Toonami Aftermath Interview

Are you done watching Toonami Aftermath yet? It's been a few months since I mentioned it, assuming you heard about it from me. If you're not, that's cool, come back when you're done.

Okay! I recently had the pleasure of interviewing "Toon," the mysterious creator and showrunner of Toonami Aftermath, through e-mail. He was super gracious and eager to answer all my questions, so if you need another reason to watch the hundreds of hours of free entertainment he provides, there you go. If you're as interested as I was about the origins and logistics of a project that obviously involves so much work, passion, and, let's face it, vulnerability to litigation, read on (My questions are bolded):


First of all, I suppose I should ask: who am I talking to in these e-mails?

Most know me by the nickname Toon, I am the creator of Toonami Aftermath.

Who's the team behind Toonami Aftermath, how did you come together, and what lead to the decision to create a Toonami "revival?"

The Toonami Aftermath team is smaller than most people imagine. I created the site and developed the tools needed to schedule the broadcast and monitor/update the schedule. Notable contributors are:

• Mercurius - Contacted me and offered help in making promos. He made a handful of show intros for Toonami Aftermath, all of which are top notch.

• Sonicstormer - Head moderator, he is in charge of pretty much all moderation which includes the chat and forum; he's the hardest working person on ToonamiAftermath.com. If I ever got banned from my own site for breaking our own rules, Sonic would be the one to do it.

• TallestRed - Our server admin, he is the computer expert of the group. If we need help with the server, general coding, or we just need advice about what software to run or what coding method to use, Tallest is the guy to talk to. If you've ever used the little buttons that change the stream quality on the front page, that is only a taste of what Tallest can and has done *wink*.

• ShepherdGrey - Another moderator, he is the guy that logs in every couple hours just to tell everyone to "GBTW!" (get back to work). Actually, Shepherd is our pretend lawyer who wrote the Terms of Service and basically owns your soul if you didn't read the fine print.

• Hangingsquid - A moderator, top contributor in the forums, recently a server admin, and soon to be an affiliate with the launch of his own "InternetTV" website.

• Last but not least is Xioustic - a mentor and the person responsible for the conception of the website. Toonami Aftermath used to just be a broadcast on ustream, but Xioustic offered to buy a domain and host a small site on his personal hosting plan. If it wasn't for Xioustic I don't think we would have ever launched our own server.

I couldn't possibly name all the people that make ToonamiAftermath.com awesome, there are so many inspiring and intelligent people here. The viewers are also top contributors, they are the voice of Toonami Aftermath. You guys all rock!

Once your goal was established, how did you go about turning Toonami Aftermath into a reality?

It was January 10^th, 2010 when I solidified in my mind what I wanted to attempt. At the time I had just discovered a Dragon Ball Z marathon stream on the web. This brought me back to a place I had long since forgotten, and I remember talking to my grade school friends, asking if they ever watched Toonami. To my surprise it turned out I was the only one that did among my group of friends until I started chatting up with my buddy Nick, who was raving about how much Toonami meant to him. To Nick, Toonami wasn't just a cool animation block on TV, it was something more than that. We discovered that we were both uncompromising fans of the 1997-2002 Toonami and shared a lot of insight about the dub of DBZ we liked and other shows like ThunderCats and Gundam Wing.

Shortly after the 24/7 DBZ stream was discontinued it hit me like a ton of bricks. I started asking around, tapping into my friends' friends' animation collections to rebuild the archive of programs that made Toonami legendary. Within a couple of days, Nick and I were watching an original Toonami block lineup: ThunderCats, Ronin Warriors, DBZ, and Gundam Wing. And in just over a week, Toonami Aftermath was ready to broadcast... indefinitely.

A 24-hour broadcast necessitates more than a weekday afternoon's worth of content, and your extended schedule's featured everything from Cartoon Cartoons to Mystery Science Theater 3000. You've also aired redubbed promos, custom show intros, and even the odd retro commercial. How do you make decisions regarding what content to air, and when and how to do it?

I spent a few sleepless nights drawing up what I remembered of Toonami's scheduling, placing shows and promos in their original order, gathering promos, and encoding DVDs. It was a torrent of great feelings putting the schedule together. I might have thought, "Why stop at Toonami? Let's see Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Cartoon Planet and Cartoon Cartoons as well!" but in reality I didn't think about it at all, it's just something that naturally seemed like the right thing to do.

I have an obsession with how scheduling of content affects the viewer experience. If the broadcast was a marathon, viewers would get their fix of a show, watch nonstop for a couple weeks, and never return after that. I see that kind of behavior as not only unhealthy, but also not entertaining. The addition of the other weekday shows was a no-brainer: the more good shows that were in the schedule, the better they could be scheduled to avoid becoming a marathon.

I did decide to indulge in the Toonami block more than originally scheduled on television, but that is to be expected from a stream named after Toonami, of course. The original Toonami promos that are used are all there because, well, they are Toonami. After you've done everything that you possibly can with the original content, all there is left is to fill in the gaps in the schedule. Inevitably there were show and promo gaps in the schedule, so naturally I decided to find affiliated or similar shows of high caliber to fill in those timeslots. With the contributions of Mercurius and VSigma100 we have custom Toonami intros for shows that did not have any originally. Everything else is simply for fun, but I try to maintain the integrity of a broadcast that knows its content and won't break the experience with petty jokes or misplaced content as much as possible.

Are you worried at all about getting sued for broadcasting this material, or at least unceremoniously shut down? How seriously did you take possible legal ramifications into account when you started the project?

Of course getting shut down was always a possibility and something that I've never taken for granted. I have been contacted by copyright holders in the past and have taken actions to minimize the chances of problems in the future. But in any case, I decided after testing the waters for a few months that we'd be up long enough for it to be worth a shot and here we are today, a year and a half of broadcast and still working at it.

How closely does the Toonami Aftermath of today match up with your original intentions? What's next for the project?

The original goal was simple: I wanted to recreate a specific Toonami schedule using the show content and promos. The success of completing this goal was massively fulfilling. Things have changed over time, but I've made it one of my top priorities to only meet this goal even further as the scheduling has matured.

The second goal which immediately followed was that of practicality. Too many good ideas go wasted with the absence of practicality. I needed to somehow automate the daunting scheduling process so that I could stream Toonami 24/7, year-round. The process of scheduling a broadcast is no easy feat. My progress in completing this goal has been over a year in the making. For the first month and a half I used to take 1 to 2 hours PER DAY just to get all the content in order for the day's broadcast. I forget how, but I managed to bring that down to a 30 minute process after a couple months; I think I made templates.

Around the time that I launched the website I came up with a more advanced templating process that took around 10 minutes per day. The reason it takes so long is that subsequent episodes need to be loaded each day and they must be timed so that they broadcast at the correct time. The 10-minute template process is where I settled at for somewhere around 8 months but it still wasn't close to what I hoped for. I still had to remotely log in every day to put in my 10 minutes.

Finally, in early February this year, after consulting TallestRed on simple coding techniques, I was able to create a 99.9% automated scheduling process. Now I spend 15 minutes per week scheduling 110 hours worth of different content. That number is rising to 118 hours worth of content soon and the automated process is now progressing in the area of better timing and more dynamic scheduling. At this point it is impractical NOT to stream, I spent more time responding to your questions then I have this month scheduling Toonami Aftermath.

The weekday schedule was revamped for a third time in March, it is everything that Toonami is supposed to be all in one big package. The revised weekend schedule is coming out this June and it will be everything a weekend schedule is supposed to be: fun, dynamic, and adventurous. Even still, there are always unannounced progressions being made and some secret for now. Stay tuned where it's still fun.

Could you tell me more about these templating tools you use? Did they exist in some form before you began broadcasting, or were they built from scratch? What's the process that takes a collection of video files and turns them into an ordered, uploaded broadcast?

Well actually the "templating" I was doing at the beginning consisted solely of well-organized archiving and simple playlist templates. The episode numbers have to be changed to keep each series progressing day by day, so I created the playlist templates with all the intros and promos laid out in order so that only the episode numbers had to be manually entered. This gives the viewers the next episodes in all the series aired each day while maintaining the same promo and intro scheduling in order to keep the playlist timed for schedule. As simple as it is I don't know if I would call this “from scratch,” but the idea was certainly my own, and of course these playlist templates were all based on my own playlists that I constructed for Aftermath.

We now employ a script I wrote specifically to automate that entire process, and that is definitely from scratch. Its function is to automatically progress each show day by day until it reaches the end of the series, in which case it starts over. It does this at an interval of 1 week at a time, although I could make it run at any interval I want it to. The only manual entering of schedule content are the 2 feature films and 4 Rifftrax of various films that are aired each week. Besides saving me all that time scheduling, the script has allowed me to be a little more creative by having certain shows only appear on certain days and even rotate promos day by day to give the broadcast a more dynamic feel and use more of our available catalog of awesome shows and promos.

Is there any particular program or programs you use to schedule, broadcast, or otherwise run Toonami Aftermath? Do you use something entirely built from scratch, or, say, something like Windows Media Player in a modified capacity? I have no knowledge of the technical side of video production, scheduling, and streaming, so forgive me if this is a really basic question.

As you'd imagine, there are a lot of requirements to make a broadcast work: audio normalization, gapless playback, video size/aspect ratio compensation, compression, bandwidth and even crash handling, which Flash encoding is constantly prone to. I use Kmplayer for playback, SCFH to capture video, and Flash Media Encoder (by command line and batch script) to stream to justin.tv. All of these programs run inside a Virtual Machine in Virtual Box on our server and keep the quality of the broadcast as high as possible at all stages. There are too many other utilities that are used in the editing/encoding and schedule planning stages to name, but for example I occasionally will use winamp to help time a schedule. These programs are all great, but at the end of the day the secret sauce is in the batch scripting.

Wow, that's even more complex than I thought. Do you have any formal training in video production?

