The Guy in the Corgi Shirt 1#: Fallout the Series

 

Exactly what the title says. I really enjoyed Fallout: The Series and here's a video where I discuss it with fellow post-apocalypse author Eric Malikyte. I think the two of us provide a pretty unique perspective on the show from people who make these kind of stories for a living. As a note, "The Guy in the Corgi Shirt" is my Youtube persona.

The Division 2 review

    The Division 2 has been out since 2019, so this review is a bit late but it’s an interesting time to take stock of a game at the end of its game life rather than the beginning. Ubisoft have been keeping The Division 2 steadily updated after a meager opening and the final results are very different from the beginning ones. With the announced multiplayer free-to-play sequel, The Division: Heartland, in the works, it also feels like a good time to go back and review what worked as well as didn’t for this installment of the franchise.

    The premise for The Division universe is that a genetically engineered smallpox variant called the Dollar Flu was released in New York before spreading across the globe. It has killed most of humanity off and left the survivors forced to fight over resources as well as territory. One government agency, the Strategic Homeland Division, is still a active and was given authority to do whatever it took to rebuild society.

    The Division 2 picks up several months after the events of the first game. You may or may not be playing the original Division agent but it’s not a character driven game so there’s not really a problem with this. Basically, after an attack on New York City facilities by mysterious forces from Washington DC, your character heads down to the former nation’s capital to contact the former federal government’s remnants in the Joint Task Force (or JTF). They are a pathetic shell of their former self with most of the city controlled by three gangs: the Outcasts, Hyenas, and True Sons. Go kill them, retake city. You know the drill. There’s also the occasional hints toward a larger more advanced force that has been feeding the chaos post-Dollar Flu.

    At the risk of spoiling a five-year-old game, The Division 2 retcons away the premise of the original The Division. One of the cheekier twists of the lore was that it turns out there was no major scary conspiracy behind it all. No, the Dollar Flu was created in a personal lab by a crazy Malthusian scientist who wanted to save the environment by killing off 98% of humanity. He did it with some basic university equipment and stuff you’d buy online. This goes out the window in The Division 2 and now there’s a massive Russian-owned PMC, treacherous Vice Presidents, and dark money trying to rule the ashes.

    Honestly, this was probably a smart play on the part of Ubisoft because the original twist works fine in the works of Tom Clancy (that is this ostensibly based on) but he wrote novels rather than ongoing video game franchises. Indeed, in Rainbow Six, the novel by Tom Clancy that the Division universe actually takes a lot of its premise from (with the villain succeeding), there was a corporate conspiracy that had much of the same motive. Indeed, I dare say that Tom Clancy would appreciate once more making the Russians the bad guys of a techno-thriller involving taking over the world with bioweapons.

    But enough of the plot and lore business. How does the game play? It’s a lot better than the first The Division. I am extremely biased in this because The Division was perfectly designed as the team-based game that it was originally designed as. However, if you are like me and are an antisocial nerd who prefers to solo his multiplayer experiences then The Division 2 is far better balanced. It also has endgame content with plenty of missions after the original and an eternal “gang war” going on where areas you’d previously liberated fall back into enemy hands.

    As a cover-based looter-shooter, there’s not much attempt to reinvent the wheel. You shoot a bunch of bad guys, level up your loot, and attempt to get enough collectibles to craft what you don’t have. Some of the systems are better than others with mods being something I flat out didn’t bother with and feel like the game didn’t care if I did or not. There’s taking outposts, bounties, liberating prisoners, destroying propaganda, and other side activities that are fun. You can get killed but that just knocks you out temporarily. Your goal is to finish the story missions and upgrade the various survivor settlements, so they go from being tent cities to thriving post-apocalypse communities full of children.

    Washington DC is an excellent setting for doing post-apocalypse adventuring and has the same general appeal as Fallout 3, except instead of the place being a radioactive desert, it’s overgrown and graffiti covered. Having shoot outs in the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and Congress will never not be fun. The nature of the highly visible landmarks and recognizable architecture gives it a lot more entertainment value as a setting versus NYC. Can you believe there was no Statue of Liberty mission in The Division? I can’t. There’s one in The Division 2‘s WARLORDS OF NEW YORK, though.

    Ubisoft was criticized for denying the game had a political message and, honestly, I’m kind of with the developer on this. As difficult as it is to parse, “Government flubbed a pandemic response and as a result bad Russian-aligned people are trying to take over in order to end democracy” not being political, I’m pretty sure that was an accident rather than intentional. One of the groups is even a bunch of conspiracy theorist cultists but they have about as much personality as orcs.

