Animal Treasure Island

So I just rewatched this 1971 Toei movie with a friend while half-asleep and it was just as much of a blast as always. A lot of the people who later went on to form Studio Ghibli were heavily involved with it, including a young Hayao Miyazaki who animated a very lengthy action sequence for it and was credited as the "idea man". This was back when the Oscar-winning anime director had yet to become the intensely jaded, cynical man he is today and could bring himself to help come up with stories that existed not to attempt to teach us any kind of lesson, but simply to entertain the hell out of us. And for better or for worse, they were also given a massive budget to work with, and this was a movie they had a lot of faith in... so it's a damn shame that it didn't do very well back in the early 70s. As a result, Toei's higher ups decided to not fund movies of this caliber anymore so Miyazaki and the lot scurried off to Nippon Animation for their next projects while Toei were busy making (among many other things) boring, low budget, family friendly alternatives to bloody and hyper-sexual Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa manga.



And you can tell why they had hope for this movie: it's technically just a series of gags and action scenes, but it feels like they really tried to make it the most exciting series of gags and action scenes out there. Everything from the fun direction, wonderful animation and musical accompaniment to the stylish background art reeks of talent an enthusiasm. The animation ranges from traditionally fluid to more cartoony and loose depending on the animator and the tone of the scene, but it's generally very well made. The characters are lively, cartoony and expressive, moreso than... pretty much 99% of all anime ever. The action is smooth and fluid, the scene composition is great and Miyazaki and Yoichi Kotabe's scenes even show some really impressive water animation. While there are some cheaper-looking scenes, it never looks like it came from the era where shows like Zambot 3 (where individual episodes were rumored to have been animated *in a matter of hours by a single animator*, only some of which were actually particularly skilled... or even knew what the hell they were doing) were deeemed perfectly acceptable. But more on that later.

For a movie containing on-screen deaths and a villain that attempts to murder the child protagonists more than once, Animal Treasure Island is a pretty joyful and light-hearted ride. It's the kind of movie where even when something really tense is going on, you know everything will turn out okay anyway and the good guys will prevail, either through their own wits or through ridiculous coincidences... but that's honestly okay in this type of movie, and to fault it for this would mean criticizing it for what it wasn't trying to be. It's all about careless fun, and the characters mirror this pretty well; despite being a little on the dense side the male lead is very fun to watch, and despite being a total scumbag the pirate captain becomes oddly likable too. Kathy, the female lead, was either Miyazaki's own idea, or simply an idea that he quickly grew to like - she's a tough, surprisingly badass character that always manages to one-up the bad guys in some way... even at the point where it seems like she finally became a stereotypical damsel in distress.

In short, this is a worthwhile movie as long as you don't expect to take much away from it beyond childish fun. Hell, if this video of Miyazaki's scene from the movie doesn't make you want to give it a shot, nothing will:

Good Old Games (more ANCIENT things)

Nearly everyone reading this will most likely agree with this statement: the use of monochrome BROWN & BLOOM graphics is probably the most annoying popular trend of modern videogames. The SECOND most annoying one, however, doesn't get criticized nearly as much, even though the way things are heading right now, it might just become a massive hurdle for the constant improvement of gaming as a whole. In fact, the majority of the gaming public actively promotes it. By now, you probably know what I'm talking about: nostalgia.

In this case, nostalgia is the unique and near-orgasmic pleasure that some gamers get from being reminded of their childhoods. It's got nothing to do with the time they spent outside playing hopscotch, kicking puppies or whatever it is that normal, well adjusted children do at a very young age (I DON'T FUCKING KNOW EITHER, SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME WITH THIS ONE). HELL no. It's always related to the time they spent in front of their TVs (or PC monitors, assuming they were truly hardcore) jumping on koopas, blasting away robot masters or watching a sprite-based strip show.

The Wii is a perfect example of this. Most owners of Nintendo's latest "innovative" creation are either children, nostalgia-obsessed neckbeard-bearers or a mix of the two (children who try to come off as OLDSKOOL gamers - fake, glued-on neckbeards are optional, although they certainly help a great deal), and developers are visibly taking advantage of that. Most Wii games that aren't shovelware like WiiFit and the timeless classic Party Babyz seem to be based around, or at least partially fueled by, nostalgia. You have the Wii virtual console, one of the system's main selling points and basically a way to play old games after selling your old systems without feeling guilty. After all, you wouldn't steal a car. WOULD YOU?!

