Animal Crossing Stuff

I find it really difficult to work with blogger's layouts compared to tumblr's so here is a lazy linky paste to some screenshot adventures.

A Film I Made

I've long since given up on the idea of one blog focusing on one thing only. So, welcome to my artistic experiments outside of the video game.

My final work for Editing Media Texts: An Audio-Visual Self-Portrait... except forget the "self" part.

RULES:
You are to make an audiovisual project using the sound, image and video editing tools that have been used through the course. 

The completed project must consist of the following public domain material gathered via the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) or Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/):


1. seven still images

2. two video images


3. no more than 50 words of on-screen text


4. two sound tracks, one of which can be ambient sound/music or effects, the other sync sound or voice over NOTE: (I tripped up on the second sound track because I didn't really consider it until the very end. I was fixated on matching the edit to the music track to my own detriment.)

I LIKED:
My efforts to explore non-narrative filmmaking inspired by Stan Brakhage. What I ended up creating was a sort of visual poetry, particularly in the first 13 seconds. I wanted to 'KNEAD the linguistic material... through cuts and incisions into the very texture of signs, through substitutions, and interventions into the laws of word formation and syntax' (Olsson, 2011, pp.276). I felt I was successful in this regard.

Embraced Sergei Eisenstein's Montage of Associations. Practically stole the pairing of a man's face intercut with rats crawling out of a box from the infamous German propaganda film that compared the Jewish people to disease-ridden rodents. Oh, and gave Satan a wife who mourned his plunge from the cliffside - watch out for that one! Or was the woman actually the God who mourned man's fall from grace? ~ALL UP TO YOU~

I HATED:
The last "act" of the short film. It repeats itself for no real benefit and could have used a lot more work.

The lack of a substantial second sound track because I was silly and tacked it on when I had finished editing the entirety of the piece instead of using it concurrently. Whoops!

Minor problems: keyframing is hard, noisy image quality because I wanted to zoom in and use close ups of specific images for various effects at the expense of clarity. A worthy trade.


Olsson, J. 2011, 'Kneaded Language: Concrete Poetry and New Media in the Swedish 1960s', Modernism/Modernity, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 273-288

Because Speed Runs Are Beautiful + Awesome Games Done Quick 2013

Look how beautiful this is.

I like exploring spaces as much as anyone else. It's one of the most enjoyable things to do in a video game, but I find myself constrained by my perspective sometimes. If some games are about power fantasies, I long for a complete view of the world I inhabit. Not just a world and a cute approximation of said world in map-form, I want to turn it upside down, crease it out, and shake the thing to see it from every possible angle. Like the knowledge that Earth is floating in space and is considered not just on its own terms but as part of something much larger. Like there's something more just outside of our vision.

I like rolling the mouse wheel all the way back and taking in a world floating on nothingness, or falling through what I thought was sturdy flooring and watching a land disappear above me. I am in a place, there is something outside of here, I just don't understand it.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is stunning when torn from Samus' perspective. Just a series of connected passages flickering in and out of existence, like the world does not exist unless you are staring directly at it; when you turn your back everything will disappear. And just in the distance is a glorious horizon that you can't reach because you'll fall and won't have anything to hold onto.

Awesome Games Done Quick 2013 + Die Hard

Awesome Games Done Quick 2013 is well and truly underway! Yay!

And in between all the fantastic runs and technical showmanship one run in particular has caught my attention. Before today, the extent of my knowledge about Die Hard for NES revolved around a video review by the Angry Video Game Nerd which, as you can guess, is not the most thorough of critical analysis you can find out there.

The run (which has been, and will continue to be, done in 10 minute bursts throughout the marathon based on donations) relies on breaking the game's internal timer. Die Hard seemingly takes place in real-time with a clock ticking down the time you have left until all the hostages are killed. Every step you take affects the timer and each flight of stairs you take down or up a floor docks a specific amount of time dependent on your foot power. If you spend the game absentmindedly walking over broken glass, John's feet get cuts and bruises meaning that it takes him longer to go up and down a flight of stairs meaning that more time is subtracted each time you do. Those stairs aren't going to climb themselves.

The goal of the game is to systematically sweep each floor in the building and eliminate the terrorists on each level (40 in total). The main elevator then springs to life, you take it down to the 30th floor, kill Hans Gruber and save the day. This is arguably the developer intended route.

The speed run, though, doesn't do any of that. Rather than going up and down each floor to kill all the terrorists individually, this run encourages the player to purposefully damage John's foot power to affect the internal clock. Once the feet are damaged enough, the next two-three minutes of the run consists of running up and down stairs, whittling the timer down to two minutes which then prompts the main elevator to automatically come up and let John reach the 30th floor.

You still need to eliminate the 40 terrorists in the building in order to open the last door to Hans Gruber, and you only have two minutes to do so, but now you're fighting them all at once on the last floor of the game. Sheer mayhem! The first run got up to Hans Gruber but died fighting him, and the second run killed all the terrorists but ran out of time just as John stepped into the room with Hans.

The run itself is understandably hilarious thanks in part to the absurdity of damaging John and walking up and down a flight of stairs ad nauseum (a technique the runner called "frame-perfect stairway buffering" hehehe) but unintentionally highlights what makes the game so interesting: it's remarkably open-ended. With such a vague objective as "kill all the terrorists" and seemingly little preventing a player doing so in whichever way they want, Die Hard welcomes ingenuity and choice. This run couldn't of existed otherwise.

