Monthly Archives: September 2010

Old Chests, Forgotten Maps, and the Frozen North—Author Joshua E. Turcotte discusses Orb: The Derelict Planet

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If you’ve been following our Game-Maker Archive series, you may recall a swell little Metroid-style adventure called Orb: The Derelict Planet. Thrown into an alien environment, you wander vast caverns, collect upgrades, and traverse hidden passages to deactivate an ancient, killer computer. As one of the better Game-Maker games, Orb has always been a mystery. It seemed to have been developed in a vacuum, and with an unusual amount of planning. It then appeared out of nowhere on the Game-Maker 3.0 CD-ROM, the only known game by its author. After a bit of detective work we managed to track down that author, the writer and illustrator Joshua Eric Turcotte.

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Thank You For Smoking

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Nobody smokes in this film. At least, I never saw it. The closest we get are old advertisements shilling the medical value of one cigarette brand over another, a vague haze in some of the indoor scenes, and a nicotine tinge to the film processing.

Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart, aka Harvey Dent/Two-Face) is a PR representative for the tobacco industry. His talent is debate, and his secret is that he doesn’t really care about his topic, his opponent, or the outcome of his argument. All that he cares about is that he not lose. For an industry with the bulk of public opinion against them, not losing is about as good a defense as Big Tobacco could want.

For Naylor’s part, there’s no more challenging or rewarding an argument than defending an indefensible position. It’s not that he’s amoral. It’s true that he meets with representatives of the alcohol and firearms lobbies, and jokes with them about which of their products kills the most Americans on a day-to-day basis. (Of the three, it’s cigarettes by a wide margin.) Throughout the movie, his actions, reactions, and manner portray him as warm, fascinated with life, even idealistic. It’s more that he feels that every perspective, even and perhaps especially the most ludicrous or amoral, needs an equal airing. So on the one hand this job allows him to defend some of the least loved opinions on the planet, and on the other the sheer impossibility of the task gives him a thrill not unlike a nicotine high.

The story skips along at a comfortable pace, and progresses logically from the characters’ personalities. The cast is mostly character actors, well-chosen and well-performed. The script is witty and nuanced, much of the dialog delivered either directly to camera or in voiceover. The cinematography is some of the best in recent years.

There are revelations later in the film which, as the movie currently stands, feel like they come from nowhere. Associated with those revelations are some apparently profound changes that, to the audience, never feel like changes at all.

It comes back to the cigarette thing; why, in this of all movies, do we never witness the characters smoking? Not even representatives of Big Tobacco? And as far as sacrifices go, is it possible to miss something that we’ve never known?

This is a smart movie. It avoids getting trapped in the specifics of its subject matter, preferring to observe characters, their motivations, and the way they present their claims, both to each other and to themselves. The cigarettes are there to give the characters something to form opinions and talk about. The story is there to give the characters a canvas in which to interact and explore their dynamics.

If you’ve seen the TV show Better off Ted, that is to Thank You For Smoking what Parker Lewis Can’t Lose is to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That is to say, it’s a TV adaptation in all but name. The movie lacks the smug desperation of the TV show, probably for the better.

The Chase

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This is an odd one. It’s the third Dalek story in two years, and the third directed by Richard Martin. In the previous Dalek story (The Dalek Invasion of Earth) we saw the Doctor abandon his granddaughter Susan on a future post-apocalyptic Earth for what he felt was her own good. This time we say goodbye to the show’s original protagonists, schoolteachers Ian and Barbara, as they are granted an opportunity to return to mid-1960s Britain.

Whereas the Doctor started off hostile, even violent, toward the pair, and at best he treated his granddaughter with indifference, by now the Doctor had softened toward the pair and indeed become a more sympathetic character in general. He shows genuine distress at their choice to leave him, which he expresses with his usual petulance. From here on the Doctor remains a softer character yet he becomes rather melancholy, prone to musing about his losses.

