Max Ernst

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Posts posted by Max Ernst

  3. Posted

    I still jump in Team Fortress 2 from time to time and play it mindlessly. I like listening to music at the same time and it's a good way to unwind.

     

     

    Otherwise Age of Empires 2 or Grow Home. I don't play many other games because I don't really play games much anymore!

  10. Posted

    Goon Squad is alright but the depiction of 80s punk rock culture is really off.

     

    Bugs me because it is one of my favourite movements in modern music and its such a bummer that a haphazard Dead Kennedys reference is basically the extent of Egan's research. Also, the Nine Inch Nails cell phone songs for babies was really stupid.

  12. Posted

    Hey, I have been on a massive Chinese/Taiwanese music kick thanks to this bandcamp label. Bandcamp is the best service.

     

    The best and most well-known is PK14's 1984. This band who has been paying their dues for a long time saved up their cash and got fucking Steve Albini to produce this record. It sounds so great, and the band is firing on all cylinders here. Their music can be described as tightly wound, nervous rock music, but that is a terrible description and I regret saying it already. Here is a good cut (which sounds a little more like Modest Mouse than the rest of the record does but them's the berries):

     

    Hedgehog are also cool and good. They are bit lighter pop-indie-rock sound, but they are so great. Here, some kind soul uploaded one of their better albums on to youtube:

     

    Another band is Carsick Cars and they make catchy songs that have big guitar freakouts. I am tired and cant be bothered to write more about them so listen to this:

     

    This band isn't from this region of Asia at all, they are from Japan. They are called Microcosm, and I can only find two songs of theirs online. I once saw a listing for one of their EPs on Amazon Japan and I would have paid $50 for four songs plus shipping so I declined. This song is amazing and would be your Stereogum number one Pitchfork Best Endorsed Track if it were in English and released on 4AD or whatever:

     

    I hope someone here listens to these bands because I spent ten minutes on this post!

  13. Posted

    Oh hey, in February 2014 I secured my dream job after doing a terrible career move and graduating with a Honours in the Sociology and Philosophy of Science. For privacy reasons I would rather not mention the type of work I am in, but I am really happy with it and it basically gives me a lot of opportunity to move forward and upward. Salary is decent considering I have been there for less than two years, and I have a lot of opportunities to move around and soak up as much experience as possible.

     

    I just wanted to pop in and say that I get the search grind, but if you studied in school (or even if you didn't), all you need is your foot in the door. It will change everything. Chin up. 

  15. Posted

    I won't deny that stuff is there, but it's so minor and background that it never bothered me at all.  It's pretty much all contained within the town and dialog with the goat so it's easy to ignore.  I even found some of it amusing, as transparent as it is.

    The entire premise of the game uses Mexican culture/history as wacky window dressing for their mashup of well-established, but still very much sacred, game mechanics. 

  18. Posted

    Ayo you want memes? You want references? Do you like Family Guy? You want the games of your youth? Are you the type to complain that the golden age of games of gone?

     

    Boy have we got the game for you. And let me tell you- it's totally random.

  20. Posted

    I finished Guacamelee. I had a blast with it. The art style and music were really solid and gave the game a really great sense of atmosphere. The platforming also felt really good and I enjoyed those difficult segments where you have to have pinpoint timing on all of your button presses and world switching. Some of that shit got really intense and it felt pretty damn good when you finally pull off the correct sequence of moves with the right timing after 20 minutes of failed attempts. The combat also felt really solid and had a lot of complexity woven in, allowing for a lot of different combos and improvisation. All in all, this was just a really solid game. After completing it I saw that Hard mode had opened up. And nope. Fuck that. The base game was difficult enough.

    The video game equivalent of a Reddit thread. I regret every second I spent playing this.

  24. Posted

    I can't wait for the Obsidian spin-off in which the writing is better, the world building has subtlety and recognises that to feel a post-apocalyptic (ugh) world, you need to feel that you aren't that significant- because everything is hopeless.

     

     

    Also remember when the President was a computer in Fallout 3? Remember? That was designed to be a big reveal that MADE YOU THINK. 

     

    I know I am being super shitty on Bethesda but they build these huge worlds and then ruin them by having people spew lore and exposition at you. All the characters feel like archtypes and all your choices are pretty simple (gee, do I blow up a town or do I let them live, I wonder what the moral choice is here...it's so complex!). It was nice playing New Vegas because the companions were memorable, each final outcome was loaded with complexities and positives and negatives. Do I go with NCR, even if they are a bloated bureaucracy that will slow things down on the strip, but at the same time provide it structure and security? Do you enable House to rule? While he is a paranoid who will do a lot of shitty things to maintain to his rule, the people enjoy a brief bit of respite on his strip and are thankful to have some happy moments away from their shitty lives. 

     

    New Vegas is a game that created a bleak, sparse world. It gets knocked for not because the tourist-landmark-roadtrip that Fallout 3 is, but that's what I love about it. It's a game where you sense the helplessness of the little communities that struggle to cement themselves among the nothingness. It's a game where you see nothing but sand to the horizon, and then filled with fear when the clean horizon is broken (by what? a ranger? Ceasar's troops? A scorpion? A merchant?). It's a world where people are trying to keep their chin up in the face of the worst living standards, and doing everything they can to hide it. In a world where civilisation has essentially hit the reset button, cultures have approached the rebuilding phase employing a range of ideologies. When these ideologies clash in the context of hardship, their worst elements come forward. Fallout 3/Skyrim posited large, dense worlds ful lof busting towns and communties. When you poke at the edges, you realise how shallow these towns are, with their limited population on a constant loop and barking the same handful of lines at you. New Vegas makes no such assertion- this is a small world, littered with small communities. With the limits of game technology, the realities of game development, and the parameters of the world it suggests, there can be no other way, really.

     

    Anyway, I will play Fallout 4 and will probably enjoy it because I like exploring, but it's inevitable shortcomings in its storytelling will be what I remember when I walk away from it. I just wrote all this without an edit or a reread so it hope it makes sense and that I realise I just criticised a game that I have yet to play but I have played every Bethesda game so I don't feel too bad about it.

  25. Posted

    I mostly cut out bread a couple of years ago (not strictly gluten free, but cut down on grains and grain carbs, still willing to cheat when convenient or for something particularly tasty).  And after quite awhile of not eating bread, I find it to often have a really strong, and not very pleasant, smell and taste.  Particularly if it's a doughy or yeasty bread.  I had a similar experience with soda when I cut it out, after months of not drinking one, they mostly taste like a syrupy mess now. 

     

    It's funny how if you cut out a food for long enough, it can change how it tastes and smells to you. 

    Last week I had a Coke for the first time in three years and it was awful. Very heavy and my teeth hurt.

     

    I wasn't a big junk food guy, but I stopped having soft drink over dinner, snacking on processed foods, and having milk in my coffee. I dropped ten kilograms pretty quickly.

     

    It sounds like I stopped having fun, but really, the stuff I eat now is a lot tastier and I feel a lot better during the day.