I don't have cable right now so I'm rewatching old shows and movies. A lot of them are animated. Such is my way. I'd like to have a nobler reason for rewatching them--something like when James 
Let's say you're the newly-sentient internet. How would you decipher
the meaning of all the bits and bytes whizzing past you? And what about
the real world outside your electronic realm?
Former Comics Editor, Guy Leshinski
has very kindly given us permission to reprint a prophetic interview
with Bryan Lee O'Malley in 2005. Will Bryan Lee O'Malley attain the
Holy Grail of cartoonists? As Bryan says, "We'll see..."
Results tagged “Doom” from The Cultural Gutter
Hopped Up on Speedrunning
Shortly after 2 pm on the afternoon of May 18th, 2005, Brandon Erickson stepped
back from the
Star Wars arcade cabinet he'd been playing continuously, with no deaths,
extra credits, or nap breaks, for the past 54 hours, having failed to break the
Twin Galaxies record of three hundred
million points in 49 hours established 21 years earlier by one Robert Mruczek.
Perhaps these records of scale are best left in the distant past: all the
golden age games had to offer a master player, after all, was more, more, more
of the same. Let marathon play sessions in pursuit of the biggest score be
consigned to the ashbin of the '80s along with the big cars, big hair, and
shoulder pads in power suits; the fashion of our times dictates that minimalism
is the new bombast.
One thing game-players in 1993 were not wondering was how quickly they could
blast through DooM -- no, they lingered over every atmospherically-flickering
alcove, marveling at its unprecedented immersiveness. It was not until its
maps had been fully savoured that they would raise the bar, culminating in a
powerhouse drive to excel and trump their friends' achievements under curious
self-imposed limitations by doing the same, only faster.
Continue reading...
This Retro Game is Not Retro Enough!
Okay, Doom is now more than a dozen years old, but apparently it's not old-school enough for some people. Check out this ASCII-only version called DoomRL: "One of the more entertaining things about the game is that, while the graphics are ASCII and the gameplay is turn-based, the sound comes directly from the original game."
The screenwriter of the upcoming Doom movie dreams big in this interview: "I never thought of it as a video game movie. I wanted to write first a great movie, then a great science fiction movie and then a video game movie."
Sickly Doom
When I was young, the ideal situation was being too sick for school but not too sick for videogames. So that after a good long sleep I could get up, get myself some toast, and play for a couple hours before my mom got home -- and I was wiser to be back in bed lest she arrive with sympathy and freezies to find me doing something more active than reading.
Now, sick with a damnably tenacious late-summer flu, I've decided to review Doom 3 (Activision, 2004). In my weakened, hypersensitive state, even coffee can make me break out in a dizzying sweat -- a single cup of the stimulant ravages my body. So I'm a little worried that the infamously brutal videogame, the game whose predecessor brought first-person shooters to office networks and introduced "frag" to the general lexicon, will literally blow my head off.
Continue reading...
Hopped Up on Speedrunning
Shortly after 2 pm on the afternoon of May 18th, 2005, Brandon Erickson stepped
back from the
Star Wars arcade cabinet he'd been playing continuously, with no deaths,
extra credits, or nap breaks, for the past 54 hours, having failed to break the
Twin Galaxies record of three hundred
million points in 49 hours established 21 years earlier by one Robert Mruczek.
Perhaps these records of scale are best left in the distant past: all the
golden age games had to offer a master player, after all, was more, more, more
of the same. Let marathon play sessions in pursuit of the biggest score be
consigned to the ashbin of the '80s along with the big cars, big hair, and
shoulder pads in power suits; the fashion of our times dictates that minimalism
is the new bombast.
One thing game-players in 1993 were not wondering was how quickly they could blast through DooM -- no, they lingered over every atmospherically-flickering alcove, marveling at its unprecedented immersiveness. It was not until its maps had been fully savoured that they would raise the bar, culminating in a powerhouse drive to excel and trump their friends' achievements under curious self-imposed limitations by doing the same, only faster.
Continue reading...This Retro Game is Not Retro Enough!
Okay, Doom is now more than a dozen years old, but apparently it's not old-school enough for some people. Check out this ASCII-only version called DoomRL: "One of the more entertaining things about the game is that, while the graphics are ASCII and the gameplay is turn-based, the sound comes directly from the original game."
The screenwriter of the upcoming Doom movie dreams big in this interview: "I never thought of it as a video game movie. I wanted to write first a great movie, then a great science fiction movie and then a video game movie."
Sickly Doom
When I was young, the ideal situation was being too sick for school but not too sick for videogames. So that after a good long sleep I could get up, get myself some toast, and play for a couple hours before my mom got home -- and I was wiser to be back in bed lest she arrive with sympathy and freezies to find me doing something more active than reading.
Now, sick with a damnably tenacious late-summer flu, I've decided to review Doom 3 (Activision, 2004). In my weakened, hypersensitive state, even coffee can make me break out in a dizzying sweat -- a single cup of the stimulant ravages my body. So I'm a little worried that the infamously brutal videogame, the game whose predecessor brought first-person shooters to office networks and introduced "frag" to the general lexicon, will literally blow my head off.
