Hi folks,
It’s March Madness! Nights are shorter while days are starting to get longer (sounds like a song from high school). The summer season1 is almost upon us—open your windows and turn-on your fans!
For those who don’t know, I recently adopted a kitten, and she is growing so fast. It’s exciting to handle a furry tornado around the house, and a very busy time to become a cat dad. Her name is Cookie, nice to meet you!
Also, I wasn’t able to write last month because I was busy…playing Elden Ring. Yeah, fun game. Let’s get on to some curiosities!
Recently
🎮 Playing
This is almost everywhere right now, but, I’ve been addicted to Elden Ring since launch! I’m glad I finished it this week or else I’ll start dreaming about those BS enemies in Leyndell. For me, it’s a game of firsts: first FromSoftware game, first open-world I “completed,” and first game I pre-ordered. I won’t be doing that pre-order bit again though! If you’ve been playing Elden Ring, here are some videos that I watched to improve the experience:
Elden Ring’s Lore by VaatiVidya. The game never felt obscure to me as was usually claimed, but this is a nice video to tie everything altogether. You can also see George R.R. Martin’s DNA in this game, with the theme of religion and family disputes. Worth a watch!
Elden Ring Critique by Joseph Anderson. A more technical review of the game. I don’t watch this channel that much because he tends to come off as too negative and smug, but he seems funnier now, so I guess that’s fun [?]. This video raised a lot of interesting points and did a nice review of how FromSoftware evolved their combat from Dark Souls to Sekiro, and how it affected Elden Ring. I like this video because it’s well-researched, but choose your poison when watching his other stuff.
I Beat the Dark Souls Trilogy and All I Made Was This Lousy Video Essay. A five-hour video essay. Holy. I watched this 1-2 hours per day while jogging and it’s definitely the experience. This guy’s great and I think he represents a majority of gamers (like me) who are new to the Souls franchise. This piqued my interest to try Dark Souls as well! If you’re just going to watch one video from this newsletter, then watch this.
Phew! Fun game that will probably change open-world games (again) in the times to come. It’s 10/10 and possibly a very strong Game of the Year contender. I’m taking a break from gaming for a bit but here are other games I’m excited to try:
Tunic. One of those Zelda-like games but with cute character design. What drew me to this game is the fact that it invented its own language. This puzzle-like system is almost a minigame of its own. Of course, my wannabe-linguist self won’t pass the chance to decipher Tunic’s language. Also, read The Gamer’s “Unravelling the Meaning of Tunic’s Mysterious Language.”
Shenmue I and II. If I were to teach a class on Video Game Appreciation, this will be my required reading (?) in the Open-World section. They say that this game started a lot of the open-world tropes we saw today. I was fascinated by this game because it actually reminded me of a place in Japan that I used to live in—sub-urban, fun, and wacky.
📖 Reading
The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. This series came back to my radar again. I don’t remember the context as to why it was recommended to me, but I recall that it has a very solid magic system. I love hard magic systems and would love to explore them further. I haven’t gotten past the first few pages but I’ll update you about this book in the future!
🎧 Listening
Maximum Fun’s Triple Click Podcast. This is a new podcast that I’ve been listening to for a more in-depth appreciation of video games. The hosts here are awesome—editors of big gaming outlets, Bloomberg correspondents, actual game researchers—awesome crew! Some of my favorite episodes so far include: a taxonomy of open-world games, the different types of boss fights, and how games hide secrets. To be honest, these are the topics that I wish I can write about in my blog, but wow, they got it all covered!
Aaaand… that’s it for this month’s curiosities! See you next month! I’d probably go back to writing again (blame Elden Ring for this haha), so expect new stuff in the blog soon :)
Hope you’re having fun :)
Well, it’s supposed to be summer, but it rained for the past few days.