Noiseless Chatter Archive

I was off to such a good start this year with regular posts! Oh well. Nothing lasts forever, least of all a consistent upload schedule at Noiseless Chatter. I’m not dead, though that becomes a bit more appealing a prospect by the day! I’ve been struck with a particularly nasty flu, for the second time this season. (The first was right around Christmas.) It’s not pleasant. I have indeed been working on a couple of posts, one of which is the final installment of Fight, Megaman!, but I certainly don’t have anything in a publishable format quite yet. That will change. I’m much better today than I was yesterday, and so on down the line. I’m just not totally recovered yet. Do stick around. There’s lots of fun stuff to come, including this year’s Rule of Three, in which I’ll take extended looks at three related comedy films. So far I’ve covered two series of films that were very important to me growing up, and this time around will be no different in that regard. I lo...

I love A Hat in Time . And I hate it. It contains a large number of things I’d point to as absolutely perfect examples for other games to emulate, and an equal number that I never want to see done again. It does almost everything that isn’t important perfectly, and almost everything that is important poorly. It’s a beautiful mess. It’s the worst game I’d recommend wholeheartedly. Everybody should play it, but it’s a shame they’ll feel so frustrated as a result. I first learned about A Hat in Time years ago. I wasn’t actively looking for it and I didn’t actively follow it, so I can’t say for sure that I learned about it through the Kickstarter announcement. Likely enough it was after it had already been successfully funded. Either way, I remembered the distinctive look of the main character and little else. The next I heard of it was just a few months ago, when I learned it was about to be released for PS4. The early reviews were positive, so it landed on my rad...

I promised a new year’s post looking back at 2017, and then never wrote it. What’s more, I didn’t even want to write it. Very little appealed to me less than looking back at the past year. I kept waiting to see if I’d be inspired to write it, and I never was. Which shouldn’t have surprised me at all; I’ve been lacking the inspiration to write about things I would like to cover. Forcing myself to write a new year’s post — even something as simple as “Let’s not do that shit again” — just wasn’t going to happen. Besides, I knew I’d have to follow that up soon enough with the actual tradition that is my birthday post. I might as well put it off, and say anything I had to say later. It’s later, now. Today is my birthday. I turn 37 as this very site enters its seventh year of existence. And what is there to say? What do I want to say? What can I bring myself to say? It was a hard year. I’d stop short of calling it terrible (in fact, it wasn’t terrible), but, much like...

Mega Man had never gone more than two years between games, but after Mega Man 8 — and the one-off experiment that was Mega Man & Bass — the series went a decade. Once an industry mascot right up there with Mario, Link, and Sonic, Mega Man just…stopped. The saddest part was that nobody really missed him. The world kept turning, no darker or more slowly without him. The industry trudged forward just fine. Even its developer, Capcom, had moved onto other series that kept its fortunes strong. Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Dead Rising, Monster Hunter, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and lots of others were released at a steady clip and to positive reception. To paraphrase Clarence Oddbody, Mega Man had been given a great gift…a chance to see what the world would be like without him. And it turned out the world was just fine. Mega Man was relegated to the chambers of memory. If you wanted to, you could dust off your old NES and rip through whatever game or games of h...