BLOGTASTIC
30/April/2009
Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 in "Not Coming to Wii" Shocker
So... why is this a "shocker," might I enquire? I'm personally surprised people would actually believe such a thing would occur. I mean, in an ideal world the Wii's downloadable games would not be full of crap and we would actually get games that could actually be called games with a straight face. In an ideal world the Wii's download service would be equal to that of the 360 and PS3, meaning full-sized, modern arcades with online play and all that funky jazz. Instead we are getting Pop-Up fucking Pirate. Sweet deal, huh?
They could at least sell it as a proper game as compensation for how Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is hardly likely to reach English shores. Unless I haven't been paying attention.
Though I admit despite the endless ragging on I do about WiiWare, this makes it pretty clear why no one wants to put effort into their products besides a select few risk-takers. Why make an all-new game when you can throw more Mega Drive and SNES games onto the Virtual Console with no need for production costs?
Though on the subject of VC: Did we really need to resurrect Boogerman? I mean, for the love of God.
26/April/2009
There's some ad on TV for something I don't care about (it's an advertisement! Why should I care?) that has a cover of This Little Light Of Mine, sung by a woman with a soft, twinkly voice. It's a very nice song. The problem is that I don't know who did that cover, because there's like a million covers and all of them are kinda crap. Okay, they're not too bad, but they're upbeat, and this one is more laid-back. I can find every single version of the song that isn't the one I'm after, and it's really grinding my gears, and there doesn't seem to be any comprehensive list of everyone who's covered the song so I can at least use the process of elimination. I JUST WANT THE SONG Y'HEAR
(IT'S A NICE SONG)
25/April/2009
There's this anime called Kemeko DX. It's one of those harem anime, except a fighting robot is worked into the plot somehow, piloted by the leading girl, no less. I couldn't get through a single episode of it, though that's less an indication of the quality of the show and more my general distaste for harem anime and my overall crankiness. It's got an addictive theme song, though, and the actual opening is full of wonderfully absurd imagery, so wasting my time on it wasn't a total loss. However, ignoring the general vibe of it being okay for women to mistreat their man but if you were to reverse the roles it would enter the realm of unfortunate implications thanks to our ever wonderful double standard (someone else can rant about that better than me!), there's one scene in particular that... well...
Christ, just look at it!
Jesus Christ, man.
I can get behind putting him in a straitjacket, putting him on a dog's leash or boiling him alive, but making him die for our sins like JC did is just kind of overboard.
Awkwaaaaard.
The song is still great, though.
I'm well aware that the Japanese aren't as familiar with Christianity so this kind of imagery is more of a curiosity, and the fact Christianity is basically about worshipping some dead guy probably weirds them out, but, yeah. Westerner's view-point!
24/April/2009
So I got watching a bit of POP today. Channel 616, only shows kids cartoons, a complete and utter guilty pleasure for me. It's got a friggin' four-hour marathon of Super Mario cartoons. What more can a man with no life ask for? Besides a jetpack, a giant beetle for a pet, laser guns, a friend, true love, a life, or any of those more popular nonsense.
Well, I suppose I can also ask 'why are there so many car insurance ads on the channel?' Not just ads for car insurance, but ads that last up to two minutes long. One hundred and twenty seconds of your life spent watching a man querying you on "are you saving enough money on your car insurance?" and getting a parade of random people going "oh, man, this service is great." If it were just a regular thirty or sixty second commercial, I could ignore it (despite my inherent loathing for the very mention of the phrase "car insurance"), but... two minutes? Seriously.
It was redeemed by being followed by a toy commercial for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, featuring the world famous Canadian dropping a tree on Deadpool and Sabertooth. I honestly thought toy commercials weren't made anymore, or at least good ones that were shown on British television. Those thoughts are dashed!
Also, it depicted Deadpool in his comic book appearance rather than Mr. No-Mouth I bitched about earlier this month. No idea if that means Deadpool will indeed look like that in the movie or they just reused an older toy or something, but still, awesome!
