Patrick Alexander (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} zpxlng) wrote,@ 2007-12-02 01:32:00 |
|
Total Gamer scans -- Part Issue Seven
What I'm gonna do now is go through the handful of issues I have here, and pick the highlights from each one. Let's begin with issue 7.
YES LET'S, PATRICK!
There's a couple of humour features in here: One where I take colourful and friendly videogame franchises, and inject them with badassery a la Shadow the Hedgehog and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, which is as moderately amusing as the premise suggests; and one called, 'Those Resilient Stalins: A well-intentioned celebration of torture goes horribly wrong', in which I attempt to torment a Sim family and basically fail. It's actually pretty good, but suffers from being squished into four pages.
But the funniest bits in this issue -- and this quickly became characteristic of Total Gamer -- are not the 'funny bits', but the nondescript, throwaway bits that became funny because funny people (me and Dan) were writing them. We didn't want any boring pages -- it seemed like such a waste. So the necessary-but-dull bits of the magazine, like competition pages, 'next issue' pages and suchlike, became the perfect vehicle for our sense of the ridiculous, and in fact the whole reason to buy Total Gamer, instead of the actual features and reviews.
I mean, consider the 'humour features' I mentioned above. Game mascots gone bad? Torturing Sims? Not what you'd call inspired. Clearly, at this point, we knew we wanted our magazine to be funny, but we thought that meant making jokes. It soon became clear that our interests and strengths did not lie in making jokes, but in simply being funny.
In the early issues, Dan introduced a number of regular features that we knew were pedestrian, but he felt were the sort of thing that needed to be included for the mag to sell (like 'Gaming Grudge Match' for example). In the later issues, we parodied and subverted our own features, having grown bored with them almost straight away.
I'm sure there were exceptions to this general trend, but anyway! -- I'm getting sidetracked. Here are my favourite bits of issue 7: pages that should have been boring, but aren't because I don't do boring.
A competition page:
In the box with the purple text, I'm pretty sure everything from "like a void..." was added by Dan, probably to (a) soften the blow, and (b) provide a more realistic entry requirement.
A two-page spread for another competition:
Generally speaking I am happy when writing nonsense instead of writing about what I'm supposed to be writing about. Even if I'm supposed to be writing about a topic that actually interests me; it doesn't matter. I have observed that I have a silly and disobedient personality. I don't know why I turned out this way, but there it is.
Finally, here's... well...
Eventually we might as well have renamed the mag Total Animal Pictures. If you were a regular reader you know what I mean.
Opposite the above page is the other half of the anime spread, a 'Timeline of Anime', which I think is funny but Angela fucked up the design by using the wrong pictures (reducing the funny slightly), so it's not worth scanning; I'll just transcribe it instead:
Timeline of ANIME
An Educational Feature
1887
Kojiro Wasamatayuu discovers anime by accident while trying to invent a cure for the nineteenth century. He burns his laboratory and commits suicide. The policemen who investigate the debris all die mysteriously within a week.
1918
Osamu Tezuka attempts to create national interest in anime with his groundbreaking series, Astro Cow. It flops. So do Astro Weevil, Astro Ferret and Astro Grandmother in successive years. He dies a miserable pauper.
1950
The first giant robot is built. It flies into space and vaporises Earth with lasers. The planet is immediately replaced, and the incident hushed up.
1983
America's nerds realise that Japan exists. They become so excited, all their heads explode. This becomes known as the 'anime boom'.
1997
Anime invasion!!
2005
Kittens.
The future...?
Spaceships.
What I'm gonna do now is go through the handful of issues I have here, and pick the highlights from each one. Let's begin with issue 7.
YES LET'S, PATRICK!
There's a couple of humour features in here: One where I take colourful and friendly videogame franchises, and inject them with badassery a la Shadow the Hedgehog and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, which is as moderately amusing as the premise suggests; and one called, 'Those Resilient Stalins: A well-intentioned celebration of torture goes horribly wrong', in which I attempt to torment a Sim family and basically fail. It's actually pretty good, but suffers from being squished into four pages.
But the funniest bits in this issue -- and this quickly became characteristic of Total Gamer -- are not the 'funny bits', but the nondescript, throwaway bits that became funny because funny people (me and Dan) were writing them. We didn't want any boring pages -- it seemed like such a waste. So the necessary-but-dull bits of the magazine, like competition pages, 'next issue' pages and suchlike, became the perfect vehicle for our sense of the ridiculous, and in fact the whole reason to buy Total Gamer, instead of the actual features and reviews.
I mean, consider the 'humour features' I mentioned above. Game mascots gone bad? Torturing Sims? Not what you'd call inspired. Clearly, at this point, we knew we wanted our magazine to be funny, but we thought that meant making jokes. It soon became clear that our interests and strengths did not lie in making jokes, but in simply being funny.
In the early issues, Dan introduced a number of regular features that we knew were pedestrian, but he felt were the sort of thing that needed to be included for the mag to sell (like 'Gaming Grudge Match' for example). In the later issues, we parodied and subverted our own features, having grown bored with them almost straight away.
I'm sure there were exceptions to this general trend, but anyway! -- I'm getting sidetracked. Here are my favourite bits of issue 7: pages that should have been boring, but aren't because I don't do boring.
A competition page:
In the box with the purple text, I'm pretty sure everything from "like a void..." was added by Dan, probably to (a) soften the blow, and (b) provide a more realistic entry requirement.
A two-page spread for another competition:
Generally speaking I am happy when writing nonsense instead of writing about what I'm supposed to be writing about. Even if I'm supposed to be writing about a topic that actually interests me; it doesn't matter. I have observed that I have a silly and disobedient personality. I don't know why I turned out this way, but there it is.
Finally, here's... well...
Eventually we might as well have renamed the mag Total Animal Pictures. If you were a regular reader you know what I mean.
Opposite the above page is the other half of the anime spread, a 'Timeline of Anime', which I think is funny but Angela fucked up the design by using the wrong pictures (reducing the funny slightly), so it's not worth scanning; I'll just transcribe it instead:
An Educational Feature
1887
Kojiro Wasamatayuu discovers anime by accident while trying to invent a cure for the nineteenth century. He burns his laboratory and commits suicide. The policemen who investigate the debris all die mysteriously within a week.
1918
Osamu Tezuka attempts to create national interest in anime with his groundbreaking series, Astro Cow. It flops. So do Astro Weevil, Astro Ferret and Astro Grandmother in successive years. He dies a miserable pauper.
1950
The first giant robot is built. It flies into space and vaporises Earth with lasers. The planet is immediately replaced, and the incident hushed up.
1983
America's nerds realise that Japan exists. They become so excited, all their heads explode. This becomes known as the 'anime boom'.
1997
Anime invasion!!
2005
Kittens.
The future...?
Spaceships.
