We All Fall Down

The Only Time

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I’ve gone over this before; the remastered Pretty Hate Machine is nice, if a little underwhelming after the special edition of The Downward Spiral. The lack of any special content aside from NIN’s cover of “Get Down Make Love” (previously available on the “Sin” single) is a little disappointing, but would be fine if the new mix were a clear improvement. The problem is that although its tracks are a little clearer than before, perhaps EQed a little better, the 2010 album comes from the twenty-first century school of mastering — which is to say, “louder is better“. Everything is compressed to the upper registers, so we lose all of the old dynamic range and the vocal tracks are now often overwhelmed by the backing.

This is unfortunate, and you’d think that Trent Reznor would know better, but it’s sort of a fact of modern studio engineering. Whatever. What I’m noticing, which I have noticed before but I’m noticing again now, is the peculiar effect of this new mastering — which is to say, the better tracks get noisy and hard to listen to, but the weaker tracks — some of them runners up for Trent Reznor’s worst ever — come out much improved. And the damnedest thing is that it’s hard for me to narrow down why.

“The Only Time” should by all reasonable extremes be the worst song on the album — except its misjudged weirdness elevates it beyond “That’s What I Get”. Now? I… kind of like it. It’s certainly easier on the ears than most of the album, and now its weirdness has a certain charm that it lacked. Again, I don’t know what’s different aside from the compressed dynamic range. It’s hard to do an A/B comparison. It’s still a stupid song, but it has become enjoyably dumb.

“That’s What I Get” will forever be Reznor’s most pointless album track, but again it lives a little more than before — as does “Ringfinger”, which to my ear will always be a limp reworking of his perhaps too-saucy-for-1989 “Twist”.

I have always thought that the mixes on Pretty Hate Machine were the most anemic of all known versions of those songs. The single mix of “Sin” is so much richer, so much better in every way — as are most of the early mixes of “Down In It”, “Sanctified”, and the joyously vague “Kinda I Want To”, which in a discussion with our Amandeep Jutla I once paraphrased as “I want to do something transgressive! And I feel ambivalent about that!” In order to make all of this material sit together and sound sufficiently gloomy, someone knocked off most of the individual edges.

This may in part explain why I’m not too bothered by the new master. The songs that it degrades mostly sound better elsewhere, and the songs that it improves have never sounded so good.

Also, the packaging.

Time and Distance

  • Reading time:5 mins read

With the recent shots of the rebuilt Hartnell-era sets for Mark Gatiss’ upcoming 50th anniversary biopic, the more conservative edges of Who fandom are bouncing off the (plywood and fiberglass) walls, demanding to know why the show’s current incarnation has changed anything at all. The way that the show was 50 years ago should be the way that it is now — never mind that the whole point of the show is change, and that it would never have survived this long without it.

A recent discussion turned to the final moments of Skyfall, which — not to spoil anything for the holdouts — bring the awesome return of a very, very familiar location from the early years of the series. When it becomes clear what’s happening, it feels like an epiphany. A chill goes up the spine. All of that jazz. Someone held out that moment as proof that they should never have changed anything about Doctor Who, because look at how right it all felt when they put things back the way they were supposed to be! Another faction came in to pooh-pooh overt calls to nostalgia, saying that anything alive needed to keep moving forward.

Which is, of course, true — but there’s a little more than nostalgia in Skyfall. All of the Daniel Craig Bond movies use the reboot in Casino Royale to make a point of building and exploring the myth of the character and the franchise. To those in the know the office isn’t just a point of nostalgia; it’s a mythic touchstone that seems to suggest deeper meaning by drawing on what we already know. When you see it, the intended reaction seems to be something along the lines of “Oh, so this is how we got there!” It draws from the past to build on it and make it feel significant in a new and vibrant way.

Generally I think the new series has done a pretty good job of following that path — particularly under Davies’ eye. When Moffat tries to inject meaning, it’s kind of… labored and metatextual (i.e. “Doctor WHOOOOOOO”; “The Doctor and the monsters; you can’t have one without the other!” and all). Compare that to the offhanded way that Davies harks back to The Edge of Destruction and (possibly) the McGann film in Eccleston’s last few episodes, or establishes any number of iconic elements from the classic series (Daleks, Time Lords, Sarah Jane, the Master) as ancient lore that carry a weight of significance as they trickle into the present.

Time and distance give the space for reflection; the images and concepts that persist form the basis of legend. For a new chapter to seize on those images and concepts and, without undue deference, to explore their place in the myth — that makes the whole thing seem coherent, it lends an apparent weight to the immediate events, and it lends a hint of consequence to previous instances of those images and concepts — as well as their immediate circumstances.

So. It’s a little more complicated, I think. It’s not that the office in Skyfall is how it should be; it’s that now it’s how it always was in the old days, and that this fact now carries a little more apparent meaning than it did — or than it would have, had things remained that way over the last several movies. Likewise it’s not a matter of nostalgia. Nostalgia is zombie thinking; the living death of the past, casting a pall on all that still thrives. These elements aren’t about stasis; they’re about a sense of consequence. Not what things are, but why they are that way — or at least how they came to be.

This is, to my mind, a really enthralling way to go about storytelling within an ancient and well-defined framework. Over the last decade reams of pop culture “reboots” and new adaptations have heavily pulled on this structure — Bond, Battlestar Galactica, Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Nolan’s Batman series. Even Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland sequel (confusingly titled “Alice in Wonderland”) has a bunch to say about personal change, the differences in Victorian expectations of women versus young children, and the nature of Wonderland as an extended metaphor for Alice’s psyche, that lends new perspective to the original material.

Of all of these, I think that Davies’ Who is one of the bigger accomplishments. It draws heavily from and extrapolates from the classic series, attempting to lay extra layers of meaning onto what came before — yet it tends to avoid overt reverence. The result is both vital, in the sense that it is alive and does what it needs to do by the pragmatic demands of the present, and consequential in that the present and all that occurs within it occurs within eyesight of the looming weight, promise, and threat of the past.

This is of course just my interpretation.

Kenji Eno

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Man. This is making me feel a little weird.

If you’re reading this blog, you know how I am with videogames; this deep-seated ambivalence. I love what they can be, but I tend to hate what they are. There’s a small handful of designers out there who I think have the right ideas or the right attitude, that could actually make something of this form if people just listened to what they said.

One of the top tier is Kenji Eno. He retired in a huff about 13 years ago. Since then I doubt a month has gone by when I haven’t wondered if he’s going to ever design another game. Every few years he has threatened to, and he very nearly did something for the Wii. (EDIT: Looks like he actually followed through, on a smaller scale.) His final game, D2, is sometimes my favorite game for the Dreamcast, which is in turn my favorite game system and the last bastion of progressive design in the mainstream industry.

