Category: Foodstuffs

The Biggest McDick’s in the World!!

You’ve read the first installment of my Disney World log, right? If not, go here to check it out. If you have, you’ll know that while we were touring in Orlando, we came across a big freaking McDonald’s. In fact, the biggest in the world. After seeing it on the Food Network, my mom and brother were determined to find this place while we were there. Not only did we manage to find it, but on the first day to boot. And as they had been raving for about a week at that time, it was really freaking big. So big, that it was advertising it’s greatness on the M signpost outside, and several other signposts in the vicinity.

Just as a little preface, I’d like to point out that a lot of my pictures of this McDonald’s turned out a little blurry. And by “a little”, I mean “terribly”. I’m not sure why, as almost every other picture I took turned out fine, but that’s the way it is, so you’re going to have to deal with it or go and do something else. The blur isn’t so bad that you can’t tell what’s what though, so you should be able to cope rather easily. Now let’s get this party started.

So now we’ll take a wondrous journey into one of the most amazing places that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen Disney World. Our tour starts outside, where amazingly, there is quite a bit to see. Just standing outside of this place, you can tell that it’s going to be like no other fast-food restaurant you’ve ever seen. You have to witness it first-hand to get the full effect of how spectacular this place is, but I’m going to do my best to give you a good general impression.

Well that one turned out horribly, but I’m sure you get the picture. It’s the big M sign seen in front of every single McDonald’s restaurant, so chances are pretty good that you’ve seen one. Only instead of a sign saying that they’ve sold so many billions of burgers, it’s got a fancy-ass electronic signboard that boasts about it’s hugeness and greatness. It also gives details on current specials, what kinds of food they serve there, and just how popular the place is. I can imagine that it’s running the 3 other McD’s restaurants within 30 feet into the ground.

And the fact that there are other McDonald’s restaurants close by is the really sad part. I thought it was a pancake house that they had on every street corner, not a McDonald’s. But on that note, there were a lot of pancake houses around. Especially IHOP (International House of Pancakes, for those not in the know. I just learned that while I was there.). That seems to be the granddaddy of them all. And while pancakes are good and all (now that I think of it, I wonder what the breakfast menu is like here…), I’m at McDonald’s, and that’s what I’ve got to get back to reviewing. So in conclusion, while in Florida, I ate no pancakes.

You might not be able to tell so well from pictures, but this place, as I may have mentioned before, is frickin’ huge. Just look at it and compare it to things around it. Oh yeah, there’s also the whole two-storey thing going on. That’s a big one. Not only is it huge, it’s exuberantly decorated as well. The huge fry box motif, the art all over the walls, and the lights and decorative crap coming out of every which way, it’s amazing just to look at. If you do ever visit, you’ll probably be stuck standing in awe of this place for a good five minutes or so before you actually get inside. And it only gets more extravagant on the inside. If God eats fast food, this is where he goes.

When you walk in (and through automatic doors, no less) you’ll notice that every bit of wall and possibly even ceiling is covered in something. To your right is the dessert bar, which I’ll get to later, right in front of you are swarms of people trying to get food, and to your left is the happy little scene pictured above. As you can see, we’ve got ocean-painted walls, a huge map, a table for taking charity donations, and that token Ronald McDonald toy display. On the floor are some sort of funny footprints that point you to the exit (which you might miss with all this stuff going on around you), and the occasional shoe scuff, which might be unintentional.

Now this one is the real kicker. Look at all of that food advertisement and display. In the very back is the regular McDonald’s counter area, where you get your food. Right in front of them are more little cash register machines, where you order your stuff. This is all a lot more complex than any McDonald’s I’ve ever seen already. Then in front or that is their gourmet food displays. These contain pizza, real sandwiches, desserts, and seafood, among a bunch of other fancy stuff. You can see various signs posted around, like the black pizza sign above, the sandwich sign in the background, and that bistro gourmet sign to the left. Over on the right side, you can just barely get a glance at that dessert area and chef station. That’s right. This McDonald’s has real chefs. That means food that won’t make you crap 5 minutes later (or block you for several days, as I would soon learn).

So while my parents stand in line to get us our grub, we decide to go explore this huge place. It might be the excess of people, or that fact that it’s crammed to the brim with games, tables, chairs and odds n’ ends, but it feels a lot smaller on the inside. Well, to be more precise, the first floor does anyway. The second floor is less jam packed, because the eating area is exclusive to downstairs, so there’s a lot more room to move around, but we’re still investigating the downstairs, so I’ll get back to that.

As you can see in the picture, there are not nearly as many people as I might have led you to believe, but there were still an ample amount. You can also see that the walls are still painted from top to bottom, and there’s decoration as far as the eye can see. Unless you’re looking out those crooked windows, because even downtown Florida, a place filled with more crap than you can imagine, looks bare compared to this single establishment. And you can also see a couple of the games along the back wall, and I’ll hint at it now, that’s one of, if not the best part of this McDonald’s.

There’s the kid’s/birthday area. It’s just as covered in fancy as the rest of the place, and it’s even got those cool character chairs. Just looking here, can you imagine how exhilarating it must be for a kid to have his birthday party here? Even to attend a party here? Or Hell, if you were going to go to a party here, chances are that you live close enough to go whenever you so desired. And that would be great. A place like this is just one of those places you have to go to more than once if you ever get the chance. Just like Disney World, and I have been there twice. Not to boast or anything, though.

Ack! It’s the attack of the blurry camera invaders! I swear… It’s not that I screwed up. No. I’m good at taking pictures. What’s that? I already admitted to screwing up at the beginning? Damn. Hoisted by my own petard. Now while that phrase makes very little sense according to dicitionary.com, I’ll take the Family Guy quote for what it’s worth. Now back to the stuff and such, this is the opposite wall to the kid’s area, and you can see that it’s covered in games, and the floor is absolutely cluttered with eating place. It’s actually quite hard to move through the tables themselves, even when they’re unoccupied. Going around the perimeter may be a longer trek, but it certainly is easier.

Oh gah! It’s even blurrier than the last. Luckily, this one I can chalk up to wanting to take the picture fast so that girl wouldn’t think I was taking a picture of her. It’s just one of those things you have to watch for when you have a camera. You see the aquarium. It’s cool and blue, but the fishies inside leave something to be desired. They’re tropical aquarium fishies and all, but they’re no eels or mantis shrimp or anything really awesome like that. Just plain old angelfish and other brightly coloured aquatic critters. It is pretty big though, so it’s not a total loss. And even if they aren’t special, fish are always fun to watch, in a bored sort of way.

You know, I think it might actually get better after this one. I’m not sure, but we can hope, right? This little corner is jungle themed for some reason that I can’t explain. It comes complete with tons of leaves and flowers hanging from the ceiling, a little statue thing with some water in it, and a rather dark air altogether. It certainly is different from the rest of the restaurant, and it really shows that they were trying to please as many as possible. This way, plant lovers can bask in their flora, and goths can sit in a dark corner. Fun for everyone!

and now, we get to the best part of the whole entire place, and one of the biggest highlights of my trip. Yes, it’s something that only I would get super-hyped about, and yes, I realize that it qualifies me as a huge loser, but damned if my heart didn’t stop when I saw this beauty…

Mc-freaking-Donald’s has an F-Zero AX machine!!!! Just like it says in the title bar! Ever since GX came out, I’ve been searching the city for one, but up here in Canada we’re lucky to get cool stuff late, and most of the time, we just plain miss out on it. I’ll tell you this, If one of these machines does take up residence in Winnipeg somewhere (please inform me if you know of one!), I haven’t been there, because I know I would have used or at least caressed it once by now.

To make my severe geekness a little more understandable, I love F-Zero. I’m not a huge racing fan, but the Nintendo racers have always had a special place in my heart. Mostly because those are the only ones that you can control without being a racing freak. Damn that Gran Turismo and it’s complexity. Heck, damn all sim racers for being too hard for me to understand. But F-Zero, it’s not like that. The car turns when and where you want it to turn. If you want to make a sharper turn, you hold the sharp turn button. None of this spin-out, drift and slow-down-when-turning funny business. Just me, the track, and 29 other racers. All set to awesome music and beautiful sci-fi scenery.

and the arcade game only capitalizes on everything there is in GX. For one, the seat moves around while playing. And since it’s an extreme racer, it moves a lot. So much it needs a seat belt. And then the speakers are right in behind your head, so those awesome tunes are blaring in your ears all the way to the finish line. It may sound distracting, but anyone who doesn’t like a hardcore mix of the Mute City music needs a serious re-evaluation of their musical tastes. Plus it sets the mood really well. I’ll even throw in this link, which you can follow to download every track from every F-Zero game. The steering was a bit touchy and oversensitive, but was easy to get used to.

Oh, just look at that. A perfect picture after all of that blur. Fitting, isn’t it? Well, there’s yet ANOTHER great thing about this machine that I didn’t yet mention. If you’ve got an F-Zero GX game save, and you bring your memory card, you can slot it in here and unlock a bunch of new machines, tracks and parts to play on GX. Yes, you can unlock them without AX, but it’s freaking hard. Just ask anyone who’s played the game. Finishing the races on the AX machine is a helluva lot easier. And even though it might cost you a couple bucks to do it, the experience is definitely worth it. This is one of the greatest arcade games I’ve ever played, topped only by Pac-Man, Ms Pac-Man(which was also at this particular McDonald’s), and Bust-A-Move.

So now that I’m done with that little rant, it’s about time that we moved upstairs. Like I said earlier, up here there were no tables or chairs, so it was a lot less crowded, and access to games was much more convenient. If you turn around while heading upstairs, or happen to be on your way down, you’ll see the scene pictured above. While the downstairs was built around the premise of eating and playing F-Zero, the upstairs is a much more patriot-friendly place. But of course, only for the American visitors. Foreigners like me feel completely out of place, eh.

Holy crap. Now that one is bad. More patriotism with the flag-bearing Lady Liberty, and behind her is a huge and brightly lit wall. Inside that wall is the prize room. Not only is this place awesome, it also takes the premise of Chuck E. Cheese’s before it and implements a ticket/reward system. All the prize-type games might have been upstairs, but I’m not sure, since I didn’t even give most of them a second glance. I was far too caught up in F-Zero. It’s kinda very sad that I’m obsessing so much about a single arcade machine, but I’ve been looking for one for months, so I technically could have had a orgasm when I saw it and still been in the right. But I didn’t, so I’m not totally screwed for finding a girl yet. (Note: Even I have a limit when it comes to video game hype.)

And the monstrous ball pit/climbing structure is something you just can’t ignore. This thing, like the restaurant, it huge. I couldn’t go in it, of course, but you know I wanted to. All the twists and turns and windows and things inside. It’s a spelunker’s paradise. In the first picture, you can see a Rollercoaster Tycoon sign of some sort; it’s a pinball game. I thought it was pretty cool, but not cool enough to earn a picture. And in the second, you can’t really see anything. I’m almost ashamed at how bad these pictures turned out, but it’s not like it’s something I can just go back and re-shoot any time I want, so they’ll have to do.

I played a mere two games while I was here. That may sound quite odd, but you already know about the F-zero AX situation. “What was the other game?” you ask? Well, in my entire life up to this point, I’ve only spent money on one woman; Ms. Pac-Man (I make things for my mom, or get my dad to buy stuff. I’m not totally heartless). Now seeing as that statement pretty much ensures me to be single for the rest of my life, I might as well keep going, as I’ve nothing left to lose. …Strange. I think I’ve typed out a phrase similar to that in an older article. Maybe it’s just one of those inaccurate feelings of déjà vu. I don’t know, and I don’t care enough to check. Now bring out the next picture!

You’ve all played one type of Cyclone game or another. Unless you’ve never been to Rucker’s or Chuck E. Cheese’s, but that’s impossible, so I’ll assume you all know how it goes down. In any case, they had both this Cyclone machine, and an identical machine called “Titanic” almost side-by-side. Maybe it’s in case of a busy day, maybe they’re just being redundant. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, but I do know what didn’t kill her. Smoking. Ah, now that’s two Family Guy quotes that don’t quite fit. Oh well, they bring back good and funny memories, so I’ll leave ‘em there. Family Guy rules.

And now that we’ve seen pretty much everything there is to see in this Super McDonald’s, it’s time that I leave. It had to happen, but not after one final race across Mute City. Well, after that, I was done, we had to leave for real, and on good timing, too, because there wasn’t anything else I really wanted to take pictures of. But on the way out, there’s one thing that stares you in the eyes through the whole long walk to the exit.

The ice cream bar. The most magical gift the human race has ever been given, and my last stop in the world’s biggest McDonald’s. There wasn’t a huge selection of flavours to choose from, but all the best ones were there; bubble gum, cookies n’ cream, mint chocolate chip, rainbow, chocolate, chocolate swirl, yellow, and a couple less noticeable ones. I, the ever-hungry pile of human I am, decided that I would delight myself with some of this ice cream even though I’d just eaten 4 double cheeseburgers, a super-sized drink and 3 portions worth of fries. I got the yummy bubbly gum flavour that I haven’t had in the years since the awesome ice cream place we used to go to closed down. That was a sad summer for everyone.

