I AM NOT DOC SAVAGE

A Typical Pulp Hero...

As I mentioned in the Song of the Week post yesterday, I have a new monthly column over at Inveterate Media Junkies. The first installment is now live and you can read it here:

I Am Doc Savage

The column is called “The Pulp Pit,” and as you might deduce, its subject is pulp. I’ll be covering whatever pulpy topics tickle my muse (or maybe cuddle my muse, since she’s not that fond of tickling), pointing out cool pulp stuff for people to enjoy, and reviewing books, comics, movies, games, TV shows, and whatever else as appropriate.

For those with possible review materials they think might be on-topic for a pulp column, please drop me a line at thepulppit at gmail.com (just connect the two parts up with an @). I’m interested in any sort of pulpish media, old or new. I don’t want people just sending me things that stack up and I never get to, as that costs you money and both of us time. So tell me what it is, and if I think it’s something I might actually make time to read/watch/play/etc., I’ll tell you how to send it to me.

Regular readers of this blog  might have noticed a recent password-protected entry titled I Am Doc Savage (Pulp Pit # 1). Two weeks after a column appears on IMJ, I’ll remove the password and make the post public, so it’s available to readers here.

My favorite character to play in Guild Wars was a ranger/warrior named Otter of Darkwood. Lean and shapely, with long auburn hair, I enjoyed her so much I rebuilt her in several other games I’ve tried over the years, like Age of Conan and Oblivion.

Well, as some of you know, I am now romantically entangled with a lovely lass named Kate. This morning, I remembered Otter and realized that she actually looks a hell of a lot like Kate. Kate even shares my interest in archery, Otter’s specialty. I figured I’d pop into the game and take a screenshot to show her. (The shot above I found on my computer, taken long ago).

I clicked on the dusty old Guild Wars icon, and the game went into its auto-update mode, drawing in all the changes and such that have occurred in the many long months since I entered its world. Finally it was ready. I signed in.

And got an error message telling me my account was banned.

There’s no reason my account should be banned. I played alone, or with the one friend I made in the game (I tend to be a lone wolf even in social games). I didn’t abuse anyone. I didn’t curse in the local chat. I didn’t try to sell in-game stuff for actual cash. I was a model citizen.

So I emailed them, asking them to please remedy the situation. To their credit, it didn’t take long to get an answer back. To their great detriment, this was the answer:

Thank you for contacting us. This account was blocked because we detected that it may have been compromised or accessed by unauthorized personnel.

At this time we need to verify that this is indeed your account. Please provide as much of the following information as you can:

– What date of birth did you use when you created the account?

– What is the 20-digit serial code for City of Heroes?
– What is the Unique Account ID for City of Heroes? (This confirmation code was sent to you via e-mail on the date your game account was activated with a subject header of ‘Game Account Activated’.)
– Original billing information for City of Heroes: If activated using a credit/debit card, please provide the last 4 digits of the credit card used. If activated using a game time card, please provide the 20-digit game time card code used to activate the account. If activated using PayPal®, please provide the Transaction ID or the Invoice ID associated with the original activation purchase.

– What are all the 25-digit retail access keys currently registered to your Guild Wars game account? (Please include the retail access keys from each campaign.)
– What are the last 4 digits of the credit/debit card used to make any purchases for your account from the Guild Wars In-Game Store/NCsoft Store online (Please provide the last 4 digits of the card ONLY)? If you instead made purchases using PayPal®, what is the Transaction ID or the Invoice ID associated with the Guild Wars In-Game Store/NCsoft Store purchase? (if applicable)

We look forward to your reply.

Shall I also send a goddamned stool sample?

With Guild Wars being an online game, and my account for the main game and all its expansions being activated online, I never reckoned I’ve have to reactivate it. I’m not sure I kept the boxes around that have the codes. And yeah, maybe that’s my bad, but almost all interactions with the game once its active are online. You buy access codes online. You buy expansions online. And I bought all their stuff at full price, and did nothing to justify losing my access.

I’m also not sure if my current credit card was the one I activated with. I had another a few years ago, which I no longer have, and I’m not sure I have a record of that number.

All of which is aside from the fact that we’re communicating directly through the email address which itself is the fucking account name.

I appreciate a company being security conscious, but just like at the airport, when your security measures start to amount to punishment of your paying customers, there’s a problem.

I’m going to dig around and see how much of this friggin’ homework I can do. Then I’ll send it to them and give them the chance to make it right.

I’ll update this with further info as it happens…

RDR is ostensibly a distant sequel to Red Dead Revolver, which I reviewed a long time ago here, but it’s really a sequel only in titular branding. The earlier game was an arcadish shooter in a small world, with a whisper-thin story (and hideous voice acting). The new game is so much more.

