The film is directed by Andrew Lau and stars: Ekin Cheng, Jordan Chan, Francis Ng, Gigi Lai and Simon Yam.

I was completely unaware of this series pretty much most of my life until I took a job as a temp for an engineering company putting together prototype RPM gauges for an upcoming line of automobiles. There I was stationed with a really cool Chinese kid from Bayside, Queens. It was him who put me onto this title. He basically did it because he knew I loved S.Korean films and wanted to point me in the direction of some quality Hong Kong titles. In his words, “Don’t watch that S%*#, watch this.”

It was after some encouraging that I made my way to Manhattan’s Chinatown to one of the hole in the wall gimmick stores where I was able to get all six films on one DVD for only $6.00. My coworker hearing about the price I paid for all films just started to smile and nod his head, “You’re in for a trip now.”

In all honesty, it took me a month to finally sit and watch the dvd. And once I had the time, I spent basically an entire day watching the dvd in my bathrobe with a regenerating bowl of hot Lipton soup on my lap. Pretty much in love with the world of ‘Teddy Boy’.

My favorite characters being of course, Chicken and the Priest. The director Lau is also the cinematographer and although the quality of the film has aged the journy is still dope. If you’ve ever played Street Dogs or watched ‘The Killer’ or better ‘Hard Boiled’ you’d understand the craze for Hong Kong cinema that was really big in small indie and underground sub-cultures. Especially, if you’ve listened to early works from Wu-Tang Clan.

The story of this entry takes places in Hong Kong, where a group of teenage members of a Triad family are sucked into a turf war between rival families. Much like the Goodfellas or better Mean Streets, the film is stylized but remains very grounded in reality with some really charming moments of levity thrown in.

The fight scenes and violence are here and very chaotic and intense, much like real life. A lot of knives, cleavers, hatchets and baseball bats.

We are very fortunate that a youtuber was able to upload the film and I’m very elated to link it here. As this is one of my favorite series to revisit. I will on occasion be posting the sequels to NewRetroWave in the near future. I guarantee maximum enjoyment.

So here it is, the first YOUNG & DANGEROUS (1996) directed by Andrew Lau, produced by Wong Jin and Manfred Wong who is also the screenwriter. Based on the Comic Strip by Cowman and Dickey Yau. Distributed by Golden Harvest and originally released on January 26, 1996. Here with orginal Cantonese dialogue and English subtitles and a running time of approximately 97minutes.

Movie Link:

We’ve talked about DOOM. We’ve looked at Wolfenstein 3D. We’ve even touched on some left-field shit like Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. The formative history of the first person shooter is no new topic to us, RetroFans…

So why the FUCK have I put off talking about Quake for so long?

As I’ve pointed out in previous articles, Quake‘s predecessors (notably 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D and 1993’s groundbreaking DOOM) create the impression of a fully 3D environment… but they’re not really 3D. Wolf3D rendered its faux-3D point of view by way of a technique called raycasting, while DOOM expanded upon that idea significantly by allowing for differences in floor and ceiling height. What we were seeing, as cool as it was (And still is), amounted to 2D information being cleverly jury-rigged into a “3D enough for me” experience. Here’s another hair to split, while we’re talking like total assholes: the monsters and items were still very much 2 dimensional – the same type of sprites one might see in a 2D title like Super Mario World.

Don’t go thinking I’m just here to take a shit on Wolf3D and DOOM; far from it. I have a point, and I’m about to get to it. Please stop throwing furniture at me.

I’ve showed you this before, but there’s no reason why I can’t show you again. Hell, I love repeating myself. A visual explanation of raycasting, wherein a two-dimensional space is given uniform height/depth and roughly translated into what a dog or a 5 year old kid might consider 3D.

In 1994, John Romero saw Sega’s Virtua Fighter, and a thought occurred to him: “We could do that. Except we could do it better. Nastier. With hatchets and demons and shit.” Thankfully, Johnny R. happened to know one of the pimp-pioneers of game development, a man whose brain runs on twelve white-hot macho cylinders… John Carmack. The man who masterminded the DOOM engine, Carmack began hatching this next golden egg not long after DOOM II was released. But a funny thing happened on the way to the release; John Romero (who, let’s be real, has been known to toss some dogshit ideas at the wall and see if they stick) wanted to make Quake a third-person game… at least partially. Seemingly hung up on Virtua Fighter, Johnny R. wanted there to be hand-to-hand fights in the game that were presented just like the Sega fighting game. This turned out to be a huge time sink, not to mention a bone of contention between Romero and pretty much every other person working on the project. Long story short, Romero left id shortly after Quake‘s release. He went on to make Daikatana, which we won’t talk about because it’s terrible enough to put on the books as a felony.

Back on subject… when Quake hit the game shelves in June of ’96, it rendered all its predecessors obsolete. Fuck “obsolete,” it made them look like some Flintstones shit. Paleolithic grunting and biting. Most immediately, it was clear that Quake was fully 3D. Not “smoke and mirrors and two-dimensional SS officers.” Not “2D wearing 3D’s stolen hat.” The environment and models were fully polygonal, you could go under and over shit, the lightmapping was lush, and to top it all off, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails did the sound and music.

Our hero. A man of coughy grunts, constant grimaces, and what looks like the world’s least comfortable helmet.

In this dark, bloody and immersive escapade, you step into the shoes of a Ranger who finds himself the last man alive after a disaster involving prototype teleportation technology. It’s unclear if the dude’s proper name is Ranger and he just had colorful parents, or he’s meant to be nearly anonymous like the Space Marine from DOOM. Anyway, the situation you find yourself in bears a close similarity to DOOM‘s: an entity code-named “Quake” (TITLE REFERENCE) hacked the fuck out of the experimental Slipgate and used it to flood your world with nightmarish horror and death. In the grand tradition of brave but questionable decisions, you decide the best way to burn a few hours is to charge recklessly into the abyss.

During your journey through overrun military bases, hellish lavascapes, and Lovecraftian vistas, you’ll meet all kinds of new friends. There’s mostly “re-programmed” soldiers and dogs at first, and a new player might get to thinking this shit’s kinda tame… until you run into your first chainsaw ogre.

There’s also the Shambler. He’s probably my favorite, because he’s a gigantic eyeless ape that gallops after you Gunnar Hansen style and slaps you with electricity so hard your goddamn point-of-view shakes. Like most of the game’s monsters, if you don’t tread carefully around the Shambler, you’re fucked.

We’ve got gear to deal with these bloodsoaked, screeching assholes, though. Ranger had the good sense to bring a shotgun with him, and he even showed a little artistic flair by choosing a short double-bitted axe as a backup. After a while, these toys don’t cut the mustard, so it’s a good thing you find new toys all over the place. Who doesn’t enjoy the ponk-ponk-ponk a weaponized nailgun, or the sheer sporting joy of bouncing a few grenades out of your launcher into a room of unsuspecting restless dead?

Back on that soundwork by Trent Reznor for a second: While a lot of the OST is minimalist, it’s hauntingly effective. The main theme is really something else, though, evoking images of darkness, rust, throbbing pain, and grit. It almost makes me think of what Coil would sound like if they were a little less “experimental” and way more aggressive.

Quake isn’t all just murder and pants-pissing fear. There’s a handful of thinkin’ man’s challenges throughout the game, and even the bosses at the end of each episode require a bit of brainwork to defeat. Even now, 22 years later, I still like to jump into the Slipgate now and then. The only difference is, I use a source port or client (much like I do when it’s time to blaze up some DOOM or Heretic). There are several decent ones being maintained by diehard fans, but the one I use is GLQuake. I feel like it offers the most authentic single-player experience. Others, like Zquake or fodQuake, lean more toward facilitating network play, which was so astounding in the vanilla product that it ended up being the direction the Quake franchise went.

It goes without saying that Quake was hugely successful, not to mention the tremendous impact it had on the gaming world. It was the phenomenon that ushered in the dawn of “modern” FPS games, and subsequent efforts by other developers were aimed at meeting or exceeding Quake‘s standard. Two aftermarket expansions were released for Quake in 1997; Hipnotic Interactive’s Mission Pack No. 1 featured three new episodes, and was followed within a month by a second mission pack by Rogue Entertainment that added two more episodes to Ranger’s gore-drenched saga. No less than five sequels were spawned from the red wreckage; even now, Queakeaholics await the 2018 release of Quake Champions, id’s latest entry into the series.

I examined this game inside and out via the clarity of hindsight, and still can find no significant fault with it. Like the id Software titles that preceded it, Quake is a big bad daddy. It was a shot of heavy adrenaline in the arm of PC gaming, shotgunning the FPS and the concept of multiplayer to new heights. It also finished what things like Virtua Fighter and the PS1 started; it held its gib-covered banner high and roared out loud that a new age was upon us. If I don’t give Quake 9/10, then someone should probably come euthanize me.

Believe it or not, at the time of this writing, we are seeing the eighth generation of home video game consoles. It has been that long.

We’ve seen and experienced a plethora of amazing concepts, innovative ideas, and ultimately spent millions (maybe billions?) of dollars as a civilization on this particular hobby, video gaming. From the early days of the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision, to the glory days of the 8 and 16 bit hit parade, to the transition from cartridge to disc to download… one could say that video games represent their own wonderland for the human spirit.

Even wonderlands have graveyards.

Some of these ideas just didn’t catch on. Be it a glutted market, poor execution of a concept, or even an idea too far ahead of its time, a few consoles have fallen by the wayside, trampled underfoot in the war-march of the gaming industry. The real heartbreak lies in the fact that some of these concepts were even good. However, it can be argued, they were simply not good enough. After all, the market is brutal, and not every idea sticks. Today I will talk about one of the notable losers, one of the ideas that you probably saw… but not for long. Today I bring you…

Generation: 5th

Year Released: 1993

Discontinued: 1996

In the early 90s, things were changing significantly in the home video game world. Companies like Sega and Sony were developing consoles that ran games from a CD-ROM interface, instead of clunky and easily-dirtied cartridges that had limited data storage potential. Sony’s future powerhouse, the Playstation, hadn’t been released yet, but the buzz was everywhere. What had been released was Sega’s CD attachment for its existing Genesis console, and it had gone over very well despite a high price point and an initially limited game library (which quickly grew).

Atari knew it had to cash in! Atari felt it COULD cash in. After all, hadn’t they been the arcade dynamos of the early 80s? Surely there was a place for them among the new stars of this bright era. There had to be. They began R&D on two systems: the never-to-be 32 bit “Panther,” and the 64-bit Jaguar. Both of these projects were farmed out to a company called Flare, which had originally worked on a home arcade system called the Konix Multisystem. Flare had bailed on the Multisystem due to what could be called an overreach; they were shooting to replicate the arcade experience at home… in the early 90s… with an eye on price. Needless to say, with a floppy-disk system and limited RAM, the Multisystem did not take off.

Why Atari saw Flare as a sure winner despite this baffles me.

Sleek. Stylish. Sophisticated. An utter flop.

In their first brilliant move, Flare and Atari decided to go with cartridges. Knowing that their competitors were moving to CDs and doing quite well at it, they decided to try and pack more into a ROM-style cartridge. The controller design is also questionable; I liken it more to a TI-83 calculator than a joystick.

Does this mean I can use it to call Atari’s complaints department?

The system was released in November ’93, and had sold only around 100,000 units by the end of 1994. With only 67 total games in its library, the Jaguar’s selection of games was tiny throughout its first (and formative) years. Flaws in the CPU and UART components of the console contributed to this, as well as third-party developers’ unwillingness to take a risk on making games for a system already doing so poorly on the market.

The system’s belated CD attachment was kind of like putting a truck cap on an El Camino. It also did little to expand the Jaguar’s piss-poor game library.

Despite later attempts to save its flagging sales, which included a CD attachment and even an earnest try at VR technology, the Jaguar never really caught up with the emerging competition. Once the PS1 was released in 1995, sales took an even greater nose dive. In late 1995, Atari even tried infomercials to boost sales. In mid 1996, the Jaguar was laid to rest… and Atari was on the skids too.

It did have a killer BIOS screen though. I like to imagine that Tony Montana would see just this part alone and buy like 20 of them. One for every room in his coke mansion.

There were (and are) some high notes to the console’s ill fated tale. Firstly, its most successful title, Alien vs. Predator, was a notable success. A memorable and underrated entry to the FPS genre, it was an early example of diversity in that category, offering multiple characters for play. It also boasted an incredibly atmospheric setting, both audio- and video-wise.

Another high point would be Tempest 2000, a remake of the 1981 arcade title. This game was originally exclusive to the Jaguar, but was ported once sales began to truly dip. It is widely praised for its soundtrack, and is exhilarating to play even now.

It should also be noted that the Jaguar received ports of two of my favorite games: Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Both received good reviews on the Jaguar.

The system still maintains a cult following. Hasbro bought Atari in the late 90s, and released the rights to the Jaguar. It is officially an open platform, and interested third parties can develop whatever they like for it. Some of the results can be seen (and grabbed) here.

I’m going to cover this one back up and let it rest in peace, but I’ll see you soon for another edition of Console Graveyard. Thanks for reading!

Arrogance? Wishful thinking? I’d say six of one, half a dozen of the other. Until next time, RetroManiacs!

]]> https://newretrowave.com/2016/03/16/ljph454ovaoyrkcyl6gvru2tbo7k91/feed/ 0 https://newretrowave.com/2014/12/09/2014129md-geist-md-geist-2-the-death-force-1986-1996/ https://newretrowave.com/2014/12/09/2014129md-geist-md-geist-2-the-death-force-1986-1996/#respond Tue, 09 Dec 2014 21:44:43 +0000 http://new-retro-wave.com/2014/12/09/2014129md-geist-md-geist-2-the-death-force-1986-1996/ Today and ALL December on New Retro Wave, our retro movie of the month will be a Christmas double-feature

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            PROLOGUE: Contrary to popular belief, I like people. I really do… although increasingly bored by them. Look at the new Star Wars teaser [yes teaser not trailer] 88seconds of tease and the whole hen house has gone crazy; between people theorizing what they’ve seen, crying like jagoffs, or complaining about the new Sith lightsaber, saying things like “But it looks stupid!”, you know what’s dumb? – A friggin lightsaber. 

All things have fallen victim to the meme or the trend and displayed like a naked babe on threads. But let’s not get excited now and switch gears. It’s bad enough the NFL is now trying to be socially relevant with a partial roster of felons under contract. But I digress, let’s talk about anime. 

Anime was once the coolest thing to be into. You hunted it and you knew everything about it. Dark and dingy specialty shops where they had stacks of tapes with nothing to distinguish them apart, other than the strip on the side with foreign writing. They were real movies with mature subjects with action sequences that were damn near impossible to do in live action with the practical effects of yesteryear. You wanted Science fiction, Horror, Drama, Romance; well it was all there and often wrapped up into the same feature. Fast forward to today and the anime you get is full of cat ears, screeching music and a dumb down pandering to an audience that never expects much. However, there are exceptions in the modern age like Terror in Resonance, Death Note, MONSTER, Attack on Titan, the Ghost in the Shell franchise and some others but the soft stuff is running more rampant in the present.

            Today and ALL December on New Retro Wave, our retro movie of the month will be a Christmas double-feature. Yes, two retro films in 31 days. This month we are showcasing M.D. Geist, the nihilistic and dark depiction of our future that, who knows, could happen.

 

            MD-GEIST or MD-02 is a most dangerous soldier genetically engineered to be a killing machine and one of the units to go completely bat shit crazy. The government in an attempt to stop the carnage decides to freeze Geist in some sort of suspended animation (like Solo!) and lock him in a stasis pod orbiting around the earth. Yes, even in anime the government is stupid. They could’ve just destroyed him but, “Nooo, we’ll just keep them in the freezer till we need them again. What’s the worst that could happen?” Well MD-O2’s pod has just crashed landed on the planet and MD is awake in a new world in the midst of a new war. He takes up an uneasy alliance with a ragtag group of soldiers desperate to stop the Deathforce from activating destroying civilization and all organic life as we know it.

            I chose this film because for this holly-jolly Christmas I am completely over the illusion of civility that has gone well past the viral phase at this point. If it isn’t one social cause it’s another, if it isn’t one thing to be saved it’s something else. Meanwhile people are still arrogant neophytes; know it all’s and do nothings. Most of these angry and outraged people online have sense like Ted Striker has a drink. So here it is; here is a film and its sequel that throws all that into a wood chipper and stomps on it. Here is MD-GEIST and MD-GEIST 2 the Deathforce. Written by Rinju Sanjo and released in 1989 and 1996.

            Both movies are below, so just hit play and watch them back to back.  This Sam Haine saying, “Lock and Load and keep your finger firmly on the rewind button.”

 

– Sam HaiNe
 

This article is written by SamHaiNe

SamHaiNe is a writer, poet, troubadour and raconteur. The author of two spoken word albums as well producer. He is often seen performing in Philadelphia, PA, the surrounding Tri-state area, and the Southern United States. His writings and creativity often blur the lines between pulp, noir, splatter punk, gallows humor, black comedy and the Grand Guignol. He has released previous material under the pseudonym O-Ren Ishi. Currently at work on a new album and book centering on his new brainchild, Hainesville.
www.facebook.com/allhailming
www.reverbnation.com/allhailming
www.samhaine.bandcamp.com

 

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