12/25/2007 - Christmas, Guitars, and NI DAQ

Alright, I said that I wasn't going to have another blog entry until next year, but since I found this Christmas-themed gem of a video, I just had to share it today. Guitar Hero-mania is sweeping the nation (I should know...after just attending a local GH3 competition) and what would be the most appropriate way of incorporating Christmas into it? Christmas music modded into the game? Nah! A mall Santa playing the game? That would be interesting to see, but this is so much cooler:



Now THAT'S the ticket! You know, in addition to being technical geniuses, some nerds are the most creative people you'll ever meet, and this is the proof. I've seen Christmas lights synchronized to music before, but this really brings it to a new level. And missed notes lighting up the trashcan? Brilliant. This almost makes me wish I was working in a cubicle.

12/9/2007 - 200th Post!

Wow, 200 posts already... I can't say it's not difficult going through so many YouTube videos to pick out a few gems for me to put on this little blog here. I don't know how many views this page is really getting, but I don't really care. It's just been fun venting my thoughts, and I don't feel as guilty as I would if I were just to watch videos all day without being a little productive while doing so.

So I think I'll take a little break from blogging like I did after my 100th post. I'll definitely be back in the new year with a reloaded queue of videos. So I wish happy holidays to all my readers and I have the perfect video for such an occasion. It's from the great YouTube user "ItsJustSomeRandomGuy" who made those great Marvel/DC videos. He is a true fan of the genre and produced this cool holiday-themed skit featuring Batman as a natural Scrooge-like character. Let's just say it's easier to believe a man can fly than it is for Batman to believe in the holiday spirit...

12/7/2007 - Yoshi

Say what you want about Nintendo being geared to the younger crowd of games, you can't deny that they know how to handle their mascots. Mario, Link, Samus are universally known video gaming icons and first party titles with them as the main character are almost always classic games. Nintendo has also created an industry with some of the spin-off characters from these games. Who would have guessed that a fatter, uglier version of Mario called Wario would have his own successful line of games (or I should say microgames)?

Perhaps the most popular spin-off character from the Mario series is Yoshi, the cuddly dinosaur with a long tongue and lays eggs. Yoshi first appeared in the SNES launch title, Super Mario World, as a sidekick for Mario... perhaps his first sidekick other than his brother Luigi. In the game, Yoshi wasn't that much more than just another power-up. It would let you kill enemies by having them be swallowed with its tongue, but this can be considered as an attack power=up for Mario. If you were hit by an enemy Yoshi would run away, but you wouldn't lose a life. So, in effect, Yoshi was just another notch in your "life bar". This is not to say that Yoshi did not have an impact on Mario or Nintendo in general. It proved that cute and cuddly could still sell games, even in a market of an ever-changing and aging population.

Yoshi would go on to be the main character in many games. Yoshi's Cookie was a puzzle game for the NES, Yoshi's Safari was a light-gun game for the SNES, and Yoshi's Island is considered by some to be the best 2-D platforming game on any system. Not bad for a spin-off mascot. He's also the star of this brilliant parody video:

12/6/2007 - Battletoads Wind Tunnel

A lot of video games these days are what I call rental games... meaning that they are so short that they are only good for a rental. A lot of times this is because they've dumbed down the games in terms of difficulty in order to attract a broader audience. That may be fine, but that makes those kind of games unworthy of spending $60, high-production values or not.

Back in the day (I can't believe I'm using that phrase), games were harder. A lot harder. If you went back and played the original Super Mario Bros. right now, you'd probably be surprised at how hard it is because the controls aren't as tight as they are now and the platforming is less forgivable than the newer Mario games. I've already mentioned Contra which was so difficult, they had to put in a 30-man code.

Probably the best example of this phenomenon was the game Battletoads. This game came at the end of the NES life cycle and the title characters were probably created as a response to the tremendous popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This game employed a great variety of gameplay. In fact, it put itself in pretty much every genre: beat-em-up, shoot-em-up, platforming, and vehicle play. The game wasn't very long with less than 20 stages, but it was hard. My God, was it hard.

Like Contra, though, it wasn't really cheap in its difficulty. The controls were pretty tight and you had a generous health bar for your Toad. Still, this game is a true test for your reflexes... particularly in the vehicle stages. Take this video for example. It's of the FIRST vehicle stage in the game and don't let this run-through fool you. It may look difficult already, but nothing would prepare you for actually playing it yourself. I remember my cousins and myself trying to complete this stage and I think it took the entire night into the next day. We would get further and further each time we played only to get our butts kicked after the checkpoint. And there was NO WAY we could ever accomplish what this video shows: completing it without dying once.



Again, I have to remind you that this is the first vehicle stage. The other ones were even harder than this. If you could complete this game without a Game Genie, you were a true hardcore gamer, and I would bow to you.

12/5/2007 - Australian Toilet Flushing - TRUTH EXPOSED!

I was wondering when there would be imitators to the Mythbusters. Sure, not everybody has access to explosives like they do, but there are some simple myths out there that people can try to bust or confirm. One such myth is the Coriolis effect where water swirls down a drain according to which hemisphere of the Earth you're in. This urban legend has been perpetuated by such shows as The Simpsons and the X-Files. So how could you test this myth? Well, travel to a country in the Southern Hemisphere of course! And that's what these two "toilet Mythbusters" did. They just happened to be in Australia and filmed their experiment. So is the myth busted or confirmed? You decide:

12/4/2007 - Animaniacs Geography Lesson (2 videos)

Geography was never one of my best subjects in school... I just never had an interest in gaining that "world experience". It would be fair to say that I'm a bit small-minded that way, especially with the stuff going on in the world now. What would have been nice is if they made the geography/social studies classes a bit more interesting by showing fun stuff like these two videos.




They come from the cartoon series Animaniacs, which I was a huge fan of when I was in high school. I wasn't the only one as it seemed all the geeks I hung out with also watched Animaniacs religiously. It was a show that took irreverence to a new level... it would parody popular movies, TV shows, other cartoons, and even itself at times. Warner Bros. was trying to appeal more to young adults and not just to little kids, and with Animaniacs they largely succeeded.

12/3/2007 - iPod Touch Commercial

I received my iPod Touch last week and I am in love with it. It's my first iPod and I can see why millions of people are into these music players by Apple (and why Apple's stock is soaring!). Even though I'm not a huge music lover or audiophile, I can appreciate having all my music in my pocket instead of swapping dozens of CDs in portable CD players. Actually, what I'm using the most of on the Touch is the Safari web browser. It's just so useful to whip out the iPod to check a webpage or two for the information you need, instead of booting up the old desktop or even laptop computer. Again, with the SDK coming out in February, this thing will really be a full-fledged mobile computer with almost limitless possibilities.

I'm sure most of you have seen the iPod Touch commercial that's hitting the airwaves for the past month. What you might not know is that commercial is based on a YouTube video created by an Apple fan by the name of Nick Haley. Apple loved his commercial so much that they flew him out to the coast to help them re-make the commercial for the national airwaves. This, of course, is another example of the power of YouTube. While I think the commercial is alright, I really, REALLY wish they had used another song choice... like the one shown in this video:



Yes, that's right... it's "The Touch" by Stan Bush. Now, only Transformers nerds like myself would fully appreciate the song choice, but I do think it fits the product being sold.

12/2/2007 - Giving Him The Business!

I think referees for the major sports have too much power. Everything is so subjective and one referee making a bad call can affect the outcome of the entire game. I'm not saying that there should be some kind of robot watching the game or that they should install infrared sensors for the boundary lines. I just think they can adjust the existing rules to make it so that a referee would have less of a possibility of making a bad call. They should maybe make it so that two out of three referees have to agree on a call. Or maybe they could bench a ref for the quarter after being overturned by instant replay. Okay, that may be harsh, but check out this next referee's call and tell me what the penalty was for...

12/1/2007 - LHB | Cartoon/Videogame Show | 2004

So were the members of the Cal band who performed that brilliant halftime show plagiarists? I don't know, but here is the University of Texas Longhorn Band performing a very similar halftime show based not only on video games, but Saturday morning cartoons as well. This was performed three years before the Cal band did their show, though, and I can confidently say that Cal learned a thing or two from this performance and generally improved over the LHB. I think that the theme of this performance does serve to prove the point of why Saturday morning cartoons died. When video games exploded in popularity in the mid-90's, kids were no longer satisfied by the animated stories they were watching... instead they controlled their digital avatars to create their own adventures, breaking through the confines imposed by cartoon scriptwriters.