Thursday, May 24, 2007

It was a great kodak moment.



I don't know which is sadder, the fact that we kept mobbing up and killing a guy 26 levels higher than me, or that he kept coming back.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Except of course, other women.

People who frequently watch my YouTube videos, read anything I have to say, or deal with me on a daily basis, have come to know that I am a sucker for bad or epic-looking direct-to-DVD movies. They're dirt cheap and even if they suck, they can still be fun to watch (Unless it's a comedy). It mostly started when I got a copy of Behind Enemy Lines II for $2 at EB Games. It was good cheesy fun that made you wonder if North Koreans have movies where they invade the US.

Since then I've picked up quite a few direct-to-DVDs, not all of which I've been able to watch yet:

  • Safe House, /w Patrick Stewart as an ex-DIA agent
  • Second in Command, w/ Jean-Claude Van Damme as a Navy SEAL
  • Game Over, a cheesy movie with FMV games
  • Pressure Point, /w Micheal Madsen trying to rescue his family
  • Chasing Ghosts, /w Michael Madsen as a detective going crazy
  • End Game, /w Cuba Gooding, Jr as a disgraced Secret Service agent.

    The latest one I watched last night and was curious about for some time, the film .45 starring Milla Jovovich. So far, all of her movies I've seen she kills a lot of people, and this title looking like a revenge movie, I figured it'd be more of the same.


    Except of course, other women

    I liked this movie, although the ending wasn't that "happy", although it does fit with the rest of the movie. It's kind of a dark comedy mixed in with a drama about a battered woman and what she goes through, especially in one scene where she is assaulted by her boyfriend "Big Al" (played by Angus McFadyen). Then she sleeps with all her friends until one of them is willing to frame Al for murder.

    So it's a movie where Milla actually tries to act as opposed to killing anything that moves, and she does alright. She does a respectable performance as Kat, a woman from New York's Hell's Kitchen who wants to get out and live by the beach.

    The cover and the title of the movie are misleading; she never wears that outfit (Or holds a gun), and with her in that pose to the title ".45" you think this is a shoot-fest. It blindsides you much like The Matador, where you expect one movie and get another. The reason why it's titled .45 becomes evident at the end when Big Al is framed for murder with the .45 handgun that is registered in his name.

    I give it four welfare checks out of five.
  • Monday, May 21, 2007

    Over 30 times more terrorists than there were in Die Hard.

    So I picked up a few games this weekend, one of which was Dino Crisis 3 for Xbox. I had heard some negative things about this game, namely the camera, but if we've learned nothing else from history, it's that Capcom has a proud tradition of fucking up the camera. Well I'm proud to report that thus far, 90% of what I've been shooting at is off-camera.

    And continuing the proud tradition established between Dino Crisis 1 and 2, the third entry in the series is nothing like the other two. But if you think about it, it seems to make sense in evolutionary terms. The first game featured slow paced gameplay where you walked down a hallway scared shitless of potential dinosaurs coming to eat you. In the second game, you ran and gunned vast amounts of dinosaurs without fear. So it only makes sense that in the third game you shot a clusterfuck of enemies jetting around doing a hundred miles an hour.

    I also dropped a fiver for a brand new copy of Without Warning. A Canadian fiver, no less. EB Games is in their occasional "Let's Sell These Games For What They're Actually Worth" period where the games are sold for what they're actually worth. It's nice getting into Xbox just now, the games are all dirt cheap.

    Without Warning marks Capcom's first foray into the Tactical Shooter genre. You'd think for a company that's been making games for over 20 years that they would have cranked out at least one other Rainbow Six/Metal Gear ripoff by now, but they haven't.

    The storyline is basic stuff. An army of terrorists has taken over a chemical plant in the US and since they haven't made any demands, it looks like they might try to blow the place up. You take control of six characters caught in the crossfire: Three army commandos, a security guard, a cameraman, and a secretary, in their efforts to thwart the plot.

    The security guard character feels like a rehash of Mark Wilkins from Resident Evil Outbreak, another Capcom title. He's a 55 tough-looking black guy armed with a pistol. Sounds familiar to me.

    And I say army of terrorists because there are a lot of them. Over 30 times more terrorists than there were in Die Hard. Up to where I am right now in the game, I've killed over 300 bad guys. Without Warning is a clever title because you will be shooting lots and lots of people who come at you without warning. You'll turn around for a second and BANG, some cockfag is shooting you in the back.

    The camera is also horrible. It looks like they started out with the Resident Evil 4 camera, but decided since it's a Capcom game the camera should still suck.

    But I'm not dismissing the game as a lousy entry in the genre just yet. Once you figure out WHERE you're being shot from, combat in the game is pretty fun, and the aiming is handled pretty good.

