16/March/2010

My cycle of fruitless productivity both frustrates and amuses me. I haven't written a good story in quite some time and given how work has me so majorly bummed, I feel something like that would help perk up my spirits. And then I just can't write. I open a blank Notepad document and stare at it, but my brain just grinds to a halt. No ideas spin around, no dialogue floats into my head - the miracle never happen. Sometimes it's because, quite literally, I'm out of ideas, sometimes it's just my mind is too caught up on other things, or it's just too noisy or busy to concentrate.

Quite a few times it's because I'm worrying about the site. "I haven't written a General Writing in a while! How can I be creative when my site needs some more snarky comments about video games?!" That's essentially how the new Super Mario Land piece came about, as I hesitated to upload the new hub page until I had a proper update to go with it, so I hashed that out. I'm a bit torn about it, to be honest; I've wanted to write about the game in more detail for quite some time and I'm quite happy with a few of the jokes, but... I don't know, I guess I'm just not too pleased with it, like it could've been better. There's quite a few General Writings I'm a bit "ehh" about and feel they could be better, but they're not dreadful. Sometimes it's because of the writing, sometimes it's because I loathe the way I laid it out. I find it difficult to go back to the Turbo Toons one because the images get kinda obtrusive. It takes a special kind of uninformed terrible to get me to remove it, though, which is why you shall never see the Shadow the Hedgehog review in its original form ever again. Or maybe if you get chatting to me I'll send it to you so we can laugh about it. Whatever works!

I think one of the problems is that my personal writing isn't going to have much of an audience, based on the simple fact that I don't know enough other writers to share them with, plus there never seems to be enough good sites for sharing fiction. There's a million havens for fan fiction, but nothing for originality! You wouldn't believe my disappointment that Writing.com wasn't so much a site for posting fiction as it was for people making absolutely terrible "interactive" fan fiction where someone writes a short segment, someone else continues it and so on. It seemed every single one of them would just be a video game character sitting in their house and answering the door, where it would slowly wade through inane banter with whoever was there. You have not known boredom until you read about Tails asking Shadow what he did during the weekend.

But basically, I'm saying that I'm suffering from a flu (again!) and thus have the perfect opportunity to sit down and be productive, and instead I'm ripping sprites and whining to myself that I should do something for the site. I have a bad habit of just being a jerk to myself!

So, yeah, how 'bout that Bomberman site?

Been in a bit of a rut regarding it. Haven't quite had the inspiration to work on it, and for some reason every time I look at it I feel like, man, this could look so much better. I had planned to redesign it when the hub was revamped, but that would've been a rather huge undertaking, never mind the fact I'm still undecided on the look. The GHZ is my main inspiration, as it's a fabulously informative site with a sleek, simple design and a great layout. I don't think most game sites are as graphical as the Shrine Place, using blank backdrops rather than tiled images, but I suppose I'll see what happens. Don't expect anything soon.

I'm still keen to do Jetters, although probably not as the Random Action Hour double feature as I'd planned - it'll likely just be plot summaries rather than a full-on screenshot blast, but it's just a matter of getting around to it. Been rather uninspired to do much of anything, lately, so please pardon the lack of productivity.

15/March/2010

I guess I'm on a Star Wars kick lately! It started with reading Death Troopers, an expanded universe book set sometime before the events of New Hope where an unsuspecting prison barge becomes the scene of ZOMBIIIES. Zombies in Star Wars! I cannot help but find that to be an incredible concept, and it's a great read. Then I dug out some Xbox games I'd burned and tried out Republic Commando. Only played it for about ten minutes, but it looks rather enticing, if a bit of a blatant Halo rip-off. Its first ten minutes alone are pretty exciting, mind you, which is more than I can say for the Bungie title.

But I knew for certain I was on a kick when I popped in Star Wars Battlefront II, as I've somehow killed about five hours of my life on it in just two days. Maybe six hours, I've lost track. The point is it's a friggin' incredible game and I love the hell out of it. I mean, I tried a little bit of Battlefield 1942 and it wasn't bad, but for some reason making it third-person and having a Star Wars theme just makes it that much more appealing to me. Of course, playing it with my brother also makes it that much better, as although I love me multi-player of all varieties, it's the in-person variety that appeals to me most simply because of the competition it generates. Plus you can shoot Jawas! You feel like a terrible, terrible person for doing it, though, but the option is there.

11/March/2010

Watched Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. I thought the third one was the best so far (at least, I remember it as the best, it's been a while since I saw the first one!) and was expecting things to be reasonably uphill from here, even taking into account how sequels do tend to stink.