No, I don't have any training whatsoever. Some might call it dedication or obsession, but really it's just a long and fun game; the fulfillment is worth far more then the effort, and for that reason I would be mad not to do it. It would not be worth it if the Flash encoder crashed every hour or even every day, I can't be around to reset them all the time which can result in hours if not days of downtime. I couldn't put in the hours it would take to keep up the schedule, time is better spent researching batch script than entering hundreds of lines of playlist variables (episode numbers) manually every day.

So yeah, I guess you can say it is a complex setup in that it took a long time to figure out what and how to implement the ideal solutions. But hey, the way I see it I intend to broadcast Toonami Aftermath indefinitely, as long as possible, so it doesn't matter if I find the solution tomorrow, next week, or next month. Finding the right way is worth exponentially more fun days than days of frustration.

Thanks again to Toon, who, again, was super awesome. Now, get back to watching Outlaw Star.

Hey Wait A Minute

In Final Destination 3, if the roller coaster was supposed to crash because the guy riding it drops his camera, and the guy gets off the ride because his friend has the prophetic vision of the roller coaster crashing... why does it still crash?

...Anyone remember Final Destination 3?

A Lot of Thoughts on DC's Rebootingest Reboot Ever

Note: People, I know this is all over the place a bit, but I need to get it published, because they're leaking info every day that's making me go back and rewrite things. If I'm still interested when all the titles and status quo have been revealed, I'll probably follow up.

DC is rebooting their continuity. But this time their approach is different enough to warrant slightly less apathy than that statement would usually entail. They're canceling most of their line and launching 52 new number ones in September, with the intention of continuing on unhindered by decades of near-worthless continuity and never going back there again. It's a gutsy move. Others have spelled out the business angles eloquently and comprehensively (do check out Greg Hatcher and David Uzumeri's takes), so let me just hit you with some of my thoughts:

So, how exactly does this new continuity operate? Okay, let's run this down. Crisis on Infinite Earths started everything over again. New continuity, nothing old counted, many new origins (back when that was still interesting). Infinite Crisis was a lot more subdued; it was basically the same post-Crisis universe with a few background details changed: Batman caught his parents' killer, Wonder Woman was a founding member of the Justice League, Kryptonians are now a race of xenophobic warmongering monsters. Same house, different furniture. As I understand it, this is different from those two. It's an entirely different universe, ala Marvel's Ultimate universe. When all of DC's new titles hit, we're reading about characters with pasts completely untied to anything that happened in the “original universe,” and they're a few years into their careers. This is a good way to go about things. Because it means...

No more origin stories. We know why Batman fights crime, okay? You don't have to keep telling us these stories with new “twists” and “insights.” It's pretty much been done to death, and adds nothing substantial anymore. Assuming I understand the direction of their “new universe,” they've got this problem pretty much licked. You don't have to explain how Superman decided to be Superman, how Lex Luthor became such a prick, and why they have this antagonistic relationship. They've met, they hate each other, we all know it. That's where we start, and now you can just GO, y'know? Sweet.

It's going to be refreshing to not have to worry about continuity even a little bit. Did you read Flash: Rebirth? I suggest you don't; one of the issues was literally a lecture about the complexities of the speed force, which had grown from a simple convenient explanation into this huge tumor that was cutting down on the amount of pages where the Flash could catch bullets and stuff. How about Legion of 3 Worlds? Much better, but still pages and pages of what happened to the Legion, why there were three Legions, where were the Legions that weren't those three Legions, etc. etc. In this new status quo, Superman can just go to the future and have an adventure with the Legion; you don't have to “clean things up” before you can have your fun. You don't have to jump through hoops to explain how Sinestro is alive; he's just alive in this new continuity. I've always thought that most comics just aren't long enough for the money, but cutting out most of this crap is going to be equivalent to a 20% page increase, easy.

Treat each story like a movie. I recall one of the writers of Ultimate X-Men said that he planned each six-issue arc as a movie: beginning, middle, and end, with enough information to get those who hadn't seen the original up to speed, as well as a few sequel hooks. If you're going for the casual fan, this has to be done; they're not going to stay when they pick up a trade that has 3/4ths of a story. Whether your arc is one issue, four issues, twelve issues, whatever, stick to that formula. I'm not saying give up the serial, soap-opera nature of comics; just keep in mind that you can't trust that the new fans you want will follow your title with soap-opera dedication. And with that in mind:

Keep each issue exciting. Can we please have a “one fight scene per issue” rule or something? Don't get me wrong, you can have your big emotional issues. Just... 19 times out of 20 have a goddamned fight scene in your superhero comic book, and make sure you have a good reason for not including one the 20^th time.

Keep each title relatively self-contained. You want Wonder Woman to team up with the Flash? Cool. Have the writer of the Flash just write Wonder Woman into his story. None of this part one in Flash, part two in Wonder Woman crap. Keep things as simple as possible here. Oh, with that in mind:

No more crossovers. Lately, as DC has been getting more and more desperate (desperate enough to try this rebooting thing, even), they've been cranking out the crossovers, and good God nobody cares any more. Flashpoint had something like 27 tie-ins, and I don't mean regular issues that were crossing over. Specially-produced tie-ins. Come on. I wouldn't read as much Flashpoint as they're publishing if they gave me the issues for free. Knock that off. So now you're thinking, okay, how about a few summer issues where all the heroes team-up and fight a cool fight, keeping the entirety of the events self-contained so as not to mess with the story-arcs of the individual titles? That's called Justice League. No crossovers.

Keep in mind that it won't last forever. You're trying to get away from continuity and having to make sure everything checks out with all of the stories you've published in the past. Soon enough though you'll have to fact check with the new stories you're publishing, and you'll start running into the same pitfalls. Don't get me wrong: you'll be going at it in a much more unified, cohesive way than the “what the hell ever, they're just comics” mindset of writers in the 60s, but soon enough you'll have to make sure everything jibes, make a retcon here and there. So, just as you're saying that the current DC Universe's story is done, know that eventually your new universe will have to bow out and be replaced as well. Plan for it. Oh, and with that in mind:

Don't bring anybody back from the dead. Start your new universe with the people you want alive, alive. If you don't want them to die, don't kill them. If they do die, let them die. You're going to have to reboot the whole shebang again soon enough anyhow, so you can bring them back without the crap later.

You now have more wiggle room for change... but not too much. Your B-listers can be completely different and go in whatever direction you want now. Good! Maybe you can make people care about Hawkman. But let's face it... Superman and Batman are always going to be Superman and Batman. You're not getting too far away from that iconic stereotype. And that's not a bad thing; hopefully, with this new, tighter continuity, you won't have to pull ridiculous Knightfall-style stunts to keep them relevant and fresh and interesting.

New! Characters! It's fun watching the Legion fight the Fatal Five. But don't just throw a list of old, rejuvenated supervillains at us. Howzabout some new ones? And some new heroes too! And supporting cast members! And maybe some new settings! Go for it! You have a new world to build, do it! Take pitches! So far we've seen maybe a third of the massive list of September titles, and so far they've all been characters we know and love. And that's fine and all, but I hope a handful of them are completely new, promising characters. Put a few more in the backgrounds of group shots. Surprise me!

The old universe isn't going away yet, and that's terrific. DC execs have said that the higher-selling titles, such as the Green Lantern franchise and Grant Morrison's big Batman storyline, are going to continue. This is good for two reasons. The first is that both of these get a ton of mileage out of the decades of twisted continuity. Now, in Green Lantern's sake it's half clean-up work and I get the feeling the same stories could be told better and quicker without having to twist old continuity to fit, but in Grant Morrison's case he uses that 60s Batman stuff in really terrifically interesting ways. The second reason is that now they have to worry a lot less about stepping on other writers' toes. Everyone else is going to be gone, so you can shoot “old” Superman in the head if you want to. Blow up the Earth. Go nuts, we don't need it tomorrow. Of course, once those story-arcs are done, I'm guessing it'll be toodle-oo to “old Earth.” Cya, pal!

Make it easy for new readers to distinguish between “old” Earth and “new” Earth. Alright, so. Grant Morrison's Bat franchises are staying put. I don't know how many of the supporting Bat-books are going to continue being published, but it'll be at least three or four. Over in the reboot, there's going to be another ten Bat-books launched, some by the same creative teams with very similar arcs (e.g. Damian Wayne, Batmen around the world). You want new readers to read the second one. I don't know how that's all going to shake out... put a disclaimer on the cover or something. Do not let those new readers walk into anything about the Black Glove, that is for very advanced, sophisticated readers which new readers are not.

52 #1's is insane in all the best ways. DC is launching 52 new series, set in their new, simpler continuity, in September. A lot of people have said that it would be much less risky to start with the big guns and slowly transition in. But that wouldn't be nearly as much fun. It says to me that they're really putting a lot of weight behind this. This is their new universe, in its entirety, and you're going to see every corner of it immediately. Street level, cosmic, horror, western... all the major heroes, the New Gods mythology, everything baby. They're trying to replicate that feeling you first got when you picked up a comic and saw all these characters you didn't know and all of these veiled references to past events you didn't recognize, a universe bigger than one book. We've all since kind of... memorized the universe, know the major players and their convoluted backstories, and know that nothing new will ever happen. Here's new players, new backstories, and new things, and it's all here at the same time. They're going whole hog on it, and more power to 'em. While it's probably foolhardy from a business perspective, that's exactly what endears me to it.

This works so much better than twisting current continuity. When a team of writers pitched a reboot of Superman back at the turn of the millennium, they used the principle of “recognize and transcend;” instead of changing time and starting over, acknowledge that the old stories happened and introduce new storylines that take the character and status quo where you want it to go. That's been DC's policy for the last decade or so, and... it really hasn't been working. They've mostly been taking things back to the 60's status quo, so, for instance, Superman's cousin shows up in a rocket and becomes Supergirl just like in the 60's. Hooray! But, in the meantime, there's been three or four other “Supergirls” that have filled in that role. From a storyline perspective, this is the fifth Supergirl that Superman's met and worked with in roughly twelve years, but he's never going to acknowledge that or mention it or have that past experience weigh on him in any way because it detracts from the “pure” 60's status quo they're trying to create. It doesn't work, at least the way they've been doing it. So, just starting over, they can do whatever the hell they want. Go for it.

This is coming out of left field, huh? I thought Flashpoint was just some Flash-centric crossover, but it turns out it's going to alter everything more radically than any other storyline in comics history. Was this planned from the start? It's weird... at first I thought Flashpoint would be a Sinestro Corps War-style self-contained crossover. Then I found out it was more of a Blackest Night-style super crossover taking over the entire line. Then it turns out it's the biggest and most “important” crossover in comic history. I was fed up with the second one, but like the first and third... there's a bell curve thing going on. And I guess this makes Professor Zoom the greatest villain in DC history?

Seriously, this fixes so many ways continuity gets in the way of the story. Like, how they have to kind of handwave the fact that Batman's had 70 years of adventures in roughly, what, 12-13 years of time? Or that the Earth has almost been destroyed roughly 400 times in those 12-13 years, and every living person isn't hiding in a bomb shelter every single day? Or that Superman's fought Brainiac literally dozens and dozens and dozens of times and he always comes back and repeats the same process? Now, this all goes back to the fact that for the majority of comic history writers weren't worried about the next issue because they though the series wouldn't be around in six months. Compare to Ultimate Spider-Man, where the villains show up differently, sparingly, and always come back in a clever way, and the first 100 issues or so take place in one year of Peter Parker's life (that poor, poor bastard). This new universe should take its cues from that.

The girls finally get to put some pants on. Thank you almighty God in heaven. If nothing else, this makes everything worth it. DC has decreed that there will be no more panty shots. Wonder Woman's weird armored bathing suit is the worst looking thing ever, and the fact that DC is finally, finally changing it to something much more practical speaks volumes about their commitment to this new universe. This is great.

Justice League is DC's front runner. Justice League #1 launches on August 31^st. It's the “first chapter” of this new universe, its golden boy, and this is as it should be. It's amazing how much they've shafted that book, when it should be their #1 book. It's got all of their most recognizable heroes; when a kid wants a comic book, you should give him or her Justice League. So... making it their #1 book is good. Do that.

Digital comics! Wait, I don't actually care that much about digital comics. At least not until they come out with a color Kindle; reading for any length of time off a traditional computer screen hurts my eyes. Still, it's a super-obvious idea. Maybe you can sell them to people that don't go to comic stores! Even do some commercial advertising. But I'd say price the comics in the "less than one dollar range" and make sure that at the end of each issue you can find all the related titles easily. Also, if you're going to do that last one, give Justice League #1 away for free, and then let readers find Superman, Wonder Woman, the Bat-universe, etc. with a variety of convenient buying and subscription options.

But... will they really change that much? At the end of the day, the same group of people that have gone to extreme lengths to transform the line into the comics they read as a kid now have nothing stopping them from doing just that. There's going to be a lot of streamlining, don't get me wrong, a lot of getting rid of the crap weighing the characters down, but I'm thinking that we're mostly going to see the classic characters. They say they're updating them for the new generation and all, but I dunno... Not that there's anything inherently wrong with the classics, but give us a new Green Lantern or something.

Please don't “normalize” things. Let's face it, in the X-Men movie universe, Prof. X isn't going to be falling in love with an alien battle princess any time soon, nor will the X-Men go to hell, travel through time, or fight Dracula. They cut out a lot of the totally crazy comic stuff, for a lot of good reasons. Though I know you're just dying to get a piece of that huge superhero movie pie, recognize the difference in medium and don't follow the studios' logic minutely. When I say “steamline,” I mean cut out the retcons on top of contradictions on top of explanations that have piled onto each long-running character's backstory, not take away the crazy fun stuff that made us endure through it all. If your oh-so-valuable new readers are too jaded to accept tiny, bespectacled mind control worms from Venus, then your new readers can get fucked. Keep DC swarming with magic robots.

So... yeah. I'm down! Put me down for a copy of Justice League, Martian Manhunter (you know it's coming), maybe a few Bat-titles, Legion... hell, my wallet...

Still not planning to read Flashpoint.

GameSpite Quarterly and Some Amateur Spite

Got my copy of GameSpite Quarterly vol. 6 in the mail a couple of days ago. You can read all of the articles online here if you'd like, but I'd recommend grabbing the actual book if you've got the money to blow. Actually, I'd recommend grabbing more than one of the books, because individual shipping is pretty rough on the wallet.

While it's sadly in black and white, has some gutter loss in the otherwise nice two-page spreads, and features typos here and there (y'know, just to get all of it's CRIPPLING FLAWS out of the way), I really enjoyed it. I mean, I read all 230 pages or so in about three days, which, with my easily divided attention and increasing lack of free time, is saying something. The analysis of each underappreciated game is generally pretty insightful and engagingly-written.

