Entertainment

The Queen has ordered a DVD box set of the latest Doctor Who series for her summer holiday. She has become a huge fan of the hit BBC show starring Christopher Ecclestone and has reportedly followed the show since it began in 1963 with William Hartnell as the first of nine actors to play the time-travelling hero. By tradition, broadcasters give members of the Royal family recordings of their favourite programmes before they are available in the shops on video or DVD. But a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace said last night: The Queen’s television viewing is a personal matter and we are unable to discuss it

It is a work of art that truly represents the nadir of film making; a movie so bad that it’s good. It has been labelled The Worst Movie Ever by the Golden Turkey Awards and is also the winner of two notable Razzies. Ed Wood’s classic movie Plan 9 from Outer Space is now in the public domain and available as a free download thanks to the fine folks over at Archive.org — via Slashdot

Did the book geek thing last night and went to a Neil Gaiman book signing. A hell of a lot more people there than when I accidentally fell over a signing at Kings Comics many moons ago.

He was really sweet, if looking totally shagged out from an insane schedule.

I picked up the Mirrormask script book, got my first and last issues of Sandman signed, am kicking myself for forgetting to bring Good Omens (which appears to have vanished into the depths of the bookcase) and my copy of NeverWhere now says Mind the Gap.

He said there’s a new edition of NeverWhere due out in September with more bits in it.
Books Kinokuniya wanted to get him a gift for doing the signing, but he politely refused. Instead they decided to get everyone who came along to write a note in a book for him. I mentioned his brush with Cthulhu at WorldCon in Boston last year

Actor James Doohan, who transported the crew of the original Star Trek television series through space on the command Beam me up, Scotty, has died at the age of 85

The always enjoyable gpod has Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy available for download:

The Complete 12 Episode Original Radio Series
The Tertiary Phase
The Quandary and Quintessential Phases

If you look in the board / card game aisle of your local department store, you’ll quickly notice that most of the games there are over thirty years old. Lets see now, we’ve got Sorry (1934), Monopoly (1903), Cluedo (1946). Some of the card games are bit fresher: Mille Bornes is from 1954, and Uno first appeared in 1971.

With that in mind, one might wonder what’s been happening in the world of board games in the last fifteen years or so (i.e. since computer and videogames became popular). The surprising answer is that Germany has been going through a board gaming boom due, a drunken traveller told me the other night, to winter being ‘cold and dark’. As it is now getting a bit colder and darker around our way, the time seems ripe to discuss some German games of interest.

Throughout this blurb I refer mainly to two sites: boardgamegeek.com (a repository of board game knowledge) and games.unhalfbricking.com, an Australian online board game store.

First up is Carcassonne, winner of the 2001 Spiel des Jahres (German game of the year). This was the first German game I got my hands on, and it blew me away with how different it was from the Parker Brothers style games mentioned above. The first thing that struck me about it was the quality of the playing pieces: the pawns (known to fans as meeples) are wooden rather than plastic, and the tiles are made of thick line-backed card printed in full colour. And the rules not only cover how to play, but also contain colour photographs demonstrating how ambiguous moves should be resolved.

The basic idea of the game is that each player places tiles (containing sections of roads, cities, and farms) in order to form a SimCity type map of the Carcassonne region. As tiles are played, meeples may be placed on them in order to claim the roads, cities, and farms (and the associated points) for a particular player. If you’re looking for a light and friendly first game to ease yourself into more sophisticated modern board games, this would be a good start. Unhalfbricking sells it for A$35. It plays well with 2 to 4 players, so it’s pretty flexible.

If you want something a bit more challenging, China is one of my favourite German games. It’s another good example of the kind of production quality you can expect from the genre: full colour board and cards, one hundred cut and painted wooden pieces, clear and concise full colour rulebook. It’s basically a game of area majority, where you play cards to place your pieces into an area of the board so that you outnumber the other players there. If that sounds interesting, you can read my full review on boardgamegeek.com. This is a game to consider if you like games of skill and confrontation (chess, Risk etc) but are looking for something with no dice for three to five players. It’s a cruel game, but it plays quickly, so the tears of your loved ones will be brief. Unhalfbricking has it for A$50.

Reiner Knizia is the most prolific board game designer, and is considered by many to be the best. The most recent addition to my stack of Knizia games is Samurai, a tile-laying game set in feudal Japan. Samurai is beautiful to behold, with black plexiglass buddhas and a deco-style map that adds more islands to the archipelago as you increase the number of players. Unlike Carcassonne, it’s an influence game, where the tiles you place represent your political and military force being brought to bear on the peasantry, nobility, and religious leaders that are on the map. It’s a very simple game to learn, but it has some of the classic character of Go, as the struggle for territory moves back and forth across the board. Highly recommended.

