Nostalgia

Oh my mighty God.

Ikaruga arrived the other day in my mailbox, after I had to painstakingly scour the Internet for a place from which to purchase the PAL version, after the incredibly stupid GameNation/Atari Australia decided to can the Australian release, on the very day it was going to be released. I could go on about my feelings toward GameNation at the moment but I have released all my fury with them over the last two weeks and I will instead simply say this: Ikaruga is awesome, in all of the ways an arcade game should be awesome. Quite simply it is perhaps the best $90 I have spent in recent memory. You can read some great reviews about the game elsewhere so I will not make any more comments on it other than that. For those of you who have an abnormal fetish for shoot–em–ups as I do, may I recommend Shmups mk2 to you? Thanks.

Ikaruga’s “old school” action has enticed a surge of nostalgia to wash over me — so much so that I have actually pulled out my A1200 from the mausoleum that is my chest of drawers and hooked it up to my amp and television. This venerable beast has to be around seven years old now and when I turned it on, it quickly got to work booting and within seconds a familiar looking Workbench screen appeared and seemed to quip “How’s it goin’ mate?” It is exactly how I left it when I switched it off all of those years ago and even the clock in it has kept the time perfectly. Within another few seconds I had instinctively given “The Chaos Engine” icon a swift clicker-roo and was enjoying a long over due blast with my old two button digital joystick and that exhilarating sound track booming from my new home theatre system. Before I knew it I had completed the first world and was so engrossed that just about everything else I had to do today had vanished in a wisp of vapour that must have escaped through my left ear. Absolutely fantastic stuff.

As I sit here now, typing on this — this thing — this monstrosity that people today call the modern PC, I can’t help but get a little angry and annoyed. I look at the Amiga — how good it was, how good and perfectly functional it still is, and how it absolutely outclassed everything in its day (yes including my beloved Nintendo’s SNES) and then I look at this multimedia behemoth with its hulking, barely manageable operating system and I cringe inside. I am not going to sit here and say, as I once did, that the Amiga is better than the PC. What I will say however is that today’s home computer experience should be a whole lot better than it is.

Do not let anyone tell you that capitalism and the free market produce the best products — it doesn’t, it’s just a popularity contest, and we know how great and exceedingly fair those are.

Rush Hour(s)

Naturally, in a complete reversal to my previous post, the last few weeks of tardiness with regards to blogging can be directly attributed to the following events/calamities/excuses:

  • Extreme pain inflicted during a paint ball session
  • A university graduation ceremony
  • A compulsively purchased surround sound system along with the associated painful re-organisation of my room (read: full) to accommodate it
  • The purchase of a god damn massive television by one of my friends
  • An Easter long-weekend (fake Easter mind you)
  • Some longer than my usual workday training courses
  • etcetera

I hope to have you a more substantial diatribe posted by this weekend. You know I am good for it.

Worm-like Appendages

While reports of my death may be a little premature, it would not be complete hyperbole to say that I have been fairly unwell in the last week or so. Suffice it to say that my recent blogging hiatus was not in fact due to a busy schedule or the usual bouts of extreme laziness but could be directly attributed to a not so nice condition which those in the medical fraternity term — and I must say it has a certain lilting rhythm to it — appendicitis. In my youth I theorised that the appendix, that small tube attached to the side of the small intestine and floats around the lower right side of your abdomen, may have been the primary organ involved in that mysterious ailment known as Spontaneous Human Combustion. My reasoning behind this was that no one knew what function the appendix served and no one knew what caused SHC — a strong link if ever there was one. You can imagine then my grief when I felt that tell-tale pain in the general vicinity of my appendix, after having suffered some nasty stomach cramping and red-hot fever the previous day. I am pleased to say that despite my concern I did not ignite in some towering inferno in which only my teeth, feet and hands survived and accordingly I actually still retain all of my worm-like appendages. These two truths are certainly surprising to me; it was my belief before this episode that any mention of the word appendicitis around any doctor would immediately result is some sort of intestinal excavation being conducted on the spot. This was compounded by the nature of my family GP who often walks into her surgery excitedly inquiring “Where is something I can cut?” — usually to my utter chagrin. My knowledge of medical practices must be somewhat antiquated however as I was simply issued a course of antibiotics along with a caveat that they would give me a fifty percent chance of avoiding having any of my appendices removed. My luck, for a change, has held and my current hobby is poking myself in the stomach just to revel in the delightful feeling of knowing that my appendix may continue to happily excrete its delicious fluids into my lower digestive tract. Oh yeah.

