From: James Duffy (eldufo@hotmail.com)
Sent: 16 June 2009 16:45:09
To: doormat@innocentdrinks.com
Subject: Grammatical error
Hello,
Your smoothie packaging contains a small grammatical error.
On the list of “innocent promises”, #2 reads: “It is cheaper to buy this carton than do the alternative; buying the fruit yourself and blending it in your kitchen.”
This semi-colon should in fact be a colon. Trust me. I know. Go on, look it up.
Frankly, you should all be ashamed of yourselves.
James
From: Innocent (hello@innocentdrinks.co.uk)
Sent: 17 June 2009 11:11:55
To: James Duffy (eldufo@hotmail.com)
Subject: Grammatical error [Your special number: 090616-000136]
Hello James,
Thanks so much for your email; it is great to hear from you.
We are indeed hanging our heads in shame. Thank you for your beady eyes and for pointing out our little typo. I will pass your email onto our creative team now and hope that we can get it changed before it goes out onto too many cartons and bottles.
In my long and adoring entry about Panzer Dragoon Saga a few weeks ago, I mentioned a particular creepy postmodern twist it half-shares with Bioshock, or would half-share if Bioshock actually went through with it, which it didn’t. In fact, I am not altogether sure if the creepy postmodern twist Bioshock hints at even occurred to the developers in the way I interpret it. Whether intentional or not, I feel it nonetheless highlights an interesting and mostly unexplored area of game design and the curious relationship between player and game. (Spoilers follow, if you are the kind of person to heed such warnings.)
Bioshock, if you don’t know, was one of the more successful games of 2007, selling surprisingly well and pleasing critics and fans alike. It’s a non-linear first-person shooter with role-playing elements, set in a fairly bizarre underwater utopia-gone-wrong with creepy art-deco art design and insane jazz flappers who want to kill you. There was, altogether, a lot of imagination and love poured into it, which made it painful for me to dislike it.
And, pleased as I am that something so bravely not involving space marines or World War 2 was met with such a strong reception, dislike Bioshock I did. In fact, I had a very peculiar negative reaction to it. Usually bad games just bore or frustrate me, but Bioshock invoked something else, a strange, more vital kind of displeasure. The art direction, though creative, was weirdly sickly and cartoonish in execution, and its unrelentingly grisly mood started to seriously depress me after a few hours. (Naturally, I understand that a dark atmosphere is intended to evoke feelings of unease, but even scary, ugly art should be nonetheless beautiful, I think— see the works of HR Giger, or Cormac McCarthy, or David Lynch— and Bioshock just isn’t beautiful.) By the time I finished the game, I was experiencing a weird nauseous fatigue, as if I’d spent too long on a delayed flight or sat through all three High School Musicals consecutively (there are three of them, right?). This is to say nothing of the various mechanical issues the game has— the clumsy technique of delivering plot information via voice recordings inevitably muffled by action sequences, the ambiguous upgrade choices with no indication of which is best (a problem characteristic of western RPGs), the dumbed-down hacking and inventory systems recycled from System Shock and Deus Ex. But all those problems pale in comparison to the curious psychosomatic reaction the game provoked in me. To this day the sight of plumbing still makes me feel a bit queasy.
But all that’s beside the point. I think the most interesting failure of Bioshock— and I am aware that I am unusual in claiming it has any particular failures at all, but hey, that’s James’ Opinion for you— is in that creepy postmodern twist. If you don’t know already, the twist, detailed chronologically, goes something like this:
So you’re this guy, Jack, and you’re on a plane, and it crashes into the ocean. You survive the crash and find an entrance to Rapture, an undersea city. Things have gone badly wrong for the once-utopian Rapture: its citizens have turned into roaming psychopaths and the place has sprung more than a few leaks. But you have a friend in the form of Atlas, who gives you directions via a radio. He fulfils that classic dual videogame role of game tutor and plot motivator, telling you where to go and what to do, which is useful in a non-linear game like Bioshock. Atlas directs you to a plasmid, a kind of mad DNA-altering drug that gives its users special powers (the usual video game abilities of lightning, ice and so on), and tells you to inject yourself with it. So Jack does. This is important: Jack does, not you (the player).
In the vein of Half-Life, the entirety of Bioshock is seen through the eyes of the player character, Jack; there are no third-person scenes where you see Jack doing stuff from outside his perspective, ala Halo. Done well— i.e., by Valve— I find this a very powerful device. But Bioshock undermines the conceit by frequently taking control from the player and giving Jack a mind of his own. (A mind of his own: this, also, is important.) One minute you’re walking around as Jack, making your own decisions; the next you’re twiddling your thumbs while Jack walks around doing stuff of his own accord. I don’t like it when games do this. It’s inconsistent, counter-intuitive, and frustrating. What’s the deal here, Bioshock? Is Jack his own guy, like Solid Snake, or am I Jack, like Gordon Freeman? (It turns out Bioshock has an answer to this, though it is, to my mind, an unsatisfactory one. I’ll get to that.)
