Mad Max in Lego!

"On the road it was a white-line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive."

 

 

As I have mentioned before, one of the unexpected joys of parenting is the fact that you get to play with your kids' cool toys – nay, you are lauded as a good parent for playing with your kids' toys – at a time when you can do way awesomer things than you could ever have done when you were a kid yourself.

So, with summer vacation winding down to a close, my son was wanting me to build some Lego cars with him. Naturally I was not content with building mere Legotown jalopies. Naturally my mind ran immediately to Mad Max.

Here we have Max Rockatansky himself in his V8 Interceptor pursued by the vermin of the wasteland across the post-apocalyptic hellscape that is my dining room buffet, with lace curtains billowing desolately in the background. (Pretend that that scalloped cloth made by my great-grandmother is actually a salt pan.)

It isn't perfect, but you have to work with what you're given, being in this case my son's Lego bucket. Still, look at all those cool pieces. I made a fairly crude blower out of this and that, and was proud of my work, only to discover that my son actually has several Lego blowers. It was a bit of a let-down, in fact. But it's hard to argue with something that ups the coolness factor by an order of magnitude at least.

My creation doesn't come from any one Mad Max movie in particular, mostly because I was constrained by the limitations of my son's collection. But it's easy to imagine making, say, the Gyro Captain's autogyro, or the Mack truck used to haul "that fat tank of gas," or Pappagallo's rocket-car, or the hedgehog attack shovel, or the dump/drum truck with its bungee-jumping flame-throwing guitarist, etc., etc.

If only there were Lego mohawks!

You Are Likely to Be Eaten by a Grue

"Zork I box art" by The box/cover art can or could be obtained
from the distributor. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

In my last post I mentioned the Infocom games, which got me to thinking about such games and about interactive fiction in general. Infocom, if you don't know, was a computer company founded in 1979 and bought out by Activision in 1986. We had a number of their titles on floppy disks for our Commodore 64, including the three Zork games, Enchanter, Sorcerer, Planetfall, and I forget what else. I mostly played them around the late eighties and early nineties.

They're purely text-based, and form a bridge between the choose-your-own-adventure books that were popular at the time and visual adventure games like King's Quest or Police Quest. But the former were too simplistic to be engaging for long, while the latter, to me, left too little to the imagination. I loved the Zork games because playing them was a bit like being a character in a book. Also, because my parents wouldn't let me play Nintendo, and we didn't own a PC until winning a shopping spree a couple years later.

The beginning of Zork II, my favorite in the series.

The puzzles were extremely difficult, partly because the possibilities for action were basically limitless – you could try any simple command – and partly also because of misleading clues and useless objects. But of course, once you strip away the trappings, they're really just big logic puzzles, and I've mentioned my proclivity for logic puzzles here in the past. Part of the difficulty for me back in those Web-less days was that we had no instructions for any of them, since we inherited the games as part of a box of disks gotten rid of by someone else, but really that just added to my enjoyment.

I've done a bit of programming, beginning with BASIC at the same time I was playing the Zork games – which probably are what got me into programming – and continuing into C++ and other things in later years. Actually, just the other day I found some ancient C++ notes of mine with a map of Zork II drawn on the back. They're the classic games for geeks, and contain numerous programmers' in-jokes and obscure references, like 69,105. I've always wanted to try my hand at writing interactive fiction...

But all of that's not to say that the setting was nothing to me. Romantic that I am, I played the Zork games chiefly for their subterranean, half technological, half magical setting, exemplified by the opening above, in which the adventurer encounters an Elvish sword (which naturally glows in the presence of enemies) and a battery-operated brass lantern in an ancient barrow. The lantern's batteries, incidentally, have a frustratingly low life-span, leaving the hapless adventurer prey to lurking grues once the light goes out.

The interested reader can experience these games at the Internet Archive, which allows you to play them online in an Apple II emulator:

• Zork I: The Great Underground Empire
• Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz
• Zork III: The Dungeon Master

Enjoy!

Oh ye who go about saying unto each: "Hello sailor":
Dost thou know the magnitude of thy sin before the gods?
Yea, verily, thou shalt be ground between two stones.
Shall the angry gods cast thy body into the whirlpool?
Surely, thy eye shall be put out with a sharp stick!
Even unto the ends of the earth shalt thou wander and
Unto the land of the dead shalt thou be sent at last.
Surely thou shalt repent of thy cunning.

