It’s been a strange month. Christmas hit 60 degrees. It was like being in Texas. I got some decent time off from work. This month ended a year long of PC gaming with a final tally of 7 games completed which is an all time low. It’s okay though, other diversions, other interests. I’ve been indulging my guitar habit much more. This is probably a good thing. I’ve been trying to sell stuff on eBay, but it’s not going well. I think eBay’s best days are behind us. Now they collect sales tax (which isn’t their fault, I get that, it’s compulsory) but I just don’t get paying sales tax on other people’s junk that’s already had sales tax collected on it by people who have official retail merchant numbers. It doesn’t make sense to me. I took advantage of the Steam Sale this year and picked up a few games. And I took a long overdue trip to visit my brother out of state. Compared to last month with a missing phone and strange debit card issues, I have to say this month was a success.
1. Dungeon Siege II on PC: Goodness gracious, I’m so ready for this game to be over with! Supposedly a 20-30 hour hack n’slash Action RPG, and here at 80 plus hours I’m feeling like it’s on par with a Witcher game. I do declare! My trusty sorcerer is now at level 41 and able to cook his enemies with a single snap of the fingers. It’s been a fun ride, it’s just been an incredibly long one. I’m in the last act of the final chapter. I’ll be glad to put this one on the shelf.
2. Cock Robin on CD: I discovered this band back in 1985, having just got out of the Navy. The band was helmed by Peter Kingsbery who studied classical guitar in Austin, TX. His counterpart was a gorgeous girl named Anna LaCazio who was of Chinese and Italian descent. The song that caught my attention was “When Your Heart is Weak” though they had other hits, none of them charted big in the USA. Kingsbery, however, moved to France and became a big success there. I’m surprised the band didn’t fare better. Kingsbery’s vocals were a powerhouse right up there with Bryan Ferry or Morrissey.
3. The Meg on 4K Blu Ray: I was disappointed in this. It was typical summer popcorn movie fare concerning the discovery of a megalodon , a prehistoric shark of gargantuan proportions. Jason Statham arrives to save the day like a superhero. And we have Rainn Wilson, who looks like he’s on a field trip from The Office. The movie paced well, and had a surprising twist or two, and for CGI the effects were good, but I think the writing suffered. This is what happens when you have a slew of people writing the screenplay. One of the writers feels he or she has to make a change simply to justify the paycheck. The best screenplays always have a single writer. For comparison, watch this, and then watch Jaws based on Peter Benchley’s novel. I think you’ll agree. They just don’t make them like they used to.
4. Railway Empire on PC: Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon was the third PC game I ever purchased way back in the last century, 1990 to be exact. I’ve played every iteration of this noble series since. 2003 was a big highlight with Railroad Tycoon 3. And then 2006 gave us Sid Meier’s Railroads! which turned the series (albeit fun) into more of a beer and pretzels type casual game. Unfortunately, Sid Meier will no longer be making railroad tycoon games. But that’s okay. I discovered Kalypso’s Railway Empire. If you’ve ever played any of the Tropico games, you’ll see how the German based developer puts a lot of love into their games despite not having Activision, EA or Bethesda type budgets. This is truly one of my dawn games, meaning regardless of when I begin a game, the sun is always popping up and birds are singing when I quit. Railway Empire deals with early railroading, 1830 to the 1870s. It’s basically a marriage of Railroad Tycoon 3 with its serious tendencies and Sid Meier’s Railroads! with its cartoon antics. The art style is colorful and gorgeous, and there is a mode in which you can hop aboard one of your locomotives and check out the view from your cab at the wondrous rail line you’ve created. With this, who needs a sprawling electric train set in their basement?
5. The Right Stuff on Blu Ray: This movie has become a quiet classic, taking a year just to develop the script, and Dennis Quaid simply proclaiming, “This is a great American film”. I had known about Tom Wolfe’s venerable novel, but I had never seen the movie. The movie is about the Mercury Space program headed by NASA in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This movie has what would now be considered an all star cast, but who were nobodys when the film came out in 1983. (Oddly these nobodys were selected because of budgetary constraints.) This was one of Dennis Quaid’s first appearances. He and Scott Glenn took their roles so seriously, they both bought new Corvettes like the real astronauts they depicted did. I looked for inaccuracies and anachronisms and I couldn’t find any. It was a movie superbly done, even to the point of being filmed only at sunrise and sunset to get the best lighting, but the real star here is the transfer to Blu Ray. The colors popped and the whole movie exuded a Technicolor kind of feel as if it really had been made in the time period it depicted. Bill Conti was rushed to make the soundtrack, and still managed to earn an Academy Award, along with the movie’s three other Academy Awards.
6. Saboteur on DVD: This was Alfred Hitchcock’s first time to use an all American cast in a film, and in typical suspenseful Hitchcock fashion we have a movie about an innocent man who finds himself at the wrong place at the wrong time and suddenly in a world of hurt. When our protagonist seeks refuge with a blind man and his dog in a cabin, heavy rain outside and a warm fire crackling in the fireplace, the movie takes a breather and we get a wonderfully touching scene that almost moves into the territory of real literature. Hitchcock had a genuine fear of heights, even to the point where if he saw a construction worker high atop a city building it would make him queasy. Strangely, that fear has managed to work its way into several of his films, Vertigo, North by Northwest (featuring one of the villains falling from Mt. Rushmore) and in this one, we get to see The Statue of Liberty take center stage causing the demise of one of the villains.
7. Terraria on Nintendo Switch Lite: I recently picked up a Nintendo Switch Lite because it hosts a bevy of indie PC games I’ll never play on PC. I booted up Terraria which is a Minecraft type game where your goal is to simply stay alive. You start with hardly anything and have to build tools and collect resources to build a house to avoid the different entities out to get you. And night brings zombies! The thing is, instructions are minimal. It’s all about the trial and error. I died. A lot. I finally built a house, but now I’m afraid to venture out of it. I guess the game-play really is the thing because this game has 2D graphics and I still get totally immersed in its world.
8. Night Gallery Season One on DVD: I just wrapped up the first season of this supernatural horror series that came out in 1970. I can see why the show eventually failed. Some of the stories are just downright absurd. Perhaps the best one so far is, “They’re Tearing Down Tim Leary’s Bar.” It’s about a man putting his job in peril because of his drinking. He stumbles about living in a confused state, his way being clouded by his drunk excursions and his memories of the better days he had in the past. The episode won an Emmy Award. If you can track it down, watch it for this episode alone.
9. Northern Exposure: Season Five on DVD: Each episode is still an enjoyable 47 minute trip into the 1990s with some of my favorite television characters. The series seems to have lost some of its profundity it exuded in the earlier seasons, but I’m still never bored by the antics of the citizens of Cicely, Alaska. Maurice Minnifield has grown into my favorite character. He’s always looking for a way to turn something into coin or bask in his former fame as an astronaut who once walked on the moon. There is an episode in which he’s awarded a lifelike replica of himself in the form of a wax statue. He shows it off like a beloved twin brother, but is eventually repulsed by its silence and everlasting gape. It’s hauled to the local dump with little fanfare, two stiff legs sticking out of the back of a camper shell. It’s one of the funniest episodes I’ve seen in the series yet.
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