Doctor Why: Falling Out of Like with a Series

My relationship with Doctor Who has never been a steady one. When the rebooted series with Christopher Eccleston first premiered on Sci Fi Channel--back when it was Sci Fi Channel--I caught an episode here or there, often times the same episode in which the Doctor combats farty aliens who--gasp!--have taken over the government. Or something. The production quality seemed dodgy as BBC shows sometimes do, especially circa 2005, but the performances were oddly solid, especially from Eccleston himself. But the show never became habitual for me, only filler until something else came on.

Enter David Tennant, the Tenth Doctor, and my interest in the series waned further. He seemed too excited and playful compared to the brooding veteran who had proverbially "seen some shit." Then, down the road, I caught the last half of The End of Time and I reconsidered my assessment. Even though some silly pulp sci-fi crap goes down (population of earth turned into clones of the Big Bad Evil Guy), the performers are all in top form and the themes are oddly mature. First, this happens:


Later, the Tenth Doctor faces death with reluctance even though this was no true death since he would just be regenerated. Though I hadn't watched enough episodes to feel an attachment, Tennant's performance made me sorry for the Doctor. But regeneration means new actor, and new actor means new personality for the 900-plus-year-old time-and-space traveler.

I picked up right at the start of the Matt Smith-Eleventh Doctor-Stephen Moffat era, having just enough context to know what's going down. I sped through it, watching two or three episodes at a time. Lunch time? Doctor Who. Dinner time? Doctor Who. Bedtime? Fall asleep on the futon while Doctor Who is on. When I was through with what was available of the Eleventh Doctor's adventures on Netflix, I started at the back catalog with Tennant himself. And I grew to like Tennant's Doctor. The Tenth had a vengeful, angry streak that made him profoundly human. A few of his episodes got dark, borderline kid-unfriendly. He was a Doctor I could appreciate. While Matt Smith's Doctor is entertaining if not goofy, he wasn't a Doctor I could invest in.

At a conference I went to in 2012, a presenter argued that the new era of Doctor Who, this post-David Tennant, post-Russell T Davies period was a shift towards not only more kid-friendly but child-geared television show. The Eleventh Doctor was himself profoundly childlike. Once it was pointed out, I couldn't not notice it. When we're first introduced to our new Doctor, he hankers for a paring of fish sticks and custard, something you would expect a child to do or at least laugh at. Endearing at first, but exhausting as the series carries on.

Also, the story arcs of the Moffat-ran Doctor Who are outrageously convoluted to the point of contrived. The "Death of the Doctor" arc is one of the more unpalatable story arcs I can recall in a TV show with a lackluster resolution that is all too clever for its own good. Moffat's Sherlock also suffers from a similar malady: hyper-cleverness that points and laughs at the viewer for both not figuring it out and trying to figure it out. It's all entertaining, but it takes the heart out of a good program.

Now, after a long absence of Doctor Who on my TV screen with the exceptions of the occasional Tom Baker serials available on Netflix, I've returned to the show with the new Matt Smith episodes. The departure of companions Amy and Rory took a significant part of my investment out of the show already, and the mystery surrounding his new sort-of companion Clara is not engaging. Maybe it's because I slipped out of routine, or that I've seen more engaging television since the last time I watched Doctor Who on the regular, but this most recent series feels meandering. I hope there's a pay off, though. I need to watch something and it's a few months before Sleepy Hollow comes back on.

Reluctant Hero, or Avoiding the Main Storyline of Skyrim

For a game that came out over two years ago, I'm still a big fan of Skyrim. The free-form classless leveling system opened the boundaries for more freedom in an already liberated game in which you were not bound by levels bookended by cinematics. It was up to you to craft the story of the Dragonborn--Bethesda just gave you the set pieces to do it.

The sad truth is that Skyrim's story isn't as compelling as it could be. One could argue it's due to narrative limitations imposed by the sandbox nature of The Elder Scrolls series, but I don't believe Skyrim was built with story in mind. Skyrim is in itself a viking-inspired playground with glory to be had and foes to be driven forth. The main quest is just a guideline, and an underwhelming one at that. But the hundreds of hours I sank into Oblivion, Skyrim's older brother, didn't give me high hopes for its successor's main quest. It's a reservoir of fantasy trope runoff, siphoning whatever might be popular. A lot of it is regurgitation, but the player's actions don't have to follow suit.

