Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

“You, go to hell. Here’s your ticket!”

Thursday, February 10, 2011 at 9:51 pm Comments Off on “You, go to hell. Here’s your ticket!”

Watched Bio Hunter. This was one of the many anime VHS tapes we had years and years ago (the batch of tapes that made my brother and I major fans of Ultimate Teacher and Cyber City Oedo 808, and also exposed us to the incredibly corny English dub of Laughing Target), but I’d never watched it properly until now. I caught the first scene when ripping it from VHS before I got rid of it, and it’s hardly something you forget – a chick and a dude are having sex, and then the woman gets the munchies, so her breasts turn into mouths and chew his arm off. It’s the very first scene you see, so you know it’s gonna leave an impact.
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“Do you have any more skeleton pirates?”

Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 9:44 pm Comments (8)

Pictured: The aftermath of having to babysit a ten-year-old whose family don’t believe in video games.

This must be the Site B laboratory.

Saturday, February 5, 2011 at 10:08 am Comments (1)

Possibly due to his new-found love for OutRun 2, my brother has had arcades on the mind lately, and this morning we decided to head over to Yorkgate and check out its sorely neglected arcade and bingo hall. We weren’t expecting much at all; we were well-prepared to just mosey around it for two minutes to gaze over the wares, inevitably see nothing of interest, and then just go home. One game shoved away in the corner gave us good reason to hang around. Why?

Because it was THE LOST WORLD ARCADE GAME

YYYYEEEESSSS

In the off-chance I’ve never stated it, I have very, very fond memories of playing this game back in Spain about thirteen years ago. The arcade in Porta Ventura back then had this game (and Puzzle Bobble but dude you can buy the PC version for £1 in Toys R Us, it ain’t got obscurity value) and my brother and I would go out of our way to play it every day  we were there. We sunk so much Spanish currency into that thing. Quite justifiably, because it’s a pretty rockin’ lightgun game with some great intense sequences and a few elements that just mix things up a little. We watched a few clips of it on YouTube a few weeks ago (because that’s precisely the sort of boring things we get up to) and couldn’t help but be a little wistful. The game is nearly fifteen years old, has never had a home port and the chances of it receiving one now are very unlikely. Would we ever play the game again?

And then, holy shit, there it is in Yorkgate. That’s not far at all! Heck, it’s my usual movie-going spot. I would ask myself how on earth I could’ve missed it for so long, but given how modern arcades never exactly have much to offer, I think that speaks for itself.
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Just a collection of antiques and curios

Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 4:16 pm Comments (6)

My brother is moving away soonish (I’ll miss you!) and thus has burdened me with looking after his SNES and Dreamcast. It seems to be a trait in my family (well, probably just my father’s side) that we hate throwing out old rubbish; sometimes it is literally rubbish (why the hell do I still haven the broken-off zips from old coats?), but the SNES is a valuable piece of nostalgia for us. It was our first proper games console (if we pretend that people used the ZX Spectrum for office tools and whatnot), signalling both the start of our love for video games, but also our totally irrational bias towards Nintendo. Yeah, we can play all the games we want on the Wii or the PC, complete with a close-enough imitation of the SNES controller, but my brother still has a fondness for playing stuff on the original hardware. In theory I’m the same, but in practise… hmm.

I recently picked up an AV cable for the SNES, partly so I don’t have to muck about with the aerial cable every time I want to use it and partly on request by my brother. It’s quite a sight to see the ol’ games played off their original cartridge again and without a hilariously bad RF reception. It’s, uh, not so fun realising that all my controllers are kind of busted.
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You can take the panda out of the jungle…

Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 11:51 pm Comments (1)

It’s headlines like this that make me pay attention to the world around me. Thank you, Yahoo! News.

I wonder if I should ever bother with those “what have I been up to?” summaries when there’s a new entry after some absence, because lately it boils down to “bog all.” I’ve been playing Castlevania HD, Left 4 Dead, Pocket Bomberman, Doritos Crash Course, Panic Bomber and several other games. Yeah, but have I done anything productive? Well, er…

That reminds me, I did start work on two blog entries that didn’t go anywhere. I still have that unfinished Zebraman review sitting around (where I compare it to Jingle All The Way. It’ll all make sense when it’s published!) and I wrote a bit of a ramble on Pokémon Rumble, a strangely intriguing WiiWare game that’s probably just the way I want the series to be, if it weren’t for a number of letdowns and limitations (which I’ll probably write up as a General Writing sometime). I’m mostly spending my time redesigning and gathering resources for the Bomberman Shrine Place, which I hope will really expand the site in terms of gloriously nerdy information. I want it to be so nerdy that you start to feel embarrassed for me. If the redesigned Bomberman site doesn’t make you weep for the man who’s wasting his life researching obscure elements of the Bomberman mythos, then I’m doing it wrong.

