Tag: Review

A Thousand Words: Road 96

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Road 96

The game Road 96 is an adventure game in the style of the old Telltale ones where you walk around, do dialog choices, and play the occasional quick time/minigame as one of a series of teenage runaways trying to escape the country of Petria in the mid-1990s. You go through one somewhat different set of campaigns which you can change through varying degrees, either by dialogue choices/actions or picking how you’re going to travel (via hitchhiking, transport, a car if available, or if you’re really crazy, walking).

On one hand, I saw basically every plot twist coming and the setting is a little iffy. Not the graphics, which are good for what they are and have an excellent visual design. Petria is a semi-eastern European country (its strongman leader looks like Brezhnev) whose residents have the demographics and style of 21st Century Americans. And for a desperate-to-escape country, it really only resembles a moderately lower-class area of the West.

The characters make up for all of it, as they combine quirks with genuinely hidden depth. While the story is a little janky due to the nature of the gameplay and has the adventure game problem of your choices ultimately not mattering that much to the main plot, it works and more importantly can jump between tones in scenes without it being seeming forced or jarring.

So yeah, I had a lot of fun with this game, even if it’s not normally my style.

Review: Seeking the Bomb

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Seeking the Bomb

Vipin Narang’s Seeking the Bomb is another nuclear proliferation study, this one focusing on how the bomb was sought, not why. This is an incredibly frustrating to read (but very fun to review) book because of how it wobbles across both extremes of political scientist writing.

Right off the bat a gargantuan flaw comes into being: Having a central thesis heavily committed to theories and charts that simply don’t really translate well into an incredibly complex set of situations with a very small sample size. This is disturbingly common in works by political scientists, of which the author is one. It’s also adversarial in its nature and cites multiple kinds of “conventional wisdom” as wrong, including both other scholarly studies and pop-history claims. This feels like a college work in that it’s written to defend a thesis argument rather than simply study the subject.

Fortunately, this book has a lot of strengths as well. It is very well researched and has an effective categorization of nuclear seekers as either hedgers (building up the known capacity but holding back for political reasons), sprinters (just openly moving ahead at all costs), and hiders (trying to keep it concealed until too late). Its story of how India moved from hedging to blatant hedging (doing an unweaponized explosion in 1974 with obvious hints) to just open use is well done as a case study.

Yet I still feel it lacks somewhat in terms of applying technical capacity. This is not to say the book never acknowledges it-it recognizes that South Africa’s ability to make a domestic enrichment plant and other technologies contributed to it being the one successful hider, praises the scholarship of Unclear Physics even as it disagrees with its conclusions, and mentions that Libya’s program was doomed. But I think more detail, more appreciation for both technical challenges and opportunities, and a couple fictional “Nth Country” hypotheticals would have done better. Almost any reasonably advanced country could sprint to a bomb in the kilotons, even if cruder and more dangerous than established ones, if they really wanted to, and I don’t think Seeking the Bomb comes across as appreciating that in its text.

Still, if this is an uneven book it’s an interesting and well-done kind of uneven, and I don’t regret reading it.

Review: The Big Book of Serial Killers

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The Big Book of Serial Killers

It’s hard to find a book with a more accurate title than The Big Book of Serial Killers. This is an A-Z compendium of both solved and unsolved serial murders. Being exactly what it claims to be is… beneficial. It does not shy away from how simultaneously disgusting and pathetic nearly all of them are. Even the smarter ones come across as less Tzeentchian chessmasters and more people who just got away with pulling the same basic trick against soft targets-until they couldn’t.

The book even pads it out by including a few cases of people who weren’t the classic kills-for-the-sake-of it murderers. It includes a handful of terrorists and excessively violent robbers who simply Trevor Phillipsed their way past every victim. The comparative effort of those makes the mentally ill creeps stand out even more.

While its subject matter is obviously not for everyone, this book is excellent for what it is.

Review: Battledrills for Chinese Mobile Warfare

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Battledrills for Chinese Mobile Warfare

Against my better judgement, I got another H. John Poole book. The title made me naively think “oh, this could be a set of practical drills approached from a different perspective.” So like any H. John Poole book, this is about 5% reasonable well-thought out arguments (in this case: Formations should be simpler and grenade skill should be focused and emphasized) mixed with 95% incoherent rambling about how artillery is useless.

The “logic” is a classic all or nothing where if the artillery fails to destroy everything in its path and close combat is still necessary, therefore artillery is useless and only suitable for clunky western armies and not cunning subtle ‘eastern’ ones. He even argues that artillery and aid of artillery has not been useful in the contemporary war in Ukraine, which is… something. But not something good.

By this point Poole has lost most of what teaching value his books had, and I recommend avoiding them.

A Thousand Words: Wario Land 3

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Wario Land 3

Wario Land 4 is one of my favorite games of all time. Wario Land 3, coming out on the preceding Game Boy Color not long before, is not. This is one of those games that you could tell the developers really just needed more power and focus and it would click. With the GBA and a clearer focus, it worked. Here it didn’t.

