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Superman

In… Superman! Part II

At the end of this section you’ll know:

1. What is the best way to ward off a Laser Attack?

2. In a battle between Superman and a stalk of celery, who would win?

When Lois is captured we’re given our first look at “The Mad Scientist”. He has a Mohawk, but with sideburns, and wears eyeliner. Apparently our “Mad Scientist’s day job is as a front man for the Gothic Metal band “Suicide Scientists”. And of course he’s wearing a lab coat. Remember, all scientists wear lab coats. All of them.

Meanwhile with Lois tied up the Mad Scientist begins to destroy the city. Everyone seems to be exceptionally happy about this. Well at least I guess they are. They’re all smiling. Maybe they’ve all just been tazered.

At this point, what is to become the most over-used joke on the planet, is seen for the first time. Clark Kent jumps into a supply closet and changes into Superman. Nobody seems to notice, not even the janitor that was stuck in the closet with him.

As the scientist continues to pound on the city tearing the foundation out from underneath a building, superman quickly swings into action to put the building upright. Now, I know that some of you think that after you remove the foundation from under a building that there’s no way that you could get it back up. Well those of you who think that are wrong. It is completely logical to have a building stand with no foundation. Back me up structural engineers.

After pushing the building back up, where it stays, Superman begins punching the beam back up to the scientist’s lair. I hate to be the one who has to bring this up to the writers of such a fine show such as Superman!, but you can’t punch a laser. Hell, you can’t punch the water coming out of garden hose with any degree of success, so what is the point of sucker punching an energy beam?

Now I slept through most of my Physics class in High school, but I’m pretty sure that I never had a test that asked me to “Prove the Energy to Jell-O Ratio”. But a bunch of animators and Superman can’t be wrong, right? Remember, lasers and energy weapons can be punched.

Ignoring this slight technical oversight, Superman continues to make headway towards “The Mad Scientist” who we get to see at least 7 or 8 times flipping switches and looking peeved. As the scientist turns up the power to his Electrothenasia Ray it begins shooting rocks, which totally makes sense. We are also treated to yet another few shots of wildly pulsating nothings and some dials that, for all we know, show that the scientist’s wash is now in the spin cycle.

Superman eventually reaches the Ray-gun and ties it in a knot. The gun goes crazy and steam starts shooting out of it. It seems that “The Mad Scientist” was using a water powered laser gun. He may be evil but he’s planet friendly.

Then, as Superman bursts through the wall, The Mad Scientist in true bad guy fashion, yells out “Superman!”. Like we at home got confused. We thought that it was going to be Al Roaker. “There’s a 20% chance I’m gonna kick your ass.”

Then the building blows up and Superman saves everyone even the Gothic Mad Scientist who gets put in jail. The jail scene slowly fades to a newspaper that reads “SUPERMAN’S IDENTITY STILL A MYSTERY” on the front page. When was the last time you saw a front page article confirming something we already new was true? You’d seriously consider changing publications if you picked up the paper tomorrow and the cover story was “News Flash! Wood Still Comes From Trees! Details inside!”

In the end though, Superman wins, nobody gets the woman, and another villain with a retarded plan goes to jail. Remember, Superman always wins. Even against a giant steam-powered Jell-O gun.

Superman

In… Superman! Part I

At the end of this section you’ll know:

1. What is the best disguise you can wear?

2. All journalists have a part-time job. What is it?

From what I gather from the back of the DVD case, this episode of Superman is the first of the animated Superman Series to be broadcast in the early 40s. Like most bands first albums, this episode is self titled and the music sucks.

The show opens with a shot of Superman’s home planet, represented by a balloon, and a brief narration provided by the same guy who does the Superfriends. He explains that Superman’s dad realized that Krypton was about to explode so he built a rocket to take Superman to Earth. Superman’s dad was apparently a Geologist and a Rocket Scientist who had the intelligence and time to master both Tectonics and Interplanetary Travel, but sadly lacked the ability to call the Kryptonian Local News.

Superman’s rocket landed on Earth and Superman was taken in by an orphanage that the animator couldn’t be bothered to color. This orphanage, that didn’t seem too interested in asking questions about why infants were falling from the sky also gave Superman his great disguising skills. Superman changes his look from guy in blue with red underwear to guy in suit with glasses and hat. That outfit couldn’t fool my grandma.

I’ve had practical experience with the Superman School of Disguise. I remember once when I was streaking and the police were chasing me. I stopped and put on a pair of glasses and a hat, and they still knew it was me. Remember, a new hat and glasses makes you completely unidentifiable to even your closest friends.

The story itself opens to Thing calling Lois and Clark Kent into Mr. White’s Office. Using my super powerful deductive reasoning skills I determined that Mr. White was the Managing Editor. No, I used super sleuth skills, I did not just read it off his door.

Inside Mr. White’s Office Lois and Clark are read a letter written by a mad scientist, who is appropriately called “The Mad Scientist”. Ten yard penalty for no originality. It reads “My Electrothanasia-Ray strikes tonight at 12. Total destruction will come to those who laughed at me and failed to heed my warnings. Beware I strike at midnight!” Those of you who have written a few threatening letters (probably to me) will quickly identify the poor construction of this ransom note.

First of all, every bad guy from terrorists to General Zod to the bully on the playground knows that you always end your threat with “Unless you give me ____.” You ALWAYS demand something, be it money, a helicopter, or French toast. Especially if you want French Toast. They have to buy it and cook it, and that takes a long time.

Also, we’re left with several questions. Like: What the hell is an Electrothanasia-Ray? or What does it do? or Does it come in red? All important information that we the viewers need in order to accurately assess the Mad Scientists situation in comparison to that of our protagonist are unfortunately non-existent.

After reading the letter Lois accepts the assignment, runs off, jumps in a plane and flies to the “Mad Scientist’s” house. There’s a real important scene here where she puts on a flight helmet. From what I understand, it was supposed to shore up some sort of continuity error. Apparently the test audience didn’t believe that she actually put on her helmet. They also didn’t believe that as a journalist she had the credentials to fly a plane, but of course they do. Remember, all reporters are also part-time flight instructors.

Lois makes a few passes around the Mad Scientists lab, for good measure, and lands in front of it. But when she goes in to interview the scientist she’s captured. [Insert Fake Surprise Here]. This happens every flippin’ episode: Lois puts herself in avoidable danger, where she gets tied up at some point. This makes me think that Lois is some sort of bondage freak.

This does raise yet another interesting question: If everyone knows where the scientist’s lab is why don’t they dispatch a SWAT team or bomb the place? Heck, I’d just send two drunk guys and a bulldozer. Tell them to just take out the first floor, leave the others where they are. They’ll destroy the building (the scientist will have no weapon) the drunk guys will die (so you don’t have to pay them) and the bulldozer will be destroyed (a tax write-off). It’s foolproof. I really should be a consultant.

Create Your Own Japanese RPG
Episode 2 : With No Further Obligation on Your Part

In the previous article I introduced you to the main elements of a battle system (Sparkles and Numbers) and helped you name your game. But unfortunately there’s more to an RPG than that. You have to have, among other things, some characters, a world and a story.. People to do stuff, a place to do that stuff in, and a reason that they’re doing that stuff. It’s an exact science.

White Guys with Swords

Creating characters for an RPG is easy if you just follow the patterns. There are certain “classes” that you have to fill, and then once you fill that class you’ll assign one of the few personalities as well as a name. Really, its that easy. I couldn’t make this hard if I tried.

Types of Characters:

Guy with the Sword – We’ll refer to him as GWS. He is absolutely required. His weapon must be a sword so large that there is no way, due to the laws of gravity and leverage, he could spin it in his hand or swing it any better than your average human could swing a motorcycle. But hey, we’re making a game here, not writing a physics book.

Hot Girl – We’ll refer to her as HG. This is another character class that is absolutely required. Her means of attack will either be unbelievably cool (like puling a dragon out of the sky), or dumb as hell (she throws a really sharp plate at them). There can be no middle ground. She’ll start out as mad or uninterested in the GWS but 20-60 hours later will be madly in love with him for no discernable reason.

Big Dumb Guy – Or the BDG. This is the kind of guy who could probably tear a phonebook in half but thinks that Latte means “a bunch”. This character must either wield a gun or be some sort of kick-boxing champion. He can be black, white, or bright green as long as the fundamentals stay the same: Must be strong as hell and have the IQ of a bag of gravel.

Comic Relief – The CR is an incredibly annoying character designed to make the player want to drag its ass out of the TV and beat it to death with a steel baseball bat. The weapon of choice for most CRs is some object that could never hurt someone no matter how much you hit them with it (such as a Megaphone or an empty DVD case). The characters in the game must be completely oblivious to how incredibly aggravating said character is.

There Are Some Who Call Me… Tim?

Acceptable names for main characters have to be either some every day word (Squall, Link, Cloud), or a string of letters that follow the Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel formula (Tidus, Evan, Zidane). As for the secondary characters it’s really anything that you can work out. One way is to take a game of scrabble and throw it on a homeless person. The hobo will then pick up a hand full of the letters and toss them back at you. Use these letters in any order you feel like to create your secondary characters.

But for some people, getting a hold of an angry homeless person isn’t possible, sometimes you’ll get a mildly annoyed hobo who will just swear at you and sit back down. Scrabble is expensive, so another tried-and-true formula is to take a common word and replace a few letters in it.
Examples:
Bell -B +Z = Zell
Muumuu -U +O = Momo

Note: Always make sure that you have at least one character with a Latin/Spanish name like Vincent, Cid or Rosa.

Personalities:

You can assign these in any order that you want, as long as at least 4 of them are present

A) Young and Idealistic
B) Quiet and Rough
C) Dead
D) Undead
E) Egocentric
F) A kid
G) A Robot
H) F***ing Annoying (Required for the CR)

Note: Usually A leads to C, but more on that later.