My first character was a Redguard that I lazily named "Prisoner" with a long terrorist beard and a great bundled mane of dreadlocks. For nearly ten levels, I disregarded improving his hit points and focused solely on improving his stamina. Near the end of his tale, he could sprint great distances, wielding two delicately crafted one-handed axes. Dragons would fall before him with only three spin attacks from his axes. Prisoner thirsted for blood and cared not how he got it. He fought alongside the Stormcloaks despite their xenophobic platform to whet his appetite for carnage. To put it simply, Prisoner was a psychopath and he will forever be remembered in the canon of The Elder Scrolls as the one who slew Alduin the World Eater.

At that point, the narrative is out of my hands. Yes, I killed the World Eater but only because the objective sat at the top of my quest journal. Is that why Prisoner did it? No, he did it to explore a monster's insides. Threat to mortals or not, Alduin's death by Prisoner's hands was by no means a noble deed. But Skyrim the game doesn't care. I had to be a big damn hero and save the world.

Not this time. In the upteenth I've started a new character, I've decided to reclaim my ownership of Skyrim's narrative. It will not be hijacked by the game's prescripted main plot. I will avoid the main quest like the fantasy equivalent of the plague. Right after I escape the raging dragon in Skyrim's opening, I'll head to Riverwood and collect whatever supplies I'm offered. But I will not head to Whiterun. I will not inform Jarl Balgruuf the Greater that his town may be threatened by the return of winged horrors with scales. I will not shout as dragons do, regardless if I am the Dragonborn.

There is no achievement built into the game or Steam for this. By avoiding the main quest and the path of the Dragonborn, I forfeit any true conclusion to the game. Alduin, the almighty butthole of a dragon set to gobble up the world, will not taste my blade because I will ignore the call for as long as mechanically possible. This may prove more challenging because, though the game is designed in such a way that my enemies increase in level as I do, it is also designed to balance with the player's ability to use dragon shouts. But I will not use them.

In doing this, I seek to change the ultimate narrative of Skyrim. For all intents and purposes, if my character is the fabled "Dragonborn," he will not know about it. Though the name my escape the lips of those I meet, my character will not know. This is, after all, the purpose of the open-world game: strip of the player of a linear path. Not only allow for diversion but mandate it. It is not destination but the journey. And if I need a destination, the Ebony Warrior shall serve as a final boss. His defeat will not affect the game's main quest. It is only at level 80 that my character my encounter him, and as that is the level cap it is fitting that I should fight him last.

Considering the fact that the highest level any of my characters are at is 56, I'd say it's going to take time.

Rated M for Mature: Wolfenstein's Strange but Satisfying Tone

Dat typeface.

Wolfenstein: The New Order came out to "generally favorable reviews" this past week, exceeding the expectations set forth by the series' 2009 bland iteration in Wolfenstein. Admittedly, Bethesda put out one hell of a marketing campaign for it, featuring a revised version of history where--spoiler alert!--the Nazis won World War II and the world comprised of public player executions on soccer fields and Nazified versions of '50s and '60s pop songs. Even from the trailers, the writing looked impressive, so it was hard for me not to be excited. Just a little excited.

So I marathoned it on my days off. I jumped into the combat boots of William "B.J." Blazkowicz, hero of the games since 1992's Wolfenstein 3D. We storm the castle of high-ranking Nazi butthole Deathshead, aiming to riddle him and his legions of jackboots full of Allied lead. But, of course, things go south quickly. Planes come down, men get killed, and we survivors get captured by Deathshead himself. Soon we are posed with a choice that changes the game significantly enough that it creates two separate timelines: do you choose to kill the wet-behind-the-ears rookie or the battle-hardened veteran? Deathshead leaves the decision up to you.

It seems like only yesterday that I was playing BioShock Infinite, a game peppered with significant choices that it almost feels less like a shooter and more like a role playing game. Then you start blasting dudes and it feels like a shooter again. Given BioShock Infinite's origins, playing with player choice is not only expected, but almost required. It's not a BioShock game if the idea of player agency isn't toyed with. Wolfenstein, however, is certainly also a series about choice but with more immediate consequences, such as which gun to maim which Nazi.

But it's more than that this time around. Picking between my two comrades, I can't decide who to let die. As a player, I've had about an hour by this point to get to know these characters. The rookie pleads for his life. The veteran resigns to death. The Nazi tells me that if I don't pick one of them, we'll all just die. I pick the rookie. He pleads, asks if I'll get him out of there. The game fades out.

