A Quick Post About Hulk Hogan

I didn't watch wrestling as a kid. It wasn't allowed; my parents didn't want me and my brother practicing wrestling moves on each other, among other reasons. The matter was ultimately academic; Whenever I'd sneak a peek on a Saturday morning after a healthy dose of cartoons, after about five minutes of watching Hulk Hogan rambling about "Hulkamania this!" and "Hulkamania that!" I'd say to myself, "This is boring." and then go play outside. 

So, thank you, Hulk Hogan, for the sunlight, grass stains, sprinklers, and quality time with the neighborhood kids. 

Admittedly, I do find the history of professional wrestling interesting, the way it dovetails with the advent of cable television, and especially how Pay-Per-View saved it from death and turned it into a multi-million dollar media empire. 

There's an infamous story of Hulk Hogan knocking out Richard Belzer on a talk show while Mr. T sulked. I won't go into the full details, but the basics of it are that Hogan and Mr. T were under the impression that there would be a row of kids in wheelchairs for a meet and greet if they came on the show. They showed up because wrestling was not in a great place and needed all the publicity it could muster. There were no kids in wheelchairs and Mr. T became reticent and cagey, which is understandable. As for Hogan, he agreed to demonstrate a wrestling move on Belzer and subsequently knocked him out in the process. Hogan admitted to putting a little more strength into the move than he was supposed to. Belzer would receive nine stitches on the back of his head from when he slipped out of Hogan's grasp and hit the floor. The incident took place in 1985 and was settled out of court by 1990 for an undisclosed amount Belzer would put toward buying a property in France. 

I only heard about this incident a few years ago because my roommate was a big Law & Order: Special Victims Unit fan and especially liked Richard Belzer's character of Munch. 

Richard Belzer would die in 2023 in Bozouls, France, of complications from a respiratory illness. 

“Diane, Stardate 3.14159…”

Audiobooks were an essential component of long car rides with the family in the mid to late 1990’s. John Grisham was generally first choice because we watched a lot of courtroom dramas together, especially LA Law and Reasonable Doubts. Tony Hillerman was the close second because we were living in New Mexico and his stories were set in and around the area, so that was a nice touch. Other cures for boredom included Douglas Adams with The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, Tom Clancy’s Op Center, and Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. On the whole, we kept it pretty eclectic.

These were on cassette, and were typically abridged to fit a roughly 6-8 hour length. You’d need a lot of cassettes for an unabridged version and books on audio CD’s weren’t especially common at that point. After all, carmakers weren’t going to replace their tape decks until the electronics companies worked out better anti-skip protections in their portable players, thereby relieving any worries of playback in cars going down bumpy or unfinished roads.

Sidenote before we go on about audiobooks: You know what my most and least favorite form of optical media is? The MP3-CD. On the one hand, this was the best of both worlds, maximizing an already amazing level of storage capacity by replacing the AIFF audio files with MP3’s, allowing several hours worth of reasonable quality audio instead of roughly one. On the other hand, this was hands-down the hardest thing to explain to people when I worked at Target in 1998. People would see MP3-compatible CD players and think, “Oh! It’s a CD Player with an MP3 player attached to it so I can use one or the other.” And you’d have to explain to them that you put the MP3 files on the CD’s and that’s how you play it back. Some people got downright angry when you explained this to them, accusing you of giving them attitude when all you’re trying to do is save them from disappointment and a return trip to the store for a refund. Recordable CD’s were also fairly new face at this time, so you’re essentially explaining two technologies at once. Some audiobook publishers did have the foresight to put their books on MP3-CD’s since spoken word doesn’t suffer that much quality loss in the compression of an MP3 file, but overall this was a very rare sight that sold poorly, likely for all the reasons I just outlined.

Audible is one of the best services Amazon has on offer, and I say that without any sort of irony or snark. Digital rights issues aside (do you own it or are you renting it, etc.), this allowed for fully unabridged audiobooks to be appreciated in a format that wasn’t prone to all the weaknesses of CD’s or cassettes. It’s opened a floodgate for content that would otherwise have to deal with the logistics of publishing their stories to physical media and then distributing them nationwide to bookstores, among other issues that can lead to works not finding the audiences they deserve.

