The Dark Night of Waldo

So I'm sitting here and am really not sure what to write about. There's no standout movie or album or videogame this week that comes to mind. Well, there was "The Great Waldo Search", I suppose. What is this surely fantastic product, bearing the never-fail Waldo logo, you ask? It is, in fact, a game from 1992, made for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. I happened to play it on a Genesis emulator.

When it comes to movies, I'm almost as fascinated with the utterly terrible as I am with the genuinely sublime, and it's the same story with videogames. Until emulators came around though, I wouldn't have been able to play most of these awful games since, as a kid, I needed to carefully spend my $3.42 on worthwhile game rentals. But as I grew older and saw videogames for what I truly believe they are, an art form, I couldn't deny my curiosity at the depths of peoples' bad ideas. Now with an emulator on hand and the internet at one's disposal, it is easy to access any game in the entire library of any old game console.

Having grown up on the Nintendo side of the tracks, I rarely played any of the Sega products, save flagship titles such as "Sonic the Hedgehog". So the other day when I went to a friend's place to play some retro games, I thought it may be a good idea to change it up and explore some 16-bit Sega titles. We hopped in and out of several games, sometimes trying to find greatness, sometimes wanting to laugh at horribly executed messes and in the end, I was left with a couple conclusions:

1) Despite some decent platforming games on Sega's console--the "Sonic" games, "Ristar", and "Rocket Knight Adventures" to name a few--none of them come anywhere close to offering the experience of a "Super Mario Bros." game. It seems almost sad, in that they had several Mario games from which to steal great ideas (on which they could have easily added a creative spin) and yet they seemingly opted not to. And the fact is, all of the games I listed above are good. They have somewhat interesting play mechanics, cool midi music, etc...and yet they feel hollow. Playing these games (which are found on many lists of the best Genesis games ever) helped cement my theory that nobody has ever (and maybe will ever) make platformers that can compete with Nintendo's. I've spoken highly of Shigeru Miyamoto in the past, but it's worth saying that even without his own designing skills on display, Nintendo makes better platformers than any other company on the market today. As an example, "Super Mario Galaxy 2" comes out this weekend. It will very likely simply be an expansion on the original "Super Mario Galaxy" and yet still will end up being the best platformer of the year.

2) "Where's Waldo" should never be ported to a console format. I remember being a kid and looking through the books. At least there was a mild degree of challenge there, like sometimes it took a minute or two to find our little traveler. In the epic "Great Waldo Search" you move left or right, causing the screen to scroll, and try to find Waldo and a scroll in each level. The first time you come across Waldo, it's hilarious. He takes up a fair portion of the screen and sticks out like a sore thumb. On the second level, Waldo started off right in the middle of the starting screen! And I know you're probably thinking "hey, this is a game for kids after all." But the fact is that even for preschoolers, this game has got a touch of the downs. There are so many other decent titles out there made for a younger age group that actually offer some kind of game play. It seems that in the early 90s they hadn't yet figured out how to make them. They did, however, already have a keen sense of exploiting a trend to make a buck. (Did they make a Pogs videogame or am I just having a genius idea 15 years too late?)

Other than that, hmmm let's see. Perhaps I'll simply recommend another good album. There's a collaboration of Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and David Lynch that hit the internet last year entitled "Dark Night of the Soul". Though I listened to it a bit at the time, I quickly was onto other things and didn't make my way back to it until lately. The fact is, it's probably one of the best albums of 2009 (in my humble opinion of course) that almost nobody has heard. And there's a reason for that, and also a reason that it hit the internet and not store shelves. Apparently there was some kind of copyright issue as far as EMI was concerned, and therefore the album never could receive an official release or the artists involved could be faced with lawsuits. Many suspect this has nothing to do with this album but is rather a simple issue of the large label making things difficult for Danger Mouse after some bad blood following his previous outing, "The Grey Album" which was a mash-up of The Beatles' White album and Jay-Z's Black album. I won't get into all of that...there's plenty written about it already. The fact of the matter is that after completing this album, they were unable to release it, so they did the next best thing. What they actually released into stores was a set containing 50 pages of artwork by David Lynch and a blank CD. The album then mysteriously leaked online. (And wouldn't you know it, it burns quite nicely right onto that there blank CD!) The songs themselves range from dreamy psychedelia, to self-deprecating quasi-punk, to lullaby ballads for the sad and lonely. It's an odd, yet interesting mix that somehow thematically ties its parts together into some kind of coherent whole. And if you want to hear it (and you should), well then the only way to do so is to download it.