11/30/2007 - Wacky Potato Chip Commercial

I'm sure you've seen some pretty strange commercials before... some that has almost nothing to do with the product that is being advertised. But nothing, and I mean nothing, will prepare you for this next video. This comes from our friends in Japan, who I have mentioned before as having some weird cultural phenomena that we here in the West just don't get. Even with those cultural differences, however, I can't imagine how they perceive this commercial as being even close to mainstream. Okay, enough with the incredulous commentary... you watch for yourself, and you just have to say... W.T.F.?!

11/29/2007 - AFI 100 greatest movie quotes

As one of the American Film Institute's compilations, their top 100 movie quotes is probably the most fun. These are the most repeated quotes from the past century of movies and most with good reason. Some of the ones I really like, though, must be viewed in the context of the movie. Most notably, the quote from Planet of the Apes ("Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!") certainly sounds exclamatory and unique. But if you watched the movie up to the point where Charlton Heston says those words, you'll know that it was all set up to climax at that point, making it a real hurrah moment for the audience. I could easily imagine the movie theater erupting in applause at that time. It's the same thing for when Arnold says "I'll be back" in the first Terminator... it's a great sound bite for sure, given his evil Terminator monotone voice and all. However, if saw what he does next after he says it, you'll know it was a totally badass line (if you haven't watched it, I'm not going to ruin it for you).



I'm glad that a lot of the badass movie quotes made it into this list, especially those by Clint Eastwood. But I'm disappointed that they didn't have the "Yipee Ki-Yay, Motherf***er" line from all the Die Hard movies. I guess they had the censors in mind, which is too bad. It's also the reason why I didn't watch the fourth Die Hard in the theaters. By making it PG-13, they had to cut off John McClane's famous line and toned down the violence, which is pretty much sacrilege in the tradition of the Die Hard movies. I'm happy they at least put it back in for the unrated DVD, though.

11/28/2007 - Don't Give Up On Vista Ad

Now this is rich... Apple is not-to-humbly crowing about the fact that some computer manufacturers are "downgrading" to XP instead of installing Vista on their new hardware because of Vista's incompatibility issues, its sluggishness, and its higher expense. If you've seen the new Apple ads with the Mac guy and the PC guy, you'll see that the PC guy is not too happy about this downgrading trend and is trying to persuade those who will listen to not give up on Vista. The funniest of these ads is actually not on TV. A few days ago, Apple started a viral marketing campaign on some tech websites with the Mac and PC guys in an online Flash advertisement. What's really clever is how the ad was designed on the webpage, as you'll see in this video:



What's kind of ironic is that the new Apple operating system, Leopard, shares a few problems with its direct competitor, Vista. My main beef with Leopard is that you really need the newest hardware to take advantage of all of its features. My Powerbook is running perfectly fine with Tiger and I don't see any compelling features that I would need in Leopard.

What is really exciting to me, though, are these new mobile computing platforms in the form of the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and the new Google Android mobile operating system. These new operating systems really allow developers to "start over" with software that has no bloat (yet), allowing for applications that run fast, are efficient, and are a truly new experience because they have to adapt to a new user interface in a mobile device. Leopard and Vista may be the big boys on the desktop and laptop computers, but Web 2.0 and mobile apps are the future, in my opinion.

11/27/2007 - Bad game box art

Everyone knows you shouldn't judge a book by its cover (or at least that's what they were supposed to teach you in grade school, right?), but the same applies to video games and their box art. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the original Mega Man. I mean, just look at it:



How could anyone at that time imagine that it was one of the best 8-bit games of all time by what's on the box art. Mind you that this was before the internet where reviews of video games weren't as widely available. In order for Mega Man to gain in popularity as it did, people would have to look past that ugly piece of manure and spread the word that it was a good game. In my case, I played Mega Man 2 first and became so enamored of it that I went ahead and bought the original. While it wasn't as good as the sequel, it's quality certainly exceeds that of the art on the box.

Here's a compilation of more bad video game box art. I'm sure there are some gems in there, but my thinking is that most of them would qualify for a review by the Angry Video Game Nerd.

11/25/2007 - Guitar Hero 3 Through the Fire and Flames XPERT!

