My Retro Purchases August 2018

My retro purchasing didn't start until the 9th when I grabbed  Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max for the PSP complete for £3 from an indy games store. The following day I grabbed 3 PS1 games complete for £1 each. they were Scooby Doo cyber chase, Pacman World, and Croc 2. I got these from a charity shop and was very happy with them especially Pacman World and Croc 2.

On the 12th I visited an indy games store where I picked up 3 N64 games for the total price of £4.50 cart only , they were Nagano winter Olympics 98, Forsaken and Fighters Destiny. I also grabbed a complete copy of TopGun combat zones for the GameCube for £2.

 

On the 19th after work I went into Game where I purchased MegaMan Starforce Dragon complete for £3.99 its actually quiet a pain in the butt game to track down the last time I saw it for a not stupid price it was £15 in CEX but the copy there looked like a dog had tried to eat it which is a far way away from this almost perfect copy.

 
On the 22nd I went in to a charity shop and found a promotional copy of Tomb Raider Legend for the PS2 which cost me 50pence. I really like getting promo copies of things just because you don't see them as often and there just something a little bit different.

 

On the 24th I grabbed Ken Griffey Major League Baseball cart only for the N64 (USA Version) for £2 from a pawn store. Its actually pretty darn unusual for me to find import games in a place like this. I am not even sure if they even knew it was an import.

This was by my standards a very slim pickings month, after all I only spent £18.99, but to be fair I am actually proud of that fact.that I didnt spend very much. I have a fairly large collection and I have been trying to insure that I don't simply buy things for the sake of buying them. My favorite purchase of the month is proberbly MegaMan Starforce Dragon just because its something I really didn't expect to get. It is a little weird to note that its the first month for a long time where I haven't actually gotten anything for the SNES or Megadrive or older. I wonder if next month will be any different.

The Halloween movie Canon Jigsaw Part 4: The Return of Michael and the possible start of something new

OK so after Halloween 3 which had no real connection to the earlier films for Halloween 4 the producers very quickly turned back to telling the story of Michael Myers. Jamie Lee Curtis was unwilling to return to the role of Laurie Strode, so this meant that her character was killed off. This is where I have to say something which might prove a little bit unpopular and that's the fact that I really did not give a monkeys that Jamie Lee Curtis didn't return.I know this might annoy some people but as far as I am concerned Strode is not the main nemesis for Michael, I see Dr Loomis as the main force which stands against Myers. As long as we have the excellent Donald Pleasance in a Halloween film then I am a very happy fellow, in fact despite loving Halloween 3 to pieces I still wish that somehow there could be a little bit of Loomis in that one. To me he is very much the Van Helsing of the series an expert in the war against evil and a main foil for our villain.

I guess before I go into what Halloween 4 is I should have a quick shout out about what it could have become. I have heard rumors that if the whole anthology film idea of each Halloween being about something different had worked that this film would have been a ghost related movie, finding evidence for this seems to be hard though. What it is easier to find evidence for though is that at one point when Carpenter was more connected to the film they wanted to bring Myers back as a spirit. The idea was that Haddonfield the film series setting has decided to ban Halloween and not allow cinemas to show horror films or kids to trick or treat and that somehow this would bring Michael back as a spirit that he would be reborn in a pumpkin field as some spirit of vengeance. On the one hand this sounds a little bit silly and also a little bit close to Nightmare on Elm street but then I guess its no sillier than a guy who can be killed again and again and seem to somehow come back and have only been in a coma or knocked out.

OK so lets leave behind what could have been and instead focus on the film we got. So lets start at the start with the most basic of questions. What has Michael been doing since the second one? Well he has been sat in a comatose state for ten years since the explosion at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, so not very much at all to be fair. It is while Michael is being transferred to Smith's Grove Sanitarium by ambulance that he wakes up after hearing that Laurie Strode, who died in a car accident, has a daughter. So I guess lesson learned right here if your ever around a comatose serial killer just keep your mouth shut just in case anything you say could wake them up and start the whole thing again. Ok If you want to watch the film without having it spoiled I recommend you walk away now as although I am not going to give away every beat of the film I will spoil the ending as well I cant talk about the movies place in cannon without doing this.

OK so lets get back to talking about this movie. So where was I? Oh yes Michael being Michael kills the ambulance personnel, and makes his way to Haddonfield in search of his niece Jamie. Dr. Samuel Loomis basically gives chase and its pretty much business as usual for the pair Michael killing and Lommis telling people Michael is evil while trying to track him down so that he can stop him. All in all as far as I am concerned its more of the same as far as the franchise goes, it takes on board the first two Halloween films while ignoring the third which with this once again being the story of Michael makes perfect sense.

