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The Sega Master System: Most underrated console ever

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:22:26 -0600

Gamers thrive on a good two-man fight. Xbox or PS2? PSP or DS? Every generation throws a hero down the unpop charts. And one fight with a clear winner, right out the gate, was the 8-bit battle between the chunky little NES and the big-padded underdog, the Sega Master System. Could there be an alternate reality where the Master System came out on top? Where playground battles were fought not over whether Mario's Tanooki Suit was better than Link's Master Sword, but over the best way to save all the hostages in Rescue Mission? As a matter of fact there was. I know because I'm from that reality. And I'm here to tell you that the Sega Master System never got its due. In fact, let's say it: the Sega Master System is the most underrated machine in the history of gaming.

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Doomed from the Outset

It could have been a contender. Just seven months separated the North American releases of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Master System in 1986. But those seven months were enough time for Nintendo's little gray box to plunder the lion's share of the consumer market, as well as the major players' third-party exclusivity. By the time Sega launched their Sega Master System Power Base, there simply wasn't the free space left in the market for the machine to establish, well, a power base. Nintendo had snapped up the best softcos of the day and signed them to exclusivity deals: if you wanted to make your game on the market-leading NES, there'd be no sloppy seconds for other systems' user bases. The battle for the hearts and minds of 8-bit gamers was no battle at all: in the year following its release, the NES garnered a whopping 70% of the gaming market. (By comparison, the Wii's strong 2008 saw the console battle to remain above the 50% mark.)

Another World, Another Chance

Above: Your writer's life

But across the other side of the globe in my homeland of New Zealand (pictured), Nintendo never had a foothold. Halfheartedly distributed by Mattel, who were far too busy making sure shelves were fully stocked with Stinko (the Stinky Master of the Universe!) figures, NES never found the uptake. Stores would dutifully provide a demo unit kitted out with Probotector (I only just learned that you folks didn't have this: Contra with robots!) or Dr. Mario and leave kids to ignore the game at their own pace; console games were such a novelty in those days that only the well-heeled and technologically adventurous gave them a day in court. (If I told you we'd only had electricity for ten years, would you believe me? That's not true, by the way).

But the Master System was another story entirely. We knew how to plug in a console by the time Sega sloped dejectedly out of North America, bucked up its ideas, and determined to take the Pacific by storm. And the company steamrolled over us like we were the beach at Normandy. With Sega handling business personally, there wasn't a man, woman or child in New Zealand who didn't know what the Master System was - and want one. The national paper at one point reported that even the Prime Minister had a Master System. (Had you going again, huh?)

New Zealand Embraces Sega; World Shrugs Bemusedly

We never looked back. Super Mario Brothers was fine and good, but put next to Alex Kidd in Miracle World, all the finely-honed minimalist mastery in the world couldn't compete with the vivid graphical blush, the varied gameplay options (he had a helicopter! And a motorcycle that made every level as hard as Mario Bros' World 8!), the inexplicable rock-paper-scissors boss battles. Lacking what dorks would come to call a "hardcore," we didn't realize we should be giving Castlevania a go, so we were perfectly happy with its ersatz Sega equivalent, Master of Darkness. And being as Sonic the Hedgehog was the last game Sega ever tried to foist on the American people, the battle between Super Mario 3 and Asterix was never fought outside of bizarro territories like Brazil and New Zealand.

Or, to put it another way, any arena in which Asterix for the Master System went toe to toe with Super Mario Brothers 3, the plucky Gaul beat the tar out of the pugnacious plumber. Was it a better game? We grudgingly admitted no. But we liked it better anyway (didn't hurt that Asterix comics were more popular in New Zealand than Spiderman, Superman and the X-Men combined. That one's true, too).

Burying the Past

Time has been as unkind to the Master System as the markets were in its day. The sleek little powerhouse, whose stylishness of frame was outstripped only by the inexplicable oddness of its design (a Pause button on the console itself? What witchery is this?!), received as merciless a drubbing from its successors as it had from its contemporaries. You can't unlock the Master System versions of the Sonic games on any Sega compilation disc. It's as if the company was ashamed that the best version of Sonic 2 was never even released in North America. (That's right: you can have Mario 3 over Asterix, but the Master System's Sonic the Hedgehog 2 runs rings around its Megadrive - sorry, Genesis - big brother). And while the SNES' Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts is justly celebrated as the ideal version of Capcom's goblin-slaying adventure, nobody ever talks about how the earlier Master System version managed to play comparably to the arcades, even while incorporating a unique RPG-style character-development system that wouldn't come into vogue until the Playstation instalment of Castlevania.

The Master System's story is a sad one because, as evidenced by its performance in The Freak Territories, it had the chops to go the distance. (Master System consoles are still manufactured and sold in Brazil: the territory was the only region to receive the system's version of Street Fighter 2). It had vastly superior processing power to the NES, and on the days when designers felt like harnessing this, the machine shone. Cheaper, cynics would say more disposable, the machine never had the punchy steadfastness to be iconic in the same as the NES. Like its descendant, the Dreamcast, the Master System was a unique treat for those who "got" it, and like the Dreamcast, it reaped mixed rewards from this position.

If only there were a way to travel to the realm where the Master System got its due... without spending 20 hours over the Pacific, at least.

[Edited By Moderator]

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Billy Mitchell is 'King of Kong' no more

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:53:21 -0600

The most controversial high score in all of videogames is no more. Billy Mitchell, Massachusetts hotsauce entrepeneur and gaming personality, held the record for the highest Donkey Kong score ever - 874,300 points - which he set in 1983. The documentary film The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters documented Washington algebra teacher Steve Wiebe's attempts to best this score. However it was not Wiebe but New York plastic surgeon Hank Chien who finally toppled Mitchell's reign, with a score of 1,061,700, as reported by UPI.

