martedì 13 luglio 2010

Phaedra

I've been catching up on the first 3 seasons of Burning Bad recently, and its awesome. All of the New Mexico scenery puts me in the mood for music of a more arid consistency.

I just saw Predators, it was pretty kick ass. They had a samurai showdown between a yakuza assassin and a predator, which rocked my socks. Robert Rodriguez knows how to layer his campiness very effectively, the death-row inmate guy only fights with a shiv for the entirety of the movie, the Sierra Leone guy gets killed by spears... I was surprised that they didn't re-use the 'ugly mother fucker' line from the original, Adrian Brody, whilst be-mudded, used the 'kill me, kill me now' line, and I think one predator even tried to pantomime 'get to the choppa!'
There were a few inconsistencies that I'd like to address however. the party of protagonists is pursued by a pack of, what I will call, 'predator-wolves', which are under the control of the Predator hunting party. Then the group of protagonists discover cages which had been dropped on the planet, similar to themselves, what was in the cages remains a mystery. The whole movie, I was waiting to see what were in all of these giant fucking cages. At one point, Topher Grace is chased by what the viewer would think is a predator, it gets killed, and turns out to be some other super-humanoid creature, its unclear if it is sentient or relative to the Predator species. I'm assuming that the creature mentioned was what was being dropped in the cages, but its never mentioned again, and those creatures don't return, which was just anticlimatic and a silly omission in my opinion. Also, Laurence Fishburn was killed like a little bitch, I expected him to do some crazy shit. (spoiler alert)

domenica 11 luglio 2010

Nork is Whole Screen Big

So, I have a habit of scouring the interwebs for obscure video game art, concept art when possible. I suppose that wouldn't be surprising to anyone who knows me, considering I don't have a life. Anyway, recently a friend of mine has been watching Dragon Ball Z, for the first time. Seriously, he's never watched it before, and I've been watching it with him when I'm over his place. I'll write more on that later. So I was looking for art for an old Squaresoft game by the name of Tobal. I only remember Tobal from video game magazines circa 1995 and from occupying the shelf at Video City (a momn'pop video store that went under around 10 years ago in the town over from me. They used to give free popcorn with video rentals.)

So Akira Toriyama did the character designs for Dragon Ball Z, he also did the designs for a surprisingly large number of video games, Tobal being among them.

While looking for this art, which i was highly unsuccessful at, I stumbled upon a website, which appears to have been made circa 1997, by Del the funky homosapien, where he reviews Tobal no.2, Battle Arena Toshinden 3, and Sega Virtua Fighters Megamix. You read that correctly, Del made audio reviews (which require real media player to listen to) of obscure japanese fighting games for the original playstation and sega saturn.

This makes me love Del so much more than I already did.

martedì 6 luglio 2010

Bimbo a Bourdaeux

Twisted Metal is the prototypical vehicle combat video game that has its roots planted firmly in the post classical era of console gaming. The first one came out in '95, making it one of the newly born playstation's first games. The gameplay was exactly what was expected to be delivered on this new 32 bit generation; shit blowing up, fairly large 3d arenas, good sound quality, and multiplayer gameplay. But it delivered more than that, it had macabre, it had the personality of a shitty grindhouse horror film, but it was creepy and funny enough to keep one involved in the rather large and colorful cast of characters that the player would navigate through the destruction to reach their prize by winning the tournament (and it was necessary for there to be a tournament, fighting games don't make sense otherwise, how do you justify all of these crazy motherfuckers coming out of the woodwork to fight eachother in some kind of organized fashion?)

the live action cutscenes remind me of the intro to the original resident evil. (apparently this site makes video games into movies, more investigation needed.)

anyway, they're making a new one for ps3. my only problem with it is that the music sucks a big fat hard one, and that sweet tooth hasn't been converted completely into a juggalo.

vigilante 8 was probably my favorite twisted metal knock-off, it took a more 70's comical take on twisted metal's dark humor, it even had a character that was supposed to mimic Barry Gibb.

giovedì 1 luglio 2010

cherry wine

i'm just gonna dump some stuff, here.
I'm gonna post more stuff soon.
got lots of plans.
big plans.
grande.

did I mention my heterosexual love for Matt Berry?