I watched The Hateful Eight in 70mm

It cost me ~TWENTY DOLLARS~ to see it in 70mm.  I saw it that way because I missed out on seeing Interstellar in 70mm.  I also at least wanted to know the last film I saw on film.  I saw a showing of 1989 Batman at the Alamo Drafthouse and I'm almost certain that was just playing a Bluray.  Maybe it was 2001, but also I feel that might have been a Bluray.

I got my favorite seat for a theater experience like this.  2nd row from the back of the front section.  I want a screen to envelope me.  I want to have to pan my head to see the left and right of the screen.

I don't really like Tarantino films.  I love Jackie Brown.  I watch it at least once a year.  I always feel afterwards he's too indulgent and too obsessed with the nature of cinema.  But his obsession with cinema gives him sole leeway to be too indulgent.  The other film of his that I actually liked the first time I saw it was Deathproof.  A film that is almost entirely him being indulgent.  It is filled with these long monologues he loves.  It just actors (and himself) being mouthpieces for his monologues.  Then it has two terrific and terrifying chase sequences.  The chase sequences will always be great, the monologues on repeat are not-watchable.  Once the monologues become an issue Tarantino is lost to you.

Then his obession with cinema.  How he loves cinema.  He drops old scores into his films.  He has references all over the place in his films.  I'd rather be friends with the guy than watch his films.  After I saw Inglorious Bastards I felt like I should just give up seeing his films.  So I never saw Django Unchained.  I heard it was Tarantino being Tarantino.

Then let me say The Hateful Eight is also Tarantino being Tarantino.  He collects a great cast.  He gives them these monologues to say.  He's seen so much cinema that it just bleeds into every frame.  he doesn't need to try and reference anything, he does it naturally.  He gets Enrio Morricone to do the soundtrack.  Then he has a weird pop-song interlude in the film that stopped me.

From the start of the film I was thinking about westerns.  I was thinking about the font he was using.  I was thinking about how great westerns are frequently about weird fashion.  Yes that was a good font he chose.  Yes everyone's outfits are perfect to give them more character.  I was thinking if I was going to remember Morricone's score after the film ended (I didn't.)

I was thinking how the actors all have great stage presence and other films they had been in.  I was thinking about what I was going to write about the film.  I didn't go into it thinking I would write words about it.  I saw 100 films last year, most of them did not inspire multple paragraphs in me.  Before the intermission I was thinking about writing this post.

And I felt Tarantino's hands all over it.  Being indulgent.  I will put this here.  I will use this actor.  Micheal Madson doesn't have to say anything to know that he's a bastard, and yet you want to like him.  I wanted to call it a mystery or suspense but I didn't care about the actual mystery or the suspense.  My mind was wandering all over the film except about the events happening on the screen.

Which is what happens when I watch Tarantino.  I'm thinking about everything about the film except the actual film.  I have no stake in any of the characters.  The reveals are just another point in the movie.  Tarantino sure does love Title Cards and I'm not sure why they are here outside of a convenient break scene.

Huh the Weinstein's Executive Produced this and didn't real him in?  Isn't that what they are notorious for doing?  They are known to butcher cut films down.  Yet here is their name on an almost 3 hour film.  That's strange.  But if anyone gets to be indulgent it's Tarantino.  He loves cinema.

I did not love this film.  It was not worth TWENTY DOLLARS.  But I do have a last film I saw on film story.

Further Suffering

Why the honk do I keep watching these terrible films?  Why do I keep forcing myself to consume these (mostly Japanese films) in which I can predict the plot almost entirely, I don't like any of the characters, and I'm just waiting for the rape-scene to happen.

Maybe because I want some sort of self-righteousness that I saw these films, and I know how bad they are.  How they disregard women.  Then even further any English description or review or critique passes over any sexual assault that happens.

I'm yelling at myself here.  There is definitely great stuff on Hulu's Criterion Collection.  I've seen stuff recently I enjoyed every second of.  Maybe writing about my lack of will will give me the will I need to will.  Let's get on with some reviews of stuff I've seen recently. If I got screencaps from twitter, that will be the links to follow each.

World on a Wire
This is great.  It's almost 3 and a half hours of people talking, but I loved it.  It's proto-Matrix from 1973!  It's orange and teal by design and beautiful.  In my ever approaching list of 10 Criterion movies to watch on hulu this is on it.  I loved it. 1 2

Double Suicide
Myself elsewhere:"Then my now favorite J-director Shinoda (Our Marriage, One Way Ticket to Love, A Flame at the Pier (watch AFatP already) did Double Suicide which opens with stage hands setting up a puppet show while ?the director? talks on the phone about where the double suicide takes places. It is kind of a basic J-story, but it has lots of neat artifice to it that I like." 1

Japanese Summer Double Suicide
Also great.  Weird stagey.  A man that wants to die and no one will kill him.  A woman that wants sex and cannot find it. A boy that wants to kill but is never given the chance.  The world might as well as ended.  Or they exist outside it.  This film feels like it says more about 60s postwar Japan than a lot of the films I watch. 1 2 3 4

Everything Goes Wrong
Not to be confused with Daly's Gone Wrong.  Maybe this film was never on my good side, as it stars a guy I've seen twice already as a sociopathic rapist.  In this film he's just a sociopath shitty asshole teen.  Terrible things happen. 1 2 

Death Shadows
I honestly can't remember much of this film.  But revisiting my twitter, it sure does have some cool visuals. 1 2 3 4

Love New and Old
That's just it's Hulu title, the original is Shamisen and Motorcycle.  Which why would you go away from that title? Like Our Marriage it is a pretty basic story but it's filled with these live human beings. The women characters are complete people. That's sadly still rare today and more amazing for 1960. Towards the end it captures what loss is, and I was bawling. I'm still teary eyed now. Less the film, and more that it cut open wounds from my own life in a way I appreciated. Then it had about 30 seconds of unnecessary film. I continue to find in Shinoda what I guess everyone else gets from Kurosawa or Ozu. early Shinoda has real humanity to it. I find something like Ozu's Tokyo Story a gentle bulldozer. The human drama Kurosawas' I've seen I'm just staring at them bored. . 1 2

Let's talk why that shot is neat though.  The camera stays on the room.  It is only when asked about the time that the characters look up and the camera moves up to show the clock, and then they continue their conversation and the clock moves back down.

Youth in Fury
Shinoda again (watch a Flame at the Pier).  His messiest film I've seen, it just kind of ends even with a bunch of stuff slammed together.  It could have easily lasted another 30 minutes.  It has an asshole protagonist.  My problem with those usually, is they are just shitty petty jerks going WHATEVERMAN.  Here the world is reacting to him not belonging in it.  Instead of just saying the Youth of post-reconstruction Japan are fucked, it gives them dimensions and motivations.  They are still fucked, but maybe there is a reason for it.

