Today's extended entry is a meditation on this shitty editorial about violent games. Read either at risk of boredom.
Adult Games, Child's Play
We’re told that gaming is growing up, but in the rush to produce ‘mature’ titles, is it actually dumbing down? gamesTM explores this worrying trend and finds a nasty case of culture clash.
The games industry seems to have something against the English language. If it’s not been mauled by insipid dialogue in cut-scenes that would make a sixth-form poet blush,
Sixth form? Fucking snooty brit. Pop quiz - of the US and UK, which country approved the use of birth defect-inducing thalidomide for pregnant women? Limey's point is valid, though. I've generally been disappointed by the poor writing of game dialogue and other text. That detail alone wouldn't save a poor game, as reading is generally not the main activity in a given game. Still, some attention to this point would be a pleasant surprise. It's an important nuance that too many game makers neglect.
it’s being abused by tautologies like ‘interactive game’
A tautology indeed, but...
and meaningless phrases like ‘mass market’ and ‘release date’.
Mass market as opposed to niche markets, like dating sim fans, or rhythm action fans. Release date is the date of a game's release. As opposed to, say, it's shipping date or the date it goes gold. What's wrong with either of these phrases?
However, no games-related misnomer could be greater than what’s apparently a simple word – ‘mature’. According to dictionaries and English teachers the world over, the word ‘mature’ means something that is fully developed; adult, sensible and wise. Inspector Morse is mature, cleaning your toilet on a regular basis and being nice to your parents is mature – it’s really not a very rock ‘n’ roll word. Which makes it all the more curious that the only prerequisite for a title being referred to as mature or ‘adult’ in the games industry is that it contains video-nasty levels of gore and preferably some harsh language to boot.
Mature also is a game rating and therefore shorthand used in place of "for mature audiences." M for mature, E for everybody. Not E meaning it's everybody's game. Nor does T mean a teenage game, it means a game for a teenage audience or older. Not that this really ruins the thesis of the essay. It's just that careful attention to the meaning of words tends to be worthwhile for good writing. It's an important nuance that too many writers neglect.
Incidentally, "video-nasty" is an irritating British phrase. The film board there bans the release of certain films and videos on the grounds that they're obscene. Films like, say, A Clockwork Orange. Such films are generally referred to in the UK as video nasties. It's a pleasant cover for the act of censorship. Sometimes it's good for a citizen to have freedom of speech as a basic right. Of course, it's always easier to toss out a quick euphemism rather than delve into a complex subject and render judgment based on a thorough understanding of a subject.
There aren’t many other forms of media that would equate visualising the fevered mind of a psychotic 14-year-old with maturity, but this strange choice of words is, at the end of the day, just a question of semantics. What is of more concern is that the industry has found that gratuitous violence and language sell (curiously, sex still doesn’t get much of a look in – perhaps the assumption is that 14 year-old boys already know how to simulate that). Not only do they sell, but adding a spot of claret and some unguarded language to your game doesn’t require any special artistic skill on the part of a developer, unlike, say, complex and involving gameplay.
Have you met Gregg Easterbrook? The argument, yet again, is that violence is a substitute for complexity. I am afraid that the end of such arguments is a call for government censorship of videogames, which would be awful. Violence can and often is a part of meaningful and, yes, mature art. The lack of artistry in a videogame is a different subject. I agree that games should be made with precise attention to detail and brilliant and thoughtful innovation, but there are only so many Miyamotos out there.
From many publishers’ point of view this is a win-win situation: they get to make lots of easy-to-develop games with a built-in audience and obvious marketing hooks, and they also get to pretend to themselves and the world at large that videogames are ‘growing up’. The only problem is that those developers whose bread and butter has traditionally been more abstract titles where the gameplay is the hook and the graphical stylings are aimed at younger gamers, or at least at a general audience, are starting to find their games harder to sell. As a result, it’s now easier than ever to argue that games are being ‘dumbed down’ but, more seriously, it’s widening the divide between the Japanese and Western gaming markets.
I'd really like evidence for this point, by the way. What games is this guy talking about that substitute fuck for finesse and then go on to become massive sellers? The evidence of strong examples would be really refreshing and would support the thesis more than the author's bald assertion. I assume he's talking about Grand Theft Auto 3, but he never has the balls to bring it to the game.
The ‘general audience’ who prefer flashy graphics over taxing gameplay increasingly consists of 20-something casual gamers, and the real concern here is whether gaming is being simplified in an attempt not so much to appeal to a wider audience as to placate this new, older, core demographic.
I think that any sane person would prefer flashy graphics to taxing gameplay. In fact, I can't see how anyone could find taxing gameplay in any way a good thing. If the gameplay's taxing, doesn't that mean it sucks? Incidentally, this has nothing to do with the thesis that games are substituting blood and "fuck" for quality.