So: the moment you walk over to the plasmid, Jack stabs the massive glass syringe full of gaudily-coloured DNA-altering nuclear juice right into his arm and hits the plunger. He does this entirely without player intervention. Apart from the frustrating lack of player control, Jack’s eagerness to go along with this whole DNA-altering idea doesn’t seem quite sensible. The sequence would have been better handled if the player had to use the plasmid to progress (e.g., defeating some environmental obstacle), which would force the player to make the decision himself (via going into the inventory and selecting it, or whatever). That would have removed both the frustrating lack of player control and the frank strangeness of Jack’s hunger for syringe action. But Bioshock is full of moments like these. Atlas asks you to lower your weapon, and Jack does so, completely without player prompt. It sucks.
But here’s the twist. It turns out that Atlas is really the villain, and he’s been manipulating you all along. That’s not a very original twist— an identical thing happens in System Shock 2, Bioshock’s precursor, and a thousand other games— but how Atlas has been manipulating you is almost (almost) clever. Jack, we learn, has been programmed via sinister hypnosis to follow any instruction tagged with the phrase “would you kindly”. (Examples: “Would you kindly pick up that shortwave radio?” “Now, would you kindly find a crowbar or something?” “”Head over to Fontaine Fisheries when you’re ready, would you kindly?”) The climax comes when Alex sends you after Andrew Ryan, Rapture’s founder: “Now would you kindly go to Ryan’s office and kill the son of a bitch?”
In what would have been a spectacularly ingenious commentary on the nature of video games had Bioshock been just a little smarter about it, Ryan, confronted by Jack, says: “In the end, what separates a man from a slave? Money? Power? No. A man chooses, a slave obeys […]Was a man sent to kill, or a slave?” He begins to taunt Jack: “Sit, would you kindly? Stand… would you kindly? Run! Stop! Turn round.” Jack helplessly obeys all these instructions like a trained dog. Finally, Ryan hands him a golf club and instructs Jack to “kindly” kill him with it. Jack obediently does so. Between blows Ryan cries again, “A man chooses, a slave obeys!” Then he dies.
Like everything else in the game, we see all this unfold through Jack’s eyes; but like numerous other occasions, the player has no say in the matter. The entire sequence is exempt from player input. The reason for this, ostensibly, is that Jack is being mind-controlled. I don’t think this works. Here’s why.
First— and this is the less important part— it’s not even consistent. Bioshock contains numerous non-interactive sequences where the phrase “would you kindly” is not used, and so Jack is not, at that moment, being directly mind-controlled. (The plasmid-injection sequence is one example of this.) Some might explain these sequences as nonetheless part of a longer-term goal, which are inevitably prefaced with “would you kindly”; but if that’s so, there is no explanation for why some stages of achieving that goal are interactive and others aren’t. To take that argument to its logical conclusion, if one is to defend the non-interactive sequences as being part of Jack achieving some long-term “would you kindly” objective, then the entire game should be non-interactive, since Jack is ultimately always being mind-controlled. (This is excepting the final chapter, where Jack regains his autonomy, but who cares.)
More important, and more complicated, is the issue the mind-control twist (perhaps inadvertently) raises about the nature of video games as a medium. Games, as we all know and love/fear, are unique in that they are dependent on player interaction. (This necessary degree of non-linearity, coincidentally, is also why Roger Ebert considers video games an inferior art, but he is a sick old man and will soon die.) This has long posed interesting challenges for games (such as Bioshock) that attempt to tell stories, because stories are very hard to tell without a confident degree of authorial control. How do you write a character when there is no telling how the player will act? How do you make the star of Grand Theft Auto a sympathetic character when he has callously murdered dozens of innocent people on the way to the save point? Issues like these have yet to be definitively resolved by the video game industry, which still struggles to come up with good box blurbs, let alone complex interactive narrative arcs, but there have been some interesting attempts.
I think Valve make a pretty good job of it. I don’t want or need to discuss their system of narrative in detail here, but their method is to create environments with typically only one way to go and problems with only one solution. The Half-Life games are effectively guided tours of exciting scripted events, like a Universal Studios ride— the bridge always buckles just as you step off it, the spaceship always crashes just as you’re in the right place to see it happen. Portal, perhaps the most cherished of Valve games, strips this premise of all illusion by reducing each area to a sparse room with a button-pressing objective, an explicit artificiality appropriate for the game’s test-subject setting. By restricting the number of options available to players, the designers are able to confidently predict their actions. (People like Warren Spector argue this creates too narrow a narrative and mechanical scope, undermining the very appeal of interactive storytelling, which is fascinating, but now isn’t the time.)
The point is that all this doesn’t just apply to explicitly narrative-orientated games like Valve’s. Everything with semi-linear problem-solving design, from Mario World to Doom, requires the player to move forward into the next area if they want to advance the text. It’s not like literature, theatre or film, where the narrative is the active agent and we, the viewer, are passive, watching it happen, letting the experience roll over us. (There are theories about art and agency — does a book in the woods contain any words if no-one is around to read them? — but, again, this isn’t the time.) Video games demand we make an active contribution to the proceedings if we want the proceedings to proceed at all. If, faced with a button to the open the door to the next room, we instead run around in circles, or jump up and down, or simply lay down our controllers and weep at the futility of it all, the game world enters a state of infinite stasis, lost without our intervention. “Come on, Gordon!” Alyx prompts, staring, waiting, forever. The poor girl.
Back to Bioshock. Imagine if that final sequence had been interactive, and it was the player who was ordered to kill Ryan with the golf club, not the hypnotised Jack. (And why not? After all, the player is the hypnotised Jack.) We’ve just been told that we’re under mind control. “Kill!” orders Ryan. Well, our first urge would probably be that of defiance, or simple curiosity. What happens when we break the story by not following Ryan’s orders? What happens if we don’t kill him?
Let’s say we follow Valve’s lead here and design the environment so the player’s choices are limited. There is no exit to this room. There are no weapons available beyond the golf club Ryan has handed us. There is nowhere else to go, nothing else to do but kill Andrew Ryan. This is not particularly different from the environment the scene actually takes place in, so this wouldn’t require any dramatic redesigns. But Ryan’s script would have to be altered to accommodate the player’s hesitation. Ryan would have to know, just as the designer knows, that his death at the hands of the player is inevitable. He would be happy to wait, and he would not have to wait long, because the player would have no choice in the matter. There would be no way to progress in the game without doing as the player has been ordered to do; the player must either obey or turn off the game.
This is no different, mechanically, from having to jump over that first pipe in Mario Bros in order to progress. What makes it different— narratively and thematically— is the issue of mind-control. “A man chooses, a slave obeys!” are the final words of Andrew Ryan. So is the player choosing, or obeying? When a game makes a demand of us— kill this boss, get that key— are we “obeying”? What “choice” do we have in a limited, Valve-style environment, anyway? What choice do we have in jumping over that first green pipe?
When I played the (non-interactive) Ryan-killing scene in Bioshock, I thought its developers had achieved something almost, nearly, sort of a bit profound. Everything I’d done so far in the game had all been the result of the game manipulating me into doing it! My God, I’m such a pawn! Am I playing the game or is the game playing me? If they’d pulled it off, the ramifications would have been totally new to the medium, a thought-provoking and potentially dangerous new commentary on the strange, still-developing relationship between games and players that would have made everyone think very hard about things for a while. But Bioshock doesn’t so much mind-control the player as it does mind-control Jack, which undoes the whole thing so comprehensively it’s difficult to know if it was even there to begin with. If I’m honest, I’m betting the creepy postmodern ramifications didn’t even occur to the game’s developers. I imagine they thought it was merely a neat plot twist. Which is a damn shame.
Still, there are other a few games that explore similar ideas more meaningfully. Shadow of the Colossus asks the player to defeat a series of roaming giants, a David-and-Goliath-style quest not uncommon to gaming (it’s what most boss fights amount to). But it becomes slowly apparent that these giants don’t necessarily deserve to die, and in fact many of them don’t even make any particular effort to defend themselves. The hero’s actions might be more selfish and destructive than noble, and indeed by the credits he’s become a pretty tragic figure. This is powerful not only because it is surprising but also because it is us, we, I, you, the player, who is going around murdering the poor colossi. We have no choice in the matter. But it is not us who murders Ryan in Bioshock, and so our hands are clean.
Once in a Lifetime bursts into life with a cymbal crash and a bass slide, and then we’re off on its unique journey: twinkling keyboards, clicking hi-hats and toms in surprising places, and that famous two-note bass riff. In keeping with the simple progressions of the album’s other tracks, the song is built of just two alternating chords; but unlike the rest of the album’s clipped paranoid funk, Once in a Lifetime ebbs and flows with a forward, organic, easy rhythm.
That “forwardness” is important. I love Once in a Lifetime because it captures, with shocking precision, a certain thought that occurs to me from time to time, which is: wait, what on earth am I doing? Or, as David Byrne puts it in the first verse: “well, how did I get here?” It’s that moment of blinding clarity that hits us all from time to time— a sudden and frightening objectivity, a sense of being completely and totally awake for the first occasion in months, years. You look around, take stock of all you’ve achieved, and realise that in some terrible way none of it truly belongs to you. I’ve experienced this a few times now, usually at times of critical change. (Leaving home for the first time is a memorable one. “This is not my beautiful house!”) I don’t think I’m alone, and the song has many fans.
As you may have noticed by now, many of my favourite songs work by combining musical mood with lyrical theme. The way Once in a Lifetime sounds so musically warm and expansive (the floating keyboards and polyrhythmic drums) and somehow naïve (the call-and-response chorus melody, the flute-like synths afterwards) is a critical part of what makes the lyrics work. In the wrong song (see later) those words could have been crushingly dark and hopeless— I mean, is this guy trapped in his beautiful house with his beautiful wife for the rest of his life?— but the catchy, upbeat music and Byrne’s warm and eccentric spoken-word delivery make this instead a song of optimism. After all, it is not just about being trapped, but also about the promise of escape: “Where does that highway go to?” wonders Byrne. I think it’s about challenging complacency, about the necessity of fear— because without that fear, you take stuff for granted, and life becomes meaningless without you even noticing. In that sense, ironically, Once in a Lifetime is life-affirming. The most life-affirming song I know, in fact.
Most people know the video. It’s one of the great icons of MTV (back from when music videos were the new thing and MTV actually used to play them) and of 80s pop-culture in general. It’s dated now, of course, and what must once have been really-quite-neat bluescreen technology— David Byrne superimposed across watery backgrounds or duplicated across the screen— now looks tacky and simplistic. But that, naturally, is all part of its appeal for me, and I’m not talking about nostalgia. The dated aesthetic, frozen in time and place, contributes weirdly to the vibe and the message of the song, of being trapped, frozen, stuck. And in a strange way it is consequently timeless.