Let me know if my attempt at hyping it up is working or not.
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CERVEAUUUU

Monday, January 17, 2011 at 10:13 pm Comments (7)

It’s hilarious at how terrible my productivity is. It’s one thing that I’m struggling to work on redesigning the site, but I can barely even work on anything else, and now I can barely even write a blog entry without stumbling over myself. I’ve been trying to compose my thoughts on Zebraman for nearly two weeks now and I still haven’t made my mind up! Surely I can’t botch up mere summaries of movies I’ve watched, right?

… right?

La Horde: A French zombie movie. French zombies – is there a more despicable combination known to man? (let’s see how long it takes for me to regret that remark! I’ve never even understood French bashing, personally, but I’m not the kind of person who lets a cheap joke pass by on the internet)

Crooked cops and multi-racial gangsters get into a scuffle at the top of an apartment building, only to realise, whoops, the city’s kind of falling apart and is stuffed full of zombies, and everyone that’s dead is coming back with a hunger for flesh! The three remaining cops and three remaining crooks reluctantly come to the conclusion that if they want to get out of there alive, they’ll need to join forces. The two groups are frequently in a bit of a tiff, to put it lightly, especially when a pervy ol’ fat guy joins up with them. Hijinks ensue.

Well, it’s a zombie flick, what are you going to expect? There’s violence. There’s profanity. The characters get uppity at each other a lot. Everyone totally beats the shit of zombies in hand-to-hand combat, and this is the only movie I’ve seen where headbutting a zombie never fails.
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Terror is coming to your home (for a sewage party)

Saturday, January 8, 2011 at 11:13 pm Comments (1)

Watched Walking The Dead (not to be confused The Walking Dead; this is the one) It was not very impressive. I wasn’t really in a mood to watch a film to begin with so that might be the reasoning behind my very surly nature throughout it, but it just felt like a slasher-movie-by-numbers.

A journalist goes to a remote village in China after receiving a letter that some guy buried his daughter to keep her safe, and finds that the place is effectively a ghost town. The girl’s mother is also snooping around for her, and the two team up to find the girl and unravel the mysteries surrounding the village. Surprise, everyone inside is dead and are zombies! (Also, the woman’s father is going around with an axe cutting people’s heads off, but that’s not exactly as marketable a threat these days)

Although the packaging tries to market it as a zombie movie, it’s more of a slasher film, as the axe-carrying dad is the main threat, and dead walking (yes, not walking dead, but dead walking. The female lead is very adamant that they aren’t zombies, but doesn’t really do a good job of explaining what the difference is. Especially when the dead walking are pretty unsubstantial; yes, dropping them would change the plot, but given how boring it is, who would notice?) are almost just there as set pieces. To be frank, I’m having difficulty recapping any of the mythos because it just felt like bollocks. There’s a lot of mythos to these dead walking (I am getting sick of referring to them as that) like how they’re controlled by “walkers,” and the eyes are a pathway into controlling them, so dudes cut out their eyes so the walkers can’t hijack their corpses, and all manner of miscellaneous titbits… but none of it really means anything. The zombies basically offer nothing to the story or to the action other than prompting totally forgettable and unnecessary chase sequences. The whole mythos behind them is never used, and only seems to exist so it can pull a totally ridiculous twist at the end.

The woman was dead the whole time, and her daughter was a walker!

And the male lead died at the end as well! But now he’s back because the girl revived him!

OoOooOoooooo!!

Don’t worry, there’s more bullshit plot twists in the eighty minutes before that bombshell is dropped.
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LUCHADORES TOTALMENTE ARTICULADOS

Wednesday, January 5, 2011 at 11:30 pm Comments (7)

I like things!^*

I received two packages in the mail today. One was Alleyway for the Game Boy, a game I already have on at least two multi-cartridges and isn’t anything exciting, but I bought it in hopes of the manual expanding upon the rather ridiculous story cooked up by the blurb on the back of the box. No such luck, the manual is about as boring as stale cheese. Mind you, what kind of moron thinks a manual for a paddle-and-ball game would actually have any interesting reading material in it? Only a total moron, that’s what!

The second package was a lot less disappointing, and I’d dare say its contents were pretty damn delightful!
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Let’s Go Tango in Paris

Friday, December 31, 2010 at 10:49 pm Comments Off on Let’s Go Tango in Paris

It’s funny how bad I am at planning things. I’ll totally have the site redesign finished to a reasonably functional degree by the end of the year, sure! And here I am, with the redesign still in its planning stages, and a bazillion unfinished projects littered around me.

For instance, this badge of a frighteningly disproportional Spider-Man. I don’t know what I planned to do with it, but I swear I planned something.

(no, I wasn’t going to wear it)

Here’s hoping next year will be a little more productive.

Ultraboring

at 12:18 am Comments (1)

Watched Ultraviolet. In a way it was a lot like your typical anime – an incredible attention-grabbing first twenty minutes, and then the rest of it struggles to compare with the expectations, leaving the viewer with an incomprehensible plot and cookie cutter action scenes. At least there’s Milla Jovovich, right?
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