It could be said that instead of appealing to a larger section of society publishers have just refocused on a slightly older, but equally narrow, group of people. The nub of the problem seems to be that not only does a 20-something audience wants lots of violence and gore it also wants its games as simple as possible. Leisure time in general might be on the increase but there are fewer and fewer gamers out there who want to learn a completely new set of skills and controls for every game they play.
So the point is now that complex controls are truly mature? I disagree. Younger people I think tend to be able to learn and become more comfortable with a complex control scheme, but I can see that people who are more mature would be more willing to accept a complex control scheme, as understanding that not all gratification need be immediate is a sign of maturity. However, I would say that artistry of the game in terms of its theme, design, and content are the keys to appealing to a mature audience. Most of the older players that I know tend to play simple puzzle-type games, like freecell or tetris. These are not games with complex control schemes but rather games that appeal to contemplation and thoughtfulness.
“Most people want simple game mechanics,” says Dave Jones, creator of the original GTA game, now managing and creative director at Scottish developers Real Time Worlds. “They want tremendous variety of content and depth in compound interactions. Simple game mechanics are appealing to the mass market and the casual player.” In fact, Jones is of the opinion that it’s not violence that’s selling but simplicity. “Look at titles like WipEout and SSX,” he says. “They have no violence, yet appealed to the 18-30 demographic. These games just suited their play style and appealed to their senses.”
Good point, Dave! I am a fan of both of those franchises. Wipeout XL is one of my favorite games of all time, and puts serious heat on Ocarina of Time for my number one slot. A defining characteristic of both of these games is that, though they don't have terribly complex control schemes, the mastery of those games is something that requires time, thought, and concentration. And the more that you dedicate to that mastery, the more rewarding the game becomes. Wipeout doesn't really entertain you with its amazing speed and constantly varying environments until you can keep your hovercraft from bumping into the walls on turns. Tricky doesn't unlock its flashiest, most elaborate tricks until you master the proper execution of simpler tricks. These games entertain you while you learn to play them well, and then entertain you even more once you've gotten good at them.
Compare, for example, F-Zero GX or the awful Extreme G series with Wipeout XL. In the other series, you're always vaulting down the course at amazing speeds, always with a pack of other contenders surrounding you. In Wipeout, you don't go that fast until you learn to drive well, and only then will you become competitive with the other drivers, which are spaced out enough that their arrangement on the course represents the spread in rankings. Wipeout XL is a very complex, subtle design. It also looks fucking amazing, but I'll still love XL long after I've tossed F-Zero into the pile with Super Mario Sunshine to never be played or thought of again.
All of this is to say that simple gameplay can mean a variety of things. Yes, there are only a handful of buttons to press in Wipeout, and it is a racing game, but the gameplay has another kind of complexity that's very rewarding for the gamer. I would certainly consider XL to be a mature game.
This is certainly true, but both of these games had a strong adult theme to their presentation and it seems that it is that match-up between non-cutesy presentation and simplistic that is the real sales winner. The problem is that this shift seems to have altered the public’s tolerance for any game that can be perceived as childish or uncool.
Simplistic isn't necessarily bad, as the author assumes. See my blather above. Are childish presentations a turn off? Certainly, sometimes they are.
When a more hard-core gamer finds a less discerning games player decrying The Legend Of Zelda or Ape Escape because they’re ‘for kids’ it’s heartbreaking. It no longer seems to matter that these and similar titles have gameplay that is far more involved in terms of the control you have over your character, the variety of tasks they must perform and the ingenuity of the challenges they face.
I want to know - who's decrying Legend of Zelda? Ocarina of Time is pretty much the consensus for best game of all time. Maybe some 13 year olds don't like the cartoon Wind Waker, but they're 13. Speaking as a former 13 year old, I can say that they're fucking idiots who sometimes have to deal with the stigma that videogames are for kids. I myself got some guff in junior high for liking Nintendo - the old 8 bit dealie. Now, I'm (so very much and horribly, horribly) older, and still enjoy videogames and have no shame about playing them, even the kiddie titles that are good, like Nintendo's Animal Crossing.
Would I prefer decapitating a videogame hooker and then molesting the still-twitching body over making friends with a cartoon penguin? Maybe, but I'm not going to remain a necrophiliac rapist for long if the gameplay sucks. While lurid subject matter can be enticing, the game lives or dies on all its merits, not just the amount of blood. This is like saying that Kill Bill is only a bloodfest, willfully ignoring anything other than the violence.
Incidentally, I'd like to note that the limey here says that Zelda and Ape Escape had "more involved" gameplay, but fails to give the games which are being compared, leaving us to imagine that horde of immensely successful games that featured tons of violence and one-button control schemes.
GTA3 was a pretty good game, and that's why it was successful. Yes, the darkly comedic content of the game helped sell it to a mass audience, but it would not have been a success if the game itself had been trash. And, by the way, the control scheme in that game sucked rancid armadillo balls - it was not that simple at all. But tt had great atmosphere and engaging gameplay. Compare it to State of Emergency, which had similar violence but shit for gameplay, and you'll see that gameplay sells.
