Anti

A long time ago, we actually liked each other, for the most part. Societies run off people who have to like each other on some level, after all. 

Back then, we liked to read and watch stories about normal people just like us who strove to be the best (or those who fell apart under the influence of darker forces) and watched in nail-biting tension wondering if they would survive their ordeals intact. After all, they were just normal people like you or me. All we wanted to do was see them survive, just like we hope to get through our trials in life. Stories reaffirm our love of life and existence and adventures stories were made specifically for this very purpose.

Which is why it is detestable that the mainstream art and entertainment landscape is so abysmal these days. Everything has been flipped on its head, and turned around backwards. And we celebrate this subversion as if it's a good thing. Storytelling has been vandalized and we refuse to clean the graffiti off despite knowing how dirty and soiled our monuments have gotten. Now we are at another crossroads: do we let our art die, or do we fight for something better than the status quo of misery? One thing is for sure, and that is that the path we are on leads to nothing but a cliff into bottom of jagged spires. We're going nowhere worth going.

So I would just like to say this right out. There is no point beating around the bush when we all know part of the issue that's in plain sight, and I don't like to waste time.

Antiheroes are a plague on storytelling, and people who swear by them do no understand heroism whatsoever. Catering to this crowd has obliterated adventure as a genre. This is a truth that should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention over the years.

Back in the 1990s, there was this trend we called Edgy. What it was was simple: the constant danger and harshness of existence is too much and so overbearing that it will even overwhelm so-called pure heroes and drag them into the darkness. This means that in order to win against evil, only the most vicious opponent will win by any means necessary. You must be evil in order to comprehend evil (which is probably actually just a misunderstood victim that the true evil people, "good guys", created) or you will lose. You must stain your soul, otherwise you are no better than an ignorant paladin saying prayers to some useless god who probably doesn't exist don't think about it too hard. Doubt it if you want, but then ask yourself when the last time you saw a paladin character in the mainstream that wasn't a hypocrite or stupid. This wasn't always the case, either, but we let it become mainstream and it ruined the concept of heroism.

This was the decade where heroism was finally overcome by the creeping nihilism of anti-heroism that had steadily been rising since the 1960s. Now good guys were lame and weak--they didn't understand the true depths of evil in this world! To fight fire you have to use napalm and burn yourself in the process. Basically, everything before Current Year was made of childish delusions. Now we're adults and see the world for what it truly is! We went from morally certain Cannon Films-style action movies at the decade's start into amoral Tarantino rip-offs where everyone hates each other and the world but they are cool for it, as you can tell by the wordy and vapid speeches. This all happened in the same decade: the 1990s.

And we've been living in this world ever since. Nothing has improved: we still think evil people are cool, morality is passé, and the only thing worthy fighting for is the right to hedonism. Around a quarter of a century of the same boring archetypes with no change.

To this day you have adults who think Flaws make characters Interesting and that White Hats are inherently less Interesting than Black Hats because of it. They think this due to growing up in a world where good was treated as a banal boring thing for all the lame normies and excitement is being against all authority and for yourself as a hyper-focused individualist. The result of this is the death of communities (no, your hobby group or art scene is not a community and it never will be) and the atomization of people into tiny clusters of detached bugmen who only care about themselves and their own appetites.

Leave that boring small town and come to the exciting city! That's where the action truly is! If you grew up in the latter half of the 20th century, you heard this all the time in media. Anyone who has ever been to a city knows how big a lie this is, but so many still believe such a thing and blindly follow this dead end path to this day. All because of a narrative that has been an objective failure and has nothing to show for it.

The anti-hero is the embodiment of this selfish and empty modernism that has led to no good art, no lasting culture, and has only created a more miserable world from the one they subverted. The will only cease when we finally admit to how utterly worthless the concept of this table-flipping culture truly is.

There are heroes, and there are villains. These are the only two that matter. Obsessing over anything else is just the same sort of paint worship that caused the obnoxious trope reverence that is stifling creative writing these days and being taught in scam artist writing courses. If you want to stand out, try not listening to these people.

Let us start from the beginning, since the term has gotten so diluted over the years that it means almost nothing anymore. Heroism is a very simple concept that anyone can understand. Here it is in a single sentence:

"Heroism definition is - heroic conduct especially as exhibited in fulfilling a high purpose or attaining a noble end."

I have to point this out because definitions have gotten so muddied that there are people who think characters like The Shadow are not heroic, but are actually anti-heroes. How you get that is a mystery to me, unless you don't understand morality from the get-go. This topic was a lot clearer a century ago than it is these days.

What happened is that at some point heroism became equated with upholding the Status Quo against those who wish to change it for whatever reason. The implication being that the modern age is an age that needs heroes in order to even function properly, because without them we would kill ourselves and devolve into an anarchy of animals. The question is never asked as to why the highest cause a hero could fight for is to be glorified police officers for a world of overdoses, morbid obesity, suicide, depression, and societal decay. Heroes would never fight for these things--they would fight to change them.

And these is where we get lost in the reeds a little.

So what you began to have in some places like Italy were films where the harsh consequences of modernism had begun to be apparent to everyone and implode on itself. Now lawlessness began to overwhelm the supposed civilized world. '60s and '70s Italian crime films ("Poliziotteschi" as the genre is known worldwide) bleakly portrayed the outcome of the modern world as it fell to ruin and disorder from entropy. This of course didn't mean such films were guaranteed happy endings, but neither did it mean they featured heroes, such as you and I would know them. That wasn't what these movies were really about. Having a protagonist is not the same thing as having a hero, and these movies weren't meant as classic adventure fare but more about encapsulating the turbulent times they lived in and try to understand them. To call such protagonists "anti-heroes" misses the point of what they were made to actually do.

That didn't preclude heroes from existing, however. Inspector Tanzi from The Tough Ones is an unabashed hero in the classic mold. But many of the genre's movies were more along the lines of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock: stories about moral and spiritual decay and what unfolds from them. They are more like classical tragedies than adventures. 

The same could be said of the spaghetti westerns of the time also being a more fantastical reflection of the era through a different setting. The Italians were not the most subtle, but they were very reflective as they attempted to also entertain their audiences. At the end of the day, Justice still mattered. Even when not telling hero stories this is an important thing to remember. You don't partake in these sorts of movies for heroes and villains, but to see Justice win through any means it can even if through an imperfect vessel. Audiences back then, however, knew that.

So why such a thing such as this is said by spiritual boomers of today is beyond me:

This isn't just a shallow reading of the genre, it's a shallow reading of heroism to begin with. Just about everything from that passage was incorrect.

But did you catch the terminology? There it is again: "realistic" and "interesting" as synonyms for "good" when neither actually mean anything at all in the context given. The above passage was written by a postmodern disciple of misery and meaninglessness who has long since lost the thread of what reality actually is, never mind heroism.

You might understand this, but obviously many do not. So let us repeat it louder for the ones in the back.

John Wayne protagonists are aspirational. You want to be the type of man that can have the kind of courage and bravery he has. That you don't think someone can live up to being the very best of men is "realistic" says more about your morally dead worldview than it does about movies enjoyed by millions back when heroism meant something. Advertising your own spiritual vapidity is a weird way to make declarative statement, but here we are.

On the other hand, the protagonists in spaghetti westerns are not meant to be aspirational. They are (usually) meant to be imperfect instruments that dispense the Justice that is sorely needed in this broken land. As said above, it was a funnel for escapism in the climate that Italy had at the time. It was too show that Justice always finds a way, and things will always find a way to work out, even if not as expected.  In this sort of story, heroism isn't really the point.

