A Prince Never Lacks Legitimate Reasons…

Nonetheless, in honor of recent achievements by Dakalos, a Dak-themed movie post:

Regardless of how you felt about that, you work hard and you deserve this. Thoughts?

Facebooking Reality: An Essay By Dakalos

Why I didn’t have Facebook until yesterday, and why I finally gave in

Yesterday, I “got “ Facebook. I signed up for a profile, set my privacy settings to highest level, tooled around a bit to find my friends, hoping of course that they hadn’t set their privacy settings to the highest level as well. I found it a little creepy that people I knew years ago were recommended as friends to me by Facebook’s recommendation system, even though I hadn’t put in any information that would suggest that I ever knew these people. I guess at some point, they ran a search for me. Once my profile was set up, and I started to receive confirmations of “friendship,” it was congratulations and welcomes all around.

This Week In Miscellanea: “Headlines”

1. Headline number 1: “Terrifying Sniper Prank on Japanese TV“

2. Headline Number 2: “Erotic Farm Girls Calendar Aims To Make Agriculture Alluring“

3. Headline Number 3: “Lights Out, Camera, Action!“

4. all kinds of interesting and sort of sexy updates.

Чёрная молния ★ Black Lightning ★

BLACK LIGHTNING IS A PEOPLE’S HERO

I Will Call Nothing Fair, Unless it be Her Panties

The title will make sense in a moment – first, a little preamble. “What is PH posting now?” you ask yourself, “That last post was silly. Why would he do such a thing?” The answer is two fold: I love you, and I am awesome in the biblical sense of the word. What follows is, as near as I can tell, the end credit sequence to a very new anime series called Sora no Otoshimono. The title translates as something like  ”Lost Property of the Sky” and is about fallen angels and high-school kids. “Typical!” you think, “I can go on youtube and watch hours of crap like this set to Linkin Park!”

You would be mistaken. If not about kids and the band… about the breasts. And the panties… ah yes, the panties.

Yes, that just happened. Things will never really be the same, I know, but I’m not done with you yet. Now, you shall watch the highly generic preview. It is highly generic! Until about 2 minutes in when it becomes totally fucking sweet. You shall enjoy it, because your equine lord compels you. Love him, and despair etc.

Tales of the Ancient Swords Shooting Swords

You may remember that Rusty once linked us a really sweet clip from The Sword and the Sorcerer.

Was that the film’s hero – the creatively named Prince Talon – shooting a guy with a sword that shoots swords? It was indeed! What’s interesting is that someone is making an official Sword and the Sorcerer sequel. “Goddamn you, Pale Horse!” you cry, “How dare you get my hopes up? It’ll be terrible, just like all the other crappy sequels we’ve been subjected to lately!” But wait, troops… there are three things that you’ve yet to learn:

• That someone is the film’s original director, Albert Pyun – a direct-to-video king who (allegedly) trained under Akira Kurosawa.

• The guy who played buddy in the original has been recast, along with five young female leads.

• The film stars Kevin Sorbo AND Christopher Lambert.

It’s called Tales from an Ancient Empire, and stars Hercules as the son of the guy in the first video – a gruff-mercenary-with-a-heart-of-gold whose “princess” half-sister needs his begrudging help with some heroic fantasy shit blah blah blah something about fate. Watch this, and then look me square in the face and tell me it wasn’t totally awesome:

Stilted dialogue with no contractions to make it sound “medieval?” Check. Horrible acting? Check. Actors who look utterly out of place in a fantasy context? Check. This is some vintage 80s fantasy barbarian shit!

Imagine

I don’t really want to imagine either of these circumstances:

YouTubin’

With my wedding day fast approaching, there’s not been much time for in-depth Iron Updates. There still isn’t, in fact. So instead, here are some neat videos from the Intertubes. Enjoy!

1- One of the criticisms that Rusty has levelled at Michael Bay’s Transformers movies is that the eponymous robots are often all but indistinguishable from each other. “I don’t understand why they had [use those designs],” Rusty asks. “Why couldn’t they keep the old designs, with their strong use of primary colours?” Good question, Rusty. Apparently, you’re not the only one wondering that:

2- This past week saw the release of the latest game in the Halo series, ODST. Rusty and PH have played it and say it’s good times; the rest of us are looking forward to giving it a whirl. I for one am really impressed with the TV spot:

3- Last week, I described a video I’d seen of a pretty rad pool table. Here it is at last. The money shot (so to speak) begins around 2:10:

4- Q: What happens when a freight train rolls into a tornado?

A:

5- Pop music and Internet gaming collide to create something truly bizarre:

6- Here in the 514 we take winter driving for granted. It’s trickier when you’re not used to it:

7- Haha!

8- Cool pet, or coolest pet?

9- Brent Spiner takes the piss with Patrick Stewart:

10- I can’t believe this gag made it into a kids’ show:

This Week In Miscellanea: “Chaotic Neutral”

1. Remember this guy? He seems to be delivering on promises made during the recent US elections. This is probably going to lead to a lengthy legal battle, but the language they’ll be fighting over is encouraging;

additional guidelines would prevent the operators from discriminating, or acting as gatekeepers, of Web content and services.

Sounds good to me.

Very Tame

2. Rammstein are in the habit of stretching boundaries in their videos. Their latest, “Pussy,” makes much of what has come before seem very tame. Warning: link extremely NSFW.

3. Briefly mentioned in the Dead Space review was my consumption of Micheal Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores. Little did I know that the Taqx have been hanging out on WordPress since April. Ping!

4. There is a fleet of Ghost ships achored off the east coast of Singapore. The global economic downturn has led to a massive slow-down in international shipping – a staggering 12% of the Earth’s container fleet are sitting around with the waves barely brushing their Plimsoll lines. The consequences are hard to predict – apart from crippling the South Korean shipbuilding industry – but 514 expat Tripp sees an opportunity…

Who wants to charter a bulk carrier for a cruise? Maybe this is the time to run the Lotus Eater hurricane rave-cruise ship? 

5. Assuming that your stocking is now going to be empty because there are no ships to bring your burrough goods, what will you ask for at xmas? How about a collection of Halo shorts in the style of the Animatrix and Gothan Knight? Maybe one that had both Toei and Production I.G. listed as contributors?

What about… how many times has rusty been burned getting his hopes up about this sort of thing? Will he be burned again? Oh woe!

This looks... tight?

Unfair Review: Oblivion

While discussing Fallout 3 with the staff at my local EB games recently , one of them mentioned that I ought to try Oblivion. Same style, same developer, and he knew at least one customer who bought it and then disappeared for 15 months… time spent putting over 1000 hours into the game.

 Time investment like that is unheard of in offline games, and the most I’ve ever put into one – outside the context of some kind of multiplayer mode – is around 120 hours. I ended up walking out of the store with a used copy of Eternal Sonata, which eventually presented its own set of problems. The parade of games I’ve been playing in the recent release drought (Dead Space, H.A.W.X., and Eternal Sonata) have gone from good to pedestrian to occasionally infuriating. I needed a winner.

Dak doesn't deserve this crap.

 After a recent LAN destroyed Dakalos’ 360, he lent me his copy of Oblivion. He recognized that the game had its flaws, but had sold him enough to level his character to 20 without ever digging into the main quest.

 That sounded refreshingly like the experience I had playing Bethesda’s excellent Fallout 3. Surely I would be able to get over my nagging case of fantasy burnout if it meant more freeform roaming in an engaging game world.

 Dakalos is a good man. He played this game for quite a while. Metacritic compiled an almost impossibly high 94 for it – a higher rating than even my beloved Fallout 3. I lasted about two hours.

 Things started off with a bang; I read a lot of race descriptions, and scrolled through some very ugly character customization screens. I would harp on this, but both Fallout 3 and (to a lesser extent) Mass Effect suffered from the same problem. Not being well versed in the Elder Scrolls back-story, a lot of the fluff didn’t make any sense to me.

Probably not chosen for his looks.

I then sat around in a prison for a bit. Soon afterwards, the king showed up and told me that I might just be the chosen one, and then abandoned me. I followed him because that was what I was supposed to do, and watched his bodyguards have all the fun beating off a horde of black-armored assassins. Too bad for the hitters, I thought, their fly gear will soon be mine! Then… Poof! Their heavy armor and battle swords magically disappeared the instant they died. I (the player “I”) became mildly displeased.

The game then separated me from the king and had me run in a huge circle, grinding some basic enemies until I met the king again. Picard then told me a bunch of shit I didn’t understand, which culminated in choosing the “sign” under which I was born. Each sign conferred different spell abilities or stat modifiers, but since the game hadn’t explained how any of this worked yet, I was shooting in the dark. I chose “warrior,” because I figured that would help me stab people with my rusty knife.

 The king was soon killed and, after grinding some more simple monsters, I was turned loose in Oblivion’s vaunted open province, Cyrodiil. The draw distance in this game was reputed to be excellent, but the opening area looked nice for two loads and then got very foggy. I walked along a 70 degree incline for a few minutes, occasionally killing giant crabs.

She looks nice, but she basically fucking assraped me.

My next encounter was a peasant tiger woman. She told me that things were bad since the emperor died. Being so well informed – the emperor had died only five minute before, at the bottom of a well – I assumed that she was some kind of spy and tried to kill her. She quickly proved me right by effortlessly murdering me with her fists.

 I reloaded and tried again. This time I escaped the peasant spy tiger lady and jaunted further along the slope until I was attacked by a pack of invisible dogs. I don’t think they had magic powers; they were just some glitchy, barking, invisible dogs who were slowly killing me in the fog, on an implausibly steep hill. My next move was to quit the game, put Fallout 3 back in and wonder how a Shishkebab build would treat me.

 So my unreasonable, ill-informed review of Oblivion is that it sucks. The story is incomprehensible fantasy gibberish and the graphics are lost in (what might be natural) fog (that probably would have cleared up). The gameplay was circular and repetitive. I hated it.

 I hated it enough, actually, to visit metacritic to find out which all-time classics were apparently worse than this piece of fluff, whose defining characteristics were incomprehensible dialog, stupid enemy leveling, and a tendency to put too many vowels in its place names.

 Here is a list of games that this massive shitpile is allegedly superior to:

• Mercenaries (86)
• Beyond Good & Evil (87)
• Deus Ex (90)
• Portal (90)
• The Longest Journey (91)
• Chrono Trigger (92)
• Final Fantasy VI (92)

Moral: a lot of people really, really like fantasy games.

Moral number 2: do not to let Rusty review D&D games, he’s shit at it.