The real problem is that if fewer abstract or cute titles get made then the inspiration for the older demographic titles is suddenly taken away. Could there have been Mortal Kombat without Street Fighter? Or WipEout without F-Zero?
Or Grand Theft Auto 3 without...erm...ah.... Now the argument is that violent and bloody games (like Wipeout?) are really retreads of more child-oriented titles and that by choking the latter out of existence, innovation will be lost and games will go to hell until, finally, nuclear war engulfs the globe and the cockroaches take over with their uniquely cute and non-threatening games. Or some such.
Articles like these are designed to encourage censorship. This is fodder for Joe Fucking Lieberman to bring restrictive legislation against videogames. The loss of freedom of expression should make your fucking blood boil. That Joe Lieberman's a democrat, the supposedly liberal party, should make your blood boil even more. We don't want to have the government banning videogames.
Let's all remember Sinead O'Connor's lesson and fight the real enemy. The UK's treatment of its developers comes to mind. This asshole's point, too.
Publishers and gamers alike better hope so. Of course, the trend here is for taking a Japanese concept and then Westernising it by making it more adult in appearance and yet more simplistic when it comes to gamplay.
Examples? Of course, there's no need to give examples. So far the only example that even comes close to meeting this point is Wipeout, but that fails the critique of simplified gameplay.
For pretty much the first time in the industry’s history Japanese-developed titles are not dominating sales charts as regularly as they used to. Even though they’ve arguably not been at their creative best in the last couple of years, companies like SEGA and Nintendo have found that many of their games, even those with previously well-established brands like Mario and Sonic, have not been leaving quite the same mark on sales charts as they once did.
So more people and more diverse groups of people are making games. I say that's fucking great.
Other Japanese companies such as Capcom and Konami already seem to have realised that more overtly violent, less abstract titles are what the market really craves at the moment, with titles like Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil selling much better than Goemon or Mega Man.
Nice point of comparison. Konami had videogames back in the day featuring fountains of blood, by the way. The Castlevania series has always been about going around whacking the undead. Which is what Resident Evil is about, incidentally. But, of course, things were all perfect and bloodles back in the day....when we played titles like Contra, where we were (counter-?)revolutionaries mowing down our enemies with machine guns, or when we played Street Fighter and beat the shit out of each other, or when we played Double Dragon and beat the shit out of other people with baseball bats. Truly, those were halcyon days of pacifism and abstract glory.
Of course, we have a somewhat unique perspective on the situation in the UK since our taste in consoles and software has always been the least receptive to Japanese titles when compared to any other country. We’ve never really taken to PC games in quite the same way as the rest of the Western world either, certainly not in terms of the format’s complex strategies and simulations – titles that, for better or worse, could really be described as mature. No, John Bull has always liked his games simple and violent and now it seems like the rest of the world is starting to agree.
No evidence, just a moralistic, finger-wagging assertion. This is the way to censorship.
[2 X-Box paragraphs deleted because the X-Box offends me]
The trend for Western gamers to shun Japanese complexity and cutesiness is spreading into other gaming genres too – it’s not just obviously complex RPGs and platformers that seem to be getting the cold shoulder.
No evidence of Japanese complexity presented. Ever. By the way, not all Japanese games are cute. But, as the author's a Brit, I guess we should him to have a patronizing attitude towards Japan.
Critically acclaimed titles such as Rez, ICO and Otogi have all failed in the UK even though they can’t really be described as cutesy and despite the fact that they’re not particularly complex. The problem seems to be that their gameplay’s reliance on learning new skills and portraying an abstract game world has become an increasingly large stumbling block.
Good games are not always successful, and that's a shame. Rez, though, had really bare-bones gameplay and was more novel than really good. I liked it, but it tended towards being a dull shooter with a gimmick. Ico should have been a massive hit, it was an amazing game. Otogi I don't know.
Neither of the two that I know, though, required learning new skills. Rez was point and shoot like many, many games before it. It was an extremely simplified Raystorm. Ico was a straightforward run, jump, hit, push button game. Yes, you had puzzles in the game, but there were puzzles in Ocarina of Time that weren't terribly different.
Abstract game world? Rez was pretty abstract, sure. Ico, though, has a little dude in a castle. A really fucking realistic castle, by the way. Nothing abstrat about it. A lot of its pleasure came from the enjoyment of its atmosphere, which was superb, and its puzzles, which weren't in-your-face obvious. Its joys were subtle and rewarded contemplation. You'll not find many massive successes that are like that, unfortunately.
Jones admits that it’s always difficult to sell abstract gameplay to a mass audience: “It has to be presented in a very subtle way. You are enticing them to spend more time [on a game] than they had maybe planned. This is always going to be hard.” McGarry agrees, “For such titles, word of mouth is key. Controversial content often benefits from a lot of hype whereas quality titles, however abstract, should always win through eventually.”
