I’m not very good with scary games but, outside of the usual suspects here, I’d say a sequence in a game that really gave me the shits was escaping the hotel in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

Weird, this didn’t show up in the Games section. Good thing I scrolled down on the main page!

For my money, Resident Evil 7 in VR should be #1. It’s intense — too intense for most — but if you like horror there’s literally nothing like it. The immersion of VR ratchets up your body’s reaction to everything going on to…

This is a case where, bizarrely, the South Park guys got it partly right in a physiological sense: the older you get, the more stuff sounds like shit.

You can take a lot of heavily distorted stuff when you’re young, because your ears are intact, and you can get a lot of nuance from what’s going on. The older you get…

Over the past five or so years I’ve found myself getting a lot more into various metal subgenres (I’m admittedly way more into the sludge/doom side of things than the music used in this study) than I ever was when I was a teen and I think I know why I’m finding it more appealing as I age.

Next week’s article: “We asked 97 people who hate the taste of beer to try the fall’s new IPA selections!”

Honestly, some of them do... but it’s surprisingly rare... once you find that you CAN do it, you tend to be able to get a good feel for your own range, your own limits and such, and it’s really only when trying to go past these limits and not listening to what your body is trying to tell you that you really risk…

Practice. Been doing it for 15 years now. When I started it was painful until I learned how to do it without having to push so hard. It’s really the same as anything else, you learn to do it correctly or you hurt yourself.

For reference:

Cuz it can be riffy and catchy and it’s fun to listen to. But that’s the stuff I like, there’s lots of death metal that is more proggy and technical than I care for with too many time signature changes for me to groove to. But fire up some Bolt Thrower and I’m a happy camper.

The ‘teenagers whining about how bad their lives are’ take is funny because extreme metal tends to be one of the least personal genres of music there is, lyrically. It’s for the same reason there’s all the dress-up. This is music to feel bigger and badder than your personal problems, not dwell on them.

As a big nerd who plays guitar and bass, “death metal” (NOT any of the stuff used as examples here) is one of the few genres that holds any interest. Punk, indie, country, blues, etc is full of tepid guitar/basslines as they’re putting much more emphasis on the lyrics, which I absolutely could not care less about with…

These three examples make for a pretty one-note display of Death Metal (haven’t looked at the full study though, maybe it gets more diverse there?), what about the jazzy/proggy aspects of genre-spawners Death? What about the Latin-rhythmed stylings of Atheist, to talk only about early stuff and not even mention the…

And I’ve always felt the lyrical content is simply designed to sync up with the aggression in the music. It rarely feels like “I’m singing about Satan because I love Satan and I want you to also love Satan,” but rather, “I’m singing about Satan because that’s some aggressive shit ... like this music I’m thrashing out…

I’m pushing 50 now and I still listen to Death Metal. The weird thing is, Death Metal kinda opened the door for me to get into Jazz. John Zorn, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy...there is something about their music that hits the same spot in my brain that metal does. I always have my iPod set to shuffle and sometimes a…

So the “surprising discoveries” the study made are:

So, this is kind-of on topic:

I used to get a kick out of how many words pulled from a medical encyclopedia of human anatomy could be strung together into a song.

Wowza. That is some top tier, high grade “once you see it, you can’t un-see it” material right there. /salute Here I thought the joke tagline would be something like “come witness the climax to Capcom’s latest horror efforts.” That pictograph description is indeed sophomoric but apt.

I started the post game content for Dragon Quest 11, but I think I’m going to give it up now that Red Dead Redemption is out.

I’m going to try again to play Abzu which I borrowed from the library. It’s not really a game yet and the incredibly slow pace made me want to give up and go play something with more immediate rewards. I’ve resisted learning anything about the game so I can be surprised by it. 

I’ve made some small measure of progress in Hollow Knight, though it seems clear that the first encounter with Hornet was the demarcation that let you know that the game was done easing you in. Every bit of progress from now on will no doubt be hard won. I got through the platforming nightmare of Fungal Wastes—bounce-p…