Welcome to Indie Gaming Theater, where I buy a discounted, barely-reviewed indie game from Steam's stacks and take a close, honest look at it. For more details on what this feature aims to do, go here to check out my lengthy preamble. Otherwise, enjoy!

Halloween Mysteries

Look, I'm not a fan of difficult games. I find zero pleasure in memorizing the Lord of Apple Cider's three-frame weak spots while slowly increasing my attunement by whacking skeletons with my slow-rolling paladin. Whatever Souls-alike is popular at the moment gets no love whatsoever from me for the same reason I don't like my dates dripping battery acid on me during our sexy happy fun times... because I'm not a lunatic.

I'm that rare breed that likes my sanity. I don't want my games to feel like I'm hammering rocks into chunks a few miles out of some gulag hellhole for a few scraps of bread and the vague hope that someday I might drop dead from exhaustion or exposure. I like games to be, you know, fun, or entertaining, or hopefully a combination of the two. I like to think I can make forward progress in games so that I can see more, play more, have more of the same hopefully great experiences.

Hard video games tend to be like the equivalent of a Saw movie. Sure, they're kind of fascinating to watch at first, but after a while, you realize they're just a series of torturous scenes, all too often at the cost of actual forward movement of plot (or gameplay, as it were). After the initial shock value wears off, there's nothing there for me. I want my games to move somewhere, and when I'm gated by gameplay that simply will not allow it, I tend to give zero shits very quickly.

Cue Halloween Mysteries, developed by Vyacheslav Ozolnieks (that's a team name, apparently).

Let's get this whole "video games are hard to make" thing out there. It's a hugely popular phrase around Giant Bomb, and I get it! Games ARE hard to make. As are books, movies, TV shows, and anything really creatively focused. And I applaud people for trying to make something, well and truly. That said, criticism exists for a reason - to make better things and to push those arts and industries forward. Criticism solely for the sake of being negative does no one any favors, but neither does being upbeat and coy about a product's problems.

With that said, Halloween Mysteries has problems. Severe problems. And it's made all the more unfortunate because it feels like very competent people made individual aspects of this game work very well. The controls are fine. The basics of the graphics are fine. The essential building blocks of what should make for a fundamentally sound game are all present, but they're almost immediately dragged down by an army of small problems that add up very, very quickly, all led by a vanguard of almost hilariously brutal difficulty problems.

Halloween Mysteries is a stripped-down isometric RPG in the vein of Diablo. It lacks the depth and loot of that game, but you can see some similarities right from the start. Leveling up nets you points to spend in health, magic, or dexterity, all of which do exactly what you'd think in a Diablo clone. You have a ranged and melee attack, and a few special skills to call upon as you gain levels. That's all basically sound stuff and all of it works well enough for a game of this type.

But those basics are immediately undermined by the sense that nothing else in the game was given as much thought or polish. The story, something about a wizard type who has his family's magic crystal stolen by a goblin, is laughably thin and would've been served better by not existing at all. The goblin's voice actor sounds both bored and baffled by the idea of even a bad faked accent, somehow managing to make the already-awful dialogue even worse. The one NPC you'll bump into sets up the weak-ass premise for the game with some of the most bizarre Engrish I've heard in a long time. It makes Persona 5 look Shakespearean in comparison, but even a better translation couldn't stop this from being an exposition slog. At one point, the character unnecessarily defines Halloween night by telling the character that it's between the evening of October 31st and November 1st. This game needed a high school English teacher's once over, or maybe a quick read-through by the kid at the dentist's office flipping through a Highlights. Anything to save it from itself.

Unfortunately, that's not even the worst of the problems. There's a bizarre amount of stuttering with the game's movement, as though it's missing frames with every step. This seems to resolve itself a few minutes in, so I assume it's a loading thing, but who knows? I've also managed to cheese several chests that were supposed to be a challenge to reach by simply pushing at random points in a nearby wall or fence and rolling until I glitched through to the chest.

But Halloween Mysteries' biggest problem is its absolutely ludicrous (as in insane, not the rapper-gone-Fast and Furious sidekick) difficulty. I'm an hour in and still barely past the introductory first couple of save points - and this does not appear to be a long game. I couldn't even get snapshots of the combat properly because every time I glanced down at my keyboard to find the F12 button, I was killed in one or two hits by amorphous enemies that could either be rats, goblins, or some kind of demon child sent to haunt me for tearing down kids in my last couple of blogs.

I wouldn't have minded a difficulty spike a little later in the game when I'm more used to its fundamentals, or if it was a bit more forgiving in the way it handled mana and health regeneration. But the game steadfastly refuses to be nice to the player, a position that I'm sure will make some of you run for it like it's the next Demon's Souls. Don't. Trust me, this isn't the fun kind of difficult. Mana regeneration pools are far and few between, and if you regenerate mana, it doesn't happen nearly fast enough to make any difference whatsoever. Melee attacks wipe out enemies really fast, but it's hard to judge an enemy's position and your swings seem somewhat narrowly focused despite the wide animation arcs. Birdmen swooped down on me and picked me off fast while I thought I was whacking them with my wizardly stick thing.

Also, why do wizards fight with sticks? What the fuck is that about? They're wizards. They should be grabbing up dragon skulls and transforming them into gatling guns that shoot out orc butts or something. "Oh hey, we're ultra-powerful badasses who can only whack you with an unsanded piece of wood. Because that makes sense."

I wish I could like Halloween Mysteries. I wish it had some redemptive thing about it, like Krampus's essentially interesting central premise or MOAI's easy-to-like basic gameplay. But there's just nothing here that makes me want to revisit it in any capacity. As a proof of concept, its programmers should have some success. They've essentially done a very good job at making the basics of a very particular genre of games. But as for absolutely everything else? Halloween Mysteries makes me kinda wish for the sexy fun time battery acid instead.

Halloween Mysteries is available on Steam for $9.99 normally, but no amount of jaw-dropping Engrish is worth the price of admission for this one.

Welcome to Indie Gaming Theater, where I take a discounted, barely-reviewed indie game from Steam's stacks and take a close, honest look at it. For more details on what this feature aims to do, go here to check out my lengthy preamble. Otherwise, enjoy!

MOAI: Build Your Dream

Let's get this out of the way. Build Your Dream is a royal bastard of a misleading subtitle. If I could build my dream in a video game, Mantaur of WWE fame would take on space goddamn dinosaurs being mind controlled by Samurai Shakespeare and Master Shredder. As Mantaur, you'd assemble two hundred of the greatest warriors Earth has ever seen, like Weird Al, William Henry Harrison, the "dude, you're getting a Dell" guy, and a plethora of other heroes waiting to be unleashed. Along the way, you'd pound beer, fight skyscrapers, and have the opportunity to romance Emily Dickinson, Martha Washington, and Fran Drescher... at the same time.

You'd traverse the universe, and unlike every science-fiction game ever made, there wouldn't be fire worlds, ice worlds, jungle worlds, and a city world. You'd travel to Giant Oozing Pustule Planet, or one where the residents are all slightly soiled undergarments who can't figure out why you're slightly disgusted when they want to shake hands. You'd haggle with an inexplicably present and bored Monica Bellucci over the one billion cosmetic options. Combat would be you whacking people with swimming noodles and firing cans of Fanta at them because when we meet aliens, Fanta will save us all with its awesomeness.

This game wouldn't be good, mind you, but it's the dream. MOAI's "Build Your Dream" underdelivers just a touch then, because all I'm basically building are huts, trading posts and giant Moai heads that ward off ghosts. So first let's give a big pbbbbbffffffffttttt to that subtitle and move on.

You might think from that totally coherent rant that I dislike MOAI. I don't! It's not a game for everyone - in fact, I'd say if you're old enough to read this and make sense of my gibberish, you're probably beyond the scope of who this game is aimed at. But if you have failed at figuring out the business of wearing condoms when doing a little thigh fivin', then maybe MOAI is worth a look if just for your demon seedlings. I assume your children are demons because... c'mon, of course they are. They're little and poopy and you can't exactly get them to lift your keg for you without them whining about pulling their back. Ugh. They're the worst.

MOAI is a stripped-down time management builder. That's pretty much it. You clear some trees and rubble, you build resource-producing buildings, and you click on ghosts. If that sounds reductive, the game is just that simple. There's some challenge in a three-tiered award system, with better times beating the levels netting you the best reward. This just basically amounts to the player needing to memorize the order in which tasks need to be done, as well as keeping an eye on the ghosts, which can wreck your progress by destroying buildings.

There's a fun, breezy islander aesthetic to the game, with some light moments of lore and non-voiced cutscenes in between missions. Of those, there are plenty - I'm two hours in and I don't feel like the game is going to run short on missions anytime soon. The story largely revolves around you washing up on a beach, where you help the natives take back their land from ghosts and greedy bandits.

The bandits and the ghosts aren't much of a threat. Bandits are dealt with by gathering resources and paying off their bribes, which feels like a pretty terrible life lesson, but I suppose it beats the alternative of "mash this jackass'es head with a coconut until he stops being a bandit douchebag." Probably don't want to teach our kids that. Probably. Ghosts wander at your villages from set positions and attack your buildings, eventually sending them into ruins you can rebuild for a nominal fee. They're there mostly as an annoyance and to slow you down.

I like the general art style with no smartassery whatsoever. It's a pleasant looking little game, clearly developed first for tablets and then ported to Steam. That's not necessarily a bad thing - as I say, it's the sort of thing your kiddos will appreciate, particularly with the recent release of Moana. It's all large and cartoonish and very easy on the eyes, a nice change after Krampus's "where the effing eff do I find a shovel" moments.

The whole thing is a pleasant little package, particularly for the cheap price. If you have to wake up every morning to the screams of, "Daddy/Mommy! I need Moana stuff foreverz!" then definitely plop their butts in front of this one while you pour whiskey into your corn flakes and prepare for another day of utter shittitude. Not recommended for adults, but you could sure do worse than playing it with your kids.

Moai is available on Steam. It appears to have once been available on Apple devices but doesn't seem to be listed on the Big Fish Games website as such anymore. It is regularly priced at $5.99.

Welcome to Indie Gaming Theater, where I take a discounted, barely-reviewed indie game from Steam's stacks and take a close, honest look at it. For more details on what this feature aims to do, go here to check out my lengthy preamble. Otherwise, enjoy!

