About
WELCOME TO ILLUSION CITY…
Romance in Illusion City…
Welcome, traveler of the cyberspace, in my humble space in the digital land of the web.
First of all, where does the name illusion city comes from and what means to me?
I first heard the name “Illusion City” when i came across the first
english translation for Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake for the MSX, in 2000.
A link on the webpage that hosted the translation of this game brought
also to a page in which a translation for a RPG called “Illusion City”
for the MSX was in progress. The game, inspired heavily by sci-fi and
cyberpunk, took place in a futuristic post-apocalyptic Hong Kong, which
has been overrun with a strange disease and with a mega-corporation, and
saw the player in the role of a detective, dealing both with futuristic
high technology and ancient magic arts, while uncovering dark and
brooding secrets. The game was very good but sadly the translation was
never completed. Nowadays a translation is in the works for the PC98
version of the game, tough.
Illusion City Title Screen (MSX)
I immediately was fascinated by the name “illusion city” and the
concept behind it…a city of illusions, real and not-real at the same
time. I imaginated it as a futuristic version of the “asphalt jungle” of
the classic noir movies. A city shrouded in smoke, populated by
trench-wielding, cigarette-smoking detectives and femmes fatales, a
place fascinating but also dangerous and potentially lethal…a town in
which many secrets lie, awaiting a daring investigator to uncover them.
Traveling in this town would mean for the traveler to dwell in the
depths of his very mind and soul, a journey through magnificent gardens
and dark corridors, passing both trough light and darkness. A potential
occasion for self-growth but also a potential danger. By no means a
journey through illusion city would leave the traveller unchanged or
indifferent to what he has seen during his stay.
I then decided to call my own space in the web “illusion city”, if i
ever would have opened it. And here we are, after all those years i’ve
been faithful to my decision. :)
I’ve decided to open a website and not a “pure” blog or, even worst, a
social network page, even amidst the so called “social” explosion of
the web, because I think that a site will give me more possibilities of
keeping and ordinate archive of toughts, reflections, reviews. Blogs are
too focused on the “present” to paint a broad and clear picture, while
social networks are often shallow, hollow and more often than not they
are the grave of the communication that they would ideally wish to
increase and improve, instead of being an ideal rosegarden of human
interaction.
In this space, i’d like to discuss a lot of things, from “high” to
“low”. I’d like to write about videogames, books, music, movies, anime,
comics, philosophy and general issues and meditations. There is an ideal
link between all this different topics, and that link is found in the
will to investigate and understand better the culture of the world in
which we live today, and by extension, to question about what that
investigation means. I’m an avid reader of philosophy, and I like it’s
lens because I found it to be positive, it’s focus is more in posing
question that actually giving granitic answers. Also, the link between
all those topics can be found in my aesthetics. I like the interaction
between alternate polarities, going through the darkness to find the
light, and I’m very sensitive to the experience of art and beauty, so
I’ll try to replicate this taste of mine while dealing with the
different issues that i will expose on this site.
I hope to have not annoyed you. Let this site be a place of beauty,
where people can find some time to think and to discover more, it
doesn’t matter if the object of investigation is “frivolous” or “deep”.
Thanks for your patience in reading so far!
Both the logo of the site and the illustration that opens this page are made by the great VikyJun. Thanks for your hard work! :)