Yearly Archives: 2011

Don’t Kick the Hive

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Rather than comment on the substance of Moffat’s mid-season finale, I’m going to dwell on a minor detail from the introduction.

In Doctor Who terms, the Cybermen are in principle my favorite recurring foe. Their only problem is that no writer has used them particularly well. Often, particularly from 1975 on, the Cybermen are used as random monsters. They stomp around and proclaim and try to conquer, and then the Doctor defeats them using their one weakness. They’re silver men who are allergic to gold. That’s their thing.

It’s only in the 1960s that the writing much tries to speak to the actual themes or dilemmas that the Cybermen represent. Of those stories, Tomb of the Cybermen probably comes the closest. The set design establishes an ominous atmosphere. The Cybermen are portrayed as something horrible looming just out of reach, if you’re foolish enough to bother them. Kick the hive and you get what’s coming to you. They take you and doom you to the same perpetual undying that you have disturbed.

The Cybermen are unknowable, and to even try to know them is dangerous. Best just leave them to their devices and hope that they don’t become aware of you.

The other good example is perhaps more controversial. Although the script and costume design are both ridiculous and tawdry, the Torchwood episode “Cyberwoman” actually hits more thematic targets than any other televised Cyberman story. It focuses on the psychological and body horror of conversion, and portrays the Cybermen as an infection. You can contain it, and that’s fine, but if it spreads then good luck trying to stop it.

Outside of these two examples, and a few clumsy examples of lip service here and there, the thematic and conceptual elements of Cybermen are largely neglected — that is, until 2010.

I am supremely bored with Steven Moffat’s version of Doctor Who. I just — I’m ready to give up on it. The biggest highlights so far have been his two brief sequences with the Cybermen — first in the 2010 finale and then in the opening to this past Saturday’s episode. Each of those examples is more of a setpiece than a real scene, and the Cybermen serve no important story value, but each is amongst the most effective uses of the Cybermen since the 1960s.

Moffat’s Cybermen feel more themselves than they have done since 1968 or so. These are quiet, reserved planners who can be reasoned with only when it comes to survival of the group.

There’s always been something a bit sad about Cybermen, and that comes up here. Granted they’re probably up to no good, but in this story the Cybermen are more or less minding their own business, observing a portion of space, when Rory barges into their hive, kicks it apart, and demands information that they had no use for in the first place.

By Rory’s standards the Cybermen aren’t really worthy of individual consideration, and that probably goes for them, too. They’re just collectors — of information, of hardware, of drones. They don’t even appreciate what they collect; they just soak up all that they touch. Everything is a piece of the collective. To extract anything from that collection means threatening the whole. There’s no other circumstance where they’d let a piece go.

Properly portrayed, Cybermen are a little pathetic and desperate yet simultaneously resilient. The whole is so very hungry for survival, but the pieces are empty and rickety and helpless. Maybe not physically, but separate a Cyberman from the collective and he’d probably just bumble around, confused, looking for anything to give its life (or perpetual undeath) meaning. It would go insane from loneliness, more or less.

There is some deep metaphor to draw from here, particularly in regard to modern life, and it’s strong enough that you don’t need to hit people over the head to make a point of it. It’s just that no one has bothered to characterize the Cybermen in ages — until now, obliquely and to no real purpose.

As much as Moffat is wearing on me, I would like to see his idea of a full, proper Cyberman story. I don’t want it farmed out to Mark Gatiss or some other third-string puppet author. I want to see Moffat’s own exploration of the creatures. Based on the last couple of snippets, I’ve a feeling he’d do them full justice.

Otherwise, I can hardly be bothered to think about his show.

Cyberman catch phrases through the ages:

1967: “We… Muzzt… Survive…”
1982: “Ex-cellent!”
2006: “Delete!”
2012: ?

The History of A-J Games: Part Three

  • Reading time:10 mins read

To catch up on the story to date, you can read the first two parts here and here.

So some of my characters, I spun out of existing projects. Others came about from that web of interests and in-jokes that brought about my Andrew-Jonathan strip in the first place. These characters are built of wholly abstract materials, which makes it all the harder to justify them in design terms.

