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Moving On

Another thing that annoyed me about Rose was that she thought she was the first person to travel with the Doctor and the only person on Earth to know about alien life. She didn’t even think to ask whether she was or not! Rose must really rate herself.

It’s just denial. She hasn’t thought about it, at least in part because she’s chosen not to. It hasn’t been brought up, and she’s seen no reason to go into it — probably because she knows what the answer will be. If she doesn’t ask, she can pretend all she likes. It’s a part of being infatuated.

She admits out loud that she knew somewhere in her mind that there had to be someone else before her; it just wasn’t important enough to bring up. What teed her off so much here was being confronted with the situation she’d been avoiding so long (even after the Doctor went into his history with “dancing”), and then the math that came as a result.

“So… okay, here’s your old Companion. That’s… interesting. Wait, though. Why haven’t you said anything about her? What does that say about her? What does that say about you? What does that say about me?”

Basically, she’s being forced to deal with issues she’s been putting off, hoping she’ll never be faced with. That’ll annoy anyone, as it forces you to completely change your head. To open up to imperfection, to compromise. It takes away all the luster. Once you do that, there’s no going back. All you’ve got is reality — which is exactly what Rose has been trying to escape, this whole time.

This is probably one of the first big seeds sown for her leaving the series. Once she manages to get past all of this, she’ll be in more of a position to appreciate all the other things in her life — Mickey, her mum, even the simple inanities of twenty-first century London.

(May 2nd, 2006 @ 1:56am)



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This Fortnight’s Releases (May 1-12, 2006)

by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh

Weeks thirty-eight-and-nine of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Game of Early May:

SiN Episodes: Emergence – Episode 1
Ritual/Valve
PC
Tuesday

It’s kind of weird; back in mid-1998, everyone was waiting for SiN – then the very day it arrived, Half-Life sprang out of nowhere, and took all the attention. That didn’t stop SiN from becoming a cult hit; it’s just hard to escape such a poor case of timing. Over the past eight years, the game has built up a reputation as perhaps the pinnacle of the old “Duke Nukem“-style FPS, before Half-Life changed everything. Traditional genre fans, who just like to charge forward and shoot stuff, have been waiting a long time for a sequel – and here it comes, via the Half-Life 2 engine, via Steam, and via the episodic template that Valve has set out.

This first episode brings back all the major characters from the 1998 original, to do much the same business as before: run forward and shoot. The difference is in the method; aside from the obvious enhancements in physics and envionmental interaction allowed by the Source engine (and the consequences thereof), the game now automatically adjusts itself to the player’s skill level and playing tendencies. If you get good at head shots, apparently, enemies might start wearing helmets. According to Ritual, the game will take experts about as long as new players to play through.

Emergence, being only one of at least nine planned episodes, will only last about six to eight hours; on the other hand, it only costs about eighteen bucks. Something tells me this episodic download thing is going to take off. It’s almost like a revised take on the early-’90s Shareware scene. The difference with shareware was that people got a whole episode for free, then typically had to pay full price for another several episodes. Now you pay pocket cash up-front for each episode. Same thing; just reorganized for efficiency on both ends. Tie in Steam, and you’ve even got the return of online distribution. It’s obvious, in retrospect.

Now if only we’d come up with this ten years ago – if we’d just adapted and kept up with the Internet – just imagine where the PC development scene would be today.

( Continue reading )

(May 1st, 2006 @ 1:38pm)



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