Back during the 16-bit days I was on team Sega, so I missed out on a lot of what the SNES had to offer. For the area where I grew up at and for the elementary and middle schools I attended, the Sega Genesis was the dominant force when it came to the console wars for the time. Luckily I had a friend who was in the minority and owned an SNES which gave me an opportunity to at least dip my toes in and try out a small fraction of the huge catalog of games for what would arguably be Nintendo’s greatest home console. For me, the game I kept going back to was Star Fox. Dem phat polygons kept me comin’ back for more.
Don’t smile, box! Don’t you understand how dangerous of a situation you were just in?!
I’ve been tracking this box for the past week and I was surprised to find out that UPS decided to leave it near my front door. This was odd because this was the first time they've done this to me. Normally they keep it because a signature or something is required. Normally I would reroute it to a UPS Store near my job after the first failed attempt, but I nearly had a heart attack when I was at work and noticed the status of “delivered” followed by the desination of “porch.”
Since I work near where I live I was able to quickly get back to my place before any poachers decided to swipe it. Doesn’t help that the news has been recently giving reports on people following trucks and then grabbing the packages off from the front porch after they checked that no one is home. Normally I wouldn’t sweat it, but this item is rather expensive (at least it is to me), so I was extra nervous about the whole situation.
I guess I was lucky that I was able to get it without incident, so all's well that ends well, but I really wish Amazon would show who the delivery service is so I can change the destination to a UPS Store whenever they are picked.
Sorry if my posts have been looking a bit tumblr-ish lately, but sometimes there is much cooler stuff on the Internet than what’s going on here. Take this for example:
I remember this esthetic; it gave off a vibe of futurism right before and during the dawn of the new millennium. And what would you know, some wonderful soul out there created a imgur account, collecting a butt ton of images using this style. They marked it as an esthetic between 1996 and 2003, which to me with that timeframe seems about right when that look started to take hold and then began to fade away.
It was seen all over the place: magazines, billboards, TVs, movies, album art, music videos, EVERYWHERE! The silky shirts, the spiked hair with frosted tips, goggles on the forehead or hanging on the neck, the slightly out-of-focus photography with a hint of glow, and of course, the heavy dosage of blue, orange, or green.
Back then you didn’t really take notice of it because we were living in it, but in hindsight you can easily tell it was a really unique look. I think technology was a big factor for the inspiration because it was steamrolling into our homes at neck breaking speed. With the introduction of the World Wide Web, people bringing computers into the house, ecommerce, and cybercrimes, it was like we were quickly surrounded by tech and didn’t know what happened until it was too late. The changes were fast and that may explain why everything was out of focus and heavy on the colors.
In relation, Y2K freaked everyone out, believing technology was going to betray us when the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2000. Thankfully that didn’t happen.
But while in the 1990s, even though Y2K was a looming threat, most people (mainly young people) saw the potential of what the digital revolution could bring. We were on the verge of starting something new and it was incredibly cool to see it about to evolve into its next stage. We were going to be the leaders of this new revolution, leaving behind the status quo of trivial stuff like typewriters, tons of paperwork, and, for the most part, the postal system.
But then nothing really happened once we crossed into the new millennium. Sure tech was still marching forward, but the utopia we were dreaming of really didn’t pan out the way we expected it to. After the dot com bubble and seeing a new threat to the country, the innocent dream was killed and so the style.
What’s this? Not only are you, the fine reader of this fabulous website, getting two articles for the video games journal for the month, but also a feature?! It may be hard to believe, but it’s true! WHO LOVES YA, BABY!
Here we have a central showcasing of all the games from the Marvel vs. Capcom series. But since this feature encompasses the other Marvel fighting games prior to the MvC series, let’s, for the sake of simplicity, call the whole darn thing the Marvel fighting series. Don’t worry, though, as we can keep this title a secret just between us.
A show I’ve been into over the last several weeks is The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story currently airing on FX. Based on the book The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, it delves into the circus that was the O.J. Simpson murder trial. With it, we see the events that occurred before and during the trial. So far, each episode does a pretty good job of segmenting each block of events. The first episode showing the crime scene and the LAPDs suspicion of O.J., the second episode telling the Bronco chase, and the third episode describing what both the defendants and prosecutors were doing post arrest and pre court trial. Obviously there’s still more to the season as the trial hasn’t occurred yet, but I’d have to guess it’s probably going to be a six episode season.
The show is compelling because it was something I was aware at the time, but I was too young to understand the details. I was ten years old when O.J. showed the nation you can run away from the cops in a slow speed car chase. I knew he was accused of committing murder because there was non-stop coverage from the local news agencies at the time (I live in So Cal, so I received the LA affiliates), and since my parents were big on current events, I just absorbed what they were viewing.
But being ten/eleven, even though I was seeing these events unfold, most of it went over my head. I was ignorant of how the court system worked, I was unware of the connection between the case and the and the LA riots I saw a few years earlier, and I didn’t bother connecting all who was involved with the case from both sides of the proceedings.
American Crime Story really helps in connecting all of those dots. I get to fill in personalities to names I heard of related to the case like Robert Shapiro, Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran, and Robert Kardashian. Although, the name drops on the show are kind of annoying. This is especially true in regards to the Kardashian clan. Whenever they show the kids: Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, and Rob, who at the time were around the tween age, really irks me because it seems like the writers are just trying to get the audience to point at the TV and say something like “omg, that’s Kim when she was a teenager!! They were so young back then!” Blargh.
With the show ramping up to the court hearings, it looks like the best part of the show has yet to come, and with it high amounts of drama. Even though I know the outcome of the case, I’m still glued to the TV waiting to see what happens next. I guess that goes to show how good the series is at presenting the details for this semi-recent-non-fiction-story; as where The Walking Dead is good at the opposite with a story of fiction-set-in-a-time-I-don’t-know-if-it’s-in-the-present-or-past.
Earlier this week I saw Kenji Eno was featured on an episode of Lunch ON! where they showcased a meal from a restaurant he liked to visit. I thought it was pretty cool that they chose to place the celebrity spotlight on him instead of the tradition of picking someone from radio, television, or movies. I was able to capture it, so I posted it on YouTube for all to see.
In a pinch while on my lunch break when I’m using the precious hour to run errands and don’t schedule enough time to actually eat something, I swing by 7-Eleven to get a combo that includes a Big Gulp and a Big Bite for $2 and smash it into my mouth with only minutes to spear before my break ends. I also throw in a pack of cookies for an extra dollar to round things off (unfortunately they didn’t have my favorite today which are cookies covered with M&M’s. Today was plain ol’ chocolate chip). It’s a filling meal for 3 bucks, but one I hate to eat because it’s nothing but sugar and fat. Most days I normally bring a salad to lunch.
I’ve got a plan to help curb this bad habit, but it’ll be at least a month until I can get this plan into action. Time is needed because I need to purchase something rather expensive, but when you weigh in my health (pun intended), I feel it’s worth the investment. Tune in next month for an exciting entry in HEALTHY LUNCH PREPARATIONS!
These styles of written reviews were so good. It was such a clean looking, informative way to review games. It was even better later on when one person would have a lengthier write-up and where a sentence of each person’s review was bold faced so to allow the reader to get-to-the-point of what the reviewer wanted to say. The layout was great for both at-a-glance and in depth reading.
I guess the current version of this is when the “what've you been playing?” segment for a video game podcast occurs.
Here we go with a new batch of game write-ups for the video games journal. It took longer than expected to get this going again due to RL stuff plus working on the backend of this site, but here we are on the verge of a few months’ worth of new articles and features. Aaand to kick things off, here is not one but TWO game articles. Wooo!
At first it seems like an odd fit to have an arcade game where all you do is drive a Semi-trailer truck, transporting cargo from one destination to another. But leave it to Sega to make it interesting by basically turning it into a game of bumper cars but with tractor trailers. Fun? You bet! Nonsense? Yup!
This one flew way under my radar to the point where I didn’t even know this game existed until just about a year ago. I was all like, whoa! 18 Wheeler has a sequel?! Guessing this was the rarest of the rarest games, I was planning to pay a good chunk of cash to snag a copy of it. Luckily it’s not a game most people hold a great deal of value for so I was able to get it for an extremely inexpensive price. Let the good times roll.
