Shit. Is it time for another edition of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Super Special Feature + already!? The last one was only published . . . two years ago? Ffff... Okay, fine. Here it is: part four of the Super Special Feature +, brought to you by the letter ಠ_ರೃ.
My nephew is a huge fan of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. A few months ago his mother, beyond anyone's better judgement, let him read the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Super Special Feature + here on The 34th Dimension. He loved it so much that he came to me and asked if I would let him make the next one.
I'm genuinely sorry that today's Celebration 2010 post is going up so late, but I think it's worth the wait. For today I have brought the return of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Super Special Feature + (currently in three parts). Don't know what I'm talking about? Well, the MMPRSSF+ was The 34th Dimension's very first feature, created back when I still occasionally reviewed movies.
It's honestly some of the best work I've done on this site, which is a huge insult to everything else. Speaking of insults, I don't think the commenters at Retro Junk will ever forgive me for these.
There's just one more day until the old domain expires! Check back tomorrow for the final surprise, and be sure to check out the rest of the Countdown 2010 posts as well.
What's this? An actual article!? You are correct, sir! To continue the 2010 Countdown, here is a brand new article that I've finished. I'll return you to your regularly scheduled disappointment tomorrow. Click here to see the rest of the Countdown.
Video games can teach us many things, like vulgarity and racism. I'm certain that, some day, games will carry so much information that we'll no longer have any need for schools. In fact, you should probably drop out now and get a head start: it'll show future employers that you have initiative! While you're sabotaging your own futures, here are just a few of the things that video games have taught me over the years to help sculpt me into the debonair walrus that I am.
The old domain name for The 34th Dimension expires on December 22, so to count it down and celebrate my cheapness I'll be posting something new each day from now until I lose control of the domain. Since I just thought of this plan an hour ago I have absolutely nothing prepared, so expect shitty quality across the board.
I'll have the first item up tonight by 11:59 PM Mountain Standard Time.
I wanted the Dino Megazord the moment I saw it in the Sears Wishbook as a child. This was probably back in '95, which means that I've spent the last fifteen years without knowing true happiness. Now that Bandai has brought back many of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers action figures, maybe someone will find it in their heart to fulfill this man-child's wishes. Or I could just buy it myself. Oh, adulthood! With your buying power and credit cards, what dreams can't you fulfill?
Some people have decided to criticize this re-release, and the toys may not be identical to the original series, but they're vastly superior to the Jurassic Park figures Kenner's been shilling. The only better re-release I've seen was for the TMNT 25th Anniversary, which I have yet to take advantage of. I still need to replace the Donatello that I lost in my neighbour's sandbox.
The Conduit had exactly three things going for it: the controls, the voice acting and the tech it was built on. Everything else—story, level/character design, hacker-friendly multiplayer and no split-screen mode—made it a game that I played for exactly one week and then forgot about afterward. It seriously only took a week for the online multiplayer to become unplayable because of glitches and invincible hackers, and the single-player campaign was just barely worth completing.
This intro video for Conduit 2 shows that they have effectively destroyed one third of what made the first game playable. The trio of Mark Sheppard, Kevin Sorbo and William Morgan Sheppard as the voices of The Conduit's three main characters made those character likeable and are the sole reason why I sat through every line of dialogue in the game. The new guy playing Agent Ford sounds exactly like Cutter Slade from Outcast, and although Outcast is a good game, the comparison isn't a compliment. And hearing anybody but Kevin Sorbo give voice to Prometheus just makes me sad.
High Voltage has supposedly done a lot of work to fix the problems from the first game. More diverse settings, a reworked storyline and expanded multiplayer (including local 4-player and coop modes) are all supposed to make Conduit 2 more playable than their last game. But, so far, the game looks like shit anyway. The once apotheosized Quantum3 engine now looks dated compared to GoldenEye 007 and even Modern Warfare: Reflext Edition. And, despite efforts to the contrary, High Voltage's level and character designing skills don't seem to have improved any since The Conduit. They've also revealed very little of the story aside from that it will take place all over the globe with Atlantis serving as a hub.
I'm sure the controls will be as great as ever: The Conduit is the reason why first-person shooters on Wii finally have almost universally great controls. But without the original cast and because of High Voltage's now-ubiquitous bad level designs and the total lack of evidence that the writing has improved at all, Conduit 2 will probably be as much of a chore to play through as its predecessor.
Do yourselves a favour and just pick up GoldenEye now, play through it, enjoy it, get online and have fun while the servers are still active, and forget about Conduit 2. You don't need more disappointment in your lives.
There is nothing else coming out this year that I have any interest in seeing, so I'm just going to call it: Predators is the best movie of 2010. I haven't enjoyed a single other thing directed or produced by Robert Rodriguez, including Planet Terror and Machette, so I was surprised that I enjoyed Predators so much. Even more than the original, I'd say.
The runners up are The Karate Kid—anyone who complained that it didn't have any karate in it was obviously too hung up to enjoy a really well done movie—and Let Me In. These are seriously the only three movies that were worth the money I spent to see them.
Alice in Wonderland was a typical Tim Burton mess—this guy hasn't made an original film since Beetlejuice; Scott Pilgrim vs. The World stars Michael Cera as Michael Cera; Iron Man 2 had all of the same problems as Spider-Man 2; and the only way Inception could be considered thought provoking is if the last movie you'd seen were Transformers 2. It was an incredibly disappointing year for movies, and Roger Ebert still thinks that he's critiquing art.
Activision published two first-person shooters for the Wii this month: GoldenEye 007 and Call of Duty: Black Ops. One is a well done remake of an N64 classic and one is a shitty port of a PS3/360 game with graphical errors and missing features.
The only thing absent from GoldenEye is voice chat for online play, but since Nintendo doesn't even want to support their WiiSpeak peripheral anymore you can't really blame Eurocom for leaving it out. GoldenEye still looks great and is a lot of fun to play both online and off. Meanwhile, Black Ops has clipping issues during cutscenes and enemies who get stuck in walls or can't be damaged until you've moved past a certain point to "activate" them.
I want to know how two high-profile games released by the same publisher in the same month can be so drastically different in quality. It was obvious from the media silence preceding its release that Black Ops would be bad, but Treyarch had done well porting three other Call of Duty games to the Wii. So what the fuck went wrong?
I already wrote about this, but now Kotaku has an interview with Reggie Fils-Aime where he says that Nintendo is trying to figure out why Metroid: Other M hasn't met sales expectations. He was reluctant to admit that the criticism of Samus's character, which is mentioned in almost every single article on and review of the game, is the reason—probably to avoid hurting Yoshio Sakamoto's feelings, since he's admitted to being a big cry baby.
It couldn't have helped that the Wii is Nintendo's least popular console ever among traditional players. But even Metroid Prime 3 has sold within 700,000 copies of the original Prime game (2 million and 1.3 million, respectively)1 and almost doubled sales of Metroid Prime 2 (800,000); whereas Other M has sold only 560,000 copies so far2. Sure, the three Prime games have had years to accrue sales while Other M has only been available for a few of months, but Metroid Prime reached half of Other M's total sales in just one week.
I was getting sick of the Metroid Prime series after four games and a pinball spinoff, and can easily say that Other M is a much better game than Corruption; but what I think doesn't make back the millions that Nintendo spent on development and marketing. Reggie may not acknowledge the vadility of fan complaints in public, but I can guarantee that Nintendo is taking a serious look at Sakamoto and Team Ninja's development process right now.
Do you see what I did with the title? Do you see it!? I think I have become a god.
I found this story via Destructoid: a couple of UK game shops are threatening to stop selling PC games that support Steam because it's counterintuitive to their own forthcoming download services. Because this isn't a news blog, I'll leave the synopsis at that and get straight to admiring my own words.
While we're on the topic of YouTube, here is an older-yet-more-recently-uploaded video that also started out on YTMND. Back in college I used to think that it would've been a really cool assignment for everyone to create their own YTMNDs and submit them, but now I realize that nobody over the age of 40 would want to view—let alone grade—thirty-something versions of animated dildos dancing to "Land Down Under."
If you haven't played or payed attention to the new Metroid game, the joke in this will be lost on you.
Update: I think I've solved the copyright problem. I filed a dispute claiming that the video is a parody of the song “Living In The Sunlight, Loving In The Moonlight” by Tiny Tim. And it is, really. It's also a parody of “The REAL Ghostbusters,” both of the Ghostbusters films, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” cosplayers, Bob Ross, and trumpet-playing penises (peni?). Hopefully this means that the video will be available worldwide from now on, because God knows the world could benefit from my specific brand of artistic expression.
This is a YTMND that I worked on last night. Because YTMND has been down for most of the day I decided to upload it to YouTube. This can be considered the "official" version since it's the only one where the sound and animation are guaranteed to sync up in every browser across every operating system.
It's a complete waste of your time, but go ahead and watch it anyway. I doubt you have anything better to do. (You are visiting this blog, after all.)
This is just great: now I have an active YouTube channel that I need to skin as well. Is it considered uncouth for an unemployed blogger to complain about having too much work to do? It is uncouth, isn't it?
I've just finished my first playthrough of Metroid: Other M's hard mode and, let me tell you, it was a brutal and unrelenting lover. I've never attempted a no-upgrade run through any Metroid-style game—where the goal is to complete the game with the bare minimum of status-enhancing items like energy tanks and missile expansions—but Other M's hard mode forces you to play this way. 99 energy units and 10 missiles will have to last you through every single boss encounter and environmental hazard, and most things will kill you in one or two hits.
Everyone knows the story of Doom: a lone marine saves the world from the legions of Hell, kicking ass all the way back to Earth. But who among us can say they know what really happened up there at the UAC facility? Today, the Doom Marine is here to recount his grisly tale as only he can.
When Activision announced that they'd be remaking GoldenEye 007 for the Wii, I was completely certain that it was going to be bad. The elements of shit were all there: Quantum of Solace, Activision's other Bond game, was a barely-playable mess; I still hadn't forgiven the remake's developer, Eurocom, for taking Dead Space and turning it into the Wii's one hundredth rail shooter (give or take); and Activision's CEO, Bobby Kottick, is a money-grubbing bastard. Everything was pointing toward GoldenEye being another shitty cash grab.
Plus nine other games for 50% off this weekend only. Seriously, The Longest Journey is five bucks. You have no excuse to not buy it, unless you hate God. Do you hate God? Because that mother fucker is watching.
(I may as well change the name of this blog to The GOG Fan Site, because that's what it's turning into.)
Yep, those geniuses at Good Old Games got you good. That whole closing the site business was a clever ruse to capture your attention and steal your infants. GOG.com, the only place where you can buy Oddworld for $5.99 without DRM, is now running in its all-new, not-in-beta mode! So instead of bitching about how you were deceived, how about you buy some games from the last company out there that isn't looking to fuck you over. Because a few days of inducing whines from bitches is nothing compared to what Valve and Steam will put you through.
I've started porting over the template from the old server to Blogger. It'll take some tweaking to make it all work, but in the end things should actually work better. Blogger has some nice features that I wasn't able to implement on my own, so that's the tradeoff for integrated user accounts and forums.
Because I don't really have to do anything code related, I might devote more time to posting content like I did in the beginning. Did you know that The 34th Dimension used to be updated daily? I shit you not. Scout's honour.
All is not lost! I've made certain arrangements, and done things that I'm not proud of, to ensure that when The 34th Dimension relaunches here on Blogger it'll still have a forum. It won't be the same script that I wrote for the old forum, and members will have to re-register in order to post, and old topics won't be carried over. But it's still a forum, dammit. I'm doing the best I can with these limited resources.
The 34th Dimension is returning to Blogger! Don't worry, though, because I'm going to make things look as nice here as they did on the old server. It'll just involve some OMGBloggerHAX and finding a decent image host for layout gfx. But you can still expect a severe drop in quality and etiquette, because 34D be a blog again, bitches. Anything more would be an insult to the medium.
This year at The 34th Dimension we’re having the First Annual Valentine’s Day Horror Movie Marathon, including each of the four great films listed below. If you’re hard up for ideas of what to watch, here’s a great point to jump off from.
I've started porting over the template from the old server to Blogger. It'll take some tweaking to make it all work, but in the end things should actually work better. Blogger has some nice features that I wasn't able to implement on my own, so that's the tradeoff for integrated user accounts and forums.