The figure lies in the bathtub in cigarette smoke, it seems that the air itself is viscous and sticky as the ex-contents of a dozen empty bottles of whiskey and other booze, which had enough royalties from the last case of missing family valuables. A phone call is heard, and a worried woman's voice is heard...

Textbook exposition when imagining a noir detective. Except for one detail, the detective in the suit, tie and beige raincoat is a raccoon.

The theme of the issue is noir games with anthropomorphic characters...

Backbone

Immediately you can hear at what high level is the music of the game. In terms of gameplay, we want to note that the game began its way with crowdfunding, and the demo version to the company showed a far cry from what was then made. Players who were waiting for the promised, of course, were upset. But if you go through the game without expectations, it falls in love immediately. 

Personally, I liked that the choices in the dialogues really leads to variations and even these decisions will affect the dialogues with other characters in other locations, but at the same time, it will not affect the flow of the game and the ending. Which in this case is a good thing because the story is told as piercing  as possible.

Chicken Police - Paint it Red!

Two Cocks walk into a bar and say: "Two whiskeys, kid! And no horsing around."

No joke! 

This is a very real scene from another game called 'Chicken Police - Paint it Red'. The preceding song is from the original soundtrack.In contrast to BACKBONE, the sound design here is complemented by a savory voice acting. The whole game is a fun parody of a noir detective, in some places the animals with human hands look creepy, but you quickly get used to it.  

Under the black-and-white feathers of Chicken Police hides the classic pixel-hunting with the inclusions of puzzles and mini-games, which all together only slightly shade the speeding locomotive of the viscous noir plot and the whole zoo of actors, to the dramatic denouement. In the middle of the action is a typical duet of two typical cops bogged down in crime of an eternally dormant metropolis, and, of course, a femme fatale as the axis along which the events and characters rotate. Pretty boring and predictable? But only on the surface, like any noir plot of the middle of the last century.

Chicken Police: Paint it Red is a unique project, made by true fans of the noir genre, so it is a crime to miss it. And by the claims of the gameplay it is easy to understand that it is not really a game, but rather a game movie, which does not make Chicken Police worse, just expect it to be a 100% refined narrative experience.

BLACKSAD - Under the Skin

It is an adaptation of the Spanish comic series Blacksad published in 2000 by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido. The game follows John Blacksad as he investigates the suspicious death of a boxing club owner.

Blacksad forgoes a point-and-click interface in favor of direct character control. Gameplay is choice-based, and the player's actions alter the player character's alignment with other characters in the world.

The direction of the story changes based on the player's decisions. During investigations, John Blacksad's heightened feline senses allow the player to slow down time and perceive visual clues in their surroundings, which are then added to the player's clue index. From here, the player may combine clues to form conclusions, both to progress the main story and to solve optional side-quests.

In spite of the release flaws and point & click controls, the player's emotions run wild and fast during the passage. The empathy and awareness of what scoundrels the detective has come up against reaches the very heart.

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It's Not Found Podcast. The podcast delves into an alternate past where neon lights illuminate a dark room filled with arcade machines with lamp screens meanwhile outside the window, it rains, and it's always twilight. We'll be talking music, movies and computer networks. Charge your device and let's go...

Hotline Miami

A few days before Hotline Miami's release, the developers set up a phone line in Miami where anyone could leave their own voice message. Some of these messages were used in the game's official trailer, created a few days after its release. At the beginning of each stage, the protagonist wakes up in his apartment and listens to coded messages sent to his answering machine. Each message asks the protagonist to do a certain, seemingly routine job at a specified location. The messages are a metaphor for the actual task of killing everyone at the address mentioned in the message. Before the mission begins, the hero is asked to wear one of a variety of animal masks - each one giving the player certain characteristics, making the gameplay easier or harder. The main protagonist makes the transition between stages by getting into an animated model of a futuristic car, combining several cars from real life. Most of all, it looks like DMC-12. In the game, it is called Acado GT.

Speaking of the car that became the symbol of the retro DMC-12, a factory was built on the outskirts of Belfast in Northern Ireland. Construction began in October 1978, and although DMC-12 production was expected to begin in 1979, it was delayed until early 1981. By then, the unemployment rate in Northern Ireland was high, and the locals were excited about the new jobs. Workers were inexperienced, and it took a lot of effort to improve the quality of the cars. Bonuses and a supply of the best available equipment allowed for some improvement in quality by 1982. The accumulated debts and lost credibility during the period of poor assembly led to bankruptcy. The quality of the finished cars was questionable because they were made in a hurry, resulting in numerous complaints from customers and leading to many returns.

Yes, also thanks to the movie "Back to the Future".

