While playing Fallout 4 I ran into this glitch that ruined my completion of the “Destroy the Brotherhood” quest. After triggering the explosion on the blimp the escape helicopter left me stranded in midair allowing the ground defenses to murder me in the sky:
The past week or so I have spent a bunch of time working behind-the-scenes on this WordPress site. My first priority was getting a handle on the new-ish system for creating and displaying sidebar blocks. Since WordPress 5.0, the goal of each subsequent update has been to make as much of the backend operate like the Gutenberg editor. When that change came to the widgets interface it ended up conflicting with a number of plugins that I was using: mainly contextual widget display and the sidebar nav. The side-nav is gone, and now I am using logic within my theme files to determine which sidebar items get displayed. So far it all seems to be working.
My next big change was to clean-up and consolidate my CSS so that I could use a single template to render the various content types on this site. In the process I have re-added a few pages that I had created in Views back on the old Drupal version of this site. Art and Retro-Computing feeds are back. Many of the reviews pages now have alternate views.
I fixed a bunch of little details all over the place and have made it so my artworks exist apart from my posts (even though they are in this main home page feed). The final change which I have yet to get to is making the navigation more mobile friendly. I never look at the Web on my phone, so this is low-priority for me.
In So Sweet, So Dead a string of unfaithful society wives are being killed off by a maniac who leaves photos of their infidelities scattered around the crime scene. The plot is just a messy pile of dropped plot points and undeveloped characters. One of the few things this mediocre giallo has going for it is a very on-brand masked, black gloved killer. Aside from the above still, there isn’t much style here and, for the record, gratuitous nudity doesn’t really count as style. The pervy autopsy assistant who relishes his job was a nice touch.
Aer takes a 1995 Zelda aesthetic and makes it into a boring slog. This game felt like a college game design project. The story is about ancient animal gods or something. You can turn into a bird and hold a lantern. The core of the game is exploring three simple dungeons to find the appropriate pads to stand on to get to the magic thing. Collect three magic things and you win!! The Epic game store is noteworthy for giving away free games but a lot of what they offer is this type of stylish indie game with no pay-off.
With this game I have finally played all the key 90s RPG classics. I attempted to play a few years ago but because the GOG version of the game ran so poorly in Windows 10, I gave up. This time around I found the Unofficial Arcanum Patch and that made most of the performance issues go away. That is, until the last stretch of the game in which characters began randomly to disappear from my party and saves became corrupted. I managed to complete the game by turning off the high-res patch and saving every few minutes, but, man, was that ever annoying.
The main selling point of Arcanum is its steam punk setting. It’s the technology of the Nineteenth Century mixed with magic and the stereotypical fantasy races. In the end it just feels like another D&D style fantasy game where you have to defeat the evil wizard, etc. I was a magic, sorry magick user so the technology stuff had little impact on my play style. Aside from the opening sequence, in which a blimp is destroyed by planes, and the occasional reference to trains this might as well have been Middle Earth. For a truly steam-punk RPG play the excellent Ultima: Martian Dreams.
The main quest line is okay. It does eventually degenerate into the aforementioned cliché of defeating the evil wizard but there are plenty of little side quests in every region to keep things interesting. Much like Fallout at the end of the game you get a recap of all the good deeds you accomplished, so it pays to offer your help wherever you travel. There are lots characters and lots of possible dialogue interactions, and, because I focused on charisma, I was able to talk my way out of many-a-problem. It could get a bit wordy at times but that can be expected of games of this vintage.
Arcanum uses the same engine as Fallout 1 & 2 but has a janky combat system that’s sort of turn-based and sort of real-time. It works most of the time, but once your characters are leveled high enough it just becomes, “point at the thing and it will die.” Despite its flaws I found the combat to be fun or, at the very least, satisfying.
The main problems with this old-school interface were inventory management (especially dealing with your party members), navigating the zoomed-out map, and moving around on screen with limited visibility. I think Arcanum is still worth playing if you can tolerate its technical flaws and its failure to live up to its setting’s potential.
I was quite a bit hesitant to get this game because I had heard that a big part of if was building and maintaining settlements. Along with crafting, this type of management system is one of my least favorite types of game play. The first few missions are all about teaching you to create and build settlements but there soon comes a point when you can ignore that part of the game in get to the really fun part: exploration and combat. Why would I want to maintain a farm when out can explode dudes.
The V.A.T.S. system is no replacement for the turn-based combat of the original Fallout games, but it has its own appeal that melds well with otherwise standard FPS mechanics. I never got tired of the slow-motion replays of the body parts flying everywhere.
The main story is the game’s weakest element. You awake from a cryogenic sleep to discover your infant son has been kidnapped. This plotline ends about halfway through the game and it shifts to working between the various factions of the wasteland. None of them seem particularly evil and yet you are tasked with destroying them by the various other groups. At that point I stopped caring.
The real fun of the game is exploring the massive open world. There’s a little story connected with every location. Sometimes its told explicitly, other times it’s gleaned from the items and messages that have been left behind. Very soon I was ignoring the main quest and just running off in random directions looking for adventure. Before I knew it I has sunk well-over a hundred hours into the game. I even started to enjoy the settlement building as I collected trophies and magazines from around the Commonwealth.
I finally completed the main quest after which the game wisely allows you to keep playing. I still think the original two Fallout games where the best in terms of narrative, but, of the three 3-D games in the series, this one was the most fun to play, and was the best looking (even though it’s still very gray and brown).
One more Carol Baker giallo in which she plays a character whose past trauma has made her mute (is that even a real thing?). I really was unimpressed with everything about this. The mystery is lame, it lacks style, and doesn’t even have the sexiness of her earlier giallos. On top of that, the muteness of the character is never really utilized in the plot. I feel like there should have been a sequence where she needed to scream in order to escape the killer.
I’m slowly working my way through various artist monographs I have collected over the years. Up until now I had only looked at the pictures. This is the catalogue for a huge exhibition of art by Otto Dix that was held at the Tate Gallery. It’s filled with many great images and some biographical information about Dix. There are a number of essayists featured and they all had about the same story to tell. Dix didn’t lead that crazy of a life other than his time during World War I and his few entanglements with the Nazis regarding his “degenerate” art. This is, by no means, a complete overview of his art. There are a few plates that are labeled like, “he made 150 landscapes during this period… here is one of them.”
The fifth and (probably) final engraving in my series of prints based on Italian giallo films. This one is based on Deep Red a.k.a. Profondo Rosso. Possibly the finest giallo ever created. It’s filled with fantastic visuals, a great score, plenty of gore, and a spectacular (and fair) twist at the end.
The print depicts the moment just before Helga Ulmann is killed as Marcus wanders the nighttime streets of Turin.
The print was engraved in resingrave, a material which, I have recently come to discover, is no longer being produced. I am really upset by this as I was just starting to get a handle on the medium.
These photos show the various stages of the engraving from concept to final print.
A police thriller in which the hero is a 60 year old detective who constantly thinks his 26 year old wife is cheating on him. His personal life gets mixed up with the case of black-gloved murders he is investigating. This one is really bad. The January/December relationship is cringe, the plot riddled with holes, every location looks like a grandma’s living room, and every secondary character is dubbed by Paul Frees, the voice of Disneyland’s Haunted House ride. The only fun part is when Max gets kicked in the crotch by a glassy-eyed heavy:
