| KANIGGETS INTO
DREAMS
A new day dawns in the hallowed halls of Normdom!
If you can accept a liberal stretching of the
connotation of the term 'dawns' to include the sun hanging high in the sky
at 1 p.m.. We're not all quick starters, here.
I learned, just today, that Ernie Anderson,
the announcer who made famous his delivery of the phrase, "The Looooooooove
Boat," was, in his youth, none other than famed Cleveland horror host
"Ghoulardi." You learn something new every day.
With the advent of the internet, Ernie Anderson
has gained some extra posthumous fame points for being the star
of a widely-distributed audio outtake in which his famous voice continually
flubs his lines and voices his frustration via a very creative and humorous
string of curses, which are so vile that you'll have to do your own Google
searches for that one, you little miscreants.
Let's see -- it was finally confirmed that
Sega's gonna be doing a sequel to what was probably my favorite Sega Saturn
game, "NiGHTS into Dreams." I don't know what the significance of the lower-case
'i' was, but as one of the 48 lucky Saturn owners in the US, I feel qualified
in reporting to the rest of you that this is very good news, particularly
in that the sequel will be arriving on Wii, where the franchise' legacy of
novelty controllers may continue unabated.
Nights was a strange one -- a 3-D flying
sidescroller with a continual countdown clock that you held at bay via skillfully
zipping through rings of... something. It's been a while. It had great art
direction, though, and some crazy, crazy bosses, rather reminiscent of some
of the stuff you'd see in the Klonoa series a little later.
Man, the Sega Saturn -- It just wasn't ready
for this world, a 3-D game machine designed to play 2-D games. I don't like
finger-pointing, but Sega should've been a bit more on-the-ball about where
this was all heading. The mass of Saturn-specific games took place in 3-D
settings, but were usually set on rails or narrow platforms to keep game
design simple. That people might one day like to go off the paths in their
games was a foreign concept at the Saturn's launch, and when that particular
worm turned, that was the death knell for the plucky little system.
It DID have it's full-3D games -- I remember
vividly many an hour getting woozy playing the spastic Saturn Duke Nukem
port -- but they were clearly exercising the machine at its limits. When
it died, it died hard, and took the newly-emerging but fairly-respectable
Dreamcast right down with it.
But I suppose that's a post for another day
-- one of the problems with video game nostalgia is that there aren't a lot
of well-defined stopping points just yet. I've got a feeling, a century from
now, the whole period from 1970 to present will be lumped into one general
'Golden Age' of the industry, and that'll be as far as any research goes.
| Norm's Link-o-th'-Moment: |
| Drew's Script-O-Rama |
| Home of the original, better
"Day of the Dead" script! |
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