Poetry For The Gaming Crowd Reviewed

Thanks to Game Girl Advance for their review of the videogame-related poetry book, 'Blue Wizard Is About To Die'. The reviewer comments: "Video games, the interactive art of corresponding actions to on screen visuals and audio cues, are inherently difficult to show. But who'd have thought that it'd be a poet from Las Vegas to finally get the feeling that goes along with video games right?" We've previously mentioned this unique book, which has an official website proclaiming that the tome "takes its readers on a psychotic and hilarious tour through the arcade and console games of the Eighties (and beyond)", and has garnered both effusive and not quite so positive reviews along the way.

Comments

That's good but...

[Anonymous Coward]

When are we going to get Poetry For The Porn Crowd

Re:That's good but...

[joFFeman]

um... you don't read a lot of contemporary poetry, do you?

Re:That's good but...

[BackwardEngineer]

Harlequin novels come to mind.

To quote my best friend "He sticks his lovetool in her honeypot!"

See, that's sickeningly poetic. (or Pornish, if you want to call it that)

A video game haiku

[seraph93]

Rounding the corner
A head shot, unexpected
Damn you, camping fag

Re:A video game haiku

[Alkaiser]

I like your poetry much better than the book author's. At least yours has a reason not to rhyme.

Unfortunately, your haiku has the un-gamer like qualities of being both spelled properly and grammatically correct. A more accurate representation would be:

Rounding da corner
A head shot, UNPOSSIBLE!
Dam camping fagot!

Re:A video game haiku

[seraph93]

I'm glad you liked it. As for the book of video game "poems", I'm so happy that I've grown old enough to realize that "random carriage returns" does not necessarily equal "free verse".

You're right that good spelling disqualifies the haiku as gaming fare. I'll have to try to be more l33t. This one goes out to all my Enemy Territory homies gettin' camped at the Railgun:

4rtY s7R|K3 t3h 5P4w|\|
A><i5 B17C|-|3z c4N7 d0 5H1T
OmG, pWnZ0r3d

So I read some of the excerpts on the webpage...

[Snowspinner]

Wow.

Those were some truly terrible poems.

Like, they did not scan with interesting rhythm, they did not offer enlightening insights into the nature of being, or even into the nature of the games, and they were, at several points, slightly offensive.

The fact that so many gaming sites seem to be head over heels from them really heightens the lack of geekiness I sometimes feel from being a humanities person.

Oh well. I have a girlfriend, and I bet he doesn't.

Hmmm..

[Txiasaeia]

I'm not exactly sure what we're supposed to say about this. I mean, the book hasn't been released yet, so we haven't read it, which means that this is pretty much an advertisement for a product.

Not that I'm pissed; I've got it on preorder from Amazon as we speak :)

Quake Haiku's

[schnits0r]

Here is a collection of user submitted Haikus abotu the Quake expereince.

Re:Quake Haiku's

[DarthWing]

Like a wingless moth, using the word "abotu" is against Nature.

So...

[herrvinny]

We've previously mentioned this unique book

So... /. editors know this is a dupe, yet they post it anyway. Terrific. So much for the "stuff that matters" slogan...

I'd recommend buying the book

[Chuck Chunder]

For someone you really don't like.

I had the misfortune to start reading the sample Joust "poem" and I'm still recovering.

JOUST:

i don't think there is much doubt that riding an ostrich
is pretty gay, especially when done as some part of a renaissance festival gone
horribly
horribly
wrong;
but gliding on those wings, those feeble orange and yellow wings,

Oh for fucks sake....

Re:I'd recommend buying the book

[Anonymous Coward]

You really are a complete CUNT!

Re:So I read some of the excerpts on the webpage..

[NonSequor]

Robert Frost once said that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.

That said, there are a lot of people who don't understand the point of poetry. One of them wrote this book.

All thine base belong to us.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thy knowledge serves thee well, yet tempt not Fate.
Go forth and move your Zigs for justice great.

my attempt

[cyrax777]

Here I quake broken pinged tried to frag but only lagged.

An NES Haiku

[SuperMo0]

I put the game in
I jimmy the cartridge and hope
The damn thing will play

Re:An NES Haiku

[Guppy06]

Perhaps you should try
to clean it on occasion;
I don't have that problem

Re:So I read some of the excerpts on the webpage..

[JonBovi]

Not to mention that they didn't rhyme.

I gave up, myself

[AtariAmarok]

I gave up: I could never find anything that rhymed with Ganondorf.

Re:I gave up, myself

[SuperMo0]

I stabbed Ganondorf At the edge of the wharf

Where is Diablo?

[BRSloth]

I checked the list of games in the book and I didn't found any reference to Diablo. Diablo was the game that had a lot of poetry in it, and you have to play it more than once to see it all.

I can see what you see not
Vision milky then eyes rot
Then you see what cannot be,
shadows move where light should be.
Out of darkness,
out of mind.
Cast down from the Halls of the Blind.


(yup, I don't know if this come from something else, but *it is* in Diablo)

Rythm and Rhyme :

[ThePyro]

... the sample poems appear to be lacking in both. I would understand if they were haikus or something, but they're not...

Perhaps I'm an uncultured dolt, but these "poems" look like someone just took a bunch of bad prose and randomly inserted carriage returns.

No rhyme. No rhythm. And definitely no music.

You know....

[AtariAmarok]

You broke through my writer's block!

I was playing "Star Trek" and "Zelda".
A very odd video game meld, ah.
As I aimed the hook-shot at Ganondorf.
I turned and said "Now, fire your cannon, Worf!"

'emoto-versatronic expressionist pieces'...

[fondue]

...or 'crap', for short.

I'm getting sick and tired of vacuous arts students plundering gaming's past in the most superficial and obvious ways possible. Attention: the 'witty' observations about the four NES games that were the last games you ever played have already occured to others. Please do not quote the Pac-Man quote again.

Perhaps one day someone will clue them in to the fact that constantly expounding a hopelessly limited and dated perception of games doesn't send out the message that they intend... much in the same way as wearing an Atari t-shirt acts as a good indicator that the wearer isn't qualified to make any kind of relevant observation about the medium.

If we all keep it up we'll have our own book

[seraph93]

My NES: Dusty, old,
Suffering bit-rot. What now?
FCE Ultra.