R: The Flippered Duck
Random Hoo Haas has a second volume of unfinished works up. If anyone actually has the patience to finish reading any of them, let me know!
Nothing terribly spectacular to talk about on the internet lately. Well, okay, I went to Portrush a couple of days ago to see a friend perform in a play; I got myself a cable that allows me to view what’s on my PC on the TV screen (time to start appreciating some gamepad-friendly PC games!); I bought myself a PSP with a really terrible selection of games; and I watched Q: The Winged Serpent, which was an enjoyable piece of schlock. I was disappointed that it offed Richard Roundtree in such a casual manner, though. I know he’s meant to be playing the “bad” cop, but come on, that doesn’t change the fact he’s as cool as Samuel L. Jackson in a block of ice.
Today’s observation: They’re advertising ShamWow! on local television. That’s kind of unexpected.
I enjoyed your unfinished doodles and commentary.
I tried writing some sort of article on Mouse Trap Hotel when I beat it last year. I didn’t get very far and I feel that my main problem was that I wanted to write about every little detail of the game and it would have ended up being really long. I took 4 or 5 paragraphs just describing some background information, the title screen, and the demo mode! (The demo mode of that game is, by the way, hilarious, as it’s basically the programmer playing really badly and then seemingly dying on purpose.)
I’d like to finish that someday. Mouse Trap Hotel is too cracked out and terrible to be simply forgotten. I wish you luck in your own rantastical adventures.
If I may suggest an awesome 80s B-Movie, might I suggest Dreamscape? I know you said once that you’re a sucker for dream imagery and the subject of dreams in general, and this is basically a movie about a guy who goes into people’s dreams and punches people. The dream sequences are well done, but it kind of turns into a more generic action-thriller (with no dream sequences for long stretches :( ) half-way through the movie, but it pays off in a great climax.
P.S. Sorry to break this to you, but “really terrible selection of games” basically describes the entire PSP library.
I was surprised at the Shamwow ads myself. We need the Slapchop ads now. I need a Slapchop.
Also Greybob forgot Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles, that, if it coutns as redeeming values, has Symphony of the Night as an unlockable. Also the two GTA games.
“[…] this is basically a movie about a guy who goes into people’s dreams and punches people.”
Greybob, you are an artist at getting me interested in a movie within seconds. I’ve added it to my list of movies I need to see (which is already totalling like a hundred so far) based on that sentence alone.
I remember you talking about Mouse Trap Hotel in the game progress topic back then, and admittedly all it did was make me more tempted to play it. I was going to say if you weren’t going to cover it (I’d be interested to read it!) I’d probably do it myself, but, well, yikes. I watched the demo and that music is positively maddening, and this is coming from a guy who likes a song that’s nothing more than “shima shima” repeated for ten minutes.
And yeah, everyone I know makes the PSP the butt of jokes all the time, and even planning what games I’d get in the future was a challenge. There’s Mega Man, Bomberman, that Castlevania game, and… uh, Star Wars Battlefront, maybe? I was hoping there’d be a variety of platformer/shooty games in the vein of Mega Man, but I don’t see too many. Admittedly a lot of the reason I picked up a PSP was for the homebrew such as e-book readers and so on, but at the very least I was hoping to have a mildly decent racing game to make it worthwhile. Burnout Dominator is an exercise in mind-boggling complexity. Is there any racing to do in that game or is it just an experiment in how much patience you have before the constant action-stalling tutorial screens drive you up the wall?
Battlefront’s pretty damn cool.