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.

Zero sky

Added a new article today. Only since it isn’t Sunday, I didn’t write it. I also took the liberty of taking the index (home) page through another change, giving it a spot for my most recent news post. Now with the news on the home page and an updates thing, you’ll be sure to never miss a thing!

~Ryan out.

Rock on the radio

I was just informed that my links page was missing two very important entries. The problem was rectified and now I can go on knowing that the world is a better place. I just can’t imagine why OC Remix wasn’t in the original list of links. It’s one of my most favorite sites ever, and no wonder I thought you people don’t visit GorillaMask, I didn’t have a link to it! Well now they’re both up there now. Whew.

~Ryan out.

However

Yes, I just added another web comic to the links page. It’s not exactly a proper update, and it’s almost all I’ve been doing lately, but you’ll have to live with it for now. At least it’s an update at all.

If you want to see a startlingly accurate article, you should take a read at this and then go over this site for a few days. You’ll be both scared and saddened by how right Jeremy is. And that’s it for today. I’ll be seeing you around. With kaleidoscope eyes.

~Ryan out.

Waldo + Bust-A-Move – A Double ROM Review!

As a gamer, I’ve seen a lot of crap. And by a lot, I mean tons. There are literally hundreds of craptacular games out there. Sure, the Playstation and PS2 have tons and tons of titles, but over 90% of those games are utter bullhock. Not to say that Nintendo systems are without their stinkers. Just looking back on the SNES and thinking of bad games for it makes me cringe. Heck, even the GameBoy Advance is a victim of this virulent affliction. Anyone can see they suck, but people must be buying them, cause they keep getting made.

On the other hand, we’ve got some real gems too. Speaking as a fanboy, almost every one of Nintendo’s games have been of excellent quality. Sure, production values are sometimes sold short, but they’re almost always fun. And it’s not only Nintendo, of course. A lot of other companies have very nice track records, like Namco, Squaresoft and Enix (which are now conveniently rolled up into one), and Rare. It’s companies like this that make people keep coming back for more. If it were only crappy whored-out movie/TV licenses (Matrix and Simpsons, lookin’ at you), video games would have been dead long ago.

So if I’m talking about both sides of the spectrum in one article, what the Hell is going on? Well, simply put, I’m reviewing one crappy game and one excellent game. Why do both at once? Well not only am I trying to make some kind of deeper meaning or something only an English professor could figure out, but neither game that I chose to review could possibly fill an entire properly-sized article. So now that you know what’s going on, I’ll start with the bad news.

Yes, that’s right. I’m going to subject you to something so bad that you’re bound to appreciate the better of the two. Now that’s a clever little idea right there, isn’t it? Glad I thought of it while typing that last sentence. Yes. Yes… But anywho, you remember Waldo, right? That guy who everyone was consistently trying to find? Ha, I can see that look on your face right now. I love that “Oh God no! They made a game out of that!?” look. It’s so… je ne sais quoi. But yeah, they made a game out of Waldo.

Actually, they made at least two games out of him! I remember renting the NES game, and damned if that wasn’t the worst 5 bucks ever spent. Actually, buying the game would constitute as worse, so I guess second worst 5 bucks ever spent will have to do. But it was entirely impossible. As far as I can remember the “maps” were huge and you got very little time and only a small sphere of vision. And if my memory is right, they stupid-fied the SNES version like rap music does to anyone who listens to it.

After the title screen, we get treated to the difficulty select right away. And let me tell you, you’ll be blown away by this. The difficulty levels in this game are Normal, Expert, and Waldo. Yes, instead of an “easy” level, they put Waldo. And no, it doesn’t just say “Waldo” where “easy” should be, there’s just a big graphic of his head and upper torso. I let curiosity get to me, and dammit, the Waldo level was just the exact same map five times in a row. Who’d have known? And why would they put something so ridiculous in a game? It beats me, but since Waldo was so easy, I’ll try Expert next.

