Chris Baer – Page 33 – Movement Point

The Unlikeliest Love Letter: LEGO Dimensions Doctor Who

July 27, 2023November 6, 2015 by Chris Baer

I tempered my expectations going into the recently released Doctor Who Level Pack for LEGO Dimensions, the “toys to life” console video game. Playing through the base game (plus The Simpsons Level Pack) provided a bit of fun in seeing Homer and Gandalf running around on the same screen, bashing baddies into bricks and solving simple puzzles, and the tactile component of the game—building and manipulating the LEGO figures and objects as a part of the gameplay—filled me with some nostalgic glee. But, as a game, the experience proved somewhat underwhelming, and once I completed the campaign missions and noodled around in the various themed “adventure worlds” dedicated to the franchises I owned figures for, I shelved the game, almost forgetting that I had the Doctor Who pack on order.

I knew, going in, that each of the Doctor’s regenerations (including, sigh, the “War Doctor”) would be playable, but based on my experience with The Simpsons Level Pack, I figured there would be some minor homages to big moments in Doctor Who‘s recent history and that the playable regenerations would just be minor variants on the default Twelfth Doctor figure.

I was, as they say, wrong.

The First Doctor in the TARDIS in LEGO Dimensions

The level of attention, of detail, to the individual Doctors stunned me. LEGO Dimensions Doctor Who is a love letter to the show.

The First Doctor figure captures, broadly, William Hartnell’s mannerisms, from the lapel-pulling and slightly haughty leaning to his penchant for pulling out a magnifying glass. Even his combat move involves his signature cane (given to him, of course, by Kublai Khan). When the player enters the TARDIS in the game, the interior matches the TARDIS that the specific Doctor used—circular wall panels for the First, Victorian sitting room for the Eighth—with even the appropriate set dressings, like the sitting chair in the First Doctor’s TARDIS. The background music changes as well based on the Doctor, utilizing the dominant theme music for each.

My shock compounded when I explored the “adventure world” for Doctor Who and found one of the locations to be Telos. Yes, that Telos, home of the Tomb of the Cybermen. I can expect most casual fans of the show to recognize the I.M. Foreman scrap yard (it’s in the game), but to reach back to 1967 and the criminally under-appreciated Second Doctor for a setting demonstrates that the team responsible both knows Doctor Who and, more to the point, respects it.

The Second Doctor on Telos in LEGO Dimensions

Even the associated game objective in the area of the Tomb harkens back to “The Tomb of the Cybermen,” which ended with a lone Cybermat escaping the destruction of the Tomb. In the game, Lady Vastra (from the new series) tasks the player with destroying thirty Cybermats before they can awaken the Cybermen in the Tomb. Even though the gameplay associated with it provides no real challenge for an adult gamer, much joy comes from bashing the little cybercreatures with the Second Doctor, who wields a flute (!) as a weapon. I really don’t know that I could ask for more.

While, of course, the majority of the Doctor Who Level Pack focuses on the new series, and the middle Doctors don’t have quite as much focus as the early or late ones, I’m still smiling broadly from my experience thus far with the game. The cost for the base game and the level pack verges on the steep, but I found the experience more than worthwhile for a fan of the series.

Besides, where else can you have the Doctor offer Homer Simpson a jelly baby?

Doctor Who Project: Fury from the Deep

July 27, 2023November 2, 2015 by Chris Baer

There’s molecular movement!

For anyone keeping track at home, with Victor Pemberton’s “Fury from the Deep” (Story Production Code RR), the Doctor and his companions have now spent five straight stories (thirty episodes total) on Earth, at various times in that planet’s history, an unprecedented run. Not until the Third Doctor is stranded on Earth by the as-yet-unknown Time Lords (and by BBC budgets) will the Doctor rack up quite so many frequent flyer miles in the general vicinity of London. What’s more, the TARDIS displays an increasing tendency towards the sea, this time materializing above the waves close to the North Sea coastline. The TARDIS can float, at least, which is more than can be said for the story’s plot.

To be fair, the story moves along with some pace, though it’s not the fare one has come to expect from Doctor Who. Indeed, the Doctor barely figures in the first four episodes, which are given over instead to the intramural power struggle between a grizzled old rig hand and a fancy college educated technocrat whose wife just happens to have sprouted weed tentacles from her wrist. While Robson, the vet, and Harris, the know-it-all, fight, the Doctor dithers about until Victoria is finally (and inevitably) captured, spurring him to action. Throw in a meddling Dutchman appointed by the multi-national organization overseeing the gas extraction, a Laurel-and-Hardy-esque pair of villains named Mr. Oak and Mr. Quill, an overactive foam machine, and lots of helicopters flying to and fro, and you’ve got “Fury from the Deep” in a nutshell.

