#bloodrayne vibes

[dread-red-queen]

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more of the assassin outfit coz BloodRayne Vibes XD

[babymorte]

Omg I just thought of the best Halloween action movie triple feature and had to come share it with you! So you could nerd out with me about it haha. So starting out it's Hansel and Gretal Witch Hunters, then into the Brothers Grimm and finishing it off with Van Helsing! They all work together perfectly and fit the theme of action movie monster fighters in old English style settings!

IVE NEVER SEEN HANSEL & GRETEL WITCH HUNTERS that’s the one with jeremy renner right?? that’s actually a really good triple feature i might have to do that tomorrow 🤔 but i also kind of wanna add bloodrayne cuz like its super shitty but it kinda gives the same vibe??

but also now i wanna play bloodrayne 😬

[may-bonne]

Lmao I'd never give you a virus I prommy 👉👈 I found that site through another tumblr post ages ago

I'm gonna wait until I finish Bloodrayne to send another long anon with all my thoughts 🫀 But I will say that I want to put Katarin and Holga Kilgore in a room together. Have you ever seen either of the Machete movies? They're both dumb fun. The first is way better than the sequel imo though

SOMEBODY should have ripped that fake mustache off. Thinking about that one interview where Mrod talks about how bizarre filming that sex scene was for her. She says something like "Frank has a very different idea of that than I do" lol. Since that was definitely the first time he got laid without coughing up hit money first, I doubt he knew that you don't want a girl looking at you like that before you fuck

I'm hard pressed to think of a single decision made by any character that makes sense. By the end of the movie, it feels almost pointless? Nothing really changed. Frank came away with a dog and gender dysphoria. He shot a bunch of dudes like he always does. Got the revenge. But there should have been forgiveness for Johnnie. He couldn't bring himself to shoot her and for a cold blooded assassin, it feels like that should have gone somewhere more significant than just sending her away

"Buddies" activated the dog part of Frank's brain. He's like a sad street dog that got out of a shelter and won't let people approach him

Idk anything about writing a screenplay either so you won't hear any complaints from me. It sucks that the only other person I've seen that likes The Assignment doesn't have anon turned on. I found your blog through theirs though so can't complain

i want to watch machete!! resident evil is the next thing on my list but then i def will. i gotta finish season 2 of lost, too. i kind of go back and forth between mrod and jordana brewster and i'm really swinging back towards mitchie right now lol

in the interviews i read she said that to get into character she went on tinder as a man and i would fucking love to see what that profile looked like. (also this just occurred to me but i feel like frank should definitely be jerking off in the shower pre-op. i'm gonna go add that in right now)

frank has major runt-of-the-litter energy. i saw a post on here the other day that was like "he's got that abandoned shelter dog rizz. he looks like he wants to sit quietly beside you on the couch while you watch tv" and immediately thought of this pic:

very much frank's vibe. i want to towel him dry and pinch his nose until he stops trying to spit out his estradiol

mrod plays all these tough chicks and then i am immediately seized with visions of them rain-soaked and shivering with sweet little kitty ears. holga is the lone exception and i think it's because she's the only one of them who doesn't seem like she's on the verge of a massive sexuality crisis. i guess katarin's would be more along the lines of "my people need me! i can't fuck this vampire!" i would love to see her talk to holga. my personal dream is a d.e.b.s. sequel where mrod plays some kind of european villain doing that exact same accent. or she could just be a jersey mobster. i'm not picky

while we're exchanging mrod media i feel compelled to share this spoken word piece she posted on tumblr in 2014 because i feel everybody should know about it

this reply is already too long but whatevs i'm going to ramble about the rewrite now. i wrote dr. jane's big villain monologue yesterday and it was fun as hell. i've changed her motivation for doing the surgery on frank to wanting to prove that she was such an incredible surgeon that she could create an altered body so perfect it would triumph over the mind and he would eventually come to see himself as a woman. but she tells dr. galen she failed because frank was never a man in the first place insofar as he never formed any sense of self beyond being a killer so it was like trying to perform surgery on a gun. meanwhile we see frank slowly starting to realize other people have lives by clumsily expressing sympathy for prostitutes etc. i also had johnnie give him some ace bandages after watching him almost take his nips off with tape 'cause good lord. in the last scene he's in a sports bra. character development!!

