I later made a Top 10 or Top 5 list for each album, depending on how big the album was to begin with.
Gavin Dunne has now released his ninth Level album, so I’m here to give it the same treatment as I did for the previous ones!
5. Setting Sun
A heartfelt country song inspired by the western game Red Dead Redemption 2, with a few lines calling back to his Redemption Blues song, inspired by the first Red Dead Redemption game.
4. Starting Over
Another country song, this time inspired by the disappointing Fallout 76.
Just goes to show that you can make something good out of anything, even out of something bad.
3. Machine Hearts
I have not played NieR: Automata yet (due to my huge backlog), but the beautiful guest vocals by Sharm makes that point moot.
Great song, can’t wait to play this game!
2. Giants Fall
Shadow Of The Colossus is an epic and hauntingly beautiful game, just like this song based on it.
1. The Death of Rock ‘N’ Roll
While rock is not as present in mainstream culture as it once was, it has evolved and found new homes.
Rock is not dead, and this song has a ton of soul!
During the late 90s, when I was between six and nine years old, I was a giant Spider-Man fan!
I never read any of the comics, I was more into Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck comics when I was little, but I have enjoyed his adventures through other media.
I was first introduced to the character through the Norwegian dub of the Fox Kids cartoon.
I used to play with my friends, but instead of Cops & Robbers we’d play as Spider-Man and his villains.
Spider-Man villains are the best in the genre, with only Batman villains coming close, so they were a huge reason for my infatuation with the series.
I liked to play as Shocker, due to his cool costume and ability to shoot shock-waves out of his hands. Although I had him confused with Electro for years as a result of his powers being changed from sound based to electrical based in the cartoon for some reason.
Later, I fell in love with Sam Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films from 2002 and 2004.
When I saw Spider-Man 3 in 2007, I was afraid that I had grown out of the franchise, so I was very happy when I later learned that the film was universally despised.
I wonder how many people have thought that they have grown out of something they loved simply because they saw a bad iteration of it.
‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ film from 2012 and its 2014 sequel did a lot to make me forgive Spider-Man 3.
Spider-Man 3 may have been the worst of the Raimi films, but it was still a film about Spider-Man, not a Sony marketing campaign starring a cool dude dressing up as Spidey on a lark.
So after three subpar Spider-movies in a row, it felt amazing to see Peter Parker show up in ‘Captain America: Civil War’ in 2016, fighting alongside Iron Man and the other Avengers, back in the nurturing arms of Marvel Studios.
And then ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ took that ball and ran with it the very next year, and now ‘Homecoming’ is my second favorite Spider-Man film ever, my favorite being Spider-Man 2.
This year, Spider-Man played a pivotal role in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’, next year will have sequels to both ‘Infinity War’ and ‘Homecoming’ with ‘Avengers: Endgame’ and ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ being released, and at the moment I am having a great time playing the new PlayStation 4 Spider-Man game.
It really makes me feel like I’m a friendly neighborhood spiderman, as I swing through New York with ease.
And today, 14th of December 2018, the new animated film ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ is released, and by all accounts I’ve heard so far, it is great.
This is truly a wonderful time to be a Spider-fan!
I don’t know what it is about Spider-Man that makes me like him so much.
I have a fear of heights (and I don’t much care for speed either), yet I often imagine myself swinging from building to building.
Perhaps, with great imagination comes a loss of anxiety.
This time I’m checking off five games I played by myself on PlayStation 4.
Prey (2017)
Prey is a first-person shooter horror game set on a space station orbiting Earth in 2035.
The game is very reminiscent of Bioshock, in that you are traversing a beautifully built structure with danger coming from within the structure in the form of enemies, and from outside the structure in the form of natural forces.
Whereas in Bioshock you have to face a gaggle of biologically altered psychopaths while the sea destroys the underwater city the game is set in, in Prey you have to face a horde of aliens with the ability to mimic everyday objects as a form of camouflage, all while the vacuum of space looms outside the walls.
Mooncrash DLC
This piece of downloadable content takes the action down to a hostile moon base, and has some randomly generated parts to it.
As with the base game, I absolutely loved the story in this one, maybe even more than the one in the base game.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
When I wrote the backlog list I had already played the first Uncharted game years ago, and I was sure that I had a collector’s box containing the second and third game for Playstation 3.
I may have lost it, or I just never had it to begin with, but since Uncharted 2 is considered to be a classic I decided to just buy it remastered for the Playstation 4.
The Uncharted series was made by the video game studio Naughty Dog.
Naughty Dog has made some of my all-time favorite games, like the Crash Bandicoot series and ‘The Last of Us’.
Crash Bandicoot may in fact be the first game I ever played, and while I can’t be completely sure of that, it was an incredibly nostalgic trip to play the HD rerelease of the first three Crash games earlier this year.
Naughty Dog have always been great developers, and Uncharted 2 is one of their finest works.
It is an action masterpiece, and a love letter to Indiana Jones, Lara Croft and National Treasure.
One of the parts I enjoyed the most was an action sequence that takes place on top of a moving train in Nepal, traveling from the urban Kathmandu Valley to the high Himalayas without breaking gameplay.
It must have taken forever to design a stretch of land that huge, but it paid off.
It’s one of the coolest levels I have played whole year.
Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
The third game in this series is not as beloved as the second and fourth, so since it turned out I didn’t actually own it, I decided to skip it.
I instead watched some recaps on YouTube to fill myself in on the plot before starting Uncharted 4.
Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End
This game builds on it’s predecessors beautifully.
It is bigger, more fun to play, and has a more emotional storyline.
The story takes you on a journey from Scotland, through Madagascar, and ends with a giant portion on a massive island, the lost pirate kingdom of Libertalia.
The action set-pieces is better than ever, and there are a few car chases that really gives that train sequence a run for it’s money.
The Lost Legacy DLC
This is a massive adition to the game which lets you discover lost cities in the ancient Hoysala Empire, in a big beautiful area of India’s Western Ghats.
Invisible, Inc.
This is a short game with espionage puzzle gameplay.
I had a lot of fun setting up ambushes for guards, and sneaking around in general.
Stealth can often be difficult to make fun, but this game nailed it!
