FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
‘Come and Buy My Toys’: David Bowie Monopoly is here just in time for the holidays
12.18.2020
06:18 am
Topics:
Tags:


A shot of David Bowie on the set of ‘Bing Crosby’s Merrie Old Christmas,’ 1977.
 
Well, it’s about time 2020 actually gave us some good news. Though it’s not actually from Mars (BOO!), a David Bowie Monopoly-themed game does exist, and yes, you can have one.

The Thin White Duke’s version of Monopoly came out earlier this year, first via an exclusive distribution with UK site Booghe. Sometime around the end of the summer, it found its way across the pond and can be easily found on all kinds of U.S. e-commerce sites. Now that you know you can actually have one, here’s the scoop on the gameplay for this Ziggy-centric edition of Monopoly.

First, speaking as a collector of Monopoly board games, one of the things geeks like me look forward to are the game pieces, and wham-bam, thank you ma’am, the ones created for Bowie Monopoly do not disappoint. There is Major Tom, an astronaut helmet, a rolled-up tie for Bowie’s 1993 album Black Tie White Noise, and a replica of the hat Bowie wore as Pierrot in the video for “Ashes to Ashes” and on the cover of Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), designed by Natasha Korniloff. Of course, there is a lightning bolt in honor of Aladdin Sane, a star to signify Bowie’s musical swan song, Black Star, and a skull, which of course, was often a Hamlet-esque Bowie stage prop. SOLD? Right? Not yet because as the saying goes “But wait! There’s MORE!” is in full effect here as Bowie Monopoly bends Monopoly’s classic gameplay just like many other versions of Monopoly have done over time.

In the case of Bowie-Opoly, instead of buying property, the squares on the board represent albums from Bowie’s vast musical catalog. Once you own one of his albums, you can then build stages (instead of houses) and then stadiums (instead of hotels) to increase the “rent” paid when other players land on your square. Other play includes hitting up Bowie on tour and hiring your crew and other musicians to increase your star power and bank account. There are also Sound and Vision cards (like the Chance and Community Chest cards), which bring both good and bad fortune to players drawing from the deck.

It’s hard to conceive there might be a Bowie fan out there who also digs board games that would not want a Bowie-themed Monopoly game. I should know; I am one of those people currently waiting for their very own Bowie-Opoly to arrive. Images of the Queen Bitch of Monopoly games follow.
 

 

 

 

Oh You Pretty Things!’
 

 

David Bowie’s performance of ‘Heroes’ as shown on ‘Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas’ in 1977.

Posted by Cherrybomb
|
12.18.2020
06:18 am
|
Ian Dury portrays a sperm in a video game, 1984
06.27.2018
11:13 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
I’ve never played the video game Deus Ex Machina, released in 1984 by Automata UK for the ZX Spectrum system—not only did I not own anything that could play ZX Spectrum games, I didn’t own any video game console or personal computer until years later. I was the kid who would instantly become transfixed by the Atari 2600 or Intellivision set whenever I visited a friend’s house—the friend in question was usually bored by the thing by that time.

Anyway, if I had played Deus Ex Machina after its release, I would have been exposed to the music of Ian Dury a decade or two before I actually encountered it. There’s no doubt that having Dury’s peculiar brand of geezer punk in my life at that point would have been a very good thing.

Deus Ex Machina, it seems, was a game of some ambition and excellence. The creator of the game, Mel Croucher, wrote a book about the game with the humblebraggy title Deus Ex Machina: The Best Game You Never Played In Your Life. Croucher was a true video game pioneer; trained as an architect, he established Automata UK in 1977 and released Pimania and Groucho before Deus Ex Machina. Dury’s son Baxter, a tween at the time who today is a musician of considerable note, was a fan of Automata UK’s products—which opened the door for Papa Ian to get involved.
 

