Games of the Abstract: Screaming Mad George's ParanoiaScape (1998)

 

Developer: Mathilda

Publisher: Jorudan Co.

One Player

Sony PlayStation

 

The Origin of Life.

A new life was established in this surrear world just now.

I feel conscious that, wishing to cover "Games of the Abstract", I have not always kept to that. In mind that, wishing to cover more obscure titles, I have touched obscurer games others would consider "abstract", today I can wholeheartedly say that Paranoiascape, an art game crossed with pinball crossed with body horror, is not conventional in the slightest. It is an incredibly short game, but it is entirely esoteric. If the rights could be bought from its creator, the name above the title, or Jorudan Co., who only published this game, and a form could be preserved, then this could be unleashed into the world and someone would appreciate it as the "anti-realist" nightmare. I would be a happier man though there would be raised eyebrows considering the content of said game.

Screaming Mad George once had the normal name of Joji Tani, a figure allowing this review to cross the worlds of cult cinema with cult videogames. Joji Tani, born in 2956 in Osaka, Japan, would take on the name "George", than "Screaming Mad", migrating to the United States and leaving a mark as a practical effects designer for cult film fans. Such fans reading this may know of him as a practical effects artist for not only films like Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and Predator (1987), but also a certain series of horror films, including ones from producer/director Brian Yuzna. George's work when you see it is unforgettable, be it a woman turning into a cockroach in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), to Society (1989) and its infamous "shunting" sequence. Or there is the time, in his one co-directed film, adapting Yoshiki Takaya's manga The Guyver into a 1991 film, where Mark Hamill turns into a slug.

He has, as well as been a lead singer to a band called The Mad, worked with Nine Inch Nails for the infamous Closer music video, and designed the original marks for Iowa's own sons Slipknot. He work is incredible, gross practical effect prosthetics which embrace their artificiality through his "antirealism" stance, of not depicting real violence, but fantastical surreal body horror. Circumstances lead to Paranoiascape the game to exist, on the original Playstation, a console which was so popular it got a lot of material made for it, and Joji Tani did not compromise his artistry either here.

Paranoascape's premise does have a plot, though it does not appear in the game. In Makai, the demon world, a suitable replacement for the Demon King is required, the Makai government deciding that testing Makai citizens is the wisest direction for a candidate. Two skeleton brothers from the country are chosen, having done well so far until, at the start of this game, they are left with a final test in the Paranoiascape, possessing an ancient flipper bat artefact from the Makai to help them fling Brain Balls, the pinballs of this game, on to succeeding as the new Demon Kings by navigating this world. To those without this context, which comes from the manual, you still have a one-off, something as a pinball game alien to the genre, to videogames still one of the most unique to exist.

Truthfully, before this review becomes a gushing praise of this obscurity, it is an interesting take on the pinball genre which needed ironing out as a game. Your camera is placed behind the dinky winged skeleton brothers, a pinball flipper substitute each, having to fire flaming Brain Balls to clear through the targets and barriers. You have the ability to move ahead as well as left and right, required to progress in some levels. The mechanics if this game ever got a spiritual successor would need to fine-tune the struggles you have with this, namely that you are having to get used to moving forwards and play pinball, but not only is there an option for infinitive Brain Balls, but that after the initial few levels where I struggled with these mechanics, this game progresses beyond this concern. Even with the curious fact you also have a life bar that you need to protect, there are power-ups to replenish the bar, and getting hurt is not something easy to do unless you wander willingly into hazards, especially as there is no time limit in levels.

Paranoiascape, as a pinball game, also confounds the player from the get-go even without this idiosyncratic structure; that it flips the rules of how it plays from Level 2, of four stages, undercuts the pinball genre, but even before then, on Level 1, you see how the game looks and already have to content with its style. Paranoiascape the world is a hellish nightmare-scape, one of the most distinct of the original Playstation console, and arguably still, as playing regular pinball if having to move towards the exit played out in a corridor of mouths screaming on the floor, with ears on the walls, and the sky a roof of thousands of eyes starng at you. The second level, a boss fight to already undercut the genre, has giant hypodermic needles to dodge, giant scissor blades coming out of the ground to avoid, whilst another level is, continuing with an ideas over multiple sections of Paranoiascape partly taking place inside a giant body, having to go through the intestines and guts.

