Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

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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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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Ultraboring

Friday, December 31, 2010 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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Braindead headbanging meatpuppets!

Wednesday, December 29, 2010 at 2:11 pm Comments (1)

Who’s up for an encore of my “fuck colds” charade?

I watched I Am Legend last night, though watching it was an amusing series of minor setbacks. It was being shown on ITV, but I thought, forget ads, let’s just watch it on DVD! The DVD wasn’t bad at first, but the sound would pop and blank for a few seconds at random moments, and even stranger, the video would cut to earlier parts in the film at totally inappropriate moments. In the midst of Neville searching through the darkened building for his dog, we got a five second glimpse at the earlier scene where he’s closing all the shutters. And then it would resume back in the building. We got as far as the second flashback to before-the-infection before we decided, this kind of stinks, so we watched the rest of it on ITV. The ads weren’t as frequent or as obtrusive as I had feared.

And then when I went to write up my thoughts on it, I realised my monitor had died. Its status light blinked randomly, but it got no picture or recognition, even though it was very clear the computer was on; you could hear the “bing!” of trying to close unsaved text documents.

So I wrote up my thoughts totally in the dark. I could write and I could save, but I certainly couldn’t look at what I was writing. It was actually pretty fun, and there weren’t quite as many spelling errors as I thought.

I’ll present my thoughts pretty much as I wrote them, minus the wacky formatting and spelling errors. Every instance of me forgetting what I was talking about will be included just for giggles.
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Christmas isn’t Christmas without “PUT THAT COOKIE DOWN”

Sunday, December 26, 2010 at 7:05 pm Comments (1)

A box of Ferrero Rocher and a Wallace & Gromit calendar. Y’know, this is probably the one year where I could’ve done with a pen or some underpants instead. I’ve got a serious lack of both. (yes, you needed to know that)

So, yeah, Christmas! I haven’t seen Jingle All The Way on TV, unfortunately, but I really should just get myself the DVD instead of having to whine that ITV doesn’t bother showing it for the umpteenth time. I did catch a few animated flicks, some of which weren’t that bad, so, hey, let’s summarise my thoughts on those, shall I?
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Aw, you’re all heart, sonny.

Friday, December 24, 2010 at 1:23 pm Comments (1)

Given my status as a rampant Nintendo fanboy, you’d think I’d have talked about Donkey Kong Country Returns by now, right? I haven’t even so much as mentioned it since the time it was shown at E3, and the game’s been out, what, over two weeks now in the UK? Well, truth is, I only got my copy on Monday! My brother preordered his but even then thanks to the terrific weather we’re currently having pretty much all postage has been delayed quite badly, so it took a week to arrive even after its release date. Awesome.

The first thing to be asked when talking about a Donkey Kong Country game is this – is it challenging enough to make you utter increasingly-creative expletives? Yes. Yes it is. Is that a good thing? You bet your bananas it is. It’s very relieving to play a game with proper kick-you-in-the-face challenge again. Returns basically takes the tough-as-nails level design of the original trilogy, turns it up several notches, and moulds it into a curveball and expects you to get it on the first shot. This is also why I should be banned from making analogies when I have had barely any sleep. Basically, it’s tough!
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There’s no such thing as a free panda

Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 7:53 pm Comments (3)

Ugh. Designing a new layout for the various bits of the site isn’t too bad, and I’d dare say it’s actually mildly entertaining. Porting old content into the new layout is an entirely joyless affair that makes me want to cry, though. Why did I think this was a good idea?

SITE UPDATES ARE POSTPONED FOR ANOTHER EIGHTEEN MONTHS

Nah, just kidding. Though it’s probably not far from the truth. It’ll probably be sixteen months.

As usual, I haven’t really been up to much, and what little I have done I’ve mostly forgotten about. I haven’t been watching many movies lately either, and what little I have watched I haven’t commented on, so let’s try and catch up!
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The Redeadening of the Undeaded: Super Dead

Monday, November 22, 2010 at 11:28 pm Comments (13)

This was originally just going to be a reply to Greybob‘s comment on the previous entry, but it kind of spiralled out of control into an outrageously long ramble on everything tangentially related to what he said. And then I thought, well, why waste it in the comments box? Who even looks at those things, anyway? (don’t answer that)

Well, personally I think zombies are more versatile and have been handled a lot better then vampires have recently. I’m not quite zombied out yet. I’ve been meaning to check out Walking Dead, both the show and the comics.
Have you heard of High School of the Dead? It’s an anime about a group of high school students who get trapped during the zombie apocalypse. I’ve been meanng to check it out, but I’ve heard it’s very very fan-service-y.

I definitely think zombies are the most universal of all the typical monsters and I’d say there’s probably tons and tons of stories you could use them in that haven’t been utilised, both from simply the environment you put them in but also just how you view them. Though, yeah, after playing Left 4 Dead several times a day, every day, for months on end, I think I am quite officially zombie’d out for the time being. It does speak volumes about how much I love the game and how much I like zombies, though.
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