Thirty One Days of Horror: Resident Evil - The Movie

Day Two: Resident Evil (the movie)

The first Resident Evil movie arrived in 2002, featuring Milla Jovovich as the lead character. As movies based on game franchises go it was pretty well done, but as anyone who’s sat through more than a few such adaptations can assert, being “better than normal” in this department is sort of like saying, “I’ve eaten plenty of bugs in my time, and as bugs go, this one’s pretty tasty.”

In the film’s defense it actually is pretty good, and unlike later sequels you can easily follow each component back to the source without too much effort. The movie focuses on a squad of Umbrella mercenaries who are sent in to investigate their immense subterranean lab beneath Raccoon City, where they’ve been experimenting with all sorts of unpleasant bio weapon research. Unlike the game, the movie focuses primarily on a cast of characters here to deal with what at first appears to be a rogue AI computer, and set pieces from the game like the mansion and underground subway are given a slight nod but aren’t even remotely as relevant in the movie. Even the zombies from Resident Evil are just one part of the movie’s focus, and not even the main one at that; the numerous high-tech traps of the “Red Queen” AI as well as the licker creature (a late-appearing foe in the first game) are given a great deal of focus.

In many ways this movie complements that game because it could, in theory, be depicting previously unseen elements of the massive and complex mess of plots that comprise the events of the game. Later entries into the game franchise (like RE: Operation Racoon City) even seem to take direct inspiration from the film while trying to meld its many elements together with the game’s. This in some ways makes this first film more significant. It’s possible, after all, that Milla Jovovich’s character Alice is actually a resident of the mansion (or another mansion….Umbrella has a lot of places like this, it seems), and the film follows the games in spirit by demonstrating a large underground Umbrella operation being present, although the demonstrated scope of this facility in the film seems to be far greater than anything the games imply or demonstrate.

If one ignores the fact that Hollywood has never, ever made a video game tie-in that was an accurate depiction of the source game, can it be possible for them to intentionally or accidentally get the thematic elements right? So going by my core criteria for Resident Evil as a game series from last time, how does the film stack up? Let’s See:

(Un)controlled Pacing

You can’t really have a “player” in a movie so this is an unfair comparison. However, you can have plenty of unpredictable or frightening moments in film, and you can punctuate these by building up a slow and methodical pace, then surprising the audience in ways they didn’t expect.

The movie does a fairly good job of attempting this, but fails in the sense that it doesn’t really capture the slow but suspenseful build-up that the original does. The movie tries to frame much of the experience through the eyes of Alice and her erstwhile ally who are both suffering memory loss, allowing them (in theory) to be as surprised as us when they discover things even though they worked for Umbrella. Likewise, the mercenaries seem to understand the sort of employer they work for yet are woefully unprepared for just what it is they might encounter. I give it a C.

Scenery Porn – Horror Style

There are some great moments in this film, with weird sets, moody and disturbing scenes of carnage, industrial equipment and machinery, weird labs and a wide range of such to boot. If you graded the movie a success on this element alone it does a pretty decent job. Unfortunately except for the mansion scenes and the underground railroad very little is directly inspired by the games. B+.

Sense of Isolation

Actually I thought the movie did a pretty decent job here despite its large cast of cannon fodder. You start with a large number of characters, who quickly get whittled away. There are moments where the film engenders a decent sense of claustrophobia (you definitely feel like they’re deep underground) and I never saw anything that felt specifically like a set to me. On the other hand these are a gang of tough mercenaries and special agents; only the poor reporter guy stands out as someone who should be losing their cool in the midst of all this. With so many cast members running around, it’s hard to feel the isolation. I give it a C+.

Resource Management

So how would you go about expressing this theme in a film? Running out of bullets, taking a moment to demonstrate that people are running out of resources, or emphasizing when they do find them. It’s not really a “thing” in the movie, which frames events in a very short time span (I’d have to say that the length of time that passes in the film isn’t much more than a few hours). Hard to grade this, since it’s so specific to the game experience, but the movie could have made it stand out. There is one point where Michelle Rodriguez’s character mentions that they’re running out of bullets, I think. People often seem to run out of ammo in these movies, and usually respond by tossing their guns to the ground. Yeah….give it a C, I guess.