These are very two different approaches to the western genre. So why are they compared at all? Agenda and poor education in regards to morality.

Of course the above separation completely misses the point of both in order to say another prayer to the God of Realism and Interesting Characters that he has been told through garbage media criticism of the last 50 years are actually elements of good writing. These are the same people years back that argued Game of Thrones was better than Lord of the Rings because it didn't start with a birthday party. Lightheartedness is childish and bad writing. So says the spiritually hollow.

And yet we let them dictate quality standards to us regardless.

"Shades of grey" as a concept doesn't mean anything. Heroes don't have shades of grey: what makes a person a hero is doing the right thing exactly when he needs to: rising above being a normal passerby and turning into an active Hammer of Justice against the unjust where there wasn't one moments before. There are no shades of grey in that. None. There is only right and wrong. 

And this is why so many (post)moderns have been attempting to muddy up the waters ever since Easy Rider was thankfully murdered by a bunch of trigger happy hillbillies back in the day. Such people hate heroism and wish to overturn the definition of it to something far lesser in order to enshrine their own baser tastes instead.

As a different reviewer says of the same above spaghetti western:

You can already see the contradiction, I assume. Both reviewers praise and love the same bog standard modernist philosophy, and yet they come to different conclusions on the same movie which impacts how good they think it is. Insanity runs deep. This movie is simultaneously a subversive mature epic for smrt people and a cliched kiddy carnival ride for the hicks. It would be impressive if it wasn't so obviously crazy.

So which is it? Is Django a movie about a grim anti-hero in a nihilistic world where nothing matters, or is he a "goody goody" declaring objective moral statements which reaffirm the existence of a natural order of things as he saves the day? It can't be both, but apparently it is. However, you might also notice that the second is considered a Bad Thing.

We have become so morally dead that a character saying a forceful statement such as "That's not right" is considered embarrassing and worth recoiling from. And yet somehow a selfish character that cares about nothing but himself but somehow still does the right thing (which isn't actually realistic, but hey, we ignore that when it's convenient) is somehow Interesting. Except that is isn't, at all. There's nothing interesting about an asshole who just happens to do the right thing because it benefits him in the moment. He's just a villain that walked down the wrong alley at the right time. How does that make for an interesting character? It doesn't, and I'm tired of pretending it does.

Heroes do the right thing because they choose to. The requirement is rising above yourself to dispense the justice that is needed in the moment. That's it. These characters don't have to be aspirational like John Wayne, but they have to exhibit behavior worthy of being called a hero in the first place. That might not be considered "Interesting" to those who think the cool bad people are deeper and more complex than the lame good people, but it is interesting to people who actually do love Justice and desire to see it play out through any means possible.

To return to the earlier example of The Shadow, ask yourself how he could be considered an anti-hero by the above morally grey gruel crowd. The reasons are fairly shallow, just as they are for arguing Flawed Protagonists are inherently more Interesting than aspirational ones. Which of the two is The Shadow? The latter, and one of the best examples of such. This is why the industry has been frantically trying to scrub him from existence over the last few years.

Just look at the arguments one hears about how he falls short of the heroic idea. Warning: they aren't good arguments.

"He kills people!"

Everyone he kills is an objective evil scumbag threatening innocents.

"He thinks he is objective Good! That's dangerous! No man can judge another!"

He IS objective Good. That's part of the appeal of the character. We don't know who sent him or even what he really is, and yet he is so mysterious and all-knowing that we find him intriguing regardless. He is an unabashed agent of Good. There is no grey in The Shadow.

"He laughs like a villain and dresses in black! That's anti-hero behavior!"

He does this to reflect the villains' evil back at them and make them afraid the way they make their innocent victims afraid. For those who love "nuance" or whatever, simple color schemes do confuse them quite easily.

"He doesn't answer to the law!"

Justice is above the law. If the law doesn't run in accordance with Justice then it is evil and must be destroyed. The Shadow proves this over and over again. This is White Hat behavior.

"He's too dangerous and unhinged to be considered a true superhero! Batman would never kill or assert moral superiority!"

The Shadow is a pulp hero, which means he is already morally superior to all superheroes. Superheroes uphold the status quo and bow to the law in order to keep the machine grinding along; pulp heroes fight for Justice and Truth above all else, even if the law or other "good people" don't agree with them. Again, heroes fight for Good, not the Status Quo.

But we've forgotten this, just as we have forgotten that objective good and evil do exist outside ourselves. Corporately owned heroes, however, have another agenda they need to serve instead. That is, how to make sure readers keep buying stories about a hero that will never affix any real change on the world.

That sounds pretty evil, but what do I know. Maybe it's grey and Interesting instead.

The above also explains why the last Batman/The Shadow crossover comic had Batman morally preening to a broken Shadow about how much better he is. This despite the fact that Batman is a pale Shadow ripoff without any of the Justice or search for Truth but with plenty of merchandising opportunities for his safer brand of law enforcement. Upholding the (post)modern order in place as it crumbles under its own weight is quite a heroic feat. He might not have killed the Joker who just escaped Arkham for the fifth time and killed a crowd of 5000 but at least he isn't a murderer! Yes, this is an argument you will hear from supposed hero fans.

This is a sign of how bad it has gotten.

Sorry, Mr. Reeve, that's not "Interesting" or something.

It wouldn't be half as annoying if this view evolved in some way since its first real push into the mainstream back in the 1960s, but it hasn't. It's only gotten lazier. Still the same arguments; still the same examples; still the same shallow worldview at the heart of it. Nothing changes, except the stink of decay getting worse every day.

This was the major criticism thrown at the currently mega popular My Hero Academia manga and anime series. You might have heard it at the time, I know I did. It was called generic and bland, but no one could give examples of it being such or give a reason why. I'm certain said critics are still buying Batman comics and ready to line up for the next movie though. Apparently half a century of declining moral certainty and repetitive plots brought about due to corporate mandate is far less generic than a series that literally deals with the very issue Western comics refuses to address. But you'd have to actually give it a chance to know that. Comic book readers don't like new things very much, as can be gleamed from what actually sells. So a new series coming out to outsell their market must have been quite upsetting.

I'm feel sympathy if the industry didn't deserve it, but it absolutely does.

For those unaware, My Hero Academia has slowly since it started revealed itself as a hero story dealing with the inherent contradictions in modern life, upholding the current status quo at all costs, and burying the inconvenient past to construct a utopic future over the remains. It goes where a corporate western comics refuse to, and that's what makes it generic next to the 500th retcon of Peter Parker's love life over the last decade. Go figure.

My Hero Academia is a hero story exploring what heroism actually means at the root of it, which means there is little room for grey goo. And this is one of the reasons it has achieved the massive success it has. Black and white exist, no matter how you might think otherwise.

Now, I'm not trying to overanalyze this. Kohei Horikoshi is telling a fun hero story at the heart of it, but he never mucks about in the grey. While there can be hard situations and tough choices, a hero still picks himself up again and strives to make the best one he can. He does not stop dispensing Justice and saving the innocent to indulge in his appetites instead. This isn't a western comic. 

The one "anti-hero" in My Hero Academia was designated a villain. He inspired terror across the country, the repercussions of which are costing lives and wellbeing in the series at this very moment. This happened because of his selfish actions that he wrapped in Truth as a shield for his reprehensible actions. In other words, he was still a villain. There was nothing heroic about any of his actions. And unlike a modern western comic fan, the series readily admitted this as the truth of it.

