Robert Rath
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Articles by Robert Rath
Explore the expansive world of Warhammer in audio
Warhammer 40,000, known to most fans as Warhammer 40K, is a tabletop war game set in the distant future—the year 40,000 CE, to be precise. Its unique setting, extensive backstory (further explored in the Warhammer books), and fantastical elements have made it one of the most popular miniature tabletop war games in the world. The game debuted in 1987, and its popularity is only growing stronger.
Ep 456 - Napoleon — The Only Podcast About Movies
“Some new Napoleon might arise” wrote Lord Byron in 1809. Over 200 years later, Sir Ridley Scott brings back Le Petit Tondu with an American accent. We’re joined by author, historian and head writer for the YouTube channel Extra History Robert Rath to discuss the great emperor and Scott’s historical accuracy. Command our legions by emailing onlymoviepodcast@gmail.com or invade our social media at Instagram or Twitter (X) As always, you can catch our episodes early and ad free over on Nebula.
BEYOND WORDS: C.M. Russell's Real Montana Winters
The phrase "words can't describe it" is often used when a person is trying to articulate something either extremely good or extremely bad. And mere words definitely could not describe the extremely bad winter of 1886-87 for the Montanans who experienced it. Starting with a late fall arctic fist that slammed into the Territory's cattle country and never let go, cowboys, ranchers, and homesteaders desperately hung on for life as snow piled higher, temperatures fell lower, and food ran out.
The Fall of Cadia
An Astra Militarum Audiobook Cadia. This proud world stood defiant for centuries – a bulwark against the forces of Chaos residing in the Eye of Terror. All of this would change when it was targeted for destruction by Abaddon the Despoiler as part of his Thirteenth Black Crusade. LISTEN TO IT BECAUSE The Fall of Cadia is a touchstone moment of the Warhammer 40,000 timeline.
Alien: Colony War
Political conflicts on Earth erupt into open hostilities between their colonies in space, with Xenomorphs as the ultimate weapon. On Earth, political tensions boil over between the United Americas, Union of Progressive Peoples, and Three World Empire. Conflict spreads to the outer fringes, and the UK colony of New Albion breaks with the Three World Empire. This could lead to a Colony War. Trapped in the middle are journalist Cher Hunt, scientist Chad McLaren, and the synthetic Davis.
The Infinite and The Divine
Explore a story told across the millennia that delves deep into a pair of fascinating necron characters, their relationship and their plans for the galaxy. Uitgeverij Van Ditmar Boekenimport B.V. Imprint Games Workshop Ltd Uitgegeven als Paperback Eerste editie 20-07-2021 Laatste editie 20-07-2021 ISBN 9781789998320 Aantal pagina's 368 Serie Warhammer 40,000 Taal Engels
Magic, mojitos and mobsters: The promise of Cuba's first magic conference
Cuba: 90 miles from Florida, fifty years in the past. Once an illicit playground for Hollywood stars and mobsters, it now stands as a forbidden island of socialist revolution. That’s how Americans see it, at least. Cut off from the United States since the Eisenhower administration, Cuba has gained a mythic status in the American imagination through the hard truth of history and the soft lies of cinema.
The Tiered Burial Grounds Carved into the Hillsides of Hong Kong
The cemetery climbs ten stories up the valley wall, moss-covered gravestones lining each stair-like terrace. Plants press in, shading tombs with wide palm leaves as roots burst up through sarcophagi. Mosquitos drone. Cobras flee approaching footsteps. These are the cemeteries of Hong Kong’s Happy Valley, a historic burial district shaped by terrain, disease, history and culture.
Remember when Call of Duty had you defend a border wall from Latinos?
Call of Duty: Ghosts seems much, much weirder now that a core part of its plot is part of America's actual national discourse. Do you recall? It was a few years ago now. Only three to be precise, but in today’s political climate, three years might as well have been the Pleistocene. It was Call of Duty: Ghosts. The mission: defend a giant wall along the US-Mexico border from hordes of Latin Americans bent on destroying the United States. It was a big, beautiful wall. Thirty (maybe fifty) feet high.
A History of the Evil Corporation: from Abstergo to Umbrella
These organizations share a few things in common: they manipulate governments, crush ordinary people, and have killer logo design. They’re flagship examples of the Evil Corporation, a trope that’s familiar to any gamer. As staple of genre fiction, the Evil Corporation seems like an invention of the modern world.
The Imaginary Racism of Bioshock Infinite
BioShock: The Collection hits shelves today, putting one of the decade’s most polarizing games -- BioShock Infinite -- back in the public consciousness. Given that, I think it’s a good time to revisit that title and assess it for what it is -- a daring game that doesn’t quite live up to its ambitions. Boil it down, and Infinite both succeeds and fails due to one aspect: it re-conceptualizes racism via an imaginary world.
6 historical details you might have missed in the Battlefield 1 beta
DICE promises that Battlefield 1 will show players a new side of World War I -- a dynamic, global conflict that goes far beyond the trenches of France. Last week we got our first hands-on experience of that vision with the game’s open beta, transporting us to a sand-swept desert reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia. The gameplay speaks for itself, but there’s much more going on under the surface.
Godzilla Resurgence is actually a biting political satire
Early in Godzilla Resurgence the Japanese Prime Minister zips on his emergency management jumpsuit and addresses the press. The government has been studying the creature that has surfaced in Tokyo Bay, he says. Experts have assured him that the creature’s feet will not be able to support its weight on land. An aide rushes to the podium and whispers in the his ear. The PM’s eyes go wide and he stares into the news cameras.
No Man's Sky is a Captain Cook simulator
In June 1768, Lieutenant James Cook unsealed his secret orders. It was a slim letter with the Admiralty seal, given to him on instructions that it remain unopened until he’d completed his mission to anchor in Tahiti and observe the transit of Venus across the sun. He was to sail south. Rumors of a vast southern continent -- Terra Australis -- ran rampant among geographical circles. Cook was to find this unseen land, chart it, catalogue its wildlife, and make contact with its inhabitants.
The archaeologists who are using No Man's Sky as a dry-run for exploring actual space
According to Hello Games, there will be 18 quintillion planets in No Man’s Sky. Most will be uninhabited, while on others, you’ll find life that’s only recently crawled out of the ocean. At times, you’ll find a barren wasteland where a great civilization once reigned. That’s an exciting prospect to players, but it’s even more thrilling for Andrew Reinhard, an archaeologist who’s brought together a team of gamer-academics to explore and catalogue this evolving star map.
We Happy Few built a dystopia with Mod culture, psychedelia, and Facebook
You begin We Happy Few as a censor clerk, searching through old newspaper stories, wiping them, and putting the clips into a pneumatic tube for delivery. But when the character sees a photo of his brother -- and reaches for his bottle of “Joy” -- he instead decides to throw away the government-enforced happy pills and start his escape. The parallels are obvious.
What an Ingress battle in Hong Kong tells us about the future of Pokemon Go
Pokemon Go shares many features with developer Niantic's previous game, Ingress -- so much so that we can use it as a roadmap for future updates. “We’ve captured it. Point Three needs our help. Go! Go! Go!” Sneakers scuffed on paving stones. Our squad took off like a shot, dodging between the statues of Hong Kong’s favorite comic book heroes, like Bruce Lee and McDull the pig.
Tragedy and E3: It's Not Just the Guns, It's the Stories We Tell
On Sunday morning, a man walked into an LGBT nightclub in Orlando and killed 49 people. Apart from the dead, he wounded 53 others who may never walk, see, or speak the same way again. To even think about it breaks your heart. And later that morning, the gaming press had to go to E3 and watch trailers for games about shooting people. Many game journalists struggled with the dichotomy.
A historical defense of Battlefield 1
Minutes after its announcement, controversy bubbled up around Battlefield 1. Set during World War I, the game’s trailer features brutal kills and a pumping remix of “Seven Nation Army,” promising intense action and huge battles -- but it also runs against the popular memory of the war. Certain circles have even gone so far as to suggest EA DICE shouldn’t make a game about the conflict. This reaction is understandable.
Hitman is the best Bond game since Goldeneye
I first encountered James Bond when I was nine. My third grade teacher kept Goldfinger on the classrom reading rack-- a literary booby trap, meant to blow the mind of any kid who picked it up. It worked. Three chapters in, I hit a sex scene and dropped the paperback as if it were a moray eel. Though a lifelong fan of the movies, it was only a month ago that I touched a Bond novel again, and found a wholly different character than the one I knew from the screen.
1979 Revolution: A Snapshot of Chaos and Propaganda
1979 Revolution: Black Friday knocks you sideways first thing. The game begins with the protagonist Reza in a prison interrogation room. In front of him sits a tape recorder, a file folder, and his camera. A sinister interrogator gives him tea and asks him questions. Despite the real-life setting and cultural details, any gamer knows the drill. We’ve done the Interrogation Resistance Section before in Metal Gear Solid. Just be strong and tell them nothing -- they’ll give up eventually.
