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October 2009 Archives

The Plan is in effect

I've re­cently started re-watch­ing the en­tire Bat­tlestar Galac­tica se­ries from the be­gin­ning, and I'm find­ing it sur­pris­ingly awe­some con­sid­er­ing I al­ready know how it plays out. A big part of what made BSG great is all the lit­tle in­ter­ac­tions be­tween the char­ac­ters, and these are first things you for­get. So, I've still got a lot to enjoy.

I watched The Plan on Blu-ray today. In it, you fol­low two Cav­ils while they plot and ex­e­cute their plan to de­stroy hu­man­ity. It takes a lot of the mem­o­rable mo­ments of sus­pense from the minis­eries and sea­son one—when you knew some­thing was hap­pen­ing but weren't given all the de­tails, or when you sus­pected some­one of being a Cylon, etc.—and ex­pands them to show you what was re­ally hap­pen­ing using a lot of old ma­te­r­ial is used to seam­lessly tran­si­tion into the Cy­lons' point of view.

I'm re­ally sad to say that the only part I liked about The Plan was Dean Stock­well's frakkin' amaz­ing act­ing and Bear's equally great score. The Plan has a lot of prob­lems. First and fore­most is that it's lit­er­ally a recap of the minis­eries and sea­son one -- there's no new story. If I had to guess, 25 to 50% of the scenes were ac­tu­ally old aired footage. An­other prob­lem is that all those great mo­ments lost their sus­pense by being ex­panded. And the last major prob­lem is that the new ma­te­r­ial fo­cuses on the "bad" Cy­lons. This seems like a re­ally great idea at first, but what I quickly re­al­ized is that the TV show never made us con­nect with them and as a re­sult I had trou­ble car­ing at all about their scenes. Most of the time I was just hop­ing my fa­vorite human char­ac­ters or "good" Cy­lons would get on screen and give me all those lit­tle in­ter­ac­tions I talked about.

Purely as a BSG geek, there was some in­ter­est­ing new in­for­ma­tion to learn. But bot­tom line? I was bored. I wouldn't rec­om­mend this to any­one. I'm re­ally sorry to say it too, be­cause I and so many oth­ers were look­ing for­ward to it.

More Ice Caverns updates

A new pair of videos is out, this time show­cas­ing an an­cient tomb in Soul's Ab­solute Zero cam­paign for Left 4 Dead. The area's de­sign draws from a lot of an­cient civ­i­liza­tions to cre­ate a unique yet fa­mil­iar look that makes you imag­ine what it was like in its orig­i­nal state. Even though it's not done yet, the ar­chi­tec­ture still looks pretty awe­some!

Dur­ing the mak­ing of the video we couldn't stop play­ing around as hunters. The area quickly re­minded me of some of the freestyle trick maps for Quake where there is no par­tic­u­lar goal, only at lot of stuff to play with. We began mak­ing tricks more and more com­plex and were hav­ing so much fun that I recorded a few of them for the start of the video. De­spite con­sist­ing of a mere three pounces, the mid­dle jump was by far the hard­est to pull off, re­quir­ing snap aim, tim­ing, and air con­trol all within a quick few sec­onds.

Valve's orig­i­nal idea for Left 4 Dead was to make it a game of who sur­vived the longest, not who sur­vived. They didn't go through with that idea, but it's one that we've al­ways liked. One of the first de­ci­sions Soul made when cre­at­ing this cam­paign is that it would be much harder than Valve's cam­paigns. Even ex­pe­ri­enced teams shouldn't ex­pect to sur­vive with­out some re­ally ex­cel­lent strat­egy and team­work. I know a lot of play­ers seem to think that fun means win­ning and win­ning means never dying and fin­ish­ing with a score of 8000 to 300, so this map might not ap­peal to all crowds. For peo­ple who enjoy a real chal­lenge, I think this cam­paign will have a lot to offer.

If any map­pers, mod­el­ers, or tex­ture artists are out there, Soul could use your help! He's cho­sen such a dif­fer­ent art de­sign that most of Left 4 Dead's pre-made stuff isn't going to work.

The first level of the map can cur­rently be down­loaded from L4Dmaps. This sec­ond level is about 80% of the way to­ward a basic beta ver­sion.

Dollhouse might get cancelled?

Doll­house fin­ished its first sea­son with pretty poor rat­ings, with Fox de­cid­ing the only rea­son to keep it on air is DVD sales of Joss Whe­don's shows are al­ways high. Fox did de­cide to trim some fat, though, choos­ing to can­cel the more ex­pen­sive Ter­mi­na­tor: The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles in­stead. The sec­ond sea­son pre­miered a few weeks ago to even worse rat­ings, at the bot­tom of the charts with the sec­ond episode even being beat by re­runs.

Ap­par­ently there is now real talk of can­celling Doll­house mid-sea­son. I can't say I'm sur­prised. Peo­ple have blamed the Fri­day night death slot, while oth­ers blame los­ing Ter­mi­na­tor: TSCC as a lead in.

My­self, I just don't think it's a good show. I'm a huge fan of Joss' other shows— Buffy, Angel, and Fire­fly were all frakkin' fan­tas­tic, along with all of the comics. Doll­house just doesn't cut it, though. I re­ally can see the po­ten­tial for an in­ter­est­ing story, but it has thus far been tak­ing the ir­ri­tat­ing Lost ap­proach of only spend­ing 5 min­utes of every episode to ad­vance the over­all story. This might work in Lost, but with Doll­house in­tro­duc­ing new char­ac­ters (though played by the same peo­ple) every week it be­comes very hard to in­vest in.

Most fans agree that the DVD-only bud­get episode "Epi­taph One" is the best in the whole last sea­son, and that doesn't do much of any help if it was only on DVD. I had hope that sea­son 2 would quickly ad­vance the sto­ry­line into some­thing more like "Epi­taph One", but so far we've just had more wasted mon­ster-of-the-week time. Ter­mi­na­tor: TSCC was an in­cred­i­ble show, I think much bet­ter than Doll­house, and it re­ally sad­dens me to know it died for this. Un­for­tu­nately due to the way TV is filmed so far ahead of when it airs, there's not much quick ad­just­ing that can be done to save it ei­ther.

Should Doll­house be saved? I think Joss would even­tu­ally be able to pick up the pieces to make it in­ter­est­ing, but I can't help won­der if it would be best to just cut it now and let him move on to some­thing new. Prefer­ably with more Amy Acker hint hint.