Multi-melting – Page 3 – The Implausi.blog

Record Store Day 2025

April 12th, 2025 was Record Store Day once again, and I managed to make it out to my FLRS to grab a couple titles this time around. There wasn’t a ton of stuff I was looking for from the RSD ’25 exclusives, though I did have my eye on a few, and ended up getting one. Also added a few from my backlog, and a couple that I grabbed on a whim, and I ended up noticing a recurring theme. Let’s have a look at the haul (roughly chronologically):

Gil Scott-Heron – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1974)

The lead track is an all-time classic, repeated here on what is essentially an early “greatest hits” collection, and one that I’ve wanted for a long time. This wasn’t a RSD special, but I couldn’t pass it up. Required listening, but how does it fit in the post-television era?

Judas Priest: Live In Atlanta ’82 (2025)

The vinyl edition to a set that was previously included in a box set (that I don’t have). A legendary band that basically formed a genre, at pretty much their peak. Fantastic set list from their “Screaming For Vengeance” era. “The Hellion/Electric Eye” is one of the best opener’s ever.

Corrosion of Conformity – Blind (1991)

The pivot point, where CoC started moving from their hardcore roots to something recognizably metal. One that I’ve listened to lots but didn’t have on the shelf. And as a reflection on the current era, it is as a fierce condemnation as other better known albums from their early 90s contemporaries.

My Chemical Romance – The Black Parade (2006)

What has become an all-time pop punk classic for the millenial generation, I saw it for a discount, and thought it was worth trying out. And I’m glad to, as it is a varied and fun album that far exceeds the usual ambitions of its genre.

Kendrick Lamar – DAMN (2017)

And much like the MCR, this was on at a discount, and I thought I could expand the range of what I listen to. Given the recent SuperBowl halftime show and dissing on Drake, this seemed a worthy choice.

And.. well, I’ll give it a bit of time. This one is far outside my usual listening, and a bit challenging for that.

Have we found the theme yet? It’s a pretty angry set; the rage seethes throughout the riffs and vocals across the tracks and decades. It is a setlist for the current age.

But as for Record Store Day: Overall, it was a fun experience, despite the 30 minute wait outside with snow slowly starting to fall (because April). We’ll be back.

The WYCU grows…

A few weeks ago, we laid out the timeline for the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, the WYCU, and in the footnotes we mentioned the rumours of an unnamed Predator project due to come out in 2025.

And this week, that rumour was confirmed:

We have Season 4 of Deadliest Warrior coming out on June 6th. Predator:KoK is set up as an anthology movie, with three arcs, following Vikings, Samurai, and WWII US fighter pilots (in what looks to be the Pacific theatre). Interesting alternatives, and I’m really excited to see how they come to the screen.

This should land somewhere in the middle of our WYCU rewatch, so we’ll likely step back for a special episode to cover it during the middle of our chronology.

Join us online as we shout “Who… Is… Deadliest?” at the screen and online.

The Lost Tower (2025)

Sometime algorithmic feeds can allow for joyous moments of serendipity, when stuff outside your sphere breaks through those digital walls. Case in point:

This cute little digital short showed up on the feed. And rather than let it flow away into the ephemera of the river, I thought I’d capture it here.

Why did it show up? No idea. Perhaps it’s because other Blender-animated shorts, like the Oscar-nominated Flow (2024) are attracting attention (of which more on later), but regardless, happy to have it show up.

Half-Life 2: 20 years on

2004 was as pivotal a year for the video game industry as 1999 was for film, and two of the titles that had the biggest impact have been getting an extended retrospective. While World of Warcraft wasn’t necessarily my favourite MMO, I can’t deny the larger impact it had on the MMO market as a whole. (I wrote at length about this impact in my first peer-reviewed academic article back in 2009 too. Hopefully one day I can share that with you).

The other game with a massive impact was Half-Life 2, and there’s an extended documentary about it up on Youtube to look back at how it changed video games:

Like many gamers of the early 21st century, I played Half-Life 2 on release, playing through the full campaign, stealthily and working through every nook and cranny

Watching the clips hit me right in the feels with Nostalgia, so I fired up the install and started another playthrough. The game came back to me fast, the keys are instinctive, and the maps well worn in my memory. I moved through quickly too. The names of the various chapters of the game evoked memories: Water Hazard, Ravenholm, Nova Prospekt, each with their identifiable sections and set-pieces: the chopper fight, the flaming traps, deadly snipers along the rail line, swarming ant-lions and more.

The sections proceed naturally, a testament to the storytelling by the creators of the game. As I’m playing through, each part has me wanting to see what’s next, even though I’ve played this at least a dozen times. (Twenty years ago, I’d restart the game shortly after finishing it, as I wanted to replay some of the early chapters again. It speaks to how dynamic the gameplay is, with very different feels between the foot, jetboat, and buggy sections).

It’s not a perfect game, but it’s close. There are occasional parts where you can see some of the rough seams, and not everything is interactive. It’s fairly linear, without the dynamic ways of working through situations that can be seen in some of its contemporaries (Deux Ex, Thief, and System Shock 2 come to mind, but again, those are exemplars of the genre, in the pantheon of all time greats).

And while the graphics looks a bit dated compared to more modern games, they’re still fine: with a great view to the distance, and so fast on a modern machine that gameplay is smooth and seamless. But I don’t find the “date” on the visuals a negative either: it’s still clearly a game, and the low-fi version of it allows for a certain amount of projection to take place. It’s “cool” media, to borrow McLuhan’s parlance, or how Scott McCloud wrote in “Understanding Comics” (around the same time this game was released) of how the less visual information conveyed on the panel allowed the audience to map themselves on to the figure on the page.

Gordon Freeman becomes Everyman, in this lo-fi version.

The amount of influence this game has had is also evident in the playthrough. I’m not a video game historian (well, I haven’t been for a while), but the entire Call of Duty / Modern Warfare section of the games industry draws a line through Half-Life 1 and 2 (and Counter Strike and Team Fortress more specifically). The design language of modern gaming can be seen here in the simple and direct playthrough, the embedded tutorials and tooltips throughout, the smooth ease of use of the various elements of the game.

For anyone who reads this who has never played Half-Life 2, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. Its iconic for a reason, and any history of the video game industry needs to spend a few hours racing along the canals or walking through Ravenholm. It holds up remarkably well.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Having sworn off the extended Alien franchise after finding myself hating both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant back-to-back, I was surprised to find me watching this on the opening weekend. Good word of mouth from a few friends whose opinions I trust had me checking it out, in IMAX no less, in a late afternoon matinee.

And surprise, it’s good!

Now, the challenge with any movie in a franchise with 45 years of history is to deal with the accumulated weight of expectations, of both the hardcore fans and casual movie-going public, and even those lapsed fans like myself. So, to achieve some modest success in creating a movie that is genuinely terrifying, and expands on the universe, fitting in as a piece in the larger story, and leaving room for more development later, is no easy task. Well done on all those involved.

That isn’t to say it’s perfect: there are a few scenes that feel like level design in a video game adaptation, which has been an ongoing trend in movies since at least the Star Wars prequels. It’s the curse of cinema in the new millennium. And a couple notable lines that tie too close to the past movies in the franchise fell flat, not having enough room to breathe. But these quibbles aside, it was a fine film, that never felt like it dragged, and kept the tension up throughout.

There’s room to expand the Alien universe off this; more with Andy, obviously. But I’d also like to see a wider universe, beyond the Weyland-Yutani corporation, and see what other approaches to outer space there might be. Because in a galaxy where the Xenomorph is a solution, what kind of problems might lurk out there?