 
According to Chris Priestman, Deus Ex Machina was “a surreal, hour-long journey from womb to grave adapted from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, about our insignificance and the impossibility of living a perfect life.” Dury agreed to record a track for the game, noting that he desired to help provide an alternative to the violent video games in the marketplace, which he characterized as “a load of old fucking electro bollo.” Croucher asked him “to play the sperm,” as he puts it in the book, and Dury recorded a track about fertilizer that can be heard if you heed the videos at the bottom of the page.

The author of “Spasticus Autisticus” suggested Marianne Faithfull as a possibility to be the voice for “The Machine,” but it didn’t work out—during the early 1980s Faithfull was in the throes of serious drug addiction.

More, plus video evidence after the jump…....
 

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
06.27.2018
11:13 am
|
Bloody brilliant Nintendo TV ads from the early 90s starring Rik Mayall
06.12.2018
08:04 am
Topics:
Tags:


A photo of actor Rik Mayall (RIP) as his namesake Rik in UK television show ‘The Young Ones.’
 
Actor Rik Mayall, whom we lost four years ago this past Saturday, will never be forgotten thanks to his lasting gift of making us laugh at his own, beautifully executed expense. During his career, Mayall played wild fictional characters with enviable viciousness especially his highly-quotable namesake Rik on UK series The Young Ones and for most American audiences, his role in the much-loved doleful comedy, Drop Dead Fred. So when Nintendo made a power play in the UK in the early 90s to try to compete with popular rival Sega, they hired Mayall to appear in a series of television commercials. According to the website Nintendo Life, the company hoped using Mayall as a spokesperson would help them appear less “family friendly” to consumers.

Not only the star of the commercials, Mayall helped write dialog for many of the ads along with Black Adder producer John Lloyd. At the time Mayall was one of the biggest celebrities in the UK, and Nintendo lined his pockets generously for his work which Mayall used to buy a house he nicknamed “Nintendo Towers.” Seven or so spots were shot over five-weeks, and more were planned, but Nintendo’s Japanese owners didn’t “get” Mayall at all and ended his contract with the company. Since I’m fully confident our Dangerous Minds readers get Rik Mayall I’ve posted footage of his nutty Nintendo commercials below. Game ON!
 

 
HT: Nintendo Life

Posted by Cherrybomb
|
06.12.2018
08:04 am
|
Title screens for made-up Nintendo games we’d like to see
06.06.2018
12:52 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
After the video game crash of 1983, it was Nintendo more than any other manufacturer that showed the way forward for video games. Today there is a whole generation for whom Nintendo Entertainment System games from the late 1980s that supplied the key formative experiences, with such homegrown hits as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. Unlike its main predecessor Atari, Nintendo was highly aggressive about pursuing licensed games based on movie and TV franchises, such as Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles, Batman, The Simpsons, and Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

A while back a blog called VGJunk created some amusing title screens for licensed NES video games that never existed.

In some cases (Alien) it’s all too easy to imagine what the gameplay might be, but in many of the others, it’s a little harder to imagine. Does The Shining have a level in Dick Hallorann’s bedroom? In Ghost World, is the final boss Blues Hammer? Does They Live have a no-fighting bubble gum mode? So many questions!
 

 
More of these delightful NES games that never were, after the jump…...
 

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
06.06.2018
12:52 pm
|
Amazing ‘naughty’ French card game about sex from the 1960s
04.19.2018
09:42 am
Topics:
Tags:


Est-ce que celà vous regarde? // Does this concern you?
 
Here’s a ribald glimpse of the swinging Sixties from the land of yé-yé, la France! The title of this card game is La Grivoise, which translates as “The bawdy wench” or something like that. The women initiate the action by taking a red card and reading aloud the question to the men, who answer with the blue cards. I think. The notion of mixing and matching answers has some vague resemblance to Cards Against Humanity but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.
 

 
On the package, pictured above, the text reads, “Un jeu marrant! pour rire et s’amuser,” which means, “A funny game! To laugh and have a good time.” My French is OK, but I must confess I didn’t understand everything. I used Google Translate where I wasn’t sure, so don’t blame me if the English renditions of the phrases suck. The pictures and the general vibe are really all you’re gonna need, though.

You can actually buy an English “deadstock” version of this game on Etsy that appears to be identical. It costs only $8.99, which is kind of a steal if you’re in need of a sexy card game ASAP.
 

 
There are more cards, and you can see the entire set in the Flickr photostream of “patricia m,” who for years ran the indispensable Agence Eureka blog.
 

Un homme ferait-il votre affaire? // Would a man do your thing?
 
More after the jump…...

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
04.19.2018
09:42 am
|
Big in Japan: Cheesy vintage ads for arcade and video games from the 1980s
03.20.2018
10:49 am
Topics:
Tags:

01japvid.jpg
 
That moment in Field of Dreams when Kevin Costner hears a voice saying “If you build it, he will come” was really bad financial advice. You gotta advertise that sucker first before people will show up to hand over their hard-earned greenbacks. No matter how shitty the ad might be, the punters still gotta see what they’re getting first.

These cheesy vintage gaming ads from 1980’s Japan offered consumers a sense they were hot, sexy, in control, and (apparently) tough as fuck. Video games were a globalist wet dream. Here was a product like sport, movies, television, and pop music that created a global culture that offered the same experience to thumb-bandits in Tokyo as it did to those, in say, Moosefart, Montana. Here was the next evolutionary step from pinball machines.

History, traditional culture, and social standing were no longer the dominant forces in shaping young people’s lives. It was now about who could afford to buy a games consul and spend their money in gaming arcades. It was a revolutionary moment, unlike these ads for the likes of Nihon Bussan, Sega, and Capcom, which relied mainly on text, hot young women, muscled-up beefcake guys and dayglo bright colors to sell their shit.

 
05japvid.jpg
 
06japvid.jpg
 
02japvid.jpg
 
More vintage ads, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
03.20.2018
10:49 am
|
Depeche Mode, the Flaming Lips, others re-record their own songs in ‘Simlish’
02.13.2018
12:32 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
Back before the intricacies of the thoroughly made-up ancient language of Dothraki in Game of Thrones entranced the more dorkish among us, that same sort of person spent his/her time immersed in Simlish, a language that was created for the world of the Sims, a popular franchise created by Maxis that was first released by Electronic Arts in 2000 in which users, in the act of ensuring that their anonymized suburb dwellers took out the trash on time, often ended up ...... neglecting to take out their own trash on time (that’s how I processed the experience of playing the game, anyway).

The Sims was enough of a sensation that it spawned some sequels, such as The Sims 2 in 2004 and The Sims 3 in 2009. By the time those franchises got going, the concept of Simlish had gotten embedded in enough people’s minds that someone, most likely Maxis audio director Robi Kauker or EA music marketing honcho Steve Schnur, had the idea of enlisting some top music acts to record some of their songs in the language. (Noted spud Mark Mothersbaugh was also hired to compose the music for The Sims 2, but there was no Simlish component to his contributions.)

The expansion pack The Sims 2: Open for Business, released in 2006, featured songs by several well-known acts, all of which shared the trait of having their most fruitful period occurring well before the year 2000. Depeche Mode released a Simlish version of “Suffer Well,” off of 2005’s Playing the Angel. At least that was a new song at the time—joining them on the The Sims 2: Open for Business soundtrack were Kajagoogoo, with “Too Shy” and Howard Jones, with “Things Can Only Get Better.”
 

 
Later expansion packs saw the inclusion of such Simlish classics as “Future” by Cut Copy, “Free Radicals” by the Flaming Lips from their 2006 album At War With the Mystics, “Take Out the Trash” by They Might Be Giants off their 2007 album The Else, “Violet Stars Happy Hunting!” by Janelle Monáe, and “Na Na Na” by My Chemical Romance. You can consult a complete list of Simlish music here.

