How's this for a video?

Ok, this is the video for Front Line Assembly’s song Epitaph:

"Manhattan island 2001. A drug addict is beaten by her dealer and is forced to deliver a parcel to a certain address within forty minutes. She falls asleep on the tube and a retarded man steals the parcel. Here follows a sequence where the stoned girl stumbles after the limping mongoloid before finally sinking to the ground sobbing. The retard then approaches her and opens the parcel forcing a glowing globe into the half unconscious girl’s mouth. She then wakes up, now dressed in regular clothes, at the train station and sees her train boarding."

How’s that for a story? And I thought mongoloid people only appeared in Aphex Twin videos. But it is the same kind of music so it might be something with the genre. What could be the message behind this quirky video? The meek leading the blind perhaps? The retarded man obviously rescue here from life on the street so why not. This could be a glimpse of a future where Lars Von Trier has given up dogme and started digging into the commercial market.

The only think I can be certain of is that there will be quite some time before I see a video with a retarded hero again.

The return of the arcade?

I Stumbled over this a few days ago.

"[Cecropia is] making a coin-op game about emotion, controlled by the earliest of videogame input devices, a single knob. They call their game a filmgame."

The idea of merging the cartoon world with computer games is not new at all. On top of my head a dozen titles pop up. Leisure suit Larry, Sam & Max, Day of the tentacle, Dragon’s lair. In fact, back in the days when I started doing computers (yes it’s a drug) these kind of games where everywhere. The 2D graphic and quirky stories must been why I fell in love with computer games in the first place (that and Samantha Fox strip poker on commodore 64 of course).

So the revolutionary thing about this story is about the return of the cartoon games? The answer is no even though this is indeed a fabulous thing. The key words here are instead Arcade and Single knob. Bringing this kind of game to a platform that traditionally has been reserved for car and fighting games is both interesting and very bold. How will it be received? This is a first step toward the interactive movie set in a public place.

“Players have to correctly read and control the visual personality cues in the animated characters in order to move to the next level of the game. The control system for The Act is a very simple and easy to use dial”

Apparently the dial is an analogue stick that you at given points use to tell the game just how funny you are or how meek you should be. I for one would line up at the bar to drop a few coins in this experiment.

Watch the trailer here