Birdy, erm, Beardy

So completely randomly, about two weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to start growing a beard. Now, while I love the prospect of having a beard, there are three little catches that will more than likely keep me frm achieving my goal:

1. I’ve tried this before. It didn’t work out. As far as I can tell, my face doesn’t have what it takes to grow a proper beard. It grows very unevenly, faouring the left side, and after a couple weeks the growing just stops and it stays at the “long scruff” phase until I shave it off. I’m hoping it’s just because I didn’t wait long enough before, which leads to point two.

2. I’m too impatient. Since my facial hair (and regular hair, after a certain length) grows at a snail’s pace, I’ll most definitely get bored of this long before I have anything resembling a beard. To help imagine how long my hair takes to grow, it takes be approximately three days to grow in a proper five o’ clock shadow.

3. My girlfriend is not a fan. I asked her at the beginning of the relationship how she felt about facial hair (because I shave maybe once a week at most), and she said she wasn’t big on real facial hair, but could deal with the stubble. I did tell her my plan, however, and she seems okay with it, if not even supportive. I was ready to give up after just over a week, but she told me to hang in there a little longer, just to see how it goes.

So that’s what I’m sporting now; Not too wonderful looking, but it’s past the crustache phase and makes me look a little older. You may not be able to tell because that’s the most terrible picture ever taken, but yeah. I dunno. I’m pretty much ready to shave it off, but I’ve made a promise to myself to wait at least one more week before I take the razor to it. Well, I mean, it’s due for a bit of a trim around the neckline, but it’s got seven days to straighen up and fly right before I axe the whole thing.

So why am I doing this? Dunno. Boredom, I guess.

PANAMA!

I know it’s a bit wierd that I might show such enthusiasm for a Guitar Hero game after (mostly) politely snubbing the last one to be released, but have you seen the track list for Guitar Hero: Van Halen yet? I was mostly on the fence before, but then I saw the tracks. It has “Panama” and “Jump”, so I’m absolutely there. “Unchained” doesn’t hurt either.

What’s really got me excited however, are the songs that aren’t by Van Halen. Any Judas Priest is welcome, but another go at “Painkiller” has got me dancing in my seat, and the fact that I finally get some more Queen is icing on the cake. I also greatly appreciate “Pain” and “Space Truckin'”. I’ve got to say that it’s really a great overall selection of filler music. Yes, we’ll always have to put up with a few shoddy choices like Fountains of Wayne and Weezer (and why is Lenny Kravitz here? Activision, can you please make one Guitar Hero game without Lenny Kravitz? Please?), but it far surpasses GH: Aerosmith’s meh-tastic choices and GH: Metallica’s a-bit-too-metal-for-my-tastes track list.

Take the chains off, take ’em offa my heart

It should need no mentioning that I bought Wii Sports Resort on Sunday. My girlfriend and I played it almost literally all day. If there hadn’t been a party going on in my house that night, we probably would have clocked in over eight hours. The different sports range from frustrating to awesome, so it’s a bit of a hodgepodge, but what it does right, it does with flair. Swordplay and Archery are the top contenders in fun, and the Island Flyover has sucked up more of my time over the last three days than anything else. Even Bowling, which has gained no superficial improvements since the original Wii Sports, has become awesome because the Wii MotionPlus device makes it a hundred times more playable (I always used to curve left, now I can play a half-decent game).

So my words be damned, because we took videos! The first is of the practice area in the Power Cruising event, and was more or less just a test to see how well the woman’s camera would capture on-screen stuff. The next two are levels one and three in the Swordplay Showdown event (played by Steph and me, respectively), which is possibly the most addictive mini-game ever.

TE Hits the Road: Fargo ’09

Hi all! Yeah, it’s yet another article about the once-again yearly trip I take down to Fargo/Grand Forks. I say once-again because there was a stretch in there for a few years where we didn’t go at all, but for the last three years, it’s been an essential part of summer. The only difference is that now, instead of going down with my family, it’s me and the woman. There are pros and cons for both parties, but I don’t really care who I go with. The Fargo/Grand Forks trip is the only summer staple I still have left, so I’m holding onto it as tight as I can.

