For thirteen years, players of Command have dreamed of real-time multiplayer. And now…. it has arrived.
So let it be written, so let it be done: CMO v1.10 with real-time MP now available
Review: Ankoku Shinwa
Ankoku Shinwa (Dark Myth)
From the pen of horror mangaka Morohoshi Daijiro came Ankoku Shinwa, a seven chapter manga from 1976 that was turned into a two episode OVA in 1990. In it, teenager Takeshi finds he is simply a force in a cosmic war of gods and feuding ancient families. Its art is good, especially the monsters. Nothing else is.
The fact that a seven chapter manga was shrunk to two episodes without missing much tells a lot. What you get is the following:
- Good drawings/animations of monsters and mythical beings (again, the art has little complaint)
- CONSTANT exposition on the jumble of Asian religions that make up the backstory/reason for the manga
- Set pieces that only exist to provide the base for more exposition.
- Human villains who do nothing except fall victim to the Indiana Jones Villain Fate where they try to use something supernatural with predictably poor results.
- All of the above happens very, very slowly.
On one hand, the OVA is inevitably faster than the text manga. On the other, it has the production values of what you’d expect a low budget OVA to have. So… not really ideal either way. It’s a shame, the concept could have been done better.
Review: Boeing 707 Group
Boeing 707 Group
Graham Simons’ next book about Boeing planes I’m reviewing is not as good as the 737 book. This is about the 707. It is also full of British sour grapes and has no coherence, talking about things like LBJ’s swearing in and the book/movie Airport (!). There are much better technical resources on the 707 that don’t involve strawmen.
The 707 does deserve to be taken down to earth a little, but this book is a full-bore Controlled Flight Into Terrain.
Yep, This Is It
So my time for Fuldapocalypse has basically ended. Am I outright stopping the blog the way I did for the Creative Corner? No. However, and this is important, I no longer feel obligated to update it. So if I make one post every few months or move to a different platform or just leave it (don’t worry, I will keep it up as an archive) I don’t know. But Fuldapocalypse has ceased to be really interesting for me as a creative endeavor.
But I’m not sad or angry or disappointed. Fuldapocalypse started as a way to try and catalog a genre (conventional 1980s WW3) I thought was huge. It turned out to be too small to support a blog and my format too limiting. But then I found that it could become a general review blog. Then a general blog. I wrote and read and expanded all my horizons so massively. I could finally open my eyes and see the elephant in front of me.
So this blog has provided eight (!) great years of content, fun, and education. I remain extremely proud of it.
Literary Survivorship Bias
People are lamenting, and not unreasonably so, that people are losing the ability to process literature. However, I believe that A: Such a thing did not really exist, and B: If it did, it was something along the lines of “past generations knew how to ride horses better.”
I think the reason is survivorship bias, which my reading of decades worth of cheap thrillers has shown. Basically, people see the literary works that endured in popular conciousness, not the far cruder ones people actually read.
Review: Boeing 737
Boeing 737: The World’s Most Controversial Commercial Jetliner
Graham Simons brings his aviation writing talents to work on the archetypical airliner, the 737. His book is fittingly named Boeing 737. In it, he tells the full long story of a plane that was at first believed to be an ugly duckling nobody wanted, that ironically survived in its early period due to a government contract, became the world-beating airliner extraordinaire, and got pushed forward past its diminishing returns in the present.
The early 737 survived on exports as union requirements for three crew despite the aircraft being designed only for two from the start, with United the only major American operator. Despite this slow start, it became the centerpiece of a company.
I would say that this book is excellent but has the problem of being broader than it is deep. For instance, we get long writeups of individual operators complete with huge photos and detailed descriptions of individual accidents like the Aloha Airlines loss of the roof. Yet, the word “deregulation” (the Airline Deregulation Act and its equivalents internationally) only appears once. As this was what propelled the 737 to its heights, such a context would be much appreciated. But as a coffee table book this is wonderful.
Review: The Quiet War
The Quiet War
I must confess by this point I read The Quiet War just because I wanted to see just how far down Mark Hewitt’s Duncan Hunter series could go. Two chapters in, I was not disappointed. We get a padded flashback chapter where every single technical name is spelled out in full like it was a late Gold Eagle book, and then an example of the gargantuan homophobia the series became infamous for. And another. And another. The “flashback” chapters reach double digits, treating us to such horrors from the main character’s perspective as The Beatles.
This is not a book about a super-plane, even though there’s a chapter where it effortlessly crushes its opposition (like it has always done in the series). This is a book about gay communists. This sounds like some online insult, but it’s actually the factual book subject matter (besides said squash and a past article about the main character finding a treasure chest.) Tirades about how a cabal of gay communists were steered by the USSR into sabotaging America make up most of this. And the previous book. And…
So this isn’t even amusingly bad. It’s just on repeat.
Happy 250th 4th of July
Happy 250th 4th of July to all my American readers!
The Dumbest Air Disaster
In 2024, Air Serbia Flight 324 (barely) made it off the ground and sailed into history as quite possibly the dumbest pilot error air disaster of all time.
The crash thankfully didn’t result in loss of life, although it could very well have been catastrophic.
At first glance, this was like Comair 5191 or Singapore Airlines 006 where a plane moved to a wrong, too-short runway and tried to take off from it. Except here the ATC caught them having moved to the middle of the runway instead of the end and warned them. They acknowledged-and then decided to try and take off from the half-runway anyway.
At least PIA 8303 was already in the air and trying to land. This was safe on the ground when the crew decided to do something as risky as it was dumb. Fortunately, the only casualties were the hull of the plane and the lessor airline’s contract with Air Serbia.
Conflict
It’s hard to believe a contemporary Cold War Hot game existed. But it did, in the form of NES’s Conflict.
