I posted before about the new Muppet video so I imagine I should as least point out this new one.
I don't know, I'm of mixed mind. I chuckled but I don't know that all that thrilled about Muppets becoming internet commentary meta-memes. I just think that's ultimately limiting. I was hoping this was starting somesort of bigger comeback for the Muppets but I don't think making fun of YouTube will lead to anything bigger.
Read moreMuppets: Bohemian Rhapsody
This is awesome:
(via everyone. The first link I saw was Chris Hardwick.)
Watching this drives something home to me: the Muppet folks need to bring back the variety show. Here's what I'm saying: sell it direct-to-DVD, stream it on YouTube or Hulu, or do the more esoteric sell subscription podcasts or whatever. Do anything other than attach it to some stupid basic cable channel and I'd sign up. I'm positive you could get a season's worth of various internet folks to guest host the show (just imagine a Muppet Show with Jonathan Coulton for example. That's internet gold right there.). Somebody is going to break this market open eventually, and I seriously think The Muppet Show has the right nostalgia factor to make it happen.
There are these fumbling steps to bring back the Muppets (Waldof and Statler doing movie reviews for example), this video has a link to buy a Queen CD at Best Buy, but I think it's overkill. Just give geeks the show they remember from childhood and and give them some way to pay you for it. (Imagine the Pigs in Space take on The Matrix and tell me you wouldn't pay for that.)
Read moreBorderlands - A Belated Thumbs-Up
It's been a long time since we talked games here. In large part because posting frequency has gone way down (Hey, I've been busy), comment frequency is even lower, and because I hadn't really been playing much. Nothing exciting had come out and even the weekly multiplayer session had reached a threshold of "cancelled more often than not" for a while.
Borderlands has changed that though. I was suspicious of the game at first, reading it as a Diablo clone with a sci-fi Wasteland skin applied. This sounds fine to me but the folks I play generally oppose RPG trappings like character levels and skill trees. But Tony was persistent and then Amazon ran a sale letting me pick up a few titles at a discount so I grabbed Borderlands and I like it a lot. The multiplayer is fast and frantic and each class feels very different. I'm even playing quite a bit of the single player which the reviews were pretty down on.
As it turns out, the objections I expected to Borderlands hasn't materialized yet. I'm not sure how much of that is the fantasy trappings of Diablo (or a clone such as Torchlight) and how much of that is the change from 3rd person clickfest to the 1st person shooting, but the takeaway is that there's still a lot of interest in the multiplayer.
I like the single player because I can sit down and play it for twenty minutes, complete a mission, and then turn it off with a success under my belt. It begs some comparisons to Fallout as both can make some claims to being the spiritual heir to Wasteland from back in the day. My problem with all of the Fallouts has been the lack of story. They take the sandbox approach so far that you're just wandering a wasteland aimlessly, trying to not get killed. There is a story in them, but the main story is sort of just incidental to the bulk of the game. Borderlands has story missions and it has side missions, but they are pretty clearly distinct. It just turns out I like that model a lot better. Fallout 3 took me at least an hour to get anything done - I'd turn it on, review what quests were active, pick out something that made sense, hike around for a bit, maybe get sidetracked into something else and so forth. I had fun with Fallout, but I'd only dedicate the time to play it maybe once a week. I can play a couple of Borderlands missions in the time it takes to drink my first cup of coffee of the day. That's a big plus for me.
I'll knock it for one major stupidity: it plays in the first person and yet there are jumping puzzles. HEY GAME DESIGNERS: first person jumping SUCKS. It always has and I suspect it always will. This is 2009 now, you should have internalized the lessons of Half-Life 1 by now. (Even Bwana has played Half-Life 1 already!) But they are fairly intermittent and I haven't seen any that are "fall to your death" just "fall lower on the level and run around and try again". The latter still sucks but it's not a deal-breaker. It ends up being 2-3 minutes of annoyance, not 10-15 minutes.
Anyway, if you're a fan of multiplayer action RPG lootfests, you should definitely check out Borderlands. And if you get it on 360 let me know!
Read moreWhat's A Few Notches Below "Internet Famous"?
One of the topics that I could talk about but is rapidly turning into "old news" is the existence of the Jonathan Coulton concert DVD called Best. Concert. Ever. This is a concert recording of a show he did in San Francisco (with Paul & Storm) back in February 2008. I was aware it was coming out from Coulton's Twitter or RSS feed but I'd seen the show live so I wasn't in a major hurry or anything. Then shortly after it came out I got an email from a friend saying that Karin and I showed up in the audience "several times". So thus reminded I ordered the disc.
First off, I recommend the disc naturally. You get an immediate link to download the music tracks and then a few days later you get the DVD/CD combo set. To be honest I haven't taken the CD out - I mean I had the audio files already, but the music tracks are worth having. They may represent things you already had - but it does have the Zen Drum version of Mr. FancyPants which I've been wanting well ... ever since I saw this show in back in February 2008. And the DVD is a lot of fun to watch. I haven't listened to the commentary track yet, but Karin said it was funny.
I did watch the regular concert part but I watched it from an unusual perspective: I wanted to know if it would be unhealthy to play the "Every time we see Tim or Karin on-screen we take a drink" drinking game. Now I should note I was not playing said game, I was just checking. For the first third or so I thought "man, people are crazy. I haven't seen either of us at all", then there were some shots. And some more shots. Then I saw a shot from the left wings and I remembered "Oh that's right, that one camera guy really liked that angle and parked over there quite a bit." We quickly went from "this would be a sucky drinking game" to "Well, that song would have been a bit much to be doing to shots" to "No, this would not be a shot-drinking game" to "Oh no, you wouldn't even want to play this game with a mild beer". In short, we turn up a lot in this video. No idea why especially, I suppose just my magnetic personality and charisma carries through ....
So if you want to know what I was up to about a year and a half ago, you could do worse than to watch this concert DVD. Which is awesome in its own right, even without the bits featuring me or Karin. You should really go see Coulton live, but this DVD is a good substitute if that's all you can manage.
Read moreOh yeah, BSG we hardly knew ye
Brother-in-law-to-the-blog commenter Whiskey asks what I thought of the BSG series finale. It's a fair question, BSG is probably one of the more discussed shows here on the Snarking Post.
Well ... I still think Battlestar Galactica represents one of the best 1.5 seasons of television out there. Unfortunately they followed that with another 2.5 seasons of crap. The series finale did nothing to change that opinion and in fact reinforces it. I thought the finale was jumbled, unsatisfying, and they clearly punted on a lot of key issues. We've spent an entire "season" (spread across two full years) on what the hell is going on with Starbuck and the final answer is just "she's an angel. POOF! Wait! Look over here! Dancing robots!" They find Earth. Again. But this Earth isn't all frakked up! Wait what again? It's OUR Earth! They destroy all their technology! They are the ancestors of modern humanity! I guess they destroyed all their oral history as well! That way we can not learn anything!
Just why do the Cylons keep insisting this has happened before and will happen again. Clearly it didn't, not in this way with a Cylon/human war and genocide and "angels" and whatnot. Was there any point to Baltar's religious conversion? Any point to the conflict between the human polytheism and the Cylon monotheism? WHY DOES NOTHING HAVE SQUARE CORNERS?
In short, the finale made no fucking sense. Not only that it failed to close out many of the series' long-running questions. At the end of the day it turns out that BSG was a big shaggy dog story. Swell. Can I have the last "four seasons" of television watching back now?
I don't have any plans to watch Caprica anytime soon, I'll tell you that much.
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