Attic Cleanup – 12-01-2014

Hot damn, 2014!

In case you’re wondering about the Featured Image, yes, that is an Angel Witch with horns riding a mechanized broom. It’s from the anime adaptation of a series of novels caleld Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon (Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere), a fantastic story with one of the most convoluted plots ever conceived. Both the novels and the series deserve a watch, so go see it! Trust me, the witch you’re seeing doesn’t even crack the top 5 weirdest stuff you’ll see in Horizon.Once again, Happy New Year to all, hope you had an amazing holiday. On my end it was a quiet affair, just my mother and I eating copious amounts of food on the 24th, 25th, 30th and 1st. On the 24th we had a fantastic potato salad my mom makes with onions, parsley and bacon, coupled with our homemade Pan de Jamon (Ham Bread), which as it name implies is just a bread filled with ham, but we also add a ton of bacon to it, and while the original recipe has both green olives and dried prunes, but since I loathe prunes, our recipe doesn’t have them. It’s amazing. We finished the night with Raclette, a Swiss dish. I lived in Switzerland from ’89 to ’92, and we ate Raclette a lot, and when we got our hands on some of the cheese (also called Raclette), we froze it because we knew it made the perfect Christmas meal.

On the 25th, we had Pasta Bolognese, a lot of it.

On the 30th and 1st we ate fritters, from Empanadas and Tequeños (look’em up) to fried chicken. We’d planned for some Fish & Chips, but in the end, we couldn’t get our hands on the fish. By the end, the oil we used could’ve been put in an engine hahaha.

So, how have things been in the Attic? Well, this week I’d planned for about 4 reviews to go up, but I caught a nasty bug and was down on the ground, or the bed, from Wednesday to early Saturday, and I’m still recovering. The symptoms were Headache, Muscle pains, Fever, and your eyes burn, making it really hard to open your eyes and write. I was down on Thursday and out for the count on Friday.

But not all things are bad, because I did manage to put up my Mob City review. Read it and watch the series, it’s worth it.

Better yet, I had the good fortune of getting a reply and posting my Attic Dive into Phoenix Online Studios; a nice interview about the development of Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller. I want to give a big shout-out to Phoenix Online Studios’ Katie Hallahan for taking the time to answer the questions and even provide me with some cool concept art to feature on the post! It’s hopefully the first in a series of post focusing on Phoenix Online, which, as some might know, is quickly becoming my favourite developer!

On my gaming front, this week I played and finished Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. The review will be up during next week, but to give you a head’s up, it’s a pretty cool game but it has a ton of issues it has inherited from its parent series and from its genre.

On a related note, this week the awesome community at Speed Demos Archive and SpeedRuneLive had their charity even Awesome Games Done Quick, for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. They raced through games and with each other and managed to raise over $1.000.000 for the Foundation. A big congrats to them and I can’t wait for Summer Games Done Quick, where I’m hoping they’ll raise even more! I may just have discovered ASDQ, but from now on I’ll be sure to follow them religiously and you can bet I’ll get in touch with them and get them to answer some nice questions and introduce them to you all! Be sure to visit their Twitch Channel for the current Bonus Stream and for the videos of the entire event. The Blindfolded Super Punch-Out and the Super Metroid Race were some of the highlights of the entire thing, so check them out!

Also, I want to give another big call-out to the fantastic V from the Verbal Spew Review for some pretty kickass movie recommendations. Between last weekend and now, I saw Byzantium, The Way Way Back, Star Trek Into Darkness and Drinking Buddies. Go check out her reviews while you wait for a couple of mine! I still have Despicable Me 2 to see, but I’m hoping I’ll really like it, since I enjoyed the first one so much, though I agree with V’s last post; Megamind, released in the same year as DM, is by far the superior film and story.

On the other end of blogging, Kim finished and reviewed the first season of Telltale’s Sam & Max, go check it out!

Sadly, for me, the illness messed up my weekend plans and I did little writing and no Unity 4 learning whatsoever, but I’ll just have to go even harder this week.

To close up, and speaking of weekends, yesterday the cool 1001-Up crew had a party, with the gorgeous Not-Phil (don’t ask) in her finest dress, and Not-Kim (again, don’t ask) and Craig looking pretty sharp themselves. They invited me to join them for some gaming and we had some Borderlands 2 and Torchlight 2 time. Hopefully, next time we can go a lot longer with both games, and in Borderland 2’s case, have more players. There’s nothing as fun as 4-player Borderlands, and anyone who’s ever played it can attest to that.

For this week you’ll have 3 reviews: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (which might come on later today depending on how tired I am after my Sunday WoW Raid), Saint’s Row 4 and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. And following the Phoenix Online theme, I’m working on a Cognition post I’m sure you’ll like, so wait for it. It’s not a review and not an interview, and I won’t say anything else.

Until next time,

Kevin