Supplementary Addendums: The Definitive Review
Piecemeal pieces to make my peace with
I was dithering over what subject to write about this week, being pulled in a few directions while not noticing the inexorable spiral I was in thanks to the ever-closer encroachment of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 upon my psyche. Thinking that maybe I should write about the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R., for that game did truly surpass my expectations, I eventually decided it might be better left to waffle that I can stuff into my review of the sequel. This left me with a void of elusive semi-ideas, those little notions that don’t quite seem up to the full-post treatment or tidbits I’ve always wanted to add to things I’ve previously published. I have a personal philosophy that if you can write 200 words on a game then you can do 1,000, and if you can do 1,000 words, you can definitely do 2,000 if you really try. And try you really should, but being in a kind of maudlin post-birthday lull and purposely cultivating a mix of engrained depression and grim pragmatism at the state of the world (as part of my S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 roleplay, of course), I’ve decided to give up entirely on lofty ideals and just wallow in my own delicious laziness. HENCE:
Longing For Lost Pirate Media
In my piece on the 8-bit experience, I dedicated a footnote to the copied C90. I was in the middle of some mundane task recently when whatever podcast I was listening to referenced Public Enemy’s Chuck D. This immediately gave me visual flash of the cassette I used to copy It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, an album that practically educated me on the breaks of James Brown and his backing band’s spinoffs as well as the Black history we’d never be taught in school. I immediately longed for that specific tape, for it had a personal, sentimental value that nothing from eBay could ever replace. There was always a correlation between the object and the music upon it, for seeing the black plastic, red-labelled BASF C90 rolling around my schoolbag, amongst bits of decayed headphone foam from my Walkman, enforced my bond with the music almost as much as listening to it. That sense of the music being physically with you, part of your belongings, even though it was a pirate copy. All this made it so utterly and distinctively mine.1 This launched me into recalling all the copied games I’d owned, from the earliest tape blags from friends to the copy I had of Paradroid ‘90 with its superb cracktro, and off into the grandiose PC Warez CDRs of the mid-late 1990s. I remember the one that brought Half Life into my world as fondly as the game itself, just as I recall despising the menu graphics of the Blobby collection discs. I’d love to have those physical items again, and as luck would have it, I was having a rummage the other day and came across the CDRs that had my first ever Super Nintendo and Megadrive ROM fullsets. The warm glow they gave me was more than mere nostalgia, but more to do with remembering the riches within, of the hours I spend banging away at SNES obscurities like Ninjawarriors Again and Final Fight 3 while indulging in the mandatory RPG canon entries Final Fantasies 4 and 5 and Chrono Trigger. It may seem odd that a black-labelled, pen-inscribed CDR would carry more personal value than the actual legit carts for these games, especially as the data probably isn’t readable anymore, but that disc really means something in terms of my 16-bit education and understanding of videogames in general. And perhaps that’s what the lost pirate media represents - this bonus additional material, which I would never be able to afford to own legitimately, holds experiences and knowledge that I think is invaluable. In my intellectual frailty and my despicably liberal worldview, I do agree with the cringe hacker maxim that “information wants to be free”, and as such, pirate media is how that freedom is gained. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that platform holders and publishers should never be trusted to ensure the preservation of gaming’s history, and that piracy is nearly always the superior answer to that non-commercial necessity. With these two ideas in mind, those lost pieces of pirated media carry a symbolic weight that legitimately purchased consumer products can never attain.
[7]
Shattered Space’s Visual Style - A Question With Plenty Of Answers, An Excuse To Name Lots Of Films.
So it turned out Shattered Space was far less than the RRR saviour for Starfield than us diehards had hoped, even if it did give me a glorious suite of underground facilities to explore and saw me leave the whole thing behind while proudly brandishing a completely new main weapon (A super-pimped, non-named Starlash, if you must know). In my review, I mentioned having gone on something of a 1950s retrospective to the Sci-Fi greats of the time, which chimed nicely with the TOS Star Trek references that occasionally popped up in Va’ruun decor. What I completely forgot to add was that Forbidden Planet and This Island Earth shared a kind of glorious Raygun-Gothic aesthetic that while not 100% wedded to the Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers looks of the 1930s, somehow managed to retain stylistic cues while heading towards the shiny-surfaced, hyper-clean functional minimalism of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.2 I am certain that between Forbidden Planet and This Island Earth lies both a visual style and a particular Sci-Fi outlook that would be supremely compelling in the right context. That there are videogame universes to be cast in that style, that may pick up the lost promises of that era and perhaps point us away from the constant flood of post-apocalypse hellscapes or capitalist ura-dystopias. Oddly, the Wildfire facility of The Andromeda Strain seems to be the endpoint of that ‘50s brushed-metal hard decor style. The ribs and baubled spikes and streamlining curves of Deco may have been smoothed out or erased entirely, but much of Wildfire’s internal architecture wouldn’t look out of place in the Krell’s subterranean complexes or aboard the Metalunan saucer. Look at contemporary early-70s Sci-Fi like Lucas’s beautifully atmospheric THX 1138 and you find the foundations of Unixcore Cassette Futurism in its ‘found’ utilitarian environments and hard-clunk interfaces, many repurposed from actual telecoms and broadcast control rooms. Phase IV nails it even harder, and with Silent Running encoding the visual language of 1970s spacecraft by carrying on 2001’s torch, we find the earlier elements of the style solidifying nicely around the likes of Logan's Run, Dark Star and even Solaris. Rather than being a pair of distinct and separate aesthetic styles, Raygun Gothic and Cassette Futurism become ends of a spectrum that blends in the middle around the likes of Andromeda Strain.