Mystery Unexplained

Well in one sense there’s plenty that remains unexplained in this movie. Enough to do four sequels, it would seem! But not all is obvious…as subsequent reviews shall demonstrate. Needless to say, the movies do attempt to keep plenty open, but mostly for purposes of framing the end of each film to open up for a sequel. In 2002 when this first came out it was a great cliffhanger, which felt like a decent conclusion to the movie and at the same time implying a future sequel.

In the context I intended, which is to say the idea within the games that there remained many unexplained puzzles and implied mysteries or tales yet to be told, the movies do a less than adequate job. The problem here is not even a matter of simply dropping hints or suggestions of things to come or events unseen; it’s a problem with film script writing in general, especially in the genre of action films where plot and exposition will always fall by the wayside. A side effect of this sort of film is the so called “fridge logic” moments, which if the film makers are very lucky transform into “fridge brilliance” moments instead. (I dare you to lose hours of your life looking these terms up on TVtropes).

A fridge logic moment happens when you think about a movie later on and realize some glaring plot holes. Fridge brilliance is when something less obvious suddenly stands out as especially impressive later on. Unfortunately Resident Evil’s first movie has a lot of the former and less of the later. It only gets worse….much, much worse…with later films. The saving grace will boil down to: how much can one overlook the problems inherent in these fridge logic moments, and assume that…at least in the implied universe of the RE movies….such deviations from logic are the norm?

Luckily for the first film there aren’t many…but what it does is set up the stage for the later films to violate logic…and canon…all over the place; but more about those later on. For now, I’ll just ask the following questions and rank this film with a B+ for effort:

That Crazy Laser Trap

How did that laser chamber trap work? Assuming it worked in any way like a conventional laser, what is that material the walls are made of, because if it’s glass then the laser ought to be slicing right through it and the metal framework everything is held up by. The only other explanation is that the laser source is being generated on the surface of the glass and metal frame….but that way lies madness. We’ll ignore the “gridded” trap for the moment, too.

The Licker Crate Conundrum

The lickers were kept in crates in a large containment area. Okay, I can accept this. But if all these creatures are so virulent in their ability to transmit the virus, and there are crates full of them down there, why wouldn’t Umbrella have at least considered the risk, or briefed their team going in? By the second movie the only implication is the entire corporation is managed by psychotics who like to experiment with stuff for fun, but more on that later.

Also, why do we only see one licker escaping? The answer, of course, is “because we could only budget for one and a gaggle of them wouldn’t work in the framework of this movie,” and more do appear in the second film.

Umbrella’s Lack of Faith in the Red Queen

How come no one at Umbrella could speak with the Red Queen to ascertain what had happened? It was never adequately explained, as best I could tell, just why it was assumed that the Red Queen had gone psycho despite the fact that she seemed to be engaging in Umbrella-approved methods of containment (which included gassing the work staff and arming lethal traps). I mean…the Red Queen didn’t build these, right? She’s just in charge of making things happen as it should, a neutral and unbiased personality who’s willing to push the button when the tough decisions need to be made. So why didn’t Umbrella recognize this? My rationalization is that Umbrella is, for such a ridiculously evil, secret corporation with clear government backing, heavily compartmentalized to the point where whomever sent in the initial response team in this movie probably didn’t have a need-to-know, and by the time somebody with familiarity of the situation arrives (at the tail end of the movie) its mostly just to salvage what they can.

Final Verdict

It’s a half-decent attempt at a video game film which manages to tell a story that, while highly deviant from the source, still feels like it “fits,” telling a side-tale that doesn’t entirely contradict the original game story, even if it also doesn’t precisely fit in a round hole/square peg sort of way. Worth seeing though, and taken on its own merits it’s a fun movie to watch even if you know nothing of the games. B+

Next: Resident Evil: Apocalypse in Review

Calendar Countdown to the Apocalypse

Get it here while it's hot! I think I'll pick one of these up, they're going to be fantastic novelty items in a few years.

