Archive for June, 2007

Rise of the Shitty - Oh fuck it, the movie just sucks

22 June 2007

Seriously. If you’re a Fantastic Four fan or even if you don’t know what the Fantastic Four are, don’t go see the new movie.

See, I knew it was going to be cheesy. But damn. Damn. Outside of Stan Lee being denied entrance to the wedding of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, I couldn’t manage more than a groan to their varied attempts at humor. In its fairly bland story-line, it had plot holes that actually managed to widen the void in my heart. Not to mention rampant advertising was played to a sickening level.

Even the action was tepid at best. Really, it was devoid of anything redeeming, unless you want to see some average to good CGI.

But for posterity’s sake, I’ll give to you a brief playdown of how some of the more tender moments of the movie went.

U hav no chance to survive. Make ur time.

Wut? Noooo. Thar b choices!

Lawl, wut?

Plz. Dun b blowing ups our Earf.

Zomg, u r teh hawtzor.

O rly?

Ya rly.

But for reals, we needs our planet.

O. Well, I is needing to save my planets from teh masterz. Gurl me luv look liek u.

Lawl, wut? Y u not kill teh masterz instead?

K. Gunno go blow myself up inside of cloud Galactus. Bai.

Touching, really.

I Kicked God’s Ass

20 June 2007

As some sort of vindication for those hours of my youth spent attempting to beat The Final Fantasy Legend, I decided to tackle the game once again. I kicked its ass.

Well, kinda. There was a reason I had such troubles as a youth. The game is a bit random at times and obtuse at others. There are basically 3 kinds of characters to make. Human, mutant and monster. Humans get their stats upgraded by, get this, quaffing potions related to the stat. So, you can kill hundreds of enemies, but not until you drop a few thousand gold can you see an upgrade in their stats. This includes hit points, which are a bitch because there are four classes of HP potions. Once the stat reaches a certain value, that level of potion only grants 1 HP. And since the game boasts an old style shop/inventory system, it can take forever to up HP.

Mutants gain stats similarly to the characters in Final Fantasy 2. Use certain weapons or skills increases your chance upping stats. Dandy! Except, each mutant has four of their inventory slots dedicated to skills (every character gets 8). Not a big deal until you realize you have no control over their skill growth. After any battle, any skill can be replaced with any other skill. All too often I ended up in situations like this. That ESP skill? Does nothing as far as I can see. There are also apparently healing skills in the game, but I never fucking saw one.

As for monsters, well they are pretty much static until you have them eat the bodily remains of your slain foe. Even choking down powerful monster meat doesn’t seem to guarantee the best results, so I avoided using them. Might in a replay, because having two Mutants was a fucking hassle.

The game itself is relatively short. There are four relatively small worlds to explore and a tower to climb in between them. Despite this, there are a few things that make the game drag. The poor interfaces of shops made buying and selling a hassle. Battles are so wordy that even I found them a tad grating at times, even on the fastest text speed. An interesting quirk to that is it seems the text speed also effects the in game dialogue procession. Cut-scenes fly by in a blink of the eye as there is no “Press a button to proceed” moment between lines.

In the end, for a portable RPG made back in ‘89, I gotta give it props. I’m kinda hot and bothered to try the WonderSwan Color remake. If enough things were tweaked properly, this could be a damn solid game.

My Balls Are Melting!

20 June 2007

Jesus Pole Vaulting Christ it is hot. And I will be moving to a place that will probably be hotter. Oh dear me.

So I’m back in good ol’ Joisey. Get to spend the next month and a half or so down here before the big trek to the Japans. It’s great to see some of my friends again. But at the same time, entirely bittersweet. And hot. Holy shit is it ever hot.

The Final Garbage Plate

13 June 2007

Well, as I am about to depart Rochester, I am hitting up the places I enjoyed the most, which pretty much limits it to restaurants.

I can’t complain about that.

So Tuesday night I went and got myself a garbage plate. Sweet Christ on a cracker, I’m going to miss these things more than I should. Hopefully I’ll be forced to walk a lot in Japan. I show pictures of garbage plates to out of the area friends and get no positive responses. Obviously it’s not the healthiest thing to shove down your food pipes, but it’s not like my friend’s don’t eat this shit anyway. Just put it together. And pour delicious sauces on top.

Mmm…

Technologically Sound

11 June 2007

So, in my packing efforts, I’m putting all my UPC carrying objects into Delicious Library. Pretty swanky software, really. Using the webcam built into my computer, I can scan UPCs and it will query amazon.com for all the data on the item and add it to my database. Really nice for keeping track of things.

So anyway, in between scanning items, I took a break and began browsing the internet. All of a sudden I hear the beep that signifies an item has been scanned. Curious, I swap over to Delicious Library to see that the webcam was fixed at my hair and had read that image as a bar code.

So apparently, I’m 778767197478.

A Flurry of Electric Impulses For Practical Business Purposes

9 June 2007

Idea - An alcoholic beverage that alters the scent of your sweat.
Purpose - Turns bums into air fresheners.
Result - Possible catastrophe. That or children become lost in a decrepit world of collecting the scented homeless.

There Comes A Day In A Man’s Life

5 June 2007

I started packing today for my great trek back to my parent’s house before I depart for Japan. While doing this, I found something I haven’t seen in years.

When I was in Japan back in 2004, a few friends and I went to a random video game store and saw a bucket full of posters labeled free. So, we did the natural asshole gaijin thing and snagged the whole bunch. It wasn’t until we returned to the dorms that we discovered that these posters were for hentai games, or for those of you not in the know, Japanese porn games. The posters ranged from scantily clad schoolgirls to a full blown poster of a girl who may as well be saying “My clothes are torn and I’m covered in jizzum and I look scared for some reason!”

I have few regrets in life, but one of them is not taking a photograph of when I lined up my roommate’s wall with these posters. It was quite the glorious event when he returned from summer vacation to see his entire wall lined with scandalous Japanese school girls awaiting him. But, those days have passed and now I’m preparing my trek back to Japan.

I threw out my hentai-game posters.

I am now more a man.

*sniff*

Hot Sauce - Pizza’s Savior

2 June 2007

Having been a college student for six years up, I have eaten my fair share of pizza. Most of it shitty, but generally undeniably cheap. On Wednesday, my roommate and I purchased five medium pizzas for $25. And I’m still eating it. In fact, there’s still more for me to reheat. But, a savior is there.

Hot sauce.

Holy shit do I drench my reheated pizza in it now. And goodness is it awesome.

Holy Allergens, Batman!

1 June 2007

My summer vacation has not started off well.

Spent the past few days sick. Flopping around bed with various ailments. Totally pleasant stuff. Much to my dismay, my beautiful Mac Book Pro power supply decided to die last night. Meaning I had to truck the good half hour drive to the Apple store today to get it replaced. Someone remind me to buy an extra power supply before I go to Japan. Shit, who knows how far an Apple store will be then.

Anyway, so on my drive back, I was accosted by a scene that made me blink a few times too many. Huge white chunks falling from the sky. This bullshit, although, was not Rochester dumping one final glorious mountain of snow on my ass, but rather large chunks of pollen just waiting to get all up in my respiratory system and cause me ill.

At least I didn’t run into any bears in my daring visit to the outerlands.