"Pele's Soccer" and Other Retro Footie Games

Recently at work, a group of 32 lucky punters took part in some kind of FIFA14 World Tournament. The game itself is very life like, it almost pours off the screen into the real world, and the moonlighting managers (three hour lunch break today eh chaps?) sit and cheer like real fans.

Am I taking part? Am I watching? Like hell.

For me, the shiny modernity of a modern football game just doesn’t cut it. It has no quaintness, no charm, and frankly if you like football that realistic, why not just go and play in the garden for pity’s sake?

I liked my football games a little more old school. Not that I was any kind of gamer now, then, or ever, but as any kid does, I enjoyed playing on my friends computer’s, and soccer type games actually offered some of the few decent opportunities for live head to head contests.

It goes all the way back, in fact, to the 70s, where visiting my father’s house I came across a classic Atari cartridge console. It was the second video game I’d ever seen, after an early “Pong” console on holiday in Arran, and it belonged to the son of a very famous footballer of days gone by. My stepbrothers used to borrow it, and I loved it, especially the “Combat” cartridge with the biplanes.

The game that got played the most was the first football game, the inimitable “Pele’s Soccer.” No flash manager mode here, you were limited to selecting a formation of, er, 1-2 as your men, shown in plan view as hexagonal blocks with sticky-out little feet, were clearly skewered together in a fixed equilateral triangle, kidneys impaled. It didn’t seem to stop them running, as they flew up and down the pitch accompanied by a marching little sound like a centipede tap-dancing. The round ball was a square and only travelled in straight or 45 degree lines (much like England) and a shrill whistle blasted out of the screen if it went out of play.

It's all action on the wing

The scoring of goals, a relatively easy business as the console controlled goalkeeper had the speed of a shrivelled slug, was signalled by a computerised fanfare, and firework display graphics nicked from the advert breaks on the Benny Hill show.

I say scoring was an easy business, I should have added “if you were playing me” because I hardly ever caused Benny Hill expressions of goalular delight, while my stepbrother and his cousins would regularly stuff twenty past me in an eight minute game. I always tried to claim it wa because I had the crap joystick where the handle grip would come off.

They would say it was because I was crap. They were right.

I played other olde school football games on various platforms. “Football Manager” on the Sinclair ZX81 offered, um, a blurry grey screen interrupted by score reports and the chance to manage Newport County, but it was the progenitor to one of the most successful game series. The Spectrum version had highlights; black or red stick men either scoring or not scoring, in very jerky basic.

“Match Day” on the Spectrum was a real cut above any previous game, however. It was probably the first to have anything even approximating playable, realistic action, and you could use Panini 82 World Cup annuals to name and commentate upon all your players - “And what a goal for Boniek!!!”. You could even play on a black pitch, but too bad about the unstoppable goals from throw ins.

That were scored against me by my friend. In great numbers. I never won a game of this either.

Scoring in "Match Day". Just like I never did

“Pele’s Soccer" was still the best though. The great man even endorsed it. That’s how good he thought the three impaled hexagons in a triangle were.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 30.07.14

Painting the New Worlds of Space

Space is just out there waiting, an undiscovered, unspoilt quantum wilderness. I’ve written before about a planet of poets, trying to poet their way to a new society and watching the crops they sowed wilt in a blight of pretentsion.

Where do artists fit in in this creative universe? Well, I figure perhaps the best place would be the asteroid belt, great grey rocks that may soon turn out to be the future prosperity of Earth as the corporations mine them out for iridium, titanium and all manner of valuable metals.

But in the meantime, they are lifeless boulders with the complexion of ashes. From the size of footballs to hundreds of kilometres across.

Ready, and waiting, for interplanetary gentrification. Enter the artists.

“Art for an Intergalactic Race” proclaimed the flyers in every city. “One Small Step for a Man, a Giant Leap for Human Culture” was emblazoned on giant banners over the motorways/freeways/interstrada. “Leave Your Mark on God’s Creation” was painted down the side of a skyscraper in Salt Lake City. Applicants were required to do nothing more than proclaim their fitness, after all, there were plenty of asteroids to go round…

Every artist is given a small spaceship and a very large supply of paint, special paint that can coat with thick colour in layers only a molecule thick. The spaceships are on preprogrammed autopilot so all the artists have to do is eat their freeze-dried space food and urinate into a rubber hose. It is a very boring voyage, and all the artists have to do is talk to twelve other artists of their choice. All these thirteen way conversations are beamed back to Earth to be broadcast on very very earnest radio stations in the dead of night, listened to by no-one but a few insomniacs and deranged cultural commentators.