I can't even joke about it ironically....sigh.....actual familiarity with a subject sucks all the fun out of it. I wonder what it is about western European culture and it's wacky American offshoot that finds itself so obsessed with apocalyptic end times, enough so to co-opt a perfectly legitimate calendar from an entirely unrelated culture just to ascribe special significance to its effectively arbitrary termination/cycle date? After all, the end of the Mayan calendar to its original creator signified one thing: time to make a new calendar for the next cycle.

I think...correct me if I'm wrong....that the next big world-ending event to loom nigh after we get past December 22nd is the 2037 close pass-by of the 2004 MN4 NEO (near Earth object) that will no doubt lead to hillarious shenanigans my son can enjoy (and also hopefully myself at the ripe old age of 66).

In the meantime, I have an intense urge to find this guy, and forcibly shave off all his hair on national television while giving him a wedgie for the impressively anti-science, anti-rational thought show that is Ancient Aliens:



Seriously. Large Hadron Collider being a clear depiction of the Mayan (or Aztec?) Calendar? I'm eagerly awaiting the episode where he explains how ancient aliens brought us Michelin tires.




Y'know, I miss the good 'ol bad 'ol days of the Cold War, when an actual apocalypse was riding on the mental sanity of men like General Curtis LeMay. Now that was an era in which we could all validly place our collective terror of real annihilation.

So next time a wacky relative or friend goes off on a tangent about this (does anyone actually do that who's a real live person not on the internet?) link them this so they can fume and ignore it under the pretense its all a ruse to distract us from the horrible truth.

Thirty One Days of Horror: the Resident Evil Games

Starting October 1^st and going until I run out of oomph or actually complete my goal: thirty one days of horror reviews in both cinema and game! I’m going to kick off the week with a look at the Resident Evil franchise…

Day 1: Resident Evil – the original games

Sometimes the scariest thing about a horror franchise is what its owner does with it. In this case, Capcom has managed to take what was a 1996 classic adventure/action title that single-handedly put survival horror as a genre on the map*and over the course of the next 15 years has managed to take that title on a whirlwind survival adventure of its own. From game to film to book, Resident Evil is its own entire domain now, with so many spins and takes you’d think it was suffering from vertigo.

Where am I going with this? I plan to review each of the Resident Evil movies, but to talk about them, I first need to discuss the games. The games set the foundation from which all was to come, and reviewing movies which carry the Resident Evil title requires a look at the games and my interpretation of them, first.

The original game was released in 1996, first as Biohazard in Japan and then under the odd but apparently distinct title we know it as in the United States and elsewhere. This game has a special place in my “personal history of gaming.” It was the first title I purchased for the original Playstation and also the game which motivated me to try many, many other games trying to recapture the lighting that Resident Evil embodied in mood, atmosphere, story and (for the time) game play. For myself, like many others, it was the first time anyone had really experienced a truly frightening and engaging game experience and was key, I often feel, to the early success of the Playstation.

Writing in retrospect about the games is hard, because the gameplay that I found so compelling 16 years ago does not hold up well today. This has led to an interesting problem for fans of survival horror, for as you may have noticed the genre has taken a nosedive according to the consensus of most game journalists and fans. Notable exceptions pop up on occasion (such as Amnesia, Penumbra and the recent wave of Slender Man games) but the apparent prevalence of the genre seems to be absent…..at least, for the franchise which started the genre.

Resident Evil spanned three titles on the original Playstation. I’m not considering spin-off titles here, focusing instead on the core games, the ones which seem to provide the underlying narrative. Resident Evil started the story of a remote mansion in the Aklay Mountains, under investigation by a group of agents belonging to the Special Tactics and Recon Squad (STARS), featuring Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, the first two heroes of the tale. It progresses to Resident Evil 2, in which the zombie outbreak of the mansion has spread to neighboring Raccoon City and eventually we get to Resident Evil 3 which completes the trilogy, all set in the same region and centered on the same events, portrayed here as happening in 1998. The next proper title in the franchise doesn’t show up until some time later on the next generation of consoles, featuring a new series of tales and foes that take place several years after the Playstation One games.

