Confessions of a YouTube Addict

5/30/2009 - Rap Chop (500th post)

2009-05-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

Holy crap! I can't believe this is my 500th post! And what better way to celebrate than with one of the coolest videos on YouTube? One that takes one of my favorite infomercials and edits it into a music video! A software program called Auto-Tune was used to control the pitch of Vince's voice so that it appears he's actually harmonizing with the background tunes. I'm sure it's not as automatic as it sounds, but with a lot of editing, the end result really is a full music video:

I think that if this version of the infomercial hit the air, even more people would by the Slap Chop.

5/28/2009 - Snakes on a Plane - The TV Edit - The famous line

2009-05-28T22:22:00.000-07:00

It's weird to me how stuff on TV gets more and more violent (or they show more blood and guts in the medical shows), and more and more racy, and yet when it comes to language, profanity is still a no-no. Kiefer Sutherland himself says that when Jack Bauer says "Dammit", he's really saying it place of an expletive. So what happens when a movie's most famous quote has to pass the television censors? Well, here's the original quote in question, from the movie Snake's on a Plane:

Samuel L. Jackson even said that they didn't fight the R rating mainly to keep that quote in. Now that's standing for artistic principle! I just wonder what he thinks of how the TV edit butchered the line:

5/26/2009 - We Didn't Start the Flame War

2009-05-26T21:48:00.000-07:00

This video really encapsulates the state of the Internet today in it's "Web 2.0" state where everybody can many any comment on anything, good or bad. As you can imagine, message boards and comment sections are perhaps the least civilized stomping grounds in today's society:

5/23/2009 - Real-life Mega Man

2009-05-23T09:06:00.001-07:00

The guys at Mega 64 are great, but I don't think they could top this cosplayer from Japan dressed as none other than Mega Man. I think he truly understands the character and how he would behave in our world. Free from Dr. Light and missing his friends Rush and Roll, Mega Man would have a difficult time adjusting to a life devoid of enemies and boss fights. It seems like only E-Tanks can drown his sorrows:

5/21/2009 - Jack in the Box - Mini Sirloin Burgers

2009-05-21T23:36:00.000-07:00

I like the White Castle burgers occasionally, but I don't really get the mini-burger phenomenon. I like my burgers big... with multiple beef patties and grease oozing from every pore. But these days, fast food places seem to be downsizing with items like snack wraps and mini burgers. One would think that the restaurant cooks would protest such a trend since it would probably mean more work to them (flipping three patties at a time instead of one).

While I generally don't care for the concept of mini burgers, I really like the Jack in the Box commercial for their version:

Everything from the song, to the midgets (or should i say dwarfs?), to the mini cattle is hilarious. I especially like the expression on the gopher's face.

5/19/2009 - Super Mario Kart : Death Race Double Dash

2009-05-19T22:22:00.000-07:00

It seems like making a good video game movie is an impossible task. The last one I saw, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, was so bad that I think there should no longer be live-action movies based on video games. The only video game movies that I thought were decent were DOA and Mortal Kombat. They do have the greatest acting or plots, but at least they were fun and didn't take themselves too seriously. Trust me, I'd love to see a good Legend of Zelda movie, or a good Metroid movie. But I just don't think it's ever going to happen.

I can kind of see what studio execs are thinking with video game movies though. They see an audience with a pre-established brand, and that audience paid up to $60 for a game with that brand, much more than the price of a movie ticket. If they could make a quick movie of that video game, even if a sixth of those who bought the game watched the movie, they would be making the same amount as that video game publisher. The more successful the game, the more successful the movie should be, right? Wrong.

I mean it's surprising to me that there haven't been movies of some of Nintendo's biggest franchises like Zelda and Metroid. What would really be daring would be to make a movie out of Super Mario Kart. I mean, it's a huge seller for Nintendo, right? And here's what it could look like:

5/16/2009 - Rose Ball

2009-05-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

It's rare in a fighting game to have a character that has a fireball move and and move that reflects fireballs. But when you do have a character like that, you can play a mirror match and have a mini-game reminiscent of Pong where you reflect a fireball back and forth until one player gets hit. In Street Fighter, Rose has both a fireball and a reflect move, so this game is naturally called "Rose Ball":

5/12/2009 - Engadget's wild ride in the P.U.M.A.

2009-05-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

I'm a fan of the compact concept cars. In fact, I bought my New Beetle not too long after when they first came out in 1998. I was actually put on the wait list for six months before it arrived. I was also really interested in the Smart Car that was used in those Nintendo Wii commercials. I think the Beetle and a Smart Car would both fit under my carport. However, after witnessing the frightening car crash tests of the Smart Car, I've had second thoughts. Even though I think these cars are great, I think the concept has gone too far with the P.U.M.A.:

It actually looks like a two-person Segway. I don't think anyone would dare ride that on a real road.

5/10/2009 - Opera Face Gestures

2009-05-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

This was originally an April Fools joke by Opera, the alternative browser to IE and Firefox. In actuality, however, something like this could be quite useful, especially to the handicapped. Of course, the user will still look somewhat ridiculous...

5/7/2009 - Christian Bale Freak Out

2009-05-07T21:35:00.000-07:00

In light of today's news about the arrest of Kiefer Sutherland for his alleged head-butt of a fashion designer, I wanted to give my take on another celebrity freak out: the now infamous audio of Christian Bale yelling at the director of photography on the set of Terminator: Salvation. These two incidents have much in common with each other in that the two actors are known to play badasses on the screen and are in some way bringing their on-screen personas to real life. Headbutting an annoying fashion designer is something Jack Bauer would really do (if you caught him in a good mood). Kiefer should really be cheered instead of being put in handcuffs.

As for Christian Bale... well, he IS Batman, after all. He's somebody who is badass enough to play both the Dark Knight AND John Connor, the savior of mankind against the Terminators. I haven't seen American Psycho, but I've heard that character makes Bruce Wayne look tame. As you can imagine, he is not somebody to be messed with. So when the DP was walking into Christian's shot, I can't say that he deserved to be berated with excessive profanity, but he should have known what was coming. When you hear the audio, it's actually kind of scary to hear, especially when you can imagine Christian at his most disturbed state.

What totally turns the perception of the audio, however, is some video of a fan recreation of the event. The audio is intact, and even the context may be the same, but for some reason, what may have been scary before is hilarious now:

5/5/2009 - Laptop Hunters

2009-05-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

There is much we can derive from those new "I'm a PC" ads from Microsoft where "laptop hunters" go out to do comparison shopping for laptops that are $1000. These ads are probably the most direct attack on Apple and relies on just one argument: price. Of course in this economy, that aspect is nothing to sneeze at. Yet, nobody ever talks about the difference in the Total Cost of Ownership between a typical PC and Mac laptop. Sure, the initial price of a PC laptop may be less, but that doesn't take into account all the antivirus and antimalware applications you have to buy just to keep the PC healthy. Those programs have yearly subscription fees, which can add up over time. With all that added bloatware on top of a resource intensive operating system, you're going to need more memory as well, just to keep things humming. There's also the notion that you get what you pay for. I'm sure Microsoft has some kind of gag order on the release of all those customer satisfaction surveys.

And you have to love the controversy that surrounded this particular commercial:

It turns out that "Lauren" is not a real "laptop hunter" after all. She's an actress hired by Microsoft's ad people to attempt to relate to the average consumer. Yes, Lauren, you're not cool enough to be a Mac person.

5/2/2009 - SF4 Simultaneous Supers/Ultras

2009-05-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

Probably what makes fighting games somewhat difficult to develop for balance must be move priority. You have dozens of different fighters and dozens of regular and special moves each fighter, and a one-one-one fighting structure where all those conflicting matchups come into play. And I'm not just talking about a certain character fighting another character. I'm including the possibilities involved when certain fighting moves are matched up against others. That's where move priority takes into account. In

Street Fighter, for example, Guile's flash kick beats Ryu's hurricane kick, but the hurricane kick goes through Guile's sonic boom. And that's just an example of two characters' special moves against each other. There are also the normal moves to consider. Some moves have higher priority than others, and many moves will just trade damage with each other. Then there are the super or ultra moves found in the latest Street Fighter games. The programmers must have debates and all-out fights when it comes to determining move priority!

As for the mirror matches, you'd think that all the moves would just cancel each other. For the most part, they do and that's why most mirror matches are a snore to watch. On the other hand, seeing what happens when the supers and ultra moves play out simultaneously during mirror matches is pretty awesome:

4/30/2009 - Miniatur Wunderland

2009-04-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

I never understood the appeal of model railroads, but then again, I grew up in the age of video games. Nonetheless, I can appreciate what was accomplished here. The amount of work that was required to build this model railroad must have been massive. My favorite touch: a miniature crime scene with a dead body.

4/28/2009 - Super Mario Bros. 1 Drag & Drop

2009-04-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

I will say this for the Wii: some of the titles have been pretty innovative in their approach to using limited technology and a unique control scheme. I mentioned Super Paper Mario last time for its 2.5-D gameplay. Super Mario Galaxy has a rather unique 2-player mode, or I should say 1.5-player mode since the 2nd player doesn't control a character like Mario or even Luigi. Instead, he or she uses the Wiimote to collect and use star bits to help out the first player. It's not exactly hardcore competitive or even cooperative gameplay, but it is an accessible feature that can be fun for non-gamers or newbie gamers.

This next mod may have taken some inspiration from that feature in Super Mario Galaxy. It's actually a pretty cool concept that surprisingly hasn't made it into an actual game. Imagine being able to have a second player have the ability to manipulate live gameplay by having an all-powerful drag-and-drop cursor. I guess it's similar to the Little Big Planet level designer, but I predict that it will make it into some game as part of its main gameplay.

4/25/2009 - Mega Man 2.5D

2009-04-25T10:35:00.000-07:00

One of the neatest concept games for the Wii was Super Paper Mario. Even though Super Mario 64 and Mario Galaxy perfected 3-D platforming, Mario's roots were in 2-D sidescrolling. It would be hard to come out with a game these days that was strictly 2-D sidescrolling and have it not be considered outdated or merely a nostalgia game. For example, Mega Man 9 was a wildly successful game, but it was geared almost exclusively to nostalgic gamers. Super Paper Mario, on the other hand, added the third dimension to it's 2-D gameplay in a very clever way. It merely allowed you to switch your perspective to the back of Mario so that you could see what was previously behind or in front of him as now being to the left and right of him. It's hard to describe with words, but if you watch any gameplay video of it, you'd understand.

While not all classic 2-D sidescrollers could benefit from such an enhancement, I think the makeover would be ideal for the Mega Man franchise. As shown by Mega Man 9, the Blue Bomber belongs in the 8-bit world. But for future installments, I would hope that Capcom could think a little out of the box and adapt some of the Super Paper Mario innovations. A game modder has done just that with a Mega Man 2 stage and it looks absolutely terrific:

4/23/2009 - THE LEGEND of Hamster on a piano and pop corn

2009-04-23T21:56:00.000-07:00

So let's get this straight... if you can videotape a hamster being extremely lazy, you can get over 5 million views on YouTube. I'm sure that if I was to videotape myself being that lazy, I'd be lucky to get 100 views. It's just not fair:

4/18/2009 - Mr. T on the Flavorwave Oven Infomercial

2009-04-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

You know me to be an infomercial junkie, and I've probably seen them all. I don't know how this one escaped me. I've seen some infomercials of the Flavorwave Oven before, including it's competition, the Nu-Wave oven. This one is new to me though. It has the special privilege of including none other than Mr. T himself. Now, you might think that it would be an unbeatable combination. After all, George Foreman touted his Foreman Grill and made it into an overnight success. Mr. T was also known to be a (fictional) bruiser in the 80's, and he's much more flamboyant than George Foreman ever was. For some reason, however, it just doesn't work:

Maybe it's just me, but I just can't see Mr. T dressed in khaki's.

4/15/2009 - Man Survives After Getting Hit by Truck & Train

2009-04-15T21:41:00.000-07:00

Being a geek, my first thought after watching this video was how Mr. Glass engineered this accident:

Yes, that was an "Unbreakable" reference.

4/13/2009 - R2D2 in Episode 1

2009-04-13T22:27:00.000-07:00

I'm sure there are those out there who have watched the Star Wars movies so many times that they could swear they know what R2D2 is saying. They might think they know, and they might even have some confirmation from George Lucas himself. But I'd like to think that this series of videos has the true subtitled translation of R2D2. Caution... vulgarities lie ahead:

4/11/2009 - Mugen - The Super Mario Bros. vs. RonaldMcDonald

2009-04-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

Because of Super Smash Bros., it's not unusual anymore to see Mario and Luigi in a fighting game. But Ronald McDonald? Yeah, that's pretty strange:

Boy, these MUGEN programmers can be really strange. I mean, I don't know where anybody would even get the idea to put Ronald in a fighting, much less giving him a Japanese voice... at least I think it's Japanese. And you have to love Grimace and the Hamburglar surrounding Ronald's fallen body when he's defeated. Sometimes I think the MUGEN people put the strangest characters they can just to make a YouTube video out of it and get more viewers. And you know what? It works.

4/7/2009 - Wii Breakfast

2009-04-07T22:04:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure it's fair to say that the Nintendo has become the laughingstock of the hardcore gaming community, but since the release of Wii Music, it's hard to find any first-party properties Nintendo is rolling out specifically geared to the hardcore gamers. Punch Out is probably the only game I'd look forward to, but I'm a retro gamer. Sega's Mad World looks to be a decent effort, but such games on the Wii are few and far between. Go to any Gamestop and just look at the Wii section of games. I guarantee you'll find a dozen titles that will make you go "What the f---?" With such a sad state of gaming on the Wii, it makes videos like this seem plausible:

4/5/2009 - MacHeist 3

2009-04-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

With only two days left for this offer, I wanted to get the news out about MacHeist 3, the software bundle that aggregates hundreds of dollars worth of Macintosh applications for only $39. Too good to be true? Fear not, because this is actually an opportunity for software vendors to get their brand noticed in the Mac community, and it's a donation of sorts since 25% of the sales go to charity! That's right, get a bunch of quality apps for a rock-bottom price and donate to charity... how can you lose? Here was the unveiling of MacHeist 3 a couple of weeks ago:

Would you ever see this kind of promotion for Windows software? I don't think so.

