Announcements and Upcoming Plans 2018.1

I've been on vacation and completely neglected to mention that!  Oops.

But yeah, all sorts of things have been going on over here.  My roommate went to Florida for a few days, so my wife Jessie and I decided to just enjoy having the house to ourselves.  Unfortunately Jess caught a bad cold, so a lot of our time was actually spent with her feeling poorly.

On a more positive note, my sister-in-law is currently visiting with her daughter.  Jessie and I haven't seen our niece since she was a baby, so this has been our first chance to really interact with her, which has been a lot of fun.  I've always felt like I would be a good dad but an awesome uncle.

Oh, I've also been playing a blue ton of Elite Dangerous.  I'm actually supercruising to a space station as I write this post.  So yeah, you could say I've been distracted.

But that's okay, because I'm still here, and I actually have a lot of announcements to make regarding upcoming posts.  So without further ado or adon't, let's get to it!

Announcement Numero Uno: I am happy to announce that I will now be keeping to a specific schedule for blog posts.  Starting today and continuing into the foreseeable future, new posts will go up on Monday and Friday.  Specifically, I'll be writing a post every Monday and Friday afternoon, to be posted in the evening, after they've been checked over and whatnot.

There's no hard schedule as to what kind of posts will go up when, it'll basically be whatever I have in the tank, but I already have two Confirmed Kills (my laziness has been productive) and a smattering of "obscure stuff" reviews.

Speaking of which, I'm also here to officially announce the title of that series: Vault of the Obscure!.  And yes, the exclamation point is part of the title.  I'll have the first of those posts up either Monday or Friday of next week (so either February 5th or 9th) depending on how things work out.  This is something I'm really excited to get started on, and I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I will.

On a somewhat related note, you may have noticed some subtle (and not so subtle) changes to the layout of the blog over the past few weeks as I've tried to figure out what works and what doesn't.  I'm generally happy with how it looks right now, but I've still been feeling like it doesn't have enough of its own identity, especially when it comes to each individual series of posts.

And so, with that in mind, I'm going to slowly (as in, over the course of months) be overhauling the site completely, with a new layout, new designs, and official logos and headers for the site itself as well for the different post series, such as Confirmed Kills, Blogtober, and otherwise.  The idea is to give this blog its own identity, as well as give each series its own, slightly different, feel.

But with all that said, that's pretty much all the announcements I have for today.  This Friday, February 2nd, will see the first Confirmed Kill post of the new schedule, so look forward to that, and in the meantime I'll be working hard to make sure I have new stuff to write about all the time.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Persona 5 Original Soundtrack (2017)
Playing - Elite Dangerous: Horizons (2015)
Reading - Deadlands: Hell on Earth (IDW, 1998)
Watching - The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Worth Your Time: Civilization VI/Humble Monthly

Boy, time has really gotten away from me.   That first "obscure stuff" post was supposed to be up days ago!  Don't worry, I'm still working on it, I've just hit some snags along the way that have caused some delays.  For now, though, I'm here to tell you about a deal that you can take advantage of right now!

Ugh, forget I said that.  This isn't a sales pitch.

You may have heard of Humble Bundle before.  Maybe you've even partaken of their awesome "cheap bundles of digital content that also provide money to charity" in the past.  If so, good on you!  You're both contributing to a great cause and getting a great deal.  I've personally been taking advantage of the service for a few years now, and I have a ton of awesome stuff to show for it.

Something that's relatively new to me, however, is Humble's monthly subscription service, aptly titled Humble Monthly.  It's sort of like a digital Loot Crate kind of thing, where you pay $12 (USD) a month, and you get a whole slew of digital games delivered to your Humble account.  Each game is attached to a code that you then redeem on Steam, and the game is added to your Steam library.

Now, I've known about the service for a few months now, but I had yet to see any major games on offer that really made me pull the trigger.  Don't get me wrong, it's always great stuff, it's just so far been great stuff that I personally already own or am not interested in.  This month, though, they finally hooked me.

I've been a big fan of the Civilization series ever since I first played Civ3 back in the day.  I've never been great at strategy style games, but I still love to play them every now and then, and Civilization is pretty much my go-to.  Civ5 was, unfortunately, not quite what I was hoping it would be.  I didn't hate it, but it just didn't gel with me at the time for whatever reason.

