Funday Times 2/12/13: Facts again?!

More facts for you to learn, for me and for you.

As with last time, here's the Google Docs link. Even if it fucked up the typesetting beyond belief, it at least shows you what I was going for with the pictures.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-RYw9UkJUmYYm1aTnZabWJrYmc/edit?usp=sharing

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Editor-in-Chief: Greg Gentry

Ever wonder how Aliens evolved the necessity for a human host in their maturation process? Maybe Ridley Scott was simply using the film to express his creationist worldview. ☺

Doctor Whaaaaaaaaaaat?
While British adults are world-renowned for their unusual cowardice, recent scientific studies indicate this tendency may originate as early as childhood.

Exhibit A: Ruled terrifying for children

Finding sparsely lighted rubbish bins - known as "Daleks" on the Doctor Who television serial - petrifying, young children would hide behind the sofa when watching the programme. As such, "behind the sofa" has become a common expression in the Queen's English to denote a nostalgic feeling of utter, paralysing terror. ☺

Upon its release, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner received mixed reviews from critics, and Coleridge was once told by the publisher that most of the book's sales were to sailors who thought it was a naval songbook. William Wordsworth believed the poem to be a great deterrent to Coleridge's work by virtue of its strangeness and the lack of distinction of the eponymous character. ☺

The Streisand effect is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no contrary action had been attempted. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, following a 2003 incident in which her attempts to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity and an episode of South Park. ☺

The period extending from the late 1940s until 1961 is known in the U.S. as television’s “Golden Age”. During this era, anthology dramas were most popular, almost all of which were broadcast live. Programs were known as “teleplays”, often starring stage actors and occasionally adapting classic works such as Macbeth. It wasn’t until the popularity of filmed shows like The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents that this practice began to evolve, and thus came the Golden Age to an end. ☺

American History 000h

At its peak around 1920 (before women's suffrage), the KKK encompassed nearly 15% of the voting population of the U.S.! Talk about the good ol' days! ☺

Pictured: The joy of racial equality

Al Jolson, America's favorite employer of blackface, was actually one of the foremost promoters of racial equality on Broadway. He was widely considered a primary advocate of the cause and was seen as a hero by African-Americans of his day. He is also credited as one of the key individuals in spreading jazz to white America. ☻

Splatterpunk was a movement in the eighties and early nineties in written horror fiction, characterized by the type of explicit graphic violence which exceeds even what we now refer to as “torture porn”. Imagine novelizations of Doom 2 (with corny names almost all including the words “meat” and “splatter”) and you’ll get the idea. It has gone down in history as the worst and most unnecessary usage of the “punk” suffix. ☺

English majors may already know that in the Middle Ages, it was common for authors to include retractions at the end of their works, begging for forgiveness for vulgar or simply unsatisfactory content. These apologies are known as palinodes, the most famous of which is Chaucer’s retraction of The Canterbury Tales. ☺

The author of the previous segment would like to apologize for any inaccuracies, misconstruction, or offensive content contained therein. He would further like to beseech for Mercy on his soul the Lord God on High. ☺

The author of the previous segment would like to apologize for the predictable joke and unwarranted sacrilege that he unwisely saw fit to convey. ☺

New Feature: Letter(s)!

Dear Abby,

I am, as they say, on the lam. I've fled to a new town and am currently staying under the roof of a kindly old couple. The rent they ask is meager, and I'm enjoying my new job at the local filling station.

    However, there have been reports of my crime, and crude depictions of my face have been posted in the news.

    I fear the old couple may grow suspicious. So far, they seem unaware. Do I have nothing to worry about?

-Concerned Criminal

Well C.C., it’s a tough issue you’ve brought up, but that’s what I’m here for. Before we get too wrapped up in activities of questionable legality, let’s take a minute to remember that my name is not Abby, it’s Greg. There. Doesn’t that feel better? We’re halfway there.

    Now, on to the issue of the concealed identity. For situations like yours, seasoned criminals rely on what they like to call “the three M’s”: the mustache, the murder, and the male-to-female sex change operation. That’s all well and good, but we don’t want you to end up as a bearded lady on trial for two counts of homicide! The trick is to choose the correct “M” for the situation.