In other news, Metroid Prime was released in Australia last Thursday (although I was lucky enough to receive it on Wednesday, even while bed ridden, thanks to the efforts of a very dear friend) and I must say the wait has been well worth it. You may recall that I generated a bit of a rant on the PAL Metroid delay on these very pages not that long ago and as usual when I open my mouth, it’s usually to take my feet out. Not more than one hour after I posted the entry in question I read a news item on some website detailing the improvements that Retro Studios were making to the game for its PAL release. These improvements include:

  • More speech
  • A harder difficulty level
  • Some other bits and pieces that I fail to remember

You may show me some leniency though as these details were not exactly highlighted by an obvious source such as Nintendo of Australia’s web site but on some other rather obscure enthusiast site that I just happened upon that night.

I was particularly roused on the issue of increased difficulty in the game as I am fair and square in the middle of the camp preaching that “today’s games are too bloody easy.” There just seems to be few games lately that will take you and tell you in a shower of profanity that “I am going to make you my bitch.” I was having a minor issue with Metroid’s difficulty level. I had completed about forty percent of the game with only having witnessed the intense game over screen once in all that time — the result of taking too long to escape the first level due to being too busy gawking at the visuals rather than any lack of game playing prowess on my part. You won’t see any such words of ease now however as not more than an hour ago I had my arse handed to me, several times, by several different varieties of alien space pirate. Needless to say those bitches are going to pay a hefty toll and my craving for some measure of a challenge is being satisfied in the best possible way. Just be sure that when you remind me that Metroid features an explicit “hard” mode which you can unlock upon completion, that you have some sort of kerchief handy to wipe that drool away from the corner of my mouth.

Note to Nintendo: I never meant a word of it.

Democracy Through Cotton Wool

Oh boy. What a match! Last night was seriously the best batting display I have ever witnessed. Unfortunately, due to staying up to some ungodly hour to watch the awesome display that was the Cricket World Cup final, my brain feels like it is fully surrounded in the fluffy white stuff and will not, under any circumstances, be tempted out from hiding. As a result this post may end up reading at a level of sophistication somewhere close to that of your average kindergarten narrative. Not that this is always a bad thing. Poo poo.

While you are here I would like to direct your valuable thoughts towards an article of merit that I happened upon in Thursday’s edition ofThe Newcastle Herald. In particular, Jeff Corbett’s often polemic editorial attracted my attention as it addressed a point of view which I had myself been churning around in my brain; possibly somewhere close to my lower cerebellum. In his editorial, Corbett discusses an interesting viewpoint towards the efforts of the “Coalition of the Willing” to liberate the people of Iraq and install that pinnacle of Western institutions: the democracy. Basically the premise of the editorial is about whether it is worthwhile for an external power to come in and effectively give the Iraqi’s a democratic government. Surely something given has no value. He argues that if the Iraqi’s are so oppressed and mistreated there would have been some sort of uprising or gradual force evolve in that country which would usurp Saddam and implement a system of government more to the benefit of the common people. Corbett also does not understand why his sons (metaphorical I assume) should risk their lives to provide an alien society with the governing system that we enjoy in our own country.

While Corbett looks at the issue from the selfish view point of personal sacrifice (I use the term selfish here in a neutral, non-emotive way) I tend to look at it more from a longevity and value angle. If Western powers install a democracy in a country whose constituents have not had to fight for it (although undoubtedly they will have paid a heavy but passive toll) what is to stop them from installing a new government just as insidious as the last? Or having another dictator emerge? Will the Iraqi people genuinely appreciate a system of government provided by the blood of soldiers from a foreign, fundamentally different society? These are questions for which I have no answers and I realise that I have taken a hopelessly narrow view of an incredibly volatile and complex situation; I am also the first to admit that my political knowledge in general is very limited. However I feel that these are questions which deserve to be considered, lest the inevitable death toll at the end of this insane conflict result in a situation which is no better than the one which preceded it.

My opinions concerning the current war have ebbed and flowed from the shoals of opposition to the high water mark of agreement. In the end I have decided that the world would most certainly be a better place without Saddam; a popular view I am sure despite all of the anti-war protests occurring lately. What I am not so certain about, however, is the manner in which this is being attempted. Do not ask me how it should be done though; in this regard I am overwhelmingly naive.

I just hope that those who are in positions of power are not like me.