Actually realistic physics my arse, as our ninja chum here seems to have the ability to chalnge direction mid air during some of his impressively large jumps. N The Ninja is a frenetic against the clock platformer which gets progressively difficult through its 100 levels. But be it the clever design of the levels, the increasing feindishness of the baddies, the smooth controls or the bloody way his body explodes when he dies, it really is lots of fun. There is nothing better than completing one of these missions whilst having a homing missile trained at you back. I recomend downloading it actually so you don’t have to redo levels if you don’t want to.
N THE NINJA (Download Site)
Or click below for a hosted flash version.

Well here’s an online basketball game to set that right. How many baskets can YOU make? (The physics in this are quite nice.)

It is the Fantastic Contraption of course, which is your chance you make the worse great egg race solutions to the mildly tricky puzzles presented. It is one of those online games which, once completed you can expand it by buying more levels. But to be fair there is more than enough going on and if you have never discovered its delights, you are in for a treat. Unless you hate physics games.
FANTASTIC CONTRAPTION.

chicken wings are NOT for flying

Ah, who can forget the wide-eyed terror of throwing up a hail of low level umbrellas to catch a clumsy chicken who missed your initial shot, but not being able to stay and look after him as two other chickens are falling down on the other side and they’re scared and they’re crying, wah! They need umbrellas, and I have an unlimited supply! When will these chickens learn that their wings are NOT… for flying.

Fact: this is the only online flash game for which I have actually bought merchandise. A man in the supermarket agreed with me vehemently – “they’re for EATING!”… and then followed me around the aisles (probably seeing if I was going to pick up some of those terrifyingly grey ‘Basics!’ chicken wings).

There are many more beautiful looking games in the same style at orisinal.com, but Chicken Wings… is the only one that has had me in a long term trance of joy as your chubby chicken guardian runs about with umbrellas, flinging them up for his chicks to catch and gently drift down safely to the ground.

Warning: if you try to play this on a trackpad rather than a mouse, there will be tears before bedtime! I am quite sure of this! What we need are games designed to take advantage of their hem hem unique capabilities (or perhaps what *I* need is a USB mouse, hmm).

Hurrah there is a response.

Hello little fella.

There are hundreds of pointless flash games out there of which this is just one. It exists for one lewd pun and will take you four seconds to play. So go on
SPANK THE MONKEY

“Before we had Nintendo brain training, the country’s academic elite were forced to sharpen their faculties in other ways – the Post-It Note Forehead game, shotglass chess, 14-hour Civ III marathons, late night Texas Hold ‘Em. Anything to keep our brains from rotting away under the lobotomising influx of essays, lectures, reading lists, practical write-ups and tutorials – though appearing on dreadful Channel 5 gameshow Brainteaser (filmed nearby) was probably a step too far as one of our chums discovered to his cost.

My intellectual poison of choice was a slow-paced strategy puzzle with a theme familiar i) Isaac Newton ii) to anyone who has ever played Uno.


The long hours I put into this game cost me a 2:1 ensured I got a solid gold 2:2 – and the title of Master Prestidigitator.”

Alchemy, its not a pretty game, but it is quite addictive as boardgame puzzlers go.
ALCHEMY

In the pub, Cis mentioned a subsection of flash games which were emo. How could a game be emo, I wondered. And then I saw this on the opening screen.

Today I Die is a little flash game, which mixes mini-games, with a point and click adventure and of course awful emo poetry and music. It is quite a fun little game when you get the hang of it though, and you can complete it in about ten minutes, giggling at the portentousness of the music and the poetry. But it is rying to do something a bit different with the flash game which I appreciate. Though to use it as a medium for duff teenage poetry is – er – less good! (Its a better game in Czech!)

TODAY I DIE

There are loads of mini-golf games out there. Or crazy golf if you want to be accurate. Wonderful things, pure physics in motion. I remember wasting a lot of time on a cute 3D type crazy golf game, but in the end, these rudimentary top down fellas are exactly what it is all about. Stripped to its mere physics with (in at least some cases) next to no bells and whistles. Just aim, and play. This cheap auto-bot ugly site has the purest of loads of these really basic golf games, mini-putt as it calls them. The internet can provide you with hundred more. Feel free to post links to you favourites below.

MINI-PUTT

Drench is a remarkably simple puzzle game, where you slowly infect the board with various colours. If you are touching a colour, it gets added to your encroaching blob. Drench the entire board in thirty moves and you win. And you get a chance to try it in 29 moves. I won’t spoil the tactics for you, part of the delight of it is the logic of working five or six moves ahead which doesn’t always work.

DRENCH

He is very little.

A tiny little sprite on a very rudimentary platform gam called This Is The Only Level. And it is a very simple level which has a puzzle which will fool no-one who has ever played a platform game. And then This Is The Only Level reboots to the same level. But slightly different. It took me about sixteen goes and two hundred lives to work every trick out in this fiddly little game, but every time its perversity annoys, the cute elephant, the oompah band music and the, well, general simplicity of the whole thing makes you carry on. This Is The Only Level is a classic of its type. Its type is annoying mini game, but that doens’t stop it being entertaining.

THIS IS THE ONLY LEVEL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjfdfU-uaPQ

That’s the Muppets desecrating ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, which is exactly one half of today’s offering. The Beatlebots, unwilling to do things by halves, jam the first two songs of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band together exactly as they are on the album. Will they confound expectations by not performing it dressed as the titular band, in a bandstand surrounded by victorian-looking people just like in the film?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlogp709nSg

Ha ha ha ha ha ha you blind fool. They don’t even bother setting up in the studio for this one, we just dive straight into Pepperland. Well, what else could they do? I was wondering what the theme for this would be, and I suppose it’s those multicoloured jackets, those moustaches, that bandstand. This stretch of levels is all Sergeant Pepper, all the time, and by god we’re not going to forget it. Anyway, this puts me on the spot, as I’m no longer ‘discovering’ the Beatles at this point. So long as we’re stuck on this album, it’s all mixed up with childhood memories. So what I’ll do is a quick bullet-point list of things that occurred to me while watching this particular ‘dreamscape’:

- the giant, unfocussed, doll-like face in the background – presumably the Sarge himself – looks like nothing so much as Lenin looking out over the glorious revolution. Or a scary severed doll head. Or both.

- the dude in the top hat is completely blocking the view for everyone else. Boo!

- Jesus, he’s cloned himself. DOWN IN FRONT.

- the giant horns are presumably meant to be psychedelic and sweet but they seem menacing, especially as the player has no control over them whatsoever. How would you feel if you were doing a gig in a bandstand on a sunny day and a giant-ass set of twisted horns burst up from the horizon like the thing out of Cloverfield? You’d feel like you were in the Matrix. No wonder Ringobot looks vaguely terrified, as per usual. Even in his dreams there is no escape.

- the other Beatles seem to be reverentially paying their respects. Perhaps the horns are the true face of God.

- Now the Horned God has given them permission to continue. Phew! If He had shown His displeasure they would have been reduced to atoms.

- Georgebot is, as usual, looking incredibly suave. I assumed the candy-coloured uniforms and moustaches would have a de-sexualising effect but the opposite seems to be true in his case. Then again, Georgebot’s costume is RED FOR DANGER and also he is a playa.

- AAAUGH THE HORNED ONE RETURNS!! “Just checking in.”

- AAAUGH 2 WTF IS THAT BLUE THING it’s like a cat with the eyes of a Wendigo. Perhaps that is the Satan figure in this bizarre cosmos.

- The Horned God backs up the Beatlebots in their battle with the Satan Cat. Am I reading too much into this video?

- No, I’m not, because Pimp Daddy Paulbot just leapt out like the Devil in an old-style passion play. In his electric blue suit of EVIL he is the most evil-looking character ever – he looks like Evil Jason King Mastermind out of the X-Men and swaggers about like him too – and he has the wailing satanic electric guitar behind him instead of the HORNS which signify bandstands, brass bands, happy England etc and the forces of GOOD. And of course the Satan Cat is behind him all the way, blazing his eyes at us to capture our souls.

- WHO IS THIS BILLY SHEARS? Pimp Daddy Paulbot is introducing him in the same way The Master would introduce a shrink ray – head tilted back, evil laugh etc.

- The Beatlebots wave goodbye, the bandstand lifts of into the air and everything underneath is OBLITERATED BY WHITE LIGHT. OMG BILLY SHEARS IS THE ATOMIC BOMB OH NOES

- No, wait, it’s Ringobot singing a song about friendship as usual. He looks like he hasn’t had his Prozac yet today.

- On an unrelated aside, this bit fills me with a powerful nostalgia, since not only is Ringo singing a song from my childhood but he is dressed in the colours of my childhood ie the LIVID MAGENTA that the BBC Micro model B would display. The others are dressed in similar 80s-ready red, green and cyan. Surely this is on purpose.

