HomeNews
Madonna, Dark Souls and Mario meet in a sweet and confounding swimming experiment based on a PS1 obscurityDolphindie gaming
Dolphindie gaming
Image credit:Hatim Benhsain
Image credit:Hatim Benhsain
In Benhsain’s rework, b.l.u.e. has become a game about games swimming through each other. Levels from the original Legend Of Water appear within it via emulator, but they’re molten and deferred and spliced with other media to the point that you can’t really call this emulation (let alone piracy). The older PS1 game occupies a screen within the screen that zooms and blurs, tilts and dissolves and reappears as you no-clip through a larger, enclosing world of azure and stone, awash with “borrowed” chunks fromDark Souls, Super Mario 64 andKingdom Hearts. The soundtrack, meanwhile, slops together waterlogged excerpts from American Idol performances and Madonna, as GameFAQ text unfolds across the top of the screen.
The controls are straightforwardly adapted from Legend Of Water - ah, how strange and joyful to play a 3D controller-based game from the pre-Dualshock era - but what they actually do seems to shift in accordance with the game’s steady remixing and refocussing of its source materials. It reminds me a little of synthesising the geography inMu Cartographer.
The creator’s term for all this is a “plunderludic”, or “game made of other games”. I hadn’t come across this concept before, and am curious to understand what distinguishes a plunderludic from, say, an interactive 3D collage. Benhsain includes a link to aresource pagewith some tools and examples of plunderludic games. It makes connections with the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht and George Maciunas, a member of the mid-20th century Fluxus art movement. I’m looking forward to giving it a proper read at some point.
