It’s a pretty weird rationale, I realize, but Earthbound’s potential Wii release might actually be the thing that gets me to blow my Economic Stimulus Package. And that’s a pretty serious statement, especially given
1) the assertion made by other members of this site that Mario Kart Wii is better than electricity;
2) Smash Brawl’s continual presence in everyone’s life;
3) the shitstorm and subsequent adorableness of the Okami box art mistake;
4) the promise of continually being exposed to games with titles like Opoona…
So I don’t know what it pegs me as to be more excited about Earthbound than about any of those other things. Niche gamer? Nostalgia fetishist? Big fucking nerd? Whatever!!!
IF YOU ARE THE BRETT GRAHAM WHO MADE FRUIT MYSTERY PLEASE CONTACT ME. YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS IS NOT ON THE INTERNET AND NEITHER IS FRUIT MYSTERY AND I WANT TO PROVIDE A MIRROR FOR IT IN CASE IT GOES DOWN EVER AGAIN (WHICH IT IS RIGHT NOW)
TO GIVE YOU AN IDEA OF HOW SERIOUS THIS IS ELIZABETH AND I SPENT A GOOD FOUR HOURS TODAY TRYING TO GET HER LOCALLY CACHED COPY TO WORK
If you play the game linked in the last post and are getting sick of winning all the god damn time, then perhaps you should sit a spell with Fruit Mystery. Fruit Mystery is a good way to learn about zoo animals, and also fruit, and also about responsibility. It is also a good way to miss JeffK.
(And if I may WEAR THIS STUPID WRITER HAT for a second I think there is something additionally great about games that pipe you directly to an ending despite, more or less, what you actually input into the game itself. If I had read just a little more Anne Lamott this morning I would probably point out that maybe this sort of game is like a really good short story, where you learn the interface and get accustomed to the presentation just long enough for the game to to do you what it had intended, and then leaves you with a whole afternoon where you can go outside and do something. Sort of like getting to meet something really interesting at a party who is moving to Arizona? OK now I am thinking too much.)
A late spring makes for dreary spells of rain, and perhaps its made me a bit mild in my gaming challenges of late - some free swim in Dolphin Olympics 2, some Dice Wars, a Quadradius match here or there against the sea of new players, AKA ranking fodder - I haven’t been really pushing myself as of late. But now is no time to start! The lovely swedes over at Mazapan have followed up the game where you make a viking’s dong dance with the decidedly better-in-a-different-way You Have To Burn The Rope. I’m afraid at this point you are going to go have to beat the game, then come back for the rest. Really. It’s not a joke. See you in a few.
~
~
~
~
~
~And we’re back! aren’t you in love with it? Are you already comparing the ending song to Portal’s? (Oh DON’T, no one can win that!) At first I was worried by the in-landscape instructions - is this game going to be all about lost hope and how some bosses you can’t beat and the rope symbolizes your only hope of escaping the drudgery of life, “W3 W1LL N3v3R 4G3T T3H M3Xi4N 3M0 R3B3LLi0N”? But a quick glance at my adorable bizarro-Kirby wearing a hat and throwing Castlevania axes settled my soul, and then the game lived exactly up to its promise. And I mean exactly. Plus that song! Swooooon. For gravy, there is a god-damn manual, and fans went a step further and made walkthroughs in English, German, and YouTubese. And a god-damned text edition! Way to take back your name from Jack Black and Mos Def, you lovable swedes!
Sigh. Yesterday, I decided to test my hypothesis that every song, no matter how unlikely, has an incredibly cheesy AMV attached to it somewhere (that somewhere being on YouTube). It started out innocently enough. I was looking for Toto AMVs when I stumbled across this gem:
Next time you need to tell your special lady that you love her, do it with Toto and Photobucket! Actually, I don’t really have a problem with this guy; the song is catchy as far as these things go and the slideshow is appealingly amateurish. And, I suppose, if your special lady also loves seeing static images of Squall and Rinoa, it could even be kind of sweet. But it gets better! It turns out that the images from the slideshow were largely plagiarized (as much as one can plagiarize something that is not the source’s IP to begin with, but I’ll leave that to Lawrence Lessig) from this source (which he, in a ballsy move, actually favorited):
Now this one is an abomination; not only is it set to Bryan Adams but it demands the viewer to ask, “How is it possible that a cheesy half-assed slideshow of “romantic” anime images (that features no moving images) has gotten almost 1.5 million views?” OK, so I count for about 6 of those views. Still, is this a meme I somehow missed? It doesn’t seem likely, because there is nothing particularly funny about it aside from the jaw-dropping banality (and the part where Bryan Adams caterwauls “The one thing I’m sure of/is the way we made love” and it is accompanied by some nakedness), and banality isn’t generally a LOL-type thing. So, is it possible that this “video” has gotten over a million legitimate viewers? To test that hypothesis, I decided to conduct a scientific survey.OK, so my scientific survey consisted of searching for AMVs of “I Want It That Way.” A couple things I noticed: A lot of people chose this particular song to commemorate their love of a middling anime series, including this ineffably creepy Naruto lip dub:
(n.b. There are a bunch of Naruto “I Want It That Way” AMVs; this is the best one–try reading the subtitles! Unintentional hilarity!)
Then, however, there was this gem, proving that the “related” pane is actually useful, nay, necessary to life itself:
Somehow it sums up everything that is right and wrong about Final Fantasy and it also gets stuck in your head. From the render-porn visuals to the utterly cheesy content to the melodramatic montages–it’s all in there! And you know what? Tidus and Yuna are two worlds apart. Yuna lives in Spira and Tidus doesn’t actually exist. I don’t even know what to say. I’ll leave it to xYunaax:Every Night I dream about yOUCause yOu’re The Best Thing In My LifeAnd I Think yOu’re the One…With lOvee,Me
