Item - Green Circle Blues

This book is an expansion of an earlier solitaire Car Wars adventure published in Autoduel Quarterly. I haven't played the original version, so I can't say how the revisions stack up; I can say, however, that I was rather disappointed by this book's role in this series. Scott Haring's previous book offered a breath of fresh air with its unusual design and at least slightly atypical plot. All this book offers, though, is yet another linear escort mission. For the most part, it's no worse than the previous books, but after having done more or less the same thing two or three times before, I found the whole thing pretty dull. There's not enough character personality or plot originality to set it apart. I also strongly object to one of the adventure's final choices -- it's possible to make it through the whole adventure, then fail at the last minute as the result of a seemingly trivial decision. This may be realistic, but it's an awfully demoralizing and frustrating thing to do to the reader. If you ask me, once the final battle has been won, the reader really shouldn't be forced to start all over again; doing so only results in senseless tedium. Of course, I might not have found this book quite so redundant if I hadn't played it so soon after completing its predecessors. If you own a set of these books, you'll probably increase your enjoyment of them if you can avoid reading them within too narrow a window of time.

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