Krampus

It might not be Christmas, but here at Sparky's Indie Game Theater laboratories, we're always up for some holiday cheer, especially when said cheer involves a horrific spin on the good ol' Saint Nick legend. The myth of Krampus is a pretty simple one - instead of a jolly old fat man cramming his ass down a chimney in the dead of night and sucking down all the Christmas booze, milk, and cookies while occasionally macking on moms like your skeezy uncle Julian when your dad's passed out at the barbeque (apologies for the mental trauma to all people with uncles named Julian, but c'mon, you know with a name like that, it's happening), Krampus is a delightful goat-devil who is sent to please the grumpy Sparky Buzzsaws of this world by whacking naughty kids with chains and dragging them off to hell.

That's right - this guy actually DOES something about the bratty little shits out there, and we vilify him as a nightmare story. Whoever reps the Kardashians of this world, think about taking Krampus under your wing, huh? He needs you because he's a goddamn hero.

That's oversimplifying things a bit, but for the purposes of this blog, that's a very quick and loose definition of the Krampus myth. He's supposedly "evil" Santa Claus, The myth's purpose was to largely scare bad children straight and to let people get down with their bad selves, as stated (in much more flowery terms) by National Geographic here.

Krampus, the independent video game developed and published by the much-into-brevity Peace, follows the relative basics of the myth to a letter. Around Christmastime, a boy and his mother arrive at a new home, apart from the boy's father who is off working for... I don't know, Fathertopia Incorporated, or something. The point is, he's an absentee dad who has left his wife and child in a mansion apparently designed by a drunk Jareth the Goblin King. It has something like eighteen bedrooms and a zig-zaggy basement, but only one bathroom. One. And it's clear across the house from the study, necessitating a trip down two flights of stairs, through a migraine-inducing basement and back up a flight if someone was working in the office and had to take a leak. I don't know about you, but If I'm gonna buy a mansion, I'd at least want thunder pots.

Also, how great of a phrase is thunder pots? Because holy shit.

Anyways, the boy prepares for Christmas by building a snowman by himself, shoveling snow by himself, hanging decorations by himself, picking up toys by himself, drinking milk and eating cookies by himself, and in general doing everything by himself. I mean, it kind of makes sense from the mother's perspective. She's probably piss-ass drunk from having to hang with her overachieving kid solo on Christmas Eve. I think we've all been there with our buddies Hot and Toddy, am I right? Yeah, let's hear it for alcoholism and neglectful parenting!

Anyways, his chores done, the boy heads to bed - or rather, stands in his room next to the bed like some Asimovian creature being powered down for the night. He's woken up by footfalls outside his door, and discovers his mom's been taken by the criminally misunderstood Krampus because the boy's been too spoiled in his life and deserves to be punished.

Right fucking on, Mr. K. I heart you already.

Instead of the story ending there and me standing and applauding this brilliant game, it instead decides to continue on as the boy wanders the house looking for his mom. Why, I have no idea. She's a shit mother who was locked away in her room on Christmas night while her kid probably dreams of friendship and daddies and not having to clean up his mommy's vomit off the bathroom tiles because she had one too many sidecars.

Shit. Now I want a sidecar. And a hot toddy. I need a bartender for this feature already and we're not even through the first one.

Anyways, the game becomes a search through the house as the kid tries to find his mother. Pretty simple setup, but not a bad one. It could have been quite the opportunity to create some real scares - after all, seen through the eyes of a child, a house like that could be utterly terrifying.

Unfortunately, the story never quite capitalizes on the potential of the nightmare situation or the dream-like quality to a lot of the household. All of the scares presented here are either done by audio cues or brief - under a second - flashes of Krampus or things appearing where they weren't before. These are only done once or twice, unfortunately.

As a game, Krampus is very much just a brief exploratory game with very light puzzle elements thrown in once or twice. For the purposes of the game itself, that's fine. It didn't need to be anything more than what it was and the simplistic gameplay is a good fit for the story. That said, it's over fast. I finished in less than a couple of hours, and at least an hour and a half of that was padded by me simply not being able to see jack shit in the house's dark environments.

That's the game's second biggest problem - darkness. Though the house has a number of lights, many of the objects you need to find are unfairly tucked away in dark corners. There are absolutely no options within the game itself, so there were no sliders for lighting or anything like that. Again,t he game is so brief that the options shouldn't have mattered, but when you have players search corners of a house and your lighting effects can't help them, that's a problem.

It's also fairly buggy. The game didn't auto-save correctly between the opening scene and the next one, so I had to redo the beginning sections again. Once you know where the objects are, that takes all of about a minute, but it's still a chore. Er, literally, I guess, since it's on a list of chores given to you. The game crashed out to the desktop once, and one section saw me locked in a room with no way to escape because I didn't think to explore the house before I investigated the next obvious story beat. That's bad game design - the key should have been in the room with the player character, as they're not going to assume they'll be forced to load a save if they actually go where the developer seems to point them.

Krampus's biggest problem lies in its conclusion. The last level is kind of neat, as you explore your dad's small office and prepare to find your mom. You wander through an endless hallways, opening the same door over and over again while new words describing your situation are etched on the walls (including "bad education," which is now something I wish I could tag on a train for no good reason). The game ends all too briefly, though, as you open the last door, you're shown a quick flash of the child moving towards his mother's bedroom and... nothing. Nada. That's it, you're done. Fuck off, hope you enjoyed the game. It's like the Sopranos, if the Sopranos didn't have an episode of Tony tripping balls on Indian food and an entire season about a guy named Furio. Furio. How badass of a name was that?

So is Krampus worth your time? Nah. It's a brief proof of concept with some neat ideas behind its basic setup and some real potential if someone were to revisit the theme of a child searching a haunted home for his parents, but overall, it's just not scary or unique enough to really recommend.

Krampus is available on Steam. It's listed regularly at $5. Sadly, no DLC is available for the goat-guy to come punish those loud neighbor kids that keep pounding metalcore until the crack of dawn.

Welcome to the setup for what will be my first new blog feature on the site in quite some time. It's been too long, but now that I have a shiny new computer and a little extra disposable income, I thought this would be a great way to start to dip my stinky, calloused toes back into the filth of the community forums. I kid. I'm sure you all take baths. Except ZombiePie. He probably lathers himself in ketchup every morning and calls it good.

Now that I've implanted that nasty image in your head, let's get to work.

So What's Indie Gaming Theater?

IGT aims to take a look at games that might otherwise slip under the communal radar. Since I'm a cheap bastard and I have very little time on my hands, this will occur roughly once per week when Steam launches its weekly deals every Monday. There are hundreds of games in those sales that go completely unnoticed by me and probably the bulk of humanity, so I plant to dig up games with relatively few review scores and examine them here on the site. Good, bad, playable, unplayable, I'll put them out in the sun and examine them as fairly as possible within the realm of the limitations put upon indie developers.

What does that mean? It's basically me saying I'll try not to be a dick. That said, I'm not going to lie or sugarcoat anything about these games. I'm not interested in making friends with the developers. I won't accept solicitations for games for the feature. If a game is straight-up terrible, I'll be as ugly with it as I would be with a AAA game. But - and this is the kicker - I understand indie manpower is what it is. If a game has heart, or some really clever ideas behind it, I'll be focusing in on that just as much as the negatives. The world is full of people with great ideas that just need to be seen and given a moment of time by someone - anyone - capable of doing so. Those are the games I hope to find through this feature.

The games will be reviewed largely under Wolpaw's Law, meaning that once I've had enough of a game to review it properly, I'll consider my job satisfactorily done. I've actually got a real life now, so I can't devote a ton of time to this feature. That said, I will always try to give games their due diligence.

What Kinds of Games Will Be Eligible?

The focus will be on indie games with few reviews. What "few reviews" will end up being is subjective. If something looks interesting enough to grab my attention but toes the line, sure, I'll pick it up too. This isn't going to be a strictly set-in-stone rule, either. But it's the basis for the feature as a whole.

- If I'm solicited about a game, it will be disqualified. I'm not interested in free copies for looks or hits. Similarly, fans of games should not send me anything they want me to play. I won't disqualify a game for this, but it certainly won't do it any favors, either. My feature, my money, my rules.

- No VR. The logistics of this are pretty simple. I'm legally blind (more on that in a second) and I don't believe headsets will work with my glasses. And before you say it, yes, I know, some of you who wear glasses have no trouble with the headsets. Mine are very, very big. Games that happen to have VR capabilities but are still playable the traditional way are definitely eligible.

- My vision unfortunately will dictate a lot of what games will be playable by me. I'll try my best to adapt but no promises about anything. If I can't play a game, I'll simply refund it (more on that below). This is largely going to mean racing games at large are a no-go, as will be some fast-paced shooters or actioners.

- No refunds unless a game is straight-up broken or I can't play it. I'm not out to screw anyone over, and using someone's game as blog material and then refunding it feels cheap.

- Games will largely come from Steam, but other PC services like GOG and Humble Bundle will be considered too. This isn't just limited to new games. At some point I'd love to explore some of the more obscure games in GOG's back catalogue, but that will be a ways down the line.

- Suggestions for games will largely be politely ignored. I'm not trying to be a dick here, but this isn't a popularity contest and I don't want my choices of games influenced in any way by anything other than the Steam video and its review numbers. I'm not even all that concerned about review scores. It's just me and my itchy buying finger.

- Multiple games may be considered per week if I've completed one fast enough and if I'm really bored. That goes without saying.

What Else Might Be Contained in the Blogs?

I don't plan on solely playing indie games, so I'll probably throw in brief notes about more popular games I'm playing at the moment, as well as my usual random bullshitting about books I'm reading, movies, and TV. I am not interested in using the blog as a platform to talk about my own novels, but I might consider doing a similar feature as this one with independent writers. Haven't made up my mind on that account, and since I have a ton of friends in the field, it might feel a little skeezy. That said, if I do take it up, it wouldn't be to promote the books written by friends, but an examination of random stuff I try out on the Kindle. We'll see.

And that's it. I'm hoping to do up the blog on a weekly basis. We'll try to affix a firm date to it when I get rolling. I'll probably give myself two days to play the games in question, with the hope that I'll produce the blog every Wednesday. As always, thanks for reading!

Games! I play 'em! Occasionally. Sometimes.

I need a break from editing, so I figured I'd ramble a bit about what I'm playing at the moment and what's in store for the future. My big news is that I'll soon own a modest computer, probably within the next month and a half or so. This will be my first self-purchased computer since 2008 or so. While I love the laptop my brother gave me, it's starting to develop some worrisome quirks, and I'd like to get a desktop before this breaks for good.

