Success!
Further research has proved fruitful. According to archives of the UK top 40 singles, Ambassadors of Funk featuring M.C. Mario - Supermarioland reached number 8 towards the end of October 1992. That very same year in December, another tune appeared in the charts and soared to the heady heights of number 34, HWA featuring Sonic The Hedgehog - Supersonic. Armed with an artist and a title, it didn't take long to track it down on the internets. I knew I remembered a Sonic single coming out around the same time, and I knew I remembered it being really cheesy. It appears that I was correct!Closer inspection of the charts has yielded even more fruit! There was the rather terrible Doctor Spin - Tetris, which apparently reached number 6 in October 1992, the very same month as Supermarioland! I am terribly ashamed that this track slipped my mind.
Adventures in Azeroth
Bet you can't guess where I've been and why I haven't updated this site.Well, I'll tell you. After a short stay in Paragon City for the 5 year anniversary of my first ever MMO (City of Heroes), I am back in the world of Azeroth. Yes, I am playing World of Warcraft again. Yes, I am extremely disappointed in myself. In my defense, Blizzard patched in the new raid zone and I wanted to help my guild work through it. They're good people... not the most dedicated raiders, but really good people. The raid itself, Secrets of Ulduar, is lovely. The boss fights are all creative and it's a ton of fun to heal through it with my shaman. Killed everything up to Auriaya so far, should start work on the keepers next Tuesday if people show up. I'd rather be playing my achievement whore paladin, Meredy, but the Heroism buff is too nice to give up. Most of my time in game has actually been spent grinding out achievements and soloing the old level 60 raid content with Meredy. There's nothing quite like walking in to a zone designed for 40 people and stomping it flat on your own to make your epeen feel massive. It's a decent way to make gold when you're sick of running dailies too.
My other hobby is awful music and I've been thinking about that terrible single released in the early 90s which sampled Super Mario Land's sweet, sweet "Birabuto" theme. Well, that got me thinking about others released around the same time all based on video game and cartoon theme tunes. So I decided to go hunting and see how many I could find. It was pretty easy to get hold of Do The Bartman, Mortal Kombat, Power Rangers and Teletubbies Say "Eh-Oh!", but it's taken me a while to track down the one that started me off on this quest. Well, last night the search engines were kind to me and I was pretty amused to find out that the Ambassadors of Funk actually put out a whole album of this bullshit: Super Mario Compact Disco. It's the most inane, terrible, tuneless bullshit I've ever heard and I adore it. Best part is that I know there's more of this awful shit I haven't remembered yet <3
Heroes is bullshit
I saw the latest episode of Heroes yesterday. I was not impressed. I would describe the episode as being complete fucking bullshit. I made a list of all the reasons this episode was bullshit. Here are those reasons for your enjoyment.1. Matt Parkman.
So I guess Matt has developed multiple personality disorder since last week or something, since he seemed to completely forget all about how the government kidnapped, tortured and killed the love of his life. He has instead become a pacifist bitch afraid of conflict, trying to save his marriage and reconnect with his estranged wife. I wouldn't mind that so much, but at the end of the episode he makes ANOTHER FUCKING U-TURN and decides he should go and fight after all. Bullshit. And while I'm on the subject of Matt being a prick and forgetting all about the people he loves, what the fuck happened to little Molly Walker? Y'know, the girl he practically adopted?
2. Hiro and Ando.
I like Hiro. I also like Ando. I really want to like them together but the writers are making it so fucking hard with all the bullshit they keep pulling with their characters. Hiro as an aspiring hero and Ando his faithful sidekick? I liked that. Then we had a role reversal with Hiro trying to be a hero without his powers while Ando tried to come to terms with his. I liked that too. Then baby Matt gave Hiro his powers back and I was looking forward to Hiro and Ando struggling over who gets to be the alpha hero. But at the end of this episode, Ando has powers and Hiro has a nosebleed. Bullshit. Also bullshit was how Hiro only just worked out that he could touch someone and they wouldn't freeze when he stopped time, despite the fact that he's been grabbing people to teleport them since the beginning of the first fucking season, but that's easier to accept because Hiro is fucking retarded.
3. The Extended Petrelli Family.
At the end of the last episode, Angela, Nathan, Peter, Claire and Noah decide that they're going to work together as a family. Approximately three minutes later, Nathan flies off to Washington on his own to save the President, because he started it and he has to finish it. What the fuck? What was the fucking point of dragging everyone out to Coyote Sands for '1961' if they're going to undermine it in the very next fucking episode? Bullshit.
4. Sylar.
There was a time when Sylar was an emotionless killer who showed no remorse, no fear, no mercy. He was a relentless engine of destruction and I loved him. Then the writers turned him into some kind of creepy stalker and had him manipulating the fuck out of Maya for some reason. And then the parental issues started and Sylar quickly stopped being a badass and started to turn into Peter Petrelli with stubble. We now come to the point where Sylar is self-harming, obsessing about losing his identity and shifting into the form of his own dead mother in order to carry on a conversation - with himself. And what the fuck was Sylar helping Micah escape for?! Not killing him, OK, it's a stretch but sure, I can accept that. Acting as a decoy to help the kid get away? Bullshit. Someone needs to track down the mouth-breathing faggot who thought making Sylar more human was a good idea and kick the shit out of him until he admits that he made a tragic error.
5. Everyone Gets Captured.
Nathan gets shot in the back. Danko says the agents are getting ready to move. We then see a montage where everyone gets captured. Despite being on the run for practically the entire fucking volume, everyone gets captured in the space of thirty seconds. Without even any dialogue. Mohinder Suresh is a dude who has super strength and super stamina and has managed to continue fighting (or at least running away) with multiple darts in him before, but he drops like a fucking stone. Bullshit. Angela, Claire and Noah get captured without any kind of fight whatsoever. She didn't see that coming? Bullshit. That's a full episode's worth of action there that we were screwed out of. We should have had a car chase, we should've seen Mohinder throwing agents through walls, we should've seen the command center directing the troops. Instead we saw Sylar turn into an old hag and carve up his own arm. Bullshit. The only people to evade capture are Matt who has agents crawling around his home and might be captured anyway, Hiro and Ando who are pretty much useless, Micah who is thirteen years old and Peter fucking Petrelli who flew off after his brother Nathan like a little bitch. Again. Bullshit.
Each and every time Heroes looks like it's going to start getting good again, we get an episode that just shits all over everything. It's so frustrating and I honestly can't understand why I still watch it.
The rythym game blues
Continuing the theme of "shit I missed while I was in Azeroth", does anyone remember Audiosurf? I wrote it off as a glorified iTunes visualizer or screensaver when it first came out, but no! There's a proper game in there and it's pretty fun. It's one of those really simple but addictive games that has a kind of hidden depth to it. While I was playing it though, I couldn't help but feel that I'd played it before. The block collecting felt really familiar and I spent ages trying to remember out what it reminded me of. Turns out it was a game called Klax on the C64 which I played to death waaaaay back. Loaded it up on an emulator after I remembered what it was... that game did not age well. Audiosurf looks like it'll age better, it'll always be different because the music you have to play it with is always going to change. I tried some dance, some pop, some heavy rock and even a bit of classical. In the end I was having the most fun rocking out to songs with slow build ups leading to epic guitar solos - Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell were awesome. Right Here, Right Now by Fatboy Slim was pretty sweet for the same reason, a slow build which breaks into a more intense beat.Playing Audiosurf got me thinking about other rhythm and music games. The genre as a whole has always been pretty interesting to me, but I never really got into Dance Dance Revolution or it's various competitors. Probably something to do with me not having a PlayStation, being cursed with two left feet and really not wanting to be shown up by some hyperactive thirteen year old in the arcades. None of that managed to stop me from messing around in my own home with Stepmania though, and I did manage to steal and hook up a PSX dance mat to my PC once. The resulting performance left a lot to be desired. Now that I think about it, I have Dancing Stage: Mario Mix for the Gamecube somewhere with a dance mat... that might be fun to play with if my enforced exile from the world of the internet continues. Wonder if I still have that CD full of DDR MP3s and step files?
The other big names - Rock Band and Guitar Hero - have a cost of entry that's far too high. Donkey Konga is an alternative, but far too simplistic (though DK Jungle Beat is a laugh). Singstar-style games are completely out, my singing voice is terrible. Thing is, all of these games have the same problem - they're not generated by music you plug in, they're games based around the music the developers include. Audiosurf can be a completely different game depending on the music you choose, which is completely awesome. The only other game I can think of that's actually generated by the music you plug in to it is Vib-Ribbon on the PlayStation.
Also, just for the record, most songs by Steps are bastard hard.
Old games
So in between trying to find a job (not going well, thanks global economy!), I've been digging through my collection of old games for something to play. PC games really are bug-ridden pieces of horse shit, aren't they? I decided I'd give an RPG a try, so I installed Grandia II. Unfortunately, the video locks up every 30 seconds. I cut my losses and tried to play through the giant Skittles advert, Darkened Skye, but none of the in-game cut scenes will play. For a game which boasts about how they got the voice of Jasmine from the Aladdin cartoons to voice their heroine, for none of her dialogue to actually work is baffling. I am still baffled now. I dug deeper into my collection and found that Dead to Rights and Dungeon Siege won't install, Midnight Club 2 installs, but won't run, while Urban Chaos installs, runs and then crashes at random.Eventually I just gave up and started to play through The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker again. Lovely game. Came out around 2003 and still works perfectly on my Wii. Didn't need a patch either.
Templates are fun
So now I have a Kamek on my website. I guess that's kind of cool?The annoying thing about (re)starting a blog...
...is that I can't think of anything to write about.No. That's a lie. I can't think of anything to write about that isn't World of Warcraft. Perfectly understandable seeing as I've been playing the game for close to three years with the same (awesome) group of people, but it does tend to drill home exactly how much an MMO will take over your life if you let it. Scary.
But now that's all over with - at least temporarily - I can try to reintegrate myself with society and catch up on all the other things I've been neglecting in favour of killing internet dragons. Did you know that there are three new episodes of Red Dwarf airing next month? This is just one example of the things I would never have known (or cared) about if I was still pretending to be a pink haired gnome. They'll probably be shit, but it's still new episodes. Finally. And there's always the chance that it might lead to another series, or even the movie (which has been coming soon since Red Dwarf VIII was finished).
I do like Red Dwarf.
Ooh, did that count as something else to talk about?
Hi.
Starting again.Again.
Don't expect fancy art, creative writing or worldly wisdom. You're more likely to get crudely drawn stick figures and a lot of unnecessary swearing.