Beer Notes: Monk's Blood by 21st Ammendment

image hastily cribbed from http://idrunkthat.com/beer-reviews/beer-review-monks-blood

Monk's Blood in a can.  It looked intriguing enough for me to pick up and give it a taste test, the Mrs. is a fan of Belgians.  I'll keep this short - it's not what I was expecting.  It's heavy on the oak, something I barely glanced over in its description.  A little focusing calls to mind white wines I've had.  It's also moderately toasty at 8.2% ABV.  Asides from that, there's some hint of fruitiness, but nothing really stands out much beyond the oak.  Not terrible, but not enough there to make me come back to it again.

Personal Rating: I'll drink it if it's free.

3 Major Things I Never Knew About Maniac Mansion

Maniac Mansion, a game for the Commodore 64 and later PC & NES, riffs on B-horror movies with a schlocky plot about students breaking into the mad scientist Dr. Fred's mansion to rescue the protagonist's cheerleader girlfriend.  Under the goofy premise, players were treated to a fun and very clever adventure game.  It was filled with dark humor (as well as outright silliness), featured multiple endings, awesome music, and the advent of SCUMM ("Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion"), which streamlined play by eliminating text commands, and would be used in future LucasFilm games.  As popular as the game was and continues to be, there are a few major things about Maniac Mansion that even as a fan of the game and the genre, I had no idea about:

Innovation in . . . Breakclips?

The damsel in distress making her "Oh Dear, I'm About to be Lobotomized" face.

One of the mechanics in the game is avoiding capture by the residents of the house (Dr. Fred, Ed, and Edna) as you go around rooting through their stuff.  In order to warn the player when one of them was on the move, or sometimes just to provide plot points or hints, the game would be interrupted to show these characters talking and going about their evil business.  Doesn't sound too crazy; it's common in modern games to leave the actual gameplay to show an expository bit of video.  What was significant about it, as described by Maniac Mansion co-creator Ron Gilbert, was that before Maniac Mansion, games had shown non-interactive portions between levels or after big events, but this was different.  The game cut away from the action to show a scene.  Indeed, Maniac Mansion is credited with having the first true "cutscene", a term that Ron Gilbert actually coined during the game's development.  So every time you sit back and watch a game's better-rendered story bits, you now know it has a tiny bit of MM's DNA.

Makes you wish for the good old days when a cutscene was just "Gee, I'm hungry!"

Serious Nightmare Fuel

Maniac Mansion scared me as a kid (even the tamed-down NES version), which I've been pretty embarrassed about in retrospect.  However, while researching the game, I've seen enough mentions of similar experiences to realize I wasn't alone.  It seems odd to have been afraid of what is fundamentally a really goofy game - that is, until I actually went back and took a good look.  Let me hit the high spots for you:

Ledger of Terror

- The constant anxiety about being caught (if you don't know what you're doing, anyway)
- The multiple ways to accidentally nuke yourself and everything in a 5-mile radius (I once declared this winning since it effectively stopped Dr. Fred and the evil meteor).
- One of the first rooms is a blood-spattered kitchen, complete with a bloody chainsaw . . .
- Walk a little past the blood and Nurse Edna suddenly appears, captures you, and locks you in a dungeon . . .
- And if you have a male character, she says "I should have tied you to the bed, cutie."

Okay, maybe that all sounds relatively tame, but you can also get into a situation where a resident of the house does more than merely consider sexing you up.  Hint: It's not any of the humans.

If you go to Green Tentacle's room, you find a record entitled "Tentacle Mating Calls".  If you use the equipment in the music room, you can record that music onto a cassette tape.  Give the tape to the Green Tentacle and he pops it into his stereo system and plays it, thinking it's your demo tape.  Then this happens -

And in front of his mother!  The cad!

He says 'THE TENTACLE MATING CALL!", approaches your character, and then the screen cuts to an image of your gravestone beside the mansion. Allow me to clarify: 

In Maniac Mansion, you can be  

RAPED TO DEATH BY A TENTACLE MONSTER

Just one tentacle?  Meh.

And lastly, in contrast to that -

Wholesome Family Programming

Later on in life, when I was a little less tentacle-phobic, I played Day of the Tentacle, the hilarious, time-traveling sequel to Maniac Mansion.  Up until recently I had vague memories from that game's plot, something about the Edisons getting money from the use of their image; I guess I kind of assumed it was from the first game or some-referential joke like that.  It turns out that it was supposed to a TV show they were getting paid for, but either way I just laughed it off because that’d be ridic-

Holy crap.  This was actually a show?  How come I never heard of it?

Who has time to read things!?!  There's video games!

Also, I didn't have cable.

It was aired on YTV in Canada and was available on The Family Channel in the United States.  Still, I'm guessing I probably never heard of it because things like this usually start as mediocre ideas and get canned midway through the pilot, right?

Maniac Mansion, the TV show, was not only critically acclaimed, named one of Time Magazine's top ten shows of 1990, but ran for three seasons – 66 episodes.  The writers managed this feat by having increasingly little in common with the game over time.  (Read: Disappointing lack of sentient tentacles.)  The main similarities were that the family lives in a mansion and there is a meteor that Dr. Fred experiments on.  In this universe, where trespassing and the name Edna didn't hold up well in focus groups, his experiments backfire and cause trouble with the family, a family that now includes siblings with moody teenager problems, etc.  For instance there’s this segment, which includes the Uncle that was turned into a fly with a human head, the toddler that was turned into an exceptionally creepy man in his early forties, and FEELINGS.

It’s weird alright, but keep in mind that “family” sitcoms at the time didn’t rule out crazy stunts like this.  Family Matters, which was long-running and popular in the US, hung its hat on Steve Urkel, who also was a mad scientist.  This is evidenced by his artificially intelligent Urkelbot, the love interest, Laura, falling for a clone of Urkel who was run through some kind of coolness enhancing machine, and the episode where Urkel builds a nuclear bomb and destroys Chicago.

 Contemporaries

Another interesting tidbit - the show was created by and occasionally guest-starred Eugene Levy.

They nixed his idea about Nurse Edna making a pie and the tentacles finding it.

So there you have it folks, retro video game nostalgia lovingly wrapped in retro TV nostalgia.  It all goes to show that the more you look at your past, the more horrifying and bizarre it becomes until you're not even sure the world makes sense anymore.

Also, the Angry Video Game Nerd is clearly Bernard

BONUS:  Here's screens from the Famicom version, which looks like a Playskool reenactment.

Info Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_Mansion 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_Mansion_%28TV_series%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Matters
http://www.blacknerdcomedy.com/2009/09/24/19-prime-urkel-and-family-matters-moments/

http://www.maniacmansionfan.50webs.com/index.html

http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html

http://grumpygamer.com/8139425

Retronauts Episode 39

Picture Sources

Game Cover: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_Mansion 

Pretty Brains Screen: http://home.comcast.net/~ervind/mmzakold.html

Squall Pic: http://www.well-rendered.com/2011/10/why-i-love-final-fantasy-x.html

Tentacle Time Pic: Screencapped from Maniac Mansion Deluxe

Anime Girl Pic: http://s307.photobucket.com/albums/nn309/RockLeesLilShadow/Anime%20People/?action=view&current=animegirl.jpg&

Manual/Ad Pic: http://forums.gametrailers.com/thread/what-s-your-favorite-nes-game-/1264874

Urkelbot Pic: http://gentlemenbehold.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/rundown-the-top-5-robot-civilizations/
Eugene Levy Pic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Levy

AVGN Pic: http://www.listal.com/viewimage/1293048

Bernard Pic: http://www.tiempodeculto.com/articulos/juegos/outsidersVideojuego.htm

Diablo III: Time Wasted is Money Earned

image from thehive

                A problem with any successful MMO is the dread you experience after typing “/played”.  That’s hours - who am I kidding - weeks, months you’ll never get back.  Ideally, you had fun and it was all worthwhile.  But thinking about all the grinding and crafting and queuing, you can’t help but contemplate the utter meaninglessness of it, especially with a new expansion on the horizon as a reminder that all our purples will soon be outclassed by greens.  Thankfully, Blizzard is providing its own timely alternative to WoW, which may go a long way towards combating this problem. 

                Diablo III, overall, will not be a surprise to anyone.  Even if you haven’t been lucky enough to get your hands on the beta, you know what you’re getting – you will click, you will conquer, and the demon-slaying areas of your brain will hum pleasantly.  It will be a good time.  But beyond the escape from trade chat granted by a single player campaign, or a return to (somewhat) less complex suite of skills and stats, the symptoms of MMO grind might be relieved more so by the introduction of the real money auction house.

                When a person expends their time on an activity, there are two possible presumptions – the activity is either pleasurable enough itself to be worth doing or there is some reward for the unpleasantness involved that compensates.  Run the same dungeon enough times and you start to wonder whether you’re meeting either of those criteria.  But the introduction of a way to earn real money through the course of typical gameplay could be a huge step to conquering the fatigue associated with the less novel portions of gaming.  When games start to feel like work, we question the whole activity – getting paid for our efforts may provide just enough motivation to keep us going until we find something engaging again.  Even if your exploits only shake out to, say, a quarter an hour for your evening click-fest, it feels like something could be extracted from your efforts, and that might be enough to assuage the guilt of screwing around when you could be, I don’t know, working a second job at the QwikStop.

Diablo III has a release window of Feb/March 2012, if we all just clap our hands and believe.  According to Amazon, the standard version will be $60 and the collector's edition will be $100 and *totally sweet*.

I am a n00b. Sincerely, Me.

 
Today's Penny Arcade, in addition to being a pretty decent poem somehow, is about the vinegary sort of people you find harnessing the power of global communication nested inside a FPS to inform you that the state of your genitals and/or sexuality is questionable, perhaps even outright lacking.

My Experience: I played an online FPS for roughly a day.  I decided to give Team Fortress 2 a roll after I had exhausted Portal and started digging around into the rest of the Orange Box.  I hadn't logged much guns + multiplayer time since GoldenEye 64, and sucked out loud.  Under different circumstances I might have just kept weighing down the angry hardcore players long enough to actually improve, but I made a crucial oversight:  I forgot to give myself a Steam handle.  The default it used was my full name, resulting not only in the furious demands over talk to get off the server being disturbingly specific, but the feeling that every hasty death had my signature beside it.  It said "Why yes, l33tG4Mz3r69, it is possible for a real person to suck this much".  I couldn't shake the feeling that one day I'd be down at the local watering hole, brandish my ID to the barkeep, and he would glance, glance again more intently, then stare into my eyes.  "That's him," he'd think to himself "that's the kind of face that both sucks and is gay".

Webternetergration

Just writing something to fill out this contentless void - but there is some news!

There is now a twitter page @aradicallynewnerd and an email of aradicallynewnerd at-for-stand gmail dotcom.  And there's a URL www.aradicallynewnerd.com that redirects to hereabouts.  So that's me catching up with the late 20th century.