4/2/2009 - Terminator 2 3D

2009-04-02T21:22:00.000-07:00

There are two episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles left this season, and if rumors are true, it may be the last we see of the series. It would be sad to see another great science fiction series fall prey to low ratings. I knew the show could never reach the level in terms of special effects and action that the movies did, but it certainly had great drama and it really paid great homage to the movies. Even for someone like me who watched Terminator 2 seven times in the theater, the show had to remind me how Sarah got the scar on her shoulder.

Anyway, even if the show does get canceled, that does not mean the end of the Terminator. Terminator: Salvation hits the theaters in May and it's looking awesome, especially with the casting of Christian (Batman) Bale in the lead role of John Connor. If it somehow becomes one of the summer's blockbuster hits, I would dare say that it might give the Fox or Warner execs second thoughts about the TV series. At the very least, the sequel will be greenlit without hesitation.

It's ironic to me how Terminator "purists" will say that the Terminator storyline should have ended with Terminator 2 since that was the last feature film to be directed by creator James Cameron and that it the ending seemed made it look like it was the end of Skynet. What they forget is that the storyline did continue in the Terminator 2 3D experience for the Universal Studios theme park, and that it was indeed directed by James Cameron. It had a lot of the great elements of Terminator 2, but toned down to PG audiences and enhanced with 3D effects. The experience can't be adequately shown on YouTube, but here's the feature footage minus the 3D:

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

2009-03-31T21:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-19T21:53:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-15T11:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-14T09:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-10T22:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-08T13:49:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-07T10:10:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-05T20:45:00.000-08:00

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%

2009-03-03T20:41:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-01T09:43:00.000-08:00

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. :)

2/28/2009 - Steve Jobs demos Apple Macintosh, 1984

2009-02-28T08:59:00.000-08:00

It's really too bad that Steve Jobs has had to take leave from running Apple day-to-day because of his mysterious illness. Everybody hopes he'll make his scheduled comeback this summer (maybe except Steve Ballmer). The innovation of the original Macintosh cannot be understated. The computer you're reading this blog on is not much different in terms of the GUI from the 1984 Mac. It's hard to imagine what kind of a seismic wave was produced when the Mac was introduced, but it was probably quite substantial. What everybody was working on before were computers with ugly screens and text-based input. Remember how big the hype was when the iPhone was introduced? I would argue that the iPhone wasn't as much of a revolutionary product than the Mac was. After all, there were smartphones with GUIs prior to the iPhone. The Mac was really something different. You may have to be over 40 to appreciate this video introduction of the Mac, or you may just have to be a computer enthusiast:

2/26/2009 - Vince with Slap Chop

2009-02-26T20:19:00.000-08:00

I'm an infomercial addict and it's been a while since I've seen a really good one. I think the last good one I've seen until recently was the Ronco knives. Even though they were a direct copy of the Ginzu knives, Ron Popeil can still sell them as if they were his own product. Ever since that last infomercial by Ron, all we have seen are "mini-infomercials" (ones that don't go for a whole half hour) that mostly feature Billy Mays, a loud-mouth third-rate salesman in my opinion.

Then came Vince with the ShamWow. Even though it's still a mini-infomercial, and absorbent shammies aren't new, Vince is what makes it a great infomercial. He speaks with such speed, he sounds like an auctioneer. And it sounds like he isn't going from a script: a lot of it sounds ad-libbed. Take for example, "It's made in Germany... you know the Germans make good stuff." I also love his little dig at Ron Popeil when he says near the end "we can't do this all day". Ron is famous for giving an initially large price for the product only to lower the price five or six times to its final cost.

It was Vince's first infomercial and already he seemed like a natural. His instant popularity would seen lead to selling another product: the Slap Chop. He has the same delivery style and the same unnecessary headset microphone. This product is also nothing new, but the infomercial is already one of my favorites:

Reasons why I love this infomercial:

1) "I love pizza too, but once in a while get the veggies in."
2) "Stop having a boring tuna, stop having a boring life."
3) The sparkle effects.
4) The perfect backwards toss into the sink.
5) "Life's hard as it is, you don't want to cry anymore."
6) The unnecessary arrow pointing to the onion skin.
7) "Fettuccine, linguine, martini, bikini."
8) The "Beware of imitators" disclaimer when the Slap Chop itself is an imitator.

and of course

9) "You're gonna love my nuts."

2/24/2009 - Diane Sawyer Drunk

2009-02-24T20:47:00.000-08:00

Alcohol is another thing that has little logical appeal for me. Yes, I see it as some kind of relaxant for social inhibitions, and bars that serve alcohol are places of adult congregation, but for something that has so many negative consequences for health and for safety, it's a phenomenon that can only be explained by man's imperfections. Plus, I just think it tastes bad.

Being drunk, however, is a sensation that under controlled conditions I wouldn't mind experiencing. And when I say "under controlled conditions", that means no video cameras. Otherwise I'd look like this clearly toasted Diane Sawyer:

2/17/2009 - Electronic Cigarettes

2009-02-17T20:06:00.000-08:00

I don't get the appeal of cigarettes. I think my grandfather let me take a puff once and I nearly puked. If nicotine is the drug that is the addictive agent, what makes smoking a cigarette the ideal delivery method for the drug? Gums and patches just don't do the job for some people and so they fall back to the carcinogenic smoking. But like everything else, there may be an electronic solution. There is now something called "electronic cigarettes" or e-Cigarettes, which look like the real thing and you can actually "smoke" the cigarette that releases a nicotine-laced vapor that you inhale to get your fix. They have these in Europe apparently and you are allowed to use them in the workplace! Will it take off as a true smoking alternative? I don't know, but I think it's a very creative solution. Here's video of e-Cigarettes in action:

2/5/2009 - EVO moment 2k7

2009-02-05T20:57:00.000-08:00

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 may not be the most balanced fighting game out there, but it may be the most fun fighting game, with only the Super Smash Bros. series being a possible exception. I mean, I'm a Marvel fan and a Capcom fan, so this game was tailor-made for someone like me. Imagine playing with characters like the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Wolverine against Ryu, Chun-Li, and Guile... all with that Capcom polish. To top it all off, you create tag-teams of three with 56 characters to choose from!