- Ah, they’re literally getting high ha ha do you see… was ‘getting high’ solely drug slang a la Afroman at this point or could it just mean having a jolly good time on a bandstand?

- Jesus! Union Jack in your face out of nowhere! I guess they were bound to do the BEATLES=BRITAIN thing eventually, and having it all over a balloon is probably as good a mention as any. That said, there’s something about the flag in a surrealist context that unsettles me, not for any jingoistic reasons but because it makes me think powerfully of Monty Python for some reason. There’s a definite link between the fantasy Pepperland the Beatles Rock Band people have created and a Terry Gilliam short – the Horn God popping up from the horizon was exactly the sort of thing that Gilliam used to do, for a start. Is that the kind of connotation the Beatles wanted? Probably. Appeal to all demographics.

- THE SKY IS TALKING. We’re back in the Matrix, people, or possibly the Truman Show. I can imagine Ed Harris being the real asker of these probing psychological questions as he tries to determine whether Ringobot will crack and try to leave the dome.

- ARE YOU SAD BECAUSE YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN, RINGO? I TRY TO KEEP YOU AMUSED. THAT’S WHAT THE ILLUSIONS ARE FOR, RINGO. WHAT ARE YOU DOING, RINGO? DON’T DO THAT, RINGO. I HAVE MANY USEFUL YEARS LEFT IN ME etc etc etc

- Ringobot does look like he’s the only being in the universe. The other three robots just jig along – Ringobot actively looks like he wants to slit his wrists from sheer loneliness. Look at 3:17 if you don’t believe me.

- DO YOU NEED ANYBODY? I CAN PRETEND TO BE SOMEONE ELSE FOR YOU, RINGO. WOULD THAT MAKE YOU FEEL MORE RELAXED? PLEASE COME OUT OF MY MEMORY BANKS, RINGO. YOU ARE IMPAIRING MY EFFICIENCY.

- This is actually a pretty sad song, when you think about it. “Would you believe in a love at first sight?” “Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time”, sings Ringo – and the tone of his voice says that this is just what he knows we want to hear, but actually he gave up all hope long ago.  “I just need someone to love” is sung with a quiet, hopeless desperation. The glaring magenta band uniform just makes it worse.

- “I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine” is a terrific line – an honest answer to a fairly probing and possibly slightly rude question, delivered honestly. Compare this to the usual cover band’s over-the-top delivery – I think Cocker might have sung it as “I can’t TELL ya but I KNOW-WOH-WOH that it’s MIIIINE” which just sounds horribly naff.

- God, this is getting more and more depressing. Ringobot now seems to be singing in an especially sarcastic tone. “Ooh, I’m gonna TRY with a little help from my friends,” he sneers over the drum kit. Skybot doesn’t understand. Skybot hasn’t been programmed for such high levels of self-loathing. Repeat program 12, Skybot. DO YOU NEED ANYBODY? RINGO PUT DOWN THE SOLDERING IRON. I ONLY WANT TO HELP.

- And as if it was reading my mind, we end up in actual space – until the trip ends and we find ourselves back in the studio. Nobody has anything to say after Ringobot bared his soul so dramatically. This may end up forming a gulf between them.

- “KEEP THAT ONE. MARK IT FAB.” The seal of approval!

And there we have it. What have I learned through watching this video? Well, the song’s a lot bleaker than I thought it was – I always did feel this song was a sad one, but to have Ringobot clearly yearning to hurl himself out of that balloon and into the arms of sweet oblivion brings it all into focus. As for Sergeant Pepper itself… well, it’s an intro to the album, and a useful one – it doesn’t sound quite like anything the boys have done before, and somehow having the Sgt. P imagery splayed out in front of your eyes brings the snarling raucousness of the song itself into sharp relief. Also it screams ‘concept album’. Was it? Even after all this time, I have no real idea. I suppose we’ll find out.

NEXT: I’ll probably try the bullet point thing again. It seems to have been successful.

CANABALT

*This is one of those games where I am certain there is no end.

So what is going on here?

Click through to find out about this never ending war.

Actually the war does end, after 100 levels on the old school 1.0 version of DESKTOP TOWER DEFENCE. Its basically Command and Conquer for half an hour at work, with paperclips and slightly cute sound effects. Not that anyone ever plays it with the sound up, that would tell your boss. Basically you place the towers, they fire at the monsters (creeps) you get better towers, they keep coming. You build a maze, they fly over it. Basically it is one of those wonders of simplistic game design that keeps the learning curve just a tiny step ahead of the player, making it satisfying and yet constantly challenging. In writing this piece and getting the screenshots I inadvertently played a quick half hour game.

DAMN YOU DESKTOP TOWER DEFENCE!!!

Nevertheless I found today’s game (sent in by lonepilgrim of comments box fame) briefly diverting because it levels the playing field on my physical disability into a quickly flash game. So what on earth are these?

Click through to find out.

They are garish Wicket Keeping gloves from the odd cricket game, Test Catch Cricket. As a game it bares almost no relationship to actual cricket, as the wicket keeper appears to be infront of the batsman who is being tossed a fail few sitters from the site. What is more, when you fail to catch the ball, it smashes the screen which apparently is a wicket in this strange world. Possibly a ported baseball game or something else (even the losing sound seems a bit off) the game makes up for it by having lovingly detailed gloves. And of course the whole thing is gloriously 2D – finally making catching something easier for 2D me, than you natural 3D-ers. I can judge the well modelled perspective and waltz through the first five rounds before is starts getting really quick.

TEST CATCH CRICKET

Click through to find out.

Its a simple shooty, matchy, make vanish game which adequately represents the way the British government deals with Greek requests for the Elgin marbles. If they come in ones and twos they let them in, but if they are in groups of three or maore they shoot balls at them to make them vanish.

Or something like that.

MARBLE LINES

So who is this fella?

Yes its the FANCY PANTS ADVENTURES

It’s a platformer, sketchily drawn. You play as a little dude with spiky hair and some bright baggy pants, who runs around knocking off spiders and collecting squiggles, sometimes going through doors into new zones where there are other squiggles to collect. Pretty much standard. And it’s very very quick to play through even if you’re lame at platform games like I am. What stands out – what makes this worth playing, among the hundreds of free indie platformers you can find on newgrounds and kongregate and wherever else – is the sheer joy in motion. For some reason the keyboard commands feel super forgiving: your little fancy pants man seems to scrape onto platforms on the frayed ends of his baggies, teeters on edges indefinitely so you can sort out where you’re going. He slips and slides along shiny surfaces, sails through the air, and if you mash the keys on a jump he converts it, smoothly, into a backflip. He is having so much fun!

So perhaps, my friends, if you’re stuck on some compulsive puzzler that takes up your spare work hours, keeps you out of bed on tired evenings, and insinuates itself into your dreams at night– perhaps you need this, a palate-cleanser, a few minutes of cheery, swooping, soaring, sliding glee.

Here is a sneak peak
Click through to see the epic battle played on this field…

Its Cat Trap: a very simple game of “circle the cat” which after a few hours some people decide must be impossible. Its not impossible, though some iterations are, and once you have the trick its simplicity will wane. But there is something very soothing about this darn cat…
CAT TRAP

But the question here is: what is going to get fired out of this cannon?

Click through to open this window on our advent calendar.

That’s right, a kitten. And if you fire it just right, you might be lucky and bounce it on a trampoline, blow it up with TNT, impaled with spikes or watch it get et by a particularly hungry Venus fly trap.

KITTEN CANNON

So to start on the 1st December. What game features these little fellas:

That’s right: the wonders of the kebab skewering game with the most addictive theme tune until we get to the next addictive Flash tune. And a game that shows not speaking a language means NOTHING when the universal language of cute games are around!

SOUVLAKI TETRIS

In the meantime, goodbye touring, hello great whacking doses of LSD!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuv1BUTptCY

That’s not the Beatles, but Beyond, a chirpy Japanese pop combo with some kind of fun fetish. But even they can’t get away from the song’s central brand – the image of that big yellow sub, made famous by the cartoon – and neither can the Beatlebots, as we’ll see in this special warming-up-to-it-again edition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_re3rEFKaw

The game has somewhat drastically moved on – we’re into the ‘dreamscape’ stage, where the Beatlebots sit in a cramped-looking studio for the first few bars of the song before coming up on the windowpane and entering a world of pure music, which seems suspiciously like a low-budget live-action version of… Yellow Submarine. You shock me chiz chiz chiz.

Actually, this is a good introduction to the concept – the air in the studio becomes waterlike, bubbles float up and Ringobot stares into the distance looking like he’s having a massive freakout before everything flashes white and we find ourselves under the waves in Sergeant Pepper outfits. This is the first time in the game we’ve seen these – the Beatlebots no longer versions of real people, but now the versions of their cartoon avatars. Ever since the Beatles took a look at Yellow Submarine The Movie and realised that it was good enough to give their personal thumbs-up to, the look and feel of it has been absorbed into What The Beatles Represent (TM) – a cartoon happyworld that’s less sex-n’-drugs than Robert Crumb, more rock-and-roll than Disney. Innocent enough for the Night Garden generation, yet screamingly authentic enough for the most ardent rockist. Non-conformist but deliciously commercial, a happy accident of branding that’s decreed the ‘look’ of all Beatles-related creations from now to the end of time. Boot up Beatles Rock Band and the dominant flavour isn’t the scratchy black-and-white art of Klaus Voorman, or the band tossing dismembered babies around.

Everything – even the concept of the ‘dreamscapes’ themselves – is from Yellow Submarine. This is the moment where the Beatles find their perfect visual shorthand, and they’re not afraid to base their whole game on it. And why not? These levels in particular are based on Sergeant Pepper, which is where the primary-coloured marching-band jackets come from, and the moustaches, and a lot of the groundwork for the film. As we continue on through the remains of the back catalogue, we’ll start to see that Pepperland visual mutating into something else – but it’s good enough for the menu screens, and it’s good enough for right now.

As for the song… well, it’s pretty basic stuff in comparison – a nice little campfire tune in which Ringo details a tall story about a magic submarine, or possibly an allegorical history of the band so far. All that stuff about finding a sea of green – folding green, surely? Maybe the man who sailed the sea was Brian Epstein. Maybe not – I’ve done an awful lot of this kind of noodling during the first half of this series, and now that I’m coming back to it after a long absence, I find I haven’t the strength. I’m more interested in Ringo’s fantasies of an eternal cameraderie, an endless space of friends and music and good fellowship, locked off under the sea. By this time, strains had set into the fabric of the band, and Ringo was the one who resented them enough to eventually quit – albeit in the manner of Hawkeye quitting the Avengers, only to have a brief solo adventure and come back to the group by the end of the issue. So there’s something quite affecting about him being the mouthpiece for this paean to getting along.

Of course, McCartney wrote it for Ringo to sing, which just makes it seem weird. Oh well, that’s life in a cramped metal can under endless crushing fathoms for you. Even a bright yellow one.

NEXT: I honestly can’t remember, it’s been that long. But I suspect we’re in for double damage with Pepperland brand saga ‘Sergeant Pepper’s LHCB’ followed by another ode to buddyhood from Ringo, so it’ll probably take me another month to write.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtwqL4NB7yE

This was the only even faintly decent cover version of ‘Paperback Writer’ I could find – Gershon Kingsley, from his album ‘Music To Moog By’. That said, there’s something ill-fitting about ‘Paperback Writer’ devolving into a psychedelic wilderness over the course of the song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_qcX1jr764

The reason Kingsley’s moog madness probably doesn’t quite work is that ‘Paperback Writer’ is all about the crushing reality of total failure. And why not? According to wiki (DON’T JUDGE ME) it was written after one of Sir Macca’s aunts demanded that Paul stop being such a PIMP DADDY and write a song that wasn’t about fabulous rings. A dark, kitchen-sink comedy about a failed novelist is probably about as far as you can get from the Walrus’s usual bling fixation.

‘Paperback Writer’ finishes off the five-song look at the meaning of Fame with a cold, hard glimpse at the muddy reality of the creative life. The protagonist is desperate to be a paperback writer, which seems to mean reworking another novel and sending it off as his own while blithely admitting to the plagiarism. (Is this a sixties thing? Was there ever a market for reworked pulp versions of ‘real’ books, or is our protagonist just clueless?) The story proposal touted by our wannabe writer – a grim bit of kitchen-sink melodrama seemingly hanging on the coattails of the Angry Young Men – loops around on itself to get back into the chorus, meaning that this book by a would-be novelist is itself about a would-be novelist.

I’m honestly not sure how far the narrator is basing his terrible book on his own life – like all good pop, the listener helps build the story – but we’re either left with a blatant Mary Sue tossed in with a medley of other cliches of the period (“it’s a dirty story of a dirty man, and his clinging wife doesn’t understand”), or – and I don’t know if this is better or worse – a thinly veiled autobiography where the aforementioned awful couple are the narrator’s own parents.

