Articles – Page 11

The 23 Days of Materialism 2009

Hey kiddies! Unless it’s the far future and you’re new readers, you probably read most of this on the blog during December. But now it’s in article form! And backwards. I really can’t be arsed to switch them all around.

If you don’t know the history of this project, for every day in December up until the 24th (it tragically petered out on the 23rd this year) I write about one thing I think people should buy. To convey the true spirit of Christmas. Which, of course, is spending all your money buying too much shit for people who probably already have too much stuff. If you want to make it more positive, think of these as gift ideas. Aaaanyway…

Day Twenty-three – Phantasy Star

Phantasy Star is yet another game I received as a birthday gift which I hadn’t started playing until I decided to include it in this feature. Only this time, it was a gift from my youngest brother, as for every birthday and Christmas, he sends me a (seemingly) random Virtual Console or WiiWare game.

I’ll admit that at the time, I wasn’t overly thrilled that I got Phantasy Star over say, Excitebike or Ninja Gaiden, but a free game is a free game. I also wasn’t too thrilled that when I started playing the game, I dicovered I needed to save after every encounter because it’s brutal.

Over time, though, I learned to go heal after every second fight, and eventually made a little headway into the game. Admittedly, I don’t think I’m very far yet, as I’ve only assembled most of my party (one of those characters being nearly useless in combat), and haven’t even seen one boss yet. I really did want to finish the game by now, but other things got in the way (New Super Mario Bros., and RE: The Darkside Chronicles being the main culprits).

Anyway, Phantasy Star is a fairly decent RPG, if a little tough. But most RPGs of that era are, so that’s a little moot. It’s a lot quicker than Final Fantasy though, which is very good. The downside being that every enemy makes a terribly annoying buzzing noise when they attack. It’s definitely a game best played with the sound off and a CD/iPod on.

The really cool part is that the dungeons are all 3D-esque, a little like Etrian Odyssey, only you have to supply your own graph paper if you want to make maps. And the map-making aspect is my favourite part of the game. It’s what I loved about Etrian Odyssey (when I’d mapped every floor, I felt I was done with the game, grinding and FOEs be damned), and it’s a little less convenient in Phantasy Star, but still really fun. Also it makes each and every one look exactly the same, which is why it’s absolutely essential to keep maps.

So yeah, chances are good that I’ll never finish it (I’ll likely be playing Silent Hill: Shattered Memories over and over until the end of time if it’s as good as Tomm says), but I do quite like Phantasy Star. Maybe I’ll try to get back into it though. I really do like the urgency that the 3D dungeons create, making drawing maps into an essential gameplay element. But that’s probably the only reason I’ll go back. The gameplay otherwise is pretty dated, and despite the space travel element, the story hasn’t really captured my interest. Not the worst way to spend your five bucks though.

Day Twenty-two – GameSpite Quarterly Vol. 3

Look what came in the mail yesterday! YAAAAAY!

A few of the articles are online over at you-should-know-where-by-now and more are dribbling onto the site day by day, but I’ll have burned through this baby by the end of the year. End of the week if I’m really good.

Though I take issue with the sweet extra-money-costing hardcover deluxe edition bearing the Dragon Warrior cover. Not that I dislike Dragon Warrior or anything, but I think Mario should have graced the cover of the premium edition. Oh well. This is well and truly the first time in my life that the saying “You can’t jusdge a book by its cover” has applied to me literally.

Day Twenty-one – A Boy and His Blob

It probably was about a month ago that A Boy and His Blob was released on Virtual Console. It struck me as odd, because I remember that game being pretty popular back in the day, but maybe I’m just crazy. Maybe it was just one Nintendo Power article that I read over and over.

Anyway, since I’ve always wanted to really play the game, I downloaded the game right away, and only then did it hit me that I actually had played it already. I think. My memory normally isn’t so sketchy when it comes to whether I’ve played a game or not, but I can’t for the life of me remember if I’d actually rented the game once or again, if the Nintendo Power artcile is messing with my mind.

In any case, it turns out that A Boy and His Blob is quite difficult. I don’t imagine that I would have had as much trouble with it is a child, but in an age where we’re accustomed to having in-game maps or some sort of navigational help, I just can’t manage without any kind of reference as to where I’m going and where I’ve been. Also I have no tolerance for the limited and sluggish movement of our heroes.

The point remains, however, that it is a really neat game wherein you feed a white blob jellybeans to make it transform into objects that will help you navigate the world. And it’s quite possibly the first of its kind. Tons of games gave you a large inventory of tools to solve the puzzles that the world presented, but I can’t think of even one other that gives all of it to you at the beginning of the game and leaves you on your own to figure out what it is you need to do and how to do it.

Very luckily for me, however, that someone out there was thinking of me, and decided to give the formula a bit of a tune-up.

I picked up the new Wii version of A Boy and His Blob back in October, a week or two after its release, and I’m so so so so happy that I did. The idea is the same, gameplay-wise, but changes a couple key elements that simultaneously make it more approachable and enjoyable.

The most obvious change is that the world is no longer one big map to explore, but rather segmented into many normal-sized levels. Also, lives are gone and now the boy just respawns nearby when he’s viciously murdered or you drop him into a bottomless pit.

Another change that’s a little detrimental to the formula is that to go with the bite-sized levels, you’re only given a certain number of jellybeans in each stage. This makes the challenges the game presents you with much easier to solve, as at any time, you only have so many options, and you can never run out of jellybeans, so you never have to worry that you don’t have the right transformation for the job. While this does make the game a little friendlier to those who aren’t hardcore explorers, it doesn’t mean that the challenge is gone. No, in fact I think I’ve spent far more lives in this game than even in New Super Mario Bros Wii, and in that game, there are usually other players who make it their life’s goal to see me die.

The new A Boy and His Blob is quite a pleasant game, actually. The challenge level is just right (though some of the bonus levels are downright evil), and the only real complaint I can lobby against it is that there aren’t really any puzzles that have multiple solutions. I would very much like to see a sequel where you have more options and can make your own way rather than follow the path the developers paved. And while the new one is head and shoulders above it’s ancient predecessor, the original A Boy and His Blob still has its charms (even though it lacks a “hug” button). It’s just too damn hard though! I do intend to finish it one day, but there will be legions of lives lost and game overs suffered before that ever happens.

Day Twenty – Matthew Good : Live at Massey Hall

If I have to explain this one, you haven’t been paying enough attention.

Matthew Good. Live. Nuff’ said.

Day Nineteen – Scott Pilgrim

The internet has been abuzz about Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comics for years now, and I’ve kind of stayed outside the loop up until recently. See, I knew people loved them, but I didn’t know why (lack of research). But then I was reading about the upcoming movie adaptation and heard that there were all sorts of video game references. Guess which books I went out and bought as soon as I could?

Yeah, after I read a couple articles about the movie, I decided that it was definitely something I was, or at least should be, interested in. And because I’m impatient, I decided I needed to read the comics to get a really good feel for what I was getting into. It was a very good move on my part, because the internet is not wrong, Scott Pilgrim is awesome.

I only bought Scott Pilgrim 1 and 2 to start off with, and I read them both that day. It’s a perfect story for everyone, blending growing-up issues with romance and rock n roll and video games, and I was instantly hooked. Not hooked enough, mind you, to remember that I needed to buy the rest of them, but hooked enough that I’m making seeing the movie a very high priority.

I have been negligent in my duties of picking up and reading the remaining issues, but I am hoping to get at least one more for Christmas, and worst case scenario, I’ll just go out an buy them myself with the mall gift cards I’ll inevitably receive. Very much looking forward to how the story pans out, and all the gags and video game references that still await me. Huge mistake on my part for waiting so long to see what Scott Pilgrim was all about.

Day Eighteen – Resident Evil : The Darkside Chronicles

When Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles was released near the beginning of the Wii’s lifespan, I picked it up with cautious optimism. Also I wanted something else to use my zapper on. It was so much more fun that I’d ever had with a rail shooter, and I’ll admit I was shocked. Turns out it was even super awesomer to play with someone else, and it even ended up being one of my girlfriend’s favourite games.

The only issue I had with it is that it was a re-telling of pre-RE4 games, but while it went through Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil, and Resident Evil 3 as well as a whole slew of new material, it never touched on my favourite game in the series, Resident Evil 2.

That’s where The Darkside Chronicles comes into play. When it was first announced, I only ever heard anything about RE2 being covered in it, so I was pretty ecstatic that the next shooter would be dedicated to my favourite classic RE game. And then as more news trickled out, nobody said anything else about RE2, but focused on the new announcement that Code: Veronica was now involved. I was a little sad that nobody was giving any attention to RE2, but whatever.

It all worked out alright though, because The Darkside Chronicles is even better than its predecessor! Mixing RE2, Code: Veronica and more new material. The new stuff shines a little light on Leon’s relation ship with Krauser (from RE4), and delves a little further into the effects of the Veronica virus. It’s a really good new story, very different from anything we’ve seen in Resident Evil up to this point.

The past games are represented pretty faithfully, too. The RE2 segments stick really close to the source material, outside of the fact that Leon and Claire are together the whole time. The fact that they made sure the licker flew by that first window in the police station is great, because for some reason that is the definitive moment of RE2 for me. I’ve never played through the entirety of Code: Veronica, but it seems fairly faithful to what I have seen of the game.

The most important thing to note about The Darkside Chronicles is that unlike its big brother, it’s more about the experience than the shooting. The camera moves around a lot more, as characters look around, and they seldomly stop for long to take out approaching enemies, opting instead to have someone shout “There’s no time!” or something of the like and press on, leaving more zombies alive than I’d usually like.

It’s still really fun though! If not for Super Mario Bros Wii and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories I would say that this was my most desired Wii game of 2009. Of course, I can’t rememeber what came out this year before October, so it’s kinda moot. Definitely recommended, and despite its relative brevity, I’ll be playing it for a long time to come.

Day Seventeen – Joe Satriani : Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock

So here’s another CD I’ve bought recently. It’s Joe Satriani, and that means that it’s gonna be harder to review than most albums because it’s (almost) entirely instrumental. That makes it hard because really, I’m no music scholar. I just know I love his stuff.

The strange part is that the sticker on the shrink wrap said that it included the new hit single “I Just Wanna Rock”, which is odd because I’ve never heard Joe played on any radio station ever, so how could he have a single? Then again, I only listen to local radio, so maybe there are (non-classical) stations out there who aren’t aftraid to play instrumental music.

Professor Satchafunkilus is a terrific album, containing the same kind of music you expect from Satch, music that rocks hard and really moves you. It’s deep without having to say a word, and I think that the poignancy of the music says a lot, because like I said before, I’ve never heard a completely instrumental piece on the radio in all my life, and the fact that there are still people out there who can express themselves without having to resort to lyrics is comforting in some way.

The big killer to this wholly positive post is that I still kinda prefer Super Colossal overall. On a track-by-track basis, “Asik Vaysel” and “Andalusia” blow my mind and I’d choose one them over any single song on Super Colossal, though. “Andalusia” in particular is amazing, starting with an arrangement I can only describe as “deserty” because it reminds me of the Gerudo Desert music from Ocarina of Time, and then blows up and rocks your face off. Easily my favourite track on the album.

It’s a great album though! Not enough people get the understated beauty of instrumental rock. They’re all worried about the stupid overused love song lyrics, and don’t think about the real soul of the song anymore. And with the current club music craze, true feeling in popular music is essentially nonexistent. Boo on that.

Hm. Guess I could write a full post about it. Who knew?

Day Sixteen – GameSpite Quarterly Vol. 2

Well you must have guessed that this one would be down the pipe somewhere, right? To be honest, I probably should have just put these two together in the same day, because there isn’t nearly as much to say for Quarterly 2 without repeating most of what I said for Q1.

Anyway, the theme of this second book is the greatest games of all time. That is to say, Parish asked everyone on Talking Time and these are the 48 games that got the most votes (40 if you cheaped out and bought the paperback). Of course, all the articles are available directly on GameSpite.net, but there’s something heartwarming about having a tangible version of something so wonderful.

Most of the games featured in this one will shock no-one, as the lion’s share are all quite high-profile titles. There are a few that surprised me, like Dragon Quarter and Civilization, and the order is sometimes a little unexpected, but the real attention grabber is that Final Fantasy VII is nowhere to be seen. And that’s a good thing. That means that the part of the internet I live in has taste. Yay!

Like Q1, this is a wonderful read, and I couldn’t recommend it more (you should definitely buy a copy to support the site and writers! don’t just read it online!). The problem is that it makes me want to play all the games within! I bought Dragon Quarter and Final Fantasy XII based on the articles contained in this book despite the fact that I most definitely do not have the time to play through two of the most time-consuming RPGs on the PS2. Yeah.

Day Fifteen – Garry’s Mod

Along with Zombie Shooter, Edwin had sent me Half-Life 2 and Garry’s Mod for my birthday earlier this year. Being the awful friend I am, I had barely thoughed either of them until just recently. Thank God I finally cracked open Garry’s Mod though, as it is so much fun. Did I use enough italics there to sell my excitement?

It’s one of those things that in retrospect, I had heard of but never realized just what it was. Garry’s Mod, or GMod, as I will herein refer to it, is some sort of modification of Valve’s Source engine, and is mostly just a big toybox. You’re given all the assets of either Half-Life 2 or whatever Source engine game you have installed to to screw around with, and create whatever your little heart desires.

There are tons and tons of options in this game, and I’ve just barely scraped the surface of what I can do with it. That’s probably mostly because I’ve just been creating ragdolls and attaching bunches of balloons to them to make them float up into the sky (note the balloon fetishism above). Other than that, I haven’t done much more than spawning legions of zombies and watching them tear through a bunch of civilians an Alyxes.

Really, the best thing about GMod isn’t that it’s a ton of fun, but rather that you can do almost anything you can dream of with it. Obviously the more complicated your plans are, the more you’ll have to figure out to actually make it work (I’m still working on building the basic crate/sawblade car from the tutorial), but the payoff is totally worth it. Seeing the towering monument of randomly welded-on crap that I made once was oddly satisfying. Far more than it should have been, actually. Attaching a baby to a pole with an elastic and slingshotting it back and forth? That definitely shouldn’t have been as entertaining as it was.

Obviously, I give GMod the big two thumbs up of approval. It’s absolutely worth every penny Valve is charging for it. Not that I was the one paid for it or anything. But you get what I mean. I think tonight I’ll make a pen for my zombie slaughter, so they can’t come after me once they’ve murdered all everyone else. Or maybe I’ll try to build a little shack! Who knows…

Day Fourteen – The Office season 5

So here’s some Office things. Um. I don’t know. I don’t feel like writing today. Getting tired of this stupid blog thing. Blah.

Anyway, The Office. It’s a TV show, and season 5 is the most recently released on DVD. We watch it pretty religiously. As soon as the DVDs come out, anyway. Far too busy to bother trying to remember when it’s on and if it’s a new episode or not. Whatever. We usually have a set done within the week we start watching.