But it goes without saying that the star of the show is David Byrne himself. After seeing the man perform live a few weeks ago and soon after digesting an awful lot of live footage on YouTube— I particularly recommend the Rome concert— I have decided after some reflection that David Byrne is the coolest man who has ever lived. And he has never been cooler than he is in the Once in a Lifetime video.
When I first started getting into Talking Heads, it was with some disappointment I discovered that David Byrne’s “50s Midwestern geek” look (suit, bowtie, spectacles, tidy haircut) was created for the Once in a Lifetime video and is not how Byrne generally goes about in life— another terrible lie of the MTV generation. Somehow Byrne makes what should be a clichéd aesthetic fascinating, inscrutable, meaningful, mesmeric. A lot of that is down to his famously erratic dancing, his puppet-like movements, fitting and shaking and collapsing, twitching to the beat. From time to time he recoils as if something big has struck him, or an idea has occurred to him, or drummer Chris Frantz has hit him instead of the tom-tom. (I don’t say this in jest: it really is as if the weight of the music itself has hit the twitching-puppet Byrne with sudden force.) The suddenness and unpredictability of his moves, apparently derived from a patchwork of sources from evangelists to epileptics, mirrors the sudden realisation of the song’s lyrics.
The image, then, is of a man who is somehow not a man but a figure to which things are done. He is pushed around, picked up and dropped, toppled. He is apparently subject to the (sometimes violent) ebb and flow of life itself. But, importantly, he doesn’t seem to be a victim. He’s fine with all this. He stares at us with wide-eyed, inhuman calm. There is no fear or pain or panic in this guy, or apparently much of anything at all, which would make him uncanny or unpleasant under normal circumstances, but for some reason he isn’t. And through all this he seems to be communicating something, something urgent and important but hard to discern. It’s kind of like the Red Room in Twin Peaks, but less creepy (though no less awesome). You wake from the dream with a sense of renewed clarity, but can’t say why.
David Byrne himself appears to “wake from the dream” in the video’s closing moments, appearing in two brief shots sans glasses and bow tie, mouthing the backing vocals, moving his head subtly to the beat, his eyes shining, human again. This is the “real” David Byrne. I find these two shots, the total inverse of the rest of the video, mysteriously moving, I suppose because they temporarily deconstruct the Byrne we’ve been seeing the whole time and offer a kind of momentary relief— a reality check, I guess. Which, really, is what the whole song is about, isn’t it?
I will close this entry by linking to a pair of fascinatingly dreadful cover versions of the song. I wouldn’t feel this necessary if I didn’t think that, in their own perverse ways, both covers reveal something about the music they mutilate. Here’s a version by the Exies, an emo/alt-rock band from LA:
And here’s the Smashing Pumpkins’ version, which is, incredibly, arguably worse:
What I find most interesting about these covers is that neither of them even attempt to emulate the music of the original track. Aside from the verse-chorus structure, nothing of the song’s musicality– its melodies, instrumentation, even its chord progression– remains in either cover. Not that I believe that covers should attempt to simply recreate songs, but the degree to which both bands have deviated here is quite amazing considering the original song is comprised of exactly two chords. (Again, I should specify that I wouldn’t have a problem with this if both covers weren’t so stirringly awful.) I suppose this just illustrates the song’s hidden and surprising complexity; it may only be two chords, but have you tried sitting down with a guitar and working them out? It’s harder than you think.
Still, it’s hard to take the cynicism with which both covers treat the source material. It’s difficult to imagine the Exies have even heard the original song, such is the degree by which they catastrophically miss the point, and in their generic emo ninnying they seem essentially harmless. But Billy Corgan, that fallen rock legend, has no excuse for rewriting the lyrics. “And you may ask yourself: am I who I think I am, or am I what they want me to be?”, he asks dispassionately, taking the open-hearted message of the song and warping it into a ghastly blunt instrument. I almost wonder if it’s ironic. “You might ask yourself: who is this guy talking to me? You may ask yourself: what does he know about me and my life?” My God! What have I done?
If you pay attention to such things, you will have heard by now that 3D Realms, the developer of the Duke Nukem franchise, has finally run out of money. With it dies Duke Nukem Forever, the game industry’s most notoriously delayed product and perhaps the best definition of “development hell” anyone has ever had the misfortune to provide. Since the fold, the internet has seen a torrent of leaked DNF media, including animation reels and design documents (complete with typos), as ex-employees either show off their CV or try desperately to give the world something to show for their years of wasted effort. As it turns out, the catastrophic failure of Duke Nukem Forever has ended up being far more interesting than the finished game ever could have been, and I have been shifting through the fallout with some fascination, particularly the reports from frustrated ex-employees. I hope someone writes a tell-all book about the whole miserable story one day.
