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Thursday, March 30, 2017 by LotBlind

I think my Hyde is just me in the mornings

Batman... no. Potter... no. MacGyver... yeah! Bond... no. Luke... no. Rambo..? very much so! Sorry? What I'm doing? I'm listing some of the best-recognized heroes of popular fiction and determining whose legacy includes a well-established phrasal construct. You can imagine one for each of them, but in TL;DR form I think only the really straightforward "one-trick ponies" (me and that expression are going to have words later on) can survive as verbal memes. Or is this just what those memes have reduced them into?

As interesting (just keep nodding) as this question is, I must now hurry to justify the tangent by revealing that which it is a tangent to. Any viewer of the attached will be able to attest that along the curve joining Rambo: The Video Game, 'GrassHopper' the runner, and the 1:31:09 run, one "goes Rambo" a lot. Now let me perhaps surprise you with a year of release: 2014. If you're from the part of Europe that for irrelevant reasons didn't air one called John Rambo (in parts just Rambo) in 2008, the last time you could have met his stony (or should I say... rocky) face in the dark of a multiplex was around when I was being touched off at the secret and awesome Master Race assembly plant a full twenty years previous.

Basically our "sounds like they're from Metal Gear Solid" companion GrassHopper makes Rambo: The Video Game look like Rambo: The Whatever You Please, playing on the lowest difficulty without making use of fancy-schmancy bonus items. Much more on the run itself in the gracefully provided second track audio commentary! It's honestly more nuanced than you'd expect of a rail shooter.

The original name for the Super Famicon game was Paneru de Pon (LotBlind BS Translations ltd. translation: 'Panel Bang'), but it had an original, generic story with mincy little fairies and wasn't selling too well, so Nintendo wanted to link the international release to an existing franchise. Hence Yoshi's Island lending a "cast" to Tetris Attack. The Tetris Company, gatekeeper of all things that resemble Alexey Pajitnov's derivative-of-existing-things-even-in-1984 concept in any shape (such as the shapes of the pieces or the play field, no kidding!), agreed to licence the name to Nintendo's new release only to ultimately regret it since it's too far-removed from Tetris as we know it.

Thus Tetris Attack isn't really the same discipline as those world-famous world championships are held in. It's still sufficiently involved to run though, as 'CardsOfTheHeart''s XXL power-fertilized comments will convey with some degree of adequacy. Your pattern-spotting faculties had better be keen! Despite the inevitable amounts of competition, 0:03:37 (42 seconds off previous SDA time) stands up high like a garish naïve art mosaic flag in Cards' back yard, still representing the only sub-4 within single-segment, very hard, versus mode runs.

Doshin, the Love Giant, and to a lesser degree his "Hyde" side Jashin, won over as many hearts amongst the younger audience at a game exhibition in Japan in 1999 as he garners in-game from the clinging populace when 'PvtCb' takes him for a spin (a tumble really). In what amounts to a slightly twisted god sim, Doshin the Giant, a player mixes and matches from one of two approaches: be very nice, or very VERY naughty, and watch the lil'uns substantialize their likes and dislikes as large monuments dedicated to whatever emotion the Giant has predominantly given rise to in them. Doshin/Jashin will also grow in size having been thumbed up or down enough, affecting the field of possibilities.

One half of a god sim is the "sim" - the tribesmen act on an untractable A.I. and the player can only try as best they can to facilitate the desired (positive) kind of monuments to be built without accidentally leveling a church with the equally untractable controls. It really is one of those games where no plans can be plotted, only high-level strategies. Throughout the single-segmented 1:34:12 on the more complicated GameCube version, PvtCb is seen terraforming, combining trees into flowers, introducing the villages to one another (to prevent inbreeding of course), and destroying finished monuments to stave off hubris. Yeah it's a bit weird but at least all that amounts, as you'd expect, to getting to launch a rocket into space.

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