The cumbersome nature of the mechanics are reduced as the world takes over, the options for infinite Brain Balls clearly causing one to consider, alongside options for a set limit, that Paranoiascape was always meant to be experienced and the challenge was for afterwards. Especially as whilst it tallies a score each level on, it never is brought up by the finale, showing that was not the prerogative. The game, as pinball, is too abstract, especially as within the first three levels you have expectations subverted, a boss on the second level immediately, the third with your Brain Ball stolen by flying fish, having to clear them off. Hitting enemies back at them flying towards you, that level also has you avoiding giant Monty Python feet from the sky and giant hands coming out the ground on a permanent forward momentum.

Conventions will never stay consistent, even if the middle stages sticks to a hybrid of pinball with levels to move through, with bosses battles in-between, the balls used to pass gates, literally knocking them down, or clearing enemies closer to a Breakout game. The world and the enemies are incredibly unique and disturbing, with references to George's work in cinema eventually appearing, like a face for an arse from Society, or human headed insects. From the bowels of an unknown entity to a Cthulian city, you have a lot of environments to go through, the latter where Screaming Mad George himself, as a giant head beaming like God in a halo of colour, even makes a cameo, either letting you continue or try again to pass a level's puzzle of hitting the right photo of a person's face from a selection. Paranoiascape is an experience in the truest sense, and factoring into this too, the original PSX game also a soundtrack CD for its own score, is the music from Screaming Mad George himself with Psychosis. It has many of the traits of that decade, of nineties industrial rock, but with its punk overtones and dark ambient passages, it is a soundtrack itself, alongside being perfect, in dire need of a re-release in itself, let alone the game it came with.

Even in mind to its clumsy controls, you can adapt quickly as I did to its logic, hitting swarming masses of human cockroaches with the movement allowing aim, or hitting back projectiles at a translucent blue giant spider boss. The esoteric and weirder elements are compelling and, by the finale, it manages to get even weirder. An abrupt puzzle, actually simple but catching you off-guard, is the least expected thing at that point, the second to last level suddenly changing to an image matching one, but the last level completely undercuts the game it was even meant to be. You play a mechanised wheelchair bond doll being whom, avoiding zombies lurching along, have to find a Queen and King, in the right coffins in a small area, and get them into a bed in a brief 3D walking simulator with enemies to avoid. The Queen and King form into a hermaphrodite winged being, and the game ends.

What does it mean? You get a full motion video cut scene with a shot of the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, of surreal imagery, before returning to the main menu. Clearly, Screaming Mad George was more concerned with mood than meaning. Even with some instructions in Japanese, the game can be figured out eventually mind play and Paranoiascape, if you know what to do, can last up to thirty minutes. It is, truly, something special. Most would flee the other way from it, but for those like myself, it is incredible and in dire need of preservation. Mathilda disappeared after developing it after as their only game, as if they could not top it in quality. Screaming Mad George continues to this day. Publisher Jorudan Co., Ltd. tried to top this weirdness with Sukeban Shachou Rena (2009), a Wii mini-game collection in which a human player must appease the CEO of Cat Queen, Inc. Named Reno, who is a cat, selling only 100 copies at launch week and becoming the worse selling Wii game for the console. In a sense, after Paranoiascape, that is the closest you can top this in being unique in background and content¹.

 

=====

1) Giant Bomb's Sukeban Shachou Rena page, for those like myself curious about this oddity.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)

From http://nerdsontherocks.com/wp-content/
uploads/2014/09/elm_st_4.jpg

Director: Renny Harlin

Screenplay: Brian Helgeland, Ken Wheat and Jim Wheat

Cast: Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger; Lisa Wilcox as Alice Johnson; Danny Hassel as Dan Jordan; Tuesday Knight as Kristen Parker; Brooke Theiss as Debbie Stevens; Andras Jones as Rick Johnson; Toy Newkirk as Sheila Kopecky

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #130

The Dream Master is a mess. Made during a writer's strike, with only a year after Dream Warriors (1987) to capitalise on that prequel's success, this film makes little sense. Freddy Krueger being resurrected by flaming dog urine is just one of the odder moments to expect but it's one of the more memorable moments in a film littered in a lot of convoluted or underwritten material. It's neither a sense of the intentionally surreal  as the biggest issues with the sequel is that, whilst the dream sequences for the most part are memorable, the film altogether feels as rushed and improvised as its production history suggests. Krueger returns to pick off the survivors of Dream Warriors, using a friend of one of theirs Alice (Lisa Wilcox), a shy and introverted teenager, as a conduit for him to acquire new souls once he's run out of the ones he originally targeted. The problem after this in terms of logic is not the structure of the film but trying to make sense of what "the Dream Master" is, never properly developed and a term thrown around in dialogue as word salad which is the cause of the problems of little making sense, especially the ending.