Eventually each spacecraft arrives at its randomly allocated asteroid, and every artist disembarks to begin their project under a glittering hail of stars. All wear spacesuits part from the Japense conceptualist Umagi who walks out of his spaceship naked and allows his decompressing intestines to form a ribbon around a minor planet the size of a house.

“Is he encompassing the asteroid, or is the asteroid encompassing him?” was the debate back on earth.

Other artists went for entire coatings of one colour, including one who claimed to have used transparent paint. One had taken along some of Rothko’s ashes, and used two colours before he realised he had hung the asteroid upside down. Abstract space squiggles - very tedious and predictable - decorated others, while another carved out the huge asteroid Vesta into the likeness of female genitals and coloured them in crimson reflective paint. He thought he was celebrating womanhood on an unprecedented scale. Most said he was a sad exploitative old man.

Asteroids ended up as moon sized pastoral scenes, fluffy clouds above fluffy sheep, green fields on a bedrock of scheiss and silicate. Thee are impressionist asteroids, expressionist asteroids, and a descendant of Duchamp urinated on the surface of one and said that asteroid was now both a urinal AND a work of art.

The urine froze into yellow space crystals before it hit the ground.

Asteroids were red, asteroids were blue, asteroids were Mondrians, others were Koons.

The asteroid that eventually caused a mass extinction on Earth was a Vettriano...retro dancers on the beach wiped out all life, as others had previously thought Vettriano had wiped out at.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26.07.14

The Unquiet Mind in the Universe

I'm not right in the head today.

I'm full of tics, twitches and glitches. Feel very uneasy.

I can get down on it sometimes, he thought of heading back into an awful job, and all that stuff. Modern day George Orwell in the workplace of dead souls.

And then you try and "think of the positives" to use an awful cliche. But there are some...the anxious mind, the Tourette's  mind, is one that is closesly tuned to the movement of the universe.

Every twitch, every judder, every flip thought of panicky thought, is the mind picking up a neutrino, or a graviton, or a Higgs boson. A major attack of tics is the intersection of the rippled, uneven edges of two universes within the eleventh dimension, causing all the n-s and p-s and superstrings to vibrate.

A major convulsive Tourette attack with yelling and raging, is a more substantial universe collision, resulting in a big bang somewhere in the multiverse.

Astronomers listen! Put way your expensive detectors and enormous tanks of dry cleaning fluid deep underground. Turn off your LHC. Just use your eyes.

And look at me.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/07/14

The Intricacies of Multi-Dimensional Yoga

Just down the road from me is a yoga studio, yes that’ll be the place, another of those middle class emporia of spirituality, an overheated pine floored sweat box, where people get convo-knotted while things happen with their chakras.

All the lazy cliches any jealous, stiff as a board writer might fingerspit on to his keyboard as he feels his back begin to ache yet again, the fool. Yet, I always feel a faint contempt, spritzered with a splash of envy as I cycle past the yogistas every Thursday, either arriving or leaving, purple and green mats rolled up in a professional manner, leggings on the women, loose Boris Becker type shorts on the the men.

And yes, the cliche spits out again, there is more than a whiff of “the organic” about most of them.

The thing that amazes me is the number of them. Not that there’s many people interested in yoga in this town, but that they can all fit into the tiny end terraced house the studio is located in. It really is small, it must be like a yoga tardis up there to have so many people doing sun salutations in a two up two down.

This led me to wonder - perhaps the studio isn’t extra dimensional, but the yoga practitioners are.

Imagine, when doing your bow position, or dying dog, or cervix of the moon (half or full), in a crowded studio full of sweat trained buttock leggings shoved into your face, how much more comfortable it would be if you could alter your quantum state to actually move your ankles through your things, or sink your head back right into your back. Do the standing splits and pull your calf through your head, and that of the ripe old hippy next to you.

As well as alteration of quantum state, utilising my beloved eleventh dimension would enable more yoga folk to fill the space, than there is actual three dimensional space. But in order to maintain the eleventh dimensional bubble, they have to carry out ultra low frequency Hindu chants that warp space time and cause earthquakes on the far side of the world.

Sometimes the yoga carried out is of such intensity, the dimensional bubble opens up completely into the brane dimension, and the yogis can communicate with other alien contortionists...invertebrates who can fold up their 256, light year long tentacles into a the nucleus of an atom, insectoids who carry universes instead of wings within their shells and thus cause a big bang every time they do a cobra position.

There are even universes where Lycra itself is a highly developed life form.

No wonder the yogani look so contented when they come out of their tiny studio, mats dripping. While I scoff, their spiritual antics have indeed taken them to a higher plane of existence.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.07.14

Who Thought "Strippers versus Werewolves" was a Good Idea?

I've been watching this film for about 15 minutes, and the insult level is like Bernard Manning defecating on the graves of every ancester I've ever had.

I've been known for saying how much I enjoy cheap Brit Horror genre flicks, and efforts like, say, "Community" with Jemma Dallender, are characterful, quirky and enjoyable. They even sometimes manage to be disturbing too, witness "Sawney, Killer of Men" as well as the aforementioned "Community" with its human-nourished super cannabis plants.

"Strippers versus Werewolves" however, is like a Hollyoaks producer thinking that he needed slightly stronger stroke material, and getting on the phone to Ali Bastian's agent while sucking on a pair of transparent heels.

Ms Bastian, who unbelievably is the second most credible actor in this movie - behind a tying Sarah Douglas from Supermaan 2 and a Steven Berkoff who shows up for five minutes presumably to pay for printer cartridges for his latest theatrical script - teams up with such luminaries as the "Injury Lawyers 4 U" man and a bunch of what look like Page 3 girls trying their "hands" at acting.

Thrown in some Queen Vic background extras in speaking parts, and prosthetics stolen from a skip behind a hairdressers, and you have a feast of cretinism that a hydrogen bomb couldn't erase. For some reason I find the most hateful thing being the scene wipes consisting of a silhouette of a stripper, or crappy claw marks.

It really marks it out as a production of quality.

The ironic thing is that if it is designed to have a titiallatory air about it, then anyone who gets off on this movie must have a ridiculously low level of eroticism, because the whole movie is more vanilla than ice cream. I've had more hardcore experiences buying Barr's Cherryade for 29p in Poundstretchers.

The fact that it's on SyFy, rather than the Horror Channel, tells its own story.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.07.14writing, am writing, horror, sci fi, 

Junk Shop Sci Fi DVD Hunts

Amazon et al has taken a little of the fun I get out of looking for sci fi movies.

Sci Fi movies are difficult to find on DVD. They may be shown on TV a lot, but even major films like "The Forbidden Planet" are a swine to find in the UK.

But that's what makes the finding of them so exciting when you do.

To me Amazon and the Internet is cheating, and judging by the difficulty in finding the said "Forbidden Planet" on Region 2, not that much use for some of these films.

Instead, I plough through markets, charity shops, junk shops, and pawn shops. Sure, Cash Converters may be full of what the downtrodden and addicted have discarded during society's downward spiral and is thus full of mainstream action and JCVD and Seagal, but heck I picked up the admittedly non-classic Species 2 there for 75p the other day. And Zardoz, way back when, nestling amidst "Wayne Rooney's Golden Goals" and "Carp Tips".

My profit in the misfortune of others.

Market stalls are great too. There's a couple of great ones that visit my home town...one where the DVDs are a bit more expensive and loosely sorted by genre - hello "War of the Worlds" 1953 style - and another one that is a hodge podge of plastic boxes stuffed with movies so tightly you can't actually look at them without trapping your fingers.

Another trader offers electric guitars and DVDs, got 2010 here wild admiring a really nice classic red Stratocaster. Another has horror DVDs a plenty, but I only buy classics, not "Boy Meets Girl Who Then Nails Her To A Spiky Chair" type material.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for

You can get all sorts of great stuff at Charity Shops, but I often find the obscure ones have the best stuff, and even then you have to be quick - "Quatermass 2" disappeared from "Save the Children" in the time it took me to go 5 minutes to an ATM. Oxfam have great stuff sometimes, but folk know to hunt there, among the classic vinyl and Skorpions albums with horrific covers. Lesser known charities in out of the way places can often be the best.

Junk shops are great too. Most don't really have movies, but you can be lucky if someone has got fed up and emptied their house of media on a whim. I love these places anyway, the owner often ignorant of the wonder he has, the dust, the oddities, collections of random ephemera.

But, none of them ever has Forbidden Planet

Copyright BloodyMulberry 09/07/14

The Spine

JG Ballard talks in the "Drowned World" how travelling down the spine is travelling back in time, back through evolution to the Jurassic, Triassic, Silurian...Devonian.

An injury to the spine takes you back in time, and forward too. It renders you helpless, a simple muscle pull leaving you an occasionally twinging, shrieking child or an elderly person spilling tea or soup down themselves as they sit down. A glimpse of hopeless past, helpless future, at the mercy of carers and family - if you have any.

Why are we still so vulnerable? We should have evolved past this flimsy calciferous entity within us, one that can paralyse us if it goes wrong. Should it now have been replaced with something constructed from carbon fibre or titanium alloy? Must we be a slave to this ironically invertebrate prawn like structure within us? 

Our livelihoods and basic functionality depend on this weak, vulnerable, hopeless thing? And we have to suffer the pain when it goes wrong?

Pah. I'm getting a new one...I shall make one myself. Maybe even lego is preferable to this.

Copyright  Bloody Mulberry 05.07.14