See? Blue. It also matched the sign outside if held up properly. You might also notice that it says “internet” in the window. Yes, they had internet. Yes, I could have made a little post while inside. But it cost money and it was a touch screen, and I had racing and dot-eating to do. So I opted not to and simply went on my way.

And that’s the end of that adventure into the wilds of fast-food land. Actually, if you compared it to the rest of fast-food land, it would be like the throne room where the king sits and get really fat. And now that I’ve typed over 3100 words about a McDonald’s restaurant, I have to go and wonder why I’m not doing this for money. Seriously. I would love to get paid for the site, but it’s not going to happen. So while I flush that pipe dream, I’ll leave you with a couple closing statements.

1. If you’re ever in Orlando or anywhere remotely close to it, make sure you visit this place. Even if you don’t like McD’s food, they’ve got something for every taste. They’ve probably even got caviar if you’re into that kinda stuff.

2. Buy me an F-Zero AX machine for my birthday. It’s still 4 months away, but you’ll need to start saving now. If nothing else, get me GX and a racing wheel so I can pretend.

3. Yes, they have a Bill Cosby standy. If that’s not reason enough to travel down to America’s wang, I don’t know what is.

Disney World Day One: Highways From Hell

I guess I can say a lot for myself. I’ve been to Disney World twice before I reached the 18th year of my life. It’s a lot more than most people can say about the same topic, even if there are a few who’ve been there more. Other than that, though, I haven’t really accomplished much. But this isn’t about how I’ve done nothing noteworthy with my life up until now, it’s about my second trip to Disney World. So I guess I’d better start on THAT then.

It all started way back in January, when I caught wind that my aunt and uncle (who had taken me on my first visit to the Disney World) were going to take my brothers there in April, since they hadn’t been on the first trip. My parents were feeling bad for me, so they decided that they’d spring to send me if I saved a couple hundred bucks and pitched in. With an offer like that, there was no way to refuse. Only I had no steady income, so I was lucky to have a nice little nest egg saved away. But that wasn’t enough, and I still owe my parents a little coinage. Nothing big though, I’ll just work it off like one of those cartoon characters who forgets their wallet when they go to a restaurant and has to clean dishes to pay the bill.

So about a month later we went over to their house, where my bros were informed of the good news. Only there was a surprise twist for everyone. Instead of my aunt and uncle taking the four of us, they were just going to let my parents go instead! So now the whole family (except me… how did that happen?) gets a free trip to Orlando, Florida to bask in the sun and experience the wonder that is Disney World. I guess there’s something to be said for having siblings. For my mom having siblings, anyway. Rich siblings.

Fast forward two months. We spend the whole weekend doing a whole bunch of random crap, and completely neglect the fact that we need to prepare to go on vacation for a week. So Monday rolls around and we start toying with the idea of packing. Tuesday comes, and everyone is packing all evening and night. I carefully pack more than enough clothes to last me the week, not adding in the washing machine factor. My suitcase is almost stuffed, and this will become a key factor near the end, so remember that. Nobody really gets any sleep, and before anyone realizes it, it’s three o’ clock Wednesday morning, and we have to be at the airport by 4:30

We’re totally packed, confident that we have everything, and are waiting for our rides. Both sets of my grandparents came to take us to the airport since there are so many of us and so much luggage to go along. Now, it’s about 3:15, and my parents expect that we’re barely going to make it. Problem is, they forgot to factor in the lack of traffic in the middle of the night. So I’m perfectly confident that we’ll be on time. It might have been my keen intuition, it might have been the lack of sleep, but I wasn’t nearly as in a rush as everyone else. So I took a picture of myself just before I stepped out the door. And because I was the main photographer, this is one of the very few pictures with me in it.

Ugh… My neck seems to have rolled horribly. Oh well. It’s not like that’s how it is all the time. Keeping on track, I hopped in the van and popped on my shades. My grandpa remarked that it was too early to be taking flash pictures, and nobody commented on the sunglasses at night thing, because that’s the kind of thing I do. My family knows me well enough to not bother asking questions when I do something strange. So as I so cockily predicted, we made it to the airport with ample time to spare. Enough time, in fact, to enjoy a Tim Horton’s coffee. Well, the coffee drinkers did, that is. Me, I just complained that we had to wait half an hour. And it was only going to get worse from there.

We unpacked all the stuffs and moved them inside. After waiting in line for a good half hour, we waved bye bye to the grandparents and moved onto the customs. Now I’m pretty sure that all those people who claim that customs is really harsh are all exaggerating, if just a little bit. All I had to do was put all my crap in a bucket so they could scan it. Then we sat around and waited for the plane to get ready. This took another half hour at least. Finally, we were aboard the plane. And waiting. Again. Only a short wait this time, and after the captain gave the OK, I busied myself in my GameBoy for the flight.

There were two major problems with this flight. One, was that my brothers had never been on a plane before, so they got dibbs on the window seats. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but watching out the window of a plane is strangely entrancing. Secondly, due to the stupid part of the population who have allergies (or was it idiots who choked on them? I’m not sure), I received no airplane peanuts. Instead, I was offered a granola bar and orange juice, which I grudgingly accepted, cause I’d had no breakfast. The granola bar was so-so, but whatever kind of orange juice they’re serving, it must be squeezed from the oranges of Eden, cause it was the best freaking OJ I’d ever tasted. After 45 minutes or so of playing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, the captain said to turn off electronics and we landed.

Our first stop was the Minneapolis airport, where we would transfer onto our flight to Orlando. Since we had 2 whole hours to waste, we stopped in at one of the local McDonald’ses. I’ve gotten tired of hotcakes over the years, so I did something completely out of character and got m’self a McGriddle. Now I’ve read the review on X-E, and I know you can see yourself getting unhealthier as you eat it, but I wanted one, dagnabbit. I tried the eggs and bacon variety, and for someone who doesn’t like eggs, I thought it was pretty damn good. Also noteworthy was a sign for the McRib, which instantly reminded me of the “Ribwich” episode of the Simpsons. And if you think a whole paragraph about an airport McDonald’s is bad, just you wait. There’s a big surprise in the near future.

After that, we wandered the monstrously huge airport in hopes that we’d make it to our gate before takeoff. Yes, the Minneapolis airport is that huge. We did make it, and with a good hour to spare too. Fortunately for us, I have a special ability that lets me figure out where I need to go by reading signs that tell me which way to go. So we sat down, I played more Castlevania while listening to some sweet OC Remix tunes, and the time ticked by. It was getting boring, so we formed two groups; one which would sit and wait due to laziness, and one which would adventure in search of cool stuff to look at and/or buy. Surprisingly, I was in the latter.

So we walked down one hall, and then realized that there was nothing interesting to be seen in an airport other than the excess of “The Daily News” stores and went back to sit down. On the way back, I was distracted by a vending machine that had on display two types of bagged potato product: Potato Skins and Fritos. Now I’ve heard of Fritos, and they might be from the same guys who make Lays, and that was even more mind boggling, because there were Lays in the machine as well. I had no change on me, so I wasn’t able to find out. I guess it’ll be a mystery to me forever. As for the Potato Skins, I don’t know what’s going on there, but the bag says “T.G.I. Friday’s”, so I’ll just assume the worst.

Eventually we got on the plane and started to fly away. This time, I got the window seat, as evidenced by the picture above. If you’ve never seen the top of clouds, there you go. Look remarkably like the bottoms of clouds, don’t they? Anywho, this flight was going to be about three hours long. It was a good thing that I brought a lot of stuff to do. I popped on the ol’ headphones and booted up the GameBoy Advance SP. Things were good until I got to Death (still playing AoS, of course). Now he wasn’t much of a pain in Normal mode, but on Hard, he gives you quite a bit of trouble. So that got annoying and I gave up.

The “flight attendant” came around eventually, and offered not a granola bar, but a bag of pretzels. These were a bit closer to peanuts, but still not the same. It would have been okay had they been good pretzels, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: airline pretzels suck. And that’s all there is to it. The OJ was the same as on the prior flight, and I enjoyed it muchly. Now you may be wondering why exactly I took a picture of my “lunch”. Well, on the first trip to Disney World, I took several pictures of my food, and it had turned into a running in-joke with my family. So of course, before I left, I was reminded on several occasions to take pictures of my food. Sadly, this is one of only two I remembered to snap.

After I had become bored with Castlevania, I moved onto MegaMan Battle Network 2, and did a little bit of NetBattling with my brother. See, there are these secret battle chips hidden in the game, and the only way to get them is to play against a friend. And of course, to make it a bit harder, they show up randomly. That’s the bad part. We played over 100 battles and only managed to get four out of ten of these secret chips. BN3 had the same problem, but there was only one secret chip per version. And I’m delighted to hear that BN4 supposedly has none of these horrible things. On the upside, that did waste about an hour and a half, so it wasted a good amount of time.

Now I’m convinced that we were riding in some sort of Transformer, mostly because it’s a funny thought, but also because the wings kept changing shape. Now I know that they do that for a reason, but it’s a lot funnier if I pretend that I don’t. Just look at this shot compared to that other wing shot and tell me that there is no huge difference. …Ah, this is really a waste. It’s not nearly as funny in writing as it is in person.

After the lengthy GameBoy session, we cleared the bunch of clouds, and I watched the scenery go by as we slowly got closer to our destination. There are a lot of things that you can see from up in the sky, and one of those just happened to be a building shaped like and S! And not just any S at that. Specifically, it is shaped much like the S in the Metroid symbol. I thought this to be odd and worthy of writing about, so I took a picture of it and circled it in red because without the circle it’s kinda hard to see. Take it as you will, but I think that it’s some sort of conspiracy. Conspiracy of what? I don’t know, that’s why it’s a conspiracy.

After a short nap and some more window-watching, the plane finally arrived. We got out and were astounded by what we had to travel to get to our baggage. See, the Orlando Airport is divided into two buildings; one where you board and get off the planes, and one where you enter/leave the place, pick up your rental vehicle, and deposit/claim baggage. These buildings are amply far away from each other, and to travel between them, you get to ride a monorail. And it’s not just any monorail. It looks like it came straight out of some futuristic movie or something. That’s about it. If you failed to be impressed, you need to see it to get the full effect. Really cool monorail.

So we rode that, picked up our luggage, and went to pick up our vehicle. Only problem was, out of all the vehicle rental dealies, we got the one with the longest line. Talk about getting the shaft. So after about another half hour, we were finally on our way to our hotel.

This in itself proved to be an even bigger problem. Something had gone askew and neither my mom nor dad could figure out where we were supposed to go, even though they had two maps, one specifically printed off the internet to tell us where to go. After we’d finally collected our bearings and figured out where we were (this took almost an hour), we scanned the map to find out where our hotel was. Now there were two possibilities; either our hotel was the only one not on the map, or we were headed somewhere that didn’t actually exist. To our relief, we found the place after driving all over town all day. And what a town it was. There was so much crap there that you could be there a month and not see everything. As I was already aware, the same would apply to Disney World itself.

This is where we stayed, the Marriott Residence Inn. It was a nice place, and it seemed to be relatively new as well. Trust me when I say that this picture doesn’t show even half the place. The place had everything I could ask for; free breakfast buffet, an arcade room, full cable TV, and an internet-ready PC. I know I didn’t make any posts during the trip despite having the tools to do so, and I can justify that. Every time I went to try to get on the PC, there were some stupid teenage girls IMing it up, even though there was a framed sign right next to the thing that said, and I quote “For business purposes only. No chatting, please.” As useful as it is, I hate instant messaging. It just causes me to have less access to computers. Scratch that, I hate kids who use computers only for chatting, as they are most likely morons who know little more than how to use their P2P and IM programs, and don’t deserve to be allowed to use computers.

 

Here are the pictures of the room that we stayed in, which is actually five rooms. One main room, with kitchen and lounge areas, two bedrooms, and two bathrooms. This is quite possibly the fanciest place I’ve ever stayed, so I was impressed to say the least. I, of course, stayed on the couch-bed. I always choose the couch-bed over one of the real beds. Why? I can’t explain it, but I prefer the humbleness of it all. Oh, and there were three TVs, one in each main room, so everyone could watch what they wanted all weekend. My brothers’ was seemingly stuck on MTV, because I don’t think it ever changed. My parents did their thing, with the reality crap, and me, well I was captivated by a lot of the fancy American channels.

For most of the week, my tube was set to the Cartoon Network or the WB, and changing only to watch a little hockey and Big Daddy, which, if you haven’t seen it, is a great movie. For the first couple days though, it was set to this one channel which was constantly looping this one promo for Disney World about the seven best attractions there. Now why would I watch this channel endlessly when I have trouble making it through a half-hour sitcom? Simple answer there: hot host. Seriously. It’s not exactly the most dignified reason, but it’s the only reason I watched the thing even once.

Ooh! Here’s a good one. Check that out! It’s a silver and green fire hydrant, and not some kind of prop either. All of the hydrants were these funky colours. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m always amazed by fire hydrants painted colours different than red and black/yellow. The red hydrant is the stereotype, and stuff like that is always constant. Why do places change the world-known colours? It’s just crazy, that’s what it is.