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The fight for Donkey Kong supremacy had come to mean so much to so many after the release of the documentary, in which Mitchell is painted as a villain in the mold of milkshake-chugging There Will Be Blood protagonist Daniel Plainview or Adam-chugging Bioshock antagonist Frank Fontaine. However Mitchell maintained the filmmakers had edited key scenes to make him seem unneccessarily antagonistic toward Wiebe and painted an unfairly negative picture of him overall.

The documentary concludes with a contested win for Wiebe, one which was later overturned by Mitchell as he beat both his and Wiebe's scores. But Chien's score trumps all previous achievements in the field of plumber-centric barrel-evasion.

Chien, who says The King of Kong inspired him to train for the record attempt, told record-keeping website Twin Galaxies that he had known since September of 2009 that the record was within his grasp. Chien also said the cliquey elitism of high-level arcade play depicted in the film was never an issue for him: "I couldn't be any more of an outsider and I have been welcomed with open arms."

Neither Mitchell nor Wiebe have been reached for comment.

[Edited By Moderator]

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Sex, Truth and Video Games: A History of Sexy Gaming

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:26:00 -0600

Final Fantasy X's Yuna stares at you with the dead eyes of a doll. Her outsized breasts (possibly the result of some sort of status ailment) bounce in a manner possible under the gravity of neither Earth nor Spira. Her stomach twists awkwardly, resembling those photos of Paris Hilton that had bloggers diagnosing the socialite with some sort of "ass-goiter". Bobbing halfheartedly in and out of Yuna's mouth is a disembodied, pixellated mush that could be a microphone, except that it's pink with a lurid fuschia tip, so maybe it's not.

Yuna's decidedly unsexy misadventure is the sort of thing you'll most likely find if you search the Internet for "XXX game" or "sexy game" or "porn video game". A tawdry world of shoddily-translated Flash games, poorly-written "dating sims", and "dressup games," often involving bootleg versions of gaming femmes like Yuna, Dragonball Z's Bulma and King of Fighters' Mai Shiranui. Is this all we can expect from the mix of sex and videogames?

Above: Tifa, possibly

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Someone who doesn't think so is Damon Brown. "Flash games?" he muses, when I ask why his work largely omits this most ubiquitous of sex/gameplay crossovers. "They're important, but as far as their pop cultural impact?" He's got a point. You never saw Britney Doggy-Style or Adult Tetris on Conan.

1972: Beginnings

Damon Brown, author of Porn and Pong

Cultural impact is vital to Brown, the author of Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture. The book charts the paired histories of videogames and modern, mass-market pornography, from their simultaneous bastard births to their current lofty heights, looming over and into the mainstream. In Brown's book, porn and videogames become twin Enfants Terrible not unlike Metal Gear Solid's Twin Snakes: It's hard to know which came first, where the greater power lies, and just how closely their destinies are linked.

As Brown tells it, he "started to see a pattern between cultural things that were happening and videogames that were out at the time. And sometimes videogames would be the pusher, and other times, particularly early on, videogames would be the reflector. It seemed to be a symbiotic relationship between the two." What were some of those "cultural things"? That would be the mainstreaming of hardcore porn.

In 1972, patrons of Sunnyvale, CA watering-hole Andy Capp's Tavern filled the coin bucket of the first Pong prototype to overflowing, an act that at once created the videogaming culture and supplied it with its first article of folklore. Across the country, in mainstream cinemas on Times Square, Deep Throat's Linda Lovelace was demonstrating for sellout audiences her own throaty capaciousness. These weren't the moments at which the untapped cultural and commercial potential of both porn and gaming became apparent - they were the moment, singular.

Fast-forward (or stage-skip) to 1982, when Caballero Control Corporation lost sway over horse-donged porn superstar John Holmes as he served trial for the Wonderland murders. One way in which the company stayed afloat was by moving into interactive smut, providing Atari gamers with a priapistic George Custer and a host of troubling Colonial rape fantasies in the form of the infamous Custer's Revenge. That same potential, flooded with the blood of commerce and culture, stood poised for a push into the mainstream.

2001: Things Get Heavy

Nearly thirty years later, the story of that push was ready to tell. But it wasn't dodgy historical innuendo that prompted Brown - writer on sex, technology and culture for Playboy, the New York Post and PlanetOut - to do the telling. It was the all-but-forgotten Playstation title, Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix.

"That was one of the first videogames to feature lesbians as the heroes," explains Brown. That milestone was enough to warrant pitching an article on the game's significance to Playboy.com. But soon after he pitched, "I found out that a couple of major videogame magazines had banned the ads for the game, because they were too risque." He laughs: as soon as Playboy found out about that development, "they were like, 'how quickly can you do this story?'"

After Brown wrote the article, the sex/videogames parallels kept occurring. He built his case, gathering examples of moments when the popular culture had expressed itself through sexy videogames or tech-friendly sex. Eventually it got to the point where he decided there was a book in it.

2008: Telling the story

That book, released in 2008, would become equal parts history lesson and cultural manifesto. Researching the text took Brown from the basement-coding suites of developers like Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe, to the hentai-rich porn stores of Tokyo. But one of the most interesting stories of Porn and Pong isn't how videogames embraced sexuality: it's how many of the sexiest games achieved that status almost accidentally. "The guy that made Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix, was like, 'I'm just playing with it. I didn't really want to explore the sexuality.'" Brown names the creators of Lara Croft and Leisure Suit Larry as similar unwitting agents: "Toby Gard, even Al Lowe himself, was like, 'I wasn't trying to make a game that was sexy, I wanted to make a game that was funny'. It's not that they didn't know what they were doing, but I don't think they really knew what the results were going to be. And so it's almost like a Rorschach test. This has to be reflective of something."

It's this level of scrutiny that hints at the larger project of Porn and Pong. Brown wants to help bring videogames out of their vacuum, to discuss the medium as part of the wider culture. Most writing about games, he argues, characterizes the field as stiflingly self-contained: "Here's this insular world, we're going to let you in. You can stay or you can leave, and if you stay, they might accept you, if you understand their culture. With Porn and Pong I wanted to do the opposite. [Gaming] has always been connected to other cultures: movies, books. I think we need to do more of that kind of discussion."

2010: Moving forward

In this regard, the sexuality angle of Porn and Pong almost becomes something of a Trojan horse: a vital aspect, yes, but also a means of smuggling in some new tools for talking about videogames. The book namechecks Saturday Night Live, Voltron, and Madame Bovary; a discussion with Damon Brown about videogaming is more likely to involve the Beastie Boys and Don Quixote than Wonder Boy or Super Don Quixote. For its considerable scholarly depth, this may be Porn and Pong's greatest contribution to the cultures of pornography or videogaming: the invitation to discuss these deepest of niches as elements of a wider culture. Post-Deep Throat sexuality has had some practice at this - it was pretty much Bob Guccione's founding tenet for Penthouse magazine - but gaming is yet to catch up to its twin in this regard.

"I want a certain type of experience," says Brown of the future of sex and games. "It doesn't matter how you get us there." In a wider sense, he could be talking about the future of games within the culture. Just as porn moved from naughty postcards, through the Green Door and into the mainstream success of stars like Sasha Grey and Jenna Jameson, so games have gone from a rink-dink experiment in a Sunnyvale tavern to a fixture in households worldwide. The next step, says Brown, depends on the videogame community's willingness to "loosen up a little bit, and actually look at the bigger picture."

One thing seems obvious: asking more interesting questions of our games than "What would Yuna look like naked?" is a good start.

Damon Brown's book, Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture, can by purchased from the book's website.

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Game/Culture: Why didn't gamers like Gamer?

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:37:36 -0600

The 2009 movie Gamer was written and directed by Neveldine/Taylor, the game-friendliest directors currently (arguably ever) working in Hollywood. Its editing style was cemented by a guy whose day job is cutting short films that make people love videogames. The movie's central conceit is a sci-fi/action exploration of games and gaming culture, with an emphasis on the action. For gamers, by gamers. Like a really, really white FUBU. And yet, as evidenced by comments over here, there's not a whole bunch of love for Gamer in the gamer community. The majority of gamers greeted it with a mixture of ambivalence, resentment and distrust. So why did gamers ignore Gamer?

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Gamer Credentials

Neveldine/Taylor made their mark with the Crank movies. (Crank has basically the best basic hook for any action movie ever. Jason Statham has to keep running/shooting/screwing/cursing to keep his heart rate above a certain speed or the drug in his bloodstream will kill him. If Speed was Die Hard in a bus, Crank is Speed in Jason Statham). The pictures' hyper-hyperspeed style actually challenges the Ritalin generation to keep up. Crank 2 makes Michael Bay look like Yasujiro Ozu. They're also some of the most inventive, playful action pictures of their decade.

Crank's second-strongest stylistic influence is videogames. (The strongest is channel-surfing on crystal meth.) The title sequence of Crank 2 recreates the first movie's climax, Symphony of the Night-style, as an 8-bit action game. So when these movies' creators just cut the crap and make a movie explicitly about videogames, it behooves gamers to see what the results might be.

The Case For: Counter-Strike In-Jokes

And while gamers ignored Gamer because it looked like a great big stupid action movie with token gaming elements in it, its flaw may be that it was actually too faithful to its tribe. Gamers who skipped Gamer missed out on plenty of fun. Grunty, heavy action laced with Counter-Strike in-jokes; Gerard Butler playing the character Gerard Butler plays best (that is to say, a talking steak); no small helping of gratuitous and thoroughly uncomfortable T&A. But they also missed a heavy-handed parable about control and the mediated body and a whole host of issues not really covered in the kind of depth to warrant this 90-minute cutscene's lack of a "skip" button.

The Case Against: Infusing Counter-Strike In-Jokes With Nietzchean Subtext

The problem wasn't that Gamer dared to make a movie about gaming into a fable about control and physical force (these are fairly central issues in most games, after all); it's that "which big man has the control, and what physical force is going to be brought to bear on him?" is the theme of every scene in every action movie ever. The movie didn't fail for its irrelevance to the gaming culture; it hewed too closely to the issues explored by games when they're just in "action movie mode" anyway.

Not Bad, Just Unnecessary

Was Gamer a "bad" movie? Not by a long shot. If one were concerned with the relative quality of movies, one could apply Roger Ebert's criteria - how worthy is its goal, and how thorough its success? - and say that Gamer's goal was not exactly curing cancer but it did okay at what it set out to do. And if one wanted to measure its creative problem-solving chops, one could point out that Darren Aronovsky has never made a movie in which a man downs a fifth of vodka for the specific purpose of vomiting into a car's fuel tank so as to escape a battlefield. Gamer was a fair snapshot of what people were saying about games in 2009 and what sort of movie that lent itself to. It just turns out that conversation wasn't all that interesting to many.

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Looking Back at Spirit Tracks: The Decline and Fall of Zelda?

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:59:00 -0600

I have an ex whose introduction to Zelda was via my copy of Phantom Hourglass. She started playing one day, intrigued by the game's physicality: the puzzles involving the closure of the DS, the mortifying embarrassment of yelling, "I WANT A CRANE!!!" on a crowded bus. When she was done, she felt duty-bound to backtrack, through Minish Cap, all the way to Link to the Past, and she soldiered doggedly through them. But when Spirit Tracks was announced, she was overjoyed at the prospect of returning to "real" Zelda gaming. So when she messaged me the other day to announce that she was bored stupid by Spirit Tracks - which for her was like being made sad by a Polyphonic Spree song or calmed by an Ann Coulter interview - I had to wonder: what went wrong?

The Good Old Days.

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The Zelda games are inherently progressive, as the Mario games are inherently conservative. Mario's games evolve with the slow pace of the guy who has a good thing going and doesn't want to jinx it. The basic formula - dude in hat jumps for coins, brutalizes fungi - may receive small augmentations in the form of having Mario carry things or having things carry Mario, but the gist remains the same. Thank God for the illegitimacy of Doki Doki Panic spicing up the gene pool, or Super Mario Galaxy would just be reaching the 3D phase.

Whereas every new Zelda is a crapshoot for new elements. This has been a constant ever since the notoriously divisive The Adventure of Link's addition of RPG elements to the Zelda formula. I worked in a games store when The Wind Waker was released, and the cries of disappointment from thick-skulled Nintentoughs at the game's "cartoony graphics" was equaled only by the shrieks of delight from more adventurous aficionadoes. Zelda games try new things. That's what they do.

Remember how before The Phantom Hourglass was released, the idea of a Zelda game controlled entirely with the Stylus caused consternation roughly equal to that created by the Global Economic Crisis or an outbreak of Ebola? The DS Zelda playing stance - hunched over the handheld like an antisocial teenager - now feels so natural that already, the mere idea of moving the little tyke around a portable Hyrule with D-pad and action buttons somehow seems ridiculous.

So, with Phantom Hourglass having done the hard work - persuading players that chasing the stylus' tip was just as valid as D-padding doggedly onward - Spirit Tracks ought to have been a true leap forward. Hourglass was like Radiohead's Ok Computer: giving fans permission to enjoy samples 'n' keyboards, clearing the way for Spirit Tracks to usher in an epic of Kid A-like sweep and texture. Or at least not an Eraser-calibre feast of plodderry that defied you to wring an ounce of fun out of its flaccid husk of an experience.

Skilled analogy-followers may be able to discern the author's attitude, confessed only now in the fullness of time, toward The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. I like most everything with Zelda in the title, but excuuuuuse me, Princess: damned if that game was not some desperately boring crap. Sailing with Hourglass' Linebeck was constant joyous freedom, a treat so effervescent that even the game's third-act fetch-quest couldn't stop the fun. But riding the titular Spirit Tracks brought everyone's least favorite filler genre - wahey, it's a rail-shooter! - to Zelda.

I pronounce thee boring as all get out.

And the cutscenes! Where Phantom Hourglass was short 'n' sweet with the cinematics, Spirit Tracks aimed to become the DS' own little Guns of the Patriots, making players munch huge chunks of hopelessly drab story to get to the meat of the thing. All of which is a shame, because when Zelda is on point, it's basically everything a reasonable person could want from a videogame, and Spirit Tracks was no exception. The puzzles were still ingenious, and there were still those forehead-slappingly bittersweet "oh, of course!" moments that mark every Zelda adventure. And the action - rail-mounted boss-battles aside - was still a joy. But it feels doubly mean to dole out these moments of purity so stingily: bad enough we had to wait four years for the game, we then had to tap the screen through endless model-train semi-interactives?

Pictured: Fun?

Twilight Princess suffered from the same paucity of innovation. The Wii-specific immersivity - draw the Nunchuk back to notch an arrow, then release your grip to let it fly! - was dropped lest fans find the game's newness alienating. The game became the darker-'n'-edgier Ocarina sequel that fans professed to want, instead of the flurry of Wii-grade innovation they deserved to be confounded and delighted by. It was like seeing your favorite indie band release a 3:30 pop single: the games seemed to have lost that experimental spark that gave us the epic sweep of Link to the Past, the assured 3D transition of Ocarina of Time - and the Stylus-driven freshness of Phantom Hourglass.

An optimistic view of Spirit Tracks might see it as nothing but a sophomore misfire. Hourglass taught that Stylus-driven Zelda can be great, and Tracks warned that it's not inherently great. Hopefully the next DS Zelda installment will take the innovations of Phantom Hourglass and use them to craft an adventure that avoids the plodding mediocrity of riding the Spirit Tracks. And by extension, here's hoping the games start charting that new land promised a couple installments back. What with these being basically the best series in gaming and all - try and argue that Mario or Sonic or Final Fantasy or Halo don't put a foot at least as wrong as Zelda on a regular basis - here's hoping another rush of innovation is imminent.

And hey, maybe you'll be able to download The Legend of Zelda: In Hyrule's Rainbows for free off the Internet. Let's be optimistic.

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RIP Capcom COO Mark Beaumont

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:46:50 -0600

Sad news from our friends at Capcom today, as we learned that their North American and European Chief Operations Officer, Mark Beaumont, passed away this morning.

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Beaumont's role in the games industry cannot be underestimated: working in the sector for over 25 years, he performed PR and executive duties for outfits ranging from Activision to Psygnosis, as well as infuential periods at Atari, Data East and Midway.

But it was his work at Capcom North America and Europe, begun in 2005, for which he will be professionally remembered. Beaumont served as executive Vice President and senior Vice President, but had filled the role of COO since April 2008. It was Beaumont who ushered into the West the varied range of IPs enjoyed by the current generation: interviewed not long after joining the company, Beaumont announced his desire to provide a clearer pipeline from Capcom's Japanese developers to Western markets.

"I have found the developers in Japan to be very open to the idea of working with us to find ways to make better global products," Beaumont told Edge in 2006. His avowed goal was to keep Capcom's strong properties such as Resident Evil in the company's back pocket, while passionately championing fresh IPs like Dead Rising and Lost Planet. It was this strategy that saw Capcom's fortunes and creative output go from strength to strength in the later 2000s.

It is testament to Beaumont's professional success that Capcom's Western reputation today is that of an industry leader with strengths in both Western and Japanese markets. On a personal level, his colleagues spoke of his "humor, passion, and commitment to the industry."

We extend our condolences to those saddened by Beaumont's passing. The industry will miss him.

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Alan Wake gets box art - really imminent this time!

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 05:26:00 -0600

Highly anticipated psychological thriller Alan Wake has finally got box art to go with its May release date. In the pipeline since a 2005 announcement, the game is hyped as a videogame version of thrillers like Lost and Twin Peaks. While fans have grown weary of waiting for the game to really, finally actually come out, developers Remedy Entertainment explain that they had a lot of "freaky prototypes" to sort out on the road to bringing Alan Wake to fruition. Take a gander at the cover art and try to discern whether it'll all be worth the wait (hint: probably, but you wouldn't know it from this fairly safe image).

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Game/Culture: Gaming + WTF = eXistenZ

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:58:00 -0600

After the first installment of Game/Culture, I got numerous requests for the inclusion of two movies in future installments: The Last Starfighter and eXistenZ. While they're both interesting pics, they represent different points on a scale that we can use to sort stories about videogames. And if we want to understand that scale, the best way might be to start with a movie that scarcely even fits on it.

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Movies (and other stories) about videogames tend to fit onto a scale we can call the Analogy Index. On the one end you have pics like Grandma's Boy and The Wizard: pics about people whose videogaming experiences are basically like ours, albeit skewed for maximum comedic/dramatic effect. And on the other end you have films like Toys and Gamer: stories in which videogames serve as a metaphor for one or other concept the filmmakers wish to explore. When we're talking about stories in which videogames play a prominent role, it's always worth asking early on, "how much of a metaphor is this?"

And on the far end of the spectrum - so far, in fact, that it almost feels it doesn't belong on the spectrum - is a movie like eXistenZ. The movie's plot may revolve around Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh delving into a sinister new videogame played via total-immersive hallucinogens, but around the time folk start firing human teeth from a gun made of bone and gristle, you start to realize nobody's going to be picking up a control pad any time soon.

Dreamed up by master head-buster David Cronenberg in 1999, eXistenZ is very centrally about videogaming, but it presents such a willfully skewed perspective on the topic that you could watch it without having any interest in games. Cronenberg's Naked Lunch was "about" writing, but it was really about bizarre psychedelic adventures; Dead Ringers was "about" medicine but really about lost identity. And eXistenZ is "about" gaming, but it's really about the blurred boundaries between imagination and experience.

One person who asked me to talk about eXistenZ pointed out that the movie doesn't present a very rosy view of gaming. The movie presents gamers as addicts with a loose grasp on reality, and the eponymous game itself is a poorly-acted, gratuitously violent, thoroughly unpleasant way to spend one's time. I wouldn't disagree with this, but I'd say the filmmakers aren't really concerned with passing commentary on games or gamer culture. It's almost as if David Cronenberg was in an elevator with someone who briefly explained to the blissfully ignorant Canuck the basic notion of videogames, and the director took from this the idea of a story he'd like to tell. It's a movie about many of the things we can talk about when we're talking about videogames - fantasy, depersonalizing violence, terrible dialogue delivered terribly - but it takes these notions and spins them into such a wild metaphor that viewers waiting for commentary on the state of the gaming industry at the turn of the century will be waiting a long time.

Above: Umbilical-based controller technology wouldn't catch on for a few years yet.

If all that seems like a bit too much head-scratching for a cold Tuesday, how about a simpler question: where on the Analogy Index does The Last Starfighter fit?

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Game/Culture: Gamers in the Movies

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:02:33 -0600

This is the first installment of Game/Culture, a new feature where we check out how games, gamers and gaming are portrayed in movies, TV and general pop culture. Some of these items are too brief to warrant their own installment, but others are movies we'll be returning to later down the line to discuss in more detail. So for now, consider this a taste of things to come...[nextpage]

Tron (1982)

What's the game? Tron, a fictional Virtual Reality world years before Neal Stevenson or William Gibson had started banging on about Virtual Reality. For reasons that remain unclear, Tron is the only place in which dangerous criminals can be apprehended. It's obvious to say this now, but the 80s really were a very strange time.

Who's the gamer? Kevin Flynn, played by a young Jeff Bridges: a hotshot software engineer who has the strange notion that maybe these "computerized games" might be worth looking into. His game-making business gets sidetracked when a colleague tries to use the lad's program for evil, prompting Flynn to take the obvious action: turn himself into a virtual vigilante and ride the varmint down.

And how realistic is that?? Spotting facepalm moments in Hollywood's depictions of computer programming is a treasured pastime for hackers. But Tron's depiction of gaming as a sinister wonderland takes the early lead: the movie may be a sci-fi spin on electronic gaming, but if anyone thought this was what videogames were actually like, they'd be disappointed when they got their Atari 2600 home.

WarGames (1983)

What's the game? Global thermonuclear war! Except it's not a game at all, and the folks that give an amusing voice to a computer and grant it the power to launch missiles around the world really should put a bigger "This Is Not Defcon" warning label on the title screen.

