You'll Turn 360° and Walk Away

A lot has been happening lately guys and lady-guys. The gang and I have been working a bit and writing a bit less and shooting even less. Why is this? Is it the economy? The 1%? My father's lingering suspicions about my sexual orientation? Nay, the answer is much simpler. Two words:

Skyrim and Modernwarfarethree.

Between the two of those games it is a wonder that the entire United States hasn't ground to a halt. (Fun Fact: in Japan whenever they release a new Dragon Quest game its pretty much a national holiday the next day because everyone would call in sick anyway) But you might be one (percent) of the unlucky ones who has very little money or hates America and doesn't want to play some delicious brand new software. How then will you be able to boast of your digital conquests amongst patriots and dragonborn when you are stuck with nothing but the vidya games of yesteryear? The answer is to play Nuketown. Stick with me here.

Multiplayer is fun sure, but you need to up the ante. As a sporting man you need a challenge that will make your mates take note and perhaps even pause to consider breaking out their copy to see if they're bad enough dudes. TK and I came up with this (to be fair I'm not sure who deserves more credit because we were drinking at the time) a little bit before MW3 dropped as a way to kill some time. The rules are as follows:

Pop in your copy of Carl of Duty: Black Cops. Go to Multiplayer-Local-Split Screen- and set up a map at Nuketown. Set the time limit to 15 minutes, the score to 30,000 points, and enemy robot to quantity 9 and difficulty to recruit. This is part of the fun because its like playing with zombies that don't try to bite you and take something like two minutes to draw a bead on you. Recruit difficulty makes them unable to tie their shoes, its a wonder they can still get the rifle pointed the right way. As far as perks,weapons, equipment and killstreaks: anything goes. Do what you have to do to get the job done marine.

It is a lot of fun, somewhat difficult to get done and just challenging enough to make you wanna keep playing. The fun doesn't have to stop there though, make up your own variation! How many kills can you get with crossbows in 15 minutes (not 300, that shit is impossible), how many knife kills, the gun of your father only, shotgun only, the world is your oyster.


While you're busy doing that, I'm going to go back to crawling dungeons in Skyrim and defending your freedom in MW3. That's it for now, stay tuned for some exciting new content (I swear).

-G

sim·i·lar

I've been thinking about writing a few articles about this for a while now. Here goes part one of an on going series on movies that are awfully similar. Was one studio just too lazy to think up an original idea? Is there some "inspired by" going on? Is America just ready for two movies about Victorian era magicians? The people cry out, and its for two movies about trains.



Monsters and Troll Hunter (English title, LØL) are two pretty fresh movies. Both are shot with a very low budget (Troll Hunter being the higher of the two, but still very small relative to bigger movies.) and filmed in a way that uses very unsteady Cloverfield flavored camera work, with the digitally inserted critters as the star of the film. In Monsters this is simply because of the guerrilla style shooting they did with little to no crew or permission, and in Troll Hunter we are watching "found footage" from a Norwegian community college film crew who decided to bother some poor man who murders trolls for a living (I find the whole found footage genre very insulting, much like Firespinners and Dub Step, but I digress..).

Let's take a look at some stats:

"Troll Hunter":
Budget: NOK 19,900,000(around 3.5 million USD)
Release Date: October 2010
CGI Monsters: Trolls. Lots of 'em. Big fuckers too.
Plot: Follow around some guy while he tries to kill or avoid trolls.
Rotten Tomatoes: 82%
Longest Name in Credits: Torunn Lødemel Stokkeland - Hilde, veterinär
Trailer:



"Monsters":
Budget: $800,000
Release Date: October 2010
CGI Monsters: All sorts of scary alien creatures. Big fuckers too.
Plot: Follow around some dumb girl through Mexico back to USA while killing or avoiding aliens.
Rotten Tomatoes: 71%
Longest Name in Credits: Kenia Guadalupe Dominluez Yamas - Little Girl in Pick-Up Truck
Trailer:




Both movies are very cool and worth a watch. I learned about Troll Hunter from a painter who worked on Top Chef with me (shout out to my boy Bean) in Texas and I thought he was kidding. He replied "Nay, verily it is a thing." and asked if I had ever seen Monsters because he felt that it had a similar stylistic approach. Monsters is not only a cool giant creature flick, but it combines subtle unertones of political commentary and relationship drama to make it not just an exploitative "Lookit the creature" type deal but a film with some real substance. Troll Hunter (pic on right related, it is a troll) takes the rather formulaic "found footage" genre and does it the way it should be done. You could compare Apollo 18 (neat) to Cloverfield (meh) as an example.

-G

BONUS: Have you guys seen our new vidya? We made it the other day. Shit is very fresh. Also we filmed it on Ryan Neal's SLR camera. Holy-depth-of-field-Batman.

Twofer Tuesday

This one is almost too easy. I spent hours a few minutes pouring over the HotDamn archives to make sure we've never covered this meme. This one is serious you guys. Like Leeroy Jenkins and Nintendo 64 Kid serious.



This one is the grandpappy of them all. What song is he enjoying the fuck out of? What language is that? Urdu? Farsi? That Africa-language with all the clicking and shit? I'm not even sure but it is incredible. This video spawned zillions of imitations and tribute vidyas, each one more delicious than the last.



It took months of planning and countless hours of hard work (read: playing Call Of Duty: Black Cops) to decide what the perfect companion video for the original was. The trololol guy got a similar treatment on some kind of Danish variety show (pretty awesome in and of themselves) where they upped the ante and did the song REAL big. Big like Guns 'N Roses with a full orchestra. Big like Meatloaf big. I dunno what this is from but its the Numa Numa song performed in an operatic style. It is good , oh yes, it is good.

-G