Weekly Geekly Rundown for August 11, 2023

Conan, Dracula, Cyberpunk, and Living and Dying in L.A.

I’m always on the lookout for a generic glimpse, or interesting take, from the geekosphere for my opening item. That’s not an easy task, but earlier this week I was reminded of a music video I saw some time ago that combines a couple of things I enjoy, Classic Rock and Conan.

Neil Young's classic song Old Man is a song I associate with many of my favorite childhood memories. Harvest, the album featuring the song, played on our home's stereo with great frequency and is a part of the soundtrack that plays in the back of my mind from time to time. One might think that a parody of this classic rock ballad that mixes sorrowful nostalgia with John Milius' vision of Conan the Barbarian would come across as silly. It doesn't. Nat Kramer's parody music video "Conan Look at My Life" works because it adheres to the first rule of parody songs, above all things make sure that your song is good.

Weekly Luke Y Thompson and Courtney Howard Film Article Cavalcade

Luke’s Reviews

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is based on Chapter 7 of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. That chapter of the epistolary novel contains a section of Mina Murray’s journal containing a pasted news clipping about the ship’s arrival and the contents of its log. The film is an attempt to transform this very brief section into 90-minutes of suspense and according to Luke’s review, it fails in that attempt. Reading Luke’s review it seems to me that maybe a reason the film doesn’t work is that in trying to make the tale more appealing to new audiences it doesn’t trust Bram’s technique for building suspense.

Stoker uses the clips from the ship’s log to build suspense through mystery and the unseen, “believing is seeing” as one of my old film professors used to say, rather than through showing the violence monster movie style. One of the things that striking about Dracula, the novel, is how he uses dogs in particular to build suspense. In the case of Chapter 7 and 8, this is done to amazing effect and with a little dose of humor as well when Stoker mentions members of the S.P.C.A. (yes, it actually existed then, I was surprised too) attempting to find and befriend an “immense dog” who leapt from the Demeter when it was investigated.

Luke’s review of Brooklyn 45 makes it sound like a mashup of John Steinbeck’s Lifeboat (directed by Alfred Hitchcock), Renny Harlan’s Mindhunters, and a modern Blumhouse film. That’s a good combination in my opinion and since my wife is at a training this weekend (she’s not a horror fan), I’ll be cueing this one up. What can I say? I’m an AMC+ subscriber.

Courntey’s Reviews

Courtney Howard argues that creating a compelling coming of age narrative requires more than good acting and compelling aesthetic techniques in her review of Love in Taipei for Variety. These kinds of stories are hard to tell, especially when adapting material from other sources, but I’ll likely still give it a try in the hopes that it might lead to better sequels even if it does feature “indie film perfectly centered couch shot” within the first few moments of the trailer.

Courtney’s review of Gal Gadot’s new spy thriller Heart of Stone over at AV Club begins with an opening paragraph for the ages. I really wanted to quote it here, but I think I want you to click the damn link and read it for yourself. I’m not usually a fan of poetic negativity, because it’s often fueled with snarky and meanness. That’s not the case here. Howard is a fan of genre films, she just wanted more from this movie and her disappointment provided a real banger of an introduction. Negative review aside, I’ve seen enough variations of the Kim Philby story, or stories written by the former friends who became victims of his deception who try to wrangle with how he broke them (The Ipress File, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Hopscotch, and others) that I’m willing to watch spy stories that cover the same ground. After all I watched No Time to Die, which was a nihilistic and heartless version of Mission Impossible 2, so I can watch a movie made in the same time frame as Mission Impossible 7 part 1 that covers the same territory without batting an eye. After all, Dredd and The Raid cover the same ground and they are both worth it. Netflix has produced a couple of action thrillers I’ve enjoyed, so even if I think they are a trash company for what they are doing to writers I’ll still watch to support the writers they are shafting.