“Fury from the Deep” shows Doctor Who in a rut, with another isolated base (this time a set of gas drilling rigs in the North Sea) under attack from another enemy that can control minds and generate copious amounts of foam. Only this time, unlike the Great Intelligence and the Yeti, the foe has no intelligence of its own. Because it’s seaweed. Evil seaweed. Six episodes of evil seaweed.

Materializing Soon: LEGO Doctor Who Set Scheduled

July 27, 2023October 7, 2015 by Chris Baer

Not that there was much doubt it would eventually happen, but LEGO has finally scheduled the release for what, one hopes, is the first of many Doctor Who building sets. Landing right after Thanksgiving, on December 1st, the inaugural Doctor Who LEGO set features the TARDIS (with detachable police box and console play area), buildable Daleks, and minifigs for the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors, plus current companion Clara and a Weeping Angel for good measure.

I had put my money on a November 23rd release, to coincide with the series’ anniversary, but December 1st isn’t too far off. I certainly hope that LEGO has sufficiently estimated demand for this product, as the early rumblings seem to suggest the Venn diagram of LEGO enthusiasts and Whovians overlaps to a fair (OK, absurd) extent, and the LEGO Ideas line tends to be limited run. Even at the US$60 price point, Doctor Who fans will not find it a difficult purchasing decision, though the choice of Doctors and companion leaves, perhaps, something to be desired. I realize my dream set of the First Doctor, Vicki, and Steven facing off the the Dhravins from “Galaxy Four” would make for a hard sell, but still, no Doctor from the original run? Not even a K-9?

Given that this set will sell as well as Yeti take to the Underground, ideally LEGO will produce variant consoles and the proper Doctors to go with them, either as separate sets or as expansions to this set. They’ve already done something similar with their planned LEGO Dimensions Doctor Who set, albeit in a mostly digital fashion, so I imagine that the licensing would not be impossibly prohibitive.

The popularity of the current iteration of the series makes the inclusion of the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors essentially mandatory, but a Whovian can dream of LEGO Sensorites…

(Image via LEGO Ideas Blog)

Triple Threat: Churchill (GMT Games)

July 27, 2023October 2, 2015 by Chris Baer

Three players is an odd number. Well, literally, of course, but also in terms of finding a good game. Some games play well with three, but the purpose-built three player game tends to be a rarer beast, particularly with wargames. One of GMT Games’ latest offerings, Churchill: Big Three Struggle for Peace, by Mark Herman, fits the bill with an intriguing blend of office politics and abstracted grand strategic combat.

Players take the role of one of the three leaders of the Allies during World War II: the eponymous Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin. While nominally a co-operative game wherein the players allocate resources to various theaters of war against the Axis powers, it’s co-operative only in the sense that while everyone loses together, only one person really wins. And balancing that desire for a non-lose state (surrender of both Axis powers by the end of the game) against an individual win (most victory points without going too far above your opponents) provides the game’s essential tension.

Churchill: European Front

The conference system sits the heart of Churchill’s gameplay. Cards representing cabinet-level assistants are played to debate various agenda items during one of the war’s ten conferences, corresponding to historic meetings of the leaders and their teams during the war. Winning an agenda item through debate, be it resources for combat or political shifts in conquered Europe and Asia, gives you the ability to shape the outcome of the war. But, as long-time gaming buddies Doug Bush and Mike Vogt and I found during our initial playthrough at the first ever WashingCon last month, just because you win the debate doesn’t mean you win the war.

Doug took the Soviet side and painted almost all of Eastern Europe red on the road to taking Berlin, giving him a big VP lead, but because Mike’s Americans and my British failed to muster enough strength to knock Japan out of the war—caused mostly by our attempts to counter Doug’s clandestine machinations—at end game, we wound up with a group loss. The system played smoothly, and we managed to finish the five turn Tournament scenario in about four hours. Dice do play a role (no pun intended), but proper planning (and resource allocation) can overcome almost all luck-dependent situations.

The Churchill box comes filled with bits, mostly of the wooden variety, to justify its price tag. Counters take the form of GMT’s deluxe “rounded” counters, with individual counter die-cutting rather than die-cut strips, and the fifty-odd cards are of typical size and with a nice finish. The mounted map has a good matte finish and works ergonomically for the most part. A note to the sticker-averse, however: some of the wooden blocks do require stickering. Thankfully GMT provides extra stickers and blocks in case your manual dexterity just isn’t what it used to be.

Churchill fits a good niche: a grand strategic World War II game designed for three players that focuses on the conduct of the war more than combat. There’s no real panzer pushing here, just perilous politicking over production. Charts included with the game allow one or more sides to be run via flowchart in the event that you have fewer than three players, but the deal-making (and deal-breaking) at the heart of the game make Churchill best with three. Churchill occupies a prime spot on my very short list of games I’ll bring out when three players are on hand.

