5/31/2008 - Elephant Paints Self Portrait

Elephants seem to make fascinating YouTube videos. I've featured two of them myself... one of them showing a Mythbusters episode proving that elephants are afraid of mice, and another one showing an elephant enjoying another elephant's, um, colon. It's hard to believe from the previous videos (especially the latter) that elephants can be smart creatures of nature. This video goes a long way to show that a lot of training can go a long way:

5/29/2008 - UnBOXing Asus EEE PC BOX with BOXing-Gloves

With every new gadget that comes out, you get a bunch of unboxing videos. The newest gadget craze has to be these ultraportable laptops of which Asus has made a name for itself with its tiny and inexpensive EEE PC. There have been competitors and copycats all over the PC landscape and the popularity of these machines has even led Microsoft to extend the shelf life of Windows XP, which EEE PCs now use (they used Linux before).

What's one way to make a creative unboxing video? Why, use boxing gloves of course!

5/28/2008 - New Mega64 Video

Is there anything more pointless than the Street Fighter bonus rounds? They are simply stages where there is something that you can beat up for points. But who really pays attention to the points in a fighting game? For that matter, are there any games left that even have accumulating points as a main goal? It used to be that points were the main indicator of videogame skill as shown in the excellent documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. But now, everything is pretty much centered on beating up the other guy in fighting games or finishing a single-player adventure. Capcom got the hint and excluded the bonus rounds in later version of Street Fighter II (they did make a comeback in Street Fighter III). I guess there's some nostalgia and tradition in beating up a car as it was first introduced in Final Fight. The Mega64 folks had to prove their videogame worthiness by doing what? Yes, beating up a real car:

5/27/2008 - Star Wars: No Easy Way Out

Last month, the James Rolfe (AKA the Angry Video Game Nerd) paid tribute to one of his favorite movie series, Rocky and its sequels. In addition to his great documentary about the locales featured in the movies, he gave quick reviews of the movies. I was very curious as to how he would review Rocky IV. I always thought Rocky III, IV, and V were less about the story and the Rocky "legend" and were made just as moneymakers. There was, however, something about Rocky IV that appeals to me as a child of the 80's. Looking at it now, it is quite the period piece with its heavy use of montages set to music, it's almost like a feature-length music video from the 80's. Like James says, "It's all about the montages."

Take the "Driving" montage for example. Here is Rocky, contemplating over the loss of Apollo (sorry if I spoiled the movie for you), and the prospect of going up against the beast Ivan Drago. Not only did this montage contain clips from the previous Rocky movies, but flashback video of something that just happened 15 minutes ago in the movie! Now that's a hardcore montage! It's all set to the song "No Easy Way Out" by Robert Tepper and is frequently parodied on YouTube.

Perhaps the best parody is the one with Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, where Darth Vader is witnessing his son's torture at the hands of the Emperor. Who knows what is going on in his head at that moment... after all, his face is completely covered in that mask. I guess it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think that he's thinking about the past... and hey, that's the perfect occasion for a flashback montage!



I like to think of this as "What if Sylvester Stallone directed Star Wars?".

5/26/2008 - How YouTube Looked Like in the Past

When I first heard about YouTube, I didn't think a site could possibly exist for very long. I just couldn't fathom how many server farms would be needed in order to contain all the terabytes of video that anybody on the internet can just post there permanently. That's not to mention the bandwidth necessary to serve all the videos. Only when Google came on board did I believe that it was possible. I mean, if Google can index most of the internet, surely they've figured out how to make YouTube technically viable. Whether or not they can make it profitable is another thing. I'm starting to see these little ads embedded into the videos all over the place and while they're not really obstructive, I still hide the ad each time. Also, you can watch many videos in "higher quality", which tells me that they actually keep the source material while hosting a compressed version at the same time. Amazing.

With all these changes, it's interesting to look back and see how YouTube started out. With the Internet Wayback Machine (http://archive.org), we can get a glimpse of webpages as they were archived on certain dates. Here is a collection of those archived pages edited into its own YouTube video:

5/25/2008 - Michael Jackson's Punch-Out!

What the heck happened to Michael Jackson? I know there were some Daddy issues and there must have been a lot of stress with childhood fame, but how did any of that make him what he is today? There are a lot of celebrities and icons at the top of their genre that were tragically taken out of this world due to tragic circumstances (Elvis, Marylin, Bruce Lee, etc.), but Michael Jackson just became a freak. He may still be on top of the pop charts if it weren't for the (somewhat justified) suspicion that he is a pedophile. Could it have all begun with his "special relationship" with Home Alone star Macauly Culkin? Who knows? But here's a hilarious parody of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out starring M.J. and the other Little Mac:

5/23/2008 - PS3 Laptop from Ben Heck

I've talked about video games being "modded" before, where the ROM images have been modified so that you can play the games in ways not normally intended. These were all software hack and it's probably not surprising that people mod hardware as well. Why do they do it? Simply because they can! Perhaps the most well known gaming hardware modder is Ben Heck, who has made pretty much all the non-handheld video game consoles out there portable in some way. Now, these systems may not truly be "portable" in that they require an AC power connection, but they are truly self contained systems in that the built-in LCD screens negate the necessity for an external television.

It would seem that the PS3, with all of its advanced hardware design and power consumption and cooling needs that it would be difficult to turn into a portable system. And according to this video, it was Ben's longest project, taking 14 months on and off. But the end result looks like it was worth it:



It may be humongous, but it still looks sleek... and that may be the biggest accomplishment of all.

5/22/2008 - Annoying

I'm glad I never had a roommate, because I am certain that even with the best possible roommate that stuff like this can happen:

5/21/2008 - Megaman 3 with vocal audio

While I think Mega Man 2 had the best soundtrack of the series (and perhaps the best videogame soundtrack in general), Mega Man 3 has a pretty awesome soundtrack as well. As with many great videogame soundtracks, you often find yourself humming a particular theme or two... maybe in the shower or while driving. Well, what if you could replace the music in a videogame with vocal humming and vocal sound effects? You get something that's kind of weird, but totally awesome:



I appreciate the fact that they used my favorite track from Mega Man 3, the Snake Man stage.

Update to yesterday's post: The Angry Video Game Nerd has been reinstated to YouTube! Hooray! Now if they can just get PlayItBogart and Armake21 back.