Who's the gamer? Fresh-faced Matthew Broderick, starring as supergeek David Lightman. Lightman is supposed to be a computer genius, capable of accessing and manipulating systems as sophisticated as the US Government can create... but the fact that he nearly annihilates the civilized world while trying to download the 1983 equivalent of Commander Keen gives the lie to that notion.

And how realistic is that?? In 1983, it seemed far-fetched but possible that a speccy kid could infiltrate the shadowy world of computer defense systems to endanger the free world. Years later, hackers like Kevin Mitnick would prove that while it might be plausible, the idea that he'd look anything like Matthew Broderick was simply ridiculous.

The Wizard (1989)

What's the game? Then-unreleased Super Mario Brothers 3, which was anticipated to be pretty much the biggest thing ever. The idea that you could make a movie about waiting for Mario 3 is one thing, but that movie's notion that the unveiling of the Nintendo Power Glove would be a similarly epochal event in the history of gaming proved not to pan out so well.

Who's the gamer? A developmentally-challenged kid who takes it into his head that he wants to become the world's greatest Super Mario Brothers 3 player, and will travel across the country to do it. The Wonder Years' Fred Savage decides to aid him in his quest: because if you can't get to being regular people, and you can't get across country, you can at least get to the end of World 8.

And how realistic is that?? Perfectly realistic: Super Mario 3 does exist, and it really is played by the mentally subnormal (and everyone else). The Wizard gets a lot of stick, but it is the only gamers-in-movies item so far that makes all that much sense.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

What's the game? Missile Command, a game from 1980 about repelling an alien attack from the skies. Why a movie that traded on its tech-chic credentials chose to use a game from eleven years ago is anyone's guess. Of course, we're sure James Cameron had a good reason for what he was doing: he was, after all, making Terminator 2 at the time, so he was obviously thinking straight enough.

Who's the gamer? John Connor, future savior of the human race. The script makes explicitly clear that this is meant to signify John's future role: "he parries deftly as the enemy ICBMs deploy their MIRVs... the warheads stream down... it's more than he can deal with." This is one of those "foreshadowings" you read about.

And how realistic is that?? Well, kids certainly were skipping out of school to play arcade games in 1991. And LA certainly does have loads of malls, many of which are sure to have embarrassingly retrograde video arcades in them. But they could've at least gone with Robotron 2084, what with it has the exact same plot as the movie and all.

Toys (1992)

What's the game? An unspecified military sim that turns out to be a front for a military takeover of the toy industry, using army-themed games to train the next generation of child soldiers. The movie uses videogame violence as a metaphor for the Military-Industrial Complex's threat to childhood innocence: as was Robin Williams' forte in the early 1990s, Toys is one of those "allegories" you read about.

Above: one of those allegories you read about

Who's the gamer? In the movie's most nightmarish moment, Williams' lovable manchild wanders into a darkened room in which droves of children are being brainwashed by interactive entertainment: butchering digital enemies and lethally neutralizing unhelpful UN forces in a virtual warzone. For a fluffy Robin Williams movie about an issue nobody was really thinking about, it's pretty heavy-handed.

And how realistic is that?? Your blood may be boiling right now, as you consider a movie in which videogames are painted as kill-training for vulnerable minds. And, while yes, gaming is used as a rhetorical pawn in Toys' misguided fable, the argument is not without weight - which is why the issue deserves more sophisticated debate. But then, it's not like anyone saw the movie or anything.

Brainscan (1994)

What's the game? The titular Brainscan, an hallucinogenic gaming experiment in which users submit to hypnosis in order to customize the game to their own worst fears and most hated enemies. However, after they commit murders in-game, they find that correspondent crimes have been committed IRL. SPOILER: there's a connection.

Who's the gamer? It's only little Eddy Furlong again! While his antics in Terminator 2 served as clever (not clever) metaphor for his role in the movie, Furlong's character in this movie is a horror-obsessed loner who finds himself losing control of the distinction between violent game and depressing reality. The art, it imitates the life, etc.

And how realistic is that?? This is the closest gamer movies have to a stock plot: the best example might be the ton of thoroughly unintelligible brilliance that was David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. But while game obsession is a real thing, it's usually treated as a hamfisted metaphor: you're in trouble when cult 1990s sitcom Parker Lewis Can't Lose treats the syndrome with the closest thing to a realistic tone.

Swingers (1996)

What's the game? Genesis ice hockey game NHLPA '93, obsessively played by the eponymous nitelife-loving dudes. Their encyclopedic knowledge of the differences between the 93 and 94 versions of the game suggest that they have only ever owned one game, but that when they own another one, if will be the two-year-old update.

Who's the gamer? The twentysomething would-be rat-packers led by Trent (Vince Vaughn). Trent's main NHL buddy is the comically-named Sue, and the game is used as a none-too-subtle metaphor for the tensions in their friendship.

And how realistic is that?? The idea that a bunch of guys would run away to LA, taking only a Genesis and one game to remind them of home, is poignant and true. Though the whole "game violence as release valve for personal tensions" thing always rings a bit hollow: don't you find the most severe virtual violence is dealt on those you feel most comfortable around?

Stay Alive (2006)

What's the game? The eponymous Stay Alive itself, which looks to be some sort of fairly boilerplate Survival Horror affair in which players explore a haunted house, are killed, and then die in real life in shockingly (predictably) similar ways. So the game, y'see, it is in fact not helping them to Stay Alive at all! (This is half of the title's cleverness).

Who's the gamer? Most of the movie's cast have a go on Stay Alive at one time or another, and are summarily dispatched by infamous serial killer Elizabeth Bathory, who lives on in the game code. (Of course). So the game, y'see, it is helping her to Stay Alive! (This is the other half of the title's cleverness).

And how realistic is that?? Well, Elizabeth Bathory has been in all manner of video games that haven't killed people, so there's that. Mind you, those games inevitably trade on the bogus vampire mythology surrounding the character, as does Stay Alive. So (prepare to be shocked!) the idea that a 16th-century noblewoman performed black rituals to encode herself into a video game is not very realistic!

Grandma's Boy (2006)

What's the game? Demonik, a bedroom-coded action game put together by a game tester on his off hours. The game is what we film types call a macguffin: it's used mainly as a tool to divide friends and win success for the movie's main character. As it does these things quite well, we can assume it's probably better than the aborted Clive Barker game of the same name.

Who's the gamer? Alex, a sad schmuck who tests video games for a living and lives with his grandmother. Alex is torn between pursuing his pipe dream of developing a game that will lift him out of his rut, or contributing to his grandmother's pipe dream of making a fortune off Antiques Roadshow. This is one of those "juxtapositions" you read about.

And how realistic is that?? In 2006, it might be called nostalgic to cling to the notion that a dedicated dweeb could build the Next Big Thing in his grandma's bedroom. But with indie gaming enjoying a renaissance of late, the only thing wrong with Demonik is its crappy moniker.

Gamer (2009)

What's the game? Slayers and Society, the logical extensions of Battlefield and Second Life. "Logical," that is, if you think that Capture the Flag is one step away from mind-controlling convicted criminals and having young children force them to disembowel each other on primetime TV, or paying people minimum wage and making them rape strangers.

Who's the gamer? Simon (get it?), the champ of Slayers. The clean-cut, socially able lad's popularity earns him a dozen messages every time he logs onto the near-future equivalent of Myspace, many of them from girls desperate for him to deflower them. There's also a subplot about a Society player who looks like the Gluttony victim from Se7en, which may be a bit more believable.

And how realistic is that?? Gamer has a weird love/hate relationship with its titular target audience. Basically its position seems to be, "gamers are amoral freaks, unless they choose to stop playing, at which point they'll be rewarded with some hyperviolent action sequences." This is what happens when you greenlight a high-tech philosophical allegory from the guys what brung you Crank 2: High Voltage.

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Microsoft's top ten milestones of the past decade

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:00:00 -0600

When Microsoft announced they were getting into games, the assumption was that the first American-grown console since the 3D0 would bring with it an onslaught of brash Silicon Valley bombast and Wall Street sloganeering. Whether you loved or hated the House of Gates' brand-intense style of technological savvy, their arrival on the scene was bound to shake things up. What we got was what nobody expected. The story of Microsoft's gaming fortunes in the 2000s is one of determination, grit and sacrifice: a company who came on the scene with a big splash, but whose subsequent efforts demonstrated that they were in this for the long haul.

2000: The Acquisition of Bungie

It's easy to forget that a dedicated Microsoft-branded gaming box at the start of the decade was such an unlikely notion. The guys that made OS software for beige boxes; the makers of dry-as-a-bone Dadware like Microsoft Flight Simulator? They were getting into games? Microsoft needed to demonstrate that they understood gamers and the gaming culture, and in 2000 the company showed their hand by acquiring Bungie. [nextpage]Microsoft's buy-up of the critically-beloved Mac specialists hinted at a new way of doing business. Denizens of Apple's gated virtual community wailed, but for Microsoft - and Bungie - the future was bright: the acquisition would help launch one of the most unexpected new console players of the decade. While the established majors palled about with software's biggest names, Microsoft would nurture indies and unknown quantities like a talent scout, expanding the playing field not just for themselves, but the whole gaming industry. Would their investment pay off? Maintain the illusion of suspense for about a paragraph to find out!

2001: Enter the Xbox

While Microsoft's forays into gaming predate the Xbox, it was the release of the big black behemoth that put them on the gaming map. Outperforming rivals in almost all contests of technical prowess, the system represented a calculated hit in size and cost. In an aggressive bid for marketshare, Microsoft sold each system at a lost, but this was a calculated investment: more boxes in homes was the best advertisement Microsoft needed for its console's gamer-pleasing tech specs. A prime example was the console's debut of a dedicated internal hard drive. Another upside was in mindshare: just as Bill Gates had tried to put a PC in every home, the dream of an Xbox in every living room - playing music, running games and screening dvds - got a running start with the Xbox. Within a year of release, any serious discussion of gaming's "Big Two" - Sony and Nintendo - had to be expanded to a Big Three. Microsoft had arrived.

2001: Halo Evolves Combat

If Microsoft's investment in unknown quantities like Bungie represented a Geffen-like interest in developing new talent, Halo became their Nevermind-sized payoff. Here was a signature property that showed the world all the reasons why Xbox was a force to be reckoned with. A huge, massively confident, take-no-prisoners epic in tone, scope and playable intensity, Halo was undeniable proof that Microsoft understood the gaming market. The game did it all: powerful, uniquely intuitive gameplay that managed at once to feel like a game you'd waited years to play, and like something fresh and new. More impressively, Halo represented the console market's wholesale adoption of the FPS, one of the last genres almost exclusively associated with the PC audience. Technically, Bungie did things with a machine at the start of its development cycle that nobody had thought possible. But that much was expected: what was a welcome surprise was how constantly these displays of power functioned in the service of a solid single-player campaign and unprecedented multi-player skirmishes.

