The PiBlog

No Capcom, -you- are the stereotype.

2011-09-20T21:22:00.004-03:00

I may not be qualified to discuss fighting games but I am qualified to discuss Resident Evil. Played them all, own most of them, will probably do an Outbreak video close to Operation Raccoon City launch. Anyway:

This probably won't have any kind of intelligible point to it but I just wanted to get it out in text so I could understand the kind of epic level stupid that Capcom has just finished pulling (and it's not Mega Man related!), and you can make whatever you want of it.

So, here's a mini timeline:

Sep 9, 2011 3:30 AM - Kotaku posts a "leaked" Resident Evil: Revelations TGS trailer showing footage of 'Rachel', a mop-headed giant-chested special ops-type person who freaks at the first sight of a monster (someone in the RE universe is new to this?), loses her composure, and runs away. Trailer feels incomplete.

Sep 9, 2011 11:20 AM - Kotaku, staving off boredom, gives a commenter an article asking "is Capcom getting lazier with its creation of minor characters in its Resident Evil franchise?" Discussion ensues over Japan's culture, female stereotypes, and overall creates buzz for the game.

Sept 20, 2011 2:37 PM - Capcom Unity member posts article saying "I'm happy to report that she's dead!" with link to FULL TGS trailer (on official Capcom YT account) in which Rachel is a complete fish out of water who gets a death somewhere between Kenneth and Brad.

So, she was just a pair of gazongas led to the slaughter. She exited stage left (in a body bag) and served no real purpose whatsoever.

Jill calls her a "survivor" (she witnesses the death), but wherever the game takes place, the context of this Rachel character is that she was some kind of special ops type (the Rebecca Chambers kind) who did just about every thing you don't do in a horror movie. She's not some innocent bystander who found a wetsuit, she's actively talking to someone about the situation on a radio before she's attacked. There's no reason to highlight whatever the hell she's doing because the main character never witnesses the entirety of it, and marketing an hourglass with melons getting the shit killed out of it is probably about as low as you can get in marketing without being the EA Dante's Inferno marketing department.

LOOK, SHE'S DEAD! BUY OUR GAME! etc.

Now I'm willing to bet that it's the standard Resident Evil 'gathering combat data' excuse where someone with no talent is intentionally killed that the series has used over and over again and will probably lead the plot over to HUNK, but even so, she's got her jugs hanging out and her hair cemented over her eyes. It's the standard Sniper Wolf-type character but with none of the talent to compensate. Granted, Rebecca Chambers doesn't have any business being in a special ops team like STARS either, but she didn't show up for work that day dressed like she wanted twenties stuffed into her clothes.

And I know this is viral because A) it's the year 2011 and B) Capcom is absolutely terrible at grassroots/astroturfing and this sort of stupid shit is right up their alley. Capcom would have you believe that they dolled up that teaser trailer with Rachel in it being all la la laaa, and then drummed up that full trailer in which she's basically killed for amusement as a response to the public outcry. Of course not. Capcom put Rachel out there because two giant beacons are a great way to get instant buzz. They fully expected people to get pissed over it, waited a brief period of time, and then released the trailer as if to say "we're listening to your concerns!"

Capcom has had fanservice characters in Resident Evil. They've had scenes in which irrelevant characters get killed. They might have even had scenes in which fanservice characters get killed (example after posting: Excella's demise in RE5). But they don't MARKET THOSE!

Or maybe she's not really in the game. Maybe it's some kind of stupid parody in which Jill, who is usually pretty modest in the fanservice department, stumbles upon a really exaggerated version of herself whose appearance and conduct are completely detrimental and counter-productive to the situation at hand, and the whole experience is meant to lampoon modern action gaming stereotypes and what passes for horror today.

No, Capcom, YOU are the stereotype. You're a company that's manufacturing controversy for publicity's sake and then shitting out a planned response as an act of contrition. You have no business trying to gloss over the fact that you're a Japanese Activision. Just release your stupid little handheld game and quit being cute about it, because you're as transparent as a DVD eco case.

Just stop.

-PiB

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2008-09-07T20:34:00.001-03:00

And I just bought a Tom Brady pro bowl jersey too.

Sonic and the what?

2008-07-21T15:44:00.003-03:00

Ok, so in typical Sega fashion, they're working on another Wii game in tandem with their usual console game which I'll reserve judgment on for the time being.

However, the new Wii game is called, and I am not making this up, Sonic and the Black Knight. And the gimmick is that Sonic is wielding a sword.

...

...

What?

Ok, so Sonic, the guy with the razor sharp shit on him who runs around slicing and dicing enemies by rolling into them...and you gave him a sword? I think that just topped the retardation of giving Shadow guns.

Also, review this week.

For the record

2008-06-08T18:51:00.000-03:00

The MG NES review was finished yesterday and uploaded to Revver early in the morning. They approved it around 11:30. But it hasn't made it's way online yet.

Assholes.

Le Video Preview

2008-06-01T14:23:00.000-03:00

Bah!

2008-05-28T19:53:00.001-03:00

My overpriced webcam just bought the farm.

Well, I'm going to Futureshop tomorrow to buy Rambo IV on BluRay, I'll see if I can find anything decent.

The Collection As It Stands Right Now

2008-05-24T23:43:00.000-03:00

Mostly just a showcase for the new camera. You can't make out all the titles in the first shot, but if you own the games you'll recognize the end labels.

Some gaming musings

2008-05-21T19:34:00.000-03:00

In no particular order:

MADDEN NFL 09 - This will probably sound weird coming from me, but I think Madden 09 is showing some serious potential to be a good game. There's a lot of little things that are starting to add up for the better.

They're getting rid of the goddamn radio announcer.
Replacing the "home town announcer" will be NBC commentator Tom Hammond and the NFL Network's Cris Collinsworth. I don't recall either one of them really off the top of my head, but at this point even Michael Cole and Tazz from Smackdown Just Bring It would be better than the radio guy.

MULLIGAN!
I haven't looked into all the details of it but it looks like they're going to implement a rewind feature where you could do-over a play if you're satisfied with it (or if you want to piss off a human opponent). You can set it to X number of uses, so you can just turn it off completely if you don't want it. Admittedly it would be nice to maybe get a do-over on the occasional play. Obviously, not available in online play.

Actual High-Def graphics?
It seems to me that the graphics in Madden 08 only look good if you're playing it on a regular TV set in 480P, otherwise the graphics look washed out and blotchy. It's especially evident with some uniforms textures changing depending on how far away they are from the screen (Try this with the Green Bay Packers).

Now for all I know these are renders, but this shot of a snow game from Madden 08 and this shot of a snow game from Madden 09, it looks better, and it actually looks like there's snow on the ground, instead of white turf.

It's not as if EA isn't capable of good graphics. NHL 08 has fantastic visuals. I guess that's the difference between EA Tiburon (who make Madden) and EA Canada (Who make NHL).

ESPN?
They may try to incorporate ESPN into the fold a little better other than just having ESPN Radio Sportscenter playing whenever you're in one of the menus. It sounds like it could be some ESPN Insider content and the occasional episode of PTI.

MIAMI VICE THE GAME

You know I thought it was a little weird when I heard that the Miami Vice film would get a video game adaptation, but only go on the PSP. I just can't think of many instances where a major film release would go on just one console, let alone it being a handheld.

Anyway it's an alright little game. It doesn't follow the plot of the movie at all, which begs the question of why they bothered to call it Miami Vice The Game. I've kinda wondered why companies feel the need to title their licensed games Whatever: The Game, especially when most people take to calling it The Whatever Game, and especially if the game in question isn't really based on the movie at all.

The gameplay is taken almost bit for bit from Resident Evil 4, except now the Spaniards have guns instead of pitchforks. Crockett and Tubbs control like tanks just like Leon Kennedy, but with the addition of being able to strafe (Something Leon can't do), albeit this "strafe" really just changes the analog knob from normal third person to Move In Whatever Direction You're Pointing The Stick In.

There's also some arbitrary minigames which go with any handheld title. One, called "Hacking" (for hacking USB sticks you find) plays like a cross between Asteroids and Bomberman, which is pretty amusing. The other one is a pain in the ass and is used to negotiate major drug deals.

Imagine if I had you play Rad Racer. Now imagine there were no road signs. Now imagine you're driving a hovercraft. Now imagine you're drunk as fuck. That's pretty much it. Your goal is to keep that line in the blue so your drug-o-meter goes up. If it falls into the grey, it goes down, and if it goes in the red it REALLY goes down. The sections will occasionally move to the left and the right and completely without warning. Also, that line refuses to stand still. It will frequently move to the left and the right, and you'll be forced to push the other way to compensate, and then you'll have to push the OTHER direction to compensate for your oversteer, and it's just a massively painful process because it can be as easy or as frustratingly difficult as the game wants it to be. If you succeed, you sell all your drugs and make massive $$$. If you lose, you make nothing, and they steal all your drugs. You'll need to complete the minigame twice in order to win.

The reputation system is kinda neat. If you storm nightclubs with high-tech weaponry and SWAT gear, your reputation won't increase, but if you barge in wearing your pastel colored suit and your sidearm, it'll shoot up, allowing access to more drug dealers.

Once you beat the game, you can buy the Cheat suit, which is basically a slightly different pastel colored suit but with additional upgrades for it you can unlock infinite ammo and invincibility.

What's also kind of strange is that they use Colin Farrell's likeness for Crockett, but he sounds more like Don Johnson, which can't outdo 007: Nightfire, where he looked like Pierce Brosnan but just sounded like an idiot.

It's not a bad game, and if you like the way Resident Evil 4 played, you can't go too wrong.

Some updates

2008-05-20T20:20:00.000-03:00

Took up WoW again, mostly so I'd be able to do something while I watch the 15 or so DVDs I have yet to watch. If you must ogle him, the armory link for him.

Undercover Filmer insists I take another stab at getting the YouTube account, so what the hell, if mostly so he has more information for the documentary he's working on. As many videos as possible are still going to Revver.

I say as many as possible because Revver is a little uppity about using music in videos, and the Rad Racer II review got rejected because it has Van Halen's Panama playing the entire time, so we'll have to see what happens with that.

Also,

I don't know how either.

Definitlely not getting back on YouTube nAAoooow.

2008-05-14T16:40:00.000-03:00

DATELINE PiB - Enjoy some back-and-forths between myself and YouTube because if they're going to make it this much a pain in the ass just to restore my account, then I'll save the effort for something that's worth it.

ROUND 1-A: YouTube.

YouTube | Broadcast Yourself™
Dear Member:
This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Take 2 Games claiming that this material is infringing:

GTAIV - "Hostile Negotiation", the Michael Mann Edition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsdUwdlmOmc

Please Note: Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account. In order to prevent this from happening, please delete any videos to which you do not own the rights, and refrain from uploading additional videos that infringe on the copyrights of others. For more information about YouTube's copyright policy, please read the Copyright Tips guide.

If you elect to send us a counter notice, please go to our Help Center to access the instructions.

Be aware that there may be adverse legal consequences in your country if you make a false or bad faith allegation of copyright infringement by using this process.
Sincerely,
YouTube, Inc.

ROUND 1-B: Counterclaim

Dear YouTube,

I am David Cochrane, the proprietor of the YouTube account "PlayItBogart" and wish to counter a claim made by Take 2 Games.

The following are details of a clip removed by you pursuant to 17 U.S.C. Section 512. I have a good faith belief that this material was removed or disabled in error as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material. I declare that this is true and accurate under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America.

GTAIV - "Hostile Negotiation", the Michael Mann Edition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsdUwdlmOmc
08:52

I believe this clip was covered under the points of Section 107 of 17 U.S.C.

1. The clip is not for profit because I am not a member of any advertising partnership program and no profit is generated.

2. The clip is factual and does not misrepresent the media in question, and informed many of its viewers to the nature of the game, who had no prior knowledge of it. It is creative as it meshes together two concepts to illustrate the similarities it bears to a popular filmmaker.

3. The footage taken represents a single percentage of the source media and by no means constitutes a significant fraction of the media as a whole. Furthermore, it is at a reduced picture quality and is further abbreviated from the original content.

4. Citing the copyrighted material in the clip in no way adversely affected the ability of the copyright holder to derive income from sale or rental of the relevant media (Quite the opposite in fact, I'm told several people actually purchased the source media after viewing the clip). No moral rights are infringed as the clip contains no parody or defamatory comments about the material cited.

5. The clip is transformative as it is cut and edited to demonstrate the similarities to that of Hollywood film.

Having complied with the requirements of Section 512(g)(3), I remind you that you must now replace the blocked or removed material and cease disabling access to it within fourteen business days of your receipt of this notice. With the clip restored, this leaves my account with the previous two strikes, and should be reinstated. Please notify me when this has been done.

I appreciate your prompt attention to this matter. If you have any questions about this notice, please do
not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

David Cochrane
(Address and telly # removed)

I also sent them a scan of my John Hopkins. No, not THAT one, although after this NEXT email...

ROUND 2-A: GENERIC RESPONSE

Dear David, We haven't been able to process your request with the information you have provided us. If you're trying to file an objection to a copyright takedown, please review our copyright hints at http://youtube.com/t/dmca_policy. Please be aware that any counternotice we receive will be forwarded to the party who issued the takedown notice; hence, your identity will be revealed. Also, before deciding to send a counternotice please be sure you understand that you can be held liable in court for a false counternotice.

Blah blah blah.

ROUND 2-B: You said WHAT about my mother?

Well maybe I'd be able to file more information if you people were to give me more information to work with, like, for example, the communique between the copyright holder (Which I was convinced was called "Take Two Interactive" and not "Take 2 Games") and YouTube, because all I have to work with is "HAY YOU'RE INFRINGING ON OUR COPYRIGHT".

Seriously, you're expecting me to defend myself by putting a blindfold over my head and forcing me to recite every aspect of another country's inane copyright code, while for all I know the person who contacted you is a company janitor with an email address who searched your site and fired off a complaint for every hit of "GTAIV" he found.

Which is compounded because there's a user running around by the name of "piayltbogart" and "1337er1337berserker" who's claiming that he's behind my termination. No, I don't have his statements because they're offensive and the first name is capitalized in such a manner that it sounds like it's the real me. I'm sure you can dig the statements out of your server yourselves, especially if you're capable of terminating any other account (i.e. one) that I made with this email address.

I'm not going to move heaven and hell to convince you people to give me my account back. I'll take my ball and go to another court. Maybe Revver? They comb through all your content BEFOREHAND so this kind of crap doesn't happen, and not just that, they let you share the ad revenue! Isn't that awesome? On YouTube, you'd have to be a plagiarizing asshole who appeals to the lowest common denominator to get into YOUR ad revenue sharing program.

If you don't know how your own laws work, who are you to expect me to?

A lot of people are very pissed off with you right now, and I don't mean just me.

Yours in destroying the fabric of the internet,
David Cochrane
"PlayItBogart"

P.S.: Here's a bright idea. Instead of disabling accounts, why don't you just disable their uploading privileges so that they can access important past messages like one from Richard Cheese giving them approval over a clip using their content? Or is this so advanced a concept that it clearly just have been jacked from another media sharing site?

A Correction:

2008-05-13T18:40:00.001-03:00

Bethesda Softworks, a Zenimax Media company, is not owned by Take Two Interactive. They just had a joint publishing agreement for Oblivion.

Also,

Also, for those who are wondering if Take 2 Games could REALLY be that big a douchebag...

2008-05-12T21:42:00.000-03:00

Here's your proof.

So,

2008-05-12T06:56:00.000-03:00

Everybody's wondering where PlayItBogart went.

Well, I didn't go anywhere. I'm still gaming, still working 40 hours a week, still interacting with human beings.

I suppose the better question would be "Why did YouTube suspend PlayItBogart's account?".

It was Strike Three. Let me explain.

When you put up Shit You Probably Shouldn't, some bored employee at the company that owns the copyright to it surfs YouTube when he has nothing better to do to see if you uploaded The Gumby Christmas Special or Dr. Phil on The Simpsons. Then he sends YouTube a letter saying "tits or gtfo" and YouTube sends you a nasty letter saying you've committed a crime worse than ravaging the Pope.

In both instances, yes, I was probably in the wrong, and I didn't contest them. And for a time, all was well.

Then Take Two came along.

Yes, you know Take Two. They own 2K Games, Bethesda Softworks, and to some extent, Rockstar, the company behind the Grand Theft Auto series. Perhaps you've heard of them?

Evidently, they feel that the video "GTAIV - "Hostile Negotiation", the Michael Mann Edition" is a blatant, profit-stealing copyright-infringing non-fair use travesty and simply HAD to go. Which is kind of odd, considering my account is littered with clips from Take Two games such as Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, NFL 2K3, ESPN NFL 2K5, All-Pro Football 2K8, 24: The Game, Star Trek Encounters, and Star Trek Conquest, and they never had a problem with any of THOSE clips.

And since YouTube is too lazy to actually investigate claims, they just blindly follow whatever somebody with a company email address says and kicks your clips, and if it's the third time, your account and every other account tied to your email address goes bye bye.

This is of course, a bullshit claim by Take Two Interactive, since the video fell under the perview of fair use, what with it being nonprofit (I don't profit off my videos), entertaining AND factual (many viewers had no idea how GTAIV worked), didn't deprive any revenue from them (quite the opposite, in fact), and is transformative, being that I made it into something more than it was by itself.

So yeah, I'll file a counterclaim. In theory it would reverse the third strike and give me back my account. But by then the damage is already done. Take Two has already sullied their reputation with me, and YouTube being an accessory to it wouldn't make things any better, so I'll certainly be shopping for a new repository for my videos (which are all backed up in soft copies), but it would be nice to have the original account standing with all the original account for posterity. I'd also remove all content promoting Take Two Interactive from my account (As I've already done with my games collection, INCLUDING Grand Theft Auto IV), because if they feel that I can't promote their game using their game which I paid for and use it to encourage OTHER people to purchase their games, then I want none of it.

Not surprisingly, this throws the Star Trek review into jeopardy, seeing as four of the games featured in it WERE Take Two games (SPOILER ALERT: Encounters is clunky, Legacy is dull and broken, Tactical Assault is a dumbed down version of Starfleet Academy and therefore is fail, and I stopped playing Conquest after about two days). So that'll probably have to be backburnered AGAIN because at this point I don't want to go through it and remove the "infringing" content.

Allow me to reiterate - YouTube and Take Two Interactive may go fornicate themselves.
The only question is how hard and with how blunt an instrument.

In any event, the Rollergames video is now on Revver.

PlayItBogart's NES Games.

2008-01-29T19:54:00.000-04:00

I suppose in the year and a half of operation on YouTube I never let anybody know what NES games I had, so:

NES GAME LIST AS OF JANUARY 29 2008:

1. 10-Yard Fight
2. 8 Eyes
3. Abadox
4. Adventures of Bayou Billy
5. Astyanax
6. Back to the Future
7. Baseball
8. Bases Loaded 3
9. Bionic Commando
10. Blades of Steel
11. The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout
12. BurgerTime
13. California Games
14. Captain Skyhawk
15. Crystalis
16. Deadly Towers
17. Dr. Mario
18. Dragon Power
19. Dragon Warrior
20. Dragon Warrior II
21. Duck Tales
22. Faxanadu
23. Final Fantasy
24. Gauntlet II (Out having a sex change to Tecmo NFL 07)
25. Godzilla
26. Gyruss
27. Hogan's Alley (Have Box)
28. Hydlide
29. Ice Hockey
30. IronSword: Wizards & Warriors II
31. John Elway's Quarterback
32. Joust
33. Karate Champ
34. Kirby's Adventure
35. Knight Rider
36. Kung Fu Heroes
37. Kung Fu
38. Legacy of the Wizard
39. The Legend of Zelda
40. The Lone Ranger
41. Magmax
42. Metal Gear (Have Box)
43. MiG 29 Soviet Fighter
44. Milon's Secret Castle
45. Mission: Impossible
46. NFL Football
47. Paperboy
48. Platoon
49. Play Action Football
50. Punch-Out!!
51. RBI Baseball
52. RBI Baseball 2
53. R.C. Pro-Am
54. Rad Racer
55. Rad Racer II
56. Rambo
57. Rampart
58. RoadBlasters
59. Rocket Ranger
60. Rollergames
61. Rollerball
62. Sesame Street Letter-Go-Round/Ernie's Big Splash (My first NES game)
63. Shinobi
64. Silent Service
65. Skate or Die
66. Skate or Die 2
67. Sky Shark
68. Snake's Revenge (Have Box)
69. Solar Jetman
70. Star Voyager
71. StarTropics
72. Strider
73. Super Mario Bros.
74. Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt
75. Super Mario Bros. 2
76. Super Mario Bros. 3
77. Super Spike V'Ball
78. Tecmo Bowl
79. Tecmo Super Bowl
80. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
81. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (Have Box)
82. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
83. Tetris
84. Tetris 2
85. The Three Stooges
86. Time Lord
87. Top Gun: The Second Mission
88. Touchdown Fever
89. Track & Field II
90. Wall Street Kid
91. Willow
92. Winter Games
93. Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth
94. Xevious
95. Xexyz
96. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
97. 31-in-1 Famicom Multicart
98. 42-in-1 Famicom Multicart
99. 118-in-1 Famicom Multicart

The New England Patriots - Good for the NFL all around

2008-01-27T19:20:00.000-04:00

The Patriots have always been my favorite team. They're the closest team geographically, and it helps that they won Super Bowl 36 (which was around the time I was shopping for a team to back). That was the season where Patriots QB Drew Bledsoe was sidelined with an injury and second-string QB Tom Brady took over duties as the Patriots' general, and won his first of three (possibly four) Super Bowls.