It would be one thing to base a game on abstract concepts. That’s probably an ideal place to begin, actually; to take vague notions from life and to see how best to communicate those ideas through a framework of cause and effect. You only seldom see this approach; when you do, as in games like Passage or D2, or even Pac-Man, you end up with highly expressive, meaningful content.

Pac-Man

To base a game not on concepts, but things — well, you’re always starting on the wrong foot. This is why there are so few excellent licensed games, and why genres and long-standing series tend to devolve into meaningless variations on a form. It’s why tech demos, although fascinating on a level, make such empty and tawdry exercises.

This may be why so few developers have made real use of the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo boiled some brilliant and progressive concepts down to a thing, which developers proceeded to use as a thing rather than explore for the concepts that it represented.

Red Steel

So it’s hard enough to build a game out of an established character. Imagine if that character itself is uncertain. Instead of A-J Bear to draw from, with all his built-in thematic trappings and influences and continuity, you have the vague idea of a hedgehog who is very, very British. Offhand you can throw together a few lazy pitches, but what are you basing those pitches on? Cultural preconceptions? Handy iconography? Are you going to just stop there, or are you going to examine those preconceptions and break down that iconography into something practical and representational?

Think that’s easy? How about a game based on a funny name combined with a meaningless catch phrase? Whoever the character is, this is his name and these are the words that he spouts whenever possible.

Though I’m certain meaningful projects have begun with less material, some tasks were too much even for the slapdash methodology and low artistic standards of my youth.

Sign of the Hedgehog (title)

Considering its origins, Sign of the Hedgehog turned out pretty well. From its title you may ascertain my thought process. For full clarity, though, let’s take a trip back to 1991.

From a very young age, I was obsessed with hedgehogs. Such it was that when, in the early ’90s, I read of Sega’s upcoming mascot game, I felt compelled to tell the world. No one would believe me. I was obsessed with the Sega Genesis, which was fine but at that time no one owned or played the system. I was obsessed with hedgehogs, but in mid-Maine in the pre-Sonic era no one had ever heard of them except in association with me. So clearly I had gone off the deep end and was just making things up now.

Sonic the Hedgehog

The game arrived, and it was very good, but — Sonic wasn’t really a hedgehog, was he. He didn’t look like a hedgehog, he didn’t move like a hedgehog, and he wasn’t really characterized the way you’d imagine. About the only parallels you can draw are that Sonic has spines and that he can roll into a ball. My mind got working.

Over the next couple of years, more Sonic games kept coming out to decreasing returns. Sure, each game had more stuff in it, but those were just things. The actual themes and spirit that made the first game so intriguing was being sidelined in favor of… stuff. It got so that Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was the last console game I bought or played until the Sega Dreamcast, another five years on. I was totally disenchanted with the direction that games were moving in.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

And yet here I was in response, comporting more stuff into my own fetishistic ideas of propriety. I would draft my very own hedgehog game, the way that Sonic should have been. My hedgehog would of course be British, and as a Briton he would be enamored of all things tea. He would be reserved and conservatively dressed. As a hedgehog he would live in green places and only rarely stray out of his comfort zone. It would take a spectacular quest to shake him from his Hobbit-like indolence — something like a personal request from the Queen.

Hedrick

So we have a reluctant hedgehog with a tea obsession invited to see the Queen. What would motivate him to actually attend? Well, let’s make it tea with the Queen. What makes his journey an adventure? Maybe he needs to prepare for the visit. Let’s say he needs to bring supplies. What sorts of supplies? Goods for a tea party. So what goes with tea? If we’re being stereotypical, then crumpets.

SotH screenshot

You can see the game taking shape here. Now we have a journey, and a scavenger hunt. Although there is a linear goal, this is a game about exploration and discovery rather than about speed (which is just as well for a hedgehog). Since it’s broadly linear but narrowly not, let’s scatter the levels around an overworld rather like Commander Keen‘s.

Overworld map

I’m not sure that this is very deep stuff, but at least the design concepts do come from the basic premise. If you squint, the game might even look a bit like satire regarding British conventions and the arbitrary decisions in mainstream game design. I don’t think any of that was deliberate. So far as I was aware, I made the game in earnest.

