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A very honourable winner. Congrats MrT.
 
coz1 said:
Though I doubt seriously that - Friedrich's Ambition (A Saxony AAR) - needs a showcase to pick up any new reader's, it certainly is a must read for anyone curious about the new game. You've cornered the market so far on EUIII AARs MrT. ;)

Congrats on the showcase. :) I'll be most interested to see who you pass it on to next week.
Hehe.

Well rich-love sent me a PM the other day to say that he'd been thinking of this, and my reply was much the same as yours (that I doubted the AAR was flying under anyone's radar atm). I said the decision was up to him, in any event. As to who I shall pass it on to next week...you'll find out next Monday. :p

Nevertheless; thanks to rich-love for the honour and thanks to all for the kind words. Time permitting, I'll see if I can shake off a little of my AAR rust and produce something with a little more literary merit once the game is released. I'm looking forward to seeing the AARs that the rest of you will write when you get your hands on the game. Undoubtedly my monopoly on EU3 AARs will be very short-lived indeed.
 
Congrats MrT, and thanks for the really entertaining look at EUIII. :)
 
A little bird just reminded me that I need to pick this week's showcase; but to be honest, thinks are rather...er...hectic right now and I haven't had time to do any reading of current AARs. For me to pick one at random would hardly be fair to the community, so I've asked CatKnight to select one for me that he thinks would be appropriate.

But....if anyone has a bit of time and would like something to cuddle with something that's a glorious, side-splitting read, one of my all-time favourite AARs is Chris Heagarty's Tales of the Gluttonic Knights. If you haven't read it, you should. :)

Thanks again for the honour of being this past week's showcase.

Chris
 
CatKnight said:
The idea (behind the Weekly Showcase) is to select a single AAR ... that deserves everyone's attention and focus on it.

I find sometimes it helps to go to that first post, now almost two years ago and remind myself what my intentions were when together we restarted the Showcase back in February '05.

I managed to stuff a lot into that sentence, more than I probably thought at the time. Together we've used this award to welcome newcomers who knew how to entertain us. We've congratulated veterans on once more pulling something meaningful out for us to read. We've stared in awe as someone found new ways to tell us something important, and we've laughed at cynical, almost resigned humor at the expense of our old friend, our old enemy, the AI. Together we've highlighted what is best about AARland. Thank you.

In that spirit, I want to pull out a gem one more time, polish it, and hold it up for all to see. This writer waged open war for control of this story for almost THREE years. He introduced us to a young man, taught us to care for him, then steered him through a wild series of adventures.

Hidden in there, far beneath gunfights, love and betrayal, is a message. Roughly translated, to me it comes out as: You are not your past. You are not a computer running some program with a predestined stopping point. If you don't like what you see, then you can fix it.

Powerful idea. Powerful AAR. One of the shining jewels of AARland.

And thus, I will deliver this award unto one of its first winners. Two years ago it was 'only' brilliant. It ended a masterpiece.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Into the West, by Coz1!
 
A most masterful tale, and well deserving a final spin. Congrats coz1!
 
A humongously brilliant work, and truly the AAR of the week! Congrats to coz - you deserved it and more.
 
It deserves an Oscar for cinematography, too. Coz1's ability to set a scene and then play it out is just terrific. 'Into the West' isn't just an homage to great western films, it is the script for a great western film.
 
just started reading it a bit ago, am on page 4. definitely deserves aar of the week :cool: :D
 
Very nice choice. Congratulations coz1 :)
 
What a nice Christmas present! Thank you to everyone who has said many nice things in this thread as well as those that read and followed over in Vickie! It means a great deal to me, both your support and the work itself.

When I last saw this AAR showcased, it was March of 2005 and I was just about halfway through. I did not doubt I would finish, but I was not sure when that would be. There were some definite periods when the writing was not working for me and I wasn't sure when it would get going again. I can thank many people for helping - most surely my readers who wanted another update, but also the many, many great works done around here. Often times, reading someone else's great work gave me that little push I needed to get the ball rolling once more.

I am very pleased to see the wonderful reaction it has received since completion. And I do hope some new readers might pop in and take a look. But I warn you - it is rather lengthy. :rolleyes: There are pdf links in my signature that might make reading easier, however.

Thanks to CatKnight for picking a great time to highlight the work again and thanks again to all of you for speaking so highly of Sonny Gamble's journey. As I said, it truly means a lot to me. :)
 
after starting this morning, as mentioned, I'm somewhere in chapter VIII, post 909 :eek:

brilliant stuff, the concept behind it reminds me very much of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which I read for school just last year. I remember what my teacher said about it, that they could be anywhere and do anything they wanted, but they just had to be in certain places in certain times no matter what, and they would die in the end no matter what. dunno how Into the West ends, but I can certainly see you're taking the same concept and running with it :D
 
Myth said:
dunno how Into the West ends, but I can certainly see you're taking the same concept and running with it :D
And as a special bonus, Into the West doesn't have all that dumb coin-flipping! :) Fate. "No! These are only daydreams, and fate awakens you to reality." Great, now I have an image of Tchaikovsky in a saloon.

Director makes me wonder: so, everyone ............ who would you cast in Into the West: The Movie?
 
Hajji Giray I said:
Director makes me wonder: so, everyone ............ who would you cast in Into the West: The Movie?
I told Coz a long time ago I thought Sonny was Josh Hartnett.

Congratulations, Coz! Most definitely well earned and deserved!

Rensslaer