With so many characters and so many possibilities of team match-ups, I found it hard to believe that Marvel vs. Capcom 2 could be used in competition, especially for the formal Evolution tournament. Well, I'm glad they included it because it gave us one of the best comebacks put on tape that wasn't performed by Daigo. In fact, it's none other than Justin Wong, who you may know from the Evo Moment #37 video as being the victim of the greatest clutch performance by Daigo. Justin could have been known solely for that video if it wasn't for this one:

Being down 2 characters in a 3 on 3 match must seem like a hopeless situation... but as the video says, NEVER GIVE UP.

2/3/2009 - Youtube Street Fighter

2009-02-03T20:40:00.000-08:00

YouTube has grown so much after it was taken over by Google. Not just in terms of viewers, members, and storage capacity, but in technology as well. YouTube can handle widescreen video now, HD video, and embeddable annotations. The last feature allows you to embed comments within the video as speech bubbles and even hyperlinks pointing you to a website or even another video. The most creative use of that feature would have to be the interactive Street Fighter game. Yes, you can play Street Fighter within a YouTube video:

It's like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, but with Street Fighter action figures in a stop motion video. Seriously, this must have taken ages to create. You can see that each successive video in the series is just a branch in the tree hierarchy with all the possible moves planned out. I'm not sure if embedding this will allow you to play the game, so here is the direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPQ1XrllZmA

2/1/2009 - Zelda Ocarina of Time on Halo Custom Edition

2009-02-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

Even though they are fun and can be very well done, I feel that first-person shooters are overdone in today's gaming landscape. It's even worse than it was in the 90's when fighting games were overdone. Almost every other game on the XBox 360 is an FPS, and that's probably not an exaggeration! I suppose what makes them popular now is because they lend themselves so well to online play. Gamers who are hungry for violence let out their frustrations by "killing" others live on the internet. I keep waiting for the next big genre to break through, but I fear that the FPS will stay for quite some time. It's gotten so bad that people are converting games of other genres into first-person shooters. You wouldn't think that the Nintendo 64 classic The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time could be modded into an FPS, but if there's a will, there's a way:

1/31/2009 - UStream on iPhone/iPod Touch

2009-01-31T09:06:00.000-08:00

The Truman Show is one of my favorite movies and is probably Jim Carrey's best acting performance (I still love him as Ace Ventura more, though). The "Show" itself is actually a live uninterrupted broadcast of Truman Burbank (Carrey) and his life as it happens. It's a fascinating concept and the movie came out just as the reality-TV show craze started.

I bet the creators of The Truman Show didn't anticipate, however, that in just a few short years websites like UStream and Justin.tv would allow anybody with a webcam and an internet connection to broadcast their lives voluntarily. I guess these websites take advantage of the fact that there are a lot of voyeurs online.

Plus, it's just a great demonstration of technology. Just take YouTube, make it live, and fulfill your dreams of becoming an internet celebrity. I remember when portable TV's were a luxury item 15 years ago. Now with internet connected portable devices like cell phones, watching internet streams on the go will soon be a reality:

1/29/2009 - Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it)

2009-01-29T20:39:00.001-08:00

I never watch the entire Star Wars (original) Trilogy until it was re-released in theaters in 1997. Until then, I never "got" why it was so popular. I had always believed it to be a showcase of special effects and puppetry. Although it's more fantasy than science fiction, the original trilogy was imaginative and it spurred imagination at the same time. It set itself up as a timeless mythology with archetypal characters. Above all that, it was just fun. It's ironic then, that the prequel trilogy would largely devolve into a mere showcase of special effects and (computer) puppetry.

But if you were to ask me before 1997 what the original Star Wars trilogy was about, I'd probably have the same kind of explanation as in this video:

1/27/2009 - Watch boiling water turn to snow!

2009-01-27T20:55:00.000-08:00

I'm going to Washington, D.C. in a couple of weeks and my only trepidation about the trip is of the potential of some very cold weather. Living in the Southwest USA for most of my life, I have yet to experience truly sub-freezing temperatures. I mean, it snows in Tucson once every two or three years, and when it does, it makes the top of the news. I see tomorrow it will be 40 degrees Fahrenheit there and I would actually accept that for my trip. But I fear that the law of averages will play into the early February time period and below 30 degree temperatures will be awaiting me. If that's the case, I might try some experiments with freezing water or licking a metal pole or something. Watching this next video inspires me:

1/25/2009 - Legend of Zelda medley - A Capella Voices and Violin

2009-01-25T08:43:00.000-08:00

This is one of the only YouTube videos where I would recommend watching with the browser window minimized. It's music from the Legend of Zelda series sung in A Capella with violin by one person. While the artist is undeniably talented, and the music is some of the greatest in videogaming, the performance looks... I don't know... it just looks strange when you have four unblinking singers stare at you for the entire performance:

1/24/2009 - Palm Pre and webOS CES DEMO

2009-01-24T09:38:00.000-08:00

So the biggest product at the Consumer Electronics Show this year in terms of buzz was the Palm Pre (yes, that's the name). It's yet another touch screen smart phone, but this one actually has a chance to compete with the iPhone in terms of features and interface. iPhone users have been clamoring for features like a physical keyboard, multitasking, and copy/paste, and the Palm Pre actually delivers those features out of the box. And unlike recent smartphones like the Blackberry Storm, the interface is smooth and responsive, even when handling multiple applications at once.

Even though I think Steve Jobs' introduction of the iPhone is the best tech demo ever, the product should speak for itself, and that's the case with this introduction of the Palm Pre. The presenter is not a showman like Jobs, but that's not necessary when the product is so slick. It's almost as if Palm expected everybody to be 100% familiar with the iPhone interface, and they wanted to show how the Pre is different or better. I used to have a Palm PDA and I'm glad to see that they are back as a player in the consumer electronics industry.

1/22/2009 - How to Piss off a Geek

2009-01-22T21:12:00.000-08:00

Yes, there's nothing more annoying to a geek than talking to someone who thinks they know tech stuff, but really don't. What else annoys us? Being told to restrict our bandwidth usage. Put both elements into a recorded phone message, and you have one pissed-off geek:

Oh, and his last name is pronounced pi-ri-loh.

1/20/2009 - Theremin Hero

2009-01-20T20:56:00.000-08:00

Rock Band and Guitar Hero World Tour have the element of karaoke in it where you can sing along to the song and be judged on your timing and pitch. So, is it possible to cheat in the vocal gameplay? I guess if you were to play the recorded song back to the microphone, you could. But what's the fun in that? Take an instrument that produces a human-like voice sound like the theremin, pipe that to the microphone and you get "Theremin Hero":

1/18/2009 - ZY2K (2 videos)

2009-01-18T08:25:00.000-08:00

Ah, Microsoft... It seems like every one of your products has some kind of flaw that inspires ridicule or scorn. Red rings of death on the XBox, anyone? How about the system requirements of Vista? Microsoft's Zune may not be competitive with Apple's iPod, but it can be said that it is more feature complete than the iPod (if you discount the iPod Touch, of course). Its style might be lacking, but it wasn't considered to be a "broken" product that made it a non-viable choice of an MP3 player. Well, that was the perception of the Zune before December 31, 2008. That was the date when all 30gb Zunes suddenly stopped working. Why? Because 2008 was a leap year. That's right: the programmers for the Zune's software handled programming for a leap year incorrectly, and the result was dubbed ZY2K:

1/17/2009 - PS3 + xbox 360 = PS360

2009-01-17T10:23:00.000-08:00

As a person in the Playstation 3 camp, I'm not sure how to feel about this video. It's a demonstration of a Playstation 3 console whose guts has been replaced with the core components of an XBox 360. Essentially, it's an XBox 360 with a Playstation 3 faceplate. It's an impressive mod to be sure, it's just that it seems to be a waste of a perfectly good Playstation 3.