The game’s title is both a none-too-subtle nod to Sega’s game and a play on British public houses — or at least my adolescent concept of them.

In the end, Sign of the Hedgehog is more linear than I intended. You can thank those constant Game-Maker goblins of flags and counters. There was no easy way to prevent players from entering the same level over and over again to rack up provisions, which could only be a problem because Game-Maker will never reset special counters. Thus the player could keep collecting crumpets and 1-ups, dying, and then starting over to build up a wealth of currency and blow through the later levels.

Of course since the counters don’t reset this is a problem anyway, but at least making the level progression linear prevents players from abusing the system too terribly. In retrospect there are a few other unexplored solutions, but this is what we have.

The game was successful enough in my mind to warrant a sequel. I had promised one to registered users, and I figured that this time I would finally get a few orders. The orders never came, I got distracted by other projects, and the game never took shape.

Sign of the Hedgehog 2 (title)

To be precise, Sign of the Hedgehog 2 took a very general shape but I never bothered to whittle it down. As a result I have a slightly amended concept — this time Hedrick is collecting scones instead of crumpets; he now can toss crumpets like a Frisbee — and a new map screen, decorated with a poorly designed first level. To change things up, the map is now side-scrolling rather than an overhead view. You can tootle around the map all that you like, but there is nowhere to go.

One advantage to the side-scrolling map is that it does give a sense of scale and adventure. Compared to the bird’s eye view, you can judge how far Hedrick has traveled and what he went through to get there. I guess you could say it’s more subjective.

SotH2 screenshot

So far as I can tell, the one working level was more of a test than a real finished design. It consists of clear blocks against a night sky, presumably because I so enjoyed the clear blocks in the Commander Keen games. It was an easy visual effect, and it looked cool. Beyond that it had no purpose.

Already you can see my sensibility devolving, in several respects. But it would disintegrate much further.

The Adventures of Fred Earwigian (title)

The Adventures of Fred Earwigian is the nadir of my character-based design process. By this point I had been hammering that character button for a couple of years, expecting my game concepts to magically present themselves at the last moment and allowing the full projects to take form. In this case, that didn’t happen. Why not? Well, let’s see.

Fred Earwigian was not so much a character as a wacky name. I have no memory of its origin; just that the name arose somewhere before high school, and thenceforth again whenever life called for a nom de guerre. Around my third year of high school, the name crossed paths with a domestic catch phrase and inanity was born.

On one return from Russia, my mother imparted a story of crossed communications. One of her hosts had advised her on departure not to forget, as she heard it, her hair. In reality he was speaking of a stuffed rabbit, a gift from one of her Russian friends. The misunderstanding delighted her enough to turn “Don’t forget your hair!” into a common goodbye in my household.

An arctic hare

By 1994, my well of ready ideas was dry. I began The Adventures of Fred Earwigian with nothing but the name, and eventually a title screen, expecting intuition to steamroll the rest into existence.

Based on the title graphic, I figured that Fred was rather slow — both physically and mentally. In physique and mannerisms, I envisioned him as a vaudevillian yokel with bits of Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx. In personality, my mind went to Steinbeck’s Lennie, from Of Mice and Men. I wasn’t trying to be obscure; these were honestly my cultural references as a teenager. I didn’t get out much.

Of Mice and Men

When one thinks of Lennie, one thinks of rabbits on the farm. When I thought of rabbits, I thought of Fred singing “Don’t fergetcha, don’t fergetcha hare / Ba-dum, ba-dum”.

That became the basis of my game: a bumbling, slow-moving, dim-witted fellow looking for a lost hare. I couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t find the game. I couldn’t find a point to it.

I drew and animated Fred’s sprite, and I recorded him some voice samples. I drew up half a dozen scenarios, none of which fit. The game was stalled.

Fred Earwigian sprite

I threw the character sprite and title screen together with a map and background tiles from one of RSD’s demo games, and uploaded the mess to the semi-official Game-Maker BBS in Rockport. With the files I included a document pitching Fred Earwigian as a design contest. Whoever made the best game out of the available materials would win something or other. No one bothered. Quite understandable.

