MIDI Week Singles: "BGM #02" - Ace Combat Advance (GBA)

 

"BGM #02" from Ace Combat Advance on the Game Boy Advance (2005)
Composer: András Kövér
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Namco Hometek Inc.
Developer: Human Soft Inc.

I'd like to say that I love the Ace Combat franchise, except I think I like fewer games in the series than I've actually played.  Ace Combat Advance is one of the early games that I have not played, and by the look of it, I think I like it more in concept than in actual execution.  A top-down aircraft shooter like 1943 but in free-roam does sound pretty cool, but apparently wasn't executed all that well.

What I like about this particular song is that it gives me stealth mission vibes and I can't quite place why.  When I listen to it, there's something about it that makes me think of Pefect Dark running around either the Carington Villa or the snowy mountain airport.  It's just a groovy little tune that I enjoy listening to and for me at least, makes those six minutes fly by even though the melody repeats nearly a dozen times.

That's really it.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

And There Are Many Paths to Tread

A House in the Blind Spot of a Smart Home

[First off, I don't know who this article is for.  Is it a self-own?  Is it an attempt at some kind of humble-bragging by way of self-deprication?  What is someone else going to get out of me describing the house that I live in, and my feelings about smart home appliances reinforced because our house was built in 1917?  Why did I even think that this was a good idea?  But here we are, over 1,200 words later, and I've saddled myself with an article about how I have a form of technology that I know I could live without and have no deep love for, but use on a near-daily basis in a way that has helped Amazon lose upwards of $25,000,000,000 as of 2021; so probably an additional $10-15 billion since then because I typically only ask Alexa what the weather will be over the weekend and what time the sun will set on Sunday August 10th in Lake Arrowhead, CA.]

I don't mind smart home devices.  We have two Amazon Echo Dots, one in the living room and one in our sous-sol, which is where our TV and video game consoles are hooked up, along with three of our bookcases.  We also have three smart plugs connected to lights in the living room, the sous-sol, and the bedroom.  We also have a portable A/C unit and a wall-mounted heater in The Squire's bedroom, both are connected to our Alexa app.  Our house is also 108 years old with no central A/C or heat: central, gas, hydro, or otherwise.  Two of our rooms have electric floor heaters, while three others have those internally mounted electric fan heaters, you know the ones.  This is to say that very little in our house is centrally connected, although I can turn on and off lights and the A/C and heater from the comfort of our bed if I really wanted to.

For our two Echo Dots, we predominantly use the one in the living room, asking the temperature for various locations, what time sunset will be on a particular day, to play a particular song, or to tell The Squire what day of the week it is when he's convinced that it should be the weekend at 6:45 AM on a Wednesday morning; me too little Dude, me too.  The first thing I did after my older sister gave us our first Echo Dot, after the obvious steps to set up the device, was to disable voice purchasing from Amazon.  What I was most afraid of with this smart device was accidentally ordering something while drunk, not that I got drunk often at that point, but I have been known to make impulse purchases online after a couple of beers or an exquisitely tasty edible.  So I really didn't need a 55-gallon drum of lube showing up at our house and a $1,969.69 (heh, nice) payment on my credit card statement.

Maybe it's because I'm a geriatric millennial, or a Xelenial, or a Gen-Xer, but I like some semblance of tactile response when buying something, which is probably not the right word.  I don't necessarily need to feel a pair of earbuds or a cookbook before buying it, but I do like to look at something before I buy it.  I also like to look at the price history to know if I'm getting a good price for something, and not that something last week saw a 25% price increase and yesterday saw a 10% price drop.  Do the black earbuds cost the same as the orange earbuds?  I've never actually used our Echo Dot to make phone calls, partly because I carry my phone with me, but mostly because I use aliases for all of the contacts in my phone, and while not Echo Dot specific, I've never had a great experience using the voice-activated calling in my car.  And how would you pronounce "Mümer and Püper" in a way that Alexa would understand?

