Ding-dong! Postcard time! A TV show from the 80s, a video game from the 2000s, and a YouTube video from 3 months ago. What variety!
Golden Girls is the best sitcom I have ever seen
A month ago, my friends and I decided to watch the first couple of episodes of Golden Girls, knowing that the show existed but never actually watching it. The obsession was immediate. Discord avatars were changed, the WhatsApp group icon promptly switched out, and our chats became filled with gifs of the show. We tried to assign ourselves to each one of the Golden Girls, but quickly realised that we loved them all equally. These four divas had won us over wholeheartedly, and I honestly wonder how I had walked on Earth this long without the show being in my life. I LOVE THIS SHOW. In a time where, in a bizarre trend, every horror movie villain seems to be a gross old lady, we need The Golden Girls in our lives now more than ever. I love how campy and witty the humour is. I love how these ladies talk and joke openly about dating, divorce, sex, menopause, and death – all while looking fabulous on their palm tree print couch. Argh, I love it so much! Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia are my GIRLS.
Rachel
More YouTube recommendations from Rebecca and it’s exactly what you’d expect
A few weeks ago I stumbled across an animation on YouTube called Danganronpa But Really, Really Fast. (Note: yes, even at top speed it’s still 25 minutes long, but that’s not bad going for a surprisingly comprehensible distillation of a 40-hour narrative game.) I’m never too sure about parodies like this and I was trepidatious going in, but I’m pleased to report that StarStrike et al. are the sort of people who can look at the blatantly queer-coded goings on make up roughly 40% of Trigger Happy Havoc’s screen time, and not feel the need to either buy into Spike Chunsoft’s halfhearted case of the Classic c.2010 Not-Gays or make any of the lazy obvious jokes about it. Instead, they just lean into it as backstory and work from there. And you know what? It’s a great parody generally, but I love anything that takes a queerbaity canon and with its full chest reclaims those tropes for the gays.
By now I’ve watched it three times – and did I laugh at the “I’m haemophobic” joke and the characters’ reactions every single time? Yes, yes I did, they earned it. But my favourite line has to be “THAT’S NOT THE MAN I MARRIED” (delivered at a bellow, naturally) – never has a surrealish riff on a very different actual line felt so spiritually accurate. Also the “I hope it’s not catching” to “GIRLFRIEND” pipeline may be one of my favourite brick jokes ever. (I’m going to assume that anyone passingly familiar with THH can probably parse which characters get which lines, but if you’re still confused, go watch it! It’s well worth 25 or 50 or indeed 75 minutes of your time, unless you actually want to play the game at some point without spoilers, in which case I recommend holding off for now.)
So instead of the more obvious goofs, and aside from being a healing experience for my queer little heart, we also get: really lovely pixel art of the characters; great voice work from just two people voicing a cast of like 18, including but not limited to randomly Irish-accented Yasuhiro (who might now be my preferred-sounding Yasuhiro, even if he is 100% canonically a Californian stoner despite being Japanese); a new vocal stim (EVIDENCE! EVIDENCE! EVIDENCE!); and, most astonishingly, Makoto getting a much better character arc than in the actual game! StarStrike apparently plans to do the second game as well, but maybe not the third since they haven’t played it yet – consider me sat for whenever that happens.
Rebecca
I am begging you to play Dino Crisis 2
My love for all things Resident Evil is extremely well documented at this point. CAPCOM’s long-running survival horror series has been a comfortable constant throughout my life, offering bursts of mindless action every other year since I was a literal child.
It should go without saying, then, that I’m also very fond of Dino Crisis, a duo of PS1 spin offs* that replaced decaying zombies with quick-witted dinosaurs. The first game is a pretty cut and dry clone of Resident Evil, forcing the player to explore an abandoned facility as they’re pursued relentlessly by near-impervious raptors. It’s good! I like it a lot.
However, its sequel (the imaginatively titled Dino Crisis 2) is the superior game. Despite featuring the same fixed camera angles, door transitions, and tank controls as its predecessor, Dino Crisis 2 drops the survival horror element entirely in favour of all-out action. You can move while shooting. Ammo can be slurped up from any save point. Enemies flood the screen, to the point where there’s an honest to god combo system to encourage you to keep mowing down raptors. The higher your combo, the higher the number of DINO POINTS (not a joke) you’ll be rewarded with once you transition into the next area.
It’s the antithesis of everything Resident Evil established in its original trilogy, and yet it’s built on exactly the same bones! The result is a cathartic palette cleanser, a game that lets you shake off the restrictions of its survival horror cousin with reckless glee.
If you’ve never played this before, it’s actually never been easier to do so. CAPCOM recently added it to Steam (alongside the original) as well as GOG. Thanks to Proton Experimental, it even runs well on Steam Deck, although you do lose its pre-rendered cutscenes (not a huge loss).
Give it a try!
*Yes I’m aware they made a third one, and a lightgun thing, but it’s best to pretend they don’t exist. Cheers.
Liam
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