True enough, though card games, which are pure abstraction, are probably the most popular games in the world.
As inappropriate as the term ‘mature’ might be, its opposite number, ‘cutesy’, is often more offensive to hard-core gamers. In the strictest sense this most inelegant of terms is at least vaguely descriptive – there’s no point pretending Dark Chronicle or Ratchet & Clank have anything but cute, cartoon-style graphics. But cutesy, when used by many a games player, is a derogatory term spat out in contempt of the concept of playing any game that seems to have been designed for children. And this is the overriding irony of the whole situation. Ignoring the fact that simplistic revenge fantasises being fought out in a guns-blazing bloodbath are about as far away from maturity as you could imagine, the real problem is that most of these violent games just aren’t as complex and involving as their cutesy counterparts. Even though it’s success is largely justified by its wide range of locations and vehicles, nobody likes to admit too much that the combat in GTA3 is fundamentally flawed or that the vast majority of the missions are repetitive and over difficult. That’s at least 50 per cent of the gameplay that just doesn’t work and yet it’s the most popular game of the moment.
Cartoony graphics can be a turnoff, but I don't think that's unreasonable. Style does count, and if your style is "cutesy," that too often means simplistic. Certainly, a style can be cute and also rewarding of contemplation. Ico is a fine example of this. It's a boy, a princess, a castle filled with ghosts. Simple and extremely darling. But to look at it carefully is to be delighted by the care and artistry in the design. To look at Jak and Daxter is to see big and goofy, which can be trying if you've not got more complex tastes than an eight year old, especially when the market is flooded with shitty videogames that try to lure children into begging their parents into making a purchase.
As for the "irony," the author is again conflating "mature" meaning "for a mature audience" with "mature themes." So there's no irony there. Isn't it ironic? And here we get what I think is the author's real problem. Yes, GTA3 was a huge success and yes, it had some serious gameplay problems. In spite of these, it was a fun game to play. That, combined with the dark, adult humor of the title, spawned a huge success. Yes, it sucks that the designers didn't achieve perfection. Oh fucking well. It doesn't mean that the gaming world is coming to an end. It doesn't even prove that if you slap a few slapped hookers in a game that it will be a success. See State of Emergency.
“GTA has a very simplistic game mechanic - it is Pac-Man,” admits Jones. “The people are the dots you eat (run over) and the police the ghosts who chase you. What was different was the level of interaction within the city. This was not an easy feat to pull off. Many developers do not realise the work involved in trying to deliver that level of compound interaction.” And yet the public is willing to forgive the fact that the gameplay of this and lesser similar titles is no more than adequate at best because the game and its marketing is cool and uncomplicated.
What? The interaction that Jones talks about is completely dismissed by the author as irrelevant. In fact, it's a large part of the gameplay experience in GTA3, and one that does make up for less-than-stellar controls on the title. Of course, the author ignores that and instead argues that it's the marketing which cons people into buying the game, which makes no sense given other unsuccessful titles with similar content, like State of Emergency.
Now, by the way, it's the marketing which is cool and uncomplicated. I think the author kinda conflated his points.
It’s heartening to see that obviously bad games like State Of Emergency still can’t sell on gratuitous imagery alone, but even that game managed to get into the upper reaches of the charts, however briefly. It would seem obvious to any disinterested party but the real secret of sales success is to appeal to a middle of the road audience. That explains why Kirby remains the most obscure of Nintendo characters and it is also the reason that tiresomely unpleasant titles like Postal are kept away from any significant position in the charts.
Postal, too, completely screws his point.
As Dave Jones points out: “The big sales will come from the mass market and these will be the culture-driven, content-rich, fun games. Like it or not, it’s the Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, the Take Thats of the games world [that sell].” McGarry clearly has a greater belief in the taste of the games-buying public though: “Good quality titles with gratuitous content will raise the bar for other developers. If they're rubbish, they simply won't sell. Gamers aren't stupid, they'll buy into a title if it plays well, not because there's a hint of nudity.”
Like BMX XXX, State of Emergency, and Postal. He's right. Sometimes the things that are popular aren't loved by all people, sometimes they're not even the best games. Sometimes good games don't sell. To claim that violence and the f-word are the keys to success is just fucking dumb, and merit a severe beating. Ha! Teh funny!
If convincing someone to buy a game that doesn’t have a direct relationship to actions in the real world, or that doesn’t contain violence, is so hard what is the likelihood that any game will ever really earn the mantle of mature?
Non sequitur. Abstract doesn't mean mature. Nor is it a prerequisite for mature content. For many many thousands of years we've had literature and art that dealt with the real world, and I think some of it is mature. Nor are the abstract titles I can think of off the top of my head, like Tetris, freecell, Devil Dice, Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, and poker particularly mature. Maybe poker, but only because of connections to the game external to the gameplay itself.
Furthermore, it's not impossible to sell a game that doesn't have violence. All of the games I just mentioned, with the exception of SPF2T, contain no violence, and some of them are popular. In fact, this dude never claimed that only violent games sell, making this point silly.
It's also worth noting that violence can exist alongside emotionally mature content. Those thousands of years of art I mentioned, there's some violence in there, too. Like Shakespeare. He got people to come for the eye gougings, but stay for the quality drama. That's assuming you can make a clear distinction there, which you really can't. I mean, eye gougings are pretty cool.
Any student of literature, indeed anyone who’s ever seen a film more complex than Bulletproof Monk, would laugh at the suggestion that games could ever play host to any serious philosophical or emotional content.
You know, I was having a discussion with Gomen the other day about what we thought were the best games of all time. I was arguing for Ocarina of Time, he was arguing for Ico. We agreed that both games are really fucking fantastic.
Gomen likes Ico for the unity of the design. The castle's layout as well as its detail creates a very real environment that is complete and whole like none other. I like Ocarina's narrative, as I find myself engrossed in the story. The game is filled with memorable moments and situations. I've replayed the ending of the game several times just to watch the end credit sequence several times, an ending sequence which nearly makes me cry at the complete end of a beautiful story in which I felt a real participant.
Both games are able to evoke a very particular (and, I feel, pretty uniquely Japanese) emotional response, a kind of melancholy affection and tenderness that is rare in any medium, let alone videogames. This is a complex emotional reaction created through skillful application of craft on the part of the game makers. The author of this article, for all his championing of less successful titles, seems to be unaware of the complexity of some of those very titles. The skill and artistry of several games, and of those two in particular, demands to be called mature. These games, which can certainly be enjoyed by children, are so emotionally rewarding in their execution and so open to thoughtful contemplation that their joys must be considered mature.
As for philosophical complexity, I like to think of another "cutesy" Japanese game. In Animal Crossing, one lives in a persistent environment where one earns money, creates relationships with other characters, and tend to the landscape in order to create a thriving, successful community. The game, which could pretty aptly be considered a children's version of The Sims, is designed with a philosophical bent in mind, which is executed in so simple a manner as to make it appealing to kids. I think that similar examination of other games would yield positive results. Which is to say again that games are more complex and thoughtful than the author suspects.
But when I first read this, I thought of games like Xenogears, which have a lot of philosophical-sounding dialogue and weird religious themes to their stories. So, apparently, did the author, as we see here:
Considering that most arguments that games already do would probably centre around something like Final Fantasy, with its sledgehammer subtlety and badly translated dialogue, it’s not difficult to see their point.
All I really want to say about this sentence is this. When the author says "their point," he means to have the students of literature be the antecedent. Unfortunately, the nearest reference would have to be those who make the argument that Final Fantasy is a mature game. Therefore, when he says he agrees, he's agreeing with those arguing against him. True, he doesn't state a group making the arguments, but arguments don't exist without people. The most charitable reading of this sentence would have it be sloppy, but in reality it's completely contrary to the author's point.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that publishers and developers have been unwilling to make too many serious attempts in this area. As Jones points out: “This is going back into a niche market and one that is unproven. The demographics of this group may be at complete odds with those who want to play games.”
The best developers are able to transcend the limitations of their genre to create works that appeal to broad audiences, even educated and mature audiences. Shigeru Miyamoto is proof of this. More people are playing games, and maybe one day developers will start targeting women and other non-traditional audiences. That, along with the increasing diversity of talent creating the games, bode well for the future. Let's just hope that no government censorship of content starts laying down rules for what's appropriate for a game. That's more frightening than GTA3's success.
It should be possible though – cut-scenes and storylines are becoming ever more important in all genres - but it seems like it would require just too much work. After all, there’s a reason there aren’t too many clones of Zelda, ICO or Rez around and it’s not simply that those games don’t sell any more, it’s that they require hard graft – years of development from experienced programmers, artists and producers, not just a simple driving game with a few expletives scattered around it.
It's funny that the author recognizes the technical skill involved in those games, but decides to completely ignore the skill required in creating GTA3's environment.
The fact is that’s it hard enough to produce a quality videogame that plays to the medium’s own strengths let alone try to absorb additional content from elsewhere. It’s wrong to hope or expect games to mature into something else – they’re an art form that has slowly evolved over the last 30 years with its own conventions and requirements for success. The danger now is that these conventions are being simplified for short-term gain and the nebulous mass market, such that it’s a genuine worry whether publishers will even see it a necessity to break this dangerous cycle that could ironically make games more puerile than ever.
The author never compared past games to current ones. Never proved that simplification meant less maturity. Never proved that this simplification was taking place. Brought a grand total of one game (two if you count Vice City as a different game from GTA3. I don't) as an example, and failed to make that game support his case.
This is nothing more than "I don't like violent games." This is one step away from "ban them." Fuck this guy and his simplistic understanding of videogames.
No Sex Please – We're Gamers
Although MPs and the tabloids seem to have given up complaining about violence in videogames, curiously the one element of gaming that keeps getting attacked is its portrayal of the dirty deed – despite the fact that virtually no games feature anything more titillating than a few oblique, Carry On-style references in cut-scenes. Just in the last few weeks the largest cinema chain in the US has banned all arcade games featuring ‘sexual behaviour’ from its lobbies, and the Australian Office of Film Literature and Classification has repeated its threat to ban any titles where “there are rewards for sexual violence, gross nudity and other sexual activity”. What games are these people talking about? Have they been importing Japanese hentai titles or something?
Weird. Maybe Boonga Boonga has started showing up in AMC's somewhere.
A More Civilised Age
The first game to be labelled as mature, or in this case ‘adult’, was Custer’s Revenge on the Atari 2600. This charming title cast you as a naked Custer - apart from his hat, boots and scarf - and required you to rape a series of equally exposed Indian squaws tied to poles. Having to dodge cacti and arrows was your own impedance in a title that makes GTA look like it was programmed by nuns. Published by the now happily deceased Mystique it seems incredible that this game could ever have been released. But it was, and although it was not a sales success and was largely unknown at the time of its release, it has subsequently been quoted many times as proof that all videogames are inherently evil.
You know, I have never ever heard this game cited in an article about the evils of videogames before this guy. Doom I've definitely heard before, but I only learned about Custer's Revenge when I was reading some websites about 2600 rarities. I've played it and boy, is it a shitty game. Setting aside the content, I wouldn't be surprised if nuns had coded this fucker, it's so fucking awful.
The real problem is that sex is such a fucking weird subject to deal with that games with strong sexual content are shoved to the extreme margin to die with no talent behind them and no quality in them. Not that sex is divorced from all games. I mean, there's that DOA volleyball game and all. Still, it's sad to think that the genre might have climaxed (so to speak) with the Leisure Suit Larry series. But really I guess those hentai games and the interactive DVDs are the new versions of Custer's Revenge. And all that.
Fatality
Perhaps the earliest and most obvious comparison to make, between a game with cartoon visuals and a clone with added violence and excised depth is Street Fighter vs. Mortal Kombat. The latter was very clearly an attempt to make a more violent, Westernised version of the former and the fact that it was so limited in moves and strategy compared to its inspiration didn’t stop it from becoming one of the most popular games of the Ninties. Ironically, as sequels have made the gameplay ever more complex the fortunes of the series have floundered, such that this year’s really-not-too-bad Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance was nowhere near the hit that Midway had hoped.
Oh, go fuck yourself, limey. MK was perfectly entertaining, and ripping a dude's head off was extremely entertaining back in the day. Plus, that whole digitized actor thing was neat. It was like beheading real people, which is fun.
The Legend of Celda
Nintendo has never been one to chase blindly after market trends but when it first unveiled the GameCube it ran a very impressive reel of CGI that showed a very realistic Link and Ganondorf fighting in a foreboding-looking cathedral. It was therefore something of a surprise when The Wind Waker was revealed and it seemed that Nintendo had purposefully made the game look even more childish than previous games. Because of the GameCube’s limited fortunes in the West it’s difficult to judge just how much effect the graphic style had on putting people off buying the game, but certainly in Japan, where the console has fared much better, the game was not a major success.
It had nothing to do with the cel style. Here's a complete guide to the last three Zeldas:
Ocarina of Time - brilliant gameplay, intriguing storyline, affecting content. Directed by Shigeru Miyamoto. Big success.
Majora's Mask - fucking boring,irritating and repetitive gameplay. Story went nowhere. Directed by Eiji Aonuma. Lesser success.
Wind Waker - Incomplete game, irritating and repetitive gameplay. Story went nowhere. Directed by Eiji Aonuma. Lesser success.
The lesson of Wind Waker is the Eiji sucks and Miyamoto is god.
And that's the truth.
No Worst, There Is None
No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Feel bad, and it seems like that you never adapt to that suffering, that it just gets worse, as if the torment you endure grows more vicious in its torture.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
Hopkins was a Jesuit, and much of his earlier poetry celebrated the awesomeness of god through the cool uniqueness of the creations. Poems like As Kingfishers Catch Fire, The Windhover.
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
Herds-long, as in the cries of a herd of cattle.
woe, world sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing-
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked "No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."
Fell means cruel, fierce, dire, sinister, deadly. Force is short for perforce, meaning by the force of circumstance, by necessity.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Durance is endurance
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
From "here" through "whirlwind" confuses me. I think that it goes like this - creep under here, this idea, you wretch - a comfort serves in a whirlwind, which is that all life, etc. That is, I think that "here" is "a comfort", that "under" is a preposition that has "here" as its object. Or "a comfort." Of course, "here" could just be some exclamation, "under" an adverb with "creep." I'm open to suggestions on the grammar, but I think that the gist is that your only shitty-ass comfort in the face of the suffering of life is that it'll end.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention Cheap Ass Gamer to you guys. I saw this on slashdot games' recent thread on cheap games, and thanks to this site, I've just ordered Ikaruga for 20 bucks. Lotsa deals on the site, check it out.
