12/30/2008 - Pizza Delivery Fail

I go out to eat a lot because, frankly, I don't cook. I know I'm paying more than I would if I bought the ingredients myself and made the meal, but you can't beat the convenience of drive-thru. The only thing I have to put out of my mind, though, is what goes on behind the scenes of a restaurant. I just don't want to know if someone back there has a cold or if someone didn't wear gloves while handling the food. That's why footage like this scares me:



Well, at least it was on the floor for less than 5 seconds.

12/28/2008 - 100 Movie Spoilers in 5 Minutes

I always tell myself not to look at the spoilers on the internet for shows or movies that I am watching or going to watch, but I just can't help myself. I can't say whether or not it really takes away from the overall enjoyment I have while watching a movie that I already know a lot about, but certain things are meant to be surprises and I guess it's better not knowing them beforehand. For example, I read about "deaths" in X-Men 3, but as I was reading them, they seemed incredulous and I sort of brushed them off. But sure enough, the spoilers were true and nothing in the film gave me any surprise... just the opposite, actually. But then you have a movie like the original Planet of the Apes where I knew of the famous ending long before I watched the whole movie, and it still felt powerful to me. That's the difference between a good movie and a mediocre movie, regardless of surprising plot developments.

So if you're a spoiler-hound like me, you may appreciate this video:

12/27/2008 - Sadie's Gaming Infection (2 Videos)

OK, if you happen to know a video game voice actor, you could probably get them to do their famous voice for you and have it be put on YouTube. But getting four famous video game voices? Now THAT'S an accomplishment:



And how is it that "UltraNeko" got four voice actors to leave voice messages? She's actually the star of a series of YouTube gaming videos called "Sadie's Gaming Infection", and I have to say that it ROCKS. I haven't been this addicted to a series of gaming videos since the Angry Video Game Nerd series started, and that's saying a lot. UltraNeko/Sadie reviews games of all kinds (not just the bad ones) in a weekly show that gives her live first impressions of a game.

What's amazing about these reviews is that they are not scripted. James Rolfe does the best scripted reviews of games, but Sadie responds spontaneously to what is on the screen while still playing through the game. It's also refreshing to see a true girl gamer (don't call her a gamer chick) have a level of success in the industry of game reviews. She knows her stuff and has connections that, as they say in the MasterCard commercials, are priceless. Here's one review that exemplifies the series:



Yes, the second movie F@(K1NG RULES!

12/25/2008 - Santa's helpers disable naughty cameras in Tempe

Merry Christmas everybody! I'm not exactly a speeder when it comes to driving, but I do get paranoid by the red light cameras on the road that takes pictures of your license plate if you go speed through a red light and mails you a ticket. I always wonder what would happen if the cameras malfunctioned and got the wrong car ticketed. How exactly would you fight that in court? Anyway, it looks like some enterprising gentlemen in Tempe took it upon themselves to fight the oppressive local government there. They did so, however, in some very festive costumes:

12/23/2008 - Tourettesguy Tank soundpack - L4D

With the huge price discrepancies between gaming consoles and gaming PC's, I've always wondered why anyone would pay north of $2000 for an overclocked PC to play games when a console at a fraction of the price would suffice. But then I remembered that you can't hack a console game as easily as you can a PC game. Even replacing the sound effects for a game can be a profound experience. I remember back in high school we played an unofficial Star Trek game called NetTrek, and we would replace the phaser and torpedo sounds with sounds from the Monty Python shows. Needless to say, the "SPAM" sound still is ingrained into my subconscious to this day.

While that was fun and sort of amateurish, this sound replacement pack for the new game Left 4 Dead really takes the cake. Apparently, you can play as a large monster called Tank and you can go and hunt the protagonists in the game in some sort of deathmatch mode. Someone had enough sense to dub in sounds from the Tourettes Guy videos for Tank and it seems pretty appropriate (language warning):

12/21/2008 - Star Wars Vs. Star Trek - DMP Edition HQ

These Star Wars/Star Trek videos never get old. This one is actually more in a humorous vein and addresses the technological divide between the two universes. While Star Wars tech is decidedly less advanced than that of Star Trek, Star Wars has a little trick up its sleeve:

12/20/2008 - Ice Sculpture Fail

I spent two and a half hours the other day installing new servers into our server rack at work only to discover that the servers did not have the operating system installed in them. It was a lot of work for basically no reward. And yet, it wasn't nearly as bad as what happens to the sculpture artist in this video:



And this is why there is a need for math and physics classes.