    The major factors you need to take into consideration are the severity of your crime, the limits of your public exposure, and your attachment to your penis. For instance: if you’re on the run for a series of unpaid parking tickets, you’re probably only making things worse by slaughtering every individual who recognizes your face. On the other hand, if you’re wanted for getting a little too personal with the kids down at the grade school, murder might be a good idea, both to decrease the odds of arrest, and to buff up your image before the inevitable jail stint.

    Luckily, you seem to have found a temporary room and board situation, so you probably won’t be having casual run-ins with the men in blue. That in addition to your currently limited income would lead me against recommending the sex change operation. If anything, the procedure would probably just rouse the suspicion of your landlords! The elderly generally rely on major facial characteristics for identification, such as scars, makeup, and hair. I think you know what that means!

    And one last piece of advice, C.C. Lose that job at the filling station! Think of how many people see your face when they stop in for gas!

    Best of luck with your time outside the law. Hope I don’t see you on the news anytime soon!

-Abby (real name: Greg)

Some words on Super Ghouls'n Ghosts

Since I've covered the two subseries recently (Demons Crest/Gargoyle's Quest and Maximo), might as well talk about mainline GnG.

Super Ghouls'n Ghosts. For all the superfluous "super"s that are thrown around throughout the SNES library, Super Ghouls'n Ghosts is the one that best earns it. The arcane tome known as dictionary.com provides this definition: "super: of an extreme or excessive degree". How better could one possibly describe the antagonistic forces - the eponymous ghouls and ghosts - of Super GnG? Severe, punishing, unforgiving, exorbitant, obnoxious, take it away, Mr. Thesaurus! The very nature of the game is its wildly skewed balance, pitting a very ordinary hero against an extraordinary threat. So I can't think of a more fitting title - besides perhaps You're Gonna Super Lose, which didn't test well with focus groups.

Goddamn these fuckers

It is an ass game. It is so stupid, pisses me off in every way possible, and there is no way that anyone should ever want to play it. It's random as shit, wildly unbalanced, controls beyond unintuitively and some ASSHOLES claim it's one of the greatest platformers of all time. Nothing pisses me off more than a bunch of ASSHOLES declaring something to be one of the greatest somethings of something. Look at the Grammy. The Oscar. There could literally be nothing worse for a work than in its time to be declared the best of its time. WHY would you like Super Ghouls in Ghosts? I've never heard any legitimate answer or explanation. But I know the secret. It's hard. And any game that is hard (proper hard) immediately develops a following, because there is that handful of assholes (ASSHOLES) who manages to stomach it all the way through to the end just so they can say "I beat it". And then comes that most scoundrelous of questions: "who fucking cares?". Well, now that they've wasted the time and made the claim, Asshole Group A needs to justify it somehow, so they condescendingly say "it's an amazing game and you'll never get to experience that because you SUCK too much to win". It's always going to be subjective whether anyone liked the game, but now there's that ulterior motive: that elite distinguishing earned because claiming that they like it means they're "good enough" to like it.

Still though, who cares?

Well, for all its unpleasantness, Super GnG does have a strange charm, an enthralling character that always seems to drag you back for one more try. I don't think it deserves dismissal among the elitist ranks of Gradius V, Metal Slug 3, or Battletoads. The people who are speed-running or 1CC-ing this game have totally missed the point.  It manages to be captivating because you don't actually have to win, and you can accept that making it to the end is hardly even the goal anymore. You just want to make it one more second, survive a tiny bit longer. The game laughs in the face of the notion that there is an end; when you do finally defeat the boss at the climax of the last stage, you're informed: "Actually, Sir Lonely, you have to do it again. You don't rescue the princess this time. Go back to the beginning, which is now set to a higher difficulty, retrieve this bracelet that wasn't available the first time around, and then come back here." It's not like a "bad ending" or a Second Quest (Legend of Zelda), it's literally that you have to beat all of the stages two times through to reach the end. What a dick move.