1/15/2009 - Thundercats Movie trailer (fanmade)

2009-01-15T20:08:00.000-08:00

The biggest cartoons for boys when I was growing up were the Transformers and G.I. Joe, and it's a wonder they took so long in coming to the big screen. We'll see the Transformers sequel this year, as well as the G.I. Joe movie. Even though the first Transformers movie was not entirely accurate to its source material, it was a fun summer movie with great special effects that didn't take itself too seriously. I hope that they use the same kind of approach to G.I. Joe, because looking back on the cartoon, it's clear that it was more of a vehicle to sell action figures.

Another movie that I would like to see made is one for the Thundercats. Even though it ripped off Star Wars in a lot of ways, it was a very cool cartoon for the tweens and it was a little more mature than G.I. Joe and Tranformers. I still remember being scared by Mum-Ra, being sad at the death of Jaga (in the very first episode!), and the excitement of the trials of Lion-O. This next video would indicate that I'm not the only fan of the series who wants to see it as a movie. It is a fan-made movie trailer that uses footage of various movies that have been Photoshopped FRAME-BY-FRAME!

While it is quite impressive, I have to disagree with the casting of Brad Pitt as Lion-O. My pick would be Tom Welling of Smallville.

1/13/2009 - Gaming Expert

2009-01-13T21:21:00.000-08:00

Forget about being smarter than a fifth grader, try your gaming knowledge against this ONE YEAR OLD GIRL:

Seriously, if your heart doesn't melt from hearing her recite what Pikachu says, you're not human. There is a little debate going on as to if this is healthy learning for the child, but I would say that if this makes learning fun, then roll with it.

1/11/2008 - More Mega Man Madness (2 videos)

2009-01-11T09:31:00.000-08:00

I'm sure you've seen some kung-fu movies and thought, "Why can't all the bad guys just gang up on the hero at once?" Well, if that happened, that would probably be a very short movie. The same kind of logic can apply to video games. You go through the various levels and encounter some kind of boss character at the end of each level. It's a staple, in fact, for all the Mega Man games. In Mega Man games, however, you do encounter them all again right before Dr. Wily himself. But you still only face them one at a time. Certainly the NES couldn't handle all the boss characters on one screen, but no such limitations apply to a hacked ROM:

Then of course there's Met, sometimes called Hard Hat for a very obvious reason. He is perhaps the most annoying Mega Man enemy and has been part of the series since the first game. Met is only vulnerable when he peeks out of the hard hat, only at that time he fires a spread shot at you. If you don't time your shot right, he just goes back to hiding under the hard hat. Of all the boss weapons in the Mega Man games, what is most effective in dealing with Met? This video attempts to find out:

1/10/2008 - Cruel Summer (2 videos)

2009-01-10T10:05:00.001-08:00

I've been complaining how MTV and VH1 doesn't show music videos anymore, but I think I have an explanation as to why they aren't. I think that musical artists now are reluctant to do music videos even as promotional material for their albums (which was the primary reason for them in the first place). Why are they so reluctant now? Well, just watch this video:

Oh man, that is so incredibly retro... and not in a good way. The 80's where definitely a goofy time and it shows in that music video. After seeing something like that, I can understand why some artists would not want to do music videos for fear of looking stupid in the future. I mean, "Cruel Summer" is a great song and it's one of my favorites, but that video is breathtakingly bad. Ace of Base did a remix of the song only 10 years ago and even their video seems dated:

Still, I would prefer watching these music videos over the crap they're showing on MTV nowadays.

1/8/2008 - Astronaut demos drinking coffee in space

2009-01-08T21:30:00.000-08:00

Being a science geek as a kid, I always thought that being an astronaut would be a dream job for me. But as I got older, I've been more and more apprehensive about even the idea of being in space. It's like I have some kind of phobia about it or something. Maybe it's the exact opposite of claustrophobia... an extreme form of agoraphobia perhaps. I don't know what it is, but the idea of being stranded out there and being far away from Earth gives me the night sweats.

Still, I would really like to experience weightlessness. I guess it would fulfill the dream of flying, being free of gravity, and just having fun with it. Imagine the "fun" you could have with a cup of water in a weightless environment. What's amazing is that scientists have found a way to make an open container that will work in space where the liquid doesn't fly everywhere:

I'd LOVE to try that with Tang.

1/6/2009 - Mactini

2009-01-06T21:02:00.000-08:00

The last MacWorld keynote (with Apple's participation) was today and a lot of people expected an Apple "netbook" to be announced. Netbooks are the big trend in computing these days. People seem to like their ultraportability despite having underpowered processors. They're meant to be carried anywhere and everywhere, and they cost about half the price of a regular notebook computer. I'm actually skeptical of the longevity of netbooks because their underpowered processors can't handle the HD video that is becoming more prevalent. Still, I think Apple would have been well-served if they did come out with a smaller laptop but one that has a real processor in it. My previous laptop was a 12" PowerBook and I thought it was the perfect mix of portability and power. The smallest laptop Apple has now is 13" and my complaint of it is that it won't fit into those small safes you find in hotel rooms. Ugh.

Well, if Apple ever did make a netbook, I'm afraid it will look something like this:

1/4/2009 - Immersion

2009-01-04T14:45:00.000-08:00

There has been much talk about the link between video gaming and childhood obesity. I'm not going to make a judgment about that except to say that I personally don't have such an issue, despite being a gamer for over 20 years. Genetics may be part of it, but I feel that I actually burn a lot of calories when I'm gaming. Maybe that's because I really get into the games... I take the life and death situations in the game seriously, and that translates into the physiological responses associated with flight or fight situations: heart rate increase, perspiration, etc. In other words, unless it's a boring game, I don't become a zombie when I play... unlike some of the kids in this video:

It's funny how a lot of the kids have an intense, yet sleepy stare when they are playing. It's as if they've been pulling an all-nighter on the game... which wouldn't surprise me.

1/3/2009 - The Price is Right, Showcase Showdown PERFECT BID!

2009-01-03T08:53:00.000-08:00

Have you ever watched the movie "Rain Man"? You know, the one with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, where Dustin Hoffman plays the title character who is an autistic savant that can barely function in society, but has extraordinary recall abilities that allow him to count cards to win at blackjack and even count toothpicks. Well, I think this Price is Right clip features a real life Rain Man:

What's extraordinary is how close Terry's competitor was as well in her bid. But what will blow your mind is what you didn't see: that Terry had another perfect bid on the opening item that led to him being in the Showcase Showdown! Unless he cheated, he should go down in the Price is Right as their greatest contestant.

1/1/2009 - The Art of the Quincy

2009-01-01T10:11:00.000-08:00

So Playstation Home is finally out and I must say that it's mostly useless. Trying to copy the success of Second Life, PS Home aims to provide a virtual environment where gamers can congregate in the form of avatars. The problem is that there's really not much to do in the virtual environments that Sony provides. The videos take forever to load, the minigames aren't much fun, and they limited the ability to voice chat. It kind of makes me angry to think that Sony has spent all this money to develop Playstation Home instead of using it to improve their network or to cut deals with game developers for exclusive games.

Really, the only thing to see in Home is how the mostly male population flock to the female avatars in the virtual environment. The problem is, there's no way to tell if the avatars truly represent their gender in the real world. Which is why a prank like this is possible:

12/30/2008 - Pizza Delivery Fail

2008-12-30T10:10:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-28T13:51:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-12-27T10:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-25T11:39:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-23T09:53:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-21T10:17:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-20T09:56:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-18T20:50:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-16T08:46:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-12-14T08:36:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-13T09:01:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-12-11T21:10:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-09T08:10:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-12-07T13:47:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-06T10:45:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-04T22:25:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

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:

11/30/2008 - I'm a YouTube Junkie

2008-11-30T20:52:00.000-08:00

Here's a recommendation/request from a fellow YouTube addict who has put the whole obsession into song. Having it be in a country/blues motif may seem like an odd choice, but it works. Actually, my YouTube addiction has somewhat subsided as gaming has taken over my life once again, but I still cruise the Popular Videos section for videos for me to blog about. But I do take suggestions, too! So e-mail or message me through YouTube or this blog.

11/29/2008 - SSF2THDR ROUND 1 Trailer

2008-11-29T09:56:00.000-08:00

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix finally arrived on Tuesday and it was worth the wait! I'll give my review of the game in a later blog post, but I wanted to highlight the trailer Capcom released just prior to the game's release. As we all know, Capcom enlisted the artists at Udon to redraw the sprites and backgrounds of the game in the style of their popular anime-inspired comic book series. That art is on full display in this trailer, and as a fan of the anime movie, I can say that it is gorgeous. But we knew that would be the case with this HD version of SF2. Besides showing off the gameplay in a well-choreographed tournament style presentation, Capcom did something very special in this trailer that would prompt me to write this blog entry about it.

Yes, that would be the music in the trailer. The use of "You're the Best Around" by Joe Esposito is truly inspired. Before I knew of it's actual history from the Karate Kid movie, I heard it in a ScrewAttack Top 10 video that played it as a tribute to their fans who submitted their favorite video gaming music. Whoever made that video is probably a fan of cheesy 80's music and this song in particular is really cheesy, but really good! It wasn't until I found my King of Kong DVD that I learned that they had included the song in the classic gaming documentary as well. In fact, this is where ScrewAttack probably got the idea to feature the song, as it was included in the King of Kong soundtrack. So would this cheesy 80's song be some kind of anthem for classic videogames?

The answer would be cemented in this trailer for SSF2THDR. When I first heard it in the trailer, I said "No Way", and then I laughed with glee. I'm not sure if Capcom themselves knew of the links to videogaming this song has recently had, or if they just wanted to feature a retro song from a movie about martial arts, but everything just works in context. So much so that I had to download the MP3 to this song and am seriously considering renting the Karate Kid movie even though it looks so bad. I just have to say that Capcom "is the best arooouuuund!"

11/27/2008 - SMule: Ocarina for iPhone

2008-11-27T22:25:00.000-08:00

One of the annoying things about owning an iPod Touch instead of an iPhone is that I can't use any of the applications that require a microphone for input. For example, the latest version of the Google application uses voice recognition to decipher what you are searching for but just speaking your query. Also, I would love to try out those apps that recognize any song you're feeding into the microphone. But this app might just trump them all.

The ocarina may not be the most popular wind instrument in the world, but it has gained fame amongst gamers for being the title instrument in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In the game, Link uses the Ocarina to cast spells that range from teleportation to changing the weather to time travel. As the game exploded in popularity, so did the ocarina. I remember them selling ocarinas within the pages of Nintendo Power.

It took some real ingenuity to design an application for the iPhone that mimics the functionality of the ocarina. This can only be done because the microphone can pick up sounds such as blowing, and because the screen is multitouch. Of course if you are going to demonstrate an ocarina application, you must play a Legend of Zelda song:

11/26/2008 - Resident Evil 4 - Playing As Link

2008-11-26T08:57:00.000-08:00

What happens when you combine two of the most successful games on the GameCube (Resident Evil 4 and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess)? You have Link wielding a gun:

11/24/2008 - Gears of War 2 Executions Montage

2008-11-24T20:08:00.000-08:00

After Mortal Kombat, I didn't think that video games could get more violent. Boy was I wrong. With high-definition graphics in all the new games, blood splatter would of course get a lot more realistic than the now cartoony gore found in the 2-D Mortal Kombat games. Perhaps no game is a better example of this than Gears of War and its sequel on the XBox 360. When you have a chainsaw attached to your gun, you know you're in for some alien blood letting -- and lots of it! There are videos of Mortal Kombat fatalities, so there has to be a video of a montage of executions from Gears of War 2:

Watch in high quality for the full effect!

11/22/2008 - Mario vs. Air Man

2008-11-22T00:05:00.000-08:00

Having a working Super Mario Bros./Mega Man 2 mashup is impressive enough, but there are a couple of things that makes this one so impressive. First, the play mechanics did not change from Super Mario Bros. The programmers could have easily just put a Mario sprite in place of Mega Man and people wouldn't think the less of them. But Mario is all about stomping, and unless you have the Fire Flower, that's the only way to kill the enemies; thus making this game particularly difficult compared to a Mega Man game where you have an arm cannon. But what tickles my fancy about this video is that it has an 8-bit rendition of the song from one of my previous Mega Man favorite videos (http://youtubeaddict.blogspot.com/2007/07/7152007.html), the one where Air Man is supposedly impossible to beat. I hope the programmers continue to make more levels, or maybe even other mashups.

11/20/2008 - Spittin' Narcissism

2008-11-20T13:59:00.000-08:00

Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is finally coming out next week and I couldn't be more excited. No, seriously, I have been looking forward to this for over a year now and it was my primary reason for getting a Playstation 3. To celebrate, we have a music video staring Street Fighter's most conceited fighter, Vega (or Balrog in Japan). The sprite animation in this video is simply amazing, and the music isn't half bad either. This should herald a new genre of music: Street Fighter Rap!