For example, one of the first titles I came across on Audible wasn’t so much a book as much as it was a kind of brochure for a game. It’s called Til Morning’s Light: The Private Blog of Erica Page. It’s written by Ross Berger, narrated by Stephanie Sheh, and has a total runtime of 35 minutes. Between the length and promotional aspect, there was no asking price, so it kind of seemed like a no-brainer for trying out this new platform. As the title implies, it’s told from a first person perspective in the style of a blog, a modern take on epistolary literature. The game it serves as a prequel to is developed by WayForward Technologies (a seasoned developer/publisher known for franchises such as Shantae and Mighty Switch Force) and was originally an exclusive launch title for the ill-fated FirePhone. It would eventually be released to the iPhone before ultimately being delisted a short time later. I never got a chance to try it, so I can’t comment on it or how the “audiolog” ties into the narrative. This was released in 2014, so it’s led me to wonder how this would have been available were it not for Audible, if it had been released earlier. 35 minutes is a very short time to put on a cassette and sell in, say, game stores as part of a pre-order for the game. Would it even be worth the expense for the publisher in the first place? Chances are, it would have simply been a website, no audio narration whatsoever. Had it been released for something like the original Playstation, the game’s CD would have been playable on a standard audio CD player, provided you skipped the first track (which was the game data), something a lot of people wouldn’t have known to do in the first place (see Sidenote).

That said, something like this did come out on physical media, all the way back in 1990, and has also been made available today through Audible for a reasonable price.

“Diane…”: The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper was originally released on audiocassette to coincide with the David Lynch and Mark Frost television series Twin Peaks, which ran for two seasons from 1990 through 1991. This was followed by a prequel movie, Fire Walk With Me, in 1992, and was eventually revived for a third season in 2017 for Showtime. There’s also been a number of books related to the series, including The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, written by David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Lynch. It was released around the same time as “Diane”, written by Scott Frost, and they do share some DNA in that both are epistolary works, much like Til Morning’s Light.

“Diane” has a total runtime of about 45 minutes, which would make it about the length of a typical music album on cassette or CD. I have no record of how much it cost upon release, but it’s reasonable to assume it was competitive with albums of the time, maybe between 10 and 15 USD. On Audible, I got it for less than 4. What makes “Diane” interesting is how it was produced. Throughout the TV series, FBI Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan) talks into a micro cassette recorder about the details of his case before the tapes are sent off to his secretary Diane Evans (who is never seen nor directly heard from) back at the Bureau’s Pittsburgh office. “Diane” contains these clips from the TV show (with the background music and even most sound effects removed) along with new entries recorded by MacLachlan himself. There’s a notable difference in audio quality between what’s clearly recorded in a studio and what’s lifted from the audio tracks of the television series. Some diligent fans have made YouTube videos of “Diane” synced up with the original scenes when applicable and stills for the “new” recordings.

I should mention in the interest of full disclosure that I did not watch Twin Peaks when it came out, mostly because I was 9 years old at the time and shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles occupied most of my television consumption. At best, I have the vaguest whispers of memories of people talking about how weird the show was, but I wouldn’t learn more of it until many years later when reviews and retrospectives of horror games like Silent Hill would make frequent references to the show. The 2010 horror game Deadly Premonition is practically an interactive adaptation of the series, borrowing many themes, plot points, and imagery from the show. I wouldn’t actually get to watch the show proper until only a few years ago, I think shortly before the Showtime revival in 2017. Those first two seasons and, as of just today, Fire Walk With Me are all I’ve seen. The third season is on a very long to-do list I may never get to. My overall impression of the show is that it’s worth watching, but if it doesn’t grip you in the pilot, no one’s going to hold it against you if you don’t bother with it.

It’s one of those works of media whose influence has come to overshadow it, to the point that someone new to the series in this modern world would probably wonder what all the hype was about. Lynch and Frost are unique voices, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a show that matches its off-beat quirks and idiosyncrasies, but in other areas such as tone and subject matter, the show has been surpassed by other police and forensic procedurals or courtroom and medical dramas. It pushed the envelope, but others have pushed it further since then. I’m not saying any of this to knock it. Though I do have some issues with the show I’ll expound upon another time, it’s deserving of respect and appreciation for what it is and what it led to in terms of the medium of television.

