the website of author and local favorite blake michael nelson | about | contact: theblakeshow@gmail.com
|
NEWS AND VIEWS - DECEMBER 2023
WRITING NEWS I finished writing the first and second chapters of City of Strange Gods this month. Jack from The Adventures of Jack and Miracle Girl, Chance from Galatea and the Dupe, Raye/Sneak from Sneak and the Shadow of Darkplanet, and Ally from Champions Weekly are the POV characters in this one, and Max and his Signal Intelligence outfit play a pretty big role as well. (Orchid, unfortunately, doesn't appear, and neither do Kaden and Izzy from the White Ribbon books, but they'll probably be getting their own standalone sequels eventually.) I've been having fun with it so far, but the book takes place in 2024, almost ten years after the events of the Jack and Miracle Girl books, seven years after Disreputable Persons, six years after Champions Weekly, and four years after Sneak and the Shadow of Darkplanet, so a lot of things have changed for these characters, and catching the reader up on everything that's been going on, without seeming like I'm doing it, has been kind of a challenge. Hopefully these first few chapters don't come out too infodumpy. * * * * * * * * I HATE THESE GAMES A few months back I wrote something about the movies I like that nobody else does, and the movies I hate that everyone else likes. Are there any video games which fall into these categories? Maybe a few. I'll be the first to admit that Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Bill and Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure for the NES, and Nolan Ryan's Baseball for the SNES, are not exactly classic games, but I played them a lot when I was a kid and I continue to have a kind of nostalgic affection for them. I feel the same way about The Adventures of Willy Beamish for the Sega CD and some of the old TI-99 4/A games like Parsec, Jawbreaker, and Car Wars. There's also a few games that I would consider underrated, like Dark Wizard for the Sega CD, Um Jammer Lammy for the PS1 (which I think is better than Parappa), and some of the Tales RPG's, but I can't really think of any games that I consider "great" but that everyone else hates. On the other hand, there's lots of games I didn't like or couldn't get into that many gamers seem to love. Dragon Age: Origins. I got about an hour into this game before giving up on it. The battle sequences were so chaotic I couldn't figure out what was going on half the time, the graphics were terrible (admittedly I was playing it on a PS3, not on PC), and the story just struck me as generic fantasy crap. Assassin's Creed II. I never played the first game, but it seemed like something I might like, so I bought this sequel. I guess the gameplay was all right, but the ludicrous frame story, about this guy going back in time to relive his ancestors' lives or whatever...well, I just thought that was silly, and extraneous, and I never bothered with any of the other games in the series. Wasteland II. I like the Fallout setting, and the Wasteland setting is similar, so I decided to give it a try. What a waste of time! My squad was constantly getting wiped out, simple things like healing and equipping weapons were way more complicated than they needed to be, and the battles were simply unfair -- I'd have a 75% chance of hitting a target and I'd miss every frickin' time, while my opponents were somehow hitting me every time despite having only a 35% chance of making the shot. The whole game was just an exercise in frustration, and every quest I fell into had some kind of bad outcome, too, regardless of the choices I made. For some reason, though, people seem to love this game, and its sequel, too. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something. Mass Effect. I gave it a try, but something about this game just bugged me. The Metal Gear series. I never got anywhere with Metal Gear Solid or Metal Gear Solid 2. These are probably good games, but I just hate stealth games. I'm not a patient guy; I like to just rush in and Leeroy Jenkins my way through games. It's why I always lose at Street Fighter. Those are the games/series I actively dislike. There's a few more games which I consider overrated, though: Chrono Trigger. It's a great RPG, but personally, I hate the silent protagonist trope, and I think Final Fantasy VI had better music and more complex characters. Persona 5. I've written about this one before. Fallout: New Vegas. The problem with this game, and indeed with almost all of Bethesda's recent games (Fallout 4, Skyrim) are the factions. Probably this is just me, but I hate hate hate factions, and I hate having to choose one or another in order to advance the main quest. In New Vegas you're forced to side with either Caesar's Legion, who are a bunch of psychos, the New California Republic, which is corrupt and sclerotic, or Mr. House, an annoying asshole who is constantly belittling you. I didn't want to side with any of these groups. The same thing happens in Fallout 4, except it's even worse -- if you choose to side with, say, the Brotherhood of Steel, they'll eventually send you out on a quest to kill the Minutemen and everyone at the Institute, despite the fact that the Minutemen helped you out at the beginning of the game and have been nothing but friendly to you throughout your adventure. For these reasons, I usually just ignore the main quests in these games and spend most of my time wandering around -- completing the subquests, filling out the map, and collecting new weapons and armor. That's the fun I have with Fallout. * * * * * * * * THE CONTENDERS Jake Paul just won another fight. This guy does have some talent, and if it were properly cultivated he could probably become a decent boxer, but his continued success in this sport has less to do with his own talent, I think, than with the absymal state of boxing today. If this YouTube "influencer" guy, who basically started boxing as a lark, can go out there and knock out MMA guys and even a handful of okayish boxers, well, that says more about the sorry state of boxing than it does about anything else. I watch old boxing videos on YouTube when I'm working out. The other day I watched the first fight between Monte Barrett and David Tua, which took place in 2010. Tua, a big, stocky slugger, managed to hurt Barrett in the early rounds, but Barrett gradually came back, keeping Tua at bay with his jab. Barrett finally knocked Tua down in the final round. I thought it was a pretty entertaining fight. But then, immediately afterward, I watched Larry Holmes' first fight with Earnie Shavers, and I was struck by how much more skillful these guys looked compared to Tua or Barrett. The Tua-Barett fight was an ugly, pawing, plodding affair. Holmes-Shavers was a masterpiece in comparison, with both men exhibiting good footwork, good head movement, and great technical skill. There was an artistry there that simply wasn't present in the Tua-Barrett fight. It was a good reminder of just how far boxing has fallen over the last several decades. And it made me feel a little sad for Shavers, who was one of those perennial contenders back in the 1970's. He had the bad luck to be boxing in an era when the heavyweight division was full of incredible talents like Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, and to a lesser extent Ken Norton. If he was boxing today, he'd probably have at least one of the alphabet belts. I think he might have a hard time with Tyson Fury, because of the size difference and because Shavers tended to have trouble with boxers, but I'd pick a prime Shavers to beat just about every other heavyweight out there today, even Usyk. Jerry Quarry, Ron Lyle, Jimmy Ellis, and even Jimmy Young would probably clean up the heavyweight division if they were fighting today, too. Even some of the lesser talents from the 80's and early 90's would probably dominate the division today: Ray Mercer, Razor Ruddock, Tony Tucker, definitely Riddick Bowe. Unfortunately, as with Shavers, these guys had the misfortune of fighting during a talent-rich era, having to contend not only with each other, but with the likes of Tyson, Holyfield, and Lennox Lewis. Any one of them would blow away Jake Paul, though. * * * * * * * * THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENTS Another Christmas come and gone. I got some pretty good gifts -- my brother and his wife bought me an enormous fully automatic Mastodon Nerf gun, and my parents bought me a Mumm-Ra action figure I didn't have. Yeah, I admit it, I'm basically a big kid. These toys got me thinking about some previous Christmases, and some of the gifts I got. The first Christmas I really remember was the Christmas of 1986, when my family lived in Colorado. We didn't have a lot of money, and I wasn't really expecting very much, but my parents really came through -- they sent away for a Mumm-Ra figure (the beginning of that obsession) and bought me a Lion-O and this huge Cat's Lair playset. Needless to say, I was big into ThunderCats back then. Anyway, I still have the Cat's Lair, which is sitting on top of one of my many bookshelves -- it's missing a few pieces, but it's pretty much all intact and the electronics still work, somehow. Another memorable Christmas morning was the Christmas of 1990. In addition to some toys and gadgets, my parents bought me two VHS tapes: copies of Back to the Future Part II and Return of the Jedi. I was so excited when I got these movies that I was bouncing off the walls. It's probably hard for younger people to understand, but back in the early 90's, there was no YouTube, no Netflix, and no streaming services, and we didn't have cable TV at our house, so the only way to watch a movie was to see it in the theater, to buy, rent, or borrow the VHS tape, or to hope against hope that it would someday air on broadcast TV. We didn't go the theater very often and renting a movie from the grocery store was a fairly rare treat, so to actually own my own copies of these movies, and to be able to watch them again and again, was just thrilling. There was also the Christmas of 1994. The only thing I wanted this Christmas was a copy of Final Fantasy III for the Super NES. I wanted this game like Ralphie wanted that Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle, and like Ralphie, I was worried I wouldn't get it, partly because my parents were prejudiced against video games and didn't think I should be playing them in the first place (they were always worried about my bad math grades), and partly because they didn't really know very much about them; it wasn't hard to imagine them making a mistake and buying the wrong thing. 
I really, really wanted this game, though, so I dropped hints and made lists and did everything I could think of to implant this game, Final Fantasy III, indeliably into my parents' subconscious, to paraphrase Ralphie. And to my surprise and delight, they came through for me. They also bought me a copy of Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, which I wasn't particularly interested in, but hey, it was a Final Fantasy game, and I didn't mind having it on my collection. They also bought me the latest Calvin and Hobbes collection that year, as I recall. A good year. |