11/17/2008 - Take On Me: Literal Video Version

2008-11-17T21:15:00.000-08:00

I think I've made my point before about MTV never showing any music videos so I won't belabor the point again (although they did recently cancel Total Request Live, just to add insult to injury). I'm not sure there is a point to having music videos anyway, except to showcase how telegenic the singer is (which SHOULDN'T matter in terms of musical quality). It's not like the lyrics of the song matches exactly with what is shown in the video. For example, here is the video for the popular 80's song "Take on Me". It sounds the same as the original, but the lyrics have been changed so that it actually tells what is happening in the video. Like I said, it is an exercise in silliness:

11/16/2008 - Stan Lee Cameos (updated)

2008-11-16T11:40:00.000-08:00

Two more Marvel movies in the summer, two more Stan Lee cameos! I'm talking about the ones in Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, of course. Stan's cameos are getting better every time and I hope he continues to do them for the sequels and for the upcoming Captain America, Thor, and Avengers movies!

11/13/2008 - Apple Macbook Sucks

2008-11-13T21:01:00.000-08:00

When Apple announced the new aluminum MacBooks, I thought for sure I would get them. My previous laptop was the titanium 13" PowerBook and it would seem that the new Macbook is its spiritual successor. I was looking forward to the new LED screens, new trackpad, and faster graphics. Then came the sticker shock. $1300 for a laptop? I know there's the traditional "Apple tax" that pays for the luxury of using a stable and elegant operating system, but I'm not sure that argument holds water, especially in today's economy.

Then there's the new Display Port. The new display adapters that you can only get from Apple would cost $30 instead of $20 or less than the display adapters for the Mini-DVI ports of the previous generation MacBook. Also, there is no Mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapters yet. So to connect the aluminum MacBook to my TVs, I would need to buy two different adapters that total $60 instead of a single Mini-DVI to HDMI adapter for $20. $40 may not seem like much when compared to the cost of the computer, but that can be 8 lunches.

Then there was the last straw. No FireWire. FireWire is an interface that Apple pioneered and promoted, but when USB 2.0 became the standard for PCs, Apple all but gave up hope on FireWire. I should have realized when they switched the interface for iPods from FireWire to USB that they would eventually do the same with their computers. But I was a chump, and I bought a FireWire drive as my backup drive. To me, FireWire is the better technology in that it carries enough power to the device so that I don't need to plug in an extra AC adapter for the portable hard drive. Also, the Migration Assistant works so much faster between two computers with a FireWire cable.

So after evaluating all of this, I went ahead and bought the last generation MacBook. I saved over $300, migrated from my old PowerBook in under 2 hours, and am hooked into both my HDTVs. Although I have some regrets (this MacBook's trackpad kinda blows), I'm happy that I took the time to consider everything before the purchase. I could have easily ended up like this guy:

11/11/2008 - The Incredible Hulk: Alternate Opening (With Captain America)

2008-11-11T09:03:00.000-08:00

Being the Incredible Hulk fan that I am, it's no surprise that I got the Blu-Ray on the release day, and I was not disappointed. Over 40 minutes of deleted scenes? That's like a whole new movie right there. There were rumors of the many cuts Marvel made to the movie to make it more fast-paced, and that these cut scenes were largely the creative contribution made by star Edward Norton. All I can say is I can see why Norton was reportedly displeased with the editing decisions made because most of these cut scenes were gold. I especially liked the stuff with Doc Samson... those scenes could have come from Peter David himself (my favorite Incredible Hulk comic writer).

If you had paid attention to all the trailers, you see that there was supposed to be a scene in the arctic. However, in the theatrical release, no such scene was shown. Everybody who read the novelization of the movie can attest that this was supposed to be the opening of the movie, where Bruce Banner goes to the desolate arctic to kill himself, only to be stopped by the Hulk. Now, I can understand why studio execs would be nervous by a scene where the main character tries to commit suicide, and looking at the movie as a whole, I find it would have been difficult to fit it in. As it stands, the theatrical opening works better.

However, with all the production that went into it, such a scene would not be lost forever and they included it on the DVD and Blu-Ray. What else is fascinating about this alternate opening is that there was a rumor of a cameo of Captain America, another Marvel superhero who would be the leader of the Avengers. For those who don't know the story about Captain America, you just need to know that he was a soldier in World War II who was given superhuman ability with a "Super Soldier" serum and was thought to have perished at the end of the war. In reality, he was frozen in the icy waters but still alive in a state of suspended animation.

The Incredible Hulk already had the cameo of Iron Man's Tony Stark in the movie, a reference to Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D., and the Super Soldier serum that created Captain America. In this alternate opening, though, you'll actually see the frozen body of Captain America himself... if you look carefully. It's a "blink and you miss it" moment, but it really brings everything together in preparation for that Avengers movie.

11/9/2008 - Bacon Salt recent press montage

2008-11-09T08:32:00.000-08:00

I just realized that one of the great things about having a blog is that I can promote products that I really like and sort of advertise these products to an audience that may not be aware of them. Such is the case with Bacon Salt. I heard about Bacon Salt through an "As Seen on TV" news segment even though it doesn't have its own infomercial.

Bacon Salt is exactly what it sounds like: it's a seasoning that tastes like bacon. Bacon is probably universally liked by everyone, including myself. The concept of Bacon Salt is that it makes things taste like bacon... brilliant, no? Well, it was so appealing to me that I made it a mission to try to find it in stores. In Tucson, Arizona it's not an easy thing to find these niche items, but I was able to find it after a few tries. So I gave it a try and I really, really like it! I've been putting it on everything to hamburgers (why pay more for bacon?), corn, popcorn, mashed potatoes, and green beans. It doesn't taste EXACTLY like bacon, but it's really close and it's pretty darned good.

Even though I think this product will take off and eventually be found in every store's spice isle, I'm not taking anything to chance and will do my part to promote it on this blog. Here's a montage of press segments about Bacon Salt:

11/8/2008 - Gameshow Fail

2008-11-08T09:08:00.000-08:00

One of the guiltiest of guilty pleasures on TV is probably MXC or Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, the American translation of the Japanese gameshow Takeshi's Castle. It's one of those "extreme" gameshows where contestants traverse ridiculous obstacle courses and usually fail by falling in muddy water. It's popularity on the Spike TV cable channel was probably not lost on the ABC network, so they created the show Wipeout. The shows are very similar, down to the choice of contestants who weren't picked for their ability for critical thinking. This is probably best illustrated by the following clip:

11/6/2008 - Fastest text message

2008-11-06T20:53:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has an old style cell phone without a full keyboard knows how much of a pain it is to type out a message. Granted, the iPhone's virtual keyboard isn't a peach either, but if you can get used to it, you'll be light years ahead of having to press the 7 key four times to get the letter "S". And yet, the expert old-fashioned texter in this next video could probably beat me even if I used an iPhone:

11/5/2008 - Spider-Man Web of Shadows-Launch Trailer

2008-11-05T21:23:00.000-08:00

Have you ever watched an awesome movie trailer, only to be disappointed with the actual movie? I'm sure we all have. Apparently, the same phenomenon applies to videogame trailers as well. Check out this trailer for Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, for example:

It is really one of the best videogame trailers I have ever seen, and would definitely be my pick for Trailer of the Year. The Beethoven music really fits and gives it a whole new level of epicness. The premise of a Venom symbiote infected city seems really interesting, and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that as a future storyline in the comic book.