On that level, and in the introduction of one of my favorite companions, Steven, the story is a success. And indeed the first two episodes are pretty solid stuff, despite some shaky studio work with the regulars casting shadows on matte paintings mere inches behind them, and despite the hilarious make-up of some incidental alien peoples. The final two episodes are passable as well, with an android duplicate Doctor and a fun dilemma where Vicki gets left behind by the TARDIS — and of course the introduction of Steven. In the Mechonoids we also see an unsuccessful, yet interesting, attempt at creating a nemesis to the Daleks.

It’s the middle two episodes that try on the patience. On paper they sound wonderfully bonkers; Daleks versus rednecks on the Empire State Building; Frankenstein’s monster lifting and pile-driving whole Daleks; a Dalek landing party causing the desertion of the Mary Celeste. There’s a year’s worth of comic strip material in these two episodes. Unfortunately none of it really comes off on-screen. Whether it’s a lack of comic timing on the actors’ part or proper framing of the action on the director’s, it all comes off as tedious and directionless. If it weren’t for the rather wonderful cliffhanger to part four, which results in Vicki’s travel predicament, I’d say it’s possible and desirable to just skip the middle two episodes entirely.

This is also the first Dalek story not to be adapted into a feature film starring Peter Cushing. Pervasive as the movies would later be on TV, apparently they weren’t such hot stuff at the box office. Also, the Dalekmania bubble was quickly deflating. The following year would be Hartnell’s last, and would very nearly be the end of Doctor Who — that is, until a new production team hit on the concept of regeneration. All the same, despite later ratings spikes in the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras, it took another forty years for the show to regain this height of popularity and cultural saturation.

This story sort of forms the middle block of a trilogy, with The Space Museum to the left and The Time Meddler to the right. The latter is one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who serials, and I think the first hint at something greater for the format. I think it’s fitting that with the departure of the original leads, and therefore the shift of loyalties to the Doctor himself, the show would immediately start in on hints at his personal background. But that’s a conversation for another review.

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 16: Trees in the Forest

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We have previously discussed Sherwood Forest Software. They’re an outfit of two Pennsylvanians, Rob Sherwood and Dan Whalen, who latched onto Game-Maker early, pumped out game after game without ever really learning the tools or apparently play testing the results of their efforts, and then quickly vanished.

What is curious about Sherwood’s games is that often the concepts are, if not brilliant, unusual and full of potential. As they went on, some of their sprite and background design was even rather charismatic. Yet their actual design is bewilderingly slapdash, to the point where there’s a certain fascination, perhaps even an education, to poring over their catalog.

There is evidence of at least 11 games by the duo, most of which were released within about six months in 1992. The latest games seemed to trickle out somewhere in 1994. Previously we breezed over four of them: Big Bob’s Drive-In, Shootout at Dodge, Rocket Fighter, and Robo Wars. Thanks to some of the methods outlined in a subsequent chapter, we now have three more games to discuss, this time in a little more detail.

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The Game-Maker Archive—Part 15c: The Easiest Lifting, Act III

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Bergervoet is a Dutch fellow who goes under the developer name Multigames. In 1998, probably about two or three years after RSD pulled support for Game-Maker, he found the software and threw together a few games. For his inspiration… it’s not that he just lifted sample material and called it his own; he drew all his own sprites and tiles, and I think recorded most of his own sound effects. And unlike Felix Leung it’s not that he directly quoted popular references and based a game around them. Strictly speaking, everything in his games is original. It’s more that his games are strongly inspired by other, existing games.

There’s nothing unusual about that, of course. Without Mario Bros. we wouldn’t have Bubble Bobble. Without Bust-A-Move/Puzzle Bobble, we might not have a casual game industry. What’s unusual is that all his games are based on, well…

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The Game-Maker Archive—Part 15b: The Easiest Lifting, Act II

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Previously we discussed Felix Leung, who did a pretty good job of co-opting familiar properties and filtering them through his own fairly advanced understanding of Game-Maker to create original, often bizarre, conglomerations. You could say that he crossed the line in places, and then danced back over it, and then tied the line into a sheepshank, but it’s easy to understand his method and reasons. This next fellow is a bit more brazen, and therefore a bit more puzzling.

