Work is for the weak

29 June 06 | 12:35

Milon's Secret Castle Party at my desk! Bring some chips or drinks or something and together we'll try to figure out which random, arbitrarily-placed blocks to shoot.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 18 comments | §

Sketchblog Returns

27 June 06 | 12:10

posted by: | category: blog | forums | fourteen comments | §

Mistress of Sorrow

26 June 06 | 14:05

After I tried to rationalize the oddities inherent in Dawn of Sorrow to my girlfriend, she apparently spent some time contemplating how to make the game better. Demon karate maids and deadly curry, it seems, aren't sufficiently awesome for her. Thus she commissioned me (and by "commissioned" I mean "insisted forcefully") to sketch her plan for improving the game. Thus: Mistress Sashimi, the ninja dominatrix who throws deadly raw fish.



She may or may not be an improvement over Persephone, but at least she'd push that T rating to its absolute limit.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 25 comments | §

It's the Chronic(WHAT)cles of... Metroid. Vania.

24 June 06 | 13:30

I've finally decided to get around to the task of codifying (and venerating) the entries on the Metroidvania page, starting sensibly enough from the top. The Metroid link up there no longer leads to an elderly review (circa 2002) about the version of the game packed in with Prime but instead an entirely new write-up focusing on the little tidbits that make it intrinsically... uh, Metroidvania.

(ProTip: it's actually the same thing I posted at my 1UP Blog. I feel obligated to post something there every few days, but my heart really lies where I have a little more control over the backend and archiving, i.e. here.)

To that end, I've completely reorganized the Games main page, organizing things in a much more orderly fashion than the prior state of disaster. I've also begun dusting off some really old write-ups and editing them to be less painful to read, such as this thing on Simon's Quest.

posted by: | category: blog | forums | twelve comments | §

Square for battle

23 June 06 | 15:11

Yeah, I don't even know. I guess no more Rush for me.

posted by: | category: media | forums | 31 comments | §

BONUS UPDATE: Gyakuten Ayn Rand

22 June 06 | 18:15

Inspired by the recent Neil Peart search string. By an odd coincidence, I had a little extra money after my last paycheck and used it to pick up Rush's (somewhat) recent DVD box sets yesterday. See, I do this thing where once every year or two I think, huh, maybe I should see if any bands I like have released anything recently; turns out Rush has. I don't really care all that much about DVDs, honestly, but since the sets include live bonus CDs and cost about the same as a stand-alone live set would, it was hard to say no -- Rush is pretty limp-sounding in the studio, but they're impressive performers, and it's nice to hear music from the Grace Under Pressure era performed with real instruments. Plus the Pressure tour live CD has the entire Fear Trilogy performed back-to-back. It almost takes me back to high school, except that I'm no longer delusional enough to believe that just because I enjoy music it's actually any good.

posted by: | category: media | forums | ten comments | §

The custom M-16... of LOVE

21 June 06 | 23:46

I completely forgot to update during my period of post-E3 decompression about the best thing to happen at the entire stupid event. See, at the 1UP members-only party, Wes Ehrlichman of The Gamer's Quarter gave me a box of condoms.

While that action alone would be creepy to the point of terrifying, it was the brand of condoms that made the difference. Yes, Golgomania has now become full circle: I own a box of Golgo 13 prophylactics.



Having stumbled across these things when I went to Japan a few years back, I've since kicked my brain repeatedly for being too bashful to buy a box at the time. Thanks to Wes' grossly inappropriate gift (the box was already open, for that extra touch of ewwww) my love of insane novelty has been fulfilled. These things are great. Er, well, I mean the packaging is great. I won't actually be using them, for far more reasons than I have space to enumerate.

Highlights: crass multilingual innuendos making the obvious connection between sex and Golgo's preferred M.O. -- note the condom illustration on the back of the box which happens to look remarkably like an M-16 shell casing. And the front of the box says in English: "We'll never make a bad shot." But the best part is the somewhat obscure pun about these being for "big safe capers" -- "Big Safe Caper" being the title of the very first G13 story from 1968. In that case, the safe was a vault; here, of course, it refers to safe sex. Which really just goes to show that no matter what the property, no matter how "adult" the ancillary merchandise, anime-branded collectibles are inescapably nerdy.