You’d think that my experience with Fred Earwigian would have taught me something, but any wisdom was a good decade off yet. In the meanwhile I had mistakes to burn.

The story continues in Part Four…

The History of A-J Games: Part Two

  • Reading time:7 mins read

To catch up on the story to date, you can read part one here.

The bulk of my Game-Maker career involved a backwards design process whereby I would think up a character, then write a story, then decide how to incorporate it all into a game. I built levels with little thought to the characters’ abilities or the game’s broader themes. I had that amateur notion that games were a battle of wills between the player and designer, so my games tended to be unfairly difficult. It was a mess.

Further confusing the issue was my process for choosing my characters. Life with my parents was like tap dancing in a mine field. Most of my energy was devoted to avoiding random triggers, which amounted to a sort of high-stakes guessing game. To keep in good graces, and thereby to be left to my ways, it was wise to run my activities past my mother and to leak details very slowly.

I recall that all of my pitches involved specific things, facts, that I thought would distract her. If nothing went click, and those gears failed to turn, it was safe to progress. Once, scrambling for an idea, I suggested a bear riding on a seahorse. I think that got a pass, but I couldn’t figure out how to spin a game out of it.

I had spun my first game from my comic, Andrew-Jonathan; that had been a success, both creatively and domestically, so for a while I kept returning to that mine. There was certainly enough to draw from. The world of my strip barely touched the page. It spanned a junkyard of irrelevant whimsies, from Easter toys to Apple Jacks prizes, wound together with half-remembered snatches of Susan Cooper novels.

One of the larger recurring themes is Cousin Zoom, a timid librarian with a prophetic name. For reasons unclear, Andrew-Jonathan’s grandfather is a wizard. Some wires crossed, his cousin found himself in the wrong place at the right time, and that cousin became a superhero.

Although Zoom gets the disguise right — he not only drops the Clark Kent spectacles; he dons a Zorro style mask — he keeps the same name in both guises. He also becomes a hazard to friend and foe alike.

Inspired by Taito’s Superman arcade game, I chose to do something a little different with RSD’s engine. I alternated side-scrolling action levels with overhead shooting segments, and I ramped the difficulty way down to make the game accessible.

The lower difficulty worked together with some new concepts to gloss over some of my earlier awkwardness. Flight removed the logical problems of platform mechanics, and a bulky sprite with full player control improved collision in the shooter levels. The engine was still awkward, but the game worked within its box.

Zoom cohered well enough that people seemed to actually play it. Although I have no metric, it looks like the most widely distributed of my games. Often listings would describe it as a children’s game, presumably because of the bear. That always confused me, as even with its lowered difficulty the game is still pretty tough.

Around the turn of the millennium Zoom turned up on a few major download sites. I recall that ZDnet gave it three stars out of five, which although unremarkable made me rather proud. By that point the game was five years old, running in a weird engine, and far from my best work — but someone who reviewed this stuff for a living still found it adequate. So, hey.

Some of the spin-offs are less obvious. Ralph, for instance, only made a single bizarre appearance in the comic, and in the game his backstory is very different to what I imagined elsewhere.

Ralph is an orphaned chicken-duck who dallies as a consulting detective. What complicates this task is that the only word he seems to speak is his own name. For the game I transplanted him to a world where all life forms are powered by precious green crystals, and gave him a range of surreal terrain to navigate in his search for a portal to Earth. Since Ralph was a detective, the mechanics were based around searching for objects and using a magnifying glass to focus beams of light at enemies.

Of all my Game-Maker games, Fluffy Ralph is probably closest to RSD’s intended use for its game engine. It’s a top-down, vaguely Zelda-like action adventure. There’s nothing complicated or subversive in the mechanics. Ralph was just a simple game to develop. I even borrowed many of the graphical elements from Zoom. Perhaps this lack of a struggle shows in the design, as compared to some of my other games very little feels out-of-place.

I’m unsure how far the game traveled, but I have received comments. It seems that people remember Fluffy Ralph, and remember it favorably. As usual the later levels become needlessly difficult, but presumably only a few have known that torment.

