From The Boss Dungeon Vaults: Doctor Who Series 8 First Impressions (Episode 1: Deep Breath)

(Hello! Long time no see, kids! Sorry, this isn't about Nintendo games. We're shifting gears to talk about old British people in magic space boxes for a bit. With Series 9 of Doctor Who looming over us, it's finally time I got to some archival business. A year ago or so at this time, when Series 8 was airing, I was given the opportunity to post First Impressions articles on a website called Boss Dungeon. Said website eventually went under due to a bunch of reasons, and though that's tragic, I'm still very grateful to its webmistress, Andrea Ritsu, for giving me the chance to talk about new Doctor Who as it was coming out! Though Boss Dungeon is gone, I still have all the writeups right here. What we're doing here is reposting them, mostly as they were... but the really fun part? I'm rewatching Series 8 again, right here and now, in anticipation of the next series. As we go along our archival journey, I'll be posting my current thoughts on these episodes. This is gonna be a thing. Alright, let's start with Deep Breath. A primer for anyone who doesn't know a thing about Doctor Who: this show is about a very old man with a big blue box that's bigger on the inside, and it can travel anywhere in time and space. He goes around time and space with ordinary humans, showing them the wonders of the universe and usually running away from scary monsters in the process. If he is mortally wounded, he can revive himself by changing his face and personality, becoming a totally different actor incarnation. That has just happened in the leadup to the first episode of Series 8, and the Doctor has just become Peter Capaldi. From there, this is what I thought in late August...)

New series. New opening. New Doctor. Once again, Doctor Who has changed everything by recasting its lead actor. After nine months of shivering with anticipation, the world got its first extended glimpse and glimmer of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. How was it?

It was okay.

Deep Breath invokes both the method used to avoid the monster of the week, and the average fan's nervous reaction as they dive in to the unknown depths of a new era of Doctor Who. Over 50 years, the show has done this song and dance several times before. It's a guaranteed part of being a Doctor Who fan; one day the lead actor you've grown to adore will suffer some mortal wound, and in a flash of bright light there will be some other fellow running around acting weird. Such is the concept of regeneration. That's the secret to Doctor Who's success, but with the birth of one era comes the death of another. Since 2010 we've had Matt Smith running around all of time and space as the Doctor, and now he's mostly gone. Let's try to make sense of this confusion, and take things objectively.

We're in Victorian London this week, and immediately we have a touch of the fantastic when we see a T-Rex walk on screen and roar. That's not a thing that belongs in Victorian London! Nor is a blue box, or a deranged alien with a Scottish accent. As far as I can tell, this is the first regeneration story Doctor Who has done that's set in the past. Really, the T-Rex is just a spectacle to raise eyebrows. The real threat of this episode involves scary clockwork robots who steal organs from people. Those of you with a keen memory of past Doctor Who stories will echo the Doctor here; there's something familiar about all of this. Writer Steven Moffat also adds in a "rule" for avoiding the scary robots; they can't see you if you hold your breath and move like a clockwork robot. Writing it out sounds silly, but it does create some tense scenes where characters struggle to hold their breath and walk past stationary clockwork half-people. It bears similarity to the infamous Weeping Angels, where they can't get you if you stare at them and don't blink. Turning automatic bodily responses into the only way to avoid getting killed by a monster makes things somewhat scary, though the clockwork robots have nothing on the Weeping Angels.

The Paternoster gang from the previous series return, giving this new and weird show starring Peter Capaldi a link to the previous show called Doctor Who that most viewers remember. They add a definite element of physical comedy to the episode that's well appreciated, for the most part. (There's one cartoonish sound effect that's a bit TOO silly, but we'll let that slide.) Their other role is, as stated, adding some familiarity to this strange show called Doctor Who. Part of the appeal of Doctor Who is the way it can use its open setting of travelling through time and space to create madcap ideas. Frankly, if you can't get excited about a show that has a scene where a Victorian lady and her lizard-woman-from-the-dawn-of-time wife fighting off clockwork half-people robots with swords, the show might not be your thing.

The crux of this episode, and the most important part, is the interaction between the new Doctor and his companion, Clara. At first, Clara seems incredibly put off by the fact that an old Scottish man is the Doctor now... even though from a series standpoint she should be aware of the concept of regeneration and the Doctor being mostly old people in his incarnations. Over the course of this episode, she's feisty and not afraid to talk back to the Doctor. It gives her a bit more character than she had before, and brings back memories of Donna Noble from just a few years ago. Good memories, too. The Doctor and Clara's new relationship is still up in the air, but as it is now it reminds me of the Sixth Doctor and Peri Brown, from way the hell back in 1985. Theirs was far more acerbic, however, so that's welcome.

