Ugh. So as kind of expected, I blew the driving test. Not too badly, though, and I should be able to pass easily next time. When that next time is going to happen, I have no idea. Given my penchant for procrastinating, probably not too soon. I also had a job interview yesterday, which was sweet. I doubt I'm going to get hired, but it was nice to at least get an interview. Those are rare.
I don't have much in the way of links today, but I suggest checking out The Top Eleven Best Arch-Nemeses
I said I'd talk about StarFox Command on the off chance that I bought it, and quite frankly, I seem to have a problem saying no to StarFox. That's not such a bad thing though. Command is almost as good as StarFox 64, even though it deviates from the formula quite a bit. All the flying is done in free-range areas, maning no on-rails levels. A shame, because I love those kind of levels, but I'm not going to complain. The things that do put me are A)you're always on a timer, and B) there's very little variety as far as objectives go. Either you're hunting down a specific enemy type, or you're going upa gainst a boss. The formula could use a little more, but it's still fun.
The new thing in this game is that for each stage, you actually have a tactical map to move your Arwings through, collecting items, encountering enemies, and liberating bases along the way. It sounded dumb in previews, but I actually really like how it works out. You even get to control all your pilots (who switch in and out during the story) independantly, and each one has a unique ship and theme music. It all works out really well, and I most definitely suggest you pick this one up if you have a DS. I haven't even gotten around to playing mulitplayer yet, and I think that says a good amount about how good the single-player game is.
Busy week here in Ryan Land. Tomorrow is what I like to call D-Day (as in Driving Test Day). I don't know how well that'll go, but here's hoping it won't get too ugly. I'm pretty confident, but it's mostly false confidence. Which I'm told is a character flaw. But is it really false confidence if I know it's false? The perplexity of it all makes my head hurt.
I also have to head back to the dentist on Thursday so that he can fuck around some more in my facehole. Getting a filling isn't nearly as bad as some have made it out to be, but I could most certainly be doing more enjoyable things with my morning.
Nextly, it's a pretty big week for Coozy For Hire. Along with the regularly scheduled comic on Thursday, we've got our 1st year celebration on Friday, which will come with a free bonus comic. And to top it off, the second episode of Spare! hits on Saturday, so you're going to be getting three comic days in a row. Just nuts I tell you. Fortunately, I had most of them done early (though now my buffer is totally used up and I have to start drawing again). Not to mention, our traffic is steadily increasing every month, and that's very reassuring. I imagined that this little project would flop long before the year mark. I even have some juicy tidbits for you: firstly, the comics up until at least the second week of October are gold. Secondly, I'm working on a new feature, but I'm not sure if it's going to work out. It's for a very minor audience anyway, so I doubt it'll matter in the end.
StarFox Command hit yesterday, and I want it, but I'm a little wary. The whole "command the missons" junk is a little off-putting, but I think WiFi dogfights would easily make it worth buying even if single player is a miss. I'll make sure to log my thoughts about it if I do decide to pick it up.
Keep an eye on RainbowPuke.com. I recently submitted a piece. It'll likely appear once a third page is posted, and you'll likely be able to tell it's mine. Cause it has my name on it.
Due to my recent CD acquisitions, I will have to update at least one page in the CD Collection. I'll also be adding a new page by the end of the week. Not many short ones left, either. B, Q, and S in particular are ones I'm not at all looking forward to doing.
After all this, I think it's pretty much understood that I'm not going to be doing much on the article front this week.
I watched The Bechwarmers the other night. It was surprisingly good. I mean, it's not something I would buy, but I'll recommend renting it. Dick and fart jokes, plenty of slapstick, and mucho vomit. Exactly what I look for in a dumb movie. Plus a bunch of good names. I'm not a huge Rob Schneider fan, but he, David Spade and Jon Heder do a commendable job on this one.
Bought me a buttload of CDs over the last couple days. Four, actually, but I defy you to load your butt with more than four CDs. Bad Religion's The Empire Strikes First is fan-frickin-tastic, and Thrice's Red Sky EP headbutts women in the ovaries for fun. The other two (Resident Evil Soundtrack, OK Go's Oh No) are less notable, but I like them enough to have bought them. I also finally found a copy of The Alpahbet of Manliness. Needless to say, it's the best book I've read since... Well, probably ever.
Lastly for today, I will wipe any doubt that I don't kick major ass from your mind. Behold:
click for king-size
Frankly, "Bark At The Moon" was a bitch, but otherwise, I think I'm getting pretty good. I'm not going anywhere near Expert mode though. Not until I five-star everything on Hard, at least. It literally frightens me.
I knew that MegaMan and the robot masters had been cuteified for MegaMan Powered Up!, but I'd never seen the character art for Dr. Light until now.
Wheee! Look at how fat he is! And his giant shoes! Chibi-Dr. Light is adorable! Hooray for Capcom and their spectacular artists!
Stumbled onto a sizeabe deposit of twenty-spots earlier today. One almost large enough to fund an XBox 360. But there are far more important uses for those twenties, so Dead Rising will have to wait.
In other news, my brother showed me the greatest candies ever; Ice Breakers Sours.
There totally isn't enough to talk about here to wrtie a whole article, so I'm gonna constrain it to the blog. The thesis here is that these are friggin' awesome candies. While they go under the guise of mints, I'm going to be referring to these as candies, beacuse quite frankly, they have all the properties of candy, and very few semblances to mints.
Let's get the obvious bit over with, they taste awesome. Coming in either "berry" or "fruit" varieties, Ice Breakers Sours taste like scoring with your friend's hot sister. So awesome. They're called sour, and I'm not a big fan of sour, but they're not so bad. The whole sour bit lasts about four seconds, and you're just left with sweet candy taste. The first time I ate one, the sour hit me hard, then faded away into the delicious berry taste that I could only describe as "happiness."
They're got a pretty good texture to them, being shaped and smooth like Sweet Tarts. They're about as hard as Sweet Tarts too, but they crumble very nicely once you bite into them.
Ice Breakers Sours are officially regarded as mints, but they certianly don't act like mints. Yes, their strong flavour will linger in your mouth for a while, but it doesn't last long enough to be put to any serious breath-freshening use. They cost a pretty penny, though, which is common for top-tier mints, like these and Altoids. It's damned hard to resist eating them like candy too. You know, the whole delicious thing playing a part there.
Overall, I stand firmly behind my opinion that Ice Breakers Sours rule. One might even say they're crumbelievable.
Time for a quick BotM here. This month, I'd like to pay some tribute to the greatest cover artist ever: Richard Cheese. And he's not your regular cover artist either, he redoes all sorts of popular songs lounge style, and it's usually a pretty sweet result. Some particular favourites include Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" and Sublime's "Smoke Two Joints". One thing that really makes him awesome is that when remixed as lounge songs, a lot of the tracks he chooses end up sounding absolutely hilarious. Take Disturbed's "Down With The Sickness." Not even the Vandals have any songs that make me laugh that much, and I'm pretty surre that's what they're out to do.
so yes, Richard Cheese = awesome lounge remixes. Check him out if you haven't yet (I've already preached this to many of my friends), as I'm pretty sure it's a kind of music that anyone can enjoy. End.
I spent the day at the beach today. Bad idea. The beach is fucking torture for me. On the plus side, I got to watch a couple hot girls play tennis for an hour (boing boing). I also finally got a tiny litle sunburn. I say "finally" because I've spent a good chunk of time this summer just basting under the sun, and I hadn't burned at all. I'm pretty much immune.
As far as the site goes, my productivity here is probably going to go down the crapper. I've doubled my workload over at Coozy For Hire by deciding to publish two comics a week, and basically what that means is I'm going to be double annoyed by having to write articles. I've still got a handful on the back burner that I've been putting off for months now, so maybe I'll get one or two of those up in the coming weeks. Or maybe the ramped-up comic production will push article production even further down my priority list.
Now, I'm not just putting out a second CFH strip each week, either. On every Saturday, I'll be drudging up a comic from days past, drawing (pun!) from my gigantic collection of comics written about my high school shenanigans. The art quality will be a little less than I shoot for when I do a CFH strip, but considering the source material's quality, it still looks about 100x better. I think that's about everything I needed to go through today, so I'll be off now.
