Category: Movies

Videogaming Illustrated (Issue 4, Feb 1983)

At a convention a few weeks ago for the princely sum of $5 I bought this:

It’s one of the very earliest video game magazines, dating to before the ‘crash of 1983’. It’s from the same publisher of the old sci-fi magazine Omni, and the format is very similar (silver pages, yellow pages with fiction, somewhat pretentious tone).

This was very much a magazine without an audience. The inclusion of fiction, the monthly news round up heavy on business content and the (repulsive) interview with Don Imus suggests they were going for the Playboy approach. So much so I’m surprised there’s no cheesecake photos!

That said it’s also an interesting curio from the earliest days of my favourite hobby! For instance I was surprised by the lavish adverts for Atari 2600 games:

(By the way I’m ripping off Ashens here and taking photos of the magazine on a couch rather than scanning it. Hey I’m lazy!)

And the lengthy strategy sections – which take up a decent amount of the magazine and cover arcade and 2600 games – are charmingly low-tech:

The middle one is a four page guide to the arcade game Kangaroo which was probably mostly forgotten even when this issue shipped!

There’s also a guide to third-party 2600 joysticks, a lengthy but superficial article about pinball machines, too much fiction and a lot of uninteresting (even then I suspect) ‘monthly news’.

What isn’t well-represented though are advertisements. I’ve shown some above, but there are very few in total and many of them are clearly there as part of some paid-content promotion:

That’s just one of two ads for Cosmic Creeps, an Atari 2600 game profiled and given a strategy guide in this very issue…

The other element common to today’s magazines that is almost entirely absent are screenshots! In fact, in the entire issue, there is a grand total on one real shot (as opposed to drawings of the screen) and this is it:

Can you name the game? (And yes, I suspect it may also be fake…)

Anyway this mag was sold at the con by a guy who flogs old magazines of many kinds, and at the same time I got some very old Dr Who magazines as well as a bunch of cheesecake horror mags. Why was he selling this one issue of a 35 year old gaming magazine? The cover!! It features a preview of sorts of Revenge Of The Jedi (tied to an article about the 2600 Jedi Arena) which includes this gem:

It was all mostly true, if a bit off with the date estimates!

Anyway a curio from the dawn of gaming time. This magazine would run another year and change names twice before becoming another victim of the crash that almost sunk the US industry, but from what I see here I struggle to wonder who bought it even then?

The Last Nightmare

I had a dream last night in which I watched the entirety of The Last Jedi (the upcoming Star Wars film) and it was terrible! KLS suggested I blog this since it’s so vivid in my mind, so here we go.

I was watching the film in a church with a large crowd. A gigantic screen had been hung over the altar and we were filling the pews and everyone was excited. It seemed to be launch day so no one had any knowledge of the film in advance. The church may have been my childhood church, St Marys of Charlestown.

The film opened in some sort of meeting between a few SW characters (Poe Dameron, Han Solo, Lando) and a bunch of DC superheroes. They were in some giant computer room talking to the computer. I forget details here, but I do remember Clark Kent (holding an umbrella like the 7th doctor) was the prominent character.

The film then cut to a lengthy sequence (easily over an hour) where a group of heroes went on a mission to a rocky desert planet to find a software upgrade for C-3PO so he could wield a lightsaber. This was in fact the main plot of the film: 3PO was for some reason the chosen combatant to fight the ‘bad guy’ but had to be prepared. The First Order was in the film, but the specific villians such as Snoke or Kylo Ren weren’t. Instead those roles were filled by DC heroes (not villians) including Silver Surfer and Aquaman.

During this desert sequence the film progressively became more stylized until it ultimately became a full-blown cel animated movie in the stule of 1980s Hanna Barbara cartoons. The group of heroes by now included Kent, Solo, Lando, some girl (not Rey), Garazeb (from Rebels, who was tiny and looked like Yoda) and a few others I forget. They were fighting off crab monsters and giant worms to get to some shrine in which they found the upgrade for 3PO as well as armour that they bolted on to him which made him strongly resemble the robot Maximillian from Black Hole.

It was bad. Really bad. I was grief stricken at how awful it was and at this point I exited the church to look up comments online. Almost everyone had the same reaction I did (horror) but a few praised the frequent Coen Brothers references (none of which I caught) or the fact the director had projected the animated portion onto a mirror then filmed the mirror to make it more ‘dreamlike’. Meanwhile I was disappointed like I had never been, but returned and kept watching.

I recall the film used licensed music (including Tainted Love by Soft Cell and some classical piece I can’t recall) and the characters broke the 4th wall more than once. CGI battle scenes were heavily obscured by fog (to minimize the workload?) and the sets became increasingly minimal as the film progressed. It also eventually returned to live action as well, with elements introduced during the animated sequence being retained. For instance while they (Clark actually) piloted the Millennium Falcon to the desert planet, they left it there and instead departed in a ship that was nothing more than a giant hollow metal cube with a tiny control pedestal rising from the middle of the floor. There were no windows or exterior or interior detail at all. When the film returned to live action, this ship still existed as a set.

Anyway the finale was in a city that resembled the Gold Coast with the exception of the buildings being closer to the ocean. The actual final battle was C-3PO vs Aquaman with 3PO using a lightsaber. Aquaman was 80s-era in his classic outfit, and he fought by throwing big balls of water at the heavily armored 3PO.

While this was the end of the film, it didn’t in any way seem like the end of the story. There was some subplot involving Luke (who was briefly in it) and Poe Dameron and involved flashbacks of Poe flying in the attack against the first Death Star and apparently being some very old friend of Luke. There was also another subplot involving a planet that had stopped spinning because of the Silver Surfer but that’s all muddy in my memory.

Anyway it was a real nightmare dream. When I awoke I was momentarily confused and upset before realizing it had just been a dream at which point the relief was real πŸ™‚

Let’s all come back and re-read this in six months and see just how close to guessing the actual plot of the film I ended up being?

Rogue Friday

Today was ‘Rogue Friday‘, which is the day that merchandise for the new upcoming Star Wars film Rogue One hit stores. Obviously I had to go and check things out.

Apparently Toys’R’Us opened at midnight! Of the five stores I went to, they were the most disappointing so I suspect anyone that did arrive at midnight may have regretted it…

Target seems to have made a bigger deal out of it, with signs on the doors, this display just inside the entrance and…

…a whopping big (cardboard) AT-AT towering over the toy aisle endcap! They had the most new stuff by far, with all sorts of toys, costumes, models and Lego kits.

I don’t know much at all about the film, having only seen the trailers. It’s my intention – as I did The Force Awakens – to go into it as spoiler free as possible. Even so, these toys give a little glimpse at what’s to come πŸ™‚

That’s the Walmart display, or at least some of it since they were still setting up! Happily I found the new Rogue One trading cards there, which made me a happy nerd πŸ™‚

My last stop was probably the best, and that was (surprisingly!) the Disney Store. They had oodles of exclusive stuff including some very nice diecast figures. I bought the hell out of this one:

No I don’t know this character, who appears to be an R2 unit but is called C2-B5. He looks like a baddie with his dark paint, but then almost everyone does in this film. My guess he’s a lovable rogue of a droid πŸ™‚

So it was a pretty good day of Star Wars toy shopping; certainly better than I had expected. In addition to C2-B5 I bought a couple of figures, a bunch of trading cards, some kitchenware (!) and a few other things that may end up as gifts.

Now the hype can really start for the film!