Retrogamer Revival: Good or Bad?

Playing: The Melvins - Ozma /Watching: The Big Combo/Reading - Neuromancer - William Gibson

Wow -- this is a terrible title for this blog. I might have to go back and amend it. First off, isn't retrogame or retrogamer and revival kind of redundant? Seciond of the offenses is that these cultural movements aren't necessarily good or bad. They simply are, and if they are more than this, it isn't as simple as "good" or "bad" in any case. Any interpretation of them is just my opinion.

So, is it just a fad? Is it here to stay? I think it is indeed he to stay. All fads are cultural movements, but not all cultural movements are mere fads. Fad implies more transience, and more vacuous nature. These games would be here to stay in some ofrm or another regardless of whether there was interest in them, and the sheer magnitude of their former popularity, coupled with their cute and addictive (ie: "timeless") nature means that long after these old disks, arcade boards, ROM, and cartridges have lost theior battery power making it impossible to save your game or become completely unplayable in a non-digital format, they wqill be revived, in the same way that google, a massive mainstream corporation revamped their logo last week on the Pac-Man's 30th anniversary in the most elaborate (and likely costly) vneture yet, by forming the google logo into a playable Pac-Man maze (I won my my first round!). As gamer Steve Sanders has said of archaic games "These are the games people cared about." We still do.

Pac-Man didn't just become a Saturday Morning Cartoon, along with a host of his contemporaries. He is a cultural icon. My uncle once used the charcter to describe the shape of a surgical tool that was to be used on him to make sense of it to my family. Everyone understood. I rest my case.

Seriously, though, retrogaming is all the rage in the 2000s. Sure X-box 360 and Wii are the kingd of the day when it comes to cutting edge, Son'y monsterously oversized, overpriced PS3 continues to limp along, and Dreamcasts and Playstation 2s sell surprisingy well in a downed economy (online marketplaces repackaging unsold or used dreamcasts with new games as new consoles sell well, and the PS2 continues to sell far better than its successor, the result of a downed economy and the quality of software available). New Dreamcast games are still being made, and the Sega Master System continues to have new games published for it in Brazil. Independent developers such as Milestone, Good Deal Games, 4 Play/Scatologic, G.rev, redspotgames, and many others continue to develope and publish new games for older consoles (likely without the consent, publicity, or support of the system's original developers). Many of these games quickly become collector's items.

In the mainstream, the retro revival can be seen in malls across America, selling derivitaves (either officially supported or pirated international derivitaves) of older systems, often in the popular (but cheap) plug'n'play format (the CTV, or commodore 64 for your television, for example, came packed with over 30 games inside of a joystick that plugs into your monitor, or Atari's "new" systyem, the all-in-one plug'n'play Atari Flashback, fashioned to look like a vintage 2600, or even the seemingly endless array of dual systems such as the Twin Famicom, which plays both NES and SNES games, Genesis and SNES games, or some derivation thereof).

T-shirt are the most visible sign of retrogaming outside of the house. Retro gamer shirt are sold everywhere, just as vintage-looking AC/DC, Saturday morning cartoon, and Marvel and DC comic's shirts, are being bought and sold by kids too young to even remember, muvch less have lived through, these times. Still, it warms my heart to see a T-shirt sporting the Atari logo I remember seeing when I was far too young to have ever held a joystick.

"i am 8-bit" is another outpouring of life-support into the classic gaming format. This is a multi-artist, multimedia teqam of artists who have joined forces in representing their favorite characters of the 8- and 16- bit era of gaming artistically. They have released at least one art-book that I know of, sold in places like Barne's and Noble, and conmtinue to exhibit works all over the place. I once met a couple of the artists and saw their work at an art exhibition at Pergamont Station in L.A. here in CA. Warning: many of these renderings are not for the kiddies. Nevertheless, its fine art format aside, i am 8-bit is a kindred spirit and bastard child of pixel art, which has become popular within the last twenty years in or outside of gaming, and which, in its purest form, uses an isometric perspective like that seem in the very non-pixel oriented The Sims or in arcade games like Viewpoint or computer games like the original Siom City. Created skillfully, often employing tiny pixels themselves to painstakingly render the work with a sometimes surpring detail but a distintly stylized and retro feel, these pieces have given way to an wera of subculture which embraces larger pixels and less detainled artworks representing characters like Donkey Kong, Link, or the guys from Contra in all their pixelated glory. Spritemaking and the modification of in-game graphics, and even from the ground up new derivations of old games (an example being Sonic Chaos Revolution and numerouis Zelda spin-off) continue to thrive in the Homebrew scene, which releases new or modified games indepentendly devloped (thus, homebrew) and released.

Never in my life have I live in an era where I could expect to regularly see a slim, well-rounded girl wearing an Atari or Q*bert T-shirt.

