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The first entry of a Minecraft diary I’m starting just went up on PC Gamer – it’s just a short one to start with, but this might turn into a long-running thing. It’s about playing with a sort of permanent death rule: if I die, I have to delete the whole world and everything in it, then start again from scratch in a new one. It’s also starting from when I first played the game, so I know virtually nothing about how it works. The next entry will go up first thing tomorrow, and it’ll probably be every other day from then on. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. I’m not going to harp on any more about how good Terriers is – it actually had a bit of a dip around episode 9, getting too bogged down with its heroes’ personal problems to investigate any clever plots – but I am going to give you the full song the ridiculously catchy theme tune is taken from. It was written by the series’ composer Robert Duncan specially for it, but I like that he wrote the full song too.
My Call of Duty: Black Ops review also went up on the site this week. I reviewed both the Modern Warfares, and it sometimes felt like I might be the only one not having his mind blown by the unending B-movie combat. Both those games had a saving grace: the first had a few really smart sections, and a level of dazzle that was new at the time; and the second’s co-op mode is still the best thing the series has ever done. Black Ops has neither, and its multiplayer is too glitchy to get much out of yet, so it’s the first time the score really reflects how much fun it is to aim-and-squeeze your way through a badly written action movie. Amusingly, the only other review on Metacritic with a score close to mine calls it “Truly a magnificent single-player experience,” “the best single-player campaign that the series has ever had,” and “stunning”.
More Music Downloads
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This made me laugh. Povenmire and Marsh still found themselves fighting for some of their more surreal material. In several episodes, for instance, a character named Major Monogram interjects—apropos of nothing—the phrase “Ever since… the Academy.” A Disney executive quickly flagged the line, arguing (correctly) that it was utter nonsense. Povenmire assured him that it was exactly the kind of nonsense kids would parrot to one another at school. In fact, he felt so confident, he told the executive he expected to one day hear children repeat the line. The skeptical exec pledged to give Povenmire $100 for every time Povenmire heard it (unsolicited, of course). “He now owes me $2,000,” Povenmire says. “And he said, ‘Can I give it to you in Hannah Montana merchandise?’” The making of Phineas and Ferb, on Wired. This was the first kids’ TV I’d seen in years when I caught on telly at Kim’s, and I felt like the future of humanity was in better hands than I realised. | ||
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Almost anything that features a master criminal fancies itself as a battle of wits between him and the star detective. In practice, all that usually means is the bad guy leaves no evidence, then blunders into an obvious trap by the cop. Death Note actually is a battle of wits, though: the entire series revolves around two people desperate to eliminate each other, but prevented from doing so directly by the complicated mathematics of suspicion, guilt and uncertainty. It all stems from the Death Note: a book found by a sociopathic hyperintelligent schoolkid that will kill someone if you write their name in it. You have to be picturing their face, and you can specify the time and circumstances of their death. He starts using it to rid the world of violent criminals, but gets into such hot water so quickly that his immediate objective is mostly self preservation.
The detective is never entirely sure if it’s really him doing it, since the flexibility of the book lets him schedule killings of people he’s never met, by natural causes, at times he has a perfect alibi for. But nor can the villain find a good way to kill his rival and get away with it: the two keep manoeuvring so that the villain could always feasibly be innocent, and the detective cannot be safely killed. It’s a terrifying mind game of questions.
Luckily, the complexity is kept readable by a completely frank expositional dialogue style, where people actually say things like, “If this had happened sooner, it would have been bad for me!” and “Please could you explain a little better.” You’re forever wondering how the hell the series is going to last more than a couple of episodes further, because massive developments tighten the circle around these two players in almost every one. But it keeps finding clever ways to scupper the dominant player, and luck never sides with either of them too long. I haven’t finished the whole thing yet, but I can say the first 24 episodes are essential brain fodder. Thanks to Graham and Lisa for recommending it in the pub the necessary five times for me to get around to checking it out. If you’re in the US, PleasingFungus points out that the whole series is available on Hulu for free.
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Alek: I think I'll be the outcast here and say that I actually very much enjoy the second opening song, and I'm not even a metal head. It just grew on me in this really odd way.
In other news: Death Note is brilliant. | ||||
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I was pretty rude about the plot when writing about the pilot episode, but impressed by everything else. This is a quick update to say that, in the four episodes since then, that simple set up has changed dramatically every episode, and led to some superb twists and tense situations. The pilot establishes a rich guy as the villain, getting away with murder, as if that’s going to be the overarching plot for the whole season. Instead it’s picked apart and inverted in a few episodes, and the jobs-of-the-week get much more inventive and entertaining as they unravel it.
Everything else I’m watching at the moment treats its series-scale plot with kid gloves, never daring to move it more than an inch in a single episode to preserve precious plot juice for the finale. Terriers goes at its own with a wrecking ball. Basically my only complaint has been totally overturned, and unless I’m forgetting something big, this is the best new drama since
More Brevity Week, Terriers
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Jim Nathlich: Agreed. I'd guess the writers knew that cancellation was a possibility, and wrote with that in mind.
The good: Plot, characters, and the actors doing some campaign work to get the word out on the show. The bad: The name, and more importantly the lack-of-campaign by the rest of FX marketing to get the word out. Many people thought the show was about dogs. The next: Hope to see these people in other shows and endeavors. | ||||
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Prohibition-era Sopranos. Steve Buscemi is a corrupt county treasurer in Atlantic City in the 20s, and it’s lovely to see him play a position of power. I’ve got so used to him as a snivelling loser that it’s surprising how well his perpetual sneer works as one of superior disdain. The tone is just right, for me: Buscemi’s character is a villain, but not repulsive so far. It’s possible to enjoy the early twentieth century opulence of his life without being put off by the guy himself.
