Doctor Who Project: The Abominable Snowmen

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They came to get their ball back!

Thus far in its run, Doctor Who has delved only occasionally into religious themes, using such themes mostly as set dressing. The eponymous Time Meddler, for instance, occupies an abandoned monastery and disguises himself as a monk (and his TARDIS as an altar), but the religious imagery is incidental to the story. When religion becomes more central to the story, the results have been masterful, providing two of the best stories so far: “The Aztecs” and “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve,” both, not coincidentally, historicals written by John Lucarotti. There were no monsters in those stories (at least, non-human monsters), and they were in the “serious” historical mode. Imagine, then, a story where the Doctor and his companions defeat the Daleks with the help of nuns by reciting a string of “Our Father” prayers and you have, in a nutshell, Melvyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln’s “The Abominable Snowmen” (Story Production Code NN), which draws heavily upon Buddhism (or a facsimile thereof) for both set dressing and, more significantly, plot concepts.

“The Abominable Snowmen” is not, by any stretch, a historical in the vein of “The Aztecs,” but like that story, it treats the religious underpinning of its setting—in this case, Buddhism in early twentieth century Tibet—with a degree of respect. To some extent, the setting is treated as alien, with the actors playing the Tibetan monks of the Detsen Monastery with the same kind of nuanced mannerisms one finds in the portrayals of the Sensorites or the Menoptera. The acting is not uniformly convincing, but the characters all evince a strong and coherent belief system. Unfortunately, the belief system has been distilled into one of unthinking obedience to ritual and authority rather than any more searching version of Buddhism, and when one character, Khrisong, the warrior, dares to challenge the Abbot’s absolute control, he is portrayed as the villain. But with a mustache like that, how could he not be?

Khrisong in a huff

To its credit, “The Abominable Snowmen” emphasizes a peaceful vision of Buddhism, with a desire for harmony and a reluctance to commit harm, but the end result is a society where questions are not permitted, as in “The Savages” or “The Macra Terror.” To that extent, then, Buddhism is set dressing for a monster-of-the-week, an exotic and fanciful backdrop for a story about Yeti in the Himalayas. But still, there’s something more at work here. A sinister force has taken over the mind of the monastery’s Master, Padmasambhva, but only because of the Master’s meditative journey into enlightenment and his belief in the essential good nature of all beings. This malevolent force, the Great Intelligence, threatens to take over the world, all because Padmasambhva journeyed to the astral plane and provided the Intelligence with a means to enter the corporeal world. And he was just trying to be helpful. It’s not a ringing endorsement of Buddhism, or spiritual pursuits in general.

And to top it off, the Intelligence forced Padmasambhva to labor for hundreds of years, and all he got for his efforts was a cave full of silver balls used to control a whole bunch of furry robots…

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Another Brick Blue Box: Doctor Who Revealed for Lego Dimensions

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Following news earlier this year that a Doctor Who Lego set has been approved via the fan-suggested Lego Ideas brand, we now have seeming confirmation from Lego fansite Brickset that a Doctor Who “level pack” will be available for the forthcoming console game Lego Dimensions. Image via https://brickset.com/article/15231/more-dimensions-packs-revealed-in-instructions

Lego Dimensions follows on the heels of console games such as Skylanders and Disney Infinity that feature physical figures placed on a special sensor mat or base, allowing the figure to appear in virtual form on screen. Travellers’ Tales, the studio behind the highly successful Lego video games of the past decade, is also developing Lego Dimensions, so one more or less knows what to expect from the gameplay—puzzles, jumping, and bashing baddies into bloodless blocks. I’ve enjoyed their games for what they offer, and Lego Marvel Super Heroes was quite a bit more fun than it had any right to be, but they’re not excessively deep games. Lego Dimensions was only slightly on my radar. Until this announcement, of course.

The Doctor Who set would appear to include a TARDIS model, plus the Twelfth Doctor and K-9. If it’s at par with the announced level packs, retail will be around thirty dollars, with the mandatory starter pack at a hundred. To buy the set just for the pieces makes little sense, as there’s maybe five bucks in plastic involved, total. You’re paying $30 to play with the figures in the Lego Dimensions game, with animations and effects and such, plus an adventure level focused on the pieces. So this is not an automatic purchase for people who like little figures sitting in front of their computers.