That aside, I’ve decided that this year I’m just going to mash up all the pictures I took instead of trying to do anything more inspired with them. No categories, no long-winded stories, no character commentary. Nope. Just going to put them on the page and make some quick notes where I deem necessary.

Also there are tons of pictures,. Enjoy 😉

This is a cake. This is what Stephanie and I ate for breakfast. Actually I had a bowl of Reese Puffs cereal beforehand because she was taking a really long time to get to my house. But yeah, cake for breakfast. Woo!

We struck a deal before we left that she would drive there, and I would drive home. I wasn’t told until we’d arrived at the hotel, but apparently I had been voted to drive everywhere while we were in Fargo.

GPS. Lifesaver.

I bought a huge jawbreaker on a stick at the Duty-Free. It’s been ages since I’d had one of these bad boys, and I felt it was absolutely necessary. My mission was to finish it by the time we got home. I did one better and finished it before we were even back in Canada. The passport is there for scale.

She opted for the jawbreaker’s smaller cousin, the cherry Jelly Belly sucker.

I think I might have had a better chance of getting in here when I used to come down with my family. The girlfriend seems wholly opposed to entering a restaurant so garishly decorated. But we went to TGI Friday’s, so I don’t know. Maybe she’s got a fear of aliens?

I feel it’s important to mention that I used that baby pool to its full extent.

Our facilities. This is the most interesting photo ever.

Aah! Too much sunlight!

“Take one of me on the couch!”

“Now take one of me on the bed!”

See? TGI Friday’s. Hard on the eyes though it my be, no trip to the United States is complete without a stop in either here or Chili’s. I wish Canadian chains or those that extended into Canada knew how to make such wonderful fries.

Dear God! Six years with this camera and still I take blurry pictures! I’m a horribly lazy photographer.

So good.

Also awesome, but far less new to me.

For years, I’ve refused to believe that this DVD exists. Well ,outside Amazon, anyway. But I found it! I really found it! Now I can’t say Hot Topic never did anything for me.

More crap I bought. Teenage Zombies was ten bucks, and the rest I consider to be things absolutely essential for me to own. I was hunting Friday the 13th and American Dad Vol 4, but Ghostbusters Vol 1 came out of nowhere and made me the happiest girl in the world.

Like the trip to Fargo itself, no summer is complete without a small tub of Americone Dream.

TGI Friday’s was having a two-for-one burger day, and I had ordered a burger for dinner, so they gave me this second one to take home. I ate it that night and forcefully regretted eating two giant cheese-slathered burgers in one night. A task a younger me would ahve faced with aplomb.

The main dresser on our first morning. It’s covered in crap we bought and other such things. The Playstation 2 is there because I hate overpaying for movies I don’t really want to watch and every time I bring my DVD player I forget the remote.

Seriously. You’d think I would know how to take a not-blurry picture by now.

I usually grab a jug of Hawaiian puch on my southernly adventures, only this time I picked the “light” version. Trying to watch those calories…

West Acres mall. It’s huge, and wonderful. It’s probably the best mall ever. It’s not a lot better than Winnipeg’s biggest mall, but I only get to go there like once a year and I don’t get bored of it. Also I looooove Mrs. Fields’ cookies.

We went to the Lone Star Texas Grill on our second night. We’d never been there, but were pleasantly surprised. The steak I had was excellent (especially since I hadn’t had a steak for several weeks at that point), and there was a pail of peanuts on the table to keep me busy while we were waiting for the food to come.

That evening we ventured over into downtown Fargo, and on our way back, we ended up accidentally driving through some sort of classic car show-off night. Don’t know for sure what was going down, but we took a bunch of pictures.

I used the Fargo onion to determine that we were going the right way on the way back into the hotel/shopping part of the city.

I guess it’s just out of habit that I keep taking pictures of the Fargo TRU. We didn’t go in this year, but it looked just as sad as ever on the outside.

All packed up! I don’t subscribe to Nintendo Power anymore, but I felt like picking up an issue for old time’s sake. This one was the perfect candidate, because the only things I really want to read about are the new Mario & Luigi game and Wii Sports Resort.

This is how many towels we used over the course of two days.