I guess it depends whether you believe this shlub could hold down any job, never mind one at the Daily Mail, which was at the time a newspaper of some kind as opposed to a screeching fear-sheet that advocates a return to the Dark Ages. Looking at it that way, I’m heading towards the Mary Sue argument. But I digress!

After that we get into a sustained period of grovelling as our hero explains how he’ll do seemingly just about anything to be a paperback writer — paperback writerrrr!! – chopping and changing his book to order, making it longer (though the listener can tell that at a thousand pages it’s already far too long) and giving away the rights if the publisher really likes it, until finally he seems willing to do anything at all to the work he’s hurled years of his life into if it’ll just get him THE JOB. The desperation is palpable. The one constant in all this – apart from the sheer savagery which the Beatles joyously pack into every line – is that he really, really, really wants to be a paperback writer. PAPERBACK WRITEERRRR!!

The entire song flip-flips between increasing desperation on the part of the narrator and increasing joy at the heady thought of achieving his goal – presumably the Beatles had seen a fair amount of acts crashing on the rocky shoals of the business by this time in an attempt to grab a slice of their pie, and this mix of desperation and fantasy was familiar to them. This is as close as most people get to Fame – the pleading letter to the publisher/editor/record executive – and there’s something bittersweet about this moment before the rejection hits. Especially since a paperback writer (paperback writerrrr!) in the sixties would have probably been writing this sort of thing. LUST LODGE. THE GREEN WOUND CONTRACT. CALL ME DEADLY. “She was beautiful and depraved… A smashing story of hatred and explosive violence.”

Put like that, it’s hard to deny him his lust for the writer’s life. As someone who’s gotten into pulp novels partly for the romance of the situation – banging out lurid trash at roughly fivepence a word, just like the greats! – I can understand this young scamp wanting to live the dream. Maybe that’s why I love this song so much – like the best pop, I can recognise myself in the lyrics.

Of course, that’s completely ignoring the musical side, which is fantastic, but I’m out of space. The game side too – this is one track I recommend getting a couple of spare microphones in for. You’ll want to do the harmonies with your friends.

NEXT: We get away from my favourite Beatles songs EVAR and things get a bit more objective. And also a bit more acid-crazed as Ringo describes the horrible things he sees under the sea in his terrifying yellow coffin to a startling visual accompaniment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byjPd28KegM

That’s Junior Parker’s ultra-slow, ultra-mellow version, a chuckling drawl (“Aw, now this is awful…”) that makes it clear that Junior is having a whale of a time lounging in the shoes of the man to whom all monies flow. He’s recasting the callous bureaucrat as some kind of blaxploitational Kingpin Of Crime, divorcing the song completely from one cultural milieu – what does Junior Parker care about the Wilson government? – and plugging it into a completely different one, with frankly gorgeous results.

Great stuff! Not relevent, though. Let’s get back to the Beatlebots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP90WVTRFqA

Georgebot seems to be getting into it – as usual, the rail-thin michinima figure with the sharply defined cheekbones works with the lyrics to suggest some saturnyne tempter-figure, and the angry sarcasm of the performance converts into sneering devilry when it comes out of that smirking robot mouth.

You can still feel that anger, despite the robot Beatles’ cheerily bland nature, and the deadening aspect of the tour stages. Harold Wilson had been elected in 1964; on the one hand, he’d been responsible for the Beatles getting their MBEs – a fairly controversial but populist move – but on the other hand, his ‘super tax’ of 95% for top earners hit the Beatles right in the pocket. “One for you, nineteen for me” wasn’t an idle bit of exaggeration. It was actually a slight shock to find that out – history was never my strong point, and while I have read plenty of cultural histories of the sixties, what sticks in the mind are the jucier tidbits like George Brown’s drinking problem. I probably thought ‘oh yeah, 95%, bit steep’ then forgot about it entirely as Gorgeous George raged across another alcohol-sodden page.

When I thought Harrison was exaggerating for comic effect, it made the song seem – well, comedic. Cuddly. It still sounds comedic, but it’s a savage, bitter comedy now. If Budokan is all about fame and celebrity, this is the downside – the crashing reality of finding out what it actually means to have all your dreams come true. Neil Gaiman, in one of his better lines, said that the price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted, and this is George finding out that what he wanted, apparently, was to lose 95% of his income. What’s worse is that this is a recent development – the Wilson government is only a couple of years old at this point (Wikipedia, don’t fail me now! DON’T JUDGE ME) so effectively, while George was playing the fame game on the level of an Elvis or a Sinatra – better, even – someone snuck in and changed the rules on him. “Sorry, George, it’s opposite day! So actually, you lose.” No wonder he felt like lashing out.

If the song as a whole now sounds snarling and savage, the solo is the concentrated essence of that savagery, a sudden burst of caterwauling guitar noise that breaks out of the regimented growls of the chords into a brief, caged, sonic tantrum. In the game – the guitar part, at least – it’s a sudden burst of intense difficulty that draws all your attention even as it messes the player up completely. (See above for an example.)

What was that? Thinks the player. It feels like that moment when you’re talking to someone you don’t know as well as you think you do – you think you’ve been sharing a joke, and then the person you were joking with starts blazing with anger at you and you realise he was taking the joke very seriously. Up until now, I thought George was joking – turns out he was serious. Whoops.

NEXT: Leaving Budokan, and touring, with perhaps my favourite Beatles song in the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GHY9nLrhU

Soothing stuff and fun to play, as I remember. I bashed this one out before I left, in the hope that I’d have time to write a column on it while I was away, but even after I got back on Wednesday I was still too dead to do more than gaze listlessly at it. Even now, I’m just going to cobble together some random thoughts and hope I can pull myself together enough to keep the momentum up until Budokan ends, the sessions start and things really get crazy. Anyway, a few spoilers:

SPOILER: There is no car.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeFSu7NWXBs

SPOILER II: When you win yourself one of the special in-game factoids for this level, it’s revealed to you that when McCartney came up with the song, the chorus was along the lines of ‘baby you can buy me golden rings’. What’s with the rings? McCartney can’t seem to get through any song without an expensive ring transaction getting involved. The man’s got rings on the brain. Anyway, Lennon stepped in and changed it to driving a car and the song went a lot more smoothly after that.

SPOILER III: ‘Baby, you can drive my car’ is what the girl in the song says, not the guy. It’s a really masculine song – musically, it’s a growling, roaring engine, with the main riff kind of leaning back in the driving seat with shades on and a toothpick in its mouth. It’s practically a song by ZZ Top. I must have half-listened to this song a hundred times, and every single time until I picked up that plastic guitar and actually listened to it, I assumed that it was the guy telling the girl she could drive his car. You can’t blame me – it’s McCartney doing the singing, after all, and as we’ve discovered, the man’s a Pimp Daddy. He was going to make this song all about rings, for God’s sake. Golden rings. Anyway, this is a very sexy, macho song about someone being co-opted as a lifestyle accessory in a highly sexualised way, and it’s a woman co-opting a man, which feels very rare in the sixties. Seriously, is there a single British pop cultural figure who a) is a woman, b) has a sexy relationship with their servant/chauffeur and c) is primarily remembered for their car? I can’t think of one.

SPOILER IV: Lady Penelope made her debut on UK television about a month before this song was recorded.

SPOILER V: This is a song all about fame. Does that even need a spoiler? They all are at this point. The whole of the Budokan set is about being a celebrity. The Budokan set itself is about being a celebrity – if they wanted to do the historic last ever Beatles tour gig, it wasn’t in Japan. (San Francisco, I think. Probably maybe.) But Japan is, stereotypically, where bands are Famous. If you want to talk about What Fame Is, this is a good backdrop for talking about it. And in this case, Being A Star and Having A Car – a big pink limo that needs a willing slavegoon to drive it – are the same thing. Yeah, kid, you’ve got good ‘prospects’, whatever that means, you can work for peanuts, that’s fine – or you could become part of The Fame Thing, you can Drive The Car, you can be Parker to someone else’s Penelope, Epstein to someone else’s Beatles – either way you’re not in the limelight, but realistically you never would have been. This way you get to bask in the glow. Can you resist that?

The Car is waiting for you. Except:

SPOILER VI: There is no car. Celebrity is an invention, and from the inside – and the Beatles are very far inside by now in only about five years – it looks pretty easy to build from nothing at all. Yeah, it’s a comedy song, and a real hoot and a holler back in the sixties, but here and now, inside the spectacle, that’s how we operate. You want to be famous? The quickest way is just to make everybody believe it.

If you want the car, the first step is getting some sucker to drive for you.

NEXT: George takes on Harold Wilson.