Retro gamnes tv shows abound on the internet, and some have spawned official and not-so-official DVD releases. Classic Game Room, a short-lived, but much loved, early internet show centered around gaming and introducing the sarcasm and brand of humor now found commonly on shows of this format, recently had a DVD release you can find on Amazon wheich celebrated its short but influential existence, and Retrowaretv continues to broadcast reviews, information, news and stories from the basement, literally, of a couple of enthusiastic retro game players. On the show, they also support affiliates, new projects (like working reproductions of retro gaming games that are too pricey for the general public, and From Pixels to Plastic, which reconstructs 3 dimensional (albeit pixelated) scenes from older games. Videogame Take-
Out is another such show. Humorous shows are often less beholden to retrogaming in general, but still feature older games in their shows on a regular basis, although the emphasis is here again on humor. These include The Angry Video Game Nerd and a few other shows in which the percieved, but often very real difficulty of older games, especially bad ones, is exploited for the sake of crude and/or offensive humor, which is the emphasis of said shows.

Retroganming recently rwent "viral" on the internet as well. Stories reviewing new entries in long-running series like Super Mario Bros. (with the distinctly non-retro Super Mario Galaxy 2), the miraculous return to 2d form of Sonic in Sonic the Hedgehog 4, are regularly featured on sites like Yahoo! News (which is really unfortunate, if you ask me). A recent story on Yahoo! reported the historic breaking of the Asteroids high-score. The brilliant \documentary "The King of Kong" has both imporved expusure ofr the long-running Twin Galaxies scorebeaord, which is available online, and has served to heighten public awarness and popularity of cheif Donkey Kong contenders Billy Mitchell and Steve Weibe, who are now virtual celebrities on a wide scale. Phrases combining popular urban clioches and retro gaming like "old-school" and "it's on like Donkey Kong," are the norm among teens, 20, 30, and 40-somethings.

Back to the viral videos, the culmination of all of this (so far) has been a "viral" video that got wide exposure on retrogaming outlets like youtube (and wewas featured as a Yahoo! top story about a month ago) represented the coming to life of the I am 8-bit and From Pixels to Plastic subgenre movements, featured videogame sprites coming to life, becoming 3D pixels, and attacking new York City. The rendering is beautiful and thwe epic in scale video was brilliantly conceived and executed. Both its creation (tyhe video is called "Pixels" and is by artist Patrick Jean) and its popualrity represent a high-water mark (thus far) for the retro gaming movement.

Honestly, I ping-pong (no pun intended) back and fourth on this one. This is essentially both a fad and a subculture of a subculture. Nerd culture has become popular and mainstream-ized in the 2000s, but it's also been watered down. It's hard to tell for the less informed of us who the REAL, original "nerd" are. Or are they "geeks?" Essentially, I'm saying that all those teens wearing skinny jeans and atari shirts are the clingers-on and when their interest in the "fad" side of the movements (which is one, don't forget, of reverence) dies down, what will be left is a subculture of a larger D&D and Caltech inspired nerd culture, and which I respect, and which will hopefully go on long before it ever dies.

