SnowFlame Fan-Comic

BlaZeon (ATL-67140), 1992 Tsukasa Masuko

The Hybrid Front (Mega Drive), 1994 Naofumi Hataya, Junko Shiratsu, Yoshiaki Kashima

STAND BY FOR ACTION

Had to do some cross-referencing with the OST, but I think I have some more accurate track names now. Sound test identifies the player as “player”, so that’s what I’ve stuck with.

Time Dominator 1st (Mega Drive), 1993 Fumito Tamayama, Yoko Suzuki, Shigenori Masuko, Yasuyuki Hamada

To me, the sound design in this game is perfect. This is what FM should sound like. There are other games that do more impressive things with FM, but this totally captures its essence: silky, biting and idiophonic.

The reason Yamaha’s implementation of FM is so good at idiophonic sounds is because in most of the chips, the operators are all sine waves (also why it sounds so smooth). Sine waves most closely resemble the natural sound produced by struck idiophones like bells and vibraphones.

You may recall that when I shared ResQ, I said the intro featured a “square wave”. Well. That’s not strictly true:

Lundi Linkara : Snowflame by Shlapocalypse

What’s better to warm up our hearts during this cold winter season than… cocaïne? Wait…no, that’s not right. In more ways than one. So how about a cocaïne-powered supervillain?

Behold the almighty Snowflame, a short-lived yet glorious comic book character that apparently gets his powers from snorting enormous amounts of cocaïne, which in itself could inspire a whole series of anti-drugs PSA but was instead confined to a one-shot role in The New Guardians no.2 where he opposed said Guardians to protect his drug cartel.

Even if he lasted only one issue before being killed off, Snowflame was made pretty unforgettable not only because of his eyebrow-raising source of power (as well as God) but also by just how ridiculously over-the-top he was as a character. Sure, his way of speaking about himself in the third person and using strange phrasings à la Ultimate Warrior made him rather silly, but somehow awesome at the same time. So awesome in fact that the model I made was literally twice as big as every other character in the collection. Look how big he is compared to the others (and Neutro is supposed to be a giant robot!):

That’s just how glorious Snowflame is.

Either that or I just messed up my scale and was too lazy to start over…

Anyway, Linkara thought he was pretty awesome too… Until Snowflame appeared in his appartement one day, as hyper as usual, making huge sandwiches, giving out some very questionnable advices on peer pressure, watching him read and inquiring about the wereabouts of some fuzzy slippers. That’s when Linkara started to wish he could go back to a simpler time, you know, like when Linksano wanted to take over the world or 90’s Kid wanted to discuss Bloodgun for hours…

So remember kids: not even once!

Bloodgun, I mean.

;)

The Linkara Collection gift box set was given to Linkara at Conbravo 2014. And it now proudly dangles around in his Christmas tree ^^

Who’s Linkara? A movie maker. Come on people, let’s make this happen! atopthefourthwall.com

“Issue #18″

Model: Cin’ Von Quinzel as Ms. Marvel

Okay, so we all know what happened in the first movie. Now let’s jump to the third movie.

Once again, the surviving hero canoes over the lake, ostensibly so she’ll have a place to safely collapse, but really because of what comes next: Another trippy scare, where not only is Jason still alive and running like a pro sprinter, but where Pamela Voorhees’ corpse jumps out of the water, much like “Boy Jason” did in the first film.

Since Pamela’s corpse would be headless in real life, there’s no room to view this as anything other than “not real.”

But why do I suppose “forced hallucination” over “dream sequence?” Simple: To my knowledge, Chris didn’t have any idea about Pam, and even if you’d argue that she’d heard the news about the prior killings and yadda yadda yadda, I don’t think that’s enough to fuel a nightmare about a lunging lady corpse.

This is something I hope to tackle during the Countdown, because it’s one of my favorite subjects.

Focusing mainly on Parts 2, 3 and 4 – because that’s where my loyalty was most definitively built – these are horror movies, but they’re not just horror movies. They’re also movies about young adults getting to have the kinds of “vacations” I used to dream about as a kid. You know, the whole idea of being out on their own in a pretty dead town where the only thing to do was act on their impulses.

Crystal Lake had a lot in common with Pleasure Island from Pinocchio – get there and have your fun, but be careful, ‘cause you’re gonna pay for it.

I just love that aspect of the earlier films. The whole “bunch of friends mixed with non-friends thrown together for what essentially amounted to weeklong parties in the woods.” If you only know F13 by its reputation, this sounds off, but when you see the movies, it’s pretty clear and it has a lot of layers.

(And FYI, that was my main problem with the remake: It knew this, but it didn’t really understand this.)

Beyond that are other reasons, of course. I enjoy Jason as a character. I love the fact that he evolves from movie to movie, more often by happenstance than by storyline direction. I love that no two Jasons are exactly alike.

Thanks to changing trends, different directors and the simple fact that the franchise was “worth more” or “worth less” depending on the year, the F13 movies grew to have quite distinct flavors, too, and they hit upon so many mostly-lost horror “trends.” Part 5 is trashy. Part 6 is MTV. Part 7 is direct-to-video style. Part 8 represents the era when cinema wanted to get hipper but didn’t always know how to do that. Part 9 is ‘90s sci-fi. Part 10 is 2000s spoofy. Like, look at the each movie’s release date and then match it up with other movies that came out in those years. You’ll find that it makes SUCH WEIRD SENSE.

PSYVARIAR “THE MIX” (Egg Music Records), 2008 Bacter & Zinger

I can’t get enough of these guys!! PSYVARIAR “THE MIX” is a Japanese-released remix/arrange album of SKonec Entertainment’s Psyvariar 2 shooter, originally released in 2003. “THE MIX” brings together Japanese and European demoscene musicians for something that, frankly, far, far surpasses the original soundtrack.

Street Angel vs. Stardust the Super Wizard