Violent Video Games made me a Lunatic... I Guess.

Video games get a bad rap because some people believe that they promote antisocial behaviour. I’m not antisocial. Look, I’m typing this for you right now. Do you want my perspective? Of course you do. Blaming people being morons on videogames is like blaming geese for playing silly buggers around the oil pipes in the Gulf of Mexico. Did watching 80s cartoon Mask make you want to put on a helmet and pilot a car that is also a plane? Actually, that may be a bad example because I have never wanted anything more!

A.K.A What Bigmrjosh saw himself doing as a job, circa age 8. (There's still time.)

I’ve never really played much Grand Theft Auto because I tried it once and it was hard. My friend told me you can hit someone in the face with a shovel, but only if they’re a hooker. I don’t have any desire to do this, but even if I did I don’t own a spade. Or some hookers. If I was in a hooker spading mood, I would probably fire up the Playstation and spade some hookers on there. I would do that instead of giving it a shot in real life for two reasons. Firstly, I am not a moron. And secondly, I am far too pretty for prison.

“Yo lady, you got a spade?”

Role playing games take this stuff to a whole ‘nother level. For example, RPG logic dictates that whenever anyone leaves something inside a shiny chest they mean for you to have it. And that doesn’t matter if you are on a mission from God or the village goat boy. It’s first in, first served. I have pinched enough stuff playing RPGs to open up an antiques store, but that doesn’t mean when I come to your house you need to count the cutlery afterward.

Another thing that you should only do in video games: Chicken abuse. Besides, anyone who has played Zelda: Link to the Past will know there are some pretty goddamn serious consequences for this act.

Video games are without a doubt inspirational. Some guy was inspired to propose to his girlfriend through hacking Chrono Trigger. I think that’s a good thing (but I haven’t seen his girlfriend). Mostly they inspire me to stay indoors but, hey, that keeps me out of trouble! I can't understand how some dude can play Modern Warfare 2, then decide he wants to replicate it in the real world. That takes actual effort.

I think it's more likely that some people are just predisposed to putting on a leather jacket and shooting up a lunch room, and they would probably do that whether you gave them a turn on the PS3, a copy of Mein Kampf or blindfolded them, spun them around 16 times and put an M16 in their hands. The people who are calling this the fault of video games are probably the same ones who called those guys ‘fag’ every day of their high school career.

There. Now that we've dealt with that, shall we discuss whether video games are art...?

The Nintendo Seal of Parenting

Some people say that divorce is damaging to children, but I consider myself lucky. It meant that I was raised by three parents: a mother, a father and a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

There are literally tens of books about parenting as a Mum or Dad, if you are interested in that sort of thing. (A few parents of kids I teach could stand to maybe pick one of these up some time.) But not much attention is paid to the important lessons children learn from that third, some would say ‘completely inappropriate’ parent. But what those stuffy blowhards don’t realise is that the NES taught many valuable life lessons to my brother and I, its willing disciples.

Sure, we learnt practical stuff, like if you run into a tree hard enough a fairy might fall out, or the benefits of plumbing as a means of cutting down on your transport time.

But we also learnt a lot of abstract concepts. Nintendo helped us become better people. Well, helped me.

Lesson #1: Be a Goddamn Man

Nowadays every second Nintendo game is about grooming your horse or getting your hamster from the vet to the mall before the timer counts down to homework. But 20 years ago the only reason a horse would be in a Nintendo game was because you would be riding it into the middle of a massive battle against a 12-foot Pig-god; a hamster even less likely, unless maybe it had been mutated into a fierce warrior. Back then, games were made for men, and by men I mean pre-teen boys. In a very-hard-to-find game entitled Earthbound (or Mother, if you’re Japanese. No, I don’t know why) you learnt that when aliens invade the Earth with the help of local gangsters, it’s up to a bunch of cap-wearing kids wielding baseball bats and yoyos to protect the populace. That’s called responsibility, bitches.

A-well, better grab ourselves some baseball bats and yo-yos, mosey on down to that there meteorite and beat the tar outta whatever comes out.

Lesson #2: If at First You Don’t Succeed

Remember the Virtual Boy? No, but with good reason. It was terrible. What if Nintendo had thrown their toys out of the cot after the resounding failure of the Virtual Boy? We never would have seen the likes of the Nintendo 64, the Gamecube or the Wii! Remember that time, I wrote that blog that sucked? Me neither, they’re all solid gold. But in the event that that happened would I give up? No way! Because another thing Nintendo has shown me is that persistence is key.

Lesson #3: Modify your Expectations

The first game I chose to buy myself for my NES was Legend of Zelda, which pretty much set my life on its present course. I was taken by the gold box, by the gold case and I was also intrigued by the little gold ‘Nintendo Seal of Quality’ starburst. ‘This seal is your assurance that NINTENDO has approved and guaranteed the quality of this product,’ it said reassuringly. That’s nice.

I think it was about 2006 that Nintendo realised that consumers don’t want quality interactive entertainment. What they want is to spend all their disposable income on games developed poorly by Korean developers. Hold on though! What about the Nintendo Seal of Quality, guaranteeing the quality of the games released for Nintendo systems? It turns out that employing that clairvoyant division was a great idea, because 14 years earlier Nintendo removed the words ‘approved and guaranteed’ from its seal (which had since also been renamed simply Nintendo Official Seal) And replaced them with ‘evaluated and approved.’ In all honesty, that is still a little bit optimistic for some of the stuff coming out nowadays. It’s only a matter of time until the Nintendo Seal will represent that ‘Nintendo has recorded on the back of a napkin that this game exists and will be unable to look you in the eyes while they sell it to you.’ Even though it’s not always for the best, Change is constant.

Lesson #4: A Hundred Bucks!

Have you ever paid $150 for a video game? It’s getting a little excessive, in my opinion. I’m no economist, but if games keep going up in price by $20-$25 every generation, I may have to revise my cryogenic head-freezing life insurance plan. Because who wants to be revived in 3027 just to find that Final Fantasy 607 is going to cost $28000?

Games have always been expensive though. Back in the NES days it used to cost me $100 for a new game. That’s $100 Australian. This is how much I paid for the Addams Family back in 1991. I don’t know how I got such a sum of money at the ripe old age of 9, probably through a combination of plaintive begging and the mowing of 1100 lawns. I put my money down and took my new game home, reading the instruction book from cover to cover in the car (because you had to read the instructions back then). At home, I put the game in the machine and fired it up. Then I turned it off, ejected the game, blew into the end of it, put it back in and turned the machine back on.

The amount of time it took me to do all of this is pretty much equivalent to how long it took me to ‘clock’ (win) the game. That’s right; I dropped the GDP of Micronesia on about an hour’s entertainment. I could have played the game again, but since replay value wasn’t invented until 1996, there wasn’t much point.

From this I learned... um... that hard work is its own reward? The value of a dollar? Truth be told, I’m still pretty dark on the whole thing.

You can see in this screenshot that the player has no money and only three lives, which means they have only just started and, paradoxically, have nearly finished the game.

An Assessment of Digital Comics

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, trying to figure out where I stand. I’m on a precipice; I’ve dabbled, but am I going to really invest in this? I’m going to work through what I’ve come up with, but any ideas that I’ve missed are welcome.

The PSPgo has had almost universally bad press since its largely unheralded release.
I bought one anyway.

And now that ridiculously ill-informed decision has paid dividends, in the form of digital comics. Digital comics, bitches! They’re like comics but they’re digital!

They cost less than actual comics, in some cases about 1/3 of the cost of buying them in a comic store. $10 for the real paper ones becomes $1.95-2.95 for the digital version, depending on the publisher. Marvel is the big fish in this digitally distributed pond, and that apparently justifies a $1 price hike. Having said that, I will happily pay $2.95 for an issue of Runaways, Iron Man or X-Men, but I will think twice about $1.95 for an unproven publisher or franchise.

I must admit though, DC’s absence is noticeable. Will they come on board? Hopefully they’re waiting to see how the whole thing pans out. Personally, I can’t see the problem. Everyone knows digital distribution is blowing up, and the comics are being commissioned to be created in paper form anyway. I would love to get my hands on some digital Green Lantern or Batman. Come on, DC!

What advantages are there, aside from the economic factors, to purchasing your comics digitally? I guess another obvious one would be the reduction of clutter. I still have several boxes in my garage, originally containing reams of paper, stuffed with comics. As well as that I have a large – maybe 30 litre – container half full of graphic novels. With a living space our size, we can’t really afford any more clutter. Similar to how I no longer need an entire wall for my CDs thanks to my iPod, you can now keep your copy paper boxes! Even in the context of digital space these things are small, usually between 20-50MB. Presumably environmentalists can do a little dance about the reduced paper usage as a result of fewer people buying paper issues and buying digital issues instead. Ideally, to facilitate this, publishers would have to simultaneously release digital and paper issues; otherwise it’s like releasing a movie digitally 4 years after the DVD has come out. The fans have long ago bought that DVD.

What really intrigue me about this new idea are the unique features of digital comics that paper comics cannot provide. It is obvious that a lot of consideration has gone into how to engineer the software so that it simulates the actual act of reading a comic. It is not enough to simply show a page at a time on the screen. The wording would be too small, and you can’t appreciate the fine detail of the art. So a bush of the button emulates the scanning process of the eye, sliding from one word balloon to another. It’s amazing how quickly your normal reading habits assert themselves, and how effortless the system becomes. This by no means perfect, and some publishers seem to have a better handle on it than others. One issue of Transformers actually skips some word balloons, making you go back and find them yourself.

