This album has one bad song. All the others are so good that I keep giving “A Tale that Wasn’t Right” chance after chance, convinced that I must be missing out on its genius somehow. But it remains a bad song.

The rest of the tracks are classic German speed/power metal, with lots of riffs, huge choruses, and a pleasant sense of camp. Helloween is the band that can take you on a 14 minute progressive metal journey, and midway through, you get a lyrical reference to Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. The band’s childlike naivete and sense of humor is genuinely refreshing, and set them apart from a metal scene that was already becoming laughably self-serious.

Kai Hansen is a dominating songwriting force here. His high speed-cookers “I’m Alive” and “Twilight of the Gods” are very fast, the former more agitated, the latter more ambitious and story-driven. “A Little Time” and “Future World” are catchy midpaced rockers, the latter having its childlike melodies cut with creepy brainwashed lyrics – this isn’t power metal as much as Jim Jones metal.

“A Tale that Wasn’t Right” dull and sloppy, but Michael Kiske’s piercing voice is somewhat a point of interest. “Initiation” and “Follow the Sign” are little filler instrumentals that help add a little atmosphere between tracks. The Keeper albums aren’t concept albums as such, unless it’s possible to be a concept album without a concept. The only thing uniting them is the uniting them is the vaguely Nostradamus-like character of the Keeper, who has all of time and space floating within his cowl.

The final song is “Halloween” (A plus two E’s), an incredible recap of Helloween’s (three E’s) career to date: heavy Anthrax-esque thrash riffs, speedy tremolo picking, what seems to be several dozen harmonised guitar solos smashing together in a musical clown car collision, and Kiske nailing ungodly high notes. An astonishing blizzard of speed and technicality that pretty much set the bar on what’s possible with power metal – and yet the songwriting is clever enough that it can be condensed into a 5 minute single while still making sense.

The songs are great, and the lasting impression is one of grandeur, fun, and nostalgia. Sad, too. The Keeper of the Seven Keys diptych came too late to launch them to stardom. Come another couple of years and they’d be a band in ruins – destroyed from the inside by a depressed drummer and egomaniac singer, destroyed from the outside by the advent of grunge rock. By the time they recovered, the window of opportunity was gone. They’re still battling on, without Kai, Kiske, or Schwichtenberg, but they never regained what they’d had before.

With this album nearly twenty years old, its touching to remember the band that was king, if only for A Little Time.

This is the kind of game that gets called a “cult classic”. But who wants to be in a cult?

Released at the eleventh hour of platforming genre, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 sees you controlling the titular character against Devan Shell, a mendacious tortoise who has made the critical mistake of being the villain in a platforming game.

The game takes the concept of the first game and pushes it as far as it will go. Basically, think Sonic, but not as fast. Or think Mario, but a bit more edgy. Visually the game draws heavily from drug-trip psychedelia, and the soundtrack is mostly slap-bass acid funk. JJ2 is basically the hippie era put into a computer game, more so than any other game I know (except maybe Timothy Leary’s Mind Mirror). Jazz doesn’t smoke a bomber joint as part of his idle animation, but I guarantee the artists wanted him to.

You get to play as Jazz or his brother Spaz (Jazz can hover in mid-air like Mario in SMB3, while Spaz can double-jump), collecting jewels and killing enemies with guns, speed-dashes, even your ass (literally). The game simultaneously looks dated yet great. The background is an ever-morphing LSD light show of color, and the lighting effects of muzzle flashes (etc) are simple but dramatic. The hand-drawn sprites are fun and cartoony. You do stuff just to see how the characters will react.

The problem with Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is that it doesn’t seem like much of a game. The single player mode took me about three hours to beat on hard difficulty. The enemies are too easy, and the bosses are rote and predictable – crack the “code” and you can beat them blindfolded and in a body cast. The levels are not very interesting, and don’t invite another play-through.

It does, however, have an extensive multiplayer mode, as well as lavish level-editing and modding tools. Forget Mario or Sonic, this game’s true inspiration is Quake. Epic’s approach was to make a bare-bones product, and throw it over to the fans to put some meat on it. Their bet paid off. JJ2 spawned a community took this game and ran with it, producing all sorts of custom levels, mods, etc, some of which are pretty impressive (tip: download Tomb Rabbit).

The game itself isn’t much. It’s like a shitty movie that has a cult following who analyse every frame. It’s the fans that turned it into a product worth owning – JJ2 isn’t a game so much as a piece of real estate, something that’s only as good as what you’re prepared to do with it.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff in JJ2. But it’s rushed cool stuff, thrown in without much polish or thought. What’s the point of giving the player tons of weapons if most of them are useless? I think I used the pepper spray once and then never touched it again. Even Jazz is pretty useless next to his brother, who can reach all sorts of high places thanks to his double jump. Jazz gets completely upstaged in his own game.

I had some fun with Jazz Jackrabbit 2 back in the day, but I don’t expect to ever play it again. Like the hippie era it pastiches, it came and went, leaving only memories. It still has a dedicated following, but somehow the Kool Aid wasn’t strong enough in my case.

One of the books you’ve read even if you haven’t, because it’s influenced everything. A story about a vampire written before Dracula, Carmilla is set in a castle in Austria, right next door to Hungary, where the word vampire originates in the form of vampir. Hungary also furnished us with a person who was close to a real life vampire: Erzebet Bathory, who legends said bathed in the blood of virgins. Bathory had no immortality, but she nonetheless partook in the vampire contract: great power can be yours, but first you must be willing to feed on blood.

But these ideas are far away from Carmilla, which is whimsical, even a bit romantic in places. Le Fanu’s gothic horror is comforting and cossetting, full of soft corners and velvet edges. Laura, daughter of an English serviceman, strikes strikes up a friendship with an odd girl called Carmilla, who seemingly never ages, and becomes filled with rage when she hears a Christian hymn.

The romantic elements are between two female characters, and although Le Fanu writes for a 19th century audience, he obviously means to imply a sexual relationship. I’m reminded of how Hollywood’s Golden Age took place during the Hays censorship code, and it led to a lot of subtle and clever movies – with directors having to suggest or hint at things rather than say them out loud.

Modern readers will probably find Carmilla to be a bit dated. The conflict and resolution is speedily handled, propelled along by a few chance meetings that could be called very convenient for the plot. When the dust settles, it seems like it was all over much too easily.

Even worse, Carmilla is curiously shallow and unevocative. A vampire story needs an atmosphere. It needs to evoke the chilliness of the Alpine range, or the loneliness of the Carpathian forests, or the stately derelict of a crumbling castle. Carmilla is a “who? whom?” kind of story, driven almost entirely by character interactions, and it lacks the strong anchor of a convincing environment. The world Carmilla evokes is as thin as the paper it’s printed on.

Carmilla is a good example of a 19th century gothic story, but it’s probably more interesting for what it inspired than what it is. Soaring mountain peaks sit atop tons of necessary but unspectacular rock and gravel, and it’s often the same with books. Carmilla wasn’t state of the art even when it came out – The Monk by Matthew Lewis was written 75 years earlier, and is far stronger in most respects.

Le Fanu will probably never escape Carmilla’s shadow, although he published many other short stories and novellas. It’s probably best remembered as a literary version of Blade Runner: a fairly average film that changed everything.