29/December/2011

So, Christmas has come and gone, December's coming to a close, the new year's approaching, and I've been so much of a self-absorbed shithead that I've barely even noticed. Story of my life! In my defence, Jingle All The Way was not shown once on television, so what's the point of caring? Instead they showed things like My Neighbour Totoro. Are they actually trying to bring some class to the festive season? Get outta town!

The annual get-together was pretty bog-standard, and I got two calendars and a box of Rolo. Hell yeah.

My personal winter tradition always seems to be a season of pandering nostalgia where I dig out and enjoy my favourite old rubbish. I always get the craving to dig out a movie or game I haven't touched in ages, whether or not it was any good. My brother had a tradition of hauling out the Dreamcast and starting up some Timestalkers, though never actually progressing any further; it was just fun to see the sights again. Randomly generated dungeons, though, seriously. Has any 3D game ever done those well?

This year I got a hankering for some Croc: Legend of the Gobbos. I'd never actually completed this game, and given the so-whimsical-it-makes-a-dude-wanna-hurl atmosphere, one would get the impression I should be ashamed of that, but jeez, it starts throwing some really tough jumping puzzles at you halfway through the game! I did finish the fourth world, but I need to go back and complete all the stuff to unlock the secret mega world.
Mind you, I forgot just how much I love the game's atmosphere. It's nice to see a game that, difficulty curve aside, is so sweet and whimsical and cute. Croc is just so friggin' adorable; I love his design so much! LOOK AT HIS WIDDLE WAGGLING TAIL~ I think it's like why I fell in love with Oscar's Oasis - a lot of kids' stuff seems to be so stylised it hurts to look at and the content is no more than smartasses being smartasses, so it's nice to see the actions speak for a change. I was going to rant about how I can't remember the last new game I saw that was unabashedly kid-friendly cute, but my scope is hilariously limited and I just can't be bothered looking at modern games.

The other thing I consistently dig up every winter season is 3D Movie Maker. I haven't written anywhere near enough junk about this program as I'd love to - I have gotten so much entertainment out of this stupid thing, and despite being nearly 17 years old, it's still got an active community going on! It is kind of plagued by people who just want to make Sonic the Hedgehog stuff in it thanks to all the super deluxe mods and crap they've made nowadays, and the effort that's put into some of the films is kinda frightening when you know the bazillion limitations of the program - you almost feel it'd be easier to just make a movie for real with salaries and rental cameras and stuff. It's not my kinda scene, but I have much respect for a community that's still playing and tinkering with this old thing.
There is some genuinely impressive stuff made with the program, but I admit when I watch 3D Movie Maker, I'm looking for quick dumb laughs. And when I want quick dumb laughs, I turn to Will Maltby - violence and action and lots of people making stupid noises. It's the most immature you can possible get, but I just love the I Know series. Mind you, my idea of sophisticated watching in the program is Johnny Samsonite (Jason Ruiz's work is also fantastic, check it out if you can), so, uh, take that as you will.

It's mildly amusing slash depressing looking at entries from last year and seeing brief mentions of stuff I'd planned to do, but never went anywhere. This one has a bunch of 'em in one paragraph. I did finish the site revamp, at least, though some parts were rushed. I dropped Python like a crab on fire when I realised it wasn't really a language for making games with. The radio production did go through a few readings, and apparently there's plans to turn it into a puppet thing, but it's out of my hands and I'm really that interested - I'm the kind of petty individual who gets bored of something when it isn't "my thing" anymore.
The "secret project" is kinda sorta still in the works, but my accomplice is busy with actual productive things and we're both chronically lazy. I'm interested in trying to finish if just because it's easy to write and I'd love to try and get an interesting visual style for it, but, uh, the best I can say is "I'll see what happens."

What can I promise for 2012? Pfft. A few Bomberman updates, perhaps, and maybe I'll finally get around to adding those small little corrections to the Puchi Carat shrine that people have emailed me about - sorry to let you down, all three of you! I'm not one who has the success rate or history of competence to back up promises.

17/December/2011

There's an update to the Games I Own section, and the links page has got some new links and a lot less words. I figure there's gotta be one page on the site where I'm not babbling multiple paragraphs about nonsense.

15/December/2011

I watched Vertigo yesterday. I won't deny it's one of those classic movies that, although great to finally see, didn't offer many surprises since it's been parodied so many times. Heck, the Sledge Hammer! episode "Vertical" basically compresses the two hour-long movie into 22 minutes without too many omissions, if you don't mind it being totally out-of-character and losing out on Hitchcock's great visuals.

