First up this week is “Space Oddity” by David Bowie from his 1969 self-titled album. I picked this song for really obvious reasons, seeing that David Bowie passed away suddenly and tragically this week. I can’t really call myself a huge David Bowie fan by any means, but he was one of those huge presences in popular culture which is always there, but one which you never really consider that they’re going to fade away Read More

Welcome back to the Metal Gear retrospective! In this entry we’re going to cover the seventh entry in the franchise, 2008’s Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. After years upon years of convoluted storytelling and epic moments, it looked as if the Metal Gear franchise was finally drawing to a close, with a storyline that promised to wrap up Solid Snake’s story for good. After all the batshit insanity that had characterized the franchise up Read More

Welcome back for part six of the Metal Gear retrospective. In this entry, we’re going to be covering Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops. As the first canonical entry in the series on a portable system, would this rather ambitious game carry the signature Metal Gear gameplay over the PSP successfully? Read on to find out… (Note, I did own a copy of this game for PSP and actually beat it 3 or 4 times on that system, Read More

Welcome back to the Metal Gear retrospective! In this entry we’re going to cover the fifth canonical installment in the franchise, 2004’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater! After all of the controversy surrounding the release of Sons of Liberty, would Kojima manage to win the fans back with a back-to-basics prequel? Read on to find out… (For this retrospective, I played the HD edition re-release on PS3. Unlike Sons of Liberty, there aren’t really any Read More

As you have probably heard by now, during this past week President Obama has taken executive action to try to push some more gun regulation in the US. Predictably, there has been considerable backlash to this decision, particularly by the NRA and Republican Presidential candidates. However, this condemnation obviously has nothing to do with the actual content of Obama’s action, but rather partisan politics at their absolute “finest”. This is an effective demonstration on just Read More

Welcome back to the Metal Gear retrospective! In this entry we’re going to cover the fourth game in the franchise, 2001’s Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty! After the massive, genre-defining success that was Metal Gear Solid, would Hideo Kojima’s big follow-up manage to deliver on the expectations of fans? Read on to find out… Before we go on further, in the interest of disclosure I feel that I should mention that when I Read More

First up this week we have “Blind” by Korn from their self-titled debut. I have a bit of an odd history with Korn: I saw them live in 2011 when they were double-headlining a concert with Disturbed, but didn’t really care for much of their music. However, I grew to really like the band’s (former, at the time) guitarist, Brian “Head” Welch, his conversion story and fantastic side-projects The Whosoevers, Save Me From Myself (the book Read More

Welcome back to the Metal Gear retrospective! In this entry we’re going to cover the third, and arguably most popular, game in the franchise, 1998’s Metal Gear Solid. This game often ends up in the top 5 in “Greatest Games of All Time” lists. Does it still retain its legendary status more than 17 years since its initial release? Read on to find out… (Note, I have beaten this game once on an emulator in 2007 Read More

Welcome back to the Metal Gear retrospective! In this entry we’re going to cover the second canonical game in the franchise, 1990’s Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. How would Kojima build upon the foundation he set up in 1987’s Metal Gear? Read on to find out… (Similarly to the first game in the series, I will be reviewing Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake based on the HD Edition re-release on PS3 on Original difficulty. Also, unlike Metal Read More

Kept you waiting, huh? It’s finally time for the Metal Gear retrospective! I’ve spent way too much time over the past few months getting through every canonical game in the franchise and then writing up my analyses, so hopefully you enjoy the fruits of my labour. For this retrospective, we’ll be only looking at the 11 canonical installments in the Metal Gear franchise, and then I’ll cap everything off with some final words, a ranking of the Read More

Good news – the Metal Gear retrospective is 100% complete and ready to go in the new year! I’ll be posting the first part on the 1st of January, and then a new post every second day thereafter, so be sure to tune in! It has been a lot of fun to go through the whole series and write up these analyses, so I hope you find them enlightening and enjoyable as well! First up this Read More

We’re going for a Christmas theme this week on the playlist (for obvious reasons, I would hope). Considering that this is a year-round playlist though, I’m going to be using the idea of a “Christmas song” fairly loosely in order to make my selections not feel very strange when you’re listening in late August. HONOURABLE MENTION: This being the year we lost Christopher Lee, I think now is the best time to check out his Read More

There’s a recurring argument which seems to occur within my family every couple months. Most recently it was triggered by Rajon Rondo’s anti-gay comments to a gay referee in an NBA game and his two subsequent non-apologies. On one side, the argument was being made that Rondo was being an asshole, but how was this different than player ribbing one another by making comments about their mothers/sisters? There was also the free speech argument being tossed Read More

First up this week is the famous title track from “American Pie” by Don McLean (no, not the 90s teen sex comedy). This is another one of those selections that everyone knows and loves, and for good reason – it’s fantastic and a cultural milestone. A lot of people have been stuck listening to the shorter radio edit, but for the IC2S Playlist I chose the full-length version, because it is simply better, full-stop. Definitely Read More