Monthly Archives: January 2013

Air Fortress

  • Reading time:8 mins read

The Goodwill by my house is a well of pleasant surprises, from a $3.00 unopened, factory sealed copy of Torchwood: Children of Earth to a well-kept VHS copy of Dark Crystal. Yesterday on entering I noticed a glass cabinet by the register. The first thing that leapt at me was Spider-Man for the Sega Genesis. Decent game; I have the very similar Master System version. I don’t need it. Still, they had Genesis games! On closer inspection I also saw a stack of NES cartridges. The spines faced away, so I could only see the top game — some sort of top-down racer. The cashier was busy, so I waited.

On the way out I flagged down the lady and asked to flip through the games. The selection did not inspire me. there was a Wheel of Fortune game. There were two copies of another racing game. There were a couple of licensed games. And then at the very bottom, a well-worn rental copy of Air Fortress. That was it; though I had only played it in emulated snatches, I knew that I wanted to look deeper. The game was fairly obscure; it had a strange structure and mechanics; it was by eventual Nintendo second party Hal Labs. It’s just, when you’re flipping from one eccentric ROM to the next it’s hard to focus on any game for too long. Having the physical cartridge would give me an excuse to do so.

Air Fortress is a curious game, and obscure in more than one sense. Its director, designer, and programmer Hiroaki Suga didn’t seem to do much else. He ported the second Eggerland (or as we know it, Lolo) game from the MSX to the Famicom Disk System. (Later the first Lolo for the NES proper would compile the best levels from all of these earlier games into a single megamix for Western audiences.) He was in charge of New Ghostbusters II, and wrote music for a pinball game and a Game Boy version of Shanghai.

His game was released in severely limited quantities. The history of the NES being as opaque as it is, there are many conflicting version of the story — but according to one version Hal produced just 20 copies to sit alongside the NES test launch in 1985. In 1987 Hal pushed it out again for a larger official print run of 385 copies. As the story goes, people had to order the cartridge directly from Hal Labs — and in turn Hal would throw in a wall poster. Finally in 1989 the game entered regular production, and even was selected for a major Nintendo-sponsored game-playing competition — but its time was past and it never really gained traction or widespread recognition.

So check this out. The game is at least as old as Zelda and Metroid, and it feels like a postmodern indie retro game. It starts off with a Zelda-style story scroll that you’d swear was deliberately ripped off of that game but which was more likely parallel development. The character is named Hal Bailman because, well, Hal Labs and… Bailman? I don’t get that part. It’s a cool name, though.

The game has, for the time, an eccentric structure; it alternates between side-scrolling shooting segments and… well, not platformer areas. And it’s not quite action-adventure. Let’s just call it action-adventure platforming, though, to make the point and move on. During the shooter segments you bulk up on the game’s two kinds of power ups (of which we will speak more soon), then the adventure-platforming segments are where we see the real Hal-style contextual puzzle level design come into play.

The hesitation in that last paragraph comes from the game’s unusual mechanics; in the platformer sections Mr. Bailman has two main moves: shoot, and fly. He also can walk along the ground, slowly. The D-pad is used for all motion, and both buttons shoot. One shoots a standard projectile; the other shoots bombs. The effect of this control scheme is a little like the dual-stick, dual-trigger setup of modern first-person shooters — except minus a dimension.

There are two on-screen counters: one for energy, and one for bombs. These two counters correspond to the two power-ups. You can use the bombs at any time, and they can be replenished; they work sort of like the missiles in Metroid, except more so. Some things can only be destroyed with a bomb, and some things are better disposed of with one. Energy is an interesting thing, worthy of its own paragraph.

Energy serves two roles: not-dying, and fuel. Think of the way breath meters work in so many water levels, where a character’s life will drain to represent depleting oxygen — and often the less life the character has, the less breath available for submersion. Similar concept here, except we’re talking up instead of down. As you fly, your energy temporarily depletes — making you all the more vulnerable. As you sustain injury you lose freedom of motion, and you need to think harder about what you’re doing.

So there’s a minor juggling act. Next let’s add gravity and momentum, so the player needs to master the physics of the jet pack — all while avoiding injury and keeping an eye on fuel.

While we’re speaking of momentum, let’s conserve it — meaning recoil. When the character shoots, floating around or otherwise, he is repelled in the opposite direction. The game makes use of this property alongside everything else to construct clever, deliberate logistical problems. Say, you float down a well with spikes at the bottom and along the left wall. To move ahead you need fly below an underhang, just pixels above the tips of the spikes — yet that narrow passage is blocked by a robot sentry. If you shoot the sentry without thinking, chances are you will fly back into the spikes. If you lose control of your flight, chances are you’ll graze the bottom spikes. If you dawdle to think about it, chances are your fuel will run out.

So the levels are nice. The build-up of new concepts is very slow, and indeed there aren’t many to play with — but then the game keeps throwing in new loopholes. When you beat the first fortress and destroy the core, you continue a screen or two to the right and board your little, er, space scooter, which has somehow found its way to the exit. Presto; on to level two. When you beat the second fortress, the screen begins to blink and shake. After way too much time wandering you realize the place is going to blow up. There’s no countdown timer; you just have to intuit that things aren’t right, and bolt back to the entrance fast as you can. Otherwise, game over!

The game’s map designers had more storied careers than its director; the head one, Akio Hanyu, went on to program several of the Kirby games and the first two Smash Bros. games. The others worked on Sylvalion and the GBA e-Reader. (Remember that thing?)

Aesthetically the presentation is all over. The game looks bright, simple, and appealing, but hardly sophisticated. Then you look closer and you notice the backgrounds. What could be a flat color or repeating pattern, and in another game would be, will instead be a complex web of cross-hatching or dithering, the scratches getting denser toward the walls and more scattered in the center of a room. The character seems to have all of four frames of animation, but does he need much more? The same uninspiring music repeats through the whole game, or at least seems to; only the space opera bombast of the main theme really stands out.

Should you die, and you should, the game has a password continue — a short one; maybe only half a dozen characters. Considering its vintage (again possibly pre-Icarus), that’s novel stuff as well.

Air Fortress is a progressive game from an era when that didn’t make much sense. It trades spectacle for concept — and the kind of concept that only someone who designs games or has been playing them for long enough to look at them analytically (much longer than they had existed at the time it was made) would really notice or appreciate. It’s actually a very simple concept, that raises several questions about the assumptions that go into most design — and that works largely because of the game’s careful, didactic level design, that helps to illustrate how very simple the concept is yet how complex its ramifications can be at any given moment.

That concept? That you have a jetpack and a gun, and that every simple little thing you do has consequences. Physics and the energy system make sure of that. I mentioned how the controls bring to mind modern first-person shooters. The energy system calls to mind the “shield” innovation in Halo, and the attention to the physics of every motion is still fairly novel after twenty years.

As I play Air Fortress I think of Fishbane and Hero Core. This might well be their contemporary. The decisions here sort of make the game feel like a modern literate gamer’s idea of 8-bit design, with the benefit of a lifetime of hindsight and with the limited resources and attention span of most indie designers. It’s designed just far enough to make its point, play with its notions, and move along.

These days, that’s all I ask from a game — and it’s all I really have the patience to absorb.

The Genre Drain

  • Reading time:8 mins read

I have made no secret of my annoyance with Steven Moffat’s oversight of Doctor Who. The problems aren’t the ones that you will see people citing in British op-ed columns or fan surveys; they have more to do with Moffat’s personality, or rather the aspects that seep into his work. To my eyes he is desperate to seem clever, and he seems to actively court the adulation of the obsessive. The pursuit of these goals often seems of a greater priority than exploring new concepts, using the show’s structure to explore familiar concepts from a new perspective, communicating to the audience in an emotionally comprehensible way, or even sorting through the logic of his own overwrought plots to make sure that it all adds up.

Davies’ era may have gotten cozy and familiar by the end, and it may at times have over-egged the bold concepts in favor of sensible storylines, but through his entire tenure I always felt that something new was around the corner. Even when the show didn’t work, it felt brave and adventuresome — eager to explore new things. On the successful side we have episodes like “Gridlock” and “Midnight”, that throw caution to the wind to play with big themes, big images that explore the spectrum of human response under extreme conditions. One is erupting with event and scenario; the other is perhaps the single most focused episode in 50 years of Doctor Who. On the problematic side we have things like “Aliens of London”, “Love & Monsters”, and “Last of the Time Lords” — each of which flounders in several respects, but which operates under a stable internal compass: their goal is to explore the consequences of extreme situations so as to examine and, where possible, satirize the mechanics of the world that we live in today.

Davies’ work is outward-looking. Moffat’s stuff is very, very insular.

Case in point — and this is why I’m writing any of this now; I just noticed this on the bus today — is the infusion of new perspectives.

Davies revived the show, came up with a brand new context for it that managed to provide a brand new start for everyone — old viewers, new viewers, the writing staff, the production crew — while allowing space for its history. He then brought in a bunch of people to work on it, because there were too many episodes to write for himself. That first year he brought in four other writers: Moffat, Gatiss, Rob Shearman, and Paul Cornell. Fine, lovely. Despite a few hiccups, he put out one of the best seasons of Doctor Who ever.

The next year was problematic, mostly because of production problems carried over from that first year — so again Davies wound up writing more than he intended. Even so, he brought in four new writers. Of the previous stable, only two returned this year. Year three, he brought in another four writers. By year four the show was about as stable as it would be, and he brought in only two new voices. For the 2009 specials there were only five episodes, and yet for the best of those — “The Waters of Mars” — again he brought in a new writer.

That’s sixteen writers over four and a half production runs. If we ignore the Eccleston series, which to be fair we should, that’s eleven new writers that Davies introduced as the show went on.

Since Moffat has taken over he has introduced five new writers: two in his first series, two in his second, and one in his third (whose work will be broadcast in the spring). That’s nearly as many as Davies would introduce in a single year. Altogether, over three production runs Moffat’s stable consists of just ten writers. Out of 42 episodes, 33 have been written by the same six returning writers — Moffat, Gatiss, Gareth Roberts, Chris Chibnall, Toby Whithouse, and Matthew Graham.

Aside from Moffat none of these writers is particularly bold, dynamic, or visionary. At best they churn out mathematically coherent scripts based on stock themes, character archetypes, and textbook story templates. Although they have written a few surprisingly functional episodes of late (“The Lodger”, “The Power of Three”), Chibnall and Roberts seem to draw from no more practical knowledge or life experience than what it means to be a fan of a TV show. Though more competent, Gatiss is only really interested in pastiche of existing literature. Whithouse and Graham are to my mind interchangeable; creators of successful genre series (Being Human, Life on Mars) that consist of a random fantasy twist applied to a familiar template. The only difference is that Whithouse uses bottled story structure and low-hanging themes to provide his stock characters space to talk at each other, while Graham seems to have no idea how to develop his stories, themes, or stock characters beyond the initial pitch.

Out of Moffat’s five new writers, three have written more than one episode. Gaiman is Moffat’s mirror in inward-looking fan service. Stephen Thompson’s one episode so far has been possibly the least competent or imaginative since the show’s revival, constructed as it is almost entirely of genre cliches with little attempt to examine them, the characters, or the audience’s expectations beyond the surface description. Neil Cross, well! We haven’t seen either of his yet.

So what do we have left? Two new writers, and then one anomaly. Simon Nye, the creator of 1990s sitcom Men Behaving Badly, wrote “Amy’s Choice”; Richard Curtiss, writer of countless romantic comedies such as “Love Actually” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, wrote “Vincent and the Doctor”; and Tom MacRae got his start in screenwriting with the unfortunate 2006 two-parter that reintroduced the Cybermen. Then after five years of experience in the field he came back with the best episode of Moffat’s era, “The Girl Who Waited”.

Each of these guys has only written one episode to date, and it seems unlikely that any of them will write again soon. These are also the only three episodes in Moffat’s era that bring a sense of a distinct outside perspective — and thereby a thematic and emotional inroad to the show. To an extent it makes sense; two of the writers come from different disciplines entirely, and bring with them their training and observations from those fields. MacRae has just grown a hell of a lot as a writer, after jobbing around the TV landscape for half a decade.

I think I’m getting away from my point a bit. What I’m trying to illustrate here is just how insular the show has become since 2010. Under Moffat, the show has become a splatter of self-serving fan-fiction. It’s not just Moffat’s writing; it’s that the show displays little vision aside from Moffat’s writing. Nearly everything points inward; toward fandom, toward prior expectations, toward a celebration of a very narrow, unexamined perspective and experience of life. It’s like someone locked a small group of drop-out nerds in the basement and told them to write to their greatest fantasies. The only outsiders who get to play along are the ones who either cater to or neglect to challenge that nuclear fervor with the burden of context.

I’m not saying that Davies’ other fifteen writers were all brilliant. Heck, six of them make up the core of Moffat’s gang. I’m saying that the variety of voices during Davies’ era — including the touch of the insular — reflects the outward-looking stance of Davies’ own writing, which as a whole makes for a more relevant, inviting, and to me inspirational piece of television. It’s the numbers that justify all of this in my head; noticing the pattern over the years. You can see the sphincter clinching shut, and with it all sense of perspective.

Series 1: 5 new writers
Series 2: 4 new writers
Series 3: 4 new writers
Series 4+specials: 3 new writers
Series 5: 2 new writers
Series 6: 2 new writers
Series 7: 1 new writer

The show dearly needs new writers, from different disciplines, with their own original views on life. Under the current stewardship it’s going down the genre drain. Key question: will Moffat allow in another strong voice to clash with his own? To my eyes that’s the main hurdle here.

Slight addendum: Notice also that up until 2009 Davies managed to produce fourteen episodes a year, and also produce and write for two spin-off series — meaning at the show’s height there were 39 new episodes of Doctor Who in a given year. Even in calendar year 2009 we saw 20 episodes, when you throw in Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Moffat struggles year-on-year just to get a single fourteen-episode series out the door. Between Christmas 2011 and Easter 2013 he has completed just six episodes of Doctor Who. Every month we hear a new excuse, but the problem seems to be a conflict with Moffat’s other series, Sherlock — which itself only runs for three episodes every couple of years.

Seriously? Is that how tightly the sphincter has closed now? I can’t help but correlate the slim quantity with the slim quality, even if I’m not totally sure how one leads to the other. There’s something here, though.