It won't be a beastly gaming computer. I have been doing well with the writing, but not THAT well. My plan is to buy a decent midrange computer now, then in a few years when I'm hopefully a billionaire bestseller with supermodels hanging off both arms, I'll invest into a really nice Origin computer or something similar.

In the meantime, I've been updating my Steam wishlist, since I've largely been ignoring PC games for... hell, three years, at least. Civ VI is probably the great big fat tantalizing jewel, but I'm really looking forward to getting my mitts on Marvel Heroes and Grim Dawn, too. Hit me up if you've got some quirky recommendations! Or hell, even if you're in indie development and want to show your project some love, throw down a title in the comments. I'm down to play whatever, even if it's not my cup of tea. I cussed out Giant Bomb lately for the "waiting on the server" video from a couple of weeks ago, so maybe I'll put my money where my mouth is and play a few indie games every week for a few minutes apiece to see what's out there.

On to what I've been playing!

Deus Ex is why I shouldn't put half-played games on my GOTY list

...because boy howdy, did I hit a wall hard in that game.

At one point, our plucky hero Jensen has to jump into a VR simulation puzzle thing that's just utter garbage, from a gaming standpoint. It's uninteresting. The puzzles don't really take advantage of the gameplay, are visually head-scratching (seriously, how the eff am I supposed to see half the crappy infrared nonsense?) and the whole thing feels like a bad bit of DLC just thrown into the middle of the game. I hit that point and realized as good as parts of that game really are, it had no place on my GOTY list for 2016.

Dishonored 2 makes me feel like a psychopath

...and I'm kind of okay with that, I guess? It's a weird game in that the stealth mechanics are largely reliant upon how observant you are of your surroundings (at least in the early game). Me being blind, I was just stumbling into bad guys left and right, so I stopped trying to spec for stealth and just ended up concentrating on being a murder machine. At that point, I really stopped caring about the gameplay, which is kind of a shame, because I feel like the pieces are there for something really fun.

It doesn't help much that Bethesda's created a really cool world with little reason to care about what actually happens within it. Corvo and Emily's story is boring as hell, the villains are barely given any time to shine, and the whole plot is just one quick info dump followed by "revenge, revenge, revenge!" There's no nuance here, which is weird, considering the strengths of the well-developed world and the rich history of the locales.

And in a shocking twist, I really like a turn-based strategy game

Fire Emblem Heroes is kind of perfect for a bite-sized free to play game. The entirety of the campaign can be ripped through relatively fast, and without any addictive hooks in its multiplayer, I feel like I've gotten just enough out of it to say, "Boy, that was a fun few hours!" It doesn't need to be anything more than that. If it was, I'd probably be tempted to spend money on it, only to realize almost immediately that I'm just pissing more money away on mobile games I'll never pick back up a month later.

The gameplay is simple, the characters are pretty inconsequential but plentiful, and there's a fair-ish amount of meat to the campaign, but it never overstays its welcome. It's not bad!

And that's about it...

Okay, I suppose I should quit dicking around and get back to it. How's your 2017 in gaming going? Or how's your 2017 just in general? Up to anything fun so far this year?

Games! I played 'em!

This is probably the least number of games I've played in years, and as such, my GOTY list will be pretty cut and dry this year. The top three are pretty well locked in, but I've got a few games in my stack I'd like to look at before I finalize things probably around the first.

As it stands, though, I think it's time to hand out some awards to the games I've played so far, as well as some additional awards for the year that was. Ready? Break!

The Hot Sauce Boss of 2016

Tobasco with Chipotle

As someone who doesn't particularly like Tobasco sauce, Tobasco with Chipotle is freakin' amazing. It's also the only new-ish hot sauce I've tried, so it wins this award by default.

The Dumbest Puzzle

Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse

At one point, a cockroach blocks your path. You can neither stomp on it or move it out of your way. This is a thing some game designer thought was a great idea. It's not.

On a different note, the Broken Sword games have usually had style for days, and Broken Sword looks gorgeous. The hand-drawn art style is sharp and crisp, and it gives the backgrounds and settings real heart. Some of the animation looks just a little off at times, but it's usually remarkably well done. I just wish the game around it had been better.

Top Tea Getting Me Through This Awards Nonsense

Touch Organic

Tea aficionados right now are looking this up and thumbing their noses at the idea that a bagged tea could win this. To them, I say, "pbbffffffft." Look, it's a buck eighty a box at Big Lots, it's fantastic bitter black tea, and it's got enough of a kick to keep me awake while I write this. Snark aside, it really is a good cheap tea, and if you're at Big Lots, give it a shot. I like the black tea, but the peppermint and white tea versions are great too.

Best Use of a Whackin' Stick

Assassin's Creed: Syndicate

Not many series can make me so internally divisive as Assassin's Creed. In one iteration, I'm swearing off the series and telling myself never again (III, Unity). But when there's a great one - like Brotherhood or IV - I'm singing its praises from the rooftops.

Overall, Syndicate falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, but leans towards being one of the better games in the series. It's just a shame that Ubisoft never quite realized what makes the game great, and focuses its attention too often on the wrong characters and aspects. Evie is a terrific character and very obviously should have been the focus, but her brother is thrust upon the player all too often in an attempt at keeping everyone happy with choices on who to play. Syndicate needed just a little more focus to be great, and it unfortunately lacks that.

That said, though, beating people about the head with Evie's cane is a delight. While I hope to see the games in the future tell a different story, if we saw more of Evie, I wouldn't be terribly disappointed, especially if she brings along her beating stick.

Best Nod at a Game's Roots

The Book of Unwritten Tales 2

When The BUTT (thanks, @mento) focuses in on its story elements, it's a terrific game. Unfortunately, it relies a bit too heavily on tired tropes like "solve these three problems for people to advance the story" while trying to wink and nod at how old-fashioned they are. I've said this before, but games can't get away with a bit of barbed humor about a genre's tropes while still forcing the player to sit through those same tropes. It feels creatively bankrupt, as though the designers were just smart enough to realize how silly those aspects are without actually coming up with some backbone to their game that could replace it. And that kind of defines The BUTT as a whole.

That said, though, there's one particular moment when in order to solve a puzzle, the game's wizard protagonist must travel back in time to solve a puzzle. The designers of the game take this concept to a great level, and actually change the graphics of the game to match various eras of adventure gaming, from 16-bit LucasArts and Sierra to King's Quest-esque 8-bit old school experiences. It's a really fun moment and a terrific surprise that shows just how much heart and love these folks have for the games they've used as influences.

Best Engine Sounds

Mad Max

I thought Mad Max was a fairly underrated game. Sure, it's a big open-worlder, but those aren't necessarily bad things. The best part of the game was rolling around in Max's cars, all of which are a blast to drive post-patching. What really sells me on the driving in particular is the engine sounds, which is an odd thing to single out, but when so much of the game is spent rolling around and doing minor little things in the universe, it winds up being the game's soundtrack in a way. The engines growl and rev in a fantastic, realistic reminiscent of the most recent film, and in a very visceral way, it added a lot to the experience.

Best Pug-Distracting Chewies of 2016

Wal-Mart Christmas Candy Cane Rawhides

My dog has been snuffling at my feet this whole time, until I went and grabbed him one of these. He attacked it with all the ferocity a pug can muster (which admittedly isn't much), and now I'm free to keep writing.

Best Remake

Ratchet and Clank

While there are stories I still wanted to see from the R&C: Future series, if the developers use 2016's Ratchet and Clank as a means to reboot the series, I'm completely okay with that. It looks gorgeous, it plays as sharply as its PS3 predecessors, and the Clank mini-game nonsense is kept to a minimum. This is a game that knows what it does well, focuses on shoring those strengths, and excises a lot of the extraneous bullshit from the series, all at a relatively budget price. It's a highlight for the PS4.

Best Monster and/or GB Blogger

ZombiePie

He'll never let me hear the end of it for this, but Zeep's been killing it with his Final Fantasy blogs. Factor in that he also writes and organizes the weekly Community Spotlight, and he's my pick for best blogger on the site. Well done, you horrific mess of a human being. Now stop bugging me about cat people.

The "Why Bother?" Award for Most Pointless Iteration of a Game

Trackmania Turbo

The title here is a bit disingenuous. I actually sorta like Trackmania Turbo, in that same way I like most Trackmania games. It's fast paced, it requires sharp reflexes, and the track creator is a blast to tinker with. But everything else about the game is just poorly designed. Relying upon medals to unlock new tracks is archaic and stupid, and hinders a lot of willingness to continue playing, just like Trials. It's too hard to share levels with friends and communities. Multiplayer in general is poorly thought out, making it hard to organize parties with friends and communities.

But most damning of all is the game's loss of everything that makes the PC versions so insane. You can't have custom soundtracks. The tracks, while fun, are severely limited. There's only one car that controls worth a damn. It lacks the beating heart of what made Trackmania so fun, and for that, Turbo just isn't worth playing.

Most Cathartic Way to Work Out My Anger Issues

Dead Rising 3

Apart from the timer-based psychopath and survivor encounters, Dead Rising 3 cuts out the annoying Zombrex-timer bullshit of the previous games and lets you cut loose in its environments at your own pace. It's an utterly fantastic game that recognizes what makes the series fun and expands upon it in every way. My only real complaint is that a lot of the psychos aren't as interesting as in previous games, but c'mon, those were ludicrously high bars to hurdle over. In terms of sheer fun, Dead Rising 3 is one hell of a hard game to top.

Best "What the Hell Did I Just Play" Game

Jazzpunk

While Jazzpunk's bizarre coder-friendly sense of humor was largely a miss for me, the delightfully absurd game still hooked me enough to see it through in about two sittings at my brother's place. While I played it, he constantly offered up a stream of "what the hell?' and occasional laughs, and I tend to agree. It's got a ton of style, it's crazy in ways I'm not sure I particularly like, and the level design is often kind of crap, but Jazpunk really has something going. Just what that is, I have no idea.

Most Plot Cliches Hit on Its Way Down the Plot Cliche Tree

Uncharted 4

Warning - here there be spoilers, and I'm not going to bother with spoiler blocks, so move on to the next category if you haven't played this yet and want to.

Okay. First off, Uncharted 4 is a pretty spectacular game. The mechanics of the exploration and combat feel nice and tight, and I never found myself dying from anything that wasn't a fault of my own making. And moment to moment, the dialogue in UC4 really crackles. I love the minutia of the character interactions, and when he's not being a completely inexplicable douche for Questionable Plot Purposes, the relationship between Nathan Drake and his wife feels terrific and lively.

