Last night I intended to write a new post in between sessions of Guitar Hero III. Luckily (or not) my laptop wasn't wirelessly communicating with my router. Usually they have a spat for about ten minutes every evening but they're right back talking like old friends. But last night my laptop as in the "doghouse" and I couldn't get online. So, more GH3 for me. I beat Medium and have transcended to hard. You would think that with four skill levels the differences would be minor, but they are not. Adding another button each level is a huge spike in difficulty. However, trying to go for 5 stars on all songs does help subconsciously prep you for harder levels. Kind of like the "wax on, wax off" of plastic guitar prop playing. I even played a song on expert and I beat it, bearly.
I haven't talked much about anime and manga since I started this. After getting addicted to anime watching Star Blazers, Voltron, Battle Of The Planets, Tranzor Z, and (my personal favorite) ROBOTECH, I wanted more. Being an unemployed junior high and high school student I needed a quick fix of something Japanese and manga was just hitting the comic book store shelves. Akira, Area 88, Mai: The Psychic Girl, Legend Of Kamui, and Xenon all became parts of my obsession with Japanese story telling. My love affair with manga lasted many years until I could afford anime tapes, then DVDs, and sadly I haven't looked back. There are many good titles I have never even read and some I never finished. One such title is Parasyte, Kiseijuu in Japanese.
Parasyte is a story of an insidious alien takeover of people on Earth. The parasites quietly landed on Earth and began taking over people by eating their heads and assume control of the body. Not like zombies, but with a taste for the flesh of the species they inhabit. The main character is wearing earphones when he is attacked and the parasite merges with his hand. They both become strange friends and begin to hunt down all other parasite-infected humans. The original English translations have been out of print and even harder to find on eBay. Del Rey Publishing just bought the license to reissue it and it is for sale once again. The art style is unique and a great horror story , with elements of The Thing, Terminator 2, and lots of original style. Very visual even though it was never adapted to anime. A Live Action movie has been reported, with a release time somewhere in 2008.
On with my video game musings. #88 is the Star Wars arcade game. The original wire-frame Death Star attacking arcade game. As far as I remember it is the first first-person perspective game of the whole franchise, and you attack the Death Star, with the voices from the movie talking you through it. Released when Return Of The Jedi hit theaters, in 1983, this was the only thing I ever wanted to do, fly an X-Wing, destroy TIE-Fighters, and blow up the Death Star. Even Obi-Wan tells you, after the Death Star is reduced to wire-frame debris, "the Force will be with you always." This is a great game for anyone who grew up with the Holy Trilogy. And after you blew up the Death Star, you got to do it all over again, with a harder Death Star. By the third time through the trench is filled with obstacles akin to the Second Death Star. If I owned arcade games this would be on top of my wish list with Star Castle, TRON, and Tempest.
#86 is Perfect Dark. The company that brought you (and me) GoldenEye made another perfect FPS. The single player "story mode" was intelligently written, with plenty of surprises, and made you (and me, as well) want to keep playing 'til the bitter end. A point I've mentioned before in this genre is about the amount of killing. Some games become a work in tedium to kill everything to move on. Moving from fight to fight never gets boring with Perfect Dark and walks the line from movie plot story telling to FPS moments, never over-doing one or the other. Then comes the multi-player, as deep as the single player game. With so many options, even giants like Halo pale by comparison to GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, and Time Splitters multi-player. Why doesn't Halo have bots? Why doesn't Halo have random weapons? All I can say is Laptop Gun. Throw it on the ground and it becomes a machine gun auto-turret. And to top it off, you didn't need a Dual Shock to play it, just an N64 controller with one analog stick. Perfect Dark Zero is another matter. Don't confuse the two.
#81 is Space Invaders. A game so simple, the reason I loved it as a child is the same reason everyone still loves it and the genre it started. I could go on about how it started the overhead and side-scrolling shooters of the 90s. Its not only the precursor to classics such as Xevious and Zaxxon but it was the first game you played as a "survival mode." It's strange to think about but there wasn't a name for "playing as long s you can on one quarter." All arcade did this, and Space Invaders was the first to track a high score (and have music). For those that may not know, Survival Mode is just a term for holding out in a game as long as possible until the bitter end. Trek fans would refer to this as the Kobayashi Maru test. As a child I played this and Radar Scope little realizing they were Japanese. I apparently had no choice but to fall for all things Japanese even from an early age. The most import thing I can say about this game is the psychology of the people (Japanese) who invented it back in '78. There were whole arcades in Japan that only had Space Invaders. This is an un-winnable game about holding the line until you are stomped on. Sure, you have a couple extra lives and some bases to hide behind but it won't help. Sooner or later it'll be time to pay the piper. This is a game created by a country that lost a war and a people who are shamed by the loss. This may sound mean, but we won the war and invented Space War and Pong using oscilloscope circuits from ICBM targeting computers of the 60s. I don't think it would have occurred to us to make a game you lose, until Pong started making money in bars, and the Japanese sucked all our quarters out of our pockets and into the Space Invaders coil slot.
Look at the early games of the Atari 2600. Air-Sea Battle, Combat, Circus Atari, Football, Maze Craze, Indy 500, and (one of my favorites) Adventure. All these games either pit one player against each other or gives you a goal to achieve. Sure you could die, every conflict has losers, but you weren't guaranteed to lose. Play well enough and you win every time. Asteroids and Missile Command, both Atari games and seminal works themselves, still were created after Space Invaders. And to nitpick, Asteroids is you against Mother Nature (uhhh... Mother Space) with a little space ship thrown in to shake things up. Missile Command is the American version of the Space Invaders mindset, and certainly points out it's cold war origins.
I love the Terminator franchise, but I only like the third movie. Nothing really against it but Rise Of The Machines wasn't exactly on the caliber of T1 or T2. Not only do we have a Terminator TV series in the works, with River from Firefly as a Terminator, that ignores the third movie, but there is news now of a fourth offering to the theater gods. Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins hopefully will finally show us a complete future when John Connor totally kicks SkyNets ass. The whole reason for the first movie is that John Conner, and humanity, beats the AI and returns the Earth to flesh-based intelligence. Not even Neo in the Matrix could do that after three movies, and John Connor is pre-destined to win. And who is John this time around? Christian Bale, someone used to fighting for humanity in the future. Picture Reign Of Fire with a leader like Maximus from Gladiator killing Androids, Robots, AI Tanks, AI drop ships, and whatever else SkyNet has. It better be that cool. Sadly James Cameron is once again not attached to the project, but at least he's helping NASA out with the Mars program if he's going to waste my time not making movies. So it looks like we have two (2) different Terminator Time Lines to follow. Along with Back To The Future and Bill & Ted, this 80s movie helped define the current trend in pre-determination, time travel plots. Watch the new Time Machine movie to see what pre-destiny does to the original plot. See you next broadcast.