    The presentation is also pretty cool. It's heavily influenced by 24 (The show, not the game). The same clock as used in 24 is used to display what time it is in the game, and you control the six characters as they go through the same period of time. It's sort of like Resident Evil 2, except you're switching characters every 15 minutes instead of beating the game, THEN switching.

    A review will be done for it. I intend to do it in the style of X-Play.

    And finally, I finally got a copy of the direct-to-DVD film End Game, a movie about Cuba Gooding Jr. failing in his quest to save the President just after the opening credits. Let's watch at how amusingly silly it looked.

    Thursday, May 17, 2007

    Aliant: Queer For You

    Two major events occured today and it's not even 1PM yet.

    1. I bought a cell phone. A Samsung A640.


    Not actually with Sprint

    The guy working there who handled my purchase was gay. Big gay with earrings and the gay accent. For the record, I have nothing against gay people. And I'm quite sure he thought I was gay too. I admit my hair's a little long but I don't think that's an indication of gay (Although the fact that I like 80s Pop could dissuade). He was pretty friendly, and if there was any doubt about it, it was cleared when he said this:

    "If you drop the phone in water so help me god I will pull your pants down and spank you."

    Oh well. He gave me a free car adapter so I SUPPOSE I endeared that for good reason.

    2. I went to EB Games and bought a copy of Mega Man X Collection for $15 (It's like a 25% off day so it was supposed to be $20). I open up the box when I get to the C@P site and there's a copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee in there. Normally this wouldn't be a problem (Since that game's worth like $50 used), but I already own it.

    I spoke to a guy at the store and he said off the record that it'd be a better idea for me to trade the game in since it's got a $23 trade in value and I could just get a brand new copy of MMX Collection for an extra $2.

    Profit!

    And on that note, send me an angel.

    Tuesday, May 15, 2007

    Does their beak auto-destruct before I can get my hands on it?

    I'm back doing my work term at the C@P site like I did last year. Not making any money this time.

    You may ask "Wait, what happened to your $20 an hour dream job?" Well they eventually figured out that it wasn't cost-effective to hire two guys to sit in their cubicles and do nothing all day, so they kept my friend on and didn't renew my contract. Oh well, I made $2,100 after taxes to just play Genesis games all day, I won't complain.

    Started playing World of Warcraft. It's been a while since that one week where I played a trial account (My lvl15 NE Rogue is still sitting on the Arthas server). Decided I wanted to go with a server that not only has people on it, but people I know (i.e. Tiana and now Nick).


    And he still squeezes in a NES reference

    Blood Elf Paladin, lvl 14 so far.

    I'm sure every WoW player complains about this at one point in their careers, but when you're on a quest to get the bodyparts of various creatures (Beaks, Hooves, etc), does it not make sense that they should always drop them? I mean, when I kill a "Farstrider" (Ostrich), does their beak auto-destruct before I can get my hands on it? If I physically look at the dead animal, I could SEE a beak.

    Insert nonexistent image here

    In any event I was able to make short work of my $1400 paycheck. I'll break it down:

    -19" Widescreen LCD Monitor
    -1GB DDR RAM
    -DVD-RW Drive
    -Keyboard
    -4GB Flash Drive
    -GeForce 7600
    -World of Warcraft
    -World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade
    -World of Warcraft game card
    -Counter Strike Anthology
    -Star Trek: Encounters
    -Dicksmokes: Forbidden Memories
    -Walther P99 C02 Gun
    -Three seasons of ER on DVD (Mother's Day)

    And I still want to buy a cell phone.

    Wednesday, May 9, 2007

    8D 74 70 03 C8 DF 5F B0 10 1E 25 57 94 40 37 F5

    MY 128-bit integer.

    And you can pry it from my cold dead hands if you want it.

    Get your own.

    Monday, May 7, 2007

    And to this day, I still lay awake at night wondering about the game that got away

    The unthinkable happened at work today: I worked.

    Maybe I should elaborate some.

    In my college, we go out and work for our third semester. Through one of my professor's husband, we were able to get contract from IMP Solutions, which is a division of IMP Group, an international multipurpose company based in Halifax. They do work in aviation, aerospace, and they own CanJet.

    Our mission, if we chose to accept it, was to provide assistance in any way possible to the Annapolis Valley Regional Health Department's Information Services team based off-site at their new office complex.

    I'm not sure how much of my work I could actually talk about (I signed a non-disclosure agreement), but I'm sure I CAN say that due to their lack of organization, I've spent about an average six of my eight hours a day playing emulators.

