Music and From Software

Chu Ishikawa is an awesome Japanese industrial composer who is probably most famous for creating the music of Tetsuo: The Iron Man in 1989. By doing sound design work for several movies, he (and later his percussion group Der Eisenrost) ended up also having a major influence on video game music in Japan throughout the 90s. What's less obvious, however, is whether or not he was directly involved in working on music for From Software's King's Field series. Now, Chu Ishikawa worked on the soundtracks for every Takashi Miike film in the 90s. Except for ONE, Full Metal Yakuza (1997). This film's soundtrack is credited to a contract group called Sound Kids Corp. (sometimes credited as simply SoundKids). However, Full Metal Yakuza's soundtrack sounds pretty much the same as any other Chu Ishikawa soundtrack for a Miike movie.

Bloodborne Fan Reaction

So Bloodborne has been out for about a week and a half, and as a long time devotee of From Software’s games I couldn’t be happier. The game is an incredible thematic and mechanical evolution of the story and level design found in its predecessors while also offering a more detailed world to play through. While I’m happy to see such a good game receive high critical praise, at the same time I’m noticing a trend where most reviewers are talking less about how the game is good, and more about how the game is hard. Not much is said about what it does that sets it apart mechanically from other adventure games other than your character gets killed often. Getting killed repeatedly is presented as a mark of validity, only a real gamer would make it through Bloodborne, a real video game where you get killed over and over again!

The weird thing about this is that Bloodborne is actually much more accessible than its predecessors by design, yet the changes and reasoning behind why are lost on the many people that use Bloodborne less as a fun game and more as a platform to judge others’ gaming skills. It’s taboo to simply not enjoy Bloodborne for what it is, and I constantly see this bristling reaction to people who don’t like it, since how could anyone not like Bloodborne? Toxic folks live under the assumption that since they like certain games, and they play games, they are true gamers. People who don’t like the exact same games as them are somehow lesser people. It’s especially tragic coming from From Software fans, however, since we were all collectively crushed by their games over the years.

Something fans seem to be forget about Demon’s Souls is that it actually has an excellent tutorial. It eases players into its more deliberate pacing, with an introductory area that gets subtly more complex as it goes on. More than just a few brief messages on the game’s controls, it quickly gets you used to the idea of taking things slowly, peaking around corners, and paying attention to what’s above and below you (compared to how many big budget titles eschew use of vertical space in their level design, this may be the most important part).

The Order: 1886

There have been so many complaints about The Order 1886 over the past week regarding how good or bad of a game it is, even going so far as to question if it even qualifies as a video game. Most of them are meaningless. We've heard that:

Godfrey Ho

Godfrey Ho is one of my favorite directors.  This man directed eighty-seven movies from 1980 through 1989. Of those eighty-seven films, forty-seven of them have the word "ninja" in the title. That's a lot of ninja movies. A Hong Kong version of Ed Wood, Godfrey Ho's secret was getting tons of footage of movies from the sixties no one cared about, editing in a few minutes of footage he would shoot of western actors dressed as ninja, dubbing English dialogue over the whole thing (even over the new actors that are clearly speaking English anyway), and calling it a new movie. Similar to the Superman/Superman II controversy, he convinced his staple of US actors that they were filming two or three action films, then would take a few minutes of each of these "films" and edit them into dozens of separate movies culled from the dregs of Hong Kong schlock.

The Blood of Heroes / Salute of the Jugger

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time watching cartoons on Saturday morning, and I spent a lot of time playing video games. The most important way to spend time for me, though, was watching a tv station called WPIX. It became The WB Television Network in 1995, and after a lot of changing hands between Warner Brothers, CBS and others it's roughly what we now know as CW. "WPIX" itself still exists in NYC in the form of PIX-11, but it's a shell of its former movie marathon, Star Trek syndicating glory.

All weekend I'd get to see a huge variety of movies thanks to this station, and there was no gauge for critical popularity.  A typical Saturday would give us a solid block of Apocalypse Now, The Puma Man, Clash of the Titans, and Flash Gordon. The Sunday after would have Mad Max, Blade Runner, The Thing, and The Godfather. It wasn't a sci-fi or action movie or drama themed channel but, rather, a channel of whatever they got their hands on. So you'd have classic stuff like The Exorcist mixed in with Cyborg Cop, every weeknight and all weekend. Most of these movies were ubiquitous in fine video rental establishments throughout the city, but one stuck with me that I never saw anywhere else, The Blood of Heroes.

I only saw this movie on WPIX once in 1991 and thought it was awesome. It stuck with me due to my love of post apocalyptic movies and because of its mostly visual storytelling. Years later, I got a job working at a Blockbuster Video in NJ in 2000. Despite regularly taking advantage of their free rentals for employees, special order requests, and being able to access any Blockbuster's inventory listings, I could never find a copy of The Blood of Heroes. The only US VHS release was out of print, and unlike other 80s cult films it did not get an internet fueled surge of popularity to get it re-released in the late 90's.

Fortunately, the movie kept a small following in Europe (under the name Salute of the Jugger), to the point of the fictional sport of the film, jugger, being turned into a real one still played to this day. It stayed in print fairly regularly there, and, following a 2001 DVD release, Lions Gate released the US cut of the film on DVD in the US and Canada in 2003. Like plenty of budget DVDs, this was taped off someone's worn out VHS copy, and looks and sounds awful, but at least I could finally see it again!

It holds up.

The Dead Talk Back

"Have you been hearing some weird stories recently? About telepathy, the fourth dimension, or GHOSTS?"

After a prologue where a woman is murdered, The Dead Talk Back gets down to business with this off the wall monologue from one of its two narrators. Two narrators?  Yes, director Merle S. Gould went all out here. Like most movies of this kind, the cast was a bunch of non-actors who didn't get paid (you'll get royalties, honest), except now we get double the scenes of disinterested people sitting around doing nothing while an off screen voice tells us what they're supposedly thinking and doing. So don't worry, the running time may only be sixty-five minutes, but thanks to this great padding you'll definitely feel like you're sitting through five hours.