Saruman Actor To Voice Deus Ex Machina Rock Opera Game

[Karloff]

Saruman Actor To Voice Deus Ex Machina Rock Opera Game

Mel Croucher's going back to the game he made in 1984, and taking it to Kickstarter.

Way back in 1984, former architect Mel Croucher put together a ZX Spectrum title Deus Ex Machina, a multimedia 8-bit mindbender rock opera starring Jon Pertwee - aka Doctor Who - in the lead as Storyteller and Croucher himself as the Defect. Roll on a few decades, and Croucher now wants to take his game to Kickstarter for its sequel, Deus Ex Machina 2. This time out the Storyteller - now Narrator - of the piece is a knight you may remember from any one of a dozen different villainous roles, from Dracula and The Man With The Golden Gun to The Lord of the Rings' Saruman: Sir Christopher Lee.

Deus Ex Machina assumes that all life has been wiped out by a computerized defense system. All that's left is the Machine, but its programming has gone awry thanks to an errant dropping left by the last mouse on earth, just before the poison gas defense system killed it. The now slightly broken Machine therefore sneaks a Defect into the ordered, programmed system, a test-tube baby that, over time, grows into an adult. The game charts its development, using Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM8LAbuateI] as its premise. Nothing else was quite like it; you had to synchronize your cassette tape deck with your Spectrum - yep, you needed a separate system for the game's music - and press pause on the soundtrack every so often when the on-screen action dictated it. Deus Ex Machina, despite its awards and favorable critical reception, did not sell well back in 1984, but Croucher now hopes his Kickstarter will spark old memories. "Back in the day, we never sold out to banks, advertisers or parasites, we only ever dealt direct with our players," says Croucher. "Now we can reward them in advance thanks to mechanisms like Kickstarter."

Croucher's looking for £64,000 to make his sequel. If this sort of thing intrigues you - or if you just want to hear Sir Christopher intone a Shakespearian crossover about soldiers seeking hi-scores even in the laser's mouth - here [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1552445321/deus-ex-machina-2], for a look at what Croucher has in mind.


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[TheLazyGeek]

I can always get behind a game that has Sir Christopher Lee narrating. And if he should happen to sing as well, that would be even better.

 

[James Joseph Emerald]

There's something about describing Christopher Lee as "Saruman actor" that gets my jimmies rustled...

 

[Sugarman101]

Have we really fallen so far that Sir Christopher Lee is only known as 'Saruman Actor?'

OT: Sounds like a pretty cool concept, and it looks like they're fairly far along. I look forward to seeing the final product.

 

[xplosive59]

Did you really need to put "Saruman actor" in the title? I am pretty sure if people are visiting The Escapist they know who the duck Christopher Lee is! Dude is a living legend.

The game needs:

 

[Zachery Gaskins]

I've been following this game for a while now - if the existing footage is still accurate, DEM2 is a series of minigames set to completely original music (I downloaded the soundtrack off of Amazon). I'm guessing it's been in development hell for a while, and needing a funding boost to get it out there. The interesting thing is that you're not scored based on your achievements, but instead on how much of the game you complete without screwing up: you literally start at 100% of "Ideal Entity", and it drops every time you make a mistake.

Here's the stages as I recall:
1. Fertilizing Agent: Guide a sperm towards the egg, beating out your fellow swimmers.
2. Birth: Steer your about-to-be-born child out into the world while avoiding nanoscopic Defect Police scanners.
3. Infancy: Learn to walk and avoid obstacles like scissorhanded teddybears, while being taunted by the Defect Police Captain.
4. Schoolchild: This is where I'm getting the idea (from the footage, soundtrack and website) that this may be an alternate universe where the Nazis won WW2 and you're being propagandized as a youth.
5. Adolescence: As hormones rage, sprint through a fantasy world of pimples, hairs, and naughty bits to a catchy surf rock tune about puberty.
6. Love: Your character floats through tunnels and discovers love for the first time.
7. Betrayal: Your character learns the hard lesson that people can be untrustworthy and mean.
8. War: Drafted into the armed forces, your character runs for his life amidst airstrikes and bombs. (Croucher appears to be an avowed pacifist, take that how you will).
9. Pain: You drift through an army hospital trying to find ways to heal yourself after being wounded in combat.
10. War Crimes: The Defect Police Captain tempts you into being ok with the atrocities you committed.
11. Dance: This level is vague but it appears to be you trying to ease back into society after the war, looking for partners on the dancefloor.
12. Guilt: Using your Machine-given powers to rise in power, She scolds you for the damage you may cause in the process.
13. Power: Not much known about this level, apart from the orchestral/choral arrangement (One-Winged Angel kinda stuff, you know the drill.)
14. Decline: The effects of your existence starting to fade, hints at perhaps some planet-wide catastrophe about to happen.
15. Danger: Things are spiraling out of control, and you can feel your twilight years approaching.
16. Old Age: A bluesy-shuffle about your body falling apart - if memory serves, you hobble down a path picking up pills and manage your body's final days.
17. Senility: You begin to lose your mind, and float through various moments in your life (revisiting previous levels).
18. Wonder: As death approaches, you suspect there may be something more to this life than you had expected.
19. Death: You return to The Machine, and report on what you learned during your precious little life.
20. Transfiguration: ???

