Poetry's First Pop Group

Someone suggested I watch this video from back in 1998, of 'poetry's first pop group', Atomic Lip. In the aftermath, I find myself uncharacteristically lost for words. Wow. Just wow. Actually spectacular. Anyone starting out in performance poetry could learn a huge amount from this video. Just study the choreography, their various delivery techniques, and the content, then do the exact inverse.

Games With Stupid Names - #4: Hatris

Since today marks the 25th birthday of Tetris, I thought meh, why not, I'll chuck in a 'bonus' post. There have been many variants of Tetris over the quarter century since it first appeared, but none quite achieve the status of 'Hatris'.

Yes. It's Tetris but with hats. WACKY.

Playing Hatris is like waking to discover that, during the night, a tramp who subsists entirely on Buckfast and vindaloo has emptied his rotten bowels all over your chest and face, like some aggressively generous poo Santa. Stack five hats and they disappear! Look! The heads vaguely resemble Elvis! That's it! That's the entire game! Just be thankful you can't hear the sour, brain-rotting six-second loop that constitutes the only in-game music.

Fill up the word 'SALE' by stacking enough hats and you get to remove one type of hat from the board. And look! The Elvises have turned into vague Regan simulacra! Aha! Aha ha ha! Brilliant! I must play on to see the next row of crudely rendered celebrity faces! Or open my wrists lengthways! One of the two, definitely!

So yeah, before you get too dewy-eyed about Tetris' glorious legacy, take a moment to remember Hatris, and consider if we wouldn't all be better off if Alexey Pajitnov had been relocated to Siberia for some hard labour.

Games With Stupid Names - #3: Cotton Boomerang

Cotton Boomerang (full title Cotton Boomerang: Magical Night Realms) is a side-scrolling shooter that takes the hypercolour cutesy aesthetics of games like Pop n' Twinbee and Parodius, dials back on the self-consciously wacky elements, adds a touch of R-Type, then finishes with smatterings of that deliciously cultish shoot-em-up sub-genre, 'bullet hell', to create a game that's big, brazen, and really rather good.

I realise that most readers of my blog will be going WHAT THE CRAP TIM at this point, because I'm talking entirely in video game references and most of you are artsy types whose shoot-em-up knowledge starts and ends with the ironic Space Invaders t-shirt you sometimes wear at festivals, so look, even though you feel horribly alienated and you've probably already stopped reading by this stage, just for you here's a (very) brief bluffer's guide to shoot 'em ups. Who knows, one day (in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances) it might just save your life.

So it starts with Space Invaders in 1978, your little ship tucked behind destroyable bunkers, shooting up at gradually descending aliens.

1979 saw vector-graphics based Asteroids, where your little triangular ship can rotate through 360 degrees and fly around the screen with the thrust button. Your job is shoot at the asteroids, breaking them into ever smaller chunks until they disappear, without colliding with them. Pew pew pew! Later shoot 'em ups in the 'fly in any direction' sub-genre include Sinistar, Time Pilot, Blasteroids and Geometry Wars.

Vertically-scrolling shooters like Twinbee built on the single-screen format of Space Invaders and saw you taking the battle to your enemies.

1942 is another classic vertical-scroller, replete with power-ups and ridiculously huge planes which you must nail with a hail of gunfire.

The granddaddy of the side-scrolling shoot 'em up is Williams' Defender, a peach of a title where you nim about in your little spaceship trying to stop aliens snatching humans off the planet and using them to transform into super-fast mutants. The game is impressively elaborate, with a range of enemies, a 'scanner' display up the top of the screen that shows you where your enemies are, smart bombs, and a 'warp' button that gives you a last-resort escape hatch when under fire. Games like Scramble foreshadowed the more straightfoward left-to-right shooter, the main difference being that Scramble is absolute unremitting shite.

Sega's Choplifter is one of the more successful attempts to create an earthbound variant, pitting you against a plethora of anti-aircraft turrets and fighter jets as you attempt to bust hostages out of their holding cells and fly them back across enemy lines to safety.

The R-Type series is one of the most fondly-remembered instances of the side-scrolling shooter, boasting many features that have now become staples of the genre. By holding down the fire button, you can charge your laser, allowing the player to choose between rapid fire or big, surging blue blasts of energy. Multi-directional lasers that can ricochet off walls and air-to-ground missiles add to the havoc, as do the gigantic fearsome bosses that wait at the end of each stage.

In lots of ways, the shoot 'em up in most of its classic formats is something of a forgotten relic, but one of the most modern iterations is the 'bullet hell' sub-genre. It took a while for hardware to reach the stage where it could cope with calculating and updating the exact position and velocity of pillions of different-sized projectiles, but once it could, a hardcore of shoot 'em up junkies found themselves drawn to games where colossal, multi-part bosses spew volley upon volley of burning death, leaving you tiny wedges of screen to hide in while you fire back with everything you've got. The game above is Raiden Fighters Jet, a late iteration of the popular Raiden series. Bullet hell isn't for everyone. It's kind of like grindcore - it's evolved to scratch a very particular itch, to the extent that the genre and its select audience exist in an almost symbiotic relationship. You have to be committed to take on bullet hell. This is the real shit, yeah?