As for “Diane” it’s an odd duck, its very existence rather enigmatic. Between its brevity and fragmented presentation, it doesn’t really offer much substance as a piece of ancillary media. To be fair, it would be pretty tacky if it merely summarized the story arc of season 1, that being the murder of Laura Palmer, in a mere 45 minutes with a few name drops and a little more background on Cooper’s character. It would also be very easy to simply dismiss it as a quick cash grab, but it’s got too much effort behind it for that. A cash grab would have only compiled the recordings from the show and not bothered with the studio portions. Still, it’s overall a very unsatisfying little experience. Maybe it could have done with a part two. The tape only covers roughly the first season (leaving us just before the big reveal), and as the second season got underway, the narrative device of Cooper’s tape recorded messages to Diane played a smaller role. In all likelihood, there wasn’t enough interest by that time to give such a project a second go around.

Kyle MacLachlan would receive a Grammy nomination for “Diane” in the Spoken Word category, along with John F. Kennedy Jr., Jimmy Stewart, Garrison Keillor, and George Burns, with Burns winning for Gracie: A Love story, his biography of his late wife, Gracie Allen. Not a bad lineup to be a part of. 

Afterword: I wrote some months ago about how Douglas Adams’ radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Future was not available through the BBC’s website anymore. I learned today while browsing Audible for Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul that the Future radio series is available there along with an addendum entitled, “Did Douglas Get It Right?”.

The Blogspot of Games

My first blog was Yahoo!360° (circa 2005-2006?).
My oldest blog that’s still around today is technically DeviantART (Dec 2007).
My second oldest blog still active today is Blogger (May 2008)

After 360° closed down, I migrated my blog over to a site called Multiply, which didn’t last more than a year before transforming to an e-commerce site and eventually shutting down altogether some years later. Blogger, meanwhile, has frankly managed to defy the odds and stay up and running for all these years. I’ve speculated before that the only reason Google keeps Blogger around is because of the goodwill it builds with users, the potential backlash of closing it down, and the overall small footprint it takes up on Google’s servers simply not being worth the effort to delete. It does worry me that the day may come when I have to say goodbye to Blogger. I’m not sure what I’ll do at that point besides go all-in on WordPress (where I’ve been since Dec 2014).

In my last entry, I wrote about the Crazy Castle videogame franchise, a series I’ve never actually played beyond once holding the box of the first game in a grocery store in the American midwest in 1989. Videogames have been a part of my life as long as movies, starting with the Atari 2600 all the way to my current collection of consoles that’s only one generation behind the current lineup. This meant I also read quite a number of videogame magazines such as Nintendo Power and Gamepro. Eventually, I found my way to the internet, where games journalism wasn’t bound by the conventions of print media. One of these sites was Gamespot, which is still active today. Not content with merely being a place to post articles about the games industry, Gamespot wanted to be a haven for gamers, a place where a community could thrive, where people could make connections and share their experiences with titles both new and old.

To this end, they offered a blogging service.

Although there were no real hard and fast rules about what you could post there, it maybe wouldn’t be the best place to host your travelogue of Europe or your collection of photos of telegraph poles or your thoughts on the self-determination of the South Moldavian people. Generally, if you were reading someone’s blog on Gamespot, you were reading about games, maybe anime, possibly movies, and technology as it pertained to the gaming space (graphics cards, console specs, etc.). As I was exploring options in case Blogger went the way of Multiply and 360°, I started a blog there in August of 2009. My first entry was announcing a short story I’d written that was posted to both my DeviantART and my Freeservers site (which is still somehow up and running). My last entry came in October of 2014 with a review of Velocity 2X, a PSVita game and sequel to a really nifty shooter originally released for the PSP. 47 total blog entries in those years, and I’d almost completely forgotten about it. I think the only reason I’d checked back in on it was I was wondering whatever happened to the site 1UP, as I had a small presence there. 1UP is completely gone, folded into another publication with all records of user-generated content wiped. That was when I remembered Gamespot and managed to uncover my old account there.