There's Super Paper Mario, a game where your invincibility sprite is a gigantic 8-bit Mario, ripped straight from the old NES game. This might seem like a cop-out to avoid animating something new, but to the average nostlagic gamer, it's all about the beautiful symbolism. It represents the long-gone days of true gaming when we, as children, and even our beloved video game protagonists felt truly *invincible*. Young, innocent and untouched by life's hardships. Nintendo fans don't view these decisions as mere laziness: they think of it as proof that *Nintendo loves them*.

It's not just SPM; Every Mario game since the original trilogy has been filled with pointless and irrelevant masturbatory tributes to its past successes. The "Mario turns into an 8-bit sprite" concept, for instance, was used in nearly every Mario RPG to date - only in those games (which, coincidentally, Nintendo had very little to do with), it was just a clever little easter egg and not an integral part of the gameplay. Even games that mix "old school" elements with actual creativity and attempt to bring old franchises to modern standards, like Bionic Commando: Rearmed and the Super Smash Bros. series, suffer from certain Nostalgia-related flaws.

Mario Galaxy, while certainly a very polished and well done game, still suffers from this. As soon as it was announced, I predicted it would turn out to be be "Mario 64 in space". Guess what? I was right. After boasting about Mario 128, the next step for the Mario series, nay, for GAMING ITSELF for years on end and attempting to start a pointless rivalry with Pokemon creator and co-worker Satoshi Tajiri, Shigeru Miyamoto released a game that, while admittedly fun and filled with clever level design ideas, is STILL just Mario 64 all over again. Despite the game's galaxy theme which might suggest an open-ended environment, you are still bound to a hub area which leads to a number of enclosed environments. You still have to collect 120 stars. You still get to play nostalgic bonus stages like in Super Mario Sunshine, complete with 8-bit Mario screenshots in the background and some remixes of old Mario songs which sound like something an Ocremix user crapped out while going through a particularly bad hangover. The original tracks in the game are nothing short of brilliant, so why didn't Nintendo's music team put a little bit more effort into their work instead of resorting to nostalgia-based filler?

Don't get me wrong - Super Mario Galaxy is a GREAT GAME. Though honestly, it could've been so much more if it weren't for Nintendo's tendency to latch on to nostalgia. Same goes for the latest major Zelda game, Twilight Princess, which is basically a fanservice game aimed at people who simply wanted to play yet another Ocarina of Time. While being a flawed game in the end, Wind Waker was a great addition to the Zelda series and certainly a step in a new and interesting direction. Sadly, most of the gaming public didn't think of it as a step in the *right* direction, so the only followup s to Wind Waker were minor and not particularly noteworthy portable releases.

Megaman 9 is nostalgia in game form and it was met with ridiculous amounts of praise. Capcom treated the entire project like a joke; nothing more than a parody of their older games, complete with badly drawn and painfully cheesy cover art and *an option to turn on NES-style graphical glitches*. Instead of being annoyed by the fact that the latest entry in their favorite series was turned into a parody of NES gaming as a whole, Megaman fans treated it like a labor of love aimed at hardcore gamers. Street Fighter 4 looks more like Street Fighter 2: 3D Mix than a real sequel to the incredibly awesome Street Fighter 3 - the only original characters are throwaways from some of Capcom's worst character designers. Most new franchises are mediocre, and whenever a competent developer tries to take an old series or genres to a new and interesting direction while taking advantage of current-gen systems, old fans bitch and whine. Every time someone buys a copy of a Bethesda RPG or The World Ends With You, Gary Gygax's corpse sheds a small tear of blood, for true role playing has finally been slaughtered by money-hungry developers and their urge to ruin the once-sacred role-playing genre with blasphemous, newfangled bullshit.

To this day, I still haven't managed to figure out how the mind of the average nostalgic gamer works. The original Super Mario Bros. was the second video game I ever played, and I loved the hell out of it. I still think it was a competent platformer for its time, but I don't really want to play it again. I certainly don't want to PAY for it again, and I don't want to see screenshots of it or hear its music in any of my recent Mario games. Commander Keen and the first two Duke Nukem games were some of my first PC games ever and I played them for hours back in the day. Looking back at them, they weren't even good for their time: they were clunky, the scrolling was painful to look at and the gameplay was extremely simplistic, even compared to some 80s NES games. Wanting to return to those times just because taking advantage of modern hardware originally led to a lot of generic brown & bloom FPS games is like if humanity stopped using fire altogether after finding out that touching it hurts. Every console generation so far has had its ups and downs, and there is really no reason to try and go back to the gaming stone age. I'm certainly looking forward to future game releases, and I really hope nostalgic hardcore wannabes aren't a large enough demographic to significantly stagnate the industry.