That said? My God, this game climbs up the Mile High Cliche Diving Board, does a 720 degree Plot Cliche Dive, hits the Plot Cliche waters, and takes a few Plot Cliche victory laps. There's a staggering number of plot tropes for the sake of plot tropes here, and it's appalling in a game so otherwise spectacularly written.

I have a general rule about quitting a TV show if they introduce a supposedly dead family member. it's a cheap way to introduce drama and familial connections and feelings without having to invest the time and effort of a slow drip of a series regular. It's frankly dumb and cheap, and assumes the audience will conveniently forget about said family member when they've been used like a Kleenex in a teenager's bedroom and tossed away. Uncharted 4's entire plot circulates around this being a good idea. And it's not. The supposedly long-dead brother thing leaves the player little room with which to develop feelings for Nathan Drake's brother, whose name I forget offhand and will hitherto refer to as Natty Light.

Things continue to get progressively worse from there. In a typical eye-rolling Uncharted fashion, solving one puzzle only sends our heroes on a quest to another place, solely for the convenience of creating new set pieces rather than plot. Several of these new puzzles are set in such areas that a fly-over by an airplane would have revealed them long ago, not to mention cave spelunkers or anyone who looks off the bow of a ship and sees the enormous arrows pointing to giant treasure caves.

But that's not all the plot cliches, oh no. We have the inevitable Shocking Betrayal, which is about as shocking as a wet fart after eating seafood on a Monday. But that's not the worst offender. The absolute most head-scratching bullshit in the game is the way Natty Regular takes a trip halfway around the world and doesn't tell his wife, coming up instead with a limp excuse that she'll obviously see through in about ten minutes. It's meant to inject some drama into the married life of the Drakes, but it's just dumb. Nathan is supposedly going on this trip to save his brother's life, after all, something which any good spouse would say, "Shit, yeah, go, do what you need to do, because hey, family."

All this nonsense turns Uncharted 4 into what could have been a fascinating game into something approaching near drudgery at points simply because no one told the writers that these plot tropes aren't just bad, they're entirely avoidable with a few more go-arounds on the drafts. It's a shame. Uncharted 4 is a spectacular game but a huge step backwards in terms of narrative.

Best and Worst Use of a Character from Other Media

The Walking Dead: Michonne

There are two halves to TWD: Michonne. The first is a cookie-cutter Telltale experience, full of characters you're not given time to care about who are killed in pretty typical "shocking" Walking Dead ways. There was some room here to establish some interesting settlements and new characters, but no effort was made in giving this whole thing heart, so who cares?

But the second half, the one I'm more interested in, is a fascinating look back at the horrifying moment when Michonne makes it back to her apartment shortly after the zombie outbreak. She's looking for her children and the man taking care of them, and her haunted reflections back on that moment in time, of her terror and panic as she can't find them, is fantastically well done and actually adds to that character's backstory in a really well told way. Michonne's guilt and how she deals with it throughout the episode makes for a far more fascinating story than the other crap padding it out.

Best Puzzler

The Talos Principle

There are a few moments when The Talos Principle really irritates me, particularly when some of the extraneous puzzles require me to be able to see pixel-specific points of interest in absolutely huge environments, but by and large, The Talos Principle never made me feel stupid, just stumped on occasion. I had to look up more than a few solutions due to stuff I just wasn't seeing, but every puzzle that I could solve only required me thinking about the puzzles that came before and how I could use the physics of this world to my benefit. It's a spectacularly smart game and definitely should not be missed by puzzle or adventure fans.

Best Christmas Candy I Should Probably Lay Off While I'm Writing

My Mom's Homemade Peanut Butter Fudge

I'm addicted. I should not have left it near my laptop. Hang on, I need to move this tin... after just one more piece.

Best Cheapo Game

King Oddball

This is very much just a spin on the classic Angry Birds formula, but it's a good one of those with just enough levels that I felt satisfied without feeling like it droned on forever. It was a buck on PSn on sale, and if it comes up at that price again, snag it. It's a pretty good game.

Best Tactical Turn-Based Squad Game

XCOM 2

It's more XCOM, so that's a good thing. But the performance issues on console is hugely disappointing, as is Firaxis's decision to stick with the limited tech tree and strictly timed overworld activities. I'd like to see an XCOM about taking over territories, without time restrictions, and with a deeper weapon and RPG mechanics system behind it, but in the meantime, these games are still the best at what they do. Unfortunately, given the limited number of games in the genre these days, that's not saying much.

Still, this is probably the game outside of Fallout 4 I sunk the most time into this year, and there's a damn good reason for that. XCOM is still fundamentally a superb tactical game, with all the turn-based squad goodness of the last one.

The Best Book I Read in 2016

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

I think the only book from this year I actually read was Justin Cronin's City of Mirrors, but for my money, the best thing I actually read all year is Station Eleven. I've waxed on and on about this book across the site, through various chats and forums, and I'll say it again - this is one of the best books I've read from the last half decade or so. Period.

It's about the interpersonal relationships between several tangentially or directly related characters through a superflu plague that wipes out a large chunk of humanity. it sounds like the stuff a horror novel might be mde of, and to be sure, Station Eleven is a haunting novel. But it's also a remarkably beautiful one, with finely crafted, believable characters who are neither good nor bad, but products of the lives and events that surround them. it's the sort of book that makes me wish more people in my life read, so I could buy a hundred copies and give them out with the promise that if they liked it, they would in turn buy two more copies of it and pass it on. it's not just good. It's the sort of book that demands to be read, that has stuck with me for months after I finished it. I haven't been this utterly in love with a book in a long, long time.

The Best Gameplay-Related Experience of 2016

The Division

There's a reason I snuck in the best book of 2016 above this game. A lot about what I loved playing through The Division is owed to Emily St. John Mandel. Not directly, mind you, but because her book was what I listened to while playing the bulk of this game. It was an oddly satisfying combination, racing through one post-plague New York while listening to gorgeous words about another.

It doesn't hurt that the core mechanics of The Division are fundamentally great. I wish the enemies weren't so bullet-spongey, and post recent patches, the game gets brutally difficult in later stages, but banging around, collecting tapes and doing minor little side activities was made an absolute joy by the experience of listening to a great book accompanying what will hopefully be a great series. In retrospect, I'm probably not going to be as fond of Division as I am today because that experience will fade, but for now, it's one of my warm and fuzzy moments of 2016.

Sparky's "What Are You Smoking" Award for Game I Don't Like Nearly as Much as You

Doom

Doom and Doom 2 were great games, to be sure, but I don't count them among the genre's top tier games. They were fine for their day, but have since been surpassed in scope and gameplay, and in nearly every conceivable way, I just didn't want to return to them.

Unfortunately, 2016's Doom is a return to them.

Let's get what I liked out of the way. Punching demons feels great. Apart from that... well, I guess I like the shotgun? The weapons feel generic and lifted straight fromt he nineties. There's nothing here that feels like it has quite the punch of the shotgun, especially with bullet-sponge enemies that never go down quite as fast as the fast-paced combat makes it feel like they should.

The environments have the weird Fallout 4 feeling of coming from a limited construction set. Every level feels too samey, with little variation on the general shiny set pieces. The enemies look okay, but are largely uninspired and actually seem like a step backwards from Doom 3's greatly designed baddies. The music is pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a major company trying to inject some attitude into its hell-shooter, with generic metal riffs and little that kept my ears as occupied as my hands.

I like that people are enthusiastic for this game, but it is entirely, wildly not for me. Good for Bethesda for not doing the thing we thought they would and screw this up, but... man, this game just doesn't do anything that really appeals to me.

Most Wasted Potential

Batman - The Telltale Series

As a Batman game, Telltale Batman sucks. The combat is the same thing you've seen from, what, a dozen Telltale games by this point? It's not fun to be Batman, and the limited choices you have in combat end up breaking the game severely, causing several points at which the game hard locked for me.

But that said, as a Bruce Wayne-centric story, this game is amazing. It offers a really terrific spin on the character and several of the villains. I won't spoil it for anyone, but at the very least, the early episodes' story beats are worth a look for any fans of either the DC Comics character or fans of Telltale's previous work.

All that goodwill and playfulness with the lore is pissed away in the last episode, though, as just about every meaningful decision you've made is thrown out in order to establish the typical Batman status quo. It's disappointing that a game would take so many early risks only to come to such a limp conclusion. Batman, you coulda been great. Sorry, champ.

The Game I Tried Hardest to Convince Myself I Liked

Dangerous Golf

There's a backbone to Dangerous Golf that might be great given a sequel years down the line. it's basically Burnout's crash mode, but far too limited and narrow in scope to actually be fun. There are a tiny number of levels that unfortunately are riddled with bizarre problems that affect the enjoyment of the game. Invisible lips on tables or edges send the ball careening in ways it shouldn't, a weird lack of precision in the controls means that you're never quite aiming where you want to be, and a lack of numbers flashing whenever you destroy things means you're never quite sure just what's combo-ing properly and what isn't.

And then there are the disappointing mini-games. Putting becomes the focus here, instead of taking creative license with the thing the game does best - destruction. That's a bizarre choice in a game like this, and makes me question whether or not the developers actually understood what might have made their game fun.

Best Multiplayer and Most Accessible Game for the Low Visioned

Overwatch

It's a rare thing when I can find a multiplayer FPS where I don't feel completely useless. Although my K/D ratios in Halo 3 were tremendously awful, I loved driving a Warthog because it mademe feel like I was serving a purpose on a team.

Overwatch does an amazing job of making sure I can have that feeling whenever I want to, with a selection of characters that aid the team regardless of how well I'm shooting the baddies. As Tjorbjorn, I can focus in on my turrets and aiding teammates with shield boosts. As Ape Guy, I can spray my rifle in the general direction of baddies and the lightning will arc to hit them. As a healer, I can aid my teammates without firing off a shot at all. It's a tremendously accessible game that damn near made me emotional the first time I got a Play of the Game as Tjorbjorn.

It's not without its faults - some fonts on the main screen are nearly unreadable against the backgrounds, and there could be some other nods towards accessibility for the low vision and color blind. But overall, the gameplay is far and away the most accessible I've seen in a shooter to date, and I'd love to meet the team and shake their hands for that sake alone.

Best "How Did I Pull That Off?" Game

Hitman

Hitman is a delight through and through. It's another tightly designed game, with everything running like clockwork, but with enough flexibility in its mechanics that the player never feels locked into a set of rigid rules. I had just as much success tossing out proximity charges like candy as I did following checkpoints and doing everything by the book. It's a delightful game that rewards outside-the-box thinking, and accommodates the player to such a degree that it's almost hard not to eventually succeed at a level once you're familiar enough with its mechanics.

Best RPG

I Am Setsuna

The JRPG fanatic in me very badly wants to give I Am Setsuna my Game of the Year award for just how tight and classic an experience this game is. The turn-based ATB combat is spot-on, fun, and engaging without the action-flashy bullshit of that other big Square RPG this year. The characters are RPG tropes, but they're very, very good ones, with simple stories and heartfelt dialogue. the locations could have used a bit more variety, but what's here is gorgeous and well-realized. I wish the scope had been slightly bigger, but for what's here, this is a superb experience.

Worst Introduction to an Otherwise Great Game

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Deus Ex is a case study in how not to introduce your cyberpunk themed game to an audience. Instead of giving an introductory sequence that showcases the strife between man and augmented human, instead the first level takes place in a bland Middle East level ripped straight from a Call of Duty game. it's a bizarre, terrible choice, and belies the fun of the area just beyond it. I'm still not sure why the city you wind up in can't be the starting area. Whoever thought this was a good idea, go back to the drawing board and figure out what makes your game and your world fun, because this isn't it.

Otherwise, Mankind Divided is a great game that smartly does a lot of things right. I just wish it started players off with the degree of badassness that the introduction does and offer up new tech to go with what you have already in the previous game. instead, the Tabula Rasa of having to return Jensen to his most basic levels of mobility is a chore.

Oh well.

Most Improved Sequel of 2016

Watch Dogs 2

i genuinely liked the original Watch Dogs. I thought the base takoever stuff was a lot of fun, and utilizing your environment to escape from the cops or take down baddies was pretty inspired.

That said, though, Watch Dogs 2 takes the ball and runs it into the net for a homebasedown. I think those are sports terms, right?

There's a pervasive sense of joyfulness in WD2 that I adore. At first blush, the hackers you pal around with look like dumbasses, but getting to know them through the game's chatter made me care about these dorks, and fast. There are a ton of great little interpersonal moments - the main character acts as an anchor for the often self-destructive boy genius o the group, the man-behind-the-mask Wrench is a perverse delight with a sense of history, and the female sorta-kinda leader does a great job of tethering them all together.

And the villain, a hipsterish douche, manages to be both threatening and charming at the same time. I kinda want to see the game through not just because it's fun, but because I want to get this guy - and he hasn't even done anything particularly evil. He's a great exemplification of smart villainy in a modern game, and I applaud Ubisoft for taking things back a notch.

This isn't just a great sequel. it's a great game. It might even by GOTy material. We'll pull back the curtain on that in just a few days.

Best Zen Game

Stardew Valley

Apart from the dumb, badly controlling fishing minigame with an icon way too small to see properly on a PS4, Stardew Valley seems meant to relax me on a fundamental level, and for the most part, it succeeds. The console port seems smartly designed, eschewing what could be a clunky made-for-consoles interface with a simple Minecraft-esque UI and a simply mouse cursor.

it's a farming game. If that appeals to you, pick this up. If you need something to relax you, pick it up. I you want a bit more skill and involvement in your gameplay, look elsewhere.

The Game that Probably Could Have Used One More Pass at the Script

Firewatch

On a surface level, Firewatch is a sharp game until you start picking at the edges. What could have been a smart, forlorn love story between two characters who know they can't actually wind up together for complicated, very adult reasons ends up turning into a head-scratchingly dumb mystery that doesn't do enough to explain its supposedly bizarre elements. It tries to go big and weird when it never needs to. It's a shame, because otherwise, Firewatch has 2016's best interpersonal relationship between its MC and the never-seen but often heard boss and love interest.

In order for a game so heavily focused on its narrative to work, it has to stick the landing. Unfortunately, Firewatch doesn't come close. The last third of the game is a confused mess of ideas and plot points that shouldn't have needed complications. There are points added that were clearly esigned to try to keep a player's attention, showing a lack of faith in the central narrative that drives this game. And that's kind of damning, because that narrative answers the very definition of the question Giant Bomb enjoyed asking so often.

I wish Firewatch had been a short story. I wish Firewatch hadn't tried to introduce anything involving a chain link fence. I wish this game had been what I wanted it to be, but it's not. it's someone else's vision, and unfortunately, that vision just doesn't work quite as well as it should.

It's 2016's closest swing-and-a-miss game, even moreso than Telltale's Batman, because you sort of expect that game to wind up at a status quo for the next series. This game doesn't have that excuse. It's sharp, but unfortunately, it chose to falter on what it wanted to be.

Guy Who Most Needs to Step Away from the Keyboard for a While

Sparky_Buzzsaw

Time for a nap! Thanks for reading, and I hope you have an awesome 2017.

From a gaming perspective, I don't have much to comment on when it comes to 2016. I'm only just now getting around to a lot of this year's best games, and I'm not quite ready yet to throw down a GOTY gauntlet or do up any sort of an awards blog. This is kind of more of a rumination on a few great experiences and a year in general when I grew further and further apart from games, and not necessarily for bad reasons.

It's been terrifically hard for me to single out any game this year that feels as close to me as either Tales from the Borderlands or Witcher 3 did last year. That's not to say there aren't good games that I played this year, but nothing holds up quite so well as those. I don't want you to get me wrong here - I think the overall quality of games this year has been superb. But nothing's quite hit those storytelling nerves quite so hard as those two titles did.

That said, though, I've had some outstanding gameplay moments this year, particularly when it comes to multiplayer. Overwatch is simply one of the best multiplayer shooters I've played, period. It's accessible in that I don't actually have to be shooting baddies to be helping out my team, something that makes me wildly grateful. I'm a liability to every team in a FPS I play, but in Overwatch, I feel like I'm generally helping if I'm turreting it up as Tjorborn or spraying the general direction of the baddies with Ape Guy. I plan on trying out that area healer soon too. It's neat to have found a popular shooter in 2016 I can actually play, with a shelf life longer than a hot minute or two.

And that's not the only great multiplayer experience I've had, either. The Division is a bit problematic, particularly after a recent patch rendered the enemies hard to deal with when you're playing the late game solo. But wandering around while listening to the incredible novel Station Eleven (also about a plague) while teaming up with randoms to take on the gangs of the Division's New York was a great time. I wish the game had been more varied on all accounts - the character class potential feels samey, the enemies feel samey, the gameplay itself is very samey, and the game could have benefitted greatly from a wilder clothing selection - but damned if I didn't like it anyways. A huge portion of that is owed to Emily St. John Mandel's brilliant book, but not all of it. Ubisoft is definitely onto something with this formula, and it wasn't the only game from their corner of the world that surprised and delighted me.

Cue Watch Dogs 2, I actually really liked the original Watch Dogs. I get the problems people have with its protagonist, but it was a solidly good game all around and I really liked the base hacking and exploration. Watch Dogs 2 takes what I liked about that first and makes it a more bombastic, cheery-hearted good time. The crew of hackers on your side are a bit cliched, but they're all pretty charming and a little bit silly, which is cornerstoned by the terrific lead character.

But the best part of the experience by far has been meeting up with randoms online and trying to take on missions together. Finding someone and working with them only to discover we have two wildly different ways of approaching the base infiltration stuff is a hoot. It's not without its faults - it's too hard to get out of multiplayer once you've started and some of the MP elements can be too invasive when you're just roaming around. But thankfully a lot of the most annoying crap can be turned off in the settings, so it's not too bad.

From a single player perspective, I think my heart belongs to I am Setsuna, a delightful throwback RPG produced by Square. it's highly reminiscent of Chrono Trigger - and in a more modern sense, some of the Trails in the Sky games. There's a simplicity to its storytelling and settings that I like, and the turn-based combat, overworld exploration, and NPC interaction is just what I needed this year. If you're looking for a great way to pass the time solo with RPG comfort food, this is very much the game for you.

There are more games I want to talk about, particularly some of the more mediocre experiences I had this year, but we'll save those for a future blog, maybe when I've had a chance to play a couple more games before the end of the year.

I imagine the mods will want to skip this next section. Apart from my close circle of family and friends, they've had to endure the brunt of my bullshitting about my books, and for that, I sincerely apologize. It's become a running joke that I never shut up about them (sorry, @sweep).

Since February of this year, I've written four novels and published three of them, with the fourth set to hit sometime in January. It's been a batshit crazy year for me personally, and not just for those reasons, but it's something I'm proud of having done. It's been a weird experience, though. I'm pulling away from a lot of the things I loved for the last seven or eight years, and that's unfortunately included Giant Bomb. While I still try to catch an hour or so of the shows here and there, I'm terribly behind on blogs from all my friends here and I've only been browsing the forums for a few minutes at a time each day. It led to me stepping down as a moderator this year, something I don't regret, save for putting more workload on the other fine folks.

And it's pulled me away from games in general. At one point, right up until Black Friday, I thought for sure this would be the year I bought an Xbox One, particularly since they're so cheap. But I know that'd just be a mistake. Games like Forza Horizon 3 look great, but when I'm sitting around, I'm compelled to write something, or edit, or otherwise be working on the novels in some fashion. In a weird way, I've become something I've never been before - a workaholic.

And in another happy note, I've become pretty focused on losing weight too. It's not always as successful as I'd like, but I've definitely started to focus more and more on getting myself right this year, physically and work-wise. I'm down over fifty pounds (I gained a bit back in early November, but hey, I'm back on track now), and I can really feel the difference in how energetic I am. I'm not sweating as much, my clothes are hanging off me, and I'm in a good place to continue losing weight in 2017. I have no end goal in mind. I just want to get healthy.

And part of that "getting healthy" mentality is just not to sit around in front of a TV screen as much. It's one thing if I'm working, but even then, I'm trying to develop better habits, like walking around a track several times a day, getting my dog out for more walks, and that sort of thing. It's going really well.

I'm not sure what 2017's going to bring personally. I'd like to put out at least two new series of novels and continue to build on the one I've already created, but we'll see how it goes. For everyone who's been encouraging me and taking an interest in this whole nonsense, thanks. This is one of the best communities on the Internet and I look forward to bullshitting with you all more in 2017.

I'm in a good place right now, the best I've been in a really long time. So for all those who've been patient with me and endured my endless tirades about books or helped spread the word, I owe you, I really do. I'm going to try to do better in 2017 to keep my business stuff away from my personal life so hopefully this stuff isn't so pervasive in our conversations, but from my end of things, it's been a tremendously exciting year and I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes in the future.

