Noiseless Chatter Archive

As mentioned previously , Nintendo Life has a shelf in the 3DS eShop, starting today and continuing on until next Thursday. If you go here you can see which staff member chose which five games. But I wanted to write a short post about why I chose to spotlight those games…and also provide the five more recommendations I would have made, had space allowed. VVVVVV (3DSWare) Unquestionably one of my favorite games, period. I played this when it was fairly new for the PC, and was instantly won over by its affectionate visual tribute to the Commodore 64. Sharp writing, brilliant stage design and a perfectly utilized gravity-flipping gimmick were just icing on the cake. I almost mentioned the game’s stellar soundtrack in that sentence as well, but…no, the soundtrack deserves a sentence all to itself. It’s genuinely, impossibly, beautifully perfect music, and as silly as it might sound, the game is worth playing just for that. Even if you end up despising it — which I...

…provided you live in America. Log in and check it out! I’m second from the right, as if you couldn’t tell from the fact that I’m ABSOLUTELY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MY MII. It will be up until a week from today, so soak it in while you can. You can read more about it here for now, and I’ll update later on with some commentary on what I picked, why, and maybe some additional recommendations as well. But for now… …I’m in the ****ing Nintendo eShop! Photo by Ron “The Bod” DelVillano

You know to stay out of certain areas. Fine. Then you know to stay away from rough bars or other places. Okay. But once it starts following you into movie theaters and shopping malls and supermarkets and people are getting killed just for the sake of aimless massacre, what are you supposed to do? What, in all honesty, are you supposed to do?

  This isn’t you. As I mentioned earlier this week, I am far from caught up on Breaking Bad . I’ve only finally started watching it within the past few months, and there’s no question that it deserves the mountains of praise its gotten. Season five began this week, and while I’m still lagging a few seasons behind, I thought it might be nice to spotlight an episode that really managed to stand out for me. Perhaps this will serve as a kind of time-capsule as well…a record of my thoughts before I knew for sure where things were headed. A moment of reflection before barreling forward, before I know too much of what’s coming for these thoughts to really matter anymore. A time when I get to delight in the fact that I don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, and so focus that much more intently on what little I do have. In fact, that’s a more appropriate introduction for this episode than I had intended, because focusing on some small aspect of the larger picture — a...

So Breaking Bad starts up again tonight. Don’t worry; I have something else planned tomorrow by way of celebration. But for now, with the inescapable commercials, and online advertisements, and interviews and so on, it’s got me thinking about spoilers. My girlfriend and I are at the end of season two. Tonight, season five begins. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and we’re getting there…but we’re enjoying the ride and don’t feel too much of a need to rush. Yet whenever we see some kind of promotional material for the show, we want to look away, stop listening, change the channel…all for fear of spoilers. And I’m not really sure why. I’ve always maintained — and still maintain — that spoilers shouldn’t matter. If the quality of the piece of art in question is high enough (and for Breaking Bad I’d absolutely say it is) then it shouldn’t matter if you know what’s coming. The pleasure shouldn’t be found in an endless succession of surprises. The pleasure shou...

You may recognize the name Adam Lore, as he comments here pretty regularly. I’ve known Adam for several years now, and he’s always been a fascinating — and compulsively creative — person that I enjoy checking in with now and again. Recently he offered me a copy of Abyssian Squelch , his latest album, and I was happy to receive it. In return, I told him that I would write a review on this blog. Fast forward to me actually listening to the album, and realizing that it was, more or less entirely, beyond the scope of any words I could possibly find. It’s a fantastic and involving listen…but it wasn’t something, I felt, I could adequately discuss. So I figured I’d turn to the man in charge, and use his words instead. Hence, the below interview, which I hope you enjoy. If you have any questions for Adam, feel free to leave them below. And Abyssian Squelch is brilliant. Just putting that out there. 1) How many songs have you recorded as of today? Have you lost count? I...