I feel immediate pangs of remorse right after I make the timeline altering choice. My conscience sings in cliches: the rookie had so much to live for, the veteran knew what he signed up for. I answered back with cold logic: the veteran was experienced and necessary to the mission. But the mission is a failure, we attempt to escape, and Blazkowicz ends up in a head injury and a vegetative state for fourteen years. Such is Wolfenstein.

The game is unrelenting in its depiction of a Nazi-controlled Europe. Most World War II shooters don't show the full extent of Nazi persecution. In a given Medal of Honor game, it was almost as if the only crime the Nazis committed was not having enough bullets in them. Developers depended on the history books to give you the explanation why the Nazis are the bad guys here. But Wolfenstein: The New Order is a post-World War II game. I don't only mean the setting of the game, but also the fact that it comes in after an era where much more of the shooter market was comprised of World War II games where the big objective was to thin Nazi ranks. The objective remains, but the narrative seems more daring this time around. We go to a labor camp in the game, evoking depictions of concentration camps in film and TV. Blazkowicz gets a numbered tattoo, echoing the very thing that so many came out of the war with on their arms.

While the thought of depicting a concentration camp in a video game can appear to trivialize the war, the game sets its stance on war early on: it's bad. Blazkowicz and the player bear witness to some awful scenes, often when they have no choice but to watch. Throughout the game, Blazkowicz whispers to himself in a way that sounds like a broken man, damaged by things he's seen. The player must see these things. Such things can't be whitewashed, or they almost assuredly trivialize this war.

But a video game can't run on such harrowing content alone. Given the almost B-movie backdrop of the game, Wolfenstein could run dangerously close to undiluted melodrama and undercut any weight the game might carry in its more serious moments. We've got to have the moments of humor because, let's face it, we're playing a game where a good portion of the enemies are giant robots whose scanning sounds like a guitar lick from a garage rock outfit. Wolfenstein can take itself seriously at times for some very human moments that we rarely get in video games. But in those other times, if it takes the player to a Nazi moon base, it's okay if a character says, "I'm on the motherf***ing moon."

Much Thanks to The_Eternal_Void for the Prompt

[The following was inspired by a post on the Writing Prompts subreddit.]

I understood Celeste's reservations regarding Vance's membership to the party. Her paladin training told her to be wary of those who wield godlike powers, and while I'd seen my share of horrific images in the camps, I hadn't seen anything quite like this. None of us were equipped nor trained to deal with matters of the arcane, especially those that fall under the purview of all things eldritch.

My eyes followed where she pointed: the greasy wizard whose robe conveniently disappeared--again--while green glowing ichor poured forth from his lips into a skull-goblet with ruby eyes. He sat atop a dead spider, leaning forward only slightly as if just catching his breath.

"Oh not again," he said between heaves. He wore a pained expression that seemed like he wanted us to believe he was in pain. But I could tell he wasn't. Though he squinted and gritted his teeth, all of the other muscles in his face were relaxed, at least as relaxed as they could be for a man vomiting otherworldly slop.

We picked him up in Hyde's Hollow in a tavern. It was rare to find a scholar outside of a library or university, so Celeste considered it a boon from her god that we found a man capable of reading ancient script in the very place that we sought shelter only days before we planned to arrive at Nettle's Tomb. In truth, he seemed normal enough. But then we left town. She's been cursing him for the last few hours.

The fact that he insisted on riding the spider instead of one of our hired horses should have been a sign.

Your Song Sucks: What I Don't Like About Imagine Dragon's "Radioactive"

Such excitement.

Imagine Dragons is a band that the kids like these days, and I can see why with their song "Radioactive": they got some dark brooding lyrics, poundy drums that make the song feel epic, and judging from their website and music videos, they even have a sense of humor. There are much worse acts out there that people could be eating up. But this song is painfully middle-of-the-road that it might as well be painting the line. The instrumental work might get a preteen amped, but the vague electronic undercurrent to the melody seems like an abandoned synthesis that an unambitious mad scientist is responsible for. But nothing puts me out quite like the song's lyrics.

To begin on this odyssey into mediocrity, the song is lyrically lazy. So much of the chorus consists of the vocalist singing, "Ohohohohohohoh" at least twice. I get it. It's a chorus. It should feel like an anthem, and it's easier to do that with some repetition. But this isn't a matter of the chorus being repeated--it's a matter of words being repeated within the chorus. Let's take a look:

Ohohoh
I'm waking up
I feel it in my bones
Enough to make my system blow
Welcome to the new age
To the new age
Welcome to the new age
To the new age
Ohohohohohohoh
I'm radioactive
Radioactive
Ohohohohohohohoh
I'm radioactive Radioactive 

The phrase "to the new age" comes up four times in that chorus, as does the word "radioactive." I've heard the key to repetition is to repeat something in threes, but this seems like overkill. Also, bear in mind that we haven't even reached the second verse yet. Worry not, friends. You'll get it a couple more times to let it sink in deep.

