Song of the Day: Volume 5 (Space Time)

Today's song is Gojira's Space Time. This track nicely encapsulates everything that makes Gojira such a phenomenal band. It's groovy, weird, creative, brutal, and melodic, all in appropriate measures. Oh, and those pinch harmonics can cure cancer. Enjoy!

-TRO

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike

My first exposure to the Street Fighter universe came with, like the vast majority of people, the phenomenal Street Fighter II. I never had too much experience with arcades or fighting games growing up, besides my playthroughs of Simpsons, X-Men, and some game in which you play as a tugboat trying to get up a river at Chuck E. Cheese (back in the good ol' days when Chuck E. Cheese had some real arcade games, not just coin sucking ticket dispensers). But Street Fighter II was such a cultural phenomenon that even I couldn't have missed it. It was in 7-Elevens, malls, everywhere.

The one arcade to which I used to go as a teenager was a place called Wow! which you paid like 5 bucks to get into, but then the games were a nickel or dime instead of a quarter. There was also a selection of free games. One of these was Street Fighter II (well after the time it was popular), and I completely wore it out. I loved the look of the characters, the ease of control, and the spirit of communal learning that came about by getting your butt kicked by the great kid who could shoryuken at will, while the rest of us struggled to do the most basic of moves.

Anyway, I never really played any other Street Fighter games after that, as arcades were largely dying, and I didn't know about any of the other games. I played Marvel v. Capcom on Playstation, and would play SFII or one of the Alphas if I found an arcade, but my fighting game time was largely spent on 3D fighters like Tekken, Soul Calibur, etc.

But then, I purchased the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection for PS3 a few years back, in order to catch up on my Street Fighter history. Including SFII, Alpha 1-3, SSFIV: Arcade Edition, SF x Tekken, a Bluray with most of the SF anime and a documentary series, an art book, a wicked sweet Ryu statue and belt, and a game I'd completely missed, SFIII: Third Strike.

I spent a lot of time playing SFIV, but I spent more time playing Third Strike than I spent on the rest of the games and movies combined. It was completely captivating. Featuring a roster with very few identifiable characters to fans of SFII (only Ryu, Ken, Akuma, and Chun-Li appear in the game), I rather thought I'd play through the arcade mode with Ryu, Ken, and Akuma, and go on my merry way having beaten it.

But it was too good to drop. The visuals are superb, the introduction of parrying adds a dizzying level of technicality and skill to the game, and the characters are so diverse and well designed that it's very easy to see why this game blows SFII out of the water. While I hear that the arcade version slightly edges out the PS3 one, I absolutely adore it. If you like fighting games, you have to give Third Strike a shot. It's my favorite fighting game, a genre in which I have many loves. I'd give it a perfect 10.

-TRO

Back In Black (?)

I've been out of town for a few days, but I'm back now! Look back tomorrow for the first exciting new review since I've returned. Happy trails!

-TRO

Hearthstone

It's been a surprising length of time since a video game review, due to my thoughts that I'd already done enough, and also due to the fact that Tales of Phantasia took me SO LONG to finish (I finally finished last night, nearly 50 hours later). I knew there was a reason I'd drastically dropped my amount of JRPGs...hmmm. Anyway, I started working on the handheld game I'd teased in my Super Metroid review, and I'll definitely finish Banjo Kazooie and review it, as promised, in the next few weeks. I haven't had as much time gaming, or rather, my gaming time has been sucked up by the game I'm reviewing today...Hearthstone!

Back when I had a lot of free time, I spent most of my time playing 2 PC games, League of Legends and Hearthstone. I still love League and was pretty good at it during my peak (got platinum in two seasons, which is pretty good for someone with pretty poor reflexes), but I simply lack the time to play now. Devoting 40 minutes to a game with kids, a wife, and things to do is simply impossible, especially when you can't pause or save it, and the real time outcome not only affects your stats, but also the experience of 9 other people. Anyway, I still play a few matches every few months with my brother-in-law, but my days of 2 League games a day are long gone.

But I have continued to play Hearthstone most days. Hearthstone is an online, digital only collectible card game very similar to Magic: The Gathering. While I never played Magic, I did get pretty into Pokemon cards, and very into Yu-Gi-Oh, so I am familiar with and really enjoy the game.  At this point, I'd say that I like Hearthstone more than any of the other two card games mentioned, for a few main reasons.

First, Hearthstone is a mouse only game, meaning I can play it on my laptop, without the computer in my lap, while watching TV. It's a wonderful casual competitive experience that I can enjoy while also spending time with my family. Your opponent gets a turn that typically lasts a minute or so, so you can easily jump in and out of conversations and TV shows with ease.

