Let's start with the latest news and that is I have joined The Master Race and have officially become a PC gamer...yep, I am done with the console wars. I have said long since before that I am NOT buying anything after The PlayStation 4 and I meant it. The reason is that there are just too many consoles out these days and they come out so fast that games barely have a chance to simmer, and with titles being exclusively on one console and not the other...it's just not for me anymore, man. Anyway, with the transition to PC gaming, I'll finally be able to play current wrestling games as they were meant to be played, and this WITH CUSTOM ENTRANCE MUSIC!! The PS3 Era for Wrestling games (as short as it was) was really a BOOM Period for the genre, at least in my opinion, and since those were the titles I was playing back then it stands to reason I'd wanna get back to them eventually. Hopefully making the leap to PC will open that door for me and free me up to play some new titles as The PS4 enabled me to do.
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| Can't wait for this, so excited! |
Those new titles will be "Metaphor: Re Fantazio" and the upcoming "Control 2"...which this one is a bit strange. I loved "Control", hell, I still love it as I haven't beaten everything on it and thus I'm still playing it. Despite my love for the series I didn't think "Control" warranted a sequel and if it did it shouldn't have anything at all to do with The Hiss. The Hiss was all but defeated in "Control" despite it running rampant you'd think by the time a sequel rolls around The Federal Bureau of Control would be dealing with a new enemy, and that's really what I'd like to see in the sequel, a game dealing with field operations and other day to day things The FBC has to deal with, maybe even missions that take place outside The Oldest House. Whatever the case as long as the sequel has the same awesome weirdness of the first game and Jesse Faden is still present, I'll check it out.
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| Them Control Points though... |
Since we're on the topic of games my foray into "The Legend Of Heroes" Series "Trails Of Cold Steel" is coming to a close with a boss that I find incredibly difficult to defeat. I love these characters and the gameplay is unique enough for it to maintain my interest but for whatever reason I'm not interested in playing any more of the series. Maybe that's because if I decided to continue I'd have 2 more games to play and in all actuality, this series was just a substitute for me to play while I waited for the next Persona or "Metaphor: Re Fantazio". But I digress. Jusis and Fie are my favorite characters, along with Emma and Rean, of course, everyone else is fine but I could take or leave them. I'll probably play "Trails Of Cold Steel II" since I already own it, and that's IF I beat "Trails Of Cold Steel" The final boss is proving to be quite difficult, and it's not that he's hard, he's just one of those annoying gimmicky bosses and I HATE those with a passion. It's not enough to beat them with raw power, strategy is everything and for whatever reason my strategy is sucking balls but I kinda want this over with.
The problem with "Trails Of Cold Steel" is that for me the game really didn't cook. Or to not put it in "Hoodspeak", the game didn't get interesting. I felt like I was coming in the middle of a story and much to my not surprise I was right. "The Legend Of Heroes" games span for a long time with one major long-standing continuity between games, which is impressive. Characters from previous games continue in this game as guest characters and if you've played these games for a long time (which I haven't) then you're rewarded by seeing these characters again and what's become of them. That's freakin' awesome...but...that's a lot and I'm not exactly interested in learning about all that history and because I'm not, I feel like despite this being the start of a new series the "Legend Of Heroes" series is kind of lost on me, which is unfortunate. This game is great and the world-building is INCREDIBLE. I really felt the difference in each location I went to and I really felt the scope of the world I was entering, so great job developers. Maybe I'll change my tune after "Trails Of Cold Steel II", we'll see.
Let's talk about something I wasn't even sure I was gonna talk about and that's "Frasier" of all things. My wife and I are HUGE fans of "Frasier", I can probably quote a line from each episode and that's every season. So with my love of "Frasier", you can imagine my shock when it was announced that everyone's favorite radio psychiatrist was returning to TV. In this day and age, nostalgia is ruling the roost, and everything that once was is becoming popular again or resurrected to live another day as a zombie franchise, I never thought "Frasier" would find its way on that list. Nevertheless, these new episodes of "Frasier" have been quite good for the most part. I was worried that modern times would see "Fraiser" fall into a realm of modernity but surprisingly it didn't. The original series always had a timeless quality about it that didn't date itself too much, it came out right around the cusp of the early 90s to early 2000s when technology was slowly advancing with the rest of us so it grew as we did. Plus the show never relied on technology or did much with it so that made it easy to not notice cellphones and other trappings of modernity we enjoy.
Overall, I'm happy with the series and it still has the same wit and humor as the original without relying on "remember berries". However, the "remember berries" are good because it reminds you of "Frasier" episodes, such as Freddie being a goth (something I wanted them to mention as it was his last appearance in the original series). The one glitch in the series (at least for me) is David Crane, the son of Niles and Daphne, and well...I feel like David is a caricature of what Niles and Daphne's son would be. Not to say that the actor's performance isn't entertaining I just feel like he's out of place. Time will tell, and despite everything the new Freddie is growing on me, I'm just waiting for his many allergies to appear. We'll see how it goes but in the words of Gil Chesterton, "Huzzah, Frasier, your series is a triumph!".
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| This is the natural evolution of his career, becoming a Dr. Phil type character... |
Speaking of good TV shows, shock of all shocks, I was surprised by Disney Plus's "Goosebumps". Yes, believe it or not, this show was actually much better than I believed it would be. Yes, it did suffer from modernity but not in the way you'd notice. There is a character there named James, who is a girl pretending to be a guy who is in love with guys...so basically she's straight with extra steps...so that aside, the series was actually really dope. I liked how several of the "Goosebumps" stories were integrated into the plot and I liked how it was building to an actual logical conclusion which was much more complicated but sensible. Essentially, the main villain is Ozymandias if I can make a comparison without spoilers. I'm really hoping it's renewed for a 2nd Season because I was genuinely impressed with how much I liked this series.
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| Margot, Lucas, Skeletons, James and Troll Face. Great characters. |
That being said, is it just me or is TV in a slump? There really hasn't been any new TV shows that hit my radar and that's due in large part to streaming and the utter lack of creativity we've been seeing coming out of Hollywood recently. Despite my praise of the aforementioned shows above they are nostalgia bait and are riding the coattails of an established brand. I think after the mid 2000s, say like 2014 was the last ditch for really good television. TV shows with genuinely interesting premises were coming out and now things have dried up. The streaming services aren't doing any better because a lot of their line-up gets canceled or doesn't get any viewers. Hulu seems to be making a wave for itself and Netflix is slowly building its reputation back by backing Asian media like "Squid Game", "Alice In Borderland" and the occasional anime original but that's about it. And maybe it's just me but it seems that a lot of TV shows are gearing more towards limited-run shows as opposed to on-going AND it seems like TV shows are becoming more serialized and less episodic. This is both a good and bad thing.
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| This was brought to you by "Parasite" winning an Oscar. |
With streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and the like one doesn't have to make sure they tune in at a given time to catch up on their favorite TV show like it was back in the day. These days you can just start watching wait a week and pick up right where you left off, that gives these platforms more time to really build a story, especially if you're Netflix and just releasing every episode at once anyway. As a fan of serialized television, I like this...however, for episodic television this really doesn't do them any favors. For starters most TV shows that are episodic are going to be your sit-coms or police procedurals, for sit-coms it's usually characters get into hi-jinx but by the end of the episode the status quo is back and tomorrow everything that happened is like it never did, same goes for police procedurals, cops catch the bad guy, rinse, wash, repeat. Sure, you may get an arc villain who sticks around for maybe a couple episodes and they may even shake things up a bit in a 2 parter BUT in all honesty the status quo never changes in those shows either and if they do it's usually for the worst.
