Starfield: a very short review

If you follow computer gaming at all, I'm sure you've already learned about Starfield, but just in case: it's an open world RPG set several hundred years into the future, in outer space.

Your adventures consist mostly of flying around from star to star, and then from planet to planet near certain stars. You can land on various planets and (somewhat) explore them. In the Starfield universe, there are a lot of stars, and a lot of planets. Each planet is different, and some of them allow for fairly complex exploration.

As you go around, you have various encounters: with people, with alien life, etc. What you do in those encounters determines a lot of what sort of experiences you have playing Starfield.

Starfield was developed by Bethesda, one of the oldest computer game developers, known for gaming franchises such as The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, so if you know anything about those games, you know a fair amount about what Starfield is like.

As you travel around in the game, you meet different people, who have different stories and viewpoints, and many of those people offer to engage with you. They may operate stores, taverns, hotels, space ports, etc.; they may give you quests; they may become companions and join you on your travels, etc.

There are a lot of quests. If you don't like doing quests, you probably don't like to play computer role playing games, and then Starfield wouldn't appeal to you, but then you probably won't have read this far in this little article.

It has taken me more than 50 hours of playtime to get to the point where I'm starting to really enjoy Starfield. It's large, complex, and elaborate. You can invest less time in the game, but then you might not get as much out of it.

Starfield is a really nerdy game. The developers spent a lot of time thinking about what it might be like in a possible future where space travel is possible, and the game primarily appeals (I suspect) to people who are interested in this topic themselves.

But it also means that Starfield is the sort of computer game where the loading screens display messages like:

The Iron family of inorganic resources includes Alkanes, Tantalum, and Ytterbium.

So again, that sort of tells you whether you might be interested in this game or not.

Given the size and complexity of Starfield, it's hard for me to find enough time to really play it as it's meant to be played, for long stints of several hours or more at a time.

So check back in with me in another six months or so, when I'll probably have been playing Starfield for several hundred hours, and then maybe I'll have more to say.

The Blackpool Highflyer: a very short review

Andrew Martin has found quite a bit of success with his Jim Stringer series of railroad-themed detective stories. Our hero is a railway worker and amateur sleuth; the books are set in the glory days of the English railroads, principally the first decade of the 1900's.

The Blackpool Highflyer, second in the series but the only one I've read so far, is charming and completely fun to read, with just enough mystery to justify Martin's true delight, which is to relive this particular period in history with as much attention to detail as he can possibly summon up.

In particular, Martin works extremely, extremely hard to match his descriptions and dialogue to the language of the day, for the English that was regularly used in, say, 1905, is already quite a distance from the English that is used now, just 120 years later.

This means peppering his text with lots of unfamiliar-to-me words. Some of them were railway jargon, others were variant spellings of words I know, and still others were amusing curses of the day.

But more interesting to me were those passages that were entirely full of ordinary words, but were used in a style that so far pre-dated me that it seemed somehow foreign and from another language (though it was merely from another time), sort of like the effect when you are first struggling to understand something written hundreds of years ago.

She was pointing at the letters spelling 'Dean Clough' standing up on the roof of the building just beyond the North Bridge. Each letter was taller than three men, and although the North Bridge was high enough to fit the goods station underneath, those letters towered above it. The Dean Clough Mill seemed to have been built by men who'd never seen another mill, and so had no notion of the correct size, but what they did have was an endless supply of bricks. You could fit twenty mills of the common run inside it. It was built by the Crossleys, who also -- along with a certain Porter -- put up the brass for the orphanage where young Arnold Dyson now lived.

The whole book is like that. I suppose you either like that or you don't. And I mostly did.

Andrew Martin is clever and talented, and I can't really fault his approach. But with all the books to read in the world, maybe one dose of 1905 was enough for me.