How have I gone so far in my life without seeing Big Trouble In Little China? It's not exactly the be-all end-all of movies, but it's just a classic, y'know?
22/April/2009
To keep on prattling on about toys (you guys enjoy listening to this, right?), normally I have no problem with stupid superhero merchandise. The sheer amount of flying characters that have cars, the fact everyone and their mother owns a motorbike (when are we going to get Ghost Rider's bike on a bike, huh?) and all the ludicrous repaints that are meant to represent suits for very specific tasks. No one's going to buy every single one of these absurdities, and some of them are just plain baffling, but so long as they don't need to murder puppies to produce them or something, they're doing no harm.
But having said that, why does this bother me so, so much?
I like Iron Man, and I
like Captain America. But I can't decide which of them is better! There's only
one way to find out! FIIIIIIGHT Give Captain America an
Iron Man suit. And I'm not sure if I like either of them now.
The toylines for the Iron Man and Hulk movies weren't bound to have much merchandise, really. Hulk's toyline consisted of him with differently coloured pants, gimmicks and people to beat up, plus Abomination, and I'm pretty sure they put both of them on a bike. Iron Man has the Iron Monger as the obligatory villain, but the rest of the toyline is just Tony Stark in different models of his armour, or differently coloured versions of the same armour. Did they really need to stretch it out this far?
Just looking at that bothers me.
It could just be the light blue. If it were a darker blue then maybe I wouldn't be so repulsed.
20/April/2009
Is it sad that I bought this set simply for the tiny Ratchet figure? Ratchet is meant to go for £5 (though most places now jack him up to £6.50) and the set normally retails for £30, but I got this for £18. Not too shabby.
Sunstorm's rather crap, though. The figure itself is full of cumbersome joints and an unnecessarily clunky feel in comparison to the far awesomer Activators version, and the fact he's primarily composed of two unflattering colours doesn't help. If you ignore the fact it's meant to represent a fearsome, villainous fighter jet, though, the colours make him look quite delicious.
The face looks odd being bright white rather than mild grey (it's easier to see in-person than with the promotional photos), and with the lightpipe eyes it gives an almost ghostly effect. That, or a resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy. Poppin' fresh!
Sunstorm is going straight onto Amazon. Profit time!
Ratchet is probably the second-best of the Activators I've got. He doesn't top Starscream and his vehicle mode isn't as good as Bumblebee's, but he certainly beats the yellow guy by the fact he's got proper arms (with pegholes, too! They're tiny and L-shaped so all he can hold is particularly thin twist ties). Bulkhead kind of stinks altogether, and the fact my one has a broken auto-transform makes it worse. Look at that, his arm doesn't even lock properly. Good thing it cost zilch.
Okay, translating the whole website is a lot of fun. I've finished two pages and made a fair bit of progress on three others, but I still haven't gotten around to emailing the guy because I'm kind of challenged by the fact that I'm in no place to translate English to Japanese. I mean, all I've been doing is using two automatic translation sites to get the gist of each sentence and a dictionary for the more confusing parts, and then rewriting it in a more understandable manner. I'd like to email him and not sound like an incomprehensible doofus in the process. This is particularly frustrating since the whole project lies on receiving permission. I'd like to be given the go-ahead, because I think this might actually be the most passionate I've been about something in quite a while. It's been a total time vortex, though: I work for what feels like a few seconds and suddenly fifteen minutes of my life have flown by.
Aside from that, life's been rather uneventful, so I haven't had much worth rambling about here. Why don't you tell me about your life, eh? That'd make a change.
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Translating this page is a lot of fun. It's taken me three hours so far and I'm still not finished, but it's educational and entertaining! Though I'd like to be polite and let the guy know I'm translating it before letting it go public. Even in broken English his Balloon Fight page makes me laugh.
12/April/2009
wnspoem was the culprit. I spent all of Thursday using SDfix, RegEdit, AVG and other such tools to try and take care of the bastard, but it looked like it was refusing to budge. One scan of SDfix took SIX WHOLE HOURS and got NO RESULTS. So I spent all of Friday moving crap onto my portable hard drive and threw the computer over to someone who knew what they were doing to, yet again, reformat it for me.