Still, though, as soon as I heard about Civ6, I knew I would get it eventually.  I was mainly just waiting for a good price to converge with a driving urge to play it.  Well, imagine my excitement when I discovered that Civilization VI is the leading game in this month's Humble Monthly package.

Let me put that into clear terms.  Up until February 1st, you can go to Humble Bundle, pay $12 (USD) to sign up for Humble Monthly, and get Civilization VI, plus two DLC packs for it (Australia Civlization & Scenario Pack and Vikings Scenario Pack), plus a whole host of other games that haven't been revealed yet.  And just to top it off, you also get 10% off any purchases made in the Humble store, and that even applies to things that are already on sale.

So naturally, I jumped at the deal, and am now a Humble Monthly member.  I can't say now whether I'll stay signed up permanently, but it's safe to say I'll hang around for at least a couple months.

But what about Civilization VI?  Well, I blazed through that signup process and installed the game ASAP.  According to my Steam page, I've already put 21 hours into it, and I've been having a blast.  Before I get into my specific thoughts on the game, though, I'd like to take a second to address something up front.

See, here's the thing: there's this weird controversy surrounding the game that I genuinely don't understand, but it seems to orbit around the prospect of DLC for the game.  Basically, the base game comes with 18 Civilizations (19 if you count the fact that Greece has two separate leaders, but we'll ignore that), and other Civs can be bought as DLC for between $4.99 and $8.99 USD (the more expensive ones come with two Civilizations).

If you go to the Steam store page for pretty much any piece of DLC for the game (and the game itself, to an extent), you'll see them awash with scathing reviews.  These negative reviews are almost always centered around the fact that DLC exists for the game at all.  People accuse 2K Games and Firaxis of cutting this content out of the base game just to charge more for it.  They make the accusation that the base game is basically just a demo, and suggest you have to buy all of these Civilizations in order to actually own the "complete" game.

Now, let's ignore for a moment the fact that we live in a world in which EA Games bases their entire business model around "games as a service," squeezing every nickel they can out of every game they make for the smallest amount of effort possible, thus making these accusations comparatively laughable.

No, instead let's focus on the fact that, back in 2010, Civilization V also launched with 18 civilizations.  Let's talk about the fact that Civilization V's store page also has extra Civilizations on sale as DLC and still charges a minimum of $4.99 USD for this DLC for an eight-year-old game.  And let's talk about the fact that not a single damn review on the base game's store page has anything negative to say about this whatsoever.

Look, if you don't like DLC, that's fine.  Personally I think the question of "yes" or "no" for DLC is a complicated one.  It's difficult to get it right, but I love it when it happens (like Super Smash Bros.) because I always want more content in my games.  But if you are the type of person that just rejects any DLC on principle, well, that's cool for you, and I honestly can't wholeheartedly disagree with you.

The issue here is the double standard.  You have two games, six years apart, that do the exact same thing (something that has only become more common in those six years, and will continue to do so), and yet one is given a free pass.  Why???  Admittedly, the one dual civilization pack for Civ5 is cheaper than the dual packs for Civ6 by about $1.50, but you're still talking about an eight-year-old game!  And they still charge the exact same price for their major expansions as what Civ6 will be charging for the upcoming Rise and Fall expansion ($29.99 USD).  The mind boggles.

But enough of that rant, because it went on for way too long.  The game itself has so far definitely lived up to what I hoped it would be.  It's not perfect, and some of the complaints on the Steam store page are legitimate, but overall I've really enjoyed myself.  Like I said, I've only put about 21 hours into it across two campaigns, but I'll talk a bit about what I liked and disliked, based on my little bit of exposure.

First off, I absolutely love the character designs.  I mean, I guess you'd call them character designs, even though the civilization leaders are real people.  Either way, they look like something out of Disney's recent CG movies like Frozen or Big Hero 6, and I mean that in the best possible way.  They're the perfect kind of cartoony: expressive and full of life, but not so over-the-top that you can't take them seriously.

