cobysev

Control is one of my favorite games! I’ve really wanted to review it here, but I wanted to review Alan Wake first, since they’re tangentially connected. And you kept playing Alan Wake and posting about it, so I didn’t want to add more Alan Wake content to this community at the same time. It’s my goal to keep adding new content, which is why I generally don’t go back and discuss games I’ve already reviewed once.

I remember the game being short […]

Short?! I’ve played for 36 hours and still haven’t beaten it! Granted, I stopped playing when I got stuck on a boss fight and didn’t want to grind endless mobs to level up for the fight. Then when I did return, I decided to just start the whole game over because it’d been so long since I last played, I forgot what was going on. So I have two half-played game sessions on Steam.

Also, I got absorbed in the details of the game. Something about it scratches a particular itch for me so I love just exploring every nook and cranny and collecting every little bit of lore I can find in game. I love the world of SCP, and this game is based on the overall concept of it. I especially like how this game retcons Alan Wake into an anomaly that The Oldest House is tracking.

[…] if you said introducing them to true local food […]

I did. I took my family to locally-owned restaurants, not food chains or fast food places. Just because I mentioned a couple familiar food types doesn’t mean I bought them from a fast food joint. Still, my family didn’t care for them. They wanted recognizable American fast food instead.

In one case, a Japanese friend of mine invited my family over to her parents’ house to have a home-cooked dinner. My family were weirded out by the food and barely ate. It wasn’t even strange foods; they had grilled marinated meats, rice, some local vegetables, etc. My dad did enjoy the sake though.

Growing up, my family has always accused me of being a picky eater, and it comes up every time we’re eating together. Every family get-together, it’s always a big deal whether I’m going to eat the prepared meal or not. My sister especially likes to offer to make a separate meal just for me because I’m “sooo picky!”

I can’t get it through their skulls that I’m less of a picky eater than they are - I’m just vocal about the very few specific foods I decided I don’t like. Which happens to be in a lot of recipes my extended family makes.

I spent 20 years traveling the world with the US military and I made it a point to try local cuisine everywhere I went. I became a bit of a foodie, and some of my favorite foods are from foreign countries. Every time family members came to visit me in other countries, I’d spend half of their visit just introducing them to amazing cuisine in the local area.

We’d eat out practically every day to give them a taste of the local culture. And surprisingly, most of them didn’t care for it. They wanted their “American food” instead. They weren’t very adventurous when it came to trying new things. There’s nothing worse than going to a ramen shop in Japan or a döner shop in Germany and having your family ask if we can go find a McDonald’s instead.

But sure, I’m a picky eater because I’ve hated squash since I was a child, and that’s apparently a staple of every family banquet.