Will you enjoy this game? If you're looking for a thoroughly complex unified experience, then probably not. However, if you wondered what a game based on a concept album (The Wall, 2112, etc) might be like, this is one helluva acid trip.

 

[Grabehn]

There's something about describing Christopher Lee as "Saruman actor" that gets my jimmies rustled...

My thoughts exactly, it sounds a lot like "that guy that did this thing you saw" which makes it sound indredibly mediocre for some reason. I don't think there's that many people here that don't know who he is. *fixed due to my lack of writing abilities*

 

[iniudan]

Saruman used to walk these woods, but now he has a mind of metal

You forgot the video to go along it

 

[James Joseph Emerald]

I seriously doubt that more than a few people that actually read news on this website don't know who he is.

Wow, that is one confusing sentence.
Here's what Captcha thinks: BOWTIES ARE COOL

 

[-Dragmire-]

Have we really fallen so far that Sir Christopher Lee is only known as 'Saruman Actor?'

OT: Sounds like a pretty cool concept, and it looks like they're fairly far along. I look forward to seeing the final product.

I am absolutely awful with actor names while character names stay with me. It's probably because I don't care about them outside of their job. Also, I don't watch movies much anymore.

I'll say I appreciate having "Saruman actor" in the title, while I understand some people are offended on his behalf, it was useful to me.

 

[octafish]

Ha! Come, come Mr. Bond you dissapoint me, you get as much fulfilment out of videogames as I do, so why don't you admit it?

 

[octafish]

Ha! Come, come Mr. Bond you dissapoint me, you get as much fulfilment out of videogames as I do, so why don't you admit it?

 

[Grabehn]

I seriously doubt that more than a few people that actually read news on this website don't know who he is.

Wow, that is one confusing sentence.
Here's what Captcha thinks: BOWTIES ARE COOL

Oh shit you're right, I guess I won't be relying on my 5 AM half asleep writing skills anymore...

 

[Darth_Payn]

Sir Christopher Lee (we know who he is; you don't have to ID him by one of his many, many, MANY, roles) is so fucking metal! If I had more money, I'd just throw it at the kickstarter project!
Speaking of the 1st DEM game, can I still play it in this day and age on our modern systems?

 

[Nghtgnt]

Wow, the butthurt is strong in this thread.

It's because a lot of people find that naming him by a movie role in lieu of his actual name implies he is only notable for playing that one character, and is extremely disrespectful given all that he has done in movies, music, and warfare.

...not only was he a former secret agent in WWII whose actions are still classified to this day...

From http://www.badassoftheweek.com/christopherlee.html

Christopher Lee enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1940, where he worked as an intelligence officer specializing in cracking German ciphers and skulls and any other Nazi bullshit he came in contact with. In North Africa he was attached to the Long Range Desert Patrol, the forerunner of the SAS, where he would jump in a badass fucking four-wheel-drive jeep with a gigantic machine gun mounted in the back, drive hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, survive the scorching heat of the Sahara Desert, then sneak-attack Luftwaffe airfields by rolling up on them at sixty miles an hour with his .50-caliber machine guns blazing out curtains of white-hot Nazi-smiting justice, planting dynamite on their airplanes, then peeling ass out of there leaving nothing but bullet-riddled corpses and gigantic explosions in his wake. After working with the LRDP, Lee was assigned to the Special Operations Executive ? better known as Winston Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare ? a group that did shit like lead a twelve-man assault that destroyed the German top secret nuclear weapons development facility in Norway and assist brave Eastern European partisans and rebels sabotage Nazi supply lines to prevent them from bringing reinforcements up to fight the Soviets. His service records are sealed and Lee doesn't talk much about his service (when pressed on the subject, he reportedly asks his interviewer, "Can you keep a secret?". When they excitedly say yes, he leans in close and says, "So can I."), but we do know that by the time he retired as a Flight Lieutenant in 1945 he'd been personally decorated for battlefield bravery by the Czech, Yugoslavian, English, and Polish governments and was good friends with Josip Broz Tito, so draw your own conclusions.

Oh, and after the war he was tasked with hunting Nazis

After the war, Lee, who can speak fluent French and German, among other languages, was seconded to the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Here, he was tasked with helping to track down Nazi war criminals. Of his time with the organisation, Lee has said: "We were given dossiers of what they'd done and told to find them, interrogate them as much as we could and hand them over to the appropriate authority ... We saw these concentration camps. Some had been cleaned up. Some had not."