 History is Made At Night
This film was old and boring I just wanted to link this again.

Safety Last!
Harold Lloyd silent film.  So I enjoy the craft more than actually enjoying the film.  The subplots for the comedy made me groan.  The final climbing the building sequence is worth watching.  1

Gates of Hell
I watched this thinking it was going to be horror.  Then it wasn't.  instead it ended a Tragedy For Everyone Involved.  Everyone wears a mountain of color.  It won the Academy Award for that.  Skip through it just to enjoy all the costumes.

The Fire Within
confirms I hate French Films. They are all just two people frozen mid-coitus while an omnipotent narrator says some bullshit.

Mahler 
was kind of cool, but you could use a highlight reel for the same effect.

Getting Old and Wasting Time

After every movie I watch on Hulu I go back to my queue and count it.  It's currently at 96.  When I got the urge to update this blog, I was trying to write reviews of what I had seen on it.  That fell off.  When I first got the subscription I screamed at the amount of Criterion films on there.  I've now seen a whole bunch of Criterion films and still have a bunch more I intend to see.  I think.

But one day I'm going to die.  I'm going to die and have wasted a whole lot of time on dumb media.  That's what you get for being an introvert who doesn't drink and just wants to move to the other side of the world already.  Until then, a bunch of video games and movies and not enough books.  Not to say books are a better way to spend your time.  I hate that I read all 1000 pages of 1Q84.  I respect that I read all of Lord of the Rings and declare that the movies are definitely better.  I read all of Anna Karenina and feel like I learned something.  I didn't love it.  I question if it didn't have any cultural baggage would I have dropped it.

Cultural Baggage caused me to finish two films recently.  They both had acclaim for reasons.  Neither of them were particularly long. Y tu mama tambien ended up being a decent film in the end.  I was happy I watched it.  The ?actual? sex at the beginning and marijuana usage made me fear it was going to be about shitty asshole teens doing shitty asshole stuff.  There are a lot of those.  I had just seen Spainish language film about that Deprisa, Deprisa.  Outside of a man staring into a fire and seeing truth I got nothing out of it.  I hate shitty assholes be shitty assholes films.  There are a lot of them.  Their rebellion is so small and self-centered and only about themselves being crap-containers. 

Y Tu Mama Tambien had a decent movie in it.  Near the end, they play a jukebox number B-13.  I used that as a randomizer and on my queue B-13 ended up being Gimme Shelter.  The Rolling Stones documentary.  Not a Rolling Stones fan (sorry!) the music didn't give me much.  The eventual chaos was smaller scale than I thought.  I did want a bit more journalism in it.  Or any journalism.  Which wasn't the point.  The point was a whole lot of people were on a whole lot of drugs.

So back to the queue.  What's at the top? A Legend or Was it? ideallic farmside in the opening.  Something feels off in my head.  I pull open reviews.  They don't say specifics but they keep mentioning it gets dark.  I decide the film is going to be a bad time. I close out and remove it from my queue.  I feel..guilt? about not finishing the film.  I didn't get my full experience?  I could have given it more time.  It still nags me days later.  There's not even a friend or a website yelling at me about the film.  Just silent tug at my brain that you need to do a thing.  And I know the answer is no.  There are infinite films that will instantly grab my attention and enjoyment.  Or films I can re-visit that I know I enjoy.  I could on Hulu re-watch I Hate But Love, Kill!, A Flame At the Pier.  Or see films I am actually intersted in.  Or watch Parks and Recreation?  Or a classic sitcom just to see if it is any good. or ALL OF SEINFELD.  But no I should waste this time on this film.  My brain is telling me to.

So I'm fighting that impluse but then in video games I will get sucked into doing complete bullshit.  Or against my better judgement go after trophies because ???  There was a quiz recently that showed my "gamer type" or whatever.

That chart is pretty much true.  It doesn't go into how I will try for achievements and completions against my rational judgement.  I know I get nothing outside of running towards the day I will die.  I should at 30 be focused on learning or enjoyment.  I get nothing out of doing side crap.  Or even beating a game I don't enjoy.  Better to play a shooter or Bloodborne.  I've got Destiny now, and I hate the crap out of it.  Then a friend convinced me to get both expansions.  Now no one i know is palying it and I'm out 20 bucks.  I have absolute apathy towards Destiny.  I just want to at least get something of my twenty dollars I wasted in enjoyment.  or time towards my ultimate demise.

I hate acheivements and checklists.  I keep thinking about trying to see 100 movies before the year is over.  That's a terrible idea.  Towards that goal I was suffer though something I hate or worse completely apathetic about.  Oh great 2 hours of nothing.  Or a game 8 hours of nothing.  killallgames.exe

Maybe this is a side effect of that I keep a list of media I consume.  I've got lists for years.  I'm happy because it helps my faulty memory about the ways I spend my leisure time.  That energy should be put towards a diary to keep my thoughts down. 

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Let's go back to that chart.  It does help define my game habits..to a point.  I love playing games with friends.  I definitely prefer hard action to turn based or numbers.  I want action and reaction and control.  I want to play well and be rewarded and punished in my performance.  This probably means I should play fighting games, but I cant' get the focus to spend enough time on them.

Video Game stories are trash garbage for people that only know video games.  I can get behind an environment and just being in a place though.  The creativity % is misleading.  It could be assume that I want to build or design.  I hate those aspects of games.  I do try and push the game and see what it can and cannot do.  Go backwards where-ever possible.  There's probably a bobble there that needs to be picked up and I need that TROPH.

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Hopefully in writing this, tomorrow I will make better decisions on my media and I will look at the media as I play it and go "one day I am going to die."  I will then smile and continue to enjoy the media.  Or I will quit and do something else.  Like spend 4 hours tonight just refreshing facebook and twitter.

Vita Games

I need to get some Vita game impressions down on some words before they slip away as transitively as they are.

Murasaki Baby is by Massimo Guarini the director of Shadows of the Damned.  He's decided to get away from Grasshopper and make something independent.  His product is a cute-scary scary-cute game about making the player try to manipulate the Vita to do some simple puzzles. 

There is also Escape Plan which is about making the player try to manipulate the Vita to do some simple puzzles.

In Metrico, the developers have the player manipulate the Vita to do some simple puzzles.

None of these games use language to explain their features.  That's a tiny bit clever.  There is almost the same escalation of feature reveal. I never felt clever in my experience with each game.  It was always a mild frustation at having to figure out how they wanted me to manipulate the Vita and how many of these manipulations would I have to do at the same time.  Sometimes you're pinching the Vita.  Sometimes you're using buttons.  Sometimes you're re-wiring your brain to understand what it wants you to do. 

