Category: Post

     I’ve recently come across references to two video games that interacted with the player in a pretty unique way. I’ve never experienced either of these first hand, but I’m intrigued, and curious if other such examples exist.

     The first example I’ve seen referenced is 1993’s ‘X-Men’ for the Sega Genesis. I’ve read incomplete accounts of what exactly this ‘breaking of the fourth wall’ entailed in a few different places, but this is the most complete account I’ve found:

     “At the end of the level “Mojo’s Crunch,” you will be in a room surrounded by tv screens with Prof. X’s face on them. When the timer starts to run out, Prof. X will tell you to reset the computer. At this point press the RESET button on your Sega’s Genesis. You will see a screen that looks like binary code. After this fades out, You will then move on to the last level, Asteroid M.”

     AT least that’s the most coherent description I found of the goings-on. Anyone who grew up with the NES and it’s successors can relate to the horror of a mid-game resetting, which is why I was particularly enamored with this bit of ingenuity on the part of the developers.

     Ever vigilant in my efforts to be both nerdy AND thorough, I was curious how this oddity had been handled in the various Genesis emulators, so I did a bit of googling. It looks like it hasn’t been handled at all: “Sadly – emulators can’t emulate the soft reset function.”

     The other example of such weirdness involves a recurring character in the ‘Metal Gear Solid’ line of games – a character called ‘Psycho Mantis.’ From the wikipedia entry on Mr. Psycho Mantis:

     “When Solid Snake faces Mantis, Mantis demonstrates his psychic powers by breaking the fourth wall. In the pre-battle cut-scene, he activates the controller’s rumble feature, then reads the player’s memory card. Then, at the begining of the actual battle, Mantis yells “Blackout!” and causes the screen to go completely black except for the words Hideo (a reference to the director Hideo Kojima) in green all capital text in the top right corner of the screen, much like TV or VCR on-screen-displays. Many players mistook this to be a glitch in the game, while it was supposed to trick the player into thinking that he or someone else changed the TV or VCR input, as a slight attempt to throw the player off.

     The reading of the player’s memory card involves checking how often they’ve saved their game in reaching the battle with Mr. Mantis, and commenting on the relative wisdom or recklessness that this symbolizes. The card is also examined for specific game saves which are then commented on (“I can see into your mind. You like Castlevania, don’t you?”).

     According to various sources, the best method for defeating Mr. Matis involves configuring your memory card and controller connections, mid-game. Again, from the wikipedia entry:

     “The easiest way to defeat Psycho Mantis is to for the player to remove the memory card, plug the controller into the Player Two portal (which prevents The Parasite from predicting your battle moves) and equip both the FA-MAS and the Thermal Goggles (FA-MAS is useful for attacking Mantis with speed and power, while the Thermal Goggles prevent him from turning invisible on Snake [by detecting his body heat] and making Mantis unable to hide from your attacks). The battle should be a lot easier now, if not impossible to lose (on easier difficulties).”

     So, looking at this from a game design / programming perspective, we have the following: Leaving your controller in port 1 during the battle passes your button presses onto the logic code that controls Psycho Mantis — So he’s ‘reading your mind.’ The game will accept controls from the player 2 port without passing them on to the enemy’s artificial intelligence logic.

     This means that the designers assumed that the player would mentally extend the scope of the game they were playing to the physical space around them, based on nothing but subtle contextual hints.

     Crazy. And awesome.

Scene: A few years ago, driving on I-96 towards Detroit.

     Motorcycle comes screaming up behind me on the left. Swerves into my lane, cutting me off in ridiculously-close, Hollywood-novelty style. Is that enough? No, that is not enough. Said motorcyclist proceeds to POP A WHEELIE, and stand on his back pegs. This pose is maintained for the better part of a minute. Doing 80. On the freeway. I thought I was being attacked by Ghost Rider or something.

Scene: A few days ago, driving on a main road in Ann Arbor.

     Motorcyclist swerves from behind me, presumably because I was moving too slowly for him. Upon passing me on the left, motorcyclist appears to jump off the bike proper and SIT ON HIS HANDLEBARS for several seconds, before remounting his motorcycle. How is that even possible?! Don’t you have to have your foot on a pedal or something?!

     So: for some reason, my mere presence on the road apparently compels motorcyclists to do ‘tricks.’ Needless to say, this is extremely weird. Is this some sort of “You got served!” thing that motorcyclists do? Like “I just passed you! Here’s a trick to remember me by! I served you!” Perhaps.

     Ever since Readymade Magazine got my brain churning on the possibilities of DIY clocks, I’d been toying with the idea of having the minute and hour hands rotate entire transparent clock faces — to create some sort of evolving image. That’s as far as I ever got with the idea, so I was pretty excited to see that someone else has effectively finished the thought.

     The face of the Imbroglio clock consists of a soup of multi-colored shapes on transparent backgrounds, which rotate and convene hourly in such a way that the numerical representation of the hour is visible, however briefly. Definitely not the most functional clock, but endlessly appealing to my nerdy sensibilities. If it weren’t $120, I would be all over that shit.

     Anyway, the point of all this is to put this thought out there so that other internet wanderers might stumble across it and inform me of similarly evolving clock faces. That’s all. [via]

Update:

     This ‘bingo’ watch similarly plays with the idea of a rotating, semi-transparent clock face; and this binary clock implementation uses semi-transparent faces as well. The ‘Decider‘ watch also uses a face with transparent areas.

     Even more examples: The insanely expensive ‘Opus 8’ wristwatch uses a face with extended pins that push up segments to create a pretty sweet analog / digital marriage. Nadine Grenier, a student at ESAD Strasbourg, made a kinetic installation consisting of 500 clockworks, the hands of which line up every 12 hours to form a sentence in french, which roughly translates to ‘Time passes, and every time the time passes, there is something that fades.’ Similarly, Christiaan Postma has designed a clock that uses dozens of synchronized hands to spell the current hour. Finally, an as yet unproduced prototype for a clock with a single hand, perpendicular to the plane of the face. The hour, minute, and second hands are created in shadow via three rotating lamps.

Aw, hell, why not more: Clock faces that rotate to form a digital representation of the time (And again, as a product from Art Lebadev; and again, as a gallery show, and another), a clock face that self-destructs over the period of 100 years, a clock face with each hand’s center point attached to the end point of the previous hand, an LCD video screen-as-clock-face that shows the hands being redrawn, a clock face that rotates as one piece, using gravity and a ball to mark time, and a clock face designed to be used as a scheduling whiteboard, with an eraser-equipped hour hand.

     In the comments to a previous entry, someone pointed out that this week’s ‘This Modern World‘ strip contains a coded message. This past Friday, while killing time at a bar before a show, I accidentally opened the local ‘alternative weekly’ to this particular strip, and using the knowledge of the strip’s title and author (Tom Tomorrow) as a key, I decoded the message that runs along the bottom of each panel. The full, undecoded strip can be found here. To see the decoded message, simply click on the panel below (My decoding is in red helvetica).

     There’s a brief mention of the rogue ‘P’ in the message on Tom Tomorrow’s site:

     “(1) The news logo behind the aliens translates as gibberish because it is gibberish; and (2) Yes, apparently if you translate the crawl, I mistyped the word “moron” as “morpon.” And while I’m flattered that so many of you would take the time to figure that one out, I have to say, you’re scaring me a little bit here, people.”

     A less politically-pointed coded message can be found in nearly every ‘Spy Vs. Spy’ strip. The original artist, Antonio Prohias, ‘signed’ the strip in morse code. Interestingly, though the late Prohias (1921 – 1998) no longer pens the strip, his coded signature still appears in it.