Edward's January 2020 Mix

A rather odd winter has befallen. No snow and no Antarctica temperatures. I’m certainly not complaining. I finally beat Dungeon Siege II after 95 hours. But that’s the way I roll, beating 40 hour RPGs in 90 hours. Dungeon Siege II certainly isn’t a first. After saving my pennies I was finally able to score a Gibson Les Paul. I’ll keep practicing and hopefully develop enough mad skillz to do it justice. I became an official empty nester parent this month. I’m trying to get used to how quiet the house is. Coming home is like walking into a newly discovered ten thousand year old tomb. But you know what? I can crank the distortion on my amp and attempt to bellow out some tunes. I could get used to this. Okay, this is a first. As I was typing this, my monitor died. My beautiful 144hz 1440P 27” monitor gave up the ghost. I picked up an el cheapo at Best Buy. Now I’m the proud owner of a 1920x1080 25” It will have to do until an upgrade. I had to pick up something to be able to provide you with this most awesome reading material. Oh, how we suffer for our art!  

1.      Magic: The Gathering - Arena on PC: I read about this one a couple of issues ago in PC Gamer. The editors stated it was the best rendition of the game on PC yet. They were right. The game has an excellent tutorial and the art style and interface will make you feel right at home if you’re a veteran player. The AI is challenging enough, but playing online is where it’s at, of course. There are even ranked games, and best of all, the game is free. There’s no need to go to McDonald’s anymore to play or call your buddies who always have something else going on. Be forewarned: the game is chocolate crack. 
    
2.     Frampton Comes Alive!  on CD:  This album which sold 8 million records its first year and was the first album that sold one million cassette tapes spawned a few big radio hits that always takes me back to high school days. I can still listen to the elongated (13:46) “Do You Feel Like We Do” all the way through and hit the repeat button to hear it all over again. It was my first exposure to a guitar Talkbox. Peter Frampton seemed to harbor as much of a talent for it as he did playing his magnificent black Gibson Les Paul. This album is somewhat of a fabricated live album, but not in a bad way. It’s not a continuous recording of a single concert. The songs are all live, but they were recorded at concerts in San Francisco and New York City and meshed together in production. 

3.  Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation on Blu Ray: The Mission Impossible movies are always nothing short of a roller coaster ride. This one involves a group of former secret agents who have formed their own cabal and of course Tom Cruise and crew are being blamed for their shenanigans. Set pieces include Tom Cruise riding the wing of a transport plane from takeoff (in which he really did the stunt, truly death defying) and an underwater scene in which Cruise had to hold his breath for several minutes. Admittedly, the high point of the movie was what went on behind the scenes. Cruise co-produced it, stepping from behind the camera to take over and augment every scene how he saw fit to do so. Directed and written by Christopher McQuarrie, McQuarrie said the only thing Cruise cared about was making each scene breathless for the movie-going audience. I abhor Cruise’s politics and personal beliefs, but as an actor who puts so much effort in his movies as to perform his own stunts (and he’s older than I am!) I have to admit: I admire the guy.  

4.  The Witcher on Netflix:  As an avid fan of the game series (I picked up the original game in 2007 on day of release) I dismissed this series because of the casting. Placing Henry Cavill was a no-no in my book. The man was simply too young and too handsome. Geralt of Rivia, in the games was much older and more meaner looking than handsome. But hearing guys at work talk about how good it was, I had to check it out. Boy, was I wrong. Henry Cavill played the role with aplomb. And of course, now I want to replay the games. I’ll probably see Henry Cavill in my mind’s eye as Geralt from here on out which is not such a bad thing. The series touches upon many things in the books and the games. It’s a bit mature, but well worth watching if you enjoy fantasy set in medieval times.

5.  Home Alone on Blu Ray: A John Hughes classic film (are any of his films not classics?),  this is one I had never seen before. It was one of those movies I was quite familiar with, having been exposed to numerous scenes over the years and hearing how good it was from my parents. I could see this movie become a favorite Christmas movie for the multitudes. My own personal title is Elf. Like other Hughes films, this was made in Chicago, Illinois which made it special for me since I spent some of the best years of my boyhood in the prairie state. Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern are excellently cast in this slapstick comedy, basically a “family movie without the family” as the movie’s tagline described. The Blu Ray transfer is on point. If you’ve never seen this, you’re missing a gem, but that’s impossible because I’m the only person I know who had never seen this film.

6.  2018 Gibson Les Paul “Classic”: Saving and yearning for quite a while I was finally able to pick one up from Reverb.com. It wasn’t brand new, but the former owner who bought it new only had 3 hours play time on it. As I’ve said before, when you are a lefty the search is always treacherous and unfruitful. I got lucky with this one. Equipped with P90 pickups, it emanates total Angus Young AC/DC tone. I did find a minor quality control issue with it. Kudos to my friend Josh Query for remedying it for me. Weighing in at over ten lbs. it’s not light, but I’m loving the 1960s style smaller neck and the way it makes me feel I have to step up my game to do it justice when I play it. 

7. Dead Space 2 on PC: I finished the original game way back in 2011. I figured it was about time to knock out the next game in the series. The last game I played this scary was 2014’s venerable Alien Isolation which filled me with such a sense of dread I was just happy to finally get through it. This game runs a close second with each door sliding open and not knowing what’s in the room. There is nothing more terrorizing than being swarmed by necromorphs and having to stop to reload my weapons. This game offers such situations in spades. Taking place on a space station orbiting the planet Jupiter’s biggest moon, Titan, the game environment is so immersive it feels like a real place to me. When a game accomplishes this so well, there’s just no other place I’d rather be than at my computer. 

8. Guitar Gods by Rusty Cutchin: Basically a mini encyclopedia of some of the greatest guitarists in history. Loaned to me by my guitar mentor, Michael Stevens, this is a compelling book for a few reasons. It hosts a biography and photo of every guitarist I've ever known of, and it also lists the albums that made them famous. I've been jotting the albums down and listening to them on Spotify. I will never need a rock and roll appreciation class after this! Talk about an education. I may adopt this venue and call it my own, "Edward Burton Rock Appreciation 101." 

Edward's December 2019 Mix

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.

Edward's November 2019 Mix

It’s been a bizarre month. My mobile phone died. So, I did what I always do: buy a new one on eBay. The seller sent me a phone set up for the wrong network and then wanted me to try all kinds of things to get to work on the correct network. I went to two Sprint stores and one local phone repair center. No joy. I was finally refunded my money. I then tried to purchase a phone on the Sprint site and my bank suspended my debit card. When I talked to them about it they stated it was standard procedure. They don’t trust mobile phone websites. Go figure. I got the card reinstated, and made another attempt. Sprint sent me a text message for identification verification. Being that my phone was bricked there was no way I could receive the text. I called their tech support and was told they couldn’t help me. What? I ended up having to make the purchase in a Sprint store. I’m finally connected again. I’ll tell you, it was like being alone in outer space without a phone. Is such a dependency a good thing or a bad thing? To combat the frustration I listened to a lot of music and discovered a few new bands. Maybe something good does come out of everything.  

1.      Stranger than Fiction on Blu Ray: One of the best role casted movies I’ve ever seen. And no, I’m not so much a Will Ferrell fan, but I have to admit the guy was endearing and graceful in this film. A modern fable about a man buried in the mundane routine of his work days as an IRS auditor who suddenly discovers he’s actually a character in a fiction book.  Realizing he’s going to be killed off in the book he embarks on an adventure to find the real life author writing the book. Emma Thompson (little known fun fact: started out as a stand up comedian) plays the author. She cites a line from her own book, and I’m paraphrasing here, but I’ll never forget it: “ We must remember the nuances, anomalies and subtleties which we assume only accessorizes our lives, in fact, are here for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives.” 

2.     Fender Mirror Image Delay Effect Pedal: Found this brand new at a bargain price at a local music store. It seems Fender released a whole arsenal of effect pedals, everything from distortion to reverb and chorus pedals. They even released a distortion pedal for acoustic guitars. This Mirror Image pedal is a delay pedal that even had my wife proclaiming how interesting it sounded. (She never comments on my playing. I think she just quietly tolerates it.) Imagine playing your guitar in the Grand Canyon during sunrise. This pedal is the sound of that. 

3.      Deaf Center “Pale Ravine” on CD: A wonderment of atmospheric soundscapes and ethereal instrumentation perfectly coalesced. One Amazon reviewer likened this music to the soundtrack of old grainy black & white 8mm films. I could easily see it. The band, comprised of two gentlemen from Norway, create some of the most achingly beautiful ambient music I’ve ever heard. Look up “Path to Lucy” on YouTube. You’ll be converted. What’s amazing is I paid 8 bucks for this CD a month ago, and now there are only 3 available on Amazon selling for an exorbitant $182.10. How did this music get so expensive so quickly? 

4.   Jeff Pierce “To The Shores of Heaven“ on CD: Pretty much to guitar what John Serrie is to keyboards when it comes to space music/new age music.  Pierce is a one man show, using numerous guitar effects, especially reverb and delay to make amazing soundscapes.  Take a drive on a late night Interstate highway under the stars, when it’s just you and the 18 wheelers and the lights of the dashboard. Chances are this music will take you to places in your mind you’ve never been. “Sudden Light” is the one to sample via lookup.

