Some movies I watched in 2024: Izzy Gets The Fuck Across Town

Monday, May 12, 2025 at 1:04 pm Comments (0)

I am a dope who’s managed to ignore multiple cinematic classics for decades, but I’ll pick up a random film on a whim on the most idle of notions. I asked myself, “have I seen anything Haley Joel Osment has been in?”, saw this striking title on IMDb and figured, I might as well make this my first…!


Izzy has a mission: to crash a wedding. Only she’s on the wrong side of town and her car is on the fritz, so she winds up pulling every favour she can to get where she wants to go. We don’t know quite why Izzy’s looking to crash this wedding, or whose wedding it even is, but we pick it up as we go.
Izzy is quirky at best — she’s a dreamer, young and wild and full of big ambitions, a stronger believer in love and fate, with a knack for getting people to see things on her wavelength. At worst, she’s a self-absorbed wreck of a human being, mooching and coasting on other people’s couches waiting for the stars to align before she dares to make something of herself.
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Tales from storage: The Squinkies squad

Monday, May 5, 2025 at 2:01 pm Comments (2)

If I hadn’t sold or gifted away most of them you could probably expect this column to be nothing but dodgy toys and action figures picked up from resale outlets like TK Maxx, Pound Stretcher, and wherever else used to be in the vicinity of Abbeycentre. I was certain I’d chucked these things years ago!


ah, Pound Stretcher, we hardly knew ye
actually we knew you extremely well, like your glut of merch for Spider Riders and The Golden Compass, but those foibles seem charming in hindsight
absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that
especially when this entire strip is just a dirty big void now


So, Squinkies. I haven’t a ballsy what they are. They’re soft, slightly malleable inch-tall figurines that exist to be stored in little ball capsules, it seems? And then you can stow them inside a stubby plastic vehicle? At least, that’s what I’ve picked up from the two sets I had in my possession.
I was fully expecting these things to be extremely short-lived and long gone by now, and although their website is still in business (albeit extremely downsized from its previous iterations), I’m having a hard time finding evidence new ones are being sold, or that Blip Toys is still in operation. Their YouTube channel hasn’t updated since before the pandemic, which isn’t a good sign.
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Some comics I read in 2024: Earthworm Jim

Monday, April 28, 2025 at 9:23 pm Comments (0)

I mentioned before that I had one sorry, solitary issue of an Earthworm Jim comic in the ’90s, and was surprised not just by the dire lack of information on it online, but that it wasn’t the only one — there was a Marvel Comics mini-series as well! I was on a short-lived Jim kick after my stint with the games, and you better believe I had to gobble up whatever media I hadn’t consumed yet.
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Tales from storage: comics upon comics

Monday, April 21, 2025 at 9:54 pm Comments (1)

I feel like I owe people an apology on behalf of my Turok column…! Firstly, for leaving it dormant for so long; COVID kind of threw the world for a loop, plus my own iffy health, other responsibilities, procrastination, any number of excuses. You know how it is.

Secondly, I feel like it led people to believe I’m a comics person. I’m really not! I respect comics in so many ways, and I do hope that comes across in my write-ups, but the total number of comic series I’ve read can probably be counted on my fingers and my toes.

It’s been so long I sincerely can’t recall what my local newsagents carried…! I collected Sonic the Comic for its entire run from around issue #50 onwards, and I did read The Beano for longer than was healthy; whatever I owned was donated to the children of parent friends years ago, and I’ve nothing to show for them in my collection. Aside from those, I’m drawing a blank! Obviously kiddies football magazines were on shelves, but I don’t believe newsagents dealt in traditional American comics, not unless they were published in a different format.
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Some games I played in 2024: Earthworm Jim 1 & 2

Sunday, April 13, 2025 at 8:29 pm Comments (0)

While sorting through comics I found my sole issue of the UK Earthworm Jim series, and was reminded of my uneven feelings for the franchise. The cartoon is the only part I ever truly clicked with — the two games I’d played were not exactly its shining hours in any way (Earthworm Jim 3D and the botched port of the first game on GBA), but I felt like there had to be something in this that resonated with me…! The first two games have since been added to Switch Online, and I felt compelled to give them as earnest a try as I could muster. Will they work for me this time? (before you start holding your breath, the answer is no)
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Tales from storage: Gravis gamepad grumbling

