Noiseless Chatter

Why “Metroidvania” Is Not a Thing

Metroidvania is not a thing.

It isn’t. Or, at least, it’s not a thing that should have that particular term appended to it.

“Metroidvania” is a classifying term gamers use to refer to video games, usually 2D, that restrict or grant progress based on the items you have. It typically takes place in a large world comprised of smaller sections. As you find items and upgrades for your character, you can explore more and more of that large world, and usually even find additional treasure and passages hidden in previous areas.

If it sounds like I’m describing Metroid here, that’s because I am. And if it doesn’t sound like I’m describing Castlevania here, that’s because I’m not.

The term “Metroidvania” is an obvious portmanteau of those two series. But there’s a problem, because Castlevania has fuckall to do with the formula.

See, when Metroid was released, this sort of gradual progression in all directions was a relatively new navigational approach for video games. Whenever a game was released afterward that followed a similar mechanic, it was usually classified as Metroid-like. Just as games that offered a stage select were often compared to Mega Man, and games that featured you jumping on enemies to kill them were compared to Super Mario Bros.

Castlevania began life as a simple — though very good — side scroller with a Hollywood-Gothic horror theme. The antagonist was typically Dracula, and the protagonist was a vampire hunter (typically of the Belmont lineage) who set out to destroy him. You fought with a whip or similar weapon through linear stages. Sub-weapons were temporary, there was no backtracking, little in the way of alternate paths, and no permanent upgrades of any kind.

In other words, it was nothing at all like Metroid.

Eventually however Konami struck rightful gold with Symphony of the Night, which was a lot like Metroid. The entire game takes place in Dracula’s castle, and you progress by collecting upgrades in the forms of items and abilities. It was, and is, a great game. And thus, “Metroidvania” was born.

Symphony of the Night — along with its similarly-themed quasi-sequels — is about the only time the term “Metroidvania” makes any sense to use. After all, it combined elements of Metroid and Castlevania.

Since then, however, the term has been thrown around to encompass anything even remotely Metroid-like, whether or not it incorporates any elements of Castlevania whatsoever. Somehow these two games — despite one being a series-wide approach and the other being a series exception — got hybridized in the cultural consciousness and had a genre of their own named after them.

But that doesn’t work. Or shouldn’t work. “Metroidvania” only makes sense if the game being described contains elements similar to each of those series, and, really, nearly always, that’s not the case. A game in which you explore a funhouse or something, throwing pies at clowns and gradually opening passages can be like Metroid. It doesn’t sound to me, though, like it could possibly be anything like Castlevania. So why would we call it a “Metroidvania?”

I find it interesting that one singular game could be looked at as Metroid‘s equivalent in defining the genre…and I also find it inaccurate. Symphony of the Night borrowed Metroid‘s approach. It added its own elements, yes, but those are not the elements that define most other games that have since fallen under the classification.

The fact that the term “Metroidvania” exists speaks volumes about how immediately important Symphony of the Night was to gaming. But nearly always, “Metroidvania” is a misnomer.

That game you’re playing where you’re seeking jump upgrades and better bombs to blast open new doors? It’s a lot like Metroid. It’s nothing like Castlevania. It is, I’ll grant you, a lot like Symphony of the Night. But Symphony of the Night was a lot like Metroid, so let’s not complicate things.

It’s Metroid-like. Unless it isn’t.

And it usually, unquestionably, is.

Noiseless Chatter Spotlight: Retro City Rampage (2012)

Good gosh!
The hero has arrived.

Last month, a game called Retro City Rampage was released for download on the Wii. By this point, the Wii is already dead, its place in the console market usurped by the WiiU. This was a too-late release for the system in another way as well: other versions of the game on competing systems were released in 2012. The game itself was announced in 2010…and development began all the way back in 2002. That’s an extremely long journey for anything on its way to a dead platform.

I remember the announcement well, because I decided more or less immediately that I didn’t want it. It seemed like a nice idea — retro-style games such as Mega Man 9, the Bit.Trip series and VVVVVV had a pretty high success rate as far as I was concerned, and I’d take a simplistic, difficult romp over a modern-day talky slog every time — but early screen shots, and then the eventual trailer, were enormously disappointing.

Or, rather, there was one specific thing about those screenshots and trailers that was disappointing: the sheer number of references.

I’ve written about this before. I’m simply not a fan of references for references’ sake. I don’t like the modern tendency for the snake to wink as it swallows its tail. I want to see art that carves out its own space to inhabit…not lazily inhabit the spaces carved out by those who came before.

There’s a place in the world for parody — of course there is — but that place is not front and center. That place is not in the spotlight. When parody becomes the dominant form of expression you end up with garbage like Epic Movie, which ends up spoofing Nacho Libre because there simply isn’t enough straight-laced material to serve as fuel anymore, and comedy has to begin eating itself.

Personally, I’m happy to blame Family Guy for the glut of lazy references and recreations masquerading as something new. Parody has existed long before Family Guy, of course, and lazy parody has existed exactly as long. But only Family Guy seems to have found more success the lazier it gets, to the point that entire sequences and acts consist of word-for-word reenactments of other programs, films, music videos, or anything else the writers might have watched earlier that week.

It’s lazy, and it’s not creative. But people eat it up. Prior to its first cancellation, Family Guy knew how to pull off its warped style of twisted comedy. Since its revival, it’s circled ceaselessly toward a lazy singularity, replacing jokes and cleverness with joyless recreations. It’s not funny, it’s not interesting, and it even drifts into the territory of insult when they decide to lift wholesale scenes from other parodies, such as Airplane! Perhaps the Family Guy staff simply can’t tell the difference anymore. Certainly its audience can’t. And that’s beyond disappointing…that’s irresponsible.

Retro City Rampage appeared to be following in those footsteps. One of the areas resembled the first stage of Metal Gear for the NES, complete with on-screen mocking of that game’s infamous Engrish. Two of the characters are named Bill and Lance, who we remember from Contra. A store called WonderHats uses the ThunderCats font. A dessert parlor is called Vanilla Ice Cream. Tee hee hee.

Even its title is a triple reference: Grand Theft Auto, River City Ransom, and Rampage. This is all before you get to the clear Back to the Future homage of its cover art. The entire thing just screamed out that it was pieced together from bits and fragments of better things.

It felt cheap. It felt lazy. It felt like it was attempting to coast on the goodwill engendered by its source material, rather than any merit that it could have possibly earned on its own. It wanted the laughter of recognition. And that’s quite possibly the least satisfying kind of laughter there is.

The game boasted a huge world to explore, but if all I was doing is finding cutesy puns on the signage and identifying bland references to better games, then it didn’t feel worth exploring. At least Family Guy delivers its own personal blend of offensive laziness to you passively…Retro City Rampage required interaction. It wasn’t enough to just groan at what you were seeing…you first would have to make the effort to track it down.

And I wasn’t interested in that.

But I learned something from Retro City Rampage. Specifically, I learned that Family Guy has done even more damage than I thought. Because not only does it train me to see references like this — even in things that I enjoy — as unnecessary and annoying, but it made me forget why people started making references like this in the first place: love.

