review

Disney's Darkest Hour

I've been thinking about Disney a lot recently. I'm not entirely sure why, but I did discover a video on YouTube based around Disney's darkest and scariest moments. The video mentions how dark The Little Mermaid is, and I quite distinctly remember myself thinking hang on - the movie of the Little Mermaid was all fluff and cuddles compared to the original book, how can they possibly call it dark?

So I began thinking about when Disney goes bad. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was pretty twisted in various places, and let's not forget that Disney also own Touchstone, Miramax and a bunch of other movie studios, so it's not like they just do kids stuff. But to get at the absolute crowning achievement of messed up Disney darkness, you need to look beyond movies and head to the happiest place on Earth, Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Or more specifically, Walt Disney World in the late 1990s.

In the Tomorrowland section of the Magic Kingdom is Stitch's Great Escape. But before it was opened in 2004, it was a different attraction, going by the name of the Extra-Terror-Restrial Alien Encounter. A warning notice outside this attraction alerted punters to its intense nature, but being part of happy fluffy Disney World, nobody cared about that. It must be suitable for kids, right?

The attraction took the form of a show, but one you experienced mainly through non-visual means, as the bulk of the show was in total darkness. I'm really glad I got to visit this thing in the short time it was open, and certainly before I went deaf in one ear, as a lot of the show used clever stereo sound to fool you into thinking sounds are coming from somewhere else. The 'story' of the show involved you being strapped into a chair and given a demonstration of an intergalactic teleportation system that went horribly wrong, allowing a hideous, winged extraterrestrial being to escape into the room with you. You got to see the creature for a split second under strobe light before it "escaped" and pretty much everything else happened in almost total darkness. It breathed hot breath and drooled down your neck, made noises as it flew around your head, and shook your shoulder restraint violently. Several times throughout the show a staff member was apparently slaughtered, causing "blood" to spray across the audience, before the alien finally reappeared in the teleporter and got blown up right in your face. It all sounds pretty gruesome and gratuitous, but when you consider the entire thing was achieved through nothing other than a water jet, some air vents, a couple of speakers and a motorised seat restraint it's amazing how intense the entire experience was... there was a genuine marriage of art and technology which explored the path previously trodden by so many fine horror directors who know that there is nothing scarier than the human imagination; you're far more likely to be scared by something you can't see. It was the sort of attraction that they could happily move to Universal Studios and run it for years, but somehow it ended up in the Magic Kingdom, where it scared the crap out of children for a while before being replaced with something far tamer.

What's even more worrying is that the version eventually made was very toned down, compared to some of the original concepts. The original idea was to have a ride based on the movie Alien, which was seen as a big no-no by the Disney board of the time, as the Alien movies were all rated R. They even brought in George Lucas to write a screen play which involved the alien actually being a captor of the company, who are using the audience as 'guinea pigs' in some hideous experiment.

It's impossible to convey the experience of this thing through text, or even video as you don't get to fully appreciate the special effects and sound and touch cues that the whole thing uses to scare the hell out of you, but there are one or two videos on YouTube that try - including at least one filmed with a night vision camera that gives away most of the secrets of how it all worked. But if you're ever looking for a good example of Disney being a little less kiddy-friendly and frankly shit-your-pants terrifying, then look no further than the Extra-Terror-Restrial Alien Encounter.

Dispelling the Fear of Crime, One Bad TV Show at a Time

It's been a while since I've blogged, so I'm going to do a TV review. Last night I watched a show on BBC1 called Caught Red Handed. I'm not a big fan of police hidden camera shows in general, I was simply killing time until something else came on, but this show was refreshingly positive, albeit probably unintentionally so. It was also hilarious for reasons I will explain.

Most hidden camera shows have badly shot CCTV or camera car footage overdubbed with smart-arse comments from some B-list celeb. They require no effort or budget at all to make, and the most creative part of the show is how they manage to edit it to make it look like the cops are always in the right, despite following that asian driver "on a hunch". Caught Red Handed was more like a documentary than a reality show. Yes, it had lots of hidden camera footage of cars jumping red lights at railway crossings, but the main part of the show followed an undercover police officer who was essentially trying, usually unsuccessfully, to set up a honeypot. He had a laptop that he seemed desperate to get rid of. He left it on a park bench in a "crime hot spot", and returned later to discover, to his dismay, that it was still there. Later he left the laptop outside a cafe, again in an area described by the narrator as having a rise in the number of recent thefts, and was disappointed when he discovered that someone had handed it in to the cafe owner. Leaving it near a pub had a similar result, someone picked it up and handed it in as lost property. In the interspersed footage, we see the police officer lamenting the fact that nobody has stolen his laptop, and describing the whole thing as "a little bit frustrating". Eventually he did manage to convince someone to take it and arrest them on suspicion of theft, but the guy they caught turned out to be known to them and on the run anyway. Cue more negative comments from the undercover officer who was hoping to catch someone who had sold it on, rather than someone they knew was dodgy anyway.

So what did we learn from this show? Basically, if you leave a laptop in a so-called 'crime hotspot', it will probably still be there when you get back, and if not, someone's probably handed it in. The police, on the other hand, are openly frustrated that there just isn't enough crime for them.

Still, nice to see a slightly more realistic police camera show for a change, rather than the "be afraid, be very afraid" nonsense that seems to be commonplace on the less popular Freeview channels that only really serves to scare the elderly into thinking they can't leave their houses for fear of being mugged.

Pokemon GoldSilver

It's part 2 in my series of video game articles in which I choose my favourite entry in a long-running series of games. This week we're looking at Pokemon.

Possibly the only Nintendo success story to not involve Mr. Miyamoto, Pokemon is the brainchild of Satoshi Tajiri and was based, I'm told, on his childhood love of collecting bugs. Whatever the origin, Pokemon was, and remains, pretty damn popular. The original game was released on the Gameboy (in black and white!) and was quite clever in that it came in two different flavours, red and green (green was renamed blue in the west for some reason). It soon spawned a toyline, a TV show, several movies and an unholy amount of merchandise, but the game came first. The game is a role-playing game in which you control a nameless character (who became known as 'Ash' in the TV show for some unknown reason) who wants to be the Pokemon champion. Pokemon (short for Pocket Monsters) are little critters who can be caught, trained and pitted against each other. There are certain parts of the game you can't get into unless your monsters are a particular strength, which can only be increased through fighting. Occasionally you find a gym and get to fight its leader, allowing you to proceed even further into the game. By the time you get to the end you'll no doubt have a strong team of monsters with which to battle the Pokemon Master and become the best in the fictional land of Kanto. But that's not all, because once you've won you can still keep training your monsters by fighting friends in two-player mode and also trade your monsters in an attempt to collect all 151. The whole point of having two different coloured versions of the game is that some monsters can only be caught in red and others in green, so in order to truly win you need a friend who has the other version.

So that's Pokemon in a nutshell, but it didn't get truly good (and hasn't been nearly as good since) until its first proper sequel, the gold and silver versions. Red and green were followed by a couple of remakes, blue and yellow, but gold and silver were a brand new game, and for the first time presented the world of Pokemon in full colour. It takes place some years after the original in a different country, Johto, and follows broadly the same idea - you're a young lad who wants to collect and train pokemon. There's 100 new monsters indigenous to this new land, although some old favourites come back after a while. You can also trade with older versions of the game in order to transfer your winning team from red and green over to gold and silver. But there are other new things in the second generation of the game. The game is more realistic; you now not only have to keep your pokemon strong, but also happy, and there's a real-time clock built in. Some events only happen at certain times of the day, and the concept of nocturnal pokemon was introduced. Five new 'legendary' pokemon were introduced, all with different methods of catching them, and some pokemon from later games were given infant or adult forms.

But new features are added in every generation of pokemon, so why is the gold/silver generation so much better than the rest, I hear you ask? Well, it's basically a game developers' masterclass on how to do a sequel properly.

Remember I said how in the first game you could complete the quest and there was still more to do? Well this time it's taken to a whole new level. Yes, you can beat everyone in Johto and become the champion, but once you've done that the game isn't even half-complete. You then get a call from one of the characters in the first game, who invites you over to Kanto. So you now get the free run of both games' playing areas. You can then go through the bosses and gym leaders from the original game and beat them again, bearing in mind it's set some years later so they've all got a lot stronger since. Effectively, gold and silver contain a tougher version of red and green as a freebie. Finally, after beating the previous game, you gain access to third, final area in which you get to fight and catch some outrageously powerful pokemon before taking on the ultimate challenge - the protagonist character from red and green, who has since become stupidly difficult to beat. His Snorlax still gives me nightmares. And then when you've beaten him, you still have 251 Pokemon to go find before you're done. Basically, gold and silver raised the bar so high that all subsequent pokemon games were a massive disappointment. Sure, all pokemon games are basically the same, but no sequels since have added more to the overall gameplay than gold and silver, choosing instead to add gimmicks or massive amounts of new monsters.

I've actually played Gold through three times, once in Japanese and twice in English, and my current record is 239 of 251 pokemon caught, so all these years later I've still not truly completed the game, and probably never will because I no longer have any friends with whom I can trade. And now I've started again with Heartgold and Soulsilver, the improved remakes for the Nintendo DS. Both have identical gameplay to the originals but feature better graphics, a new game engine and one or two extra additions from later games.

So to conclude, if you are a game developer with a surprise hit on your hands and fancy doing a sequel, take a look at Pokemon Gold and Silver versions and learn how it's done. Many Pokemon purists insist that only the first generation counts, but I strongly disagree. Later Pokemon games deserve criticism for simply being re-hashes of the first, with so many monsters it's impossible to name them all. Gold and silver did introduce 100 new monsters but that was a minor point compared to all the other cool stuff that was added. Definately the best in the series in my opinion.

Sonic CD

So, the final part of my three part video game opinion piece. I've already outlined my favourite Mario game and my favourite Pokemon game, so it stands to reason that I should write about my favourite Sonic game too. And there is no better Sonic game than Sonic CD.

Back in 1993 the Megadrive got an upgrade, the Mega-CD. It was the first ever CD-based games console and Sega were rather pleased with it. Thing is, for gamers at least, it didn't really have anything special about it, other than a new storage medium. The only games that came out for it were early FMV-based games - most of which were awful - and slightly enhanced versions of older Megadrive titles. I personally only really remember two games on the Mega-CD being any good. Snatcher was one, and Sonic CD was the other. OK, so Sonic CD did fall into the category 'enhanced version of earlier Megadrive game', but it was the only game to do it right. And boy, did it do it right.

Take a simple concept like Sonic the Hedgehog's smooth speedy platformer. Now let's add a few things that require a lot of extra data space to accommodate - graphical enhancements are old hat, a CD-quality soundtrack, meh. OK, let's produce the CD soundtrack properly with an actual band, and lyrics and stuff. Commonplace nowadays, but at the time it was something special. Now let's add a few extra special stages, some FMV intros and endings - it's still just Sonic with bells on. Then someone came up with the idea... hang on, Sonic can run really fast. How about having him outrun time itself?

Getting to, and beating the last level in Sonic CD is actually quite simple - seven zones, three acts each with a boss at the end of each zone. But that'll only get you the 'bad' ending - to get the good ending you need to not only collect all seven time gems (similar to the old Chaos Emeralds), but in every act you need to somehow travel back to the past, undo all of Robotnik's wrongdoing, and then return to the present to ensure a good future. In order to do this you need to pass a 'past' or 'future' emblem and then maintain top speed for a few seconds, which is a lot harder than it sounds on the later levels which become more and more claustrophobic and maze-like as the game goes on. Each non-boss act has a past, a present, a bad future and a good future, and the boss acts have two versions each depending on whether you managed to successfully alter the zone's destiny in previous acts. In total, that's 70 levels! Remember that soundtrack I mentioned? Each time period for each zone has a different theme tune. There were also a hell of a lot of graphical enhancements and dozens of new sprites (including a mini-Sonic for when he gets shrunk in the second half of the final zone.) Basically, Sonic CD served as a masterclass for Mega-CD developers at the time on how to really stretch the new hardware's capabilities and make a wonderfully fun game at the same time. On a personal note, Sonic CD contains possibly the most difficult boss level in any Sonic game for years to come - the high speed obstacle race between Sonic and his robotic counterpart at the end of Stardust Speedway is infuriatingly difficult, and a welcome change from most other Sonic bosses which simply involve twatting one of Robotnik's vehicles enough times to make it explode.

Of course, like all good retro-games, the game is still available today. It's been re-released on the Playstation 2 and the Gamecube as part of various Sonic multi-game collections, but was re-made in 2011 and re-released on Android, iOS, Steam, Windows Phone and XBox 360. The updated version adds a few enhancements, such as being able to play as Tails, the choice of Japanese or US soundtracks, some cosmetic changes such as a higher quality FMV opening and Sonic 2's spin dash physics which hadn't actually been written at the time of the original game's development. So if you want the best possible experience of playing this game, rather than finding an emulator, grab yourself an Android device, preferably one with a USB port so you can plug in a proper control pad. You can always try and get hold of an original copy for Mega-CD, but good luck with that one, I'm certainly not selling mine.

