Monday, June 2, 2025 at 1:25 pm Comments (0)
So, uh, playing Maiden Cops might have encouraged me to pick up other games on Steam for the sole purpose of ripping their sprites, whether I enjoyed them or not. I played Fast Food Rampage for less than twenty minutes and my verdict was “criminally unsatisfying.”
I wasn’t aware of its history at the time, but apparently the roots of this game began in an animation for the YouTube channel Mashed, a parody of Hatred — god, remember that? The same self-serious monologue about the inferiority of others, only it’s delivered by a fast food mascot bemoaning the rising popularity of health foods as he weaponises the McDonalds menu to make people explode from overeating.
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Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged game, review
Monday, May 26, 2025 at 1:24 pm Comments (0)
I’ve a bad habit of absorbing random information about esoteric subjects, despite never otherwise exposing myself to them. As such, I’ve picked up a buttload of trivia and opinions about Ralph Bakshi productions over the past decades, despite having only seen his Lord of the Rings adaptation and a couple episodes of the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon. I have heard many things about Cool World, few of them positive. So… fuck it. Let’s watch Cool World.
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Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged movie, review
Monday, May 19, 2025 at 2:07 pm Comments (0)
I continue to be zonked out of my gourd, and the insistence of Northern Ireland sporting unpleasantly hot weather really isn’t helping matters. I would love to be writing or drawing or doing any number of things, but in these circumstances I gravitate towards whatever quick-fix distraction feels even mildly productive… which is a long-winded way of saying the sprites section updated with a bunch of guff:
We’ve got Arvoesine; Bomberman ’93, GB and Quest; Bubble Bobble Double; Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales; Double Dragon Gaiden; Drake & The Wizards 2; Elevator Action Old & New; Fast Food Rampage; The Flintstones (GB); Frogger 2 (XBLA); The Itchy & Scratchy Game; Neutopia II; Rampage (Lynx); Shamisen Brothers; Snoopy Tennis; Street Fighter (PCE); Strikey Sisters; and Toryumon.
Which ties into today’s ramble: a game I picked up for the sole purpose of ripping its sprites, but The Spriters Resource has obliged with a temporary removal on request of its devs until it gets its full release on all platforms. I figure it’s good manners to do the same as well. I’ll then proceed to befoul those good manners by being disparaging towards the game in the ensuing ramble, and for that I apologise!
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Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged game, review, update
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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Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged movie, review
Monday, May 5, 2025 at 2:01 pm Comments (3)
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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Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged tales from storage, toys
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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Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged comics, earthworm jim, review
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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Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged comics, tales from storage
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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Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged earthworm jim, game, review
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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Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged controllers, tales from storage
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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Filed under Basic bloggin' Tagged pokemon, tales from storage