For my example RPG, here are my picks:

GWS: “Steel” – Fights with a ten foot blue sword. – Quiet and Rough.
HG: “Yantie” (from “Panties”) – Human that fights with differing sizes of lampshades. – Young and Idealistic
BDG: “Mokon” (from “Moron”) – A Human that fights with a rifle. – Egocentric
CR: “Stotip” (from “Shut up”) – Half-cat Half-Turnip that survives on marsh mellows and uses a snow cone as a weapon – F***ing Annoying

Secondary Character (Created with the Scrabble Hobo method): Xipoz

I skipped the other alternates due to space, but I think you can see how the system works. Now that you’ve completed this you should have your merry band of adventurers ready to venture out into the world and knock the sparkles out of things.

The Things That Need to Happen

Congratulations! You’ve made your characters and given them names and personalities. Now what are they going to do? If you just have your characters run around and fight people for no particular reason other than to level, that’s called Pokemon. In order to avoid that we’ll need a world and a story, and a decided lack of badges.

The most important thing in the game world are save points. You forget these and you might as well throw yourself out of a window (For the BDGs out there, make sure you get one 5 stories up or better).

Also, place them in areas that don’t make any damn sense. Why any self respecting bad guy would allow someone to put a save point on the front porch of their evil fortress is beyond me. That’s practically begging for trouble. The salesperson for “Save Point Distributions Inc” must be a millionaire. Not only is he getting them in every bad guy’s fortress, he’s sold one to every inn keeper and priest on the planet. Good job buddy, but now its time to take your sales trophy and go home.

“Save Point Distributions Inc” has a proven method to creating save points for games. First pick any random object that has nothing to do with saving, make it float and add a lighting element to it, like a glowing ball or a shiny question mark.

I picked a blinking Eat at Joe’s sign. It was on sale.

What They Say and Where They Say It

Next you’ll actually need to develop an atmosphere for your world. If you’re running short on time then the easiest way to do this is to take two time periods at least a century apart and mash them together. You could take the 1920′s and combine it with the year 2200, creating a society that has floating cities but still uses coal powered trains. Also, to complete the image of “another world” make your characters wear overly-complicated clothing like hoods with no shirts or shorts with an excessive number of straps. If you’re feeling particularly evil remember that someone somewhere is going to Cosplay your characters at some point, so feel free to have all of your characters walk around naked with their underwear on their heads sporting a purple jockstrap that reads “I’m with Stupid.”

The last thing that you need to do is to write your story and dialogue. The story must have a world-shattering human-obliterating force taking the guise of some long forgotten evil that resurrects itself just about the time that our hero ventures out into the world. The evil force will be presented in a way that allows insight into the human spirit, the nature of love, or some other mushy crap that will lead players to wish that you had taken less time reading philosophy and more time learning how to write coherent sentences.

Dialogue is the easy part. As long as you have a subject, a verb and punctuation its up to the player to decide what the hell you’re talking about. Then, have the game translated from English to Japanese and then back to English by a dope fiend who SWEARS he knows Japanese. In fact if you’re on a budget just let him write the story for a few hundred bucks. The more convoluted the story the more of a chance that you’re going to get reviewers to say things like “Deep” and “intricate” in their articles. This is because they don’t have the balls to admit they don’t understand what’s going on either.

There! You’re almost done! Now that we have the game all together all we have to do is package it and sell it.

-cjdaweasel

For those of you wondering Xipoz is worth 23 points.

Create Your Own Japanese RPG
Episode One : With Little or No Money Down

So you want to make a Japanese RPG but you aren’t Japanese. You rented an office. You gathered the semi-competent developers, and a marketing department. You hired the soda guy and the janitor. Now what? How do you make a game that people will buy? Will making the characters have big eyes and eat sushi cut it? How do you know? I know, and I am going to guide you through the process of creating a Japanese RPG that will look, feel and act authentic even if you’re not quite sure where Japan is. Also, since I’m such a nice guy I’ll be creating a game along with you to show you what you might come up with if you were as cool as me.

Oh, and Japan is in the Pacific Ocean, but that’s just details.

The Name of the Game

Some people whine that what makes or breaks an RPG is the story, or the battle system, or the characters. Pansies all of ‘em. What makes or breaks an RPG in English speaking countries is the title. Case in point: Dragon Quest vs. Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy sounds cool. Final, meaning the end, and then Fantasy adding an alliteration quality that makes the whole name come off as sounding like the game isn’t going to take any sh*t. The name Dragon Quest on the other hand simply screams “give me a wedgie please”. The most important thing that you can do for your game is to create a name that is going to stick to the public like a week old shirt to a roofer in July.

If you aren’t continuing in a series that is already established, make sure that the title of your game does not make any sense, and if possible, do not use any real words.

Examples: “Shining the Holy Ark”, “Biomotor Unitron”, “Grandia”*

Here’s a few examples of titles that wouldn’t work, and why:

Title: “Boobies”
Why: Many purchasers may be upset that they have to DO things in order to see the boobies.

Title: “Guy with a Sword hits things for forty hours”
Why: It gives away too much of the plot.

Titles: “Syphilis”
Why: Never name a game after an STD. It’s just bad form.

*Note: If you feel your title absolutely must relate to the story of your game feel free to later go back and add a colon. Then describe your game in 5 words or less, preferably in a different language than English.

