Nostalgia trippin’

Hey, so does it mean you’re old when just the air can cause waves of nostalgia to wash over you? Because I’m totally getting that right now. It’s been a beautiful fall day, and the first real one as far as I’m concerned, because it’s just got that feeling to it. I love this weather, and it brings back memories of everything I’ve ever associated it with. I have no way to properly convey these feelings in words, but I can feel them in my heart and I need to get them out somehow, so I kept a running list of every memory that came back to me today because of the cool autumn air. Here’s what I got:

  • Trick-or-treating in general
  • Beating Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes for Nintendo 64 one Halloween night
  • Playing Silent Hill for the first time
  • Daily visits to the Heath Sciences Center
  • Watching Criminal Minds on Stephanie’s laptop in my car
  • Guitar Hero 5
  • Visiting a small corner store downtown that smelled like curry, and buying Pepsis at said store which also smelled of curry
  • Treehouse of Horror
  • YTV’s Dark Night specials
  • McDonald’s Halloween McNugget toys
  • Driving around with the family to look at Halloween houses
  • That old McDonald’s Halloween cassette tape. “Spooky Sounds” or something of the like?
  • Pokémon Silver Version
  • The beginning of Christmas madness at Toys ‘R’ Us
  • Donkey Konga
  • Traipsing through yards covered in crunchy, fallen leaves
  • Finally earning my driver’s license
  • Purchasing my first car (I still love you, Spirit)
  • The beginning of hockey season, and all those dreadful practise sessions
  • Carving jack-o-lanterns
  • The last family trip to Fargo
  • Chasing a bunch of egg-chucking hooligans down the street while dressed as the red Angry Bird
  • Playing Rock Band 2 at a Halloween party, and my sister-in-law commenting at how intense I looked while I was playing
  • Creating the alias “Tito Sanchez” for reasons I cannot recall
  • Going to a corn maze and haunted house with a group of friends, and being thought of as a goofball (not in a good way) by the females of the bunch.
  • Playing Magical Starsign in the upstairs storeroom of Toys ‘R’ Us instead of working
  • My brother’s friend Brent dressing as a woman for Halloween, and being called “Brenta” for many years afterwards
  • Not giving out free cookies to trick-or-treaters at Tim Hortons
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, for some reason. I don’t know why, because I never played that at Halloween time
  • Pillsbury cookie rolls, with pumpkins coloured into them!
  • Enjoying those cold, foggy mornings where nobody’s around and silence abounds
  • The many times I said I’d participate in (or at least check out) a zombie walk, but never did
  • Pumpkin pie
  • The Nightmare Before Christmas
  • Specifically, “This is Halloween”

You’ve finally made a monkey out of me

Well guys, that’s it. I’ve finally completed Xenoblade Chronicles. And by “completed” I mean I’ve finished the story. I still have a few dozen incomplete quests in my logbook, my affinity chart isn’t all filled out yet, and four of the five superbosses have gone undefeated, but I decided it was time to put a cap on this one and move on with my life. What I did take the time to do, however, was max out my party affinity, so now all my playable characters are hopelessly in love with one another. And after sitting in Tephra Cave slaughtering millions of spiders, you’d probably want to just put it to bed too.

But my opinion on Xenoblade remains the same as it was after my first week with it; I still think it’s the best game available on the Wii. It’s certainly the most robust. Yeah, maybe pound-for-pound the graphics look a little dated, but the environments as a whole are more astounding than anything I’ve seen on a competing console. The second half of the game quickly spiraled out of control and went from a fairly solid plot to anime/JRPG cliche madness, but it certainly didn’t ruin the game for me. In fact, I thought that the lead up to the final boss was one of the coolest parts of the game. Especially since the locations were given proper names and the mind-boggling reveal at the end was something I totally did not see coming. And, uh, if you’re a Simpsons fan, the post title should ruin that reveal fairly efficiently. Not that the screenshot doesn’t spoil enough for anyone who isn’t at least three-quarters of the way through.

Clocking in at slightly under 150 hours is… well, I’ll probably take longer to finish Skyrim, but man, is that ever a beefy game. I think I probably could have stuck another 10 on there if I’d bothered to mop up the rest of the available quests and take down those superbosses. As it is, I’m satisfied with my clear file. Colony 6 is 100%, and that’s the only percentage counter in the game, so it’s enough for me,

Again, this is my favourite game available on Wii. I’ve dipped my toes into The Last Story, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit so far, but I don’t think it’s going to hit the same sweet spots for me. Monolithsoft didn’t give us a sequel hook as everything wrapped up quite nicely, but they did arguably leave the wide door open for a potential sequel. I suppose it kind of depends on how you interpret the ending, but I for one would embrace the opportunity to spend another 150 hours in this world if the Wii U ends up with a Xenoblade 2.