The second and third movies tended to have some overarching theme to them - the second had Freddy taking over the mind of the main kid, and the third was the characters having abilities in their dreams. The fourth... in theory it's meant to be a continuation of the third, what with the three survivors of that one appearing complete with Kristen's drag-someone-in-for-help ability, but they're killed off fairly quickly (and without much creativity in their deaths) and a new girl is given that unique power, but believe it or not, it's actually totally pointless. Seriously! Maybe I've forgotten a minor detail already, but I'm pretty certain you could have removed that element from the movie and it wouldn't have changed a thing. I'd like to say "instead the movie focuses on the main girl's ability to 'take' people's souls," but even that isn't really used to its full potential, as the use of those abilities (which aren't anything cool like wizard power or having a mohawk, it just boils down to having some mild athleticism) is rendered pointless as the movie just throws her a ridiculous loophole to make Freddy explode.

This essentially boils down to the movie being rather aimless. The first three had rather distinct themes, but this one just seems to potter along, killing off people when it pleases until eventually deciding that the characters need to stop Freddy, by which point it only consists of the main girl and her completely nondescript boyfriend. I'm serious, the man has no characteristic features whatsoever. It's kind of disappointing, as there's a lot of great elements to the movie, most notably the camera work. Although it doesn't get enough opportunities to wow you, when it does it really creates a fantastic, dizzying, dream-like effect; even the opening credits of the girl creating a chalk drawing looked fantastic simply with some extreme close-ups and slow panning. The story, however... just felt a bit flat. I did find it interesting how the boyfriend woke up before they could encounter Freddy, something I felt hadn't been explored in the third movie, but aside from that, the plot was pretty thin and rather wobbly. The dream scenes were a particular highlight, mostly because how most of them really did just come from left field - who expected Freddy to be resurrected by flaming dog piss? The meatball scene is just fantastic and I'd probably say my favourite scene in the series so far, but for all the great ones the rest just seemed rather flat. The "let's suck face" kill might've been better if it hadn't looked so utterly ridiculous.

It's not bad, but this one just seemed rather unsure of what it wanted to do, and I can see how by this point the series is getting a little stale. I'll still be interested to see how the remaining three fare, but I can't say I've got my hopes up.

10/March/2010

I watched the Fist of the North Star animated movie. Well, watched is a loose term. I had it on while I did some sprite ripping and paid attention when faces started imploding. To say it's got a story is like saying I'm a tube. There's lots of characters thrown around willy-nilly, a fair amount of set pieces for the two hour flick, but the story is vaguely defined and serves only as lead-ins for fight scenes at best. It doesn't help that I watched the English dub, gaining some surprisingly fun voice acting and corny dialogue in exchange for the story being seriously blurred. Raoh, rather than challenging the heavens, just goes on a typical cartoon villain rant about NO ONE CAN BEAT ME I AM SO STRONG. So, yeah, the story just revolves around chasing after Kenshiro's dame Julia and beating up everyone along the way.

I'd like to compare the movie to the original Transformers: The Movie, as they both exist mostly to display these cool characters and then have most of them killed off in wicked fight scenes with incredible animation. What makes it a little less accessible than Transformers is simply how long it is - while Transformers is barely over an hour long, Fist is ten minutes short of two hours and is very slow-paced for the most part. Transformers, for me, is the ultimate movie to just have some fun and then move on, because I can very easily just fast forward after the Starscream's coronation to the Unicron battle, because that's all I really care about. Fist of the North Star isn't quite so evenly split. It's an enjoyable movie and probably worth properly sitting down and watching sometime, but it's not a very rounded whole. Still, bonus points for James Avery voicing Fang.

08/March/2010

I went to see a production of The Vagina Monologues. I had had a thoroughly miserable day and wasn't even expecting to go, but I'm glad I did, as tales of males being assholes and coochie-snorchers being mutilated was apparently enough to uplift my spirits. The fact at least three of my friends were in the performance was certainly a bonus, close chum Jo getting to talk about how she preferred to envision her vagina as a leather furniture suite. Evening well spent, I'd dare say. Rather thought provoking, personally, and it's amusing the contrast of how women talking about their vajayjays (because you see "pussy" is a term for vagina and "jayjay" is a type of bird and please tell me someone likes my linguist jokes :{ ) for an hour and twenty minutes is seen as enlightening and eye-opening, while men talking about their pork swords for the same time would be seen as crass. Can't say I'm complaining, mind you, as my workplace has enough of that kind of conversation as it is.