Near the end of the film just before Michael is ''finished off'' Jamie touches his hand, then when things have apparently gone back to normal after the events her step mum goes upstairs to run her a bath, at this point though Jamie attacks old mummy dearest. Loomis hears screaming and starts to race up the stairs before stopping dead in his tracks about midway. We see why he has stopped, there at the top of the stairs stands an emotionless looking Jamie who is wearing a clown mask, holding a pair of scissors in her hand, her costume covered in blood looking pretty much like a young Michael had when he killed his older sister Judith, Loomis raises his gun to shoot her but is stopped. The film ends with Loomis sinking to the floor sobbing leading us to believe that for one reason or another be it something in her blood, the trauma she has suffered or some kind of curse passing from her Uncle when they touched that Jamie will become the franchises new killer. Would this change of killer ending go on to be an important piece of cannon or not? Well I guess you need to wait for my next post to find out, well unless you have seen all of the movies which given there age I am going to guess you most likely have.

Is Emu-Paradise no longer having Roms the begining of the end of Video Game History ?

Well seeing as I am most known for being that Super Nintendo guy a lot of the time, well I couldn't help but comment on the recent semi shoot down of EmuParadise. A lot of people will think of EmuParaide as that site full of game Roms and to a degree that is kind of true but id like to think that it was a lot more than that. Yes it was a place you could go to get Roms but it was also sort of a digital museum that celebrated retro gaming and even  helped to remind people of old games that they might have forgotten. Now you probably noticed I said semi shutting down and not shutting down well that's because the Roms are going but the site is not.

The situation with regards to emulation sites has been changing recently. Sure there have always been companies who have been hostile to it, companies that have thrown there weight around with legal threats and complaining to hosts demanding that Roms be removed but right now we seem to be in the eye of a storm and rather than put its team members in a position of risk EmuParadise has decided that it needs to change. Yeah I think its a shame to loose a good source of Roms, one which came without the risks of viruses and such but I think its good that it will continue to exist as a resource which will help chronicle the history of games even if it cant help people to actually play them.


Some people are saying that this shift is the beginning of the end, that it signals the beginning of the death of video game preservation. You see companies like Nintendo might be afraid that if people use emulators and Roms for free then they wont pay money for virtual console style games or collection discs or official mini consoles and well that is to some degree a fair argument, some people wont pay £6.50 to play Super Metroid on there Wii U or New 3DS if they can simply download it for free and use an emulator to play it on there PC. So if you look at it from Nintendo's few point then emulators and roms do kind of suck. Looking at it from the consumers point of view and also the video game historians point of view though and you will start to see a whole new range of issues and arguments.

Look at it in this way, if a person was to remember a game, one which meant a lot to them, one which held a special place in there heart, one that they had played in there youth well what about when you want to play that game what do you do? Well you have a handful of options one of them is to look up the original hardware and software, another is to look for a modern legal way to get the game be it to buy a micro console with preinstalled games or to look at old game compilation discs or a console system based marketplace and the third one of course is to download an emulator and a rom so that you can play the game on your PC. Now there is this idea which some companies and even people have which basically goes like this every one when they are downloading a rom are doing it because there a dirty pirate who wants to have something without paying for it and that basically if you do this then you are a thief.

OK so if  Sonic the Hedgehog is available on pretty much every console's market place, is also available on PC through Steam, on the Android phone store, on the I-Store and is on a whole bunch of officially licensed micro consoles and you still decide sod all that noise I am just going to grab it for free then you could make an argument that your basically stealing it because you don't want to pay for it but this is really simplifying matters. You see there are a lot of games which you cant pay for at the moment but you might want to play, games which are not available for all kinds of reasons, licensing issues, the company that made them no longer existing, perceived lack of interest by the owners. In these cases if you really really want to play the game then what do you do? Well you either get an original copy of the game and its hardware or you have to emulate. In both of these cases the studio that made the game is not going to profit. Game Studios do not get any money from you going on ebay or visiting a retro game store and paying for an old copy of one of there games. Its a little extreme to expect someone to pay lets say £1000 for a rare arcade cabinet just to play a game which they could easily use a computer to emulate. Plus and this is the real kicker hardware doesnt last forever especially if its some custom chip arcade game like one of the old pre jamma board ones, so if we only play a game using real hardware eventually this hardware will break and there might even be a time where we no longer manufacture the parts with which even the most tech savvy of people could manage a repair. Old machines will eventually die out and if there are games which no one is re-releasing on modern platforms then there is a chance that these games could die out as well.

I have to admit though that I am not as worried as a lot of other people and you know why? Its simple you can get tough on roms and kick up a stink but you will never get rid of it, at the very most you will simply push things underground a bit. Lots of us are sitting on huge supplies of Roms now and we will continue to swap and trade these and as long as that happens then not only can we play the otherwise unplayble but we can also hold on to our video game history.

