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.

The Giant Steps of Cowboy Bebop

It's all about the music, you know?

It's a pretty exciting opening. The blaring trumpets, the rapid-fire cuts and bursts of colour, the drum fill and then a moment of silence before a groovy bass line kicks in and everyone is ready to go. Cowboy Bebop's score is renowned for good reason but it goes deeper than simply having great tunes. Take the score away from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya and it'll be of a little consequence. Take the score away from Cowboy Bebop and everything changes. The soundtrack of Cowboy Bebop informs every aspect of its storytelling.

Cowboy Bebop is not some happy accident. Shinichiro Watanabe understands – really gets – how to use music as something more than cool window dressing. Samurai Champloo was released five years later to critical acclaim and garnered the same gushy reaction to its music, despite being of a completely different musical genre. And, from an outsider's perspective, Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo feel wildly different to each other both in plot and setting. Samurai Champloo takes place in Edo Period Japan and follows the adventures of three travellers in search of the “samurai who smells of sunflowers”, while Cowboy Bebop is set years in the future and focuses on a group of bounty hunters.

With its improvisational and, at times, sombre jazz soundtrack, it's almost natural that Cowboy Bebop tells the tale of a group of “losers” haunted by their pasts, out of cash, and barely scraping together a living. The cast of Cowboy Bebop are really a bunch of musicians themselves, skirting from place to place performing (or in their case catching bounties), living off their meagre winnings until they run dry, and then doing the same thing all over again. There's real romanticism at work here. The impoverished artist, the freedom to be tied to no one, and, of course, the indulgence. To devote yourself to your work entirely and break free from the concerns of reality.

It's all bullshit, naturally. Spike, Jet, and Faye all know this. The Bebop, the crew's ship, is a transformed husk of a fishing boat now flying through space. A literal fish out of water. Spike's blasé dickishness is really hiding his misery over losing Julia, Jet ends up becoming the paternal figure of the group as a result of his failure to protect Alicia, and Faye, behind all the sex and allure, is painfully alone. After the smoke is settled and the haze of the performance is over, all three of them are left wringing their hands in the spotlight.

And what's jazz now except a shadow of its former self? How do you feel about Giant Steps? Fuck that shit, everyone's played it, it's fifty-years old, it sounds like crap, write a new song, and stop playing that god damn song. I don't care if you can fuckin' modulate it and change it up. You can play in seven, you can play in nine? It's boring.

Ultimately, the crew of Cowboy Bebop can't let go of their past no matter how hard they try. Jazz is the music of an era long since past and yet it still clings, lifelessly. Bebop was a flash of brilliance before it quickly fell into its face. A good idea, a great idea. Let's go out into space and catch bounties for a living. Free from the man, man. A romantic life and a lonely one.

In the world of Cowboy Bebop, if you have a past, you have a death wish. A history is a heavy burden. It doesn't lead to bigger and better things, it leads to stagnation and paper-thin “cool”. And it's intoxicating and rotten and miserable and lovely.

Maybe that's what makes jazz so wonderful. It sounds defeatist in its familiarity. It's pleasing to see and hear such characters and music start off so confidently and quickly spiral out of control. Despite all the improvisation, we all come back to crushing repetition.

Let games be as challenging as they need to be

In which Alois defends the value of easy games. Also Boku No Natsuyasumi.

I hate listening to/complaining about difficulty in games. It feels like such a non-issue. A triviality. The people that really get to me though are the ones that argue modern games aren’t any good because they’re easier to complete. What sort of metric is that? I welcome the idea that by making games easier, we’re letting more people experience the medium and even allowing people to finish titles, too.

Because name another medium where some people don’t even see the complete work? Yes, book and movies can be placed aside whenever someone wants to but they require no effort on the viewer to see/read the whole thing. They’re open to be discussed by anyone.

And games need that level of approachability. We don’t have enough people talking about games.

Colonialism under the guise of the dungeon crawl: Etrian Odyssey and the invasion

I talk about a lot of things that make Etrian Odyssey great in this piece but the best thing about the game, what makes it rise above and beyond even the oldest games in the genre, is how it uses the DS screen.

Because dungeon crawls can be awful to the perfectionist. You have to buy graph paper because you’re gonna be drawing a lot of maps, and normal white paper simply won’t cut it. Then you have to buy a bunch of pencils and various fine pens so you don’t smudge or ruin your map. Then you have to annotate it and make sure every event or treasure is marked correctly. It’s a blissful, addictive experience that’ll ruin even the most patient of people.

Etrian Oydssey dedicates the touch screen entirely to your map. It’s an empty grid at the beginning of your adventure but gradually transforms into a perfectly aligned map. It maintains the intoxicating lure of drawing your own map and gets rid of all the awful ink spills and blotches that can ruin everything. It’s wonderful.

Beating up God in Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth

My latest is up at Nightmare Mode :D

So, apparently this game isn’t as well-loved as I thought it was? That’s kind of understandable, actually.

Valkyrie Profile asks a lot of the player. There’s a strict time limit, a complex battle system, and tri-Ace have the gall to trick you into playing the game a very specific way when you actually have a lot of freedom. Valkyrie Profile is a little too clever for its own good. No wonder it didn’t stick with a lot of people.

You need to get in the right frame of mine to play it. Valkyrie Profile is melancholic. You’re not met with congratulations for mastering these systems. You spend the entire game recruiting dead people and watching their last moments on Earth.

And, similar to Majora’s Mask, the narrative is remarkably understated. You don’t recognise just how oppressive the game is until you’ve let it rest a little bit after your first play.

It’s not a happy game, there’s little room for humour. But there’s a sense of cohesiveness here rare in video games. A unified vision. It’s pretty short, too!

We need more short games.

(Thanks, as always, to TimeCowboy for the wonderful art)

The things that I write

So, I've been a little bit slack with updating this side of the internet. I have two blogs alongside my scheduled writing at Nightmare Mode and I invariably pay more attention to my Tumblr. Why do I do this? I'm not sure. I'd like to say it's because I have an established audience there but that "established audience" is honestly not the sort who would have the time/patience/effort to read the things I write.

I mean, it's Tumblr. It thrives on reblogs and funny images. I'm kind of out of my element there.

Art by Jake Lawrence. Always and forever.

Anyway, I've written two pieces recently that now rest at Nightmare Mode for the foreseeable future. The first was a little treatise on flying in video games and looked at what is my ideal form of flight. It's a little whimsical - as all my pieces often are - but I had a lot of fun with it.

The second piece is, well, I hesitate to call it controversial, but it's certainly the most confrontational piece I've written. I don't get angry or shout at anyone but I look a little deeper into what I want when I play games and respond to a piece by Richard Cobbett about guilt and choice. It's certainly a piece that has words and opinions in it!

And, finally, go pitch things to Nightmare Mode. They're lovely people and they want lovely writing. Write some lovely things, please.

Headshots Episode 1

There's a new video feature up at Nightmare Mode in which the writers get together and answer short questions about games and games culture.

This week's episode is focused on "Your Favourite Guilty Pleasure Game" and I was in it! I was in it for about 10 seconds or so, but I was in it! :p

It's a fun feature and I'm already excited to see where it goes from here.

I derped pretty hard in the video, too.

The Campfire: A nightmare in Hyrule

My new post at Nightmare Mode!

Yes, video games were always scary when I was a kid. The age of polygons introduced freakish characters with pointed ends where things should be round. The Nintendo 64 made things worse by applying a fuzzy sheen to everything so things were even harder to distinguish.

Sometimes I wonder why and how I'm still interested in the medium considering how much video games scared me as a child. They were out to get me.

Mega Man: An Outlaw in an Asimovian World

(New post up at Nightmare Mode!)

The original Mega Man is not a fun game.

It's got some really whacky, awkward level design sandwiched between all the really brilliant parts. It's a good game littered with minor design flaws that really hamper your enjoyment. Mega Man laid the foundation but it was Mega Man 2 that would go on to be everything the original game wasn't and demonstrate what a small group of people can do when they pour their heart and soul into development.

