Harry Yack takes a trip to the home of donkeys, expensive lighting and billions of bed and breakfasts. No time for sausage ‘n’ chips or walks along the promenade, however, as the 2011 Replay retro video game type thingy was also taking place just down the road at Norbreck Castle.

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Well, this isn’t a proper ‘review’ as such, but an exercise in taking video games far too seriously.

Critical piece discussing the fungus fancier’s first console outing, chronicling the conception, controversies and downright LSD-fuelled insanity of Brooklyn’s most prominent pudgy pipe plunger. Nah, not really. I just reiterate the really obvious, half-humorous observations of other people.

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Harry Yack takes a look back at a game so culturally significant it hardly matters.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire stood proudly atop the video games sales charts for weeks, nay months, after its release. This delivers false promise, for due to the unbelievable popularity of the TV show, every other parent who got their kid a Playstation for Christmas went out to Dixons and bought a copy. For 35 quid. In actuality, all you get is a bog-standard question and answer affair, and you know how fantastically those types of games translate to the Playstation. Exactly, they don’t.

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Teleglitcher, an early video from my 2007 Pixel is Power project, has been featured in a special presentation at the New Zealand Film Archive. Kiwi visual artist Dick Whyte, with the help of Mark Williams, put together a screening of various experimental media, described as such:

“What do Miss Piggy, Britney Spears, Mussolini, Super Mario Bros., Charlie Rose, John Key, Ruth Richardson and Buster Keaton have in common? They are all the subjects of avant-garde films on YouTube. Film maker and academic Dick Whyte presents a screening of recent avant-garde films he has curated from YouTube. All of them re-purpose existing material into new works.

“Whyte says, “Technology has taken a long time to get to the point where video makers can sample with the same abandon as musicians and still image makers. YouTube heralds a new age in avant-garde cinema which is fully engaged with popular media.” The screening will be accompanied by short introductions to the films and their particular strategies, looking at the function of avant-garde moving-image at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” — New Zealand Film Archive

The show was screened at the Film Archive Mediatheatre, Wellington, in January of this year. See all films from the presentation at Whyte’s blog.

Personally, I am not a fan of copyright licenses. Oftentimes I feel restricted in my work, unable to sample almost anything at all for fear of infringing copyright laws. This comes as no real surprise, me being of the mass media Internet generation who doesn’t much care for the mainstream music or film industries and all.

That said, I still enjoy a good album or movie in much the same way I like lighter, DIY user created content such as video mashups, and respect peoples’ rights to make money from their creations. Heck, it would be nice to one day make something out of what I do, but of course it’s never the primary motivation. People motivated by money may be rich but, on the whole, aren’t very nice individuals, and I’d hate to become one of them.

Good Copy Bad Copy is a Danish documentary offering some hope for the future, a utopian world where individuals are free to express their creativity with as wide a range of media as is available without fear of censorship. It’s a great watch for anyone interested in such things, covering copyright laws in the United States, Europe and even Nigeria. Here’s a bit of taster, the final minutes of the film:

Watch the film on YouTube, or download it from the official website.