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I didn’t think this game was so crash hot, until I was lying in bed thinking, ‘If I placed gun turrets there and there, those aliens’d be toast.’ NB. the flying aliens are a real pain, but the plasma towers take them eat. And the fully-upgraded plasma towers are great! Yes, let’s hear a salute to plasma.
(That said, apparently this one’s a “non-lethal weapon”–it only blinds the victims.)
Ps. I note that here’s the original game that XenoTactic is based on–this one’s better; cuter.
The B, we’re told, “is for bargain!” But when we’re speaking about the recent episodes of Doctor Who that I’ve managed to catch, I think the B should really stand for ‘Not bad, earlier work was superior; must do better.’ Now, I’m a big fan of the Doctor; yet it seems that in recent episodes and story-arcs the writers are trying to accomlish something, and using a particular plot device, and each of these has been done better by the Doctor in the past.
[Two caveats: the aim and the device aren’t connected, I think. Also, I don’t think either of these two complaints is especially significant.]
First, the aim: the writers are trying to make the Doctor seem tougher, harder, more alien–he is the last survivior of Gallifrey, slayer of the Daleks, etc. (Note: the new Daleks are way too powerful. They can fly, they’re unstoppable, and there’s millions of them in the Time Lord prison. I like my Daleks a little more weak, so we can understand more easily why they’re so hysterical all the time. And the best Dalek story ever is ‘Rememberance of the Daleks‘, of course.) Righty-O. So, the Doctor meant to be alien to the viewer, not simply in the biological but in the emotional and spcyhological sense as well. Yet I can’t help but feel that he’s lost a certain capacity for self-reflection. Or, he hasn’t lost the capacity, but all the self-reflection he does seems to be on his relationship with Rose; if there was anything approaching the moral self-examination of his ‘genocide soliloquy’ (’Genesis of the Daleks‘), I missed it. And it’s sorely missed; this quasi-Socratic behaviour–inquiring about the logos of action rather than the thumos of love–made the Doctor human, all too human. [And that’s sufficient pohilosophy wankery from me.]
Second, the device: one way to give characters an alien bent, to make them seem so very unknowable, is to make them fight against ‘crawling space horrors from beyond the depths of time.’ Make them battle spawnful, awful things from when the world was young, and make them know about those things, and be known by them, and this makes the character seem older and more menacing. This is what the writers seem to be doing, with the Carrionites, and the Racnoss, and suchlike. Don’t get me wrong, I love crawling horrors from the trackless colds of space, as a theme or as a villain. But if you want space baddies that were old when the earth was young, I’ll take Scaroth over the Racnoss, the Fendahl Core over the Carrionites.
Speaking of crawling horrors from the birth of the cosmos; how many alien specie, from Doctor Who and from elsewhere, are held responsible for humanity’s ‘progression’ from the apes? There’s one, though, that really surprises me … (and here’s yet another reason, if we needed one, showing why AvP sucked… BWP suggested I write to the producers and ask for my money back) … I would’ve thought of these guys not so much as Great Educators or Emancipators, more as Great Eviscerators.
But hell, I could be wrong.
I started working at a cafe a few weeks back, washing dishes. I can’t help but recall, years ago, when I was working in a cafe finishing my BA and a bloke I worked with said he had a friend with an MA in Greek philosophy, effectively unemployable. At least I can clean, sweep, and mop. One of the women who works there is named Tegan–and yes, her Dad was watching a lot of Doctor Who when she was born, apparently. I learnt the other day that another woman who works there is Sarah Jane Smith.