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Archive for October, 2008
Things afoot
03 years ago
by Chris Valdez
in Gaming
So in one month I’ll be halfway across the world and living it up in Japan. I plan to eat tons of food (melon pan, fugu, sukiyaki, okonomiyaki, tonkotsu, etc.), walk around a lot and burn off some of those calories, and pick up a few gaming-related goods.
I’m trying to figure out what things I may want to pick up for myself. DS games are an option, as they’re small and not terribly expensive. But what to get? Rhythm Tengoku Gold, as that still has no release date in the U.S. Maybe an old PC-Engine/Turbo Grafx-16 game, I dunno. Anyone have suggestions? I’m trying to avoid picking up an entire gaming system, though I am tempted to pick up a Japanese Wii to play some of the games I know won’t ever get released here.
The first emo
03 years ago
by Chris Valdez
in Random
So, shitty androgynous, emo bands have become all the rage recently. But where did they get their start? A few of my coworkers and I discovered the answer, and it’s none other than Chris Gaines, or should I say, Garth Brooks.
Now, you may not realize this, and it’s probably because it was a stupid thing to do, but Garth Books tried an unsuccessful pop career back during the height of his popularity. He even came up with a whole timeline and history for this pseudo persona. Did you know Chris Gaines was born in Australia to an Olympic swimmer coach?
Take a look at that mug of his. It screams “Daddy don’t love me know more and he beat me in front of my girlfriend and he took her from me and now I have nowhere to go so I’ll sing about it!” OK, maybe that pic doesn’t say it, but surely this second one does.
‘Super Value’ not so super
03 years ago
by Chris Valdez
in Random
Wendy’s used to have the 99 cent value meal. It was great. All the items I wanted for 99 cents each! Now it’s the “Super Value” menu. That means not everything is 99 cents. Some is 1.19. That doesn’t sound like such a super value compared to what was had before.
My mind is officially blown
03 years ago
by Chris Valdez
in Random
So, I’m talking with my Montanian friend, Rebel Treble, one Saturday night, and I decide to ask her about foods and cultural differences I may not be aware of. See, in some states people won’t have the same foods you may have in your own.
Out on the east coast–North Carolina and upward, as far as I know–you can’t order brisket. People there, with the exception of butchers and expatriates from states that are home to brisket, don’t know what it is.
So I asked her if she knew what brisket was, and she said yes. Then she asked if I had tried flavored honey.
Copy editing needed; Nintendo needs to answer questions
03 years ago
by Chris Valdez
in Gaming
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| Penny Arcade |
A few posts back, I mentioned the need for professionalism in the world of gaming journalism. I neglected totalk about one of my pet peeves: copy editing. Not a day goes by that I browse the various gaming news sources where I don’t find an error. The problems range from incorrect word usage (homonyms, incorrect denotation) and comma splices to the inability to spell common words.
I can understand the occasional slip. I mean, large metropolitan newspapers have errors in each issue. But when almost every single post on your site has an error, that reflects sloppiness and laziness, both on the part of the writer and the editors that should be checking the article.
Now onto other gaming news: the new Nintendo DSi. It adds two .3 MP cameras, eliminates the GBA slot, adds music playback (AAC format), enlarges the screen and adds an SD card reader to a. Oh, and in Japan it’ll cost about $50 more than the standard DS Lite.
MTV died years ago
03 years ago
by Chris Valdez
in Random
Remember when MTV played full-length music videos? Or are you so young that you didn’t even know it did that? If so, get the fuck out. MTV is a joke now. To prove that MTV and all it stands for is even more of a joke, I present to you the European Music Awards. Current nominees for “Best Act Ever” include Britney Spear, Christina Aguilera, Green Day, Rick Astley and Tokio Hotel. As pointed out by Wired’s Listening Post, it’s easy to see that more deserving groups, such as The Rolling Stones are left off the list.
So the stand out of the list is Rick Astley. Good thing he’s on there, as the EMAs is having an online poll to allow visitors to the site the chance to vote for the winners. This is great, especially because the site allows for unlimited voting. So guess who the internet is trying to get to win?
Click that link and you’ll be taken to a site that has information (including automated scripts) to allow you to vote automatically an unlimited number of times. The easiest for most people to use will be the RickVoter. Or be like me and open up the link in 5 windows and let it run in the background. In the past 24 hours, I’ve voted for him at least 15,000 times. Whewps!