I’m going to miss that wonderful continental breakfast buffet. It’s really the highlight of all my best hotel stays.

On our way home we stopped in Grand Forks to investigate the Columbia Mall among other shops. It’s just as boring as ever, if not moreso because they don’t even have the cookie place in the food court anymore.

Evidence that she does eat.

There was a completely random mailbox on the side of the road nearl Kohl’s. I felt that I should capture its soul incase it disappears between now and next year.

This makeup is all blurry! Let’s go somewhere else.

I bought these movies at Best Buy. Zombie Strippers is pretty hilarious, Zombie Diaries was disturbing, and Trailer Park of Terror-though I expected the most from it-was merely okay.

No, I did not buy Friady the 13th twice. I don’t know how it got into this picture. On the other hand, Jason X was five bucks and was the last missing piece in my collection, and the Elm Street four-pack was $10 and completed its own collection. Mallrats I couldn’t understand why I didn’t already own.

We hit Rock 30 games on the second night, and I picked these up there. I have no idea why in God’s name I had sold Donkey Kong, as it is one of the greatest original Game Boy games ever, and FF8 I own on PC, but would rather play through my PS2. I will not say how much I paid for either of these items. I will say that one was just a little more expensive than it should have been, and the other was hideously overpriced. I’ll let you come to your own conclusions.

And that’s pretty much it. Following in the general spirit of this “article”, I really don’t have much more to wrap up with, so I’ll leave it at that.

~FIN

Guitar Hero: Smash Hits

If you ask the average consumer whether they preferred the Guitar Hero or Rock Band franchise, most would likely be curious what’s to prefer, since they’re both pretty much the same game at this point. If you asked someone very into gaming, however, the clear cut winner would be Rock Band nine times out of ten.

The game structure remains similar enough in both series that it won’t influence anyone’s opinions too heavily; what it really comes down to is how each game is sold. In the case of Rock Band, you either buy the Rock Band or Rock Band 2 game disc, and then it’s up to you to download extra music from the music store to enlarge your library as you see fit. On the other hand, Activision’s plan for Guitar Hero is to throw as many discs at us poor schlubs as possible, and offer very little in the way of DLC.

The big difference here is that with Rock Band, you get to choose which songs are added to your game, and you won’t have to pay for half-a-disc worth of songs you’re indifferent to or flat-out hate. Guitar Hero, on the other hand, forces you to buy the songs they want you to play. It’s a damn shame, but the franchise that started a revolution in music gaming has been poorly marketed and left behind the trend to the point where it’s starting to be passed over by people who are addicted to the genre. Myself included. Actually, it sounds a lot like Nintendo’s life story. Only I don’t see a Wii-sized comeback in Guitar Hero’s future.

With Activision flooding the market with “Hero”-branded games, it’s getting hard to keep up with all of them. I’ve purposefully neglected to buy two titles already, and I don’t see myself too interested in buying any of the upcoming games (with the exception Guitar Hero: Van Halen, obviously). The one GH game that I was very excited about, however, was Guitar Hero: Smash Hits. It may seem a bit redundant for me to want the “greatest Hits” version of a game series that I’ve been ragging on for being stale and overused, but I have a very good reason: these are the songs I want to play.

GH: Smash Hits contains a handful of the most popular tracks from all the GH series games that came before World Tour. This is important to me because these are the songs I played and obsessed over while I was still smitten with the genre. Only now they aren’t covers anymore. It brings back a ton of memories and while it follows the trend of running the Guitar Hero name into the ground, it’s got a few redeeming qualities that I’m very much enjoying.

The most obvious change, and the main reason of the game’s existence (other than another udder on Activision’s cash cow), is that all the songs can now be played with a full band, rather than being restricted to guitar and bass, or in the case of GH1 songs, guitar only. This alone does not add nearly enough value to justify my purchase, as I bought the Wii version, and I rarely do any multiplayering on my Wii. Also I do not own Wii drums and do not plan on buying any. What does add the value is that all the note charts have been mostly re-written, making use of all the new GH gimmicks like the slide bar sections and the open note on bass. Most songs are also a Hell of a lot harder, and these changes make the game seem fresh and adds a new challenge to songs I’d long since mastered. The only song that’s noticeably easier is ironically enough Dragonforce’s “Through the Fire and Flames”, which is now entirely possible to play through thanks to the slide bar sections.

