Late to the Party - Overwatch (Origins Edition)

Author’s Note: Today’s post is #400!

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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 Overwatch.

More Thoughts on Game Reviews/Commentaries

Over the past several months I’ve written a fair number of commentaries on video games that I’ve been playing in my attempt to knock out a chunk of my gaming backlog. It’s been quite an experience doing so much writing on one of my personal passions, and one of the things I’ve gotten out of it is an appreciation of why major video game websites distribute game reviews across a group of writers, rather than having a single person write a lot of reviews in succession, like me. As much as I love video games, writing these longer pieces about them, one after another, can be quite draining, especially considering my desire to produce something that’s actually worth reading, as well as my habit of perpetually second-guessing and revising my work all the way up until the moment of publication. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m getting close to the end of my current gaming backlog, and when I reach that point I can’t deny that it’ll be nice to take a short break from writing commentaries. I’ll still be writing about video games during that period, but I won’t be doing any longer writing pieces with my detailed opinion on games I’m playing. Hopefully that time off from writing commentaries will get me reenergized and ready for the second wave of game commentaries that will no doubt come in 2017.

Gaming Backlog

With my recent completion of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, a bit over a week ago, I am finally nearing the end of the list of games in my gaming backlog that I really want to play. While there are still a few games left on the list, and more naturally will be added with the passage of time and the release of new games, it won’t be too long now before I reach the place where I have to think about when I’m going to close down my Gamefly account. I anticipate this to happen before the end of the year, and at that point the gaming backlog will start growing again. Closing the account will also mean the end of the first season of my Late to the Party series of posts, which lately have made regular appearances on this blog’s Friday editions. Whenever that happens I’m thinking I’ll do some sort of short retrospective writing piece about that first season. At some point in 2017, when I have the time and I feel the backlog has gotten big enough, I’ll reopen the account, starting the process all over again.

Memorable Places, Part 11 (Finale)

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.

Today is the final entry in the series. Like the 2015 Europe trip, this journey must too come to an end.

Read more >>

You might have noticed that Friday’s writing post looked slightly different on this blog’s main page. The opening paragraph and first image were visible, but below that there was a Read more >> button and to read the rest of the post you had to click on that button. This is a new feature to this blog, and one I’ve wanted to add for some time, but Blogger, being the unwieldy beast that it is, doesn’t make it easy. There’s a setting in Blogger that is supposed to automatically do this for all posts, but despite being turned on for about a week, Blogger has done nothing. So, to make this happen I have to manually insert page breaks, which isn’t a big deal to do on an individual post, but there’s no way I’m going back and inserting page breaks for everything I’ve published up to this point. Going forward, nearly all future posts will have page breaks so that you don’t have to scroll down a lot to reach something from earlier in the week, and the number of posts displayed on the main page will be increased to ten, thus giving the reader two weeks worth of content before having to load more. The only posts that might not get page breaks are shorter ones like this, and the decision will be made on a case-by-case basis. As always, feedback on this new feature is welcome.

Late to the Party - Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

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 Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, referred to hereafter as just Catalyst.

Elihu Syndrome

I sometimes suffer from what I call Elihu Syndrome. The name isn’t accurate to the story of the person it is named after, but it’s the name that first came into my head when thinking about it and I’ve never come up with another name to replace it. Elihu is the name of a man in the Old Testament Book of Job. Although Biblical knowledge has fallen precipitously in America, a decent number of people have at least heard of Job and might even be vaguely familiar with part of the story. Elihu shows up in the part most people don’t know about. When you ask people to recount the story of Job, those that can often give a rough retelling of the first two chapters, wherein God permits Satan to bring trials upon Job’s life and Job proceeds to lose his property, his health, and all of his children. After that comes the part of Job that most people can’t tell you anything about, which is actually the vast majority of the book. Chapters 3 through 37 (out of 42) are a long discussion between Job and some friends of his who came to him after they heard of everything that befell him. They go back and forth about topics such as justice and the nature of God, but Job’s friends turn out to not be particularly helpful, or even friendly. With Job’s friends is a man named Elihu, who during the conversation has been patiently letting his elders speak, and in Chapter 32, when he sees that Job’s friends have run out things to say, jumps in and starts laying into Job with platitudes galore, though he, along with everyone else, is silenced when God speaks out of the whirlwind in Chapter 38. That was a lot of background info just for the sake of a personality quirk of mine. Anyways, what I call Elihu Syndrome happens when I’m in a group of people (usually who are older than me) and I feel like it’s never my place to talk. Like Elihu, I’m waiting for the wiser and more insightful people to finish, but unlike Elihu, I never say anything. I just sit there, mouth shut, allowing others to speak their mind, convinced that I have nothing worthwhile to say, even when that’s not true. I’m not totally sure where my Elihu Syndrome came from, and I’m hopeful that I’ll one day break out of it, but for now it’s something I have to contend with.

Memorable Places, Part 10

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.

Granada

My time in Granada was something of a second chance for the city. In 2012 I was there, but only for a very short period, so I didn’t see much beyond the Alhambra and a few other sights. In 2015 I came back and had the time to experience more of the city. Granada has become my favorite city in Andalusia, with a nice balance of history and modernity. Everything you could want in a modern city is there for you, and right within it are enough sightseeing attractions to keep you busy all day long. The crown jewel of Granada is, of course, the Alhambra, which is a monument to the last flourish of Moorish culture in Spain before 1492, when the Spanish retook the city. I visited the Alhambra both last year and in 2012, and I personally think it’s better than the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. You could spend half your day up there, and when you come down there’s a vibrant city waiting for you. Whereas Seville has an older, dignified feel to it, Granada’s vibe felt younger and trendier, at least in the central part of the city where I spent most of my time.