As for the man himself, Peter Capaldi? Well, we have the old "post-regenerative crisis" malarkey wheeled out again, causing our leading man to act like a madman, babble on about things and misremember people's names, and spend a bunch of time passed out or wandering around London in his dressing gown. He appears to settle down by the midpoint of the episode, but he still has a bit of an angry spark (Scottishness?) to him. The only real sour note is when he appears to abandon Clara, running off and leaving her at threat from clockwork robots. He does return to save her, but dismisses her complaints of abandonment with a "sorry-not-sorry". The other possible odd moment is when it's left ambiguous as to whether or not he kills the villain. This one doesn't ruffle me as much because the whole "man who never would" angle doesn't hold much weight. He might have done it, and he might not have... but I can buy it either way.

All in all, this episode was okay. It wasn't a standout hit like the Eleventh Doctor's debut episode, but barring a few eyebrow-raising moments I can get behind this new Doctor/companion dynamic. There's a cute moment near the end that I won't spoil, and the possible seeding of a new season-long mystery. Now that makes me groan a little, because this is the third season in a row to have a "season-long mystery" that will probably just amount to a cryptic lady or phrase popping up over eleven episodes, and then the reveal near the end. Perhaps this one will actually seed clues as the show goes on instead of just teasing, but we'll see. It's not the best, but one can be excited for what's to come.


Next week: Daleks! How can you not be excited for new angry eyebrows Scottish Doctor vs. the Daleks?

AND NOW WHAT I THINK... NOW

(I'm gonna be writing these parts with hindsight and knowledge of how the series turns out, so... spoilers for the rest of the Series 8 episodes will probably crop up, as I compare stuff. Be warned.)

Hindsight is a hell of a thing. Now I know how Peter Capaldi turns out. Back when this aired, he was just some angry Scottish asshole and I wasn't sure if I liked him or not. It took a few episodes, but I was sold on him. I remember being bummed out at the time, though. The Eleventh Hour so solidly sold me on Smith, and Deep Breath just didn't do that for me with Capaldi. Doctor Who had changed, and I wasn't sure who the Doctor was any more. Much like Clara Oswald in this episode. Much ink has been spilled on the inconsistency of her being aware of different incarnations of the Doctor in the Series 7 finale... and yet being written here as if all of a sudden the Doctor has "totally changed". I'm gonna stake my territory here and say that nitpicking out inconsistencies and plot holes in Doctor Who is really boring and far too easy to do. I don't do it when I talk about Doctor Who. My friends often do. I guest star in Doctor Who review things a lot, because I'm part of a little group. Some of them are of this school of thought, and again, many deep breaths have been taken before launching into a tiny rant about how this or that don't make no sense and god damn it Moffat et cetera et cetera. So, that's boring to me. It's been done and I don't agree with it, but the Moffat era is basically Marmite at this point. You either love it or you hate it and want him to just move on to Sherlock full time. Or something. Here's what I think Moffat is doing with Deep Breath; he's playing the meta game. Not really tongue-in-cheek, but more self aware. There are little things and hints that suggest to this in the episode. Clara not being sure who the Doctor is any more? That's holding a mirror up to the audience. It's commentary on the assumed reaction of the public when these regenerations happen. Some people... a lot of people, are going to be unsure about it. I was! Rewatching it now, in hindsight, and remembering how I felt... that's the vibe I get. Meta-commentary on the audience not being so hot on Capaldi. Moffat is just the kind of clever TV-savvy fellow to attempt to pull such a trick, too. Then you have things where the Doctor doesn't get his own references. Ranting about his face looking familiar as a callback to Peter Capaldi's past roles in Doctor Who stuff, or the whole thing with the reveal of the villains being related to the villains from Moffat's Tennant-era story, Girl In The Fireplace... and the Doctor not connecting the dots there. The section of fandom who cares about lore consistency and the callbacks will get it and light up, but the 2000 year-old Time Lord doesn't remember.

