God is In the Wrist

Twitter Sonnet #76

Sure is a bad time for me to be sick.
I hope a lighter meal is all I need.
A Zelda fairy now'd be fantastic.
Why can't problems ever be solved with mead?
Calculators oftentimes will not help.
Much is done with Satan's power of sloth.
Water's more easy going with some kelp.
A cop can sing or bust crime but not both.
Loud chairs misunderstand their true function.
Chuckling ghost imps dance to cause chronic pains.
To winter air, dead trees apply suction.
Blood is the cranberry juice in your veins.
No man alone is a big yellow bird.
Green garbage monsters should not be disturbed.

Another video game Friday at Tim's. While he was playing Oblivion, I went through a bunch of old Nintendo and Super Nintendo ROMs I had on an old disk. It seems at one time Nintendo games were made from everything and I played a curiously goofy Jaws game that involved moving a little white diver about a small square of water, avoiding octopi gliding horizontally across the screen and collecting sea shells. The shells looked exactly like the shells in the Disney's Little Mermaid game, and I wondered how many little bits of graphics and programming were often reused.

The Bible Adventures game certainly seemed to have borrowed a lot from Super Mario Brothers 2 (or Doki Doki Panic), and I was briefly involved in the cartoon madness of Jochebed taking Moses to the river--controlling the woman speeding from one end of the screen to the other, lifting her baby like a prop as well as evil spiders and periodically throwing them. "Wow," I said to Tim. "Everyone's going to be Christian after playing this game."

The Wikipedia entry has screenshots, as well as this fascinating bit of trivia;

Bible Adventures is one of a very few games produced without a license from Nintendo. In order to bypass the NES's 10NES chip, which was intended to prevent unauthorized games, Wisdom Tree used technology licensed from Tengen which used a voltage zap to bypass the security mechanism.

Because the technology used in the cartridge was technically copyright infringement, the Bible Adventures cartridge was not sold through traditional video game retailers, and is thus a scarce collectors' item today.

What are the laws of man to 8 bit God? Well, thank heaven Wisdom Tree had the courage to go rogue and put repetitive, derivative God into the devilish grey boxes.

I played some WoW last night, then watched Blood: The Last Vampire, a rather short anime feature film by Production I.G., the same studio that makes Kimi ni Todoke. It's also very beautiful, though I think their works, like Kimi ni Todoke, the animated sequence in Kill Bill, and xxxHolic, that have less overt use of cgi, actually look far superior to Blood and Ghost in the Shell. There's a stiffness about the fusion of the two styles. But Blood's story is certainly better than average, nicely avoiding any time wasted on exposition and just showing through images and dialogue Saya's character and her relationship to the monsters, her strange sympathy with them coinciding with her commitment to killing them coming off as far more poetic this way than just another rehash of the common half demon versus real demons story. Though, as there are apparently a manga and anime series that follow the film, I'm sure a lot is eventually made more explicitly clear.

I see the film's concept is the result of a sort of contest among students of Oshii Mamoru, according to Wikipedia, and "The submissions of Kenji Kamiyama and Junichi Fujisaki became the basis for the upcoming film: a girl in a sailor suit wielding a samurai sword." Which seems pretty amazing to me as that describes about 80% of action anime. It's nice to see director Hiroyuki Kitakubo was given artistic license to take it somewhere interesting.

Well, I think I'm slowly weaning myself off caffeine. I managed to get by on just one cup of coffee yesterday and I'm going to see if I can do the same to-day.