Review - The Annotated AvP: The Story, part 12.5

Sorry for leaving all y’all on a cliffhanger last week. Chapter 14 was just too long to snark all in one go. So without yanking the rug out beneath you any more, here’s the conclusion of “The Third Species War” from my Aliens versus Predator 2 fanfic.

(from AvP: The Story, chapter XIV – The Third Species War)

The first of the Species Wars had taken place four million years before, on the same rocky ground of Lv-1201, when Aliens and Predators battled over ownership of the planet. The second Species war was fought between the Aliens and humans in 2179, on 1201’s sister planet of Lv-426, where the humans emerged the victor, but with many lives lost. But now, the ultimate war was taking place between all three species.

I only have two questions: is it on pay-per-view, and will Paul Bearer make an appearance?

Analysis - What a Wonderful Exploding World

Following a recent—and still ongoing—gaming binge I’ve realized that open world action games, best exemplified by the Grand Theft Auto series, constitute my favourite genre in the video gaming medium. Following the fairly on-rails single player experiences of the Call of Duty and Gears of War games I’ve come to really appreciate interactivity or at the very least well-executed mechanics: games like Half-Life 2, the Halo series and BioShock give you a variety of tools but don’t hold your hand, preferring to let the player work their way through a scenario as they see fit.

In the case of open world games, where missions are accessed in a continuous environment and non-player characters abound, the beauty is how you can make other entities react, like dropping a pebble into a pond just to see the subsequent ripples. Or, in the context of GTAIV, dropping a live grenade in the middle of a traffic jam smack dab in the centre of Star Junction.

Tangent - "Mr. Sandman..."

As I’ve told a few of you, my dreams have been incredibly lengthy and vivid as of late. I’ve curled up for an eight or nine hour sleep and woken up at the end of it after what, to my subconscious mind, has been days and, one time, even a whole week. Every night becomes a surreal adventure, albeit sorely lacking the backwards cadence of Twin Peaks’ Man from Another Place.

But the ones that actually irk me are those I can’t clearly remember as being dreams. One time I imagined a friend and I chatted about cats at length, and once awake had to firm up with her if the conversation actually happened (as we do regularly talk about the abnormally cute kittens we’ve discovered online). It’s gotten to be quite annoying, as these fairly mundane dream fragments can be nearly indistinguishable from the chunks of memory that lie on the outskirts of the conscious mind.

What I’m saying is, I’m starting to think I need a totem.

The following are a mixture of the most bizarre and bizarrely mundane dreams I’ve had to date.

Analysis - "The rhythm has my soul."

everyone goes through two periods of knowing me

when they mock me for listening to peter gabriel

and when they start to believe—Riley Byrne

Three years ago, I knew exactly three things about Peter Gabriel: that he was the original frontman of Genesis, that he wrote some great songs for Pixar’s Wall-E, and that he sounded like a slightly raspy Phil Collins. Most of my knowledge of the guy came through my dad or the slightly Pete Gabe-obsessed man quoted above. But something happened after picking up the 25th anniversary rerelease of So for the former this Christmas. Maybe it was the sound quality—most of Gabriel’s songs sound like they could have been recorded last year—or the variety of the music or those funky world beats, but Peter Gabriel has become one of my favourite artists in the last month.