November 2023 Newsletter

The time of spirits draws to a close. Pumpkins carved with moldering faces rot on porchsteps. Like an ancient VHS on rewind, mummies walk backward into their sarcophagi. Bats turn into draculas who then also walk backward into their coffins. Frankenstein puts on a silver-buckled pilgrim hat if he is in the United States. Something howls at the moon, but what's that silhouette? Not a wolf–a turkey. And the Ranged Touch newsletter is back, baby!!!!

Gosh it's been a minute, huh? But we've made some exciting changes around here, or rather, one big change, which is that this newsletter is now free for anyone to read, meaning not only all our Patreon supporters and current listeners but their friends, relatives, loved ones, or just anyone can walk in off the digital street and get the lowdown on what's been happening here at Ranged Touch over the past month or so, not to mention glimpse a preview of what's on the immediate horizon, with a conclusion touching on other shenanigans we get up to in our spare time.

What's the Haps?

For last month's Game Studies Study Buddies, Michael and CMRN read Marie Laure Ryan's 2001 tome Narrative as Virtual Reality, which is probably more about comparative and digital literature than it is about games as such, but nevertheless sketches some connections between the fields that have paid dividends (and also some that have not). November inaugurates what CMRN has ominously called The Winter of Children, with the guys reading Marsha Kinder's book on early 90s children's transmedia franchises, Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games. This one is pretty incredible: she predicts TikTok within the first five pages and by the midpoint is talking about how an episode of Garfield and Friends models castration anxiety. Typically you can find the books we read on our Bookshop page, but actually, these are both old/out of print so Bookshop doesn't have listings for them? It happens that the Kinder book, however, is open-access.

October's Just King Things covered the return of Steve's Richard Bachman persona in The Regulators, an extremely weird and very bad novel loathed by CMRN but in places adored by Michael even though he agrees no human being should probably ever read it (listening to a podcast episode about it is still fair game, though). The bonus episode was the third Sewer Special, in which the guys did a long Q&A from readers, talking about King's place in genre, being angry little goth kids, their favorite King villains, and gave their rankings of the best King books they've read so far. November will see them back on the road to the Dark Tower with 1997's weird West fantasy romance, Wizard & Glass, and a bonus episode on the first big volume of the 2000s Marvel Comics adaptation of Rolan Deschain's early life, The Dark Tower: Beginnings.

Meanwhile Shelved by Genre, our newest show about reading genre literature, is where CMRN and Michael are joined by the august Austin Walker as together they soldier through Gene Wolfe's mystical Melvillean puzzlebox science-fantasy magnum opus, The Book of the New Sun. Last month they completed the third volume in the cycle, The Sword of the Lictor, and began the fourth and (sort of) final, The Citadel of the Autarch, which will wrap up by the end of the year. For all Sunheads out there, the show also gave us an opportunity to add a new shirt to our store, a shirt about shirts and who wears them and under what conditions. October also featured a bonus episode on the collection Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, and November's will be a long and interesting discussion of the entire Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. And as always, our bonus episodes are overseen by delightful producer Jordan Mallory. Let's hear it for Jordo!

On a bittersweet note, October was also the month in which CMRN and Michael wrapped up the Too Much Future series, where they play through the Fallout games, with an episode about the odd and frankly often unpleasant thing that is Fallout 76. A shirt was also made about this, and the game's entirely absurd design decisions. Anyway, while TMF is in storage now, that doesn't mean it's gone for good–surely more undreamt of Fallout games are in the expansive, abundant, way too big future, and in the meantime, there's a Magic: The Gathering block to look forward to and, we are to understand, some sort of TV show…?

If that still leaves you wanting, however, rest assured CMRN and Danni are hard at work in the Baldur's Gate 3 mines, picking over a very long, very big, very popular game for the inevitable return of Mages and Murderdads. Speaking of which, they also released their monthly podcast, which still exists by the way!

Out and About

In terms of some off-network activity, you may be interested to know CMRN dropped by the recently launched Remap Radio to chat Assassin's Creed, the latest installment of which he also reviewed for them. Michael, meanwhile, appeared on a special Halloween episode of the BBC podcast The Digital Human, where he talked about creating the horrific internet urban legend known as "smiledog." And at his personal page over on Cohost, he wrote a longform answer to a question about Shakespeare authorship conspiracies that we heartell "people are liking to read"!

Meanwhile Danni has played the latest Unmatched expansion, Tales to Amaze, and provides for you the following review:

Danni's Big Review

For several years now, I’ve been buying and playing Unmatched, Restoration Game’s reskin and reboot of Star Wars: Epic Duels. In Unmatched, players take control of heroes hailing from mythology, history, and various intellectual properties and pits them against one another like a child smashing together two mismatched action figures until something breaks. Who would win in a fight between Achilles and Sherlock Holmes? Probably Sherlock Holmes, but if you want to find out definitively if you buy two boxes containing plastic figurines and cards and find out for sure.

Unmatched: Tales to Amaze takes the same basic formula but transforms the game into a cooperative affair, pitting one to four players against pulp villains and their cryptid minions. I’m writing this shortly after Bullseye, Sun Wu Kong, and Sinbad took on Mothman alongside a motley crew of creepy dudes.

We got our asses handed to us. Mothman flew around and destroyed a sleepy American suburb’s bridges and kept getting increasingly powerful the more infrastructure he wrecked. The Blob moved around leaving a bunch of goo everywhere and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. The Skunk Ape killed half a dozen of the Monkey King’s illusory clones. A giant tarantula cornered Bullseye and trapped him in a bunch of webs. In the end, after the town was completely cut off from the rest of the world, Mothman won.

I don’t know what happens after Mothman wins. Our heroes weren’t dead. But Sinbad’s last Voyage card, the Voyage Home, was stranded in his discard pile after Mothman countered it on the final round. Unable to recur any further Voyages, where does Sinbad go? Is this how it ends? Mothman the mayor of a dead town and Sinbad stranded there, unable to voyage out?

The game’s manual recommended we face Mothman because apparently the Martian Invaders are even harder. Well, what the fuck? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, given that the Martian Invaders have access to technology that allows them to travel to Earth and such. I bet all those fancy gizmos wouldn’t do a lick of good against Medusa’s gaze, though.

The match was demoralizing, but misery loves company so we bonded over it. I think my wife liked it a lot more than the 1v1 competitive experience of me going infinite on a Jeet Kune Do combination as Bruce Lee and turning her Dracula into a fine pink paste just outside the sturdy oak doors of Heorot.

9/10

Wowie! Looks like SOMEONE wishes he was denied the Mothman! Hahah but we kid here. Also we're out of time, by which I mean I'm out of things to write about. Well, this was kind of a beefy letter, but we had to cover a lot of ground, connecting the old to the new. Next month we'll check in again as we close out the year.

Until then, charyou tree!