Every now and then, I get it in my head to do up a movie marathon. I'm not talking about your usual Evil Deads or your Indiana Joneses. It has to be bizarre, sometimes loosely related movies that no sane person would ever watch one of, let alone multiple films in order.

A decade ago, it was all the Police Academy movies. All of them. Mission to Moscow? Yup. Citizens on Patrol? You bet. I watched all of them over the space of about three days in a shitty little rental wrapped in blankets while the cold air seeped in through the cracks of my misshapen doors. By the end of the second movie, I knew it was a bad idea. By the end of the last one, I was squirming in my chair, ready to be anywhere but in front of that TV. Truthfully? I really should have just gotten up and turned the damn things off after the end of the first one. But I didn't, because I have pride, damn it. Pride and a slight desire for self-destructive behavior.

Sometimes it's nice to pour a little Draino into the mind's butt canal and give everything a good cleansing. Because there's no other way to really describe the kind of pain I put myself through with these things. We're talking all the Toxic Avenger movies, interspersed liberally with such "gems" as Poultrygeist, Killer Condom, and other Troma films. We're talking all of the first six Star Wars movies... en Espanol, of which I speak literally nothing. I have more $5 JCVD movies on DVD than any one person should ever own, and I've watched many of them in order of release... with breaks for sequels to his films that couldn't even be bothered to sign him. Seriously, Kickboxer and Bloodsport 2 couldn't even be bothered to sign the guy who once punched out a snake in a film.

Flash forward to last week. It was a good time for me to take a break. I just wrapped up the first draft of my third novel. I was nervous as hell about the upcoming Kindle release of my second and I desperately needed to not sit there and dwell on it or I was going to drive myself crazy. When my brother @upperdecker invited me up to his place for a week or so to celebrate his birthday, I jumped on it. I needed time to recharge my batteries and visiting with him is always fun.

I spent most of my time up there dicking around with XCOM 2 - you can read my thoughts on that in my "games I've played in 2016" list if you want to read about actual games on a video game website (and what kind of crazy person are you, anyways?). It was a good time, but we eeded to do something memorable, to achieve something, to give ourselves horrific mental scars the likes of which we'll very likely never recover from.

As both of us are wrestling fans, this led naturally to a wildly unreasonable solution to our dilemma of "how can we hate ourselves fully?" Cue wrestling's golden boy John Cena, the seemingly vanished Ted DiBiase Jr., and (up until a very recent promo) wrestling's Captain Boring Mike "The Miz" Mizaninianiannan... Mezzanine... Mizzou... Mizanana... uh... the Miz. We were going to watch ALL of The Marine movies.

Fuck.

The Marine

a.k.a. The Film That Caused John Cena to Salute Every Damn Time He Ran at a Ring Regardless of Not Actually Being a Marine Because It's Wrestling

I respect the hell out of what John Cena has done both in the ring and as a humanitarian. The guy has done roughly a bazillion meet-ups for kids with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and has been the best face of the company in its entire history. That's not hyperbole - the dude genuinely seems like a stand-up guy.

The guy's not a bad entertainer, either, especially when he's given a looser rein on what he can and can't say. Look up his appearances on late night TV and you'll see what I mean. He's a genuinely funny dude with a pretty good sense of comedic timing that doesn't seem scripted or forced. And while he's taken a few hundred shots to the head over the years, he seems immensely normal for a WWE wrestler.

That said though, his first real foray into films was a pretty hilarious mess. The Marine falls into the action cliche tree, hits every branch on the way down, gets back to its feet, dusts itself off, then climbs back up to do it one more time - all followed by thirty megatons of explosions.

It's not so much that The Marine is unwatchable. It's entertaining in the way that it revels in its stupidity. It knows how absurd it is and it never lets the audience forget that they're always three or four minutes away from another explosion. I'm okay with that. But the movie maybe assumes that the audience is a little too stupid. Let's start with the main character's name: John Triton.

It's a thing in bib dumb action movies to name characters in really obvious plot tie-in ways - see Simon Phoenix from Demolition Man, who rises from the dead (more or less) to be born again. It's not clever. It's not as wink-and-noddish as the writers or producers would like to think. It's just annoying. "Oh, see, he's a Marine, so his name should reflect that. We can't call him Poseidon - even as dumb as our target audience is, they'll get that right away. No... we'll go with, uh, Triton! We're so clever!" If you want your kid to be a CEO someday, are you going to purposefully name him Dominic Rich Guy? No? Why would you then name a character after a Greek god? And don't even get me started on calling characters after their real world names - John for John, Bennett for Manu Bennett (Crixus from Spartacus or Deathstroke from Arrow, who slums it up here in an early appearance), etc. It's just the worst. Like my brother said upon viewing the film, it's like they didn't want to confuse John Cena on set or the audience by calling him something different. "Bob Bobberson? But that's John Cena! We're confused!"

The plot seems largely irrelevant in the short term, but hang onto these thoughts for the rest of this blog, okay? Marine X rescues Woman Y. In this case, John Cena has to rescue his wife (Kelly Carlson, who you might remember as being the crazy counterpart to Christian Troy in Nip/Tuck) from a band of diamond robbers, cop killers, and all around bad dudes. Robert Patrick leads the band of rascals as they pretty much shoot up the entirety of the scenes they're in.

Cena plays a Marine discharged from service for doing his job and saving people or something, comes home, has a happy fun sexy time with his wife in their remarkably huge house, gets a boring security job, is terrible at said job, and bemoans this fact to his wife, who suggests that rather than try to work out his problems earning bread to keep the lights on and help support her lingerie habit, they go on a vacation. Because a vacation will suddenly make him not terrible at life, right? Right. Pay attention to that theme of early marital/family problems too. It's going to come up again.

Fuck it, roll with it, says UpperDecker and me.

Things go haywire for Greek God Dude and Nip/Tucker when the Terminator, Crixus, and Other Dudes roll up to a gas station and kill more cops. Keep in mind, this is a universe where cameras exist - The Prototype John Cena was caught on camera putting someone through a glass window earlier in the film, so we know cameras exist. We know they have to be somewhere in this film. But Robert Patrick and Co. are apparently such master criminals that their pictures haven't been spread to law enforcement across the nation, let alone in the immediate vicinity o the place where they just MURDERED A CAR FULL OF COPS. Seriously, not a damn cop in this film recognizes or even flinches away from them. I'm surprised all the boys in blue aren't sitting around flinging feces at each other in the entirety of this thing.

Shit pops off when one of Robert Patrick's crew gets antsy and shoots one of the cops at the gas station in the head. They take off with Cena's wife as a hostage and he spends the entirety of the film chasing them down, taking them out, and never breaking a sweat in the bayou of Somewhere, I don't Give a Shit, USA. In the end, the guy saves the girl from drowning - because he's a Greek water god, remember? REMEMBER?!? Triton? Huh?! Huh?!? Roughly five hundred thousand things blow up, with about a full hour of slow motion shots of John Cena doing hero things like jumping in front of explosions and running in excruciatingly slow motion, because fuck plot, let's show our wrassler and never stop.

That sounds like a pretty okay plot for what the film is, right? It's a big dumb actioner, with plenty of Robert Patrick's patented gleeful dickery. He's everything you want from Robert Patrick in a Robert Patrick-ass movie, like From Dusk Till Dawn 2. Where things fall apart is when you realize just how much of a WWE movie this really is. Racism? There's a whole scene devoted to a black man who refuses to go with the smart choice of a min-van because he's black and won't drive something like that. He instead steals - you guessed it - a Cadillac because this is the WWE and there's not a stereotype they don't love. Maybe no one's actually explained to them what stereotyping actually is? I don't know. Seems like a pretty big word for some of them to have to understand.

Then there's the offhanded child rape jokes. Yes. Pluralized. In a straight-up painful scene between Cena and Carlson, he tries to joke that the last time he's been tot he woods was when his dad took him and his brother up there for some good ol' implied pedophilia. Yuuuuuup. That really plays well. The second comes from a running "gag" (emphasis on the gagging part) that the aforementioned black guy was sexually abused as a child by a camp counselor who managed to woo him with rock candy. Someone genuinely thought this shit was hilarious and included it in several points of the movie.

And that kind of defines what to expect out of The Marine in general. The blueprint for a dumb, fun B-movie is there, but the whole of it is so tone-deaf that it winds up being immensely cringe-worthy. That said? It's far and away the best of the bunch of these shitacular movies. If you plan on following in our footsteps with these things, a) don't and b) stop with The Marine. It only gets worse from there.

The Marine 2

a.k.a. Seriously, What the Hell Happened to Ted DiBiase Jr.? Is He Okay? Does He Need a Sandwich and a Coat?

I'm not sure what the intent of The Marine 2 is. Or the rest of the films in the series, for that matter, but particularly this one. Remember that line about Marine X saving Woman Y? Applies tot his film too. This time, Ted DiBiase Jr. must save his young wife from Asian terrorists who don't like white people because they've desecrated their land. I paid zero attention to this one, largely because it tries to take itself too seriously. At least it doesn't have the rampant cringey aspects of the first film.

Ted DiBiase's character is largely a bland, vanilla hero type, contemplating the end of his run as a Marine and looking at civilian life, a world he's not sure he can... wait, didn't we hear all this before? Ohhhh, right, that's because every film in this franchise basically has the same lead-up, the same archetypes, the same cookie cutter molds. Even his wife is vaguely reminscent of Kelly Carlson. It's almost a remake, not a sequel, save that it happens overseas. Admittedly, I'm pretty glad about that, because the one great highlight of the film is the cinematography, and I say that with no hint of sarcasm. The shots o the island they're on are gorgeous, and some of the long ight scenes are technically remarkable, if not all that actually exciting. Someone clearly took influence from Tony Jaa fight scenes, which is a fine influence.

Oh, and Michael Rooker's in this (Darryl's brother from Walking Dead). Why? I have no idea. His character is largely squandered as a bemused ex-soldier who buddies up to DiBiase in a ew key scenes of exposition and that's about it. Hey, it was a paid vacation to what looks like a hell of a locale, so I can't blame the guy.

I'm trying to think of anything else to say about this movie. DiBiase probably deserved better role than this. He wasn't given enough personality to judge his acting chops, and he's since sadly disappeared into the ethos. Are you okay, Mr. DiBiase? Check in with your mother. She's worried.

