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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8591890" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 97: July 1994part 3/5Into the Dark: After several columns with vague or nonexistent themes, James picks a solid specific one this time. Wax Museums and their occupants. They can be pretty creepy just as they are, so if they start moving, you know it's probably not to do anything nice. But it's fairly cheap on the special effects, as all you need is heavy makeup and someone capable of standing very still until the crucial moment, so there's plenty of films that use the idea one way or another. Let's see if the low bar to entry means at least some of them are good.Mystery of the Wax Museum takes us right back to 1933, to hear Fay Wray scream repeatedly and piercingly in response to the horrors Lionel Atwill's mad sculptor inflicts upon the world. Interesting, but also very dated indeed, with the slang very amusing to modern ears. Not the best, but not the worst either. House of Wax remakes the same story 20 years later, with Vincent Price as the villain. This is an improvement on both acting and technical levels, but is also more sanitised, as we're now right in the middle of Hays Code censorship. Drug references and female protagonists with a job? Just say no! Once again, it's interesting to see how things have developed over the years, but there's still room for improvement. Maybe someday there'll be a definitive version.Nightmare in Wax, on the other hand, is of no great value or interest, and very unlikely to ever get remade. Cheaply made horror where people are turned into waxworks by injection, until wearing off at dramatically appropriate moments, with a scenery chewing ham villain. Yet another one I feel no desire to check out.Terror in the Wax Museum is somewhat higher budget and features a surprisingly good cast, but that just means it manages to be bad in a more conventionally boring way, which leaves me with even less desire to check it out even in a rubbernecking way.Waxwork sucks the victims into the places depicted, letting them depict a whole smorgasbord of horror scenarios in shallow vignettes. This one falls into the OK overall level of quality, decent cast and effects, but poor scripting and bits that are just an enactment of the writer's barely disguised fetish. Of course, if sado-masochism is also your thing, that'll just be a bonus, so make of that what you will. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Weasel Games: Having established the basic principle of the column, that backstabbing is fun and you should do it whenever you can get away with it, Lester gives some more examples of games and the terrible things he did in them. Cosmic Encounter and Castle of Magic have some sadistic potential. But it's Diplomacy that any aspiring Starscream should really hone their skills on, as without any dice rolls, winning is entirely contingent on knowing when to make alliances and when to break them. Who is weak enough to annihilate without consequence, who is far away enough that you can't fight anyway, so you might as well ally with them to crush the people in the middle, who is too strong to fight on your own so you need to ally with others take them down soon even if it's not the optimal course of action short term. Eventually you'll have to betray everyone to win, but the order in which you do it is crucial. Essentially a lesson in enlightened self-interest, this once again stands out quite a lot against the overall tone of the newszine and is quite an entertaining read. There's a good deal of fun to be had embracing the dark side and it's nice they they've decided to cater to that section of the gaming public at last. Still not sure what the response will be, or how soon it'll get stale, but I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts.</blockquote>

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