Lego Chess!

 

As a general rule I hate playing board games, but I make an exception for chess. I don't pretend to be anything but an amateur, and I've never played anyone but family members and friends, but I enjoy it quite a bit, and read about it from time to time. I've been playing chess with my son since his fifth birthday and my daughter since well before her fifth. My son has almost beaten me several times; I don't know whether that says more about me or about him! We're also reading Through the Looking-Glass, having just finished Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The latter is definitely the superior of the two, but the kids are amused by the chessboard conceit of the former.

Another thing we three do together is play with Legos. You see, the awesome thing about having kids is that you get to play with toys all over again, but now that you're older you can do way cooler things with them. Plus, people think you're a devoted parent, etc. Anyway, when I was a kid, I was really into Legos. I eventually had this enormous plastic tub full of them. And my parents, who save everything, from my umbilical cord (carefully coiled in a little pouch) to a piece of my finger I chopped off in high school, naturally kept these stored in their garage like the Ark of the Covenant in a top-secret government warehouse. And now I have them all – cord, finger, and Legos.

It was quite an experience sorting through the tub, which hadn't been touched since my brother and I got too old for them. The Lego Movie is, naturally, quite a favorite around here. Best movie of 2014. Part of it takes place in a hall of "relics," which include a dirty Band-Aid and other nasty little bits of trash. The joke here, which only a person with lots and lots of Legos would get, is that all kinds of weird things end up in the bucket. Well, going through our old bucket was like opening up a time capsule of relics. The helmet of a G.I. Joe; the leg of a Parademon; the eraser-end of a pencil bitten so as to make the eraser protrude just a little bit further; the wrapper from a clandestinely consumed piece of candy; a plastic cockroach; a rusty binder clip; and so on.

Well, being the systematic person I am, I washed each and every Lego and sorted them into colors. That done, what was I to do? I made several increasingly grand gothic imperial space palaces, but, you know, that gets old. So at last I hit upon the awesomest idea of all: Lego chess! A bout with a stomach virus over the Christmas break gave me just the opportunity I needed.

Here's a picture of the white side:

Which makes me think of the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet:

The king is accordingly called Hamlet, and his wife, Gertrude. One of the bishops wears the sign of the shell, selected as being an ancient symbol of pilgrimage, and also because I ran out of red capes. The black side has more of an Iron Crown of Witchland thing going on:

Naturally, white represents Order, and black, Chaos. It's hard to see in the pictures, but the white king holds a sword across his lap for Justice, the black king a whip for Tyranny. The latter (King Gorice XII) has a fierce spiky cross:

His queen we call Semiramis. Just for good measure, here's another view of the white side:

The set is inspired partly by Battle Chess, which I loved watching on autoplay in Radio Shack in the late eighties. The horses' heads, alas, protrude beyond the edge of their squares, and they thus must sometimes be turned sideways. I could build a more traditional-looking knight, but what fun it is to use real horses!

And yes, the pieces are a little cumbersome to play with. But the kids and I derive considerable enjoyment from it nonetheless. As you can probably tell, I'm inordinately pleased with it. The Lego bricks are all from the late eighties / early nineties, the very latest having been bought by my younger brother after I'd moved on to other things. So they're not as specialized as what they make now, and the white ones are slightly discolored.

No arena of combat would be complete without spectators:

Most are from my old sets, but several of my son's make an appearance as well. As you can see, quite a few celebrities like to stop by. From left to right:

• Row 4: Blacktron Future Generation spaceman; Larry from Newhart; morning news anchor; Chima bird-thing; one-eyed cutthroat; M:Tron spaceman; Redbeard the Pirate; Blacktron spaceman; Jolly Roger pirate.
• Row 3: Burt Reynolds; Bane; the Toecutter; crossing guard; Justin Bieber; Lizzie Borden; airport worker; greasemonkey.
• Row 2: General Zod; General Zod's minion; doctor; Sally Ride (it's hard to tell because of the helmet); Sir Bruce sans Pitie; Shell gas station employee; rioting peasant; barbarian warrior; hardened criminal.
• Row 1: Emmet Brickowski; Batman; Super Mario; Commissioner Gordon; Robin Hood; Little John; Benny the retro eighties spaceman; Superman.

We keep ourselves entertained.

