videoGaiden do America

As far as I know, the only place videoGaiden ever aired was in Scotland. And even then, I only noticed it when the Christmas Special just so happened to bring the venerable Dominik Diamond – with appropriate fanfare – to my screen while channel surfing. “What on earth is this?”

Way back in the 1990’s: GamesMaster was teenaged geek’s must see TV. I remember complex discussions the next morning in German class at school about whatever games had been dealt with in the last night’s episode. That must have been 1992! It only seemed natural that gaming deserved its own early evening blockbuster. It had the shelf space at the newsagents, and the cavernous bunkers in the high street record shops, so why not? And yet when the show was finally axed after its seventh season, there would not be a replacement. There still isn’t.

Despite the thriving place gaming has today, you have to go online to see it talked about.

Meanwhile, for the last few years, BBC Scotland – the local division of everyone’s favourite state-run media conglomerate – had been sneakily airing this little gem where I’d never notice it. It wasn’t just me either: you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’s aware of its existence even in Scotland! The special which I fortuitously saw was itself on at some daft time, and our meeting was pure coincidence. But it didn’t take long at all to realise there was something to this that I liked. Best of all, they keep all their stuff on the website. (If your IP address is in Britain, apparently, or of course YouTube may be able to help.)

Another new fan of the show just so happens to be Stephen, the friend who made last month’s machinima with me. After going through the show’s archives – and its online-only predecessor Consolevania too – we had enough to go on to give The Movies another try. Hunter and Rayorg in particular inspired our little endeavour, if you’d like to check it out.

Do beware though: the in-jokes for those not already familiar with Jeff Gerstmann’s infamous departure from GameSpot (and subsequent project: the Giant Bomb), Rab and Ryan’s games critique style, and said Hunter and Rayorg’s great saga; may prove mildly bewildering. We did though ensure that the Scottish dialect component was up to scratch, so if you can put up with twisted textual swearing: have at it.

A message to BBC Scotland: if you keep us plied with videoGaiden, I can forgive you Newsnight Scotland. Do not try my patience! Perhaps putting it on sometime a little less daft – and maybe advertised before its last / maybe even last ever episode – could help bring in those rare viewers? Just a thought.

A Night at the Machinima

Until this weekend I'd never heard of a little game called The Movies. Wikipedia has the details as always, but in short it's a something of a cross between the Sims and Theme Park, at least to my rather outdated feel. There are two games to it: first a build things and train people game like so many before, and second the good part; which is what we spent an evening on.

I was at a friend's who had just recently picked up The Movies on a budget title impulse. He already had a game in progress where he'd been attempting something of a Harry Potter remake, with actors tailored as best as he could approximate them given the game's often clunky tools. Since he already had that progress saved, I asked if we could try making a new feature, borrowing the cast and sets he'd already spent the time constructing.

The concept we settled on was the Hitman. The games have a film noir feel to them, and having seen the limitations of this Movies title, that was pretty much the recipe to escape the worst of those. Dialogue is made a morass of mumbling Simlish, fist-fights and swords are pretty dodgy, cars are very visibly filmed against rolling backdrops, and you've never really quite as much control over the camera or the actors as you'd want. But hey, it's there, and being a challenge it's not without its charm.

What we came up with over the course of four hours then was a dark tale of the solitary assassin, doing his work in a city of eternal darkness and eerie mists. The fellow who had earlier been cast as Harry Potter duly shaved his head and donned the all black suit of an urban professional … albeit with double breasted jacket and a bit more flamboyance than we'd have preferred given a broader wardrobe. The ginger lad was recast as the trigger happy law, which seemed to suit him. While the girl – I'm not a Harry Potter fan myself so I can't ever remember the names – was vamped up something special as the mandatory mysterious woman such movies need just as much as guns and nonchalance. A little far fetched maybe, but I couldn't help from choosing the black afro and Vampira combo!

The story evolved as we were planning the scenes: each of which is a moderately customisable pick from a fairly broad menu for each set. All was going well by the time we'd finished the planning phase, though it was not to last. One thing we'd forgotten was a director! You need one "in game", despite your own essentially directorial control. We nominated an untrained cast member who can be seen as the janitor with broom in the subway. Far more consequential however was our negligence of the extras. We'd been cunningly trimming them from scenes and actions in the planning phase, only to discover with horror when our little sims did the actual filming that at least some of these deleted positions were still there. A ginger haired lass in garish miniskirts was a repeating feature … single-handedly responsible for our deleting the hitman's shots in the car chase sequence as she was inexplicably sitting in the passenger seat for all to see! She also accompanied the cops down the subway stairs, a ludicrous arm waving accomplice as they approached with guns drawn. A final discovery – which had us in stitches when the scene was shooting – was that the female cop was chased against the subway car's door by a Swamp Thing of all the apt bloody luck! Argh! Ed Wood, your genius lives on this game all right.

Post production cured most of the trouble though. In fact this side of the game was better than I was expecting … by then. Your control is a lot more direct, so my able offline editor friend could trim the shots from appalling cheesiness down to their moments of passable drama and symbolism. The music choice and timing was also better than we'd hoped. While the details were being done, I quickly cobbled together a script for the all but silent short's much needed onscreen prose. While the rest of post production may have been about reducing cheesiness, I must admit I did ham it up a bit with some especially literal lines for the old man's sweet early 80's word processor. Indeed, it was the idea behind that computer's appearance which set up the tale in the first place.

I must say we were both quite impressed with how it finally turned out. We had a decent little noir for our evening of battle with the game. Savoured all the more for the knowledge of the horrors we had to cut out! If our virtual studio had been pressing DVD's, the out-takes for this one would be quite special.

If only I'd remembered to change the characters' names to our more fitting "Hitman" and "Vampira". The original idea had been for it to be a presentation by the Rank Xerox Organisation too, but building on another save game's deeds puts an end to that. Back to the very 20th century studio title then. I still remember the shorts we never made…

Anyway, without any further ado: the Hitman.