Operation Ear Bleed #4

Adeva “Love or Lust” -this shit sucks. Period. *****

Adamski, Doctor “Musical Pharmacy” -weak ass eltectro shit ****

Adamson, Barry “The Negro Inside Me” -This is like eating a whopper…it fucking sucks. ****

Addict “Stones” -They use too much wah pedal. They need to use less suck. Fuck this is bad. *****

Aerosol Halo “When the Light Has To Fall” -Generic rock bullshit. Feed me gasoline instead please. *****

-cecilpaoli

National Game Registry 1974: Maze War

MAZE WAR
original platform
Imlac PDS-1
notable conversions
Xerox Alto (1977)
key personnel
Steve Colley
Howard Palmer
Greg Thompson
David Lebling

Maze War is notable for being one of the earliest network video games but more importantly the very premiere first-person shooter. Like the first video game, Spacewar!, the game was completed by students at the Massachussets Institute of Technology. As in many subsequent first-person shooters, the players navigate a maze and destroy each other with projectile attacks. 

(Alto version)

Maze War was inducted on March 18th, 2009.

Return to the National Game Registry to view more inductees.

National Game Registry: Xerox Alto

image: Mr. Gadget

This article features the best games released for the Xerox Alto as selected by the National Game Preservation Board and recommended for permanent preservation by the United States Library of Congress National Game Registry.

System: Alto
Manufacturer: Xerox
Debut: 1973
Nation of origin: United States

The Alto was an innovative computer designed for internal use at Xerox’s Palo Alto facility. Although never distributed commercially, the computer was highly influential on future home computers, in particular the Macintosh, which in turn influenced Microsoft Windows. These innovations include a graphical user interface, including a desktop. The Alto’s most famous contribution to the video game world was the second version of the original first-person shooter, which happens to be the only inductee released for the system:
Maze War

REFERENCES AND ADDITIONAL INFO

Visit the National Game Registry to view more inductees.

Three categories of compilations, as I see it

According to me, there are three kinds of compilation albums, but if there are other thoughts on the issue, I’d love to hear them.

1) THE ‘GREATEST HITS/BEST OF’ ALBUM (PS – BORING)
This kind of album doesn’t have to consist of actual hits but it’s basically just a collection of widely available or especially popular recordings by a group. Good for casual fans, expanding horizons without diving too deeply, or historical purposes. I don’t have a whole lot of these but I did use them to explore artists that I ended up getting into like Prince and The Smiths.

2) THE B-SIDES ALBUM
I always love these and wish they were more common. I have a lot of these, including lame Japanese-market releases like Morrissey’s ‘Rare Tracks’ (which Morrissey certainly was unaware of). These albums basically just group together single b-sides, outtakes, non-album singles, and rare tracks. The best ones do so with some rhyme and/or reason. The Beatles Past Master releases are arranged in chronological order, for example.

3) THE RECENTLY-RELEASED SINGLES ALBUM
This isn’t especially common anymore but until the 1960s, as I’ve babbled about many times before, most full-length LPs were simply collections of the 5 or 6 most recently-released singles by an artist. These releases are often basically studio albums that happened to be serialized in the form of singles. A semi-recent example is Morrissey’s ‘Bona Drag’ album from 1990. He basically released singles every few months over a couple of years without any album to connect them and then BAM out came ‘Bona Drag’. But why the hell does it have a couple of tracks taken from his previous studio album?!

4) COMBOS?
These are really annoying – the ‘let’s cover all of our bases’ type releases. The best example from my collection is the ‘Sounds of Science’ double CD by Beastie Boys. It’s a jolting, incongruous collection of hit singles, album tracks, b-sides, outtakes and even a brand new song or two – seemingly arranged completely randomly. LAME.

BONUS) BOX SETS
I might be dead wrong but there have been some really cool box sets released in the last 5-10 years. Some of these are complete works type things that just have EVERYTHING (album tracks, single tracks, outtakes) all in one place. I have releases like this for the Zombies, 1970s-era Black Sabbath, non-Island Records releases by Bob Marley & The Wailers and there are more I’m interested in. How about that awesome Nirvana box set from a few years ago? B-sides and outtakes galore! A lot of these box sets are really cheap compared to what they’d be if they were individually released singles. For example, I think my brother and mother found the Black Sabbath box set for me (for Christmas) for maybe $40 NEW. That’s only $5 per album! Even if it was actually $50 that’s only like $6+ per album.

Am I missing anything?

World Baseball Classic update

I wrote about the World Baseball Classic last week and here’s an update! Here are the teams that made it through to the second round: USA, Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Netherlands, Japan, Korea

And the eliminated teams: Canada (they have a good team but they were in a tough group with USA and Venezuela), Italy (no big surprise), Australia (no big surprise), South Africa (no surprise at all), Taiwan (a good team but in a tough group with Japan and Korea), China (no surprise at all), Panama (a good team but in the toughest group) and Dominican Republic (a HUGE surprise).