At Nintendo Life, Featured Editor and all-around great guy Thomas Whitehead interviewed Brian Provinciano, essentially the single man responsible for the entire game. And it was a good interview, but here’s what really stood out to me:

It became public knowledge on Gamasutra in 2009 that a sales threshold is in place, whereas, if you don’t sell enough copies [as a WiiWare download], you don’t get paid a cent. [...] Many developers became unable to sell enough units, and this became a reason for so many cancellations of announced WiiWare titles. The publishers knew they wouldn’t make a cent and needed to cut their losses. Between the office rent, hardware, insurance, game ratings and other costs, had I not done the WiiWare version, I could’ve saved around $20,000 – not even including my salary in porting it. And as it stands, virtually no games hit the threshold these days, so it’s only being released as fan service. A $20,000 gift to the fans.

There’s no chance — and I say this in the nicest possible way — that Retro City Rampage will hit that sales threshold. Most games released through the WiiWare service never made it, and that was definitely one of Nintendo’s major missteps with the Wii. Far from encouraging developers to put their best work into the console, it encouraged them to put it anywhere else. Releasing through WiiWare was expensive, and as more developers and games failed to turn a profit, fewer developers and games went near the service at all.

With fewer games, the audience simply drifted away. A sales threshhold that was already near-impossible to hit just got shoved that much further out of reach.

Additionally the Wii is dead. And, with it, WiiWare. Retro City Rampage comes long after most Wii owners will have upgraded to the WiiU, and the ones that stayed behind aren’t likely to be in the habit of checking the shop channel anymore. On top of that, just about anyone who was dying for Retro City Rampage would have simply bought it somewhere else over the course of the past year.

And yet, here it is. Not because it’s expected to make any money…in fact, Provinciano is convinced it will lose him money. And I agree.

But he released it because he could. Because he made enough money from its other versions to put this one out there on a Nintendo console, as a gift to the fans. A “$20,000 gift to the fans,” to be exact.

And that’s love. That’s love, and that’s nothing short of love.

That’s also what made me buy Retro City Rampage. I know this version of the game won’t make a dime, but I bought it anyway. Because that’s the least I can do. Far from the smorgasbord of lazy references and winking visual recreations of classic games, Retro City Rampage was made with love. How do I know that? Because nothing but love could make you shovel twenty thousand dollars into a release you already know will be totally unprofitable.

It’s what I remembered about references, about why people make them, and why they took such an easy foothold in parody and pop-culture: making them betrays, or should, a love for that source material. It’s a form of flattery, a form of tipping one’s hat, respectfully, to those that laid the groundwork for what you are now able to do.

Family Guy doesn’t express love. It can’t, because it feels none. Its references are lazy at best and outright mean-spirited at worst. Robot Chicken feels very much the same way. It lives to deflate the cultural ephemera of days gone by. By contrast, when Futurama incorporates the lore of other science fiction works into its universe, it feels like the show saying thank you…no matter how they subvert the character, idea or object. Futurama exists because its creators and writers love the genre, and want to play with the same toys. Family Guy might have existed at first because Seth MacFarlane loved the golden age of television, but it continues to exist just to feed more meat into the grinder. It all comes out the same. A joyless, tasteless, inconsequential mush.

Retro City Ransom, which I can say now that I’ve played it, is great. But I almost missed it, simply because I forgot that references aren’t always lazy…they’re often, when done right, admirable. They’re a familiar seasoning in a new and exciting dish. At least, again, when done right.

Many years ago, in 1999 or so, I made two video games myself. They were both part of the same series. The first was called Larry Vales: Traffic Division, and its sequel was Larry Vales II: Dead Girls Are Easy. I haven’t thought about them in a long time, though certainly at the time I was working on them they were everything to me. I invested a lot of creative effort into two games that, for all their faults — and there were faults, boy howdy — people enjoyed. That was all I really wanted. I wanted to make people laugh, and I wanted people to have fun.

A couple of years ago I found a video on YouTube of somebody playing through the first game. I watched it, and re-experienced the game for the first time in around a decade. And I was overwhelmed by the number of references I crammed into it. Whereas Retro City Rampage mainly pays homage to classic NES games like Super Mario Bros. and Bionic Commando and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Larry Vales paid homage to The Simpsons, and 1984, and Pink Floyd. In short, it was everything that had inspired me, at some point…just as Provinciano refers back to everything that inspired him.

Watching that video, I cringed. I felt lazy. I felt as though I had every opportunity to make something interesting and unique, but I fell back on mindlessly referring to other things that I enjoyed, hoping that others would share in the nostalgia, and that would be enough. I was being a bit harsh on myself, I think now, but I also believe there’s some truth to that.

But that’s just the Family Guy effect. I felt guilty for making those references because the practice of paying gentle homage to your inspirations has been dragged through the muck and become something dirty, something lazy, and, above all else, something to be avoided.

What I forgot — or, perhaps, was in no condition to remember — when watching that video, someone else playing through a game world of my own construction, was that I made those references out of love. They may have been lazy. They may not have been funny. But they were my way of saying thank you…of openly expressing my gratefulness for the so many wonderful things that made me want to create.

That’s a lesson Retro City Rampage taught me, all over again. There are a few bad apples that have poisoned the practice…but, in doing it right, it’s still as noble a way to tip your hat as it ever was.

References are a way of saying thanks. That’s something I’m going to try to remember again. Perhaps, one day, I’ll even give those thanks right back to Retro City Rampage, for showing me that someone, somewhere, still knows how to make them for the right reason, in the right way.

Hell, releasing Retro City Rampage at all, with the complete foreknowledge that it will only lose money, is a way of saying thanks. Provinciano is using Retro City Rampage as a sort of double-sided note of appreciation…he’s thanking the industry that inspired him, and the players who’ve been inspired right along with him.

It’s an admirable thing to do. And I really do hope he ends up turning a profit, against all odds, because it’s nice to see goodness rewarded in the world every now and again.

And the game is also, to put a fittingly obscene button on it, pretty fucking incredible.

The Live Action Uncle Ruckus Movie Needs Your Help

I just wanted to draw your attention to what has to be the most intriguing Kickstarter campaign I’ve seen yet. (It’s certainly the only one I’ve even considered donating to.) Aaron McGruder wants you to support a live-action Uncle Ruckus movie. And you know what? You really should.

I haven’t written anything about The Boondocks here yet, but I will. I was a bit wary of the show before it premiered (and the comic strip never did anything for me) but from the moment I gave it a chance I realized that it was so much more than I expected it to be. It’s not the cheap humor of culture clash that I expected it to be…it’s a consistently strong and shockingly smart dissertation on race relations in America.

Similar ground has been covered more times than I could ever hope to count in the past, but McGruder’s is an articulate rage, and it’s one that very knowingly has three fingers pointing back at him. That’s more than part of its charm…that’s its identity. McGruder doesn’t focus entirely upon how blacks are perceived in a predominantly white region…he also looks inward at blacks themselves and asks, “What the fuck are we doing?” As often as he’s appalled by white privilege, he’s at least as enraged by black attitude, and The Boondocks emerges as a brilliantly confused, ethically complicated question of co-existence…both with each other, and with the conflicting aspects of ourselves.

