Console Nation

Kids, it's time we say goodbye to Video Game Week.


This most likely comes with a rounding cheer from a heart segment of my audience, while coming from a heavy heart. I really do love to apply analysis and critical thought to my gaming. Whether its the simplest indulgence, like button mashing and rhythm games, or the headiest, most convention defying experience to date, I love examining the phenomenon that occurs when we play games. I really appreciate the fact that anyone here would read my thoughts on a field that has no shortage of self-righteous essays and pretentious diatribes, not just from me but from much more talented, witty writers. 

I could honestly fill pages upon pages with content devoted to my love of gaming but in the interest of not shedding any more readers, I'll just round up the few posts on the subject that I have done and get back to what I do best - heartfelt examinations of the music that makes people tick. While there may be the occasional post on games in the future, they will much more sporadic, that's for sure. For example, I hardly mentioned the unsung hero of games - soundtracks. Someday, kids. Some day. 


Here's anything and everything I've written about button mashing:


Zombies Ate My Neighbors - an old post about a sublime SNES game, which is a love letter to B-Movies.
Silent Hill 2 - the scariest and most captivating experience I've ever had with a game, bar none.
Gamespite - a look at the most funny and intelligent gaming community I've seen, headed by Jeremy Parish.
S.T.U.N. Runner - a whimsical tale about lost memories from my childhood. And Chuck E. Cheese!
Scribblenauts - I wrote about this smart little game after a pre-flight happy-hour and some in-flight DS time.
Grabbed By The Ghoulies - Rare's black sheep that's really not too bad, worth the few dollars it goes for these days.
Maniac Mansion - a groundbreaking classic, as fun then as it is now. Another of many loving homages to Horror.
ToeJam & Earl - Co-op ahead of its time, a stealth masterpiece of the Sega Genesis.
Link's Awakening - The secret-best Zelda game which goes undeservedly neglected these days.
Dragon Warrior 4 - In which I wax nostalgic about exploring and having a curious mind as a child.
Virtual Bart - The hidden redemptive qualities of minigames and the mindless pleasures they afford.

That wraps up Video Game Week for me, kids. Starting tomorrow I get back on my grind with the more traditional music-based posts and articles. Down the line we'll have more themed weeks, like Book Worm Week and a special Halloween themed series. Until then, I'll see you guys on the flip side. Thanks for reading.

World Maps

I'm still in the grips of another Middle West heat wave, kids. It's tough. 

Everyone here makes jokes about risking death by venturing out in the winter months when wind chill can get down to 40 below zero, but the secret about Minnesota is that the summer can be just as dangerous. Case in point - in search of a specific dinner ingredient last night, I braved the 110+ heat index for all of 20 minutes. Having not had dinner yet and slowly navigating the jungle-like conditions, I returned home with the elusive ingredient on the verge of fainting. I just needed something to munch on (keeping mind and body together) and a cool glass of water to lower the temp. But it reaffirmed the notion that, for long stretches of time here in MPLS, it's simply not safe to venture out. One of the best outlets I've found to combat these potential cabin-fever conditions is exploring in video games. Not all games provide it, but it is a motive that was instilled at an early age.

 Like many people in America my brothers and I subscribed to Nintendo Power when we were kids, not only for all the amazing secrets and game tips but for...wait for it...drumroll...a free game! We got our copy of Dragon Warrior in the mail and were promptly confused. Our experience with RPGs at that point was minimal. I don't think I even know how to read at that point, actually. But we had our resources (the mag) and a resourceful attitude (what else do you do on a dangerously cold snow-day?) so we set about making Dragon Warrior a worthy endeavor. Alright, mostly I just watched as my older brother played it with the neighbor kids, explaining the action to me very patiently. At some point the addictive nature of a solid RPG hooked its claws into both the older brother and the Summers kids across the street and the three older kids went about working their way through the rest of the Dragon Warrior catalogue on NES.

 For myriad reasons the second and third iterations never captured my imagination (except for the Phantom Ship which was amazing), even after I learned to read and played through the original. When the three older kids had played through Dragon Warrior Four, however, I was mystified. Here was a brightly colored, artfully plotted and constructed game with a massive world to explore. At the time there was nothing else like it. Being the conservative tacticians that they were, rather than save their game right before the final battles, they saved them in the final safe spot, allowing me to pick up the controller when they were all off watching a baseball game, so I could explore the world as it existed in the almost completed, fully unlocked state. Doing so triggered some nascent, developing corner of my mind that until that point had been slumbering. When it awoke it was like a white ball of burning curiosity, seeking info, from reading every line of text to exploring every nook and cranny.

 The world of Dragon Warrior Four was big, to the point of being navigated with either a ship or hot air balloon. I understood the basic mechanics from watching the others play it, so I knew about the chaptered structure, the overlapping plots and the wide cast of characters. I was curious, though, how it all fit together. Having a fully powered up cast of characters to explore with allowed me free reign over the game, granting near-instant gratification to my desire to see what lay around the corner. Sometimes it was amusing, like being able to run a shop in a certain village. Other times it was with great caution and trepidation as I wandered into the World Tree just to see where it could take me. I knew I shouldn't monkey around in end-game affairs but the temptation of hidden worlds was so tempting!

I know it seems really childish and foolish to speak of it in such reverent terms, but the experience did set into motion my love of playing with boundaries in games. I spent hours with my younger brother glitching and sequence breaking The Ocarina of Time. Goldeneye on the 64? I still dig up bugs and tricks on it, just to see if anything new was discovered, like the test level 'Citadel'. As games have evolved this sense of "Can I do this?" has changed with the design. I remember how exasperated the older brother was when I was playing some hunting game on our PS2 and kept trying to get the little guy to go into a cabin. 

"Man, it's a hunting game!" he insisted, frustrated at my nebbish, indoor-only attitude. 

"Dude, you're missing the point," I tried to explain. But he would have none of it. 

Games now reward that sense of rule-bending. They reward you for thinking outside of the box. Look at the driving concept behind of Dead Rising, where your entire experience in the game is predicated on dispatching zombies in the most creative, outside of the box conceivable. Modern classic Bioshock is nothing but a philosophical examination of choice and free will in gaming told through the eyes of an Ayn Rand-obsessed studio. Some of the most fun I've had in gaming comes from just dinking around in the environment. I remember bouts of insomnia combatted with tooling around in GTA: San Andreas just observing the generation and mechanics of the traffic around the city.

 Anyone who's met me will attest that I am not a big outdoorsman, camping and hiking and all that. I think the content to this site proves that well enough. But that doesn't mean I don't have an adventurous mind. Some of the brightest, most wonderful people I know demonstrate this just by engaging their mind, no matter where there life takes them. You don't have to work for NASA to exercise your mind. Find something that makes yours go, and keep at it. Dragon Warrior Four, of all things, helped me get my mind running. It doesn't have to be ultra-taxing - just try to have fun with your life, no matter the circumstances, and you'll be mentally engaged. 

Futures Past

I always thought the world would be different when I got older.


As many have observed, we anticipate the future to be some ultra-stylized mix of Futurama-esque, Jetsons styled culture with a touch of Back To The Future's version of 2015. Instead we have what is today - it's the same as the present always is, just a little older and a little more advanced.


To quote Homer Simpson: "This isn't the future! This is the lousy, stinkin' now!"


In some ways, he's wrong. Look at smart-phones - that is, without a doubt, some Star Trek business right there. Or how about the fact that our country is still mired in a series of un-winnable wars, all fueled by our defense-driven economy? Reagan would have been frothing at the mouth simply at the thought of it. Our cars all have rear cameras and GPS devices, wi-fi and Google are ubiquitous. There's nothing we don't know. 

I think it boils down to our expectations and the reality of our adulthood when we reexamine our current situation. It only feels stagnant and boring when we forget all the progress that's happened in our lives. Man walked on the moon more than 40 years ago - since then we've established space stations, which was no doubt the fever dream of the boys at NASA when they first started. Every day we're closer than ever to curing cancer once and for all. AIDS can be frozen in its tracks, if not someday cured. Hell, we can give you a new face or limb for less than the cost of a car. 


That, my friends, is the future.


What seems silly to me are the little ways I thought I would be able to gauge our steps into the future. Back in 1996 when I was babysitting some neighbor kids I was kinda bopping around the whole night, moving to a new-found sense of rhythm in my head. I had just seen, for the first time, the video 'Virtual Insanity' by Jamiroquai on MTV that night. I remember that it was winter and I was thinking about going back to school after Christmas break and asking if other cats had heard it. Of course they would all eventually say yes, as the single was huge, but what I really hold on to from that night was the feeling of unlocking something in my head, that there were new sounds out there. Until that point I had not paid much attention to music not made with guitars - I was firmly in the Weezer, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins vein. Jamiroquai, with their funky acid-jazz beats and electronic elements and white-boy dancing had shown me there were many more styles of music than I could anticipate. The world wasn't simply Rock, Rap and Country. Shades of gray started to show in my sense of understanding. 

I loved the song but always thought it was not the right fit for who I was at the time. A scrawny little 15 year old kid in rural Wisconsin, I had little use for funky dance tracks. I thought that it would be the kind of thing I would listen to when I was older, in some hyper-stylized future where technology zipped around me and I lived in a big city with hip people and a beautiful girlfriend. Now, as I type this, surrounded by more tech than I have time to indulge in as I plan the final steps of my wedding to a woman much more wonderful and gorgeous than I deserve, I realize how right I was. And I'm still scrawny.

I listened to 'Virtual Insanity' today, and it still feels futuristic. 


The future is a strange, hard-to-pin-down thing.

Escape Artist

Why do I do the things I do?

That question is, in a way, at the heart of this site.

I don't necessarily mean in the grand, existential "Why are we here?" frame of mind, but rather the more basic, if-q-then-p logic of my choices and behavior. No doubt there are trends that are apparent to others in my writing that evade my detection. I'm sure there are not only trains of thought but word choice as well. Words like 'haunting' 'fantastic' and 'surreal' often appear in my reviews of forgotten or under appreciated music, but to a certain degree that can be traced to the material as well as my vocabulary and predilection. But tracing that thought further back - why am I listening to so much music that can be described in those terms? It certainly betrays a fondness for music of a certain vein. The jumping off point for this article was similarly centered.

I was waiting for the bus the other morning and listening to Apex Twin when I realized just how often I find myself listening to music that many would find unpleasant or disquieting. To clarify, this was not the thumping-and-pounding, acerbic Aphex Twin of 'Come To Daddy' or 'Windowlicker' but the contemplative and cerebral work of his compilation Selected Ambient Works II. It's a lovely album, even if it is fifteen years old at this point. It's my understanding that Richard D. James, the man behind the madness, was essentially attempting to recreate soundscapes he heard within his lucid dreams, an idea that both fascinates and frightens me just a bit. I think it may be that same ethereal and intangible nature of our dreams that I'm chasing after when I spend my life with headphones on as I go about my business. Waiting for the bus, shopping for groceries, walking anywhere, really. There seems to be a fairly clean demarcation between what I would listen to in a car compared to what I listen to when I'm on foot. In cars, it's all hip hop and alternative from the 90s. On foot, it's ambient and surreal.

 Maybe it's a form of escapism. I've always been fascinated with my own dreams and the idea of experiencing lucid dreams. However, lucidity in dreams has never been something I've been able to experience. Take, for example, my piece on the Inception App for IOS devices - the way the code incorporates surrounding noise and reinterprets it along with a contextual soundtrack is, in a way, the closest I've come to that state of waking dreaming. In my early post about dark winter mornings and Akira Yamaoka's music I hint at this idea as well - that by adding that soundtrack to a time right after I wake up, it's almost as though I never left the sleep state. In the act of pumping ambient noise to my brain I'm blocking out the outside world, in what is a (perhaps not so) unconscious move to return to the subconscious.

 This is not to say that I find my life to be unpleasant or that I wish to escape from it, but I think more so that it's a move to block out some of the jarring sounds with more pleasant, dissociative white noise. One of my pet peeves is when people on the bus (or anywhere in public, to be frank) talks loudly on their phone. I'm willing to wager upwards of 90% of the passengers on my commute have phones, yet only a select few choose to conduct conversations on what is otherwise a quiet bus. While the reasons it bothers me are numerous, my reactions are limited. The best one I've found is to play music like SAW2 or the Inception App, which effectively filters out or negates the sound of half of a conversation I wish I wouldn't hear. Traffic and car horns, people yelling, construction sites - it all is a bit less disturbing when filtered through some heady music.

 This is why, I think, I have a predilection for ethereal and dreamy music that tends to skew my sense of reality. It's not some psychopathy or misanthropic nature, but simply a desire for a quieter, more serene experience as I navigate city life. Realizing this, I still choose to live in Minneapolis instead of, say, International Falls. Though, to be fair, if I had a decent wireless signal up there I might be tempted. Give it a shot - follow some of the links and see if it doesn't help undo some of the audio kinks of life.