Thoughts on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

 I've started rewatching the three existing Indiana Jones movies recently, whenever family life lets me. Last night I rewatched Temple of Doom, probably for the first time in something around two decades. I have thoughts:

• The movie starts out much weaker than its predecessor. The whole jungle sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark was much more evocative than Willy singing in Chinese while two dozen wannabe-Bond-girls in yellowface dance. All in all the opening is trying too hard to be James Bond rather than Indiana Jones, if that makes sense in what is only the second movie of the franchise.
• Indy is even more of a thug than in the first movie. Taking a woman hostage like that? The diamond being payment for whatever McGuffin he collected for that guy? And why is he so smug when escaping on the plane - he has nothing to show for? This later turns out to be set-up for character growth. I think.
• How many best friends he previously had tons of adventures with does Indy have stashed away all over the world? He can't be more than 40 years old at this point in time. What gives?
• Willy is a massively annoying character. So much so that I don't understand how Indy decides to go for seducing her. It's not worth it, dude. It's also obvious that the only thing he sees in her is a pretty face.
• The geography is all over the place but let's ignore that. I mean, we don't know how many days the crew spent on that river for it to go from sub-alpine to tropical.
• The elephant riding sequence is uneccesarily long.
• The gross-out-dinner-scene didn't faze me anymore. Most of the stuff I have eaten in one form or another. Standard backpacker-gotta-try-it-once fare. Snake? Had that in Cambodia (though no live baby snakes. Mine was barbequeued). Beetles? You get that in Bangkok at the night market. Eyes? I didn't but I know plenty of people in Mongolia who swear it's a delicacy. Monkey brains? I only had goose brain but you get my point.
• Also these special effects ... were those real baby snakes? Is that a thing somewhere?
• I must mention that Short Round is awesome. He is actually outclassing Indy in this movie. Great acting by Ke Huy Quan. The boy was so into it. I'm glad he got back into real acting with Everything Everywhere All At Once. Shame that the Asiansploitation genre had to come into existence for him to get work like that again after growing out of being a cute kid.
• The secret entrance to the dungeon in the bedroom is cool. So are the traps, crazy and illogical as they are. They are also much more plausible than those from the first movie, considering this palace is still in use and the bad guys presumably do some upkeep work.
• I'd expect the centipedes to be more bitey but that may be my personal fear of that horrible mixture of spider and snake.
• The temple is vastly illogical but also awesome as fuck. I'll give Lucas and Spielberg the benefit of the doubt here. Also, this whole human sacrifice sequence is what Lovecraft would have seen in just arriving at the palace topside because of all these horrible non-anglosaxon people.
• After being captured it is up to Short Round to save the fucking day. At this point, the movie turns into basically one long, drawn out action sequence. The breaks are off (literally, as we see during the mine cart scene).
• Voodoo dolls are more of a Carribean thing, aren't they? Oh whatever floats, Steve and George. I would have saved that one for Indiana Jones and the Creepy Creoles or something like that.
• The fight scenes are done really well. Indy is scrappy and tricksy and even tries to rescue the head henchman from a gruesome death (as a hero should). He fails but the effort put into it shows character.
• Speaking of the fight scenes: Short Round can take about as many bad guys at the same time as Indy can. Like I mentioned before: This is really his movie. Indy is just the dream big brother he has tagging along.
• Willy is fucking useless. She had exactly one scene where what she did was relevant (saving Indy and Short Round out of that trap-room). Before and after that she only screams. A real step down from Marion, from which the franchise would never recover.
• Also, Willy has the same name as my grandfather. Which makes me even more angry now that I realized it.
• The cart ride is, of course, another iconic moment. Copied a million times, this is peak Spielberg/Lucas. I don't have much else to say about it.
• The callback to the sword-to-a-gunfight-scene from the earlier movie is a nice touch – although the fact that this movie takes place bevore the first one implies that Indy just regularly guns down swordsmen. He cannot recall the scene from the last movie like we do.
• The rope bridge is also iconic, although to a lesser extent. I like the use of the fact that Indy and Short Round are the only people present who speak Chinese.
• Is Indy actually posessed for a moment while the stones drop out of his pouch? I believe so.
• The happy end is the colonial forces gunning down the savage rebels. Now that's a political message you don't get to see often these days.
• Speaking of rebels: Why bows and arrows? We saw them with rifles and I'm pretty sure I even spotted a machine gun or two in the mines.
• Rescuing the village is character development for the Indiana Jones we saw in the beginning of the movie.
• Don't pretend like Willy and Indy have any kind of future together, please.
• What happened to Short Round after this story? The boy was extremely capable. And dreaming of going to America. Did Indy just ditch him somewhere?

