Looking back, it was impossible for Starfield to live up to the hype. Twenty years in the Making! A Thousand Worlds to Explore! Massive Cities! Build your own Outposts! Build your own SHIPS! And it looked amazing. Screen shots of ringed planets filling the sky, space battles in asteroid fields, and characters that appeared to have-character. Turns out you can’t actually land on all the planets, such as gas giants and the like. The ones you can land on are, well, pretty empty. And the Points of Interest are procedurally generated. Meaning you can find the same Abandoned Listening Post…
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Still Just A Geek by Wil Wheaton
An Annotated Memoir “Never met your heroes.” Is a common refrain from fans who regularly attend Conventions. The actors who play your favorite characters, are not, in fact, your favorite characters. Most of them aren’t even fans of the shows they star in. If you ask them about the character they played, the odds are good that they’ll talk about the sets, the props, and a bunch of stuff that is interesting to them, but not so much to you. They’ll also bitch and moan about all the stuff you love. And they will definitely have a William Fucking Shatner…
Starfield First Impressions of Gameplay Reveal
Starfield-Fallout 4 in Space Since this is as Bethesda Game, well, it looks a lot like Fallout 4. It’s a lot prettier. The artwork looks amazing. I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about the frame rates, but I’ve never been that kind of geek. My games either work or they crash, frame rates aren’t that important to me. In Fallout 4 the first companion you met is Codsworth, a very friendly and overly cute fellow with brilliant voice acting that gives him a lot personality. In the new footage from Starfield we appear to have a robot companion who…
Fallout 4:Things I Love and Things I Hate
Just a few opening thoughts There are three YouTubers I found who spent a lot of time on Fallout. Oxhorn is kind of the unofficial Fallout 4 historian who dives deep into all the lore and everything you are likely to encounter in the game. Gopher Gaming has a great Let’s Play series that covers the base game and the many DLCs that followed it. There are hundreds of hours of videos of these two playing Fallout 4, talking about Fallout 4, and complaining about Fallout 4. All these videos are, of course, several years old and both have moved…
Outer Range-Season 1
Outer Range is an odd bit of business to be sure. It starts off like a number of other modern Westerns, a couple of rich ranchers hate each other, their kids are kind of idiots, the countryside is beautiful but hides all kinds of secrets. But we pretty quickly discover that this isn’t Dallas or Yellowstone, it’s more like LOST or Westworld with just a touch of the Twilight Zone tossed in. There’s an odd mixture of the mundane and the extraordinary. Most of the time we’re shown people doing normal real world stuff. Lawyers and land disputes. A rodeo…
Fallout 4-Seven Years Behind Everyone Else
I remember the Wanderer commercial. That was cool, but not cool enough for me to shell out the money for a machine powerful enough to run Fallout 4. So I forgot about it. Until a few months ago when it showed up on Xbox Game Pass. I downloaded it and played several hours a day until I had gathered all the companions, become General of the Minutemen, destroyed The Institute, and learned to hate Settlers. I used Fast Travel, played on Normal, and didn’t realize there was a whole world of players that considered fast travel cheating, and playing on…
Thinking About Writing
When I was in the 7th grade a teacher gave me a bag filled with old copies of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I was already a fan of Star Trek and Lost in Space and just about every other clunky sci-fi show I could find. But these stories were something different. They demanded more from me than passive viewership, they made me think. Many of them made me think, hell, I can do better than that. Turns out after lo these many years, well, I couldn’t do better than punished writers from forty years ago. I stopped writing short stories.…
Dallas Cowboys Rant
Rams 30, Cowboys 22. I remember the days of Roger Staubach, Too Tall Jones, and Hollywood Henderson. Those Cowboys went to the Superbowl on a regular basis. The great Danny White took the team to three NFC Conference Games. Things went downhill from there, but even during the last few years of Tom Landry’s reign, his teams still often lost by a field goal or less. There was always hope that they could make one more play. Then there was the Jimmy Johnson juggernaut whose game plan was to score 40 points in the first half and protect the lead.…
Welcome to Marwen
The special effects in Welcome to Marwen are on display from the first scene. Our Hero, the brave toy Cap’n Hogie, is shot down during World War II and immediately has a problem. He shoes catch fire. It’s a setback, but luckily, he finds a crashed Nazi car with a truck in the back seat. Inside he finds a pair of black and white wingtip…women’s pumps. He likes wearing the high heel shoes, finds that they help him to understand dames, and he wants to make it clear, he likes dames. We then meet Mark Hogancamp, a man with serious…
Mary Poppins Returns
Mary Poppins Returns is CGI on overload. Special Effects cranked up to 11. But they are very good special effects and very good computer generated graphics. But I didn’t love Mary Poppins Returns. We open with a song and there will be plenty of song and dance to follow. Soon enough Mary Poppins shows up to help Michael’s children in a moment of crisis. A villain in the piece is the Bank Manager, who wants the Banks house so he can sell it and add a few more pounds to the coffers. The original Mary Poppins was the last of…