Completely brilliant. So thank you, Wes Ehrlichman, for having sufficiently poor judgment to think an open box of condoms is a suitable gift for a complete stranger. You rule.

For your consideration, geekiness of a more family-oriented nature: a random yet completely great comic I stumbled across yesterday. Sadly, a cursory glance of the archives suggests that the rest of the comic is fairly mundane. But in lieu of other comics about pink-haired girls with a fondness for Katamari Damacy, perhaps you will feel otherwise.

In sadder news, one of the site's latest referring search strings is "Neil Peart naked." Come on, Internet. I expect better than that. Even from you.

posted by: | category: media | forums | 23 comments | §

Dawn of... something

21 June 06 | 16:51

This morning on the bus to work I finally collected an Iron Golem soul to complete my 100% soul run in Dawn of Sorrow. I collected the Chaos Ring, forged some insane weapons and defeated Menace. Correction: I defeated Menace with a demon vacuum cleaner.

Unfortunately, that was such a mind-blowing feat that I feel alarmingly directionless now. I can't think of anything else to do with my life that would be anywhere near as awesome as saving the world with an undead Electrolux.

By the way, I don't care how nostalgic you may happen to be for Symphony of the Night or Dracula's Curse. (Or Legends, if you were unfortunate enough to have been introduced to gaming with that sad excuse for a game and think it represents something akin to "quality.") Objectively speaking, Dawn is absolutely the best Castlevania ever. I know you hate being wrong, so I'd recommend not disagreeing with this completely factual statement.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 30 comments | §

Lester Bangs says you're stupid

21 June 06 | 12:06

Last week someone or another asked my opinion on some Slate article (which I hadn't read) that took the world to task for having failed to create "the Lester Bangs of videogames." I tried to ignore it, but now I can't, because the topic is cropping up everywhere I look. Jane sagely pointed out the fact that there is no Lester Bangs in any medium now, and I don't see people berating the New York Times for its lack of hard-hitting "book journalism." But there's something even more important that no one seems to have mentioned yet: that videogames are not, in fact, music.

Last I heard, developers don't go on tour performing their games; Bangs was able to live the rock-n-roll lifestyle in a way that is completely impossible with videogames. There's a certain mystique to music that comes from its performance-based nature; the creative process of videogames is more akin to the process of recording a studio album, which for most bands is simply the means to an end. In gaming, the product is the end.

More importantly, Bangs made his mark before the total corporatization of the music industry, giving him unprecedented access to musicians and the ability to be confrontational as he saw fit. Once Nintendo took over the games industry, though, developers vanished behind a monolith of PR -- and PR types don't like to play ball with the media even when said media is trying its best to make the game in question look good.

(All-too-typical exchange at the office: "We'd like to do a cover story on ______. Millions of people will see our extensive preview coverage of this game we've selected because we're genuinely enthusiastic about it!" "Positive, high profile coverage? Eh, we'll get back to you.")

Come to think of it, even Atari hated to give credit to its creators -- thus the mass exodus to Activision back in the day. In short, the people who run the industry are very reluctant to reveal the people behind their products, and Bangs' work was great because it was as much about the musicians as their work and his feelings on it. Gaming is a more impersonal medium than rock -- outside of a few major names, it's not a personality-driven medium. And even those major names, the Miyamotos and Wrights and whatever, are carefully tucked away behind layers of PR representation by overbearingly protective publishers.

When teenage boys across the country stand in front of their bedroom mirrors and "air code" in time to GTA, when thousands of gamers spontaneously convene in a muddy field in upstate NY to watch their favorite developers program games, gaming will have finally become a cultural incubator to parallel the rock culture that gave birth to Bangs' work. Until then, though, this is all very silly. Much like the entire concept of "videogame journalism," in fact.