It is the weakest of the three only existing Indiana Jones movies but still entertaining enough. The long action sequence that is the second half is cool to watch and until then you have Short Round to carry the film. It holds up on that end. We'll see how the third movie fares, when I rewatch that.

Sir, You Are NOT Being Hunted part 1

So I decided that I need some gaming to relax my mind. Like, really relax it. That got me an idea: What if I take an old favourite of mine, Sir, You Are Being Hunted, and turn it into a walking simulator? No threat. Just the moody, gloomy, but ultimately pretty and relaxing British countryside and the need to eat every once in a while? The game certainly makes that possible, without having to be modded or anything. So I got to work:

No evil robots appearing with these settings. It'll be just me and some wildlife. Perhaps I can even hunt and cook a pheasant? Never done that in the game before, I was always too afraid of lighting a fire and didn't want to waste ammunition. I let the British Countryside Generator do its thing and then go into the game world.

After the short tutorial-steps that always start the game, I decide to head for the nearest village. Since I'm not a man on the run, I walk there leisurely and don't cross the field. Wouldn't want to trample someone's harvest. I make my way along the fence, through a small thicket and then reach Leafy Eating.

Despite the sign at the village entrance, the place is calm and quiet. As I need some supplies for the exploration to come, I go looting all the houses like I would in a regular game of Sir – albeit at a much slower pace. In real life I wouldn't run in this situation, so why should I do that here?

As night starts to fall, I head towards a ruined farm next to the village. I do something I never do in a regular game of Sir and switch on the flashlight I found in one of the houses.

This makes exploration a lot easier. I now feel a bit like I'm urban exploring. Nice.

I make my way along the road towards the next village. It's called Kings Burrow.

Since I'm starting to get thirsty/hungry, I chug down a bottle of sherry, to the usual effect. Drunkenly I stagger through the deserted village.

And then, sobering up, down the road towards Nimby Tweaking in-the-Wold.

I gather whatever the residents of Nimby Tweaking have left behind and seems useful to me. Then I tetris my inventory so it looks nice and ordered. I think I'm ready for a nice hike on one of the outlying islands.

The road going through Nimby Tweaking terminates around a large, dead tree. Where I'm from this would be the village oak.

I follow coast towards the first boat. I plan to collect the teleporter bits on the centre island last. So, next up: The North Island.

It's a calming experience to play this game like that. Birds are chirping. I met a hare. It's a bit like playing a homeless person in a post-apocalyptic Britain. But the nice kind of apocalypse, that left nature intact and only removed most people.

Reverse engineering Gaslands

 My firstborn and I have been inspired by some YouTube-videos to reverse engineer Gaslands into a game we can play for free. Started by building our first vehicles to do battle with:

The black one is by my son. It has a double medium machine gun on an outrigger that can swing 90° to the right. It also has three rifles on the hood and a reinforced bumper. Mine is the red one. It has two light machine guns on the hood but the main armament is the ram in the front coupled with four nitrous injection systems.

We took two toy cars we had (the kids recently haven't been playing with them anyways) and modded them with plastic bits that were left over from a set of Warhammer 40k Tau scouts my son uses as an army for One Page Rules GDF Firefight. I ground a mesh-pattern into the windshield of my car, attached drone parts as motor bits, added some pockets and pouches on the door and doodads for machine guns on the roof. Then I crafted the ram from leftover bits of plastic frame. Also some wire clippings for the side windows.

We played some duels for testing* and I've been refining our rules. The game already supports vehicles from motorcycles up to war rigs of theoreticall limitless size. It has a wide array of weaponry and funcioning rules for maneuvering (it lacks the slides and out-of-control-spins that the original Gaslands has – if you want the original, buy it. Seriously, buy Gaslands, it's a great game!). We'll make some more vehicles until the year is over. Perhaps I'll even write a rules-doc in English and publish it on my itch page.

