ROC

So I'm planning on getting this, but I've heard the 360 version has been godawful in terms of freezing issues and the additions are hardly worth the trouble. Has anybody who has played the 360 version gotten a good idea on if there's any big issues in dynasty as of this week?

The Piano - B+ Even if it kind of drags around the middle, still so damn good. Amazing how well they played off the piano motif for some haunting music, too. And they made HARVEY FUCKING KEITEL uber psycho of the century into a character that Holly Hunter could conceivably fall in love with and we don't feel danger for. Good shit.

The new Brows Held High just got uploaded this morning. I won't ruin the idea of this episode, but it's tremendous. And I say this as someone who isn't normally a fan of the "gimmick episodes."

It's not on the TGTWG site yet, and I'm guessing the Spoony stuff has left posting at a bit of a delay, but the Obscurus Lupa Presents on THE AMAZING BULK. Oh man. You just have to witness this movie. http://blip.tv/OLPresents/amazingbulkfinished-6281385

I don't have one that fits individual seasons, but I found it interesting that Veronica Mars was really no good in season 3 until the arc that tied up the end of the show. It was like cancellation freed them from annoying strawmen and storylines with muddled messages.

Space Jam Opening Credit Sequence: A++++++++ Rest of the Movie: About a C Seriously, Joe Pytka's directing experience with commercials showed in that opening sequence, complete with that damn theme song. It's masterful. Then I'm watching a movie where Michael Jordan acts alongside a green screen for 80 minutes. Then Bill Murray shows up, goes HAM, and leaves. That's about a C.

Turn Me On, Dammit - B+ Ok, this is going to require a lot of context. Around a month ago, a big controversy started swirling around this little movie from Norway. Our publicly funded theater was showing Turn Me On, Dammit and church pastors were in outrage. They made calls to the city and with little resistance, the screening was pulled. Quickly a couple of local businesses sought to actively respond to this cancellation and made all of this firestorm of attention about the cancellation, noting that it was censorship of art and namely that the things pastors objected to (that the lead character masturbates and that there's an exposed penis) really only last a very short portion of the film and aren't any worse than the drunken teen comedies that America puts out. They eventually found a way to put the screening for the film back on. More hilariously, the pastor made a metaphor involving the city block being up in flames by comparing it to when a porn shop was aflame presumably because God hates jobs and jerking off. And also said pastor used to be a male stripper. I'm serious. Anyways, all of that context is to explain the letter grade because as it turns out, controversy packs a theater. A Norwegian sex comedy with subtitles drew 600 people and a raucous reaction. And it was well deserved. There was more of an innocence to the story of a girl feeling horny and thus "abnormal." It's kind of a only slightly raunchier version of Easy A from the big story twist, and Helene Bergstrom is extremely charming as Alma. Without her chaste rebellion, the movie could look really fucked up. But with her, the movie works at creating great running gags and a solid amount of heart and care about its characters and world. Needless to say, it's art and not pure vulgarity. I think switching the surroundings made the film a more gratifying experience as well. It's really damn good, even if without the belly laughs in the theater, it might lose only a little bit of something at home.

lolololololol oh quom. Even in a singer's thread, you gotta be catty and contrarian. Glorious.

Oof, my lack of steady internet has made me fall behind on this. With all that said, I think I either want to go for the one Metal Slug game released on the system that I hear is not that good, or finally begin going through all of the major PS1 RPGs starting with some Final Fantasy game that I never played called Final Fantasy VII. Y'all throw down the low down of suggestions.