The two teams I was between were the Patriots and the Packers. It stems back to Super Bowl 31 where everyone said the Patriots would win, and I said Packers would. Packers did. But in light of their recent success (i.e. SB36), Pats won, and Packers became my backup team. Ya gotta have another team to root for if god forbid your team falls to the wayside.

The only way you wouldn't know anything about the Patriots success this season was if you lived under a rock, AND, if that rock had wi-fi coverage, you haven't been watching my material. First team to go 16-0 in the sixteen week schedule. Most touchdowns by a QB in a regular season. Most TD receptions by a receiver in a regular season. Most touchdowns. Most points. Etc. They've kicked ass, taken names, and are now the most hated team in the NFL.

But, why hate them? They have their shit together. A QB who throws. Receivers who catch. A line that protects. A defense that won't let up (Unless you throw short passes, they don't seem to like those). They're setting a new benchmark for excellence, and rather than cursing the Patriots for it, they should be encouraging their own teams to step up and meet the challenge.

Teams need to improve their defense a little more. It used to be that Brady could just throw toss after toss to Randy Moss for the score. But about 10 or 11 weeks into the season, everybody figured out "Hey, why don't we cover Randy Moss more?" That worked for about one drive before Brady just started throwing to everyone else like Wes Welker and Dante Stallworth, and now Randy Moss is a great decoy. Teams HAVE to cover him because he can generally beat single coverage if you aren't on the ball. I can't really recommend anything beyond "try harder".

Which leaves the offense. QBs have to get better, their lines need to protect better, and their receivers have to get more open. Sure, it's easy for me to dish out that kind of advice, especially since with football games you have the benefit of being able to see around you more open, but that's why they're the ones playing football and I'm not. Teams have gone back to throwing short passes for two yards that might run for another four, and it's a good tactic all around.

If the Patriots win the Super Bowl, not only will it cement the Patriots Dynasty, but it will also win them the label of "End Boss Of The NFL".

Teams have three options.

1. Improve their players.
2. Wait for the draft.
3. Wait five years.

Look at it this way. You want your team to beat the New England Patriots. You don't want the Patriots to lose. You want your team to win. There's a difference. A team loses when they self destruct and collapse under their own incompetence, and the other team stands back and lets the pieces fall where they may (see: Pats vs Ravens). A team wins when they rise to a challenge and excel. You know?

I want to say there's some kind of divine intervention at work in the New England region, what with the Patriots perfect season and the Red Sox winning their second World Series in recent years, but it looks like the Celtics are starting to fall back to Earth, and the Bruins are about average.

Honestly, I wish the Super Bowl had been Patriots at Packers. The awesomeness of the Patriots coupled with the history of Brett Favre? I honestly would not have cared who won, it would be epic either way.

FYI, Tecmo Super Bowl 2007 is repeatedly calling the Super Bowl in New England's favor over New York. You may laugh at this, but it also called the Packers/Giants game. Repeatedly.

So did Eddie Murphy.

DISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS

K, so

2008-01-23T18:09:00.001-04:00

I was gonna make a big post explaining why people should love and not HATE the New England Patriots, but something's come up that I suppose I should comment on.

These comments are from my Rambo NES review. The AVGN, as could be predicted from every time a movie comes out that has a minor connection to an NES game, also reviewed Rambo for NES. People are making allegations of the AVGN blatanty ripping off my review (which I do for free) for his token expected review (which he is paid for).

You can watch them both and dicide for yourself.

I don't really care either way. I could get outraged about it, but what's that going to accomplish? It's not like there's any kind of legal recourse or anything beyond demanding an apology. We're all adults here (In theory), and I will admit his video does bear more than a passing resemblance to mine.

I would like to point out the irony in that when IrateGamer was accused of being an AVGN ripoff, the "AVGN Nazis" (Yes, that's an actual term) unloaded on him and refused to give him the benefit of the doubt. But when AVGN makes a video that looks an awful lot like someone else, it's all "...if you are review the same game you are BOUND to bump into same flaws". No shit Buckwheat? Suddenly it's not such an injustice when it's the other way around?

I personally am waiting for IrateGamer Nazis (Again, actual term) to flame AVGN by proxy as using my video as "proof" that he is a ripoff - they accused him of basing his Atari Porno video off an article written by Seanbaby.

I'm calling it - Sometime around Star Trek XI's release in December, AVGN is going to review Star Trek 25th Anniversary for NES, in addition to any other Star Trek games he has....just like I'm doing in March.

IN OTHER NEWS: I just got a new 72-pin adapter off eBay for my NES, and now it works great! I don't even have to push the cartridge down half the time.

The first thing Sega has done RIGHT with Sonic.

2007-12-30T21:26:00.001-04:00

Amusing little bugger. Found it for $10.

Moar info

It's The End Of The Sonic Franchise As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

2007-12-25T17:14:00.000-04:00

Ok, so a review in written form. I struggled with the thought of another Shadow review, and it really boiled down to “do I want to record a whole lot of new footage of this stupid game and spend an entire day cutting it together along with commentary just so I can say that Shadow fucking sucks and people are retarded for liking that game”?

Of course I answered yes. But the problem with Christmas is it’s hard to find five minutes to yourself between family and friends and women and football and your day job, and to be honest, I really don’t want to play Shadow anymore. It’s not just because the game is so godawful, but I die a little more inside every time I realize how far down the shitter the Sonic series has gone. Mario transitioned nicely to the third dimension and has come out with game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game, all the while Sonic is sitting stranded on a 727 on the tarmac.

The inherent problem with the Sonic franchise is while it is technically a platformer, it’s moreso based on running around as fast as possible while smashing into enemies, which is all fine and dandy for a 2D level strung up like a racetrack, but it just doesn’t work well in 3D. Take Mario 64 for example. 15 worlds with plenty to do and can be as explored as fully as the player wishes. Lots of platforming, lots of replay value, and it’s very fluid.

However, Sonic games are still stuck in the same philosophy. Sure it’s three dimensional and sometimes you turn left or right, but the principle is still the same. Run from Point A to Point B. No exploring. In fact for the most part if it were possible, you could zoom the camera out and to the side and just play it like it were 2D. Oh sure, this is rudimentary and isn’t overly horrible, but the standard of gameplay quality has been raised from generation to generation, and that sort of thing just won’t cut it anymore. You think Capcom could get away with releasing the same kind of Mega Man games they did 10 years ago? The Mega Man X Collection is a prime example of a rise and a fall of a series. It reached its pinnacle with Mega Man X3, and then went straight down after.

I suppose I should really go into detail where my origin in the Sonic fandom lies and what happened when. It all started, like everything else involving a video game as a kid, on Christmas ’93, I think. I got a Game Gear for Christmas from I believe my aunt Linda and uncle Robert. It came with Sonic the Hedgehog and Chuck Rock. I loved Sonic. I wasn’t so hot for Chuck Rock. And I was delighted with the maybe hour of gameplay I’d get out of six rechargeable nicads. And then the following birthday I got Chase HQ and Sonic Chaos. And then the next Christmas it was Sonic 2 and some Sonic comic books. And then the next birthday it was Sonic Spinball. And then the next Christmas was Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. And then the NEXT Christmas it was Sonic Blast.

And then it kinda just faded away. The TV shows weren’t on anymore. The comic book series had gotten boring after issue #50 (where Robotnik was killed). And there were no more Sonic Game Gear games coming out. And just like Journey after the Raised on Radio album, it just vanished without warning.

There was a small resurgence a few years ago when I finally got a Sega Genesis on the cheap from a neighborhood garage sale, which came with Sonic 2 and Sonic & Knuckles, among other games (who needs two soccer games, let alone one?). I’d had plenty of experience with Sonic 2 at other people’s houses who had Sonic 2, but S&K was new to me, and fun, despite the age and the lack of a Sonic 3.

The Sonic Mega Colletion Plus was released for PS2. I bought it. I loved it. Had all the Genesis games and some of the Game Gear games. Didn’t have Sonic 2 GG on it though, which was unfortunate.

And then one day I went and bought a Gamecube (Even though the Wii was coming out in five months), and at one of the local game shops I bought Resident Evil and Resident Evil 0. Turned out there was a buy two get one free deal, and I couldn’t pick another game, so the guy gave me Sonic Adventure DX.

I played it. It was alright. I liked the small choice of characters. Sonic ran fast. You could go exploring outside of the stages. The characters were unlocked in order of interest, the Big Three were first, and then your bit characters like Amy, that Robot, and that retarded cat.

There were of course catches. I hated Knuckles’ levels with a passion; I can’t recall a time in my life were I was more irate to hear a loud beeping noise over and over and over and over whenever I approached an emerald shard. The camera was annoying, but manageable. I didn’t care to play as anybody outside of the Big Three. I stopped caring about unlocking emblems since I already had most of the Game Gear games. Tails levels were redundant since they were just rehashes of Sonic’s levels but with time limits.