It never made me feel smart or ah-ha!  Which should be a sign I should delete all 3 games off my console.  Murasaki Baby is the one I found most engaging, that might be because of who made it and in the credits discovered the Akira Yamanoaka sounding soundtrack was Akira Yamanoaka.  I got it because of Playstation Plus.

Also because of Playstation Plus? Well. I can't find it on my Vita.  Fennick and something?  I was going to say it was a 2D platformer controlled by Worms (the game).  In the running theme of this entire system, it was asking me to grope the controls to have me do numbing activities.

I guess the Vita is pretty good if you want to play an anime game.

Jeff Rosenstock - We Cool?

I was/am a huge huge Bomb The Music Industry! fan.  Vacation is already a classic album.  BTMI! ended with an almost perfect album.

So now the head guy of BTMI! has a new project that features some parts of that band but is called a solo project.  I always thought of Jeff as the heard and soul of Bomb but there is maybe more distinction there than I think.  Or maybe it is just doing the thing where they do not have to play old songs because this is a different band.  They keep referring to it as a different thing and as a solo project.  But it does still feature a full band.

Here is an album that reminds me of myself.  If I kept thinking about death after I turned 21.  I sure did think about death a lot as a teen and college student.  Not in a goth way (I was a ska fan for bonglord's sake.)  Just a lot about what it would mean if I died.  For Jeff I don't think that ever stopped.  It has been a theme in his lyrics.  That and the depression I've never had.

This is how you think about death when you're 30.  When you've had the people close to you die and then see how people change the first time a close person to them dies.  With that death you keep being alive.  And you keep thinking about what would happen if you died.  I'm glad I stopped having these conversations with myself.  Though Jeff keeps having them and has had them for a lot longer than I have.

And I wouldn't call this a dour or depressing album.  It is just fighting with that personal conversation the whole time.  It's putting on an earnest smile while thinking about death.

It is an album that frequently makes me go "Yeah I know what you mean."  This is strongest on "I'm Serious, I'm Sorry."

I really don't like "Hey Allison."  I read a review about "has there ever been a song with "hey [name]" as the title?"  hmm.

I like the album outside of this.  As this is 2015.  Make up your mind since the album is FREE.  And streaming.  As always the role of music reviews in 2015 is curation and analysis less than IS IT GOOD?

Twin Peaks The Pilot

Fun for all ages, a man watches a TV Show that is 25 years old for the first time. 

It was kind of boring. 

That's my honest feeling.  Everyone is angry with me now.  Or agreeing with me.  I can't tell I'm writing this now.  I liked that it was paced like The Wire.  It was paced like chapter 1 of a novel.  It didn't have a TV show arc.  What happened in the pacing over 90 minutes was a bit dull though.

I liked that it was season 3 of a drama with a murder dropped into it.  All the characters had history and relations like a long running drama.  There just happened to be a murder involved.  So you get FBI Agent Dale Cooper.

The music was fantastic though. 

And I guess I will watch episode 2 I mean it is there on Hulu+.  So in that way it was successful.  I will spend some of the limited time before I die with the series again.  I'll probably decide if I'm going to watch anymore based on that second episode.  So Twin Peaks you're on thin ice because being on thin ice is the only way to treat any media in 2015.  There's too much media that you will absolutely enjoy to waste time with stuff you are indifferent to.  I could watch season 4 of Archer.  I haven't seen that yet.  Will probably love it!

Or I could waste a thousand more hours on the internet doing jack shit.  That will probably be what happens.

One Way Ticket to Love (1959) - Hulu Plus

Criterion had a 50% off sale.  I took that as an opportunity to finally try Hulu Plus since they have a lot of Criterion films on there.  I could sample the first 20 minutes of films I might find worth buying.  I will maybe come back to this neglected blog to talk about them.  But I have this trial and I did queue up in just the Criterion films: 159 films.  That's a lot of movies.  It's certainly longer than just a 2 week trial.  I'll go ahead and pay for one month, why not?  I'm certainly getting my money's worth. 

Hulu doesn't really advertise that they have Criterion and Janus films on there.  They do in abundance.  The best I've experienced so far is One Way Ticket To Love.  I wish I could read the Japanese title, but I can't.

I'm going to try and not spoil it.  But if I fail at that stop at this paragraph.  It is a Japanese film from 1959.  It is something of a love story.  It is something of a marketing tool for the same title single.  In 2014 it is a fantastic B-movie experience.  In the context of 1959 it is astounding it exists.  All the characters have more depth then you expect.  It is above all a tragedy.

Now I'm going to try and talk about the actual film without spoiling it.  The main theme throughout is Japanese culture's guilt duty.  Very good sociological term I made there.  Because of being given an opportunity a character is required to do one thing.  Because of the social bubble they have entered into they are now part of that social bubble.  That social bubble requires they do another.  Each character also has a life outside of that social bubble.

I said it was a love story.  It's a love story in the same way that Romeo and Juliet is a love story. So it's a lust story. Yes, Rudie, I guess you could say that. The various loves in the story line up with the guilt duty into making a Wire style poster board of allegiences and debts. 

Each character feels like a stereotype seen in various films of the time.  They rise above it to become people that you believe in their actions.  While you could say that almost every problem in the film is solved by just walking away most of them can't and by J-society they definitely can't. 

NOW ANOTHER LAYER OF SPOILING BUT NOT

A gun will eventually makes its appearance.  It will begin to change hands.  The predicted target of the gun will continue to change.  Eventually the gun goes off.  And then the film ends.  The ending shot is heartbreaking. 

I'm having such a good time thinking about this film.  I'm going to have to get a copy somehow.  It's only on HuluPlus.  If this is the best film I get out of the experience that's okay.  It is a fantastic film.  I want other people to see it so I can talk to them about it.

東狂アルゴリズム Toukyou Algorithm

So I went to a last show of Tokyo  Algorithm right before I moved back to America.  It was a cool show and kind of sad because they were a real cool band.  I decided to look them up again last night.  Turns out they are playing a shows again.  They were indie as fuck back then self making all their CDs.  Now the singer has a record label that is various shades of j-punk.

Link to sampler

They just released a sampler that comes out TODAY.  One of the bands sounds exactly like Jeff Rosenstock's Ska Band.  Also it is pretty dang obvious when Toukyou Algorithm actually comes on the station.  I'd like their new song, or any of their back catalog that has disspeared because they were indie as fuck so if you didn't go to their shows you didn't get their stuff.

But their "main" album is on US iTunes and you can get it right now!  Just search for Tokyo Algorithm!  It's right there.  It's fantastic!  it has music like this:

There name is Toukyou.  It sounds like the city but the kanji is written as "EAST" "LUNATIC" as opposed to "EAST" "CAPITAL".  And if this music isn't your thing I'm sorry.

