I hope all of my American readers out there had an enjoyable 4th of July holiday chock full of blowin' shit up and hot dogs and blowin' up hot dogs. To all my American readers, ummmm....well...it's not like I can say something to the extent of "On this day, EVERYONE's an American" like they say with other holidays because a good chunk of people in America still don't even want to acknowledge anyone that's not white as an American, even if they've lived here all their lives. Hooray for xenophobia!
Anyway, much like my last blog entry. This one's not going to be very long because I'm still having trouble finding stuff to write about. But hopefully that'll change for a couple of reasons.
First of all, I actually have one article almost done but it's kinda "meh". After that, I have an idea for another one that has the potential to be awesome if I put the time into it and flesh it out a bit more beyond "just an idea". But beyond that, I don't have much. I kinda want to do another movie review but I don't know what of yet. Also, there's not a whole lot of stuff coming out for me to talk about.
Musically, there's not a lot out there that's exciting me right now. So far, I've only bought 3 albums (not counting 2 comedy albums) released this year and there hasn't been anything good released in the past few months. Right now, the only thing I can think of that's out is the Jonah Hex soundtrack EP that Mastodon did, but I'm not even sure if that's been released in stores. As for upcoming releases, The Sword's "Warp Riders" comes out on August 24 (with some sweet cover art) and Dimmu Borgir's next album comes out in October, just in time for Halloween. But beyond that, nothing. Oddly enough, I found out that William Control, the depraved dance-goth alter-ego of Aiden's Wil Francis, released a new album entitled "Noir" and I only found that out via the Stuff You Will Hate column from Something Awful. Yeah, it's a guilty pleasure of mine. Which reminds me, I REALLY hope Blaqk Audio releases an album this year. I know they have an album title set and songs completed but no release date as far as I know. In the midst of this musical drought, I reached out to some of my friends on Facebook for suggestions but nothing really tickled my fancy. Though I will admit, giving Animal Collective a chance made me think that they were more than just your average gimmicky indie quirky-for-quirky's-sake fare and worth a listen. In the meantime, I decided to break out a few of my old CD's that I haven't listened to lately, including "Spiritual Black Dimensions" by Dimmu Borgir and Converge's seminal classic "Jane Doe".
There's not a lot going on for movies either. Hell, my next article is basically going to be "Hey, these are all the movies I have left to watch and I need content, dammit!" But I did manage to find yet another video store closing, this time another Movie Gallery while visiting my friends for a July 4th cookout. We had some time to kill so we strolled on over. And unlike the crappy Movie Gallery that closed a few weeks back that only dropped their prices down to $5 a DVD and didn't have a very good selection, this one dropped their prices down to $1.99 a DVD for New Releases and $1.49 for everything else. (Also, 80% off for games and Blu-Ray, though Blu-Rays didn't have a set price) And their selection was pretty decent for only having a couple days left. Here's what I managed to snag:
-The Kid Stays In The Picture - A documentary about movie producer Robert Evans. I wanted to see this ever since Patton Oswalt did a stand-up routine about him.
-Kiltro - A recent martial arts movie from Spain. I could stand to see some awesome kung fu.
-Not Quite Hollywood - A documentary about '70s exploitation films from Austraila AKA "Oz-sploitation". Been looking for this one for a while now and a Movie Gallery in the middle of buttfuck Northwest Ohio was literally the last place I expected to find it.
-The House of the Devil - A recent horror movie that's a throwback to cult worship films of the '70s and '80s, so authentic that it could've easily been made back then. If I had the money, I would've gotten it on Amazon with a bonus VHS version in an old-school clamshell case but oh well.
-The Warriors for PS2 - Yup another video game to add to the stack. But at least this one's based on one of the coolest '80s movies ever.
The best part? I managed to snag all of that for under $10, unlike the other Movie Gallery where I got the same amount for over $25! And most of the discs were near perfect to boot! And unlike the other Movie Gallery, they also opened up the cases, maybe only to check if the discs were inside but at least they did that. The dumb bitch that worked at the other one didn't and now I'm stuck with an anti-theft device on my copy of Iron Monkey. Yeah, maybe that's a bit harsh but still, I'm kinda glad that place closed down so that she wouldn't have a job. That's what she gets for ignoring me for minutes as I stood up at the counter, not saying a word to me and not even opening up the DVD to check its condition, let alone removing the anti-theft device! I decided to rip apart the case in an effort to take it off myself but to no avail. So now I'm stuck downloading the movie on a torrent. Hey, I DID buy it so it's technically legal.
Also, I plan on checking something out at the theaters this weekend for my birthday but I'm not exactly sure what. I'm leaning towards Predators because, well c'mon, you have Morpheus, Danny Trejo and the Yakuza fighting aliens. How badass is that? But considering I'll probably be going with a group, I don't know what everyone else will wanna see. I did want to see Despicable Me but the more I see the ads on TV, the less good it looks. I still haven't seen Toy Story 3 yet and would like to. And even though I don't think it's playing anymore, a sick part of me wants to see Jonah Hex just to see how bad it really is. Speaking of bad movies, apologies to any Avatar fans who felt shafted by The Last Airbender. I've been catching a few snippets of episodes of the original series here and there and it's pretty good. It definitely didn't deserve the M. Night Shamwow treatment. Hopefully this will be a sign to Hollywood not to give that hack any more money but apparently it did decently at the box office so who knows.
As for video games, I finally finished Yakuza 2 last weekend (as the two people who voted in my poll might have gathered) and was kinda disappointed. Not to say the ending or the story was bad, but there were so many plot twists and character turns that it kinda made it hard to care. It seemed like every single chapter it was like "Oh no, this guy's really a bad guy!" or "Oh no, these people are related somehow and didn't know until now!" Take into account the lengthy timespan that I played for and the long gaps inbetween plays and my ability to care about the story went down more. Hell, during the ending when one bad guy turns on another, I didn't even recognize who that guy was considering he only showed up about once or twice, so the importance was lost on me. With that said, Yakuza 3 still remains my only reason for wanting a PS3. That and Goro Majima will always be badass, whether he's voiced by Mark Hamill or not. And apparently, he's rumored to get his own spinoff game in the future, so yay! As for my other video games that I have yet to play, there was a tie in my poll about what I should play next: New Super Mario Bros. Wii and WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010. Currently, I'm leaning towards SvR'10 since I'm stuck on the damn ice world in Mario Bros. and ice worlds in video games suck. Seriously, the only thing worse than ice levels are underwater levels in 3D games (like any of the N64 games like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie). But with SvR'10, chances are I'd only really play around with the Create-A-Wrestler mode. Seriously, put a Create a Character mode in a game and I'd probably play with that more than the actual game. Just ask my ex-roommate on whose copy of Soul Calibur IV I added about 5 new fighters (including Mega Sean Connery!) without ever really playing the game. And like I said earlier, I did manage to snag The Warriors for PS2 on the cheap so I might give that a go. It's an old-school style beat-em-up that I've been wanting to play for the longest time. Oh yeah, and I did decide to pre-order AAA Legends of Lucha Libre or whatever the hell it's called, just for the lucha mask that GameStop is giving away for the pre-order bonus. Luckily, the Wii version is only $40 compared to $60 for the 360 and PS3...but then again, that's probably a tell-tale sign that it's going to be a sucky port. Whatever, I'll probably just trade it in anyways.
I figure I should probably update you guys on our gaming club as well, especially since I don't think our gaming group's actual blog has been updated in months, despite us still recording podcasts for it. We just wrapped up our Steampunk campaign for Mutants and Masterminds a few weeks ago. My character named Hitokiri Katsuo, a gunslinging Japanese hitman with robotic limbs, was able to defeat his nemesis in an epic fight but was also able to defeat the Oni inside him that fueled his revenge, resulting in his previously lopped off limbs to grow back. Hmmmm... Anyways, who knows if we'll ever pick the campaign back up again but it'll be interesting to say the least. We're taking a break for a few weeks between the July 4th holidays, birthday celebrations (3 of our birthdays fall within a couple days of each other, mine included) and moving situations. But after that, we're starting up another Star Wars campaign that's predominantly based in spaceship combat. Honestly, I'm not sure if I'm going to play it, at least not regularly. Even after returning from my self-imposed hiatus from gaming last year, my desire to do it has never really come back. And it's starting to get to the point where I have to game just to hang out with my friends, which kinda sucks as I prefer we'd do other stuff. Plus, I'm not that huge of a Star Wars fan (or sci-fi nerd in general) so it's not really my kind of setting. But I am getting psyched for 4th Edition of Legend of the 5 Rings, though. We don't have an exact start time for that game but I'm already getting a character started. So far, beyond basic stats and a few extras, here's a preview of what my guy is going to be like: I took an Advantage in "Daredevil" and a Disadvantage in "Epileptic". Yes. I said "Epileptic". So, yeah, it's gonna be awesome.
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