Side-Scrolling Spitfires: Wing Leader (GMT Games)

July 27, 2023September 7, 2015 by Chris Baer

The art of design involves knowing what to remove as well as what to add. So I find what Lee Brimmicombe-Wood has done with Wing Leader: Victories 1940-1942 (GMT Games, 2015) rather appealing: he’s created an air combat game, at squadron scale, that eliminates an entire dimension, portraying the combat interactions of fighters and bombers from a side-on perspective. By focusing his game of Second World War air combat at the point of contact between the opposing sides, the need to maneuver squadrons to their destination has been eliminated, and with it, the need for that Z dimension on the plot. Wing Leader provides the sharp end of the stick, as it were, without the rest of the stick.

Wing Leader: Blenheims in Trouble

Similarly, the differences between aircraft types have been smoothed down to a small range, demonstrating the broad similarities between aircraft of the same generation. There are certainly contrasts between, say, a Spitfire and a Me-109, but they come out in very subtle ways that require the player to use the planes to their proper, and historical, advantage. Which is not to say the game lacks chrome, as Wing Leader includes forty beautifully drawn aircraft types (with data presented on nice cardboard cards) from Great Britain, the United States, Japan, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. I defy any discerning gamer to resist playing a scenario involving Regia Aeronautica CR.42 biplanes against RAF Hurricanes over Malta.

As can be seen in Lee Brimmicombe-Wood’s earlier large-scale air combat game, Downtown, once fighters start mixing it up in Wing Leader, they quickly become ineffective in combat, not from losses per se but from progressive disorganization. Squadrons deteriorate slowly and then very suddenly in this game, and a single dogfight can reduce a fresh set of planes to a leaderless gaggle over a game turn or two. Loss, morale, and status tracking takes place on a set of charts, using counters for various states. The ergonomics work well, as though there are quite a few variables tracked, the counters mostly flip when needed to the next state, and ammo is only broadly traced. It’s not fiddly, the bane of many a game that uses charts and counters for tracking.

Wing Leader: Wing Tracking Chart

I had the opportunity to try the system recently with regular gaming opponent Mike Vogt at the District of Columbia’s finest game store, Labyrinth Games. We played a scenario set during the Sedan campaign in 1940 that features both sides escorting bombing missions. It was a fairly hefty scenario, with seven to eight squadrons per side, but we gamed through it in a decent time frame, perhaps four hours tops, and came away with a good sense of why you don’t let Stukas reach their targets.

As with Downtown, once the fighters lost cohesion and headed for home, the end of the game dragged slightly, with little to do but roll up the final bombing raids and flak attacks, but the overall experience remained solid. The game flowed quickly, with a fairly simple sequence of play that allows for focus on tactics rather than rules. Proper usage of squadrons was rewarded, and poor usage penalized. (Mike won a German victory by four VP, helped by some abysmal British bombing, if anyone is keeping score at home.)

Wing Leader: Victories 1940-1942 stands as the first in a series of games exploring the development of air combat during the Second World War. The second volume is already under development, promising to bring more aircraft from later in the war into the system, and I’m keenly following its progress. Not, of course, that I need much more in this life than a game that gives me Gloster Gladiators and Fairey Battles in the same box.

Doctor Who Project: The Web of Fear

July 27, 2023September 1, 2015 by Chris Baer

Here we go again.

Repeating monsters are, of course, nothing new by the middle of Doctor Who‘s fifth season. The Daleks have made six appearances so far (seven if you count “Mission to the Unknown” as separate from “The Daleks’ Master Plan“), the Cybermen a respectable three, together populating roughly a quarter of the Doctor’s stories to date. And yet there’s been no real linkage between the stories they’ve featured in beyond some vague desire for revenge on the part of the Daleks and ominous recriminations from the Cybermen for past plot foilings. Events of prior stories are waved away with single lines, the better to focus on the action at hand. Even the single return of the Time Meddler, the only recurring character thus far, as opposed to monster, feels more like a bit of early fan service (and an easy way for Dennis Spooner to leave his mark on Terry Nation’s magnum opus) rather than the establishment of a character with any depth or continuity across the series.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise that when Doctor Who finally produces what can be considered a proper sequel story, “The Web of Fear” (Production Code QQ) by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, the producers choose not a well-established opponent to bring back but the amorphous Great Intelligence and the eponymous Yeti from “The Abominable Snowmen.” Haisman and Lincoln did pen the Himalayan yarn, so bringing the furry robots back makes sense in that regard. Yet at the same time that Doctor Who showcases, at last, two stories linked by a single continuity, with recurring characters and monsters and a direct line of action yoking them together, it squanders the opportunity with a flat story and uninteresting characters.

Uninteresting, that is, except for Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart.