KILLER WOLF'S PROFILE

The demo for The Mark of Kri was incredible. This was back in the Ps2 days, so I'll offer a quick recap of the premise: Conan the Barbarian as animated by Don Bluth. Limbs, heads, and torsos could all go flying at the slightest provocation of your axe, sword, spear, and bow.

Fun times.

Until the second level, when the game shifts into a more stealth oriented experience. You have to kill the horn blowers first. You have to kill the guys wearing armor next, or they'll royally screw up your battle plan.

The demo teased the perfect hack and slash game, but the final product was 75% stealth. I had fun, but have to admit it was a bit of a let down. The final boss battle tried to make up for it, of course. You pretty much just carve up an army of zombies while the evil sorceror throws magic at you. And then...



The Nar Shaddaa section in KOTOR2 also qualifies. It wasn't bad, per se, but it really dragged on for a lot longer than it should have. It padded the quests out by making you go through the same exact area twice, and then (if I recall properly) threw a maze at you. It didn't bother me as much the first time through, but each new character made me hate that damn moon a little bit more.

The Save system and the mission where you have to defuse the bombs in Dead Rising. The demo for Dead Rising was great. I had just started a horror punk band, we had songs about zombies, and like a bunch of dorks we would sit around after practice some nights and play Dead Rising. Here's the catch though, even once I had the full game, we just played the demo. There were a lot of little mechanics that conspired to make the full game more of a chore than a fun experience, but the mad bomber section was the worst. No thanks.

The ending in Mass Effect 3 was a great moment in "...I found this on the floor..." writing.

Resource gathering in Mass Effect 2

Getting pelted with werewolf torsos during pocket universe challenge rooms in Ninja Gaiden 2.

There needed to be an options in the settings for Max Payne 3 that would have let me watch the cutscenes as graphic novel panels. I want Max Payne to feel like he's in a graphic novel, not a Tony Scott film. Although, if Tony Scott were to direct a Max Payne movie starring Bryan Cranston... the brain reels!

A black Mercedes barreled down the dirt road like a runaway freight train, throwing up tails of dust and scattering small stones, left over from some ill fated attempt at smoothing out some of the deepest ruts, to the wind. The vehicle’s air suspension was dialed in to a setting called “Sport 2” which was supposed to improve handling by providing more agility on bumpy road surfaces. Considering how the terribly maintained dirt road felt even through the finely tuned suspension, the driver wondered how rough the ride would have felt in a cheaper car as he decided to blow straight through a pock-marked stop sign and yanked the wheel hard to the left. The German engineering in the car’s steering and a bit of luck were the only things that kept him from leaving the road and plowing through a sand pine and the thicket of blackberry bushes that stood between the road and a thick looking wooden fence. The driver was just about to relax, mentally patting himself on the back for the all the clever maneuvering he’d done in the last fifteen minutes, when the headlights from before reappeared in his rearview mirror.

The driver swallowed hard and stepped down even harder on the accelerator. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he thought to himself. He was an important man. He was above this, or at least he should have been.

He chanced taking one hand off the wheel long enough to check his cell again. He was rewarded with an onscreen message telling him the phone still couldn’t find a signal and had entered standby mode to conserve power.

With a roar from its big v-8 engine, the truck started gaining on the Mercedes, despite its own modest 3.0 liter diesel v6 humming along admirably. The driver gave up on his cell phone and tried to put everything out of his mind except for making it back to the paved road. Once he got out of this godforsaken warren of dirt trails and dead ends, he knew he could get away. From the second his tires kissed asphalt again, it would be a seven mile straight line with no reason to slow down whatsoever. From there, a quick jog to the right would put him within sight of the interstate. There was no way that lumbering gas guzzler on his tail could keep up with the one hundred and fifty five miles an hour the Mercedes could do in its sleep.

All he had to do was get there in one piece.

