Noiseless Chatter Archive

Well hello! I’ve been working for the past couple of weeks on the big, annual April feature, Rule of Three. That’s my series in which I take a look at three related comedy films, beginning on April Fool’s Day. The second and third entries will post on April 8 and April 15, giving each of them a solid week to breathe and be discussed. This time around, I’ll be focusing on the three Ghostbusters films. I’ve even added the schedule to the Trilogy of Terror page. (I guess I really should give Rule of Three its own page soon, huh?) While there, you can check out the previous features on Muppet films and Pee-wee films. They’re great articles. I should know, because I wrote them. We’ll get into Ghostbusters pretty extensively over the next few weeks, so I won’t say much now except that the first two films are quite important to me, and revisiting them through a critical lens was damned interesting. I’m glad I took the opportunity to do so. The third film, obviously, is ...

In the years between when I stopped playing Mega Man games and his miraculous resurrection in Mega Man 9 , there were plenty of games I enjoyed. Games I loved, in fact. Resident Evil , Metroid Prime , Pikmin …even the game that remains my all-time favorite, Majora’s Mask . I still enjoyed games. The medium evolved and in many ways no longer felt like the one I grew up with, but if I sat down looking for a good time, there were more than enough games that would give it to me. Then Mega Man 9 came along, and it didn’t just give me another good time. It reminded me of what games used to be like. I don’t just mean that it reminded me what they used to look and sound like, though it certainly did those things. I mean that it reminded me of what games used to feel like. Of what gaming itself used to feel like. As games through the generations grew larger, deeper, more complex, they almost uniformly lost the feeling of addictive simplicity that attracted me in the first place....

Note: Third Editions provided me with exactly one physical copy of each book in exchange for a review. No other compensation was offered, asked for, or delivered. The opinions you read here, as always, reflect my honest feelings as fully as the limitations of the English language will allow. I’m a fan of Boss Fight Books . From the publication of their very first batch of titles, I’ve been following them closely, as excited about each new wave of announcements as I once was on Christmas morning. Sometimes they write about something I know well, and I look forward to the gift of experiencing a game through somebody else’s eyes. Other times it’s about a title I don’t know well at all, and I get to learn about the experience the game offers from afar, whether or not I end up particularly interested in playing it myself. It’s a great series of books, and while there are a number of them that didn’t really resonate with me or work for me, I’m sure that those same titles are...