Yep. I know I didn't post an article last week. And so the streak ends. It was a good run though. Anyhow, I've been at the cottage for the last four days, and damn did I get a lot accomplished. Most importantly, I learned to bake pie. This is probably going to end up a bad thing though, because now I can create pie whenever I want, and it'll likely be my downfall. Secondly, I finished Kingdom Hearts 2 with a 100% completion rate. It was a bitch, but I did it. I'm proud of myself. And the game was pretty awesome too. A little easy due to Forms being totally broken, but fun no less. So now, links!
The Top Ten Unmanliest Superheroes
Your Band Name Sucks: 50 of the Inexcusably Worst
My new favourite video ever (NSFW)
Remember when I went nuts over the prospect of Biker Mice From Mars on DS? Trailer! While it certainly looks like it could be good, they really need to ingect some, oh, I dunno, action into it. Not a whole lot going on there.
Help name a bridge after Stephen Colbert! We're still a long way off, so go get voting, you dummy.
Best internet mashup video ever. Even better than all those Zidane headbutt collections. There must be dancing!
I know I'm really late on this one, but if you haven't seen the PS3 vs. Wii vid yet, hurry up. Hot chicks in boy shorts are always excellent promotional tools.
After just over a week of being under repair (felt like forever though), Tyler's back!
I finally got my hands on Remastered Tracks Rockman Zero 4: Physis. I heartily approve! Even the drama tracks (which are diaogue explaining the story, and entirely in Japanese) are pretty cool. Sample, anyone? (right-click, save as)
HA! It's just in the nick of time, but there's an article up this week. It's an old article, but it's been lost for years now, so I figure why not post it? There's a slight chance you've seen it, but I highly doubt that. It's short too. I don't know what else to say.
Went to see Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby last night. As expected, it was excellent. Might have even been better than Anchorman, and damn do I love Anchorman. It's the only movie (I own) that I've watched more than four times (aside from the original Star Wars trilogy). Anyway, Talladega. It's hilarious, the actors are excellent, and it's even got a badass soundtrack. There's nothing not to enjoy. Maybe they drag a couple jokes out for too long, but other than that, there isn't anything to complain about. Oh, and since it's a NASCAR movie, there's plenty of product shilling, which is normally kind of annoying, but it's a NASCAR movie, so you really can't complain, as NASCAR is like the biggest sellout... thing... ever. And they play a lot of jokes off the product placement too, so it works out. Not like that damned Will Smith. Like I care about stupid Converse.
So in conclusion, um, yeah, go see it. It's worth the (x) dollars, and I know I'm going to be paying another (x) dollars when it's released on DVD. Maybe then I'll finally pick up Old School too. Been meaning to get that for quite some time now...
There was something I wanted to link to today, but being a Boy Of Very Little Brain, I've forgotten what it was. I can't find it again, whatever it was, so to make up for the lack of a link, I've moved over a couple more old articles from Angelfire to the dot-net. Someday they'll all be moved. Probably the day before I decide to give up on this internet crap, but it'll happen. Anyway, I have to do some rambling on a somewhat deeper level right now, so just ignore the next paragraph unless you're really interested in me. That means you, stalkers.
While I was rummaging through my old junk, I found a rather personal hidden document that was written by me circa 2002. What that document was about, I'd rather not say. I know that there are a couple people out there who've stumbled onto other secret documents of mine, and I can assure you it's not what you think. I do bring it up for a reason though. After reading it thoroughly, I can do nothing but smile. Why? Because it makes me happy to know that I've become happy. I think maybe I was more troubled as a youth than I remember, and I'm very pleased to know that things have gotten much better. I've clearly grown as a person, and I like seeing something that really shows that, even if the contents of said documents fill me with shame. It also makes me wonder how much growing I still have to do. I know that there are still some personal issues and hurdles to overcome, but I'm kinda looking forward to the day I can. Damn, I feel like I'm some kind of sullen hero having his cliché self-acceptance moment. And no, that wasn't my link. It just kind of fit. So yeah, I guess that's everything. I'm not great at writing about stuff like this (some may argue that I'm not too good at writing about anything), and truth be told, I'm a little embarassed to be publishing it to a public place. I guess that's really the reason I keep this blog though, so I can write about junk and know that someone, no matter how random, might read it. I would never want to talk about this kind of stuff with anyone, but the idea that someone might know what's going through my head is actually rather comforting to me. And look at that, I managed to drag it out some more. Well, this is the real end. It's probably best you just ignore everything in this parapraph. Except the link. It's pretty funny.