5.   Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit on PC:  Finally beat this on Steam. As I’ve mentioned before this is old by today’s standards, released in 2010. There’s no storyline, but there is a conflict as old as literature. True man vs man and machine vs machine. There are two sides to the game, the first half played as an illegal street racer trying to outsmart the cops. And the second half in which you are one of the cops trying to take down the street racers. Some of the exotic police cruisers are downright comical in their luxuriance. When was the last time you saw a Lamborghinni Countach decked out in police markings? Still the game was fun, and challenging enough I had plenty of do-overs.  

6.   The War on Drugs “Lost in the Dream” on CD: I never would have discovered this band without my friend Cary Gillaspy posting one of their videos on my Facebook wall. It was a love at first listen. I immediately purchased the CD. It’s a mishmash of so much good music. Try this one for size: A spoonful of Bob Dylan mingled with a dash of Bruce Springsteen. And I swear I can hear A Flock of Seagulls in the shadows (others state they can hear Dire Straits.)  This is like a return to the 1980s for me. I’m amazed I had never heard of this band before. Carey, thank you.   

7.   Twelve Monkeys on Blu Ray: I hold a few film directors in high esteem. Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan (some of his films, not all). Ever since my old friend, Vic Berwick introduced me to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen I’ve added Terry Gilliam to that list. The bespoke film, Munchausen almost killed it for Gilliam in Hollywood being the film was the most expensive ever made to date completely lacking any computer generated special effects. Hollywood lost money and all trust in Gilliam making money making films was pulled. However, when Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt signed on to make Twelve Monkeys, the Hollywood execs took another look. Financing was granted along with some restrictions, but Gilliam’s maxim is “I have to start small because the film will get big.” And this movie was no exception. Set slightly in the future from 1990, the film concerns a man sent into the future to get a sample of  a virus that will annihilate Earth’s population in 1996. Somewhat convoluted, it’s a movie you will want to pause for bathroom breaks because if not, you’ll come back lost. The transfer to Blu Ray (from DVD) is gorgeous.

8. Dungeon Siege II on PC: My Grand Sorcerer is level 33 now and I’m 2/3 into Chapter 2 of a game with 3 chapters. It’s a mouse click festival, hacking and slashing in its purest form, but it never gets old. I still wrestle with trying find goal locations, but mowing down monsters on the way to them is never a waste of time. It all adds up to leveling up. Despite its muddy graphics, once I cut the lights and don the headphones I still get lost in the game’s world. This is every bit as immersive for me as good music or an enjoyable novel.

 9. David Copperfield  by Charles Dickens: Weighing in at 940 pages I’m only on page 150 and I already never want this novel to end. My goal was to knock out 18 books this year,  but reading this I doubt I get it done. It’s okay though, it’ll be worth it to lose the goal over this novel. Remember the 90s movie, Matilda and how the titular little girl told her teacher she could read Dickens everyday?  Well, little sister I’m with you. Granted I’ve met with one or two Dickens novels I found dry and dreary, but I think this one more than makes up. The tale concerns a boy, David Copperfield, who’s lost his father. He lives with his mother in a small cottage near a lighthouse.  His world is less than idyllic, but he’s a happy boy. One day his mother meets a charming gentleman named Edward Murdstone.  Charming, to her, that is. Murdstone feels threatened by the boy’s relationship with his mother and schemes. He has little Copperfield sent off to a boarding school filled with harsh taskmasters.  And so our story begins.

Edward's October 2019 Mix

This might be another new record, this one, conversely, for the smallest mix I’ve created. It’s been an odd month. My Blackstar amp has been in the shop getting a tube replacement. I resorted to buying an old cheapie at a local guitar store. It worked, but sheesh, I felt like a high school kid with a cheap Crate amp pilfered from a $100 guitar/amp kit. After two and a half weeks I finally got my amp back, and boy howdy! Truly a testament to the old adage, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. It’s been some really long hours at work (including Saturdays.) It’s another year in which we had no autumn. Beautiful fall foliage worthy of calendars and post cards. I think they’ve become a thing of the past, in Indiana, anyway.

