Endgame

Babylon 5 Season 4, Episode 20.

Primary Plot: Sheridan leads the final assault on Earth. President Clark commits suicide at it grows clear his forces are doomed, but not before turning Earth's defense platforms towards Earth and attempting to scorch the surface.

Secondary Plot: Marcus uses the alien healing device (previously used to revive Garibaldi in "Revelations"), sacrificing his own life to save Ivanova.


Return to the Babylon 5 Episode Guide.

In chess, the endgame is one of the three main portions of the game, the Opening, the Middlegame, and the Endgame. Many lower level players find the endgame boring, but those dedicated to the art love a good endgame. The endgame is characterized by a trading off of most of the pieces and pawns. The result is that the game will usually be decided by very subtle maneuvering. It is very important to understand endgame theory, because if you don't know what you want the endgame position to look like you won't know which middlegame lines to play. Chess is best studied from the back to the front, but few people actually go about it this way.

A gamestore in Oakland, EndGame stocks RPGs, minatures and wargames, import and traditional board games, and CCGs.

Aaron is the name of that freaky-looking guy with long hair and a chin piercing who stands behind the counter. He is actually quite nice, and is a hardcore gamer.

At 3344 Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland, CA. Across the street from a Starbucks and a Noah’s Bagels, next door to World Savings Bank. Just a few doors up from an all-night donut shop!

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In Peter Greenaway's film Drowning by Numbers, the morbid little boy Smut plays this game, at the end of the film, as the numbers increment from 96 to 100.

The object of this game is to dare to fall with a noose around your neck from a place sufficiently off the ground such that a fall will hang you. The object of the game is to punish those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions. This is the best game of all because the winner is also the loser and the judge's decision is always final.

The title of the final Star Trek: Voyager series episode. Similar to the Next Generation finale with the time traveling plot, but with the slight twist the two Janeway's coexisted in the same timeline at once (the one we know and hate/love and the senior citizen).

Plot in a nutshell - Janeway finds a way to get Voyager back to Earth faster... 20 years too late. So she procures a device that allows her to travel back in time and she informs the Voyager crew of said method of early return. Unfortunately, the younger Janeway would rather nuke the Borg instead and there's a whole big battle between the two Janeways over who is right and how it affects the crew and blah blah blah...

At any rate, in the end they both get what they want as Borg are nuked and ships are returned to proper quadrants (alpha instead of delta) in very creative ways, as is the trademark of somewhat good sci-fi.

The only downside to Endgame is that now we have to wait for the new Star Trek series which is doomed to suck.

-- NETHACK SPOILERS --

The endgame to Nethack is reached by taking the "up" stairs out of the Dungeons of Doom on level one, with the true Amulet of Yendor. It consists of:

Four elemental planes: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. These levels exist to provide vastly different challenges compared to the previous 50-plus dungeon levels. Earth is a big cavern consisting of several unconnected chambers. Air is a vast stretch of atmosphere, and either levitation or creative use of kicking are required to get around here, while contending with lots of the newly-deadly Air Elementals. Fire is full of lava. And as for Water... let's hope you brought along a waterproof container.

After this last comes the Astral Plane, stocked with dozens of angels, (some friendly, many not, one tame), three Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Death, Famine, Pestilence – see if you can guess where – or rather, who – is War), and three High Altars, on which one, and only one, should you sacrifice the Amulet in order to win the game.

Suffice to say, most Nethack players never get even this far.

A play by Samuel Beckett, of Waiting for Godot fame, which continues his Theatre of the Absurd ideas. It takes place in a room with two windows, next to a kitchen that is "ten feet, by ten feet, by ten feet..." There are four characters, none of whom ever leave the house. One character, named Clove, cannot bend his knees, and another, named Hamm, cannot see or walk, and never leaves his chair-on-wheels. The other two characters are Hamm's parents, who live in separate garbage cans. Clove spends his days serving Hamm, pushing his chair around, and reporting what he sees out the windows: "Nothing, nothing, and nothing". At the end, Clove prepares to leave the house, but the lights go to black as he is standing at the door, so we never know.
It is probably best played towards the humor side, as it does have some very funny lines, but it's the kind of humor that you laugh at, think about, and then feel guilty about laughing at them. For example: "At least we haven't lost our hearing!" "What?" the father (Nagg) to the mother (Nell), both extremely old, live off basically bread crumbs, and they live in garbage cans! If the production is played without trying to emphasize the humor, it gets very long, and very slow, and very boring; the humor is necessary for contrast to the remarkably depressing situation that all of these characters have been stuck in for a long time, and will most likely remain in until they die.

"Endgame" is a book recapping the 1993 PCA World Chess Championship in which Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short competed against each other. The book was written by Dominic Lawson, a member of Nigel Short's "chess training camp". The book takes an in depth look at the psychology of the chess match (the actual championship is actually spread over many games, not just one) through Nigel Short's view. There is also a large conflict between FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Echècs) and Kasparov before the match actually begins, which results in Short and Kasparov getting together and creating an organization called the Professional Chess Association. So the end result was a now hellish situation with two different chess organizations having world champions (PCA ended up disbanding, but Kasparov still disliked FIDE, so the 2000 chess championships were held outside of FIDE again. (Read: World Chess Championship)). This is supposed to be corrected by year 2005.

Nigel Short was born in England deemed a chess prodigy at age eleven. He was considered destined to reclaim the World Chess Champion title from Russia; he was considered the strongest western power since Bobby Fischer by many. He also went through a period when he didn't enjoy chess, and just wanted to listen to music and live a normal teenage life.

But it's hard to live a normal teenage life when you have beaten Kasparov before age 17, Russia's most hopeful young chess player.

After Short beat Kasparov in a match during his youth, Kasparov dominated the rest of the matches they had. Going into the world championship match, Short had not beaten Kasparov in his adult life. This, coupled with the belief in the chess world that Kasparov could simply not be beaten created a huge hurtle for Short. Short went through eight weeks of training for the event, with two assistants, one computer with a massive opening database. He spent this time memorizing countless opening variations, middle game strategies for specific types of structures, and eventually lifting weights to build up stamina. Chess at those levels takes a lot out of you, not only mentally, but physically as well.

After long months of preparation the match was ready to begin. A 20 game match for the title of World Chess Champion. At this level in chess, not many games are won, but rather drawn. So if anybody can pull out a win in the world championships, it really proves that they are truly above the rest. It was obvious as the match went on, inside the Short camp and amongst the media and chess world, that this was the case, Kasparov simply dominated Short. By the time Short finally beat Kasparov in a game (finally getting rid of a curse that had plagued him all of his adult life), 15 games had already been played, with Kasparov winning five of those, the rest being drawn. It was too late for a comeback, Short conceded mentally.

So after all the conflict and emotion, the match was over. The book ends on this, Short strumming his guitar while singing:

"It's been a long... lonely road."