Tell Me a Story: Deception

This, the penultimate episode, basically just moves all the pieces into place for the climax. Put everyone in a position where a violent confrontation is the only possible resolution and then somehow get them all into the same location. Yes, all three stories are going to be "connected" by coincidentally resolving at the same place and time. OK, there are other connections, but they're really not important at all. And I still think it would have worked better to tell each story separately, even with these connections, because that would have given us the opportunity to put the pieces together as we watched the second and third stories.

Tell Me a Story: Truth

They're actually starting to show the connections between the stories now, although the Red Riding Hood one is pretty tenuous. And despite it still being very slow, I am enjoying this show, even if the fairy tale gimmick doesn't really add anything.

Quick Game Reviews 7

Playing more games, making more snap judgements.

Five quick game reviews

I've been trying out some new games again. Somehow I keep ending up with a bunch of games I have no memory of in my games library. Most of them aren't worth having, even though they were free.

Tell Me a Story: Betrayal

After a very slow start, things are actually moving at a decent pace now. But I'm still not sure what direction they're going. The fairy tale links remain as tenuous as ever and we're still left frustratingly in the dark about a lot of things. Some of that is because the protagonists are equally confused, which is fine, but they've also started concealing things from the audience that the characters we're watching do know, and that's annoying.

Doctor Who: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

Another absolute nothing of an episode. I guess they were sort of trying to make mystery out of it but it was just terribly contrived and resolved in a completely meaningless way. I think we're also supposed to care about Tim Shaw from Demtel episode one coming back, but, uh, why? He was basically the platonic ideal of "generic villain". The thing with him collecting a tooth from each of of his victims sounds like an interesting hook, but it's not actually relevant to anything and it ends up making him look pretty dumb a lot of the time.

Do Not Poor Tea Into the Mystery Cup

It's sitting between the teapot and the dirty dishes and you can't remember why.

Star Trek: Discovery - The Brightest Star

Saru is duuuuumb. Not as in he's a dumb person who does dumb things, I mean the character concept. This episode is also dumb. And it makes the Federation look dumb. Straight from one of the best Star Trek episodes ever to, well, not the worst but it's bad.

Tell Me a Story: Guilt

The pace is definitely picking up now (except in Red Riding Hood's story which is still the weakest of the three by far) but mixing the three together still makes them feel pretty slow. Like, a decent amount of stuff happened in this episode but because it was in three unconnected stories it doesn't feel like very much.

'Mite as Well

Vegemite is great. But it's not the only product of its kind - far from it. English people will often argue the superiority of Marmite, but they're not talking about the same product Australians know as Marmite, and there's even more than those three. I've heard of the various other versions, even eaten a couple of them before, but I've never done a proper comparison. So I went down to my local shop and grabbed one of each.

Doctor Who: It Takes You Away

This episode is just a mess. There are several directions it could have gone in, but instead it's just a bunch of random shit thrown together for no reason. There's sort of a mystery, but the solution is just some meaningless technobabble. There's sort of an adventure, but the characters just sort of wander through it without ever facing any real adversity. There's obviously supposed to be some emotional impact, but it's incredibly forced and artificial so it doesn't work at all. Nothing works in this episode.

Tell Me a Story: Madness

A bunch of stuff happened this time, and I'm sort of starting to see where the fairy tale influences come in. It's pretty tenuous and I'm still not sure what the point of it is though. There's definitely not enough there to say that they're based on the fairy tales. And it still makes no sense to have all three stories going on at once.

Doctor Who: The Witchfinders

This episode couldn't have annoyed me more if it had been intentional. The cast is great and the monsters look really cool, but the story is garbage. Nothing makes sense, the dialogue is incredibly annoying, and even the bits that could have worked don't because they take full advantage of every lazy shortcut instead of bothering to come up with plausible reasons for anything to happen.

Tell Me a Story: Rage

This show would be so much better if they'd just done each story separately instead of cutting between them. And also just not done Red Riding Hood's story. But mainly doing each story separately, because then they wouldn't feel so slow. Because each one only gets an average of 15 minutes a week there's just not time for much to happen. The stories aren't even connected. It's basically just three shows cut up and mixed together.

