"Ah, my old love."

I got the mini-gun in Serious Sam 3 last night.  It's Sam's trademark weapon, and that line, "Ah, my old love.", is the same line he utters when he gets the gun in the first game.  I smiled at that.

I'm obviously not at home, currently, so I'll refrain from talking about the game anymore since I don't have access to my screenshots.  There's a certain new kind of enemy new to this game that I want to mention, but I'd like the picture to go with it.

So instead, let's discuss how things are faring in 11/22/63.  I did more reading than I did gaming last night anyway.

When last I left our intrepid hero, he had just returned back from the past.  Before he committed himself to actually going back and stopping Oswald from killing the president, he wanted to change something smaller and observe the "butterfly effect" of his actions by returning to 2011.  In the back of my mind, I wondered how this was going to work.  The portal always takes you back to the same instant in the past, and every time is a reset.  That means, if you go through the portal a second time and then immediately turn around and return to the present, you'll erase everything you changed during your first trip.  That meant Jake was going to have to save Harry Dunning's family twice.  I wondered how King was going to pull that off without boring the reader.  (Why would we want to read the same thing twice?)

I assumed he would either make the second time a lot quicker, or he'd make it different so as to keep it interesting.  He ended up doing both.

In any case, Jake observed the impact his changes made.  One thing shocked me, and it did so simply because it shouldn't have.  I should have seen it coming a mile away.  Jake saved Harry from being crippled by his father (and saved his mother and all but one of his siblings, too).  His goal was to see if Harry would still be a janitor at the school where he teaches in 2011.  After all, if the guy was no longer a cripple nor slow from having his skull caved in, he probably wouldn't be a janitor, right?

Turns out Harry dies in Vietnam instead.

So instead of saving him from the life of being crippled, he basically takes at least 40 years off his life.  Oops.

Jake's pissed at first, of course, damning the whole thing, the portal, and even the guy who showed it to him.  But after calming down, he realizes something:  If he does it again, and also stays to stop Oswald from killing Kennedy (which is his ultimate goal in the first place), there probably won't BE a Vietnam War.

King fits this together so very nicely.  It's master storytelling at work.

The one other thing that I found fascinating was the idea that the past doesn't want to be changed.  It's obdurate, as King puts it.  As Jake gets ready to stop Frank Dunning from murdering his family, several things try to stop him.  Actually, that's not right.  Several things -happen-.  It's time itself that's trying to stop him.  He wakes up with a blinding migraine.  (He's never had a migraine in all his life.)  The banister for the stairs snaps, sending him nearly tumbling down them head first.  A hole appears in the pocket of his new slacks, nearly causing him to lose his keys.  The battery cable in his car comes unfastened.  Two of his spark plugs corrode.  His spare tire is flat.  It's directly suggested that all of these things are the past's way of resisting change.  It's trying to stop Jake from meddling, and I find that fascinating.

It's also suggested that eventually you can "break through", and it all stops.  When Jake does "break through", his headache subsides almost immediately and he's able to change we he came to change.  It's also stated that the amount of resistance time itself will give is directly proportional to how big the change is.  Stopping Frank Dunning probably affected a -lot- of people.  He ended up not murdering his family, so all of them would live and affect the lives of who knows how many?  That's a pretty substantial change, and look at how big of a fight the past put up.

Imagine how many lives will be altered by stopping Oswald.  It utterly boggles the mind.  I cannot imagine what kind of resistance Jake is going to encounter trying to do this, and I can't wait to find out.