That's another issue I have specifically with the voice recognition of Alexa.  Some of the bands I like to listen to don't have English names, or if they do, they're not always understood.  How would you pronounce "Feuerschwanz" in a way that Alexa would understand?  Because saying the band's name the way you would pronounce it with an American accent doesn't work, because Alexa is expecting to hear an English word, and instead, you're speaking German slang.  If you throw in Roman numerals, all bets are off.  If I want to hear the soundtrack to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, specifically the score from the video game and not someone's interpretation of "From Past to Present," I have to say "The Elder Scrolls Vee, Skyrim by Jeremy Soul-lay," even though that's not how you pronounce his last name.  I've never had any luck getting Alexa to play the soundtrack to LIVE A LIVE HD-2D Remaster even before the album was delisted from Amazon, despite having purchased it through Amazon; it's the same issue with Equilibrium's album "Erdentempel."

So last year, when Amazon announced that they were looking into charging for an upgraded Alexa experience with Alexa+, I scoffed at the idea of paying for an upgraded service when their existing service was, more or less, doing alright.  Sure, Alexa doesn't always play the correct song/band/album when I say, "Play the song Leshiy by Arkona," but I would need to actually test the product myself before even considering paying an additional $10/month to communicate with an upgraded learning-language model.  On top of that, though, I also have no interest in any of the upgraded services that come with Alexa+, such as account linking with Uber, Ticketmaster, or OpenTable.  I genuinely have no desire to request an Uber by voice command or order tickets to a show without specifically seeing where all possible seat locations are and the breakdown of all of the fees, hidden and otherwise.

I get that people, myself included, are not using their smart home devices in ways that are designed to make someone else money by way of additional convenience fees, and in doing so, were and are part of Amazon's problem.  I have no problem being inconvenient for Amazon's higher-ups.  If Amazon were to require any kind of fee for use of their voice assistant, I would only be minorly inconvenienced at now having to unplug the string of lights in our living room and not being able to play (occasionally) play music upon command, but then I would also be saving the price of Amazon's music service too.

But this is all based on my own personal biases.  Just because we have a handful of limited smart devices that we limitively use doesn't mean that other people aren't excited by making purchases from Amazon or scheduling an Uber pickup using only voice commands.  I recognize that.  But I thought that it was something worth talking about as we enter the era of paid AI LLMs as in-home assistants, and remember all of the people who are not participating in this branch of the economy for whatever reason.  It's all computer after all.

If you like, you can go back up to the top and reread that opening paragraph, because it also works as a great closing statement.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

There's a Man with Tattered Clothes who's Cursing at the Air

MIDI Week Singles: Mutated Derek Simmons III" - Resident Evil 6 (VSD)

"Mutated Derek Simmons III" from Resident Evil 6 / Biohazard 6 on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, & Nintendo Switch (2012 - 2019)

Composer: Akihiko Narita, Akiyuki Morimoto, Kota Suzuki, Azusa Kato, & Laurent Ziliani

Album: Biohazard 6 Original Soundtrack

Label: SULEPUTER

Publisher: Capcom

Developer: Capcom

I wasn't initially sure if I was going to post this song for today since I was unable to find it on the official soundtrack, but it does appear in two places during Leon's campaign in Resident Evil 6 (Biohazard 6).  The track (sound file?) is titled "Mutated Derek Simmons III" because it is the third of 900 times that this absolute bastard comes back from being run over by a train, blown up, blown up again, set on fire, probably blown up a few more times, dropped from a flaming building while he himself is on fire, and probably blown up again just for good measure.  This version of the Simmons fight theme crops up while Leon and Helena are scaling a building towards the end of Leon's campaign, while trying to flee from the aforementioned Simmons, who, as the title suggests, is on his third horrific transformation.  Something else that's interesting about this scene in particular is that you're not actually fighting Simmons, but instead climbing a building while Ada fights/runs away from the monster.  

What drew me to this song was that it was also used during the end credits as a closing song after the actual staff roll song, "Back for More," and followed by another song I can't quite place.  I don't know if it was intentional or not, but there are a lot of sections in this song that remind me a lot of "ROAR! Cloverfield Overture" by Michael Giacchino from the 2008 monster movie, Cloverfield.  There's the five-note theme played by the bass instruments that really sound like what the composers for this song were aiming for, and for me, it's hard not to draw a comparison.  All it needed was a choir to chime in throughout, but that might've been too on the nose.  I do like how the main theme of the game (or is it just Leon's campaign?) is sprinkled throughout in a dark heroic manner.  It helps add a sense of familiarity that carries through the entire campaign and this fight in particular, as you fight your way through the city in ever more ridiculous situations.

