This has been a hot minutes, guys! So I figured I may as well jump back into writing. To be quite honest, I totally left it behind and focused more on my career, family and just life as a whole.
Since I was here last, we’ve added an amazing little man to our lives. (Now 2-years and some change.) We’ve adopted a black Labrador, whose finally grown out of his puppy habits. I’ve gotten a few promotions at my job and we will soon be celebrating 10 years of marriage.
I think I answered my question, in a nutshell. Hopefully if your reading this and have actually followed me in a spec of your life, you’ll come back and share a few more specs with me.
I’ve always had a desire to share a few pieces of my days on this Earth with guys and I hope to come back to do this even more.
When I left this blog, I felt like did it for the wrong reasons. Those were in hopes of gaining more ground in terms of viewer, likes and followers. I over that and I’ve matured past that desire for attention. My true ambitions were always my writing and doing what I loved: the experience of my life, the journeys into my own imagination and the appreciation for the creative world of visual media entertainment.
The wait is FINALLY OVER! We now have our hands on Resident Evil VILLAGE! Hold on…
Was there ever a wait?! Last I remember about this game was when it was teased, it was like January or December. (Not sure, it wasn’t that long ago!) So that wait, wasn’t all that long…
Maybe it was a long wait for those Lady Demitrescu fans…ok, I’ll admit I’m one!! But I was wasn’t counting calendar days until her in-game model was used for NSFW purposes. (Rule 34, adult bros and fems, research at your own risk!)
I got what all that hype was about, 10 ft tall drink of water after all!
Joe’s joke on Demitrescu is just hilarious! The Angry Joe Show – The terrifying Lady D!!! RE8 REVIEW
So did I get what I wanted out of my Resident Evil Village experience?!?!?! AB_SO-LUTE-LY!!
Right away, I wanted to remind the population (you) that I’m an OG Resident Evil fan, circa 1996, my guys! I read the lore, the wikis and have even read the S.D. Perry Novels way back when! With that said, you may as well give me my honorary doctorate in Resident Evil lore; I’ll take that oversized piece of paper and flash it like the Stars and Stripes on Memorial Day!!!
(BTW my salute is raised to my fellow members, now and forever!)
Moving onto what this whole article is about… Resident Evil Village AKA RE8.
Right away, this is your warning!
THERE WILL BE SPOILERS!!!!
RE8 starts where the last teaser left off, with Chris Redfield’s boot on Mia Winters as he pops off a few bullets in her. Quite the abrupt heel turn, my dude! I guess that was how they wanted to take this rollercoaster. This event leads into Ethan Winters (the primary protagonist in RE Biohazard, AKA RE7) and his infant daughter being kidnapped by Redfield.
AAAAAAAnnnnnd of course, none of this goes to plan as the vehicle is attacked by an unknown bioweapon, leaving Ethan stranded in a nearby village, which just so happens to be a den full every damn monster that Capcom can think of!!! Holy F*ck is this guy the most unlucky motherf*ckin’ dad EVER!!!! But hey, its a game!
Playing this, felt like a strong blend of Resident Evil 4 and 7, enemies come at you in almost horde numbers, yet ammo is plentiful and treasure is to be found! (Yes, there is a money and merchant system, too!)
Yet the interior environments bring you back into the claustrophobic castle, mansion, cave and factory settings that are the core of the series. Hell, you feel that the development team truly wanted to show love to many of the unexplored horror elements, especially in the Benviento and Demitrescu sections, which I felt were the strongest part, creative-wise.
The enemy variety was another big step-up for me. There are werewolves, armored werewolves, regular wolves, old giant wolves, really hairy wolves, wolves with cheese…
Joking aside, there are tons of different varieties beyond the wolves: zombie-like vampires, cybernetic junk monsters, flying crow people and LOTS of bosses!!! Hell some reviewers have referred this game to being one big ass boss rush or the main bad guys being like the Fox Hound Unit from Metal Gear.
In response to that, I’d say its more the latter, with each of the major bosses having their our back stories, personalities and agendas on the world they live in. I’d say, this is the same formula seen from RE7, but executed in a cleaner fashion. Lady D is elegent and well spoken, Moreau is vile and dim-witted, Heisenburg (Stop, no I won’t say it!) is chatty and cunning and you get the drift.
Capcom
Overall, I dove into RE8 like I do every time I’m playing my a series I love. I stay off the internet until I’ve played it!!!!! I know, why are you here?! Am I going to see you again now that I’ve told you the best way to avoid spoilers!!! Because its common sense; avoid the hype and jump in blindly!
Also, stay away from Mashable and Screen Rant, those are valuable minutes of your that are being wasted! (Just my opinion!)
Jesus from what I understood, the internet spoiled the ending and everything! How does that bring anyone joy?!
