“I felt like destroying something beautiful” – Jack, “Fight Club”
And boy did I! If there has been one moment in my life that made me feel truly a man, as close to Hemingway as i’ll ever get, it was when I slayed my first bull in Coreland/Sega’s “Bull Fight”. In preparation for this event I went out and bought a fifth of Old Crow whiskey and a very large cigar. I poured myself triples upon triples and dipped the sucking end of the cigar into the fuming, brown liquid. I tried to tap into Papa as much as possible before playing “Bull Fight”. I stood outside and watched the sun descend below the horizon, through the bottom of my drinking glass. I asked myself “What is true? What is brave?” and smashed my glass against the wall. I belly laughed while biting the end of my enormous cigar. I must have made my way inside, because I woke up on my couch an hour later with ashes in my beard, whiskey sweats and a hunger for Bull blood.
“Bull Fight” is an odd game for a few reasons: 1) It’s in top down format, which is usually only seen in fantasy games such as The Legend of Zelda, Gauntlet, and Ultima. 2) The game play is deceptively simple. As the Torero, you stand in the middle of the arena, waving your red cape. The bull moves around and runs in your direction, and once it comes close enough to you, you stab it as many times as you can before it dies in a puddle of blood. At other times, up to two more bulls enter the arena to trample your body, then gore your corpse and fling you out of the arena. That is the entire game.
I managed to make it to level 2 several times, but for some reason my desire to draw the blood of my hoofed enemies waned, leaving me waiting for the beast’s horns to find my lower G.I. While researching the subject of bull fighting, I found that the activity isn’t viewed as a sport, but rather as performance art. At this point I started weighing the morality and ethics of art, as well as what constitutes the designation of either art or sport. If something beautiful must die to create art, is it ever worth the cost of the life? And if it is worth the cost, is all life up for grabs? Surely it is easier to take the life of a tree to craft a wooden sculpture, than it is to use a cows hide to craft an avant garde fashion masterpiece. If this idea of the act as “Art”, would the world think differently about the practice of bull killing? Could we ever consider Nascar as performance art, since I don’t think of it as a sport. Would it be more artistic if on the final lap, the lead car collided with a bull at 200 miles per hour?
In the end, I found the game to be too simplistic to enjoy for much longer than a few minutes and a few funny deaths. For 1984 standards, the graphics are nice and colorful, except for the shitty brown floor of the arena. The sound that was produced through the emulation was nothing more than discordant tones, broken apart by clicks and pops. This schism between visual and audio quality speaks to the dichotomy of the pleasure derived by living the life of Hemingway and the deep emptiness derived by living the life of Hemingway.
I give this game one double barreled shotgun and one depressed author seeking truth and bravery out of ten. So that’s, uh, 3 outta 10 I guess.
Dan
Retro Arcade Review, because the original name was a dumb joke. 