Author: Alex Doenau

“.07%”

I preferred my old theories.

Spoilers!

Perhaps you are familiar with my friends the Pokémon. I have been friendly with them since 1998, and they have rewarded me by winging their way into my home come tomorrow. Expect to never hear from me again!

… unless I come back, triumphantly riding on a Torterra. You never know with me. One second I’m gone, next second I’m astride a tortoise that has a tree and a mountain on its back; just like US Network Television.

Bang-b-bang-bang! Kaboom! Ra-ta-ta-ta! Whompf-whompf-whompf-whompf! Screeeeeeeeeeeee!

This was precisely the movie I needed. I can’t be serious all the time, I need some levity in my writing. What better source of levity could there possibly be than Mark Wahlberg shooting stuff until it explodes? The only real problem with Shooter is that I had to wait almost two hours before Mark Wahlberg started swearing at people. That’s easily what he does best.

This was a great show. I don’t think I even really need to say anything. I’ll just plagiarise my friend Pangle, quoted from his journal:

Warning! Contains Mild Profanity!

Pulazumaaaa!

You may recall that in October I said of Dead Rising

As it stands, I don’t feel like playing Dead Rising ever again.

Times change. People change. The moment that I finished Dead Rising I lent it to a friend. The moment he gave it back, in late January, I played it through again. Twice. The moment I finished it the first time on my repeat play (from level 1, because I figured out how to do that), I played it again on my level 50 save.
Since then I’ve played it through, what, five or six times? That may be an exaggeration, I don’t know; the impetus for my recent spate of play throughs was the introduction of an HD TV to my home. Now I can actually read the text rather than simply make it up!

It’s probably no surprise to a lot of 360 users that the achievement system is a stroke of genius for replayability, if they feel like achievements you could be bothered achieving. Dead Rising makes you feel like a king amongst zombies.
I am now thoroughly convinced that I am a king amongst zombies.

Yes, my good sirs, I have saved fifty plus survivors in one run and, thanks to My Name is Earl and picture-in-picture, I achieved zombie genocider. Now I can shoot things like a true Megaman.

I’m not sure why I came back to my old friend Dead Rising, with whom I had parted on bad terms. It’s the sort of game that you master; the sort that you just keep on playing because you’re so dang good at it. Unlike something like Oblivion, you can get harder, better, stronger, faster, but the zombies and psychopaths stay as they ever were. Unfortunately, the survivors are permanently stupid, running into walls and whatever, but if you know all of the mall’s secrets, then you can outfit them well enough to make them not suck to hard. If you’re good enough, you can save every last one of them without compromising the storyline.

This is just like the olden days of video games, when the game content was so limited that you had to keep on playing and improving on your style for the benefit of … well, who exactly I don’t know. In my personal experience, video gaming has become so broad that you can’t bring your friends around to say “hay check out what I did in this game” or tell them about it at “school” the next day. Kids still go to school, right?
I’d say that the days when you could lie about having done something in a game are done, too, thanks to the internet, but rumours and scuttlebutt are really easy to be perpetuated amongst the stupider classes, I suppose (“Hay guys Luigi is total in Super Mario 64 if you stab yourself in the eyes and jump forty seven times on Bowser’s shell.” This does not explain how the N64 accepts the knife-eye interface and I’m lucky that I was able to worm my way to the top of the transplant list).

Basically, in the last thirty years (only 21 of which I have been a party to), many video games have remained exactly the same: exercises in rote learning! The only difference is now you can kill in excess of 53,594 zombies and then tell everyone on the internet how great you are.

Because believe me, I am freaking magnificent.

Update: I have been informed that Luigi was in Super Mario 64, and unlockable by the method I described above, only I couldn’t see him on account of my eyes being stabbed. I apologise to the heroes who have managed to achieve such a feat.

There must be some sort of serendipity involved in the fact that the week that I looked into Junior Senior for the first time in ages is the exact same week that their second album came out in Australia. It was also the same week that I developed a brief, morbid fascination with that other Danish band, Aqua.

Why it took nigh on two years to make its way to my fair shores, I’m not quite certain. If you recall our friends Junior Senior at all, you probably remember them from “Move Your Feet”, which featured such memorable images as a smiling hotdog and a squirrel spinning in an X-Wing.

This Danish duo is like a singing gay-straight alliance poised to sing songs about parties and dancing but also to reinforce their playful distaste for the others’ proclivities (“Hey gay, get out of my way!” “Hey straight, you’re always too late!”). This was a new idea to me when I bought D-D-Don’t Stop The Beat in 2003, in my first week of work, and it’s a message that has stuck with me since.
I’m not quite sure why I bought the album beyond liking the “Move Your Feet” video, but these were the days when my musical tastes were not defined very far past Roxette, Kylie Minogue, Björk, and anime songs with excessive guitar solos.
In the same week I bought Daft Punk’s Discovery, which probably goes to show that having a disposable income leads to wild musical experimentation. Unfortunately it also leads to the disposing of said income, but that’s a story for another time.

I listened to D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat a lot back in the day, before it was replaced in my heart by Scissor Sisters and Franz Ferdinand (damn them and their self-titled albums). Stumbling across the existence of Hey Hey My My Yo Yo of course led to the discovery of a couple of new music videos.

The first is “Can I Get Get Get”, which is edited together from fan sources and raises a smile for world love:

The idea of people just putting videos of themselves lip-synching on Youtube is still pretty alien to me (hello, “Peach Plum Pear”?), but when people put effort and editing into their fandom then magic happens.

The second is “Take My Time”, which is notable for two things. The first is that Junior drew it himself, and the second is that backing vocals are provided by the female portion of The B-52s. Watch out for the volcanoes, because they’re a kind of magic:

Junior Senior are clearly big in Japan, like several notable acts before them: Queen and Scissor Sisters are the two that strike me the most. There are some others that I can’t recall off the top of my head, but with Junior Senior making it to #2 on the Japanese charts clearly they’ve got something going for them over there. Perhaps the fact that they’re an awesome happy band.

I’ve already got a great fondness for these two songs, and when I checked the track listing I found that there’s a song called “Dance Chance Romance”. One of the key phrases in the City Hunter ED “Super Girl” (and, if you’ve read Anime Pilgrimage at all, you’ll know that City Hunter is among my favourite titles ever) is “Dance Chance Romance”.

This is a sign: a sign that I must go out and buy this album. How could I refuse anything released by a label called “Crunchy Frog”?
Come on in, leave your coats. Grab some chips … they’ve got loads!

Even if they had money they’d still be white trash, yeah!

Unlike the stuff I see at the cinema, the DVDs I write about are picked totally arbitrarily.

I don't understand my peers' attraction to Garden State. Don't get me wrong, I like it; it's just that I had always assumed I held the monopoly on depressed, directionless people with emotional numbness that they are desperate to be rid of regardless of the pain that it inflicts upon them.