The Gameboy is 25 here is an index

Everyone is celebrating the Game Boy/Gameboy.  That means it is as good as time as any for me to actually make an index of my screenshots and comments when I played through the entire Game Boy/Gameboy romset.  Enjoy and link!

#-B
C
D part 1
D part 2
D part 3
E
F part 1
F part 2
G part 1
G part 2
H part 1
H part 2
I
J
K part 1
K part 2
K part 3
L
M part 1
M part 2
M part 3
M part 4
M part 5
N
N sports
O
P part Pone
P part Ptwo
P part Pthree - Q
R part 1
R part 2
S part 1
S part 2
S part 3
S part 4
T part 1
T part 2
T part 3
U - V
W
XYZ

Bother me on twitter if any of the links are bad!  Even if I don't write about crap I'm playing much anymore I am still playing all kinds of things. Listen to me talk about them on hinge problems!  It was absolutely insane that I did this project.  Enjoy all the pictures!

Disney World

So in the interest of celebrating I went to Disney World.  It was very expensive.  It was a great positive experience.  the 3-4 times I went to Tokyo Disney Resort I kept thinking "They could try 10% more and I would be completely satisfied."  I went 3-4 times to Disney World for various reasons in high school.  I remember really liking Epcot.

I enjoyed all of Disney (outside of it being very expensive constantly.)  The expense was always at a forefront in my mind as an adult.  I went their with my fiance. I just kept thinking of the multiplication of cost if we had one child.  If we had 2 children that suddenly wanted the constant barrage of things they wanted to sell you.  The constant barrage of overprice food or Disney Park branded merchandise that had no value outside of Disney parks.  Lightsabers for the night shows that I got hit in the thighs twice and the crotch once walking by a kid swinging one.

But the need to sell you things constantly is also reflected back at you with how amazingly it all runs.  There was buses to everywhere in the D-World from our Disney hotel every 10-15 minutes all day.  The parks are incredibly run for the absurd amount of traffic every day.  One of the major attractions would be down for only 90-120 minutes if it broke.  For any kind of technical difficulty that is insane.  All of the stores looked perfect despite probably being destroyed by children and customers constantly all day.  It is an incredibly run machine.

This is partially because of the college interns that aren't paid but are given food and board to work 12 hour shifts.  And they have to be busting with smiles the whole time.  My fiance had a button declaring our "anniversary".  You know they say it to everyone, but twenty strangers throughout your day enthusiastically declaring "Happy Anniversary" does make your day better.  The level of service is constantly amazing.

It's also the same level of service you get in most places in Japan.  On Japan, when we entered Japan-land in Epcot we both immediately felt at home.  It is VERY Japanese.  Right down to the Irrashaimase.  Oh and they full equipped, full sized Japanese Department store Mitsukoshi.  Where most of the "countries" have a thing, Japan has a full sized Pagoda, Castle, and a department store made to look like a temple.  It is impressively large.

10 years ago Epcot's Worldshowcase would have had more value to me, or...most Americans.  Today we have the internet and World Markets.  The main feature of the different countries is shopping for goods from those countries.  90% of this is stuff you can find in your local import goods store or World Market or probably amazon.  I'm sure it has amazing value to people not from America.  All this stuff from around the world.

Despite what I claimed a dozen times before I went, I didn't get drunk, though getting drunk around the wold sounded like a heck of a fun time.  I originally planned to get drunk despite being a non-drinker because I wanted to turn off the thinking part of my brain a tiny bit.  A constant problem with Tokyo Disney as I said above, is I kept thinking "this could be a tiny bit better very easily."  World didn't have this problem.

The food in Tokyo Disney SUCKS.  It is tasteless and expensive.  At least Disney World will spend 10 cents per dish on some spices.  I thank them for that and then curse them for having to spend 10 dollars a meal.  I never drank a coke there, so I'm proud of that.  I kept looking at every (?American?) in the park and going "lood gord at least cut out soft drinks."  Having one water bottle we kept refilling saved us at least FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS (and you can too.)

I'm exaggerating that number (a tiny bit).

Most of the food was super greasy though.  So that wasn't great!  At least I got to eat some Moroccan food and a giant turkey leg (wonder what they do with the rest of the bird?)  I didn't get to dine at the restaurant that is also an aquarium (booked 6 months in advance, along with all the nicer places).  In Tokyo Disney we just walked right up and in to the bayou style place that Pirates of the Caribbean goes though and had an incredibly bland meal for Cajun food.

I can probably blame 90% of my frustration at Tokyo Disney on it not being actually owned by Disney.  FUN FCAT.



SO HOW ARE THE PARKS?

I'll try and talk about them one at a time, but y'all know my writing style at this point.  Lot's of parenthesis.

The Magic Kingdom

- The Peoplemover ride in Tomorrowland is definitely there for sweet teen makeouts and more adult stuff.  It is a slow moving ride where there is a good 1-2 minute section of complete darkness.  Like can't see anything dark.  It's not even a ride so much as an excuse for sweet makeouts or more.   You see like 2 things as it takes you in a loop around tomorrowland. I bet the disney cast members that get to watch the security cams for that ride have a real good time.  Oh yeah You're being monitored at disney world at all times.  By those college kids who aren't getting paid but are being wonderful to you for 12 hours with their incredible stamina.
- It sure is super annoying that everyone calls him Captain Jack Sparrow on Pirates of the Caribbean ride.   It is a joke that he asks for more respect than he deserves in the movies.  Then you have his nemesises call him by his full name CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW.  His animatronic looks super good though.  Weird next to the 60 year old ones though.
- It's pretty weird they still have Tom Sawyer island and frontierland.  I didn't see anything from the Lone Ranger there now that I think about it.  Make TSI the city for lost boys from Pinocchio.  Or something.  Keep the Tree House from Swiss Family Robbison.  Tree Houses are cool.
- The Hall of Presidents was super patriotic and almost got me in the mood.  I thought it would have something from every president instead there is just this long listing of each one who then slightly nods their heads.
- They certainly put 2000s era technology in Haunted Mansion and do one thing in there that frankly blows my mind and I'm not sure how they pull it off.  A+  also giving kids stuff to do in lines is super cool and they should do that in every ride.
- You get to touch this wall with musical instruments and it changes the song that is playing.  There's also a bookshelf that will just not keep all the books in place.
- No seriously it is insane how many rides give you nothing to look at or to distract the kids with.
- At the park entrance hidden is a special talking blinking mickey you can get your picture with.  It freaked us out. 
- The...light show on the castle is super awesome.
- we were in the wrong position for the fireworks, but they were going off right above us so I sort of super enjoyed that even though we missed a lot of the visual element of them against Cinderilli's castle.