    In conclusion, The Division 2 is a solid game that gives you a definite “meat and potatoes” shooter experience. It’s an improvement on The Division in terms of solo play as well as having a lot more to do perpetually. You can go on missions post the “final” one like attacking Camp David, going to a zoo, and other enjoyable experiences. If you also manage to beat the game (technically before but I wouldn’t recommend it), there’s Warlords of New York. The game includes several seasonal events, but these are one that you’ve probably missed the majority of.

The Division: Recruited by Thomas Parrott review

    THE DIVISION: RECRUITED is an expanded universe novel set in the universe of TOM CLANCY’S THE DIVISION by Ubisoft. The premise is the United States (and probably world) has been devastated by a plague called the Green Poison. With the majority of the human race dead, the survivors attempt to eke out an existence in the aftermath with various lawless factions rising to compete for limited resources. Standing in the way of utter chaos is the Division, a secret agency of disaster responders with special equipment as well as training. Oh and the authority to shoot any individuals who are standing in the way of you rebuilding America.

    This book is set around the time of The Division 2 and in the Washington D.C. area. Maira Kanhai is a cyber security specialist from the US Navy who served her term before the pandemic occurred. After a failed attempt to rejoin the US Army, she ends up the protector of a small community of survivors that is just barely holding on as the lawlessness of DC continues. After a bloody battle that results in many deaths, she is taken on as a probationary member of the Division.

    Maira proceeds to travel with a pair of other Division agents as they leave the DC area and start a lengthy road trip to the Midwest in hopes of setting up food convoys to prevent famine from finishing off the millions of survivors on the East Coast. It’s a very good acknowledgement of the infrastructure being the real issue that would finish off humanity’s remnants. The apocalypse can’t continue as a scavenger-esque society for more than a year as eventually the survivors would go through all remaining supplies.

    I give props to the writer as they successfully create new factions to add to the Division universe rather than just reusing the ones from the games. We are introduced to the Freighties and the Roamers, two bands of truckers who have developed radically different ideas of what they should do with their gasoline powered transports in a society where that suddenly means a lot of power. We also have a plot related to a Division agent going rogue because it seems they can’t keep their personnel from doing so in any spinoff.

    I have a few complaints about the book related to the fact that it sometimes imitates the game a little too much. For example, over the course of the book, our protagonists kill something akin to a hundred or more Outcasts. You know, the plague obsessed crazy cultists menacing DC from the second game. That’s me being literal about their numbers rather than exaggerating too. They get into several pitched battles with the Outcasts rushing them like Zerg. In the game, that’s understandable, but you’d think that would be a significant chunk of their actual forces. It just took me out of the book, especially since Tom Clancy’s name is attached despite him being a brand rather than actually involved in the IP.

    Even so, I overall really enjoyed this book and think that it will be a good introduction for people trying to become acquainted with The Division franchise. While you’re probably going to get more out of it if you’re already a fan, I had a lot of fun with it. I recommend getting the audiobook over the Kindle or paperback version as well. The narrator does a fantastic job.

Available here

Review - Silo: Season One

    SILO is based on the similarly titled book series by Hugh Howey. After finishing FALLOUT, I was still in a post-apocalypse mood and didn’t want to deal with zombies, so I decided to check out this series on Apple TV that I’d seen advertised at my local comic book store.

    I'm a fan of Rebecca Ferguson from her work in the Mission Impossible movies so I figured it would certainly be up my alley. I have to admit that it was the look of the show that sold me on it and the idea of living in what appeared to be a literal nuclear silo was something that I definitely was attracted by. Certainly, I ended up getting the book after finishing the first season. Still, it’s not going to be a wholly positive endorsement. It’s a good show but I have thoughts.

    The premise is that humanity, at least as far as we know, only exists in the Silo now. There’s ten thousand people living in a single vertical tube stretching down into the depths of the Earth with the outside considered to be wholly toxic. They have forgotten all of their history and all records of it have been destroyed due to a great rebellion that was put down a century and a half ago. Relics of the before times are illegal and a vibrant trade in them still exists. If you screw up or are feeling suicidal, you are sent outside to clean the cameras watching the outside and will inevitably die within minutes.

    The first couple of episodes deal with Sheriff Holston Becker (David Oyelowo) and his wife, Allison (Rashida Jones), dealing with the fact that they are unable to conceive during their preordained period to have a child. They are also people who have stumbled into possible secrets of the time before, including an actual hard drive. This story will segue into the story of Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson), a “Mechanical” working in the lowest, dingiest levels of the Silo. Opposing their efforts is Robert Sims (Common), a sinister Judicial agent, and the ambiguously loyal Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins).

    The plot is, obviously, stretched from the original novel. You can tell they have added a large amount of content in order to fill out the show’s ten episode runtime. This seems like it could easily have been a movie and probably should have been. There’s quite a bit of melodrama that feels contrived and designed to just maximize the conflict despite the fact that the story is fairly straightforward despite a few twists.

