Super Smash Ponies
I had a dream last night that Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was a playable character in Smash Bros. Brawl.
I wonder if my brain is trying to tell me something.
You are currently browsing the Basic bloggin’ category
Sonic Colours made me sad
Finally got around to covering Resident Bongo on Random Action Hour. It’s actually got some good bits, but the rampant repeating of sound effects and voices just gets grating real fast.
So, I rented Super Street Fighter IV about two weeks ago. It took a while to get into, if just because I’m a total scrub and was so used to Marvel vs. Capcom and its newbie-friendly Easy Mode, but after three nights of light playing I had warmed up to it quite nicely. Having no choice but to properly learn the control inputs for moves really encouraged me to learn these characters and their movesets (though I only had the time to spam Hadoukens and Shoryukens as Sakura), and even the really brief story modes had a certain charm to them – I barely know these guys, but the short glimpses of gentleman boxer Dudley talking about roses and drinking tea with boxing gloves on, it was all rather cute. I had picked up the game on a whim, but I thought it was a worthwhile rental. Heck, if the temptation ever crosses me I might even buy it! It’s not like it ever kept its original £25 price tag for long.
It left me quite optimistic after returning it, and I thought – why the hell not – let’s rent Sonic Colours!
Aheh.
(CONTINUED)
I’m oldschool.
More Resident Evil goodness is happening by Random Action Hour.
How about some more really brief movie reviews of kids films? I caught the CGI film of Astro Boy a couple of days ago. It had decent animation and some surprise voice actors (Nicholas Cage as Dr. Tenma! Donald Sutherland as the evil president! Samuel L. Jackson voices a giant robot for all of three lines!), but it really had nothing to offer no other CGI kids flick couldn’t. They got the license to a franchise with nearly fifty years worth of history behind it, and then they just didn’t seem to have any grand ambitions with it.
(CONTINUED)
I only know one Resident Evil joke
The second part of the Resident Evil coverage is up on Random Action Hour. Get your sandwiches ready!
I watched Up a couple of nights ago. I’ve a bad habit of seeing commercials for animated films, thinking “I must go and see that sometime in theatres!” … and then I spend too long thinking about it that by the time I’m ready, it’s no longer listed. Same thing happened with The Princess & The Frog. Kinda vexing!
Like all of Pixar’s stuff, everyone else on the face of the planet (and probably a few Venusians for that matter) has gone on about how they’re great films in better paragraphs than I’m capable of. I could run through my regular review routine, but I’ll just focus on the element I admired the most.
(CONTINUED)
The most exciting of super updates is here!
Would you believe that Random Action Hour updated today? Really! And technically it’s the first step towards the Random Hoo Haas site revamp! Admittedly it’s the crappiest of the revamps because all I’ve done is rearrange the directories (linking to the ol’ “Cartoons/” directory will forward you to the new “rah/” index) and removed a lot of RQ87’s stuff. Yeah, that’s what you get really excited about. As of this writing there’s still a few things to finish uploading, but the real highlight of this update – for me, at least – is that it ties the online and offline files closer together.
If Random Hoo Haas were to violently cyber-splode, I wouldn’t be able to make a flawless replacement just by uploading my offline files, as there’s a fair few things changed or missing compared to the online one, and vice versa. As of this update, Random Action Hour is totally in sync with its offline files, and as mundane as that sounds, it’s a bit of a relief.
This update has meant that I’ve had to upload every single RAH file all over again – that’s over 400mb of stuff. Sorry for killing your bandwidth, FO!
Scarcely amusing anecdote – I was so concerned about the strain on the server of uploading all this stuff again that I was thinking of just getting my own server/domain/whatever so I wouldn’t be bothering anyone else. This is what happens when you’re comically non-confrontational.
Also, hey, did I mention there’s Resident Evil movie coverage? Check it out.
“You’re programmed to be an asshole!”
And so, I’ve finished the Alien quadrology (I can’t help but laugh every time I hear that) with Alien Resurrection. It is better than Alien3 in a lot of ways, but it just came across as the least appealing film.
Ripley died in the last flick, but two hundred years later a new organisation clone her using a blood sample so they can extract the alien. Surprise surprise, that eventually goes tits-up, and Ripley, a scant few crew and a bunch of bounty hunters are trapped on the space station with them. That’s about as far as the plot goes, really.
(CONTINUED)
Rental night!
Paid another visit to Xtravision today, where I rented Transformers: War for Cybertron, Prince of Egypt, and Space Chimps. The last one was at my father’s choice. He’s got a thing for all things simian.
Just a head’s up – this entry’s gonna be looooong and largely about Transformers. Just a warning for the many folks who don’t give a damn about that little obsession.
(CONTINUED)
Wankers! In! Spaaaaaaaace!
Watched Alien3 last night. I’d seen it once before years ago; it was actually the first movie in the Alien series I’d seen, but I couldn’t remember much about it besides the totally gratuitous deaths of everyone but Ripley from the previous movie – before the movie even begins! – and the ending, so I was looking forward to seeing it in full.
You’d need a lengthy list to detail all the ways it’s different in tone from the first two films, but the main point is that there’s only one alien, the place they’re trapped on has no useful working technology to fight the creature with, and for some reason, despite being set on a dingy prison planet in the ass-end of the universe, it’s probably the brightest of the first three movies. I can understand Aliens because it was on a ravaged human colony that about to blow up or something, but who’d thought a near-derelict prison would be lit well?
Yep, that’s a great comment to start the review off with.
(CONTINUED)
Battle for Originality
Went to see Battle: Los Angeles, because that’s the kind of braindead movie one wants to watch after you’ve done nothing but feel ill and write code all day.
When I say braindead, I really do mean it. The movie is practically Military Movie 101, it throws in so many clichés. The first half hour is spent ‘getting to know’ the main players in the force, which is not only needless because their personalities are summed up in less than a minute, but also… well, let’s face it, they all end up looking the same in the heat of a battle. One guy is joked about by the others because he’s a virgin, but it’s difficult to see what other contribution he makes to the movie because it’s so damn hard to keep track of who’s who. We have emotional overreactions thrown about every ten minutes. The group find two adult civilians who provide one useful bit of support and then are made redundant. There are the kid civilians are there just for the marines to give inspirational speeches to. At one point there’s a helicopter with wounded soldiers (who are all given emotional good luck speeches from their comrades) that is blown up mere seconds after takeoff. There’s a rather needless scene where the hero and female civilian (who I guess is meant to be a love interest, but it sure isn’t developed!) muck about with an alien corpse and try to find its weak spot (which is to the right of where a human’s heart would be. Yeah, like you wouldn’t hit that eventually through regular fire). All the film needs is a dog that somehow survives all the hellish action until the end of the film and the aliens taking over a human’s body and that would nearly complete the set!
(CONTINUED)
Seriously awesome?
Father roped me into watching A Serious Man. I sat through it to the end, and was able to wriggle my way out of stating what I thought by scoring it an interrobang out of ten, sending him rummaging through dictionaries to identify the word.
It’s an interesting film. I will wholeheartedly give it that.
It is not the kind of movie one wants to watch when you’re feeling unwell and just want to see a simple everything-makes-sense comedy where, I don’t know, people fall into bathtubs or something. When I’m unwell, I’m not exactly in the mood to watch a film exploring the injustices and justices of the world and how simple actions can warp the moral fabric of the universe and screw everyone over.
Maybe sometime I’ll be willing to analyse it, but at the moment I’d just like to go to bed each night knowing that I have something worth contributing to the cosmos around me.
