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I can't figure out how the glue got there in the first place. The facts that it hadn't all completely dried out yet and I last listened to Brighten... only a month or so back mean that its origins are in the recent past. Who put it there? What was its purpose? Looked an awful lot like Ghostbusters' ectoplasm, or the trail left by a slug with diarrhoea. For those who don't know, the aim of NiGHTS, stripped down to its most basic, was simply to rack up high scores. It was the way in which this was achieved that made the game stand out as something special. No killing of anything. You flew around looped levels (kind of like circuits in a racing game), dashing through hoops and picking up baubles (Ideya) as you went. If you managed to link actions together your score would multiply. Spininng around a group of Ideya created a vortex which would slowly suck them in, allowing you to travel a distance to the next loop without breaking the chain. The movement of the player character was so smooth that the whole thing became utterly entrancing. It was possible, on some levels, to keep up a continuous link over an infinite number of laps. In the background of each level was an artificial-life system (A-Life) which had no bearing on the main game objectives. Levels contained a population of dream creatures, Nightopians and Nightmarens. Nightmarens were obstacles in your path, creatures that had been twisted and warped and existed only to hinder your progress. Nightopians, on the other hand, were peaceful creatures who smply lived in the level surroundings and they'd evolve depending on your actions within that level. So if, for example, you accidentally sucked a couple of Nightopians into a vortex or dashed into them, they'd learn to fear you. Alternatively, you could ignore the main game objective and just fly around hatching their eggs, in which case they'd begin to 'love' you. Playing musical instruments, decorating the levels, flying around you when you appeared. One saved game I had saw them build a statue of the NiGHTS character on one of the levels; it only ever happened the once, and I've not seen anything similar happen again in other saved games. It was also possible to alter their genetic makeup by knocking Nightmarens into them. The A-Life system was also tied in to the game music. Chip-generated, rather than running off the CD, it'd remix itself every time you played the game, depending on how you'd altered the Nightopians. What was amazing was that it always sounded fantastic. There was never a poor mix. You could load up a friend's game and not only would the levels look different, they'd sound different too. It's something that you wouldn't be able to achieve with the sound in any other entertainment medium and one of those brilliant ideas that, unfortunately, has never been built on. And its because of ideas like this that I love videogames. There's a trick to producing music for games. You need a hook. There has to be a recurring motif or riff running throughout the tracks. Again, NiGHTS pulled it off magnificently. The main theme would pop up every now and again, subtly altered, in each track, before finally being expanded into a full-on song as the credits rolled. There are many, many more examples of brilliant game music. I'm particularly happy with the way that a whole genre of game - Bemani / Rhythm-action - has sprung up which has the soundtrack and the player's involvement with it as its main focus. More happy still with the general quality of a lot of these games. Yes, there are many poor examples. They're more than made up for by the gems. Parappa the Rapper, Rez, Frequency, Samba de Amigo, Space Channel 5, Bust-A-Groove... each takes the basic bemani formula and twists it into something different. You're sitting there shaking your head. Videogames are one of the reasons music sales are declining, yeah? They're lowbrow. Childish. They're of little cultural importance. It's disgraceful how kids nowadays are prepared to waste their time on this rubbish. They encourage antisocial behaviour. They pander to base instincts. Guess what? Pop and rock 'n' roll had exactly the same arguments thrown at them fifty years ago. You've turned into your grandparents. Congratulations. And gruddamit if another pile of books didn't arrive this morning. I've always been a hoarder/collector type, but it's getting ridiculous now. I'm broke, I've got somewhere in the region of 80 books sitting here waiting to be read, including 2/3rds of the Gollancz SF Masterworks library, Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio and Paradiso (determined not to fall foul of the old "read Inferno, go no further" stumbling block), Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (which, despite being massively entertaining I put down and forgot all about) and a whole host of books on various aspects of medical forteana, yet I still go and buy Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt and Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space trilogy. After this weekend, I've got just over a month of doing absolutely nothing to enjoy. It's just as well. I was perhaps a little harsh on Effendi in my last post. It's a lot more convincing than the first book in the trilogy. Still flawed, but not quite as flawed. The publisher really needs to have a few words with the proof-readers, though. There were some annoying mistakes in Pashazade, but none of them quite match up to this - I fail to see how everyone missed the fact that