Bleh. No wonder this is direct to Blu-Ray & DVD, although I won’t stop you from buying or renting it. Some folks are creeped out by this new digital Chucky, but I couldn’t stop laughing once his eyeballs bulged when that gal leans in closer. Maybe I’ll catch this on cable in a few months and change my mind, but probably not. For my money, 1945’s Dead of Night still has the scariest single “animated” doll on film, but I’ll give it up for Trilogy of Terror’s “Amelia” chapter for putting me under a couch. This new film might put me under a couch if I’m rolling on the floor laughing… we shall see…
Well… I should have expected this after Sharktopus, but still… wow. Actually, double wow and a slap to the jaw because I thought of the frogs raining down from P.T. Anderson’s excellent film Magnolia as soon as I saw the “poster” for this soon to be instant classic. Ah, SHARKNADO… you’re a puzzlement! Will I waste two hours with commercials watching this? Mmmmmaybe… not, as anything with Tara Reid in it makes my ears smoke pretty badly. She delivers lines like a drunk mailman delivers a box of champagne flutes. The trailer is more than enough for me to see exactly where this will go and even if it has a surprise ending, I can just ring up a friend I know is going to catch this and ask him what happens. I generally have a super high tolerance for stuff like this, but too much during the week is like stirring heroin into your coffee. Er, not that I’ve ever taken heroin, mind you. I just overheard that analogy made a few years back and have been dying to use it somewhere. Wait, does that me I have to drop dead now? Crap. I still have so much to do! *THUD!*
Yeah, that postcard to the left was promising back in 1996, but less than three years later, the Sega Saturn ship was about to come crashing to earth in a slow nuclear explosion. While the console did get a number of excellent titles, fans of the system in North America suffered through Sega of America’s leadership at the time that seemed to ignore some pretty obvious Japanese 2D imports in a few genres in favor of approving too many first and third party polygon-based games or imports that seemed “safe” bets if the right segment of the system’s audience was willing to buy them.
Combine that with some third-party games taking seemingly forever to arrive and Sega deciding to only ship limited quantities of the last few major games on the platform and having the gall to rub consumer’s faces in it for the best game on the platform (see below the jump) and you end up with a console that died a horrible death it really didn’t need to… Continue reading →
Myahhh. MAN, it’s HOT out. Some like it that way, but I do NOT. “How hot is it?” you ask? TOO damn hot, it’s too damn hot. To be more precise, it’s hotter than Georgia asphalt out, my energy level is draaaaining faster than the Bandy tract (sslurrrrrrrp!) and I think I’m melting. How are you feeling? Hot, hot, hot? It feels like today is the day the earth stood still AND caught fire. I could go on and on with the movie references, but my poor brain has gone and walked on out of my head and is sitting in the freezer taking a nap. And my feet are about to go join it there.
Anyway, back later tonight, or at most, by tomorrow morning to afternoon. I’m so beat that on the way back from shopping with ingredients to make a niiiiice soup, I thought of the time I needed to spend chopping up stuff to toss into a pot, made a detour and had a slice of pizza and the rest of that bottle of formerly ice-cold water I’d been toting around all day.
OK, I did get three insanely hot peppers cut up and into a jar with some oil for later use, but while saving the seeds to plant (hey, free peppers are a side benefit and easy to grow too!), I accidentally rubbed my eye (thankfully after washing my hands) and had a small sun frying one side of my face for a bit. Oh, it’s fine now, but I was about to act out the ending of The Man With the X-Ray Eyes for about five minutes or so. OK, I’m going to take another shower and collapse onto my bed with the fan on. If I pop up later tonight, it’ll be a miracle…
It just hit me once more (ha ha) as I still have that slimy frosting taste in my mouth that Nabisco, like too many other American food companies, have lost their collective minds over getting as much money from you as possible and giving you nothing in return but a bellyful of pain. We’re getting fat, lazy and sick from these guilty “pleasures” designed to act like narcotics once ingested as they slap and tickle the same pleasure centers and lead to addiction much in the same way any drug made to do so does all to well.
