Steamed: What I’ve Been Playing in 2025

Steamed: What I’ve Been Playing in 2025

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ImageThroughout 2025, I shared with you what I was Reading, Watching, and Listening To (audiobook-wise), I also covered a little bit of videogaming in a couple columns. But I figured I’d talk about some of the games I played this year, in one post. Utilizing my approach from my Conan Pastiches article during Cimmerian September, we’ll keep it to two paragraphs each.

I do most of my gaming through Steam, with Fortnite and a couple titles on Epic. I haven’t played anything on Good Old Games in a few years now, and I don’t use Amazon gaming pretty much at all.

OUT OF THE PARK BASEBALL 26

The 2019 edition of this baseball sim is my third-most played Steam game (771 hours). And I had payed a prior version for years, as well. I upgraded to the 2026 iteration this Summer, and it’s already in my Top 20. This is a simulation, not an arcade game. You can take any team from history and manage it from year-to-year. And you can quit/get fired and take over another team. You can manage games pitch by pitch, or by batter. Or have the computer simulate the game, or even month.

I enjoy setting up World Series match ups of two historical teams. I just replayed the 2017 World Series as the Dodgers, beating the Astros, who couldn’t cheat in this baseball game. Before that, it was the 1947 Dodgers vs. the 1946 Indians. I really enjoy this option. I think any baseball wonk (which I absolutely am) would enjoy this game.

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Some Holiday Shelfies

Some Holiday Shelfies

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A few of my book shelves

I’ll get back to regular posts next week but one of my readers asked if I had any shelfies to show of my collection. I took a few and will post them but these only represent a portion of all my books.

I’m lucky that my wife doesn’t mind a house full of books. Above are pics of my biggest individual collection, which is Robert E. Howard related. (The top shelf with the stuffed dog toy contains some SF/Fantasy encyclopedias and my inspirational shelf, which are books that I take down and read passages from when I feel the need to be inspired in my own writing. Favorite books, I guess you’d say.)

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Star Wars is the Best Star War

Star Wars is the Best Star War

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Today, nearly fifty years after its release, Star Wars still feels fresh, exciting and entirely organic. It is a naturally progressing story. Everything in it matters, and every moment leads inexorably and inevitably to the next moment, as it should — building to a tremendous climax and satisfying denouement.

None of those things are true about its immediate sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.

For that reason above all others, I rate Star Wars by far the better film.

I am well aware that a number of fans of the franchise — possibly a majority and seemingly in greater numbers every year — feels Empire is superior, including Black Gate‘s own Neil Baker.

I believe they are wrong.

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Tor Doubles #37: Esther Friesner’s Yesterday We Saw Mermaids and Lawrence Watt-Evans’ The Final Folly of Captain Dancy

Tor Doubles #37: Esther Friesner’s Yesterday We Saw Mermaids and Lawrence Watt-Evans’ The Final Folly of Captain Dancy

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Cover for The Final Folly of Captain Dancy and Yesterday We Saw Mermaids by Pat Morressey

This volumes  was originally scheduled for September 1991, but the series was cancelled before it would see print. Both stories were eventually published by Tor in different formats. Had this volume been printed, it would have been the first volume in the series to include two original stories. Although published separately, both were coincidentally first published in the same month.

Yesterday We Saw Mermaids was eventually published as a stand-alone novel by Tor Books in October, 1992. Set in 1492, Friesner tells the story of a magical ship that seems to be racing Christopher Columbus’ expedition to the new world. The ship is mostly crewed by a group of nuns from Porto in Spain, but there is also a monk, Brother Garcilaso, a woman named Rasha, and two unnamed women, one called La Zagala and one called the Jewess. The story is told from the point of view of a young nun, Sister Ana, who has been appointed the scribe for the voyage.

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Merry Christmas from Black Gate

Merry Christmas from Black Gate

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The Black Gate Christmas Tree

This has been a rough year for Black Gate. On January 16 we lost Howard Andrew Jones, who created this site virtually single-handedly. Black Gate had existed as a print magazine since November 2000, and I’d launched the website a few months earlier, but it was a pretty flimsy affair. Not much more than a place to sell subscriptions, and host our submissions page and occasional guest articles by Rich Horton and James Enge.

Howard dreamed of something vastly more ambitious — creating the premier site for heroic fantasy on the internet, with daily content from a round robin of some of its best writers. It was impossible, of course. Our overworked staff was already struggling to keep the magazine alive, and I had no time — and certainly no budget! — to spend on a project that didn’t address the fact that I was losing $10,000 every issue.

Howard ignored these minor problems, and all on his own assembled a crack team of bloggers including Bill Ward, David Soyka, Scott Oden, James Enge, EE Knight, and Ryan Harvey. By November of 2008 he launched the Black Gate blog, and for the last seventeen years we’ve produced at least one article every day. In 2016, we won and Alfie Award and a World Fantasy Award, and crossed 2 million page views/month.

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A Boy Scout’s Handbook: The Mysterious Island

A Boy Scout’s Handbook: The Mysterious Island

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One of the more popular time-wasting activities these days is the “desert island” game, where people compile lists of books, albums, and movies that they could in no instance dispense with, works that they would take with them if they had to be exiled for life on a desert island. In this exercise, esthetic or just plain entertainment qualities reign supreme, but if we were talking about surviving on an actual island, uninhabited, unsettled, untamed, practical considerations would come to the fore; I don’t think The Sopranos would be of much use when it came to building a shelter or planting a crop, and as for Survivor, is there anything more contrived than a “reality” show? (My actual TV choice, Green Acres, would be marginally better but still likely inadequate.)

