Hi there. A lot has been happening with my health and I don't write as much as I should so let's use this stupid platform that I've donated money to for the past... 11 years!?

Oh. Oh no.

What even is time?

Uh... Aaaanyway... So I should journal or blog or whatever more. Why not do it here? People seem to read these things I guess.

Page 01: My Head Is Broken

As I sit here in darkness, my body trying to decide if last night was plenty of or not enough sleep, I cannot help but be occasionally reminded of the war raging within my left ear. A classic, though minor, ear infection battles on causing me mild dizziness, occasional pain, and a minor level of crankiness. It's not the worst I've ever had, but it is my first real illness incurred since the pandemic began so it still kinda caught me off guard. It also comes trailing on the end of a small health realization that, in retrospect, should have been an obvious one but... Eh... What're you gonna do?

So for the past several years I've noticed many changes about my life and health. I was crushed by a drunk driver some odd seven years ago and suffered some pretty serious bodily harm as a result, as you'd imagine. The obvious stuff followed: PTSD, nerve damage, pins and rods knitting bones together, etc. It was my new life. I got through it. It changed me but I got through it and would like to think I came out okay on the other end. But I also experienced lots of other smaller things over time. Stuff that is tricky to put your own finger on, like seeing something just out of the corner of your eye. New flavors of depression and anxiety would crop up, delusions and unusual ambitions, difficulty sleeping, increased levels of nightmare activity, an intermittent inability to read or conjure mental imagery, and other weird stuff like my tastes and tolerances for certain types of games changing.

None of these individually were things I felt like could be attributed to anything other than "Gosh. I've become a real fuck up since the accident. Why can't I do anything right anymore?" And, sadly, others around me didn't see the big picture either. It wasn't until a random google search brought me to an article. You see I was just lying in bed on my tablet kinda scooting around through gaming news and stuff that was just running through my head. I ended up googling something about the PS5 I think and it brought me to PSNation.com, a site that I did not frequent but a name that rang a bell. At the time the top article there was about video games and addiction. I was mostly just curious about what the author had written about and I made it a few paragraphs in until he mentioned something he had discussed in a previous entry: His TBI or Traumatic Brain Injury and how it had greatly changed many aspects of his life, including taste in video games.

There was a needle scratch moment and any interest in that first article was lost. Poof. Bye-bye. What's this other article? Clicky-clicky.

So yeah. Turned out after reading the associated original article, this gentleman experienced head trauma that damaged his brain and since then has experienced a laundry list of long term effects. And as he's listing them off I'm also checking off the same boxes. Holy shit. These things weren't all necessarily unrelated. It was an eye opener. In a weird way it kinda gave me this new hope. It rejuvenated this dying flame. A flame that said "Hey, you're not a completely lost cause. There are ways to keep on living."

So I sent him an email and now I've turned this page in the book of self-understanding. Mere weeks ago I was in a pit of despair, mulling over how six months of Hey There 2020 was just piling up on my already struggling psyche and that I was rapidly approaching 40 and feeling like less of a man than I was at 25. Good lord I could barely read a book anymore. The hell was wrong with me? Now I had potential answers. Now I had new directions to pursue for treatment and therapy.

So the suck part of brain damage is there isn't exactly a cure. This is all more or less a forever thing. BUT the good news is that piecing all these symptoms together and focusing on getting my head scanned here and there and doing specific tests and treatments will potentially improve my way of life more that just... not knowing what was going on. And even if this doesn't lead to, I dunno... Better anti-depressant application or whatever... There's something about me just knowing that some of this Effed Up Ess that I've been trying to figure out over the past seven years wasn't just me failing myself as a person. It was the fact that some asshole cracked my skull open with his car on Christmas Eve.

And as we have learned, knowing is half the battle.

Page 02: Let's Talk About Cartoon Marsupials Now

I have never played Crash Bandicoot before. Not one of them. I wasn't much of a PlayStation user until partway through the PS2's lifespan and even then I think I bounced between that and GameCube and Xbox and PC so much during that era that playing any of the Crash games of the time (which I have come to understand are not to be looked directly in the eye) was so far off my radar. Even with the PS2 dominating the world at the time I don't think I became anywhere close to a PlayStation fan until most of the way through the PS3's lifespan. This is all a waste of words to remind you, again, I've never played Crash Bandicoot.

Yet something about promotions for Crash 4 caught my eye. Piqued my interest. Grabbed my attention. What could it be...

Oh right. I'm a gross horny furry.

That explains a lot.

So yeah. Crash 4 got my attention. I was all "Hey I've never played these games before. Seems like as good a time to try them as any, right?" and thus I polled my BFF, himself also a gross horny furry, and after a DAT BOOTY THO came to learn he was actually a HUGE classic Crash fan who completed all three original PS1 games and was excited for me to discover the series myself.

Last night around 6pm it became available for me to play and so I did. Since then I have played through the short opening world, the first full game world, and most of the second. Here's what I think so far:

This game is harder than I expected it to be. It's not frustratingly hard. I'm not playing through it struggling to even complete a stage then breaking my controller over my knee. Not yet, anyway. It does definitely make it's difficulty apparent and certainly lets you choose the form of your destroyer through optional objectives. Are you cool with just coming to terms with the obstacles placed in front of you? Platforming and battling your way through a colorful and creatively designed stage to get to the end of the game? There's plenty of challenge in that, sure... But what if you also collected X number of thingies? What if you also had to destroy a certain number of objects, some of which are hidden? What if you also had to do all this without dying more than three times? What if you did it without dying at all? Did you find the secret hidden item in the stage? Did you do the time trial? Did you get the highest rank in the time trial?

It's one of those games that says "Sure, you can play me and beat me. But come on. Be a real gamer and actually play me and actually beat me. I dare you." and I think that's... Actually kind of cool. It's like an alternate timeline where games spawned off of Donkey Kong Country instead of Mario 64.

Very early on I realized I had to do my best to avoid perfection right off the bat or I would drive myself insane. I attempted 100% on the very first stage and after about 20 tries I got everything except one objective complete. Once I reached the second world I told my aforementioned best friend "I don't think I'm going to 100% this game." After beating the boss of that world (which was an amazing surprise) I smiled to myself and said "Oh... Maybe I'll go back and work on completion after I see the credits."

The one thing in particular that jumps out at me and the thing that I always love to see in games is the really lively cartoon art style. All the world art is carefully detailed, placed, and shaded just right to give it a look that is both elaborate and simple looking. The characters have a ton of visual personality with a lot of springy movement and squash-n-stretch animations. And as a spongy fluid sack who grew up in the late 80's enshrouded in funny animal cartoons I always love seeing animal characters with a lot of energy having so much effort put in to them.

So yeah, Crash 4 good. I'm looking forward to playing more and seeing how fast it'll be before I regret agreeing to go back to 100% it later. I mean... I just recently got completed all of Spyro 1 for the first time. How bad could this be?

Page 03: Electronic Arts And The Curious Case Of The Deliberately Attractive Price Point

Something strange happened this week. I know, right? What are the odds of that happening in this perfectly normal year we're all having, right? But really, this was weird. EA released a game... A Star Wars game, mind you... At 30% cheaper than it's contemporaries, did not include any way to make supplementary purchases in-game, and did all this with a public explanation that they felt this was a smaller, more focused gaming experience and as such decided it should be at a lower MSRP.

This game is Star Wars Squadrons, a title that feels reminiscent of the MS-DOS series of Star Wars flight games (X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and... Uh... X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter) and it's... Kind of awesome? It's a very enjoyable game, it's made with a lot of care and polish, and it's only enhanced further in appeal because it's only $40.00.

I'm not really going to get too much into any sort of "review" territory on this game. There are reviews out there if you want to know more about the game itself. I'm still trying to recover from the pricing model on this thing. Now granted I get it. This seems like a good thing. This seems like something we should have been doing all along... And it was something we certainly *were* doing last generation. I guess the thing that gets me is that this seems, for lack of a better term, extremely consumer friendly. This thing is priced to appeal to the buyer. It was marketed with humility and there's no gotcha buried inside (and no gacha either). It's exactly what it says on the tin. It's a single player story and two multiplayer modes. It's basically For Honor with space planes and no way to buy more character skins with dollarbucks.

It's rad and I would love to see more stuff like this from EA or other publishers where they say "We don't think this game will do any better for us if we charge upwards of $100 for it plus microtransactions so let's just sell it at a value price and see if that gives us a big initial revenue push." Hopefully this game will sell well enough to encourage variable retail pricing going forward... But hopefully not well enough for them to start shoehorning in loot boxes.

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Whew. That was more writing than I'm used to doing. Hope y'all that read enjoyed the twisting nether train that is my thought process. Tonight is our weekly Giant Bomb community night with Avengers on PS4. So if you want to participate in our Saturday Assembly just look for Squad Fulla Hulks on PSN Communities and join us! Elite Hives came out recently and we're all preparing for the upcoming raid, so bring a character you're working on leveling and find a dance partner tonight at 7PM PT!

Til next time <3