Pancake City

I saw “The King of Kong” a few days ago, and wrote a short user review for Netflix (review below). My lukewarm reaction may be entirely due to the high expectations I had, both from critic raves and my own fondness for these types of documentaries.  There are also some arguments over the movie’s details I read after watching it that make me question the degree of its accurateness. Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

“The movie’s best moment is its two-and-a-half minute preview. There, the elements of the story are stripped down–egotistical manic versus likable, down-on-his-luck Joe–and the twists and turns of their battle is left to the imagination. The actual movie doesn’t live up to the promise. The succession of interviews with the socially awkward and singularly focused give off an insular feeling that the film makers don’t do enough to overcome. Friends, this is what true nerd-dom is, and it’s not pretty. Also, the film makers mishandle a few dramatic moments and leave the narrative muddy in others. It’s not bad and worth seeing for fans of quirky documentaries, but doesn’t reach the heights of similar documentaries before it.”

There’s a wonderful episode of South Park where the kids are playing ninjas and Kenny throws a shrunken into Butter’s eye. Not wanting their parents to find out what they did, they dress Butters up as a dog so they can drop him of at an animal hospital. Butters wanders off in a haze, and near the end of the episode, Cartman uses his “ninja power of invisibility” and walks naked across a public stage in an attempt to get Butters.

Butters is near death, and the town is outraged…that their children saw another boy’s naked penis.

The story reminds me of the current controversy with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In the game, you play a gang banger who can run over people, beat them up with almost every conceivable weapon, shoot cops, and…well, that’s all I know so far. I’m only on mission 4.

Recently, someone wrote a program that allowed players to unlock a special sex mission in the game. A few media watchdog groups and politicians, including Sen. Clinton, successfully pressured to have the game’s rating changed from Mature to Adult. Target, Best Buy, WalMart, and other retailers are taking it off the shelves.

GTA: San Andreas is an awesome game. But I wouldn’t want my kid to play it. It’s incredibly violent, crude, and could make younger teens less sensitive to the idea of inflicting pain upon others. Isn’t that worse than dirty, filthy sex? Sometimes this country seems absolutely loony.

“You wanna do some Super Mario? It’ll get you real high.”

Sometimes I think there is a heavenly battle for my soul. You see, the devil made my roommate buy an XBox. So God steps in and kills the heat sink in the Xbox so my roommate has to return it. So the devil retaliates by not only making my roommate exchange it, but by giving him a two-week project that sucks up all of his free time, and sending my other roommate on a trip for the weekend. God says, “Screw that. I’m going to scratch your “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic” disk and I’ll scratch the next one if you try to rent it from a different video store.” Which I did.

That’s where I stand today. To give you some background, and I say this without irony, I have a video game addiction. I have no problem using the word addiction because in the past, there have been moments where I have skipped meals so I wouldn’t have to stop, lost interest in my normal activities (like writing for this blog), and thought about a game obsessively when I had to be away from it.

I’ve gotten much better at handling my bad habits with video and computer games. For the most part, I’m able to stay away from playing them (moderation isn’t effective for me) and the few times recently I have caved in and went on a binge, it has been easier for me to stop when I needed to. But at the same time, I’m glad the game is too frustrating to play for long because it is scratched. It makes leaving the house much easier.

This guy totally kicks the shit out of Carpal Tunnel XTreme 3000. (link from LYD).

Mario, meet Mr. Electric Guitar. (from BoingBoing).

I suspect the band Minibosses provoke one of two reactions: “Huh?” and “That’s totally awesome.” Put me down for the second one. The band almost solely performs music from old Nintendo games. Electric guitars and drums give life to the poppy beats of Mega Man, the infectious theme of Zelda, and even unusual choices like a tune from Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out. Remember how pressing Select made Doc rub Little Mac’s shoulder faster and restored his life? And if you hit the old man in Zelda the fire would shoot an energy ball at you? And…

That’s why I like their music. A combination of spending much of my childhood playing video games and the emotions of these memories strong from the lack of exploitation of advertisers makes this a band for me.

You’ll have the best luck finding their tunes on a file-sharing service like Kazaa. Wired has an article on them in its February issue (not online yet).

Video game magazine EGM gathered a group of young teens and gave them classic video games to play. The results are hilarious. The kids playing Tetris:

Tim: Which button do I press to make the blocks explode?

EGM: Sorry, they don’t explode.

Becky: This is boring. Maybe if it had characters and stuff and different levels, it would be OK. If things blew up or something or—

Sheldon: If there were bombs.

Becky: Yeah, or special bricks. Like, if a yellow brick touched a red brick it would blow up and you’d have to start over.

John: Why haven’t I won yet? I’ve paired up so many of the same color.

EGM: Don’t worry about colors.

John: I just lined up six of the same color. Why didn’t they blow up?

EGM: Nothing blows up.

(link from LYD, BoingBoing, FARK…)