GTA4: Little Things Done Well

Grand Theft Auto IV has me conflicted. After years of ogling the Xbox 360, and missing out on big game releases like Halo 2 and Gears of War (all the while righteously proclaiming that PC gaming was where it's at), I finally caved and got one when GTA4 was released back in April. I'd never played any of the GTA games -- never really had much interest in shooting hookers and running down pedestrians. But the mammoth hype machine sucked me in and I joined the consoling masses that I'd derided for oh so long.

The bottom line is, the hype was ... well, hype. GTA4 is not the game to end all games. Reviewers who probably put 10-15 hours into it before making their judgment were understandably wooed by the open-world freeform sprawl of Liberty City, the interesting and well-done main story propelled by believable characters and excellent voice acting, and, of course, the massive PR campaign.

Once you get past the newness of it all, though, you see that the gameplay is fundamentally very repetitive: drive here, shoot this guy, steal this money. Drive there, take this guy out, call this guy. To their credit, the devs do sometimes get creative with this GTA equivalent of the standard RPG FedEx quest (i.e. take X package to Y guy for Z reward). But in the end, when you step back from the details, there's really not much variety here.

Still, though, somehow this game has a way of sucking you in. From what I can tell, it's the sheer amount of 'little things' that come together to make Liberty City so compelling: traffic, while not the smartest, is everywhere; pedestrians are on every sidewalk, yell things when you honk at them, answer their cell phones, get angry at drivers that hit them, and have conversations among themselves. In 27 hours of game time, I think I have yet to hear a single repeated conversation or comment from any one of them. Ambulances come to the scene of big accidents; cops chase bad guys; food vendors hawk hot dogs on street corners. Day changes to night changes to morning. Sunny skies turn to downpours, soaking the streets, forcing pedestrians to open umbrellas or run for cover. In short, the city really does feel alive, and its sheer size is such that you can't help but feel like it dwarfs you and would just keep on going even after you stop playing.

Seven months after its release, I'm only 37% of the way through the game, according to the in-game stats tracker. I'm not in any particular hurry, and I don't play that often. I pick it up every now and then, maybe once every two weeks for an hour. Right now I'm stuck on a frustrating-as-hell mission called "Waste Not Want Knots". I'm supposed to go with Packie McRreary and his brothers to a waste management plant run by the mob to steal a stash of cash. We have to hop the fence, take out the bad guys standing around outside, get into the plant, fight the baddies inside, I have to run up the stairs to the office and grab the cash, then we have to fight our way outside to the rear of the plant, where a 'getaway boat' is waiting for us. I've tried this mission, oh, probably thirty times. There are just too many bad guys. Making it that much harder is that if any of your guys dies, the mission's a failure. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I just can't beat it.

Anyway, on the ride over to the waste management plant, Packie and his brothers have a conversation about the mob and about their own family. I was getting so, so tired of hearing this story every single time I had to drive them back over to the plant for one more try. Then, a few nights ago, on my 4th try of the night, I notice that Packie doesn't start talking - he's quiet. All I hear is the radio ... and then he says, "is it OK if we just listen to the radio on this one?" I couldn't believe it! The game knows I'm really damn tired of hearing this same stupid conversation and had some pity on me! Freakin' awesome!

So yeah, that seems to sum up the appeal of GTA4 for me. It does a lot of little things really well, and in combination, it adds up to a very well done game. The hype was way overblown, but it's a damn fun game.

Nitpicking Fallout 3

Whether gamers took Bethesda's advice to Prepare For The Future or not, the long-awaited Fallout 3 was released on October 28 to much fanfare, including midnight openings at hundreds of Best Buy and Gamestop stores around the country. Having never played the first two Fallout games, and being turned off by all the "it's just Oblivion - with guns" preview clamoring by game sites, I decided many months ago that I wouldn't buy it right when it came out, instead waiting until it'd gone on sale and I had no other new games to play. Besides, I was deep into STALKER: Clear Sky, and didn't see myself siphoning off much time for another game.

But, I'll admit it, the awesome ads plastered all over Metro Center for the game got me interested again, and I scooped it up on release day. Rushing home that night to install it and give it a try, I reflected on how much I hoped it wasn't just Oblivion with guns, because although I'd loved Morrowind (possibly due to its being the first real RPG I'd ever played), Oblivion just didn't "do it" for me: sure, it was gorgeous, and huge, and open-world-ish to the max, but there were enough annoyances and lack of originality that my enthusiasm for it eventually waned and made me stop playing (though admittedly only after many months).

Now that I'm five hours into Fallout 3, by my standards (i.e. bitching can be justified with even only a very minimal amount of actual relevant knowledge) I'm more than qualified to point out some criticisms that I have of the game. Here goes:

• Floating objects: this is not a bug, but rather a perpetual artifact of the Havok physics engine which also showed itself in Oblivion. All objects that should be touching, like a plate on a table, are in fact levitating a small distance apart. My guess is that the engine can't handle having two objects touching without forcing some reaction to occur between them; i.e. it is contact between objects that triggers the physics reactions to be applied. In most cases the devs have been careful to minimize this separation distance between objects, but there are times when it is blatantly noticeable and just looks ridiculous. Can it really be that in 2008 we can't design a physics engine to get around this problem?

• When the player's view is moved over a box, crate, desk, closet, or any other object which can be searched, if it is empty, the world "EMPTY" appears over it. Now, I too grew tired of clicking on searchable items in Morrowind and Oblivion only to find them empty, but couldn't the devs have come up with some sort of happy medium between wasting my time and leading me around by the nose only to items that aren't empty? I feel like this is a concession to short-attention-span consolers, which always bugs me.

• Immersion-breaking NPC behavior: for a game that relies so heavily on interactions with NPCs, it boggles my mind at how unrealistic they can behave. I've watched two NPCs stand face to face, trying to walk through each other, for more than 10 seconds before one gets pushed to the side and is able to walk around the other. I've also heard about occasions where a conversation with one NPC gets triggered by the player's proximity regardless of what the player is currently doing - including fighting another NPC, which gets put on hold while the crucially important conversation with the first NPC occurs. C'mon Bethesda - is it that difficult to prevent such immersion breakers?

• While I think the Pip-Boy UI is a cool approach to presenting the player's inventory, stats, and map, I cannot understand why the actual screen area is so small. Taking up the rest of the screen are all the non-functional graphical details of the Pip-Boy: the knobs, dials, and metal frame. As a result, a ton of scrolling through menu items must constantly be done, which gets old fast. Sure, the Pip-Boy looks cool, but how about letting me see more than a handful of items in the lists at a time? Hopefully some enterprising modders will get around this soon.

• Another leading-consolers-by-the-nose element: every NPC in your vicinity is indicated on your compass by a marker showing their orientation toward you: friendly or hostile. This takes some of the 'exploration' impetus out of the game, as you always know when a baddie is around the corner.

• I can't see my body when I look down! While probably a legacy limitation of the Oblivion engine, it's disappointing to not be able to see my torso, legs, and feet when I look down. Most games these days show the rest of your body, adding an element of embodiment of the player into the game, so not having a body noticeably detracts from the experience.

• Wonky animations: while switching to third-person view and zooming out is convenient for running around and exploring - when a wider field-of-view is preferable - the animations are so basic and untailored to the actual player movement that they become distracting. For example if you run forward and then additionally press sidestep, the animation doesn't change at all; rather, your player just slides diagonally. I know, sounds like a minor issue, but when your player's movement over the ground doesn't look right, you notice. Again, seems like an issue not that hard to fix - couldn't more animations simply have been created for the player?

• Having to scroll through dialogue options: again probably a console concession. When talking to an NPC, the possible player responses are listed, but if there's more than about 3, you have to scroll through them to see the rest, even though there's plenty of screen space (at higher resolutions, which most PC gamers would be playing at) to have extended the dialogue box in order to fit them all in. Again, hopefully modders will get around this one by either making the box bigger or the font smaller.

Whew! That's what I've come up with so far. Sure, none of them sound terribly serious, but when you come into the game hoping that none of Oblivion's shortcomings bled over into this one, you can't help but notice how they mostly did. That leads to a game experience that, for all intents and purposes, could conceivably be seen as nothing more than a high-quality total conversion for Oblivion, which for the most part, is a bit of a disappointment.

However, all that aside - and I fully admit this might sound contradictory - I'm really enjoying Fallout 3 so far! That's because, well, all faults aside, an Oblivion total conversion putting the player in a post-apocalyptic world set in and around Washington, DC would have been pretty frickin' cool - and it is. As I get more into it, I'm sure I'll have more to complain about, but this is only because I'm paying such close attention to the game and continue to have such high hopes for it.

Back in the days when I was a teen-ager ...

before I had status and before I had a pager
you could find The Abstract listening to hip-hop
my pops used to say it reminded him of be-bop
I said 'well daddy, don't you know that things go in cycles?'

So begins the opening track "Excursions" from A Tribe Called Quest's classic 1991 sophomore album The Low End Theory. I clearly remember listening to the cassette for the first time after getting it as part of BMG Music Club's 'buy 1, get 10 free' initial offer way back in 1992. At the time, I was heavily into hip-hop already, but with a very narrow focus on Ice-T, NWA, PE, X-Clan, Eazy-E and the like - the more 'confrontational' stuff. Aware that there was a whole 'nother world of hip-hop out of New York that I knew little about, I used the BMG 10-free deal to get up to speed on it - Brand Nubian, BDP, Tribe, Big Daddy Kane, etc.

I remember being blown away by The Low End Theory, in particular. It was unlike anything I'd heard: creative, positive, headnodic (yes that's a word), jazzy. I listened to it constantly for months, and it's been one of my favorite albums ever since that first listen.

Pondering recently the state of hip-hop (again), it occurred to me that my enthusiasm for new music has waned considerably these days. I look forward to new game releases much more so than hip-hop albums, whereas it used to be the opposite by a long shot. A big part of it is that I still haven't found a convenient way to keep up with and find new material (yup, still mourning the loss of college radio at WMUC since leaving College Park seven years ago). I try to catch The Soul Controllers on Decipher on Thursday nights, but since they moved from 11 to 10 PM, I haven't actually caught the show live in months. In the past few months I haven't been checking out local shows in DC either, for various reasons. And so my only source of information is various websites like Sandbox, which, while regularly updated, don't make it easy to actually listen to and discover new stuff.

Not that I haven't been finding anything new; in the past few months I've really enjoyed Atmosphere's When Life Gives You Lemons, J-Live's Then What Happened?, The Package's New Golden Era, and The Roots' Rising Down; and I did recently pick up People Under The Stairs' FUN DMC (nice as usual, although not quite as addictive as some earlier efforts) and The Mighty Underdogs' Droppin' Science Fiction (just today, and the first listen was pretty positive, although with Lateef and Gab how can you go wrong?). I've also ordered Panacea's new one, A Mind on a Ship Through Time, which is in the mail and is presumably just as good as everything else they've done.

But nothing's really amazed me in a long time. I feel like back in those 'golden era' years that was a regular occurrence. And so, feeling a little hip-hop malaise tonight, "Excursions" popped into my head and I just had to hear it ... but then I couldn't stop at Buggin' Out, then Rap Promoter, and before I knew it Scenario was ending; an hour had passed without my having even realised it, hip-hop nirvana having sucked me blissfully in.

*sigh*

Man, I miss those days.

Rebirth

Yup, this is it - the rebirth of GregP's Profundity. After an absence of almost 14 months, I'm back. Some things a few months ago actually stirred my interest in reviving the blog, but it didn't feel prudent at the time. Just today, though, it finally felt like it was time to do so. While there has been a few things of note to talk about from my absence, I'm going to skip it all for now to address the specific subject that made me post again, and that is ... The Low End Theory (see above).

Goin' Back To ... D.C.

Today I filled up my gas tank for the last time in California. I paid $2.87 per gallon. My next fillup will be either in Maryland or Washington, D.C.

Next Friday is my last day at work and that evening, I fly to D.C. Saturday, Ladan and I fly to Iran for vacation. By October 19 we'll be back, I start looking for a place, she flies back to Phoenix, and on November 5, I begin my new job.

Everything has happened pretty quickly in the past few weeks, and it's hard to believe that in ten days I'll be leaving here for good. I've gotten very comfortable here - too comfortable, in fact, bordering on apathetic - and so it's been tough preparing mentally for 'the end'. In recent months I've made some good friends at work, and I'll be sad to see them go. The work environment is just ... different in D.C.; it'll be a much smaller office, very small group, more formal.

Just as happened to me at the end of 2004 when I was preparing to leave Maryland, when I really started to notice and appreciate D.C., I'm loving these last few days. I'm enjoying every minute, the weather, the food, the stores, the people. This past weekend, I took some time to go around and snap photos of some of my favorite spots out here, most of which, sadly, have no equal on the east coast.

