A Line of Flight (Gold Medal Challenge 92, Golf, Golf Grand Slam, Greg Norman's Golf Power)

The subject is the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. But as with any attempt to capture a subject on film, the resulting image is framed by background. Any instant is held taut in the overall weave of personal history and memory by other threads. The subject morphs into the lens itself, its background becoming a foreground anchored by the thing. Suddenly our map links Barcelona to Mahopac, the golf course to the graveyard. Remove it, avert your eyes, and the weave unravels, the ordered skyline of associations and moments dissolving back into disordered chronology. Tack back to Seoul or forward to Atlanta and the illusion is gone, the coherence of the metaphor shattered, and Barcelona is as far from Putnam County as Spain is. To disentangle this edifice is to watch it crumble to undifferentiated noise. Instead we must work along the individual strands, traveling this rhizome from within.

By 1992, the NES was dying. We all had Super Nintendos, or at least I did. I got mine in fourth grade, the school year that ended in 1992, and by fifth grade was running what was, for a ten year old, a reasonably successful side business selling off NES cartridges for $10 a pop, a process I'd begun at my grandparents' moving tag sale the previous summer before they moved from Mahopac, New York to Newtown, Connecticut in tacit admission that my grandfather was getting sick (although to be fair, it had been planned since my parents bought the Newotwn house), although it would not be until 1993 that we gave up on the prospect of pretending it wasn't Alzheimer's.

The Nintendo generation winds its way through my grandfather in odd ways. The height of the NES era, from an objective and historical perspective, was the summer of 1990, which I spent much of living at my grandparents' house while the Newtown house was vacated and readied for our moving in. The basement was converted into my bedroom, with the cot I was used to sleeping on following Christmases and other major family holidays becoming my bed. But more importantly, my NES was hooked up to the television there, and my mother, as ever pragmatic and knowing her way around a major retailer, loaded me up with a fresh stack of games so as to make the prospect of a summer with no friends living with my grandparents something that appeared vaguely survivable.

Follow either string and eventually you come to me studiously attempting a legitimate, IDDQD-free clearing of Map 30 of Doom II, holed up on my PC. It is the fall of 1996, a scant few days past my birthday, and both the Nintendo generation and its odd second wind on the Super Nintendo have given way to the brief interregnum of PC gaming that would hold way from there until 2001. This is the uncertain space of adolescence, cut off from my history by technological obsolescence and, as we will eventually see in my other blog, Paul McGann.

There is a hand on my shoulder, and a tangible silence. It takes a second to realize that I should pause the game, and in that second I know the news that is about to come. My father, clearly having through through the words in his head, simply says "it's over." Before I have processed this - an oddly momentous task given that I knew what was coming and that my grandfather has been dying in a nursing home for some time, given that I saw him a week ago and fled the room in awful horror at the gasping, frail shell impersonating my grandfather from a hospital bell - the silence is cut by the wail of my still three-year-old sister from downstairs as she processes the same news. Some hours later, I realize my computer is still paused. Mute and dumbfounded, I make another failed attempt at legitimately killing John Romero.

Here on the fringes of the event, the threads go everywhere, lines of flight linking more and more disparate pieces of my life.

Summer of 1992 was squarely in the middle of this. My sister gestated determinately. The spring prior I skipped a school field trip to the Natural History Museum, which I'd seen in memory, in favor of a day off and a copy of the new Zelda. The fall after, my sister was born. Focusing in further we can pin the moment down in other terms - the golden age of comics, at least if you were conveniently nine when it happened, with Marvel publishing what at the time seemed like its sure classic The Infinity War, in which evil space duplicates of Marvel heroes... ummm... attacked things. And there was an evil version of Adam Warlock. And more to the point, we cared that there was an evil version of Adam Warlock, which gives you a good sense just how fucked up things were getting over there.

We might ask what significance can be granted to the fact that my sense of these times is based entirely on family and media. There is no point in lying and pretending this is anything other than a character trait on my part. By and large video games were what I opted for in lieu of friends. I can think of one I had at the time, the very definition of a good bloke, Eric Richter. I ran into him at the Newtown Library Book Sale last summer, shortly after I moved back here, and exchanged pleasantries. If I recall, he's involved in making cell phone games now. He seemed well, if, given the age at which we were closest friends, eerily unchanged.

But even here my social memories are hazy reconstructions. I can take it as a given that I was not yet friends with the people discussed here, as they were in different elementary schools - Newtown at the time had four, which only pooled together in sixth grade. Now they pool at fifth grade, the town having built a 5/6 school to alleviate the pressure on the middle school, which, for plot-related reasons, cannot be effectively expanded. This is part of the town's bafflingly incompetent strategy for handling demographic trends, simultaneously requiring an expansion to the high school only ten years after the last one. How exactly they did not notice the very large Kindergarten class that would eventually become ninth graders and realize they would need the expansion is somewhat beyond me. More puzzling is the town's ability to simultaneously try to close the smallest of its elementary schools, Hawley (actually the one geographically closest to me, but not the one I went to) while simultaneously expanding the high school, a maneuver that indicates nothing so much as a bewildering lack of long-term planning.

Being the gap between fourth and fifth grade, my sense is that I was not yet close friends with Tom Zimmerman, who I would later impugn as the person who hacked into the new girl's AOL account. In truth, the fact that she was openly obsessed with dragons made guessing that her password might actually be "dragon" surprisingly effective, causing me to have one of those heart-sinking moments when the mischievous and naughty thing you expect to fail actually works. I went on to date the girl in question as I graduated high school, and tend to think of her as my earliest in-some-sense-remotely-mature relationship, a status I strongly suspect she does not endow me with in return, and quite right of her.

