioned elements. You invoke any combination of these three elements, then hit the fancy Ninjutsu button to release your inner demons and psychological trauma upon your enemy. Luckily, you don’t have to remember the names, as they are beautifully color-coded into blue, red, and yellow respectively. Primary abilities are primary colors. See? Super easy to remember.

Keep in mind, these actions must be done in the order specified. Ninjutsus are picky and want things done perfectly. Luckily, there are at least two combinations of every jutsu, so memorize the one that makes the most sense for your hotbar setup and noggin’.

The key to being successful with jutsus is planning ahead!

Anyways, the list of Ninjutsus are as follows:

Fuma Shuriken - Hit a button, any button: Fuma Shuriken is the first actual Ninjutsu you can use. It’ll be your bread and butter until 5 levels later, in which you’ll promptly abandon it for Raiton. The shuriken looks cool, but unfortunately, it’s outclassed by nearly every other jutsu.

Katon - Chi (Red) and Ten (Blue) OR Ten (Blue) and Jin (Yellow): The main AOE move. You’ll invoke this whenever you want to burst down large packs. Ideally, you want to use this after placing down your Doton. Doton is pretty instrumental to the AOE toolkit; we’ll get to it later.

Raiton - Ten (Blue) and Chi (Red) OR Ten (Blue) and Jin (Yellow): The single target heavy hitter. Use this on single-target fights and as a “filler” for when you’re about to cap out on mudra charges. There are later skills that make this one a high priority button, but once again, it’ll come up ~later~.

Hyoton - Ten (Blue) and Jin (Yellow) OR Chi (Red) and Jin (Yellow): The fancy ice-y boy that does absolutely nothing on its own. There are two times you use this skill: when you’re panicking mid-fight, accidentally input it, and shoot it out immediately to hide your shame from the other Ninjas, and with Kassatsu, one of your long cooldowns that make it a lot more powerful.

Huton - Jin (Y) -> Chi (R) -> Ten (B) OR Chi (R) -> Jin (Y) -> Ten (B): Burn this into your memory. Do whatever it takes to memorize Huton. Live it. Dream about it. Become it. It is your single most important buff to maintain.

Huton reduces your Global Cooldown (GCD) and auto-attack delay by 15%. This is what makes Ninja press the buttons fast. Cherish it as if it were your own sugar-addicted child. You gain a 70 second timer upon cast, so throw out any other notions of time in your brain and replace them with this ticking clock. If you forget, there’s a gigantic pinwheel with a number counting down menacingly in it to remind you of the inevitability of time.

At first, you’ll have to keep it up via invoking jutsus. Eventually, you get weapon skills that extend the timer for you, so you can save jutsus for more of the abilities that make the numbers real big.

Doton - Ten (B) -> Jin (Y) -> Chi (R) OR Jin (Y) -> Ten (B) -> Chi (R): The main form of AOE for targets that stand still or take a while to kill. Doton puts a nice little puddle of suspiciously white goo (you should hear my group callouts when it’s cast) that damages and slows enemies inside. It lasts 24 seconds, meaning that if your tank doesn’t fear The Goo, you’ll have plenty of mudras to spare for other things. In an ideal scenario, you place this pre-pull, let the tank pull enemies into it, and laugh as those poor NPCs bathe in the power of your puddle. You won’t use this a lot in single-target fights, but keep it in the back of your mind just in case.

Learn to love The Goo.

Suiton - Ten (B) -> Chi (R) -> Jin (Y) OR Chi (R) -> Ten (B) -> Jin (Y): This skill has two purposes in life: to let you use Trick Attack out of stealth, and to be dismissed back to the Trick Attack hole for more Ninki. You’ll lead with this for the burst windows your group has assigned.

There are two more ninjutsus: Goka Mekkyaku and Hyosho Ranryu. They have the same inputs as Katon and Hyoton, respectively. They are enhanced versions of those inputs that can only be used when Kassatsu is activated beforehand. These are the heaviest hitters you have; make sure they’re comboed inside of Trick Attack window of death.

The oGCDs, Because We Haven’t Achieved MAXIMUM SPEED Yet

Ninja doesn’t have many oGCDs (off Global Cooldowns), mainly because this is an MMO and not an esport with an APM requirement. They are few, but they are very important.

Mug: The class starts as a Rogue, so you gotta steal! Mug does very little damage, but has two side effects that are relatively cool. For one, it increases the chance of extra items dropping off a mob (not bosses) if it's used as, or right before, the killing blow. Secondly, it increases the Ninki Gauge, Ninja’s meter that’s used to, you guessed it, press more buttons! Whoo!

Dream Within A Dream: The skill with the “weirdest name in the kit” award. I genuinely have no idea why it has this name. Ninja’s don’t dream, they believe.

The ability hits three times, totaling a potency of 600. It deals a very good amount of damage, and activates Assassinate Ready, which leads into…

Assassinate: The oGCD for your oGCD, because BUTTONS. You cast Dream Within A Dream then immediately roll that finger over to Assassinate to deal extra damage!

That's it!

Ninki And You: How To Induce Carpal Tunnel For More Damage

The Ninki Gauge is the metered resource that the Ninja has. This gauge has a cap of 100 and builds up with the use of your bread and butter combos. There are two abilities, both costing 50 Ninki each. The Ninja can spend these precious points to cast one really cool skill and one really lame skill. Remember: these are oGCDs, so weave them into your combos.

Hellfrog Medium: You get on a giant frog. It spits. It’s tight as hell. Use froggy boy when you want to AOE, or you just want to feel loved by Frog-Chan.

Bhavacakra: The harder to pronounce cousin of the frog. It’s infinitely lamer. Unfortunately, you’ll be using it instead of Frog-Chan in single-target fights. It does decent damage, weave it inbetween GCDs.

The Burst Enablers, AKA The Big Boy Cooldowns

The tell-tale sign of a good Ninja is how they use their cooldowns. These puppies are long, but they make the big numbers bigger. This in turn raises the serotonin levels, so if you ever want to be happy in life, you’ll learn to love the cooldowns.

Kassatsu: This nifty little guy is perhaps the most important cooldown for the class. It allows you to use quantity one jutsu without actually using up one of your two mudras. It single-handedly shakes up the Ninja rotation. Once you get this skill, your life will go from 50 to 100 MPH, easily. It’s time to go fast.

Once you reach level 76, Kassatsu gains an additional effect. You can use the skill to cast those two previously mentioned high-level jutsus, Goka Mekkyaku and Hyosho Ranryu. These two do MUCH more damage than any of the other jutsus, so you’ll be using Kassatsu mid-fight to throw out the mightiest gang signs the Ninja has to offer.

Ten Chi Jin: This is different from the mudras, I swear. This cooldown turns each of your three mudras into a fully-fledged jutsu, meaning you get to cast three ninjutsus in a row! All possible combinations start with the cast of Fuma Shuriken and then can transition into other different combos. The most common combos are Fuma Shuriken -> Raiton -> Suiton for single-target, and Fuma Shuriken -> Katon -> Doton for AOE. There are other combos, but they aren’t used as much. Find them yourself if you want to, I’m not doing it.

Meisui: This cooldown can only be used when Suiton is the active jutsu. It dispels Suiton, and gives the player a nice 50 point chunk of Ninki. You’ll use this in the burst window for more dumb, non Frog-Chan casts of Bakaclava or whatever on single target conflicts.

Bunshin: Alright ya Naruto fanboy, it’s your time. Bunshin invokes the art of the SHADOW CLONE JUTSU to create a, you guessed it, shadow of yourself. This shadow has five charges. A charge is expended upon the use of a weapon skill. The amount of damage done is different depending on if the attack is ranged, melee, or AOE. It also serves as a Ninki generator, totaling another 25 points of that sweet, sweet Ninki after all charges are expended.

The Other Stuff Or Whatever

The sacred Ninja pouch has many more tricks stored inside. These are the utility skills that don’t do direct damage in a fight, but are still nice to have.

Shade Shift: An incredibly powerful survival cooldown. This grants a shield that nullifies 20% of maximum HP damage. Your healers will love you if you use it.

Hide: Thief invisibility. You go invisible. You go slower. Bosses can still see you though. Ideally, you do this pre encounter and use it as the intro move to the fight for the sick Trick Attack application.

Shukuchi: incorrectly pronounced as “shoe-coochie” by me (only the Ninja gods can judge me.) This makes you disappear for a split second, and reappear at a targeted location. It’s a very good ability to use when you need to dodge out of boss attack fast. You get two charges of it at max level, so pop in and pop out.

All Fours: This is a passive, but still noteworthy. You take reduced fall damage! The cat-like reflexes of a Ninja save you from embarrassing falling-related deaths. Other classes don’t get this level of flavor, so they’re pretty jealous of it. Don’t mention it at parties.