Classic Roleplaying Game Recommendation

For as long as I can remember, I've been a fan of Super Hero role playing games. My entry into this particular gaming milieu was Hero Games' excellent Champions2nd edition role playing game. I happened upon a copy and was amazed that game designers had even attempted to capture super heroes using game mechanics. At the time, I was only familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, Star Frontiers, Tunnels & Trolls, and Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. I had played all three of those games and their mechanical foundations did not prepare me for what Champions offered.

Unlike the other games with which I was familiar, Champions did not have randomly created characters and instead allowed players to build whatever they could imagine. The only limit to the character you could design was the number of points available at creation (100 points with 150 more possible if you took Disadvantages). Other than that, it was all good. During my initial Champions experience, I didn't have anyone to play the game with and spent all of my time making characters and doing some solo battles. My character builds were heavily influenced by the sample characters in the rule book and thus were typically of 200 total character points (100 and 100 from Disadvantages). This included my personal write ups for the X-Men. I was content with my view of the game, but this view was to be shattered in short order.

A couple of months after I discovered Champions my family moved to a new city, I finally encountered a group of gamers who played the game every weekend. Given that this was the Bay Area, and the game company was a Bay Area company, I soon discovered a rich and vibrant Champions community. I also discovered that how I interpreted character adaptations to the game was very different from others. Some of that difference, I maintain to this day. I personally believe that too many gamers inflate the stats of their favorite characters out of love for the character, rather than an examination of benchmarks and mechanics of the game. But these are things that can only be understood through play, and that was something I had not yet done with Champions. In playing the game, I learned how some combinations worked better than others and I learned that other players were much more likely than I had been to "grab" the "Obvious and Accessible" items some characters used in combat. Not that I designed a lot of those kinds of characters, I didn't, just that I had expected gamers to behave more like the characters in comics than like "tactical gamers" and that the rules treated gamers as tactical gamers while allowing them to behave like characters in comics.
Long story short, I learned that you can only truly judge the quality of a game by playing it. I still love Champions and think it is one of the top 3 or 4 super hero games out there, but my view is now grounded in experience of how the game works and how when some character building norms take over the game can slow down significantly and lose some of its charm.

Eventually, my love of super heroes and super hero games led me to purchaseVillains & Vigilantes, Marvel Super Heroes, and DC Heroes, all of which have there charms. At one point in time, not that long ago by some standards, I could claim to own a copy of every super hero rpg published (at least in one of its editions). With the explosion of pdf based publishing, that is no longer the case and I'm sure I'm missing out on some great games, but I also have a HUGE backlog of games I'd like to play...see how I'm pulling this back to the recommendation of the day?

Among that backlog is Jay Harlove and Aimee Karklyn/(Hartlove)'s early Supergame. It wasn't the first super hero rpg published, that was Superhero 44/Superhero 2044, but it was one of the first and predates Champions. Both the first edition and revised edition came out in 1980. I discovered the game as a "real" thing and not just something mentioned in old gaming magazines when I moved to Los Angeles. I was looking for gaming stores and found a long standing game store in Long Beach that had a copy of the 1st edition. Later searches on the internet have shown me that I got a significant bargain on it, as I did with copies of Warlock and a couple of other games originally designed by the Southern California gaming community.

Supergame, like Superhero 2044 which predates it and Champions which comes after it, has a point based character creation system. It also has an interesting skill and combat system that I think has a lot of potential. Just like Superhero 2044, some of the stats are odd in how they are presented. For example, if a character has an Agony score (similar to Stun for Champions fans) of 10 or more they suffer no penalties to how they move or act. Given that scores start at 0, and that some sample characters have 0s in other stats implying that a score of 0 is sometimes the "average" score, it seems odd that a person has to spend points just to be a normal person in some areas and not others. Why not just have stats start at "average" and let people buy them down later? Or why not have Agony start at 0 with no penalties and allow negative scores to cause impairment? It's a small complaint, and there are a number of neat features like different defenses against different types of attack (pre-Champions remember). A thorough reading of the rules, both editions, and the supplements has convinced me that I need to play this game to evaluate whether the designed characters are effective at all in a way that would be fun. There are far more characters who have an Agony of 10, or a Physical stat (like Hit Points but with those with less than 10 being hurt), which means that if they suffer just 1 point of damage they will be impaired.

