Articles – Page 4

Six terrible Wii U eShop games!

The Wii U is dead and I’m the only person who liked it.

Okay, maybe not the only person, but some days it sure feels like it. Wii U lived a short and underwhelming life, but it was home to some of the best games that I’ve ever played. Super Mario Maker, Splatoon, Yoshi’s Woolly World, Xenoblade Chronicles X, et cetera, et cetera. It’s also host to some absolute stinkers. Games so bad that no person should ever have to suffer their existence.

Fortunately, these games are squirreled away in the depths of the eShop, where they can be forgotten and die without harming too many with their terribleness. It’s very much opposite the Wii, where there were rows and rows of awful shovelware populating store shelves, tricking naïve parents into buying the absolute worst games for their kids.

As a bit of a last hurrah before the Switch’s launch in a few days, here is a short list of six Wii U eShop games that nobody should ever play. Not that you would. Because you don’t own a Wii U. Jerk.

So why did I buy them, you ask? Either because I thought they may have some legitimate merit to them, or they were on sale for a dollar (give or take) and I figured they’d be good for a laugh. Your job is to figure out which is which!

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The First Skunk Bundle

I don’t know if I’ve ever really gotten into it here, but I am endlessly fascinated by bad video games. I like bad movies, too, but terrible video games are even more delicious. And they’ve got to be real bad. If a game is just mediocre, that’s boring and no fun to dissect. But when you have a game that is consistently making you wonder what the heck the developers were thinking, that’s the real good stuff.

To put it simply, the more of a “complete garbage fire” a game is, the better.

And that’s where The First Skunk Bundle comes in. A $25 eShop game that for some reason went on sale for free a while back, this is a pack of five games that range in quality from passable to, well, complete garbage fire. Let’s have a look-see and break down the contents.

No, wait. First, I feel obliged to mention that the music on the game select screen is a piss-poor piano rendition of Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”. So poor, in fact, that I thought that it was a piss-poor rendition of the Friends theme at first. In retrospect, they do have seem to have a similar melody. Maybe? Am I crazy?

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The Top 12 Video Games of 2016

“Why” you ask, “did you choose to list twelve games?”

The answer is simple. Because sixteen (for 2016) seemed too many, and ten is too cliché.

“But doing a Top X Things of Year list is in itself too cliché!”

Shut up!

(You should know my Top Video Games rules by now: Any game that I beat in 2016 is fair game, regardless of what year it was actually released in. No remakes or remasters allowed.)

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2016 Xmas Gift Roundup!

Oh my, has yet another year passed already? Well, I guess three years if you’re just going by the last time I wrote one of these things. Remember how it used to be an annual tradition? Did I write this exact same intro paragraph last time? Ehh, I’ve already recycled the idea and the banner, might as well re-use some of the text as well.

I think that, for the most part, I stopped doing these because I began to feel embarrassed about all of the stuff I get for Xmas. I mean, it’s not like it’s all that excessive (especially with my lack of wife), but it’s easy to look at these articles and think to myself “gee, I sure am spoiled, aren’t I?” Maybe next year will be the year I finally act on my desire to volunteer somewhere and help those less fortunate.

But probably not. That would also require leaving the house, and my incredible selfishness is a defining character trait.

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TE Movie Time: HAUSU

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Japanese horror (“horror”) film Hausu (or House, if you demand Englishness), but I watched it over the weekend, and BOY OH BOY was it a thing that happened.

At first blush it seems as though this would be the kind of movie that bombed hard and then gained a cult following in the decades that followed. This is mostly the case, or at least that’s what I got from briefly skimming the Wikipedia article. But this film is actually part of the Criterion Collection! It’s considered to be fine art! Which is not the kind of thing one would suspect after having watched it!

That’s not to say that Hausu is without merit. It’s got a lot of insane scenes and I certainly appreciate that they were going for wacky. But as a whole, it mostly left me cold. Maybe it’s because we live in the year 2016 and I’ve become desensitized to goofiness, but I feel like they didn’t really push the envelope far enough. There remains plenty of room to be even more mind-boggling.

But hey, three paragraphs in and I’ve already written my conclusion! That will not do! Let’s turn this puppy around and start from the start. Which I’m going to tear through in a single paragraph, because the first half hour is a slog.

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TE Movie Time: The Shallows

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

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

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

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Junk Food from Solo Market

Some number of weeks ago -I’ve forgotten already because I’m a senile old fart- I had taken a vacation week off work. And when the cards of fate line up so that my parents and I are on vacation at the same time, that can only mean one thing: a day-long road trip to some places around rural Manitoba.

