For Whom the Chip Tunes
Six months ago I jokingly said that Tim Rogers is the Lester Bangs of video games. After reading Tim Rogers’s novel-length Fukubukuro 2004 last night, devoid of sarcasm and despite the horrible things it might do to his ego, I have to say that Tim Rogers is NOT the Lester Bangs of video games. Tim Rogers is the motherfucking Ernest Hemmingway of video games. Maybe if I’d read any Kerouac I would feel that he would be a better comparison, but I haven’t read any Kerouac, and I have read some Hemmingway, and Hemmingway is what it reminds me of.
Fukubukuro 2004 vaguely claims to be a review of the top 12 games of 2004, but it’s actually a “year in the life” of a womanizing, video-game-obsessed American gutter-punk living in Japan who, by virtue of being American and an incredible writer, ends up rubbing elbows with living legends of the Japanese video game industry. It is quite pretentious, and I get the feeling that there’s a fair amount of embellishment, but that just makes it even more Hemmingway, except with all the droning about boxing matches and bullfights replaced with salient observations about various video games.
The only downside of the work (I don’t feel comfortable calling it either an “article” or a “story”, so “work” will have to do) is that rather than have any sort of ending it jarringly jumps into a review of Dragon Quest VIII. Maybe Tim decided at the very end that a work claiming to be a review of video games should at least have one fairly-traditional video game review, or maybe it’s just there to jerk the reader back into the mundane before the tone of the rest of the work drives him to drink.
I can count on one hand the number of friends who I’d recommend Fukubukuro 2004 to, and I can count on MANY hands the friends who I would NOT recommend it to. Check it out, and if you can make it past the first page without shouting “what is this pretentious emo bullshit???” then you’ll probably enjoy reading it all the way through.