So yeah, Cotton Boomerang. Remember that? When you start out, you get to select a team of three characters from a choice of eight possible shot-patterns. Once you're in-game, you can switch a limited number of times (you can replenish your 'switches' with power-ups) and, if you get hit, that character drops out and the next in line takes over.

Cotton Boomerang synthesises the cutesy monkey business of Twinbee with the robust power-up spread of R-Type and Raiden's merciless spray of deadly ordnance. As either a witch on a broomstick, a fairy, and some kind of sentient witch's hat presumably employed as comic relief, you battle legions of magical fiends and nasty beasts. As with R-Type, you can charge your shots - a full-power blast unleashes some kind of etheric dragon which blasts through foes and traps them in spheres, Bubble Bobble style. You can then catch these spheres, and fling them across the screen into other bad guys, who will in turn be captured, and so on and so forth. Like the 'option' unit in R-Type, these spheres absorb most bullets, cutting a useful swathe through enemy fire and offering you some much-needed breathing space.

Like most bullet hell shooters, Cotton Boomerang is all about the boss battles, which are everything you'd expect them to be - creative, spectacular, and brutally unforgiving. At first, you'll just get nailed repeatedly as the boss ejects seemingly unavoidable walls of projectiles. If you persist, however, you soon discover ways to take cover or blast through, and resulting in some near-knuckle evasive maneuvers and a lovely jolt of adrenaline.

Cotton Boomerang's biggest failing is the intermittent doses of cheesy anime fanservice. I don't need to see some bikini-clad sprite wapping out an implausible rack and vast acreage of thigh at the end of every level, thank you very much. I'm no prude, I just think porn should be porn, you know? This sort of embarrassing halfway house stuff just feels awkward and chauvanistic.

So yeah, in summary, Cotton Boomerang is a game with a silly, effete name that carries a technicoloured sledgehammer. Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

Games With Stupid Names - #2: Appoooh

Appoooh is an early attempt by Sega to capture the excitment and sweaty, balletic majesty of pro-wrestling, without actually forking out for the rights to the WWF franchise. This 1984 button mashathon sees you limp and jerk around the ring, punching, kicking and grappling your opponent into a stupor before going for that all-important pin.

The 'action', such as it is, can even go outside the ring:

When you start out, you're offered a selection of wrestlers including the rather cheekily named 'H. Hogen' and the similarly copyright-skirting 'A. Giants'. With moves such as the 'Body Slum' and 'Neck Hanging' at his disposal, this Mr Giants fellow sounded like my kind of beefcake, so he was the lucky brawler I chose to take me into my first bout.

Now I know here that A. Giants [left] looks, if anything, like Rowlf the Dog from the Muppets, which might lead you to question his chances of success, until you notice that his first opponent is David Crosby.

Sure, side by side two of America's best-loved musicians look pretty evenly matched. But once you step into the ring...

A. Giants reveals his secret weapon. GROTESQUELY ELONGATED ARMS. Seriously. He makes an orangutan look like a thalidomide baby. We're talking serious Mr Tickle shit here.

The combined power of freakish monkey arms and the devastating body slum made short work of Crosby, who sloped off to seek solace with the other members of his increasingly uncool supergroup. Like a lot of beat em up games of this era, you can only attack people to your immediate left or right, meaning skilled fighters stand slightly above their opponent, before moving down at the last moment to attack. You've got two attack buttons at your disposal, punch and kick. Pressing forward and kick together makes your wrestler do a dropkick. By pressing forward and punch, you lock your foe in a grapple. Then it's just a case of bashing the buttons fast enough to win, so you can hurl them into the ropes or pile driver them.

Having won my first bout at a canter, I was getting a bit cocky. I have huge bemuscled arms and the face of a dog, I thought, who on this planet can challenge me?

WHAT THE FUCK.

Sigh. A wrestler with not just long arms, but super-long legs. Yes, this spaghetti-limbed gangle-molester made short work of poor stubby-legged A. Giants. I staged a brief, promising comeback, keeping him at bay with well-timed dropkicks, but once he had me in a grapple it was curtains. Headlocks, elbow drops, all sorts of monkey business. I left, humiliated, my head swirling with the image of a tortoise on its back, helplessly pedalling its useless limbs while an ostrich pecks at its exposed belly.

Oh. The game's rubbish, by the way. I have no idea why it's called 'Appoooh', except that, possibly, it is one. Aha. Ahahahahaha!

Games With Stupid Names - #1: Tinkle Pit

Tinkle Pit is the kind of hyper-cutesy epic bananas-ness that peaked in video gaming around the late 80s and early 90s. For the most part Taito had this market all sewn up, with the Bubble Bobble franchise, New Zealand Story, Don Doko Don, Rodland and Liquid Kids amongst others. Namco clearly decided they could go one better.

Tinkle Pit is laden with aggressively pointless, incomprehensible shit swirling round reefs of heavy-handed Namco cameos. Cribbing heavily from Universal's Mr Do series (especially Do! Run Run), the game sees you lugging a giant sentient jingly bell around a maze full of enemies. Holding down a button pays out the rope the bell is attached to. As you walk around, this trail of rope grows longer and longer, until you release the button and - ping! - the bell goes shooting along the trail you've left until it returns to your side. Any enemies it hits along the way get killed.

The sub-genre of 'games with elaborate and idiotic ways to kill enemies' is replete with this kind of asinine Heath Robinson muppetry. Dig Dug started it all off, making you inflate foes with a bike pump (the Fygars and Pookas from Dig Dug appear in Tinkle Pit too, as if Namco are desperate to batter us over the head with reminders that they make good games too), then there was Snow Bros, where you had to bury enemies in snow until they became a huge snowball, before kicking it into the other baddies. Tumble Pop made you suck multiple bad guys into a vacuum cleaner before firing them back out as a big, tumbling ball of limbs.

Tinkle Pit is crappy. It starts off ludicrously, insultingly easy, so that on a first go it's possible to get past the first two worlds without losing a life. Somewhere around the middle, the difficulty jumps from 'simple' to 'frustrating'. Levels suddenly become packed with baddies, and robots are introduced that fire deadly lasers that can pass through walls and travel the length of the screen. Even less forgivable, there are only two boss battles in the entire game - the majority of it is taken up schlepping round saccharine giga-nippon labyrinths, waiting for foes to blunder into the path of your massive, jangling bell. Ha.

Booktrust Interview

Oh sheesh y'all, if you have a sixty second window in your schedule lolling open and unsightly like some ageing schnauzer's slobber-rimmed gob then why not cram a tasty shin bone in there - metaphorically, bien sûr - by reading my short interview on the Booktrust website. I drop so much knowledge it's like I'm some kind of klutzy bookseller trying to rearrange the encyclopedia window display - WHICH IS TO SAY I DROP A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF KNOWLEDGE.

Penzance, May 28th

So I caught the train down to Penzance, my nose all runny from hayfever and my shirt sticking to my back in the heat. As you get close, the track is bordered by lots of verdant spiky bushes and trees that look like they belong in Malta or, y'know, somewhere rather hot and exotic.

When I arrived I realised I needed somewhere to stay, so I rang around some guesthouses. All of them said they were booked up for the week, until eventually one chap said that yes, he had one room left. I asked him where the B&B was. It turned out it was behind me, about 30 seconds away. When I met him, I found myself being extra smiley and polite, and I realised that it was because I felt a bit weird about being a young man booking himself into a B&B all on his own, down here on the edge of the country, apparently without having planned it in advance. I think I was worried he might think I'd come down to Cornwall to commit suicide, and they'd find my shoes neatly side-by-side at the end of the quay. (did you know that people who commit suicide by jumping off things tend to take their shoes off? It's one of the early warning signs bridge attendants are supposed to look out for)

The man running the B&B was very helpful, and recommended a couple of good seafood restaurants, before giving me directions to the road I thought the Arts Club was on. On my way to the night, I heard shouting echoes from amongst the thick stone pillars of the church. A guy with splayed, bird's nest hair around a sunburnt bald pate was propped on one elbow, talking loudly to a teenage boy slugging on a can of Stella. The man had a bedroll and rucksack next to him. He made an expansive gesture to illustrate some garbled, recondite assertion and an almost empty litre bottle of Teacher's whiskey went clattering down the steps, each bounce ringing and echoing across the street.

I'd sent an email to check that the night was definitely on before I left Cambridge, and had received a simple 'Yes! Still on!' from someone who, as it transpired, never showed up to the venue. I asked a short man wearing little wire frame spectacles if he knew where the Arts Centre was.

'I think you mean the Arts Club,' he said. 'Follow the street down and it's the yellow door on the left.'

I waited for an hour inside the Arts Club. There was no mic, and no performance space. The two rooms were decorated with the motley abandon of some fruity widow revelling in her newfound freedom after her stuffy husband's long overdue death - albeit with a fully-functioning bar installed at one end. Actually, no - that's exactly the sort of very cool extravagance a fruity widow would splash out on.

When it reached the time for the evening to start, there were three people aside from me; two of whom were down in Penzance by chance and had decided to pop down to the Arts Club to see what it was like. The person supposed to be running the night had not turned up. There was a sort of nervous murmur as to whether anything would happen at all.

In the end, it turned out to be one of my favourite open mics I've been to so far. I'm not going to explain everything that happened here, but I met some fascinating people and really felt quite privileged to have stumbled across such an odd little coming together of people of all sorts of ages, to talk and listen and share.

I'm starting to collect all my photos and recordings and notes and memories together now, and I'm battling Dr Procrasto for the opportunity to sit down and start synthesising them into the beginnings of a story. My journey is far from over, but I really do feel like the nights I've visited and the people I've met are beginning to change me. The only question is whether I can convey that on a page, and make someone else feel 'wow!', or whether they feel so precious precisely because, as the saying goes: 'I guess you had to be there.'