Something else I had a problem with: All of a sudden Sonic is interacting with vibrant cities full of humans. When did his happen? When did Sonic go from being a hedgehog on planet Mobius full of animals where the only human was Robotnik - which was a clever jab at how humankind is destroying the planet with automation, to a full blown human race and where the humanoid bipedal animals were the minority? Does the Sonic series even take place on Mobius anymore?

I got what I paid for.

So I’m frequenting EB Games one day and I see they have a near-mint copy of Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for GC for $11.99. I pick it up. Maybe they’ve fixed some of my concerns from the previous game? NOPE. Sonic is still running in a glorified straight line, the camera is even WORSE (instead of panning upwards and downward, it zooms in and out), and now for the most part I can’t pick who I’m playing as.

Rather than give me six separate characters to choose from, thus letting me decide if I want to run in straight line or be masochistic and listen to loud beeping over and over while I look for goddamn emerald shards with an extremely awful camera, the game forces me to pick a team of three characters, and now I alternate between them. Sonic runs, Tails rides retardedly hard to control vehicles, and now Knuckles has a full-blown rap accompaniment. Lovely.

They did something new though. They introduced some new characters. Rouge, some kind of nymphomaniacial bat, and Shadow, a black hedgehog. I’m not going to sit here and pretend to know what their deal is, because I honestly never bothered to play as them. I got pissed off after failing numerous times at some Tails level where he was riding this stupid airplane mech and wouldn’t stop falling off things or dying and vowed never to play Sonic Adventure 2 ever again.

And not just that, they took out the little free roaming feature where you could wander between levels, thus making the game fully linear.

But like I said, I simply stopped playing. I don’t know. Maybe the camera magically fixed itself. Maybe nonlinear random roaming returned. Maybe Sonic’s levels stopped being glorified two-dimensional race tracks. Maybe Knuckles stopped being a wigger. Maybe Tails got the fuck out of his mechs and became easier to control. I have no way of knowing.

Then Sonic Heroes came out. Now it’s four teams of three characters that you play all at once. Great! Now rather than having to play as two characters I don’t like alternating from level to level, I now have to play them all at the same time and stop the gameplay so I can switch to that character and do whatever task it is they do in order to advance!

Again, I’m assuming that’s the gist of the whole game. I played it for 10 minutes at my cousin’s house, so for all I know the rest of the game may not be like that.

And guess what? They introduced even MORE characters! There aren’t enough already? Now we have some pedo meat rabbit named Cream and whoever else is on Amy’s team, and team CHAOTIX, which is a croc, an armadillo, an a bee that nobody has ever heard of.

I’m lying. Sonic purists will tell me that the Chaotix have always been there. Which is also a lie. The Chaotix were never there. The Chaotix were only known beforehand to the four people in existence who owned both a 32x AND Knuckles’ Chaotix, and maybe the 10 or so people who read the comics. So four teams of three characters, in a Sonic game, we’re only playing as Sonic a twelfth of the time.

Let’s take “Team Sonic” out of contention. Let’s leave the other nine characters. Who is the average newfag Sonic fan going to pick as their favorite? Shadow! Why? Because he’s an anti-hero! That means he’s badass. And he’s black. Which means he’s evil or rogue or something else. I don’t know. It’s an overused archtype. No game can get the whole anti-hero thing down. Kane and Lynch failed. FF7: Dirge of Cerberus failed. GoldenEye: Rogue Agent failed. In the end, the game designers wind up creating unlikable douchebags rather than bold deep characters who play by their own rules.

So yeah, the kids like Shadow. I know! Let’s make a game about him! Let’s explore his backstory! Let’s make a brand new gaming experience! Let’s fix all the gameplay flaws! Let’s make this the best Sonic game ever! Wait, I’m being told that we’re just going to shine up the same shit and give it a different name. My bad.

The camera still isn’t fixed. We’re STILL just going in a straight line. There are STILL too many characters. But wait! Instead of fixing old problems, let’s create NEW ones! Let’s make it so you have to scour these straight line levels back and forth so you can kill 30+ enemies! Let’s leave the visuals intact so the PlayStation 2 has problems managing an FPS above 10! Let’s give Shadow a GUN.

A GUN.

Let’s look over Shadow’s resume briefly. He’s the ultimate life form. He can do fancy shit like transport all over places and unleash energy waves and fly and deflect bullets at stuff. So why does he need a gun?

Rather than go into a large philosophical and sociological debate as to why someone with such fleeting powers would choose to engage hostiles using a primitive manmade weapon, I’m simply going to quote a line from IGN’s review of Miami Vice: The Game for PSP:

“Take, for instance, its reputation system. While not the first game to have such a thing, the notoriety feature in Miami Vice actually comes with a trade-off: wear body armor and use badass weapons and you'll get through the level much easier, but do it with defenseless lounge singer clothes on and nothing more than your department-issued handgun, and your rep will go up a lot quicker.”

It goes back to the whole badass anti-hero thing. He’s doing it to look cool. Which…makes sense, for an idiot to do. But really, the guns are for the most part, optional. You don’t have to use them.

This leaves you two forms of attacking enemies:

A. Punch them.
B. Jump smash into them.

A is impossible because of course, Shadow’s punching radius is maybe two pixels farther than his character model, and gently brushing up against an enemy results in a loss of rings or a life. That’s another indication that Sonic is clinging to the same gameplay mechanic they used 15 years ago. Sure, back then, enemies always caused damage when they brushed up against you, but for the most part nowadays it isn’t always the case. I can take a game like Max Payne and have Max randomly run into people and sure, he won’t take damage from that (although their constant shooting may do him in), but still, if an enemy lightly taps Shadow (or whoever in this series) on the shoulder and all of a sudden it’s assault & battery.

B (for those who have forgotten, is jump smash) is too unpredictable for it’s own good. Basically, you jump, and then hit the jump button again, and Shadow flies forward. Sometimes. I like to use it as a means to get a running start. But it’s also an attack, and it will randomly auto-lock onto nearby enemies without notice, which is usually OK. Shadow will bounce off an enemy and kill them, and you can hit the jump button again to smash into the next enemy.

This is where it can get problematic.

Let’s say the level takes place on floating platforms (as many of the levels in this game do) and plummeting off the edge of the track results in instant death. If Shadow’s jump smash attack decides it doesn’t want to auto-lock onto enemies anymore (maybe they’re behind him or a little too far away), Shadow will jump in the same direction he was going if you make him. Often this is straight over the edge and right into death. So what are you supposed to do? You can’t tell when it’ll auto lock and you can’t tell when it’ll stop. And you can’t punch the enemies because it’s too much of a goddamn risk to Shadow’s life since he’s a super duper all powerful master being who can deflect bullets and zoom around and teleport and roundhouse kick enemies but is in fucking critical condition if you tap him on the shoulder.

You pick the gun up and you shoot them. Maybe THAT’S why they implemented gunplay, the other attack mechanics were too broken to be of any use.

So yes, the game is finally nonlinear, but this isn’t exactly a good thing. Like I said, you now have to do X number of things in order to change the storyline. And there’s usually a 2P character who’ll remind you how much you have to do. But at certain points in the track, the other character shows up to remind you what the OTHER objective is.

I stand corrected on something I said in my review. I said you had to manually change them back in forth in order to continue the objective. It turns out you can keep doing the other objective without it being the one actively displayed on the screen. However, you STILL have to change back and forth to have any goddamn idea how many more GUN soldiers you have to kill just so you can earn the label of “EVIL”.

So follow me here. We have an archaic gameplay design wherein the player runs from point A to point B. The quality of this gameplay was already suspect to major criticism. You NOW have to scavenge this track for X number of items or enemies. In a gameplay setup that is designed to accommodate a player who runs really fast, you now have to tread slowly and run back and forth completing objectives.

The Sonic series has degenerated into an old beat up 1992 Volkswagen Jetta. It’s based on old technology. You’ve put a spiffy new radio in it, but the speakers are still shitty. The seats are held together by tape. There’s a hole in the floor. The power windows don’t work. The gas tank leaks if you fill it more than halfway. And rather than replace this old car with a shiny new one, Sega insists on still driving it despite the fact that it’s degrading into a deathtrap with wheels and any cosmetic change is offset by something that still makes it unusable.

And even after all that, when the problems with the Sonic formula were more than glaringly obvious, what did they do? They released ANOTHER Sonic game! And now they just called it “Sonic the Hedgehog”. What, is it a remake of the original game? Where does it relate in the series canon? Does it tie up any of the plot twists from Sonic Adventure 2?

No, it’s just MORE broken gameplay mechanics! Now you play as Sonic, Blackie the Hedgehog and Whitey the Hedgehog! Good to know we’re being creative, Sega! I see we’re STILL creating too many poorly defined cast members and we’re STILL not upgrading the gameplay and we’re STILL driving that piece of shit broken down VW Jetta.

For the video review, I was going to buy the 360 version of that game and just snap it on camera, saying that’s what I thought of it. But what a waste of $20 that would be. There’s far better uses for $20 right now, such as alcohol and gameday snacks.

And really, I can sum up Sonic Team’s incompetence in one observation. THEY CAN’T EVEN REMAKE SONIC THE HEDGEHOG GENESIS PROPERLY. Everyone who has played Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis 15th Anniversary Edition for the Game Boy Advance has had an overwhelming urge to kill themselves. We have Nintendo remaking Super Mario Bros. all the time for various consoles, whether they be straight ports or enhanced ports or remakes, and Sega can’t even get their first game right ONCE.

As far as I know, there’s no plans for any main series Sonic games. And I honestly hope it stays that way. My inner child can’t take any more of this rape.

I have to wonder though, with the rash of people commenting on the Shadow review saying that Shadow rocked and that I was an idiot and a fatass (that shirt is actually very large), but they never specified if I was an asshole for hating the character or for hating the game. I have to say they think I’m attacking the character because there is no way in poo perfect hell that they could seriously regard Shadow the Hedgehog: The Game as anything less than utter shit.

I don’t know. I don’t watch the new shows. I see him as every other rational person sees him: Black Sonic with a gun. Nothing more, nothing less.

tl;dr: Shadow sucks.

EDIT: This is what’s nice about blog posts. If I decide I forgot to mention something or I thought up something else, I can just add more.

So yeah, the game has 10 normal endings. 10? 10 endings? I like variety but ten endings? What’s the point of 10 endings especially if there’s a FINAL ENDING that just invalidates the previous 10?

I’m gonna be honest with you guys. I didn’t play 100% of the game. Why? I don’t need to play 100% of a game to tell that it’s crap. I shouldn’t have to play 100% of a game to decide that it’s crap. I should have to play 100% of a game if it’s a single-entry game or if it’s from a series with a history of excellence. You know what I did? I downloaded a save file with 100% completion and just replayed most of the levels.

I have about 40 or 50 some odd games sitting around waiting to be beaten, at least six or seven of them RPGs. If Shadow the Fucking Hedgehog thinks I’m going to dedicate the time and energy needed to unlock every little piece of shit extra content, level, and swear word he has, he’s out of his fucking mind. I might as well just sit in my chair and do nothing for the next 48 hours, and I’ll accomplish as much as I would by finishing Shadow. “Cool, I finished Shadow. I learned nothing and it was the most unrewarding experience of my life. I think I’ll shoot myself now”.

But I think I figured out Sonic Team. Yessir I did. You see, there’s a hidden genius to what they’re doing. They remove whatever feature was good from their game for the sequel. Sonic Adventure, free roaming! GONE. Sonic Adventure 2, only have to play through the game twice. GONE. Sonic Heroes, you could at least play as Sonic. GONE. Shadow the Hedgehog, you only had to play as one poorly defined character. GONE. And since there’s no plans for another main series Sonic game, I can’t tell what, if anything, Sonic ’06 did right.

I want to say the Sonic series is the video gaming equivalent of the San Francisco 49ers but frankly that would be an insult to the 49ers. At least they have that backup quarterback Shaun Hill who’s showing some promise. What does Sonic have? The best thing he’s done in the last decade is not release a game in the last year.

Someone, answer this for me. Did Shadow retain his guns in Sonic ’06? Actually, you know what? Don’t answer that. That’s an admission that you actually played Sonic ’06.

I want to pose the question to people as to how to fix the Sonic franchise without turning it into a 2.5D sidescroller, but I seriously don’t think there’s a way to bring Sonic to the third dimension without him sucking immensely.

I still have no desire to ever play Sonic Adventure 2 again. Maybe it’s the one instance where I quit the game at the exact moment where it was going to pick up and all the problems were going to magically be solved. In the line of crappy Sonic Games, it’s certainly better than what they’re cranking out now. Sonic Adventure 2 is a fucking godsend compared to Shadow the Hedgehog. That’s kind of like saying Resident Evil Extinction is better than Resident Evil Apocalypse.

And before anybody puts my gaming talent into question, I would like to point out that I did do that speed run of Sonic 2 GG, so it’s not like I can’t hack my way through a naturally difficult Sonic game.

EDIT#2: Final edit, I swear. Basically, it all comes down to this. We could go back in time about 15 years and I could give you the choice between playing Super Mario World and Sonic 3 & Knuckles and you might have a hard time choosing between them. Today I could give you the option between Super Mario Galaxy and Sonic '06 and you wouldn't even have to think about what to say.

PlayItBogart says:
I could give you the option between Mario World and Sonic 3 & K, and there might have been a slight chance you could pick Sonic over Mario
PlayItBogart says:
Today I could give you the choice between Mario Galaxy and Sonic '06
WolferGiga says:
HAHAHAHA
PlayItBogart says:
You wouldn't even have to think about it long enough to know that Sonic '06 is crap
WolferGiga says:
playing sonic 06 vs eating my right testical.... hmmmm
WolferGiga says:
hard choice.
PlayItBogart says:
You know I think I'd rather eat my testicle.
PlayItBogart says:
Sorry fella, but you're gonna have to pack your bags. Maybe I can sell you to Lance Armstrong instead.

Reports of my assimilation are greatly exaggerated.

2007-11-27T20:23:00.000-04:00

Not dead.

Also I finally picked up a DS Lite. Got a couple games for it, including Super Mario 64 DS and New Super Mario Bros. Right now I'm playing Madden NFL '08 on it because I simply must be permitted to play football on the go.

And it looks as thought the next IrateGamer review is on Tetris.

uuuuh....

what?

Looks like it's time to get involved. (RE: IrateGamer)

2007-10-14T13:14:00.000-03:00

For a time, all was well. The reviewing community had managed to distance itself from the majority of AVGN-nazis and we had embraced the content that we all came up with.

And then that community turned it's guns on the Irate Gamer.

Irony, right?

Near as I can tell, it all started with a rant that Silent Rob put out after Chris announced that the next review would be on TMNT. It was full of butthurt. Every third word was "cock" and it was full of "BAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWW HE HAS LEET EDITING SKILLZ". Every teenager with nothing better to do (i.e. school and/or job) latched onto the idea that hating IrateGamer was way more fun than liking him, and proceeded to troll the fuck out of him.

I'm not going to sit here and say that the resulting TMNT review didn't bear a suspicious resemblance to the then-ANN review (Or say I wasn't a little aghast when he went after TMNT2).

Let's review some facts and assumptions.

FACT: A reviewer is going to review a game regardless if someone else already did it.

FACT: The pizza next to the collapsing razor walls is massively outrageous, and it'd be a crime NOT to mention it.

ASSUMPTION: Chris probably saw the original TMNT review sometime after he put out the TMNT teaser.

ASSUMPTION: Nobody ever used the phrase "shit load of fuck" on the internet before Chris did, right??

ASSUMPTION: AVGN is the ONLY internet celebrity allowed to market his own t-shirt.

First, let's address the "shit load of fuck" issue. The expletive "shit load of crap" has had the word "crap" removed and "fuck" added in it's place. Witty and unique, right? Sure, if you discount the fact that AVGN comes up with these things probably by sticking swear words and other complete randomness into mad libs just to come up with these terms. If I want to say shit load of fuck, I'm saying it. I don't give a shit who else said it before I did.

Another issue of contention among his detractors is his use of fancy effects and cutting-edge video-editing software. So what? If you've got a talent, fucking use it. And if I had the talent to put in the kind of special effects he does, I'd do it too. HE USES SONY VEGAS HE SUXXXX. If you guys get a rare power-up in a video game, are you gonna use it? No, of course not. To use it would make you a jackass who exploits rare knowledge or talent to make a task easier or more appealing. I'm going to assume that everyone who uses Sony Vegas as a talking point never used the tank on the Runway or Streets levels of Goldeneye 007 because that would make them hypocrites.

Another talking point people use is that he has reviewed Back to the Future and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which were also reviewed by AVGN. I count at least five TMNT reviews on a search for "tmnt review nes" that weren't done by AVGN or IrateGamer. You guys had better be flaming every one of those guys too for reviewing a game AVGN did.

"But wait Bogart, you reviewed Top Gun: The Second Mission, which AVGN kinda reviewed and/or mentioned in his Top Gun review. Nobody hated you for it."

Oh they hated it before I pulled out the review. Everybody assumed I was just going to trash the game. Then the review came out and it was quite the opposite. The YouTube reviewing community assumes by default that you're going to rip someone off if you go after a game someone else did.

UrinatingTree did a Snake's Revenge review (ish). He even used sound clips from my review. Does that make me hate him? No, of course not. He took my review and made it better. It's not plagiarism to take an existing concept and improve it. ZOMG PLAGIARISM IRATEGAMER TOOK A TALKING POINT/REALLY STUPID EXPLETIVE AVGN DID. If we handled all instances of taking ideas and trying to improve them, we wouldn't have new video game consoles. This is why we can't have nice things.

Granted, I did pull a really mean bait and switch on wizwar100 for doing an intro like mine with the Time Lord theme, but that was in really bad taste and I apologized for it.

Some of the butthurt IG haters have created an article at EncyclopediaDramatica. This is a huge mistake. From someone who has frequented ED for the last couple of months, this article is extremely shitty. I don't know if the people brave enough to contribute to it know this, but ED doesn't think much of reviewers, seeing as how they have articles for AVGN and UrinatingTree. Haters, pay close attention to the UT article. It's about as appealing as the IG article. And ED thinks it's made of massive fail. ED also hates AVGN. So for reviewers to go there and try and make ED their own personal army is only going to come back and bite them in the ass. ED is an outlet for sites such as 4chan and entities such as Anonymous. There are three constants in the universe: Death, Taxes, and Don't Fuck With Anonymous/4chan/ED/etc. But you guys would know that, you actually looked at content the site hosts before you went there to flame IrateGamer, right? If not, Pay close attention to this article. He tried to make 7chan his personal army. It didn't end well.

Finally, I'll address his need for having to sometimes approve comments. Gee, could you blame him? Sure, there are some of you who want to point out legitimate concerns, questions and/or criticisms of his video, but do you know what the majority of his detractors are posting? Random stupid ass comments probably involving cocks or homosexuality. If he manually approves comments, it's because idiots are spamming his videos. I don't appreciate when my videos are spammed with trash, you don't appreciate it, and Chris certainly isn't going to appreciate it either. I wouldn't be surprised at all if part of the motive of his comment approving had to do with fucking pornbots comment-spamming porn links.

I'm going to tell you guys what I told DanielCraigIsNotBond. If you have a legitimate reason to dislike IG, go right ahead. If not, stop acting butthurt and surpass him if you think he's so shitty.

It's a shitload of fuck.

Because YouTube and Revver fail at life...

2007-09-28T16:47:00.000-03:00

Star Trek V in V Seconds

Resident Evil: Exstinktion

2007-09-22T00:39:00.000-03:00

^{Trailer for the film.}

So as I've been saying, I went and saw Resident Evil Extinction tonight. I do have to admit that I thought the first was alright, and I liked the second one a little better. It helps that RE3 is in my mind the most fun Resident Evil to play, and that I recognized most of Toronto sitting in for Raccoon City. Plus they're certainly not the worst video game movies out there, they're not Doom or Bloodrayne II (Which I may also purchase and review).

My thoughts? I think I liked this movie.