Right now the story concerns itself with the hero society falling apart because of how fragile their lives of carefree modern living were. They got fat and happy, soft, and let it all fall apart around them. All it took were those who hated the world for various reasons of their own to want to tear it down more than people wanted to protect it, and that happened quite easily. There wasn't much to protect aside from comfort held up by organizations stifling things like natural abilities and freedoms which caused even more problems of its own. What is there to protect? Essentially, good rolls out from good and evil rolls out from evil, good intentions or not. Now the question remains how the protagonists can fix this mess before the villains wipe out everything. Can they rebuild society or will they collapse under the weight of the sins of the past? We'll have to see.

Doesn't seem very generic to me, and I've been reading manga for a long time. But you would have to look past the surface level of "shonen" and "superpowers" and actually give it a chance. It isn't a western cape comic, no. It actually progresses and develops as a narrative. Oh, and it will actually end, too.

I should also say the above is a reason that Japanese manga has overtaken comic books in sales and popularity. It has none of the faults which crippled the western industry. The morality is also simply much sharper in manga these days, and that's clearly what audiences actually want after being fed a diet of morally ambiguous garbage for over half a century now in the west.

People want moral certainty and real heroism, not murky grey gunk from limpwristed losers. And they've been wanting it for a long time.

But it will never be the same.

Another recent example of such obvious dichotomy of black and white morality is in the manga series Edens Zero by Hiro Mashima, the creator of Fairy Tail. However, unlike that series, Mashima has really turned up the heat and pulled out all the stops to make something better than he had before. He created a cosmic adventure story between the forces of good and evil. As someone who didn't really like Fairy Tail, I'd say he is definitely succeeding where that one fell flat for me.

For those unaware, Edens Zero is the story of Shiki Granbell who is traveling across the universe on the Edens Zero spaceship to meet Mother, the mysterious supposed goddess of the universe. Along the way he meets the worst scum the cosmos has to offer, and it is up to his crew and himself to set them straight while they head out on their quest. It's only been running for a bit over three years and with over 150 chapters, but so much has happened in its pages that it puts all modern western comics to shame. No one in the mainstream is putting something out like this.

Edens Zero is a shonen adventure series that manages to avoid the power creep problem the genre has become known for since Dragon Ball while also maintaining a high level of excitement throughout its onslaught of action. It's just a good old fashion adventure story. I'd call it sword and planet, except there are also guns, androids, virtual planets and planes, tokusatsu power suits, time travel, space pirates, space cops, and superpowers. Mashima isn't afraid of throwing everything in but the kitchen sink into this one, and he makes it all fit together as a neat whole.

It's a fun read of heroes against villains with some "grey" characters along the way (that will always eventually turn black or white, as it always goes in proper stories) to wild worlds as alien and inventive as anything you can imagine. It is quite a bit different than Fairy Tail, and quite a bit more inspired.

This is because, unlike Fairy Tail, Edens Zero is completely planned out and not done by the seat of the writer's pants. He used everything he learned through both Fairy Tail and first series Rave Master in order to write an epic adventure through the cosmos with cyborgs, magic, spaceships, and aliens aplenty, and a good bit of action to wash it all down. 

But most importantly: the good guys and the bad guys are always clearly defined and the line between them is never blurred. There are characters not on either line that will eventually be made to choose a side when trouble arises. When alliances are tested then you know precisely who everyone really is. This moral certainty is what gives the series its hotblooded drive and spark that makes it a blast to read through.

If it was just a bland hodgepodge of "grey" characters it would be like every other western comic set in space. And none of those are anywhere near as popular as Mashima's work is. 

This is why it feels like the Japanese are dominating the medium where the west is constantly stumbling. It is because their competition has completely ceded the moral ground which has in turn affected the interest audiences have in their anemic comic books. Who wants to read about miserable people being miserable to each other while fighting slightly more miserable people with slightly meaner motivations?

Nobody, apparently. It seems normal people don't care about "interesting characters" or whatever they are calling that grey mush these days. Audiences want heroes and villains. They probably always did despite being told they couldn't have them.

And this is also why movies like Dirty Harry or The Tough Ones still hold up today. They give the audience exactly what they crave, and they do it incredibly well.

Ambiguity of any kind does not preclude depth.

This is the main lesson to take away from the quest for "realism" and "interesting" is that it has led art off a cliff and should be abandoned. there is clearly no future in it, proved even more by how it has directly led to the climate we know live in. It is time to abandon this path just like heroism was abandoned back in the '60s. Enough is enough.

We deserve better.

While NewPub and the evaporating mainstream gives more room for such stories to finally flourish, it won't mean all that much if we don't change our understanding of real heroism. The fact of the matter is that we let this climate exist to begin with. It won't just evaporate overnight.

So let us start today in offering and indulging in more art and entertainment that celebrates the good instead of the evil. Change can only start with us, after all.

Then maybe we can finally turn this whole ship around before we steer right off the world's end. We don't have forever, after all. We can like each other again, and we will. As long as we remember to celebrate the good we can connect again.

The past is over, but the future always has the potential to be better. The more we work on it the more we can turn it around. No more celebrating the corrupted and the tainted: we will bring the good back to where it belongs. Once things are put back in their natural place everything will finally make sense again, just as it was always meant to.

And won't that be good?

A battle of good against evil in a nightmare world!

Violence is Golden

You can say a lot about social media, but I think I can safely say that it is unhealthy. Of course pornography and a smokescreen of altruism over a rancid layer of greed are by far the most common seven deadly sins on display. If you go online you want walk three feet without stumbling into a minefield of either blowing up under you.

What tends to go unspoken is the absolute poison that is Wrath being just as prominent. In fact, I would say it is just as big an issue as the other two, especially today. Dehumanization is rampant, as is dehumanizing the dehumanizer and vice versa, in reverse, upside down, and even in the mirror. It is as if everything must be torn down--except the fault itself.

Many who act on such passions try to camouflage it as righteous anger or injustice. Anything to avoid taking the blame for their own faults. I would know, as would you. We've all been there. Justification of falsehood is the first step to avoiding truth.

A lot of this gets pushed on our entertainment as projection from those who very much have issues with Wrath. As a result, the modern view of violence has been completed twisted. It has been twisted by those who misunderstand the roots of their own disorder.

But I do think much of this disordered passion comes from misunderstanding the difference between Wrath and Justice. This goes a long way to describe the modern state of art and entertainment. Actual Justice isn't about me and it isn't about you. It is blind because it transcends the individual and the group to encompass us all. It is real, and it scares a lot of us.

And a lot of people, really really don't like it. You can tell that by the way violence in storytelling has been treated. The history of critique in this area, I have to admit, is straight up abysmal to nonexistent. It still is, unfortunately. Nothing has ever changed.

For about as long as I've been alive I don't think there has ever been a time violence in media has ever been understood correctly. To this day, even by those who should know better, violence is considered the lowest form of entertainment, made for those sick individuals who like blood and guts and mindless carnage. And this goes for both people who enjoy the stories just as much as those who don't. How this happened is a mystery to me, aside from it just straight up being projection.

Don't get me wrong, there are times when violence, like everything else in fiction, can go too far. You can say this about most anything, however. This issue comes from a lack of self-control or misplaced priorities in regards to fiction. However, it isn't quite as common as you've been told it is. In fact, if anything, most modern creators are far worse with sex (from basic appearance to the very act itself) than they are with violence.

Then you get complaints that the violence in fiction glorifies these horrible acts, such as wanton killing or malicious torture (though the latter is more of a complaint centered on horror) and suggests these as valid solutions to our problems. Such complaints, however, are often given my those who don't understand the purpose of storytelling to begin with or are projecting their own fears onto others. And yet they somehow control discourse over the subject. This really does explain a lot.

So what actually is the purpose of violence in fiction? It varies depending on who is speaking, though usually dependent on how much blood churns said critic's stomach, most agree it is unnatural, unlike the very natural subject of sex, which means it has little value in most stories. Sex should be celebrated, violence should be shunned! But this is like the "realism" argument (post)modernists tend to make: it completely misses the point of fiction to begin with.

At the same time, some psychoanalysts have gone so far as to shove sex into the equation even further by comparing violence in fiction with the sexual act itself. Everything is sexual! This should go a long way to explain how misunderstood storytelling itself has become over the decades, especially from perverts obsessed with sticks and holes.

In other words, much of violence's place in storytelling has been obscured by people who have never liked it or seen value in the subject to begin with. How this misconception came to be the predominant view on the subject to this day is a bit beyond me, but much of it must have to do with the miscategorization of  bothWrath and Justice.

Let us start with the most obvious elephant in the room, and the one we are going to have to start with before we get anywhere: What actually is the purpose of violence in fiction? To talk about this objectively, we have to cut out the modern jargon, degenerate fetishes, and (post)modern deconstruction that has utterly demolished all discourse on the subject for as long as most people reading this have been alive. Essentially: why does violence exist to begin with? Why have it in a story at all? Shouldn't all stories be "natural" and "healthy" instead?

The answer is that violence has a very potent purpose in fiction in that it is the strongest form of tension release possible in a story. The writer builds up a threat the protagonist has to stumble through only for the stakes to ratchet up to threatening his very life and soul. The easiest way to show this is through physical altercations.

By the end of the story it is between the hero and the villain of the plot: who is correct in their struggle? Who will make it out with their values intact? This is the underlying tension in all adventure stories. Which one is ultimately correct on a moral level? We find out through the final confrontation where all stakes are on the line.

The most intense way to show this is with a physical clash that ends with the ultimate result of two titans dueling: the death of falsehood and the victory of Truth. Through this peak battle, both sides are revealed for what they are and the story ends with the most powerful climax possible where it all comes to a head. In essence, and ideally, the rougher the violence the more intense the participants beliefs are and the more willing they are to fight for or be killed for believing. It is the ultimate confrontation of men, and it is why the story is so universal.

Of course, however, there are those that completely misunderstand such obvious things. They instead twist it around backwards.

The above clash often gets misinterpreted by perverts to equate to the sexual act. This is as deep as it gets for them, as they will willingly brag when speaking on the topic. The reason is that they cannot think outside of base pleasures or their own shallow and juvenile views. They are prisoners of lust, and quite proud of it.

You heard it all the time if you were around back in the day. Shirtless men showing off their muscles is not meant to intimidate the enemy or cause the audience to nod at the protagonists chances in the ensuing threat--it is actually about sex. That's all! 

A serial killer's butcher knife is actually a penis substitute which means every murderer in history has exactly, and only, one motive. The final action sequence is akin to a sexual climax because . . . they share the same name I suppose. Do you get it? It's all about sex!

What such interpretations do is lead to boring and very sterile fiction that hasn't aged well at all. If all you see is pornography in everything you read then you're eventually going to burn your brain out. Not everything is so juvenile as that.

None of this new, either. I recently quoted Sam Lundwall's description of sword and sorcery, and he took the most shallow view possible. Because that is what Fandom does.

"The more exclusive variants of sex like sadism, masochism, necrophilia, fetishism and so forth can be found in ample measures in the Sword Sorcery Heroic Fantasy. Despite the cries from some advocates of this type of entertainment that it is pure and virginal and clean, there is sex to be found everywhere; sublimated in various ways, but still there, and in fact the overshadowing ingredient. There is sex—but an immature, infantile sex where the copulation is the sword-fight and the orgasm is the death of the opponent. Women are invariably beautiful, desirable and, beneath their exquisitely sculptured bodies, completely sexless. The symbols of sex (breasts and so forth) are there, but sex itself can be found only in a grotesquely sublimated form. Like in the Wild West story, the sex urge has been transformed into violence and death in the manner of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch."

"The hero's sword-penis is used a lot, although mostly on other males."

If your literary analysis is the exact equivalent to the 13-year-old chuckling at Sam and Frodo hugging in the Lord of the Rings because lol! then you might not be quite as smart as you think you are. And you might not be mentally equipped to analyze fiction or themes.

You're also probably a degenerate who should expand your mind beyond base subjects. I suggest adventure stories: they are far more wholesome for the mind.

But then again, those with baser interest on storytelling always seem to enforce their own shallow interpretations on everyone else. As you can tell with the state of criticism, it's more or less a dead art. This, unfortunately, isn't a new problem at all.

Take the emergence of vigilante films during the 1970s. Many of these were made to counteract the nihilistic evil of movies like Chinatown that were running rampant during the decade. Were you to look at the #1 complaints of these vigilante movies, starting mainly with Dirty Harry and Death Wish, you would see that many people, usually those who don't understand the purpose of narrative violence, were attempting to tell those who actually do understand it, just what they really believe about the subject. You better listen up and learn about yourself from people who don't know you. Sound familiar? That's because things haven't changed at all since then.

You see, you enjoy movies like Death Wish because you like to see people shot to death and you want to shoot people to death. Possibly even innocent people! You think everyone should be free to distribute their own brand of justice, regardless of what the government says about such things. You're a fascist and dangerous! These were the very things being banded about back during the 1970s. You can read the old reviews, and the same stupid charges are still being shouted out today.

The truth is that a story is a story. This is what many wannabe moralists disguised as critics forget. A true and proper story is one that reflects the innermost desire of the soul. The reason people like things such as vigilante movies or revenge films is because they embody and enforce something the modern world doesn't understand at all: Justice. 

It doesn't really have to do with loving to see bad people die without a fair and impartial trial, it has to do with wanting to see Justice played out on the unjust and the innocent saved and their suffering vindicated. And, believe it or not, the law as it is does not always work to do these things. Sometimes it is up to the architect who lost his family or the rogue cop who watched his partner be murdered in cold blood to be the one to make sure no more harm comes to innocent people, and also that the evil of the antagonist is stopped before it flowers into an even more poisonous plant. Stories give us hope and remind us that Good is always Good and Evil is always Evil. These tales of Justice are very necessary.

These movie promote the opposite cause of Wrath and very frequently argue against it. Paul Kersey in Death Wish struggles against the taking of life, but does it because he feels he has to and that there is no other choice. His emotions do not overwhelm him--what he does is very calculated and reasoned out. Whether you think he is right or wrong in his methods is where the discussion comes from, not whether murders and rapists deserve what they get from him.

As you can tell, there is more to these types of stories than mindless carnage and death. But that is rarely the sort of side we see discussed in the wider culture. Mostly we just seem to be endlessly fascinated with the most boring topic of all: sex. And we project it onto everything.

It must be said that if you giggle because your sex-addled brain sees a gun as a penis and the villain as a potential sexual partner then I have to say that these stories probably aren't for you. Also, I would suggest cutting out the pornography. It is obviously damaging your brain.

Next we turn to horror, another genre quite misunderstood, though its biggest fans certainly don't help with that impression. There is more to the genre beyond slaughter. One simply has to look at it from the right angle, and not the debased one so common in our modern culture.

In horror stories the point of violence can be the same as the above, but it is also used to emphasize the level of the threat being dealt with. The protagonists are facing an unknown evil, after all. It's a matter of scale and proportion. Those who break the rules usually don't live long afterwards. How badly a fate they suffer should, theoretically, have to do with the nature of the horror itself. Who will get through the night and who will fall to the darkness? I don't know--but you can bet they will never open that door ever again. And that is the point of a good horror story. Coming from a storied tradition of fairy tales will do that.