The reason why the all-in-one release and streaming doesn't do these shows favors is because it removes the urgency to watch them. I used to watch "CSI" a lot (the original, not David Caruso) and I started to realize that no episode really flowed into the next, EXCEPT when it came to serial killers and every now and then "CSI" would have an arc villain and after awhile I stopped caring about the show altogether because ultimately things didn't change and when they did change, they sucked. Nothing against Lev Schreiber, Laurence Fisherburn, and Ted Danson for taking over for Grissom but the characters they played SUCKED! In a like manner when episodic TV shows kill off characters, it can be shocking since the status quo is in fact changed BUT with the series being episodic you and the characters kinda have to roll with that character being gone and kinda move away from addressing it. What I'm saying is in this day and age the tilt is more geared towards episodic television and thus sit-coms (as we've known them with the laugh tracks and what not) and going the way of the Dodo bird and single camera sit-coms like "The Office", "Community" and whatever that other show is I can't be bothered to remember are ruling the roost and I can't say I'm a fan.
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| This man was so damn handsome... |
Shifting gears, let's talk about what's going on with "Scream 7" and the franchise as a whole. While I enjoyed "Scream 6" I feel like this new "Scream" series is losing its meta-commentary on the horror genre as a whole. The original "Scream" was a meta-commentary on the slasher genre, making it less of a whodunit to a whydunit and as well as pointing out the tropes of the genre and doing their best to not only keep in line with them but break them. This was all done with a wink and a nod to the audience who had seen these kinds of movies and could now point out the stupidity of the characters with the characters themselves. "Scream 2" was playing off of the whole "Media makes people violent" scare that happened during the late 90s and wouldn't have reared its head again until 1999. "Scream 3" while the more comical of the series (keeping in line with its parody origins) was a deconstruction of the trilogy trope. "Scream 4" was a deconstruction of the fame trope, rather than gain sympathy, Jill craved fame and that worked in our current world where people brag about followers, subscribers and, likes. I thought "Scream 4" was very smart in that commentary about how far people are willing to go for fame and our society's voyeuristic tendencies to witness some really F'ed up stuff to happen to someone not named us.
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| Her dedication made this movie worth it so much. |
Now we come to "Scream 5" the requel (a term I actually like) and the overarching commentary had something to do with "toxic fans" BUT the whole fandom angle wasn't really at play here. I understand Richie and Amber were fans of the "Stab" movies and were complaining about how bad they got as the series went on and decided that in order to set the franchise right they'd have to make a new tragedy happen, I understand the motive and again, BUT, if they wanted to make that commentary they should have made it in "Scream 4" when the beginning of the movie was a commentary on the absolute weirdness of horror sequels as a franchise drags on. Furthermore, the whole "toxic fans" angle wasn't even at play because in "Scream 4" there was "Stabathon" a festival held by the kids of Woodsboro where they'd watch all the "Stab" movies back to back, hosted by Charlie and Robbie, two movie geeks who love the "Stab" films. Maybe I'm just right-braining here but the whole "toxic fans" angle would've made more sense in that movie since we actually see how fanatical people are about the "Stab" movies and the start of the movie already made a commentary on how bad horror sequels get?
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| This was a great opening. |
Basically what I'm saying is "Scream" seems to be losing the plot when it comes to meta-commentary. These aren't just slasher films, they're supposed to break the concept of what a slasher should be while still being a slasher OR they should point out the issues of the slasher genre in general. And I make no apologies but Mindy doesn't do it for me because her observations are lazy and the slasher genre really hasn't gone anywhere lately...and perhaps that's the commentary, that there is no commentary. After all "Scream 6" was just a revenge film and that's fine, so was "Scream 2" but again "Scream 2" was a legit murder mystery, which the first one wasn't. As it stands with Melissa Barrera not returning due to political views and Jenna Ortega working on "Wednesday" the only thing "Scream 7" was going for it is the POSSIBLE return of Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott. One can only hope she gets her happy ending, she deserves it. I'm just really hoping the meta-commentary comes back because "Scream" needs it and possibly bringing back Stu Macher would be a great way to do it. Anyways, that'll do it for me, here's a GIF of what my future will look like now that I got my new gaming PC. I'll catch you guys later on the flip-flop!
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