I don't like doing that. I was intent to take care of the virus myself this time, instead of being a puss and abandoning ship. To make one of my awkward comparisons again, a computer is a house, and a virus is a mouse. You can, with patience, determination and other positive qualities, snoop around in the roof space and other such places trying to take care of these mice, and then you can be satisfied with a job well done. Or you can go the easy route (computer-wise!) and just backup your stuff before formatting the damn thing; which in this house/mouse analogy is a bit like burning down the house and building a new one. Except that one costs a bit more than just time.
This is all a bit pointless as the computer bud said there was nothing wrong with it. Apparently I had actually taken care of the problem myself. Whee! If only I were a smoker, because a revelation like that deserves a celebratory cigar.
07/April/2009
Looks like my computer has a virus, or at least something nasty. Hooray for making my day worse!
<Dazz> FFFF You know Deadpool?
<Dazz> Marvel character
<Ragey> Well, I'm aware of him.
<Dazz> He's in the new Wolverine movie... But for some reason, they
decided to take his character design and shit all over it.
<Dazz> he has no badass outfit, and has no mouth...
<Ragey> Didn't his original costume have no mouth?
<Dazz> Yeah, COSTUME
<Ragey> ooer
<Dazz> That is totally
not deadpool
<Ragey> wait
<Ragey> fuck
<Ragey> I thought you said "no badass costume" it was like he had a costume but
it just wasn't badass, y'know
<Ragey> but
<Ragey> shiiiiiiit
<Dazz> Yeah, NO badass costume
<Dazz> hahaha
<Dazz> I was really shitting myself about this new movie but now I can tell that
Deadpool will be the gayest character.
<Dazz> He'll probably be like "Guys this is a bad idea i'm scared"
<Ragey> They could keep his personality the same as it is in the source material
and it still wouldn't be satisfactory because DUDE HOW DO YOU FUCK UP HIS
COSTUME
<Ragey> I mean, I can forgive most of the other X-Men costume changes because I
assume bright blue and yellow don't quite look intimidating on film (though why
EVERYONE needed to dress in black is Nag City USA for me), and even costumes
that fail like the Juggernaut at least have the basic resemblance to the
original look, despite looking more like a beefcake than a true juggernaut
<Ragey> buuuut srsly, how is that Deadpool? my only guess why they changed him
is that maybe he looks ever so slightly like Spider-Man. Which in turn is a
large part of his appeal for me, because a mask with only eyes on it allows for
some fun expressions.
<Dazz> Yeah, exactly
<Dazz> The fact that you can portray someone's expression through 2 bits
changing shape is really awesome
<Dazz> But now he has a face... and no mouth
<Dazz> How the fuck does he talk?
<Ragey> I mean, comics Deadpool has a face, it's just messed up. I'm guessing
they thought focusing on that element would be cool, but... uh.
<Dazz> Yeah, but this is a bit much - they've changed the character entirely
with this
<Dazz>
If he doesn't talk with the same attitude, it'll be a serious issue
<Ragey> See, if he had a mask it'd automatically allow for plenty of expression,
because as you say, you've only got two shapes to work with. Trying to recreate
those shapes as gashes over his eyes IS NOT THE SAME THING YOU GUYS
<Dazz> Hahahaha
And that's why you shouldn't talk comics with me: Angst central all up in your face.
I saw the trailer before Watchmen and it looked pretty good, so hopefully Deadpool won't bum it all up!
(could be an April Fools for all we know!)
(also I apologise for how shitty my April Fools was. It was quite literally shat out in five minutes.)
01/April/2009
Toys R Us is somehow a magical place again, as they look like they're trying to clear out a load of their Transformers crap. In record time, too! It took them two years before they finally realised maybe the Commemorative Series stuff would stop clogging shelves if it weren't priced so high. That 2-pack I ragged about before is back to £15, though they still haven't adjusted the single figures so you're paying £2 more for a second toy. Grimlock here was £14. Can't beat that with a big stick.