I think there is a very good game buried in the Supergame rule books, but I think it is a game that needs a lot of play testing and rules tweaks to bring out that game. I applaud Jay an Aimee for their hard work on the game and their ability to get a game like this published in 1980, and this is definitely a game I wish I was playing right now. I have so many questions I'd like answered and I'd love to house rule this game into a more complete system.

I don't know how many copies of Supergame1st edition exist, but I do know that you can purchase the original and second edition of the game on DriveThruRPG. Precis Intermedia Games reprinted the game last year with a high quality scan. The pdf includes both the 1st and 2nd edition of the rules. I don't know where Brett got his copy of the 2nd edition for the reprint, but I do know where he got the copy of the 1st edition. It's my personal copy. He treated it kindly as he scanned it for the project. I'm glad he did, because I think that this is a unique gaming item.

Classic Music Recommendation

This week’s “classic” music recommendation was inspired by one of my daughters asking one of our many “smart speakers” to play Strong Bad’s classic techno-extravaganza “The System is Down.”

The song first appeared in Strong Bad Email #45 and it has long been one of my favorite pieces of internet entertainment. What makes it work so well is that in addition to being a funny acapella piece, it’s also a pretty good techno song.

As soon as Strong Bad’s song stopped playing, for the third or fourth time since you can’t listen to it just once, I asked our smart speaker to play this week’s recommendation, “Join in the Chant” by Nitzer Ebb. As soon as the song started, my daughters noticed the similarity in the basic melody. It’s not identical, but you can hear it lurking there behind the pounding sounds of industrial percussion. The song itself is a call to revolution. I would place it alongside the industrial punk of KMFDM and the Rockerboy/Rockergirl (to borrow a term from Mike Pondsmith’s original sourcebook) cyberpop of Ke$ha’s “All that Matters (The Beautiful Life),” “Die Young,” and “We R Who We R.” The combination of party imagery, commercialism, and hopelessness in Ke$ha’s songs from the Warrior era put her at the top of artists I think of when I imagine cyberpunk sounds. It’s that combination and contrast that have always made me believe that Ke$ha is a tremendously underrated musical artist. While we contemplate how the tools of the “Machine” can be used to undermine it (or can they), let’s “Join in the Chant.”

Classic Film Recommendation

William Friedkin died this week and most critics are going to talk about the importance of The Exorcist and The French Connection. Both of those films are important and I love the way that both portray the morals of the institutions they present. In the case of The Exorcist we are given contrasting views of what it means to be a priest, one rooted in faith in a higher power that wants to save people’s souls and the other rooted reason wanting to save people from suffering in this life. It’s a film about the conflict of reason and revelation that works on a number of levels and is worth repeated viewings for a variety of reasons. The French Connection also gives us multiple views of “cop morality” in the form of Popeye Doyle, his partner Buddy Russo, his commanding officer, and Federal agents. Let’s just say that Popeye may be a “defender of society,” but he is no hero. I don’t want to give spoilers away if you haven’t seen it. You should watch it.

Those films are being advocated all over the place, so I thought I’d recommend a different one. Like The Exorcist and The French Connection, and sharing much of the social commentary of Connection, Friedkin’s film To Live and Die in L.A. is an examination of institutional morals. In this case, it’s an examination of the morals of Federal Agents working for the Secret Service. It’s a tale of revenge and personal corruption. Los Angeles is my favorite city. It is a place I love, but it is also the “most noir” city in America. It is where the train tracks end. It’s an amazing geode of a city that sparkles at a distance, looks pitted and dirty up close, but is truly beautiful when you crack it open. It takes a lot of work to crack it open and you can be destroyed if you get distracted or lose hope along the way.

William Petersen is fantastic in the film, as is almost everyone really, and his performance is an interesting contrast to his performance in Manhunter.

Of course, one cannot simply recommend To Live and Die in L.A. without recommending the Wang Chung song too.