New Video: Crazy

 

 

Crazy by Gnarls Barkley was omnipresent on pop radio for several years in the late 2000's. I never got tired of it because it was such a kick-ass tune. Of course, I lack the singing chops of Ceelo (I ain't in the same fucking ballpark) but I thought I'd give it the ol' garage try. Did keys, bass, and drum loop in Reason, and then added two guitar tracks, one clean with reverb, the other distorted. Sped up the song just a tad. Kind of sounds like an actual crazy person is singing it, right? The year of covers continues.

Video Game Review: Resident Evil Village

 

Looks like a great place to vacation.

Resident Evil Village is loaded with atmosphere. If you appreciate an intricate level of detail bordering on excessive in your video games, then this is the title for you, especially if you're well-versed in classic horror tropes. Village has baroque castles with dark secrets, a creepy blockaded Eastern-European town full of terrors, and traditional monsters pulled from fairy tales  and tweaked with the series' mutated theme. Seven foot tall vampiress Lady Dimitrescu took the internet by storm, but she's joined by lycans, giant werewolves, blood-sucking witches composed of flies, possessed dolls, and a humongous amphibious catfish that vomits acid. Unlike the last Resident Evil game I played, Village uses a first person perspective, which heightens the horror without taking away the signature gamplay of the series. You'll still have to search rooms for loot and ammo, scrounging what you can while dealing with the occasional puzzle. The shooting feels solid, although the frame of view is too narrow, and Ethan, your doofus protagonist,  moves at the pace of a wounded buffalo, which is fine most of the time, except when you're trapped in a cave or narrow rampart and you have to outmaneuver a giant mutated dragon. The story is nigh incomprehensible, especially for someone who didn't play Resident Evil 7. The game opens with Ethan sitting down to a nice dinner with his wife after putting his infant daughter to bed. A bunch of spec-op guys break in, shoot Ethan's wife, and steal his baby. You start following them, only to discover that they were ripped to shreds by a pack of werewolves. Turns out Ethan and family decided to move to the very worst possible place they could have, the titular village which is ruled by Mother Miranda and her monstrous lords. Resident Evil lore has never particularly interested me, yet the interesting juxtaposition of B movie shenanigans with incredible visual artistry won me over rather than pushed me away. This is the kind of game where your player character has a hand sliced off and sticks it back on about a minute later. Still, the Beneviento mansion chapter, with it's adventure game-esque escape room and subsequent nightmare fuel conclusion, scared the shit out of me. I might have giggled every time Ethan walked off a life-ending injury, but I was immersed enough in the game world to start babbling "oh shit oh shit oh shit" when SPOILER a huge mutated baby fetus started rambling after me. The only real complaint I have is that Village has crashed several times randomly. So far, it's my game of the year.

Screenshots for your viewing pleasure:

A Tour of My Work Weightroom

 

I'm privileged enough to work with my family, and because of that I have a weightroom in their garage that I utilized about twice a week. It's not fancy, it's dirty and grimy, but it's convenient and I really don't need much else. The above picture shows a bench pressing station that my Dad bought me for my sixteenth birthday. I'm now 36, so I've certainly gotten my money's worth. The bench can be adjusted to a decline or an incline with the movement of a steel bar. There's a pulley system attached, with a high pulley for pulldowns and a low pully for cable rows. It also has a simple leg raise/curl station at the front. I've benched around 290 lbs on this station; for anything more, I prefer my power rack. I use the low cable station frequently, although it isn't really built for much more that 120 lbs or so. The leg curl station typically gets ignored.

To the right of the bench station is a pulley machine. I think it only offers about 100 lbs of resistance. I only use it for triceps pushdowns, and I'll often put a dumbbell atop its weights.

To the left I have a rack for squats and standing presses. That metal stool serves as a nice place to rest my ass during box squats. I've squatted 425 lbs off of it, which is probably a little foolish, although it is very solid. I have the following dumbbell pairs: 15, 20, 25, 30, 40. These get used for isolation exercises, although lately I've only really been doing curls. There's also an ez-curl bar that I didn't get in the photos.

I have one 45 lb Olympic barbell and 425 lbs worth of weights, making 470 the total amount of weight I'm able to lift at this gym. I do my deadlift day at my house, where I have 570 lbs of weights, but I usually don't deadlift that heavy so I could still get a good workout in at my work gym. Outside the garage, I have a 145 lbs Atlas stone that's great for conditioning. The only additions I'd like are a couple heavier Atlas stones. Otherwise, this simple gym has everything I need.

New Video: Daughter

 

An acoustic version of one of my favorite compositions (Check out the electric version here on Soundcloud). As is my wont as of late, this tune is acoustic guitar, bass, no percussion, raw vocals, and a few electric guitar overdubs. I don't have a lot of time to record, so whatever I get done in an hour or two is what I go with. At this point, I'm a garage hobbist. If I ever get a tattoo, it's gonna say "Lo-fi as fuck."

Video Game Reviews: Control; Crysis Remastered

 

Arish giving Jesse the side-eye.

Control is a third person shooter from Remedy that puts the player in the shoes of Jesse Falden, a women who has stumbled upon the secret Federal Bureau of Control in search of her brother, Dylan. Unfortunately, Jesse finds the FBC under assault by an otherworldly entity known as the Hiss, and most of the Bureau is possessed. The story is heavily influenced by Twin Peaks and the X-Files, and while it's not exactly scary, the atmosphere is topnotch. The Bureau's janitor Arish, who is definitely not just a custodian, speaks in a strange Finnish drawl that is almost indecipherable, and he's a pretty obvious nod to the work of David Lynch. The rest of the cast isn't particularly memorable, and Jesse's only a little interesting because she's carrying an extradimensional hitchhiker in her head. Because of a childhood encounter with an altered object (in this case, a film projector), Jesse has paranormal abilities. Finding more loose altered objects eventually grants Jesse the respective powers: launch (basically Force-throw), levitate, evade (a super-fast dodge), seize (allows you to switch an enemy into an ally), and shield. She also has a shapeshifting pistol, the possession of which grants her the title of Director. Launch pretty much makes the game. Remedy has filled the highly-detailed FBC with typical office decor, all of which will come in handy as makeshift projectiles. It is hugely satisfying to rip a piece of concrete out of a wall and hurl it at an enemy like a drunken Yoda. My only complaints are a few too many difficulty spikes, and a rushed ending. I'm assuming Remedy ran out of development time and had to release the game, that's how quickly it's over. However, it took me about eighteen hours to beat the campaign, and I didn't do all of the side quests. This is also a beautiful game that requires some serious horsepower to run at max settings at higher resolutions. I would say Control is worth sixty bucks for fans of Lynchian surrealism. You can currently play it on X Box game pass.

Crysis Remastered is more of a mixed bag. Crytek and Saber have updated the classic FPS, adding high resolution textures, an updated lighting system, software ray tracing, and more. On a mix of medium and high settings at 1440p, it looks great, and much closer to my memory's conception of the game. However, Crysis Remastered is based on the console version of Crysis, so some features, such as leaning and the original nanosuit controls, have been removed. Purists might be disappointed; personally, I think the game plays better. Instead of switching to speed mode, you simply hold down shift as you run; similarly, performing a power jump requires you to hold down the jump button instead of switching to power mode. There are also a few bugs, such as floating Koreans. Check point saving replaces the original's save-anywhere function, which stinks, because Crysis is a pretty challenging game on harder difficulties. Still, the graphical upgrades are really nice, and the gameplay still holds up. Crysis Remastered is currently on-sale for fifteen bucks on the Epic Games store, and I'd recommend it at that price.