General Stuff with Subtitles

General

Be happy blog, today you get subtitles. It’s not so much been a slow week; there’s just a bunch of little things. I suppose I could’ve come up with some grand unifying title and make perfect transitions between topics, but I’m feeling a bit out of sorts. If you ever find yourself in the somewhat rare position of being able to make your own schedule for work I don’t recommend trying any experiments. Turns out if you crank all your shifts back to about three or four hours earlier than normal to give yourself more evening time it nearly kills you in the mornings. Consequently sleeping has been a bit of a hit or miss experience this week and I’m willing to milk that excuse to be lazy with this post.

Game of Thones

I’ve wanted to ramble on about a Game of Thrones (the TV series) once more for a while now, but I’ve held off because we wanted to make a pod-cast. We still do in fact so I’m not going to consume the next three pages typing up everything I think about the casting, changes and art style. No, I just wanted to say that the series seems to be really hitting its stride now, and once again toss the name out there in the vain and presumptuous thought that it’ll somehow convince other people to watch the show. Granted, no one reads this blog – but still, the show deserves whatever recognition I can give for managing to take a rather convoluted and twisty book series and hammering it out in new type of media. Don’t take those adjectives as insulting though; I loved the books. I just felt the story had so much to it that trying to convert it all into any format other than a book would be at best incredibly difficult and more likely impossible. HBO has proven that wrong, and I’m quite happy to admit it.

The real challenge will be seeing if they have any plan for speeding up late-comers to the series with what’s going on. They’ve already got a green light for the next season, and presumably they’ll attract new fans when it begins to roll. But it’s not like the huge quantity of plots and twists in the story end with the last pages of each book. No, it all interlaces; gaining more depth as it goes. I really don’t know how a new viewer would ever catch up while trying to keep tract of the continuous new information at the same time. Bar, of course, some one swatting them and telling them to watch the entire first season on DVD, but asking for a $50 investment to just understand a show won’t be very enticing to new people. More so since they’ll have likely only seen one utterly baffling episode and will want more to fully judge it.

L.A. Noir

L.A. Noir happened. Not all of it though, I’ll inevitably come back and do a full review when we’re finished. My first impressions for the four-ish hours we got into it though are mostly good. The facial animation is superb, the various crimes you solve are interesting and generally keep you guessing without having any absurd twists to them (Shamylans, as they could be known) and the game-play is fast paced enough to keep the game fun for people who like a bit of action. I’d say it’s a nice blend taking some of the better elements from Heavy Rain and Deadly Premonition, but honestly it didn’t use all that much from the former and just about no one knows of the latter. The one thing that should be pointed out is this really isn’t a GTA game where you play as the cops. No, you’re not going to run around gunning down people when you get bored in this game, and if that was one of the major appeals of the GTA classics, it won’t hold much for you this time around.

Anyways, it’s got thumbs up from me for now, but we’ll have to see how the crimes progress in the remainder of the game before I’m making any final decisions.