So, I sometimes tend to let my mind wander all over the place when it gets busy around here, but then again, no one is ever in complete control of their brain and what it thinks. Anyone who says they are is lying, but they may also be unaware that their brain is getting the better of them by allowing the very thought of control from outside to creep in just to keep them properly pacified. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah… I’d been kicking this idea around for a while and some people have even done stuff like it in the past, but I’d always wanted to see popular modern films get reworked as if they were done in different time periods by famous writers of those eras. Now, before you get all “but that’s been done already and a LOT of times, too!” on me, I think a period remake of Death Wish as scripted by William Shakespeare might be a fun bit of business. Or Dirty Harry by Ernest Hemingway (yikes!). And for the ladies? Emily Dickenson’s Mystic Pizza or something like that. Feel free to think up your own favorites and play around with them (I’m not much of a chick-flicker, I’ll admit)…
Eh, maybe this has been done already, but the big hook would be every bit of dialogue would be true to the times each writer lived in, but the films would all be subtitled with the original English scripts. Hell, I’d pay real money to hear how “Gimme your money, or I’ll bust you up!” sounds in Shakespearian English (and you know you would, too!)…
Which is, amusingly enough, radiation exposure will actually go way UP across the globe thanks to all the new and old people spending too many hours playing Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics once they download them all for FREE as part of gog.com’s fantastic DRM-FREE Winter Sale. Yeah, get this deal NOW and don’t delay, as in less than 48 hours all three titles will be disappearing from the site forever as their rights belong to another huge games publisher who wants more control over distribution of those titles.
Yeah, it’s one more “best deal of the month!” for you, but make sure to check out the other goodies on the sale page (over 600 games means over 600 sales!), as you can walk away with a ton of great games for insanely low prices. OK, get crackin’ and remember, if it’s too busy to download the games today (because a chunk of the planet is crashing gog.com’s servers), as long as you have the games in your gog.com account before the sale ends, you can download them afterwards. I got three hours of sleep and woke up to this news, so perhaps I’m still asleep or something. But I think not…
So, yeah – someone decided to partially translate this classic Abbott and Costello routine from English to Japanese and somehow, I found this more hilarious than I needed to, so here you go. This clip is from the great old flick The Naughty Nineties, by the way. I think I was thinking of seeing this in full reverse with a pair of Japanese comics doing this bit in Japanese and having English subtitles done up. That would be pretty darn spectacular, as Japanese baseball has some oddball rules you don’t see here that make it a more exciting game in a few respects. Granted, I’m not a HUGE sports fan at all (yeah, yeah – I’m soooo unpatriotic it hurts YOU more than it does me), but I know funny when I see it and appreciate a good laugh a hell of a lot more than a well thrown, hit or caught ball of any type.
Oh, yeah – here’s a longer version of the famous routine below – enjoy!
Well, now. That wasn’t hard or annoying after all except for two things. One quick download of an emulator, some fast configuring and popping in the demo disc I have here and boom – pictures of the first of three Omega Boost demos that appeared on Japanese PlayStation Club discs from 1996 to 1999. The game went through some major changes in those three years, but even as a 30% complete version in these shots it’s pretty darn interesting from a technical standpoint.
I believe the demo runs at 60 frames per second, it has three selectable viewpoints (first person/cockpit/third person), a full 360 degrees of freedom and is pretty fun overall for what it is. Granted, I took these screenshots at the library while dinking around on a keyboard because I didn’t bring a controller with me (oops) or else there would have been about 30 more images here. I also didn’t tinker with the visual settings on the emulator to make the game prettier because I like the look of many early PlayStation games.
Finally, I need to find out who made up Cyber Head, which seems to be the development team behind the first two builds. Based on some other games I’ve played, it seems that in the early days of PlayStation development, a few studios didn’t mind sharing talent to help each other out as the new hardware was being explored to see what it could really do. Hmmm… I smell a longer story here at some point. I wonder if there’s anyone still around from those days with some helpful info?
Somewhere before and in between Gran Turismo and Gran Turismo II, members of Polyphony Digital (seemingly working under the name Cyber Head) worked on a little game called Omega Boost which was released for the PlayStation in Japan in April of 1999, the US that August and in Europe a month later. Japan got the awesome and hilarious TV ad above for the game (the US ad was amusing, but not as nuts as the Japanese one) and when the game arrived at the small indie game shop I worked at, it spent a decent amount of time in the store play stack. Back then, the game was impressive to me and many others right away thanks to the opening movie that still packs a punch:
Thankfully, other than the slightly unwise replacing of the Queen-style rocker that opens the import with some alternative tune that’s OK in terms of it’s title (“Fly” by Loudmouth) but lesser than the original theme music in terms of impact, the US version got the same explosive intro:
By the way, note the “Marilyn Monroe/Norma Jean” autograph reference – I loved that tiny bit of fluff because it was a little detail only a film buff would latch on to right away and smile at. As far as the gameplay went, it was an arcade-style space shooter with 19 stages, some cool planetary and tunnel missions along with a number of intense boss battles and a ton of cool bonuses for the dedicated players out there. Some game critics unfairly compared it to Sega’s Panzer Dragoon games, which only made sense as a frame of reference if you were a PS owner who also happened to have a Sega Saturn in the house. There were some minor similarities, but Omega Boost was more a technical showcase for the PlayStation hardware than Panzer Dragoon ever was on the Saturn.
The game was actually in production as early as 1996 (or perhaps sooner), as a series of Japanese demos I have here shows the early work on the game back then was making for a very different-looking experience running at 60fps with simpler polygon visuals and a few more viewpoint choices. Oh, you want some videos of that for proof? Well you’ll need to come over if you want to see them, silly. I’d thought someone would have posted them on YouTube already, but nope and nope so far. Get on it collectors who never open your stuff, I say!
Oh, all right. One day I’ll get off my butt, dig out those PlayStation Club demo discs and have someone shoot footage of me playing them, but I just haven’t had the time to get onto that and some other projects. As usual, I digress. Anyway, the game wasn’t exactly a “blockbuster” in terms of sales or review scores, but it’s definitely one of those side projects where you could see the quality right from the beginning. Of course, with Polyphony so darn occupied with the vastly more popular Gran Turismo series of games, it’s hard to even think of a new OB rolling out from them any time soon. That’s not to say that is SHOULDN’T be done at all, folks. I’m just hoping that if there is a follow-up or remake, it gets the attention it should on a few fronts the original certainly didn’t.
Eh, perhaps I’ll bite the bullet, download a PlayStation emulator from somewhere and figure out how to record some gameplay. It shouldn’t be that hard to do, although I generally dislike using emulators over an actual console…
Ha and ha. It’s kind of funny that we live in a country where some are going nuts about too much government poking in to their private lives or nanny state politicians wanting to tell people what they can and can’t eat when back in 1943, this was considered a mighty GOOD thing to want to have happen. Yeah, yeah, we were in a big war back then, but haven’t we been in a bigger and longer one this century to some extent? Yeah, I bet if this nifty propaganda flick ran in every movie theater and on every network TV station NOW, half the people watching would choke on that super-sized soda and barrel of popcorn in their extra-wide laps while the other half would be banging out a protest petition on their devices with chubby little sausage (flavored) fingers. I say look at it this way, folks – staying in better shape keeps you alive longer to enjoy some of that freedom people keep dying for just so you can gorge yourselves while they do all the heavy lifting.
Now go thank a soldier somewhere on your block this weekend and maybe have a fresh turnip for dessert…
So, I’m walking about the other day and I pass some kids coming from school and overhear one of them saying to his friends that his mom is punishing him for some offense or another by taking away his gaming and online time at home. As I’m grinning while just ahead of them, I hear the kid say he doesn’t know why he’s being treated “like a prisoner” and IMMEDIATELY this intro came to mind. Oh, you kid… you don’t even KNOW what it’s like at all. AT ALL. Although, I’d laugh like a loon if he walked in the door to his home and a Rover was waiting to chase him right to his room away from the TV and computer. Those damn things always scared the heck out of me as a kid when I was watching the show every week and not knowing what in the world was going on, but not being able to look away.
And be glad I didn’t think of the opening theme and titles to HBO’s super NSFW show, OZ. Although, that might be more fitting under the most incorrect of circumstances. Stay in school, boys and girls… stay in school…
I’d heard of 1A4STUDIO and their hilarious 60-second remakes of classic genre films, but only got around to watching a couple today. Yes indeed, it’s ABSOLUTELY worth your minute or three to check these out before you waste the better part of your day watching and re-watching the rest of their output on YouTube. The other movie speedruns they’ve done are also priceless, but some require you know every bit inside and out, as you’ll laugh harder when you see how some scenes are handled.
I don’t have a “favorite” yet, but this trio made me crack up the most because I’ve seen all these way too many times to count. Still, I think the Aliens clip was the most amusing to watch, but T2 below? Yeah, they nail the big action scenes perfectly in record time. I can’t wait to see these guys handle some of the more recent blockbusters for sure, but given that many ONLY have about a minute of actual plot (ha ha, but I’m not kidding either), I’m wondering if we end up seeing thirty-second speedruns sooner than later.
Thanks to Xseed Games still dropping DLC for Valhalla Knights 3 on PSN and me deciding to try out a bunch of it. I have not yet gotten around to polishing off the review I’m almost done with. Then they go an release Ys: Memories of Celceta and I’m suddenly seeing the rest of my year gone with the wind once I get around to picking this game up. THANKS, guys! No, really. It’s not like I have anything better to do than to prove that the Vita isn’t dead as some say (or hell, dead at all!), and it’s always a pleasure to play a new JRPG that’s actually an old JRPG redone with some spiffy new visuals and even more fun gameplay than the original. That said, as I keep stressing… someone REALLY needs to create a means of stopping or slowing down time so that I can enjoy more of the games I buy and play. Anyway, you should add this one to your library if you haven’t already – I’ll get out a review in a bit…
I always used to crack up as a kid watching Peter Lorre jumping off stuff and onto some poor stuntman or actor as Mr. Moto, not realizing he wasn’t some very talented Asian guy, but some guy playing a very talented Asian. Yeah, not quite PC these days, but the films are still fun (and funny) to watch as Moto-san solves a murder or three, gets in some comments about people underestimating him for assorted reasons and wraps up each case with a neat little bow.
This one’s one of the later entries and not as “cool” as some of the previous films in my opinion, but still worth a look. And hey, it’s FREE, so knock it off with the “but I wanted to see something more current!” stuff and eat yer popcorn. That’s free as well when you come around here. Hey – you’re lucky I even let you in with all those shopping bags and that Black Friday grin you were wearing. You look like a possessed Cheshire Cat crossed with a tired elf!
"DESTROY ALL FANBOYS!" 