On Pop-Tarts and sock puppets

I was going to start this post with an “if you’ve been reading this blog for a while” intro, but I feel like I do that a lot. Maybe even too much? Or maybe I don’t and just think that I do? I have no idea!

Anyway, there’s no doubt in my mind that as a person who has spend much of his life being perceived by others as “creative,” I am not nearly creative enough. Oh sure, now and then a spark will ignite and I’ll pop out something that shows a little thought, but mostly I just coast on doing the same thing that the people I see as inspirations do, but with my own half-assed twist.

I thought my Pop-Tarts Review videos were pretty creative, even if there are a dearth of people with the same idea on YouTube. The whole project started because I just needed an outlet for my silliness (God help you if you take those videos seriously), because I find it hard to express directly to other people. I don’t even really like talking to people about the Pop-Tarts videos, because it makes me feel embarassed and weird.

Of course, as time dragged on, I got kind of bored with the whole idea, and felt like it needed a shot in the arm. That’s when I developed Sockstopher.

 
Sockstopher is… not the grand slam I was hoping he’d be. Oh, people like him alright, and that was always the goal, but his video is one of the less popular in the series, as far as the view counter goes. Whether this is because I’m a bad puppeteer or because people are just getting tired of the whole Pop-Tarts Review schtick, I don’t know.

I really like Sockstopher though. I think he’s a fun character to have around, and I’ve been desperately trying to find a way to work him into more stuff. I just haven’t been able to find a good fit for him yet. I do have one plan for him, but it requires a box of Pop-Tarts that I don’t have.

On the whole, the production side of the Pop-Tarts Review series has come to a stall because I have run out of flavours and so far the few people who have claimed that they’d bring me some when they take a trip down to the States have flaked. I’m not offended or anything because I’m asking for handouts here, but I’d be eternally grateful if someone actually followed through.

I do have a few more episodes that just need to be uploaded, if you’re into that sort of thing. Problem is, my internet speed has been unfairly chopped down to a fraction of what it once was, and those 5ish-minute videos now take like two hours each to upload. It’s pretty ridiculous. Hooray for capitalism!

Something about momentum

Last weekend was delicious Thanksgiving long weekend for us Canadians, but the awesome dinners I got three days in a row are actually the least incredible things that happened over the weekend.

Not to downplay those dinners, of course. Many people worked hard to prepare them, and I appreciate all that effort. In fact, you might even say that I give them my thanks for stuffing me so full that I literally rolled out of bed on Tuesday morning.

The big news, as you might be aware, was that Pokémon X and Y launched on Saturday. I was so damn excited about them, in fact, that my youngest brother and I decided to attend the midnight launch at our local used games store. Wifey tagged along for the ride too, but I was not able to convince her to start her own journey with Pokémon. Some day…

We figured it’d be a pretty low-key thing, because I guess neither of us know many Pokémon players in the city. Also, like I said, it’s a little local place. But the turnout was pretty amazing! I’d say that there were at least 60 or 70 people there. Which is low-key compared to the official Nintendo launch event in Toronto, but still way more than we’d expected. There wasn’t much more to the evening than waiting in line for half an hour and then merrily skipping out of the store with games in hand, but it was still a pretty fun experience.

And so that’s what I did all weekend when I wasn’t out Thanksgiving binging.

Except for Monday night, which was just wonderful enough to outshine a new Pokémon game as the best part of my long weekend. Yes, you read that right. And that totally awesome thing was the opportunity to go see Joe Satriani.

I first heard that he would be playing here back in the summer, but there was no way that I could justify dropping enough cash for tickets. I so desperately wanted to go, as I’ve been a Satch fan since the very first time I heard “Surfing With the Alien” and he was easily on my top 5 list of concerts to see. (The rest: Matt Good again, Tom Petty, Tonight Alive, and Go Radio)

A miracle happened though, and my in-laws bought me tickets for my birthday. It was way more than they should have spent, but it is quite possibly the best birthday gift I’ve ever received. At the very least it’s neck-and-neck with Life and an NES.

It doesn’t really need saying, but the concert was fantastic. I didn’t recognise a lot of the songs because I don’t have the new record (Unstoppable Momentum), but maybe that’s even better, as I got to experience a bunch of material for the first time live. “Satch Boogie” and “Surfing With the Alien” were in the set, and that’s all I could really ask for. And the encore… oh, the encore. Let’s just say that even my wedding day may not have been as emotional a day as the day I was actually in the damn crowd for “Crowd Chant.”

I don’t go to very many concerts, but the ones I go to are so damn good. And now that that’s all said, I have to get back to work. And by “work”, I mean “Pokémon.” Because I totally don’t type these things out at work.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

You’re going to have to bear with me, internet. I want to talk about Monster Hunter again.