The fuck is going on here

Yet it reminds us of the purgatorial nature of Super Ghouls'n Ghosts. We aren't really supposed to be enjoying ourselves. We aren't supposed to grasp for the light at the end of the tunnel. We're beating our heads against a ridiculous wall, laughing at the futility, lamenting every squandered opportunity. Yet somehow it isn't soul-crushing, but invigorating. Everything is so well-crafted, so technically impressive (slanting, shaking, and morphing environments) and artistically detailed (everything has a face?) JUST to fuck you over, that you can't help but delight in the hours spent wasting your life.

Treatise on the power of positivity or something

Here at GNG we delve pretty deep into rabbit holes of subjectivity and, for lack of a better term, taste.  Yourself has mentioned at least once his ambition to spend more time considering the things he enjoys about games rather than brooding over faults, and essentially nitpicking games to death as so many other reviewers of media are wont to do.  I have much respect for this particular goal; too often people looking to assess a particular thing come to see it as their responsibility to exploit fault or error.  Some of this, I think, can be blamed on a culture of what I'll call ironic cynicism in media.  We can point blame at post-modernism for finally seeping into our collective conscious; so much of our art claims self-reference as its key principle, and our criticism follows in its need to deconstruct rather than appreciate.  There is a sort of snarkiness with which we dismiss sincerity of idea in art.  I see it as a sort of defensive mechanism: if we appreciate, respect, or, god forbid, claim to be inspired by something, then we leave ourselves open to attack from others who have found a flaw, or worse yet, already found the next best thing.  Value judgement claims, in my mind, are much more easily made if negative, rather than positive.  

But, like, what IS art, man?

What I'm saying may not seem applicable to you.  In fact, odds are that it doesn't, at least not fully.  But, as someone who spends some time on Reddit, but more time reading news outlets like Salon, Slate, The New Yorker, and The Daily Beast, these are merely observations of what I perceive as all too common currents in cultural criticism.

Let's take my phrased posit of subjectivity, previously commented on the blog, as a given:  "I dig Wagner, but it's all just music. None of it exists on some higher plane of art than any other, and to pretend it does is another attempt to impose the subjective values with which you judge music on the entire medium."

The purpose of this rant isn't to argue the point above.  If you happen to disagree than that's fine (you idiot), but the issue I want to raise is more normative.  Here is we delve deep into my mind and explore the inane pseudo-observations within.

People take this ironic cynicism to an extreme I find unnerving.  It's as if there is more pleasure to be gained from hating something that is *subjectively* unpleasant than there is loving something *subjectively* pleasant.  The vitriolic criticism flung at so-and-so pop musician is often an emotional step above praising, I don't know, Mumford and Sons or something else people consider hip.  That's if some such praise is ever expressed.  And so not only are these criticisms harmful because they're often supposedly situated objectively, but they fail to satisfy the part of us that should be filled actually enjoying and considering enjoyable things.  

Baby, baby, baby, ohhhhh

This isn't to say people shouldn't acquire taste.  Personal preference will always play a part in artistic consumption, as it should.  But if one tendency of these ironic cynics is to focus on the negative, another is to be hyper-selective.  Some approach new music, art, games, and movies with a "this is awful and merit-less until its quality is validated by the approval of *insert online publication or forum*" attitude that blends well with the need to deeply criticize items exogenous of our comfortable consumption.  And what this does is limit our artistic purview.

I only engage with video games stamped with the iconic gng symbol of approval, for example.

Maybe more troubling is that hyper-criticism in its often ironic mode spirals out towards a deeper cultural insensitivity.  Falling into the trap of rote negative perception becomes habitual and counterproductive. Using an argument that is, admittedly, implying a slippery slope, the cynic reserves his cultural stock due to their fear of commitment to an artistic work. And because we are uncomfortable with connection to something serious and meaningful we go on to forfeit our ability to make value claims in criticism, or even as an artist.  

