What are you playing? Clay Withrow of Vangough is digging ‘Resident Evil 7’

In What Are You Playing, we catch up with musicians about their favorite video games, systems and games that influenced them. Today, progressive trio Vangough’s guitarist/vocalist Clay Withrow, whose album Warpaint will be self-released on March 17th, talks about some of the games he’s been playing lately.

You can preorder Warpaint here.

I just finished Resident Evil 7 and it’s such a great game that really gets back to the roots of what I loved about the first three games (can argue Code Veronica as well), such as the horror-movie aesthetic and brooding atmosphere. Though, what initially attracted me to the series was its resemblance to a George Romero Dead film, especially Resident Evil 2 with its burning cars in the city streets. I love that game so much and still think it’s one of my favorite homages to the classic zombie movie pedigree.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Mortal Kombat X recently after a long hiatus. I’m focusing on learning just one character well so I can mix it up between quick high or low combos, starters and being able to switch my strategy up mid-fight. I initially started toying with Sub-Zero and Reptile, but landed on Raiden. He’s got a good variety of moves, simple high, mid and low combos and he’s the god of thunder. I haven’t even checked if he’s low-tier or not. Probably is. But he’s too much fun.

Finally, I just got out of a month-long obsession with Bloodborne, which I missed out on when it first released. Needless to say, it is fucking fantastic. Maybe one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. I’m waiting for the DLC to go on sale but in the meantime I’ve been exploring the Chalice Dungeons, which never get old to me.

Even though I’ve been playing these PS4 games a lot recently I think most of my gaming time is spent on the Wii U or N64. Lately my friend and I have busted out a few of our favorite N64 games like Mortal Kombat Trilogy and NBA Hangtime. Both amazing games that I would argue have aged like fine wine. Back in the day both games mainly received lukewarm reviews because true 3D graphics was the new hotness while games with 2D graphics like MK were seen as antiquated.

https://youtu.be/fOlEgEEgA14

But funny enough, those 2D games seem to hold up the best after all these years. And MK Trilogy is oddly one of those games that shouldn’t be as fun as it is due to the limitations of the N64 cartridge, which meant they had to cut a lot of corners to make the game fit. But damn, I think it’s one of the most fun games out there today. 3-on-3 kombat is insanely addicting. When one of your characters dies he or she just explodes and the next character jumps right out before the blood even hits the floor. It’s an adrenaline rush and we find ourselves spending hours into the night playing. I told my buddy next time we do N64 game night, I’ve gotta leave MK Trilogy at home because we never play anything else.

With that I gotta say I love my N64 the most out of all my systems. It just has a lot of meaty games with tons of replay value that hold up over time. And it has a huge collection of arcade sports and racing games that were never re-released after all these years, which is a shame. Also you have to love no loading screens, no navigating through a home menu or anything that removes the focus from just playing games. Slam that cart in and feel the rush of cutting-edge pulse-pounding 64-assblasting-bits of power!

So that’s a snapshot of what I’ve been playing lately. If your readers also like games like we do, they should check out our video series where we play through the games in my collection. We’re currently recording more gameplay videos but already have a few up. Let us know what you think and also be sure to check out our new lyric video for “Morphine” from the album Warpaint, out March 17! You can pre-order the CD at our Bandcamp as well. Thanks so much!