*All of which my son won. While his car costs 22 points vs my 20 points I believe it is more likely due to the fact that in a 1 vs. 1 fight the car with more firepower has a nice advantage. In a melee with more participants, things may work out differently.

Free Release: The Discarded Giant's Boot

 I made another one-page-dungeon: The Discarded Giant's Boot.

It's a the adventure I played on a long car ride with my son, as written down in this post. It was meant to be played with Arnold K.'s Copper GLOG but can probably be easily adapted an dumped into any sufficiently weird/magical play world. Wherever a twenty-kilometer-tall giant may have existed somewhere in the very distant past.

Have fun!

Airships!

 I love Zeppelins. Not blimps. Airships. Rigid structure, an aerodynamic hull around a series of gas chambers. That sort of thing. Now for the past year or so my older son and I have sometimes dabbled in One Page Rules Grimdark Future FTL Warfleets. The rules are simple enough (two pages, not one, but one may argue that you can print double-sided). But it takes place in space. My son loves it. I like it too. But I feel one could do an airship mod.

Working on it. Of course.

Now airships _were_ used as weapons of war for a couple of years that included World War I. Afterwards there were some attempts to have them in a military role by the victorious powers. The USA built the USS Akon, which was a flying aircraft carrier – although more of a scouting vessel than made for direct sorties against hostile targets. I think the British and French also built them. Germany wasn't allowed the big toys anymore after the Treaty of Versailles so the greatest fans of the technology only built civilian airships.

A little aside on those: The Graf Zeppelin was the vessel which I personally would want to travel on if I ever got my hands on a time machine. Global readers will associate the term Zeppelin with the Hindenburg, however. It was known for two things: Having swastikas on its tailfins and spectacularly (and on camera!) going up in flames. Two things to save the honor of that airship: The Nazis didn't like Zeppelins because by that time airplanes were faster, more reliable and had more range than before and they thought the Zeppelin technology to be of no use for the military. The swastikas on the tailfins were not supposed to show how nazi the ship was but simply the national flag at the time. As for the fireball: The Hindenburg was designed to be run with (nonflammable) helium gas. But pre-war sanctions against Germany meant that the one big producer of helium at the time, the USA, didn't deliver that gas so they had to go with hydrogen, which has somewhat (8%) greater lift and far greater risk.

Alright, aside's over, let's talk about these hypothetical war Zeppelins. An airship is mostly gas-bags and the structure supporting them. The gondolas, both for command/control and with motors, are tiny attachments to that. Yet, an airship cannot carry all that much additional cargo/ammunition/personell. One cubic meter of helium only lifts something like 1.1 Kilogramms. That is not much and the reason, airships were so large.

So if we're gonna make a tabletop game out of this, we'd have to assume helium as lift-gas and ignore fire and loss of lift due to damage entirely. I dislike my games to be bogged down by to many detailed rules. Ships in Grimdark Future have between two (light) and four (heavy) ship systems. I'd go one lower for my airship mod because installing a cannon on such a craft is a big deal. Also, ships in the original game have turrets that become more powerful for the bigger craft. Airships will have a set of machine gun emplacements around their hull which means they all have the same base "turret" weaponry.

What weapons could one sensibly attach to an airship? Bombs (the most common weapon for such craft historically) are, of course, irrelevant in air-to-air battles. But there are other options:

Machine Gun Battery: If you expect to encounter lots of enemy planes trying to swarm you, this would be a sensible option. It simply means that there are _more_ machine guns on your ships - with the respective crews to fire them.

Anti Air Howitzer: I suppose an airship can carry a heavy infantry howitzer like mountain troops used to lug around. 150mm caliber, airburst-ammunition – this would be the king of weapons in the skies.

PomPom Battery: Heavier than machine guns, heavier than even heavy machine guns. The PomPom was a maxim machine gun upscaled to a 1-inch-caliber and did indeed see use as an anti-aircraft-weapon in WWI.

Dumbfire Rocket Rack: Just a bunch of rockets to saturate a distant area of the sky with explosions and shrapnell. The original game already has something like this which barely needs any modifications to work.

Wire Guided Missile System: This is the sniping weapon of the game, I guess. It could be made even though it is more of a WWII-kind of technology. We are doing Dieselpunk here so I guess it'll be alright.

3"-AA-Battery: This is the broadside-weapon in this system. Imagine like two cannons per side of the airship, firing smallish howitzer-rounds.

With weaponry out of the way, what ship systems would seem somewhat plausible?

Reinforced Structure: Your typical armour-upgrade. HP instead of anything actively useful.

Crew Parachutes: Good for morale if you play with such a thing.

Extra Motor Gondola: More speed!

Weapon Swivel-Mount: Choose one of your weapons. It can now turn 360 degrees. I imagine it's hanging below the ship.

Advanced Fire Control: Hit better.

Airplane Support Bays: Helps the swarms of fighters around you somehow.

Turret-Upgrade: Replaces the generic MGs with PomPoms?

Harpoon-Cannons: Entangle an enemy ship. This makes sense if you are smaller and want to hinder a larger craft from participating in the fight more.

This is missing rules for boarding, which I bemoan. I once met a nice oder lady at a lecture on airships who was not only leader of a club of Zeppelin-enthusiasts but also the granddaughter of Germanys only air corsair (the man had, in WWI, actually captured a Norwegian seagoing vessel with his airship). I believe that boarding may be unrealistic but is cool enough that it should be an option (in the base game as well - send over those space marines with boarding pods!). Have to think about it but I fear it would complicate things too much.

A theory on dungeonness

 What exactly makes a dungeon a dungeon? I've previously thought about the minimum size of one but the very nature is something else entirely. I've been working on a series of novellas lately (expect a link to the release of the first one in October – but it'll be in German) and started wondering, what of the adventures my hero has actually constitutes a dungeon.

I believe that there are three hard factors and a checklist of soft factors that make a location into a dungeon. Of course, your personal definition may vary but this one is mine:

A dungeon must be an enclosed location. Open air maze? No dungeon.
A dungoen must have some sort of treasure in it. That treasure can be abstract, like an information, knowledge etc.

Now it also needs to confirm with my minimum dungeon size (see link above) so:

A dungeon must not be completely visible from the entrance. If it's just a single, unobstructed room, that's no dungeon.

Let's talk about soft factors. The dungeon should have at least two of these (and it can be multiples in the same category):

A dungeon should have an obstacle.
A dungeon should have a riddle.
A dungeon should have a trap.
A dungeon should have an enemy.

These make up the dungeon-score. Let's put the thing to the test using Indiana Jones (because I'm writing pulp adventure and don't want to spoil my own stories.

The temple in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

-Is an enclosed location.
-Has a very obvious treasure.
-Is pretty damn big and cannot be overseen from anywhere.

So check for the hard factors. Soft factors?
-Has an obstacle (pit that Indy and his lackey swing across).
-Has a riddle (the trap trigger underneath the golden idol).
-Has (at least) three traps (spikes, arrow-launchers, stone-ball self destruct mechanism)
-Whether or not it has an enemy is arguable but let's say it doesn't.

So it comes out with a dungeon score of five. Pretty good.

The excavation site in Egypt in Raiders of the Lost Ark:

-Is an enclosed location.
-Has treasure in the form of information: Where is the Ark?
-Has nooks and corners.

Check for thard factors. Let's go to the soft factors:
-Has an arguable obstacle: Indy needs to climb into the place, after all.
-Has a really cool riddle with that staff and the light and all.

This one comes out with a dungeon score of just two but that's enough to qualify (if not much more than that).

The well of souls in Egypt in Raiders of the Lost Ark:

-Is an enclosed location.
-Has arguably the most valuable treasure in the world.
-Has nooks, corners, and even hidden rooms full of mummies.

Hard factors are check. Soft factors?
-Has the same arguable obstacle of needing to climb into it.
-Has another obstacle in the shape of a wall Indy must tear down.
-Has what is either a trap or an enemy in the form of swarms of snakes.

So it has a dungeon score of three. I have this as a Lego set sitting next to me (my kids gave it to me as a birthday gift). Love it.

Godzilla Minus One - some thoughts on an aircraft safety feature

 If you haven't watched Godzilla Minus One, do so. This text will contain spoilers and the movie is (very) good. Don't believe me, believe Kevin Smith. Or even my wife who said that the film was alright - that's very high praise for a kaiju-movie coming from her. So, spoilers ahead.