Vulpes Valentine's Video Game Valley

Tag: stephen king

  • Recency Bias Volume 6

    Recency Bias Volume 6

    As autumn draws to a close and we approach the dark and cloudy days of winter, it is important to remember the real reason for the season: to use all the extra time off to play video games.

    And while this November was a time for me to play a couple new releases and march my way through another Final Fantasy game, it was also a month of clearing out the backlog and having a great time doing so. I’ve also launched a pretty big project this month which I’m excited to highlight here (spoiler: it’s my new podcast!) and I sat down with the family to enjoy a new Stephen King adaptation that was fairly good in spite of my expectations that it would be quite bad. You know what? Let’s start by talking about that.

    The Long Walk (2025 film)

    The Richard Bachman books are, shall we say, not so good. They were books written by Stephen King but then published under a pseudonym for… well a variety of reasons both stated and implied such as trying to escape the pressures of a massive audience to taking advantage of loopholes in publishing contracts. They feel exactly the way that their context allows for: like books written by an angry young white guy, dusted off years later and pushed to market. They often give the sense of being incomplete or largely abandoned projects, and the whole Bachman experiment in general has always struck me as more odd than it is compelling. And it was abandoned fairly quickly, considering that now all of my copies of the books proudly announce that the author is “Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman”. No great mystery as to why that might be.

    But one of the Bachman books I always had a particular soft spot for was The Long Walk, a dystopian novel about a national competition wherein the contestants must walk at a steady pace until only one of them remains. Those who choose to stop, or who are forced by their bodies, their minds, or external forces to stop; are executed by cold and unflinching soldiers. The prize for winning? A single request that will be met, no matter how outrageous or exorbitant the cost. The surface level criticism one can easily make of the book is this: they’re just walking. And while the actually interesting aspects of the books are the physical and spiritual toll the contest has on the participants, the human drama of how in-groups form and social lines are quickly drawn and violated, you kinda gotta wonder at how this would make for an interesting film when the primary action is guys walking through rural Maine.

    Where the film succeeds most highly is in the performances of its two leads: Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson. These two elevate the somewhat lackluster source material through the chemistry they share and the way they are able to confidently and beautifully express their ideals to one another. You root for them, the pit in your stomach reminding you that there can only be one winner and that at some point you will have to see one or both of these men die.

    With some very smart changes from the book, The Long Walk is able to run where the book… uh… walked.

    Kirby Air Riders

    Remember those games you played as a kid? The ones where you spent hours and hours in front of the television, ticking off every little activity, every side-objective, every unlockable, only to keep on playing with the same fervor? The game you couldn’t pull yourself away from, the one that always sat within arm’s reach, ready to be popped in and booted up at a moment’s notice?

    As you could probably guess by what I do for fun, I had a LOT of games like this, but the original Kirby Air Ride was definitely one of the ones I spent the most time on, playing with my brothers on our CRT television on our beat up Gamecube. And boy did we play the crap out of City Trial.

    When it was announced that Nintendo was developing a sequel after over a decade, my brothers and I all kind of had the same thought: they should just make Kirby Air Ride … but like… again.

    They delivered.

    Though the game is remarkably similar to the original, the added content is nothing to sneeze at. There are tons of new vehicles, new characters, a story mode with branching paths, online functionality, and a heaping helping of additions and tweaks made to the old content to make it feel crisp and new again. Blasting around the City Trial map on release night with my youngest brother was an absolute joy, and you can bet that we spent the next night playing even more of the game, breezing through the new courses and all of the retro tracks in a single sitting that left us feeling excited to run them all again.

    It’s a very pedestrian take to have, and an oft repeated phrase that really offers very little in games criticism, but I feel it is aptly used here: if you liked the original game, you’ll like this one too. I know I sure do. I’m actually going to play more of it as soon as I’m done writing this.

    Table for Two

    For those of you who don’t follow me on Bluesky (you should, vulpesvalentine.bsky.social) or who missed my post from earlier this month, I have started a podcast with my good buddy Kadmor. On the show, we both play and discuss a different tabletop roleplaying game every single month, breaking each game into a character creation episode, a one-shot campaign, and a pseudo-review and TTRPG general discussion episode. In addition, backers of our Patreon will have access to monthly bonus episodes where we play micro-RPGs, sometimes with special guests!

    So, if you haven’t already, pull up a chair and join us wherever you get podcasts!

    https://media.rss.com/table-for-two-pod1/feed.xml

    Have a Happy Thanksgiving and I’ll see you next week to talk FFVI which I have DEFINITELY finished already.

  • Recency Bias Volume 2

    Recency Bias Volume 2

    Welcome, one and all to the celebration of our first full month of posting content! Woohoo! Mom, you said I couldn’t do it, called me a failure, lobbed several hundred dollars worth of rotten vegetables at me from your seat directly behind my office chair, but I sure showed you!