    Next, Silo feels a great deal like a an adult aged cast of characters in a YA novel. There’s the sinister conspiracy, the plucky heroine with way too much plot armor, and the somewhat contrived backstory that lets her keep a role as a working class hero while also being an educated young woman with ties to the upper class as well as eventually falling her way into law enforcement. Having read the books, I feel like they did a much better job of getting straight to the point and not getting sidetracked.

    That doesn’t mean the show is bad, per se, but it does lower its score a bit. The show has fantastic set-building and a strong claustrophobic feel throughout. Much of the technology is analog and feels very much like Fallout without the retro-futurism or wacky humor. Everything feels appropriately worn down and you believe these people are living in a slowly dying ruin. The little rules and feel of the place are all well done as well.

    The acting is good, too, and none of the performers do anything less than their A-game. All of them are very talented and even if they don’t have much to work with, they manage to expand the characters and give them a humanity that the writing doesn’t necessarily justify. Even if you can see who the villains are from a mile away, you also believe that they have justifiable (at least to themselves) reasons for their activities.

    In conclusion, this is an entertaining show with some flaws. I recommend it to individuals who enjoy dystopian fiction, post-apocalypse storytelling, and those who don’t mind a little melodrama to round out their dramatic acting and tragedy of circumstance. The world of Silo is well-realized and the acting is good enough that I can ignore most of its flaws.

Will Leave the Galaxy for Good by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw review

    WILL LEAVE THE GALAXY FOR GOOD by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is the third and final installment of the Jack McKeown series. The series is about an out of work star pilot and his feud with the seemingly fictional Jack McKeown, a author of rugged stories about star pilots who has actually rewritten the adventures of both the protagaonist as well as his many friends. Due to complicated stories, the protagonist is also forced to adopt the identity of Jack McKeown on multiple occassions. Sometimes he’s also known as Dashford Pierce, even though that is also a pseudonym.

    The third book opens with Jack/Dashford struggling with the fact that Jack McKeown is no longer as popular as he used to be. The Flash Gordon-esque star pilot stories have gotten passe and the public have moved on to the more Star Trek-like Trail Spacers. Worse, the protagonist can’t write any new books to continue his legacy because, well, he’s not actually an author. Instead, the point becomes moot when his apartment blows up and Jack/Dashford assumes that it is Jacques McKeown behind it.

    There’s a certain melancholy to the third book as I really think this could have remained a ongoing series as the humor of Yahtzee remains relevant throughout. Still, you could tell he was perhaps running low on the premise as there’s only so many ways you can reinterperet the same premise of, “maybe Golden Age heroism wasn’t all its cracked up to be and we should all be living in the real world versus fantasies.” Which is a hard needle to thread when you are reading escapist literature primarily read by fans of the same.

    This isn’t me criticizing the book and whether or not this is actually the Aesop being supported by the protagonist or the author is deliberately undercutting it at every turn is up for interpretation. Much like Martin Scorseze, he presents star pilots and the protagonists as stunted man children but also individuals have a genuine sense of heroism that is needed against, well, very unheroic sorts of people. Indeed, analyzing this contradiction and what it means may be the heart of this story.

    The primary difference between Trailspacers and the star pilots is, without mentioning it, the Prime Directive. The TrailSpacers observe things happening but don’t interfere and then pat themselves on the back for doing nothing. This, of course, is rarely what the protagonists of Star Trek do but there’s been a few indications when they take the attitude it’s morally superior to do nothing but observe. This is then contrasted to the people who watch TrailSpacers and the people who are stuck inside the show. I can’t say more without spoiling things.

    I will say that this is a pretty good ending for the series and that most of the major plotlines are wrapped up in a satisfying way. I was surprised by the identity of Jacques McKeown and I think no one will properly guess his identity but that it is surprisingly timely with recent scandals among Amazon and other publishers. I also think the series nicely ties into MOGWORLD and if you haven’t read that book then you probably should.

    In conclusion, it is sad to say goodbye to Dashford Pierce/Jack McKeown but we’ve had a good run. Very few books get more than one great book about the series. This one isn’t quite as good as the previous two since it seems to restart itself after having a couple of perfectly satisfying endings to begin with. That’s a small complaint, though. I gladly would have continued to enjoy the adventures of the last star pilot.

Available here

Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw

    WILL DESTROY THE GALAXY FOR CASH by Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw is the scond book in the Jacques McKeown series. The series is about a washed up space hero who lost his job after teleportation (quan-tunneling) wiped out the necessity for spaceships. The first book was an absolute treat and I immediately picked up the second one in the series. This is one of those series that is best listened to in audiobook form because Ben Croshaw’s voice is so distinctive as well as so much of his humor tied into his delivery.