Cordoba

Oh, poor Cordoba, you can’t catch a break. Cordoba feels like the least of the trio of larger cities in Andalusia, even though it’s actually bigger than Granada, and gets passed over by a lot of people. I myself only spent two nights there, and when I left I didn’t feel like I had missed out on much. The alcazar of Cordoba isn’t much compared to the one in Seville, or the Alhambra in Granada, and there’s much less to see and do in Cordoba than its sister cities. What Cordoba can claim to its credit is the Mesquita, a former Visigothic church that was turned into a mosque by the Moors, and then turned back into a church when the Spanish reconquered the city. Inside is a forest of columns and arches, which seem to stretch out to infinity. Near the Mesquita you can cross the old bridge and climb a small tower for a good view of the old city. I spent a little while up on that tower, staring back at the Mesquita, the alcazar, and the rest of Cordoba. Long ago it was the foremost city in all of Europe, but today it is a quieter town, and I suspect Cordoba is just fine with that.

On this day, one year ago, I flew from Istanbul to Madrid. Before leaving I acquired the legendary Umbrella of Constantine, and upon arrival in Madrid my first meal was a delicious serving of chocolate con churros. That night I also finally got to see Picasso’s famous Guernica, which I had missed the last time I was in Madrid.

Yearbook Signings

While adding labels to some of the older posts on this blog, I was reminded of that time at the end of my senior year of high school when everyone was signing each other’s yearbooks. Since I have my senior yearbook on my bookshelf, I was able to grab it and dive back into the memories of those days. I spent twenty or so minutes looking over what people wrote in my yearbook, with some writings making me smile, some having me burst out laughing, some weirding me out, some straining eyes as I tried to read the writing, and some leaving me trying to remember who exactly the author was. During that time rereading my former classmates’ writings, I also couldn’t help but notice that they fell into two broad categories—the generic ones, and the ones from people who had put more effort into writing something meaningful. The generic writings all said the same thing, though in different wording depending on the author, which was something along the lines of “it was nice knowing you, good luck with college, keep in touch.” I don’t blame anyone who wrote one of these, as I know my yearbook got passed around to a lot of people who didn’t know me that well, and I know it can be tough to think up something profound for each yearbook you sign. To be completely transparent, I did it myself to quite a few peoples’ yearbooks. But I also know that I wrote some meaningful stuff in other peoples’ yearbooks, and a number of my classmates did the same for me. Several of my classmates had known me from elementary school and wrote about our experiences growing up together. Others brought up how notorious I had become on campus for my paparazzi ways and unrivaled camera skills as the Photo Editor of the Yearbook. My dry sense of humor and commentary on the things we all did in various classes were common themes, along with the random quotes I would sometimes write on classroom whiteboards. The one thing that came up consistently, though, was people writing about how unique I was back then. I enjoy being complimented as much as anyone else, but those remarks left me wondering about whether or not I’ve still got that spark from high school. It’s been over a decade since graduation, and I know I’m not the same guy I was back then. Hopefully I’m a better person than I was in high school, but I do wonder if I’ve lost something in the relentless march of time. Perhaps, perhaps not. High school was a different world in a different era. As much as I enjoyed reading those old writings, I couldn’t stay in the past forever, so I closed the yearbook and put it back on my shelf. There it will remain, until one day I summon it forth again.

Memorable Places, Part 9

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.

Seville

Seville (or, Sevilla, as it is properly called) is the largest of what I think of as the big three Andalusian cities—Seville, Granada, and Cordoba. It’s probably the most iconic as well, drawing in visitors from around the world to take in that quintessential Andalusian feel. A decent analogy for Seville would be to say that it is sort of like a well-aged bottle of wine. It doesn’t have the pop and vibrancy of cities like Barcelona or Granada, but has an older and refined charm to it. Seville has a lot of things that attract tourists, such as the fourth largest church in the world and the Royal Alcazar, (palace) but my personal favorite spot in Seville is the Plaza de España (pictured right). I’m not that old and haven’t seen all that much of the world, but I’m fine declaring it to be one of the world’s most beautiful architectural masterpieces. Brick, stone, and tiles are laid out in splendid fashion, the likes of which I’ve hardly seen anywhere else. Seville has tried bringing in some modern art and architecture, such as the giant mushroom structure, the new bridge over the river, and the World’s Fair expo grounds, but I don’t think the city needs it. Seville is all about aged elegance.

Tarifa and Tangier

I have stood at the edge of the world. Ok, so Tarifa isn’t actually the edge of the world, but it feels like it. Down at the southern edge of mainland Europe you can see the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, and the Mediterranean Sea with a single turn of your head. The winds blow in strongly from the Atlantic, bringing in all the kite surfers looking to catch the air.  Across the strait is Tangier, which despite being only a forty-minute ferry ride from Tarifa, feels a world away from Europe. The narrow crowded streets in the old city are bustling with shops and salesmen. Nearby a series of high-rise apartments line the beach, with a new port under construction. Back in Tarifa I saw perhaps the most brilliant sunset of my life, with reds, oranges, and yellows reflected in the clouds and the small pools of water on the beach as the sun went down over the Atlantic. It was the edge of the world, and the sun was saying goodbye.

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On this day, one year ago, I was wandering all around Istanbul. In the morning I ventured into the Grand Bazaar, and in the deep core of it I found a Turkish tobacco pipe shop from which I bought a friend’s wedding gift. For lunch I grabbed a meal with two people from my hostel at a restaurant near the Süleymaniye Mosque, and in the afternoon I went out to the old city walls and also visited the Chora Church. From up on the walls I strained looked around in every direction but couldn’t seen an end to the city.