The Issue

How did we get to where we are in this country now? How the hell did we get to where we are on planet Earth now? We stopped paying attention, that's how.
That being said, British Petroleum and Halliburton have some answering to do. It is past time for these companies to feel our wrath.
The Gulf disaster might very well be the result of bad luck, but that is a very short-term outlook: they have gotten us to the point where we are virtually slaves to their products, dependent on "their" oil. Every time I go to the gas pump or use a petroleum-based bi-product (including plastic, a major qualm I have, and a major reason, I suspect, for increasingly shoddy products whose dependence on plastic parts makes them weak and obsolete quicker) I wince both with guilt and outrage. These people are virtually ensuring my future and that of my only child, and of all our children, wafts around us like a shroud.
It doesn't have to be this way, but it may already be too late to avoid a major ecological crisis that will make US obsolete. They have made it this way. Anyone ride in a hybrid or electric car lately? What happens when you come to a red light? You wonder if the car is still on . . . that's what happens. I had the recent fortune to come to a red light in a hybrid. "What the f*ck happened to the engine?" I thought.
Watching other countries run circles around us as far as mass transportation-wise is a humiliating past time indeed. How chagrin we should all be!
Some people have the fortune to be able to shoot from one end of town to another in a matter of minutes, or to drive virtually noiseless cars, and here we are, bouncing around in bulky, boxy automobiles running on antiquated and downright stone-age energy like morons. I feel like one, riding around in this veritable go-cart of metal and dinosaur ooze every day. It's would almost be comical, if it weren’t so devastatingly embarrassing and catastrophic.
I hope no one reading this honestly believes that battery and fuel cell technology are really as ineffective as our corporations would have us believe. I sincerely hope no one is actually gullible enough to believe that these carbon-munching metal monstrosities we bounce around in every day are really the best we can do. The technological advances necessary for clean-burning fuel have DELIBERATELY been held back and under funded for decades. The transition to new energy sources would be too difficult for petroleum giants like Halliburton. They don't want new energy sources.
Our financial institutions have robbed us many times over, and their worst offenses destroyed our economy and nearly destroyed our country. Worst of all, they almost destroyed our livelihoods. I would say they betrayed us, if it weren't for the fact that they never were pledged to our well-being.
Our federal government chose to use our money to bail these unbelievably corrupt and stupid gamblers out. Thanks go out to Billy Clinton, who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which regulated the necessary divide mandating that financial institutions could not lend and invest credit at the same time. The results of this and Bush-era aggressions against the American people has led to what we are seeing today. They have not given any indication they would do the same for us, nor that they have any appreciation for these efforts. Nor has the federal government given us much indication that they are ready to bail us mere constituents, i.e. their BOSSES, out. Us taxpayers are, in fact, the superiors of our own government. We must never forget this again. Moreso, we must struggle to remember this fact once again.
It has been written that a Revolution of sorts must take place every 12 years or so to shake up the pillars of power as they are infested with the growth of decay, of corruption. When was the last time we really had a revolution in any real sense?
Citizens must be angry. We must keep informed enough to be able to feel a sense of utter betrayal when we realize that our futures have been sold down the river, when we know that supporting these too big to fail institutions and supporting our government is now one in the same. Virtually indistinguishable.
Noam Chomsky wrote a piece for "in These Times" recently, as sent to me by Reader Supported News (desperately in need of donations, by the way, please subscribe and donate if you enjoy it). In the piece, titled "Rustbelt Rage," there was a quote that had a particularly poignant effect on me. He said "An acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and government, only to discover they had been only instruments of profit and power." He details the actions and final written manifesto of Joe Stack, the unfortunate blip on the joke-that-is-the-media's radar screen whose devastatingly affecting story led him to fly his private jet into the Pentagon, killing him and one other person. This man's actions are indefensible, but his point rings true in an era in which Congressional seats are being auctioned off to the highest bidder: uniformly United State's corporations, now defined by the Supreme Court as "people" (many thanks to people like Justice John Roberts for this).
Stack's life had essentially been destroyed by system which provides for the super-rich in a heartbeat, and to the rest of us when they have time. He lived next door to a women who lived on Social Security and subsisted on cat food after her late husband had been promised, then cheated out of a healthy pension fund after 30 plus years of hard labor. This man was driven to rage and to desperate measures after a life rife with difficulty at the hands of a system which rejected any attempts he made to strike out on his own after becoming disenchanted with big business.
Our system has failed. We must fix it. If that means once again shaking up the pillars of power, then so be it. I only hope this is done peacefully as it was in the Glorious (Bloodless) Revolution of 1688 in England and not with the bloodlust of the French Revolution of 1789. The futility of throwing a brick through a window must always be realized, favor then being given to nonviolent opposition (what Gandhi termed "satyagraha"). Economic warfare is currently being waged on the middle class. The middle class is slowly disappearing. When less than one percent of the population controls 99% of the wealth and people can no longer put bread on their table, things historically have gotten bloody . . . VERY bloody. This is no longer necessary. Bricks are no longer needed to send a message. Massive boycotts of services and products are now necessary. Favor electric cars. Favor hybrids. They are now available and will become more affordable. Boycott Chase and Bank of America in favor of local credit unions. Pay off and toss your credit card for good. Less plastic for our wallets. Work, if possible, for socially responsible organizations (usually smaller ones). Vote with your dollar. The dollar is now mightier than the sword, so to speak.
Oh, and for GOD'S sake, pass some real Campaign Finance Reform. If it ever passes in any meaningful manner, many of our problems will (briefly) work themselves out in ways that may surprise us. This is our single most important task right now politically.

The CD-ROM Revolution

CD-ROM was, to the entertainment industry, the equivalent of an ant getting hit by a violent supernova. It changed everything, and is now a sadly underrated, yet overused medium. CDs were, at first, simply digital music. Remember how they were packaged like they were events unto themselves (I suppose some of them were)? CDs came in those long, artsy boxes that had the album artwork expanded. They were even longer and more wasteful than today's DVD boxes. As a matter of fact, musician David Byrne once made it so that his album artwork was labeled "This is Garbage” on the longbox in protest of what he thought was wasteful packaging. It was, but I'll admit that for the sake of memories, I've had my eye on a copy of U2's "The Unforgettable Fire" on ebay, still in it's original longbox, for some time.

CD's were an amazing new digital medium. They had at least twice the fidelity of LPs (likely much more, although audiophiles still knock them as not producing that nostalgic pop and crackle sound, something I uderstand nad sympathize with) and no rewinding or strategic setting of the needle. Cassettes didn't dissappear overnight, but they got dirt cheap and were rendered obsolete almost overnight (or at least until CDs became cheaper). I remember my older brother buying his new stereo system somewhere around 1990 or 1991. We listened to Queen's "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions" all night, and he learned to put The Steve Miller Band's "The Joker" on repeat ad nauseum. This was new power, and the discs looked so . . . . . silvery, so shiny . . . so advanced. This was emphasized in ads for CD players, stereos, and especially in Sega CD ads in which seemingly label-less discs were shown peeking their heads out of the CD unit, and this shiny-ness was a selling point unto itself. Meanwhile, my brother Dan’s stereo system, still probably a decent system if it still worked, was the size of a dryer in the amount of space it and its massive speakers took up. Amazing.

On came CD-Roms. PC Games like The 7th Guest, Myst, the Doom series, and the Journeyman Project looked to the future. Videogame systems began to come out taking advantage of the medium as games were, for the first time, put on CD. Theses systems inlcuded the FM Towns and FM Towns Marty, the Turbo CD (PC-Engine CD in Japan), the Sega CD, the 3DO systems, and the CD-i systems, among other early entries. Let's not, of course, forget the mighty PC- CD-Rom drives that cost and arm and a leg and were, among my friends and I, spoken of in hushed circles. Even non-CD games began, like the TurboGrafx-16 games, to be packaged in ways that resembled CDs.

Early CD-ROM games weren't as impressive as people might have expected, but many still packed a punch, compared to the older games. The initial benifits, since most systems were still only 8- or 16-bit, came not in advanced 3D graphics so much as in longer length of games, more colors onscreen, full-motion video and animation, and sometimes ever so slightly crisper graphics, the result of a digital medium and one that could hold many times the amount of data of a cartridge, cassette, chip, or floppy disk could.

Full-motion video, in itself, became a revolution, although one whose underlying potential was put to rest mostly by lack of technology and lack of vision in many cases. The quality of many of these titles was horrible, but it would be hyperbole to deny that, for a brief, shining moment in the early nineties, the idea of “interactive cinema” was considered the wave of the future. Perhaps it would have been more so if the quality control had been better. Even so, the idea of controlling a movie only by pushing specific buttons at JUST the right time (reminicent of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace in the arcades on laserdisc, also enjoying a resurrection on the home market thanks to the storage power of CD) turned off many frustratted gamers not long after the initial novelty of the FMV visuals and REAL digitized speech wore off.

I remember reading about the gasps and the massive impressions felt and heard during a demonstration Sega gave for its new CD game "Sewer Shark" on Sega CD just before their mighty system hit the market. There really was excitement about all this. I also remember hanging out at a local game store early on, hearing the guys working there talking about this RPG that “talked” (it had real voices). I can’t remember which one it was, but, it was either Lunar on Sega CD or Ys Books I and II on the Turbo CD (Ys was the first ot have voices).

On the PC-CD-rom market, there was the groundbreaking 7th Guest, a still-decent game (although very dated) that combined advanced, crisp 3D visuals (albeit pre-rendered) with full-motion video of real actors and speech. This was revolutionary. The idea of real people coming from a videogame machine in full-motion (or at least at 24 frames/second) was unheard of. Sure, the Amiga computers of the late 80s and early 90s had animation equivalent to today's animated gifs showing motion in games like Crimewave, and Mortal Kombat has digitized actors, but this was FILM we were talking about. Videogames had attained the sensation of watching a movie, but your were in CONTROL . . . . . sort of. The HIGHLY controversial "Night Trap" came and sunk just about everybody's ship. The false statements made by politicians like our beloved pariah Joseph Lieberman and Tipper Gore about the action in the game caused its parent company, Digital Pictures (then headed by the affable Tom Zito, now hard at work as a photographer with his own studio) to go on the bliacklists of just about every middle class parent in America who could actually afford the game for their kids. Digital Pictures, and FMV in general, limped along into the mid 90's before losing favor quickly with gamers as new systems like the Playstation and Sega Saturn hit the market and FMV slowly became even more passe. The new systems had impressive "photorealistic graphics" and 3D polygons, but you were in control again. Still, "Night Trap" is a cult favorite (albeit a forgotten game), and it's not a bad game in and of itself. It is often (mistakenly) cited as the first game to use FMV, but it was one of the earliest.