The other little things that I really love are that the game finally provides a star meter. It was always a pain in the ass playing songs over and over, but never knowing exactly how far away you were from earning that fifth star. The game also lets you choose from any song right at the start of the game when you choose quickplay mode. It’s not something I would have ever benefited from, as I always blaze through career mode before touching anything else, but it’s a super-nice feature for casual players and people who just bought it and want to get the most out of it at a party they’re having that night. I dunno. Little things matter.

The career mode structure is also very nice. It’s back to the set list format, rather than World Tour‘s me-too gig setup. You unlock new sets by earning so many stars, and new sets unlock very, very quickly. Therefore, you can usually skip right to the songs you want to play without having to pick through too much of the other material. The only exception is the final set, which unlocks after you’ve played all the encore songs. But those are all the super-difficult songs anyway, and I doubt you want to play the new version of “Play With Me” without a nice, long warm-up anyway. (read: it’s very hard!)

I’d also like to make a little side note here, where must admit that I’ve forgotten how much fun it is to play these guitar-based games just for the sake of playing them. The last few I’ve been playing on the 360, and it’s really just become entirely about the achievements. Playing this on Wii has rekindled a lot of feelings of love for the actual gameplay, rather than the chase for arbitrary virtual medals. Just sayin’.

There are a couple of gripes I have with the game though. While the songs that Activision picked make an excellent roster of playable songs, the game only offers 40-some songs. This is essentially Guitar Hero’s Greatest Hits album, and everyone knows that the standard hits album is much longer than a band’s standard albums. There are 86 songs in World Tour, Guitar Hero 5 will have 85. We should have gotten at least 60 in Smash Hits (the entire GH1 soundtrack wouldn’t have been a bad idea). Also, there are no bonus songs! You earn money through career mode, but all it’s used for is bland clothing options. Get Ready 2 Rokk and Decontrol were probably my most-played tracks on GH1, so I’m very upset to see that no bonus songs from any of the GH games have been included. I expected Monkey Steals The Peach’s “Guitar Hero” at the very, very least.

But everything else aside, I really just bought Smash Hits because Guitar Hero doesn’t have a lag calibration option and nobody’s re-released it. All I really want is to play the first Guitar Hero game. That’s it. But I guess the fourteen tracks they provided here will be more than enough. I got what I really pined for-“Killer Queen”, “More Than a Feeling”, “Take it Off”, “Godzilla” and “Unsung”- but I sure do miss “Crossroads”, “Spanish Castle Magic”, “Texas Flood” and “Frankenstein”. Also, how could they possibly say this is the best of Guitar Hero music and have not included “Iron Man”. That’s like the biggest song ever. not a personal favourite, really, but it’s insanely well-known. Fuck, I think I’m just going to go play GH1 for a while, lag or not. I love those songs so much…

I am the Taco King!

The woman and I took the yearly trip down to Fargo last Wednesday afternoon, and stayed until Friday night. It was a pretty paint-by-numbers expedition, but there were a few highlights. For one, we explored a bit farther than the shopping/hotel part of the city and checked out downtown Fargo a bit. It was actually pretty cool. We saw some interesting shops, a liberry, and we even got stuck in the middle of some kind of classic car show. It was a ton of fun, and of course, there was a ton of shopping to be had.

She’s been absolutely picture-crazy ever since she got a camera for her birthday, and I felt I needed to compete during this trip. I took a big handful of photos over the course of the two-and-a-half days, and my original intent was to take compelling pictures of strange, wonderful, or curious things and make an awesome gallery of intrigue. However, most of them ended up being of all the things I normally take pictures of. And my girlfriend. There are lots of her. Because, you know. Overall, I’d say her gallery wins. If only because it’s a lot bigger (though it should be noted that she wasn’t stuck with a crappy 16MB memory stick).

That gallery, while much more tepid than I’d hoped it would be, will be posted later this week. Today, I want to talk about the single video game I purchased during the trip: Teenage Zombies: Invasion of the Alien Brain Thingys. Yeah, it’s one of those Ninjabread Man scenarios where the title and theme seemed so awesome that I couldn’t resist. Fortunately, Teenage Zombies was only half the price of Ninjabread Man. Also, it isn’t horrible.

