The fantazmic wor(l)d of blog and longplays.

Blog. Sounds so questionable. Like a really tame term you can use at a party. "Yah, like, Stacy, oh my God, it was SO disgusting. We're just at this party and suddenly she just BLOGGED, right there, it was so gross I don't wanna think about it". "Dude, you blogged all over my shoes. "Oh man, I think I'm gonna blog."

Well, enough resistance on my part about the bite-sized web. Let's party, less coding.

So.

Back in the early 90's, I remember wanting to download a game for the PC called Mean Streets. Given the amount of digitized graphics and sound, pirating this thing was a job on its own at 2400 bauds. The first in the lineage of Access Software's titles, whose only surviving franchise today is Links Golf, or is it dead already. I remember seeing a "Walkthrough" posted on a local BBS. I was very excited about this because I had never heard of walkthroughs and believed that a Walkthrough would be watching somebody play through the entire game, or a simple script that would complete the game before your eyes. I was fascinated how all this could fit into a single 70k ZIP file. Well, of course, it didn't. It was, a text file describing how to 'get the powerup and win the game'.

All illusions will eventually come to be real with enough processing power thrown into the mix. For some odd reason, I made a random search for "Pitfall" on Google Video and was treated to a 'true' walkthrough of the entire game. Actually, they call it "longplays", the antithesis of a "time attack", also known as "speed runs" (an equally post-alcohol term). Thanks to emulation technology, skilled players of the old are finishing the great ones one more time for the masses in AVI or MP4 formats. I've been done with watching the Pitfall II longplay, I've not moved on to The Last Ninja, if not for skillz, than for the excellent musical score. If they made a game out of Urban Ninja, it should look like this. In fact, looking back at a lot of titles, it's blatantly evident that one person doing it's own thing will get a much more heartfelt game at the hatching point. So many games are a testament to this, the KO belonging with Eric Chahi's "Another World"/"Out of this world". Anyway, the videos make it look like it never really took any skill at all to plow through these games, and actually, it really did. Give the "Forbidden Forest" longplay a viewing, you can tell that it's all about knowing the exact timings else suffer many consecutive deaths with a free trip to gameover.

Soon, very soon, I will have a full course meal whilst watching someone take down Impossible Mission.

Check out http://www.c64-longplays.de.vu for the goodness that is longplays.