Repressed homoeroticism in R-Type

[PC Engine Fan X!]

After looking at some of H.R. Giger's conceptual artwork for the first Alien movie, some of his works does corporate phallic and vagina imagery with his unique alien designs. In the artworld, anything goes...it's up to the artist to make his or her ideas become a reality on whatever medium they decide to apply their artistic creativity/expertise to. If you watch in the fourth Alien Resurrection film, there is a scene with the cloned Lt. Ripley having some "one-on-one" time with an Alien creature and seems that she does enjoy it. But then again, this clone Ripley has both human and alien genetic material on the cellular level making her a hybrid human/alien creature to begin with. The mysterious and all-powerful Anglo-Japanese joint-effort conglomerate "Weyland-Yutani" Company should have not messed around with trying to create the Aliens for their own bio-weapons division but they learned too late. ^_~

Or you could say that some certain scenes in the Species films had H.R. Giger's alien designs used in erotic ways. It is all up to the director and conceptual artist to see what they think is appropiate for the respected medium being used. The Alien train engine featured in the first Species film "dream sequence", Giger wanted it portrayed somehow in the earlier Alien films but that was never to be until the Species film project came along. He was quite pleased with the way how things turned out with it in the end. ^_~

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[FIL]

Academic writing on videogames...

The current problem is that 'academic' writing on videogames is almost exclusively written by non-academics with a thesaurus up their butt.

[MadScientist]

Seems like it was written as a joke to me. I doubt it's meant to be taken seriously.

[myname1z4xl]

What bugs me about this article is that R-Type never seemed repressed or homoerotic. There's a long history of sexuality in science fiction horror, stemming from the works of H.R. Giger, that isn't really repressed at all. And there's nothing specifically homosexual about the game; there's lots of opportunity to jam your force in the the enemy's 'womb'. So while yes, there's a 'erotic' aspect to the game, used to unsettle and enforce the horror-in-space theme, but the article as a whole still feels pretentious and a stretch of someone's repressed homosexual imagination.

I think we need to tell that guy, sex-symbolism existed long before written history.

[Specineff]

/pretty much agreeing with everyone's comments - the writer is probably wants to be a twit.

Fixed.

Also, facepalm x10 to the Nights "Dream Analysis."

They're freaking games, there are no pretentious Xenosaga-style underlying meanings, sheesh.

[ChurchOfSolipsism]

Academic writing on videogames...

The current problem is that 'academic' writing on videogames is almost exclusively written by non-academics with a thesaurus up their butt.

Not to disagree with you, but in the discussed case I'm pretty sure that the author has attended some Psychoanalysis Bullshit and Literature 101 course at some point in his life.
Strictly speaking, it's not even his fault if he isn't making much sense...

[mr_m0nks]

Why is it that whenever an academic sees something longer than it is wide, immediately assumes everyone subconsciously thinks its a cock?

[Ed Oscuro]

Solipsism hit the nail on the glan, er, penis, shit. Right, correct.

Horrible writing in that blog too. I like to write dry stuff, but dear god, that's just painful. I'd rather read Frederic Jameson because at least he makes tangential references to reality (and also tries to entertain you with interesting word choices...this is both dry and emotionless, completely soulless).

No mention of X-Multiply, where you're literally (if I understand this right) inside a female body? Irem people obviously were having fun with sexual imagery (I don't really see anything in Dragon Breed, aside from the name and the name of the first musical minimatic theme, "Born;" course I haven't seen all the bosses), but it about ends there.

It's totally inappropriate IMO to talk about R-Type Delta as "support" for a Frankenstein's Monster dissertation because that was another case of fucking up a good thing with a storyline. Unless the original people were behind it (and didn't they go to Nazca corporation?) it doesn't reflect the authorial intent (which was more centered on making a good "ugly" arcade vidya game).

Obviously people like to say more than the format of a video game allows, as has been seen in countless non-sequiturs in endings throughout the ages (like Sengoku 1 by SNK), but it only succeeds in provoking an emotion. The format of the old pre-talkie video games actually opposes deeper thought or analysis, since there's little material to begin with. Any "dialogue" on art in older video games is confounded since these old games are necessarily slapstick and not much more.

Nobody even mentioned Gynoug...for shame.

[Master O]

http://www.gamecabaret.com/2008/02/repr ... -type.html

The author of that article should do an analysis of Parodius, too. The theme of it should be about penguino-eroticism and how it plays into socio-political elements of 1990s Japan.

... or how about Darius, with the makers' obsession with fish eroticism?

[/sarcasm]

[Xonatron]

Wow, is this something we missed while making Duality ZF? lol

[E. Randy Dupre]

They're freaking games, there are no pretentious Xenosaga-style underlying meanings, sheesh.

