Ever have one of those days were NOTHING works? On my end, let’s see…
- My internet mysteriously went dead sometime last night, meaning I wasn’t able to send out some rather important emails before heading to work (plus some torrents went unfinished, obviously). And I woke up too late to spend any time troubleshooting to figure out what might have happened.
- Internet at work is acting spotty, which of course only happens when I actually need to do work (hence why I’m wasting time bitching about it).
- I can’t access my fort90 webmail due to the aforementioned spotty internet, plus my site host’s webmail sucks dick.
- And without email, I can’t follow up on a Gama piece which is getting close to the past due date.
- I just realized that I have a meeting with a Nelson to talk about Spready Bear later tonight. I scheduled it early last week and totally forgot about it when plans for a meeting with NYU came up. Please I still have to talk with Katie about her anthology piece(s) later tonight as well! Plus I can’t send her the necessary notes due to, you guessed it, fucked up internet!
- And I can’t do anything else related to the anthology with the other folks because: A) MK has all my notes, and she can’t fax them to me cuz B) my job’s fax machine is borked for some reason.
- Also messed up is my voicemail at work, so I can’t access my messages.
- I can’t hold a single conversation on my cell phone due to really shitty reception or dropped calls left and right.
- My tooth, which I somehow messed up on Sunday night, is still sensitive and I can’t see a dentist till tomorrow.
- I know I’ve bitched about eBay before, but I forgot to mention how the overall eBay experience suddenly becomes 20 times more annoying when video games are involved. I’ve dealt with numerous types of goods, like movies, comics, and toys, both as a buyer and seller, and almost NEVER have problems. But when it comes to video games, those who sell are always extremely lazy when it comes to shipping things on time, and forget about buying anything used because everyone treats their media like total shit, with scratches all over the place and caked on sticky residue that I don’t even want to think about. As for selling, no one wants to pay what they owe and are always filled with transparent excuses. So anyway, I won some Dreamcast controllers (transparent green ones to match the green color shell I already have) over a month ago, but the guy never sent them. So I asked the guy what the situation was and since then we’ve been passing messages back and forth. Before he had the rather “oh gosh, I don’t know how that could have happened” attitude going, but now it’s the oh so pleasant “guess they got lost in the mail, sucks to be you dude” tone. And considering he doesn’t even fucking remember me or have any records, I’m sure that he just fucked up and is covering his tracks. Cuz he’s… you guess it… one of those annoying “eBay power seller” douche bags. You know, if I wanted to deal with an impersonal, insincere, jack-assed salesman like attitude, I would have gone to Best Buy or GameStop directly.
- Also last night I spilled ice tea all over some books I got this weekend. 
- Lastly. and I don’t know how the fuck this happened, but now there’s cockroaches in my house!
As what else has been going on? Stuff I guess…
- Saw the Island with Marc on Thursday, it wasn’t that bad really. It wasn’t necessarily good, but for a Michael Bay film it was surprisingly decent. Bear in mind that I’ve only really seen one other Bay film, and that was Pearl Harbor (which I only saw because I was dating a total psycho at the time, and would choose to see films that I knew was going to suck, like Crocodile Dundee in LA ,just for the two hours of silence from the girl that the movie would afford me). And why see the Island in the first place? Aside from both the director and the screenwriter’s involvement in the upcoming Transformers movie, I’ve always had a thing for Scarlett Johansen. And the only real reason why the film was even tolerable was because of actors that can actually act, such as Johansen and especially Ewan McGregor.
- On Friday night MK & I bummed around Jersey, mostly just hanging out at the Barnes & Noble near her place. In addition to figuring out which of my friends and other interested parties would be doing what for the anthology, I got Johnny Ryan’s second Angry Youth Comix collection and the first volume of the Battle Royale manga, both of which would become ruined in the aforementioned ice tea spill.
- After a rough Saturday afternoon humoring her parents, MK & I went to the boardwalk on Point Pleasant to play skee-ball the rest of the night. Gotta say, we’re pretty damn good at the game, so we scored tons of tickets, which was cashed in for a slew of gliders, kazoos, and parachute soldiers. No spider rings or super bouncy balls this time though.