I am under no illusions that this is not a character flaw. The entire reason The Infinity War is a tentpole is that when I moved to Newtown, the latest fad was the first series of Marvel Universe trading cards - the set where Arthur Adams and a young Mark Bagley, among others, do their damnedest to draw like George Perez. Being wholly incapable of any strategy for social integration beyond obsessive knowledge, I proceeded to get into Marvel cards, along with Marvel comics, and, with minimal effort, blew completely past all lines of actual social chic into pathetic nerdery as Marvel cards went out of style. Thankfully, I actually liked Marvel comics, so this was not a particularly high cost investment.

The technique, of course, is the nerd equivalent to the spoiled kid whose mother simply buys him whatever the cool thing of the moment is - a phenomenon I encountered with staggering efficiency a few years later when I went to a trading card store with a friend and watched in shock as he proceeded to buy hundreds of dollars of Magic: The Gathering cards. Given that my mother was, as I've already mentioned, no slouch in the strategic retailing world, the sudden realization that it was possible to be beaten at my current geeky hobby not by virtue of actual skill but purely by virtue of the size of one's allowance was, to say the least, a bit of a downer.

But it is worth zeroing in on exactly why I had this character flaw (eventually reverse engineered by realizing that a token amount of effort in learning to be effective at social niceties was both wholly within my MO and a bloody good idea). The Magic: The Gathering anecdote is strong evidence here. The central feature of my geeky completist approach to life (And seriously, knowing me at age ten makes the existence of this blog as obvious as can be) is that knowledge was a matter of skill. I could know more about Marvel superheroes, Magic: The Gathering, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or, in my more spectacularly useless move, Doctor Who than anybody else. And I understood implicitly that this was a matter of skill. That in a measurable sense, I could be better than other people.

I have a vague sense that "normal" people encounter this phenomenon via sports. The obvious problem with this is in the word normal, which by definition has trouble applying to people who are good at something, "good" generally being definable precisely because of its departure from the mean. But obvious problems have never stopped the patriarchal march of society before, so it's probably optimistic to hope that they might wake up and give it the old college try on this issue. Instead we have the form of institutionalized torture recognized as gym class. I will be the first to recognize that instilling kids with healthy living habits such as nutritious eating and exercise is a noble goal. What I am more skeptical of is the proposition that dodgeball is remotely useful for this task. And I say that as someone who was reasonably good at dodgeball, given that its basic skill - avoiding overt efforts at violence towards you - was one I practiced more or less constantly through the school day. (In point of fact, of course, Dodgeball is the very definition of bad game design. It is a game played virtually exclusively at the elementary and middle school levels, where the primary goal of sports is to cause kids to engage in physical activity. Given this, a game that rapidly eliminates the less fit players and makes them stand impatiently on the sidelines is possibly the biggest pile of steaming failure ever to become an institutional fixture since *insert punchline here*.)

I have spoken before of my intense desire to maintain the sensible line between those who were good at sports and those who were good at video games. This line is oddly reinforced by games like Gold Medal Challenge '92, a button mashing track and field game from Capcom in the style of the more famous Track and Field 2 from Konami. Gold Medal Challenge, which goes aboslutely as far as it is legally possible to go to pretend to be an actual Olympics game without actually paying the IOC money. The genre of game relies on modeling sports via the experience of rapidly trying to mash the A button at as high a speed as possible.

These games have what is either a staggering flaw or a transcendent virtue. Which one you view it as comes down entirely to whether you're actually trying to enjoy the games as fun, or whether you are a mildly sociopathic existentialist. The thing about these games, you see, is that they are completely impossible. Even fewer people are actually physically capable of the level of fast button pushing necessary than have gotten anything worthwhile out of playing dodgeball. On the surface, this seems like it is clearly a problem, in that it renders the games functionally unplayable. But given the existence of a sports/video game divide, an unplayable video game about sports is, if you are completely and utterly insane, quite nice.

The only trouble is that it was an Olympics game. The Olympics, after all, are the sporting event that even pathetic nerds can safely enjoy. Given that it has no sports of any social prestige to a nine year old American, it can be watched and enjoyed without any of the pesky expectations that come with watching, say, American Football, where one feels a vague sense of obligation to, for instance, understand the rules. (It is worth noting that, in terms of complexity of rules and amount of the game in which absolutely nothing happens, football is far more like cricket than Americans would like to pretend.) The 1992 Olympics, however, remain the high nerd watermark, because that was the year of the Olympic Triplecast.

The Olympic Triplecast was one of those tragically ahead of its time ideas. NBC reasoned that the rise of cable meant that people would pay a bunch of money ($95-170) for three cable channels for the duration of the Olympic Games that would show all events live and without irritating touchy-feely features about the athletes. The service was a legendary flop that has kept any similar service from being offered in future Olympics even though they're now the complete norm for other sports. Needless to say, my mother ordered it in a heartbeat. The thing about the Triplecast was that it was a flop for being ahead of its time, not because it didn't work. It worked brilliantly. It was the one year I actually followed the Olympics. I made detailed study of the scheduling tables and what would be on when, and made a detailed schedule of everything I would watch, then promptly ignored it and played video games when I realized that, actually, swimming was boring.

These were the summers where our swimming pool was oft-used (these days it's mostly the dog in there), our air conditioning was non-existent, and summer camp was a thing. Mine were usually in the vein of drama camp, failed stabs at craft camps, and, in one memorable disaster leaving me with an ankle with chronic tendon problems and a tendency to twist out from under me, track and field camp. These were the days when my grandmother made me french toast every Saturday morning, I grudgingly went to church every Sunday morning, grudgingly then because it was boring. Later grudgingly because of an intense and visceral rejection of a god who considered being bored for an hour a week to be necessary in order to avoid eternal torment. Still later I would realize that the Catholic notion of salvation is miles weirder than that, sparking an ongoing quest to see just how far from being Catholic I can manage to be without quite tripping the "going to hell" alarm just in case I have another relapse.

