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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Many thanks to guest poster Joester! Nice job. Joester posts may continue to appear on this blog from time to time.
I just got back from San Francisco, where Joester and I actually attended the same penny arcade.
The display on the right was called "Laughing Sal." The mannikin loomed and laughed demonically for an unnervingly long time on a single coin. This place is all about value for $$. Note the demented tourist that forced her way into the shot. The execution chambers provided dang good cartharsis for a quarter, but the Opium Den might have been my favourite display. When activated, doors and curtains opened to reveal all kinds of psychedelic horrors. I also very much appreciated the opportunity to play Pole Position again! Such a sweet little old racing game...I still remember every curve and oil patch.
Okay, my guest blog stint is almost up, but I do have one more thing to say. There’s an ad here for the new Star Wars film that says “ You Cannot Control Your Destiny”. Especially, I would add, if you’re making a prequel. Anyone remember the first Star Wars? Wouldn’t you have said that one of the themes of that movie was “you don’t have to work on your uncle’s space farm your whole life”, or “You Can Control Your Destiny”? A better blogger might find a way to tie this into the politics and social fabric of the day making some keen cutting observations, but I am but a lowly guest blogger and will leave that to the professionals.
The Penny arcade in San Francisco is totally great. It might seem like a tourist trap but it isn't – or it is but in a good way. There was lots of great stuff there, but the surprise was these execution games. You pay a penny (now a quarter) and the doors slowly open to reveal a deathly tableau of either a guillotine or a gallows. After a few nervous seconds the act is committed and the door closes. It's fucking awesome. Way better than any "head shot" in Splinter Cell. It's a perfect antidote to the knee jerk reaction to the violence in video games. Shit dudes, violence is a part of our culture like it or not (and if you need it for emphasis) beatch!
I started Prereview a couple of years ago, and I’m starting to ask myself the question, “How many uninformed reviews can one man write?” Prereview had it’s internet sensation moment in the sun about a year ago but my hits are way down now. By all indication I really should put it to bed, it was clever and fun but now it’s over. Or at least that’s what I think and then I’ll see a poster for "Beauty Shop” a (spinoff of Barbershop II staring Queen Latifa), or the Longest Yard Remake staring (inexplicably) Burt Reynolds, and the site will seem relevant again. So, I’ve decided to keep going until the movies get better, which I think should be about Christmas.
Whenever I go to an arcade now-a-days (yes, I'm going to post about video games again LM) I always end up in the "classic games" section. But I never play them. Sometimes just looking at Donkey Kong or Defender is enough to satiate whatever nostalgic nonsense I was craving, but mostly its because they don't have the games I want. I don't want to play Pacman, I want to play the crazy trackball football game with X's and O's that made your arm hurt. I want to play Zaxxon and the Red Barron, not centipede or Galaxia. What I really want to play is the above game that I have poorly drawn from memory and can't remember the name of. You were the triangle space ship that bounced off the walls, but I can't really remember what the bad guys looked like. You had a fire button and a knob that you could turn to change your direction and a thrust button. It was similar to but much better than asteroids, and a contemporary. If anyone remembers it let me know.
UPDATE: I FOUND IT! Spent way too long looking on KLOV but it was there! . It's called Omega Race and it's the only vector game by Midway - that's part of the reason it was so hard to find because I was assuming it was Atari who seems to have made most of the vector games. The other tricky thing was that the game is not a race, it's more like asteroids. Maybe they mean a race of peoples called "Omega". My drawings turned out to be pretty good. Now I have to find one on ebay
There's a sign that says "security camera" on the security camera at Walgreens (drug store chain). I tried to take a picture of it but the manager wouldn't let me. Maybe it's just as well, some things are better in the telling. Anyways, I keep trying to figure out what the sign is really saying. "We're spying on you, and we're telling you we're spying on you - in fact, we're telling you we're spying on you in the same font that we're telling you where the cold medicine is kept". Gotta love that.
The other day the local news ran a story about how crystal meth can be easily made from cold pills and kerosene. (Talk about responsible reporting). I have been fighting a cold and buying box after box of Advil Cold and Sinus, wondering each time how many I can buy before I'm on some FBI watch list. I keep making a big show of how sick I am each time I go in there to buy more, as if the crystal meth guys wouldn't think of doing that too.