- Squid Yes! Not So Octopus is not a twin-stick shooter. You might be forgiven for thinking it is just because you’re playing it on Xbox 360, where every second downloadable game is a twin-stick shooter, but it isn’t. It is in fact, essentially a one stick shooter – your squid moves in the precise, almost calligraphic manner twin-stick shooter protagoships often do, but it fires in only one direction, in a wide, shotgun-like spray. The effect of this minimalisation is that it reduces the main cognitive interplay you get from a twin-stick shooter, splitting your focus between where you are moving and where you are shooting, changing the dynamic from one where the player’s attention is divided to one where it’s juggled back and forth from guiding the Squid to thrusting its wave of electric death toward the pinpoint pricks of light (prixels?) of the game’s enemies.

This then doubles up nicely with the game’s other signature mind-jerk, which is that the whole thing rhythmically pulses, throbs and spasms with showers of Minter-level pyrotechnics (pixeltechnics?), forcing the player to read the situation and react before the whole thing is drowned in coleascing waves of pixelated bukkake (pixka … no, let’s leave that alone), like a kid in a wave pool trying to avoid being pushed along the trajectory that sends him tumbling into an overweight pensioner in a tiny bikini.

Squid Yes, Not So Octopus is 80 Space Bucks on XBL Indie Games, and worth the price of one go on Prop-Cycle.

£%$%^&&^*&STOP ALL THE DOWNLOADING£%^&^&*&((

- Tim Rogers in well written, informative games journalism found on Kotaku SHOCK!

- A certain kind of tragic beauty.

- If the internet has topography it now has ghost towns.

- CANABALT – Flash game worth playing (EDGY META-COMMENTARY), the game itself is pretty old, these scraps of design materials and sketches are tasty newness.

- This is practically porn if you like theme parks as much as ’some people’ do.

Elf Shot the Food’s Soup

Continue reading The Week in HYPERPOP

Stacato Bleeps from the Satellite HEART

-A Whole pile of interesting analysis of Avalon Hill’s computer game output in the Eighties, when the industry (video games, that is) was in its infancy. Also, achingly beautiful box art for the aforementioned games.

- Because when an Indie Dev is remaking side-scrolling fire-breathing ape arcade game Toki (Irem, originally, I think, and they made R-Type and thus Mean Something), Elf Shot the Food is watching.

- Southend comics curmudgeon’s weekly column hits mighty stride with insightful commentary on New Gods.

and moreWRRREEEeeeeooooRADIOSYNCRACIESoooooeeeeeeEEEERRRWWW

http://www.darkwaterpirate.com/
- Some people say this feels like Talislanta.

http://housetoastonish.podomatic.com/
- like a less ribald Panelologists …

- Star Guard, Indie platformer with lovable ’space dungeon’ setting, great retro art and interesting in-game naration.

- Amazing arcade flyer art. Enjoy the crazy worlds of awesome these games had to offer and then tell me Raven Storm Hammer Squadron 4 isn’t bland as paper flavoured gruel.

1. Preface. Is Strike Witches a horrific paedofest that no responsible human being should watch or enjoy?

Yes and no. Let me be the ten-thousandth person on the internet to say that if you are bothered by the sexualised fashion in which the Japanese media often portrays young girls, then you probably won’t get on well with Strike Witches. If you find that watching this kind of thing makes you want to commit some kind of crime, please get yourself to a therapist and talk that shit out, you’ll feel better for it, and may avoid jail. Both of these statements are pretty-much common sense for most people. Most people. It’s interesting (like a clown interesting) to me that the same kind of people that might be reading my article on this show are also often the same kind of people who insist on this kind of disclaimer; I’ve shaped the disclaimer in this way to highlight the fact that this debate is fairly simply resolved – if this (or anything) bothers you, don’t watch it. If it makes you want to do something criminal, don’t do it. Following these simple guidelines, we can enjoy this corner of anime, should we want to, without having to worry about whether it ‘makes you a paedophile’. Just a little piece of advice before I launch into the main drag of my argument.

You can't go to school like that young ladies!

2.World War II Revisionist Anime
Space Battleship Yamato is very popular in Japan, like Gundam popular. It’s maybe a little less in the public eye, but I think it is safe to say that ‘Yamato and its storyline underpin Japanese pop-culture like Superman or Starwars in the West. To summarise, it’s the future, and aliens are nuking Earth quite a lot, forcing us to live underground. Time is running out, because even the underground War of the Worlds cities are going to start getting irradiated pretty soon. But, in this darkness, there is a light of hope! Nice aliens contact the Earth, and can save us and the planet with some special technology – if only we can get to them on the other side of the galaxy. Luckily, they attach some plans for an awesome spaceship in which to do this to their message, and we use those plans to rebuild the WWII battleship Yamato – a symbol of real-life Japanese patriotism that never sailed due to the abrupt end of the war, and the new Yamato blasts into space to save the human race. Rocking.

What this is roughly taken to mean is that a symbol of Japanese military might is going to save the world from the terror of nuclear war, simultaneously healing the psychological scars of both being the ‘baddies’ in WWII and being the only country to have firsthand experience of being nuked. It’s stirring, powerful stuff to a foreigner, so I guess this is even more poignant to the Japanese.

Leiji Matsumoto, sort of creator of Space Battleship Yamato. Thanks to AnimeWorldOrder for posting the picture

3. The 501st Joint Fighter Wing
In Strike Witches, our heroines are a group of young to very-young girls whose magical birthright allows them to pilot magical-tech devices that essentially look like stockings made from the tails of WWII era fighter planes. In turn, their use of these devices allows them to not wear any trousers; or pants, if you prefer. The world of Strike Witches, a renamed version of 1940’s Earth, has been overrun by the Neuroi, a mysterious and inscrutable alien race that tends to resemble the bosses at the end of vertically scrolling shoot ‘em ups (that their designs are based on experimental WWII planes that never saw active service speaks of the level of military fetishism going on in the show); the Strike Witches are humanity’s, last, best hope for peace.

Each member of the squad is very-loosely (very) based on a real WWII flying ace, and each represents a different country – Europe, America and Japan are all represented; the heroine is of course Japanese.

Click here for a breakdown of the Strike Witches, their historical basis, and panty configuration. This is simultaneously breathtakingly intriguing and a sign of the last days of civilisation.

4. Moe
I first encountered this term years ago as a word describing the attraction to a fictional character. As I knew it then, ‘moe’ (which is, among other explanations derived from the Japanese ‘moeru’, to burn or burning) is what one felt when Chun-Li did a spinning bird-kick, when one wished they knew a girl as spunky and interesting as Kitty Pryde, or when Bugs Bunny dressed up and pretended to be a girl bunny – YMMV. It is commonly employed as an expression, with an exclamation point: “moe!”; you can hear Otaku-Jesus Travis Touchdown say it right at the beginning of No More Heroes. These days moe is usually a descriptor given to shows in which the main characters are somewhat sexualised underage girls (it doesn’t matter what underage is in your part of the world, you can usually find anime to oblige) – part of the agreed meaning of moe is that the attraction one feels to these characters is paternal and asexual, things which aren’t necessarily indivisible, like that of a ‘big brother’ to a ‘little sister’. Anyone who has watched a bit of anime will know that this is a fairly flimsy argument for a non-sexual relationship, but I digress. Either way, this ‘protective’ attraction, the desire to ‘look after’ the innocent young girl is used as the primary defense of moe content against suggestions of impropriety.

Torabisu Torchadaunu and the object of his moe, Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly.

5. Twilight
Twilight is the first of a series of novels (and a film, which I’m mainly addressing here) following in the Anne Rice mold of sexy vampire stories for girls. These novels feature a brand of vampires who are kind of gay (in that they have intense homosocial relationships with one another and are largely not interested in Other Girls), emotionally mature but sexless (because lust for blood has replaced icky non-fictional urges), non-threatening (because their pure love for whoever prevents them from drinking their tasty bloods) and really, really dreamy. Like Rice’s Interview with a Vampire before them, these stories are popular with teenage girls because they provide an outlet for feelings of desire that bypass the usual problems found in the real-world versions of these feelings – i.e. that teenage boys are stupid immature pricks who only want to get laid, and often don’t care about girls’ feelings or their own personal hygiene. These vampires are dark in a sexy way but essentially portrayed as non-threatening and safe.

So dangerous, yet I am fascinated, transfixed like a mouse in the eyes of a hooty owl

6. The New Otaku
Strike Witches provides two social functions – it’s a new revisioning of Japan’s cultural relationship with WWII, with a simpler mechanic at its heart. Whereas ‘Yamato can be seen as an attempt at symbolic redemption or atonement (Japan’s national pride and Imperial war machine saves the human race from the peril of nuclear attack as a way to say sorry), Strike Witches retells the war with a new bad-guy, one that sidesteps issues of nationalism and loss, both personal and human, allowing the whole human race to band together to confront it; later episodes paint the Neuroi in a more human light, and it’s our Japanese heroine that first perceives the humanity in them. If we consider a person’s relationship to national identity, war and violence to be on some level intrinsic facets of masculinity, Strike Witches provides a safe framework for fantasist explorations of these feelings – there are no impossibly stoic or invincible men to compare oneself too, and the spectres of the past become identity neutered sci-fi spaceships to be defeated in a systematic, video-gamey way, essentially by ’shooting the core’. It does this too with sexuality, in a way similar to the service Twilight provides for its female audience. The characters in Strike Witches aren’t interested in boys, and their relationships with each other hover on the border of titillation without ever seeing expression physically or verbally – enough for it to be sexy, not enough to make it ‘gay’. They are constantly portrayed in a sexualised fashion, but this is never transparently about sex – they don’t wear any trousers because they have to use the Striker Units, the camera is perpetually between their thighs because this is how you would see a fighter plane, they compare the size of each others breasts because that’s the kind of thing teenage girls do, or teenage boys hope they do, at least.

Moe itself suggests that the sexual feelings one might have towards these girls are passive, about looking after them not having sex with them, creating a parallel with the show’s abundant military fetishism (the girl’s weapons are lovingly depicted WWII era technology for example) which is also de-clawed by the revisionist setting. Like the boys of Twilight, both the girls and the guns of Strike Witches are safe to lust after.

Something for everyone, much like Pokemon.

7. Conclusion
So, Strike Witches is for masculinity what Twilight is to femininity? Perhaps. I certainly feel that it’s interesting as an example of how boys find safe expressions of their heterosexuality in a fashion different in some ways but also very similar to how girls do the same thing. One could argue that Strike Witches‘ sexuality is less generally problematic than Twilight’s, because at least it doesn’t de-normalise sexual attraction, but then again, those girls are all pretty young. The counter arguement, well, other than the ‘paedofest’ arguement, is that Twilight at least values emotional and intellectual maturity. Both are fairly dangerous naratives of the otherness of the opposite sex. In the end, mainly because I was able to identify with the main character’s dilema of being a pacifist in wartime (not that I’m at war, but I do consider myself a pacifist), making her a viewpoint character rather than an object of moe for me, I started thinking about the stuff presented here in this article, and enjoyed the show. It’s not amazing, but I got something from it, simply from not dismissing it out of hand as a terrible paedofest that no responsible human being should watch. By all means find Strike Witches and its moe, furry, anthropomorphised fighter-plane girls repugnant; by all means never watch it or any show like it. It’s fair to say that a lot of other, similar shows have all Strike Witches‘ icky flaws and no interesting subtext to justify watching them; in which case, don’t watch them. I feel that Strike Witches is a little more interesting than that due to its relationship with anime-past, with its audience, and with the wants and needs of the new, current, generation of anime fans. Let’s not miss that in case someone calls us paedophiles.

The artist of Strange Tales, one of the better components of Wednesday Comics, draws single page strips based on the chapter opening quotes of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Robots from found objects

Dots

<3

(A Blog Essay Thing, with no pictures, and some harsh language)

When I was attending university, in the summer of my intellectual arrogance (I sometimes consider doing a second degree in order to find it again) I wrote an essay examining the very first season of Big Brother (The one with Nasty Nick, 2000 I think) via Freud’s theory of fetishism. In short, Freud, god-bless him, decides that a fetish is any sexual act that doesn’t result procreation – as such it is given all the meaning and importance of procreation, but is essentially a false interaction, one with no chance of a meaningful result. My theory was that this was essentially the function of Big Brother, but with social interactions substituted for sexual ones. Big Brother gives the viewer the feeling of engaging in conversation, having friends, reacting emotionally to social situations with no risk of any real interaction, of having to develop or display real feelings or opinions. Everyone thought it was quite clever and I got a good mark for it.

This was a long time ago; Big Brother season 1 was essentially the ground zero of a terrorist attack that almost killed television, or at least televised fiction. Suddenly, that fucking boring uncle you had who as a kid told you that he hated stories because they ‘weren’t real’ had suddenly ‘won the television’ in the same way that posting a particular lol-worthy image to a message board might win one the internet.

The most public casualty of the realitypocalypse was poor old MTV. Do me a favour; go watch some 80’s MTV on Youtube – go on, I’ll wait. Right, did you notice how not only were there music videos, but there may have been several in a row, and the handsome young person that spoke between the videos may have said something interesting or at least cogent about the artists involved. This all seems a lot more like the remit of ‘music television’, for sure, but that well-worn point is not what I’m going for here. Back then, the face, the voice of MTV was an equal, our partner in consuming the rockin’ – sure, a ‘VJ’, but essentially just a hip young thing who loves music, just like us. Now, the faces of MTV have shifted along with the majority of its programming into the reality-show wasteland that is modern MTV. Flavor Flav, Brett Michaels, Reverend Run, the Osbournes, Hulk and Brooke Hogan, Paris Hilton, Tila Motherfucking Tequila. Three of those people are musicians? A similar number are the same age as the target demographic (maybe), or came from a similar economic background.

The weird thing is, these shows have reached a kind of critical mass of artificiality where, like the spaceship in Asteroids, they go off one side of the screen and re-emerge on the other (or like how Gears of War is so straight it is in fact really gay), and the real becomes the unreal, the common, uncommon and so on. To appear on a reality show, I think it’s fair to say a person must have a certain hyperreal quality about them (in this sense, a terrifying epiphany for comics fans – Tila Motherfucking Tequila is the real life Jenny Sparks), or to be more modern, a certain ‘truthiness’, a desire to project their own personal reality onto those around them, and through the TV, into the reality of the viewers living room. This is why Nasty Nick was so compelling in BB1 – unlike the others he didn’t submit to Endemol’s artificial reality, he gamed the system, usurped reality as his own (in BB1 you can see the guy working out where the cameras are, and repositioning himself for dramatic effect). These people, these crazy, fucked-up people, are now all over the television, which rather than portraying reality, is now a scrying pool into their own divergent reality that bares only a cursory resemblance to the parents that spawned it. For a particularly traumatic glimpse at this, try one of the MTV reality shows that don’t feature a celebrity, like Exposed for instance, where two whores of gender (a) attempt to woo a self-obssesed uber-prick of gender (b), while being spied on with complex and probably fictional lie detecting equipment. The ensuing reality battle is pretty explicitly there on screen: Uber Prick presents a task, let’s say it’s ‘paint a picture’. Whores paint pictures, and then Uber Prick makes some kind of arbitary judgement as to which attempt confers more sexiness on the winning Whore. Cut then to the losing Whore re-establishing her reality with some soundbite that, regardless of the task, suggests that she is in fact the sexier; usually it’s like ‘So, Brad didn’t like my painting – pity in wasn’t a cum guzzling competition, or I’d have cleaned up, if you know what I mean’.

When we look in on this hyperreality, inhabited by these beautiful terrible deviant quasi-men, we have a new viewpoint character to guide us, to look into this world through the eyes of somewhere there, at ground-zero. This person is no longer ‘one-of-us’ (we don’t remember what that is really), but the only figure in the narrative that is not ‘one-of-them’ – the rockstar, the faded celebrity, the hieress, whoever sits presiding over the whole thing with the Jeweled Crown of Aquilonia on their troubled brow. Compared to the strange menagerie presented to them, Paris, Brett or Flav is now an easier point of identification for the viewer than any of the ‘real people’ in this world. It’s easy to sit back after watching Brett Michael’s closing statement on Rock of Love 3: The Bus and think “Man, it is difficult for him to choose which one of these 20 strippers to fuck more than 5 times after only fucking them less than five times. It must be rough, I feel for him” because his dilemma is so much closer to the average person’s experience than the bizarre vision-quest being undertaken by the girls – he’s from our world, he only works in outer space, to misquote the warrior poet Kirk.

The flipside to this is that TV now has an insatiable appetite for ‘real people’ that can only be satiated by celebrities; we can see this reflected in the fact that the internet acts as if Linsey Lohan’s Twitter, and by extension her extremely interesting meta-porn relationship with Samantha Ronson is a reality show itself, not just a person utilising an internet site the way it was intended. I also think we’re going to see more shows like Top Gear in the coming years as this style burns itself out. Top Gear is essentially professional wrestling with automobile appreciation substituted for ritualised combat. It’s real, in the sense that we follow the adventures of three guys using there real names, essentially not playing characters, doing real-things, recorded as if live or semi-live. There is however an obvious narrative, and the situations they encounter are obviously unreal, a deception the audience is deliciously complicit in (This also makes Hulk Hogan’s Celebrity Championship Wrestling possibly the most post-modern TV show ever made). The funny thing is, this format is not massively unlike MTVs The Real World, which though many credit as being the first reality show in the Big Brother mold, it eschewed a game-like, task orientated narrative and a microcosm style environment in favour of a reality-documentary feel that simultaneously made it ahead of and behind its time, and without the constraints of this format allowed for greater narrative control via editing. It’s almost like the fiction is coming back. Until then, I need to engage with someone who feels my pain. Like Brett Michaels.

I might as well get the guys from Scritti Polliti to bone me, because I ain't getting any dick from Jackyl with a Y

There’s a game on Xbox Live Indie (nee Community) Games called Onslaught – it’s not to be confused with the WiiWare FPS Onslaught, made by Hudson, which is an interesting game in it’s own right; this Onslaught, by Hewson (no relation) is a port of an 1989 Amiga/ST game, a weird hybrid melange of a game from when Western developers (esp. in Coninental Europe, which is where Onslaught hails) were being brushed against creatively by Japan but hadn’t yet began the full on aping that would eventually melt the life out of the Japanese games industry (see Tokyo Game Show 2009) as the Western industry refined into the myopic knife-sharpening murderist it currently is. To give you a brief picture, somewhere in the vast digital wilderness between this Onslaught and Koei’s Dynasty Warriors series is the game I’m looking for, and that game might be called Peter Jackson’s JRR Tolkien’s Aragorn at Helm’s Deep The Game, the sequel of which, Peter Jackson’s JRR Tolkien’s Gandalf at Minas Tirith will have a really broken magic system and generally not be quite as good.

Hudson’s Onslaught, before I forget it, is an interesting little game. Mainly because it’s a Japanese first person shooter, and it’s weird seeing the Japanese influences that burst through the cracks in the pavement of this quintessentially Western genre (pattern based enemy encounters, aliens not army men to be slaughtered, squad mates who are more like Options, in the Gradius sense, than like Tom Clancy squadies), but also since it’s interesting to see whether the Wii audience will bite given the bare bones of a hardcore genre for five quid or so, kind of a test to see whether the Core Game can still talk politely to girls after a 48 hour Warhammer 40k marathon. The game’s spiritual successor, Water Warfare, which asks the same questions but voiced by Stephen Fry rather than Noel Gallagher (and about multiplayer FPS, which I can’t find an appropriate metaphor for) is a funny little thing too, it’s also better, if you don’t mind me saying.

A Video Game, Circa 2009

But back to the other Onslaught. So, ignoring (in an abstract way since I am going to write about it, right now) the fact that this is a decades old European platform/shootemup/wargame available for a couple of Euro to a massive audience who largely don’t give a shit, from a staggeringly deep library of games just like it that could theoretically follow in it’s bloody and muddy footsteps (I’ll take Metal Mutant, Tanglewood and Pandora to start, thanks), what got me thinking about this game is just how massively more appealing it is to me to play it with a Xbox 360 pad.

Shigeru Miyamoto recently said that he thought the key problem of Natal (and I guess that means EyeToy before it) is that the gamer needs something in his or her hands to experience any meaningful tactile feedback from a game. I agree (to an extent), and wonder out loud just how much this kind of thinking was effecting me as I played Onslaught again for the first time in nearly twenty years (Christ). Anyway, I was never really a home computer boy – I was a console kid. Sure, there’d been an Apple II in my house since I was born, but it was the Master System that made me a gamer. Spectrums, C64s and Amstrad CPC464s were all thinks I played at friends houses, and generally thought were alright. When later on I got an Atari ST, it never really eclipsed the Master System for me, and the Megadrive and SNES came swiftly to kick it out of the limelight. The main reason I didn’t play many games, certainly many arcade games on the ST that is that the various joysticks for the system just never felt right. Control was always a little sluggish, a little simplistic, leaving you with the feeling you were imposing on the computer, asking it to do something which it just didn’t feel comfortable with. Pads (which back then were one of the things that distinguished console play from home computer play) were the default and propper way to control the Master System, and in comparison felt responsive and empowering. I still feel the same way about PC games, and I play emulated games largely on a modded Xox, which despite not being their native platform, makes them feel better – on a console – with pads.

Mylo, more like LIE-lo amirite?

Somewhere in all this is the idea that there is some kind of distance between the player and the console (be it digital, physical or cognitive) when playing with a non-native controller – EyeToy always felt so clunky navigating the menus. My ST always seemed to want to tell me that though it loved me, it just wasn’t into joypads in the same way as I was. Try playing SFII on a keyboard and, if there’s any justice in the world, a flock of screaming robot harpies will rend your heretical flesh. Don’t worry, there’s no justice and as such no harpies, but I wonder aloud to myself whether Natal games, or Sony Wand games, will ever really feel right on there non-dedicated hardware. Maybe in the future they’ll be some kind of CamToyBox (don’t google that if you’re not looking for porn) that we’ll download old Natal games onto and say “man, this is more like it, this is how it’s meant to be played”. Or maybe I’m wrong.

Street Fighter II, Home Computer Version

SquuuuEEEEEEeeeeeRadiosyncracies,broadcASTINGFRomPrAGUEeeeeeeeee

Nanashi no Game: Open Your Eyes sounds like a videogame version of Haruki Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Andrew Rilstone, a very clever gentleman who apparently gamed with some people I gamed with a long time ago has written a fanzine-like collection of articles on Watchmen, which also touches on the weirdness of being a fan of American superhero comics in the 80’s and 90’s in the UK. Also, also, also, it is very good indeed. Also.

Data East is releasing a collection of arcade games for Wii. This is super-cool because it might contain Edward Randy and will certainly include a bunch of awesome games that you should play. Part of me would rather have seen these separately and cheap on Virtual Console Arcade though.

Other things happened too, for it truly was a Mystery Cave.