With the flick of a pair of dashboard mounted switches, the row of lights on the truck’s roll bar, as well as the extra pair mounted below the front fender, snapped on. The sudden glare painted the Mercedes’ basalt gray interior a stark white. The driver couldn’t help flicking his eyes up to the mirror to see where the flash came from, and likewise couldn’t stop himself from reflexively flinching away and blinking his eyes.

That was all it took. Well, that and a doe with a very unfortunate sense of timing. The driver saw the deer too late and over-corrected. The big car skewed sideways, momentum following a straight line despite where the front wheels were pointed. The animal made a loud and distinctive thump against the passenger side rear quarter panel but didn’t have much of an effect on the vehicle’s forward speed.

The driver clenched his teeth hard enough to crack one of his fillings as he fought to regain control of the car. He managed to get straightened out only to drop a tire off of the side of the road. The car’s collision response system sensed there was a problem and had already locked the sun roof, tightened the seatbelt down across the driver’s chest and tilted his seat into a crash safe position. The car did almost everything except get itself back on the road. Unfortunately, it was the back end of the middle of nowhere, so there was only a sharp decline where a soft shoulder should have been, and absolutely nothing to stop the rest of the car from careening down the slope, where it came to an abrupt, and total, stop as soon as the front bumper plowed into the massive concrete culvert below.

The radical slant the driver had on the wheel during the crash worked against him as the airbag inflated, driving his own forearm into his face with enough force to fracture his right zygomatic bone. It was still an entirely survivable crash, except for that sudden numbness in his left arm and the feeling of intense pressure in his chest that he, despite the fact he knew better, hoped he could simply blame on the self tightening seatbelt.

He briefly considered trying the phone again, but even if he could find it in the aftermath of the crash, he knew it wouldn’t have done him any good. When he realized he could hear again, the driver noticed that the vehicle’s horn had somehow been locked into the on position by the crash.

The truck lurched to a stop even with the wreck, giving up both a subtle screech from one of the brake pads and a sound similar to a twisting spring from the suspension. The driver was able to hear the sound of one of its doors opening over the low gallop of the engine’s idle, followed by a scuffling he figured was one of the men who had been chasing him sliding down the edge of the ditch. As the car door swung open, the driver entertained a brief fantasy that it had all been in his head, that these men hadn’t been trying to kill him. Maybe they were just good old boys out for a night drive, knocking over mailboxes or whatever the hell they did for fun around here, and maybe now they would turn out to be good samaritans as well and save his life.

“He don’t look so good,” this voice was close, but for some reason the driver’s vision had begun to white out around the edges so he couldn’t see the man it came from.

“You see the papers?” another voice called back, this one was further away. It was harder to hear. The driver realized he’d stopped breathing at some point and couldn’t start again.

“I think he’s having a heart attack or something,” the nearer voice again, but this too was getting more difficult to make out.

“Saves us the trouble,” the other voice called back.

By then, of course, the driver wasn’t really paying attention. He was getting cold and really wishing he could take another breath.

One last breath.


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About the project:

I'm trying to take my own advice and write what I know, so even in this cold open we have callbacks to my time driving cars for a dealership, my pre-pre med days, and my history of speeding down dirt roads.

The story is going to be set in a fake rural county in Florida and revolve around a powerful family that owns a lucrative construction business with many state contracts, as well as the private gentleman's club they run that deals both in illegal gambling and prostitution.

The idea is something I've had kicking around in my head for a few years now. At one of my band's shows, I ran into the older brother of a guy I went to high school with. He was blown away by my band, and very drunk. Personally, I think the latter had a lot to do with the former. Anyway, he said "When you're a gangster in a small town, you can run the whole world."

It also tied in with discussions we had about how far we wanted to go with our band. Every step up the ladder means a whole new set of issues. You can be a great local band, but run out of steam when you try to go regional. You can be a hot regional act but get ignored when you try to go national, etc.

It gave me the idea of a "big fish in a small pond" sort of set up, and the problems that could start surfacing when the fledgling backwoods mafia tries to expand its reach.