Of Flying Whales

My About Me page lists such luminaries as Conrad and Melville as authorial inspirations. Metaphysically, I am an Aristotelian or (more accurately) a Thomist, of sorts; I read Thomas Aquinas through his great twentieth-century expositors, especially Etienne Gilson, and I believe that this has a heavy influence on my writing. My knowledge of the physical laws that appear in my works (usually to be purposefully flouted) was imbibed at the font of my mathematics doctoral program, through which I studied graduate-level quantum theory and cosmology. And, lest my pedigree be suspect, I can point to Carl Friederich Gauss, Prince of Mathematicians, as my teacher-to-pupil mathematical ancestor. (So can about twenty thousand other people, of course.)

This list of influences and credentials is, admittedly, impressive. Yes. But it would be incomplete were I not to add one more source that, due perhaps to childhood trauma, has never been far from my mind. Those of you, my readers, to whom the felicitious locution "You spoony bard!" is not unfamiliar will know that of which I speak. I refer, of course, to the video game Final Fantasy II (Final Fantasy IV in the original Japanese version) produced by SquareSoft for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in the early nineties. (The total number of random Google hits my blog has received to date just octupled.) After having completed the American version too many times to count easily, I obtained the original version together with an English language patch, and am proud to say that I beat it as well, despite the added difficulty.

I know that I've spoken dismissively of video games in the past. This is for three reasons. First, I am a grown-up now, and have better and/or more lucrative ways to spend my time. Second, they rot your brain. It's true. And, third, I don't like first-person shooter- or slasher-type games, and those took the market over in the late nineties. I liked the old two-dimensional games like Zelda, which could sometimes be quite beautiful. (I also love to peruse Owen Jones' Grammar of Ornament.) Final Fantasy IV (IIE) is, alas, not particularly beautiful*, although the re-release looks to have corrected this. It is a great sadness to me that I will most likely never play it, as I have no intention of ever spending money on the system for which it was produced.

No, what chiefly I loved FF IV (IIE) for was the grand sweep of its story. It is a remarkably coherent story, considering the number of ridiculous plot elements introduced into FF VI (IIIE), which I also played extensively. There is much for the writer-of-fantasy-series to learn here. The key is the gradual broadening of perspective. What begins with the dismissal of Cecil the Black Knight from the Red Wings of Baron ends with the defeat of the evil Lunarian Zeromus deep beneath the surface of the Moon. (I can't believe I remember all that.) The story follows something of a spiral pattern, with new characters, forces, and places being held in reserve until the proper moment. This works to maintain player interest. The same idea applies in fiction.

This is a matter of nuts-and-bolts practicality: you can't introduce all your characters in Book I and have them keep returning to the same familiar places throughout the series. It's boring. On the other hand, if you're writing epic fantasy and not episodic sword-and-sorcery, you can't let the finish line recede indefinitely. There has to be a point where whatever was causing the trouble in the Prelude to Book I is finally overcome, or else the reader will feel cheated. She'll get the feeling that you didn't know what the hell you were up to when you started, or else that it wasn't important enough not to alter in exchange for (ahem) enhanced financial security.

Another thing I like about FF IV (IIE) is its blend of fantasy and science fiction elements. Actually, it's pure fantasy, but it has spaceships and world-annihilating robot giants, which people tend to associate with science fiction. These things are given an air of strangeness and immense antiquity, though, and there's no incongruity in the transition from the spaceship (built, of course, to look like a glowing whale) to the lunar palace where our heroes meet Fusoya, Cecil's Lunarian wizard-uncle. I think this appeals so strongly to me because it tends to naturalize or humanize the aspects of our civilization (namely, industry and techonology) that I find most jarring, being a birds-and-flowers sort of fellow.

Well, FF IV (IIE) is one of those things I had to discover when I discovered it (early adolescence). I'm certain it wouldn't draw me now if I hadn't played it before. But game design is an art—in the sense of chair-making rather than of, say, Gilson's Arts of the Beautiful—and FF IV (IIE) is certainly a memorable product of its time, and one that, for one reason or another, affected me deeply.

A special welcome to all my new Google hits. Thank you for increasing my site's traffic. Alas, there are no games for sale here, no downloads, no hints or secrets or cheat codes. Go read a good book; or, better yet, go for a long walk and just listen. I recommend Moby-Dick and/or the National Park System.

* It did have a good score; I especially loved the overworld pieces.