pubs
Like Castlevania? Jibe with the Old Testament? Read Japanese? This is the game for you.
EDIT: Translation!
EDIT AGAIN: Origin, sort of!
Okay, I can see why Davies thought of swapping the first two episodes. That was a kind of weak beginning. Not bad; just… it was a bit of a mess. It reminded me of The Long Game, kind of. And The Two Doctors — the later bits, especially. Not really sure why, aside from Chip.
My favorite bit was the pre-title sequence, especially the bit with Rose saying goodbye as the Doctor warms up the TARDIS again after — apparently — four months. In the commentary they talk about how the Doctor was probably living with the Tylers the whole time since Christmas. Curious.
After that, pretty much every major plot element and/or device lost me completely. The one body-swap is reasonable enough. What’s the impetus for all the other swaps, though? Why was Cassandra turned to a bit of fairy dust who can flit around at will? Besides it making the writing easier, that is? It doesn’t mesh with the elaborate procedure behind the first transfer.
Then the zombie patients. Okay, they can spread every disease known to man just by touching you. Fair enough. And yet if they’ve got thousands of diseases apiece, why are they cured by a handful of random serums yanked off the shelf? Just by being splashed with them? And why can they pass the cure on to other zombies (again) just by touching them?
And that’s just the immediate plot. Don’t get me started on structure.
This is the first time I’ve really been frustrated by a RTD script. I’m just… perplexed by this whole thing. There are so many nice little scenes in this episode, few of which are given space, most of which are basically throwaway. And aside from Boe saying he’ll say something more important later, we come to the end of the episode not really a bit further along than we started.
Obligatory. I guess that’s the key word for this episode, and most of its contents. A shame, as there’s such invention in the actual execution. I hope we see the catnuns again, for instance.
Ah well. The next five episodes should be an improvement.
EDIT:
New Earth didn’t actually make much sense. Which isn’t exactly a prerequsite, of course. It’s just a weird way to start the season. Especially since… how much actual Rose Tyler did we get? A few minutes’ worth? It feels like the kind of thing you’d give your actors somewhere in the middle of the season to keep them from getting bored.
And yeah, I think Davies would have been better off sticking with the gloomy conclusion he originally intended. Especially in light of the reason for the change — guh. It just doesn’t seem like he spent a lot of time on this one. It needed another draft or something. It says something also that it was directed by James Hawes, the guy behind The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances — since, you know, that was so excellent. And this is just… okay.
I think, frankly, it’s the weakest episode of the fifteen to date. The frustrating thing is that it’s got so much nice stuff in it. With a little fussing, it could have been a lot better. Some of it simply structural. It seems a mistake to reveal Cassandra at the beginning, for instance, instead of at the moment Rose discovers her. I don’t see any purpose to doing it earlier. You could have the spiders and their POV, and leave it at that. People will figure it out, if you want that foreshadowing. And it just gets clumsier as it goes along.
You can tell that this thing was rewritten to serve all kinds of different purposes, much like Long Game was. It’s just confused as to what it wants to accomplish. Originally Boe was to die here; then Davies decided to hold that off until next series. So having him here is… nice, but kind of beside the point of the episode and ultimately kind of fruitless. As executed it doesn’t even really set up a decent mystery; you’re just left thinking “huh”.
If he’s going to move it to series three — which he apparently did as soon as he knew there was going to be one — then take him out altogether. Refocus the episode altogether. Don’t keep the kibble. Likewise, frankly, the Cassandra thing is kind of wedged in. She wasn’t integrated into the story as she might have been. Toward the end she gets a bit of understanding from the situation and uses it to “create” herself, etcetera. That’s all nice, except it doesn’t really come out of the underlying conflicts here. It just kind of… happens. It’s never really explained what she’s doing there or how or why this whole body-transfer thing is happening aside from a few throwaway lines. It just seems like a neat thing to do, really.
Davies is a good writer in principle. I think he mostly needs a hard-ass editor to yell at him. I get the feeling much could have been saved even at the assembly stage, after filming — except it turned out this episode was hell to film. They kept picking up pieces for months after the fact, putting the episode together like a patchwork. So by coincidence they didn’t have that luxury either.