If you don’t know already, this is what Duke Nukem, the character, looks like:
That image tells you nearly everything you need to know: ie, that Duke is a vest-wearing, shades-sporting, gun-toting, ultra-ripped chisel-jawed all-American badass with a way with the ladies. He goes around “quoting” Evil Dead lines (and by quoting I mean “nicking”, much to Bruce Campbell’s distaste; even Duke Nukem 3D’s boxart is essentially a repaint of the original Evil Dead theatrical poster.) Duke’s missions tend to involve busting alien chops, having sex with strippers, and often a combination of the two. According to the leaked design documents, Duke Nukem Forever would have opened thus:
“After beating his own Video Game and having sex with the Holsom Twins, Duke must play his part in a Talk Show at his own Lady Killer Casino until the power goes out. Investigating the power disturbance, Duke acquires a Jet Pack from a young fan and jet packs up an elevator shaft. At the top Duke sees the Alien Mothership in the Vegas sky floating over the Lady Killer. Duke quickly locates his throne, riding it down to the secret Duke Cave hidden in the middle of the huge casino.”
I’m 23 as I write this– hello, older future self, by the way, hope you’re well– which made me 10 (just) when Duke Nukem 3D, which is the Duke game everyone knows and remembers best, came out. I played it, my dad played it, Brendan played it– hello Brendan, hope you’re well– every other pubescent boy (and his dad) played it. People swapped the shareware floppies in the playground. And it was brilliant. Duke said things like, “I’m gonna rip off your head and shit down your neck!” You could take a leak, and give money to strippers! And there were remote-detonated pipe bombs and holograms and laser trip wire mines, which were all amazing at the time if ultimately a bit useless, and jetpacks, and you could shrink enemies with the Shrink Ray and then squash their tiny diminished forms with your boot! (Speaking of your boot, you could also kick people, which is still novel in a first-person game.) And at the end, after you’d blasted the aliens back across the galaxy and saved Earth women from horny extraterrestrial tentacles, a woman said over the credits, “Come back to bed, Duke”. Look, it’s like sex! Did you hear that? They’re going to have sex!
But. Look. Here’s the thing. That was 1996. I was 10. It was the nineties. Things were different. I was different. Games were different. With all due sympathy to those chaps at 3D Realms now out of a job– and I can’t imagine how it must feel for director George Broussard particularly, who has for the last decade been the butt of every tired internet joke– I gotta be frank and say: good riddance, Duke. Thirteen years on, you represent everything about games I have come to despise: the apalling misogyny, the sniggering scatological humour, the obsession with firepower and violence, the aren’t-muscular-guys-with-shades-and-guns-cool character design– every ugly, dated stereotype about games and what game players are supposed to like. Your crude excesses do not help me convince girls that video games aren’t just sad, petty, ugly machismo-simulators for lonely nerds in darkened bedrooms, and that in turn doesn’t help me stop being a lonely nerd in a darkened bedroom.
It surprises– and encourages– me to realise this, but, as far as video games still have to go in proving their cultural worth and earning a wider acceptance in the arts, we really have come along way in the thirteen years Duke Nukem’s been gone. As huge as Duke Nukem 3D was in 1996, I don’t think Forever was ever going to sell very well, certainly not enough to recoup the enormous cost of its grotesque development period. Sorry, Duke, but you’re a dinosaur, and I am glad to have withdrawn my bet on you long ago.
I remember Noel Edmonds as a nice man who poured technicolour gunge on celebrities and gave excited children Mega Drives (with Sonic 2 and everything). Until recently I had thought of him as a rather pitiful but ultimately harmless presenter of awful light entertainment programmes and peddler of creepy “cosmic ordering” books. (Cosmic ordering is some kind of new-age self-help thing whereby you, I don’t know, pray to bits of rock floating in space and consequently learn to forgive your ex-wife, or something. He also has been going on about his giant orbs that only appear in digital photographs quite a lot.) So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Noel is not just a sad, deluded man, but also a frothingly cross right-wing lunatic bastard from hell.
“Noel’s Bonkers Britain” is a slot on Noel’s recently-canceled Sky One “Noel’s HQ” show that usually consists of Noel smugly mocking “bonkers” things– bus drivers demanding grandmas provide proof of age for a concession ticket, that sort of thing– set to an appropriately bonkers looping soundtrack of military drums and farty tubas and bonkers mad things like that. Noel asks at the end of each segment: “What do you think of that?”, much to the delight of his audience, who are very much against bonkers stuff in general and miss the days when Britain was a sensible country where schoolboys had to wear knee-high socks until seven at night, and who therefore all cry in response: “Bonkers!” Then an awful man called Chris turns up and sings a song with a guitar about how Britain’s gone bonkers, and everyone quickly learns the words and joins in for the chorus, which goes, “Britain has gone bonkers / we’re treated like we’re plonkers / that’s why we sing this song / ’cause Britain has gone bonkers.”
However, there is no such joviality about this very special episode of Noel’s HQ, wherein Noel– and, inexplicably, Keith Chegwin– gets “angrier than he has ever been in a studio” about a man and a bungalow in Wealden. Cheggers definitely says ‘bongalow’ at 0:23, incidentally:
I’ve watched this video a few times and I’m still not sure I haven’t missed something. (Have I missed something? Leave a comment, Noel.) What Noel has never been angrier about– finger-pointingly, martyr-makingly, knife crime-referencingly furious, in fact– really does seem to be a just war veteran, Joe, who has been denied planning permission for a bungalow extension. If that’s truly the case, the implications of Noel’s position are frightening. If Wealden Council went about giving every war veteran planning permission for anything they wanted, they would have expanded beyond the Sussex borders years ago and covered most of Europe in bungalows. You would have to visit an Incan ruin to find a staircase, and even then I imagine Noel would be there with Chris singing a song demanding Machu Picchu be made wheelchair-access-friendly. (”They left their legs in Ypres / so Britain wouldn’t be blown up / now these stairs are far too steep / for them to reach the top.”)
I am mystified by Noel’s disdain for the council’s policy of “not talking to entertainment shows like yours”. This seems a perfectly reasonable position to me– Jade Goody’s death was undeserving of national coverage, let alone one man’s bungalow extension– and I am reassured to see a governmental body for once not bowing to the pressures of cheap celebrity.
Back in the glory days of Noel’s House Party, Noel would have had the budget to fly a gift bungalow in by helicopter as a surprise and drop it on top of whatever no-doubt crap patch of Outstanding Natural Beauty Wealden Council may be trying to protect. (He certainly could at least afford a Mega Drive, which I distinctly remember costing an impossible amount of money.) That would have really stuck it to those sneering bureaucrat bastards, who probably all have bungalow extensions themselves anyway. Instead the best he can offer Joe is a state-of-the-art carbon-fiber all-terrain wheelchair, a monstrous, warlike machine that will surely trigger flashbacks. Still, when it comes to showing authority figures what for, Noel and his team are wise not to underestimate the potent sting of a well-deployed rhyming couplet.
“The Government aren’t reading the instructions / Couldn’t find weapons of mass destruction / What’s the whole point of it all? / I guess we’ll never know really.”
And if you don’t watch out, he’ll cosmically reorder your house so your bed is in the LAV.
I found this strange video a year ago and still review it from time to time. Apart from its obvious comic value, I find it oddly beautiful. Its visual incongruity– a Korean man dancing a very American dance to a very undancable piece of music– and sad, faded, washed-out tint seem eerily appropriate for the song. That the music, reverberating around the room, is diegetic (played within the scene itself, rather than superimposed in post-production) is also somehow important.
Very strange. And actually better than the real music video. Sorry, Michel.
Panzer Dragoon Saga was released on the Sega Saturn in 1998 and sold (approximately) four copies. This was (approximately) only half of the amount of copies Sega printed for the European and North American markets in total, the Saturn living only via life support at that point. My own copy is the prize of my video game collection, and, never having been too into untranslated Japanese shooters released on formats even I’ve never heard of, it’s certainly the rarest game I own. Nowadays it goes for hundreds on eBay. What’s most important about all this is that the game is actually worth paying (approximately) that much for.
I don’t like RPGs. That’s sort of one of my rules. Like most of my rules, though, it’s flexible. (I don’t like racing games either, but love F-Zero; and I possibly only like Smash Bros so much because I don’t like fighting games.) The role-playing genre has long frustrated me because, with its emphasis on narrative, it should be the genre that most excites me, but instead I typically find RPGs impenetrably clunky and trite. Of all genres, the RPG seems the one most leaden with its own internal language of complex menus, battle systems and other nonsensical tropes that surely make it very difficult for non-gamers (or even non-RPG fans) to access.
Even as someone who grew up on games I was long mystified by the genre. It wasn’t until someone loaned me Grandia 2 in my mid-teens that I actually finished an RPG— unless you count the early Pokémon titles, which I suppose are like RPGs with training wheels— and even then it took me months, having ended up midway through the game chronically under-leveled, not realising you aren’t supposed to avoid every enemy you come across. (The same thing happened to me the first time I played through Pokémon, come to think of it. I only used one Pokémon the whole time, Blastoise, and got stuck on the ferry bit a few hours in.) It seems to me that a game where the player is expected to systematically do something basically not interesting or fun for hours on end is a flawed one, and appeals only to people somewhere low down on the autistic spectrum whose obsessive-compulsive need for order and certainty makes them susceptible to repetitive work-reward mechanisms. Luckily for Japan there are a lot of such people in the world (my mother calls them ‘men’) and so the genre remains popular.
I cannot continue writing this entry without mentioning the RPG behemoth that is the Final Fantasy franchise. With the exception of Final Fantasy IX (declared ‘the worst one’ by several FF fans I know), whose sumptuous art direction I found charming, and Final Fantasy XII (declared ‘the worst one’ by apparently most people on the internet), whose bravely revitalised battle system I found refreshing and utterly addictive in an autistic-spectrum kind of way, I have bitterly loathed every installment in the franchise, including the spin-offs.
I am sorry, internet, but I think Final Fantasy VII is an ugly, trite, backward game, with utterly naff character design and a graphics engine so dated as to be basically unplayable. Its enduring popularity with people who don’t really play games— who haven’t owned a console since the original PlayStation, and talk nostalgically about playing Sonic round their brother’s flat before wondering out loud what his little girlfriend was called (“oh yeah: Tails”)— is to me one of the biggest mysteries of the video game world. I can only assume that these people were bowled over at the time by what were once cutting-edge FMV sequences and exciting little Lego people in 3D. I would understand all this better if the game weren’t so fraught with impenetrable and counter-intuitive design elements; during the first boss fight, for example, an ally gives you a piece of advice that actually works against you due to a mistranslation. Considering the game was a huge success even in Europe, where Nintendo previously didn’t bother to release Super Mario RPG due to the territory’s notorious disinterest in the role-playing genre, I am amazed anyone managed to get through the first hour without specialised training beforehand and a lot of counseling afterwards. I suppose Square makes a lot of money from strategy guides.