The more significant take-away here is that Lego is moving forward with Doctor Who licensed products on at least two fronts, and with luck, we’ll see a wider range of Doctor Who figures, at the very least encompassing all the Doctors and many of the companions. If Travellers’ Tales can bring a level of gameplay to Lego Dimensions on par with Lego Marvel Super Heroes, the console game and its sets might be worth keeping an eye on.

Besides, there’s also apparently a Simpsons level pack in the works…

(Image via Brickset)

India Pale Meeples: Brew Crafters (Dice Hate Me Games)

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I jokingly warned everyone at the start of our inaugural playthrough of Brew Crafters (Dice Hate Me Games, 2015), the newly released worker placement Euro about, um, crafting brewskis, that brewing the Pumpkin Ale recipe would result in immediate loss of the game. Because, really, that stuff is awful, an abomination to all right-thinking people. But then, after I had installed hop infusers in my fledgling brewery, to increase the value of ales, and cornered the market on fruit, I realized that brewing Pumpkin Ale was a very winning strategy. So, yes, I brewed a ton of the vile stuff and felt only slight shame. Such are the hard decisions in this quite pleasant game about operating a craft brewery.

Thirsty, thirsty meeples!

Some Euro-style games have themes that only tangentially relate to their mechanics, but Brew Crafters is one of those rare spiels that marries the two quite nicely thanks to the beer recipes at the heart of the gameplay. In the Market Phase, players place workers on spaces providing ingredients (malt, hops, yeast, and specialty fare like fruit and coffee), money, or special workers who alter game rules; these spaces may only be chosen by one player at a time, providing a nice adversarial aspect to the game. Then, the Brewery Phase allows players to conduct brewery research, build brewery components like a brewpub and oak barrel aging racks, and assemble the ingredients into differing types of beer, with each recipe requiring a different combination of ingredients and each being worth a varying amount of reputation. The highest reputation at the end of the game wins.

A close-up of the Chris-Craft Brewery

Gameplay is quick, about half an hour per player. Our four player game ran only slightly over two hours, and that even includes time spent getting real beers from the fridge to complement the beer chits we were brewing. The components are above average for a Euro, with a ton of wooden cubes, a handful of traditional wooden meeples, several sheets of die cut cardboard counters, fifty-odd standard-sized cards, and a two-toned wooden glass of stout as a first-player marker. The box is chock full, well worth the $60 retail price just from a component standpoint alone. Throw in engaging worker placement gameplay on a theme near to my heart, and, well, this one is a keeper. There are multiple paths to victory (one of the players in my session tried to crank out as much of the cheap stuff as possible), and there are over twenty different kinds of beer recipes in the game, so there’s a nice degree of replayability in the box as well.

When I saw the demo copy at Labyrinth Games and Puzzles on Capitol Hill, my Fine Local Game Store, I knew I had to have it. I’d drink a toast to Brew Crafters, but I already have…

The Simpsons Finally Cancelled (On DVD)

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Well, they finally cancelled The Simpsons. The DVD releases, that is. As has been widely reported, show runner Al Jean announced last week that Fox would no longer produce season sets of The Simpsons on DVD or Blu Ray.

Behold the glory!

Fox released the extant season sets over a period of thirteen years, launching season one for the 2001 holiday season, then releasing roughly two a year until 2009, when they released the 20th season set out of order to coincide with the show’s two decade anniversary. The sets came one a year after that, through season seventeen in the fourth quarter of 2014. The extensive audio commentary on each episode in the season sets likely accounted for the gradual slowing of the releases, not to mention the slow decline of physical media sales in the last half decade.

Possibly, had the commentary not been recorded, Fox could have released the seasons in a more accelerated manner, though one wonders how much they needed to protect the lucrative syndication market for the show by pacing out the releases. Still, the remarkable commentary tracks were a labor of love, and while the commentary at times diverges wildly from the episode being discussed, it’s hard to begrudge the creators of the show the right to talk about the episodes and their creation.

It’s fashionable to note that the “best” years of The Simpsons are already on DVD, so the loss of the remaining seasons in this format shouldn’t be considered a tragedy, but the later seasons have their share of gems, and to watch the arc of the show is a pleasure in its own right. While Fox does run a streaming site for the series, providing access (with restrictions) to the whole series, there’s something to be said for having them all on the shelf, ready to watch regardless of bandwidth issues or what cable provider I have.

Perhaps DVD is a dying format, but I still want my box sets. Just seeing them all there, on the shelf, mostly uniform in terms of appearance, makes me happy. Like, Homer with beer happy.

