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July was a super slow month, not even warranting my usual recap breakdowns! For the first time in a several years, I did not finish any games over the course of the month  I was busy! I also did not buy any games (that will certainly be changing in August), so I'd have almost nothing to recap if not for PS+. Even with that I only got four of the six games. Darkstalkers: Resurrection (PS3) is the most interesting of the bunch to me. There was also the Tell Tale Game of Thrones (PS4) game as well as a couple I'd never heard of, Element4l (Vita) and Don't Die, Mr. Robot! (PS4/Vita).

Lovecraft is a pretty big name in internet culture, and "Lovecraftian" is a popular descriptor to throw around. Cosmic horror! But while I have read some Lovecraft—most notably the fantastic "At the Mountains of Madness"—most of his work has remained a mystery to me. But this year I finally broke out the massive Lovecraft book I've had for a while and am slowly working my way through it. 110 pages and 19 stories so far. Since it lists the stories chronologically, I'm still in his earlier works. He obviously improves as he goes because if what I have read so far was the totality of his output, Lovecraft would merely be an interesting footnote in horror history. There have been some good stories, specifically those that deal with deteriorating sanity of the narrator—I especially liked "Polaris" where a man stares up at the North Star both awake and in his dream and anguishes over which life is the real one—but mostly the stories have been overly vague in their supernatural elements and predictable in their endings. Sometimes an unexplained mystery can be compelling, as in "The Temple" or the fantastic final line of "The Statement of Randolph Carter," but stories like "The Terrible Old Man" I finished and was like...so? Too many of these early stories are like that, containing the germ of something interesting but failing to flesh it. But on the whole I have enjoyed my time with Lovecraft and, looking to the stories ahead, I'm excited to finally get to the famous stories I have yet to read.

The animated Castlevania series on Netflix debuted Friday and my wife and I watched through it. Let me start by saying my expectations were pretty low. I mean, when was the last time you saw something based on a video game that turned out well? And it was by the studio that brought us Adventure Time...so this seemed kind of out of their wheelhouse. But the one thing that gave me some hope was that it was written by Warren Ellis. He would know what he's doing, right? Well I'm glad to say that I was impressed with the show all around.

Games Beaten

Games Beaten

Games Beaten

Another is a horror/suspense/mystery anime that has a little bit of trouble deciding what it wants to be but is quite good overall. The story focuses on Koichi Sakakibara, a 15-year-old boy who transfers to a new school in a rural Japanese town partway through the year and meets a mysterious girl whose classmates ignore her very existence. Why? And what does she have to do with the tragic death of a student 26 years prior, a death the class at the time refused to acknowledge? The story of Another is hard to tease because the less you know going in, the better. But it features an intriguing premise and likeable characters, so it’s easy to recommend in that sense. The problem, if you can call it that, is that the tone does not stay consistent throughout. The first five episodes skew strongly towards horror while the remainder is much more of a mystery. The problem with calling that a problem is that the tone changes organically as the story develops. It would have felt forced to maintain the horror vibe throughout, but it is certainly effective while it lasts! I should also mention that this is not shock-value horror but rather a creepy unease that settles under your skin. That feeling never truly goes away but it’s more compartmentalized in the second half. (By the way, if you’re scared of dolls, you might not make it through those first few episodes. They use brief flashes of creepy dolls between scenes almost as a subliminal message of terror that is quite effective.)

Games Beaten

My last blog was about the treasure trove of anime on Hulu. My enthusiasm has been curbed a little bit with the realization of how they were able to get/afford so much stuff. Very few of the shows are dubbed, even when I know a good English dub exists. When I started watching Another (still two episodes left to go, btw) I discovered it was in Japanese with English subtitles. It's certainly not the first time I've watched something that's subbed and it doesn't bother me. It's a pretty niche show set in rural Japan. An English dub probably doesn't exist, I figured. Even though a little research revealed that one does, it hasn't affected my enjoyment of the show. But there are some series that I don't want to watch subbed. Two of the things I was excited for on Hulu were Cowboy Bebop and the original Dragon Ball, two fairly mainstream anime that have good English dubs, and that's how I'd like to watch them (especially with DB, which has over 150 episodes). So I'm going to need to cull my list of possibilities after some serious consideration. Kind of a bummer but not the end of the world.

I like anime. Let me say that up front. But I've watched very little of it. When I was a kid, one of the local tv stations would sporadically play episodes of Dragon Ball Z and later we got Cardcaptor Sakura and a season of Escaflowne (that's not counting the unusual cases of Pokémon and Digimon). Buying anime was super expensive and we never had cable, so Toonami didn't help me when they started regularly airing cool stuff. I was able to get Akira from the library once. That was an interesting experience. And I torrented everything about Ghost in the Shell in college, later buying legit copies because Stand Alone Complex was just that good. But those were certainly exceptions.