12 Aug 08
As I get older, I never cease to be amazed at the petty selfishness of your average human being as he or she goes about their daily tasks. I just popped up to the post office and, as often happens, all the streets within quick walking distance were bumper-to-bumper with parked cars. Except, that is, for one space which could have comfortably accommodated two and a half cars, which a woman had just parked her 4WD smack bang in the middle of. As she walked from her car I pulled up and politely mentioned that she had taken up two large spaces and that it wasn’t very considerate.
Of course, the modern method of dealing with any problem that is your fault immediately kicked in–denial. Not “you know, you’re right, I wasn’t thinking” or a slightly embarrassed “whoops, sorry, I’ll repark”. No, she gazed like a stunned mullet at her car and muttered some excuse about needing the room to back up. I kid you not, if she needed that amount of room to park, she must spend half her life looking for parking spaces in Sydney. I sighed, said “forgedabouddit” and drove off. I found a place to park a few streets away. Hell, at least I got a little exercise.
Now, is it just me that finds that selfishness annoying? Every time I park my car I think about other people, making sure that I’m not taking up unnecessary space that can be used by others.
#46873 of a continuing series.
Grumpy Rants grumpy
30 Jul 08
Starbucks announced today that they were closing 71 outlets in Australia, in part due to Australia’s “sophisticated coffee culture” (ie, we can actually tell the difference between crap coffee and good coffee).
It’s times like these that put my faith back in Australians. It broke my heart to see the cloying corporate culture of Starbucks start to spring up in Sydney. Now if we can only get rid of the bloody Gloria Jean chain, a Starbucks wanna-be run by the Hillsong evangelical church, we can get back to enjoying good coffee in cafes run by locals.
Opinions
17 Jul 08
Work is almost finished on Tales of the Arabian Nights, the big game design project I’ve been working on for Z-Man Games. Finally, the cover is confirmed:
Box cover
[click image to enlarge]
The cover features three illustrations from the original 1912 edition of Arabian Nights illustrated by the wonderful artist René Bull.
Since my first preview, I’ve done more work on the cards and improved them somewhat. The card front design has been simplified a bit, and the type of card is now shown on it. These types may yet be differentiated more, probably by colour.
This sample city card shows how players can easily find the location of a city both by a thumbnail image of the board and an image of the city and surrounding area.
This status card gives you a sample of the many wonderful and horrible things that can happen to adventuring characters. And of course there are many creatures and people to encounter in the world of the Arabian Nights: for example, this card and this card–not to mention the 3,000 or so paragraphs in the Book of Tales!
Fortunately, there are many wonderous treasures to be found as rewards for the brave and lucky–here’s just one of the many. All the encounter and treasure cards are illustrated by the talented Dan Harding.
And finally, a look at the entire board, close to final approval. Hope you like it, even if the sea isn’t blue. Note that I was careful to put the numbers for the score tracks outside the actual spaces!
Board
[click image to enlarge]
Hopefuly you’ll all grab a copy of this great game when it’s released–I know I’m looking forward to playing …
Board & Miniatures Games Tales of the Arabian Nights
01 Jul 08
Warning: some spoilers!
Well folks, I finally got to see Indy IV—despite the fact my original plan to see it in luxury La Premiere style (comfy chairs, waiter service, bottle of wine) was scuppered by family visits and various other commitments. Instead, I took an afternoon off work, swallowed my pride and went alone to Hoyts where, as usual, you get treated like scum that they must begrudgingly provide with a minimal service in exchange for being fleeced (already it’s on the ‘put it in the loungeroom-sized cinema for those few losers who didn’t see it in the first two weekends’ list).
But this isn’t the place to enumerate my numerous complaints with the soul-sucking Hoyts chain of cinemas; that’s for a later post. This is about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the one film all us life-long Indiana Jones fans have been champing at the bit to see, the return of our beloved hero and his whip-cracking adventures. And the verdict?
Meh.
Oh, it’s OK. It’s light, predictable fun. I had a good time, walked out of the cinema, and promptly forgot all about it. Because you could beat yourself senseless agonising about all the things this film could have been. You could scream that that they should have left Indiana to ride off into the sunset at the end of The Last Crusade, that Harrison Ford is too old to play the character anymore, that there’s no magic, no Indiana Jonesness, to the whole exercise. Or you could just pay your money, have a laugh, and forget about it afterwards.
The question is, it the films themselves, or is it us? I watched the 1972 sci-fi film Silent Running by Douglas Trumbull the other night, and it seemed clunky and slow, and in places (especially the Joan Baez songs) silly. When I saw it as a kid that film blew me away. It seems all our old popular culture memories are either being plundered and destroyed, or held up to a light far too bright for them to endure. Nobody has an “I remember that, that was fantastic” moment anymore, because we see all the old films and TV shows again when we buy the lavish DVD box sets, and replace the warm, special glow of childhood with the harsh glare of experienced adulthood.
So maybe I’m too experienced now. When Indiana flies to the Nazca lines in Peru, my ten-year-old self would have been wrapped up in the exotic mystery of such a place. But now I’m 42 and I’ve actually been there myself, and flown over them in a light plane. I know there’s no hill overlooking the spider symbol with an old Peruvian graveyard on the top. Of course suspension of disbelief is all part of the fun, but there are plot holes and unbelievable sequences here that reach out of the screen and slap me in the face.
This brings me to my next question, has it all been done before? Have we seen all the good ideas in cinema, and especially in the ‘wisecracking adventurer’ genre? There’s nothing about the plot in Indy IV that surprised me or that seemed clever or new. There were no memorable lines that people will repeat to each other for decades to come (“snakes … why did it have to be snakes?”) There’s very little wit.
Of course, I have to lay some of the blame at the feet of George Lucas. He seems to see storytelling as a railroad track his characters follow against their will—a bit like Indy strapped to the rocket sled in a sequence at the start of the film. Anakin Skywalker never seemed to make one damned decision in the whole three of those odious Star Wars ‘prequels’. It gets worse here towards the end—Indy and his little Scooby gang go through the motions, not affecting anything around them. Indy doesn’t make a difference, do anything heroic, he just becomes a cardboard cut out following the scriptwriter’s dotted line. He doesn’t do any of what he so famously used to do—“make it up as he goes along”.
There was a lot of potential here. Indy could have been dragged successfully into the 50s, with its McCarthy paranoia, cold war conflict, 50s B-movie aliens. It just needed a script cleverer than this one, which makes perfunctory nods in the direction of these plot devices and then doesn’t go anywhere with them. Cate Blanchett brings a lot of charisma to her sexy Russian, but there’s no chemistry between her in Indy, and nothing is done with her character except fill the boots of bad guy. Shia LaBeouf is a good young actor and there could have been some great father-son stuff with Indy, but it never really happens. Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) could have been Marion Ravenwood instead of the strangely two-dimensional character here. Steven Spielberg still knows how to direct an action sequence, but this time they feel pasted in, with no relevance to anything, and there’s none of that brilliant ratcheting up of the stakes that was done so well with sequences like the flying wing fight in Raiders.
Yep, it could have been a great film. But by some combination of lack of ideas, the feeling we’ve seen it all before, and the fact that I, and the filmmakers, and the actors, are all a lot older—well, it just never gets there.
But I’m still giving it three fedoras out of five. It’s an OK couple of hours, even though Indiana Jones should have been left to ride into the sunset.
Movies and TV Indiana Jones
19 Jun 08
Kindly sent to me via the Reverend.
World religion
15 Jun 08
Update: Excuse me while I wipe the egg off my face–I’ve since been informed that this is not in fact an American government conspiracy, but a setting in Microsoft Outlook my father must have hit by accident. I don’t know if I’m more embarrassed that I jumped to a conspiracy theory conclusion (though let’s face it, call it a terrorist surveillance program and you can do whatever you want), or admitting my father uses Outlook!
My father, who is Australian, has lived in the States for more than 20 years, and has gone from being pro-American in most things to disgusted with the way the country has been run into the ground by Bush and his minions. Here’s a little example of how the Land of the Free treats its citizens these days.
He recently sent an email to my brother and I which contained this paragraph:
“… of course we have this stupid election process to elect a president and that has gone on for about 10 months and has still months to go! I can’t believe how any intelligent country can have such process that is so long it gets boring and and costs millions and millions–Hillary Clinton is already 20 million in debt. Everyone I speak to agrees the process in Oz makes so much more common sense.”
He was checking his ‘Sent’ folder to make sure the email had gone through when he noticed a line written in red at the top of his message that he hadn’t put there. It read:
“This message is being watched.”
I kid you not.
Opinions
14 Jun 08
I meant to post this ages ago but didn’t get around it, along with reviews of Suzanne Vega and Joe Jackson …
Enraptured, like many others I suppose, by Feist’s cheerful ditty 1234 when I saw it advertising the iPod, I went online and checked out some of her videos and was pleasantly surprised to discover a very individual and interesting singer songwriter. They’re becoming a rare breed in this age of cookie-cutter copycat American Idol alumni.