Considering this was the first campaign of four that I've played from Resident Evil 6, this song was very fitting for what felt like a two-hour-long sequence involving an ever-larger mutating monster that keeps hunting you down despite losing every previous encounter.  Great monster track.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Don't Think There is Much Hope For Me

Adult Games, Pornography, Bank Regulations, and Performative Morality

I'm not really a purveyor of adult games, ie, games that are either rated "A" by the ESRB or games that have "Adult," "NSFW," "Nudity," or "Sexual Content" as descriptive tags.  I've played the demos for Butt Knight, Lust from Beyond: Demo, and Robin Morningwood Adventure - A gay RPG, and last year I played through Lust for Darkness.  I did play the free-to-play Radiator 2 nine years ago and had a blast.  I also recently purchased Tender Loving Care because it was less than a dollar, it has an interesting concept, and I like John Hurt's voice; I have yet to play it, though.  But don't tell Lieberman or Howard Lincoln that I also purchased Night Trap on the Switch a few years back.  It's not a genre that I actively seek out, so it was only once articles started cropping up a few weeks ago that I found out that many adult games on Steam and Itch.io were being delisted due to pressure from Visa/Mastercard.

When I first started hearing about payment processors essentially not wanting to be the middleman for NSFW games and Steam/Itch.io, it immediatly reminded me of the scene from Boogie Nights (because I wasn't born until the 1980s) when Buck Swope (Don Cheadle) and Jessie St. Vincent (Melora Walters) try to get a business loan from banks but are refused solely on the basis that they're both in the adult film industry.  It was possibly/probably also rooted in the fact that Buck Swope was Black and that he and Jessie were a mixed-race couple, but that not doing business with someone who was previously in pornographic films was the one thing they could legally hang their hat on without repercussions.  And it's not like the practice of turning down people who work in the adult entertainment industry has gone away since the '70s & '80s either, as there are articles to this point from every decade since.*  This time around, however, it's primarily from the actions of Collective Shout, a conservative Australian advocacy and anti-porn lobbying group.

These actions over the recent weeks are also reminiscent of banks and credit card processors threatening to stop all payment processing for OnlyFans if they continue to host sexually explicit content.  No, not all content on OnlyFans is NSFW, as there was an account for "Saucy Victorian Ankle Pics" (SFW YouTube Link), but people are also using is similar to Patreon as an alternative method of income.  I guess those are the businesses that Collective Shout and the payment processors' respective boards of directors what to help facilitate?  I mean, who hasn't thought of starting an OnlyFans account and posting only pictures of ceiling or floor fans?**  Or maybe furniture?

This feels like a pretty similar scene, except instead of adult games being delisted on the grounds of payment processors not wanting to have their services go to pay for games that involve things such as incest or rape, there are also reports of games that have LGBTQIA+ storylines and characters that have also been delisted under the pretense of the same umbrella.  That's not to say that I think that a game that features rape, incest, sex trafficking, underage depictions of sexual exploitation, etc (it actually kind of feels wrong to "et cetera" that list) should be considered entertainment, but a blanket ban because a topic is part of a checklist isn't the way to go either.  Just because a story might have a character who was raped, had incest forced upon them, was sex trafficked, was sexually exploited as a minor, etc (see above) doesn't immediately mean that the game should be delisted because of the content within the game.  Some of these could be avenues for people processing trauma.  Remember That Dragon, Cancer?  But to also target games that feature, include, or mention LGBTQIA+ storylines because of a supposed moral superiority is the same kind of culture war bull shit that we're seeing all over the United States by way of Project 2025.

Over the last week (as of Tuesday, July 29th, 2025), I've performed several searches on both Steam and Itch.io (I have accounts on both, so it's not a default setting-type search that's purposefully excluding adult-related content), and only on Itch.io have I experienced any kind of censorship in search results and seen a page for a delisted game.  I also haven't seen any of the aforementioned titles from Steam being delisted, and after doing an "NSFW" search on both sites, there are still a lot of "adult" games on Steam versus Itch.io.  Maybe the games that were pulled from Steam are just more hardcore than 3001: A MILF Odyssey - NSFW Sci-Fi Porn?  From what I've read from several articles, the delisting on Steam has affected only "several hundred" titles, while Itch.io has pulled nearly all tagged NSFW titles as Itch.io undergoes a review process of the content in the affected games.