It’s a really great show. Quite funny, but also a little uncomfortable at times. The main character, Steve Carrell’s character, is so oblivious and naive and at times incredibly racist (by accident). It’s almost painful to watch him make an ass out of himself sometimes, but still hilarious. The rest of the characters are pretty great too. I noted that this season that Pam was by far the most prominent secondary character, which is good because she’s sassy and likable and Jim’s schtick is getting old. Definitely need more Andy/Dwight craziness though.

All in all, though my apathy here might imply otherwise, I’m just not in the mood for writing. Season 5 of The Office has quite possibly been the best yet (I really loved the Michael Scott Paper Company episodes), and I can’t wait for 6. Yeah, I could try to watch it on TV, but bleh. Too much effort. I’ll just buy the DVD.

Day Thirteen – Rock Band Queen DLC

It’s been nearly two years since Rock Band was first released, and every week since then, Harminix has added new songs onto the various console shops to play in the game. For a long time, I would eagerly bounce out of bed every Tuesday morning, eager to see if they’d added anythign I would like to play, and for the most part, the early stuff was really good. Lately they’ve been branching out a little more, even adding country into the mix, and it’s not very oftne that I check the music store these days.

Only in early September, there was a humongous announcement that there would finally be a Queen track pack released for the game. Queen being my favourite band ever, I was giddy. I had two wait nearly two months until it hit, but damn was I pumped.

Then it came and I’ve literally played Rock Band three times since I downloaded it. All three to play said Queen tracks, but still. To be completely honest, I think I’ve finally lost my lust for pretend guitaring. I mean, yeah, I still really enjoy playing the games, but they’re very low on my to-do list. Below reading, if you can believe that.

Anyway, the Queen track pack is pretty awesome. It’s got ten tracks in all, and they’re obviously all the band’s biggest hits. “I Want it All” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” are pretty fun to play, but “One Vision” sits high at the top of my list. We’ve already played the Hell out of “Killer Queen” and “Under Pressure” in Guitar Hero, but they’re still great to come back to. A couple songs, “Another One Bites the Dust” in particular, are retarded easy to play on the guitar side of things, but at the very least, the solos are always fun and challenging. Maybe you didn’t notice, but it’s definitely more of a pack for those vocalists out there, because hey, Freddie Mercury.

The only qualms I have is that “Tie Your Mother Down” makes my hand hurt, and where the fuck is “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Seriously. Unless Harmonix is holding it back for Rock Band 3, it’s a pretty heavy omission. But hey, it’s still Queen in Rock Band, which is suuuuper awesome no matter which way you slice it.

Day Twelve – GameSpite Quarterly Vol. 1

This whole feature is really focusing quite a bit on video games, isn’t it? I guess I should have used the same media type schedule that I did last year to mix things up a little better. Oh well, live and learn, I guess. So let’s talk about a book today! It’s a book about video games, but whatever. Deal with it.

Gamespite Volume 1 is the first direct-to-print venture by the writers at GameSpite.net, quite possibly the only wesite I talk about with other people. I’ve been reading the site for years now, and obviously I jumped when Parish said he was contracting his writers to make an actual book (that isn’t just a collection of already-posted content, which I also bought), and hopped on that badwagon as soon as I could.

It helped that the first issue was dedicated to Game Boy, which was my object of affection for many, many years. Me and my many Game Boys have been through everything together, and I will always cherish my big grey brick, as well as it’s few cousins that still remain in my posession. It was a sad day for me, the day that the Game Boy brand died and was replaced with the soulless, mass-market appeal DS brand, but that’s the way she goes. DS and I still have a long way to before we forge a bond similar to what I had with Game Boy, but it’ll never be the same. You never forget your first love.

But anyway! The book! It’s not really a book per se, even thoguh it looks like a book, and feels like a book, and tastes like a book. It does not, however, read like a book. That is because, despite its hardcover appearance, Gamespite Quarterly is essentially a magazine. It is filled with little articles, rather than a single long story. Though to be fair, there is a little segue between each section of the book that details the life and times of Game Boy, so there is kind of an overarching plot. But that’s besides the point!

The book is mainly filled with articles about Game Boy’s best games. You know, the obvious ones like Tetris and Link’s Awakening and Donkey Kong ’94. There’s also a few articles about competing hadheld devices, and even a few that have nothing to do with Game Boy at all. It’s a rather large book, being that it’s a magazine with zero advertisements. Also, it’s awesome. The writers at GameSpite are incredibly talented; the best ill make you want to go out and play a game having barely said anything about the game at all. I think they’ve influenced my on writing a bit, and I kind of dream of eventually writing a piece for a future issue, but as it stands I don’t think I’ve got what it takes quite yet.

The best part, though, is that Parish always includes a teaser image at the end of each issue, hinting at the theme for the next, and I find the suspense very entertaining in and of itself. It’s a tiny thing, but yeah. Awesome book. Go get a copy and support the site.

Day Eleven – Dead Space : Extraction

When Stephanie and I play video games together, there’s usually three categories what we’re playing falls under: Mario games, Rock Band (occasionally Guitar Hero), and Wii rail shooters. The first two are pretty obvious, but I was quite shocked at how quickly she took to Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles. I wasn’t one to complain about my girlfriend liking games, so I took it and ran with it, buying House of the Dead: Overkill and more recently, Dead Space: Extraction.

House of the Dead was fun, and really over-the-top, but wasn’t something that really stuck with us. Dead Space, on the other hand, was soooooo cool. It’s a little strange that in two player mode, both players are technically the same person, but lack of a P2 character is a trifle.

I’ve never played the original Dead Space (I bought it recently, but haven’t had a chance to play it yet), but I was very intrigued by the idea of “strategic dismemberment.” It was a real system shock, trying to get used to the fact that I wanted to shoot my enemies in the limbs and not the head. The drawback here though, is that there are only about five enemy types, so there isn’t really much strategy involved after level three or so. You’ve seen all there is to see, and all you’ve gotta do is focus on choppin’ those limbs off.

But! The game is still a ton of fun, especially in two player mode. The competition isn’t too fierce, but in every game we play together, I usually get hit once or twice a session for taking all the items because she hadn’t noticed them or was too slow. Blasting the crap out of monsters as a team is great though, and since it’s a horror-themed game, I really enjoy how every time an enemy pops out she screams and jumps while I proceed to explode its legs.

As much as I enjoy the game though, no one thing stands out for me as something I really love about it. Which is sad, because it’s hard to write a piece according to new games journalism standards without a feature to focus on. I guess maybe the unlockables are really great? Each level gives you a rank in stars, and when you get enough stars, your guy levels up. As far as I can tell, it’s only extra life, but still neat. Weapons have upgrades hidden throughout the game as well, but I never noticed any difference after picking them up…

oh! Wait, it doesn’t warrant a whole review, but the unlockable comics are really cool. All the panels are narrated, and they shead a lot of light on the backstory of the game, which in itself is a prequel, so… Goin’ really far back then. And yeah. Those are the things I like about Dead Space: Extraction. It’s not as perfect as the Resident Evil rail shooters on the Wii, but it’s still a good time.

Day Ten – Pontypool

Today’s entry continues down the zombie path. Well, sort of. We recently rented this movie called Pontypool, whose trailer had been advertised in theaters, but never actually made its way there. I was quite disappointed because I really wanted to see it. But it did eventually show up at the local Blockbuster, and I pounced!

Pontypool is not your everyday horror movie. The film centers around two main characters, and they are in the same room for a good 80% of the movie’s length. This makes most of the action take place over the radio, and it’s great.

The most prominent thing about Pontypool is that it plays up the suspense by never showing you exactly what’s going on. Up until about three quarters of the way through, I was on the edge of my seat wondering what was going to happen next, and what the Hell was going on. This is the first movie I’ve seen in a long time that has wrangled 100% of my attention and held onto it until the very end.

The only thing that I didn’t like is the last leg of the movie, wherein a new character was introduced and started explaining it all. It was just conjecture, but since it all sort of worked out, it was dumb because the scariest things are the things you can’t understand. Also the explaination was kinda stupid and nonsensical, but at the very least it was original. I would have preferred it if there had been about half the exposition, if it was absolutely necessary. It’s like how Silent Hill is such a wonderfully frightening series because you’re never told exactly what is going on.

While I was a bit disappointed with the ending, I still think Pontypool is a fantastic movie, and I fully intend to add it to my DVD collection after Christmas, unless by some miracle it appears under my Christmas Tree. I also hope to read the novel, in hopes that like most, it is superior to the film version.

Day Nine – Zombie Shooter

Waaaaay way back in September, Edwin sent me a few games over Steam for my birthday (what a swell chap!), and one of those games was called Zombie Shooter.

This game is exactly what it sounds like. You’re a little woman (or man) in an isometric world, and you run around blasting the shit out of hordes and hordes of zombies. And when I say hordes of zombies, I mean hordes. The fist thing you’ll notice about Zombie Shooter is that there are boat loads of zombies. I think it goes so far as to have around 100 zombies on the screen at a time, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the number was actually double or more. I never stopped to count them.

The second thing you will notice is that the bloody remains of your slain foes stays there. No matter how long you wait, no matter how many more corpses you explode, the mess will stay until you leave the level. Click on the screencap below for a bigger sample of the carnage left behind after a wave of undead have met their end.

The gameplay here is really simple, and I think that the reason I enjoyed it so much (besides the zombie motif, obviously) is because it reminds me of a game I only had the shareware version of way back in the day: Cyberdogs. I played that demo over and over and over, and all I ever wanted was the full version. Basically the game was about running through simple little levels, killing everything that moved, and collecting money to upgrade your character between levels. Yes, this formula is used for many other games on the market, but Cyberdogs was my first. I’ve downloaded it many times, but since it’s a DOS game and I’m far too lazy to install and figure out how to use DOSbox, it’ll never happen. Zombie Shooter fills that void though, and it’s even a little more refined. Also better graphics. But no multiplayer, which is boo.

Zombie Shooter is really fun though! And for the low, low price of $4.99, worth every penny! I’m even considering buying the sequel, which apparently has a lot more content and is only $10. They really need to add some multiplayer support if there ends up being a third though. That would make it really awesome. Also less (or at least less obvious) grammatical errors. I have complete this entry.

Day Eight – G.I. Joe : The Rise of Cobra

To continue my train of thought from yesterday, let’s chat about the recently-released live action G.I. Joe movie for a while!

I may have mentioned it briefly on the blog when it was new in theaters, but I was incredibly surprised at how G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra turned out. From the day I saw the first screencaps up until the day I went to see it, I was completely convinced that it would be an awful bludgeoning of a beloved childhood franchise. Surprise! It wasn’t!

I think the most poignant thing I can say about the movie is that it was undeniably better than 1986’s G.I. Joe The Movie, which was not bad overall, but has the most ridiculous story and plot twists ever. Not to say that The Rise of Cobra‘s plot is airtight or anything, but it beats the Hell out of taking over the world by turning everyone into mutants with funky alien spores.

The Rise of Cobra is not a groundbreaking film. It’s just another effects-bloated summer blockbuster. But it is really fun! And better than Transformers! You know the scene in the trailer when Duke and Ripcord are running down the street and dodging missiles in those super suit things? I thought that looked really stupid in the trailer, but the entire scene is actually really enjoyable.

Where the movie really shines though, is in the final battle scene, which I like to describe as “Star Wars under the sea”. It’s got a huge ship battle outside the base, a shocking relationship revelation, and a fight to the death between two ninja masters. How does that not resemble the makings of a great Star Wars film? Or a great film otherwise?

Yes, truly the only real downside to The Rise of Cobra is Channing Tatums’s stale acting. Hopefully the next movie mimics the progression of the cartoon and kind of gives Duke the backseat in favour of Flint. I mean, there are a lot of other things you could gripe about, but it’s a shallow Hollywood blockbuster. So just sit back and watch the fun action scenes.

Oh, also, it doesn’t have Shipwreck. Boo-urns. But that’s what sequels are for.

Day Seven – G.I. Joe : A Real American Hero

I never had too much opportunity to watch the G.I. Joe cartoon when I was young. I just never knew when it was on. Maybe we didn’t have the right channel. I’m not sure why. I know my brother once got a VHS with a single episode on it packed in with an action figure or something, and we watched that tape until it died. I loved G.I. Joe, not quite as much as my brother did, but I did have a ton of those little guys.

Of course, when television-producing comapnies learned that they could make bucketloads of money by showing their shows on DVDs, G.I. Joe, as the theme song goes, was there. The issue being that they were charging $100 (give or take) for half-season sets. So I skipped on those, despite that it was something that I was itching badly to have.

Finally though, Hasbro (or Shout Factory or whoever made the decision) has wisened up and re-released the show on new half-season sets that only run $25, which is not only acceptable, but awesome! Awesome because as it turns out, G.I. Joe is just as great as I had always imagined it was!

I’ve burned through the first half of season one at this point, and I’m truly loving it. A little miffed that Shipwreck isn’t the main character in every episode, but that’s really asking too much. Um, also the theme song is fantastic, if a little cheesy. Sticks in my head for days at a time.

The only thing that I’v found is that I liked the big, long 5-part miniseries episodes a lot longer than the singles. Maybe it’s because they allowed slightly more complicated stories, or more characters. Maybe it’s because they’re very video-gamey in the “collect X number of superweapon parts before the enemy” plots. I don’t know, but they were somehow noticably more satifying.

But seriously guys! The animation quality is really good for an 80’s kiddie cartoon, and it doesn’t rely on pop-culture to sell itself, so it hasn’t gotten all stale and crusty like the original Ninja Turtles cartoon. The voice acting isn’t always totally convincing, mostly in Duke’s case, but like any failings you might find with the series, Shipwreck alone makes up for it.

Case in point: Shipwreck is awesome. Especially when working with Snake Eyes. And I guess it’s pretty entertaining whenever Alpine and Bazooka get paired up too.

Day Six – Matthew Good : Vancouver

Did I mention Hospital Music last year? Because it was far and away the greatest album Matthew Good has ever ever released. It was so deep and full of love and emotion and it was completely eccentric and I loved every second of it. Even “Girl Wedged Under the Front of a Firebird” which was not so much a song, but the looped ramblings of a homeless man. Anyway!

Vancouver, sadly, cannot compete with the prior album’s brilliance. When judged by its own merits, however, it is truly fascinating. It’s like how Chase This Light was to Futures for Jimmy Eat World, if you need a comparison. Or anything Led Zeppelin releaed after IV.

Matthew Good, as you may have heard, is a very politically aware person. Which makes it easy to understand why he might write a concept album about his hometown of Vancouver. The songs reflect many social issues surrounding the city. Pretty much none of this comes through to me. I’ll admit, I live a life of luxurious bliss and tend to block out a lot of the unpleasant stuff that this album was made to make me more aware of.

While it hasn’t made me decide to go out and try to change the world for the better, I very much do respect the man for caring so much and writing about something that matters so strongly to him. This makes sense. Unlike deciding that from now on all your songs will be about Bush, which is just lame (ahem).

So yeah. The music is pretty sweet too. It’s exactly what you’d expect from Matthew Good: an album full of deep and wildly varied music. It’s all completely original sounding, but it sounds exactly like Mathew Good. After listening to his work for a while, you get to understand that he will try many different things, but in the end, it’s all immediately recognizable. His faster songs are catchy without being too sweet, and his slow songs will chill you right down to the bone.

I don’t know if I’ve said anything that would be at all useful to anyone trying to decide whether or not to buy the album, but just know that the bottom line is if you like Matthew Good, you’ll be in heaven. The man is a genius, and let’s all buy his music.

Day Five – New Super Mario Bros. Wii

So this one was inevitable, right? I mean, it’s Mario. On a console. In a side-scroller. Moving in two dimensions. Awesome

Um, anyway. New Super Mario Bros Wii is quite likely the most fun I’ve had in ever. See, Mario games are great and all, and this one is no exception, but one player really doesn’t even register once you’ve experienced the utter chaos of multiplayer Mario.

I’ve nearly finished the game 100% (SPOILER! I still have a few levels in the secret world to go), and while I did a little adventuring on my own, I had my girlfriend in tow playing as Luigi. It is a fucking riot. You cannot play Mario well with more than one person, but it is so so so so so much fun. You’ll be murdering each other left and right, stealing power-up and lives, and causing a huge headache for anyone who wants to play legitimately. We never got a third party in, but playing two players was pandemonium enough.

In this game, when you hit a power-up block, the game gives items according to how many players there are, so everyone has a chance to be more than regular-sized. Time after time, one of us would jump on top of a power-up block just as the other hit it from below, snagging both items in the process. There were even more instances of one player trying to make a jump, but then the other comes out of nowhere, and the first player hits them from below and is sent careening into a pit. But what’s worst is when somebody picks you up, and throws you into a bottomless hole. Or a goomba. Or lava. Or a giant studded death dong. It sounds more frustrating than anything, but everytime we played, I would end up with a hoarse throat from laughing so much.

The game itself is fantastic too. The propeller hat and penguin suit are great power-ups that offer plenty of versatility without breaking the game (see: cape). The levels are fairly long, and nearly every single one has some sort of gimmick. One might be a gauntlet of gigantic gears, or a boat that stops moving if too many bodies are on it, or physics-breaking free-floating water orbs. It’s vastly superior in every way to the DS New Super Mario Bros, and I thought that was pretty spiffy when it came out. Plus Koopa Kids apparently. I don’t know what the deal is with them, but they’re fan favourites I guess. Don’t see the appeal myself. The final boss is awesome in every way though, and nearly impossible to beat on multiplayer.

So, um, yeah. Game of the Year. It’s a totally sweet ride to play alone, but you should most definitely try to get at least one other person in there at all times. I’m willing to declare that it may even be too much fun.

Day Four – Pokémon Rumble (demo)

If there’s any one thing that Nintendo’s WiiWare service is sorely lacking, it’s that it doesn’t provide game demos for people who’d like to try before they buy. People have been complaining about that since Virtual Console, nd yet for some reason, only now has Nintendo begun to remerdy the situation. And even now, they’re only offering demos for a select handful of WiiWare titles. Even worse, they’re only going to be up there for a limited time.

On the upside, what they did put demos for is mostly great, and will likely spur some actual sales. The five demos are offer are for NyxQuest, World of Goo, Pokémon Rumble, FF Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord, and Bit.Trip Beat. I downloaded the first three (having already owned Darklord and no interest in Bit.Trip Beat), and two were definite winners.

NyxQuest seems like it has potential hidden in the latter parts of the game, but what’s in the demo is far too basic and slow for me to care about. World of Goo is really really cool, and seems like a pretty solid game, but it doesn’t seem like a $15 investment to me. If it were $10, I would own it.

Pokémon Rumble, on the other hand, I have frothing demand for. It’s a really simple 3D brawler, but for some reason, it makes my soul yearn for more. Probably because of the collection aspect.

The game is about toy Pokémon who battle each other in hopes of becoming the top Pokémon in the battle royale. But of course, it’s not just as easy as hopping in and beating the shit out of everyone else. The game starts you with only a pitifully weak Rattata, who stands no chance in teh Battle Royale (and in fact, only gets in because somebody didn’t close the door all the way).

From there, it’s a matter of wandering through a few levels and slaughtering millions of other Pokémon in an effort to recruit stronger monsters into your team. You can only play as one Pokémon at a time, but you have a huge roster (unlimited maybe? I haven’t hit a cap) from which you can swap out monsters whenever you like.

Each pocket monster has at least most of their personal attack repertoire, but can only know two attacks at a time. When recruited, they’ll have one set as a default, and then any additonal skills much be bought from a move roulette. And as you may have guessed, I used the word “roulette” because additonal moves are handed out at random. It’s a bit inconvenient, to tell the truth. Also a bit strange is that your toy Pokémon never level up or evolve. So if you want to buff up a certain monster, you’ll have to grind its level until you find one that meets your needs. Which is a little lame, but I’ll let it slide. This time.

I haven’t played the Battle Royale yet because the demo cuts out just before you’re allowed in, but playing levels is pretty repetitive, and really only enjoyable after about three levels because of the OCD of finding and collecting stronger monsters. Also because massacring hordes of Pokémon is unnervingly satisfying. I’m definitely getting the full version, but not soon because I’m trying to hint to my brother that i want him to gift it to me for Christmas. So until then, I’m stuck playing the demo over and over. Fortunately it’s fun!

Day Three – Paramore : Brand New Eyes

I know it’s not cool if you’re not a fourteen-year-old girl, but I like Paramore. Particularly their newest CD, Brand New Eyes. It’s really quite good! Don’t let “That’s What You Get” sour you on the idea of the band, because they’re really quite capable of much higher quality music. And this album would be the conclusive evidence to back up that claim.

Now, I liked Riot!. It isn’t the deepest album in my collection, but it’s a fun disc, and has a few stand-out tracks. Their first album, All We Know is Falling is worlds different, sounding very much like a first album from an alt-rock band, not relying on poppy hooks and saccharine lyrics to lure in the mindless radio drones. I was very worried, in fact, that since Paramore had gained a considerable amount of popularity after Riot! that Brand New Eyes would just be more of the same. My fears were completely unfounded, however, as the new album is much closer in spirit to their first.

This is awesome for many reasons. The one I like the most is because it shows that Paramore is not just another sellout fad that ends up playing the same music over and over because that’s what the radio stations want. Riot!, as far as I can tell, was a bit of a compromise. It seems like the album they made to get their name out there. And now, Brand New Eyesgoes back to their grittier, alternative sound, which makes music snobs like me very happy.

The lyrics on display are far more poetic, offering far more imagery and metaphor as opposed to most of the songs on Riot!, which are comparatively shallow and aren’t too far off from your dime-a-dozen “I wasn’t popular in high school so I’m going to write a million songs about it” band. They aren’t Matthew Good deep, but the writers evidently have a penchant for the craft and their ability is clearly maturing. The accompanying music doesn’t slouch either, and can easily be described as everywhere from energetic to experimental to haunting. Each track is undeniably individual, and most provide a wonderful range of riffs and melodies.

I bought this one for the woman because I was unsure of how it would turn out, but now that I know I can trust Paramore not be be a big pile of sellout, I’m most definitely going to be getting their next disc on day one.

Day Two – Turtles in Time : Re-Shelled

Ha ha! I told you we weren’t done with those Ninja Turtles yet! But we will be after this post, so just sit tight, okay?

Turtles in Time was a HUGE game. Not necessarily in scope, but in the fact that at the time, it was the number one most sought-out SNES brawler out there. Actually, that’s probably still the case. All the guys I worked with at Toys R Us who regularly play video games were pretty into this one, so I can only assume the rest of the world agrees. Take into account though, that the arcade version, while prettier, was not quite as well loved. It was shorter, had fewer bosses, and would eat up your small stack of quarters fairly quickly.

You can imagine how I was both excited and let down when I learned that there was a remake of the game to be released on Xbox Live Arcade, then.

The bad news is that it’s a port of the arcade version, which is balls, but it’s not a deal breaker. The music also suffers, like all the ports of TMNT arcade games, because the rights to that music appears to have vanished into the ether. So we get some bland upbeat poppy business. Oh well.

The good news is that the game is otherwise the same! Or better! The biggest (and only, as far as I can tell) gameplay change is that you can now attack in eight directions, rather than just left and right, making defending yourself a bit easier. Otherwise, it’s the same old “walk to the right and beat the shit out of everyhitng that moves” formula that made the original such a winner. Or was it the fact that it was Ninja Turtles? There are a huge number of games that are exactly the same but with different graphics that aren’t anywhere near as appealing, so it’s probably the license that sells it.

The graphics have also obviously been redone, and the Turtles’ voices have been updated to be the same as those from the 2000’s TV series. Which is good. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in the last few years is that people don’t love the surfer-talking TMNT nearly as much as they did 20 years ago. The graphics are really nice too, being almost perfectly true to the original spite-based game, but splashed up in fany-pants 3D. It’s every bit as colourful as the original, and all the personality stays intact as well.

Of course, what would all this mean if the game wasn’t fun? It is, but you didn’t need me to tell you that. You’ve played Turtles in Time. Everyone has. So grab a couple friends and a Microsoft points card, and go out and kick some shell already!

Day One – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Smash-Up

I can hear everyone groaning already. Yeah, more Ninja Turtles, but deal with it, okay? (This isn’t the last time you’ll see them!) You may have heard of this one, as there was actually quite a bit of hype leading up to it. Which is both comforting and strange at the same time. Comforting, because it means at best, there are a few people out there besides me that still love the Turtles. Strange, because it’s a Ubisoft game, and as we well know, most of those are garbage.

But alas! Impressions were good going in, which helped the cause greatly, and also apprently most of the team that worked on Super Smash Brothers Brawl were behind this game, giving it a pretty stellar leg up. I think that without that team’s experience, Smash-Up might have suffered a much more disappointing fate, but that is not the case.

The most important thing I can say about Smash-Up is that like its older cousin, it is incredibly fun. As a party game, mind you. Single player is a bit light, and there isn’t anywhere near as much variety as in Brawl to keep a single person occupied for too long, but it serves well enough. Playing with others is a blast and a half though. The controls are fairly similar to Smash Bros, so vets of that game can get into the TMNT groove quickly, and that also means they’re simple enough for a novice to jump in and be able to hold their own.

Now the downside here is that immediately after release, a lot of fans were pissed. The character roster is minimalistic, and annoyingly padded with Ubisoft’s Rabbid characters (whose appeal had worn off after the second Rayman Raving Rabbids game), featuring only 13 TMNT characters and 3 Rabbid varieties. It’s not something that breaks the game, but Ubisoft made some promises about a more robust roster, and declined saying anything of the sort as soon as the game found its way to store shelves. I myself don’t particularly mind, as the only people I care to play as are Raphael and Shredder anyway. The stage selection is a bit short too, with only 14 arenas. All but one have at least one gimmick, and some take place over multiple screens. This I’m a little more uneasy about, because none of them click with me, and I really love having a huge stage variety. I know it’s really snobby of me, but even Brawl‘s massive selection of stages barely slakes my thirst for an endless variety of battlegrounds. Stage creator equals win, though. Sadly, Smash-Up offers no such feature.

You’ll notice that I’ve spent almost all my time here comparing Smash-Up to Brawl, and honestly, if you played both games for yourself, you’d have a hard time not doing the same. They are extremely similar in many, many ways. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Smash-Up is a slightly beefed-up reskinning of the first Smash Brothers. It’s lower on content than people expect these days, and it works ever-so-slightly differently, but really, both games are tons of fun to play with others. They’re also alike in that playing online sucks nuts. Local multiplayer is really the only way to go here. You’ve gotta have the other person/people in the room right there with you or it’s just not the same.

TE’s Bargain Shop Adventure!

So I was in Lac du Bonnet the other weekend. Not something that’s going to be happening all that often in years to come, even though it used to be a trip the family made many times a year. Me and the girlfriend went to see the Canada Day fireworks display (which had been rained out in July and postponed to August 1st), and it just so happened that her uncle runs the Subway down there, so her whole family was there too.

Before hitting Lac du Bonnet itself, I decided to take her around the surrounding area and show her some places I used to frequent, like the cottage that used to belong to my grandparents, and the legendary Pinawa Burger Boat. It was a long morning/afternoon of adventuring, and we finally headed to Lac du Bonnet and made camp at the Subway. There were still many hours to kill before the fireworks began, so we had to busy ourselves in town. Reading her Cosmo and playing CrossworDS (guess who was doing which) only lasted so long, and we were forced to explore the small town to eat up the rest of our day.

Fortunately, that meant doing my absolute favourite Lac du Bonnet activity: scouring The Bargain Shop for interesting goodies. There’s also a dollar store that’s so generic that I can’t even remember what it’s called, but ever since my brothers and I were tots, I’ve loved prowling that The Bargain Shop. It even moved across the street into a bigger building a few years ago, making room for even more crazy crap. I bought a whole bag full of stuff that day, and all for less than $15! Let’s take a look-see, shall we?

Probably the last thing in the store to catch my eye (the first being shitty Transformers clones with absolutely horrid grammar on the box, sorry for the lack of pictures), but easily the best thing I bought were the Butterfinger Buzzes. They were three for two bucks, and my curiosity was piqued by the allegations that it contained as much caffeine as the leading energy drink, so I dove right in. It bears mentioning that the woman is currently addicted to/dependent on energy drinks, so it was easy to convince her to take one. I like Butterfingers, but I’m not a glutton.

Now, a Butterfinger is pretty good on its own, and the promise that it’s brimming with caffeine is even more enticing, but I was a little turned off by what I found when I opened the wrapper. For whatever reason, “loaded with caffeine” is apparently synonymous with “dyed an unnervingly bright red”. I guess it’s just that I was used to the golden Butterfinger, but the insides of these bars were bright, bright red. Possibly dyed with the blood of a thousand neon children.

In the end though, it was just a Butterfinger. Flamboyant colouring aside, it tasted perfectly normal, and despite promises of giving me the caffeine rush of a lifetime (I ate two!), I felt no more energetic after consuming them. Overall, I’m not disappointed though, because they were cheap and as I’ve stated at least twice by now, I like Butterfingers.

What I’ve never cared for, however, are Hot Tamales. Not sure why, but they just never caught on with me. I love cinnamon hearts, so it’s not the flavour or anything like that. Maybe the chewiness doesn’t mesh with the cinnamon in my head for some reason. Maybe I just don’t see the point of getting a box of Hot Tamales when you could get the far superior Mike and Ikes that are always right beside them. I may never know.

What I did know, however, is that I absolutely had to get the box of Hot Tamales Ice. It makes no sense! It’s so wonderful!

So as you can see from that box shot up there, these are minty flavoured instead of cinnamon, and as far as I’m concerned, are much more enticing. They give off that same cool aura as spearmint leaves, but have the smooth, pill-like texture of Hot Tamales. I don’t know if it was just an old box or that Icy Tamales are naturally hard, but these ones in particular were a bit tougher than your garden variety Hot Tamales/Mike and Ikes. This problem was circumvented when I left the box in my hot car one day and they became soft and more like their forebears.

On the note of this possibly being an old box, I could find no mention of the Ice Tamales on the official website, however it did show me that they’re producing a product that opposes the Ice Tamales even more than the original: Hot Tamales Fire. It is now my lifelong quest to find the Fire version. And then procure another box of the Ice, so that I may put Fire and Ice on display together as my most prized possessions. Sadly, this requires at the very least, a three-hour trip back to Lac du Bonnet. I guess I can just hope that they’re still there next year.

As an end note, I’m still a firm believer that Tropical Typhoon Mike and Ikes are the best of this candy family.

And speaking of tropical things, look at what we’ve got here! It should be known that I’m also a huge fan of Dots, even moreso since I’ve learned that Wal-Mart carries big ol’ boxes of ’em and I don’t have to wait for Halloween for my Dots fix. Even then it was a gamble. Dots always topped my Halloween candy wishlist, even though they’re not even close to being the best candy. You were always guaranteed to get a king’s ransom in Reese peanut butter cups and Tootsie Pops, but Dots, Dots were the rare candy that always made my Halloween.

The Tropical Dots, however, are not my friend anymore. I gave them the benefit of the doubt at first, as they come from good stock, but then I ate one. They come in five flavours, all listed in the image above, and none of them are any good. They all taste vaguely similar, and kinda waxy. The Wild Mango and Paradise Punch stand the best chance of being deemed “acceptable at best”, but I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what happens to the rest of them. Very, very disappointed here. I’m talking last-episode-of-Seinfeld disappointed.

Also, there’s a math puzzle of some kind on the back of the box. Boo, Tropical Dots! Not only do you taste bland, but you also use your box activity to attack my weak point! Massive damage! I hate Tropical Dots.

To add an extra level of woe to my already melancholy situation, I purchased two boxes of these chewy little abortions in my excitement of seeing a new brand of Dots. Eating two boxes of Tropical Dots does not make one a happy camper. I really hate Tropical Dots.

These suckers are less interesting than most of the other stuff I picked up, and in fact you can easily find them at most dollar shops or Zellers. Usually as a feature item, because they’re two for a buck. These really only made their way into the bag of swag because the girlfriend is totally nuts over suckers. And why shouldn’t she get a good tongue workout? Oh yeah. I went there.

The nice thing about them is that there are a ton of flavours, and most of them are awesome. Root Beer and Banana Split, which I have pictured here, are my favourites. Cherry Cheesecake and -strangely enough- Grape are also worthy competitors. There’s even some kind of margarita flavour, so there’s really something for everyone. I should also mention that they are incredibly tasty and much bigger than the average sucker, so you’re getting a great value with these little guys. If you see a stand next time you’re picking up cheap greeting cards, don’t hesitate to buy a couple.

This big ol’ lolly is both more and less interesting than the previously showcased suckers. It’s more interesting because look at all the colours! Whoo! they swirl so brightly! Also it’s much bigger. But the real amazement lies on the backside of this lollipop…

BAM! It came with a toy! For a dollar!

Yeah, I know it’s the cheapest-ass toy ever made, but still! Little motorcycle dude will reside in my room for possibly weeks or months to come, until I finally get too annoyed with his poor construction. It’s too bad, because despite his small stature and cheap build and training wheels, I really like Moto Dude.

The real tragedy here is actually that big lollipop itself. I’ve had many lollies like this one, in different shapes and sizes, with different colour patterns, and different characters emblazoned on them, but I’ve never had one like this. Not even close. This was hands-down the worst lolly I’ve ever had the displeasure of having in my mouth. Initially it had no taste at all, so I figured it was some kind of shitty coating that caused the lack of flavour, so I sucked some more, and eventually it just started to taste like plastic. The colours weren’t running at all despite the mass amounts of saliva being slathered upon it. I couldn’t even bite the damn thing. I’m beginning to think it was just a prop lollipop packed in as an easy way for whoever made this to sell their shitty little Moto Dudes.

Sadly, I’ve got to be one of the very few suckers ever to fall for it. Pardon the half-pun.

Okay, now this can’t possibly disappoint me, right? A sucker version of a Kinder Surprise? This has gotta be awesome.

But just one thing bothers me; how exactly did they get the toy and giant chup in that egg? Certainly the toy must be held in an egg within the chup, just like a fruity version of a Kinder Surprise. Yeah, that’s gotta be it.

What!? It’s just a regular sized chupa with the stupid toy taking up the rest of the space inside that humongous egg? I’m outraged! Mostly.

On the upside, the Chupa Chup is a sucker that you know you can depend on. They will always be good, as they always have, even if they aren’t bloated to an unbelievable size, as the packaging had led me to believe. Seriously, I only bought this because I thought I was getting a ginormous chupa with a toy encased within. If I had known it was a regular chup, I probably wouldn’t have been nearly as excited about it.

To dishearten me even further, the toy included inside was not at all the pencil topper that the various images on the package had promised. I mean, it’s a robot cat, which is cool and all, but Robo-Cat does not top pencils. He doesn’t even try. He just rolls back and forth whilst bobbing his head. Despite the fact that my fat sausage fingers weren’t nearly dexterous enough to assemble Robo-Cat without an hour-long fight, I’ve become quite attached to the little guy. He now sits atop my Wii with Moto Dude. I give them about a week before my dog eats one of them, having caught the scent of facetious suckers on them. I do not relish the thought of having to hold a tiny funeral for the tiny, unfortunate soul.

And that’s what I got. It may seem like I got taken to the cleaners for spending just under $15 on this mostly disappointing junk, but you’ve gotta remember that that comes out to over 130 words per dollar, so it more than evens out on a penny-to-word ratio. If I hadn’t written this completely pointless article, then the only thing I’d have had to walk away with was the enjoyment I got from the few candies that were good. Also a Robo-Cat. And that’s more than enough to satisfy me. Case closed.

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…

Cleaning the Closet – A Blarticle

The other day I had some free time, and I started going through all my video games and picking out ones I no longer liked or was sure that I’d never play again. Honestly, it was very hard. I’m a pack rat by nature, and it’s incredibly hard to look at a game and admit to myself that I’ll never actually play it again. God knows that most of the ones I kept will only continue to collect dust until my girlfriend (or possibly even my mom, she would love to clean my room) gets rid of them, but I ended up with some incredibly large piles. 32 games ended up on the chopping block, and when I mentioned it to my mother, she recommended I hit my Nintendo Power collection next.

While I’ve stopped getting them over the last couple years, I had subscribed to Nintendo Power magazine for at least ten years, and had a nice collection of really old ones from my uncle. They were eating up a sizeable portion of my closet, and I decided it was time to free up that space. Issues 92 (Shadows of the Empire, and coincidentally, the number of this article) through 198 were lined up neatly on a shelf and were an easy purge. It was just a matter of grabbing a handful and tossing them in the recycling bin. Everything I owned that came before #92 was a little more complicated. These issues were left in a milk crate in the corner of my closet, and due to their poor location, were mostly torn and ripped far past the point of me feeling they were worth keeping. A small stack of these ones is pictured below.

Getting rid of all these magazines was a terribly nostalgic ordeal. The shelf issues were in such pristine condition that I could barely bear to part with them, and looking at just the covers was like a trip backwards through my entire life. In retrospect, it’s perhaps a little distressing that I could take any point in my life and define it with an issue of Nintendo Power. Every time I grabbed a new stack, my heartstrings tugged a little harder as I remembered all those games and all the good times I had. I have at least one story (short and trivial though some may be) to go with every issue, but that’s not why I’m writing today.

What’s truly interesting was the crate pile. Or moreover, what was mixed into the crate pile. Among the torn, raggedy, old relic magazines was all sorts of neat junk that inspired just as much (if not more in some instances) nostalgia as the Nintendo Powers themselves. Old drawings, writing, other kinds of literature, and even a bunch of exclusive promotional junk that came into my possession through my subscription to Nintendo Power. This may be a terribly boring article to most, not unlike my tribute to the cottage (which is yet to receive its due second part), but to me it’s a wellspring of memories and cuddly feelings of simpler days gone by. This is my tribute to what basically amounts to a pile of junk.

The first (excluding the small forest’s worth of magazines) thing I noticed was this wonderful little booklet of looseleaf. It’s entitles “The Guinness Book of Freaks” and is essentially a time capsule of how broken my sense of humour was nearing the end of grade seven. Things were so hard back then, I still had no idea who I was as a person, I was trying so hard to fit in with anybody, and my usual material (stick men being killed in decreasingly creative ways) was starting to dry out. So I guess it was time to parody a record book? Isn’t that the logical next step? I don’t know.

Looking back at this “book” of about 3 pages, I start to wonder exactly what went through my head back in those days. I mean, yes, gross and weird. I get it, just like most young boys. But this book is really bad. And I don’t mean disturbing or anything like that, but rather that it just shows a complete lack of imagination or originality. The best entries held within include “World’s Fattest Man” and “World’s Hairiest Woman”. I’m fairly confident that at that age I still had an imagination, so I have no idea what happened to it here. Guess it was just a stinker. Those happened every once in a while. It’s not even finished, with more than half the book’s pages completely untouched.

And no, I’m not scanning any of the pages. The mere description should be more than enough. It’s just really bad material, though fairly interesting in that it’s not often that I find something I did almost a decade ago and don’t look at it with even a bit of nostalgic fondness. This just sucks. F minus minus.

Now this bunch of old drawings, I was very happy to find. It’s not nearly as old as the Book of Freaks, but it’s at least a billionty times better. Most of this pile is comprised of the original pencil drawings for Coozy For Hire comics. A good portion of them come from the time before the tablet, some even from before I started colouring them in! We’ve only been running CFH for three and a half years, but already I look at these like they’re some kind of long-lost relics.

Even better than old rough comics, is that there’s a veritable wealth of unused material stashed away in here! And it comes in all kinds: unused comic ideas (albeit they were never used because they’re terrible), hordes of doodles, character galleries, etc etc etc. Granted, most of it will never see the light of day as anything more than filler, but I love that it’s there to be filler. The well was runnin’ dry, you see, and now I’m good to shirk off my comicing duties for ages to come! (But not really.)

Also hidden inside this slimy little pile is a script for a short play (possibly short enough to be referred to as a “skit”) that I co-wrote for grade 10 drama class. Yeah. If you hadn’t heard, I took drama class in grade 10. It was cool. Anyway, it’s a story about… well, I won’t say too much about it, because I may turn it into a feature-length comic one day (as inapproprite for that medium as the story is), but I like it. It was fun to write my character, and actually doing the play was a gas too. Second best play I’ve ever been in, hands down. The best one only wins out because I got to drop my pants in it.

Hmmm. Seems I owe junior high a shitty holocaust book.

Grade eight, I believe. English class, we were doing the inevitable yearly holocaust/WW2 unit (seriously, do they have to teach it every goddamn year from 6-12? I got the friggin’ point after two years; Hitler bad, Vandals good.) It’s a terribly generic story about a girl who gets magically transported from her passover supper or whatever to a concentration camp and then has to survive to get back. I don’t remember the details, but I don’t care. I’ll probably burn this book for being a smack in the face to all the people who had to suffer through that horror.

Ah, this one is great. Sort of. It’s great for what it represents, not so much the finished product. Of course I use the word “finished” very lightly, as what is contained in the notebook pictured above is an unpublished article. I find it amazing that at one point in time I actually loved writing for this website so much that I would take a notebook places and work on articles in my away-from-the-computer spare time. Of course, this is the only one I ever actually completed writing, but it’s not the only one I ever worked on.

And what is the lost article about? Well, actually, it’s about porn. Yeah. One of two articles about adult-related media that never got published because I didn’t really want to smut up the site like that. This one was actually about my dissatisfaction with pornography on the whole, though it focused more on film than anything else. It’s not worth typing out and putting up, because it’s short and crappy (er, crappier than my usual crap anyway), and I really don’t like it. I guess I probably didn’t like it by the time I got around to typing it up, because it never came to fruition.

The other porn-related article I was going to write was about a game called 3D Striptease that, after a little searching, no longer exists outside a demo. The article then, obviously, was a review of that demo, as the full game was still in development at the time and I wasn’t going to pay money for something so garbage anyway. It was opposite the article in the book, however, as I had all the pictures and article structure ready, I just needed to sit down and write the thing. The game was supposed to be released in summer 2004, so I’m assuming the article in the notebook is at least as old if not older. Maybe someday I’ll dig up the demo and then write about the greatest stripper FPS that never was.

This notebook is only marginally more interesting. The first page is a continuation of the Spare! comics I wrote throughout high school. Only high school was over so I had no more material, since Spare! was based on actual events. I actually coloured and posted the first strip on this page on the blog many years back. It’s much better than the other two, which at best serve to set up the “I’m not in high school anymore so no more reality-based comics” premise of what I assume would have been called “New Spare!”.

I never made another attempt at new Spare! comics in either high school or after high school format. The only other use this book has served over time is as a stand-in for our old printer that never worked. In it, I copied down every single alchemy recipe for Dragon Quest VIII. I was pretty into that game, and of course I would have to complete the alchemy book. I’m obsessive-compulsive like that. Ironically, I never beat the game proper, as the last boss is too Goddamn hard and I totally fucked myself by putting skill points in all weapon types for my characters, rather than focusing on one or two.

There’s also a map to every hidden Sorcerer’s Scanner item in Tales of Legendia, which I did collect all of in the end, but really, Legendia wasn’t that good. And that’s coming from a pretty loyal Tales fan. Maybe I just need to play it again? I dunno. I’d rather just play Tales of Vesperia a fourth time.

Here’s a pile of Nintendo Power-related goodies, the one which I’m most excited about being the Nintendo Power Club challenge cards. See, back when NP was awesome and I read every single page (even about games I’d never care about in a million years), they put in little punch-out cars in the back of the mag that you could collect. I had tons of them, and I thought they’d been lost to the ether many, many years ago. But alas! It seems that there were a couple issues from which I did not remove the cards, and forsooth, I have a small number of them in my possession. Kinda shitty when you have a collectible that you can no longer collect though.

