A stray observation

You know how in some shows, a character will ramble to themselves very specifically about whatever situation they’re in, as a way to tell the audience about what’s going on? I think it’s a pretty common thing, at least in family-friendly cartoons, but I’ve never really thought about it before so I can’t say for sure how prevalent it is.

Lately though, I am finding that it drives me completely bonkers. The “Exposition Monologue” trope, where a character explains their situation to nobody but themselves (and the audience), is a terrible way to shoehorn in some information. It’s very annoying, and really takes me out of whatever I’m watching. Like, I get that you don’t have the time or money to always show everything, but at least throw a second character in there. It’s still obvious, but at least the exposition doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb when one character is explaining the thing to someone else.

Anyway, this little quibble comes up thanks to a notably bad episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), where the first few minutes are made up of an incredibly annoying character that just keeps chattering to herself. This could have been taken care of in the cold open teaser, but no. And this episode is sandwiched in the middle of the otherwise stellar Season 3, which makes it seem even worse. Oh well. They can’t all be winners.

TE Movie Time: The Shallows

It’s October! Time for scary movies! Right? While it isn’t exactly the Halloweeniest movie out there, I decided to skip school last night to watch The Shallows. Totes worth it!

The film is about a young lady who goes surfing at a secluded beach somewhere in the depths of Mexico. Or, I suppose, on the fringe of Mexico. Whatever. It’s out of the way, and a secret to everybody who isn’t a local. If you know nothing else about this movie yet, I recommend that you stop reading here and go watch it. The less you know going in, the better.

If you aren’t interested in actually watching it, yeah, might as well keep reading.

Continue reading TE Movie Time: The Shallows

Watch your follow-through

‘Member last week when I said that I transferred an old article from the Angelfire TE to WordPress TE? ‘Member how I made you guess what it was? If you didn’t care enough to figure it out, here is the answer:

TMNT2: Battle Nexus (GBA)

This is important, because something related is just around the corner. You may want to read up now, to make sure that you’re ready.

Also I got wrapped up in the moment and transferred a couple more “gems” over to the current site. I won’t mess around with you this time. Here are the links:

Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

The Three-Foot Six-Pak (Part One)

If you haven’t read these before, one is kinda like mehhh, and the other one is a beloved TE classic. Try to guess which is which!

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – September 2016

Birthday month! Also, month of all the games. My 3DS was already in constant use since July thanks to Monster Hunter, but now it’s just flooded with huge, awesome games that tickle all of my fancies.

~ Game Over ~

KickBeat (PS3) – A game about punching endless waves of goons to the rhythm of angry nu-rock. Surprisingly, I really liked it!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (GBA) – I’m going through a TMNT thing right now, okay? Replayed this for the first time since like 2004, and I am convinced that the Shredder fight is literally impossible without cheating.

Jotun: Valhalla Edition (WiiU) – Wherein you play as a Viking warrior who must earn her place in Valhalla after suffering an inglorious death. This is done by finding and slaying a number of elemental giants. It’s a really great game!

NEO-NOW! (PC) – A pretty boring Early Access game. Maybe it’ll get better in time? I don’t really care and am just calling it a wash. To the “Done Forever” pile with you!

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – September 2016

You Should VVatch The VVitch

I watched The Witch on Netflix the other night, which was not the first spooky movie that I’ve watched this fall, but easily the best so far.

Before we move on any farther, I’d like to note that the title is stylized as “The VVitch” in most promotional materials. As a result, I always pronounce it “The Va-Vitch” when I say it out loud, and find it hilarious every time. Honestly I decided to write this entire post just to share that tidbit.

An unusually good modern horror movie, The Witch is not scary, but it is horrifying. There is a scene near the beginning wherein a baby is stolen and… you know what? Let’s not spoil it. The point here is that the scene was gruesome (though mostly off-camera) and truly shocking and I couldn’t do anything but stare, unblinking and slack-jawed, for the five minutes or so that it was happening.

Once that is over, things even out for a while. The story takes place in, oh, I think probably the Days of Yore? It’s about a religious family that abandons their church because of the father’s pride, and attempts to run their own little secluded farm to get by. Things go horribly askew and the farm produces only garbage crops. The children are all getting into assorted kinds of trouble, and also there’s the baby-napping. These are not good times.

Our main character is the eldest daughter, Thomasin, who is a budding young lady and happened to be watching the baby when it was yoinked. This creates oodles of tension between her and her mother, and things just keep escalating as she gets blamed for more and more unfortunate events. Right up until the end where it all comes to a head (literally).

The other characters are as follows: The aforementioned parents, who are struggling to make it in the big city middle of nowhere. The tween brother that is constantly salivating over Thomasin’s rack. A set of super annoying twins who may or may not have made a pact with Satan. A black goat named Phillip. A rabbit that shows up mysteriously here and there. With this hodgepodge cast, obviously things are going to go amiss.

I don’t really want to say much more about The Witch, because you should definitely go and watch it yourself. It’s a coming-of-age story that really doesn’t have very much in common at all with any other coming-of-age stories that I am aware of. Also it’s not that kind of horror movie. The titular Witch is real, but she never ever once jump-scares you. It’s much more frightening in the sense of seeing the events unfolding around this family and how awful life must have been back on those days. Especially for women. Sure, the supernatural elements might not exactly hit, but there’s plenty of other unsettling stuff in there that folks could easily relate to.

If there’s one gaping flaw with the film, it’s that it is so very incredibly hard to make out what anyone was saying. The dialects and accents are so thick that I had to turn on subtitles ten minutes in because I simply could not make heads or tails of the dialogue.

On the whole, though? Super good movie. It was not at all what I was expecting when I turned it on, and I’m so glad that I watched it. I’ll likely be telling people about this one for the duration of the 2016 Halloween season. Maybe even longer.

Here’s one little spoiley, because I need to type out this sentence: Someone literally gets ground into paste. But I won’t say who. *wink*

What is filler? We just don’t know.

Hey so September’s been a pretty quiet month vis-a-vis blogging.

Here’s an update: I moved over an old article from the Angelfire site. Which one? Stay tuned, as you’ll find out in three days!

Will I do any others? Ehh, maybe. I’d like to clean up the stragglers, but I don’t see myself being so motivated as to actually follow through.

(This is very much a 2003-style post.)

Not worth the bytes

Last month, I bought a bundle of games from IndieGala, as I am wont to do. I purchased it for less than four Canadian dollars, and it contained exactly one game that I was actually interested in: Dragon Fin Soup. I still have not played this game.

However, I did install and play Apartment 666 right away. I had a pretty strong feeling of what it would be from the name, and I was partially correct; it was in fact a barely interactive scare-em-up. What I did not anticipate was that it is also a junky PT clone. That is to say, it’s a game where you keep walking through the same hallway over and over as progressively spookier things happen each time.

It was a pretty crappy game, with exactly one moving object and a record number of typos. If I have to say something nice about it, it’s that the developer at least tried to give it a unique story. I think. I’m not entirely clear on what PT’s plot is.

Also, since I’m a huge baby that gets scared by his own shadow, it did spook me well and good enough that I Alt+Tabbed out of the game while chanting “nope nope nope nope” on at least two occasions. So there’s that.

In addition to Apartment 666, I installed and played NEO-NOW! on a whim, and was similarly disinterested. To be fair, though, at least this one is an Early Access game, while the former is considered to be a complete experience (if that’s actually something you can call a video game these days).

NEO-NOW! is a very odd game. You begin by selecting a character model from a group of about five, and then a woman appears in the background, and suddenly your motorcycle is crashed at what looks like a gas station.

It’s a top-down action-type game reminiscent of old Zeldas or maybe Gauntlet? You waddle around shooting/stabbing enemies and collecting the odd power-up. They start out with a sewer level right out of the gate, which is never a good sign, and then once you finish the sewer, you’re immediately swarmed by guys who blow up once they get close enough. This kills you immediately, of course.

There was no hook for me in this game, so I got bored after about ten minutes, when I had exhausted my small supply of bullets and got repeatedly blown up while trying to stab the kamikaze guys to death. I couldn’t find a path forward on that screen, so my adventure was as good as over anyway.

I don’t know if I’m going to go back to it. Probably not. It’s not like it’s a notably terrible game or anything. I’ve played (and paid more money for) far worse. It’s just that NEO-NOW! presents nothing that makes me want to keep playing. Like I said, it’s got no hook. Also, there aren’t enough bullets and trying to stab your way to victory is no fun.

So there we are. Two more games down, neither of them worth my time, but fortunately I can write them off as having essentially been free with the purchase of another game I was more interested in. I’m going to try to get through the rest of the bundle by the end of the month, but no promises. There be many more interesting games on my plate right now.

Sap-tember

September is my favourite month of the year. Obviously, it has something to do with the fact that it is home to the anniversary of my existence in the world, but also I just really like this time of year.

Summer is winding down, so the weather is often more cool and tolerable. That lovely autumn air starts to seep in more and more consistently. Back To School is out and Halloween is in. Pumpkin Spice is everywhere. It’s all so beautiful and perfect.

It has also become so bittersweet for me. I have some particularly treasured memories from September of 2012 that make me feel so warm and fuzzy when they come on, but then quickly bring about a sense of sorrow. At that point, I was really just settling into the idea of truly building my own life. Married, living in my very own home, and working toward a real career. That was the absolute happiest point in my life.

It wasn’t long after that, that everything went out of control and started to crash down around me. But, I still like to look back on those days, and remember how good they were.

Even in the face of the self-doubt and hopelessness that I feel nearly every day, I think that someday I can be that happy again. And that maybe next time, it will last.

It’s my birthday. I’ll be wistful if I want to.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – August 2016

In August, I started organizing all my Steam games. To that end, I decided to actually start playing a few of those indie games I have hundreds of from cheap bundles. I also decided that it’s time to let go of truly “finishing” games and just call them done once I’m bored. For Steam games, that is. If I spend $80 on a console game, I’m damn well still going to try to wring every bit of content out of it.

~ Game Over ~

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii) – It is finished. Click here to read my long, rambling, final impressions, if you haven’t already.

Monster Hunter Generations (3DS) – Cleared both the solo and multiplayer campaigns. And by “cleared”, I mean “I did all the key quests to get to the final bosses and unlock stuff.” There is still a ton of content to play through! I haven’t even seen all the monsters yet. And the Deviants. Oh Lord, the Deviants!

Bonk’s Adventure (TG16) – I was really into Super Bonk on SNES as a child, and was so awed by the ads for Bonk games that appeared in comics, but I’d never played a “classic” Bonk before. Turns out, ehhhhh, not so hot. The framework of a decent game is there, but the levels are uninspired and Bonk’s got really strange momentum.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – August 2016