The Video Games Guide Book Review

by Matt Fox
$55.00; 376 pages

I received this book for free as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

I think this is one of my favorite books I've received for review. I end up with a lot of stinkers, but this book is pure joy for me. For a videogame nerd, this is an outstanding reference work. I can easily open it up to a random page and lose myself in memories by reading the brief description of one of my favorite games. I find lots of reviews by Fox that I disagree with, but that is all part of the fun. Unlike a fan-contributed sites like MobyGames, which is probably more comprehensive, every review here is the work of one mind, with a particular and interesting point of view. You just don't get as much out of a collection of disparate reviews. Even if there is some kind of wiki-style crowd-editing process, it cannot produce a work as interesting as this one.

The book is primarily composed of short reviews of videogames. The middle of the book contains color images of the best and most popular games. There are several appendices listing other interesting information: a chronology of videogames including many not reviewed in this volume, a capsule history of consoles, a listing of prominent videogame designers, and a glossary. This is the best one-volume videogame reference work I have ever seen. It is also the only one-volume videogame reference work I have ever seen. Don't let that deter you, this is a fine work.

The most complete and comprehensive history of consoles that I know of is Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames by Leonard Herman. This work focuses on the games themselves. The sheer quantity of games the author has played staggers my mind. I thought I played a lot! What really impresses is the overall quality of the work. Sure, you can find a mistake here and there, but there are hundreds of reviews, and I appreciate the yeoman's work done here to collate all this information into one handy volume. I know I'll be leafing through this often.

My other book reviews

My other videogame reviews

CrossFit 2013-06-03

Back squats, going deep

• 9-9-6-5-3-1-1
• 40-50-60-60-62-65-70kg

Dessert

• 25 wallballs 12#

How English Sounds to Non-English Speakers

This is comprised of actual English words in random order, but once someone told me English sounds like "sss-sss-ssss" to Chinese people, and it seems true to me, we often accentuate our "s" sounds. Now that's all I hear.

CrossFit 2013-05-29

The Longest Mile

• 1/4 mile run
• 25 pushups
• 1/4 mile run
• 25 kettlebells [20 kg]
• 1/4 mile run
• 70m lunge lap
• 1/4 mile run

Time 13:20

Last time 14:10

Best time 12:50

Dessert

• 10 kipping pullups

Simple Reaction Time Data

There has been a story trending recently in the news about the Victorians being cleverer than us. I've been following this story since Bruce Charlton broke it in February of 2012. I've never been that impressed, but I've thought about looking up the data to see if its as overblown as it sounds. I still haven't done that, but William Briggs does provide us with a scatterplot from the paper:

Intelligence and reaction times Woodley et al.Nice model-fitting boys. Keep up the good work.

CrossFit 2013-05-20

Christine

3 rounds

• 500m row
• 12 deadlifts [50 kg]
• 21 box jumps [20"]

Time 16:51

Last time 15:50

The Peshawar Lancers Book Review

by S. M. Stirling
$7.99; 483 pages

I picked up this book because Stirling co-authored several of the books collected in The Prince with Jerry Pournelle. I hadn't ever read a solo work by Stirling, so I was curious. I have had mixed success with Pournelle's co-authors. I tried reading a book by Niven, and while I liked it, I only liked it, I didn't love it. I picked up a work from Michael Flynn on the same day I bought this one, and I couldn't even finish it. I like Flynn enough to read his blog, but so far I've started but not finished two of his novels.

This book I loved. I'm going to go get more of Stirling's work, because this is everything I look for in a book: adventure, psychological insight, and a love of history and place. I also want to live in the world of the book. Not really, since most of the population of the Earth starved to death or was eaten after a comet hit in 1878, but Stirling has created a world where the Victorian age lasted an extra 150 years in the technological and cultural stasis the comet wrought.

