#missing media

[by-gray]

the great and worst thing about being a season 3 hartnell who fan is that any fanfiction you write about it exists more than the actual season does.

[secretsnowclub]

I found a weird old Gamecube survival horror game??? Can you help??

I’ve recently started collecting older video games, specifically all the survival horror games that I was too afraid to play as a kid. Now that I’m older and have a salaried job, it’s nice to be able to court that younger version of me and buy all the stuff my family couldn’t afford. Plus the games are fun. Everything from Resident Evil to Rule of Rose, Fatal Frame to Parasite Eve. I love being scared and these games work their hardest to do it and sometimes succeed.

Before I play them, I like to go on youtube and watch retrospectives, reviews, and old ads for them, so I can sort of get settled into the headspace and learn about the creation of them. But there’s one that I’ve stumbled on that I’m unable to find anything about. Almost like it came out of nowhere.

I found this game at a used game, movie, and music store just off the red line in Chicago. It’s called Soul Cemetery for the Gamecube. A survival horror game about a detective returning to their hometown to investigate the mysterious death of her father. It’s very obviously inspired by Resident Evil, featuring the tank controls, fixed camera angles, and similar graphics, not to mention the focus on zombies which wander the town. There’s also some Silent Hill influence with a heavy use of snow (instead of fog) and ambient music throughout. 

It seemed like a very generic sort of game after the opening cinematic and wandering around the opening area, but then it started to reveal itself as something more. The controls were straight forward but also had some interesting things about them. You aim and shoot like in RE, but there’s also a button to “hum,” which makes the detective slow her run to a walk and hum a tune, which changes with each area and sometimes changes within each area depending on exactly where you stand. 

There’s also a dedicated “smoke” button, which plays a unique (albeit short) cutscene where the detective smokes a cigarette and says a little something about the area, or what just happened. It almost feels like the journal mechanic that games like Life is Strange have, where the character recaps the last chapter in their own words, only you get to control when it happens and how often. 

Both of these things kinda took me off guard and drew me into the game in a way I didn’t expect. There are no save rooms or safe rooms like in a lot of survival horror games, so these two things were like getting a break for the spooky scary stuff whenever I needed it, while also getting to hear the thoughts of the character. 

This got kinda freaky when the detective started saying things about me during these moments. The game must read your memory card and system data or something because the further I got into the game, whenever she’d smoke she’d say stuff to me about how late I was up, or about the weather (possibly reading the month??? Idk if Gamecubes have location data). In the light of day these things aren’t that scary ig, but after getting killed by zombies after playing till 4 a.m. it was definitely giving me goosebumps.

It was extra creepy when the detective would do these things without being prompted. The further I got into the game, the more she would indulge in humming or smoking without me pressing the buttons. At first I thought maybe my hand slipped, but no, it’s almost like she has a mind of her own. And these self-indulgent moments were often the scariest.

I played through the entire thing in one sitting, it was maybe 5-6 hours. There were some obvious levels included in a lot of survival horror games, like a spooky motel with zombies, a dark forest with this weird moon spirit creature who is like the main bad guy of the game, and an empty town center where there’s a boss battle. About halfway through, the detective finds herself at her childhood home and that’s when shit really started to freak me out. I don’t know how to explain it other than her house had the same layout as mine? Maybe it’s just a coincidence because the game takes place in an unnamed midwest town, and maybe the houses here are just copy-pasted anyways. But it was spooky. Her living room was my living room, her bedroom was mine, the kitchen was mine. Even the spooky stairway into the basement was in the same place. 

Back in her parents room, her mom is a zombie. There’s no music. Just the looped MP3 of the zombie groans. Whenever you press the button to aim, the detective would hesitate and tell me not to do it. It was only after the mom had attacked and killed me once that I could actually return to the room and shoot the zombie. Immediately after, the detective took control and started humming this really broken, solemn tune. It felt so recognizable but I can’t figure it out. I did my best to record it here:

Visit Original Link

It’s been stuck in my head ever since.

After the run in with the mom zombie, the detective continues humming that tune, allowing me to walk slowly through the house. I returned to her bedroom and was able to “interact” with her childhood bed. The detective climbs in, the humming breaking up more and more until she falls asleep.

There’s a few esoteric and surreal images that flash on the screen. I didn’t expect them, so I couldn’t take pictures, and when I went and played through the game again, this entire section didn’t happen. Idk if it’s just like the order of events was different, or if it was how I killed the mom or how I explore after? Idk. But the images were these brutal close-ups of the mom zombie. Like, real photos, not just rendered. There were startling, and even if I can’t get them to pop up again, I feel like they’re still fresh in my mind.

The detective wakes up in her childhood bedroom after a second and is different. She’s a child. Her character model is smaller, she doesn't have her gun, and her entire control scheme is different. Most of the buttons are replaced with the “hum” thing, which has her doing that same haunting hum from before. As a child, she can still wander around the rest of the town, and it’s still overrun with zombies, now there’s just noway for her to defend herself.

I felt kind of stuck and frustrated with this as the zombies kept killing me and I didn’t like hearing the MP3 child scream over and over again, so eventually I turned the Gamecube off and on, and when the game loaded up, the detective woke up in her childhood bed as an adult, like none of that stuff happened. I was able to continue the game but was unable to beat the final boss. I think there was something I had to do as a child to be able to? But I don’t know. The game was very confusing at that point and, like I said, when I tried to replay it, the child-thing didn’t even happen. 

I think if the game has a guide or even just, like, any information online I could have made sense of it. It’s a weird take on survival horror that really did get under my skin, I just wish I could finish it, or at least figure out what some of the weird stuff in it was doing or trying to do. If you played this game when you were younger, were there any guides you followed? Or do you remember anything? The only thing I was able to find was a shitty scan of the game manual, but even that I’m having a hard time deciphering…

Any help is appreciated!

[c00and]

I just remembered an old MMD web series I used to be obsessed with and I really want to find it again. If anyone knows anything, please reach out!

It was a mecha series, subbed in English with no dubs. The main character was the Vocaloid Len if I remember correctly. Miku was also super important. The main Crypton-Loids were pilots of Giant Mecha and were fighting Evangelion-Like Angel creatures. I believe Miku(????) went missing before the start of the story and a good chunk of it was spent finding Miku. I remember Meiko, in classic early Vocaloid fashion, was an alcoholic and lived with Kaito, who was the most series character. Fake-Loids like Neru and Haku showed up occasionally too, and Neru was shipped heavily with Len. It was animated in MikuMikuDance and used some of the earliest models on the platform.

I have extremely fond memories of this web series so I hope I can see it again someday. Thanks!

[lookingforvideo]

Searching for performance art

Hi! This is my first post and is going to be my main post where I explain what I’m looking for but I will definitely post a short version

So:

I remember a video of a play where a few “military officials“ were in front of the stage while a doctor was experimenting on a patient. The all reacted a different way to the sounds from the doctor, like one was crying, one was ignoring it and they would kind of dancing/sway with the noises? Towards the end of it all a doctor came out of the patients stomach. So it was an art performance, sort of like the blue man group and I’m thinking it was supposed to be about Unit 731, where Japanese soldiers would experiment on Chinese soldiers and even their own military. Could completely be a different event though, I just know it’s referencing something. Plus it was completely live, like a ?host? talked to the “surgeon”. I doubt this was a performance in English. I want to say Japan because of their history but it was definitely around Asia. It didn’t took too old, I would be willing to say the 2000s, maybe even early 2010s. Thanks for reading all this, any help is welcomed!

[littlewalken]

I am trying to find the name of a comedy show that aired around 1990 that had an on going bit where Barbie and Ken dolls, or knock offs, were used in stop motion animation. It was not a children's show.

The bits were only a few minutes long, and the general title could have been something along the lines of 'Ever Expanding World/Universe' that made sense for it being dolls.

One bit I distinctly remember was about the main guy getting involved with a bank robbery because his pregnant wife needed money or something. One of the robber dolls was Jordan of NKOTB so it really stuck with me. I think when the baby was finally born it was an oversized, for the parent dolls, baby doll.

It probably aired on national broadcast television, we didn't have cable, but we did have MTV 1992-1994.

The NKOTB dolls came out in 1990 so it couldn't have been made before then.

I watched The Edge and Guys Next Door, Haywire is another candidate. I know I saw a handful of Liquid Television episodes but it's not on any I recorded. I don't think it was on the Ben Stiller show, I don't know if it was on Pirate TV on MTV.

It's not Winter Steel, Action League Now or Robot Chicken. It wasn't on The Idiot Box or MTV Smells Funny. It's not the bit from Groove Tube or The Most Popular Girls.

*Update 1- It's not The Edge or GND.

[some-oc-questions]

Which oc loves cursed or missing media? Maybe they research it in their spare time?

[selfieignite]

Anyone know if there's a copy of this video? It's not available anymore.

[x]

[annoyingclownery]

I'm going insane trying to find this book I read as a kid with no luck. It was aimed at probably 8-12 year olds, it followed a young girl from historical England named either Elizabeth or Mary (I think she was implied to be either a young Elizabeth I or Mary of Scots) who had contracted some kind of disease, maybe scarlet fever or pneumonia? The story starts with her sick in bed and she's trying to fall asleep when a beam of light hits her across the face between the canopy of her bed, and suddenly she's in modern day (1990s/2000s) North America. She makes friends with a modern girl her age, and I distinctly remember the main character not understanding that the other girl went by a name that wasn't her "baptismal name" because she went by a nickname, but I can't remember what that name was. The modern girl's father took care of Mary(?) and got her medical care, which I remember being 2 or 3 weeks of antibiotics. The mc spends a long time wanting desperately to go home, but just as she begins to adjust to modern life, she's laying in a barn (I think) with the other girl and the light hits her face in the same way as at the start of the story. She wakes up back in her canopy bed, wearing all the same clothes she was before, except for the muddy tennis shoes she was wearing in the modern world, and the story ends with someone (a nurse or a maid or something similar) commenting on how Mary is "suddenly" better. Please god help me find this book I've been searching for at least an hour and have found NOTHING