Late to the Party - Ratchet and Clank

I love video games, but it's rare for me to play them right when they are first released. Normally it takes me a somewhere from a few months to a few years to get around to playing to a game. I've got a considerable backlog of games that I've been meaning to play and it hasn't been until recently that I've been able to start chipping away at the list. With that in mind, I've created a series of posts called Late to the Party, wherein I discuss the games that came out in the preceding years that I'm finally getting around to experiencing. Today's entry in the series is Ratchet and Clank.

Memorable Places, Part 2

A year ago I was in Europe and lately I’ve been thinking over some of the places that were the most memorable from that trip. If you read my travelogue posts from back then you already know the details of each place I visited, but I thought I’d do a series of short writing pieces over the next three or so weeks where I give my thoughts on particular cities or regions as a whole. I’m not going to talk about every location - just the ones that have been on my mind. The order that I write about them will be in the approximate chronological order of when I visited and each writing piece will feature two locations with a photo from the trip to accompany each of them. As a bonus, at the end of each writing piece I’ll note where I was, one year ago that day.

Lyon 

Lyon is urban France. Paris may be bigger and more populous, but Lyon does not have Paris’ building restrictions, so it feels more modern and crowded. When I think of Lyon I think of tall apartment buildings, shopping malls, busy streets, and masses of people with places to go. But with all its modernity, Lyon is still a city with a long history, and past and present are oftentimes not far from one another, as in the case of the remains of the second oldest church in Western Europe being right across the street from a courthouse. This merging of antiquity with modernity is probably best symbolized by the confluence of the two rivers that divide the city. I walked down to the point where the rivers come together and found it sort of mesmerizing to watch the faster, clearer Rhone merge with the slower, murkier Saone. Also there are mysterious tram tracks down there that go directly into the water. That’s probably symbolic of something but I don’t know what.

Cote d’Azure

The waters of the French Riviera are so beautiful that it’s a shame they don’t have good sand beaches to go with them. Growing up in Southern California, I thought all beaches were as nice as that ones I knew from back then, but that is not the case. In all honesty, the pebble beaches in and around Nice are fine, and I can understand why this part of France has been a resort for the rest of Europe for the last 200 or so years. Warm, sunny days. Leisurely strolling by the beach. Stunning blue waters. Look around and you’ll see Belgians, Germans, Russians, and other visitors who escaped colder lands in order to soak up the sun. Nearby in Monaco you can stand outside the famous casino and see an unending train of expensive cars rolling in to pickup and offload people with too much money on their hands. I don’t have that kind of money, so instead I took a swim in the Mediterranean during the day and satisfied myself with a gelato or ice cream at night. The French Riviera might not be as good as SoCal, but it’ll do.

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On this day, one year ago, I bought a 24-hour water bus pass and maxed it out exploring the Venice lagoon. In doing so I found one my favorite places in Venice, a small park with a vineyard on the Mazzorbo island cluster.

Worldly Possessions Update

Clearing out excess stuff you own is one of those things that is easy in theory and strangely difficult in practice. In July of this year I did a writing piece about how I was going to try to offload some of my unneeded possessions and since then it’s been a slow process of evaluating things and then decided what to do with them. Last week I had something of a breakthrough when I gave away several items to friends of mine and donated a few pieces of old clothing to charity. The garbage and recycle bins also claimed their own prizes. I still have three full boxes of stuff that I’m trying to figure out what to do with, but I can say that I’ve made some level of progress on decluttering my life.

Memorable Places, Part 1

A year ago I was in Europe and lately I’ve been thinking over some of the places that were the most memorable from that trip. If you read my travelogue posts from back then you already know the details of each place I visited, but I thought I’d do a series of short writing pieces over the next three or so weeks where I give my thoughts on particular cities or regions as a whole. I’m not going to talk about every location; just the ones that have been on my mind. The order that I write about them will be in the approximate chronological order of when I visited and each writing piece will feature two locations with a photo from the trip to accompany each of them. As a bonus, at the end of each writing piece I’ll note where I was, one year ago that day.

Paris

Paris is one of those cities you can keep coming back to over and over again and it never gets old. I’ve been to Paris on three separate occasions and at the end of each time I was thinking about when I would next be coming back. There’s so much to see and do, but at the same time it’s one of those cities where you could spend a few hours just wandering and not feel like you had wasted your time. On one particular day I walked from the Eiffel Tower to the Arc de Triomphe, to the Louvre, to the Bastille, to Notre Dame, and finally getting off my feet at the Chatelet metro station (that’s a 6.5 mile circuit, in case you were wondering). Paris can be whatever you want it to be. It can be a hectic sightseeing marathon, or it can be a mellow lifestyle of slow meals and leisurely strolls along the Seine. When I remember Paris I often think of the first day of my first visit, when I hiked up the stairs of the Eiffel Tower in the late afternoon and then stayed up there for two hours. I was sitting on a bench on the second level, watching the setting sun bathe the skyscrapers of La Defense in a fiery glow. The lights were starting to come on in the city, a cool breeze was blowing, and I knew I would soon be making my way down the tower, but I didn’t want to leave, so I sat there and savored the moment as long as it lasted. It was a good beginning to the week I would be spending in Paris.

Normandy

The Normandy region of France is something of a fascination for me. As a student of history there are certainly plenty of things like D-Day and William the Conqueror that I’m interested in, but there’s something about this rural, rainy, and profoundly peaceful part of France that I gravitate towards. While Paris is a city that I could enthusiastically visit many times over, if I actually lived in France I would pick one of the towns of Normandy as my home. Green pastures. Gentle hills. Smaller towns. Not the sort of place you might think a city boy like me would choose to settle down in, but especially if I had a family I could see myself buying a house in a place like Bayeux and laying down roots. The land is good and the people are friendly. The weather is a lot like the Pacific Northwest, but that’s price I’d be willing to pay.