And then, of course, that final scene. Not the one with the lady, but the one where Matt Smith calls up Clara and asks her really nicely to give this new guy a chance. The cynical among us will call this pandering to the fangirls, pleading and begging them to stay despite the fact that the Doctor isn't a good-looking twentysomething in pinstripes or a bow tie. The Doctor was never anyone's "boyfriend", and now we've gone back to how it was 40 years ago, like when he was your kooky uncle with the ridiculous scarf. Again, this is metacommentary, but it's the only part I have no real defense of. Matt Smith asking me to give the Doctor a chance didn't change my mind any. I was giving him a chance already, and Capaldi eventually proved himself over the series. It was unneeded, I think. Same with a lot of the gags and physical comedy and whatnot. It padded the episode out, and the only real chuckle I got out of it was Clara getting whapped in the face with a newspaper. That's base level humor, though. There's a fellow who goes by the name of Whoflix that does fan edits of the show, both classic and new. He cut Deep Breath down to about a 45 minute episode, and I thought it worked a lot better. Well. Deep Breath. We took the plunge, we kept the air in... and the episode is still okay. There are things that don't work, but on some level I can understand what Moffat was trying to do. As always, he was being clever with his narrative and how he expected the audience to perceive it. On other levels... it doesn't work. It's an okay episode, but that's the thing. A regeneration episode needs to really punch it in order to sell people on your new Doctor. The show, with rare exceptions, has faltered when it comes to this. The Eleventh Hour was a great intro to Matt Smith. Deep Breath left me unsure if I liked Capaldi or not, and it bummed me out. It honestly soured my mood a little. Then there's Missy. In hindsight, I'm not sure how her scheme is supposed to work if she's also nicking people from the future, and people who aren't even people but half-faced robots. Whose goddamn body is she going to put the half-faced man into in 2015? Now I'm getting into lore inconsistency. See? It's easy and kinda boring to do. The Moffat era, especially, doesn't quite stand up to this sort of "Whoniverse" critique. You end up picking at it and picking at it until nothing's left. I don't know how it makes sense, but given time my brain could think up some sort of explanation for how it could make sense. If one were to be optimistic, they'd say that Moffat is challenging you and making you think about the plot rather than just spelling it out... but that's a rabbit hole we won't jump into.

Instead, let's shrink down and go play inside a Dalek.

Press "B" To Blow (The 10NES Lockout Chip)

Every now and then, I like to pull my old NES out from its resting place in a drawer somewhere. I hook the bad boy up, and I get ready to play some Nintendo games. Then... the eternal struggle. You younger kids out there may have your own gripes with the fancy-schmancy technomancy of the future. Constant updates and patches, tutorials everywhere, et cetera. Don't worry. It's nothing new. Back in the NES days, it was a hassle to get the damn things to work. The struggle of physical media was real, and I feel like writing about what made the NES struggle what it was. I'll probably drench it in terms of a magical war based on my own invented mythology, too, because that's just what the Nintendo Project is or was or will be now. So, let's flap open those dusty old books about the material history, and see what we've got.

Oh. It's Atari's fault again. Of course.

Yeah, the Video Game Crash is why your Nintendo tapes are so goddamned hard to get to work. We've worn out this ley line a little, I'm afraid, but once more for old time's sakes. I mean, every so often I drag my NES out of retirement. Seems fitting we do the same for this line of history. The Atari years were a lawless frontier, and anyone and everyone was shilling out carts. Add to that the one-two punch of ET and Pac-Man, and you've got a disaster. I already yapped about ET a year ago when the AVGN movie came out, so I won't tread that ground again at least. Still, when you pair it with Pac-Man it reveals a certain arrogance going on at Atari HQ. ET will obviously be a hit for Christmas, so make that coder do it all in six weeks, quality be damned! That pales in comparison to the thought process of Pac-Man. Here they have the rights to the home conversion of a hot arcade title. It'll probably sell well! It will probably even move more Atari systems! Great! Let's produce more cartridges than Atari systems we've sold. Surprising many, the Atari Pac-Man was kind of a bad port and they were left just a bit overstocked. Thus, video game crash, Famicom is born in a land that doesn't exist, it crosses the boundaries that divide one world from another and here we are, Valya be praised.

It's that crossing over that I don't think we've talked about. To survive in a world where video games were dead, the Famicom had to adapt. Thus, the Trojan Horse gambit of ROB the Robot. See? It's not a video game! It's an interactive television toy, with a robot friend and a clicky gun! And you slip the fun tapes inside just like a VCR! That's where the first trouble came in. The weird insertion method of NES carts didn't really work right for sustained use. Connectors got bent from repeated insertion, and the communications were broken. The alchemy was imperfect, and thus instead of your colorful and fun gateway into an emboited space... you got a blue screen. So that's charming. Especially when paired with the other thing. Nintendo can't be faulted entirely for this. They didn't want a lawless dystopia where just anyone could huck out a Nintendo tape and oversaturate the market... so they embedded a lockout chip in their system. The 10NES chip. They may have gone too far with this, being general dragons to their licensees in the name of Lady Capitalism... but that's a whole other story. In practice, it didn't really work. Tinkerers like Tengen managed to get around the 10NES chip... and for us honest Nintendo fans, the 10NES created another problem for reading games. The connection issues would compound things, and sometimes they would confuse the 10NES chip. Thus, you could have a game that's connected right... but 10NES is active and resetting the console every second. Your game is unplayable. Pull it out and try again. At this point, between all the fiddling with connectors and 10NES, people ended up just blowing in the damn carts. I've no idea how that monomyth got started, but trust me; I know of it. Everyone knows of it.

These issues combined to make playing authentic Nintendo tapes a disaster for me. Entire swaths of games in my collection were avoided because the hassle to get them to work wasn't worth it. In particular, the nice Zelda carts I took pictures of for that gonzo post. They're beautiful artifacts, steeped in history and lore of dozens of kids playing and enjoying them before I stepped in and got them. They also didn't work. It was a shame. Then, a few years ago, a breakthrough. I went and bought myself a brand new 72 pin connector. You can see me testing it out on video here. The sheer catharsis of loading a Nintendo tape into the system and having it work first try is a joy that is rivalled by only a few things in this world. It worked great... for a handful of games. Things like the Zeldas or Startropics were still stubborn, however. I could jiggle around all I wanted, but the basic fact remained that the 10NES chip was in there and making the thing blink and preventing my readjustment techniques from working. The last straw came recently, while I was attempting to get a copy of Solar Jetman to work. Sitting in a far too warm room while this son of a bitch kept resetting on me? I was fed up. The next day, I took my NES apart, and I did some adjustment of my own. With a set of instructions and a tiny screwdriver, I plied back a single connector on Nintendo chip, designation 3193A IC. Otherwise known as the NES10. Oddly enough, given how much I've talked about Zelda here, the instructions felt like finding a secret in that game. Snap the 4th pin from the left off, and 10NES will be disabled, allowing you entry.

Well, I did it. I did it and now I'm pleased to say that just about every cart I have works with some minor fiddling. Some require more than others, but I got almost everything to work right. Maybe cleaning the carts themselves would make them all work, but I'm happy for now. I thought my copy of Zelda would never be played again, but I managed to get it working and it was glorious. The battery's still kind of doomed on it, but that's its own problem. Gaze, then, at the corpse of the great beast. This tiny little bit of circuit ruled the world for Nintendo. It kept the licensees at bay with its power. Tengen defied it and Nintendo struck them down for it. An entire generation huffed air into their Nintendo tapes, in the vain hope that they could best it. Now, I have defeated it, and it lays here on my desk, impossibly small. With its defeat, I have conquered even more strange alien worlds. Power Blade has fallen. Code Name Viper has completed his mission. I am a puzzle master with the dinosaur Yoshi.

Good game, 10NES. Good game.

A Tribute To Satoru Iwata

One of the great microchip alchemists of our time is dead. No. More than that. Satoru Iwata might have started as a tinkering programmer, weaving vast formulas and concepts throughout various experiences over the history of Nintendo. Then something else happened entirely. He became a businessman, the President. The face of this company that launched a thousand words about alchemy and Valya and destruction, a second-in-command to Lady Capitalism. Here, as Jim Sterling put it, was a man in charge of one of the most popular and powerful video game companies on this planet... and yet he was not afraid to have a little fun. To wear Luigi hats, to hold bananas on camera, to have a dancing Muppet of himself made in his absence. He was a fun man who livened up Nintendo Directs or E3 announcements... and his legacy will live on. Not just in the company that he helmed to massive profits, but in the games he worked on. Let's take stock in some of them, in tribute of him. Here are the ways in which Satoru Iwata, a tinkerer from Japan who I never met, changed my life for the better.

ARCANA

My cheat sheet says Iwata was a "technical advisor" on this one. I suppose that means that, as a HAL Laboratory employee, he oversaw other programmers and helped them crunch out difficult programming tricks. Arcana, then, is HAL's take on a dungeon crawler. It's very linear and it has its problems, but it was my first real introduction to the genre. Having a guide book with all the maps certainly helped, too. It isn't perfect, but I love it. I was going to suggest it for the next SnS Plays, which is where I also got the idea of playing The Final Fantasy Legend. Maybe we can still do it.