The original Resident Evil has been revised on more than one occasion, with a Director’s Cut edition followed by a remake on the Gamecube, as well as a “Resident Evil Zero” which served as a Gamecube-exclusive prequel to the original game. To the best of my knowledge none of these titles have been released in a modern HD edition or compilation, though you can get some of them on the Playstation Network for download. I have them, but do not have a PS3 or a PSP on which to play them right now.

If this is a review then the question to be asked is: are they worth your time? The answer is tough, because while the franchise and original games are monumental in what they created, after 16 years they have aged poorly, and may not be suited to everyone’s tastes anymore. The control scheme in particular, as efficient as it was back in the day is potentially nightmarish to someone who has spent too much time with modern day games. Some people mistake the clunky control scheme for being one of the charming traits of survival horror (especially as it was common to see that type of control scheme in other similar titles, such as Silent Hill). Make no mistake: it as a necessary artifact of the era, a crude work-around to the limits of console and PC technology back in the day.

So if you are an old vet, or you have a high tolerance for archaic control schemes, the games might indeed be worth your time to mess with, especially if you can get them on the PSP, where the tiny screen provides the illusion of better graphical fidelity in a land made of very low polygon counts. If you can do this, and you are willing to overlook the graphic limitations of the time, then you have a treat in store. Resident Evil had a lot going for it, and it introduced several key concepts that I feel are extremely important to defining survival horror as a gaming genre, and even have importance in films. Specifically, a countdown on all five defining elements:

Player (Un)controlled Pacing

If you’ve played Resident Evil you’ll remember when you meet the first zombie, or when the dogs show up. In fact, you’ll never forget. Even if you go back and replay it, finding the scene to be mildly amusing now thanks to the quality of the graphics , the memory of that first experience from back when it was all new will always stick with you. I sound snobby dissing the graphics, but I’m not, really…it’s just things have changed so much in terms of graphic quality its impossible to ignore. The fact that these moments in the game are so memorable is a testament to the pacing of the game, and the way it employs slow moments with sudden surprises and unexpected events.

These scenes work because much of the time spent playing Resident Evil is slow paced. You walk all over, you turn slowly, you need to aim carefully when you do fight things and you spend a lot of time looking for exotic and not always obvious clues. You do a lot of adventure game stuff, basically, minus some of the pixel-hunting. And then, suddenly, a giant snake shows up, or dogs, or Wesker or who the hell knows what and the game throws you out of “adventure game” mode and deep into action-holy-crap-what-do-I-do territory. This was a common feature of all the Resident Evil games up through Resident Evil: Code Veronica.

Scenery Porn – Horror Style

I think it goes unrecognized too often, but while the polygonal characters of the original games may not look that exciting now, the static backdrops through which you traversed the game were pretty amazing and still look fairly decent. Resident Evil was one of many games to employ the static backdrop for design, and it did a great job of it. Modern adventure games still employ this technique, and it’s actually a fairly easy way to evoke mood and a sense of disquiet, exploring haunted and evocative locales as you search for clues and answers. This element is what sometimes helped the films along, too. Resident Evil in particular employs a distinct aesthetic, which is tantamount to “baroque research labs gone wrong,” and when the films stick to such environments it does well. More on that later, though.

Sense of Isolation

Resident Evil employed the concept of being alone really well, even when you weren’t (and frankly there were a lot of STARS members running around that mansion in the first game). Limited processing power prevented the first few games from deploying more than a handful of characters in screen at any given time. Younger gamers may find it hard to believe, but there was one a lost age of gaming when people discussed ways of technically rendering more than four creatures on a screen at once. Those days are long gone, but they were a key reason that you never see more than a few zombies in old Resident Evil games at any given time, and it took the later generation of consoles to start to break these limits.

A side effect of such limits was the fact that it forced the writers and designers for these games to build the plot and story around the idea that you met very few people (i.e. remote Mansion near remote mountain town), and when you did they tended to go away conveniently at the end of cut scenes (looking at you, Ada Wong). A downside of this of course meant that ambitious titles like Resident Evil 2 couldn’t often present elaborate sets filled with zombies and survivors. Another downside came later, with the neg-gen wave of titles (Resident Evil 4 and 5 specifically) in which the option to add extra characters changed the story dynamic, and not always for the better. But for the original games, it worked well.

