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I’m usually focused on the end product, in this case the game’s story, rather than how we get it. However, every now and then we’re forced to talk about the delivery system because if we can’t receive the story we can’t interact with it. The entertainment industry has always had an issue with home video, for example, because you buy it once and unless it gets destroyed or a new format shows up they never get your money again. On TV or returning to theaters, and now on demand and live streaming, they still get licensing rights to get money from.
Video games oddly never had that problem until recently, when they were being owned by Hollywood companies or subscribing to their mindset. Video games in arcades and various food establishments (our local Cumberland Farms had a Centipede game) and bars at a quarter a game were still either rented through a third party company or just bought from the game manufacturer. They weren’t getting any more money once it was sold than the company I bought my basic pinball machine from. So the move to home video just cut one middleman out of the field because gamers were still going to stores to get them, and the stores had to buy the cartridges and CDs. It’s only in recent years where that wasn’t enough.
So you had downloadable content (DLC) for bonuses like extra levels and in-game items, which was fine. Then you got loot boxes, items that almost felt required to play a game, especially MMOs that already had a monthly fee going to keep the servers active. Now you have companies who want to get rid of physical copies altogether as another method of getting your money on a regular basis even if you aren’t paying for an online experience. Sony is already plotting to get rid of physical media. As a guy with a declutter side project, I still defend physical media because you buy it, you should own it even when it’s not for sale. Otherwise you just paid for a rental. This led to the Stop Killing Games movement, that has been fighting for physical game and “you buy it, you own it” around the world. And it looks like they finally have an ally in the US government. They could use one in the EU.
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Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a 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 a read-along book club.
In our last chapter, Kevin and Korsal may be about to receive some good news from the Enterprise…if they live long enough. Meanwhile, some idiot breaks medical protocol, and I think I remember who the idiot was. The answer will not surprise you, but I’m not going to spoil it here.
We’re going to be hitting the halfway mark, and it’s good that the regular cast is finally going to be involved with events. They’re who we’ve come to see and so far their absence, in spite of how good the story and characters have been thus far, has been notable. It would be fine if the story were set somewhere in the larger Star Trek universe of the classic timeline. There have been good official and unofficial stories with that idea in mind. That’s not how the book was sold, so they were missed. Now they will be part of the story and that’s a good thing.
With the intro padded out (thank you, article series blurb), let’s get reading the next chapter and see if our new favorite Klingons get rescued, and what they’re about to walk into.
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At least it gives me art practice.
The archive as I write this dropped everything before #219, has images that don’t belong there, and there are so many comics it makes more sense to break them up by creation year (not calendar year). So I’m in the process of that now. Hopefully it’s done by this time next week, which will be the comic’s anniversary, which I didn’t even realize when I decided it was time to make this fix. Next week will be the usual Best Of in place of the comic, with a programming note for site updates posting the same time here as my usual article for The Clutter Reports.
Speaking of which, this week’s report is unfortunately on a failure, since I’m still trying to get Batman: Vengeance running. I’ve been trying to get this going for twelve years, it turns out, but I have been sick on and off and struggling to get into a creation pattern. Plus I have a plot for this year’s Captain Yuletide to turn into a comic by December 25th, and even for a minicomic in my minimal art style, that takes time. I’d like to get a few more of this year’s declutter goals done by the end of the year if I could.
In addition to all that, we have the next chapter of Star Trek: The IDIC Epidemic for Chapter By Chapter, and hopefully some interesting discussion topics. Have a great week, everyone! Hopefully I don’t have any big distractions.
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This might look cool if I new what they were safely leaping from.
Amazing Mystery Funnies #20
Centaur Publications (May, 1940)
COVER ART: Greg Chapian
And so we begin the May, 1940 comics–or at least that’s the cover date. If comics in the Golden Age are like today’s, and many of the oddities of publishing started here, the comic might have come out a month or two sooner. It is easier for Comic Book Plus to catalog, I guess. Either way, the comics wouldn’t know that Winston Churchill is now the UK Prime Minister and preparing to seriously push back the German advance. Plus we in the US still weren’t involved in the war. That won’t happen until the end of the following year. The people might not have wanted in, but if the writers weren’t trying to get us involved, they were at least milking it for story ideas, what with all the not-Germany countries trying to get us involved in the war as part of some take-over-the-world schemes we’ve seen.
We’re starting off with this comic, but it should be noted that one of the stories listed, “Space Patrol”, isn’t in this issue. Whether it’s missing from the scan or dropped before publishing I couldn’t really say. This being the first month using the reading list, that means it’s been consistently interesting enough so far. Let’s see if that trend continues.
