Police reunion

Preemptive

THE RIDE

"No amount of piling up skulls thrills any more"

I breathe in still. The music grows calm. I breathe out.

Ragbag Buntara creeps towards me from her bed in the dirt of Imperial City. My will wobbles a tightrope of death. Yet like her, I stare up breathlessly through my whiskers at the fuming ruins, the shattered shell of the Church of the One. Smoking in its crumbled midst, an enormous stone dragon: moments ago paralyzing and golden and alive, a righteousness-spewing manifestation of Akatosh himself! Need I stress he’s one of the great Nine Divines, the very gods who cement this world of unmatched beauty and evil, our teeming Cyrodill? Without winged Akatosh’s summoning, all on it would have been smothered methodically from above by the four hands of the axe-wielding titan, Mehrunes Dagon. For the last 357 sunsets, the Daedric Prince has hatefully stabbed holes into the stretched skin of the land, mountains to deserts to oceans, pushing through his gates of blood and bone countless abominations! Thousands have died in his name, from penned horses to an entire city: that infamous pile of rubble, Kvatch. Today, Sun’s Height 13, he materialized in the great city and was exiled by Akatosh in a storm of flame. Perhaps he’s even dead. Or both are dead.

Yet even now, Buntara begs me for a coin, my smashed and enchanted weapons still vibrating from the battle moments ago that would end the world. There is a Daedric arrow shafted through my groin, one of several souvenirs of erupted demon war. She looks directly at me, an armoured Khajit catman named Grandpa, my fur as bright as the sun. Then asks, “Tell me again how you and Martin defeated Mehrunes Dagon.”

To be honest, it’s a long fucking story. Thanks to Emperor Martin summoning Akatosh at the cost of his existence, the Line of Kings is broken, the world without a leader. But I soon learn walking the lonely land - now free of Dagon’s prehistoric fiends and buxom spider queens - that’s all anyone wants to talk about any more, from the Black Horse Courier office outward. The battle legend pours even to the extradimensional Shivering Isles, once domain of Mehrunes’ cousin Sheogorath, another Daedric Prince, Lord of Madness instead of hate. Sheogorath has a special place in my grit teeth. After his queer gate showed up on the lake outside of Bravil it took an extensive penance.

There I was trapped for weeks, kept from my artistic heart: my hand-decorated wizard’s tower Frostcrag Spire, where so much of my passion lies in this life of mindless killing and errand-running. There: every skull I’ve ever liberated is piled. It’s home to my massive library and sycophant servant boy, cruelly commanded to remain in the bedroom conservatory, a little herb-garden gnome. Though I have no taste for his praise, he reminds of me the price of engaging the corrupt cities of men. In the tower’s rooms below, an unmatched collection of weapons and armour, trinkets; but also an easel-framed painting traded for keeping quiet about a certain royal infidelity; also, the head of a sick wizard’s mother; best of all, a handmade spiral staircase made of inexplicably floating paintbrushes carefully arranged upward, hanging there as if life were some mere game with cool graphic glitches.

But with both Daedra regals snuffed, I admit I’m not quite sure what to do with my life any more. To circumvent their disruptive ambitions, I’ve thrown myself into Felldew addiction, salivating and scrambling desperately through the hollows of a giant tree for the right kind of man-sized bug to juice – soon after, a battle with a dark mirror of myself; I’ve ripped the keystone hearts out of 15 Oblivion planes – hewing others’ reality; I’ve even leaped into a book, the secret Paradise of Mankar Camoran, destroying yet another dreamworld.

So now, the idea of lackey-fetching singing Ninroot for a wine-burping chemist or finding some fool woman’s debt-ridden husband in an orc dungeon seems positively … janitorial.

I’ve said it then. I believe I’m suffering post-Oblivion depression, healer. The mountains have been claimed and flattened. And no amount of piling up skulls or climbing floating paintbrushes over walls I’m not physically supposed to thrills any more. And I’m thinking about Ragbag Buntara. I’m thinking the next time she asks me for a coin … I’m going to have to hurt her. You know. Just for something to do as the guards rush to their deaths.

Better a debauched canary than a pious housecat, after all.

ESH: A Palpable Loss

Undead Losers

"A clever simulation of a mid-‘70s experience"

Grindhouse
Written and directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
Now playing at Empire Theatres

First of all, nothing exactly like this film has ever been intentionally attempted before, even by David Lynch. This alone is a blast of warm summer air in the face. Grindhouse isn’t just two full-length action-horror movies slapped together. It’s actually a clever simulation of a mid-‘70s experience long forgotten in our download era – namely, sitting in a decaying theatre watching exploitation trash, complete with warped, furry projections, ludicrous trailers and even retro, drive-in adult content warnings. Oh, and missing reels. The package is an wildly referential labour of love. In other words, the features - running at over three hours together – exist in a very deliberate and beautiful pomo framing device. Especially cool given they’re set in the now, stressed by tension actually brought on by text-messaging. Rodriguez’s fake trailer – Machete - is even going to be real film! Can’t wait.

But is the art good? Are you surprised I even care?

Funny thing is, to describe the two hemispheres is to lessen them in every way – the narratives depend so much on surprises, especially the latter. Still, open wide: A genetic-experiment zombie-survival flick (Planet Terror) vs. Death Proof, the tale of a paraphelic serial killer who murders with cars? Sounds utterly ghastly. But to be honest, I haven’t had this much fun in a movie setting since Two Towers - the one with that impossibly perfect rainy siege battle and “Looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys!”

Put together, Planet Terror and Death Proof actually hit a lot of Peter Jackson’s nerves. Over and over again, till everything’s covered in blood and zombie ooze. Perhaps you’ve seen the trailers – a one-legged woman with a machine-gun attached! A helicopter tilting down into an army of undead! Kurt Russell! Being the master of the come-from-behind, border-crossing action-framing fills Rodriguez’s Planet Terror with characters you actually care about. It cleverly flips sympathy back and forth between a husband and wife falling apart, a sheriff and his Texas chef brother, and our main heroes, Wray and Cherry. Freddy Rodriguez plays the former with world-weary detachment, except when it comes to his knockout former girlfriend (Rose McGowan), retired gogo dancer. And don’t forget about Bruce Willis as a misused Afghanistan vet turned bad butting heads with a testicle collecting gangster geneticist (Naveen Andrews, Said from Lost). You just have to see it to believe it. I grinned constantly.

Though Planet Terror seems more fun, by the time Tarantino’s Death Proof is over you’ll start arguing with yourself.

Using many actors and even characters from Terror, Tarantino paints the far less manga story of four girls slowly drawn into the trap of a killer. I don’t dare reveal anything else, save that Quentin plays the joke to the hilt following the most unbelievable, slow-motion car crash I’ve ever seen by cleaving his half in two as well. But our antagonist messes with the wrong girls - who we’ve gotten to know quite well thanks to Q.T.’s trademark casual banter - in, again, one of the best chase scenes ever.

I’ve said too much.

This is the monolith Tarantino was hoping for with Kill Bill, dripping with story, cameos, great music and - need I say? – copious and realistic gore. As a collaboration it’s thrilling and varied, especially interesting to see how both expert directors handle Rose McGowan. Rob Zombie’s dumb trailer for Werewolf Women of the SS is more than made up for by the subtle genius of Thanksgiving, basically the last untouched holiday horror. A cop leans down to a decapitated man in a turkey costume, announcing seriously, “It’s blood.” Hilarious.
I can’t think of a better waste of an afternoon. Dudes, you’ve seriously done it again, the sum exceeding two partners.

ffff/fffff

Goldilogs & the Three Bears

"Ready to snap at all the endless bullshit"

Shooter
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Danny Glover and Levon Helm

You know what the dismissed left really needs to do? Strike back. With bullets. And napalm. And high-powered explosives. That would certainly make the U.S. government think twice before slyly suspending even more civil liberties.

