The Last Candle

Devin Townsend is awesome. The video includes headbanging guys in skeleton suits, comely monster-mashesque women, and Devin in a cheap devil suit prancing around and acting frilly. Oh, and it comes with a great song, too.

My lone computer is going to be offline for about a week, and I’d like to make the following observations, statements, regrets, pinings, opinions, praises, and proclamations:

• Elder Scrolls: Oblivion comes out today, and the PC gaming and Xbox360 world has about a hundred hours of RPG adventurin’ more today than it had yesterday. (The aforementioned world does not include LARPers, who reportedly can enjoy up to 24 hours of role-playing per da, every day of their doublet-wearing lives. Incredible!)

  Unfortunately, I’ll not be adventuring back to the world of Tamriel for quite some time for two reasons, one major and then other minor. First, the whole “RAM today, gone tomorrow!” deal. I expect to be reading a lot in the coming seven days. Oh, and catching up on my Animal Crossing, too.

  Second, I already have too many games to play! Easy enough, right? Just completed and vanquished were Kameo and Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars (more on those below), but Condamned and the Broken Sword sequel immediately rushed to fill the sudden gap in my gaming repetoire. This is aside from the multi-hour gaming sessions of Shadow Warrior and Battletoads a Swedish friend and I engage most every night.

  Plenty to see, plenty to do, plenty to kill — but not in Oblivion. Sad, really.

• Really brief reviews, brought to you by: Father Time! Man, that geezer can move…for an old guy! Or is he young? Or…what?

  Kameo: Not bad — had all the looks and sounds of something you’d hope to see from a next-gen game, with enough bloom to last us until the next two generations. The gameplay, on the other hand, was far from next-gen, reminding me mostly of playing Altered Beast back on the Genesis, except Kameo has a fairy and Altered Beast has a couple of kickboxing meatheads that can turn into pumas and tigers at the drop of a aht.

  Okay, maybe it’s not so much like Kameo, but it was roughly the same concept with a new gloss of paint, a few more options, and about $20 million more dollars behind it. Worth playing for the next-gen love, but I don’t feel any need at all to pick it up again and visit the bloomin’ world again.

  Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars: Pitted against the 2005 release Kameo, this 1996 game also rears the decent, mostly ordinary head of “Not Bad.” Some aspects were very good: The characters, by and large, were vibrant, interesting, and involving; the voice acting and script, especially the protagonist’s, was clever and amusing without being verbose or too silly; and the artwork was generally very well detailed, especially the backgrounds.

  To recap: characters were good, voice acting was good, art was good. What’s left? Ahh, yes — the story and the puzzles.

  Broken Sword started with a bang — or a boom, I should say — and the plot moved along at a smart, involving pace, but it didn’t land the ending. There’s a decent amount of history about the actual Templars during the gameplay (rivaled only by Gabriel Knight 3), and the way the game was heading all signs pointed towards the history actually making an impact on the climax. Didn’t happen. For the finale, while the device was mentioned about a thousand times during the game, it was just some…thing that didn’t relate to the game or the Templar’s context in a meaningful or functional fashion. The rest of the story was quite good — traveling around to different geographic locales and hunting down those Temple Knights was a lot of fun — but man, a bad ending is like waking up after not brushing your teeth before bed the evening before. Blegh.

  And the puzzles? Okay, I guess. Fairly obtuse in places, a little too obvious in other places. A few items where you know exactly where they go when you pick ‘em up, and others that still don’t make any sense when you finally discover how to use ‘em. In short: pretty much your typical point-and-click adventure game. Longest Journey’s puzzles seemed more satisfying, anyways, and nothing can beat the world-wide puzzle known as Riven.

• Alright, another review, since I can churn these babies out faster than the ocean can make a man thirsty.