Since discovering a little niche rental place down in Kirkwood, I've been catching up on some low budget Italian horror flicks. Those I've been watching fall into two categories: Dario Argento films and trash. Dario deserves his own post (plus I've yet to watch Suspiria again, so I'll hold off until I do that), so I thought I'd write about some of the trashier ones. These trashier films feature some strikingly common traits.
Aguirre, the Wrath of Colonialism - The main action of these flicks follows a group of Italians/Americans in some tropical area. Sailing to and from small islands, hacking through dense foliage, interacting with with half naked aboriginal tribes, these are staples of these fuckers. Although it's American and takes place in the Florida, George Romero's Day of the Dead follows the same formula, replacing the bare assed indians with crazy army officers.
New York Style - Not only do these flicks all end up in some tropical location, they all fucking start in New York City, which is shot in the most non-descript manner possible. That's actually refreshing, because we've seen New York look the same in so many movies, it's nice to see it done in a real, documentary style. Also, I guess New York is the only American city worth shooting in if you're Italian and want to make a movie marketable in the US.
Less Talk, Gore Rocks - Unabashed, these films are, in large part, death porn. A little plot and a lot of unique gashes, whacks, and general lack of respect for bodily integrity. The violence is gross and explicit, body parts being removed and so forth. Watching these, you're almost certain to see some bloody brains and intestines.
Love, Cannibal Style - Couples abound in the films, there's usually one or two in the main party lost in the jungle. Sometimes the heartwarming adventure through cannibalism and zombies brings the couple together. It's sweet. I guess this is the influence of the American horror films, starting with Chainsaw, which had small groups of couples like this as the protagonists. The couples in the Italian films, though, aren't teenagers.
Titties - Unlike recent American horror film, these films fucking deliver the naked bosoms we all want. You go rent Wrong Turn, you'll certainly have a good time with the flick, but since Eliza Dushku never sheds her shirt to let fall free her chestal glory, there's a certain sense of disappointment. Which is a shame. However, the Italian horror flicks give you plenty of nice tittage. Less than an Andy Sedaris Cinemax film, but enough for satisfaction.
OK, so let's examine three films in detail.
Zombi - Lucio Fulci's zombie picture. A good one, too. Features an amazing sequence in which a zombie fights a shark underwater. Fo ril! It's an actual dude underwater, wrestling with a real shark. No puppets or cgi or any of that crap. It's not shot to hide anything, no quick cuts to stock footage of a real shark munching on a pubescent surfer girl's arm or anything like that, just a full, dead on look at this dude in a zombie outfit wrestling with a shark, opening up blood packs to make it look like the zombie's eating the shark. This is just amazingly inventive. Underwater Zombies? Cool! Zombies attacking sharks! Whoa, man! In addition to this deep blue action, the flick has a great scene in which a zombie breaks through a door, grabs its victim and pulls her to the door, impaling her on a giant splinter which gouges her eye.
Ever since reading Apuleius' The Golden Ass, I've been a great fan of impalements which immobilize people. It's a trick that's used far too infrequently. In the Ass, a dude reaches into a window to unlock a door and another dude stabs his hand with a dagger, sticking it to the door so that he can't get away. In Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, a pussy Dustin Hoffman does a similar trick with some copper wire on the guys pulling a home invasion. In the Godfather, that one fat fuck gets his hand stabbed to a bar and then axed. It's a great piece of visual storytelling, tells a scary visual story with no words.
In Zombi's New York opening, a couple goes on a previously zombie-infested boat to do some investigamating, and end up hooking up to fool a cop who's guarding the thing into thinking they're just horny kids and not snoopers. Of course, this then leads to them really hooking up and c.
Zombi also has a silly ending tacked on, in which zombies are seen marching on New York. This was added to tie in to the then-successful Dawn of the Dead, the second in George Romero's holy trilogy of zombie films. Of course, the city under siege in Dawn is Pittsburgh, but I guess an Italian seeing an American metropolis sees only New York.
Cannibal Ferox - A NYU grad student is finishing up her thesis which disproves the existence of cannibalism in any culture. So she goes to the Amazon with a dude and his hot-and-soon-to-be-topless girlfriend to investigate a primitive culture. There, they accidentally hook up with two thugs from, you guessed it, New York who are on the run from the cops and claim to have been attacked by cannibal natives who castrated one of their buddies. This castration is shown in flashback, but all you really see is groin-centric bloodiness. Turns out, in a nice critique of colonialism, that these guys were the real butchers and the indians are just out for revenge.
