Hard Evidence (1994)

 

Director: Jan Egleson

Screenplay: Richard Rashke

Cast: Kate Jackson as Sandra Clayton; John Shea as Tommy Marchant; Terry O'Quinn as Wiley; Beth Broderick as Melissa Brewer; Jennifer Guthrie as Beth Tyler; Rand Courtney as Shane Clayton; Megan Gallacher as Shannon; Gustave Johnson as Agent Curtis; Dean Stockwell as Commissioner Sam Caldwell

Ephemeral Waves

 

There is an entire world of made-for-TV cinema, including true crime dramas and melodramas, and this is my tentative toe dip into that out of curiosity. They are something many are probably aware of, but who talks of them? Baring infamous or acclaimed examples, they are something to consider as more people and distributors look back at them with interest, finding the ones of virtue even if during the DVD area, a film like Hard Evidence were being released in the United Kingdom. The American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) toe dipped into this area too, specifically with their licensing of films owned by Multicon, allowing theatrical screenings in the United States to be booked for a film like Death of a Cheerleader (1994)¹, a film based on the real-life murder of Kirsten Costas. Hard Evidence, originally called Justice in a Small Town, would never become a cult film in truth. Starting off explaining itself as based on a real tale, but with the names changed, this is a tale set in Georgia involving corruption in their Labour Department, one which will combine crime, romance, thriller and the struggles of being a single mother together into one film. Whilst sadly not in the film as much as one would hope for, Dean Stockwell is the corrupt commissioner Sam Caldwell, which is great casting.

More surprising is Beth Broderick, who I remember as the wisest of the aunts from Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996-2002), a Melissa Joan Hart sitcom for young teens I used to watch as a kid. There are many potential surprises with this area of cinema, such as surprise appearances from actors outside their usual territory, and whilst Hard Evidence did not live up to what one would hope, the one image I will have is this figure from childhood nostalgia playing a seductive Southern Belle, one who in the office is the figure who helps acquire new female employees for to send to parties and for men to have sex with like a brothel Madame. That was a surprise.

Not a lot can be further elaborated on Hard Evidence, as this is one of those story driven films which are solidly made, but honestly do not stick out in anything. It is fascinating to watch in terms of how, reflecting back, a film tackling political corruption in the 2010s onwards would have people on multiple sides of the political spectrum arguing for it, toeither praise it for its bravery or challenge it for being liberal propaganda, whilst there is a TV film from the nineties here which has its entire set in this subject. It does not even wait to get to this point, set up with single mother Sandra Clayton, played by Kate Jackson, immediately starting work as a secretary where everything is openly rotten. Her immediate boss if a slime ball that has new female staff hired by Melissa Brewer, played by Broderick, just to blackmail into sexual favours to keep their jobs, forces staff to also pay for a new car for Stockwell's birthday, and is even involving in drug smuggling. This film does emphasise a paradox with many media - lifestyle magazines, TV movies - which do not explicitly tackle adult subjects onscreen but still are obsessed with true crime, corruption, or subjects like domestic violence and murder, a vicarious nature to this work even if moralising which this film does admittedly get into when it becomes more genre in its plotting with supposed real life events. There is one scene, I would suspect was not in the TV broadcast, in Hard Evidence which is done entirely seriously, and we will get to, which is incredible strong whilst being tastefully done, but the same applies here. It eventually becomes quaint, in spite of itself, ending on a wedding with a group photo and charming music over the screen as if this had been a melodrama and only that.

That scene, of a prelude to a female employee being raped by a corrupt upper class man she is forced to be with, involving nudity, is a surprise, as it is very explicit in content and context, the catalyst for Sandra to start digging up dirt on her bosses with Tommy Marchant (John Shea), a male member of staff fully involved with the shadier side but sick of it, falling for Sandra at the same time he wants too to whistle blow the corruption.

The film onwards is a pot boiler which is ultimately just average in the sense that it is interesting to watch, but after the experience was ultimately passing time, not feeling the weight of the material. Scored to a surprising southern rock score, this juggles a lot in hindsight, which makes the okay nature actually detraction. Romance is there with the leads, as they gather evidence and both, he more so, are threatened by being found out. There is domestic drama as her teenage son hates his mother being out for work, then eventually learns of her goal to bring down Stockwell and supporting her when the tension and danger grows. And there is thriller in how, when a FBI employee appears, mistaken for an assassin, eventually the lead pair has ominous threats over the phone and trying wire tapping to deal with. This is a lot to work with, not just for entertainment but just a subject, but it skims past it all in the end.

That this is even about political corruption this casually depicted is odd nowadays decades later to revisit. No one bats an eye with a film like this having came out once ago, set in the South, suggesting political corruption at any level, whether it is a good film or not. Probably the one thing to say of this film is that its images of political corrupt are neutered as merely corrupt figures, without addressing the cause of such figures existentially, something which jars when discussing these subjects, especially sexual harassment and violence in real cases of corrupt male figures, in real life. That is likely the reason this film exists and probably no one bats an eye to it. This film still exists in a wholesome moralisation in the end, in spite of the one uncomfortable sequence which shocks in actually showing sexual violence, a character as much allowed to exist herself without the ramifications fully depicted and she, in truth, being fully fleshed out as a human being who can even overcome such a horrible event. Dramatically this is dry and merely okay, one which does not stand out. Instead, this the curious film to witness off the beaten path, effectively of the mainstream even if most have never even heard of it, one whose inertness in itself causes one to ponder like this.

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1) For AGFA, it is definitely in mind to the film Death of a Cheerleader being sold as a cult film, with the description, in their theatrical film catalog, of it being "a mean-girl melodrama with campy charm".

Games of the Abstract: Sin & Punishment - Star Successor (2009)

 

a.k.a. Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Skies

Developers: Treasure; Nintendo SPD

Publishers: Nintendo

Two Player

Nintendo Wii / Nintendo Wii U

 

In the era of the Nintendo 64, the developer Treasure worked on three titles for the console. Mischief Makers (1997) became a cult hit people such as myself want to be preserved and re-released, but also found itself originally being a 2D platformer finding itself stuck on a console which wished to ditched 2D for polygons, which it fought against by adding polygonal effects to the boss battles but was always going to stick out in terms of selling. Bangai-O (1999), which was released on the N64, was a Japanese only release, will be more likely known for its updated and worldwide release version for the Sega Dreamcast. Sin & Punishment (2000) was the final game they released, and it never even left Japan, at the time when the N64 was winding down in importance. Yet the game became one talked of greatly in admiration, and eventually in 2007 for the Wii's online service the game was finally released in the West. A fascinating one-off, an on-rail shooter on the N64, Sin & Punishment has even been re-released as part of Nintendo's push in 2021 for Nintendo 64 games on an online subscription for the Switch, finding itself among Super Mario 64 (1996) and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) as some of the first games to be included for people with childhood nostalgia for that console, which really says a great deal of that game's legacy in spite of being a game released at the end of the N64's lifespan when it went out to pasture. In the late 2000s, there another incentive to release the prequel on the Wii virtual store, as Treasure was lucky enough to have a sequel commission for the titular console.