A cool little feature that has been added on some issues is screen movement to simulate and enhance what’s happening in a panel, like shaking during a full-page explosion, for example. Note that splash pages do lose some of their effect in digital comics, because of the necessity to zoom out. Decompression, the stylistic use of repeating panels with minor changes and little dialogue, on the other hand, is vastly improved by the necessity to manually advance the story in digital comics.

When I downloaded IDW’s 'Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse', it came with a little bonus that I hadn’t expected: a writer/artist commentary on the making of the issue. There is huge potential here. It’s like a behind the scenes podcast with the benefit of being fully integrated with the content. Because there is no sound in a conventional comic, the integration is seamless. It is in fact possible to take in the issue for the first time while listening to the commentary, something that would be difficult and not at all enjoyable with a DVD movie and its commentary, by comparison. I would love to see more of these, especially by the bigger writers whom I really admire, like Warren Ellis, Mark Waid, Matt Fraction or Joss Whedon, although it is probably naive of me to assume they would have time for that sort of thing.

And, don’t forget it’s backlit, so you can read in the dark! There is something very exciting about this for me, similar to being a child with a torch under the blankets. And if you share your sleeping space with someone it means you can read and they can sleep. Then everyone’s happy!

There are some downsides to these new-fangled digital comics, of course. The most obvious I have already addressed in part, and that’s availability of titles. Obviously it’s not the same depth or volume you would expect at a real comics store. Nothing from DC, and Marvel seems to be throwing all the Iron Man and Avengers they can find at us. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the issues on offer. For instance, despite Joss Whedon being one of the ‘featured writers’ on the PSP comics store, the Runaways series ends at the issue before his run began. X-Men issues are available from 2000-2005, but nothing particularly recent. However, there are no sold-out runs when your product is digital, and presumably a high upper limit to how much can be made available on the network over time. In other words, publishers will keep adding content without removing the old stuff, eventually creating a massive stockpile of potential purchases.

Another area where I think a fresh perspective could be useful is in the rerelease of classic comics. It seems strange to me to ask customers to choose between a comic from the 2000s and a comic from the 1960s and pay the same price for both. Digitally, the first issue of Spider-man is not a collector’s item. They could be sold at a cheaper price, or say given as bonus issues to a customer who purchases a 6-issue run of modern Spider-man, for example.

The most obvious and devastating omission of digital comics is the smell of ink and paper, the richer the older the issue gets. It is evocative. It is a big part of comics as they were. But it does not create a complex, satisfying story and it does not even really add a lot to the art anymore, much of which is digitally inked, coloured and in some cases drawn nowadays.
I think writing this has made my position quite clear, actually. I am a comics fan, and digital distribution will allow me to get more comics for less money. The option to buy paper comics still remains, especially if a series I am keen on does not get released digitally. But only two months in, the situation definitely bears watching.
Look out, iTunes, you have some competition for my micro-transaction dollar! When I, you know, have some.

To Be a Gym Bunny! Level 2

The Scott Pilgrim comics represent an idea so intricately tied to my existence that I am amazed I never thought of it first: life is like a giant, slightly retarded video game.

"Give me most of your money, Tamaki style!"

Actually it’s probably just as well Bryan Lee O’Malley thought of it before I did, because I suck as an artist and I would never have been able to make it cool like he has. Seriously, they’re wicked good comics. But I digress.

The gym is a perfect place to test what passes for a sensible belief system in my world. Today I did a fitness test. (If you want to know how diabolically I performed on my last fitness test, you have only to look at my last Gym Bunny post.) It’s a simple test: ride a stationary bike for 10 minutes at between 60-65rpm. The bike monitors your heart rate, among other things, and prints this information at 30-second intervals.
The gym instructor takes this little printout, slaughters a goat, puts the printout and the goat’s entrails into this big cauldron and from the resulting mixture scries your fitness level.
The score can range from 1-5.
5 means you are fit. You are like the Jesus Christ of fitness if you are a 5; like a Chinese acrobat, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber and taking for sustenance only the honourably nourishing wishes of your nation.
1 means you are me. Or an amoeba. It’s important you recognise that 1 is the lowest possible value. If it were not, my first score would probably be 0.8, but the machine is programmed to show you a little more love than that, so I am 1.
Today’s test I scored... wait for it... another goddam 1.
But before you slit your wrists in sympathy, wait for the good news. Apparently, I am on the verge of 2. Do you know what this means?