For my RPG I chose:
TurfQuester Sigmo : Last of the Ultitrons

Hitting Stuff

The next thing that you’ll want to create is your battle system. The easiest way to do this is just to have the good guys line up on one side and the bad guys line up on the other. Then let them take turns beating on each other until one side isn’t standing anymore. Not very interesting, granted, but it’s tried and true.

But no matter what type of battle system that you use, you must include lots of two things: Sparkles and Numbers. This cannot be stressed enough.

Sparkles must appear every time that you hit something, and increase with each attack in a series. The more powerful the attack, the more sparkles. The player must feel as if they are literally beating the sparkles out of things.

Numbers are the building blocks on which you’ll pretend to have the “system” in “battle system” worked out. Most players will ignore 70-80% of the numbers that come up on the screen, so don’t stress their accuracy. Nobody can do math that fast. Just have a lot of them appear when ever anything happens in a battle.

Historical Note: The number system actually replaces an old system where the screen would turn different colors to communicate the status of your characters. Green for “Good”, Red for “Bad”, and Black for “Turn on your TV, stupid”.

Lastly for your battle system, you’ll have to create buzz factor. The easiest way to do this to take one thing that your system does differently (even slightly), and make it sound like you’re going to put it on your resume. To accomplish this, simply use a bunch of physics or math terms followed by “Battle System”. This words can include, but are not limited to: Active, Matrix, Real, Time, Base, etc. Not only will this make it seem like you had a purpose when you created the battle system, but it will give the poor lonely souls marketing something to write in their press releases.

For my RPG I chose:
Active-Matrix Battle System

In the next installment we’ll learn how to create comedic relief with snowcones and find out what question marks have to do with saving. If you feel the need, you can stop right now with just the battle system and title and release the game with no stories or characters. This product can be marketed as either a puzzle game in Japan, or in the US as “Every single game released for Atari Jaguar”.

Flash Gordon

Akim the Terrible Part II

The show fades to Commissioner Alec using a pen that his son made for him in art class at his desk in front of a wall of flood lamps with letters of the alphabet on them. Immediately the Commissioner is greeted by the happy robot on his desk and informed that Flash Gordon and Dane are coming in. I was hopeful that this Commissioner was finally going to be the one normal character in the show. Just to clarify what I’m talking about check out the inset to the right for a breakdown of where we stand in the story.

As you can see, commissioner Alec was my best hope for someone that was normal. But that all fell away as soon as they did a close up of his face.

To say that Alec’s eyebrows were horrifying would be a tragic understatement. Commissioner Alec has eyebrow parasites attached to his face that are slowly eating away at all the hair on his head. A better description would be to say that they it like a pair of long skinny caterpillars crawled up onto his face, latched onto his forehead and died. After the close up of Commissioner Alec’s face everything went black.

When I awoke I was greeted by Flash’s gay lover, Chris (or possibly Kurt, I can’t tell) who is on his way to the planet Karen as a welcome wagon. What exactly he is sent there to do is never quite make clear. But luckily the writers didn’t let that get in the way of progressing the story and after a very telling discussion between Flash and Chris, he’s on his way to the planet of Akim the Weird.

After Chris lands in the spaceport on Karen, he walks through to customs and is pounded senseless by two guys in unitards and a train conductor. The conductor calls the throne room to inform Akim that the GBI spy has been caught. This is a pivotal scene as you can see in the background that the spaceport door is actually made of bamboo chutes. This means that Akim’s scientists have discovered one of nature’s best kept secrets: Bamboo is space-proof.

Again we are taken to the throne room of perpetual laundry with the GBI spy Chriskurt. Most of the dialogue in this scene is by the king, meaning that I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on. This made me lose focus and I started trying to see pictures in the clothing in the background. In this Tide-inspired Rorschach Test I found a camel and a monkey.

Being that I can only truly understand one side of the conversation, I was at a bit of a loss as to what was going on. Apparently Akim wants Chris to kill Flash, but he won’t do it. So they tie him in the spring mounted bathtub which gives him an orgasm inducing massage which turns him into a killer.

After he’s had his fun in the Raffle’s hot tub, Chris is taken back to Akim and is questioned about his loyalty to Flash. Chris responds by promising to kill Flash with a knife. The most important thing to note about this scene is that in the laundry you can clearly see both a buffalo and a human hand.

Back at GBI headquarters the Commissioner plays himself like a bagpipe as they wait for word from Chris, the happiest spaceman in the galaxy. This scene is the final nail in the coffin over Chris’s sexuality. This guy is queerer than Richard Simmons while sucking on a popsicle. Finally, after waiting for what seems like 3 or 4 lines of dialogue, Chris beeps them and explains how much he wants to see Flash. The wild thing is that Flash doesn’t act like its strange at all that Chris REALLY wants to see him after being away for so long.

The next important scene takes place in small room where Flash is planning out some cruise to visit a crab. Drawn on the board is also an intergalactic Family Circus with Jeffy’s path drawn all across it. Here Chris or Kurt or whatever the hell his name is tries to stab Flash, but ultimately fails as Flash slaps him in the stomach and takes him down immediately. To his own credit, Chris completely deserved that one. In a future of interplanetary travel, stun guns, and spring-loaded mind obliterating bathtubs, if you’re still trying to kill people with pointy things then you deserve to have the ever loving crap kicked out of you. You damn dirty ape.

