Yes, I am wearing donkey ears and no I won't take them off.
The cutscenes are worth $24. I've been up to my waist in W3 for the past week or so since PCgamer made it the greatest PC game of all time. I'll get more in detail when I finally review the whole game for real as I honestly forgot I haven't done that yet. Suffice it to say, the game grew a lot on me before I dipped my toe into it's dlc. Now that I have? Well... holy sh*t hearts of stone is amazing. Holy. Sh*t.
Not to knock a game for being too heady at times, but Witcher 3 is actually helping me sleep! Each of the witcher contracts in the game are like bite sized mysteries. They won't dove tail into Geralt's politically dense main story but they won't leave you hanging like other side quests can.
They have beginnings, middles, and ends. Like a fun noire paperback on my night stand, I can thumb through a contract or two and not feel like I'm being dragged through too many gameplay loops. I can get my fix and stop whenever my eyelids get heavy. Witcher 3 isn't afraid of me putting it down for good. It knows I'll be back.
PlayStation is coming to pc. I... I don't know what to say. I would have bet my entire life savings on this never happening but now that it has (or is going to) I can see the logic. $60 a unit is no longer cutting it as budgets balloon out of control. I'm of the mind that $100+ special editions were a sly way of gauging just how much people were willing to pay for games. This move suggests the resounding answer to that question was "not more than 60 bones."
Well damn, if the subscription fee isn't insane I will definitely sign up for a month or two. Lord knows I won't want to hold onto PlayStation's back catalogue forever.
UPDATE: I've seen the list of games. I am unimpressed. Man... that was a fleeting high.
You can tell a lot about a composer's mettle by how they handle their montages. When almost the entire focus is on the music plenty can go wrong. The sad truth is the vast majority of soundtracks don't hold up outside the thrall of the film and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. A good soundtrack doesn't have to stand on it's own... but the great ones always do.
So what we have here is something very similar to the end credits suite but in a slightly lower gear. The 10 note theme still works marvelously and Bear always puts a new kind of crescendo in each reprise because he's a total eff'in pro like that.
There's always a story playing in my head. Sometimes it's something I've seen and sometimes it's something I've written. Either way, it demands music! Here's what the inside of my head sounds like this week:
If this becomes a regular thing, Bear Mccreary is going to be on here a lot. He's a genius and 10 Cloverfield Lane is already one of my favorites. The entire score is based around one 10 note (get it?!) theme and I should find it grating or annoying after a while but somehow I haven't. It's like a John Williams horror score, but not exactly. It has a bite Williams never had and yet it's got a sense of whimsy that honestly has no place in this movie. That's something Bear does sometimes. He puts moods and feelings into projects that shouldn't fit, but somehow they do. The lighter tones seem to speak to Howard's dangerously childish feelings toward women which serves to make his character all the more pitiful... and unsettling.
This is seriously one of the best horror/thriller scores I've ever heard and I hope you'll give this a shot. If soundtracks are at all your thing. Even for me, I'll admit this is pushing it. But goddammit you guys, I love soundtracks!
The internet is so full of people saying so much we can't find all the writing worth reading. But sometimes you're listlessly scrolling through a BMD comment section and sometimes someone holds up a nugget of gold: The most perfect summery of Bond's character arc in Casino Royale.