Level Up!!

I want you.

I can’t wait.

Pokemons! I Choose You!

I choose... ah, who cares.

Pokemon Platinum: the must-have game of the season.
I was pretty ashamed to get so much enjoyment out of Pokemon back when it first came out and I was about 14 years old. How sad is it that I still play the games now that I am a grown man?
Worse than that is the fact that I persist with the Pokemon series even though quite early on I gleaned one important truth about the Pokemon games: they’re all the same!

I can’t be the only person who has noticed. And yet, review sites applaud the developers’ ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality. I think those reviewers are just searching for a reasonable explanation for why they still enjoy this repetitive mass-marketing gimmick of a game. Incremental changes happen from one iteration to the next (what? Pokemon ribbon contests? Where do I sign up!) But the core mechanics remain very much the same.
But this is not even the problem. After all, how many great series have been ruined by ill-advised changes to the mechanics?

What irks me is that you can’t apply the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality to story. Sure, themes, settings, re-occurring characters. That’s all fine, but the whole thing? Why is there even a Japanese guy’s name listed under story in Pokemon credits nowadays?!

Seriously, watch this:
Boy (or girl. Next gen addition!) lives boringly in small village.
He meets professor who gives him a choice of three pokemon (grass, fire or water only!)
Boy is tasked with finding, like, every damn pokemon on the planet AND at the same time becoming the super pokemon master of the world. This is the manga equivalent of winning the Ultimate Fighting Championship with the aid of a paperclip while simultaneously locating the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti in the undersea kingdom of Atlantis. Make something a priority, Professor!
Your best friend, and also hyperactive pain in the butt, vows to prove that he is better than you like all best friends and runs off to do the exact same thing you are doing. Now I’m no scientist, but if you have two massive tasks that you would like taken care of, and two fresh-faced young scamps to do those tasks then why wouldn’t you give them a task each?
Boy goes to all the cities in his tiny world, facing the challenge of the Pokemon gym leaders who, despite being the best pokemon trainers on the planet, haven’t mastered the concept of elemental strengths and weaknesses. How did you climb to the top of the competitive pokemon industry by using six pokemon made of grass? It takes one fire-breathing pony to utterly destroy you! The gym leader’s explanation for their ridiculous choice is that they ‘like’ that type of pokemon. You know what type I like? The ones that let me win! That ‘I like them’ attitude is not how winners operate.
Oh, meanwhile you somehow get involved in stopping some conspiracy haphazardly thrown into play by Team INSERTSCARYGANGNAMEHERE to kidnap every pokemon on the planet and have them print money or defraud the government or something equally horrid.
Having slaughtered the gym leaders, and demolished some plot to do something dastardly with Pokemon, Boy goes all the way to the Final Four – Four trainers who – despite having no gym of their own – kick way more butt than those lame gym leaders. This might be because you have to fight all four of them in a row. Then you become the Poke Champ or something and you win. Because you abandoned the ridiculous ‘Find all the pokemon’ quest hours ago.

See what I just did? I wrote the story of every Pokemon game ever, including any subsequent sequels. Some royalties please, Nintendo?
Would it be too much to ask that something, *anything* could change in the typical Pokemon storyline? But Pokemon is not about story. And they’re shifting units so what’s the harm, right?

At the end of the day, I tell myself I won’t bother with the next one, but I still do. I still play them. I don’t know why!

A Boy and his Blog!

It looks like things might be turning around for the Nintendo Wii. I stumbled across the news on a gaming blog that A Boy and his Blob is being re-released.
I remember playing this when I was, like, 8 years old. Good times!
It was about a boy who just kind of came across this blob thing from space (they didn't really worry too much about story back then) and he found out that he could feed the blob jellybeans and it would turn into a ladder, or a hot air balloon, or a hole, or all kinds of great stuff! It made no sense, especially when you consider how you learn that a blob from space even likes jellybeans. What old school games lacked in story they made up for in sheer ridiculous difficulty! I remember it being really, really hard. They don't really do that with games nowadays, but I hope they don't make the remake too straightforward. (Remember Battletoads!?) And I'm glad to see they seem to have kept that old sense of whimsy and haven't tried to 'grow up' the series. Like, I'm thinking you don't feed him a napalm jellybean and he turns into a flamethrower or anything.
The graphics on the Wii are looking great. Throw in some story and I think you've got a winner. Of course, I don't actually have a Wii, so... Hmm.


The original Boy (and his Blob) embarking on his poorly scripted original adventure. Back when kids didn't need wimpy things like faces on their video game characters, just a litte black dot to see by.
I actually remember being fully impressed by the backgrounds in this game when it came out


The new Boy. He has a Blob too. And a face! Spoiled!!