Second, Hearthstone has a big player base that enables you to play against real humans in an evolving meta game each and every day. If Yu-Gi-Oh had an online experience like Hearthstone, I would probably play it frequently, but every attempt to do this has been a miserable failure. Since there are real humans participating, strategies are constantly changing, as people attempt to optimize their decks to succeed against the dominant decks in the current metagame. This makes for a fun and always fresh experience driven by players as much as the designers of the game.

Third, Hearthstone's purely digital existence opens it to an enormous universe of possibilities that other card games can't measure up to. Randomization is now possible, making way for some of my favorite cards, including Flamewalker, Arcane Missiles, Yogg-Saron, etc. Changing cards is now possible as well, enabling the company to tone down once dominant cards, or give tune-ups to poor cards (although they rarely do the latter). This keeps any particular card, hero, or archetype from becoming too dominant, and the designers can react a lot quicker to emergent strategies with this tactic than by the ban lists seen in other card games. I also like that the designers are not too reliant on these changes, preferring to wait and see whether or not players can "figure out" a deck before knocking it down a bit. Sometimes, as was the case with archetypes like secret paladin and patron warrior, they wait a bit too long, but I'd rather they wait too long than start changing things very quickly without a clear plan and enough data to substantiate the changes.

Fourth, it's completely free! The client is free to download, and the cards are all unlockable simply by playing the game enough.

Fifth, the two methods of playing the games are really fun and distinct. In arena, you draft cards from a random pool, while in constructed you pick a deck from your own cards, and play with that one. Arena is wonderful because you get rewards based on how well you do, and it really scratches my itch for randomness and probability, but both represent a fun and unique take on the game that gives a breath of fresh are when one mode becomes stale.

Hearthstone does have a few things about it that I don't much like, but they're far overbalanced by the things I do. The client is at times buggy (although it may be my old computer's fault, so I won't hold them to this too much), resulting in disconnects and long load times.

The business model of Hearthstone results in a long curve of difficulty for me, as I am too cheap to buy card packs, so I have to earn them with in game gold and arena runs. When a new set of cards is released, I am typically left adapting to new strategies and cards with outdated cards and strategies, which always makes the first few months of a release challenging. I usually spend most of the first few months playing Arena, so I can build up my card collection, and then shift into playing constructed later on once my collection is sufficient. But I do have to say that they aren't cheap about giving out rewards to dedicated players, so it doesn't feel as much of a play to win game as other free to play games.

I'd give Hearthstone a 9.7/10. It's supremely fun, and I'd recommend you check it out!

-TRO

Great Ideas (Volume 2)

A TV or movie murderer/rapist/kidnapper (pick one) who's constantly whistling REO Speedwagon's "I Can't Fight This Feeling". This could be fantastically creepy.

Song of the Day (Volume 4): Last Remaining Light

Sylosis' Last Remaining Light is a great example of what great thrash metal should look like in the era after which Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer have ceased to be the shining lights on the horizon of metal. Oh, and that hook.

The whole album (Conclusion of an Age) is great, so if you like this, check out the record and the great band! I can also attest that they're great live, so if they come off of hiatus and tour, you should go check a show whenever you can.

-TRO

To Pimp a Butterfly

Here we find ourselves at the end of rap week here on reTROview, with one record left to review. And if you haven't heard this one yet, shame on you.

Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is a modern classic. It seamlessly blends an enormous number of black musical styles into one sweeping masterpiece. Musical influences range from funk (George Clinton himself sings on Wesley's Theory) to R&B (Isley Brothers sample/cover on i) to electronic (Wesley's Theory) to jazz (For Free? Interlude) to hip hop (whole album). Rather than feeling like a disjointed mashup of popular styles, however, Kendrick's omnipresence and the tremendous skills of the producers involved help to make this record feel like a cohesive whole.

Kendrick's rapping is superb, and the beats over which he raps are almost as good. Standout tracks from the record include King Kunta, Alright, i, These Walls, and the Blacker the Berry. The message of the record is cutting, direct, and honest, dealing with a wide range of troubling political and social issues in and around the black community, from police brutality to managing fame and fortune to gang violence.

The record isn't perfect, as tracks like Institutionalized and Mortal Man fall a bit short of the promise of the rest of the record. But in all, this is an excellent record, and an instant rap classic for current times that will stand the test of time along its peers in greatness. I'll give it a 9.5/10.

-TRO