    For real though, it has been really gratifying to make these little posts and to work on these writing projects. Getting some of my thoughts on games on to the page is really fun in a “it’s work but it’s therapeutic” kind of way. And now we’ve come to that time again, that end of the month tradition (this is the second time, so it’s officially a tradition now) where we wrap up all of the little odds and ends of media I’ve been enjoying but didn’t feel the urge to write a specific feature about.

    Let’s cruise on down the list.

    Spy x Family

    You know that thing when you’re watching a show and you get so swept up that without realizing it you’ve stopped having thoughts like, “hmm what an interesting narrative choice” or “ah, this comments on the Japan’s anime industry because…” and you find yourself grinning, cheering, weeping, and feeling like you’re just having the best god damn time? Because that’s how this show makes me feel.

    I wouldn’t consider anime a huge part of the entertainment I enjoy, though I have had my fair share of it. I’d say I have a slightly above average American level of interest in it, but I’m not like IN IT. That said, if this had been the first series I’d watched when I was a teenager just getting interested in anime, my god, what a different life path that would’ve set me on.

    Spy x Family is one of those shows that just COOKS. Every choice made by the production team is the exact best decision, be it the way lines are delivered, the animation for a badass action sequence, or the clever ways the series plays with the dramatic irony of none of the characters fully realizing what’s actually happening in any given scene. It’s also a deeply heartwarming show, one that cares about its characters and has no trouble getting you to do the same. Adapted from the manga of the same name, Tatsuya Endo has mastered the comedy and romance of the romantic comedy, to the point that they should just retire the genre altogether.

    The premise is simple: a spy has to form a fake family as part of his mission, so he adopts a child (secretly one with telepathy) and finds a desperate young woman (secretly an assassin who is just as much using him for cover as he is her). With these pieces set in place, what follows is a show that will stop at nothing to fulfill every possibly delightful circumstance you could dream up, my favorite episode being one where one character has taken a non-lethal (but highly painful) injury from their secret career, and has to endure a romantic evening while trying to cover up the fact they’ve literally just hours ago been shot in the ass.

    Even if you have only a passing interest in anime, please check this show out. You won’t be disappointed.

    Baldur’s Gate 3

    So I’ve actually been playing this for over a year now and have completed two separate playthroughs already, but after a few months away from the game the siren call of the platinum trophy drifted from beyond the waves of the Sword Coast and pulled me back in for one, highly organized, efficiently designed, and carefully planned out final run through the game, on the highest difficulty no less!

    And I’ve learned that I am much too ADHD-brained to get really good at this game. Thank god for the gifts of RNG, save-scumming, and brute forcing!

    I’m a big opponent to the idea that these methods are somehow “less real” or “dishonorable” ways to beat a game. A game is, at its very base, a series of systems working in tandem to produce an experience, and if you can manipulate those systems to have a better time, you should do so! I summon for fights in Souls games. I also have the platinum trophy for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and earned it through sheer grit and skill. Play games the way you want.

    But what I mainly want to highlight in this section is just how truly dense this game is. You’d think after having beaten the game two times through and having gone out of my way to do nearly all of the side content I could find, there are still events and bends in certain scenarios that I have never come across before, and every time I find one I am left gobsmacked.

    Act One is by far the best portion of the game. It certainly feels the most fleshed-out. But this is one of those RPGs that truly allow you to play a role that feels personal to your specific experience. Which is kind of the whole point of an RPG and yet so many games miss this mark but so wide a margin you wonder how things got to this point.

    Look forward to my update next month where I complain about how brutal it was to keep all the tieflings alive through Act Two and rescue the prisoners of Moonrise Towers on Tactician Difficulty.

    Stephen King’s The Dark Tower Series

    I would say I am a fan, generally of Stephen King. Bold statement, I know, but I think he simply has the juice. Sure, his political ideology and mine are, let’s say, incompatible (by this I mean I am so far left that the center looks like the eastern horizon), and he has certain fixations that I find unpleasant to indulge in, but to purity test every writer is to find out that “good books” are virtually nonexistent. You truly can write anything (not that you should) and Stephen King must have heard that at some point in his early life because boy does he write ANYTHING.

    And of the several dozen King works I’ve read and to greater or lesser extents enjoyed, there is simply no greater embodiment of this method than the The Dark Tower books. As of the writing of this piece I have just finished Wizard and Glass (probably my least favorite of the series so far but still rather good) and the way that these books just… go places? Light spoilers but the way that elements and characters from other King stories get woven into the threads of this series are at times baffling and at other times immensely entertaining. Early on in this particular entry, I was the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme for a good long while when I recognized the term, “Captain Trips”.

    I’ve heard mixed things about the remaining books but I will likely be starting up Wolves of the Calla soon and intend to finish the series before the year is up.

    Side note: I also read Doctor Sleep recently and is it just me or is the movie actually better than the book?

    And that’s all for this month! I’m thrilled to be keeping up with this project. I’ve always said that even if no one sees it, I believe in the restorative effect this work has on my spirit and when even one person views something I’ve written it’s a bonus. And a genuine thrill! Look forward to more reviews, game design news, and other various pieces in the future!