More than that though, it accomplished something that I've wanted to see done for a long time. Whenever I read a gaming magazine with a nice feature, I almost always want to see it go on longer and deeper in depth. I understand why they don't - magazines just don't have the pages to devote to one feature. An article on underappreciated games in, say, GamePro would get maybe 12 pages max, but here there's 230 straight pages of coverage. It's essentially a feature that has all the room it needs, and when I was done I felt that the concept and each of the games had been well and fully explored. So that's great.

Also... it inspired me. Reading about the love for all of these overlooked games reminds me of one of my favorites, a game so mind-bogglingly great its ridiculous that it doesn't have a higher position of respect among players. Want to know what it is? I know you do! Read on!

What could it be?

Rocket Knight Adventures
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
U.S. Release: June 16, 1993
Format: Genesis

Lately we've been seeing a resurgence in the side-scrolling platformer. From big-budget commercial releases like New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Donkey Kong Country Returns to downloadable titles such as Mega Man 9 & 10 and Sonic the Hedgehog 4, we've been getting the sequels to the classics the way there were meant to be played, dammit. The industry is maturing; designers and publishers are coming to terms with the notion that older play and art styles are a worthwhile stylistic choice instead of a product of outdated technological limitations. Those same designers are also more and more often nostalgic for a childhood obsessed with Nintendo and Sega's 16-bit offerings, as are we all. It's great, yeah?

Exceppppptttt... It's not quite the same, is it? Play DKC Returns or Sonic 4 or any of the others, and you'll likely have lotsa fun, but... something seems off. Is it the physics? A sense of viscerality? Does the parabola of the jump seem stilted to you? They're different. You can feel it. Maybe it's because they have to be designed to appeal to the "old" and "new" gamer alike. Maybe the designers are focusing so much on nostalgia they feel more like remakes than sequels. Hell, maybe we're just misremembering the originals. Probably all, and more. Who knows?

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying today's new side-scrollers are worse than the ones most of us played as children. The gaming industry today produces experiences of the highest quality, convenience, and value of any time in history; anybody who tries to tell you that the good old days were objectively better is an idiot. What I'm saying is that the side-scrollers of our youth had a unique weight to them, and they're relegated to a time that's gone forever.

I say this all because, if you're looking for one of those excellent never-to-be-replicated honest-to-god "old school" platformers, dig a fiver out from under your couch and pick up a copy of Rocket Knight Adventures. You probably haven't played it, and that's a shame, because, at least in my opinion, it's the best platformer ever made. Better than Mario, better than Yoshi, better than DK, better than Sonic. It belongs with a handful of others in that upper echelon characterized by godly physics, gameplay, music, and art design. It's that good, people.

It's not that hard to see why people may have ignored RKA when it first arrived. It's hero, Sparkster, is a blue marsupial on a console more-or-less defined by a certain other blue marsupial and several dozen mediocre clones thereof, and the game's advertising campaign and box art didn't do much to distinguish him from all the wannabes with attitude. Ignore the marketing department; Sparkster doesn't even try to be cool. That's not who he is. When you go too long without pressing a button he doesn't stare you down to do something because he's got places to be you idiot. Instead, he gives you a big thumbs up and Genesis-chirps "Let's go!" We're on an adventure, man! Let's go see what's next! Not to say he doesn't take his job seriously; he has what Tomm Hulett described as "an earnestness in the fun cute protagonist that takes heroism dead seriously." He's easy to love.

Don't worry; Sparkster is Japanese happy, not American angry!

The design of his game can be roughly described as "Sonic meets Contra." It's got platforming, colorful worlds, and animal characters along with fast, relentless action and midbosses all over the place. Sparkster's basic attack is a sword that shoots flames a short way. Hitting directly with the sword deals more damage, leading to a solid risk/reward mechanic that encourages you to dash forward at the optimum moment and hack the boss' face off. The distinguishing mechanic of the series is Sparkster's rocket pack. By holding down the attack button a short while you can boost in eight directions or do a mostly useless standing spin attack. Hitting walls causes Sparkster to bounce around haphazardly, so platforming requires precision boosts and boss fights involve slamming into weak points and scrambling to reposition yourself before the boss starts attacking again.

The game is very short, about seven stages amounting to an hour or so of playtime, but don't let that put you off. It's short because it cuts out the bullshit. The game is constantly throwing new things at you. With one minor exception, enemies never repeat from stage to stage. You're being thrown into fresh situations often, such as platforming by using your reflection in a lava flow, running from indestructible robots, or engaging in some really good some side-scrolling dogfighting straight out of Gradius. These new wrinkles arise, are satisfyingly explored, and dissolve to the next wrinkle, keeping things fresh and surprising throughout.

You're up top, behind the crystals. Eh? Ehhhh?

