Book Impressions: The Longest Con

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 19, 2016

I recently finished reading Michaelbrent Collings’ newest novel, The Longest Con. Collings is best-selling indie horror novelist, though he has written plenty outside of the genre he’s famous for. Several weeks ago I read Apparition, which was creepy as hell, especially if you are a parent. The Longest Con is not horror. Broadly, it would be Urban […]

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Movie Impressions: I Am Not a Serial Killer

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 12, 2016

It’s scary movie season at the Barnson household. It’s been tougher in recent years to pack in the scary movies in October, because we’re so busy that month. My wife is a professional storyteller who specializes in ghost stories, and was a tour guide for the Salt Lake City Ghost Tours for a couple of […]

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Impressions – No Man’s Sky, Part 2 – No Man’s Planet

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 25, 2016

Several more hours into No Man’s Sky, and I’m past the point where many players have rage-quit. I’m at about 35 hours in, and still occasionally find myself playing a LOT longer than I intend in a session. Compared to something like Daggerfall, another gigantic procedural world which I spent triple-digits hours playing back in the […]

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Impressions – No Man’s Sky, Part 1

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 17, 2016

No Man’s Sky. I kind of ignored it at first, because I have played a LOT of spacefaring games and survival games, and even spacefaring survival games, many of which had procedural content generation. But this one had some really great trailers and screenshots of supposedly procedurally generated landscapes and creatures, and so I soon […]

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Book Impressions: Burning Bright, by Melissa McShane

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 16, 2016

A few years ago, I got hooked on the Bolitho novels by Alexander Kent. I also read a couple of the Master & Commander series by Patrick O’Brien, the movie based on the books, and a couple of the Horatio Hornblower films. Basically, the whole age-of-sail, nautical warfare, wooden ships and iron men thing. These […]

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Book Impressions: Unhappenings

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 10, 2016

I recently read Unhappenings, by Edward Aubrey. I wonder if this novel came about from a writing prompt that went something like, “It really sucks to be a time traveler.” The main character, Nigel, suffers from what he refers to as “unhappenings.” Nothing in his life has permanence… things change, and nobody else remembers how things […]

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Impressions: Stranger Things

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 1, 2016

This weekend, we finished watching the series (first of many seasons, I hope) “Stranger Things” on Netflix. Here are some of my impressions. First of all — the gimmick. As I’ve often said, in all entertainment media, you need some kind of gimmick just to get attention. In the case of Stranger Things, the gimmick […]

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Quick Take: Batman v. Superman

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 5, 2016

I finally saw Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. The version I saw was the extended edition, which apparently resolves a lot of questions about character motivations, at the cost of a more plodding and confusing pace. So I won’t complain about the pacing here, because… well, I’m sure the theatrical release was better edited. […]

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Book Impressions: Death By Cliché

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 17, 2016

As a game developer, it seems that every other week you hear about a new game coming out that sounds exactly like the one you are making. In the 90s, this would strike us with fear, because inevitably the other guys would be beating us to market with something that sounded exactly like our game […]

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Movie Impressions: X-Men Apocalypse

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 15, 2016

When I really started getting into comics – as in actively following titles monthly – it was the 1980s. Two of my favorites, The Uncanny X-Men and The New Mutants, were written by comics legend Chris Claremont. At the time I got into the X-Men, they primarily consisted of Cyclops (Scott Summers), Colossus (Peter Rasputin), […]

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DOOM – then and now. Part 2.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 19, 2016

So we get to last week’s release (on Friday the 13th, naturally) of the 2016 version of Doom … AKA “Doom 4“.  It’s been over twenty years since the original’s release, and over 10 years since the release of the last game in the series, Doom 3. Well, from my perspective, there’s bad news, good […]

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DOOM – then and now. Part 1.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 18, 2016

“Guten Tag!” If you were a computer game geek back in the early 90s, you remember that one. The greeting heard ’round the DOS gaming world. It was the intro to the boss encounter on the shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D, at least on those PCs equipped with the popular SoundBlaster card. A requirement, for […]

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Book Impressions: Caretaker, by Josi Russell

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 25, 2016

Caretaker, by Josi Russell, is an unusual science fiction book. The story is about Ethan Bryant, a man designated to the sole conscious person – the “caretaker” on a very lonely 50+ year colony ship. He was the last of the passengers to be put into hibernation stasis, but before that could happen, the actual […]

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Book Impressions: Servant of the Crown

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 8, 2016

Romance novels aren’t really my thing. At least, I don’t suppose so… I think I could count the number that I’ve read on one hand and have fingers left over. Novels with romance, sure. Romance movies, sure, a few. Romantic comedies, more than a few. But straight-up romance novels, not so much. The thing with […]

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Movie Impression: Dudes & Dragons (formerly Dragon Warriors)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 7, 2016

This weekend, I watched Dudes & Dragons, formerly entitled Dragon Warriors, a locally-produced fantasy / comedy film project that I backed as a crowdfunder a long time ago. Their agreement with their distributor prohibited them from sending out the movies to backers before the film went public, which totally sucked from my perspective, but I […]

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The Return of Master of Orion

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 26, 2016

I normally don’t play “Early Access” games, on the justification that I don’t have time to play the completed, released games I already own, so why would I want to play a buggy, incomplete game? But I make exceptions. And for the early access launch of Master of Orion, the rebooting of a franchise I […]

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