The man was avant-garde in an era when videogames never ever were. He couldn’t follow a straight formula if his life depended on it. He’d get bored and depressed at the suggestion, and then go make a sound-only game for blind people, or… something like this:

1UP: What can you tell us about Short Warp, the wild minigame collection you made for 3DO?

KE: This was the funkiest game!

1UP: And it even came packaged with a free condom. Were you trying to get gamers to have more sex? Because when we see used copies in stores, the condom is always unused and unopened.

KE: That’s sad. [Laughs] This game was made when I was almost on the edge. My mental status was getting very unbalanced, so I wanted to balance myself back by creating a game like this. I was thinking, “If I’m going to create a game like this, I should do something really crazy.” And that’s how I came up with the idea of this game, and that’s why I included a condom. However, I had to make it limited because the packaging was expensive because it came packed with a condom, so the physical dimensions of the package got thicker, and there weren’t any packages like that. So the manufacturing fee jumped up, and condoms weren’t cheap either, so it was expensive to manufacture the games. If I manufactured too many units, I was going to be deep in the red. So that’s why I limited the units.

1UP: How many units did you make?

KE: 10,000, and I hand-numbered all of the packages myself.

The man was an auteur and a rock star, and the game industry didn’t know what to do with him. After a certain point he got fed up with the scene and returned to his first calling, music.

He was only 42 when he died. Which means he was 29 when he retired from game design. He was 20 when he got his start with the sound design to a Famicom prot of Altered Beast. He was 25 when he delivered his breakout game, D. His entire career spanned just a decade, from scutwork through superstardom to sidelining and burnout. In amongst there he met and influenced and was influenced by the likes of Goichi Suda and Fumito Ueda. And he also pissed people off — not without good reason, or fair warning.

I was very mad at Sony. When I released D on the PlayStation, Acclaim was to publish it. So the sales people gathered orders for a 100,000 units, but Sony had given their other titles manufacturing priority. So Sony told me that they had only manufactured 40,000 units, and I was very mad about that . . . . So I was talking to a guy at Sony, and this was toward the end of the year, and I said, “OK, I’m going to go to [Japanese electronics retailer] Bic Camera, and if I don’t see my game there, I’m going to punch you.” and they said, “No don’t worry about it. It’s going to be there.” And I went to Bic Camera and didn’t find it, so I actually did punch this guy — so that should tell you how mad I was.

And so now he’s dead. And an era is passed. Be that as it may, surely his effort must have had some effect. Fifteen years and a couple of abysmal console launches later, surely the field is changed somewhat?

Well. Look at that; a new PlayStation.

Here’s the short version.

Yoshida: What do you mean, people aren’t buying game consoles? People still buy consoles. All we have to do is bring people games that they want to play, and they will buy our console. That doesn’t mean original or exclusive games, and we certainly don’t need new voices or intend to publish anything too outside the norm — but I am confident that the games that happen to materialize on our system will make people want to own it.

…

So okay. He probably wouldn’t have made another game on the scale of what came before. And if he did, it would have made only a small impact — and far too late to turn this ship around. You can’t fight entropy. Not with a hundred Enos. It’s foolish, really. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, or hope.

It’s not his voice that I’ll miss; it’s the potential that he represented. It’s the fact that guys like Eno are out there in the world, and that just sometimes they have an effect — either directly or by proxy. And now there’s one fewer. And the world is poorer for it.

Thanks to Amandeep Jutla and Frank Cifaldi.

The Reign of Terror

  • Reading time:6 mins read

So the first season of classic Doctor Who is now complete on DVD — or as complete as it will get. The seven-part story Marco Polo is missing, and is represented on DVD by a half-hour cut-down photo reconstruction set to the surviving audio track. And then there is the case of the season finale, the six-part The Reign of Terror. As with Marco Polo it’s one of those early-era historicals, this time set during the French Revolution. For years the serial was missing, but in the 1980s four of its six parts were recovered from a film archive in Cyprus. Cypress should also have held copies of episodes four and five, but they were destroyed during a Turkish invasion in 1974. Such is the way of things.

As with the Patrick Troughton serial The Invasion, the serials two missing episodes have been animated for DVD release. New pictures are set to the existing audio, and bingo; we have a completed episode. Whereas The Invasion was animated by famed British studio Cosgrove Hall (responsible for Danger Mouse and Count Duckula, among other series), The Reign of Terror was primarily animated by a guy off of the Internet who calls himself Otaking.

The results are, shall we say, mixed. The discussion that I have seen has focused on the rapid cutting in episode four, which goes against the directorial style of the existing episodes (and indeed most 1960s TV). People have also singled out lots of weird touches like candles that cast shadows of themselves on the wall, or an odd cutaway to a character’s crotch as he rose from a chair. The animation definitely has its problems, but I wouldn’t consider any of that a major issue.

The biggest thing that stands out to me, to the extent that I find the animation hard to watch, is a drastic difference in character models from one shot to the next. In one scene it took me a while before I realized that two separate shots depicted the same character, as the geometry and shading looked so completely different. I just thought there was another unspecified character in the room.

The other problem, which ties into the above confusion, has to do with dialogue. Due to various decisions it often takes some concentration on my part to work out who is talking, and to whom. Although I understand the impulse to avoid as much lipsync as possible, as it is very time-consuming and tedious work, there seems to be little attention here to the flow of the script. Halfway through a sentence we will cut to a shot of the character standing up with his mouth closed. Sometimes a character barely opens his mouth before we switch to an extended reaction shot. This is particularly evident in conversations involving Hartnell; it seems whenever another character is talking all we see is close-ups of Hartnell’s face. A couple of times — and this is almost cute — the moment a character begins to talk, the top of another character’s head passes in front of his mouth.

To make it stranger all of this is contrasted with sudden jump cuts to an extreme blow-up of a character’s mouth. That… still doesn’t help me follow the discussion. It just makes me feel like I’m being jerked around.

The thing that confuses me about the character models is that there are only limited drawings for each character. Then the animators apply a morphing effect to the portraits to add lipsync and generally make them less static. I can understand the model shifting if we’re talking about hundreds, or even dozens, of frames of animation. Here it’s just a few individual drawings. Seriously? You can’t draw six pictures of William Hartnell with the same general facial geometry? And then once you have the pictures you can’t be bothered to animate a complete sentence?

As I say, I don’t so much care about the specific editorial choices. So the editing jumps around more than it should from a historical perspective; okay, whatever. So long as the cutting doesn’t interfere with my moment-to-moment comprehension, I’ll accept the stylization. The visuals are a new product, and you have to give them some creative leeway to do what the animator feels they need to do. What bothers me about the above two issues is the extent to which they interfere with my comprehension, and generally make the viewing experience more work than it should be.

When I watch The Invasion, I almost feel a twinge of disappointment when the animation ends. I’ve shown it to a couple of people, and they were enthralled with episode one — and then totally lost interest when it hit episode two and switched to a live-action archive TV show. The animation was that good, on its own merits. Here, I was relieved when the animation ended and I could relax my attention. I don’t think I would show this to someone who wasn’t already invested in the era, as I don’t think it reflects well on the series. It’s better than recons or the narrated episodes, in that I do feel that I can follow the story now — but I still have to work at it.

Maybe I could accept that better in the middle of a more interesting story. As it is, this is a simple and rather uneventful tale — so all the while that I’m focusing, I can’t help but wonder if it’s worth the effort. By no means is this a poor story, and I’ll take even a slightly dull Hartnell over great swaths of the show’s history. What rankles me is the juxtaposition. If Reign were to swap animation teams with The Invasion, I think I could handle things a little better; a story as still and simple as The Reign of Terror demands the clarity of a Cosgrove Hall, while a story as jumbled as The Invasion could withstand a little more shaking.

To my understanding the animation team here underwent several changes in procedure as the project went along, and to be sure the end of episode five is much steadier than the start of episode four — but the above problems persist to the end. Previously, on the basis of the Invasion animations, I was eager to see their work on the remaining missing episodes. Now I approach the prospect with more caution.

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.

Clouds and Grenades

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Okay. That was way better than I expected. The resolution with the crying was… typical recent-era Moffat. Which is to say, disingenuously twee. Otherwise — well, hell. Way to step up your game, man. It feels like Moffat spent way more time on this script than any since the first two episodes of last year. And this may well be his best script of his era as showrunner, though I’d have to watch it again to make any conclusions.

Not going to recount everything good here. I will mention that subtle as they are, the changes to the theme are appreciated. I figure if they’re going to do an original take on the theme they might as well go for it and stop clinging to Ms. Derbyshire’s soundbank, and the main riff is finally distinct. I like its thin, fragile sound and the way that the notes pitch-decay after a phrase. It’s probably my favorite rendition of the theme since the show’s return — though I am fond of the final Davies-era theme, with its rockabilly overtones.

Conceptually the intro is the first with some actual thought behind it since the McCoy sequence. Recently the narrative has just been: 1) stock time tunnel effect; 2) stock CGI TARDIS model; 3) credits. Whatever you can achieve within those narrow conceptual boundaries and technical resources, it’s golden.

Here we don’t even see the TARDIS for most of the intro; we pull out of it at the beginning, and then we swoop into it again at the end. In between we’re dragged through various celestial phenomena — planets, galaxies, nebulae, plasma clouds. We get the current doctor’s face in the dust, then the voyage pulls to a halt with the logo — at which point the screen begins to spark and fizz, and explodes into a rather different and to my eyes more appropriate interpretation of the time tunnel. All plasma and distortion and so forth. Only there does the TARDIS reappear and pick us up again to continue the adventure.

In execution I still feel like I’m drowning in cheap Photoshop filters, as I have since the start of this series. There’s some ugly use of color, and the individual elements feel flimsy and incongruous. They’re just sort of thrown in there and don’t really cohere all that well. Still, there’s more to it than just the last-minute reuse of stock elements.

And yeah. Nice TARDIS interior. Unsure about the (literally) over-the-top Gallifreyan scripting, but whatever. Good to see they haven’t thrown out that bit of design, as I always rather liked it.

Overall — I guess I just appreciate how different the episode feels, while also being of an unusually high quality (for this era) in and of itself.

And yeah, I’m also curious as to why the Doctor only just seems to remember the Great Intelligence. Is this a reference to all of the deleted episodes from the 1960s? On a metatextual level am I to infer that when a Doctor Who episode is lost or destroyed, a bit of the Doctor’s history vanishes from his memory?

At first I thought I was missing something — that it had turned out that the GI that we know wasn’t behind this after all, and that this was just a random phenomenon masked by a familiar name. But… no, I guess this really is the Great Intelligence? And… well, I guess we’ll see what’s up. I like the idea of an origin story, though (if that’s what this is), and I like the idea of using the GI as a major recurring threat.

Post-credits, I was surprised how many good, original designs flashed by toward the end of the “coming soon” trailer. In broad visual concept that faceless toothy gentleman one has been done before; just in the revived series it’s similar to both the Silence and the Trickster, then there are things like Buffy and the Mouth of Sauron. Even so, hey. Nice variety. Combined with the preceding episode, I’m actually rather looking forward to the rest of the series — for the first time in a while!

The Arcade Machine

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Okay. Something major that I was unaware of:

Even earlier than Pinball Construction Set, which (text adventures aside) has popular distinction as the first game creation system, there’s a product for the Apple II and (later) Atari 400/800 computers called The Arcade Machine.

This is a tool for creating simple top-down shooters in the Space Invaders/Galaga mode, which seems rather narrow — but then so is a dedicated pinball design tool. Going by some screenshots, it also seems very flexible within those limitations.

The Arcade Machine was designed by Chris Jochumson and Doug Carlston, the latter being one of the two founders of Brøderbund. Yes, this is an early Brøderbund release — pre-Choplifter. That totally makes sense, and it also may explain why although reviewed well this tool has gone so under the radar these last thirty years — as this was just before Brøderbund hit it big and became a major publisher.

Also going by the back of the Atari box, it seems there was a contest where Brøderbund would reward the best user-derived game with a prize of $1,500 ($3,600 in 2012 dollars).

So much of videogame history has become obscure. And some of this stuff, you’d expect it would be fairly important.

Portfolio

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Back in the NES era every game was part of a publisher’s collection, and the collection was expanded in waves. I sort of miss that context. You’d get fold-out posters presenting a broad range of software, all in the same template, as if they all were aspects of a greater whole.

The implication was, to fully understand a given range you needed to collect them all: Kid Niki and Side Pocket and Ring King and Break-Thru. The sense was that any given game was just part of the picture, and together they all added up to something more — like a band’s albums. It helped that across the range they had consistent, usually hand-painted artwork.

It’s this that lent the publishers a sense of an overall creative voice and personality. As if Konami and Acclaim were individual people. A player got to know and appreciate these voices, like old friends. Every new templated game was like the sharing of a new confidence.

A change of template was a change of mission, and a break of template — your Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. 3, even Wizards & Warriors — was a radical event. The suggestion that this game stood alone, apart from everything else a publisher had to say, was startling. These were event games. Mission statements.

The non-event games, though — even if they weren’t important unto themselves, they also had a part to play. They were the album tracks to the hit singles of the standalone games. I’ve written before that when I was younger I had no concept of a bad game. There were games that I understood and got into, and there were… strange games. There were big games and there were small games. And time was, for every Metroid or Kid Icarus there were a dozen Wrecking Crews, Gumshoes, Balloon Fights, or Clu-Clu Lands. Collectively these games set the field and the context that both lent the event games their special meaning and made the whole medium feel vibrant, alive, like anything could happen.

Today, every game is a standalone. There isn’t as much sense of a constant dialog, with occasional upsets and asides. In the mainstream at least, nothing is as special and nothing is as intimate. Or as complex and varied. The last vestige was the Sega Dreamcast.

You get some of that now by following indie authors, but you don’t get the context — it’s like iTunes, versus full albums by an artist like Nine Inch Nails. You get bits and pieces; not a sense of place and posterity.

The Power of Three

  • Reading time:7 mins read

In the event that I write about Doctor Who on this blog, usually I’m complaining about something. That goes double since around 2010; I’ve made no secret of my dislike for the show’s direction under its current creative team.

The weirdest thing, though — some of the least offensive, by which I mean at least moderately creative, episodes are by writers who have in the past done little but annoy me. “The Lodger” and its slightly less successful sequel are the best things that Gareth Roberts has written for the show. Whereas MacRae’s 2006 Cyberman story was a big waste of time, “The Girl Who Waited” is probably one of the best episodes of the revived show. And now there’s the curious case of Chris Chibnall.

I have no doubt that I have written of him, or more specifically my views on his writing, before. I have said that he doesn’t seem to have an original thought in his head; that all he seems capable of is digesting other people’s work and then rearranging it in a less interesting or meaningful configuration. I also have said that, as with Gareth Roberts, all he seems to have to discuss as a writer is his affinity for other TV writing. He’s a professional fan, basically, let loose in a toy store with the full range of action figures. The result is some of the most abominable writing in Doctor Who’s history, by which I include the first two years of Torchwood.

So what do I make of this year’s crop of episodes? So far we’ve got one of Moffat’s worst scripts yet, and the worst of Toby Whithouse — one of the show’s least outstanding writers in any respect. Someone on a message board described his writing as painfully functional. I can be no more eloquent. Next week we’ve another Moffat script that promises more than I have faith in the writer to deliver. Interspersed amongst these dubious fruits are two Chibnall episodes, which it turns out are the highlights of the run.

I didn’t really comment on “Dinosaurs On a Spaceship”; it didn’t compel me to say much. It was adequate, which for Chibnall is an achievement. Considering its writer, and all of its associated problems in tone and pitch — the testicle jokes, the gun cocking, the pointless and wasted supporting characters — it is a great compliment to say that I didn’t hate it. The good parts — the gormless family member, the total rotter of a villain — were largely borrowed, and possibly successful for reasons outside the script itself, yet they did work. I also enjoyed a few things that almost suggested thought or imagination, such as the idea of Silurian arks launched way back in Earth’s history, when most of the race went into a deep sleep.

Then there was the Doctor’s reaction to the villain — actually, their whole dynamic throughout the episode. The Doctor can be ruthless, and when he is, then he just is. Where lesser writers like Whithouse (and increasingly, Moffat) go on about how old the Doctor is, how tired and bitter he feels, and how he’s capable of doing anything, writers like Davies just let him go merrily about his way until he stumbles across something that offends him — which he then steamrolls without a second thought. See Eccleston’s response to Cassandra in “The End of the World”; he sees that she is irredeemable, so he has no compunction about letting her explode.

Though there is reason to his response, it’s moments like this that make the character dangerous and unsettling — as he has been since the days of Hartnell nearly bashing in that caveman’s head with a rock. The Doctor is not a heroic figure; he’s a man who stumbles into situations that demand his involvement, often just to extricate himself. Often if he does good, it’s a side effect of his basic efforts to survive. He does have a deep moral core (at least, ever since Barbara drilled it into him), but it tends to take a passive role in his decisions. Actually, his most radical or startling decisions are often his most passive. Here as in many 20th century stories that escape me in the early morning, he simply allows things to happen. He lets the villain die. He watches it happen, then he turns his back and forgets all about it. All continues as normal. Which is all the more disturbing.

It’s curious that Chibnall is the one current writer who seems to get this part of the character, considering his previous record for character and motivation. Right now everyone else seems to write him as an ineffectual braggart, quick to threaten people on the basis of his reputation and slow to actually follow through.

So, that was a decent episode. Certainly Chibnall’s best script to date. And then there was yesterday, and “The Power of Three”…

Okay, parts of it are derivative. You can’t get around that with Chibnall. In basic shape and detail you could easily rebuild the script from pieces of “The Lodger”, “The Christmas Invasion”, “Army of Ghosts”, and “Children of Earth” — all Davies scripts, you will notice, except for the first one, itself a surprisingly original episode by a writer previously distinguished by his poor imitation of Russel T Davies. Also, the supposed “A” story — the invasion plot — doesn’t really hold together and is very rushed toward the end. After the basic idea is established, the script glosses over most of the development and resolution.

Otherwise — well, look at that. Chibnall is turning into a real writer now. I realize that I sound patronizing; instead of justifying it, let’s change the channel and throw him a real compliment. Out of the Moffat era there are really only about four episodes that stand out to me as exceptional. Preliminary to a second viewing, I’ll say that this makes five. There’s a level of ambition and a degree of awareness here that I have to respect.

The key moment for me is where the cubes cease to be a novelty, and the episode traces out the extent to which people have begun to take them for granted — using them as paperweights, as table decorations; filling the trash with them. The concept of the slow invasion is fine; it’s the kind of thing a person might think up on the toilet and think it sounds amazing. What impresses me is the extent to which Chibnall thought out its logistics and ramifications, in particular the human response. It’s maybe a small thing, but for a writer like Chibnall this awareness of human nature signals a big change. For once, here, he actually is writing about something. He has something to say. And it’s kind of interesting.

There are lots of other nice touches. I like the basic structure where the front-window story is actually just a backdrop to or catalyst for the real discussion — that of the Ponds and the consequences of living with the Doctor. Or more often, waiting for him. Or more rather, waiting for him to disrupt their lives. Or even more, putting their lives on hold because they never know when he will show up to disrupt things again.

Again we have some deeper thoughts and something approaching insight — in this case specifically about Moffat’s pre-established characters and their make believe world, but again filtered through and then reflecting observation about human nature and what I like to call the General Way of Things.

So, I don’t know how to get out of this discussion. Remember how I said that even the most dire of things are better than mediocre, as at least they provide something to think about? I’m starting to think that there is an added dimension in there somewhere. Something about great things having the potential to be awful and awful things having the potential to be great, but the mundane being beyond dynamic range and therefore beyond help. Five to seven years ago, Moffat had great things to say and Chibnall was a blight on the show. Now the positions look like they’re slowly flipping. Meanwhile writers like Whithouse just grind around in the dust, never bad enough to fail and never good enough to succeed.

A Town Called Mercy

  • Reading time:5 mins read

This is about as tedious as the show has been since its return. Even very bad episodes can be entertaining in their way. Toby Whithouse… God, does he ever make a surprising or difficult decision? On purpose, I mean?