After I picked the difficulty, I got a choice of four different graphics. A dangerously obese man-thing (anything that fat cannot be classified properly as a man), two guys who looked to be getting drunk [whilst sitting] on magic carpets, a strange pig-like thing with spikes and a hugeass nose, and some guy throwing what looked to be liquid Play-Doh on a robe-sporting man. It decisions like this that make life so difficult. I figured eventually I’d have to see them all, so I took the drunk carpet guys.

And this is what I got. I don’t know, but I feel as it there’s something wrong with this picture. Oh, maybe it’s that it’s following the exact same stereotypes as the Where’s Waldo books. I’m not exactly sure, but I think they might be in Arabia somewhere. If that’s even a place. I did really bad in geography class. But anywho, you’ll notice that everyone here is coloured. Not only that, but they’re all wearing turbans and sashes, and riding on carpets. And when in the Hell did they invent a country where anyone and everyone was required to be on the rooftops? And why didn’t they ask me to be a part of that country?

Next I chose the pig face thing, and we move from somewhere in Africa to the medieval times, where everyone has changed from black to white. Where is the equality? I’m already sick of this game and its racist stereotypes. Didn’t the creators of this game ever see that movie Black Knight? But now I’ll direct your attention to some on-screen stuff. Near the bottom, we can see a gray brick. Clicking it gives you 150 points. Somewheres near the middle right side of the pic is a clock, which increases the time you have to find Waldo. And speak of the devil, there he is right beside the magnifying glass! That level sure was a breeze.

The other two levels are pretty much the exact same things. I should note a couple things about the gameplay here, I guess. Now obviously there’s a time limit, and you can extend it by picking up those clocks. But honestly, you don’t even need the whole first clock to complete a level. The only thing that takes any time at all is finding the other objective, a scroll. They, unlike Waldo, can be hidden quite well, as they’re small and can be fit behind things quite easily. But of course, they rarely are, so each level will take you about 30 seconds, and that’s if you stop to pick everything up.

One other thing I forgot to mention that influences the game in a big way is the size of the maps. For one, they’re very, very small. Bite-sized, even. And to top it all off, they only scroll horizontally. This may not sound like such a big deal, but considering how big everything is, you’ve got an extremely small zone of probability of where Waldo can be hiding. A zone of probability comparable to that of an electron. And that’s pretty much all there is to it. You scroll around until you see the scroll and Waldo, and you’re done.

But what would a game be without its bonus levels? I’d be a game without bonus levels. But Waldo’s game has one. Yeah, one… If you manage to find the strange Waldo-dog in a level, you get to fly around on a magic carpet collecting bones. Now you don’t have to be in the magic carpet level to get this bonus, it’s the exact same on every level. Yeah. They went through all the trouble of making four levels, so why not four bonus levels? Maybe then I wouldn’t feel so cheated. Maybe if there were more than 8 people on the staff, they would have put in individual bonus levels. We’ll never know now.

So if you just so happen to beat all four levels, you get taken to the super-secret fifth level! Woah! Never saw that coming! It’s just the same thing, but with no extra pickups and one tiny little twist. There’s a lot of Waldos here, see, and only one is the right one. That right Waldo just happens to have lost one of his shoes. It’s a long shot, but at least they tried. I’m still not satisfied. And what do you get for finding shoeless Waldo?

Even Super Mario freaking Brothers had more of an ending than that. The question remains, though, why did I want to get the scrolls back? He’s obviously not going to do anything for me. Hell, he could be evil incarnate for all we know. Maybe the instruction booklet had some kind of story in its pages, but I really doubt that possibility. I bet this game didn’t even have an instruction booklet. You can only use two buttons the entire game, so there’s really nothing anyone needs help to figure out. Even Jessica Simpson could figure this one out. (Okay, the joke was a bit stale, but I couldn’t think of anything else.)

I think I can sum up the entire review portion into one paragraph here. Graphics were so-so. The animation was at a max two frames switching back and forth. The sound and music wasn’t much better. The music was forgettable and might have been annoying too. The sound may have consisted of a couple beeps and one really bad voice sample that says “Where’s Waldo?” every damn time something happens. Gameplay was boring and simplistic. I finished all three difficulty levels in less that 10 minutes total. If that doesn’t tell you that this game needs a little tuning, what will?