There’s more to these cards though! While they may seem like cheap eye candy or collector fodder at best, the back sides also have a couple challenges for each game. The MegaMan X card, for example, challenges you to beat certain stages using only the X-Buster. This is a joke because today I can finish the entire game with only the X-Buster, while asleep! But they were hard back in the day! They also give a short summary of the games’ plots, and some practical data, such as genre, number of players, and the date the game was released. You may also notice that the cards are color-coded; purple cards are Game Boy games, red are NES games, and green are Super NES – the same color-coding Nintendo Power used for page themes.

There are a couple Nintendo Power Supplies catalogues in here, but I definitely want to review those separately, and the big “confidential information” file folder look-alike is a promotional brochure for Goldeneye 007. I haven’t leafed through it very thoroughly, but I’m thinking it’s also worthy of its own article, so I’ll let it sit and collect dust for a few more years before I get around to it. Plus, it’ll be way more retro by then. Hopefully retro will still be cool.

I’ve always loved super heroes and comics. Every Saturday morning for most of the 90’s I would get up early and watch FOX’s morning cartoon line-up, which included X-Men, Spider-Man, and… well, I can’t remember what else. But I watched the shit out of X-Men and Spider-Man. Ask any male and they’ll tell you that those were some awesome shows. Hulk’s cartoon was nowhere near as popular and was never in the Saturday morning lineup, but he managed to make himself my favourite super hero with his pure awesomeness. I’ve been interested in super heroes as long as I can remember, I’ve read up a ton on them, and when I was younger, even had most of the toys.

I’ve also always been a huge fan of comics. Admittedly, they only had Archie and ALF (with a few Heathcliffs and Richie Riches thrown in for good measure), but my grandparents had a magnificent stack of old comics at the cottage, and over many years, I read them all. My fondest memories involve ads where Batman is selling twinkies. And these days (though admittedly less often than usual) I read at least five webcomics, and I even draw my own comic! It’s amazing! You’d think this obsession with comics would equate to me having a good collection of my own.

Not the case. Pictured above is every single comic book that I own. Yeah. Just over twenty. There’s a pretty wide variety, from Batman to Spider-Man to KISS to Star Wars, but it’s still a bit tiny and embarrassing. Though there is a Marvel art book in there called “Marvel Masterpieces 2” which is amazing and has some truly fantastic portraits in it. It’s the gem of my collection and is the only one in pristine condition. The rest range from okay to have-the-cover-ripped-off. It’s actually probably the only one I’m going to keep. I may not have many comics, but I’ve read them over many times each, so I don’t really feel much sorrow parting with them. It was fun, but I guess when it comes down to it, I’m just not a comic person.

This is just a bunch of window decals that I took from work before the Wii launch. It was a great time to work at TRU, because there was so much promotional Wii crap that I could swipe and enjoy for myself. Other than that, I’d say it’s no more enjoyable than most other jobs. Friendly crew, but that’s about it.

I would love to type “Ahh, the piece de resistance” at this point, but as cool as this book is, it’s not some kind of amazing article-finisher. It’s just a standard unlicensed Nintendo strategy guide. In pocket book form.

Edwin gave this to me a few years back. I forget where he found it, but I believe there was some sort of intent to see it on the website. Maybe not, I don’t know. It was ages (three years) ago. All I can think of when I look at this book is that I know I’ve read it before, but a glance at the index of games covered assures me that I have not. I’m certain that the book I read covered Monster Party, Friday the 13th and maybe a Choplifter game. But that was all the way back in grade five, so I may be off on a couple titles. Googling it, I couldn’t find a game index for any of the three follow-up books, but I’m pretty sure it was one of them. The cover just looks so familiar.

On the other hand, I looked up Jeff Rovin on Wikipedia, and while he’s a pretty prolific novelist and biographer, he’s also pretty big on movie novelizations. Which is not too bad, since he’s done a ton of original work, which makes up for the movie novelization’s inherent lack of imagination, but he novelized Mortal Kombat. Why? Why would you bother? “Read the book based on the mediocre movie based on the crappy game!” That would be the pitch. What a terrible idea…

And that’s about that. I should mention that while the article is titled “Cleaning the Closet”, we’re only talking about approximately 5% of the closet’s space, so it’s a little misleading. If I were to dig out all the old nostalgic junk from the entirety of my closet, this article would never end. And that would be more than even I could take.

Virtual Console Wishlist 2008 – The Super NES Edition

Here we are again, at the end of another year. Only this time it’s 2008. And since it’s a different year, I guess I get the luxury of running the same article I did last December without the guilt of using the same idea twice in a year. So like I did back then, I’m going to make a short list of games that I would personally love to see on the Wii’s Virtual Console service. It’ll be a little bit harder this year, because I used my most wanted in 2007, but coming up with seven more wasn’t too hard. And I even have a gimmick this time!

For 2008’s VC Wishlist, I’ve decided that I’m only going to pick games that appeared on the Super Nintendo (or Super Famicom, in some cases). Why? I dunno. I was just picking games and once I had it down to a relatively short list I realized that the ones I wanted the most were on the SNES. Sure, there are some NES games that I would love to play again, but none more than G.I. Joe or Nightshade. The only thing I’ve craved on the N64 lately has inexplicably been Pokémon Stadium, but that’s not super important. And like last year, I really couldn’t give a crap what happens with the Sega and Hudson machines. Or even the Neo Geo. I can’t even think of all the systems they’ve got on there now. All I had as a kid were the Nintendo machines, so we’re gonna stick to those.

#1 – Soul Blazer

Chances are you’ve never played Soul Blazer before. It’s only slightly less likely that you’ve never even heard of the game before now. Or maybe it was huge and I just missed it because I was afraid of RPGs back in my SNESing days. Imagine my surprise when I opened the ROM file a couple years ago and learned that it wasn’t really that much of an RPG at all!

No, Soul Blazer has more in common with the Zelda series that it would with any Final Fantasy. It’s one of those top-down action RPGs that I love so much. Wish I had known that back in the day! Yes, that would have been good, because I really don’t think Soul Blazer has held up all that well over time. The graphics aren’t horrible, but do reek of bland. It looks almost like a dressed-up Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Or at least that’s what I can best liken it to. Not to mention that the gameplay could use a little sprucing up. I’ll give in to the fact that it’s an earlier SNES game, but it could still work a little better. The point is, at the tie I would have thought the games was great. At present, it’s a little outdated. Or a lot.

So If I’m being so hard on the game, why do I want it on the Virtual Console soooo bad? for one, because if you look past its age, it’s not a terrible game. A little clunky and rough around the edges, but entirely playable. I do like it, but there’s not use pretending it’s better than it. The main reason I want to see it is because I’ve never played all the way through. I’ve only spent about two hours at most with the game, just more than enough to form an opinion of a SNES title. And I want to play it because I’ve been itching to go through Illusion of Gaia again, but my misguided sense of fairness is forcing me to play this one again. And if it lived on my Wii, that would make it that much more appealing to actually load up and play.

I can’t truly rate Soul Blazer at this point, because I’ve only barely gotten into it, but then again, I’ve only finished two of the games on this list, so it’s really more of a “I want to truly experience these for the first time list”. Mostly, anyway. If I did have to place a final judgement on it right now though, I could tell you that I’ve easily downloaded games of lower quality than this. The TG-16’s Neutopia, for example. And that’s essentially the first Legend of Zelda game with a facelift. So yeah, I would buy this one as soon as it showed up in the Wii Shop. Might not play it right away, but it would give me peace of mind to at least know that it’s there waiting for me.

#2 – Illusion of Gaia

Illusion of Gaia is the sequel to Soul Blazer, and the second game in the trilogy. It’s also the only one I’ve finished. Of all three games, I think this one would be the most likely Virtual Console candidate, if only because Soul Blazer (as far as I know) was never hugely publicized and the sequel never made it to North America.

Illusion of Gaia is a huge step up from its predecessor. It’s still a top-down Zelda wannabe, but it’s much more polished and the story is actually really interesting. Or, at least, it was many years ago when I played it through. I think it would probably still hold up pretty well these days.

The plot of the game follows a young boy named Will on a quest to save the world from a doomsday comet. It’s pretty standard stuff, but the part that I love about it, and indeed what drew me to the game in the first place, is that most of the game locations take place in real-world locations like the Nazca lines and the Great Wall of China. It’s officially a fantasy world, but there are so many analogues to real human history and mysteries, and I think that adds an incredibly interesting facet to the game. I know it sounds horrible, but I kind of wish the game gave even more real information about these things. It would be the first truly entertaining edutainment title.

Plot and locations aside, I still think Illusion of Gaia is a solid title. It’s still sort of a lo-fi Zelda, but it has its own charm that I find very few other games possess. Maybe I’m just looking at it through rosy nostalgia glasses, but I’ve been itching to play through it again. The only reason I haven’t is that I have so many other games in progress that I couldn’t possibly start playing a game I’ve already seen through to completion. Also, I want to play and beat Soul Blazer first, if just for that minor sense of completion. Of all the games featured here, I think this is the one that I have the strongest craving to play.

#3 – Terranigma

The last in the series, Terranigma is also the finest. Well, probably. I’ve only been through roughly a tenth of the game, but that was much more recently than the other two, and I remember thinking that it was really quite awesome. My friends even agreed with me when I showed it to them. Though to be fair, it was still early in our career of playing ROMs, and it was mind-blowing to play pretty much any SNES game on our computers for free.

Terranigma, as far as I remember, is more of a “preserve the world and nature” themed game than simply saving the world. Or at least, that’s the impression I got from the first couple hours of it. A quick check on Wikipedia confirms that it’s a wee bit more complex than that. The game takes place in a world where the Earth is hollow and the overworld is dominated by good, and the underworld interior by evil. There’s more to it than it seems though, because the hero of the game… is from the underworld!

I honestly can’t remember a lot about this game other than the fact that it plays pretty closely to Illusion of Gaia and that it was a ton of fun. Not sure why I never finished this one, because whenever I think about it, I can only remember it being pure bliss. I’m sure it wasn’t that good, but I’m willing to stake my reputation (not that that’s a huge gamble) on the fact that it is a top tier SNES game. In fact, while it was only released in Japan and Europe, the main (only?) reason we never saw it is because Enix’s North American branch closed down before they could get it out. the only thing I’m not into about this game is that because of my misguided sense of obligation, I have to finish the other two games before I’ll let myself start this one! Aargh! Well, if by some impossible stroke of luck we see this on the Virtual Console first, I suppose I’ll have a loophole.

#4 – Robotrek

While not a sequel to any of the aforementioned games, Robotrek comes to us from the same development studio as the Soul Blazer trilogy, Quintet. Over the years, I have come to really respect their work, and the fact that most (if not all) of their SNES titles were published by Enix made them must-plays for me. See, I’m willing to give anything with the Enix name a shot because they had so much wonderful product in the 16-bit era, and Robotrek is no exception.

I have actually tried playing Robotrek twice, neither time making it very far into the game. This saddens me, because it’s exactly the type of game I want to play. For one, it’s an Enix RPG, and much more of a standard RPG than the last three games I just talked about. For two, it has a large collection/synthesis/customization aspect to it, and that I absolutely adore.

The game is about robots, obviously, and I have no idea what the plot was about, but you play as a young boy who uses robots to battle. It’s essentially Pokémon a year before Pokémon existed. Not only can you build new robots, but you can customize them to your liking, adding new parts and weapons, and even make your own new parts by combining old ones. Like I said, it’s exactly the kind of game I want to play. It’s almost like if Custom Robo were a standard JRPG.

So yeah, I think I’ve made it clear exactly why I want to be playing this on my Wii as soon as possible. I think the reason I put it down in the past is maybe because the completionist in me became too obsessed and I was too interested in beefing up my robots than actually playing through the story. That sounds about right. I do, after all, usually have Butterfree and Wartortle before even reaching Brock.

#5 – Umihara Kawase

Nintendo very rarely uses their infinite power to infuse the Virtual Console’s lineup with games that were never released in whatever particular region you may be in. Sin and Punishment would be the big one for us here in North America, but there are tons of lesser known games that never made it over here that I would love to see make it over in digital form. Umihara Kawase would be somewhere around the top of that list.

The thing that makes Umihara Kawase a good candidate is that Nintendo could put it up with very little extra effort going into it. The game is a platform puzzler, and one of the best. You play as a small girl tasked with reaching a door on the other side of the stage, and your only ability is to use a fishing line as a grappling hook. The trick is that the hook responds to all sorts of physics, and the game can get very complicated, but once you get good (good luck ever mastering it!), it’s insanely entertaining. And that’s why it’s easy. The game needs no instructions. The only thing you have to learn is how your hook is going to respond to how you use it. Any story sequences I may have forgotten about are irrelevant, and the game is simple enough that you don’t need the tutorial.

So if Nintendo could put it up so easily and it’s so great, why isn’t it available yet? Sadly, it’s likely because the franchise then moved to the Playstation and recently somebody decided it would be a good idea to make another sequel on the PSP. I hear it’s a pretty sad interpretation of the SNES game, and that’s why I’d love to see the original swing into our lives via Wii. Will it happen? I don’t think it’s too likely. In fact, I’d wager that the Playstation game ends up on PSN before the SNES edition hits Virtual Console. Yes, that’s how bad it’s gotten on Nintendo’s digital distribution system.

#6 – Mario’s Super Picross

Of all games never released on American shores, I would think that Mario’s Super Picross is one of those with the best chance to end up as a Virtual Console candidate. Why? Because it’s already been released in Japan and the PAL territories, and also because Nintendo loves Picross. They’ve made a few puzzles from this game available as free DLC for Picross DS, so why not let us have the entire game for a few bucks?

I think I’ve made my love of picross obvious over the lifespan of this website, but if you hadn’t heard, I heart picross. It’s a fairly simple puzzle game wherein you’re given a grid and a set of numbers for each row and column. You have to deduce from that set of numbers which spaces on the grid in that row or column need to be filled in. It sounds unbearably easy, and for someone who’s spent a few hours solving picross puzzles, it usually is. The main mode in Mario’s Super Picross gives you a time limit in which to solve each puzzle, and you’re deducted time for each mistake you make, so it’s very much a thinking game. Fortunately, like sudoku, event though it involves numbers and heavy thought, there is no math involved. If there were, I wouldn’t love it.

It gets harder in the second set of puzzles, hosted by Wario, in which you have unlimited time, but the game won’t tell you if you make a mistake. It can take much longer to figure these ones out, but I’ve never taken much more than half an hour to get any of them done. It’s also much more satisfying to solve one of these puzzles, like when you beat a game of mahjong without any hints.

I stand firmly in my belief that Mario’s Super Picross will eventually be available to me as a Virtual Console title, because the Japanese and Europeans already have it, so it has to show up here sooner or later. Only now since Chris Kohler has become disillusioned with the VC, we don’t have anyone to badger Nintendo for equality anymore.

#7 – Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island

Alright, Nintendo. Honestly, where is this? We have all the other Mario platformers, and even Yoshi’s Story. I think we’ve waited more than long enough for this one. We deserve Yoshi’s Island.

Yeah, I totally saved the best for last. As much as I like any of the other games on this list, none of them could even hold a candle to the majesty Yoshi’s Island. It is platforming perfection, a mecca that may never be reached again. How Nintendo could have slapped Yoshi’s Story on the VC list without Yoshi’s Island to reinforce Yoshi’s reputation is a mystery that may never be solved.

I honestly don’t think I should have to describe this game or why I love it. I mean, I don’t know why you would even be on this website if you’re the kind of person who would have skipped over this gem. Unless you’re my girlfriend, but that’s really the only acceptable case. So really, if you haven’t experienced the wonder that is Yoshi’s Island, I highly recommend you stop reading this right now and go find yourself the ROM and an emulator. Or at the very least, the GBA port. Just play it. And that recommendation goes double if you’re my girlfriend, as there may be hope for you liking video games that don’t require plastic guitars after all if you try this out.

So yes. That’s my list. It’s taken a lot of beer and Danish butter cookies to struggle through, but I’ve done it. Unlike last year, wherein I posted this in early November, I’m just making this one up on the second-to-last Monday of the year. Hence, this time we won’t think of these of games that I want to see before 2008 is up, but rather a list that I would like to see show up sometime in the year 2009. And don’t fret; unless some giant change in my life takes place that makes me unable to webmaster anymore, there will totally be a 2009 edition. It’s just too easy.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts – The Redemption of a Franchise

I’ll start off saying that I’m not a huge fan of new games journalism. Sure, I read Gamespite as if it were the word of the Christ reborn, but it’s more for entertainment purposes. If I want to know if a game might interest me, it’s probably the last place I’d go. Most of the time I get no idea from their articles whether the game is worth playing or not. It’s not that I think new games journalism is bad, I just think it’s a little pretentious to take games so seriously. They’re just for fun, after all. So then the question would be, as it were, why exactly am I throwing my hat into the ring and trying it out?

For one, I think I’m probably going to do a really bad job. If I were to submit this article to Parish, he’d probably turn it down and say it’s too much like a standard review. But I have been thinking along the NGJ lines while coming up with things to say about Nuts & Bolts, and I suppose it’s worth a try, if only to keep things a smidgen fresher around this dusty old corner of the intertubes. That said, I’ve linked a few other non-standard game reviews on the “related” section of the navi bar. There’s a short description of how I feel each fits under the banner of new games journalism in the hover text. Also, the 2007 Vitrual Console Wishlist is linked, but that’s just because it features Banjo-Kazooie.

So now that I’ve already gone and broken the fourth wall and stated exactly what my intention here is, I suppose I should wrap up this introduction of sorts and get on with the article. Can you all be real good pals and forget that these last couple paragraphs happened once your eyes drift across that separator line below? Thanks. I really appreciate it. Makes the whole thing seem a little more legit.

Banjo-Kazooie is not a popular franchise by any stretch. Not with gamers anyway. I know my girlfriend likes it, but the only thing she’s played in the last God-knows-how-long that doesn’t involve a plastic guitar is Trauma Center, and she gave up on that shortly after she lost her first patient. And I mean that as in the first patient she’d ever treated. Pressing on, gamers tend to look upon Rare’s Mario clone with a burning hatred that is not totally undeserved. The first game in the series was a very basic platformer that basically just had you collect a plethora of objects. It goes without saying that the less important doodads would be laying out for anyone to see, but even the Jiggies (equivalent to Mario’s power stars) would occasionally just be lying there for even the most witless of player to scoop up with no effort (like every single dragon in Spyro).

The sequel that appeared a couple years later, Banjo-Tooie, didn’t have a much brighter light cast upon it. It abolished the Effortless Jiggy and made players work a little bit harder for that golden treasure, but at the same time at least doubled the number of trivial whatsits you needed to collect. I’m sure that at the time, people thought both games were upstanding shows in a sea of terrible Mario wannbes, but over time, that lesser-of-two-evils respect faded and people realized just what a cheap hackjob these games were. Of course I still look upon them with an air of pleasant memories, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re kinda half-assed.

To be blunt, the less said about Grunty’s Revenge, the better.

But times have changed, and it’s been nearly a decade since we’ve seen the bear and bird in anything more than retro webpages. Fortunately for all parties involved, time has been kind to Banjo and Kazooie, even though the opening of the game would lead you to believe otherwise. Which is a point of note in itself; the game is constantly poking fun at its heritage and all gaming tropes that have been called out as stale and thoughtless. Nearly every main character balks at having to collect something, and the writers took every chance they could get to rip on having to complete arbitrary tasks for seemingly worthless prizes. In fact, the first achievement you will get is titled “Pointless Collector”, after a scripted race to see who can collect more golden thingamabobs.

Since the writers are complaining about collecting, there’s obviously still a large collecting element to the game. Jiggies are still the number one goal, but each and every one has a challenge associated with it. From simple races to protecting landmarks to defeating a number of enemies, every piece of gold has its price. The widely-loathed musical notes have returned as well, but only as a simple unit of currency, making collecting them completely optional. There is still a set number on each stage, but they’re also handed out liberally for almost every task you complete, so you could theoretically make it through the entire game and buy everything without picking up a single static stage note.

Besides the Jiggies and notes, there are also Jinjo tokens to be earned. They are won exactly like Jiggies, but are, much like the notes, completely optional. They’re used at the bingo hall, where you are rewarded notes and vehicle parts for filling in rows and columns on the bingo board. Lastly are vehicle parts, and we’ll go over those later. That brings our total of collectibles up to four. Four. Three of which are entirely unnecessary. Over the limitless number of things you needed to pick up in Banjo-Tooie, I’d say that’s one Hell of an improvement.

So if the game isn’t about collecting copious amounts of knick-knacks, then what is left? Well friends and relations, that’s a question I’m glad you may have asked. This is where those vehicle parts come in. See, the game doesn’t work anything like Banjos before. There are no moves to learn, no platforming to be done. No, no. This game is all about driving. And flying. And driving, uh, boats. Boating?

This time around, Banjo can run and jump to his heart’s content, but the game was designed specifically with vehicles in mind. And the best part is that you, the player, get to create each and every one of those vehicles. This creates not only gigantice game worlds, but also very open worlds and even better, a ton of room to experiment with ways to overcome the many challenges the game puts you up against. The hub world is the only exception, since you’re only allowed to drive a basic shopping cart-like machine, but there are still opportunities to press on and get places you shouldn’t be. In the early game, there are slopes that neither Banjo on foot nor the simple cart can scale, but with some clever use of the protruding pieces of scenery (windowsills, lamps, signposts, etc), you can reach most of the available area before you even enter the first game world. If you thought sequence breaking in Metroid was exciting, you’ll most definitely get a kick out of exploring bits of Showdown Town that you aren’t yet meant to be in.

And then you’ll venture into the first level and all restrictions will melt away. Early on you won’t be able to make much more than simple car- and bike-styled vehicles, but once you find even one propeller, the worlds are yours to explore as openly as you want, and there is plenty to explore. Since the worlds are contained, it’s not exactly open-world play as in a sandbox game, but the levels are many times bigger than anything seen in previous Banjo titles. The fact that there are so many ways to see each world adds to the value as well. If you want to cruise around in a car, that’s cool. Feel like taking to the skies in a plane or helicopter? Go for it! Or maybe you’d prefer the challenge of scaling the tallest peaks on foot. Why not? The world is your oyster, and you’re truly able to to do anything you want exactly as you see fit.

Now the best part of this completely open game design is that you can also tackle the game’s many challenges however you like. The game invites you to try out some suggested ways of doing things early on by forcing you to use pre-built vehicles once in a while, but less than halfway through, they become very scarce and it’s up to the player to decide how they want to solve the problem. Most races, for instance, take place on the ground, but if you’re having trouble driving the specific course, why not take to the skies instead? Races are marked by compulsory rings to pass through, but a low-flying plane would not only soar past any competition, but also nullify any issue of minor enemies in the way and terrain becomes almost negligible. The game will never directly penalize you for using a vehicle they didn’t intend to be used in the mission, and you’ll get an extra sense of accomplishment for thinking outside the box.

But there’s got to be more than races, right? Of course! There are a wide variety of mission types, and seeing them through in your own way is as rewarding as anything else. For example, a later mission in the first world sees a statue under attack by airborne foes, with the gamer left to try to defend it for two minutes. A gamer’s first instinct would be to build a flying warship to take out the invaders, and if your contraption is built the right way and you’re skilled enough, I’d say go for it. I, on the other hand, found that there were far too many enemies to be able to complete the mission. I tried and failed many times before genius struck. I went back to the garage and tried something completely different. I figured that if I couldn’t stop the enemies from destroying the statue, then maybe taking them down was the wrong approach. So I build what could be best described as a flying house with no floor. It was two layers thick, powered by all the engines and propellers that I had available, and I flew it over to ground zero and landed it right over top of the statue. I sat there for two minutes as my assailants shot at and dive-bombed the small fortress, and laughed heartily when the time expired and my statue was left without a single scratch.

Another example is one mission where I was given the task to transport as many coconuts as I could from the top of a tower on one side of the island to the coconut farm where they would be sucked up into some kind of coconut repository. You are given three minutes. I should also mention that in this game you can pick up almost any object in the scenery, and that is basically the only thing you can accomplish on foot. At first I tried using a helicopter to winch over one nut at a time, and as you may imagine, it went very poorly. After that, I put together a large flying monstrosity composed of a giant tray and a trash bin, thinking that I could load it up with nuts and fly them over in two or three trips. Putting the nuts on and taking them off one by one was very time-consuming, and I could have passed, but just by the skin of my teeth. And then I crashed into the coconut-sucker and it detached from the rest of the machinery. I had another brainstorm, and on the next attempt, I broke of the coconut-sucker and flew it over to the tower. From there, I picked it up, and simply swept it over the area, sucking up every single nut in no time flat. I had more than two minutes to spare by the time I was done.

One final example is from one of the many Jinjo challenges. This particular Jinjo turned into a huge ball and asked me to ram into him and fling him as far as I could. He would give me a token if I made him go a predetermined distance. So I tried over and over with many different vehicles built for speed or power, trying different angles and tactics, but I could never seem to get him far enough. There would always be a hill to slow him or an obstacle to outright stop him, and to get a perfectly aimed shot was near impossible. When I did get the perfect shot, it still wasn’t sufficient. By that time I was bashing my head against an ottoman in frustration, trying to come up with a solution. It was then that I build a super fast plane with a carrying tray. I put the Jinjo-ball in the tray, took off, and while my engines cut out once I passed the allowed field of play, it still drifted far further than I needed, and I got up and did a little celebratory dance for finally finding a loophole.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is a fantastic game, and that’s probably because aside from the characters, it’s nothing like the previous games in the series. It gives the player a true sense of freedom, letting them play the game however they want, building machines of their own design and then tweaking them to get the absolute perfect performance for whatever given task they may be facing. It often suggests the obvious way, holding the player’s hand for a little while to get them started, but then lets them fly free to make their own decisions on how to play. It encourages players to think outside the box by making some challenges frusrtatingly difficult (but still possible) to do though by following the most logical course of action. It’s an incredibly engaging – if at times infuriating – experience that I’m glad I didn’t skip out on. Nuts & Bolts is a game that genuinely lets the player take control, and I think that’s the kind of thing that truly defines a next-generation gaming experience. That and it’s gobs of fun.

Oh, and the music is totally solid, as to be expected, even if it is all completely recycled from previous games. The Banjoland medley? Nostalgically awesome. But we all already knew that anything Grant Kirkhope or Robin Beanland does is terrific, right?

Mass Review Time – Fargo ’08

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It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these mass review articles (usually they’re just blogged). More importantly, it’s been a while since I’ve done an article at all. Much to my own dismay, a cheap mass review is not way to worm my way back into the game, but it’s all I’ve really got the gumption to work on at the moment. It’s not that I don’t want to write articles anymore, it’s just that there are so many other things I want to do more. And even more things I need to be doing.

But I digress. Blabbing about why I’m no longer writing full-length pieces is not today’s topic! But rather I’m here to discuss money well spent? I decided to end that sentence with a question mark because at this point I still can’t gauge the actual quality of most of the products below. I just bought most of them through good word-of-mouth and personal tastes. In fact, I’m pretty sure that at least a couple would be considered complete garbage by the general population, but we’ll see!

So the bonus theme here is that I picked up all this stuff when my girlfriend and I went away to Fargo(, North Dakota) for the weekend. I did a little photo gallery with commentary of last year’s trip south of the border (see sidebar), so maybe you’ll prefer that one if you’re looking for an article with a little more meat on its bones. Also, certainty. This here article, as of this writing, is pretty much all assumptions. It’s built on the hopes and dreams of millions! …Or maybe just me.

• Item #1

Tesla – Five Man Acoustical Jam

Okay, I know said it was all assumptions from here on in, but I’m starting with something I know is awesome: Tesla. I’ve been listening to Tesla for many, many years now, and sadly, I’ve only ever been able to find one of their CDs in any local stores. Thus, I often take it upon myself to scour the multimedia-type shops south of the border for anything I can find by them. This time I got real lucky, finding the two Tesla discs I was really gunning for. Five Man Acoustical Jam is obviously enough, a recording of a live acoustic show. It’s one of very few Tesla albums that I haven’t downloaded, so jackpot!

In other news, it’s completely awesome. Tesla is a great band, and they made their name through their acoustic prowess, so the only logical conclusion is that this album must rule. And rule it does. Don’t know what else there is to say other than I love it. Score: A

• Item #2

Tesla – The Great Radio Controversy

I know it seems silly that I only bought two Tesla CDs while I was down there, and now that I really think about it, I probably am really silly for it. I mean, I probably could have completed the full discography, but I stopped looking after I picked up these two.

Unlike its lovably live cousin above, The Great Radio Controversy is a studio album, but that means little. The Tesla-loving community largely believes this to be their finest work, and I’m not one to argue. It’s everything that makes Tesla great (minus the “awesome live performers” bit), and while it may not rock quite as hard as Psychotic Supper, it rocks just as well or better. Two thumbs up. Score: A

• Item #3

Mega Man Star Force 2

Yeah, I know you’re groaning right now and about to skip this paragraph, but that’s quite alright. You put up with more than enough of my Mega Man nonsense that you deserve a break from it if you can find one here or there. So go ahead and move on to the next item if you’ve gotten sick of hearing me rave about Mega Man.

For those that care, Star Force is the dual-screened big brother to the MegaMan Battle Network games. It seems like it’ll be following the same “new chapter every summer” release schedule that Battle Network had. I played the first one almost to completion last summer (I didn’t beat the final optional boss), and I was surprised to see this one in stores because honestly, I had no idea it was out. so I picked it up, and I’ve got to say, it’s most certainly not as big a step up from the first as Battle Network 2 was to its predecessor. I mean, I’m enjoying the game, but it hasn’t offered anything that improves on the first game. Well, not enough to make it feel exciting and new anyway. Score: C+

• Item #4

Etrian Odyssey 2: Heroes of Lagaard

As soon as I’d finally stopped flip-flopping on whether I wanted the first Etrian Odyssey or not, it had long since become impossible to find at retail. I was afraid EO2 would see a similar fate (despite being a new release), but after searching each and every store that sells video games in Fargo, I gave up and checked GameStop. As much as I generally loathe the GameStop/EB chain, it has to be said that they do actually carry Atlus games, and as a fan of Atlus’ niche titles, that scores some decent points in my book.

Anyway, I haven’t actually had a chance to plug it in and start playing yet (probably because I’m awasting all sorts of time writing about shit I buy), but I’ve read more than enough on the subject to be more or less familiar with what I’m getting into. The Youngest One bought it too (before I had a chance to advise him otherwise), probably because he thought “Ooh, an RPG. I should buy it”, and promptly got his ass whupped and put it right down. I doubt he’ll be spending too much time on this one, but someday when I’m in the middle of fewer games, I’ll crack this one open and spend a little quality time with it.

Edit : Decided I’d just forego finishing some other games so I could sink my teeth into this one. I’m not regretting it. Etrian Odyssey II is even better than I’d imagined. This is a real horror game, because you’re always on the edge of your seat, wondering if you’ll be able to survive the next fight. Also, even the slightest progress feels like you’ve made a huge accomplishment, so yeah. props to that. Love it. Score: A

• Item #5

Day of the Dead

No, it’s not Romero’s classic with a new cover. It’s one of those horrid “re-imaginings”, or so I assume. At least on the back cover it said it’s inspired by Romero’s Day of the Dead, so we can hope it at least pays a little homage to the original. In any case, it’s a zombie movie, so it most definitely belongs in my collection.

I should let you know that I fully expect this to be completely awful. That’s how these movies are. The characters are stupid and unlikable, the plot makes little to no sense and there’s buckets and buckets of gore. Yeah it sounds like a disaster, but that’s exactly what I’m looking for. I enjoy a good zombie movie, but I love a zombie movie that makes you want to root for the zombies. It’s brainless (in a manner of speaking) fun, and that’s really what I want in movies. So despite the fact that it’s defacing a classic, I have high-ish hopes for this one.

Edit : Yeah. So I watched it, and it’s not so great. It has almost nothing in common with the original, though if you concentrate real hard you can find a couple loose parallels between the two. But yeah, it’s not even a fun gore-fest. Just low-grade zombie schlock. When Nick Cannon is the best part of a movie, you know that you’ve got a bit of a train wreck on your hands. I’m a little let down by this one, honestly. Score: D+

• Item #6

The Dead Pit

As I was perusing the horror section at Fargo’s Best Buy (why doesn’t our Best Buy sort movies by genre? It’s so much easier…), and I saw that Day of the Dead remake thing, and then right beside it, The Dead Pit caught my eye. The cover didn’t really get the idea of zombies across to me, but reading the synopsis on the back confirmed my suspicions: zombies!

Much to my delight, this is one of those 80’s zombie flicks that pretends to have a cohesive plot. By that of course, I mean it’s more than “OMG zombiez. Let’s try to survive!” Something about a mad scientist attacking a mental ward with a horde of zombies? I dunno and I’m too lazy to go check the case, but it sounded like a riot at the time. I honestly think this could be as unpredictably lovable as Hellraiser. Score: B (pending)

• Item #7

Chucky: The Killer DVD Collection

I’ll level with ya, I’ve only ever seen the first Child’s Play movie, and even then, I was still a little squeamish at the time and covered my eyes a lot. I did like the movie though, and I’ve always wanted to at least see the first two sequels. Bride of Chucky isn’t exactly a priority, and Seed of Chucky seems like they’re just taking it too far. Alas.

I’ve been putting off buying this collection for a while now because I knew that not having the first one would drive me bonkers (OCD, you see), but it actually hasn’t been grating on my nerves too much. It’s not like the movie isn’t on DVD or anything either, I just can’t find the damn thing anywhere. Oh well. I’m sure some day I’ll be in the right place at the right time, and it will be mine. Or I’ll have forgotten my wallet and smack myself in the forehead. Score: B+ (pending)

• Item #8

Bruce and Lloyd: Out of Control

I’ll say this now, because it’s the most important note here: I was promised a lot more Patrick Warburton than I got from this purchase, and it makes me ever so slightly disappointed. Other than that, good times!

If you haven’t seen Get Smart yet, you’re really missing out on something. I loved it so much, I ran out an bought this straight-to-DVD supplemental material without even reading a review first. Fortunately, it’s not nearly as awful as most straight-to-DVD stuff, but it’s still nowhere near as great as the main movie. Then again, I never expected it to be. I’m just confused as to why exactly Steve Carell couldn’t make at least a cameo. Anne Hathaway shows up in one scene, so why do we get no Steve Carell? Ah well. If Get Smart was at the “hilarious” level, I’d probably only rate this one as “silly” at best, but it’s still worth a look if you liked the source material. Score: B

Also, I should mention that I bought some other stuff, like shorts and foodstuffs, but I decided to cut them out because clothes are boring (do not tell my girlfriend I said that, she bought clothes almost exclusively) and junk food isn’t something that really needs to be logged into the annals of internet history. At least, not any of the food I bought. It was all pretty much run-of-the-mill junk food that a) isn’t available in Canada or b) is ridiculously expensive in Canada. So yeah. That’s the end then. Good night.

Two Rockman Arrange albums, reviewed

We all know that I love video games. I’ve made no attempt to cover that up at any point in my life. I’ve downplayed it a lot, but never outright hidden the fact that my number one hobby is spending hours with a controller in my hands. It’s not a glamorous hobby, and most certainly not one that wins me any points with the fairer sex, but it’s what I do, and there’s no point in trying to deny who I am. Given, I spend a lot less time with video games than even a year ago, but it’s still a fairly prominent part of my life, and where a huge portion of my personal funds are directed.

So how could this inherently geeky hobby get any geekier? Well, it doesn’t help that I listen to lots and lots of video game music, and have shelled out many hard-earned dollars importing huge game soundtrack collections. You’ve heard me go on many times about how I’m absolutely fanatical about Yoko Shimomura and Motoi Sakuraba’s works, and how I nearly messed my pants in excitement when my copy of the Okami soundtrack arrived, but I never really talk about any of the music that relates to my most deep-rooted video game obsession: MegaMan.

It’s sad but true, I never really blog about how deeply I love the music from the many hundreds of MegaMan games out there. I may have mentioned it in passing many years ago when I wrote that article about why I’m such a Mega-fanboy, but other than that, I’ve never really touched on it for more than maybe a short paragraph once every God-knows-how-long. Today, I shall begin to remedy this situation though, as I have not one, but two discs worth of shimmery remixed Mega-goodness. Enter the 20th Anniversary Rockman 1-6 Arrange albums.

Left: Wily. Right: “Mr. X” (Spoiler: It’s Wily in disguise!)

I recently purchased these two arrange albums from Play-Asia, and have been listening to them maybe not quite as often as my fanboyism might lead you to believe, but more than enough. I’m sure that there are still people out there who would be shocked to learn that people produce and pay for soundtracks to video games, and possibly even more shocked to learn that I fall into the latter category. It’s no surprise to long-time readers, but the last time I mentioned that I collected video game soundtracks, there was an obvious air of confusion afterward. My parents even, who I’ve explained it to many times, are still dumbfounded whenever I receive a new one in the mail. I can understand that it’s a very niche genre, yes, but how is it so hard to understand? But I digress.

As the whole “Rockman 1-6” part up there might have clued you in on, these two CDs specialize specifically in music from the original run of MegaMan/Rockman (I’ll be using Rockman from now on. First-timers, they’re the same thing) games on the NES. Depending on your knowledge of all things Rockman, you may not be surprised by this fact, but overall the CDs weight very heavily in the favour of material from Rockman 2, whilst the first, fourth, and fifth games are all represented very sparingly, with only one dedicated track per disc. Yes, I know and agree that Rockman 2 was completely epic in every respect, especially as far as music goes, but you’ve gotta give the underdogs a little more credit. On the upside, my personal favourite tracks are the medleys, and every game gets its respects (due or not) in those tracks.

The ROCK CD, which was the first one I got, is obviously more oriented towards rock-style remixes. In that respect, it does not disappoint. The albums opens with the most killer “Boss Mix Medley”, which alone is reason enough to look into this disc. It is an impeccable track that combines a handful of what are essentially throwaway pieces (boss music is usually a 30-second loop at best) into a hard-rocking six-and-a-half-minute tour-de-force that will melt your face right off. It is simply awesome. Its follow-up track, “Cutman Mix”, does it perfect justice, as it takes the already stellar Cutman theme, changes the pacing a little, and makes the whole thing a wonderful sequence of guitars hammering out the verses and screaming solos like they’re going out of style.

At this point the CD goes up and down. I can’t fully appreciate their new spin on the MetalMan theme, but the infamous Dr. Wily theme from Rockman 2 comes out in full force with a wailing guitar duet that just won’t quit. Shadowman’s theme is nice, but is somewhat lost on me, and I honestly cannot believe that they managed to pull a whole 3:30 of non-repetitive material out of a “get weapon” theme for the “Get A Weapon (Rockman 3)” track. The Dr. Cossack theme was never my favourite track from Rockman 4 (though they mixed it quite nicely), and I can’t say the second Wily theme on the disc is overly impressive. “Yamatoman Mix” features an instrument that I’m not smart enough to identify (I may be a moron and it may very well just be an acoustic guitar) which plays a tune in the background of the entire song, and hits the foreground at the beginning, the end, and whenever the electric guitars take a breather between verses. It’s definitely makes the song stand out, and gives it a nice Asian vibe. “Tomahawkman Mix” has what might be the fastest solo on the album, though it could have been so much more epic if it had lasted even ten seconds longer. Like “Boss Mix Medley” before it, “Title Mix Medley” takes all the title screen themes and blends them together into a track that can only be described as awesome. It won’t blow you away quite as handily as the former, but if you’ve got a thing for fancy guitar work, you’ll love it to death.

After getting and playing the snot out the ROCK disc, I decided to go ahead and reunite it with its peppy twin brother, TECHNO. I’ll admit that I’m not a huge techno fan, but I’ve got at least a dozen various other Rockman remix albums on my PC that are mostly techno-centric (which I do quite enjoy), so it was a risk I was more than willing to take. TECHNO opens with a fairly competent “Stage Select Mix Medley”, which like the boss medley, takes a bunch of throwaway tracks and makes them into something worth far more than the sum of its parts. The ROCK disc was all about the screaming guitars and blistering solos, and the TECHNO disc comes right out the gate with pulsing synthesizers and heavy percussion that let you know that it’s going to be living up to its name. Elecman’s theme is next on the chopping block, and it’s slowed down considerably, though unlike another particular mix, does not invoke the feeling that you might be listening to a rip-off of Journey’s “Faithfully”. The constant thump of the bass drums and the peppy synth contrasts the slower tempo and floaty choruses to make sure that you’re grooving and not mellowing out. After that, we see the return of Rockman 2’s first Wily theme, and to tell the truth, I don’t think anyone has ever done a bad remix of this track. Regardless of genre, speed, or instruments used, this is just an overall wonderful piece, and Capcom’s skilled sound crew certainly put it through its paces here. The rock version does it justice with fiery guitar leads, and the techno version will storm you and make you want get up and move move move with its high-speed thump thump thump.

Sadly, those three tracks set far too great a precedent for the following pieces, as they’re simply mediocre in comparison. On it’s own though, “Quickman Mix” has a wonderful metallic vibe going for it, and as much as I want to praise the great, punctuated chorus-type bit, the song relies far too much on the main tune to really be a kickass techno track. “Airman Mix” has an airy (no pun intended) lead-in that lasts far too long, but once it gets going you’ll be able to feel that beat coursing through you. Oddly enough, I feel that this one makes too little use of the base tune, only bringing it in for short bits at a time. “Heatman Mix” doesn’t really do anything for me personally, but I can’t get over how much I love the “Snakeman Mix”. The high tempo and the bridges (which I can only think of as “carnival-esque”) really work for me, and the original tune is peppy enough to inspire at least a little bopping along. The revised Magnetman theme is another one that I consider entirely missable, and the second Wily track on this disc doesn’t exactly inspire me to create a Facebook group dedicated to it. Honestly, the less said about “Starman Mix”, the better. It has a nice spacey sound, but otherwise alls flat on the grounds of impressing me. “Flameman Mix” fares a little better, but only because I really like the original song. Unfortunately, the techno disc does not end on another wonderful medley, which officially makes me a very sad panda, but I won’t dwell on it because it’s a techno CD and I didn’t exactly expect to be blown away by it to begin with.

Besides the fact that they both feature mixes of the “Dr. Wily 1” track from Rockman 2, the two CDs have but one thing in common. That would be that they both contain short versions of all the original tunes used in the mixes. You may look at the track listing and see a robust 20/21 tracks on each, but then you’ll notice that half of them are just the original 8-bit chiptunes directly from the NES games. And that’s not an entirely bad thing, say if you’re trying to educate someone who liked the mixes on the background of the music, but a much better way to do that would be to have them actually play the original Rockman games. Or to play the games and have them watch, because seriously, someone who has never played one of the old Rockman games by this point likely won’t be playing any video games other than Wii Sports anytime soon.

Overall, I’d say that these are two very solid albums, and make a very good case of representing Rockman’s 20-plus-year legacy, regardless of how niche it’s become over the ages. I’d recommend both albums to diehard Rockman fans, but only the ROCK disc to the general populace, as the mixes are a little more interesting on that one. If you’re interested in owning them legitimately (and God knows you aren’t), I most definitely recommend procuring them through Play-Asia.com, as I snagged them both for a debatably reasonable price of about $30 each, whereas Amazon is charging $42.99 for the ROCK disc and a whopping $72.99 for the TECHNO CD. It’s not cheap either way (retail game soundtracks never are), but at least your wallet won’t get completely raped if you order from Play-Asia. Of course, if you’re up to searching for a better price, I won’t stop you.

Remembering the Cottage: Part 1

My fondest memories can more or less be summed up in three categories: “Shopping at Toys ‘R’ Us”, “Holidays/Trips”, and “The Cottage”. The first two categories can still potentially be added to, but sadly, the third is now sealed away as only memories.

I’ve mentioned many a time on this website (most often in the blog) my many visits to my grandparents’ house, which just happened to be a sweet cottage out on the Winnipeg River. The thing is, I never described many events in detail, or took any pictures while I was out there. to nearly everyone, this mysterious cottage could have just as well been a well-constructed myth. To me though, it was very real, and it was the essence of my summers. I spent at least two weeks out there during the summer months for as long as I can remember, and there were quite often other trips out there for such events as Spring Break, Christmas, Thanksgiving, family reunions, long weekends, and many more. It was a great place, and while I may not have appreciated it quite as much in my older years, it was still a place I loved being very much.

Imagine my heartbreak when I first heard that my grandparents were thinking about selling. As if enough bad mojo wasn’t surrounding me in the year 2007, but now my beloved cottage was going to be taken away? Yeah, it sucks balls. The place was actually sold right at the end of August, and on my last weekend out there, I decided I would take a few pictures so I could put them on a webpage laced with wonderful stories of the time I’d spent there. This is that page, and it’s definitely more for my own sake than for anyone else to read, but feel free to sift through it. There are a lot of memories and strong emotions here, so don’t expect even an attempt at humour.

The TV Room

Overview: Ah, the TV room. I probably spent more hours here than anywhere else, but there are a couple catches that help to make that seem less like I was glued to the TV for all the time I was at the cottage. The most obvious one would be that for a couple years I used one of the couches as my bed, so that racks up the hours pretty quickly. If I regret anything in my lifetime, it’s that I didn’t spend nearly enough time out on the balcony that extends from this room. Don’t know why, but it just never seemed like the place I should be hanging out.

Atari: I guess the earliest thing I can remember this room for is that it’s where we had out Atari. Long before I got hooked on video games, my dad left his Atari system out here, only to be dug up many years later so he could show me the kind of games that were around before the NES. I spent many many hours playing Kangaroo, Pitfall, and Pac-Man. Even back when I was only but a wee lad, I could recognize that ET was the worst game ever made. The biggest mystery about the whole thing though, was that we had a manual for Donkey Kong, but there was nary a cartridge to go with it. Oh, how I burned to play Donkey Kong.

Simpsons & Bonding time: My younger cousin would often come in to visit at the same time we did in the summers, and it worked out well because he’s very much like me, so myself and The Youngest One would often spend a lot of time hanging out in here with him and playing whatever handheld game was in at the time. Or just whatever the most recent Pokémon game was. Those two are even more into Pokémon than I am, and I would always get into it when we came out to the cottage, because the young ones just wouldn’t shut up about it, and that would drag me into it. The Tall One and I were also deeply entrenched in the MegaMan Battle Network series, and it was pretty much a summertime tradition to buy the games just before we went out the cottage and simply play the Hell out of them while we were there. Both series of games brought me not only the regular pleasure of playing video games, but also a lot of valuable bonding time with my brothers and cousin. Sure, I can still play with them at home, but it’s just not the same. Also, my grandparents got satellite TV a few years back, and it seemed like that on any given evening that we were there, the Simpsons would always be on at least one channel, so we generally always had that on in the background. Good times, they were. Good times.

Movie night: Back in the day, my grandpa would often borrow a bunch of movies from a neighbour so we had something to watch while we were out there (this was before the satellite, and we were restricted to like three fuzzy channels). This is notable because it’s the first place I ever saw Kindergarten Cop, which remains my favourite Schwarzenegger film, and is near the top of my overall favourites. Many other times, while my grandparents were staying in the city, my family would come out for the weekend and basically binge on junk food and watch movies. Most of them were stinkers like RV and Epic Movie (to name some of the most recent), but it was still cherished time spent with my family and many, many cookies.

Random thoughts: It was a great place to hang out, and of course we often brought more in the way of video games than handhelds, as Atari was fun, but never quite enough. We fought over which console we would bring each time almost as much as we fought over who got to sit in that big reclining chair you can see in the second picture. I played a lot of Donkey Kong 64 out here, and that particular week at the cottage remains one of the most memorable for many reasons. I’ll always carry in my heart the memories of the first time I caught all the legendary birds in Pokémon Blue, as they were all while I was out at the cottage. I spent many subsequent trips out there playing through the game again and again, always reliving my triumphs over Zapdos, Articuno and Moltres with a smile on my face, often in the middle of the night when I should have been long asleep.

Guest Bedrooms

Overview: Only one is pictures, but there were actually two bedrooms upstairs. While I suppose they weren’t technically guest bedrooms, nobody used them but guests, so there you have it. Until the shed outside was turned into a mini-cottage of sorts (more on that later), we would often sleep in these rooms. For a handful of years I slept in the TV Room, as I mentioned before, but these were where we stayed the majority of the time.

Bedtime: The room you see pictured is actually the final phase of that room’s series of redecorations. Initially it had two huge beds lined against the window wall and the wall opposite the shelving. And when I say huge, I mean huge enough to play underneath with plenty of room to spare. I guess they were more high up than anything else, but while they were in there, I was still small enough to think they were gigantic. Until The Youngest One was born, the older two and I would sleep in this room together, a crib or mattress was placed in the empty floor when needed, and I moved onto the second bedroom room when The Youngest One came along and three beds weren’t enough to satisfy the four of us. But until that time, we spent many nights staying up “late” (back when 10:30 was late) and telling stories and jokes in the dark. Being all boys, there was plenty of roughhousing after bedtime too, and I really miss those times.

Bedtime 2: Eventually, when I moved onto the second upstairs bedroom, I was on my own and free to do whatever I pleased instead of sleeping. Obviously, I used that time alone to play GameBoy, listen to music, and read (most memorably the Final Fantasy VIII strategy guide, because that was another completely kickass summer) all through the night. Once the boys started sleeping outside (in the aforementioned shed) I took over the original room for myself again, and at that point it had been rearranged into the room you see in the picture above.

Comics: You can see the shelving in the picture, but hidden behind the pile of assorted sheets and whatnot is a huge collection of comics. They consisted mostly of Archie, Alf, Heathcliff, and Richie Rich. While those aren’t exactly my first choices in comics nowadays, I was pleased as punch to spend countless afternoons leafing through them. And though it took me a couple years to get the job done, I did eventually read through them all. Taking note of my love of comics, my grandpa started saving me the Sunday comics from the Free Press every week, and every time I went out to the cottage he’d always have a stack of funnies for me to peruse. He still saves them for me to this day, and I haven’t put any time aside to read through them for a while now, so I’ve got a rather large pile in my closet just waiting to be read or thrown out.

Horsin’ Around: Back when we were young, and the huge beds were still in the room, my brothers and I spent a lot of time playing in there, often concluding in someone being injured, however slightly. The number one game would be “Lava Monster”, which I know is not exclusive to us, because I’ve seen characters on TV playing it. But in case you have no idea, basically one person would be the Lava Monster and have to stay on the floor, and anyone else would be trying to stay on the beds while the Lava Monster tried to pull them down “into the lava”. The limited playfield may seem like an issue when I describe it, but it was more than enough when we were just lil’ guys. Plus, we’d always get any other visiting children to join in too, so sometimes the Lava Monsters would amount to more than one, depending on rules (either “Tag” or “Last Man Standing”).

Random Thoughts: Now that I think about it, I guess probably the thing I miss most about the cottage (and childhood in general) was playing with the older two of my brothers. While we still hang out and play video games together now and then, we don’t spend nearly as much time together as we did when we went to the cottage. Back when we were kids, we fought a lot (like, seriously, a lot) at home, but as soon as we got to the cottage, we were like best friends. It’s weird to say because I still see them every day, but I kinda miss my brothers. The Youngest One, I still find plenty of time to hang out with though, so at least I’ve got that. For now.

The Kitchen / Dining Room

Overview: Honestly, the living room, dining room, and kitchen are pretty much all the same room. But that’s hardly the point here. Being the glutton that I am, this area of the house holds just as many lovely memories for me as any other room. My grandma is a wonderful cook, and even the simplest dishes meant a lot, just because. I’ll certainly miss the couple weeks each year where I was guaranteed to have three square meals a day.

Breakfast time: Where to start? I suppose breakfast would be the obvious one. I’m not a big breakfast eater. I adore the meal, but very rarely to I have enough motivation or time to partake. The nice thing about the cottage is that breakfast was always a sure thing (with the exception of the later years where I would stay up too late and sleep right through breakfast time). Most of the time it would be a simple cereal/toast/fruit affair, but that was okay. My grandpa would always have the paper completely read by the time I got up, so when I was eating breakfast, he’d have the comics and puzzles pulled out and ready for me. Eating cereal is twice as awesome when you’ve got a crossword laid out for you and someone to chat with. On the best mornings, my grandma would make pancakes. Oh, those were mornings to really treasure. Until later on when grandma didn’t feel like making tons of them, my brothers and I would always compete to see who could scarf down the most. Good times were had by everyone, but our bellies were probably the happiest of all. Lazy mornings are probably my absolute most favourite thing in the world, and at the cottage, they were all that much better.

Lunch: I never looked quite as forward to lunch as much as I did breakfast, but I still like to revel in the nostalgia of noon-related meals. Most of all, would be when I was between eight and twelve or so, and we would often get the boat out and go fishing with my grandpa in the mornings. We’d always get bored pretty quickly and just resort to fooling around on the boat, but going home was a payoff in more than just getting back on dry land. My grandma would generally have lunch ready by that time, and it was awesome. Coming home to a big plate of sandwiches, veggies, cheese, cookies, and all sorts of etc was just superb after a long morning of fishing. Of course, lunch was great on other days, but those are the ones I remember the most. Looking back on this, I guess maybe it all sounds a bit mundane, but you really had to be there. Being pre-adolescent would help too.

Dinner: This is where grandma’s cooking really comes into play. You’re not going to do anything too fancy for lunch, but dinner is a different story. Grandpa often joked that he ate like a king whenever we were over, and I suppose maybe it’s not too far from the truth. I’m a notoriously picky eater, so I would often pick at some things, but most of the time I ate really well. Hams were especially common, and my family seems to be imbued with the power of making wicked awesome mashed potatoes. Going to the cottage on special occasions was great too, because that meant my grandma would make an extra huge and extra delicious dinner, which was always something to look forward to, even for one with as particular eating habits as me. In fact, I actually wrote about one particularly wonderful Easter dinner on the blog. Turns out it would be the last Easter diner we ever ate there….

Elsewhere…

Overview: While it’s true that being at the cottage was in itself the high point of going to the cottage, there were plenty of other cool places nearby to spend time. Most were great for adventuring while we were little, and some offered more than a simple thrill of an excursion into the unknown. All of them though, played a vital role in making trips to the cottage as memorable as the were.

Town: The cottage was about a five minute drive from the nearest town, Lac du Bonnet. I never cared too much for it while younger, but as I grew, I started to realize that it was more than just a grocery store and a beach. Annual Canada Day parades, while officially boring as Hell, would become an important family tradition, and the fireworks afterward only seem to get better each year. It was also home to the only dollar store where I’d ever seen the infamous Nintendo Surprise. It has since closed down and moved to a much larger building, and the goods within have become only slightly less magical. When Subway moved in, it was all we talked about for ages. The only chain restaurant that had been in the town until then was Chicken Chef, and that’s not the kind of place you just go on a whim. Nope, after Subway moved in, I don’t think there was one trip to the cottage where we didn’t partake.

Town 2: Pinawa is a little farther away, and we visited less often, but always for good reason. Firstly, I would like to mention that if it weren’t for my need to shop compulsively for various electronic media, this is exactly the kind of place I would like to live in. It’s small, but not tiny, and most if not all of the houses are quite nice. I’ve always entertained the thought of living in a small town, and Pinawa has always romanticized that idea. Anyhow, the main attraction here is The Burger Boat & Ice Cream Barge. It’s not the best ice cream place I’ve ever gone, but there’s something special about getting your ice cream from a boat. Always a special occasion, going to The Burger Boat was something to really get excited about. Seriously! On a boat! Turns out they even have their own web page. Neat!

The Boat Launch: A short hike away from the cottage, there’s a boat launch that I’ve never seen anyone use for boats. We’d go swimming or fishing off it, but never any boats. Probably because nearly everyone with a boat in the area has their own boat launch, but that’s besides the point. In any case, over the years, it became more of a point just for me to travel out to just to get some alone/thinking time. There were better spots for such things, but they were all farther away, and I’m lazy. The hike there was worth mentioning too, as there was always a bunch of stuff on the way. Mostly bodies of water to skip rocks in and bales of hay to climb on, but they meant a lot back in the day.

The Rocks: Along Tower Road was, that’s right, a tower. To this day I’m not sure exactly what kind of tower it was. Maybe a broadcasting tower of some sort? No idea, but that’s not what we ventured over there for. All around the mysterious tower were what seemed like endless miles of rocks perfectly fit for climbing. Heading out there at least once per summer, we’d make entire days of climbing around, searching for something, but not quite knowing what that something was. Maybe we were looking for anything at all? To me, it always seemed like the formations had changed, but I guess that’s dumb to say. I know they couldn’t have, but I guess my mental mapping skills weren’t entirely developed by then. We did, on occasion, find a small pile of rocks that signified that someone else had been wandering around there too, and we’d often set up our own little rock piles, with the intent of showing both other people and ourselves that we’d been there already. I haven’t been out there since I was about fifteen, and many times I’ve considered just making a trip out there to visit both Lac du Bonnet and Pinawa, and to spend the rest of the day climbing around on the rocks I so loved as a young’un. Maybe I’ll get around to it one of these summers.

More!: Yeah. There’s still more here. Hell, I could go on nearly forever with stories of my youth in any of these categories. It just so happens that the ones that take place outside sound infinitely less boring to everyone else. There were a lot of other places we’d head out to see what we could see, often against our wills. The Pinawa Dam was close enough that we didn’t mind going, but there still wasn’t much of interest. Point Du Bois was much farther away, and while it held a bunch of great memories for my grandparents and dad, there’s like nothing there that’s even remotely interesting to anyone who never lived/spent summers there. There were all sorts of other landmarks that my grandparents liked to take us to, like a big ol’ suspension bridge, and yet another dam. All were pretty boring and mosquito-filled, but in the end, I appreciate them taking us, because as lackluster as they are, they still count as good memories.

Woof. Considering that I haven’t tapped even half the pictures I took, this article could very well go on forever. We certainly don’t want that, now do we? No. So, keeping everyone’s best interest in mind, I’ll stop here for the moment and call it Part One. How many more will there be? Who knows! It’ll likely only be a two-parter, but if I’m as verbose with ther rest of the pictures as I’ve been with the ones I’ve posted so far, we’ll likely be seeing a Part Three as well. But that’ll be the absolute limit. Even if I tried, there’s no way I could justify doing this in a four-part series. I guess you can’t really put a limit on your memories, but the honest truth is that most of the events that I found significant and still dream happily about would be viewed as horribly mundane by pretty much anyone else. So keep an eye out for number two. Given how long it took me to finish this one, we should be seeing it by the second half of 2011.