Monthly Archives: January 2011

The Game-Maker Archive – Part 20: Blinky and a Small Kind of Fame

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Jeremy LaMar is perhaps best known under the handle SnigWich, for his Megazeux games such as Bernard the Bard – often ranked amongst the best games ever produced under Gregory Janson’s engine. More recently, under his new name Otto Germain, he has returned to his roots as a cartoonist. Before any of that, he was renowned for his RSD Game-Maker work – and he never even knew it.

At some point two of LaMar’s early Game-Maker games, The Return of Blinky and Blinky 3, made their way to a section of America Online known as AOL Kids. There, they gained a small yet fervent cult following. In the following years, a Blinky wiki and fanfics and video tributes would spring up around the Web. Even years after the AOL Kids area vanished, LaMar’s fans kept up the devotion. At least one poster to a DOS games forum claimed that the Blinky games inspired him to pursue game design.

When you consider the obscurity of most Game-Maker games, indeed of Game-Maker itself, this level of enthusiasm is remarkable. To be sure, LaMar’s games are amongst the most polished produced with RSD’s tools, both in terms of the design sensibility and in their mastery of the materials available to them. One does wonder, though, how much circumstance and exposure play in a game’s fortunes. One also wonders what other small communities might even now be obsessing over even less likely games, and to what extent those players might be inspired to greater things.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

An Overview of Series Four

  • Reading time:3 mins read

David Tennant’s third year in the role is his strongest, despite a fairly tepid allotment of scripts. You have a couple of stunners toward the end; “Midnight” and the prologue to the finale, “Turn Left”, are amongst the greatest scripts ever written for the show. The earlier Ood story is a bit on-the-nose, but has the right idea. Although the Pompeii story doesn’t quite work, it tackles some themes never before addressed in the series — and when it does so, it does it well. Not as well as the later “Waters of Mars”, but hey.

Otherwise the series is mostly a dud, narrative-wise. Nothing as horrible as some of the series three indiscretions; more a dull murmur of mediocrity. Despite the odd flash of competence in his Sarah Jane Adventures scripts, I’ll be happy if Gareth Roberts never writes for the parent show again. The Sontarans were boring villains at the best of times, and although their new adventure is superior to all of their classic ones (save perhaps the shortest and most conceptual, The Sontaran Experiment), there’s little positive to say and nothing so heinous as to strain myself in detailing. It’s just… there.

Yet this is also the series where Donna (Catherine Tate) comes in full-time. And it’s the series where her grandfather Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) becomes a recurring feature. The two of them can battle it out off-screen for the position of greatest Doctor Who companion ever. As lukewarm as I may be toward Tennant’s portrayal of the Doctor, his chemistry with each of them elevates the show to a new level and harks back to some of the best Doctor/companion pairings of the past — Troughton and Frazer Hines, Hartnell and Ian and Barbara, McCoy and Sophie Aldred.

Donna is such a flawed, yet such a genuine character — and she undergoes more development than any other companion figure in the show’s history. Heck, she probably develops more than any other individual character. As far as the new series goes, it’s refreshing to have such an unimpressed companion. Donna respects the Doctor’s perspective, and he inspires her every bit as much as she inspires him, yet she is immune to his nonsense. If he needs a kick in the rear, Donna will gladly provide it. If anything, she frequently shows better judgment than Tennant’s petulant, temperamental Doctor.

So although it’s hard to find a standout episode in this bunch, these dynamics make any episode entertaining, whatever else may or may not be going on with the story. As it happens the overall story arc is pretty decent, and better developed than in previous series. (With that in mind, It is curious that the two best-written episodes are the ones where Tennant and Tate are largely separated.)

In some ways it’s a shame that the last few episodes are so continuity-heavy, as otherwise it would be easy to point series four at the Doctor Who neophyte and say, here; this is all the David Tennant you really need to see. This, and maybe a few excerpts from previous seasons — most of them by Steven Moffat. And “The Waters of Mars”.

Oh well. Even though the production team was running out of creative steam here, the cast carries the show to an extent it hasn’t since the boring scripts and amazing chemistry of 1967-1969.

Cropsey

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Any element of this documentary could have been interesting on its own. Its problems are of organization, depth of content, and in its representation of its contents.

Cropsey sells itself as an investigation of the history behind a local tall tale or scary story — sort of a Hook Man legend of the New York tri-state area. That could have been really neat. Instead it uses the Cropsey story as a facile metaphor for the story of a convicted child predator who roamed the site of a former mental institution in the 1970s. Again, that itself could have been a good subject. Yet instead of investigating the social circumstances and consequences of the killings — what led to the fellow’s crimes, and what effect those crimes had on the local culture — the filmmakers spent most of their time puttering around Staten Island, conducting inconsequential searches of the institution grounds, writing questionable letters to the convict in question, and making fruitless visits to his prison.

You can tell how young the filmmakers are by the depth of their solipsism. The documentary is almost more about the fact that they’re making a documentary, and the problems and logistics that they face along the way, than it is about its ostensible subject. Guys, I don’t care what brick walls you ran into. None of them are even particularly interesting. And then, what, you stop and shrug the moment the convict decides not to talk to you? What about the actual content of his letters? What can we gather from that? You barely showed it.

We could also have looked at the institution itself, and the culture from which it arose. Why were the conditions so bad there? What was the justification? What promises did the staff make to families? What were the ramifications, in terms of the mental health of its patients? How are the conditions and culture of the institution related to the killer’s emotional and physical circumstances? Now that you’ve thrown all these pieces on the board, how do they fit together?

There are at least three failed explorations in here, any of which I’d have been pleased to hear more about. The most interesting of those is the folklore angle — as evidently the filmmakers recognized, given the documentary’s spin.