Other Stuff Monthly #10!

Possibly the furthest these posts have gotten away from videogames and general nerd culture this month, as today's subject is a book about prefabricated housing blocks in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in eastern Europe. It's not as boring as it sounds, though, as this book is Panelki, and the back half of it is made up of a press-out-and-put-together kit to build your own little replica of one of those very blocks.

The book itself is short, but fairly interesting, with text about the history of these building systems, how they came about, and why, and how "a home for every family" was a high priority in the postwar USSR. These prefab blocks were the way to fulfill that goal, in that time of diminished resources across all of Europe. (Interesting to note that in 2020, "a home for every family" isn't anywhere in sight in capitalist America or Britain. More like "a hundred homes for every landlord"). There's also a lot of big pictures, since this is essentiall a coffee table book, comprised of both photos of the blocks and the people who lived in them, and reproductions of promotional posters and magazine covers from the time.

The kit itself is surprisingly big, and obviously, it's a simple build, since you are essentially very slowly putting a big box together. While building it, though, it's kind of educational with the repetitive routine of putting the square panels demonstrating how a gigantic concrete version of the same would be a quick and cost-effective way of building a lot of housing in a short time, compared to manufacturing millions of bricks and having them be put together into one house at a time. Most of this won't be of any interest to most people, and to be honest, it's not a subject I expect I'll be looking into any further. But sometimes, you have to look into areas of knowledge that go alightly further away from your main interests (even if it's just going down a wikipedia rabbithole), or you'll end up being a boring, ignorant person.

Polestar (PC98)

Released in 1995, it's clear that Polestar is an attempt to bring some approximation of contemporary arcade racing games like Daytona USA and Ridge Racer to the humble, and by then over a decade old PC98 hardware. (Though the fact that you're driving a red convertible with a passenger is an obvious homage to Outrun, it's those more modern games that Polestar plays more like) In doing so, it also brings to mind the legendary MZ-700 port of Space Harrier, which made incredible use of ASCII graphics to produce the illusion of high-speed sprite scaling on vastly underpowered hardware. Though the PC98 is more powerful than the MZ-700, and Polestar uses low resolution sprites rather than ASCII, the principle's still the same.

The structure is a simple as can be: you drive around a bunch of tracks, racing only against the clock, no other drivers. The biggest problem this game has is that the time limits are incredibly strict: crash or even just go off the road even once and you're not going to finish the race in time. Luckily, you can just go into time attack mode and choose which track you want to drive on if you can't make it through the two linear courses. And it's worth doing too, as it's the tracks themselves that are the real draw in Polestar.

There's eight of them, and they're all ful of cool things to see (albeit some tracks have more stuff than others). The 3D effect offered by the lo-res sprites works excellently, though it's a lot better in motion than it is in still screenshots, unfortunately. And it's used to great effect, too, as you drive past aeroplanes taking off, people on theme park rides, flocks of ravens flying out of the windows of a ruined castle, and lots more interesting things. The devs have been very successful in making a racing game set in a world that's full of life, not just barren tracks with decorative billboards next to them. Though the arcade games mentioned above have all this stuff too, they do it on powerful hardware with polygonal graphics. Personally, I'd love to see a sprite scaling arcade racer with the same kind of background features as Polestar, but with more detailed sprites. I guess the closest thing would be 1992's Outrunners, but even that falls a little towards the "decorative billboard" style of the 1980s.

Polestar is a decent enough game, and incredibly impressive consdiering the host hardware. The only real problems it has are that the time limits are way too strict, and the actual act of driving the car doesn't feel that great, either, so once you've seen all the cool stuff in every track, you aren't likely to go back to it. Contrast with games like Outrun or Super Hang On, which feel great to play, and as such, are endlessly replayable.