Daily Archives: Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Myths and symbols

  • Reading time:3 mins read

It occurs to me how well the Angels, as iconic monsters in the way that we haven’t had iconic monsters or villains since the early ’70s, integrate with the show’s current format. We’ve got a showrunner who, to an extent not professed by previous producers or script editors, is making a point of highlighting both the time travel aspect of the show and its built-in fairy tale qualities (magical door in a junkyard that can open to anywhere you can imagine; ageless, cranky man who leads you into trouble; an individual monster to represent each of your primal fears). And so here we’ve got supremely memorable, carefully crafted baddies who are intimately entwined with time and whose power largely comes out of their overt fairy tale visage — to the extent that if they’re weathered, worn down, they lose their power. And there’s a certain fairy tale logic to dealing with them — face your demons, but don’t look them in the eye. The Angels basically are an icon of Moffat’s vision for the show.

What they remind me of is the way the Master was created to reflect and enhance Pertwee’s Earthbound super spy adventures. He was the iconic foe of the era, as Letts and Dicks weren’t fond of the Cybermen and the Daleks were slow and slim coming after their ’60s overexposure and Terry Nation running home with all his toys. And the Master was basically a summation of that era: a suave Bond villain to set up schemes for our suave Bondish hero to foil, week after week. Basically, if you’re stuck on Earth in one time period you might as well have a meddling Time Lord to provide an excuse for all the action.

It also strikes me how since the early ’70s no one has really put that much thought into creating a menace that really establishes the contemporary tone and concept and stakes of the show. And yet since the start it’s the baddies that have stuck in people’s minds, and brought them back. For a reason! They establish what the heroes are fighting against, what the nature of the struggle is. They provide the show a certain emotional context.

I guess with that in mind, the Earth Reptiles do a pretty good job of establishing some of the other stakes and themes of the Pertwee era — even though they’re not a consistent threat, or even inherently monsters or villains. It’s almost a shame they didn’t get a final appearance in his last season, to wrap up the ongoing threads in the way that they meant to do with the Master.

Review: Uin

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

There was a point toward the end of Uin where I became stuck. I had navigated a water level and a forced-scrolling shooting segment, and was now faced with a sort of a boss battle. My character stood in a bubbling pool of water. To the right floated an enormous child, orbited by a handful of large five-pointed stars. Occasionally the stars would shoot out, then boomerang back, causing my character damage. For the life of me I couldn’t beat this boss, and I had started to despair of ever finishing the game.

To further my frustration, the last save point was several minutes earlier — before the water level, and before a sequence reminiscent of everyone’s least favorite part of Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game. You know, the bit with the coral. So each time I reached the boss, both my character’s energy and my own were fairly well drained. And each time I failed, I knew I would have to navigate that whole sequence again.

And then something happened. Well, two things happened. One, I realized that I had recently earned a new power — one that I had never used, as I had been underwater all this time. Two, I randomly hit on a new strategy that used, though did not rely on, this new power. The next time I faced the boss, the encounter was over within seconds — and I realized it wasn’t so much a boss as a random obstruction.

My fault had been in filtering the event too strictly through my own understanding of game structure. And that is the uncertain balance tread throughout this game. For all its waves to tradition, Uin is still a biggt production. It may have an inventory, and a persistent world structure, and sub-quests, and cutscenes, and a fully developed (if eccentric) control scheme, but those details are incidental to the dream logic at play.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )