First Impressions: Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir (3DS)

 

Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir

System: Nintendo 3DS

Release Date: April 13, 2012

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Koei Tecmo Games

I recall hearing about Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir within a year of it being released and I kind of wrote it off as a gimmicky game that was only trying to make a buck off of the 3D effect of the 3DS and the camera on the system.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, that this was part of the Fatal Frame survival horror series that revolves around the Camera Obscura used to fight off malignant spirits.  I think I had thought it was more like an app that had ghosts pop up around your house and you fought them with the camera on the 3DS, not part of some established franchise.  However, even knowing that it was part of an existing franchise might not have fully changed my mind, but only after Conklederp and I purchased a house that was built 100 years ago and while doing research earlier that year on our article about weaponless survival horror video games did I think, "Huh, I think I would like to play this game."  So I forked over the $15 and started playing it after we moved in.  Again, this was around the time that some of the 3DS buttons stopped working so I put the game back on the not-so-proverbial shelf.

Last week, after deciding that I was going to stop playing The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (more on that in the actual article), I plugged this game in and restarted.  On my first attempt, back in 2017, I played for 22 minutes and made it through the first page of the book.

Okay, let me backtrack a little bit.

Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir is part visual novel, part survival horror, part Alternate Reality game that uses an accompanying physical book (called "The Diary of Faces") at specific points in the game.  You progress through the game by talking to characters who appear in your actual space by finding them with the outward-facing camera.  The game prompts you when to use the Diary of Faces and is pretty patient with you while you wait for the camera to focus on the page.  There is some combat in the game that is pretty similar to the main title in the Fatal Frame series, in that you keep the camera focused on the enemy while a power bar fills up and you either attack with a full bar or ward off an attack while causing only a fraction of damage.  That is really all I know as I am now only 44 minutes in and have gone through and have flipped to four of 16 pages, so maybe a quarter of the way through?

The one thing after the last lead-up to and through the battle got me thinking about the mechanics and functionality of the game.  Spirit Camera is a survival horror game in that you have to survive various encounters with spirits, there are jump scares, and a general unsettling atmosphere created by the locations and the story.  How the game achieves this though is where I am having mixed results.  Because this is a horror game, I want to play with the lights off, to feel more immersed in the haunted pages of the Diary of Faces, but the quality of the camera on the 3DS (and probably any economically priced 3D camera developed in 2014) requires there to be sufficient light for the camera to read the pages to generate the in-game content.  And the Diary of Faces should be placed on a non-movable flat surface (ie: not your lap) because having the game can be a little finicky if the angle gets off just a bit.  TL;dr: you need to play this survival horror game in a well-lit room with plenty of light and at least one flat surface.

None of this however will stop me from playing the game.  I love the concept and I am so far entertained by the story, and most importantly, I am excited to see how the various AR pages play within the game.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Game EXP: Color Zen (NS)

Color Zen

System: Nintendo Switch, Android, iOS

Original Release Date: June 5, 2013

Publisher: Cypronia

Developer: Large Animal Games

Color Zen is a puzzle game that I see advertised on the Nintendo Switch's news posting every couple of weeks or so when they talk about free-to-play games (you know, along with Fortnite, Apex Legends, Arena of Valor, Warframe, and Rogue Company).  This is the exact opposite of every one of those titles.  Color Zen is a logic color-based puzzle game where you move geometric shapes around in a contained space creating colors and eliminating others until only one remain.  Now before I show the video below, I should say that you can only move the shapes that are bouncing along with the music, and that if you move a color into a black shape, it removes that colored shape and the black color.  

So these are three of the early stages in Color Zen:

This free-to-play version is made up of four different themes, with each theme having between 10 - 20 stages to play with additional stages in each theme able to be purchased through the eShop.  Maybe because I am cheap, or mainly because after finishing 40 levels in this game, I feel completely satisfied, so I have not seen what else there is to offer in the way of color-based puzzles.

That should not be a deterrent though.  This game is fairly relaxing, even when I got frustrated in trying to figure out the correct order to have the blocks knock into each other.  There was even one level that I had given up on because I could not figure it out, even after watching a tutorial on YouTube, but then I had forgotten that when shapes have a dotted white line around them, if you double click them, they become immovable but also do not disappear (absorbed) if their color fills the screen.  And then there are stages that I managed to complete but was not sure what exactly I did (which is why I saved the video).