The main driving point at the start of the story is the Hewes family trying to kill legislation that would legalize gambling in the county, thus removing their criminal monopoly.

I'm kind of planning it for my NaNoWriMo entry this year, provided I can keep from getting started on the rest of the story for that long. (To keep things honest, I just wouldn't count what I have written for the intro). If it starts burning a hole in my brain and I have to get it out earlier, so be it. (I could always just count from the day I start on chapter one, proper, and make sure I finish within a month's time.)

Not Johnny, dressed considerably more presentably for his dinner at Candice’s place than he had been for his activities the previous night, tried not to wince as he settled in behind the wheel. He was riding his medication a bit harder then usual, and was plainly aware of the swelling in his back and his knee. He wanted to see the young woman again though. He would have made the trip, even if it were raining razor blades.

As he waited at her front door, a single press of the call button to do the trick, he settled on a one night on, three nights off schedule for his nocturnal vigilante activities. It gave him time to heal up, to whatever degree he could, between sojourns into the violent criminal underworld…he almost wanted to work it into either his opening line with Candice, or maybe later as an amusing anecdote.

“What did you do last night?” He could ask. She’d tell him something interesting, and he could counter with, “Well, I was busy closing down a crack house. Want to see my bruises to prove it?” He thought better of this before the door opened.

Candice looked very good, wearing clean dry clothes and just the right amount of makeup. She smelled vaguely of something Not Johnny couldn’t place, either something she had been cooking or a perfume of some sort. He couldn’t help but smile.

“Hi.” He said.

“Hi.” She responded with a smile of her own, “Come in.”

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Coates was going to get home late, another wonderful day on the vigilante task force put to good use. He’d honestly hoped it would just go away, after that mess at the bank. It seemed to be fading out, and then bam. That shit last night.

He grumbled about it for a while, mulling it over from various angles, as he drove. Turning onto his street, he saw it almost immediately. Something was wrong. The chimney for his house was belching out a steady stream of smoke. It was a cold night, so it could almost have been passed over, except for the fact that no one was supposed to be home. His youngest was away at a friend’s place, his oldest was god knows where, but damn sure not under his roof.

Even if one or both of them HAD managed to anchor themselves in the house, they knew that he didn’t want them lighting fires. The place had a renovated electric heating system that worked just fine. He already had his pistol in hand as he parked the car.

Up the stairs, in through the front door, Terrence followed his service pistol’s lead. He cleared the house room by room before locking it up tight again. This was not somebody’s first probative glance into the world of breaking and entering, nor was it some random act.

He put all the lights on and made another series of sweeps. To the best of his ability to discern, the place was untouched. Nothing was missing. His wife’s jewelry box was right where she’d left it the last night she’d spent with him, and the clasp was still well dusted over.

Terrence went to the kitchen and set his pistol on the counter. Soon, he provided a shot glass to keep it company while he fished around for a bottle of something to drink. He found it, tucked away under the sink behind the pots and pans. He tried to tell himself he was hiding it from his youngest, but he knew he was only trying to slow himself down. If he had to get down on his hands and knees and rummage through a dark cubby, terrorizing spiders and the occasional lizard, to find his booze, he was less likely to have a drink of opportunity.

He poured a shot, tossed it back and poured another before managing to carry the bottle, the shot glass, and his pistol into the living room with him. He deposited his assembly of small burdens on the coffee table and watched the fire as he sipped at his second shot.

This was not a burglary, he knew that much the second he stepped over the threshold. It felt all wrong for that. This had nothing to do with the vigilante case either. This had been about delivering a message to him regarding that other case he was working, and he realized with a sort of hollow feeling that he hoped the liquor would soon insulate him against, that he was looking right at it.

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Not Johnny’s dinner with Candice was not going well. It seemed like she based her responses to what he said and did on an imaginary coin that she flipped in her head. Heads up. She laughed and thought he was charming. Tails up. She looked at him as if he were an escaped serial rapist. Heads up. They cleared the table together and laughed in the kitchen as he helped her wash the dishes. Tails up. She did not appreciate him getting soapy water on her, despite the fact she’d just splashed him a couple of times, clearly on purpose.

There were two heads up in a row, they sat down on Candice’s couch to watch some TV, and she didn’t seem to mind him being close to her, but then there were about four tail tosses in a row. Not Johnny couldn’t say the right thing to save his soul.

He tried to sound smarter then he was, failed, and was promptly called on it. This put him on the defensive and so he reverted to playground antics. If you don’t know what to do, generally involving a girl, you start making fun of her. He tried to be flirty about it, because it was supposed to work. Heads up. She smiled at first, because it seemed like he was being charming.

He pushed his luck with a second attempt at a humorous observation and failed miserably…but maybe it was just because he’d worked profanity into it. Okay, that was a clear message, he tried to remind himself. She doesn’t go for that.

With a feeling not entirely dissimilar to a motorcycle crash in slow motion he realized what was going on. She seemed to be tolerating him, but only so far as her own interest required. Dinner was nice, he was okay to talk to, but that was it. The rest of it, she’d just kind of put up with or ignore. This was a service, plain and simple.

She was paying him back for the pills by feeding him, and letting him sit there and make an ass out of himself. Anything else, any interest that seemed to bubble up to the surface…hell, that was just in his mind. Or at least, it seemed that way to Not Johnny.

“Well,” he said, drawing his preamble out in the hopes she’d head him off, “I’ve got to get going.” He waited, she made no move to try and change his mind, “Thanks for dinner, Candice. It was really good.”

Candice smiled and walked with him to the door. “I’m glad you liked it. I was trying something new out.” She pulled something up from the table by the door, “Here.”

She drew one of Not Johnny’s hands to her, palm up, and scribbled something out. On closer inspection, it turned out to be her number. Maybe he wasn’t doing as badly as he had thought.

“Come by tomorrow, if you can…if you want.” She smiled, “But call first, okay?”

He smiled and nodded and was then politely on his way. He tried not to skip as he headed towards his car. Maybe he’d read her wrong, or right…depending on which reading he was referring to. For the first time in a long time, Not Johnny began to wonder if his battered body could hold up to a good night in someone else’s bed.

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“You need to forget about her.” Dunn said, watching Not Johnny dial the number again. “Do you see the flaw here?”

Not Johnny left his second message of the day and hung up. He turned back to see Dunn’s accusing stare and was somewhat thankful that the table full of the pieces of his ‘outfit’ stood between them. He closed the cell phone.

“What?”

“You don’t get the hypocrisy of it?” Dunn prodded, “For almost as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been bitching about how you always put other people first. Now, for the first time in your life you’re actually in a position to do some good and you’re going to fuck it up by being selfish.” He shakes his head, “You don’t get it. There is a reason you could do this, N.J. You had nothing to lose.”

“What are you talking about?” Not Johnny asked, adorned with the sort of perpetual shrug only Dunn could bring out. Nothing had changed, as far as he was concerned.

“Think about it. In all the books, the comics, the movies, whatever…when the guy goes after the bad guys, what happens? Invariably, the bad guys end up going after him through the people around him. See, that is where you fucked up. You’re a dying man, NJ. You had nothing to lose. They couldn’t hurt you, couldn’t get to you. If you start something with this girl, you know what she becomes?” A pause, “She becomes the biggest weapon that the world has against you.”

“But it isn’t like that.” Not Johnny pawed around for an argument that made his declaration sound slightly less feeble. “I wear a mask.”

“Okay, maybe that’s enough.” Dunn said in a tone of voice which indicated it wasn’t even close, “But think about it another way. You don’t know how long you’ve got, and if things go bad for you now it could be even less. Do you want to do that to this girl?”

“You’re jumping to conclusions.” Not Johnny affirmed. “Its just a car ride and one dinner so far. She might just be using me for pills anyways.”

