Judd Winick isn't exactly everyone's favorite comic creator in today's age. With things like the resurrection of Jason Todd and playing Weekend at Bernie's with Green Arrow's son, he's definitely worked up some stinkers in the past years. But he might have completely redeemed himself with this week's issue of DC's Titans.
We all feel pain. I don't think there's any way to avoid it. Some people encounter awful things in life. I am in no way saying what has happened to me is worse than what has happened to you, my friend, but it is just as devastating. What I can say is that as we live life, we find ways to deal with this pain. We do it in different ways too. We medicate, create, destroy, ignore, replace, and confront the trials and tribulations of our lives in different ways.
This is one way that I do it.
Back in 1992, to my amazement, I opened up a rectangular package inside a Mr. Gatti's Birthday room to find a Gameboy and a copy of Tetris. My parents smiled as I screamed in glee. As an eight year-old with minimal exposure to gaming, I really didn't know what Tetris was, but I loved it. I came to fall in love with the bulky grey machine and its yellowish-green screen, not caring for the scratches, dents, discolorations, or cracks that came with it. I didn't even know that it was a used model that my parents could barely afford at the time. It was mine. It was an escape from the world.
I would always have that Gameboy with me wherever I went. I found myself scrounging up loose change and dollars when I could for months, saving for the opportunity that I could buy one new game Two new games a year was a good year for me. I would play the games whenever I had the chance. Bus rides, car rides, rainy days - all of the times that a child would find boring and unenjoyable, I made better with my Gameboy.
My great-grandmother passed away in 1995. I remember going to her house frequently. Even at the age of 87, she would always cook me fried apple pies. She was one of the nicest people that I never got a chance to know well enough. Her death caught my family off-guard entirely. We all grieved in our own way. I personally found myself trying not to think about the subject. I just dove head-first into Super Mario Land, finally beating the unnecessary airplane level the day I found out she died. It brought relief to me - a sense of joy and instant gratification that games provide in a time where these things were no where to be found.
In 2004, I lost my grandfather. Believe it or not, he was a retired, one-legged, door-to-door insurance salesman. He was always an inspiration to me and the rest of my family. The days and nights I would spend at my grandparents during my childhood would often be filled with me playing Sonic & Knuckles on a Genesis a distant relative left there by accident. He would just sit in his recliner, reading the paper, watching me with a smile on his face as I would constantly drown at the Chemical Plant on Sonic The Hedgehog 2 with anyone other than Knuckles. I don't think he understood it, but he found some delight in the digitized beeps, boops, chimes, and pings that would emit from the TV screen.
There was never much to do where my grandparents lived. It was a farm with the closest neighbors being four miles away and the closest person within a decade of my age being ten miles. Every once and a while, my grandfather would give me a five dollar bill, saying, "How about you use this to get a new game to play on the TV next time you come down?" He did this well into 1999, when the Genesis was long gone and a five dollar bill wouldn't even buy a memory card. I just nodded and told him I would.
When he passed away in 2004, I placed the money he left me in his wills in mutual funds and the like. It was what was expected of it in most situations. I did, however, leave a small amount of that out of the mutual fund. With it, I purchased a Playstation 2. The first time I booted it up, I sat in the floor crying, thinking as if my grandfather would never be behind me to smile as a I play video games. But as I began to play, the feelings of joy rushed back to me. I felt as if someone was still looking over the ink-stained pages of the local paper, smiling at me.
I still find myself turning to games for catharsis. Even recently as this past weekend, this medium has been an escape from the horrible things that often fall upon us. My girlfriend of two years and I broke up. It wasn't a conflict or anything, but we found our post-graduate lives were calling us to different parts of the world. We don't want to find ourselves so distant from each other. So it ended. Rather than turning to Captain Morgan or any other venue to drown my sorrows like my close peers do, I found myself playing Grand Theft Auto IV, losing myself in someone else's world. A fictional world. Hanging out and eating with friends there. The time spent in Liberty City wasn't trying to replace my world, but help me take a vacation from it.
But more devastating is the news I received on Sunday. You have no clue what it is like to have your mother calling you, crying and apologizing. At the beginning of the month, I moved my dog, Addison, back to live with my parents on the farm while I set to move into a new apartment. Many people on Dtoid have seen her pop up in Stickam when she hops on the couch. Addison was struck by a car on Sunday and died. Call me weak but I have found myself crying, wanting my puppy back for the majority of the time since Sunday. After hearing the news and crying until I could not breath, I resumed my session of video games, losing myself in another world.
She would often jump up on the couch beside me, curling up against me as I played games, always remaining loyal and loving. Each button press, each click of the joystick, each explosion of a digital gunshot, I found myself smiling - smiling in remembrance of all the times my puppy would lay beside me, loving me.
We often get excited here when a new game comes out or when we get to play with others. What we often don't realize is that games and all mediums, offer us a chance to cope, a chance to remember, and a chance to embrace the world around us. Call it a hobby if you want. I call it "help."
New images of what will be regarded as Ed Wood's post-humous action flick, G.I. Joe have hit the internets, revealing the antithesis of good casting. Dennis Quaid is going to be a sad, sad individual when this hits theaters next year. Here comes the casting and characters. Some good. Some god awful.
Forgive the watermarks. The studio released a character to various websites to increase the hype.
Dennis Quaid as General Hawk
Ray Park as Snake Eyes
Scarlett
Destro is surprisingly fleshy.
Breaker... whoever that is.
Storm Shadow looks alright
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (not Lemon) as Heavy Duty
I never have really seen the appeal of Dance Dance Revolution. Stepping on four buttons really doesn't translate to dancing for me because you can't grind against equally drunk women while doing so. If the makers of the game had more intelligence and a sense of American awesomeness, they would deploy Ryan Gosling's girlfriend from the floor.
Ten points to anyone who gets that joke without googling it.
As many of you know, Miyamoto topped Time's list of the top 100 most influential people of the world thanks to the lack of time of many internet fans and a general ignorance of the contest on the part of people who are aware of the real world. Outed from the top spot was the #3 political pundit in the world: Stephen Colbert. Furious, Colbert attacked Miyamoto and exposed Donkey Kong as the hate crime that it is.
Then he turned his attention to his longtime rival for the top spot of Time's 100 influential people rankings: Korean pop star, Rain. Continuing in his videogame theme of anger, Colbert challenges the singer in a round of DDR. Whoever wins: we win.
With the inevitable controversy that has surrounded GTA, we have seen accusations of "murder simulator," "drunk driving promotions," and my personal favorite, "mentally molesting minors for money." It is obvious that the game is going to get a lot of negative press from sources not outside of the realm of gaming culture. People love controversy, I guess.
But one famous Harvard Graduate has used his intelligence to prove that GTA is no longer the awful source of moral corruption that it was once branded as. Conan O'Brien, who can't move up to replace Leno soon enough, took a look at the game and found some very surprising results. I have to say, that I'm still shocked by the horrible imagery of Niko Bellic wanting to go to Bed Bath & Beyond.
Has Conan put an end to the controversy? Or did he open up a new realm of criticism for the media to add a fourth ring to its circus?
There is no doubt that everyone is feeling quite smarmy over the successful interview between Destructoid's own Jim Sterling and the now straw-man of a legal practitioner in Jack Thompson in today's edition of the Podcastle. I have to say however, the thunder has been stolen on a national level with NPR's interview of Adam Sessler this afternoon concerning the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. The legal scholar of incomparable excellence graced NPR with a phone call to "All Things Considered" and the two met with great force.
It's unfortunate that such a clash of larger titans had to occur on the same day. Of course, I'm not inferring that the two are physically larger than our monoculus friend, but rather that they are more well known.
Below is the interview and the entertaining clash between the two. Meeting par once again, Thompson carries on his apparent satire of an ignorant human being that misinforms his audience. Laughs are ahoy, me maties!
This was taken from what appears to be a cell phone camera during a viral marketing stunt that this movie is implementing so well. I am in absolute awe of the level of quality and godliness that this is approaching. It features more Harvey Dent than usual and gives even more new Joker footage.
And of course, it has our lord and savior: Bale.
I am more excited about this than playing my copy of GTA IV right now. Anyone else?
As Dtoid's resident evil, Republican bastard, I often find myself falling into political commentary with the rest of the community and explaining to them why I'm right. Of course, "explaining" in this context usually involves me using gentle means of persuasion. From time to time I get in disagreements with people like Necros or Vexed Alex concerning how they are wrong and my conservatism is completely infallible and brings smile to children across the globe as we exploit them. 34 cents a day is better than no cents a day, right?
But I admit that I love to laugh at myself. I love satirization of my ideology and the misconceptions of it. Combine that with gaming? Things are pretty darn good.
The following video is one of genius. It is from likely-to-be appropriately named hotdude321. I personally have never played Alfred Chicken, but I never knew that the 1994 title was so precognitive.
Interestingly enough, I have discovered that Karl Fitzhugh, the Product Manage for the Amiga version of the title, ran for office on the Alfred Chicken Party in the 1993 British Parliamentary elections. Fitzhugh came in second to last, only beating the Rainbow Party candidate. Although its attempts at political office were short lived, the game has definitely lived on as a stout source of political commentary.
I love Grant Morrison. As possibly the greatest comic book writer within the past twenty years, Morrison has revolutionized the industry with his concepts and writing. From breaking the fourth wall in the 80s with his astonishing run on the animal-rights-advocate D-list hero, Animal Man to his phenomenal work on JLA to the tragically retconned stint on New X-Men to the godly and perfect style on the current All-Star Superman (I can go on forever), this man is essentially a god when it comes to fiction.