I also really like that the research tree and the civics tree have been separated, thus allowing you to learn two things at once.  This is, for me, a very welcome change, since I was always annoyed that I couldn't learn how to make a bow & arrow because I was too busy learning what a law is.  Like, what?  On a related note, I also like how easy it is to customize your government.  You still pick an overall system of government, but now you acquire different "civics cards" as you progress through your Civics tree.  These cards give you different bonuses or focuses in addition to what you get from your base government choice.  And these bonuses can be swapped out for others at pretty much any time to focus on what you need at any given moment.  It's a really cool system that gives you that extra bit of fluidity and adaptability.

And the last thing I want to focus on is the big one: districts.  Basically, when building the area around your city, you can now add city districts.  There's quite a few of these districts, such as a harbor, business district, theatre district, etc., and they all serve a different purpose.  Each district takes up one of the hexes in your city's region, with each district getting certain bonuses from surrounding hexes.  Now, on the one hand, this could cause you to have to give up a valuable food space or a productive mine, but these districts are crucial to the growth of your city.  You can't have a school without a campus, you can't have boats without a harbor, and you can't have religion without a holy site.

The districts system is probably my favorite new feature of Civ6 because it's just so cool.  Even just having played two campaigns, I've already had to make some serious decisions over whether or not a certain district is worth it to a certain city, and sometimes it's not.  I found myself, more often than not, focusing each city on one or two particular districts (Boston, of course, focused on the campus), but if you learn the game and are pretty good with your ability to think ahead, I could easily see someone really getting as much benefit as possible out of each and every city.  It's just a really great system, and I'd love to see it expanded even further in a future update or something.

Like I said before, though, Civ6 isn't perfect, and it definitely has some room for improvements.  For one thing, I found myself clicking around the UI trying to find things a bit more often than I would like.  For another, sometimes the game suffers from these really weird pauses.  Like, not like the game itself will freeze, but you'll click "next turn" or whatever, and it just idles there for a while, and sometimes I have to click it three or four times to get it to go.

Also, as much as the DLC civs don't bother me on principle, there is one thing about it that irks me.  The Greek civilization has two leaders, and neither one of them is Alexander the Great!  Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that Alexander has had his time to shine, and at least it's still possible to get him as leader of the Macedon civilization.  Still, I do really wish he were part of the base game, even if it meant just swapping him with someone else I'm not overly fond of.  But hey, at least it helps me decide which DLC pack to buy first.

So far, I'm more than happy with Civilization VI, and what few complaints I have about it are pretty much a non-issue because of how cheaply I got it.  Seriously, I plan to buy all the DLC civilizations over time, and I still won't have spent as much as the normal price for the base game.  I'll also most likely buy the Rise and Fall expansion eventually, if for no other reason than to have even more civilizations because that's what I want!  The game definitely needs a bit of work here and there, but I'm very excited to see where it goes.

Now here's the icky part, because this is where I ask you for a favor.  See, yet another perk for being a member of Humble Monthly is that I now have a special referral link attached to my account.  Basically, what that does is that whenever someone uses that link and signs up for Humble Monthly (up to 30 people), I get a kickback of a few dollars in my Humble wallet, to spend in their store.

Let me make a couple things very clear.  First, Humble has not asked me to write this blog post.  They have no idea who I am (outside of being a moderately recurring customer), and they haven't offered me any special incentive to convince you to sign up.  This is the exact same referral program that you will have access to if you sign up yourself.  No one pays me to type these words.

Secondly, I'm not writing this post because of the referral program.  I was genuinely going to write all this before I even knew about it.  I honestly, wholeheartedly, just want to share what I feel is a great deal for a great game, plus a bunch of extra stuff.  I don't have many recurring readers, but I take my blog and my own sense of honesty very seriously.  I hate deception, and I will never be deceitful for money or rewards.  I say what I believe.

Lastly, and this is the thing I really want to stress, you don't get anything special out of my referral link.  I'm not saying that to be an ass, because I honestly wish I could offer you some sort of special promo or exclusive deal.  But no, outside of all of the regular perks of Humble Monthly (and there really are quite a few), I can't give you anything extra, except for my genuine appreciation.

So yeah, don't sign up for Humble Monthly to help me out.  I'd appreciate it greatly, and I'd use the referral credit to get some new stuff to review.  But don't let that be why you do or do not choose to sign up.  If Humble Monthly doesn't interest you, that's totally cool, and thanks for taking the time to read all this.  And hey, if you do decide to sign up but don't want to click my link just to spite me, well that's cool too.  I won't hold it against you.  Hell, I'll even provide the regular Humble Monthly link, and if you don't trust that, well it's just a quick google away.

My link is here, and the vanilla link is here.

Here's hoping that you have some serious fun, no matter what.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - The Sickness (Disturbed, 2000)
Playing - The Ultimate DOOM (1995)
Reading - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW, 2011)
Watching - The Toys That Made Us (2017)

Confirmed Kill: Wolfenstein 3D

Hello hello, and welcome to the first Confirmed Kill of 2018!

So this was actually mostly an accident, since I had originally planned for today's post to be the first of my "obscure stuff" posts, but I got distracted by today's subject.  But don't worry, you can expect to see that post later this week.

Title: Wolfenstein 3D

Original Release: MS-DOS (May 5, 1992)

Completed Release: Complete DOS Release (1992) [Modded]

So, before we get started, I just want to get a couple things out of the way.

Pictured: 1992

First, if you've been reading my blog for at least a couple weeks, you might remember my review of 2015's Wolfenstein: The Old Blood.  In that review, I briefly mentioned that I had finished the mobile version of Wolfenstein 3D a few years ago.  I genuinely believed this at the time, but it stuck in my brain, and I came to realize that I honestly can't remember finishing it.  I'm still fairly certain that I did, but I can't guarantee it, so I was thinking maybe I should give it a go again.  At the same time, almost as if by divine providence, I signed into Steam to discover that Wolfenstein 3D was on sale.  Heck. Yes.

For the record, I also grabbed Wolf3D's expansion, Spear of Destiny, plus Doom, Doom II, the entire Heretic/Hexen series, and Quake, all for less than $10.  So, yeah, expect to be reading about those soon.

Secondly, I played through the entirety of the game using a mod known as ECWolf, which you can download by clicking... wait for it... here.  It doesn't change a whole lot, mainly just quality-of-life improvements.  It allows you to play the game in a modern resolution, so you aren't having to squint, and lets you make aiming with the mouse much less of a headache than the original DOS release.  It also gives access to an automap feature, which I did use, because why the hell wouldn't I?  If you think this ruins the purity of the experience, that's okay, because I don't.  It makes the game much more approachable and drastically cuts down on wasted time.

So, with all that having been said, let's jump right into this.

The place: Nazi Germany.  The time: the height of World War II.

OSA Agent William J. "B.J." Blazkowicz is in a bit of a pickle, finding himself held prisoner in the dungeon of Castle Wolfenstein.  It doesn't really matter why B.J. is being held prisoner, especially since it doesn't last long.  Before the game even begins in earnest, he manages to kill the nearest guard with their own pistol, and we're greeted with the opening visual that created a genre.

Yeah, that's the good stuff.

Common knowledge will tell you that Wolfenstein 3D was the first first-person shooter, which is technically incorrect.  Still, the influence this game has had on the gaming landscape, for better or worse, cannot be overstated.  It's easy to look back now and point out how archaic it is, but that's kind of missing the point.  Without Wolf3D, there would be no Doom.  Without Doom, while it's almost certain that someone would have eventually created the genre, we may not have gotten the FPS boom of the '90s.

Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal, Half Life, Halo.  These are just a sample of the games that may never have existed if not for Wolfenstein 3D.  And of course you can extrapolate all of that out even further and further, leading to sequels, spinoffs, inspirations, imitators, and competitors, and you begin to see how different gaming would have been over the past 25 years if this had never been created.

Pictured: The influence of Wolfenstein 3D

Back in 1992, Wolf3D was released using the shareware model that was and would continue to be the norm for quite a while.  The game was originally split into three episodes, the first of which, "Escape From Castle Wolfenstein," was free.  If you liked the game, you could pay some money and id Software would send you the next two episodes, "Operation: Eisenfaust," and "Die, Führer, Die!"

id then went on to create a second trilogy of episodes that take place before the original three episodes, collectively referred to as the Nocturnal Missions (har har).  The titles of these episodes are "Dark Secret," "Trail of the Madman," and "Confrontation," respectively.

All six of these episodes are more-or-less standalone, but there's a surprising amount of continuity between them if you're paying attention.  For example, you basically wind up killing what appears to be the entire Grösse family over the course of this game and its sequel, Spear of Destiny.

For the purposes of this review, I played through all three original episodes, plus the three Nocturnal Missions, without putting too much effort into finding all the secrets.  I focused on getting from one stage to the next, with my ultimate goal being able to definitively say I finished the main campaign.  I'll definitely be going back through to find and complete all the secret levels, just to say I did.

Here's the thing: notwithstanding the historical significance of the game, I love Wolfenstein 3D a lot more than I probably should.  If I take a step back and look at it from a more objective point of view, I can see the difficulty in approaching it from a modern perspective.  If I'm brutally honest, it's probably better enjoyed as a museum piece rather than an actual game at this point.  I mean, I had to mod the game just to make it comfortable to play with a mouse.  This thing is downright prehistoric.

But I don't care.  Let's do this.

So you've killed your guard and stolen his gun.  What next?  Well, you'll be going through hours of running, shooting, avoiding being shot, and attempting to interact with every single open panel of wall in sight.  The main objective of Episode 1, as the title might suggest, is to escape the prison of Castle Wolfenstein.  This involves completing 9 levels (plus one secret level), the last of which features a giant boss enemy, in this case elite guard Hans Grösse. Once you've accomplished all that, you're treated to a sweet visual of B.J. escaping, and you move on to do the same thing again in each of the next five episodes.

Look at how happy he is!

That's not to suggest that there is no variation between the episodes, because there is, but the game is definitely repetitive.  One benefit to this, at least, is that it's an easy game to learn.  It doesn't take very long to get into the groove of things, and the game does a good job of teaching you the ropes in short order.  And I have to say, even though there's not a ton of new stuff added from episode to episode, what is there is pretty cool.  My personal favorite is Episode 2's unique enemy, the Mutant.  There's also a few new textures here and there as you advance, including a pretty sweet wall texture in later episodes that features a skull design.  It's actually kind of foreboding.

Speaking of textures, did you know that Wolfenstein 3D isn't actually 3D at all?  That's right!  It's just a trick of some really crafty early 90s programming.  The end result is a world (well, some hallways) that gives the feeling of depth, even though the whole game is just as 2D as Super Mario World.  Constraint breeds creativity.

The graphics are what they are.  I didn't play with any sort of graphics mod, since I'm actually pretty fond of the game's 1992 aesthetic.  The palette is colorful (with a surprising amount of blue), which kind of clashes with the fact that it's supposed to be NAZI GERMANY.  Seriously, there are pools of blood on the floor and skeletons in cages and hanging in chains from the ceiling, all in the PC equivalent of technicolor.

Still, this tonal dissonance is really just indicative of the nature of the game.  It's a power fantasy built around the sheer catharsis of gunning down hordes of evil Nazis, all with tongue planted firmly in cheek.  It's just so dang quirky that it's as hard not to love it as it is to take it seriously.

The music is also a product of its time, and for me it doesn't stand up as well as the visuals.  Don't get me wrong, it's still really impressive for the time, it just didn't appeal to me.  It was never to the point that it irritated me or anything like that, but I ultimately chose to listen to my own music instead most of the time.

The gameplay itself definitely shows its age, which honestly isn't all that surprising.  The game is more than twenty-five years old, after all.  I played through most of the first episode with the original controls before deciding that I could do with a controls mod.  I then started the game over with the new controls, and I never looked back.  The unmodded game isn't unplayable by any means, but the mod just makes it a much more pleasant experience.  It essentially makes the game play like a modern shooter, albeit without a Z axis.

Like I said before, the ECWolf mod also adds an automap feature, making it so that the game will automatically make a map (get it?) of each level as you move through it.  This can be pulled up at any time with the tab key, making it that much simpler to keep track of your progress through the level.  And this actually brings me to one of my few complaints with the game that can't be put down to the game's age.

The very fact that I have to mod in a map feature is absolutely ridiculous.  The first three episodes wouldn't be so bad without it, but the levels in the Nocturnal Missions quickly become so gigantic and convoluted as to be downright labyrinthine.  I could easily see the lack of a map adding another hour or more to the completion time for some of the later levels.

I get the feeling that, maybe, you were expected to draw your own map, in the real world, since that is sort of how things were done in those days.  The problem with that comes from the very nature of the game.  A dungeon crawling RPG is done one step at a time, thus making it simple, if tedious, to copy each square of the map onto graph paper.  Wolf3D is not that game.  You move in real time, very quickly, and having to stop and try to make a map would defeat the whole purpose of the run'n'gun feeling of the game.

Get used to mech suits and chainguns.

The bosses are another, relatively minor, point of contention for me.  I like the designs of them (and all the enemies, for that matter), but there's very little to distinguish one from the next outside of their looks.  A couple of them have their own little quirks, and one of those two actually has his own unique weapon (and thus a unique strategy), which is cool.  But the vast majority of them just boil down to a hit-and-run strategy, and the only distinction between them is that some take more hits to 

kill.  The boss of Episode 4 is just the regular, run-of-the-mill soldier with lots of health!

Oh, and they're also easy, because they're stupid.  That hit-and-run tactic I mentioned is almost always really simple to pull off since they'll just follow you in a circle around any given column our square section of wall.  The only real increase in the boss difficulty is accomplished by throwing in some lower tier enemies as well, but this doesn't make the boss more challenging or memorable, it just makes things annoying.  It's also pointless, since, again, it's really easy to outmaneuver the bosses and kill the minions at your leisure.

My final complaint is the secrets.  Don't get me wrong, secrets are great, but the way they're implemented here is as basic as it gets.  See, there are pushable walls sprinkled throughout every level, and these can be moved by interacting with them, thus uncovering the secret they're hiding, usually treasure, but occasionally hoards of ammo and health.  This isn't necessarily a bad idea in theory, but there's no visual cue to separate a "pushwall" from every other frame of wall around it, not even a subtle one.  The secret areas will occasionally be behind a wall with a Nazi flag or painting of Hitler, but this is less creative design and more just "that's what we happened to pick for this one."  All this combined leads to a feature that could have made you feel really clever for finding a secret, but instead makes you feel like an idiot as you run back and forth over every stretch of wall, slapping the spacebar furiously as you go.

Still, none of these complaints serve to ruin my appreciation for Wolf3D.  In my opinion it more than earns its place in the annals of gaming history.  And beyond that, I just have a blast playing it.  If you're interested at all, give it a shot.  The digital version is pretty cheap, even when it's not on sale.  It's a great game to play while listening to a podcast or an audiobook, since it's just mindless enough to let you absorb something else, while at the same time serving as a decent challenge.

Just, for the love of God, use a map.

Until next time!

Current interests:

Listening - We Need Medicine!  (The Fratellis, 2013)

Playing - Wolfenstein 3D: Spear of Destiny (MS-DOS 1992)

Reading - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW, 2011)

Watching - Bob's Burgers (2011)

Worth Your Time: Paperbacks From Hell

So remember a few days ago, when I announced that I was going to be launching a new series of posts, highlighting obscure corners of my favorite fandoms and genres?

This is not that thing.

No, instead, this is a completely separate new series, focused on just talking about things I think are worth your time (hence the name).  It could be anything that pops into my head, but I honestly don't expect it to have many entries.  Think of it as a catch-all series.  There won't be any real standard to them, I'll just draw attention to the thing, say a bit about it, and try not to ramble as much as I usually do.  Note the word "try."

And don't worry, I'll still be doing the obscure stuff, and I actually have a title for that series now.  I chose to talk about this first, though, since it does a thing that's very similar to what I hope to do with my new series: draw attention to forgotten gems.

I've mentioned before that my wife is amazing, and that she basically takes care of me.  She feeds me and supports me, both financially and emotionally.  She believes in me way more than I do.  And sometimes she just does really cool things for me.  For example, to celebrate my birthday this past December, she took me out for a nice lunch and a shopping spree at my favorite stores.  One of those stores is famous Canadian bookstore chain Chapters, where most of that money was spent.  I got a ton of cool stuff that day, but the standout for me has to be this little gem, Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix.

As I mentioned above, this book does exactly what I want to do with my forthcoming "obscure stuff" series, but the focus here is relatively specific: horror fiction in the 1970s and 1980s (and some brief 1990s).  The author, Grady Hendrix, is a horror himself, and is already pretty well-known for his own '80s throwback novel, My Best Friend's Exorcism, which I hope to read pretty soon myself.  I had been wanting this one for a while, and I was not disappointed.

The book is bigger than I thought, about 230 pages including the epilogue.  But it's what's on those pages that really matters, as Hendrix takes us from title to title, the vast majority of which I had never heard of.  The amount of focus given to any given book really depends on a few factors, such as cultural impact, overall quality, or just sheer insanity.  A few noteworthy entries get an in-depth review, but most are rather mentioned more in relation to the category they fall into, and how well they do it.  There's also more than a handful of titles that get short non-sequitur mentions highlighting a particularly disgusting or disturbing scene.  Hendrix is witty and irreverent throughout, but it's clear he knows what he's talking about, and his obvious love for the genre shines through despite (or rather, because of) the snark.

If I had any real complaint about the book, it's that I wish there were more of it.  I said that it was bigger than I expected, and it was, but it still wasn't quite enough to satiate me.  There were plenty of books or series mentioned over the course of this book that I would like to know more about, without necessarily buying them separately (if I can even find them).

Still, what's here is extremely enjoyable, and I honestly feel guilty complaining that it isn't enough.  And I definitely can't say that the book didn't do what it intends to do, since I actually made a list of books to track down because they interested me so much.  First and foremost among these is the Blackwater saga by Michael McDowell which, coincidentally (or not), recently got re-released in a single complete volume.  I'll be picking that up as soon as possible, all because of Paperbacks From Hell.

I enjoyed myself so much that once I had finished it, I seriously considered just starting it over again.  I honestly can't remember the last time I felt that way about a book.  I actually felt just the slightest bit sad that I had spent all my birthday money, since I would've liked to trawl the local used bookstores to see if I could find some of the things from my new list.  I wouldn't be surprised if I do that before too long, and I can almost guarantee I'll be reading Paperbacks From Hell again very soon.

If you want to pick it up (and I highly recommend doing so), it'll run you about $25 USD, $30 CDN, about ten bucks cheaper on Kindle.  At the time of this writing, its price is actually reduced on Amazon (US), bringing it down to about $15, which is an absolute steal.

Let me just be clear in saying that I don't get any kind of kickback for saying any of this stuff. I have no affiliation with Amazon or anybody involved with the publishing of Paperbacks From Hell.  I genuinely just love it, and I want to let people know about it.  It was the most enjoyable experience I've had with a book for quite some time, and it is absolutely Worth Your Time.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening -  Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles, 1967)
Playing - Wolfenstein 3D (1992)
Reading - Star Wars: Princess Leia (2015)
Watching - Bob's Burgers (2011)

First Post of 2018! Where Do We Go From Here?

Happy New Year, everyone!

I intended to have this post up yesterday, but time got away from me.

So!  2017's over, huh?  A bit of a mixed bag, to be sure, but more good than bad, overall, at least for me.  I hit some serious rough patches, but I got through them.  I completed two major projects on this very blog.  And this Christmas may have been the best that I can remember, thanks in large part to several very important people in my life.

I genuinely hope that your holiday season, no matter what (if anything) you choose to celebrate, was as great as possible.  But more than that, I hope that you left 2017 better than you entered it.  And whether you did or didn't, I hope that your 2018 is happy and fulfilling.

Speaking of 2018, I want to talk a bit about what the blog is going to be like going forward.  But to get to the future, we need to briefly discuss the past.

As I mentioned before, 2017 was a big year for me in regards to my own productivity.  Blogtober was the biggest project I've ever completed, and the fact that I was actually able to finish it was extremely satisfying.  I'm not convinced that it's of the highest quality that it could be, but that's okay.  What matters is that I decided to do something and I stuck to it, and I can do even better if I happen to do it again.  I still haven't decided if I'll be doing a 2018 edition of Blogtober, since it stretched me pretty thin.  But I have a while to decide, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if my Halloween spirit kicks in and spurs me into action.

December's Confirmed Kills project was nowhere near as large an undertaking as Blogtober was, but it brought with it its own set of hurdles to overcome.  Still, I (mostly) stuck to my plan, and I was able to finish it before the end of 2017, so that's another writing project down.  Sure, in the grand scheme of things, these two projects don't amount to the biggest accomplishment in the world, but I'm suitably proud of myself for finishing them all the same.  But on the subject of Confirmed Kills, that's actually the first change I'd like to talk about.