12/18/2008 - SlashBot: The Guitar Hero Robot

How hard is a Guitar Hero song on Expert? Not even a robot can get 100%:



Seriously though, that is one cool invention. It already tops the Wii bowling robot I blogged about a while ago. I'm not sure if the robot actually "sees" the screen and the notes that it's supposed to be playing or if it's pre-programmed somehow. I would assume it is the former, otherwise it wouldn't be worth it as a game-playing robot if was just programmed with the song already in memory.

12/16/2008 - Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade gets Rickrolled

Ha, ha, ha, ha!! Were they serious with this? Did the organizers of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade honestly think that Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" was a legitimate internet phenomenon? Well, actually it is, but not in a flattering way for the song. It's been used as a practical joke on YouTube for those dumb enough to click on something that looked enticing. If you fell for the joke, you have been "Rickrolled". I bet one of the organizers was thinking, "Hmmm... let's find the latest internet/YouTube craze and put them in the parade." And after looking at all the "hits" the Rickroll song has received, they thought they found their star. It's either that, or someone played a practical joke on them, and on us all. We were all Rickrolled Thanksgiving Day 2008:

12/14/2008 - Wii Theremin (2 videos)

Not much can be said about the Wii as a hardcore gaming console. Besides Nintendo's first-party offerings, Wii games have largely been mediocre party games. You're certainly not going to see any Wii games being nominated for Game of the Year at tonight's Video Game Awards. It's a big mystery to me as to how the systems are still selling out to this day. While the Wii has lost my interest as a gaming system, it's still interesting to see how people are utilizing the technologies in the Wiimote controller. For example, here's a guy who turned the Wiimote into a virtual theremin. Yes, that's the instrument you can play without touching it.

12/13/2008 - Bruce Lee plays ping pong with nunchuck

There have been many famous actors who died before they could reach their pinnacle of success: James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and most recently Heath Ledger. If I could choose one actor to have dodged his untimely fate, it would have to be Bruce Lee. Really, there is no one better at practicing and displaying the martial arts other than the Little Dragon himself. His movies may not have been the greatest in terms of acting and story, but when Bruce Lee was fighting onscreen, you simply could not take your eyes off it. And in Way of the Dragon/Return of the Dragon, it was indeed Bruce Lee who kicked Chuck Norris' ass. What I would give to see the completed Game of Death movie and the many movies that would have followed if he didn't die so prematurely. It makes me curse the fates every time I think about it.

So when I saw this video, I had to smile. It may be a fake, but Bruce was such an incredible martial artist that it wouldn't surprise me if it was really him in a display of his nunchuck skills:

12/11/2008 - Sack to the Future (3 videos)

It seems like most of the people creating levels for the PS3 game, Little Big Planet, are creating levels based on other video games. There are plenty of Super Mario Bros. levels and Mega Man levels. That's to be expected since those were side-scrollers just as Little Big Planet is. Games of other genres, such as Mortal Kombat and Shadow of the Colossus are represented too. These levels based on games can be problematic because they could be yanked from Sony's servers at any time for violating copyright laws. There has been much controversy over this, and in my view, I would hope that the various game companies out there would be lenient in their intellectual property protection. After all, most of these levels are tributes to great games, and I would think that they would be flattered by the hours taken to create such intricate stages.

If all levels based on games were to disappear, however, I fear that levels based on movies would be next. Here's a series of levels based on one of my favorite trilogies of all time: Back to the Future. The great thing about these levels is that they are surprisingly accurate in telling the story of the three movies:







I only wish they could have included the musical score from the movie!

12/9/2008 - How to Break a 360

One of the main reasons I did not get an XBox 360 was because of all the news last year about the high system failure rate. I'm sure I read somewhere that 1 in 4 Xboxes suffered from the "Red Ring of Death". Yes, I know it's ironic that my PS3 failed and I had to get it fixed, but I'm still happy with my choice. My new PS3 is working just fine and I'm sure it has a better chance of lasting than a random 360 out there.

