pubs
“Government scientists developed a drug named Rygar” — conspiracy nut, about a supposed anti-errection product in the water supply.
Thom: I always get crushed by the crushy-things in the second stage of Castlevania
aderack: I used to have real problems with that, to the point that I was terrified of that section.
Thom: I think I still am
aderack: Yeah. The first one you can just walk under. The one that trips everyone up is the half-height one. Harder to judge.
aderack: Interesting that these things never appear again.
Thom: yeah
Thom: that is weird
Thom: and there’s no special weapons between there and the boss
aderack: If this were designed by Sonic Team, they’d be everywhere just to capitalize on the creatve investment.
aderack: They did come back in Castlevania 3, of course.
Thom: this is always where I stopped playing castlevania
aderack: It’s the middle one that’s half-height, right? Walk through the first, wait, walk halfway across the second, duck. Stand up, finish walking across, wait. Walk through the third one.
Thom: yeah, I figured that out last time, unfortunately it was my last life before I had to continue
Thom: so I’m back at the start of the stage
Thom: plus I didn’t have a sub-weapon, so Medusa kicked my ass
Thom: holy shit the treasure chest
Thom: had forgotten all about that one
aderack: Yeah.
aderack: I love those things.
aderack: You just don’t see that kind of thing anymore.
aderack: It’s kind of Zelda-ey in how magical it feels.
aderack: Like you’re exploring an ancient castle and you hit the right switch — and there’s a glowing crown, flashing crazily.
aderack: Like something out of a dream.
aderack: Flashing treasures. That’s what I like about early NES games.
Thom: the weirdness?
aderack: Dreamy weirdness, yeah.
aderack: Sense of… anything being out there, if you know the right incantation. Like a world before science.
aderack: NES games have a certain air of alchemy to them.
Thom: probably due to their sitting in-between pure abstraction and realism
aderack: Also, their… crackliness. Like. The Metroid wall-door hidden world thing ON TOP OF the intended mechanism for finding stuff by shooting random walls. You never knew what could be hidden where, in part because the seams overflowed so much. And the bugs produced such magical results, taking you to places like the Minus World.
aderack: Again, on top of intentional secrets like the warp zones and the beanstalks.
aderack: Do the right spell, hit the right sequence of buttons, enter the right password (ICARUS FIGHTS MEDUSA ANGELS)…
aderack: Stand in the right place for the right period of time, hit your head on Deborah’s Cliff…
aderack: Duck the right place, burn the right bush…
aderack: I spent so long looking for a third quest in Zelda. Some kind of entry portal to a “dark world” that I’d seen in a dream.
Thom: the second quest is really quite a mindfuck
aderack: I was convinced I just had to find the right bush…
aderack: And then I’d find something nobody else had ever seen. I’d be immortalized in the Nintendo myth.
aderack: You know the great Nintendo myth, that resulted in stuff like The Wizard and Captain N. Where Nintendo was a whole lifestyle. Sort of a Willy Wonka thing.
Thom: yeah
Thom: you might have found something nobody had ever seen, if you were playing one of the more obscure games
Thom: there’s probably some great glitches that nobody’s ever found
aderack: Undoubtedly. Those often scared me a little, though. I didn’t understand a game like Dr. Chaos. It didn’t register that the game might be poorly made; it simply upset me. It seemed hard and strange and threatening.
(June 17th, 2006 @ 4:55pm)
The second series of Doctor Who has, to date, focused to an unusual degree on a loss of identity by outside influence. It’s been a central plot point in every story: the blood control in The Christmas Invasion, Cassandra’s shenanigans in New Earth, the Werewolf in Tooth and Claw, the children in School Reunion, the repair droids’ use of humans in The Girl in the Fireplace, the Wire’s victims in The Idiot’s Lantern, Toby and the Ood in The Satan Pit, the Abzorbaloff this Saturday — and then there’s all the Cyberman stuff. In each case the victims are robbed of a personality, such that their bodies might be used for other purposes — in most cases, to be physically transformed or integrated into something else.
Then there’s this lesser theme of people with obsessions abandoning them and “moving on”: The Rose with Doctor #9, Cassandra again, Sarah Jane, Mickey. The Doctor keeps half looking for excuses to give up wandering (in both Fireplace and Satan Pit) — or at least, he sure gives up quickly whenever it looks like he’s going to be stuck somewhere. To contrast, there are the characters who insist on clinging to the past — and we see what happens to them: Sarah Jane, who nearly wasted her entire life waiting for the Doctor to return; Reinette, who did. Then there are all the “Doctor Who fans” in Love & Monsters.
And yet there’s this temptation, this constant theme that maybe one can return to the past. That there’s some way to reclaim what you’ve lost: Cassandra and her business with Chip, Victoria and her paranormal mutterings, the Skasis Paradigm, this “before Time” business in The Satan Pit. Though she thought it was behind her, Rose still can’t get over her father and is drawn to his doppelganger. Part of the Doctor’s infatuation with Reinette was in how she managed to help him revisit his old, buried memories. And then there’s “Army of Ghosts”, coming up.
Of course, given that an identity is mostly built up out of memories… this all gets rather complex.
Especially in light of the huge new spoiler that will not be mentioned, I wonder how this all ties into the last couple of episodes. I doubt we’ll see any true conclusion in the next few episodes; these themes seem to be setting up something so huge that it’ll take most of series three to address.
(June 15th, 2006 @ 5:04pm)
The driving force behind all “civilized” behavior is loneliness.
(June 8th, 2006 @ 2:45am)
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
Part one of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “Culture: Games and Metaphor”.
For the last several months, this site and others have been nodding along to figures like Satoru Iwata explaining that everything you know is wrong; that everything you recognize as videogames is actually backward and childish, and making bold claims about what the future might hold for the medium. We’ve seen the “games as art” movement and “new games journalism”, and the backlash to both. It’s understandable enough; we’re human. We get attached to things; mere familiarity is enough to calm us down. Make the world a little less lonely.
Something I’ve not really seen addressed is, well, what’s wrong with videogames, anyway? The simple answer is that, in their current form, they’re pointless. Or, well. They’re not conducive to conveying a point, anyway.
( Continue reading )
(June 1st, 2006 @ 4:45am)