On to card games now, and one game in particular that everyone seems to enjoy is Bohnanza, the game of trading, planting, and harvesting beans. People are usually lukewarm to the theme, but once you put some cards in their hand they start trading soy beans for green beans as if their very lives depended on it!

Bohnanza has some really clever mechanics that make it a cut above most other card games I have come across. Everyone can trade beans with the active player and also harvest beans at any time, so there’s no looking at your watch and waiting for your turn — you’re playing all the time. Additionally you must play your cards in the order in which they were dealt to you, which encourages everyone to get involved so that they can trade away their unwanted cards. Another great mechanism is the way the game handles income from bean sales: you flip over the sold cards and there’s money printed on the reverse.

You can get it for A$35 from Unhalfbricking. The game supports up to seven players, but the two player game is a variant. A 3 to 7 player game should take somewhere between 45 minutes and 1 hour 15 minutes.

A popular card game for couples is Lost Cities (also by Knizia). It’s basically a game of card counting and compromise, with a rather thin India Jones theme tacked onto it. The components are of excellent quality: big tarot sized cards, and a folding board with areas for the game’s five discard piles. There’s not much more to it than playing cards in numerical order or discarding them, but there are so many choices to be made that the game is strangely addictive. This is a good game to try with relatives that might be confused by a more complex German game with a zillion wooden cubes in it. A$40 from Unhalfbricking.

If the above games sound a bit too light and fluffy for you, a more complex German card game to consider is San Juan. In this game the cards pull triple duty as buildings, money, and trade goods. For example, I might discard two cards to pay for (play) a sugar mill card, which will later produce sugar (a face down card atop the sugar mill) which can then be sold (in a fluctuating market represented by cardboard price tokens) to bring in fresh cards as income. On each turn, the active player chooses a role for all of the players to play out: the prospector draws a random card, the councillor seeks a specific card, the builder builds a structure (e.g. sugar mill), the producer generates trade goods (e.g. sugar), and the trader sells goods. The role selection mechanism is fiendish, and players will try to choose the builder when their opponents are broke, or the trader when their opponents have no goods to sell. If that’s not enough for you, San Juan is actually a simplified version of Puerto Rico, an even more complex board game. Unhalfbricking has San Juan for A$40.

Henry Warwick has been actively involved with the creation and performance of electronic music since the mid 1970s, when he first delved into musique concrète techniques in high school. Always experimenting with new ideas, sounds, and techniques, he works with a variety of materials ranging from the completely digital realm of computer music in Max/MSP to much more organic and acoustic practices, such as the Armenian duduk.

He has decided to release the bulk of his music to the public for free download.

Go. Listen. Enjoy — via S P A R K !

Apparently not all of the DVDs that sell for one or two dollars are crap — it seems that a lot of good movies never got copyrighted properly. But there’s no silent movies (not mass market) or movies that aren’t family friendly. None of the DVD companies mentioned in the article sell online — it’s all though discount bins in supermarkets

I have seen Global Frequency and it is good.

Despite being a raw cut to sell to the monkeys at Warner Bros — who apparently wouldn’t know a good show if it bit them on the arse — the pilot still looks awesome. Some of the external sounds, like car doors and engines, were yet to be editted in and sounded a little tinny. The GF ringtone was a placeholder that would have a proper composition later; Warren Ellis was hoping for Aphex Twin, which would have been both amazing and disturbing.

The cast rocked. My only complaint there was the horrible American, cloned cuteness that US network execs seem to demand. I’d have preferred something more gritty. Aleph was so watered-down, I didn’t recognise her at first. That said, Michelle Forbes portrayal of Miranda Zero was perfection. She looked and sounded spot on, plus, she got to go all Emma Peel on the boys, which is always a good thing. You can never have too many women in leather throwing men about.
I was wondering why it looked like they’d opted to run with two leads instead of the constant rotation of guests that the original comic used and screenwriter John Rogers explained:

In order to have some semblance of continuity for network audiences, I needed some viewpoint characters — but it couldn’t be Miranda, because you never knew what was going on in her head. As a matter of fact, part of the entire five-season arc was that you were never sure what Miranda was up to … So we were going to use Josh and Jenni as the focal characters, but toss in a rotating cast of guest characters to be the expert of the week. Neatly, of somebody hit, I could then have built them up into recurring. Then, if the audience really started to like them … I’d kill them.

I guess now the weird thing is that a show that never was has developed a fanbase. You’ve got to love the internets.

The spy was definitely not called Bond, for that name is not among the military officers selected 40 years ago to conduct reconnaissance missions for the US from an orbital laboratory in space. But secret agent Bond shares a number — 007 — with one of the US spies-in-training. Space historians are trying to find out who the mystery man is after his spacesuit turned up, along with an identical outfit bearing number 008, in an abandoned space agency (Nasa) blockhouse last used to launch Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom into space in 1961 — via Warren Ellis