    The premise for this volume is that our protagonist has unfortunately found himself impersonating the fictional Jack McKeown, world famous author-adventurer, who the protagonist bitterly loathes because all of said adventurer’s adventures are plagarized from other star pilots (like himself). A life of absolute luxury and wealth seem like a poor way of torturing our hero but he can’t bring himself to enjoy any of it knowing that it comes from pretending to be someone he’s not.

    This all becomes extra-twisted as Warden, “Jack’s” employer from the last book wants to hire him for a job that suspiciously sounds like a heist. Specifically a heist of Jimmy Henderson, boy mob boss, as he pays for McKeown Con. It’s supposed to be for a cure that will help the protagonist’s father-figure/mentor, Robert Blaze, but you can never take anything as it seems in these books.

    I really enjoyed the heist crew of this book and Derby, a self-styled gentleman thief, and Malcolm Sturb, a nebbish mad scientist who invented the setting’s equivalent of the Borg. Oh and he was also the protagonist’s archnemesis. The three of them play off one another well and also underscore the fact that so much of the series is about men playing dress up as well as trying to pass themselves off as the heroes of their own narrative.

    Fans of the original more or less know what to expect with the sequel. It’s a kind of zany Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy travel through the bizarre world where space piloting was a brief Golden Age of Sci-Fi/Flash Gordon-esque time of heroes before popping like a soap bubble. Sort of like the Wild West. However, the question of whether the star pilots were ever actually that heroic in the first place is repeatedly brought up. Were they actually heroes or just guys living out their adolescent fantasies on worlds that hadn’t discovered steam power?

    Ben Croshaw is a fantastic narrator and performer but he’s also a great writer of comedy and this comes from someone who writes comedy for a living. His word-building isn’t bad either and it more or less hangs together. Things may be absurd or silly but they’re never such for its own sake but as a commentary on the driving forces of capitalism and human pride.

    In conclusion, this is a fantastic follow-up to the original novel and manages to capture most of the magic. The books have something to say about wish-fulfillment in fiction but I’m not sure it’s wholly negative. After all, the star pilots are mostly heroes. It’s just some of them weren’t at times.

Available here

Writing Update - April 24, 2024

Hey folks,

I thought I would give a wonderful update about what's going on with my current projects because what is the point of this if not to keep my fans updated with what's in the works? This has been a very busy April and the news is both good, bad, and in-between.

* The Supervillainy Saga: The next book, THE RISE OF SUPERVILLAINY, is presently slated to be the finale of the series. It's lasted ten books but sales are a bit down and Gary has achieved a lot of what I've wanted to tell so putting the series to rest for a time seems like a sensible choice. The premise for it is well-timed, though, because we'll be doing a "Gary meets the X-men" style story.

+ Fear not fans of the Gary universe as when the Supervillainy Saga is finished, we'll be doing a sequel series called WORLD'S WORST SUPERHERO. Which will take place in the same world and deal with Gary's opposite number in would-be patriotic superhero, Jack Washington Junior. Except, well, he just  keeps doing villainy! By accident, really!

+ Space Academy Miscreants (Space Academy #4) is now off to the recording studio at Podium where we'll be seeing Vance Turbo's adventures against the evil SLAVE LORDS OF CRIUS and meeting someone he never expected to see: [spoiler]! I think this will be a very enjoyable work.

+ Speaking of Space Academy, SPACE ACADEMY VAGRANTS will be coming out probably just two months after the release of Space Academy Miscreants. It will be a massive treasure hunt story and a redoing of the planned third Lucifer's Star book. Basically, the concept just fit for Vance and crew.

+ We will actually be wrapping up the Lucifer's Star series with a short story included with Miscreants called "The End of History" which will provide a nice epilogue for Cassius and company looking back on their connections to Vance Turbo and his crew.

+ The fourth and final Cthulhu Armageddon book, CTHULHU'S CANYON has been started up and I hope to have it done by the end of Summer. This will return John Henry Booth to the Wasteland for one last time to discover the fate of his two children and whether it's possible to save what little remains of humanity.

+ Speaking of Cthulhu, I have a novelette in TIME LOOPERS, a Cthulhu Mythos anthology edited by David Hambling  of Harry Stubbs fame. We're also going to be releasing THE BOOK OF HASTUR, which is another set of excellent Cthulhu Mythos stories that will be starring John Henry Booth. It's my hope to eventually do a compliation of all of the short stories into one Pulpy mythos volume.

+ Plans remain for the third Moon Cops book and second Morgan Detective Agency book. A Peter Stone sequel too but finishing up the above is currently preoccupying me. Not that I have too much on my plate, no sir!