The biggest story of the tournament so far has been the Dutch team, which beat heavy favorites Dominican Republic TWICE in the first round. However, the incredible shock and awe they’ve been receiving is slightly patronizing as the majority of the team is from the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao, where baseball is the most popular sport. The Dutch were eliminated last night by USA.

Japan, Korea and Puerto Rico have been awesome. These teams have marched right through their opponents. Puerto Rico is unbeaten. Japan and Korea have only lost to each other, with Japan beating perennial favorites Cuba 6-0.

USA has been getting by on talent alone, NOT fitness. Most of the Latin American players played at least part of the Winter League Caribbean seasons and the Asian players started spring training in January and February. Meanwhile, the USA team (and probably the Canadian team) basically started training right before the tournament and their lack of fitness is obvious. It seems that with every passing game one or two American players picks up some injury that takes them out of the tournament. The possibility of having to FORFEIT has even been mentioned. Pathetic. Seriously, if you’re going to play in a pre-season tournament you have to train BEFORE everyone else. I’d rather have a team of upcoming wannabes that do the necessary training on the team than a bunch of superstars that show up with stiff joins and beer guts.

Dear Noising Machine writers and regular readers,

I’m going to write a couple of sports posts now. Feel free to ignore them. Thank you.

Midway Games executives rewarded for failure

Right now, everyone is justifiably outraged that AIG is set pay out almost $200 million in bonuses to people that made decisions that ultimately HARMED the company, all the while using government bailout money to stay afloat.  I don’t understand why shareholders, theoretically semi-ordinary people like you and me, would every approve of packages like that.

The situation also reminds me of a current embarrassment in the video game world.  Once-great Midway Games has been bleeding money left and right.  Midway is one of the old video game companies, having been involved in the arcade business before there were video games, and releasing one of the first Pong clones.  Eventually, Midway made headway with more original efforts.  Midway also strengthened its porftolio by acquiring Williams and Atari Games over the years.  Here are some of the series and franchises that are under Midway’s control:

Mortal Kombat
NBA Jam (now named something else but I forgetted)
NFL Blitz
Hydro/Off-Road Thunder
Cruis’n USA/World/Exotica
Smash TV

acquired with Atari Games:
Asteroids
Battlezone
Centipede
Paperboy
Gauntlet
San Francisco Rush
Area 51

acquired with Williams:
Defender
Joust
Robotron 2084

Suffice it to say, Midway controls some of the most successful video game franchises in history, practically all of them introduced in the arcade. Midway has done a poor job of holding on in the home market and the results have been pretty poor. FINALLY, back to the executives thing: these executives that have run Midway into the ground have been given an opportunity to receive millions in bonuses if they can stem losses. Their solution? SELL MORTAL KOMBAT. How’s that for a lack of vision? But that’s clearly not what it’s about. It’s about getting that unearned bonus before ditching the company. So they’ll get those millions, Midway will lose Mortal Kombat and maybe have one quarter in the black and then it will be business as usual but even worse.

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost & Damned

Right after I beat GTA IV last week I downloaded the new expansion, GTA IV: The Lost & Damned.  It’s $20 but it’s been receiving very strong reviews (average: 9.1) and I’m kinda insane for GTA so I got it!  First, I should mention some horseshit that IGN.com has spread about the game.  In their previews, they originally mentioned that the story mode requires 12-20 hours to complete.  Then they changed it to 12 “plus hours of extra content”.  Then their final review said 8-10 hours.  Well, the truth is it’s much closer to the lowest number.  After completing the expansion, my save file showed 6:40 of playing time.  If you add in the times I turned off the game without saving it still doesn’t add up to 8 hours.  Sure, there are plenty of ‘bonus’ things to do like 25 gang wars that are all basically identical, or 12 races that are not fun, or 50 pigeons to find throughout the city.  That stuff isn’t fun.  I know there are supernerd GTA devotees who do all that stuff but the only fun things in GTA games are the main missions plus randomly causing mischief.  In spite of the shortness of the game, the same IGNdiot, Hilary Goldstein, mentioned in an editorial that GTA IV: The Lost & Damned could have been released as a full-priced retail game.  Seriously?  Fucking seriously?  Who thinks $60 for an 8 hour adventure is a good investment?

That said, Lost & Damned is pretty good for what it is, which is a side story to GTA IV.  The events of Lost & Damned occur concurrently with the main GTA story and even intersect a few times.  L&D is all about bikers, which COULD have been pretty cool but really it’s over before you know it.  The biker gang stuff isn’t nearly as fleshed out as the street gang element in GTA San Andreas but it’s still cool.  Some of the missions are pretty standard but some were quite nice, including a PRISON BREAK-IN!  As an example of how real-world GTAIV can sometimes be was demonstrated by the outcome of a somewhat difficult mission I was having trouble with: 4 carloads of hitmen are after me and I have to kill them all.  On my third or fourth attempt of this mission I accidentally murdered a cop and suddenly I had hitmen AND cops after me.  I thouht I was screwed until the 2 groups intersected – and began fighting EACH OTHER as I imagine they would in real life.  I patiently allowed them to thin out each other’s ranks and then I cleaned up.  Lovely.

Lost & Damned is decent but it should have been $10 NOT $20.  I can’t believe these dumb cunts at IGN and other sites are heaping such praise on a simple expansion.  Remember (if you already knew, that is) you have to have a physical copy of GTA IV for Lost & Damned to work.  All the download adds is the new missions, some new characters, and some new weapons, for the most part.

Singles Club: 8

UNKLE featuring IAN BROWN

“BE THERE”

b/w “THE KNOCK-ON EFFECT”

Released 2/1/99

(Davis/Brown)

Kind of an interesting case, this one.  Throughout its 15 year existence, UNKLE has largely been comprised of Mo’ Wax Records founder James Lavelle and whoever else is around at the time. UNKLE’s first formation revolved around Lavelle and future DFA co-head Tim Goldsworthy; its second major incarnation featured Lavelle and Josh Davis a.k.a. DJ Shadow.

The group’s debut album Psyence Fiction was released in 1998 and featured collaborations with artists like Thom Yorke, Richard Ashcroft, Badly Drawn Boy and Mike D., among others. One vocalist that did not appear on the album is former Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown, yet the second single released to promote Fiction features his rough Northern tones. Originally presented as an instrumental entitled “Unreal”, with Brown’s words and vocals on top the song became “Be There”.

On a personal note, this particular single changed my musical life, and therefore my life in general. I imported this single (like so many others) through sirendisc.com, but purely for its b-side, a remix of Psyence Fiction‘s “The Knock (Drums Of Death Pt. 2)” done by Noel Gallagher of Oasis. I had picked up Fiction when it came out the year before and really liked it (especially “Lonely Soul”), but I was certainly not an UNKLE completist. I was, however, an Oasis completist, and in these distant days before filesharing and hi-speed, sirendisc was usually my only way to get the UK-only releases that Oasis and so many of my other favorite bands put out.

The aforementioned remix, entitled “The Knock-On Effect”, was a pretty good effort and incorporated elements of the Led Zeppelin sound Noel was obsessed with at the time (it’s also probably the only time Noel Gallagher, DJ Shadow, Jason Newstead and Mike D. will ever appear together). But on my way to this b-side, I listened to “Be There”. It started like “Unreal” did on the album: dreamy keys underlined by ominous strings until the beat kicked in. So far, so same until about 40 seconds in when that voice comes in.

Now, Ian Brown doesn’t have a technically great voice. He’s a personality singer. And for whatever reason, as he sang the lyric of “Be There”, I was captivated. I was aware of The Stone Roses, knowing them as an influence on Oasis, and I was vaguely familiar with their single “Love Spreads”, which was a moderate U.S. hit. But for whatever reason, as of early 1999, I had yet to investigate them. It was a real moment of discovery for me. The next month I was at the CD Warehouse on Merle Hay Road in Des Moines, and bought The Stone Roses’ debut (as well as Modern Life Is Rubbish by Blur). It really changed my life, and influenced the way I sing, the way I write lyrics and the way I look at the world. Hyperbolic maybe, but true for me. And it may not have happened without “Be There”, a great, great single in its own right.

Audio:

And a severely truncated live version on Top Of The Pops circa ’99:

G.

National Game Registry: Atari Pong consoles

image: Computer Closet

image: Old Computers

image: Old Computers

image: Old Computers

image: Old Computers

This article features the Atari Pong consoles, selected by the National Game Preservation Board and recommended for permanent preservation by the United States Library of Congress National Game Registry.

System: Pong series
Manufacturer: Atari
Debut: 1975
Nation of origin: United States

Two years before the 2600 Video Computer System was released, Atari took the home video game world by storm with the release of the Pong console. The system played one game: Pong. The console was incrementally updated every few months with new systems like Super Pong, Super Pong Ten, Super Pong Pro-Am, Ultra Pong, Ultra Pong Doubles, etc. Each of the new releases added new variations, including many of the previously released arcade updates. The following inductees were included in the Pong console series:

Pong (1972)
Pong Doubles (1973)
Superpong (1974)
Goal IV (1974)
Breakout (1976)

REFERENCES AND ADDITIONAL INFO

Visit the National Game Registry to view more inductees.