Doctor Who Project: The Tomb of the Cybermen

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Well, now I know you’re mad. I just wanted to make sure.

Though only two months separate the end of Doctor Who‘s fourth season and the start of its fifth, the difference between “The Evil of the Daleks” and Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis’ “The Tomb of the Cybermen” (Story Production Code MM) could scarcely be more striking. Where David Whitaker’s Dalek magnum opus plodded along several episodes too long and jumped from location to location, Pedler and Davis bring the Cybermen back in a taut, crisp, and focused four episode story that feels unlike any Doctor Who we’ve seen before—mostly because it feels exactly like what we think Doctor Who is supposed to feel like. This story is the ur-Who.

After a brief introductory scene bringing new companion Victoria into the TARDIS, a scene serving mostly to give a refresher about what Doctor Who is all about to new and returning viewers after the summer hiatus, action shifts immediately to a crew of space archaeologists on the planet Telos. It’s actually a quarry, of course, but the setting works inherently because these archaeologists are blasting their way into the buried Tomb of the Cybermen. You can tell because there are Cybermen on the walls next to the (electrified) doors.

I wonder who is buried here?

We’re given no excuse or reason for the TARDIS appearing here, unlike the elaborate explanations of a wonky control console or stuck fast return switch of prior seasons. The TARDIS simply lands and the Doctor and his companions just walk out to have a look around. Further, the archeological team only cursorily question the Doctor about his sudden presence and then the matter is effectively dropped, the show’s internal logic reigning supreme. In this instance, the Doctor is taken to be a rival archaeologist, also seeking the secrets of the long-dead Cybermen, and he goes with it, silencing his young companions when they threaten to blow his conveniently bestowed cover. There’s a story to be told here, so on with it.

The Doctor volunteers to help the expedition get into the tomb, and once there, he vacillates between helping and hindering. Something seems not quite right, with two members of the expedition, Klieg and Kaftan, curiously insistent upon getting in, despite the death of a expedition member by the electrified tomb doors. The Doctor knows the danger of the Cybermen, but he also wants to know just what Klieg and Kaftan are up to with the Cybermen. The story establishes (somewhat ham-fistedly) that they’re up to no good, and by the end of the first episode, there’s a sense of menace without a Cyberman in sight. One does show up right at the end of the episode, but it’s a dummy, albeit a deadly one. We do, however, meet someone new. A cute, cuddly, metallic Cybermat…

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SuperSpaceDungeonDelve: StarCrawlers Early Access

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I’ve more or less kicked (slight pun intended) my crowdfunding habit, particularly when it comes to computer games. The eager excitement of the campaign leads to ennui as update after update tells a sad story of delays and curtailed features, and by and large, you wind up paying more (and far earlier) for the finished product than the person who buys it when it releases. Sure, you’re supporting projects you ostensibly believe in, but the economics don’t always make sense.

So I’m pleased when games I backed, back in the day, come to fruition more or less on time and more or less feature complete. Take, for instance, StarCrawlers, by Juggernaut Games, a first-person, party-based space dungeon crawl game that just entered the Early Access phase on Steam. Some features are missing, the story is barely there, and there are balance issues, but I have to say it looks quite promising for an Early Access game.

Robots stand between you and loot.

You control a party of up to four space scavengers, chosen from a wide array of classes, all of whom level up and gear up through missions. You maneuver in first person, with a real-time interactive environment, but once foes are encountered (and there are a lot of them), you switch to a turn-based combat system not unlike the computer role playing games of yore. There’s no positioning to speak of; combatants take turns attacking, with each action costing an amount of time that places the combatant in a turn order. One powerful action could see your combatant placed at the far end of the turn order, with combatants who take faster actions attacking several times in the interim. The classes all have different passive and active abilities, and finding synergies between the classes plays an important role. The Solider, for instance, can taunt enemies, taking blows that would otherwise affect characters who can dish out the damage but can’t take it.

More robots stand between you and more loot. There are a lot of robots in this game.

The gameplay isn’t absurdly deep, being mostly a move/fight/loot loop, but it’s fulfilling in short bursts and ticks off the appropriately addictive loot acquisition and character development boxes. Too, it’s rare to see the dungeon crawl model applied to a futuristic setting, making StarCrawlers all the more appealing. Once Juggernaut Games fills out the storyline—for the most part, the missions seem to be procedurally generated—and adds a bit more polish, the game is going to be a keeper. For what I paid (and it wasn’t much), StarCrawlers gleams as a gem in the sea of crowdfunded dross.