T.K. Wade -- Author

Monday, May 13, 2024

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Bramble: The Mountain King [Video Game Review]

[This blog spoils some aspects of the game.]

A fairy tale game!

"Bramble: The Mountain King" is a video game developed by Dimfrost Studio. It was released in 2023. It is heavily inspired by Nordic fairy tales. In fact, this game lets you experience them first hand.

The story goes that a little boy named Olle is looking for his older sister. In his attempt to find her, they both end up in the fairyland of that realm. At first, it looks very cute and playful. You got the little gnomes with the pointy hats and such. This is incredibly misleading though.

The playful opening of the game does not represent what's coming. You see... the problem with Nordic fairy tales is that.... there is a preponderance of bad things that absolutely love to murder and eat little children, and this game does not pull its punches.

This game has every horror you can imagine. Nothing is good. It's all bad. Everything's trying to either stab you, cut you in half, eat you up, drown you, and the game has no problems in showing a little child meet a gory, horrible end. And you will see these things happen often, since the game has a fair bit of difficulty to it.

Most of the horrors in this game are too large for you to actually fight. You do have to fight them sometimes though. You have a single weapon which is a glowing rock. You can flash it at some things, and very rarely it can turn into a sword. But most of the time you are hiding or running away from giant hags, ogres, and zombies. Yeah, there's zombies in their lore. It's nuts.

Another thing the game does not pull its punches on is the terrible aspect of killing babies. This game goes into a sort of fairy cult where people are murdering babies by drowning them. You have to deal with this for a long time in the game and it will make you sick to your stomach, if you're like me. It's rough, but they actually did a good job at it. It's just another reason we should not be entertaining creatures like this.

Honestly, I think the baby thing was the worst of it for me. I was really upset over that entire plotline. And I am not upset with the developers at all. They gave me a legitimate look at how terrifying their fairy tales really were. They censored nothing.

Another thing that happens a lot in this game is that you will go through a dark period that is scary, such as a cave or just night time, and then breech out into the daylight. In most games, that means that you are getting a brief reprieve, but all too often in this game that is not the case. Daylight will just come with more problems. It almost never lets up. Bad things just keep coming from one thing or another.

What was even the more surprising was that this game actually has a satisfying ending. I won't go into what it was, but it was very good and worth the journey to the end. And with that, I am going to recommend this game. They did me proud with this one. If you want to see how absolutely terrifying fairy tales can get, then this is the game for you. If you are easily squeamish though, you might want to avoid it.

This blog was written on April 26, 2024.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. Also stop by my Amazon.com listing by clicking this link: https://www.amazon.com/T.K.-Wade/e/B07BQK9RTZ

Check out my books! Thanks!

Wednesday, May 8, 2024

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Unbegotten Child [Short Story Review]

[I spoil the entire story.]

"Unbegotten Child" is a short science fiction story written by Winston K. Marks. It was published in 1953. This story reeks of evolution, but this is the muddy waters I have to often tread when I read early science fiction stories. I'm not saying I am excusing it. It's just something I have decided to endure in the name of finding all those hidden gems I am always looking for.

The idea here is that a woman shows up at a doctor's office, and she is clearly pregnant, but she is convinced that it's a tumor and wants the doctor to remove it. The doctor is alternatively convinced that it is, in fact, a baby inside her. But the woman is absolutely sure that she is a virgin. She never had sex.

As it turns out, she had run away from a French doctor who had been kind of obsessing over her condition. He too believes that she is pregnant, but that her pregnancy was the result of a change in human evolution. He thinks that humans are changing to become asexual reproducers. That basically means that people are evolving to just get pregnant without needing sex. He even suggested that men would also suddenly get pregnant.

I'm sighing a lot while I write this. Pinching the bridge of my nose. Trying to just... move on with this review.

Anyways, the French doctor ends up being correct. She ends up having a beautiful baby girl. At first, the doctor thinks it must have all just been a misunderstanding. Maybe she just had sex and didn't remember it or something. This is until he is pointed to the fact that the baby has no navel. Basically humans are just going to grow inside people like tumors now. Yeah. That's evolution for ya.

I don't recommend the story. It was stupid.

This blog was written on April 26, 2024.

Check out my books! Thanks!

Monday, May 6, 2024

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider [Video Game Review]

"Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider" is a video game for the PlayStation released in 2001. I actually only found this game about a year ago and it got me hooked.

The whole idea of this game comes from those old cartoons where Ralph the Wolf and Sam the Sheepdog go at it. Ralph the Wolf is actually Wile E. Coyote but with a red nose. Other than that, they look almost identical.

Ralph would always try to come up with clever ways to steal Sam's sheep and always end up getting bested by Sam who would beat him up. The funny thing about the cartoons were that they would punch out at a timeclock at the end of the episode and just go home... and of course come back to do it all again the next day. Those cartoons are the whole reason this game exists.

In the game, Daffy Duck shows up and introduces Ralph to a gameshow where he might actually have a chance to steal the sheep from Sam as long as he is clever enough. Most of the levels have you using various cartoon tricks that are very familiar to us over the many years of watching Loony Tunes. My favorite in the game is the big rubber band which can actually be used in a couple different ways. You can bungie down from a cliff and try to grab the sheep from below, or you can tie it two two trees and use it like a stretchy catapult.

The difficulty of the game just comes from figuring out the correct series of actions needed to first remove the sheep from Sam's surveillance and then to get said sheep to the goal ring. As the game progresses, both of these tasks can become very, VERY difficult to figure out. It's basically a stealth game crossed with a puzzle platformer.

The animation of the characters seems inspired from the cartoons themselves. Even though the PlayStation graphics are dated, you can see the special care that the animators put into it. Everything looks really good, and I loved all the cute little expressions everyone made. Also the death scenes are hilarious.

I also want to mention the dash mechanic. If you jab really fast on the Triangle button, Ralph will run super fast, so fast it's actually hard to get him to stop. If you happen to run off of a cliffside, he will actually run in midair for a bit before he realizes he is in trouble. He will also slam into a wall if he can't stop in time. This is one of the many aspects of the game that make you feel like you're controlling a cartoon character. It's brilliantly crafted. I can tell that the developers had fun making it.

If you can get ahold of this game, I do recommend it. Just keep in mind that it is a very challenging game. You'll end up dying a lot. However, dying is actually very entertaining and just helps you realize that you should probably just be trying something different. That's the whole point. Keep trying different things and eventually you'll figure out what the game wants you to do. It's a good and solidly made game, and it's really too bad it's not better known these days.

This blog was written on April 26, 2024.

Check out my books! Thanks!

Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Water Eater [Short Story Review]

[I completely spoil this story.]

"The Water Eater" is a science fiction short story written by Winston K. Marks. It was published in 1953.

The story is about a beer-delivery man who is also an amateur scientist. By "amateur" I mean that he reads science magazines. While attempting to clean his wife's roaster oven, he combines a bunch of cleaning chemicals and accidently creates a blob that absolutely eats all water that comes in contact with it.

His wife is naturally terrified of this possibly living creature, but the problem is that the husband gets obsessed over it. All other projects, including his job, fall to the side so he can experiment on this strange water-absorbing blob.

Now, this thing as actually dangerous. It would try and take the water out of your body. And yes, that would kill you. But the thing of it was that the story was written in the first-person which assured that the main character would somehow live through it. That, however, was kind of a trick. The real reason this story is a horror has to do with something the story doesn't even show.

After the man realizes that this thing is potentially dangerous, he uses a blowtorch to completely destroy it. However he happens to remember that some of it did manage to make it down into the drain. This drain would ultimately lead into the ocean where the creature would have all the water in the world to grow. The story ends here, leaving you with that fun little thought. Not bad, and kind of morbidly funny.

Good story, if not a bit goofy. I do recommend it. I've been having a lot of water problems at my house. Might not have been bad to have this creature as a pet!

This blog was written on April 24, 2024.

Check out my books! Thanks!

Monday, April 29, 2024

Fairy Tale Spotlight: Annihilation [Book Review]

[I heavily attempt to stay away from spoilers in this blog because I want people to look into this franchise.]