The show then fades to Dr. Zarkov’s laboratory where he is examining Kurt/Chris’s brain with his glowing Magic Eight Ball from the future! Zarkov determines that Kurt has the brainwaves of a homicidal maniac. The Dr. says “It looks like he’s had a frontal lobotomy.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t a frontal lobotomy make you docile? I thought that was the whole point behind it giving them to violent mental patients.

At first I was skeptical that you could determine someone’s mental health from a lightshow or that lobotomies made people fly across the galaxy and try to murder people with knives. My fears were quickly relieved when I realized that Dr. Zarkov has a beard. If there’s one thing that TV has taught me, it’s that you don’t argue with doctors that have beards. You’ll probably wake up one day as a head in a jar.

Dr. Zarkov Determines that in order to keep them from falling to the same fate, he’ll need to put a celinite tape on their frontal lobes. And to do that, they’ll need to shave their heads and put wigs on them. I know what you’re thinking. They just pretended to cut their hair and pretended like they were going they put on a celinite tape and then pretended to put a wig on afterwards that looked EXACTLY like their original hair. But that is WRONG. They really did all that stuff, because the crew of the Flash Gordon TV show were committed to excellence.

Flash Gordon

Akim the Terrible Part I

Before I give you the rundown of what the show Flash Gordon : “Akim the terrible” (pronounced ‘Ah-keem’) is about, I’d first have to throw in some Trivia:

- Steve Holland plays Flash

- Irene Champlin is Dale Arden

- No, I didn’t just steal that from the opening credits.

The show opens with a description of the planet Karen, which is the stronghold of Akim the Terrible (who later will be called Akim the Moderately Irritating). He is a horrible man who, if the intro is to be trusted, rules a marble floating in space. This may not be entirely true, as the world resembles a nut as well. It could go either way.

With the narrator droning on about the despicable person Akim is, the camera fades in on a destroyed city on this horrible planet, represented by a very lost cat and bunch of paper. Nothing screams horrible ruler more than a bad sanitation department. The narrator informs us that on this particular planet “Robbers and cutthroats lurk around every corner” while showing us an old guy trying to escape the planet with everything in his possession: his physics lecture notes, his lunch, and a his Monopoly money. The man is quite serious about his Hasbro games.

As the pre-escapee walks down the street, he is assaulted by (1) Robber and (1) Cutthroat, who both are dressed in unitards. They wear unitards because they are in the future. In the future people have advanced beyond the need for fashion sense, but not the need for briefcases. At this point the old guy struggles to keep his lunch while the two men tickle him. Then, out of somewhere off-screen a Vatican priest shows up and attempts to defend the old man by giving the Cutthroat (the bald one) a noogie. This works relatively well seeing as how no one knows how to fight on this planet. Akim somehow turned the entirety of Karen into a bunch of fourth graders. That’s not really Terrible, that’s just kind of weird.

On this planet that King Akim rules it seems like train conductors are policemen as well, but only if they’re wearing a cummerbund. I say this with a great degree of certainty because when the priest, the robbers and the old man are roughhousing, a conductor comes out of nowhere and breaks up the fight. Saying he comes out of nowhere is kind of a lie. He clearly sees the fighting from a train station downtown and uses his superpowers to run all the way to the fight in a matter of seconds. He quickly breaks up violent pushing and shoving that has erupted and arrests the priest for being a nice guy on a planet that is supposed to be Terrible. Vatican guy didn’t get to go to the “How to be Bad” seminar like everyone else and for that he will be put in a spring powered bathtub, but more on that later..

The show then cuts to Akim in his throne room where it is apparently laundry day. Everywhere hanging from the ceiling and walls are clothes drying. The throne room is ridiculous, but it’s Akim’s clothing that take the show. King Akim’s headdress is a cloth reproduction of a cherry pie accented by Fruit Rollups that are hanging from it. His gown is made of fishing net. Not fishnet, it’s fishing net, like the kind you use to catch dolphins.

Of course, his assistant is no better dressed. This poor guy is donning an British policeman’s cap and a shellacked kimono. He looks like he’s either late for his Legend of Kung Fu audition, or he’s wearing 50 ponchos at once.

I took quite a bit of time checking out the background of this throne room as well as Akim and his assistant’s clothing since I haven’t the faintest idea what Akim is saying most of the time. The man has an accent heavier than the box of porn under my bed. [Movie Clip 1.7 MB]. In case you are on Dial-up and 1.7 Meg is too big for you to download (Welcome to the new millennium, get with the program), here is a brief synopsis of the dialogue:

King Freshly-Baked: Der haff been improovmen.
Assistant Poncho: Bootifool Bootifool
King Freshly-Baked: Is goo to haff you bag [something] Ow goez hour campin?
Assistant Poncho: Sumsvay vey well you magisty. Buh as long as the galazy have [something] We canno make happy de sire.
King Freshly-Baked: But their leeders have a prize. Everyman haf a prize.