The Marine 3

a.k.a. In Which We Learn the Police Have Never Heard of Snipers

Let me get this out of my system. The Miz tends to bore me to tears. As a wrestler, he's technically sound and tends to protect his opponents, which I applaud. His finisher is also pretty great - I love forward Russian leg sweeps - and he's been on his game as of late working an angle with Daniel Bryan that shows him with more personality than he's given us in the whole of his career.

That said, though, imagine if a frat buddy of yours got a job on TV every week, day in, day out for about a decade. That's the Miz as a personality. He's not terrible, but there's a reason when he's announced as a former WWE heavyweight champ that I have to think back and try to recall the run of main event matches he had.

As an actor... well, he's still the Miz. Technically, there's nothing wrong with his performances. He's not awful in the last two Marine movies, but he never comes across as anything other than boilerplate, either. At least we get another great actor for him to go up against, this time in Neal McDonough, who you might remember from a run on Justified's third season as a crazed Dixie mafia middle manager.

Or maybe you remember him from the rah-rah-rah Cadillac commercial.

Anyways, McDonough's a hell of an actor. It's a bit unfortunate he's so oten typecast as a villain, because I think he'd make a great Roland for the Dark Tower - or even a Randall Flagg. Anyways, the guy's been in dozens of roles and has generally knocked it out of the park as a charming tough guy. Here, he plays a man who's tired of the system, who wants to see capitlism crumble. This might have a slightly anti-American way bent to it, but he manages to make the role pretty okay by genuinely playing up the aggrieved widower of a woman who died from being denied insurance for cancer treatments and the son of a man who committed suicide after losing everything in a stock market crash. Not a bad way to set up a sympathetic villain, and by and large, when it's just him on the screen, it really works.

And honestly, the setup for the Miz isn't terrible. He's a Marine who's having trouble adjusting to lie at home and... ah, fuck it, you know the drill. Instead o a wife to rescue this time around, the Damsel in Distress is his sister and her ne'er-do-well boyfriend with a heart of gold. The difference here in characters from the first two is largely negligible, though if I'm trying to pick diamonds out of the coal here, I'd say one of the better decisions is to have the Miz's character be slightly more unhinged and demanding than his predecessors. It's still not enough flavor to make me give a single shit about this film, but it's something, I guess.

Anyways, Neal McDonough - or Sexy Eyes, as UpperDecker calls him (and he's right - that dude was blessed with some killer eyes - is preparing to blow up an undisclosed target with some newfangled explosives in an attempt to deliver a historic message to the people that capitalism is bad. The villains are trapped in a standoff with the FBI on a wrecked ferry, and shit pops off.

Ok, shit really pops off - in an astoundingly dumb way.

Up until the midpoint of the movie, there's a hope that this thing is trying to be something more than a big dumb actioner, what with McDonough's character being sympathetic and all. But the moment the FBI decides to take him down on the ferry, things get stupid. With a single helicopter, or a sniper, or an armored vehicle, the villains' plan would have been rendered completely moot. But because the writers were apparently asleep that day or on strike or died of malaria or something, instead, we're force fed a scene wherein the FBi just sends in waves of bodies against McDonough's people, who are insanely good shots, have craploads of armor-piercing rounds, and guns a small army would envy. It's meant to be a tense, terse scene that shifts McDonough into being a real villain and a threat, and instead, it just forces the viewer completely out of whatever little sense of fictional escapism they've managed to find. It's remarkably stupid.

The movie steadily rolls downhill from there, ending with a limp yawn of a showdown that leads to the Miz driving a car loaded with explosives out to a lumber yard before it blows up in a tiny explosion that probably wouldn't have killed a kitten, let alone done enough damage to land McDonoguh's character in the annals of terrorizer history.

Oh, and in true Marine fashion, the Miz's character arc is never mentioned again outside the first twenty minutes. Perfect.

The Marine 4

a.k.a. I Don't Care About Anything Anymore. Make This Recap Stop.

We return to Mike Mizanainanaianannan's character as he prepares to take on a new job as a bodyguard for a private security firm. Good. Fine. Yeah. His sisters, his adjustment to civilian life, none of this is every mentioned again. He's apparently moved on from murderfests and gunfights to a happy normal life in no time at all.

His first day on the job, he has to drive and protect a hacker with sensitive data regarding the nefarious deeds of Private Military Company Y. Yup. Guy X protecting and saving Woman Y again. Yippee.

There's no saving grace for this movie. There are no notable actors. No diamonds in the rough. No notable progression in terms of what the filmmakers have learned. And as if by this point they've learned UpperDecker and I are watching, there's a literal SEVEN MINUTES of opening credits, text, and general inane bullshit before the movie even gets going. Whoever made this hated goodness and happiness and rainbows because there's nothing in this boring, cold turd of a movie to interest me, except for one particular bad scene near the end.

The last forty or so minutes of the film are devoted to one particularly drawn out chase through the woods, wherein Evil Mercenaries are out for our beloved heroes' blood or something. They keep flip-flopping on wanting to kill the hacker or keep her alive for reasons unknown, save that it helps create drama when she's within their grasp. I don't know, man, by this point the movies have killed my brain.

Anyways, the Miz and Damsel in Distress 4 have a night together to prepare for the oncoming mercenaries, so they spend it building traps in the middle of woods they don't know. In the dark. With limited (read: non-existent) tools and apparently four hundred feet of rope they pull out of their ass.

There are swinging spiked logs. There's a hanging snare that lifts a mercenary forty feet in the air. There are intricate "got ya!" traps that require knowing there will be two mercenaries side-by-side at precisely the right moment walking through a very narrow pair of trees at precisely the right moment. There's all the dumbest fucking shit you'd expect from something labeled a WWE film.

At least Marine 4 had one bright shining moment - it was the end of our horrible decision to watch all of these remarkably crappy movies. For that, I'm eternally grateful to it.

Kids, like the WWE always says, do not attempt this at home.

That's a dreadful title, isn't it? I love it.

Anyways, the long and short of it is that I've handed in my moderating badge. That's right, the people's moderator is no more. There's really no drama behind it all, so before Internet tongues start a-wagging, I want to get out in front and tell you it's just simply because I need to focus on my writing and my personal health. I'm already sitting in front of a computer screen for eight hours or so a day writing and editing - and that's at a minimum. I'm down nearly forty pounds since February and in my free time, I need to be exercising more and getting out and socializing in the real world.

It's been a real honor and a pleasure working with the moderation team and Rorie these past few years. As much shit as we give each other, they are simply some of the best individuals I've ever had the pleasure of talking with on the Internet. I've seen some really great moments with them, and some truly shitty stuff that never seemed to end. Rorie is, without question, one of the great backbones to this site, and he does so much more damn work than you see on the front end of things. It's astonishing how much personal time he and the moderators have given up to doing this job.

I won't be leaving the site permanently - I said this to the mods, but I've been here nearly from the start and I'll see this place through to its very end (hopefully in the year 2250 or something). I'm hugely fond of this community and I look forward to many more bullshitting sessions when I'm supposed to be working on the next novel. That said though, my time here has already been drastically reduced since February and I expect that trend to continue. If you'd like to stay in better contact with me, I'd recommend looking me up on Twitter - linked elsewhere on my profile, I believe.

And no, I will never, ever stop telling Zeep that his taste in everything is complete and utter bullshit. Some things are just never going to change.

I wasn't sure I was even going to write this blog. It feels vain, a bit like I'm patting myself on the back and looking for attention. If that title and the first sentence or two makes you feel that way, go ahead and move on. I sure can't blame you - I think I would too.

But the reality is that I don't want to write this for me. We've had a number of amazing bloggers and writers here on Giant Bomb, some of whose work has been recognized (like moderator @thatpinguino and his awesome work on his series of guest articles), some of whose work continues to be great (@mento, @gamer_152, and @zombiepie) without the professional recognition it sorely deserves, and some of whom we just haven't seen enough of lately (@dankempster, I'm looking at you, buddy).

The sad fact of the matter is that I think the efforts of a great many writers will remain unrecognized until there's a severe shift back to the great focus we used to have on blogging and the community here on Giant Bomb. Blogging here used to feel rewarding. It felt like we were reaching a readership, not pissing away our words in a sea of insularity and a vague promise of future site revamps. It's ironic that even as professional games journalism bemoans the death of the written word in favor of Youtube-style Let's Plays and short firebrand videos that they're not taking proactive steps to ensure the next generation of writers actually want to continue creating.

I say that in the vain hope that maybe I ruffle the right kind of feathers. We should and used to be a home for some of the Internet's best gaming bloggers. Now we've got a few old guard continuing to do good work without a bit of recognition apart from the ZombiePie cultivated Spotlight - and his name doesn't even appear on the byline. As great as his work is, it shouldn't be the only bit of recognition these writers get. And I know for most of them, they'll probably get a little pissy at me and say they're not doing it for the recognition, but they do deserve it.

Now, that's not the reason I decided to write a book. It wasn't even a factor. But in the months since I wrote it, it's made me realize that with just a couple of months worth of effort, I've been happier with the results of my writing than I have been in years of blogging. That's not to say I don't appreciate the hundreds if not thousands of comments from everyone who's read my hot garbage on here, but it makes me realize how empty those years of effort left me.

There's a golden rule among writing that I want to reiterate before I get any further, especially after that paragraph - if you're writing for any other reason than to satisfy yourself, you are almost certainly bound for disappointment. There was a stat a creative writing professor used to say at the beginning of her courses, that 99.9% of people who set out to write for a career will fail. And it's the hard truth - none of us are assured success as writers, no matter how much our vanity wants it to be otherwise. Cream does not always rise to the top and I'm realizing you have to be downright crafty to market a book. It's a lesson I want anyone who read those last few paragraphs to remember - even if I'm not pleased with Giant Bomb's continued lack of community support for its dying blogging enthusiasts, I also recognize none of us were entitled to jack shit.

So my recommendation to all those creative writers on here? Keep doing what you're doing. Keep blogging, if you like it. But maybe keep on reading and think about writing a book of your own. Here's how it went down for me.

The Start

First, I want to iterate that this is not me shilling my book. I have no intention of writing down its title here. This is solely about the process, a bit of cathartic bullshitting if you like.

Back in December or January, I popped in the shower, just doing my usual thing and preparing for bed. As is usually the case for me, I zoned out and started drumming up little bits of conversation in my mind between imaginary characters. It's sort of like the people-watching creative exercises your teachers might have had you do back in high school or college, wherein you invent stories and dialogue for random people you see. It's not something I do on purpose - it's not a meditation, just a way to amuse myself when I'm alone or lost in thought (which is pretty much always).

