I thought that I would contribute to the historical record and shoot some fat, dead fish in a barrel with a new project. I always find it amusing to reminisce over the fuck-ups of the past, especially technology fuck ups.
I was browsing some of the now defunct video game systems on Wikipedia when I ran across a flop from the mid-nineties that I used to talk about and lust after when I was a kid. The 3DO looked promising on paper, until you read the price.
Looking at things now, jesus, what a piece of over-promised shit! And if that wasn’t enough, 3DO attempted to release another system, with even more hype than the first. This is a tech demo from a trade show, featuring the possible “next-gen” 3DO that never was released. It features a “Shooter” theme but it doesn’t represent a game, nor a realtime performance of the actual 3DO “M2″ hardware, but a fat, nutty wad of pre-rendered dogshit.
This is an other “tech demo” from the same show.
Who knows if it was running realtime or not. I guess they did need to back up their visuals with actual horsepower to sell their software back in the day like they do now. (snark)
All I remember being released for the original 3DO was demolition man, and though it looked sort of good (visually) compared to what was offered from Nintendo and Sega at the time, why the fuck would anyone pay for it? For $700 bucks at launch time they really could have served themselves better by putting a bullet in their heads. Instead, they suffer through a prolonged massacre at the hands of their competition, then decide to regroup for another ass fucking with the “M2″. By comparison, for expensive as the Neo Geo was, at least it had great games. It seems so clear now how fucked these guys were out of the gate. It’s a pity they got so far.
In an effort to saturate the Grounds with movie reviews, I’ve been combing the *ahem* libraries for some golden oldies. This time around, it’s George Romero’s Creepshow. I remember this movie from when I was a wee lad, and that it both intrigued me enough to watch it over and over again and that it scared the shit outta me. I’ll slice this review up to follow the serial nature of the movie, so follow along…minor spoilers ahead
Father’s Day
Not as creepy now as it once was. A group of smarmy republicans assemble every Father’s Day to honor their dead grandfather, who was rumored to have been killed by their mother with a marble ashtray because all the fucker did was bang on his chair with a heavy cane screaming and calling her Bitch all the time, complaining that they’re all just after his cash. If you ask me the fucker got what he deserved… In the end, it’s not as scary as it used to be. Satisfying though.
The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill
Stephen King (who wrote the stories) stars as a hillbilly’s hillbilly that finds a meteor on his land. Everything the meteor touches (or touches it in the case of King) begins to quickly overgrow with some eerie-ass grass…and not the smoking kind. While he begins to turn into a Chia Pet, he dreams about selling the meteor off to a local college to pay off his debts. More quirky than scary.
Something to Tide You Over
An old school tour de force, starring Leslie Neilsen and Ted Danson. Ted’s sleeping with Leslie’s wife, and Leslie wants revenge. Again, I can’t blame him. He’s got a strange CCTV fetish and a love for the tide. Probably my second favorite of the five serials.
The Crate
A couple of buddy professors secretly loath the ultra-controlling drunkass whore wife that one of them was unlucky enough to marry…to the point where the dumbass married to her daydreams about killing her. One day, a janitor at the college they teach at finds a crate hidden under a stairwell marked “Arctic Expedition, 1854″, all hell literally breaks loose. My favorite of the five stories.
They’re Creeping Up On You
EG Marshall is a particularly annoying SuperRepublican, living alone in a spartan apartment built to seal out pollution, germs and bugs. He obsesses about cleanliness while screaming at people on the phone, ordering them around and buying up companies. He gets his…and this story was the hardest for me to watch when I was young. An telltale quote, said by a woman’s voice on the phone to EG, “I hope you get cancer in the worst place!”
The best part of the movie is the way Romero mixed in the serial comic content with the live action content, tying the stories together with a short story about a kid killing his shitty dad. Each of the stories use comic-cell style overlays and crazy lighting throughout to link the comics to the live action…good stuff. Also you’ll notice that in each story, the people that meet their end have it coming, while the protagonists are usually people you also loathe…which in a way makes the world the stories are based in a little easier to believe, i.e. everyone’s human.
Arousal Factor – Magic John Stone for Creepshow – Snapped to Attention
Another new review topic, a brainfart of our man Redscape called “Why you keep bringin’ up old shit?”. We intend to use this category to review old movies, games, music, etc. And my old I mean ‘relatively accepted as in the past’. Spoilers are mute because we’re going to assume that you’ve either seen, read, played, heard, etc…what we’re talking about.