By the time we were ready to get a move on, it was already seven or later, so we didn’t have a whole lot of time to adventure, but there were two must-see stops on our short first-day tour of Orlando. The first we had previously seen on the food channel: the world’s biggest McDonald’s. I told you it was only going to get worse. And it gets even worse than that, too. This place was HUGE. I’m sure everyone’s been to a Chuck-E-Cheese sometime in their life. Well this place was at least twice as big. It had 2 floors, tons of games, play areas, and decorations, and the most shocking part was that along side the regular McD’s fare was real food. Gourmet crap, pizza, real sandwiches, seafood, salads, and even a dessert bar with waffle cones! This place had EVERYTHING.

In fact, it was so big that I’m going to write a full article about it. It was probably the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, and I was ready to go home afterwards. It was like a whole vacation spot in itself. Let me say this, if you ever go to the States for a trip and you don’t know where to go, head straight to Orlando and check this place out. It will absolutely blow your mind. But enough gabbing on about how great the place was, I was damn hungry by that time. I usually have an equal of four meals a day, and I had had less than one during this whole day, so I needed a big meal. Four double cheeseburgers with super-sized fries and drink hit the spot in a way I didn’t think McDonald’s could. The only repercussions were that the pipes were blocked up for three or four days afterwards.

On the way out, I picked up a cone of the ice cream variety and we started out to our second location: the legendary 24-hour Wal-Mart. And we were lucky that it was open 24 hours, cause it was at least nine by the time we left. Finding it wasn’t too much trouble, since we got some advice from some friendly locals and were on our way in no time.

As you can see, we did get there, even though everyone who we told about it said we’d not have enough time to make it there. Oh we made it there alright, and at least two other times during the week as well. We’re just one of those families who will eat at McDonald’s twice in a day and find time to visit Wal-Mart three times while on a weeklong vacation to Disney World. Now is when you get to feel a lot better about your own family, unless they would do the same.

But this Wal-Mart wasn’t only just open 24 hours a day, it was also a Super Wal-Mart. It was huge in comparaison to any other Wal-Mart I’d ever seen, even that one Bizzarro Wal-Mart (That was on a completely different adventure. I fell asleep while in the van on a trip to hockey one day, and woke up to enter a Wal-Mart that was the exact opposite of the local store.). So of course, it had a hell of a lot more crap in it, but it also had an entire grocery store in it. The only thing wrong with it was that the electronics section was shamefully small and poorly stocked. It was less than half the size or my local Wal-Mart’s electronics section, and just slightly bigger than most Electronics Boutiques (That I’ve seen, anyway).

After stocking up on root beer, juice, foreign cereals, and various other foodstuffs, we left the giant store and headed home for the night. All in all, it had been quite a day, and it was still only the first of eight. We all knew that it was going to be a very busy and fun week, and that we had plenty of walking and a lot more waiting ahead of us. At least the weather down in Florida is a lot better than it is up here in crusty old Winnipeg. And the scenery too, the grass was a brilliant shade of green, the palm trees were everywhere, and most notably, there were eye-catching monuments of buildings everywhere. Among the most notable of those buildings were an upside-down museum thing, a huge inverted metal pyramid (the Hard Rock Vault), and one big freaking shoe on top of a closed-down sporting goods store.

After we got home, I ate some more, watched a little TV, audited my pictures and went to sleep after a rousing round of Ms. Pac-Man. So ends my tale for now, but be sure to tune in for part two of this extraordinary adventure, where we make our first stop at the Magic Kingdom, visit Wal-Mart for the second time, and discover a giant outlet mall where dreams come true.

2004’s Easter Egg-stravaganza!

It’s been Easter again. Last year I did that big Egg-stravaganza thing, but this year it’s just a little photo collection. But why have I gone all half-assed? For one, there wasn’t really enough to make a real article out of, and none is really as interesting as that mystery chocolate was. Secondly, it’s more or less that same thing as last year, but with more of the “random stuff” than things that stand out. Finally, I’m just too friggin’ lazy to even try to pump that many words out when it’s not meant to be done. And finally for real this time, I can’t put together a second good intro for an article about the same thing as another. Not that my intros are all that great, but damned if I’m gonna do it.
To make up for the relatively small amount of text, you’ll notice that I make the font a lot bigger. Now it looks like something Maddox wrote! Hooray. But I have to get this ball rolling, so without any further ado, we shall plunge right into the second and last of my Easter-themed articles!

First off we have the Peeps Bunnies. Now I wasn’t a huge Peeps fan before, as you may recall, but this is stupid. Go back to the birds. Sure it’s the same thing, but at least make the damn things white or some other bunny colour. Pink is not a colour that I like to be associated with. When I use Peach in Super Smash Bros Melee, I always switch to the white costume. When using Zelda, I’m always Sheik. I don’t like pink. Peeps were created yellow and should stay yellow. I refused to read a paper we got in math class because it was pink. Boo, Peeps, boo.

Next thing I took a picture of is the marshmallow bunnies. More pink here, but an acceptable level of such. As you can see, there are only four bunnies in the picture. There were more, but they were communists, so I was forced to eat them. I think that these bunnies are much better than the Peeps Bunnies. Peeps just aren’t that good. And don’t you try to tell me different, because you know that I’m right. Why Peeps have so many fans is way beyond my comprehension.

Another Reese egg came around this year. I’m not sure what last year’s Reese egg tasted like, but I’m pretty sure that this one was worse. It tastes pretty bad to tell the truth. Reese should stick to the tried-and-true cups and give up trying to break into the egg market. They’re failing pretty bad there.

A box of Smarties. Gee, there are really interesting. The only thing I can say about ’em is that they’re chocolate flavoured and Easter coloured. They’re Smarties for God’s sake. Shut up.

Aaaah, the Cadbury Creme Eggs. Possibly the greatest delicacy of the Easter time. And that’s the saddest part. I just don’t seem to like these guys as much as I used to. What’s happening to me? Why do I not like junk foods that I once would kill for? Oh well, three Creme Eggs are better than one, so down the hatch they go. Hm. Word is an idiot. It keeps correcting “Creme” to “Crème”. Stupid computers. Wow I’m angry today. Why that is, I don’t know, as nothing has happened to me lately to justify said anger. Oh well.

Mmmm Mini Eggs. Now these things I’ll never not like. That candy coating… and the delicious chocolatey center… Oh wan I wish I could be eating them again right now. But again, there really isn’t much I can say about these. Other than their deliciousness, they’re pretty boring. Even the package is kinda lackluster.

Chocolate eggs. If you want me to say any more about ’em, fark you.

 

And this is the fantastic centerpiece of my chocolate empire. Or it was before it got eaten. You can’t quite tell, but it’s shaped vaguely like Homer. I was quite happy to receive a giant character chocolate, but then I realized why I hadn’t gotten one for so many years; the chocolate is of rather low quality, regardless of what the packaging claims. So it was a bit of a disappointment, but it’s a good box for putting stuff in. It’s even got a cool viewing window.

In an odd, ironic twist, my parents gave me a toothbrush. It makes sense, what with all that chocolate is gonna kill my teeth. Anywho, it’s one of those fancy-ass “spin brushes”, and I have no friggin’ idea how to use the thing. I can’t help it, I was raised on the normal toothbrush. So I’m going to have to get used to this behemoth… or just take out the batteries.

Last time I checked, the holiday was Easter, not Christmas. I’m grateful and all, but I’m as surprised as you are that I got something so expensive for such a low-level holiday. I guess it kind of explains the smaller amount of candy though. In any case, it saves me $60, so I won’t complain. I know you’re all kinda spooked that I’d want a Pokémon game, but that would mean you don’t know me too well. I like the Pokémon games. Or at least Blue anyway. This is the first Pokémon game I’ve been able to truly enjoy since the Yellow version came out.

And it’s a lot different from other Pokémon games too. It’s a lot more evil than all the other games, and that almost makes it okay for someone my age to be playing. I just look at this guy here. He is a total badass. Not only is he buffed up, but he’s got a necklace of Poké Balls. I bet he stole ’em all, killed the creatures inside, ate them, and painted his face and dyed his hair with their blood. Nope, no characters in the other games would even think of pulling shit like that. Plus there are no random battles, so I love it. Random battles are the bane of my existence.
And that’s that. It’s over 1000 words, so it’s long enough to qualify as a proper mini-review, so you can’t complain about nuttin’. This Easter was kinda boring, and rather expensive, but it turned out pretty well. I played Pokémon Colosseum for 5 hours straight yesterday. There really isn’t any appropriate way to end this one. So I’ll just end it here. Happy belated Easter, heathen bastards.

The Good Stuff:
  • Tons of chocolate
  • I got a non-bargain bin console game? Holy shit!
  • Everyone loves Cadbury
    		•
    The Bad Stuff:
  • Chocolate gets annoying after you eat so much
  • Peeps bunnies are less fun to eat than the original Peeps
  • Am I rating a holiday? Materialism on a new level…
    		•

    The Cup

    We all have our favourite things in life, some a little more strange than others. Pretty much everyone has a favourite colour. It’s just a given. Most people have a favourite song or band, even if it’s not a real band, any group that doesn’t play their own instruments. Some people even have a favourite day. Those are the ones who are kind of off their rockers. I mean really. A favourite day? I can see a favourite season, and maybe even a favourite month, but favourite day? Favourite holiday would make more sense, because it’s a given that pretty much everyone is gonna choose a holiday as their favourite day.

    But enough of that. Talk of favourite days has very little to nothing to do with this article that you’re reading now. Maybe in one later on, but not this one. No, this one is about something even stranger. Well, maybe not very strange, but it’s a little bit on the odd side. I know people have a tendency to play favourites with many objects, like chairs and pants, and this article is all about my favourite cup. Why a cup? I’m not sure, but I needed to write about something.

    You may not realize it now, but there is actually quite a bit you can write about a cup if you choose the right one. I’m not sure exactly how much I’m going to be able to write about this cup, but I’ve taken a lot of pictures, so I’m probably going to be reaching quite a bit with this one. Heck, if you hadn’t noticed, I’m reaching pretty badly just for this intro, but since I do the same with most intros, it’s not such a bad sign as it could be. So enough of this, onto the cuppage!

    This is my favourite cup. It is a very cup-like cup, just like a cup should be. It has the ability to hold many types of liquids, and even some small non-liquid things. This cup is from Finland, where my grandpa used to live. He knows how to speak Finnish and has a sauna house. My grandpa immigrated to Canada when he was young, but I don’t know if this cup immigrated. Look at the happy little cottage on the cup. It looks like my grandparent’s cottage, only redder and on an island. It also has less windows and porches.

    On the other side of Heir Cuppen, there are some bird-looking squiggles and a Finnish flag. I like the Finnish flag because it’s so simple to draw. Not like that damned Canadian flag with its crazy leaves and crap. Why is there nothing on this little island? I would like to live on an island, but only if it had lots of island things on it. Like mountains and wild pigs and fairies. Then I could have my very own adventure on the high seas. An adventure with pirates! Or maybe I’d be a pirate. It’s really hard to say for sure.

    The cup says Aarikka on the side. I don’t’ know what Aarikka means, because I don’t speak Finnish. And neither does the Babel Fish. My grandpa is far away, so he can’t tell me, but an internet query surely can! Internet queries can tell you anything, like how to find Robot Pirate Island and how many web pages have the word “is” on them. Is. Now I’m a statistic!

    The Googleing came up with lots of answers, but I’m a lazy crapbag, so I only clicked on the first one. It make us whisk off to the magical site of Aarikka. If you don’t know how to read Finnish too, you can go to an equally magical (though slightly less whimsical) English Aarikka. They like to sell things. Things like finely molded cups from Finland. Now we all know what Aarikka is! Hooray for Google! Hooray for internet! Hooray for sammiches!

    But if it’s Finnish and white, why is the cup so great? You can’t notice from the other pictures, but the cup is very small! See the one above? The cup is being stood beside a normal-sized cup. Look how very small he is! What a cute little cup. Some people like to drink from big cups, but big cups aren’t so charming as such a tiny little cup. Those people have penis envy. But not me. I don’t envy penises. They’re always getting beaten up.

    The legend of the cup is a very old one. To this day, I have another favorite cup. It’s a cup with a lady on it. She’s a virgin. It says so right on the cup. On the other sides, it has my horoscope. but I won’t take a picture of that side because I’m a very lazy Virgo. I call it my girly cup because if you don’t know what the cup is, it sounds dirty. Nobody else ever drinks from it. They know that if they do they will die. The little cup is still an excellent cup, but there is no way it can compete with a girly cup. Unless…

    There are two little cups! For all my life up until yesterweek, I was under the false impression that there was only one little cup! But to my amazement, there was two! And they were both there all along! The cup now has a friend. Sadly, his friend has a chip. But not like my hamster. No, that’s a totally different Chip. How there could have been two cups all along is confusing, since someone like myself would definitely have noticed that there was two of my favorite cup!