This is the message of Shooter, either as wish-fulfilment or warning, and it’s frankly scary. For years, Hollywood had to look back and mine the rotten, maggoty idiocy of Vietnam for source material. Everything from Apocalypse Now to, on the sillier side, Rambo. Yet thanks to the current Republican warlocks, today’s headlines are enough to justify the boiling anger of Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg). But what really got his goat was how, as a patriotic military sniper in Ethiopia, he and his spotter were left out to dry after protecting a covert operation to stop rebellion against America goals - oil.

His partner dead, we fast-forward to the rural and mountainous supposedly not B.C. The peaks of Kansas, perhaps – doesn’t matter – where Swagger now lives with his dog, a well-worn copy of the 9-11 Commission Report and plenty-a Ol’ Glories. Into this nest of abused patriotism drive up Col. Isaac Johnson and the guy who played Casey Jones in the original Ninja Turtles, now reekingly scummy, both. Despite protests from the sniper that he doesn’t like this president or the last one – set after 2008? – Johnson plays up Swagger’s sense of duty and democratic belonging to get experienced assistance and stop an impending assassination. Wellllll, it’s pretty clear from the posters who’s going to get set up for the fall, and soon enough, after an Ethiopan minister is blown away right beside the Prez from a mile away, Swagger is on the run, framed for a crime only he could’ve committed. His framers, meanwhile, sit cackling in an expensive-looking room, surrounded by icons of Reagan and Bush Sr.

Lucky for Swagger, shot and bleeding and on the run, the rookie FBI agent he overcomes (Michael Peña as Nick Memphis – love these names) is hung out wet by the agency for failing to stop the invented assassin. Slowly with surety, their two fates pretzel in some of the most fantastic leaps of logic and plot nonsense ever slapped onto this Molden Age of cinema. Just for starters, each of our two victims is aided secretly by ladies who conveniently have exactly the skills and information and pass codes they need. Oh, and pointy breasts, of course.

Lucky for us, Wahlberg is a captivating actor. The topographical wrinkles on his furrowed brow keep us going as Swagger and Memphis kill literally dozens of federal agents, two modern Rambos who no way in hell should be allowed to live to tell their tale to clear their names. And yet.

Like the crew on Boston Legal weekly, screenwriter Jonathon Lemkin is couching very serious condemnation of Republican behavior vs. public apathy in the last six or so years - Abu Ghraib, WMDs and even, thanks to the Band’s rickety Levon Helm, the Kennedy plot all rise to the surface by name. Lemkin is more than hinting that even the most loyal and partisan and guns and apple pie among Americans is ready to snap at all the endless bullshit. And that if they do, led by misused soldiers instead of blue-state liberals, it’s going to be a fucking bloodbath.

Valid enough. But a better film, please?

--/-----

The Millionth Man

Catfight!

Don't forget, the Catfight! still rages at ArtsHab...

Why the hate?

Oilers Woes

Wii work hard...

So much about the Wii is a waiting game. Those of us who already have Nintendo’s shiny ivory keystone are, quite literally, a-waiting games. Those of you who don’t, well, at least our collective Golden Dawn will come simultaneously – we’ll dance in the street together, like this one really creepy Mario ad I saw in Japan the same weekend Edmonton was tornado-grated. We’ll revel the point when, for example, a perfectly responsive knockout boxing game or subtle sword simulator make us swear off the opposite sex forever. Until, of course, the wave of interactive Japanese sex games hits us – HARD, the all-confusing “third sex”: robots! In the meantime, there may yet be hope for the human race.

For the retail price of just more than its included controller, the pun in the newly-released WiiPlay is possibly unintentional, but speaks volumes. We’ve seen it all before, though not that that’s such a bad thing. Not quite as athletically heart-squeezing as WiiSports, WiiPlay leads us back to a number of long-forgotten arcades and dens - sans bullies - offering up a replay of Pong in Table Tennis, for starters. There’s also a motion-sensitive cover of the old NES Duck Hunt not quite as good as WarioWare’s Can Shooter, plus that Red’s Rumpus Room classic, Laser Hockey, which nods appropriately to neon vector graphics. Unlike a real air hockey game, it’s pretty tough to physically hurt your opponent by shooting a disc into his teeth, sadly.

Yes, it’s true. Wiis don’t actually hurt smart people, no matter what Sony hopes. So seriously, for the love of God, will you people stop droning on about Wii-motes going through TV screens? Anyone who manages to forget to hang on to their controller when swinging their arms around, strap or no, is – let me just calculate some numbers here – yes, a complete fucking idiot. Would you let go of a golf club? A hammer? The neck of a poopy puppy over your Persian rug? Of course you wouldn’t. So shut it, crap mongers. It’s not a funny joke any more.

Back to our pleasant walkthrough, amid the hundred brilliant mini-games in the spring-leggy Wario Ware, including cleaning a cow ass and zipping up the back of a panda, was a proto pool game. I was going to slag WiiPlay’s pool – a simple game of nine-ball with background music only Jimmy Buffet could love – until I realized I’d been playing it for an hour without blinking, even though I really had to go to the bathroom the whole time. Like WiiSports’ bowling, it’s a brilliant way to spend an afternoon, especially if you just got laid off from a major newspaper freaking out about all the free commuter dailies in a non-commuter town that just showed up, owned by and in direct competition with your own paper. What are these idiots thinking?

Ah, but we keep getting distracted. Besides its pool, and certainly not its Where’s Wii-ldo game, battle tanks is the cherry. The closest ancestor is Intellivision’s Triple Action, of all things, just a bunch of tanks trapped amid four Bezerk walls, trying to kill each other. A metaphor for life, really. Hm. Instead of fighting wars in the Middle East, maybe we should all sit down and play the vs. mode of this, then send the vanquished into the most convenient disintegration booth. Of course, some Cpt. Kirk figure would come and disrupt our utopian society and force us to kill for real again. Effin’ space philosophers.

Anyway, for the extra controller alone, WiiPlay is worth it. Now, without passing anything or touching at all, you and the Mrs. can sit side-by-each and answer such questions as “Is there life on Mars?” on the Everybody Votes Wii channel, or just take turns spinning the NASA weather globe, which currently remains the coolest thing about Wii anyway. SPIN, TINY LITTLE PLANET –WHO’S YOUR DADDY? SAY IT! BWA HA HA HA!

BACKBEEP – Air hockey at Red’s – the ‘90s

Despite barely being able to skate, I’m killer at air hockey. The trick to winning it is staring your human opponent in the eye so he looks back at you, kicking off the psychological battle. While he’s looking at you, slip all four of your fingers down over the side, thus extending the width of your nipple-shaped paddle a variable extra inch or so. Like most things in life, your “serve” is the best time to score, usually a rebound off the side wall. But once he starts guarding for that, shoot straight into the net as much as possible, destroying his ego with backwall cracks. Unfortunately, once the enemy realizes you’re cheating (though even show me a rulebook), you’ll probably end up with blood-bruised fingernails. But after the first couple hits you don’t even feel it any more. You don’t even feel anything.

Ghost Rider: "A trifle idiotic"

FLAME ON! Oh, wait – that’s that other flamer. Well, you could see how a guy could get confused.

Tell the truth, though, there’s no way I don’t know who Ghost Rider is. Born with an unnatural fear of skeletons, I obsessed over Johnny Blaze clawing at his face burning off every time the plot called for it in the ‘70s comic. Though the idea of a satanic bounty hunter transmuting into a burning, chain-whipping skeleton man in a leather jacket on a bike made of Hellfire seems a trifle idiotic at this point, it’s just the kind of thing that ensured Generation X would never really grow up. From Howard the Duck to Pretty in Pink’s Duckie, our fledgling pop culture is simply too insane to let go of.
Now that CGI Hollywood is prepared to mine the Marvel and DC back issues, Ghost Rider seems like a perfect target. And, to cut to it, I loved it. Even though. Sigh. It’s pretty much terrible.

If there’s still a kid in you, you just get over lines like “I feel like my skull is on fire” and probably the second-worst worst sense of what a TV reporter actually might be and say (1998’s Godzilla owns the lowest). Nick Cage handles Johnny Blaze with a certain Garfield disaffectedness, but that seems right for a guy who knows the devil is coming for him one day. Speaking of whom, Peter Fonda does a strange and interesting performance as Mephisto, though I really miss the frilly comic-book outfit only alluded to in shadow. But Fonda manages to fuse trustworthy charm with singer Nick Cave’s “weak and evil” to good effect as he convinces Blaze to sign his soul over to save his dad from terminal cancer. Father and son are in a motorcycle duo which young Blaze would break up to ride off with his girlfriend, Roxanne. But hearing the medical news, Blaze is torn up enough to attract the devil. Mephistopheles keeps his word about the cancer; he just kills pop in a bike accident the next day anyway. Haha. Blaze ditches Roxanne, done with love’s price for now.

The restrained ‘70s/’80s carnival feel is perfectly captured here, especially as we fast forward to now – all tits and tattoos and shitty metal licks. No wonder the Islamists want us buried.
Mephisto’s defiant son Blackheart, played by the weirdo kid from American Beauty, is after a certain 1000-soul contract that’ll bring on hell on earth with a cherry on top – him. So the devil brings Ghost Rider into the picture to take out his own son, sort of the opposite of how Blaze got into this mess. But watching the stuntman transform is a treat especially as, finally, we get an antihero who enjoys himself, cackling like mad – finally freed from worry.

How well a CGI skull can act is up for debate; slightly better than super-hot Roxanne (Eva Mendes), anyway. And for dealing with a bunch of demons and devils, there’s never the same kind of chaotic terror you get, say, reading Master and Margarita. But, unlike Hulk and Spider-Man, the film’s a lot of fun. Especially when, as huge geek bonus, the original, cowboy Ghost Rider hoofs into the plot. Played by none other than The Big Lebowski's cud-chewin’ Sam Elliot.
As a film, extremely dumb - but hot, wild and fantasy-fulfilling. What, you snobs have never wanted to crawl into bed with something like that?
zzz

Coolness Simulator

A burning question: are professional guitarists naturally keen at Guitar Hero II? They should be, right? The controller’s a fake fucking guitar: five colorful fret buttons below the head - a single string of sorts to strum - a Whammy bar for chewing on the long notes. Size of a parlour … uh, axe. Odie-tongue red. Obviously, I already scratched my initials into it. But is there a road and stage advantage for pros?

Only one way to find out = party. My drunken, train-hoppin’, post-BeerFest panelists include Red Ram’s Mark Feduk, the Secretaries’ Tash Fryzuk, singers John Guliak and Corb Lund, Twin Fangs’ Paul Coutts joining on this side of the river. So. What happens first is you invent a band name, usually pornographic. Thus far, the righteously assembled have chosen in an AC/DC font: Emotionz, Shittickets, DNK, Devildyke and Truck, the night’s winner. By now, every available towel is slurping up spilled beer and some kind of leopard-skin liqueur Jenny Jenny from the Sun brought in.

Even this early, the “coolness simulator” has us all laughing and some ooh-ing at the sublime cartoon art of the menus. We pick our weapons, a fine exercise in gender-swapping – Manga-scrawny Judy Nails on the Cherry Blossom Gibson Les Paul, for example. The first four songs show up.

Lund to this day ignores Wolfmother and goes for Shout at the Devil, where everyone else usually picks Cheap Trick’s Surrender. Psychologists would do well to cross-section these choices. After some serious play, the list grows – G’N’R, Spinal Tap … even War Pigs. Solid.
“It’s not really a guitar, it’s a Whac-a-Mole!” Coutts exclaims. He’s right. As notes colour-matching the fret buttons speed down the infinite neck, your job is simple. Hit the fret button at the same time you strum, matching the oncoming target note with precise timing. The easy level (where you don’t make money to buy more songs, outfits and guitars) uses only the top three frets. And no chords. Easy. You basically play a pared-down rhythm guitar initially. Expert level, on the other hand, crushes your hand into a furry albino lobster claw which doesn’t matter much because you’re head’s screwed right off your neck anyway.

The game is a hit. Rock poses are struck. Sitting while playing appropriately mocked. Fryzuk screams and drops the thing laughing while hound-voiced Guliak slags himself, but gets the general hang of it. “I give myself ½ star out of five,” he laughs. With my own band, Hebrella, I quickly notice out loud how effective this game is as a role-playing device. Just like real musicians, you’re deaf to how great you just played, obsessed with and chatty about the notes you missed. Uh, great post-gig conversation, in other words.

Hard-rockin’, grey-wearin’ Coutts, meanwhile, generally refuses to pilot any videogame. But while a dance party forms in the music room, there he is, strumming to Danzig all by himself. A heartwarming crossover.

Side note: Someone clever should mix Guitar Hero with bar karaoke. Add virtual drums and keys. Instead of going out to see music, you’d make it! In the meantime …

Lund, it turns out, starts taking names after the typical pro-to-nerd translation fumble. His pro advantage kicks in. He rises to the top of the musician heap. The metal set list has him especially going. “Someone had good taste there,” he muses. “I could imagine it becoming very involved.

“Then again,” he points out the obvious, “it might be a better investment of time and energy to actually get a real guitar and apply your efforts there. But who wants to do that, right? Not like there’s any money in it.”

Thus: Guitar Hero’s ultimate drawback, this early version, anyway. It’s different enough from the real thing that if you can’t already play a real guitar, you’re totally pissing your time away.
Guliak and Lund happily spending the next hour on Wii Sports golf, well, that’s another story.

BACKBEEP: IBM Machine Language music programming (1985)

How cruel our junior high teachers were, making us program an entire song in machine language! Each note was something like “6348.” To go through and program all of Talking Heads’ Heaven without the ability to read music was the first time I stayed up all night on an assignment. Bah! All for a C+. But, you might say, was not a thing learned? Oh, yes. As stated: my teacher was a dink.

Snore Trek: Lame-assy

You know what really stinks about Star Trek: Legacy? This is the pretty Xbox version, the one with all five series-starring captains voice-acting including -- thank God -- Kate Mulgrew. She’s just so great, with that really, really old “put me to sleep” cat inflection: “Ensign Kim … Harry, have a seat -- Neelix tells me your emotions haven’t been conforming to regulations lately.” Anyway, what stinks about Legacy is it’s not quite fun enough. So not exactly all that different from modern TV Trek, now in its, what, 438th year? But you know. Fundamentally flawed. This makes me very sad as a nerd. Plot-wise, it’s the newest Trek we get till the rumoured animated series (set 150 years apocalyptic after Nemesis) plops.

Anyhoo, the point of Bethesda’s generation-hopping, hi-res play-thru of the history of the Federation’s self-made woes is to be the captain on deck. But sadly, never to see the captain on deck. In this sense, the graphically strong answer to, “I wonder if V’ger and the Borg are related?” is largely a radio play … with special effects. But, ironically, it lacks a human touch. Honestly, I would have taken stills from the TV shows and shut up about it. A face does so much, especially Bill Shatner’s in his heyday.

Instead, in special features, with no caution of spoilers, imbedded are the crappy, panned-over drawings of the back story surrounding a long-living Vulcan scientist, including the tale’s denouement. So it’s quite easy to accidentally watch the entire narrative, right up to Jean-Luc Picard dusting himself off and summing up the moral about the needs of the many. Yet. Again.

Well, who cares about all that collectible card game trivia shit, right? You just want a wicked fight! Then too bad for you the spaceship dynamics are such a wet bagpipe. Even the Klingon scout ships careen painfully slow on full impulse -- and I know, “you can’t turn in warp,” I hear Geordi LaForge telling his imaginary Holodeck love doll. But a limitless game can’t even match the physical dynamics of one of the greatest battles of all time. If you remember the classic head-on of Kirk vs. Khan, these Xbox babies move with that weight -- but those ships were damaged from the get-go. Still, even that Enterprise could drop straight down. Nothing like that here. In terms of space-battle simulation, it’s a huge crime. In the later TV space battles like the Borg’s massacre at Wolf 359, properly working destroyers are skidding all over the place, firing blindly as the collective hacks them to slivers. I would seriously like to play that game. Quick and dirty, especially against friends. Something with the physics and ping-pong pace of Sega Genesis’ Star Control (see BACKBEEP below).

There’s more. Beyond moving your admittedly beautiful space turtle around its celestial pond, you’re required in the missions to fleet-command four ships at a time. Which is, frankly, hell in later levels. Is it fun to micromanage a ship’s repairs system by system in the middle of screaming space ambush, babysitting three other dumb-ass AI ships who don’t fight back? Well … take every time you press A as shorthand for Kirk riding Scotty’s fat ass, maybe – but even a game starring James Doohan in the Jeffries tube would, rest his soul, suck shit.

To bitch even more, the cosmos are not 360 degrees. Remember the turtle pool? Your little NCC-1701 or spicy Bird of Prey can only poke its nose to the, er, top of space, but no loop-de-loops over your enemy to launch photon torpedoes into his “dirty.” Did the crew of the USS Yamaguchi die for this?

Casting aside the laborious missions, the one-on-one is enjoyable with lots of practise. Though vs. the computer you can’t hand-pick its ship, with a buddy online it’s possible to recreate any battle you like, with the mandatory molasses drive and fire-only-when-locked weapons systems. Unfortunately, Bethesda didn’t have the decency to program a split-screen two-player combat mode for the living room. This is the final straw, a self-destructive snub at the nipple-raising wave of party gaming going on. But even a bridge-screen view would have gone parsecs. And: sighing.

Honestly, I’ve had more fun sitting around at lunch break trying to throw a bolt into a bucket first from a distance, but it’s better than sex with someone you dislike. If the ships could motor or even hit another object in space (they auto-veer), I’d rise up and testify to the power of a good tractor beam. But in too many ways, this game just adds to the legacy of laziness itself. An adequate, fly-by one-on-one with some nerd-candy voices and pointlessly stunning graphics does not the most engaging game make. Score? Half impulse at best.

BACKBEEP: STAR CONTROL II – SEGA GENESIS (1992)
Now this, cadets, is what I’m fucking talking about: Dozens of races with their own theme music and fascinating weapons, including the mermaid power of the Syreen to seduce your crew into space and the “LAUNCH FIGHTERS” attacks of the mighty Ur-Quan! Speed, gravity and witty weaponry like the VUX version of gooey Oobleck made this 2-D descendent of Asteroids resonate to this day - though we did cheat and steroid the game up by blasting the theme music to Wrath of Khan and Sneakers. KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

The hot new superehroic adventure novel from Minsiter Faust! Above is the Vue Weekly cover illustration for my interview with the Minister, drawn by the author himself and colored by brand-new Liverquest contrib Fish "Zoz" Griwkowsky. Friend party!