For instance, in the film An American Werewolf in London, the plot starts out with two young college students wandering the Scotland moors. Seeing the world and enjoying everything they can before going into the working world. It was a big pastime for kids at the time. These two are told specifically to not use a shortcut at night through the moors or else they will regret it. Of course, the two young fools don't know any better and do not heed the wise warnings of the natives. To summarize what happens next, they both die in very horrific ways and the movie is about the gruesome result of their choice from the beginning of the movie and how it rolls over onto everything to come. Essentially, it is a morality tale.

The same tends to go for even slasher movies. There is a reason the chaste tend to last to the end of the film while the others die along the way. The ones that are slaves to their passions and baser desires are the ones unable to think clearly or see the forest for the trees. In a way, the slasher is the representation of what befalls those who break the rules for selfish gain.

There is purpose here, though it has gone ignored for many years by critics and perverts with far different agendas than expressing universal themes and connecting the audience to the art.

This ties into another complaint about violence. You don't see it as much these days, at least from mainstream types, but it still remains nonetheless. That gripe being that there are many who consider violent stories inherently nihilistic and evil.

If you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s you probably heard this charge a lot. How so many people die pointless deaths and audiences cheering over corpses mean we have become morally depraved and have lost our way as a culture. It should be mentioned that many of these same people would stand up and cheer for movies like Pretty Baby or that terrible Dakota Fanning movie about Elvis music from a few years back, but let's not bother addressing that elephant in the room. The point is that these people see stories in one very myopic way and believe such a shallow view is universal.

When someone dies in a story, the audience needs to analyze the circumstances that lead to their death. In every story, as in life, there is a reason everything happens even if it is not so clear to us at the moment it is occurring. Looking into things deeper always reveals a pattern. This is also invaluable to being a better writer.

There is always a reason for everything.

For instance, I recently viewed 1976's The Tough Ones, also known as Rome Armed to the Teeth or Roma a Mano Armata in the original language. This is a poliziotteschi film, a crime movie, a genre which blew up in the 1970s and '80s in Italy. This happened for a very good reason. What the Italians have never been scared of is portraying violence for what it is, when even Hollywood shied away from it during the supposed unbridled and "Golden Age" of the 1970s. I have a feeling Italians are so good at it because has to do with their heritage, but that is neither here nor there.

The Tough Ones is essentially Italian Dirty Harry only a lot less shy in showing the results of the evil the criminals perpetrate or the violence the spurs from it. Protagonist Inspector Tanzi is a cop who has to deal with an amoral and collapsing society the cares more about rules and base pleasure than what is right or what must be done. The villain even uses the fact that he's a hunchback to garner support in the media against Tanzi because he is being bullied and abused by him. The freaks are always misunderstood and hated, for no reason! However, we the audience know this psycho is guilty, as is the gang he runs with, which is terrorizing the city. But no one will do anything about it. Inspector Tanzi takes on the role for himself. Chaos, of course, soon follows in his wake.

The entire film is about Inspector Tanzi being the agent of Justice that is inevitable in a world that has forgotten out. When the characters in the movie don't act with Justice in mind, someone ends up paying the price for that decision. Whether it is innocent people suffering from inept law enforcement letting scum roam the streets, to showing mercy to someone who has no intention to repent, those who fail in their duty end up suffering the consequences, or it rolls out onto the innocent. As such, you are cheering when the villains actually do die. Not because they are dying, but because they have been stopped and Justice has been served. The world has been set right again. Justice always wins, in the end.

Most would call such violence nihilistic, but there is a point to everything that happens. Every decision has a consequence--and this truth is what makes such a story tick. As far as storytelling devices, violence is an invaluable one which remains because it is so potent and raw. It isn't quite as blatant as message fiction is, but it's a fairly obvious theme for those paying attention. Or, really, you'd think it was.

Compared to the topic of sex, which has a very limited use and can stop a story dead in its tracks, violence very rarely slows anything down. If anything, it exacerbates the pacing, which is something a lot of modern stories suffer from in their bloated lengths. The fact of the matter is that the hotblooded violence flows out from the passion behind the story conflict itself. When the unstoppable force hits the immoveable object, one will break. This is the tension of an action story that often goes unexplored. It also goes a long way to showing why today's bloodless violence is so often cold and flaccid. Conflict is about more than pretty words and idealistic speeches.

Without that old school pulp energy you're just left with a bunch of thunder and bluster signifying nothing. And that is exactly where we are right now. All this because we put things in the wrong place.

Now, don't get me wrong. You can use violence incorrectly in storytelling. You can find no shortage of examples in modern stories from "shock" (the worst possible reason to use violence) to outright gore fetishism. One who has to rely on either is engaging in pornography, not entertainment. They merely want to see violence for the sake of watching blood be shed, and not for the storytelling itself.

An example of this would be the Saw franchise. A gaggle of good-looking Hollywood actors playing normal people are kidnapped and put in elaborate death traps. They have to squirm out, possibly suffering bodily mutilation, and engage in horrific acts, including betrayal, or face violent and painful death. There is nothing else to this aside from wanting to see how people will die in miserable and pointless fashion.

If you took out the deaths, what story would there actually be? What would be the goal for the villain beyond bloodthirst or the protagonist beyond escaping pain? You can't muster sympathy for such characters outside of a base level so what are you supposed to feel towards them? And with an ever-rotating door of protagonists to slaughter you also cannot get a feel for who you are supposed to root for. Partially because none of them matter, in the end. It doesn't matter who lives or dies, as long as we the audience get to watch someone die horrifically.

And what critics see violence in fiction as being is pretty much what Saw actually is. There is absolutely no nuance to them.

The only way you confuse a movie like Saw for The Tough Ones is if you don't understand violence at its very core. One has a belief that human life is worth nothing but the organs and flesh we are composed of; the other believes that lives have inherent value and should be protected from the evil that seeks to destroy them. As a complete coincidence, the latter type has all but been removed from OldPub and Hollywood and replaced with safe superhero fare where upholding the Status Quo comes before all else. True Justice doesn't really exist in mainstream art and entertainment anymore. Just its store brand counterparts.

The issue is that if you look at a lot of reviews from the decades many of these works came out you will find critics absolutely oblivious as to the audience's interest in it. Not just oblivious, but outright hostile. That fact is that decades after its heyday, the highest selling genre of vintage Blu-ray releases is 1980s horror--the one considered the most worthless and most degenerate by said critics when they were around. Now how can that be? I was assured these movies were completely depraved and amoral. Aren't they getting this exact thing out of Hollywood right now? If so, then why is Hollywood product not selling as well as it used to? Perhaps there is more to this than what the critics believe.

The thing to keep in mind is that we live in an era where pornography is everywhere, and free at that. Meanwhile, re-releases of those old beach movies and erotic skin flicks don't do all that great in contrast to horror. Why is this? Don't they offer the same thing? Clearly not. This should be a good hint that the reason people buy those movies isn't quite for the titillation or depravity, especially when they can easily get that for no cost elsewhere on the internet. There are whole sites dedicated to misery and porn, after all. Yet horror still sells. Therefore, this tells us that these older generations of critics completely missed the boat.

People desire more from their entertainment than mindless pleasure or indulgence. The repeated success of pulp-style adventure in popular culture despite its constant burying by the industry is proof of that. The audience always knows what they really want, even when they can't get it. The critics? Not so much.

Those in charge of your tastes have their values backwards. They substitute Justice for Wrath, replace Love for Lust, and mistake Virtue for Sin. This is why their critique's only ever get the surface level details right. When it comes to any of the above topics, they are like a fish flopping around the side of a creek. Completely lost and without a clue.

