Issue: Games: Chris LeDoux

A long time ago me and my buddy were all crossed out. We were obsessed with Kris Kross, not Christopher Cross mind you, although "Sailing" is a great song.

We noticed girls were really into Kris Kross, and hypothesized that if we dressed and acted like Kris Kross the girls would like us through the transitive property. A theory that yielded pretty good results, but also had the unfortunate downside of making us look like silly copycats to other males our age and adult people, which didn't bother us much, as they were not middle school girls, so at the time their thoughts and opinions couldn't matter less to us.

We wore our clothes backwards, grew little braids, spoke in staccato pentameter while waving our arms up and down like robots, rapped in double time here and there, that type of stuff. We would choreograph little routines in his garage all day. Our favorite was "Jump." One day we heard about a county fair talent show going on a city over that all the girls were talking about, and we instantly knew what every thing in our life had been leading up to.

The talent show was going down in a week, So we kicked the training into overdrive, jumping higher, spitting verses faster, modifying the routine to accentuate our dancing, which we thought to be our greatest strength. We were ready to go about two days before the event, the only thing we hadn't done is tell our parents we intended to enter.

They had no idea what to do with our obsession with Kris Kross. They couldn't understand how we could walk out of the house in backwards clothes, couldn't understand why little kids would talk and walk like that, they were completely in the dark.

When I told my mom where the talent show was taking place she was even more confused. She said, "baby, those people are rednecks, do you think they will... understand what you two will be doing?" I looked at her like she was from Jupiter, I couldn't understand her words, this was Kris Kross, who didn't "understand" Kriss Kross?

Anyway, we preformed and killed, people were clapping after we were done, throwing their ten gallon hats in the air and whatnot, asking to touch our hair, giving us free sloppy joe's and soda, girls were coming up to us and writing their phone numbers on our hand in pen, shit was crazy. We felt like we had made it.

Then some cowboy kid our age got on stage after us and sang some sad cowboy song by a rodeo cowboy singer guy named "Chris LeDoux." He won the competition and all the girls, we were pissed. When I went home I searched out this country singer that robbed us of our hard earned glory. Turns out he was a pretty amazing musician and dude, still a bullshit win by that kid though, what a copycat.  

The Protoculture Mixtape V.42 Issue: People: All X'd Out

   

Issue: People: Duke Nukem

Duke Nukem is an old video game character that got started a long time ago, sometime around the 90's. He has big muscles, smokes a cigar, wears wife beater t-shirts and dark sunglasses, says controversial things, and kills stuff, mostly aliens. Video game dudes back then fell all over themselves when they played Duke Nukem for the first time because everything he said and did was completely out of bounds to do in real life.

In the game the player could make Duke take a piss in urinals, cops were portrayed as pigs, and they could make him put money into strippers underwear, stuff like that. Most times after he killed something he would say a witty comment. For instance, if he killed an alien pig cop he would say, "Bacon is served!" Or if he shot a stripper he would say, "Shut up bitch," or something, it was a long time ago and I forgot exactly what he would say, but it was always something fucked up like that.

Duke got a lot of attention because adults thought the games were too violent or misogynistic for kids to be playing, and for the most part only little kids and teenagers were playing video games back then. But as is the rule anything parents do not like becomes holy to young adults, and Duke Nukem was no exception. People rallied against politicians that tried to censor him, and his titles were waited upon with baited breath. Then one day the titles just stopped coming. As time passed the legend of Duke Nukem grew, with the absence of a new title only cementing the legacy. There was always this lingering rumor that a game called "Duke Nukem Forever" was on the way, but it took so long to come out that people began to openly question if it existed, and then one day it came out.

Everybody hated the game when it came out. I don't really get why, it's the same damn game from 1991, only thing different is the graphics. It's loud, it's controversial, Duke shoots stuff, mostly aliens. I had fun. I think people just got disappointed because they had no idea what they were waiting on, as in, the game didn't change, they did. In the 90's everything that Duke would say or do was just some far out shit that you would never see on TV or in normal life. These days everything he says is pretty much said and done all the time by everybody that wants attention, and every video game. Duke was just late to the party.

