Table of Contents

• February’s Watches: A Brave New World & Familial E …

• February’s Plays: Continued Pro Skating & Speeding …

• February’s Listens: 100 Days of Music & Going Furt …

The month of February has been… a lot; varying in levels of positive and negative across the board. With it being the shortest month of the calendar year, I felt like the days passed in the blink of an eye and I didn’t get to do much. Yet, the few snow storms and icings gave me enough time in doors to indulge in my many hobbies to stay warm and keep my mind occupied from sinking into the dread of the time period we live in.

February’s Watches: A Brave New World & Familial Espionage

For once, I went out to the theaters to see a new movie; and in even rarer fashion, I went to the theaters on opening night to see a new movie. My spouse and I decided to kick off our Valentine’s Weekend together with a late showing of Captain America: Brave New World. For a little over a year now, I just haven’t felt compelled by any of Marvel’s offerings. Maybe the superhero movie fatigue that so many speak of has finally caught up with me. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve outgrown Marvel’s universe of movies and characters, having experienced the blow off of my generation of MCU films with Endgame. But I felt drawn back in for Brave New World as the trailers and material I had seen leading up to release felt different from what Marvel has been putting out lately.

Coming out of the theater, I felt very whelmed. The action and story was about what I expected out of an MCU film, but there just wasn’t much else to hook me beyond the movie. The biggest take away for me was Sam Wilson’s continued arc of filling the shoes left behind by Steve Rogers. Amid all the multi-versal mumbo-jumbo, this has been the most interesting storyline in modern Marvel. Seeing Sam have to push himself to his fullest to meet the duty of being Captain America without a drop of super soldier serum in his veins feels very grounded in a universe that has become overtly fantastical. Outside of this storyline, I came out of Brave New World feeling nearly finished with my investment into Marvel. While the trailer for Thunderbolts looks like a fun team-up, and the Fantastic 4 already wowed me off of visual direction, I don’t really feel any investment to the overall story the Marvel Cinematic Universe is building towards. However, I’ll remain as I have, with one foot off of the train until I’m pulled in either direction.

Growing up, I’ve had my fair share of history watching anime. I was in the prime age of Toonami and remember watching episodes of shows like Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon & Cowboy Bebop with my older brother when all three shows were still fairly new in the United States. Even having watched some of these essential shows, I don’t really consider myself a fan of the medium the way so many others are. Hell, I have enough issue keeping up with a single show of any genre let alone multiple series like some anime fans can. So at the suggestion of a friend (big shoutouts to you, Perf) I decided to dip my toes into the anime series Spy X Family. I hijacked my spouse’s Crunchyroll account to throw on an episode while I had the apartment to myself one evening, and ended up blowing through ten episodes.

As a slice of life style series, Spy X Family much different than other anime shows I’ve watched before. There is no over the top energy attacks or fantastical threats to planet. That being said, the show goes beyond your day to day family activities as there are bigger stakes at play. The only reason that this show focuses on family in the first place is because our main character Loid (secretly a spy codenamed Twilight) is on a mission requiring him to fake a family in order to get close to a diplomat to save an international treaty. Thus he adopts daughter Anya, an orphan girl who can secretly read minds, and “marries” Yor, who is secretly a highly skilled assassin.

The main characters are definitely the highlight of the show thus far, both individually, as well as how they mesh with each other as a “family.” Individually, they all have their own means to an end for keeping up this facade of being a normal family. Loid has an important mission to complete, while Yor needs to draw away suspicion to be able to keep up with her work as an assassin. And in the middle of it all, Anya just wants to have a family. Yet at the same time, watching these three have to maneuver this new situation together, you get to see them slowly shift from being a fake family to just feeling like a normal family. While I’m not close to finishing the series available currently, I’m looking forward to the continued adventures of this found family.

February’s Plays: Continued Pro Skating & Speeding In Circles

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 has gone from a game I could hardly remember from my childhood, to the one game in the series that I have replayed the most, and is in my opinion, easily the peak of the series. The variety of environments chosen to make up the game’s levels are among some of my favorites in the series. College continues the trend of great first levels in the Tony Hawk series with a variety of terrain for beginners to learn the ropes with, and lines for experienced players to string together for high scores. Kona is another real life skate park brought to life for the series and provides many fun park pieces to skate on. And Alcatraz in particular is easily within my top levels of the series overall as it flows so well and has so many layers that allow you to carry combos across the map.

Taking a controversial step forward, gone are the two minute goal runs of the previous three entries. Replacing this main game is Career Mode, where each level has individual goals spread throughout to take on at your own leisure. I liked that they kept and even elaborated on some of these old goals. For example, Combo goals have carried over, but completing the first Combo goal opens up an even tougher Combo challenge to land. Similarly, Competitions are back, except instead of having a full level dedicated to a Competition, they’re naturally integrated into the level. What I like most about this new system is that more unique and intricate goals were able to be implemented into each level. One of my favorites is in Alcatraz, where you have to use a Loop of Death to launch yourself onto a dart board to score points. Another one comes from the post game Pro Goals where you have to trick to the beat of a song as Chad Muska.

Above all, what I like most about this game is the scaling challenge of each level and it’s goal requirements. There’s a gradual escalation of what the game expects of the player that just feels absent in most games today. A lot of the early goals feel like nothing to anybody who’s seasoned in this series by this point; but for beginners, College’s goals are a nice way to set your feet in the water to acclimate to the game ahead. That being said, the game is not going to hold your hand the entire way. There are going to be combo lines you need to hit that get tougher by the level. And by time you reach the game’s last main level: Zoo, it expects that you’ve learned it’s mechanics enough to be able to knock out a pro score of 200,000 points within two minutes.

This game offered a unique experience for the series, and it is one that I’m sad is not going to return with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4. At the time of editing, they announced that the new version of Pro Skater 4 would be changed for the remake to match the two minute goal oriented gameplay of the original three games. It’s disappointing as some of the game’s iconic goals are being thrown away in favor of retrofitting the levels to a style they were simply not designed for. But as opposed to pissing and moaning about the change in the same way many others currently are (and most likely will until release), I choose to be optimistic. I get to experience some of my favorite levels in a new way and with updated mechanics that would come years later. Will it match up to my previous experience? Possibly not. But it’s one I’m at least willing to try.

Tony Hawk’s Underground was a game that I played a lot growing up from a Player 2 perspective. Back when my brother and I had to share a PlayStation 2, my brother would play the main game while I watched. But when I did get to play, we’d spend our time playing Free Skate around Moscow, or triggering the KISS concert on repeat in Hotter Than Hell. Coming back to this game after over two decades, and finally getting to play the main game for myself, I must say, Underground is pretty overrated in my opinion.

There’s use in the game’s biggest new feature of being able to get off of your board, allowing you to both to explore the levels and extend combos. And the game also some solid levels to boot, namely New Jersey, Tampa and Hawaii. Tampa in particular feels so much bigger than the rest in the game, and a whole lot bigger than any level before it in the series. The Story Mode itself is a highlight, delivering a feel good, albeit cheesy story about the main character choosing the purity of skateboarding over the glitz and glamor of becoming a pro skater.

At the same time, the game isn’t perfect and there were definitely some points on the negative end. While the game has some good-to-great levels, there were also the levels that I felt mostly “meh” about; the worst one in my opinion being San Diego. The level, mostly consists of areas with quarter pipes, seemingly has no flow to pull off lines and combos across the map, and just felt boring to play compared to others. San Diego has found its way on my personal list of least favorite levels after this playthrough. The biggest blight on this game without a doubt is the driving mechanics. The few vehicle segments forced into Story Mode felt incredibly stiff and ultimately awful to control. I understand that it was the time when Grand Theft Auto had really taken off, but there was no reason to shoehorn in driving into a game about skateboarding.

This isn’t all to say at all that Tony Hawk’s Underground is a bad game, or that I didn’t enjoy my time playing. While I had my fun playing, and enjoyed the game in the segments that I did, I just don’t see it as the golden child of the series that many others regard it as. Also fuck Eric Sparrow.

In a random twist, possibly fueled by my interest in YouTuber EmpLemon’s videos on the sport, I found myself playing NASCAR Thunder 2004. As random as it felt to find myself pumping so much of my time into a game for a sport I don’t even watch, sometimes it just feels good to drive fast. And drive fast I have as I spent my time playing the game’s Career Mode to contend with the best drivers of the era. Its been pretty funny to look back at how far I’ve come in learning the game. Naturally I stared out as a complete amateur on the track with crappy equipment who couldn’t stop bumping other drivers and rubbing the walls on turns. Now, after many races under my belt, I still have crappy equipment, but I now understand how to make good left turns and not make everyone on the track hate me. It’s been a fun change of pace from the other games I’ve been playing; acting more as a snack of a game I can pick at when I want to. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up my first win on the track some day soon.

February’s Listens: 100 Days of Music & Going Further Down The Ween Hole

This past month, I really found myself slacking on the listening front. The only consistent source of new music that I had found was in my daily listening to the 1,001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Since this past November, I’ve been following a daily randomizer that dishes out an album from the list each day. As someone always looking for something new, it’s been a great way to broaden my musical taste and discover artists outside of my listening bubble. As of editing, I have just passed the hundredth album milestone, and in the coming days, you’ll be seeing a longer piece with my full thoughts on this list up to album one-hundred. In the meantime, feel free to follow along with me on my Bluesky as I trek my way to album one-thousand-and-one.

When looking at my Last FM stats for the year so far, it’s undeniable that I’ve fallen further down the Ween hole in just two months (pun fully intended). Up to the editing of this piece, I have listened to songs by Ween almost 500 times. As I mentioned in last month’s edition, I had listened to Ween’s full studio discography (which alone takes up the majority of these listens). Their overall body of work ranges from ridiculously amusing to profoundly beautiful. Yet it seems that my appetite for this band has not been satiated by their studio albums. So I decided to go deeper.

I started to delve into their many Live Albums, as many fans of the band have said that their live performances are comparable to the album originals. And I have to say that I’ve come across some live cuts that have become my default way to listen to these songs. Specifically, I have to give due props to their live performance of their full debut album: GodWeenSatan The Oneness. The original album is fairly rough around the edges, yet still an enjoyable listen. However, this live anniversary performance of the album with the band’s matured sound absolutely lifts their freshman material to higher quality to where this live album is the best way to experience the album.

Yet even still, I needed more of this band. The offerings on streaming alone were not cutting it. And so I’ve started to delve even deeper into the world of their demos, bootlegs and other releases. I found a complete album unavailable on streaming titled Craters of the Sac (I’ll let you use your imagination for that cover) that has some great cuts on it that would later be rerecorded. I also listened to the demos for both The Mollusk & Quebec: two of the band’s best albums. It’s pretty impressive how close to the final studio recordings these demos are. But what’s even more impressive is the amount of unused materials both demo tapes include. Quebec’s demo’s in particular seemingly have enough songs to release a whole second album, and they’re all quality tracks. I anticipate that I’ll continue to chug further into my full embrace of the Boognish by next month. But for now, I’ll continue to listen through some fantastic music from this band.