Our Video Game History Part III

A return to the joyless PC games of yesteryear, the brussel sprouts to Nintendo’s sweet white grapes. Your eyes may very well melt out of your head.

I can’t be a total douche about this, since I think that Bouncy Bee is the cutest thing with abnormally large eyes since that anime I saw where a schoolgirl turned into a wolf and was raped by a giant beetle. Bouncy Bee! The cutest of the cute! I’d learn the English alphabet with you, Bouncy Bee! We could be friends and go to the mall together, and you could tell me that mall begins with “M”! We could play frisbee (get it?) and then you could tell me that frisbee begins with an “F”! Bouncy Bee and me!

On a more serious note, the description on the box sucks all the joy out of video gaming, and I wouldn’t be surprised if kids would rather just play outside than having the game “adjust to match individual pace.” Like the bee says, “ZZZZZZZZZZZZ.”

Another game that offers absolutely no hook in its advertising. This stark, humorless box art makes it look like you’ll be spending the game trying to mail a package or cash a check, but you’ll be thwarted in these menial tasks. Why don’t you just walk down to the post office for real? There you’ll probably get the same sign at the window, but eventually you’ll get a book of stamps out of the deal. Oh, and you should notice that the game is from Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, which means it will have overwrought, cumbersome jokes and way too many characters.

The Carl Lewis challenge is nothing compared to the challenge of a photo editor. Is this really the best picture you could have used? A spread-eagle buffalo shot, suspiciously minus the genitals? And Carl Lewis signed off on this? I call foul.

There’s something oddly charming about Third-World English. Maybe it’s the lack of understanding of idiom, maybe it’s the excitement put into something they have no idea the meaning, but it has this benign, Mayberry-esque quality to it. Of course, you are still playing a game where a pistol can create a mushroom cloud, and the “catacombs” are better lit than my apartment, but you’ll have no doubt that the badly translated English will make it all worthwhile. Make Your Day, won’t you?

“…and also did awful things to my graphic artist!” One would hope the artist would have seen a football helmet before attempting to draw one, but in the wild west that was 90’s video games, you took what you could get.

Fat soldiers: much cheaper than regular soldiers. Since I’ve been looking over these video games, I am always stymied about how many of the games involving European invasion, Nazi fighting, and WWII military campaigns have some copy on them in German. How much fun is it for Germans to kill their ancestors in a video game? Unless they just sabotage the game. “Ha ha, Douglas MacArthur, would you like to see what happens when your aircraft carrier runs aground? Oh, it looks like your ship has crashed and all you Americans have died. Pity. Yes, I would like to play again.”

I can imagine the pitch to SEGA for this game. “Ok, so you and your friend are both businessmen, with totally corporate haircuts, but then a goat demon attacks and you get guns and then there’s an ape who helps you fight against the goat demon and his castle and his army of mummies.”

“Can the mummies have flamethrowers?”

“F**k yeah, they can. And you and your friend don’t have to wear shirts. Or you could just wear vests if you wanted.”

“Sounds like a deal. I’d shake on it, but I appear to have been blown on my ass by all the awesomeness.”

“Hey kids! Do you want to practice DOS?”

“No.”

This just smacks of “hey, my nephew’s into art. I bet we can get him to do the cover to our game and not pay him.” To be fair, it is a step up from notebook doodles, but that’s a very small step.

Yes, I know, it’s German, it just reads funny.

Daryl Gates. Former Chief of the LAPD. Famous for not controlling the LA riots in 1992. Famous for saying, in front of a Senate committee, that casual drug users should be shot. Famous for saying that “blacks might be more likely to die from chokeholds because their arteries do not open as fast as they do on ‘normal people.’” Famous for racially profiling blacks and Latinos. Famous for resigning in disgrace after the Rodney King beating. That was in 1992. This game was released in 1993.

This week in Netflix

Every week, the DVD-through-the-mail site Netflix announces new DVDs for rental. Most are films that never got a theatrical release. Ethan Kaye brings you This Week In Netflix, the most inexplicable actual description of an actual film actually posted by the Netflix staff.

This week?

Marina Monster

With a deadly bull shark trolling the waters of the local marina, Earl Molar and his girlfriend, Oceana, drop everything to convince their parents — competing owners of rival yacht clubs — to cancel the town’s annual “Around the Bay” race. Earl’s father is so obsessed with winning the race to pay off his towering pile of debts that he hardly has time to listen. But he’s also worried about the nosy reporter who’s been watching his every move.

Notice how little copy the shark gets. 12 words in the beginning of a sentence, then isn’t mentioned again, a sure sign that we’re not supposed to be interested in the shark. No, we’re supposed to be interested in the political workings of the marina. And you know, that’s fine, I’m almost happy that there’s a movie that focuses on what it takes to run a profitable marina on a day to day basis.

And what about that nosy reporter? He gets 14 words to the shark’s 12. Obviously, the real villain here is the nosy reporter, attempting to bring down the marina through the press. And you know, that’s fine too. Better for a television pilot (sort of like “Hey Dude!”), but they made it into a 72-minute movie and that can function just as well as a pilot.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the shark didn’t kill anyone and was kind of like the Gentle Ben of the series? Like, Earl and Oceana are the protagonists and they have funny adventures every week under the eyes of the bumbling marina owner, Earl’s dad. Maybe Oceana’s dad can be all stuffy and preppy and he disapproves of their romance but he’s too tied up with work to do anything about it. And then the nosy reporter comes around, snooping for dirt on the marina (he is the “antagonist,” for those of you English majors). And then the shark can talk and the kids bring all their problems to him every episode and when things are bad he jumps through the wall or onto the boat and fights people. You know, kind of like Jabberjaw meets Knight Rider.

Sadly, I don’t think that Marina Monster is as interesting or as fun as my re-telling of it. It’s a Jaws rip-off, pure and simple, the best plot that 72 minutes and stock shark footage can buy.

Our Video Game History Part II

I knew I’d be returning to the DOS game site soon, and the more I read through it the more I found bizarre video games from the past. How I delighted in sharing with you what I have found! Oh joy! Let’s talk a walk through crappy video game land!

Asteroid! The game that comes with free photos of the banjo-playing kid from Deliverance! How does this cover accurately sell a game? How does this make you want to purchase this game above another sitting on the shelf? What the hell is that weird-eyed kid doing there? Is he part of the game? SO MANY QUESTIONS! And no desire to follow-up on them! Whip out that Wii banjo!

Let’s play detective! Judging by the Hebrew lettering on the box, this game was made in Israel. Therefore, the character on the box is probably Jewish. If you buy this game, you are purchasing something that focuses on a bald, fat, Jewish man as a protagonist. Now, that’s fine and dandy, Nintendo has made a fortune off of a fat Italian plumber. However, this game, the title of which “!e’2K” makes no sense to me, seems to involve throwing bricks, apples, and oxygen tanks at this bald, fat, Jewish man. Hamas Magazine rated this “Best Game Ever in the History of Time” and sent the publisher a card.

Civilization, over its decades of existence, has won countless gaming awards. Happily, Award Winners has also won awards, most importantly “Crazy Homeless Guy Game of the Year”. As an added bonus, the designer of this cover has forgotten that human beings have mass under their shirts and has colored that area the same as the sky. That, or he’s shouting because his torso has been bloodlessly removed from his legs and you can see the background through the hole.

When half the planet is experiencing day, HALF OF IT EXPERIENCES NIGHT! The best earth rotation simulator on the market! Now a full day’s rotation can be simulated in 30 minutes!

We’re not going to beat around the bush on this. It’s a game where Elvis Costello is tied up and raped by a desk PC.

This game is now being offered, unsolicited, to email users. Apparently my “g1rlfr11wnd wi11 l0ve it!”

The less said about this, the better.

This translates to “Federal League Manager Professional”. Obviously, the person on the cover is not playing the game very well if a car and airplane are crashing on the field. Now, a sports manager wouldn’t necessarily be in charge of stadium security, but if you have multiple on-field disasters like that, it probably has something to do with gameplay. But the real joy comes from creative use of the cropping tool.

More to come!

Our Video Game History

Remember the 80’s? And the 90’s? Of course you do. You were playing your Nintendos and Super Nintendos and Sega Genesises and Atari Jaguars and Sega Saturns and Turbo Graphix 16s and enjoying the advances in technology that made happiness possible.

Unless you had parents who didn’t believe in console systems. Like mine.

No, we poor unfortunate souls had to make do with PC games, the Ringo of entertainment. Most of the games had an educational component, or, alternately, had really awesome graphics which wouldn’t work on your slow 1990’s PC. It was a fun era, if you liked spending your time waiting to play a game about numbers. Ideally most of my generation just played outside instead.

Now, in 2008, someone has collected many of the DOS-based game covers here, so you can browse through and look at the awful games that you were luckily able to avoid or maybe unlucky enough to own. There are about a billion of these, so I’m only going to grab a few stand-outs from the first few pages for this post. Let’s see what the kids were playing/forced to play back in the day!

“Your next battle will take place…ON A CLIFF!!!!!”
From what I’ve read, there’s nothing 3-D about this game at all, other than some shading that’s a step up from an 8-bit Nintendo but kind of on-par with Super Nintendo. It’s just a boxing game, plain and simple, yet the cover implies that you’ll be in the woods, or something. THAT would be an awesome game. You’re a boxer, maybe a little down on his luck, and you have to get to the big bout in a faraway land. But you’ve got no bus fare, so you’re hoofing it through the forest, in your boxing gear. While you’re walking around, you have to fight things while keeping your gloves on. It’s not much better, but it would tie in real nice with the cover of the game, right?

James Bond played by British actor Timothy Dalton. Bond girls played by skanky models we found hanging around the photo studio. Hopefully he’s out for revenge on the skanks.

Let’s ignore the Indiana Jones game, and “Mad TV” which has nothing to do with the comedy show, and focus on the showpiece here, LOOM. LOOM absolutely has to be a first-person 3-D weaving adventure. You could not get away with calling your game LOOM and have it be anything else. Why would you want to play anything else? Why would any game that wasn’t weaving call itself LOOM? I wouldn’t want to play an action/adventure game called LOOM, I’d be afraid to tell my friends about it. LOOM! LOOM! Type it a few times and the meaning goes away. LOOM! LOOM! LOOOOOOOM!

“3 more colors inside, in addition to the 4 on the box!”
Big Brother is watching you load a floppy disk.

Addicted to chess? How does that work? Your game better come with bare-chested queens and knights that rock out on red guitars, or I’m calling shenanigans.

C’mon, that’s the best cover you can do? That was your marketing department’s #1 choice? Even the “7 Colors” guy was better than this, and he was just a face. Raspberry color? A hideous out-of-the-box font? A pixilated legless wizard zapping a ball on a black background? Sorry for ruining your lunch break by asking you to design a game cover, a**hole.

“Oh crap, Casper, someone’s fired a laser at your house, the one that’s floating in space with no driveway or yard or anything. Yeah, you should totally check that out.”

There is no way to get excited about this game. Even the guy on the box isn’t excited. “It’s a Great Game…but if you have something else to do, that’s cool too. I’m still your friend.” If you get excited about video cricket, then toss that box of condoms out, because you ain’t using them before the expiration date. This game boasts two big selling points: 1) the Sheffield Shield, and 2) it’s the Allan Border Tribute edition. The Sheffield Shield is like the Super Bowl of Australian cricket, so congrats, you got the licensing to use the name. And Allan Border is not dead yet, making the Tribute edition kinda unnecessary. We don’t called “Madden ‘08″ the “John Madden Tribute ‘08″ for a reason, that reason being that he’s not dead yet. Silly game. Silly Australian game.

By “ancient,” they mean “only after 1915.”

Maybe in other, poorer countries, a slot machine actually spits out the food that is depicted. If that’s the case, I do not want to play this game.

Too easy.

RIP. John Phillip Law

Actor John Phillip Law has passed away at age 70.

Folks may remember him best as the blind angel from Barbarella, or Sinbad from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. However, fans of schlocky movies will mourn him as the guy who starred in Space Mutiny, Danger: Diabolik, and Skidoo.

In Space Mutiny (also called Mutiny in Space, Law played Kalgan, the chief “enforcer” on a space ship.

Granted, the ship interiors were actually a boiler room and all the outer space shots were stolen from Battlestar Galactica and the star, Reb Beach, went on to star as TV’s Captain America (the one where he wears a motorcycle helmet all the time), but Law was definitely in this film. He laughed a lot, usually at unfunny things, mostly to sound intimidating. About a quarter of the time he actually pulled this off. MST3K had a grand time with this film.

MST3K also did a number on .

This one was based on an Italian comic strip hero who’s a thief. Law was a pretty good choice for the title character, Diabolik, with his thin-ness and square jaw. If I recall, there’s not a lot of dialogue in this film and the action moves slowly. Not recommended, even the MST3K version.

Then there’s Skidoo.

Skidoo is a film so bad that it needs its own entry in this blog at some point. It’s an Otto Preminger film about drugs, gangsters, hippies, and music, none of which are convincing, compelling, or at all interesting. The cast alone sinks this film because you’d expect something good to come from Jackie Gleason, Groucho Marx, Frankie Avalon, Carol Channing, Michael Constantin, Austin Pendleton, George Raft, Caesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, Richard Kiel, Peter Lawford, Harry Nilsson, Burgess Meredith, John Phillip Law, and Mickey Rooney, yet all you get is horror and pain and boredom. It’s a film that goes nowhere while having so much. To Mr. Law’s credit, he’s the only person in the cast who WAS a hippie at the time the film was made. Suck on that, Avalon.

And so, we fondly remember John Phillip Law through the body of work he gave to us, parts of which were mocked by MST3K. Still, Golden Voyage of Sinbad was a neat movie, and that’s the one you should probably netflix for your John Phillip Law Memorial Day Celebration this weekend.

This week in Netflix

Every week, the DVD-through-the-mail site Netflix announces new DVDs for rental. Most are films that never got a theatrical release. Ethan Kaye brings you This Week In Netflix, the most inexplicable actual description of an actual film actually posted by the Netflix staff.

This week?

Who’s Your Monkey?
In one night, childhood buddies Mark (Scott Grimes), Bobby (Jason London), Laith (Scott Michael Campbell) and Hutto (David DeLuise) discover how far they’ll go for friendship in this award-winning dark comedy. When Mark reaches an emotional and professional dead zone, the others try to cheer him up. But what begins as a simple night out mushrooms into a madcap adventure to bust an animal porn ring and dispose of the body of a crystal meth dealer.

There’s a LOT going on in this film. So much, in fact, that the attractive girl with the monkey isn’t even mentioned in the Netflix description. That’s how much is packed into this 86 minutes. Girl, monkey, animal porn ring, character development of four childhood buddies, dead crystal meth dealer, Mark reaching an emotiona/professional dead zone, friends’ plot to make Mark feel better. IN 86 MINUTES. That includes credits, people, both opening and closing. This is like the Nutrageous of movies.

As always, I have to say that I haven’t seen this movie. It seems to have a lot going against it, seeing that 86 minutes is an extraordinarily short amount of time to develop any of these plots adequately. Your typical body disposal comedy, say, Men at Work, is over an hour and a half, and that doesn’t even have an animal porn ring plot.

Then again, a typical evening can have a lot happen in it. Last night, for instance, I saw a half-hour sketch comedy show, ate pad thai with my girlfriend, watched an episode of Boston Legal, and then read a JSA trade paperback. It took a few hours and consisted of multiple events. That’s four separate things in one evening - is it so strange of me to question the combination of boys’ night out/animal porn ring/dead meth dealer disposal/something to do with a girl and monkey?

No, it probably isn’t. On the same night you find a dead crystal meth dealer, you probably won’t be busting up an animal porn ring. I mean, each one of those can suck up your evening pretty fast, but together? Yeah, I’m not suspending disbelief that far.

Mark Trail: Forbidden Amore

Mark Trail. Lonely nights on the road, saving animals and dealing with the man. Sometimes you just need to find a hotel. A little out of the way place, off the interstate.

And sometimes you might miss your wife. Yes, Mark Trail’s got a wife. And when he’s on the road a whole lot, he misses certain things about her. Yep, he misses his wife.

So he calls the local ASPCA. He and them have a deal going, a little under-the-table fun for out-of-town trips. He gives them the password, “Sunday Funnies,” and the weight of the “pet” he would like to visit his hotel room. Woe be to the poor clerk on duty when Mark calls up and says a low number, like “22.” It makes him feel guilty.

Luckily, Mark’s called in with the password and a large number. In fact, the number’s so big that the clerk just grabbed the biggest dog he could find, the biggest dog that wouldn’t be missed for a few hours. Biggest St. Bernard in the place.

And that’s the dog that’s in the foreground, like Mrs. Robinson, while Mark’s relaxing on the bed. High on quaaludes.

Sinner.

Bottom of the Barrel: Celebrity Art

Way back in the days of Hollywood gone by, the big crossover stars were those who could take their vaudeville act to the radio. Radio was BIG and NEW and that routine you could do 8 nights a week for different crowds wasn’t so attractive after you’ve done it one or two times on the radio. Then the leap was made from radio to film. Not only did you have to be a sound performer, you had to look good too (slapstick was encouraged). Then off to television. And if you had enough balls, you’d be a television or movie star who put out an album. Joe Pesci did it, Eddie Murphy did it, Bruce Willis did it, all to very little success.

Now there’s another forum for celebrities. Index card art.

Just by checking eBay you can find completely untalented artists auctioning off their doodles for charity. Famous as they may be, these pieces just scream, “Stick to your day job, making millions of dollars.” Here are a few of the stand-outs or mediocrity that are selling for hundreds of dollars. Hundreds, people, hundreds.