What I gather from this conversation is that they want to go camping, but Akim has set up some galaxy wide raffle and he can’t go. I didn’t see raffle ticket one through the entire rest of the episode, so my translation is probably wrong. It’s probably better that there wasn’t a raffle since he’s so terrible it would probably be rigged anyway. Luckily for us English speakers, it doesn’t seem to matter what the hell Akim is talking about as long as one comes away from the conversation with the impression that Akim is bad, and he wants to destroy Flash Gordon. Which is a plot twist that surprises only one-celled creatures and a few really dumb plants.

After the wonderful banter about the raffle and destroying humanity as we don’t know it, the priest from before is brought in to be put on trial. He is introduced as John, which with a name like that solidifies him as definitely being an alien. John the alien is sentenced by Akim to “have his mind changed”. According to the owner’s manual you need to do this once about every 80,000 miles.

John is then grabbed by two guards, whose uniforms are made out of Glad trash bags, and tied into a hot tub with springs all around the inside and a bunch of floodlights at the bottom. At first I thought this was the raffle item they were talking about earlier but it turns out that this retrofitted tub is actually a brain scrambler. This device gives the subject a good massage and then turns them into a bad person. John, who’s name suddenly gets changed to Jorgo, is given a hippy-style headband, turned bad and released back into the planet of stray cats, lines of trashcans, and 8.5×11 sheets of paper. [Movie Clip 800K]

After Jorgo/John is led out of the throne room, another man in a shiny duct tape hat enters to report that a spaceship from GBI is on its way to Karen. GBI or the Galactic Bureau of Investigation is never clearly explained in any of the episodes I’ve seen. As my guess, which is always accurate, they’re a collection of 20 or so humans that go around the galaxy aggravating aspiring dictators, destroying robots, and getting captured. They do that last thing extremely well. And I think King Akim summed it up the GBI’s function when he so succinctly said to his funny-hatted messenger: “Ah Geebee eye mahn fum earf. Ery vell owl dahs is a peasent sopize.” You can’t argue with that.

Crazy For Cows

Part II : Poo Launching Cows

In case cow stories aren’t your thing, there are several other cow related things to do on the site. You can also play games! Most are quizzes related to parts of cow’s bodies that you’re probably better off not thinking about. I took a quiz and got 2 out of 10. One question I got right just because I guessed well. The other was the question about shit, which I consider myself an expert on.

My favorite game has to be the “Pie Game”, where the object of the game is to shoot falling steaks by launching poop from the anus of a cow. In case you didn’t catch that, I’m going to repeat it: The object of the game is to shoot steaks out of the sky by shitting on them with a cow. As of this point, the site lost what little dignity it had left. The good news is that if you have problems playing the fantastically fun Cow Pie game, fear not. There’s a place where you can email “if you have a problem playing CowPie”, which last year was given the “Least Used Link On the Internet” Award.

Fun Cow Fact:
Per day, a cow spends 6 hours eating and 8 hours chewing cud.

As if cow stories and cow games that involve poo, weren’t enough there’s more! For that cow lover in your life, there’s “something for everyone”. I don’t personally know any cow lovers, but I do know a few idiots, so I figured that gifts recommended from this site were a good bet. I bought my retarded cousin a cow with palm trees growing out of its back. I was sure that this Chernobyl-esque deformed cow would be considered cute by anyone with a single digit IQ, so I bought it. Chucky (my cousin), slobbered on it, laughed, and then promptly smashed it. It was too stupid even for him.

The problem with cows is that they’ll never be cool. Take movies for example. The coolest thing that cows get to do in movies is be mutilated by aliens. This stems from their only real products being: Leather, Food, and Farts. It’s hard to admire that. Horses, on the other hand, which are closely related to cows (and by closely related I mean they look the same), but don’t suffer from an image problem. John Wayne’s popularity would have been drastically different if he would have come riding into town on a cow. In fact, aside from mutilation, I can’t think of one thing that cows do that is cool. They chew cud, fart, die and we eat them. That’s it. No website needed.

Crazy For Cows

Part I : Why Cows Probably Hate Us

There are sites everywhere on the internet that are dedicated to different things. Star Trek, Video Games, Cars, etc. Cows, however, should not fall into this list. In fact, www.crazyforcows.com delivers everything you never wanted to know about cows, and more.

Usually, when a website opens up with “Moo!”, your expectations of a site should drop to zero. If they don’t, tell the dwarf men from Happyfun Mountain I said “Hi.”. Those of you not running off to deliver my message, please read on.

I discovered crazyforcows.com on one of my many searches for naked midgets in clown costumes. Why? Do you ask? I don’t know. Midgets and clowns have nothing to do with cows, so I don’t know how the site related to my search. Search engine technology is designed by light beings from NASA and is decades beyond our pathetic human minds to comprehend. The beings must truly have wanted me to see this site, bending the laws of the universe to show me to it.

Instantly, upon viewing the site, you can see why it is so incredibly important. There are many, many things to learn about cows, and most of them are really gross.

Fun Cow Fact:
A 1,000 pound cow produces an average of 10 tons of manure a year.

Also on the site is listed several stories that readers have submitted about cows. I don’t want to know what kind of sad lonely life that you have to lead in order to think that a cow related incident is good enough to write about, submit to a site, and then have it read and pondered over by other “cow fanatics”, but I’ll tell you this, we have a phrase for people like that: Serial Killer.

