A Blog Both Wonderful and Strange

For the fullest enjoyment of this blog post, make sure you read  this previous post , in which I go into more detail about this book's existence and review the first one. Also, I would like to dedicate this post to the memory of David Hedison, who passed away shortly before I began work on it. Hedison portrayed Felix Leiter in Live and Let Die and Licence to Kill, making him the first of two actors to play Felix more than once in film. Now, let's get onto this thing; my apologies that it has taken so long. As I noted in an update to my previous post, after presumably getting a cease and desist letter from Ian Fleming Publications, Edward F. Koehler PhD's Felix Leiter books are no longer for sale beyond third-party sellers on Amazon, who are selling them - as of this writing - for no less than $123. Far overpriced, if you ask me, but I suppose they're a rarity now, as I highly doubt many were printed, much less actually sold. However, for a brief period, th

You're probably reading this because you have at least a passing interest in my blog. Well, currently, I'm working on a follow-up to my  post about commercialized James Bond fanfic . But here I'll go through a few ideas I have for future blog posts. Specifically, plans I have for reviews. Exploring the Star Wars Expanded Universe Recently, I began posting old drafts I had of  Star Wars  video game reviews, which I intend to be part of a sporadic blog series,  Exploring the Star Wars Expanded Universe.  Right now, it is only video games, but I intend to expand (ha) this series to books. In fact, I had written a review for  Heir to the Empire  after re-reading it last summer. Didn't do that for  Dark Force Rising  or  The Last Command,  but hopefully I can manage to refresh myself with the Wookieepedia articles and write some reviews. I intend to eventually read every single Expanded Universe book, play every game, and so on, then review them here. Right now, I'm

Got another video game here. As you may be able to guess, it is a sequel to Dark Forces, which I previously covered . Once again, you play as Kyle Katarn. With a beard this time. Oh yeah, as you can see, that image of our hero is a still from a live-action cutscene. If you weren't aware, there was a period in the '90s where it was cool for video games to have real live actors portray the characters in cutscenes. This was one of the games that got this treatment. And I'm actually a fan of it, at least in this game, which is the only one I've ever played that has this feature. The acting is fairly good, but the rest of the visuals in the cutscenes are dated, but I don't personally mind. And there's a tiny bit of what some may call "so bad it's good," but I just call it "the '90s definition of awesome." In this game, Kyle is out to stop a group of Dark Jedi from reaching the Valley of the Jedi, which contains an area of h

Here we go. The first Star Wars video game I'm going to cover. I played the PlayStation Classics version on PlayStation 3, so yeah. Being a first-person shooter and having come out in 1995, this game plays pretty much like Doom. Honestly, I'm not really a retro gamer at all, but I can play Doom -like games any day. But they're not my favorites, mostly due to how dated they are. I don't just mean the visuals - I take no issue with the graphics in games. As long as I can tell what's going on, I'm fine. But what really gets me is some of the level design. It's easy for me to get lost in a lot of these games and it takes me forever to figure out where I'm supposed to go and what I'm supposed to do. I understand that's just how these games were designed back then. It's just not my cup of tea. I think I read somewhere that this game, when it was early in development, was intended to be an adaptation of the original film, but the devs decide

Felix Leiter. Probably the closest thing James Bond has to a good friend. It's hard to tell that in the movies, though, since he's been played by a different guy nearly every time he's been on-screen. (top row) Felix Leiter, Felix Leiter, Felix Leiter, Felix Leiter (bottom row) Felix Leiter, Felix Leiter, Felix Leiter, Felix Leiter Despite being a recurring character in the books, Ian Fleming never really gave us much background on Felix prior to assisting Bond while in the employ of the CIA and Pinkerton Detective Agency. So, that's where Edward F. Koehler, PhD comes in. I was casually exploring Wikipedia, as I often do, and I ended up on the Felix Leiter page. As a seasoned Wiki editor, my eye caught a bit of something that seemed promotional rather than encyclopedic: Written with speech-to-text by Gomer Pyle So, I thought that maybe this was referring to a pair of new Bond books I somehow had not heard of. I consulted Google and found s