Additionally, Die Hard inspires with its mechanics. The game takes place from an overhead top-down perspective but does something practically unheard of even today. John can only "see" in the room that he's in; all other rooms have a fog of war effect on them preventing the player from peeking into them until they've moved John inside. Dat realism! Despite being granted a god-like perspective, the player is locked to what John can see at any given moment.

And what game has ever made injury affect player movement? With a low foot power meter, the time it takes to walk up and down a flight of stairs is increased, indicating that, yes, this man is injured and he's not indestructible.

I'm just surprised, if anything. Die Hard doesn't look remarkable and in some cases resembles a light bullet-hell shooter with all the projectiles you're dealing with at any point in time, but it is an odd, little thing with interesting ideas. I don't think I ever would have noticed it were it not for its presentation in a speed run setting. That's the value of these crazy challenge runs.

To speak for the "..."

This piece is my attempt to speak for the unspoken - the silent protagonist. The archetype has been in a rough patch for a while, with countless more to come, no doubt, but there's value in the character. Playing the archetype "straight" in today's climate would likely cause more people to roll their eyes but there is space for subversion.

Dragon Quest V is that sort of wilful experimentation that only comes from years of exploring the same subject matter. The Silent Protagonist is always the hero? Then let's tear them down and force them to watch a chatty NPC replace "their" duties instead. Dragon Quest IV showed shades of this deconstruction with its focus on telling the stories of your comrades before yours, but Chunsoft and Yuji Horii really laid the despair on thick in Dragon Quest V. It's a fantastic game that everyone should play if only to realise that Dragon Quest has been, and always will be, more than "the same old thing".

The cold science of Pokémon

Wow, haven't used this for a while....

Nightmare Mode is back everybody and I was the ickle firsty for the relaunch with this piece on the scientific side of Pokémon Red and Blue.

I still have so much to say about Pokémon, in particular the first generation. This piece was really a jumbled up version of my ongoing Pokémon Red Let's Play with some extra snippets which I'll further elaborate on when I get to them in my everlasting saga of updates.

Pokémon is more important than a series of minor updates. If you dig deep into the designs of these creatures, you'll find all sorts of surprises. I'm sure the story behind Cubone's helmet has been well and truly spoiled for you, but there's really obscure ones like the traditional Japanese story Of a Mirror and a Bell reflected in the design of Bronzor and Bronzong respectively, and the cross-cultural mythology of the giant turtle who holds the world on top of its back. It's wonderful stuff.

In other news, work on my zine (two of them now!) is trudging along. It turns out that one piece is proving far more difficult, and lengthy, to write than expected. I... really have no excuse for how long this is all taking. I am excited to show it all when it's done, though.

As always, the art is done by the lovely Jake Lawrence.

Remixing Samurai Champloo

It's all about the music, you know?

Cowboy Bebop did it first but it wasn't until Samurai Champloo that I realised anachronism could be used for more than just humour. Anachronism grounded Cowboy Bebop in the past whilst flinging the setting far into the future and the opposite was true with Samurai Champloo. Set in Edo Period Japan, Samurai Champloo uses hip hop to update the history of Japan to a modern context.

But what distinguishes Samurai Champloo from Cowboy Bebop's score is Watanabe's efforts to make hip hop affect how the story is told. He briefly flirted with the idea in Jupiter Jazz with Gren's wind-up music box triggering his memories in an inspired metaphor of winding back the clock, but Watanabe really came into his stride with Samurai Champloo. The chopped up samples of hip hop and record scratching lend the story a staccato rhythm both visually and textually. Scenes and episodes are divided by musical cues and emceeing. It's more than Cowboy Bebop's thematic use of jazz to enhance the atmosphere, it's genuine engagement with the text.

And closer examination reveals that hip hop is remarkably suitable for a show set in Edo Period Japan. It was an era of great societal change. The samurai were superseded by businessmen who saw that profiting of their fellow man was better than killing them and an inkling of Western culture had slipped into the borders before the rigid port lockdown for all foreigners. Japan was a melting pot of change and social upheaval. In contrast to Cowboy Bebop's infatuation with the past, Samurai Champloo is concerned with the uncertain future. Much like Spike and Jet before them, Mugen and Jin find themselves penniless and without a consistent job but, instead of languishing in their prior greatness, toss themselves into the future with reckless abandonment.

Samurai Champloo is a show about appropriation. It's about a culture on the cusp of rapid change and figuring out what it can identify with while inviting all the exciting changes of globalisation. It looks to the past only to figure out what it can steal. And hip hop is the great appropriation of our times. It takes the old and makes it new again and by doing so forges a greater appreciation of what has come before us.

But, if there's one thing that the show makes abundantly clear, it's that Mugen and Jin don't belong in this brave new world. As much as the pair seem to adapt to the life of hired swordsmen, the culture around them are no longer interested in killing people. There's baseball to look forward to and an inkling of Japan's rapid technological advancement and its eventual terrible misfortune. When a sample in a hop hop track is so readily absorbed into popular consciousness without even an awareness of where it came from, or even a question as to whether or not it is a sample, society tends to forget what came before. All the jumps, grooves, and scratches of a vinyl are invigorating at the start, but they gradually wear away the original underneath it.

Samurai Champloo is built to show change as inevitable, natural, and even damn cool, but the show trips itself up at the end with a disappointing finale. Mugen and Jin live when they should have died. But then I wonder why I wanted them to die so much and realise that maybe my responsibility as a consumer is just to enjoy the show put in front of me. Maybe Watanabe, the DJ, is the one responsible for preserving and appreciating the culture we've lost. He's the one that mixed the two to begin with. Let him keep his sappy ending. We've got a future ahead of us.