It's time for gaming to move on, so drop that NES controller, take off that diaper and try to support the tiny bit of creativity and innovation we're actually getting right now.

East vs. West AKA "I will be copy+pasting 1 year old stuff I wrote for some other lame blog"

In pretty much every videogame community out there, the East vs. West argument is bound to pop up at some point. 99% of the time, this will turn into an endless bitchfest between two completely insufferable groups of people: the emoticon-spouting, anime-obsessed japanophiles and the overly patriotic Western gamers. Both sides will spend hours on end verbally fellating their favorite developers while claiming that the opposition is the cancer that's killing gaming and/or the reincarnation of Satan, effectively ridding the thread of any sane and semi-sane posters that might have taken part in the argument.

When dealing with such people, you can simply resort to the easiest way out: the old "both sides are wrong in every way, the answer is somewhere in the middle" argument. While this definitely isn't the worst stance, it's also wrong in many ways. It's hard to admit, but even those pathetic rants written by blithering fanboys might have SOME truth to them under all that self-righteous nerd rage. There's one thing you just can't deny: by and large, both types of games contain certain recurring themes and gameplay styles which might be enough to put certain people off. And if you're not a complete douche about it, that's really nothing to be ashamed of: it really depends on what you personally want from gaming.

There has been a distinct difference between Japanese games and their spiritual Western equivalents, especially during the last three console generations. While most Western games attempt to simulate certain real life activities which might seem out of reach for most of the gaming public (from sports to playing a musical instrument), Asian ones tend to throw any attempts at realism out the window in favor of an over the top, often ridiculous and inherently unrealistic experience that simply wouldn't work in real life.

As a way to prove this point, I chose to compare a distinctively Japanese game to its popular Western equivalent. Namely, I'm comparing the Guitar Hero franchise to the semi-obscure rhythm game Gitaroo Man from iNiS. Those of you who have played iNiS' Ouendan/Elite Beat Agents series probably know where I'm going with this right now. Both games are based around the same simple main concept: a guitar-based rhythm game. Guitar Hero just screams modern Western game design philosophy: It tries its best to simulate the experience of playing a real guitar in a believable environment, right down to giving the player a guitar-shaped plastic controller.


Gitaroo Man, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. In the tutorial level, you play as a young boy while your pet dog, the Obligatory Talking Animal Sidekick teaches you how to play the guitar. As soon as the actual game starts, an insanely annoying baby demon inexplicably breaks into your bedroom, warps reality in various insane ways and CHALLENGES YOU TO A ROCK-OFF. Your dog hands you a futuristic guitar which turns you into an all-powerful superhero. The rest of the game is spent battling a wide variety of characters including but not limited to giant robots, racial stereotype bees, mecha sharks and creepy metrosexuals, using THE POWER OF MUSIC. You really can't make this shit up.

This is also blatant in RPGs. Even fantasy-themed Western role-playing games try to make everything as believable and realistic as possible while their Eastern equivalents feature unrealistically powerful children with ridiculously unrealistic hair cuts taking down unrealistic monsters using unrealistically huge swords. Western developers churn out fairly realistic military warfare games based on events that actually took place in real life. Their Japanese equivalents contain many unrealistic things including but not limited to Stalinist colonels with electric super powers, foes that can read your mind AND your PSX memory card, and last but not least, giant enemy crabs. While Western mech games try to simulate what piloting a large mech would REALLY feel like, Japan goes all out in a blaze of over-the-top ridiculouslness. With such polarizing design philosophies, it's no wonder that some people happen to be prejudiced against certain types of games based on their country of origin.

Of course, it goes unsaid that not ALL Western and Eastern games conform to these stereotypes. In the long-gone NES days, virtually all developers shared similar design philosophies. As Zero Punctuation's Yahtzee pointed out, you could make a game about pretty much any ridiculous crap you could think of and people didn't seem to mind it. Though really, past attempts at those sorts of games are now being mocked endlessly. I think gaming went from being too ridiculous to overly generic and serious, but I'll leave that stuff for another entry.

So yes, there are certain tropes and elements that clearly define games based on their cultural origins and there's nothing wrong with preferring a certain type of game. Does that justify your endless Gamefaqs rant explaining why WRPGs are superior to JRPGs and why anyone who disagrees with your views is a faggot? Is it a good idea to never shut up about the superiority of video games from GLORIOUS NIPPON compared to their Western counterparts? Hell no, you worthless sack of flab.

If you're still interested in the whole culture clash seen in modern gaming, I recommend reading Kurt Kalata's Killer7 article over at HG101. It makes a few great points about the whole thing and overall it's a pretty fun read.

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