Alright, I've dumped on Guitar Hero before because I thought that playing the game isn't an exact analogue to playing on an actual guitar. I still feel that a game like this should be a learning facility for playing an instrument, but this video at least gives me an appreciation for the good Guitar Hero players out there. Apparently, this is the hardest song/level in the game and after watching it, I just cannot comprehend how anybody besides the original guitarist of the song would be able to keep up with the pace. I mean, it just looks physically impossible to match, note for note, the pattern displayed on the screen to the strumming of the controller/guitar. The player here is called "Conrad the Great", and I must say that he deserves that nickname.



On a side note, I'm not really into hard rock songs, but this one actually grew on me. So much so that "Through the Fire and Flames" will be the first song I'll rock to on my new iPod Touch!

11/24/2007 - POOL TRICKS

You gotta have some admiration for pool trick shot experts. Their dedication to the "sport" can lead to some pretty amazing sights that leave you wondering if physics were somehow defied in the process of hitting those balls in the pockets. It always amazes me to see the high-english shots that make the ball curve and sometimes go backwards. Some trick shots are so elaborate that they rival even the most complicated Rube Goldberg contraptions. Of course, when trick shots go wrong, they're quite underwhelming. But that's why they invented video editing...

11/23/2007 - Cal Band- Video Game Show 2007

I don't know how many people in the audience of this next video are video gamers, but I hope they all appreciate what the Cal band has performed here. This video has definitely gone to the top of the heap of my favorites simply because it tickles all of my fancies as a retro gamer and video game music lover. It must have taken the Cal band months and months to put this little halftime show together, but it was well worth it. If the halftime show for the Superbowl was like this, I would skip my normal bathroom break.



It's a little hard to see because it's upside down, but the patterns are from the games Pong, Tetris, Mortal Kombat (complete with the MK dragon!!!), Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., and Super Mario World. To think, if it weren't for YouTube, the Cal band members would never have gotten their 15 minutes of fame which they wholeheartedly deserve.

11/22/2007 - Tetris Skits

You know a video game has invaded the consciousness of the masses when parodies of it are presented in popular cartoons. Tetris is probably the best example because it's one of those games that, if you get addicted to it, will be an experience that will last with you and even haunt your dreams. There's just something about falling geometrical shapes that brainwashes even the strongest of minds.

11/21/2007 - Past Favorite: Dragon's Lair

I state in my profile that I got addicted to YouTube after watching the videos of the Angry Video Game Nerd. What really got the ball rolling was this video review of the game Dragon's Lair for the NES. It was made by a prolific video blogger (who calls himself Jedite) at a time when video game reviews on YouTube exploded in popularity. Jedite now produces a regular feature on his YouTube page called "Q & A" where he answers any question you pose to him about video games. He is such a dedicated gamer that these Q & A's are almost always spot-on factually, and they're entertaining as well... for some reason it's fun to watch a geek rant about his favorite subject.

Jedite's most popular video, however, remains this one, and it's easy to see why. Dragon's Lair for the NES is notorious for it's frustrating difficulty -- and it's not a kind of difficulty that is rewarding like Contra. Jedite spends the entirety of this nearly 5-minute video trying to get past the first level. Needless to say he does not make it, but his attempts and profanity-laced reaction is worth the price of admission. When I first watched this video, I laughed so hard that I had stomach cramps the next day.



Because of the popularity of this video, numerous requests have been made to James Rolfe for his take on the NES game. Just yesterday, The Angry Video Game Nerd finally released his review of Dragon's Lair. It has truly come full circle.

11/19/2007 - Halo 3: Star Wars

The more I watch the Star Wars prequels now, the more I think that they are not going to get better with age. I don't know... there something about trying to shoehorn in a backstory which has been told already seems redundant to me. I know that they were trying to humanize and flesh out the character of Darth Vader, but all it does it makes the character somewhat smaller in stature.

They made the same mistake with Michael Myers in the recent Halloween remake. Yes, it was necessary to see him develop his homicidal mania as a kid, but not necessarily the root cause of it. It's much scarier to think that Michael Myers was born a killer, rather than being made a killer only because of a bad home life.

The only movie that bucked this trend was The Godfather: Part II, where we see how Marlon Brando's character in the original movie was made to become The Godfather. In the prequel portions of Part II, they pretty much showed Vito Corleone as being badass from the start. He didn't kill the Blackhand to become Godfather out of revenge or out of desperation. He just didn't want to be extorted and disrespected.

Where was I? Oh, Star Wars... yeah. Well, my rant and general distaste for the prequels should dissuade you from enjoying this next parody of Episode III. They basically took a couple of scenes from that movie and replaced the actors with Halo 3 characters. The way they've done it is very seamless and it's overall very nicely done.

11/18/2007 - "I have 3, PS3's"

When watching this next video, you have to place yourself in last year's gaming environment... when the PS3 was launched with great fanfare and wait lists and inflated eBay prices. This was only a week before the Wii took the world by storm and put the PS3 to shame. For that brief moment in time, the PS3 was king of the hill, receiving insane press attention and fooling scalpers into believing that people would pay $600 for a gaming system. With that in mind, it would seem like anyone with three PS3's would be considered an eccentric in the sense of being extravagant. In the reality of today's gaming market, however, a person owning three PS3's would probably be considered an ignoramus. Still, it's a funny video that's worth recommending.

11/17/2007 - Parody of Super Mario Kart

When done right, stop-motion video is undeniably cool. You can do so much with it as to fool the audience into witnessing something unnatural merely by removing the real-time nature of video. An easy example is making yourself "levitate" by jumping repeatedly and taking consecutive pictures of yourself when you're in mid-air. The result may be choppy, and it may take a LONG time, but it's how special effects are done. This stop-motion video of a group of college buddies parodying Super Mario Kart has been making the rounds on the gaming sites, and it's easy to see why. If you've played Super Mario Kart, you'll recognize all the material... the mushrooms, bananas, and even the red turtle shells. My favorite part has to be when the star is collected and the invincibility effect is simulated by wearing different colored t-shirts in each frame. It must have been a lot of work, but it was worth it!

11/16/2007 - Cowbell Hero

Okay, so in order to fully appreciate this next video, you have to be familiar with two pop culture references. The first is the Will Ferrell/Christopher Walken "cowbell" skit whose video I've featured here before. The second is the video game, "Guitar Hero", which is a very popular rhythm game similar to Dance Dance Revolution, but uses a guitar instead of a dance mat. Frankly, I don't understand all the hoopla regarding Guitar Hero, mainly because being good at the game doesn't necessarily prepare you for actual guitar playing. On the other hand, if the instrument was a cowbell, this video game parody might actually get you into the Blue Oyster Cult!

11/15/2007 - GTA: Anime Style

So far we've seen Grand Theft Auto mods pay tribute to Superman and Back to the Future. There are plenty of other mods out there, but I think this may be the weirdest. It's based on the Lucky Star anime, I believe, and it has Pikachu of Pokemon fame as substitutes for the regular police officers. Pikachus being shot dead with blood coming out if them is a visceral sight that actually seems more violent than when regular people are shot. And when the Lucky Star girls are laughing after they shoot them... just creepy. The addition of the Big Blue theme of F-Zero as a radio selection is nice, though.

11/13/2007 - Magic Baseball Bat

Now here's something that you will never see again. It looks so impossible that it's easy to believe that it's a fake. All it is, however, is a thrown baseball bat that ends up balancing itself on the floor. I couldn't even tell you what are the odds of something like that happening. I could probably say that you'd have to attempt it 24 hours a day in order for it to happen sometime in your lifetime. But here it is... in living color and on video. And that's the beauty of YouTube, isn't it?

11/12/2007 - Contra Trailer

Contra 4 comes out this week for the Nintendo DS, and this is the one game for the system that makes me want to buy the system just for the game. Why? Well, it's because Contra III for the SNES was one of the greatest games ever! Contra exists for one reason: to kick your butt and make you like it. It's intentionally hard, but not impossibly so. Even though it may be the most unrealistic game in the world by having one guy (or two, if you have a second player) taking out an entire alien horde, it does have one all-too-realistic element to it: ONE HIT AND YOU'RE DEAD. That's right, no health bar, or hearts to give you extra energy. One bullet from even the weakest enemy will put you down... well, it takes away one of your lives at least. And that's why so many people resort to the most famous code in video gaming history: the Konami code. UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, START. It gives you thirty lives in the original Contra for the NES and is so well-known that it's printed on T-Shirts.

To celebrate the release of Contra 4, I have to feature this video from the TeamAwesome crew, the same people who made that ultra-cool Punch Out movie trailer for the Nintendo video contest. This "trailer" is of Contra, of course, and it pays homage to the movies of which Contra is based on: Aliens, Predator, Commando, and Rambo. Yes, it was a time when action movie stars were muscle-bound actors, not the sensitive leading men of today aided by stunt men and computer graphics. Those movies definitely hold a special place in my heart, and so does Contra for the same reasons.



By the way, TeamAwesome... you guys rock! Hope to see more of your stuff in the future!

11/11/2007 - SF2 - Dancer vs. Baby

This video wins in the Most Creative Use of Street Fighter II Music category. Not to mention sound effects. Don't worry, folks... the baby gets up fine right after the end of the video.

11/10/2007 - Vista Oops

We all saw previously how a Microsoft product demonstration can go wrong when the product just stops working. Now here comes a Microsoft product demonstration where the product works, but works poorly. Voice recognition software has always been dodgy at best. Even after months of training the product to recognize your voice and speech pattern, there is always going to be the occasional hiccup where it confuses words that sound alike. It's kinda like that episode of Seinfeld with the lipreader. I guess it could be easy to confuse "sleep" and "sweep", but what we see in this demonstration defies explanation:



After watching these buggy Windows systems, I just hope that the air traffic control system in this country isn't run by Microsoft products.

11/9/2007 - Mega64: Super Mario Bros. 3

I think there really might be something to the theory that the creators of the Super Mario Bros. games were on something when they were making the games. When you have a mushroom as a power-up item, that's a pretty clear sign. Super Mario Bros. 3 gives us another good example, Kuribo's shoe. What is Kuribo's shoe? It's some kind of man-sized shoe that Mario or Luigi climb into and use it to stomp on enemies that they couldn't normally stomp on (spiny-shells, for example) and it gives them the ability to traverse on hazardous grounds. Oh, and the "shoe" has a wind-up control on the back for some reason.

Now, how ridiculous is this concept in real life? Well, they boys of Mega64 shows us:

11/7/2007 - Nerd Trapped in Balloon

We nerds get a bad rap sometimes. Actually, make that most of the time. It's not that we're anti-social. It's just that expending any more energy than is necessary just to be "part of the group" is somewhat illogical. I mean, we serve our part in society by thinking out of the box, being innovative and inventive, and pursuing our interests with disregard to social norms. We're not necessarily smarter than the rest of the population, but I think we give higher priority to our intellectual pursuits than most others. We come in all varieties. For a good example, go watch the movie "Revenge of the Nerds". I think it's one of our good qualities, actually. On the other hand, some nerds do give the rest of us a bad name. Especially when they film their exploits for everybody to see:

11/6/2007 - Street Blaster V Turbo 20

We saw what happened when Double Dragon was ported over to the Atari 2600. Despite its, um, primitive nature, it still looked playable and somewhat faithful to its source material. Now what happens when you try to go from a 32-bit game to an 8-bit system? And not just any 32-bit game... it's Street Fighter II, baby. To my knowledge, the only official 8-bit port of Street Fighter II by Capcom is the one for the original Game Boy. The rest, including this little gem, are pirated games.



Let's try to review this, AVGN-style (without the swear-words, of course). First of all, what's with the name change? Street Blaster V Turbo 20? I know they were trying to avoid lawsuits by Capcom, but how did they come up with "Street Blaster"? Is there a construction worker character in the game that blasts streets or something? And is this the fifth Street Blaster game, or the 20th? Or it could be a cumulative title, making it the 20th version of Street Blaster V Turbo, which itself is the faster version of Street Blaster V, which is the fifth version of Street Blaster, making it the overall 26th version of Street Blaster (unless there were Championship Editions in between).

Now look at the character select screen:

I can recognize the first 10 fighters... they look like most of the Street Fighter gang. But what about the next 10? Is that Evil Ryu? Is Blanka in a hockey mask? These look like the Bizarro versions of the Street Fighter characters? Why was this even necessary? I mean, in the original Street Fighter II, you could only choose from eight World Warriors. It's like the makers of this piece of junk were trying to give you a bonus by allowing you to choose alternate versions of the characters.

Then, when Guile and Chun-Li are chosen, the VS screen shows Blanka and Dhalsim. What the heck happened? Did they not even test this game before releasing it? Then we get to the game. Okay, it looks decent enough. But why is Chun-Li just doing her Spinning Bird Kick? All Guile has to do is Sonic Booms and she's down for the count. Speaking of which, why does her body bounce three times when falling to the ground? Boy does that get annoying fast.

So after Guile wins, Blanka says "Ha Ha, Nice Fight, Go Next Fight!" It may not be as bad as "All Your Base Belong to Us", but it's close. Then you have a Guile vs. Zangief screen, where it's Blanka instead of Guile again, and Zangief is having some kind of complexion problem:

Now that's just disturbing.

After the Guile/Zangief fight, the next opponent is Ryu, but the VS. screen shows E. Honda. Whatever. The thing is, the music for Ryu's stage is E. Honda's music as well. Oh well, they're both from Japan. After Ryu is Chun-Li again? Oh wait, it's the Bizarro Chun-Li, and the name on the HUD says Maki. Oh boy is this game crap, or what?

I do have to say that after looking at this game, I think that Capcom could have made an NES port of Street Fighter II and it probably would have been decent. I mean, the NES was certainly capable of displaying the fighter sprites in a recognizable way, and it had enough horsepower to emulate the fighting gameplay engine to a degree. Surely, if they could churn out mediocre Mega Man sequels at the end of the NES's lifecycle, they could have made room for a guaranteed success of a SF2 translation. And they could have save the rest of the world from this awful piece of garbage.

11/4/2007 - Crazy Indian Video

I now know why they use the term "culture shock". Every time I watch one of these Indian music videos, I'm speechless. What's weird is that they do try to incorporate some aspects of American pop culture. The problem is that they stuff they copy from us is over twenty years old! I mean, Michael Jackson and George Michael might have been cool back in the day, but now they are more known for their perversity. The Indian Thriller video I highlighted before might have been a nice little homage, but this one is just plain strange. What is awesome about it though is not the video itself, but the subtitles that go along with it. YouTube user "buffalax" has watch the video (many, many times, I'm sure) and provided subtitles that are not a language translation, but what the lyrics sound like using English words. The result is quite hilarious:

11/3/2007 - Cool Computer Program

Sometimes I wonder if I missed my calling and blew the chance at learn or work at a place like MIT. Don't get me wrong... I love my sysadmin job and I think I'm pretty good at troubleshooting computers. But when I see cool stuff like this next video, it makes the work I do look like child's play. This whiteboarding technology is like nothing I've ever seen. It looks like a combination of a projection display with either a touch-sensitive background or perhaps a motion-tracking system to follow the pen. There's some kind of hand-writing recognition feature to autocomplete the shapes and figures drawn. A built-in "dictionary" of physics and engineering concepts rounds out the software featureset. The integration of all these features is phenomenal. It may be something that would be very useful in physics simulation or as a design tool. But face it, you'd probably spend hours making to carts crash into each other.

11/2/2007 - The Internet Stars Are Viral

Let's face it... YouTube would be nothing if it weren't for viral videos. These are the videos that are most linked to, most viewed, and most featured in the "mainstream media". I've featured many of these viral videos on this blog, but have left out many others. I can see why some of these videos became blockbusters, but this blog is about the videos that tickle my fancy or have some deeper meaning to me that I can share. For example, the OK Go and History of Dance videos show very talented displays of dancing, but I'm just not into dancing videos too much. Now, you may ask how does that differ from the Hare Hare Yukai videos. Well, those videos are mainly about appreciating the animation of the dance, rather than the dance itself.

I'm sure I'll feature more viral videos in the future, but if you want to see something about all the videos I missed, you can't do better than this one. Destined to become a viral video itself, it is a music video set to the tune of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" that lists out in quick fashion most of the viral videos featured on YouTube and elsewhere in the past couple of years. I really wish it mentioned the Angry Video Game Nerd or the Hare Hare Yukai Dance, though.

11/1/2007 - Darth Vader being a smartass

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! This video is so cleverly edited that you'll never watch this scene of The Empire Strikes Back the same way again:



The Dark Side has never been so funny.