The plot is complex - the original game is known, despite only having three and a bit stages, and thus being a short game as a result, for a complex narrative. The sequel's only key note is that the male lead Isa Jois the son of the two original male and female leads, possessing non-human inheritance as well from his father from the prequel game. Aside from this, the plot is honestly one you will only have fully fleshed out from the paper manual, but even in what is onscreen in cut scenes still engages. In a version of the Earth where there is an Outer Space and an Inner Space as a result of multiple dimensions existing, a figure taking on the form of a young woman is sent from Outer Space to our Inner Space, developing amnesia and being taken in by Isa, who is sent to destroy invaders like her from outside of Inner Space but ends up bonding with her, dubbing her Kachi and wishing to protect her despite the fact she is hinted at being a dangerous and destructive entity if she was ever to awaken from her human shell and learn her real self again. This does not impress a group known as the Creators, in the game's lore part of a cycle of destroying and rebuilt multiple Earths, who send the main villains, a group known as the Nebulox in the Western releases, and the less silly sounding G5, or Gathering of 5 Countries, in the Japanese version to take them down or at least have Isa take out Kachi himself.

If this sounds like a stereotypical anime in presentation, it does but this becomes part of the game's aesthetic charms, Treasure's biggest trademark for me getting into their games being that, alongside their huge reputation for incredibly well made and inventive games, being their eccentric charm. With these continuing the trend from the prequel of looking alarmingly childlike in their faces despite being older, Star Successor even in its English dubbing does feel like binging on a hyper dramatic sci-fi action anime series from the era this game was made in. With a large portion of the game in this far flung Earth is getting to what Mt. Fuji in Japan has become, taking anything down in the way, Treasure decided to make as bombastic and hyper-stylised a game as you could get, and it stands out considerably in a great way.

As an on-rail shooter, you are in the curious position where you are entirely restricted in the screen unable to move until you clear the screen of enemies, or on a continuous plane of tracking, through scenarios in each chapter, but have the advantage (barring floating over lava or thin air) of moving anywhere in that restricted space. This is almost cinematic as you can get structurally in the truest sense but with the fact you will have to manoeuvre and strife as much as you would do in a vertical or horizontal shooter. When the original game had a jump button as an important tool, the jump button returns but it is probably useless when you are able to the ability to hover that takes the heavy weight of the game alongside the strafe button, which allows a temporary invincibility and dodge if you carefully use it. Some chapter stages are permanently in the air, others allow you to vary this and take the risk, and the dodge button will become your friend. One boss battle on a railway track even makes hovering too long a risk for a memorable challenge, as you can be blown off if you float for too long, whilst another has you (if you choose Isa) riding a vehicle on a desert highway, whilst Kachi rides a bird creature, as giant sandworms jump out into the open air in the background.

Sin & Punishment's sense of freedom is contrasted by the fact you will be strafing for your life as the screen is covered in many glowing orbs, beans and even rockets of death. It is a game, despite its difficulty opinion having cute monkeys, where the Hard Mode states "you will be punished". Even the Easy Mode will test you, with the option alongside two player mode to use the original Wii Motion Controller, the Classic Controller, or even the GameCube controller when the first version of the Wii console had backwards compatibility. Either control, you have movement independent to the target for shooting, which can be moved separately as an onscreen crosshair away from your character. Even on the Classic Controller as I did, this can be done without being cumbersome. A melee attack is with the tap of the shooting button, whilst a super charge on a separate button is also very useful especially for bosses.

The motion controls, briefly used and vital for me for targeting for the final boss, which is about protecting someone you care for from projectiles coming at a dozen rather than hitting the enemy, are good. Even for someone using the classic controller, a conventional controller stuck into the end of Wii Remote, this game is one in danger of being left abandoned by the technology being obsolete, which alongside the tragedy of such a game being lost, is potentially sad when the game, with its unconventional mechanics, will eventually be grasped and let a player enjoy the game even more so once they experimented with its very unique method of motion and shooting. You will learn to coordinate moving and moving your gun's target separately at the same time, and even with the classic control, organising the target whilst strafing works perfectly with only the potential of hand cramp from requiring the dodge roll so much being a danger. I blame the Nintendo controller's design for that, not the hard work of this game's developers.

It is perfect mechanics for a game either way, and whilst a short game still, for Star Successor you have a very ridiculous plot balanced out in its sincerity, with the adding weight that Treasure, underappreciated for this in their work, are masters of never creating a generic level or boss from the little exposure I have had with them already. Here they created a true action spectacle that, as mentioned, is cinematic, this alien world of a future Earth compelling even in Wii's standard definition appearance. You start in industrial corridors but quite soon into the game, encouraged to shoot even non hostile life forms which fly on mass for points known as "popcorn" enemies in this genre, you witness a fully fleshed world of strange flying creatures in the distance or hordes of mechanised and military opponents. The highway battle, fighting a creature eventually who forms from a giant lion-creature and bird creature, and you eventually befriend after a misunderstanding, is an exceptional level for any game. Treasure were known even for shifting genres or tones for levels as far back as a Mega Drive/Genesis game like Dynamite Headdy (1994), and with Star Successor you have a variety of interesting shifts in pace to work from which look exceptional onscreen as they are imaginative to experience. The highway level for example has such detail, not all to shoot, of the aforementioned giant sand worms, whilst an earlier one takes place in a nightmare fully embracing Japanese yōkai monsters and period aesthetic, from shooting giant toads to an occult female boss for the finale. The level involving not hovering too long on a railway is the strange kind of boss where you find yourself having to knock railway carts at the enemy rather than directly shoot them, followed by the sympathy you have realising you had killed a creature baring child being undercut...when the little bugger forces you to have to shoot a platform upwards to rescue a character from lava by shooting the two cranks on each side to drag it up.

It is a game where even the strange aesthetic choices, such as the characters being adult or older teenagers who yet look like children in the face, fits the eccentric but masterful craft of Treasure themselves. Naturally the boss battles for the developer are unique, where even one of the toughest for me - a sword duel in mid air a cherub faced and flirtatious Miss Psycho with a katana - became rewarding, requiring learning even in Easy mode to dodge her, whilst not going too far away to get a swipe, or a melee attack for parrying at the right time. Infinite continues are here, and for the better, as for me, if you were to go up each of the three difficulties, the point of a game like this is both the spectacle of the narrative whilst learning to improve on each difficulty level. More so as you can unlock the stages to play separately for each difficulty, this is an arcade game with enough life saving features alongside hard craft to make every stage memorable to be a worthy evolutionary follow through for this type of video game in the console era. One of the earliest bosses alone, among the side of the Nebulox, involves him into an evolutionary cycle of aquatic life forms, even a choreography of dolphins who fling explosive balls at you in somersaults, which by himself enforces the level of creativity on display here before you get the later levels with their spectacle, already as magical as it sounds unconventional as a game. Sadly an obscure game, one of the more expansive for the Wii second hand whilst thankfully not among the rarest, it had a re-release for the Wii U, Nintendo's divisive follow up console, and with their habit of archiving their past really scattershot at times, Star Successor is the kind of game in danger of being left abandoned again. That would be a tragedy as this is a game that really is something special, and in mind to how the original Sin & Punishment is kept in relevance still, something this good and idiosyncratic should, with all hope and a little praying, be kept aloft as a gem.