Still, this little collective Internet brain-fart hasn't been completely pointless. It prompted me, finally, to make those New Games Journalist buttons:



The first batch is being shipped off to serve as prizes for SGE '06, but I'll put together a few more designs and offer some sets, since I know a few people were interested.

posted by: | category: games | forums | twelve comments | §

Retronauts Blog 8: Sega's Masterful Moment (Addendum)

20 June 06 | 00:06

This week -- or maybe next week, or possibly last, I'm not very clear on this point -- marks the 20th anniversary of the Sega Master System. Now, last year was the NES's 20th anniversary, and we marked the occasion with a really enormous blowout. For the SMS... we're posting the two-page write-up I put together for EGM.

Bias? You bet.

Well, OK, not really. I don't have anything against the Master System -- in fact, I bought one and gave a bunch of its games a fair shake two summers ago. The problem is... well, there's just not that much to say about the system. The EGM piece could probably stand to be expanded on ever-so-slightly, I guess (since the EGM Retro style is deliberately fatuous) -- but not by much.

Part of the problem (for me) is that I only knew a single person who owned a Master System back in the day, and he had serious compensation issues. I'd go over to his house to check out his games and he'd spend the entire time talking about how much better the SMS was than the NES; he'd come over to my place to play NES and harp on the most mundane details as proof of the SMS's superiority. "Zelda II has such slow text scrolling! NES games are for idiots." Or, "That Blaster Master stage four music is too creepy. Videogames shouldn't sound like that. Master System is better."

In other words, I had lots of practice for the Internet.

The bigger issue at hand is simply that the Master System, despite having superior hardware to the NES, lacked the breadth and depth of its competition's library. Sega did lots of clever things with their first internationally-distributed console, but they fell flat when it came to wrapping up third-party support. And we all know that third-party software is what makes a console great! (Except, ironically, Nintendo's more recent entries in the hardware arena, which have largely gotten by on in-house stuff.)

But I come to praise Master System, not to bury it. Despite some tough times, it had its moments. And I cling to these tiny bits of Sega nostalgia to convince myself I'm not really just a hopeless Nintendo fanboy at heart.

Read on, gentle pilgim, for the world's worst Master System retrospective. Ever! >>

posted by: | category: games | forums | 24 comments | §

Meanwhile, on the other side....

19 June 06 | 15:53

1UP has been struck by a glacier, or something. We did this crazy thing over the weekend: we switched the site to a new data hosting service, which is reputed to be one of the fastest and most reliable in the country. (And for a small bonus, it's located down the block from us.) In theory, the site should be faster than ever... in reality, erm. It's the thought that counts, I guess.

Anyway, assuming you can get the site to load, my reviews of the Haunted Castle and Contra Oretachi Game Center imports are finally, finally up. The reviews are longer and more boring than I remember, but I guess I had a lot of anger to worth through after playing Haunted Castle. So! If you're dying to know whether you should import some games that came out a few weeks ago, here you go. Almost but not quite up-to-the-moment coverage.

Spoiler: No, you shouldn't buy them.

In much happier news, the information superhighway suffered a major Super Paper Mario spill over the weekend. Cleanup efforts were largely unsuccessful, so if you haven't rubbernecked yet you should check out GameVideos. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Back already? Well then. Let's commence frothing.

Nintendo is responsible for a lot of great stuff these days, but I'm fairly certain that Intelligent Systems is the best thing the company has going for it. Maybe I'm just biased in favor of the development house that gave us Metroid.



Mostly, though, I think IS has an intuitive grasp of how videogames work -- an ability to explore the inherent and unique possibilities of the medium without getting bogged down in excess like, say, Hideo Kojima. Paper Mario was subtly sophisticated beneath its disarming facade of simplicity, and WarioWare is... well, WarioWare.



Everyone's already gushing about how the Super Paper Mario dragon boss fight is OMG SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS, which... OK, yeah, I see it. It also reminds me of Ouroborous from Strider 2. Far more intriguing to me is the first video, which shows off the simple, mundane platforming aspect of the game -- specifcally, the fact that it's in no way mundane.