i cut all the shakespeare and poe and just have her quoting the hippocratic corpus and stuff. i was talking to myself in the shower yesterday (in my dreams i am invited to appear on national television to share my opinions on mrod movies while america watches raptly) and had more thoughts about the literary allusions but i'll save those for later

also if you're talking about who i think you are, her mainblog is missin-you-already and she has anon on there! i haven't talked to her that much about the assignment, though, so i dunno if she has thoughts. although it's hard to imagine anyone wouldn't

[vamprisms]

have like three projects on the go but now i'm feeling compelled to draw a bunch of fictional characters at a dhampir support meeting

[kaorei-endgame]

There's this Daryl Surat Greater Action Movie postulate (which i only half remember so blame me not him) that goes "female led action movies <something something> falter because <something something> studios won't let directors do the Hard R." Which I bring up in the context of this video game because I remember this weird controversy about the secret ending as it pertains to not only mental health but like.... girl on girl violence? Like it went around the bigger bloggosphere and if I'm playing devil's advocate shoot me but how much literal violence we will swallow (like just.... absolutely.... 6-8 hours of teens beating the shit out of each other) as long as nobody directly verbalizes it? Like haha what's with that moralist shit dude go scream at a cop and let video games be even 1% gross sometimes. It takes me 30 seconds to refocus my eyes after this boss intro:

Usually when they say a WayForward game don't end good, they're talking about that part in the Bloodrayne platformer where you had to make 6 pixel perfect kick jumps off set of floating blood mosquitos while fire's chasing you, am I right??🤣

Well, think about it this way. If most beat 'em ups feel kinda slight and most Way Forward games way too long, River City Girls is exquisitely paced for a Way Forward beat-em-up, especially as a direct-ish sequel to the original, where you could beat the last boss to the end of the game.

I don't know if is this is just all in my head, but as someone who appreciates pink things, bubblegum poppin, oversized jackets, short skirts, and band-aids everywhere, emotionally I gotta approach a Bubblegum Pop video game aesthetic like I'm about to be served the next Lollipop Chainsaw...... specifically with what it's gonna do with my emotions it's rarely some "lived in" shit, if you know what I mean? And the line between "do I feel like I'm playing art about high schoolers, or art about playing chicken with the line of how fuckable you can make a child before someone will call you on it?" is like.... oddly thin? In video games specifically it's like the Macualy Culkin The Good Son of thin ice (but I'll save that for 2021's 2020 Game of the Year Write Ups: Aegis Rim (which will not contradict what I said up there about gross video games so chill🥰much love in 2021).

The risky aesthetic dive is bolstered by a genius soundtrack. Is it synthpop? vaporwave? I am 100% sure a synth or a wave is involved but possibly not both. Album of the Year, and not only because I have found continuous respite this year via "smoking a lot of weed and listening to Smackdown on repeat until I feel like I'm falling into an infinite tunnel in the carpet." While you got an overall great smorgasbord of tracks to beat ass to, sometimes she'll hit you with this insane Stevie Nix-style croon like The Hunt, which is playing off diegetic speakers in the area and fades as you transition out.... I have no idea how to explain what kind of fuckin' vibe that puts you in for a beat 'em up.

Kyouko and Misaki fill in the rest. Part sukeban, part valley, part scene girl, a mismash style of high ponys, varsity jackets, stocks with cute kicks, painted nails on scuffed hands, and pink backpacks (weaponized). They lean femme, yet they slip the beat em up noose of the sexy-cool girl (eg. Blaze) because they're neither sexy nor cool? They're thuggish brutes with a bit of a mean streak. That's the whole point. It don't matter if you're a buff terminator man or a glitzy gyarus, in River City, you gotta be willing to chuck a trashcan.

You know what I'm saying. Kyouko and Misaki are a pair of mutually enabling, oversensitive knuckleheads on a moronic quest that the (maligned?) secret ending reveals was premised on nothing. This may also be described as..... puberty. I don't wanna like... make that argument, but this would not be the same game if it wasn't a pair of brutish morons making trouble for a whole city of equally brutish morons.

They don't make fun beat em ups anymore (not since 2013) but they also don't make games where a soft butch and a hard femme pick on each other for six or seven hours straight. There's that fundamental comedy beat where the smartest person in the dumb-dumb group corrects everyone else, only for their correction to also be wrong? I think this is a game for anyone who has ever sat across from their friend and been like "I am so much smarter than this bitch." One time I thought that sitting across from a person I lived with who also smoked, so we--on my initiative--stole a 5 gal paint drum filled with sand from campus for our personal indoor ashtray and threw our butts into it for a year. I 100% knew I was smarter than that guy.

And yet!! They were still.... my bitch. The girls take selfies together, compliment each other's technicks, go gaga over food, scream about schoolyard drama, and kvech on the various creeps. Part of what makes beat em ups so fun to play is they're something to occupy your basic motor functions while you chill with your besties. This is the fundamental truth of all multiplayer games--vectors for dorks to dish about their day--here it's on the screen. Kyouko and Misaki know they are both the smartest, raddest, coolest, hottest, strongest girl on the block. Occasionally moments of cutscene outre reveal how the cool clique just fucking reviles these girls. But they don't even seem to know they're not part of the cool kids. Or they don't care. They have each other.

[suburbanchildhood]

ur like..... bloodrayne the nazi killing dhampir's kid or smth ❤ keep up the vibe 🧛‍♂️🦇

YEEHAW I LOVE THIS!

[antifainternational]

Hey! For Halloween I’m gonna be a 1930s-era vampire who sustains herself on the blood of Nazis (while rocking a super snazzy fashion sense to boot!) and I was thinking of having an “antifascist bloodsucking” pin with red and black bat wings instead of the flags. I’m not a full-blown Antifa member, but I really do respect and admire Antifa a lot, so I was wondering if it would be offensive? (My goal is to portray antifascism positively. If Halloween is about being scary, I’ll scare the fascists!)

1) If you’re a) against fascism and b) willing to do something about it, then you are, in fact, a “full-blown Antifa member.”  Welcome aboard!2) Not sure about the pin.  We love the concept, but are vampires the heroes or villains?  Maybe it’s not worth worrying about too much BECAUSE WE LOVE HALLOWEEN!!!  And you can always explain the idea to anyone that asks, right?3)  Maybe you’re going for like a Bloodrayne vibe?

4) POST-HALLOWEEN PHOTOS PLEASE!!!!

[pixelgrotto]

Ads they couldn’t get away with today

I haven’t updated in forever. My bad! Blame a busy schedule and a month that saw me traveling to a few different places for the holidays. One of those places was my parents’ house, and while I didn’t do much gaming there (aside from a few quick sessions of Crypt of the Necrodancer), I did spend a fair bit of time revisiting one of my greatest pleasures - my secret stash of video game magazines, buried in the depths of a blue cabinet in the room where I caught my first Pokemon and therefore grew from boy to man.

I loved video game magazines as a kid and would always get excited whenever copies of Computer Gaming World and Electronic Gaming Monthly showed up in the mail. Never mind the fact that during the period when I subscribed to both mags - the late 90s to about 2009 - I never actually had a decent gaming PC nor any of the modern consoles. That wasn’t the point. Looking at those pages made me feel like I was a member of a community of like-minded electronic entertainment enthusiasts, and that was enough. Plus, in the days before sites like Kotaku, Polygon and the like, you could always trust dudes like Scooter, Jeff Green, Dan Hsu, Milkman or gals like Jeanne Kim and Jennifer Tsao to drop trustworthy knowledge with just the right amount of personality to make you feel like you were getting advice from a buddy in real life. (Jeanne Kim, I kinda had a crush on you at one point.)