Regardless, RE8 shoots a good game and tells a good story…with one big EXEMPTION. The original cast isn’t here…no Jill, Barry, Leon, Sherry or Claire are here, nor are they mentioned anywhere in the game! This was my only true complaint and truly wished there were some. Fans of the series have been grown attached to these characters and their stories.
Ethan is great and his story is closed out pretty well, but there wasn’t even screen time put in for cameos. The ending will certainly leave you with a lot of questions on where the series goes from here…beat it (or tube it), you’ll see!
RE8 is an awesome game and holds up better than most of the series predecessors and improves on everything that RE7 did! However, I think I’m ready for that 3rd person or fixed camera gameplay again, as I think Capcom has pulled almost every trick they can with a first-person perspective that hasn’t been done before!
Ok, I’m done talking, as I could go on forever about this and the series. You’ll definitely enjoy this one!
So what, if I dropped off of the face of the Earth…I got a PS5!! (Viewer hovers over the close tab X)
No no NO!! Ok, I know, I KNOW! Nobody has one, I get it! I checked all of the Twitter feeds, subscribed to a few hundred, dubious profiles that were called PS5/Xbox Series X RESTOCK 2020 !!!!!
Rest assured that, A) I will be hacked at some point soon and B) There Will Be Blood!
Okay, so none of that may happen, I don’t know…Only a blogger, not a fortune teller!
In all honesty, only I was able was to snag one was…to get a hookup. As in, I had a friend who “bought” two of them. (Literal quote, dunno what, why, when or how)
But he sold one to me for $100 extra and man IS IT AWESOME!!! (Considering I’m upgrading from the stock PS4)
Yet, I felt pretty sad, because I really just lucked into getting one, whereas the rest of the globe ISN’T going to be as such.
Hopefully gaming companies and vendors will start to put their actual customers in mind during a console launch, instead of the scalpers and wholesalers that are ripping you and me off. ($100 dollars, let alone 600 is a LOT for a dad with with 2 kids, wife and 2 dogs)
There was no lines because the pandemic, but it still could’ve been handled better and less under the pure focus on corporate greed. This is the sole reason a LARGE majority of this year’s games for the PS5/Xbox Series X are delayed into 2021. Sure there is a chip shortage and the cryptocurrency craze and auto industry are ripping away at the what little microchips there are.
I just could’ve addressed better. But that is all hindsight and I, nor you could’ve manipulated the cogs of this new console generation. Here’s to hoping there is a brighter future all of us gamers and that you can get one or two in the near future!
Until then, lets enjoy a couple wonderful attempts at the ingenuity of the 2020 pandemic for us gamers!
Imagine for few moments that you’d just gotten hired to a new job and your new boss is…an actual video game boss!
In these new entries, I plan to take a comical yet realistic look at putting you under the employment of the baddest bad guys and maybe even the good guys.
I’d like to get creative with these and possibly make a potential regular post.
Recently, a few articles popped out at me. One was briefly about the Steam network banning the title, “Rape Day”, which was a hit to their unstable company to customer relationship, in regards to censorship. But I felt it was 100% RIGHT MOVE, on their part. The game literally centralizes itself on gratuitous sexual violence. So yeah, definitely not something we need as a game or really anything beyond what has been done already.
Personally, I think Rockstar crossed the line when they added a interactive torture scene in Grand Theft Auto V. Sure, they weren’t doing it to push the boundaries, but maybe to see how a player would respond to torturing someone in-game. It was sort like the Milgram Experiment, you didn’t necessarily have a choice unless you progressed. Then again, maybe you did if you’d stopped playing.
-Rockstar Games
GTA has always been the benchmark on how far games will go and I’ve yet to see the series or any other game (that wasn’t considered pornographic or hentai) add a rape as a gameplay element. Why?! Because that is where 99% of people will draw the “line in the sand.” It’s one thing to have it portrayed as a negative point in a narrative, but a direct interaction is almost a perpetuation of the crime itself.
All I can say is, WHAT THE HELL IS THE PROBLEM??? It’s just a woman’s bare ass! Not only that, it’s more like a half-moon! Go watch an episode of “The Simpsons” and you’ll see more nudity there, male and female. For the longest time, nudity and sexual censorship has been a real head-scratching topic for me. It’s probably because I was an amateur artist in my high school days. Or maybe it’s the fact, that I learned about art from books about popular artists of the Italian Renaissance. (Like the painting by Rafael seen below)
Why is the human body, man or woman, so scary?! Isn’t sex one of our many necessary functions as human beings?!
Now I understand that children are never to be associated with the coupling of two human beings, outside the subject of birth. It is just something we don’t do, so we protect our children by parenting. Which stems from the lessons of our history, that are projected through previous generations to keep us protected until we are ready. However, parents and adults cannot protect their children forever, as the world has its ways of revealing the fact of life: anatomy, death, sexuality and violence. Which is why we should be there for them, to give them the proper guidance on the realities of life.
