Hello everyone,
It begins … And it seems, as always, where there is a plan, there is a plan that’s undoubtedly going to change immediately ! The Advent Plan this year is going to include the Star Wars Lego Stuff (the calendar looked great this year and had an excellent start) and games. But I’m going to deviate slightly from that already. What’s behind day 1 ?
There we go. Usual suspects in there (covering up the wall !), plus one I made earlier and today’s model which was a dinky little A Wing. They do marvellous things with the advent calendar models. I think that’s actually a better looking A Wing than the bigger one. I haven’t acquired the Ultimate Collectors Series A Wing though, it’s a bit expensive at £180 and to be honest, with the X Wing game, it wasn’t my favourite ship to fly. Still, nice concept with a pilot ideally placed at the centre of rotation and two massive engines for speed.
What’s the book there ? I have a memorium as part of this post … One of the authors I grew up with died yesterday of covid complications. His name was Ben Bova. I’ve enjoyed quite a lot of his books, although with all authors as prolific as him, the quality does go up and down. It’s a hell of a bibliography and I’m just realising that there are a lot of books to go there that I haven’t read (linky).
Highlights include the Orion series, which started with a lovely concept of a Protagonist and Antagonist who were at opposite ends of their stories. One was stepping forwards in time, the other was stepping backwards. They would meet at certain nexus points in history, where mankind could have died out if not for an intervention. Central to the series were a race of hyperadvanced Creators, who would be our long distant followers (what’s the opposite to Ancestor ?) Ah ha ! Descendants. To ensure their survival, they had to protect their ancestors … and they made Orion their agent. As he goes backwards in time, he learns more about the origins of the conflict and how his feeling about it develop is exceptionally well written. I think the strongest of these was Orion 3, Orion in the Dying Time, which put Orion in the period where the dinosaurs died out and homo sapiens took over. There are events here on a cosmic scale.
And then there’s Orion 2, which saw our character moving through the stories of the sieges of Troy and Jericho with a little bit of Egypt too. He inherits a mercenary band of Hittite Engineers from an Empire that had crumbled to dust as the story begins.
They’re usually great stories of epic adventure and his specialty was near future Earth, such as the story of the first Moon colony and an incredibly tense race to independence in Millennium. There’s also Messianic Nanotechnology in Voyager and … the two Mars books. (I should read the other Grand Tour books at some point).
There have been plenty of Mars books and they tell their tales in their own ways. This time, we have a multinational, multirace crew inhabiting a temporary base on Mars. Bit like The Martian, perhaps double the size. They have Hydrogen fuel cell rovers and power armour. And a precautionary tale for what can happen if your vitamin supply gets neutralised by pure oxygen … One notable thing is that for the second book, Return To Mars, they convert the rovers to Methane because the Hydrogen leaks out (the molecules are too small) which might be a precautionary tale for the moves to fuel cell technology today …
Anyway. Great author, I enjoyed most of the books he wrote (variance in quality is ok !). I’m tempted to read Mars again and I was chuckling away at a Remember story written by R.A. Salvatore that was posted on Farcebook yesterday. Need to read more of his books.
To the game … I’m still addicted to Mars Horizon. Yep.
I left the last Mars Horizon post with the people getting to the Moon …
I managed to get back there again last night in record time. I’m hunting achievements again … It’s going to be tricky to get all of the achievements but I’m enjoying having them as targets along the way while I play this lovely new game that they’ve given us. It’s a little marvel.
The graphics are a little simplified and cartoony but they look great and don’t get in the way. You could probably successfully play this game on pretty old hardware and it would still look good. It doesn’t need great graphics to do its thing. The gameplay is very simple as well. You choose the research and the missions and there is a resource token puzzle minigame that determines how well the missions go.
It gives you these little cutscenes along the way too. I’ve only played Japan and half of NASA so far, so I’m looking forward to seeing the other rockets and devices from ESA, USSR/Russia and China.
Yes. I will always make that joke given chance.
This made me chuckle as well. It was a tiny little sampling rocket fired off from a Mars lander, designed to bring Martian surface material back to Earth. Could this happen with our science ? Probably not. I did enjoy seeing it in game though.
A curious base. Bit small for my liking. I think the best starter base I know of for Mars has to be the one in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, where engineer Nadia carves out an underground (for radiation protection) base at the landing spot. Of all the stories in the Mars books, that’s the one I enjoyed the most.
The Mars mission in Mars Horizon feels very much one way … but that’s ok for game things. I think the Transit Spacecraft plus Lander Vehicle and Ascent Vehicle model is more like the way to go.
I think that’s it for me for today !
Lovely little A-Wing model;
Sad at the loss of Ben Bova, possibly the author I read most (after Anne McCaffrey) in my teenage/young adult years;
Vastly enjoying Mars Horizon.
Hopefully this will be a good December’s worth of posts and I won’t start burning out on them like I have in previous years …
Stay safe, be well.
(PS I should say a couple of words for the drama in the Vendee Globe over the last couple of days … maybe tomorrow ! Good to see one definitely safe and the other travelling to safety)