My only fear is that the inclusion of hit points and a seeming experience system indicates that this will not be a simple level-based Mario game but a platformer with the world structure of the previous Paper Mario games. That is... Metroidvania. Or, perhaps, Mariovania. I'm kind of hoping that's not the case, because then I won't be able to play the game. I'll be far too occupied with curling up on the floor weeping for joy, you see.

P.S. Important memo to Mega Man from the BLOGOSPHERE (TM): put on some pants.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 17 comments | §

Victory: Pixar

19 June 06 | 10:57

I went to see Cars a few days ago, rather against my better instincts. In fact, let's be honest: Cars looked absolutely terrible, and it was only a sense of obligatation that drove me to support the latest creation of the only company in America that appears dedicated to creating genuinely entertaining cartoons. Thus I supported the movie on general principle, even though it gave every indication of being completely wretched.

And while there was still an unpleasant whiff of merchandising behind the movie's basic premise -- making the entire cast into action-figure-ready automobiles rather than focusing on, say, human drivers was seriously pretty shameless -- and while the story was, unsurprisingly, Pixar Boilerplate Plot #1 (cocky/overbearing protagonist is humbled by circumstance, embarks on a Joseph-Campbell-approved journey of self-discovery, applies important lessons of experience to his old life), the movie was, shockingly, quite good. A little too cutesy in places, hopelessly predictable, but the superlative pacing made for a steady supply of jokes, action scenes and Touching Moments (TM) with just enough of a break in between each setpiece for the whole thing not to be exhausting.

Sure, it was all a carefully packaged work of craftsmanship rather than art, but it was marvelously crafted. And the whole Route 66 subplot tapped into some sort of collective, primal nostalgia for vanished America without being overbearing about it. Plus, the trailers for the film only focused on the gruesomely plastic-looking characters without giving a hint of how completely beautiful the backgrounds were. Pixar's CG artisty never ceases to astound -- anyone can render talking cars in 3D, but creating endless vistas and rugged desert badlands in CG is pretty crazy amazing.

I'm pretty sure that all the trailers for upcoming CG flicks were included before the movie started just so you can appreciate how far ahead of the competition the company really is. I've seen trailers for about a dozen generic CG cartoons in the past month, but the only one that made an impression was...



...suffused with a gentle warmth and luminosity never before seen in CG...



...featured fluid animation and character physics reminiscent of classic Warner Bros. work...



...and hinted at comical sight gags that recollected the prime years of Tom & Jerry. You know, the era they never show anymore because of its unfortunate racist undertones.

What's that, you say? It's Ratatouille, Pixar's next movie? Well alright then.

Dear everyone who is not Pixar: please give up forever. You're all five to ten years behind and your inability to do anything except rip off Madagascar offends me. Love, me.

posted by: | category: media | forums | 38 comments | §

Heartbreak addendum

16 June 06 | 14:07

More bad news: I think yesterday I permanently ruined my chances of ever convincing my girlfriend that videogames are pretty great. She's expressed some vague interest in Animal Crossing, and her fondness for Angelina Jolie automatically translates into an above-average tolerance for Tomb Raider (despite the complete lack of Ms. Jolie in said games). I was kind of hoping those could maybe serve as chinks in the armor of her indifference, but then I made the mistake of playing Dawn of Sorrow in her presence.

Not that Dawn of Sorrow is an unappealing game on the surface! It's just that I happened to be using a fully-leveled up soul combination of Skeleton Waiter and Persephone. Which means I was battling the forces of darkness by syphoning my enemies' life force with a demon maid's vacuum cleaner before finishing them off with a bowl of curry rice. This was harder to explain than you might expect.



"So what is that thing you just used?"

"Oh... well, I captured the soul of a demonic karate maid and now I can drain energy from bad guys with her vacuum. Plus any time someone shoots an arrow or something at me, the vacuum will suck it in. Plus whenever I destroy a candelabra or skeleton or something the vacuum sucks it up as it crumbles."

