In the year 2000: The Beatles are back and Barenaked Ladies get their due

 

The first Beatles stuff that I listened to when I was a kid was from my brother's copies of the Red & Blue Albums, so I'm not going to get on any kind of high horse about the value of greatest hits records (in fact, due to the Red Album version of Help!, which includes a piece of the movie's score in the opening, being superior to its regular version, I guess I'm occasionally in favour of them). 

That being said: there really wasn't anything new for me here. I enjoyed the listen, to be sure, but I'll take the brilliant Love album over a standard compilation. What's fun and wild, of course, is that a Beatles greatest hits record became a top-seller in 2000.

In the Great White North, the Barenaked Ladies were nabbing a Juno for Album of the Year with Maroon. It's a fine album, but this may have been a "Sorry we gave so many awards to Celine Dion when you probably deserved one for an earlier album" kind of thing. 

So, what have we got? Pinch Me is a great single. Falling For the First Time is really good, too. Non-single stand-outs are Sell, Sell, Sell and the terrific closing track combo of Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel followed by, praise be, a CD bonus track (I miss them so much) called Hidden Sun. It makes for a tremendous album closer.

What's with Steven Page writing some 75%-ish of the songs on this album, though?

In the year 2000: Survivor takes over TV

Survivor was must-watch TV for my wife and I for the first three seasons; the shine was already lessening by the time our son arrived in 2003, and then we fell off almost completely all the way until South Pacific in 2011. Not long after that we started watching with our son and daughter and it's been a family affair ever since.

There's some real kismet in catching up on the first season, the highest-rated show of the 2000, right now in my project. The tape in the picture above is a full-season recap and behind-the-scenes featurette, found in a thrift shop a couple of years ago and just waiting for its time to come. Also, the 50th season just began, bringing with it all sorts of nostalgia and retrospectives.

The tape, which mostly features player profiles, their auditions, their eliminations, and their final confessionals, lost sound about halfway through - but that's okay, I've been trained to watch TV with closed captioning for years now. 

They actually didn't show a lot of challenge material, but I'm glad they focused on the final challenge of simply not letting go of an idol pole. I always like the simplicity and endurance of that one.

This show is the primary reason we still have satellite TV.

In the year 2000: Virtua Striker 2, Dragon Quest/Warrior VII, Pokémon Gold & Silver, and The Sims

While Virtua Striker 2 holds onto the top spot in arcade gaming (and remains, unfortunately, out of my grasp as far as finding a site for playing it), but I had plenty to occupy my time in getting a start in Dragon Quest VII, known in North America as Dragon Warrior VII, which was the top-selling console game of the year (on the PlayStation).

At this point I think to myself: hold up, does that mean this is a descendent of this NES favourite of mine?

Yup! I didn't know that Dragon Warrior had gone by another name elsewhere in the world, and I'd certainly never kept up with the series to know about its sequels. I did love this game, though.

It was a nice treat to get back into the world as I explored, gave my dad a fish sandwich, spoke to a king, and maybe performed some kind of dark magic with his edgy son? I made it far enough to kick a storyline into motion. The movement (and some character design) felt very Zelda-esque, but the mechanics of the gameplay are somewhat more complex and that's exactly what I remember about the original game.

Also coming back, sort of, is Pokémon with new versions of the game with Gold & Silver. Times have changed from its previous iteration: it's again the number-one handheld game, except this time it's on the original Game Boy and Game Boy Colour. There are new Pokémon to find, battle, and capture, a new region to explore, and a phone interface to call people because, you know ... kids and their phones.

I battled my way around a bit, learned some information from Professors Oak and Elm, and said farewell to my mother ahead of an adventure while also agreeing to let her to manage my money for me. Dang, was this game meant to prepare kids for growing up?

Finally, for the number-one seller on home PCs, I unfortunately (and interestingly) couldn't find a playable version of The Sims and had to again check it out via some gameplay footage.