"Annihilation" is a novel written by Jeff VanderMeer. It is the first book in what is called the Southern Reach Trilogy. It was published in 2014. I read this one because I liked the movie from 2018. The comparison to the movie is kind of important to this review, at least from my own personal perspective.

The concept of this story is very simple. There is an area on Earth called Area X that has some pretty strange things happening in it. All living matter is slowly combining with each other, which is creating a new eco system. The story itself is about one person in one of the many groups that decide to travel into Area X.

In this case, the speaker of the book is a biologist. No name is given at all. In fact, not one single name is given to any of the characters of this entire book, and I thought that was pretty cool. The closest thing you get to a name for the main character is Ghost Bird, which was just a pet name that her husband gave her. I suppose a lot of the fans of this series will probably lovingly call her by that name.

Other than what I just said, I won't be spoiling anything else about the story since this book is still heavily in play. The reason I wanted to write this blog is to explain that this book is like an alternative version of the movie. Although it might be more accurate to say that the movie was an alternative version of the book since it came afterwards.

It felt like I read an entirely different book which ultimately was the same as the movie. That's a weird feeling. But you know what? It makes sense if you understand anything about the story at all. I might even suspect that the people who wrote the film did it on purpose. This is the kind of universe where things sort of keep changing because of the combining and transformative nature of Area X. I can't say that this happened for that reason, but that doesn't make it any less cool.

Going from movie to book was actually a very surreal experience. I felt like I traveled into an alternate universe that was just different enough to notice, and yet the very same event was occurring. Very cool!

Personally, I do recommend this book, but this recommendation comes with a caveat. I think the best way to experience this particular story is to both read the book and see the movie. I honestly think they go well together in this very particular situation. I don't think I have seen a case where this happened, at least to this degree.

If you have never heard of the Southern Reach series, you might try poking around at it. It's especially good if you are a fan of the surreal. Other than that, I think I've said all I want to. I liked it, and that was what was most important.

This blog was written on April 22, 2024.

Check out my books! Thanks!

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Oz Author Breakdown

So over the course of reading all of the Oz books, I have had to experience the styles of many authors who contributed to the series. I am going to take this opportunity to explain what I think of them. In a later blog, I'll probably rate them from my most favorite to least.

*****

L. Frank Baum

Obviously, L. Frank Baum gets major credit for creating the series as a whole. That doesn't make him infallible though. Most of the credit he gets comes from his world-building and character creation. He has always done that well. Almost every character he created got reused by later authors down the line.

As good as his world-building is, Baum had an awful time with continuity. He would either forget things or rework his stories for personal reasons. This actually led to a tradition among Oz authors of not caring if the continuity matched or not. These discrepancies were later explained in "Paradox in Oz" charmingly.

Ruth Plumly Thompson

Hit and miss. Thompson wrote her books entirely for children. She pandered to them harder than any other author. Some might defend her in this, but it made it especially difficult for grown adults to take these books in. The majority of her books had very rigid formulas which made nearly every book seem like the same book but with the characters swapped around.

This formula also led to a sort of feel that the books were being padded out. The characters would often run into these random encounters that were never good. They always made Oz feel like an unsafe and uncomfortable place to live in. She did this far more times than was necessary.

Her much later books were not as bad. She seemed to get get better at broadening her storytelling. Those books are quite good, but they are sadly in the minority. Thompson's rigid belief in pandering to the innocence of children ultimately made most of her books feel dull and uninspired.

John R. Neill

John R. Neill was actually the illustrator of the books since the second one that Baum did. He took over as author for a little while and a lot of people dislike them. That said, however, I really enjoyed the change of pace. His Oz stories seemed directly related to the animated cartoons of his age. Everything was alive and could talk, even inanimate objects. It was chaotic, but it was all done in good fun.

Neill's books also had a main character. Jenny Jump just about turned into a fairy character herself, despite the fact she came from our world. She got extremely integrated into the world of Oz... even creepily so. The Wizard of Oz actually magically lobotomized her to make her friendlier.