the main character's name is spelt wrong in the very first sentence in the book... It's an entertaining read, but I'm kind of disappointed to find - after some glowing reviews - that both this and its immediate forebear, Pashazade, owe a huge debt to Michael Marshall Smith's SF novels (Spares, in particular). There's the fundamentally decent hero forced to make distasteful decisions in a morally bankrupt world. There's sentient technology. There's a smattering of surrealism involved in the depiction of that technology. There are flashbacks to turning-point childhood events. There's sudden, unexpected violence. Sci-fi noir. Thing is, they're not as involving as MMS's work. The world they're set in isn't fully realised, the character roster can become a little muddled and the whole idea of the fox inside the protagonist's head is fuzzy at best. Is it a tech-implant to boost intelligence and reaction time or is it merely a psychological construct he's created as a safety net? It's so ambiguous you get the feeling the author hasn't decided himself. Yet I'm still enjoying the books. Take them as fairly basic adventures of no real consequence. As a change of pace, I'm looking forwards to getting my teeth into the third part of Stephen Baxter's Manifold trilogy, Origin. Haven't forgotten the promised words on those albums. Tommorow. Donna Summer (no, not the Donna Summer) - To All Methods Which Calculate Power First impressions of the Scream and Coral albums aren't very good - Evil Heat just seems to be going over old ground and sounds tired, The Coral come across like a La's tribute band - but I'm going to have to give each a fair few listens before making any firm statements. More soon. Last week, by the way, an editorial in the Sun claimed that the miners' strikes were directly responsible for the mass redundancies in the mining industry in the 80s, with the rather odd notion that if nobody had taken industrial action, there would have been no job losses. I suppose it works as a piece of creative fiction... As I say, that's mostly paraphrased. What isn't, however, is the, "It's their own fault for being there," line. That's verbatim. And I'm thinking, couldn't exactly the same argument be used by interested parties for targeted attacks on civilian centres the world over? As, for instance, with the WTC attacks? It's their own fault for being there. Or is blowing innocent bystanders to pieces only allowed if you're a member of the American military and its allies? Just before I gave these over, I decided I'd go through Grant's JLA again. Hugely unpopular though this opinion is going to make me, I think it's better than his work on New X-Men. The characters, for a start, possess masses of charisma. They always should have done, obviously. I mean, we're talking about the most recognisable comics characters there are: Superman, Batman, The Flash, Wonder Woman... but under most writers they become completely one-dimensional. Batman's dark and brooding. Superman's the Good Boy Scout. What Grant does is flesh them out some more, making them more human and yet also bringing back a sense of just how awesome they are, modern day gods watching over us from the heavens. He achieves this through one of his favourite tricks - he places himself inside the book. Here he's Green Lantern, the new boy filling in shoes that he feels are too big for him. It lets the audience have a character they can empathise with and also builds the others up. If even a superhero's awed by these guys then they must be something extra special. Grant also performs a miracle with Superman - he makes him interesting. He brings out the alien in Kent, even though he only makes this obvious twice in his entire run - once with a sly smile and once when, having emerged from the sun and saving both the future and the past in a single stroke, he turns to the audience and winks. You get the sense that there's a slightly mischievous side to him, that after being through it all he still sees something inherently funny in the whole Life business. I would have loved to have seen Morrison let loose on the main Superman books. This is to say nothing of the stories. Each one's an epic, with a real feel of scale and importance. Look at how he ends World War III - with the entire human race gaining the powers of metahumans and saving Superman's life. This is where Morrison's real strength lies in superhero comics - he introduces concepts and plots that should have been obvious from the start. These things should write themselves, yet everyone's so wrapped up in creating 'their' version of the character, in making their mark, that they overlook the important stuff. An entertaining story. Big themes. Characters who are both impressive and attractive. In contrast, I don't really care what happens to Cyclops, Beast, Wolverine et al. I think he's trying too hard with New X-Men. Things don't gel or flow as they should. The biggest problem is that the book just doesn't work when Frank Quitely's not present, but I'm not currently sure why this is the case. Part of it's to do with the detail that Quitely packs into every single frame - Van Sciver doesn't appear to have a grasp of how important background detail is in Grant's X scripts, Kordey doesn't seem to understand the word 'detail'. Quitely fills the panels with what on first glance looks like extraneous scenery, but on closer examination has major subtextual (if that's a word) impact. It's getting to the stage now where I'm wondering how much of this extra detail he includes of his own accord.
Transistor 6, AKA Frances Castle, is kind of an upbeat Laila. Her songs are collages of seemigly random samples, with birdsong, cuckoo clocks, yodelling and rusty wheels all being thrown into the mix. MP3s are available on her site, with others downloadable from MP3.com. Another act on Catmobile is Printed Circuit, AKA Claire Broadley. The nearest comparison I can make here is to Add N To (X), but where they too often fall victim to their own art school humour (especially, on their last, the lacklustre Add Insult To Injury), Broadley manages to infuse her tracks with a real sense of cool fun. Check out the glitch beats behind Gimmie Aibo, the Tellytubbies drum 'n' bass of Getting To The Moon and the clipped, Daft Punk-esque Hard Drive Soft Drink. Other tracks show a huge Kraftwerk influence. Hell, there's even one which sounds a bit like a glitch Family Ness theme tune. So far, I've only heard the one track by I Am Robot And Proud. A List Of Things That Quicken The Heart has a real Fridge vibe to it. It's pretty, melodic and - excuse me while I get all poncey on yo ass - glacial. Album's on order as I write this. More as and when it arrives. Notice how I'm having trouble describing any of these artists without comparing them to others? I'm going to go with the excuse that I'm not familiar enough with them yet to describe them on their own terms. Sound reasonable? It leads to problems with Figurine, as Broadcast are the closest act I can match them to (not quite true; there's a much better comparison tickling the front of my brain, but I can't quite access it). Broadcast are a hell of a lot more dour though, their music often feeling like hard going. The delivery of the vocals on Figurine tracks is extremely deadpan, but that doesn't lessen the impact. I'm particularly fond of Medley (which may not actually be its title). "I always told you that we'd go down in flames." Final pimp for the night comes from the same site as yesterday's Dragonattack. Giorgio Marauder's You Only Live Once is the soundtrack to the greatest Bond action sequence never filmed. A John Barry-style theme with an almost French air of cool runs underneath the sampled thrash metal guitars and careering beats, an Ace Of Spades rip zooms in and everything tumbles onwards like Fidel Villeneuve filming an episode of The Saint. Mama. Currently rocking my world: Boredoms' Rebore Vol 1, one of the CDs in the Rebore mix project (this time put together by James Lavelle of UNKLE fame). The only other Boredoms material I own is the fantastic Vision Creation Newsun (how much do I want that musical box?) and I'd heard that earlier Boredoms stuff was basically unlistenable noise. This, though, is anything but. Thankfully, Lavelle manages to keep his wankier trip hop side in check. The one thing I keep thinking when I listen to it? Neu!, more specifically the 1975 album. Okay, so take out some of the Stones-ish rocking and add some breakbeats. There's the same basic, insistent beat underlining it, the same sense of wide-open space. I like. The only problem with Boredoms is the fact that their back catalogue is either unavailable or ridiculously expensive. Also doing it for me these last few days: the Weird War album. I'd been looking forward to this for a couple of weeks, the promise of new Ian Svenonius (Make-Up) stuff giving me a distinct tingle 'down there'. That Neil Haggerty (Royal Trux) was also involved only added to the strange urges. The hit isn't as immediate as with either MU or RT records, but it's still a damn sight better than a lot of albums released this year. The most obvious presence is Svenonius, his vocals being instantly recognisable, and while we lose Make-Up's gospel stylings we gain the sleaze-rock feel of Haggerty's previous work (thankfully, slightly lighter than on the stodgy Veterans Of Disorder). Very good, but it doesn't quite reach the heghts that Make-Up scaled on their later albums. As with In Mass Mind, Svenonius imparts some of his wisdom in the liner notes. It makes for highly entertaining reading. If I can't find it anywhere online I may stick it up here for y'all. Surfing earlier, I tripped over Cock Rock Disco. If you only download one track this year, make it Dragonattack. It sounds like Squarepusher invading the set of Saturday Night Fever and machine-gunning the mirror balls. Absolutely fucking amazing. |
Losing the fight against mediocrity for the last few years. | ||
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