Grit to the Thrill

Mercy me, I’ve not updated this thing in a while, have I? It’s really not too great when the two most recent posts both start like this, is it? Maybe it’s time to do something about this? Maybe?

Well, here goes nothing.

It’s going to be a rambly one. And quite image-heavy, I’m afraid.

PART ONE: VIOLENCE ACTION

D…do you like fighting games? I dooooo, to a ludicrous extent, despite me mainly writing negative things about them. Even though I’ve not been  getting regular two-player bouts of them for many years, and am so far below ‘tournament-worthy’ that the fighting game ‘scene’ would despise me, I still buy pretty much any fighting game that comes out.

Recent acquisitions? A copy of Samurai Shodown Anthology for the PS2 from Germany (mainly for colour edit mode and the excellent Samurai Shodown VI – it got a hyper-limited release in the UK, perhaps due to the utterly abominable/unprofessional translation, the typical piece of half-arsed nonsense from Ignition Entertainment), and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (which has flaws, but it is good fun, and Morrigan finally has a Scottish accent).

I’ve previously bought stuff I sort of knew I wouldn’t like , such as Art of Fighting Anthology (which I bought mainly for the colour edit and King of fighters link) and World Heroes Anthology (colour edit again, and, er, nothing else), and a game I’ve known nothing about whatsoever- Spectral vs. Generation (it was one pound, and was decent but uninspiring).

So I like a fighting game (as I typed that, Butch by Imperial Teen was playing, and it kept repeating “I like you” at me, so it was a bit like fighting games were replying in the positive to me liking them? Sort of?)!

I’ll basically buy any old shite, so I will. I’ve a definite preference for ones I can transfer my skills between (there’s an argument that says I basically keep buying the same game, and I don’t mean in the sense that I’ve got  three versions of King of Fighters 98, which I do), but I’ll still enjoy a Tekken or a Fighters Megamix.

One series I will never purchase a game from, though?

Mortal Kombat.

Ocht, Mortal Kombat. Where to begin? Perhaps in the past?

I AM NOW REMEMBERING THE PAST AND TELLING YOU ABOUT IT.

I remember reading about the first game in a Mean Machines publication, and thinking it looked terrible. It seemed based around two things: the uncharismatic graphical style of one of the worst games of my youth, Pit Fighter, and bloody death moves when an opponent is defeated. It did have a chap in it who looked like the lightningy guys from Big Trouble in Little China, though, which made me slightly interested. The power of cultural association and cool hats is a strong one.

I first played the game with my big brother at an arcade at the Leuchars Air Show, and, as suspected, it seemed shite, even to a youngster with no real critical faculties. It was sluggish, you didn’t feel properly in control of the characters, and they looked hilarious when they performed their moves, flailing wildly at the air like an embarassing dad swatting an imaginary wasp he wants to keep at arms’ length (on Hallowe’en?). The blood was such an obvious attempt at making the game ‘badass’, as were all the skulls, the tacky way that the letter ‘c’ was replaced with the letter ‘k’, and the general gloomy atmosphere.

The game became an object of derision between me and my pals. I can see this now as a kind of childhood snobbery (I was a precocious wee shite), but then it WAS near-unplayable compared to the other fighting games of the time, notably the unstoppable Street Fighter 2, which had gameplay that seemed to reward spending time with it, charismatic, cartoony characters who were just ‘serious’ enough, and (importantly), lovely blue skies. It felt joyful and rewarding to play, unlike Mortal Kombat which had the general feeling of the final reel of a woeful straight-to-video kung-fu film. One of those ones  that are an utter chore to watch, and couldn’t even sustain appeal on the most basic “haha, this is shit!” sort of ‘camp’ level (These days, I actually like that about the early Mortal Kombats – they set out to homage a very specific kind of entertainment, and they succeeded).

Pure Golan-Globus.

They stayed on the periphery of my radar until around Mortal Kombat 3. To their credit, they improved the gameplay, but not enough to make the games worth more than an inquisitive three-day hire fae the video shop. The special moves were still unwieldy and with unintuitive commands, the characters were uncharismatic and looked embarassing (all a bit ‘Alex Ross‘), and it still had a boring grim and gritty atmosphere. There was some definite humour, though, with the ‘friendship’ moves where, instead of ripping out the opponent’s spine/smashing their frozen body/ripping out their throat (or was that Roadhouse?), you offered them a present or did a fun dance or something similar.

