First Impressions: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

Original Release Date: April 20, 1990

Systems: Famicom, Nintendo Switch

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Intelligent Systems

At this point, I have played a couple of Fire Emblem games, but only a handful, and not including the mobile Fire Emblem Heroes.  I know my way around a tactics game too, from varying mechanics like those in Final Fantasy Tactics where elevation and character direction are just as important part of each battle.  Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light (hereto referred to simply as Fire Emblem unless otherwise noted) is the first tactics game that I can think of that I have played on the NES/Famicom.  I mention this for a number of reasons.  First, most of the other tactics games I have played have had some dimension to the battlefield be it elevations, screen rotation, but here, the battles are all fought on a 2D stationary map.  Second, this is the first tactics game I have played that forces you to interact with town services while in the middle of combat, but more on that later.  While this presentation does feel somewhat simpler compared to other Fire Emblem games, I also find it terrifying that I am going to mess something up a la Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light style.

The presentation for Fire Emblem, the version that Nintendo sold for an apparently limited time, is sparse in its presentation, at least for the digital version.  You can, if you want, watch a rundown of each type of unit that you are likely to come across and command during the game noting their strengths and weaknesses in regards to specific units and their usefulness during battle.  There is no digital instruction book, just a title screen, a snippet of lore, and then you are thrust into battle with only a brief dialogue between Prince Marth and Princess Caeda.  There is no explanation as to anything.  Everything in the game you need to find out by doing, and sometimes that means finding out by doing by accident.  During the first map, I took the numbers next to the weapon you use during battle as a strength or power indicator, but now I am thinking (after map 2) that this is actually a durability counter, then when it reaches 0, that the weapon will break.  So I need to find a blacksmith now?  Do the percentages that flash by when it tells you which type of terrain each character is in mean a defense bonus or an attack bonus?

On the map during battle, there are buildings, some look like huts, others look like a tent.  Visiting a wooden hut on the map constitutes visiting a village and engaging with the locals.  Waiting while occupying the same space as a fort (what looks like a walled-off hospital) allows your characters to heal.  You can buy items at an armorer (square building with a pickaxe) but you then have to trade with another character as those items do not go into a larger inventory.  You can only trade items between characters if they are standing next to each other.

Death is permanent.  I presume that if Marth dies that the game is over, but there has been no indication, in-game, that this would be the case, which brings up the issue I had with Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia.  If death is permanent, and if the game is over when the main character dies, in this case presumably Marth, why would I want to actively put Marth into battle?  Yes, to level him up, but if I use all of my other characters, level them up, and just hold Marth back, not putting him in harm, then I might run a higher chance of not getting a game over.  Maybe.  And I also run the risk of having him be significantly underpowered in the event that there are any one-on-one battles between opposing military commanders.  Although Marth is probably a lot stronger than other characters because he seems to be the hero, so that would make sense mechanically.

But in the process of researching (cursory research mind you), I found out that you can recruit enemy characters by having specific characters talk to them; often hinted at by talking to people in villages.  But then comes in the FOMO (as the kids today like to say) of losing characters (Bord was killed in Map 2) both in battle, or losing the chance to recruit them to your side.  And is there a limit to the number of characters you can have in your army?  Is there a limit that you can have on the battlefield at one time?  So many questions that I feel I can either look up information on or just jump back in and play the game some more and learn by doing.

Or just restart the game with some of this knowledge in mind and actually recruit both Castor and Darros without Bord dying.  And actually, visit all of the villages on each map.  Yeah, I am thinking I will probably start over now.  

Thank you for talking this through with me.  Your participation has been invaluable.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Let Me Get A Single Minute of Your Precious Time

MIDI Week Singles: "Silent Hill" - Silent Hill (PSX)

 

"Silent Hill" from Silent Hill on the PlayStation and the Game Boy Advance* (?!?!?) 1999
Composer: Akira Yamaoka
Album: SILENT HILL ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACKS
Label: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo (Team Silent)

It made sense to use a song from Silent Hill the last Wednesday before Halloween, although if you were not familiar with the franchise, I would be surprised if someone were to not only guess that this was from Silent Hill, but from a survival horror game.  There are some hints to the setting, mainly being that the song sounds like it was recorded by someone listening to an LP, but that is really about it.  The Wikipedia page states that composer Akira Yamaoka did not have any knowledge about what Silent Hill looked like and composed the music apart from the game development, which is probably why the song sounds like you just walked into either a cheeses shop or an Italian restaurant.  There is even the James Bond riff (around 1:20) that to me eeks out of nowhere then slides back into the ether.

This is just a very strange song, but I like it.  It somehow works with Harry wandering around a snowy beachside town looking for his daughter after a car crash.  It kind of makes you question why it is there, which is kind of what Silent Hill is about.  Or I am just coming up with a justification for this song existing in this terrifying universe.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

*P.S.  This game was ported to the Game Boy Advance in Japan!?  Why am I only just hearing about this now?  That's right, it was a choose your own adventure visual novel.  I remember now.  Never mind.

MIDI Week Singles: "Sweet Sacrifice" - Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits (NDS)

"Sweet Sacrifice" from Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits (2009)
Album: The Open Door
Composer: Amy Lee & Terry Balsamo (Evanescence)
Label: Wind Up Records
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Vicarious Visions

Last week while listening to soundtracks from the Nintendo DS, I came upon Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits, and I thought, "Oh yeah, these games use existing music.  Huh."  And then I spent the better part of the day debating if I should use existing music that was not specifically composed for use in a video game.  But since we are here, it seems pretty clear where I landed.

While not my favorite song from Evanescence's second album "The Open Door," it is one of the heavier songs, and choosing this song from their 2006 album to go on a compilation of Modern Hits released in 2009 does say something about the possible longevity of the song; although the game was released in June 2009 so you figure that Vicarious Visions was looking at what was popular towards the end of 2008; maybe?  It is a pretty standard Evanescence song in that it features more of Amy Lee's vocals than intricate guitar work by Terry Balsamo and John LeCompt.

Honestly, though, I feel a lot less competent talking about the modern live real person singing music than I do talking about music composed for video games.  The sound quality is about what you would expect from the DS speakers (not great, not terrible) and as for the Guitar Heroeness of the song, there does seem to be a lot of chugging riffs as opposed to quick "Through the Fire and the Flames" fingering, because thank the gods; I did play one of the Guitar Hero games on the DS back at PAX 08 and after playing the first song on easy, my fingering hand was pretty cramped so I can only imagine how it would be at the end of a maximum difficulty song.

Well, this was (somewhat) fun.  I do not see us going the full hog and featuring songs from the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises just so we can play non-video game music, but I know that it will not be the last time either.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
But He Knew It Couldn't Last

So I Bought a Wii U. Now What?

 

Well, the title pretty much says it, right?

Let us move back just a little bit.  I bought Metroid Dread which came out on the Switch on October 8th.  This is, technically speaking, Metroid 5 in the numbered Metroid series which does not take into account the Metroid Prime series.  I have played (although not beaten on my own) the first Metroid game, but I have beaten Metroid II - Return of Samus (being Metroid 2) and Super Metroid (being Metroid 3).  I have not played Metroid Fusion (being Metroid 4) and I really wanted to play that before jumping into Metroid Dread.  Metroid Fusion originally came out on the Game Boy Advance 19 years ago in 2002 and I think the reason I did not buy it at the time was that I was heavily influenced by the negative reviews, that it differed too much from Super Metroid.  I also have heard nothing but good things about Metroid: Zero Mission, a retelling of the first Metroid game and was also released on the Game Boy Advance in 2004.  

Now, I still have my original Game Boy Advance, but earlier this year, I discovered that the unit would not power on, even with a healthy set of new AA batteries.  I know of a person online (Gametracks) who has been doing Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance repairs and glow ups, but the prices are a little out of my price range; not to knock their work, which is pretty amazing and it looks great and I have read nothing but good reviews of their work.  I also have access to Conklederp's DS lite as my unit is a bit busted, so I do have a way to still play some of the GBA cartridges I still have.  I mention this because I could look into buying the physical cartridges for both Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission, but with the release of Metroid Dread, prices for those games has skyrocketed from around $20 to anywhere from $40 to $212 to say nothing about them being authentic copies and not the Chinese fabrications being sold for $10; the same goes true for Metroid: Zero Mission.

There had been, and I believe continue to be, rumors about Nintendo releasing a Game Boy Advance Online app akin to their NES, Super NES, and now Nintendo 64 on the Switch, which might include either of these Metroid titles, but they are both also currently available on the Wii U's Virtual Console.  So I started looking into used Wii U consoles sort of absent-mindedly.  But then I looked up the longevity of the Wii U's eShop as the Wii U officially ended production in Japan in 2017.  From the multiple sources I read, both official and on Reddit said that Nintendo had made a statement that as of January 2022, that Nintendo would no longer be accepting payments on the 3DS and Wii U eShops effectively making purchases impossible although you can still download already purchases digital titles.  This moved up my timetable a bit if I really wanted to purchase a Wii U for the two Metroid titles.

So last Friday (October 15th) I pulled the proverbial trigger and bought a used Wii U (the deluxe 32GB version) on eBay (my first purchase in about seven years).  So now I am creating spreadsheets to crosscheck, cross-reference, and cross off all digital Virtual Console games that I already have access to on either the NES or SNES Classic consoles, or on the NES, SNES, and soon to be N64 Switch Online apps.  And because the Wii U is gloriously backward compatible with Wii games, I now have another whole new console's physical library available to me, which means I am going to pick up Dead Space: Extraction at the very least.  But at least for the time being, my focus is going to be looking at which Virtual Console games I would like to have access to.  

But other digital games as well?  Most likely.  Metroid: Other M has always intrigued me and the Metroid Prime Trilogy is a tantalizing $19.99 rather than a whopping $65-$140.  I will have to do some scouring of the Wii U eShop after I get the system and register it to my existing Nintendo account because apparently, you cannot add games to your wishlist if you do not have the system.  So, Google Sheets it is with the lists.  And for those of you who like lists and reading lists by other people, I present to you a shortened (and likely ever-lengthening list, at least until January 2022) list of Wii U Virtual Console games that I am 69.47% likely to throw my money at.

• NES
• Duck Hunt
• Gargoyle's Quest II
• GBA
• F-Zero GP Legend
• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade
• Golden Sun
• Golden Sun II: The Lost Age
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
• Mario Kart: Super Circuit
• Metroid Fusion
• Metroid: Zero Mission
• NDS
• Mario Kart DS (turns out the one I bought on eBay in 2007 was a fake from China)
• Metroid Prime Hunters
• New Super Mario Bros.
• N64 (I may have to wait on some of these if they get announced for the N64 Online App)
• 1080 Snowboarding
• Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (No idea this was on the VC. 100% buying)
• Wave Race 64

I know I completely skipped out on the SNES portion of the Virtual Console, but there was not anything that jumped out at me that I felt I would be sad about missing if I did not pick it up before January.  And again, this does not include any physical Wii U or Wii games that I am now going to be in the market for.

One of the things I am actually most looking forward to, is actually figuring out how to play the Wii U.  Do you just put the disk in and play off of the screen or the GamePad?  Can you choose which one to play and not the other?  If you are playing a Virtual Console game, can you just play on the GamePad without turning on the main system?  Otherwise, what is the range that the GamePad has to be within of the base unit before it disconnects?  Can the GamePad disconnect from the base unit?  Can you only play Wii games if you have the Wiimote and Nunchuk attachment?  How important is it that I get a Wii U Pro Controller and will it work with regular Wii games?  I have never seen a Wii U in action, so the next month is going to be interesting to say the least.

Leave it to us here at Stage Select Start to jump in on a console nearly a decade late and then purchasing nearly nothing but ports of games released on older systems.  Classic.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Born of No Love

P.S.  According to the email I received, the Wii U should arrive sometime between Tuesday, October 19th, and Thursday, October 21st, so it will be likely I will answer a number of my questions in November's Monthly Update article.

P.P.S.  Because obviously, the thing I need to do is add to my already growing backlog of video games with ever-increasing amount of free time.

MIDI Week Singles: "Into the Legend" - Dragon Warrior III (NES)

 

"Into the Legend" from Dragon Warrior III / Dragon Quest III on the Nintendo Entertainment System (1992)
Composer: Koichi Sugiyama
Album: Symphonic Suite Dragon Quest III: Into the Legend
Label: Apollon Music Industrial Corp
Publisher: Enix
Developer: Chunsoft

I learned last week that composer Koichi Sugiyama had passed away on September 30th, 2021.  He was 80 years old.  He wrote the music to every mainline Dragon Quest game starting in 1988.  He was also someone who held right-wing nationalist views, denying Japan's involvement in the murder of 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese citizens and the rape and subjugation of 40,000 to 80,000 Chinese women and girls.  I feel like it is hard to celebrate the music without bringing up the faults of this magnitude from the man, and then being able to separate the two while still acknowledging both; In a similar manner when discussing Richard Wagner's white nationalist views or H.P. Lovecraft's anti-Scemitism.  It is possible to appreciate the advancements and accomplishments that Sugiyama had on video game music at large, while still acknowledging that he may not have been a great person with the most forward thinking stances while denying the lives of nearly 400,000 people.

"Into the Legend" seemed like a fitting send-off after hearing about Koichi Sugiyama's passing while coming to terms with his social viewpoints.  The song has been recorded, featured (most recently during the announcement of the Dragon Quest III 2d-HD Remake), and arranged many times and for good reason.  The fanfare opening is just as grand yet different enough from the "Overture March" that it takes on a more heroic and less regal feel.  I decided to use the version from Dragon Quest III (Dragon Warrior III in NA on the NES) because at the end, there is the reprise of the "Unknown Land" / "Overworld BGM" theme from the original Dragon Quest and having that there as the song fades out completes Erdrick/Loto's story and legend.  It's just a great song and I wish that more arrangements had that overworld theme from the first Dragon Warrior/Quest game because it's a great send off.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
What Better Way to Say I Love You

#IndieSelect: Underland (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a copy of Underland from publisher QUByte Interactive as part of #Indieselect.  The game was given and received without expectation or promise of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared on social media channels.  All of the words and screenshots, unless otherwise noted, are my own from my own experience playing the game.

Underland

Systems: Windows, Nintendo Switch

Original Release Date: February 5, 2021

Publisher: QUByte Interactive

Developer: Minicactus games
My Play Time: ~2-3 Hours.

Underland by Minicatcus Games is a sidescrolling puzzle game where you navigate two astronauts through environmental puzzles to help them reach human civilization that has found itself living underground after the surface of the Earth becoming inhospitable to human life.  That is the premise for each of the 30 levels in the game where you start out on one side of the screen and make your way to the elevator on the other side leading down into the next level.  How you make your way to the other side of the screen, what tools you are allotted to use in each level, and how the physics engine operates the fluid in each stage are what make Underland a fun and engaging puzzle game.

The difficulty in the game I found to be very progressive, in that there did not seem to be any significant jumps in difficulty that utterly confused me.  The opening levels teach you by doing, which for me, is the preferable way of having tutorial levels.  The first level teaches you about switching between the two astronauts and getting to your objective.  The second level introduces machines as a way of altering the underground terrain to get you to the elevator.  The third level introduces a toxic fluid that is in the way of the elevator, but you also have the earth-boring machine to redirect the fluid but in a way that still makes the elevator accessible.  Since I have now described 10% of the levels in the game, we are going to move on.

One mechanic in the game that occasionally gave me issues was selecting between the astronauts and the machines you could manipulate.  This was done using the L/R Shoulder buttons, but the order that you selected which object/character you were moving was all dependent on where they were located on the screen.  I understand this makes a fair amount of sense, especially when you have machines like the TNT-Bots who are used up when they detonate, but there were times when I thought I was switching back to astronaut #2 and ended up selecting the platform that astronaut #1 was standing on and accidentally shifted it, knocking off astronaut #1 and killing them.  There was even one instance when one of the astronauts was standing on a platform in a way that made selecting the platform impossible, so I ended up having to move the astronaut a few pixels to the right to be able to select the platform again.

For me, I found that trial and error was a useful tactic for finding the solution to some of the more complex problems.  Failing at a stage though could be any number of factors, most of them human error related.  But that was where a lot of the fun in Underland came from was trying out different ideas and seeing how the toxic fluid might move in the trench you dug out, or how few shots with the canon you could use and then what to use the remaining five shots on just because you could.  On a number of levels, you would only need to get one astronaut to the elevator with the rest needing to get both, although the reasoning behind this never felt 100% clear.  There were a few stages where it made sense to need to get both astronauts to the elevator thereby increasing the difficulty and an immediate restart if one of them died (as the game did not automatically restart for you).  Other instances were more self-imposed like if you created too large of a gap for the astronauts to jump with the earth-boring machine, or if you used up your TNT-Bot detonating earth to gain access to an area or free a moving platform you would need to access the elevator.  