Back to the Future is also undoubtedly a hallmark of its time. But it too might not have been as we know it now. For the first five weeks, the role of Marty was played by Eric Stoltz. Since Michael J. Fox had to drop out of the role because of his involvement in the sitcom "Family Ties." However, a couple of weeks into filming, the filmmakers realized that Stoltz's more intense and serious approach to the material just wasn't working. Along with him went Melora Hardin, who played the role of Jennifer. The problem was that Hardin was chosen for the role based on her close height to Stoltz, who was significantly taller than Fox (5'11″ vs. 5'4″ Fox). Hardin was replaced by Claudia Wells, who was closer to Fox in height.
In addition, the time machine was supposed to look like a refrigerator and the Ford concern offered $75,000 for the movie makers to use the Mustang as a time machine.

Eddie Van Halen recorded new music specifically for the Walkman scene. One of the most bizarre moments in Back to the Future occurs when Marty, disguised in a radiation suit, "tortures" his future father George with 1980s guitar music on a Walkman. The humor of this scene is based on the not unreasonable notion that the speed and volume of '80s-style guitar solos sound to a man from the 1950s as if they came from another planet.

This movie definitely influenced the future and the perception of the past without a doubt.

Retrowave itself

Now that we've soaked up some memories and feelings from the past, it's time to talk about Retrowave or synth-wave as a genre.

Synth-wave is a micro genre of electronic music that draws predominantly from 1980s films, video games, and cartoons, as well as composers such as John Carpenter, Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, and Tangerine Dream.

Other reference points include electronic dance music genres including house, synth, and nu-disco. It is primarily an instrumental genre, although there are occasional exceptions to the rule.

Common tempos are between 80 and 118 BPM, while more upbeat tracks may be between 128 and 140 BPM. "Outrun" is a synonym of synth-wave that was later used to refer more generally to retro 1980s aesthetics such as VHS tracking artifacts, magenta neon, and grid lines. The term comes from the 1986 arcade racing game Out Run, which is known for its soundtrack that could be selected in-game and its 1980s aesthetic.

Out Run

According to musician Perturbator (James Kent), outrun is also its own sub genre, mainly instrumental, and often contains 1980s clichéd elements in the sound such as electronic drums, gated reverb, and analog synthesizer bass lines and leads - all to resemble tracks from that time period.

There is also a visual component on synth-wave album covers and music videos. According to PC Gamer, the essence of outrun visuals is "taking elements of a period of '80s excess millennials find irresistibly evocative, and modernizing them so they're just barely recognizable." Other sub genres include dream-wave, dark-synth, and si-fi wave.

Nicholas Diak wrote that "retrowave" was an umbrella term that encompasses 1980s revivalism genres such as synth-wave and vapor-wave. Dark-synth is influenced by horror cinema. Invisible Oranges wrote that dark synth is exemplified mainly by a shift away from the bright "Miami Vice vibes" and "French electro house influences" and "toward the darker electronic terrains of horror movie maestro composers John Carpenter and Goblin" also infused with sounds from post-punk, industrial and EBM.

Based on 1980s-inspired color schemes of pink and blue that are shared with synth-wave and retrowave, a stylistic theme known as "bisexual lighting" has also been suggested by some commentators.

In the early 2010s, the synthwave soundtracks of films such as Drive and Tron: Legacy attracted new fans and artists to the genre. Drive featured Kavinsky's "Nightcall" and, with College, "A Real Hero", which catapulted synthwave into mainstream recognition and solidified its stature as a music genre. The genre's popularity was furthered through its presence in the soundtracks of video games like Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and Hotline Miami, as well as the Netflix series Stranger Things, which featured synthwave pieces that accommodated the show's 1980s setting. Nerdglow's Christopher Higgins cited Electric Youth and Kavinsky as the two most popular artists in synthwave in 2014.

In the mid-2010s, "fashwave" (a portmanteau of "fascist" and "synthwave") emerged as a largely instrumental fusion genre of synthwave and vaporwave, with political track titles and occasional soundbites, such as excerpts of speeches given by Adolf Hitler. The phenomenon was described as self-identified fascists and alt-right members appropriating vaporwave music and aesthetics. 

Elsewhere, there was a growing trend of Russian synthwave musicians whose work espoused nostalgia for the Soviet Union, sometimes described as "Sovietwave".

Synthwave remained a niche genre throughout the 2010s. In 2017, PC Gamer noted that synthwave influences were to be felt in early 2010s gaming releases, primarily of the "OutRun" subgenre ("tenets of the genre: angular concept cars screeching along retrofuturist highways through a miasma of purple and pink"), including Hotline Miami and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Writing in 2019, PopMatters journalist Preston Cram said, "Despite its significant presence and the high level of enthusiasm about it, synthwave in its complete form remains a primarily underground form of music." He added that "Nightcall" and "A Real Hero" remained "two of only a small number of synthwave songs produced to date that widely known outside the genre's followers."

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