                                       

1.       Alien Covenant on 4K Blu Ray: Ridley Scott returning to the roots of the series. That’s how I’d best describe this one. The movie exudes the same kind of stressful intensified suspense that defined the original Alien (1979). It basically reveals how/where the original alien comes from in what is technically the second half of the movie Alien Prometheus. Scott covered all of the bases in his usual obsessive style. He story boarded each and every scene. He wrote a page long character sketch for each character in the movie which was so well received, all of the actors took them and used them to flesh out the characters they were portraying. He’s been called a visionary, and you can see it in the very beginning when the spaceship Covenant unfurls solar “sails” to extract light from nearby suns to recharge the ship’s power cells. NASA is actually working on this technology as you are reading this. Scott said in an interview he was inspired by several sources in the making of this movie, including John Williams’ original score from which he uses small snippets and the great comedic actor, Slim Pickens, which he used as inspiration for Danny McBride’s character, Tennessee, right down to the cowboy hat. The hat alluded to Pickens’ character as the pilot in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. I thought this was a really well done movie. The only thing I found incredulous is the amount of f bombs dropped. I mean, yeah, I get it. Everybody thinks it’s cool to adjectivize every single noun on the planet with the f word these days. I think the word is an affront to the eloquence of our language. I would hope in two centuries the word will have fallen into disuse.

2.      Steel Division on PC: This had been sitting in my Steam library for the better part of a year. I was getting burned out on my old favorite Company of Heroes so I thought I’d tackle it. Think Company of  Heroes only at a platoon level instead of squad level. Eugen Games used satellite topography to depict Normandy, France and they nailed it beautifully. Hedgerows, buildings and trees all come into play. The units are authentic (and behave accordingly.) You expend “playing cards” to build your armies to go into battle. There are three phases each lasting ten minutes. It’s critical you balance which units are on the field in a given phase. It starts out well enough, but eventually there’s a lot going on. It can get overwhelming. I’m playing the American campaign now (there are only four missions per campaign. I’m told skirmish and multiplayer is where this game shines.) And admittedly, it was relatively easy, and just challenging enough to be fun. The last mission has shut me down. I’ve watched YouTube videos to try to get through it. And hopefully I will. I’ll just keep slogging through it until I do.  

3.      Sanford & Son: Season 3 on DVD: A carry over from last month, I’m about 2/3 of the way through this one. The Quincy Jones theme song still takes me back to my childhood. Everything Redd Foxx says still sends me into guffaws. Supposedly Norman Lear developed this on NBC as an answer to CBS’s “All in the Family.” Redd Foxx made $19,000 an episode, not bad money, especially for the early 1970s. The show had high ratings clear up until the end of its sixth and final season (in which ratings began to decline.) I was a child of television, meaning, I watched a lot of it as a kid. I remember getting on the school bus and the first thing out of my mouth to one of my friends would be, “Hey, did you see so and so last night on TV?” I think we were all like that at the time, and what’s funny is, there were only six or seven channels on television at the time. Yet, television meant so much more. Today, it seems almost mind numbing. I don’t watch network television and haven’t for years simply because of television advertising. I find them repulsive. (Definitely a topic for another discussion.) But Sanford & Son will always hold a place in my heart as the first adult comedy I took interest in as a kid. It made Friday night fun before the late night horror movies.

4.      A Million Little Pieces by James Fey: I’m still quite engaged in this notorious novel by James Fey. His description of life inside of a high dollar rehabilitation center is as effective of a dissuasion as the old 80’s TV commercial of an egg being cracked open and dropped into a sizzling skillet with the monotonic voice guy saying, “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?” Actually, Fey does offer glimmers of hope in a character named Leonard who has mafia ties and generally seems to care for Fey’s well being, and a girl, a former crack addict that Fey has become smitten with. Fey is a tough character in this book, his parents come to visit him and all he does (albeit unintentionally) is say things that shatter their hearts, and he becomes so angry he pulls his toe nails out by hand for the sake of the pain. It seems to be the only thing real that he can truly feel. One moment I love this guy, and in the next I find him disgusting.

5.      Dungeon Siege II on PC: I’m still hacking my way through this hack and slash action RPG. It’s fun, despite its now muddy graphics. My party is all comprised of high 20 something level characters. I rarely die now even when surrounded by high level foes. Composed of 4 “Acts” I’m currently in Act 3 and it’s moving quickly. This isn’t the most novel ARPG I’ve played (so far that honor goes to The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. Though not as frustrating as the first game of the series, Dungeon Siege, this game is fraught with difficulties in trying to find key locations even though it includes a hotkey accessible full scale map. It doesn’t help that I’m such a completionist probably to an extent that borders masochism.

6.      Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Season One on DVD: Debuting in 1970, I remember living in an old decaying apartment house at the time. I was nine years old. I was supposed to be in bed but I would sneak up to the doorway of our sleeping room and watch this show as my mother would sit closer to the television (unknowingly that I was behind her in the doorway.) The episodes would creep me out and I’d crawl into bed, my mind lingering on the horrors I’d just witnessed. The opening theme music (which will go down in history as one of the first television series to use electronic music in its opening) along with the myriad of creepy faces always gave me the willies. It’s odd watching this now. I wouldn’t say it’s cheesy, not at all. The show took itself seriously, but it was just a stifled product of its time.