Notice that the speaker is "waking up" at least twice in the song: first in our inaugural verse, and then immediately in the chorus that follows. In each repetition of the chorus, the speaker continues still to be "waking up." The theme of awakening is not something ever addressed, unless you consider that "checking out on the prison bus" is the speaker returning to slumber. This happens twice, by the by, in verses one and two. Half of the first verse is cannibalized for the second verse. It's not repainted with any clever wordplay. We're treated to the same bland image twice:

I'm breaking in and shaping up
Then checking out on the prison bus
This is it, the apocalypse

Apocalypse, huh? How spooky. And it looks like the speaker's in a dystopian nightmare to boot: "I'm waking up to ash and dust / I wipe my brow and sweat my rust / I'm breathing in the chemicals." What dreaded chemicals is the poor speaker respiring? Dunno. Is this a biblical apocalypse? Dunno. In fact, "dunno" might be the answer for just about any question regarding the lyrical content of the song. Listeners are barely given a watered-down broth. The speaker is so unsure of him- or herself that no picture is painted, no senses stimulated via the imagination.

One of the lyrics' biggest sins lays this line: "It's a revolution, I suppose." The "revolution" bit fits the vaguely dystopic theme of the song, but almost never is the phrase "I suppose" acceptable in a song--especially at the end of a line. It feels like filler, especially since the line follows the phrase "...dye my clothes." They have rhyming dictionaries out there for a reason.

Lyrics provided by Imagine Dragons official website

Why We Fight: What Titanfall's Not-Single-Player Does For The Campaign As We Know It

These days, for me to touch a competitive multiplayer game is a rarity. Long gone are the days when I'd hop onto Xbox Live and cook fools in Halo: Reach or whatever Call of Duty game was in vogue. They say practice makes perfect but practice in an FPS game is a soul-crushing endeavor: enduring the torment of junior high students berating you for not having played the game as much as they have. Because of this, you "suck" like a "noob" and they've done all sorts of disgusting things to you and with your mother. Enduring the harassment becomes tiresome and to stoop to their level would not only be beneath you but possibly borderline illegal.

While you'd like to pump a few digital rounds into your foul-mouthed opponents, you can't because the little asshole came flying in through a corridor you forgot about or had no idea existed because unlike that kid whose been on since 8 AM because he was "sick," you just logged on after getting home from work. Because you have a job.

Anymore, FPSes are expected to provide players with single player and multiplayer options. The former, while might be saddled with an interesting story and compelling characters, is always overshadowed by the multiplayer element. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had a reasonably strong narrative for a military shooter, and while some of its campaign moments are fondly remembered, the game's multiplayer was the real honeypot and for good reason.

But the shooter genre has always been characterized by a schizophrenic divide between play styles: you could either play by yourself and let the story wash over you or you could dig into the trenches and combat fellow players on the virtual battlefield with no prominent narrative outside of what you might tell your buddies the next day. Games with a cooperative element would likely have story, but they nearly always were the single player with a second controller plugged in. Not a true multiplayer narrative. 

Developer Splash Damage is perhaps best known for their two Enemy Territory games based in the Wolfenstein and Quake universes, but in 2011 they put out a multiplayer-only game called Brink. Technically, it contained a single player option but the gameplay was strictly based on the multiplayer element. If players chose single player, they were just playing multiplayer with AI. But the game attempted to have a narrative that came through the competitive gameplay. Players were split into factions at war in a dystopian future city and a vague story was told through the matches. While the game didn't do all that well at launch, I'd like to believe that Titanfall drew some inspiration from Brink. 

My own experience with Brink is limited, but I think its lack of success might serve to underscore the inherent difficulty in dropping story into multiplayer. You can attempt to compose a complex narrative like Bioshock Infinite for a multiplayer game, but in the end it's going to take away from the pacing of a team-based deathmatch. The reverse is equally disappointing: lackluster story will only sap the life out of a single player campaign. 