Doom Asylum (1987)

 

Director: Richard Friedman

Screenplay: Rick Marx

Cast: Patty Mullen as Judy LaRue / Kiki LaRue; Ruth Collins as Tina; Kristin Davis as Jane; William Hay as Mike; Kenny L. Price as Dennis; Harrison White as Darnell; Dawn Alvan as Godiva; Farin as Rapunzel; Michael Rogen as Mitch Hansen

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

It's Wade Boggs, he's blown away!

Doom Asylum is one of the more obscure slasher films in existence, and I will preference the following that even very well regarded films in the sub-genre like the Friday the 13th sequels are ridiculous, something as much part of the charm for their fans and where Doom Asylum is as silly as these films can get.

It is full of the clichés and there is a sense, whilst clearly sold on slasher film tropes and the gore, this is aware of being stuck in the later era of this genre as they were declining, with a deliberately comedic tone. There is however also the sense that, when you even have the cliché of the morgue attendant who immediately bites into a sandwich before working on a corpse, a lot of filmmakers were oblivious of repeating these tropes and inexplicably they started being the kind of ideas everyone jumps to when fleshing out filmed sequences. The set up is simple - an attorney is involved in a car crash with his girlfriend, waking up on the morgue slab with his face cut off and having also lost his mind. With his hand girlfriend, the surviving piece of his love, he stays inside an abandoned mental asylum watching old British films starring Tod Slaughter, a British actor who was prolific playing villains during the thirties in British gothic melodramas, whilst maiming anyone who wanders nearby.

This, as slasher films goes, barely hides the pretence of the gore, full of the goofiest main leads as you have a nerdy guy whose only character interest is a pathological interest in baseball cards, a daughter of two psychologists who as the nerdy female character crowbars in psychological insights which are flimsy, and the most psychologically questionable male and female lead, as due to her issues, she eventually starts to call her boyfriend her "mother" out of comfort, which eventually gets as weird sexually as that sounds. Naturally you find yourself more closer to Tina & The Tots, the trio of punk women playing avant-garde drone in the asylum - far more appealing with their leather, fishnets with holes in them, chains and spikes, you have Ruth Collins as Tina cackling and pronouncing her lines as broadly as you can get, and one of the members even being a stereotypical liberal feminist with a faux French accent talking about the patriarchy and overcoming capitalism.  

We are fully in a giant cinema piece of cheese here, with "Spike head" a credible insult and our lead killer fully from the school that, since the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels were doing well, he should make jokes as he kills people. The gore is so strong from special effects artist Vincent J. Guastini, in drastic contrast to the goofy tone, that you can feel cynical that this was just a death spectacle delivery machine, if not for one of the last being the reveal that the asylum has a body processor which turns people into cubes of meat. Then you see this had a sense of humour even if it does really skimp over conventions of setting anyone up as fleshed out.

The film is an acquired taste, let us be honest. The little touches more than the "narrative" is why we are here, with the cheesy lines spoken awkwardly the cherry on top. The Tod Slaughter film footage is really idiosyncratic to have chosen, just by bringing forth with a lot of films used, in having an obscure era of British gothic melodramas being evoked few may even talk about; Tod Slaughter really an early era example of a cult star who in films like Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street  (1936) was the villain who goes maniacal when the polite veneer is peeled off, even (if faked) having his crimes being accused of by a corpse of a victim of his in one of the many tantalising pieces of footage used. That in enough made Doom Asylum worthwhile. The asylum itself is a character for its ridiculous graffiti alone. "Dead Zeppelin!" is there, as is the unholy combination, to show punks and the unruly have taken the place over, of having both Pink Floyd and Metallica spray painted on the walls among other words. It does the heavy lifting for what is a string of deaths, slowly whittling through the cast as disposable figures, by making everything clearly a farce whether intentional or not.

It does raise the point whether Doom Asylum should be appreciated as entertainment when there is, honestly, laziness to this. I think personally the weird tone would salvage the film for me even if I was not a figure who feels no film should have its existence questioned; unless we are really going after a AAA blockbuster of nowadays to question, films like this from the straight-to-video era are more interesting in just that, when they succeed or are very weird, they are interesting even if material is really threadbare. Doom Asylum, a low budget production, is deeply silly, too silly to have any cynicism of. Far more criticism comes from just the stereotypes - if we are to get serious here, the two African-American characters are as broad as you can get, and with little to work with, the film just manages to stay the right side of gauche to not need to have to be taken to aside for dubious characterisation, all because neither has anything really to do and thus we can avoid even worse characterisation. The film itself is one of those that, if you like slashers or have a fascination for really peculiar genre movies from the past, will win you over. This is more of a case for me that, fun and deeply silly, Doom Asylum is acquired taste even for me if appreciated.

There is definitely a case of this being not quite in my usual wheelhouse. Patty Mullen, the lead, was in Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker (1990) as the titular figure, and that is definitely my kind of bizarre and inventive genre film from this era. The touches we get here are strange and fascinating - referencing an obscure cult figure from Britain is one, having a version of House of the Rising Sun on the soundtrack being another - only that in the scheme of slashers, as someone who has an ambivalent view of them sometimes, it is legitimately out of preference that there are others I find more interesting. My mind wanders to the sincere silliness of The Mutilator (1984), a regional production its director and crew pushed from little, the outright cheese spectacle of Nail Gun Massacre (1985), or the downright tonally skewered Satan's Blade (1985). This is, well, the deeply goofy one which will be remembered for the female lead calling her boyfriend "Mom" and saying that it would be incest if they hooked up. It is a deeply curious film as a result, but with other films in this ballpark I would hold to higher esteem.

Games of the Abstract: Super Mario Galaxy (2007)

 

Developer: Nintendo EAD Tokyo

Publisher: Nintendo

One Player

Nintendo Wii / Nintendo Switch

 

Reviewing a Mario game seems ridiculous - by this point, one character, an Italian plumber in blue and red, was already a mascot for a legendary videogame company, Nintendo, so any attempt to paint anything new in opinion is comical. That is before you consider this is a big game, highly well regarded, with a budget visibly onscreen and a games console (the Wii) to sell by making the 3D platformer stretch its prowess and game play technology fully. You could argue that one, amateur or professional, should question a game's legacy especially if the franchise is one that is considered a sacred cow, with a lot of money behind it, but honestly that feels less an issue with a company like Nintendo, when the issue has always been when the publisher and hardware manufacturer refuses to make games available, even bad ones or from consoles like the Virtual Boy, and get angry people pirate them.

If there is anything new to this review, it is entirely from someone who never grew up with Nintendo's catalogue and consoles. If I am to be blasphemous, to be a man who buys a Wii second hand when some games now second hand cost more than the actual console, I will say right now my admiration for Super Mario Galaxy in its style and game play will not mean I will suddenly start playing Nintendo games now over obscurer work, and any I do take a fancy to will be whims more than the passionate interest I have even for the misbegotten doomed to perish for lack of sales. As much of this is a contrarian nature, to want to root for the underdogs and the miscreants of art, even if that can lead to questionable ideas and more questionable game mechanics, but as much of is innately that usually, for me, something that is widely popular can arguably be more conventional to appeal to the masses. A console like the Wii is more fascinating now, whilst only some of the games of ridiculously prized on the resell market, for the curiosities than Mario or Zelda, and if I take interest in Nintendo games, they are the curiosities and the strange experiments. As much of this is that, like many sacred cows like the Star Wars franchise or arguing with people on Twitter, I never submerged myself in these institutions, never growing up with Nintendo work in my childhood because I had a Sega Saturn and Playstations one to two in my house. The only time I have played a Mario game before this one is the Gameboy game Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (1992) as a child, and we have come a long way from that title to Super Mario Galaxy.

With the Switch in 2022 became even more a huge seller than even the Wii, which shows just how exceptional Nintendo have been in getting two generation defying gaming platforms released, these characters and their newest innovations are still going to compel people to their work and hardware. In this case, like if I was to buy a Switch eventually, it seems as if it was at least mandatory to have a Nintendo game if I was to acquire an old black cased Wii for my collection, like a passport you have to acquire. Admittedly, despite the popularity of the Wii, it is surprising that, when acquiring it from a second hand store, there were very few games there of personal interest, almost enforcing that I would be playing Super Mario Galaxy as fate even if I ignored the others. Thankfully you see here why Nintendo, when they get things right, are a behemoth as they are, and even a contrarian like myself admires the hard work they bother to put into their mascot's work.

By this point, the franchise had been a long one existing since the eighties.  The reference to Mario being their mascot, and to push the hardware's capabilities, was emphasised when Super Mario 64 (1996) opened the door for 3D platformers on the Nintendo 64, a console made for the game down to its controller. Three dimensional platformers came before and just after, and I played a few, the Jumping Flash! (1995) to the infamous Bubsy 3D (1996), but Mario 64 became the game everyone wanted to hitch a trailer onto after its breakout success. By this point to, this presents the obvious problem, when franchises are institutions, of constant sequels. Not because of their existence, but that by this point, a character like Mario and his Nintendo band mates are ageless cartoon characters and you can either a) alienate the fan base with a drastic change, or b) continue the same story and tropes and figure out how to keep things fresh. This is not an insult at all, especially as Super Mario Galaxy managed the second successfully, but in mind that, at this point with Princess Peach being kidnapped by the turtle-like giant Bowser again, attempting to bring a continuity to the games is going to either involve Stockholm Syndrome, or the kind of not-safe-for-work fan theories (and art) Nintendo are never pleased with existing. Even in game, whilst kidnapped with her castle taken into the galaxy far away, she managed to get letters still to Mario with five bonus lives continually, suggesting this is not as much as a struggle as before but a constructed fantasy between the three characters of Peach, Mario and Bowser to entertain themselves. Only the actual peril the plumber has, and Bowser's decision to harness the power of the cosmos and black holes adds severity. The later is a really dumb thing to do, especially as with full spoilers, if not many, the ending literally suggests the Mario world was destroyed and rebuilt in a new dimensional plane.

Made with director Yoshiaki Koizumi in the seat, having had his trial by fire before as a director on Super Mario Sunshine (2002) as his first directorial work, a heavily promoted game in 2000s game magazines for the Gamecube that became more divisive for fans as time passed, Galaxy is literally my first proper 3D platformer since I was a child. This is insane to consider but in mind, to my exile from videogames, also a huge advantage to seeing how far games in this genre have evolved. The camera here is still a pain at moments, but the mushroom consuming plumber has the advantage that Nintendo have had a lot of time to hone these games, with the legitimately curious touch that this has to sell a console specific controller which is surreal to consider nowadays as mainstream. Wiis were so commonplace that you could even find one gathering dust on a sell in a hospital, as I have seen, managing the rare achievement of even winning over non-gamers to them. It led to a lot of shovelware, and zumba games second-hand in charity stores in Britain, but it comes with the peculiar aspect, in danger of causing interesting games to not be preserved, that Nintendo put their resources entirely onto full motion control play even if a "classic controller" was made available too. Super Mario Galaxy, in its original version, had to be played with that controller and a "nunchuck" attachment, a controller which is full motion control to aim onscreen, the nunchuck providing the movement stick and jump.

The additional aspect, which is a huge virtue aesthetically and in gameplay, is that with its American cartoon plot, with Bowser carrying Princess Peach to the centre of the universe, Mario finds himself interacting with a figure named Rosalina and her space station full of cute Lumas, star-like creatures who became planets and other intergalactic forms, needing to help repower her station to reach his arch nemesis by travelling around tiny weird planets. The game from the get-go has a playfulness that is its biggest virtue, its sense of colour and pop fell in how everything is already pleasing aesthetically, and that the game's modus operandi was clearly for the staff to come up with every idea for a game play mechanic, or level design, that they could. There were enough rejected concepts to fill out a Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010), literally the add-on sequel of all the other ideas after this prequel's incredible success.

The Wii's motion controls, even lucking into a later MotionPlus controller for my black plastic box, and specifically the motion sensor bar is a finicky little creature, with Mario attempting to roll on a giant ball a nightmare for the worse example of how, in attempting to set the console up, it was a machine betrayed by one's living quarters rather than the technology being at fault. That said, there are moments where the game does occasional fail, as whoever came up with the giant spring power up that turns Mario into a perpetual bouncing spring, where the bounce button is unpredictable and a greater problem than Mario hoping about in all-directions, should have had a stern talking to about figuring out ideas first on the drawing board. I am admittedly late to the part for that example, as many gamers who bought this brand new in the day lament that power-up's existence, and aside from little decisions like this, ninety percent of this game is innovation backed by Nintendo forcing everyone to make the game to their best. Even these flaws (and the camera's occasional misposition due to a dynamic shot angle) feel closer to the mistakes made by people trying to create than sloppiness, something that sums up the console as much as the game meant to sell the Wii.

A lot here is stuff which gaming really needed more of from the earlier days, how it is designed for anyone to play, right down to bosses having very obviously designed ways shown to find their weaknesses, for the better, but that this will ramp the difficulty up in the end for a challenge at the right time too. The final boss battle was practically a breeze when, to even get to the fire breathing dino-turtle once played by Dennis Hopper, you have a literal assault course of homing bullets with eyes in a vast nightmarish obstacle course before you. The game finds a right balance between its playfulness with its steadily increasing challenge, more so as (in the moments of grimness to a brightly coloured game) falling off the planets in this game leads to Mario being sucked into black holes or into the molten cores of satellites, let alone any of the challenges if you stay on the platforms. Everything has a playability that, once you grasp the instructions, is precise and well made. You start in a main hub with Rosalina's space station, with its mass of platforms and secrets, with both the stars you need to acquire per level to complete the story mode, including multiple versions of levels for variety of a setting, alongside there being a lot of content here even after the story mode is completed. You have collectables, but the star bits, are practically both as a way to feed Lumas, even mid-level, to create new bonus stages, and also for firepower, as using the Wii remote like a gun allows you to fire them at enemies to stun them. Coins are collectable, but also you use them to replenish life, with the risk that you only get them for stomping on enemies then spinning into them.

