Damn da Dam

Hey, crew:

Happy weekend to you (for those who celebrate)! This post is long overdue, just like the rest of them.

And in many cases, the reason for the delay is the same as ever but there’s also some new stuff in there, too.

Such as…jigsaw puzzles!

If you follow me on Bluesky, this isn’t news. But over the long Thanksgiving weekend, Edi and I broke out a 3,000 piece Marvel jigsaw puzzle to work on together. She’s got a thing for doing the jigsaws—thanks for that, COVID!—and I’ve got a thing for Marvel comic book covers—thanks for that, lonely childhood!—so it was fun to have a little superhero team-up, so to speak.

(Back during COVID, the idea was to do the jigsaws together but it rapidly became apparent how much it was her jam and how much it wasn’t mine? I have some fond memories of the first few where, like here, the quilted nature of “covers next to covers” I could handle in my scattered attention span way. But when it came to puzzles where the ability to see the shapes of the puzzle or the difference in the gradations of similar colors? Ugh, no. And sadly there are only so many jigsaw puzzles of Edward Gorey book covers out there. More’s the pity.)

Anyway, it was great. I think we both figured we’d be kind of chatting as we moved around this enormous space, filling in bits and pieces, but in fact, we were mostly quiet and focused. But because the thing took close to three fucking days, during which we probably put in between 6-8 hours ever day, even the small, occasional chitchat added up.

The company, Aquarius, really did an excellent job with this puzzle; everything was well-tooled and the level of reproduction was high enough that, for example, Steranko’s signature on his two covers were clearly legible. (Our only gripe—no fold out sheet of the puzzle so all we had to go with were the smallish photos on the box…at least until Edi started looking up covers on the Internet.) They have a couple of smaller thousand piece puzzles in a similar vein—a collage of Batman comic covers, a bunch of Spidey covers—that would be fun. Less of a challenge, less rewarding, less variation? But still fun. So….I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be our new Thanksgiving tradition.

As I recall, getting photos into these posts is fuckin’ nightmarish but let me give it a shot. You deserve that much at least, definitely:

Eh, what else have I been meaning to update you on? I’m still playing Yakuza: Kiwami and Animal Well on the Switch. I was spending much more time (and loving!) the latter until I hit a plateau and kinda leveled out for a week or so. In the abstract, I know that M*troidv*nias rely on you backtracking and using newly acquired skills to access previously inaccessible places but the very opaque nature of Animal Well made it hard to tell if I needed to accrue another skill/item in order to get to the next inaccessible spot or if I just sucked.

So switching to Yakuza—which is not opaque, and pretty much gives you all the tools to advance should you decide you can’t just get there by brawling-—ended up being a nice counterpoint and a huge relief. I’m pretty sure I’m at the point where I used up all the game’s open world exploration and the only thing left to me are completing the story and playing all the minigames…but man would I love to be proven wrong and have the world up another dozen blocks or so. As it is, to get some of that juice back, I turned off the minimap so I’m navigating mostly by visual memory (though I’m sure I’m hitting the map function much more than it sounds like I am).

I don’t know. Part of me wishes I did have a PS4 (or 5?) so I could’ve played, you know, all the damn Yakuza games but I’ve really had a great year in video games.

Video game consoles are kind of like the passing of the seasons, I guess? When you start off, it’s winter and there’s barely anything available, just a couple of showstoppers that launched the console you have to play over and over and over again (or in the case of the PS2, you spend the first year mostly watching DVDs).

Then it’s Spring, and the other publishers who decided to commit to the console bring their titles and it’s all a bit messy and muddy but there’s that feeling of fecundity.

Then comes Summer, and the console makers have distributed better tools plus the programmers really know the machine now, and the games are arguably at their most impressive technically, and the people who are swinging for the fences are connecting.

And finally there’s Fall, where maybe things start to slow down (or slow down a lot) but what’s coming out is the peak of what you’re going to get for the system, even as everyone starts gearing up for the next console and starting the cycle all over again.

I know, I know; there’s a ton of head-shakingly poor generalizations in there, and god knows there are so many situations that have really turned all that on their head. For example, from what I can tell, every modern console has a storefront where digital product can be purchased so that the number of indie games has grown tremendously; and I’m talking about all this through the lens of the Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo does a lot of stuff at least a little differently than the other consolemakers to make sure their titles are evergeen. (I wasn’t paying attention at the time, but looking around after the fact, I think anyone who put forward the idea that Breath of the Wild is the most stunning launch title a console has ever had is going to be correct for a good long time.)

And yeah but so: a good year-plus of video games for me, thanks to developers getting their old stuff onto the Switch, indie developers putting up with all of Nintendo’s nonsense to have their stuff on the console, and Nintendo’s own considerable game-making chops. (And looking at the list there’s a lot of great stuff I played that came out in 2023 that I never got to until this year, so probably part of why my year was so good was playing two years worth of games in the course of a year: Balatro; Yakuza: Kiwami; Animal Well; but also Dave The Diver; the first two games in the Batman: Arkham Triology collection; that Metal Gear Solid collection; Dredge; Cocoon; Inscryption (from late 2022); the 1.6 patch of Stardew Valley I haven’t even tried (and man, the $14.99 I spent on that game years and years ago was easily the best use of fifteen dollars in the maybe the whole history or money)…all good! Maybe too good!

Okay, so those are two of the things I wanted to tell you. If I’m on my game—and if you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you know I’m not—I’ll turn around with my list of November comics and talk about the highlights…and part of me wants to do a Top Ten list.

Because even though once you untether a top ten list from the constraints of “an informed consumer of the media telling you what was the cream of the year’s crop,” it all but loses the point, that point is tied into a sort of steady drumbeat of constant consumerism, an eternal embrace of now. In a perfect world, we’d get people exploring and talking about things that are new to them, whenever that thing came out.

(Oh right, and Bluesky. I should probably talk about Bluesky.)

Anyway, that’s coming….soon, he says all but certainly jinixing it by saying so. I guess we’ll see.

Ok, that’s enough for now. I hope you’re well! Thanks for putting up with me.

-Jeff