Friday, February 7, 2025 at 1:53 pm Comments Off on Tales from storage: Gravis gamepad grumbling

Back before it got revamped (however many revamps ago that was…!), the Games I Own section really was about having something to say about every possession I owned, from DVDs to action figures to video game controllers. Gamepads are fascinating to me, if having a blog tag dedicated to the things weren’t already a clue.
If I ever need a bit of frivolous and unwarranted retail therapy, I often think: why don’t I treat myself to a nice new controller? Having a different doohickey to wrap my paws around is a neat way of experiencing the same games in a new light, whether it’s trying to play Metal Slug on a flight stick, or running through Sonic Adventure on a d-pad. Look, I didn’t say it was a good use of my time, but sometimes you just want to scratch a silly itch.


At one point picking up controllers for the express purpose of reviewing them was something I wanted to do, and I can only imagine that’s why I came into possession of the Gravis Eliminator Gamepad Pro (it’s easier to accept that than remember how dour the USB gamepad market was at the turn of the millennium).
I, uh, don’t know what this controller is trying to accomplish though. Gravis were seemingly a big name in the early days of PC gamepads, at least when it came to wares that were inspired by console controllers, designed with platformers and arcade games in mind… however many of these there were at the time. So why on earth is this secretly an analogue joystick?!
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Tales from storage: card collecting and counterfeiting

Saturday, November 23, 2024 at 8:33 pm Comments (1)


I’ve exposited plenty of times on this blog about how I was very much swept up in Pokemon fever — my brother and I bought the games, watched the cartoon, collected the figurines, amassed whatever other dumb trinkets and doodads that were available, so it’s only natural we also picked up the Trading Card Game as well.
I… don’t think we ever actually played it. I don’t know anyone who did back in the day…! As much as the franchise invited discussion and shared activities among kids, I get the impression we feared being robbed more than daring to share activities among our peers. I feel like there’s an allegory in there, but I’m too tired to pursue it.


What I’d almost forgotten about were these print-outs my brother and I must have made of the then-recently announced Generation 2 starters, presumably pasted on top of energy cards. They were already woefully unconvincing back in the day, and look even more diabolical after a couple decades worth of water damage. Can’t say it isn’t Aesthetic™ though, especially on the Croconaw card.

Looking at these card kind of feels like a childhood captured in amber: all the idle whims and silly notions, the short-sightedness and lack of thinking behind the activities you get up to, because you’re young and have no responsibilities. I might’ve been bitter thinking how much was spent on things I never used, only to be chucked in a shed and left to rot.
How did we get some stinkin’ many? Were they sold at the local newsagents? Were we picking up packs every time we went to Toys R Us? There were close to two hundred or more of these bloody things, and yet I simply have no memory of how they fit into our hobbies and habits back in the day. We sure as hell didn’t play or trade them! That would’ve required a social life!
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Some games I played in 2024: Spud!

Wednesday, October 30, 2024 at 11:02 am Comments Off on Some games I played in 2024: Spud!

The games I played in 2023 review is done with the addition of Lois & Clark and Combo Rangers. Hopefully I can freakin’ write some different things for a change! In the meantime… uh, more dumb game reviews, sorry.

Have you ever played a game, read a book or watched a TV show forever ago, left it unfinished, and wondered how it panned out in the end? And if you do decide to finish it long after the fact, is there any hope of it matching your expectations…?