I had an inkling when I heard about XBox Live Arcade that the chances that I would one day own an XBox 360 had risen astronomically. Now, thanks to Jeremy Parish, it's nigh inevitable.
Servbots! I could ignore the MegaMan X suit, but I cannot hope to resist the Servbots. If you'd played MegaMan Legends, you'd know exactly why. Read the post on ToastyFrog for more info.
My iPod got royally messed the other day. Read the tale here. Hopefully it'll be corrected one way or another pretty soon... I miss the little guy.
I recenty read through the Ugly Hill archive. Good stuff.
If you love platformers and theses, I recommend reading this study on platform games. I spent my Friday night reading all 31 pages of it, and I don't entirely regret it. Then again, I'm a huge nerd.
Apparently there was recently a Masturbate-athon held in London. I'm still trying to figure out why I wasn't the guest of honour.
I'm not going to argue with this list of the Top Ten Manliest Superheroes, mostly because they included Grifter (a personal favourite), but I really think that despite Bruce Banner being kind of a pussy, the Hulk should have been on it somewhere.
A little over a year ago, I purchased a game for my Nintendo DS called Meteos. It was a pretty simple-looking puzzle game that was getting very respectable press. Since I adore puzzle games, I was going to get it even before I heard how good it was. So I bought it. And by God, was I impressed.
I started playing Meteos again about a week ago, and it's easily just as addictive and fun as it was a year ago. Of all the DS games I own, I think I'll be coming back to this one the most over time. There's nothing not to love about Meteos. It's frantic, it's engaging, and there's a good level of strategy associated with it. You can pick up, learn, and have fun with Meteos just as easily as you can Tetris, but just like Tetris, you'll have to pick up on a few tricks and techniques before you can earn mind-boggling scores. A year later, my skills haven't slipped at all, and I've even finally been able to reach the elusive "The Ascent" ending.
One coolest things about Meteos is the music. It's not like other games in that there's just BGM playing while you do your thing. No. You essentially create the music as you go, with each successful Meteo match-up inciting a little tune, and different tunes being playe for bigger matches, higher combos, etc. I know the Wind Waker was a little bit like that in the way that attacking enemies would produce short melodies, but no other games that I've played really even attempt such a neat feature. The other thing I really love is that once you get into Meteos, Meteos gets into you. I know that on days that I've spent playing the game, that when I close my eyes at night, I see Meteos falling and then my mind just starts to play its own game. And not by choice either. It just happens, and I love it.
So why do I bring it up? Because I don't think I've ever talked about Meteos before. That, and I really wish they would re-release it with WiFi capabilities. Just like nearly every muliplayer game, it's so much more fun to play against other people. I've been trying to get my brother to buy it ever since I got it, but no such luck. Sure, there's a single-card option, but we don't play often enough for him to get good by that alone. I think my only real chance of getting some really good multiplayer Meteos going on is later this year, when Buena Vista Games releases Metos: Disney Edition (which will hopefully include a WiFi option). I mean, I'm sure everyone that bought Meteos would adore WiFi play, and since they won't be re-releasing the original, that's probably the best we can hope for. The only downside to Wifi Meteos would be that my productivity would go from six to zero.
First things first, I've gone around and fixed some archive pages that were missing, had bad links, that kind of thing. Mostly added some archive backlog. So that should be completely up-to-date now.
Also, I've taken the liberty of uploading this week's article. It's in the usual spot, so I don't think I really need to link you to it. Again, I really like it. You may not feel the same way, and that's too bad, really. I even enjoyed writing it and taking the pictures, and that's a rare thing to happen. Well, enough of this crap, get to it!
I'm about halfway through this week's article, and I've gotta say, I'm really having fun with it. This is the kind of article I started the site to write. I'm pretty sure that you're gonna enjoy it to. Especially if you're a fan of any of my biggest influences. Here's a snippet to keep you on the edge of your seat:
Ryan : It looks like syphilis.
ShadowMan : Is that an educated comparison?
Ryan : I blame the internet.
ShadowMan : Please just mix it. I think it gave me a dirty look.
Come back tomorrow for the full story!