This next spin-off is a little harder to explain. Remember Wacky WallWalkers? I used to collect the things. To prevent them from drying out, I would preserve them in clear film canisters filled with dishwashing liquid. Somehow this turned into a running joke.

They were never exactly characters in the comic; more like a recurring concept. Yet I always felt empathy for the WallWalkers. They seemed sincere, with their huge eyes and startled expressions. The film tubes weren’t just a grotesquerie; I wanted to protect the Walkers from decay. This, I suppose, plays into the scenario of Octolris.

The game describes the titular hero as the last of the slime octopi; to avoid becoming soup, he embarks on a treacherous journey back to the sea. The levels he navigates make very little sense. He travels from an ambiguous green and purple area to the seashore, then to a disco. Between standard levels, Octolris explores tight mazes — storm drains, air ducts, plumbing.

The character can walk, leap in three directions, and climb up or down certain walls. The mechanics here are sort of unusual. Jumping is an all-or-nothing thing; when you press the key, you travel in a specific arc and land in a specific place. I wanted to address the weirdness of jumping in earlier games like A-J’s Quest, which encourages the player to spam the controls in order to glitch into higher and farther jumps. The mechanic works well; it’s just that I often fail to account for it in the level design, which makes some areas harder than necessary.

The other oddity is the wall-climbing. To reflect the way that Wacky WallWalkers lose their stickiness and slowly dry out, I chose to mete out the octopus slime. One problem with this idea is that, guess what, I failed to account for it in the level design — so if you run out of slime, you’re stuck. There is no other way to complete most levels. The other problem is that Game-Maker does not provide a display for special counters, and so the player has no way of understanding how much slime is left. I got around these problems by overwhelming the player with slime refills. Instead I should have just ditched the limit.

If you will, Octolris seemed to have more legs than many of my games. I see it pop up here and there, and I have gotten some positive feedback.

Despite their origins, all of these games pulled together fairly well — at least, by my standards of the time. Their designs did reflect key aspects of their concepts, and those concepts served to humanize the mechanics.

Probably their greatest asset is the shared background. Although by necessity I entered the design process through the wrong door, I had already thought about the characters and scenarios enough that there was at least a sense that I knew what I was doing. The result is that the games are a little more holistic than by rights they should be. The result of that is that they stick in the mind a little, and that people seem to have reacted fairly well.

The story continues in Part Three…

Better than Who

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Bored is a good adjective for me and the Moffat years. Whereas I can hardly wait for the new season of Torchwood, with every episode of its parent show I feel less bothered. Given the writers in the second half (Gatiss, MacRae, Whithouse, Roberts), this autumn should be even less involving.

Even at its worst, with Davies’ Who I was always entertained. I nearly always felt that the stories were about something more than themselves. Even if the plots made no sense and the sentimentality was sometimes smothering, there was a certain minimum quantity of glee and love at play; optimism about everything constructive, balanced by cynicism about the things that need scrutiny.

I don’t feel that the show is about anything anymore, or that it serves much purpose. The plots don’t make any more sense than they did, the show has somehow become even more smug, and it just feels like it’s being done for posterity or fetish rather than because someone has something important to say through it. Worse than smug, the show has become glib, to the point where I wonder why I’m needed in the audience.

It’s not bad. It’s just… lifeless. This is the same problem I have with the ever-so-popular Hinchcliffe years and the early 1980s under Eric Saward. The former script editor was concerned mostly with pastiche of whatever horror film was popular in the cinema at that moment, and the latter just wanted to make a gritty space opera.

Although “The Rebel Flesh” is boring, and in plot and detail about as lazy as you can get, it is one of the few times in the past two years that it felt to me that the writer was trying to go a step beyond the obvious. Instead of just being about plotting and the mechanics of the show itself (which is as well, since the plot was so tedious), it made a small effort to examine the questions raised by the story’s premise. And then it shrugged and had the hothead charge in and move the story along again.

So we’re not at the level of Davies’ Who; more like the thinkier parts of Troughton’s run. But I did appreciate that. I guess it’s that which brings the rest of Moffat’s era into contrast. This is hardly hard-hitting stuff, yet thematically it feels so much more substantial than we’ve got since 2009.

I guess I just prefer a show to reward curiosity, rather than rote obsessiveness. And for that reward (however slight) to be a broader outlook on life (however slightly), rather than a cheap surprise twelve weeks down the road.

How might I apply the existence of a regenerating little girl to my life? Well, I guess it will make me wonder what will happen next in this particular TV show. How might I apply even so apparently fannish a moment as the Doctor’s restaurant conversation with Wilf, or the reactions of the passengers in “Midnight”, or the facile Dahlian satire of the Slitheen in Eccleston’s series? It’s commentary on identity, on mob mentality, and on the motivations of the people who we blithely assume are there to take care of us.

It’s all simplistic, and no, it doesn’t provide any answers — but it gets an audience accustomed to asking questions. It encourages one to look at the world with a healthy skepticism for the order and hierarchy presented to us through most culture. Aside from a few key eras, Doctor Who has always presented the audience that outsider’s view of life and its workings. It’s simple, clumsy, and in the end it has a narrative goal to reach, but in some small way it fosters an ongoing sense of wonder and attentiveness.

This is a right and a healthy message, and it’s a message that Davies both saw in and extrapolated from the show’s history, then developed into something much more pervasive and deliberate. That’s a part of who he is, I guess — Second Coming, Queer as Folk, and all. He can’t help tweaking people who he sees as intellectually or spiritually lazy. But that’s not really a priority anymore, and I miss it.

The History of A-J Games: Part One

  • Reading time:5 mins read

If you have played Builder, you may wonder about the developer name tacked onto the front. The answer is that Builder puts official close to an era that previously I had left dangling for about fifteen years.

Play it, really. It's kind of interesting.

When I was young, I expected to be a cartoonist. From 1988 to 1992 I wrote and drew a spectacularly unfunny comic strip called Andrew-Jonathan. Although there was no particular story or humor, there were plenty of characters – all with complex relationships, backgrounds, and personality quirks. The strip was also an outlet for themes absorbed from adventure movies, Tintin and Uncle Scrooge comics, and personal experiences.

A yuk a minute.

1988 was also the year that I began to design my first game, in the margins of homework assignments and in the back pages of notebooks. The game started as a clone of Konami’s The Goonies II — attic setting, inventory, and all. As the ideas developed and took on their own life, they absorbed elements of Hudson’s Adventure Island, Contra, and Super Mario Bros. 2. The cast of Andrew-Jonathan (in particular the title character) was also absorbed into the concept, almost from the start.

An influential game, in may ways.

This imaginary game began to trickle back into both the text and the metatext of the strip. The Crabby monsters (likely a subconscious influence from Super Mario 2) started to appear.

An influential game, in may ways.

The strip absorbed some of the game’s scenario, and the sort of violent 8-bit sense of cause and effect. Most curiously, whenever A-J’s friend Freeport was shown playing a videogame, it was a variant of that game –based on the strip and featuring those characters.

Never did implement those jumping things.

In a way, the strip’s four-year run was a build-up to and replacement for the game that I dreamed of playing. When in 1992 RSD’s Game-Maker presented itself, my attention shifted entirely from the comic. My first task on installing the software was to implement the game as directly as possible from my extensive plans. The result, I called A-J’s Quest. Barring the engine’s limitations and some improvisation along the way, the result was fairly close to my intentions – if a bit rough.

Watch out for them snappers.

The biggest diversions came from the limits on idle states, the odd key-mapping restrictions, the engine’s strange treatment of counters, and the lack of an on-screen display for hit points, items, and whatnot. I also envisioned the ability to equip and unequip weapons, as in many NES adventure games. None of these were big problems; I just adapted, and found more pragmatic implementations.

The generic inventory menu.

Soon after completing the game, I responded to a note in the Game-Maker box and mailed a copy off to Recreational Software Designs. They quickly responded with an unexpected call, then a long correspondence that would eventually lead me to produce gameware for Game-Maker 3.0. More immediately, they sent me the beta to an upcoming release of Game-Maker – one with provisional Sound Blaster support. In turn I went out and bought a sound card.

Blaster Master, a sound recorder for DOS.

The adjusted version of A-J’s Quest, now labeled 2.0, found its way into a demo for the 2.0 release of Game-Maker. It was also a feature of the short-lived Game-Maker Exchange program, where RSD compiled peer games onto floppies and sent them out to contributing users. But before I let loose my opus into the wider world, I decided to think up an official studio name. I didn’t think very hard.

Blaster Master, a sound recorder for DOS.

Now that I was a real game designer, I started to pour my energy into developing a more-of-the-same sequel. Its main gimmick would be multiple characters, each of whom followed an original path to the same goal. To prepare for this focus, I redrew the character sprite almost from scratch. In a short time I had learned much of pixel animation, and the previous sprite had started to bother me. The new sprite, I used as the basis for all four characters.

Aside from appearance the characters were only really distinguished by their vocal tics, which the new Sound Blaster support made possible. The levels were mostly recycled themes, using recycled tiles from the first game.

Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?

A couple of years later, with a beta of Game-Maker 3.0 in hand, I set about making the biggest, most convoluted game possible with the tools. I meant to incorporate every possible character from the Andrew-Jonathan strip, each of whom would have distinct abilities and a different path through the game. The game would be a huge, branching adventure full of big decisions. For this event, I again tweaked the Andrew-Jonathan sprite with more detailed shading and more sympathy to Game-Maker’s quirks. In turn I added more variation to the other characters’ animations.

Simply titled A-J 3.

With my masterpiece in hand, I went back to revise the first two games and raise them to the level of A-J 3. I incorporated the second game’s much cleaner sprite into the first game. I adjusted most of the background tiles and some of the layout, added another level to A-J’s Quest, and smoothed over some awkward concepts. After all the tweaks, the first game wound up at version 4.0 and the second game wound up in pieces all over the hard drive. It was too much work to bring The Return of A-J up to snuff, and I had long overwritten its original format, so I was stuck with a dissected husk of a game. I figured if anyone actually registered the first game, then that would motivate me to put all the pieces back together. Neither happened.

Freeport takes to the clouds, for some reason.

Both the 4.0 and the 2.0 releases of A-J’s Quest achieved fairly wide distribution. The others, not so much. Whatever its form, for all its quirks and compromises, A-J’s Quest is probably one of the most familiar and influential games to come out of RSD’s tool set — and it became the cornerstone for about a decade of my creative life.

The story continues in Part Two…

Breaking the Frame

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I just realized how much Builder was subconsciously influenced by Portal. I honestly didn’t even think about it at all. But Valve’s design pervades almost everything about the game’s structure, down to the build/destroy thing (as opposed to red/blue portal stuff), and the way that the design is broken down into… sort of puzzle rooms.

And the whole game is sort of about escaping from this cozy gamey situation. And all the way the game teases you about what may be beyond that facade. Then at some point you — well. At some point everything becomes clear, and that’s when things become really interesting.

It says something about Valve’s design sensibility that I find myself aping it without even knowing I’m doing so.

If you have yet to play Builder, go and do so. If you downloaded it early on, you might as well upgrade; there are always little improvements. Meanwhile I’m working on a way to make the game easier for everyone to experience.

Ghosts of Machu Picchu: Nova

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The Incas are the best of the bunch, as far as South American empires go. Whereas the Mayas were poets and astronomers and the Aztecs were warriors, the Incas were architects and planners. What I didn’t realize was just how short their heyday was — only about 100 years. Had the Spanish not come, preceded by their wave of smallpox, one wonders how the Incas might have developed.

I had always appreciated Machu Picchu for its exotic location and architecture, and the mystery surrounding its discovery. This is the stuff that established the template of the adventurer archaeologist, that later brought us figures like Indiana Jones. What this documentary has brought me is a new appreciation of the planning and rigor that went into the structure’s development.

There’s nothing arbitrary about the process. For all the reasons not to build a palace in Machu Picchu’s location, there is a certain political, mystical, and engineering logic to its location. Furthermore, the palace wasn’t simply plopped on top of the mountain; nearly 60% of the work is under the ground, in extensive drainage and support structures both to prevent erosion and ensure a steady supply of fresh water.