Without Justice we will fall to Wrath, and this is something the critics will never understand. Not as long as they stubbornly refuse to put things in their proper place. But people like that have always existed, and they always will. We just have to get around them.

They might wish to dictate to the audience what they should consume, and sometimes we might need a little nudging ourselves, but for the most part we know exactly what we want even if we can't describe it quite well. At least we know better than they do. If one thing about the failed social experiment called the 20th century should stick it is that the audience isn't as dumb as some of their "betters" think they are. They might not even see it themselves--but they know it internally. Everyone does. That's just how it is.

At the end of the day, that's all we need to understand. Art is connection, for artist and audience, and without that shared understanding we are both left adrift in the ether lost in our own worlds of madness. It's not about one group over the other or a battle to the death between them. We should hopefully get this by now. None of us are kids anymore--we can easily be on the same page when we have to. And it is about time we do so.

Because despite what OldPub or Hollywood pushes in their misplaced arrogance and mindless greed, art is a team effort. We can get through this together, and we will. Such a thing might be difficult in an era that so overwhelmingly focuses on ego and the self over all, but it is very much possible to accomplish.

All it takes is a little imagination.

A story of hotblooded action on the shadow planet!

Violent Storm: One of the Best Video Games Ever Made

We're about due for another dive into the past with one of these posts, so what better time than now? Let us talk about some classic video games. Posts around this place have been a bit heavier than usual, so let us lighten this puppy up. And we're going to lighten it up with one of the goofiest video games you can imagine.

The subject I have chosen is a game I have mentioned briefly one or two times before at Wasteland & Sky, but which has recently been getting noticed by bigger figures in the retro scene and new gamers everyday. This would be the 1993 Beat 'Em Up, Violent Storm, created by Konami. This was Konami's last entry in the genre, alongside Metamorphic Force (which is a game I might also talk about at some point), and is not very well known. Nonetheless, they went out with the strongest possible game they could. Violent Storm is one of the best games ever made.

And that's why this post exists.

Though for the longest time, Violent Storm was mocked by irony-bros and very online people as being too cartoony and stupid with "bad" music, it has recently turned around in appreciation due to the long-awaited wane of '00s bitter and angry internet culture. People now appreciate the game for what it is instead of mocking it for the era it came from.

I chose to talk about this game because of two reasons. The first is that Konami will probably never re-release it--they rarely ever re-release any of their classic arcade games from the late '80s and early '90s. The second is that it epitomizes everything the genre does right and when it was at its absolute peak, and easily shows how Beat 'Em Ups managed to captivate audiences for near a decade back in the day. The genre showed the art of simplicity in concept and how it could be blown up into an entire genre that still engrosses to this day. Keeping it simple allows more flexibility than you would think. Violent Storm is the perfect game to epitomize what the genre does best.

The reason it has shown new appreciation is due to the game finally getting a clear-headed approach. This is due to the death of irony poisoning in game criticism. Now we can discuss what Violent Storm mechanically right, and how its aesthetics are actually not bad, but indicative of the time, bring bright and attractive. Now that we're finally done laughing at a better cultural time period than the present we can see just what appeal was.

Violent Storm is the peak of a genre that had been more or less solidified by 1984 with games such as Kung-Fu Master or Konami's own Shaolin Road.

The Golden Age of the genre (Picture made by me)

Violent Storm came out right as the peak of the genre was starting to wane. By 1995, Beat 'Em Ups would more or less vanish from popular consciousness aside from one or two console releases in the years to come. Due to the advent of the one on one fighter, such as Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, most arcades changed their focus towards them. The focus remained on the burgeoning fighting game long into the death of the arcade scene. As a consequence, Beat 'Em Ups were looked on as lesser for many years, hitting a low with IGN's review of Double Dragon Neon in 2012 lamenting "quarter munching" difficulty and stating that games such as this should no longer be made.

But that is getting ahead of myself.

Let us begin talking about the subject of the post. Violent Storm was put out at the tail end of August 1993 on the 30th. It was the 21st most successful arcade board of the year in Japan and, as previously mentioned, was Konami's last real entry in the genre. The game sort of came and went, not really getting much notice.

It was also the unofficial third entry in their Crime Fighters arcade series following Crime Fighters from 1989 and Vendetta in 1991. These were all made by the same team, and showed drastic improvements with each entry. Each game was based on a Cannon Films-style action movie plot with Konami's typical brand of cartoony, slapstick humor and buoyant music to brighten the crisp gameplay. As a consequence, this unofficial trilogy is fairly unique, even today.

Most Konami Beat 'Em Ups were based on licenses such as The Simpsons, X-Men, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but these were completely original games that carried much of that flavor over in new ways. By 1993 they had the genre mastered. Violent Storm is the peak of everything Konami learned in the genre since they started near a decade prior.

For instance, let us start with the story, such as it is. You don't play these games for the story, but it is important to note how they threw wrinkles in the framework in unexpected ways. It's a jambalaya of well worn ideas, mixed extremely well.

"In the 1990s, World War III has at last ended. The people are left to pick up the pieces and rebuild their civilizations. However, vicious gangs that prey on these defenseless citizens are obstructing the reconstruction.

"The main protagonists are Boris, Wade and Kyle, vigilantes who protect the fearful and helpless. Their largest problem is the corrupt, incorrigible, ruthless and lethal gang known as The Geld Gang. They have commissioned every type of person imaginable: purple-haired, leather-clad, chain-wielding, lead-pipe swinging, masked, martial artists, orange-mohawked, and men who use manhole covers as shields.

"One day, when the trio is patrolling the streets, alert, ready and able to help those in need, they see a woman named Sheena (a friend of theirs) waving at them as she walks across the street from a supermarket with groceries. A moment later, Lord Geld's right-hand man, Red Freddy, snatches her away on his motorcycle. Now, the three braves must save Sheena from the grips of Lord Geld."

Someone clearly likes Fist of the North Star, Mad Max, Cyborg, and Double Dragon, but the twist they took on the topic is what makes it memorable. It takes all those things and adds just enough of a spin to make it different. What makes Violent Storm work so well is where this all goes after said setting and setup is out of the way. They crank it to 11.

While most decided to make such an aesthetic look grim and depressing, Violent Storm decided to do the opposite. They created a strange look that helps the game to stand out from the crowd, inspired from many of the other games in the genre they had made up to this point. As a consequence, Violent Storm doesn't really look or sound anything like the above properties.

The advances in arcade boards and technology also allowed for big, bolder sprites than ever before, as well as improved sound. This game is a 2D powerhouse. What you get is almost an entire world of difference from what was happening in Kung Fu Master nearly a decade earlier, and well beyond what the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were capable of. Konami pulled out all the stops. This is how far the Beat 'Em Up genre came in such a short period of time.

1984

1993

The bright palette contrasts with the violent subject matter and adds to the comedic tone without undermining the action. Every character is big, intimidating, and larger than life, and yet their reactions when they get hit are taken to the extreme which both adds to the threat and comedy at the same time. Violent Storm does double duty as a straight Beat 'Em Up and a loving parody at the same time, and both work tremendously well to creating an exciting tone.

However, as hinted at above, Konami also adds in a wrinkle with the aesthetic and setting, which is a sort of post-apocalyptic utopian vibe. You'll see crumbling buildings, creaking trains, dirty punks, and dirty streets outside ruined buildings and museums, and yet you'll also see sealed-bubble cities, beautiful forests, clean water, and happy people dressed in ancient Greek attire. It's a strange setting, but since it isn't elaborated on, it works. This is showing and not telling taken to the extreme, and that's what sells the tone. It also adds to the wide variety of locations you'll be battling through as well as some of the bizarre enemies that will show up to take you on. You won't see anything else in the genre that quite looks like this game does.