“Day-long” may be puffing it up a bit, though. It’s more like half a day at most. Truth be told, we all get bored of seeing a whole lot of nothing fairly quickly.

This year’s road trip began with a tasty brunch out at a funky little place just outside of the city. I don’t remember what it was called, but it’s squirreled away behind two golf courses. It was so pretty and rustic and woodly, I immediately brought up how I felt like I had wandered onto the set of Gilmore Girls. To which my father let out an exasperated sigh, and the rest of us enjoyed the rest of the day making Gilmore Girls references.

That’s not really relevant to this post though. I just needed an excuse to bring up Gilmore Girls.

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TE Movie Review: Basket Case

I’ve been intending to watch Basket Case for over two years now, and only last night did I finally get around to it. Of course, I didn’t exactly watch the movie as I did watch bits of it while waiting for gold to accumulate in Clicker Heroes. Also I sat there with it paused for about 20 minutes at one point while I mulled over whether to go out and get a pizza or not.

I’m really bad at watching movies, is what I’m getting at.

Basket Case was a lot of fun, though. An early 80’s monster movie, it really should have been more engaging for me, as that’s precisely the kind of thing I love. Or, used to, anyway. I haven’t watched such a film since… I don’t know, Pumpkinhead, two Halloweens ago? I used to watch cheesy horror films all the damn time. I don’t know what happened to me…

But that’s besides the point. The first thing you’ll notice about Basket Case is that the acting is all over the place. A lot of it is perfectly competent; not good, really, but not so bad that you’d ding the movie. But then, every once in a while, there is a line (occasionally an entire scene) that is delivered so poorly that you can’t help but chuckle to yourself.

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Forgotten Film Round-Up #3 – Vacation Flicks

I was on vacation last week, and as per my usual, it was more of a “don’t go to work for a week” kind of vacation, as opposed to other people who generally do things when they take time off. I mean, I did things, but from the comfort of my own home. A lot of those things, surprisingly, were movies. I credit the How Did This Get Made? podcast almost completely for that, as it has encouraged me to watch a lot of movies lately. Like, I’ve gone from one or two a month to several each week.

These are not necessarily “forgotten films” in the usual context of movies I own but haven’t watched, but they’re all movies that I’ve wanted to see at some point. And it’s just nice to have another collection of films to throw under that umbrella. Two entries does not a proper series make.

#1 – Birdemic: Shock and Terror

A film about birds who attack people, much like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Only, Birdemic was made on a shoestring budget by an actual crazy person. The acting is mostly terrible, the plot makes zero sense, and the birds don’t even show up until a good 45 minutes in. Oh, and also the birds are 2D clip art and explode like kamikaze fighter planes.

While the film is sold on the killer bird action, it’s actually billed as a “romantic thriller,” which is a gross overstatement on both counts. I mean, technically, there’s romance, but the main character is such a poor actor that he seems more like a robot or an alien than a man. And the thrills? Yeah, there aren’t any, really. The stakes are so low, and the characters so stupid, that you simply can’t be bothered to care. You don’t watch Birdemic for its artistic merits. You watch Bridemic because it’s one of the most staggering train wrecks ever committed to film.

It’s really a must-watch for anyone who likes bad movies. If nothing else, listen to the Birdemic episode of How Did This Get Made?, which is fantastic. It features Weird Al as a special guest, and they also managed to bring in Whitney Moore, who plays the female lead in Birdemic. It’s really, really worth your time to give it a listen.

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FNAF World

Five Nights at Freddy’s. If you’ve been on the internet at all over the last year (and then some), you at least have half an idea what this is. I mean, you should. It’s been a straight-up phenomenon. You’d have to have a pretty empty Twitter feed to not even have heard of the franchise. Seriously. Get with it already.

Ugh. Fine. If I have to spell it out for you, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a video game. It’s about animatronic animals that wander around a pizza parlour (think Showbiz Pizza) at night and brutally murder you if you don’t close the doors at the right time. Also those doors require power to stay closed for some reason. I don’t know why, and this isn’t an in-depth analysis of pizza parlour technology, so we’re not going there. The game made a huge splash on YouTube and took over the internet. Three sequels, each changing up the gameplay to some degree, were released within a year’s time. Warner Bros announced that a FNAF movie is in the works, and there’s even an official novel. I have read said novel, and despite it seeming like a terrible idea, I quite enjoyed it.

If I may be excused for a moment, I feel like I ought to mention before we go any farther that I am a huge FNAF fan. I can’t play the games because I can’t handle the tension, but I love the world-building, the lore, and the characters.

Alright then. Moving on.

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