"Okay..."

"Also, the suction effectively disables a lot of the female monsters in the game, because they're too busy keeping their skirts down to attack me."

"....."

"I prefer to use the curry, though -- it's really powerful now that I've leveled it up to a complete place setting."

"Curry?"

"Right. I can toss a plate of curry at bad guys and if they walk into it, they'll be destroyed."

"That's stupid. Why curry? Why not naan?"

"It's Japanese, not Indian."

"OK, so why not sashimi?"

"Well, you serve sashimi slightly below room temperature, so I don't think it would be as dangerous as a plate of hot curry."

"Still, why curry? Why not tempura? That's fried and oily and way more dangerous."

"Uh... well, have you ever eaten Japanese curry? It's pretty dangerous."

"'Bland' is not the same thing as 'dangerous.'"

"But... uh...."

From this, we can take away two important lessons. One, videogames are ridiculous. Two, I'm really pathetic when it comes to rationalizing their excesses. Bonus lesson: I really shouldn't post conversations like this because they're intrinsically not interesting to anyone who is not me.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 44 comments | §

Angel of Heartbreak

16 June 06 | 11:25

I think it is time to come to terms with a heartbreaking reality. Much as I'd like to deny it, the truth is unavoidable: Battle Angel Alita Last Order is not very good.

Wait, scrub that. Last Order is really, really bad.

Guys, if I ever write a story that degenerates into a fighting tournament -- aka the Chapter 11-iest form of creative bankruptcy ever -- please find me and kill me. It'll be deemed a justfiable mercy killing in any court.

posted by: | category: media | forums | 26 comments | §

Second harvest

15 June 06 | 10:55

A recent referring search string for the site: "sloppy seconds fantasy." Doesn't seem like much of a fantasy to me, but it takes all kinds, I guess. And, it happens to be timed rather amusingly -- I realized yesterday that the very first two articles I ever wrote for 1UP, back in the mists of time, have been lost to the ether. It seems they failed to make the delta migration to the current server and no longer exist. So I've posted them here for no real reason except that I'm a complete packrat, even with words. Sure, I tear down this site all the time, but you don't think I actually delete things, do you? I still have writing and drawings from as far back as junior high school kicking around in various forms.

My obsessive-compulsive habits are therefore your sloppy seconds.

First, there's this horribly overwritten thing on Boktai, which I remembered as I was writing up a brief paean to the game for my retro-blog thing. And then here's this kind of sad atttempt at FInal Fantasy XI humor. These aren't much fun to read and I wouldn't really recommend trying. Mainly I've posted them to remind myself that I actually have grown as a writer since working here.

Granted, I've mostly just grown more apathetic and self-loathing, but it still works out -- I write less because I don't care, and I have fewer compunctions about throwing away massive chunks of work because I have no attachment to it. Despondency: the key to effective editing.

posted by: | category: blog | forums | eight comments | §

Low-Bandwidth Edition

13 June 06 | 00:14

Hit the refresh keys, kids, there's a new design going on at this here site. And since most of the design-y bits are background elements which tend to stay cached, you're likely to end up with a really dopey-looking half-update if you don't abuse that F5 key. (This concludes my annual attempt to speak to Windows users in their own language. Mac types: Command-R, STAT.) It's an incredibly plain-looking design, but this is very intentional as I need to cut back on my bandwidth usage; this header single-handedly shaves about 90K off each page load. But actually my latent graphic designer training makes me all gushy about needless minialism and excessive white space, so whatever. I sort of like it, cheap as it may look.

Anyway. If you're one of those people who doesn't like to go to 1UP, because it's slow or crashy or pop-up infested, or maybe just because you feel that avoiding corporate-owned websites is your way of violently sticking it to The Man, you'll be happy to know I've been diligently archiving my bi-daily Retronauts blogs right here. You know, if that's your kinda thing.