The graphics are terrific for the Genesis, with lots of foot soldiers on screen, huge bosses, and helpful Contra-style slowdown. More relevant today is the art design. Your enemy is a nation of pigs, all of whom look like they enjoy the work of being evil. Like Sparkster's light-hearted seriousness, the green-armored ham soldiers are simultaneously menacing and mischevious. They're satisfying to smack around (and come to think of it, I've never really given credit to the game's wonderful smack sound effects). The bad guys have a steampunk aesthetic to their equipment and capital city, which looks like industrial Germany with wonderful pig-faced buildings. The other environments are lush, colorful, and filled with detail that's hard to appreciate when you're moving through them so fast and frequently, ala the Sonic trilogy.

The city of Hamburg. Hey-ohhhhhhh!

One thing I love about this game is its narrative structure. First off: don't read the official storyline, because the way the story is told in the game itself is so much more enjoyable. It begins with a cutscene of Sparkster standing on top of a cliff, drawing his sword, and staring down the leering, ghostly face of Lord Ham, manifestation of all that's evil and greasy. What follows is essentially, I shit you not, God of War for kids. For the rest of the game you're chasing the pigs down for kidnapping a princess, and note that you keep chasing and slaughtering them for two stages after you rescue the princess. You just keep going and going, crushing their armies, sacking their city, and blowing up their Death Star. Soldiers and robots and giant mechs are just chucked at you, and you just kill 'em and kill 'em and kill 'em. It's awesome.

You're not told much about Sparkster in the game itself, but just from the gameplay you know two things: he shows up to selflessly fight evil, and you do not want to fuck with him. Well, there's one more thing: you also know that there are at least two rocket knights. On the enemy's team is Axl Gear, the Knuckles to Sparkster's Sonic. He shows up throughout the game to mess with you, and you know, just from your own nation-crushing power, that a battle with another rocket knight is going to make for one hell of a boss fight.

He is, however, American determined

Also, the music. I can close my eyes and recall the theme for each substage in the entire game clearly in my mind. It's a Genny soundtrack up there with Sonic 2 and Streets of Rage.

RKA got two sequels before the 16-bit generation was up, one horrible, one passable, and recently got one of those new downloadable installments in the classic side-scrolling style. It wasn't very good even on its own merits, probably the worst of the revivas in its attempts to evoke nostalgia through surface replication of the original's themes, music, and gameplay. Another example of the fact that 16-bit platformers had a certain something about them that can't easily be replicated in today's gaming environment. Rocket Knight Adventures may be the last of those "classic" platformers that you haven't played, and, if so, it should be the last one you do. Right now.


...Oh goddamit, GameSpite actually covered RKA earlier here. I find it interesting that Mr. Nomali finds the game's stylings cartoonishly nonviolent, while I took away more of a relentless onslaught of porkstruction from the experience.

Serious Sam and his Amazing Friends

I've recently become aware that holy hell are there a lot of first-person shooters coming out this year. We've already gotten Bulletstorm, Crysis 2, Killzone 3, Conduit 2, Homefront, and Portal 2 (though that's more of a puzzler). Upcoming is Brink, Bodycount, F.E.A.R. 3, Red Faction: Armageddon, Duke Nukem Forever, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Resistance 3, Serious Sam 3, Battlefield 3, XCOM, and Rage. That's not counting really similar third-person shooters like Gears of War 3 and SOCOM 4, nor anything to be unveiled at E3 like a new Call of Duty or Halo, nor anything I forgot to mention. Most of them with XP-grubbing mutliplayer and DLC to encourage addiction continuous, long-lasting play.

Wow! I'm no FPS fan, but that's one hell of a lineup. Look at all those games. Their histories, their legacies, their stories and momentum, all intersecting at this moment. The long-delayed Duke Nukem Forever. The seminal third installments of several blockbuster console franchises. The first new IP from id Software since Quake. What's looking to be the real sequel to Deus Ex that fans have been waiting for for a decade. Serious Sam 3. Huge franchises, and promising newbies. Nearly every major FPS producer, from EA to id to Splash Damage, is throwing their hat in the ring this year, polishing their multimillion dollar baby, pushing those features that make them unique. So many circling, positioning, prepping their marketing campaigns, working long nights to give gamers the experience that will earn their finicky dollars.

What I'm saying is, there is no way all of them can be profitable. No. Way. These games are so huge and packed with content that you could play any one of them for months. It's too much even if you play FPS games exclusively, and won't buy any of the other huge 2011 games. No no, no way all of these get another sequel.

And of course, every single one of them is coming out on the 360 and PS3, a fact I love ribbing my PC-gamer brother about. I can remember when first-person shooters were rare on consoles, and more often than not derided where they appeared. But, not to disparage the fine other FPS games that have arrived before (Perfect Dark anyone?), the trinity of GoldenEye, Halo, and Call of Duty have pushed the genre inexorably to the forefront of the console gamer's mind.

Like I said, I'm no real FPS fan (though Serious Sam 3 is one of the few games I might buy new this year), but this confluence is really interesting to me, just from a business and cultural perspective. I wonder how it's going to shake out.