- Sunday was a birthday party for Rich of the Beer Drinking Fools. We just mostly sat around and talked, though there was much fun had overhearing his trailer park trash yell and scream at each. Joe is filming a music video for BDF, so he had June’s camera on hand to catch some action, and he even shot the beginning of the vid which I’m a part of (I play some annoying hipster at a party that gets punched in the face). The only shitty part of the evening was a corn chip that I bit down in a wrong way which led me to believe that a filling had fallen out. Now I’m not too sure… there’s a spot that was never “finished” (I had a root canal done back when working for Ubi, but never got the job done cuz when the studio shut down, I lost my dental insurance, so I’ve been walking around with an uncapped tooth ever since) and has always been susceptible to possible damage… but nothing technically fell out and everyone says that there shouldn’t be any bleeding. Guess I’ll find out soon enough.
- And last night I saw March of the Penguins with Dave and Raina. There’s nothing much to say other than, if you really like penguins, and the idea of watching an hour and a half long featuring nothing but penguin sounds good, then the film is right up your alley.
As for gaming news, all I know is…
- World collided the other day, specifically the worlds bullshit driven political agendas and shitty game journalism, when Jack Thompson called for Killer 7 to be reclassified because of what he read in its review on IGN. So funny on so many levels… Hopefully some good will come out of this via generating some interest in the game.
- BTW, here’s some email exchange with Thomson and a 14 year old boy, and not surprisingly, the 14 year old does a better job of stating the facts. My fave quote from Jack? “While you gamers are all autostimulating yourselves with hopefulness that all of this is going nowhere, I’m in the current Reader’s Digest and working with US Senators. You all ought to be concerned.”
Autostimulating?
- Here’s a site that lets you create your own fake Nintendo Revolution controller. Perhaps the best one I’ve seen thus far hails from the GAF:
- So the Penny Arcade guys are getting their very own collectable card game. This is by far the nerdiest news of the whole year, and that’s with all the hoopla that Star Wars, Firefly/Serenity, and the very looking Superman on the horizon has already generated.
- Just found out that Treasure’s new DS game is based upon Bleach. I’m not familiar with the anime, but the game sure does look nice (there’s a definite Last Blade vide going on there).
- Sony has a new puzzler on the way, developed by the folks who did Wild Arms and Sneakers (yeah, that mouse game for the Xbox from a whiles back) and it deals with triangles and all that jazz. Its called Mawaza and you can check out the trailer here.
- I forgot how I came across the following… I believe it was during a discussion for The Movies, Peter Molyneux’s latest game… and someone brought up this somewhat similar title; it’s called Wet: The Sexy Empire, and it sounds like the Movies, but with… you know… porn and stuff. Remember, if you ever say “Someone should make a game where…”, try to remember that at least someone has already tried it.
- Meanwhile on a somewhat related note, and on the IC boards, someone brought up the obscure Super Famicom gem Photograph Boy. Basically you play a photographer that has to take pics of wacky things and people as they pop up. Here’s a page that has some good info but what everyone really should see is the Quicktime of the game’s whole play-through, which I’ll have to ask the person who has it for permission before linking it (I don’t want to rape the guy’s bandwidth).
- Also from IC comes this Craiglist ad for the a rare Nintendo “Super Chair” which is basically a huge controller for the NES.
This reminds me of the special chair/controller that Nintendo designer for paraplegics. There was a chin-strap to control movement like a joystick and a straw for the button inputs; you sucked on it for the A button and blew into it for B button. The cynical types all say that its creation was purely motivated to off-set the bad press Nintendo was recieving at the time, such as the advent of “Nintendo thumb”.
- 1UP just posted a fairly interesting read to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Sega Saturn. Never has a title for a piece, in this case “The Pleasure and the Pain” been so appropriate. And to this day, I still have to say that I never enjoyed gaming as much as I did when I was playing a fighting game where my guy, which was a racing car, was getting trashed by my opponent, who was playing a large duck with bombs.
- And finally, EA recently added two new players into their upcoming Madden 2006: the President and his brother Jeb, the Governor of Florida. As its been already noted, seems like EA just wants even more reasons to be hated.
I can’t figure what’s worse: having the George Dubya or Jaime Kennedy in your video game?