I could literally talk myself in circles without getting anywhere or making more of a coherent argument, so I'm going to cut myself off here.  Maybe that's a copout instead of doing a longer and better researched thinkpiece on the topic (and better written for that matter), but even just bringing up the topic is something.  Maybe?  

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

*I was unable to find historical data about banks not allowing people involved in any facet of the sex work industry, only that it's been happening for decades through a combination of self-imposed moral high ground and because banks view any type of "sex work" as a "high-risk for fraud "industry, often citing sex trafficking as a catalyst.

**In the early days of Damon Lindelof's Instagram account (circa 2012), he was only posting pictures of sinks, so it's kind of similar.

PS.  Related, a Kotaku article about a statement from Mastercard claiming that they didn't pressure Steam to pull/delist games.

Monthly Update: August, 2025

 

I don't even know where to start with today's Monthly Update.  I'm coming off the heels of writing my article for Monday, August 4th, and getting into a jovial video game headspace is a little awkward, which might make more sense once y'all read that article.  There's so much shit going on, not just in the US, with the checklist execution of Trump's transition plan, aka Project 2025, along with the lesser-known Project Esther and the hijacking of real-world anti-semitism by conservative right-wing white Christian nationalist organizations (aka, the current Presidential Administration and the architects, The Heritage Foundation), and their desire to database healthcare records of US Citizens in the name of obesity and diabetes is utterly rediculous, that this would just be a run on sentence of humanitarian atrocities and ongoing war crimes.

And no one wants to read that here at 6:30 on a Friday morning.  That's what NPR, Reuters, and the Associated Press are for. 

As I write this, I'm currently sitting at a table in Victoria, BC. Like any good geriatric millennial, I brought along the Switch OLED and the Steam Deck, and obviously my computer, as there's no way I'm typing this out using the virtual keyboard on the Steam Deck. However, I do have a Bluetooth keyboard for the Steam Deck, but that's at home.  I bring this up because I sucessfully signed up for the current Nintendo Switch Online: Playtest Program, and while I was able to download it onto the Switch OLED, I wasn't able to access it due to the whole Switch virtual game card semi-minor-debacle.  The playtest runs from July 28th through August 10th, so I'll at least be able to play (and not report because of NDA requirements), but I'll probably have some general things to say in September's Monthly Update, just nothing that could get me perma-banned from using Nintendo's online services.

So instead of participating in the playtest, I've jumped back into Triangle Strategy, and I've likely chosen (again) the more difficult path because I didn't feel the persecution, imprisonment, and enslavement of a group of people just because they have rose colored hair by an authoritarian religious government overseen by an invisible oligarch was not the route I wanted to take.  I'd rather be the last ruler of a region in the long term than actively participate in a form of ethnic cleansing in the short term.  I don't know, call me naive, I guess.

There have actually been several announcements in the last couple of days, including those from the Nintendo Partners' Direct yesterday (July 31st).  There was the Final Fantasy Tactics announcement and subsequent semi-fallout a few weeks ago.  In short, content from the PSP The War of the Lions version is not all there.  There was the announcement of SOMA coming out on the Switch (also compatible with Switch 2).  There was the announcement of Octopath Traveler 0 and then the subsequent fallout about its Switch 2 release on a game card only, and the Switch 1 edition not having additional content that is on the Switch 2.  I finally watched something regarding Bloober Team's new game, Chronos: The New Dawn, during the direct, which surprised me that it's also being released at the same time on the Switch 2.  It looks like some kind of combination between >observer_ and what I imagine their work on the Silent Hill 2 remake was like; still need to play that game too.  I'm also super-hyped for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment because of how much fun I had with Age of Calamity and how much world-building that game did for me with the Breath of the Wild setting/timeline.  Interestingly, it's advertised as being "canonical events," a feature that was denied to Age of Calamity.  As with Chronos, I'll probably wait to see some kind of comparison between how Star Wars Outlaws runs on the Switch 2 compared to the three-year-old Steam Deck.  Lastly is the game that's quite a mouthful, The Adventures of Eliot: The Mellinium Tales.  And no, I'm not at all sick of Square Enix's HD-2D.