Whoops

It figures. Right after I post a drunken rant about the tragic loss of strategy guides in magazines, I find two at once.

The first is from the December 2009 issue of GamePro. This is one or two issues before the infinitely better redesign, so it's still basically the ultra cool GamePro of olden days. It inexplicably includes four random pages out of BradyGames' Uncharted 2 strategy guide. They're not interesting pages either, just a few spreadsheets detailing what you can buy in the store. Bizarre.

However! The fact that the reprint pages are produced by BradyGames leads me to believe that one route for getting strategy content back into magazines is to outsource it to strategy specialists, by which I mean publishers of strategy guides. Take that four-page Donkey Kong Country Returns guide I talked about earlier and am now starting to realize I desperately want. Let Prima repurpose information and screens from the strategy guide they already have and produce it for you. They get some kinda stipend and free advertising. They can also sell the "miniguide" at their own site; pay a dollar, print it out, fold it up and keep it in the game's case. Ta-da!

The other guide comes in the form of a Rift launch guide from the April 2011 issue of PC Gamer magazine. It's 5 pages, and this time it's produced in-house by the magazine's staff. It actually reads a little like an early review or preview describing the experience, but the point is it gives you a lot of tips on character selection, dungeons, and what to expect initially. Because apparently MMORPGs are hard to just jump into?

This brings to mind another way that magazines can best serve their customers with strategy. Consider magazines exclusive to specific consoles or formats, such as Official Xbox Magazine. They can rest assured that when it comes to the big exclusives, like Halo or God of War, a much larger percentage of their readership is going to be playing them as compared to the readership of a multiplatform magazine. Thus, when it comes to those exclusives, they're going to be best positioned to deliver magazine strategy. This also might be one of the few cases where online multiplayer strategy is justified; if readership continues to play, you can "update" them every month.

Yup. I wish I knew the business better so I could say if all of these ideas are half-assed and unfeasible. Well, at least unfeasible.

Put Guides Back in the Back!

Recently I was reminded about Square's mishap with their Final Fantasy IX strategy guide. In short, they didn't include all the information about the game in the guide, instead prompting players to use a password to access further (essential) information at Square's PlayOnline website. Now, assuming that you had internet access in 2000 (which was far from certain), you had to endure the frustration of having to pause your game, put down your guide, go to your computer, look up your information, walk back, and repeat. People who buy guides, outside of collectors, do so to have the information on hand as they play.

Which makes it odd, to me, that magazines, which used to be bimonthly 250-page strategy for everything monsters, neglect to include guides in their pages. The stated reason? People give them away for free on the internet. Ah...

Okay, okay, there are some not insignificant differences between the world of today and Square's FFIX fiasco. For one thing, everybody has internet access. For another, a lot of people have internet access through devices that they can set down in their lap when they unpause the game. Furthermore, game magazines have it a lot rougher than they did in the glorious mid-90s, forcing them to cut down on pages, rely more on freelance contributors, and really dig for stories that can't be found anywhere else, and strategy guides can be found a LOT of places else.

Still though, I think there's a place for them, if three conditions are met:

First of all, you'd only want to do guides for games that are guaranteed to be popular; Call of Duty yes, Saw II: The Game, no. You will not have a lot of space for strategy pages, so to best serve the largest segment of your readership, you need to provide coverage on the games they're most likely to play. It can't be like Nintendo Power in the 90s, unfortunately.

Second, you're probably going to want to stick with games that encourage the second playthrough and the score attack. You don't have enough space to cover basic information. The guide is there to help your players get the most enjoyment out of the game, and the 4-page strategy section is best positioned to highlight the stuff that might go over your head the first run through. For example, you're not going to want to waste pages talking about rolling, hovering, and the importance of keeping Diddy alive in a short Donkey Kong Country Returns guide; you're going to want to explain speedrunning tactics, the requirements to open bonus levels, and where to find the hidden stuff (or even cut that to the trickier to find hidden stuff) in each level, using little more than a small print paragraph and a screenshot or two. In a short Mortal Kombat guide, you're going to want to list the secret fatalities per character and provide a one page spreadsheet of all the unlockables in The Krypt. And so forth.

There's another benefit to focusing on "new game plus" guides: the magazine might not be on the stands by the time a player begins a new game, but it more likely will be by the time that he or she begins replaying it. There's a built-in lead time to second playthroughs that magazines can take advantage of. An expert guide can also encourage a player to pick a game back up, even if it arrives late (hell, if I had that DKC:R strategy guide I just made up I might think about going back and getting all those damned KONG letters).

Thirdly, you'd probably be focusing on single-player guides, simply because multiplayer is too immediate, with strategies evolving and changing fast enough to make a short, printed guide next to useless.

And there you have it: guides that serve the reader and the format. Now... I don't know how much work goes into guides as opposed to the other content magazines create, and I don't know how it would affect profits. It may just be a simple matter of more work for the same money. But we can say one thing for sure: all of this stuff was a bunch of things that I said.