November 2008 Archives

Geek Out

Contend. MoMA (11 W. 53rd St.) is running an ill-defined but nonetheless enticing film series right now. Deemed “The Contenders,” its press-release description reads, “Whether bound for awards glory or destined to become a cult classic, each of these films is a contender for lasting historical significance—and any true cinephile will want to catch them on the big screen.” Translation: Here’s a bunch of recent movies we think are good. Not that I’m quibbling. When you run a museum you get to do cool things like that.

The screening schedule includes summer hits like Wall-E and Iron Man that you’ve probably seen already, along with notables that you probably missed. In the latter category are Encounters at the End of the World (pictured), Werner Herzog’s documentary about the Antarctic scientific community. I want to see The Silence Before Bach, a “biopic” of sorts that’s more Philip Glass than Amadeus.

Check the schedule for showtimes this weekend and beyond.

Geek In

Stay warm. After all, it is freezing outside, so maybe you’d rather wait for the DVDs of all those “contenders.” In the meantime, dig out your old board games and practice for the upcoming Board Game Olympics produced by Metro Metro. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Metro Metro puts together the annual Metropolitan Odyssey scavenger hunt that kicks all variety of urban-gaming ass.

On Dec. 2, they’ll host eight teams of four each in a board-game throwdown. The tentative, likely-to-change game list is as follows: Trivial Pursuit, Scattergories, Connect Four, Battleship, Memory, Jigsaw Puzzles, Operation. Quick takes:

• Trivial Pursuit: My buddy Sam and I play exclusively with the Genus II set because all of the editions produced in the 1990s and early 2000s are way too easy, and the original Genus set has too many questions concerning the world as it stood in 1981. (Somehow Genus II’s 1984 hits the sweet spot of obscurity.) Given that this event is sponsored by Hasbro, we’ll probably be playing with more recent versions of the game. Perhaps the TP writers have gotten more clever in the past few years.
• Scattergories: A fantastic game that often leads to fantastic fights. My family almost came to blows one Thanksgiving as we debated whether to accept the answer “lock key” in the category “Things Found in a Locker.”¹ I’m sure the Metro Metro guys will have a solid adjudication system in place.
• Connect Four: Has been solved, so if you can play with the discipline of a computer program, you’re golden.
• Battleship: While Scattergories tends to result in open rancor, Battleship breeds quiet suspicion and contempt. Are you sure I didn’t sink your destroyer? Really?
• Memory: Many children’s first board game; I love its potential inclusion in this adult event. Hopefully it remains on the docket.
• Jigsaw puzzles: A game in the same way that Love Connection is a game show. I.e., not.
• Operation: I can’t say I’m a fan, but it was fun to build my own Operation game in high school.

Sign-up details are on the Metro Metro events page, so get your team together for its inevitable defeat at the hands of my squad.

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1. The answer is obviously unacceptable, and only a moron would argue otherwise. ↑

Most of us have a passing familiarity with the Press Your Lucks and $25,000 Pyramids of game-show history, but there are countless other gems that, for whatever reason, have faded from memory.

Since the game show is TV’s most ephemeral genre, its fans have an especially active community on YouTube. The uploaders—a mix of hardcore tape traders and casual fans who happened upon an old VHS trove—have brought back to light shows that, in some cases, haven’t aired anywhere for decades. In this series, I’ll take a look at a few forgotten would-be classics that I think hold up well.

Time Machine

Watch a clip here.

Host: John Davidson

Originally aired: 1985

Forgotten because: It was short-lived, lasting only 80 episodes or so.

What makes it great: OK, it’s not great. But it’s interesting. There haven’t been many game shows based exclusively on date recall, probably because the conceit wears thin quickly. Time Machine barely pulls it off, yet it does indeed pull it off, with a nice variety of games and an irresistible play-along factor. Great set, too

I don’t know why John Davidson kept getting emcee jobs in the ’80s. He’s not a complete loss, sure, but there’s a Sisyphean quality to his hosting: He’s always trying to catch up to the show, but as soon as he gets there, it’s moved on without him. Davidson’s friendly, he looks good in a suit, and he locks onto those cue cards with the force of the Federation’s finest tractor beams. That’s about it.

Watch the clip linked above—Davidson is ill at odds from the start, flubbing his little joke about the morning news. You can discern his internal process for handling contestants: He picks one fact about each contestant to remember and then structures all his remarks around that fact. For the first game, John builds a little billboard in his brain that reads “RON: LIKES BOATS.” The next billboard says “SHIRLEY: IS A NURSE.”

I like when Davidson refers to the clothes washer in a Tide ad as a dishwasher.

Game-show fans know this is a Reg Grundy production by the opening drum roll, a staple of Grundy’s more successful ’80s games, Sale of the Century and Scrabble. Charlie Tuna, the announcer here, also did Scrabble, and his voice is one of my favorites.

Another Reg Grundy staple comes after John says that the prize package is worth $24,000. The resultant “Yeah! Woo! OW! Wow!” crowd noise was used with unapologetic frequency on Grundy shows. Which is an odd production choice, because it sounds artificial from the first time you hear it—even as a kid I found it weird that the same people went “Yeah! Woo! OW!” every time a jackpot was announced. Not knowing the concept of audio “sweetening,” I presumed they were show staffers who reacted the same way every time. (It never occurred to me that something on television would be fake, heaven forfend.)

Further viewing:

• Part two and part three of the above episode.
• Another episode, in not quite the same sparkling quality, but watchable: part one, two, three.

Speaking of glossaries, Pink Tentacle has posted an entertaining roundup of the 60 most popular words and phrases in Japan this year. It’s very nicely put together and expertly translated by my favorite Japan-culture blog.

When I studied Japanese in college, teachers and students alike loved to chat about things that were popular in Japan. Except nothing was just “popular.” It was either “very popular” or, in the most notable cases, “extremely popular,” because everybody was working under the assumption that Japanese people consumed new trends with uniform voracity. I became suspicious of this thesis when I traveled there and found that not everybody ate Pocky while watching reruns of Sailor Moon and purchasing teenagers’ used panties from hi-tech vending machines.

I had been lied to, but you have my personal guarantee that phrases like “You say?” are enormously, riotously popular in Japan.

My favorite way to learn about a subculture is a glossary. The more thorough, the better. A good glossary compiles the accumulated idiosyncrasies of a group in one place and should awe the viewer with its unapologetic appropriation of language. The best glossary I’ve ever seen is this staggeringly long bowling glossary. My friends and I used to hang out at the bowling alley throughout high school and college, and I would be surprised if I’d heard even five percent of the terms in that glossary prior to reading it.

I tried to pick one example from the bowling glossary to excerpt here, but almost every entry is its own delight, probably because the world of bowling is inherently funny. There are nicknames for every variety of split:

CHRISTMAS TREE
The 3-7-10 or 2-7-10 split; so-called because of the triangular arrangement.

POISON IVY
The 3-6-10 split.

BED POSTS
The 7-10 split.

WOOLWORTH
The 5-10 (five and dime) split; see also “Kresge.”

BIG EARS
The 4-6-7-10 split.

CINCINNATI
The 8-10 split.

GREEK CHURCH
A split leave of five pins similar to the 4-6-7-9-10; so called because it reminds people of an old cathedral type church with spires etc.

I like entries where the lexicographer provides an explanation for the origin of the term, e.g.:

GRAY BOARD
The gutter. Many centers have their gutters painted gray; hitting the gray board is an attempt at humor to tell someone that the shot went in the gutter.

And WHAT an attempt!

My favorite, though, is probably this pair, which offers the one glimmer of self-awareness in the whole thing:

FIELD GOAL
A ball that travels between two pins without knocking down either of them.

JACK MANDERS
Same as field goal. (Jack Manders was a field goal kicker for the Chicago Bears back in the 1930s, so this term is pretty much dated.)

I will henceforth use the term “Jack Manders” wherever appropriate, and often where inappropriate.

“The dude abides.”

Geek Out

Abide. Few events can bridge the stoner-nerd gap like this weekend’s Lebowski Fest New York, a celebration of a f—-ing awesome movie, in the parlance of our times. I’m always surprised by the diversity of the cult that has sprung up around the Coen brothers’ unclassifiable 1998 film, The Big Lebowski. Seems that in any gathering, you can find someone who not only loves the movie, but has gladly sat through the requisite dozens of viewings. Lebowski fans love to watch this film, but even more than that, they love to watch it again. Put another notch on your belt or see it for the first time on Saturday night at The Fillmore (17 Irving Place): doors at 8, music at 9, film at 11.

Geek In

Tee off. I’ve expressed my love for the Hot Shots Golf series before, and this won’t be the last time, either. I recently picked up Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds for the PS3, and as expected, I can’t stop playing it. The PS3 entry isn’t quite as addictive as the PSP games, which offer much more to collect, but I will never get tired of setting off fireworks when I hit an especially good drive. The HD courses look beautiful, too. I picked it up cheap from an Amazon Gold Box deal, but the price should be coming down elsewhere, too. If you don’t love this game, well, obviously, you’re not a golfer.

Via AM New York’s Urbanite blog comes this charming clip from a 1982 airing of The Honeymooners on WPIX.

Great things about this clip:

• They have a pre-recorded announcement to apologize for problems with the “picture portion” of a program.
• Long before “bugs” would persistently advertise the station ID in the lower-right corner of the screen, the station logo only came up if something went wrong. This lends a certain irony to the “11 Alive!” card, appearing just as the picture goes dead.
• The please-stand-by music keeps playing as The Honeymooners resumes, and it fits.
• “We just gotta stretch the soup!”

WPIX was a great station in the ’80s and ’90s. My family had a satellite dish in the backyard—back when having a satellite dish meant a huge black metal parabola of doom rather than a plastic frisbee you mount on your balcony. I loved watching reruns of the Adam West Batman series on WPIX, a privilege denied to my classmates with their fancy cable TV. After a big rain, though, I wasn’t allowed to tune into WPIX because pointing the dish at that part of the sky would cause it to dip into overflow from the stream behind our house. I still mourned the big dish and its sense of adventure when we switched to corporate, squeaky-clean DirecTV.

“Hello. I’m Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies. And in the end, isn’t that the real truth? The answer is: No.”¹

Geek Out

Entertaining lies! I’ve been waiting for a month to plug this in a weekend post. Start Trekkin’ is a longform improv comedy group that improves entire episodes of Star Trek live, on stage. As with all improv, it may be hit-or-miss, or it may be a transcendent best. episode. ever. That’s what makes improv exciting. My only beef is that the group sticks to the original series. I’d love to see some TNG improv. A minor complaint, though. Catch “Start Trekkin’” tonight at 10:00, at the Sage Theater (711 7th Ave.). Admission is $10. If you can’t make it tonight, Start Trekkin’ has a hilariously old-school website, but it looks like the official Facebook page gets updated more frequently.

Geek In

Get a silk bag from the graveyard duck. In 1989, when you got stuck in a Nintendo game, there was no GameFAQs to consult, and if the answer wasn’t in the latest issue of Nintendo Power, you had only one option, the Nintendo tip line. After begging your parents to allow the 85-cent-a-minute call (or whatever the rate was), you could pose your question to these seeming oracles of the 8-bit world, and they would set you on the path to victory.

Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest might have been designed to boost those tip line revenues. Part of an unholy triumvirate of “WTF?” NES sequels (along with Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and the American Super Mario Bros. 2), Simon’s Quest was a clever game hampered by terrible translation. Diverging from the linear play of Castlevania, the sequel took more of an exploratory approach, which would have been fun if the game gave you any idea what to do next. Unfortunately, all of the in-game clues got mangled in translation, so the villagers gave you bizarre “hints” that, while helpful in their original Japanese, made no sense in English.

I remember calling the tip line and asking about a “graveyard duck” that could supposedly be found in Simon’s Quest. “There’s no such thing as a graveyard duck. I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the tip-line guru said. It was the first time the tip line had let me down, and I wasn’t just disappointed; I was angry. A woman in the village told me I could get a silk bag from a graveyard duck, I insisted. I stayed on the line to argue with the guy, sacrificing more of my allowance by the second, but he kept telling me I was confused and/or making things up.