There was an alternative available if one knew where to look. Kentaro Yoshida, an artist on Panzer Dragoon Saga, recalls that the game’s art director, Manabu Kusunoki, “was adamant that he didn’t want any Final Fantasy-style unusual haircuts like [gestures a Cloudlike spike] or purple hair or anything like that”. A lack of purple hair is only the beginning of PDS’ artistic triumphs, for it features, I think, one of the most strange and beautiful universes in all science fiction. This alien, frequently surreal post-apocalyptic world is a terrifically odd clash of fantasy and sci-fi influences— most clearly Nausicaä and Mobius (who contributed concept art to earlier Panzer games)— and whose concept art I have saved on my hard drive for those frequent moments when I need to remember what exciting, original character design looks like.
The game is relatively short, coming in at only about fifteen hours, twenty if you do the (mercifully scant) side-quest stuff. Some people cite this as a criticism, but I can count on one hand the number of games longer than thirty hours that justify their running time. Unlike the sprawling and ultimately superficial stuff of Final Fantasy, PDS’ plot is tight, focused and to-the-point, with relatively few locations and a small cast (and only one playable character). It manages to achieve both a sophisticated political subplot (the game opening with a coup on an Imperial base) and, almost unheard of in video games, characters that actually develop through the story. Azel, the mysterious, inhuman-looking girl who functions as the story’s principal MacGuffin, begins a fierce antagonist but by the credits has revealed both a humane pragmatism and sympathetic vulnerability.
The main character, Edge, has his own unusual vulnerability. Like most RPGs, our hero is a teenager, but has none of the idealized shampoo-model looks or trite never-give-up attitude of the typical RPG protagonist — or even the frequent alternative, that of angsty aloof cool. Edge is instead a young man with a sensible haircut who is understandably angry when he is shot and dropped down a cavernous shaft in the opening FMV; that he survives this is an apparent plot hole that explains itself via a creepy postmodern twist in the end sequence. (I might return to this particular postmodern twist if I ever write an entry about Bioshock, i.e., how it doesn’t have one. It’s a thorny issue, so give me a while.)
Importantly, Edge has no particular powers or fighting skill of his own: instead he traverses the world map and fights enemies on the back of a dragon. Like everything else in PDS, the dragon subverts the clichés of its type, and contrary to what you might have expected of a dragon it is in fact a sleek armoured horned thing that breathes lasers instead of fire and roars like a synthesiser in pain. (Trust me, it’s cool.) In what I take and admire to be a tacit declaration of Edge as his own character (and not some personification of the player), you cannot name the player avatar, but you can name the dragon; he is, after all, Edge’s pet in some frightening capacity. I usually call him Pongo.
Pongo, it turns out, is a particularly powerful dragon and most of the human enemies in the game are quite scared of him. It’s a smart explanation as to how our hero could possibly go about taking down a corrupt empire without a large army behind him (most RPGs have its heroes manage with a sword and a few mates). More importantly, the dragon facilitates what remains in my book the most visually dramatic and exciting battle system of any RPG (and more than compensates for the game’s disappointing reliance on a traditional random encounter system). All battles are fought in the air, sometimes above the clouds, with the dragon and its target flying alongside one another; much of the strategy is derived from circling the enemy, trying to find its weak spots whilst concealing your own. Unlike the slow and static battlefields of FFVII only a year before, PDS’ battles are possessed of a sense of movement and sweeping drama that is still unusual. Though combat is not exactly turn-based, it nonetheless uses a (clear and visual) menu-based system whose instant accessibility slowly reveals a rich and surprising depth. Importantly, there is never a hurdle between deciding on an action and having your dragon do it— the sense of immediate control is sustained by shortcuts mapped to the main buttons and the ease with which the player moves around the battlefield— and, though the action waits for your input before proceeding, the feeling of urgency never slips.
By the time the player reaches the end of game’s first act, the player– and Edge– has adjusted to the idea of the dragon as a feared and uniquely powerful creature, having laid waste to hundreds of monsters and a small rebel fleet by this point. The disc climaxes with the first confrontation with the girl Azel. In what is probably my favourite boss battle of all time– and one of my favourite twists of any fantasy story– Azel turns out to have a bloody great dragon of her own, Atolm. And just look at the size of the bastard:
The neat visual contrast between the dragons– Edge’s svelte and dragonfly-like, Azel’s like a flying blue whale, complete with something resembling a dorsal fin– emphasises the hidden similarities of both riders. (I like to think of Edge’s dragon as female and Azel’s as male, just because they somehow seem to me gendered in that way and for the notion’s pleasing symmetry.) When the player finally lasers Atolm into submission, Azel is clearly distressed and laments having rushed him into battle too early, mirroring Edge’s growing bond with his own dragon; and the tiny form of Azel perched on Atolm’s mighty brow reminds us that, even moreso than Edge, she is a small and fragile figure in command of something big and very dangerous. It also visually dramatises Azel’s fierce-but-vulnerable character, and makes her something worth caring about.
