As for the life of Aamons, Mona, the index itself gave a jangling, surrealistic picture of the many conflicting forces that had been brought to bear on her and of her dismayed reactions to them.
‘Aamons, Mona:’ the index said, ‘adopted by Monzano in order to boost Monzano’s popularity, 194-9, 216 n.; childhood in compound of House of Hope and Mercy, 63-81; childhood romance with P. Castle, 72 f; death of father, 89 ff; death of mother, 92 f; embarrassed by role as national erotic symbol, 80, 95f, 166 n., 400-406, 566 n., 678; engaged to P. Castle, 193; essential naïveté, 67-71, 80, 95 f, 116 n., 209, 274 n, 400-406, 566 n, 678; lives with Bokonon, 92-8, 196-7; poems about, 2 n., 26, 114, 119, 311, 316, 477 n., 501, 507, 555 n., 689, 718 ff, 800 n., 841, 846 ff, 908 n. 971, 974; poems by, 89, 92, 193; returns to Monzano, 199; returns to Bokonon, 197; runs away from Bokonon, 199; runs away from Monzano, 197; tries to make self ugly in order to stop erotic symbol to islanders, 90, 95 f, 116., 209, 247 n., 400-406, 566 n., 678; tutored by Bokonon, 63-80; writes letter to United Nations, 200; xylophone virtuoso, 71.’
I showed this index entry to the Mintons, asking them if they didn’t think it was an enchanting biography in itself, a biography of a reluctant goddess of love. I got an unexpectedly expert answer, as one does in life sometimes. It appeared that Claire Minton, in her time, had been a professional indexer. I had never heard of such a profession before.
She told me that she had put her husband through college years before with her earnings as an indexer, that the earnings had been good, and that few people could index well.
She said that indexing was a thing that only the most amateurish author undertook to do for his own book. I asked her what she thought of Philip Castle’s job.
‘Flattering to the author, insulting to the reader,’ she said. ‘In a hyphenated word,’ she observed, with the shrewd amiability of an expert, “self-indulgent”. I’m always embarrassed when I see an index an author has made of his own work.’
‘Embarrassed?’
‘It’s a revealing thing, an author’s index of his own work,’ she informed me. ‘It’s a shameless exhibition – to the trained eye.’
‘She can read character from an index,’ said her husband.
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘What can you tell about Philip castle?’
She smiled faintly. ‘Things I better not tell strangers.’
‘Sorry.’
‘He’s obviously in love with this Mona Aamons Monzano,’ she said.
‘That’s true of every man in San Lorenzo, I gather.’
‘He has mixed feelings about his father,’ she said.
‘That’s true of every man on earth.’ I egged her on gently.
‘He’s insecure.’
‘What mortal isn’t?’ I demanded. I didn’t know it then, but that was a very Bokonist thing to demand.
‘He’ll never marry her.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve said all I’m going to say,’ she said.
‘I’m gratified to meet an indexer who respects the privacy of others.’
‘Never index your own book,’ she stated.
Sometime later, Ambassador Minton and I met in the aisle of the airplane, away from his wife, and he showed that it was important to him that I respect what his wife could find out from indexes.
‘You know why Castle will never marry the girl, even though he loves her, even though she loves him, even though they grew up together?’ he whispered.
‘No, sir, I don’t.’
‘Because he’s a homosexual,’ whispered Minton. ‘She can tell that from an index, too.’
A character in Kurt Vonnegut’s indispensable Cat’s Cradle performs a kind of intellectual palm-reading of an author based on his choice of indexes at the rear of his book.
A sober warning to writers hoping to cut costs by working up their own index that, in doing so, they likely spill their secrets for the perceptive to enjoy.
Winsor McCay, the early 20th Century comic artist and illustrator is perhaps best known for his astounding 1914 short film Gertie the Dinosaur.
Ten years prior to this McCay started drawing a newspaper comic strip called Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, a project that secured him a job on the cartoon staff of the New York Herald newspaper.
Each strip features a different protagonist who is found tangled in the midst of a messy dream or nightmare. At the end of the strip he awakes to blame his hallucinations on, usually, Welsh Rarebit eaten before bed.
The strip below is from 1921 and is gloriously post-modern, so much so that it reads like a little like contemporary parody of the comic form.
I can’t really think of another medium that screwed with its structure and formula so soon after its inception – certainly not one created before modernity got into full swing.
Drawn.ca draws attention to the new and beautiful Dream of the Rarebit Fiend collected works. Well worth a purchase I’m sure.