KIRBY'S ADVENTURE

Iwata produced this one, and a slew of other Kirby games. Kirby as a series just exudes charm... but this one? This is the finest moment that the NES had in its post-SNES days. It's beautiful, innovative, technically impressive... and then it also had to inspire the old Nintendo blog, huh? This, combined with two people getting engaged, are what really sent me tumbling into the Gonzo Age of the Nintendo blog, with the Goddess Valya lighting up the world with her grace. I paid tribute to the one source of inspiration in those engaged kids, and now that Iwata is gone, I am only now just paying tribute to another. Maybe, in some distant land in a 1993 long past, he came up with that cool spinning Butter Building trick. I'd like to believe that.

DONKEY KONG COUNTRY SERIES

Well, now I pay my proper respects. This is getting into Super Nintendo Project territory, but this is no magical exorcism. This is gratitude to a ghost. The Donkey Kong Country games were a cornerstone of my childhood. My SNES was packed in with the first game, and I remember Christmas morning... being WOWED by the amazing graphics being played on my television screen. After staring at Bayou Billy and Simon's Quest for five years, it was like looking at the face of God. It took me a week to beat it. That's nothing compared to what happened when the sequel came out. Donkey Kong Country 2 is a contender for my absolute favorite game of all time. Something about its platforming, its clever use of stage hazards, and its collectables being plentiful but not overwhelming sold me on it. Totally and completely. The third one... well, it's my least favorite. It's the start of Rareware being more obsessed with collecting all the things, and I never liked Kiddy Kong. Still, I had fun, and I got everything in that game in a pre-Internet world. Those three games are a solid series with its ups and downs, and Iwata was right there at the end of them all. Executive Producer. Thank you.

EARTHBOUND/POKEMON GOLD AND SILVER

The soul of Earthbound is the result of Shigesato Itoi. The chassis, the machine code body that the soul pilots? Iwata and friends. I have also lumped in Pokemon Gold/Silver here, because both of these are examples of how Iwata was a goddamned wizard when it came to programming. Legends say he worked out most of the kinks in Earthbound, and made the game actually work... to say nothing of Gold and Silver. Their big surprise claim to fame, the revisitation of the lands of Pokemon Red and Blue? That would not have been possible without Iwata coming in and creating elaborate compression algorithms. He made Johto compact, code-wise, so that Kanto could be slotted in. One of the secret joys of my childhood, and one of the hidden joys discovered via my days as a teenage ROM fiend. Iwata, behind the code of both. Wow.

I think that's all I need to say. Certainly, according to this page, he tinkered and worked on so many other things. Hell, he's even credited for working on the Famicom Mini port of Ghosts n Goblins. The man's even involved in one of my favorite hard game series. Dare I say that Iwata is a Nintendo god in his own modest way? He is the secret history, his name in the credits of many of Nintendo's greats. The threads of fate cross between Kirby, between Donkey Kong, between Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem and Star Fox and Mother and Yoshi. I could go on forever about all of the games he's worked on that have touched me personally... but it's here I leave Satoru Iwata to rest. In 55 years of life on planet Earth, you helped create computer video games that resonate with a billion video game players across the world. I can't thank you enough for it. I suppose I'll close by talking about Mother, since Shigesato Itoi posted a lovely farewell to you. Satoru Iwata did not work on Mother... but just a few weeks before he died, it finally arrived on our shores. Earthbound Beginnings exists now. I close with two things. Lyrics from Catherine Warwick... and this image of a rainbow over Nintendo HQ in Kyoto.

'Cause I still believe in miracles,
I swear I've seen a few.
And the time will surely come
When you can see my point of view.
I believe in second chances,
And that's why I believe in you!

Rest in peace, Mr. Iwata.

Ten Years Ago: Tales Of Symphonia

(Hi! This has nothing to do with NES, sorry! Instead it's me being an old nostalgic fart and thinking about things that happened ten years ago. Please enjoy me remembering old Gamecube RPGs. Thanks.)

I never got to beat Tales of Symphonia.

We are casting the net back quite a ways here. Wikipedia, which did not exist back in the time I'm thinking of, says that Tales of Symphonia came out over here in July 2004. I would have been on the Summer Works Program, doing odd jobs for my town council. Cutting down overgrowth around playgrounds on hot summer days, planting the first seeds of what would eventually become my NaNoWriMo winning empire. And, oh yes, playing multiplayer Gamecube games with my pals. There was Super Smash Bros Melee, which I always got creamed at but still enjoyed. Then came the glut of FPS games, which... I was even more terrible at. Those three other pals I played with, the crew, they were all army cadets. One of 'em even did join the army. They knew their way around the militaristic. I did not, and as such my soldier or my British secret agent was frequently headshotted. That's fine. I had yet to discover my latent talent as a Hard Game Beater, a Beast In The Shape Of A Man. That was fine. What I ended up becoming good at, or had the most fun with, rather, was Tales of Symphonia.

It would have been the end of my Summer Works when I first heard about it. That lovely lady who captivated my late nights on dial-up Internet mentioned it. Said it was awesome, as I recall. Who knows, it's ten years ago. The saga of me and that lovely lady spread on through the rest of 2004, but that has nary a lick to do with Symphonia. The holidays approach. I return on Christmas break, and now my friends have Symphonia. I see the final boss battle, without context. A translucent winged boy attempts to murder a party of four as they battle, a kinetic frenzy of rhythm, positioning, and panache. Game looks pretty cool. Matt made a good purchase here. It's not the last good purchase he'll make, either. Meanwhile, bad decisions have left me mighty high and stranded for most of 2005. Ding dong, the new year approaches and I am banished to the dark reaches of small-town Newfoundland. This is oddly cyclic, as the end of 2005 will lead to much the same thing. Again, that saga has naught to do with Tales. The upshot? Lots of time to spend playing video games with my pals, after their own school times are said and done. Most of it is spent on the weekends. The same fun times. Smash Bros. Shooter games. Card games, who could forget those? Then comes the decision to replay Tales of Symphonia, with the four of us. That's the exciting bit. It is an RPG where multiple folks can join in, a souped-up Secret of Mana for the Gamecube age. The PS2 may have a billion Japanese RPGs, but here and now? The Gamecube gets its best one.

I take my character selection. Matt is the leader, Lloyd Irving with his dual blades. Blazey takes on summoner Sheena. I forgot who our third pal took, but I went with Genis. The small child who casts the spells that makes the peoples fall down. I blame Brian Clevinger and his comics for turning me into a mage-lover when it comes to these sorts of games. Hurling all sorts of things arcane and elemental at your foes. What's not to like? I took to my role well. While the others rushed in, melee ready and hacking away with their Sonic Thrusts and Demon Fangs, I stood back. I charged and concentrated, and then unleashed my power. The rest of it, the out of battle exploration and plot twists and whatnot, I only watched unfold. The leader piloted Lloyd through all of that. I was only needed for battle, and I assisted in battle well. I liked this role. I liked being a support. I enjoyed watching the tale, and was eager to beat the game.

It never happened. Matt made another good purchase in the spring of 2005. Resident Evil 4. Another achievement for the Gamecube, sure. I remember watching the opening cutscene with them all. Everyone was amazed at how good it looked, but I scoffed that it was just pre-rendered. Then the game started, and it looked the same. You were playing a game that looked that good. Holy shit. We petrified poor Blazey. I got him to shoot the lake. Matt got him with the Regenetators. It was a game they all flocked to, and I loved to see...but it wasn't Tales of Symphonia. We never picked up our file again, and now it is lost to time. As good as Resident Evil 4 is, I am inclined to resent it a little for taking away the climax to the RPG for me. Ten years ago, we were playing a lovely little RPG that I enjoyed playing a passive role in. Survival horror came and took it away. What a shame.

If we look further ahead into the future, we see some fun things. Blazey getting me a copy of Resident Evil 4 for my birthday, once I owned my very own Gamecube. On a later visit to his new home, he spied a copy of Tales of Symphonia for 15 bucks. He snagged it first. I was inclined to be a bit envious at him for this, but only for a while. Matt returned home for Christmas, having sold all of his Gamecube collection for new hi-fidelity Xbox 360 things. All but one. "Merry Christmas", he said to me, handing me Tales of Symphonia. The same copy that we had played all those years ago, and now I own it. Tragically, though, I still have not beaten it. My passive magic skills are naught in single player. I lack the know-how to use Lloyd properly. The end of the game still eludes me. I eventually did get a sort of catharsis, however. Summer 2012. Over three weeks, the three of us were back again. On the Playstation 3 we went non-stop, playing Tales of Graces F. Me as Pascal, a lady with fabulous hair and magic power for days. We did it. We actually beat the damned thing. It was glorious, and it was fantastic... but it still wasn't Tales of Symphonia.

Maybe someday, I will get to beat it.

Sexy Fun With The Socks Make People Sexy Sockscast!

Before I started this blog space, I wrote plenty of words for a site called Socks Make People Sexy. During its heyday of regular guest-contributated content, I submitted god knows how many amateur wafflings about old video games and whatnot. For those who haven't seen those raw writings of mine, here you go. Not counting the multiple things I've written on their forums, some of which I've cross-posted over here. Others I haven't! That's not important right now. What is important is Socks Make People Sexy, curated by a lovely lady named Polly. She's run the site out of pocket for ten years now, and recently she began a biweekly podcast where her and two other regular SMPS members talk about video games they've played and other fun things they've partaken in! Sometimes they have guests on the "hamper seat", so to speak... and I got my chance to do so around two months ago. Sockscast Episode 14, with 3 hours or so of me with Polly and pals talkin' up video games.  It was an incredible time, to say the least.

Just last night, to celebrate 10 years of SMPS, Polly and friends hosted a live version of the Sockscast! 7 hours straight of podcasting, swapping in various guests for a half hour or so each to talk up whatever they liked and join in on the festivities. You can find the massive 7 hour audio files right over here.  I show up at around the 90 minute mark or so in part 1, and talk about my own history with the site while getting somewhat praised for writing esoteric Nintendo god mythology over here. Point is, the SMPS was an important turning point for me writing words on the Internet, and I cannot thank Polly enough for her grace in... gracing her own blogspace with my unfettered and unpolished words about how Mega Man 6 isn't all that good.

Here's to 10 more years of Sockscast, and here's to the Pitchfork that's prodded me about this blog that's really made me want to get back to writing for it.

The Super Nintendo Project

If you look up top at the header, you'll see the name Phil Sandifer. Phil is the very nice and smart man who started this Nintendo Project. He then put it on the back burner in favor of writing about Doctor Who, and then a magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, but also a lot of Game of Thrones or something? Hey, I can't harsh him for putting Nintendo game blogging on the back seat. I'm guilty of the same. Anyway, thanks to his Patreon, he's started something new which I feel obligated to link on this space since it's related to the mission statement of this place; The Super Nintendo Project.

His first entry is, of course, on Super Mario World. Rather than go through alphabetically, he's taking an approach that has snapshots of the history of the console and landmark games. This is smart because then he doesn't have to talk about 45 baseball and golf games. What's also notable is that, on social media and whatnot, he repeatedly describes the Super Nintendo Project as "a magical ritual to destroy Gamergate". Which, you know, I'm really curious to see how that pans out. In fact, I'm throwing whatever arcane power this cultivated blog space has into that bit of alchemical nonsense. Mr. Sandifer, you may consider the full power of Valya, Peko The Destructor, the Dread Beast GREED, Pure Platforming, and any other magical property I brought into being during my time on this blog to be part of your ritual. Use their power wisely, and boost the energies of your own liminal space.

For the rest of you, you can read the first post of the Super Nintendo Project right here. I do have a thing planned to write that is not about Nintendo games, but we'll see whenever I get around to it. Enjoy the ritual, and please begin your social justice paganist chanting now. 

Obscure Alchemy For Queen And Country (Rock Boshers DX: Director's Cut)

(It's the full disclosure fairy, again! The computer game I am about to write about was given to me by the #GamesMatter Twitter account. I got a game, and in exchange I get to write about how I liked it and whatnot. Really, I would have written about this game anyway. Because I had a thing or two to say, as you'll see. Let's get into it!)

You know something? NES nostalgia pieces may have run their course. It's odd of me to say that, considering the fact that this is the bloody Nintendo Project Resumed, but one gets tired of the same old same old. That being said, amazing things have been done with NES nostalgia. Amazing things, but also dark forces. I said as much when I talked about Shovel Knight way back when, but loving tributes to old video games are a sort of alchemy. You can get a perfect Philosopher's Stone like Shovel Knight, which expands and improves upon the formulae perfected over the life of a little grey toaster box... or the putrefaction that was the Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures. That one's a shambling homunculus, a Hyde prone to violent outbursts... and yet it gets away with it. SO REWARDING AND SO NINTENDO HARD, JUST LIKE THE GOOD OLD DAYS. Absolutely not, but this is not our intent. Our intent is to zoom the lens out, and ponder something. Why have we let the Nintendo  alchemists overwhelm this field of electronic equivalent exchange? Where are the Genesis madmen with their volatile blast processing vials? The patrons of the Master System and Game Gear, the little system that could? Show me some love for your Wonderswans, your Neo Geo Pockets, your Commodore 64s. Off the top of my head, there are two of these unconventional alchemical love letters to the obscure systems. The first is La-Mulana, a wildly successful homage to the MSX days in its original form. The re-release I have just replaces all the MSX tapes with laptop programs. Something has been lost. The second is what I finished playing a few days ago; Rock Boshers DX, from an alchemy outfit called Tikipod. Their goal? Bring back the ZX Spectrum.