Of course, most folks will deny this as they have that 3am craving and boogie to the kitchen for their much more legal fix, but it’s the same “I can stop if I want to!” deal you hear from any addict when it comes to getting out of the fatty/sugary/salty hole you’ve fallen into. Anyway, buy these at your leisure (and/or peril) along with the other horrid “limited edition” Oreos while you can. I’ll be putting in a call to Gallagher and hoping he can clone himself. There are a LOT of Target stores to hit…
Read it and weep, or clap or run to the window and make like Peter Finch or whatever… but don’t get TOO happy, I say. Sure, Microsoft is finally listening to some of the rage (justified and unjustified) that’s been washing up over them since the reveal of the Xbox One, but the console is still packing a slew of restrictions that make it unpalatable under certain conditions. For one, a mandatory online connection is STILL required to activate the console (set up an Xbox Live account and probably check in with Kinect), meaning those gamers without broadband access at home or nearby (you know, the ones Microsoft told to buy an Xbox 360 if they wanted to play games offline?) can’t use the thing at all (duh).
That’s the main sticking point for me, but I also dislike the current licensing terms that say the product can (and will) change any time at Microsoft’s discretion. So expect things to roll back in as the system draws in suckers users who don’t mind or don’t know this until it hits them in the face when they turn on their consoles one fine day and get smacked upside the noggin with a mega-update that smarts because it’s the company thinking it’s time to move “forward”… We shall see, but I got a sack of pennies (well, 21 pennies) riding on not all going as smoothly as the company would like. Hell, at LEAST the damn box is region-free now (something the Xbox and Xbox 360 can’t claim outside of a handful of games that run on consoles in almost any territory)…
Yikes and “Hmmmmmm…” Here we go. OK, folks – given the quality of some fan-made Lego movies (go hit the YouTube at your leisure and see for yourself), the very idea of spending a TON of loot for a CG film and all that expensive voice talent just makes me cringe a wee it too much. Yeah, it looks funny and yes indeed, LEGO probably got all the proper clearances for all those characters in one internet video conference call. Still, there’s something… off about this flick that I’ll most likely not see at all in a theater, but catch on the cable rebound circuit and think it’s not too bad at all (but still wonder if some super-fan could have done it for a few hundred bucks over the course of a few weekends)… as usual, we shall see…
Ha. Leave it to The Onion to gently slap the gaming industry about with its trademark humor. Well maybe this might actually help Microsoft out a wee bit more, as they’re now at the “$500 isn’t a bad deal, really!!” stage of whatever insanely backwardly incompatible PR strategy they thought up to promote their new console thinking everyone would buy in after not one, but TWO big press conferences. Ah well… live and learn, I guess. Well, I guess we’ll see what transpires as November rolls around and the games get closer. And a few more comments from all those execs from all three big companies that try to sort out other issues with their respective platforms…
So, the Xbox One. Yeah, THAT Xbox One. Did you know it has the computational POWER of ten Xbox 360’s? No? Well, Microsoft says so and while it’s probably true as the sky is blue (under certain circumstances) and the sun always rises even if you can’t see it (always, so far). Amusingly enough… I was planning to post that clip above BEFORE this article appeared (you WILL laugh at some point while reading it, trust me), but I got busy tinkering on a review and man, I feel as if they’re writing my lame comedy material for me and I don’t even OWN a Kinect.
At this point in damage control mode, you have to wonder when they’ll just start sending out white or black vans rolling around neighborhoods to grab random strangers off the street and MAKE them play a game just to show off how much POWER their system has. POWER, I tells ya… Granted, you still can’t use it offline unless you’re online first (subject to change based on day of the week and a update to the licensing agreement) and that new Kinect is always on even if you shut it “off”, but POWER! Wondrous working POWER… *Crack*,BOOOOOM!!!
Ouch and double ouch. Bringing Ted Price on stage to state their new game could ONLY be done on the Xbox One was pretty a nasty shock to some longtime Sony and Insomniac fans who thought the companies were inseparable. The again, as soon as FUSE was announced initially as Overstrike, I figured that the relationship was over as far as a one-console future for the developer. Well, here you go – it looks like this one will do well based on the response, but some hate the visuals for looking “too Xbox 360” or “too cartoony!”… which is hilarious, as that’s what they wanted with FUSE when it was called Overstrike. Ha and ha ha. Well, it’s still early as far as the dev process goes, so stuff may or may not change as development continues…
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 