The visuals were the true treat for watching the film - it's practically a glamour video for 1950s San Francisco! So many beautiful landscapes combined with terrific frame work - it's a great story and all, but goddamn, those sights! And everyone had such terrific eyebrows. I'd dare say it's a very sexy film for people who like landscapes and eyebrows. I can't be the only one, can I?
I really can't say much because it's only had over fifty years for people with better opinions than mine to critique it. One thing I did find curious was how after the real wife is killed, the wife's impersonator not only has a flashback showing the audience what really happened, but also writes a letter that gives further details on the shady shenanigans (before tearing it up so none of the other characters see it). It was fascinating to finally see what really happened, but it seemed oddly placed in the film - the audience knew what really happened, but it takes another forty five minutes for Scottie to catch on, and until then it's just him in his awkward lonely creeper phase.

I won't deny that during all the lovey-dovey scenes between him and the woman, it gets a bit tiresome, but I'm just unsentimental like that. I kept expecting it to fade out and say "THE END" every time they got all kissy-style, because I get the impression a man and a woman sucking face is good enough for an ending in the '50s, no matter all the plots that are left unresolved.

I also watched Disturbia. Shia LaBeouf is put under house arrest, but in observing his neighbours, has suspicions that one of them is murdering people! If I'd actually seen it I'd say it's like Rear Window with more teenage horniness, but until then I can't make an official statement. I was a bit concerned over how engaging it would be, from the boring teenage social status angle to the fact that Shia LaBeouf needs a backing cast of space robots to make him slightly interesting, but it's a fun little movie. It's worth watching for Aaron Yoo being goofy, if horror ain't your bag.

06/December/2011

I can owe a number of trivial audio-related parts of my life to the cassettes my dad would play while driving me to primary school years and years ago. Most importantly, it introduced me to The Goon Show, which probably led into my interest in radio production and absurdist humour. It introduced me to Flanders & Swann, I heard the story of The Hobbit without ever touching the original novel, and I was probably subjected to the theme from The Adventures of Robin Hood more times than any child should be.

It also meant I got to listen to Little Red Monkey by Joy Nichols, Dick Bentley and Jimmy Edwards a bunch of times. For whatever reason, the song freaked me out when I was a kid.
It's an upbeat, jolly little song about a cheerful red monkey. What's not to like? The three singers are all trying to make it happy, either by trying to get it into the zoo to hang out with some chimpy chums or by playing it music! Hardly nightmare-inducing stuff. Okay, the strange organ ditty between the lyrics can be a bit odd, but nothing to really unsettle things. No, it's the ending that's unsettling.

Dick and Jimmy ask in unison, "little red monkey, won't you stay to tea?" The monkey chirps giddily, and one of them translates: "He said yes!" That's totally swell, right? Dick, Jim, Joy and their monkey mate are all going to have a tea party. That's what adorable snuggle-bum dreams are made of.
Instead it chooses to end on some sort of scare chord. I don't know what kind of instrument it is, or what kind of sound it's trying to achieve; I guess it's trying to find some way of closing off the song instrumentally, but it effectively undermines all of the previous jollity. It unnerved the hell out of me when I was a kid.

What did it imply? Were they going to eat the monkey? Were they-- well, it doesn't really imply anything else. They either eat it or they don't. If they ended on "little red monkey, could you help me saw this woodblock in half?", or "little red monkey, would you like to see my house of wax?" then you could imagine some sort of serial killer shenanigans. But "would you like to come to tea?", in a horror scenario, implies nothing but GONNA EAT YA (which, in turn, implies GONNA KILL YA because you can't eat something without killing it - at least, not if you've got some sorta ethics. It seems impolite to let a pig stroll about with a bite taken out of it).

This song has popped into my mind occasionally for the past few years, and it's only today I remembered what it was. I bought myself the track on 7Digital, and admittedly the 'scare chord' isn't quite as jarring as I recall. The improved sound quality probably helps - we listened to those cassettes a lot of times, it probably sounds much more horrific when it's been played off a decaying strip of magnetic tape.

04/December/2011

I was going to say that I wouldn't trust an equine wearing tights... but then I realised that was just the tint of its wings.
I wouldn't trust one wearing wings, either.

Today's observation: Replacing all usages of the word "epic" with "big ol'" makes it infinitely more charming. Kirby's Big Ol' Yarn. Big Ol' Mickey. Big Ol' Comics. Big ol' poetry. Big Ol' of Gilgamesh.

02/December/2011

I watched The Iron Giant last night. I'm in one of those miserable curmudgeon-y moods where I'm totally uninspired and a colossal bore and curse arbitrarily to myself (because that's what bummed people do!), and as such I'm really disappointed that I don't even have much to say about it. But I really quite enjoyed it! The visual style was really slick and colourful and just gosh darn swell, and for a simple story, it carries itself pretty well. I might even have to admit it tugged on my heart strings a little. I can definitely see what all the fuss is about. Bonus points for John Mahoney voicing the army general, because I just love the dude's voice.

So there's this cartoon that I've caught more episodes of than I'd liked to; it's not dreadful or anything (I have to appreciate the effort!), but something about it just plain irks me, y'know. It's called The Gees.

It's a French CGI cartoon about three extraterrestrials that warp to Earth while someone is trying to accomplish something, such as fishing, wooing some ladies, performing a magic act, gaining access to a temple full of treasure, and so on. The Gees float around, express child-like curiosity over various things and make a right nuisance of themselves, often putting the human through all manner of comic humiliation, but by the end of the episode the person will have achieved what they were after, with a little unintentional help from the Gees.

The concept is simple enough and can be mined for basic comedy antics, but it's very hit or miss, I feel. The best episodes are when after the Gees are royal pests and make an arse of everything, the human achieves more than they would have on their own. For instance, "The Gees go eskimo fishing", where they preoccupy themselves sawing up the ice to make various shapes - until they saw a gigantic circle and flip it over, landing a huge pile of fish in front of the fisherman - way more than he could ever have caught himself.

However, a lot of the episodes simply involve a lot of mucking about until some obligatory conclusion is stumbled upon. For instance, the episode with a girl playing Dance Dance Revolution. She gets wedged into a pinball machine and has fireballs thrown at her and all kind of malarkey, and by the end she... gets a winning score. Yeah, okay, but it was implied she would've got that anyway if she weren't being harassed with Whack-A-Mole props. I can hardly say it's a shaggy dog story when each episode is only 3 minutes long, but for all the dialogue-free capers, it's never on par with even the Gene Deitch Tom & Jerry shorts.
(mind you, I've a feeling I've only ever seen two of the Gene Deitch shorts, and the only one I remember is "It's Greek to Me-ow!", which I recall as being really strange and minimalist and out-there. I might be doing an injustice to the man!)

The animation is decent enough, but the visual style is where it stumbles for me. The humans are largely "realistic" with a mild air of generic European cartoon, what with the pudgy fingers and pronounced noses; while the Gees feel like a bizarre mixture of South Park's facial design and 'cartoony' anime (like Gegege no Kitaro).
I think the problem lies with the contrast. You've got these logic-defying aliens who can make shit fly just by pointing at it, who interact with relatively realistic humans in relatively realistic settings. It can never quite achieve the feeling of "this is a madcap cartoon!" when a lot of the character designs just feel too limited.

I suppose my personal beef is that the designs just don't feel expressive enough. Okay, sure, once they're being swung around the room by a flying rabbit the humans might have some reasonable expressions of fright, but until then it feels very toned down. Plus, I can't help but wish they'd give the design a bit more 'zing'. If they're going to look 'Euro', they should look full 'Euro'! Bring on the giant noses and the wobbly body proportions! It's sad that a still image from an Asterix comic actually carries more character and motion than an actual 3D animation.

If you're in the UK you can catch The Gees on Sky Channel 616, POP, but I don't watch the channel for The Gees. No, I watch it for Oscar's Oasis.

Ultimately, that's the most damning fault of The Gees - it's okay at best, but nothing incredible or memorable. And it just so happens to precede and follow Oscar's Oasis on POP, which does the dialogue-free slapstick capers genre like a bazillion times better. The character design and visual style is top notch, the animation is superb quality, the musical accompaniment is brilliant, and at the end of the day, it does what The Gees doesn't - it makes me laugh out loud. I am loving it something fierce. I've been itching to lovegush about it since I discovered it last month, but words have yet to form sentences for me.
(I could also damn Iggy Arbuckle for the same forgettable filler fate, but at least you can learn from The Gees - all I've learnt from Iggy is that it's ugly and preachy and its Flash animation doesn't do the show many favours)
(Bitch, bitch, bitch!)

(also, yes, this is the channel where I was subjected to Doggie Doo.)