I have finally gone back to wood engraving into a properly manufactured wood block. This print was engraved into a traditional end-grain maple block. Maple certainly doesn’t hold as much detail as resingrave but it is much easier to print and is more accommodating to various drawing transfer methods.
I don’t have much to say about the imagery here, just that I have been in the mood to draw monsters these days.
I’m slowly working my way through the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. I think I liked this better than L’Avventura, but it is still a plotless excuse to glorify middle-aged men and their barely-legal muses. The movie opens up with an loveless married couple visiting a dying old friend in the hospital and ends with them making out in the sand trap off the eighteenth green. The whole thing seems to symbolize an entire marriage over the course of a single 24 hour period. There’s lots of brooding and extramarital dalliances, and it’s all shot in a beautifully velvety black and white style (especially all the “notte” scenes). There’s also a long sequence of an exotic dancer balancing a wine glass on her head. Deep stuff guys!
A Borderlands 2 stand alone expansion that is more of the same from this franchise. In this one, you are playing a game within a game as Tiny Tina DM’s a table top RPG filled with dragons, wizards, and other fantasy archetypes. There is very little to distinguish it from the other games in the series other than the grenades now act as missile-style spells. You are still collecting randomly generated guns and pairing weapon types with various enemy types. The main reason for playing this is to get the usual doses of comedic stories and characters. Claptrap is searching for his wizard beard, Torgue is a jock looking to gain nerd-cred, etc. A worthy expansion if you like the series.
Skald was one of handful of Kickstarter projects that I have backed. It is a throwback tribute to 80s role playing games like Ultima or Phantasie with a heavy emphasis on pen-and-paper dice mechanics. Watching the game’s development has been pretty interesting. Early builds of the game look very much like the PC version of Ultima V. As the months (and years) went by that art style became much more detailed and modern stuff like weather and lighting effects were added. The final product is an incredibly detailed pixelized world to explore.
So much care has gone into every single map tile. There is an overwhelmingly brown and gray tone to the art. I think this is trying to be reminiscent of the Commodore 64 palette but at times, especially during nighttime battles, it became difficult to discern friend from foe from foliage. The art style extends into several lovely “cutscene” graphics and various dialogue screens. There are even fanciful medieval drop-cap letters in the text display.
All of this is in service of a Lovecraftian tale of dark fantasy in which various old creatures are emerging back into the world and corrupting the minds of men. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t much emergent gameplay. The story is pretty linear despite the initial open-world feel of the map. I am playing this just coming off of re-playing the first two Fallout games and perhaps I expect a bit more player choice in the narrative. But, to be fair, the Ultima games were basically adventure games with role-playing mechanics thrown on top.
The role-playing here is mostly about building the skills you can use in combat and navigating the world map. Many tasks in the game will require a stats checks and Skald literally shows dice rolling as it checks for success. As experience is gained and characters level up, the player can assign points to stats trees that differ based on class. Spells are gained, new attacks are learned, and various combat skills become unlocked.
Skald is at its best during combat. It recreates the turn-based strategy of the early Ultimas in which you control the actions of every character in order of initiative. It isn’t quite as tactical as the Wasteland sequels but there is a fair amount of positioning, spellcasting, ability management. Keeping everyone alive is a challenge and those battles that end with just a couple of party members still standing are exhilarating.
Skald falls short of greatness in that it does not quite live up to the potential of a next-gen 2-D RPG. Hopefully the engine will continue to be developed to add more environmental interactivity, a better dialogue system, and a more expansive and explorable over-world. During the Kickstarter there was walk of releasing development tools. I’d love to see what the modding community can come up with using this system.
The title and cover art have absolutely nothing to do with the story within the pages of the pulp detective novel. Strip for Violence is about a diminutive detective with judo skills whose small-time case involving a mysterious stone devolves into murder and mayhem. There are lots of distinct characters like Bobo the ex-boxer sidekick, Johnson the overweight postman, and Louise the tennis enthusiast. This is not exactly Shakespeare, but its a solid pulp thriller that was a light and entertaining read.
All of the artsy Italian films from the 60s seem to be about the same thing: wealthy middle aged man’s escapades with twenty-something girls. Filled with moody ponderings about life and love and then it just ends, plot be damned. Still, something about this that kept me engaged and feeling stupid for not really understanding it.
I got this book as an advance copy and was really wanting to like it so I could say that, “I was totally in to this before anyone else.” Unfortunately, this book is terrible. The prose is dense and unnecessarily incomprehensible, the characters are flat and undeveloped, and the main plot goes nowhere. Just when I thought I had a handle on what was going on, the next chapter would shift into flashback or a side story told in a different voice. The main idea here is that there’s an warrior who can’t be killed and who has roamed the Earth for 80,000 years. There’s also an immortal pig. Most of the story takes place in a laboratory or something. I don’t know. This book was so boring. Even Zardoz or Highlander 2: The Quickening tackled the topic of immortality in a more interesting and thoughtful manner.
I couldn’t resist the pull of Fallout after a recent playthrough of Fallout 1. This is the second time I have played Fallout 2 but I have little to no memory of the game other than the opening temple and the Reno levels.
The game may not look much different than its predecessor, but there are massive improvements. The world is much more vast and there’s more variety in the overworld encounters and towns. Your followers now have a combat settings in which you can granularly control their actions. You can even tell them not to burst fire you to death! Inventory management is slightly better. They’ve added a “Take All” button to the interface. There’s a car that you can use for fast travel. Also the tile sprites are more detailed and you can tell characters to move if they are blocking a doorway. In other words, if you’re wanting to try out a vintage Fallout game, this is the one to play.
My biggest negative about the game is that the main quest line is nowhere near as good as the first game. It makes up for it in the sheer number of side missions and character dialogs to distract the player from the ho-hum threat of The Enclave. And at least there is no water-chip timer ticking to push you along.
My final thought is that much of what we think of when we think of Fallout really comes from the 3-D sequels. The retro-fifties aesthetic mostly exists in the manuals and marketing of these old Interplay games. That actual feel of the 2-D world is way more Mad Max than Leave it to Beaver.
Christopher Walken’s evolution into a parody of Christopher Walken makes this a little hard to take seriously. In the end, it’s a very well crafted thriller despite the goofy premise and completely unhinged depiction of a corrupt politician.
After watching, my wife was asking about the actress who plays the female lead (Brooke Adams). I said that I think she’s the lady from Invasion of the Body Snatchers who vibrates her eyes and that’s about all I know. She then looked her up and asked, “Hey, do you know who she’s married to?” I guessed what I thought was the most random actor I could think of, Tony Shalhoub. Turns out I totally dead zone’d the correct answer. I swear I had no idea. I even went back to see if any of the suggested films on the streaming service were Monk or Wings or whatever. Nothing. This proves it. I’m psychic.
Baby Boomers love this movie and you’ll often seen it ranked as one of the best comedies of all time. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t hold up. I swear the first twenty minutes of the film are completely joke-free. Belushi is billed as the star but his part boils down to being a pervy Buster Keaton and occasionally mugging his puppy dog eyes at the camera. I found it hard to sympathize with the Deltas who were, in reality, a bunch of stupid drunks. The movie’s idea of a joke is to yell, “Food fight!” then have people throw food. Hilarious. I guess the general form here is gross-out comedy, but so many films did it better later on. Even Revenge of the Nerds, which basically steals every plot beat here, had more likable characters and bigger laughs. The last 15 minutes of mayhem is the only time when I felt the movie come to life.