Resource Management

This has been in almost every game, ever. In real life military personnel don’t go off on a mission that may require 4,000 bullets without—you know—taking 4,000 bullets with them. In video games you find ammo lying around. In Resident Evil you find mysterious herbs and mix your own poultices. You find all kinds of stuff lying around, but you try to carry all of it in a fanny pack, apparently, for the scope of your inventory. This is a deliberate game play feature, of course, but it also contributes greatly to the suspense and helps to enhance the horror element, especially when you realize you need to start counting bullets. Later additions to the franchise got away from this a bit, and some wannabe titles ditch it entirely, and often to deleterious effect.

Mystery Unexplained

By this I mean, “Lots of mysteries, and you don’t know if you’ve figured it all out by the end.” Sometimes this is because the writers didn’t bother to explain something, or maybe the localization missed some subtle detail in translating the game to English (ala Jill, master of lockpicks). Sometimes its because this is a game, after all, and for all the story elements needed to string events along it’s occasionally necessary to include something which borders on the nonsensical in any in-universe explanation, until a later sequel figures out a way to use that errant bit of data.

Not all enigmas in Resident Evil are good: chess piece keys and that guy who follows you around selling weapons in Resident Evil 4 are two painful examples of immersion-testing nonsense. However, many things which go unexplained in one game lead directly into the rather more robust canon that emerges in later sequels. Resident Evil Zero and Code: Veronica are both instances where the whispered hints of the Umbrella deviancy in the first game are magnified into full-blown Machiavellian plots for later titles. Wesker, creepy guy on the take in the original game emerges as a godlike test subject for evil by Resident Evil 5 (and apparently has a son in the forthcoming Resident Evil 6).

But the important thing, of course, is that for every mystery you resolve or every Umbrella facility you blow up by the end of the game, the implication should be that there is so much more your protagonists has barely scratched the surface on.

Summary

This is mostly an overview of the games (especially the original three), and I may write more about specific Resident Evil titles later in the month, but this overview helps set up the framework for the forthcoming movie reviews. For now, remember the following key features that I feel help define the special subgenre of Resident Evil: horror scenery porn, unexplained mysteries, methodical and slow (player-driven) pacing interrupted by sudden shocks and over-the-top action, resource management, and an overwhelming and tension-inducing sense of isolation. There’s no one to back you up, and if there is, they might be out to get you, too.

Next: Resident Evil (the movie)

*It didn’t create the genre, but it did make it a “thing.” Alone in the Dark was, near as I can tell, the progenitor of this style of game, but RE put the survival into the horror.

I'd Play That Campaign

XKCD

Thirty One Days of Fun But Hard Work

Not a lot to post today, but that doesn't mean I'm not posting. I'm thoroughly committed to seeing through my plan of "Thirty One Days of Horror," filled to the brim with horror movies, as well as some book and game reviews. It's a lot of fun, and I used my free time while the wife and child were away to get a jump start on it, but I will see this through. Trying to watch each film right before reviewing them....it's much more satisfying to talk about the movie in question with it fresh in mind.

So....more later! I'll post other stuff for Friday if any interesting news pops up.

For today, I offer some cool images to segue September into October....my favorite month of the year:

Cool Blog and Other Stray Bits

To keep up with my Monday-Wednesday-Friday regimen, I present...another post!

First off, go check out How to Succeed in RPGs or Die Trying by S.P.. I really like what he does there, it's full of useful stuff and inspires me to do more like it. He's also pushing out monsters you can use with 4E or Gamma World, which is pretty danged cool.