Let’s begin with the basics. The Monster Hunter series is all about fighting giant beasts, and is pretty much a game built around hectic, exciting boss battles. Yes, it includes some smaller enemies too, but they’re like the basil on the tomato soup that is the rest of the game: they add a little flavour, but aren’t what you came for. You’re there to bring down huge, fearsome beasts and then turn them into pants. It’s even more fun when you’re doing it with your friends, so much so that it’s the only video game that I actually have a desire to play with people online.

Victory in Monster Hunter requires what I call the Three P’s: preparation, patience, and practice. It’s not a game for people who can’t be arsed to earn their victory. There is no coasting in Monster Hunter, and there is no easy mode. If you’re going to win, you need to make sure you know what you’re doing. Triple-checking your supplies before you head out on a hunt isn’t just helpful, it’s nearly required. You need to study your enemy’s movement and attack patterns to find weaknesses and openings. Familiarity with the terrain in each map is just as important as being familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen weapon. Long story short: Monster Hunter requires a huge investment of time and effort on the player’s part, and that’s what I love most about it.

Most games, especially those of the current generation, you can just turn on and play if you’ve got even a basic knowledge of video games. Monster Hunter is not at all like that. If you boot up a Monster Hunter game and expect to get just another action game, you’ll be eating a healthy serving of humble pie in no time. These are complicated games, and you need to take the time to learn them before you’ll get anywhere. Each game starts with a rather lengthy tutorial in your basic survival skills like item gathering, meat cooking, and small monster slaughter before you even get a whiff of a real hunt. While these might seem like boring little subsystems that aren’t so important that they need to be forced on you, it turns out that they are absolutely essential.

Continue reading Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

4 Crazy Chip Flavours!

I guess it’s a Canadian thing, so if you’re a foreign reader you may not have heard of it, but Lay’s currently has a contest running. It is, unsurprisingly, a contest to create a new flavour of chips for them to produce. At current, we’re about a month away from the end of the contest, and the four finalist flavours have been in stores for a while now. Since July, I guess?

Fact of the matter is that since I shun any social media that doesn’t involve me and I don’t spend any time in the chips aisle anymore, I didn’t notice these new flavours until a couple weeks ago. I just happened to randomly stumble upon one of them while out with the wife getting faux Slurpees. I used to be really crazy about trying each and every new potato chip flavour, and since that compulsion still exists deep inside of me, I went absolutely nuts just seeing the first one sitting there by its lonesome.

Now after all that embellishment, try to imagine how I felt when I looked at the back of the bag and saw that there were three more new flavours to hunt down. Suffice to say, I needed a change of pants. It’s not often that I get to enjoy the thrill of the junk food hunt like I used to, and knowing that those flavours were out there somewhere made me feel like my life had a real purpose  At the very least, it took me back to a time when hunting down article fodder was half the fun.

So I guess you’re all writhing in your seat there, wondering which of the new flavours I found first. You don’t care for the anecdotes; you just want the cold, hard, facts. Well tough. The anecdotes are important to my process and to the total word count. They’re never going to go away, so you might as well just learn to enjoy them.

Continue reading 4 Crazy Chip Flavours!

Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: September 2013

Welcome, good reader, to a new thing that I want to be doing each month. I’m calling it Monthend Video Game Wrap-up, and it’s basically just going to be a snapshot of what I’ve been up to in the world of video games over the course of each month. Why? I dunno. Same reason that I put anything on this blog, I guess: to keep a cheap record of stuff I do and think.

Okay fine, I’ll admit it. This is all just a big excuse for me to make a banner. It’s one of those odd little things that I really love doing, and I can’t really be bothered to make them for common blog posts. Also I guess since it’s going to be a big thing I’ll make a section for it on the Features page.

~ Now Playing ~

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD (Wii U) – I played through WW only twice on Gamecube, but it’s still one of my favourite Zeldas. People seem to be pretty split on the graphical changes, and I am firmly in the “I love them” camp. The swift sail changes the pace of the game from “pretty slow” to “not as slow” which is nice, but what really I appreciate is the improved Picto Box. It’s making completing the Nintendo Gallery seem less like the most horrible, tedious task ever and more like something that’s actually pretty fun! I’m about halfway through the game, just entering the Earth Temple.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: September 2013

And Ryan said “Let there be content”

I was poking around the site today, just lookin’ at stuff, and noticed that the Features page is full of content, but there aren’t any actual links to that content. So I went and made all the Steve Articles and GameFAQs submissions available to read. and I do recommend that you check out those Steve Articles. They’re pretty surreal, and a nice reminder of an age long ago when other people would occasionally contribute to the site.

