Tag: Review

A Thousand Words: Red Ape Family

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Red Ape Family

NFTs, or “Non-Fungible Tokens”, were one of the most shameless fads of all time. Unlike previous market bubbles like tulip bulbs or Death of Superman comic books, these offered no practical value. In fact, what they even are is hard to explain. The closest normal person equivalent is a receipt.

So normal cryptocurrencies are “fungible” in the sense that as long as they’re in circulation, one dollar bill is functionally the same as another. Non-fungible means distinct, like say, an explicit receipt. Why would you spend a million dollars on a receipt for a transaction of a picture of a badly drawn monkey? The answer is a combination of get-rich suckers and wash trading (despite the name, not directly money laundering).

But I digress. So Red Ape Family, about a family of bored red apes who steal a drive full of the most valuable NFTs and go to Mars, is…. to call it a toy commercial would be an insult to toy commercials. More like a get rich quick infomercial made by someone with no talent whose sense of humor was a single episode of later Family Guy.

The existence of this is more interesting than any of the “gags” itself.

Review: Labyrinth

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Labyrinth

An early Jon Land novel that somehow escaped my eye until now, Labyrinth has every note I know him for. There’s a super conspiracy with super weapons to take over the world, infighting within said super-conspiracy, and a crazy plot that ends in a crazier set piece (this one involves old warbird propeller planes).

This by Jon Land’s standards isn’t the best simply because it’s too conventional. If this was my first Land book I’d probably have loved it more, but I know he can do goofier (and thus better) in hindsight. Oh well.

Review: Speedrunning

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Speedrunning: Interviews With The Quickest Gamers

David Snyder in Speedrunning tackles the titular way of playing video games. It looks good on paper, interviewing numerous champion speedrunners and explaining how the basics work. The problem is its format and layout. It’s like trying to play Dark Souls on a drum set, and he doesn’t quite manage it.

So this first consists of explanations of speedrunning, which are a little cookie-cutter but still essentially accurate for an absolute beginning. Then Snyder gets to interviewing speedrunners, which isn’t really the best way to go about it. I might be a little stereotypical, but speedrunners are a group not generally known for their wit or sociability. More importantly and specifically, the interview subjects go straight into huge technical details which contrast with the basics given elsewhere in the book. I don’t blame them, but I blame Snyder for not integrating it better.

A bigger problem is that it’s using text to describe a visual medium. There’s no shortage of speedrun history/explanation videos , and almost all of the record speedruns themselves can be easily seen. Reading a book about it simply can’t compare, even if Snyder was a lot better. So that’s why I can’t recommend this.

A Thousand Words: NARC

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NARC

The 1988 Williams arcade game NARC is probably the most 1980s piece of interactive media developed. Playing as super-cops in biker helmets Max Force and Hit Man, you blast your way through a drug empire of hobos, dealers, weed-growing Rambos, prostitute-kidnapping clowns, henchmen who couldn’t decide if they wanted to dress like mobsters or construction workers, and attack dogs, ruled by a giant biomechanical head-worm. None of that is exaggerated or false.

There is nothing subtle or easy about this game. It’s meant to have you win solely by pushing in quarters. (Who’s the addiction inducing dealer now?) But it is fun and is well, incredibly 1980s.

Review: Initial D Volume 1

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Initial D Volume 1

Note: The specific thing I reviewed was Initial D omnibus Volume 1 which is actually the first two manga volumes in one book. But whatever.

Reading the legendary racing series in original manga form made me think that… the anime kind of superannuated it. Ok, I already knew what happened from seeing the anime (spoiler alert: Takumi wins), and while the manga has some distinct diffferences (like the order of races), it’s not all that different. Certainly not different enough to be easily better or worse. This isn’t a “behind every good 1970s movie is a bad 1970s book” type of deal.

But it’s pretty self-explanatory how much better in motion picture form a car racing series works. Having one large panel (even if well-drawn) of two cars at a turn with a huge comic “VROOOM!” sound effect just isn’t the same as watching two cars (even if they’re from PS1/N64-era CGI) zip around the same turn. I don’t blame Shigeno for anything. It’s just the format is a lot inherently less capable.

Review: Airlords of the Ozarks

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Twilight 2000: Airlords of the Ozarks

Twilight 2000 had the problem of reaching a good stopping point (escaping Europe) but then being commercially successful enough to continue. Airlords of the Ozarks is a very blatant example of how the style shifted, to the point where I once used the phrase “Arkansas vs. the Blimps” to describe other settings doing the same.

I feel now that GDW might have written itself into a corner and for better or worse had to change tack instead of copy-pasting classic adventures only in different continents. But to go from brutal survival to almost Jon Land/Mack Maloney level conflicts against airships with nuclear missiles? It may have been too far in the opposite direction. But I don’t fault them for trying.

Plus Airlords is still vastly, vastly better than the abomination that is Kidnapped!

A Thousand Words: Heading Out

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Heading Out

I saw “road trip” themed games and got Heading Out on a lark. I want to say that it was a worthwhile playthrough simply because of the feelings it generated and how at the very least it was interesting. But to be honest, this is a game where the messaging actually felt insulting to me.

So the gameplay itself is moderate roguelike resource management between driving set-pieces that control like a second-rate arcade racer from the mid 90s. I think it says something about its interest that I turned the difficulty down at the first chance. Beyond that, the best strategy is to frequently cut off road, which doesn’t feel right. Which unfortunately meant I had to experience the plot. Oh boy, the plot.

You’re a faceless figure on a trip of reckless driving in the 1970s USA. Through a series of not-exactly difficult deductions, it’s revealed the player is stuck in a Groundhog Day loop after being tricked into a deal with the devil. Is it real or metaphorical? I know it’s pretentious. As they go west to face the “world’s greatest driver” (an instant obvious hallucination), they develop a reputation as the “Interstate Jackalope” and various people comment on them (and other things) over the radio. This is the worst part of the game. The music itself ranges from serviceable to very good, with a lot of guitars and early 1970s electronics (think electric organs).

The “talk radio” is not. It is what happened if someone took the anti-American axe-grindiness of Grand Theft Auto at its worst but with none of the goofiness, and (even?) worse quality all around. It’s honestly one of the most mean-spirited pieces of fiction I’ve seen. Like the overwhelming theme is of some bitter underemployed elitist screeching at everything and everyone. You have the screaming right-wing host who is designed both to be completely wrong about everything while also being sanded down to the point where he can’t be as vile as a real George Wallace-era figure of that time and place would be. There’s a ripoff of the movie Network desperate host broadcasting and two liberal women who are supposed to be better than Mr. Right Wrong but who you’re also supposed to sneer at (see what I meant?), and the literal (drug?) devil who’s providing social commentary that is still supposed to be profound but ends up being the ramblings of someone who just read A Peoples History of the United States while listening to turn of the millennium whine-rock.

Also the story scenes/adventure book style choices you encounter are variations of: “I don’t really care because this is all a time loop/crazy drug-induced hallucination anyway” – “the same bitter nihilistic things you had to listen to now you have to read and watch” and, in my least favorite scene, treating immigrants who are sincerely in awe of America’s wealth with barely concealed subtext of them being naive fools and not, you know, people who actually have firsthand knowledge of what real poverty and oppression is like.

Anyway, I spited the game by ramming into as many things on the road as I could while giving my character the least sympathetic backstory in the choices allowed. (He was an adulterer who was driven to despair and rampages out of boredom).

…Whoa, never thought the plot of a rougelike would invoke this much reaction in me.

A Thousand Words: Gone Home

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Gone Home

A 2013 game about a young woman exploring her now-deserted family home, Gone Home has been pretty controversial back in the day, being one of the first video games classified as the dreaded “Walking Simulators.” Now that I’ve played it, it’s weirdly better in terms of actual gameplay but worse in terms of central plot than I’d expected it to be.

So the game is not just “hold forward to win while listening to some pretentious narration” like too many of its successors were. It’s really atmospheric, you have to do some exploring even if it ultimately boils down to “go everywhere and interact with everything”, and it’s no worse in terms of kinetic gameplay or lack thereof than say, the classic PC adventure Myst. That’s the good part. It’s still just a short fun experience but there’s substance to it.

The not so good part is that the “secret” hidden is a melodramatic teen drama where I saw every twist and development coming despite not really knowing the game before I played it. The first world problems of upper-middle class America here just aren’t that intriguing.

That said, I have to give this a positive overall score. It is better than the firebreathers have made it out to be.

Review: Skygods

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Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

Written by aviator and former Pan Am captain Robert Gandt, Skygods is the most fun I’ve had reading a history book in quite some time. First, I want to get the small negatives out of the way: This is very much a David Halberstam style ‘History as Narrative’ book, so I’d recommend taking specific claims with even more grains of salt. That said, everything important I did find corroborating evidence for.

The good part of this “history as narrative” is well, it feels great to read, flowing smoothly and going into the minds of people in a way that Gandt can clearly write from personal experience. And what he says about Pan Am is both interesting and dismal.

Pan Am’s decline, arguably inevitably terminal, started long before Lockerbie. It started long before deregulation. The impression I got from Skygods was that Pan Am was basically to airlines what Harley Davidson is to motorcycles: A wheezing lummox with poor fundamentals whose longevity was/is due to mystique over any practical advantage. There’s also the “British Industrialization” problem Pan Am had where being the first to do big international routes meant they were stuck with the most baggage.

So this is a great book I highly recommend for anyone, not just aviation/history enthusiasts.

Review: Hard Landing

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Hard Landing

Thomas Petzinger’s Hard Landing is a 1995 book about the corporate wars in the airline industry. It’s naturally dated, but that’s not something it can help. I view it as a very good book that could have been great. Why?

On the plus side, there’s lots of things even I didn’t know. Everything from FDR’s attempt to renationalize the air transport industry that served as a rare early bungle to how the Gulf War was truly what finished off Pan Am is there. This is a very detailed history.

On the minus side, it misses the forest for the trees too often. We get long, long descriptions of meetings and takeovers mixed with the occasional vignettes that aren’t really relevant. Yet it’s not good at articulating the basic problem with airlines, similar to sports betting of all things: It’s hard to truly differentiate the product, and costly sales wars are one of the few weapons marketers have.

But there’s a lot more good than bad here. It just hit a triple instead of an inside the park home run.