Count_Zero

A review of this should be up on Bureau42 by the 14th.

There's a lot of overlap here with the other America's Test Kitchen cookbook I've read. Hopefully when the Cook's illustrated cookbook comes out, it'll have a bigger selection of new recipes. Still, the recipes that are here are certainly quality recipes, and I'd definitely consider the book to be a worthwhile purchase.

My video review will go up first Wednesday of October.

I'll try to get a review of this up in two weeks. But god was this a spectacularly dumb book.

  Bitmap Books is a company that's been on my radar for a while, but whose books I'd never gotten around to picking up. They had built up a very solid reputation for generally very well-written books about video games, both on the computer and the PC with really solid production values, both in terms of the layout of the books, and the quality of the materials used. The book I'm reviewing today – The CRPG Book – is no such exception.      The CRPG Book does kind of what it says on the cover – it runs down the history of computer role-playing games (console games generally excluded) from the 1970s to the present day. The rundown is broken down by decade for the first portion of the book, then by 5 year span by the later portion of the book. Each section includes some a quick primer on what else was going on in games at that time to give context – such as the release date for games like Doom and Quake, along with home consoles like the Xbox, as those had impacts that would spill over to CRPGs, either by changing the style of game to take advantage of new technologies or pushing changes in style to fit with releasing the game both on console and on PC.  It's also important to mention what this book is not. This is not a “150 CRPGs to play before you Die” kind of book. Some of these games have aged poorly, and the writers often, but not always, recognize that. Other games are just bad, but are bad in interesting ways. Other games are a very acquired taste that make them something the contributor to the book likes, but you may not. Others just are lacking quality of life improvements that would make them difficult for people to play, or have mechanical quirks meant to make the game more “special” but can make them obtuse – which the contributor thinks isn't a problem and you should git-good.  This does lead to the weakness of the book, which is also (to a degree) its strength. The book has a massive variety of contributors to the text, who all bring different things to the table, both in terms of their history with CRPGs and their taste in games. While the reviews are marked by author, it's with a three letter initial code. While there is a list of contributors at the start of the book, it's also not exactly done alphabetically in a way that makes sense. It might have taken more column inches to give a longer contributor name, and in the process added a page or two to the contributor section, but it would have done a lot to help keep straight who contributed what, and in the process to see how their preferences impact what games they write about. 

This volume has the train-ride to the hot springs. If you've seen this portion of Hayate The Combat Butler series 2, then you know the plot beats here - the anime adapts it fairly faithfully. I kind of prefer the anime version of it, because some of the jokes are a little funnier in motion - but this volume of the manga is really enjoyable to read.

I'll have a review up on Bureau42 next week Monday (knock on wood)

In “A Generation of Swine” Hunter S. Thompson turns his sharp and angry wit upon the 1980s, particularly the Regan administration,, through the rise of “Greed is Good” economics and the Iran-Contra scandal, up until the Iran-Iraq War.

It is, beyond a doubt, an excellent book. It's not as sharp as volume 1 of the Gonzo papers, but Volume 1 had some of his most famous stuff (that wasn't written explicitly for other books) in there - his article about racial tensions in California and his meeting with Oscar Acosta, covering the Kentucky Derby with Ralph Steadman, etc.

Nonetheless, this is excellent work from Hunter, and I whole heartedly recommend it.

I really enjoyed the book. Some of the humor was pretty good (though aimed directly at anime fans), but even if you're not an otaku, most of the humor is still something you can get.

This was a decent manga, but it's really not my thing.

This is a good primer on Japanese arcade gaming culture in most of its forms. At $20 it's a little steep on the price side for its length though.

A fairly good adaptation of the Icewind Dale Trilogy. The graphic novel format allows for skipping some of the descriptive exposition, and lets the art carry the fight scenes a little better than the book does (particularly related to the fact that scimitars aren't exactly thrusting weapons, and Salvatore tends to have Drizzt stabbing a bunch).

If I have one complaint, it's that Cattie-Brie's armor toward the end of The Halfing's Gem has the Female Fantasy Armor problem - of both the bared midriff and boob armor variety. I understand this is comics and you want to be stylized, but there's got to be a better way to do it. Or at the very least, just pick one - either do the bared midriff thing (leaves an important chunk of you wide open), or the boob armor (directs blades towards your heart), but don't do both. It's not just kinda sexist, it's also kinda tacky. At least when Frazetta did that lack-of-wardrobe design for his female characters, he was either doing John Carter of Mars (where everyone is mostly naked), or Swords & Sorcery (where, again, stylistically everyone is mostly naked).

This is Heroic fantasy of the European bent, and those outfits just don't work as well.

