Armagideon Time

There are three things that stand out in my memory of the summer of 1990 — the suffocating heat, my purchase of a Sega Genesis, and listening to this track…

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…along with the rest of the This Is Boston, Not L.A. compilation album over and over and over again in the stifling second floor bedroom I shared with my little brother.

Those were good times.  Good, sweaty, suffocating times.

There was a four month hiatus in Genesis game acquisitions following the arrival of my free copy of Last Battle at the end of July 1990. This was partially because I was broke, unemployed, and busy adjusting to life as a freshman in a non-traditional public commuter college, but also because I was content enough with occupying myself with the twin time sinks of Phantasy Star II and the first Final Fantasy game (purchased with the remaining balance of my graduation money).

It’s not like there was a flood of quality Genesis releases worth spending money on, anyway, as Sega seemed happy to coast on the dubious strengths of its roster of launch-window titles supplemented with some additional arcade ports and a handful of third party side-scrolling shooters (the genre du jour of that primitive era).  If I was curious about a given game, however, my buddy Damian’s obsessive early adopter tendencies and short attention span made him the perfect source from which to borrow recently released Genesis titles. It was through Damian’s generosity in the long hot summer of ’90 that I was able to experience today’s pair of featured games for as long as it took me to rule out a future purchase of either one of them.

E-SWAT: City Under Siege was a PINO (port-in-name-only) of a 1989 arcade game…

…which excised everything that made the original’s amime cyberpunk-meets-Rolling Thunder formula modestly enjoyable.  Where the arcade game handled the player’s transition from a jackbooted patrolman to a power-suited engine of destruction though a trio of quick preliminary missions, the Genesis version forces the player to tough it out through several long, punishing levels before granting him or her the satisfaction of mowing down legions of generic paramilitary thugs with a portable gatling gun  (a.k.a. “the purported draw of the damn game”).

The only remotely appealing aspect of the Genesis version of E-SWAT is the game’s soundtrack (a common theme in both CJ’s and my studies of Sega’s early 16-bit offerings), which features an early form of the 808 State-y acid house/jazz that would later become synonymous with first-party Genesis game scores.

Populous, one of Electronic Arts’ early attempts to crack the home console market, is the original “God” game…

…a streamlined port of a critically acclaimed PC title created by Peter Molyneux (back in the days before he was bound with chains of hype to the rock of the Fable franchise and forced to watch as outraged fans pecked at his entrails.  I like the Fable games quite a bit, but both fell far short of Molyneux’s stratospheric claims regarding the content).

I legitmately enjoyed the “shepherd the chosen and smite the wicked” gameplay of Populous…for the roughly two weeks it took to figure out the algorhythms that governed the in-game universe, after which it felt as formulaic and pre-determined as a round of Tic Tac Toe.  It was one of the earliest manifestations of what has come to be a common occurance in my experiences with games of the “god,” “4X,” or open-world “sandbox” variety — there inevitably comes a point where any sense of wonder generated by the game’s expansiveness gets overpowered by an awareness of its effective limits.   (Red Dead Redemption‘s random events scripting is quite impressive, but once you’ve seen one honey trap/carriage thief/prostitute mutilator, you really have seen them all.)

I made an offhand reference to a Black Lightning villain named “Ghetto-Blaster” in my Nobody’s Favorites entry about Halo. Given the context and tone of the post, it’s possible you assumed I was simply cracking wise at the expense of DC’s “Two-Bit Justice League.”

I wasn’t, and incontrovertable proof can be found in the pages of Batman and The Outsiders #21 (May 1985), specifically in a tale titled “The Roar of the Ghetto-Blaster” written by Outsiders creator Mike W. Barr and illustrated by Ron Randall.

The comics industry has a long and storied history of co-opting popcultural trends and repurposing them as laughably off-model caricatures, so a handle like “Ghetto-Blaster” naturally conjures all sorts of potentially fascinating scenarios. 

A straight-take precursor to the type of cliché Dwayne McDuffie would puncture in his work with the Milestone imprint?  A companion character to the Detroit Era JLA’s Vibe in DC’s mid-Eighties attempt to  represent “old school” (back when it was “new school”) hip hop flava?

Or maybe a guy sporting some garish ”Generic Supervillain of the Month Club” duds who eschewed any high concept pretentions in favor of the most starkly literal interpretation of his chosen code name?

Ghetto-Blaster — it’s who he is, and what he does…

…in between spouting off rhetoric cribbed from the Reader’s Digest version of the Black Panther Party’s revolutionary manifesto.