I never would have imagined that I'd have as much trouble finding ways to play games from the turn of the millennium as I did from the 70s, but I think I can guess why: while it's obvious that I was never going to find a full cabinet version of Wild Gunman from 1974, it also makes sense that, because The Sims is recent and popular enough that it's still for sale as a downloadable game, I can understand why it's not readily available to play for free on retro sites. I'm hoping this doesn't become a routine issue.

I don't recommend watching this entire hour-long video unless you loved this game and are craving nostalgia, but as I skipped around through it I admit that it was entertaining. I would like to get my hands on a playable copy sometime, but for now I was amused by the Civilization-style unintelligible muttering by the characters, the fun interactions you set up as puppet master of the people, and the clever interface of the see-through house.

I've written in previous posts about how wild it is when two properties, like a pair of movies or, in this case, a game and a TV show, can come out at about the same time after months to years of development. I'm talking about Big Brother, of course, which came out only months after this game. Would that have given TV execs enough time to throw together a real-life version of the game, or was it coincidence? No matter which it was, both correctly banked on the interest viewers had in a house of people with see-through walls. 

In the year 2000: Scott's Gladiator is better than I remember, and Howard's Grinch is worse

Trust me, I get the irony here.

Before this project started, I would have been hard-pressed to think of a movie that I was least-looking forward to watching. Now that it's here, though, Ron Howard's version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas should have been an obvious pick.

I disliked this winking, cash-grabbing, reductive, stand-up routine by Jim Carrey when I first watched it on video not long after its release, and time has not been kind to it. At heart is the same problem that should have handcuffed the animated Horton Hears a Who, which is taking a rather perfect short story and stretching it out into a feature film by adding less-than-perfect filler, but I never felt the same drag with Horton. The fact that Carrey is taking the lead in both films means that it wasn't just him that brought The Grinch down. 

Anyway, I don't need to spend too long bemoaning this number-one movie of the year in 2000, except to say that surely there was a better option for people to see. But, this one drew in the families over and over again, I'm sure. Actually, now that I think about it, it's an incredible feat for a movie released in November to grab that top spot.

Like I said up top, I get that I'm being Grinchy about this movie, but it's just not for me.

Gladiator, on its way to winning the Oscar for Best Picture, was a little more up my alley when I first watched it, but I nonetheless found it to be remarkably okay back then. I was much more impressed by it this time.

I remember feeling that the ending was a bit of a letdown in terms of what was promised. I mean, here's Derek Jacobi saying that no army has entered Rome in 100 years, so that sounds pretty cool - and then that plan is immediately squashed. It was a letdown, historical accuracy or not.

I knew even then, of course, that this was one man's story and not really about a siege of Rome, and this time it clicked for me that all of the scheming surrounding Maximus and the efforts to use his skills and name meant little to him; he had his personal mission and was steadfast in chasing it.

Maybe now that I've seen Gladiator II, and relished its over-the-top action scenes, that itch was scratched and I'm now seeing this first one as a comparatively subdued and personal affair.

In the year 2000: Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winner joins the super hero fray

While there's no accounting for the long process of publishing a book or producing the movie, it sure seemed like there was a concerted effort to re-frame comic books and their heroes in 2000. Along with Unbreakable, Spider-Man, X-Men, Mystery Men, and any that I'm forgetting, comic books were pushing for a new age on the big screen, and in the midst of this was Chabon delivering a remarkable re-telling of the golden age of comics with his own hero. I've seen the book described as a historical fiction, but maybe it's more of a historical tribute. 

Chabon introduces Josef Kavalier and Sammy Clay as cousins brought together by circumstance and a shared skill in art. That's more Kavalier's bag as the somewhat reluctant artist, while Sammy is more of the business-minded optimist. I can't help but picture them as Josh and Ivan from Tapeheads. 

Their amazing adventures are all tied up in the world of comics as Superman hits the stands and gives the cousins, along with most everyone else, ideas of how to create their own Man of Steel. They do, with the Escapist, a do-gooder whose skillset is based on Kavalier's dalliances with becoming as escape artist himself. This part is really fun.

That's really just the beginning, however, and though I get the feeling that the subsequent amazing adventures (the outbreak of World War 2, the parting and reconciling of friends and family, and Joe and Sammy growing into themselves as adults) are the elements that pushed this over the edge and into a Pulitzer Prize winner, I just didn't enjoy it as much as the stories from the world of comics. 

1999 in video games: Pokémon stays on top, SimCity launches, Final Fantasy evolves, and I'm a striker, not a fighter

 

Let's start with the number-one arcade game for 1999: Virtua Striker 2. Having recently played Virtua Fighter 2, one of a long string of fighting games that claimed top spot, I presumed that this was some kind of off-shoot of the franchise. Upon my first search, I was surprised to see that it's a soccer game.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for a little change of pace and playing something other than an arcade combat game was deflated as I couldn't find a site to play it. I was bummed and more than a little surprised; I wouldn't have thought that anything from the 90s onwards would be difficult to find online, but I had to settle for watching a video for now. It's crazy how good and smooth this gameplay looks.

Next up: I've always known that Final Fantasy is a big deal but it's just never drawn me in from afar. I was already sufficiently impressed by my introductory gameplay of FFVII, but seeing the big leaps made in Final Fantasy VIII, best-selling console game (for the PlayStation) , has definitely earned a deeper dive into the franchise sometime.

Gone were the cute sprites for characters; we're now into an era in between LucasArts' The Dig and Knight of the Old Republic and it's a cool shift. I can only imagine that this change in style, on top of the cinematic opening, more or less blew people's minds. 

One thing that continually surprised me was how a cutscene would end and I'd just be standing there for a few moments before I realized that there was no transition from the scene to gameplay - it just went continuously from one to the other. 

As with most every game in this project I'm just playing enough to get a sample, but here I even found that took a little time. I wasn't forced along a path as I had been in VII, and my free roaming ways were rewarded to the extent that while I'm sure there was an important mission to begin, I'd just found a hotel and did some shopping, so let me enjoy my life.

I finally did get to a testing ground of some sort where I faced off against a demon-y kind of mini-boss, but I'd made a fateful decision earlier in giving myself only ten minutes to traverse a volcanic pathway and defeat the demon (I could have given myself up to half an hour, I think), and though I was seemingly doing all right ... I ran out of time. A raincheck, then.

In handheld gaming, Pokémon Red/Green continues to rule the roost. I didn't play it along any further this week. 

I did, however, give some time to SimCity, number-one PC game for the year. This is yet another game that is brand new to me (I haven't even ever played any of the spin-off Sims games, but that will be another box checked soon enough). 

It's yet another progression forward in world-building games, though unlike Age of Empires or Civilization, this is much more of a world-management game. I put myself into a scenario in which, as you can see above, I had to help get Frankfurt ready to host a big party. That would be easy enough if, while I was looking for a good venue, fires weren't breaking out in the city, forcing me to figure out how to send out emergency services and putting my party planning on hold. Then, naturally, came riots. It's like these people didn't even want me to throw the party at all.

So I never did. After three riots and a bunch of burning buildings, I figured Frankfurters just had their own ideas of fun so I let them destroy their own cultural history while I built many police stations. 

I quite enjoyed this game.

1999 in movies: Star Wars returns and Spacey reaches his peak

By the time The Phantom Menace finally arrived in theatres to take the crown in the box office for the year (side note: I saw it on May 22, three full days after its premiere, which is better than my track record with Terminator 2, for example, but still surprisingly late), I had so successfully avoided spoilers and news of any kind (another side note: by not, for example, looking at the names of the spoileriffic track titles on the already-released CD soundtrack) I didn't even know who was playing which role. As it happened, then, in a buzzing AMC movie theatre in Oakville, I missed the first time that Qui-Gon Jinn called Obi-Wan by name, so it was almost an hour and a half into the movie before I realized who Ewan McGregor was playing.

This is my first time, out of so many times, watching a blu-ray version of this movie. I'm not actually sure if I've ever seen a blu-ray of any Star Wars movie, but that seems unlikely so I'll guess that I must have. It looks fantastic. 