And I do care about Azel. Practical, matter-of-fact and quietly composed, she is the reverse of the typical Japanese RPG female’s frail, giddily emotional hostage-bait. She is fiercely loyal to her master– Craymen, the man Edge is chasing– and tells Edge: “If you interfere with him again, I’ll kill you.” When Azel and Edge end up trapped together in an underground ruin, she allies with him to escape, but there is none of the usual rivals-forced-to-work-together comic banter. Azel tells Edge frankly that “I would have escaped [on my own] if I could”: she is calm when Edge is not. Azel begins to soften to him after this encounter, but she still tells him to stay out of Craymen’s way when it’s over. A tough cookie.
It’s nearly a shame, then, that in the penultimate act Azel falls unconscious, almost recasting her in a typical damsel-in-distress role– but I can’t deny that this classic storytelling tactic of moving a powerful character into a position of vulnerability is one I always fall for. Without Craymen’s military jacket her strange artificial form is revealed fully, its puppet-like joints and asymmetrical black-and-white colour scheme making her look like a cross between Pinocchio and Pierrot, and the hidden vulnerability behind all her determination is again visually illustrated.
When she recovers, however, Azel has lost none of this determination. By the time the story ends, she is determined to find Edge, who has vanished into the ether. His chances of return seem slim– especially if we interpret that aforementioned creepy postmodern twist to mean it is the player who has invested Edge with new life after he is shot in the opening sequence, only to snatch it away once the game is completed– but Azel remains hopeful. With Craymen dead, she has nothing more to live for, and the sadness that has been lurking in her character all along now comes to the fore. The Panzer Dragoon game that came next, Orta, told us that Azel eventually conceives a half-machine-half-human child using Edge’s DNA she found floating in Sestren (a sort of sentient computer dimension– it’s complicated). I think this cheapens what I find a poignant and unexpected ending, and damages the pleasing ambiguity of Azel’s surprisingly maternal response to a child who trips near her: she dusts him off and watches him join his playmates. Besides, I frankly love the bleakly romantic image of Azel, who has been the story’s real focus all along, embarking on a surely hopeless journey out of love. Her question is one that is better left answered.
So, two thousand words later I now confess what you may have presumed already: Panzer Dragoon Saga is the only RPG I’ve ever truly loved. Eleven years on, it still far surpasses every other RPG in nearly every important field: plot, characterisation, art direction, world design, enemy design, battle engine. Yet no Final Fantasy fan I’ve met has heard of it. (One of them told me she had, but she is lying. She is a girl and therefore has likely never even touched a Saturn.) Like most of Sega’s best creations, PDS was doomed from birth to a life of obscurity— Sonic & Mario at the Olympic Games has sold millions, luckily— and it remains a tragically overlooked title. Modern-day gamers can be forgiven for not wanting to splash out for an eBay copy (tight gits don’t know what’s good for them), and admittedly at the time it was tough to look past Half-Life, Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid, the other critical releases in 1998.
But I will never forgive GamesMaster for the dismissive TV review that surely sealed the game’s fate for good. “It’s not Final Fantasy VII,” disapproves one reviewer. “Or Zelda. But it’s a good attempt.” 87%. In the wonky logic of game journalism, that’s the percentage equivalent of six out of ten, or three out of five, or a patronising smile and a lollipop. It’s also only two percent better than Postal, apparently, so save your cash and download that instead.
In an interview with 1up not too long ago, Yukio Fatatsugi, Panzer Dragoon Saga’s director, said of his career ambition: “I just want to create something that will make no money.” That quote was on my Facebook page for a while. I find it inspiring, and it induces in me a nostalgia for a company of creative madmen before the inescapable demands of capitalism finally caught up and forced them to make Sonic & Mario at the Olympic Games instead. Rest assured that not a single penny you might spend on procuring a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga will find its way back to Sega now. It’s what they would have wanted, once.
(Images for this entry were sourced from the wonderful Art of Panzer Dragoon website. Have a look, it’s got nice pictures.)
Heard on the radio this week that the masks worn by Mexican citizens in all those photos offer no protection against airborne viruses. I had assumed that they were officially-distributed sanitary masks with proper filters in them, but apparently they are just bits of porous material. It seems the manufacturers of useless sanitary masks are profiting from the world’s superflu anxiety. Who did they sell them to before the advent of swine flu? Film extras? Halloween costumers?
My Dad has been making jokes about ‘oinkment’ all week. But he has canceled the family holiday to Barbados.
The BBC has received more than a thousand complaints after Robert Luckett’s appearance on “Stupid” Paul Armstrong’s Radio 4 comedy show, The Crumbs of My Battenberg.
Luckett made reference to urination on thirty-one occasions, and twice himself urinated - at one point onto fellow guest panelist Rob Brydon - during yesterday’s broadcast.
One listener wrote: “Though the radio medium spared us having to actually see Mr Luckett relieving himself onto Mr Brydon, thank God, the sound effects picked up by the microphones paid for by license-owners provided a nonetheless clear mental image. Brydon’s gurgling noises were particularly troubling.
“I will not be tuning in again.”
The show has been defended by TV presenter Noel Edmonds, who declared on a live Radio 2 call-in programme earlier this morning: “I LOVE piss!”
Edmonds’ comment has drawn a further 118 complaints from radio listeners.
The Controller of BBC Radio 4, Mark Damazar, told BBC news: “Though some listeners may have found Mr Luckett’s actions disturbing, our research shows that there is an ever-growing demand amongst the British public for piss-based programming.”
