3/31/2009 - LittleBig Contra: GAF collab preview

If you have a game like Little Big Planet that has a level designer, you can pretty much expect levels to be designed like those from video games of other franchises. There are plenty of levels that mimic those of the Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man games for example. But it wasn't until the Metal Gear expansion pack that gave Sackboy the ability to shoot a gun (albeit a paintball gun). This paved the way for what is perhaps one of the coolest collaborations of the gaming community ever. Yes, that would be the recreation of the original Contra game:



Each level of the game was handled by a different designer or team of designers. What amazes me is how they recreated the pseudo-3D parts of the game where you're going down the corridor. Stuff like this really shows the creativeness of the gaming community.

3/25/2009 - Giant Multi-Touch Air Hockey

Something like this might be fine for the iPhone, but turning a 60-inch plasma or LCD TV into a giant touchscreen to play air hockey is simply a waste of money. How can you watch a video like this and still say that the economy is bad?

3/19/2009 - A woman missed her flight at the boarding gate HKIA

Wow, over 5 million people watched this next video. And I'm sure most of them have the same impression: that the woman has lost her mind. Well, being Chinese, I have a somewhat unique perspective of this. The woman may be overreacting to a somewhat trivial matter of missing a flight, but her reaction is pretty characteristic of that of a middle-aged Asian woman. Trust me, I've seen this kind of behavior happen when rice is overcooked. I don't know what it is about Asian adults that take things so seriously. I mean, it's like that "parody" video of an Asian mom who berates her son for getting a B+ (and I put parody in quotation marks because I think it holds more truth than fiction). Yeah, and you thought you had crazy parents.

3/15/2009 - Some people are not meant to do game reviews.

The title says it all:



It's rare to see a review of a review, but in this case, it's definitely needed. For those who don't know the Street Fighter franchise, the mistakes the reviewer makes probably seem trivial. But for those like myself who are Street Fighter fanatics, the review is atrocious. I don't have complete hate for the first Street Fighter movie, but I agree that it should NEVER be referenced in a Street Fighter game review... unless it's a bad Street Fighter game.

3/14/2009 - GoldenEye: Source

Capcom is really hitting the nail on the head with their remakes of classic games, like Street Fighter and Bionic Commando. In one case, they've completely hand redrawn sprites frame by frame to bump them up to HD quality. And in the other, 3-D models were used to replace the 8-bit sprites. In both cases, however, the classic gameplay was intact, and that's all that really matters to retro gamers like myself. But Capcom also added an extra element that transcended the original gaming platform: online play. And of course, that's so essential now that any game without it is dismissed as being incomplete.

When you think about it, though, there are so many games out there that could benefit from the same kind of upgrades Capcom instilled in their classic franchises. There is one remake that nearly every gamer would love to see, though: GoldenEye of the Nintendo 64. If Nintendo had any sense, they would just plow through all the legal red tape that is preventing the remake, because that would undoubtedly be the game that would have disaffected gamers turning on their Wiis again.

Of course, this has not been lost on the many homebrew game developers and modders out there. The potential threat of lawsuits by Nintendo and Rare are no deterrent to these folks, and that alone should tell you how great an online high-resolution remake of GoldenEye would be. They've presented a trailer of their ongoing work, and it almost brought a tear to this retro gamer's eye:

3/12/2009 - Bill Gates/mosquitoes @ TED

It's allergy season and I see my friends and co-workers fall victim to it one after the other. I find myself fortunate enough to only have a couple of allergies. The first being a certain type of berry (which one in particular, I don't know... it was a mixed berry pie). And the second allergy I have is of mosquito bites. The bite area will swell up like a balloon and turn purple the next day. Yeah, it's not very pretty. And they itch like hell, too. One time I had three mosquito bites on one hand. It looked like a baby's hand the next day... a purple baby's hand. If I didn't keep it elevated above my heart, it would have probably exploded.

Ever since, I have developed a fear of mosquitoes. When one flies into my house, I drop anything I'm doing and go on the hunt until it is dead. So when I saw this video, it confirmed to me that Bill Gates is an evil man:

3/10/2009 - D-Pad Hero

Except for the "controller" and the CD-quality music, there's nothing about Guitar Hero's gameplay that prevents it from being a game that could be played on retro systems like the NES. It's just a rhythm-based game that tests how well you can follow the button presses and strumming directions on the screen. This fact is not lost on modders who can make custom games that can run on NES emulators and potentially on the console itself. And thus the game "D-Pad Hero" was born, and it actually looks hard:



I mean, it seems difficult to me to separate the directional nature of the left-B button and the right-A button from the directions you have to press on the D-Pad. Even trying to follow the motions in my head is giving me a headache.

3/8/2009 - Spoiled Girl

If you're not from Arizona, I couldn't possibly relay how disappointed I was with the last Superbowl. If it wasn't for that interception before halftime, this world would be a different place. And for those who were watching just for the commercials, there wasn't much entertainment to be had either. The only commercial that stood out to me was this one for Cheeto's:



There's just something about the laid-back evilness of Chester the Cat in this commercial that tickles me. I think he should be the next James Bond villain.

3/7/2009 - Prison Escape Fail

Like Jay Leno, I like hearing stories of stupid criminals. It seems like there are more criminals that are stupid than not. Of course, one could argue that being a criminal is stupid in the first place. Then there are those cases that make you scratch your head and make you wonder what they were thinking. This attempted prison escape is one of those cases:



Yes, they were escaping with handcuffs and tried to go on opposite sides of a light pole. Brilliant. It is such slapstick nonsense that you wouldn't even expect to see that in a Pink Panther movie. Then again, the new Pink Panther movies are pretty bad.

3/5/2009 - Tiny Clip-On TV

There are two possible captions for this video:

1) Lawsuit waiting to happen.
2) Resistance is futile.



Seriously, I'm a TV junkie myself, but this would be taking it too far.

3/3/2009 - Through the Fire and Flames 100%

I'm not sure what happened to Conrad the Great's video of him passing the Guitar Hero 3 song Through the Fire and Flames, but as "Great" as Conrad is, he wasn't perfect with the song. It's hard to imagine, though, that anyone could perform it perfectly. But you know that if anyone could, that they would put it on YouTube. Indeed, the aptly named "GuitarHeroPhenom" has done the unthinkable and conquered the song with a 100% result. And to prove his achievement, he records himself playing so he can present a picture-in-picture performance to the world:

3/1/2009 - CubeCheater iPhone app

I'm constantly amazed by the creativeness of some of these apps for the iPhone. There seems to be no limit in what you can do with a handheld computer with a built-in camera and an internet connection. I'm pretty sure programs existed that let you solve a Rubik's Cube before, but I'm sure they were tedious to use since you would have to enter in the colors on each face of the cube manually. That's where the iPhone's camera comes in:



I never understood the method in solving a Rubik's Cube. But with this app, I would never have to. :)