On the whole, I think the Confirmed Kills project this December was a success.  In retrospect, however, I think I'd like to change the approach to it from here on out.  Don't get me wrong, I love reviewing the games.  And I honestly think that focusing on games that pull me in organically is the correct decision, rather than necessarily whatever is newest at the time.  I really enjoyed having a wide range of time represented.  The biggest problem comes from trying to do them all at once, long after I finished them.

Take, for instance, my first review in the set, Mega Man 2.  I finished that game back in February, and here I am reviewing it in, what?  November?  That was a great game, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but do you have any idea how much media I consume over the course of one month, nevermind ten?  And don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware of the fact that I have a problem with focus, but I think the finer details of my experience playing that game would have been hazy nonetheless.

And so, with that having been said, I've made the decision to alter the scope of Confirmed Kills.  I'll still be focusing on games I've personally finished for the first time, no matter when they came out, rather than what's new and popular at the moment.  I don't see that aspect ever changing, since that's more in keeping with one of the major reasons I originally started the blog.  But rather than shotgunning them all out at the end of the year, I'll instead be writing and posting them as soon as I've finished the game.

This creates a twofold benefit: it allows me to write the reviews with the game fresh in my mind, and it lets you keep close track of just how often I finish things.  That way, if you follow along, you'll be able to see just how unusual it is!  It will also leave me without a project ready to go come the end of the year, but whatever.  That's for December me to worry about, January me is shaking things up!  Controversy creates cash!  Chaos is a ladder!

Okay, that got away from me, but I'm back in control now.  So let's talk a bit more about why I originally stated the blog.  If you've been following along since the beginning (which four whole people potentially have been!), you know that the main reason was just to make myself write, and that is certainly true.  The purpose of the blog is, first and foremost, to give me a casual outlet to get my creative juices flowing, by way of a platform I feel obligated to contribute to.  This, in turn, will ideally lead to me being better able to channel that creativity into my own original fiction.  My dream has always been to make a living as a writer, and that's what this is all about.

But that doesn't mean that the blog is an afterthought.  In fact, the other major reason I started the blog was actually in an effort to salvage an idea that didn't come to fruition.  I had, at one point, been planning to start a YouTube channel.  This never happened, mainly because I couldn't justify spending the amount of money it would've required for me to have a camera I was happy with.  But less important than the camera is what the channel would have been about.

I've talked about this before, but when I really get into something, I really get into it.  I tend to dig as deep as I can, and this usually leads to me discovering some really obscure things.  I love this aspect of being a fan of something.

Take something like Star Wars, par example.  We all know Star Wars, right?  Well, I could review Star Wars, sure, but that wouldn't do you much good.  So instead of that, I could review an early 90s PC game based on Star Wars.  Hey, that's much better!  Oh, but wait, there's a novella based on that game, even better!  Oh but wait, there's an audio drama based on that novella!  Three of them!  Now that's a winner.

So that's a very extreme case, but there's a veritable treasure trove of things from your favorite fandoms (or at least my favorites) that you may never have known existed.  And that's what I want to start spending a bit more time on.   I'm not necessarily saying it's going to become the main focus of the blog, but it will most likely be the most common thing for a while.  I'm really excited about it, and I hope you guys like it going forward.

Beyond that, I want to dedicate this year to really going forward with my original fiction.  I would really like to have something published in the first half of this year, most likely through Amazon Kindle.  Either way, I'll be posting excerpts and samples of my fiction here and there on this blog, if for no other reason than to make me actually do it.

As of right now, I don't have any solid plans for a release schedule for any of this stuff.  I have a shortlist of things I'd like to cover for my first few "obscure stuff" posts, and I have at least two games I could finish any day now, thus leading to some Confirmed Kills.   I'd like to have at least one post a week, but I'm hesitant to promise anything just yet.

Still, this should all lead to more (and more varied) content from here on out.  It's some very exciting stuff, and I genuinely can't wait to get started.  Here's hoping that 2018 leads to some really special places!

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Various
Playing - Final Fantasy IX (2000)
Reading - Star Wars: Princess Leia (2015)
Watching - Bob's Burgers (2011)