The Halloween movie Canon Jigsaw Part 3: Where does Season of the Witch fit into all of this or does it simply not.

OK so with Halloween being the story of what Michael Myers did on Halloween and the sequel Halloween 2 being a continuation of this most people would probably presume that Halloween 3 would be yet more of the same, after all that's pretty much how it went for horror movie Villains like Freddy Kruger and Chucky and such right? Well in this case you'd actually be wrong, in fact you could say that you would be dead wrong. You see Halloween III: Season Of The Witch, abandoned the story of Michael Myers altogether he doesn't really feature in the film at all, well except for the part where an advert for the first Halloween movie appears on a television set. The idea at this point in time was that  from this point on Halloween was going to be a sort of series of  anthology films, so film 1 and 2 would be about Michael and then 3 would be about something incredibly different happening one Halloween night and then 4 would be about another thing. I guess that kind of means that in Halloween universe terms we have a slight problem here, either Halloween 3 is happening in a completely different universe where the first Halloween at least exists as a movie or the whole Michael Myers thing really happened and then someone made a movie about those events, a movie which got the details at least close enough for its trailer to look like a pretty much beat for beat reenactment of some of what happened.

To be honest I kind of really like the idea of the Halloween trailer seen in Halloween 3 being a trailer for a movie based on real killings in that universe by Myers but then it would come with all kinds of problems, including the fact that people in future films should know who Micheal is on sight. Add to the fact that knowledge of  a killer in your neck of the woods who had survived a crazy amount of punishment and was basically a relentless killing machine would mean that everyone would have there houses so super super secure and live with loaded weapons in there hands every second of every day well lets just say you'd have to factor these kind of things into future films which would create a whole heap of work. OK I am going to leave this here as I could go in circles talking about it all for a very very long time.
 
I guess I should say at this point that I am an absolutely massive fan of Halloween 3. I have written about it quiet a few times, I have reviewed it, I have discussed whether it might have been met with a better reception if it was just called Season of the Witch with its Halloween connection severed. I have also spent a lot of time wondering what would have happened if the film had been a success, what would Halloween 4 and 5 and 6 have been about then, and how good or bad would they have been?

One thing I would have liked to have seen done in latter films is to have the events of Halloween 3 connected to the cult of Thorn. Yeah Myers is great on his own but I would have liked to have played the cults power up a little bit more, to have made it seem like they were a force for evil in the universe and that they didn't have all of there eggs in the Michael basket, they had the mask plan and various other ideas.

OK so I guess that's me done talking about Halloween 3 but I will say one thing, if you havent seen it then give it a bash, just don't go into it expecting a slasher film with a silent shadow killing people, go in to it with a fresh and open mind and you might just find that you really enjoy it.

The Halloween movie Canon Jigsaw Part 2: How the original Halloween was alterd when it was brought to TV to set up Halloween 2 and that movies place in the universes canon.

The first Halloween was soon followed up by Halloween II. I ended my last Halloween blog post by saying that I would be talking about how the original Halloween was altered when it came to TV and that it was altered in order to add a few facts that they wanted to slip into the canon before the sequel so this is what I shall do now.

It was scenes added to the TV version of Halloween which introduced the twist that babysitter Laurie Strode, was Myer's long-lost sister.  So how and why did this come about? Well in 1980, the television rights to Halloween were sold to NBC for $4 million and apparently they wanted a few scenes to be censored to one degree or another. When Halloween appeared on television for the first time in October 1981 not only had bits been censored but Carpenter had also filmed twelve minutes of additional material and inserted it in to the movie. This stuff was filmed during the production of Halloween II and included a scene with Dr. Loomis at a hospital board review of Michael and with Dr. Loomis talking to a 6 year old Michael telling him that even if he has the board fooled he hasn't managed to fool him. Another scene featuring Dr. Loomis at Smith's Grove shows him examining Michael's abandoned cell just after his escape and seeing the word "Sister" scratched into the door.
The last scene added was one in which Lynda comes over to Laurie's house to borrow a silk blouse before Laurie leaves to babysit, just as Annie telephones asking to borrow the same blouse.To be honest as far as my memory goes Laurie was always Michael's sister so maybe the first ever version I saw must have been the altered one. also in my opinion any version with more Loomis is a good version as for me he is quite simply the best thing about the Halloween films.

OK so with that out of the way Halloween 2 was basically to the best of my knowledge pretty much always considered part of the Halloween canon with even Halloween H20 the film which came along and ignored every film after 2 considering the TV the events of Halloween 2 to have all happened within the cinematic universe.