What will it be like when I can't spend a Saturday hitting Fry's Electronics, Tower Records (R.I.P.) or Rasputin Music, Lozano's Car Wash, Annapoorna for some chole bhatura, the Sunnyvale park to soak up some sun and read a book, Santana Row to people-watch and read some more?

What will it be like to get up in the morning and be cold? Or drive to work and not have it be sunny?

These things are gonna tough. The biggies are going to be Fry's and the cold. Fry's, because these days I wouldn't even dream of setting foot in a Best Buy or Circuit City, in all their plastic-y slick-marketed trendiness. Fry's has everything you could possibly want, and cheaper than everybody else. Returns are zero hassle, no questions asked, no matter what. Their PC games section, as far as I can tell, is the last remaining healthy bastion in the entire US retail market. I can't even remember the last time I bought a game at Gamestop or Best Buy. Fry's has them earlier, and cheaper. I've been on a minimum once-a-week visit schedule there for two years now. Most of the time it's just to gawk, which is fun enough on its own.

The cold's gonna hurt because after a year of living in the south bay, and the temperature never dropping below 50 degrees, my body has thoroughly adjusted to comfort. Last winter when I went home to Albany for Christmas, it was a bitter reminder of what real cold is like. D.C. doesn't get as cold as Albany, but there's still most definitely a fall and winter, and man it's gonna be weird having to bundle all up to keep the cold and wind out. After moving out of San Francisco last July, I haven't worn anything heavier than a very light jacket even once down here.

Ah well ... sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm also excited to get back to D.C., live in the city, walk and Metro everywhere, start applying to grad schools, get involved with international organizations, etc. I'm sure I'll look happily back on this time and miss it, but I know that D.C. is where it's at for me now, and I can't wait to finally get started down that path. But I'll probably still impulsively check the Fry's ads online first thing in the morning every day.

Book Review: Atlas Shrugged

Years ago a friend recommended Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, but I never got around to reading it. A few months ago, while reading a Bioshock preview, I came across a mention by executive producer Ken Levine that Rand's Atlas Shrugged had been a clear influence on the game's backstory. This piqued my interest and a few days later I bought the book, planning to finish it coincident with the game's release on August 21.

The book is lonnng - my paperback has 1076 pages. Published in 1957, the story centers around the experiences of Dagny Taggart (I presume that the odd spelling of the author's name led her to take it out on the main character by choosing a similarly strange spelling), a railroad executive who slowly watches the government strip away all the incentive and capability of her company and others to conduct business, in the name of helping "the people". Seeking profit is deemed evil, giving handouts to others is deemed righteous, and therefore big business becomes demonized to the point that industrialists start throwing in the towel on their own, refusing to be slaves to a system that asks for everything from them but entirely takes away their ability to do so. The character of John Galt turns out to be secretly whisking away the top businessmen of the country to his hideout, where they begin their own community in which the only proper relation is business, selfishness is encouraged, and altruism is abhorred.

That's a necessarily curt summary of a much fuller, more detailed story, as should be expected for a novel of damn near eleven hundred pages, but that's the gist of it. Rand uses the book to develop and present her philosophy that she calls objectivism. The main tenets are probably best described in terms of what they reject: any belief in the supernatural, or any claim that individuals or groups create their own reality, mysticism (any acceptance of faith or feeling as a means of knowledge), skepticism (the claim that certainty or knowledge is impossible), determinism (the belief that man is a victim of forces beyond his control), altruism (the claim that morality consists in living for others or for society), collectivism, and the "mixed economy" notion that government should regulate the economy and redistribute wealth. In four phrases, she has described it as objective reality, reason, self-interest, and capitalism.

Of course, given my atheism, I found much appeal in her views on religion, although I don't entirely agree with them. While I do thoroughly reject the idea of a god watching over humanity, and that any knowledge can be claimed through faith, I definitely believe there are things we do not and cannot understand, and that there are other realities about which we are clueless. Ruling out all of these things seems to me to be a much too simplistic and narrow-minded approach.