As for books, I recently read something that would definitely make the real desert island cut — Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. It’s a veritable Swiss army knife of a book, full of useful hints and practical advice, whether you want to lower the level of a lake, make nitroglycerin, cook a capybara or construct a seaworthy, two-hundred-ton ship from scratch. It’s a book no Boy Scout should leave home without.

Published serially in 1874 and 1875, The Mysterious Island is a classic Robinsonade, a genre named after Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. Robinsonades are books in which people are shipwrecked on isolated islands or stranded in other remote areas and are thrown back almost entirely on their own resources. Inherently dramatic, such stories have proven enduringly popular, with examples such as Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies rarely if ever falling out of print.

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Iron Lung vs The Establishment

Iron Lung vs The Establishment

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Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

I feel like I manifested this… But I’m getting ahead of myself. Does anyone remember me lamenting about how difficult it was for original or new folks to break out in the entertainment industry? I’ve been griping since Adam was knee-high to a grasshopper (how’s that for a malaphor?) that original stories aren’t getting made anymore, with production companies all settling for established IPs with a huge fanbase they can take advantage of. Smaller stories, no matter how good they might be, are left in the dust because creative risks are just not done any longer.

It’s been a point of ire of mine for a while now. And then, as if answering the call, in comes a YouTuber with a fully independently produced and distributed film based in the world of a fully independently created video game. Alright, technically it is an adaptation, but the fact that the game is independent, small, and not widely known in the way, say, the Assassin’s Creed Franchise is, means that this one counts. It counts, alright?

Also, I believe this is not the story in the game, but in the world of the game, but I’ll explain later.

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That Annual Audible Sale 2025 (What I’ve Been Listening To)

That Annual Audible Sale 2025 (What I’ve Been Listening To)

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ImageI have been using my library app a lot for audiobooks the past few months. I just borrowed (not all at once. I’m not a twit) the entire Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio shows, as part of my Douglas Adams rabbit-hole trip (which started when I listened to this book).

At the same time, I was listening to the early Cole and Hitch Westerns, from Robert B. Parker. You might have read about the great job Titus Welliver (Bosch) does reading those, here.

While using the library app more, I still have my Audible sub. And they do a BIG sale every year. Every title is on sale to some extent. Compared to last year, it seems like either the base prices were higher, or the percent reductions were less. However, I set my limit at $4 per title, and spent quite a few hours looking up authors and delving into subjects. I didn’t buy as many titles as I did last year. And I was hoping some things sitting in my Wish List since last year’s sale (like The Keep on the Borderlands) would be in my price range. Not even close. But I still picked up nearly two-dozen books – many for around $2.

CASTLE PERILOUS – John DeChancie

DeChancie wrote eight books in this series between 1988 and 1994. They aren’t quite as humorous as those classic-style paperback covers might lead you to believe:  like Craig Shaw Gardner’s stuff, or even Piers Anthony’s Xanth books. Maybe ‘fantastical’ is more appropriate. A little whimsical. 144,000 doors in the mysterious Castle lead to other worlds/aspects – one of which is Earth. It’s ruled by the sorcerer Incarnadine, and people who find their way to the Castle often become Guests, and stay. The series involves key characters in wild adventures – often with villains trying to take over the Castle.

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The Stories Before the Story – Half a Century of Reading Tolkien, Part Eight: The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien (mostly)

The Stories Before the Story – Half a Century of Reading Tolkien, Part Eight: The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien (mostly)

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First edition, UK

Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass. The Dispossessed they be for ever.

from Chapter 9 The Flight of the Noldor

I took The Silmarillion to camp with me the summer of 1978. I’d gotten it for Christmas the previous year, but I was put off by its Biblical diction. Still, I was determined to make my way through it. I mean, Tolkien was my favorite author, and I’d already read The Hobbit twice and Lord of the Rings, including the appendices.

I did read it that summer in the woods of Upper Delaware Valley. For all the activities, there was always free time to read, and read I did. Beside Tolkien’s book, I read Cajus Bekker’s A War Diary of the German Luftwaffe. Bekker’s book was a relatively easy undertaking, Tolkien’s was not.

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The Star Warses — Part 2

The Star Warses — Part 2

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Walt Disney Studios, December 14, 2015)

Read Part 1 here.

#6 – The Force Awakens (2015)

A great way to kickstart the franchise after a dozen years, even if it is a retread of A New Hope. There’s a lot to love in this film; I think it features some of Williams’ best work with recurring leitmotifs that instantly feel like they’ve been part of the entire saga, I love the new principal characters, the action set-pieces are thrilling and tick all my visual/sound design boxes, I really like all the Jakku scenes, especially Rey’s introduction, I can’t get enough of the X-wing attack outside Maz Kanata’s castle — the single tracking shot of Poe Dameron handing the New Order their arses in the air sends shivers up my spine, the respect shown to the Falcon, despite an ugly radar dish, and the unsubtle nostalgia threads woven throughout.

There’s not much on show that I don’t enjoy in this one; perhaps the superfluous scene with the betentacled beasties onboard Han’s hideous new ship, or the petulant Ren stuff, but I mostly get on fine with it all. One personal sticking point for me though is the inclusion of Simon Pegg as Unkar Plutt (he of the measly muffin portions). I used to be a huge fan of his, firstly in Spaced, and then in Edgar Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy, but his ongoing vocal hatred for the prequels and the ‘death’ of Star Wars used to get on my nerves.

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