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Joe!: Annoying music.
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Opens on a conversation between two unappealing men in a pickup. A few lines into it, I know I’m going to love this show. Nothing about the premise is interesting or original, and the plot of the pilot is so over-familiar it could have been traced. But smart writing shows instantly, shows constantly, and never stops being a pleasure.
You’ll spend a few episodes trying to figure out which one of the central partnership is the dopey archetype, which one’s the womaniser, which one’s the genius, which one’s the loser. Eventually I realised none of those templates fit any of these characters any better than they do real people. Basically, the hook is that it’s written by someone who doesn’t think you’re a moron or have an insultingly reductive attitude to human nature.
More Brevity Week, Terriers
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Terriers Again, by Tom Francis: [...] was pretty rude about the plot when writing about the pilot episode, but impressed by everything else. This is a quick update to say that, in the four episodes since [...]
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Ow, this was hard going. If you’ve seen all of season four, the John Lithgow series and the best yet, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, don’t read any more of this. I’m pretty sure I’ve already ruined it for both the people adjacent to me on the plane when I watched it. “Whose funeral was that?” “Uh…”
They kind of had to do an episode like this – skipping over it or doing anything fun would have been a betrayal of the emotional punch of the finale. But that didn’t make it any easier to watch. The theme of discovering your humanity through a relationship just hit a little hard. That makes this an effective episode, but I can’t claim to have enjoyed it over the lump in my throat.
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Bret: Ever read the books?
Similar theme comes up from a slightly more positive angle in the latest one. Also cannibals. | ||||
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Futurama hasn’t been this good in years. It’s been very funny this season, and I think most of the movies had some inspired gags, but this week’s was the first time the plot’s been as good as the jokes since the good old days. It did what all the best episodes do: found the humour value in an old sci-fi concept and took it to ridiculous extremes.
If you didn’t see it, Farnsworth invented a mind-swapper. He and Amy swapped bodies to enjoy youth and food respectively, but found they couldn’t switch back because their body’s immune response blocked the same switch being made again. They could still swap to other bodies, though, so Bender and the Professor (really Amy) swap minds. Bender (really the Professor): Now then Amy, we’ll simply switch bodies, and then we’ll… no… I’d be back in my body, but then you and Bender would be switched, and the Amy and Bender bodies can’t trade minds again since they just did! Professor (really Amy): Oh no! Is it possible to get everyone back to normal using four or more bodies? Bender (really the Professor): I’m not sure! I’m afraid we need to use… MATH. You can already tell the whole episode is going to be amazing at this point, but I had to pause and work it out before watching any more. You could call this an intentionally self-inflicted spoiler, but you kind of already know the main characters aren’t going to end up permanently switched, right? I just wanted to know if this was a way they could be restored, and if so how many more people they’d need. It’s trickier than it seems as first, but not as impossible as it starts to look shortly after that. To be as clear as possible, I’ll refer to people as Person They Appear To Be (Person They Really Are). This is important because it’s the bodies that can’t switch back directly – there’s no rule about minds. By this point in the show, here’s the story so far:  Amy and the Professor switch
Producing:
Producing: Leaving: Bender (Professor) proposes switching with Professor (Amy) but doesn’t go through with it. It’s easier to think about if he does do that, though, because we’re back to just two wrong ‘uns to fix.
Producing: Leaving: Now Bender and Amy need to switch, but they can’t directly. So we use Fry as temporary storage:
Producing: Leaving: But that’s not enough. We need a somewhere else to put Bender’s brain so we don’t end up using the same storage person twice for the same trade. So:
Producing: Leaving: Now we can get Amy’s brain back in her without putting Bender into Fry – we can’t re-swap that pair.
Producing: Leaving: Similarly, we can put Bender back to rights without stranding Fry.
Producing: Leaving: So finally we can switch two people who both want to be switched, which is the only way you can ever finish this thing:
Producing: That was my first attempt. Looking it over, I think there’s probably some flab there – I think I can see a way to save a move or two early on. But figuring out this much made the rest of the episode all the more fun to watch, because the switches get nuts very, very quickly. It seems to be biting off way more storylines than it can chew, and more maths than it can resolve, but it does both beautifully. The Wash Bucket is one of those sublime minor characters we don’t see enough of lately, like the homeopathy-hating announcer bot in Crimes of the Hot. And although they seem to be glossing over the mess they’ve made by having the Globetrotters announce that any such tangle can be resolved with two extra people, that is provably correct, and they show they’re nerdy enough to do the legwork by doing a montage of all the required switches at the end. If Futurama sometimes seems weirdly inconsistent, it’s probably because of the crazy number of writers. No two episodes this season have been written by the same person. This one was by Ken Keeler, also behind Time Keeps on Slipping, and I therefore conclude that he is awesome.
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Tom: It seems to me that maybe the producers made a deal with some of the voice actors to give the lesser characters a greater role in order to secure their return. Amy in particular has been given a lot more to do this season than before, when to me she was always one of the weaker characters. It used to be a running joke on the show that the adventures would always fall to Bender, Fry and Leela (and maybe Zoidberg), with the other characters standing on the periphery.
But I agree with Pentadact that the characters are one of the shows main drawing points. The writers of Futurama have a way with character-specific dialogue that I'd usually associate with Joss Whedon (or at least they used to). | ||||
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Your game diaries are always awesome.