These were also the time my grandfather was going to church. I'm not sure anyone quite knows why he had a late-life religious revival. And so we circle back to the unsettling flip side of this entire time period, which is that I spent, for no particularly good reason, my entire childhood afraid of my grandfather. There is no good reason for this. I cannot stress this enough. In hindsight, I realize he was an intensely loving man who adored me. But staring at each other from opposite ends of the twentieth century, there was simply no way to communicate that for either of us.

I was still years away from understanding the reasons I was bored in church, and thus to comprehending a reason why they made me go that didn't involve them being in some fundamental sense objects of fear. But I was well past the point where I couldn't stop trying to understand why I had to be there. Boredom was a problem like social interaction, and the only hammer I understood was trying to outsmart it. The cultural divide - the fact that they were simply, unlike me, not people with a fundamental mistrust of authority because of the growing suspicion that authority just meant that you had to do things even though they didn't seem like the right things to do.

And where my grandmother was in some sense comprehensible - we spoke the shared language of baked goods such that I could translate a given piece of booger cake into "I am fundamentally unable to understand you but think you're pretty awesome," and she could translate my peering under her door on Saturday mornings to see when her light turned on so I could pounce in and get a time estimate on the french toast into "I really wish you'd shut up about the God thing, but I love you anyway" - my Grandfather and I lacked the common tongue in which to adequately communicate these essential concepts.

Well. There was golf. A sport my grandfather played with some avidness. My father even briefly picked it up, quitting after getting a hole in one and realizing that he had almost surely peaked. Golf was the thing I could understand about my grandfather. And so when I, in the basement of his house played with my Arnold Palmer putting set (a truly bizarre game with no visibly intelligent sense of audience in which you hit a miniaturized golf ball with a club held by a plastic Arnold Palmer who was at the head end of a golf club and controlled by a lever and string at the top of said club), this was in some sense an act of love.

The problem was that I was rubbish at it. No particular reason. Just sucked at it. It's not even a very physical sport, as things go. Didn't matter. I was complete shit. It's just another blind spot in my capabilities to be made up for via exhaustive knowledge in other areas. Like video games.

There are three golf games in the G section of the NES library. Nintendo's own 1984 Golf game, Atlus's 1991 Golf Grand Slam, and, pulled from the future of the alphabet, Virgin Games's 1992 Greg Norman's Power Golf. Greg Norman's Power Golf is the easiest to deal with because, hey, glitch game. Apparently it's an early example of procedural gaming, generating a custom course with each play. So that's cool. Or would be if I could play it. Golf Grand Slam is a golf-lover's game, with a play mechanic dependent on hitting the ball in the right place on the ball as a dot moves around it. And Golf is a nice, classic Nintendo simple game about timing power meters.

I suck at all of them. That's just how I roll when it comes to golf, it seems. The incompetence is deeply seated. I can understand the games intellectually. I can see the way they are structured with narrow corridors of successful actions with penalties for going out of the ideal path, and, perhaps more importantly, a low prospect of recovery. Thus games tend to either be outrageously successful (wholly on the success corridor) or outrageously fail-tastic. Which, actually, sounds not dissimilar to golf as I experienced it from my miniaturized perspective. And with this knowledge, as with so much else of adult life, there is finally a language for the misunderstandings of childhood to be spoken. The sense that the unknowable and thus scary figure of my grandfather could be known, that I could now talk to him, and that in some sense we could communicate what we both already knew.

But there is no shared language with the dead.

Dialectical Radioactive Lizards (Godzilla: Monster of Monsers, Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters)

Thesis

Antithesis

Synthesis

To get a sense of how gobsmackingly weird Ishiro Honda's 1954 film Gojira is, you would have to imagine an American film released in 2010 in which Islamic terrorists summon a djinn who then rampages through New York City, including lots of shots of devastation. You may be thinking Cloverfield here, but that misses the point. Gojira is not remarkable just because it was instrumental in creating the genre of the disaster film. It's remarkable because the source of the disaster - nuclear explosions - is the same thing that already destroyed two Japanese cities nine years earlier. Cloverfield was just a return to the great American passtime of watching New York explode. Gojira is explicitly recreating a disaster, not in some half-assed metaphorical way, but in a literal "absolutely everybody with a brain cell sees what you're doing there" way, and then taking pleasure in the disaster. Except even that doesn't quite cover it. To really nail down the metaphor, what you'd need is an American film released in 2010 in which a djinn destroys New York that is then followed by a lengthy franchise in which the djinn fights other creatures from Arabian mythology and steadily turns into a hero character.

So to note that Toho's two Godzilla games for the NES are really weird seems almost unnecessary, given the sheer depth of weird that the character brings to the table. A far more alarming start would have been "Toho's two Godzilla games are bog-standard NES games."

What do we expect from our second tier of games? This is an important question, given that it's 105 games from here to Legend of Zelda, in which the highlights are Gradius, Adventure Island, Kirby, and Kid Icarus. Not that any of those are bad games, but they are by and large not the absolute tentpoles of the NES era. Rather, we are making our way through the great ordinary - the banal day-to-day of the NES. This can be, at times, exasperating. Indeed, after that entry, a commenter expressed concern for my ability to finish this project, and suggested I take a break. But as kind as that suggestion was, it misses the point - the turgid slog of generic and pointless video games with no meaningful bearing on humanity is part of the Nintendo Project. And if the Nintendo Project thus becomes an exercise in self-abuse, well, at least it's only a two-day-a-week exercise. 

The games are not bad. Perhaps short of good, but intriguing nevertheless. The first game, Monster of Monsters, is a turn-based strategy game alternating with button-mashing monster-fighting. Set in that classic NES date, 2XXX, when Planet X declares war on Earth, (The appearance of Planet X is, it seems, related to the crossing of Neptune and Pluto, suggesting that the year is one of 2227, 2475, 2723, or 2971. So not really a rousing success at hiding the date there.) you control Godzilla and Mothra as they fight off waves of other monsters, oddly generally ones that are native to Earth, to defend the solar system.

The second game abandons the action sequences of the first game in favor of a pure turn-based strategy game in which you control military forces trying to destroy Godzilla. Less flashy, but considerably deeper, the game is surprisingly strategic and technical for a game that is about a giant lizard with atomic breath.

But what are expectations of this tier of game? What does it mean to exceed or differ from expectations when no meaningful expectations exist? Below the tier of games that are the big ticket, unquestionable classics - those major cities in our psychic maps of our childhoods, there is this larger tier of ballast, the broad foundation forming the landmasses upon which we rest. But what does it mean to pick a signal out of what was intended as undifferentiated background noise? 

The games sit at an intersection of several well-developed themes in this blog. The foreignness of Japanese culture (from which Godzilla was, ultimately, co-opted) pushes against this game oddly. Made by the Japanese company that owns the rights to Gojira, the game sits orthogonally to the main thrust of the NES. Toho's game division has a couple of other games to their name, but they are hardly big hits - in fact, they're absolutely terrible. But more to the point, this is a Japanese company releasing games featuring Japanese movie icons. That the games got ported to America is an anomaly, making them games that seem to resist engagement or contextualization.

As do most unimportant games, surely. That's why they're mere background noise - lacking any ways to integrate themselves in the larger geography of this mental space, they cannot be engaged in except inasmuch as they fill up the space in the games drawer left vacant by the fact that there are only six Mega Man games, and really only four of them worth playing. 

But on the other hand, there is something genuine to these games - a memorable eccentricity that is lacking in a "better" game. For one thing, who actually played all of the classics? For every Super Mario Bros I played, there were far more Milon's Secret Castles and Rygars. I know a game like Gradius or Kid Icarus from Nintendo Power telling me it was a classic game, not because I know a damn thing about them. It is not as though these games were unplayed - merely that they lacked a culturally imperialist paratext that told us what we were doing when we played them, leaving them as the actual experience of the Nintendo era.

And yet, as with every other game, you are left with little but either a limp attempt to defend their playability or a mildly amusing critique of the games, not that you've had a new amusing way to describe ropey controls and dodgy hit detection in the last four months. So these are the lived experience of the Nintendo generation. It's not your experience, and the entire idea you've just developed - that the classic games are the ones with a shared cultural experience that tells us what we have in common - undermines the entire idea of talking about  the games.

Shush up, you egotistical right-justified interlocutor. If the point of this blog were to reflect primarily on known shared cultural experience, there would be no point of the blog. The entire idea of psychchronography is that we are mapping the spaces between what we "all know." So the fact of the matter is that it does matter here, far more than it will on a classic game, that we figure out what this game is.

But if the answer is just "inscrutable," you've done nothing. You've done the literary equivalent of Family Guy style humor - hey, do you remember that thing? *rimshot* So there's a Godzilla game. If it's inscrutable and foreign, it's ultimately wholly pointless. You may as well just say that "giant lizards are awesome" and call it a day. 

Giant lizards are awesome.

Come On You Pixels (Goal!, Goal! Two)

Fifteen to the hour in Barcelona and the twenty-two men comprising the first teams of FC Barcelona and Real Madrid CF are glaring down an immaculately coiffed stretch of grass at each other as the second half of their semi-final match in the UEFA Champions League kicks off in a spirit that can only be described as "mind-wrenchingly hostile," a state of affairs that doubles as a description of every other match in recent memory between these two clubs. Holding the dubious honor of being the only major sports rivalry in the world to have had a civil war fought between the two sets of fans, El Clasico serves as a biannual re-enactment of the Spanish Civil War, though thankfully toned down from the days of 1936 when Franco's forces kidnapped and murdered Barcelona's club President, Josep Sunyol, and two years later, the Barcelona grounds and club offices were bombed by the Italian airforce. Things have toned down since then, and nowadays players like Luis Figo, who switched from Barcelona to Real Madrid in 2000 and, when he returned to Camp Nou playing for Real Madrid, had a pig's head thrown at him.

Figo was just following the path tread by Alfredo Di Stefano, whose transfer to Spain was hotly contested between Barcelona and Real Madrid, who managed, improbably, to both sign him, forcing FIFA to enforce a bizarre timeshare agreement where Madrid and Barcelona would each get him in alternate seasons. At least, until the Franco-appointed Barcelona club president decided they didn't need the legendarily good Argentinian player, and they'd let Madrid have him.

Di Stefano, sadly, never really played much for his native country, switching to Spain for his short international career, and never making it in the World Cup. Which means he never got to participate in the second most heated sports rivalry, the Argentina/England rivalry, which, in the immediate aftermath of the Falklands War, served as a proxy when Diego Maradona, one of the game's best players ever, managed to in one match score both one of the greatest goals in the history of the game and a flagrant handball of a goal he described as "un poco con la cabeza de Maradona y otro poco con la mano de Dios."

As an England fan, the latter incident is the key one. Not that, as an England fan, I can persuade myself it would have mattered. England, unable to win a damn thing since 1966, are a masochist's football team, one you watch for the glorious spectacle of seeing eleven of the best players in the world faff about on a stretch of grass as though they've been watching 80s Cybermen episodes of Doctor Who in lieu of actual football matches to train, and are this committed mostly to a turgid and ineffectual march punctuated by periodic falling down or, occasionally, bursting into flames.

Still, it's better than rooting for my native country, who are so wretched at the sport they can't even get the fucking name right. This still puts them ahead of Japan in 1988, who, fourteen years before they would co-host the tournament, managed to produce Goal! for the NES, a puzzling rendition of football in which the game is divided into two fifteen minute halves with a clock that counts down. This is still better than Goal 2, in 1992, which asserts the existence of a US football league, which is puzzling given that NASL had disbanded some eight years prior.

Like any 1980s sports game, playing them now is a bizarre experience. The passing mechanics of both games are arcane beasts that make the basic strategy of "pass the ball" more than a little tricky. Still, inasmuch as one plays the games with a growing sense of rage and frustration, it captures the boil of emotions characterizing the inside of a football stadium during a game. The raucous celebrations of the winning team, or, more often for England fans at least, the agonized anger of the losing side, always defeated not by the opposing team but by the ref, or, on a truly wretched day, by ourselves.

Without it, how would we engage in that age-old football fan practice of demanding that the manager be sacked and our star players be sold and replaced with other people's star players or our own mediocre players. Which brings us to Liverpool fandom, or at least, does for as long as one can talk about Liverpool as a team without simply beginning to drink heavily.

Liverpool, you see, are lions of the game. Still the most successful club in English history, the fact of the matter is that Liverpool can beat any team in the world. The only trouble is, they can also lose to any team in the world, and pick that latter option with frustrating regularity, making them by far the best team in sports to languish midtable accomplishing nothing. But merely sucking is not sufficient to explain the glories of Anfield. No, no. We are capable of far more than merely losing games. We are also gifted at, once a season, like clockwork, going into a lengthy tailspin of turgid 0-0 draws in which, no matter the team, we are unable to do anything remotely good. It's not even that we lose. If we lost, we could at least, in theory, lose to a team that plays well. No, our ability is far more nefarious - the ability to completely drain all style, fun, and beauty out of a game in favor of a sort of raw physicality that is as memorable for its complete lack of utility as it is for its prowess.

But this captures the heart of English football, which longs constantly for the good old days of the sport (generally the days long before anyone currently watching was alive and from which no recordings of games exist) when the game was eleven thundering brutes of men who would go out onto the pitch and kick each other and, when necessary, the ball. Those halcyon days where the game amounted to good old-fashioned brutality, when you could properly tell a player "Oh shut up and play, you still have one leg that isn't broken."

It's only when those annoying, fiddly tactics came into it that the game started to turn to shit. Nowadays it's all money and details, taking away from the simple fun of bone-shattering kicks. Not bone-shattering tackles. Just good, proper kicks, preferably in the face, chest, or genital area. And the misery of constant defeat. Dump it into a blender and whip up a glorious protein shake of homoeroticism.

And in this regard, Goal! and Goal! Two have an odd appropriateness. Clumsy, endlessly frustrating, and ugly, it is unquestionably my beautiful game.

In which something finally snaps (Gilligan's Island)

The observation that no man is an island, aside from being only slightly more obvious than the fact that no man is a rutabaga, serves to overlook the simple fact that...

Oh, fuck it. What am I doing here? I mean, really, what has my life come to that I'm trying to come up with anything remotely intelligent to blog about the fucking Gilligan's Island NES game? I mean, what sort of pathetic and self-important ass would I have to be to suggest that there is anything remotely worthwhile to be said about this festering pile of digital feces? There isn't. The very suggestion that this game in any way matters to humanity - that it is even theoretically possible that this game has some larger metaphorical significance - seems mostly like a crushingly rude snub on humanity.

It is not that Gilligan's Island is an unusually bad game. I mean, it's absolutely wretched, but let's face it, wretched is the norm on the NES. That's part of the reason the theme of this blog is rapidly developing into "crushing misery." Well, that any my growing realization that a PhD in English actually makes me functionally unemployable and that, given the general state of things, I will probably die penniless of a treatable illness in the richest country in the world. But don't worry. Mostly it's just that NES games really suck. I wouldn't want you to think I have a warped set of priorities or anything.

Rather, it's that Gilligan's Island flaunts its complete lack of effort like no game I have ever seen. Through and through, in every last aspect of the game, whether it be the repetitive "sitcom dialogue" apparently written by writers fired from Joanie Loves Chachi for being insufficiently funny (and let's face it, who knew such a thing existed), the clunky controls, the shit AI, or the fact that it's a fucking Gilligan's Island game, despite the fact that absolutely nobody in the world was clamoring for such a thing.

I mean, there's a famous story of market research that says that the electric knife was almost not brought to market because research showed that nobody would actually use one. Until someone noticed that, although nobody wanted one, tons of people would buy them as gifts for other people. And so, despite the fact that there was no actual demand for the product, the electric knife was launched.

But that somber indictment of capitalism seems like an Edible Arrangement compared to Gilligan's Island, the NES game. Gilligan's Island, off the air for twenty-two years at the time of the game's release, was hardly the model of a property beloved by youth and college kids with disposable incomes. Nor is "Oh bugger we're stuck on an island and bloody incompetent" the image of an exciting action game. Even Dallas would be better - characters clearly have extra lives, and you can at least shoot JR.

And so it's not that the game isn't good. It's that the game, in all its stultifying wretchedness, is actually every bit as good as it has to be to satisfy its design and purpose. It's that the game knows full well that it doesn't have to try, and thus doesn't try. It is a game made out of sheer disdain for its players and its audience, a lame cash grab for the bargain bins marketed to parents who will remember the show and not know better.

And, I mean, we should hardly be surprised. One's heart sinks the moment "Bandai" appears on the screen, given that Bandai's video game division basically spent the NES years releasing an unrelenting torrent of shit upon the world. Their games list is a fucking who's who of games I've previously complained about - Frankenstein: The Monster Returns, Chubby Cherub, Dick Tracy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde... the list does not just go on, it goes on while actively torturing dark recesses of my brain with searing memories of playing this shit for half an hour at a stretch. Bandai is, let's face it, a company that exists, at least in NES terms, for the sole and express purpose of releasing crappy games. Actively. As a matter of policy, they clearly prefer to cheaply release shit than work to give the player a remotely entertaining experience.

And in the end, there's no metaphor here. There's no deep secret mystery that unlocks my childhood or anyone else's. There's just dodgy controls, stupid licenses, and pointless video games, and the sense that as an eight year old, I was being financially exploited by late capitalism.

So fuck it. I have nothing left on this one. Tomorrow is another game. Well, Tuesday. Tomorrow is another episode of Doctor Who, which is guaranteed to be better than this game. I can't even be bothered to fire it up again to get a screenshot. Screw it. Let's just slap the crappy box art up at the top of the entry and call it a day.

Meh.

An Imaginary Lithuanian Hero (GI Joe, GI Joe: The Atlantis Factor)

I remember vividly and guiltily how, in the lead up to the Gulf War, I longed for war. It was natural. A view of history that treated war as the interesting bits, reinforced by a view of mass media that taught me that wars were where fun things like cartoons and video games happened meant that by 1990, at the age of 8, I was positively bitter that my life had dragged on without a proper war to keep things interesting.

The viewpoint is, like so much of being eight, barbaric in hindsight. It is not quite bloodlust, but rather a sort of blood blindness - the complete failure to recognize war as something other than the skeleton upon which a textbook is draped.

Despite this, growing up, I avoided the Scylla and Charybdis of gender roles, eschewing both Matell's pink offerings and Hasbro's GI Joe line. It is not that I was not properly socialized into the commodity fetishism of cartoon voodoo dolls, but mine were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and He-Man (and even then, my previously stated disdain for my gender showed - I much preferred She-Ra, and searched long and hard for an April O'Neil figure). GI Joe always seemed vaguely alarming to me.

Part of this is perhaps the marketing. Little appeals to me less than the prospect of real American heroes. Nationalism has never been a comfortable ideology for me. There are articulable reasons for this, but those are mostly the products of a 28-year-old liberal coming to terms with a sense he has always had. At the end of the day, my sense is rather that nobody ever got around to making a compelling case for the greatness of America, instead leaving the world to make its unsettling case against us.

I am not anti-American so much as more or less neutral American. Given the choice between loving it or leaving it, I opt mostly to bet that whoever is shouting that at me is not actually going to pop back around in a few and see if I cleared out. I neither love it nor dislike it with sufficient passage to make departure a priority. (Yet. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't seriously considering fleeing for a place with a health care system.) The result is a sense of anti-patriotism that is mostly perfectly willing to sulk in relative silence, but every once in a while comes face to face with loud nationalism and is compelled to make bitchy comments.

But I'm straying too far forward here. At the age of eight, the calculus was far simpler. Advertising something as a real American hero meant nothing to me. No, that's not quite it either. It meant something to me, but what it meant was unsettlingly and indistinctly sinister. Too much of the phrase seemed over-earnest. Was there an excess of artificial American heroes? Was America somehow lacking in heroes compared to other countries? What about the phrase "real American hero" exactly was intended to signify, and what?

This dilemma seems to me the bread and butter of childhood, a period that it is more or less impossible to look back on without wondering how, exactly, anyone thought it was a good idea to simply turn us loose in a world of signifiers and media and expect us to find dry land. Without some explanation of the interplay between the real and the imaginary, and a firm sense of the geopolitical implications of American heroism as compared to the other hundred and ninety-four choices (fewer then, to be fair, as Eastern Europe was still fragmenting).

Although my instincts, as I said, were to circle warily around these signifiers, the nature of the Nintendo Project is that such evasion cannot last forever. Eventually it becomes necessary to confront the abandoned remnants of childhood. Eventually one must face a real American hero and decide for once and for all what it is.

Based purely on the 1991 and 1992 GI Joe video games, the answer is not much. Tedious run-and-guns of the most banal sort, inasmuch as these games seem to make any comment about American heroism it suggests that American heroism consists of the Protestant ethic as opposed to any thrilling bravado. If there were games to indoctrinate children into the foolish ideology of warmongering, this is hardly the game to do it with, making the Army of One an unappealing slog. I would do the games the basic courtesy of separating them into two paragraphs, but there's no real reason to do that - they're the same generic action game.

What is most striking about them, however, is their sense of the enemy. This is endemic to GI Joe, in which Real American Heroes are contrasted with nothing except for, tellingly, Cobra Command. I do not mean to be so megalomaniacal as to suggest that this organization was named for the concept I defined off of an unrelated video game, but if they were, they did a great job. As a fictional concept, Cobra Command is a staggeringly vague assemblage of concepts, basically being a paramilitary corporation. Although the temptation is to draw some sort of equivalence to Xe Services or something, the truth is that Cobra Command is altogether more ambiguous, a sort of lurking villainy happy to slot in and be evil in a given situation.

