Published: 3 Oct 2026
Introduction
A quiet month this month, as I’ve been busy with “other real-life stuff”, both work (the joys of studying for AWS certifications) and also pouring a lot of effort into a new competitive season of Flesh and Blood TCG. I’m still undecided on whether to do a write-up at some point (my current deck is Oscilio, which is due to LL/‘rotate’ this upcoming season, so it’ll be likely a retrospective), although its a question of time rather than motivation - getting something coherent together is much more difficult for a constantly moving and evolving environment, for something much more ephemeral. We’ll see.
Music
- Not much on this front once again - no reviews and only a few new albums, mainly tuned in to the slow drip-feed of new albums from old artists’ who’s discography I’ve already exhausted.
- Gammacide’s Toxic Mercenaries
- No matter what, I always seem to listen to new Thrash albums from old bands (comeback or not) despite having an abysmal hit-rate in my books, mainly due to Thrash relying a lot on youthful exuberance and energy, which quickly gets lost. This is, yet another, mediocre, non-descript, slightly too slow for my liking, Thrash metal album from an 80s band made after the 80s.
- Anthrax’s Cursum Perficio
- However… despite my little spiel around Gammacide, Anthrax may have finally come out with a genuinely good modern Thrash album from an 80s band, in fact just a good Thrash album full stop, and from Anthrax of all bands!? They’ve always been the black sheep of the original Thrash “Big Four”, both in common consensus and personally, so I’m shocked. I’ll need to give it few more spins to see if it really sits with the best-of-the-best, but it for sure is one of the best post-80’s Thrash albums ever released by a band that was there at Thrash’s inception.
- Coroner’s Ex Nucleo
- More of an archival EP release (extracting out some the original material from Coroner’s 1995 self-titled, a mish-mash of original material, selected songs from previous albums, a remix and a live cut - which I’d never listened to due to this being a Frankenstein contractual obligation of an album post-breakup) with a remaster, and very much sounds like Grin-era Coroner, i.e. a Tech Thrash band evolving into more experimental and groovy areas while still keeping their cold, mechanical feel. Its very Coroner, and its very good, so nice to have this out in a separate release where it belongs.
- Gammacide’s Toxic Mercenaries
- I’ve also discovered a very good Melodeath band, Intestine Baalism, who’s entire 3-album run are all excellent and very much worth a listen.
Games
- Most of my energy has been channelled here: I’ve reviewed two more games in the Myst Series, Uru: Complete Chronicles (which I’d finished last month), and Myst IV: Revelation (which I’d finished this month).
- Uru: A very strange concept for a game (certainly now, but even then seemed highly unique and ambitious) that ultimately falls flat on its face - and the years passing have been nowhere near as kind to the more “orthodox” Myst entries. One of those strange games that’s fascinating in concept, fascinating to read about and read around (especially its troubled development, the MMO aspect and its unusual influence on games despite being a commercial failure) - but actually playing it? A real chore.
- Myst IV: Another odd, and poor entry within the Myst series - this time taking the attempted direction of shoehorning AAA-game development aesthetics and sensibilities with much more acting (FMV and voice), more cutscenes and scripted sequences and a general over-the-top bombasticness that is horribly at odds with the Myst series as a whole.
- Despite the disappointment, I did find a fascinating technical writeup around one of the main negatives of Revelation, the extremely long load times (see part 1 and part 2) that led to a fan-mod (named Myst IV: Revolution) alleviating these slow load times. I don’t have any ambition to revisit Revolution, not would I really recommend it to anyone, but it is nice to see that exists.
- I’ve started Myst V: End of Ages (despite the… disappointing quality of the previous two entries) in the hope of squaring off the mainline Myst franchise.
- I may stretch myself to revisit realMyst (the now awkward remake of Myst, sitting between the 1993/9 original and the more recent 2021 remake), simply as an excuse to revisit OG Myst again - but it may be time to take a break from Myst as a whole, but perhaps not from other point-and-click puzzle games. There’s a few Myst-likes I’m aware of (e.g. Cyan’s other non-Myst games such as Firmament and Obduction, the RHEM series, The Witness (which I had started but inadvertently dropped), The Outer Wilds, Blue Prince), but we’ll see.
Books
- Not much on this front here either, continuing on with the same stuff I was doing last month, continuing notes to review Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine (the very segmented chapter structure/writing style made it a fairly breezy read but a little difficult to pick out key points) while also continuing to chug through the tome that is Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa (almost there!… ish), all the while my “to-read” list piles up more-and-more, naturally.
Meta/Website
- I’m potentially looking at expanding the number of ’tabs’/review sections (e.g. Anime, Movies, Game Reports etc.) but also looking to see if I slightly tweak the website to have header tabs of some sort e.g. under a Games header/button, have two clickable ‘Reviews’ and ‘Reports’. As always, its finding the time to update what’s not broken, whilst also not wanting to write about things that currently don’t fit anywhere on the website (with the additional need to tweak the review formula for different mediums). If I write some variation of “I want to do X in future” enough times, it’ll surely kick my brain into gear that I might actually want to prioritise that over my many other endlessly deep buckets of ongoing work, right?
- Outside of this, there’s no update bar any minimal maintenance.
