The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. It was a little quiet on Jank this week. Is this acceptable? Not to me, and I think you should be ruder to us in the comments so we don't let it happen again. In the meantime, here are some fine words about videogames (and Jackass) to see you through Sunday morning.

The best cinema-going experience I've had in the last ten years was seeing Jackass Forever, because nothing unites an audience like a funny and painful stunt. I used to look down upon the show, even as I watched it, but some mixture of audience nostalgia and good personal branding by the likes of Steve-O have changed its place within culture in the years since. For Aftermath, Joshua Rivera writes about exactly that, and how it "transformed from idiotic nuisance to one of the most endearing symbols of male friendship in pop culture", culminating in the new and final movie, Jackass: Best And Last.

Writing too much about Jackass is its own kind of stunt; the word count creeps up and so does the likelihood you've embarrassed yourself somehow, like you've shit your pants in word form. It is silly to position these clowns and their subsidized chicanery as some form of cultural sin-eaters, as if any of us needs to know what it's like to shove a toy car in our rectum and get it X-rayed.

When I was a teenager, a bunch of my friends would shoot wrestling videos in their back gardens. One day, they lit a table on fire and chokeslammed a boy called Andrew Montgomery through it. He received severe burns to the back of his neck, but because was too embarrassed to tell his mother, he never got the wound treated. It eventually turned septic and he almost died. We called him Monty Burns for remaining years of school. Unrelatedly, Bill Hanstock also wrote a farewell to Jackass that gets a little more into the changes the cast have undergone.

Over the years, the crew has drifted in and out of trouble and sobriety and interpersonal feuds. Bam Margera, who has struggled with substance abuse problems for the better part of the past 20 years, was in a spiral for a very long time following the 2011 drunk driving death of Ryan Dunn, his best friend. It was felt very intensely at the time, but Dunn's death is really the dividing line in the Jackass story. Everything after Ryan Dunn has a veneer of sadness or a sense that something is missing, but it truly soured the Margera/Knoxville divide, two camps that never fully felt like they belonged to the other.

Speaking of bros from the 2000s who have since undergone reconstruction, Jeremy Peel interviewed Cliff Bleszinski for The Guardian about his journey from Gears Of War and Lawbreakers to producing Tony-winning Broadway musical Hadestown. (Except, Bleszinski was never really a bro. I remember in the late '90s when he ran Hellmouth.org (archive link), a website crowdsourcing stories of "peer and administrator abuse in the public school system".)

‘It was utterly heartbreaking, to be honest, and it certainly didn’t help with my drinking. I’ll leave it at that.” Cliff Bleszinski is recalling the launch of LawBreakers, the arena first-person shooter he put out in 2017. It had been his first project as the CEO of his own studio, Boss Key Productions. Before that, he was the creative figurehead behind hugely successful sci-fi shooter series, Gears of War, when he was known to millions of gamers as CliffyB.

For Restart, Imran Khan reviewed Star Fox and ends on the note that I think justifies most remakes.

Star Fox 64 is not the best rail-shooter ever made (that distinction belongs to Sin & Punishment: Star Successor), but it is up there. I have no idea how well you personally will agree with that, but I do know that sitting here replaying it again, I remember how much fun that original game was. It kind of makes me happy that someone who had never even heard of the N64 original could feel like that today.

Back to The Guardian for their Pushing Buttons newsletter, which last week focused on the history of "brilliantly terrible World Cup video games".

Four years later, Sega’s World Cup Italia ’90 for the Mega Drive was another catastrophe, with its terrible controls, awful music and a weirdly zoomed-in view of the pitch that didn’t let you see beyond a few metres. For USA 94, US Gold somehow wrangled the official licence again and actually put out a decent footie sim … but only if you happened to buy the SNES version. The home computer alternative was memorably described in Amiga Power magazine as, “an inoperable canker on the lungs of the innocent children of the world”. Firm but fair.

For 404 Media, Jason Koebler looked at how "hustlebros pretend to be rich for TikTok", including rentable photo studios for faking private jets and apps that can fake a stream of Stripe notifications on your phone to make it look like money is pouring in from subscribers. I might get this app, not so I can make TikTok videos, but so I can make myself good about Jank's subscriber numbers whenever I want. 

Because I’d sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of subscriptions today alone, I wanted to show my followers just how quickly I’d been making money. I opened the Stripe app on my phone and decided how many subscriptions I wanted to sell. I used a slider bar—again, somewhat at random—to select 164 new subscribers, spaced out every .5 seconds. I clicked a button that said “Start Burst.” Notifications begin streaming across my phone’s Lock Screen. I hold it up to the camera.

Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence wasn't as good a cinema-going experience as seeing a man take a pogo stick to the balls, but I still love the film. At Letterboxd (which publishes articles, I guess?), Robert Daniels looks back at the film, which as much as anything is a worthy exercise in explaining to reviewers that, no, Spielberg didn't add the sentimentality to Kubrick's vision.

Initially, critics accused Spielberg of departing from Kubrick’s intentions by inserting a saccharine wish-fulfillment ending. “The most vicious parodist of Spielberg could not devise anything more precious, more shallow and more patently ridiculous,” wrote Mick LaSalle for The San Francisco Chronicle upon release. But, in reality, the ending is the same as the one Kubrick envisioned.

Music this week is Isn't It A Pity from George Harrison's first solo album, All Things Must Pass. I cannot wait for Sam Mendes' four simultaneously-released Beatles biopics, and I don't even care if they're good. Presumably the Harrison film will be 60% having sex with other people's wives by volume, all while The Chiffons' He's So Fine plays in the other room. 

Sleep well, videogames.