(April 16th, 2006 @ 3:01am)
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
Expanded from my weekly column at Next Generation, and posted on the game’s release date.
Samurai Champloo is the latest hit by Cowboy Bebop creator Shinichiro Watanabe, who might well be described as the Sergio Leone or Quentin Tarantino of the anime world. killer7 developer Grasshopper Manufacture has what might be described as strong aspirations to be the Quentin Tarantino of the videogame world. So this is a sort of clever pairing.
A Japanese trend I’ve begun to notice lately is the subcontracting of lucrative licenses to the most prestigious niche or up-and-coming developers – the likes of Treasure, Dimps, Cavia, Yuke’s. These are damned good developers, each with specific skill sets, specific views toward what makes a good videogame, and a substantial cult following. The trend is not unlike Hollywood’s recent predilection toward matching big blockbusters to the Cannes elite, resulting in movies like Batman Begins and the Spider-Man series.
Over here, any parallels are more the exception than the rule. The closest you really get are the likes of Neversoft, which sprang out of nowhere with Tony Hawk and – despite its success – has managed to keep relatively small and self-contained, seemingly more interested in exploring its ideas about design than in growth for the sake of growth. Treyarch is another good example. Maybe some past incarnations of Shiny or Raven or BioWare would count, though in their current forms they’re a little too… important.
( Continue reading )
(April 11th, 2006 @ 12:44pm)
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
Expanded from my weekly column at Next Generation, and posted on the game’s release date.
Something that people keep bringing up, yet probably don’t bring up enough, is that the first Tomb Raider was a damned good game. The last few levels were thrown-together and buggy; still, at the time it was Lara and Mario. Lara was your 3D update to Prince of Persia – all atmosphere and exploration. It had a snazzy, strong female lead, when that was unusual. (At the time, I had a friend who wouldn’t stop complaining that the character was female. He couldn’t understand why they’d made such a dumb move, since the rest of the game was so good. Go figure.) The game felt fresh and new, and – right or wrong – just a little more sophisticated than what Nintendo had to show.
Then, immediately, Core and Eidos started to listen to the fans. They listened to the media. Posters on the original Tomb Raider message boards kept complaining of a lack of thumping music. They kept asking for more human opponents to blast away, instead of these stupid animals of the first game. They wanted more and more outfits for Lara. And of course, there was the whole “nude code” business.
So a year later, there’s a sequel with the same engine – fair enough – with most of these concerns addressed. It was less interesting, less atmospheric, less intimate than the original game. Still, not too bad. Then a third game, and a fourth, and a fifth, with barely an update to the game engine – since, hey, who has the time for that with a yearly schedule – and less and less focus on what made the game so appealing to start with. The game became the Lara Croft franchise, and everything else became secondary to her new look, her new abilities, her new weapons – because these are the things that fans yammer about, so therefore this was the feedback that Eidos got.
( Continue reading )
(April 11th, 2006 @ 12:31pm)
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
Week thirty-five of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation. Two of the sections are expanded into full articles, posted later in the week.
Game of the Week:
Tomb Raider: Legend
Crystal Dynamics/Eidos Interactive
Xbox/Xbox 360/PlayStation 2/PC
Tuesday
Something that people keep bringing up, yet probably don’t bring up enough, is that the first Tomb Raider was a damned good game. And what it seems Crystal Dynamics has done is go back to the framework of Tomb Raider 2 and to break it down, analytically. What they chose to do is bring the focus back to exploration – in part by introducing some new gizmos, in part by making the environments more fun to navigate. Reviews nitpick a few fair issues; still, the overall response seems to be a huge sigh of relief. Maybe it’s not the best game in the world, or all it ever could be. Still – it’s not terrible! The theme that keeps coming up is one of nostalgia – that, for the first time, someone has managed to recapture what makes Tomb Raider interesting. And that sentiment is itself interesting.
( Continue reading )
(April 10th, 2006 @ 12:17pm)
