I booted up Wii Fit U for the first time in nearly a year, now that I’m relatively settled in my condo.
As it turns out, despite trying to eat better and getting significantly more exercise than usual over the last year, I’m nearly exactly the same weight as I was a year ago. Maybe a kilogram less.
*sigh*
Brendon Small’s Galaktikon II: Become the Storm is out today! Hurrah!
Being one of my most anticipated albums ever, I was almost in tears when it became available at 11PM last night but I had to do the responsible thing and go to bed instead of staying up another hour to listen to it.
I did get a chance to give it a listen on the bus ride to work this morning, and first impressions are very good! I’ve already written about “My Name is Murder” and “Nightmare” to some extent, and I think that so far the frontrunners for favourite tracks are “Become the Storm” and “The Ocean Galaktik.” But I’ll definitely have to give it a few more listens before I make any solid declarations.
As advertised, Galaktikon II is very much a new Dethklok album in spirit, but has enough DNA from the original Galaktikon to keep things exciting. Most of the vocals are in the growly Nathan Explosion-style, which is great, but admittedly does make it harder to figure out the lyrics and the story. There is a lot more “regular” singing peppered in than you’d get from actual Dethklok, though, and there’s a heck of a lot of vocal harmonizing going on, which I obviously adore.
I don’t know if this will replace Galaktikon as one of my go-to albums, but it is a stellar sequel. The metalhead in me is incredibly satisfied. I am greatly looking forward to listening to it at least a dozen more times over the weekend. Hopefully by then someone will have started transcribing the lyrics online somewhere.
I wanted to end this post by embedding a video of the final, instrumental track, “Rebuilding a Planet” but alas, the YouTubers are a little slower at getting these tracks up than expected. The album has already been available for a whole 12 hours at this point. Come on, people!
I have a cubic buttload of games already in my 3DS backlog, and there are a fair number of big ones coming out before the end of the year. This means I’m in huge trouble, because all I want to do on that system right now is play Chicken Wiggle.
A cute little game that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention, Chicken Wiggle is the newest game from Atooi, one of the development studios that split off from Renegade Kid. you may or may not recognize that name from Mutant Mudds, which was one of the first truly stellar games to show up on the 3DS eShop (and is now on everything). To nobody’s surprise, Chicken Wiggle bears more than a slight resemblance to Mutant Mudds.
Not only are the two games visually similar, they both feature the same kind of challenging platforming. They move at a more measured pace than say, your Marios or Mega Mans, and each is gifted with very tight, responsive controls. Chicken Wiggle takes the base set by Mutant Mudds and expands on it by switching out the gun and jetpack for a grappling hook. This means the game is far less action-oriented, but adds in more exploration to make up for it.
Also the grappling hook is a worm.
While the story mode in Chicken Wiggle is a fun and moderately challenging experience, the real meat of the game comes from the expansive stage creation mode. It’s incredibly impressive, and lets you use every single tile, object, and monster in the game to design whatever kind of crazy stages your twisted mind can come up with. It’s actually even better than the 3DS version of Super Mario Maker, because while the editor isn’t quite as whimsical, you can share stages with other players online. There’s also a robust system for finding other players’ stages, which makes it much more user-friendly than the Wii U version of Mario Maker’s bare-bones stage discovery features.
There is one massive feature missing, and that’s Mario Maker’s ability to just jump into your custom stage at any point to see how something works. Chicken Wiggle instead forces you to load up the stage each time, rather than having the ability to test seamlessly. Sure, you can move the starting point around to make sure you begin at the point you want to try out, but it’s not quite as handy as being able to jump in and out of the stage while still in the editor.
I am still super happy that Chicken Wiggle came around though, as it has re-ignited my love of stage design. And it’s nice to be working in a game that’s so mechanically different from Mario, too, because it makes you think completely differently about your stages. The only sad part is that I know very few people IRL who own a 3DS, and none of them give even the slightest flip about games like Chicken Wiggle. So I have nobody to share ideas and stages with. Sad face. My fault for not having friends, I guess.
I finally got my copy of Kesha’s new album, Rainbow, last Friday. I spent the whole weekend listening to it over and over, and I still have one song or another constantly stuck in my head.
Suffice it to say, I am very pleased with my purchase.
I know I say it every time I write about music, but I have no idea how to properly explain my feelings about music or how to talk about it technically like a smart person who really understands it. So I’ll keep this short. What about sweet? YMMV.
Rainbow is so unlike any other Kesha album. It’s so much more honest and heartfelt. The over-produced, auto-tuned, club-pop is gone. It’s not about drinking and partying. It’s about feeling good, overcoming pain and hardships, and living your life to the fullest. Rainbow a hearty melange of pop, rock, folk, country, and alternative styles. It’s literally a beautiful musical rainbow. Some songs will have you busting out sweet rock kicks, while others may cause you to shed a tear or two. You might even find yourself doing some deep thinking about life.
Of course, while Rainbow is several degrees more serious in its themes than one might expect from Kesha, it’s still got her trademark sense of humour. As that’s what drew me to Kesha’s music in the first place, I’m very glad that it hasn’t gone anywhere.
“But Ryan, you hate country music!” you’re probably shouting at your screen. Yes, I do. But the “country” tracks on this album are more county-flavoured than actually country. There’s no mention of pickup trucks or dirt roads or tractors. No godawful southern drawl. Not a single yee-haw and none of the songs are about having a cookout down at the ol’ swimmin’ hole. So all the stupid has been excised and replaced with sentiments that a non-hillbilly could actually relate to. “Hunt You Down” is just a really great track and made me laugh out loud.
Heck, even the cover of “Old Flames” that features Dolly friggin’ Parton has carved itself a little place in my heart. Might be that country music from the 80’s was just better than the miserable trash that is modern country. Might be that I’m just a cranky old man.
Anyway, if you need some proof to mix into your pudding, here’s “Let ’em Talk,” which is currently my favourite track. Though this morning it was “Boogie Feet” and “Learn To Let Go” was my fave for the better part of Sunday.
Tomorrow it’ll probably be “Godzilla.” It’s just so sweet and I love it. You know what, forget tomorrow. It’s my favourite now. Likely forever.
It’s a week later, and I am about 80% moved into my condo. It’s been quite a process. Basically non-stop work since last Saturday, with a single night off on Wednesday. So this weekend, I’m takin’ ‘er easy and just enjoying my new Fortress of Solitude. Well, tomorrow I’m takin’ ‘er easy. There is still plenty to be done today.
The work that remains is as such:
And that’s about it. Now that the business has been taken care of, here are a bunch of fun photos!
I’ve been a lot more involved with the acquisition of and moving into my condo than I was when I bought a house back in 2012. Mostly because I no longer have a wife and in-laws to do all that stuff while I’m at work. So I’ve schlepped and hauled pretty much everything by myself, with a non-insignificant amount of help from my dad, uncle, and grandpa.
One thing that remains the same is me having placed high priority on having Xenoblade Chronicles up and running ASAP.
Mostly it’s for the sake of tradition. But also because I needed a half-hour to unwind. I’ve been working almost non-stop since noon Saturday. I’ve earned a little video game break.
Actual Xenoblade talk: I think it’s notable that when you start a New Game+, all characters are wearing the equipment they had at the end of the game. Which makes the intro weird because Dunban is clearly not wielding the Monado despite constantly talking about it, and Mumkhar is already in a Mechon body. Neat!
Bonus: If you look really closely, you may be able to spot the cutest li’l amiibo ever!
I ran some numbers today, and came out with the following information:
I have acquired 100 video games so far this year.
Now, this includes freemium games, free PS+ games, games purchased in bundles, so on and so forth. So it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Still, the point remains that I really need to stop getting new games, because I don’t have anywhere near enough time to play all this garbage.
Anyway, that’s just a tease. I have a massive spreadsheet from which I plan to come up with all sorts of irrelevant data come yearend. The one thing I haven’t ever kept track of is dollar value spent. Because, quite frankly, I really don’t want to know.
Today, I officially become a homeowner again. Only this time, I’m doing it alone, and it’s a convenient (if tiny) little condo instead of a whole house. Good for me!
I’m not exactly moving in today, rather I’ll be slowly migrating my belongings in over the next week. Or couple weeks. I mean, my internet isn’t even going in for a few more days. Why would I want to live anywhere that doesn’t have internet?
Stay tuned for more news and stuff or whatever!
Yes, I’m still at it, spending bits and pieces of my free time slowly whittling away at the massive backlog of games that I have sitting in my Steam account. Today, we’re going to take itty-bitty peeks at a couple that I didn’t feel really stood up to snuff. Or at least, I felt no satisfaction from playing and opted to just pass on them before investing too much time. And then also one really good game, because I don’t want to be a complete Negative Nancy.
We begin with Red’s Kingdom. The game opens with an evil king squirrel barging into Red’s house and stealing his acorn stash right out from under him, and then you have to go out and reclaim your acorns. This… seems familiar. Oh, it’s Donkey Kong Country. Probably countless other games, as well, but it makes me think of DKC.
Then you get onto the gameplay, in which you roll Red around the stages, avoiding obstacles and collecting nuts. It’s exactly like those slippery-slidey mazes in so many video games (there’s at least one in every core Pokémon game) where you move in a direction and get locked moving that way until you hit something. You know the type. I’m describing it badly, but you know it.
It’s an entire game of just that. I find those puzzles extremely aggravating when they make up one room or part of a dungeon, so you can imagine that I was not smitten with the idea of putting up with it for a whole game. Nope. I was willing to give it a shot, but 20 minutes in, I could feel my aggravation levels rising far past the recommended level, so I called it quits.
To its credit, Red’s Kingdom is a very pretty game, with really nice, colourful graphics. The cutscenes are cute and mildly humorous, and it seems like as you progress, there will be more depth to the gameplay than just sliding around from one room to the next. I’m sure that for many people, this could be a great game, but it’s definitely not for me.
Candy Thieves: Tale of Gnomes is another obvious port from a mobile phone game. The awarding of an up-to-three-stars ranking at the end of each stage is a dead giveaway. And it’s one of those mobile phone game ports that was very clearly not developed by an English-speaking team. Because the translation is a little shoddy, you see. Not the worst I’ve seen, but the grammatical errors definitely stand out.
The tale, in this case, is of a family moving into their grandfather’s house after he mysteriously disappeared. I’m sure that will be resolved in a happy ending, because so far this has seemed like a family-friendly kind of game. I don’t know, maybe it’s like Frog Fractions and goes completely off the rails after a while. In which case I’d be sad that I gave up on it after only ten minutes. But I guess I’ll never know anyway. So whatever!
Uh, back to the plot, the young boy who is our protagonist finds a mysterious box under his bed that magically produces candy. He is initially elated, but then gnomes show up and try to steal the candy. So I guess what happens is that he goes on a chase though a mystical fantasy land to stop the thieving gnomes. Again, I gave up on this one, so I really have no idea.
The gameplay is this: drag jelly blobs to the machines in the corner to produce a candy. After so long, gnomes will start pouring out of the set dressing to try to steal candy from your pile. You click on gnomes to pop them. Sometimes they have balloons or fishing rods to aid in their thievery. So it’s basically a tower defence game, except that if you pop a gnome who is absconding with a candy, you can drag that candy back to the safety of the pile. It’s a little more forgiving that most games in the genre.
There’s also a feature where you can lay out traps to help defend against the gnomes, but I got bored before earning more than the basic spring, which launches any gnome that steps on it to his doom. Honestly, I think I may have had slightly more fun with this if I’d played on an iPad or something. It’s definitely designed with the idea that you’ll be poking and swiping with your fingers, not a mouse cursor. But even then, it’s just so bland and boring that I can’t imagine that it would have held my attention much longer even on the intended computing machine.
Lastly, we have VOI. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be pronounced “voy” or “vee-oh-eye.” I suppose it really doesn’t matter, since this thing is written and nobody would know if I’m pronouncing it wrong anyway.
V-O-I has something in common with the two other games on this list. You’ve probably already guessed it: this is a port of a mobile phone game. Or at least that’s what I’m assuming. It has all the hallmarks: minimalist design, gameplay made for touch controls, a simple UI, and bite-sized puzzles. There’s no way this wasn’t an iOS darling for a week at some point.
However! VOI also has a significant feature that separates it from Red’s Kingdom and Candy Thieves: it’s actually fun to play. The puzzles are simple and most of them took me less than a minute to solve, but I was hooked almost instantaneously. And then once the game started pulling out some of its trickier puzzles, I found myself in a wonderland of puzzley goodness.
Despite the game’s simplicity, VOI’s gameplay is a little more complex to describe. It’s a little like tangrams, but instead of mashing all the pieces into a larger shape, you have to layer them on top of each other to replicate a pattern. But it’s not that simple! When you lay one of the black pieces on top of another, any area where they intersect becomes white. Add a third piece to the pile, and it becomes black again. So you have a sort of mix-and-match thing going on where not only do you have to align the black pieces correctly, but you also have to make sure that certain parts get whited out.
Like I said, it’s not overly challenging, but it feels very rewarding to solve these puzzles. I will admit that on a couple of them, I resorted to somewhat brute-forcing my way through, just randomly slapping pieces down to see what happens. For the most part, though, I was able to look at the pattern and pieces and visualize what went where.
I had so much fun with VOI, in fact, that when I finished the 66th and final puzzle, it hit me like a ton a bricks and I was left a little disappointed that it was already over. I still think that if you have a buck-fifty burning a hole in your pocket and an hour to kill, VOI is an excellent way to spend both your extra time and money. Highly recommended!
I don’t know if this is going to become a regular thing or not, but I’m trying out something new. Well, a new spin on something I’ve been doing for years, anyhow. You know that Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up post that you ignore every month? Well, there’s one for movies now.
On the upside, I watch very few movies, so at least this should be a fairly light feature.
Power Rangers – The reboot that came out earlier this year, that I really wanted to see, but nobody I know gives a flip about Power Rangers. This is probably more on me, because I barely know any people at all. Anyway, I finally watched it, now that it’s available on home video.
Anyhow, I went in expecting the worst, and I was… well, it exceeded my expectations. I enjoyed it overall, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The Power Rangers are now straight-up superheroes, which is fine, Jason has a sword-arm, which is awesome, and Alpha 5 was somewhere between terrible and hilarious. I also liked the characterizations of the new rangers, how they all come from vastly different backgrounds and have actual depth instead of being one-note stereotypes. My biggest question about the movie is how in the heck did they land Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Banks?
So what was wrong with it? It’s the worst kind of origin story. The kind of origin story that runs over two hours (yes, really), but all the action is crammed into the last ten minutes. The Megazord looked too much like a Michael Bay Transformer, and for some reason the Mastodon Zord had eight legs. Also, during those final moments, Angel Grove suffers destruction relative to how badly Metropolis got torn apart in Man of Steel. Not quite razed to the ground, but for a smallish town, you wonder if the residents are even going to bother trying to rebuild.
Three-Headed Shark Attack – Many years ago, I watched a film called Two-Headed Shark Attack, and I remember absolutely nothing about it, other than Carmen Electra was in it literally just to be eye candy. Unlike Sharknado, it left no impression on me, so I wavered a bit before deciding to watch the sequel.
But then I did anyway, and it’s one of those sequels that has nothing in common with the previous movie except for a vague theme. Or specific theme? Mutant sharks. I guess that’s not especially vague. This movie is about a bunch of environmental researchers and hippies working near a massive island of garbage off some unmentioned coast. Turns out the pollution is mutating local animals, the biggest of which is our title monster: the three-headed shark.
The shark somehow destroys the research facility and then attacks a booze cruise that happens to be passing by. The research station survivors desperately try to save the ship, but pretty much everyone dies. Danny Trejo shows up and lops a head off the shark, seemingly killing it. Then it’s discovered that the shark will regrow two heads for every one that it loses, like the mythical hydra. Eventually the shark defeats itself when the many heads end up fighting for food and bite each other to death. Somehow.
Guys, don’t ever watch this. Unless you’re doing a bad movie podcast or something.
Wonder Woman – It’s great. It’s just great. Excellent. I never gave a damn about Wonder Woman, because I’m not really into anything DC outside of Batman, but holy cow I sure do care about the Wonder Woman cinematic universe now.
For one, it gets everything right that Power Rangers flubbed. It’s an origin story, but it’s gripping the whole time and you don’t have to wait until the very end to actually see the hero in action. There’s a bit too long of a lead-in with the background lore, but there’s still a huge battle within the first 15 minutes. And then a journey to collect a ragtag group of mercenaries to stop a foe that may or may not even be real.
I should mention that both Gal Gadot and Chris Pine are superb in their roles, and I really just want to go on more hilarious adventures with them. That’s not to take away from any of the supporting characters, though! Everyone was great and the whole movie was just about perfect. The one thing that I need to gripe about is the fact that the lasso effects did not look very good in combat. But that’s it! that’s literally the only thing I disliked about this movie! Crazy!
Satanic – And so with all that gushing about how great Wonder Woman is, we come to our last film of the month, which was unfortunately pretty bad. Of course, like all the bad movies I watch these days, this was a Netflix recommendation that missed the mark.
In this one, we follow a foursome of young people out on a road trip, who stop in LA to check out some historic Satanist sites or whatever. Along the way, they “rescue” a young lady from a Satanist cult. However, it turns out that the cult wanted her out because she was too crazy, and the young lady curses the group just before slitting her own throat. And so our heroes are stalked by an unseen force that traps them in a nightmare world and kills them one by one.
I feel like there might have been potential here, but every character is unlikable and the acting is terrible, so you want to see them die. But all the kills are off-screen, and the movie ends with the main girl trapped in an empty, black cube, her mouth sewn shut and her limbs amputated. There is no precedent for this. It makes no sense. It’s just there as a weird, shocking thing to end on. Super lame. Also, it’s another one of those movies that just spends so much time building up that all the “action” at the very end, only there’s no real payoff. None of it means anything. Blech.