The young Freeman brothers — radical idealist Huey and burgeoning thug Riley — reflect this duality quite well, and serve as our focal points for most episodes, but the most rewardingly complex creation of McGruder’s is Uncle Ruckus, a self-hating black man who has bought into the idea that whites are the superior race. The absolute worst of American hatred is filtered through this rotund, milky-eyed black man who curses his own race and wishes nothing more than to see the country purified into a sheet of uniform whiteness.

It’s terrible, and yet it’s tragic. Ruckus isn’t an inherently bad person — any more or less than any other character — but he serves as a brilliant prism that refracts the various approaches to race relations that have been taken elsewhere in pop culture. And now, with help, McGruder may create a live action film about him.

And I think you should help. Because if the show is anything to go by, this movie could be a massively affecting and disorienting comic masterpiece.

I won’t beg, and I won’t say any more — as I’m realizing now how poor I am at expressing my love of the show — but I hope you at least consider it.

If you haven’t seen the show, here’s a list of episodes to get you started: “Granddad’s Fight,” “A Huey Freeman Christmas,” “Return of the King,” “The Passion of Reverend Ruckus,” “Thank You For Not Snitching,” “Home Alone,” “It’s a Black President, Huey Freeman,” “The Fundraiser,” and “The Color Ruckus.” Or just all of them. They’re pretty fucking great.

Oh and Lego is gauging interest in a series of Mega Man-inspired sets. SO GO DO THAT TOO.

They’ve Rebadged It, You Fool

What, you thought the site was broken? No no. We were making some changes. INTENTIONAL CHANGES.

Actually, fuck it, I broke something and lost some stuff. All the content should still be here but my banner and logo vanished, so I made new ones.

Firstly meet the new logo, same as the old logo, at least in the sense that there are gridlines behind it because I didn’t want to register the creation software. It’s in the upper left of every page, in case you want to look at it that frequently.

Then the banner, which is a still from my second favorite film, North by Northwest. No real reason for cycling out the Air Man stage except that as long as I’m FUCKING EVERYTHING UP I might as well add something new.

That’s also why we have a handsome robot in the logo (and serving as the new favicon), replacing the old one that I couldn’t find anymore. Oh well, this one looks like Calculon so I’m not complaining.

I was going to hold a robot-naming contest but I’m not really feeling up to it so the first person who leaves a comment suggesting a name wins.

There are no prizes. Life will be much easier for you if you learn that now.

Review: Red Dwarf X Episode 6: “The Beginning”

I think it says everything about Red Dwarf X that “The Beginning” floats to the top mainly because it wasn’t outright terrible.

In fact, at times, it came pretty close to being good, and it sustained that pretty-close-to-being-good level of quality about as well as “Lemons” did. That’s definitely welcome, as even though Red Dwarf X feels like an enormous misfire to me it’s nice to end on a high note.

Unfortunately that high note really is relative, as “The Beginning” is marred by the same kind of misjudgment that gave us Lister on hold in “Trojan”, Taiwan Tony in “Fathers and Suns” and the crew clowning around to silly music in the aforementioned “Lemons.”

Doug Naylor must not feel like he’s writing comedy unless somebody on set is broadly mugging, speaking with an exaggerated accent, or just generally acting like a desperate circus clown regardless of actual context. Here in “The Beginning” that’s manifested early on with Hoagy the Rouguey, or however that’s meant to be spelled, who is some kind of robot I guess who lives next door to Red Dwarf and gets the crew embroiled in his hair-brained schemes on a regular basis. Again, it sure was nice when being three million years in deep space felt different from living in an apartment building in a bustling city, but what do I know.

Poor Hoagy makes some funny faces and lets his accent drift pointlessly from Super Mario to Dr. Wily as he bothers Lister and then gets embedded in a wall. Why not, right? Lister promises he’ll be back to rescue Hoagy but for the first time all series I’m glad Doug didn’t bother to look over his first draft before shooting the episode, as the fact that we didn’t get a second helping of Hoagy is one of the best things about this one.

We’ve also got some rather atypical scenes in which a group of killer Simulants on a different ship engage in comedy routines separate from the Dwarfers. It’s not often that we see other characters getting their own spotlight, free of intervention from the main characters. In fact, only two examples really occur to me: “Holoship” and “Meltdown.” In the former it was brief and for plot reasons, free of comedy and used for necessary exposition. In the latter it was indeed a comedy routine, but its corniness was offset by the impressive disorientation of having such disparate historical figures bickering as they were.

Here it’s just…filler. It’s like a supporting feature that for some reason keeps interrupting the film you paid to see. The actors aren’t particularly funny, which is fine as they could get away with being simply menacing…but the menace falls through when they’re asked to act like such imbeciles, stabbing themselves on flimsy pretenses and re-enacting the Twentiety-Century Vole sketch from Monty Python.

It’s bad. It’s very, very, obnoxiously bad. It absolutely decimates the pacing, it prevents the episode from being what should have been an effectively claustrophobic experience (Red Dwarf‘s equivalent of “Balance of Terror”), and it populates deep space with yet more side characters that really shouldn’t be getting this many lines.

But…wait. I said I liked this one, right?

Well, I did. The rest of the episode was pretty solid, particularly the Rimmer material. Poor Chris Barrie hasn’t had a real chance to shine all series. Every so often he gets an appropriately Rimmery line he can sink his teeth into, but the rest of the time he’s relegated to broadly shouting sub-par material to an audience that wants to enjoy it so much that they don’t care what he says.

Here he gets to dig more deeply. Rimmer was never one-dimensional…or, rather, he wasn’t one-dimensional for long. There was an element of tragedy behind his needy professionalism, his longing for power, and his steadfast respect for the rules and etiquette of a civilization long dead. Here, for the first time in a long time, we tapped into that tragedy. And it worked.

Rimmer’s material here with his father is everything we should have seen in “Trojan” with his brother. His emotion was real, and as a result Chris Barrie managed to dial back his performance to where it was 20 years ago. He wasn’t an actor dressed again like his most famous character…he was Rimmer. His “fear” speech at the end was a particular highlight, and not only of this episode. It was a particular highlight of this and the three series that preceded Red Dwarf X. It was a lost and damaged man who was trying his hardest, and yet seemingly still destined to fail. It was uplifting and disheartening in equal measure, clever and foolish, sincere and inappropriate. It was good writing.

And there was a lot of good writing here. I don’t know that it balanced out the bad, or what that would even mean, but it sure as heck stood out in a great way. The cockpit and Blue Midget scenes were very reminiscent of series VI, even if it overall seriously paled by comparison. Kryten’s suggestion that they look out the window was immediately the best joke in the series up until that point, and it hearkened back to an era when the comedy was organic…when the characters didn’t have to dance and hump things to get laughs…when the vending machines didn’t hurl racial slurs at us as we walked down the corridors…when the characters carried emotional baggage with them…when the crew felt not like sitcom characters but like lost adventurers trying to find their way home…when the show didn’t coast on the goodwill engendered by putting its actors in front of an audience for the first time in however long and hoping for the best…

…when Red Dwarf was good.

Because Red Dwarf was good. Red Dwarf was great. Red Dwarf was a show that mattered. It didn’t spin its wheels and pad out time with irrelevant slapstick and dead-end subplots. It didn’t take laughter or deep thought for granted. It didn’t struggle so obviously for ideas.

And “The Beginning” reminded me of that time. Not thoroughly, and not consistently, but it got me there. It reminded me of why I’m sticking with this show, and reviewing this show, even when I so clearly don’t enjoy it.

It’s because I love where this show has been. It’s because I can love it again tomorrow. It’s because no matter what else happens, these are still characters that can be redeemed. Just because Rimmer didn’t bat an eye when his brother was shot through the heart in “Trojan” didn’t mean he couldn’t be symbolically shot through his own in “The Beginning.”

One bad episode didn’t undo the possibility of that happening. Four bad episodes didn’t undo the possibility of that happening. Hell, the 23 or so bad episodes since series VI didn’t undo the possibility of that happening, and they never could.

Because these characters are always there, locked, loaded, and ready for the right material.

“The Beginning” might well represent the beginning of such a rediscovery. It’s certainly possible, because when you brush aside the abandoned plot threads and fragmented bad ideas, there’s a great concept there, and a stellar central performance that promises big things.

I know better than to get my hopes up, but it sure would be nice if this show, moving forward, managed to deliver on that promise.

Time will tell. Until then, it was nice to get a glimpse, however fleeting, of a character I once, so long ago, fell in love with.

Journey Through the Past: The 1990s

Friend of the website Dave is hosting a 1990s blogfest today. He’s managed to rope quite a few great bloggers into this (complete list and his own choices here), and we’re also now selling cosmetics door to door on his behalf. The idea is to choose one thing — one anything — as your favorite thing from each year from 1990 – 1999, and write a short bit about it. He also did one for the 2000s, which was pre-Noiseless Chatter I think, but since everything released in that time period was garbage you missed nothing. (And, honestly, I’ll probably end up doing a 2000 – 2010 one just for the heck of it.) Anyway, enjoy…thanks to Dave for hosting this, and let me know what some of your own choices might have been in the comments below. Or tell me I’m wrong in a profane way…I always like that!

1990 – Vineland

I feel more than a little intellectually guilty for only including one novel in my year-by-year rundown, but I’d have to say that the 1990s weren’t particularly well served in a literary sense. Fortunately, though, the decade opens with perhaps the warmest, most welcoming book my favorite author ever wrote. Vineland takes place in 1984, but is very much a love letter to the 1960s. It introduces us to Zoyd Wheeler, a cultural isolate from that lost decade of love, sex and freedom, who’s been reduced to throwing himself through windows to keep up a stream of mental disability checks. It’s an innately comic setup, but the backward, twisting path through time, loss and inevitability is perfectly heartbreaking. Zoyd’s reliable antics, after all, began as an act of genuine desperation when his wife left him, and it’s only been the steady march of time that’s diluted them to meaningless repetitions of what once meant so much. That’s the angle Pynchon takes as he explores the effect aging has had on this world, and ours. It’s Zoyd’s daughter who pulls the narrative along — or backward — as she uncovers, thread by thread, who her mother was. And who her mother became. And, if she learns enough from what she finds, how to avoid a similar fate for herself. Pynchon’s narratives hurdle unfailingly toward doom, but Vineland is the one that reminds you that life is always worth living…regardless of where you might actually end up.

1991 – A Link to the Past

It’s a fact: the Super Nintendo is the single greatest video game console of all time. Consequently, the early to mid 1990s were a veritable goldmine for gamers. While the NES introduced us to massive numbers of endearing and enduring characters, the SNES took everything at least one step further, and managed to refine and build upon game mechanics without overcomplicating them, or losing sight of what made them work. Super Mario World, Super Metroid and Super Castlevania IV (among so many others) all represented a realization of promise, a step deeper into fantastic and complex universes that we always knew existed just below the surface. But it’s A Link to the Past that really stands out. Taking absolutely everything that worked about the first Zelda game and disposing of everything that didn’t, A Link to the Past laid the precise groundwork for every game in the series that followed, regardless of console. And while certain later entries, such as Majora’s Mask or Wind Waker, attempted to pull the series in other directions, it’s A Link to the Past that rightfully gets the credit for building the solid foundation and framework that gave those later installments the room to expand. The graphics are gorgeous, the music is great, and even if the challenge is somewhat lacking, every new secret you find on the map feels earned and satisfying. I love A Link to the Past. It’s one of perhaps two or three games in the history of the universe that does literally nothing wrong, and it’s a perfect example of what made the SNES so great.

1992 – Glengarry Glen Ross

For a movie with no action, Glengarry Glen Ross is riveting. For a movie with two locations, Glengarry Glen Ross feels enormous. And for a movie with so little at stake, Glengarry Glen Ross feels profound. It’s a story about selling real estate, and how difficult a racket that can be, but it’s also a story about despair, about self-preservation, about pride, about confidence, and about what it means to be a man. It’s all of these things, and it’s more, and the same answer is never given to the same question twice. When a nameless emissary drops by the sales office to address unsatisfactory work, he motivates the sales force by setting them at each other’s throats: the two most successful salesmen will be rewarded to varying degrees, and the other two will lose their jobs. What follows is a single, seemingly-unbroken narrative that spans the rest of that night and the next morning. To say any more than that would likely both give away too much and artificially enhance the importance of anything that happens. The magic — and the story — is all in the dialogue. Glengarry Glen Ross began as a stage play, and it shows. Its big screen adaptation does not seek to overwhelm, astonish, or impress; it seeks to focus. It seeks make you notice every shift of the eye, twitch of the finger, and speck of spittle that accompanies a profane explosion, making it feel like an even smaller and more intimate experience than the play could have ever been. It’s a film that’s terrifying, and it’s terrifying mainly because there’s nothing here to be afraid of. After all, these are just people. Highly and eternally recommended.

1993 – Mega Man X

I deliberately avoided mentioning Mega Man X when I basked in the glory of the SNES library above, simply so I could single it out here. Mega Man is unquestionably one of my favorite game series ever, and Mega Man X deviates from the classic formula just enough to justify it as a spinoff. With an increased focus on item collection, upgrades and lingering effects of defeated bosses, Mega Man X brought additional levels of non-linearity to an already legendarily non-linear experience. While the series may have gone off the rails after another four or five games (it’s debatable), the original is a stone-cold classic, with great bosses, impressive stages, and gameplay so versatile that fans, almost 20 years later, are still discovering new ways to play it. Mega Man was never about deep plot or engrossing storylines; these were action games through and through. Mega Man X wisely didn’t try to separate itself from the originals by way of an epic storyline…it simply enhanced the action, layered on new and impressive complications, and married it to a stellar soundtrack. Mega Man X is just fantastic.

1994 – Monster

So nobody likes Monster. I know that. I also know that that’s their loss. R.E.M.’s hardest rocking album might be so much of a departure from their usual sound that it’s hard to consider it a legitimate installment in their discography…but so what? It’s fantastic. When I listen to Monster — which I do for weeks at a time whenever I stumble across it again — I hear some of the best straight-up rock and roll to come out of the decade. And it’s not entirely devoid of R.E.M.’s signature songwriting, either…you just have to listen through some thrashing guitars to find it. Songs like “Strange Currencies,” “Tongue,” and “Crush With Eyeliner” are all pulled off with the band’s usual sideways insight into the human condition, with all of the disappointment and humane absurdity that implies. The band just happened to couch that insight in some brilliantly distracting, raw, unpolished instrumentation, and that brings with it a charm of its own…a little taste of R.E.M. as the up-and-coming garage band they never were. Some fans are all too eager to dismiss this brief experiment. For me it’s top shelf material, beaten only by Automatic For the People and Lifes Rich Pageant. If you’ve written it off before, it may be worth a reappraisal.