Developed by InLight Entertainment (who have apparently made a grand total of three games), Teenage Zombies is at first highly reminiscent of Super NES game The Lost Vikings. It’s a platform-puzzler which gives you three characters with unique abilities that will help you conquer your environments. Yeah. To be completely honest, if someone had told me about this game and compared it to The Lost Vikings, but with zombies, I would have ran out and bought it a year ago. The sad truth however, is that this game is not nearly as brilliant as its seventeen-years-older cousin.

I don’t want to be too harsh on TZ though, as it is a pretty fun game, and I expected much, much less for $10. The biggest complaint I have is that unlike its Nordic counterpart, TZ has you hot-swapping between zombies. The Lost Vikings had all three characters on-screen at once, and you’d often have to combine their skills to overcome the trickier puzzles. Hitting L or R to replace zombies when one isn’t doing the trick isn’t as satisfying as teaming them up would be. The levels are still pretty clever, requiring almost constant switching of zombies. The first few chapters will seem like a breeze, but about halfway through the game I found myself dying several times before making it to the next checkpoint. And it never really felt cheap or dull either. The game is constantly giving you new power-ups, but very rarely tells you when, where, or in what order you need to use them.

The biggest problem I have with the game is that it’s a bit light on enemies. There are rats, and brains. A couple different types of brains, but nothing radically different. I suppose it’s more of a boon that combat is simple though, because what is there is a bit rough. Attack animations are slow, and most of the time you can only hit one enemy at a time, regardless of how many are within your range. Sometimes your hits don’t even connect at all. The other thing I have a minor complaint about are the stylus mini-games. They’re boring and (almost) frustrating to control. Fortunately, you’re only forced to play each once, and you can move on regardless of your performance. The one mini-game that is fun is the one where you put a zombie back together by dragging his parts around. It’s really simple, but a neat distraction.

Overall, I’ve got to say that Teenage Zombies was a pretty good buy. For $10 anyway. It’s soaked up a few hours of my life, and I don’t regret spending either the money or the time on it. The gameplay itself is a bit repetitive, but fun enough to keep you going until you get to the end, and that’s really the prize itself. The cutscenes are hilarious, and the banter between the Big Brain and his No. 1 is entertaining enough to give players reason to keep plodding through to the end, even when you have to restart a level five or six times until you hit the right combination of powers. Definitely worth a look.

You do whatever they offer

I just finished reading this book the other day. Monster Island. It’s hands-down the greatest novel I’ve read in years. Although I should note that I’ve read approximately two novels since finishing high school, so you should take that declaration with a grain of salt.

But really though! It’s compelling! And exciting! You’ll probably shrug it off and ignore there rest of this post when I tell you it’s a zombie novel though. Yes, my love for zombies has grown past the confines of video games and movies and has now expanded to the world of literature.

This is actually the third zombie-related book I’ve read recently, though the last ones -The Zombie Survival Guide and Zombie CSU- were more reference books than anything else. Monster Island though, is a full-fledged novel with characters and plot development and all that good stuff.

I won’t bother going into the plot, but I feel it’s very necessary to highlight one of the parts of Monster Island that I found most interesting. There are essentially two main characters in this novel, and one is named Gary. Gary is a zombie. Sort of. He infected himself with the Epidemic, and hooked himself up to a ventilator and a dialysis machine, keeping his brain intact even when he died from the illness. Thus, while all other zombies are brainless eating machines, Gary’s brain stays fully intact, saving his place as the smarted dead man in the world. It’s really neat how Gary develops as an intelligent monster, how he learns the ins and outs of being dead, and how he interacts with the other characters. Gary is quickly developed as a sympathetic character, beaten down by the fact that if he’d waited a couple days he would have been rescued, but things slowly start to change once he realizes that being dead makes one very hungry. I won’t go into any further detail, but at the end, I still felt kinda bad for Gary. He was very different from the dead man we met at the beginning of the story, but there was still a certain sadness about his predicament and his inability to master the art of being undead. Sorry, unliving.

But there’s much more to enjoy here than the sorrowful tale of a half-zombie! The other main character is equally (if not more by the end) likeable, and even most of the secondary and ancillary characters have plenty of, well, character. The plot itself is pretty original, and serves up a few light twists. Nothing that will change your life, but more than enough to keep you anxious to turn the next page.

The book is relatively short, clocking in at a mild 282 pages, and the chapters are a scrawny 4 to 7 pages long, making for tasty, coffee-break-sized reading morsels. If my language is confusing, I like these attributes. I don’t feel like reading a gigantic tome of a novel, and I hate setting a book down in the middle of a chapter. If the shortness of it is unattractive in any way, there are two sequels, Monster Nation and Monster Planet, but I haven’t even read summaries of those two yet (though I’ll say that I’m very much looking forward to them!). Monster Island is definitely a great way to spenad a little time, and I honestly haven’t read any other book in my spare time that I would recommend more. So hit the book store (or library if you’re cheap/uncertain) and pick up a copy as soon as you can.

I am a wild party!

As we have been doing for well over a year now, the girlfriend and I go out to the movies every Tuesday night to take advantage of Cineplex theaters’ “Big Ticket Tuesdays” promotion. It’s a simple matter of getting a free drink and popcorn to go with our movies, but it’s a valued tradition, and I dread the day that it comes to an end. But this week was different! We went to two movies! She’d amassed more than enough points on her Scene card for two free tickets, so we took advantage of the freeness (you don’t get a free popcorn and drink on Tuesday if you use your points on a ticket) on Saturday night and hit the theater for the second time that week.

On our usual Tuesday date night, we went to see the highly-anticipated “The Hangover”. As huge fans of The Office, we (or at least I was) were pretty psyched to see Ed Helms go at it in a big screen production, and he did not disappoint. Even though he was playing a completely different character (the straight man, actually), you could still see so much Andy Bernard in him. But then again, just as much props go to his co-stars, Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis, who were equally awesome. The woman has a gigantic crush on Cooper, and the crowning moment of the film (for me) was when he got the shit kicked out of him by a naked, effeminate Chinese man.

If you hadn’t figured this out by now, “The Hangover” was absolutely the funniest movie I have seen in recent memory. In fact, I’m willing to label it the best movie I’ve seen so far this year. While the beginning plods just a little bit to get the premise going, it still keeps throwing jokes, slapstick, and one-liners at you to get things going. Once the pace is set, the humour is cranked up as high as it goes, and I pretty much did not stop laughing until long after the movie was over. Whether it was Cooper consistently forgetting there was a tiger in the bathroom or the drive-by tuxedo shop, there was always something hilarious (and usually outrageous) going on, and I just can not praise this movie enough.

“The Hangover”, in the end, I think would be best described as exactly what people kept telling me “Superbad” would be. I thought “Superbad” was excellent, but I never saw exactly why people found it impossible to stop talking about how great it was. But that’s exactly how I feel about “The Hangover.” I would gladly go see it again and again, like a late-nineties woman would “Titanic.” I can absolutely see myself falling asleep every night watching this movie much like I did with “Bender’s Big Score” for several weeks. Though now that I think about it, I doubt I’d actually be able to sleep while laughing so hard.

On Saturday night, she decided that it was time we see “Drag Me To Hell.” Now, after seeing the Evil Dead trilogy, I’ve always been able to give Sam Raimi the benefit of the doubt, but after “Spider-Man 3” it got a lot harder. “Drag Me To Hell” did not register well with me the first time I saw the trailer. I just got the impression of another dull horror movie that would fail both to frighten and entertain, like so many I’ve seen recently (“Quarantine” and “The Unborn” to name but a few). I was not looking forward to it.

Oh dear lord, how I was wrong.

“Drag Me To Hell,” in a word, was terrific. It was classic Sam Raimi, only with about a jillion times more budget to work with. While the story, setting, characters, and pretty much everything else were about as far removed from anything Evil Dead as you can get, I could not help but feel overwhelmed by the spirit of that series throughout the entire movie. It was a joy to watch from beginning to end, and I’d gladly recommend it to anybody who enjoys a hearty laugh with their creepiness.