The rest of her views, though, mostly disagreed with me. Given the context and time period - the US in the late 40's and early 50's - it seems reasonable that people could have been concerned with the growing influence of socialist and communist ideas around the world and the perceived threat they presented to the notion of a free, democratic, capitalistic society. But it's harder to keep in mind that the period of the collapse of overt Western colonialism throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin and South America that came in the 60's and 70's, and therefore much of the theory and discourse about sustainable economic systems and relations between countries that lead to many indigineous independence movements, had not yet come to the fore. Speaking of the US alone, at the time the book was published, the civil rights and feminist movements had not even begun; the focus on the disparate power relations between different groups in society, and how the economic system reinforced and solidified those relations, had not yet come about. Given the gravity of these subsequent events, it's indeed difficult to avoid discounting Rand's views.

Still, I found some merit in her idea that men (the term she used to refer to all) are naturally programmed to pursue their own interests and nothing else, and that a man must never be held back in his achievements as he engages in purposeful motion toward a goal. Implicit in the story is her view that men are indeed unequal in ability, but that hard work and persistence can overcome all adversity, and that government should not intervene to attempt to enforce equality in any way whatsoever. It's an argument that's been beaten to death by many others, certainly, and will probably forever be a point of disagreement between the free market types and the socialist types. Personally, I find it to be too idealistic and ignoring of the reality of the actual implementation of the economic system in this country. Fact is, owners and producers do not always earn their profits through hard work, potential is not unlimited for everyone, and the system has a lot of inertia that is almost impossible to overcome when attempting to move up the economic ladder, so to speak. Combine this with government that panders to corporate interests to the point of enacting legislation that provides tax and regulatory loopholes for corporations, and orienting the country's foreign policy toward guaranteeing raw materials and markets for goods around the world, and you've got an international system of relations that is indeed quite unequal and extremely difficult to change.

Undoubtedly, though, the story is a good one, and worth reading. Rand manages to develop her characters enough to truly draw the reader in and identify with them, although at times their believability suffers when she has them launch into multiple-page diatribes that are little more than thin-veiled soapbox performances by Rand herself. This phenomenon is taken to an absurd extreme by Galt in his last, and the book's climactic, speech that drags on for FIFTY-SEVEN pages. Yes, FIFTY-SEVEN.

The bottom line is, the story and Rand's philosophy serve as food for thought, even if the presentation is at times heavy-handed and overwrought. I usually shy away from books, especially novels, that take up so much time - it did in fact take me two months to get through - when I have a continually-growing stack of other books waiting to be read. But I think this one was worth it, not least because the backstory of Bioshock (with main character Andrew Ryan, a name that's hard not to mentally rearrange into Ayn Rand, as intended) makes much more sense that it would otherwise, and in fact often borrows heavily from Atlas Shrugged.

Game Review: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

One of the downsides to having easy retail access to new games as soon as they come out, combined with our desire for immediate gratification, is that gaming websites and magazines are under such pressure to produce reviews immediately after a game is released that they only ever judge the game in it's initial retail state (and in fact, many succumb to reviewing late beta versions in order to get a jump start on the competition). While this is generally reasonable for the gamer - nobody should pay full price on the first day for a game that is simply broken - it means that any improvements the developer makes through patches, and the fan community makes through mods, will probably do little to create new customers in the months following the initial release.

And a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (ugh, I abhor the meaningless initialism!) is a perfect example of this situation. This was a game under development for more than five years by Russia's GSC Game World, a company known for it's underwhelming 2001 FPS Codename: Outbreak and the more popular Cossacks RTS series. The story is set around the Chernobyl area, in the future, after a second meltdown had caused the formation of "the Zone", an area in which strange "anomalies" sprang up randomly and mutated animals had free reign. So-called "stalkers" were people who wandered into the Zone in search of artifacts - essentially power-ups created by the strange phenomena associated with the Zone. For years we were treated to amazing trailers featuring a gloomy, decaying, downright spooky world where the inhabitants roamed freely in search of whatever they wanted at the time - artifacts, food, weapons, etc. A revolutionary artificial intelligence system dubbed A-Life had been designed that promised to produce a vibrant, convincing game world populated with life-like characters. I've got videos dating from 2003 showing these features in action, and I waited in excited suspense for years just like everybody else.

But as development dragged on, and the A-Life system required more and more time to tweak, and the graphics needed to be continually updated, at some point, the primary revolutionary feature of the game - the promise of a seamless, totally free game world - was quietly scrapped (or rather, put aside) in favor of a more traditional storyline-based, quest-driven game experience.