    The little cups get used a lot. Everyone likes the little cups because they’re so cute. But don’t tell anybody that we know what Aarikka means, okay? I think that nobody else knows. I like to use the cups for drinking things. Sometimes I use it for taking pictures and writing an article with bad grammar and a strange writing style. But mostly for drinking things. Things like juice.

    Juice is good and all, but the cups are used mostly for the holding of milk. This milk is white, unlike the chocolate milk. It’s made by Parmalat. Parmalat might have a website like Aarikka, but I’m not going to check because there’s no way a milk website could be any fun. Milk isn’t very fun. It’s all white and tastes like dairy. Chocolate milk is a little bit more fun because it tastes like chocolate, but it’s brown-coloured, and brown is no fun at all. Brown makes me think of wood. And wood certainly isn’t very fun.

    As I said, the cup does do a good job of holding the juice that I love to drink so much. This juice here is of the orange variety. By Minute Maid. Mmmm. They makes good juice. But I don’t like the pulp. So I’ll drink Kool-aid instead. It never has any pulp, and comes in many different flavours! I like the green the best. Green Kool-aid is the best! It tastes like green. There aren’t enough drinks that taste like green. Some cream soda is green, but it tastes like cream soda and not green. Green Nintendo gum tastes like hate.

    One thing that the cup is not good at holding is parmesan cheese. Yes, the parmesan cheese can go into the cup, but it’s not a very god thing to drink. Parmesan cheese is better off on top of spaghetti noodles. Or any types of noodles, in fact. Parmesan cheese is a very tasty condiment. Just like orange is a very tasty juice. But parmesan cheese is not a very good juice, and orange is not a very good condiment. There’s a GameCube in the background!

    Now the GameCube is in the foreground. It’s good at playing games. Not like that X-Box. It freezes all the time because it’s a piece of crap. There is no controller cord in the GameCube because I use a Wavebird! It has no cords. Only fools use controllers with cords. Fools and peoples whose Wavebirds’ batteries are dead. But I have many batteries, so I shall never be labeled the fool. GameCube also has a GameBoy Player on it. GameBoy Player makes GameCube taller, but I’m still taller than it. But now GameCube is taller than the Shredder.

    The GameCube isn’t very good at handling parmesan cheese either. Damn Kraft and it’s cheese that thinks it’s better than everyone else. I laugh in the face of your cheese! But I’d never laugh in the face of Bowser. That guy has got some lethal breath. But GameCube is stronger than parmesan cheese, it can fall down many a stair and be fine, while parmesan cheese would break open and it’s insides would end up all over the place. You should E-mail Kraft and tell them that their cheese is weak. I’m not gonna do it, I’m scared of giant corporations.

    So now you see why I love the cups. They’re funny little cups that can hold many delicious liquids and not-so-delicious liquids. I like the fact that GameCube made a special guest appearance. As you can see, I am quite happy with my little cups. They bring my taste buds much joy, and are very easy to clean because if their smallness. If I bring one cup with me when I move out, it’ll be my girly cup, but there will always be a small place in my heart for those little cups that I thought were so cool.

    To make one last warning, the cup cannot hold pizza pops. It can try, but they are far too big to go into the cup. Also, you should not eat pizza pops cold. Frozen pizza stuffs will hurt teeth muchly if teeth are not uber-teeth. But if you microwave them, they can be a very tasty treat! Except for those ones with green peppers in them. Green peppers are my sworn enemy. I’ll get them one day…

    This cup is not a cup in the thirsty sense. It’s the kind of cup that keeps the boys safe. This cup is my friend’s favorite kind of cup. I think it’s a good cup, but I would never want to drink from it, no matter how much Kool-aid there is. My friend wanted to find a picture of it so I could put it in this article, and while looking he found some bad websites. He said it was gross, but we know that he likes that kind of stuff. Man stuff. Ew.

    And that’s all we can say about the cup and anything you could possibly link to the cup. It’s true. You try to find anything else I could write about. I don’t know if I’ll ever find a more amazing up in my lifetime, but I’ll be sure to keep an eye out. And if I do find one, you can bet I’ll let youse know. But for now, it will remain the second greatest cup in the cupboard. Sure, it’s cool and all, but how can it possibly beat a cup that has my freaking horoscope on it? I think the only possible way to make a better cup is to make a cup vaguely shaped like Yoshi. Yes. That would be an excellent cup.

    Another article done, another week passed by. I think I like this once a week thing, so I’ll stick to it as well as I can. Just expect that sometimes it may be once every two weeks. I guess most updates will be done on Sundays, as I generally do very little on Sundays. Mmmm… sundaes. I’m not exactly sure what will be on the agenda for next week, but another 6-pak article seems to be the only thing I can think of. But I’m done now, partly because my keyboard arm is starting to hurt, partly because it’s way past lunch and I haven’t eaten yet.

    The Hamburger Game

    I know that as of late, a lot of my content has been revolving around video games. I intend to stop that trend with this here article. I haven’t really written about anything non-video game for a while (excluding holiday specials), and it’s making my site seem too video game-oriented. Of course, that’s what I love, so it’s okay, but that’s not why I made the site. I wanted to write about all sorts of different stuff. That includes toys, games, food, movies, whatever. If I can think of something I love and think might interest others, I’ll write about it.

    I’ve been playing board games my whole life, and you think by now I’d be pretty good. But the fact of the matter is, it’s almost always up to the dice to decide who’s gonna win. A lot of them are games of chance, and very few require a lot of skill or thinking. That’s why for the most part, they’re aimed at children. But hey, they’re fun, and that’s why I’ve been spending a lot of time playing them lately.

    During the last semester of school, me and my friends have been playing board games a lot during spare. At first it was Monopoly. We played Monopoly for months. Every day we played at least one game. It was starting to get annoying, so we mixed it up by playing Star Wars Monopoly instead. Then when we got annoyed with that, we moved onto Star Wars Battleship. That one didn’t last too long, but I did have a much better record, 5-1, than I did at Monopoly, 5-(no clue). We knew we had to find something new and fast. That’s when I remembered the Hamburger Game.

    One of the most cherished of my childhood memories, the Hamburger Game is still one of my personal favorite board games to play. Most of my friends think it’s exceedingly stupid, but I love it. I mean, how could you not like a game that is about food? All food-type games I can think of are great; the Hamburger Game, Pizza Party, Grape Escape, and to a lesser extent, Candy Land. Actually, the Grape Escape game is a lot better than all of them if you just intend to smash the Play-Doh grapes over and over, but I still think quite highly of the Hamburger Game.

    Oh, and one more little thing before I really get into it, my friend took all the pics, not me. I know he hasn’t learned the word ‘focus’, but I don’t actually have the game, so there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. Just keep in mind that I didn’t take them, so you shouldn’t get angry at me when you can’t tell whether a picture is of a tomato or a jackalope. Not my fault. Got it? Just wanna keep myself on the innocent side here. Ok, back to the thingy.

    Above, you can see the game board. It’s full of all sorts of crazy crap, and may even seem a bit confusing if you have no idea how the game is played. But the rules of the game are actually quite simple. There are two to four players competing to collect all the pieces for their burger. It’s just like a big game of memory, with a die and pawns. And even the pawns are pretty basic, as they’re the same pawns that come in 60% of all the board games out there.

    In the center here, we have all the little white spaces where all the burger pieces are placed. The only trick is that they’re face-down!! I guess it doesn’t seem so easy now, does it? You may also notice that the lettuce seems to be hitting on the tomato, but I’ll get to that a bit later. Basically, the way the game is played, is that the player rolls, moves, and then tries to find the burger ingredient that they landed on. If they find it, they get it. If not, tough cookies.

    When a player scores a piece, they get to put it in this handy little area to keep it safe from the others. It’s even got a little position for each ingredient. Isn’t that thoughtful? Now you may wonder, “But what if I only want a veggie burger? Or a burger without onions?” Well once again, tough cookies. You’re supposed to be some fast-food guy making burgers for real people who eat real burgers, not wuss-burgers. At least that’s what I like to think. I think you’re thinking that I’ve gotten way too into this game. And if you are thinking that, you’re right.

    This is what a complete burger… box… thing… looks like. Oh yes, and there’s one important little detail I forgot to mention. No matter how many times you land on it and find it, you have to pick up the bun last. Once again, you question the game’s logic, since the bun character is the whole bun, but the instructions say that it’s only the top of the bun. Besides, when making a burger, I imagine you’d gather all the ingredients before you start putting it together, so it makes sense in a roundabout way. Maybe that last paragraph didn’t make sense to you, but it worked in my head, so I’m not changing it.

    And this one is what the game might look like when being played, with all the pieces in place, and the crappy little pawns all over. Notice how they lack so much detail. I would have preferred comical standy characters, but when I think about it, there are no characters aside from the ingredients in this game. So I guess you get away with it this time, Chieftain Games. But next time… next time will be different. I’ll make the New Hamburger Game, and it will be the greatest game ever!! I’ll show you all!! SHOW YOU ALL! Ahem. You’ll have to excuse me. I tend to go insane from time to time.

    Ah crap! There is one more thing I forgot to tell youse. This space here is called “The Kitchen”. Sounds pretty hardcore, eh? Well, it is. It’s the only reason that I ever lose this damn game. You see, when you land on your own Kitchen, you can call any piece you want and go for it, but if you land on opponent’s Kitchen you’re screwed. In that scenario, they get to steal any piece that they want from you. And trust me, it’s a huge problem. Like I said, I always lose because of these damned squares!

    And now that I’ve given you an idea how the game goes down, we’ll take a look at each of the characters. Sure, by all means they’re just run-of-the-mill foodstuffs with faces, but my friends and I were able to give them all personalities. Yes, we have absolutely nothing better to do in the three hours we have between classes. Two spares in a row before lunch may sound like a good idea, but trust me, unless you want to waste a lot of gas, being stuck in school for that long is not very fun at all.

    Our first and most confusing character is Kelly Ketchup. The problem with Kelly is his/her/it’s gender obscurity. The name is no help, as ‘Kelly’ is regularly applied to both males and females. The character itself holds no evidence of sexuality either, as the face is as totally gender neutral as the rest of the body. Finally, Kelly isn’t even on the box, so there’s no way at all to tell which gender this particular bottle of ketchup is. Kelly is kind of like the Pat of the Hamburger Town.

    Next up is Billy Bun. There isn’t a whole lot to say about him. He’s the most annoying bun you’ll ever meet, because he keeps popping up when you don’t want to see him. I guess if anything, he’s a monster, because as depicted on both the box and the center square, he intends to eat all the other ingredients. He’s just making it seem like they’re going on a nice little ride, but when they’re all on there you just know he’s gonna munch ‘em all up like so many condiments before them. Gee… Now I really don’t like Billy.

    These two are Peter and Paula Pickle. There are two theories for these two. The first one, my theory, is that Peter is a cannibal and ate Paula, and on the tiles, she’s just a cardboard standy. My reasoning is that only Peter is on the box. So where is Paula? Where is she? The second, less appreciated theory is that they’re just normal pickles, but they enjoy the company of each other just a little bit too much, if you know what I mean. If you don’t get it, here’s a hint: it starts with an “In” and ends with a “Cest”. Another point of interest, my friend Stacey seems to harbour some sort of strange attraction to these pickles. I suggested that a cucumber might be more satisfying and was promptly kicked.

    This guy is Oscar Onion. As you can tell, he’s quite the wussy. Always crying, even on the box. Just look at the guy. He’s pathetic, like some sort of pity whore. I mean, maybe he realizes his fate and is very unhappy about it, but if I knew I was going to be killed and eaten, I wouldn’t stand around crying, I’d get the Hell out of there. Other than that, Oscar is a very uninteresting character. Just like real onions.

    If Kelly Ketchup is the Pat, then Marsha Mustard is the floozy of Hamburger Town. Just looking at her, you can see how much of a tart she is. And the proof is all over the box. On the cover, she’s clearly fondling the cheese, and then on the side she’s moved on to another of the condiments. Sure, maybe the guys who designed it just didn’t care about continuity, and they probably never thought that it would be analyzed by a bunch of immature teenagers, but that’s very unlikely.

    Charlie Cheese is another one of those characters that you really can’t make up anything funny about. He’s full of holes, so maybe he’s been shot a lot? All I know is that I have no respect for him, because he’s a sucker for that hussy Marsha’s seductive ways. Damn fool probably pays for sex. I guess there really aren’t any other characters fit for that job, as most of the others are male, dead, or lesbians. But maybe I should stop with all the sex jokes and stuff, this has gotten a little too dirty even for me. Oh well, it’s not like any kids read these things.

    Ah, good old “Beefy” Burger. This guy’s got a lot of problems. First off, he’s always on fire. Why? Nobody’s sure, but it is quite odd. Secondly, his name is in quotation marks, suggesting that he’s taken on a false name. Now why would he do that? The general consensus is that he is the one who shot Charlie full of holes. Why he changed his name we don’t know, as there are no cops in Hamburger Town. Well, ther’s that one guy, but he’s too busy chasing the Hamburglar. And there aren’t any other ‘Burgers’ there either. Did he really think changing his name would fool anyone? It didn’t fool me.