There's probably more to be said here.  Maybe I foolishly yearn for the pre-internet world, where the majority had less-ready access to other people's opinions, en masse.  Sure, for video game consumption, you could get an EGM subscription and be brain washed just a bit.  But the crowd mentality of the internet and worse, internet communities, had not yet taken hold of us.  I suffer symptoms as much as the next man; relying on NYtimes book review for much of what I read or scrolling through Rotten Tomatoes for reviewers I judge as having "valid" taste.  And lord knows there's more than a hint of distaste, mentally, when the movie is panned for whatever reason.  What on earth could a movie rated "rotten" have to offer me?  There's never been a work of art originally panned by critics that had cultural significance, right?

TL;DR: You should try to approach media from a position of positive reception rather than an ironically cynical one, because otherwise you might slowly forfeit your ability to truly enjoy something, say, a video game.

Man this was a weird little foray into my worldview, huh?

Funday Times 2/11/13: A true facts newspaper

This was a weird thing I did about two years ago for two months (three editions) that has nothing to do with video games. I stumbled across the docs today and figured maybe it'd be fun to publish. The original is formatted like a newspaper with columns and all, but Google docs butchered it to the point where copy/paste was just as good (see below). I doubt I'll write any more of these - far too time-consuming - so enjoy it while it lasts. And yes, these facts are as true as they are fun - most are simply block quotes from Wikipedia.

Google Docs version:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-RYw9UkJUmYWXZQdGRKM2RHeU0/edit?usp=sharing

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A joke dated circa A.D. 400, recently translated from Greek, shows similarities to the Parrot sketch. It was written by Hierocles and Philagrius and was included in a compilation of 265 jokes titled Philogelos: The Laugh Addict. In the Greek version, a man complains to a slave-merchant that his new slave has died. The slave-merchant replies, "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!"

PSYCHO CORNER!

A cause of concern for the censors was that Marion was shown flushing a toilet, with its contents (torn-up note paper!) fully visible. Up until that time in mainstream film and television in the U.S., a toilet flushing was never heard, let alone seen.

In the early 1960s, after Beatles guitarist George Harrison revealed in an interview that he liked jelly babies, audiences showered him and the rest of the band with the sweets at live concerts and fans sent boxes of them as gifts. Unfortunately, American fans could not obtain this soft British confection, replacing them with harder jelly beans instead. To the group's discomfort, they were frequently pelted with jelly beans during concerts while in America.

Monty Python's late Graham Chapman was actually a faggot! He had a life partner named David Sherlock. After Chapman publicly "came out", a member of the television audience wrote to the Pythons to complain that she had heard a member of the team was gay, adding that the Bible said any man who lies with a man should be taken out and stoned. With fellow Pythons already aware of his sexual orientation, Eric Idle replied, "We've found out who it was and we've had him shot."

The predecessor to the MPAA's content rating system was a universally adopted protocol known as the Hays Code. This code, enforced throughout Hollywood from 1934 until the 1960's, forbids such ideas as sympathetic criminals, justified revenge, negative depictions of religious faith, and miscegenation, in addition to profanity (including the second Commandment) and implied sexual perversion or dance.

GET TO THE VIDEO GAMES ALREADY!

Bizarre niche Gamecube title Cubivore is actually a production of Nintendo second-party developer Intelligent Systems, famed for their Fire Emblem and Advance "It's not Famicom" Wars series. The game was published by Nintendo as Animal Leader in Japan, a sister title to Animal Crossing! Atlus decided to pick up the localization rights to the work and renamed it Cubivore for its Western debut. As part of the deal, Nintendo agreed not to bring the competing Doshin the Giant to the States, and we continue to rue that day.

The original Mask comic book on which the Jim Carrey film was based is considerably darker and more violent, concerning itself with the psychological effects of a tool granting ultimate power while destroying social inhibition. Stanley Ipkiss kills dozens of police officers who are investigating Big Head (the superhero he becomes when wearing the mask) and is eventually shot and killed by his girlfriend. Before the casting of Carrey, the film had been envisioned as a horror picture.