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On this day, one year ago, I arrived in Venice and commenced the standard Venetian process of setting my wallet on fire.

Youtube Copyright Strike - Black Ops 3

Last week I got my very first Youtube copyright strike that rendered one of my videos unwatchable. I’m pretty sure that means I’ve come of age in the world of Youtube, and perhaps I should be honored that I finally earned one. The strike hit when I was uploading videos for last Friday’s commentary on Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. For whatever reason, one of the three videos I uploaded got a strike from Activision, the game’s publisher, for a small section at the end of the video. At first I figured I’d just cut out the part of the video that got the copyright strike, but as I was thinking about it I came to the conclusion that the part that I would have to cut was very important to the video as a whole, and the edited version would be very awkward for the viewer. I’m completely clueless as to why that video got the copyright strike while the other two passed through without incident, and I didn’t consider it something worth filing a dispute over, so I just deleted the whole video and uploaded another gameplay clip that I was originally not going to use. From reading other peoples’ comments online, it appears Activision has been very zealous to block certain gameplay footage of Black Ops 3, though the reasons behind this are unknown.

Late to the Party - Call of Duty: Black Ops 3

I love video games, but it's rare for me to play them right when they are first released. Normally it takes me a somewhere from a few months to a few years to get around to playing to a game. I've got a considerable backlog of games that I've been meaning to play and it hasn't been until recently that I've been able to start chipping away at the list. With that in mind, I've created a series of posts called Late to the Party, wherein I discuss the games that came out in the preceding years that I'm finally getting around to experiencing. Today's entry in the series is Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, referred to hereafter as just Black Ops 3. I must confess that I, like many others, have a certain fondness for abbreviating the name of the Black Ops series to “Blops,” but I try to maintain a slight veneer of professionalism with my writings, so I’ll refrain from using it here. This commentary will be spoiler free, and will be limited strictly to the game’s singleplayer campaign, which I played by myself.

The end of Bleach

Yesterday I talked about revisiting an anime I used to watch called Bleach. Today I wanted to quickly mention where Bleach ends, at least in my mind. As I stated yesterday, Bleach has an inordinate number of episodes (I believe the total is over 360 at the moment). Because I ceased my cable TV subscription years ago, however, my progress in the Bleach storyline stops at a particular place. Normally it would be a bad thing to have a show you liked get cut off before its official ending, but in my case I was halted at a very convenient spot, which I now like to think of as the end of Bleach. The place where Bleach ends for me is the episode where series protagonist Ichigo finally defeats Aizen, and in the aftermath learns that he is losing his powers and his career as a Soul Reaper will soon be over. The world is safe, and with his friends around him as he is lying wounded and exhausted on the ground, Ichigo’s story of supernatural heroics is ready to come to a close. That, of course, is not the official final ending of Bleach, but in my mind that episode is the moment of closure that the series had been building towards since episode one. I’ll probably never have the chance to get back into Bleach and watch all the other episodes, but that’s ok. For me, Bleach ended with that episode.

Bleach Revisited

During my college years and for some time afterwards there was an anime I used to watch called Bleach. I stopped watching Bleach when I stopped paying for cable TV several years ago, but last week I opened up Netflix and saw that the first three seasons of Bleach were available for streaming (full disclosure: it was the English dub version of Bleach). Feeling a little nostalgic, I watched a few segments of episodes and two or three full episodes before going to bed, but revisiting Bleach also got me thinking about the show in general. In those episodes I was reminded both of what I loved and hated about Bleach. The show has some great action sequences, characters with interesting stories, and its first season has what might be my favorite opening theme in any anime series that I’ve watched, but it suffers many of the same problems afflicting other anime with an outrageous number of episodes, namely filler material and what I refer to as DBZ Syndrome. Not all of the humor works either, but that’s probably just cultural differences between Japanese and Western-style comedy. Still, even with these issues it was nice to spend an hour watching Bleach again for the first time in years and I went to bed feeling it had been time well spent.

Game Writing Difficulty

The more I like a game, the easier it is to write about. I doubt this surprises anyone, but it is true. When I love a game the writing just flows from my mind like a river, with sentences and paragraphs seemingly forming on their own. As my enthusiasm for a game drops, the slower the flow of the writing is, and I have to put much more conscious effort into the project. A good example of this would be two of my recent gaming commentaries, one on Batman: Arkham Knight and the other on Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. The writing pieces for both games ended up being just over 3,000 words and if you read them you know I liked them both, but I liked Arkham Knight more than I liked Black Flag, and thus I had a much easier time writing Arkham Knight’s commentary. I would think that it’s also probably easier to write about games that are terrible than ones that are just somewhat bad, since a terrible game’s flaws are so blatant and so numerous that criticism of it just rolls off the tongue (or in this case, the keyboard). Thankfully I’ve never tested this hypothesis, and I have no intention of doing so.

Assassin’s Creed Going Forward

Last week I wrapped up my playthrough of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. I generally like the Assassin’s Creed games but I have come to the realization that it will take an enormous amount of time to catch up and be current in the series. Since Black Flag launched back in 2013, another three Assassin’s Creed games have come out and to complete them all would likely require me to sink about 120 hours into the effort. I simply don’t have that kind of time. What I’m thinking I will do is just read the plot summaries of the first two games that followed Black Flag and then consider playing the third. It may turn out, however, that I don’t have time to work on the third game either, in which case I’ll read the summary for that game too. This isn’t how I like to stay current with a series, but adult life is full of time constraints and hard choices sometimes have to be made.