I was roughly 11 years old, when I had my first exposure to graphic violence. It was a boring Saturday and I ended up crashing on my living room couch. I’d slept a bit, to just about 9pm, when my brother and sister popped in the movie “Friday the 13th”. (both were 15 and 19 at the time) Before they’d started it, I was told to get out and that the movie was too scary for me.
However, I was a bit of a hard-head and thought that I was big enough to watch a scary film. After all, I’d seen Poltergeist and The Ghostbusters, there couldn’t been anything scarier than that. Clearly you know where this is going, right?
I spent the entire movie hiding underneath the pillow with occasional peaks at the screen. But the pillow didn’t save me from the terrifying sound effects of Jason stalking the inhabitants of Camp Crystal Lake. Which was further intensified by the screams that fell victim to him, until the inevitable conclusion of the film. Hiding wasn’t an option, it was almost as if I was being stalked Jason himself. Yet just when I was told “it was over”, but it wasn’t, as the final moments tell you – “he’s still out there”
How many of you are looking behind your shoulders right now?
It was a harrowing first experience to nothing I’d ever seen before and it left me with nightmares for a while. That is until I had a talked with my mom and dad, which quickly resulted in my two siblings getting their ass chewed out. But after that, I’d realized that the movie was only fiction, just like any other movie or show.
The same thing happened when my mom found some of my nude sketches in my early-teens. We talked and she gave me the guidance I needed to fully understand my own sexuality. Her words were of encouragement; more for my art, than the sexual interest towards the body of a woman.
Turning back to how we view violence and sexuality in the modern media. It seems as though a naked body or sexual relations are considered shameful, almost like Queen Cersei’s “Walk of Shame” Which is why, I absolutely love HBO, Showtime and many other networks remember that sex and nudity can be an integral part of the narrative and art itself. As a matter of fact, sexuality and our own bodily experiences come much more naturally than events of rage, trauma and violence.
Yet, I can play the remake of Resident Evil 2; where limbs are shot off, people are torn in half and crushed to death. (Not saying the portrayal was a bad thing, the remake is PHENOMINAL!) I’d say this game is, the 2nd most graphic depiction of violence I’ve ever seen in my 30 years of gaming. (Whereas Mortal Kombat X is #1) But the violence depicted really suits the game and truly amplified the horror experience. Now God forbid that we see a bare-naked lady’s ass, genitalia or a full-on sex scene in an M-rated video game! Because that is just too graphic for us compute.
The line in the sand is drawn only few meters when I step onto the beach in regards to sexual content, yet the other line is being washed away by the tide.
It’s been MIN-UTE! Well, maybe like a year and well it’s been a pretty interesting year.
As are the years, of all regular oxygen breathing people besides me. But my blog, so yeah. The main reason I really left this Popsicle stand was that I felt everything I said was pointless, inconsequential and really didn’t matter to you…or anyone else. I took a lot of time thinking about if writing was to even be a part of my life and had essentially quit doing it altogether.
How I felt then.
At the time, I’d been going through a difficult period in work and home life. Then I applied to a gaming website, as a contributor. Which was swiftly rejected, I distinctly remember the editor saying “my writing was unprofessional and not what they were looking for”, despite the posting for “amateur” work. The more I wrote, the emptier I felt with each posting. Other blogs or sites were thriving and well…I was nothing but a grain of sand in the Sahara.
Once my writing no longer gave me joy. I left here.
I had life push me along like dust from a sandstorm. I moved through my days doing the regular grind, mindlessly working, being the best dad and husband I could be. Hell, I even went to Disney World for the first time!
Then the epiphany with a beating heart happened. I found out I was having a son. Forget the “mind blown” thought. It was no longer going to be Three’s Company; my boy (his name is Max, BTW) was now going to be Mr Furley walking in during an awkward moment of eye-brow raising innuendos. The first thing wasn’t “wow, that’s great!” It was “OH SHIT!”
Honestly, we NEVER saw this coming. BOTH Kat (my wife, if I’d never mentioned her name directly on here.) and I had not seen this coming. Not because, that’s just what careless, albeit perfectly normal sex bring in, as a result. But that we’d been trying for FOUR YEARS and almost TWO years after having a miscarriage.
Before, we’d had him, (FYI he’s a super cute, yet dribbling 3 month old) our chances of having him were pretty slim. Me and Kat were seeing a fertility specialist, as we’d both been having issues conceiving. Put simply, my flamethrower couldn’t light her newspaper-filled dumpster.
Around the third year, which was about the time I decided to hang my hat with you guys. I became frustrated with my weight, eating habits and activity levels. I stopped drinking sodas, laid off the sugar, took supplement stacks, chugged a gallon of water a day and kept to it for 4 months straight. Also, I was on Clomid, AKA baby glue, so maybe that helped the football team make to the end-zone.