For videogames themselves, We Lucky Few and Deathloop did marvellously with ‘60s visual modes,3 and Starfield has its own, highly committed alignment with Cassette Futurism, although I recall that much-beloved style harking as far back as the original Portal. It’s a shame that explorations at the 70s domain of the style are so scarce. The Anacrusis comes to mind as some awful hybrid gone horribly wrong, a kind of squandering of the style on a less-than-welcome retread of Left 4 Dead. One hopes that mid-decade 70s style isn’t dropped entirely, as despite my pangs to play something really fucking good in a mid-50s Sci-Fi context, the notion of inhabiting some glorious wonderland of Space 1999 meeting Baker-era Dr Who whets my appetite just as much. These seem like such rich, fertile grounds to mine that I hope oversaturation from the likes of Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 help divert Cassette Futurism a little to the side so other aesthetic styles, such as the effortless Rollerball-by-Moebius beauty of Rollerdrome4, can step into the limelight. As much as I harbour a profound, tangible love for 70s-80s looks, I already start to feel a tinge of over-familiarity and hey - what kind of soulless monster wouldn’t want to play a videogame version of Duck Dodgers In The 24 and 1/2th Century?5
[7]
When You Write About Clothes And Forget The Most Important Bit
In a hurry to finish my piece on Videogame dress-up, I stupidly forgot an entire tract I’d already thought through about custom outfits in the context of the fighting game. This seems particularly negligent given how fighting games have always been one of few genres to offer player-selected alternate outfits since the early 90s, and having been offering various types of atomised dress-up for over twenty years. It was Virtua Fighters 4 and 4 Evolution that really got me going, however, as their genius in offering clothing items as victory rewards powered an entirely new kind of enthusiasm. This went far beyond the urge to fight in singleplayer as means of gaining satisfaction or as a training regimen. You could now do it to look good while doing it, and in competition against other humans, debuting a new look could promote both your aesthetic sense and prowess at the game, as certain costume items would be only available for difficult and highly technical challenges. Some costume sets took real dedication to complete, but sometimes it was all in the details - a bit of jewellery might commemorate a hard-fought achievement and in a wonderfully elitist turn, only those really in the know would get the significance. Perhaps the greatest value in fighting game dress-up is in being able to personalise your version of a character that may be played by millions of others. In that sense, the dress-up carries more importance than it does in an RPG. There, you’re already an individual, so the costume is in some ways just visual icing, an extension of a distinct identity. For a fighting game, dress-up is about ownership and defining the personal version of an archetype. This isn’t to miss the cooler notions of in-battle costume modification that arose in the earlier Virtua Fighters. It’s an easily missed detail, but having Kage’s head-ring pop off is a mark of having taken a big hit, so to end a match with the costume intact is a real sign of excellence. I remember this bleeding into Tekken 4’s Jin Kazama, who had a costume with a hood that would stay up until he took a single hit (I think?!?!?), meaning anyone who ended a round with the hood still up was an absolute badass.
[7]
End Sinister
We’ll leave it at that for this week. Think of this as a bridging piece, a clearing out of some pipe or other that’s been gradually building up with a sense of “I really should go back and fix that” and instead of doing edits nobody will actually notice, I got 1,500 words out the way.6 Oh and an Æon Flux reference, if you noticed it.7 I mean for fuck’s sake, when can I get a pirated CDR of a retrofuturist Æon Flux open-worlder with superb dress-up options? Do I really have to wait for the Gen-AI apocodystopia for that to happen? Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the industry; the fact that this idea doesn’t already exist. My sense of utter gloom about that absence is perhaps the best footing for me to launch into S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, as I anticipate its embrace with the thrill of a death cult member reaching his personal apogee with the idea of surrendering to the void. God I hope it’s still glitchy as fuck by the time it downloads, as I agree with the pithy stalwarts and veterans in the discourse that the game’s instability is all part of the same, invaluably unique ride.
[21]
When I was bold enough to pitch to trend fashion doorstop magazines, I once wrote a piece about aging technology becoming personal to their owners and included the indescribably idiosyncratic fact that in the 2010s, I was still listening to MP3s I’d downloaded a decade earlier. Some of these were complete with little glitches from ropey transfers, which personalised the digital file in much the same way that physical media could become personalised by mere entropy generating glitches, skips, dull spots and worn grooves in the sound. Being still a devotee of the in-car USB stick full of MP3s, I crack a smile when my 25-year-old copy of Big Daddy Kane’s Set It Off comes on, for the first word of Kane’s acapella intro is heavily scratched - in the turntablist sense - by the eager DJ who encoded the vinyl. Won’t get that distinctiveness off a flawless digital stream.
To reference the other '50s film mentioned, War Of The Worlds, there's a real panache to the Martian saucer designs that sings with a particularly tight sense of aesthetic grace, even some 70 years later.
Though perhaps not quite committed enough to the avant-garde extremist visuals of Star Trek Federation tech and decor, or the fully bonkers hallucinogenic mish-mash of classical mundanity and utterly inscrutable made-for-TV futurism found in The Prisoner.
Rollerdrome: the game so gorgeous, so beautiful in every respect - including interactively - that none of us deserved it. Given the state of the industry, we should all treasure Rollerdrome with every single ounce of our souls.
Duck Dodgers is possibly watchable here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8jw8kz
What I mean is I’ve just given myself license to go back over all my old posts and write a shitload more addendums, which may in fact be a bad thing.
Let’s be honest. Isn’t one of the greatest quotes ever made “that which does not kill us, makes us stranger”? Though perhaps this is more timely - Trevor Goodchild, talking to Bambara: “This is what happens when a good deal of intelligence is invested in ignorance, when the need for illusion is deep”. Bambara: “Piss off, ponce!”