The power of Mabel

So I’ve been watching this new Disney cartoon lately. It’s called Gravity Falls and it is the best kid show on TV. That’s a pretty bold proclamation, but I’m willing to stand behind it. And that’s competing with such wonderful things as Adventure Time and… well, pretty much just Adventure Time. Does Regular Show qualify as “for kids”?

Yes, that’s the image I’m going to use to try to sell this. Do you have a problem with it? I don’t. Pants are terrible and should be abolished.

Anyway, Gravity Falls. The show is about a pair of twins, Dipper and Mabel, who are sent off to the eponymous town of Gravity Falls to spend the summer with their great uncle Stan. I should note here that he is referred to as “Grunkle Stan” and that “grunkle” is quite possibly the best word ever. Take that, pickle. In Gravity Falls, weird stuff abounds, and most episodes so far have had a sort of creature-of-the-week vibe to them, but it’s pretty clear that there’s more going on here, and that should it make it to a second season, things aare going to get a lot deeper. Kinda like Fringe. No, exactly like Fringe. Which is good, because that’s a really awesome show too.

One of the things that I really love about Gravity Falls is the level of detail in the show. There are coded messages in the end credits, crazy single frame inserts, creepy recurring men in the backgrounds, and loads of tiny continuity things. For example: in one of the first few episodes, Dipper is chased onto the roof of Grunkle Stan’s Mystery Shack, and ends up knocking the big S over. In every subsequent episode, whenever there’s a shot of the Mystery Shack, the S remains slumped over. Also, apparently some characters have four fingers and others have five? You may think it’s an animation flub, but Dipper finds a mysterious tome in the first episode, and on the front cover is an image of a hand with six fingers. Mysterious!

Part of what drew me to the show in the first place is the silky-smooth hand-drawn animation. Check it out!

You just don’t get that level of beauty with butt-ugly Flash animations. I honestly can’t wait to buy the inevitable overpriced blu-ray set so that I can enjoy it in full HD goodness.

And since we’re sort of on the topic, my other favourite part of the show is Mabel. She is adorable, wears a different sweater every episode, and is Goddamn hilarious. Every time she opens her mouth, I invariably end up laughing out loud. I don’t know the last show that made me laugh so much, never mind a single character. The rest of the cast is great too, but Mabel makes Gravity Falls. If I ever have a daughter, I hope that she ends up with a little Mabel in her, because that girl is charming like nobody’s business. Even Abed from Community cannot hold a candle to her sheer lovableness. She does a Legend of Zelda “item get” spin at the end of the first episode, for crying out loud!

If you want to know more about Gravity Falls, go torrent you some episodes. It is so so so worth it. But don’t take my word for it, here’s a link to the Talking Time thread for it, where I done stole that movin’ picture from. Read up while you’re waiting for your torrents to finish.

Ryan’s Webcomics For Funtimes

So this is… comic number one; I call it Polygamize Me. Thought it was fairly clever.

I don’t know for sure if I’m going to be doing more comics or what. It’s just that I’m on vacation this week and I’ve got a surplus of time to do fun things that I like. Drawing comics is on that list, it’s just not very high on the list, so it usually gets ignored for other things which I find to be more fun. If I do keep it up for whatever reason, there won’t be a regular schedule. They’ll just appear whenever my muse compels. It’s more exciting that way.

I’m filing the project under the name Ryan’s Webcomics For Funtimes (just like the post title), because the Coozy For Hire name died along with the website. I mean, the site is there and hijacked by penis ads (yes, still!), but none of the CFH content exists on that little slice of internet. RWFF is sill mostly the same thing as CFH in spirit, the only difference being that it’s a solo project. That isn’t a strict rule though; I’m just as open to collaboration as any hip-hop artist.

I don’t know what else to say about this yet. More on why this happened tomorrow.

Terrible Monster Costume from the Haunted Sea

It wasn’t long ago -in my second-to-last article in fact- that I proclaimed my love for campy old monster movies. Really, I’m a huge fan of the “drive-in movie” regardless of whether they contain monsters or not. Creature features just seem to be the dominant sub-genre in this case. Any why wouldn’t they be? Cheesy monster movies just work better when you’re huddled up in your car, out in the blackness of the night. You’re much more vulnerable and secluded that at a theater or in the safety of your own home. Not that most of these movies were ever frightening, but the setting definitely added to the movies’ atmosphere.

I don’t know for sure if the average drive-in screen is really bigger than your run-of-the-mill movie screen, but just by merit of it being out in the open, being forced to look up at it, it sure seems bigger. Maybe it’s because most of my drive-in experiences took place when I was about as tall as an Ewok. Anyway, whether it’s really bigger or not, putting a monster up on that big screen makes the monster seem bigger too, greatly enhancing the flavour of the film. Also, add a pinch of salt and a sprig of basil. Delicious!

Not that I’ve ever had the true drive-in movie experience. By the time I was old enough to understand complex concepts like “movies” and “the drive-in,” the golden age of cinema was long over, and with it the drive-in movie. By that point they didn’t make (nevermind show) movies like Phantom From Space or War of the Worlds anymore. No, when I went to the drive-in, I got to see stuff like Batman Forever and The Phantom. That said, going to the drive-in was definitely more about the experience than the movies for me.

Continue reading Terrible Monster Costume from the Haunted Sea

So laaazy

You know, I’ve had a new movie review sitting around for over a month now, but I have no idea how long it will be until I post it. It was originally supposed to go live in July. And it’s pretty much done, too! The bulk of the writing is done; I still have to go back over it to do a little spellchecking and other fine-tuning, but the words are essentially done. The thing that I’m stuck at it getting some screengrabs.

Normally, that’s the part I’d do first. I’d watch a movie/show, and then go back and take a few shots of important part, and then write the article around those. This time I did all the writing first, and the way that I wrote it calls for a lot of images. And not just the basic screengrabs either! No, I worked myself into a corner full of photoshops and collages. I suppose I could go over the article and edit the parts that call out images I don’t want to take/create, but at that point I’m cheating the reader of a fuller experience. Oh, what a world.

It’s not that I don’t want to do it, it’s just that taking screenshots o a movie is dull and tedious. Making sure I printscreen jsut the right moments, making sure everything is sized and named properly… It’s boring.

This is sort of similar to the reason why my Monster Hunter Let’s Play is stalling. Playing Monster Hunter is one of my favourite pastimes, and talking about Monster Hunter comes in at a close second, so in that case I’m mostly blaming Camtasia. With sprite-based games, I can set it to record and then just have at it as long as I need, then stop when I feel like the session is done and do a little chopping to make everything nice and neat before I produce it. Monster Hunter, being a PS2 game, I guess eats a ton of memory while being recorded. If I go over about 15 minutes of footage, it stops recording sound and just replaces my narration and the game’s audio with a horrible extra-loud static track. So I have to time myself to make sure I don’t record too long, find a suitable spot to pause, and then wait while to video is processed, then wait twice as long while the video is saved to a file. The processing/saving part eats up all my PC’s resources too, so I can’t do anything else with it while I wait. Then I have to do the usual editing, which is not terrible, but annoying after all the other hoops I’ve had to jump through to get that far. Especially if I screwed up the timing and have to fix the sound problems. And then, then I have to hope that while it was paused for Camtasia to do all its things, that my PS2 emulator hasn’t crashed. That’s happened twice now, and it’s even worse than when the audio breaks, because not just footage is lost, but actual game progress. This was the worst project I’ve ever started.

But that movie review? It’ll be done… maybe this weekend. I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I’ll do with my Friday night.

The Alphabet of Music

If you’ve been around here long enough, reading that post title may immediately lead you to think that maybe I’ve started working on the increasingly-obsolete CD Archive. Or at the very least maybe I’ve made a WordPress-style page for it. No. No I have not.

It’s probably a slightly more interesting story in reality. Probably.

I have a long work day. It consists of a 40-minute bus ride to work, eight-and-a-half hours in the office, and then another 40-minute (if traffic is light) bus ride back home. So I listen to a lot of music via my iPhone, not unlike many other downtown-based drones. I’ve noticed that over the last few months I’ve been falling back on one or two albums to listen to for so long, until I pop a new one on there and it replaces one of the old ones.

Not a huge deal in itself, but I feel bad for neglecting the other 95% of the music on there, so I decided to do something radical. No, I did not hit the shuffle button, that would offend my OCDishness far too much. Instead, I decided that for the past week, I would listen to one album for each letter in the alphabet, in alphabetical order. It’s not really the best way to spice up my listening tendencies, but it’s something.