Much as the [b:The Rough Guide to Anime 1 6444768 The Rough Guide to Anime Simon Richmond https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1392427131s/6444768.jpg 6634821] was an excellent primer on anime as a medium, so the Rough Guide to Manga is to manga. The book does an excellent job giving a brief history of manga, both in Japan and in the US, and giving a good rundown of useful terminology for the beginner before getting into the “Manga Canon”.Further, the 50 volumes in the Manga Canon are books that I can't really argue with, covering books both recent and past, and books which I'd consider significant to the medium, whether through their influence on other works, or due to their popularity. If I was to give one criticism to the canon, in the Rough Guide to Anime there were more than a few works of anime that I had never heard of before, that the book introduced me to, notably “Night on the Galactic Railroad”. The Rough Guide to Manga doesn't have as much of that.Were it not for the fact that Penguin Books has discontinued their Rough Guides series and is going to let the books go out of print, I'd consider this the perfect book to give to someone who was new to manga and was looking for a place to start. As it is, this book is still a good gift to give, and worth recommending.EDIT (7/17/2015): I've recently re-read the book, and while the manga canon and the history of manga sections are still incredibly useful, there are some portions that have become unfortunately (and in one case, fortunately) dated.The good news - As of this writing, the manga “Rose of Versailles” has been licensed for an English language release!The bad news - CPM Manga, ADV Manga, and Del Rey Manga have stopped operations. Some of Del Rey's stuff has been picked up by Kodansha USA, but not all of it. Further, Anime Vice has basically become just a YouTube channel, with Gia Manry having started working in the industry instead of covering it, and Tom Pinchuck taking over hosting duties for the channel. Finally, the magazine Protoculture Addicts has stopped publication.

Note: This review originally appeared on my blog - https://countzeroor.com/2018/05/12/book-review-dungeon-hacks/

Procedural content, permadeath, and extremely punishing difficulty has become more and more of a thing in game design. So, that fact, combined by my affinity for the history of technology from a social, technological, and scientific perspective, lead me to this book about the history of roguelikes. It makes for a good portrait of the development of four games, and getting briefly into some of the ways roguelikes have spread into wider gaming culture, though what could be a good look at the larger gaming picture is sadly limited.

Dungeon Hacks is, ultimately, the story of six games - Beneath Apple Manor (BAM), Rogue, NetHack, Moria & Angband together, and Ancient Domains of Mystery. Beneath Apple Manor is set up as being what Rogue could have been - the Roguelike that predates Rogue, but which failed to get the level of penetration that Rogue did.

Rogue and Nethack probably get the most time each, with the discussion of Rogue getting into how the game came about, along with it's cultural permutation through its initial distribution in BSD Unix. The discussion of Nethack gets into the concept of the Nethack “Dev Team” along with how distributed development for the game was handled.

Moria and Angband, and Ancient Domains of Mystery get the least time of the main roguelikes. In part, that's because Moria & Angband were basically designed as a response to the fact that NetHack's tone is pretty much all over the place, with tongue-in-cheek classes (like “Tourist”) and joke monsters (like the actual Three Stooges). Ancient Domains of Mystery mostly stands out because it's pretty much the main focus of one developer, and with a much larger scope than any of the other Roguelike games.

The book concludes a discussion of “Rogue-like-likes” - in particular FTL and the original Diablo.  This part is probably the most disappointing part of the book - mainly because of the limited scope - and particular what this section overlooks. In particular, the book basically takes the tack that the mainstream popularity of the roguelike is a modern western thing. This is unfortunate and wrong - in both respects. Home consoles got roguelikes, either as straight-up roguelikes like Fatal Labyrinth on the Genesis, or as “Roguelike-lites” like the Mystery Dungeon series and the Shiren the Wanderer series. They may not have gotten the same degree of penetration here that they did in Japan - but it is still important to mention - they got an incredible amount of cultural penetration in Japan, at at time where they had no penetration whatsoever in the US.

This is an excellent book, and the reader is fantastic. However, the audiobook omits the “To be Continued in Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg” chunk that comes after the cliffhanger, which is rather frustrating.

Also, this book ends on a cliffhanger, and Agatha H and the Siege of Mechanicsburg isn't out yet, so keep that under consideration - though considering that arc of the comics also ends on a cliffhanger, you may even want to wait until the 5th novel, and then binge on the three of them. That way you're on a good stopping place while you wait for “Agatha H. and the Master of Paris.” or whatever book 6 will be titled.

Disclosure: I received this book for free from the author for purposes of review.

When I received Aetna Adrift from the author, Erik Wecks, at OryCon last year, I saw that the book was a prequel to another series of books that he'd put out – his Pax Imperium series. Before I accepted the book, I asked if he considered the book to be a decent jumping point to this series. He said it was. I was a little unsure, but I accepted the book anyway. The good news is that the book is. It starts on a rough foot, but once it really gets going, it makes for an enjoyable read.