And so when the game was released four months ago, the inevitable reaction from most was disappointment. The open-ended game environment we'd been promised for years was gone, replaced with fairly standard shooter/RPG elements. Add on top of that the only slightly above-average graphics, especially relative to the recent eye-candy-heavy Prey, F.E.A.R. and Half-Life 2, the hints of lack of polish and poor language translation, and you got a mostly lukewarm response from the gaming press and fans who'd years ago already according the game 'instant classic' status. To be fair, some websites saw through these surface blemishes to appreciate the full game experience and gave it high scores, but overall the reception was mixed at best.

When I started the game, there were a number of minor rough elements that immediately caught my attention: the inexplicably goofy 'switching weapons' and 'opening inventory' sounds; the poor dialogue translation, with long paragraphs that sounded both unnatural and pointless; the way the sound of human voices and animals howling was not properly attenuated by distance, making it impossible to tell if that mutant dog was right behind you or so far away as to not even be rendered; and the unconventional quest-giving and -tracking system that took some time to adjust to. Compared to the level of presentation professionalism and polish we've gotten used to (ignoring the increasingly serious problem of actual gameplay bugs being left in shipping games that require subsequent patches), it felt slightly amateurish.

But then I started to notice the good things: the way groups of stalkers would sit around a fire, talking and telling jokes (in Russian) and laughing, sometimes even playing guitars; the way the combination of all the sounds - animals howling, random gunshots and cries of pain, wind blowing - and the artistic style of the game really made you feel like you were walking around a mostly-deserted, hostile environment where nature had been severely disrupted.

As usual, immediately the mod community kicked into action. A user-friendly automated mod manager was developed; before an official patch fixed it, a mod made the field of view adjustable according to the aspect ratio of the resolution being used (thus expanding the FOV properly for widescreen users such as myself); and the amazing Float32 shader mod went through countless iterations to radically improve lighting quality while also speeding up performance. There were also a handful of increased-resolution texture mods, especially for the weapons, animals, and NPCs; a replacement of some sound files (thankfully fixing the two sounds mentioned above); new and more varied sky and cloud textures; and perhaps most importantly for me, the Redux mod, which aimed to add realism to some of the game features: for example, bandages changed from restoring health to simply stopping bleeding, as they should; firefights became much more intense as a result of shot lethality being increased; the UI was simplified and minimalized; the frequency with which food needed to be consumed increased; anomalies became invisible, requiring an equipped detector to avoid them; and a host of other minor touches that improved the feel of the game.

And so after the official patches and numerous mods, I had a fully-tweaked, high-resolution, beautifully-lit game with minimal annoyances, a marked difference from the game that comes in the box. While even mods couldn't change the absence of the A-Life system we'd heard so much about (although modders have tried, with some success), all of these changes did add enough to the game to make a huge difference. I hadn't played a game with an environment that elicited such a response of cautious, curious fear in me since The Two Greatest Games Of All Time: System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Often I would just stop and gape in amazement at the beauty of my surroundings and the enveloping feel of the sounds; of course, it helps (in fact should be required) to play at night, in the dark, with ear-covering headphones.

Tonight, after four months of irregular playing, I finished the game. While no single element of the gameplay was brilliantly innovative in the ways we originally thought they would be, and the story felt disjointed in places, and the ending(s - there are three) were cool but average, overall I just loved this game. All the parts came together to produce a fun, challenging, convincingly creepy game, and I loved every minute of it. Sure, many things could have been done better; but the absolutely perfect game has yet to be created, and probably never will be. In the meantime, I hope to be playing more games like this one.

On to Bioshock! (Which, oh, by the way - will be the perfect game.)

The Other Side of the Shah

A few weeks ago I came across a YouTube video of an interview with the former Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. I watched it, then another, and then another, and before I knew it I'd spent an hour watching videos. From my years of reading about the country, mainly through "left" or "liberal" books discussing the sordid history of American interventionism, I had developed a view of the Shah as an American-controlled puppet dictator; certainly better than his successors turned out to be, but objectionable nonetheless. Contrary to that, most Iranians I've talked to regarded him as an educated, righteous leader, but since they all came from the same small, relatively well-off north Tehran community, I was always more inclined to believe what I read about him in books. But from watching these videos - the first time I'd actually seen him speak - I developed a keen interest in him, and found that even though he seemed a bit snobbish, there was something about him that fascinated me; I suddenly wanted to learn more about this man.