Spud! is a game my brother and I were bought in the early days of PC gaming, a point-and-click adventure where you’ve got to rescue Santa Claus from the evil Dr. Chillbane with the help of toy gnomes and fluffy bunnies. Its first-person perspective for its point-and-click puzzles is really unique, offering 360 degrees of panoramic view at every waypoint, though perhaps to the point of excess — does even your inventory need to be a sprawling dome of shelves…?
It’s decidedly off-kilter, between its questionable depictions of Santa’s reindeer and the kooky characters you meet on a tropical island, not to mention its penchant for bloody violence — if you don’t send out the gnomes or bunnies as human shields (or the species equivalent), Spud is liable to come a cropper via a spear through the eye!
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Tales From Storage: The VCR Fandango

Thursday, August 15, 2024 at 11:03 am Comments Off on Tales From Storage: The VCR Fandango

I finally dragged myself across the finish line for Some Games I Played In 2022, and the one for last year is close to being done too. Did I ever mention that was published? It still needs some editing but you can read what’s done, if doing such a thing is something you would do.

The sprites section got updated, featuring stuff for Black Tiger, Block Legend DX, Brutal: Paws of Fury, Dino Quake, Escape Goat, HeroQuest, Looney Tunes Collector, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, Neutopia 1 & 2, Rampage, Saint Seiya on PSP, Snow Bros., Trog, Wizorb, and a bunch of Bomberman games.
I think I might’ve made some minor tweaks to the sprite tutorial too? It’s due some updates to better explain some of my processes (and probably repair some links knowing ROMhacking.net is going offline shortly, oh no), but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In between fatigue and crises and other fun surprises, I’ve been trying to do some spring cleaning this year! Ostensibly in the hopes of making a push on all the guff I need to scan and get it out of the house (with the unspoken intent to probably sunset my scanning ambitions, because I’m too exhausted to keep up this line of work!), but just having less crap in the house doesn’t hurt either.


One of the things I uncovered was an NTSC VCR I’d imported from the States, and you better believe I wrote several thousand words tangentially related to that subject.
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Status report: situation snoozy

Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 12:17 pm Comments (2)

Hello! I’m still here.

I finally covered that Metal Slug Advance prototype that got leaked three years ago, and forced myself to give Metal Slug 7‘s early footage a proper write-up.
I overhauled the sprites section and added somewhere over 200 sheets to it, and also rewrote the sprite-ripping tutorial, now with less jaded snark and more insight into tools and alternate methods, like RAM editing.
I’m still editing my “games I played” reviews from last year, but there’s a couple dozen entries you can read already if you fancy. I also never blogged about the games I played in 2021 article from two years ago, so I’m blogging about it now.

I’m very tired. How about yourself?

This update is mostly just tackling stuff I’ve been neglecting to address for a while now. I tweeted about how I would’ve jumped at the chance to document a Metal Slug Advance prototype in the site’s prime — that game’s been an inexplicable nemesis of mine for close to two decades! — and yet when one finally leaked, I was quite content to completely ignore it until only a couple of months ago. Don’t expect another Missing In Action update any time soon, sorry!
Likewise, the old sprites pages were seriously old, janky, and needlessly vitriolic and opinionated for whatever reason. That and the PHP pages had given up the ghost, apparently; I’m very grateful to Dazz for coding those up for me back in the day, but I think I’m in my comfort zone sticking with plain ol’ HTML.

Speaking of stuff breaking, there’s a lotta funked-up WordPress entries! Em-dashes, foreign characters and other symbols across the board have been turned into junk, and I dread the process of repairing it all. It’s almost tempting to just convert them all into static HTML so they can’t fall apart when I’m not looking, but, well, we’ll see what happens.

Random Hoo Haas will turn 18 years old in three weeks, which is terrifying to think about. If you expect me to commemorate the event in any way, be aware I have an unfinished draft announcing its 15th year of operation, if you want an idea of my work ethic.
The last few blog posts have all expressed how wrecked I am after a demanding year, so you shouldn’t be surprised that remains unchanged! My health is not superb and the faintest whiff of warm weather is enough to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis the heck out of me. I’m doin’ what I can to keep myself busy and make myself happy, but when that may manifest into online content is another story.

One of those days I’ll remember to write these blog entries before the update, and not after when I’m zonked and want nothing more than to hibernate for five years. Sorry for sounding like a sadsack in these blogs! Glad you’re sticking around, hope my guff entertains or informs or whatever it is folks get out of it.

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