Fleet of Foot: Another cool passive; you move faster than average! Leg day finally paid off.

The Piano Opener Concerta As Played By Ninja

Ninja’s opening rotation is more complicated than most due to the plethora of buttons you have to press in the small Trick Attack window. Once the opener’s out of the way, you can relax for a few minutes before your conductor calls you up for the encore.

You’re getting a nice infographic instead of a five-paragraph essay.

This is the general opener for Ninja. Ideally, you’ll be able to buff yourself up and cu-… place the puddle pre-pull for some extra DPS at the beginning of the fight.

The Trick Attack window is the single most important part of this opener. You need to be hitting buttons constantly and fast. Once you’re outside the carpal window, you’ll be free to sit back and relax (and still hit more buttons than everyone else.)

Final Words

This class make button go brrr. You like when button go brrrr? Class good for you.

In all seriousness, Ninja was my first love inside FFXIV. The fast-paced gameplay combined with the dual dagger aesthetic enthralled me enough to finally get invested in FFXIV. It’s since become one of my favorite MMOs (and games!) of all time, and I cannot wait for what Endwalker will bring to Ninja identity. Maybe I’ll hang up the big hunk of metal and don the headband once again, but until then, a Dark Knight I shalt remain as my group’s dedicated edgy boy.

That’s about all your ol’ sensei’s got to pass on…

Now go be a Ninja.

The Best Weird PlayStation 2 Games I Got From My Rental Store That Totally Wasn’t A Front For Some Criminal Activity

Through it all, I remember the early 2000s. I was but a wee lad of 6–10 at the time. I was a pretty anti-social kid; not by choice of course, I just had a crippling shyness problem that lasted until my 20s. All that alone time let me focus on the important things in life; while you were on the playground, I was studying the game.

My mom ran into an issue with my video game addiction; I just beat games too fast to make em’ worth buying. Luckily for both of us, this was before the dawn of the instant download, so I got to do one of my favorite bonding experiences with my mom; going to the local video store.

My local store had an entirely too large collection of PS1 and PS2 games. Seriously, it was redonk. I dunno if the owner was an avid fan of really niche JRPGs or what, but this store had things that it shouldn’t have. I’m talking Japanese only releases, and titles that just never moved off the shelves. Thanks to this ethereal capitalist, I became a gigantic fan of weird games, and by extension, video games in general. I get to thank this mysterious businessman and my mom for a lifelong hobby that’s given me some of the best memories of my life.

These are some of my favorite weird games and memories from that (potential) little den of criminal activity.

Drakkengard

There is no universe in which I should’ve been allowed to play Drakkengard when I was eight. My mom only mildly glanced at what I brought to her in the local rental joint before going back to looking for her next romcom. I don’t blame her; she was incredibly exhausted from working two jobs , and genuinely didn’t understand video games. She’d see an M on the case, go “oh yeah! M for Mreally good!” and call it a day.

Drakkengard is the predecessor to the now more successful Nier series. The first game is about a boy and a dragon, a pedophile, an elf, and a child who go on their jolly adventure together with supernatural beings they made pacts with. These deals caused them to lose a part of themselves in for power, so characters like Cain lost their voice in exchange for a sweet dragon companion who absolutely despised them. I distinctly remember loving the combat and flying around on my dragon companion, and for some reason have a weird memory thats become a core part of me.

Spoilers for ending A of Drakkengard: it ends with your dragon companion, Angelus, dying. I’d never confronted an emotionally charged death in a video game before, and, as any 8 year old confronted with the concept of mortality would do, I began to cry. I sprinted out of my room into the combination kitchen/dining/living room in the small 3 bedroom closet we lived in and tackle hugged my mom while weeping.

“Whats wrong honey?”

“M-m-m-m-my dragon friend d-d-died!”

“Oh… thats… sad.”

She has a way with words.

Disaster Report

This is a game about surviving an earthquake in Japan. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know what an earthquake was when I was younger. If the ground shakes in the Midwest, you just assume it’s someone driving their tricked out Ford F150 through someone’s house.

Anyways, Disaster Report was… strangely fun. In an apocalyptic, cheesy kind of way of course. What was supposed to be a menacing adventure puzzler about dodging falling debris and dangerous human survivors became a silly jaunt through the concrete park because of its goofy voice acting. It didn’t help at all that it had the worst cover art of all time. I couldn’t help but continuously laugh while playing it with my cousin. We constantly cracked jokes at the goofy hijinks of the protagonist and the hilarity of some of the deaths.

