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Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter (or possibly multiple chapter for this one) of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
So is this how we’re going to do this, going back and forth between Commie Op-Center and regular Op-Center? Last time we met Paul’s evil counterpart, and this time we’re back in D.C..
Paul’s still not here, and I don’t know if he’ll be coming back to take charge during these events. It seems, and I know I keep bringing this up but it’s a big issue out the gate, way too early to do this story at the second novel, and the third in-continuity assignment after the first one went terrible and the second was won almost in spite of Op-Center’s actions. At this point I’m sorry I bought this and the next book in the series before reading the first one. If I had I wouldn’t have bought another one.
This is the power of reputation. It’s a Tom Clancy project, as he co-created the series and his branding is on it. The games that came out were well received when I learned of this novel series. I wanted to know if his reputation was deserved, but since there’s evidence that he didn’t write these books, circumstantial as it is, I can’t really tell. Clancy came up with the idea of an international crisis response bureau of the US government, which sounds interesting in theory but we have so many bureaus that I don’t know if we can afford another one. Would explain why our debt keeps getting worse instead of better because nobody in Congress or the other branches are doing anything to deal with it. Sorry, but it’s just something that came up, this is a political book by nature, and I’m already running low of ways to intro these stories because so far very little has happened to discuss, even as a spoiler.
So let’s get back into the story and see if we get more than a bunch of people talking. My bet is “no”.
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“At least put some pants on!” “Jealous?” “Hardly.”
The Solution #3
Malibu Comics/Ultraverse (November, 1993)
“The Hunted”
WRITER: James Hudnall
PENCILER: Darick Robertson
INKER: Barbara Kaalberg
COLORING: Tim Divar & Foodhammer!
LETTERER: Tim Eldred
EDITOR: Hank Kanalz
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I really need to schedule doctor visits and blood tests on the week I don’t have to do the monthly bulk shopping. And this week I also have to vote and get an MRI done, plus I’m trying to get some cell phone issues dealt with so I don’t lose that. In other words I had to fight to get stuff out last week and I still missed Saturday Night Showcase to fail at getting closer to a Let’s Play, as I went over yesterday and copy/pasted to The Clutter Reports this week.
In other word I don’t know what’s going to happen this week. We do have the next installment of the Chapter By Chapter review of Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image and the second section of the writer’s guide for Star Trek: Pitch & Guide. I also don’t want to leave Sonic The Hedgehog on a cliffhanger. Otherwise, if I miss a post this week, I miss a post. There isn’t much I can do about it to retain my sanity. I would hope to also have a Jake & Leon next week and get that tweaked logo done, and get a step closer to producing that Let’s Play.
So my apologies if I go dark for a day or part of the day. Know that I’ll be very annoyed but we have yet more hurdles right to end of the year I was hoping would be my most productive, decluttering, and creative year. Hope you all have a great week.
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No Saturday Night Showcase or Jake & Leon this week (I will have an update tomorrow on what’s coming) because in addition to just a week of being pulled away from the computer (and next week will be the same annoyance) I was distracted with trying to finally move forward with that Let’s Play series I wanted to do 10 #$%$#%#$% YEARS AGO!!!!!! At least that’s when I posted the poll to choose between five different games to see what order I would put them in. The goal was to do a story based game play series, called BW Gameplay, that would focus on the story, after seeing so many story based playthroughs where the player talked over the dialog. As a story person, I really want to hear the story. Talk over the gameplay, even if you have to do a voiceover later rather than a live playthrough.
Then I got sick, then I got a computer that wouldn’t run the first game on the list, and long story short I finally got that working on an emulation of the Gamecube version. Today I wanted to see if any of the games would work. They did not.
- Batman: Vengeance is the first game that was chosen in the poll…and then it wouldn’t run on the computer I had. It really doesn’t start on Windows 10, while the one I had was I think Windows 8. Maybe I could find a way to get that to run, but despite people online saying it’s possible, I could not get it to run on 10, and neither did my IT friend. (As in a friend of mine who has done IT for years.) This is the one I was able to emulate on a Gamecube emulator, and admittedly the video was better because it was less compressed.
- 007: Nightfire is the second chosen game. I haven’t gotten far in the game before and was looking forward to finishing all of these games. This one also is too old to run on Windows 10 but I have gotten it to work on older games. I could try to find a console emulation of this as well, but I would rather play these games on the version I actually own, and Batman: Vengeance was bad enough.
- Portal is the only game I’ve actually finished, but I wanted to explore the story again in review before finally playing the sequel. Admittedly this one not getting going could be the result of issues I was having with Steam, since the game won’t run without Steam. That bugged me when I got it. I bought it at a closing Circuit City for dirt cheap and was really looking forward to it…only to have to be forced to get a Steam account to play it. That’s still morally questionable, Valve, but here in 2024 game companies have done far worse. I got Steam sorted out but by then I stopped caring.
- Transformers: War For Cybertron may or may not run. The fourth game chosen, when I tried to install it the installer just sat there doing nothing. Portal doing that already made me mad so I gave up. I got partway through the Autobot campaign and really do want to give this game another try to finish.
- LA Noire tops the “block of five”, the games I wanted to open this let’s play series on. I didn’t even attempt to install it because of the same Steam issues. This will be interesting to play because the game has some swearing and I’m guessing some bloody murder scenes. As someone who likes to keep my content in the PG range I don’t know if I’ll be able to edit the videos. I wouldn’t be livestreaming any of them because you can’t talk to the chat and play at the same time. Plus I’m boring in livestream. This is the only game I have never played in this list and I would love to get to it, but it was the last one chosen by people who probably stopped waiting for it years ago. Again, 10 years have passed since I tried to start this. That’s the level of distractions I ‘ve had lately.
I think we have an old computer around here somewhere and I have copies of both Windows Vista and 8. That means if I can get the games running there, and a screen recorder that will record them, I can finally get this production going…or at least finally play and finish some of these games and have no worries about all the other old games I have to play. Hopefully next week’s Clutter Report will have an update on that plan. Given how this month has started, I’m not so convinced.
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“Christian fiction” is not an easy thing to get right. While “Christian music” is usually just hymns and gospel with a new music style (gospel is technically it’s own music genre but hopefully you get what I mean), Christian stories, and even Christian games, often push the message over the story. Sound familiar? I’m not saying you can’t make a good story with Christian themes and messages. Jesus used parables but they weren’t as heavy handed as some Christian media can get.
Author Brian Niemeier suggests a more subtle approach to how Christian themes and morals are introduced into a story, putting that story first and the messages and themes properly worked into them. Kind of like a certain other ideology that gets that wrong with less noble goals than saving your soul. This way, even if you aren’t winning them to Christ, you’re still telling a good story with a good overall message when “fire and brimstone” is not reaching your audience.