It’s not just that the plot is obvious, though that’s certainly true. It’s that it’s written on the most dim, simplistic level I can imagine and treats the platitudes that take the guise of themes as if they are deep and meaningful insight.

I mean, hell. Amy actually says (in whatever phrasing the script uses) “No, don’t kill him; you need to be better than he is!” As if there were the slightest concern that this would actually happen — which is another problem. Nearly every dramatic moment falls flat because there is nothing to back it up. There is no real peril, and the one casualty — the sheriff — just feels arbitrary. It looks like we’re meant to mourn his loss, but we’re never given anything about him except that he seemed to be a pretty good guy, and his death doesn’t come out of any kind of tragedy; it comes out of his arbitrarily throwing himself in front of a gun because That’s What People Do at moments like this in scripts like this.

Things happen not out of actual character or thematic development, but because those are The Things That Happen in scripts like this. People do things not because they actually make sense given their personalities and the present circumstances but because those are The Things That People Do in scripts like this. Dramatic situations arise not through the natural clash of characters and contextual conflicts, but through the insertion of stock dramatic concepts that the writer felt that the script should exhibit. And having made that decision, he didn’t — you know — try to integrate the concepts and explore them in an organic way; he spelled them out verbatim, as if he were actively leafing through his screenwriting 101 textbook. “Aha!” Whithouse yelped. “I will use that one!”

The end effect is that the plotting is obvious. Sure. Who cares; most plotting is. Who cares about plot anyway. What’s insulting is the presentation of all of this facile, half-assed, superficial garbage as something meaningful and original. It’s transparent. It’s cloying. It’s vapid. And the fact that this is essentially a kids’ show makes it even worse, as children’s entertainment should be better than this. It’s so insulting to fob off the kids on any old piece of shit because, hey, they don’t know any better. It’s so insulting. And the thing is, if kids know one thing they know when they’re being talked down to. Usually better than adults.

Under Davies (and nearly any previous era), even at the show’s most daft or bizarre I always felt that there was something of substance underneath. Even The Sarah Jane Adventures explored difficult, even painful concepts in terms that children could understand. To contrast, what is the takeaway from Whithouse’s writing? That… what, people aren’t always all bad or all good? That sometimes they have two stark, diametrically opposed aspects to them? Brilliant insight, there.

It’s a totally reasonable theme, but a theme like that needs more than lip service for it to carry more weight than a fortune cookie. The way that it’s handled here is so simplistic as to be ridiculous, and thereby — in this context — to render the question risible. There’s no gray at all, in a scenario that connotes an infinite monochrome spectrum.

It’s so weird. It’s like Whithouse took the yin yang absolutely at face value. Characters can be a mix of black AND white!

Something odd, and to me suggestive: just a few years ago one of Davies’ scripts made a really big point about the precise definition of “decimate” — so why does Whithouse make a reasonably big point of using it incorrectly? Unless by “decimating half the planet” he meant killing off 5% of the population.

It’s not just recent continuity, of course; the script also seems to forget its own premises, so it keeps boring us with scenes like the one where the Gunslinger storms into the crowded saloon and stomps around, assessing the townspeople. Is there supposed to be tension in that scene? We (again) know he’s not going to do anything, so why does it take so long?

For me another problem is that the script gives Rory almost nothing to do. Considering that he’s the only thing that I really enjoy about the show right now and that he’s going to be gone in two weeks, that kind of annoyed me. It’s just one more waste among many.

So. As usual for Whithouse, that was a tired lump of facile storytelling bulwarked by trite platitudes presented as sober insight — this time, infused with clumsy Holmesian pastiche.

Not terrible, but pretty boring. Actually a little insulting. Someone I know commented that until this series they never understood why people classed Doctor Who as a kids’ show. That’s about right.

Asylum of the Daleks

  • Reading time:3 mins read

New episode; new series. Half-digested mental notes.

Distinctly not for me. I liked the basic premise of Oswin being in the dalek, though I… kind of figured it was something along those lines from the moment the first eyestalk popped up through the snow. Otherwise… um.

The Dalek humans were a bad idea, very poorly executed. To borrow some parlance, the image of the eyestalks and guns emerging from foreheads and palms, where there was no space to emerge from — nope. Doesn’t work. Oh, wait. I meant to say it was daft.

Amy and Rory’s problems were sold poorly, and I’m tired of the whole facile “love will save the day” trope — even if it was sort of undermined here in that she didn’t need the saving.

I was looking, and I don’t recall even seeing a classic Dalek. Not a big deal, except — well, I was looking. And their presence was well advertised.

The new typeface and logo look like they were knocked together in half an hour. The intro is otherwise the same, with a bad color filter laid over the top.

The thing moved too quickly, was of little to no substance, and then just ended. One of my least favorites in an era that I don’t like too much!

So. Whee.

EDIT:

This episode is a summary of everything that bothers me about Moffat’s stewardship. I’m trying to think of something that I liked about it. The slow build-up with Rory and the deactivated Daleks — that was nice. Anything involving Rory was at least watchable. The one recurring character with a touch of realism, and he’s on his way out.

In his place is… Oswin. I thought that Amy got on my nerves; this is worse. Somehow she’s even more flippant and removed from comprehensible human response. Moffat doesn’t do characters, or dialog. All he does is puzzle boxes with several missing pieces.

The almost universal response I’m seeing is that Asylum is one of the best Dalek stories ever. Er. Well. Let me put it this way. Given a choice between Moffat and Helen Raynor, I’ll take Helen Raynor. Never thought I’d long for that mess; now I’m starting to appreciate it. Her story has some of the same basic ideas; it’s clumsier; yet there I can feel a few twinkles of insight or humanity. There’s nothing to Moffat anymore except empty surprises and fan service.

EDIT 2:

To me, here’s how the Oswin thing looks:

Official press has already been suggested that the “correct” Oswin (which is to say, the ongoing companion) is a computer expert; that’s enough for me. This is the same character.

We’ve seen her “death” already, or the after-effects thereof. It’s basically a recycled River Song situation, reinforced by the well-signaled element that the transformation destroys a person’s memories, starting with the most recent.

This Christmas we’re going to meet her earlier on. Then she’s going to travel with the Doctor, he all the while knowing her fate.

Having seen her performance I’m tempted to believe the extra convolution about Weeping Angels, too. To wit: rumors have it that she is from the modern day, and in all of the nonsense around the Ponds’ departure she is sent back to the Victorian era as well.

It’s living and traveling with the Doctor that strengthens her modern-day “computer skills” (and oy to that TV trope; what does this even mean?) to the level that allows her to hack into the Dalek hive mind and all of that nonsense.

I’ll be surprised if this turns out much differently.

The History of A-J Games: Part Nine

  • Reading time:23 mins read

To catch up on the story to date, you can view the archive here.