BEFORE I BEGIN THOUGH: It pisses me off that the concession stand now takes debit. My movie starts in 10 minutes, they only just let me in now, I have a voucher for a #1 (Drink, popcorn, candy bar), and I'm standing in a line full of kids who are ALL paying with debit. THERE'S A GODDAMN MACHINE OVER IN THE FRONT WHERE YOU CAN BUY VOUCHERS FOR YOUR FOOD. BUY YOUR SHIT AHEAD OF TIME SO I DON'T HAVE TO PLAY "WHICH LINE IS MOVING THE FASTEST!". I need to start wearing my duster again so I can just smuggle food in.

Let's begin a rundown of the film in chronological order.

GIGANTIC SPOILERS! BUT I'M ASSUMING NONE OF YOU ARE GOING TO GO SEE IT ANYWAY, SO WHO GIVES A SHIT?

PROLOGUE: Movie starts. We're shown a few clips from the first film where Alice wakes up, gets her dress, etc. No narration. She opens a door and the laser corridor is right there. Odd. The laser goes off once. She has to hop up to avoid it. Then the laser grid comes at her. She escapes it by hopping up into a vent (Yeah...). She crawls through, hops out, and is now in the hospital from the end of the film. Huh? She walks through, then is shot in a trap that triggers, and dies. Guys in white suits take her body. We see a shot of Dr. Issacs (Scientist from the end of the second film), looking a little disappointed

Scene shifts to a desert setting. They throw the body into a giant pile of Alice corpses. Camera pans out. It's a fenced off area in a desert with plenty of zombies banging on the fences.

RESIDENT EVIL EXTINCTION

ACT ONE:Time for backstory! Turns out Umbrella didn't quite contain the infection as they had hoped. It spread throughout the US, and then the world. The T-Virus infected lots of other stuff, too. Lakes have dried up and forests have become deserts. The human race is on the brink of extinction. Their only choice is to band together and keep moving. Footage of a convoy full of people is shown. We can recognize Carlos Olivera and LJ from Resident Evil Apocalypse. What, no Jill? I'm heartbroken. She must have died.

We're treated to a bunch of scenes that remind us who the protagonist is. Alice is riding on a motorbike and picks up a distress call from a local radio station. She responds to it and is ambushed by a bunch of bandits who strip her of her weapons. One attempts to rape her and instead gets a swift kick in the face, killing him instantly.

The bandits knock her out and drop her into a pit. She's handcuffed and they throw her down a key. SHOCK SCARE! There's multiple cerberus (Zombie dogs) in cages surrounding her. They let them out. She dispatches them easily and frees herself, and causes part of the pit to cave, allowing her to escape. The dogs kill the bandits, she takes her gear and leaves.

The convoy's been broadcasting a signal looking for survivors. Alice hears it but shuts her radio off.

The convoy arrives at an abandoned motel. Their broadcast goes without response, so Carlos and LJ go in to investigate. LJ is ambushed by zombies and takes a bite in the chest. Carlos saves him, and they leave. LJ neglects to tell anybody about his bite, apparently just hoping it'll go away. The convoy moves on.

Alice stops by a gas station. She kills the zombified attendant and looks around the place. She doesn't find any supplies, but she finds a diary someone was keeping. The person keeping the diary was writing down transmissions received from Alaska, where apparently the infection has not reached, and people live happily there.

Back to the Umbrella facilility underground. It's a meeting among top level Umbrella officials. We're introduced to Albert Wesker, Chairman of Umbrella. Liek no wai. Well, they got the blonde hair and the sunglasses right. The voice is alright. The status of Umbrella facilities globally is discussed (The Paris facility is down to 50% food supply, whatever that means).

The whole "He needs the original Alice for his shit to work" thing might be brought up here, or further in the movie. I forget.

Dr. Issacs discusses his new approach for the zombies: He wants to domesticate them. He plans to come up with a vaccine that can restore some of the zombie's intelligence, enough to trigger memories and stabilize them. Wesker gives him the go-ahead. The meeting is adjourned. All the officials fade away like holograms. Neat. It sure beats the hell out of using Microsoft NetMeeting.

The convoy sets up shop for the night at a gas station. They hand out canned food to their survivors. "Nurse Betty" (Ashanti) treats a superficial head wound on LJ's forehead (Apparently missing the big bite mark on his chest). They flirt, etc. She leaves and LJ takes another good look at his wound. OH SHIT, IT'S STILL THERE!

Carlos is riding around on an ATV. He's setting up motion detectors and surveillance cameras so they can monitor their surroundings and be warned if they have incoming. Some light conversations, beddytime.

Alice has set up camp somewhere, and is trying to sleep. She's having flashbacks about the first two movies (Mostly the first one) and all the while her ESPN shit is going off and rocks are levitating. Her dream reaches it's climax and she awakens, causing rocks and shit to drop all around. Her bike also drops and falls apart. Shit.

ACT TWO: Someone switched the reel and put Analyze That on instead. Just kidding. A zombie in a jumpsuit is secured to a chair in a small room with Dr. Issacs and two researchers. It's very violent until Dr. Issacs injects him with something. The zombie calms.

They begin handing it objects to see if it recognizes them. They hand it a cell phone. The zombie flips it up and tries to use it. They then hand it a digital camera. He flips up the zoom and takes a picture of them. The researchers conclude that Dr. Issacs has succeeded. The zombie begins playing with a larger toy with the shapes and different holes. He gets three of them in, then fails on the fourth. It gets pissed, breaks free and kills two of the researchers. Back to the ole' drawing board.

Alice is on foot walking through the desert.

It's morning at their campsite. All is calm until one of the kids gets a shock scare from a very irate crow. A murder of crows swarm the area and perch on rooftops and power lines. ROLL UP YOUR WINDOWS, KIDS! Everybody puts up their windows and remains quiet...until a kid knocks over an empty Pepsi can. A crow goes apeshit and the murder swings into action. We have two problems. #1: The convoy's ambulance (/w Nurse Betty and LJ) is stuck in the sand and can't go anywhere, and #2: The bus has crashed into a pole and isn't going anywhere. The crows are trying to break into the bus.

Action sequence ensues. They try to transfer the passengers of the bus into an army truck. Not surprisingly, more than a few are pecked off and killed in the process.

Alice notices all the crows and heads for the source of the commotion.

Someone mounts a flamethrower on top of a truck and makes use of it for a while until the crows peck him off. People die. LJ and Betty hold the windshield in place while people escape the bus.

Alice finally shows up. The flamethrower has gone haywire and is about to barbecue Carlos and a survivor. She uses her ESPN shit to prevent the flames from hitting them, then directs the flames upward and fries all the crows (The scene from the ads where there's inferno towering over Alice). She passes out and Carlos retrieves her.

Everyone's off the bus. Betty's been pecked a few times, so she remains behind as LJ screams for her. She shoots a few crows, then gets pecked to death.

Cue back to Umbrella facility. One of the officials is pissed because Dr. Issacs keeps commissioning missions for test subjects. This is the other part where he might have mentioned the "He needs the original Alice" thing. Another Alice fails the training course.

The convoy set up a memorial for their dead. LJ still hasn't told anybody about his bite. We're finally introduced to the leader of the convoy: Claire Redfield (in name only). Alice and Carlos discuss events after the second film. Carlos wonders why she left them. Alice says Umbrella was tracking her. She broke into a facility, took note of their satellite's movements, and stays off-grid to avoid detection. Unbeknownst to her, a retasked satellite has picked her up. Dr. Issacs runs the shot through a computer, where it estimates with a 62% probability that it's Alice. A hologram little girl is with Issacs, it's the same voice as the Red Queen from the first film.

Nighttime at the convoy's new nighttime post. Discussion breaks out. Carlos notes that morale is down and their numbers have dwindled. Alice busts out the diary and talks about Alaska. Claire insists that they don't need a pipe dream, but Carlos thinks they do. Claire puts it to a vote and the convoy decides it's Alaska or bust.

Issacs meets with Chairman Wesker. He brings up how there's a 62% chance he's found Alice, and asks for the resources necessary to capture her. Wesker denies his request, telling him to come back when he's got 100% certainty it's her. Pissed, Issacs shoops Wesker's voice into a command approving the resources he needs.

They need supplies, so they bust out a map and decide where to go. They suggest one spot, but Alice says the place is empty (Perhaps the gas station she was at before?). Claire suggests Vegas. They're reluctant to visit a city, but odds are there's gear there since nobody else would want to touch a city, so the convoy goes over there.

Two helicopters leave the desert outpost, one with a crate in tow.

The convoy arrives in Vegas. It's a bit sandy there. LJ, who's not feeling so good anymore, points out that one of the casinos has gas pumps for their valets (He dropped 2Gs there once), but there's a giant crate blocking their way. They get out to winch it and pull it out of the way, but Alice tells them to wait. She puts her ear to the crate and figures something's wrong. Steps back, GIANT ARMY OF JUMPSUIT ZOMBIES.

Loud gunshots. Lots of blood. Lots of Alice slicing zombies heads off. An entertaining action scene worthy of Resident Evil 4. LJ hides in one of the trucks with "K-Mart" (They found her there, Alice yacked with her in some previous scene).

Issacs is monitoring Alice onsite. The idea is for her to be killed, then retrieve her body so they can get her blood. But she's putting up a fight. Oh yeah, lots of people die. Like almost every adult other than anybody I've mentioned, and some of the kids.

Apparently, with the shit they put in her, they can "shut her down", so they power down Alice. She just stands there while people get the shit kicked out of them.

LJ finally turns into a zombie. He goes after K-Mart, but Carlos saves her. He plugs LJ in the head, but not before LJ can bite his arm. The T-Virus seems a lot slower than it did in Apoc: It took Sgt. Peyton a few hours to zombify, but it took two full days for LJ to succumb to it.

Alice is fighting the shutdown. She manages to fry the satellite with her ESPN shit and comes back. She rushes the tent with Issacs and kills all the guards, but Issacs escapes to the chopper. He's bitten by a zombie in the process and flees. Alice has a chance to board the chopper but she refuses. It's not revealed if they finished off all the zombies, but Alice reveals to the group that she didn't board the chopper because now they can follow it to wherever it goes.

They follow to the source and monitor it with binoculars. Alice needs to get in there. She figures they ought to have the anti-virus for Carlos, but he doesn't seem to want it. They start hatching a plan to get in there.