How to stop your console from destroying the world
Consoles are power hogs. With some small adjustments, though, you can lower both your energy bill and your impact on the environment. Climate change is reshaping the globe. From record-setting heat, to glacial retreat, to unprecedented sea level rise and ocean acidification, we’re already suffering the consequences of humanity’s carbon addiction. And video game consoles contribute to that. Sure, you know that.
What The Division gets right (and wrong) about disaster response
The Division's right-- when the US experiences a major disaster, the military can show up to help respond. Unlike in The Division, however, they're usually not there to shoot people or enforce the law. When it launched, we discussed how The Division misrepresents the civilian side of a disaster — casting the most vulnerable groups as its villains. But not everything in the game is so off-key.
The Division is a terrible Tom Clancy game
Most strategy in The Division boils down to using the right tool. Pinned down or getting rushed? You need a turret. Sniper fire? Pull out the long gun. If your friends go down, you toss a revive station. For every gear, there is a season. Too bad Ubisoft didn’t understand that the same applies to branding, because The Division is the branding equivalent to using a shotgun when you need a sniper rifle. To be blunt: it’s not well researched enough to be a Tom Clancy game.
Revisiting 'No Russian' in the wake of Paris
Back in 2009, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 exploded on to the cable news circuit with a section that was, to put it mildly, controversial. The sequence in question, “No Russian,” cast the player as an undercover CIA agent embedded in a Russian terrorist cell. It’s main action involved the player entering a Moscow airport and ripping through unarmed civilians with automatic weapons. The segment divided opinions.
'Call of Duty: Black Ops 3' is Right: Climate Change is a National Security Problem
Call of Duty: Black Ops III takes place in a climate change nightmare—a future with rising oceans, droughts, and superstorms changing the political landscape. Resource wars tear northern Africa apart as Ethiopian dams cut off Egypt’s access to the Nile. Singapore, vulnerable due to its low-lying geography, gets ravaged by typhoons on a regular basis. Though this may seem like science fiction, it’s a future that U.S. defense planners increasingly believe is just around the corner.
H.P. Lovecraft and the environmental horror of the 21st century.
“I hope the water will always be very deep,” he concludes. “But even so, I shall never drink it.” In Lovecraft’s “ The Colour Out of Space ,” a meteor lands on a farm in rural Massachusetts, not far from the university town of Arkham. Puzzled by the meteor’s strange properties, the Gardiner family invites scientists to examine the object, which emits an unknown spectrum of ultraviolet color. Soon, local farmers realize something not quite right is happening at the Gardener place.
Few Military Games Say Anything Interesting About War
Recently I tried to count how many military games I've played over my lifetime. I gave up at around 25 or so. The question was rhetorical, and rhetorical questions shouldn't require spreadsheets. Next I tried to list which of those games said anything interesting about war. That list was considerably shorter. Disturbingly short. I'm not sure there's another medium that's dealt with a subject so much while saying so little about it.
Examining Hong Kong Through the Lens of Sleeping Dogs
I bought Sleeping Dogs 72 hours after moving to Hong Kong, thinking I'd explore the city digitally at the same time as encountering it with my own eyes.It didn't happen the way I planned. Real life crowded the game out and I shelved the idea. But with Sleeping Dogs: The Definitive Edition launching recently and the release schedule finally cooling off, I thought it was time to revisit and see how the game measured up to reality. So how accurate is the Hong Kong we get in Sleeping Dogs?
Making a Case For Chris Pratt as the Next Indiana Jones
When reports surfaced last week that Disney was considering Chris Pratt as the new Indiana Jones, the internet reacted - well, the way we've come to expect. My own reaction? Positive, and that surprised me. I'm and Indy fan, a die hard Indy fan. Last Crusade was the first film I saw in a theater. On my tenth birthday, I got a fedora and a real ten-foot bullwhip. I still have a full run of Dark Horse's Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis comics. If anyone was going to hate this idea, it was me.
Game of Thrones: Iron From Ice Makes Word Play Dangerous
Dangerous conversations. Fateful decisions. Personal grievances that send armies marching down the Kingsroad. More than any other property, Game of Thrones deserves the Telltale Game treatment. While audiences know GoT for its explicit sex and brutal violence, it's the show's preoccupation with dialogue that makes it so addictive - and Telltale's new episodic game understands that. While Game of Thrones resides in the fantasy genre, it's ultimately about politics.
It Is Realistic For Women to Fight in Dragon Age
On a normal basis I don't muck around in comment section arguments. Partially that's because internet debates tend to be mental ulcers that never heal, and partially because I figure others can handle it if someone's peddling historical myths. But recently a topic keeps rearing its obnoxious head: the idea that it's "unrealistic" for women in Dragon Age: Inquisition to wield longswords. Women, the argument goes, don't have the strength to wield heavy blades.