So at sixteen I was a professional game artist. My work was still rough, but it was going somewhere. I had gained a little structure, a little ambition, and a huge mound of confidence. With guidance, these qualities can almost make high school bearable.

My period with Game-Maker began with what would have been my freshman year. At that time I was, if you recall, still dealing with old social ties. By junior year my life had stabilized a bit: I had adjusted to the school, and gathered a new wave of cohorts; I began to socialize more, and to spend time away from home. As I roamed, so too did my creativity. I began to write music, to learn to code, and to compose my papers in iambic pentameter. I may not have been brilliant, but I was uninhibited and I was curious.

I was also keen to show off. Whether or not I knew what I was doing, I had published six games. In the right social circle, that can go far — and this new crowd had no preconceptions.

Despite my recent crash course in discipline, I was still designing without a theory. Though my results had grown much more thoughtful and polished, and I had begun to stretch the technical and conceptual limits of my tools, to me a game was still about a character: one places a character in a scenario, then fleshes out the scenario using one’s knowledge of existing games and design tropes.

Add in a swollen head and new crowd of people to impress, and we have the renaissance of the insertion game.

There was a definite beginning. One of my associates was to spend his senior year in India. We had grown close since fall orientation, and had developed a pile of in-jokes together. I chose to give him a send-off, filled with all those jokes and hints of his own interests and personality — a fondness for martial arts, a blanket irreverence to cultural norms and sensitivities.

It helped that despite my knowledge of Tintin and Uncle Scrooge and an ostensible eleventh-grade education I had trouble separating my oriental stereotypes. Ninjas were from Asia, and so were snake charmers — and there was something in there about cattle worship. It was all part of the same pop culture muddle. Mind you, at this point I was in a prestigious private school. So I’m not sure what happened there.

With the prevalence of Ninja-based action games, I also had my choice of tropes and templates. Probably my favorite of Sega’s first-generation Genesis games was Revenge of Shinobi. Thanks to composer Yuzo Koshiro and the prominence of his name in the menus, this was also the game that made me understand that games were designed by specific people, each with his or her own voice, and that it was possible to follow an individual from one project to the next.

Revenge of Shinobi is one of those weird sequels, like The Adventure of Link. The original is a direct and merciless arcade action game, Sega’s response to Namco’s Rolling Thunder and one of many volleys between the two companies. As in Namco’s game you can flip up or down layers of a side-scrolling level. Instead of a spy, you play as a ninja. Instead of a gun, you have shuriken. In place of doors filled with ammo, there are scattered hostages. Touch one enemy and you die, but — uniquely to Sega’s game yet far from unique amongst Sega games — there is also a “ninja magic” button. It’s a panic button; press it, and everything around you dies.

The sequel takes advantage of its console origin by sprawling a bit. The character can now take several hits, and levels are less linear. There are now four types of ninja magic, that serve different practical purposes. The game is also filled with secrets and with weird unlicensed cultural references — some of which got Sega in some hot water when the original rights holders got wind.

More than structurally bold, the game is also gorgeous, distinctive, and varied — both visually and aurally. Although Koshiro only composed for this one chapter (plus a couple of Game Gear spin-offs), his music was so successful that his name is forever associated with the series. People just forget that he didn’t write all of the music. What’s all the stranger is that people sort of forget about Revenge. It’s the Shinobi game that was new when nobody had a Sega Genesis. It’s also the most elegant of the lot, and it was my starting point for Ninja Tuck.

I made the character was tall and thin, like Joe Musashi. I filled the early backgrounds with bamboo and secret tunnels. I even littered the starting screen with autumn leaves, that blew away after a moment. All was well, except that the tall character meshed awkwardly with Game-Maker’s limited monster sizes. Without getting really clever, the tallest enemies could only be half as tall as the character sprite. This was acceptable in some cases, as with the scattered cows and burning swords, but it got a little weird when I chose to include knee-high enemy ninjas.

I had the notion of building the game around short-range melee attacks, as in Ninja Gaiden. A problem that I had noticed in hindsight about Peach the Lobster was that the natural attack zone for a 40-pixel tall character tended to fly over the heads of 20-pixel ground-based monsters. Thus I drew from Joe Musashi’s powered-up melee weapon, crossed with Strider Hiryu’s Falchion — which is to say, a blade that is all swoosh and a swoosh that envelops all before the character.

Given that in RSD’s engine all attacks are achieved through monster birthing, there is not much leeway for preciousness. Melee attacks are hard enough when they’re a single, static monster block. A whole two-block sword swoosh takes some intense experimentation. Though in retrospect I can think of one or two better solutions, I eventually solved the problem with a single monster block that quickly shifts down as it animates. Good enough!

After the first couple of levels, my inspiration again shifted from Sega to Tecmo. Several of the later themes are inspired by either the first or the second NES Ninja Gaiden.

Finishing touches include a slightly pointless map screen informed by Commander Keen‘s overworld (itself informed by Super Mario Bros. 3) and a wealth of digitized sound effects. Most of these I recorded myself, and manipulated in Cool Edit. Some, such as the sound the apples make, were directly inspired by Adept Software’s little-known yet neato Zelda knock-off, God of Thunder. A few effects came later, when the object of this game’s tribute was available for recording.

As a final touch, I added morphing menus. As usual I teased the player with promises of a sequel, and even mocked up a few pictures to suggest what was in store for registered users. Maybe it was left-over ambition from my summer commission, but this time I followed through.

Often when I dropped in on my associate he would sing the refrain to a pop song that struck him as silly on some level. One of his favorite quotes was from Suzanne Vega’s “Luka“: “My name is Luka / I live on the second floor.” The way he sang it, I imagined Hervé Villechaize popping his head over the bannister to welcome a new tenant. Whether due to the accent or my own whimsy, I also misheard the name. Thus, continuing the series of in-jokes from our first game together, I named its sequel Ninja Tuck II: Booka.

Whereas my earlier insertion games were flimsy, half-hearted affairs, my work on Ninja Tuck had inspired me to new levels of ambition. Having established a basic framework, for my second go around I was determined to make everything as original and as flashy as I could. Thus aside from the sprite, I redesigned everything from the ground up. As in Peach the Lobster I designed all of the enemies around a common theme — in this case plants — and for consistency I drew all of the sprites and backgrounds in Deluxe Paint. I even dragged in Metamorf to animate some in-game elements.

Why I settled on the plant thing, I am unsure. To achieve it, I pulled on vague memories of all of my favorite botanical levels from the previous five years. Those included Sega’s Land of Illusion (the Game Gear sequel to the 8-bit port of Castle of Illusion), the Aquatic Ruin Zone from Sonic 2, and great swaths of Epic’s Jill of the Jungle. And then there were the monsters. It’s hard not to reference Piranha Plants, and the ones I had in mind were from Super Mario Bros. 3.