On my birthday my gorgeous girlfriend gave me her latest album and tickets to her Sydney show; a rare opportunity to see an artist live without knowing her material inside and out. It can be a refreshing thing to do, as then the artist’s music immediately takes on that extra dimension of the live experience, though of course it can be risky too.
Thankfully, Feist didn’t disappoint. From the opening bit of shadowplay projection where a lantern is plucked from a tree branch and she came tiptoeing on stage with the lantern in hand like a guilty elf, we were in for something just that little bit different. The show started with an interesting layered vocal track, a technique used effectively several times during the show where Feist sang into a microphone which then looped the vocal lines for instant three and four part harmony accompaniment.
Despite the twin distractions of a bunch of stupid noisy girls playing with their frackin’ mobile phones, and a strangely arctic temperature within the usually comfortable Metro, we enjoyed the show a lot. Though I would like to see her breaking out from the nice ballads a bit more with tracks like Sea Lion, which rocked with the help of scratchy, raw guitar work which brought the Velvet Underground to mind.
Here’s hoping she doesn’t disappear into obscurity. I think she’s been around for a while though and by the sound of the last album has plenty of ideas left yet.
Music
28 May 08
Drusilla curls up with a good book.
Cats religion
23 May 08
Card front and logo
[click image to enlarge]
My next major boardgame design project has been the remake of the 80′s classic part-boardgame, part-roleplaying game, Tales of the Arabian Nights, by Eric Goldberg, to be published by Z-Man Games. There have been two versions of this game–one in English in 1985, and one in German in 2000.
I pushed to get this job because I thought the rich possibilities of the theme had not yet been explored in gaming graphic design. The Arabian Nights is an unique and exciting melieu, but too often it gets a very Westernised fantasy treatment. One of my personal goals was to create artwork that reflected the exotic nature of the Arabian Nights. So the motifs are sourced from Islamic decoration, embellished with glittering metals and colourful jewels. Another big influence were the wonderful ‘Golden Age’ illustrations of such masters as Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and René Bull.
Encounter card
[click image to enlarge]
It was the chapter headings from René Bull’s 1912 edition of the Arabian Nights that inspired the game logo. Using that hand-drawn font as a basis, I reworked the letter forms to arrive at something a bit more readable but still evocative of curvilinear Arabic letterforms.
The mechanic that makes Tales of the Arabian Nights quite different from your usual game is the story–as the players adventure throughout the known world they refer to numbered paragraphs in a Book of Tales that tell an exciting interactive tale–a bit like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. The players’ reactions to the encounters influence and expand the story.
The game has a wealth of cards, many of which refer to these numbered paragraphs. In the Efreet encounter shown, the paragraph referred to depends on the time of day the encounter occurs, either morning, noon or night (or more prosaically, the further along the game has advanced).
Location encounter card
[click image to enlarge]
On location encounter cards, the paragraph number depends on the terrain in which the encounter takes place. One thing I got rid of from the old editions were the fiddly icons that denoted the different locations on the board. Instead, I used coloured gems (also different shapes to assist colourblind players). These correspond to paragraph numbers on the encounter cards. It’s also immediately obvious which type of terrain the gem is in from the colors and illustrative terrain on the board.
City encounter cards refer to specific cities on the board and feature a picture of the location and a random encounter table. There are also many other cards for various player statuses such as ‘love struck’, ‘pursued’ or ‘under geas’.
The card illustrations were done by the talented Dan Harding, whose bold, evocative work dominates the design. Nice work Dan.
The map, of course, was the main design challenge. In previous incarnations the map was painted in a very conservative fashion–green forests, blue seas etc. This new map, a small detail of which is shown, is heavily influenced by ancient cartography, the fascinating subject of several books I own. Hence the parchment look, the more subtle colouring, and the period-accurate style. Instead of little illustrations I have used silhouettes of buildings that match the architectural styles of the cultures, which contrast nicely with the old map look.
Map detail
[click image to enlarge]
There’s still a bit more work to do on this project–laying out a 256+ page Book of Tales for example–but I’m convinced it will be worth the wait. Because this game is such a storytelling, semi-roleplaying one, the object has been to create designs that transport the players to another world, stimulate their imaginations, and immerse them in the exotic, different world of the Arabian Nights. With the aid of research into old Arabian Nights editions, Islamic decoration and ancient cartography, I hope to achieve that goal.
More previews soon!
Board & Miniatures Games Tales of the Arabian Nights
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