CD technology has gone though many iterations up until now. Soon after it began to dominate the audio market, its inventor, Phillips, attempted to create a CD that would do for video what CD had done for sound. Thus, they unveiled the CD-i (or CD-interactive). This flopped big time, as did their system for playing these, the Phillips CD-i. Although slipping under the radar, one game in particular, “Voyeur,” gained notoriety for its adult nature and unique presentation and was banned in some countries, apart from being considered the CD-is showcase piece. It should be noted, however, that the CD-i format was a triumph of vision, and that were wasn't just one CD-i player. As with the 3DO, the CD-i was a technology (a medium) that could be licensed by multiple companies and systems, and not just one console. There were even video-only and portable CD-is that functioned more like VCRs or early DVD players. Big budget films saw release on CD-i, as they did earlier with laserdisc.

CDs have also embraced audio mediums such as SACD Audio, redbook (the original format), DCC audio (on 24 carrot gold discs), and DVD audio, among others.

In the video and video game front, CDs have become everything to GD-ROMS (for Sega's Dreamcast and NAOMI arcade boards), DVDs, minidiscs, miniDVDs (also used on the Nintendo Gamecube platform), CD+G, Blue-Ray (used by PS3 and suppodesly scratch-proof), HD-DVD (the loser in the HD DVD battle), CD-Rs (and DVD-Rs and RWs), UMDs (Sony's PSP), Photo CDs, HVD, Laserdiscs, SVCD, Video CDs . . . the list goes on and on.

In choosing my favorites of the massive CD games medium, I'll admit I have a bias to earlier games. In my defense, there is a reason for this. Necessity is the mother of invention. Because of the fact that the medium (the disc) was more "advanced" than the systems of the time (Sega CD and Turbo CD, MS-Dos, etc.) the games became lengthier in lieu of emphasis on making incredible graphics, putting emphasis on the gameplay and the 2d beauty of the graphics instead. This resulted in games of higher quality when quality control and vision shined through (which, in the early days rarely happened because of crappy quality control and because of the fact that progammers were just learning how to program for the massive new medium). The games became lengthier, prettier, and the soundtracks became scored by live musicians in studio recordings, often with full orchestral treatments. While not a real game music fan, it is always great to play a good CD-rom game with high quality music. I remember, for example, recently reading a blog in which a player commented that he got a copy of Beyond Shadowgate for the Turbo Duo system a week after buying the universally acclaimed Super Mario 64, and though Shadowgate was the best game he’d ever played. Thus, I choose games that stretched the then known capabilities of the medium. Games with “easter eggs” and lots of extras. Games that took existing franchises and injected new modes of play into them to take advantage of increased storage capacity. Games with massive sprites and beautiful 2D rendering. Games with fully-scored soundtracks. Games with replay value. Games with multiple endings. Games with crisper graphics. And much more.

An example of this, and one of my favorites: Sonic CD. When I was a kid, I would have died for that game. When I got it on Christmas day at age 13, I told my family (and was fully convinced) that the rest of my life lay in that shiny box. I had played it at the store (Ventura's Hi-Tech Center) on a massive TV and had caused my mom the trouble of having to rent it, along with a huge suitcase containing a Sega CD. The graphics just looked CRISPER (and it says so on the back of the box, right?). There weren't just a few bad guys. There were hundreds, in all different, crisp colors. When warping to thwe past, they looked shiny and new. When going into the future, they looked old and malfunctioned. The BOSS encounters were massive affairs and were far more elaborate than the old cartridge games. The backgrounds were crystalline and smooth, and the frame-rate, even when moving at light speed, seemed a consistent 60 FPS (even though it really wasn't.) time warping and added gameplay modes, along with a nice animated intro featuring FMV, sweetened the deal. Is it any surprise that in spite of all the more accessible and common cartridge classics, and despite the new 3D graphics, that this Sonic is most often voted the best of all of them? It is a HUGE game! Same with Twisted Metal 2. I remember telling my friends they filled that disc up to the maximum limit of storage space. So many easter eggs!

Get my point?

Then without further adieu: These, in my humble opinion, are the greatest works of gaming art ever committed to CD-ROM, at least in the early days:

(AHEM)

Sonic CD - Sega CD

Contra: Shattered Soldier - PS2

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – PSX

Full Throttle – PC CD-rom

Dracula X: Chi no Rondo - Turbo Super CD

Snatcher - Sega CD

Alundra - PSX

Lunar: The Silver Star - Sega CD

Policenauts – NEC PC-9821

Darkseed – PC CD-rom

Star Control II – 3DO

Metal Gear Solid – PSX

Final Fantasy VII – PSX

Grandia 2 – Dreamcast

Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth – PC CD-rom

Quake 4 – PC DVD

Rebel Assault – PC CD-rom

Diablo – PC CD-rom

Warcraft 2 – PC CD-rom

Beyond Shadowgate – Turbo Super CD

Silent Hill (series) – PSX, PS2, others

Doom II - PC-CDROM

Vagrant Story – PSX

Lunar 2: Eternal Blue – Sega CD

Einhander – PSX

Dark Forces – PC CD-rom

Twisted Metal 2 - PSX

Rayman - PSX

Doom 3 – PC DVD

Resident Evil - PSX

Quake - PC

Quake 2 - PC-CDROM

R-Type - Turbo CD

Gradius 2: Gofer's Ambition - Turbo CD

Metroid Prime - Gcube

Ys Books I and II - Turbo CD

Tie Fighter-X-Wing – PC CD-rom

There are many more, and I'll update this list as it gets bigger and I try more of these oldies.

What am I playing/Watching/Listening to?

This is more for my own digestion than anyone else's, but here goes:

Music:

Currently listening to:

Peter Gabriel - Scratch My Back
Erik Satie - Avant-Dernieres Penses - Selected Piano Works Vol. 1
King Crimson - Red (30th Anniversary Remastered CD/DVD Edition)
Peter Gabriel - Melt
Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - Freak Out!
Larry LaLonde of Primus - Zappa Picks

Playing:

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - PS2 (again)
Policenauts (english translation) - PS1 (again)
Final Fantasy III (VI in Japan) - SNES
Sonic Advance 3 - GBA (on final Special Stage and it's a bitch)
Star Control 2 - 3DO (on and off)
Sonic CD (already beaten many times. Just trying to open up the D.A. Garden Easter Egg)
Raiden III - PS2
Killer 7 - Gcube (not sure I like it yet)
7th Guest - CD-i (what a trip!)
Blazing Lazers - TG-16
Beyond Good and Evil - PS2 (it's like an entire world on a disc)
The Legend of Zelda - Oracle of Seasons (and then Ages)
Rez - PS2 (on and off)
Eternal Darkness - Gcube (stuck with no health on an old save, but I've beaten this one before)
Space Megaforce - SNES (sequel to MUSHA and Robo Aleste)
Axelay - SNES (HARD!)

Watching: (lots of film noir)

Rockman OVA (!!!!)
The Big Como (1950s film noir)
Twin Peaks DVD Season 2 (amazing)
Steamboy (need to finish . . . steampunk is fun!!!)
Lots more noir

Reading:
Daredevil Omnibus - Frank Miller (HUGE 400+ page hard bound)
Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot - Frank Miller and Geoff Darrows
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Akira manga
Batman and Robin (new series)
much more

Raft of Dead Men

Culture has a great many allusions to death on the high seas. Well, not always on the high seas, but is it just me, or are there a lot of literary and motion picture equivalents to the famous "Raft of the Medusa" painting by Theodore Gericault, one of the earliest and most controversial of the Romantic era painters in France.

The subject of the painting itself, the tragic shipwreck of the French Naval frigate Meduse, and the subsequent deaths of all but 15 of the survivors of a makeshift raft that sailed the sea for 13 days before their rescue, was chosen for its potential to shock and horrify. This worked. The painting was extremely controversial. The survivors and the dead endured horrifying conditions, including dehydration, starvation, cannibalism, and madness before their rescure. The painting itself looks very classical, and is horrifying.

All this brings to mind many subsequent works in the cultural annals of mankind in times since. Bram Stoker's Dracula also told a horrific tale of madness and horror on the high seas in his seminal "Dracula" written in 1897. In the book, as in the film from 1992, the tale of Dracula's internment in the earth of his homeland whilst sleeping in a crate in the gallows of Russian freighter ship "Demeter" headed for England, and to his beloved Mina, is rife with imagery reminiscent of "Raft" and many other thematically-related stories. In fact, in Chapter 7 of the original book, the poem is referenced upon the doomed freighter's arrival. Dracula subsists during this long voyage by feeding on the crewmen of the ship, who are unaware of his status as a stowaway in the ship's cargo. When the ship enters the harbor in England on itsdirectionless arrival, dracula, in beast form, abandons the ship before it haphazardly runa aground. The imagery is horrifying, as the ship is described as sort of creeping in slowly from the thick fog before "docking." Upon investigation of the seemingly abondoned ship, the police find bodies of the deceased, along with a horrific sight of a crewmember, long dead, with his wrists broken and tied with rope to the steering wheel of the ship, a grotesquely contorted monument, a a twisted altar to the Count's unholiness. Harrowing.

Most famous fo all, perhaps, is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's chilling account of a crew onboard the high seas in his "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The long-form poem, some 17 pages, includes imagery of a doomed crew, of an dangerously prophetic albatross, reanimation of the dead, and carries with it the famous line "Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink . . . " Speaking of which, this line was later used in another famous story, originally run in E.C. Comic's "Crime SuspenStories," issue #15, by George Evans. Evan's allusion to Coleridge and Gericault is in two parts. The first, titled "Water, water Everywhere . . . " involves two men stranded in a boat in the ocean who resort to rather horrifying acts in order to survive. The seconds half, called " . . . and Not a Drop to Drink!" involves the same to men displaced in a desert and stranded with nothing to drink. The cleverness of the stories is that both involve water, one even taking place in the middle of an ocean, and yet the men suffer the same fate in both stories.