I miss playing video games with people in real life. Couch game roasts were the best.

Shadow of Rome

Everyone had a strange childhood fixation, and mine was ancient Rome. I was constantly devouring the knowledge of any Roman history book I could find in whatever library I ran into. My obsession was so well known that my elementary school art teacher bought me a Julius Caesar biography at the book fair, and of course I already read it, so I simply said “oh I already read that one. Thanks though. :)”

I still cringe to this day because of that one. I’m so sorry Ms. Art Teacher, you were great to me, even though my skills were… incredibly rough around the edges.

Shadow of Rome balled hard. There were two distinct segments of the game: The bloody gorefest led by Agrippa, and the stealth action gameplay™ segments led by Octavinius or some other vaguely Greco-Roman name. Agrippa’s sections were the ones that really stuck with me due in part to the ultra violence. He was a brutal gladiator who eviscerated his enemies, and even beat others to death with severed hands. It was metal as hell.

The Octavinius sections felt much more loose. I’d previously played Metal Gear Solid, so I knew a thing or two about stealth, but these sections absolutely defeated me. Figuring out the line of sight mechanic could not happen with my tiny child brain, and any chance of ever (potentially) meeting Caesar in game disappeared with my skill. I still curse Octavinius to this day for his awful stealthing that was totally his fault, and had nothing to do with me.

Dark Cloud 1&2

The Dark Cloud series was one of my major addictions. Part “build this city to solve puzzles” and part dungeon crawler, I became consumed by the gameplay loop. Dark Cloud 2 was more of my jam due to Maximillian, the mechanic protagonist. Not to say that Dark Cloud 1 was bad, but Toan just didn’t hit me the same way. The games were filled with intriguing enemy designs, countless cool dungeons, and some absolutely bopping tracks that still get stuck in my head whenever I think about the series.

We need another Dark Cloud, and at this point I am begging. PLEASE.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

What if Breath of Fire was now a futuristic sci fi RPG? What if, instead of being able to take your time, you were rushed by a time mechanic that instantly killed you if it ticked over? What if you made a JRPG similar to a roguelike, and forced people to speedrun it? Dragon Quarter asked and responded to all questions presented, and no one wanted the answers it came up with.

I still loved it. Something about combining the JRPG genre with an in game speedrunning mechanic made the fun receptors in my brain vibrate. The game is widely considered by many to be the worst of the Breath of Fire games, but it holds a special place in my heart due to childhood wonder. This is one of the few games I couldn’t beat in the 5 days I had to beat my rental games, and I forever respect a video game adversary that I couldn’t manage to beat.

The only thing I struggled with was the combat. I still can’t figure it out to this day. It’s so overly convoluted to such a degree that I don’t think I can ever learn how to really be the Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter master.

Honorable Mention: Suikoden II

Suikoden II is the only non-PS2 game I distinctly remember grabbing off the shelves. At this point in time, the original, dingy store I called my home away from home had closed, so my mom and I started going to the local Family Video chain. Their selection was much more limited, so I found myself starting to lose out on my connection to my JRPG fascination. I went back and forth between PS1 and PS2 games regularly due to the lack of titles at this store, and I landed upon Suikoden II almost by accident. I thought nothing of the game, as it seemed like just another generic “eh whatever” anime game.

Dear god, I‘m glad I was utterly wrong.

I instantly fell in love with the game. This was the first JRPG I could play (and actually understand) that had a mature story that didn’t treat you like a kid. It was a tale of two brothers forced to confront each other on opposite sides of a war. It pulled no punches; friends died, troops were sent to their deaths, and no side felt like it was the morally “correct” one. This game was the first time I remembered being conflicted at a video game story. I kept wondering if what I was doing was the right thing, and if my brother knew what he was really a part of, and I loved every second of my philosophical dilemma.

Exploring rows upon rows of games is a joy that many won’t ever get the chance to experience now. The game with the coolest boxart was always rented out, until that fated day you got lucky enough to pick up a Kingdom Hearts or a Metal Gear Solid. Getting to read an actual, physical game manual was a regular occurrence, and one I participated in many times on my daily 2 hour long bathroom breaks. Its a deeply nostalgic time for me, because it was something my mom and I got to spend time together doing, and I loved every moment of it.

Still wouldn’t give up getting any game I want instantly though, the modern day is tight.