Rob’s Terrible Tomb Of Tat

…and you will know me by the typing of the dead.

  • Show Us Your Magic Wand

    I’ve long been enjoying wondering just how far Luke Haines can push the whole suburban glam folk anti-nostalgia thing without running out of steam.

    There’s no sign of that happening any time soon though in a lot of ways the title track from the latest album “Izzy Wizzy Let’s Get Bizzy” does feel a lot like the whole thing has reached its final, excellent, full Luke Haines, form.

    Mixing seventies and eighties kid’s TV and magic into one particularly fuzzy memory is usually the domain of electronic music and whilst I am never going to complain about someone lifting the Paddy Kingsland sound in a million years, there’s so much more to explore so why not glam-folk it up a bit? Get the guitars and the flutes going and invoke the spirit of Wurzel Gummidge, why the fuck not? The death of Tommy Cooper linked with chaos magic? Yes. Fuck it. Do it.

    And though there is a wonderfully sinister tribute to Children Of The Stones on the album, you’ll be glad to know it is nowhere near as terrifying as the original OST. Still unsettling, mind.

  • Cyber Controller

    The Cyber Controller. Telos Tum! The one with the big noggin! Ah, how much I love thee.

    (Don’t worry, I’m nearly out of cyberman doodles for the time being.)

    Attack Of The Cybermen is one of (many, many) things I had no idea some folk have a peculiar dislike for until I crash landed onto the internet, I’ve always loved it pretty wholeheartedly and still confuse people every now and then by saying “getting a bit rough is it?” whilst delivering a terrible Brian Glover impression.

    This is the thing with largely just going about your business in life, I guess. For me, Attack is filed under “slapping cybermen’s noggins off, some of my favorite huffy Colin Baker moments, Michael Kilgarriff’s most amazing podge and it being one of the most exchanged and watched stories amongst my little fan group back when nobody biz brained had really considered that folks might want to rewatch Doctor Who” and I remained blissfully unaware that some folks held a particular animus for Saward scripts and especially Attack.

    It’s got Lytton teaming up with the Tetley Tea wrestling dude! What is wrong with you all? It’s brilliant.

    I will grant you all the Cryons are really annoying and that whilst integral to the plot, the whole Doctor in the cell bit slows things right down in the most annoying manner possible. We’re talking Time Flight levels of script guff here and all with a bizarre bunch of performances that wouldn’t be out of place in The Web Planet — or someone’s school play.

    But! To counter that, I say “stealth cyberman” and we can all go to a happier place.

    (And yes, if you’re wondering, I can still have a great time just flicking through the pictures in the David Banks’ Cybermen book.)

  • Double A Saves The Day (via Eurogamer)

    I have to be careful these days because reading Eurogamer can result in some terrible brain aches with just one click. Every now and then they still run a gem like the recent piece on ladders in videogames (I have not learned to love them, they are wicked things) but mainly, I’m likely to end up on someone business talking at me and it’s pretty awful to stumble upon.

    In “and not for the first time”, this time it’s Shawn Layden’s turn to suggest the solution to videogames woes is … erm … the return of the double A videogame. Good one Shawn, that will surely fix everything.

    The good thing about asking for the return of the double A videogame is that nobody knows exactly what these things are so diagnosing it as one solution can sound really good because people will think things like “yeah, I loved God Hand, I’d love more of that” or whatever their fave game from the crushed middle of videogames at a different period in time is.

    Quite rightly you should love God Hand too! It is the correct way to live.

    “Double-A is the tier of gaming below triple-A, and above the tier I’ve never heard anyone call “single-A” but refer to as “indie”. It’s the tier of game made by a team of fewer than, say, 70 people – it’s not clearly defined – and working within more apparent budgetary constraints. They’re games that can’t be everything to everyone, in other words, so they’re usually shorter and more focused, and arguably more fun.”

    Even Eurogamer themselves are wrestling with explaining what Double A is in the piece there … it’s not indie, it’s not the industry, it’s sort of just like an indie studio, making an indie game, but it also isn’t that, it’s something else. It’s a magical inbetween state where none of the current pressures that studios already trying to exist in this space have even exist. Or the studios for that matter. Which is lucky because it wouldn’t be much of a solution if they did exist, eh? You know, with the industry being a bit fucked and all that.

    So we just have to forget about the studios trapped in work for hire cycles, the exploitative publishers, the folks trying to chase up payments and work to keep the lights on, the ones who couldn’t manage that, the work conditions in a games industry that largely ran on crunching deadlines, the games that could never exist because of all this and more. The layoffs, the closures, the studios bought and sold. And that most of the games are long forgotten by most people with only a handful getting regular mentions in a rosy nostalgic glow. It was all good and if we just get back there…

    Shawn introduces his logic by reminding everyone that there are still people alive in twenty twenty and a six who subscribe to the “Videogames are at the exact same time, the dominant superior medium and also somehow subordinate to anything else they can think of … for reasons” school of thought.

    ”If you walk into Tesco right now, almost everybody in Tesco has a favorite song, but they won’t have a favorite game, so the impact of music is everywhere, the impact of toasters is everywhere, but gaming is still, we make a lot of money but in this very prescribed set of users.”

    Toasters? Bit desperate, mate. I don’t have a favourite toaster… to be honest, at the moment I don’t even have a toaster at all. I can’t say I’ve been seriously effected by this but sure, go off Shawn.

    So. Whilst I’m not going to complain if someone is going to route more funding into studios to enable them to make games, this is really only a fluffy way round saying you’re only interested in funding ‘triple I’ games, which also only exist in the same nebulous state of I know what it is when I see it, mate. It just has the bonus of fewer people looking at you a bit funny when you say ‘Double A’ out loud.

    The pressing material reality at hand is that there are already a lot of people working in this space currently. Some of them have been around a very long time (Rebellion spring to mind but mainly because I really love the stuff Rebellion manage to put out, even when it’s not entirely to my taste), some only cropped up in the past decade, but there are plenty of these costs plenty to make, aren’t AAA open world games, already out there.

    And yes, they are struggling to find funding just like everyone else so by all means, fund them! Just don’t expect this to somehow roll back the past forty odd years of crushing capitalism or even to put a dent into the problems the industry faces now.

    I worry more that this is one more thing where the folks who have lived and breathed the line go up forever times show how truly out of touch they have become and their only plans are “if we pretend it’s 2013 again, we are going to be fine” so back to the world of Double A when those pesky upstart indies weren’t the middle ground, that was taken up by … pesky upstart indie studios trying desperately to stay open instead, and exclusives and whatever else reminds people of 2013 and being A Capital G Gamer that springs to mind.

    It won’t work but hey, it might buy us a few more years of not facing up to the shitshow that is today, whatever day you’re reading this.