Super Mario World

OK, I admit, this website is positively grumpy these days. So I've decided to start writing some gumpf about things I like. I'm going to begin with a series of three blog posts reviewing my favourite entries in long-running video game series.

I'll start with Mario. Many consider the original Super Mario Bros on the NES to be the best Mario game. Younger players may consider New Super Mario Bros on the Wii to be the best. Many of my peers consider Mario 3 to be the best. I disagree - my favourite Mario game by far is Super Mario World, the first Mario game for the SNES.

It's very similar to Mario 3 in gameplay style - rather than going from level to level it actually had an ‘overworld' mode which allowed you to choose which path you took through the game - except this time the nonlinearity went into overload. There are so many hidden secrets in this game it's almost impossible to find them all. You can simply go from level to level completing them one after the other and eventually end up at the end, but you don't get anything like the whole game if you do that. I believe the total number of levels in Mario World is 96, but I could be wrong. As I said, I've never actually found them all.

The other major addition to Mario's universe from this game onwards is Yoshi. Yoshi serves as a companion character and if you find him in a level you can ride him to the end. Unlike Mario Wii you can actually take Yoshi between levels, although you can't use him to fight bosses or navigate ghost houses. As the game progresses, you'll find four different Yoshis - the green one we all know and love, a red one that can spit fire, a yellow one that can stomp and create earthquakes, and a blue one that can fly. Yoshi is actually essential for reaching some of the secrets. And sometimes it's emotionally scarring, such as the hidden exit from Cheese Bridge which requires you to dismount Yoshi mid-flight, allowing Mario to access the hidden goal and poor Yoshi to plummet to his death. Interesting piece of trivia: Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of nearly every decent game Nintendo have ever put out, claims that he always wanted Mario to be able to ride a dinosaur, but he had to wait for the SNES's superior hardware to be able to program it without sacrificing speed or gameplay.

As if finding hidden exits to levels in order to progress on a different route wasn't complicated enough, Mario World has ‘switch palaces', which make extra platforms appear in other levels. The first switch palace is near the start and quite easy to find, but the others are hidden quite well, and some hidden sections in early levels aren't accessible until you activate a later switch palace, meaning that you need to revisit levels you thought you'd completed. And for the pro players there's the hidden star world, allowing teleportation to all other zones, and the special zone which adds an extra eight levels to the game. Using the star world it's actually possible to complete the game and beat Bowser in only 12 or so levels, if speedruns are your thing. This game has an outrageous level of depth, and even when you've completed it, you haven't actually. I still play this game some 20 years later.

So for those who like Mario games but haven't played Super Mario World, you could do a lot worse than have a go. You can get it on the Game Boy Advance (as ‘Super Mario Advance 2') or if you have a Wii you can download it from the Wii Shop as a Virtual Console game. Obviously if you're into true retro you can get a SNES on eBay and get the original game, or if you don't mind breaking the law you can probably find a ROM somewhere, there are SNES emulators for pretty much anything these days, including most phones.

This is not just any old box

May be old hat to some, but yesterday I witnessed, for the first time, a show on ITV entitled "The Cube". Basically, the idea is that a contestant, cheered on by a group of his mates who are there for no apparent reason at all, stands in a hoofing great glass cube and has to perform some menial task. Think Crystal Maze with absolutely no imagination. And I mean no imagination because the tasks range from 'press the button when the light comes on' to 'pick up some balls and put them in a tube'. It's possibly the most unintentionally hilarious example of polishing a turd that I've ever seen, as the whole thing is filmed with unnecessary slow motion, outrageous CG augmentations and even bullet-time shots. There are strategy conversations with the host, Phillip Scofield, which cover the task down to virtually sub-atomic level, futuristic theming, and lots of pulse-pounding bass in a vain attempt to disguise the fact that you're watching a bloke in a box picking up some plastic balls.

It has a sort of 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' feel in that the tasks themselves last seconds but it's dressed up with so much bullshit by the host and by the format of the show (and almost US-levels of commercial breaks) that they somehow manage to stretch 10 minutes of actual games across a whole 60 minutes of channel time. Again, borrowing from Millionaire we have the 'cash ladder' graphics (rendered in post-production on to the shot as if they are visible to the contestant) and the 'lifelines' which in this game involve 'Trial Run', allowing a contestant a chance to try a game before comitting to it, and 'Simplify' which involves - er - picking up less balls, presumably.

I've said it before and I'll say it again... I'm so glad we still have the BBC, or innovation on TV would have been dead long ago.