April Blues
April is the time of the year when all the huge mounds of snow on the sidewalk start to melt leaving, in their wake, huge mounds of cigarette butts, grime and dog shit. All the filth that accumulated in the winter months is now in full display for the spring. It’s a wonderful time.
Now that the days are getting longer and warmer it’s best to start heading outside. It’s time to leave the shelter of home, turn off those video games and enjoy some fresh spring air. It’s the best time for it, before the stale summer smog hits. Perhaps, then, I should be thankful that my second XBox 360 has died.
But I’m not. I’m annoyed, as a consumer, that I’ve had more XBox 360s fail on me in two years than all the other consoles I’ve ever owned over twenty-two years. Only one other console has ever failed me: a GameBoy. And only because water was spilled into its cartridge slot. And it still kinda worked if you didn’t mind the fucked up display. Here I am dealing with shoddy Microsoft hardware and while I await a replacement, I wonder: why the hell don’t I have a Playstation 3? When the huge multi-platform release of the season, Grand Theft Auto IV, is released later in April, why should I risk getting the version for the system that might inevitably fail me yet again?
It’s about time I purchase a Playstation 3, but first I think I’ll go outside and enjoy the spring.
Probably Promotion
If Duke Nukem Forever is released in 2008, everyone who comments on this post* will get a free, RETAIL game from me.
I’m not sure what the buzzword for this type of advertising is but it seems to be coming up more and more. It all basically follows the same formula: if event X (outside of the company’s control) then free (or discounted) Y. In the above example, if Guns N’ Roses releases Chinese Democracy this year, Dr. Pepper will give away free drinks. During last year’s World Series, Taco Bell offered a free taco to everyone if a base was stolen. This wasn’t the first time they used such a promotion. In a more localized setting, Pizza Pizza offers every ticket holder at a Raptors game a free pizza slice if they score 100 points. This has caused some odd reactions during some blowout games.
In some ways, these kinds of promotions can be regarded as gambling: there’s a prize and it’s dependent on chance. I wonder if there are any legal implications? The payoff for the marketer, of course, is that if the chance event doesn’t happen the company gets free advertising. On the flip side, if it does happen I’m sure numerous statisticians were employed to crunch the numbers to ensure that the possible risk is still worth the benefit. So even if they have to pay, the cost is minimized by the advertising and side-purchases it brought them (a single taco isn’t going to fill you up. Want a drink and fries with that?) I’m also sure that numerous lawyers were used to ensure there were appropriate outs and loopholes to ease the potential damage. There’s always a catch.
That said, I figure I’m not above self promotion. I can get in on the act. If Duke Nukem Forever is released in 2008, everyone who comments on this post* will get a free, RETAIL game from me. Make sure you leave your email address (will not be shown.)
- * Before the comments are closed, which is usually about 30 days or at my own discretion.
SimCity
I’ve been playing SimCity lately. The Super Nintendo version. On the Wii. I don’t know why I was compelled to pay eight bucks for this when the original PC game is now open-sourced and available for free. More to the point, I don’t know why I was compelled to pay for a game I already own. Granted, it’s boxed up, along with the Super Nintendo, somewhere in my parents’ house, but if I ever felt the desire to play it I could have easily picked it up over a weekend. I wonder if that battery save still works. I had a Megalopolis on there!
The PC version has the added benefit of mouse control and full keyboard support, yet I’d rather kludge around with a d-pad because I’ve always had a soft spot for the SNES version. It had a certain charm that the PC version lacked; a bit of that old Nintendo polish. It was more polished, the graphics were far clearer and distinct, the music was pleasant and everything felt livelier. The PC version, by comparison, felt really flat.
The thing that motivated me to play this classic game was Dubai: the what the fuck? new capital of the architectural world. More specifically, it was details of Dubai’s waterfront plans, with its ridiculous Deathstar building, that reminded me of SimCity. This diagram in particular:
It compelled me to build a city. A city that is designed not for living but for the sake of getting a high score. A city that exploits all the nuances of the system for its own benefit, like rails (instead of roads) everywhere, high-density donut blocks and mile long stretches without intersections, stacked zones built on top of half demolished buildings and an emphasis on waterfront development even if it means non-linking intersections on bridges in the middle of the river. And the thing is, no matter how goofy of a city I construct (so long as I do it with the goal of getting a large population), it will never match the ridiculousness of the real thing in Dubai: a tasteless because-we-can money pit of urban planning built with a high score in mind (tallest this, biggest that).
Crystal Castles vs Chiptunes
Edit (May 5, 08): Hey, it turns out Crystal Castles are thieving bastards and full of shit. Read more.
Crystal Castles is the latest buzz-making indie band to emerge out of Toronto, which has been a relative hotbed of cool independent (and post-independent) music. It’s a scene that has spawned the likes of MSTRKRFT, Holy Fuck and, before them, Death From Above 1979 and Broken Social Scene and the multitudes of artists connected to them in every conceivable way (like Feist.) The two-piece of Crystal Castles, instrumentalist Ethan Kath and vocalist Alice Glass, comes out blazing with fully armed synthesizers and their primary weapon of choice is a modded keyboard with an Atari 5200 chip in it. Yes, they’re basically creating Chiptunes.
I love chiptunes. It’s an aesthetic that has great modern and nostalgic appeal to me. The first music that I payed any attention to in my life was generated by an NES sound chip, and the last album that I listened to wasn’t very different. In the last five years I’ve been to two live shows: one was a friend’s band and the other featured bit shifter. So yes, it’s a sound I have a certain nerdy affinity to. I’m not the only one as it’s a thriving scene. There’s a countless number of artists, numerous labels, a full-on four day music festival (Report part 1, part 2) and even a documentary or two.
Crystal Castles in Toronto, courtesy of Charlyn.Crystal Castles, whose sound I would describe as “The Knife if they were on 8-bit peoples, with a touch of Atari Teenage Riot“, doesn’t identify with that scene at all. Hell, their name isn’t a reference to the Atari videogame (as I first thought), it’s a reference to She-Ra. It’s not the world they came from. In an interview with Exclaim!, they say as much:
It was only to create annoying sounds. That keyboard was made back in 2004 and then we learned about this whole 8-bit scene, which we don’t really have anything to do with. It’s a completely different world.
That’s fine. That’s great. Music history isn’t a linear path; influence happens in parallel. The kids that grew up with the SID chips and the Atari and the NES, now in their twenties and thirties, all have personal experiences with that nostalgia and it will manifest itself in ways unique to them. It’s not synchronicity, it’s culture. What irks me about this isn’t the band, it’s the media writing about the band.
It’s not my intent to start a “my subculture is better than your subculture” pissing match — we’d lose, the indie army is far crazier and more numerous — but I hate how the oft ignored, under the radar and frequently dismissed 8-bit aesthetic that defined the chiptune world years and years ago is now seen as this great and novel innovation. It’s hyperbolic articles like this one that stir my shit. Attaching a classic game system sound chip to a keyboard makes for a totally unique and new sound
? They are the most exciting and original band in the world right now
? Really?
Tracks like “xxzxcuzx me” and “Love and Caring” and “Alice Practice” have been described by some as “8-bit terror”. It’s mosh-pit music for the Nintendo generation and the crowd reactions to their performances reveal as much. Suburban ghetto music writes:
The pit was open and as the ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches washed over me I was inspired to run in, fists waving, until I was pushed out by three different people roughly twice my size. Usually I am one to shy away from the actual ‘moshing’ but repeatedly I was going for it, especially when killer track ‘Alice Practice’ came on.
That “killer track” is oft described by Crystal Castles as an “accident.” What’s even more telling is that they seem rather ambivalent to that glitchy sound. In interviews they say that they did it to be annoying:
We like to use sounds that annoy people. Especially in the earlier songs, like “xxzxcuzx me†— that was just to annoy everyone. It’s really strange when people tell us it’s their favourite song.
That annoying sound — the very same one that is getting all the praise for being “innovative” and “something completely new” — is the very same sound that has been previously derided as nerdy nostalgic noise with no musical value. Look no further than Paul Ford’s “Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s” for proof of this dismissal. There are threefour chiptune artists on that list and they all have one circle ratings. Aonami is described as “8-bit gunk” and Receptors gets the snarky “Can they win the boss level?” treatment. If anything, it proves that reviewing music is no different than reviewing the last time you masturbated: immeasurably personal and subjective.
That’s not to say that there isn’t any value in that — there is — it just depends on the context that is brought to the review. Paul Ford dismisses Receptors as noise; I hear Kraftwerkian lo-fi bit-pop. That’s my experience with it, no doubt fueled by the knwoledge that the man behind Receptors is the man behind 8-bit Operators, the chiptune Kraftwerk cover album. An album that is notable for being published by a “mainstream” label, AstralWerks. And when he hears as “8-bit gunk”, I hear a head bopping mix of nostalgia and awesome.
It’s a matter of perspective. When those not familiar with that chiptune “8-bit terror” sound hear it coming from Crystal Castles, and they like it, they like it because it’s something new and fresh and innovative. For me, however, it’s a sound that I’m already intimate with. I enjoy it because I know it. I have a frame of reference to it. I know of other acts and performances and songs with which I can compare their aesthetic to. When I hear about the mosh-pits to songs like “Alice Practice” and “xxzxcuzx me”, as mentioned above, I think about this performance by Hally at the Blip Festival.
As with everything else, it’s all been done before. David Sugar mixed nanoloop-powered Gameboy chiptunes with hip-hop over a year ago.
Beck did his thing three years ago with Ghettochip Malfunction on the Hell Yes EP. And Welle:Erdball have been doing it for over a decade. None of that matters though. Whether they’re seen as “innovative” or indie cool or as chiptune artists doesn’t change the fact that their music is fantastic. Their take on that 8-bit aesthetic is distinctly theirs. It’s personal. It’s good. It’s recommended. A fine addition to the chiptune canon.
Their debut self-titled album comes out this week.
A Source of Random Medieval Information
Amongst the many ridiculous events in the Church’s history, the Cadaver Synod has to rank in the top five. Basically, they dug up a dead pope, cut off his fingers, put him on trial, found him guilty, reburied him, dug him up again and then threw him into the river. Here’s another article about it.
Anyway, that’s all inconsequential. What’s interesting is that the wikipedia page’s discussion is categorized as “Low-importance Middle Ages articles“. Following through to that will reveal a vast depository of obscure and random medieval history. If you ever feel the need to write historical fiction set in the dark ages, this is the place to be.
PS. Don’t forget about my Tumblr, I’ve been posting there frequently.
Modern Sins
That wooshing noise you hear coming from the Vatican is the sound of the Church grasping for straws, hoping to stay relevant in an increasingly irrelevant age. Trying to stay modern, and not with the mores of the eighteenth century, the Church has come up with a contemporary set of seven deadly sins. Amongst the set are “Environmental pollution”, “Genetic manipulation”, the vague “Morally debatable experiments” and the wordy “Violation of fundamental rights of human nature”. I don’t know about these. They don’t have the marketing appeal that the old ones had. They’re not snappy. They don’t flow. The branding message is confused.
Say what you want about the ridiculousness of Scientology, but at least they know how the brand themselves in the modern age. Whereas Christianity is full of boring stories about a guy going fishing and escaping a cave, Scientology has sexy blockbuster-material involving alien invasions, nuclear weapons and the super colossal motion picture. It’s like the difference between Into Great Silence (which I sat through, all three hours of it, in a painfully uncomfortable theatre) and Independence Day.
If the Vatican wants to stay modern it needs to do more to improve its image. The brand needs a total overhaul. That old logo isn’t cutting it anymore, it needs to be shinier and more extreme. Jesus needs a talking animal sidekick. It needs to diversify and find new angles and promotions.
But most of all, the Church needs to be more expedient with these brand changes. If they’re going to change the rules this late in the game (a thousand years too late) then they’re going to have a hard time winning over new souls. And they sure as hell aren’t getting mine. It’s already accounted for. I work in advertising.
Videos for the Nostalgic PC Gamer
A little trivia: without clicking through to YouTube, can you identify the following video before its end?
YouTube user MetallicO1985 has posted the whole series of these videos and do they ever bring back memories. They’re relics of the days when live video was the next big thing in games, but they retain a character that all new sequences. This Shakespearean one in particular.
Additionally, there’s also the following compilation:
Run Button
Eight years ago when I was looking for a domain and dedicated web host for my fledgling weblog, I came across WestHost.com. It offered a lot for a very fair, and student friendly, price. I registered the-inbetween.com through them for the full $70/2 year price tag that domains had back then. The package had unlimited bandwidth (remember those days?), a capacity of 15 MB and full PHP3 support. It was good for the time. In those years that account has been automatically upgraded and I now have 2000 MB worth of space and PHP5 and all sorts of other nice things that I don’t ever use.
Halfway through that run dreamhost started promoting themselves with their weblog friendly hosting packages. Webloggers, and others, started to switch. They raved. The packages were tempting and I was considering the switch myself, but I figured that domain transfer would be annoying and that, well, nothing was wrong with my current hosting provider so I chose to stick it out.
Nowadays I hear nothing but complaints about Dreamhost. Their status page reads like a comedy of errors (Due to a typing error on our primary router while trying to block a denial of service attack, DreamHost is currently offline.
) People are canceling their accounts and looking for new options. Meanwhile, my account with Westhost just works. I am glad I never switched.
So when I was looking for some extra hosting for some possible projects, I went with WestHost again. I’m not one to normally plug companies like this but eight years of happy service has to account for something. If you ever need reliable and simple web hosting, give WestHost.com a look and put ‘the-inbetween.com’ as a referral.
Anyway, as I was signing up for that new hosting account I needed a domain. With the help of some friends on IRC, we came up with a list of potential (and available) domains. Since I can’t register them all I offer them as free domain name consultation service to you. They’re all available as of last week.
- bossattacks.com and bossattack.com
- blockpuzzle.net (unfortunately it’s a .net so it ruled it out for me)
- badicality.com
- f0il.net and m00d.net (more .net domains, but these are 133t)
- resetthis.com (not a fan of the double ‘t’)
- loadbutton.com
- levelledup.com (very good for subdomain fun, ie. mike.levelledup.com)
- isnonplussed.com and isacynic.com and enjoysthings.com (for more subdomain fun.)
In the end, I settled for Runbutton.com. It’s brief and snappy (three syllables); it’s not inherently game-y; it is totally game-y; it’s an obscure reference to weird game-y things (the most useless button ever: the dedicated run button. I’m looking at you Mortal Kombat.); it was available.
What kind of projects are going to go there? I’m not sure right now but the first might be in response to this TIGSource competion and it might look like this:
Szomorú Vasárnap
The ubiquity of YouTube is a wonderful thing. For every one four million view video on the site there’s another forty thousand videos with a hundred views each. This, as Alex Juhasz [1]calls it, “niche-tube” exists below the radar of YouTube’s popularity and is often a treasure trove of weird and specific videos that only appeal to small subset of people. Some of it is prime research material.
Take “Gloomy Sunday” for example. The so called “Hungarian Suicide Song”, which has many urban legends around it, was mostly popularized in English by Billie Holiday. Originally written by Rezso Seress (lyrics), it was promptly rewritten to be less depressing by poet László Jávor (lyrics). It was that version that was later translated into English by Sam L. Lewis (lyrics) and Desmond Carter (lyrics). Carter’s version, performed by Paul Robeson (who has his own interesting history), was the more accurate translation but it proved to be the less successful one. After a bunch of performers, Lewis’ version was eventually recorded by Billie Holiday with a new third stanza that tries to take even more weight off the original meaning of the song by implying that it was a dream. It was this version of the song that persisted, eventually being covered by the likes of Elvis Costello, Bjork, Sarah McLaughlin, Sinéad O’Connor and others. It is this version, three iterations from the original, that is mostly known as “Gloomy Sunday.”
Now this is all well and interesting written out, but a quick YouTube search will reveal all this history in all its aural glory. YouTube is a great cultural library for this media and while copyright issues will always plague it, at this point I doubt they will ever stop it. How can you go back with all this culture a click away? Here’s an audio/video history of the previous paragraph:
Two Piece Rock Band
Well, I finally jumped on the Rock Band tourbus. Partly because I’m just about done with Burnout Paradise and partly because it was overdue and partly because the disc (not the complete package) can be had for cheap and partly because the latest downloadable content releases were “March of the Pigs” and “Perfect Drug” by NIN (in time for the new digitally distrubuted album release).
I am enjoying it — so much more than Guitar Hero 3 — but I do feel as though I’m missing out by only playing it on guitar in my lonesome. The possibility that I’ll be able to put a four piece band together is pretty slim so it’ll always feel as though I’m not getting the full band experience. But there is a solution: downloadable content!
How does that solve anything? Well, create a pack of only two piece rock bands. It’s easier to put together than a three or four piece band, though it does mean that someone (not I) would have to take double duty with the microphone. Here’s some suggestions for songs that would work and be fun to play (but will likely never show up because they would exclude full bands, to my dismay):
- White Stripes - Little Cream Soda — probably the most well known modern two piece band. So many songs to choose, but I think this one off of their latest album would be fun to play.
- Death From Above 1979 - Romantic Rights — yeah they don’t exist anymore but their rock endures.
- Local H - Bound for the Floor — was a minor hit back in the 90s.
- Inbreds - Any Sense of Time — was a minor Canadian hit back in the 90s.
Burnout’s Battle for your Eyes
One of the main tasks in Burnout Paradise is seeking out, and driving through, the 120 “Burnout Billboards” scattered around the city. It’s standard collect-a-thon game design, much like the orbs in Crackdown. However, where as the orbs in Crackdown were these floating nonsensical game-ish items, the billboards in Paradise make contextual sense and are nicely integrated into the city.
As I was driving around the city looking for my last three or four billboards, carefully going through every street and corner, I was hit with a revelation. This is an EA game and like most EA games, it has a lot of advertising. There are vehicles branded with sponsor logos, like a Wal-Mart clad F1-styled racer. There’s the “EA Trax” music, which is such a weird mish-mash of songs that the only possible reason for their inclusion is music industry dollars (Avril Lavigne in a high-speed arcade racings game?) And there are sponsored billboards around the city promoting fast food chains, shaving products, clothing and now defunct retailers. Billboards.
We ignore banner ads at an almost instinctive level. There’s even a term for it: banner blindness. It’s the reason why many advertisers are using distracting flashing graphics and floating overlays and interstitials. They get the attention that static banner ads do not. The billboards in Burnout Paradise are static, yet here I was looking for them.
Find the “Burnout Billboard”s amongst the many fictional and quite real advertisements in this Times Square-esque location.I’m uncertain as to how conscious of a design decision this was and, more so, undecided as to whether this is devious or genius.
The Value of Rez
Video game collectors are strange creatures. They buy up all sorts of merchandise for all sorts of reasons — scarcity, nostalgia, perceived value and completion — except the collectible’s original purpose. In the case of sports cards, this is fine. Unless the collector has an unusual craving for hard, twenty year old bubble gum there’s no purpose to sports cards beyond collecting them. That’s all they’re there for. Toys and video games are different. They are meant to be played with. Yet, to a collector nothing is of more value than a mint, factory sealed copy. That is why a sealed copy of Chrono Trigger recently sold in excess of a thousand dollars.
The average person would scoff, “twelve-hundred dollars!? For a game you’ll never play?” They’d be justified in thinking that. That’s a lot of money for something that’s just going to sit in some archive. It’s throwing money away. On the other hand, I can understand the collector’s point of view. I can relate with the thrill of it because, for a brief time, I was a collector. I’m better now.
It was 2001 and I had my first real job, my first real steady pay cheque and my first substantial disposable income. That kind of novelty makes for excessive spending and, in no time, I bought a Playstation 2. After a several year long lull I was back into the world of gaming. It was a gateway drug. Soon I had an XBox and a GameCube and a light-modded Gameboy Advance. But that wasn’t enough. As a kid growing up I had to make due with what I had and while I enjoyed all the games I had access too, there were so many games that I missed. Games that were oft talked about and revered and highly sought. Now, as an adult, I had the funds to see what all the fuss was about and I started acquiring old systems and old games.
Before I knew it, I was frequenting collector message boards, hitting eBay, making long treks to random game and discount stores and attending swap meets. I was a collector. It was around this time when Rez was released on the Playstation 2. Commercially, it flopped. It was understocked, underprinted and it never had a chance in the market place of the time. Being in that collector’s mindset I tracked down and bought two copies (which wasn’t easy to do.) I did play Rez at the time, but only a little bit. I certainly appreciated it and enjoyed it for what it was but I was more interested in its scarcity and trade value than the bits and bytes on the disc itself.
As time went on I grew tired of the “scene”. There were too many new games worth playing, leaving me with little patience for the time and money investment required to find twenty year old rarities. I became disinterested in the community and its underlying disregard for modern games and, well, any games that weren’t worth collecting. I traded in that spare copy of Rez (for, I believe, an original — not “Greatest Hits” label — Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and something else) and boxed up everything that wasn’t of the current generation and focused on the now. I haven’t looked back.
With Rez HD on XBox Live now (and, indeed, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) there’s no need to look back. Digitally distributed games will never have an issue of scarcity. So long as the service remains active those games will always be available and their price will be immune from eBay inflation. Anyone that discovers the game, now or years from now, will be able to, in an instant, play it. It’ll always be there waiting to be found and enjoyed by anyone willing to give it a chance. This, of course, scares the shit out of the collectors. All their hard-sought titles that they feel they have an exclusive right to are now available to anyone on XBox Live or PSN or the Wii’s Virtual Console. Their value is greatly decreased by their availability. But the cultural value is that much stronger. It’s a brilliant game. Every one that has ever handled a controller should experience it at least once. Collector’s be damned.