Once it happened, our total mood took a turn for the better. Kat and my depressive state flipped faster than a Mickey Ds burger. (Provided they are even flipped in the first place.)
She went from being in constant state of lull into a kid waiting for Christmas toys. Losing a baby before birth, is very different from losing a person already here on this Earth. Men can only sympathize, but never empathize with that sort of lost. My advice to all those fellas out there that ever find themselves in this sort situation: Comfort her, never counsel or coach. Let time do the work and allow her to find peace in herself.
Thankfully, things have been much better for me. I’ve reinvigorated my desire to write and share my thoughts with everyone!
This evening many guys and gals are getting lucky because of this one special day. Many of us spent more money than we should’ve, thanks to the commercialization of Valentine’s Day. To be honest, the holiday is really a good and bad thing. This is coming from a dude, I know…mind blown, right?!
After some deep thinking for a few days on what I was going to get my wife. I stopped myself before I made a decision to go to the store. I realized that Valentine’s Day is really about appreciating those that we love deepest. Maybe it can be through flowers, cards and candy; but I think that doesn’t quite scratch the itch.
Valentine’s should be what the true meaning Christmas is. Appreciating what is great in life. For those of us who are fortunate enough to have a lover or companion in our life. This is a special time to let each other, I appreciate you being in life more than ever.
To be honest, I think we don’t stop to just truly LOVE AND APPRECIATE that man or woman in our lives.
So I came up with a better idea.
These are what I call Hot and Cold notes! The concept is super simple. Take two different color Post-It notes.
Make one color “sweet” and the other “sexy”.
For the “sweet” ones, I really took my time and thought about what makes my Louie, so wonderful. Some would be motivational, sweet and wholesome. While others would be about basic stuff, like about her smell, smile and what I thought was beautiful to me.
Now for the “sexy” notes, I got to have fun with them. Some of them would talk about the good things we did in bed, things that excited me and even new activities I’d like us to try. To make it work, I did avoid vulgarities. Let’s be honest, “I want to put my cock inside you.”, just doesn’t come off as romantic.
Instead, I would write “I miss feeling the heat from your mouth, as bodies move together!” Which sounds much sexier than the former.
For me, I did 91 Post-it notes. One for every month we’ve been together. Then for the “sweet” ones I placed them in “cool” areas in the house, like on fans or the refrigerator. The same is then done to the “sexy” ones, by placing them on the stove, a clothing iron or toaster.
To get creative, I used things like faucets to do BOTH on each knob or side.
Honestly, for me it took me a while to do. But was a very cheap way of reconnecting with what matters in your life.
Like the saying goes, “it’s the thought that counts!”
To accompany my previous post about The Evil Within 2. I decided to delve deeper into the main theme of the game: Virtual Reality. Since the movie The Matrix, the thought of virtual world went mainstream. To think that a person’s consciousness can be placed into a virtual world as real as the one you and I live in right now, truly gets us to think about our OWN reality.
The STEM system.
In The Evil Within series, that same idea of a virtual world is represented by a fictional machine known as STEM. In short, the machine uses targeted areas of the brain in order to create a virtual world where all those participating will share a consciousness together. Imagine a world that doesn’t have disease and that happiness can be made without even physically moving a muscle, this is STEM. However, in the game’s story the virtual world that was viewed as a utopia, only ends up becoming a living nightmare.
But I’m not here to write about the plot of the game, but to further analyze the virtual world from the real and fictional perspective. After watching an episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” called “PTSDee”. (Which was recommended from my wife, Louie. See the 2 clips below.) I began to think about what kind of true dangers lie in store for us, as virtual and alternate realities continue to advance in our everyday lives.
Lol, okay I know Always Sunny isn’t greatest example to bring up a serious discussion of the negative aspects of what can come from VR and AR. But you have to admit, eventually the technology may get THAT GOOD! (or BAD) The Evil Within 2 addresses this in the worse case scenario. Hundreds of people that are currently hooked up to the STEM system suddenly begin to die off and once the story goes into play; all hell breaks loose. Everyone inside the STEM system either transforms, gets killed or hunted by their own shared virtual consciousness.
Knowing that a machine could either transport you into a paradise or a life as a vegetable, is horrifying. Like this and The Matrix, if you die inside, you’re toast in the real world. Add along the potential that any traumatic experience you see or experience in those worlds could affect you in the flesh. Look at it this way, in games we die and retry until we overcome and succeed. Now imagine yourself feeling REAL PAIN and DEATH. Would we be the same? If it got that bad, would we push on and continue using the technology?
Hell, there are a ton of questions that we can ask here. That’s why I’ll leave it up for discussion. Leave any comments below.