    Linda Lettuce. She seems quite happy and normal on the tiles, but take a closer look at the box and center of the board. It’s plain to see that she is glaring rather seductively at the tomato. Now this really doesn’t seem so bad, but wait ‘till you hear this; the tomato is a chick! That means only one thing. Linda is a lesbian. No bones about it, but it’s not like there’s anything wrong with that. She’s always after the tomato, too. At least she’s not a tramp like Marsha.

    Our last character is Theresa Tomato. Not only does she have to deal with constantly being hit on by Linda, but she’s also got quite a physical load to bear. She’s a plumper, and it’s impossible to deny. The fattest resident of Hamburger Town. That’s quite the title to have, and it probably wouldn’t be so bad if she was a guy, but she’s a chick and the truth is that our society is just not that kind to overweight women. She has Linda, at least, but otherwise must deal with the disapproving glares of all the other foodstuffs. Did you know tomatoes are berries? Poor Theresa. She’s probably praying for death.

    And that’s the whole crew. They’re some pretty farked-up foods, eh? What’s that? I’m the one who made it all up so I must be the one with problems? Nah, that can’t be. Remember, this was a team effort. I wrote this article all by myself, but a lot of the ideas came from my friends. Heck, I even drew a comic about it, and it’ll be posted up somewhere eventually.

    All in all, after playing this game a few times to bring back the fond memories, I can certainly say that it’s even more fun that I remember. It might have something to do with the fact that I was playing with people other than myself, but I think it also had to do with the fact that it’s so simple and fun after playing stuff like Monopoly for so long. I’d certainly recommend playing this game to anyone. If only it wasn’t so extinct. Sadly, my friends don’t love it quite as much as I do, and after about a week, we moved onto Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. I wish I had a lot of my old games…

    Well, that’s that. I guess it’s time for the little conclusion/news thing I do at the end of every article. If you didn’t pick up on it during the article, I really love the Hamburger Game, and so many other games I played as a child. They were a lot better back then, and more original too. I mean, there’s gotta be like 5 billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and at least 27 versions of Clue. And these are all that they’re making these days. I’d like to see some old board game remakes. Particularly the Hamburger Game, the Squirrel Game, and Rockin’ Robins. Ooh! And Shark Attack, but I think one of my friends might still have that one.

    So now that this is done, I guess I’ll move onto something new. I don’t know what that something is, but I’m sure I’ll find it pretty soon. I plan to finish the 6-Foot 3-Pak thing in the near future, and it’ll be in two installments, too, as the last two games are pretty huge in themselves. Valentine’s Day is just around the bend, but that certainly isn’t going to bring in any article material. I’m going on a trip soon, and with my soon-to-be-newly-acquired digital camera, you can expect pics of that to be up sometime. And with that, I’m done. I’ve passed 2500 words so there’s no more reason for me to hang around here.

    The Christmas Gift List of 2003

    It’s that time of year again, Christmas time. Or more accurately, it was that time of year again. The event itself is long done, but the season still lingers and won’t be gone until sometime around the time when school starts again. Our happy little holiday has come and gone, but like every year before, it has left its mark on pretty much everyone. As much as I hate to admit it, Christmas is celebrated by pretty much everyone and anyone, except the Jews. And I’m pretty sure they get a little of the spirit anyway, what with it being everywhere. Christmas is no longer a special holiday for us good little Christians, but an event for everyone. While that’s probably for the best, it seems a little unfair. But I’m not writing an essay on the commercialization of Christmas, so I’ll shut up about that before I really offend anyone.

    Cartoon characters argue about it all the time, and I’m not exactly sure of it, but I think Christmas is about giving, getting, love, the birth of Christ, and delicious baked goods all at the same time. I mean why not get a little bit of all the good stuff? Why settle for one meaning when you can have 5? It just makes sense. Today I’m gonna be focusing more on the getting side. In the wrong context, that sounds kinda dirty. As I did for Easter and my birthday, I’m going to be doing a rundown of every gift and treat that I got this Christmas. Unlike the former two, this one is gonna be divided into 2 pages. Why? Because I can.

    The first page (this one, for those of you who are a little slower) will show off the stocking stuffers and all the gifts that I got from people that don’t live in my house. After all that is through, you’ll find a link taking you to page 2. There, you can see all the stuff I got from my parents, my brothers, and the legendary Santa Claus (minus the stocking crap). Also, I’ll show a couple things that were addressed to the family rather than exclusively to myself. Then it’ll be done and I’ll provide a link to the Articles board in my message boards where you can discuss all sorts of crazy crap. Then comes my sig and e-mail address and then you’ll have to find something else to read. So let’s get started already!

    Actually, on one last note, the pics are a little bit lower quality than usual because my webcam software doesn’t get along with Windows 2000, so just bear with it for now until I find a proper substitute.

    As I stated in that long and unnecessary intro, we’ll start with the stocking stuffin’s and then move on to gifts from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. One little note before I start, not everything got immortalized in a picture, some stuff (mostly money) couldn’t be present at the time so I had to do without. Of course, I’ll make mention of the gift and who it came from, just for the sake of completeness. So, here’s my stocking:

    As you can see (if you look close enough), it has been stuffed to the point where it’s become misshapen and somewhat pointy. I myself hadn’t really rooted through it before I took the pics, I was waiting to get a picture of it before I was tempted to eat the delectable goodies that were sure to lurk inside. And lurk they certainly did. Let’s dump it out and see what’s inside.

    Ah, quite the pile of mess I’ve made. That’s the second thing I’ve typed that sounds really wrong without the proper context. While we can clearly make out a few things in the pile, I feel some strange need to arrange it neatly and take another picture so that you can tell what everything is without a detailed description. At this point I can see that it’s not quite as full of exciting stuff like it has been in past years, but the candy haul looks decent, so I’m happy.

    Ok, time for a list. In this bag we have:

    • A stuffed novelty Dallas Cowboys football. My dad was jealous until he got his.
    • A chocolate Santa on a stick. Clearly came from the same mold as the chocolate Easter Bunny on a stick.
    • Circular Candy Cane. So many C’s, none of them worth it. O_o
    • A gift certificate for some book store. I was far too disinterested to know which one or how much it’s worth.
    • Box of 5 CD-Rs. I guess half a box is better than none. Though I still have 13 left over from the birthday.
    • Net full of chocolate Santas. Also mysteriously shaped like the Easter Bunny chocolates.
    • Gift card for Blockbuster. This could be useful when I need to rent video games, unlock my door or pretend I have an important person keycard.
    • A stick of deodorant. Not my preferred brand, but it’ll do.
    • 5-pak of Tic-Tacs. That rhymed. Sweet.
    • Many, many Life Savers. All in a small, festive, book-like box
    • Mini-milk carton with the Cat in the Hat on it. I hate that cat. Apparently, the carton is filled with Whoppers. Anybody want some Whoppers?
    • Finally, a box of Hot Tamales. The cream of the crop? Yes.

    I usually don’t do lists, especially unordered lists, but it’s a special occasion. I think that in the end I made out pretty good on the candy front. I ended up with a box of Hot Tamales and a ton of Tic-Tacs. Those could have been the only things in the stocking and I’d have been fine. The Candy Cane thing is a good entry, but I frown upon the Whoppers. CD-R’s are nice to have, but I’ve got a ton already. And the money substitutes will no doubt come in handy sooner or later. I don’t buy books until I have a gift certificate, so it’s time for me to do some reading! So now that that’s covered, I’ll move on to the presents. Mmmm presents.

    Wouldn’t you know it, I just got out of a veritable grab bag and stumbled into a second. My grandparents always send a bag of useful-type stuff, littered with other less-useful fun things. This one came with deodorant (more Mitchum? Dammit! I told everyone I like Brut!), plenty of hair gel (it just hit me now that the blue bottle actually came in the stocking…), dental floss, gum, free golf, movie money, a scarf (which hadn’t left my neck until I took the pics), and some mittens. There was also a pair of boxers and some socks, but they were in the washing machine while I was taking the pics. I also got a new hockey stick, which is sadly enough in the same state as my old one; brand new. Not the absolute greatest stuff, but damned if I won’t appreciate getting it all.

    One of my uncles gave me fifty bucks. It came in a nice card which is now sitting on one of the many tables in my living room. My aunt and uncle who live way in Ontario sent a card with another forty dollars enclosed. It has also found a home somewhere in the living room among all the other cards. The money wasn’t able to show up because I didn’t feel like finding my wallet. It always gets lost in my room. Perhaps I should look for it? Nah. When I need it, it’ll find me. That’s what wallets do.

    Next up is the stuff from my other set of grandparents. The dark mass on the left is a new pair of jeans. They fit suspiciously well for new jeans. The only other jeans that have fit so well are jeans that have been worn in, but these had the tags and everything, so they certainly aren’t second-hand. Up on top is Big Shiny Tunes 8. I’ve been complaining that ever since 5, they’ve just been getting crappier each year, but I can’t complain with this one. It’s not too bad for a bunch of bands I never heard of. I still don’t like Linkin Park or Simple Plan, but “Get Loose” by The Salads makes it all worth it. If you haven’t heard the song, go listen to it now. Absolute best song from a band named after food ever. EVER.

    And if you can’t make out the title, the big block on the right is a Shmuzzle Puzzle. Never heard of ‘em? Well nor had I until I saw it on TV, and then I knew I had to have it. It’s only 160-some pieces, but they’re all shaped the exact same! And they fit together in like a billion ways, so I assume that it’s gonna be quite the challenge to get this bad boy done. The box even says it’s a twin threat to my sanity. But I love puzzles and threats to my sanity, so I know I’ll enjoy doing it.

    From another of my aunt and uncles, I got this little treasure; Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. If you liked Super Mario RPG, you’ll more than likely enjoy this one. If you liked Paper Mario too, you’ll definitely love this. It’s the perfect cross between the two, and I absolutely love it. There isn’t a single thing I can’t say a good thing about in this game. The story is great, the dialogue is hilarious, the graphics and sound are spot-on, and it’s about 20 hours for an expert (good time for a GameBoy RPG). Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, it’s fun too. The battle system is very interactive and you can’t really take your eyes off the action like in most RPGs. I love it. Plus, it’s got the Mario Bros.game I get hooked on so easily and finally, an unofficial two-player option for those with a GameCube and a GameBoy Player.

    From my cousin, another Big Shiny CD. Big Shiny 90’s this time. Mucho better than the other one, because it’s got music that’s closer to my preferred music era. Not only that, but it’s 2 CDs! Talk about your sweet deals. The not sweet deal is that it’s Volume 2, and I don’t have any volume 1 to speak of so I guess I’ll have to go searching for that now. It’s still a great compilation and I highly recommend it. From the fragments of commercial I can pick out of my memory I think the first one was better, but as it stands, I like this one just fine.

    I’m not quite at 2000 words yet, but it’s time for me to make the move into the next page, which will be a bot longer. Oops… I’ll leave it to your imagination whether that was supposed to be “bit” or “lot”. Maybe I really did want to spell “bot”. Maybe I should quit trying to squeeze in a bunch of extra words to make the unspoken quota. Then again, most of the tags are counting as words so it’s a little inaccurate. But that don’t matter, we’ll just say I ended this page with a healthy 1900 words. Be sure to click on the link below to find out what the rest of my gifts were. If you don’t, I’ll know. And then I’ll get you for it.

    [Pretend there’s a page break here. Years ago there actually was one!]

    I guess the best place for me to start off is where I left off. Now that you’ve seen all that various crap, it’s time for a lot more crap! Only this crap came from my parents, siblings, and there are even a few presents from me in there somewhere. And to top it all off are a few gifts that were addressed to the whole family rather than just for me. I know I’ve told you this before but I thought I’d remind you, and I just didn’t feel right starting with a picture.

    Every year for my birthday and Christmas, my dad gets me some sort of tool. I think it’s a pretty sweet deal, because I use them a lot. Maybe not for what they’re meant for, but I use them a lot. This year I got my very first wrench set. Now that’s great and all, but I asked for a saw (again) and it never came. Why I can’t have a saw is beyond me, but frankly I’m pretty disappointed. I love the wrenches and all, but they just aren’t a saw. Oh well, there’s always next year.

    Everybody should know that I adore the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If you don’t you do now. Sadly, I only got one action figure for Christmas, but it’s no big deal, I can just go buy the rest. I’ve already got all the figures from series 1, and Skatin’ Raph here is my first from series 2. Overall, it’s not that much different from the normal Raphael, except for the skates, his clothes, and the fact that his legs are stuck in a much more comfortable looking position. The skates themselves are quite large, but they work pretty well and ensure that he doesn’t fall over. My only complaint is that they didn’t paint as much detail on the actual figure as they did on the figure on the box. It’s really not a big deal, but I feel a bit cheated.

    My brother, on the other hand, got pretty much all of the ones he needed. Ironically, I think the only one that he’s missing is Skatin’ Raph. I’m quite jealous because I’ve been a Turtles fan for so much longer than him, and if it wasn’t for me, he probably wouldn’t even know about them. I think the jealousy is mostly rooted in the fact that he has the Casey Jones figure and I don’t, but I have him one-upped in other ways that are soon to follow…

    Back to the real world for a second, I’ll take a look at my CD’s. I haven’t been listening to Styx for a long time, but I really like the music, so I asked for the greatest hits and here it is. It’s a great CD, despite only having 11 songs, and I’m even listening to it as I type this. There is one song I don’t really like on it, but it’s not something I can’t learn to live with. After all, if I can tolerate the Three Days Grace song on Big Shiny Tunes 8 I should be able to put up with anything a real band can throw at me. Other than what I’ve already typed, there isn’t a whole lot I can say about a CD.

    I believe my exact word were “Not another damn puzzle”. Just kidding, I think it’s cool that now my sanity will be cumulatively threatened four times. This one might be a little easier than the water drop as it’s got lots of colours, but I haven’t tried to put it together yet so I could be horribly mistaken. These puzzles are only like 10 bucks, so I urge you to go out and get one if you often find yourself bored. Or you could get one of those bajillion-piece puzzles, but those don’t have any gimmicks, so they can’t possibly be any good.

    Just to diversify my gifts a bit, my mom decided that it would be good idea to get me a couple books. Only problem is that these books aren’t really books. Sure they’ve got words in them and all, but they’re mostly just for novelty’s sake. I mean, who actually reads through everything in the Guinness world record books? I’ll make it a point to be the first to do the feat and then I’ll get into the next one. I’m just curious if it came from the future, because it’s the 2004 book and there hasn’t been a whole lot of 2004 to make records in. That and it looks kinda futurey. The high point is that I found a new crustacean to top the most wanted pets list: the Japanese spider crab. Though I’d need a pool to keep it in because its leg span is over 2 meters long.

    Now the Mario & Luigi player’s guide. I don’t really need it, but I can honestly say that it has come in handy. I also like to just read guides as well. Don’t ask me why, because I couldn’t tell you. Just ever since I got the guide for Final Fantasy 8 I’ve been getting them mostly just to read. We all know that you don’t need a guide for a side-scroller, but I got the guide for Viewtiful Joe because I like to read them, it was Viewtiful Joe goods, and it was 20% off. That’s like 2 bucks off right there. Greatest deal ever.

    I got the second season DVD set of Friends for my 16th birthday, and I wanted the first and third this Christmas, but my mom was only able to find the third. I guess I’ll have to go hunting for it by myself eventually. Not a whole lot to say, but it’s got one of my favorite episodes on it, The One Where Nobody’s Ready. If you don’t recognize the title, it’s the episode where Joey puts on all of Chandler’s clothes at once. The special features aren’t very appetizing, but I like commentary so I’m happy. Oh yes, we got a DVD player a while ago, so I no longer have to use the PS2 or X-Block to watch stuff. Yay!

    I told you I’m a Turtles fan and I wasn’t lying. I wanted Turtles DVD’s, and I got one set. Only once again, it’s the third in the set, and my brother got the first. Obviously my mother is not aware of my preference of getting things in order. Not only that, but my brother wrecked the plastic covering of his while trying to open in so now the cover is taped on very, very badly. Not that if affects me, but I hate to see something so precious abused in such a way. Seriously, if you saw it, you’d hit him too.

    Now it’s time to set foot into the restaurant of video games and check out the real delicacies of the annual serving of gifts. Our appetizer, MegaMan Zero 2 is by far one of the hardest games of this generation. When I read the reviews I thought “Bah, they’re just babies, it couldn’t possibly be that hard” and I thought I was right, because they said the first game was hard and it wasn’t too bad. But when I popped this sucker in I got my ass handed to me. Getting killed in the intro stage generally means the game is hard or you suck, and I’m pretty confident that I don’t suck. But after some practice, I’ve been able to make it halfway through. My final opinion: I love it. We need more games like this. Capcom, I salute you.

    Our side salad is, of course, the TMNT GameBoy game. Unlike MMZ2, it’s not unbearably difficult, but it does offer it’s own challenges. Easy mode is quite simple, but once you get to Normal, you start thinking that maybe you got more than you asked for. And it’s fun too. It’s like the old arcade/NES games, except it’s pure 2D and there is (very sadly) no multiplayer support. But it’s still an above-par game. There is a password feature, but it doesn’t unlock anything worth being there. The other problem is that they chopped up the cartoon’s intro and shoved it in there. It would have been better off without the intro, rather than with the butchered garbage that’s in there. But it’s small, and skippable so I don’t mind too much.

    And now we get to the sweet, sweet main course of the bunch, the GameCube version of TMNT. Like the GBA game, it’s very similar to the old games, only it’s in true 3D. There is multiplayer support, but it only goes to 2-player. I bet if they didn’t have to put it on the PS2 as well, there would have been a proper 4-player mode. Oh well. The password system in this version is much better, as it opens plenty of things like new game modes and costumes. There is also a production art database, and being the art fiend I am, it pleases me muchly. Oh, and if all the crazy food metaphors are kind of confusing, I’ve been playing Mario & Luigi way too much, and you’ll understand if you play it.

    I’ve said I’m a Queen fan in the past, and as you can see above, I got myself a little something to commemorate my last big Christmas haul. Actually, we were shopping on Boxing Day and I’ve never seen these CDs anywhere, so I did what I had to do. I imagine the reason they’re so rare is because they’re the first two Queen albums, and they were released a long time ago. Of course, they are the CDs and not the records, so they’re not the originals, but I’m not complaining. The one thing I am complaining about though, is that Queen II has a remix of the Seven Seas of Rhye, which I though was just an extended version or something, but it’s really a techo-ish dance mix which really destroys the song. Other than that, they’re awesome CDs that belong in the libraries of any 80’s rock fan.

    Now we get to the family gifts. You can usually see a similar background in pictures of me that are on the site, but there’s one big difference (aside from the dog toys). The new weight bench we got is a lot better than our old piece of junk. This one’s even got a thing so we can do leg stuff as well. I may not seem like the type to be overjoyed by this kind of thing, but I am. Now all I need is some solid motivation and I’ll be in shape in no time. Ooh, it’s comfy too, so comfy in fact, that I was ready to use it as a bed one night. There was a whole bunch of (figurative) crap all over my real bed, so I just laid down. But then I got up and after some possibly amusing events I ended up sleeping on the couch.

    I had taken all the pics when I remembered about getting this beauty, so I just surfed on over to Saitek’s website and stole their picture of it. It’s so much better than the old 4-button Gravis gamepad I had been forced to use for the last few years. Now I can play my ROMs in style! I would use it for other games, but we don’t really have any computer games that would benefit from using this. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, FPS games are made to be played with a keyboard and mouse or at least a Nintendo 64 controller. I wonder if I could play Tiberian Sun with it?

    And that’s the whole lot of it. Every gift and goodie has been at least spoken of, and I’m ready to go and start a puzzle. Actually, to tell the truth, there is one thing I forgot to mention, and I’m sure it’ll make up for the one I missed in the birthday article…

    Ho ho ho! Enjoy, ladies!

    And that’s that. Sorry I couldn’t get this up closer to Christmas, I was planning to have it done by the 28th, but my PC got infected yet again and only a week after the holiday have I found time to finish up. And now that this is done, I an get to work on my English project of which I had 4 months to work on and have yet to start. It’s worth 10% of my grade so I guess I’d better get to work. I might even post some of the stuff I do for it on the site, so be sure to stay tuned.

    As for the future, I stated in a recent news post that January is exam month, and not only normal exams, but provincial exams as well. They shouldn’t be too hard, as all my classes this semester are language classes, and I find that to be my forte in school, but I till have to study or something like that, so I probably won’t have a lot of time for updates. It’s going to be another November/December. If I do post anything it’s gonna be a mini-review or submissions to the gallery. Sorry about the lack of real articles, but my PC has been FUBAR so many times in the past couple months that I can’t really get anything done. Now that’s changed, and as of February I’ll be able to try a little harder.

    Cap’n Crunch’s Choco Donuts

    They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I eat breakfast maybe 2 times a month. And that’s if I’m lucky. Maybe now that school is out I’ll be able to eat breakfast more often, seeing as I don’t have to get up and leave anymore. Really. School starts at 8:50, I get up and have a shower at 8:15, we leave at 8:30 and it’s a fifteen minute drive since we have to drop my brother(s) off as well. There’s absolutely no time in my morning for breakfast. Of course, you’re probably thinking that I could just wake up earlier, but I like my sleep, so to Hell with you.

    Anyway, there’s been a plethora of different breakfast foods invented over time. Some making less sense than others, and some being much more loved than others. Honestly, I don’t think any meat (except for bacon) should be ingested before noon. It just doesn’t seem right. As for more loved than others, I haven’t encountered one person in my lifetime of introvertness that doesn’t love waffles. Everyone loves waffles, Eggo or otherwise. But the thing is, making waffles is a long and sticky procedure, and frozen waffles generally don’t come cheap. These factors make them a more rare breakfast food, possibly adding to the love.

    But waffles are not today’s topic. Oh no, I’m going to delve into the realm of cereal. The most notorious of the food groups is also probably the biggest. There are literally billions of different types of cereals. And while most are the same things in different packaging, the sheer amount of cereals can make choosing one a long and arduous task, especially to those inexperienced in the field of breakfast-eating. Luckily for me, I am quite experienced in that particular field even if I don’t eat breakfast on a regular basis. So here we go.

    I’ve tried pretty much every cereal out there. Well, to make that sentence a little more accurate, every cereal over here in Canada. Those damn Americans get so much more cereal than we do. But the goodness of the US exclusive stuff is kinda iffy. They’ve got Cookie Crisp and Coco Puffs, but they also have to put up with more varieties of that bran crap. We had Fruity/Cocoa Pebbles, but I think around the time they turned into flakes was when we stopped getting them. And that change is more than enough to make me stop liking them.

    Today, though, I’ve picked up a new variation of an old favorite. Or a few days ago anyway. There’s a new Cap’n Crunch cereal on the market, and I figured that with the backing of such a famous cereal mascot, it had to be good. Cap’n Crunch is a rather large staple in the world of breakfast, producing the original Cap’n Crunh, Crunchberries, and Peanut Butter Crunch. But now he’s got a new trick up his sleeve. The Cap’n’s new cereal has taken a turn from corny bits to chocolatey circles. Enter Choco Donuts.

    I’m working up to the good part, so I’ll start with a good look at the box. As we can see here, the Cap’n seems pretty happy with his newest creation. Though, soon enough, you’ll discover that the Cap’n is very, very wrong. Of course, they look really good. Little cereal donuts with sprinkles. How could that possibly go wrong? Did you ever try the Simpsons Cinnamon Donuts cereal? Donuts are one of the many foods that do not translate well into cereal. At the top right corner, we can also see that these little buggers are only available for a limited time. Trust me, in some cases, especially this one, the words “limited time” are a Godsend and not a curse.

    Next we see the back of the box. There’s so much stuff going of here that I had to take several pictures of it just so that I could make fun of it all. At first glance, it seems to be some kind of assembly line. But if you look closer, you’ll see that it’s not regular assembly line. It’s an assembly line that forces children with a very loose grip on the English language to work day and night for not money, but Choco Donuts. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we’ve found our new Nike. And I always thought of Cap’n Crunch as more of an upstanding citizen. Every day I find out that I’ve been living another lie.

    Look at that smug face. I bet he thinks that he’s gonna get away with this. Sure, he’s making it seem all nice and inviting us to his factory, but one day we’re gonna realize that nobody has ever come back from this “tour”. I wonder if he turns them into more slaves or if he just kills them all. Hmmm… If you look at the next picture, you’ll see that there’s a huge boiling vat of “chocolate”. I bet that’s where he puts the tourists. Yup. It seems like the general evil plot. Only one person can save us now. Only one person has enough power to defeat this evil Cap’n. That person is Count Chocula. Save us Count! Save us from this horrible man who turns people into oversized chocolate donuts!

    Just further proof that Cap’n Crunch is working a factory of child slaves. Look at this poor boy. That Cap’n probably kidnapped him from his home country on one of his crunchberry expeditions. Not only was he only taught 3 debatable words, he also had to learn to say them in French. In an effort to make sure he didn’t sabotage the operation, they probably won’t let him learn any other words until the Choco Donuts campaign is over. And just look at that smile. How badly can you tell that there’s someone holding a gun to his back? If that isn’t a forced smile, people, I don’t know what is. And as for “Choc-O-Tize”, I think we all know that that comes nowhere close to an actual word.

    Oh the horrors! First he’s kidnapping little African children, and now he’s going after the mentally handicapped! That poor girl probably doesn’t even realize that she’s working for nothing but crappy cereal. She’s just so mesmerized by all the colorful sprinkes that she’s lent herself to a lifetime of pulling a lever over and over and over and over and so forth. And I thought “Choc-O-Tize” was pretty bad as far as bad made-up words go, but “Sprinkle-Tize” just takes the cake. Really! They couldn’t have gone with an existing word like “Sprinkle!” could they? Even a word describing the machine like “Sprinkle Cannon!” Would have worked better. Screw you and your made-up words, Cap’n. You’ll also notice that on the big green machine that it says “Chocolate Donut Taste Injector”, which couldn’t be more worng, as you’ll soon see.

