Moses at the Movies: HOUSE

The credits had rolled. The lights had come up. We left the theater, turned to each other, and said roughly the same thing in chorus: "Holy fucking shit."

House, the 1977 film debut of Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi, defies every possible expectation. It spits in the face of rational thought and eschews easy categorization. It left my friends and I (who had attended a screening of the film at the Starz FilmCenter) in a stupor, and probably changed our lives forever.

The plot of the movie is simple enough-- a group of high-school girls and their professor visit a house in the countryside, which happens to be haunted/possessed by a ghostly aunt and the Cat From Hell.

Thing is, from the first scene of this movie on, you know Obayashi is using a different playbook. The cadre of girls have names like "Gorgeous," "Fantasy," "Kung Fu," (she knows kung fu) "Mac," (she's fat) and "Professor" (yup). The absurdly up-beat soundtrack-- by the legendary GODIEGO-- drowns out the character dialogue. Gorgeous slams a door to the sound of a nuclear explosion. Screen wipes I've never seen before. Cartoonish, pastel backgrounds. Sudden shifts to stop-motion. And this eventually becomes a horror film!

Maybe. Again, different playbook. Things just keep escalating. You think your mind can't be blown any more, and then the next scene hits. By the end, I was practically desensitized, numbed to the sheer madness on the screen. House is hilarious, yes. But it's also filled with bizarre, nightmarish imagery that you can't unsee. The tonal shift between the first two thirds and the last can only be fully internalized afterwards. Actually, probably not. Did they put tabs of acid on the ticket stubs? Am I going to just wake up the next day and say "Nahhh, that movie didn't happen"? Why was there that bear in the fucking truck with the ramen? All questions we found ourselves asking each other long after leaving the theater.

House has long been unavailable in the West in an easily-obtainable form, but it's getting a DVD release from Criterion sometime next year. I am buying this shit, and you owe it to yourself to at least check it out from Netflix or something. Show it to your friends. They'll thank you for it. Or write something like this, I dunno. Either way.

The arguably unrepresentative trailer:

Something I keep forgetting to mention that the trailer reminded me of is that Obayashi was mostly a director of TV commercials prior to making House. What kind of commercials? Shit like this:
 
Yes, I think that should just about do it.

Gettin' Smashed (again(for the last time))

Let's get this out of the way, first: Super Smash Bros. Brawl is marvelous. I always thought that Melee felt a little uncontrollably fast and broken, and Brawl thankfully steps away from that. The speed of individual characters has been slowed down across the board, but that's cool, because the rest of the game has been improved enormously.

All of the new characters are interesting and fun to play as. Ike is ridiculously powerful and has excellent range and recovery! Pokemon Trainer is three characters in one! Metaknight sounds vaguely like Darth Vader! Even Olimar, who looks useless at first glance, has enough tools to prove devastating in the right hands.

Probably the best of the new play mechanics in the game is the Smash Ball (seen at right), a seizure-inducing item which appears at least once or twice a game, assuming that items are turned on. When it shows up, the screen changes colors subtly for a few seconds, letting everyone know to stop what they're doing and go nuts.

Hitting the ball once doesn't do anything. Like a pinata, it requires a little bludgeoning before it gives up the goods. Whoever deals the finishing blow to the smash ball is bestowed with a horrible, multicolored aura, and the entire screen goes dark for extra drama, while everyone else yells angrily.

At this point, the victorious player can press the B button to perform a "Final Smash," an extremely powerful, character specific special move that will almost always turn the tide of battle in their favor, or end it outright if they're already ahead. Mario blows everyone away with a giant fireball. Captain Falcon runs you over with his space car. Luigi does... something. It's awesome. Of course, if you're a hardcore smash player and hate the idea that your game could be ruined at a moment's notice by something like this, you can, as always, just turn them off. Smash is cool like that.

In conclusion, Brawl done play wicked good. I can't remember the last time a multiplayer video game resulted in more mutual enjoyment for everyone involved, although for the sake of transparency, I have to admit that the last time I played Halo with anyone, it consisted of me losing 25 to 0 for about four games in a row.

There're actually so many game modes, doodads, options, music and so on to think about in this one game that I question whether I'll even be able to internalize it all for a long time. It's actually a little scary, just thinking about all of the slightly goopy, caramalized game stuff in here!

Also scary: the idea that Kazushige Nojima, the scenario writer responsible for apocalypse-class dreck like Kingdom Hearts and its sequel (and uh, more of the same), was actually paid to pen Brawl's single-player story mode, which plays a lot like the SNES classic Kirby Superstar if they forced out most of the charm with a shovel.

Which means that it's still really enjoyable if you play with a friend. But... goodness. The last area of the story mode is a massive maze consisting of previous areas from the first half of the game connected together randomly via doors. Nearly every one of said doors has a fairly sloppily designed boss fight in it! Fantastic!

That's about as much criticism as I can level at this game, other than that the manual is written entirely in comic sans. And that it's (intentionally) so absurdly fetishistic. But that's cool. It's not like it has any pretensions of being anything but.
What wasn't cool was the big midnight release of the game at the Foothills Fashion Mall Gamestop. A friend of mine had pre-ordered the game there, and we showed up at around 9:45. He had planned on playing in the planned release tournament that Gamestop had planned, but after seeing the mass of black hoodies seen in the above photo, we decided that it would be in our better interest to not spend the next two hours in the company of people we would probably want to elbow repeatedly.

So we didn't! We left, and returned 10 minutes before midnight. The crowd had more than tripled in size by then, and now included future KCSU station manager and fellow blogger Justin Weber in its ranks. He had shown up for similar reasons, and also had a friend who wanted to play in the Gamestop tournament, which was ruined by inefficiency.

"I thought it was going to start at 10, but it didn't start until 11, so I ended up having to wait around for an hour. The Gamestop employees actually started playing an hour earlier, at around 10, and a bunch of kids waiting outside the store just pushed their faces up against the glass."

Two stores away from Gamestop is Game On, a LAN center boasting two enormous TVs and a wii, but the Gamestop tournament forced players to use their tiny wii demo kiosk, which was barely visible from the crowd. There was probably a lot of red tape and stubbornness preventing Game On from working with Gamestop on this one, but Weber and I were nonetheless disappointed by the unwatchable tournament conditions.

"I went in hoping to experience something akin to The Wizard, but that wasn't the case at all."

Also a bummer were the rules, which forced all 32 players to play 1-minutes matches 1v1 with no items. It was in the interest of time, sure, but talk about boring. Also, none of the unlockable characters were available for play. Double bummer.

Thankfully, my friend who pre-ordered the game managed to get a copy at midnight in about 5 minutes. Considering the massive line, which Weber guessed to be around 300 people long, I couldn't have been more pleased. How did we show up 5 minutes beforehand and walk out earlier than people who had been waiting there for 4 hours? I have no idea!

Weber didn't have as much luck, but was he bitter about the whole experience?

"I don't regret it, because I got Smash, but there were definitely better options available, like Wal-Mart."

Another friend did take the Wal-Mart route, and walked out with a copy in 15 minutes. Even better would be to, I dunno, wait until the next day and buy a copy then. But hey, whatever. Good game!

Post your friend codes in the comments or something! Mine is 1762-2351-3558!

Gettin' Smashed (again)

Man what the heck is even going on, here

About a month ago, I wrote an entry about Super Smash Bros. Brawl, in which I concluded that it was... probably going to be a pretty good game! Now, here we are a month later, three days before the game's release in the United States, and the unnerving quality of the game's hype machine is beginning to get to me.

Let's forget about smashbros.com, which I assume I mentioned last time. That thing was pretty insidious! I'm talking about stuff like Gamestop's BIGGEST TOURNAMENT EVER, which is being held at what looks to be every Gamestop store in the US of A. I have to question whether there are enough interested Smash players in the United States to make this work, but who knows!

I've since spoken to the one sorta kinda tournament-level smash player who I know in Fort Collins. I asked him if he would be interested in playing in the Fort Collins tournament while I stand in the background and take pictures of kids with mullets and Star Fox Adventures t-shirts. It would be a real journalistic endeavor. Turns out that the event has first-come-first-serve entry rules, and my friend was thoroughly psyched about the whole thing. Oh baby.

Look forward to a report of bedlam at the Fort Collins Fashion Mall, started by a bunch of guys borderline obsessed with punching Luigi in the face. I'll be there, hopefully taking photos. We'll see how it turns out. I'm gonna close out for the time being with the below youtube video, which was linked to me by another friend of mine. The first 30 seconds are pretty great!

Tomonobu Itagaki is Kind of Insane

Tomonobu Itagaki (depicted above), the director of fabulously successful and schlockrageous franchises like Dead or Alive (no, not the Takashi Miike film! Nor the adaptation) and Ninja Gaiden, is probably insane. I say this after reading a story in the Daily Telegraph, in which Nick Cowen describes him as a "celebrity in Japan," moments after mentioning the abjunct failure of his games outside of the western market.

This put my brain close to explosion, because nothing about this guy, outside of the fact that he wears his sunglasses at night and has a couple of katana mounted behind his desk, seems to indicate that he's a celebrity. My gut reaction is that Nick Cowen got duped. Or... something. I mean, I can't take the article seriously in the first place because of paragraphs like this:

"In Japan, games producers enjoy celebrity status, while their Western counterparts are considered - at best -successful nerds and- at worst - juvenile delinquents. There, video games are regarded as an art form in their own right; one that sparks fierce debate on internet forums between the occasional and obsessive players."

Yes, Cowen is trying to convince us that angry internet forum arguments are a good way to gauge the cultural importance of video games in Japan, even though there is almost no legitimate evidence to back up his claims. I'm getting sidetracked here. The above article is dumb, but Itagaki is insane.

Take, for example, this 2002 interview with Itagaki from now-defunct XBN magazine, in which the man comes across as some kind of lecherous cyber-pimp:

XBN: A lot of men will buy [Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball] because of the attractive chicks. What is the most risque element you've included in Beach Volleyball?

Itagaki: You'd be surprised, but this is not really a sex game. The girls are beautiful, but I think of them like daughters. They're my babies!

The tone of the review is treacherously maladroit throughout, but the best quote, to me, is near the end.

XBN: Do you consider it normal practice to slag off your competitors?

Itagaki: Okay, let me tell you the real story with that. Back when the original DOA came out, Namco aired a radio commercial insulting the series. As the father of DOA, I will never forget an insult to my family. I will get them back with nuclear missiles more than 100 times for that. I will never forget it.

"I will get them back with nuclear missiles more than 100 times for that" is probably a mistranslation, but is it safe to say that Itagaki's original intent was one of near-total insanity? I'm banking on yes. Bonus points to whoever angrily uses "I will get you back with nuclear missiles over 100 times for that!" in an argument.

Of course, there were also those allegations of sexual harassment back in 2006, but talk about unsurprising.

I'm going to wrap things up with a video from Stephen Totilo's MTV Multiplayer blog, in which Itagaki himself commands us to stop mispronouncing his name, moments after mangling the title of his upcoming DS game "Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword." Enjoy!