Eat any good books lately?

[benji]

It's basically just a bunch of Grantland type columns. Which is fine! He's smarter than Bill Simmons at least.



This arguably should have been a bit more specifically focused. Many of the critical reviews are right, it falls apart after the 1970's and just rushes through mentioning all kinds of stuff to get up to date. But I really enjoyed the earlier chapters about the far earlier history and transition into standup. So it should have been two books, one with that and then one that could have given the 1980's forward the kind of attention it deserves. There's a lot of situations where he'll mention people who you know become famous later like George Carlin or Rodney Dangerfield but you never get any part where they're famous because he's rushing through some other thing. Because of the early radio and television stuff he covers I was looking forward to that time in the 1980's/1990's where every sitcom on TV was like "give this standup guy a show, who gives a shit if he can act or anybody can write anything" but it's not mentioned. Not even Seinfeld is mentioned to show you just how it really rushes through those years. But I still liked it anyway.



The second book after the first one from Kent stops just after the N64 comes out, this one gets through the 360/PS3/Wii era. This is fine, I didn't really learn too much I hadn't learned in my other reading but it's generally okay if it a bit overly focused on Microsoft launching the two Xboxes because those are the only people who would talk to him. The very last chapter is somewhat randomly about movies based on games with a heavy focus on Uwe Boll. And one of the last chapters is "the games that defined a generation" but rushes through a handful like Call of Duty and Guitar Hero that get barely article length coverage. But the worst part is there are so so many errors. Despite the fact that he claims three game expert proofreaders, one of whom is "meticulous" and "detail-oriented" but missed all kinds of wrong years. I'm more forgiving of the technical errors (claiming the PS1 looks sharper because it does more polygons than N64 or that PS3 was "much more" powerful than the 360) but some of the other errors are pretty unforgivable. Like claiming the first Soul Calibur had multiple PS2 versions. (From the context I'm pretty sure he actually means to be talking about Dead or Alive 2 which was on the Dreamcast and had two PS2 releases in Japan.) Or saying that Call of Duty was a yearly massive franchise during the PS2/Xbox era. All kinds of game titles are wrong like Super Mario Bros. Galaxy and Super Mario Kart Wii being big Wii titles. But worst of all is that he claims there was a Titanfall 3 released before Respawn moved onto Star Wars and Apex. For that reason alone I'm petitioning my local school board to ban this book from all school libraries.