On the computer gaming front I have been playing lots of Rift, which is a weird way of responding to how much I liked Guild Wars 2.....you'd think I'd be playing more of that, right? The problem remains that GW2 is what everyone is playing right now, so the crowded mobs charging around from heart to heart have been crazy, especially for someone like myself who has an aversion to digital mobs. But you know, Mists of Pandaria just arrived, so maybe they'll go back home and I can enjoy GW2 more as a result. I have a serious aversion to the new World of Warcraft race: the pandaren look suspiciously like fat furrier cosplayers to me, and I loathe cutsey anthropomorphized things of all sorts, so this expansion effectively killed my interest in ever returning to WoW. They'll need to have the Lich King himself show up on Pandaria and slaughter every last one of the furries before I'll set foot on Azeroth again...

Anyway, Rift is pretty cool in its own right. I am planning to buy their deluxe expansion deal, which gets you the Storm Legion expack with a year's gameplay and some goodies. It's nice to be committed to a game again, to have one I'm happy with. Rift has many dynamic features that are just interesting to experience; it's gimmick, the perpetual battle against the invading elemental forces which try to blast their way into reality through Rift gates, is endlessly fascinating to me. The storyline's not half bad, either, and I like the look and feel of the game. I'm such a slow leveler though that it's hard to imagine I'll make level 50 by the time the expansion releases November...13th? I think that's when it hits. That's about seven weeks away. I have a level 26 human warrior and a level 24 Bahmi (half giant) rogue....I'd have to level each of them 3 levels a week, roughly, to make the level cap before then. That's assuming I ignore all my alts in the process. It seems like I can manage 1 to 1.5 levels for every 2-3 hours or so of gameplay. Assuming I can pull off 30 hours of game time in seven weeks....hmmm yeah, not gonna happen.



It's fun browsing all the blogs out there dedicated to MMOs. I get the feeling that to really play an MMO properly you need to sink 40-50 hours a week into these things. Not a month....a week. I once ran with a group in WoW that chastised me for playing only 20 hours a week a few years ago (at a time when I was unmarried and childless, though my soon-to-be-wife was also playing WoW at the pace of a full-time job). I was told that anything less than 30 hours a week was considered "casual" and I would never pass muster for the endgame. Well, showed them! I never even made level cap, let alone bother with the endgame.

Anyway, the MMO scene has already hit the one-month mark, if even that, in Guild Wars 2 and are already complaining about the game. Really, people? Doesn't anybody work anymore? I know a lot of kids play these games, but even kids have responsibilities outside of the internet, right?

 I get the feeling that there's a huge schism between what one might consider a reasonable amount of time to focus on hobbies (i.e. MMOs) and what's actually being funneled into those MMOs. Maybe not a lot of MMOers have kids, or are trust fund babies, or have no lives outside of gaming? I'd say my wife and I have fairly bland lives outside of raising our son and gaming and the idea of devoting full time hours to a game every week endlessly for months at a time strikes me as bordering on maniacal and obsessive.*



Anyhoo! This is old, well-trod ground and other people who have been through the culture of gaming addiction have written far more interesting stuff about it than I ever could.

So my weekend downard spiral into dismal discontent with life has already improved with the return of my wife and child from their two week vacation. Yay! My kid has 4 teeth and a fifth on the way. He's standing up from sitting on his own, and can walk--carefully--if he's holding my hand. He's making noises that sound less like a baby and more like a little boy. It's amazingly cool to watch him develop.

Either way tonight's our third wedding anniversary so no game for Wednesday, that shall resume next week. And yesterday was my son's ten-month milestone! Poor little guy came home with a cold, but he's holding up well. My wife is worried about it, as she came back from vacationing in an area with a West Nile Virus scare. She's going to call the pediatrician today for advice to help calm her, hopefully.

This Saturday my bi-weekly group is going to go retro with a 1E AD&D retro excursion. Next week my Wednesday group will resume one of its many Pathfinder games. I'm not that satisfied with Pathfinder, I think the system is a bit over-powered, but I don't run games for the system anymore, I do it for the camaraderie, the story telling, and the adventures. Good stuff.





*Maniacal and Obsessive were two traits that fit my wife's MMO obsession prior to the arrival of our child. She still makes a good show for it, but only fractionally that of pre-mom-era. Speaking of which, not that anyone ever looks at my Raptr card, but I actually haven't been playing Fallout 3 (well, maybe a couple hours) or even Dead Island. I was annoyed that two of my favorite games showed no hours logged and wanted to reflect that I actually had sunk a ridiculous level of play time into both, pre Raptr...well, not so much Dead Island (just a fews hours missing) but definitely Fallout 3, a game I have played more than any other except friggin' World of Warcraft, and continue to load up and play for an occasional hour or two every couple of weeks, just to see what else I can find in the wasteland; I have 74 hours on one character (I've played four characters in Fallout 3 now) and still haven't done two of the DLC packs on him, or found 20-odd locations that remain unexplored. Admittedly, he's like some sort of walking post-apocalyptic god with his winterized T51B power armor, his rail cannon and his seemingly bottomless gatling laser....not to mention his trusty supermutant sidekick and dog....but its still fun to wander around getting into scraps and finding entire chunks of game I've never seen before....

Anmyway, Raptr lets you do manual adjustments, but for some reason shows these hours as current playtime. Meh.....I just want the petty distinction of demonstrating my dedicated 200-odd hours in Fallout-Land.



You know you've played too much Fallout when you switch out your T51B armor for Hellfire armor for fun. You know you've played waaaaaay too much Fallout when you think going totally nude with a random knife and streaking through downtown Washington DC to see how long you live sounds like fun...

Oh, and FYI don't try searching for "streaking through Fallout 3" in google. At least, not at work.

AD&D I can't quit you

Despite reservations about my burn out with D&D in particular and gaming in general, I've still got a major AD&D bug. I'll be posting more soon! I also have a regular campaign starting Saturdays using the classic books, should be fun. We'll be playing in the RAW, with as many of the rules dialed On as we can stomach. I'm looking forward to it...

One way I'm going to keep it fresh? I'm starting an entirely new campaign setting, tailor-made for AD&D 1st edition. Should be interesting...

Cool Things for the Apocalypse: Eerie Presents Hunter

While investigating the largest local new/used book store (there aren't many of them around here, unfortunately) I found a really cool gem worth mentioning:

Hunter retails for on $20 with 172 pages of gruesome post-apocalyptic tales inside, a real deal!
I snagged it for $10. Woot!

Awesome cover, and contains the full run of the "Hunter" stories presented over several years' worth of issues in Eerie magazine between 1973 and 1981. This is great stuff, and its something I would have loved back when it was new and I was too young. I remember being fascinated by the likes of Eerie, Epic, Heavy Metal, and Savage Sword of Conan....those were the "mature" cntent magazines I was forbidden from buying. By the time I had the freedom to do so, hunting down back issues was a pain...so it's great to see Eerie getting compilations like this, which I can add to my Dark Horse collection of Savage Sword of Conan (up to Volume 8 so far although I'm still reading volume 3).

If you're not familiar, Hunter is a character (the first of several, actually) who holds the name, a wandering adventurer in a post-apocalyptic wasteland as only the seventies could imagine it, inspired by the likes of Omega Man and Planet of the Apes (as the book indicates in its foreword). Hunter is a half-mutant armed with ancient artifacts of the old war, and mankind's last hope against the slavering hordes of demon-mutants. This book has all of his stories as well of those of his successors in very clean restorations of the original black and white tales. It's some got very good art. Those grognards out there who predate me by a few years probably were lucky to read some of this when it was new.

If you love mutants, post-apocalyptic adventures and that special vibe that only the seventies could pull off with its crazy spin on SF and a perpetual terror of the cold war blowing everything up for good, you'll love Hunter. You could probably get some good story bits out of this as well for a Mutant Future or Mutant Epoch campaign.

It turns out Dark Horse is reprinting all of the old Eerie magazines in archived volumes. They're a bit pricey, but I may have to start collecting them. If there's one thing I believe hasn't aged as well over the years, its comics; I don't really know why, but for me the late sixties and seventies were a unique golden age in the evolution of storytelling in comics, when story still mattered more than graphics. Anyway, I'll have to keep an eye out to see what's next in the Eerie releases now that I know about this.