EPCOT

 - Test Track had been changed since I went in high school.  Now you HAVE TO make a dumb fake car with a touch screen for 4 minutes before you can be in line to ride the car.  After the ride you get a statistic screen about how your car did.  You can then buy a thingy and if you wait in line again (40-60 minutes more) you can tune your car.  I wanted to ride again, but I definitely wanted to skip doing the dumb car thing. Also despite renovating it there is still this one person wide ramp up to the cars that is an echo chamber and absolutely miserable if you hate tiny echo chambers.
- The NASA ride ?Mission:space? definitely let me know about some fears I have.  It is a motion ride, but with a big thing strapping you in a tiny room.  As soon as that happened my brain screamed "GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT."  I did the mild course which I'm going to assume was shorted.  Interesting, but never going to ride if I go back ever.  I discovered a fear and I'm going to try avoid being in that fear.
- Francis Ford Coppola-George Lucas-Micheal Jackson's Captain EO is freaking bonkers and I loved it.  80s action movie aesthetic is a real good thing.  Happy it is back.
- Soaring definitely has the longest wait time of anything and didn't do a lot for me.  You sort of move next to an IMax screen through random scenes of California.  with really hard cuts between places.  The lady liked it a lot though.  Should really be a ride for one of the countries though instead of a transplant from Californialand.
- Weird that the 2 countries with rides are right next to each other.  Mexico and Norway both feature boat rides. Norway is the cooler ride.
- France sells baguettes for like 2 dollars.  I freaking love baguettes.
- In both Epcot and Magic Kingdom there's a Starbucks.  I originally screamed against it because there is DISNEY COFFEE and I was going to enjoy that if I was in Disney world.  Then on the last day I found out the starbucks in question is A STARBUCKS.  It has normal prices.  You could get a giant coffee for 3 dollars instead of a small coffee for 4 dollars anywhere else in the park.  Or a bottled water.  Or a pastry for 2 dollars.  The long lines for starbucks in Disney suddenly made sense.  I even used my starbucks card.  It was that much a starbucks.
- Epcot sure is huge.  It is huge and spread out and clearly the 80s Imagineers trying all sorts of things.  Like not having lots of clear direction.  Which is really a constant problem in all the parks is lack of knowing where you are going.  We'll revisit this.
- Epcot features Duffy!  The Disney Sea Bear from Japan.  That bear is super super popular in Japan despite being for all purposes a normal teddy bear.  Yes there were Japanese girls in line for Duffy.
- It sure is fun to walk around the different countries and see all the...well all the things you can buy because there's not much to look at really.  Morocco is cool for having a bunch of "back alleys". 
- When we had a sit down meal in Epcot I was suddenly confronted with the terrible thought, "Do I have to...tip in Disney World?"
- This is true of all the parks, the bathrooms are always completely undecorated. They might as well be a bathroom in a 2nd rate mall.  There are never mirrors at the sinks.  There is only a mirror right by the entrance and sometimes perpendicular to the first urinal.
- In MK there was a spring dress that the lady looked at.  it was a reasonable 30 dollars.  In Epcot Morroco there was a pretty dress that of roughly the same fabric that would set you back 90 dollars.
- Japan couldn't have been more Japan.  They had an engrish sign in the store.  Engrish in the middle of Disney.  "Do not let the pen to saturate for other customers."  It was a neat paintbrush that you painting with water.  You could also get a kimono.
- The monorail too Epcot is great because you circle the giant golfball.  I bet Big Disney fans get angry if you call it a golfball.
- The golfball ride is still the best place to take a 15 minute nap.
- Since the cold war is over maybe they should add a Russia?  It's weird they havent' given another country a space since it opened.  There are 2 "empty" slots.  Russia or India seem like the obvious choices.

my stupid car.

despite there being two food places right here there is no where to sit.

HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS

 - In 9th grade I fell out of Tower of Terror.  The safety bar for the row was too high and as a small small teen my feet slipped out and went above my head.  I don't ride ToT.  I didn't even enjoy it before that experience and now I have plenty of reason to say Yeah I'm not getting on that.
- We also passed on Rockin' Rollercoaster because neither of us like Rollercoasters and I don't like Aerosmith.
- So the first thing we did was see the Beauty and the Beast musical.  Which was pretty good.  It was 20 minutes long which as a straight male is the exact length of musical I can take before I need to be somewhere else.
- Where Epcot is huge and sprawling, MGM is very compact.  This was clearly a reaction to Epcot being so big.  That doesn't stop there being either dead space or way too many shops selling more or less the same thing.
- I wrote in my huge deathsmiles article about the diner here where you're at your aunt and uncles and they tease the hell out of you.  We didn't go, but I still hold fond memories of it.  If we had spent more than 4 hours in this park we might have gone.
- The Toy Story ride had clearly the longest line of anything in any park at a healthy 70 minutes all day long.  We never rode it.  I'm not too shook up about that.  Tokyo Disney is getting it this year.
- The Captain Jack Sparrow Experience is clearly Disney going "we need another ride and we have 20 dollar budget."  So you stand in a room and watch a video and then you are told to leave the room.  There is audience participation.
- Star Tours actually delivered.  The 3D Graphics and Effects were all really good.
- I bet that Honey We Shrunk the Kids playground is fucking awesome if you are 9.
- There's a section made to look like NYC and now a section made to look like San Francisco.  Complete with signs for restaurants that don't exist.   There's also nothing to do here. You can take a picture in front of a large mural?  Or stare at an expired box of pocky in front of a Asian Supermarket Storefront.
- This goes along with a lot of Hollywood studios feels very half finished.  It's been around for almost 20 years I think and everywhere there is the feeling that "something should be here one day?"
- You could wait in line to take a picture of with a static-nonmoving car from Cars.
- This was the park we went to first because I knew it wouldn't take long and it was the first of 3 broken Afterburner Climax cabinets I found.  There was Afterburner Climax all over disney world and none of it worked.  At one was a creepy dude dressed like Jack Sparrow that clearly wasn't a cast member and also clearly had no business creeping in an arcade.  The state of Disney World Arcades.
- We saw the fireworks show here too.  Which was impressive especially since they do two shows a night and every night.  There's also an impossible to follow story that is an excuse for a bunch of different disney characters to be around and have a kick ass dragon robot.

There is nothing to do here.

A linux based and themed arcade game.  beautiful.