My only real complaint was how he had made it so that the colors of the five areas of Oz also reflected in the skin color of their inhabitants. That was annoying to imagine. Nobody else did that and thank goodness!

Jack Snow

Jack Snow brought Oz back into the realm of believable. He was an eloquent writer who took the series seriously. He focused more on serious questing and also the beauty if Oz itself. There was something very personal about how he wrote Oz.

Rachel Cosgrove Payes

Payes is the heavenly saint that gave us Percy the Rat. But more than that, the thing that really impressed me about her writing was her ability to create interesting puzzles for the characters to solve. She also put a hell of a lot of work into making all the characters believable as people. Her dialog and character interaction is some of the best in Oz history.

Now that I think of it, it makes a lot of sense she is so good at puzzles. Her main character was usually a rat. Rats are great at solving puzzles!

Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw

These two wrote a few books together. One of them was just Eloise. Their books are a little difficult for me to remember offhand. I believe that the majority of them did well in introducing new and creative characters. I don't think I have any particular complaint about them. I guess they just did not stand out all that well.

Dick Martin

He only wrote one book ("The Ozmapolitan of Oz"). He was better known as an illustrator at the time. I didn't have any real problem with him.

Gina Wickwar

Not a bad author, but she is another author that has difficulty standing out. She handled Toto really well though. I have to give her credit for that. Toto is a character that a lot of authors shy away from.

Eric Shanower

Eric took Oz so seriously that it sometimes dipped into the horror genre. He also officially brought comic books into the Oz canon. That's a big accomplishment. He will always be known as the man who tried mightily to make Oz a story that a person of any age can take seriously.

Edward Einhorn

Einhorn was clearly a science fiction writer. His two Oz books are works of science fiction while still being Oz fantasy. They dealt with things like alternate universes and time travel. He is the author who did what he could to repair the broken continuity started by Baum himself by making everything canon within its own reality. Excellent job!

Sherwood Smith

Smith was the only Oz author to bring our real world problems into the plot. She compared life in Oz to the often broken and sad existence we live here on Earth. That will ultimately be her Ozian legacy. It was a concept worth explaining, as hard as it may be to deal with. Smith wrote the final Oz book ("Sky Pirates over Oz") which was published in 2014.

*****

That's it! Can you figure out who my favorite and least favorite is just from how I reviewed them?

This blog was written on April 12, 2024.

Check out my books! Thanks!

Monday, April 22, 2024

Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Oz Series [Review]

This is the last one, I swear.

The Oz series was a book collection that was originally started by L. Frank Baum. It ran from 1900 to 2014. It spanned many authors who all contributed along the way. I am one of the few people who can comment on the series as a whole since I have read every single one of them.

Don't worry, I won't take very long. I am only writing this because I am a completionist at heart.

The whole point of the Oz series was escapism. We all want to imagine a world that is more interesting than the one we got. The fairyland of Oz, with all of its villains and woes, is far more interesting and fun than regular Earth. It's a place we can go to have an adventure.

Everything in Oz is loosely based on our reality. Their strangeness is affected by things happening in our world. That makes it relatable. We can go there and laugh at all the jokes because we understand them. It isn't so alien that we can't understand it.

And although there is danger, there will be plenty of friends made along the way that will surly be there to save us in the end. That's the best thing of all really. Friendship is a major part of the Oz experience. If you prove yourself to be a good person, you will make the friends of every powerful ruler in Oz. They will stand up for you and put everything aside to save you from a terrible fate. Just knowing that is comforting.

People who read Oz read the books to imagine a world that's simply better. Oz still has problems, but the problems don't seem so bad because the power of good is in control. No wonder people dream of escaping to this place.

The books themselves are hit and miss. Some of them have plots that are much too formulaic to be enjoyable, but I personally have no regrets. I still recommend the series as a whole. It was a journey worth making, and I encourage anyone else to take the same path I did. And once you make that journey, Oz will be more than just a fictional land; it will be a real place that you think about from time to time. It will become real to you... and a reason for you to smile from time to time.

This blog was written on April 12, 2024.

Check out my books! Thanks!