Fat society
03 years ago
by Chris Valdez
in Random
Hey yo, fat girl, c’mere; are you ticklish? Yeah, I called you fat, look at me, I’m skinny. It ain’t ever stopped me from getting busy. — Digital Underground
So I keep hearing about how we’re a fat society and whatnot, but I never really gave it much thought other than agreeing with the notion. Last night, however, I finally found the proof in the pudding. Velveeta mac & cheese that includes bacon bits.
Now, I’m a proponent of bacon, as I love the flavor. But I’ve noticed recently that bacon seems to be getting added to more items. The local Taco Cabana at my food court will add bacon to just about any item for an extra 99 cents. But as I’ve been told repeatedly, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. And to prove the point, here are some things to think about:
I’m so blue
03 years ago
by Chris Valdez
in Gaming
So, Mega Man–also known as the blue bomber–has made a return to his roots with Mega Man 9, available for Wiiware, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network.
Capcom has said publicly, in interviews and on its blog, that the game is a throwback to the games of yesteryear. It keeps the gameplay fron 20 years ago intact, and I’m really amazed just how much it feels like it could’ve been an NES game, except for fade-ins and fade-outs that seem a little too smooth.
But really, the game delivers. Graphics that are pixelated with few minimal frames of animation, music that is catchy and uses limited hardware to produce it, and the “challenge.” I say challenge, because the game is hard, but it’s hard because of the many cheap deaths you may come across in your venture.
This game does put to rest a question I’ve had for years: Are games nowadays too easy, or am I just getting better? Well, I browsed a few message boards and read page after page of comments from people complaining about how hard the game was. I feel that the difficulty is about up there with the old MMs when I would first play them.
Several of the comments were about an elephant you fight in Concrete Man’s stage of people unable to beat it. I didn’t find this to be a challenge. Got past them in my first life (after encountering the first elephant with so little life that one hit killed me). Then someone asked about the octopi in Splash Woman’s stage. Ugh.
Now, those are some incredibly easy enemies to defeat. I mean, if you can’t kill those, you probably shouldn’t be playing video games. Or perhaps at least give it more than 30 seconds before you run to a message board asking for help.
The game is wonderful and feels like something straight out of 1990. Definitely a bargain for the $10 price tag it carries. When we can have content this good come out on download services, it makes me wonder why the big three allow some shitty content to come out. Yaris and Undertow on Xbox Live Arcade quickly spring to mind.
Spam, not just a lunch meat
03 years ago
by Chris Valdez
in Random
The other day, I decided to check out the RMo states. You know, bandwidth, unused databases, file storage, etc. I noticed that one of our e-mail addresses had 250 MBs in the inbox. Wtf? Sure, it was the e-mail account we use to collect e-mails for invalid @rain-man.org addresses, but how could that be so large?
Well, it seems neither Rainman nor I had been checking it (I thought RM tidied it up once a week or so) for the past 13 months. So I logged in to the account to find 50,619 e-mails waiting for me. Holy shit. So I emptied it out without bothering to sort through it.
Two days passed and I checked the account again. Already, there were 200+ e-mails waiting. I guess I should be thankful this isn’t a popular site, otherwise there could be a lot more spam coming to us. As it is, I average about 20 – 30 pieces a day.
Confession
03 years ago
by Chris Valdez
in Anime
I used to be a self-professed otaku. I was really into anime and was, what one might call, a weeaboo. Thankfully I got out of that phase of my life, and it was at the right time too. I stopped paying attention to anime around the time it started to become the mainstream (is it considered mainstream now?) phenomenon it has become.
I watched things like Ranma 1/2 (I even had some of the $30 tape that contained only two episodes), Neon Genesis, Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, etc. I felt that most things around then (late ’90s, early 2000s) was of good quality. But when it became popular and less underground, companies started bringing more and more shows stateside.
It used to be that there were 0 – 5 DVDs released a week. Now? I have no clue, but the market is saturated. Whenever I watch a show now that someone recommends, most of the time it’s crap, but people like it because it’s the hip thing. In reality, the quality, I feel, just isn’t there. It’s sad. Before, I could trust the localization companies to bring out quality shows I’d enjoy, now it’s rare.