ANIMAL KINGDOM

- Is definitely a zoo.
- So you get to see some cool animals
- The Safari said they had a black rhino.  Which made me think "isn't that thing extinct."  I was excited to see one.  Then there wasn't one to see and the "tour guide" didn't say anything about that bit.
- This park has the worst design with several "choke points" that must be nightmares when it opens and closes.  The whole park is cut through a pretty small pathway.
- It's a zoo so it is depressing.
- Dinosaur is still HELL the ride.  It is bouncy, bumpy, completely black, with demon dinosaurs jumping out at you.  
- Once someone left a gun on Dinosaur.  LEFT A GUN ON A RIDE.
- You are completely lost in this place if you do not have a map.
- The rapids ride is entirely about getting wetting and possibly getting soaked.  It is also not about high level thrills.  There is a drop and then you get wet.  Li-li-like dubstep????
- Long line for the burger place.  No line for curry.  The curry was as good as curry you get in the frozen foods aisle.
- There's a few places to just be in a room with a bunch of birds.  It's weird.  The birds are just hanging out on the walkway
- Outside the bird cage a Florida specific grackle caws for your curry.  Him and his 10 grackle friends.

After 2 and a half days of Disney I was ready to go back to reality and again question how anyone brings their kid there.

I can't in good conscience buy Ging Nang Boyz new album

So Ging Nang Boyz have a new album released right....now.  I would have been super excited for this.  I really like their screaming breaking the speakers punk rock.  I love it when they got it the fuck together and made the Boys on the Run single.  I think the Boys on the Run "video" is heartbreaking and beautiful.

There other videos are all very and beautiful in this shame and teenage sexuality and how weird is to be that public about it when you are 15 or in your 30s.  Bomb The Music Industry's Jeff Rosenstock likes them enough to cover one of their songs in Japanese, "I don't wanna die."

So first we have a video which is very cute and almost a counterpoint Boys on the Run.  It is 12 minutes of cute girls blowing kisses at the camera.  The song is called "paadamu" which I'm not going to pretend I know what it means with even a dictionary.  I'm also not going to pretend what the lyrics means but will try by having it play in the background over and over as I write this.

Paadamu is almost a counterpoint to BotR.  BotR goes out of it's way to humanize and break down walls of the boys/men that are presented.  It shows them all in a very vunerable light.  I'm not sure what they were told to draw on the white board, but you have an incredible wave of stuff from "I don't want to disappointment my parents anymore", "I want a girlfriend", "I want to have sex with this AV Idol", or just "Frank Zappa."  They interview a huge range of guys.  You're given a brief chance to relate to a hundred+ people.  And you give hundred+ a voice.  Ging Nang Boyz based on youtube views have more fame than you'd expect them to have as a screaming punk rock band.  Then again I didn't know this band　（warning creepy clown mask) until I saw their video with a billion views or this band that literally has cocksucker in their name.  So don't trust me to know what's popular in Japanese rock music.

Asside: Sekai no Owari is so イメージ it hurts.  I actually really like that song despite me wanting to hate it.

So the female counterpart is full of male gaze.  We do have a woman saying some words at the beginning of the song.  Who is speaking or why?  I don't know.  Let's assume the band wrote the words that were spoken.  "Do you see this beautiful world?"  "You are my beginning and end."  Then the not bad song plays and we return to the most male gazey part of a very male gaze filled video of a girl trying to not look at the camera.  I can't decide whether we're supposed to assume she's looking at the camera or at the person the camera is supposed to represent.  Most of these girls submitted the videos themselves (I hope! Not someone submitted videos of them without knowledge) There was an ad on their website a while back.  But these girls are not presented to show that they are people (if you prick them do they not bleed).  The Boys/men were.  We are just to sit here and enjoy all the pretty girls.  Which I definitely did, but contrasted with Boys on the Run it's probablmatic.

That's not the only problem.  BotR was an old song, for a movie (which I also think is very good for humanizing the loser males of Japanese society, aka my favorite film of 2010.)  The problem is the 42 minute other video used to ?promote? the new album.

BEGIN TRIGGER WARNING

 Tokyo's Last Story

I do not recommend watching that video.  It contains rape.  I'm going to describe the video in as simple but complete detail.

It starts innocently and awkwardly enough for Ging Nang Boyz.  A guy wants his girlfriend to fart in his face.  That's not far off from their weird sensibilities and whatever grown adults want to do.  There's definitely the weird submissiveness from the girl that I don't know how to process but that's a much much larger Japanese culture issue.  10 minutes into the video Yakuza thugs show up beat up the guy, throw the girl by her hair, and hawl them into their van.  We then get the music portion of the MV as the yakuza drive them into the countryside.  We get plenty of shots of Tokyo, an exhausted and fearful guy and girl, and the Yakuza laughing.  There are also lingering pantyshots on the girl.   Then rape on both the man and attempted rape on the woman.  The car crashes as a result of the girl trying to not be raped.  We then see the man trying to carry the woman through the woods. 

The man stands over the woman and comes to the conclusion that she texted the men who did this to them and was compliant in it.  He cuts off her head with a mysterious available shovel and carries her head through the forest.  The end.

The man is raped with a large dildo.  Through out the forest scenes we keep being told he still has the dildo in his ass as he travels through the forest.  I assume it is supposed to be funny.  Except it isn't at all because it's the result of a graphic rape we just saw.  And for the man's conclusion that his girlfriend was in on it, she is beaten and ducttaped and humiliated.   So in talking about "the art and interpretation" I'm pretty sure he was wrong about the conclusion (his reasoning was while he was trying to smell her farts (HAHAAH) she was looking through the window as they approached.)

END TRIGGER

So the video is a very bad time.  It left me with a sick taste in my mouth. Then a good friend who had not watched it but had watched the pretty girl video made a really good comment.  "Wonder what the pretty girls think of that video?"  That's a really good question.  They aren't presented in the 42 minute video.  But they are presented as the campaign piece in hype for the new album. 

To go to my own morals, I went from being excited about the new album to boycotting it.  As an adult I'm pretty against any entertainment or media that's a bad time.  That is entirely bad things or bad times.  There's enough very real evil and bad in the world that my media that is supposed to escapism from that.  There's no artistic statement to the video.  There's just this video where terrible things happen.  One of the worst things happens.  Then it is over.  And it theoretically is supposed to get me excited about spending money on music.  But I'm not.  I feel betrayed because my good time expectations turned out to be very wrong. 

It's paired with a video about looking at pretty girls, which i also have to have trouble with.  I love looking at pretty girls, but I have to compare it with BotR and suddenly I'm upset about what the video is not.  A band I really like I have to almost revile.  I'm not sure it has tainted their music before this, but it might have a little bit.  They made the worst thing they could then a bad album.  You can forget a bad album.  I can't just exorcise this video.  If I link Boys on the Run in the future to a friend I have to give them a huge warning if they go look at other videos they might find you know, terrible stuff. 

I just want to welcome everyone to 2014.