I was going to go ahead and link all the Chat Radios, but they’re stuck in some really ugly pages. I’m not too sure if I want to leave them as-is or go through the trouble of converting them into a nicer template. If you want to read them as they are, just follow this link. They’re also recommended reads, as they’re pretty funny.

As for the CD Archive? Well, I refuse to give up on it, but I’m certainly not going to bother updating it anytime soon. I haven’t linked in the pages that exist yet, but I guess I could go do that now. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

That’s it for today. Just admin stuff. Tomorrow I’ll make a post about video games! But I’ll warn you now, it’s gonna be more of a diary entry for me than anything else.

Insidious: Chapter 2

There isn’t any easy way to say this: I was a little disappointed with Insidious: Chapter 2.

It’s not that I thought the movie was outright bad. No, it was decent enough; it certainly held my attention for the duration. What I have a problem with is that it’s not the movie that I was expecting/hoping that it would be. Which I suppose is kind of a petty gripe, because as a sequel it’s actually quite good, so take that as you will.

Insidious 2 begins right where we left off at the end of the first movie, so there’s really no way to describe the plot of the flick without letting slip at least some minor spoilers for the first one. So I guess you’re gonna have to deal with me being all vague and mysterious. This will not go well.

The story picks up with the family dealing with the fallout of the events from the first film. Everyone’s all shaken up, and while they thought that their biggest problem (being haunted) was solved, it quickly becomes apparent that it was not. Well, it was, but it wasn’t. Now they’re being haunted by different spooks. And when the identity of one of those spooks was revealed, I slapped my head so hard because OF COURSE. DUH.

The promotional materials for the movie (like the poster above) will lead you to believe that the movie is about the baby being haunted or possessed or something, but really that’s all a lie. There are a few baby-related scenes, but really the baby has absolutely nothing to do with the actual plot. And if she was supposed to, they certainly did not get that point across very well, because I have no idea why they even bothered with the baby scenes.

All in all, Insidious 2 is more of a murder mystery than your typical paranormal horror flick. I think that the best way to describe it would be Scooby-Doo meets The Shining. Only it’s less dumb than the former, and not nearly as scary as the latter. But it’s a pretty apt description, and the more I think about it, the more fitting it seems. What disappoints me about this is that the movie spends almost all of its time figuring out who the antagonist is and what their motivation is instead of providing us with more of the dreamland shenanigans that I loved so much in the first movie.

In fact, when it comes to the otherworld at all, it’s used even less than it was in the first movie. Again, it only really comes around in the third act, and this time it’s not as full of creepy, surreal imagery. Now it’s… complicated. I won’t get into it in detail, but the story ends up folding in on itself and interweaving with a few scenes in the first film, which is all really cool for a while. And then you realize how weird it is that somehow being in the otherworld allows the characters to actually affect the past. What? Yeah, it’s… it’s not great, especially since they don’t make any effort to describe how this is even remotely plausible or ties into the rest of the established lore.

I want to say that I’m being unnecessarily critical here, because I wanted to just turn off my brain and enjoy the ride, but man, I’m sure that there’s a better way they could have resolved the scenario here than shoehorning in some time-travelling bunkus. I can easily gloss over a minor plot hole or inconsistency here and there, but this one just made no damn sense. Fans seem to be trying to make a case that there is no “sense of time” in the otherworld, but it still seems like a bunch of malarkey to me.

Another thing that stuck out to me is that while the first movie was straight up dramatic horror, part two here has a rather generous helping of comedy relief. I’m not sure it was necessary, but most of the jokes are pretty good so I’ll let it slide. Also, like the first film, this one’s mostly devoid of glaring special effects, except for one scene near the end. In contrast to the rest of the movie, where everything looks very natural, this one bit really stands out. It’s short and fairly inconsequential, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

In conclusion, I did like Insidious: Chapter 2. It wasn’t as good as the first one, and that whole time-travelling bit was annoying, but overall it satisfied. The atmosphere was pretty much what I’m looking for in a horror film, and while it was a bit too big for its britches, I thought the story was pretty good. I just preferred the relative simplicity of the first one. A third film is confirmed to be in the works, and while I’ve got my fingers crossed that they’ll go back to the unsettling distorted reality theme of the first movie, I’ll make sure not to go into it expecting that.

Insidious

Wifey and I are going to the movies tonight. For a long time, we used to go see a movie every week, but over the last couple years our moviegoing has diminished quite a bit. We still try to catch the really big ones, but generally we’ll only go out to the theatre once a month at the most.

Tonight, we wll be seeing Insidious: Chapter 2. I am pretty excited, because Insidious was so much better than I ever would have imagined it to be. And that’s what I’m going to talk about today, because we watched it again last night as a refresher before we check out the sequel, as I had forgotten pretty much everything about it. I thought that I’d made a post about it back when I saw the movie for the first time, but a site search shows otherwise.

Insidious is a horror movie from the creators of Paranormal Activity and Saw. While I do have a morbid fascination with the myriad different ways they come up with to kill people in the Saw flicks, and the first Paranormal Activity is legit spooky, I’m not a fan of either series. Which is fine because Insidious is totally different from either of them. It’s more of a back-to-basics kind of horror movie; it just wants to tell you a spooky story.

The film starts with a couple, Josh and Renai, moving into a new home with their three kids. While goofing around in the attic, the oldest of the kids, Dalton, wangs his head on the floor, sees something spooky offscreen, and doesn’t wake up the next morning. Doctors call it a coma, but have no explanation for it, saying that the head wound didn’t cause any serious damage. The parents are obviously grief-stricken, and Josh starts spending as much time away from home as possible to avoid dealing with all the stress there.

Meanwhile, stuff starts going bump in the night. And in the day too, I guess. Renai hears voices in the baby monitor, the house’s alarm system goes haywire, and spooky figures begin appearing. This all culminates in the family deciding that the house is haunted and moving again. We’re only about half an hour in here, so obviously that does not work.

Eventually Josh’s mom hires them a team of paranormal investigators, and all the pieces start falling into place. I won’t spoil anything here, because this is a movie you probably should actually watch, but I think it’s obvious enough to note (indeed the box is trying to give it away) that it’s actually Dalton that is haunted, which is why the ghostly people are still stalking around the new house.

What I like here is that it takes the usual “haunting” movie trope of the dad/boyfriend not believing that anything supernatural is happening and twists it on its ear. Josh outright denies the problem at hand when the insvestigators lay their theory on him, but comes around within minutes. I was shocked at how suddenly he changed his mind and got the plot rolling. I was all like “Pssh yeah, typical. Of course he’s not gonna believe it” and then WHAM! George Michael out of nowhere. Totally didn’t see it coming.

The entire third act of the movie is really surreal and cool, too. While the first two acts are business as usual, most of the third takes place in a dreamy otherworld, and ends up kind of making me feel like Insidious was a better Silent Hill movie than the actual Silent Hill movie or its tepid sequel. It’s fairly subtle about the horror elements, and gets its spookiness through more with unsettling imagery, foggy darkness, and the gravity of the situation than violence and gore. A lot of the scary stuff in the movie isn’t immediately threatening; it’s frightening because it’s out-of-place and unnatural. It takes the familiar and distorts it, and that kind of mucking around with reality is the kind of horror that I love to see in movies.

One of the really cool things about Insidious is that while it’s a movie about the supernatural, I’m pretty sure that it uses absolutely no special effects. It’s all makeup, camera trickery, and other practical effects. Smoke machines and lighting are used to great effect here, and they do a really great job of setting the scene. At least, this is what I’m assuming. I haven’t researched the film enough to know for certain that they didn’t use special effects, but there aren’t any that are glaringly obvious. There’s also absolutely no gore, if that’s the kind of thing that’ll keep you away from a movie.

I have two problems with the movie. The first is that it takes way too long to get to the more interesting parts of it. Only about a sixth of the movie is spent in the spooky otherworld, and I feel like if they’d given it a little more time to shine, we could have seen some truly scary things in there. As it is, a lot of the frights before that part of the movie are jump scare variants. Admittedly, a lot of them are really good and you won’t see them coming, but still. I will admit that in this case, it’s probably a good thing that they spent most of the movie building up the story and characters.

My second gripe is the ending. Considering that the rest of the movie feels pretty fresh in a fairly stale genre, the ending is all too predicatable and stands out as nothing more than a hook on which to hang their sequel. Then again, I did just literally ask for more otherworld shenanigans, and I suppose the sequel is giving me exactly that. Or at least, that’s what I’m expecting from it. The reviews are not great, but I find that I almost always enjoy movies that I go in wanting to enjoy. And that’s really the secret. That and my “don’t poke holes, just enjoy the ride” mentality.

At the end of the day, I went into Insidious expecting another paint-by-numbers haunting movie, and came out very pleased at the direction it ended up going. It’s not a renaissance for horror movies by any stretch, but it tries earnestly to do its own thing, and I can dig on that. I highly recommend you check it out if you’re big on the genre in general or a specific affinity for old-school horror.