Blaster’s proactive approach to urban renewal did prove to be popular with the locals who thought a better life was a merely a slum clearance away. (Which it was, for those folks of pale complexion and deep pockets eager to reclaim  “blighted” but well-situated real estate in the name of gentrification.)

Black Lightning, whose views ran toward more the gradualist end of the spectrum, was less impressed with Blaster’s folk hero status, especially as it undercut his own “Be cool, stay in (a roach-infested, underfunded, and poorly accredited) school” message aimed at the neighborhood’s youth population.

After a little detective work punctuated with ample lashings of reconstituted jive talk, Lightning uncovered the sordid truth about Ghetto-Blaster.  The would-be champion of the inner city was actually an ex-con who hid a small stash of stolen bills in one of the neighborhood buildings before getting sent up the river for ten years.  After his memory of the stolen loot’s exact location was lost after suffering a concussion in a prison brawl, he decided to adopt the persona of Ghetto-Blaster and randomly blow shit up in search of his ill-gotten gains.

(The concussion must have affected more than G-B’s memory, as a high-tech battlesuit capable of converting electricity into structure-shattering sonic blasts  couldn’t have come cheap — even after factoring in inflation since 1985 and the relative ubiquity of such devices in the DC Universe — and I doubt the hundred or so G’s in the lost stash would cover standard rental/lease fees, much less a full purchase.  Then again, a “penny wise, pound foolish” attitude is  a traditional prerequisite for the supervillain career track.)

Blaster’s streed cred quickly evaporated as a result of these shocking revelatiions, and he was handily trounced by Black Lightning (by doing the same shit that didn’t work in their previous tussles, only harder).  The neighborhood’s residents were naturally curious about the still-unlocated wad of bills, which Lightning assured them would be found “some day when the ghetto is rebuilt” (by a politically connected contractor long after the present inhabitants have been relocated to other as-yet-unprofitable-to-redevelop slums).

Until that day, however, they must work hard (but not necessarily for a living wage), keep studying (from pre-1970 textbooks with silverfish smooshed between the pages), and have faith in the system (which works, just not necessarily for you).

I’m waist deep in the Big Muddy…

…and the opposite bank is still nowhere in sight (though I did somehow manage to squeak out a new ComicPunx post).

The weekend can’t start soon enough. 

Big things are afoot at the day job, so I’m just going to leave you with this while I get things sorted…

It’s no furry silicone monkey doll, but its capacity to elicit existential terror is no less real for its relative subtlety.

It’s the ideal gift for those folks who enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movies, but thought they’d have been vastly improved if the characters were unholy amalgamations of Margaret Keane paintings, Stevie Nicks’s wardrobe, shitty original English manga comics, and Bratz dolls!

The safe word…

…is “Crime Alley.”

Now for some links, both timely and slightly dated:

It’s a week for blogoversaries! Dave Ex Machina turns eight! Tarty Tart turns two!

C’mon and get your FIGHT on!

What happens when the forces of Awesome and Weakass collide? Pure comedic genius.

In which a humble mariner shows up the hubristic endeavors of the Massachusetts Tourism Board.

I *heart* the Little Stuffed Bull.

Mark your cosmic calendars, kids.

The Seabrook Meltdowns — co-captained by the fearsome Trina Trioxin — will make their debut alongside the Granite Skate Troopers this Saturday at JFK Coliseum in Manchester, NH.  Be there or be square.

(Big thanks to Ken Lowery for the bat-joke assist.)

When my wife and I divvied up the household chores, I ended up with trash duty.  I make sure stuff is bagged up before the kitchen barrel overflows (most of the time) and that the week’s accumulated garbage gets to the curb on collection days.  It might sound like a pretty low key chore compared to the laundry duty my wife got stuck with, but trust me when I say she got the better end of the bargain. 

There is nothing worse than hauling one’s ass out of bed at six on a muggy collection day morning to discover that the bastard raccoons  (scientific name: Procyon lotor bastardis) have foiled one’s latest refuse-related security measures and left fragrant piles of heat-kissed garbage strewn all over the patio.  The smell isn’t so much of an issue for me.  I did, after all, grow up in North Woburn during the early 1980s, where the greasy rancid tang wafting from the town dump was a much a part of summer as the scents of fresh cut grass and meat grilling on a barbecue.

No, it’s not the smell that makes me rue the day I chose what seemed to be an easy out in our domestic division of labor.  It’s the squiriming, squggling masses of maggots infesting the spilled trash.  I am not a squeamy guy by nature, but something about maggots’ waxy, wiggly segmented larval bodies triggers my gag reflex. 

I know I’m not alone when I state that I don’t want to look at maggots, I don’t want to handle them — even through a pair of thick work gloves — and I sure as Shinola didn’t ask for Marvel to create a fifth-string X-character based on the filthy little creatures…

…yet, somehow, each of those nightmares have come to pass. 

The Winchester House that is the X-franchise has no shortage of questionable inhabitants.  While embarrassments like Adam-X or Stacy X at least made sense from a mercenary, fan-pandering standpoint, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting — much less demanding – a dude named after a type of vermin known for feasting on shit…

…whose mutant power was the ability to summon a pair of omnivorous slugs from his belly and then absorb the “power” of whatever crap they ate, turning his skin blue in the process…

…and who talked (as per the Claremontean precedent for international characters) exclusively in an over the top form of South African street slang…

…and whose physique and appearance changed radically depending on which artist got roped into working on Uncanny (or “just plain”) X-Men that month.

Maggott (the extra “t” is for extra terrible) made his debut in a 1997 X-arc that involved his quest to track down Magneto or “Joseph” or whatever the heck that character was supposed to be at the moment.  To be quite honest, the X-books have been an impenetrable mess since 1985 (with the exception of all but the last couple issues of Grant Morrison’s run).   I tried to decipher what was going down during Maggott’s sojourn with the team, but was unable to work past the riot of recursive plot points, confusingly “kewl” art, and rampant font abuse.  Toss in dialect writing which comes off as more autistic than authentic (“HEY GUYS I LEARNED THREE BITS OF PRETORIAN SLANG AND I’M GOING TO USE THEM OVER AND OVER AND OVER”) and you’ve got a pretty good sense where my tolerance for lousy comics ends. 

It’s no mean feat to be the worst character in a late 1990s X-book, but Maggott pulled it off with wiggle-room to spare, which is why is why he was a shoe (fly) in as this week’s Nobody’s Favorite.

Oh, like you don’t have a skeleton or three in your musical closet…

#724: Human League – Heart Like a Wheel

#1376: Supertramp – It’s Raining Again

#611: Foreigner – Juke Box Hero

As I mentioned during the first Blast Processed Life post, one of the deciding factors behind my acquisition of a Genesis in the June of 1990 was Sega’s limited-time offer of a free Power Base Converter peripheral and choice of launch title with the purchase of their 16-bit console.

The Power Base Converter, a clunky pass-though device which allowed one to play Master System games on the Genesis (though the actual backwards compatibility was built into the Genesis system’s chipset),  was the real draw, as I had a huge library of SMS games and an increasingly unreliable console on which to play them.  

I was a bit less enthusiastic about the choice of free games Sega offered though the promotion, consisting as they did of so-so (Space Harrier II) to terrible (Super Thunder Blade) versions of older arcade titles with a few sports games and forgettable original efforts thrown into the mix.  I eventually decided — by default — upon Last Battle…

…a side-scrolling beat ‘em up set in a harsh post-apocalyptic world where burly dudes in high fashion bikerware wage high-stakes martial arts battles over the Earth’s scarce remaining resources.

If that sounds a lot like the premise to Fist of the North Star (a.k.a. Hokuto No Ken), that’s because Last Battle was a license-scrubbed and sanitized localization of a Japanese game based on the ultra-violent anime and manga franchise.  (Nor was it the first time Sega pulled this trick, either.)

Instead of whipping up a brand new storyline and cast of characters, the folks in charge of bringing the game to the North American market went the copy and replace route, retaining the source material’s confusing backstory of dynastic betrayal but with new and laughable character names.  For example, the taciturn, organ-detonating protagonist Kenshiro…

…was stuck with the Eye of Argon-esque handle “Aarzak” (short for “Aaron Zachary Throckmorton III”). 

In addition, Last Battle dropped the (tame) gore effects associated with the Hokuto No Ken franchise…

…and indulged in a little pallete -swapping to make the bosses (destined for  grisly demises) a little less “human” in appearance…because making someone pop open and explode like an oversized zit is wrong unless said person has turquoise skin.

Weird localization decisions aside, Last Battle is a perfect example of how an innovative and potentially great good entertaining game can get hamstrung by a number of fatal flaws. 

The game’s visuals and sounds (in that Phillip-Glass-meets-Mike-Oldfield-meets-Pink-Lady way common to early Genesis titles) are great, and the punch/kick/jump configuration made possible by the Genesis’s three-button controller represented a paradgim shift in how one played console beat ‘em ups.

Last Battle also took a page from Bionic Commando, Super Mario Brothers 3, and Clash at Demonhead in terms of level design that incorporated branching paths laid out on a boardgame-styled world map…

…with diverse locations ranging from typical punch-and-run levels to obstacle-filled “dungeons” to boss-fight arenas.  Finishing an area usually results in a short and nonsensical encounter with a supporting character who grants Aarzak some form of power-up. 

In theory, Last Battle could have been a 16-bit, single player successor to the much-loved NES RPG/beat ‘em up, River City Ransom.  In practice, however, the game as a whole falls way short of the sum of its parts.

Despite the Last Battle‘s nominally branching pathways, there is a very strict linear route which must be followed to complete Aarzak’s travels, and it happens to be the most punishing and repetitive one.  Even worse, the game is of the old fashioned “finish in one sitting” school of design, having neither a save nor password system…

…which wouldn’t be an insurmountable issue if Last Battle didn’t rely so heavily on a slow process of attrition to make up the game’s challenge.  While this may have been intended to make sidetrips for a needed strength or health boost a strategic decision, it too often results in a completely disproportionate cost-to-gain ratio exacerbated by the game’s fondness for bleeding Aarzak out with frustrating juggle hits from both enemies and the environment.

As much as my brother and I (Fist of the North Star fans, the both us) tried to enjoy Last Battle, the game’s irritating flaws ended up being too much to bear. 

In fact, the only vivid memory I have of the game comes from a few years after the cartridge was consigned to the back shelf of our entertainment center and during one of the rougher patches in our fraternal relationship.  For some reason I dropped the “All is not well with the world” line from the game’s title crawl into a conversation we were having.  My brother wracked his brain to remember where it came from, and assumed it was from some lofty work of literature.

I popped Last Battle into the console and squatted down in front of the TV, revealing the source of the quote while I mocked him for being pretentious.  Not realizing how pissed off he was, I gave him a back-handed shove…which he responded to by tackling me and pummeling my head with his fists.  I came out of it with some bruises on my face and a temporary loss of hearing in my left ear. 

It was the last of our kiddie-crap physical confrontations.  He thinks it’s because he finally whomped me.  I think it’s because we finally grew the fuck up.  Whatever the case, it was certainly more entertaining and memorable than Last Battle ever was.

In the three months since Oscar passed away, Maura and I have been looking high and low for a canine capable of following the in the Tan Man’s footsteps.

It was tough going. We were spoiled by Oksie, who was a remarkable dog in both appearance and personality. We weren’t aiming for an Oskie 2: Grumplectric Chugaloo, but we did want a male small breed type who would be able to deal with a rowdy big (in both senses of the word) sister and a clan of scheming cats.

We did stumble upon several promising leads at various shelters in the area, but logistics and timing prevented us from finalizing any of these adoptions. The last (and most heartbreaking) of these fell through at the beginning of this week, when we were in the final stages of adopting a puggle from a kill shelter through a rescue group…and a another rescue group swooped in at the last minute and claimed the pup.

It was at that point that my old man took it upon himself to save the day by trekking up to New Hampshire and bringing back a Boston Terrier-beagle mix puppy that caught his eye.

Meet Baron Oliver von Oxenfree…

…or “Ollie,” for short.

Where Oskie was an obsessive (but lovable) grump, Ollie is a mellow little sweetheart eager to win approval from Addy the Big Red Dog and members of our feline conclave.  (What they think of Ollie has yet to be decided, though it’s currently leaning toward the positive.)

It’s been a while — as in “thirty-five years” — since the last time I’ve had to deal with a young puppy, and the wife and I have begun the long hard process of housebreaking and crate training…

…though not without some moments of indulgent backsliding.

My memories of White Wolf’s World of Darkness games involve terrifying abhumans in leather jackets attempting to prey upon rightfully disgusted innocents…

…and that was before the dudes in the sci-fi club broke out the dice and character sheets. KA-ZING!

My thinly veiled contempt aside, there’s no denying that the franchise’s clever formula of “Horror Archetype: The Gerunding” has been one of the bigger success stories in recent RPG history. In recognition of that big fish, small pond achievement, here’s the “toxins and disease” table from the 2001 Mummy: The Resurrection sourcebook…

…covering the heath risks a dessicated corpse might face, from Ebola and bleach right down to the pause that refreshes…if you know what mean.

There ain’t no flies on ol’ Boris.  They’re repelled by the stink of the embalming tinctures.