Edward's May 2020 Monthly Mix

It's been another month of staying home. I don't mind; I've been keeping myself busy with all sorts of cultural things, not to mention having the living room painted and our floor fixed. It was in a major state of disrepair which we discovered when we tried to get new flooring laid. Seems someone in the past tried to cover it up. As Gomer Pyle would say, "Shame! Shame! Shame!" Speaking of covering, the state is being niggardly with my unemployment. It's always fun to see the ol' checking account get smaller and smaller as nothing comes in. Come on Indiana! You can do better than this. But hey, I got to be home another month. No complaints there. I took advantage.

1. Battlefield Bad Company 2  on PC: For the sake of nostalgia, I began playing this again. Not since Battlefield 2 have I had as much fun in an EA multiplayer shooter. I was surprised it still has a very active server base, but then with some of the best sniper mechanics in a multiplayer shooter I’ve seen and the fact it was Dice’s introduction to physics based destructive environments, I’m kind of not surprised. The 10 hour single player game is worth the price of admission, but that’s not the reason to play. It’s those perfectly designed multiplayer maps. I struggle with my twitch reflexes anymore, given my age, but this is a multiplayer shooter I can still be decent at. It can be found for very cheap at g2a.com. Pick it up and see if you can best me.

2. Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Five on Blu-Ray: Nothing feels better than being immersed in another great season of this venerable series. I’ve been introduced to a new member of the USS Enterprise, the illustrious Ensign Ro. She’s strictly business. Her cold clinical demeanor is what attracts me. Were I to be stationed on the Enterprise I could see myself turning her into my special project. I’d crack that hard shell with 3D chess in the Ten Forward with glee. In this season I’ve gotten to see Counselor Troi take over the ship as the highest ranking officer. She brazenly opened herself to suggestions from junior officers. She was honest in her uncertainty. How cool is that to be able to admit something like that?  

3. Standing in the Rainbow by Fannie Flagg: It was interesting to come to the realization this is book two in a series of 3 books revolving around a small town in Missouri in post WWII. More 1-3 page “vignettes” than full fleshed out stories or chapters, this is a compelling book. I initially fell in love with Flagg’s wondrous Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe years ago. This includes similar type writing. The main character is Neighbor Dorothy and her family. Neighbor Dorothy runs a syndicated radio show out of her house with the assistance of a group of well being, but humorous  helpers. The book is set in a time when people were more virtuous and goodly to one another. Reminiscent of The Waltons or The Andy Griffith Show the book is sappy to the point of becoming cheesy, but it just might make you wish these tumultuous times we live in were just a little bit different.

4. Assassin’s Creed on PC: I’d been putting playing this game off for a very long time. I’d heard the terrible stories of how wonky the controls were, and they were right. I finally beat it, and I have to say it's been one of the worst games I've ever played. I didn't buy it on Steam, but if I had, I'd probably write it an awful review. The artificially ramped up difficulty, and the repetition, and the bait and switch final bosses were just uncalled for. Shoot, the final boss intermingled with cut scenes and bait and switches took 3 hours and 10 minutes. Fortunately, none of them were difficult. If I failed the first time, I took them down in the 2nd or 3rd try. I've been told by numerous people the series gets easier to control and better to play with each successive title in the series. If this were not the case I probably would have given up on this game and threw my controller out the window.

5. Steel Division on PC: I’ve played an incredible amount of Company of Heroes. I wanted to try something similar, but different. I had Steel Division in my library and decided to give it a go. It’s like COH only on a platoon level rather than a squad level. It’s fun, and I’ve been knocking out achievements acquired for each campaign mission I complete. Unfortunately, each mission ramps up in difficulty at a crazy rate. I’ve almost given up. Even after watching YouTube Let’s Plays I have a very hard time with it. Here is a classic example. The last mission I completed gave me 30 minutes to get my German forces through a French city held by the British. As I convoyed through, I was being attacked from both sides. At a bare minimum you must get 30 units across. After about my 30^th try I was able to get 41 units through and completed the mission. Here’s the clincher though. Those 41 units are all I have remaining of my German army, and furthermore are the only forces I’ll have left for the final mission of the German campaign. This is the most difficult single player RTS I’ve ever played. But the Normandy topography and the attention to detail of the units (which are depicted with complete authenticity) make this a game worth playing despite its insane difficulty.  

