The end of a long summer day arrives. Awake far too long trying to cram three lives into one saturday. On the road before dawn, work all morning, fish all afternoon, socialize into the night. Head meets feathers, drift into darkness. The phone rings, a familiar voice in an unfamiliar tone, “John, listen, Kay is in the hospital… It doesn’t look good…” Bolt upright. “Where? what room? What happened?…”

The last three weeks have had a profound effect on how I view myself, life, and the world around me. They say you should live everyday as though it were your last. I used to think that was a silly sentiment, and to a certain extant my opinion remains unchanged. It is impossible to maintain the high of an infinite end perspective, but there is something to be said for living each moment in a manner you can be proud of. After all, you may not have the opportunity to make things right later.

Dull, rainy spring days. Two people confined together too long in one small apartment. An arrangement of convenience and lust, smoothed over time into something more. “This isn’t healthy. I need to know what you want from this. Either we are or we aren’t.” Weathered in pride and frayed by a stubborn inability to admit what that something is. “I don’t know how to answer that…” “You just did.”

Having the last word is never as satisfying as you think it will be. Too often we take for granted that we can reconcile our differences later. That there will be another day for apologies and atonement.

“What do you mean? Where are you going?”  ”Out…”  ”And if I’m not here when you come home?”  ”Don’t come back… ever.”

The concept of revenge is the most primal element of human nature. The desire to get even, the _need_ to hurt someone in the way they hurt you is etched into the innermost fibers of the subconscious.

Cold, sterile walls bathed in the harsh whiteness of artificial light in the middle of the night. The quiet of a hospital at night isn’t peaceful, but rather solemn. Rather than calm, the air is filled with the discomfort of a thousand silent screams. “Why?” The involuntary expressions of the face betray everything we would otherwise hide. “I don’t know… I just… everything got out of hand, everything got too hard…”  ”But why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you come to me?”  Tears tell the story that words could never do justice. “I think you made it abundantly clear how you felt! I didn’t want it to turn out this way…” Sometimes there is nothing left to be said, sometime the long pause of silence says it all.  ”The doctors think I’ll be healthy enough to discharge tomorrow. I’m going into rehab, they won’t let me have visitors for the first 2 weeks… I think it’s time to say goodbye.”  ”What do you mean?”  ”I mean don’t come back… Ever.”

I’ve done and said a lot of things in my life I’m not proud of, but I’m learning. I’m learning that who is right is meaningless in the face of what is right. I’m learning that I can’t fix everything broken in the world, or even all those things in which I broke. At the end of the day, all we are is the sum of our interactions. When someone asks me how my day is, before I answer I think to myself, “Am I proud of the person I’ve been today?” The answer isn’t always yes, but the ratio is improving, and I think that counts for something.

So I ask you: How was your day?

I couldn’t imaging owning an xbox360 without having a subscription to gamefly. At $60 for every new game, and a bludgeoning plethora of shit releases endlessly churning from the depths of every development house a man could indeed break the bank in a few short weeks only to discover none of the games he purchased were even worth owning. The beauty of having a multi-game subscription on gamefly is it seems to give you top priority on new releases, especially once you time out the shipping patterns and release cycle. With the recent economic conditions many publishers pushed back releases of what should have been fall holiday launch titles to the first quarter of this year. What we have now is a virtual onslaught of big titles coming out nearly every week through the winter which almost makes up for the barren wasteland that was this years fall release cycle.

Having nailed down the aforementioned gamefly distribution system I’ve been driving through some new titles in my free time, primarily Bayonetta and Darksiders. Darksiders is a topic for another day. It’s striking parallel to Zelda is as unmistakable an homage as I’ve ever laid eyes upon, something the xbox catalogue desperately needed, but I digress.

First impressions with Bayonetta were definitely mixed… for about 5 minutes. The combat mechanic is stellar, the enemies are stunning and the backgrounds are graphically delicious. It is truly a button mashers wet dream. Without ever playing before the average masher can string together a multitude of devastating combos with relative ease, yet the enemies are balanced enough that while the combat mechanic fits like a glove ( a rawhide, mashers glove of course), it never feels easy. But then the music starts, and other non-enemy characters arrive, and the euphoria cools. The music is terrible, I felt like the sound team stole the nearest 12 year old japanese girls ipod, translated the worst tracks they could find into english, and looped it over and over again during all combat scenes. I really, truly honestly don’t care about whatever the hell the music is trying to tell me about Jupiter and Mars or some shit like that. It’s terrible. Match that with the fact that every NPC looks like it was ripped straight out of the latest JRPG and the enjoyment level begins to decline severely.

Then about… I don’t know, 3 minutes in you begin to realize that the sexualization of the main character is at a much higher level than you would expect of a game pandering to sell discs to 14 year old boys. It’s something bordering the perverse. It’s not just there, it’s THERE, everywhere, inescapable. Flaunted at a level that makes you feel dirty to play it when anyone else is around. Then you discover her costume is made of her own hair, which she uses as a weapon, and does not have enough to do both at once. Whenever you break into a cycle of wicked weave attacks against multiple mini-boss type enemies you feel the need to watch over your shoulder lest Chris Hansen should sneak up behind you and ask you to “take a seat over there”.

After a couple hours of this I gave up on the game and went back to Darksiders, but as the week of it’s release progresses more and more debate sprung up over the sexploitation aspect of Bayonetta. Many have made the claim that she is the female equivalent to Marcus Fenix, with freakish traits providing an over the top form for an over the top character. I can understand this point of view, yet with the graphical design being so perfectionist in the way every individual piece appears to have been crafted and placed with the utmost care, I find it hard to believe the design was over the top for the sake of being over the top.It still felt like a game directors quiet masturbatory side joke.

Over time, however, the combat mechanic draws you back in, being a very GodofWar-esque game for the xbox. Also, with the release of Mass Effect 2 fast approaching, Darksiders appearing to be a very deep game and Army of Two: 40th Day sitting on the shelf as of yet untouched, Bayonetta seemed the quickest game to finish and get back in the mail. While grinding through chapter after chapter the discomfort subsides, and eventually you succumb to the gameplay itself, despite the plot’s relentless efforts to drive you away. You almost forget the pervese nature of the main character design, that is until you find yourself fighting a mirror image of yourself. Upon defeating said doppleganger, it transforms into a mini-boss angel called ‘Joy’ that appears on screen, scantily clad, spread eagle, moaning and masturbating while blinding white light springs forth from her vagina. Re-read that last sentence a few times. This is not embellishment nor is it exaggeration, but rather a plain statement of fact. Over the Top my ass, this game is truly Hideki Kamiya’s way of sharing his personal masturbatory joke with the world. ‘Nuff said, back to gamefly you go.

-J

And if you didn’t believe my statement of fact I present Exibit A: