I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 1 a little bit everyday. It’s not the NES version, but the remake released on PS1 with Final Fantasy Origins. I never beat the original NES game, I have it. Perhaps I should focus on that instead. I don’t think it really matters. The Origins version is a much more pleasant experience. The menus and interface are just a lot easier to use and deal with it then the original NES version. I’ve only been playing an hour a day, about all I can handle before getting bored since Final Fantasy was essentially nothing but grinding levels. I will say this about Final Fantasy, it may be dated and repetitive, but I find more enjoyable than Hitman: Absolution right now, a game I actually had to force myself to finish.
It seems like the older generation of gamers is getting a little weary of the video game industry as it stands today. I am weary. For me, its not so much the games that are the problem. Far from it, good to great games are being released regularly. What I am weary of is the whole culture of gaming right now. The misogyny, the bitterness, the scamming and scheming of the major publishers. Games are starting to become overshadowed by all of the other bullshit. For most developers and publishers, its no longer about selling video games. It’s about using video games to sell us DLC and milk as much money as possible from their loyal consumers. All of the bullshit has truly eclipsed the games themselves.
I don’t even really want another generation of consoles at this point. The Xbox Live dashboard shoves its music and video apps down your eyehole while the games section is put in an isolated little corner. Then there is the gaming press who seem more interested in impressing all of the industry bigwigs than doing actual journalism and critique on the video game industry. Pissed at a bullshit ending of a beloved franchise? They call you whiny and entitled? Pissed that content that should be in the game is locked behind a wall of DLC that you have to pay to unlock? Well the publishers have to do this if they want to make money. They always have an excuse for the greed and stupidity that is the norm in video games today.
I remember once playing Super Mario World with a girl and at the time thinking that was the coolest thing in the world. Now gamers require that girls prove their geek cred first, or suffer the wrath of their little-dick misogyny. What the fuck happened to us? How did we get this way? Maybe I should go retro for a while, find my love for gaming again. There are of course bright spots that offer hope, but they seem to be ever more fleeting. There are good games out there, but that small question of doubt always lingers in the back of the mind. Is it worth it?
More and more, the answer seems to be no.
I expect the next generation of consoles to be more of the same. More DLC, more micro transactions, more DRM, more bullshit and if were are lucky and fortune smiles upon us that day, maybe a few more decent games. Right now, the good seems to be worth suffering through the bad. In ten years I will doubt that will hold true. I hate being cynical, but there it is.
A Highlander reboot starring Ryan Reynolds…
Are they fucking kidding? Ryan Reynolds as a Scottish immortal? Who are they going to get to play the Sean Connery role? Will Reynolds be rocking the kilt? Will they troll the geeks by revealing all of the immortals come from another planet at the end of the first movie? Will Summit actually put some money behind this or they will go cheap like they did with Twilight thus making the movie look like a two hour version of the TV show? Can Reynolds even do a Scottish accent without sounding ridiculous?
The Highlander fans have been through enough guys. Leave these poor bastards alone, I don’t think they can take any more soul crushing disappointments when it comes to this franchise. Christ, was the Quickening not enough? Was End Game not enough? Or the one with that part where it looked like the dude from the TV show and Christopher Lambert were about to kiss? Highlander fans have suffered enough. Let them die in peace. In the name of all that is good, show these withered souls an ounce of mercy Summit. There is no need to torment a fanboy when he/she is already a broken and empty shell. Show some fucking decency to your fellow humans. No one on this planet needs any more Highlanders, especially Highlander fans.
I bet Ryan Reynolds’ McCleod won’t even come from Scotland. They won’t even mention Scotland. I seriously would not put it pass a studio to have a movie called Highlander and not even have one scene in the Scottish Highlands in it. Kind of like how Disney decided to adapt Princess of Mars and desperately tried to ignore the fact that the movie took place on Mars. Then they renamed it to John Carter when no one knew who the fuck John Carter was, nor did they try to explain who the fuck John Carter was. So everyone saw the trailer and said: “Man they made a movie about John Carter! Who the fuck is John Carter?” Or when the Total Recall remake didn’t take place on Mars when the only thing anyone remembers about Total Recall was it was about Arnold on Mars and it had a woman with three breasts in it. Kind of like that.
But let me try and be helpful here. Here are the things that people remember about the original Highlander movie. That kick ass Queen song, Princes of the Universe. There will only be one. People getting their head chopped off with a sword. Sean Connery. And finally, that guy who played Raiden in the Mortal Combat movie was in it.
In order to make a successful Highlander remake, you will need people getting their heads chopped off, there will only be one and the Queen song wouldn’t hurt. Now if you excuse me, I’m going to sit here and wait for the inevitable remake of Adventures in Babysitting. THOR!!!!!!!!
Sweet 80′s, rescue me from this cruel world.
I have a scientific graph that the AP must distribute immediately that proves that Iran is raising the Elder God known as Cthulhu.
So I’ve been reading some ancient Sumerian texts. I don’t really have any good reason as to why. It’s there for free on the internet, so why the Hell not? These were originally written on clay tablets thousands of years before air conditioning and now they share the same digital space as the universe’s largest collection of cat videos. It truly is amazing just how far we have managed to come. Ancient Egypt would have went bonkers for the cat videos alone. Ancient Egyptians liked cats, or at least I assume they did.
While interesting, these ancient writings had less to do with summoning antediluvian demons that will possess your girlfriend and more to do with how much it costs for a sorcerer to get rid of the locusts plaguing the fields of your farm. As it turns out, the price is one tall palm tree. Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense to me either, but this was six to five thousand years ago. For all we know palm trees were the Tickle-Me Elmo of Sumer. That was of course, before the decidedly less popular Tickle-You Elmo.
I totally ripped the guy off, the job was only worth a nice fern at best. He didn’t go for the extended warranty though as he didn’t having any larches.
The translation I am reading is from 1917, so its probably no the most current and up to date but good enough for me. What’s interesting is there is commentary and explanation of what you are about to read. The interesting thing is the writer casually assumes that there would be more discoveries of even older civilization in Asia or Africa. He doesn’t go into a crazy Atlantis rant, he just assumes that the story of Oannes relates to an actual person on a boat from another civilization unknown to us. Once again, possibly from Asia or Africa. There are a lot of stories about a great teacher such as him from all over the world. These are not popular views these days, but its interesting how casually these thoughts were thrown around in the early twentieth century. By the way, Oannes was half-fish and half-man.
Greetings people. I have come to teach you the ways of civilization and culture. I will also instruct you in the unique opportunities of something my people call timeshares. You’re welcome.
Before you write this off as a stupid, pointless and entirely random post on a shitty blog, I ask you to remember one thing. You now know how much it costs for a sorcerer to rid a farm of locusts in ancient Sumer. How fucking cool is that?
Edit: When I wrote Lily Munster, I actually meant the character of Marilyn. It’s been years since I even thought about the Munsters and got the names confused. Hell, I’m surprised I could remember most of them.
NBC sunk $10 million into Mockingbird Lane, it was a failure before it even hit air. A giant waste of money. NBC will try to get what they can from it by turning the pilot into a Halloween special. Of course the show was a failure. Anyone with half a brain could have predicted that. Rebooting the Munsters without the Munsters was beyond a stupid idea. Sure, they have the same names, but these aren’t Universal Horror caricatures of the old sitcom, they are regular, bland, nice looking people.
Mockingbird Lane represents everything wrong with our current culture. For starters, its a reboot/remake of an old property that even my generation barely remembers. Second of all, it completely misses the point of the original show. Lilly Munster was the pretty, normal looking one. The rest of her family were monsters, she was the outsider. The black sheep of the family. The one interesting dynamic in an otherwise typical 60′s sitcom is gone. God forbid anything Bryan Singer touches actually be interesting. This is the guy who decided that the X-Men should all wear the exact same black outfit, sucked away their personality and then made the most boring Superman movie in existence. Superman 4 may have been a crime against humanity, but it wasn’t a bland trek through tedium and boredom.
Why reboot the Munsters? What’s the point? What’s the gimmick here? The Adams Family I can understand. A smart writer can take the Adams Family concept and turn it into a dark, morbid comedy. It can offer us a way to laugh at our most hideous inner self. It can offer a twisted, perverse reflection of our society. The Munsters? Not so much.
So they decided to reboot a half-remembered sitcom and then stripped everything away that was memorable about it. If you are going to reboot the Munsters, then fucking do it full on. Call it The Munsters. Make it a dumb sitcom starring Universal rip off monsters in full make up. Grow a fucking pair of balls and go for it. We have a remake of 60′s sitcom that is trying to distance itself from the source. On CW, we have a Green Arrow show that wants to distance itself from everything that makes the Green Arrow an interesting comic book hero, including the word green. What exactly is the point of doing these properties if you are going to run away from the very things that make them unique and interesting in the first place?
Granted, The Munsters isn’t the most interesting of old sitcoms. It was a fairly standard show, a Father Knows Best with a monster mash flavoring. Eddie Munster was Beaver with sideburns. Also granted, the concept of a normal teenage girl living with a family of monsters could be very interesting in the right hands. Something like Fred Phelps having a gay grandson. Just imagine those Thanksgiving dinners. But once again, they took away the concept’s only interesting dynamic. All that is left is a bland, pointless reboot of an old sitcom. Mockingbird Lane is trying to capitalize on nostalgia but not giving us anything from the show that its potential audience would be nostalgic about. The whole thing is a pointless exercise and a giant waste of time and money. It was doomed to fail at conception.