Speaking of comics, not only is Bill Everett's Sub-Mariner based on Coleridge's poem, but Alan Morre's recently film-adapted comic series "Watchmen" includes a story-writhin-a-story entitled "Tales of the Black Freighter," in which a shipwrecked man alone on an island builds a similarly doomed raft that floats on the bloated bodies of his dead comrades, wherebye he begins a nasty voyage back to the mainland during which he hallucinates, is accosted by seagulls snacking on his friend's bodies, engages in cannibalism, and is attacked by hungry sharks. Upon reaching the mainland, he attempts vengeance on the ones responsible for his misfortunes. It's supernatural occurrences and the mariner's impending doom mark this story as another in a long line of depictions of voyages of dead (or nearly dead) men. This story is especially disturbing in the motion comic DVD released to promote the live action film last year.

LAst of all, we have real-life occurrences. No citation of the Titanic here, because that story is not only different, but is, by now, so familiar as to become hackneyed. Instead, I reference the Spanish conquistadores. Lope de Aguirre and some other conquistadores have been mentioned, either in fantastical accounts of their lives, or in historical records, as having been stranded on the high seas in rafts, their crew members and they themselves succumbing to hunger, dehydration, cannibalism, sickness (often from drinking salt water), and, eventually madness and death. These stories often involve the search (fictional or otherwise) for the Seven Cities of Cibola or the city of El Dorado, or of simple colonization and exploration. I don't know all the specifics yet. Aguirre searched both for thegolden city of El Dorado, and engaged in brutal practicies both in his treatment of prisoners, interpretors, and of his own men (he even murdered his daughter Elvira, when surrounded by Spanish soldiers after being captured due to his brutal crimes and opposition to the Spanish crown. He said he'd rather her die than fall into the hands of "uncouth people." The wonderful Werner Herzog film "Aguirre: The wrath of God," references something the real Aguirre was supposed to have said:

"I am the Wrath of God,
the Prince of freedom,
Lord of Terra Firme and the provinces of Chile."

The famous Neo-German Expressionist's film also stars the violent, brooding, and wonderful Klaus Kinski in the title role. Ironically, Klaus also starred in Herzog's update of M.F. Murnau's classic "Nosferatu," originally a "Dracula" knock-off only because Murnau, also a trendsetting German Expressionist, was unable to get the Stoker family estate's permission to call the film "Dracula" and to name its characters accordingly. "Aguirre" the film was released in 1972, and its climax involves Aguirre, in madness, proclaiming himself leader of the group of explorers and embarking on a trail of murder and brutality. It ends with Aguirre the ruler of a group of slowly starving, hallucinating men, who observe things like a massive wooden ship perched in the treetops along the sides of the river. An Indian attack kills all remaining survivors, including Aguirre's daughter, while Aguirre remains alone of the sloywly circling raft, which becomes overrun by monkeys. Almost reminiscent of the much later Apocalypse Now, the river becomes a metaphor for madness and death as the lust for powerand greed has driven Aguirre insane and left him the proud ruler of a raft full of monkeys and dead men. He tells his "men" thus: "I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her I will found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. Together, we shall rule this entire continent. We shall endure. I am the Wrath of God!"

The images of a single man overtaken by madness, king of a raft of corpses, in extrmeley dynamic, but the overall theme of madness and death among the high seas seem to pervade culture, both high and "low."

The Jim Henson Revolution

There were a hell of a lot of Muppets on TV in 1970s/1980s. Jesus, there were a lot of Muppets.

To my knowledge, this all started with Jim Henson (Muppets, duh), but the Henson influence stretched long and seeped deep into the collective consciousness of 1980s culture. I rmeember Apple's popular ad campaign in the late 1990s and early 2000s, during the iMac promotion (God, are THEY taking over the world now or what? ithis and ithat). "Think different" ran the slogan. Alongside the slogan were black and white images of visionaries like John Lennon and, of course, Jim Henson. They were right. This guy changed the rules, at least for a while.

The Henson effect even started new trends in horror films. It is very sad to see us relying almost soleley on chessy CGI these days. Newer is not always better.

The Muppets themselves were everywhere. The early real-life Muppets on "The Muppet Show" soon gave way to animated series like "Muppet Babies" (which I watched as a kid) and to Seseme Street (currently dying a long, slow death at the hands of Elmo . . . when are they going to just rename it "the Elmo Show?"). The Muppets had a number of live action feature films, my favorite of which is still on my wish list ("The Great Muppet Caper" from 1981). Let's not forget Fraggle Rock and Henson's contributions to Seseme Street either. Grover is my all-time favorite (sorry, Big Bird, but you were always a total pansy).

But Muppets were ripped off and suddenly appeared everywhere. The first Muppets movie didn't come out until 1979 (featuring my mom's personal favorite Muppet song, "The Rainbow Connection," which we still have on LP in the downstairs closet) but is it any coincidence that the next and last of the first threee classic Star Wars films, Return the the Jedi, which came out four years later in 1983, had unmistakably Muppet-like characters in the either hated or adored Ewoks. The next Star Wars related live-action film was NOT Episode I, mind you. It was "The Ewok Adventure." The furry Muppets proved so popular among (hopefully mostly) women and children that a major motion picture was made featuring them. Furry critters appeared everywhere in the 1980s, from "The Neverending Story" 1 and 2, The Jim Henson projects Labyrinth (with a VERY 1980s hair metal David Bowie) and Dark Crystal, E.T., and Gremlins. Fuzzy guys were everywhere. I'll bet readers can come up with many more examples I have neglected to mention. My childhood is laced with memories of looking through my older brother and sister's sticker books, containing many scratch-and-sniffs, Shel Silverstein-like paraphenilia, Atari paraphenialia, and Gremlins, Ewok, Yoda, and E.T. sitckers. This was a pop cultural revolution. These little (and big) guys were often christened "animatronics" as the technology got better. Many will argue that this is significantly different than the revativelty lower-tech Henson "puppets" or "marionettes" and that the revolution had already begun with films like Jaw, where Spielberg's hulking shark also paved the way for the "blockbuster" films which still grace (sometimes plague) us today. This arguement definitely has legs, but I would counter that Henson's Muppets not only embodied the late 1970s and 1980s entertainment aesthetic but also started a revolution that predated CGI in itself.

The Muppets were animated as traditional 2D cartoons in "Muppet Babies," but a slew of new cartoons featured colorful characters that still strike me as very "Muppet-like." These include, but are not limited to, the Smurfs and The Snorks (anyone remember these guys?). Maybe I'm, again, reaching here.

Gremlins 1 and 2 were VERY popular. So popular they became a long-running franchise unto themselves. You know its a cultural phenomenon when stickers of Gizmo, and even of the nasty evil Gremlins (they got pissed when they got wet, right?). However, this was a significantly darker take of the Muppets mania. It frightened and disgusted me as a child, so much so that I couldn't watch much of either the first or second film. and even in horror films like The Gate, and the cheesier Puppet Master series, Ghoulies series, Critters series, and many more. This is not surprising, as puppets have an uncanny ability (like clown and spiders) to frighten as well as entertain, sometimes for no apparent reason. This was put to great effect in the Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg joint project "Poltergeist" and in it's follow up sequels. "Poltergiest" in itself, along with E.T., "Batteries Not Included," "Short Circuit," and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (and even "Cocoon" and "Not Quite Human," as I recall) each featured a uniquely 1980s aesthetic that combines the sense of 1980s cheese wonderment, blockbuster, and Muppet-like qualities that made the 1980s special to me, even though I was too-often too young to remember the genesis of all this).

How can I forget to mention "Alf?" "Alf" came to prominence during the 1980s and early 90s (I think) as well, and he was essentially a Muppet with brown fur and a combover. It's both shameful and delightful to imagine such a bizarre concept could have made it on television, but considering the considerable success of "The A-Team," "Small Wonder," "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" (AND "Big Adventure") and "Out of This World," maybe it's not so unusual that "Alf" had the success it did.

The aesthetic I recognize from all this may just be the result the fact that all of this hold sentimental value to me, but I also believe that each decade seems to have had its own general aesthetic feel as well. In researching this article, I also found that Steven Spielberg was also a creative force behind a GREAT deal of these projects, including Gremlins. The man may be a merchandising machine, but he definitely has had vision, even if his execution hasn't always come through in the end. Is it just me, or does Pac-Man's mouth remind me a lot of that of the Muppets? Anyone remember "The Missing Piece" (the chilren's book)? Am I reaching here?

In the end, I still feel like the CGI revolution, even though it's advancing technologically, has produced films that have become dated faster than a lot of the output we saw in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Jaws still looks good to me, but I can personally attest that the early CGI films, and many of the newer ones made by lazy or underfunded graphic designers(that AWFUL Wolverine Movie comes to mind . . . . those claws look like they were made by Mattel) often look like crap only mere years after they come out, and sometimes even on release date. CGI is overused, and there is no substitute for a stunt man who actually occupies physicalspace in front of the camera, rather than placticine special effects added in post production. I hereby salute the often-derided "Punisher" movie, starring Thomas Janes, whose directer opted for rea stunts and virtually no CGI in an homage to Steve McQueen's "Bullitt." Here's to taking chances. And E.T. will always occupy a special place in my heart.