ACT THREE:Back inside the facility. The same whiny exec from before confronts Issacs, who's under house arrest. He's injected himself with about five different somethings (I forget if they were the vaccine or not). Chairman Wesker has ordered Issacs killed, so the exec plugs Issacs twice. He falls over. Well I guess we're done here and OH SHIT ISSACS GETS BACK UP AND OH SNAP THERE'S TENTACLES ON HIS ARM AND HE PULLS OUT THE EXEC'S EYES AND SHOVES A TENTACLE DOWN HIS THROAT AND FUCKING KILLS EVERYBODY

Issacs has become what I guess I call Stage Two Nemesis. In RE3, once Nemesis loses the top half of his coat, gets tentacle powers and shit, which is basically what Issacs has become: What Nemesis SHOULD have been in the first movie. He's not fully a tyrant since he lacks gigantic claws or an exterior heart, but it's certainly very cool: An actual Resident Evil end boss.

The convoy's plan is as follows: Carlos rushes the crowd in their tanker-plow-thing and crashes. He blows up a bomb he has with him, clearing a path for the rest of them to drive into the fenced area. Claire and Alice get everybody aboard the chopper, and Claire escapes with the survivors, never to be seen for the rest of the film. I'm gonna assume they've survived because there'll probably be a fourth RE film and with Carlos and LJ dead, we've got nobody to carry over to a fourth film.

I would like to point out at this point that there's been pretty much no character development, but Resident Evil has never had any character development in the games. Oh I know some people may try to tell me that Steve Burnside had development in CODE: Veronica, but that's just bullshit. He's a 17 year old pre-emo emo. The only reason he warmed up to Claire was because he wanted to bone her. You put an irate 17 year old in confines with an attractive woman and eventually he's going to start thinking with his ~~penis~~ heart instead of his emo. And then he dies anyway but Wesker plans to revive him anyway.

Alice goes inside and is greeted by the White Queen. "I knew your sister. She was a homicidal bitch." WQ reveals to Alice that the cure for the T-Virus is in her blood and she can prepare all of the cures she wants on-site, but there's a problem. Issacs is sealed in the lower chambers and he needs to be dealt with first.

Alice stumbles upon one of her clones still in stasis. Then Issacs comes at her and they duke it out. She slices at him with her machetes but all his wounds heal themselves. She manages to cause him to retreat while her clone awakens and falls to the ground. It seems as though it dies, so she covers it with her jacket.

Alice follows Issacs into the training course that the Alices were going through at the start of the film. A fight breaks out in the mansion hallway and it seems for the most part that Alice has the upper hand, but Issacs fights back and the fight moves into the laser hallway.

The Alice clone isn't dead, and reawakens.

Issacs kicks the shit out of Alice and looks ready to finish her off. He declares him superior over her (Much like Cain thought between Alice and Nemesis in Apoc), and Alice just laughs. She says he's just another asshole, and the Alice clone activates the lasers. Issacs gets grid'd, and Alice uses her ESPN to stop the lasers from hitting her.

CUT TO BLACK.

EPILOGUE: We're shown some footage of zombies lurching around...Tokyo? The camera pans underground to yet another meeting of Chairman Wesker and his cronies. They haven't heard from their North American facility in 17 hours, so they consider it lost.

Apparently they have new plans, but we don't find out what they are because Alice interrupts the meeting with her own hologram. She says she's coming for them, and she's bringing her friends with her.

She fades out. The clone is standing next to her. The camera pans over to the clone storage area, where a shitload of Alices in stasis begin to awaken.

CREDITS.

VERDICT: It's better than the first two films, and the pacing is alright. You don't learn everybody's names, but most of them don't stay alive long enough for it to matter. You can give it a pass unless you had a passing interest in the first two films. I give it two stars out of four.

QUESTIONS LEFT UNANSWERED:
-What happened to Jill Valentine and Angela Ashford from Apoc?
-Where did Claire and co. go?
-Is Alaska really a safe haven?

I'd also like to point out that never once in this film do you see Milla's bare boobs.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go pass out now.

Generic Pizza-Inhaling Reptillians Living In Mobile Homes!

2007-09-11T23:58:00.000-03:00

I may do this with Abadox. I wrote about it last summer, I may turn it into a video.

There's a lot of reviewer hateorade going on right now, and while I refuse to get involved on either side, I will say that if I had the know-how and the ability to cut videos with even higher production values, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Deadly Towers review! Next week! Maybe even earlier if you guys are lucky!

So Resident Evil: Extinction comes out next week. I'll probably go see it. I honestly expect it to blow. But it's my duty as a fan of Resident Evil to get first-hand evidence of it's suckery and report it to you, the fans, so you don't have to witness the suckery.

So many good videos to put out, so little time. And a new forum image for the MGS forum I moderate at.

I HOPE THIS IS THE PUFF DADDY VERSION OF THIS SONG

2007-09-11T01:11:00.000-03:00

Smelly YouTube. It's loading slower than my wireless reception at a range of 30 feet. I wanted to be a narcissist and watch my own videos, but Noooooo, they're not going to load. WELL I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY YOUTUBE, YOU'VE RUINED MY 1AM PLANS. :'(

I'm thinking to change the Deadly Towers review format back to a standard review. I'm thinking to save the Graphic Novel idea for something entailing more than just Deadly Towers. Plus with all my job-hunting, I can't make a video THAT epic for now.

And just so everybody's clear: You all know the Police song "Every Breath You Take" is about a damn dirty stalker, right? Just in case people don't actually listen to the lyrics.

Been watching a lot more rifftrax. I'm looking to get the one for Firewall next. Not just because it's about an IT guy, and not just because it's Yet Another Harrison Ford Film Where His Wife And/Or Children are Kidnapped/Held Hostage/Killed, but because it's both.

All the reviews linked to one post.

2007-08-21T14:30:00.000-03:00

For the lazy.

Insert Post Title Here

2007-08-20T20:18:00.000-03:00

I'm still between jobs for the moment, but that doesn't mean I don't have money to spend down at my favorite local pawn shop.

Some of you know that I own at least one famicom multicart from the two-part drunk video I did on the 31-in-1. Well in actually I owned two. Now I own three.

It doesn't take a course in oriental languages to know a lot of those names look the same.

Features:
-Contra
-Super Mario Bros.
-Tengen Tetris
-Unknown Ninja game by Jaleco
-Binary Land
-Antarctic Adventure
-B-Wings
-Field Combat
-Ice Climber
-Battle City
-Galaxian
-Bomberman
-Road Fighter
-Circus Charlie

I don't have my own copy of Contra, so this multicart foots the bill for that. Not to mention two of my favorite games from my 42-in-1 (which is corroded and has graphical issues) being Field Combat and B-Wings are present on this cart.

What's odd though is even though the cart advertises it has Star Force, it does not.

Another oddity is that it is very difficult to get the menu to appear without graphical issues - yet you can select any game and they look just fine.

I'll probably take some footage of it sometime.

Video time. IrateGamer reviewed MUSCLE, one of the games features on the 31-in-1 and dissected while I was drunk.

I finally reviewed Rise of the Robots.

And this video doesn't get enough love.

The Bastard Incestuous Lovechild

2007-08-09T19:42:00.000-03:00

Lately I've been gaming and job hunting. I figured I'd spend this as my last true summer break before joining the daily grind like everybody else.

The pawn shop in town had a lot of $3 NES games and I felt obligated to buy out as many of them as I could, regardless if they were crap. Somebody else actually bought a copy of Athena there before I did. That's frightening.

One of the games I got which I've been trying to comprehend is Rocket Ranger. Without going too far into it, I would bill it as the bastard incestuous lovechild of Risk and the Three Stooges NES game.

It will be getting it's own video with commentary, although I may not bill it as a full-scale review, moreso just a display of how screwed up it is.

The following is a video of a cheat (or possibly glitch) to get to the last part of the game. See the way to do the code here.

This is also the third NES game I can think of where Nazis were blatantly censored and replaced with something stupid.

Also, IrateGamer has a new video out. It's a good retrospective of Super Mario Bros. 2.

"It makes as much sense as taking a shit in a dishwasher!"

2007-07-22T11:59:00.000-03:00

Anyway my new review is finally up. I wanted to get it up last night around midnight central, but Windows Movie Maker was acting up and I didn't get the video exported until this morning. Oh well, morning here is still nighttime on the west coast.

First it hung at 87%, so I suspected it was having problems with the MP3 towards the end of the video. I swapped it out for a wav, then it wouldn't export at all, giving me what looked like a very general error screen (files might be missing, perhaps not enough free space, etc.) I quit the program, reopened, opened the source file, and it saved.

I dunno.

Anyway, in addition to my Top Gun: The Second Mission review, enjoy the Irate Gamer's latest review on Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom. Once again, his production values are through the roof.

Feel free to debate me on this.

2007-07-22T00:32:00.000-03:00

Gunfever is still an idiot.

People are all "aaawe let's forgive him". No. You didn't have your pages spammed. You didn't have to restrict the people who could comment on your pages. You didn't have to waste time clearing his bullshit out from your accounts. And you weren't the subject of his stupid videos (Then again neither was I).

The guy spreads racist homophobia throughout the YouTube reviewing community, and then starts crying when the natural order of the internet lashes back and threatens to kill him. Has he never been on the internet before? If you act like an asshole long enough, you're going to attract people just like you who don't share your sentiment.

Course I never wished death upon him. I wished "Oh fuck off" on him. I don't care if his motives were true, or if he's just a stupid kid who wants to make friends. You don't do this sort of thing and then have the audacity to expect people to pardon you.

I can't shoot someone in the face and expect to walk on the charges because I had good intentions, can I?

He's the equivalent of a schoolyard bully. He talks shit, but he runs crying if you put up a fight.

In any event, the next video should be up within a few hours. Windows Movie Maker is taking it's sweet time exporting the video.

A jovial laugh at that!

2007-07-19T12:24:00.000-03:00

I didn't like the latest AVGN review. It's not entirely because I've never played any of the Simpsons NES games, but in olden days he could make me laugh at games I'd never played before.

But this post made me laugh. A jovial laugh at that. Yes, ScrewAttack, remove those videos which are your property! And while you're at it, remove the videos that aren't.

I've been thinking to do an actual rant to explain to people why I dislike them. Maybe this weekend. It won't be a Michael Moore ChangeYourOpinion Extravaganza, but I'll lay it out on the line, and while you don't have to agree, there'll be no grey area about my opinion of them.

