Cathode Ray Thread
November 22, 2022 7:51 AM Subscribe
Marine, aka moonovermarine, is a French embroidery artist much of whose work adapts imagery from games, movies, and other cultural wells. Their current project: a series of scenes from the monochrome ZX Spectrum game "Sentinel".
This is amazing!
Pretty much every ZX Spectrum game was monochrome, if you were drawing arbitrary lines and shapes. You could have two colours per character square, or you got objects changing colour when they clashed.
Sentinel remains I game that gives me nightmares. It's a very tense game: you have to work out a strategy to end up higher than the Sentinel, all the while avoiding its gaze. It's pretty amazing that Geoff Crammond wrote most of these games for a 32 K BBC Micro, and all of the ports had more memory to play with. Tim Follin's 1-bit polyphonic score for Sentinel on the Spectrum is also incredible.
posted by scruss at 9:09 AM on November 22, 2022 [5 favorites]
Pretty much every ZX Spectrum game was monochrome, if you were drawing arbitrary lines and shapes. You could have two colours per character square, or you got objects changing colour when they clashed.
Sentinel remains I game that gives me nightmares. It's a very tense game: you have to work out a strategy to end up higher than the Sentinel, all the while avoiding its gaze. It's pretty amazing that Geoff Crammond wrote most of these games for a 32 K BBC Micro, and all of the ports had more memory to play with. Tim Follin's 1-bit polyphonic score for Sentinel on the Spectrum is also incredible.
posted by scruss at 9:09 AM on November 22, 2022 [5 favorites]
Oh man, I had this game for the Atari ST and I hated it! But these renderings in wool are incredible.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:30 AM on November 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:30 AM on November 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
Weaves of Mefi, am I imagining that these are technically doable as tapestry?
posted by clew at 10:05 AM on November 22, 2022
posted by clew at 10:05 AM on November 22, 2022
If you feel like playing the Spectrum version there is a web emulator for The Sentinel. Click file-> search games, The Sentinel, and start with landscape 0000.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:19 AM on November 22, 2022
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:19 AM on November 22, 2022
These are great, cortex!
clew- you could do them in tapestry but I think it would go better with a weft inlay like Theo Moorman technique (pdf explanation). (E.g. Molly McLaughlin’s work as a contemporary example, or Theo Moorman’s own work.
posted by janell at 10:37 AM on November 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
clew- you could do them in tapestry but I think it would go better with a weft inlay like Theo Moorman technique (pdf explanation). (E.g. Molly McLaughlin’s work as a contemporary example, or Theo Moorman’s own work.
posted by janell at 10:37 AM on November 22, 2022 [2 favorites]
The different angles of hatching lines are the bit that would be hard to do without distortion in normal tapestry weaving.
posted by janell at 10:41 AM on November 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by janell at 10:41 AM on November 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
Hey I played that game as a kid, it was a total mystery, I never understood what I was supposed to do.
posted by SageLeVoid at 1:56 PM on November 22, 2022
posted by SageLeVoid at 1:56 PM on November 22, 2022
Scenes from the Return of the Obra Dinn could be pretty cool embroidered.
Or. Um. Trapestraphized?
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:01 PM on November 22, 2022
Or. Um. Trapestraphized?
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:01 PM on November 22, 2022
Terrifying, tense game makes for distinctive embroidery!
SageLeVoid, you had to absorb the sentinel on each level you could only absorb things you looked down on, so you constantly had to find higher ground. You did this by absorbing trees and boulders, then creating boulder piles onto which you could teleport yourself.
So much of the aesthetic of this game came from the limitations of the hardware and it was a perfect fusion. It was slow; you could pan around but not move in real-time. The models were intrinsically simple and abstracted, barely recognisable even as sculptures. The sound - terrifying! The grinding as the Sentinel slowly rotated to catch you in its gaze, killing you, a thud every few seconds acting as a stopwatch of trauma. I still hear the five musical notes that opened a level.
Nothing remotely like it. Amazing, pure, abstract entertainment that scared the bejesus out of my c64-toting twelve year old self, and so unexpected to see these crossing media.
posted by davemee at 1:23 AM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
SageLeVoid, you had to absorb the sentinel on each level you could only absorb things you looked down on, so you constantly had to find higher ground. You did this by absorbing trees and boulders, then creating boulder piles onto which you could teleport yourself.
So much of the aesthetic of this game came from the limitations of the hardware and it was a perfect fusion. It was slow; you could pan around but not move in real-time. The models were intrinsically simple and abstracted, barely recognisable even as sculptures. The sound - terrifying! The grinding as the Sentinel slowly rotated to catch you in its gaze, killing you, a thud every few seconds acting as a stopwatch of trauma. I still hear the five musical notes that opened a level.
Nothing remotely like it. Amazing, pure, abstract entertainment that scared the bejesus out of my c64-toting twelve year old self, and so unexpected to see these crossing media.
posted by davemee at 1:23 AM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]
« Older How the Slow Cooker Changed the World | Eurovision rule changes: from 2023, Americans can... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by zsazsa at 7:59 AM on November 22, 2022 [1 favorite]