The book is set at a somewhat unspecified point in the future. Humanity has traveled to the stars and has splintered into a series of various governments. One of these is the Unity Corporation – a totalitarian corporate state, with internal politics that can best be described as literally cut-throat.

Out in the ass end of the Unity is the planet Aetna, an ice planet (similar somewhat to Europa) that is home to a hydrogen mining operation. On that planet is Jack Halloway, who is doing his damndest to stay under the radar, out of the way, and in the process retain a degree of personal independence. In this case he does it by running a small smuggling operation bringing luxury goods into the colony. However, when a Unity executive by the name of Timothy Randall shows up on Aetna with his entourage, and ropes Jack into his plans on pain of death, things start going very bad, very fast, and it takes all of Jack's craftiness and a lot of luck to get through this alive.

So, Jack Halloway is our viewpoint character, and our lens through which we view society in the Unity. The problem is that life in the Unity is pretty rough and dystopian, some elements of which Jack recognizes as bad, but others he accepts as normal, but I, the reader, see as negative, since I'm an outsider. This is especially the case for women in Unity society, and it clearly comes across that way in the book. However, for most of the book Jack doesn't notice it, because it's either not a problem for him, or he's in a position to benefit from it – and by the time that changes in the book, there's enough other stuff going on that other matters are pressing concerns, until the very end of the book.

Getting into the positives, Wecks creates an interesting cyberpunk-adjacent world here, a setting that gets into some of the elements of cyberpunk, but with the addition of interstellar travel. Where this gets interesting in particular is that most works of Cyberpunk don't get much into what life in a corporate state is really like. Wecks gets into that. It's all the worst parts of real world corporate politics, with a side of Robocop's corporate politics as well.

Aetna Adrift did get me more interested in checking out some of the rest of the original Pax Imperium series, to see how well those books present the larger universe.

This book reminded me a lot of Larry Gonick's “Cartoon Guide To...” books, like “The Cartoon Guide to Computers”. It does a pretty good job of explaining some important concepts in an entertaining fashion. That said, there is some important information that the book omits, and some significant geographic biases that reflect the book's applicability.

The book has a metropolitan geographic bias going with it. There are pieces of advice that are pretty much designed to work great if you're living in a city or suburb with a well organized mass transit system where the busses don't turn into pumpkins, everywhere you need to go is convenient to mass transit, and the climate is conducive to walking or biking. If you live in a suburban community that doesn't have mass transit, or the mass transit turns into pumpkins early in the morning/late in the evening/in the middle of the day, you're out of luck. Near as I can tell, the book's advice if you're stuck in those circumstances is “move” - which is not what I'd consider useful - especially if the problem isn't limited to your suburb (as I gather this a problem that is not uncommon in the southwest, midwest, and south of the US, as well as some parts of the Pacific Northwest).

All of this gives the book what I'd call an anti-car bias. While cars are certainly spendy, but one of the recurring refrains in the book is that you should get rid of your car, which, related to the above geographic concerns, I'd consider not to be valuable advice in most cases in the US. This is perhaps aggravated by the fact that while this book is at least willing to give lip service to the idea that you might need a car, they do not have any material in the book on how to maintain your car for less - like getting Haynes guides from the local library, getting parts from U-Pull-It places or online. If you're on a tight budget, being able to do maintenance on your own car is incredibly useful, and not having any discussion on doing this, is almost absurd. For that matter, you could probably put some good basic bicycle maintenance advice in there as well (lubricating the bike, replacing chains, etc.)

That said, there is some definitely useful stuff in here. The entertainment chapter is pretty well done, though I think that the chapter really doesn't stress enough how utterly important and useful libraries are when you're on a limited income. I generally liked the cooking section, though having a discussion on farmer's markets would be nice as well. Also, considering the cost involved, the urban agriculture portion of the book was somewhat iffy. In particular, the portion about raising farm animals felt like something that could, and should have been cut entirely, particularly since that space could probably have been used for something else.

Note: This review originally appeared on my site.

A few years ago I did a video review of the original OVA for Record of Lodoss War. At that time, the OVA was out of print, as was (and still is, sadly) the manga adaptation of the novels. Since then, Funimation (not the company I expected to do it) license rescued all of the anime, and now Seven Seas has done something I never expected to happen - they licensed the first novel, and gave it a fantastic edition in 2017.

The OVA and the novel share a common framework and characters, but have some very dramatic changes from the novel to the anime. Some of these are clearly due to the change in medium. Others appear to be due to budgetary restrictions and length.

The book follows the party of Parn - a young inexperienced warrior seeking to prove himself and try to make the world a better place, Deedlit - an elf looking for adventure who finds herself drawn to Parn and his companions, Etoh - a priest of Pharis and Parn's childhood friend, Slayn Starseeker - a wizard searching for knowledge and something else... he doesn't know what yet, Woodchuck - a thief out for wealth and with a chip on his shoulder, and Ghim - a Dwarf looking for the missing daughter of the priestess of Marfa and his friend, Neese. The party goes on their adventures along the backdrop of an invasion of the island of Lodoss by the forces of the dark empire of Marmo, lead by Emperor Beld. Beld is advised by a mysterious sorceress known only as Karla.

