Tuesday Update - January 9th, 2024
Symphony of the Night, Turn of the 2010s Comedy, and the intersecting fatal flaws of the NFL playoffs
New From This Week -
Over on Football Hell, I’ve put up my Post-Mortem for the 2023 college football season. It’s a bit of a lengthy read, but I think it’s thorough.
On with the update!
I said that I wanted to play more new video games in 2024 than I did last year. I didn’t start on that path this week, as there are very few of them that have been released as of yet, none of which have really caught my eye. This left an opening for me to revisit an old standby. I am caught up in the fog of joy brought about by the flow state into which I so easily fall when I play it, and perhaps I will change my mind in a more sober state, but Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the pinnacle of video gaming. This is hyperbolic, but I can get much worse. I could build a religion around this game. I could convince myself that I would only need to play Symphony of the Night for the rest of my life, that I’d be happy in a secluded studio apartment with only a mattress, a medium-sized CRT, and a PS1. Though in this instance, I actually played it in a weird sort of tandem between my PS Vita (which I found in a box shortly before the end of the year) and a translated hack of the Sega Saturn port. The first was out of convenience and the second was out of curiosity about the extra areas included in the Saturn port.
These two areas — The Underground Garden and the Cursed Prison — add very little to the game, though the Underground Garden gives us an explanation for what’s underneath that little trapdoor out in front of the castle, and the Cursed Prison, I found, can easily break the game for a weak-willed individual like me, as it seems like every enemy within yields an abnormally high amount of experience for not all that much effort, especially the Will O’ Wisps, which take about one solid swipe of the ol’ Basillard to fell and give something like 90 XP. I left the Underground Garden unhealthily overleveled.
I don’t replay many games. This is probably the only game I routinely replay in which the primary method of traversal doesn’t involve a skateboard1 — and actually, I think that there’s something similar between the enjoyment I get in the mundane moments of traversing Port Carverton in Skate 32 and the enjoyment of traversing Dracula’s Castle. Especially when nearing the end of the first half of the game, when I’m just picking up all of the little extra relics in the right-side-up version of the castle before we switch over to the inverted version, it’s so nice to navigate the same corridors and slash through the same enemies that I’ve known since I bought the game at a Vintage Stock sometime in high school. I’ve played through it in so many places - first in my bedroom in a house that I no longer live in and can’t go back to, then in a cabin at a summer camp where I haven’t worked in over a decade, then in various dorm rooms and apartment bedrooms I’ve left, but I will always come back to a sort of surrogate home in the same familiar castle in Symphony of the Night — provided I’m not playing the Saturn version, I suppose.
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I found a DVD copy of Season 2 of The Life and Times of Tim at a store last week, and I spent much of this week watching that. I think — definitely more than is typical and probably more than has any real benefit — about the role that the shift from physical home media releases to streaming services has had on the long tail of relevance for television shows and films. I have some recollection of hearing about this show during the time when it was airing and I can remember seeing a clip of it posted on Twitter back when I used Twitter, which was at least two years ago, and when I found this DVD for eight dollars, I bought it on a lark.
I probably would not have found this on streaming, which would be a shame, as it’s a hilarious show. The dialogue moves so quickly, Steve Dildarian’s performance as Tim is defined by these meek little questions and observations quickly slid in to highlight the absurdity of the characters surrounding him — For example, take this scene from “Amy’s Got a Gun”:
As the title indicates, that is Trevor Moore! The show features many figures of late-2000s comedy. We have Nick Kroll in about every episode as Tim’s friend Stu, Jon Daly voices several background and supporting characters, plus Chris Parnell, Will Forte, Tony Hale, Jason Mantzoukas, Aziz Ansari, and Bob Odenkirk among many others make guest appearances. This aired right before I would’ve been old enough to appreciate it: 2008-12, and that is right about my favorite era of television in retrospect. That era feels long ago now. It has been fifteen years, after all, and I will say that is reflected by the unsanded edge to this show, which might not fit with many modern viewers, but to find something new to me that catches what had me first falling in love with comedy during that time is just delightful.
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I suppose that the Tuesday Update can be the place where I list my thoughts on the upcoming NFL playoffs as well. I’m excited for them, as I can’t remember a season defined by so little certainty, particularly at the game’s most prominent position. We saw seasons fall basically right into the mud due to quarterback injuries: The Jets saw their year go up in smoke only a few minutes into the year, the Bengals turned from middling with high potential to just middling with the loss of Joe Burrow, of course the beloved Minnesota Vikings were just turning a corner when Kirk Cousins tore his achilles tendon in Green Bay, and I think that you can link the collapse of the Jacksonville Jaguars to the injuries that plagued Trevor Lawrence down the stretch. Only eleven teams in the league this year didn’t have to start a backup due to an injury to their primary starter this year3, nine of whom made the playoffs, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that seven of those nine were division-winners.
So many of the playoff qualifiers have what seem to be fatal flaws as well: Dallas and Miami don’t win big games on the road, Kansas City’s receivers keep dropping passes, Detroit’s stumbled in their most visible games, Philadelphia seems to be really stumbling down the stretch, and even the 49ers had that embarrassing loss to Baltimore a few weeks ago.
This tinges the playoffs with an unusual bit of intrigue: We’re going to see these flaws intersect. Will the Miami Dolphins’ inability to win on the road outweigh the Kansas City Chiefs’ inability to hold on to passes? Does the consistent decency of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers outweigh the inconsistent dynamism of the Philadelphia Eagles? Cleveland and Pittsburgh come into the postseason on hot streaks, but will we trust their veteran backup quarterbacks to come through? Can Houston overcome their lack of playoff experience? Personally, I think that Dallas is my favorite to win the Super Bowl, but they’ll almost definitely need to win on the road to even get there. I’m excited about these playoffs, but a lot of that excitement is built on these negative caveats. That doesn’t really diminish my excitement, but it is unusual. We lack juggernauts this year. Last year, it was Kansas City, Buffalo, and Cincinnati far ahead of the rest of the AFC and Philadelphia and San Francisco far ahead of the rest of the NFC, but I only see Baltimore as a truly dominant standout at the moment, and it’s hard to get that excited about them given their inability to make deep playoff runs even with the phenomenal play of Lamar Jackson.
I can believe in anything at the moment, sensible or otherwise. It’s fitting that the whole thing will culminate in Las Vegas.
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Track of the Week:
We get a minute of Ron Howard hamming up a fake obituary for Michael Sembello before launching into a quintessentially eighties synth-funk jam.
That’s the entire Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series prior to American Wasteland, plus Skate 3 and Thrasher: Skate and Destroy. This also does not give enough credit to Hypnospace Outlaw and Minnesota Fats: Pool Legend.
For those of you uninitiated, which is probably everybody, as I never talk about this, Skate 3 is the other game jostling for the top position on my favorite games of all time rankings list. The top 25 of that list is here:
This is a long-winded way of ensuring that I can include the three teams that rested their primary starter in Week 18 in this. The ten teams were: Kansas City, Baltimore, San Francisco, Dallas, Detroit, Miami, Tampa Bay, Washington, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Green Bay