fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
I learned to play drums by playing Rock Band. For several months, I spent a huge portion of my free time pushing the few pieces of furniture I owned to the periphery of my college apartment so that I could fire up my Xbox and smack wooden sticks against a flimsy contraption made of rubber [...]
Because I had planned poorly, the Vek—burrowing, alien kaiju—came swarming out of the dirt. The war was over, I had lost. With Earth thoroughly doomed, I took my one surviving pilot and abandoned the timeline, jumping through a rift in time and hoping to do better in an alternate universe. That sequence, on loop, is the [...]
The Nintendo 64 was the first video game system that really and truly impressed me. The flat graphics of the 16-bit generation were, from my adolescent viewpoint, limited but the N64 presented games in three dimensions, changing what video games could be and allowing for a previously inconceivable level of immersion. And while the Sony [...]
Tomorrow evening I'll come home to find Red Dead Redemption 2 waiting in a package on my doorstep. Long awaited and highly anticipated, the game is already awash in critical acclaim. I can't wait to play it. At the same time, I'm slightly afraid that I won't actually enjoy the game at all. RDR2 promises [...]
It may be that the final campfire scene in Final Fantasy XV is the single most emotional moment I've ever experienced through a video game. After spending 50-some odd hours with Noctis and his lovable band of dude-bros, having been absorbed into their friendships through a near-endless Road Trip to Save the World and subsequently [...]
I didn't plan on playing Final Fantasy XV. In truth, I didn't even want to play it, having ostensibly abandoned the series after the incomprehensible slog that was Final Fantasy XIII. Still, I couldn't help but read the reviews that started flooding out around Final Fantasy XV's late November release and, much to my surprise, the [...]
Like a lot of my nerdy brethren, I am very excited about the announcement that Square Enix is going to remake Final Fantasy VII. The announcement, though, raises a lot of questions about execution for which there are not yet any readily available answers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ4_t_GqGAM In fairness, I should note that I've spent more [...]
When I was in high school, students in the state of Michigan were required to spend a couple of days each year taking the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) test. Though the exact details elude me, I recall that one or two high school grade levels were not obligated to take the test each year. So on [...]
I'm a fan of long-form reviews. I think it's kind of crazy that we ask reviewers of books and albums and games to render a verdict in only few days on art that may have taken its creators months or, more likely, years to create. How could you process all of that information, how could you [...]
For reasons that are not entirely clear to even me, I spent a small chunk of last night playing Red Faction. To those of you unfamiliar with that title, suffice to say that it's a video game from 2001 and, perhaps unsurprisingly given all the technological advancements in that medium in the past 13 years, [...]
Songs & Stories 