At school my (and presumably your) musical taste was very much influenced by one's friends. It was rare to really be into a band that nobody else liked, let alone had never heard of. Such is the social melange of highschool and the nature of network effects but unless my memory is deeply degraded (always a possibility) I seem to remember being the only person who listened to Eat.
I'm guessing that I probably first got into them because of their early Swamp Grass-esque sound, something an early introduction to The Masters of Reality and the Black Crowes had fostered but 1993s "Epicure" was more of a psychedelic indie sound. I have strong recollections of listening to "Shame" repeatedly, probably because of some doomed teenage romance or maybe just because I liked the lyric "verbal ram raid, tongue of steel"
I admit - I'd never seen this video until this morning, when, my interest piqued by uncovering a stash of long forgotten CDs, I went digging through YouTube. You can almost see exactly what went through the marketing peoples's heads when this video was being made - "Right, so Pearl Jam are big and Ange Dolittle had a heroin problem just like most of the Seattle scene so try and make him look like Eddie Vedder right. But we also like that Nirvana video with the Anarchist Cheerleader chicks where all the extras rush the band so try and work that in too. Ok? Sorted"
However, if there's one thing this video tells us is that a man should be able to wear an oversized polka dot smock with pride and not be ridiculed for it.
IDEO really knows how to party. Astrid's Dutch Apple Tart won 1st place in the pie bake-off. Sorry, no photo of pie... but their BBQ display was impressive...
With games, as in life, sometimes being forced to do something different turns out to be the BEST. THING. EVAR.
Of course, sometimes it turns out to be a steaming pile which leaves you a broken, hollow husk of a human, screaming nigh animalistic laments every night as you vainly attempt to get some sleep despite the theater of the macabre that is playing inside your brain. But that's less common.
A case in point - the GBA port of Broken Sword. Lacking a stylus the developers were forced to find some other way to manipulate George and the various oddly useful objects he stumbled across in his struggle against the Knights Templars. Whilst purist fans of the point-n-click genre thought it an abomination many other sane people thought it a revelation - the direct control of the character (as opposed to clicking somewhere and then waiting, fingers tapping whilst they sauntered leisurely to wherever you'd directed them) meant you felt more involved and the ability to cycle through all selectable objects using the shoulder buttons relieved the player from the tedium of scrubbing the mouse pointer back and forth on each scene trying to discover the one pixel that would allow you to select the rubber chicken to combine with the pulley in order to get across the water to the voodoo lady.
So it was good, and the developers' diary about the process, long gone but kindly archived here by some philanthropic soul, is well worth a read if you're into this sort of thing.
I had a similar feeling the other day play rRootage on the iPhone.
rRootage is a game of the shoot'em'up persuasion, often referred to as schmups because gamers aren't, as a rule, the wittiest people ever to grace the face of the earth. In fact it's an example of what are often known as Bullet Hell games (or, if you're the kind of person to whom the word otaku is a compliment, not an insult then 弾幕 danmaku or, literally "bullet curtain" games) which, as the name suggests, are what would happen if hell was populated by spaceships firing millions of tiny shards of flaming death in your diretcion.
Bullet Hell games are bewildering to 99.99% of people watching them. A mixture of frenetic activity, psychotropic paint patterns, completely superfluous storylines and, strangely, often ridiculously cutesy anime girls
rRootage is one of the increasingly interesting, and usually free, home brewed shooters - if you get the chance then go download such gems as Every Extend and Warning Forever. The original rRootage by Kenta Cho, available for free from the author's page uses the BulletML language and some nifty genetic algorithms to present you with an every expanding and adapting tableau of ways to die in horrible firey pixel death. Recently the bewitchingly named Lazrhog ported it to the iPhone and iPod touch. Lacking a D-pad he had to innovate and struck upon making the ship follow your finger around.
Now the reason why most people stare slack jawed at people playing Bullet Hell games, like so many inbreds gumming awestruck at a shiny, metal horseless carriage, is that they're thinking about it the wrong way. The secret to most of these games is that, no matter what the size of the ship is, the only thing that can take damage is the cockpit, usually a scant 4 or 5 pxiels across, and this is what allows players to dance gaily through flaming fields of coloured mayhem. Secondly, they're not, despite what the name says, shoot-em-ups. Most of the time the ship auto fires for you anyway so the game is reduced, in its purest form, to merely guiding those 4 pixels through the ever shifting ebb and flow of bullets - in short it becomes more like that wobbly hand game where you try and guide the wire loop over the twisting wire without making it buzz.
The touch screen method of controlling the ship brings this fact out into startling clarity and suddenly your perspective shifts like you've been staring at a poster of messy green and red ducks in a row and suddenly you can see the fricking sailboat for the love of god, YES! FINALLY!
So yes, go play rRootage, experience the flip, enjoy the rush but don't come complaining to me when your nervous system goes for a burton and completely shuts down on you. I'm just saying.
Thanks for all the great times. Looking forward to GTD with you in the future.
Enjoying treasures found at this weekend's Alemany Farmers Market this last weekend. So happy to live in California where the veggies are abundant.
Hot damn I love this weather - despite the snow already being here it's still sunny and for a boy of hardy Northern stock like me, still warm enough to be t-shirt weather. Apropos of that, or nothing, or whatever, some tweekin acid funk
As an aside; that guy at 1:20 - I used to have hair like him. I'm not saying I'm proud of it but I feel that I should share the fact in the interest of cathartic confession. Exorcise the demons so to speak.
Attempting to unlock the mysteries of the pomegranate architecture.