This is fascinating stuff, and well-told. If you’ve a whiff of interest in ancient culture or architecture, this documentary is a goodun.

Builder: The Game

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Level 2 of Builder -- a leap of faith!

Builder.

Build footholds. Destroy obstacles. Be observant.

Read the setup instructions. Play. Donate, if you wish.

A Serious Man

  • Reading time:2 mins read

A Serious Man is a mid-level Coen movie; Not as grand as Fargo or No Country, not as humble as The Man Who Wasn’t There. Not as memorable as Lebowski, not as forgettable as Intolerable Cruelty. Not as good as Barton Fink or as bad as The Ladykillers. I guess you could chuck it in the pile with Miller’s Crossing, except it’s more interesting and more distinctively Coen than that.

The movie is sort of a light comedy spread thin over a light drama about a middle-class suburban guy whose life is falling apart. His wife is leaving him, his kids are indifferent to him, he has problems at work…

Acutally, you know what it is? It’s a Jewish American Beauty. It’s about all of the same things — the stifling mundaneness of suburbia and the status quo, a midlife crisis that offers a brief glimpse of freedom before it comes crashing down, wonder at the nature of existence — with a few extra trips to the rabbi, and the convoluted parables that come out of them.

In the hours after watching I’m sure I had something more incisive to say. A week or two later, the movie has faded into a muddle.

All-Star Superman

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Without actually checking the credits, the animation here reminds me strongly of the fellow who did Aeon Flux and that cartoon about Alexander the Great. It has that same lanky angularity, and the almost grotesque caricature of the human form. Granted, if it is his work then it’s a more refined and mainstream version of his style.

As with most of these direct-to-DVD DC movies, this appears to have been based on a well-known arc from the comics — a sort of a “what-if” tale that explored the last months of Superman’s life as he slowly died of a sort of super cancer brought on by over-exposure to the normally healing radiation of our sun.

It’s all well-done enough, and it passes the time. There’s something lacking in the pace. After the first act, the movie meanders with little hint as to where it wants to go or what exactly its narrative priorities are. Halfway through, I was half inclined meander away myself. Perhaps it’s due to condensing the events of a lengthy serial into a single short narrative, as there’s a fair amount procedural storytelling: first this happened, then this happened, then this other thing…

The ending is a bit understated as well, which in itself wouldn’t be a problem. When one has spent half the movie waiting for something relevant to happen, though, one does expect the conclusion to repay that patience. I’m not sure if that happened here.

Ah well. It’s pretty good. I’ll still take Justice League Unlimited any day.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Harry Potter has never been great literature, and the movies have never been great cinema. Whereas the books are a genial mishmash of well-selected 20th century children’s authors, the films have struggled to find their own integrity outside the Scholastic merchandising machine.

The first couple of movies are not so much films as greatest hits reels of the most memorable moments from the books, translated as literally as possible to screen, with barely a thread of contextual material to bind them together. Generally speaking with each sequel the scripts stand a little better on their own feet, the pacing gets less frantic, the direction less arbitrarily showy, and the central performances grow more confident.

The Half-Blood Prince is the sixth movie, and the second directed by David Yates. Although not as masterful as Goblet of Fire director Mike Newell, Yates does solid work here, keeping a steady pace without getting too hyper and linking shots or scenes with some lovely (often heavily effects-laden) camerawork. At one point there’s a long swoop out the window of a moving train, and into another window further down. Gratuitous, perhaps. Yet it does give the viewer a welcome sense of context and scope, binding together a world that is easy to dismiss when presented as a series of scene fragments and jump cuts.

At this point the story itself is beginning to feel like standard pulp melodrama, in place of the quirky British satire of the earlier volumes. How much of that is the continually literal adaptation, which prefers fact and action over manner and nuance, and how much of it is just the nature of the beast, I am not prepared to speculate. The books wore on me long before volume six, and I figure that the films have become adequate enough to fill me in on any significant developments at a much lower level of investment.

I suppose that’s the best summation I can give. If you haven’t read the books, and just want to know the story, the films have become good enough. Considering where they started, that’s something of an achievement.

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.