RDR is from developer Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, and players often sum it up as “GTA in the old west.” Like GTA, it’s a sandbox game, an open world in which you play a character who can go anywhere and do damn near anything.

In GTA, you play a criminal in a modern metropolis, and you can kill people and steal vehicles and pick up hookers and road race and annoy the cops and go for a swim, and you can just explore the city, listening to various well-produced radio stations in your car. All of which makes for great gameplay, and Rockstar provides a lot more than than that, using their incredible urban setting and colorful characters to tell a really awesome story (in GTA IV, at least, the latest and only one I’ve played).

In Red Dead Redemption, you play John Marston, an ex-outlaw whose family has been taken hostage by federal officials to force him to track down his old comrades and bring them to justice. John is an appealing character, a man trying to just live and let live and forget the past, forced back into the world of violence. Through him, his actions, and the overall narrative of the game, Rockstar asks if a man can ever really escape his past, or do all his sins come back at him however he might try to avoid them.

The other characters in the game are all engaging and eccentric, lots of fun to interact with. The voices and character designs and animations are incredible, loaded with expression and personality. Marston and the others all come to life as video game characters rarely do, and you come to really care about what happens to them.

The story is evocative, epic, and sometimes moving. Like Lonesome Dove or The Wild Bunch, it is set in the twilight of the old west (in this case 1911), and is as much the story of the end of an age as it is the story of a man. It’s also spiced with Rockstar’s trademark satire and social commentary, from the anti-semitic conspiracy grumblings of a shopkeeper who’d be right at home with today’s Tea Party, to a twittish academic’s reflexive dismissal of Native American intellect that’s right in front of him, to the casual racism of God-fearing white women on a train, RDR is smart and literary and even topical.

But the greatest pleasure of this game is its world. You don’t play there, you live there. I loved the city of Grand Theft Auto IV, a huge living model of New York where you could enjoy a shoot-out or just walk the streets in a rainstorm admiring the neon reflecting off wet asphalt. But RDR‘s west is vast and gorgeous and vital in a way that transcends anything done before in an open world game.

RDR gives us a living landscape, with big dynamic skies and endless expanses of prairie, with rugged mountains and falls of snow, with blisteringly hot red rock canyons and swampy river towns. I can play the game for hours with no other goal but to be in that landscape, riding along and watching the quality of the light, the shifting cloudscapes, the splash of rain. You can fast travel between places in the game, but I never do, opting instead to be John Marston making his way from here to there, living on the land.

And you’re never really alone, even in the wilds. RDR has an active ecology. Flocks of crows will break from the tall grass at your approach. Raccoons make crepuscular raids on garbage piles in town. Buffalo will stampede out of your way. And you’ll be reminded that, out in the wild, man’s not the top of the food chain. The cry of a cougar somewhere nearby will come to make you afraid.

And this ecology doesn’t exist only as mobile bits of scenery, or even just monsters to fight. It exists separate from you, the player. Wolves will pounce on rattlesnakes then play with the bodies, owls will swoop down and eat rabbits, coyotes will take down a deer.

One of my favorite small moments occurred while I was riding across the plains, and I saw some people camped around a fire. You can stop in and join groups like that, and they’ll share food and stories with you. In this case, I didn’t have the option to do that, though, because a grizzly bear wandered over the hill, saw the campers, and charged into their midst to kill them all. It was savage and random and wonderful.

I could go on and on about the pleasures of this game. The unexpected enjoyment of hanging out in bunkhouses playing poker or in saloons playing liars’ dice. The thrill of racing cross country with a hogtied bandit across your saddle as his brethren charge after you in hot pursuit. The golden burn of an incandescent sunrise. The satisfaction of humiliating a wannabe gunslinger by shooting his hat off and the pistol from his hand in a draw.

Yep. Red Dead Redemption is an incredible game. Watch this at high resolution to see some of its incredible visuals and hear a great song by Jose Gonzalez:

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Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, this is pretty much an official sequel to the first two films, and is a lot better than the movie Ghostbusters 2. A lot.

The original actors return to do their own voice and motion-capture performances. Bill Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, and Ernie Hudson as the intrepid foursome, Annie Potts as their nerdily hot secretary Janine, William Atherton as bureaucratic douche-bag Walter Peck, with Alyssa Milano and Brian Doyle Murray joining the cast as the new love interest and the mayor.

The player takes the role of the new guy, a young rookie stuck with the job of trying out the newest, untested equipment. That equipment of course includes the proton beam, the ghost trap, and the PKE meter from the films, but you get three new weapon types to play around with (the slime gun proving the most fun).

