1993 was a year of ambitious beginnings. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra was founded and began rocking Christmas. In What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Leonardo DiCaprio made his debut in a major big-screen role. Square properly introduced the Mana series to U.S audiences with Secret of Mana. And I attempted to create my first videogame.
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I don’t like endings. I’m the kind of person who stays in the theater until the end of the credits, who re-reads books over and over and over again, who roams pointlessly through the rescued kingdoms of my videogame worlds. To me, when the screen finally goes black, or the last sentence ends, or the dreaded “Game Over” looms before my eyes, it feels like rejection – like the director, author, developer had revoked my passport to this other world. The curtain, so briefly pulled away, had been closed again, and once Virgil said “the end,” I was no longer allowed inside. (more…)
The five Halo titles developed by Bungie spoke of a much larger world beyond the confines of the console games. It was a place described in incidental dialogue among the marines of the United Nations Space Command, in computer terminals found on a gigantic alien installation called the Ark and in the live-action commercials for Halos 3, ODST, Reach, and the Neill Blomkamp directed “Landfall” live-action shorts. It was a universe described in glimpses and whispers. (more…)
I am a Simpsons purist. Any episode beyond season nine fails to maintain the same irony, humor and presence of its predecessors. Around this time, David Cohen went off to form Futurama with Simpsons creator Matt Groening while notorious recluse (and show genius) John Swartzwelder stopped writing the majority of The Simpsons episodes.
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The graphic novelization of Batman: Year One (originally published as Batman, issues 404-407) was two years old when I bought it in 1989, but according to the copyright page, the book was already in its fourth printing. I’m surprised my copy is still in such good condition, considering I got it when I was 12. Well, the spine does crack a little when I open it and it’s beginning to smell musty, but it’s lived a good life. (more…)
To anyone who’s seen Akira or Evangelion, the idea of Japan building a backup Tokyo is nothing new. It’s even fair to say, after the massive firebombing campaign of WWII, that the current Tokyo is, in fact, Tokyo-2. So it should only come as mildly surprising that Japanese lawmakers have proposed a backup Tokyo (Tokyo-3) to be built and presumably left vacant until disaster strikes. (more…)
“All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.”
–Robert Hass, Meditation at Lagunitas
Since Makoto Shinkai’s arrival on the anime scene, he’s created some of the most breathtakingly beautiful – and heartbreakingly depressing – feature films in the industry. He’s one of the few directors out there to regularly be compared to the great Hayao Miyazaki, and with each release the comparison becomes more favorable. Every single one of his films, however, has dealt with the very same theme: loss of love and disconnection over time and space. Even before he released 5 Centimeters Per Second (2007), some of his critics (particularly those named Daniel Imperiale) had begun to wonder whether the young anime auteur had anything else to say. (more…)
