The First Rule Of Status Quo Sunday Is

For Fucks Sake Talk About It, Because I'd Like The Promotion.

Anyway, this week's jam:


Another GHTV discovery. I'm kind of glad Guitar Hero doesn't make a big deal about their new songs the same way Rock Band and Rocksmith do, so you forget about it for a while, then come back and say "Huh,, didn't know they added this" on top of the fact that the stations keep everything random so it doesn't get repetitive.

The Mowgli's are a real life version of the Portland Cloud Orchestra from Guitar Hero Live: A big alternative/folk group that is involved with many charities, and "San Francisico"'s message carries that to a T. It's peppy, and it makes me happy. I know my musical writing vocabulary is very limited, and it's another jangly alt/folk song, but it made my workday suck less when I had it on repeat, fuck you.

MUSIC UPDATES:
Nothing.

WHAT?
Nope. I've been trying to finish up my Oath Of The Gatewatch Song, but progress has been slow on that. I went 3-3 on the prerelease though, so that's cool.

WAIT, WHAT?
Yeah, I didn't pull any big money cards, but I had a pretty sweet colorless-

WHY?
They're random booster packs. I'm not guaranteed to-

NO I MEAN WHY NO MUSIC?
Reason 1: I'm polishing up Think Geek Is Not Nerdcore

Reason 2:
Punch Club:

I've never played a game that made me love it, then hate it, love it again, hate the ending, and now I want to replay it.

Truth be told, I have a fondness for all the dumb, grindy "simulator" type browser games, and Punch Club is no different in the framework.

Where it makes up for it is the fact that it's more ambitious: the fighting system, while automated, is faily deep and allows you to switch which moves your fighter can use based upon your opponent. The story is suprisingly interesting, and branches depending on what choices you make. It's no Until Dawn, but it's an appreciated extra for a game that I wouldn't expect to make for. It's nothing you haven't seen before: train and fight for reasons, There's even a section where you go to Russia and fight a fighter named Ivangief.

Pop culture references are everywhere, and you'll either find them cute and charming (Jay and Silent Bob outside a convenience store, Jules and Verne from Pulp Fiction in a diner) or obnoxious and overdone (you fight Teenage Mutant Ninja Alligators, convenience store cleck is an Indian Guy named Apu, aforementioned Ivangief, girlfriend character named Adrian, manager named Ding King). All of this makes it feel like the game doesn't have an identity of its own and is screaming PLEASE LOVE ME!.

Would I recommend it? Depends on your tolerance on the grind and if you would plan on replaying it. I wouldn't have paid the full $10, though, at least as my initial playthrough stands. There's other avenues you can take with fighting styles and storylines, but there is a bit you have to put up with for an ending that's unsatisfactory.

Then again, I'm a crazy person.

For a video game with a slightly better price, you can download "Omnikron: The Nomad Soul" for free until the 22nd.

Anyway, I should have more for you next week, life's a little like Tetris right now: clear one thing, more keeps piling up. 

Echo Chamber Episode 142 Recap

she's concerned about my cholesterol but she's getting fat so i think she's eating it all
 
-Now, how I do these things is I listen to the podcast and write one broad heading for every subject I think I can write about. Then I put all the headings into the CMS for the site and go from there. All I have for my notes on the first part of the podcast is "Dinosaur/Donald Trump", which could only mean a prompt to list my favorite possible Donald Trump/Dinosaur interactions:

• Dinosaurs eating Donald Trump's face off
• Bernie Sanders winning the election, then riding off on a veloiciraptor, who then goes back and eats Donald Trump
• Herbivoric dinosaur thinking Donald Trump's hair is vegetation, then eats his head in the process
• Brontosaurus's stomping on Donald Trump's crotch
• Donald Trump being horn fucked by a triceratops.
• A pterodactyl picking up Donald Trump by his belt and then dropping him into a volcano and his pants come off in the process as his tiny baby dick flops around before he falls in and his dick gets burned first

-Now, "Shitlord" has gotten a lot of flack for being a "TUMBLR/SJW!!!" insult, since it's an insult not specific to any race or gender. However, I feel such limitations on languge lead to more direct, honest insults. For example, instead of old standbys like "Fag", "Retard" and "(insert racial slur here)", you're calling them "shit", which isn't comparing them to other people, but instead something that can't exist without us. Adding "serf" implies being owned by somebody else. So, calling them a shitserf means "You're subhuman and someone else's problem"

-"Anime took a shit on the E-string of a guitar"- Jeff Webster, on Babymetal's "Gimme Chocolate"

"Hungry Like The Wolf" from BABYDADROCK

-It's interesting how the Karaoke Revolution/Lips games never achieved the same success Guitar Hero/Rock Band did, because there were a lot of Karaoke Revolution games. However, none achieved the same level of success, when most people use GH/RB as a glorified karaoke machine. I think RB just got the DLC stuff all figured out, and focused on a broader scope of music, so they took first on that. Karaoke Revolution committed the Mortal Sin of having to switch out discs and even when it went online, there was not enough DLC.

So hopefully Rock Band can keep up the DLC front, since that's what kept them separate from the rest of the pack.

-Joe McCarthy was a man who was behind the main thrust of Communist Paranoia in the U.S. It was stupid bullshit in the Cold War, since we were itching to invade another country since WWII. America's got mad warboners.

So, you'd think Joe McCarthy would be regarded as a fucking loon, as his day's Jack Thompson, right?

NOPE BECAUSE TEXAS WANTS TO CONTINUE THE RED SCARE BECAUSE FUCK YOU REASON.

IM A SMERTMEN!

-I have many thoughts on Until Dawn, but if I may draw some comparisons between it, The Walking Dead (Telltale) and Heavy Rain/Sadness Trilogy.

In The Walking Dead, you reach the same endpoint of the respective stories, however all the decisions are meant to make you feel shitty THE SECOND AFTER you make a decision. The choices didn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but broken up episode to episode, you had the experience of thinking about what would happen next, where the story was going, what other people did, etc.

Beyond Two Souls seemed to have to have one binary choice at the end. Fuck that noise.

Indigo Propechy had "multiple endings" but if we're thinking in video game terms, all you had to do was not fuck up the QTEs and make the OBVIOUS CHOICES to get the best ending. It was supposed to be episodic, but budget fucked them over. It promised a "malleable story" but, not really.

Heavy Rain, on the other hand, delivered on this promise a little bit more, where main characters can die, rendering parts of the game inaccessible. Like Indigo Prophecy, the endpoint was obvious, but the game kept going if you screwed up. Also, there were "sub-endings" once certain conditions were met depending on how long you used certain items, what you did, etc. Kinda like Silent Hills 2 and 3.


Until Dawn was similiar in all of those aspects, however it does this odd thing of keeping its cards close to its vest and throwing them out on the table. Yes, like Heavy Rain characters could die, but the game gives you hints on what to do next and how to keep everyone alive. So, like the Walking Dead, characters remember what happened, but unlike the Walking Dead, I wasn't caught up in the world and the story too much. I ENJOYED IT, loved playing the game, but I was still playing it like a game I tried to win.