A Green Mushroom

I've been playing games with subtitles turned on a lot lately.  I touched on it in my post yesterday, but I wanted to expand my thoughts on it a bit. There's nothing wrong with my hearing, but I play a lot of PS4 and Wii U games while I'm on my exercise bike.  When I'm exercising I listen to audio books or podcasts.  I typically turn the TV volume all the way down. To get the story while I'm on my bike I can either pause my audio while turning up the TV or I can just turn subtitles on at the beginning of a game and then not worry about it.  I almost always choose subtitles now. If it's a story driven game that I'm very invested in I won't play it while biking, but if I'm just in it for the gameplay then it becomes a good candidate. When I was playing Arkham Knight I would work on side quests while biking and then devote my full attention to the game (with sound on) while progressing through the main story the first time. It's been i...

Last week before my trip I watched my first ever season of an anime show.  As you can probably tell from the title of the post, it was Sword Art Online. I've tried various anime shows over the years but I've never been able to get past the first few episodes of one.  Usually the pacing is too slow and the show isn't visually interesting enough for me.  My brother has told me that modern anime is much better than what I tried to watch long ago, but I haven't had much time to check out any of the shows he recommended. Then, last week, I heard some of the podcast members on Aggrochat talk about the premise of Sword Art Online and I was very interested.  Essentially, Sword Art Online is a fully immersive MMO in an advanced virtual reality.  The premise of the show is that only 10,000 people were allowed a copy of the game at launch and as soon as they all log in on launch day they are locked in the game until they can complete it. They end up stuck in the ...