This is less linear than Wario Land 4 and has the gimmick in that Wario can’t actually get killed (but can get knocked back and cost the player time that way). The problem with losing time instead of losing health is obvious, especially since WL4 didn’t have any absolute game overs. In fact, this game can be described as slow, slowly moving and slowly backtracking in the semi-open world. A lot of this is probably due to the 8 bit GBC’s limitations, but that only makes it dated.

Thankfully, the graphics are very good for the hardware limitations and do not feel dated, and the chiptune soundtrack is beautifully quirky and excellent. The game just doesn’t really gel and has the “misfortune” of being followed up by a classic.

Review: The Gardner Heist

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The Gardner Heist

Ulrich Boser’s The Gardner Heist is about the largest unsolved robbery by price ever. In 1990, two thieves went into the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston and then left an array of paintings worth (albeit by the less than exact standards of painting appraisal) $500,000,000. And as far as concrete undisputed knowledge goes, that’s it. The case has never been solved, zero of the paintings have been found, and not one court-worthy piece of evidence has been made.

I think you can see the problem with someone making a book about this. It’s like DB Cooper. All we know is that a guy jumped out of a plane. From there it’s nothing but speculation and rumor. Boser tries (the sections on how hard it is to track and recover stolen art are excellent), but there’s only so much one can do with basically nothing. A lot of the book is pure padding, which is understandable but not fun to read.

I can’t hold any of Boser’s choices against him. It’s just not a very concrete topic for obvious reasons.

A Thousand Words: Pearl Harbor

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Pearl Harbor

I couldn’t let a Pearl Harbor anniversary go by without reviewing the infamous (pun intended) movie by Michael Bay. Now this is frequently on the list of worst movies ever. However, I liken it to Jefferson Starship’s We Built This City, something that yes, isn’t really good, but is criticized and slammed so much that you kind of have to defend it, since you can enjoy it as a guilty pleasure juuuuuust a little bit. I mean, are you really expecting historical accuracy from Michael Bay?

I didn’t think so. But one fair bit of criticism is Bay attempting his hand at a love story, which is kind of like a romantic comedy director trying to make an action movie. Said love story takes over far more of the plot than it needs, and is probably the biggest criticism I can give other than “Michael Bay.”

So yes, World War II as told by Michael Bay. I can think of a lot better. But I can also think of a whole lot worse.

Review: Kill Kill

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Kill Kill: Battle of Fallujah

One of the recent very pleasant surprises for me was Chance Nix‘s Kill Kill, a historical cheap thriller (yes it makes sense in context) set in the titular battle of Fallujah. Rest assured that this is a book rather different in tone from the last such novel I reviewed, Dodgebomb. However, I feel comfortable saying that a veteran of the actual war with a purple heart is welcome to write however he pleases.

This has the tone of a cheap thriller, but there’s just enough “aha, a veteran would know this” detail (especially the dialogue) to make it feel grounded, and more importantly it comes across as reaching the tone it aimed for. While the character archetypes are the kind that were old when Homer was young, they also fit their role and I can’t complain about them.

Also realistically and somewhat daringly for a cheap thriller, Nix is not afraid to kill off his protagonists. In fact, he actually kills too many, with the number of character deaths in that one segmented viewer totaling around 15-25% of the actual American KIA in the historical battle. Which is… uh, a plausibility critique I never thought I’d be making about a cheap thriller.

Anyway, while this book is rough around the edges, it’s a good read and I eagerly recommend it.

A Thousand Words: The Woodstock Movie

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Woodstock

The Woodstock music festival is probably the most overrated cultural event ever. A ramshackle mess that could have very easily turned into a 1960s Fyre Festival or something much worse, all it gave was a huge mess in an upstate farm, music, and… a documentary film.

A massive reason-perhaps the biggest reason-why the concert is so well remembered is Michael Wadleigh’s masterpiece. Easily the best documentary/concert film I’ve seen, it cuts from the performances (of varying quality in every sense of the word) to interviews with dazed hippies, musicians, and the festival organizers, to things like the rainstorm and Wavy Gravy’s pronouncements, all done with amazing cinematic skill.

I could point out that despite being intended to be sympathetic, the interview subjects and even the whole festival doesn’t exactly look the best. But that’s the beauty of it, with the film being detailed and close (again in multiple senses) enough to give the viewer enough evidence to a make a judgement call. Its main goal was to chronicle, and chronicle it did.

Review: Quantifying Counterfactual Military History

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Readers of Fuldapocalypse should not be surprised to learn that when I saw a book called “Quantifying Counterfactual Military History“, I instantly bought and read it. The premise is simple: The authors use the Approximate Bayesian Computation method to get a large sample size in their various simulations-much, much larger than conventional wargames.

Starting off with one of the easiest and most popular ones, Jutland, that chapter made me go “a-ha! They got it.” My favorite quote is “but unlike in a wargame, our goal is to simply understand what is plausible and what is not.” This “War of the Spreadsheets” has its roles provided one knows its limitations, which the authors do. Then comes the Battle of Britain (where the goal is temporary German air superiority, along with a controversial conclusion. There’s Vietnam where the authors actually remember the large northern conventional forces that were always there. It concludes with Cold War game theory.

There’s some technical topics that are beyond me, but this is overall an excellent book whose authors know their own limitations. As someone who loves these kinds of simulations, I was delighted to read this.