#deathtrack!

[all-action-all-picture]

Warlord No. 532, dated 1 December 1984. Deathtrack! cover, possibly by Terry Patrick. DC Thomson.

[hercarisntyours]

FINALLY TFONE BLOKEES ANNOUNCEMENT i need elita now or i'll stick dynamite up my

👵🏽 me as fuck after waiting 73 years to see them after the tfnation announcement (it's been a month)

[retrocgads]

USA 1990

[trashmenace]

Death ed Stuart David Schiff

Death ed Stuart David Schiff 1982, Playboy Paperbacks

Two Bottles of Relish by Lord Dunsany (orig Time & Tide, Nov 12, 1932)

A variation on a locked door mystery - a body disposal without leaving the house mystery. This one stayed with me since childhood, though the premise wasn't as locked in as it could be.

Deathtracks by Dennis Etchison

A Nielson family survey taker visits a couple who look for hidden messages in TV laugh tracks to explain why their son died in Vietnam.

Always Together by Hugh B. Cave

One elderly twin murders the other and keeps up a ruse that she's still alive. A good setup for a twist in the tale which never happens.

Toilet Paper Run by Juleen Brantingham

Engaging story set in a girls' reform school, but the ending felt tacked on to fit the genre.

The Green Parrot by Joseph Payne Brennan (orig Weird Tales, July 1952)

Another boring entry in the "that person you thought was alive turns out was already dead" style of ghost story.

Fragment from a Charred Diary by Davis Grubb

Comedy piece about a man using a voodoo doll to commit the political assassinations of the 1960s, escalating from there.

The Scarf by Bernice Balfour

A disfigured woman concealing her face with a scarf and a curious newspaper delivery boy.

Sentences by Richard Christian Matheson

Comedy twist in the tale about a man getting his life rewritten.

Prickly by David A. Riley

A child corrupting Satanist with a monkey familiar kills himself in a British tenement building. Years later, strange creatures scuttle the halls, and children sing nursery rhymes about Prickly.

The Kennel by Maurice Level (orig Tales of Mystery and Horror, 1920)

A cuckold husband finds the body of his wife's lover and disposes of it.

Onawa by Alan Ryan

An adoptive native girl with a taste for blood

A Telephone Booth by Wade Kenny

A gambler can get tips from the future from a pay phone.

Straw Goat by Ken Wiseman

Folk horror with murderous farmers and a sacrificial straw goat.

Horrible Imaginings by Fritz Leiber

Long piece about a creep being obsessed with his neighbor, which I skipped.

The Blind Spot by Saki (orig Beasts and Super-Beasts, 1914)

Comedy piece about a killer servant.

The Dust by Al Sarrantonio

A simpleton shut-in is obsessed with dust.

It Grows on You by Stephen King

A vignette of small town misery which feels more like background to a fuller story. It's been re-written a few times, and later versions may be more tied in to the Castle Rock mythos and be more explicitly horrific. Something about a house getting a new wing built connected with people dying, but not much meat on the bones here.

The Copper Bowl by George Fielding Eliot (orig Weird Tales, December 1928)

Nasty proto-shudder pulp yellow peril story of a French Legionnaire's love being tortured by a Chinese despot.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3vkEvlR

[ega-aesthetics]

[domidextrus]

Okay, so considering Strong Bad’s about to Let’s Play the games that were name-dropped on the floppy disks in his SBEmails, these games will be next (not necessarily in that order) on Disk 4 of 12. (Game titles with a strikethrough have already been covered.)

LONG LIST AHEAD!!

FriendlyWare PC Introductory Set

World Games

Vampire's Castle Adventure (Technically not a game that was referenced on the desk's floppy box. Strong Bad picked it because it was the main inspiration for Thy Dungeonman.)

Tongue of the Fatman (aka Mondu’s Fight Palace, aka Slaughter Sport)

Lode Runner

Loom

Starflight

Rise of the Dragon

Manhunter: New York

Odell Lake

The 7th Guest

Tass Times in Tonetown

One on One

Out of this World (aka Another World)

Nitemare 3D

Nobunaga’s Ambition

Seicross

Bio Menace

Maniac Mansion

HyperBlade

BAAL

Caveman Ugh-lympics

Some classic Tengen games

Alone in the Dark

Bushido

Thexder

Lunar Lander

Deathtrack

Spy VS Spy

Future Wars

Miner 2049er

Battle Chess

Colorado

Fiendish Freddy’s Big Top o’ Fun

Marble Craze

Karateka

The Newsroom

Wraith

Crush, Crumble & Chomp

Dunjonquest: Curse of Ra

Genghis Khan

Low G Man

Axe of Rage (aka Barbarian II: Dungeons of Drax)

Swashbuckler

Sam & Max Hit the Road

Gold Rush

Codename: ICEMAN

Below the Root

Weird Dreams

Some classic Brøderbund games

California Games

The Legend of Kyrandia games

MasterType

Silpheed

BioForge

Low Blow

Drakkhen

Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty

LHX: Attack Chopper

Dark Seed

Rise of the Triad

The Colonel's Bequest

The Ancient Art of War

Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe

D

Heart of China

Ballistix

Gamma Force in Pit of a Thousand Screams

4-D Boxing (aka 4D Sports Boxing)

The Secret of Monkey Island

Return to Zork

Relentless (aka Little Big Adventure)

Mutant League Football

Flashback: The Quest for Identity

RAMA

MegaRace

Icon: Quest for the Ring

Some other games/software that had also been referenced but remains to be seen whether they’ll also be showcased:

King’s Quest II & Police Quest II (were on barely-legible floppies in Puppet Time, Brothers Chaps confirmed the names on the floppies in DVD commentary, unsure of whether that counts)

Shogun (appeared in Strong Bad Is In Jail Cartoon, unsure of whether that counts)

War of the Ring (appeared in the DVD menu of strongbad_email.exe Disc Two, unsure of whether that counts)

The Oregon Trail 1 & 2 (appeared in Main Page 22, unsure of whether that counts)

Hunt the Wumpus (appeared in the 2005 April Fools toon, unsure of whether that counts)

Cakewalk (not a game, but a MIDI sequencer)

Logo (not a game, but a programming language)

[toyswelike1]

The Toy Chronicle | CORDVIPER Deathtracker Machbones captain x Ironbabylon

The Toy Chronicle | CORDVIPER Deathtracker Machbones captain x Ironbabylon

CORDVIPER fans brace yourselves! Missed out on CORDVIPER’s Deathtracker Machbones captain x Ironbabylon last month? moguranoana has your back! forget the GI Joe, Kamen riders, SilverHawks and power rangers the real deal is here and ready to send shockwaves through your collection. Not only Deathtracker Machbones Captain, Ironbabylon from CORDVIPER also gets the international release. Love that…

[humor-y-videojuegos]

La carrera de la muerte

[martinmcg]

Dennis Etchison

About fifteen years ago I was given a book to review by the then editor of Vector – it was Fine Cuts, by Dennis Etchison. It was the first book I’d read by him, but in a (too brief – he didn’t write enough) binge I immediately tore through the rest of them. There was something about his slightly sly, slightly sparse style that really appealed to me. Since he’s passed away today, I thought I’d dig out that old review and put it up.

Fine Cuts by Dennis Etchison (PS Publishing, 2004)

I have never been to the USA, yet through television, film and books I have the idea that I know many of its cities intimately. They’re not communities or centres of commerce, they’re movie stars – no more substantial and no less the fruits of conscientious image manipulation. And, like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood they may appear in different stories, they may get cast in different roles, but they always play themselves.

I have a soft spot for New York, that I imagine as a braggart that blusters and boasts to disguise a sentimental core. Washington’s capitol might shine like a beacon but it can’t disguise the fact that its foundations are in the swamp. Las Vegas would fiddle while Rome burned if it wasn’t busy looting everything not nailed down.

But, of all the American cities, Los Angeles has the firmest grip on my imagination. It shines like a jewel in the films of Michael Mann (Heat and Collateral) but, like a dame in a Chandler story, it’s really as dangerous and duplicitous as Jake Gittes’s Chinatown. Los Angeles burns through natural resources (oil on its freeways, water on verdant desert lawns, human talent in its business) with a reckless disregard for renewal while poverty and racial tension gnaw at its foundations.

It’s a terrible city and yet it is also irresistible.

In story after story throughout Fine Cuts, Dennis Etchison captures this weird, scary but compulsively fascinating place perfectly.

I must confess that I was completely unaware of Dennis Etchison before receiving this book to review so I should point that many of you may already be familiar with the stories contained here. Fine Cuts contains no new work by an author whose output falls some way short of prolific. The twelve stories included in this volume by PS Publishing first appeared between 1973 and 2001 and most (perhaps all) have previously been collected elsewhere.

Still, as a jumping on point for new readers, this volume is very rewarding and I think even those familiar with Etchison’s work may find the decision to group these particular stories – all of which share Hollywood and the associated media industry as a setting or theme – rewarding.

There is nothing gothic about Etchison’s writing style – his prose is spare, almost invisible but his stories have a knack for getting under your skin, upsetting your equilibrium and re-emerging from your subconscious days later in disturbing and unexpected ways. Perhaps my favourite of all these stories is “The Dog Park” which, on the surface, is simply about a man returning to a park to look for his lost pooch, but Etchison invests it with a powerful sense of loss and desperation.

That idea of having lost something – missed opportunities, wasted talent, vanished innocence – and being unable to escape the consequences of that loss permeates these stories. In “Deadspace”, “When They Gave Us Memory”, “Inside the Cackle Factory”, “The Spot” and “Deathtracks” the characters become trapped in relationships or patterns of living from which they cannot drag themselves free. In “Calling All Monsters” and “The Late Shift” Etchison traps his characters in their own bodies, to quite chilling effect. This is a landscape where no one wins, even those that have made it big – like the former child-star in “The Last Reel”, the actress in “I Can Hear The Dark” or the game show host in “Gotta Kill ‘Em All” – soon come to realise that success is fleeting and that it is without substance or worth.

Like the sun-bleached skull of a steer in the Californian desert, Etchison’s characters are stripped bare, their pretensions torn away, their hopes shredded until all that’s left is a brittle shell. But these aren’t dour stories. I found that I read most of them with a grin on my face – Etchison has a sardonic wit that surfaces (albeit sometimes quite nastily) in almost every tale.

The humour is one key factor in leavening what might otherwise be a rather stodgy collection. The other is that no matter how much Etchison highlights the soul-sucking banality and insincerity of Los Angeles, he returns again and again to describe in intimate detail the city and its people. He is clearly, in his own way, in love with this city and seems no more capable of escaping Los Angeles than the characters in his stories.

Dennis Etchison was originally published on Welcome To My World

[all-action-all-picture]

Warlord No. 538, dated 12 January 1985. Deathtrack! cover. DC Thomson.

[all-action-all-picture]

Warlord No. 543, dated 16 February 1985. Deathtrack! cover by Terry Patrick.

I think the vehicle shown on the cover is a modified Rolls-Royce Armoured Car. They were introduced in WW1, using the chassis of the Silver Ghost, and stayed in service during WW2. Later models used the Rolls hull on a Fordson chassis and became known as Fordson Armoured Cars (below, Fordson were part of the Ford Motor Company). DC Thomson.

[ega-aesthetics]

[trashmenace]

Deathtracks by Dennis Etchison

Deathtracks

by Dennis Etchison Originally in Death, 1982

A Nielson family survey taker visits a couple who look for hidden messages in TV laugh tracks to explain why their son died in Vietnam.

Collected in Talking in the Dark, available from Amazon 

[trashmenace]

NRV Cruiserweight Gauntlet Round 7

While properly unnerving, Deathtracks read like a premise without a story, but more meat on the bone than Shambleau. Dennis Etchison faces the final challenge as the Gauntlet concludes!

[humor-y-videojuegos]

La carrera de la muerte

[ega-aesthetics]