In 1994, a fellow from Vallejo known variously as C.H. and Viper decided to grab everything in sight and call it his own — but then, at the last minute, to give it just enough of a bewildering spin to make it memorable. His first port of call, understandably enough, is Gregory Stone’s Nebula.

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Sock me in the stomach three more times

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In retrospect some elements of Big come off creepier than they were intended, or would have been perceived at the time. In the early ’80s when children vanished, people weren’t so much worried about molestation as they were about bodily harm. The assumption was that the motive for kidnapping was financial gain, rather than a personal drive. What other use is a kid, really, than ransoming him off?

Naive, maybe. But look at the way that products were advertised even back then. Would you buy something based on those ad campaigns? The 1980s may not seem that long ago, but our assumptions and attitudes about the world have changed so much. Racial, sexual, cultural understanding and acceptance are becoming more the norm. Taboo subjects have become everyday discussion. Even things like basic psychology have developed and spread so far.

This movie is grounded in the same mid-’80s American middle-class mindset as much children’s entertainment of the era, written by baby boomers more inclined to reflect on their own rosy memories of childhood than to observe the world and the real logistics around them. The kids don’t speak and interact like kids; they behave the way that adults remembered themselves in the 1950s. Hell, the whole theme of the movie is some baby boomer yearning for his own youth. Except sort of inverted.

I think I can appreciate this movie a little better as an adult, even given its weird cultural obliviousness. As a kid I remember it annoying me to no end. Everything was wrong. Why was everyone so excited about insect Transformers? Insecticons had been around for years at that point. The bulk of the oh-so-droll jokes about social security numbers and workplace politics bored me or went over my head. The only appeal the movie had for me was the setpieces like the FAO Schwartz piano duet, Tom Hanks’ apartment hijinks, and all the Zoltar business. It was all flash and curiosity. Was that really what it was like to move into your own apartment? Was that really what it was like to get a job? Wow, it would be great to be left alone to wander around in FAO Schwartz, or that carnival.

Now I can stand back and understand the movie’s ambition. I still marvel at its blinkered vision, but from within a cultural context that I can appreciate. As a case study, it gets a person thinking.

The Space Museum

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You may remember some of my advice on this show. If the fans love a serial, you’re probably safe in skipping it. If they despise or ignore it, it’s probably worth a look.

To give an idea of The Space Museum‘s reputation, the main extra on the disc is a short monologue from new series writer Rob Shearman in which he half-heartedly defends the story. He grasps to fit the story with a retrospective literary justification, and doesn’t quite succeed. It’s an interesting feature, but so far as I’m concerned it’s unnecessary. This is one of the more creative and fascinating stories of one of the show’s more creative and fascinating eras.

The first three or so years of the show are closer to literary science fiction than anything that has followed. Nearly every story is based either on some theoretical premise or on attempt to push the boundaries of the show’s format. Add in a cast that is fascinating to watch no matter what they’re up to, and there is room to push the show very far before it starts to get too experimental, too odd to work.

The Space Museum begins on a weird note; the cast, battered, bruised and torn from misadventures in the Crusades, suddenly finds itself standing around the TARDIS console, dressed in tidy new clothes. Dropped glasses bounce back into hands and repair themselves. Walking in heavy dust leaves no footprints. And then, spoilerphobes be warned to skip to the next paragraph, toward the end of the first episode, is one of the show’s greatest cliffhangers. The four regular cast round a corner to find their own embalmed bodies as exhibits in a space museum.

After the first episode, the mystery element diminishes and the story becomes more about the characters interacting with the world and trying to prevent the future from occurring. Though the rest of the serial is rarely as heady as the first episode, the character dynamics are always fun and the story is scattered with great moments such as a guard’s attempt to mind-probe the Doctor.

After a short 100 minutes the serial ends with an overt transition into the following story, and Ian and Barbara’s farewell after nearly two years as the show’s protagonists, The Chase.

This one is a keeper. If you want an example of a Hartnell-era story that overstepped its bounds, try The Web Planet. Ambitious, creative, and such a curious disaster.