That said, this movie was not the serious, dreary horror flick that the trailer plays it off as. It’s actually incredibly funny, with a few scary parts in between the plot and humour scenes (Alison Lohman’s face in the final scene will stay with me forever and be in my nightmares for the rest of my life). But the “horror” is just a device to bring in plenty of slapstick and gross-out comedy. And not in the terrible Wayans parody movie way, either. The fight scene between Lohman’s character and the old gypsy woman is a riot and is worth seeing the entire movie for. The part where the gypsy woman loses her false teeth and starts gumming Lohman is quite possibly the funniest and most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. When the demon is summoned into different characters near the ending is one of the most ridiculous scenes in the movie, but is entertaining and hilarious the whole way through.

The story is a bit flimsy, but you won’t care once the credits start to roll. You’ll walk away and talk about the parts that made you laugh the most, and you will feel entirely satisfied. The trailer and commercials do a terrible job of showcasing this movie. “Drag Me To Hell” is not a serious horror film. It is a lighthearted story of a cursed girl that never ever even thinks about taking itself seriously and even occasionally pokes fun at itself. It’s also about having as many disgusting things end up in the main character’s mouth as humanly possible. I loved it, and I gladly welcome Sam Raimi back into my good books for making it for me.

Pictures of food with words by them

Being back from holidays is a pain in the ass. I’ve never been overly excited about work, but over the last few months I’ve gone from apathetic about it to downright loathing even the notion of work. Maybe it has something to do with my current place of employment, or maybe I’m just super lazy and hate work just a smidgen more than Average Joe. I’m betting it’s the latter, but with a generous helping of the former. And lemon juice. Bitter, hateful lemon juice.

If there were one thing that could pick up my spirits enough to keep suffering through the long days without seriously considering burning the place down, I’m pretty sure it would be a toasted breakfast food with pictures of giant robots printed on it.

Holy shit! Kellogg’s read my mind exactly!

I’ll be the first to admit that they could use a little fine-tuning (getting the images in the center would be enough to please me), but these Transformers-branded Eggos make my day far more than they would a regular adult. Maybe it’s because I’m more likely to love anything when giant robots are involved, but these are my favourite limited edition Eggos ever. And they don’t even have chocolate. Or chocobos. But then again, there aren’t a lot of breakfast products that feature chocobos to begin with. In fact, I’m not even sure why I mentioned chocobos in the first place. Maybe because the word looks so much like chocolate. Also, I’ve been reading Gamespite Issue 1 Vol.1, and like a third of its pages are Final Fantasy-related articles. So maybe I have an excuse for having chocobos on the brain.

Ahem.

Now that that little burst of randomness is over (hopefully), let’s talk a bit more about these eggos. Obviously, the pictures weren’t going to be as colourful and sharp as the ones on the box, but there were almost inexcusably low-quality. In all honesty, the pictures look worlds better in these pictures than they actually do. My camera must have some sort of anti-blur, colour-enhancing filter, because the pics printed on the waffles were both blurry and dull. Dull almost to the point where they looked like the ghosts of the images that should have been printed on the waffles. However much sense that makes outside of my head.

I know, I know, this is pointless picking because food that is supposed to look like things always turns out half-baked (hyuk). Just look at character-shaped fruit snacks. They never look like the licenses they’re supposed to be representing. At least not enough that you’d be able to figure it out without previous knowledge of what they’re supposed to be. So I guess I can’t be too mad about the low-quality robot pictures on my eggos. Just moderately disappointed. But in the end, like I stated before, I would be more than happy enough if the pictures were centered.

Actually there’s one more catch here. See, the waffles have that flat part in the middle where the Transformers guys are printed, and it’s actually a Transformers Eggo killer. I dunno if it’s just because the texture is wrong, but this phoney-baloney middle section makes the whole eggo taste like the notably inferior Eggo Pancake. It’s a huge blow to the appeal of eggos, which may not be much, as they’re just shitty frozen waffles, but like I said, the Egoo Pancake is much, much worse. I’d rather grind my tongue with sandpaper than eat eggo pancakes.

On the upside, I suppose you could at least cut them up and pretend they’re really simple puzzles.