Critial Intel Revisits Tropico 5, Jurassic World and Black Ops
Critical Intel tries to tackle the current issues in gaming, but unfortunately it can't cover everything. Some stories fall through the cracks because of a breaking news event, because they won't fill a whole column, or because I'm in the Himalayas without any internet access. Here's a roundup of three stories CI missed in 2014, from the Thai military junta banning a game, to the Jurassic World trailer, to an embarrassingly bad think tank presentation by the director of the Black Ops series.
These "Critical Games" of 2014 Had Some Extraordinary Moments
Critical Intel's mission is to explore the overlapping space between video games and real life in order to enrich the reader's appreciation for both. In doing so, I may stumble across a game that has one spectacular element that deserves mention - even if the rest of the game isn't spectacular. This Critical Games of 2014 doesn't compile the best games of the year. Inclusion doesn't constitute an award, or even suggest that the entry is a good game.
Great Gifts for Assassin's Creed History Buffs
Happy New Year! The season of celebratory excess has come to a close and a new year lies ahead. But now that you're recovering from the holiday binge of turkey, rummy eggnog and/or latkes, why not take the opportunity to binge with your brain? Given that after the Holidays many people have a few Amazon gift cards rattling around, it's a good time to direct you toward books that'll let explore your favorite games on a deeper level, or that you'll enjoy because they're similar.
How Well Does Far Cry 4 Represent the Region?
Last week we explored how Ubisoft crafted a strikingly authentic Himalayan landscape for Far Cry 4. But there's a lot more to a country than its physical topography, so this week we'll look at the cultural, religious, and historical aspects of how Far Cry 4 depicts the Himalayas, with special emphasis on Nepal. What's fact? What's fiction? And who on Earth would be named "Pagan"? I Mean, No One Would Take the Name "Pagan," Right? Actually, they might - if they're from Hong Kong.
Far Cry 4 Offers An Accurate Depiction of the Himalayas and Nepal
Ubisoft's team was on a narrow cliff-side path when the attack came. It was a common setting for Nepal -- a strip of road with a sheer slope on one side and a drop on the other. Their drone buzzed out into the abyss, capturing footage of a river in the valley below. That's when the eagle attacked the drone. Nepali eagles are used to people, and birds, and the occasional helicopter, but they'd never encountered drones before.
Pikachu and Other Geek Icons Join Hong Kong "Umbrella Movement"
Last night, protesters in Hong Kong decided to shut down the government. They surged out of the Admiralty encampment they've held since late September and encircled the government offices and office of the Chief Executive. It was a desperate escalation. Last week, the police cleared their protest site in Mong Kok. Protest leaders contradicted each other. Breaking their weeks-old truce with the cops read like a last gasp before the umbrella movement folded.
The Good and Bad of Assassin's Creed: Unity
Last week I talked about why Assassin's Creed Unity doesn't make the grade as historical fiction. But with a game this sprawling and complex, there's no way I could fit even a fraction of my thoughts into a single column - I could probably write for a month on this game alone. Instead of doing that, I'm going to get it all out at once. Consider this half party, half purge. We're here to judge Unity: the good, the bad, and the déplaisant.
Assassin's Creed: Unity Doesn't Reflect The French Revolution
Can a video game be historical fiction? It's a question I've confronted playing every Assassin's Creed, and a goal Ubisoft clearly strides toward. They've come close in my mind, especially with Assassin's Creed II and III, but due to the settings never feeling quite real enough, they've yet to produce a game that indisputably fits the bill. So what of Assassin's Creed: Unity? Has Ubisoft finally cracked the formula? I regret to say they haven't.
You Have to Earn Your Apocalypse, and Call of Duty Doesn't Always
This article includes spoilers for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and The Last of Us This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but an energy drink. A spore. Kevin Spacey in a Mandarin collar. Armageddon is a hot topic right now. Scratch that, it's ALWAYS been a hot topic. Every culture has its Ragnarok, and at every point in history you'll find people who believe they're living the end times.
| | The Escapist
Allying with enemies. Gaining intel on warlords. Tracing their networks. Striking a training camp from the skies and destroying it in a fiery explosion. You'd be forgiven for mistaking this for Afghanistan, but it's actually Middle-earth: The Shadow of Mordor, a good game with an upside-down theme. While it plays well and has interesting mechanics, Shadow of Mordor falls flat thematically because it transplants a War on Terror mentality to a fantasy world inspired by World War I.
Yellowstone's Hot Legends and Cool Myths
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