JG Judgementally Comments...

The Legend Of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

A second Zelda game grabs my attention but can it keep up the standards of the first one?

What’s The Game? Link’s Awakening, the 2019 Switch remake rather than the original.

How Much Did You Know About It Before Playing? Not a huge amount. I was aware that it was a remake, of course, and that the game generally had a good reputation. In particular, the remake I knew was thought of as retaining the charm of the original while updating the whole look, feel, and implementation for a more modern audience. And I knew that it wasn’t set in Hyrule so sidesteps a lot of the familiar aspects of Zelda games. Well, familiar to some anyway – given that I’ve only played one so far the trappings of Hyrule aren’t as engrained in me as they are for some people. Nevertheless, the little I did know of it was intriguing and it was exciting to get stuck into a second Zelda game after loving A Link To The Past so much.

Doctor Who – The Church on Ruby Road

The 15th Doctor gets his first full episode and his first Christmas special but how does it go for the new Doctor?

What’s the Show? The first Gatwa-starring Doctor Who, the first Christmas special in quite a few years, and the last of the 60th anniversary specials.

What’s It All About, JG? A baby is left at a church door on Christmas Eve, who turns out to be Our Companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who’s fostered to a loving mum and associated family but has been having a string of bad luck. The bad luck is because some goblins – no further explanation given – have been picking on her. They feed on coincidence and accident – no further explanation given – and abduct a newly-fostered baby, Lulubelle. The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) turns up and is taken on board the goblin ship with Ruby to try and rescue Lulubelle with the help of some overly-explained intelligent gloves. There is then a song-and-dance number while the Doctor rescues Lulubelle from being eaten by the Goblin King. Meanwhile, David Bowie turns in his grave. The goblins go back in time and snatch Ruby as a baby, turning her foster mum from a loving parent into a cold, hard woman. The Doctor realises the goblins have gone back in time so follows them in the TARDIS and pulls their ship down on to the church spire, defeating them and fixing the flow of time. Returning to the present, the Doctor sees that everything is back the way it should and Ruby, having worked out the Doctor is a time-traveller, joins him in the TARDIS. And then the neighbour, Mrs Flood, interrupts the credits to ask directly to camera if we’ve never seen a TARDIS before.

Doctor Who – The Giggle

The third and final Doctor Who Tennant special sees the Doctor face the Toymaker. Are we game for that?

What’s the Show? The final 2023 Doctor Who special.

What’s It All About, JG? In the prelude, John Logie Baird’s assistant buys a dummy from the mysterious Toymaker, who’s a bit of a racist prick. The dummy is used by Baird in a test transmission… what could go wrong?

The Doctor and Donna are back on Earth where everything has fallen apart because some mysterious force – you know, the one in the pre-credits sequence – has made everyone believe that they are right all the time. The Doctor and Donna hook up with UNIT who are trying to contain the situation, with limited effect. Mel (Mel!) is also at UNIT for… reasons, helping out. The Doctor and Donna travel back to 1925 to find the Toymaker, who first taunts the Doctor about the fate of his previous companions and then leads him on a merry chase around an ever-shifting series of corridors. The Doctor loses a game of cards to him but survives using the “best of three” rule. Ahem.

Once they escape, they high-tail it back to UNIT HQ where – following a dance sequence – the Toymaker eventually shoots the Doctor. This triggers a so-called “bi-generation” whereby David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa can share some screen time. The Doctor(s) defeat the Toymaker in a game of catch, then the David Tennant 14th Doctor heads off to have a nice life (it says here) with Donna and her extended family while the 15th Doctor heads off to have adventures of his own.

Doctor Who – Wild Blue Yonder

The Doctor and Donna vs The Doctor and Donna! There’s also probably a “long arm of the law” gag in there somewhere…

What’s The Show? The second of RTD’s Fourteenth Doctor specials, “Wild Blue Yonder”.

What’s It All About, JG? After a brief stop-off to visit Issac Newton for a limp joke, the coffee-defeated TARDIS crashes on an alien spaceship. While repairing itself, it vanishes (thanks to the always-rubbish HADS) and leave the Doctor and Donna stranded in a very long corridor that sometimes reconfigures itself randomly and with an ancient robot slowly making its way down. While exploring the ship, they discover they are on the very edge of existence and that they are sharing the ship with the no-things. They are creatures who slowly take the form of those around them until they can mimic them perfectly. Once the process is complete, they plan to swarm into the universe and plunder. The captain of the ship worked out how to stop them and set the ship on a very slow self-desctruct – hence the robot – while the no-things copy the Doctor and Donna in a bid to escape their captivity in the creepiest way imaginage. The Doctor speeds up the self-destruct to stop them, the TARDIS reappears at a convenient moment to save the day and Donna almost dies after the Doctor takes the fake one on board but then is rescued. And on returning to London safely, Wilf is waiting for them but the world has gone to pot.

Doctor Who – The Star Beast

David Tennant is back! Catherine Tate is back! RTD is back! But can the old magic be recaptured?

What’s the Show? Doctor Who returns with RTD back at the helm for three specials prior to the launch of the Fifteenth Doctor. You probably know that.

What’s it All About? The Doctor has regenerated from Jodie Whittaker back into David Tennant for reasons not yet explained. He bumps into Donna (Catherine Tate), whose daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney) has discovered an alien, Beep The Meep (Myriam Margolyes), and hides it – in true E.T. style – in her shed. Donna’s still got the whole mind block from Journey’s End in place whereby she’ll die if she remembers the Doctor (or there’s a big End Of Doctor special in the offing) so keeps missing things like a crashing spaceship. The ship carries soldiers bent on bringing the Meep to justice since, though looking cute and cuddly, it is, in fact, a vicious, evil thing. The Meep is stopped from destroying London by the Doctor and Donna, who eventually deals with the whole I’ll-die thing by having had a daughter and diluting the metacrisis then just letting it go. Hmm. Anyway, Donna pops off for “one last journey in the TARDIS”, it all goes wrong, and then onto the next episode.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past

What’s The Game? A Link To The Past.

How Much Did You Know About It Before Playing? 100% of nothing. I’ve been ~~corrupted~~ persuaded to play these by my fella. They are something that have been a huge part of his life and he wanted to share them with me. I’ve been meaning to get into gaming in some kind of form again for simply ages. I always loved playing video games when I was a teenager (Elite, the best game ever, was a favourite, which nicely dates me) but come university it fell away never to re-emerge. Since this was a good chance to get back into it, and also share something important with the love of my life, here I am gaming again.

Introduction

Don’t worry, it’s short!

I’m completely new to the Zelda series and a compelte, utter, and irreducable noob when it comes to gaming. Alight, not quite, but most of my experience has been with FPS (Quake, just to show my age, Call of Duty 2, that sort of thing) and nothing really along the lines of Zelda since the ZX Spectrum was A Thing. This is a series that, beyond the fact that it exists and has a dedicated following, I know absolutely nothing about. Not the background, not the lore, not the production, not even the age of the series.

So now, thanks to my fella, I’m playing Zelda games. On the Switch, if that’s relevant. I’ll write them up as I go through them, though how much detail I go into remains to be seen.

Anyway, first up, A Link To The Past!

Stop Making Sense

What’s The Movie? The 1984 Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense.

What’s It All About, JG? Watching a band at the absolute pinnacle of their abilities perform what is arguably the greatest concert film ever put together. Capturing the band towards the end of 1983, promoting the Speaking In Tongues album and just before they tilted over into the full-on pop of Little Creatures, Stop Making Sense highlights the band’s back catalogue but changed, warped, adjusted, and generally rearranged for the film. It was shot at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles over four nights, the final result being a blend of footage from different nights. The whole of Stop Making Sense was conceived of from the word go as a concert that would be filmed, and David Byrne serves as artistic director, pulling the whole project together. It’s directed by Jonathan Demme in his first outing behind the camera, not that you’d know it from looking at the – frankly amazing – footage. Why cover a 1984 film now? Well, because it’s been re-released back into the cinema in a glorious 4K IMAX restoration to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the original release.

Barbie

What’s the Movie? Barbie

What’s It All About, JG? Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives a perfect life in Barbieland with lots of other different Barbies and Kens. One day she has strange, rather existential thoughts about dying and her world slowly moves away from its perfect state as she becomes more human. To correct this, she visits Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) who advises her to go to The Real World and figure out who’s playing with her and fix the problem. Travelling to the real work (well, LA) with Ken (Ryan Gosling), Barbie is shocked to discover that men run the world, feminism hasn’t been solved and that the girl she thought was playing with her, Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), in fact hates her. Turns out it was the girl’s Mum, Gloria, (America Ferrera) that loved playing with the doll and, after escaping from Mattel, they all return to Barbieland. However, Ken has learned about the patriarchy and tries to overthrow the rule of the various Barbies by having men – men! – take control. With guile, cunning and intelligence, the various Barbies defeat the men and “our” Barbie chooses to leave the perfection of Barbieland behind for the real world and becomes human.

Friends II

Right, it’s Major Update time!

*jaunty guitar, corny lyrics, frivolous fountain frolicking*

So, I am now up to Episode 15, The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break. I have intentionally stopped on the cliffhanger and I don’t yet know how it resolves (so please, no spoilers for the next couple of days at least – actually if you could avoid spoilers except for the very most general ones, that would very much be appreciated. Talk back, not forwards!).