Doctor Who: Kerblam!

This was a decent episode. There are a couple of things about it that I found very irritating, but mostly it was good. For a kids' show, anyway. The "twists" (such as they are) aren't going to surprise any adult viewers, but I doubt the target audience found it quite so easy to predict. My only major criticism is that it seemed like it was heading toward a particular message only to back off at the last moment, which made the point of the episode a little unclear.

Tell Me a Story: Greed

This show isn't actually bad. It's not particularly good, but it's better than some of the shit I watch. It just isn't what it's supposedly meant to be. The stories and characters just have absolutely nothing to do with the fairy tales they're apparently based on. It's also kind of slow - not boring, just not a lot happens in each episode.

Doctor Who: Demons of the Punjab

In some ways, this episode wasn't as bad as the last one, mostly because it was just kind of boring. And the aliens were completely pointless. If you cut them out of the story it would be exactly the same, you'd just save some time.

Lessons from Lone Wolf: Choice and Consequence

I've been running a group playthrough (or let's play) of the Lone Wolf gamebook series on the Something Awful forums, and I've gone over the books in some depth in order to provide extra information and to attempt to make some bits work a little better (eg. not letting us get into stupid dead-man-walking states). In doing this I've come away with a few lessons that anyone thinking about writing a gamebook should follow. Here are some of them, in no particular order.

Star Trek: Discovery - Calypso

This was the best episode of Discovery so far. It wasn't a unique or original story - I'm fairly certain I've read and/or watched multiple versions of it before - but it was well-executed and enjoyable. My only criticism would be that it ties into the main series in an odd way that I don't think is going to be paid off well, but that's a bit transtextual. Taken on its own, this is a fully self-contained story and you could watch and enjoying it without knowing the first thing about Discovery or even any of Star Trek.

Tell Me a Story: Loss

This show is slooooow. Barely anything actually happened in this episode. There's sort of some escalating tension but it's at a pretty low level. I think a big part of the problem is that we don't know any of the characters well enough to care about them. I'm not even sure who we're supposed to be siding with in the three pigs story. You'd think it would be the guy whose girlfriend was just killed (the wolf?), but the show seems to want us to care at least as much about the criminals (the pigs). And the three stories still seem completely separate, so it's not clear why they're all being told together.

Doctor Who: The Tsuranga Conundrum

This episode was about 50% mediocre and 50% bad. In fact, if not for the bad bits, it would be utterly generic and forgettable, so basically the only things I'm going to remember about it are bad and if I remember it at all it will be as a bad episode. So actually it's bad episode. I didn't like it.

Tell Me a Story: Hope

"The world's most beloved fairy tales re-imagined as a dark and twisted psychological thriller. Set in modern day New York City, the first season of this serialised drama interweaves The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel into an epic and subversive tale of love, loss, greed, revenge and murder." - TV Calendar.

I assumed, based on the description, that I was in for some kind of teen supernatural action romance. Something like Lost Girl or Wynonna Earp. Probably everyone would look like normal humans most of the time because of budget and there'd be a lot of love triangles and misunderstandings. This show is not that at all. I'm not sure what it is.

Doctor Who: Arachnids in the UK

Not a fan of this one. Kind of the opposite of last week's, in that I think the concept is good but the execution was bad. It's basically a Captain Planet episode, except that they forgot to make the bad guy actually bad. Don't get me wrong, he's a complete arsehole, but he's not actually wrong. About anything.

Doctor Who: Rosa

I liked the execution of this episode, I thought it was really well done. But I hate the underlying concept. The idea that the course of history is determined by the actions of particular "great men" (or, as in this case, women) is just dumb. If you're talking about events on a personal scale, "don't change the past" is a great rule, because something as unlikely as the existence of a specific individual would be really easy to affect. But if Rosa Parks hadn't been on that specific bus on that specific day then the whole American civil rights movement would have been derailed? Come on. I'm not buying it.

Doctor Who: The Ghost Monument

Like I said last time, this episode was better than the first one. I kind of hoped they weren't going to find the TARDIS so quickly, because a few episodes of them hitching rides to various places, following its trail, could have been pretty entertaining and would have been a good excuse for the new crew to stick around. A better excuse than "you know how sometimes the Doctor can't pilot the TARDIS accurately? Yeah, that."

Doctor Who: The Woman Who Fell to Earth

I haven't watched Doctor Who since, like, 2011 or something, but with a new head writer I thought it might not be so shit any more. At this point I've watched the first three episodes, and so far it's been mostly OK. Not great, not terrible. I've pretty much decided I'm going to watch the whole season, at least.

Star Trek: Discovery - Runaway

Being so short, there's not a lot to this episode. It's fine, I guess, though it does annoy me that Tilly keeps the whole thing secret, because that's dumb and obviously only happened because they wanted to make the story be just about her - for both creative and budgetary reasons. The real problem there is that if they'd set it outside the ship, she could have had good reasons for dealing with the whole thing herself but it makes no sense on the Discovery.

Red Dwarf: Skipper

Maybe it's because I went into it with the lowest possible expectations, or maybe they just saved the best for last, but this episode was actually almost decent. There was even a funny bit. It was piggy-backing off one of the funniest things that's ever happened in this show, but it was a good reference and executed, well, acceptably. The rest of the episode's jokes were poor at best, but I didn't hate any of it. My biggest problem with the episode was that its premise was far too good to waste on a single episode and should have been the basis for an entire season.

Table For Three

On last week's episode of Raw, Roman Reigns fought Bobby Lashley for the position of #1 contender for the universal title. One of the commentators characterised this as an attempt to win "a date with Brock Lesnar". I thought that was a pretty funny idea.

Salad Girl

This is a story I wrote back in November 2016 that I apparently forgot to post here (because I can't find it now). I thought it was pretty good, so I definitely should have posted it.

Red Dwarf: M-Corp

This episode does that classic sci-fi thing of criticising a real-world issue through an incredibly ham-fisted and implausible analogy. You know, like Black Mirror. Only Black Mirror takes itself seriously and this is pretending not to take itself seriously. I think Doug Naylor wants to write for Black Mirror. Honestly, make a few minor adjustments to the characters and the pacing and this could be a Black Mirror episode.

A famous poem by an Australian author

Sorry I ate your plums.

They were real good but.

More quick looks at games

Catan (10 mins)

I've played this game in real life and I know it's not that complex, but this version of it is fucking impossible to get into. If you already know the rules of the game it's probably fine, but if you don't then good fucking luck getting through the insanely long and disorganised rules/tutorials. I might end up finding a copy of the rules online and trying again, but I'm not dealing with the hassle of trying to learn this way.

Ironclads: American Civil War (50 mins)

I can't believe I spent so long on this. This is the most tedious thing. I think I killed five ships, but they kind of just disappeared so I'm only guessing. The game gives you basically no information or feedback on anything so it's impossible to say if I was doing the right thing or not. I was just driving my boats around in circles firing cannons at other boats until there was only one enemy boat left and it just wouldn't die so I gave up and quit.

Talisman: Digital Edition (2 hours)

The same as the board game, which is to say pretty fun but with one huge, enormous, glaring flaw: it goes on for-fucking-ever. If you told me that no one had ever successfully finished a game of Talisman I would believe you. I played for two hours before I got sick of it and no one even looked like they were close to winning, least of all me.

Small World 2 (10 mins)

Seems to be a fairly good adaptation of a board game I've never heard of, but I don't know how to play it and the tutorial is broken, so I can't really say. I might find the rules at some point and give it another go.

Magnifico (25 mins)

Another strategy board game. Relatively straight-forward. Probably one of those games where you get the basic rules pretty quickly but it takes a lot more to actually get good at it. I'd probably enjoy this as an actual board game with other people but I'm not sure I'm that into it as a computer game as it's not really something I can just sit down and play for half an hour without really getting into it and learning its complexities first.

<< More of the Steam backlog

Five quick game reviews >>

Red Dwarf: Mechocracy

I actually timed it this time. it takes about 13 minutes (of a 28 minutes episode) for the actual plot to start. The entire first half of the episode is set-up. And if you're wondering if the pay-off is worth it, you haven't been reading these reviews. To its credit, I didn't find this episode as offensive as the previous ones, but I'm not sure that's the tag line they'd go with for the advertising.

Agents of Mayhem: First impressions

I've been meaning to get this game for a while, but held off until it went on sale and I had a bit of spare time. Well, it's my holidays and it just went on sale, and I'm certainly glad I didn't pay full price for it. Actually, it seems like it might end up being pretty fun, but it's hard to tell I've played an hour and a half of it, and I'm just sort of starting to figure out what's going on and what I'm doing.

Red Dwarf: Timewave

It's been a while (almost eight months, in fact) since I started watching this season but it's only six episodes long so I thought I might as well try to finish it. Guess what? It's still real bad. It's interesting that I concluded my last review by saying that the theme of the episode seemed to be that criticism is bad, because the message of this episode is the exact opposite of that. In fact, insulting and belittling people is good... because otherwise they might be happy and confident?

More of the Steam backlog

I tried a few more of the games I've bought but not played.

More short reviews of games I barely played

I have a bunch of school stuff to do in the next couple of weeks but I finished my last essay early so I earned myself a little bit of breathing room, and since I have way too many unplayed games in my Steam library I thought it seemed like a good time to briefly try out a few games to see if they're worth playing more of.

Star Trek: Discovery - Will You Take My Hand?

So, the last episode. It was OK. The story was garbage, but some cool stuff happened. And it does reset the status-quo in a way that allows for season two to be much, much better. I wouldn't recommend the first season at all, but I'm going to watch season two.

Star Trek: Discovery - The War Without, The War Within

I have no idea how they're going to wrap this up in one episode, because nothing happened in this one. Or practically nothing. Maybe they're just setting it up for the next season, but if so then I don't think next season's going to be any good at all.

Star Trek: Discovery - What's Past Is Prologue

A pretty good episode. For this show, at least. It was all fairly predictable but only because it was the resolution to events that had already been set in motin, so there weren't supposed to be any surprises. A bit too much time spent on a big Arrow-style fight scene, but overall a good conclusion to the mirror universe stuff.

Star Trek: Discovery - Vaulting Ambition

This show thinks it's a lot cleverer than it is. This episode might have been OK if it actually was as clever as it thinks it is, but as it stands it's all style and no substance. The mirror universe is still cool - even the gold uniforms are growing on me - but basically nothing happens. Nothing we didn't know was going to happen as of the end of the last episode, anyway.

Star Trek: Discovery - The Wolf Inside

Two good episodes in a row, and they're still in the evil universe. I'm not going to say this show is overall good yet, but it's certainly looking up. Of course, they could ruin it any minute by returning to the regular universe and going straight back to how it was before.

Marvel's Runaways - Hostile

Well, that's over. And despite a pretty strong start, I don't think I'll be watching season two. Because this is where we should have been by episode three or four. The show's just been spinning its wheels for far too long and I'm bored.

Star Trek: Discovery - Despite Yourself

Star Trek's evil mirror universe is dumb in the best way. Everything about it is ridiculous and it shouldn't work, but it does. And of course that's where the crew of the Discovery find themselves in this episode. We don't get to see any evil versions of them, but the good versions do dress up as their evil counterparts and it's awesome. A bit too much gold on the captains' uniforms, but otherwise the evil uniforms are great.

Marvel's Runaways - Doomsday

I feel I'm being pretty repetitive at this point, but that's just the nature of this show, apparently. Nothing continues to happen.

Marvel's Runaways - Tsunami

Things just keep not happening in this show, don't they? I feel like we're in the same position now as we were at the end of the previous episode. It's all hints and allusions and nothing concrete. Mysteries built on mysteries without any solutions or resolutions. What are the parents trying to do? No idea. How does the formerly old guy fit in? He seems to be kind of in charge of the whole thing but most of the parents don't seem to know who he is or what he wants - but they've been doing these sacrifices to keep him alive for years? The kids are no closer to doing anything at all. It's entertaining to watch but as soon as each episode's over you just find yourself thinking "wait, what actually happened in this episode?"