While I was playing Mega Man: Powered Up (the remake of Mega Man on the PSP), I was struck by how different it was to the original game. Yes, some levels were redesigned and you can now play as the Robot Masters in the remake, but it was the tonal differences that really stood out to me. Both Mega Man and the Robot Masters dribbled conversation at every moment. Mega Man was clearly the Hero and the Robot Masters were undoubtedly reprogrammed.

This was never seen in the original game.

Mega Man and the Robot Masters never said a word. With no verbal communication at all in the game, motives and intentions were remarkably difficult to discern. Nothing was clearly defined or explained. It was... unsettling.

And that's really where this piece comes from. The atmosphere of the original games on the NES were defined by technical limitations to an extent but it gave the series such an uncertain and unique tone.

Check out TimeCowboy's art on his Tumblr, friends! He did the title image for this article :)

After Pressing Start: Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing never quite gets the attention it deserves. Like a lot of great games, it defies categorisation, appeals to the young and old, and players of all sorts.

But have you ever tried to explain it to somebody? More often than not you’ll be met with a curious stare and questions as to what makes it so enjoyable. Or -even worse- why you would play a game like that when you can simply go outside and do the same thing.

In building mechanics around fishing, eating, writing, catching bugs, moving future, and generally living a normal (well, let’s say “country”) life, Animal Crossing makes the mundane as exciting as blowing up a Grunt in Halo. It’s a charming simulacrum of reality that fills you with FEELINGS each time you boot the game up.

Animal Crossing is real life through a filter of pure happiness.

(The art accompanying this post was done by a Mr. Jake Lawrence of TimeCowboy fame. You should check out his other stuff!)

An Eternally Dull Adventure in Chopin's Dreams

Remember when I said I was in a book?

I'm still in that book but now you can read one of the two pieces I wrote in that book on the internet! And you can read it even if you're 20,000 kilometres away! How does that even work?

Eternal Sonta is frustrating. It has such a wonderful idea that I forget how awful it is each time I put the game down so that I can play it again with the hopes of "oh, maybe it isn't as terrible as I remembered". It never changes. It's always awful.

Phantasy Star Online is Hilarious

What I especially like about this ad, other than the fact it hasn't aged well at all, is how much it screams at you to play it.

These days, you have people dying playing MMOs. You've got warnings from developers like: "Don't play too long or you'll die and you've got a family and school!"

And in this trailer the guy is all like: "Play whenever you want, for as long as you want, do whatever you want, throw your life away! Have a fuckin' ball."

Stifling the Medium

Tangentially related to my most recent piece at Nightmare Mode, I recently came into ownership of the Slime-shaped PS2 controller modelled after the iconic enemy of Dragon Quest.

I don’t bring this up in the article but I tend to frown upon the merchandise that surrounds video games. The t-shirts, wrist straps, plushies, and practically everything that’s bundled around a popular video game when it’s released. It’s not because I’m against the idea of advertising, I simply find it concerning so much of video game advertising is focused around the “extras” rather than the main course. If advertising is meant to facilitate interest and engage people with the product, I can’t help but feel we’re missing out on the interactive side of video games when we buy the t-shirt.

I don’t need my Dragon Quest controller, but I do like how its advertising facilitates experiencing the product.

After Pressing Start: Dragon Quest IV Chapters of the Chosen

Blurgh! Before I forget, I wrote two things this week! I know, right? Busy, busy, busy.

A typical complaint with the Dragon Quest games is that they're all the same. This is a surface level observation. Yes, in terms of genre trappings, Dragon Quest IV is intensely familiar to the ones before it, but it's in the broader details where the differences pop up. Each game is a reaction to the previous one.

Before Dragon Quest IV, Dragon Quest III introduced flexible, player-defined companion characters. Much like the original Final Fantasy, you built your team from the beginning from whatever class you wanted. You could have a full party of mages if you wanted. All dem' options!

So, Dragon Quest IV took player-defined companions from Dragon Quest III and applied personalities and aspirations to them. You were now playing your companions, and it was their stories that were important.

Dragon Quest V would also go on to do its own thing, but that's a tale for another day....