From all the reviews, however, it sounds like the game is on the mediocre side. Which is really a disappointment to me because I was looking forward to at least renting it.

11/2/2008 - Slide Fail

2008-11-02T08:33:00.000-08:00

This next video really boggles my mind. I know what it looks like, and I think I know what the maker of the slide was thinking. What I don't know is why the park officials would approve it on their land. What I also don't know is why the kids seem to be having so much fun in it. It's like they're living their pre-embryonic stage or something:

11/1/2008 - Mega Man 9 Time Attack (2 Videos)

2008-11-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite features of Mega Man 9 is the Time Attack mode. I wish they could build this feature into every Mega Man game re-released for the Virtual Console or on a compilation disc. Mega Man games are famous for inspiring speed-runs of the game: completing the game in the shortest amount of time possible. While some people are content on just finishing a game, speed-runners are in a class of their own and are in constant competition against themselves. For example, not too long ago, Andrew Gardikis submitted a 5-minute time for completing the original Super Mario Bros. If you watch the video of the run, it looks impossible to go any faster, and yet I'm sure speed-runners are trying everyday to beat that time.

But what is brilliant about the Time Attack mode in Mega Man 9 is that is officially posts your completion time to Capcom's servers so that you can compare your time against others in the Leaderboard. You no longer have to tape yourself playing and submitting that to the Speed Demos Archive site, and unless there are glitches (I haven't heard of any), it's considered legit. It's pretty intense not just to compete against others, but yourself as you try to improve your own time. I am quite proud to be on the front page of Leaderboard for Dr. Wily Stage 1, but I'm constantly trying to improve my time.

What's also great about the Time Attack Mode is that it encourages others to become speed-runners and you can see a lot of speed-runs posted on YouTube. These videos show the techniques you can use to improve your own time and are awesome displays of skill from the most hardcore of gamers. For example, the last and hardest stage of the game (if you have no E-Tanks) is so difficult that there are only a few pages of the Leaderboard. The gamer in these videos taped himself so that he could watch his own performance to see what he could do better and to compare against past speed-runs. It's really cool to see two speed-runs side by side and even though the differences are small, they make a big difference when every second counts. Beware hardcore gamer language, however:

10/30/2008 - Stan Lee reads The Raven

2008-10-30T21:53:00.001-07:00

Here's a really cool video just in time for Halloween... As I've mentioned before, I have the greatest respect in the world for Stan Lee, the renaissance comic book genius. Not only did he create the most famous superheroes, he did voice-over for many of the cartoons of those superheroes. He was the perfect narrator... and to me, if there is a God, he will have Stan Lee's voice. It's hard to describe, actually. I mean, it's not a radio talk show host type of voice, or even a sports announcers voice. It's unique to Stan and nobody does it better. So it's a real treat to hear him read his famous poem, "The Raven":

10/29/2008 - The Dark Knight Trailer Recut - Toy Story 2

2008-10-29T22:29:00.000-07:00

Here's another video that has the audio of The Dark Knight trailer dubbed in. Instead of Legos, though, we have footage of Toy Story 2. Not only is it well-synced, it's surprisingly coherent as a trailer:

10/27/2008 - Mario Paint - Through the Fire and Flames

2008-10-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

Here's another Mario Paint composition video, except it's not on the actual Mario Paint. A Mario Paint emulator has been programmed for the PC so that people don't have to use the actual Mario Paint to make music compositions. Even though the emulation of the SNES cartridge would probably be fine, this separate emulation does add new features that make it possible to save and share compositions to other people, which is something Nintendo should definitely consider if they ever made another Mario Paint (which they should have done instead of the atrocious Wii Music).

Normally, I'd prefer a song played through the real version of Mario Paint as I consider it to be more authentic with no possibility of enhancements or alteration. That is, if you can create a great composition using the original Mario Paint with all its limitations, then you are a great composer in my view. However, I will give a pass to this musician because it's a pretty good rendition of what has to be one of the most complex songs to translate to this medium:

10/26/2008 - The Definition of "Choke"

2008-10-26T01:19:00.000-07:00

The term "hardcore gaming" can be applied to pretty much any game out there. For the challenging old school games like Mega Man, Castlevania, and Ninja Gaiden, people had to replay levels over and over again just to beat those games. Others would replay those levels ten times over just to memorize every part of them so they know where enemies spawn, where the traps are, and what the best way to avoid them. Why? So that they can do speedruns of the games and compete against others. Even games like Guitar Hero have a hardcore gamer element to them. You'd think that for songs that have hundreds of notes that missing a few or getting over 95% of them right would be enough for most. Well, it is for most people, but not for the hardcore. You'll see what happens when one of those hardcore gamers gets 654 out of 657 notes in one of the most demanding solos of the game:

10/23/2008 - Batman & Robin Cursing

2008-10-23T22:14:00.000-07:00

In the realm of comics, I prefer Marvel over DC, but back in the early-80's, I did enjoy watching the Super-Friends. After all, how could you go wrong with all the superheroes in one show? Marvel did have Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, and although I really loved the show, I always felt that Firestar and Iceman were sort of thrown in just to form a superhero team. DC had all the heavyweights in the Super-Friends cartoons: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman were almost always present. They'd bring in the second tier as well: Flash, Green Lantern, Robin, and others.

Looking back at it now, the show really didn't have much depth... especially in the early years. Aside from their powers, you couldn't really tell the heroes apart. They all pretty much had the same personality. There was no conflict between the characters, and it was always clear that the bad guys were doing evil and the heroes had to stop them. Even though the comics at the time had more weight and appealed to an older audience, the Saturday morning cartoons were really geared toward kids. Contrast that to the recent Justice League commercials and you'll see a world of difference. Batman actually has a rock of Kryptonite to use against Superman in case he ever went rogue!

One can only enjoy the old Super-Friends cartoons with a nostalgic eye... or you could laugh at how simplistic and light it was. Especially if you dub in bleep sounds like in this video:

10/21/2008 - Little Big Computer

2008-10-21T21:52:00.000-07:00

What better use of my 400th blog post than to feature a truly incredible video. Little Big Planet is a game coming out for the PlayStation 3 that will rely on user-created content to drive its replayability. Users can create their own side-scrolling levels for others to play, and as you can imagine, there will be plenty of mediocre levels out there, some vulgar levels, but there will be some very creative levels as well. It will actually be a lot like YouTube where only the best stuff will be promoted to the front page and favorited by the most people. I think Little Big Planet and YouTube will go hand-in-hand where we see videos like this that show off cool levels. I don't know how someone will be able to top this however:

Yes, that is a fully functioning calculator built with the level designer in Little Big Planet. As listed in the description, the creator used 610 magnetic switches, 500 wires, 430 pistons, and 70 emitters in creating the "level". Now that's pretty hardcore. If I were this kid's math or science teacher, I'd give him/her an A for the year.