The game captures every element of the Ghostbusters franchise perfectly. The writing is sharp and clever. The performances are lively and dead on. The gameplay is tight and exactly what it should be. The locations are complex and colorful and highly destructible. And the ghosts are varied, entertaining, and multifarious.

The storyline is far better than I’d expected. It starts in familiar territory, with new encounters with old friends like Slimer and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and to be honest I had my doubts about that. But they fully rationalize the inclusion of the old stuff, making it an organic part of the present storyline, allowing you to enjoy the nostalgic encounters early in the game, then moving into lots of new, original material. I’m glad they did this. It was loads of fun blasting the Hotel Sedgwick to pieces, and the battle with Mr. Stay Puft proves to be even more epic and fun than it was in the first film.

Apparently the actors all had so much fun making the game, they finally agreed to do another film, and Ghostbusters 3 is set to start filming next summer.

I played this on the Xbox 360. It’s available on PC and Playstation 3, but if you’re deciding between the Xbox and the PS3 version, definitely go Xbox. The PS3 version’s resolution is 56% of the Xbox version (I base this on several online sources, not on my own observations, and I have both machines, so I’m not speaking out of any particular brand loyalty). There is a Wii version as well, but it’s effectively a different game, with more cartoony graphics.

Anyone reading my book, my blog, or probably even the bumps on my head will know that I love pulp adventure. The first three Indiana Jones movies (especially Raiders). The Depression-era novels starring Doc Savage, The Shadow, and The Spider. The modern pulp adventure novels of Matthew Reilly and James Rollins. The Rocketeer and The Phantom and Planetary in the comics.

Last year, early on, I saw news somewhere about a pulpish game that was due out in the fall, and it interested me enough that I put a note to myself on my Google calendar to look it up after it came out to see if it was as good as it looked. When I did, and read the reviews I could find, I ordered it immediately, and gave it to my son for Christmas.

That game was The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac, from AEG and Dust Games, and it rocks.

In The Adventurers, each player assumes the identity of a treasure hunter exploring (and, well, robbing) an ancient temple dedicated to the Mayan rain god Chac. There are twelve characters, from American archaeology professor Montana “Bill” Baker to criminal mastermind Markus Bassler to Russian spy Tatiana Begovic to Chinese tinkerer Len Tso Yau, each represented by a cool plastic miniature (shown painted here, but actually gray plastic in the box, alas).

These characters possess special abilities like Lockpicking and Stamina and Swimming, and they move around a beautiful board depicting the inner depths of the temple, searching for treasures and trying to evade the ruin’s deadly traps.

These traps operate in real time through clever mechanics, really capturing the feel of pulp tomb raiding. There’s a gigantic boulder that rolls along the main tunnel, gathering speed with each turn, crushing the unfortunate who get in its way, ultimately blocking the exit and dooming any characters who don’t get out before it does. There’s a room with walls that close in at random speed, crushing those too slow (or greedy) to leave in time. There’s a lava room to cross on tiles that may or may not be trapped; step on the wrong tile and you’re dead. And there’s an underground river you can swim to hopeful escape from the temple, or to your demise as you wash over a treacherous subterranean waterfall.

The game is easy to learn, action-packed and swift, playing in less than an hour. Your goal is to get out of the temple alive with as much treasure as you can. The more treasure you grab, however, the slower you move, making it more likely you’ll be crushed by the boulder or trapped forever when it seals the exit. The survivor with the most treasure wins.

My son, his mom, and I have played three games, each a cliffhanging blast. I won the first. We all died in the other two, but no one cared because we had so much fun.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

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One of the best damn games I’ve ever played. Written by the brilliant Paul Dini, one of the chief creatives on Batman: The Animated Series, it featured voice work by actors from that esteemed cartoon including Kevin Conroy as Batman, Arleen Sorkin as Harley Quinn, and Mark Hamil as the Joker. With incredible graphics and design, the game follows Batman through one very long night on the island whereon the titular criminal madhouse is located, after the Joker takes over and lets many other villains out.

Arkham proves an ideal setting for adventure, coming to life in a way few locations in games ever do and never getting old. The game’s only weakness is in its boss fights, structured, alas, like video game boss fights, and are the only times the game’s contrivances remind you you’re in a game.

In this game, you really get to feel what it’s like to be Batman. Drop into a pack of thugs and efficiently take them down in seconds with acrobatic, bone-breaking martial arts. Steal through the night, lurking in the shadows above armed goons, swooping to take them out one by one without alerting their comrades. Use incredible gadgets to set traps, gather intelligence, and overcome obstacles. Investigate, using your tech and brilliant detective skills to solve mysteries and track your foes.