There's also the issue, that comes to the front here in this sequel onwards, that Robert Englund is not only squandered but everything directly involving Krueger, even in great weird sequences, is embarrassing and shows the character as being a dead weight in his own film. Every dumb aspect is entirely surrounding Kruger himself. The one liners, Kruger wearing sunglasses on the beach. Everything that's a problem with the film is directly with Krueger's prescience. Even in a good sequence as the classroom sequence, the unnerving tone to it to the gruesome sight of someone being turned as flat as a football, you still have to put up with the lame puns in the midst of it from Kruger. The character no longer is scary as the dream themselves and their special effects are an entirely separate entity, a side character who feels pointless and defanged at this point in the series. As in The Dream Child (1989), the next sequel, its Krueger himself alongside the scripts where these films deserve criticism. It would take Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) for this character to come a virtue again.

From https://thatwasabitmental.files.wordpress.com/
2015/01/a-nightmare-on-elm-street-4-pic-5.jpg

The positives of the film are the dream sequences by themselves. The special effects throughout the series never dipped in quality, and whilst you have sillier moments in this film like a pizza made with meatballs that have faces of previous victims, you also have Screaming Mad George's cockroach hotel sequence, the legendary special effects artist turning a person into a cockroach in a repulsive and surreal way¹. Then you even get utterly inspired moments, that redeem so much of the film's flaws, like the déjà vu repeating sequence or Alice entering a cinema only to be sucked into the screen. By this point, when even Dream Warriors had an engaging plot, the films afterwards are saved because of these inspired dream sequences. Whilst they're no longer close to real dreams at points, and there are some terrible ideas (the Jaws pastiche on the beach for example) you have a lot to admire. Whatever one might say of director Renny Harlin's work in terms of context, here at least he has a style and clearly wanted to embrace the music video surrealism he had carte blanch to use even under a strict production time. The simplest of moments, a Playboy Playmate disappearing off a poster on a boy's wall to swimming in the water bed under mine, to elaborate sequences such as the bathroom from hell full of cheerleaders and an elevator growing out of the cubicle going downwards, all have lot to admire. It's only when it gets overtly silly, the invisible martial arts scene immediately after the elevator, where the film suffers in this area.

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-y5FC4gC02jc/VitOuUyh6XI
/AAAAAAAAFnY/l1DdNXMwkVo/s1600/the-dream-master-1.jpg

It's also a film which does attempt greater emotional drama in the midst of what's a spectacle. It tries at times, with some success, to give this new heroine Alice some personality when she could've come off as a contrived inclusion. Depicting how she imagines how she should act in a scenario only to be daydreaming it is actually a series of good moments, standing out considerably as it does hit close to home my own shyness as a person. As does a scene at a funeral, a random moment of actual emotion in a film full of dumb moments. The problems with this are really the end when this gets reduced to her having to overcome her fears to become a heroine, something which feels at odds with a film which never lets her become said heroine, even with the symbolism of her mirror being uncovered of photos to show her own face, with its vague and nonsensical "Dream Master" concept. That ending, alongside making little sense, is what cuts this one interesting dramatic aspect down.

From https://thatwasabitmental.files.wordpress.com/
2015/01/a-nightmare-on-elm-street-4-pic-2.jpg

Out of the sequels it's also the one that manages to be the gaudiest of them all, a comment which is not necessarily an insult but is definitely a distinction between this sequel against the others, certainly so far removed from the original only four years before. This means there's some awful production decisions. That there's Kruger in the end credits contributing a god-awful rap song and the film's drenched in awful eighties pop. But there's other aspects, whilst dated, which give it a personality. There's even a cameo by MTV which puts this film in the time period, fixing a time date on this film that's more extreme than even the other sequels. Cheesy with its big hair and bright colours. A sense of playful camp in the midst of its various problems. Something I have to admire in spite of so much bad taste. This is as much part of the film as a mess, something which has a lot to admire but also a lot that fails. Out of the films in the series its definitely a "guilty pleasure" if one realises I have no concept of guilt for liking these films.  

From http://www.craveonline.com/images/stories/2011/2012/October/
Film/Series%20Project/Nightmare_4_cockroach.jpg

=====

1) Anyone whose managed to see even clips of ParanoiaScape (1998), a PlayStation One pinball-horror game which he devised the look and tone of, human cockroaches amongst other gruesome sights became an obsession for him over the years. A Japanese release only, you can find clips of it online and you see how his previous monstrous creations, including some from Society (1989), became artistic motifs like one would see in other creative mediums.