As a final note, I’d like to just plainly say that The Great Waldo Search sucked. It doesn’t even deserve to be italicized. I’m being kind enough just capitalizing the letters there. It sucked hard. Don’t even download the ROM. You’d be better off doing something productive like taking a dump or making a macaroni statue of Jerry Seinfeld. I guess the only good thing you could possibly say about the game is that the maps are fairly faithful to the books. Other than that, total crap. At this halfway point, I’m at about 1600 words, and the next game will probably yield a shorter review, because lo and behold, it’s a puzzle game. If you want, this would be a great time to go get a snack or something. It’s okay, I’ll wait for you.

I hope you’re done whatever you chose to do at our little intermission, cause I’m getting back to business now. Waldo was a horrible stain on the tapestry that is the history of video games, but the next game is one of my all-time favorite puzzle games ever: Bust-A-Move! Now the tricky part is going to be making it to the 2500 word mark, because there just isn’t a whole lot you can say about puzzle games. Fortunately, since I love this game so much, I could probably drone on and on about it for quite a while.

Hooray! Look at the happy little dragons. Incase you didn’t know or are having trouble placing it, they’re the same characters from Bubble Bobble, one of my old NES favorites. Bub and Bob make their grand puzzle debut here, and they do a marvelous job of it too. And as an added little trivia note, the game also comes packaged on every system from arcade machines to the Nintendo 64, and sometimes it’s known as Puzzle Bobble. But I’ll refer to it as Bust-A-Move, because it’s such a catchy phrase. The more you know!

Because there isn’t a whole lot of screenshot variety in a game like this, I got this great idea that taking a pic of the “modes” screen would be a good idea. Only what am I supposed to say about it? Let’s see what we have here. I’m obviously going to choose the 1P Play, because I’ve got nobody to play against and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna challenge anybody’s record. As for options, I need no options! Though a sound test would be fun…

Like most people, I don’t know any passwords, so I have to start all the way from Round 1. it’s not so bad, because these easy rounds are great for racking up huge points! It’s a pretty simple game at heart. You start with a bunch of bubbles hanging from the ceiling (Bubble Bobble fans will recognize the little guys trapped in the bubbles). Your job is to shoot bubbles up to pop the one on the roof. You get one randomly coloured bubble at a time, and you have to “line up” three or more bubbles of the same colour to pop them.

But of course it sounds easy! It is, for the most part. The only thing that gets in your way is the fact that you can get a lot of rubbish bubbles when you need particular colours, building a huge ball of garbage off to a side. And on top of that, you’re racing the clock, as the roof keeps getting lower, and if a bubble ever goes below that line near the bottom, you’re done. If you do manage to clear all the bubbles from the screen, it’s happiness and dancing dragons for you! In conclusion, yes, it is an easy game.

Now after a couple learning levels, the game spices it up a bit with some different types of special bubbles. In the pic above, you can see a fiery bubble among all of the regular bubbles. If you hit this guy with a bubble, it’ll explode into a big ball of flame and vaporize any bubbles within a small radius of where it once was. This is very useful for clearing out patches of trash bubbles, and lets you complete the round shown above in only three shots.

There are a couple other types of special bubbles, like the electric bubble pictured above. Shooting this one will send a lightning bolt blazing across the screen, destroying any bubbles that get in its way. It can be even handier than the fiery bubble, especially if it’s at the top of the screen and there’s a clear path towards it. The last special bubble I’ve seen is a watery bubble that lets a flow of water downward, changing the colour of all the bubbles below it to a single colour, making them easy pickin’s.

Like I said earlier, if you aren’t swift enough in your bubble-busting ways, you’ll get smoked by the torrent of bubbles. The poor little dragon fell over… If that’s not incentive enough to lose, let’s put it this way; when you do lose, all your points go with you. So continuing would put your score back at a measly zero. Unlike some games though, Taito thought ahead and doles out plenty of continues so you can keep going. They aren’t infinite though, so don’t slack off too much.

