Author: coilerxii

A Thousand Words: Aqua Teen Hunger Force

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Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Now Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the most misunderstood show on television. See, most people perceived it as a crude, absurdist, and surreal Adult Swim animation that made South Park look highbrow and subtle. A place featuring the strange happenings of straight man (or straight hovering box of french fries with a beard) Frylock, delightfully immature meatball Meatwad, and idiotic troublemaking drinking cup Master Shake. And their human neighbor Carl.

No. They have it all wrong. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is actually a nature documentary showing viewers the hidden, wondrous and fearsome at the same time place known as New Jersey. People don’t get it, but they just don’t get that this is what Jersey is like.

Seriously, it’s great for what it sets out to do.

Paradrops

On By coilerxiiIn EssayLeave a comment

The problem with large parachute drops, especially post-World War II, is that you need to be able to get a bunch of large transport planes to the DZ. However, if you are able to do that, chances are you won’t need to do something as risky as a parachute landing anyway.

Then you run into the issue of whether or not the resources spent on guarding the paradrop are worth it or not. There’s a reason why large operational/strategic paradrops are more in the theoretical than real. However, even theoretical offers an advantage. The force in being strategy means that a defender must prepare for the possibility that a paradrop could happen.

A Thousand Words: Nip For Speed

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Nip For Speed

One rarely encounters a work of fiction, much less a video game as deep and enlightening as Nip For Speed. It is a point and click adventure game where you, sitting in the front seat, have to help a cat drive a car. The game is very short but I had a hugely fun time laughing my head off at it.

Make of this what you will, be it a game on materialism, a lecture on the beauty and stress of travel, or just a silly surreal game where you help a cat drive a car.

Review: Star Wars Incredible Cross Sections

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Star Wars: Incredible Cross Sections

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the Star Wars prequels and their merchandise machine rolled into action, an interesting reference book series emerged. This was Dorling Kindersley’s Incredible Cross Sections. I remembered (and loved) similar books as a child showing real things ranging from Boeing 747s to T-34/85 tanks to old age of sail warships. So the art is beautifully done, even if there are issues like the Millennium Falcon being impossible to square totally with its interior and exterior differences.

So these are beautiful books. Unfortunately, the later ones were marred by a controversial author, Curtis Saxton. Saxton’s story is a nerd’s dream come true: An astrophysicist and Star Wars fan who became the writer of a site called the Star Wars Technical Commentaries. Getting to write official material would have been something.

There were two main issues with Saxton. The first is that he was a maximalist who tried to squish the incredibly soft space fantasy of Star Wars into a Stephen Baxterian hard plausible mold. Yes he gives technically accurate numbers for a galactic scale civilization-but it just doesn’t mesh with the actual movies. The second was his fixation on the “Endor Holocaust” (no really he used the exact name) where the debris from the Death Star would have wiped out the Ewok species. Imagine if a Star Trek fan was absolutely adamant that transporters were ‘destructive teleportation’ (ie killing/destroying the original subject and making a copy on the other side). (Ironically the Warhammer 40k fandom has a section like this in the opposite direction, where every Imperial Guardsman is a special forces equivalent elite soldier and most of the human population lives on advanced peaceful civilized worlds).

So not for the first or last time, it was someone plopping their fanfiction into “canon” in a way that didn’t quite fit. But at least the pictures were and are incredible.

Another Operator-Ette

On By coilerxiiIn ArtLeave a comment
Image made in Stable Diffusion

One of the things I love doing in Stable Diffusion is adding in a bunch of stylistic prompts and applying it to someone in a military uniform. This young lady here is one of my favorite recent generations.

A Thousand Words: Chains of Freedom

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Chains of Freedom

the XCOM-esque game Chains of Freedom is a new turn-based strategy game that I’ve just completed. It’s well, uh, something. So I wouldn’t have finished the game if it was bad , but man is there so much that drags it and keeps it from being what could have been. A lot of it.

The first issue is the story and setting. Do you want Brown Age throwback graphics of one Cyrillic wasteland after another? Do you want a plot and setting that’s what you’d get if you prompted an AI to go “Make me a science fiction setting based on Command and Conquer, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Metro, and throw in a couple of general cliches for good measure”? Do you want characters who are either dull or who you’ll hate from the start?

Then there’s the gameplay. Probably the most distinct thing about it compared to other XCOM-likes is that you have to scrounge and craft for items between battles. This is one of those things that’s a lot better in theory than in practice. Other than that, it’s a pretty standard “cover turn based strategy.” Which is a problem when you get into the final act and the game throws monotonous giant swarm after monotonous giant swarm at you. As if to compensate, the last few encounters and the final boss are anticlimactically easy.

This is a 49% game. And as the last couple of Super Bowls have shown for the team that bears that name, close doesn’t let you win. (Hey, gotta drop a football reference on NFL Draft day!)

Review: The Shot That Kills You

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The Shot That Kills You

A short story centered around one of the most realistic and sensible Warhammer Astartes chapters, The Shot That Kills You is about the Raptors. As it’s short and explody, one shouldn’t expect it to be anything except short and explody. Which it succeeds massively at.

It’s good enough to wash away the internet cruft surrounding the Raptors, who are the poster child for what I like to call the “Gothic-style Halo” ‘fans’ of Warhammer 40k, where the setting is tried to be made respectable and its exaggerated elements downplayed in a manner that annoys me. Thankfully it’s not the case here-an Astartes seemingly flees and lures the overconfident xenos into a trap, not uplinking to his servo-skull drone and calling down a Whirlwind missile strike that obliterates the melee duelists.