Two listens so far. I’m definitely loving it and I think it’s hitting that great balance between progressive metal technicality and the catchy grooviness of thrash. There’s lots of great memorable riffs and sections, and I really love how there’s a consistent beat ticking throughout the more complicated time signatures (reminds me of the cross-tempos of the Timeland albums). Drumming is incredible too. Definitely a great first few impressions, I’m curious how well it’ll hold up over time.

There’s not too places you can damage things when installing, but I think the most understated one is the USB 3.0 header that you connect from the case to the motherboard. The plug is super tight and very difficult to remove once you put it in, so I recommend only plugging it in once you’re ready to start using your machine. I know too many stories of people breaking it and not being able to plug in USB devices to the front of their PC case because of this.

Definitely looking forward to KGATLW. There’s also The Beggar by Swans coming out on soon on June 23, and I’m looking forward to The Harmony Codex by Steven Wilson on September 29. I do go in fairly blind to these albums though, so I’m hyped purely by these artists’ previous works.

The 3D rotating menu picker is cool in concept but I can attest that it took me longer to rotate it the right way the first few dozen times I tried using it. It does make a lot of sense how they broke down the log entries by a hierarchy instead of having all “research” in one long list though.

I think Prime 3’s got the same lack of diegetic UI as Prime 2, mostly because they want to support having a mouse cursor style of control with the Wii pointer. Also they really liked hexagons when designing all the UI in that game.