I started reading more about him online and found that he'd written a book in 1980 called Answer To History (Pasukh bih Tarikh in Farsi). The book detailed his time as Shah, starting with his coronation in 1941 when his father, Reza Shah, stepped down soon after the British and Russians invaded the country during World War II, all the way to the 1979 revolution and ending with his brief period in exile. His failing health lead to his death just a few months after completing the book but it wasn't published until 1982.

The next day I located the book in a library (it apparently only had one printing in 1982 and is difficult to find new in any retail or online stores) and picked it up. While there I also got his twin sister Ashraf Pahlavi's book Faces In A Mirror, published in 1980.

In short, I found the Shah's book fascinating. As time goes on, I'm starting to increasingly find that many of the books I've chosen to read in the past have been very consistently one-sided. Hearing the story in his own words, it was undeniably clear that the Shah was an intelligent, educated man, who truly desired to see his country progress and become a world power through modernization and education. The reasons for his downfall are many and varied and complex, but in essence, he seemed to believe - and subsequent history seems to have confirmed - that the reforms he was trying to make were simultaneously too slow for his American and British allies and too fast for his citizens. With the wrath of both groups against him, increasing pressure from both outside and within the country, it was only a matter of time until something had to give.

He gives example after example of reforms he initiated, or industries he built, or education he improved, and on numbers alone it's obvious that his governance did wonders for the overall state of the country. His detractors, especially toward the end, usually focused on human rights violations, especially by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police; although he denies claims of their excesses, I did get the feeling that either he was leaving something unsaid or he just didn't know what had actually been going on, having possibly been insulated from such vulgar details by his loyal court. Either way, his refutation of those criticisms seemed weak, especially relative to the solid defense he made of everything else he'd accomplished over his 37-year reign.

When I finished the book, I felt I had an entirely new perspective on the Shah and the revolution. What a stark contrast to the Iran that my generation knows, which starts with Khomeini and the hostage crisis, and completely overlooks the preceding fifty-plus years when the country was mostly a strong ally, where US presidents would routinely visit, and tens of thousands of American university students would study! It was like an entirely unexpected second side to a long-familiar story had been revealed to me, and I was fascinated. In particular, his detailing of the pathetically flip-flopping support by the US government was frustrating in light of later events, and his predictions of how the revolution would alter both the strategic balance between the Soviet Union and the US, and the West's relationship with the Middle East, were uncannily accurate.

I quickly moved on to Ashraf's book and found it a great companion to the Shah's narrative of the same time period, if quite a bit more personal and slightly less historical. Again, she painted an impressive picture of a country whose government was struggling against all odds to drag it into the modern era.

Having finished that book last night, I then read a chapter on Iran from The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, which shed additional light on this period, especially regarding the KGB's destablization campaigns against the Shah, including support for the Tudeh Communist Party in Iran. Among other interesting facts I was able to glean by comparing these texts, it seems that Fereydoun Hoveyda, the brother of the Shah's former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda and who served as Iranian Ambassador to the UN (and who, at first, turned against the Shah after the revolution, blaming him for his brother's execution by Khomeini) was on the payroll of the KGB and passed falsified intelligent reports on to the Shah multiple times. This was the first and only reference I've ever seen to this, possibly due to the relatively recent release of this book only nine months ago. Another surprise was an explanation of how the KGB paid someone to introduce Farah Diba, the Shah's third and final wife, for the first time to the Shah, hoping that her leftist leanings developed while a student in Paris would clear the way for greater Soviet influence over the Shah.

Taken together, these videos and books have whetted my appetite to learn more about this period, and about all the forces that came together to create the revolution. As agreed on by just about everyone, but told particularly eloquently and personally by the Shah, the revolution was a profoundly disruptive and regressive event that not only destroyed the progress made by a growing country over many decades, but undeniably changed the world political landscape for the worse and helped set the stage for many of the most pressing problems of the recent past, today, and probably well into the future.

Once again I'm amazed at how random, mostly aimless wandering around the internet can lead a person down a path of knowledge that they never expected to find; this has happened to me numerous times and is one of the reasons I so love the internet. Many people complain that we've become too reliant on it and don't often enough question it's accuracy, which is a valid complaint, but the fact is that much, if not most of what's out there is quite factual and useful, especially if it leads to exploration of other, less accessible forms of media too.