And i guess any work that brings out feelings like mine, even if they are rather negative, can be considered effective art.

That’s the charitable take, and i find it very unlikely that this was the intent. But it’s the only framework that makes my experience make sense.

There’s part of me that genuinely wonders as to if the point of the game is that people often do stupid things, our attempts to fix things can make things much worse, and desolation shouldn’t be fun - and feeling empty and frustrated is intentional. If that’s indeed the case- this is truly art.

Not everyone will feel as I do, and I am sure there are many who love Prime 4. All I can do is examine where things started to go bad for me… and i keep coming back to solitary isolation vs Adam and Space Marines, discovery vs. exposition. Agency vs. duty.

All of this ultimately culminates in an ending that is guaranteed to make pretty much nobody happy, leaving the player unsatisfied.

The funny thing is that if you go back and explore once you have reached endgame, there’s a lot of satisfying gameplay there that has been locked off until then.

I normally am not one to be bothered by a sequel, or go on frustrated rants about games, so why is this one getting to me? I think its because it lies to the player about what it could be, with the lush, beautiful, and small area of Fury Green, and just treats the player with contempt.

The padding in 4 is already fairly obvious (green crystals have been talked about enough) - but even the little things add up. Damage sponges and extremely complicated doors are everywhere… But even scanning something takes significantly longer in 4! There are SO many micro-delays.

Just a couple of hours into replaying 1, I can see where several boss battles were lifted almost directly, except made less interesting. The large armored beetle, the fire drone, the war wasps - they all are directly lifted into a battle in 4 that is less engaging, yet drags on much longer.

Went back to play Metroid Prime 1. It is an objectively better game than 4, even the aspects that haven’t aged well.

The environments in 1 encourage exploration, and are more intricate, more full. Outside of fury green, 4 is empty desert, a single snowy path, and tons of facilities/tunnels.

Every power is a rebadged power from an earlier game, outside of maybe two, which mostly act themselves as keys. The empty open world itself mocking the concept, immediately lying to you that you can go wherever you want as soon as you get to it, despite there being a strict path.

I’ve started to think of it as a spiritual successor to MGS2 in terms of being a fundamentally dadaist game, and oh my god does it make a lot of sense in that context. It deconstructs the series into hunting of keys that themself require keys, with locks literally saying “spin to open”.

I can't decide if Metroid Prime 4 is a parody of FPS games and late 80s/early 90s action movie tropes or not, but the further I get into it - my god, this HAS to be intentional, there is absolutely no way it could be this dense with this much of the most mocked aspects of both by accident... right?

Me in my teens: How can I learn technology most effectively?
Me in my 20s: How can I work with technology most effectively?
Me in my 30s: How can I make technology work for me most effectively?
Me in my 40s: How can I work against technology most effectively?

I think my purpose in life may be to convince businesses/organizations that having free-form text input fields with no character limit is a bad idea.

I broke another one yesterday - not due to any sort of exploit, just with the power of raw, unfiltered anxiety.

It’s 1995, and l’m walking down the street while a block party blasts Bell Biv Devoe. Jerry Bruckheimer and Brad Pitt are the present buzz in the movie industry.

It’s 2025, and I’m walking down the street while a block party blasts Bell Biv Devoe.…

If anything ever happens to me, please do what you can to ensure a fitting tribute, like perhaps the belle of louisville performing a calliope dirge, backed by an ice cream truck chorus.

If you take anything away from all of this rambling, I hope that it’s a curiosity and openness to exploring some of these things if you have been on that mild to moderate threshold of “able to get by.” It’s been very beneficial to me so far, and I’m curious where this journey leads from here.

I think it would be very easy to fall in to a gear acquisition trap with all of the hearing aid options that are out there, both OTC and prescription, especially if you are a music hardware guy. I suspect that path is a most disappointing one - and expensive. Be aware of real limitations.

But i also think it’s important to temper your expectations, and be realistic about what hearing aids can and cannot do, and the fact that hearing loss - in most cases - cannot be restored to perfection. Be realistic about where you are and what can be done, and what you can and cannot live with.

I am very new to this. I’m sure that a lot of what I’m saying seems ridiculous to anyone dealing with much worse. But for you all dealing with being in that mild to moderate threshold, i encourage you to explore options, add most importantly, stick with it. We have more options now than ever.

The sonys also saved my ass when i had a sudden loss in both ears that was way asymmetrical that left me unable to normally understand anyone - not their use case, but after going through setup again, it compensated for the asymmetry and was enough help that i could get by with some effort.

At first, i did not like them, but sticking with them has paid off. They aren’t great for music, and you wont stream to them via bluetooth or anything like that - they are strictly for being out in the world, and they are outstanding for that… like, seriously a tangible difference.

Otherwise, for interacting with the world around me, i’ve settled on the Sony CRE-C20s for now. I’ve been advised that for my particular hearing loss, along with the added variability in it, these are a great starting point. They are tiny things that disappear in my ear and run all day.

For mixing and mastering, it sends best to stream through the AirPods and their “media” hearing correction and live with the delay - i can hear every audiophile screaming at the idea of this right now, but it’s the compromise that works for me - at least at the non professional level i work at.

Live electronic is a different story, with so many moving parts. For that, a separate eq for monitoring that’s the inversion of an audiogram seems like a reasonable idea, and is what I’m trying - things get muddy and weird through the aids I’ve tried, so i just do it without.

I’m still trying to figure out what i should compensate for here, and experimenting. For live music, i don’t know what options there really are- and honestly, how much it matters if you aren’t the sound guy. Just playing one instrument, it may not be a big deal - that’s all very individual.

Dynamic range and EQ are the things you’d expect to change, but theres a bit of a comb filter and a bit crusher on everything as well- and things can end up just sounding strange. Some of this you can adapt to, but for mild to moderate, you may actually be better off just not using a hearing aid.

Again, to be clear - I’m talking about this from the mild to moderate hearing loss perspective. For severe to profound, I know much of what i am talking about is a luxury.

For mild to moderate, we are in a position where hearing aids help us in some ways, but radically alter playing/making music.

So I “did my own research” as people love to say these days, and looked at other options.

One thing that quickly becomes clear when you look at hearing aids is that they are optimized for speech and interacting with the world around you - as they should be. Music - well, thats different.

So while the airpods are kind of incredible in terms of lowering the barriers for me getting over my own ego to try this, they had a few shortcomings - battery life seems suddenly short when you want to wear them all day, live music sounded odd, and you look like you are tuning the world out.

I used to talk really loud. I don’t think i realized this before. But that was a small thing… the big thing was the cognitive load that had been freed up.

I used to end every day exhausted, and i think now that this was just the effort of trying to understand people all day. I feel less so now.