You can always tell you have entered an alternate history when the airships show up. We see hydrogen dirigibles, difference engines, and an England with all the power and self-confidence of the Victorians, that never endured the morale-sapping Great War or de-colonization. Except without England, since they de-camped for the colonies once it became clear that winter wasn't going to end anytime soon after the comet hit.

I get a very Kipling vibe from The Peshawar Lancers, the love of a foreign place, adopted wholeheartedly as one's home. I wanted again and again to turn to a map of India, or to look up the history of place, or a caste, or a god. Like bored little boys everywhere, I learn history and geography better if you spice it up with a battle here or there. I think I like alternative history and historical fiction so much because the real world is so much more interesting than fictional ones, unless you are Tolkien. Stirling has all the color and pageantry of India to work with, and he does it well. He only had to make up one religion for this book, and it is really just an old religion with a new name. I never could find the religions in so many science fiction and fantasy books sociologically plausible. For example, in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series, you have a whole world that is just like ours, except without the religions that gave it shape. You have the chivalry of Westeros, who somehow act just like Christian knights, without the Christianity. There have been polytheistic mounted cavalry, they just act different.

Stirling doesn't have that problem, because he can just describe Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians as they are (or were), and let all that history give him as much backstory has he could ever need. Throw in some science, some history, some philology, some intrigue, and you have a hell of an adventure. Highly recommended.

My other book reviews

This is totally not Evangelion

And I want to see it

Ed West leaving Telegraph blogs

But what a goodbye. I've only recently started reading West, through the odd confluence of Steve Sailer and Damian Thompson, but I shall enjoy his snark wherever he goes.

It's my job as a conservative to depress you, so I'm sad to say that, as this will be my last blogpost here, you'll have to find  some other way to get yourself down from now on; maybe stick yourself in a room with some Radiohead CDs and a bottle of gin and put Requiem for a Dream on a loop.

...

it’s a fundamental conservative principle that if something repeatedly goes wrong over and over and over again, it’s probably not going to work the next time, or ever.

...

Since the time of the Greeks, people have been coming up with schemes to create better societies that are hopelessly unrealistic, and from 1789 the human race has become hugely inventive at thinking of terrible ways to leave us all impoverished or dead, most of them based on the idea that humans are instinctively good.

Joel Kotkin on Zuckerberg et al.

Joel Kotkin at his website NewGeography finds Mark Zuckerberg's immigration enthusiam as self-interested as I do:

Shady 1%This bit is especially good:

Outsource Manufacturing, Import Engineers

Perversely, the small number of jobs—mostly clustered in Silicon Valley—created by tech companies has helped its moguls avoid public scrutiny. Google employs 50,000, Facebook 4,600, and Twitter less than 1,000 domestic workers. In contrast, GM employs 200,000, Ford 164,000, and Exxon over 100,000. Put another way, Google, with a market cap of $215 billion, is about five times larger than GM yet has just one fourth as many workers.

This is an equation that defines inequality: more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands and benefiting fewer workers.

While Facebook and Twitter have little role in the material economy, Apple, which continues to collect the bulk of its profit from physical goods—computers, iPads, iPhones and so on—has outsourced nearly all of its manufacturing to foreign companies like Foxconn that employ workers, often in appalling conditions, in China and elsewhere. About 700,000 people work on Apple’s physical products for subcontractors, according to the New York Times, but almost none of them are in the U.S. “The jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs bluntly told President Obama at a 2011 dinner in Silicon Valley.

It is really interesting to think about all those extra manufacturing jobs in the US. US workers are more efficient than Chinese workers, so it would take fewer people to do the same work, probably 250,000 or less, but that is a big chunk of the labor market. There are lots of reasons why companies off-shored manufacturing, but it really does seem like the benefits of this practice have accrued to a very few, while the costs have been shared broadly.

The argument has been made that the net prosperity gain of the Chinese and other emerging economies outweighs the net loss to American workers, but I do notice this argument is never made by unemployed ironworkers from the Rust Belt. Besides, I thought modern economics isn't zero-sum.