Roomania #203 (Dreamcast)

A few weeks ago, a dear commenter asked or I promised that I play Roommania #203.  I'll talk about that experience.  I'm in my room in a house I didn't grow up in but have spent 10 years off and on in.  My room in the last hour has developed strange odor I couldn't figure out the source of.  I went looking and took out the garbage (It was garbage day anyways.)  I sprayed Frebreeze.  I lit a match.  The smell didn't go away.  It's still here kind of.

So then I sat down infront of my BEAUTIFUL Dreamcast.

I popped in my Japan game booter.  I looked away from the TV to close my computer.  When I turn back I freeze.  There's people, actors, playing mahjong.  I can't hear what they are saying either because of the volume or my speakers.  After two minutes it pulls back to show our Roommate of Roommmania #203 watching the mahjong show on his own TV in his Japanese apartment.

Then it loads the title screen.  It asked if I wanted to play the tutorial.  I did.  It drops me and asks me to "click" something.  I find my fixed cam view not helping me much.  I start throwing balls with the A button at things. My Roommate sits there and smokes a cigarette.  He then gets up and goes off camera.  I think he was opening the blinds.  I keep throwing balls.  The screen flashes ”イライラ！”  I guess I'm irritating my roommate who isn't paying any attention to me.  After 3 long minutes the session ends and I get a result screen.

I eventually got more camera views.  I got to move some furniture when Roommate wasn't there to freak him out.  I was also getting very sleepy.

On a Monday Night I played a barely interactive game experience where I watched a man kill time in his room.  He was finding things to do between sleeping and not being in the room.  Here I was choosing to bare witness to him finding things to do.  I could keep throwing out balls that seemed to unlock more camera angles.  It gave me goals that flashed on the screen for half a second and my kanji skills failed me to decipher them.

Is this...really how I want to spend my time?  I turned off the game and spent a couple of minutes thinking of how it could have become a profound experience.  I thought about The Stanley Parable.  The original version of that made almost no impression on me.  I didn't even remember playing it until I saw my own writing saying that I did.

I think now about Contact.  I always meant to write about that game.  Maybe I did at some point.  Contact is a strange beast.  Turning off the game requires more effort than actually playing it.  So you keep playing it.  The game eventually begins to notice the player.  The Avatar rebels and goes to your house with a blue subaru parked outside.  He tells you he won't take it anymore.  It turns out the professor ran away with all your money.  He says you can remember the good times by playing the game again.

Okay so the subaru wasn't blue.  That game kind of left me in a daze.  Did that ending make up for the twenty hours of almost video game?  I still don't know.  I gave my copy to Ryan Starsailor.  Or I sold it to him and he never paid me back.  It doesn't matter.  Maybe he's got opinions about it.  He probably just stopped after 3 hours.  Or looked at and always meant to play it.

So would Roommania #203 live up to that if I sunk 5 or 10 hours into it?  Possibly.  But the thought of wasting my time not doing things watching a digital thing waste time not doing things is a bit too void-y.  It's dark and icky.  I should be concentrating on playing my Xbox360 shooters before I don't own a 360 anymore.

Cherry Tree High Comedy Club (PC)

Glory be to the Japanese gods that we lowly westerns can now enjoy the great world of barely interactive menu selection games.  I guess you do walk around in this one like in Persona only none of the characters are nearly as good as in Persona. 

But they are making a comedy club.  So it should be funny?  Which means I guess that the player character likes Sentai?  And is high school anime slice of life crazy?  So wacky.

Yep.  I sure was waiting for something interesting to happen in my picking menus.

Macgruber (Jorma Taccone) Redemption (Steven Knight) John Carter again

So I really liked John Carter when I saw it in theaters last year.  Enough to put it on my small shelf of Blurays.  I've now watch it again.  I still like how it changes genre like 5 times in the first half hour.  The two hour run time is still long.  I went and checked my websites about an hour in and left it running.  The plot is not as strong as I remember it being.  I may be looking through it through the new eyes of seeing Star Wars A New Hope recently and being floored by it.  Despite being a long term Star Wars fan.  Every single line in that movie is peppy.  Still John Carter (of Mars) is a better movie than that Madonna movie about Nazi Sympathizers or a movie featuring Adam Sandler.

It is also better than Macgruber.  I thought SNL movies were supposed to have jokes?  There is like one joke in Macgruber.  I guess he's supposed to come off as arrogant and incompetent, but it's done with such weak punchlines.  Hopefully it is the worst film I've seen this year!

In Redemption The Stath is a homeless war veteran that stumbles into a rich apartment who's owner is on vacation.  So then he starts looking like the Stath and gains Stath-fu.  Then the Stath has to make some moral choices at...Redemption???  The original name of the film was Hummingbird and there certainly Hummingbirds in that film.  Which makes that title better than having The Stath say it in voiceover over the closing moment of the film.

Gunhound EX (PSP) Impressions

I finally opened Gunhound EX which I got back around Valentine's.  It is a doujin PC game ported to PSP by GRev.  It is a love letter to the Assault Suit Valken games.  The first level is pretty dang awesome.  The second level is almost impossibly hard unless I am missing a big thing.  See it is an escort mission with forced scrolling.  This snake thing is coming up from behind and I can' go meet it so it just ends up in my escorting thing and wrecks it before I can murder it.  I'm not even sure I can murder it.  It is hard.  Game is conflicting.

Linda Cubed Again (PS1), Tomba (PS1)

After having it on my PS3 for a couple of months I finally launched Linda Cubed Again.  A JRPG the west never got again with a great cover and probably like a totally mind-blowing plot man.

I almost immediately regretted not getting an action game in its stead.  Playing a JRPG in another language I only 60% understand means I'm basically making it very very difficult to read a book in another language I only 60% understand.  Unless the the battle mechanics are really enjoyable (they weren't) It isn't worth it. 

I'm also going to be an asshole and say that the plot is probably amazing in the never read a book sort of way.  And if it isn't I put up a lot of effort (trying to comprehend the plot/what I need to do) and time (playing a JRPG UIH) for not a lot of reward.  It is 2013 and I am an adult and I can figure out where to most effectively spend my time.  It is probably playing Freecell games while listening to music and not playing Linda Cubed Again.

I played it for about 90 minutes.  I got the basic gist of the plot.  I was about to do a lot of dragon quest style JRPGing to see that plot. 

-----

Tomba eventually gave me the same reaction even though I was playing it in English and was more charmed by it.  That game sure does give you lots of things to do.  It doesn't have super sharp jumping and bumping which is getting more and more a stickler for me.  The pseudo 3D metrovania aspects were also starting to get overwhelming.  I played that for 3 hours and enjoyed my time, but I'm not sure I'm going back.

Legend of Zelda:Skyward Sword (Wii)

https://twitter.com/Tokyo_Rude/status/387389620368863232
https://twitter.com/Tokyo_Rude/status/387407758791700480
https://twitter.com/Tokyo_Rude/status/387389827445833728

I will maybe arrange my thoughts more clearly later and on HP.  I have just entered the first dungeon of Skyward Sword.  My thought on turning of the system was "When I will play this next, I should do something else." 

As I mentioned a few posts back, Wii controls don't fit with me.  Link holds the sword exactly (MOTION PLUS) as you are holding it.  So he always looks...as awkward as you do.  I named Link Geocity which I thought was  a fun joke to take my mind off the mind-numbing dialog.  If I had someone like Chris with me on this journey maybe it would be enjoyable just tearing the game apart.

There are many cutscenes and required dialog in the first 3 hours.  They are universally pointless and unentertaining. 

Wait.  Wait Wait.  Here's what made me start writing.  Your big Guardian Bird that is the focus of the first 2 hours doesn't even have a name.  It is just YOUR BIRD.  You've had it since you were little.  They mention it's breed (Crimson somethingsomething).  Other things and places have names.  In the meetings about the game they decided "Let's make everyone refer to it as "your bird."  Really do a wonder on the marketing.  What do you place on the stuff toy tag?  The bird is the best part of the game.

Then you're holding A to go slightly faster and seeing a green circle disappear and you wonder who thought this fun.  I don't think the makers ever played their game.

And you have to shake the nunchuk to roll. 

YOUR BIRD is pretty cute.

This Week in Blockbuster

JCVD was a great look into Jean-Claude.  He has actual acting chops behind his kicks.  It's powerful and I'd love to see him in a role where he wasn't playing himself.  He does a great job and I loved the camera work.  I think I may just hate the way that French dialog is delivered?  Like it ticked me a wrong way and this movie has to be lightyears away from Goddard, whose 3 movies I hated the way the dialog was constructed too.  Who knows?

After being ambivalent about The Godfather (the strongest thing I took from it was Pacino not playing Pacino), Goodfellas was definitely a better experience.  I liked when it became a completely different film in the last 20 minutes that sort of set up how The Departed was paced.  I liked The Departed more though.  That one had actually likable characters.  The Godfather sets it up so that you never see the criminal side of things.  You merely see the family destroyed by outside forces and the rules of the mob.  The big trick is it shows them as "good""family-oriented" people, regardless of the families they probably destroy. 

Goodfellas doesn't put up that illusion.  Most of them are idiots and trash whether directly stated or shown by their actions.  They get a lot of money by robbing and have no class on how to spend it.  Eventually the business changes (the film covers a good 30 years), and they get caught for doing precisely what they were told not too. 

My eternal love of WKW influenced me liking the voiceover narration.  It is used wonderfully when it switches characters.  Here the female characters have depth (I guess???)   At least compared to The Godfather where they are almost scenery.  It took reading review of The Godfather to realize that a phone call that followed in someone's death was a setup.  That was probably the shining point of the film.  In Goodfellas they talk business on the phone enough for the viewer to take note. 

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest it turns out the only cure needed for mental illness is life experience and Jack Nicholoson.  If this film wasn't remembered it wouldn't be remembered I don't think.  Danny Devito never registered as Devito.  It is indulgent in the story it wants to tell and not the setup and following resolution.  Maybe it retains that because it is stopping expectations.  Or because it won oscars because it had mental illness without confronting mental illness.

Moonrise Kingdom sure was Wes Anderson.  I don't know anything really about Wes.  I have maybe seen a few of his films.  This was full on that style.  I had to stop it every few minutes because it became too much.  Upper-class white people with non-problems and lots of twee-chiche.  Just twee-ing all over the place.  There's some great shots in it though.

Metroid Prime 3 and Pandora's Tower (Wii)

So I've had this Wii for a few months now.  It is my second time with a Wii after borrowing a friends for several months and gameflying.  The first time I got the amazing Crystal Bearers.  Which is still my top Wii experience because I will probably never play Xenoblade Chronicles.  The 100 hour game length is pretty damn intimidating.  The vistas sure do like nice.   The Crystal Bearers vistas are also pretty great!

So Blockbuster had Metroid Prime 3.  I have very good feelings about Metroid Prime.  I have very bad feelings about Metroid Prime 2.  2 frustrated me with it's dual worlds mechanic, how not interesting the environments were, and that the controls made me scream.  The controls in MP were perfect for the game MP1 was.  MP2 made me scream for typical FPS controls which was a complaint thrown at MP1. 

Metroid Prime 3 starts with trying to have a story and Halo-story-elements and Samus's shitty friends.  Eventually you'll fight all of her shitty friends.  The first one is the only memorable one and he's way cooler than Samus even if he's visually boring.  The first 3 areas are also visually boring.  That sort of matches up with MP2 which had one fantastic area.  It's called Sanctuary Fortress.  I can't find a non-talky let's play in 30 seconds. 

In Metroid Prime 1 you're constantly traveling back over the same ground just a little bit stronger with just a bit more you can do.  The world changes sometimes and you notice those changes.  In Metroid Prime 3 you have a series of corridors to go down and then get on your ship to go to the next corridor.  The first big world is orange.  The second big world is...also orange.

Shortly after getting to the creatively named "Skytown" in Metroid Prime 3 I started getting disc read errors. I was just going through the motions playing it so that felt like a happy stopping point. I was expecting Skytown to look nice but it was just as orange as the first planet. The Railriding made me want to play Riven. Everything else just made me think, this is better than Metroid Prime 2; This is worse than Metroid Prime 1. Wii FPS controls do not click with me. I got frustrated enough to quit within an hour of RE4 (I love all other versions y'all.) I was making more mistake than I would have liked in MP3. The remote is not satisfying to shoot especially in comparison to the glorious Gamecube A Button. 

Might be time to have an 2013 opinion of Metroid Prime 1 since I still have the ability to play it right now. 

Pandora's Tower is something else.  It is a stunningly weird game.  It's like SNES developers were given a Wii toolkit.  It makes mistakes and has things that haven't been issues in 3D games in 15 years.  It is like this was their first 3D game and they hadn't play any 3D games before.  It also has highly sexual monster flesh eating.

You gotta save your new girlfriend who is becoming a grotesque monster.  A strange woman with her own agenda (shock!) says that if you slay 12 beasts and feed your GF their hearts she'll be saved.  Now there are 12 towers of awkward combat and awkward platforming and sighing non-puzzles.  There are also at least 4 really great boss battles.   I want to remove everything else and just have these perfect little boss battles.  The rest of the game proved not worth seeing the next boss battle.

It is definitely a better game with a friend on your couch to switch off to.  Then you're just commenting to yourself how stupid and weird everything in it is.