    I think this girl is one of the Cap’n’s cronies rather than a slave. Look at her. She’s evil incarnate, I swear. “Wanna be Crunch-A-Tized?”. Come on, she’s pretty much asking if she can kill you right there. How can she not be evil? Now really, you have to wonder about “Crunch-A-Tize” as well. I’m pretty sure that the Cap’n has been using that one forever, but it’s still barely good enough to pass as a word. I guess if they added “bling bling” to the dictionary though, it’s not that far off. Dear God, what’s happened to this world? When did we go wrong? Everything seemed fine until those damn 60’s came along. I guess we’ve just been going downhill since then, and the pace is only getting faster. Yet another reason for me not to have kids.

    I also wonder about that machine. It somehow manages to break a giant donut into perfect little copies. Now I could see it happening if the machine was a little bit more complex, but it’s just a big metal doorway-lookin’ thing attached to a pole. How could it possibly accomplish anything, never mind cloning mini-donuts? And why does it seem to be zapping the donut? It’s a big freaking piece of metal! It’s not even a big magnet or ray gun, which are more often associated with the little cartoon zap lines. And don’t gimme none of that “it’s magic” crap either. Of all the things the Cap’n ain’t, magic is very close to the top of the list. Other things include: thin, smart, heterosexual, [opposite of pedophile], sane.

    Ah, the poor child thinks he’s getting just payment for his labor. Someone needs to go save these kids. Choco Donuts just aren’t good enough to replace money. Hell, they aren’t good enough to replace dog crap. “Sensass”? What the Hell is “Sensass”? I know my command of French isn’t exactly great, but I’m pretty sure that “sensass” isn’t a word. In any language. It’s probably something he was taught to say every hour so that the Cap’n would know it’s time for another …err… violation. Finally, I’ll point out that the cereal bits are not that big. Those things are the size of real donuts, not crappy little cereal donuts.

    Possibly the only slightly redeeming quality of this cereal is the fact that buying it gives you the right to a free Dairy Queen Blizzard. That quality is instantly nullified by the fact that it’s a Choco Donuts flavoured Blizzard. I suppose if you went and picked out all the cereal bits it would be fine, but if you ate it as it is, you’d have one Hell of a sore upper mouth. As we all know Cap’n Crunch cereals are famous for their upper mouth ripping ability, and I assume that when frozen, the shreddage would only be amplified.

    On the side of the box, there’s an advertisement for the Cap’n Crunch website. I bet the Cap’n taught toddlers to do HTML and forced them to make it in exchange for clean diapers. I’m not even gonna think about visiting that site. “Game Mania” just doesn’t strike me as something completely legit. I mean they didn’t even use a hyphen when it so obviously need to be there. And I like my desktop the way it is, thank you. Last time I played a Cap’n Crunch game I strongly considered killing myself and everyone within a [Earth’s diameter] kilometer distance. It was really bad. It was some kind of mix between Pokemon(Game Boy) and Decathlon(Atari). Both were awesome games, so you’d think mixing them would create a super-game of some sort. But no, it just led to mounds upon mounds of crappiness and wasted life.

    Now we get too the actual cereal. I actually think it looks good. Presentation counts for a lot less when it comes to cereal though, so it can’t save itself. Did anyone ever try those Oreo O’s? Well, in short, they taste about twenty times better than this crap, and they have the exact same taste as cardboard. I know this because in the interest of science, I have indeed chewed on cardboard. As I stated earlier, Cap’n Crunch cereals will maul the top of your upper mouth. Surprisingly enough, the Choco Donuts do a lot less damage than the original cereal does. Not to say that it’s not still a significant amount of damage, but at least the Choco Donuts won’t carry the taste of blood after a few mouthfuls.

    Look at that, the Jawa won’t even eat them. And you just know they’re bad when even a scavenger won’t eat them. Crap. Now that means that I’m gonna have to eat them. Personally, I think that they would have been better if it was normal Cap’n Crunch with sprinkles, or Crunchberries with sprinkles. In reality though, if these things do make their way into your home, let someone else eat them and then just eat the sprinkles out of the bottom of the package.

    Speaking of package, look at that. This thing is tiny beyond belief. And that’s compared to a normal sized box of Lucky Charms. Imagine how small it would look next to one of those mega-sized boxes of Raisin Bran. I guess cereal boxes are going the way of computer game boxes. But with cereal, it makes a bit of a difference. Strangely enough, this box of Choco Donuts lasted a whole 3 days in my house. Usually cereal lasts about a day at the most before the 4 of us finish it off. That really tells you how bad the stuff is. There might have been the fact that it was competing against the Lucky Charms, but for the sake of comedy, we’ll forget that detail.

    And that’s pretty much how it goes. In the ever-going battle for cereal dominance, Cap’n Crunch has lost a bit of his foothold with this little endeavor. I know that I’ve lost a lot of respect for the guy now that I know that he’s a big crook. As I said before, it’s a good thing that this is a “limited time” cereal. It’s certainly not fit to become a recurring part of anyone’s morning. What I don’t understand is why Apple Jacks always have “limited time” stamped on the box, yet they’ve been around for just under forever. Maybe I’ll tackle that mystery one day, but not today. Today I uncovered Cap’n Crunch’s big secret, and that’s enough work for a whole month when you’re me.

    I know that I was saying something about a new article in the news, but this isn’t it. There’s still another one coming up soon. Probably late this week. I’m not sure what my original forecast was, but now it’s end of the week. Damn it, I’m doing it again. Must try to stay on topic for conclusions! Aah!

    So in the end, the Choco Donuts really suck. Go get Shreddies instead. I love Shreddies. I love Shreddies so much that I did a speech about them back in in grade 9. It was great. We had this teacher who was really, really strict, and I made even him laugh. He tried to hide it, but he was practically rolling around on the floor. Ah, good memories. He taped it too, so if he hadn’t retired I would probably be able to track it down and make a transcript of it. But I think it would lose a lot of it’s comedic value if it was written rather than spoken. Oh well.

     

    Nintendo Surprise: The Nintendo surprise bag

    It’s really amazing how much merchandise that Nintendo pumps out. Sadly, most of it isn’t exactly the kind of stuff you want to buy, and very little of it is worthy promotion for the GameCube and GameBoy Advance. Sure the Pokemon line goes over really well with kids, but very few older Nintendo hardcores want Pokemon toys all over their room. I don’t. At one point, I did have a small Gloom hanging out on my dresser, but it got lost. Kinda unfortunate because Gloom is one of my favorite Pokemon.

    Of course, they have gone to certain lengths to make Mario and Zelda action figure lines. You saw a few of them in Hylian Idol. We even got a few burger restaurant deals, one promoting Super Mario Bros 3 at McDonald’s, which was a long time ago. Last year, there were Mario toys at Wendy’s, which I believe came along to help sell Super Mario Advance. The most recent was the Burger King deal, which was a menagerie of Nintendo most popular characters, such as Mario, Link, Donkey Kong, and Kirby. Everyone loves Kirby. Why we didn’t see any kind of promotion for his TV show is beyond me though.

    (>o.o)>

    Whee! Look at him dance! I guess that’s an ample intro for today. I really don’t think it’s that necessary anymore. After all, they do sway off the path of the articles a bit. But in the quest for longer and better articles, I must do what I have to do. But, enough redundant rambling, I’ll just start the article now.

    A long time ago, actually, less than a year to date, I was browsing the dollar stores of a faraway land and came across quite the treasure. It was a simple plastic bag with candy in it, but that was just the base idea. This bag of goodies was a Nintendo Surprise. Of course, the surprise wasn’t really there, since there was a transparent area on the front of the bag. That and they all had more or less the exact same things in them. I went back this year to seek more of the bags-o-fun and I found them, only they had changed a bit.

    The old Nintendo Surprise contained a sucker, a Ring Pop-like thing, a slab of gum, and a game tip card. They all sported different characters. The gimmick was that you could collect all of the different characters and candies. I guess the only surprise is what character bust you found in the ring pop. There were 2 different sucker “statues”, 6 character busts in the ring pops, and 18 different portraits in the gum. The only problem with this is that they seem to be extremely rare, and no kid would be able to resist eating them.

    Now, produced by Au’some Candies, the “Nintendo Surprises” are simply plastic bags containing a bunch of gum. It’s really a sad story. Why? Because the gum was the only collectible that you could really eat. the others left plastic remains to collect. Fortunately, you won’t want to eat the gum after you try one piece. it tastes absolutely horrible. Bad, sinful, imperfect, rancid, unsuitable, wicked, tainted, hurtful, noxious, and terrible are all words that go hand in hand with this gum. the package says “sour” but this stuff tastes worse that eating Kool-Aid powder. I kid you not.


    As I stated in one of the above paragraphs, there are 18 slabs of disgust that you can collect. Though, Au’some Candies seems to have cut a few corners when they were making them. The different characters are the following: Mario, Princess Peach, Luigi, Bowser, Paratroopa, Larry Koopa, Ganondorf, Ludwig Von Koopa, Yoshi, Ganondorf, Link, Link, Link, Diddy Kong, Link, Donkey Kong, King K. Rool, and Donkey Kong. Notice the abundance of Link. Even the two different DK gums are the same picture, just one is reversed. At least they look pretty good and not at all like some poor African kids drew them on.

    I also mentioned earlier that the Nintendo Surprise contained a card with a game tip on it. These ones are no different. But the use of the word “latest” is a bit of an exaggeration. At least now. I guess that I forgot to mention one little detail. After a little bit of researching, I found out that these things were made way back in 2001. I suppose it’s not as bad as the Hulk gum that my brothers got. If you read X-Entertainment, you’ve seen it before. And if you want a bit of a more in-depth look at the 8-year-old crap, check out Matt’s Video Store article.

    So, here’s the contents of one of the packages. It seems a lot more impressive than it really is. A LOT. There’s not a lot I can say about this pile of crap that I won’t say later so instead I’ll tell you about this GameBoy Advance link cable that I’m holding. Firstly and most importantly, it’s a pretty shade of white, with a white tip for the first player, and gray tips for the second, third, and fourth players. That said, it obviously has four heads to link GBAs together. It’s made by Pelican and was a lot cheaper than buying three Nintendo-brand cables. there’s also a little switch on the connector that enables it to work with GameBoy Colour units. Back to what’s important.


    As you can clearly see, they come in a wide variety of colors. All three colors of the… uh… groraninkbow. Ha. Got outta that one with style. Oh yeah. Anyway, it’s plain to see that a character is not confined to a single color. They can appear on any one of the three shades of gross. If you look even closer, you can see both Donkey Kongs and how it’s the same picture, just flipped horizontally, just as I said. On the upside, I was lucky and scored both Koopa Kids. I’m at a loss to see why they didn’t use all of them. If they hadn’t repeated characters there would have been enough to host all seven of ’em.

    Now, I’ll try my best to describe what all of them taste like. Orange is clearly the best of the three. Incredibly enough, it does taste like orange candy-type stuff. Only it’s way too soury-like. Bad memories of Kool-Aid powder are coming back… Yuck. Well, I guess I was wrong. Pink is definitely the best. It tastes decent, much like one of those sour soother things. It’s still not worth eating, but at least it doesn’t make me want to throw up so that there’s a better taste in my mouth. Green is supposed to taste like apple, I think. It does a little bit, but then you notice that it has a hint of BILE in it. The package wasn’t lying when it said they were sour. Maybe not as sour as some other candy, but it isn’t exactly tame.

    Look, it’s the Game Tip card! When I say card, I don’t mean card in the normal sense, or even the tradeable sense. It’s just a piece of hard paper with a picture and some words on it. Oddly enough, it’s the only thing included in the Nintendo Surprise that isn’t collectible. I guess you could collect all of the different tips, but to date I’ve only seen three different ones, and I and my brothers have been through at the very least twenty packs of this stuff. Oh, I forgot another important thing. The gum’s taste lasts for an average of 40 seconds. You’d be much better off with some Wal-Mart candy machine gum.


    As usual, you can click on the pics to enlarge them if you want to read them. The first tip is for the Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages. It’s pretty handy, and is something you might not think of right away. But, most people who played the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past have already figured this out. The second “tip” is both asinine and redundant. It tells you that in Super Mario Advance Luigi can jump the highest. It might have been helpful, but the game itself gives you this tip, so like I said, it’s redundant. Note that they have French tips too. If you can’t read the language, don’t worry, it says the same thing. This also leads me to believe that Nintendo Surprises were only distributed in Canada.

    For the sole purpose of writing this article, I saved some of the plastic carcasses from the original Nintendo Surprise. Shown above are the sucker cases. There are only two to collect, so if you went the whole nine yard to get all the gum pieces, you’d have a lot of extra sucker cases. The two characters chosen to be immortalized as suckers were Mario and Yoshi. I don’t see why not. But they could have just as easily modded the Mario mold a little and at least made a Luigi. Oh well.

