anime – Azure, Azure~

This Weekâ€™s Releases (April 10-14, 2006)

Post published:Monday, April 10th, 2006
Reading time:11 mins read

by [name redacted]

Week thirty-five of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation. Two of the sections are expanded into full articles, posted later in the week.

Game of the Week:

Tomb Raider: Legend
Crystal Dynamics/Eidos Interactive
Xbox/Xbox 360/PlayStation 2/PC
Tuesday

Something that people keep bringing up, yet probably don’t bring up enough, is that the first Tomb Raider was a damned good game. And what it seems Crystal Dynamics has done is go back to the framework of Tomb Raider 2 and to break it down, analytically. What they chose to do is bring the focus back to exploration â€“ in part by introducing some new gizmos, in part by making the environments more fun to navigate. Reviews nitpick a few fair issues; still, the overall response seems to be a huge sigh of relief. Maybe it’s not the best game in the world, or all it ever could be. Still â€“ it’s not terrible! The theme that keeps coming up is one of nostalgia â€“ that, for the first time, someone has managed to recapture what makes Tomb Raider interesting. And that sentiment is itself interesting.

Let’s kill Timothy!

Post published:Sunday, June 8th, 2003
Reading time:2 mins read

Without Orson Welles, we would have no Touch of Evil. Without Touch of Evil, we would have no Peter Gunn. And, relatedly, no Blake Edwards, as he came to be. We wouldn’t exactly have Henry Mancini, in the form we know. Without them, we’d have no Cowboy Bebop.

Another big piece comes from Peter Max (and The Yellow Sumbarine).

Another big piece comes from Saul Bass.

So. Philip K. Dick and William Gibson took late ’70s/early ’80s punk culture and other then-current societal trends and newish technologies (such as Arpanet), projected them a few decades into the future, and came up with the Cyberpunk genre.

Shinichiro Watanabe took early ’60s post-beat jazz and mod culture, and detective and kung-fu films of the era, and projected them a few decades into the future to create The Work, Which Becomes a New Genre Itself.

So. We’ve done punk. We’ve done ’60s cool jazz/bebop/mod culture. Perhaps next we can project the mid-1800s romantic classical music scene a few decades into the future. That might have some possibilities.

No, hold on. The Victorian thing is starting to get overdone. How about the turn-of-the-century ragtime era? The clash between classical and blues; between performance and recording; between vaudeville and cinema.

What other archetypical, musically-related period cultures can we tap into? This is important. We’re creating a NEW CLASSIC here.