The XBox failures was so bad that Microsoft extended its warranty from 1 year to 3 years. Well, the XBox made its debut in November 22, 2005, so the warranties on those XBoxes have expired. If by chance you bought it at that time and your system gets the Red Ring of Death, you're pretty much S.O.L. If you bought it at a later date and your warranty is still in place, you'd want it to fail so that you can get a replacement XBox with the newer chipset that is less prone to failure. That's the dilemma the folks at IGN want to help you with by showing you exactly how to break the XBox 360:

12/7/2008 - Street Fighter remix (piano)

So after playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix for almost two weeks, I can give my take on it. I had hyped it up so much in my mind that you'd think there might be some disappointment when it finally came out. That is not the case with this game, however. I bought the Playstation 3 specifically for this game and I can honestly say it was worth it. Regular readers of this blog know of my love for the Street Fighter franchise, and that has it pretty much dominated my gaming life since it first came out in 1991. Sure, I've had mini-obsessions with other games over the years, but I have always come back to the Capcom fighters.

When I first saw the artwork that was going to go into this game, I was amazed already. I have always appreciated the art style that went into the Street Fighter series and I knew that the HD visuals would be in good hands with the manga artists at UDON. You can tell that they care about the characters, and there is no single character in the game that looks out of place. I was quite pleased that they beefed up characters like Sagat, Dhalsim, and M. Bison to look more like their anime counterparts. What I really appreciate, though, is that everything looks consistent now. Back when Super Street Fighter II Turbo was introduced, the sprites of the characters looked pretty much as they did in the first Street Fighter II. And yet, when some of the new moves were introduced, they were more stylized in the anime form and it looked jarringly out of place (see Honda's Ochio Throw, for example). Now that all of the sprites have been redrawn in the anime style, those moves no longer look like add-ons.

Much has been made about the "rebalancing" of the characters in the game. I've always thought that what made Street Fighter uniquely better than most other fighter games is that the characters were so different from one another (besides Ken and Ryu, of course). Take the Mortal Kombat games, for example. They pretty much all have the same moveset except for the special moves and the combos. By and large, though, the number of special moves are the same for the characters, and their combos are just different button combinations from each other. My point is that Mortal Kombat is "pre-balanced" in a way that offers little incentive to pick certain characters because they might have an advantage over others.

In Street Fighter, however, the characters are not just different in movesets alone. Some move faster than others. Some jump higher than others. They have different throwing ranges. With all these differences, it's natural that some characters are going to be be mismatched against others. For example, I can usually fight fairly well as Guile versus someone at my skill level. However, if they choose Chun-Li, I have a much harder time because of her higher jumps. Guile has no effective way to trap Chun-Li as he does against most of the other fighters. That's why I had to learn to use other fighters like Blanka who are better to use against Chun-Li. But I can't solely use Blanka because he's weak against Bison. This kind of rock-paper-scissors element to Street Fighter is one of its strengths, in my opinion and I'm glad to see that the "rebalancing" of the game was a lot more subtle that I thought it would be. Sure, it might have changed the competitive scene forever, but since I'm not at the pro level where I can count frames and remember hitboxes, the rebalancing did not affect my gameplay too much, and certainly not for the worse.

What really excited me about HD remix was that for the first time, I would have the ability to play online against other Street Fighter fans. Sure, I've played in the arcades here in Tucson and back in Las Vegas when I was living there, but that has been the extent of my experience. Believe it or not, there are different Street Fighter "fighting styles" in different regions of the world. For example, a Los Angeles player first introduced me and to the Tucson arcades a way of playing as Guile offensively that was almost invincible (this was before they toned him down in the later games). This changed everything for me as I had long since been a Ryu player, thinking that Guile was only a defensive player.

What I found interesting was that not everybody in the rest of the country knew of this style of Guile playing, even years later when I was at this years Iron Man of Gaming in Dallas. They had a Street Fighter II Turbo console there and I was having quite an easy time as Guile because nobody expected that kind of gameplay. With the ability to play online now, there is no more "regional" style of playing, since you're playing against the whole world. I have been watching many YouTube videos of high ranking players, trying to see how others outside of the Southwest USA are playing, and boy, were my eyes widened. I'm constantly amazed to see the gameplay of folks like Daigo and the other EVO competitors. I know that I would lose to players like that, but at least I wouldn't have to travel to California to do so. With Street Fighter online, it's fun to beat newbies, but it's equally fun losing to pros.

I can't say that the online experience is perfect, however. There are lag issues, especially with those who have slow broadband connections. And there are definitely bugs which lead to disconnects and issues with the HUD. All these issues, I hope, will be fixed by a patch. That's something I'm really looking forward to, because when it works, it works beautifully. It actually amazes me, since Street Fighter has always been about precise timing and complicated controller motions for the special moves and the combos. It bodes well for the upcoming Street Fighter 4 in February.