There’s been a shiteload of Mortal Kombat games since, but I don’t know much about them other than that they still look terrible, but in an inconsistent way, as if they can’t find a decent formula to stick to, gameplay-wise. The trademark grimness is still there, though. It’s very much a franchise of games aimed at surly early-teen American males, the nu-metal of games, and I suppose there’s a certain honesty to that – I mean, nearly every video game is aimed at that market, but likes to pretend otherwise.

There’s a new one coming out and people seem quite ‘pumped’ for it, but I don’t have the required fondess for it on even a nostalgic level.

It’s just not my cup of tea, really. Though it does look like someone’s spilled tea all over it, in that required ‘edgy’ 7e7en thing that isn’t AT ALL played-out and eye-rollingly embarassing.

Speaking of which…

PART TWO: THE INEVITABLE BATMAN

One of my favourite recent video games to play was Batman: Arkham Asylum. I had a great time swinging about and sneaking and leaping between people I was pummeling to bits. It had a great gameplay engine – the character you controlled had a pleasing sense of weight and you felt satisfyingly in control of him. You gained skills and items at a good pace, it had a good sense of progression and it generally became more fun being Batman as the game went on.

The more time I spend away from it, though, and the more I see screenshots of the upcoming sequel, the more I forget what I liked about the game, and focus on what I didn’t.

Namely, the lazy grit. I am so fucking bored of it. The way film/comic/games creators try to create a sense of ‘realism’ or ‘edginess’ or ‘authenticity’ by making everything so brown-stained and filthy, like Mr. Hankey has been leaping all around the ‘set’ (probably the only South Park reference I’ll make on this blog?).I GET that DC is so keen to make the public perception of Batman be that he is SERIOUS and IMPORTANT and could be REAL, and it’s been like this for a while now, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I’m a huge fan of Grant Morrison, but I think maybe it’s his fault, to a degree. He, along with Dave McKean, produced the ‘graphic novel’ (this means ‘comic’) Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, a turgid piece of muddy pop-psychological snorecore which, thanks to the Bat-mania fuelled by Tim Burton’s first Batman film, sold a shitload and helped contribute towards the ‘Batman = weighty realism’ thing beloved of so many.

It’s a very brown comic (see also the more recent Morrison/John Van Fleet Batman #663, which looked terrible and not unlike recent Mortal Kombat games, but that at least was a satisfyingly amusing pulp read).

People go on a lot about how Batman is a good character as you can tell almost any sort of story with him, so why must it always come back to the gritt (the extra ‘t’ is for the ‘t’ in ‘grit’)?

Gaaaah!

Anyway, back to the Arkham Asylum game. The Bat-cast are all redesigned in it, their ‘edginess’ is ‘amped’ (what’s more edgy than an amp? Like what Disturbed use?), and they are so fucking embarassing-looking that it’s, well, embarassing. What’s scarier than Scarecrow? Well, imagine if he had SYRINGES on his FINGERS?!?!?! Now that’s REAL! Real like 3aw(Saw 3) ! What’s more tough and believable like maybe one day you could be him (if only phsyics/money/sanity didn’t apply) than a REAL Batman with extra REAL padding and body armour and a tiny head? 2REAL4ME! And what’s more, er, harlequiny than a Harley Quinn who, er, doesn’t dress like a Harlequin but instead goes for the ‘edgy sexuality’ signifiers of CORSETRY and FISHNETS and FETISH NURSE UNIFORM?

I tell ya, if there’s one thing I like to see, as a red-blooded babe-lovin’ demographic member, it’s portrayals of the mentally ill as uninhibited sexxxpots that are just ‘kinky’ enough so as to not unsettle me. It’s not lazy or clichéd or insulting or eye-rolling or backwards-thinking AT ALL (should I point out that that was sarcasm? Or does that seem even more sarcastic?).

Basically, this quote from ace blog Go Make Me A Sandwich sums a lot of my feelings up:

“Animated Harley wears full-body spandex for crying out loud. How insane are game developers when they look at a woman wearing nothing but spandex and think “you know, she’s just wearing too much clothing”. Only in the gaming world, I swear.”

And, shit, yeah, that whole fucking ‘psychiatric hospitals are gothic, glamorous zany fun’ trope? Fuck off, seriously. “Ho ho, it’s all striped tights and ‘damaged’-yet-beautiful ‘alternative’ types in there, so it is!”.

FUCK.

OFF.

That shit was pathetic and played out even back in 2000 with sack-of-crap no-imagination yet-strangely-well-regarded (HYPHENS) game American McGee’s Alice. It seems like a relic of terrible early-90s music videos, really.

It appears to have endless mileage, though, what with Sucker Punch and these current Batman games and all metal videos.

Ghrrrrngh.

As I say, I’m forgetting why I liked the Batman game.

I like bright colours, me.

PART 3: WEIRD RECENT NOSTALGIA

There’s a very particular sort of designy-scheme that pushes all of my artistic pleasure buttons. It’s, I dunno (art is hard to talk about), bright and aggressively POP!, pastels and angles and a definite sense of “we’ve actually thought about this, there’s an actual aesthetic here, see”. It’s difficult to describe, so here’s a bunch of images with some brief writing. EYES PARTY.

My first ‘rush’ provided by this kind of thing came from the first seasons of intermittently-outstanding animé, Bleach:

It was also there in the best-designed instalment of the King of Fighters games. Bright, clear colours and open space. It’s the least well-liked of the King of Fighters, at least artistically, which is a terrible state of affairs (but does explain why people keep making brown games. Predictably, King of Fighters 99 is my least favourite. Very brown):

The main appeal of Joe Casey’s The Intimates was, for me, the outstanding colouring by Randy Mayor, which I’m going to assume was to do with Casey’s overall idea of what he wanted the comic to be like. It also featured information bars along the pages, like during music videos. Pop as fuck, and very short-lived:

I reckon you can see what sort of thing I mean? Colour schemes that are aware more colours exist than ‘realistic’ browns? Someone’s made a conscious choice to go against that whole thing, and it shows?I mean, it’s possible that there was as little thought gone into it as with ‘gritty’ brown stuff, and it’s just my personal preference, but I can live with that, and I suspect there WAS more thought.

(SO bad at talking about art).

‘Gritty’ and ‘Goth’ can go hand-in-hand with ‘Bright’ and ‘Poppy’, too. Take Persona 4 for the PS2, for example. It’s one of the more grown-up games I’ve played (sensitive portrayal of sexuality issues!), which is great/depressing considering it’s about kids who climb inside a magic TV to fight ghosts of the personified id, and it does this without the grubby concessions to some sort of super-banal ‘reality’ that is usually, in games, brown.

Maybe I like when it appears designers of pop culture have shown that they know about and are influenced by more than just the genre of thing they are making? If that makes any sense?

Or maybe it just all goes back to my young love of the Warhammer Chaos powers of Slaanesh and Tzeentch? They were all bright yellows and blues and pinks and greens, and were always my favourites to paint in the gloomy, endless misery of the Imperium (which was actually a surprisingly vibrant-looking place, at least in the late-80s, early-90s)? Was that maybe something to do with them being the less stereotypically ‘masculine’ than other chaos powers? Hmmm.

Hey, I mentioned Grant Morrison earlier on, his shitty brown turdbomb Arkham Asylum? Well, he’s usually more responsible for total pop joy, and in the last decade has used great skill in allying grit to this. I go on about them all the fucking time, but his ill-fated Wildcats relaunch and amazing Batman RIP comics were both the perfect sickly balance of vibrant colour and seedy grime.

That’s all old stuff, though, it’s all very first-decade-of-21st-century. Am I now to be a sad husk, growing ever more sepia- stained?

Nah, not while this stuff’s still going on:

Orc Stain, by James Stokoe

My Chemical Romance’s current full-on Tank Girl direction, which I shouldn’t feel the need to defend, but will anyway. They make ace pop, and do it with a sense of imagination and aesthetic influences a bit more interesting than the usual rock band (It is difficult to get other people I know on board with this).

PART 4: FUNCLUSION

I don’t mind angst and grit and grrrr, but let’s make it visually interesting, eh?