Dystopian Sports Movies: Rollerball --> Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe

When this movie (Rollerball) first came out in 1976, Deathrace 2000 was just released, and was critically panned for its graphic nudity, violence, and killing of pedestrians and/or presidents of the united states. David Carradine was going to kill the president with a grenade in his prosthetic hand, which he calls a "hand grenade" on several occasions.

Rollerball is very much like the short story "Rollerball Murder". Corporations own sports organizations and change the rules to make ratings, even if that means killing off other players. This would be the only outcome that would make me watch sports on TV, people getting killed, greedy corporations selling out.

My perfect team would be called The Robokillers, and all my players would be cybernetically enhanced. The coach of our team would be Paul Verhoven, director of the Robocop movies and Starship Troopers. I would have female teammates with loose chainmail clothing fight other females of the opposing teams. With Paul telling everyone what to do, I'm sure he will make sure my team would have tons of unnecessary breasts and violence, like the movie Flesh + Blood.

I first played Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe on Sega Genesis. When i was 12 years old, my father got remarried, and he did not require me to go back to school right away. I had several weeks in a big empty house (river-front mansion is more appropriate) by myself while my parents were at work. I played tons of Sega Gensis and Super NES in this time period, and i had not met any friends yet. That month my dad bought me Secret of Mana for SNES, and Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe for Genesis. At first i never touched Speedball. I opened it, put it in and had no understanding what i was to do at all. I fell hard into Secret of Mana and really never looks back. I wrote Speedball off a pile, and a bad purchase.

I met Mike Hilliard through a mutual friend my freshman year of highschool. I made friends fast, and he was getting over a horrendous leg surgery after being plowed by a car. Not being able to participate in sports, biking, or rollerblading, he was my video game buddy. He had all the newest PC games, and introduced me to Rise of the Triad. He saw the game and asked me about it, and i told him Speedball sucked ass.

That night we stayed up until 2am playing. We yelled at each other, fought, threw the controllers at each other, traded players, upgraded and eventually lost the season and the game restarted. We played for days. he invited his friend over, Jeremy Hilton, and he got into the action. We started a little league and more people joined. Pretty soon i realized it was the only game we were playing with no end in sight. Inevitably, my TV took a dump, and it being a huge 36 inch mirror-topped console television, it was irreplaceable. No one wanted to come over and play speedball on a 15 inch TV. My parents had no intentions of letting me hook up my many game systems to the TV in the living room, so i was stuck. Later i got a new 27 inch Panasonic, but it was too late. Our Speedball 2 team was done.

The game was a sleeper hit, tons of games sold over many systems. The game was re released on a staggering 9 different systems with the Amgia version being the top seller. Better sound and graphics with enhanced game play made that the copy to have. The game was remade several times on Playstaion, cell phones and in the arcade.. but it never really was as good as the original.

I Started Playing Subspace/Continuum Again.. Also, a guy named Matt.

I started playing years ago with my first Non-Macintosh computer. I owned Macs from about 1998 and back, so i guess i started playing around then. I bought the CD rom from Babbages at the Mall. Shortly after i bought the CD and started playing a lot, the severs crashed, VIE went under, and i started playing Ultima Online full time.

The first time i had seen the game i was blown away. This may have been 1996.. Decemberish. Up late at Matt Mateka's* house, Matt, otherwise known in gaming circles as "Gamemaster**", and no I'm no kidding, would pretty much ignore us and play his game of the night for a while, it was Diablo. (a long, long while) Gary had met him somewhere, inadvertently, and that's how i started gaming paper-and-dice. (long story) Side note: I later met up with Matt and we started hanging out midnights at Tilt, the arcade at the Edison Mall whose manager let people in after everything was closed to play tournaments, namely, Soul Caliber.

*This part of the article was edited by it's author on 3/27/2011. Matt has been found, i repeat, Matt has been found.*

Anyways. Staying up late watching Matt play the Beta of Subspace, online no less, and free, i was most certainly floored. He had one of the first sub woofer-speaker combos for a PC i have ever seen and the sound was amazing for a Soundblaster 16 card with none of the finer things in life like dynamic reverb and such. He moved after a while and let me have a turn. I shot people with bouncing bombs, repelled others, became someones turret. Generally it was mass chaos. Anyone who had access to the Internet played this game or had memory of someone that did and bragged about it. The people who had Internet and had not heard of this game were too busy chatting on AOL and making free web pages on Geocities.

A couple years later (i think) Subspace was released to wide critical acclaim, and was available on then new, full install CD roms. I bought my copy and it was instantly rendered useless. All the servers were down and i could not play the game i just bought. Meanwhile, there were still copies on the shelves I'm sure they were selling. Player run servers were the only alternative, and they were free. The old games i loved were gone and in its place shitty hacked together maps on unreliable servers. I stopped playing around this time as did many people.

A few people decided many years ago to re-tool the game and call it Continuum. You could not hack this version, servers were reliable and all my old favorite maps were back. Player counts were and are super high. This was a game that is 2D, requires tons of skill, and is simple enough to play on any computer new or old. I was hooked again. I have played on and off since 2003, and lately i have "discovered" the game again. Please give this game a chance. Trust me.

 *I spell Matt's name wrong on purpose, only because i remember him not liking that at all. I really do miss the guy.*
**Matt - gamemaster, antpile    Gary - Droslow, Twiggy       Major - droz, docdroz, Taija, Tinehaut

Death Star VS Borg

Discuss.

(I think the cube would win, seems to me that it can travel fast, which the death star cannot do.)

Conan! What is best in life!?

Tron Jeremy

The Codex Seraphinianus: First Few Pages

If you don't know what the Codex Seraphinianus is, then please click here right the fuck now. For those who hate to click links in fear of trojan horses or virus threats, stop being a pussy. I'll explain:



The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978.^[1] The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing.

Click the pictures below to enlarge. Comment and i'll post some more otherwise I'm not going to bother.

Sorry... but I'm really not at all. Conan says sorry to no one! CROM!

Had to take care of some stuff at home. My son had some medical problems but things seem to be on the up-and-up now so i think i'll meander my way back into posting a few times a week and see how it goes. Miss me?

I have some backlogged posts I'm going to dump today and get caught up. Bear with me.

While i was gone Morgan's posts took the number one spot, so it's my job to take them away. The game is afoot!