Entry 2 - Gran Turismo 2: Oh Fuck It's Fast Background: Again, this is pretty much just a lot of me and my cousin hanging out and playing games. I don't remember when I played the first Gran Turismo, but I was pretty amazed. I know nothing about cars. This is a fact that remains so much to this day that my first planned purchase of transportation will be the bicycle and then eventually a Kia. I don't overly care about what makes a machine go fast, just that the damn thing goes fast. The up side to Gran Turismo is that it was damn easy to make the thing go fast. Stuff: So I go fast a lot in this game, but I was more surprised by the marginal improvement I made driving in the current day versus the erratic driving of the past. Weirdly, I'm still terrible at how to drive like a sane person in Gran Turismo 2, because the game doesn't overly encourage that. It's probably better to play bumper cars with leaderboard drivers than to actually drive like a rational person because the lack of crashing averts this. That does create a problem with how the series has operated. I seem to remember that even by the fourth game, crashing still didn't happen. This was weirder because around that time, Burnout 3 made crashing AWESOME. I actually dug up my PS2 today and if I ever get bored with this thread, I'll gladly dip into my PS2 collection, which will be just me grinning like an idiot during playthroughs of San Andreas and Burnout 3. Back to GT2, however, for a moment. I'm amazed at the patience I've been able to achieve. I don't know if GT2 cares whether or not that I beat it, and I probably never will, but I do want to find a way to get a car more souped up than my Dodge Viper. I guess that means I'm going to be playing the shit out of this again because dammit Dodge Viper! Even buying a Viper in game was a proud moment because it came out of a third place finish in an endurance race. My hands got a bit wearied by 53 minutes of turning and oh jesus now I understand why F1 and NASCAR folks get defended often as athletes. That said, it's much easier to put on a podcast and just race and keep your spot for an hour than it felt like it was back then. Gran Turismo 2 speaks to me more on how utterly comprehensive it is now than it did when I was younger. Usually, the game would just get damn hard, the licenses would be frustrating (unless you settled for bronze prizes like I did in this play-through), and I would just put in the Game Shark code to get 99 million credits and buy the Suzuki Escudo (the fastest car in the game, I believe) and wreck the courses that were free play or even Game Shark cheat to get to the ones I couldn't. Seems more rewarding to save up imaginary credits this time. Maybe I've gone honest.

Holy shit yep. I had the exact same one. That's what I remember Tomba! and Einhander from. I also had a demo disc that had a Bomberman game and Grandia, and I played the everloving shit out of that disc just playing Grandia over and over and over. I keep thinking the one right after this one had Metal Gear Solid, and of course that rocked everyone's shit. Also, I will throw on an entry at some point tomorrow(?) on something, likely Gran Turismo 2 or Ridge Racer Type 4 because I'm in a racing mood.

Ok, so I'm uncertain about how I'm going to format this. I kind of want to go back and forth with games, especially the ones I like. I have a real attention span to how I write and the like, and it might show all over a lot of this writing. But anyways, on with my first entry! Entry 1 - Tomba!: About The First Hour of the Game Background: Ok, so this is where I'll go into what's drawing me back to quite a few of these games. When I was about 8, I really dived head-first into the 32/64-bit generation of games. We had owned a Sega Genesis and once I moved from small town Louisiana to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, we lived in an apartment oddly similar to my current abode and got a Super Nintendo (random offhand memory: this was the only time I ever saw my dad stay up through the night to play a video game, that being Bill Walsh College Football). Me and my cousin, who is about 5 years older, sort of chased what major new systems were released. He bought an N64, so I got one a year later. He also had a Playstation, which I wouldn't get until late in its life cycle. Anyway, the Playstation was mind-blowing to me because it had these demo discs that would preview all of the games it had. This could be blending memories together, but the one I think about constantly is the one that led me to this game. It had Einhander, Tomba!, Blasto, Tomb Raider 2, and Hot Shots Golf. (A NeoGaf search maintains this might be a different demo that has TR2 and HSG but nonetheless.) Unfortunately, the archiving of these demo discs on the internet is fucking awful, so I don't know for certain. Either way, it was awesome. I played the hell out of all of the games on said demo discs. I even played NFL Xtreme, which was pretty awful then and with cruddy PS1 3D is probably wallbangingly catastrophic now. These things affected what I thought was the cool things on the Playstation. I didn't know Square for so long for the Final Fantasy games, I knew them for Bushido Blade and Einhander. I thought Sony was that company that just liked platformers. This impacted my life severely. So now I'm on to Tomba! Stuff: The game mechanics in Tomba! are way more intuitive than I remember. It seems a bit jarring that the game just sort of jumps you into the world of tossing pigs and earning points, but that's a part of the game's cleverness. I don't like harping on today, but nothing that happens at the start of the game feels like the obvious "tutorial level" that is experienced in most games, nor does it need to be. In Tomba, you can do a lot but the progression of moves is natural. I can appreciate that better now. It's also very refreshing to see a rad 2D art style instead of the more dated 3D look. Einhander does this rather well, too, which will be mentioned when I get to that, but Tomba just looks really pretty. It had a seemingly major part in what would become 2.5D gameplay that I enjoy in later entries that sort of follow this model of creative platforming, like Fez. The humor is also incredibly absurd. Some of it is dumb for dumb's sake (namely butt shaped flower tree things that pass gas and make a fart noise when jumped on), but the rest of it also plays around with the look of the hero. Tomba's charm comes not from the school of system mascot thought that birthed Spyro and Crash, but the silly antics of a PINK HAIRED CAVEMAN. At the point I'm stopping this, I'm trying to save some dwarves, thus the above exchange as I try to learn their language by, uhm, jumping on them and having them run away. So yeah, this is pretty awesome. ---- By the by, when I fully get a lot of game time in, I'll steal another thingy from Ollie and set up a nice top five list. And obviously, this won't be the last time I talk about Tomba! but I will usually do posts like these to kind of build a nice history before doing the full thing. I'll sort it out in the first post, I promise.