Titanfall does seem to borrow some of Brink's superficial elements: multiplayer-based narrative with parkour-style movement. It does so with some better success, however. For one, it makes no attempt to deceive its players: Titanfall is all multiplayer, baby. There is a campaign, but it's not single player. Instead, it's your standard multiplayer match with a story-infused mission briefing in the game lobby before the match begins. Each map is a different mission with a unique intro. You're not just jumping out of a dropship. You're discovering an abandoned colony. Or watching as a drunken pilot is being shoved into a sewer hole for safe keeping. Then, throughout the match, NPCs chime in with updates about not only how the match is going but how it affects the world outside the map. Depending on how well your team is doing, their scripted chatter's going to change. 

Now, Titanfall's narrative isn't going to challenge your notions about the human condition and what it is to be a thinking individual with agency. Most reviewers weren't big on it, like Tina Amini who showed little love for the paper-thin storyline in her Kotaku review. But Respawn's effort is a step in a good direction if not a significantly large step. And maybe not the strict "right" direction, but its potential does make me feel warm and fuzzy. Respawn makes starting the match a little more interesting by giving each match context. You're not just shooting other soldiers. You're capturing a giant railgun to sic on some spaceships. If your team loses the match, guess who's getting introduced to Mr. Giant Space Cannon. These aren't just random acts of coordinated violence: they're part of a larger picture. You're part of a larger picture. 

But if you couldn't give less of a shit about context or a big picture, you can go into "classic" mode where you can just get down and dirty. Ditch the pretense of story for what you really bought the game for: to humiliate strangers and tell them what you did to their moms.

Titanfall: Did it Fall Too Late?

Titanfall comes out this week and if you haven't heard, it's a real treat. What I mean to say is, I hope it changes the scope of the first person shooter today substantially. In an industry inundated with military shooters such as the bombastic and cinematic Call of Duty series or simulation-heavy ARMA games, we're trapped in this limbo between the worlds of realism and entertainment. The guns in Call of Duty all have real life counterparts, and if you speak to a teenager who puts in most of his time on the game's online multiplayer, he might start talking like a damn gunsmith. 

Thankfully, Titanfall dodges that bullet with a backflip. Based on what I played of the beta, it's damn enjoyable. It's fast-paced and Respawn Entertainment changes the formula of the military shooter significantly by adding a z-axis. Each player is deployed with a jetpack. Not a new development, you may say. True. And while it doesn't allow for Tribes-scale jump distances, it does give the player enough mobility to run along walls and climb up the tops of buildings and giant robots--

It took me too long to talk about the giant robots. The titular titans are the giant robots to which I refer. Giant robots that you can jump onto and jump into, shooting up grunts and bipedal drones and other giant robots. This is a game that I've wanted ever since I first saw Gundam Wing when I was a kid but never quite got. Sure, there was the Dreamcast game Gundam Side Story 0079: Rise from the Ashes, which I rented along with a Dreamcast numerous times from my local video store. But I could never drop out of my mobile suit and tread the ground on foot. Though why would you want to when you've got five-story robots stomping around and being generally loud?

It's a formula I'd like to believe the games industry has been meditating on for a while but not quite sure how to get it right. The obvious problem is that giant robots could easily overcome foot soldiers because, oh I dunno, they're giant robots. But Titanfall might've gotten it right. The robots aren't too giant--they're bigger than a person but they're only as tall as a two-story building. And while their weaponry is designed to give squishy humans and steel-plated robots equally bad days, they're susceptible to a sneaky enemy pilot jumping on the back and shooting inner components because that feels right. 

So where has this game been? Why are we just now getting it? Did we have to suffer through a plague of generic military shooters before we got the one that might deliver us from boredom? Now I admit, Call of Duty is an easy target. You don't put a game out every year in the same franchise and proclaim to reinvent the shooty wheel. And it would be remiss to ignore the Call of Duty DNA built into Titanfall: unlockable attachments, competitive team-based multiplayer, nearly identical controls. It should all make sense--they're both birthed from the same parents. 

But this kid's got something different. Something promising. It's like the gene pool is evolving. Why keep our players glued to the ground? Why force them to use the stairs when it comes to getting to the top floor? I want to believe this is the start of something beautiful. I don't have to have another game with giant robots (though I'll certainly take one). But the freedom of movement available to players in Titanfall should be a sign of something. 

We've been moving towards this. Slowly, but surely. Mirror's Edge introduced parkour sensibilities to the first-person perspective. Unfortunately, parkour alone does not a game make. And even then, the controls still felt clunky. You can't have clunk when you're trying to move like David Belle. Respawn recognized that and built on that with controls that were at one time just meant to just run and shoot. But now they mantle over rooftops and run across walls like you took the red pill. 

If only everybody in the industry could take that same pill.