It really took me back. For one entry, I was complaining about how I couldn’t use certain words like class and style because, the way the site was coded, these would cause a Javascript error. I had to spell them with 5’s. Even “classic” caused an issue. I seem to remember this error was fixed, but I never bothered to correct my entries. In another entry, Gamespot seemed to think the name Shizuru was a curse word and wouldn’t let me post until I changed it to something else. Makes me wonder how people with Shih Tzus coped when they wanted to share their dog pictures.

In the years since making these entries, Gamespot has undergone many massive changes to their backend (all the technical stuff under the bonnet, so to speak), so a number of images I posted to my entries are broken, though at least one of them can still be seen if I access the site on my phone instead of my Mac or iPad. Most of them were covers of games, while others are complete mysteries as to what they were. One of them was about a portable NES console, which really doesn’t narrow it down given how lucrative that little market was, so I have no idea what image I’d have to use if I were to archive or preserve the blog.

As of this writing, Gamespot not only still has my blog up and running (images notwithstanding), but I can make a new entry anytime I want (maybe I should test to see if class and style still cause coding issues). They don’t offer any sort of migration tool the way 360° did. So, if I were to archive these 47 entries, I’d have to do it the old fashioned way of going through one by one and copy-pasting them into Notes or Pages before I could re-upload them to Blogger or WordPress. I don’t think I’ll go that far, unless I want to repost something on an anniversary or in regard to a recent event. As I said, my last entry there was a review of Velocity 2X in 2014, a series that’s remained stagnant to this day while Futurlab (its developer) focuses on Powerwash Simulator 2. Someday, maybe there will be a Velocity 3, and on that day, I’ll dig up my old Gamespot review and we can all contrast and compare, see what’s been improved, what still needs work, and even where the series can go from here.

Game on, everybody.

A July 4th Post About Videogames Because I Can

Nostalgia is not only a drug; it is the ultimate abusive relationship. You start out loving something before growing tired of it. Eventually, you stop caring about it potentially to the point that you hate it. Next thing you know, it’s been years since even thinking about it and suddenly you want it back to the point of putting tears in your eyes.

Believe it or not, there was a point in time when we collectively hated translucent casings on our electronics. We thought it looked downright ugly. It’s only been in recent years with the rise of identical-looking smartphones and samey notebook computers that we look back on those see-through housings with fondness. From the perspective of those old laptops and music players, we’re standing outside with a Bluetooth speaker over our heads blasting love songs via Spotify, only probably way more pathetic and certainly not going to end the way that movie did.

I was thinking about all this today having just beaten Monument Valley on my iPad, including all its add-on chapters. I know I’m about eleventy-billion years late to the party on these games, but they’re new enough to me to be interesting and old enough to everyone else to be retro. I got it through Netflix, who is delisting the game a few days from now. I’m probably not going to get to the sequels in that time, but maybe I’ll just buy the damn things from the app store after all.

Speaking of abusive relationships, puzzle games and I have a similar standing as RPG’s in that I love them dearly, but I don’t have time for them. I have a rather addictive personality, and as such generally don’t play games on my phone because of the distraction and time sink. If I want to play a game, I’ve got to work for it, fire up the Playstation or the Switch and sit my ass down on the couch. There are still games on my phone, mostly as a contingency plan if I’m stuck somewhere for a while and need my dopamine fix. The exception to that is Pokemon Go, which I’ve been playing religiously for some years now. In my defense, at least that game has me get up and out of the house when it isn’t exhaustingly hot or blisteringly cold. When it came to Monument Valley, I was certainly aware of the games, but I never gave them much thought. I saw a few screenshots and clips of gameplay and my response was a resounding, “It’s probably okay, but so what?” It reminded me of a game I tried out on my PSP called Echochrome. The games have a fair bit in common in that they both involve navigating Escherian landscapes using a combination of dream logic and lateral thinking. Echochrome predates Monument Valley by a few years, the former very much still a product of buttons and joystick gaming while the latter was born and bred to work with a touchscreen, be it a phone or, better yet, a tablet.

This led me to thinking of similar sort of puzzle games, ones that involve navigating a space rather than simply sliding blocks or matching tiles. One of these games is Crazy Castle for the NES. Specifically, and depending on what region of the world you reside in, Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle (more on this in a moment). The game has you navigate a scene while dodging enemies in order to collect a number of carrots before moving on to the next level, of which there are 60. For a NES game, that number certainly seems crazy, until you realize each level only occupies about two screens worth of real estate and they employ a kind of modular construction. I remember my brother and I losing our minds at the idea of Bubble Bobble having some 100 levels, until we realized each level was only a screen and of a similarly repetitive level design. Although I do remember playing Bubble Bobble as a rental from a local grocery store in the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin, I never actually played Crazy Castle. I don’t even think I knew it was a puzzle game. Frankly, in my mind, at that time a puzzle game consisted of falling blocks or sliding tiles. I do remember seeing the game at the same grocery store and reading the back of the box. What stood out to me most was this image of Bugs Bunny embracing a female version of himself in a blue dress. According to the text blurb, this is Honey Bunny, a character who has appeared in a few classic Looney Tunes shorts, though her design has never been set in stone. The image on the box baffled me because of how much like Bugs she looked. In fact, she looked like Bugs when he’s wearing a dress to fool Elmer Fudd. On the whole, it seemed weird to me to give Bugs a love interest at all, much less in a videogame, as if someone said, “It’s a videogame! You gotta rescue a damsel!”

It turns out the reason for the love interest is rooted in the game’s origin. This was around 1989 and in Japan the game originally starred Roger Rabbit (his wife Jessica being the captive Honey Bunny). As for bringing it to America, there was a problem. There was already a Roger Rabbit game on the NES and not produced by Kemco. So, the game was reworked graphically to feature Looney Tunes characters.

More games would be released in the Crazy Castle series, at least 5 depending on how you set up your spreadsheet, with multiple versions of each one depending on the region of their release. For the Japanese version of the second game, Roger Rabbit was replaced with Mickey Mouse. North America would still get Bugs Bunny right up until the 5th game in the series, which would star Woody Woodpecker. As for other regions, intellectual properties varied, from Garfield to the Ghostbusters to a Danish troll named Hugo.

It’s interesting to compare these titles to Monument Valley and Echochrome in terms of their presentation. In Echochrome, the character you have to guide around the impossible objects is an articulated artist’s mannequin, going with the game’s ultra-minimalist aesthetic, almost as if you’re playing a prototype rather than something finished. Monument Valley has you take on the role of Princess Ida, a small and silent little girl in a white dress and conical hat as she traverses a sea of soothing color gradients and isometric architecture. While the game has a story, it is not emphasized beyond some cryptic lines of text, the ending being almost symbolic more than anything concrete. Ironically, Crazy Castle has an equally anonymous quality about it, so much so that any number of characters and scenarios can be swapped out as needed, leaving the game with no real identity of its own. The closest thing the game had to an original character was in the Japanese version of the third game, with Mickey Mouse being replaced by Kid Klown, who would go on to have his own series of completely different games from Kemco. This game would see a release in North America, though its connection to the Crazy Castle franchise was nowhere to be seen as it does play a bit differently than the Bugs and Woody entries.

Having a major IP attached to a game creates a number of problems when it comes to preservation. While an original cartridge of Bugs Bunny Crazy Castles is neither rare nor fetching some high price on auction sites, it’s not been made available through any current console platform, namely the NES library of the Nintendo Switch. I don’t know how exactly the licensing deals work for that particular service (notably they haven’t removed or retired any games from the library, unlike Netflix), but having to deal with both a game developer/publisher as well as the owners of the license, in this case Warner Bros., has got to be a nightmare. This is the unfortunate fate of many licensed games, especially older games from the 8 and 16-bit era. They’re made to cash in on name recognition, they sell as many copies as they can, and then they fade into the haze of memory until suddenly they’re wanted again.

If Gex can come back, maybe there’s still hope for Crazy Castle.