2002: Rare Join the Microsoft Stable

No more the new kids on the block, Microsoft were able to play strongarm with one of the 64-bit era's most beloved software houses in 2002. The Stamper brothers, founders of Rare - the cheeky British scamps who had kept the N64 above water and given the world some of Nintendo's best third-party content - agreed to a buyout of 51% of the company's stock, giving Microsoft controlling shares in Rare's operations. The announcement shocked many: Rare had been synonymous with Nintendo since the SNES days, dictating the terms of the N64 FPS market with GoldenEye 007 and playing custodian to the continuing fortunes of the Donkey Kong franchise. What magic would the Stampers' boys work for Microsoft? Um, Grabbed by the Ghoulies and Perfect Dark Zero. While Rare's later efforts - such as Kameo, Viva Pinata, and Conker's Bad Fur Day were better received, sales were nowhere near what Rare had enjoyed under Nintendo. Perhaps the Rare buyout's biggest payoff for Microsoft was simply that the move had broken up the Rare/Nintendo dream team.

2003: Peter Moore Becomes Microsoft's Marked Man

In 2003, with the Xbox an established industry presence, but lacking the market penetration the company desired, it was time to bring in a first-rate publicity czar to help spread the word. Enter Peter Moore. Known for his work at Sega - Moore helped the company make the best of a bad situation in the later days of the Dreamcast, and was instrumental in the hardware giants' transition to multi-platform software developers - Moore leaped into his role with gusto. The extent to which Moore would link his fortune to that of the company he represented was immortalized in the gung-ho spin-wizard's display of a tattoo commemorating the property that would be Microsoft's killer app for 2004.

While his work with Microsoft came to an end in 2007, his legacy lives on in the company's rejuvenated standing in the console market. And in a thousand crappy Photoshops of the above image.

2003: Grand Theft Auto 3 goes multiplatform

It had long been unofficial gospel that the Grand Theft Auto series had their home on the Playstation platform. Sony had invested heavily in supporting the games, an effort crucial to positioning their console as the only real choice for serious gamers. That exclusive notoriety was to end in 2003, when Rockstar's parent company Take Two Interactive cut a deal with Microsoft to port the world's biggest amoral sandbox adventure to Xbox. "But the box says Only for Playstation!" cried Sony loyalists. Take-Two's answer? "Cha-ching, bitches!" [citation needed]. The games would play so well with Xbox audiences that Microsoft would go on to invest in exclusive DLC for the Xbox version of GTA4, the company's forward-looking stance on downloadable content transforming the market yet again.

2005: The release of the XB360

Xbox was always intended as a gateway drug: a foretaste of what Microsoft wanted to do for gaming. From before launch day, Microsoft was taking a long term approach towards establishing a foothold in the console space. Critics had called the original clunky, unrefined and chaotic, and Microsoft weren't shy about addressing those issues with their Xbox 360. The sequel's launch was a remarkable transformation in hardware and software design. Commentators had speculated that Microsoft's late entry into the previous generation had hurt them: the company had always been playing catch-up in sales and trends. Xbox 360 turned this situation on its head by launching before Sony or Nintendo had finished their previous machines' cycle. The plan was to launch with exactly the capabilities Microsoft figured users would want, and the degree to which the console's multimedia capability, online integration and backwards-compatibility have become industry standards speak to how successful those reckonings were. The machine also brought Microsoft's second huge exclusive in the form of Gears of War, a new franchise to silence the critics who wrote off Xbox as "the Halo machine".

2005: The Red Ring of Death

Shockingly, this is far from the worst pun ever made about this problem.

Microsoft's brinksmanship didn't always work to the 360's advantage, though. Early adopters of the Xbox 360 lived in fear of the dreaded "Red Ring of Death", an inexplicable symptom that pointed at officially-unexplained maladies. Folk remedies cropped up all over the Internet (chief among them the notorious "towel trick"), all stemming from what was then seen as the company's refusal to acknowledge the severity of the problem (some reports had the Red Rings glowing on as many as 32% of test units). Users experiencing multiple instances of the curse blamed shoddy manufacturing practices, poor internal design, and subpar chipsets. A contrite Microsoft acknowledged the problem: "frankly, we've not been doing a good enough job" of responding to the issue, admitted Moore in a widely-spread statement. Alongside chipset improvements, the company ate a billion-dollar cost in the form of drastically increased warranty coverage and paying for users' shipping and repairs.

2006: Games for Windows

PC gaming has been its own rollercoaster ride in recent years. A stable port in a storm of console infighting, or the last bastion for hardware-junkies and MMO/strategy buffs? Column a, column b. A valiant attempt to lift the WASD crowd out of a downward decline, Games for Windows was a big push that was long overdue. Using GfW should have been the boost to accessibility and easy installs that gamers were crying out for. Microsoft even reached out to Computer Gaming World, a long time gaming magazine favorite, and partnered with them to relaunch the magazine with a Games for Windows focus. Unfortunately GfW was launched via Microsoft Vista, and as such became notorious, derided and critically underused. Your correspondent, apparently the only person who never had any problem at all with Vista, has fond memories Games for Windows doing everything it said it would: here's hoping the initiative gets its due soon.

2002-Present: Xbox Live Goes From Arcade to a New Experience

Nothing demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to forward-looking innovation like Xbox Live. Beginning in the Xbox days, the online service offered game downloads and downloadable upgrades and updates to software far beyond that offered elsewhere, as well as setting a high standard for online play. In hindsight, it's hard to see how gamers did without it: with Internet play becoming the new 3D, a robust means of getting online and making friends and enemies was a must. Xbox Live set the standard for all that followed, and the ability to take your console online for shopping, playing, and general entertainment became as standard as the internal hard drive. The next big leap was with the New Xbox Live Experience, in which a host of easily-accessed downloads and enhancements were available in a user-friendly manner, and users had hours of fun creating snarky wee avatars to represent them online. Microsoft has stated that about 50% of all users pay for the Xbox Live Gold level of membership. Sony's subscription base is similar - though their service is free. To this day, Xbox Live sets the standard for online interfaces: one others are still trying to emulate.

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