But yeah, did not like the AVGN's latest review, I only chuckled once at the six minute mark, and maybe one other time. A lot of my fanbase seemed to share my sentiments. But as I read the thread for it at ScrewAttack, I was a little shocked at how many people loved it. Now I'm sure half of those were because they had suffered anguish at Bart vs. The Space Mutants and Bart vs. The World before, but I'm pretty sure the other half were just blind fanboys who love hearing "fuck, fuck, dookey, dogshit, diarehhia, X is my ass and Y is my balls" over and over.

But that's the difference between our fanbases, I guess. Mine seem to enjoy the more articulate (and sometimes positive) reviews I've been putting out as of late, and his likes swear words.

For what it's worth, his older videos (Pretty much anything Top Gun and backwards) are still great, and I do enjoy watching his console reviews (For the information value). He's just lost that lovin' feelin'. Man I hate it when he does that.

Tonight's feature: A look at Top Gun: The Second Mission. Is it bad? Is it good? Is it a good way to waste five minutes?

I played a pretty good round of Outbreak last night with two pros, The_Unbroken and VR_SOLDIER. This game was actually the reason I bought a PS2. Watch and enjoy.

Damn kids.

2007-07-17T20:05:00.000-03:00

Kids these days.

No this isn't the story of the two stupid kids who decided they were gonna be funny and stand in front of my car when I was trying to pull out of a parking lot, then one comes to my door and then I open the door and probably break his hand, then pull off. Although that is a good story.

After reading way too many comments on the Shadow the Hedgehog review trying to defend the game, I just have to make a statement on what I feel is a growing problem in today's gaming culture.

Kids are far too accepting of crap.

For these purposes, a "kid" is defined as "someone younger than 19".

The theory is that if a company makes nothing but bad games and doesn't improve, they die and go to hell. We ran Acclaim out of the game making business (Now some other company goes by the name Acclaim). Acclaim (And child company LJN), maker of such shitty licensed games as The Karate Kid, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Back To The Future, Back To The Future II & III, Airwolf, Knight Rider, WWF Wrestlemania, The Incredible Crash Dummies, Alien 3, Alias, Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure, Jaws, X-Men, Bart Meets Radioactive Man, Bart vs. The World, Krusty's Fun House, Rambo, Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six, Bart vs. The Space Mutants, Total Recall...

I could go on.

The point is we had enough sense to hate those games. Kids today do not have the sense to hate games. People seem to like Shadow the Hedgehog. My 10 year old cousin liked it. Some 16 year old who just commented on the video liked it. People liked it enough to make it a Greatest Hit/Player's Choice.

If you want game companies like Sega to stop cranking out shitty games or stop cranking out games altogether, stop buying them.

Or at least buy them used so EB gets the profit.

PiB ripoff?

2007-07-11T13:05:00.001-03:00

PSYCHE!

He knows I love him.

FUCKTON OF TERRORISTS

2007-07-05T23:21:00.000-03:00

I talked about this game before. Well now I'm gonna talk about it again.

I like this game. There's a lot of things wrong with it but I still like it.

I think I've killed about 500 terrorists so far and I'm about 60% done the game. I found out there's a level select, but...bah, may as well experience the full game at least once.

The camera is awful, but it's a new kind of awful we haven't seen before from Capcom. I can't really describe it, just wait for a video on it.

I probably mentioned it before, but the token security guard character feels like another token security guard I've seen before...

JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM:

Dave Wilson

Character in Capcom's Without Warning

Security Guard

Former SWAT officer, shot in the line of duty

Carries Walther P99, a 15-shot 9mm handgun

Friend Joe is injured, later dies

Mark Wilkins

Character in Capcom's Resident Evil Outbreak/File #2

Security Guard

Former soldier who served in Vietnam, potential PTSD sufferer

Carries Beretta 92FS, a 15-shot 9mm handgun

Friend Bob is injured, later dies

Coincidence? You be the judge.

In any event, some of you were wondering about the articles that my Monster Party videos were attached to. I'll just link you to the articles on my older blog.

-Monster Party
-Knight Rider
-Silent Service

Dicks! They're all dicks!

2007-07-04T12:32:00.000-03:00

Let's see, who's on PiB's shitlist today...

Quentin Tarantino: Apparently a Kill Bill vol. 3 and 4 have been all but greenlit. For those of you who don't know, I consider Quentin Tarantino to be an absolutely horrible filmmaker. Rather than write it all out again, I'll post what I already wrote on another forum:

Quentin Tarantino does not make "movies". He wanks all over the film, inserts some of the most boring dialogs and scenes, and then puts in some violence expecting people will forgive the boredom for 10 minutes of Matrix-inspired slaughter. And then he just chops the movie in and puts the scenes in at random.

Kill Bill is absolute garbage and I still cannot fathom how anybody could like those movies. And I'm pretty flexible on movies.

(interlude)

Yes, I know what an opinion is. I just can't understand what of that movie is remotely likable. It's a drawn out piece of trash that didn't need four + hours to be told.

The only remotely satisfying part of the movie is the start of vol. 2 where the wedding crowd finally gets what they have coming to them. Who gives a shit what they all think? Everybody already knows they're going to die. The movie should just start with the Fucknut Patrol standing in front of the church.

WOW, FOUR MINUTES OF NOTHING BUT THAT GODDAMN PIECE OF SHIT OO OOO, OOO OOO OOO SONG FROM SOME TELECOM COMPANY'S AD. I AM SO GLAD I STOPPED DOING HOMEWORK TO WATCH THIS

OH U JAPAN PERSON SPEAK JAPANESE TOO? I SPEEK JAPANESE KINDA TOO. LONG POINTLESS TEN MINUTE SCENE ABOUT JAPANESE!

JAPAN JAPAN JAPAN JAPAN

JAPAN JAPAN JAPAN

We GET it, Quentin. You like Japan. You didn't need to waste four hours of my life telling me that. Why don't you move there like every other pretentious asshole who thinks the Japanese would welcome them with open arms.

(interlude)

Pulp Fiction is exempt from my hatrid because it's actually good. It doesn't jump all over the place (A format later used for Sin City), it features actors you know (Which gives it additional kickass value), and the theme of redemption is used well in this movie. Most of the dialog is actually pretty good, and it manages to entertain without getting too violent.

Clearly it was a fluke. I did not care for Reservoir Dogs, and Kill Bill can suck a fart out of my ass.

I don't like him very much.

Stuttering Craig and Handsome Tom/ScrewAttack.com: I don't like them very much. They're hypocrites. They go around proclaiming that you can't put their videos on YouTube because they'll lose money, yet they went ahead and pirated the entire movie of "The Wizard" for their site, even putting in their own Rifftrax ripoff commentary, which is lost profits for NBC Universal.

Their content isn't all that great either. AVGN isn't as fun as he used to be, all his remarks are just cliche now. Captain S (Perhaps their only good show) is over for now. Their podcast got boring. All they do now is crank out little Video Game Vaults for random games and make lousy Top Ten Lists, and both of those you could watch at GameTrailers without even visiting their site.

Plus they leeched $1,600 off their fanbase so they could go and be extras in Uwe Boll's Far Cry. What, Viacom doesn't pay them enough money that they have to suck it off their viewers so they can stand in a crowd and be on screen for maybe five seconds?

I don't know much about the movie business, but I know they generally pay YOU to be the extra and not the other way around. Just show up when they do a casting call for extras. I know Tim Buckley had the chance to apply to be an extra in Indy 4, which leads me to the next guy on my shitlist...

Tim Buckley/Ctrl+Alt+Del: He sucks, and his comic isn't funny. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt over the allegations that he sent naked pictures of himself to an underage forumgoer, and then banned everybody who had remotely anything to do with it, he's still a dick. He doesn't appreciate his fanbase at all, they're just a means to get paid. I haven't so much as smirked at a comic of his in weeks, unless he's changed the comic from a comedy into a drama.

I figured out his latest story arc, which many have begun to call "THE BOGART CODE". In this arc, Ethan (Tim Buckley in cartoon form) has opened his own church, the "Church of Gaming", so those of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith are going to kill him.

The Church of Gaming represents Tim Buckley. The other religions is the growing number of people who have realized his comic isn't funny and is just a mash-up of stolen PA and VGCats gags, and stupid punchlines. Except, since Tim is writing the comic, the Church of Gaming (i.e. Tim) will come out on top and everyone will love it (The opposite of people and his comic).

When this arc is over, I'm going to have to fake an alternate version where Ethan dies. Of course, I'll have to be vague about the whole thing so as to keep from being sued. He's very protective of his meal tickets.

Also, I hate new Sonic, but you all know that already.

The AVGN isn't really on this shitlist, but I should mention that I think his game reviewing career is coming to an end. Since he went to work for Viacom with ScrewAttack, he's been castrated in what he can do with his videos since he can't put any licensed stuff in his videos apart from the game itself. Plus the whole random swear words has gotten old (Which is why you don't hear me invent swear words so often in mine). And now he just goes after topical games instead of really awful ones. If a movie is coming out that is even slightly related to a video game or event, he's going to review it (SEE: Spider-Man, Silver Surfer, Die Hard, Independence Day). Frankly I'm surprised he didn't go after the famicom Transformers game. It's not like he couldn't fake owning it.

Yes, you can curse at a game that sucks, but it can't all be about the cursing. And it doesn't have to be funny, it can be a very serious pitch or it can be epic (As the next review shall be).

The following is a review by an up-and-coming reviewer called IrateGamer. He reviews Ghosts N Goblins for both the NES and Arcade. Not only is he as clever as AVGN used to be, he has amazing production values.

It was a great kodak moment.

2007-05-24T13:29:00.000-03:00

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.

Except of course, other women.

2007-05-23T12:40:00.000-03:00

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.

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

2007-05-21T23:56:00.000-03:00

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.

Aliant: Queer For You

2007-05-17T12:42:00.000-03:00

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.

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

2007-05-15T13:13:00.000-03:00

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.

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

2007-05-09T08:11:00.000-03:00

MY 128-bit integer.

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

Get your own.

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

2007-05-07T17:27:00.000-03:00

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.

It's just like Night at the Museum

2007-05-06T20:51:00.000-03:00

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.