I'm all back and suchlike from Austin now. Getting things back to normal. I'll be putting together an article about FlashForward, what I learned, and what sneak-previews I got of unreleased bits of web-development goodness.

. . .and, knowing gamedev's publishing schedule, it'll get posted to the site three months after all of the sneaked stuff goes live :)


I saw V For Vendetta a while back, and it contained one of the hallmarks of bad-writing, the spectacularly stupid supervillain. This is a supervillain who manages to make himself super despite making groin-grabbingly stupid mistakes all along the way. I'm referring to this particular exchange in the movie in which the supervillain is trying to figure out how the hero intends to blow up the British Houses of Parliament. . .

(paraphrasing)

Supervillain: What possible avenues can the hero have to blow up parliament. We must stop all possible methods to do this!

Henchman: Well, there are some old subway tunnels that go directly under the. . .

Supervillain: THOSE TUNNELS ARE ABANDONED! I will tolerate no more discussion of the tunnels!

Of course, at this point every viewer with two brain cells to rub together has now filled in all of the blanks and knows exactly how the rest of the movie is going to play out. And the movie, not disappointingly, plays out exactly as expected.


I only mention this because a couple of days ago I re-watched Mom and Dad Save The World, a dopey sci-fi comedy from the early 1990's. It's a movie about an Earth-couple who are kidnapped to a "planet of idiots" who's leader plans to destroy the Earth. In one scene, the Earth-dad (played by not-yet-convicted-pedophile Jefferey Jones) joins up with a revolutionary group that must sneak into the supervillain's castle. They do it by building a trojan horse, specifically a ramshackle wooden statue of the leader with themselves sealed inside. When the leader finds the large statue in front of the castle, he says.

(again paraphrasing)

That looks nothing like me! Look at that! Ugh. . .In fact, that looks so much NOT like me that I want it brought into the castle just so everyone can marvel at how much it does not look like me!

Again, it's a story thing. I was just impressed that the Washingmachine brothers couldn't write a script with a supervillain who was any smarter than the ruler of the planet of idiots.