Revered by many at first glance
The original purpose of this blog was largely to give my most magmatic takes on animanga, TV, video games, and any other media, only to evolve into a comprehensive look at things I like, find interesting, or just plain don’t like. Case in point:
God of War III did better to make me feel guilty about f[growl]king up the world. I hate this game!
Read More »When networks were in on the fun
Originally, this was going to be about channel bumpers and how overlooked those are compared to other filmed and animated media that hasn’t been archived, and I will get to channel bumpers in this piece. It will merely open up into the springboard of wider media and what the bumpers mean. As a guy who jackhammers the corner of the YouTube mobile app screen hoping in vain that it’ll skip the ad sooner, this may seem odd, but the bumpers weren’t just a showcase of the network you were watching ChalkZone on.
It seems to be something of an exercise in animation. Already an expensive and labor-intensive medium, be it hand-drawn or stop-motion (the latter of which I have experience with TTwTT), making a silly animation in an extremely crude manner is nothing to sneeze at. The history of the medium has a rich lineage as attributed to the likes of Walt Disney and Warner Bros. With tech catching up and more and more animators and studios abusing the new tech to see what can and can’t be done, eventually some madman would turn channel idents into an art form.
Read More »Very few imitators
You wanna know something interesting about games in the mid 1990s to around 2011 or so? The most popular properties were cloned and imitated ad nauseum. Google the most cloned video games and the search results will pull up some of the obvious examples because of how influential they were at release and still are. Doom, GTA III, Minecraft, Flappy Bird, and to add onto that, God of War, Mortal Kombat (especially in the 90s when it first debuted), Devil May Cry, and so many others as seen in this screenshot:
Even WatchMojo made a list of heavily cloned video games… multiple times. >_<
Read More »And what a bloody shame too…
One of the earliest posts on this blog concerned racing games, three of which I ranked in order from great to terrible: Midnight Club 3, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, and L.A. Rush–with Gran Turismo 4 as the wild card that I would attempt to get back into at a later date due to vague memories of what it entailed.
I made that dedication on April 7, 2023 with this post: Racing Games. Attempts were made to fulfill that promise and short of typing “Results: Inconclusive. Project Cancelled” in bold letters, it’s worth noting what I experienced in the many times I booted the game up on PCSX2 and why it’s better to categorize it as “easy to play, hard to master.”
Read More »1979 cult classic film and… 2005 Rockstar published video game?
A low-budget gangster film from the late-1970s has gone on record to achieve the cult classic status it would enjoy some 20 to 40 years later.
The basic premise of The Warriors is that the largest and most powerful gang of hoods, the Gramercy Riffs, calls upon all the gangs in the five boroughs of New York. Gramercy Riffs’ gang leader Cyrus spends the early film urging peace amongst all the gangs, all of whom outnumber the NYPD 3 to 1. Whether this includes corrupt cops and mafiosi isn’t explained, but beating the piss out of one cop would come after first trying to bribe approximately four or five. Four cops take the cash and look elsewhere, the fifth needs knuckle persuasion.
Read More »A serious mockery of an art form
Mind control doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t need to for me to make this next sequence sound all too familiar to a handful of readers. Open YouTube app on your mobile phone -> scroll through your feed -> click on a video that piques your interest -> if it’s monetized, ads will roll before, during, after, or at all three points depending on the length -> one of those ads is for a simple puzzle or side-scrolling shooter game -> the example player plays the puzzle extremely poorly. If you’re on desktop and have the Adblock for YouTube extension, then these may not be seen at all. If you’re on mobile, like I usually am, hammering away on the screen for the Skip Ad button is a regular routine.
Living After Midnight
Jet lag! Didn’t hit me as hard this week, but flying across two time zones is a sure-fire way to screw with the comprehension on this piece. Dying Light was promised and Dying Light is up for this week.
Yay alliteration
Jetlag is always fun >_>. A regular reader may know by now the entire shtick of this blog. Obscure, niche, underappreciated; this place is the Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends of the entertainment world. And lucky that it is because I’m still discovering stuff that slipped past my radar or was unavailable to me at the time of release. Case in point:
Or more specifcally Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on Steam
Read More »Veni, vidi, vici
In the research for this topic, by way of the magic coincidence, former developers at Crytek have sprang from the woodwork and the coffin to announce that Ryse: Sone of Rome was something of an experiment. Those who recall the Xbox One launch title might be thinking, “Well, it was supposed to show off the Xbox One’s stellar capabilities,” and you’re right. It was, and it did… adequately.
I’ve been on PC since the COVID pandemic was classified as an outbreak at first in late-November 2019, but even then I was lamenting the absence of disk drives in PCs and laptops well before then… (T^T)
Read More »Blame it on the WB!! Well, not all of it
If you’re a regular viewer of The4thSnake and you follow his opinions on the HD continuation of the Mortal Kombat franchise or you simply keep tabs on WB Games and NetherRealm Studios, a conclusion you can draw is that the games started to get… complacent and stick to familiar angles come MK11.