This is before you even get into the imagination in the game. You will run upside down in a dome slowly shrinking in space to escape, in one of the most inspired levels I have played, one of the many moments where the intergalactic aspect of the game is used for Mario having to move in various different gravities and even walking sideways or upside down in moments. As someone who always found 3D platformers inherently surreal, with their floating platforms inexplicably in the air since childhood, this really took that further in how you will even wander sideways on a giant robot arm as platforms, or on tiny little planets you can run or ice skate around shaped like holed doughnuts to giant wooden Yoshi heads. Even the swimming mechanics, whilst awkward for me, grew on me especially when you can ride shells underwater and eventually fight a giant skeleton fish later on in a riveting moment.

Moments are also surprisingly adult. Beyond the ways Mario can buy the farm, or that I am curb stomping giant caterpillar creatures, this surprisingly becomes cosmic, as the ending literally has an ode to the cosmos nature of life continually in cycles and regeneration as Bowser is playing with material that can absorb the entirely galaxy if he fell into it. It also leads to the real story of Super Mario Galaxy, an emotional core of Rosalina, introduced in this game and to the franchise. Unlocking chapters of a fairy tale that is her own story, told as pastel drawings, she is a girl who became lost in space with a Lumaand become a mother to them all, a tale with is legitimately sweet and profound. As Bowser and Mario continue their usual combative narrative, Super Mario Galaxy's real story is hers, warmly welcomed into the canon even if, sadly, Galaxy's sequel ditched the hub world for level select, and Rosalina herself joins the team for Smash Brothers games and karting races. The later is not an insult to those as, getting even in the Wii, it is inevitable I will explore them, merely a joke that bares in mind that, at the beginning, her creators created someone in this franchise you cared for this late in its cycle when the gameplay would have been enough.

The game's entire aesthetic won me over, even as the contrarian more inclined to the weirder games now opened on a Wii. Entirely based around replacing floating platforms with full tiny little planets to hop on in most level, its playful nature as a game won me over; even with moments of fiddliness with the game, the carte blanche to try anything leads to a very inventive production where the planets can be anything, from a kingdom of bees fending off moles to toy lands, and even gravity can be toyed with you can open up upon so many enticing ideas. Platformers, especially 3D ones from my childhood memory, had that innate surrealism to them, but here with Mario even having to fly through space to get to levels and new areas, you have a cavalcade of videogame aesthetic and tightly produced gaming that Nintendo deserve praise for.

It was obviously the game they had to sell the Wii, if it had not been sold to the public before, and the higher ups let the design decisions be a white board filled in every corner with ideas to accomplish this goal. Once you adapt to the platformer being warped in this game's premise, remembering controls will be different when you are upside down on a round satellite in space, you have so much to work with and that is not even bringing in the powerups and level specific gimmicks, excluding that one spring, which work. Being able to turn into a bee and fly temporarily; turning into a ghost Boo and, in an unintentional adult moment, realising now the other Boos rather than hurting you find you very attractive, and still float towards you; or turning to ice and freezing water under your feet among examples. Nintendo's desire to make sure their mascot has a great game meant bringing in their A-level work, feeling like they had to work here with greater care, even if taking a huge risk with working around a very idiosyncratic gaming controller. From the look of the game to the music by Mahito Yokota and Koji Kondo, orchestral at its sweetest and other times playful depending on the level, I cannot lie and say Super Mario Galaxy does not set a high bar for great game development even in terms of still having a personality and whit to it, even if there are more awkward playing games I will fall in love with and place higher than this inevitably. It says a lot that, barely scraping the barrel's bottom in terms of content, as you have many levels to complete and challenges still to beat, I still got my fair share for a game bought second hand long after its success. It was still, even in the context of choosing this or a piece of shovelware from little choice in the moment, a damn good introduction to the Wii's idiosyncrasies with Nintendo's own altogether.

Stump the Guesser (2020)

Director: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson

Screenplay: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson

Cast: Adam Brooks as The Guesser; Brent Neale as Trofim; Stephanie Berrington as Y / Other Sister; Thaller as Z

An Abstract Candidate

 

A short from Guy Maddin, these films from his career despite their length, this one created with Evan and Galen Johnson, are always as distinct as his longer work even in just twenty minutes here. Certainly you cannot escape the premise's allure, where in this nocturnal world there are carnival guessers, figures played by Adam Brooks, who can almost psychically guess how many fish a man has hidden on his persons or which chambers of a pistol have bullets in them for improvised Russian Roulette, all for prizes of various kinds given out if anyone was to manage to stump the guesser. A registered job requiring a license, with the actual skill tested to be 99% accurate or have the license revoked, even if you use "guessing milk" to assist the power you can loss this work, which is what happens when the Guesser of this ends up losing his. Happening as with so many Guy Maddin male protagonists, it all begins when he lusts over a woman and his libido controls him, a constant narrative touch which is never condemning the women in his work in a misogynistic slant at all, but always condemning men to be driven by his lusts. The woman he loves (Stephanie Berrington) also happens to be his long lost sister, which causes issues as incest is a no-no and gets you red marks of shame on your record.

Befitting a Maddin film, even the sexual desire has a transgressive aspect as, when he loses his job, the carnival guesser is fixated on overcoming this legal law against incest, even if it means taking a role helping a scientist in disproving genetic family trees. By this point, Maddin's ability to create compelling, even perversely witty realities of any length is unparallel. Little things grow beyond this too enriching the work for me as a long time fan, such as the encroaching clarity of how much Socialism and its iconography has influenced his films as an obsession, when one of the prizes in this guessing game for a one shot joke is a Trotsky-bear, which is literally what it sounds like with a plush toy with the face of the noted Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky that includes his trademark beard.

The one trait which became a permanent fixture over time is how Evan and Galen Johnson have been permanent co-directors since The Forbidden Room (2015), and it is clear their involvement come with Maddin's greater use of computer effects. Whilst it may disappoint how a director like Maddin, who once shot a lost film in a garage with sets (Love-Chaunt in the Chimney), has decided to build his worlds now digitally, but it is also clear that, never the purist of cinema in the slightest from the beginning, his tributes to silent cinema also toyed with and re-used in different new aesthetic ways, with this new stage in his career that one where he revels in the artificiality of the digital look. This could be a perverse comparison, as the later is a director who is not screened on streaming sites like MUBI or at art festivals, but I cannot help but think of practical effects creator and low budget horror film director Joe Castro, who suddenly in the 2010s changed to a similar type of filmmaking based around heavy green screen use and deliberately artificial aesthetics. His work, with all its CGI gore, I compliment with this comparison as imagining Hieronymus Bosch if he binged on internet meme aesthetic, original goregrind era Carcass album covers and splatter films with a sense of horror vacui to Castro's work after the 2010s of not wanting to leave the amount of empty space he had in his earlier 2000s films. Maddin is the same in his own way, even close to horror vacui too at times with the look of his newer films, always having the grain and damaged film look even when the films are clearly digitally made, or how from The Forbidden Room on, he eventually depicts mental collapse or tension with a little blitz of the visuals. When the Guesser is forced to make a final guess for happiness, a level of visual barrage greets the viewer which is pushing what he accomplished with acclaim for the short The Heart of the World (2000).