  Prayers for the Assassin by Robert Ferrigno. Here’s the gist of this book: Fifty years into the future, there’s no longer the United States; instead we have the Islamic Republic, which covers pretty much everything aside from the original Confederate states, and the Bible Belt, which is situated more or less into the Confederate states claimed during the American Civil War. The tagline for the book is unofficially, “The Terrorists Have Already Won — Literally!” That’s what Prayers gives the audience (or attempts to give): A look at an America dominated by Islam.

  The setting in this book is awesome. Awesome, and completely creepy, because Ferrigno fairly successfully meshes American landmarks, history and geography with Islamic law and culture. The conversion of a nation from 300 years of Christanity to Islam didn’t happen overnight and without event, of course: Chicago and Detroit are ghost towns, destroyed by war; Phoenix is quarantined due to disease planted by avenging Bible Belters; Washington and New York have been nuked by Jews in retaliation against the now-domestic Muslim population. Considering the modern staff of interpolitical affairs, the interior of this book caused a “What If?” shiver more than once.

  But in the end, I thought the setting was far and away the best part of Prayers. The book is a thriller, which brings my total read-count of Thrillers to two — the last was the ubiquitous Da Vinci Code. Da Vinci Code at least, y’know, thrilled: Cliff-hanger endings, sudden and swerving plotpoints, surprise twists, chases, close-calls, the whole lot. Not so much involved on characters as in what the characters are knowledged about and what they going to do with the knowledge. (Class is in session — please find your way to the nearest exit.)

  Prayers was, for almost the entire time, was reduced to things like, “Hey, Disneyland is a city now! Isn’t that crazy?” It was all about the setting — the plot didn’t move quickly, new developments seemed obvious twenty pages before they were introduced, and the characters didn’t have anything interesting to offer. The book is about 400 pages and is in relatively large print, but it still took me over five weeks to read it. Over five weeks — to read a thriller novel, which are supposed to be real page-burners. Just didn’t grab me.

  Still, if you see the hardcover edition in a bookstore, crack it open to the inside binding cover, and take a look at the USA map that details the State of the Nation in Prayers’ time. Everything detailed on that map — the nuke symbols over NYC, the stars and cresents placed liberally over the upper States, the skull and crossbones placed over the location of Phoenix — that’s the good stuff in the book. Give that a serious “No, really — what if?” gander for a moment, fall prey to a shiver or two, shut the book, and move along.

• Nightwish is finally looking for a singer to replace Prima Tarja. I thought Tuomas had said several weeks ago the music for the next album was just about finished, but the group is just now getting to finding a vocalist? Well, I guess if the writing part is all done, you’ll need instruments to play it…
• I like the new Joe Satriani album. Here’s hoping that Crowd Chant (iTunes link) will become a favorite at hockey and football arenas soon. Clips and video podcasts from every song and more from the new album available on the great Satriani’s web page.

  Also enjoy: The great and goofy March 10th web greeting, where Satriani himself introduces the band! Woo!

So I’ve been listening to the new Blind Guardian single Fly about, oh, fifty times a day. It’s good. I like it. <p/> About mid-day today I started trying to pick through the lyrics: Caught some stuff about “Neverland,” people flying around, and the sort. Hmm, that rang a faint bell — a song about Peter Pan, in the honorable and beautiful concept way that Blind Guardian has done for many other characters in literature and history? Sounds about right! But I could also faintly recall the Bards writing on their web page about making a Peter Pan song, so maybe that was tickling my memory. <p/> Doing a little research today, I rediscovered the association: Peter Pan did indeed have a hand in Fly, but through the film Finding Neverland. I even blogged about it a while back. <p/> My tone in that post was far from very lenient in terms of what a Blind Guardian song about Finding Neverland would sound like… <p/> …but the movie is in my Netflix queue, now, and the song is fantastic — the full turn-about speaks for itself in those statements. <p/> Update: Fixed the link. D’oh!

I’ve been trying to purchase Blind Guardian’s new single Fly off of Nuclear Blast’s online shoppe (samples!), but the page kept timing out whenever I clicked the shiny “Checkout” button. Having your tech not allow a potential buyer to complete a transaction is a pretty big flaw — not having it work for over two weeks shows signs of suicidal business tendancies. <p/> Fortunately for Nuclear Blast — okay, fortunate for me, really — the Checkout automagically started working again today, and I got my Guardian fix. I paid 4 euros (about $5) for the three songs maxisingle — a little pricey — compared to iTunes, at least! — but not an unreasonable price, and the delivery took about, oh, two minutes. Beats paying $12 for a CD single that costs additional shipping and several days to arrive. Viva la Internet! <p/> Okay, the music. Let’s just get the bad news out of the way: Even thought the clips are encoded at 192/44100 kbps (in MP3, of course), the tunes sound slightly…muddy? The sludge is especially noticable at the beginning of the single title track. <p/> But once the song gets past the goofy little intro (that doesn’t sound like Blind Guardian music — still good) and the guitars (very Blind Guardian) and and Hansi (yep) kick in…holy smoking abbots, the Bards are back. Days when Blind Guardian release new music should be personal holidays in the metal-speaking world: While Sonata Arctica, Rhapsody, and the rest of the “big” bands continue to put out good music, nobody makes a classy, awe-inspiring album like the Bards. That’s the whole truth. <p/> Now about those tracks themselves: </> The single, Fly, sounds like the boys took the heavy orchestrated production of Nightfall In Middle Earth and A Night At The Opera, killed everyone in the orchestra pit, pulled the soaring production back out of the bloody maelstrom and combined it with the cranking guitars reminiscient of Imaginations From The Other Side. Out of previous albums, I hear a lot of NIME in Fly — kind of like a combination of When Sorrow Sang and The Curse of Feanor — but it has the power of The Script for my Requiem.
<p/> Fly’s thematic progression reminds me of Battlefield from ANATO; similar bits keep reappearing, but when they do, it’s not like seeing a chorus coming flying in from left field. The parts flow together, they all sound differently, but each bit complements each other well and fine. Hansi and Andre’s fluid, dynamic, progressive, powerful writing, a style seeded in NIME and pronounced to bombast levels in ANATO, continues in full force to great effect in Fly. <p/> There’s some tinker-keyboard stuff in Fly around the 1:11 mark that was a little surprising, mostly because that’s the first time in the song where it really pulls back from the classic thrash guitar sound and says, “Remember, we can do the classical sound, too.” <p/> Hansi’s voice is in about the tone of what he used in NIME, but that might just be because he’s singing without an entire chorus behind him. I mean, I liked ANATO, but Hansi has such a unique voice, and it was masked within a chorus for almost the entire album. Fly brings Hansi back to the forefront, and he, of course, sounds fantastic. <p/> I wasn’t excited about the ballad Skalds And Shadows at first — sounded alright, but I didn’t hear anything going on behind the unplugged guitar and rolling vocals. Listening to it again and again, however, it started to feel like the uber-classic The Bard’s Song – In The Forest tuned to the current production. The song becomes more folksy and more immersive as it continues along its relatively short 3-minute span. Hansi’s vocals are as smooth as he’s ever made them, but still much more, say, plausible than he’s sounded in previous ballads (The Eldar, for one). Song progression sounds ordinary after one or two listens, but subsequent tune-ins has revealed quite a bit of variation, enough to make the entire song seem like it avoids the stanza-chorus repetition (although it includes a chorus-like vocal bridge three times). Good stuff! <p/> Finally, the cover of In A Gadda Da Vida. I confess that even though Iron Butterfly is one of the original heavy metal bands, and that a metalhead listening to Iron Butterfly is kind of like a Muslim visiting Mecca — kind of — I’m not familiar with the tune. Hansi wrote on the web page before that the cover was a “power metal version of a classic!”, or something to that effect. Musically and production-wise, In A Gadda Da Vida feels like a Somewhere Far Beyond-era tune. This one has the closest sound to ANATO, sans orchestra, and it’s not bad. Definite B-side. <p/> Whew. While In A Gadda Da Vida isn’t bad, Skalds and Shadows and Fly signal that Blind Guardian’s back in as fine form as ever — and better, if one was more particular to the albums previous to ANATO (like me). The full album is due out in late Summer. Bring it on, Bards!

Looks like we’re back to the one-update-a-week business around the ole’ Candle again. Just about time, too — these mini-hiatuses occur every three or four months, but prior hiatuses weren’t preceded by a pledge to update every day for the rest of my life, either — which I made last December. Whoops. While I wasn’t completely serious about the blogging oath, I had hoped it would induce enough pressure to keep the blogging goin’ steady for a long while. It did, but not as long as I had hoped. <p/> Anyways. <p/> February’s time for writing was mostly indulged by penning a Best Man’s speech that’s due in early April. I’ve known about the Best Man honor for two years, but it was only until late January that I researched what a Best Man is actually supposed to do in the ceremony and reception. <p/> Get the ushers fitted for clothing? Easy breezy. Roll the groom on into the chapel? Fine and fun. Hold the rings? Two hands ready, and I’m pretty dexterous with my toes if need be. <p/> Give a speech and toast to possibly 150 guests at the reception? Oh, boy. <p/> So far, I’ve decided that the Best Man’s speech is a rare occassion where a few drinks is reasonable and helpful not only during the production but also at the presentation. <p/> Come early February, I figured the best comrade to giving the speech was, strangely enough, time. Two months to write and rehearse for something that I’m not only giving without the pressure of a resultant grade — the comparisons to college speech class stop at the responsibility — but the presentation will be to a happy and infinitely charitable audience. As I looked around for tips and bits to make the speechwriting process go a little more smoothly, the best tip I discovered was that, “Everyone was on [my] side — no one is at the reception to see the Best Man do poorly.” <p/> Which is absolutely true and has deflated a lot of the tension I was having about the deal during early February. Nonetheless, a script must be written, and words must be practiced so that I don’t hop up on the stage and end up blathering on about fish or clouds or Chorizo sausages or whatever else comes to mind. The timeline I planned back in January for the speech was: Feburary entirely for writing and March for memorizing and reading. <p/> While I started on-time (“February 1st, here we go! Dear friends…uh…hrm.”), I found myself at the end of February with the most pretentious thing I’ve ever written — considering all the thick pieces I’ve written in the past, this was quite an awful feat. Not only was it a terrible piece of work, the speech could not afford to be even remotely awful. This needed to be on the other side of the coin, the happy, heartfelt, auspicious side. <p/> To increase the severity of the situation, the planned month for writing the thing had passed, and the moment for memorizing had arrived. Unfortunately, I only had a piece of trite, flowerly nonsense to stick in my head. I didn’t want anything else to do with what I had written, let alone give it to a crowd and two great friends on their wedding day. Time, as it is wont to do, was suddenly not considered friend; it had turned coat and become an adversary. <p/> March 2nd, one day into the memorize phase, however, cured my ills. Last Thursday, I went into work, sat at my cube, and decided that instead of working on developer documentation, I was going to tinker with the speech. A true rebel of the office space, if you will. With word processor on screen and a couple ideas in my mind, I started writing and rewriting the speech… <p/> …and ended up with something completely new, different, ten times as funny, fifty times as poignant, and overall just plain more sincere and enjoyable. This speech was written out in the space of a couple hours as opposed to the previous bilge hammered out over the course of a month. Whew! <p/> Additionally, I knew speech V1 was going to be a chore to remember simply because I didn’t care what it said. It wasn’t sincere; writing it was just going through the paces. Memorizing it was just a bunch of extra steps to slog through. <p/> The new speech, however, even though I’ve only spoken it two or three times, feel it’s already half-memorized. Not only is it easily becoming ingrained in cerebral storage, but I actually enjoy reading it through, and for frosting on an already-excellent cake, I’m looking forward to giving it — a definite far cry from Speech 101. Funny how the brain works (and wants to work) sometimes.