I picked up both the World 1-1 and World 8-4 Converse All-Stars last year, and now they’ve announced a new line, too. I don’t even like oxfords, but darned if these aren’t, uh, super. As in Super Mario. It’s a joke, you see. Ha, ha.
Is it possible to wear these with slacks and a button-down without looking like a complete tool? I’m guessing… no.
I was going to title this post “Even on 3DS, F-O-E,” but stupid Tiny Cartridge beat me to it. Jerkfaces.
Anyway! Etrian Odyssey IV. 3DS game, features a sword-wielding girl in a plaid skirt whose class is listed as “Swordman.” Right on.
One of the minor thrills of visiting Tokyo is dropping by the Mandarake Galaxy in Nakano and looking at the rack of not-really-for-sale rarities in the display case outside the shop. Usually it contains half a dozen rewritable Satellaview cartridges that have prized titles encoded on them — Super Famicom games that never received retail releases and thus exist only in the form of this handful of temporary ROMs. Well, and on the Internet, of course. Which is nice, because — say what you will about the ethics of ROM distribution — I sure don’t wanna pay $900 to play Radical Dreamers.
Brandish includes this minor female character, Dola, and she shows up once or twice through the course of the adventure — and, naturally, her image is plastered across all the promo art, the box art, the soundtrack art. The hero you play as for 20 hours, Ares? You never see him anywhere. My assumption is that he got dizzy from the world constantly spinning around him and had to go for a lie down.
I don’t know why author Mike Zeller was so down on Mega Man X2 in this article. This is the game that introduced us to Green Biker Dude. Few games can claim such a legacy!
Sometimes I like to think about how Umihara Kawase Portable was announced for American release as Yumi’s Odd Odyssey, but then wasn’t. That is because I like to feel sad about life. At least the DS port was released before the DSi launched and therefore is region-free. If you can find it, buy it! It’s boss. And hard. Weird, too. But mostly boss.
French cuisine! The concept sounds so intimidating. Cat and I have tried it from time to time, having experienced decent success with boeuf bourguignon and, uh, wine and cheese. But never have we tackled such a madly ambitious meal as we prepared for Valentine’s Day: Ratatouille, penne gratin, and chocolate truffles. Happily, the results turned out, pleasantly enough, to be practically perfect.
Ratatouille is actually not nearly as difficult as it seems. It’s basically a whole bunch of vegetables stewed together. As a colloquial favorite, ratatouille can be made many ways. You can do it as a super-fancy casserole as in the movie by the same name, thinly slicing the vegetables and baking them. Or you can do it the way our recipe (taken from a French country-style cookbook) called for: Thinly slice up the veggies, then throw them all together in a large skillet (we used a gigantic paella pan) and stew them. The only real trick to ratatouille is cooking the ingredients in the proper order, since different vegetables cook down at different rates. The onions went in first and cooked longest, while the tomatoes went in last.
What this creates is a colorful, delicious, flavorful dish. Healthful, too: It’s nothing more than several pounds of simmered vegetables with about a teaspoon of salt and a fair amount of olive oil mixed in throughout the process. We ate it over steamed rice. It was awesome.
Fortunately, we dabbled in the decadence of Valentine’s with the side dish, a casserole of penne gratin. This was pasta, cream, butter, plus a dash each of flour, salt, pepper, and a few other spices. Then we topped it with half a pound of shredded gruyere. Good for the waistline? Uh, no. But delicious? Oh, man, yes.
Good lord, just look at all that fatty wonderfulness.
Speaking of fatty… we made our own truffles. This involved a ridiculous amount of additional butter and cream, plus a copious amount of chocolate, and… a 250 mL of my favorite wine in the world, Domaine Charbay’s 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon. It was our last bottle; I’d been saving it for a special occasion. This qualified as precisely that, and we sacrificed a third of it to create these.
So worth it. I am a chocolate addict, and I’m a big ol’ snob about it. This ranks among the best chocolate I’ve ever eaten… and I’ve eaten a lot, which is why I spend 45 minutes exercising almost every evening. Cat found it a bit too sweet, but I don’t have any complaints. I like my chocolate both bitter and sweet, and the sweetness of the truffles was nicely balanced by the bitter of the cocoa we rolled them in. They’re almost perfect: Your first sensation is pure bitterness as you taste the cocoa, but then the sweet taste of the inner truffle slowly melts through and blends with the cocoa. A moment later, the chocolate begins to warm on your tongue, and the fruitiness of the reduced cabernet blooms and you experience the full breadth of the truffle’s flavor.
All of this took about three and a half hours to make, and it was time well-spent. Way more satisfying than going to a restaurant, that’s for sure.
French cuisine!
The Talking Time kids kicked off a thread yesterday to announce the celebration of Phil Collins Day, an event that some random people in some random place have been observing on February 15 for six years now in a fashion dripping with irony. Well, screw that. Phil Collins doesn’t have to be appreciated ironically. He’s a talented musician, and despite the fact that he has a gift for composing schlocky pop tunes and making obscene gobs of money for doing so, he’s had his hand in some excellent music over the past 40 years. People dismiss his work out of hand because they have no real sense of how much great work he’s recorded over the course of his career, or because they’re lazy and content to let satirists like Seanbaby dictate their opinions. But the man deserves better.
Well, let me learn you. In addition to his hit-driven solo career, Collins served as Genesis’ drummer for nearly 30 years, not only co-writing and performing some stunningly intricate (and often epic) tunes but also stepping out from behind the kit when Peter Gabriel went solo in 1975 to front the band, leading Genesis to greater success than it had ever known before. He also co-founded (and performed with) a jazz fusion group called Brand X throughout the late ’70s, because being frontman of a burgeoning prog-rock supergroup didn’t eat enough of his time. He spent much of the ’80s producing and collaborating on albums by his bandmates (Mike Rutherford’s Mike + The Mechanics) and friends (Eric Clapton); he had a huge part in creating the mid-’80s “sound” for that brief era wedged between the decline of new wave and the rise of all-digital production. He was also in some really bad movies, and recorded pretty much every song you remember from the ’80s, earning all the money in the process with his own solo albums, his work with Genesis, and numerous collaborations. He also wrestled with the Ultimate Warrior (!?) and did some other weird stuff. Basically, he was a machine.
Most of all, though, Collins is interesting for the way he brought an affection for classic American music — jazz, bluegrass, folk, Motown — into the prim, pompous, British realm of progressive rock. His 1980 solo debut album Face Value deserves its own lengthy write-up, but suffice to say it was like nothing that had come before it. Where his prog peers liked to name-drop obscure European composers like Modest Mussorgsky and Bela Bartok (and where Yes opened its concerts with a Stravinsky recording), Collins’ work was informed by an unpretentious affection for the popular music he grew up listening to. “In the Air Tonight” and, to a lesser degree, “I Missed Again” are what people know of Face Value, but it has far more to offer than those two radio cuts. Over the years, the following suite has evolved from a “What the hell is this?” mystery to my favorite part of the album:
This is actually three separate tracks, but they all segue into one another and work together incredibly well. “The Roof is Leaking” is a spare, mournful story piece drawing on early 20th century American folk, with a touch of bluegrass in the banjo and slide guitar — definitely not the kind of thing you expect from the man behind “Sussudio,” but all the more powerful for how unexpected its raw emotion is. Its message of feigned optimism in the face of impossible hardship gives way to “Droned,” which begins as a motley whorl of instrument phrases before coalescing into a simple percussive rhythm augmented by “talking drums.” Eventually the tension breaks, and the lighter, more upbeat instrumental “Hand in Hand” begins, driven by Collin’s incisive drum work to a crescendo of Motown-style horns and wordless vocalizations by a children’s choir — all backed by a then-revolutionary drum machine.
A lot happens in the span of this 10 minutes of music, and it manages to encapsulate both the best of Collins’ work and his personal influences and styles all at once. From a bleak and soulful dirge, to experimental production and percussion, to pure feel-good rock-and-soul, this suite is absolutely masterful. You could argue that Collins never managed to reach this height of artistry again, which would be a fair accusation. But you can’t honestly listen to this and claim the man is a no-talent hack. This is wonderful music.
So happy Phil Collins day, dammit.
We really wrote a bunch of articles for GameSpite Journal 10; after three and a half months, we’ve still have about a third of the book to get up on the site. My goodness! Here is one tiny, interesting pebble toward building that mountain: A piece on Sparkster by the dude who helped make a sequel to it.