Sexy gore is the order of the day. In addition to *that* on screen castration, there's yet another in which the bloody bits are eaten by the savages. In another sequence, the bad guy and hottie hook up, and he suggests that they get a native girl to add to their fun. So they go kidnap one at knifepoint, killing another indian. Perhaps the most jarring display of violence against humans on screen comes at the end, where two women have giant fishhooks stabbed into their tits and are then mammarily hung. Pretty sadistic stuff, in the de Sade sense of the word. I guess I would count that as an immobilizing impalement, but it's not really elegant like the others. I mean, it's not so much viciously clever as it is violently salacious.
Yet for all this nastiness, the most unsettling footage in the film, by far, comes from the real violence shown against animals. In one scene, a weasel-type animal is tied to a post and a snake comes up and crushes the poor thing. It's totally real, and so rather unsettling. Much more so than the obviously fake castration scenes or the tit hanging.
The film ends with the grad student getting her PhD. It seems that she has denied the existence of cannibalism. Which is a nice touch, I think.
This is just one film in a whole genre of cannibal films. Another film in the genre is Cannibal Holocaust, which I haven't yet seen, but which features the earliest use (that I know of) of Blair Witch-styled faux recovered footage.
Zombie Holocaust - Terrible piece of shit film. It's a mix of zombie film with cannibal film, so there's plenty of natives-snacking-on-fresh-disembowellment action. I saw this fucker mostly because of the title, which is the title of my own unrealized zombie epic. The film also got a release in the US as "Dr. Butcher, MD (Medical Deviate)." Now, even though the MD in that title doesn't really refer to his being a doctor, I'm offended by the redundant use of "Dr." and "MD."
Anyway, the story's about a doctor who's revived the practice of cannibalism in this local tribe. Some of these guys apparently escape to become nurses at a hospital in Jersey. Ha ha, just kidding, they're in New York, noshing on the corpses of the freshly-departed. Anyway, this doctor is performing brain transplants on the natives. The film develops a clear scary pecking order. The cannibal tribe is less scary than the zombies, who obey the doctor's commands. It's nice in that the corruption is colonial in nature, and that there's a whole evil organizational scheme. The film's still shit, but that part of it is nice.
As for the tits in this film, they belong to an attractive blonde who disrobes a lot. At one point, for no apparent reason, she's going to be sacrificed by the tribe. In order to prepare her for this ritual, she's stripped naked and a tribeswoman paints pretty blue flowers on her, Laugh-In style. It makes no sense, but hey, it's kinda hot, and she has a nice, full rack, so it's got that going for it. She also escapes this fate in a way that's never shown or explained, so that makes little sense, as well. But, I must emphasize, her tits are quite nice.
And that's what it's all about, really.
I hate reviewing what I've written before finally posting it, although I really should.
I just realized that I used "it" to refer to Monica Bellucci in Matrix Revolutions.
Either I'm a bad person or I was making a sly joke.
I report, you decide.
So the whole idea was to make a live action anime, right?
Part 1 had a pretty simple premise, lots of style.
Part 2 had more style, and an interesting twist.
This one still has style, and has taken up the anime cliche of solving all the problems with a lot of pyrotechnics and no explanation whatsoever. You know, it started off cool, with a lovely, slow scene in the train station. This was stuff not unlike Reloaded, pretty and Tron-like in that it tells the story of these sentient programs. OK. Then they all go to a club, shoot it up, and the Merovingian and Persephone have cameo appearances for no reason other than to fix up some plot points. You see Monica Bellucci's beautiful, bounteous bosom for far too short a time. Having played Enter the Matrix, I expected her to play some role in the flick, but it didn't.
Once that's all done with, there's a cool spaceship chase scene through sewers and some giant robot fights. I like giant robot fights, I wish there were more of them in live action films.
And then they go off to make peace with the robots so that they can fight a common enemy, the Agent Smith epidemic. This was the part I was quite anxious to see. How would they resolve this? They resolved it by having another stylish fight, this one looking considerably less cgi cartoony than the so called burly brawl in 2. But although they save the day, the film offers nothing in the way of explanation as to how this happens.
I was disappointed by this. The films so far didn't seem to lack internal logic, they seemed to pretty much make sense. Revolutions, like Hulk, resolved everything with unexplained special effects. Having been intrigued by 2 after being left lukewarm by 1, I felt a little let down seeing 3.
However, I don't want to harp on this point. As with many anime flicks, you really just have to judge this film by weighing the neat stuff against the irritation of not having a dramatically sound plot to enjoy. And the neat stuff in the film is very neat. It's stylish, and this one's big robot battle is very exciting. The film delivers pretty constant action, and it looks neat, so the film is good enough.
It's interesting to see how negative early online opinion is of the film. I think there's some hyperbole gone too far in much of this stuff. Is it the greatest film ever? No. Is it Phantom Menace bad? Far from it. I think there's just a bunch of disappointment in these reviews I'm reading.
I know that lots of people do it, but it's somewhat irritating to me that people use hyperbole so often. It's certainly more entertaining to read, but it's not really fair to the subject being discussed. Films shouldn't be forced to either super awesome or super shitty extremes.