To get an idea of what a Simlish song would sound like, here’s a bit of “Na Na Na” in English and then the same portion in Simlish:
 

Drugs, gimme drugs
Gimme drugs, I don’t need it
But I’ll sell what you got
Take the cash and I’ll keep it
Eight legs to the wall
Hit the gas, kill em’ all
And we crawl, and we crawl, and we crawl
You be my detonator

Trubs nibby trubs nibby trubs
Weys a neeba
Westu nell anzu bar will enash and za weeba
Da megs eeba za
Mental ras gibba na
Ebwee ga ebwee ga ebwee ga
Du bas an doobie sa

 
In a press release, you can find the rather anodyne quotation from David Gahan, which runs, “Depeche Mode has always been open to new ways of sharing our music, but re-recording a Simlish-language version of ‘Suffer Well’ just sounded completely bizarre. Of course, that’s why couldn’t resist doing it.”

Here are some of the primary highlights from the Simlish songbook: 

Depeche Mode, “Suffer Well”:

 
Lots more after the jump…...
 

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
02.13.2018
12:32 pm
|
Rudy Ray Moore, Mark Mothersbaugh, Timothy Leary, Steve Albini, David Yow in ‘Duelin’ Firemen’


David Yow and Steve Albini on the set of ‘Duelin’ Firemen’ (via Bogart9)

The video game Duelin’ Firemen would have blown minds if it had been released in 1995. Think the Jodorowsky Dune of games. Much of the cast is straight out of the pages of Mondo 2000 or Fiz: Rudy Ray Moore, Rev. Ivan Stang, Mark Mothersbaugh, Timothy Leary, David Yow, Steve Albini, the Boredoms, Terence McKenna, Buzz Osborne, and Tony Hawk all had parts to play.

But unlike other worthy computer games that were actually produced in order to suck away vital months of my adolescence, such as DEVO’s Adventures of the Smart Patrol and the Residents’ Bad Day at the Midway, Duelin’ Firemen never passed from becoming into being. All that remains is a seven-minute trailer and a seven-inch record with David Yow on one side and the Boredoms on the other, both embedded below. From 23 years ago, here’s Rev. Ivan Stang’s account of the shoot:

12.21.1994- Run-n-Gun! filming
by Reverend Ivan Stang

I’ve been in Chicago for the last week, and although I took the modem with me, I never had time to plug it in. I was being an actor in a CD-ROM interactive video game called DUELIN’ FIREMEN being produced for the 3D0 system by a group of SubGenius filmakers and computer animator/vr programmers called Runandgun. It’s a combination of multiple-choice filmed scenarios and v.r. game situations, all taking place in Chicago while the entire city burns to the ground. I have played two roles in it so far—first an evil Man-In-Black and second, Cagliostro the evil 1,000-year old Mason whose spells started the fire. What sets this game apart from anything else I’ve ever seen is the TOTAL MIND-RAPE HILLBILLY SPAZZ-OUT STYLE of it. It makes Sam Raimi look like D.W. Griffith by comparison… makes Tim Burton look like Ernie Bushmiller. It is sick, twisted, weird and ‘Frop-besoaked like nothing on earth. It stars Rudy Ray Moore aka DOLEMITE as the main fireman with cameos by Tim Leary, Mark Mothersbaugh, Terrence McKenna, David Yow of Jesus Lizard and all manner of local Chicago freaks and jokers. (YES! I spent the week WORKING with DOLEMITE. We DO BATTLE in a scene and you get to “PLAY” us in the game section. Now is that cool or what. Of course, you’re probably too SOPHISTICATED to even KNOW who Rudy Ray Moore IS!!! (None of the crew did, although the winos outside the set recognized his VOICE.)) The real stars are the animation, fx and sets. It’s like a LIVING-SURREAL CARTOON from the mind of a CRAZY MAN (in this case, director Grady Sein). The Runandgun crew are like this commune of crazed hillbilly technoids. I had the time of my life. The game won’t be finished till July ‘95, though.