    So it seems the less work you do, the more you get paid? Benefits of an education, I guess. Although I didn't need a college education for my favorite task: Lobbing decommissioned computers into a dumpster from two stories up. It amazes me what I do (Or don't do) to make money.

    Anyway.

    I've had a hankering to play my Genesis again. Unfortunately it's packed away for my future move, and it'd be a pain in the ass to pack it up again, so I decided to download a torrent which claimed to have "Every Genesis rom", and was a 700MB compressed file. I get the file and it turns out it contains 7.3GB of Genesis roms. Now I know a Genesis rom will weigh more than, say, a NES rom. But THAT much space? I'd need a dual layer DVD disc to burn them all. Behold, why it was so large:



    Who in the hell needs one, let alone six beta versions of Chuck Rock 2?!

    But yeah, I have my IBM NetVista with frontal USB ports and a USB joypad based on the original PS1 controller, so it serves just fine. I need to get one with analog sticks so I can play N64 games.

    Anyway, everybody has that one game that looked interesting when they were a kid, but they never got to play it. And to this day, I still lay awake at night wondering about the game that got away.

    For me, it was Sub-Terrania.


    Best cover art for any game approved for all audiences.

    I read about this game in a really old Sega magazine (Which I tragically no longer have). When I was a kid, I had a Game Gear. This made me "cool" in a sea of kids who owned Game Boys because my games were in color and my batteries only lasted about a tenth that theirs did. Which makes me I'm sure only one in a handful who would willingly spend money on compilations just to play Sonic Game Gear games.

    I didn't actually get a Genesis until I was 15 or 16. So clearly I didn't get to play it. But I wanted to. And nobody I knew had ever heard of the game. Until one fateful day when I finally did own a Genesis, I spotted Sub-Terrania sitting in a plastic pouch on a rack at my EB Games. Unfortunately I didn't play it as much as I would have liked to. I think it had something to do with me getting laid at the time.

    But with me having all the free time in the world at work, I made it so. And I love this little game. It plays like Solar Jetman (Another game of my childhood), but with a serious dosage of Sega-brand attitude. Basically, the shit has hit the fan on a subterranian dig on an alien planet. It seems the aliens don't like us (Maybe we didn't let them unionize), so they've decided to fuck things up. And you get sent on a mission to save miners and blow shit up.

    I'm going to do a video on it, it's just a question of whether I just do it for the sake of it, or submit it as a VGVault for ScrewAttack. I know Stuttering Craig wanted a while ago for me to make some stuff for them.

    I also plan to do one on P.N. 03. Because any fan of oldschool shooting games would love it.

    Sunday, May 6, 2007

    It's just like Night at the Museum

    So my Flashman remix won't be appearing on OC Remix anytime soon. That's ok. I accomplished what I set out to do, I made a remix that was good for me to listen to at work. And if people happened to like it along the way, all the better.

    I posted in OCRemix's "Work in Progress" forum. Now, up until this point, conventional logic told me that "Work in Progress" meant "this work is incomplete" and "I would appreciate feedback and suggestions".

    Apparently though, in this day in age, "Work in Progress" means "Completed work" and "Either it rocks or it sucks". 12 hours after it's posting, three established remixers at OCremix promptly began to unload their drawers on them, although one of them did repent and offer valid criticism (Which I plan to take into consideration). However, someone who shall remain nameless laid into me like I'd just backed over his dog twice. He even went far enough to say "Would your parents listen to this? No, because it's trash".

    I had to get a couple of second opinions just to make sure they hadn't changed that on me too: Since when does any person under 30 years old listen to music that their parents would like? "I can hardly get ANYBODY to listen to my music," says my metal-addicted basement dweller.

    Once you got past all the disparaging remarks about ear raping, their comments seemed to dwell upon "haven't made it your own yet", and that's true. But it's the first draft.

    Of course, darkcecil13 would delete his post later, when others claimed it was "needlessly mean". It's probably a safe assumption someone pissed in his Christ Chex this morning.

    But seriously though, and I want you to try this, take this tune and think if it deviates at all from the source material. Apart from moving one part of the tune forward, I don't think it did. This is why you check your ammo before you start throwing mud.

    Of course, now I have to improve it to their standards just to say "Oh yeah? Watch me". This of course means it'll probably have a pointless two and a half minute intro and only cycle through the main tune once, but oh well. If it makes them happy.

    It's just like Night at the Museum. Critics hated it, but that didn't stop people from seeing it like crazy. Can 650+ YouTube subscribers be wrong?

    That being said, I want to buy my car here.



    EDIT: I am aware that I have denounced individuals for lynching an in-development piece while at the same time I gang raped an in-development game. In all fairness, that game has had 18 years so far to get better.