Death Grips' album was amazing to me. I have a weird balance between what "abrasive" stuff I like, but they hit that balance right on the head. Also Beach House, Fiona Apple, and Best Coast put out some records I have trouble putting down. Fiona's record is amazing in particular.

Hmmm, I don't even remember what that one was like, although I had disdain for the Genesis Toy Story 1.

I hear these threads have become popular. Anyways, for a while, I would spend a good bit of time just writing down what games I played and what I got out of the experience. It was pretty damn fun, even if I attached weird meaning to shit that didn't have it (I think I wrote a Pokemon essay comparing it to sport. I also think I made myself read it out loud to people that probably wanted to hear creative poetry instead.). Anyways, I got a nice collection of PS1 titles rather recently through the powers of the world and I'm going to bulk up my collection. Expect to hear about these various rad titles! Einhander Gran Turismo 2 Hot Shots Golf Monster Rancher 2 NFL Blitz Tomba! Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2-4 I'm open to suggestions, although I want to keep this mainly to the more surreal/lesser-known stuff from the PS1 lifecycle. I love Metal Gear Solid, but I would not have a single original thought on the series. Probably the same with the Final Fantasy titles, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, et al. I'll also try to eliminate my present "play an outdated sports game" plan because the games tend to look like garbage and it'll be a bit silly for me to play Madden 2001 when a shinier Madden is on my shelf. Alright! I'll put up something on one of those games up above tonight. Expect text and maybe a cute photo if I'm stealing the Ollie format.

New David Byrne/St. Vincent track here. It's properly different, to the point that it might lose me a little bit (I'm not as crazy as I want to be in Byrne's collaborations.) But it's fucking David Byrne and St. Vincent and that's a great thing.

Also, I could probably look good in a Maxim photo shoot. Photoshop up the ass.

Ah, fuck it. I'll do one of these lists for old time's sake. I think everyone I like is some hipster musician now, though. Also, ummm, I'm bad with Google so...ummm...get good at it. 1. Alison Brie (She's so oddly sexual, too. Listen to like one episode Comedy Bang Bang where she's weirdly towards the end flirting towards out and out sex with Jason "Rafi from the League whose last name I butcher.) 2. Annie Clark (I touched her leg when she crowd dived at a show a month ago! These stories and more in "Stories ROC Will Incessantly Annoy The Shit Out of You About, Volume 8") 3. Brooklyn Decker (I don't understand why, either.) 4. AJ Lee (YES I PUT A WRESTLER IN THE LIST, YOU WOULD TOO SHUT UP.) 5. Emma Stone 6. Christina Hendricks 7. Jemima Kirke 8. Lana Del Rey (?) 9. Gillian Jacobs (She's literally the exact opposite of Brie in interviews. It's pretty impressive. Gillian plays social and jaded, but is way introverted it seems. Either way, it's adorable.) 10. Shannon Woodward

Maybe not totally fair because they may have reached a creative peak by the time of their end, but goddamn do I miss Pretty Girls Make Graves. Hell, I was even turning on to actually liking Jaguar Love when J. Clark left, but they're still a thing apparently.

Going to batch these in at once: Haywire - B+ Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie - D- This Means War - F Haywire is maybe just a rung below Drive, and Drive was my favorite movie of last year. Like Drive, Haywire just gets the mood right. Could've served for less Carano dialogue and Channing Tatum speaking, but the slightly messy and wonderful action scenes more than make up for it. The Tim and Eric thing is bold as hell, namely one sequence that goes beyond the line of even gross-out taste. It's also extremely poor as a comedy or even as a narrative device. It just doesn't work for me at all. Yet at least that film had ambition. This Means War accomplishes the laziest filmmaking of the year, the script is complete ass, and remarkably wastes actors like Tom Hardy and Chris Pine by simply commanding "be charming, I guess" as a thing. Also, fuck Chelsea Handler. I don't even dislike her talk show, but jesus christ is she awful at this acting thing. (Although, a lot of it also is the film's fault by outlining basically every scene with "Me So Horny" in the background.) Worst of the year so far, probably will get topped but what a waste.