Now, with the Internet, not only can I prove that I was not lying about the graveyard duck, but Simon’s Quest becomes a tolerable game. When you get stuck, GameFAQs exists, and it is good, and all is right with the world. You can get Simon’s Quest on the Wii virtual console, and there may be ROMs floating around on those unmentionable corners of the Web.

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1. From an otherwise lame crossover episode of the post-golden-era Simpsons. ↑

In last week’s cereal timeline, I noted that I had never eaten King Vitaman cereal. In fact, I’ve never even seen it, not in New York or my home state of New Hampshire. I figured it was a regional thing. Then my friend Hank, who is from Ohio and now lives in Los Angeles, said that he has never seen it either. I was in Oklahoma this week, and I looked in the supermarkets there. No King Vitaman. East Coast, West Coast, Great Lakes region, Bible Belt, I think this search has gone pretty far and wide. Where the hell is this monarch of misspelled nutrition?

This is Quaker Oats’ fifth best selling cereal (despite apparently being made of 100% vitamins and iron, which sounds terrible). But who is Quaker selling it to? Quaker is also holding back Honey Graham Ohs, which are delicious. I hate Quaker Oats. Stop coasting on the success of Life cereal and get your entire product line out there, damn it.

If you have ever eaten King Vitaman, which supposedly is still on sale, tell me when and where. I want to meet him. Or maybe I want to avoid him at all costs since he is pretty terrifying. Look, he made a crown out of spare spoons he found lying around, probably in prison. This is a deranged man.

On the recommendation of Chris Dahlen, by way of his excellent review in the A.V. Club (world’s greatest publication), I downloaded Braid, a 2-D platformer that allows the player to manipulate time in increasingly marvelous ways. Speaking of time, the game was released in August, and I am a stupid dumb jerk for going so long without playing it.

Braid’s basic trick is the rewind button, which allows your character, Tim, to travel back in time as far as you’d like. In fact, the game will not let you die. If your character gets hit by a monster or lands on some spikes, Braid freezes the action and demands that you rewind to a point in time before you mucked things up so badly. It reminds me very much of the tool-assisted speedrun process that I documented a few months ago. When you’re making a TAS, you use the emulator’s savestates to preserve your mistake-free progress. If you screw up, you back up to the previous savestate and try again. Braid has taken that dynamic and made it part of the game.

And that’s just the first few levels. As you progress through Braid, the time trickery gets more ornate. You encounter small parts of the world that exist in their own immune timeline, such that when you manipulate time, they stay right where they are. A shadow Tim appears, repeating any past actions that you erase with the rewind trick. It all sounds very sci-fi and mindblow-y, but the game introduces the new concepts carefully, so that you know what’s going on, and wordlessly, so that you feel like you figured it out yourself. Once you discern how time is warping in each environment, you have to apply your new skills to some fantastic puzzles. One puzzle, “Crossing the Gap,” tortured me for hours, but I refused to let myself peek at a walkthrough. Good thing, because that made the eureka moment that much better.

Maybe the game would have been good enough with the time gizmos and puzzles, but as Dahlen writes, “This isn’t a game about time, it’s about memories, and how they can be repeated and eventually rewritten.” Of course, memories are themselves about time—they are how we perceive time. Braid narrates itself with a short written prologue to each level that frames the platformer action in a larger narrative of distorted self-perception. This story culminates in a final level that runs forward, then backward, to the most startling ending to any game I have ever played. In a heartbreaking instant, it all makes sense—Dahlen again: “understanding this isn’t meant to make you feel like a hero, so much as a liar.”

A common tactic in game reviews is to judge a game’s value on the amount of time you can spend playing it. Here again, our technical conception of time fails us. In dollars-per-hour terms, Braid, at about 6 hours of play (give or take) may not be the greatest value at $15. I can’t remember any game since Ico that has moved me like Braid has, though. It would be better to judge this game by the time you spend thinking about it rather than the time you spend playing it. I’ll never forget Braid. Play it. (Also, read Dahlen’s review.)