How "Spectre" Could Have Been Better

 

This can also be titled "How Spectre Could Have Been Good" if you're of a more hard-line disposition. These are my thoughts on what could have made Spectre better.

1. Set up Spectre earlier

Obviously they only just got the rights back so they couldn't really do it, but the organisation would have benefited from being introduced earlier on. Given that Craig might be back for one more film, they could have easily established Spectre in this film and then dealt with it in the following film. This would make Spectre seem more genuinely pervasive and threatening.

2. Introduce 'Blofeld' earlier

When Oberhauser tells Bond that he's Blofeld in the secret base, it doesn't mean anything, 'cause it's just a name. Like Cumberbatch being Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, it's just there to titillate people with pre-existing knowledge of the character - not necessarily fans, even. Just people who can go "Ooh, I get that reference." Internally to the text, it doesn't serve any purpose.

Instead, it should have been established reasonably early that the leader of Spectre was a man named Ernst Stavro Blofeld, but no one really knew who he was. Then we can have that mystery present in the film, making Spectre seem extremely ominous: at the centre of the spider's web is a man no one can identify or target. If the organisation's leadership is so obscure, how can it possibly be dealt with?

Then it can go two ways. Personally, I would drop the 'adoptive brother' angle but there are ways of utilising it. Oberhauser could be retained as a high-ranking member of Spectre with a vendetta against Bond who knows who Blofeld is, and perhaps is a weak link in the chain for that reason.

The other possibility is that Bond believes that Oberhauser works for Blofeld - he knows of both people - but the twist or discovery is that Oberhauser and Blofeld are the same person: the reason no one from the outside can identify Blofeld is because he was there the whole time. The problem with this, however, is that much like the actual film it's a twist for twist's sake that doesn't serve the plot.

3. Construct the plot so that Spectre has already won

Rather than having a few minutes to save the world from some all-conquering surveillance mechanism secretly controlled by Spectre, the network should have been set up months ago, and Spectre have been using it the whole time for their advantage. I'm envisaging a scene with M at some kind of launch party for it early in the film. Thus Bond's mission goes from preventing Spectre to undoing Spectre's damage, and thus having to deal with the pervasive surveillance which is now at their disposal. This ups the stakes quite a bit: rather than stopping a bad thing from happening, Bond has to figure out how to stop it from continuing to happen. Again, this also makes Spectre seem much more powerful and dangerous.

4. Have more 'characters' in Spectre

In the old films, SPECTRE included a colourful cast of reprobates along with Blofeld: Irma Bunt, Red Grant, Dr. No and Largo, among others. In this we get one beefy henchman and that's it. We don't get a sense of Spectre's layers or command structure or anything like that, no levels that Bond has to work through to deal with the organisation.

5. Make it not shit

;)

"Spectre"

Not "SPECTRE" apparently, because here the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion seems to have no acronym and just be a bunch of people called 'Spectre' who aren't very nice.

Now Blofeld's back, surely Baron Samedi
is next on the 'villains to revive' list.

My review of Skyfall seems all too applicable to Spectre in some respects. I've yet to rewatch Skyfall (and I have little desire to do so, to be honest) but my primary objections to it haven't mellowed over time: I think it's fundamentally a rather pretentious film which absurdly expects me to take the character of James Bond seriously and care about his problems. As I stated in that review, I think treating Bond like a drama is inherently nonsensical, because it's a genre franchise about a larger-than-life character in almost wholly unrealistic situations, and therefore his feelings, thoughts and inner life fundamentally offer little for the audience to reflect upon.

Bond 25: Bond Has A Nice Cup Of Tea

The writers and directors of modern genre films need to realise that they are not writing the next great English/American novel, and that the nature of their medium innately precludes such aspirations from being sensible. The same delusions of dramatic grandeur affect current British television properties like modern Doctor Who and Sherlock, shows which similarly offer pointless masturbatory ruminations on the nature of unreal and unrealistic characters as if they have to compete with "literary" art.

Spectre is not as egregious in this as Skyfall was, but it suffers from many of the same problems: it's slow and dry, it's boring-looking, with a grey- and brown-dominated colour palette, and it's not shot or designed in a particularly interesting way. It feels more grounded in its own action than Skyfall admittedly, with a less dreamlike tone, but this accentuates its dryness. This is also emphasised by the fact that the plot is extremely unoriginal.

"Yeah, I'm all right."

Large parts of the plot of Spectre are extremely similar, if not identical to, 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, another dry and unexciting film. Consider this: in both films, the security agency (SHIELD, the Joint Intelligence Service) has a new headquarters in the nation's capital (by a body of water, even). It's revealed that the head of said agency (Pierce, C) is in fact allied with or a part of a nefarious secret organisation (HYDRA, Spectre) which wants to use the legitimate organisation to take over a massive surveillance network (Project Insight, Nine Eyes) to get up to mischief. A rag-tag team of surviving "good" members of the original organisation (Fury/Widow/Falcon/Maria Hill, M/Moneypenny/Q/Tanner) must infiltrate the new, compromised headquarters while the protagonist has a "personal" showdown with the film's other main antagonist with whom he has an almost fraternal connection (Bucky, Oberhauser). I felt like I'd seen a good deal of this before. Bucky and Oberhauser are both meant to have died in the snow only to have actually survived, for goodness' sake.

Good thing we all wear these suspicious rings
with this very retro-looking logo on them.

Now let's get to the main attraction: Spectre itself and Blofeld. I didn't think these were handled effectively. Having finally regained the rights, they shoot their bolt almost immediately by introducing the whole shebang: Spectre is this evil organisation which manipulates world events and their mysterious unseen leader is a man named Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Note that in the original Bond films, SPECTRE and Blofeld were dealt with over no less than six films. SPECTRE is first introduced in Dr. No as the titular villain's employer. In From Russia With Love they try to exacerbate tensions between East and West. Following an unrelated diversion for Goldfinger, Bond then deals with the second-in-command of the organisation, Emilio Largo, in Thunderball. It's not until You Only Live Twice that Bond finally meets Blofeld himself, and it takes that film and two more, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Diamonds Are Forever, to finally deal with Blofeld and put an end to the entire situation. In fact, apart from Goldfinger, the entire Connery/Lazenby era involves SPECTRE in some shape or other.

"Seat belts on, please!"

That's a hell of a lot of story, and it makes SPECTRE seem appropriately sprawling and mysterious - octopoid, like its logo. And while some of SPECTRE's and/or Blofeld's activities are very over the top and have become clichés, like the volcano lair and the laser satellite, generally their motivations were fairly clear: to play the superpowers of the Cold War against each other for money and power. That's what SPECTRE is, essentially, in those films: a very elaborate criminal organisation. Yet at the same time it functions as a reflection and even a parody of the very powers it is playing: all of Bond's spying and all of the espionage and struggles between Western governments and the Soviet Union for political and economic supremacy are ultimately little different, in those stories' eyes, to the actions of criminals manipulating affairs for the sake of profit and control. Note that in Blofeld's fish tank in From Russia With Love, all three (the West, the USSR and SPECTRE) are the same creature.

Not so here, of course. The Cold War's long over (arguably), or has at least transformed, which leaves one wondering what SPECTRE's purpose really is. What do they get from the human trafficking, from the fake pharmaceuticals they apparently sell, from the elaborate surveillance network they intend to take over? It's all very unclear, and it seems as if the film can't really come up with a good reason for Spectre's existence in the "post 9/11 world", as opposed to the world of the Cold War, much in the same way that HYDRA's role in The Winter Soldier in my opinion lacked impact. Spectre seem menacing with their elaborate Rome meeting, but we don't have enough time to really see them do anything. The film tries to do far too much. Their most threatening element seems to be this bulky henchman with no neck who is apparently immune to punches, who seems to be intended as comparable to Red Grant or a similar figure but feels like an arbitrary stooge for Bond to have a difficult fight with.

"James, don't you remember how you shot my face off during The War?"

Let's turn finally to Blofeld himself. It's this which gives Spectre similar levels of pretension and delusions of grandeur equivalent to that of Skyfall. In that we saw Bond under siege in his old family home; here Blofeld is the pseudonym of Franz Oberhauser, who knew Bond as a child when his father looked after Bond for a couple of years when his parents died. Oberhauser apparently murdered his own father out of jealousy and faked his own death, before renaming himself Blofeld and establishing Spectre.

In my opinion, it's all far too personal. We learn all this "backstory", but nothing actually substantial about this new Blofeld, apart from the fact that he's clearly a patricidal psychopath. What else does he want? Why did he establish Spectre? What's he been up to for all these years? Most of all, how did he, as he claims, manipulate events behind the scenes in Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall when all of those films already explained themselves? Spectre tries to establish itself as some kind of shocking resolution to the "Daniel Craig tetralogy", but does so by simply telling us that it is and expecting us to believe it. We constantly hear references to past characters: Vesper, Le Chiffre, Greene, Silva and the like, but Spectre has no way of actually establishing any of the narrative connections it claims because they don't exist, which gives Blofeld's claim to being "the author of all your pain" (Bond's, that is) no substance or profundity whatsoever. Oberhauser even states that he only started going after Bond because he got in his way, which makes the plot revelation of their shared past completely unnecessary and irrelevant; it doesn't provide either of them with motivation, and is only there to shock the audience with the largely meaningless concept that Bond and his traditional arch-enemy knew each other for a couple of years as kids. So what? The film does nothing with it, so why should we care? But we're meant to care simply because the connection exists, and in this way the film treats the audience like gasping idiots who will swallow any twist, no matter how trivial, purely because it is a twist.

Land, no.

The older films were from an age where everything didn't have to be "personal" and Hollywood action films weren't incompetently striving to involve novelistic characterisation and discourse in modes for which they were completely unsuited. Blofeld was there characterised perfectly well: as a ruthless, cynical man who toyed with the lives of the whole world simply for his own personal profit. In Spectre it's simply not clear what Blofeld wants or why he is the way he is: he describes himself as a "visionary" of sorts but we're never informed of his vision; I don't know why he particularly cares to torture Bond the way he does unless he's simply some kind of sadist. The weak "personal connection" element and the need to rush through the character wastes Christoph Waltz in an admittedly rather unimaginatively cast role, in which the character and his organisation seem to exist not for the sake of the story but so that Bond fans will recognise the names and be titillated. While I think the "personal connection" aspect was unnecessary and doesn't really work for Bond in any event, there was no need for either the Spectre organisation or Blofeld himself to have a role in the film. The character is simply not very interesting, being not as visually striking as Donald Pleasence's Blofeld, not as effective a foil for Bond as Telly Savalas', and not as amusing as Charles Gray's (my personal favourite).

Everything else is fairly bland, as I've already stated. The most visually interesting part of the film is the Day of the Dead sequence in the beginning. There's nothing else that is particularly glamorous in terms of location or activity. The script contains a few chuckles, but not much. Daniel Craig puts in a workmanlike performance as Bond, but he's not especially interesting to watch for most of the time. Bond girl Madeleine Swann is okay as this instalment's "reasonably competent female deuteragonist" but nothing too memorable. Ralph Fiennes as M mostly has to do a lot of the grouching and grumbling that I thought was subverted as the best element of Skyfall. The final capture of Blofeld by Bond simply shooting his helicopter (something which consistently fails to succeed in almost every Bond film) was a little anticlimactic.

For your cool, cool glasses only.

In terms of good parts, the pre-titles sequence in Mexico City isn't bad at all, featuring characterful location work and a frantic punch-up in a helicopter. I don't mind the song for this one, and the title sequence itself was okay, even if the octopus motif was rather laboured. I was glad that they used M more effectively towards the end. As I said before, there are a few humorous moments, including from Craig himself. Other than that I didn't find much that was particularly engaging about it.

Assuming Daniel Craig doesn't do another Bond, it's disappointing that he's essentially three for four in terms of mediocre films (although admittedly a lot of people thought Skyfall was good for whatever reason). I think the explanation for this, however, almost lies in the fact that Craig was cast for Casino Royale, which is in my opinion a good film which worked perfectly well on its own terms, and in which the chemistry of Craig and Eva Green was ideal for a striking standalone Bond film which didn't need and couldn't benefit from sequels or follow-ups. It's possible that the tenets established for Casino Royale, such as a more serious tone, arguably more realism, more emotional drama and the like, have in fact burdened the rest of the Craig era because they were invented for the sake and success of that single film and not for an entire sequence of films. In that sense it's possible that the last three films were doomed from the start.

"Well, if we destroy Kansas the world may not hear about it for years."

Daniel Craig may be departing, but the great success of Skyfall and the relatively substantial success of Spectre mean that we're probably likely to see more of this kind of thing in the future, unfortunately. It would be appealing if the Bond franchise could recapture a little of the colour, glamour and energy of days gone by but I doubt they'll bother. It's disheartening to say it, but it seems unlikely that we'll see that kind of Bond film made again. "Blofeld" may have been spared, but it's possible that Bond is, in many ways, dead.

The Endings of 'SKYHILL'

Lately I've been hooked on SKYHILL, the point and click survival indie game from Mandragora and published by Daedalic Entertainment. It's a simple but atmospheric game in which you play as a lone man, possibly named "Perry Jason", who is trying, apparently, to escape from the aftermath of a biological weapon attack which has transformed humanity into monsters. The twist is that you start the game in the VIP suite on the one hundredth floor of a hotel, and must fight your way down. As such, you reactivate lifts and, when injured or needing to improve your equipment, you must retreat upwards, returning to your place of sanctuary on the top floor. It plays with typical imagery of progress, in which upward motion is associated with achievement, success and escape. Here it's the opposite; you want to go down, and going up is going backward.

The gameplay is fairly simple. Everything bar a couple of "puzzles" is done with the mouse. You click on rooms that you want the character to walk into (one on either side of the central stairwell in two dimensions), fight monsters in turn-based battles by clicking on them, either generally or by selecting weak spots which have a reduced chance to hit, collect food, health items and gear, and craft with the material you collect. You can use this material to upgrade your VIP suite in various ways, primarily to cook better food in which the combined value is greater than the sum of the parts, and to build superior weapons. These range from the notionally conventional, like a blade strapped to a wooden mop to form an improvised spear, to the outright outlandish, like circular-saw-bladed axes, Japanese naginata and, at the top of the pile, an electric "chainsword" presumably influenced by Warhammer 40,000.

I highly prize simplicity in games, and SKYHILL engrossed me. I've played it for 16 hours - over ten times as long as I've played Dark Souls, which I bought recently out of an itching for RPG fantasy but struggled to find interesting. There's something about simple games that I find appealing, especially when they're laden with atmosphere. In this case SKYHILL seems to owe a fair bit to 2012's Lone Survivor as they both feature apartment-based 2D post-apocalyptic gameplay, although SKYHILL is a good deal more simple and has less immediate narrative.

It's the narrative I wanted to talk about primarily, its ambiguity being another connection to Lone Survivor, which featured multiple endings and which generally suggested that the post-apocalyptic scenario was a hallucination, dream or delusion. In SKYHILL, apart from an opening comic-book-style cinematic which shows the player character checking into his hotel and being protected by a "biological defence system" when the city is attacked, the narrative is presented through a series of collectibles and interactive experiences: a series of journal entries, a set of voice recordings, some mysterious electronic and written messages, and a torn photograph. The confusing thing is, these elements don't all correlate. 

The journal entries describe the state of the world in the near future, which seems to suggest both a plague and a severe nuclear weapons moratorium after Middle Eastern terrorists gain access to nuclear weapons. These two events are seemingly followed by the development instead of vicious biological weapons, and a failing political relationship between the West and an Asian super-state named the "Eastern Confederation". On the verge of losing a war against the United Nations, this Confederation has apparently launched last-ditch biological attacks against the West. This apparently explains the situation. It doesn't explain, however, any of the other components.

The recordings are presumably the musings of the player character, and feature his melancholy thoughts about living in the post-apocalyptic world, as well as increasing thoughts that his life is a dream, and confusion about his identity; he describes himself as an inhabitant of the post-apocalyptic world scavenging in the hotel, but he's come from outside after the disaster. He's very clearly not having the same experience as the player character in gameplay. References to a "fever" suggest that he is a deluded and possibly infected inhabitant of the ruined world who is simply dreaming that he lives in the VIP suite at the top of the hotel, and is actually following hallucinatory "whisperings" attributed to a dead relative, "Nikki", beckoning him upstairs. This person was killed in an explosion which toppled a billboard, leaving the player character as the only survivor. It's unclear as to whether this relates to the explosion presented in the opening cutscene. In this case the truth is the reverse of what the player experiences.

The interactive components, by contrast, including graffiti behind a hanged man and a computer message discerned by using a password taken from a website which can only be accessed using a web browser outside the game, a kind of modern equivalent of old games that asked players to use the phone, state that the world is unreal, and that the player character is in fact part of a virtual reality experiment testing the effects of a mutagenic virus and the possibilities of human survival through a computer simulation.

The photographs, finally, assemble a news article and statement describing the existence of a vicious serial killer dubbed 'The Mechanic' who uses improvised weaponry and who apparently believes that the world is inhabited by monsters who have infiltrated human society. They don't exactly fit together. Each one leads towards a different ending. Thus there are essentially four storylines:

1. The storyline on the surface: a man is trapped on the top floor of a one-hundred-storey hotel after "the end of the world" and is trying to fight his way out.

2. The "recording" storyline: the man is actually an inhabitant of the ruined world suffering from delusions which lead him to believe that he's in the first scenario; in actual fact he "lives" in the lobby and is climbing to the top of the hotel following a hallucinatory voice beckoning him upwards.

3. The "computer" storyline: the man is actually plugged into a virtual reality machine, being used as a human guinea pig to simulate and test human behaviour after a society has been destroyed by a mutagenic virus. Nothing in the game is real.

4. The "photograph" storyline: the man is actually a hallucinating lunatic termed 'The Mechanic' who sees the innocent people around him as dangerous monsters and is murdering them; he's not really escaping from the hotel but rather rampaging down from the VIP room slaying the other inhabitants; the premise is essentially an elaborate, violent fantasy.

SKYHILL has three endings, and I'll describe them in the order they appear in the game's cutscene menu.

ENDING 1:

Named the  "Secret Ending" in the game's achievements, in this one a point-of-view character wakes up in some kind of scientific facility being observed by two people. One of them is pleased with the "data" they have collected and tells the other to "dispose" of the person from whose point of view the player experiences the scene. That's it. It follows on from the "computer" storyline.

ENDING 2:

This is the default ending, and it follows from the "recording" storyline, but is achieved regardless. The player character bursts out not from the front doors of the hotel on the ground, but rather the door on the roof of the hotel, high above the city, calling out for "Nikki" and finding out that she is not there. He climbs onto the edge of the roof and looks down, presumably preparing to jump, a reference to one of the recordings in which he considers whether his life is a dream and muses that death supposedly ends dreams.

ENDING 3:

Dubbed the "Alternate Ending" in the achievements, in this one the player character wearily emerges from the hotel's lobby, a bloody axe in hand and a dead mutant behind him, only to discover a brightly-lit, functioning city, and the hotel surrounded by armed police telling him to put down his weapon. As he warns them of further monsters, they shoot him, and he dies in confusion, unaware of his hallucination, the final shot showing that the dead "mutant" behind him is in fact the murdered body of the hotel's receptionist.

Thus the odd thing about SKYHILL is that it has three different storylines, none of which wholly relate to the others, and the only one that apparently isn't true is what I've termed the "storyline on the surface" above. The only thing that the player knows for sure is that what they are observing is, in one way or another, not the truth, at least not wholly. The mutants might not be real, or the progression of the game might not be real, or the entire thing may not be real.

On the one hand it's an interesting narrative exercise if nothing else. To what extent do we trust what we are presented with in a text? In what way can a video game have an "unreliable narrator"? This also leads to the question of whether one of the multiple narratives is "more true" than the others. The default ending resolves one of the narrative strands to the same extent as the others, but requires none of the luck required for the "alternate ending" (as the photograph fragments do not necessarily appear on a particular playthrough, at least not in accessible places) and does not require the arguable puzzle-solving ability of the "secret ending", which relies on the player, unless like I did they discover it through the internet, realising that the mysterious password file on one of the interactive computers in the game is the address of a real website which can provide them with the password used at the end of the game to access the "secret ending". Does this mean that Ending 2 is the "least true"? Ending 3 relies on luck, while Ending 1 uses both luck (the computer with the password file does not always appear) and puzzle-solving ability. Does that make Ending 1 the "most true" ending as it arguably involves the most challenge? In the end, however, the character is deluded any way you slice it, and perhaps the point of SKYHILL ultimately is to question the idea of "multiple endings" and whether they really mean anything.

Multiple endings are typically presented as a "reward" for conscientious players. They typically give different levels of closure, with the most difficult to attain being the most satisfying, as in Lone Survivor. SKYHILL reverses this situation by turning it on its end: none of the endings offer any real closure. If Ending 1 is true, what's the meaning of all the material about 'The Mechanic'? Was that part of the simulation? If Ending 3 is true, what is the meaning of all the information about the war, or the computer in the lobby? If Ending 2 is true, who was "Nikki" and why was the player character so confused about what he was doing? You might be able to fold some of it together; Ending 1 lists the test subject as an unknown agent who might conceivably be 'The Mechanic', but it's hardly clear.

In this way SKYHILL also interrogates typical gameplay experiences. Ending 1 presents the game as a data-collecting exercise which gives no benefit to the player whatsoever, a possible commentary on game experiences in general. Ending 2 questions the reality of what a player is presented with in-game, arguing that graphical representations are nothing more than that - up might really be down and a penthouse might really be a lobby, and we're none the wiser. Ending 3 to an extent goes down a familiar route of criticising the routine violence of video games, presenting it as deranged, but it also mocks the current obsession with "crafting" in the indie game survival scene, portraying the questionable combinations used to produce new items in such games as the imaginings of a deluded mind.

On the other hand, SKYHILL might be seen as a cop-out, a game that foists upon its players three vague storylines, fed in an arbitrary fashion, to avoid composing a single robust narrative. The "simulation" ending in particular is hardly original, and there are certainly precedents for the "Mechanic" ending as well. As a result, ultimately, my favourite was actually the default ending: the idea that all this progress has been no progress at all, that the inversion of typical goals was itself being inverted, and that there is nothing, really, to discover. Perhaps that's the point, and the "harder to attain" endings are formulaic deliberately to subvert our expectations. In that case, almost as an exercise in futility, SKYHILL succeeds.

All that remains is to consider this archetype of the "man alone", alienated in a world in which there is no meaning, and how the game's various narratives engage with this. I'd argue that the game essentially presents them as interchangeable and focused on a single concept: our utterly limited comprehension of what constitutes reality, and how modernity and its artificiality has brought this, so long avoided, to our notice.

On Warlord Games' "Bolt Action"

As I've said before, I collect toy soldiers. I don't know why I like them. It's weird.

In any event, I have, or had, three main toy soldier games that I play:

Kings of War, the fantasy battle game by Mantic Games (I also play their sci-fi stuff intermittently, like Deadzone)

Dystopian Legions, the steampunk, or to use their own words, "Victorian Super Science-Fiction" battle game by Spartan Games

Bolt Action, the World War Two battle game by Warlord Games.

I say "had" because I think I've more or less given up on Bolt Action.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't given up on Warlord Games' Bolt Action models. I still buy them. They're nice models, if a little chunky, and they make a huge variety of different Second World War style soldiers. No major complaints there.

But Bolt Action the game may have seen its day for me, after a good many games over the last year or so.

In some respects, there are a lot of advantages to Bolt Action. It's quite simple, with very standardised soldier, weapon and vehicle rules making most aspects of it pretty quick to learn. Some aspects of it are quite effective. Shooting, for instance, isn't enormously powerful if you use cover effectively. There are, however, quite a few issues with the game:

1. The activation system.
   You draw dice from a cup or bag and whichever player's die it is, they activate a unit. I think this is meant to represent the "ebb and flow of battle" but if can very easily result in one army suddenly hurling out an enormous number of actions, if their dice keep getting drawn, while the enemy sits around doing nothing. It's also possible to "game" the system by adding more dice to the pool with oddball units like medics and special weapons, making it more likely that a certain player's die will be drawn earlier.
    
2. It in no way represents historical Fire and Manoeuvre tactics.
   Maybe this is a pedantic thing to care about, but Bolt Action seems to base itself on a "Warhammer 40k" style system in which squads of soldiers are kitted out with an "assault" weapon and a "heavy weapon", as Space Marines typically are in Games Workshop's game. In reality, in the Second World War, a squad of ten men didn't advance together with a light machine gun, rifles and any short-ranged weapons all firing simultaneously. Rather, the squad would be in two sections, with the light machine gun section laying down covering fire for the rifle section to advance on the enemy. As the smallest squad size in Bolt Action is usually five men, it's essentially impossible to replicate this, as historically most light machine gun teams would have featured at most three soldiers.
   It doesn't matter in any event, however, because in Bolt Action light machine guns are so ineffectual that they are generally not worth taking. Their limited firing (they only get two more dice than an ordinary rifle) and complete lack of any enhancement to "pinning" an enemy unit means that they cannot provide covering fire in any way beyond three riflemen, which costs the same as a single light machine gun in terms of points, albeit with a slightly improved range. It annoyed me a bit recently when I saw some posts on the Warlord Games forums arguing against squads taking a light machine gun and sub-machine guns because they serve two different purposes in the game, when that's exactly what historical squads were equipped with: the two squad leaders (sergeants, corporals and the like) were often, and in some forces always, equipped with a sub-machine gun for short-range firepower. Their main job was to direct the riflemen and/or light machine gunner anyway.
    
3. There is insufficient differentiation between vehicles.
   In Bolt Action, there are only four different gradations of armoured vehicle: light, medium, heavy and super-heavy. As such, Warlord has very little room to move when classifying tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles. This makes for a rather unrealistic scenario in which, for instance, a late war Panzer IV German tank is identical to the Soviet T-34/85. In actual fact, even the latest models of Panzer IV were markedly inferior in terms of armour and firepower to the T-34/85 (which is the whole reason the Germans developed the Panther).
    
4. It is too difficult for infantry to deal with vehicles.
   Technically you can buy "anti-tank grenades" to allow your infantry to more easily charge and destroy a vehicle, but this is a fiddly process which far from accurately represents the situation, in which infantry on a tank could shoot into gun slights, toss ordinary grenades into turrets and down hatches, smash treads and gun barrels, and a whole host of other creative things the tank itself would be powerless to prevent. In Bolt Action, unless you've gone to the trouble of buying "anti-tank grenades", the likelihood of your infantry charging or damaging a tank, even a fresh unit which has suffered no casualties, is very slim, which is a far from realistic scenario probably again deriving from Warhammer 40,000 in which "power fists" and the like are needed to damage vehicles in close combat. In Bolt Action it's quite simple for a tank to simply steamroll an enemy line without the slightest concern if enemy armour or AT weapons are destroyed or preoccupied. As an average platoon can only purchase one tank, this essentially means that whichever army uses its tank to kill the enemy's tank first now has a weapon which can ride roughshod through the enemy army, when in actual fact a tank which drove unsupported against infantry would have very quickly found itself with any number of problems.

Those more or less sum up my main issue with Bolt Action: it neither encourages nor rewards any kind of historical authenticity. Sure, I personally am not interested in exactly recreating actual historical battles, and enjoy a bit of a Hollywood or Company of Heroes kind of vibe, but at the same time it would be nice to think that the game was in some way a Second World War game and not just an incredibly generic platoon-style military game with a veneer of Second World War imagery slapped over the top. But it is, and it's done well because of its admittedly good models and flashy presentation. Here's how I'd change the game:

1. Split squads up into historically composed sections for fire-and-manoeuvre.
2. Give light machine guns a bonus to "pinning". They don't necessarily need more shots (but they maybe should have them too).
3. Add an extra two armour and heavy weapon classes. This would involve reworking the vehicle system a bit, but it would be more realistic.
4. Turn the "anti tank grenade" rules into the normal rules for infantry assaulting vehicles. Then units with specialised explosives can have another bonus.
5. Revise the activation system in some way, possibly involving spending command points if you want an extra go straight away without handing over to your opponent. This would also give more of a role to officers, when at present they're just walking morale bubbles. There are also some odd consequences of that, too - why would my Inexperienced Officer be remotely Inspiring to a group of Veteran Commandos, for instance? This is a problem with Commander units in tabletop games in general.

Of course, it wouldn't really be Bolt Action anymore, would it? My advice, really, as I know more than a few people are disgruntled with Bolt Action's limitations, is to look at alternative games. You can still use all the miniatures perfectly well, of course. My current direction is Disposable Heroes and Coffin for Seven Brothers by Iron Ivan Games, which is a game which basically renders Bolt Action completely redundant, although I'm looking into Chain of Command by Too Fat Lardies as well. I hear Rules of Engagement is good too, and I mean to look into it. In any event, don't be seduced too easily by smartly-dressed rulebooks. You're not necessarily getting the experience you could be.

Opinions Can Be Wrong Plays! The Consuming Shadow

Want to see me play through and almost win at The Consuming Shadow but not actually win because I suck at the game's combat system? Well your wish has been granted!

Some Further Thoughts on 'The Consuming Shadow'

So I've been playing some more of 'The Consuming Shadow', Yahtzee's horror roguelike, and I have some more things to add to my previous post. I've now completed the game once, which is to say that I got the 'A' ending with The Scholar, who is the default character of the game. I went to Stonehenge, figured out the god's rune and beat back the Ancient, which is actually very easy. You just whack his tentacles and eyes as they appear and then counter his magic as you would with a Cultist enemy by copying his spells. I was probably lucky, however. I had a good playthrough in which I managed to unlock two new characters. Firstly I unlocked the primarily mêlée character, The Warrior, by completing the lockpick delivery mission and beating the subsequent dungeon. This, nicely enough, gave my Scholar an advanced close combat attack of his own for that playthrough, which seems to have been useful as my pistol-whipping of the Ancient's tendrils was surprisingly effective. As a result of this completion I also unlocked The Ministry Man, who is seemingly one of the "challenge characters" of the game - he only has 24 hours to save the world, rather than 60. I've now had a few goes as them and my thoughts are as follows:

1. Yahtzee probably should have re-written the in-game dialogue for playing as The Warrior. Something one notices when playing a lot of Yahtzee games is his rather verbose style. He's no Hemingway, and his elaborate prose can at times be a little jarring depending on the character in question. I can more or less accept The Ministry Man using the same dialogue as The Scholar, because while The Scholar is an intellectual and might be expected to express himself in such a way, The Ministry Man is heavily implied to be an existing Yahtzee character known for his rather involved note-taking activities. The Warrior, however, is described as "a two-fisted man of action in a world beyond his understanding". All of The Scholar's descriptions and so forth are retained, however, giving this apparent henchman of organised crime a fairly unlikely voice. This is particularly noteworthy because The Warrior does have unique starting lines and various others which establish him as more "plain speaking" and less of a user of complex language compared to The Scholar. I did appreciate the unique text messages the characters receive, however.
   On the other hand, Yahtzee in general uses way too many similes, and (no offence to him) often pointless, trite or ineffectual ones which add nothing to what he is saying. In general, though, he just uses too many similes. There are plenty of other language techniques out there to choose from!
2. I'm still convinced that combat is clunkier than it needs to be. While The Warrior has a dodge move, I feel as if the characters in general could use a duck or crouch manoeuvre. Another thing which surprises me, really, is the lack of stealth elements in the game. I'm surprised that it's not a valid option to hide from enemies, at least as a way of giving combat more variety. It also seems a bit awkward that The Warrior's more powerful mêlée attack is a kick, even though he has a knife in the insanity minigame. He could at least stab up some fools. Often your mid-range, waist-level kick is "hitting" creatures hanging from the ceiling or otherwise out of reach, which only really makes sense with the arcing move of The Scholar's pistol whip, which makes The Warrior's attack look off.
3. It's possibly too easy to get gear. In most "safe" towns you can find a cheap piece of gear immediately, and more are available in dungeons. Something which added to the challenge of a game like FTL, which I've never managed to finish (yes, yes, because I suck at computer games), is how situational the random events could be depending on your ship layout, your crew and a host of other variables. I find that if I'm regularly collecting gear in 'The Consuming Shadow', most random events become a breeze. This is particularly true when one uses the Lucky Charm to harvest gear more quickly.
4. To refer back to my point about atmosphere in the last article, I think some more "English" dungeons could have worked. There could perhaps have been a historical or ruined building layout, especially given that the UK is riddled with mouldering architecture. A nice ruined abbey or some such would fit the bill. The house, office, warehouse, park and brick building environments are maybe a little generic.
5. The game doesn't really tell you this, but it's possible to narrow down information on the rune, colour and aspect of the Ancients by inspecting the markings and bodies in dungeons. This information, however, is not recorded in your notebook, so you have to do it straight away in some fashion.
6. I appreciate the references to Yahtzee's older Chzo Mythos games, particularly the possibility of Chzo as one of the Ancients and the concession in the game of an existing "Tall Man", like the hunter monster in this one. Furthermore, it's nice that The Ministry Man is heavily implied to be Trilby, one of the protagonists of the Chzo Mythos. It's interesting to see that although Yahtzee tends to characterise the Chzo games as a bit pants in hindsight, he still uses Trilby. I also like the use of the Ministry of Occultism, as in those games, and the idea that by 2015 Trilby would have become a high-ranking agent. The use of codenames like T, C and F are good nods to the history of British Intelligence as well. My initial thought, actually, was that C would be Yahtzee's old character (and one of Trilby's supposed colleagues in the Special Talent Project) Chris Quinn, but I don't think that really makes sense.
7. One thing I will say about this, however, is that in the Alpha of the game the Ministry texts were completely anonymous, which gave them a certain unsettling feel when you received the negative ones. Now that they're addressed from "T", this sympathetic character, some old texts like threatening to shoot himself unless you give him good news, contemplating taking his cyanide and having disturbing thoughts about his secretary (the last of which in my opinion was the least necessary) from early Alpha days seem weird and out of character. This is especially true because T's diary entries, which you unlock by playing the game, emphasise his level-headedness and actually describe his conscious difficulty with bringing the apparent apocalypse into meaningful perspective.
   It's worth noting, by the way, that the game's wiki currently describes T as "your handler at the Ministry", but if you read the diaries it's evident that T has possibly never met The Scholar before, and at least has not seen him for a long time. It's also apparent that apart from seemingly being an associate of Keegan, The Scholar is largely unaffiliated with the Ministry, even in an unofficial capacity, and that they've simply "kept an eye" on The Scholar.

In any event, 'The Consuming Shadow' is still fun. I've been watching Yahtzee's 'Ego Reviews' on Youtube and he mentions in the one for 'Trilby: The Art of Theft' (another favourite of mine) the possibility of additional content for 'The Consuming Shadow' at some point, perhaps in time for the Steam release. Hopefully that's also provided to everyone who purchased the game through other means. At this stage I'd argue that the aspects which would liven things up in further content would be another dungeon environment or two (perhaps with some more background assets), some event artwork, possibly another playable character (although I realise I haven't unlocked The Wizard yet) and maybe some kind of custom mode. I imagine alterations to the game's combat and so on would be too big a task. In any event, this is one I'll be attempting to keep multiple blinking-from-the-darkness abominable eyes on.

SPOILERS! Ending A screen below!

"I just wanted to go into Stonehenge!"

Some Initial Thoughts on 'The Consuming Shadow'

As I once stated in my article 'On Zero Punctuation', I quite like the works of Yahtzee. I'm not a complete Yahtzee fanboy, mind you. I certainly think he buys in a bit too much to this whole "Oh no there are evil forces of political correctness who want to lock us up for making crass jokes" paranoia which seems to exist on the internet, but I think for a mostly one-man team he's made some pretty fun games in his time, games which have given me just us much entertainment as many notionally "professionally" made games and a good deal more entertainment than even more such titles. With 'The Consuming Shadow', however, he seems to have progressed properly into "profesh" territory himself, as this is not a free title but one you must purchase for the sum of ten American-style dollars.

I'd been keeping my eye on the game for a while, but lost track when it actually game out, so I've only just grabbed it as of a few days ago (as of writing). I'd played a bit of the alpha, but not too much, and I was looking forward to the improvements made in the full version. In case you're unaware, the game is a procedurally-generated "roguelike", which is to say that every play-through is randomly generated but at the end of each playthrough (regardless of how it ends) you get experience points and thus levels which contribute towards your next playthrough. The game's in two dimensions with a fairly simple interface and a silhouette art style, which leaves a lot to your imagination.

August 16th, 2015. Made the mistake of looking at the 'Latest Threads' on The Escapist forums...

Here are my thoughts so far:

1. The game is fun. It's not overly complicated, it's quick to play, and the procedurally-generated nature of the content gives it a feeling of longevity, in my view at least.
2. The dungeons feel a bit limited. Dungeons are a single storey of a randomised assortment of screen-sized rooms, regardless of whether you're in a fancy home, a warehouse, an office building, a park, etc. Thus the dungeons themselves can be a bit monotonous at times. There's also not a great deal of background material in most of them.
3. The controls are also a bit limited. You can walk forward, run forward, turn, shoot, make a short ranged close combat attack and cast spells. Apart from one unlockable character with a dodge there's little variety of movement, like ducking, jumping or what have you, which can make gameplay feel a bit stiff and unrealistic.
4. The art style works. I don't think Yahtzee always gives himself enough credit for his artwork, and claims that the silhouette style in this primarily compensates for his limited skills, but leaving the enemies up to your imagination gives the game an unsettling feeling. There's a decent variety of enemies as well. The music and sound effects are quite good.
5. The game has a nice deduction game appended to the main dungeon gameplay in which you have to gather clues to figure out which ancient being you're meant to be banishing from the universe and which exact magical incantation you'll need to do so.
6. It's possibly not as atmospheric as it could be. It certainly is atmospheric in the sense that it gives a nice uneasy feeling of Britain falling under a mysterious darkness that no one really wants to acknowledge, but I feel like it's not as quintessentially "English" as it could be. Admittedly, you can also travel to towns in Wales. I feel like one thing which could benefit the game would be some unique artwork for the random encounters and a little more artwork for the town screens, a bit like the visuals that come up each time you reach a new city in Organ Trail. I need to put a bit more thought into this, and obviously Yahtzee wanted to limit his artwork, but I still feel like this could have helped.

Overall I think 'The Consuming Shadow' is a pretty decent game to play if you've got the inclination. It's spooky and sombre with a definite sense of progression. For a mostly one-man job I think it's very admirable indeed. At the same time, I feel like if someone was to take inspiration from this game for a project of their own, there are a few ideas which could be expanded to really capitalise upon the potential of a concept like this.