Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

Some games I played in 2024: Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind

Monday, June 16, 2025 at 1:28 pm Comments Off on Some games I played in 2024: Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind

While I enjoy a good brawler, I tend to stick to the ones I’m comfortable with, but pal ShaolinTurtle very much keeps up with what’s hip and happening, and had been keeping tabs on Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind. Ever since Shredder’s Revenge, there’s been a whole swathe of pixelated beat-em-ups based on retro properties — the Karate Kid, Toxic Crusaders, G.I. Joe, even Jay & Silent Bob… and no doubt more I’m forgetting, there’s so flippin’ many!

What made Rita’s Rewind stand out is that it showed more than just standard brawling — shooting galleries, auto-runner vehicle sequences ala Konami’s G.I. Joe arcade game, and even Punch-Out style Megazord battles. It certainly got my attention!
Full disclosure, I did not purchase this game, I simply took part via Steam Remote Play, and have not been back to the game since. My positivity and defence of it might come from not paying for the experience…! The game’s since announced major updates to remedy quirks and feedback, so what I describe is likely a thing of the past.
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Some movies I watched in 2024: Space Jam

Monday, June 9, 2025 at 1:27 pm Comments Off on Some movies I watched in 2024: Space Jam

I’ve mentioned pal ShaolinTurtle before, and bless his heart, he’s a terrible man for exposing himself to obnoxious discussions or terrible opinions, only to rant about it to no one on Discord. One such occasion was an inexplicable comparison between Sonic the Hedgehog‘s Rouge the Bat, and Space Jam‘s Lola Bunny.
Because we are both insufferable dweebs, we had lots of opinions on Rouge and how she’s a far more capable character than she’s often depicted, but were coming up short on defences for Lola. Time to take notes and expose everyone to an impromptu watch party, then!
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Some games I played in 2024: Fast Food Rampage

Monday, June 2, 2025 at 1:25 pm Comments Off on Some games I played in 2024: Fast Food Rampage

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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Some movies I watched in 2024: Cool World

Monday, May 26, 2025 at 1:24 pm Comments Off on Some movies I watched in 2024: Cool World

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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Some games I played in 2024: Maiden Cops

Monday, May 19, 2025 at 2:07 pm Comments Off on Some games I played in 2024: Maiden Cops

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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Some movies I watched in 2024: Izzy Gets The Fuck Across Town

Monday, May 12, 2025 at 1:04 pm Comments Off on Some movies I watched in 2024: Izzy Gets The Fuck Across Town

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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Some comics I read in 2024: Earthworm Jim

Monday, April 28, 2025 at 9:23 pm Comments (1)

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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Some games I played in 2024: Earthworm Jim 1 & 2

Sunday, April 13, 2025 at 8:29 pm Comments Off on Some games I played in 2024: Earthworm Jim 1 & 2

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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Some games I played in 2024: Spud!

Wednesday, October 30, 2024 at 11:02 am Comments Off on Some games I played in 2024: Spud!

The games I played in 2023 review is done with the addition of Lois & Clark and Combo Rangers. Hopefully I can freakin’ write some different things for a change! In the meantime… uh, more dumb game reviews, sorry.

Have you ever played a game, read a book or watched a TV show forever ago, left it unfinished, and wondered how it panned out in the end? And if you do decide to finish it long after the fact, is there any hope of it matching your expectations…?

Spud! is a game my brother and I were bought in the early days of PC gaming, a point-and-click adventure where you’ve got to rescue Santa Claus from the evil Dr. Chillbane with the help of toy gnomes and fluffy bunnies. Its first-person perspective for its point-and-click puzzles is really unique, offering 360 degrees of panoramic view at every waypoint, though perhaps to the point of excess — does even your inventory need to be a sprawling dome of shelves…?
It’s decidedly off-kilter, between its questionable depictions of Santa’s reindeer and the kooky characters you meet on a tropical island, not to mention its penchant for bloody violence — if you don’t send out the gnomes or bunnies as human shields (or the species equivalent), Spud is liable to come a cropper via a spear through the eye!
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Talking about RPGs because I don’t know!!

Monday, October 19, 2020 at 9:59 pm Comments Off on Talking about RPGs because I don’t know!!

I dread being asked what my favourite anything is. I’ve a whole lotta favourites! Literal stacks of favourites that I shuffle between depending on the mood or time of day! It’s like asking what my favourite pair of socks is — I cycle them! You can’t ask me to rank one pair of socks above the other! They’re all the same colour! And it’s at that point the analogy begins to fall apart. Not unlike my socks, actually.

This stinks because I sure would like to engage with folks on Twitter a bit more often, but unless it’s a multi-tweet thread about a topic that’s of interest only to myself and no one else living or dead, then I typically don’t wanna do it. I do appreciate folks daring to tag me in tweets, but it invariably results in a week of hand-wringing whether I’ll respond or not… and then not responding anyway because to reply after waiting a week just feels rude. Rest assured I read all emails, DMs and correspondence, and I appreciate it and give them a lot of thought, and then rarely actually put those thoughts into a reply. I don’t think that’s very reassuring, actually. My apologies.

Whatever point I was trying to make, I assume it applies to when pal herrDoktorat tagged me in naming iconic RPGs I’ve played in my life. There’s maybe a dozen I’ve played long enough for me to say with confidence I have played them, but RPGs aren’t really my strong suit…! To name off three game titles without context doesn’t gel with my brand of being needlessly fucking verbose, so let’s just rattle off all the RPGs I’ve played enough to have a tangible opinion on. I never said they’d be good opinions, so I’m throwing myself on the mercy of the court! You’re talking to a man who associates Mario with RPGs more than flippin’ Dragon Quest…!

Final Fantasy VII

My introduction to RPGs! A friend of my dad’s just gave the game to us for whatever reason, and it was unlike anything we’d played before. I, as a dumb youngster, was put off by the fact you couldn’t jump. Why have all these detailed 3D environments if you can’t jump!? But watching my brother play it was fascinating, seeing the story play out through text and many varied setpieces and environments. When Shadows of the Empire on Nintendo 64 was as cinematic as a console game had gotten in our experience, this was a whole other kettle of fish.

Because Europe missed out on so many iconic JRPGs, this was probably how most folks were introduced to the genre? Without Chrono Trigger or the like, the only alternatives were obscure Game Boy titles or flippin’ Rings of Power on Mega Drive, I don’t know. Even in America it seems like the first RPG to take on mainstream success, thanks to its big-budget advertising campaign.
As such, it’s kind of resulted in a lot of people reading the game the wrong way; for your first RPG to tackle a complex narrative and themes of unreliable narrators and withheld memories is going to cause some complexities, even before you factor in its iffy translation. I should be the last person to judge people for reading a story the wrong way, (Dok will attest to my lousy reading comprehension), but it’d be nice if people got their personalities right once in a while. Aeris is meant to be spunky!
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