The world here has a heightened mood entirely different to his earlier work but still refining what he did before with new collaborators, such as tiny touches as using colour against monochrome, like having to guess the eye colour of a woman who turns out to be your sister). Far from feeling like a compromise, all I would ever regret with Maddin teaming up with Evan and Galen Johnson is if he entirely jettisoned the stage bound sets of earlier films, and that side to his career as a result. Thankfully, even if it means melding the two more than he has done in the 2010s on for a wonderful hybrid, that is still being felt with films like this.  Stump the Guesser as it stands is another fascinating work and, as just twenty minutes long, is rich enough in what is told in its little narrative even in the little storytelling touches you can miss out on - that the Guesser, as a master when we meet him, even wanders his living quarters with others blindfolded, with a side of his sleeping blanket marked for heads and feet he cannot see and is meant to get the right way up, something which goes amiss when he starts to fail in this work and obsesses over his sister. This has enough richness in narrative, including its final punch line, left with a metal bird toy, to be a worthy part of Guy Maddin's work even among the feature length titles.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: George Toles

Inspired by the novel Pan by Knut Hamsun

Cast: Nigel Whitmey as Peter Glahn; Pascale Bussières as Juliana Kossel; Shelley Duvall as Amelia Glahn; Frank Gorshin as Cain Ball; Alice Krige as Zephyr Eccles; R.H. Thomson as Dr. Issac Solti

An Abstract Candidate

 

Returning to Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, I see where this would have been a dead end for Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin as much as I am going to say it is incredibly underrated. I am not surprised of how this came to be a frustrating production for Maddin, who was recording for the documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997) from this film's set looking miserable. It is the closest thing to his mainstream film, the moment in any filmmaker with an auteurist's career where, like a non-American and non-English language director making their first Hollywood, their film can either lead to them going into the Hollywood filmmaker or led to their most contentious work. This has recognisable names like Shelley Duvall and Frank Gorshin, and was shot in 35mm film, where Maddin's usually visual aesthetic was toned down. This is still a film, as we will get into, where the idea of this being his tame film is absurd, as one piece of dialogue talks of Gorshin, who famously played the Riddler in the nineteen sixties Batman television series, having had his penis torn off on a chair nail in his past. Where the film's frustrations for Maddin clearly are, and why for one film this is a fascinating gem for him, is entirely how Twilight of the Ice Nymphs tells its story, setting up iots elegant yet eerie mood with the title card among red dirt and bodies of broken statues in the ground.

This is definitely more a drama for him, where former political prisoner Peter Glahn (Nigel Whitmey) returns back to his home of Mandragora and his sister Amelia Glahn (Shelley Duvall), who is running an ostrich farm in a contentious relationship with Cain Ball (Gorshin), an older handyman promised the deeds to the farm and kicking a stink when this comes under threat. This is also another film where Maddin tackles his obsession with heterosexual desire and the folly of the male libido, caught between two women. One is Zephyr Eccles (Alice Krige), a woman baring child who devotes herself to the woodland; the other he is obsessed with Juliana Kossel (Pascale Bussières), a woman he meets on his boat trip home, the likely mistress of Dr. Issac Solti (R.H. Thomson), a figure left disabled on a walking cane as a result of a statue of the goddess Venus he has managed to uncover in the land, one which may possess actual connection to the goddess when Zephyr gives herself to Venus for Peter. The immediately thing to bear in mind is how more dialogue heavy this is, and whilst it is definitely a Maddin film in his quirks and dark sense of humour, the huge elephant in the room is that, whilst aesthetically gorgeous, this is Maddin's most restrained film aesthetically, with long dialogue scenes and none of his editing techniques to tell story, which is a drastic change of pace for him.

Onscreen, this slowly builds to the kind of whims and perversity of Guy Maddin's other work in its dialogue, still transgressive when Zephyr has a monologue of the erotic fears of seeing girl help a bull insert itself in a cow. This leads to morbid tales of two sisters, their skulls still refusing to face each other after death, whose hatred become so bad one drove a nail into the other's skull, to be reflected back again when it is used as inspiration for a spat resolver. That this has known actors neither undercuts this, merely the psychosexual content and anxieties are thankfully given to an actor like Shelley Duvall, someone who has always been underappreciated and here fits the mood. The film is one, like other Maddin work, with their complicated anxieties, where the male lead is frankly irredeemable, with a clear psychotic side, and where everyone adds to the film alongside Maddin's compelling dialogue. The plot itself - with Alice Krige as a woman who escaped her marriage with assistance of a poisonous snake filled "Bad Night Bog", a love rivalry between her Zephyr and Juliana over Peter, and Peter and his own sister's growing dark sides - fully conforms to Maddin's other work in how things get weird, escalate and (as usually happens) someone gets gravely injured.

The film also looks beautiful. After its initial mood, feeling its low budget artificiality, the film starts to take this to its advantage with an almost plastic-like dreamy tone, pagan at times with its many woodland and beach scenes. The colour aesthetic eventually becomes the hugest influencer on this film for the better, such as when the scenes take place in Dr. Issac Solti's home, here emphasising that for a director know for his silent film aesthetics, including many black and white productions, Maddin here and with films like Careful (1992) when he uses colour is exceptional alongside his collaborators in using it. You can even make the true compliment with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs that he is almost touching Raul Ruiz's best examples of extreme colour lighting in his own most delirious films.

Any film where Frank Gorshin, drunk, burps at an actual ostrich cannot be ditched into obscurity. The problem is clearly that, even if he did not have the stress of working on this film to sully it, Maddin if he had succeeded with this film could have suffocated his career. It is clear where the film feels a dead end even if one I find a great deal to admire. Here for a one-off, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is an underrated film from his career, and it is fascinating to see his hands tied for his aesthetic tricks, showing his dialogue and storytelling skills. But it suits a one-off only - never was there a man, whilst his dialogue is proven to be quirky and memorable, who if he had his style restricted would have lost half of his talents onscreen. Whilst a virtuous film in content, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs also does emphasis his talents in his other films tenfold.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Whimsical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Games of the Abstract: Mischief Makers (1997)

 

Developer: Treasure

Publisher: Enix (Japan)/Nintendo (USA/Europe)

One Player

Nintendo 64

 

Sadly, with the esteemed developer Treasure, who I have come to now with interest, is a Japanese company who does not make a lot of games nowadays. Key titles too, despite their acclaim and even their re-releases on the Xbox 360 in the 2000s, are scarcer to find. This is a surprise knowing their status, an acclaimed company of video games, to which you can pluck out among them for an example Mischief Makers, one of their Nintendo 64 games, one I half suspect is either caught in legal paperwork, as an Enix published title which Nintendo released outside of Japan, or Nintendo is inexplicably sleeping on it. I wonder if it is the former, as with Treasure's last Nintendo 64 game, Sin and Punishment (2000), Nintendo would eventually release it in the West digitally in the 2000s (and 2020s), and was a game they clearly held with admiration enough to even reference in a Super Smash Brothers game and commission a sequel for the Wii console.

Mischief Makers is definitely a game with a cult audience, existing surprisingly cheap in unboxed cartridges over years for a rare moment of luck, and turned out to be such an inventive and delightful piece of platforming. It's back-story in creation does bring up how much an underdog it has been in general in that, when Treasure started developing the game for Nintendo, as when they started in 1995 on the project, they did not even had access to the N64's chipset and focused entirely on a 2D platformer¹. Unfortunately, whilst a cult hit, Mischief Maker's concerns as a product were confounded by the fact that, by its release in 1997, Nintendo's intentions with the new console was, as was the huge issues in the fifth generation of consoles, to embrace the polygons arms race of the era of three dimensional graphics. With the Nintendo 64 almost exclusively with polygon based games, including its legacy of 3D platformers, Treasure's game is one of the only real exceptions, which has 3D flourishes including in the bosses to make this a 2D.5 game. This is not a big issue for me personally, but definitely adds to its distinct appearance.

The game is unconventional anyway, for the better, apt in how Treasure take genres - shooters, platformers, beat-em-ups - and add their own distinct styles to them even in terms of their mechanics. Treasure is also usually known for hard games, but Mischief Makers instead follows more the line of literally stretching and shaking its game mechanics in a very quirky way. Someone here had the ingenious idea to base a game premise on whether you could hold anything, even enemy projectiles, and shake them. Baring in mind possible liberties in the English translation of the text, that this even references the sixties Batman television series with "same Nintendo channel" at one point, this is still structured like a short anime series, a series of miniature stories which connect together the larger narrative. You play android maid Ultra-InterGalactic-Cybot G Marina Liteyears, who most just called Marina, who in the game has to constantly rescue her elderly male creator, Professor Theo, throughout the narrative from kidnapping. Admittedly it hints, in its 2D animated sections, that he is likely a sex pest, as he sinisterly moves up behind her when rescued only for her to judo throw him into orbit, but we can guess she still cares for him deeply enough that, as he keeps getting kidnapped, she will go to rescue him.

All transpiring on Planet Clancer, the plot is slight but includes the populous, the titular Clancers, being caught between a war between a sinister emperor and his brainwashed army of them and the Clancers helping Marina as much to save their planet. There is also a trio of intergalactic space heroes, animal men, having been tricked by the Emperor to attack Marina, under the presumption of a doppelganger that she is a really evil person, and one unexpected reveal of a sibling to a cast member on the villains' side.  Consider as well you will eventually ride an alien cat in a boss battle, riding on him riding on missiles if you time your jump well enough, surfing it as you throw other missiles back. You will also have to compete in a series of track based athletic mini-games like 100 meter dash and long jump, which inexplicably also involves a math quiz for one, because someone kidnapped Professor Theo to have a first prize despite no one wanting him. Mischief Makers is a deeply silly game, but also from the surfing missile sentence alone completely awesome at the same time.

Mischief Maker's controls in the midst of this are as idiosyncratic. They can be difficult to grasp at first, but once you get used to them, this is where the game becomes even more inventive. You have your standard platforming mechanics, barring that using standard direction to move, Marina also has jet boosts, following her to float in the air or move faster on foot. The key mechanic is that, yes, almost everything can be caught or held, even projectiles where, if you catch them with perfect timing, you sometimes convert glowing rays and balls of death into gems, red ones common through the game to collect to have continues, or advise from a pink ball with a face and a bow called Miss Advice, or blue gems that heals/increases the health bar. You can grab enemies, shake them in case they hold gems, and throw them. You can even throw good NPCs on your side, and shake them for gems, with the advantage that they will get up whilst the enemies disappear with their ghosts floating off with halos, with a dark humour especially as one level has you exorcising a cave full of ghosts at one point. In one boss battle, you are literally shaking negative thoughts, negative words, into their positive opposite, whilst access to a shaking pot allows you to capture objects and combine them for tools. You can even pick up flowers and throw them. You can even be a dick and shake a ball, in an early training level based around a theme park, with a child Clancer on them at the same time, and cause them to fall off and cry. And yes, I admit to doing the later once and feel guilty about it still.

This also means the game, alongside platforming, plays to a lot of obstacle course puzzles, with the challenges involving manipulating and tugging objects, and here as well, whilst limited by the technology of the Nintendo 64, talking of how the game looks actually intersects with the gameplay. The story is set on the aforementioned Planet Clancer, where the populous, good and bad, are figures who, possibly inspired by ancient Japanese burial statues called Haniwa, also look like if you took the central figure of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893), and made them cute chirping figures. Everything has faces, even floating orbs and cubes which are on the ground or floating in the air, obstacles or objects to interact with to figure out where to get to or, if after the yellow gems which are the one 100% goal, as they unlock more of the final cut scene, figuring out where they are. You will shake a lot of items, leading to the catchphrase "Shake, shake!" a lot, pull and pull in wheels of orbs to negotiate around environments, use springs to propel yourself further, and generally negotiate around the environments with nothing onscreen not designed for manipulation. This is where, alongside Mischief Makers requiring a re-release, a sequel would have been fascinating as, for a short game which manages to do so much, seeing the ideas this has stretched further and challenging the jumping/shaking mechanics would have been compelling to see.

Again, this was an outsider when it was released, including how its short length contrasts a time when significantly longer games were being produced. Considering how eclectic this manages to be however, Mischief Maker really does make every second count, which is a common occurrence for Treasure games. Here you can be negotiating upwards, working a time reverse mechanic in a confined environment for one stage, later on trying to flee lava on a tricycle. The stages are almost all short, little tasters where you never find yourself stuck in a cruel overlong level at all, where one of the longest, the only long one in fact, is a late stage rush between enemies which is a frenzy of throwing people at others, throwing people's spinning blades back, stealing machine guns which seemingly fire eggs of death from cat robots, and just charging through a ridiculous amount of the evil Clancers army. And the entertainment is there consistently high throughout. Alongside its charm, even in the English dub, there are many of the personal touches which are exceptional, such as Norio Hanzawa's music which is diverse and moody, and the energy through the game is rich. When this gets harder, the goals once figured out are clear, only having one little flaw that there is never a clear signal for some bosses for how many times you need to hit them. Considering, however, how over-the-top and varied these boss battles are, even that is not a complaint that can stain every virtue this game has. Here you will encounter some of the most dynamic boss battles with some inventive and very unconventional directions to take - from getting the first proper boss you encounter to punch itself in the face, to tripping one's robot over and quickly squashing it onto its head on the ground. Throughout you will find so much to appreciate and, for me, it was a pure joy to play Mischief Makers. This was the kind of game I wanted to uncover, and yes, it is an unsung gem for its console of origin.

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1) This is documented in an interview by IGN Staff, from the year of the game's release on the 15 April 1997, with the president and CEO of Treasure, Masato Maegawa.

Games of the Abstract: Battle Garegga (1996)

 

Developer: Raizing

Publisher: Eighting Co., Ltd.

Two Player

Arcade / Sega Saturn / Playstation 4

 

Author's Note: There are multiple versions of Battle Garegga. Depending on which version you play, that can be the intended version created by developer Raizing, the compromised Western release, the modified versions from Raizing themselves when acquiring feedback to the game, and the more modern releases worked on by M2 which reflect the changes to one key trait of the game's structure. Bare this in mind with what you play.

Battle Garegga is the hardcore of the hardcore. Between the multiple versions which exist, Battle Garegga is held both as a well regarded title from the shoot-em-up catalogue, especially the nineties games. It is also, due to a certain intricate mechanic is one which could cause debate from players of these games regardless of skill, one which has influenced opinion on the game including its developer modifying on multiple versions of Battle Garegga over the decades.  Regardless of the version played, and I say this with as much admiration even someone who is way out of his depth with this genre, a bad player who yet is growing to love their aesthetics and craft, Battle Garegga in any form is a punishing little bastard. Even a compromised version can introduce you, as it will, to missiles and beams hitting you from everywhere, which reminds one that, with "bullet hell" games born from the likes of this these games are as much how you learn to dodge attacks, like an obstacle course for twitch game play. As these games pushed the newer hardware of the time with more death bullets to hit you, more so did this become a spectacle of keeping on your toes moving as it was shooting the enemies back.

Naturally I come to this as the player, with no shame, that would rather play these sorts of games with infinite continues, allowing me to appreciate their artistry even if my ship blows up many times. Instead, the gameplay is the learning curve of how, in one play and in all future ones, you eventually learn to "improve" and have your ship blow up less. Frankly, from a controversial perspective, infinite continues should have been a common part of countless games, even if this reflects as much Battle Garegga being an arcade machine you needed to feed coins into for continuous playing; a game like this, even if very short, at a disadvantage in the modern day in terms of value of money, has one advantage that it was always designed to replay and replay until you get good. Even that this has no rapid fire as other games in the genre means that, mechanically depending on which version you play, this was a game you hone and learn to ultimately get a higher score and hopefully keep it without dying.

For a plot, this is set in an alternative nineteen forties, where two brothers called Brian and Jason Wayne make the ill-advised decision, after running a very productive automobile factory, to be paid by a shady organisation called the Federation to switch to manufacturing weapons, which are used by the group to begin a world conquest. The Wayne brothers quickly figure out that they had made an extremely poor decision and use four experimental aircraft to fight against The Federation and destroy the machines they made for them. Set in a "dieselpunk" world of elaborate aerial battle ships and planes, if you boot the game up, this back-story does not appear in the game itself. Battle Garegga becomes just the tale of one of four planes¹ trying to survive an entire army of on land and aerial death machines, a period plane and mechanical nerd's wet dream in sprite form, whose aesthetic beyond that evokes, if anything profounder, a horrifying image of the 20th century as mere mechanisation, where your tiny plane, no matter how powerful, is always outmatched and outgunned by mass of opponents or industrial behemoths, trying to survive as a faceless machine against actually terrifying machines. Truthfully, you could find yourself not getting on with the game as it is entirely a mechanical world of planes and war machines without characters or any of the more fantastical/whimsical touches of other shooters of the time. This is not even cosmic sci-fi or biomechanical, entirely pure diesel-industrial machinery and war mayhem in how you obliterate turrets/planes/tanks, which can still be appreciated by the lovingly detailed and hardcore aesthetic. Even if the bosses are merely warships, the final boss merely a red warplane, you can find a pleasure in this game in its intensity on an aesthetical level before you even get to the game play.

Even as someone who prefers his games to have weird elaborate bosses and aesthetically elaborate designs, I admire this for this aesthetic and how well it is presented. Raizing did admittedly make the decision, one they would revise on improved versions of Battle Garegga, that some of the bullets fired at you are drawn more realistically, not necessarily an issue barring that, as I can attest, they can catch you out of nowhere having not seen them, a necessary thing to amend on the later versions as it goes against how you can at least, even in a bullet hell wall of glowing death, see your impending doom and see if you can twitch quick enough out of their way. Admittedly, there is a far more contentious mechanic, one which is Battle Garegga's biggest assets, one which was compromised in certain ports of the original arcade game, and in the future updates from Raizing would be modified. It is their elusive ranking system in how, depending how well you are in the game in skill, the difficulty can ramp on so much that a tactic has been for players to even self sacrifice a life, all so they can clear the dangers of there being so many bullets and hostiles onscreen after them. Obviously if I was a better player, this mechanic would be a greater concern as, with the influence it has elusive in the earliest versions of the game, it eventually makes the game more and more harder to an extreme. It is also fascinating to know however that just for the Japanese only Sega Saturn release, Raizing improved on the game, in how they made bullets more distinct but even in how they added options to modify the game in the options available. The mechanic's original existence is fascinating as artificial intelligence, but in mind to when CAVE eventually made their games as accessible as they did comes to mind, including hardcore difficulty levels for their shooters for the ultra hardcore players but also easier options being available. This is apt to bring up as Shinobu Yagawa, as a member of Raizing who helped programmed Battle Garegga, would move to CAVE and develop games for the company like Muchi Muchi Pork! (2007).

For me, Battle Garegga regardless of my skill level was a pleasure. Whilst my taste is more fantastical, the distinct artistic virtues are significant, and it would be blasphemy not to mention the score by Manabu Namiki, who would eventually move to CAVE too, whose work here is arguably the best aspect of the game. Detroit techno in the least likely of game settings and tones, it nonetheless works beautifully, melding with the intensity of the combat, fighting proto-stealth planes to giant multi-sectioned warships with numerous guns, with the contrast of the atmospheric techno music by Namiki. Tracks like Subversive Awareness have a timely marker of when they were composed but they are timeless in their moodiness. The energy of the game, its darker mechanical setting, with no human beings and pure mechanised destruction, becomes compelling even if you keep dying. The slowdown which was common in these games, when they had to keep up with the number of bullets and explosions onscreen, happened for me mid-play, usually because the plane I preferred using as a special bomb, with collectable missiles to stock up, fired all its stock of homing missiles off everywhere on mass, even if there were thirty plus onscreen. This accidental aspect, alongside the aesthetic virtues of the game from its appearance to the music, compensate for how crushingly difficult it is, let alone if you tried limited deaths down to credits. Less difficult for the sake of difficult, these games benefit how now they are not designed as arcade machines meant to chomp coins anymore, but can be replayed over and over, as you improve and get the skills of the genre slowly. To just try to play even if on infinite continues leads to a symphony of visuals and sound, where I feel no sense of cheating for unlimited credits because the thrill was there nonetheless, one that would lead someone to want to improve to fully appreciate the game.

 

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1) There are secret planes, from the Raizing game Sorcer Striker (1993), you can access by a password, which brings characters from a fantasy sci-fi setting including a dragon man in for some idiosyncratic contrast.