On the Steam Deck, I've been playing the usual, The Elder Scrolls Online.  But I've also been playing more frequently, Resident Evil 6.  I'm not sure if I'll write a First Impressions article, as the game consists of four separate stories, and I may end up writing separate Game EXP articles, followed by an all-encompassing one once I've finished everything.  I also finished Final Fantasy - Pixel Remaster, but just the first/original Final Fantasy.  I'd intended to use it as a cool-down game after Resident Evil 6, but I just got hooked and sank 23.5 hours into the game that introduced me to the JRPGs and Nobuo Uematsu.  So I started up Final Fantasy II - Pixel Remaster with the same intent.  It's been about 21 years since I last played Final Fantasy II on the Game Boy Advance, so I'm eager to replay this title (and really looking forward to Final Fantasy III, since I've only played the 3D DS remake from 2006).

I think that's it for now.  So I'll see you out there, or likely not.  Unless you're between my commutes to/from home and work.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

In the Joyous Days of Childhood

MIDI Week Singles: "Main Theme" - Dishaster (A26)

 

"Main Theme" from Dishaster on the Atari 2600 (1983)

Composer: Unknown

Album: No Official Release

Publisher: Zimag

Developer: Zimag

This week, we return to the dish-spinning action of Dishaster, the original game that my sources tell me was released in 1983 and that Dancing Plate was a port of.  Like the "Main Theme" from Dancing Plate, I wasn't able to find or determine if this is an original song or a variation on a traditional or folk song.  But something else that surprised me even more is that the song is different between the two games.  Again, music in video games on the Atari 2600 was exceedingly rare, so having essentially the same game from two different publishers with two different songs is equally surprising.

The song itself is pleasant enough, and after a couple of loops can become the type of earworm that sticks around and crops back up at 2:30 in the morning.  I'm not saying it's a bad song at all, it's just one of those simplistic melodies that is likely to stick around long past its expiration date.

You're welcome, and I'm sorry.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Woke Up Sad from this Dream I'd Been Having

Game EXP: Mountains of Madness (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Skelethrone: The Prey through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Mountains of Madness

Systems: Windows, Steam OS, Linux

Release Date: July 14, 2024

Publisher: Deep Dive Project

Developer: Deep Dive Project

Time Spent: 2 Hours 42 Minutes

Walkthrough Playlist on YouTube

Before I get to the actual game, let me share with y'all a little story.  While playing on the Steam Deck, I recorded my entire playthrough over the course of a couple of days and nights, and you can watch it over on YouTube (link above).  During my last playthrough, I played for about an hour and didn't remember to break up the recording into 15-20 minute sections. Instead, I divided it into two roughly 30-minute files, which I combined into a single video about an hour long.  Because of this, the video files became corrupted and the video stalls frequently throughout, while the audio can be heard uninterrupted.  If I were a professional video game journalist and video producer with extra time on my hands, I would simply replay the entire game, as it's only about two hours long, and begin recording where the last video started and upload that.  But I'm not, and honestly, the thought of replaying that last level again with all of its literal twists and turns, and locating three star-shaped keys does not at all sound appetizing.

So, what does it mean when not wanting to play a 40-minute section of a two-hour game is what holds me back from having a complete walkthrough?  It means, I think, that Mountains of Madness was a visually appealing game and a bold attempt at somewhat faithfully adapting one of H.P. Lovecraft's quintessential stories of cosmic horror, but that the maze-like structures in the second half of the game were not particularly fun to play through which sadly taints the entire game.  But only somewhat.