“This is going to be nothing but trouble for you NJ, one way or another.”

After meeting up again around midnight, Not Johnny and Dunn prowled around in the latter’s beaten up old van. Not Johnny felt fairly stupid, sitting there in the uncomfortable mess of an outfit Dunn had fashioned for him.

The fact that so much of the raw components that had gone into making it were just laying around gave some credence to Dunn’s offhand claim that he was still doing private contracts for certain security agencies. He was either being purposefully vague in his descriptions, or he simply did not recall who the voices on the other end of the line were.

Watching Dunn drive, a procedure which evidently served as a source of great inspiration, if the number of notations he scrawled out on a pair of dash mounted notebooks was any indication, did not instill a sense of confidence in Not Johnny, so instead, he studied his new gloves.

His eyes had sort of glassed over as Dunn explained it. It drew its power from Not Johnny’s signal, whatever the hell that was. There were capacitors and stuff. Striking the palm of the glove against something made a connection between the two probes there and the board and let the capacitors discharge…or something. All Not Johnny really needed to know was that he’d better not slap himself on the thigh during a particularly funny joke, unless he wanted to be on the receiving end of what Dunn referred to as “a taser on crack.”

Not Johnny didn’t mind the knee brace so much. Hopefully when Dunn crashed the van into something while writing out a diagram for whatever the hell jumped into his head, the brace would allow him to walk briskly away before spilled gasoline could ignite. The back brace was less thrilling for him.

“You know, this is like the thing they say got Kennedy killed.” Not Johnny said, a fragment from a video they showed in history class looping. “He couldn’t get down after the first shot was fired…This could get me killed.”

“So don’t run for president.” Dunn said as he let the van idle in place, “We’re here.”

Not Johnny looked out the windows. Here seemed to be nowhere in particular, at least nowhere that he wanted to be.

“What is here?” Not Johnny asked.

“You said it yourself earlier. Do you have any idea how hard it is to just be riding by and find a crime underway when you’re prepared for it? You probably used up even your bad luck just by being in that bank. So we’re trying a more direct approach. This is a bad neighborhood.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” Not Johnny said. He suddenly felt nostalgic for the days when he had no concept of a bad neighborhood. He was also nostalgic for a seatbelt, having made the trip thus far without one.

“I’ll come back for you in a half hour.” Dunn said, reaching across to open the passenger door. He’d shifted into park.

“You can’t be…” but he was serious, Not Johnny realized, as his friend…or at least the person whom up to the last five seconds he thought was his friend, shoved him out of the van.

By the time Not Johnny was back on his feet, Dunn had pulled the door shut and peeled out. Already, the curious were gathering.

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“What the fuck is this?” The words snapped Not Johnny’s current status and set of problems sharply into focus. Here he was with an encroaching semi-circle of what did not appear to be the glee club, though one of them did happen to be smiling.

“Its not even close to Halloween.” The one who’d spoken before asked. “Shit, what you been smoking, man? Can I get some?”

Not Johnny could see it from their point of view. He looked like a cross between a ten year old playing at Batman, and the gimp from that Trantino film. He wasn’t exactly the picture of health and sanity in either case. At least they couldn’t see his face, though his goggles were not opaque, due to the night time theater of operations, as Dunn had called it, so they could still see his eyes.

He remembered something, maybe from a nature program when he was fourteen years old and watching porn. Adult supervision loomed right on the other side of what was, by all accounts, a flimsy door. As the door began to yawn open to him, he’d clicked to another channel. Any channel. It seemed luck was with him that day, he hadn’t gotten his pants down yet…so it didn’t look strange at all for him to be sitting there watching a nature program when the door finally opened. Anyway, Not Johnny chided himself for getting drawn off topic, the memory was supposed to be about the content of the program and not how he’d come to see it.

One of the young men shoved him over onto his back and they all started kicking him. That, strangely enough, was when he recalled the point his subconscious had been trying to make with the memory about the nature program. They could see his eyes. His eyes did not portray confidence and dominance, and so they took him to be the weakest in the area and pounced.

Everybody had to go to school sometime.

Without even a conscious attempt, Not Johnny ran through his precursors. His right eye twitched, and then the kicking stopped. One of the young men was already down, the fingers of one hand bending backwards in what someone with a sufficient medical vocabulary would have identified as dystonia. Another seemed content to stagger around with his hands clutching at his head. The third one was the one that concerned Not Johnny.

This young man only had one hand pressed to his head. Despite the nosebleed, he was fumbling behind his back for something. Not Johnny scrambled for the first time in years and made it off the ground in time to shove him in the chest with both gloved hands as the man’s pistol came free.

The man’s body recoiled from the charge, but that might just have been the skeletal muscles all spasming at once. The firearm discharged, but once the man holding it had fallen to the ground and the convulsions began, it was easy enough for Not Johnny to slide it away with the tip of one boot.

His first battle as a superhero was somewhat of a cluster fuck, but he’d managed to survive, so far. It was then he realized the building that the young men had been guarding must be some sort of illegal establishment, because they weren’t the only ones intent on coming to its rescue. Again, making the conscious decision he’d rather die on his feet then wake up one morning to find out all he could move were his eyelids, he pressed on.

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Terrence Coates stood in the anesthetic hallway as the doctor explained the particulars of the condition that afflicted the patients who had recently been dropped off by a cadre of unusually dedicated ambulance drivers. He was only halfway paying attention, a wait and see game just in case any trigger words came up. His mind worked better like that. His mind worked funny. Thinking ‘trigger word’ brought up the concept of being shot, which brought up the concept of his detective’s ‘shield’.

The word shield conjured something you wore on your arm or held in your hand, something that could protect you. It was something to hide behind when the shit started hitting the fan. Coates had never viewed his shield in this way. As he wore it, perhaps it could function as its namesake. It could very well protect his heart from an assassin’s bullet, were it fired from a particular set of angles, and should the bullet itself be of a particularly underpowered variety. Coates weighed the odds of running across a criminal minded trigonometry freak with a bb gun and felt re-assured in his original choice to trust instead a Kevlar vest underneath his jacket.

Wait, there had been something, his mind called him back to what the doctor was saying.

“..is that none of them has any family history of seizure.” The doctor paused for a moment, “While it makes little sense, it seems like this was done to them. Just like the other two.”

Coates felt his hand stop writing and flipped the pad closed. That was another trick that had served him well, he could write down what he heard and be off on a completely different tangent independently.

“So, we’re dealing with what…a serial who gives people seizures?” Terrence thinks this but does not say it. His verbal center goes up a more logical avenue. “It was some kind of crack house or something, but we could never get there without it clearing out. Any chance this is from some new drug?”

The doctor looked at him, a confused expression pinching his face. “Doubtful, although if it was, I don’t think it would sell too well.”

Coates leaned forward with the doctor as one of the patients, about to be further sedated, began shouting. The doctor waved the nurse off and Terrence followed him into the room.

“Looks like we’ve got a talker.” Coates said, flipping his pad open again as he advanced on the stricken gang member’s hospital bed. “What happened to you and your pals?” the detective asked.

“The black man.” The youth says, he shakes his head sideways, which seems to nauseate him. This is not what he meant. “The man in black.”

“You were attacked by Johnny Cash?” Coates heard himself ask before he could get it stopped. It made absolutely no sense. Johnny Cash had been dead for a few years, a damn shame too considering how the last couple discs sounded.

The youth started thrashing around again, and the doctor gave a curt nod to the nurse as she waited there, a loaded hypo poised to spring into action. As the needle made love to the young man’s IV, Coates heard him repeat it one more time, “The man…in…black.”

I like how you get the space setting involved in the middle part now, but the ending is really wtf territory. To me, the Detective is acting in self defense, so it makes no sense for him to go suicidal over that.

Is this for a game, or some other type of medium?