Victoria Jackson
Victoria used to be on SNL, the blonde girl with the squeaky voice. I liked her parts on the show, and I think she was a great part of the cast. Apparently she found God at some point. Apparently she also bought a glowing carpet made of Corn Flakes that she uses to do handstands on while a flower is yelling comic book obscenities from its home on the cross. This may be part of her act.
Selling for: $78.78

Wanda Sykes
Wanda is a comedienne, however her doodle makes it look like she’s a magician who does hair (assuming this is a self-portrait, it’s a theme with many of the celebrity doodles). In her right hand is a plastic shower cap used when coloring hair, in the right is a magic Hogwarts wand that she uses to “Reducto!” grey hairs and the like. In this mini-adventure, “Wanda Sykes and the Chalice of Love,” Wanda has gone to the wizarding town of Hogsmeade, where she is accosted by a floating heart. With a flip of her wand, our hero causes its hair to fall out, and, embarrassed, it slinks away in shame. Also, she dyed someone’s hair at the same time.
Selling for: $330.00

Gillian Anderson
I’ll admit that I had a small crush on Gillian Anderson when she was on the X-Files, even though I rarely watched the show. I’ll also admit I have no f***ing clue what her math means. Here’s the best I can come up with:

School bus + Tree…wait…CHURCH! AHHHH! ABSTRACT CHURCH! + Flower Bugs Roots + Picket Fence + Base from GI Joe + Ark of Covenant + Cockatiel Dog = BIG LOVE and aliens

Yeah. I had a crush on her.
Selling for: $668

Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia has drawn a sneeze.

Selling for: $168

David Duchovny
David has gone all out and just drawn over every little part of the card. In fact, he didn’t know when he was supposed to stop, and he even voices his confusion in the piece itself. Why he didn’t keep this thought to himself is a mystery, although the fact that he wrote it is very indicative as to his confused mental state. I’m sure his scripts are full of notes like “Stop reading after period. That means sentence is done.” and “! means happy.”

Selling for: $405

Simon Pegg
No, I don’t think I’ll say anything about Simon Pegg, since it’s obviously his dog and he obviously loves it, and pet owners can be really violent to critics sometimes.

Selling for: $285

The Fantastic Four, death from beyond the panel

As an addendum to yesterday’s post about the Fantastic Four’s theme song being “ungrammatical,” I’ve found numerous Fantastic Four covers where they’re being menaced by something vague off-panel. On occasion, they clearly state that they are afraid of such things. Just some fun examples of the Fantastic Four being caught with their pants down, figuratively speaking.

(I actually have this issue, they fight a giant totem pole. Kid thee not.)

Fantastic Four, WTF

I’ll admit it: I liked the two recent Fantastic Four movies. If there was ever a film series that translated the feeling of the over-the-top 60’s-70’s comic book the best, Fantastic Four films would be the best of the lot. Overblown dialogue, stupid humor, impossible action, it’s all there. Now, I never saw either in the theaters and bought both DVDs sight unseen used for less than market price so that the creators didn’t receive a dime off me, but I like to think my psychic support reached them at some point.

There is something to be said, though, about the Fantastic Four cartoon from 1994. As far as cartoons go, it’s rather unremarkable. Guest spots from Marvel heroes, celebrity voices, fighting and whatnot; in short, it was very much like the X-men, Iron Man and Spider-Man cartoons of the day. Except it had a theme song that was remarkably dumb.

On an outer space adventure
They got hit by cosmic rays
And the four were changed forever
In some most fantastic ways

Call the four
Fantastic Four
Fantastic Four

It’s the “ungrammatical” line that sticks in my craw. Yes, that line was included in the theme song. The singer actually takes valuable breath and points out that the writers of the theme didn’t know English.

But to top that off, the first stanza of the lyrics also contains “ungrammatical” elements as well:

1) They got hit by cosmic rays should be “They were hit by cosmic rays”
2) In some most fantastic ways is just a mess with the word “some” there, and could be easily changed to “In the most fantastic ways” without losing the meaning of the sentence.

Also, the claim that they do not need anymore than themselves is false. The number of heroic guest stars in the show proves that.

While much has been made of the “ungrammatical” line, which is weird in and of itself, not much has been said about the closing credits theme, which I’m sure elicited a few red faces around the writer’s room.

There’s Galactus looking hungry
And ol’ Doctor Doom is near
Here come the Skrulls invading
Do you run and hide in fear?

Reed Richards is elastic
Sue can fade from sight
Johnny is the Human Torch
The Thing just loves to fight
Call the four
Fantastic Four
Fantastic Four

“That’s all, no more” is probably indicative of the need to rhyme, rather than anything else. Plus they threw in the other “grammatical” for no reason other than, well, it was sort of in the opening theme. The part about the villains just reads like a Dukes of Hazzard re-cap, like “Looks like ol’ Boss Hawg has some plans for that Gatorade”. Whatever.

The entire series is out on DVD, if you choose to purchase it.