Stang

 

 
The trailer’s quality reminds me of the way videos looked on the screen of my Macintosh Performa during the late Nineties, except that back then they were about the size of a matchbox. What I’m trying to say is: prepare your mind and body for ugly fat-pixel video…

Watch after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
12.22.2017
06:57 am
|
‘60 Minutes’ loses its shit over D&D (not the demogorgon, though), 1985
11.14.2017
09:17 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
I’ve never really cottoned to 60 Minutes. I’ve always thought their approach was rather heavy-handed, pushing a simplistic line through bullying interviews and repetition of facts that might be considered innocuous when viewed in a sober frame of mind. One of the best takedowns of the 60 Minutes method comes from the talented writer Michael J. Arlen, who published a lengthy critique of the show in The New Yorker in 1977—and his criticisms stand up perfectly well in the present day, in my view. (You can read Arlen’s piece in his 1981 collection The Camera Age.)

In 1985 the show turned its attention to Dungeons and Dragons, and the results were predictably overwrought. The 1980s were an unusual time of “moral panic”—over drug use and satanism, sexual lyrics in rock songs and D&D and drunk driving—there was hardly an aspect of teens’ lives that parents couldn’t blow up into a huge threat to the safe and featureless suburbanism in which so many of the teens lived.
 

 
The 60 Minutes reporter on the case is Morley Safer, whose very calmness is an ideal conduit for the moral panic at issue. He idly puzzles over the funky-looking dice—one young enthusiast tells him that the 4-sided die is mainly used for damage from daggers and darts—before getting to the condemning testimonials, most heartbreakingly the sister of a teen who had committed suicide. An alarmist psychologist is trotted out—this one employed by the University of Illinois—I’m sure that such people would never use the moral panic to enhance their own bank accounts, no sir.

Fortunately, Gary Gygax himself is on hand as well, to supply a reasonable analogy to Monopoly, in which the money lost isn’t real. With the perspective of decades, it’s all too clear that D&D may at best have been a symptom of deeper problems like alienation and loneliness, rather than a driver of violent deaths.
 
Watch after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
11.14.2017
09:17 am
|
Buy your very own Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup can chess set
11.10.2017
11:11 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
According to Hans Ree’s book The Human Comedy of Chess, there was an occasion in the mid-1960s when Marcel Duchamp played a game of chess against Salvador Dalí in public, to a soundtrack provided by the Velvet Underground, at the behest of Andy Warhol. The context for this remarkable event was the display in 1965 of a work of Duchamp’s called “Hommage à Caïssa,” a readymade featuring a chessboard. The incident merits direct quotation, so here it is:
 

At the vernissage on the roof of the building on 978 Madison Avenue, Duchamp played a game of chess against Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol had the band Velvet Underground sent to provide background music. After the game, chess pieces were sent into the air by balloons.

 
It’s notable that Warhol himself didn’t play in the game—I can’t find a reference to Warhol playing chess anywhere, which doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

An early work of Warhol’s dating from 1954 is entitled “The Chess Player”—it looks like this:
 

 
It’s speculated that the work was executed at one of Warhol’s coloring parties, which were hosted at the trendy Serendipity 3 café.

After having been bombarded with multiple factoids involving Andy Warhol and chess, you will surely be primed to purchase the Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can Chess Set, which has recently been made available by Kidrobot and The Andy Warhol Foundation:
 

This chess set features Andy Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans as chess pieces on a pop of color chess board complete with felt accents. Each vinyl 3-inch Campbells soup can is labeled and printed on top with its corresponding piece to bring a pop art look to any game room.

 
Because the pieces are very difficult to distinguish from one another, they have little labels on the top with the words “ROOK” and “KNIGHT” or whatever.

Those on a tight Christmas budget will be disgusted to learn that the groovy plaything has a price of $499.99. Surely your landlord/mortgage officer will cut you a break this Christmas season?
 

 

 
More after the jump…...
 

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
11.10.2017
11:11 am
|
Page 1 of 17  1 2 3 >  Last ›