Brainstorming Things to Blog About

My expression of Burnout is not as bad as the clinical diagnosis, nor is it specifically about gaming in general...I know that behind this I am experiencing a lot of problems with work, and the slow but methodical fashion in which my professional career is unhinging in slow motion. A side effect of this, I think, is that the sense that I am just going through the motions with some of my hobbies, and not experiencing real satisfaction or stress relief from them is a byproduct of bigger issues I'm dealing with.

That said, in thinking about stuff I could use to maintain creative focus while also getting out of the rut I feel I am in creatively, I came up with a few interesting ideas. Starting this week and next I hope to expand on some of them.

Blogs are a weird thing. They're fairly personal (or can be), enough so that it's easy to write for yourself and if you develop a following it can be entirely incidental to the personal intent of the author. There's a whole different sort of blog, the one designed for promotion of the author or the author's ideas, goals or focus. Then, of course, there's the professional blog...where the author is perhaps one of many voices and the blog itself is a medium for the expansion or focus on another entity entirely.

I've treated this blog as I intended when I started it out early last year: as a means of motivating myself to write and stay focused on writing. As such I have written what whimsy prompted me to do, rather than perhaps what was best to generate hits. I've also kept this blog away from advertisements and generally (for the most part) ignored metrics. So what this means is, if I feel like writing weird stuff for it, I feel no compulsion to do otherwise. 

Anyway, the ideas I have are as follows:

1. I'm going to do "thirty one days of horror" starting October 1st, and carrying through until the end of the month. The goal is to focus on one horror film, book or game each day as a tribute to my appreciation for the genre and also because...you know...Halloween.

2. I think I need a D&D break, for a bit. I've actually been on burnout mode for a long time, but this weekend was one more reminder of it. The reasons are complex, ranging from the fact that I've been engaging in RPGs as a hobby for too long, I feel like I'm in a creative rut, that "special something" I used to feel for D&D in particular has been absent for a while now, and my sense of community with the hobby has been badly eroded by the internet.

A break from D&D does not mean a break from gaming entirely, though. I am not sure how I'd fill my time without gaming. I have other RPGs I'd really like to devote the time to exploring. Chief on the list are The Mutant Epoch and Conspiracy X, followed by my old favorite, Call of Cthulhu. I'd love to get into some other RPGs again as well, more interesting and unconventional genres that could be supported by BRP, Savage Worlds or GURPS. I need to try this, for my own sake of enjoyment.

3. I haven't posted much this year on my other hobbies and interests, namely archaeology and astronomy. I really feel like I should focus more on this. I hardly ever read fiction anymore; all of my interests as a reader center around non-fiction and science. I have also developed a keen fascination for cold war history, would like to talk more about stuff like this. It takes a bit more effort than the typical ramblings of a blog, but I feel it would be worth it.

So if you see a wider range of interest percolating through the blog soon, this is why! D&D probably isn't going away as a topic for me....I do enjoy it....I just feel I need to diversify my focus a bit, to keep from eroding my interest in the game. We'll see how it goes.

Burn Out!

I'm experiencing a bit of burn out. Again, I suppose. It boils down to this:

1. Been gaming for thirty two years now. Have played all editions of D&D and many, many other RPGs over the years. My sense of enjoyment with them is both sated and rests upon well-trod territory.

2. The hobby is in kind of a weird place these days, and I am realizing I don't much like what the RPG community has morphed into, with its weird little factions and splinter groups. Maybe its always been like this (read any old issue of Dragon magazine for evidence to support the notion) but perhaps my tolerance for it is diminishing, dramatically.

3. I have other things I want to focus on. I do want to keep writing about gaming...but it feels sort of hollow right now.

Long story short, I'll be focusing more on all sorts of stuff in the blog, and try to push myself away a bit from writing about games. I have already done this a bit, but expect a bit more of it going forward. I feel like I need to branch out a bit, diversify my interests. I don't think I could tolerate cutting out my weekly tabletop games...but I may move them to just once a week, at first. Make weekends more for the family, and other hobbies and interests. Give my gaming batteries* a recharge. We shall see...






*not necessarily my computer gamer batteries, those are different things....