I might also mention that the mix of music on my phone is a little past eccentric. I’ve got everything from classic rock to nerdcore rap to classical. From Ke$ha to Hawksley Workman to Ghost Hounds. I have both the Xenoblade Chronicles soundtrack and Dustin Kensrue’s Please Come Home on there. It’s varied, and while it’s not all in the best of taste, it’s all squarely in my taste. So go suck and egg if you don’t like it.

Because I will take any reason to make up a list, the results of my project and some musings are after the jump.

Continue reading The Alphabet of Music

The numbers game

So one of the fellas over at Game|Life posted a story today about how Nintendo product sales make up roughly 70% of the Japanese video game market. Whether these numbers are skewed or not, this makes me very happy, being a big fat Nintendo fanboy and all.

Now we just need to find a way to make those numbers happen over here, and all will be right in the world again. Also then we might get Dragon Quest X, the first traditional MMO I actually want to play.

It also makes me happy that New Super Mario Bros 2 is selling really well, and that people are enjoying it. If you hadn’t been keeping up, the internet didn’t seem to be looking forward to it. To put it nicely.

One of the things that stood out to me is that Nintendo platforms make up roughly 75% of console sales in Japan, and Sony has approximately 23 of the other percents. I’m going to go ahead and assume that the Xbox 360 has the other 2%, and all the other lesser consoles combined account for less than a percent. Also of note is that the only 360 game whose sales are worth mentioning is Monster Hunter Frontier.

So let’s have a look-see at the facts here. MH Frontier is the most popular Xbox game in Japan. Xbox is the most popular console in North America. So why, Capcom, do you not bring Frontier to North America? I don’t have a lot of disposable income, but I would gladly fork over a little bit of what I have each month to have the opportunity to play a big, fancy, HD version of Monster Hunter. I know there’s more to it that that, but seriously. Capcom’s got peanut butter and chocolate here, but they refuse to mash them together.

I kind of hate Capcom right now. Or I would if Dragon’s Dogma wasn’t so rad.

Tongues on fire

Hey, remember last summer when I was writing about those limited-time Doritos that claimed to be the spiciest ones, and came in three different levels of heat? Yeah, those ones. Since I’d decided to pick up each different kind on separate occasions, I was made the victim of some sort of conspiracy to make it seem as if the third tier of these special Doritos had never existed. Of course, the bags of lesser hotness themselves touted the “3rd degree burn” variety, but when the time came to give those 3rds a try, I could not for the life of me find a bag to purchse. I searched high and low, but was forced to write them off as a lost-forever.

Imagine my elation upon finding that 7-11 had begun to stock the Scorchin’ Habanero exclusively.

I’ll admit that I’m not certain of whether or not the 3rds were the only member of the Burn family to be restocked this year, but I don’t rightly care. As far as I’m concerned they should be the only ones to make a return, after their mysterious disappearance last time this promotion ran.

For all I know the 7-11 I’ve been visiting lately just lost the box last year, recently found it, and are now trying to get rid of the crusty old stock. That “AU 21” best before date very conveniently omits a year.

Getting down to brass tacks, I think I may have been a bit of a whiny baby last year, because I refuse to believe that the 2nd Degree was as hot as the 3rd. If you go back and read that post about the 2nds, you’ll see that I typed that they were so hot that I could not eat them all in a single sitting. When eating the 3rds, I had the same problem! It actually took me three runs at the bag to get them all down this time. I think I’d need to try both again, but at the same time to come to a definitive conclusion.

The other travesty here is that aside from the weclome spiciness challenge, I didn’t really like them all that much. Much like the jalapeno of the 1st Degree, I wasn’t really won over by the habanero flavour. I’d eat them again if they were to be offered as a snack or small gift, but I wouldn’t buy them again. Well, aside from the aforementioned spiciness comparison. For science and all.

If I had to choose one Degree to be the overall winner, I’d have to go with the 2nds. Since it’s been so long since I’ve eaten the two lesser varieties, I’m making an assumption based on anecdotal evidence, which doesn’t seem overly professional. If it’s my own anecdote though, it should be all right though, yes?

In other news, that Slurpee is of a “mystery” flavour (one of those stupid “name the flavour” contests). It’s orange. Orange with a little something mixed in at best. I solved the mystery, gimme the prize.