In particular the strip above got me thinking about videogames that have broken out of their confines, allowing their characters to show an awareness of the audience and comment on the medium’s structure, creation and clichés. Monkey Island and Broken Sword (remember the talking goat?) certainly moved in that direction at times but it’s the ending to Rare’s irreverent N64 game, Conker’s Bad Fur day that really sticks out.
Here’s a Youtube video of the brave and funny ending that parodies pop culture, interacts with the audience and pulls apart the videogame ending in a delightful way.
I’m not quite sure of the reasons behind the move but Edge Magazine’s Online site looks to have been incorporated into Next Generation’s web presence recently.
During the course of the relocation some of the magazine’s contents have spilled out online, including a recent feature I wrote for the magazine on PlayStation RPG epic (and while that word’s horribly over-applied in videogames it’s absolutely appropriate here), Xenogears.
Head over to the page here and have a read – I think it’s an interesting one even if you never played the game. And if you did play the game but were left befuddled by the cat’s cradle of plotlines it should straighten a few things out for you.
Considered by some to be a multimillion-yen, convoluted science-fiction vanity project, Xenogears nevertheless remains one of the most keenly eulogized PlayStation RPGs.
Viewed ungenerously, it’s a confused hotchpotch of play styles, lacking focus and consistency across its 60 hours of winding, occasionally incomprehensible adventuring. Detractors argue that the game’s been propelled to cult status for little more than a marrying of overwrought philosophical posturing with big stompy robots, that classic infatuation for the college student fanboy.
But in its defence, Xenogears’ devoted fanbase points to a game which, through labyrinthine mythology, deep, multiple battle systems and a dizzying parade of cute narrative and gameplay set-pieces, comfortably outstretches most contemporary videogames in scope and ambition. It remains writer and director Tetsuya Takahashi’s most challenging and pure work, the game from which his ill-fated Xenosaga series was birthed, but never quite matched up to.
Takahashi and his team, many of whom worked on the Super Nintendo’s much-loved action-RPG Chrono Trigger, manage to create a believable and authentic universe through intimately knowing its every minutiae, past and present. The sheer amount of precise detail to this imagined universe is staggering. Even before the time at which the game begins, the project’s team of four scriptwriters laid out 10,000 years of intricate history.
Finally, I traveled to Thunder Bluff, a grim homecoming, and began unceremoniously destroying armor I had come to prize.
I could have simply deleted the character to the same effect, but I felt like I needed a clean break both within the world as well as without, and seeing the prompts come up, which may as well have said, “Are you crazy?!” infused the moment with the sense of finality I was seeking.
Here went 40 hours of dungeon crawling, there went the fruits of countless hours of PvP, these artificial items I had coveted were a This is Your Life of wasted days. The reality of the time I spent in-game settled on me with less weight than I had thought it would. I gave my stashes of cloth, money, leather and elemental motes to guild mates, who thought I was nuts.
Then, when everything that once had meaning was gone, I bid farewell, logged out and set to the task of deleting the character.
The Escapist publishes an excellent diary from Sean Sands, a World of Warcraft player who decides to ‘complete’ the game.
He does this (somewhat artificially but with no less effectiveness) by choosing a date on which to euthanise his character and all of its hard won armour and weapons in order to bring some closure to the experience and break what has become a wearysome addiction.
It’s a good and well-written story that demonstrates how often the MMOG’s unique selling point – that the game is, in effect, never ending – is often its shortfall (even if, by the time a player realises this, the game’s publisher has earned a handsome financial reward). Are MMOGs the most evil and ensnaring of the genres?
‘Own The Birth Of A Generation’ urges the copy, somewhat awkwardly, on the back of the box.
Setting aside the broken imagery (consider the acres of placenta you’d have on your hands) the phrase does manage to outline, with rare marketing frankness, the only reason players would be interested in buying this, the latest overhauled re-release of the second Final Fantasy game.
Of course, the chances of finding a gamer interested in owning Final Fantasy II out of historical curiosity who is simultaneously yet to actually play the game might be more problematic for Square-Enix.
Once upon a time this was a tricky title to find outside of Japan, but nowadays, thanks to emulation and fan translation, not to mention re-releases on WonderSwan Color, PlayStation, various mobile phones and the GBA (in the form of Dawn of Souls) the chances are that any interested parties already regretfully own this primitive RPG.
Essentially this is a port of the PlayStation remake of the original Japanese Famicom game. The new dialogue and CGI cut-scenes introduced by the PlayStation version remain intact here, the novelty being yet another graphical upgrade. Unlike the recent DS remake of Final Fantasy III this update is purely 2D, boasting pin-sharp pixels spread across lush parallax backgrounds.
The visuals are indistinguishable from the first Final Fantasy Anniversary – no bad thing as both games are bright, pretty and engaging, albeit within tight nostalgic boundaries.
It’s been a good many years since we’ve seen a character roster quite so embarrassing as that offered in Street Trace: NYC.
The hopeful protagonists (dubbed ‘tracers’) line-up in front of you begging selection, each seemingly lifted wholesale from a ’street cool’ 3D model library disc that fell off the front a second rate CG magazine in the mid-nineties. Token black man, Mack (‘Can’t nobody stop me now’ he blurts when you select him), rubs shoulders with the peroxide blonde, wrap-around shade-wearing Rocket, while Hotrod, his unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt flapping in the breeze, stares with nonchalance through hollow eyes.
Meanwhile the girls pose all awkward gait; shoulders thrust back so their breasts balloon forwards, poor texturing and low polygon frames shifting the intended titillation to something closer to queasiness.
It’s a cruel way to start a review, and we’re sure that the character artist/ modeller is a frightfully nice chap who can turn out delightful work with the right tools, brief and budget, but the wider point is that this unsuccessful grasping at imagined street culture cool continues through every aspect of the game. The game’s visual framework is ugly, off-putting, lacking in any shade of authenticity or soul and the game is all the weaker for it.
Perhaps the developer felt bound to pitch the game’s style in this direction. After all, this is a futuristic hoverboard game set in a post-apocalyptic New York. Still, the whacky costumes and Z-list voice acting do nothing to bring life and vibrancy to the perpetually murky environments that make up the game’s drab vision of a future New York.
I just got around to finishing Portal, one of the five titles included in the 360/ PC over-generous box of treats, The Orange Box. The game’s floored me.
I mean, it’s astounding. I love the length (it’s about 2 and a half hours long) as the game burns very brightly for it.
The dialogue and narrative is all at once interesting, menacing, funny and terrifying (written as it is by the Old Man Murray team) as you take on the role of a lab-rat human, working your way through a series of test/ puzzle rooms under the watchful encouragement of Hal-like female sentient computer, GLaDOS.
Talking about the game in specifics will spoil it for those of you looking forward to picking it up tomorrow so let’s not do that.
Here’s a mechanical overview though: your character Chell, must work her way through a series of puzzles solved by teleporting her and other simple objects using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device. Shooting the gun’s ‘bullet’ against a flat surface opens up an oval portal door. Shooting a second bullet somewhere else in the environment opens up another door and stepping into one will see Chell emerge from the other.
By far the most successful and ongoing activity in videogames is shooting stuff. Aiming and firing at objects is the most natural activity within the confines of a videogame – not just because of our boyish, Yippee Kay Ey! tendencies – but mainly because pointing and shooting at things is the easiest way to interact instantly with objects both near and far within a 3D space. You can take out an obstacle standing in front of you or flick a switch with a bullet 100 metres away just by pointing and clicking.
What Portal does is to mess with this formula by allowing you to manipulate the environment around you using the same reticule + projectile conceit but by removing the offensive/ aggressive violence of solid projectiles (e.g. bullets). Challenges are thus constructed in a completely different way but using an interface and control scheme that is immediately familiar and comforting.
The game presents more than just passive physics puzzles (i.e. how to get from here to there) as there are more traditional ‘enemies’ that must be disposed of. However, as you only have the Portal gun, which is essentially a passive tool and not a weapon at all, the way these antagonists must be overcome is by turning their violence against themselves.
Thus you let a turret aim its sights on Chell before ducking out of the way, opening a portal where you were standing and sending their bullets right back at them.
It’s pure passive-aggressive gaming. While Halo’s designers often wax lyrical about how much of their series’ success comes from that player feeling that Master Chief is a one man army ploughing on against insurmountable odds, Portal is far more successful in exploring how it feels to be weak and helpless and as such the value of victory is raised much higher than in traditional FPS titles.
The Portal gun will inevitably be shoehorned into a more traditional First Person Shooter (either by Valve themselves or by industrious fans UPDATE: here it is working within Half-Life 2, in fact) where it will become just another tool in the player’s arsenal of more traditional weapons. This will be interesting (fire a Portal under an enemy’s feet and see them tumble down a ravine) but it will never be as successful or effective an experience as it is here where the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device is the only tool available.
In Portal you’re forced into approaching gaming’s traditional problems and obstacles with a new perspective and fresh eye in a way that would lose much of its power and intensity if you could default to a pistol when challenged.
Developer Valve manages to reinforce these mechanical themes with the scenario, narrative and dialogue (indeed, the GLaDOS AI character which guides Chell through the tasks is a passive aggressive mastermind, the irony of which is she’s also one whom you take on with a purely passive aggressive tool-set) – a peculiarly female way of examining conflict perhaps.
The game’s ending is particularly memorable – not only because it manages to pull off a satisfactory one (take note Bioshock) but because it’s soundtracked by a cute song sung by GLaDOS herself. Written by folk-nerd singer songwriter, Jonathan Coulton, it’s unusual, quirky and interesting and helps to underline what’s one of the few unusual, quirky and interesting releases in a year of blockbusting heavyweights.
Here’s the story behind the song which, if you’ve not finished the game yet, you should read as soon as you have.
Popular Japanese action film actor Takeshi Kitano, perhaps best known in mainstream UK for his riotous imported gameshow, Takeshi’s Castle, released four little-known videogames bearing his name in the late 1980s.
Reportedly Takeshi hated the idea of videogames so much that he wanted to create one so irritating and poorly-designed that it shocked its players into a realisation of the futility of their hobby.
One of the games, Takeshi no Chōsenjō (Takeshi’s Challenge) was released for the Nintendo Famicom in 1986. The title screen bears the text: “This game is made by a man who hates videogames.”
Over the course of the game players are presented with a succession of increasingly ludicrous, near-impossible and vague tasks. One of the earliest missions in the game is to sing karaoke for exactly one hour (utilising the second Famicom controller, that has a built-in microphone) in order to progress.
If you manage to do this successfully everybody else in the bar then attacks you without provocation.
It gets better. After this Takeshi dispenses with all metaphor and has you literally sit and do nothing in front of your TV for, wait for it, four hours before you can progress to the next level. No cheating though: to ensure you really are sat in front of your warming Famicom and not off sleeping to pass the time, the game requires you hold down the ’select’ button for the full duration.
The next section switches to a sideways-on shoot ‘em up in the Gradius style. Here you must avoid the oncoming bullets but, to make things unpleasant, you don’t have an ‘up’ movement. Insread, you must carefully mange your limited number of downward dodges until you hit the bottom of the screen and can no longer move the craft.
If you make it through all of this, and few people ever do – the game is famous in Japan for being one of the hardest videogames of the 1980s – the game’s final boss takes 20, 000 hits before he is defeated.
If all this sounds a little implausible then have a look at the video below that shows a Japanese test subject being forced to play through each of these stages for television.
If you manage to complete the game a caricature of Kitano’s head says: “This game is pretty bad. What are you going to do?” which is basically how I’m going to finish all of my reviews from here on in.
Here’s an advertisement for the game that has turned up on Youtube:
Some people claim that this was Takeshi’s only game but that’s incorrect. Here’s a much more welcoming advertisement for another game he made to round things off – although the short gameplay segments shown look just as terrifying as those in Takeshi no Chōsenjō.
Any more information on these titles would be gratefully received – the Wikipedia entry could do with some smartening up for starters.
Owing to a well-deserved promotion, Chewing Pixels’ brother no longer works in the Launch Pad area of London’s Science Museum.
He was previously an ‘explainer’ there where he’d fire Barbie dolls from cannons and envelop teachers in giant bubbles to entertain and educate awestruck children in the name of science. I went backstage one time and saw this incredible health and safety notice.
The interface is clean and stytlish, the colour palette and the sound effects just so and the mechanics solid, sure and comforting in a way that can only come from a game designer confident and assured in both their craft and idea.
The aim of the game is to guide a ball from A to B using simple tools and physics. There’s even a level editor for budding game designers to work with and a straightforward password generator so you can pick up where you left off. The game’s easy to use and understand and doesn’t do anything to unnecessarily put the player off in the front end unlike so many Flash games.
Completing each self-contained level reveals a fact about the forces/ tools you’ve used as well as recording the time it took to complete and the number of blocks you used.
As for the life of Aamons, Mona, the index itself gave a jangling, surrealistic picture of the many conflicting forces that had been brought to bear on her and of her dismayed reactions to them. 
I’m not quite sure of the reasons behind the move but Edge Magazine’s Online site looks to have been incorporated into 
Finally, I traveled to Thunder Bluff, a grim homecoming, and began unceremoniously destroying armor I had come to prize. 
‘Own The Birth Of A Generation’ urges the copy, somewhat awkwardly, on the back of the box. 
It’s been a good many years since we’ve seen a character roster quite so embarrassing as that offered in Street Trace: NYC. 
I just got around to finishing Portal, one of the five titles included in the 360/ PC over-generous box of treats, The Orange Box. The game’s floored me. 
Thus you let a turret aim its sights on Chell before ducking out of the way, opening a portal where you were standing and sending their bullets right back at them. 
Popular Japanese action film actor Takeshi Kitano, perhaps best known in mainstream UK for his riotous imported gameshow, Takeshi’s Castle, released four little-known videogames bearing his name in the late 1980s. 