But there was one other thing about these mags that was appealing: salivating at the ads of soon-to-be-released games. It’s hard to imagine these days, but back in 1999, gaming mags were FAT, like 200-300 pages fat, and I think there was one tome of Computer Gaming World that bordered on 400, with at least 60% of that space filled with junky adverts. It was a different era, to be sure - a simpler time when the best way to attract consumer attention wasn’t to get video personalities to promote your game on Twitch, but to rely on the seductive magic of glossy paper ink.

Looking back on these things today, though, I’m stunned by how much they got away with. I used the word “salivate” earlier, and it’s a pretty accurate one, because if a video game could possibly be promoted with a pair of tits or an ass back in the 90s or 2000s, then it most definitely was. And while I’m sure my high school self dug stuff like the Bloodrayne 2 ad above, there’s something a tad bit embarrassing about it nowadays. Not to mention that Deathtrap Dungeon ad, which was weird in 1998 and is still weird today.  When games couldn’t be marketed with lady lumps, advertisers usually turned to the other things they felt would appeal to their audience - stupid humor/taglines (John Romero actually apologized for that whole “MAKE YOU HIS BITCH” Daikatana fiasco) and graphic violence. If you wanna see what I’m referring to with the graphic violence, peep this two page spread for the Resident Evil PC port, featuring a dog carrying a dismembered arm, as well as this grisly and frankly quite disgusting display for some game called Flesh Feast that nobody remembers anymore. Trigger warning, I suppose - these pages actually disturbed me when I first saw them as a 14 year old, and they still bother me today. 

I occasionally wonder what companies were smoking back in the day, but then I remember that electronic gaming is a relatively young hobby, barely older than 40, and many of these ads represent a time period which could easily be considered gaming’s adolescence. Is it any wonder, then, that marketing agencies often chose to target the demographic that was biggest at that time - teenage boys - with depictions of violence, dumb jokes, gun porn or curves rather than actual gameplay?

Growing pains aside, ya just can’t get away with stuff like this anymore. The more cynical folks out there might say that all the internet social justice warriors simply wouldn’t stand for it, and would bitch and moan and start petitions if anyone tried to pull off a Fear Effect 2-style marketing campaign talking about thirteen climaxes in 2017. This is probably true. But I also believe that gaming has grown up tremendously over the last decade, and really doesn’t need to promote itself in this fashion anymore. Violence is rarely overtly depicted in today’s advertising, and while there’s still some sexy pandering in modern ads, it’s usually done a little classier nowadays. (When it’s crude, as in the case of this relatively recent Soul Calibur V piece, it isn’t received very well.) It’s a brave new world out there today, and frankly, it’s also a more mature one where diversity and representation are being championed more often than blood ‘n boobs. Since the typical gamer is now a 30 something rather than a 15-year-old, we’re also starting to see more games promoting their proud DADHOOD FEATURES (hi, Dishonored 2 and The Witcher 3) rather than their voluptuous thonged wimmens. Not a bad thing at all.

That said, I’ll admit there is a certain kitschy quality in the brazen “damn, they’ve got some balls” vibe omnipresent in these ads of yesteryear. Which is why whenever I’m back in my video game mag secret stash, I like to give ‘em a stare. Just as overstuffed gaming magazines are themselves largely a relic of the past, these printed commercials are a firm remnant of days that are long gone - and a useful measurement of just how far this hobby has evolved in the past decade.

And hey, some of those early 2000s ads surpassed the schlock of their time and hold up today. That Metal Gear Solid PC ad about a “tranquil Alaskan night so quiet you can hear a neck snap?” Still kinda dope. Vintage ads found through an hour of Google Image searching. Hit up Video Game Print Ads, a really good Tumblr, for more fun times.