One of the later levels is based on a technique hit upon by James Faux of Eclypse Games, and used in his game Mortal Harvey. As an elevator rises, threats gradually present themselves; at the end of the ride, the floor opens up and the player moves on to the next level. In design terms, the level is all trickery. The player remains stationary, while the background animates; different columns of tiles shift at different speeds to create an illusion of parallax scrolling. Monsters slowly scroll down from above, to create the impression that the player is rising to meet them. My implementation was rather clumsy, but these sorts of levels do add variety.

James Faux also helped me to address that final bugbear of RSD’s engine, original music. For months I had been fussing with Amiga-styled music trackers, which consist of low-res digital samples keyed to MIDI data. Compared to the FM synth that Game-Maker supported, tracker music seemed like the way of the future. Furthermore, this stuff was easy to write. Thanks to the mid-’90s demoscene explosion, there was a free tracker for every UI flavor or song format one might like.

There were no obvious tools for RSD’s preferred format. I knew that someone had to be writing these .CMF files, as Epic Megagames used them for all of its early projects — Jill of the Jungle, Solar Winds, Brix. I was tempted to rip this music, which was as simple as looking for the correct headers and renaming the file extensions, but again I wanted to do something original. If I couldn’t, then to my mind it was better to keep using public domain material, even if it meant recycling the same pieces in every game I made.

For months I had been nagging RSD about better music support. I now know that there were complex plans on the board, but at the time my whining was met with silence. By the time of Booka, my petulance had reached a peak. With the aid of some awkward command line tools, James Faux and I were able to convert simple .MOD files to MIDI, and then to .CMF. It was a process of trial and error. Usually the result sounded like an angry modem. With a few tweaks, it might sound like an out-of-tune kazoo. Awful, but original!

Thus I scored my first game. Two or three tracks are by James Faux; the rest is all me, mostly to the game’s detriment. And yet, I was proud. Later I lopped off part of the intro music, adjusted its voicing, and turned it into the A-J Games theme.

After this experience I contacted RSD, and told them that I was “on strike” until they got the music situation in order. I wasn’t going to squander any more energy until I got the features that I wanted. Thus I rode out high school on small-scale games and half-baked experiments, waiting for a cue that never came. It would be years before I tackled and finished another game of this ambition.

Take Ricci’s Cow Hunt. I barely knew the fellow in the central role. He was a class clown; he liked cows; I worked from there. It began as a single level: character, item pickups, background. Whereas the sprites are Deluxe Paint beasts, the level is built from a small collection of simple bitmapped tiles. I drew them dot-by-dot in RSD’s Block Designer tool, then reskinned the first level of A-J’s Quest. The results were clean and bold, and stood out better than many of my gradient-fill blocks. Compared to, say, Crullo, this simple level looked and felt vibrant.

It’s not that I set out to be different; I set out to be lazy. I designed a character based on a slight acquaintance because I was bored, and I wasn’t about to invest the time and energy to build a real game around him — so I puttered in the easiest and quickest tools to hand. It just turned out that a lack of ambition equaled a decrease in affectation. I wound up concentrating more on the task at hand than the process that I had built up, and my basic sensibility took control.

So I had one level down, and it was kind of nice. Next step? Design another level — a completely different one, with a new tile set. Then another, and another. For over a year I continued to putter with Cow Hunt, adding new levels as the muse struck. When I had ideas for a new technique, I would pull up Block Designer, whip up a few tiles, then turn them into a level. Gradually the game became rather like an Ikea show floor; every level served to suggest a new way to mold and paint particleboard. There was nothing to the game besides touring from the entrance to the exit, but it was a pleasant journey.

I installed the game on the computers in the school lab. Whenever there was an update, I would make an announcement in the autoexec.bat files. I don’t think anyone really took care of those machines, as I got away with murder. As time passed I noticed unfamiliar names in the high score lists; it seemed that people were playing. With an apparent audience, my ambition grew. My levels grew more complex, with reversed control schemes and hidden passages. Thanks to this feedback I also realized the game’s object. There were few threats or serious obstacles, but it took a dedicated player to collect all of the cows. Every cow lent the player 100 points. Thus, the game was all about score.

How novel. Since Pac I had been trying to break or sidestep the engine’s location-based objective structure, and to backpedal to something more basic. Something pre-Miyamoto. Here it happened by accident, in a game that I hardly cared about, after I had given up on serious design.

Something else kind of happened. Since the game’s mechanics are so simple as to be almost nonexistent, the level design wound up pretty focused on the character’s abilities. Since the goal in any level was just to show off some new concepts before sending the player off to the next tile set, the design wound up focused more on exposition and forward momentum than on interrupting and frustrating the player. Cow Hunt is one of the first games I made where the player is free to poke around without judgment or severe consequence.

More than once I have heard the later, more confined levels compared to Mega Man. Although that series tends to typify judgment and severe consequence, I think I see what they meant. Peril or no peril, the clean bitmapped backgrounds and the forward momentum make Cow Hunt feel more like a real game than some of my greater efforts. There is a familiar sort of rhythm and flow, and the player feels prepared to handle every next beat as it comes.

I think on some level I noticed this rhythm, as late in the process I added the first level of Super Mario Bros. as a secret area (an area that would later form the basis of Jario!). There’s little to do here aside from run and hop to the exit, but I guess that was the idea. I think that I knew I was approaching something primal, or fundamental, about game design. What that was, I couldn’t have told you. I doubt I would even have described it that way. I just knew that things were working strangely well.

With a few new neurons buzzing, I decided to get deliberate again. I plucked a somewhat closer associate, in the shape of a former roommate with a shambolic persona and an affinity for R.E.M., and sketched out a grand plan.

Before I seriously ramped up production on The McKenna Chronicles, I settled on a rough story progression then blocked the progression out into levels. The initial scenario and structure were inspired by the zany historical fantasy of WolfTeam games like El Viento and Earnest Evans, crossed with a passing awareness of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

The WolfTeam games are full of fast and quirky action, huge setpieces, and long scenes of interstitial exposition. Accordingly I gave the character a run function, precise Castlevania-style jumps, and a gimmicky, experimental means of attack; and I took advantage of Game-Maker’s new multimedia features to connect the dots between levels with elaborate cutscenes.

I think that, in the vein of Earnest Evans and Castlevania, I wanted to give the character a whip — which in principle would be a good follow-up challenge to the sword mechanic in Ninja Tuck. When I hit a wall, my brain slid laterally to Dark Castle, the crackly Castlevania-styled game for the classic Mac. In that game, the character slings rocks at airborne and ground-based rodents. Although I couldn’t replicate the precise mouse-driven aiming, I could add some realism by making the character lob his stones in a wide arc. Combined with the precisely measured jumps, I felt a mechanic like this would add some strategy and open up neat possibilities for level design.

The simplicity of Cow Hunt must have connected a few key synapses, as my whole approach to design had changed almost like magic. Previously my characters’ movement had always been vaguely defined, and their abilities slightly considered. If a character was to jump, his animation took him somewhere diagonally into the air. If he was to shoot, then at best the projectile might be matched to the animation. Since my command of the design was so hazy, I put only the most nominal thought into how a character would interact with its environment. So long as a task was possible, I was satisfied. “The player will figure it out,” I thought. Never mind that figuring it out often meant glitching the engine and relying on blind luck.

With Chronicles, that approach is no longer an option. The character jumps a precise distance up and over. If the character is to land on a platform, one needs to measure the distance between footholds. Too few tiles, and the character will sail over the target; too many, and he will fall short. Likewise the character’s default weapon has a specific arc to it with certain areas of effectiveness, and the character’s running momentum will only carry him so far if he should stop and slide.

So on a basic level the levels are mapped out according to the character’s abilities, in such a way as to regularly introduce new challenges and explore new uses of those abilities. On a broader level, the levels are also scattered with secret passages full of treasure — treasure that may be used to buy character upgrades, which generally allow the player to blaze through the game with less and less caution. The promise of these upgrades encourages exploration off of the most direct and obvious path through a level, and also gives reason to replay an area.

Even more broadly, Chronicles is one of the few games since A-J’s Quest that I extensively planned, as compared to charging ahead in a blind rush to the end. There was still a large element of improvisation; I don’t think the game’s full arc came into focus until I finished a draft of the first level. Even so, from very early on I had the entire game laid out as a series of labeled blanks. All I needed to do was procedurally fill them in, and the game would be finished. You can probably guess the punchline here.

Out of six planned levels, I worked on four and completed just two. It started off well enough. As with Cow Hunt, the active design began with a Deluxe Paint derived character and meticulously bitmapped backgrounds. In this case the monster and item sprites are also largely drawn in Block Designer. After the first level, the game took its own odd path through space ships, alien planets, and Monument Valley.

The second level, largely informed by Commander Keen, introduces themes of identity and deception. As in Sega’s Alien Storm, monsters begin to disguise themselves as items, background elements, and even as the player character. From here I built on the sprite morphing from Ninja Tuck II, supplementing the raw output of Metamorf with careful cleanup and bitmapped animation.

For later levels I imported textures from NASA photographs, and filled entire tile sets with large self-contained structures drawn in Deluxe Paint. I also drew and animated several full-screen cutscenes, frame-by-frame, and compiled them with some awkward command line tools into the preferred .FLI format.

And then… it was over. I think I told myself it was due to annoyance with lingering issues like the music situation. I wanted R.E.M. styled music, to reflect the fellow in the starring role. Though I had written music for Ninja Tuck II, the method was a headache to implement and the results were a headache to hear. I think maybe I was feeling fussy about control mapping and collision issues.

The real problem may have been in the planning. I may have overwhelmed myself, when I laid the whole game before me as a task that I obliged myself to fulfill. Or maybe, as with Rōdïp, I pulled a Hitchcock. Having planned the whole game in principle, the act of realizing it bored me. I knew where things were going, and my head just had to keep moving forward. Chugga chugga chug!

Whatever. It is clear that my patience with the game engine was wearing thin.

Case in point: my sole self-insertion game, Watch Me Die!. By my senior year, Game-Maker was more or less history. I had moved on to music, poetry, short stories, and illustration. Everything that in the past might have tied into game design was now set free.

I even co-edited the student literary magazine, Cereal. It consisted of bad poetry laid out in PageMaker then Xeroxed onto two or three sheets of legal paper. By my second or third issue I was irritating my co-editors by editing and designing the magazine alone. In my defense, it was nearly impossible to get them in the same room at the same time. Though I may have missed out on the spirit of collaboration, I still got the thing published.

For the purposes of Cereal, each editor had an abstract doodle as a portrait. One consisted of puffy hair, glasses, and a mouth. Another, a backwards baseball cap and some facial features. Mine was oval glasses, a nose, ears, eyebrows, and a few dangling strands of hair. This caricature formed the basis of the character in Watch Me Die!.

From the title on down, the game is a work of ironic apathy. I was creatively tired. I had stopped trying to be flashy or to impress anyone, and had returned to doodling in the vein of Ricci’s Cow Hunt. In the course of an hour or two I would knock out a tile set and a character, then piece together a couple of simple levels. In the case of this game, I made a point of my fatigue. In videogames the most basic measure of success or failure is life or death; even that was beyond my interest.

The character walks as slowly as possible, and looks frenzied while doing it. The idea was to instill a sense of futility. There is also a “skip” move that allows the player to speed up travel at the expense of some control. It is easy to skip over a ledge in one’s frustration with the pace of movement. The character also jumps very precisely and abruptly, with little fanfare. You want the character to cross a gap, or climb an obstacle? Fine. There, it’s done. Happy now? The lack of enthusiasm is almost droll.

There are items, and to contrast with the understated character motion they all overstate their importance. Simple pickups might be accompanied with a Hallelujah choir. Hearts can’t be simple heart shapes; they need to be big, throbbing organs. Again it’s all passive frustration with the design conventions and expectations that I felt no joy in rehashing.

Within all of this, something began to click. I was bored enough with the post-Miyamoto tropes that I had sort of transcended any rote obedience and begun to search for something, anything to interest me in the design process. What I came to focus on was the moment-by-moment interplay of the character with the environment. Everything else kind of fell away.

From the player’s perspective, Watch Me Die! is all about the controls. They’re simple, crisp, and accurate. The levels are built around the character’s abilities, not to do the player any favors but rather to see how well the player responds in a given situation. Death is easy, but if you die it’s because you screw up. And that’s fine. The game doesn’t dwell on the fact, so neither should you. Just start again from the top, and try not to die again.

It’s only when I gave up that my games began to feel right — less like the work of a fan desperate to replicate something that he loved, and more like a deliberate, professional product. Condense the control mapping so that all the jumping is on one key and the skipping on another, and you could stick Die in an arcade cabinet and it would almost make sense.

Everything good happens only as an afterthought, and so it was with my Game-Maker career. Some thirty-five games in, finally I made something playable — just in time for me to change tracks and leave all of my experience behind.

Or very nearly. In our final chapter we will see the results of design unchained. If you’re going to go out, you might as well go with a bang.

Next: Learning to let go.

The Principles of Game Design, #7

  • Reading time:1 mins read

There is no such thing as a bad mechanic; only a thoughtless application.

If you think that level grinding will serve an expressive purpose, or illustrate an important concept, then by all means work it in. If you’re just including it to slow down or impede the player, or because you see everyone else doing it, then maybe you should think a little harder about what you’re trying to accomplish.