And as one of the more adamant fans of Morrison, you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that this man wants to get into video games.
Morrison is no stranger to games. He claims to be a lover of the medium, saying he owns an Xbox 360, a PS3, and a PSP. (Side note: I want that man's Gamertag.)
Being the genius mind he is, he has also been asked to scribe several stories for games. In 2003, Morrison was asked to write a script for Battlestar Gallactica for the original Xbox. In Morrisonian fashion, he did his best to expand and energize the basic concepts of the franchise.
"I had come up with whole storylines and was trying to do more emotional stuff," he said. "The missions were more weird. You had to find an [alien] brain and feed it sugar so it would come alive and tell you where to go next. There was a bunch of weird stuff in it, all based on slightly biblical quests transferred to science fiction. ... I was trying to capture that feeling: the burning bush and prophecy and a young guy's journey through this terrible Cylon deception where they build an alternative planet Earth. And none of that survived. It might have made a good movie, but as a game nothing of the story survived at all."
God, reading that almost makes me interested in Battlestar Gallactica and whatever the hell a Cylon is.
Vivendi Universal also asked him to do a script for a new Predator game. Morrison returned with a Predator story set in both the gangster-heavy 1930s and 100 years later. Morrison's work was obviously never picked up and we were stuck with the famous 2004 title, Predator: Concrete Jungle. Fuck you, Vivendi. Fuck you.
After that, Morrison continued to tell people that he was interested in doing video games. Yet there still hasn't been any interest in his genius.
One title that he has been shopping around is a dreamlike GTA in a hybrid New York, Edinburgh city, going by the name of "Citizen Death." He describes it as "my own attempt to do my own dream version of what one of these things should be like." The game includes enough detail to allow you to go into every building you see and unusual things happening in some. You learn voodoo from stores and use it to go on missions. The vehicles are much more interesting, like UFOs, flying saucers, and boots that allow you to bounce over skyscrapers in a Siegel & Shuster original Superman-esque manner and also as a play on the outrageous jumping abilities of characters Morrison remembers from his days of playing the Sega Genesis.
For me it was just to stretch all the boundaries of what they do in these games, to make it more like a comic and more fantastical."
Stretching the boundaries is definitely what Morrison does best. His work on All-Star Superman exists as one of the greatest explorations of hero archetypes and fiction today and should be required reading for life.
Apparently, Morrison also hangs out with the crew from Rockstar. "I've met those guys a bunch of times," Morrison says. He claims to be a fan of theirs as much as they are his.
'When we hang out with them there have been a couple of times when my wife Kristan asks, 'Do you want Grant to write [for the 'GTA' games]' and they say 'Oh, no.' "
I can partially see the reasoning of Rockstar and other developers in avoiding Morrison's concepts. As costly as video games are to produce today, extreme concepts like his work on The Invisibles certainly would be a risky endeavor. But when titles like Bioshock are praised for their above-par storytelling and atmosphere, one asks why a Morrisonian epic like Animal Man couldn't be played out in a style similar to Eternal Darkness. The wonder and intensity of house pets turned into military weapons in We3 would be amazing when applied in a pseudo-Ratchet & Clank style.
The problem is that video games may not be ready for high concepts like Morrison's ideas. But the reality is that Morrison is ready. Who wants in?
I love superheroes. A lot. There's just something appealing about good old fashioned badass characters with extraordinary abilities. They are what inspired me as a child and still put a smile on my cold Republican heart to this day. So imagine my glee when I found that I could create my own superheroes or supervillains.
Mecha Reagan is the Great Communicator for the next millennium. His supersonic speech capabilities can solve any crisis on infinite Earths and give comfort to the American people. His super strength is matched by his superior armaments and defense capabilities. The Gipper just got an upgrade....
And his nemesis...
Words cannot describe this evil.
How to make your own Dtoid Community Superhero! Go here and create your own hero from various options.
Hit "Print Screen" or whatever screen capture program you have.
Upload & share with the Dtoid Community!
I'll do a repost later on with the Dtoid Community Justice League and Legion of Doom. Get to it!
Attached photos:
I'm ironically attempting to be awesome while being on a web site focused on video games.
I try and keep interested in all of the many fronts here on Destructoid and trying to report some news that slipped through the cracks. You'll usually find odd ramblings about most news in this blog and also hear about my dreams to genetically engineer an army of bears with chainsaws for hands to take over a small midwestern metropolitan area and maul Hillary Clinton's face after I insert a battle axe ever so gently.
I am a vicious, conservative bastard that supports the career of the Rap Cat.
Here's what people are saying about Rorschach:
"Rorschach is the official bouncer for Destructoid. He is a vicious, heartless, evil, Republican bastard." - Velcroman
"Rorschach, you are my hero. I cannot wait for you to be our emperor." - CJPKiller