And finally, we come to the music of the game. When I first heard that they were going to remix the music, I was apprehensive. The Street Fighter soundtrack is probably my second favorite video game soundtrack after Mega Man 2 and it something I could listen to daily without getting tired of it. Remixes are rarely better than the original and I hoped that it would not sound too radically different. I was quite pleased to learn that the remixed soundtrack would be an option for the game and that you could go back to the original arranged soundtrack. In fact, the game has tremendous value in that the non-balanced game remains and you can even turn on those old non-HD sprites if you want! While I prefer the original soundtrack, the remixes are too bad at all, and I'll turn it on if I'm in the mood for it.

That brings me to today's video (finally). Like I said, I could listen to the Street Fighter soundtrack forever and I like to listen to some of the renditions of it on YouTube. There are remixes done on guitar, and some even done on the Mario Paint composer! I never thought there would be a great remix done on the paino, though, and that's what we have here:



I've always thought of the Street Fighter soundtrack as being so universal that anybody would appreciate it (they are World Warriors, after all). I am intensely curious to know whether or not the entire audience knew that this was from a video game... and if they didn't, what was their reaction when they learned that it was.

12/6/2008 - Every Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe Fatality

When they said that the next Mortal Kombat game would be T-Rated, I knew that it would not be a good sign for the series. They had to make it T-Rated because of the inclusion of the DC superheroes. In a bid to outdo Marvel vs. Capcom, all Midway did was to water down their flagship fighting series and to include licensed characters that seem oddly out of place. I suppose as long as the fighting engine is solid, neutered fatalities shouldn't be an issue, but it still seems wrong:



Batman's finishing move being a swarm of bats is just lame. Shang Tsung having to morph into the opponent in order to suck his/her soul? I thought he sucked people's souls so that he could morph into them. They actually had to censor Deathstroke and The Joker's fatalities in the final version of the game as well! I guess a point blank gunshot to the head is more intense than the Jax's machine gun fatality which wasn't censored. Ugh.

12/4/2008 - Windows 7 "Aero Shake" Demo

It seems like Microsoft is trying to put out the next version of Windows as fast as they can. Who can blame them, really? They're putting out these "Mojave" ads that try to trick users of Vista that the operating system is actually good. It's the same thing that happened with Windows ME. It turned out to be such a turkey that even Microsoft would acknowledge it as their ugly stepchild. While Vista isn't ALL bad, it's just not that much of an improvement over Windows XP, which has turned out to be pretty solid.

From what I've seen of the next Windows version (called Windows 7), I can probably predict that it won't be as bad as Vista. Although they copied Apple again with the new taskbar complete with big program icons, the "Peek" feature actually does look to be somewhat helpful. The interface won't change much from Windows Vista (in fact, if you didn't know better, you'd think it was Vista), but at least it won't be the jarring change from XP to Vista. There is one feature that I had to laugh at when I saw it demonstrated, though. It's called "Aero Shake", and I'll let it speak for itself:

12/2/2008 - quantum of bonds

I was quite skeptical when Daniel Craig was named as the new James Bond. I was silently rooting for either Hugh Jackman or Julian McMahon for the role. Actually, I would have preferred to see Pierce Brosnan in at least one more outing. He made some pretty good Bond movies and I didn't want to see him go out on the lame Die Another Day. But when they said that they were rebooting the franchise, that meant that they had to choose a new actor.

The only other movie I saw Daniel Craig in was the first Tomb Raider movie and I was not impressed (ironically, he had to fake an American accent for his role while Angelina Jolie faked a British accent). Lots of other bond fans weren't pleased either as "Craig is not Bond" websites started showing up. I didn't even watch Casino Royale in the theaters and it took me a while to watch it on DVD. While I still prefer Brosnan as Bond, I can see why the producers chose Craig. In an era where Jack Bauer of 24 could eat James Bond for breakfast, a new Bond has to be every bit as rough around the edges as Jack Bauer is, but still be a natural in a tuxedo. Craig does fit the bill, and Casino Royale was a pretty good movie, but I can't say that it was a classic Bond movie.

I'll tell you what I do want to see, though. I'd like to see the two Bonds duke it out in some way, maybe in another movie or venue. It doesn't seem like that would ever happen, though. In fact, I don't think there's ever been a movie with two Bond actors in it. Even the GoldenEye Nintendo 64 game was supposed to include the old Bonds as playable characters in the multiplayer, but the feature was scrapped before release. Is there some law of nature that prevents two Bond actors to appear on the screen at once? I guess this video breaks that law then: