31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 4 (Ghouls 'n Ghosts Sega Master System)

Well, we're back here again... but in a really weird way. You may wonder why I specifically am highlighting the Sega Master System version of this game. Personal resonance? Aesthetic goals? No no. I'm doing it because this version, this poor unloved little darling, may actually be one of the finer examples of its series. Yes. I said that. We do need to familiarize ourselves with the original version, however. Let's go and do that... now-ish. 1985's Ghosts n Goblins was, to put it mildly, a chaotic hell festival of hatred. (You can read more about said festival here if you like.) Luckily, it was an arcade machine and its hateful hellish nature combined with A+ aesthetic presentation made it a lot of quarters. 1988 saw a sequel, Ghouls n Ghosts. The original version of this game was quite a step up, and I'd call it one of the better games in the series. Mainly because it's shorter and gives you better control over the chaotic elements at play. Granted, it adds new ones... such as treasure chests. Hidden over all the levels are treasure chests you can find. Some have helpful items inside, like an armor upgrade or a weapon drop. Others (in fact like 80% of the fucking things, if we're being honest) have a shitty magician inside who will curse you. Gambling! How FUN. Other fun improvements that stuck with the series (but only sometimes) include being able to shoot in four directions, upgradeable armor which lets you charge your attack to do a magic attack depending on your weapon (but shatters just the same in one hit), and the second loop unlocking a super weapon called the Psycho Cannon which you need to have on your second go of the final level in order to reach the true final boss. The game even has a pretty faithful port on the Sega Genesis that definitely emulates the feel of the arcade; I'd call it the second-best Ghosts n Goblins game. All that is intro, however, to the Sega Master System version. This weird underdog port that came out for an underdog system... what's it do different?

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 3 (Stephen King's The Langoliers)

AURORA BOREALIS? At this time of day, at this time of year,
in this part of the country, LOCALIZED entirely within a Stephen
King miniseries???

You may be wondering "What? Why this?"as you look on the subject of today's writeup. Maybe you have familiarity with The Langoliers, and maybe you don't... but either way, it's a bit of a deep cut when I haven't ever covered something more popular. The Shining this is not... but beyond the simple answer of "it's my marathon", I've got justification. Personal history, if you will. Let's go back to the past for a moment, albeit the past of memory and not... whatever the hell is going on in this story. We are getting ahead of ourselves, though. Okay. It's 1995. I'm a kid and I'm spending the weekend with my parents up at our cabin in the woods. It's lovely, if not quiet and isolated. Playing around with other kids, heading out to the diner on the highway, going swimming in the river. You know. Fun. The important thing happens when we get home. My sister, who did not come along and instead opted to relax at home (BIG MOOD, now that I'm older, by the way), is watching something on TV. Wow, what is this? It looks kind of interesting. Then it goes to commercial and I see what it is. Stephen King's The Langoliers. This is, as I've gone into before, a source of primal fear for me. Thanks to some... shall we say choice encounters with horror at a young age, I was batshit terrified of Stephen King. But this? This didn't look so bad, and it stuck in my mind. Here's the weird thing. I know 2003 was the breakout time when I started reading King, thanks to the Dead Zone TV series that came out around that time. I also know, however, that the titular Langoliers were in my imagination sometime before then... and it had to be before 1998, because of the eras of my imagination. Sometime between that cabin return in 1995 and the new era of my imagination and storybuilding in 1998... I had to have sat down with those VHS recordings and watched The Langoliers. I wasn't even planning on covering it here and now, but the other night I just saw the book collection on the shelf, pulled it down... and got sucked right back in again. Well. Here we are at last. Let us talk about The Langoliers.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 2 (More Spooky Star Trek TNG Episodes)

Captain's blog, Stardate 74822.3. We are, as they say, "back at it again" with the Star Trek content on the blog. Two years ago I covered a trio of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes with spooky-aligned concepts and themes, and I now find myself back at that well once more. It was and is, of course, a meaningful series to me. Though I've spent thousands of words on Enterprise and blasted through a bunch of the original series in 2019, it's the Next Generation era we find ourselves analysing again. Most of them are from the later years of the show, again, because I guess someone had a thing for the spooky themes as the show went on. Of course, the exception is our first episode, a little number from the first season I'd like to talk about called...


1X25- CONSPIRACY

The short version: We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 1 (Resident Evil 4)

ZOMBIES COMIN' UP THE FRONT! SHOOT 'EM IN THE
HEAD! SHOOT 'EM IN THE HEAD!!!

Welcome to the SPOOKTACULAR October marathon here on the blog! Once again, because of complications of vacation, this is a ghostly post written well over a week before October actually begins. Look, I'm getting all my affairs in order before I go off and do absolutely nothing in isolation, okay? If we're being honest, this is even more of a haunting than usual. I didn't even play this thing here and now in preparation for this kickoff writeup. No, my playthrough of Resident Evil 4 happened in June. I didn't talk about it then, but now I'm in need of stuff for the marathon so you get to watch me squirm out a couple hundred words on the thing. It'll be fun, trust me. Much like the game is quite fun! Oops, gave the game away. Yeah, surprise surprise, one of the most critically acclaimed action horror games of the last 15 years which revolutionized the genre still holds up. What shock. I'll talk about in a moment, but first I want to talk about ghosts. Specifically the ghost of this game, the lingering wound it left with me for 14 years, and how playing it in June finally helped me heal from it.

Coming Fairly Soon: 31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection

Get it? 'Cause it's the fourth one, you see. "The fourth of what", you may be wondering, if you're new here. Why, the fourth installment of a spooky marathon in October, in which I write about spooky themed media every day for an entire month (and then go on to write NaNoWriMo in November. My pen doesn't stop from my birthday until the holiday season. Fall's a fun time, huh?) and generally have a good time about it. This being the fourth go-around, I'm hoping I can squeeze 31 posts about spooky things in. It could be a bit of a stretch, and I haven't gone and tallied up everything I may want to do yet... but I'll manage.

In the meantime, I'm reaching out to you, the community who reads this madness I'm somehow allowed to continue to do! I'll happily take suggestions and recommendations for things I should view/read/play/listen/what have you. As long as it doesn't take more than... oh, let's say 4 hours to experience (and books and stuff are subjective on that, I know, but we can take that case by case) then it should be fair game! My only other caveat is that the stuff be easily obtainable; for movies, at least, my platforms of choice are either Youtube Movies or Canadian Netflix. So, keep that in mind. With that, I can't think of anything else. Fire away with anything you may want to see me write about, and I'll see you in October for the spooky stuff!

Well, it'll probably be backlog stuff that I cram into scheduled posts for the first few days because of birthday vacation stuff, but it will go up. Eventually. Okay. See you on THE SPOOKY MONTH.

Silence Will Fail (Doctor Who: An Examination Of The Silence Arc)

We're right.

Well, it's been a whole half a year since I talked about Doctor Who over here. We continue on through the long dark hiatus of 2019, bits and pieces of new news coming out and being rumored about Series 12... but not too much to show for it. I had to do something to pass the time, so why not a loving revisit? That led me to grabbing the Matt Smith years boxset on DVD for cheap, a simple little jaunt back to an era I hadn't thought about that much (and a precursor to an era I did think about that much, but this is not a Capaldi years post). It took a bit longer than it should have, and I took a big break near the middle, but I finished it. Even before I finished the first Matt Smith series, though, I knew I wanted to write this. 

See, I hadn't actually revisited the Smith years before now and given them a whole lot of thought in hindsight. New critical mind and all that, given I write about this shit now. The Smith years, in retrospect, are Steven Moffat at his most puzzlebox arc-ish peak. They're also him expanding upon (as well as nesting) earlier concepts that worked well for him in the past. Those being River Song and non-linear storytelling. Events being told out of order. Consequences shown and their inciting incidents teased. This either infuriated you or fascinated you. I happened to be in the latter camp at the time, and enjoyed the wild ride of trying to figure out the mysteries laid out before me. Who are the Silence? What are the Fields Of Trenzalore and the Fall Of The Eleventh? These things kept me guessing all through the runtime of the show. I always envisioned the Fields Of Trenzalore as a grassy plain, myself, where a question would be asked of the Doctor in a massive standoff. Well. I got it all except for the season. Everything was wrapped up sufficiently enough for me at the end of 2013, but on this rewatch a new revelation hit me. One which I knew I had to write about, one which kept getting more and more evident as I saw those consequences play out all over again. One fundamental truth which changes everything about the Smith years in hindsight.


The Silence may be the biggest cosmic fuckups to grace the 50+ year history of Doctor Who.

Coming Sometime: Gotcha! A Brief Foray Into The History Of Masocore Games

So hey there. It's been quiet here since I finished talking about Enterprise. I've mostly been experiencing media that's neat, but not quite neat enough to devote essays to. Also actual real-world stuff. Also a few half-formed essays that didn't go anywhere but might be poked at in the future. Since I'd like to put something out there before Halloween, and this is on the mind, here it is. The reveal of one of the idea seeds growing in my head. This is, I suppose, an announcement for a project called Gotcha!. A Brief Foray Into The History Of Masocore Games. What's a masocore game? Well, the definition is broad and there's a lot of "I know it when I see it" in play, but generally it defines those games that are single screen challenges with infinite lives, where the obstacles are instant death and either laden all over the place or used as surprise traps to be memorized. Gotcha. See? Get it? This definition, of course, is nowhere near the specifics we're going to have to get into, but I want to leave the proper defining of masocore to the actual project itself when I work on it. That being said, we're going to be playing jazz with it a lot. This is nowhere near a definitive history of the genre, and it's also going to venture to territory that's not really masocore but that I feel fits the spirit of the project and the story I want to tell about the evolution of this game style.


Still, I may have overlooked something, so in announcing this I'm going to throw out my rough draft chapter list for you. That includes the things in the maybe pile. If you lovely readers out there notice some glaring omission that I'm a buffoon for not noticing, I would be thankful if you pointed it out for me here. Regardless, here's the general outline I have so far. All subject to change, of course, but these words you're reading are literally the first ones jotted down about the project. So the ball is still very much in the air. I hope you enjoy it, if and when it actually gets out there!


Gotcha! Chapter List: 

80's PC Grab Bag (Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, C64 Hercules)
Super Mario Bros. 2 (JP)
Takeshi's Challenge
NES Grab Bag (Contra, Mega Man 2, other formative and inspiring hard NES games)
Battletoads
SNES Grab Bag (I have no idea what will go here but I need something between 1991 and 2004)
The Big Adventure Of Owata's Life
I Wanna Be The Guy
Syoban Action
Kaizo Mario World
Dark Souls
Super Meat Boy
1001 Spikes
Battle Kid
AVGN Adventures/AVGN II
Celeste

The "maybe" pile:

Dragon's Lair
Jumper
Give Up Robot
VVVVVV
Bullet Phaze
Life Of Pixel
Mega Man 9/10