The character designs are amazing, managing to be original while remaining completely true to the characters’ histories. Killer Croc is dinosaurian and terrifying. The Scarecrow is creepier than ever. The Joker is manic and crazy-eyed. Poison Ivy is more inhumanly sexy than in any prior incarnation. And Batman is an armored engine of dark destruction, whose costume over the course of the game shows more and more damage, and who even gradually develops a five o’clock shadow on his square jaw. The attention to detail in the characters, and the world, is fantastic.

An utterly amazing game, and a sequel was just announced, which creates a flood of endorphins in my system when I think about it.

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Back in March, I blogged about some oddly inspiring material I found in a new roleplaying game I’d bought (Optimism, Action, and How To Be The Neighborhood Pulp Hero). The text in question “caused a synaptic hiccup and made me think about my life.” Pretty darn cool for a game manual.

The game, Spirit of the Century, is not only the best-by-far pulp game I’ve ever found (and I know most of them, all the way back to the first, 1982′s Daredevils from Fantasy Games Unlimited), it’s quite possibly the greatest face-to-face rpg. I’m reserving final judgment till after I actually have time to play the game, at which time it’ll get a full review here.

My copy of SotC had some issues, alas, but Fred Hicks, one of the game’s co-authors, exhibited some first class customer service and sent me a new copy. I was greatly appreciative at this, so I sent him a signed copy of my book.

(Just to share a bit more good will, I also had similar fantastic service from Shane Hensley {of Savage Worlds fame}  years back when a Deadlands book I’d ordered had a split spine. These are truly good guys in an industry with an often razor-thin profit margin.)

Well, apparently Fred read the book, because on October 20th, he gave it a quick review on his blog.

While set in the modern day, this book LOVES pulp (and Lovecraft, for that matter) and makes a bunch of oblique and not so oblique references to it throughout. It’s a breezy, very fast read for an adult, but an adult will be entertained precisely because of those references. It’s like a fast mad dash through a landscape littered with mines that explode with geek-love every now and again.

To summarize the plot would be to tell the story of the whole book, so I’m going to leave that out of this. It’s a fun family romp, has good life lessons for kids, and features a boy child and a girl child who both compete with each other and value each other…And if you’re looking to get your kids primed with some excitement about high-pulp adventure…I think Doc Wilde would be a handy tool for giving that to ‘em…

There’s a bit more, which can be found here.

The complete tales are currently available in this beautiful Del Rey book:

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For the roleplaying games fans among you, one of the absolute greatest RPGs in years is this Savage Worlds gamebook by Shane Hensley:

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And this trailer for the upcoming cinematic adaptation looks very promising.

A blog by Robin Burkinshaw relates the poignant ongoing tale of a homeless father and daughter trying to survive in a harsh world. But the harsh world in which they live is inside a computer, and the pair exist only in that virtual realm:

This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes…

I have attempted to tell my experiences with the minimum of embellishment. Everything I describe in here is something that happened in the game. What’s more, a surprising amount of the interesting things in this story were generated by just letting go and watching the Sims’ free will and personality traits take over.

Apparently The Sims has evolved to a point in which the artificial intelligence and social dynamics systems are damned near organic. The Sims have dreams, goals, and emotions and their behavior is driven by those qualities, resulting in complex relationships and interpersonal drama.

This is Kev and his daughter Alice. They’re living on a couple of park benches, surviving on free meals from work and school, and the occasional bucket of ice cream from a neighbour’s fridge.

When you create a person in The Sims 3, you can give them personality traits that determine their behaviour. Kev is mean-spirited, quick to anger, and inappropriate. He also dislikes children, and he’s insane. He’s basically the worst Dad in the world…

His daughter Alice has a kind heart, but suffers from clumsiness and low self-esteem. With those traits, that Dad, and no money, she’s going to have a hard life.

Alice’s teddy is more than her only possession in the world. It’s the only thing that’s ever hugged her.

As her father dislikes children, he hates sleeping next to her. In the morning, he’s always the first to wake, and he immediately throws a tantrum and wakes up Alice to tell her to leave the room. Alice understandably responds that they’re not in a room, and she doesn’t have anywhere to go. Then they argue, and Kev seems to blame Alice for every possible thing.

Again, you really need to see this. It’s worth reading through the whole thing, and at the time I’m writing this, the lives of Kev and Alice continue in regular updates. You can even subscribe to get the latest entries through a RSS feed.

This is human drama boiled down to its essence, people acting on simple raw emotion emerging from their primal true selves. The result is a suprisingly sophisticated, insightful, topical, and oddly moving story about people a lot more real than any reality TV participants you’ll ever see.

It’s like a novel of the id. You’ll find it here.