Given that you are playing a game as a post-apocalyptic gang, the sights you see along the way to rescuing your girl are quite in contrast with what you might expect. This isn't Double Dragon or Final Fight. It's a bright and busy world, yet filled with a lot of danger that will catch you off guard. And isn't that how it should be in a video game such as this?

As you also might have gathered from the clip at the top of the post, the music is also quite buoyant and loud. Of course many people will take note of the cheesiness, which is very much a good thing, and sort of write it all off as a lark, but that is dismissing much of the appeal. The music works because it knows how to shift with the atmosphere. It never stays in the same gear too long. always changing when the game demands it.

There are tracks that are bright cheery pop songs such as the above, but there are also darker atmospheric tracks for abandoned museums and underground facilities. Most tellingly of all, however, is the presence of rockabilly piano tracks, and surf songs that riff on Konami's own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. These add a punch of energy, levity, and aesthetic that gives much to the tone of the game. You're always left wondering just what is coming next, and everything works towards that.

Art-style aside, there isn't really any other game that sounds like Violent Storm does.

Then there is the gameplay. This is what puts the game over the top, as it should for any video game.

Konami Beat 'Em Ups have always been the most simple in the genre to get into, and Violent Storm doesn't buck the trend. However, in this game they decided to take the old standby Final Fight formula of one button to attack and the second to jump, and add a host of tweaks to it. Violent Storm is a game that is easy to get into but satisfying to master, much like home entries in the genre such as Streets of Rage 2 or Double Dragon Advance. And, unlike those two, Violent Storm manages this feat with only two buttons.

Depending on the direction you push the joystick, you can block attacks, strike enemies behind you, or angle your own moves in a way to break enemy defenses or strike faster or harder. Subtle directional movements of the stick can also add additional attacks to your arsenal while you hit the attack button. You can also change how you input your presses of the attack or jump button to change the movements you make. In other words, instead of one button being responsible for one move you are afforded an entire move-set depending on how willing you are to dive into what the game offers you. Or you can just mash the attack button. Whatever you'd prefer.

Another advantage is that the game directly tackles what is unavoidably one of the biggest issues with the genre: repetition. No matter how good a Beat 'Em Up is, the largest challenge is getting around the fact that you are beating up more or less the same waves of enemies over and over again for stages at a time. So many entries in the genre fail at offering the variety so sorely needed. This is what makes level design so very important.

In Violent Storm you are always doing or seeing something new. The first stage, as always, introduces the basics, but every level after that throws in a new wrinkle to keep things fresh. Just like the music and changing aesthetic, each stage switches things up in very subtle ways. Stage 2 is on a train that allows you to throw enemies off, light bulbs to shatter, and piglets that turn into weaponized footballs when you pick them up(!), and stage 3 goes from a street brawl with a kicking rap theme into a dance club with some of the craziest music you can imagine, not to mention weaponized potted plants and breaking furniture. In the midst of this are plenty of weapons, enemy patterns, and bosses, as well as varying enemy strengths, that all must be approached differently. The game keeps the flow moving, and keeps you thinking. It also ends at the exact right moment it should.

There are seven stages, each taking somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes to beat, lending the game the perfect length for the genre being around 45 minutes to an hour. This is assuming, of course, that you fly through the levels with ease.

The difficulty isn't really as quarter muncher as you might think. By this point, and with other games such as Sunset Riders and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, Konami had mastered their arcade design in a way where they didn't need to suck your quarters to keep you playing. They simply made the game tough enough that you just needed to understand the gameplay loop and get rewarded with having fun simply doing well. It's a hard game, but it isn't close to overbearing. This is arcade difficulty done right.

If you didn't know better you would have to suspect Violent Storm was made by someone who knew the genre inside out, and they very clearly did. As said before, this was made in 1993, when the genre was more or less mastered. Konami had this down to a science.

See for yourself:

Gameplay

As you also might have noticed, this is a three player game. Konami was always good at allowing a party atmosphere into their arcade games, and Violent Storm is no exception. Get together with a bunch of buddies and the lunacy of Violent Storm gets just that much better. The arcades were the peak of co-op gaming, followed by couch co-op with friends, but nothing quite beat making new friends and bonding  over great games like this. It's an experience lost with the death of the arcade. Nonetheless, this remains a shining example of a lost era. It doesn't get much better than this.

Unfortunately, Violent Storm has never been ported to anything since its original 1993 arcade release date. As mentioned, Konami never releases compilations or re-releases of their late '80s and early '90s arcade classics, for some reason, leaving gems like this forgotten outside of those in the emulation scene. Unless you find a cabinet of this one (which is very unlikely) there are precious few ways to get your hands on it legally.

Regardless of all that, you should very much play it. They don't make them like Violent Storm anymore.

In an age of $70 AAA games that last for maybe one playthrough before they are forgotten, the arcade age seems like an entirely different world now, and it is. Back in the day the length in games didn't come from artificial length depending on linear progression through a story: it came through mastering gameplay loops and replay value which leaned on fun factor. This is why classic games have stood the test of time like they have and why AAA will not, and such a thing just isn't admitted in the current broken industry. But you know it's true.

We are coming to the seventh anniversary of when the game journalists declared Gamers Were Over, and, as you can tell, that turned out to be patently false. They get everything wrong, just as they passed over great games such as this. They have no idea what they are doing or what made their own industry so successful to begin with. This is why they are dying out.

As the old industry falls apart under its weight from years of going in the wrong direction, it is more important than ever to realize what made the medium so big and so good to begin with. In other words, industry guards are not to be trusted. Be wary when this crowd reviews classic games. They aren't looking at it from the right angle, and they deliberately undersell them. Keep that in mind in the unlikely event that Violent Storm is ever released. Guarantee that nothing I mentioned in this post will be brought up by them.

Nonetheless, none of that matters. What does matter is that Violent Storm is one of the best games ever made, and one that everyone should play. It epitomizes the best in the genre, and the best gaming has to offer. Its gameplay, aesthetic, and structure, are all perfectly crafted to form the ultimate example of what one expects from a video game.

Seek it out and play it. Few games are so fun as Violent Storm is, and few ever will be. It epitomizes what makes a Beat 'Em Up great.

And that is what makes it one of the best games of all time.

For more Beat 'Em Up inspired action, check out Grey Cat Blues! Where mudmen from hell run rampant on the shadow planet!

The Rise, Descent, and Restoration of the First Person Shooter

The First Person Shooter. Now there's a genre of video games that causes all sorts of strong reactions. About the only ones that will get a fiercer reaction might be JRPGs or walking simulators, though for slightly different reasons. The First Person Shooter (FPS) has a history as simultaneously the most extreme and offensive genre and the safest and most tame for reasons that are quite clear to anyone who grew with the genre and its early roots in games like Wolfenstein 3D. It also the most unabashedly male genres.

The main character is usually the most appealing to males, either musclebound men or attractive curvaceous women, utilizing a wide variety of weapons to battle insurmountable armies of soldiers, monsters, or aliens, that wish to take over and/or destroy the world. Levels typically involve much exploration and puzzle solving to get through, on top of it. In other words, these are as pure action adventure games you can get short of platformers.

But because of its roots in 80s action movies, these games are now considered quite offensive, probably more than they were when they first came out.

Me, I've personally never had an issue with putting a bullet into the brain of a demon or enemy agents trying to destroy the free world, but I've also grown up with the genre. Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Duke Nukem 3D were the games I played the most of on my very first PC. I played GoldenEye and Perfect Dark to death on the N64. I was playing Medal of Honor on the PS1 before the World War II fad began and Timesplitters was the first PS2 game I ever owned.

It was one of my favorite genres.

And that's about the time where a lot of my interest died out.

You see, in the '00s video games began harping about becoming "realistic" like other dying mediums such as novels and comics in order to be "relevant" to people who never cared about the medium to begin with. All of a sudden every genre had to "relate" to every single gamer (and non-gamer) which meant dumbing down the content to appeal to the lowest common denominator. In the process of doing so FPS games became the go-to action genre for mediocrity. It was now a safe space hand-holding session for wimps who like watching movies more than playing video games. The "bald space marine" cliche existed for a reason: those games are what choked the life out of the genre. The bombast was gone, as was the fun.

If you want to know what I mean, simply look at the earlier entries in the genre. They may be "dated" now, but they still offer more gameplay and variety than any AAA game the industry drools out of its maw these days. I've spent the better part of the last year using my gaming time on these old relics, and they still remain fun.

Catacomb 3D and its sequels were proto-DOOM with maze-like levels and plenty of demonic enemies and monsters to blast into goo. The Blake Stone games were a James Bond meets sci-fi monster movie in space mash-up. Rise of the Triad is a dime store novel come to life. The Star Wars: Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games brought pulp adventures with the open ended level design and varied enemy types that classic shooters were known for. Strife attempted to blend roleplaying elements with DOOM. And those are just the tip of the iceberg.

Throughout the 90s, the genre only built on these games, constantly improving while holding onto its roots.

Blood: One Unit Whole Blood is one of the best of the genre. It actually might be the best FPS ever made, or is close to it. Wide open levels, satisfying weapons, mad villains and demons of all stripes are hiding all over, and the trashy story about demons killing other demons is delicious. You won't get a purer FPS experience than this. And it still holds up today.

I suppose I could also bring up System Shock, but there would be little point. Other similar games share FPS elements, but are not FPS games, like Thief or Deus Ex, just simply share influences and crossover appeal. But if it wasn't for that genre, they certainly wouldn't be what they are now. I would argue they have more in common with the likes of the older games than any of the games coming out now, however.

It was at this time that genre began going crazy with games like Shadow Warrior, SiN, and Redline, the latter of which is part car combat and Mad Max simulator. And the games kept coming. It's a long way of saying that the genre was built purely on fun and excitement with a very clear focus. You could also mention games like the last two S.W.A.T. entries and Rainbow Six for bringing strategy elements in. There was nothing off limits.

And, as has been said, video games were one of the few mediums that continued impressing and growing into the '00s. No One Lives Forever, Serious Sam, Clive Barker's Undying, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Shogo, Judge Dredd: Dredd Vs. Death, Painkiller, and most games up to the second Star Wars Battlefront had at least something to offer the player while keeping the fun alive. Things were only looking up for the genre. Even the first HD console generation started off on a different note with the first Condemned entry.

But then came along a game called Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Now, I don't hate this game. As far as cinematic shooters go, it's still one of the best to this day and it was original when it released. It's very well directed and was impressive for its time. However scripted and shallow the level design might be, it is still well made. But it hobbled the genre and sucked all creativity out of it, damaging the genre for years afterwards.

Everyone ended up copying its success. Shooters had to be "realistic" and "down to earth" while at the same time doing away with health packs for hiding behind cover until your bullet wounds simply go away. The absurdity sells itself. And this was the main problem with this new focus.

Every weapon needed to be "aimed down" on with iron-sights which both obscured the screen and slowed down the action tremendously. Again, in the name of realism.

Enemy types as well were now standard humans with no real differential AI or placement in a level. Monster closets were about as complex as enemy encounters ever got. Because of this change, strategy was practically gutted from any firefight, and level design was streamlined to compensate. Enemy types all having the same weakness (headshot) and body type (normal fit humanoid) cut down on the crazy enemy variety the genre was capable of and had indulged in.

Wide open levels were replaced with one single hallway. This was pared down from DOOM's traditional labyrinth-like designs because players could get lost and need event triggers and explosions to keep them engaged and their eyes on the screen. This despite near two decades of history showing the audience was fine with the original approach.

Whereas in early games you could carry ten weapons+ including crazy gizmos such as alien guns that could fire through walls, chainsaws, super shotguns, and portable wall turrets, you were now limited to two that were limited to realistic military hardware. The reason given for this was because it was "more realistic" and for "game balance" because creative weapons might be too imaginative for gamers and take them out of their fantasy experience. Also, so developers didn't have to extensively test balance between weapons and the levels themselves.

And all this was in the service of streamlining and "casualizing" for the audience.

Certain people blamed consoles for this. They were wrong. Games like GoldenEye and Perfect Dark existed solely on consoles and had big levels, a large set of crazy weapons, and multiple scaling objective for players to tackle long before Call of Duty existed. Even the original Halo: Combat Evolved had it. Not to mention the Timesplitters games. Games like Quake, DOOM, and Half-Life were all ported to consoles with no problems. They did not need any of the things Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare made standard, and it is revisionism to say they did. The dumbing down was purely due to hopping on a trend train that ended up gutting much enjoyment from the genre while finding a convenient scapegoat. It had nothing to do with the limitations of consoles, but the limitations of developers.

Around the time Halo and CoD hit fever pitch, the genre lost its way with clone after clone aping their original success. They all followed the same template, they all had the same aesthetic, and they all played exactly the same. This continued for years as the entire industry became bereft of originality or depth. New consoles came out, and the same bad decisions were still being made. It looked as if the FPS was never going to reclaim it's former glory.

But then a strange thing happened. DOOM 4 was announced, and not only was it announced, but it was against everything modern shooters had become.

Originally it was going to be another CoD clone. id Software even had a concept of it they showed around. But it sucked. It was predictable, safe, and forgettable. It was the anti-DOOM and against everything the genre was supposed to be. At some point they realized just how far the genre had fallen and decided to change course. So they went back to basics. They got to working on a classic DOOM game the way it would look if made on modern hardware. They decided to update the old formula and forget current trends.

And it ended up being one of the best shooters ever.

How did they succeed? Well, I'll leave it to the Razorfist review to tell you.

*WARNING: NSFW language*

It was a massive success.

DOOM 4 is one of the best FPS games I've ever played. The levels are open, the weapons are satisfying, the art style is fresh and engaging, and everything is just plain fun to do. It was as if they went back to 2005 and pretended the intervening years didn't happen when Halo and CoD were the only influences in the genre. This is exactly what FPSes needed.

It remains to be seen if id's masterful gambit has paid off yet or if it will be ignored as soundly as John Wick's success has been by Hollywood, but I would hope someone is watching. The genre is turning it back around.

However, smaller developers and publishers got the hint. For instance, there is Ion Maiden from 3D Realms and Voidpoint. A new shooter made in the old engine of Blood, Shadow Warrior, and Duke Nukem 3D, it uses modern tricks in the genre while still adhering to the roots that made the genre a success in the first place.

But they aren't alone.

Amid Evil and Dusk from New Blood Interactive. These are classic style shooters designed with modern sensibilities, but still retain what built the genre in the first place. Taking up from where the AAA industry has dropped the ball, these creators went back and reinvented the wheel, only giving it spiked tires and built-in machine guns. They are reminding gamers just where the genre came from.

This is a long way to saying that you don't need to give up. Just because things might have gotten off the track does not mean they will always stay that way, or that no one else realizes the problems going on. Times are changing.

Eventually it all comes back around again.

So keep your chin up. A real revolution is on its way.