Oh yeah, and my girlfriend gets back from her two-week vacation in a little while, so I guess that's probably the end of the Worst Ending series. Tragic reality: I was mainly doing it to kill time while she was out of town. Love is the death of creativity, it's true. It was fun while it lasted, though (in a stupid sort of way).

posted by: | category: blog | forums | 27 comments | §

Worst Ending #4

11 June 06 | 22:44

These are starting to become irredeemably obscure, sorry. Technically I kind of cheated on this one -- the endings in Simon's Quest don't really correspond to the quality of your performance. The only positive ending is the one you get if you take more than two weeks. If you blast through the game in less than a week of game time, Dracula returns; if you do a fairly decent job of finishing, Simon bites it. Whatever; in my eyes the worst ending is the "Dracula returns again" one.

I'm pretty sure the people who made Simon's Quest were a bunch of misanthropes. We've all sort of taken for granted the notion that the game's bizarre and misleading clues were mistranslations, but actually, no -- the original Japanese dialogue was useless, too. In fact, Castlevania II may be the most accurate 8-bit translation ever. No, I don't get it, either.

posted by: | category: worst ending | forums | 29 comments | §

Capcom = UHHH

10 June 06 | 13:13

So I was skimming Kotaku in my RSS feeds and noticed a new set of Capcom figurines.


It's a little on the icky side, yeah -- apparently they're pandering to the really hopeless otaku losers now by dressing their characters as TGS booth girls. Kinda meta, actually, since--

Wait a minute.


Is that a...?


Is that a Servbot? Dressed as...


Dressed as a booth girl?


Oh man. If being a hopeless otaku loser is wrong, I never want to be right again.

posted by: | category: blog | forums | 22 comments | §

Worst Ending #3

09 June 06 | 00:08

I know, I know, obvious joke that's already sort of been done before. I'm just covering my bases here. The sooner I work through this odd "Worst Ending" fixation I have the sooner it'll all be over and we can move along to happier experiences.

posted by: | category: worst ending | forums | 33 comments | §

Time to make your sad face :(

08 June 06 | 11:27

Guys, terrible news: the Tingle RPG still exists. And based on the screenshots it's both creepy and a little revolting.


I mean, really, I feel a little sick just looking at it.

Needless to say, I'm going to do everything in my power to get that localization opening at Nintendo's Treehouse -- I so totally want my name in the credits of a game this emotionally scarring.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 35 comments | §

Worst Ending #2

07 June 06 | 00:38

No, really, this isn't a series. I can't really think of that many games with multiple endings, and I've played only a tiny fraction of them. Go on home, nothing more to see here.

It occured to me after I finished that the cereal kinda looks more like Lavos spikes than Crono hair, but I don't think I should be held responsible for Toriyama's fixation with pointy edges.

posted by: | category: worst ending | forums | 34 comments | §

Number of the whatever

06 June 06 | 09:57

Man, so maybe today really is evil. Like, I got to the office and found a copy of the new EGM in which I had apparently succumbed to some sort of delirium and penned an upbeat article on Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I don't even remember that. Must have been my vile doppelganger -- the same one who sent me a cryptic and vaguely satanic message last night from my own email account.

But what really has me convinced of today's inherent menace is that my bus ride to work today was pretty much the epitome of the worst possible SF MUNI experience: a vagrant got on the bus at an early point on the line and decided to regale us with his raspy obscenities and even more obscene odor. I can still smell it, lingering on my clothes, an hour later. (For those not familiar with the aroma, it's like being dumped in a vat of wet, elderly dogs, then drowned in stale urine. Seriously. I may not have an appetite today.) Then some dude decided to reenact that scene from Star Trek IV where the guy blasts rap on the bus and Spock nerve-pinches him into submission, except we didn't have any Vulcans on hand to soothe our poor, violated ears. And the last time I tried nerve-pinching someone they ended up dead, which causes all kinds of annoying legal issues I don't have time to deal with today.

And when I got off the bus, our friend Frank Chu was standing there, staring at me. In his, uh, LETSPHRENETICAL way.

I don't know about you guys but I'm having a tall glass of holy water for lunch.

posted by: | category: blog | forums | nine comments | §

Life's little Essentials

05 June 06 | 00:08

I think The Essential Handbook of the Marvel Universe may well be the most rewarding $14 I've spent all year. And this is a year in which I've bought a new computer, which is a whole lots of $14s combined, so that's really saying something.

I remember stumbling across an issue of the Handbook when I was a kid and finding its obsession and devotion to trivial minutiae about imaginary super-people completely fascinating. When I discovered Marvel was reprinting the series as part of its dirt-cheap Essentials series, I dropped change without hesitation. The sheer preposterousness of the whole thing alone was worth the price of admission: not only is this a phonebook-sized tome of insanely detailed profiles about comic book heroes, the information contained within is nearly a quarter-century out of date. I'm pretty sure the majority of the characters covered in the book are either dead, or have been dead at some point, or have had a child sent into the future only to come back full grown and possibly evil, or have quietly been erased from the Marvel Universe due to their having been created during by Roy Thomas during a particularly loopy circa 1978 drug trip, and thus laughably ridiculous by any cultural standard which isn't tainted by overexposure to mirror globes and roller boogie. What sort of idiots would print something like that? Apparently the idiots at Marvel. Good thing they have idiots like me to encourge them.

This is the sort of thing that sits around collecting dust until I'm good and bored, and that describes this weekend in a nutshell -- the girlfriend is out of town for two weeks, and I've been forced to rush through Astonishia Story as quickly as possible for a review. Between yawns, I keep shouting curses at Ubisoft. Like, "'Localization' does not mean 'dropping a raw translation into the game and nipping off for an early weekend.'" Fortunately, the Handbook is keeping me sane. I slog through another three battles, I get to read a profile.

Rereading these things as an adult, I realize -- well, that I probably shouldn't be rereading them as an adult. But I accept that it's too late for me, so the other thing I realize is that this book is pretty much the progenitor of screaming Internet fantards who freak out when their four-color funnybooks aren't "realistic" enough. Because, you know, a medium where spandex fetishists can rattle off three lines of faux-Shakespearean soliloqies between laser punches is so deeply rooted in real life. Whoever wrote this stuff -- apparently Mark Gruenwald -- spent way too long coming up with rationales for superpowers whose only real litmus test during the creative process was HOLY CRAP three hours to deadline I'd better think up something oh god oh god.

So, I've leared interesting things, like the fact that Alpha Flight's Aurora isn't just fast -- she gets around by "channeling the kinetic energy of the atomic motion of her body." Which handily has the side effect of making her skin more rigid (due to reduced atomic motion) and thus resistant to air friction. Or that Kitty Pride (who apparently was using the codename Ariel at the time, presumably so that thirsty villains wouldn't mistake her for the great taste of Limon(TM)) doesn't actually become intangible so much as she vibrates her molecules so quickly that they fall out of sync with her surroundings, and that she is fortunate enough to be able to cause her underwear to vibrate with her to help prevent embarrassing bouts of accidental public nudity.

In short, this book fills my mind with visions of sad, doughy 45-year-olds sitting in a basement-scented comics shop arguing about the physics of Dazzler's disco-beams with the sort of passion other men put into making out with girls. It is, needless to say, glorious.

Other fun trivia: Google Maps indicates that the Avengers Mansion (located at 721 Fifth Avenue, NYC) has been converted into a small public park.



Also, the Avengers' mainframe computer is capable of "2.5 giga flip-flops per second," which certainly must come in handy when Galactus needs footwear for his beach outings.

Best of all, every once in a while I'll come across a character who's so frickin' weird that there was clearly only one solution:


That's right, they had to call on King Kirby to handle the art. Because lesser mortals cannot draw a man who has placed his brain into his stomach for protection, wears an ESP transmitter where his head used to be, and broadcasts the image of his former face on a TV grafted into his stomach. That way lies madness.

If comic books were still that awesome, I'd actually be willing to buy them.

posted by: | category: media | forums | sixteen comments | §

Worst Ending #1

03 June 06 | 17:57

So I drew a comic, preying upon the eternal fear that the weird waves emitted from cell phones cause sterility. I'm willing to believe it -- a cell phone can make a computer flake out just by sitting there waiting for a call, and I'm pretty sure that our essential human plumbing is a lot more delicate than your average Dell.

The comic's unfortunately kind of a disaster, since I drew it oekaki style (hoping it would speed things up) but was compelled to shade it properly. This caused it to take nearly as long to draw as a normal comic -- plus the sketchy style inflated the file size so much I had to scale it down pretty painfully.

Don't worry too much about the "#1" at the end of the title. I don't intend to turn Worst Ending into a series, I'm just leaving my options open.

posted by: | category: worst ending | forums | 28 comments | §

The return of the joker

02 June 06 | 00:22

So, I guess I should start updating again.

May wasn't a very enjoyable month for me. The good news (I guess?) is that I managed to resist the natural inclination that comes hand-in-hand with soul-searching and/or contemplating how much of my life I waste on frivolity: namely, erasing all traces of my life from the Internet. Beginning, as always, with this site. But for once I decided to be realistic; I've invested waaaay too much effort this time around, and we all know I'd be drawn back into the fray sooner or later, so I bit the bullet and left ToastyFrog.com online for a while longer. Hooray for progress, I suppose.

Speaking of wasting my life on frivolity, I've written yet another preview of Final Fantasy XII. By our previews editor's count, this makes something like 10,000 words I've written on the subject, and I've got to say I was ready to claw my eyeballs out at around the halfway point of this one. But, since it contains the results of my E3 interview with Kawazu, Yoshida, Maehiro and Watanabe (an interview that went much, much too badly to stand on its own merits) it had to be done. And actually, once I got past the agony of trying to find a new way to write about the game, I think it turned out pretty well -- it's the sort of thing that could almost stand on its own merits as a magazine cover story. Almost.

As a small bonus, I included a brief review of the FFXII OST, which is superb. For videogame music, I mean. I really think it's the best Sakimoto brain dropping I've ever heard, and he is one talented and prolific man to begin with. FFXII's music sounds a lot like what you'd get if the OSTs from Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story had a baby together, and then that baby went on to give them a grandchild with Michiru Yamane's Castlevania soundtracks as the mother. It sounds a lot like Sakimoto's other work on Matsuno projects, but there's a definite warmth to the music that his earlier work generally lacked. Plus there's a totally unexpected rearranged version of one of the best tunes from a much older chapter of the series that brought a tiny flicker of happiness to my bus ride home this evening. Home audience, say it with me: Aww.

In other stupid, frivolous news, I'm going to buck the conventional wisdom and say I liked X-Men III a bit more than the first movie. That doesn't mean it's better, because it's not; but I found it much more enjoyable than the first flick. And, let's face it, no matter how terrible it was, it's still a lot better than any X-Men comic ever created. At least there were no Claremont-esque three-paragraph essays being spouted between punches. Nor did characters ever refer to themselves in the third person -- "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!" is awful, but not as awful as "Juggernaut will destroy you!"

I also saw the Da Vinci Code over the long weekend, at my girlfriend's bequest, and it turned out to be less painful as I expected. Sometimes I forget that critics have no clue what they're talking about. (You'd think it would be easier to remember, being a critic myself.) Watching the two movies within a day of one another, a revelation dawned on me: you can save tons of money when you recruit your screenwriter by simply hiring Sir Ian McKellen for a part. He has the rare ability to turn the world's worst dialogue into sheer euphonic rapture, meaning you can get any ol' hack to draft your script. He'll make it sparkle for you. His gentrification of Da Vinci Code was no small feat, either, because it had a screenplay like starch: totally stiff, and it left me feeling uncomfortable and kinda sick after swallowing it for two and a half hours. I'm pretty sure he could give a reading of The Eye of Argon and leave his audience with the impression that they'd just experienced a big ol' deep kiss from Shakespeare himself.

posted by: | category: media | forums | 32 comments | §