I might add that there is one finer point to losing. When you do lose, if you choose to come back, you get an aiming tool that helps a lot. You can’t see it in the pic above because it flashes and I pressed the button at the wrong second. It’s not my fault though, the little dragon was yelling at me to hurry up. But it does take all the guesswork out of the game, so you only get it for one level. After that, you’ll have to rely on your knowledge of simple physics. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me take the course because I’m no good at math, so all I can do is hope my aim is true.

I’m not sure why I love this game, but anyone who’s ever gone to a movie with me can surely back that claim up. If there’s an absence of Metal Slug, you just know I’m gonna be at a Bust-A-Move machine until my quarters run dry or they manage to pry me off the machine because we’ve already missed the previews. I think one of the biggest factors that keeps me coming back is the music. It’s always the same tune over and over, but I love it so. If you need a little idea of how it goes, here’s a link to a remix of the main tune. It’s not quite the same as the original, but I can still put it on loop for hours and not get annoyed.

To wrap this one up in a single paragraph doesn’t do it justice, but I will anyway. The graphics are colourful and fun, almost giving off a Yoshi’s Island vibe. The music, as I already stated, is very cute and loveable. Sound effects include happy “yay!”s and such from the dragons, and the always fun bubble popping sound. The gameplay is that of a puzzle game: simple, but at the same time complex. Controls are nice and precise, and give you the accuracy you need for tricky shots.

Overall, I still love this game, and when it gets ported to the Nintendo 20075, I’ll still love it. When I go see whatever movie I deem worthy of seeing 30 years in the future, I’ll still love it, and my accomplices will still have to convince me that the movie is what we came to see. I suggest finding a GBA version, or if (God forbid) that doesn’t actually exist, go for one of the older GB games. If you can’t find one of those, look for the PS2 version. As a last resort, download one of the many ROM versions. Usually I wouldn’t condone such a thing, but some games are just worth breaking copyright law for.

And that’s the end of this week’s article. I probably shouldn’t say that, because these don’t exactly come weekly, but it’s too late to go back and type in something different. Maybe I should try to do an article a week, or at least bi-monthly. Lately I’ve been doing pretty good, with nine submissions so far this year. If you total what I did last year, that a whole lot of crap in two months. I think that this is one of my best articles in a while, because for at least the first half, I concentrated on not actually reviewing, but picking out little things and making big deals out of them, much like one of my many web-heroes would do.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. I know the electron thing made all the difference for me. I think it would be a whole lot funnier if I’d actually made that page, but as it stands, very few people will know what I’m talking about or take the time to read the whole thing and try to understand. I also had fun taking the screenshots for Bust-A-Move, and almost forgot that I was trying to write an article and not trying to finish the game. As a final remark, I’d like to say that after writing this, I’m certainly convinced that I should go out and buy Bust-A-Move. I guess it worked. Ooh! And I even managed to finish with a sweet word count of over 3100!

For you

Two days sick and I have two articles ready for the posting. But I won’t. I said I was gonna do one a week for a while, that’s the way it’s going to be, and since I already posted one this week I won’t be putting the next one up until Sunday. The next one is nice and long too, about 600 words more than my preferred word count. I think it’s pretty good and I’m sure you’ll all enjoy it too. And in other news, the forum is once again “bustling” with activity and even some new members. So make sure to drop by after you’re done reading this. Which should be right about now.

~Ryan out.

Taking my time

After some situation assessment, I’ve dicovered that I have enough junk ready to be done so that I can post one article a week for at least four weeks. That’s a whole March of content, people! Be happy that I’m actually getting into a good groove, and if I can keep finding things that I want to write about, we’ll be good for a long time to come. I’ll be posting a new article every Sunday (or at least sometime on the weekend) until April. And then I don’t know what’s going to happen, so enjoy it while it’s good. I could get used to this “routine” thing. As long as fun things are out there, I shall seek and review them. That shall be my mission. That way, when my site is popular one day, people will have a lot to read when they have nothing else to do.

~Ryan out.