Blade Runner – The Final Cut
So I’ve finally made it COMPLETELY through Blade Runner without falling asleep. My previous attempts numbered (3), each time just making it past the point where Edward James Almost makes his strangely asian-speaking debut. And while this is “Why you keep bringin’ up old shit?”, I am reviewing Ridley Scott’s “Final Cut” of the movie, just because if I’m gonna watch the damned thing might as well be the ulti-version.
I gotta say, it’s great to see a young and healthy Harrison Ford in a movie. One of the reasons that I’m holding my enthusiasm for Indy IV is because of his age. It was also good to see a good old classic 80′s representation of the future, just gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling inside. This movie starts out like it’s going to go 2001 style, extremely slow shots with Space-Mountain music that lull you to sleep…and then some asshole shoots a repub through a wall in one of the better over-the-top handgun-blasts I can remember. The rest of the movie ebbs and flows from slow 80′s-scifi pace to action movie pace, never quite slowing enough to lose you but never going over the top.
This vision of the future has been played before, although when it was new it might have been original. LA’s a huge city with enormous skyscrapers and monolithic structures built over the husk of the old city. There are tons of asian influences, no doubt when we were sure Japan would buy up the country. It’s dreary, dirty looking and full of smog and rain. Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) apartment looks like a cabin on a spaceship and is on the 97th floor of somekind of superbuilding. Everyone seems grimy, sweaty and tired of life. A great outlook.
In any event, I’m not gonna run down the whole jist of the story. Suffice it to say there’s some ‘Replicants’ (very-human looking androids) running around looking for someone to tell them how to live longer than four years, and Deckard’s job is to race after them and shoot them with his burpgun all the while giving that trademark Harrison Ford what’s-going-on look. I’m sure there’s a deeper meaning here, but I just watched the movie and haven’t had decades to argue it with my buds. The rest of the cast is pretty good, nobody was too shitty. Meh.
All in all, not a bad movie. I’m glad to have finally seen it, but I don’t think I’ll watch it again, at least not for a long time.
Arousal Scale – Magic John Stone for Blade Runner – A Magic John Bone
At that moment a police club ended a no doubt clever quip from the lips of Walter. The blow caught him mid-speech clipping off a good 3/4″ slab of tongue. A loud “MOOOMPH” hummed out of Walter’s head as his jaws snapped shut on his word whistler. His moan was short lived as the rest of the clubs found their marks on his skull, neck, and balls. Marcel thought it wondrous, despite his situation, never having liked Walt, and wishing he had never been brought into this world.
He saw Walter’s body slump into a sickening mass right before he was pulled up off his feet and quickly brought outside and into one of the three squad cars awaiting him. The officers, not planning on having a repeat of the clumsy spectacle that just transpired, were shielding Marcel, guns drawn, flies zipped. Officer fat fuck was radioing dispatch for a meat wagon just as the door was slammed shut and the cruiser rolled off down the street.
Marcel sank in his seat in realization that he would not be able to return to the apartment, and most likely would never arrive at the police station. He couldn’t overpower the officers who’ve come for him, and he was out of options now that Walt had played his only hand. Dumb fuck.
Mid-thought, the police car detonated. The flash was amazing and burned all bystanders as harshly as the occupants inside. If there were anything left to burn, that is. The pressure released from the blast shredded Marcel into hot balls of carbon, shattering glass and decorating random debris in his path. It was clear from power of the device used that malice, not purely business, was the inspiration. A message loud enough to show that no force could stop the wheels that were now in motion. Marcel knew that he could have stopped this and had planned his escape, but not well enough. With that first blast, others followed. The bombs continued to fall.
Seconds later, the group emerged from the low-rise onto Percy Street. Marcel’s heart rate settled more and more the further they got from his apartment, as he realized that this was just another case of the city exploiting his questionable talents. The street glistened in the pale yellow of streetlight, and wind pulled at his coat as he stepped from the doorway. It had stopped raining sometime after he arrived home from the bar.
Lieutenant Fatty started to slowly amble down the steep steps toward the sidewalk, and Marcel could now see that the City’s Finest had brought not one, not two, but three fuckin’ squad cars…so much for being discreet this time.
Marcel reached out to grab the rail, slightly worried that the stairs might be slick, when Mustache suddenly swept him back with his left arm and chopped Lt. Fatty on the nape of his neck with his right! Fattman rolled down the stairs like a 300-lb. snowball, collecting all of the other cops in a heap against a lightpole. Marcel started to turn toward Mustache, getting only a glance at his gleaming nameplate, “O’Toole”, before the officer put Marcel in a headlock and dragged him back through the doorway. He swung Marcel away from the door, which he slammed and bolted shut. Marcel reeled backward and suddenly found that there was no more floor as he tumbled backward down the short stairwell toward the basement. The cold, hard concrete floor greeted him with a dull thud.
Marcel shook off the cobwebs to find Officer O’Toole standing above him. He slowly drew his hand back to his coat pocket, but the cop held out his right hand, showing Marcel the gun that used to be there.
“I wouldn’t think you’d want to shoot me…Doc.” he growled.
Marcel gazed stupidly at the man for a moment…”Walt?” he managed to blurt.
The cop pulled off his hat, peeled off the brush-like mustache and was transformed into, “Walt Sparks, at yeh service!”
Marcel grinned and reached out to be helped up. He rubbed his lower back from the fall as he looked Walter over, dumbfounded. The moment ended when commotion could be heard outside the door at the top of the stairs. Apparently the mountain of cop had crumbled and reformed at the top of the steps.
“We’d better go, unless of course you want to head to the station again…” Walt turned toward the hallway to the service entrance when Marcel grabbed his shoulder.
“I can’t leave yet, there’s something I have to get from upstairs.”
I wrote it in Word but for some reason the formatting (indents and such) would not carry over when I cut and pasted it here. I tried saving it as rich text, plain text, and even straight html but no matter how I input it here it wouldn’t retain the formatting. Thus the simple blocks of text you see below…
Filed under the “Story Project” label.
Marcel fought to keep his composure as he entered the small room. His senses surged and promised to boil over at the sight of the men in front of him. They’re silver buttoned shirts and grotesquely overdone rank insignia assaulted his very being. Time slowed to a crawl and the rush of blood through his rapidly beating heart slowly built to a crescendo overcoming all other sounds in the room.
What the fuck were cops doing in his flat? More importantly, how much did they know? After several panicked moments he allowed reason to douse the fire raging inside his mind and with an almost visible effort forced his fists to unclench.
He realized the men had stopped talking and were staring at him. Had one of them said something? Was the burden to the conversation now on him? Had they searched the small 1 bedroom apartment? Had those window shades been open or closed when he left and had…
Wait, what was that? Did the one with the moustache just wink at him? His mind raced as he fought for answers. Marcel knew he had to say something.
“…the fuck?” was all he got it. The cops seemed less than impressed.
“Cut the shit pal. You’re wanted downtown. There’s been another murder and they want you to come down and weigh in on it. We’re paying double this time if you can figure out the cocksucker who did it. You in or you out?” quipped the short fat one.
Even as the voice in the back of his mind screamed the opposite, Marcel willed his head to nod affirmative. Anything to get them out of this room! Had they searched it? Did they know? His eyes darted to the window shades…
“Good let’s move”, grumbled one of them.
They pushed their way past him, the fat one having to turn sideway to get through the doorframe. Once out in the hall they turned and waited impatiently for Marcel who hadn’t moved an inch.
“You coming doc?” asked fatty.
Reluctantly Marcel left the room and carefully closed the door as his escorts ambled down the cramped hallway. As he did so he allowed himself once quick and furtive glance to the floorboards in the west corner of the room. With a small measure of relief he noted they appeared to be untouched and intact. For time being at least.
Nevertheless, as he slowly trailed after the two officers, Marcel found his hand tightly gripping the gun in his coat pocket and his mind squarely centered on what was under that floor.
Sitting in a hotel room in Appleton, Wisconsin, I came up for an idea for something to add to the website. While simple in idea, it may or may not be easy to implement, and by no means is it worth spending dosh on (this means you Beard). A few years ago, Redscape and I started a pass-around story, where one of us would write a few pages, then stop in mid-thought and email it to the other to continue. The story started out interesting and fresh, but quickly derailed when we got to a critical plot point (who knew?). Would something like this be simple to implement on the blog? We could make it as simple as just uploading the story to the file transfer page and continue it around. To speed things up, we’d have to limit the writing each person could do to 1/2 a page or so, and try to keep it so each person will have the story for a day, then pass it on. What do chall think? Dumb or not?
BTW – Beardo, the Desksite project animations are fuckin great.