1995 – “Knowing Me Knowing Yule With Alan Partridge”

I love Alan Partridge. He ranks easily among my five favorite comic creations throughout all of human history, and that’s due in large part to the way that Steve Coogan slips — seemingly effortlessly — into Alan’s skin and becomes him. Though he started behind a sports desk and then moved into the chat-show format, there was always something more to him. He was never a “type,” and the humor was not situational; Alan was a human being, free to be himself wherever — and with whomever — he was. He was a person, a person with insecurities, interests, and a uniquely slanted perspective. “Knowing Me Knowing Yule” is a one-off special that bridges the gap between Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge and I’m Alan Partridge…two very different, but perfectly complementary, insights into this fascinating man. It’s presented as a needlessly expensive and woefully inessential yuletide installment of Alan’s chat show, and it’s what seals the casket on his broadcasting career forever. Considering that the last proper episode of Alan’s chat show saw him shooting a guest through the heart live on air, that gives you an idea of just how poorly this festive outing manages to go. It’s a great and always welcome entry into the Christmas special canon, and worth a watch at least once per year. Alan getting threatened by a transvestite, failing to properly lip-synch “The 12 Days of Christmas” and struggling desperately to halt an in-process bit of product placement never gets old. Watch it during a family gathering. Believe me, it will make you feel better about everyone you’re related to.

1996 – “22 Short Films About Springfield”

Coming at a time when The Simpsons could genuinely do no wrong, “22 Short Films About Springfield” reads like a time-capsule today. It’s a relic — and a loving, fascinating, and clever one — of a time when Springfield was more than just a sea of caricatures and types; it was a place, fully functional in and of itself. One operating under its own logic and impossible to mistake for the real world, but real in its own way all the same. It’s a half hour without plot, without intention, and without a moral…just a simple, and undoubtedly well-earned, chance to take a deep breath and survey the incredible playground the show had built up for itself by that point. The characters were so well established and the dynamics between them so fruitful that all you needed to do was let Apu take some time off, bring Reverend Lovejoy and his dog to Flanders’ front lawn, or give a stranger the chance to turn the tables on Nelson, and comedy would flow. Effortless, wonderful, eternal comedy. “22 Short Films About Springfield” floats by like a whisper, as it should. While any other show on television could work harder and harder every week to make even a fraction of the impact on the cultural landscape that The Simpsons made, The Simpsons itself didn’t seem to need to work at all. It could just step back and see what the characters were doing…and, here, that’s what it did. The Skinner / Chalmers segment will go down in history as an all-time best sequence no matter how long the show runs, but even if that clear highlight were to be somehow excised from the episode, “22 Short Films About Springfield” would still be a perfect gem. With so many forgettable seasons behind us now, the episode is almost like footage of a great civilization long gone: those of us that were there will always have this souvenir, and those who missed it will be eternally grateful for this brief — and brilliant — window into the past.

1997 – Time Out of Mind

I’ve talked a bit about Dylan’s lost years here, but I didn’t say much about what brought him back to life. Time Out of Mind is what brought him back to life. For me, it was released at the perfect time; just as I started to explore Dylan myself, this came out. Suddenly the warnings to avoid “the recent stuff” went quiet…and I do mean suddenly. Time Out of Mind is a bullet of an album…a shot through the brain that lingers and haunts and does not let go, and critics and fans alike flocked to it immediately. Time Out of Mind doesn’t feel like a comeback album…it feels like he never left. Though his youthful, nasal prophesying is replaced here by a gravelly howl, it’s Dylan to the core, providing one of his best love songs (“Make You Feel My Love”), some chillingly vague danger (“Cold Irons Bound”), and a classic meandering tale of introspection, playing Neil Young at high volumes, and ordering hard-boiled eggs at a restaurant (“Highlands”)…it’s a gloriously meandering shaggy-dog story that caps off an aimless-by-design rediscovery of who Dylan is. It would be quicker to list the things I don’t like about this album, because there really aren’t any. Songs like “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” and the bluntly desolate “Not Dark Yet” triggered suspicions that this was Dylan’s final statement…that the man had pulled it together one last time, to end his career on a high note. He’s released four more albums of new material since then. Dylan’s going out on a high note alright…he’s just making sure to sustain it this time. On his next album, Dylan would sing “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” That would have made more sense before Time Out of Mind, which disproves it conclusively.

1998 – Rushmore

There may not be much more I can say about Rushmore than what I’ve already said here, but that by no means dampens my excitement for talking about it yet again. Rushmore is, by many accounts, Wes Anderson’s best film. Anyone who says that to you, however, is lying. What it is, however, is Wes Anderson’s mission statement, and it’s a solid, fantastic, indelible one. Coming off of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore represents an almost unprecedented stylistic and qualitative step forward. It’s not a film in which Anderson finds his voice…it’s a film in which we find Anderson’s voice. The soundtrack, the costumes, the visual design, the character dynamics, the relentless attention to detail…everything here established what it meant to be “classic Anderson,” and it both defined a career and forever cemented a fanbase. It also introduced the world to Jason Schwartzman, and reintroduced the world to a penitent Bill Murray…a gift to humanity that Anderson should always be praised for. It’s one of those movies packed so densely that no two viewings have to feel the same, and there’s literally always something new to notice, tucked away in the corner of a quick shot, or hiding in plain sight while the camera dwells and your eyes wander. Rushmore is a great film, and while I enjoy it most for what it allowed Anderson to do down the line, I can never watch this one without coming away impressed all over again. And crying when Max introduces Mr. Blume to his father. Because that part’s fucking gold.

1999 – “Space Pilot 3000″

When Futurama debuted, it seemed like it was just going to be the less-deserving little brother of The Simpsons. But arriving, as it did, just at the time the elder show was losing steam, it established itself immediately as a more than worthy successor. While The Simpsons took a few seasons to establish a flow and sustainable gag-rate for itself, Futurama burgled some writers and hijacked that momentum, allowing it to fire on all cylinders right from the get-go. The result is an almost impossibly strong first season, kicked off by one of the most confident and well-handled pilots I’ve ever seen. Space Pilot 3000 has barely aged at all. While the voice actors may have still been getting a handle on things, the writing is sharp and solid, and the groundwork for countless fantastic episodes of smart science-fiction, piercing comedy and genuine emotion is laid here. There’s a long love letter to Futurama that I’d like to write, but as the years go by it keeps getting longer…eventually I’d just end up with too much to say. After all, what can I say to a show that gave me “Jurassic Bark,” “Time Keeps On Slipping,” “The Luck of the Fryrish,” “Godfellas,” “Lethal Inspection,” and so many others I love beyond words? Futurama is by no means a perfect show, but for some silly cartoon knockoff of another silly cartoon, it sure managed to exceed expectations quickly. It brought an end to the 90s, but ushered in a whole new expanse of grand adventures and brainy plotwork. Philip J Fry inadvertently froze himself, and woke up in a far stronger television landscape. Welcome to the world of tomorrow.

A Further Defense of Stubborn Refusal: New Super Mario Bros. 2

I’ve been considering writing this post for a while now. Since the moment I first played New Super Mario Bros. 2, in fact. But, obviously, I put it off, and it’s only due to Jacob’s brilliant piece on the game that I thought I’d revisit it, dust off my ranting cap, pull on my bitching pants*, and get down to hollering vaguely at the metaphorical children on my lawn.

With a high profile release such as a Super Mario Bros. game, reviews are everywhere. That’s fine. And they vary pretty widely in opinion, which is fine too. What’s not fine, as far as I’m concerned, is the perpetually echoing criticism that it’s not different enough from New Super Mario Bros. That’s missing the point, and it’s missing it in several substantial ways.

First of all, I will concede this: you have every right to be disinterested in New Super Mario Bros. 2. Of course you do. What baffles me, though, is that anybody would expect the game to be something other than what it is…and even to hold against the game the fact that it isn’t something different.

The Super Mario Bros. series has splintered over the years into so many spinoffs and subseries that it’s literally quicker to list off the genres that Mario hasn’t made his own than to name all the ones he’s branched into. That’s where New Super Mario Bros. came in. It was a deliberate exercise in getting Mario back to his purest platforming roots. Gone were expansive 3D worlds and game-long gravity gimmicks. Mario’s primary weapon and mode of transportation were once again, at long last, one and the same: his feet.

New Super Mario Bros. was a massive success, and it still sells well to this day, in spite of the fact that at least five hardware upgrades and countless releases stand between us and its release date. The reason for that is simple: it promised a return to basics, and consumers voted en masse with their pocketbooks to say, yes, that’s exactly the kind of promise we’ve been waiting to hear.

That was in 2006. Six years ago. The fact that a sequel was released just last month doesn’t exactly scream “cash grab.” Enough time has passed since the original’s release that it’s fair to assume that fans might enjoy another set of worlds to hop, stomp and somersault through, so Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros. 2. And it’s been criticized almost universally for not being different enough from its predecessor.

This is puzzling, as New Super Mario Bros. made its intentions clear. They were intentions that millions of gamers supported, and with pleasure. To criticize any game in the New Super Mario Bros. series for not being different enough is to miss the point; if you want something “different,” there are enough Mario games to suit your needs as it is. So many, in fact, that a return to basic platforming required a whole new subseries. That’s this. “Different” is explicitly against its reason for existence.

I’m always surprised by the “not different enough” criticism of video games. Mega Man games faced that problem. Ditto Fallout and Fallout: New Vegas. But why? Is “not different enough” really a fair complaint? It’s one thing to say that you’d prefer not to play through another game so similar to the first, but that’s a matter of personal preference. To try to blame the game for that is a bit unfair, as that’s what the game has set out to do: further explore the world, characters, and game mechanics that it laid down in previous installments. If the series feels a need to evolve it certainly will — or will branch off into multiple paths of sequels — but should it be obligated to constantly do so?

Video games seem to occupy this strange place in the culture that expects them to always be changing, always evolving, always hurtling toward the future at a pace we unfairly expect to exceed our own. This isn’t the case with films; we don’t expect the sequel to a gangster movie to be a musical about time-traveling leprechauns. Ditto music; when Neil Young releases several albums in a row of raw, rusty country-rock, we don’t complain that he didn’t do a disco album, followed by speed metal, followed by Gregorian chants.

We know what Neil Young does well, and we like it when he does that. (In fact, the times he has deviated substantially from our expectations, he’s been critically raked over the coals for that transgression.) We don’t expect every song or album to sound exactly the same, but we do expect that it will fit into the scope of talent that suits him best. We want it to be Neil Young, and that’s a desire we can only have where there exists a set of expectations for something to be Neil Young.

So why do we expect video games to always be offering substantially different experiences with each installment?

Personally, I don’t want that. I’d rather know what I’m getting into ahead of time. I know I can rely on Mario to give me a fun adventure every time, and it’s that reliability that keeps him so dear to my heart. I don’t want him trying to surprise me every time, because then I can’t know what I’m getting into. Or, if he does feel the need to surprise me, I ask only that he make that clear from the start, by slapping a Sunshine or a Galaxy on the label to make me look twice, and consider this new game on its own merits and of its own potential, separate from whatever other expectations I may have.

I don’t want the next Fallout game to be a real-time strategy. I don’t want Half-Life 3 to be an anime-influenced choose-your-own adventure. And I don’t want the sequel to a game I know to deviate so far from the original that it no longer fits into the world it created for itself.

It’s sometimes nice to know where you stand.

It’s sometimes nice to have expectations.

And it’s sometimes nice to come home to old friends.

That’s why they’re friends. We took the time to know them, we know what we can expect from them, and we’ve become comfortable around them.

“Not different enough” isn’t a criticism. And especially in the case of New Super Mario Bros. 2, it’s practically a compliment.

* That’s as in pants I wear while bitching, not pants that are so stylish that they could affectionately be described as “bitchin’”. Though my bitching pants are also pretty bitchin’.

I’m Still in Your eShop! And Here’s Why I Chose What I Chose…

As mentioned previously, Nintendo Life has a shelf in the 3DS eShop, starting today and continuing on until next Thursday. If you go here you can see which staff member chose which five games. But I wanted to write a short post about why I chose to spotlight those games…and also provide the five more recommendations I would have made, had space allowed.

VVVVVV (3DSWare)
Unquestionably one of my favorite games, period. I played this when it was fairly new for the PC, and was instantly won over by its affectionate visual tribute to the Commodore 64. Sharp writing, brilliant stage design and a perfectly utilized gravity-flipping gimmick were just icing on the cake. I almost mentioned the game’s stellar soundtrack in that sentence as well, but…no, the soundtrack deserves a sentence all to itself. It’s genuinely, impossibly, beautifully perfect music, and as silly as it might sound, the game is worth playing just for that. Even if you end up despising it — which I truly doubt you, or anyone, would — the soundtrack guarantees that the experience simply can’t be a waste of your time. To speak at all of the game’s plot is to detract from the unfolding wonder and surprise of the VVVVVV experience, so let’s just say it’s great and leave it there. When I found out it was coming to the 3DS I couldn’t wait, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a stellar port of an unforgettable game.

Bird Mania 3D (3DSWare)
I’ll be honest here: I expected to hate this one. The developer never impressed me in the past, and so when they released this deliberately simple and warily inexpensive score attack game, I thought it was going to be a complete phone in. Instead it became one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve had on the 3DS. Bird Mania 3D is fast-paced, satisfyingly challenging, and urgently addictive. You’re ostensibly guiding a left-behind little bird to Africa, so that he can reconnect with the rest of his flock, but since it’s an endless game you’ll never achieve that goal. The bird is fated to perish…all you can do is collect stars and balloons along the way, racking up as many points as you can before his inevitable crash. It sounds dark, and I suppose it is, but it’s hugely entertaining, and infinitely replayable. More like this, please.

Antipole (DSiWare)
I picked this one up because it sounded a lot like VVVVVV. Aside from the fact that it’s another gravity-manipulation game, it wasn’t. And even the gravity manipulation is handled — and experienced — completely differently. As such, this turned out to be happy accident; I bought it hoping it would be one thing, and got something even better. Antipole finds you flipping, floating and dodging through a hellish machinescape full of killed robots, death traps, and precision-demanding obstacle courses. That’s good enough — and it’s great fun just trying to make it to the end — but a more difficult mode, isolated challenge stages and copious achievements make this an even richer experience than it would have been. DSiWare without question had more than its share of garbage cluttering up the service, but this is one worth digging down to find.

Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge (Game Boy)
This is one of the few games I had for the Game Boy, and, surprisingly enough, it was the only Mega Man game I owned. (Apart from the unmentionable PC disasters.) While I loved Mega Man as a kid, for some reason I never had the games. I simply rented them all so many times that I could have paid for them 10 times over. And that’s why I have such a fondness for this one: it was mine. It’s a flawed little game with some annoying physics and an all-too-short adventure on offer, but I have a personal attachment that’s stronger than I have for most games. And, to be fair, it’s great for what it is. The stages are all reinvented for the Game Boy, meaning there’s surprisingly little overlap with the NES original. The music has also been rearranged to account for the different sound chip, making it sound just as great as — and in some cases better than — the source material. It’s a minor entry in the Blue (or, erm, Grey) Bomber’s catalogue, but brilliant all the same.

Avenging Spirit (Game Boy)
Another(!) great surprise, Avenging Spirit is yet another platformer that tasks you with rescuing your girlfriend. Only this time, you’re already dead. Yes, you’re killed by mobsters before the game even begins, so it’s up to you to possess the living, using their abilities, weapons and strengths to wreak your revenge upon the villains who did you in. It’s a delightfully dark concept for such a cartoony game, and seeing the bodies you possess fall lifeless to the ground when you leave them never gets less chilling. It’s extremely challenging (noticing a pattern here?) toward the end of the game, but that just gives you greater incentive to push through and find new things. There’s one unlockable body you can get if you find all three keys, but the game’s main replay value comes simply from playing through the levels again and again, using different abilities every time, and having it feel like you’re playing a completely different game. Avenging Spirit is absolutely an experience worth having.

And five more I would gladly add to that list…

Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again! (DSiWare)
There’s not much on offer here that you won’t find in the other Mario vs. Donkey Kong games, but the fact that it’s downloadable — and therefore always on your system — is recommendation enough for this puzzler. You need to manipulate obstacles so that the mindless mini-Marios can march safely through the exit, all in pursuit of the big dumb ape who stole your toys. It’s great in short bursts, and absolutely worth having on the go. It’s also — say it with me! — really, really hard. I can safely say that the number of Mario games I enjoy far outsteps the number that I don’t, regardless of the ever-shifting genre. His presence usually means a purchase is a safe bet, and that’s as true here as it ever was.

Sword of Hope II (Game Boy)
The story is almost gleefully naive, but the adventure — not to mention atmosphere — is fantastic. Sword of Hope II confusingly made it to the 3DS Virtual Console before its predecessor did, but I’m not complaining. It’s a classically-styled RPG with turn-based battles and massive amounts of weapons, items and spells. You guide the good Prince Theo along with several companions through a kingdom threatened by an unrelenting evil. So, yeah, the plot is nothing of note, but the experience of playing through it is fantastic. It’s a step back in history…no, not to medieval times, but to a time when video games were just meant to be fun…and that’s a trip I’m willing to take any time.

Kirby’s Dream Land (Game Boy)
Another of my original Game Boy games. I’ve always — always — adored this one. The first trip through the game is brilliant, light, sunny fun. The second trip is shockingly challenging. And beyond that you can configure the game so that it demands perfection and turns everything into a one hit kill. Funnily enough, Kirby’s never been more difficult than in this original adventure, which is so often wrongfully derided as being kiddy, or too easy. If this is kiddy, then I don’t want to grow up. (Also…I don’t want to grow up.) Kirby’s been in more great games than I can even count, but there’s an effortless beauty to his original outing, and, for better or worse, this is how I’ll always remember him.

Metroid II: Return of Samus (Game Boy)
The Metroid series has tried a lot of things over the years. From loose, unguided exploration to first-person shooting to linear battlefests (to, uh, pinball…) just about every game offers a unique experience. Its singular Game Boy outing, however, manages to stand apart even from that disparate group. It’s not survival you’re after here…it’s xenocide. Samus is tasked with hunting down and exterminating, one by one, every remaining Metroid in existence, and that gives this game an impressively dismal feel. You worm your way through caverns and tunnels, slaughtering tiny aliens as you go, and watching the Metroid population diminish. It’s not exactly the case that Samus becomes a cold blooded killer in this one, but the experience is, by definition, guided by bloodlust, and that’s not a common theme for a game developed in-house by Nintendo. It’d be worth playing for its novelty alone…the fact that it just so happens to be a fantastic gaming experience as well makes this unmissable.

Mr. Driller: Drill Till You Drop (DSiWare)
Mr. Driller — an offshoot of the classic Dig Dug series, though rightfully classic in itself — is simple: you drill. Fast. It’s a sort of reverse Tetris that relies on destruction and speed rather than organization and wise consideration. The longer you take, the more your oxygen diminishes…but the faster you drill, the more likely you are to cause a cave-in that ends your game outright. This version features more levels than I’ll ever be able to finish, but that’s okay; Mr. Driller isn’t about succeeding, or even surviving. It’s about reflex, and immediate decision making, as well as constantly dealing with the fallout (pun intended) of your past decisions. It’s a slight experience by design, but it’s limitlessly satifying.

I’m in Your 3DS eShop

…provided you live in America.

Log in and check it out! I’m second from the right, as if you couldn’t tell from the fact that I’m ABSOLUTELY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MY MII. It will be up until a week from today, so soak it in while you can.

You can read more about it here for now, and I’ll update later on with some commentary on what I picked, why, and maybe some additional recommendations as well.

But for now…

…I’m in the ****ing Nintendo eShop!

Photo by Ron “The Bod” DelVillano

20 Questions: Adam Lore

You may recognize the name Adam Lore, as he comments here pretty regularly. I’ve known Adam for several years now, and he’s always been a fascinating — and compulsively creative — person that I enjoy checking in with now and again. Recently he offered me a copy of Abyssian Squelch, his latest album, and I was happy to receive it. In return, I told him that I would write a review on this blog.

Fast forward to me actually listening to the album, and realizing that it was, more or less entirely, beyond the scope of any words I could possibly find. It’s a fantastic and involving listen…but it wasn’t something, I felt, I could adequately discuss. So I figured I’d turn to the man in charge, and use his words instead. Hence, the below interview, which I hope you enjoy. If you have any questions for Adam, feel free to leave them below.

And Abyssian Squelch is brilliant. Just putting that out there.

1) How many songs have you recorded as of today? Have you lost count?

It’s difficult to put an exact number on it.. I have written 48 albums but only about 10 of them have decent presentable finished recordings currently. So somewhere between 100 and 600 songs, depending on what you want to count.

There are a few more albums I have worked on in collaboration with others, too.

2) Is there something particular about your creative process that causes you to be more prolific?

I think it has a lot to do with saving most of the stuff I work on regardless of how good it is and organizing it all into albums after the fact. And most of the music I write is pretty simple and repetitive, so it’s not a lot of work to come up with material.

For music, it’s easy to create an album in separate pieces and then assemble them together after the fact. Comic strips work that way, too. For other things, like writing a book or making a graphic novel or a musical or something, you really can’t do that, so I tend to not finish those types of projects as much as writing individual songs.

3) Describe the journey from your initial inspiration to your final edit.

I’ll use a particular song for an example. I was watching the movie Jack, starring Robin Williams, for those of you who don’t remember it, in the movie Jack has some kind of disorder that makes him age much faster than normal children, so he is in elementary school but he looks 40 years old or something.

There is a scene where Jack is on the playground sitting alone and a basketball rolls toward him. And there’s that moment where he is on the spot, and he picks up the ball, and everyone is staring at him, expecting him to throw the ball to them. And it’s just such a simple task to just throw the ball back, but it’s like this huge celebrated achievement that you are thanked for so graciously for just returning a ball.

Something about that really resonated with me, and I could relate to it on a very deep level for some reason.

I was also reading a lot about fairy tales at the time.

The next day I was walking to my friend’s house and these kids where playing with a ball, and it almost rolled into the street, and it landed at my feet! I thought “I’m Jack!” which was immediately followed by the thought “and you’re the beanstalk”. After tossing the ball back I had a pretty solid idea for a song.

There’s really not much to it after that. Write the lyrics down, add a bridge or something. Find the chords that fit with the tune in your head. Record a demo.

That’s not a good example of the journey to a final edit, though, because I still haven’t recorded a final version of that song.

If I’m collaborating with someone it is a lot more interactive. If I am working with Mr. Door we usually focus on writing out more of a full song with multiple verses, which I tend to just rush through when I’m working alone. Collaborating with other people, like working with Mitch Guss, for example, it can be a lot more spontaneous and experimental. We may just hit record and start screaming.

4) When listening to Abyssian Squelch, I hear a lot of influence from They Might be Giants and The Flaming Lips. Who would you say your primary influences are?

You’re right on the money. They Might Be Giants are a major influence for my music. My main influence, for sure. The Flaming Lips have been very influential, too. I draw a lot of inspiration from Daniel Johnston and James Kochalka as well. I won’t go into a huge list or anything, but I have also been influenced by stuff like TV theme songs, movie soundtracks, and music from Nintendo games.

5) You recorded a soundtrack for Dino Golf, an NES game that never existed. If you could conjure the perfect video game out of thin air, what would it be like?

I always want to play Dino Golf. It’s too bad it’s not a real game.

I don’t know about the perfect video game, but I think there are a lot of great things you could do with geometry and topology in a video game that aren’t being taken advantage of.

I’d love to see a game where you could explore extra dimensions, or see time as part of space or something like that. Maybe controlling and manipulating the laws of physics within the game.

6) What game (or games) have the best soundtracks in your opinion?

I love the music from all the Mario games (including Yoshi’s Island), Zelda, and Mega Man (especially Mega Man 3 and X), Final Fantasy has great music. The Moon level on Ducktales for NES is one of the best for sure. Bubble Bobble and Kirby have really fun soundtracks. Dr. Mario, too. I’m envious of the music from Rygar, Metroid, Dragon Warrior, Punch Out, Castlevania. Too many to list.

7) If you could sit down with any musician, alive or dead, and write one single song with them who would it be and why?

Believe it or not, I would love to collaborate with Justin Bieber. I think it would be so fun and interesting to combine our different styles and approaches to music. And I think seeing Justin Bieber dancing around and singing passionately about marrying an invisible dinosaur from the future or something would just be hilarious and wonderful.

8) What is your favorite musical moment in any film?

If I can pick three, I’d go with:
1) Will Ferrel’s “Whole Wide World” scene in Stranger than Fiction
2) the “Let My Love Open the Door” scene from Dan in Real Life
3) The Squid and the Whale, when Walt performs “Hey You”, claiming he wrote it

If I had to choose the best musical moment, though, I’d probably go with The “Wise Up” scene in Magnolia. So good!

9) You also draw comic strips. Do you see any overlap between creating visual art and music?

I think in theory it always seems like a really great idea to combine the two. But I don’t see them as being easily compatible. I do think a lot of the creative energy comes from the same place, though. With animation, on the other hand, you can do it well. I think animation would be the perfect medium if it weren’t so difficult and expensive to produce.

I love the montage scenes of comic book art in the Crumb documentary, though. Maybe it’s just a matter of finding the right music.

10) What single album has spoken more deeply to you than any other?

Probably Apollo 18 by They Might Be Giants.

11) What instruments can you play?

Pretty much anything that’s based on a keyboard. And basic chords on the guitar. Though I tend to avoid electric guitars entirely. I can play the accordion to a limited extent.

12) What single instrument that you can’t play would you most like to learn?

It would be fun to learn how to play a theremin.

13) You’re on a desert island with your iPod. There’s no hope of rescue and you’ll only be able to listen to three more songs before the battery dies. What’s on this short playlist?

1. “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid
2. “Si Me Dejas Ahora” by Camilo Sesto
3. “The End of the Tour” by They Might Be Giants

14) If you could be remembered for one thing — anything, whether or
not you actually did it — what would it be?

To have formulated a unified theory of quantum gravity.

5) Favorite Bob Dylan song?

I’m not really a big Bob Dylan fan. At least not yet. “The Man in Me” from The Big Lebowski soundtrack is a good one, though.

16) Describe the Adam Lore of 2022.

The Adam Lore of 2022 is a big Bob Dylan fan.

He has written over 100 albums and has recorded 14 of them.
He has published two best selling graphic novels and lives
with his beautiful wife Jessica Alba.

17) Describe the Adam Lore of 2002.

In 2002 I was finishing up high school. Had very long hair.
I was in a band called Trojan Horse which was good fun.
Working on issue #2 of a mini-comic called Munky Monkey.

18) What’s your next — or current — project?

I’m always working on a bunch of different stuff at the same time, but most noteworthy is probably the upcoming album Ordovician Brainstation. I’m also re-recording my third album Columbis and working on some more Toad Road comics. Chipping away at a lot of other ongoing projects here and there.

19) If you had to choose between being blind or deaf, which would you choose? Why?

It would be horrible to be deaf, but I’d definitely rather be deaf than blind. Just doing everyday tasks and even walking would be far more difficult. Being deaf wouldn’t be nearly as debilitating.

20) Due to an accident, you can no longer write or record music. How do you cope?

I’m not particularly devoted exclusively to music over anything else. I think of myself as a visual artist first and an amateur musician second or third. As long as I could express myself in other ways I would be alright.

It is having an idea and not being able to get it down that really drives me nuts. So if I came up with songs in my head, but couldn’t write them or record them, that would be torture.

BONUS: Say anything to the readers that you haven’t gotten to say yet.

If you are interested in seeing what I am working on check out my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/adamlore

And you can see my comics and other artwork at http://adamlore.blogspot.com

And some of my music is available for free on http://last.fm/music/Adam+Lore

Thank you for your time. As Allen Ginsberg said, follow your inner moonlight and don’t hide the madness.