The only other issue I had in the game was that there were two levels that felt like completing them was based on luck.  In one stage, you had to let a little bit of the toxic fluid out from behind a door to knock over some crates you would need later to use as platforms to walk across.  But if the crates fell in a way that from what I could tell, you had very little control over, made using them as stepping stones impossible, you were forced to restart the stage.  The almost randomness in how the crates were falling made me consider that I was approaching the solution incorrectly, and I assume that I could have done it incorrectly but still having my solution work, but the design of the level seemed to be pointing me in that direction.  The other level had jets of toxic gas that shot out from the ground, but the timing was like the turning signal from three different cars, in that they would sometimes line up so that all three jets of toxic gas would alternate to make passage through them impossible.  So you would just have to stand there, waiting for the pattern to reach the point where you could probably make it through unscathed.

Coming in at 30 levels, Underland really felt like it was the perfect length.  None of the levels felt like padding to make the game longer just for the sake of being longer.  There were no times that I dreaded the fact that I had 45 more levels to get through just to say that I beat the game.  The end of the game, told in epilogue fashion was nice too, leading to a sequel that was released back in April, but is currently only available on Steam; I would not recommend looking up that game yet if you have not beaten Underland as the description does give away the story here.  I was very happy with Underland, despite feeling that some of the levels did not play as fair as I would have liked, and my occasional confusion with the character selecting, but everything else about the game worked well and I am hoping very much that QUByte decides to bring more of minicactus games' catalog over to the Switch.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Leave the Rest of the World Behind

P.S.  Apparently unable to find the best place for this mention, but I wanted to say that I greatly appreciated that at no time do the astronauts take any kind of fall damage.  They could fall from the top of the screen to the bottom and still be fine.  There were only a few levels in that this could have played a factor, but I am glad that it did not.

MIDI Week Singles: "Main Theme" - Mario Paint (SNES)

"Main Theme" from Mario Paint on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1992)
Composer: Hirokazu Tanaka, Ryoji Yoshitomi, & Kazumi Totaka
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo R&D1, Intelligent Systems

 

I played Mario Paint a lot.  Like, a lot, a lot.  I do not know if I could say that I "was good at Mario Paint," and I certainly was not good at making anything that looked amazing or could qualify as groundbreaking or original.  Well, except for the music editor, which I used to write some original songs that have long ceased to exist.  Most of my time was spent just messing around making stamps, using the coloring book section to paint Yoshi various shades of pink and orange, or again, to make either original songs, or to try and create approximations of existing music to be my own Mario Paint arrangements.

In the game, one of the fun things to do was to mess around with the title screen.  When you clicked on each of the letters in the title, something different would happen visually and would either add to or alter the main theme you hear.  I considered featuring the slowed-down version that happens when you click the T which allows you to draw rainbow checker dot colored lines on the screen or one of the Is which either invert the song or make it wobbly sounding (for lack of a better description).  I decided to use the primary theme because it seemed to make the most sense rather than a song that altered the original.

To me, and maybe because this is memory and nostalgia talking here, but this song comes across as a very Mario-esque song that could have fit in with Super Mario World but is so different from anything written for Super Mario World that it just sticks out on its own.  Just a chill song that brings back a lot of memories from nearly 30 years ago.  Damn.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

Monthly Update: October 2021

 

I just realized that it was October 1st on Friday while standing in my office looking at a calendar of October.  Also that I should have had a Monthly Update article ready for Friday, October 1st, but here we are on Monday, October 4th, but sometimes that is just the way things fall these days.

Because we still have the biohazard symbol in our logo (the real-life biohazard, not the video game series Biohazard / Resident Evil), we are still somewhere in the lifespan of this pandemic.  Yes, in the United States infections (seven day average of 116,090 new infections every day) are on their way down, as well as hospitalizations (seven day average of 74,760 patients admitted to the hospital and of those 21,219 in the ICU) after a steady rise for the last two months.  Back in July, I believe it was on an episode of The Daily or on NPR (I apologize for not being able to cite my sources on this one) they were anticipating an increase in infections/hospitalizations/deaths for about two months and then a drop off after that, which is what had been seen in China, India, and Israel.  With some luck, this downward trend will continue, but as we head into Thanksgiving in just about two months, followed by Christmas a month after that, then New Year a week after that, I would not be surprised by another increase in all of the areas mentioned above from about December through March.  I am not an infectious disease analyst by any means, so you don't have to take my word for it.  Oh, and as of last Friday (October 1st, the US passed 700,000 COVID-19 related deaths.  And everyone at Fox News can go to Hell.  Again.  Some more.  Whatever.

