Future Blog Plans

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 keeping it to the old Expanded Universe, now branded Legends.

Novelizations

Many of you may know that there are books based upon movies. This was especially prevalent in the '70s and '80s and many of them included scenes cut from the film and sometimes provided information not mentioned in the film at all! Some films already based on books also have novelizations, for some reason.

I don't remember the last time I read a novelization (miiight have been a Star Wars or Indiana Jones junior novelization back when I was a kid). But for some reason, I've always been fascinated by the concept, sooo... I think I might watch a few movies, then read their novelizations, and write posts about them.

Revisiting My Childhood Books

I often revisit films I loved as a kid (the live-action Popeye movie is a great film, you heathens), but I'm not sure that I've ever gone back to any books I enjoyed many years ago. I have the full hardcover collection of A Series of Unfortunate Events that has sat there for years. So maybe I should pick them up again and write some sort of blog. Gary Paulsen's Hatchet series is another I can revisit, as I loved those and OpenLibrary has copies of them all.

Movie Reviews

As you might know, I co-host a movie podcast. On that podcast, I review movies with my good friends Josh and Lee. But I also enjoy reviewing films on my own, particularly ones that I doubt we'll ever cover on the podcast. However, right now I have no disc drive and I need a new one. Why do I need a disc drive for this? Well, many of the films I want to review on here are on DVD and it's really hard to find the screenshots I want online. For example, my only solo film review right now, Silent Rage. In that review, I used a number of screenshots. I took these by myself so that I wouldn't have to search to the ends of the internet to find them. Some of them I'm sure would have been impossible to find if I had searched for them instead. So yeah. I need a disc drive. I only have so many downloaded films that I want to review.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Felix Leiter - CIA Agent, Private Eye, and Victim of Commercialized Fan Fiction

Image
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
Read more

Exploring the Star Wars Expanded Universe - Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

Image
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
Read more

Exploring the Star Wars Expanded Universe - Dark Forces

Image
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
Read more