 So what about the new upcoming film Halloween 2018 for want of a better title, well this is actual the first film to ignore Halloween 2, in this new upcoming movie nothing is cannon apart from the first Halloween movie, but its not even clear as far as I know which version of the origianl it is set to follow, so will it follow the Theatrical cut or the Television cut? Will Laurie and Michael be brother and sister or will he simply be some guy with her being just some random person he tried to kill? I guess we will have to just wait and see.

The Halloween movie Canon Jigsaw Part 1: An explanation of Cannon and is the original Halloween a sequel to Black Christmas?

OK so this is the first in a series of posts about the Halloween film series but in order for this all to make sense I kind of need to start with explaining what the term"canon" means. It should be easy but its kind of not. Canon is basically any part of anything which is supposed to fit in to a larger story, its treated as something which actually happened and can be sited as a true series of events within a film or a comic series. I guess the easiest way to explain it would be to say that all of the regular issues of Spider-man happened and can be seen as counting as real events that happened in the life of Spider-man, where as any of the ''What If'' stories Marvel did happened outside of canon, they are interesting little tales which might feature the same characters but are supposed to be ignored for the purposes of the bigger picture.

Canon is a complex beast because what is and is not considered canon can change at almost any time, basically whenever the person or company holding the rights decides that it needs to. The easiest example for me to give is probably Star Wars. So for years and years books and comics and such were released which were supposed to show us what happened in the Star Wars universe after the end of Return of the Jedi. Fans invested a whole bunch of both time and money in following the adventures of Luke Skywalker and friends and then bang Disney buy Lucas Arts and they own Star Wars and pretty much the first thing they do is to tell us all that all of that stuff we had purchased and read was no longer canon, it was all basically alternative universe what if style stuff and that if we really wanted to follow what happened canon wise in the universe after Return of the Jedi then we would have to watch the new films and stuff that they were going to be working on.

Plenty of film series have toyed with canon in a whole range of ways scrubbing out a film here or there, telling us to ignore certain parts but arguably no other franchise has pissed around with its canon to quiet the same degree as the Halloween series. I cant even make it past the first film without having to talk about its Canon and whether it is part one of one story or part two of another and its only going to get more complicated from this point onwards.

So I guess usually the first place to start would be the original, in this case the 1979 slasher movie, Halloween. Sounds simple right? Well it mostly is apart from one little footnote and that's the fact that some people think that Halloween is kind of an unofficial sort of sequel to a film called Black Christmas. So what do Black Christmas and Halloween have in common, whats the connection? Well both of the films were released in the 1970s, Black Christmas in 1974 and Halloween in 1978, add to this that both of them are often credited for helping to kick-start the American slasher movie movement that pretty much dominated the 1980s. Add on to this the fact that some people feel that the origins of John Carpenter’s film can perhaps be traced back to a conversation he once had with Bob Clark about Black Christmas. The following is taken from an interview with Bob Clark and is about a discussion he had with John Carpenter.

I never intended to do a sequel [to Black Christmas]. I did a film about three years later… started a film with John Carpenter. It was his first film for Warner Bros. He asked me if I was ever going to do a sequel and I said no. I was through with horror; I didn’t come into the business to do just horror. He said, ‘Well what would you do if you did do a sequel?’ I said it would be the next year and the guy would have actually been caught, escape from a mental institution, go back to the house, and they would start all over again. And I would call it Halloween.

OK so that is for all intents and purposes basically the plot of Halloween right? So this conversation does very much make Halloween look like a Black Christmas sequel which went on to have its connection to Black Christmas stripped out of it doesn't it? Yet when you look into the history of Halloween a little more deeply you learn that producers Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad approached Carpenter to direct a movie about a killer stalking babysitters. Carpenter and Debra Hill agreed, and began working on a script titled The Babysitter Murders. It was reportedly Yablans who then suggested the movie be re-titled Halloween, and that the story take place on Halloween night.

In total honesty I don't think Halloween is a sequel to Black Christmas in any way shape or form, but I do think that Carpenter had clearly enjoyed Black Christmas and had taken something away from his viewing of it, something which lurked in his mind and in certain ways came out during the making of Halloween but this is a common thing people do. It is one of the reasons why if I am writing stories I will try to limit what I read and watch and will try my best to look for elements of anything I have seen seeping into my work, as long as you keep it in check and you remain inspired instead of simply cutting and pasting whole chunks of something else I don't really think that it is a problem, heck if you can see even a slither of Black Christmas in the DNA of Halloween I am pretty sure most people involved in that film would take it as a very high form of compliment.

OK so join me next time when I will be talking about how the canon of the first film was changed for the TV version to set up what they decided needed to be set up for Halloween 2.