Unfortunately, after the rush of the opening titles and crawl, it wasn't long until I was a little bored and just waiting for the podrace, which, for the record, I don't find all that exciting either, but seeing as it's basically the whole reason for Lucas to have made the movie at all, he certainly puts his heart into it.

Other than that, it's still the same poorly scripted and directed, stiffly acted, loveable, cherished piece of my life.

Now, conversely, this is only my second time watching American Beauty, which would go on to win the Oscar for Best Picture the following year. The first time that I watched it was on DVD and I remember feeling impressed in the way that one sort of feels like they should be impressed. In truth, I didn't like it all that much, and I liked it less this time around.

What it tries to do is soon to be done much more effectively in Fight Club, and I settled on something that I believe I always felt but couldn't articulate at the time: Lester is a loser. And I don't mean in the context of the movie that he was a loser and then came to life - I mean that he was a loser all the way through. 

Spoilers follow for a nearly thirty-year-old Oscar-winning movie...

I think of him as a loser because one of his big triumphant moments is telling Carolyn off in juvenile fashion in the middle of the night, then tucking himself in with a satisfactory grin on his face like he just delivered a historic burn. He remained a loser while blackmailing his office because he couldn't even dream big - a year's salary (with benefits) was a paltry lowball offer on his part. And, of course, there's the element of his teenaged daughter's teenaged friend inhabiting his fantasies. 

On a related note: both he and Jane should stay far away from Ricky. Ah, that's probably just me now watching as a dad. But seriously: stay away from Ricky.

For Spacey, who won Best Actor for his performance, this was a turning point, professionally speaking, as what had been a career with terrific performances in great movies would soon turn into ... K-PAX and such. Allison Janney probably came out in the best shape in the long-tun.

1999 Pulitzer Prize winner a collection of quick, stinging jabs

 

This collection of short stories, the first publication by Jhumpa Lahiri, lets you know right off the bat that she's not here to go easy on you. In a book informed by life in India and life in the U.S. as an Indian immigrant, it's really, as it almost always is, all about people.

That first story is of a marriage at a crossroads, slumping and trapped by the tragic birth of their child. When Lahiri brings us to the decision point of whether or not the marriage will survive, the resolution is both sad and beautiful. 

As I often do in these projects, I go in as blind as I can and then read up on works or creators afterwards, and I read an admission by Lahiri that she found writing a short story easier, or more manageable, to write than a longer novel. By word count, I'd say she's right but, really, a good short story is harder to write than a good novel, I think. There's just no room to hide or time to recover from a misstep. 

My other favourites in the set are A Real Durwan and The Treatment of Bibi Haldar.

1999's top TV-show wants to make you a millionaire

I don't remember when I first watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, TV's top-rated show for the year, but it was definitely somewhere in that first season. I went back to watch the premiere episode from August 19th and was happy to have a chance to check back in with DailyMotion and see that it's still doing just fine.

This recording also came with the commercials intact, and even though it was a fairly disappointing spread filled mostly with McDonald's and KFC ads, it's still a treat.

I'd forgotten about the Price is Right-esque showdown to even get into the hot seat - or did that part eventually disappear? What really matters is that I nailed both showdown questions; I should have timed myself to see if I'd have made it.

I remember watching fairly regularly, waiting for that seemingly, probably, maybe inevitable moment when someone would actually win ... and I missed it. At least I missed seeing it live.

It didn't even take that long before John Carpenter won the first million dollar prize three months later on November 19th, but apparently I'd lost interest before then. Most people didn't, of course.

If you haven't seen the winning moment, by the way, it's well worth checking out: https://youtu.be/WvilG74MdeE

1999 in music: Backstreet's back (again) and so is Alanis

 

Having been decidedly a non-fan of the New Kids on the Block (until I got older and they did, too), the Backstreet Boys were hardly ever on my radar. But I'll tell you something: they know exactly how to front-load an album with hits and then just fill the rest of the time however they please.

I mean, I suppose The One is a hit, but only in a vaguely recognizable way. The first three tracks (Larger Than Life, I Want It That Way, and Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely) are where they make their bacon, and it's an impressive album opening.

Other than those, I'd pick out Don't Want You Back as my top non-single track. My advice to them would be to simply not get into a relationship with that person again. I mean, calling a song I Want You Back implies a journey, but not wanting someone back seems pretty straightforward, unless you start talking about restraining orders.

Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morissette's previous Juno-winning album of the year, was not really the record of an angry person with the exception of the mega-hit You Oughta Know. The rest of the album featured plenty of introspection and contemplation, which happily continued with Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, also a Juno-winner for Album of the Year.

This album feels much more complete, in that ethereal way that some records feel like one track split up into smaller movements. Thank U, my favourite of her singles, led the charge for countering expectations and I remember it really confounding some people when it debuted.

That I Would Be Good, Unsent (which I remember well off the album but didn't remember, or ever know, that it had been released a single), UR, Would Not Come ... these are terrific songs but they sound out of place to me when I hear them on their own. Early on I knew that I wanted to only listen to the whole album and not pick and choose amongst the track, which is a fairly rare accomplishment. 

1998 in video games: Tekken, Zelda, Starcraft, and Pokémon

This year's number-one arcade game is yet another fighter: Tekken 3. I know that I've played a later version of this on Game Pass (5, I think?), but I don't remember anything proprietary about the franchise so I'm going in cold. If anything, it reminded me of the Virtua Fighter game I recently played.

I took Xiaoyu into battle and did fine in the first round, then lost my streak of winning my first three matches. I basically lost to Bruce Lee, though, so I'm okay with that.

    

In the home console market, Nintendo surged back into the picture with its release of the best-selling The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This game ate up my free time when I got my hands on it in back then, and it's still the one that I revisit more than any other Zelda game. Although it suffers a bit from being the first out the gate for 3D Zelda, so certain things could have used (and will receive) some refinement, the expansive world, the bosses, and the items and weapons are still all so much fun.

I played this before I'd ever played A Link to the Past, so I later learned that many of the features that I thought were brand new for the 64 were actually brought forward from the SNES game. It didn't diminish my love of Ocarina, though; it just confirmed that I really do need to play all of them to get the full picture.

I took the advice from someone's meme and named Link "my dude" so the cutscene interactions would be chill.

I played it via the Switch Online library with the new 64 controller which, mock its weirdness all you want, is the only way I could possibly play this game.

Next up is Starcraft, the number-one game on PC. I've learned that it's a revered game, and I can appreciate how it took what Populous and Age of Empires offered and made it just a little funnier and also easier to pick up and play. Even though I only followed through what was essentially a tutorial, I found it so much more intuitive than those titles. I'd play this one again for sure.

Finally for this week, I re-did everything I'd completed for Pocket Monsters, but this time it's officially Pokémon as it was released in North America - and without the use of Google Translate.

It really is exactly the same, right down to some music that sounds an awful lot like part of Hyrule's music from the first Zelda game, to Oak forgetting his nephew's name until I remind him. I got my Charmander, beat up on a few wild pokémon, and tucked this one away until I find a copy of a Game Boy cartridge in a garage sale somewhere.

1998 in music belongs to Queen Celine

 

First of all, I was happy to give the local library something to talk about because they made a point to tell me that nobody else has CDs brought in on inter-library loan anymore.

This week it's the number-one selling soundtrack to Titanic, with its dreamy soundscape bolstered by My Heart Will Go On, while that super-sized ode to tragic romance is also featured on Celine Dion's Juno Album of the Year winner Let's Talk About Love.

Titanic first: it's a fine score, and features James Horner performing his signature borrowing from James Horner. The song, or "that song", or the song (however you want to refer to My Heart Will Go On), has one of my favourite behind-the-music stories. The tale goes that the studio and Horner wanted a song for the end credits while Cameron wanted nothing to do with it, and Celine wanted nothing to do with another movie song having done a couple in prior years.

Horner managed to talk his way into Dion's studio and got her to record a demo. While I've had an up-and-down time listening to her albums in this project, her voice is an undeniable force, and more proof in the pudding is that she recorded the demo and that was it. That demo was what made it into the movie soundtrack.

That's pretty cool.

However, her album Let's Talk About Love: not cool. As pleasantly surprised as I was to enjoy Falling Into You, I fell back to earth while listening to this one. As always, it's vocally impressive, but this one really doubles down on the schmaltz with duets featuring Barbra Streisand and, worst of all, Luciano Pavarotti, which is possibly the death-knell for a pop artist (U2 barely survived, but Bryan Adams didn't).

Honestly, I don't even have a pleasant surprise to promote. Be the Man (On This Night), maybe? But that's really only because I'm forcing myself to pick one. So, Celine, we end our journey here; see you sometime for Deadpool 2 and the Paris Olympics. 

1998's Pulitzer Prize winner The Hours recreates and celebrates Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

I'm in a bit of a hole here, because I've neither seen the soon-to-follow movie nor read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, so there was a lot for me to read about and catch up on afterwards.

If, like me going in, you don't know the conceit of this Pulitzer Prize winner, Cunningham tells the story of Woolf as she both sets about to write Dalloway (originally titled The Hours) and comes to her fateful decision to end her own life, and intertwines it with two other characters' stories: Sally, who, in a state of uncertain desperation about her own life, finds comfort in reading Mrs. Dalloway 25 years after the book's publication; and Clarissa, who in 1990 is living out a sort of modernized retelling of the story of Mrs. Dalloway itself.

It's like a remake, a reboot, and a cover song all rolled into one.

What I found most intriguing about the telling was that, while the story jumped between three periods ranging 65-ish years, Cunningham doesn't seem all that concerned with world-building. What I mean is that he doesn't go to extreme lengths to establish the settings of each time or make a point to notify us of the uniqueness of the environment or technology beyond what comes up naturally. I think the idea is that in order to really emphasize the shared experience of these three women, it's not important to highlight the differences in their worlds but to focus on the sameness of their lives.

And, yeah, it's wild that Meryl Streep came up in conversation between characters in the book only to soon star in the movie.

1998 in TV: ER takes back the number one spot

 

I'm not sure what made me pick Exodus out of the list of ER episodes from this year, as the show recaptured the most-watched honours, but I'm glad I did. I know I've only watched 5.5 episodes of the show (explanation of the .5 episode to come) so the sample size is small, but this is far and away my favourite. A disaster movie in a hospital? With Eva Mendes? And Mickey Rooney? And a kid stuck in an elevator with minutes to live? And Alex Kingston causing a cave-in?

It's giving me even more reason to run this show through from the beginning.

The reason why I snuck in an extra half-episode was from catching sight of the thumbnail for Day for Knight and spotting Ken Kercheval doing a guest spot, and I owed it to myself to watch his scenes and make a connection back to Dallas. It's funny to think about all of the guest spots I must have seen on TV as a kid, many certainly featuring someone of note from shows before my time who I just thought was some random actor. 

1998 in movies: TItanic takes off and Shakespeare gets an Oscar

Being as I was a big fan of Tom Stoppard's Hamlet-adjacent Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, seeing it first as a movie and then the play, I was primed and ready for this Stoppard-assisted romantic comedy. To add a little perspective, I'd just seen Hamnet in the theatre a couple of weeks before watching this Best Picture winner for the first time in about ten years. 

While finishing the immensely moving Hamnet, I was reminded of the ending of Shakespeare in Love because both movies conclude with a summary version of one of Shakespeare's most revered works, and whatever faults may lay within the first two acts of either movie (and there are few, to be sure), all ends well as you suddenly realize why the ending of the movie is so great - because, oh yeah, it's mostly Romeo & Juliet (or Hamlet). It's hard to mess that up.

Incidentally: there's quite the run for the Fiennes brothers right now (though I think I knew even back then that Ralph was going to be the long distance runner of the two). 

In other news...

As posted for last week's Oscar-winning Titanic, it double-dipped as the top box-office earner for this year thanks to its very late release date and staying in theatres foreeeeeever. My most memorable viewing of it came at a drive-in late in the fall of '98, and by the time people were freezing in the water it was snowing and pretty cold in the car - call it an early 4DX viewing. 

1997 in games: King of Fighters, Final Fantasy VII, Age of Empires, Pocket Monsters continued, and Snake!

People sure did like to fight in the arcades. This year's top game is The King of Fighters, which is my first team fighting game. You select three characters for your team, pick their order of fighting, and see if you can outlast the other team.

I kind of, sort of followed my rule of three because I won my first two matches with the team above, but of course, in winning two matches I really won six fights. I met my end when the third challenge was facing my doppelganger team. I don't know if that's built into the game to happen the third time around or if it was just a wild coincidence, but either way you can see that my Robert was no match for the CPU Robert.

Next up is Final Fantasy VII, top game for home consoles on the PlayStation. I didn't know going in that this was a particularly beloved title in the franchise, complete with remasters and ground-up re-creations coming for years after its release.

After my short run through the beginning adventure, I was impressed by the scope of the story's world. Graphically, and even mechanically, I'd always heard about how the PlayStation system was superior to Nintendo's, and I can honestly see what people were talking about, even though it wouldn't have been the kind of stuff to sway me. It felt like a mixture between an N64 and a PC game.

I made it as far as this steel scorpion and will wait to continue it another time.

Next up: before I even got into some gameplay of Age of Empires, top-selling PC game for the year, the emulator I used had a bonus surprise for me ...

Boy, it's been a while since I've seen that loading screen. I remember installing and uninstalling Windows 95 about a half dozen times as I slowly weaned myself off of Windows 3.1 in fits and spurts. It was fun just to see it in the loading screen.

I was reminded of Populous as I began my quest to ... well, I'm not sure exactly what. I explored, I gathered loads of gold, wood, and fruit, built some structures and a nice-looking dock, and then I was advised that all the relics had been discovered and the game would end in 2000 years if control of them didn't change.

That didn't sound good, but it also sounded like I had quite a bit of time to work with.

I eventually found another empire and was woefully unprepared for combat, so it turned out that I didn't really need the full 2000 years to throw in the towel. Would I play it again? Probably. Am I more likely to play Civilization? Probably. 

In handheld gaming news, Pocket Monsters is still ruling the world, and is now just one year away from expanding into North America.

In the meantime, though, there's a new category to touch on - most played mobile phone game. Long before birds got angry or Pokemon would go, there was one clear, first champion of phone gaming,  Snake: https://youtu.be/TJdKMFy7MEA

I found an old, stylized version on the Google Play store and had a pretty good run, but I'll bet I would still do better on an old phone with real buttons.

I don't know why I never considered this before, but it really is just a one-player Tron lightcycle game. No wonder I was immediately drawn to it. It's interesting to think back to these days of phone gaming and compare the technology to early Game & Watch titles; the games were simple but it was just so much fun to play on a new kind of system.

1997's Pulitzer Prize is another exposé of what lies beneath

In a manner a bit like last week's Pulitzer winner, and a bit like Ragtime from way back in my project, Philip Roth's American Pastoral takes aim at what looks perfect from the outside - in this case, a handsome, popular, star athlete and his beautiful family - might be a much grimier version than what you'd expect.

The vehicle for this narrative is very interesting: that big, handsome athlete's name was Seymour "Swede" Levov. I say "was" because very near the beginning of the story we learn that he has died, by way of the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman finding out from Levov's brother. Zuckerman has only met Swede a couple of times but always admired him from afar, and so begins the rest of the book: Zuckerman's own written version of how he thinks Levov's life unfolded through limited personal knowledge, some newspaper accounts, and the rest is put together by conjecture.

In this way, the caution against trusting an unreliable narrator should be in place, but it's an interesting version of that because there doesn't seem to be any malice in Zuckerman's attempts to recount a life, nor does it even come close to becoming a hagiography as Levov is hardly spared a critical eye nor are we spared some uncomfortable details in the telling. 

It's just fascinating to have a narrator who's just kind of doing his best, and to have that passed on to the reader by Roth makes it a sort of passed-down tale. 

1997 in TV: Seinfeld goes out on top

 

It makes sense that Seinfeld is raking in the ratings in its final year as that kind of event likely drew in more casual viewers, but by the same token it's a little strange that it didn't have the same effect for 1998 when the show actually drew to a close. Then again, that means it only had half of the broadcast schedule in '98 with which to draw viewers.

Okay, I've made it make sense.

I watched the opener of the season, The Butter Shave, along with The Strike because, for all the talk about it to the point that I've even quoted it myself, I'd never seen the Festivus episode. Now, after having checked that box and done a little more digging, I'm more than amused to discover that it's based on a very real celebration by the family of one of Seinfeld's writers.

And, because Seinfeld didn't stay at number one for next year, I still haven't seen the finale. I'll take a run at the whole series someday.

1997 in movies: Men in Black benefits from an early release as Titanic looms

          

Men in Black secured the box office crown in 1997 thanks in large part to its July release date, because the second movie on my list for this week, Titanic, simply didn't have enough time to beat it as a December release. 

First though: Men in Black. I remember seeing it in Oakville at the Mews theatre, where I later worked for a summer and as of now operates as a Film.ca cinema, and I walked out feeling like I had just experienced a spiritual successor to Ghostbusters. I think it's a really smart, tight movie, with some surprisingly thoughtful and sweet scenes, all from Tommy Lee Jones and his views on people and his yearning for his old life.

That yearning was so well done and so central to the conclusion of the movie that I can't stand the sequel for how it betrayed those great moments. There probably was a good enough path to make a second movie but they sure didn't find it. The third one was all right, though, and I never saw the reboot.

Titanic is awesome. It just is. Watching a period, pseudo-teen romance for 90 minutes and then immediately chasing it with a 90-minute disaster movie is brilliant, and I like both halves of the movie in equal parts. Winslet and DiCaprio do their best to carry the movie at their age, but it's the supporting cast that holds them up. Three cheers for Frances Fisher, and three more for David Warner. 

If ever there was a movie that could benefit from revisiting and augmenting effects, it would be this one. The only glaring problems exist in scenes like wide shots of passengers and crew walking on deck and a couple of photoshopped faces. Fix those up because the effects simply weren't good enough at the time, and the movie would pass muster.

Cameron's epic will, of course, be the top moneymaker next year, which means I watched it this week for its Oscar win, and I'll pass on watching it again next week. It is, noteworthy, of course, as the first movie in my project since Rocky in 1976 that took both tops in the box office and the Best Picture Oscar.

1997 music: girl power

 

I had a friend whose family had moved over from England; I met him in Grade 6 and stayed in touch with him until around the time of this album in the late 90s. One of my last interactions with him was after he'd returned from visiting England and he asked us if the Spice Girls were a thing in Canada yet. When we said no, he replied ominously: they will be.

I unironically loved this album. This CD, the best-seller of 97, was full of summer and road trip anthems for my friends and still has some favourites on it after all these years (favourite hit: Say You'll Be There; favourite album cut: If U Can't Dance).

Then, the next album was even better - and then, they were all but gone until reunion tours. But, they were a force of nature in their time.

I definitely slept on this album, which would win the Juno for Album of the Year, because I was a big fan of Fumbling Towards Ecstacy and found this one a little too straightforward and not quite as haunting as the former. I think the first single, Building a Mystery, set that tone for me because, even now, it sounds like it was a engineered to be a single. On the other hand, Adia is my favourite of McLachlan hits so that counts for a lot. 

Then there's Angel, which was featured in a drinking and driving PSA that was used as part of the driver's ed program that I taught, so I can conservatively say that I've listened to that song over 100 times in the classroom, and even now when I listen to it I can hear the voice-over dialogue that went over certain parts of the song. On top of that, I believe it was used in a pet adoption video. And it was used in City of Angels. Suffice it to say, it's a fine song but it simply carries too much extra baggage for me to appreciate it on its own.

This time around, I quite liked a couple of songs from the middle of the album (Do What You Have To Do and Witness), so while it's not surprising for me to learn that there are some gems on here because McLachlin was still in her prime, it's another reminder to revisit works I've dismissed in the past.