One of the things that I love about this game is how the beginning of each of the stages looks like something that could be hanging in the Museum of Modern Art next to the Piet Mondrian exhibit, not that I am a connoisseur of modern art, but I appreciate that the game feels like you are able to interact with and modify an existing work of art.

There are times however when one level transitions into the new level that I have become overwhelmed.  Like the stage above, because there are a lot of elements that it can become confusing to know where to even start, knowing that by the end, you have to have the entire screen be that same shade of teal-green so you know you are going to have to save that ball in the lower right-hand corner.  See, you have already started the planning process.  Also figuring out how many black or white objects you have to work with as well as the number of objects of a specific color can help you determine if you need to get rid of one of them with the black circles or if they might clear out when the rest of the background changes color.

You might be able to tell from the two videos above that the music is very chill as well and pairs well with the zen in the title.  It kind of nudges you along even when you end up at the end of the stage with a giant pink square sitting in a sea of purple and the game tells you that you need to restart.  The objects that you are allowed to move pulse in time with the music which I thought might be distracting, but I actually found it to fit in well with the visual aesthetic and the music.  Everything just seemed to fit together as one cohesive experience.  

But again, with everything that I enjoyed about the game, I think I am good with the 40 playable levels.  It is a bit of a turn-off that levels are packaged with their respective themes as opposed to buying multiple levels from multiple themes in one bulk package.  Maybe if the levels were not grouped individually I might be more inclined to throw money at the publisher and developer after spending about 4 hours playing.  Although, the packs are each less than $1.00, and there are between 100 - 120 additional levels. . . which then feels almost more daunting.  I guess we will just have to wait and see if there ends up being another article for Color Zen covering Serenity or Nature modes in the future.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Pulses Glow from their Homes

MIDI Week Singles: "Bianca City" - F-Zero Maximum Velocity (GBA)

"Bianca City" from F-Zero Maximum Velocity on the Game Boy Advance, Wii U (2001)
Album: No Official Release
Composer: Masaru Tajima, Mitsuteru Furukawa, & Naoto Ishida
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer ND Cube

F-Zero Maximum Velocity is a game that played quite a bit back in the early 2000s, but I realized I was never that great at it.  The formula is closer to the original F-Zero with Mode 7-type mapping and is all about taking tight turns, avoiding hazards, and having stupidly fast reflexes.  

The opening track in the Pawn Series, Bianca City, is a great introduction, music-wise into how this game is played.  Right out of the gate, the song is trying to push you along at, roughly, 180 bpm, or 3 beats per second.  Now that is pretty fast for a lot of music, maybe not music used in a racing game, but for the opening track on the easiest series, this is a track to get your blood pumping and keep you on your toes.  Or at least it can be if you are playing on Standard or higher difficulty settings.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Cause Everyone's Just Too Weird

Game EXP: ACA NEOGEO CROSSED SWORDS (NS)

ACA NEOGEO CROSSED SWORDS

System: Arcade, Neo Geo Aes, Neo Geo CD, Nintendo Switch

Original Release Date: July 25, 1991

Publisher: Alpha Denshi

Developer: Alpha Denshi

ACA NEOGEO CROSSED SWORDS (Crossed Swords from here on out) is a port of an arcade game that Dr. Potts and I played at some pizza parlor in the town where we grew up.  I only remember playing the game a handful of times, maybe five or fewer, and recall that when the game was taken out of that pizza place, I continued to look for the game until I discovered it last year as part of the ACA NEOGEO arcade ports on the Nintendo Switch.

Let us be clear about something before we go any further.  I 100% recognize that all of the fondness I have for this game is through blood-tinted nostalgia goggles handed to me from my 11/12-year-old self.  This game is a slog, taking nearly two hours to play from start to finish.  Because this is an arcade port, I could plug as many fictional digital quarters into the game as I wanted and by the time I finally killed the main boss, I had gone through 84 credits or $21.00 in quarters, assuming that 1 credit was $0.25 and I cannot imagine that it was a premium $0.50/credit game.  When Dr. Potts and I would play, I think I would max out at $2.00 at most, more than likely it was probably only $1.00.  Plus what 11-year-old is going to stand at an arcade cabinet for nearly two hours while their family eats pizza without them and bring along $21 in quarters?

In Crossed Swords, you play as Knight of Journey (yes, that is the character's name, or at least what they are referred to as by the King and Princess) who sets out to help the King of Belkana stop the evil Warlord Nausizz.  Partway through the game, the Princess is kidnapped and the King tasks you with saving her.  The game is played in semi-first person in that Knight of Journey has a wireframe instead of a filled-in body so that you can see what types of attacks the enemies are using.  You have a usable shield that can block high and low attacks, but only one at a time.  You start out the game with a sword that you can upgrade by making purchases from traveling merchants and occasionally townspeople will give you an enchanted blade or an heirloom shied; I honestly do not know if you can accidentally miss the townspeople giving you upgraded gear, because if they always show up, then the gear seems pretty much pointless. After all, you have to take it and the game scales accordingly.

The format of the game is repetitive.  You begin a stage, fight three to five (maybe more) enemies followed by a boss, and then you move onto the next stage.  Thankfully, you only fight one enemy at a time although at times you can see a couple of enemies hanging out in the background who you will be fighting next.  Your attacks consist of a high/low weapon attack, a magic attack, a ranged magic attack, and a berzerker attack that will also drain your life and, I think, you can only perform if your power level is maxed out (meaning it is flashing and you have not taken damage in the last couple of seconds.  And taking damage in this game is something that will happen all the damn time.  With each enemy capable of performing high and low attacks, it is up to you to be able to notice the tells, however subtle, which attack the enemy is going to perform.  Because I am the paranoid type, I am about 75.47% convinced that the game cheats, performing attacks in the direction that your shield is not placed in; so if you are blocking high they will attack low and vice versa.

Thankfully, I can cheese my own berzerk attack all I want because I have an unlimited supply of quarters.  This would be a useful tactic, except that the developers must have thought about that because there are several boss monsters (who in typical RPG fashion turn into regular monsters after their first encounter) who can block your berzerk attacks (looking at you Satan Goat, Blue Sword Knight, Gold Wing Knight, and every Crab), so you are left to your own skill and luck hopefully blocking at least one attack which will often give you an opening to hit them at least once.

That is pretty much the entire game.  There is no additional political intrigue happening at the Court of Skaken Castle.  None of the King's advisors was working with evil Warlord Nausizz to kidnap the Princess.  The story is straightforward and your mission is clear from the start, to stop Nausizz.  The final battle against Nausizz felt pretty lackluster.  After climbing through his castle and killing enemy after enemy after enemy after, you fight him.  Nausizz's move-set felt more like fighting an unarmed martial artist with a flamethrower and a magical sword.  There was the expected second form when Nausizz took on his turn demonic form, and that actually felt a bit easier than some of the regular enemy battles (like the Goat Knights and the Giant Blue Knights) except that Nausizz had a stupid amount of health.

I feel like Crossed Swords is a decent arcade game, especially when played in the early '90s and maybe it could be a fun couch co-op game played in a single evening.  It, however, is not a great single-player experience.  The format of the game becomes repetitive by the time the Princess is kidnapped, which should be when the game really takes off.  If anything, it can get frustrating in the later levels with enemies frequently blocking you and not being able to pull off the berzerk attack.  Really the game is twice as long as it needed to be with nearly 50 stages spread out among seven chapters; although you will not visit every stage as there are some points where you choose one of two directions to go, these choices only happen a handful of times.  Had this game only been 25 stages, it could have been a tighter experience and a lot more fun with some replay value to visit the areas you did not go to the first time.  As it plays right now, I have no interest in seeing how the Courtyard was different than the Back Door to the castle, or the Port side of the Land Battleship was different than the Starboard side.  I was also sad finding out that there was no online co-op, although I should not have expected it, so until Dr. Potts and I are again in the same room for an evening (sleepover?), we will have to play our respective digital copies of Crossed Swords.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I'm the Last on the Planets

Game EXP: The Amnesia Collection (NS)

 