FACTS OF LIFE

Tired of blaming the U.S. military for countless wars and loss of life? Well try your hand at blaming them for Sonic - Sega was founded in the 1940s by American servicemen stationed in Japan, with the purpose of creating coin-op games to place around military bases. The name is shortened from "SErvice GAmes of Japan". The only title still known today from this early era is Zaxxon. After the video game crash of the early '80s, ownership of the company shifted to native Japanese - and the rest, as they say, is a very sad tale of woe, despair, and some of the worst games anyone has ever put to market.

Super Mario War: A history of The Mushroom Kingdom

I love this because of how much everyone else hates it. Anyway, let me fill you in on some Mario canon that may be unfamiliar to you, which will hopefully help you come to understand the strange ongoing relationship between Mario, Peach, Bowser, and friends. Everything I say here is taken straight from the games. I'm not relying on supplemental material like instruction booklets or spinoffs like Turtles in Time.

The first game allowing playable Koopas

For the sake of sanity, we're going to say that Super Mario Bros. is the first Mario game. It's the first one with any sense of a plot, the first clearly set in the Mushroom Kingdom, the first appearance of Toadstool/Peach, King Koopa/Bowser, so forth. It's the first non-Donkey Kong Mario that you can really give a skiff about. This first chapter of the story I'm about to relate pertains to Super Mario Bros. and its first true follow-up, Super Mario Bros. 3. I can't even say I remember where things go from there, but I'm sure it gets pretty hairy. Some sort of Jurassic Park situation IIRC.

So here's the deal. Super Mario Bros. is clearly set during a war, presumably between the Mushroom Kingdom and whatever Kingdom Bowser is in charge of (remember, his name at the time was King Koopa). We'll call it the Koopa Kingdom. Mario might be a Mushroom soldier, but his uniform certainly isn't regulation. Most likely he's a commando on a one-man crusade to rescue the princess and topple Bowser's reign. That said, it could also be interpreted that Mario is a revolutionary, trying to end a cruel monarchy, and that the entire game is set in only one kingdom - that is, Bowser is the King of the same country where Toadstool is Princess. It remains unclear, but I prefer the latter theory, if only because there is no apparent delineation between levels supposedly set in different kingdoms.

A particular narrative delight is 6-3, which gives us a glimpse at the pre-war Mushroom Kingdom. You may remember 6-3 as the black-and-white level, at the opening of which Mario softly utters "I remember now...". The black-and-white imagery is a common visual trope, indicating that this scene takes place years in the past. 6-3 is idiosyncratic in that it is the only one of the 32 stages that is completely devoid of the standard Koopa armies. No Koopers, Goombas, or even Fishy-Bloos, just a few solitary Bullet Bills foreshadowing the onslaught to come. Some have suggested that this is the first day of the Koopa invasion, a D-Day of sorts, which Mario is now recalling, remembering how far he's come.

The game is spread over the course of eight "worlds", each culminating in a castle infiltration. It seems clear from this that Mario is embarking on eight different military campaigns, each targeted at one of Bowser's strongholds. The post-boss dialogue - "our princess is in another castle" - makes explicit that Mario takes down each of these fortresses with the expectation that the princess is held within. Considering the span of his conquest and the effort it would realistically take for one man to overcome an army, it seems natural that each of these "worlds" may take place over a span of time closer to a year than the few minutes it takes to play through in the game.

This is where things get controversial. As I see it, it seems a surety based on Mario's extensive spy/informant network that he does indeed have the correct castle each time, but King Koopa manages to evacuate the princess just in time to move to his next stronghold and leave Mario fighting a Replicant and rescuing a Toad.  This explains how Toadstool was able to give birth to eight Koopa children in the span of the first game (the third being an immediate sequel). She was trapped in each castle for a year and had no choice but to... well, you've been to the Internet, I don't need to explain it to you. As Koopa has never had another romantic interest (nor do there appear to be adult females of his species), this is the only provable origin on the Koopa Kids. Also, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 pretty heavy-handedly hints that's what happened. Plus Peach is openly Bowser Jr.'s mother, so it's not like the two are... strangers to intimacy.