04/March/2010

I saw The Wolfman last night. It's one of those movies that makes for an entertaining two hours and a bit of discussion afterwards, but is essentially entirely forgotten about the next day, and that's kinda what happened. The wolfman makeup was incredible and definitely the best looking human-style werewolf I've seen in film (I admit the more beastly type from the likes of The Howling are more to my preference), even if the climatic fight between the two wolfmen did kinda look like two hair people just jumping at each other (I think if they'd excluded the wolf nipples it mightn't have generated such an image). I was surprised at the big names involved! Anthony Hopkins was incredible as the main dude's dad with a brilliant blend of fatherly attitude and total asshole, and Hugo Weaving just stole the show as the inspector, not just because I only recognise him as the voice of Megatron. Benicio del Toro was a fantastic choice as the main guy, I must say - when an American is thrown into a British setting (never mind the fact he just lived in New York, not an actual apple pie citizen), I can't help but expect them to be prettied up and made into beautiful Hollywood supermodels, but Benicio has a fantastic face. It's a face lined with tragedy, remorse and weariness. I didn't expect it to be someone who'd actually been in other films, and then I found out he played Doctor friggin' Gonzo. Left field!

I haven't really much to comment about the actual movie, though. It's an entertaining flick with some beautiful set pieces and fantastic facial hair all around (never mind the black plague, old-fashioned ideals and general abundance of people dying a death, I'd love to live in that time just so I could have a walrus moustache). I found it kind of amusing how even for a movie rated 15, no actual animals are shown being hurt - the bear remains unharmed, the moose makes a getaway before Wolfie munches on it, and you never see if any unfortunate fate befalls the family dog, which is all in contrast to the humans getting legs, arms, faces and necks clawed off. It's especially odd in comparison to Eight Legged Freaks, where human death was mostly just action happening in the background while there were a substantial number of animal deaths (not counting the giant fucking spiders, of course). Food for thought.

I watched two more episodes of Buffy tonight (episodes 5 and 6 of series 1). Yeah, I'm ploughing through this show like a friggin' torpedo, aren't I? The first of them wasn't bad, but was wholly unremarkable - I'm very thankful the show has variety in its monster threats, because ones like this where it's just vampire prophecies get a little bit meh. The second of them was a fantastic step upwards, featuring hypnotising hyenas that make a group of teens become even bigger assholes and start eating people. Now that's what I call good television. I commented last time how Xander's a character I wasn't expecting much from, but he can be entertaining. It seems in regular episodes he's a bit of a bore and quite possibly unnecessary to the plot, but he becomes more entertaining when he takes the spotlight. I'm not sure what that implies. Lots of fun character interaction and highlights in this episode, and the zookeeper somehow became a really interesting character - I mean, he's barely got ten minutes of screen time yet there's just something intriguing about the weird guy. Maybe it's the fact he painted over his beard. Get a bit of a Cesar Romero vibe going on. I will say I was saddened by the abrupt consumption of the Sunnydale principal - I liked that guy! I will admit anytime a character shows up I ponder out loud "I wonder how many episodes that character will last before they snuff it," but given the fact he's the principal and had appeared in at least three or four episodes so far, I thought he was good for at least one season. I thought wrong.

So, yeah, the link to Rage Quitter's site is still on the hub. Once again with me being a serious procrastinator when it comes to redesigning stuff, I was hoping to have a freshly made hub page ready by this time which would have bigger buttons, more links and would simply fill up the screen a bit better, but I forgot how much I hate making buttons to represent the site. I'm going to have to make a proper Bomberman Shrine Place logo! I'll have to make a less shitty Random Action Hour button! Heck, I'll even have to give Metal Slug: Missing In Action some attention again solely to make a new button! However will I made a 350x300 image that represents Random Hoo Haas in a nutshell (without just having an image of me spewing excrement from my cake hole)?? A vexing experience, I must say.

02/March/2010

I've been meaning to revamp the blog so it's a little more sophisticated than just a HTM file, but something that's a little more fancy and would allow tags, comments and other such things, but mostly just comments. I only know one guy who'd actually want to comment, mind you, but it'd be neat to have. And I just keep putting it off. My first idea was to work on it before 2010 so the new year could start with some mild excitement, but that didn't happen. And then I planned to do it for March, but then I forgot the February is several days shorter than a regular month and didn't have the time (and I ultimately just dinked around with WordPress for five minutes, had no luck and proceeded to delete it). I'm a fickle, fickle man.

On the subject of being fickle, I bought Sonic the Hedgehog for the Xbox 360. You know, the one that's said to be the worst in the series (no, not the other one that was hoisted with that statement... or that one) and has hedgehog-human romance? Yeah, that one. Quite frankly, I'm surprised that I didn't get it sooner, given how I'm a big of a Sonic nerd. I'm not as wild over the series as I used to be, but I can still say with certainty that I think Sonic Adventure is pretty awesome, although probably for all the wrong reasons. To be honest, I'm not sure why I like the series - the 2D games are decent in a hard-to-pinpoint manner and although everyone cries about how the new games suck and the old games ruled, nobody seems to have a valid reason why they were good. Yes, in comparison they're better thanks to good level design, smooth pacing and difficulty among other factors, but what made them good in the first place? Could be worth exploring.

So, yeah, the 360 game. There was a blog entry long ago where I was legitimately excited about the game, and even when word spread that the game was comparable to simian faeces, I was still mildly optimistic. I mean, it looked like the closest thing we had to the original Sonic Adventure, and come on, it looked like a proper game. I still don't see how The Secret Rings was sold at full price, given how the core of the game relies on sidestepping away from obstacles.

I'll be honest - I can't even try to step around the fact that the game is broken as hell. Sonic is wildly out of control, the homing attack arcs as smoothly as a brick, and the camera is somehow even worse than the previous games. Yeah, don't ask me how, but they did it! Even just from two levels' worth of story it looks like a wonky mess (I literally cringed when Elise did the "oh no you're hurt let me tend to your wound" cliché), and my god, even after downloading the game to the hard drive the load times are still hilariously bad, not to mention prompted for remarkable trivial reasons. Sandwiching a boss' death animation between two separate loading screens is just... wasteful. And, yes, Sonic cutscenes have never been the epitome of good timing, choreography or anything actually good, but when the framerate lags and desyncs with the audio solely because the game is struggling to load the lighting effects, that's just bad.

And it's a shame. Ignoring all the extraneous cutscene bullshit, this really looked like it was trying to make a decent game on par with the original Sonic Adventure. I won't deny its priorities seem to be rather inconsistent (one of the early claims was that it was just going to be Sonic and Robotnik, no one else, and you don't even reach the first stage before you run into Tails) and even if it was polished and bug tested, some of the crap shoehorned into gameplay would still be rather mediocre. But, personally, given the run-forward-and-move-away-from-incoming-danger nonsense we've been getting lately, anything that feels like a proper adventure game is fine by me. I'll have to stick with it a while longer before I can get some proper opinions going (I haven't even played as Silver or Shadow yet! I haven't even played it for an hour, for crying out loud!), but I'll definitely admit it's an... interesting first impression.

I watched Eight Legged Freaks. I was going to watch the fourth Nightmare on Elm Street movie, but then my dad dug this one out and I opted for it instead. Radioactive waste causes giant spiders to terrorise middle-of-nowhere small town, and when they've milked the best bits of that concept, they move the setting to a shopping mall. It's a very silly movie! Judging from this and the only other giant spider movie I've ever seen (Spiders, natch), moviemakers seem to have a thing for avoiding giant spider stories from getting too scary. Spiders was, well, pretty stupid and full of ridiculous moments when it wasn't using some pretty decent body horror, while Eight Legged Freaks, although ripe with spiders and ripe with freaky imagery, it's very light-hearted and the arachnids all chitter amongst themselves like octoped Gremlins. Seriously, cut a few scenes of spiders being stupid, throw in more jump scares and ask out the characters who are actually entertaining and the movie could very well transform into a generic teen horror flick!

Heck, even the original short film that inspired the movie (graciously included in the special features) is more frightening simply because the spiders make no noise whatsoever. Okay, a real spider making little chattery noises would be pretty unsettling (I CAN HEAR THEM BUT I CANNOT SEE THEM) and no doubt being trapped in a shopping mall with them surrounding the outside bleating away without end would be doubly so, but silent killers are always scary shit. I was a bit disappointed in the ending of the short, though. She blows up the spider and she goes outside to recuperate, and then it's implied giant killer rats will be the next upcoming threat. Boo hoo? Having mice in your house is not cool at all, giant mice doubly so, but the problem is that mice have the same basic physical structure of cats and dogs - big ol' eyes, cute little whiskers and four adorable little feet. Spiders are automatic scare quality because they've got like eight legs and a million eyes and probably four arses. I was personally expecting her to leave the house and instead find a big swarm of spiders descending upon her, but I guess that's a bit much to ask from a student film.

So, yeah, silly-amusing movie. If Capcom ever want to make a spin-off of Dead Rising, they don't need to look any further than this movie as inspiration.

Today's observation: Overhearing a 9-year-old tell another 9-year-old "your ma does it doggy style" is very unsettling.

Tonight's observation: If I spontaneously died at this very hour, it'd be kind of embarrassing to have the Wikipedia article of Clifford's Big Red Movie as the window displayed on my computer screen. (Can anyone tell me what the hell the significance is of the first sentence in the plot summary? It sounds like someone's just going LOOK LOOK I MUST MAKE THIS MINOR VISUAL TRANSITION A BIG DEAL)