Tag: A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words: The Woodstock Movie

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Woodstock

The Woodstock music festival is probably the most overrated cultural event ever. A ramshackle mess that could have very easily turned into a 1960s Fyre Festival or something much worse, all it gave was a huge mess in an upstate farm, music, and… a documentary film.

A massive reason-perhaps the biggest reason-why the concert is so well remembered is Michael Wadleigh’s masterpiece. Easily the best documentary/concert film I’ve seen, it cuts from the performances (of varying quality in every sense of the word) to interviews with dazed hippies, musicians, and the festival organizers, to things like the rainstorm and Wavy Gravy’s pronouncements, all done with amazing cinematic skill.

I could point out that despite being intended to be sympathetic, the interview subjects and even the whole festival doesn’t exactly look the best. But that’s the beauty of it, with the film being detailed and close (again in multiple senses) enough to give the viewer enough evidence to a make a judgement call. Its main goal was to chronicle, and chronicle it did.

A Thousand Words: Emergency Call Ambulance

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Emergency: Call Ambulance

Sega’s 1999 Emergency Call Ambulance is a perfect footnote for what the arcade would become. Released alongside Crazy Taxi that same year, it has the same basic gameplay: Drive very fast under a time limit-in this case to get the patient to the hospital as quickly as possible. Looking at it and Crazy Taxi (which was reviewed much more positively) shows the obsolescence of arcade machines by this point: By now consoles could deliver effectively the same experience at home, so arcades had to sell elaborate experiences unrelated to the actual game.

This is something I’d still have spent money on to pass time. But it’s one of those ‘post-1945 propeller fighters’ that had the problem of simply being too late. Besides, it has a pet Dalmatian that accompanies one patient and gives a subtitled thank-you speech in dog. How can you not like that.

A Thousand Words: Initial D

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Initial D

One of the most famous car racing works of fiction and the biggest reason why people know the ‘eurobeat’ subgenre of electronic music, Initial D is the reason why there are so many memes of cars and “RUNNING IN THE NINETIES” and “GAS GAS GAS”. It’s the story of ‘touge’ racing through winding mountain roads, tofu deliveryman/prodigy driver Takumi Fujiwara, and the Toyota Corolla AE86, which thanks to it has gained popularity well beyond what a mid-80s Corolla would get.

Seriously, it’s like how in Red Storm Rising the Iceland invasion was a crazy jury-rigged gamble but so much else treats it like normal and standard. The whole point is that it’s an underestimated clunker. It’s like a tank novel with an M48 or T-54 or something with an ace crew and everyone thinks it’s the tank. But I digress.

This is basically an action show/manga with cars instead of glowing superheroes. The most famous “First Stage” initial (no pun intended) anime adaptation holds this to the core: With early CG and blaring music, characters dramatically take actions graaaaaduallly and somehow have the ability to hold huge monologues and conversations while roaring through perilous streets. It honestly sounds better than it actually is, with the pattern of ‘how is this ’86 winning’ being worn down even then.

But still, that music…

A Thousand Words: Mach Rider

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Mach Rider

Like many video games, Mach Rider was a minor hit for Nintendo in the mid-1980s and then languished forgotten until Smash Bros. revived it. The game is a pretty crude but impressive-for-the-time ride along a twisting track and dodge and destroy the evil giant tricycles until you eventually fail, but it has a couple of quirks.

The first is that it was one of the first games to have a level editor, even if it was only in Japan and very limited in practice there. The second is that it has a vague story (there’s minor justifications for you fighting back against an alien invasion in the various track missions) but no ending. The third and most interesting is that the titular rider has been alternately depicted as male and female (the former being in screens showing a helmeted but clearly male figure and the Smash Bros. Melee trophy using ‘he’ while the latter is a female biker in a piece of official art and a woman in the arcade version that’s implied to be a Mac Rider). I guess the different color riders are different people.

Of course, back in the day I remembered the Mach Rider theme as an alternate stage track in Smash Bros. that I loved and nothing else. Which can be said about a lot of things.

A Thousand Words: BeamNG Drive

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BeamNG Drive

One reason why Fuldapocalypse hasn’t been updating much is BeamNG Drive. It is an automobile sandbox with realistic physics that allows someone to do so much. Now on its own the game does not look like much. You can drive around maps that range from tiny to several virtual square kilometers, do some challenges like races or time trials or seeing how far you can get on an almost empty fuel tank, etc…

But that is like saying like sports is just throwing/kicking a ball around. With just the stock game (and the mods for this are numerous and excellent), you can control everything from big truck fronts to tiny old cars. The seemingly mundane can turn into fun, like towing a trailer with cargo many times the weight of the car pulling it, and doing so on a dirt mountain road without mishaps (easier said than done).

You have to make your own fun in BeamNG, but there’s a lot of it.

A Thousand Words: Big Fight

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Big Fight: Big Trouble in the Atlantic Ocean

On one hand, the 1992 arcade brawler Big Fight can be viewed as nothing but a mechanically bland copycat of Final Fight and the like. While this is true, it’s also very hard to deny that the game is also a very weird and bizarre eccentric game with a premise that could have been written by Jon Land, graphics that fit said style perfectly, and translation terrible even by the standards of the day that weirdly adds to the charm.

See, the entire game takes place on a cruise ship/battleship/supervillain base called the “SKELETON CREW”. There are three protagonists with designs that aren’t anything to write home about the standard fast/strong/balanced differences. The normal enemies likewise are standard fare… but then come the bosses. They not only include a sumo-kabuki and an ancient Egyptian mummy-wizard, but the big twist is that after each defeat, everyone except the final boss becomes a playable character.

Every one has the same dialogue, repeated here verbatim: “[boss]: ‘Now I came to my sense. Can you take me into partnership? [character who beat the boss]: Sure.”

It’s not explained if they were mind controlled or whatever, but yeah. The sprites and backgrounds are not ‘good’ in terms of pure detail, but they’re bright and do exactly what they need to do. The ship has a variety of zoos, gardens, gyms, and the like to rival Spaceball One.

Is this a good game to actually play? No better than other ones of its time. Is it fun to look at? Oh yeah.

A Thousand Words: Double Dragon 3

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Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone

Double Dragon basically made the brawler what it was. Unfortunately, its position at the height of beat em ups was very short lived. By the third game, an externally developed one called “The Rosetta Stone” that replaces the postapocalyptic streets with a world tour, it had been left behind by the likes of Final Fight. Really far behind.

If Final Fight has fluid controls that only seem slightly worse or clunky now than they did over thirty years ago, this feels like someone at the time who played both would have noticed it. The characters just move like they’re pieces on grooved slots (maybe it was even programmed like that). On top of it, being able to buy power ups with real quarters made this one of the first games with microtransactions.

So yeah, there’s a reason why Double Dragon fell out of favor. It didn’t make good games, and this was definitely not a good game.

A Thousand Words: Clue

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Clue

As proof that movies based on bizarre IPs are not a new thing, 1985 saw the release of a film based on the board game Clue. Thankfully the board game has a basic plot of “murder mystery”, which the movie uses. It ends up killing a lot more than Mr. Boddy.

This movie is not “good” by any means, but it falls into the category of “a lot better than it could have been” and is perfectly fun for a time waster. Its multiple ending gimmick at least tries to be experimental and interesting (it was intended to have different theaters show different ‘definitive’ endings). And the John Morris score is underrated and excellent.

A Thousand Words: Noita Conjurer

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One of several things responsible for my slowdown in reading, writing and blogging has been the Conjurer mod for Noita (previously reviewed here). The problem with Noita was that it had excellent and complex interactions, an incredibly customizable magic system, and more… thrown into a punishing roguelike. Even respawning mods didn’t really solve the latter problem for me, as it just still felt like luck and brute force.

Enter Conjurer, which turns the entire game into a silly sandbox. It’s great for getting the hang of wand mechanics… and just seeing what happens when you pour lava on things. For me it turns Noita from one fun game into two.

A Thousand Words: Some Kind of Monster

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Some Kind of Monster

One of the best musical documentaries of all time, Some Kind of Monster covers Metallica in the early 2000s during the making of the St. Anger album. Given a surprising amount of access, including their arguments and therapy sessions (seriously), the filmmakers put together a tour de force. At times it’s like a ‘real’ Spinal Tap in its ridiculousness, but at other times it’s earnest.

Besides being a well made film, there’s a couple factors that help this along. The first is that it ultimately has a ‘happy’ ending: The band managed to overcome their difference, reunite, finish the album, and get a replacement bass player who has remained with them since. The second is that with hindsight it’s at just the right time. The band members are clearly past their absolute height and have grown with families and responsibilities. Yet at the same time, they aren’t in the pathetic, irrelevant “Fat Elvis” phase that every aging rocker inevitably falls into.

I think the best and most poignant part of the film comes when the album is finally done and the band members talk about the strange mixed feelings they have. As I’d just finished A Period of Cheating when I saw the movie, I understood completely that feeling.

Anyway, even if you don’t like Metallica (I’m not exactly a fan), this is a great film to watch.