Anyways, I got to thinking to myself about a local bar and how it looked back in the early nineties. It was this wood-paneled, very Western bar complete with animal heads on the wall and cheap lights that sort of gave the place the feel of a low-rent apartment. I don't know how or why, but I lit upon the idea that the bar was frequented by ghosts (an idea that was later cut from the novel). Then my thoughts turned to what the ghosts would be like if they really were stuck here in the afterlife, because if they were stuck here, wouldn't that theoretically mean they were neither good nor bad, but kind of just assholes?

And there it was, my first line. "Ghosts are assholes."

I liked it. I latched on to that son of a bitch like a pug on a gopher carcass (something I'm now an expert on thanks to my Curious George of a dog and our local gopher problem). I couldn't quite figure out the specifics. I didn't really have a plot, or characters, or a good set of villains. But I had a good line, a great idea for an opening scene, and I had to get the idea down on paper.

Except I didn't. I sat on my ass for a month, played video games, and watched movies. I did nothing of importance, just like I've been doing for something like seven years now.

Things didn't need to change. There was no great lightning bolt from the sky, there was no health scare, there was nothing that would make this into a great romantic Hollywood story. But I was bitter, depressed (not in a clinical way, just bummed about my lack of forward movement as a thirty something), and anxious to do something, to feel better about myself. No one was going to help me with this and I couldn't do it for someone else anyways. If I was going to start to make changes, I needed to do it for me. I had to get in a healthier mindset.

The plan was and is two-fold. First and foremost was to get myself right physically. I am grossly obese - I was pushing nearly 380-390 pounds when I started all this, and I couldn't walk around a store without getting sweaty and exhausted. I hated waking up alone. I hated knowing I'd let myself go this far. I knew I had the willpower to change things, I just needed to focus and do it.

That part's still rough, but I'm happy to say I'm improving. I've dropped thirty some odd pounds, I'm walking a mile every day, and I've begun to really enjoy working out with dumbbells. I feel good, if not great. I'm not doing some crazy fad diet, just reducing the amount I eat, drinking more tea and less pop, and in general just trying to make smarter decisions about my day to day lifestyle. It feels good.

But while I'm pleased with how the physical stuff is going, I'm downright fucking astounded at how well the writing aspect is going. That brings me to the second part.

The Book

I still had that first scene. I knew how I wanted to write it backwards and forwards, but I was losing the specifics, the things that gave it heart. I had to put it down on paper and I obstinately refused until I started to get my shit together in February.

I'd written a draft for a novel before. It was a garbage horror novel, the sort of thing I pushed on and finished just to say I had written something of length in my lifetime. I wanted this to be different, but I knew it was going to be rough. I've written a few stories over the last few years, one of which was published in an anthology, but it had been half a decade since I attempted a novel. I wasn't sure if this was going to be the one or not.

Turns it, it was. I started slowly. I must have wrote and rewrote that first chapter five times, at least, and later again after the first draft of the novel was finished. I forced myself to finally move on, to develop the central two protagonists and see where they went, what they'd do. Turns out they like to fight criminals and act like a modern day Robin Hood, if that Robin Hood was slightly emotionally crippled and mildly homicidal.

About halfway through February, I had a chance to housesit for my folks, something I thought would clear my mind and help me get a better perspective on what I wanted from this novel. It was a great time - my folks have six dogs and together with my pug, I was surrounded each night by a sea of snoring pugs, Sschnauzers, and chaweenies. During the day, I hammered out pages feet away from a deck overlooking one of Montana's most beautiful mountain ranges, armed with a plethora of K-cup cappuccinos and a growing desire to do nothing but write. That sounds like hyperbole, but it's slowly becoming more and more truthful.

In that week, I must have written about thirty or forty thousand words, which is roughly about a third of what the novel wound up being. It wasn't great writing - hell, half of it ended up in the bin on the second draft - but it was forward motion the likes of which I hadn't made in years. I went home happy, exhausted, and completely ready to get up the coming days to return to a normal writing schedule of about a thousand words a day.

Turns out, I didn't want to just do the bare minimum anymore. While there are days that I do struggle to get out those thousand words, almost every day since then I've pounded out between 3-6k words a day. It's becoming easier to focus, to find myself lulled to that daydreaming state where my fingers do the work while my brain is a thousand miles away, not focused on anything but the work in front of me.

Within a month and a bit of change, I had the first draft finished. It was hilariously bad in spots - there was a occult-like undertone to a great deal of the book that I liked in theory but which read like a 70's horror acid trip. Some of it, though, I was really proud of and I realized I had something on my hands I wanted the world to see eventually. That was exciting. I hadn't had that feeling in years.

I've done a lot in my life I'm proud of but nothing stands remotely close to that first draft. It was shitty and hastily cobbled together, but on those pages was my heart. I am all the elements of my novels. I am the main characters, the villains, the decaying city, the lovemaking, the fighting, the fear. It was, all of it, me in a way nothing I'd ever written was.

And then I threw it all away and started over again.

The Second Draft

Writing is a lot like the human body. A heart and lungs are the very basis of your life, but without the ribcage, without structure, you're just not going to fit together very well. That first draft? It didn't fit together very well.

I had to start over, go smaller with the plot while going deeper on the details. The book badly needed fleshing out. Most of what I'd written was dialogue. Given that I have a history and deep love of the stage, that's not surprising, but it needed more action, more description.

I tried to rewrite the novel from the draft I had originally. That notion was stupid and I wound up pitching the whole thing about a week later. There were elements I really liked, and a great many scenes in rewrites are essentially the same, but in order to fix everything that was wrong, I needed to start over. It was very much the right decision.

What I learned mostly about myself is this - I'm okay at shooting from the hip, but I'm not great. Eventually the lack of structure starts to add up and the whole thing comes apart in the latter half. I stored that little nugget of new information away for my second novel (which wound up getting a thirty page chapter synopsis before I started writing it - great decision), but for this one I had the basics of where I needed the novel to go and just had to get the innards to all fit properly.

It took some doing, and it was a lot slower going than the first draft. I scrapped the idea of my villains altogether and started over with a fresh batch, ones that weren't so mustache-twirly. That draft wound up being about 30k longer than the first draft, eventually topping out at just over 120k words, which felt about right for the story I wanted to tell.

That draft took about another two months. By May, I was ready to edit my novel and get it out to my beta readers. Unfortunately, that's where I got impatient and started pushing things too hard, too soon.

Editing, or the Lack Thereof

Let me get this out in front now. I realize I make a shitload of errors in every blog I write. I try to edit the worst of them out, but I'm not great at catching my own typos unless I'm reading the work out loud. Imagine the number of typos I make in a blog and multiply that by about a hundred, maybe a hundred thirty.

Yeah, that's a lot of fucking typos.

Here's the thing about hiring professional editors - they're really expensive. For someone to have edited my book professionally, it would have taken $750 for someone with experience who I trusted. Nearly a fucking grand before I'd even released the thing. There was no way I could afford that, so I figured, hey, I'll do the work myself, get it out to beta readers, and let them find the rest.

Not a bad plan, except for one thing - I got impatient.

By the first of June, I hadn't heard back from my beta readers. I really wanted the thing out in time for E3 so I could focus on my moderation duties (and enjoy all the amazing nonsense here on Nuke dot com). Two of my close friends helped me with formatting the book for publication and making a cover, and too early, I punched that publish button on Amazon.

It was a mistake. I realize that now, but it was a minor one. I've only sold a marginal number of copies to date - online advertising will be my big draw and I won't be starting that until next month - but here's the thing about publishing ebooks on Amazon: your updates will only affect future copies of the book. You can request that they push out updates to older copies, but the process can take months and without substantial changes, you're not guaranteed that they'll do it. It's crazy, but when you consider all the possible copyright infringement stuff they must deal with, it makes a lot of sense.

Anyways, there are a lot of readers out there now stuck with copies of my novel with an absolutely stupid number of typos. With the help of more responsive readers, I've since fixed most of them and future readers will get a cleaner copy of the book, but damn, that was embarrassing. Lesson learned.

The Next Book

I'm about halfway through writing the first draft of the next book, which I started in late May, I think. It's going well, especially thanks to that chapter synopsis I mentioned earlier. If you decide to write your own novel, try writing one of those to go with it. It helps streamline the process and keeps you focused. I'm going through chapters like shit through a goose.

Will I be a popular writer? Fuck no. I'm not even all that mediocre. I just got my first review yesterday and I'm happy about that, but until they start coming in from the wild and not from people I babysat twenty years ago (true story), I won't really know how successful that first book will be. Probably won't sell much more copies than what I have now, but I'm okay with that. My family has copies. My closest friend does. My entire hometown, which has been hugely supportive of me throughout the years, has seen my name on an advertisement in a local paper. It's pretty cool and it's rewarding in a way that writing should be. Can be, if you're willing to take the chance and write something yourself. Discipline and focus, that's all it takes. Sit down, write out an idea, and you'll be surprised at how quickly it grabs hold of you.

As I write this, I don't know what my plans are for blogging here on Giant Bomb entail. I've played fuck-all for video games this year, limiting myself mostly to Rogue Galaxy and Fallout 4. If I do continue blogging here, it's likely to be on stranger stuff, more blogs like this and less about gaming. I was really proud of my Doctor Who series on here and I have a vague plan to continue that with other shows (maybe Battlestar Galacitca?). I have a personal blog for random, spur of the moment writing thoughts, but I'd like to continue to encourage the blogging atmosphere here as much as I can. i think the right solution is to work from within, try to get the people here who write so much quality stuff better recognition, and try not to get so moody about these things, but I can't honestly say what the future holds for me here as far as blogs go. I'd like to talk more about the advertising process once I've had some experience with it, and once I've finished up the planned trilogy of novels, I'd like to do up more tips for aspiring writers.

With that said, with all my earlier negativity, I want to encourage all of the great writers here on Giant Bomb past and present to keep working. I've been lax lately in supporting you folks by commenting on your blogs and I apologize for that. We gotta stick together, and we need to encourage newer writers to join our ranks.

For now, I'm going to end this monster of a blog. I don't know if this helped anyone besides me, but know if you're a writer out there struggling with the idea that the world is turning away from the written word, you're not alone and you shouldn't have to be. Keep being creative, not just for you but everyone who's going to follow in your footsteps.