20 Things That Piss Me Off

Videogames

There are lots of things that I’m generally pissed off about. Like how we elected a man as our president who, even with millions of dollars, couldn’t find oil in Texas, or that I’m still not convinced that its Chicken in the Chicken Chow Main. But in the reality of a world where people get mad at celebrities that don’t want to have babies, I have to go off and play some games to release some stress. So it really pisses me off when I can’t sit down and play a game that doesn’t do something stupid that twenty thousand games before it haven’t done as well. So here, for my viewing pleasure are 20 things that just piss me off about games:

1. The fact that any super secret soldier can have 15 lights on him, and still be “invisible” at night. Agreed, it looks cool, but unless the enemy isn’t expecting to be attacked by a Christmas tree, I think that we can leave all of the Halogens at home.

2. The first person to come up with a game that has a mascot that jumps around on mushrooms, shoots fireballs from their mouth to rescue a princess from an evil turtle is considered “a genius” not “a possible crack addict”.

3. Why is it that every soldier can carry 15 different types of guns, ammo for all of them, a PDA, a backpack, two tickets to Monday Night Football, a few keycards for doors, and still jump around like Jackie Chan? No wonder you’re the hero, you can carry the entire US arsenal on your back. Hey here’s a tip: Put all that crap down and just punch the daemons of hell to death.

4. In the advent of next generation games that can faithfully reproduce the snot flying off the nose of a German soldier with complete historical accuracy, why am I still playing Role-playing games where the good guys stand on one side, the bad guys stand on the other, and they take turns beating on each other? Imagine if wars were fought this way. Most of the soldiers would die of old age before they ever got to their turn.

5. From my own survey, the average mental age of an MMO player seems to be about 12 years old. I swear, if another matureless brat follows me around for half an hour telling me how great my Night Elf’s “obobs” are, I’m going to test my real life PVP skills on them.

6. How long is it going to take before developers realize that movie to game adaptations, well, suck. What I would suggest is that they take all the movie to game adaptations, incase them in a hard plastic, and sell them as $45 commemorative coasters. People who liked the move (which was good) will by the coasters, and they won’t feel compelled to play the game (which sucked).

7. When did the Sonic the Hedgehog game Series turn into a game Armada? In the past year there’s been, I think at least 50 Sonic games released and/or re-released. Give the poor guy a break. He runs really fast, he jumps on stuff, gets missiles, spikes and all sorts of “owie”-inducing things thrown at him. Let him have a vacation where he just sits in a lawn chair, drinks margaritas, and watches Tails work his ass of taking down Dr. Robotnik.

8. Stop turning stuff into mascots for games. It is official, every noun in the known universe has been a character in a game. Mushrooms? Check. Rat? Check. Weasel? Check. A pile of poop with corn for teeth? Check. Mark my words, one day you’ll be playing a game as a Vienna Sausage.

9. Rainbow Six 3. Shouldn’t that be Rainbow 18?

10. Why do zombies come out of rooms that I’ve already been in, that are in a car on the end of a train that’s moving. Where the hell are they coming from? Scotty beaming them in?

11. Criminals must be the source of Extra-dimensional travel. That’s the only reason I can see being able to fit 12 behind a cash register.

12. People need to stop making “Retro gaming” out to be some sort of noble cause. First of all, its not feeding Africa. Second, the only reason you’re playing Centipede instead of Halo is that the Xbox won’t make long distance calls.

13. What is it with Health Packs? They’re in every game now, even car games. The only reason you need to put an Ace Bandage on your car is if your a redneck and need something to hold your bumper on for your big date tonight.

14. Does anyone besides me not get Pro Wrestling games? Let me get this straight: You’re a person pretending to be a character that represents a person that is pretending to be a character that pretends to fight. I hope that I’m missing something.

15. NASCAR games. Really, how many times do you have to go around the track before you realize “Hey, I could be stabbing my eyes out with hot pokers right now.” Sure it’d hurt, but at least you’d have a better story for work the next morning than “I sat on my ass at home alone and drove a pretend car around a pretend track for 2 hours.”

16. What the hell is a “Realistic Damage Model”? And how would you make a car game with Unrealistic Damage Models? One car hits another car and they turn into 15,000 ping-pong balls?

17. People that insist on telling me about a gaming experience. If I wanted to know how you got the Ice Sword of Gibraltar from the Holy Fire Caverns when you were only level 12 and you forgot to restock your arrows, then I’d ask you to shoot me, because I’d never ever want to know that.

18. The main character can be beaten up, thrown around, blown up, shot, and stabbed, and somehow live, yet his girlfriend can be stabbed once, and she dies instantly.

19. When after twenty minutes of playing a new game, I realize I’ve just been swindled out of fifty dollars by an impressive Ad campaign.

20. Every soldier in every game can pitch like Nolan Ryan. Hurtling a grenade at 30 miles per hour over 300 yards? No problem! The man shouldn’t be fighting in a war, he should be pitching for the Mets.

The End of the World

Conclusion

There’s a lot of things to be afraid of on this planet, like rapists and Mormons, but you can’t let it control you. You can’t let the world party while you sit in your fallout shelter with $300 in bottled water and a Y2k Ready Port-A-Potty. But you can prepare for the eventual end of the world with a few necessities, in the event that aliens invade because the love messages that NASA’s sending them got too graphic. So, here to help as always, I give you my MUST HAVE list for the Armageddon.

1. Water – In order to drink and bathe as well as other things. Don’t drink too much, being that the human body is already 80% water, you’re pretty close to drowning as it is.

2. Food – You’ll probably want to pack things that are ready to eat, in the off chance that your microwave breaks or that Papa John’s Pizza shuts down for the Apocalypse.

3. Old Spice – If you don’t want/need to bathe, or you want a cheep air freshener, you’ll need some old Spice to freshen up.

4. Monopoly – You’ll have lots of time to kill and this game takes for fucking ever.

5. Framed Picture of George Bush/Bill Gates/Tom Green – To remind you of why you’re not going to miss civilization that much.

6. Hustler Magazine – Trust me, it will become important.

7. Clothes – Because being naked is fun until you have to sit on a concrete floor.

8. Gun – In case anyone tries to steal your Hustler Magazine.

9. Condoms – The only thing worse than being one of the last humans alive in a post-apocalyptic nightmare is being one of the last humans alive in a post-apocalyptic nightmare with an STD.

10. Pets – Initially they’ll offer protection and companionship, but as time wears on, they’ll be the only food source that will come to you when you call.

Beyond that, the rest is up to you. But now I hear the question: “Now that I’ve prepared for the End of the World, which end am I preparing for?” To which I would answer “Shut up voices in my head.” Just in case though, I’ve set up the different ends of the world and a rating scale of probability of them coming true based on the very real possibility of all the worlds writing utensils coming to life and revolting against the humans that dragged their faces across paper. I also chose this rating system because it’s extremely abstract and therefore difficult to argue with.

Y2K

Believability: 1 Sharpie

I know this may shock some people, but there is a remote possibility that we may not be dead. Outside of Sureway’s register system going on the flop, exactly what were people expecting? Nuclear missiles to go flying off to other countries? I hope that I’m not the first one to point this out, but why would Nuclear missiles built in the late 70s need to know the date in the first place? And even if they did, certainly they wouldn’t be scheduled to launch in the year 1900.

Maybe the DoD was preparing for some sort of Back to the Future thing where Marty McFly sends a couple of missile silos back in time to 1899 with some Communists, and we have bomb China before Jan. 2 1900. And in a triumphant conclusion it is found out that the missiles were already set and they destroy the Red Chinese before they can launch their plans for world domination. Or maybe it was all bullshit to begin with.

Of course, it could have been a practical joke that the programmers put in. One time in my Scheduler I set myself up to attend Woodstock ’69, but when it rolled over to the year 2000, my Palm Pilot turned into a missile and blew up my apartment. I tried to explain this to the police, but I was still booked for Arson.

Jesus

Believability: 2 Pens and a Pink Crayola

The idea that a dead Jewish guy is going to come back to life with a bunch of trumpets and horses seems a bit weird. And since a most of the world’s religions don’t even believe he exists, and those that do believe in him have a nasty habit of killing people that disagree with them, I’d say that if he is coming back he’s not going to take anyone with him anyway.

Besides, Jesus is like the Manager of Earth, he decides what gets done, who does it, and then has other people make up the reasons as to why it was a good idea to do it in the first place. And as any person who’s had any job for more than 27 seconds knows, managers will soon as bend the laws of physics before they’ll admit that they could have possibly maybe partially in part been slightly incorrect at some point in the far and distant past about some trivial matter that in no way would have effected the outcome of one of their decisions. If Jesus the Manager does in fact exist, then he’d never admit that he goofed on the human race. And we all know he did.

Rocks

Believability: 4 Smelly Markers

It’s really hard to find fault with the theory that we’ll all be wiped out by Asteroids that burn through our atmosphere, slam into our planet, and begin humping our monkeys. It seems pretty iron-clad. Excluding the fact that there literally hundreds of miles of space, and that our planet is but a small fraction of that void, what do we have on our side? The only thing we really have protecting us from falling rocks from the sky (titanium umbrellas aside) is the magnificently crappy SPACE GUARD, who have a better chance of correctly naming all the new spring fashions for the upcoming year than giving us valuable rock forecasting information.

It seems to me, of all the things that can fall from the sky, big ole rocks would be top of the list. Yet we pay a weather man in California a 6 digit salary to tell us if water is going to come from the sky in big drops, or itty bitty drops, and he can’t do that without giving us some sort of  % of chance. I just want to know the weather, if I wanted to do math, I’d go back and finish 5th grade.

The End

It will come, at some point or another. Several Scientists say that we have only a few measly million years left until our sun runs out of fuel and explodes, turning every cow on earth into a well done steak. Which scientists, I don’t know. It never give their names, which makes me think that they’re lying. But by that time humanity will either have reduced themselves to dust or learned how to move stars around and spell out naughty jokes in the sky. When the time comes, I hope that there’s someone like me, telling my “Pirate and the French Whore” joke to the world with supernovas.