Adapting any of H.P. Lovecraft's stories is going to be a chore in terms of gameplay and achieving the right tone while convincing the player that what they're witnessing is so utterly maddening that simply surviving an encounter might be the best outcome, although you might likely go insane in the process.  And as is often the case with a lot of Lovecraftian cosmic horrors, how do you create an accurate representation of a creature that in nearly any other game you could kill with a gunblade or a fire spell after appropriate leveling?  The general outline for At the Mountains of Madness, the short story that this game is based on, is that Dr. Dyer recounts the events of an expedition to Antarctica where he saw evidence of a ransacked camp along with corpses of otherworldly creatures.  Along with a graduate student, Danforth, they fly a plane and discover massive stone structures/ruins among the mountains.  During an exploration of the ruins, the history of the buildings and the Elder Things who lived there is revealed.  The men come upon a "pen" of albino penguins presumed to have been raised as food for the shoggoths that the Elder Things raised.  Dyer and Danforth are chased out of the ruins by a shoggoth, and upon reaching the plane and flying away, Danforth sees something that drives him mad.

For the most part, Mountains of Madness does a pretty good job of recreating the story without tacking on a lot of extras that feel out of place in the poor brief I just related.  There are no enemies to fight.  There are "keys" of a sort to get to certain areas, but they're presented as ropes to rappel down cliffs, a ladder to cross gaps too wide to jump, and ice axes to break through ice walls.  There is one instance where you are required to locate three star-shaped objects that unlock a door to the final section of the game, but at least it visually fits in with the rest of the game.  The fluff in this game is the cave systems and confusing labyrinthine mazes at each stage of the game.  Before you are able to get to your colleague Lake's camp, you have to navigate through several large cave systems where you have to locate rope and an ice axe.  After discovering the camp, you're flown out to the ruins where you once again enter a maze of hallways, ladders, and ropes, trying to get to somewhere that's never made 100% clear.  After unlocking the three-star door and locating the bodies of the remaining members of your original expedition,  you enter another series of long hallways created to make the player feel turned around and lost.

My last two criticisms are somewhat minor.  First, scattered throughout the ruined city are carved murals depicting the history of the Elder Things and the shoggoths.  In-game, these are represented by large reliefs carved into walls with odd-looking gold markings that could best be described as scratches and dripping paint.  There's no actual image here that goes along with anything that the narration talks about.  I get it, though, since creating this kind of original asset would likely be time-consuming, but at least it's somewhat obvious while exploring the hallways that a wall is supposed to have a relief or a mural on it.  The last criticism is that the "pen" with the albino penguins is represented by a single penguin.  Granted, the design and look of the penguin is pretty creepy with its blind and pink eyes, and strange puss-like lesions over its body, but there's only one.

Okay, I lied, one last criticism.  Before I put together my "Found Footage" video, I had liked the brief look of the shoggoth from my first playthrough attempt.  Granted, I never got a good look at the creature, but I recall there being a black mass with a dozen eyes and writhing tentacles.  In my first playthrough, the shoggoth had almost caught me as I was running down the hallway towards the stairs as the tentacles were wrapping around the screen, and I was convinced that I was going to die.  However, upon closer look at the creature as it scuttled down the hallway after Danforth sprints past you, I thought that the creature looked more like a giant arachnid.  I get it though.  You're not supposed to hang around and watch as the massive creature descends upon you, you're supposed to run away which means you won't be looking directly at the design of the creature long enough to get a good look at the thing.  The moral of the story: don't look too hard and overanalyse shoggoths when you're supposed to be running away from them.

What I find odd about having written what I've written, is that I did enjoy Mountains of Madness.  I liked the feeling of isolation.  I liked the feeling of not understanding the logic behind the structure of the ruins and why the layout and hallways were constructed as they were.  I liked the uneasiness of the narration and that it was a real person and not a text-to-speech program.  I liked how the various items were used and solving these types of environemtnal puzzles that wouldn't've made sense considering that someone else (Gedney and Danforth) had already been through the area.  I liked all of the moments of narration over still images rather than trying to make animated sequences that might not have panned out.  I'm very glad that I played it because I love when a developer takes the risk and actually tries to make a faithful adaptation of a Lovecraftian short story.  And maybe it's just a play once and done kind of experience?  I'm glad I played it, but I don't know if I want to get turned around in those winding hallways again.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Hope You Find Some Time to Drop a Note

P.S.  I should also mention that while I liked the idea of having a compass to help you navigate during any time in the game, I really found it useless.  But it would really make sense for Dr. Dyer to have a compass at the ready when exploring the Antartic, so I can't really be mad at its inclusion.