This sticky tack and string approach to villainy, in which there is not so much a set of principles and an ethos as there is a twirling moustache that will tie Pauline to the railroad tracks when called upon to do so, is a chilling reduction of the world that is enough to make one long for the Frankfurt School conspiracy theories of the culture industry. There, at least, there is some sense that the strings are being pulled in pursuit of some greater evil. The sense that one is opposed by something significant.

The world of GI Joe is far worse. A world in which heroism is a banal and rote opposition to a nebulously defined evil, where the wheels turn and the bullets fly without any larger interest being served. Looking back, we can see that the greatest sin of real American heroes is not blind patriotism, or any jingoistic brutality, but the far more banal evil of base nihilism. We do not fight because we must, nor because we can, nor even because we want to. Indeed, we do not fight because. We simply fight, real heroes that we aren't.

Strange Doors That We'd Never Close Again (Gargoyle's Quest II, Ghouls and Ghousts, Ghoul School)

A larger, more monolithic experience in video games than Ghosts n Goblins seems impossible to find. Surely one of the all-time classics of the NES era, the game is through and through brilliant. But playing it, it is strangely difficult to pin down why. Other than the music, an admittedly brilliant piece, there is some sense of futility here - a game with oddly clunky level design and oddly unfair enemies. But as with many classics, there is something else - some undefinable trace that nevertheless cannot be ignored or reduced out. There is no reason this game should be great, and yet, despite all of its flaws, it is. In the end, this turns into a paradox. The game is monstrously hard for a classic, far harder than any massively popular game seems to have any right to be. There is no reason why it should be beloved in a world where few can clear the second level. The game is sheer brutality, positioned in plain sight, and strangely accepted despite it. But this is, perhaps, an important lesson - monsters, in point of fact, rarely lurk.

All the same, a sense of ineffable fascination is necessary to the function of a monster. It is not that we must want to gaze upon the monster - in fact, it is in some sense essential that we wish the monster to be unseen. Rather, we must not want to look away from the monster. Whether it is an artfully rendered or stuck in a clumsy video game with pathetically bad graphics, we are compelled not to avert our eyes. This is the basic dynamic upon which the monster functions - we must want always a sort of stasis. Whether the monster is seen or unseen, we want first and foremost for it to stay that way.

An unnecessary redemption of a sequel, Gargoyle's Quest 2 manages the odd feat of being a completely unnecessary game that's still pretty good. On paper, it's a train wreck - a pseudo-RPG sequel to a classic arcade game that fuses light RPG elements with wall-jumping/gliding action gaming featuring the game's main villain as the protagonist. Even if any part of this works, the combination is so bloatedly unnecessary that something has to go wrong. And yet somehow it works, perhaps because it development appears to have been conducted with no second thoughts or hesitations, plowing gamely forward to produce a game that works in spite of itself.

For it to stay that way, of course, one must move. None of this is because you want it. You had what you wanted, before that damnable Red Arremer swooped down to take her. Your armor sitting there, mere feet away, crumbled in a post-coital heap as she was stolen. Now you have no choice but this endless forward march. No second thoughts or hesitations, compelled by lust or duty not to avert your eyes, you march on, up these horrific towers, pushing desperately for an unnecessary redemption.

In its loathsome form, the alien is eye and bubbling flesh. These are the monsters that make up the bulk of Imagineering's 1992 NES game Ghoul School. Imagineering was the in-house development studio of Absolute Entertainment, which means this is a game from the people who brought you the classic A Boy and His Blob. (Now there's an entry that merits a complete rewrite and expansion for an eventual ebook version of this blog) Which means about what you'd expect - pathetically bad graphics, incredibly clumsy controls, etc. Avoiding getting hit is a matter of dumb luck, with nothing to insulate you from your environment. And yet despite this, like A Boy and His Blob, there is a sense of ineffable fascination.

In spite of itself, the monster holds strange power. Inevitably disappointing as it may be, we cannot do without its visage. What is a hallway without the possibility of unknown footsteps behind you? What use are shadows that do not flicker in the corner of your eye? What use is the faint trace or echo if it is not a portent of far worse possibility? We depend on the gnawing knowledge that something has to go wrong, that in some gap or stammer, some repeated bit of data, some awful fiend shall emerge.

Its arrival is necessary, the inevitable culmination of a stretch of graves and zombies. Whipped aloft on leathery wings adapted to ride the thermals of this awful place, its fur burns a brilliant crimson that is not of this world. It is not the rusty thrush of blood, nor the rich purple of wine, nor even the incinerate glow of embers, but rather the heat of some other awful fire from a place mercifully far from here. Its hair crackles and pops, a million tongues of fire spasming across its skin. Even before the acrid stench and unholy glow can be seen, you know it is there. This fur is not designed to insulate this creature from its environment. Already the incandescence within its fell gut generates such heat that from the beast's mouth spits searing flames. Rather, this fur insulates the world, imprisoning the balefire in its loathsome form.

Monsters, in point of fact, rarely lurk, at least not unexpectedly. The entire reason a monster is scary is because it is expected. The monster is only scary if you know it is there. Where this turns into a paradox is that the presence of the monster drains its fear even as the inevitability of its arrival is necessary.

Some awful fiend shall emerge. That is the way these things always end. A stretch of mortal peril interrupted only by the emergence of larger mortal peril. This feebly armored life builds inexorably and constantly towards this inevitable end. And yet there is some sense of futility here. Some part of you knows that you are not the first nor the last to trod this ground. Or, a far worse possibility, that this is neither the first nor last time you yourself have trod this ground. That this entire affair is some ghastly encore, a repeat performance in an epic that will go on to rival Cats for sheer frustration. That even if you survive, it will all turn out to be some fiendish trap, a game within a game, your past performance a mere echo, disassembled out of any sensible order, if such a thing ever existed, embedded in a larger, more monolithic experience.

