We All Fall Down

Better than Who

  • Reading time:4 mins read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The History of A-J Games: Part One

  • Reading time:5 mins read

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

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

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

A yuk a minute.

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

An influential game, in may ways.

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

An influential game, in may ways.

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

Never did implement those jumping things.

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

Watch out for them snappers.

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

The generic inventory menu.

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

Blaster Master, a sound recorder for DOS.

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

Blaster Master, a sound recorder for DOS.

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

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

Wanna be a member? Wanna be a member?

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

Simply titled A-J 3.

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

Freeport takes to the clouds, for some reason.

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

The story continues in Part Two…

Breaking the Frame

  • Reading time:1 mins read

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

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

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

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

Ghosts of Machu Picchu: Nova

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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

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

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

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

Builder: The Game

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Level 2 of Builder -- a leap of faith!

Builder.

Build footholds. Destroy obstacles. Be observant.

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

A Serious Man

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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

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

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

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

All-Star Superman

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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

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

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

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

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

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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

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

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

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

An Overview of Series Four

  • Reading time:3 mins read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cropsey

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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

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

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

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

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

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 19: Presents and Protocol

  • Reading time:3 mins read

There were three main ways that Game-Maker users communicated. Either they knew each other in person, which was nothing unusual but could lead to larger and more nuanced projects than an individual could tackle, they communicated through the post, which was slow but both mysterious and intimate, or there were the BBSes.

Before the Web caught on (or even existed), the big deal was local dial-up boards. Most of them were text-based, and most were fairly slow. You would connect, check your personal messages, see if anyone had posted any new discussion topics or responses, perhaps fiddle with a multiplayer door game or two — and then you would head to the file area.

Most boards had a ratio: you can download so many bytes for so many bytes you upload. A bad ratio was close to 1:1. Somewhere between a 2:1 and 4:1 ratio, the file area would come to life. Users would be just motivated enough to keep sharing material, yet wouldn’t feel pressed to dump just any junk on the community. This is the environment where shareware thrived; when the Web took over, the whole shareware model went into whack.

If you found the right board, BBSes were also the perfect environment to share and discuss Game-Maker games. Mark Janelle ran the Frontline BBS with RSD’s semi-official blessing. Other users ran their own boards or carved out corners of existing communities.

A problem with BBSes was their dial-up nature. Unless the board was very local, you were in immediate danger of old-school long distance phone charges. If the board was in the same state but not in the same county, you were particularly screwed. So despite Janelle’s and RSD’s efforts there was never a unified Game-Maker community. Rather, the community consisted of countless islands of independent development, that would occasionally cross paths and trade ideas.

Although it was located in the middle of nowhere — specifically Kennebunkport, Maine — which must have made a daunting long-distance charge for most users, the Frontline BBS was the most prominent place for these paths to cross. That makes sense; it was the only board referenced in the Game-Maker box. The board therefore carried some valuable artifacts of shared Game-Maker culture. Whether or not those artifacts are in themselves excellent is sort of beyond the point. What’s important is that they are formative and sort of iconic to the Game-Maker experience.

These four games, by two authors, are amongst the first Game-Maker games that many users will have played, aside from RSD’s demo games and those users’ own creations. Unfortunately not all of them still exist in precisely their original form, but one takes what one can get.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 18: Call and Response

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Back in July we unearthed two previously unknown Game-Maker games, Roland Ludlam’s space racer Hurdles and Matthew Groves’ free-roaming space shooter Space Cadet. We then tracked down and interviewed those two authors. Roland Ludlam is currently working on a WiiWare project and Matthew Groves is considering Android development; each was generous with his time and memories, and with some prodding each was generous enough to find and forward some other long-neglected projects for us to record and archive. The former scrounged around on an old backup of a backup, and the latter mailed us a collection of 5-1/4″ floppies to extract.

From each party we received two games: one fully developed and substantial, and one experimental or unusual. We’ll start with the “big” games, and then once we’re primed we’ll turn to the really interesting stuff.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Zombieland

  • Reading time:2 mins read

You can tell this is the filmmakers’ first major project after film school.

I too often confuse Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera. They’ve got the same hair, same build, same facial expressions, and they’re cast in similar roles. So it is that when the film freezes and spells out Eisenberg’s personal (postmodern ironic film-hip) tips and techniques for zombie survival, the mind travels to Scott Pilgrim. Similar conceit. Not the same kid. Whereas Pilgrim takes the conceit further than sense dictates, and thereby elevates itself beyond the conceit in much the way that the mind stops processing Tarantino’s violence as violence, Zombieland is content to lurk in the hipster fog beneath the glowing neon signs. So it’s not transcendent, and therefore the affectations do end up feeling a little gratuitous.

But oh, I’m speaking in absolute terms here. Zombieland ain’t bad. A bunch of kids wanted to make an ironic zombie movie and they got some high-profile talent involved. You’ve got Woody Harrelson. You’ve got Bill Murray. You have a script by someone who watched a little too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You have good cinematography and effects work. It’s a noble effort, and it’s got a good spirit to it.

You’d think the kids would know that there is no way Jesse Eisenberg’s character could afford that apartment, though. Who do they think he is, Mark Zuckerberg?

Lost in Space with Matthew D. Groves

  • Reading time:1 mins read

A few months ago we detailed some search methods for discovering unknown Game-Maker games in the wild Web; as examples we detailed two games: Roland Ludlam’s rather wonderful Hurdles, and Matthew Groves’ modestly charming Space Cadet. Since our interview with the one author went so well, we now turn our sights on the second, Web developer and aspiring Android coder Matthew D. Groves.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )