Red Dwarf back from the dead (Have you been trying to explain about our future selves again, sir?)

Hello? Testin', one two three. Hello?

Ye-es!

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Red Dwarf is something I discovered in high school, and then obsessed over, in the truest sense of the word, for the next eight or nine years.

Someone (who coincidentally I haven't seen since high school) just sent me this link - they're making a new series of Red Dwarf! Like, right now they're making it. As I type this, Robert Llewelyn is probably having his mask removed and complaining about it, wondering if his complaints are amusing enough to justify another book.

This is very interesting to me! Imagine if the news said, "Lucas unveils third Star Wars trilogy!" or "Turns out there are invisible Dinosaurs! How bout that?" Really interesting. Dwarf is the reason I write, and the standard I aspire to. It shaped my teenage years, my sense of humour, voice and personality. Red Dwarf.

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But here's the thing. I don't want any more.

It's not just because series 8 was a massive disappointment. And it's not just because last year's special episode, 'Back to Earth' was somehow even worse.

I don't want a Red Dwarf IX because Craig Charles, who plays Lister, is 46. I just read that in the above Daily Mail article.

At the start of the show, Lister was 25 (how old-do-I-look??) and even by series 7 (after many new seasons, reinventions and Craig Charles' unwarranted stay in prison) the guy was only 28 (and I feel a new maturity about myself. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I tried to urinate on Rimmer from the top of D Deck. Oh wait a minute... Friday.)

The credits at the end of the last-broadcast show began with "The end" - to contrast with "The beginning" on the first episode's credits. And though the show claimed it was joking... even then I figured they weren't. Or it was a half-joke. Maybe.

So - for years I waited... and co-creator Doug Naylor toiled to make a movie happen. The plot... sounded pretty bad (the baddies were called 'Homo Sapienoids') but I wanted to see it more than anything. It never happenned, for various reasons.



And then, out of nowhere, after a decade, came the all-new special, Back To Earth. And this was a really wierd experience for me - Knight will attest because I poured my confused feelings out at him several times - because it was bad. My favourite, favourite writer ever, ever had written a bad show (although there were some flashes of real brilliance in the third act).

Worse than that - with the exception of Kochanski, all the characters were old. Like, old old. I don't mean to sound like a sneering teenager, but they were old. Understand that these characters were like friends in my head - dear friends, honestly. And now... Lister was old. Kryten was old! The Cat was old and wrinkled. And Rimmer was old and wrinkled and grey and thinning... and some of them were getting fat.

And they were on Coronation Street for some reason.



I know that so far this entry has been garbled, confusing and quite frankly duller than an in-flight magazine produced by Air Belgium. But I'm getting to my point - here we go now.

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I don't want Dave Lister to be 46.

At the age of 25 he fell in love with Kristine Z. Kochanski. After that, he got stranded in space after the end of humanity and longed to get back to Earth and to get Kochanski back. He was a disgusting slob who consumed nothing but curry, lager and cigarettes, and it was funny. He spent the next few years still a slob and still in love with Kochanski... but slowly becoming more mature, more romantic. In one of the novels, he was marooned on a planet and grew a field of jasmine in the shape of two K's. At the age of 28, he met Kochanski again and lost Rimmer, the hologram bunkmate he hated, and who existed purely to 'keep him sane'. Rimmer was easily the funniest one, and he had now left the show, becoming a hero in the process. The story was coming to an end, right?


In the Back to Earth special, he was forty-something... still living on Red Dwarf, still a slob in a leather jacket, still pining after Kochanski. Rimmer was losing his hair. And the jokes weren't funny.

I like to pretend 'Back to Earth' didn't happen.

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Okay, I'm being overly dramatic!

Craig Charles says he refused to settle without a script as good as the golden age of series V and VI. Well. If he's right, I owe the Dwarf people a big apology for this blog (if indeed anyone read this far!) Part of me is very excited about new episodes.

But - a new series as good as the glory days? Or even decent? I don't see it.

It's a comedy about four or five lonely, odd young men (and a perfect woman at one point) alone on a space ship. usually in silly costumes. They shouldn't still be there at 46. They were supposed to be on Fiji by now. Or in the Ganymede Holiday Inn with moustaches. Or repopulating the human race after destroying The Rage. Or something. We weren't supposed to see them getting fat.

Game Review: Prince of Persia

I had a gift card, so I bought it. The main reason being that it was only $20, and another reason being that the back of the case promised an "open world" adventure. I was like, "Okay!" Sounds good to me. I had pretty much played Red Dead Redemption into the red dead dust a few days before, so I needed something new to mess around with: preferably something that would take me awhile to get through.

Plus, I have fond memories of my last Prince of Persia outing, which would have been Sands of Time. Ah, the Gamecube days.

Anyway, I get the game and, first of all, I'm blown away by the visuals. UbiSoft have taken cel-shading graphics to new heights in this game. They brought back fond memories of Wind Waker, and Assassin's Creed; a fantasy world that seemed like something ripped from a fairy tale, and the freedom such a world should provide.

You go through a quick tutorial, where you learn how you will be traveling across...Persia? It's like Assassin's Creed, but waaaaay simpler. You approach a wall, press A, and you're running across it. You approach a gap, press A, and you're jumping across it. You approach a series of pillars, press A, and you'll jump from pillar to pillar.

I'm making this sound simple because it is. This game is devastatingly simple. Mario is laughing at this games simplicity. A jumping, Italian plumber has a more complicated and challenging game than the Prince of Persia.

And, see, I could even deal with that, had the "open world' actually been open. It's not. It's as open as your typical Mario game. In fact, if you took Super Mario Galaxy, took all those levels, stages, so on, and linked them all together into an Oblivion-type free-roaming setting, you would have Prince of Persia. But, unlike Super Mario Galaxy, the Prince's world is a very, very boring one.

It's you (the Prince) and the princess, a girl named Elika. That's it. You will have nil contact with any other human in the game (save for one, but he doesn't count). This world, though crazily, visually inspiring, is pretty much dead. Maybe that was the point of the story. This "open world" game is very empty.

EVEN THEN, I could have dealt with the game. The simplistic controls, the awesome, yet desolate, world, the lack of a good story. I could have dealt with all of that, but there's one other thing that just slapped me across the face. Aside from the boss battles, you'll only fight one other enemy per level. So, once again, bring back to mind that linked together Oblivion-type Mario world I was talking about, and then imagine there is exactly one other enemy per level.

This game is devoid of story, open world, and any challenge. Not to even mention the fact that you cannot die in this game. No matter what ledge you jump off of, your princess companion will be there to catch you. Every. Single. Tiiiiiime.

This game is the anti-Knight. It's the type of game that I try to avoid every time I put money down, which is a rare event in itself. It has beautiful visuals, and, additionally, a beautiful score by the composer of Dragon Age: Origins, Inon Zur. (Here's a sample from the game.)

To that end, there is one - and only one- reason why I am not only keeping the game, but will be keeping an eye out for an eventual sequel: the characters. Despite all of this game's failings, and there are many, the Prince With No Name and Elika are very, very well-written. I mean...it's like David Gaider and Drew Karpyshyn took a brief vacation and wrote all of the dialogue for this game. It's reflective, it's funny, it's tear-jerking. I wanted there to be a book about them that I could read.

This here's one of my most favorite conversations in the game: RIGHT HERE.

So, the characters got to me. Despite literally EVERYTHING else in the game working against me, the characters saved it. And the ending made me want to know what would happen to the Prince and Elika, enough that I'll likely buy a sequel, should they ever make one. And I'm hoping that UbiSoft puts as much effort into said sequel as they have with their other amazing sequels of late (i.e. Assassin's Creed II).

So, can I recommend this game? It's very hard for me to. Unless you happen to be walking along in a shop and find it for under $20, I'd say go for it. Other than that, you might as well do what I'm doing and wait for the eventual, more competently-executed, sequel.