Horror AMV of the Day: Bloody Ayase (Oreimo)


BloodyAyase

Here we are once again with the wonderful month of October. This means the place gets an extra dosage of horror in everything we can think of. For my first horror-themed post I shall go with the latest “AMV of the Day” and this time it’s an aptly titled video: “Bloody Ayase”.

This particular AMV takes the cute, romantic comedy series, Oreimo, and subverts it by way of clever editing, song choice and some additions like blood splatters to turn it into an obsessed crush. This video actually does a great job in showing the anime personality type called yandere. It’s the obsessed and mentally unhinged lover or ex-lover who doesn’t want to let go and will kill anyone, even the target of their affection, if it means keeping them away from others.

The only thing this video doesn’t have is a pot of boiling water with a rabbit inside.

Anime: Oreimo

Song: “E.T.” by Katy Perry

Creator: Cheeseharry

Past AMVs of the Day

VGM Entry 03: The crash of ’83


VGM Entry 03: The crash of ’83
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

You may have heard that the video game market crashed in 1983. You may have even heard that this was the consequence of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari, December 1982) being a commercial disaster. I don’t know that anyone is naive enough to actually believe this latter claim, but E.T. certainly tops most lists of “worst” video games ever made because of it. A more accurate explanation is summed upon Wikipedia: “the main cause was supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games which resulted in the loss of consumer confidence.” E.T. was definitely one such low-quality game, but it was one of many.

Yes, the market was flooded, games and systems were being cloned right and left, and everyone was looking to maximize profits by minimizing production costs. The mere existence of such titles as Purina PetCare’s Chase the Chuck Wagon (Spectravision, 1983) should raise an alarm, and nothing surpassed the almighty failure of the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man (Atari, 1982).

Rumor has it Atari released a test version in the early stages of development in order to get the title on the market in time for the holidays, but the game appears to have been released in March. Either way, it was completely unplayable. Atari were so convinced that consumers would purchase it based on the name alone that they produced two million more game cartridges than actual Atari 2600s.

Atari’s deceptive business practices certainly did not win over the hearts and minds of the public, so why didn’t other companies pick up the slack? Well, the truth is they couldn’t. Games like Pac-Man could have been better, but they couldn’t have been much better, because they were constructed with 1977 technology. Atari didn’t deceive the public by blowing off the production of Pac-Man so much as they deceived the public by pretending that the game was even possible on the system. It really wasn’t.

This is the arcade version of Up’n Down (Sega, 1983), to steal an example from Karen Collins. It was pretty standard for its day, and while it has nothing on the likes of Gyruss, it certainly did not contribute to a market collapse. Indeed, if everyone owned a home console with the graphic and audio capacity of 1983 arcade machines instead of the 1977 Atari 2600 there would have likely been no market crash; this is the point which I think a lot of commentaries overlook.

You couldn’t pull off a game like this on the popular home systems of the early 80s. Once ported to the Atari 2600, Up’n Down sounded like something of a sadistic nightmare set to the visual backdrop of a sewage drain. The technical explanation for why the music was so terrible is a bit beyond my grasp, but in plain terms the sound chip was simply not in tune as we commonly think of it. Further complicating the problem, the approximate notes available in any particular octave varied drastically, and the tuning for the North American and European versions were slightly different. Attempting to create good music on the Atari was simply hopeless, and visually, well, you can count for yourself how many pixels developers had to work with.

This wasn’t going to cut it. Nothing in the second generation of video game consoles was. It’s not that home gaming had to keep pace with the arcade, but it still needed to break that threshold of well, being any good. Quality wasn’t a possibility on these older systems, and by 1983 novelty had run its course.

The last interesting point I care to make is that a lot of Atari 2600 games did in fact have continuous music during gameplay. Up’n Down is a prime example. Quite a number of second generation systems–the Atari 2600 (Atari, 1977), Bally Astrocade (Bally Technologies, 1977), Odyssey 2 (Magnavox, 1978), Intellivision (Mattel, 1979)–were theoretically capable of this. If music was guaranteed to sound as bad as Up’n Down, then perhaps no developers bothered to waste their time with it initially, before the arcade made it an expected feature of games. But on the other hand, maybe some developers did, and their games were later lost in the sea of trash that characterized first and second generation game consoles. Was Rally-X in 1980 really the first? I suppose it’s not an important question, but I think the typically unsourced claims to its credit merit scrutiny.

AMV of the Day: Futuristic Lover (Bakemonogatari)


It’s been almost a week since my last “AMV of the Day” entry and it’s time for a new one. My latest pick is short but it’s a really good one. To better tie it with pantsukudasai56 and his last post about how everyone should be watching the anime series Bakemonogatari this video is all about that anime.

It’s interesting how songs from singers and bands I usually wouldn’t be listening to would end up being ideal for making anime music videos (AMV). One such singer is Katy Perry whose songs remain quite popular with AMV creators. I’ve already profiled two AMV’s that uses Katy Perry songs with I Heart Tsundere and Fairy Tail Teenage Dream. This time around it’s a less pop sugary Katy Perry song with “E.T.” being used by creator OkamiRvS for the video “Futuristic Lover”.

The video is barely over an minute in a half and only uses part of the song used, but the overall effect of the video doesn’t suffer from it’s short length. In fact, I have a feeling extending the video to the length of the song’s full playtime would’ve made the AMV not as awesome. I like how even in the video’s short runtime OkamiRvS was still able to convey the supernatural theme of Bakemonogatari not to mention the weird harem-like relationship the series’ protagonist, Araragi, have with the different girls he encounters under some weird circumstances.

Definitely one of my favorite videos of 2011 (even though I only discovered it recently).

Anime: Bakemonogatari

Song: “E.T.” by Katy Perry

Creator: OkamiRvS

Past AMVs of the Day