Quickshots- Westworld

 

Season 1- This is the best thing ever on television

Season 2- Really liked that Raj scene, couldn’t get myself to finish the season

Season 3- Is this thing still on?

Quickshots- Trailblazer

 

Not good.  Palmiotti and Gray have written some great westerns, and this isn’t one of them.  Interesting concept (hitman goes into witness protection that happens to be in the old west) that could have been held up with decent art, but this is like the Rob Liefeld’s understudies got together and decided to try a western.  Ugh. Cover art is great, though!

10 First Impressions of Red Dead Redemption 2

 

 

I’m midway through Chapter 3, here’s the impressions so far:

1. It’s almost like being in Westworld, but instead of $40k/day I bought it on sale for $30.  
2. Customizable Arthur is tons of fun.
3. Although set 12 years earlier, it captures the “end of the frontier” feeling better than the original.  
4. A lot of it plays like a frontier simulator rather than a strict RPG or action game, which I’ve really enjoyed.
5. I haven’t been this attached to characters since the Mass Effect series. 
6. Constantly torn between growing a massive mountain-man beard and shaving it down to a cool yet massive mustache.  In the mean time most of my money has gone to hair tonics.
7. This is probably the best written game I’ve ever played.  
8. One weak point in the writing so far is Dutch; he’s a little less fleshed out than in the original, but then again he was the most engaging character in the original and that’s a hard bar to hit.
9. I still like the early game style of redeye better than the later versions that you learn. 
10. Looks like it’s possible to have an animal hat, buckskin clothes, a mysterious medicine bag, a giant beard, a LeMat and a rolling block Sharpes, and a bandolier of massive bullets, all while riding a giant horse, which means I’ll eventually make Arthur Morgan a twin of Mad Amos Malone.
    

Quickshots- Call Down Thunder

 

I’m aging myself to think that anyone remembers the old Disney movie Davy Crocket and the River Pirates, but if you do you may remember Mike Fink, King of the River.  In that movie Fink was a bully juxtaposed against the good hearted King of the Wild Frontier.  The light but great Call Down Thunder by Kerry Newcomb follows Mike Fink’s career from a young ranger in frontier Pittsburgh to a keelboat captain along the Mississippi through the Red Stick War and Battle of New Orleans.  Fink’s more of the good hearted King in this book, and Newcomb introduces a different sociopathic bully riverman counterpoint that mirror’s Disney’s Fink and serves as the main villain for the story.  Bloody fights, frontier mayhem, and a little bit of sexy times makes for one of my favorite reads.

Gaming notes- As usual, I’ve spent way too much time trying to make Mike Fink as a D&D character (in Pathfinder a good River Kingdoms rogue/ranger/horizon walker or barbarian/river druid, maybe even a skjald if you like the hybrid classes). 

 

Let's Slap Some Bookleather!

 

Recently I stumbled across a ton of vintage grindhouse westerns on several web sites, and thought about putting together a list of links to those movies somewhere.  As I brainstormed ideas it occurred to me- don’t I have a western blog?

Yep, Slap Bookleather is still here, even though it hasn’t been updated since late 2015 (and that was just a few YouTube links, so really mid 2015).  So what happened?

For a time I lost my appreciation for westerns, and it’s certainly come back in the last few months.  Hard to say why, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that I stopped reading westerns the week after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States in the 2016 election, and only returned this summer when it became clear that there was no way that any reasonable person with a moral center would ever vote for decadent real estate huckster and pathological liar who mismanaged the government to the point where COVID could wreck the economy and kill or cripple my friends and family.

(Note: 70 million of you voted for him anyway.  I’ll chalk it up to the fact that I keep hearing people say “amazing, you never heard of anyone actually getting COVID until just a few weeks ago, and now it’s everywhere!”  Well, if you lived between Philadelphia and Boston you spent the Spring watching your friends and family get sick, go on ventilators, and sometimes die, and your hands turned cracked and bloody from constantly sanitizing everything.  New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey have had the virus under control for six months now and we still have the highest per capita death rates- update, the Dakotas just topped us, thanks Sturgis!  We hoped you would learn the lesson from us.  We hoped wrong.)

Regardless, some time in late 2020 a friend reminded me of my former love of westerns and I jumped back in.  You'll see a few pop up again in the next few weeks and months.  Let's see how my tastes have changed.