The latest Batman game said "bitch" more times than Duke's new game did, and the standard in most games now is the ability to "Execute" anybody you want through quick time event, doesn't really matter why, and the hero don't say any thing witty, just one snake going up an enemies butthole, another going in through the mouth, then they burst out through a boob or any orifice still semi intact holding hands. The company that made the new Duke fell for the oldest trick in the human book, trying to deliver people a feeling from the past as a physical thing you can interact with.

Motherfuckers will talk your ear off about a pastrami sammich they had 15 years ago in Chicago, and about how they don't make em' like that anymore, and what they would do to that sammich if it was in front of them right now. But even if you build a time machine, went back to the same deli, bought the same sammich cut from the same meat and bread and whatnot, came back to present day, and showed them time stamped video of how you came into possession of the sammich, they would take one bite and say "Hmmm, I dunno, doesn't taste the same..." Yeah cause it's not. Eh, such is life.

The Protoculture Mixtape V.41 Issue: Games: It's Gucci

Issues : Games : Belated Crack Gaming

As mentioned previously, I mostly play sports games. How this happened, I really have no idea. I've always played sports games (the yearly Maddens, NCAA Footballs, whatever baseball game, etc.), even when I was a kid playing Joe Montana Football or Bulls vs. Blazers. However, I used to have time for the other games as well. Every Mario game, every Sonic game, pretty much everything that came out for Nintendo 64 (I saw the title screen for Wave Race 64 the other day and got very nostalgic). As my time shrank, I gave more importance to the sports games. Something about them being based in reality, I'm sure.

Anyway, the joke between myself and J4RMZ is that I only play sports games and Rockstar Games. No matter how far I got away from every non-sport, I still found time for each new version of Grand Theft Auto. Cut to last night, when I couldn't sleep and had officially grown tired of NCAA Football (it only took 10 days). I decided to look through the Playstation Store and found Red Dead Redemption. Two things crossed my mind when I saw it:

1. They sell entire games through the Playstation Store?!? Does Microsoft do this? As far I could remember, they didn't, but maybe it's something new. I had been without a gaming system for nearly two years, but the last thing I remember about XBox Live was that their downloadable games were cute mini-games. Kind of like ROMs, and some of them were simply old SNES games (the day Street Fighter came out on XBox Live was a good day). However, a full and gigantic game like RDR? No way. Why would anyone ever bother going to the video game store (those places are terrible, but that's a whole other post)? Or buying a CD that can get lost, broken or scratched? Also, and I have no idea if this is true or not, back in the day you could "download" your game from the CD to the XBox hard drive and the many sports games actually played a little faster/smoother when you did that. I see no downside in buying from the PS Store vs. going to some gaming store, except for limited selection (at the moment) and RDR probably came out on CD 6 months or so before being downloadable.

2. One of the last non-sports games that I bought, played and enjoyed was Red Dead Revolver. I remember thinking, after playing it, that the game was good but a little short and missing some things. From what I heard, this version was everything I wanted the first one to be.


So I bought it. It was going to take about 4 hours to download, so I fell asleep for 6. I woke up at about 7:30 and (looking at the clock) have played it pretty much nonstop for 10 hours. At one point I tried vacuuming my apartment, got through one room and decided "That's enough for now." and found myself turning the game back on without even realizing it. Even now, I have the game paused instead of turning the system off because I know I'm going right back to it after I finish writing this.

I forgot what this was like. I remembered what it was like to want to finish a season or play one last game in a sporting game, but I forgot what it's like to lose entire days to games and have no idea if you're anywhere near the end and not caring. I'm trying to figure out how functional I'll be at my job tomorrow if I get no sleep tonight. The answer is it doesn't matter and I don't care.

Thank you, Default Tester, for reminding me of all of the things I forgot I loved about video games. This project is already a rousing success.