Amnesia Collection

System: Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: September 12, 2019

Publisher: Frictional Games

Developer: Frictional Games & The Chinese Room

I picked up Amnesia Collection a while back and only recently started playing it because I realized I had only played each of the games once, The Dark Descent back in October 2012, Justine (the short permadeath expansion) at the end of October 2012, and A Machine for Pigs shortly after it was released in September 2013.  This time around, I played it on the Nintendo Switch, wanting again to support the developers Frictional Games and The Chinese Room with this collection (currently) being the only games that they have made that are available on the Switch.  Since none of the gameplay changed, from what I could tell between when I first played these games nine years ago, I will just give briefs for each title included in this collection.

When I started this collection, I decided that I would start with A Machine for Pigs, having been developed by The Chinese Room (Dear Esther, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture) I wanted to start off with a game that I knew was going to be mostly walking, occasionally running and just experiencing the world and the story.  Based on the first time I played The Dark Descent, I did not want to have to worry about managing my sanity and worrying about how much oil I had left in my lantern and how many tinderboxes I had left as the darkness closed in around me.  So I started off with A Machine for Pigs, being the last entry chronologically in this series.  Then I went back to The Dark Descent and finished it up with Justine.

The Dark Descent was in some was exactly as I remembered it and in other ways, a lot easier and at times, less scary and stressful than when I first played it nine years ago.  When I first played TDD, it was on Steam using keyboard/mouse controls and had my laptop hooked up to my TV.  This time around, I was playing through the Switch using a Switch Pro Controller and by this point in my console gaming career, I feel that I am more proficient playing first-person games with a controller than I used to be (although I still prefer kb/m).  What made me the most anxious before even starting was the water monster stage taking a fair amount of time to work my way through without running out of lantern oil or tinderboxes and the something about solving puzzles in the sewer stage (which turned out to be the Cistern).

The biggest difference in the way I played TDD this time around was that I had the developer's commentary turned on (I do not think it was available when I first played?) so scattered throughout the game in different rooms were golden gears with a microphone that you could click on to hear someone from Frictional Games talk about some relevant aspect of the game.  I feel a bit like an idiot because in the beginning (really up until the final area in the game) I would click on the floating icon then run to a well-lit area to finish listening to what was being talked about so that I would not go insane in the process.  I did not realize that you could just pull up the inventory menu to essentially pause the game and listen to it that way.  I think I must have tried actually pausing the game, bringing up the Save & Exit portion of the menu and that stopped the commentary so I figured I could only listen to it in-game.

For the most part, I impressed myself with being able to solve most of the puzzles, although there were a couple, more towards the end of the game that I had to look up solutions to.  In the Cistern, I did not remember/realize that you had to jump from the Western Bridge as you raised it back up to the Eastern Bridge to dislodge it.  The in-game text telling you to "dislodge" the bridge I felt implied that there was a tool you needed.  Then in the last section of the game, I had to look up GameFAQS two or three times because I could not figure out how to escape prison (I think I may have glitched through the bars?), where to locate a bone saw, and where to reassemble an orb when the game told me to look for a more suitable place not thinking/remembering that it was the pedestal that the orb would sit in and not a laboratory or a table. I did end up experiencing two of the three endings, with the third being one that I had already seen when I first played the game and was apparently impatient during the final ceremony.  I was pretty amused by the end, being as stingy as I was with tinderboxes for the entirety of the game, that at the end, I did have a surplus of 23 tinderboxes, one jar of oil, seven bottles of laudanum, and a wooden crank that I ended up never using.

Justine is a strange beast of its own.  Unlike The Dark Descent or A Machine for Pigs, this is a single run permadeath short story where you are presented with SAW-like puzzles where you decide to either solve a puzzle to save a person's life, or take a quick choice, kill them, and open the door to the next area.  Oh, and the whole time you have at least one Grunt-like creature hunting you.  My biggest issue though is that there does not seem to be a run ability, which I do not remember, but maybe that can be explained away in-game by the character just waking up from a drugged sleep?  There is a story here told through gramophones and notes/letters scattered throughout the rooms, but it is sometimes hard to focus on that while you are being hunted and figuring out how to save person number two.  I still have not figured out how to save person number two, and for whatever reason, I refuse to look up how to do that.  So my counter shall remain, two out of three people saved.  I still love the puzzles in this game and would love if an entire game, another game, were developed with a similar approach.

Lastly, and the first game I played was A Machine for Pigs for all of the reasons that I mentioned above.  While the game played fine, and I know that there were moments when the game is purposefully supposed to slow down with the graphics becoming blurry, there were additional times when it felt like the game was not optimized well and the frame rate really plunged.  There were also times when it felt that the colors were not as dark as they were supposed to be, like instead of there being a gradient of darkness, instead there were four shades.  I have no pictorial evidence of that, so maybe it was just me?

Either way, I love A Machine for Pigs.  Mostly.  Having gone through the game before, I knew to look in every cabinet and desk for notes/letters to further tell the story of Mandus and his sons.  And by the end of the game, I still felt that there were letters that I was unable to locate, which was a criticism my first time around.  Also taking the time to sift through desk drawers seems like a very video-gamey mechanic when the main character is trying to hurry through areas to reach a sub-sub-sub-sub-level of a meat processing factory that is apparently flooded to rescue his two trapped sons.  There was a real sense of urgency in Mandus' voice but there is a lot of time spent traveling back and forth that any real sense of urgency is lost.  This is not so much a criticism of The Chinese Room, just video game mechanics in general taking over the implied urgency created by the story which is in nearly every JRPG.

Having gone through all three games before purchasing this collection on the Switch, I can say that there is really not a big reason to purchase this collection if you have already played through the games.  There did not seem to be any added content that did not already exist in previous versions of the game.  I did purchase this collection because I loved these games and I wanted to be able to support the developers; the collection was also on sale at the time.  If you have not played through any of these games, or just one of the three, then I would recommend picking this up on whatever platform is your preferred.  The stories are all well-conceived and written, the voice acting is phenomenal, and as long as you do not suffer from first-person-motion-sickness, and enjoy solving puzzles in a survival horror setting, then I would definitely recommend any and all of the games here.

I really wish that Frictional Games and The Chinese Room would release more of their catalog on the Switch because I again would throw money wholeheartedly at them.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Is This Your Gift?

MIDI Week Singles: "Back Hall" - Amnesia Collection -The Dark Descent- (NS)

 

"Back Hall" from Amnesia: Collection -The Dark Descent- on Linux, OS X, Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, & Nintendo Switch (2010 - 2019)

Composer: Mikko Tarmia

Album: Amnesia -The Dark Descent-

Label: Bandcamp

Publisher: Frictional Games

Developer: Frictional Games

This track, when it happens in the game, is the biggest breath of fresh air that I have nearly ever had.  Almost more so when I first played the game back in 2012 because this time around, the flooded archives stage in the game where you have to run through water away from an invisible creature that is chasing you while you try to distract with with rotting body parts and hindering its advance by closing doors behind you caused me a lot more trouble the first time than this time around.  So upon finishing that stage with this music blaring in my ears, coming upon "Back Hall" finally gave me a moment to finally take a breath.

And sometimes that is really all we need in the moment, to just take a moment to really breathe, especially when you realize that you have been holding your breath for the last 15 minutes or taking in such small breathes that when you do take that full lung-full of air, you get tingles on the back of your neck.  That is what this song is like for me.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Monthly Update: August, 2021

 

It's August.  It's 2021.  Over the last week or two, there has been an increase in the number of unvaccinated people in the United States contracting COVID-19, and how many of those new cases are the Delta variant is, at least of this writing, not entirely clear.  I have been debating with myself when I would go back to our original Monthly Update banner up there at the top and I think I will take my cue from the WHO who apparently will say that the pandemic is over when "the worldwide spread of a disease is brought under control to a localized area, we can say that it is no longer a pandemic but, instead, an epidemic[.]"  So there we go.

#ActiBlizzWalkout was a thing that happened this last Wednesday and as of this writing to show support from a lot of people in the video game industry in regards to the the victims of sexual harassment and discrimination as well as Activision/Blizzard's response to the initial filing of the lawsuit.  Aside from the general accusations about there being a frat boy culture at Activision Blizzard and the general disregard for women in the workplace, I am not caught up on the specifics of the alligations so I will leave it at that and do some (more?) research.  Oh except for the whole Cosby Suite thing which was a hotel room at BlizzCon "operated" by Blizzard developer Afrasiabi.

