Gary Devore's Blog

New Short Story Published

I have a new short story in the latest issue of online literary journal called Oyster River Pages.

The story is super gay, set 14,000 years in the deep past, and tells a romantic story of found family.

Check it out here: https://www.oysterriverpages.com/on-the-high-guide-path-of-the-wind-riders

Why I’m Enjoying Fallout 76

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Fallout 76, Bethesda’s new MMO game, has its issues, but I’m greatly enjoying exploring this post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Fallout 76 hits many of the right notes for me.  The engine and gameplay are familiar (since I put many hours into Fallout 4, a game with many more flaws than Fallout 76 IMO).  Plus, Fallout 76 brings enough new things to the table to entertain me, with interesting ways in which the game can be expanded in the future.

I’ve pulled together some of my thoughts below.  This...

The First Gay Romance of Fallout 76

[image error]Fallout 76 is a new online multiplayer game developed by Bethesda.  It launches this month and I have taken part in a couple BETA testing events.  Bethesda as a game company has had a mixed-to-negative history on inclusion and representation of gay characters in its games, particularly in the Fallout series.  In the last iteration of the franchise, for example, all players were forced to play a straight character at the game’s start.  They could then seek to “romance” a handful of same-gender...

The Narrative Failures of Far Cry 5

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As a game, I thought Far Cry 5 got a lot of things right:

The sandboxy, open world is enjoyable and amusing The physical setting is gorgeous and nicely rendered, with a good deal of hidden detail for those who like to investigate the game world deeply The cult members, who make up the bulk of the disposable foes, mostly feel like a suitable challenge, and it feels good when you defeat them Sometimes it’s an adrenaline-fueled adventure just getting from point A to waypoint B, especially in t...

Telling Stories in Games: Rewriting the Narrative of Fallout 4

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I’ve played many, many hours of the post-apocalyptic adventure game Fallout 4.  I’ve finished the over-arching main quest and hundreds of side quests.  I’ve saved the bombed-out Commonwealth around a destroyed Boston and become powerful.  Although games like this give you the feeling (sometimes the illusion) of being open-ended where you can do whatever you want, I thought the main quest of Fallout 4 was ultimately quite controlled, cliched, and disappointing.  It was certainly the least rew...

Meat-Scenery

 

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The penultimate scene of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), a far better piece of cinema than anything associated with Mel Gibson.  If you don’t know it, learn it.

In the 19th century, photography brought the carnage of the American Civil War home to the civilian population.  Photographers captured the torn and twisted bodies of anonymous soldiers strewn across battlefields, and those images were published in newspapers and journals to show the cost of a war that would go on to kill 2%...

Ready Player Re-Done

A brief twitter thread chat between @RandomiseUser, @Endo_Chick, and myself got me thinking about character appearance in games. I set out to put some ideas down as to how games structure this, and why I’m so drawn to character appearance in the games I enjoy.

Cool games that force me into the skin of a pre-made, pre-packaged protagonist, quite frankly, annoy me. Those set player characters rarely interest me deeply, and have never been close to any real concept of who I would prefer to be....

20 Free Copies of Pantheon Available

I recently published a new revision of my novel Pantheon. Now readers can read the novel serialized over 6 separate volumes, or as the original 700 page omnibus edition (in both print and ebook form). I can share the first volume with potential new readers, instead of foisting a huge tome on them.[image error]

To celebrate, I’ve put 20 FREE copies of the ebook version of Volume I up on Amazon. If you’ve been interested in reading my novel but not yet picked it up, here’s a chance to sample it and see if...

The Death of Giordano Bruno

I was writing today about the Campo de’Fiori in Rome (preparing a small waking guide for a friend soon to visit the city) and happened to notice that it was the 416th anniversary of the execution of Giordano Bruno, a personal hero of mine.

Bruno was originally a Dominican monk, but left the order to roam northern Europe and England, usually one step ahead of the Catholic Church who considered him a dangerous heretic. Bruno believed that the universe was divine in itself, and that such divini...

Crows: A Tyrant’s Empire

I mentioned in my last post that my new mystery novel A Murder of Crows on the Wall takes place in 209 CE. For most people in the Roman world, I suppose that year was one of relative calm and security, although they could easily remember violence and civil war. A North African military man named Septimius Severus had been their emperor for 16 years. In the beginning, he had been just one of four powerful men attempting to seize power after the assassination of the despotic Commodus (the vill...