6. Car Mechanic Simulator 2014 on PC: This was my go to game after struggling with ulcer inducing Steel Division. It’s a strange little garden of zen game involving repairing cars. It won’t teach you how to be a car mechanic, but it will educate you on little things like what a tie rod looks like and where it goes on a car. You start in a small oil stained cement floor cracked garage and as you complete customer orders and make money, move up to an intermediate garage and finally a state of the art repair facility complete with chip tuning capabilities. The game does get repetitious, but each order is a challenge and I have to admit I could feel the dopamine flowing when I completed a job and saw my funds increasing.  

7. The Power Station  on CD: I’ve always regarded John Taylor of Duran Duran as one of my favorite bassists. When this album came out in 1985 I thought the song, “Bang a Gong” was one of the coolest songs I’d ever heard, especially with Taylor’s masterful bass play. Listening to this album again after many years, I’ve picked up on something I totally missed 35 years go (my goodness, it’s been that long!) Any Taylor is an incredible guitarist. I never realized how underrated he was. And of course Tony Thompson and Robert Palmer making up the rest of the group made this band a bonafide supergroup. This was a one album band, but man, what an album, a real shooting star with an accompanying lifespan. The album did spawn a tour in which Robert Palmer walked out of whilst in the middle of. (Garnering much criticism for the gesture as well.) This was a hallmark album from the 1980s, a real touchstone of my youth at the time. 

8. Everspace  on Nintendo Switch Lite: After an extended hospital stay I learned the valuable lesson of having a gaming device for any subsequent stays. I’d had a Sony PS Vita, but after Sony kicked it (and all support of it) to the curb I sold my Vita and went with a Nintendo Switch Lite. So far, I’m pretty impressed with it. I’ve been chipping away at Everspace, a space shooter along the same vein as Origin’s Wing Commander series. This game, however, harbors roguelike characteristics. You cultivate credits and sundries by fighting outlaw ships and mining ore. You use money earned to unlock ship upgrades. When you are killed and lose your ship you are able to use that money for upgrades and ultimately better, faster, stronger ships. I’ve not gotten far into it, only the 2^nd sector so far. But I’m having fun doing it, and its portability enabling me to take this gaming system anywhere is unequaled. 

9. Battlefield 1942 on PC: After I found out an old gaming clan I used to play with was still playing this ancient game on a rented server I couldn’t wait to reinstall it and join the fray. As it turns out, there are a bevy of patches that need to be installed just to make it work right. I dabbled around with the single player game and it was obvious I was wearing rose colored glasses when I made the decision to give this game a try after all of these years. I played the crap out of this game when it came out, and I can glance over to my gaming shelf at the game boxes of this series on my shelf, with pride. But I’m almost glad I couldn’t connect to the servers out of the box. I suppose it’s true: some things are better left alone in the annals of memory and nostalgia. This game is definitely one of those things.

Edward's April 2020 Mix

This has been another month straight out of the Twilight Zone. Each day is another train car passing the station, a bevy of silhouetted passengers under florescent lights speeding by. I’ve lost track of days and dates. Spring has become a tantalizing Red Delicious apple with a worm burrowed inside. I’m reminded of my heart mishap where I was out of commission for seven weeks. I was in stasis while the world continued to spin around me. It was as if I were standing at the bottom of an escalator, reluctant to catch the right step emerging out of the floor. And this time the escalator is just stopped. I haven’t been standing there, however. This has been quite the busy month.   

1.   Persuader (Jack Reacher #7)  by Lee Child:  Jack Reacher books are a guilty pleasure for me. Beach reads for guys I guess you could call them. Child might not be Hemingway or McCullers but he does put words together in a compelling and graceful way. And I’ve talked about the character, Jack Reacher, enough times in previous posts that you know how I feel about him. He’s basically an American superhero sans the cape and the armor. He’s like David Banner in the old television Hulk series, with never a need to transform into the bulky green alter ego. This novel has our hero going undercover to flush out an ex Army Intelligence officer who was responsible for the deaths of two of Reacher’s prior associates. This is the second Reacher novel in which the perspective is told in the first person, so we all go along for the ride inside Reacher’s head. And man, what a ride. 