Actually, there are. R-Type Final's absolutely packed with visual metaphors. Just because a lot of the so-called 'academic' writing on games is bollocks, doesn't mean that there's nothing there - it's just that an awful lot of the people who engage in it don't have the necessary vocabulary and aren't capable of constructing intelligent, original analyses of the games they're writing about, instead going for the blatantly obvious or making shit up on the spot (alarm bells should start ringing in this particular example when the author tries to claim that 'Arrowhead' means 'dick').

[monkeyman]

For me the alarm bells sounded when he assumed the joystick interface for the arcade machine was:

a - relevant specifically to R-Type

b - some sort of tool for controlling subconsious sexual impulse and not a tool for controlling the ship

I was looking forward to getting to the puchline as I read on but alas it never came.

There are a lot of sane and intelligent psychologists out there who make relevant and important discoveries about human behaviour, but seriously, the more I look at his work, the more I realise that Freud was just some crackpot sexual deviant who assumed that the rest of the world shared the same crazy assed worldview as him, and if you said you didn't then you were just in denial!

Now if someone can pyscho-analyse me a route through level 6 without me dying every 3 seconds then I'll be a much better balanced individual.

[Specineff]

I felt that Delta's final level had more metaphors and references than Final did. On the other hand, two figures doing the not-so nasty in the background speaks lots by itself... probably about the repressions and needs of programmers trying to meet a dangerously-close deadline.

[Mortificator]

It's totally inappropriate IMO to talk about R-Type Delta as "support" for a Frankenstein's Monster dissertation because that was another case of fucking up a good thing with a storyline. Unless the original people were behind it (and didn't they go to Nazca corporation?) it doesn't reflect the authorial intent (which was more centered on making a good "ugly" arcade vidya game).

The stages in the R-Type games have always had a sentence or two of concept behind them (you can read them on the official site, though they existed prior). Delta does the same while providing a nice plot - unfortunately no longer on the webpage - connecting the stages. It handles its story better than any other R-Type.

[Aquas]

(ya don't see the word spermatozoa much these days)

Funny article, despite many of the points falling flat. Hey, now I want to play R-Type so I can experience the forced tension of scrolling into a vagina stage, and ultimately face my homoerotic Id in an epic boss battle of warring dicks.

[JBC]

I couldn't resist

"I agree with this article as R-Type was the game that actually helped me discover my own repressed homosexual desires.

It all started one night when I was a freshman and my mom dropped me off at the mall with a roll of quarters. I kept them in one of those purple velvet Crown Royal bags the brand is famous for. I remember now that I used to want to rub my genitals with it. "Is that a roll of quarters in your pocket?" the ladies would have asked and I'd reply, "No. That's a massive boner I got from playing R-Type and thinking about men". lol, okay I made that up but the rest is true.

Anyway, I had gotten pretty good at the game through all those nights of playing at the Blazing Flippers (that was the name of our mall arcade) and was planning on beating it that night. I had reached the Gomander, boss of the second stage. Sometimes people refer to it as the 'Cyst' but I myself like to picture it as a giant throbbing cow heart. I realize that the stage design is supposed to make a person feel something like revulsion but I guess I had gotten used to the 'gore', if you would call it that. It just made me think of people's insides. I couldn't help but wonder how nice the little crab guys on your way up to the boss would feel crawling their way out of my urethra.

Somewhere along the lines of me reaching the boss and engaging it in combat I had unconsciously recognized the phallic imagery being offered to me in the form of the spiraling worm creature. This had excited me and I began to wave to and fro so as to stroke my proboscis with the velvet quarter bag through the hole in the pocket of my jeans. I would purposefully go commando to arcades because I liked the way my sweat felt against the material, the way it's temperature would rapidly fluctuate with my movements.

Upon the worm creature's first insertion into the upper leftmost ventricle and resulting quiver animation I felt a chill down the girth of my meat. The movements of my R9 paralleled the dodging of the feelings I had inside, almost like a beautiful but horrific dance. I tried to fight them as I blasted away at the Cyst but could contain myself no longer. As my R9 exploded, so did I. Then there was a moment of bliss and beautiful silence as the arcade machines' noise droned out in my muffled eardrums. When I awoke from the hysteria I realized that my penis was inserted into the 2 player slot, having pounded the red tab face into the depths of the machine.

The manager of the establishment was furious, the patrons were hiding their elation. I jovially shrugged off the embarrassment and proceeded to blow everybody with newfound comfort in my sexuality."

[null1024]

"I jovially shrugged off the embarrassment and proceeded to blow everybody with newfound comfort in my sexuality."

Mmmkay, was waiting for the punchline, that comment poster is awesome.

Seriously, either there's no way the author of that article was serious, or I have way too much faith in people to not be this stupid.

[BPzeBanshee]

This reminds me of the "Compression and Funneling" article that TrevHead posted at Development: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=36593

Only problem is, this has absolutely no value for Development at all, unlike the former.