The Number You Are Calling Has Been Disconnected Due To Lack Of Payment (Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters II)

The essential premise of the film Ghostbusters, when you get down to it, is that three upper middle class academics have to slum it in a working class job like exterminators. Yes, it layers all sorts of wacky paranormal goofiness onto that, but at the end of the day, that's what it's about - the absurdity of working class paranormal experts. 

Class issues are perhaps the most overlooked aspect of video gaming. Reams of text exist on gender and video games. Smaller reams exist on race and video games. Very little exists on the issue of class and economics in video games.

Those approaches that do exist focus on things like Farmville. I'll take Jonathan Blow here, the creator of Braid, the best video game of the last decade. (The website fails to mention that Braid is also available from the Mac app store. This blog gets about 200 readers a day, so far as I can tell. I assume some of you have played Braid before, but if Braid does not get 150 purchases within the next 48 hours from you lot, you have done it wrong. Go buy Braid. If you like this blog, you will like the game. Period.) But in an interview with Gamasutra, Blow says:

It's about "How do we make something that looks cute and that projects positivity" -- but it actually makes people worry about it when they're away from the computer and drains attention from their everyday life and brings them back into the game. Which previous genres of game never did. And it's about, "How do we get players to exploit their friends in a mechanical way in order to progress?" And in that or exploiting their friends, they kind of turn them in to us and then we can monetize their relationships. And that's all those games are, basically.

In other words, and I think Blow is absolutely correct here, the point of Farmville is to treat the player's time as labor. Fun is given as a reward for investing sufficient amounts of labor into the game. The games thus work specifically by deferring the player's fun - by promising them that in the future they might get to have fun, just so long as they play more.

In a way, this is a regression towards the old arcade stimulus - insert a quarter to die again. But in practice it has merged with the equally disgusting trend towards "gamification," a word that cannot have enough scare quotes put on it. In the arcade mode, fun is dished out in increments. Skill allows you to buy fun more efficiently. But when you insert a quarter, you are definitely buying 25 cents of fun. But the gamification model removes fun from the occasion - instead, you invest your labor as labor and get a reward - victory. The point of Farmville is not that crop harvesting is fun, it's that crop harvesting is the labor you have to invest to get shinies.

(Yes, I am conflating social gaming and gamification. Why? Because they're the same fucking trend.)

But for all that Farmville is an extreme example, once you take the step of equating gameplay and labor, overt Marxism is difficult to avoid. With bad games, that's downright easy - it's next to impossible not to read something like Frankenstein: The Monster Returns as anything other than a game in which you experience endless misery for the arbitrary prize of "winning." But it's true of good games too. It's hilariously easy to read Gauntlet as a chilling parable of the underclass working themselves literally to death (as their lifeforce ticks away, they desperately try to eke out just a few more kills). Video gaming is a medium about class. That's why we don't talk about class - because the nature of the game is the exploitation of labor as a mechanism of producing more labor. You play a game to be taught to play more game.

What, then, do we make of Ghostbusters, a game adaptation of a movie that is already about the exploitative nature of labor under late capitalism? Well, let's start with Ghostbusters II, because it's by far the simpler angle. Ghostbusters II is a completely shitty game in which you flail about ineffectually platforming. Being a tie-in game, it exists mostly to prove that the ethical bankruptcy of Farmville is not a new phenomenon in video gaming, rather the existence of intelligent people like Jonathan Blow who believe that video gaming can and should be better and are willing to be vocal about it is a new phenomenon.

Ghostbusters II is a masterful piece of cynicism. On the back of a reasonably successful (due to being pretty darn good) licensed game and a new movie, Ghostbusters II is nothing more than an attempt to argue that your enjoyment of the film creates in you a moral obligation to buy and play a game regardless of its actual content. That is, after all, the central rhetoric of the licensed game - the content doesn't matter, because you buy the game on the basis of its branding. The gameplay is simply the labor you must endure in order to fulfill your existing contract formed only on the basis of your appreciation for the movie and previous games, i.e. fun that you have already paid for but that somehow was in excess of what you paid and thus amounts to a debt on your part.

Ghostbusters, on the other hand, is a supremely not-half-bad game, at least for half of it. (The concluding portion of the game, in which you climb Zuul's tower, is easily one of the worst gameplay mechanics ever, and unless you engage in some radically postmodernist reading in which the misery of this experience is a commentary on the relationship of the gamer and the product of his labor, you should simply ignore it as a trainwreck) But what is interesting about it is specifically that it is a good game that plays on a mechanic of labor.

See, the Ghostbusters have exactly the problem you'd expect them to have - they have virtually no money and still have to defend the city from a siege of ghosts. Even though the city direly needs them to solve its ghost problem, it's still going to charge them. Perhaps most ludicrously, there is an entire store dedicated to selling ghost catching supplies. The world is on the brink of ending, and they are still charging in a business-as-usual fashion. There is, in fact, a minimum $4000 investment to have even an abstract chance of helping the problem.

From there, you spend most of the game balancing cash flow - trying to catch enough ghosts so that you can actually afford to catch ghosts, while simultaneously trying to build up sufficient "savings" to buy the equipment needed to survive Zuul's Tower, which, of course, you won't. Perhaps most tellingly, Ghostbusters is the only game I am aware of in which the world can end because you were too poor to buy gas. In other words, the game is about the need to have sufficient quantities of money in order to play the game effectively.

Ghostbusters, then, is a rare game - a game that allegorizes labor and class, as opposed to simply using those concepts for the further exploitation of the player. There are better games, for sure. But there may well not be fairer ones.