And that's where a lot of similarities end. Probably the biggest example of this is the characters of Ashram and Pirotess. In the anime they are set up very early on as the dark opposites of Parn and Deedlit - both are skilled warriors (though Ashram is very skilled from the beginning), and both care for each other, though Ashram and Pirotess aren't particularly able to show it because in Marmo it would be a sign of weakness. In the anime, Ashram and Parn first meet during the sacking of an Alanian fortress, with Parn witnessing Ashram's attack and swearing revenge. Further, throughout the anime, when the narrative moves to the Marmo camp, in addition to seeing Beld and Karla plotting, we also see Beld and Ashram together (setting up Ashram as Beld's #2), and Ashram and Pirotess (again, setting up Ashram and Pirotess as the dark version of Parn and Deed).

In the novel, on the other hand, while we cut back to Beld and Karla, Ashram barely shows up in this the book, only appearing briefly in the battle between the Empire of Marmo and the Valis Alliance, and Pirotess doesn't show up at all. Wagnard, Beld's court magician, is dramatically much more visible, and has a much more direct connection to our protagonists, though he and the Heroes of Lodoss don't interact in this story.

This leads to the other really dramatic change. Much more time is spent on characters backstory in this installment. In the OVA, we get backstory for Parn and his goal to redeem his father's memory, and Ghim and his goal to bring back Lydia to Neese. However, here we also get more backstory for Woodchuck and Slayn. We learn about Slayn's time at the Wizard's academy, why he left, and we get a connection through him and Wagnard - that Wagnard was a classmate of Slayn's who was not only expelled, but also had a lock placed on his magic so he cannot cast spells without great physical pain. Also, the book sets up that Woodchuck had been incarcerated for almost 20 years for a heist gone wrong, and was only just released, putting a chip on his shoulder that leads to him making a particular decision at the end of the story that he didn't make in the anime.

Additionally, the dungeon crawl that takes up the OVA's first episode takes up about two paragraphs in the novel.

The other changes are a little less dramatic. Parn and company meet Deedlit and Woodchuck in the middle of a festival in the novel, which would have been really expensive to animate in the OVA. Also, in the OVA, the battle between the Valis Alliance and Marmo is just a general pitched battle, without any real tactics or maneuvering (and which generally goes badly for the Alliance before the end), while in the book, it's a more strategically planned battle, with Parn and Kashue taking on a flanking force of Marmo, and only after they are repelled successfully do they join up with the main force, and then at that point do they lose the track of the battle and things start to look closer.

As an aside, there's another change from the book to the OVA, but the Chronicles of the Heroic Knight TV series incorporates and shows the book version, so it less merits mentioning.

Karla is still one of my favorite antagonists, because her worldview is internally consistent, and while it doesn't make sense from a human perspective - that's the point - she's lived so long and through so many bodies that she's effectively lost touch with her humanity, which makes her a more interesting and unique protagonist. The character of Mordenkainen in Greyhawk is the closest character in tabletop RPGs as far as motivations go, through as near as I can tell, the depiction of his motivation as being similar to Karla's doesn't seem to appear until after Lodoss gets a US release in the late 80s, so I don't know if that aspect of the character was inspired by Lodoss .

The Grey Witch isn't exactly a ground-breaking novel now, particularly when it comes to modern heroic fantasy. As with Legend of the Galactic Heroes, it's a genre that has become well trod, and numerous other works have paid reference to and been inspired by. Still, it's worth reading seeing where all those stories came from, and honestly, it's an exciting read.

This is a really rushed conclusion to this series.

Good volume, with some great development on Kenjiro Hato's background.

A good basic primer on anime and manga for those who are new fans, as well as parents who are trying to find out more about that stuff their kids are watching.

Lemmed.

A sort of pulpy superhero story, with a protagonist who is a mix of Steve Rogers & Tony Stark. They set a lot up here, but I'm kind of on the fence until they start paying it off.

Biomega reads a lot like a late '80s-early '90s OVA, in the sense that the manga has an incredibly tight focus on action. While there is a narrative there, the story spends more time on the action sequences. To be fair, there isn't anything wrong with that - the manga gives the action sequences the time they need to flow properly, and allow the reader to keep track of everything. There are a lot of manga artists who could probably learn something form Nihei.

This book is incredibly dark, and violent. At this point in the series, I'd say that Guts is an incredibly unlikable protagonist - unless you had seen the anime or otherwise knew what happened in the Golden Age arc - which would inform your opinion of Guts' actions a little more.