    If you did manage to get you hands on a lot of these guys, they could be used as really low-budget action figures. I have several Yoshis and use them to war against my Star Wars figures with Mario as their leader. The detachable bases can also double as hats or a bad game of stack-the-sucker-bases. That’s what they seem to be doing in the picture above. To tell the truth, I’m really scraping for idea for this one. There’s a cool picture of a pelican on my GameBoy Advance link cable.

    Pictured above are the remains of a couple of my Nintendo ring pops. They come in the same colours as the gum, but they taste a whole lot better. In fact, so do the suckers. Everything tastes better than that gum, except clams. I hate clams. Stupid chicken nugget-looking clams. I hate you, clams. I hate you and your cousin the oyster. In fact, I hate all seafood. Except sushi, I’ve never tried sushi. Or lobster. It’s pretty sad, but I plan to try it the next time we go to Red Lobster. Which should be in about 3 years. So I may never try lobster until it’s too late. I bet lobster tastes better than that stupid gum. And clams.

    By now you should be aware that this bag of sugar was made for kids. This is further evidenced by the fact that the rings barely fit onto the second joints of my fingers, never mind the third. It also teaches us that Link doesn’t look good in pink. Red, blue, and green yes, but pink no. Yoshi can come in any colour and seems to be enjoying his orangyness quite well. I think green Yoshi is a bit jealous of orange Yoshi’s happiness. And Link seems to be jealous of both of their decent colour palettes and full bodies. Poor Link is just a bust of himself.

    While I’m writing about shoddy Nintendo products, I guess I should mention this GameCube watch. It’s not really that bad, I did get it for free after all. My complaints focus mostly on the extremely easy to press buttons, causing the time to change by itself. If compared to most digital watches of today, it’s got no options, just the time and date. No fancy bells, whistles, or beeps. Then again, the time and date are all you really need. I never need a stopwatch or alarm anyway, so I guess I don’t care.

    Now, back on topic, after finding my goods, I went to the dollar store next to the dollar store I had just been in. There I browsed the party favors and found some Groucho masks without the mustache. I had to have them. I’m not sure why I wanted them, they don’t fit, but I wanted them anyway. So that’s me with one of the masks on. Wow… I look nerdier than usual. It would probably have been a good idea not to upload it, but nobody who would judge me reads this site anyway. I guess I’m safe.

    So to turn around the theme of the article and show a excellent Nintendo product and add some cool, I’m including another picture of my AGB playing MegaMan Zero. Once again, it’s an awesome game and if you have an AGB, you owe it to yourself to get it. Really. Or you could just wait a few months and get MegaMan Zero 2. Or you could not wait and import RockMan Zero 2 if you don’t care about knowing what to do or can read Japanese. In any case, it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. Well, that’s about that for that.

    So now you know what I was blabbering on about in that one news update. Ummmm… this whole conclusion part is the toughest thing to write. I guess I could mention that I have plenty of gum left if anybody wants to try some. I’m more than willing to let go of a piece or eight. That’s all I have to say for today. I have no more ideas about what to review, so I don’t know when the next article will be. Maybe I’ll finish that MegaMan article sometime within the week.

    When Soup Attacks!!

    I made soup for lunch today.

    If my webcam hadn’t been so downstairs at the time, I would have made an article out of it. It sounds like a bad idea, but it was quite the ordeal getting it done. I guess I’ll just sum it up for you.

    Ryan decides to have soup for lunch. He proceeds to get the box, it says “4 pouches, 16 bowls” so it looks like he’s going to be eating a lot of soup. He reads the instructions “Mix contents into boiling water”. Ryan looks at the oven and says to himself “How do you work this thing?” After much trial, error, and burning, Ryan gets the water and soup onto an element. He starts to mix the block of “soup” and the water turns all murky. Now unaware of what is going on beneath the surface, Ryan continues to whisk away. After a while, Ryan notices that the water level is rising at an alarming rate! He reads the second and final step of the package “Lower temperature and put lid on pot”. sound easy enough, but at this point the water is almost at the top of the pot. Ryan slams the lid down and lowers the temperature. The lid buckles as the water pushes it up and slops over the sides. Ryan holds the lid with all his might until the pressure dies down. After about 5 minutes, he lifts the lid to look inside and is scorched by escaping steam. He then turns off the oven and removes the pot to let it cool off. Some time later, he takes the lid off and pours the contents into a large bowl. When grabbing it, he realizes that the liquid is quite hot and that it has made the bowl quite hot as well. After thoroughly dousing his hands in ice water, Ryan takes the bowl downstairs and hopes that it tastes good, because he’s gonna be eating 4 bowls of it.

    Quite the adventure, no? Well, that’s all I really wanted to say for today, so I’ll do a real update later this week. ~Ryan out.

    The Easter Egg-stravaganza (2003)

    Today is that seemingly holy day of chocolate – Easter. I know it’s got some kind of religious meaning, but most people just associate it with chocolate and rabbits instead of Jesus. And you wonder why the world is going to Hell? The sucky part is that the damn non-Christians get to benefit from it too. I’m mostly pissed off at the Atheists though. They deserve nothing. Make them go to school or work. Stop leeching off those who have beliefs!

    Enough about that. Today I will present a comprehensive review of all of the candy and other assorted crap I got on Easter morning. Yes, by now I should have grown out of it, but hey, why should I give up a perfectly good opportunity to get a load of free candy and junk? Besides, I’ve only got one year left that I can profit from holidays to this extent, so I’ve decided to milk it for all that I can.

    Now we all know that there are upsides and downsides to everything. The great things about Easter are no doubt the candy, chocolate, and the family get-togethers. Also, I have a good excuse to use girly colours for my backgrounds. The downside is that this is one of the two times of the year that they throw church at you from every angle. Not that I really have anything against going to church, it’s just when I have to go several times a week that it starts to get to me. And on a totally unrelated topic, I finally got that haircut I’ve been wanting for so long.

    Now onto the candy! We’ll start with a more obscure piece of milky chocolate goodness. This is one of the things that I got that didn’t really stand out among the rest, but still provoked many questions. What is this mystery chocolate? That’s exactly what it is – mystery chocolate. Now normally I don’t like to eat anything I can’t identify with either my expertise or the help of a handy label. Just take a look at it.

    The Magical Mystey Chocolate

    Willy Wonka’s got nothin’ on this mofo. Seriously… it’s just a blue foil wrapper. This (badly wrapped) oily ovalish odyssey was just begging to be opened. Maybe not. After all, the wrapper was starting to fall off by itself. So I figured if I didn’t get to the bottom of this thing first, it might get to me. So I picked it up, and the wrapper more or less came off, leaving the next layer sitting upon the table. It only get stranger from here folks.

    Two chocolates in one? That's unheard of!

    This baby was a strange one alright. Look at it! White and dark chocolate! Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe it’s telling us that chocolate isn’t as racist as we thought it might be. Whatever the case, I picked it up to examine it further. Upon doing that, I discovered that it was a hollow egg. Only, there were things inside. Things. They rattled around maniacally, waiting to jump out and kill me. So I took the next logical step. I split the bastard in two.

    Smarties ahoy!

    So maybe it wasn’t evil. So maybe it wasn’t plotting to eat my eyes. But it could have been. And I took that chance anyways just to give you a decent article. You should be thankful and send me more mystery chocolate. Preferably none with razor blades though. Poison is OK, but I’ve got a big enough razor blade collection already. Looking back on how much I’ve written, I probably could have gotten a decent article out of just this egg. Oh well, it’s too late now.

    Our next subject is one of the most beloved candy icons in the world. To my knowledge, they only come around at Easter time, and that’s when the people gorge themselves on the puffy delights. Personally, I don’t like them that much, but the rest of the world can’t be wrong, can they? By now you should have an idea of what I’m talking about. Yes, it’s the cutest marshmallow out there next to Kirby… the Peeps.

    These

    Peeps. What makes them so loved by everyone? Is it the cute little eyes? The cute little beaks? Or do people really get a kick out of eating something that vaguely resembles a little baby chick? That must be it. Stupid voraphiles. As you can probably tell from the photo, my teeth already had their way with three of the sugary yellow chicks, leaving only two. They weren’t happy about having to share the fame, but that’s the way it goes when you’re Siamese conjoined twins. In fact, they were so unhappy being stuck together that I had to perform a little unnecessary surgery…

    and let there be two!

    So they lived happily ever after… in my colon. Well that about sums up the marshmallow content of my goods, let’s move to the next.

    Chocloate rabbits. Who'd have think it?

    These are another chocolatey Easter menu item that voraphiles could really enjoy. Caramilk Bunnies. These little wonders aren’t quite as popular as the Peeps, but they do have their own commercial running, and that’s gotta count for something. While normal Caramilk bars seem to have some kind of mystery surrounding them, their rabbity counterparts have a much easier and fun way to get the caramel in. Just take a look…

    Those dirty bunnies!

    I suppose that the term “F***ing like rabbits” refers to any type of rabbits. Even tiny chocolate ones. Note how the other two are content just watching the love bunnies get it on. They had better not caramel all over the tablecloth. Maybe that was a bit dirtier than most of my other work, but it’s only gonna go downhill from here, so don’t be surprised if i stop censoring the big curse words somewhere down the line.

    Now we have a couple other egg-shaped chocolate bar spin-offs. Note how both have the exact same rabbit picture on them. Thank God for continuity. On the right is a Reese Egg. It sounds exactly like what it is. It’s basically a Reese Peanut Butter Cup in the shape of an egg. Let me tell you, the PBC’s shape is part of why it tastes so good. This one just isn’t the same caliber as a normal PBC. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but it does taste different.

    Easter-themed chocolate bars

    On the left in the yellow packaging is an Oh Henry! Egg. I’ve never been too partial to Oh Henry! bars, and this one is no better. It tastes the exact same, only it’s smaller, and it looks even more like a lump of dog feces. I’d take a picture of it, but I took all the pics before I started writing and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna re-bust out the cam. I still haven’t put that Mystery Chocolate anywhere near my mouth.

    The creme de la creme of Easter

    This big boy is the mainstay of any Easter goody basket. If a kid gets one thing for Easter, this is probably what that one thing will be. After all, Easter would be nothing, I repeat nothing, without a solid pound slab of chocolate vaguely shaped as a rabbit. The only thing that can top this is one of those huge hollow characters. My littlest bro got a big hollow Spider-Man. Needless to say, the rest of us were rather jealous.

    Attack of the giant bunny!

    Unknown to me, while my back was turned to save the pic, the big bunny broke out of his wrapper and started straight toward the other animal-shaped chocolate. None of them realized what was heading their way, but luckily I caught the heinous hare before he was able to trample the smaller, cuter candy. That and I couldn’t find any red food colouring to make it look like the Peeps were mutilated by the big guy.

    We’re nearing the end of my candy smorgasbord, and I saved the best (or worst?) feature item for last. This one is even weirder than the Mystery Chocolate. It makes little to no sense, and it’s almost Christmas-themed to boot. Behold the power of the mighty Hershey Kisses Game!

    What can it do? What can't it do?

    Look at it in all it’s glory. I can’t figure out for the life of me who isn’t going to simply rip it open and eat all the Kisses. Yes, we all play with our food, but only when we’re making the rules. Nobody in their right mind would play a board game with candy. They’d lose all their pieces by the second roll of the dice. Then again… maybe that’s the point.

    I haven’t opened it yet, but my bro opened his, and we were in for quite the shock. All the Kisses had silver, red, and green wrappers. See? It’s Christmas-themed. Despite the fact that the box suggests no particular holiday, you can tell by the colors that they intended it for Christmas. In all likelihood, Hershey just had a lot of leftover red and green foil and were too damned lazy to make Easter colors for their “game”. And it’s not an all-year round thing either. I’ve never seen it out of Easter season.

    The rest of the loot

    This concludes my winnings this year. I really didn’t want to look at all of these other things individually, so I just took a picture of all the little stuff and focused on the big things. Maybe you could consider the Kinder Surprise, Creme Eggs, and Mini Eggs big things, but like Hershey, I’m just too damn lazy to do all that extra work. Especially after I’ve eaten all that crap. I’m gonna be doing a lot of crapping over the next couple days. The ironic part is that the Oh Henry! Egg won’t look any different than what it looked like before I ate it.

    Oh, I guess I should also mention that my parents always get us a little something else just for the sake of they’re such good people. This year I got something a bit more expensive than the usual CD, but it’ll also keep me occupied for some time. Check it out.

    Golden Sun: The Lost Age

    And that sums up this year’s Easter candy. If I’m still interested in this site by the time next year rolls around, maybe I’ll do another article like this. And that’ll be the last Easter where I will receive any candy, because after that I won’t be a kid anymore. Oh well. Life goes on with or without a mountain of chocolate.

    On a side note, this little expose marks my 10th article! when I started I never thought I’d be interested long enough to get even this far, but it looks like I’ve done it. Maybe some day it’ll be a real site that real people visit. Next milestone is 50, so I’ve still got a long road ahead of me. Until next time.