I feel like the highlight of the last month was playing Tux and Fanny, a game I received a review code for back in the middle of September.  If you haven't read our article yet, the game is a point-and-click adventure game that incorporates numerous other genres of video games as well as different narrative devices to tell the story of how Tux and Fanny were able to get their soccer ball inflated so that they could enjoy the afternoon together.  The game is currently available on the Nintendo Switch and on itch.io.  Again, I highly recommend the game and that is not the freeness of the review code talking and I"m hoping to hear Dr. Potts' thoughts on the game soon.  I also finished EqqO, which I started a while back and had been playing on-and-off.

I also started Blair Witch on the Nintendo Switch which I purchased a while back and started after Conklederp and I finished the video game escape room, Curious Cases.  I hope to have an article up about that game in the coming weeks, but that will probably be up after I finish my article for Call of Cthulhu.  And then Metroid Dread releases on Friday (8th) so I may either start playing that immediately, or I will put it on the back burner in the hopes that I will be able to find a way to play Metroid Fusion (being part four in the now five part mainline Metroid series).  In the 3DS-verse, I started and finished Spirit Camera: The Lost Memoir closer to the beginning of September and then started Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, which I am working my way through here and there when I find the time and maybe it is me, but only about a third of the way through and I feel like a couple of the riddle answers have been more subjective that would have sat well with Obi-Wan (ie: "from a certain point of view").

Speaking of time, I have again found myself in the realm of the employed for which I am eternally thankful, for the most part; meaning the noon-working life was spending a small portion of my day looking for work and the majority of it with my family.  And with this 9-5pm job again comes the time management conundrum.  I do have some time at work to play the 3DS on my breaks, but in recent weeks, I have also found that I can use my breaks to email myself articles that I have been working on, which frees up my time a little after getting home from work; which is why last Wednesday's MIDI Week Single looked the way it did.  Then I have some time in the evenings to do some writing, or more likely, do some reading.  I have mentioned (before and here again) that I have been reading the new canon Star Wars novels and while for the most part, I have been enjoying them, I have hit a wall rather hard.  Heir to the Jedi by Kevin Hearne I have not been vibing with as much as most of the other stories.  I do not know if it is because it is a Luke Skywalker story if it is a story written in first person past tense, that I find the writing to not be as good or as entertaining as I wanted it to be, or any combination thereof.  What I have told Conklederp is that if I read it with whiny Luke as a 19-year-old, it is a lot more palatable.  I have also been rereading The Lord of the Rings to Conklederp as we drift off to sleep and even now, feelings about how I wish Peter Jackson et al. had handled the Black Riders is again coming back; in that, I wish they were more terrifying, or terrifying at all in the movies.  Anyway, love the books, which is why I'm rereading them again.

Last week, Conklederp and I watched the first episode of American Horror Stories, the new series from the American Horror Story creators but this time it is a series of stand-alone short stories that last only an episode or two.  We did not make it past the first episode, not because it was too scary, but because we felt kind of odd watching a show that was actively fetishizing a 16-year-old girl who specifically said in the episode that she hadn't come out to her classmates in high school because she didn't want them fetishizing her sexuality.  So instead we started Midnight Mass on Netflix, from the creators of The House on Haunted Hill and The Haunting of Bly Manor.  We are four episodes in (as of this writing, but we will likely be done by the time this article goes up on Monday as there are only seven episodes).  And I have been hearing a lot of good things about Squid Game over the last week so maybe we'll jump in on that bandwagon.  And then there is Star Wars: Visions which I was initially not interested in until I saw a couple of screenshots and hopefully we will start in on that soon.

Lastly, I am again participating in Inktober, but again, only doing it in a non-serious manner.  Last year I stopped before the end due to some at-home issues we were having with our cat Joey Mjolnir Explosion and I just lost the chutzpuh.  This year I am picking it back up again and have decided that I am going to relegate my drawings to post-it notes while at work; and it's okay that I'm using post-it notes because I was the one who bought them and brought them into work so I am not wasting company office supplies.  I will only be posting those pictures over on our Instagram page if you are at all interested. 

Let us leave it there for now.  I have a number of articles that I will try to have written this month in between actually playing games, attempting drawings, actually working, and my post-work home life (which is pretty damn awesome).  We'll see you during the month.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
So They Took from the Moment