2.     Splinter Cell: Conviction on PC: If you were to miss playing through Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series it would be mighty remiss of you. I remember 2003 when the first game came out, the lighting effects blowing me away. Sam Fisher, the agent superstar of the series never seems to age, but he sure has gotten meaner. There’s not much stealth in this one, and there’s no knocking out the bad guys. Shoot, even to “interrogate” someone involves slamming their heads against porcelain restroom sinks and knocking teeth out. Fisher is on a vendetta to put the hurt on the guys who have kidnapped a family member. I’m “borrowing” this from my own review of the game on Steam, but I've played every Splinter Cell game from this one back, and I have to admit this one is probably the most violent and frenetic one I’ve played. Michael Ironside returns as the voice of Fisher, which seems to be a role he was born to be cast in. The visual style of the game is superb, especially the in-game GUI which highlights mission objectives. There is a welcome desaturation of the screen to signify when Fisher can't be seen by patrolling guards and security cameras. Speaking of guards, the guards in this game say things that had me laughing out loud, the threats they call out to Fisher, whom they know is hiding in the shadows but can't locate him. I haven't found guards so hilarious since Fox Interactive's delightful No One Lives Forever and that game was trying to be funny.

3.   Aerosmith Get Your Wings  on CD: My guitar mentor , Michael Stevens, taught me “Train Kept A Rollin’” which is one of the coolest songs I’ve ever heard in my five decades of rock music listening. The original song hatched by The Yardbirds (pun intended) was pretty darn good, but I have to admit the Aerosmith version sounds much better in my opinion. Joe Perry has always exuded a flair all his own (of course, as did Jimmy Page). I’m drawn to Perry simply because he’s a lefty who learned to play right handed. It’s kind of a sad story. His parents bought him his first acoustic guitar as a kid. The guitar came with an instructional 45rpm record. The instructor on the record explained the plectrum should be held in the right hand, so Perry doing as he was told followed suit. When he learned to play that way he never changed. This album, their second, bleeds their original sound, much like their eponymous first album. It spawned three singles, but none of them hit the singles charts.  As it turns out, this pointed out by my music maven brother, Robert Burton, the song “Train Kept A Rollin’” has some interesting history to it. Get Your Wings album producer, Jack Douglas wanted to mesh some live recording with the studio song. The famous session guitarist, Steve Hunter (from Decatur, IL) was in another studio at the recording center. Douglas asked him to supply a solo for the song. Hunter obliged by playing the dastardly good beginning solo in the song. It’s meshed together so nicely I couldn’t tell it wasn’t Joe Perry slinging both solos out. 

4.  Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman on Kindle: This had been on my GoodReads.com To Read list for ages. And being typical of me to read two books (sometimes more) at the same time, one a physical print book and the other being electronically on my Kindle, I thought a nice long fantasy during these crazy days would be apt. The novel concerns a young businessman named Richard Mayhew, a guy heavily involved in his work and his engagement to a girl he considers out of his league. All of this changes when he is inadvertently whisked away to an alternate version of London, a parallel city that resides below the traditional London, a city that has fallen through the cracks. Gaiman’s mystical city beneath the city, intertwined by the sewer systems of above ground London is reminiscent of a bleak nightmare Charles Dickens would have put on paper about the back alleys and byways of his own Victorian era London. I’m not that far into the story, but what I like about Richard Mayhew is how reluctant he is to be an adventurer. This isn’t a guy sitting down to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with his mates, or fire up the computer for a bout of Baldur’s Gate. This is a guy who’s living a nightmare and just wants things to return to normal.  
  
5. Vangelis Soil Festivities on CD:  This was released in 1984 by Vangelis simply because “he wanted to make music, not sell a million albums.” Vangelis states it’s a concept album giving a soundtrack to the nature at our feet, the life processes taking place on the Earth surface. The songs on the album are titled, “Movements” and begins with the comforting sound of a rainstorm, which signals nurturing of life on the planet. The music continues, growing ominously dark, perhaps signifying the struggle for survival. This is a great ambient album perfect for sleeping or reading or writing (I’m listening to it as I write this.) I will never understand the connection, but Vangelis just has a way of connecting to my very soul when it comes to music. 

6.  Sid Meier’s Pirates! on PC: For all my gaming buddies, Sid Meier, needs no introduction. For the rest of you, he’s considered a gaming god. Anything he creates on the gaming front is lauded as exhibit A in many a divorce court. I’ve always been a fan of his Railroad games, but before those he created a little gem called Pirates! This game is a complete remastering of the original 1987 game. Firing up the game and creating a pirate you can swear allegiance to Spain, France, Holland or England and steal treasures for your country, harassing each country’s foes. Or you can simply become a pirate and terrorize them all. Or you can make it your vendetta to cash in on the bounty of every pirate in the game. The game covers a lot of ground: overrunning fort settlements, participating in ballroom dances with esteemed governor’s daughters in hopes she’ll give you information such as where bounties are hiding or a piece of a hidden treasure map. You battle other pirate fleets and victoriously take their ships and their cargoes, cashing them in for yourself. Occurring aroung the Caribbean and the Florida keys, all that’s missing is the smell of sunscreen and a Pina Coloda.  

7. Company of Heroes on PC: I’ve mentioned it before. This is one of my castaway tropical island games. I’ve played the game extensively since it came out in 2006. I introduced a friend of mine from work to the game. And to my chagrin, we played five games straight and he slaughtered me all five games. Should I even be admitting this to anybody? Despite my tragic losses, this is one RTS I still have fun with even when I lose. The game’s sound design won all kinds of crazy awards when it was released. The first time you hear the grinding squeaky sounds of a German King Tiger tank, lumbering into your base like some prehistoric monster, or the eruption and landfall of American artillery, you’ll understand why it got those awards. The game is fourteen years old, and if you log on right now there are always people to play with. That is a lot to be said for this venerable real time strategy game. 

8. Mad Max: Fury Road on Blu Ray: This makes the third time I’ve watched this movie. The first two times I watched it I remember thinking it was one of the best action movies I’d ever seen. But now I doubt I’ll watch it again. I don’t know if I’m just Mad Maxed out or if I noticed certain stand out things this time I’d not noticed before. In movies as of late there seems to be a Hollywood agenda to push feminism. Women should have the same opportunities as men. I just don’t like the push. It’s odd that I didn’t notice it in the movie before, but it’s actually Mad Max as the secondary character to Charlize Theron’s “Furiousa.” The actual plot of the movie is a feminist revolt. At its essence the movie is one long vehicle chase. But it’s the style of the movie that does it for me. The whole movie has an American western flair to it. There is even tribute paid to Chuck Jones and his wonderful Roadrunner cartoons. It’s been called one of the greatest action movies ever. I made that call and for once I wasn’t wrong. 

9. Assassin’s Creed on PC: I’d been putting playing this game off for a very long time. I’d heard the terrible stories of how wonky the controls were, and they were right. I’m using an Xbox controller, and it’s still tedious.  I remember the game looking gorgeous when it released and it still doesn’t look bad. The sweeping vistas of Jerusalem are nothing short of breathtaking.  The game concerns a young man who discovers, actually, it is discovered for him that he is the descendent of an assassin who lived during the Renaissance Era. The ancestral assassin seriously shook up the world of the Templars. And now you are being coerced into being transported through time via a weird DNA strand/time continuum thingie to finish what your ancestor started. Yes, it’s hokey, but it sets up the premise of the game. What I really want to do is play all of the cooler newer games in the series, but me, being that purist that I am, have to muddle through this one first.  

10. Van Halen Fair Warning on CD: When I was in high school I worshiped Van Halen. I loved their first two albums and when their third album, Women and Children First came out, I enjoyed the ride, settling into the groove of knowing Van Halen was my favorite rock band. When Fair Warning came out in the spring of my senior year it seemed a departure from their previous albums, but I was okay with that. I would soon graduate and leave for the Navy. In a way it was exciting to see Van Halen go through this change; I felt I could personally relate. I gave the album a thorough listen this month for the first time since probably 1981. Yes, it had been that long. Esquire magazine stated Fair Warning is an album every man should own. There are some remarkable songs on it, my two favorites being, “Unchained,” and “Hear About it Later.” Both of these are the band at their best, but the remaining songs, despite Eddie’s usual guitar prowess,  seems to me as if David Lee Roth is trying just a little too hard. What seemed effortless on the band’s first three albums, seemed almost laborious when it came to Roth’s vocals. Not surprisingly, I became more disinterested with the band with each successive album after. 

11. Black Hawk Down on 4K Blu Ray: This is probably the fourth time I’ve seen this movie. It’s a movie I’ve always been excited about ever since reading Mark Bowden’s Pulitzer Prize winning Black Hawk Down and playing the Novalogic game of the same title that came out in 2003. What usually happens on a repeated viewing of a movie is the detection of details I had missed in previous viewings. This time was no exception. I didn’t realize much of the mission-turned-into-disaster included a fierce rivalry between the US Army’s Airborne Rangers and Delta Force operatives. Another interesting note, this was Tom Hardy’s first onscreen presence. The 4K treatment is a noticeable improvement over Blu Ray. I’ve said it before, but this movie illustrates modern day Middle Eastern type CQB as good as any movie of its type I’ve seen.