I feel I was somewhat productive over the last month considering (as of this writing) I remain unemployed but have a potential interview lined up for the week before this article comes out.  I did manage to finish a handful of games such as Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (article coming on Friday), Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (article coming sometime not this Friday), The Unholy Society, and Doki Doki Literature Club! (not the new iteration that came out on June 30th) and Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (although some may say my prolific use of rewind/save states means that I am a n00b sucking piece of trash who should put down the controller and play an age appropriate game like Pinochle or Tiddliwinks).  I am frequently impressed that I was even able to make it this far in the game when The Kid and I played through it the winter it was released; the frequency that I have used saved states and rewind is a bit embarrassing.  Most of the time I will try to at least make it to the checkpoint before using rewind, but I do not have all the time in the world to hone my skills to the levels they were at when I was 15.  And then I started up Call of Cthulhu on the Switch as well as replaying Amnesia: The Dark Descent since it has been eight-and-a-half years since I last played the game on Steam.

Big video game related news last month was that the semi-long running rumors about a Dead Space reboot/remake/HD remaster were finally confirmed during EA's big press event, which you can read more about that here.  My biggest question though coming out of this announcement is if I will upgrade my laptop to something that can play the remake or just buy an Xbox X/S because I do want to play The Elder Scrolls VI because playing that game is going to be in a similar boat.  Because then there is also The Callisto Protocol which has been announced but not if it is going to be an exclusive.  And then there is Negative Atmosphere which I am still a little surprised has not been shut down by EA just because it looks so much like Dead Space even though it uses all originally created assets (at least from what I understand).  We are a year or so out from TCP s release date and no word on NA, and TES VI is probably the furthest away from being released.  So in the meantime, I reinstalled Dead Space 3 to pick that game up from where I left off when I apparently stopped playing two-and-a-half years back.

TV show-wise, Conklederp and I have been somewhat productive.  We started and finished Lupin, a Netflix series made in France about a guy who grew up reading the Lupin novels.  We also finished the first season of Loki on Disney+ and really enjoyed the show, although neither of us are hardcore MCU fans.  It was interesting to see this iteration of Loki since this specific Loki was from right after the attack on New York, from the events in the first The Avengers movie, which was before the two Thor sequels, although those events were brought up in the show.  The finale seemed to open up the next phase of the MCU and had an amazing performance by Jonathan Majors (who we loved in Lovecraft County).  We are also finishing up The Bad Batch, the sequel to The Clone Wars animated series that I was initially unsure about based on the characterizations of Clone Force 99 in Season 7 of The Clone Wars.  The biggest takeaway from the show is that I love seeing the Empire in the days/weeks/months/years following the end of The Clone Wars and the beginning days of the Empire.  And all of these Star Wars series including The Mandalorian as well as the rest coming out on Disney+ really hopes that Disney will see the benefit of releasing all of these series on Blu ray, because I honestly do not see people only keeping their Disney+ subscriptions so that they can rewatch episodes of The Mandalorian.  But I could very well be wrong.

Finally, the other month (June?) I finally admitted that my Kindle Paperwhite was nowhere to be seen in our house after looking for nearly five months, so I picked up a Kindle Fire 8 HD 2020 Edition during Amazon's Prime Day, so now I have access to digital library books, which is a wonderful feature.  So I picked up and started reading Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig, and at 13% complete, I am surprised by how well the book is written and just the overall setting so far.  I must have had low expectations going into it because I have found myself looking forward to picking it up to read; the 21 day checkout period probably also has something to do with wanting/needing to read 5% every day, but I am genuinely engaged by the characters, some of which are dealing with PTSD following the Battle of Endor and the fall of the Empire, themes that I feel are not common in a lot of the movies and TV shows.  There will probably be a Book Review article coming, but only after I finish the one I have going for The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.

So that is kind of where I am at right now, or at least where I am/was at the end of July leading into August.  Wait!  How did I miss that SkateBIRD has a potential release date of August 12th!?

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Pulling in a Wave of Thought