In the 1980s, Japan was a hazy island that the video gaming children knew little about. In 1983 it produced a red and black box that became a grey box when it came to North America and took us all by storm. We know this song well. Over on another hazy island, one called the United Kingdom... a different sort of beast emerged. The ZX Spectrum, a decidedly low-tech but affordable computer machine. Seven colors, the minimum of graphics and sound, but with a "do-it-yourself" mentality that took the island by storm. One need only witness a program like Manic Miner to see the oddity of the Spectrum. The shrill and harsh digitized classical music, the simplistic platforming, the unforgiving nature... hell, England ate it up. I don't know why, seeing as I was not around for this, but it was a scene. The ZX Spectrum was popular, and it grew its following. Rareware, the fellows who would entertain my childhood and frustrate my adulthood, got their start on this thing. The Spectrum happened, and 30 years later Tikipod here have capitalized on it. Their alchemy, much like Shovel Knight's, takes the base and expands on it. At over 100 megabytes, it easily dwarfs an average Spectrum game. The point is that they did their best to remain faithful. It looks and sounds like a Spectrum game, even if I was playing it on a handheld that would have blown my mind 15 years ago, let alone 30. They take the formulae, and work with every trick in their playbook to make a fantastic evolution; the next new Spectrum game. Then they go further, and make things oddly fitting. It all begins with a faux Spectrum loading screen, but once that's done the real magic begins. The true power emerges, and here we are. It is 2015 and 1983 at once, and we are playing Rock Boshers DX.

At its core, Rock Boshers DX is a twin stick shooter. One moves with an analog stick, and fires in another. This created a problem, I must admit, on my Vita. The itty bitty analog sticks meant that shooting right or diagonally right was difficult. In the heat of the moment, this caused misfires and frustrations. Were I playing on PC, I get the feeling that this would be less of an issue... but I cast my lot with the Vita, and this is what I got. Let us focus more on what Rock Boshers is. It is a double 80's nostalgia piece. There is the obvious nostalgia for the 1980s and the Spectrum, but the game's setting is no less than the 1880s. You play as Queen Victoria, on a steampunk adventure to Mars to blast at turrets, tanks, and zombies in order to stop a man in a top hat from taking over the British Empire with his absolute power. So, we're at the very heart of alchemy itself, then. The iconography of the Victorian era, with its playable character as the namesake of that era, no less! These are the stakes we play for, and we play a difficult but mostly fair game. The action is fast-paced but also dangerous. Death can come quickly, and often. Still, one learns how to work. Shoot and move. Run in laps. Bait out homing missiles and equip new weapons to survive. Oh, and don't forget to take a break for tea and scones. They'll unlock things.

Of course, in the end, we cannot escape the gravity of those NES alchemists. I just learned about this. The Steam version has an option to play it in 8-bit console style mode. The NES formulas snuck into the brew somewhere down the line. Not on the Vita, as far as I can tell... and to be honest, I prefer it that way. We've had enough NES nostalgia, as I've said. There are steps in the alternate directions, beyond Rock Boshers DX. La-Mulana in its original form invokes the MSX. Games like John Thyer's Fugitive pull forth power from the original Game Boy. Daniel Linssen's Roguelight is a shade of red away from being a Game Boy game played on the Game Boy Color, in default palette. This is good, but I wish to see more. Invoke the Master System and Game Gear. Invoke the Neo Geo Pocket, the Wonderswan, the Commodore. Invoke everything obscure and unique that you can. Rock Boshers DX can be the first step to a larger world of reimagining nostalgia, if we allow it to be. We can observe the history of these consoles, find what made their core games tick, and then advance them for the modern age. It's 2015 and we have that power... so why not do it? Queen Victoria can. Why don't we?