We All Fall Down

Thank You For Smoking

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Nobody smokes in this film. At least, I never saw it. The closest we get are old advertisements shilling the medical value of one cigarette brand over another, a vague haze in some of the indoor scenes, and a nicotine tinge to the film processing.

Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart, aka Harvey Dent/Two-Face) is a PR representative for the tobacco industry. His talent is debate, and his secret is that he doesn’t really care about his topic, his opponent, or the outcome of his argument. All that he cares about is that he not lose. For an industry with the bulk of public opinion against them, not losing is about as good a defense as Big Tobacco could want.

For Naylor’s part, there’s no more challenging or rewarding an argument than defending an indefensible position. It’s not that he’s amoral. It’s true that he meets with representatives of the alcohol and firearms lobbies, and jokes with them about which of their products kills the most Americans on a day-to-day basis. (Of the three, it’s cigarettes by a wide margin.) Throughout the movie, his actions, reactions, and manner portray him as warm, fascinated with life, even idealistic. It’s more that he feels that every perspective, even and perhaps especially the most ludicrous or amoral, needs an equal airing. So on the one hand this job allows him to defend some of the least loved opinions on the planet, and on the other the sheer impossibility of the task gives him a thrill not unlike a nicotine high.

The story skips along at a comfortable pace, and progresses logically from the characters’ personalities. The cast is mostly character actors, well-chosen and well-performed. The script is witty and nuanced, much of the dialog delivered either directly to camera or in voiceover. The cinematography is some of the best in recent years.

There are revelations later in the film which, as the movie currently stands, feel like they come from nowhere. Associated with those revelations are some apparently profound changes that, to the audience, never feel like changes at all.

It comes back to the cigarette thing; why, in this of all movies, do we never witness the characters smoking? Not even representatives of Big Tobacco? And as far as sacrifices go, is it possible to miss something that we’ve never known?

This is a smart movie. It avoids getting trapped in the specifics of its subject matter, preferring to observe characters, their motivations, and the way they present their claims, both to each other and to themselves. The cigarettes are there to give the characters something to form opinions and talk about. The story is there to give the characters a canvas in which to interact and explore their dynamics.

If you’ve seen the TV show Better off Ted, that is to Thank You For Smoking what Parker Lewis Can’t Lose is to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That is to say, it’s a TV adaptation in all but name. The movie lacks the smug desperation of the TV show, probably for the better.

The Chase

  • Reading time:3 mins read

This is an odd one. It’s the third Dalek story in two years, and the third directed by Richard Martin. In the previous Dalek story (The Dalek Invasion of Earth) we saw the Doctor abandon his granddaughter Susan on a future post-apocalyptic Earth for what he felt was her own good. This time we say goodbye to the show’s original protagonists, schoolteachers Ian and Barbara, as they are granted an opportunity to return to mid-1960s Britain.

Whereas the Doctor started off hostile, even violent, toward the pair, and at best he treated his granddaughter with indifference, by now the Doctor had softened toward the pair and indeed become a more sympathetic character in general. He shows genuine distress at their choice to leave him, which he expresses with his usual petulance. From here on the Doctor remains a softer character yet he becomes rather melancholy, prone to musing about his losses.

On that level, and in the introduction of one of my favorite companions, Steven, the story is a success. And indeed the first two episodes are pretty solid stuff, despite some shaky studio work with the regulars casting shadows on matte paintings mere inches behind them, and despite the hilarious make-up of some incidental alien peoples. The final two episodes are passable as well, with an android duplicate Doctor and a fun dilemma where Vicki gets left behind by the TARDIS — and of course the introduction of Steven. In the Mechonoids we also see an unsuccessful, yet interesting, attempt at creating a nemesis to the Daleks.

It’s the middle two episodes that try on the patience. On paper they sound wonderfully bonkers; Daleks versus rednecks on the Empire State Building; Frankenstein’s monster lifting and pile-driving whole Daleks; a Dalek landing party causing the desertion of the Mary Celeste. There’s a year’s worth of comic strip material in these two episodes. Unfortunately none of it really comes off on-screen. Whether it’s a lack of comic timing on the actors’ part or proper framing of the action on the director’s, it all comes off as tedious and directionless. If it weren’t for the rather wonderful cliffhanger to part four, which results in Vicki’s travel predicament, I’d say it’s possible and desirable to just skip the middle two episodes entirely.

This is also the first Dalek story not to be adapted into a feature film starring Peter Cushing. Pervasive as the movies would later be on TV, apparently they weren’t such hot stuff at the box office. Also, the Dalekmania bubble was quickly deflating. The following year would be Hartnell’s last, and would very nearly be the end of Doctor Who — that is, until a new production team hit on the concept of regeneration. All the same, despite later ratings spikes in the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras, it took another forty years for the show to regain this height of popularity and cultural saturation.

This story sort of forms the middle block of a trilogy, with The Space Museum to the left and The Time Meddler to the right. The latter is one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who serials, and I think the first hint at something greater for the format. I think it’s fitting that with the departure of the original leads, and therefore the shift of loyalties to the Doctor himself, the show would immediately start in on hints at his personal background. But that’s a conversation for another review.

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 16: Trees in the Forest

  • Reading time:1 mins read

We have previously discussed Sherwood Forest Software. They’re an outfit of two Pennsylvanians, Rob Sherwood and Dan Whalen, who latched onto Game-Maker early, pumped out game after game without ever really learning the tools or apparently play testing the results of their efforts, and then quickly vanished.

What is curious about Sherwood’s games is that often the concepts are, if not brilliant, unusual and full of potential. As they went on, some of their sprite and background design was even rather charismatic. Yet their actual design is bewilderingly slapdash, to the point where there’s a certain fascination, perhaps even an education, to poring over their catalog.

There is evidence of at least 11 games by the duo, most of which were released within about six months in 1992. The latest games seemed to trickle out somewhere in 1994. Previously we breezed over four of them: Big Bob’s Drive-In, Shootout at Dodge, Rocket Fighter, and Robo Wars. Thanks to some of the methods outlined in a subsequent chapter, we now have three more games to discuss, this time in a little more detail.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 15c: The Easiest Lifting, Act III

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Bergervoet is a Dutch fellow who goes under the developer name Multigames. In 1998, probably about two or three years after RSD pulled support for Game-Maker, he found the software and threw together a few games. For his inspiration… it’s not that he just lifted sample material and called it his own; he drew all his own sprites and tiles, and I think recorded most of his own sound effects. And unlike Felix Leung it’s not that he directly quoted popular references and based a game around them. Strictly speaking, everything in his games is original. It’s more that his games are strongly inspired by other, existing games.

There’s nothing unusual about that, of course. Without Mario Bros. we wouldn’t have Bubble Bobble. Without Bust-A-Move/Puzzle Bobble, we might not have a casual game industry. What’s unusual is that all his games are based on, well…

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 15b: The Easiest Lifting, Act II

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Previously we discussed Felix Leung, who did a pretty good job of co-opting familiar properties and filtering them through his own fairly advanced understanding of Game-Maker to create original, often bizarre, conglomerations. You could say that he crossed the line in places, and then danced back over it, and then tied the line into a sheepshank, but it’s easy to understand his method and reasons. This next fellow is a bit more brazen, and therefore a bit more puzzling.

In 1994, a fellow from Vallejo known variously as C.H. and Viper decided to grab everything in sight and call it his own — but then, at the last minute, to give it just enough of a bewildering spin to make it memorable. His first port of call, understandably enough, is Gregory Stone’s Nebula.

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Sock me in the stomach three more times

  • Reading time:3 mins read

In retrospect some elements of Big come off creepier than they were intended, or would have been perceived at the time. In the early ’80s when children vanished, people weren’t so much worried about molestation as they were about bodily harm. The assumption was that the motive for kidnapping was financial gain, rather than a personal drive. What other use is a kid, really, than ransoming him off?

Naive, maybe. But look at the way that products were advertised even back then. Would you buy something based on those ad campaigns? The 1980s may not seem that long ago, but our assumptions and attitudes about the world have changed so much. Racial, sexual, cultural understanding and acceptance are becoming more the norm. Taboo subjects have become everyday discussion. Even things like basic psychology have developed and spread so far.

This movie is grounded in the same mid-’80s American middle-class mindset as much children’s entertainment of the era, written by baby boomers more inclined to reflect on their own rosy memories of childhood than to observe the world and the real logistics around them. The kids don’t speak and interact like kids; they behave the way that adults remembered themselves in the 1950s. Hell, the whole theme of the movie is some baby boomer yearning for his own youth. Except sort of inverted.

I think I can appreciate this movie a little better as an adult, even given its weird cultural obliviousness. As a kid I remember it annoying me to no end. Everything was wrong. Why was everyone so excited about insect Transformers? Insecticons had been around for years at that point. The bulk of the oh-so-droll jokes about social security numbers and workplace politics bored me or went over my head. The only appeal the movie had for me was the setpieces like the FAO Schwartz piano duet, Tom Hanks’ apartment hijinks, and all the Zoltar business. It was all flash and curiosity. Was that really what it was like to move into your own apartment? Was that really what it was like to get a job? Wow, it would be great to be left alone to wander around in FAO Schwartz, or that carnival.

Now I can stand back and understand the movie’s ambition. I still marvel at its blinkered vision, but from within a cultural context that I can appreciate. As a case study, it gets a person thinking.

The Space Museum

  • Reading time:3 mins read

You may remember some of my advice on this show. If the fans love a serial, you’re probably safe in skipping it. If they despise or ignore it, it’s probably worth a look.

To give an idea of The Space Museum‘s reputation, the main extra on the disc is a short monologue from new series writer Rob Shearman in which he half-heartedly defends the story. He grasps to fit the story with a retrospective literary justification, and doesn’t quite succeed. It’s an interesting feature, but so far as I’m concerned it’s unnecessary. This is one of the more creative and fascinating stories of one of the show’s more creative and fascinating eras.

The first three or so years of the show are closer to literary science fiction than anything that has followed. Nearly every story is based either on some theoretical premise or on attempt to push the boundaries of the show’s format. Add in a cast that is fascinating to watch no matter what they’re up to, and there is room to push the show very far before it starts to get too experimental, too odd to work.

The Space Museum begins on a weird note; the cast, battered, bruised and torn from misadventures in the Crusades, suddenly finds itself standing around the TARDIS console, dressed in tidy new clothes. Dropped glasses bounce back into hands and repair themselves. Walking in heavy dust leaves no footprints. And then, spoilerphobes be warned to skip to the next paragraph, toward the end of the first episode, is one of the show’s greatest cliffhangers. The four regular cast round a corner to find their own embalmed bodies as exhibits in a space museum.

After the first episode, the mystery element diminishes and the story becomes more about the characters interacting with the world and trying to prevent the future from occurring. Though the rest of the serial is rarely as heady as the first episode, the character dynamics are always fun and the story is scattered with great moments such as a guard’s attempt to mind-probe the Doctor.

After a short 100 minutes the serial ends with an overt transition into the following story, and Ian and Barbara’s farewell after nearly two years as the show’s protagonists, The Chase.

This one is a keeper. If you want an example of a Hartnell-era story that overstepped its bounds, try The Web Planet. Ambitious, creative, and such a curious disaster.

Phantom Fingers: The Series — Part Five: Myths and Legends

  • Reading time:1 mins read

It is 1981. Somewhere between testing and mass release, interest in Nintendo’s Space Invaders clone Radar Scope had cooled. It’s not that the game was poor. It’s just that six months earlier Pac-Man had changed the arcade landscape, and in the narrowing landscape for Invaders clones there was only room for excellence. Do we order Radar Scope, or do we order Galaga? Easy choice.

Enter the slacker art school kid who was only ever hired as a favor to his family. Shigeru Miyamoto was told to recoup losses by designing another game for the returned Radar Scope hardware, preferably aimed at US audiences. Inspired by Pac-Man, Miyamoto took pretty much all of Iwatani’s new ideas of scenario, character, empathy, and play narrative, and pretty much built a whole game on them without the traditional clutter.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 15a: The Easiest Lifting

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’m not saying that everything has to be original. We’ve gone over this before; some of the best ideas in history began by ripping someone else off and then veering off in an original direction. One of the best ways for a budding artist to learn form and space is to trace everything in sight. That’s the way that we think; we take what’s in front of us, and we bend it and shape it until it suits our needs. The best of us just do a very good job of hiding our influences — and then if someone spots them, we call them influences.

These guys… they weren’t so good at hiding it. Over the next three columns I’m going to go into some of the stranger creative blanks in the Game-Maker community. What can be confusing is the amount of genuine talent at work — or, having grabbed and run, the bizarre directions they took their borrowed source material. One of these artists pushed Game-Maker in a way that few others did. Another chose the strangest route of influence, but at least made all his own material. The other guy just didn’t care what people thought. Most of these games I find inexplicable, one way or another.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Good Games, Bad Design – Episode 2: Repeating Chaos

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

Sonic Team has always had trouble finishing its projects. The Sonic Heroes demo had a great premise and played well; then after E3 they just dumped in a bunch of content and called it done, without adequately bug-checking or thinking through the actual game progression. The first release of Phantasy Star Online was bare-bones, with a rushed cut-and-paste level structure, a fraction of the planned races and locations, and a tacked-on offline mode (albeit with a well-written story). Even the final, International edition of Sonic Adventure was weirdly abbreviated and riddled with bugs.

This tendency goes all the way back to the Genesis. The otherwise streamlined Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is famously crammed with unused material, some of which made its way into the third game. That right there hints at Sonic Team’s problems; they’re fine when they keep small and simple. ChuChu Rocket! is glorious, if confusing; Samba De Amigo is respectable enough. Although Sonic 2 is less diverse and quirky than the first game, it is more focused and polished — but given a hint of scale, they quickly lose perspective.

Rather than extrapolate a premise to its logical extremes, Sonic Team overloads a simple game with details and systems and drowns it in a deluge of random content, then calls it epic. Then, more often than not, they fail to complete the content in time, resulting in a half a game of padded level designs and incomplete ideas. Sometimes, as with Phantasy Star Online, they get a second or third chance to finish what they started, which basically means packs of content lumped on top of the existing unfinished structure — resulting in, well, an underdeveloped game straining under an inappropriate weight. Which is much better, apparently.

The problems first showed themselves in 1994, with the release of Sonic the Hedghog 3. The game was a slight departure from its predecessors: different music staff, different visual style, different level pacing and structure. The game was to be huge, with three characters and battery backup. Instead of blindly racing through the levels as in the previous game, players were encouraged to play over and over from multiple perspectives, to explore the game thoroughly.

Therein lay the problem: the plans were too huge to complete in the allotted time and memory constraints, and no one was willing to strip back and look at what was really necessary to make the point. The clever, if perhaps ill-advised, solution: break the game in two, and release the halves eight months apart.

The solution might have been brilliant, had their ideas stretched far enough to allow each half to be unique and vital. Unfortunately they barely had one game’s worth of ideas.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

The Game-Maker Archive—Part 14: Laser Light

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

My association with Recreational Software Designs started early, maybe around the time of my first game. I don’t remember the circumstances. Maybe I wrote in with some suggestions. Maybe I was trying to show off my work. Whatever my motivation, I was fourteen and unhampered with caution or tact. I mailed a letter and maybe a 3.5” diskette, and then forgot about it. Weeks later, the phone rang. Against my normal habits, I picked up. The voice, which asked for me by name, sounded uncannily like one of my friends. Being fourteen and tactless, I told the voice that it was an idiot. The voice was confused. I unleashed more rudeness. The exchange continued until the voice identified itself as the president of RSD, a certain Oliver Stone. Tickled with the oddness of the situation, I laughed for a minute or more.

I’m not sure why he stayed on the phone, or indeed continued contact with me. Eventually we developed a rapport. He would mail me pre-release versions of new Game-Maker updates; I would scour them for bugs and inconsistencies. I would mail in my newest creations; he would introduce me to other Game-Maker users and show me their work. This went on for a few years.

For the 3.0 release of Game-Maker, RSD chose to transition from floppies to CD-ROM. In 1995, this was a big step. It was like having a book or an album published. Within a year AOL mailers and demo discs would render the CD common; in 1995, it was still a magical endless data well. So RSD now had a whole CD to fill, and to justify the leap they needed to fill it.

I was prolific, and able to hide my ineptitude behind polish and an intimate understanding of the game engine, so evidently I was just what RSD needed. They contracted me to design six games, and to sign over another two. My rudeness persisted; when asked to contribute, my first impulse was to toss them a couple of my least favorite games. It was only with later discussion that I twigged their desire for new, flashy, and instructive content. With that goal in mind, a certain inspiration struck me. I progressed at about a game a week. Some of the games served to demonstrate certain design concepts; others spun themselves out of a whim.

At reader request, here are those six games, in the rough order of development. I’ll hold off on the overt criticism, and instead try my best to explain what was going through my head. We’ll just see if a sensible train of thought develops.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Paul Greasley takes you Under the Garden

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The same game jam that brought us Whale of Noise and Pigeon Racing (and indeed Deltoid Onions) has inspired Edmund and My First Skydiving Academy creator Paul “Farmergnome” Greasley to contrive a side-scrolling survival-based take on Animal Crossing. At least, that was his stated goal. The end result is a highly original cross between Lost in Blue and Metroid. Sort of, not really.

You take the role of a middle-aged farmer whose house has collapsed. You collect your tools and you set out into the wilderness to gather much-needed supplies while your stamina drops from the cold. You chop and gather wood to burn and restore your stamina. You kill rabbits for meat. You chip at rocks to find, er, cookies and bullets. Never mind; you gather bits and pieces to help you rebuild your house, and to expand your range thereby to find more stuff, thereby to get hardier and further expand your range.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Deltoid Onions Will Puzzle You

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Deltoid Onions, AKA Onion Warriors, is one of those single-player cooperative puzzle games where you play as a character then switch roles then switch again to accomplish tasks. In this case the enigmatic Fabienne has unleashed on us a Kwirk-flavored push-and-pull action-puzzler. In place of a tomato, we’ve three onions with slightly different mustaches.

To move forward you push rocks, stand on switches, plug holes, and lower barriers. The goal is to get all three onions to the goal, signposted with an energetic camel. Overall I’m pretty impressed with the level design. The game is a little glitchy and bare-bones, but it’s got oodles of personality and it’s legitimately clever.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Tiptoe the Tiles in Meong

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Kyle “Neonlare” Riley has reforged the baffling Action 52 opus Meong into a NES-styled action-puzzler reminiscent of Adventures of Lolo. The story involves a blue-robed thief who goes tomb raiding in China. Avoid traps and occasional mind games to get to the next screen.

The game uses just the arrow keys and a single button, which is used to reset the level when you get stuck. Unlike its older cousins, Meong comes from the modern indie school — so don’t worry too much about dying. You fail, you just try again from the start of the screen. Sometimes the music restarts; usually not.

As it stands, Meong has a great tone and some pretty good level design. It’s worth an eyeball!

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Meganode

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

When I want to read Catch-22, what are the options? I can go to a library, and do it for free. While I’m there, I can browse the rest of his works or nearby, possibly similar, books. I can search by topic, author, or year of publication. If I want my own copy, I probably can find it at a nearby bookstore. Failing that, I can order it online for a pittance.

Thanks to Gutenberg, books are indexed and ageless. They may go out of print or become obscure, but one way or another you will always be able to find a copy. Then with a copy in hand, the only thing between you and their ideas is the work of digesting them.

How about if I want to watch Nosferatu — not the Werner Herzog one; the Murnau version? If I’m near an urban center, it may be showing at an indie theater or festival. If it’s October, I may track it down on a classic movie channel on cable. Or I can rent the DVD or VHS (or indeed borrow it from the library). If I go to a video store, there’s a good chance it’s in stock. Or, again, I can just hit up Amazon.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )