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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.

Dear Team Sonic,

What the fuck are you doing? I’ve been a devout fan of Sonic the Hedgehog since the Genesis. I love Sonic, and I like Tails, and I will usually crush Dr. Eggman (Eggman, Egghead, Robotnik… whatever) if given the time. But I feel that the Sonic series has taken a decided turn for the crappy, and someone needs to say something. Through research, time and frustratingly boring gameplay I think I’ve narrowed down my three major complaints with the new games:

1) Please stop adding characters to my Sonic games.

Really and honestly Sega I give less than a sh!t about Peach and that stupid alligator. I don’t want to beat the game with 52,000 different characters that are just clones of the three main characters: Sonic, Tails and Knuckles. I never asked for that, and from my reasearch (see above) neither did anyone else. Please remove all of them, except for Shadow. He can stay.

2) Please stop making levels so flippin slow.

I play sonic so I can fly through a level a top-notch speed. Unless I missed a meeting, which is entirely possible, that’s what Sonic is about. I will take the time to admit that you have been pretty good about this, but there should never EVER be a time where I have to stop Sonic and line up a shot before I jump. If I wanted to play something slow and easy I’d play Mario.

3) Please stop making Final Fantasy 7 : Sonic Edition.

All of the sudden Sonic can gain levels and pull off limit breaks. Let’s stop pretending. He’s already got the spikey hair, why not just give him a sword and be done with it. I’m up to my scrotum in bad RPGs, I don’t need another one.

Seriously guys, what the h*ll are you smoking?,
CJ

The Curse of the MMOs

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft is an MMO designed for just one thing: Taking your money, and lowering your IQ. Okay, that’s two things. See? I’m getting stupider by the minute. No matter what you’re doing in WOW you’re going to be constantly pelted with requests to do things that you don’t want to do. If FFXI was about complete jerks with 15 dollars a month of disposable income and an internet connection, then WOW is about a secret government project to make everyone who plays it as mature as the plot to a Power Rangers episode. And it’s working.

My Story Begins

I started off playing as a female Night Elf. Anyone who has played the game already knows where this is going, so feel free to skip on to the next section. Everyone else, read on.

I spent most of my time denying requests to remove my clothes and dance. Which, if you have any life outside of videogames you will realize that this is not only a waste of time, but kind of sick. One person even went so far as to follow me all the way across one of the continents demanding that I remove my clothes, and even offered me a few silver if I did. I finally gave in and that’s the story of how I bought my first set of Druidic robes. THE END.

I wish. I figured that the higher I rose in level the more this kind of thing would taper off so I did my quests, built up an ignore list of perverts, and continued on with my pretend life. It seems though, that I just traded one type of harassment for another. One day, I shit you not, someone requested that I have sex with their character. Naturally I turned them down because I have a girlfriend and that is kind of like cheating even though there’s no real sex involved and its not me doing it anyway. Of course this is all just rationalization for the fact that having sex in a game is probably the saddest thing I can think of this side of Beanie Baby collecting. I can only determine that WOW breeds polygon molesters. They’re freaking everywhere.

Stay Away From Me

The worst thing about partying with anyone on WOW is that you have to put up with people who try to make their characters do things that they’re not supposed to do. I’m all for customizing characters, but a Rogue (think Thief) is NOT a healer. I don’t care how many Goblin Jumper Cables (an item that revives a fallen character) you have, or how high your First Aid skill is, you are not “TeH HeelR!!1!” You are “TeH imbecile!” If WOW were a benefits package then Druids, Paladins, and Priests would be Full Coverage, and a Rogue with Cables and First Aid would be an HMO. A bad HMO. There is at least one of these people in every Town, and usually two in any decent guild.

If you’re not in a guild, prepare to be harassed until you join one. Once you’re in a Guild, prepare to be harassed by duel requests. Actually, just prepare to be harassed. Everyone seemed to want to fight my Healing Druid. Why the hell would you want to fight me? What am I going to do? Heal you to death? That would be like a Tank Battalion challenging a MASH unit to some war games.

How To Take A Game Too Seriously

WOW also has different types of servers, such as PVP (Player vs. Player), Normal (ummm… Normal), and RP (Roll Playing). My favorite is RP. These people take the game far too seriously, but since its an RP server they don’t feel so bad about it.

More often than not, in an RP server, you are greeted by someone in the following fashion “I am Cabados of Stormwind, warrior of our King”. No. You are Greg of Ohio, maker of Slushies. I respect the fact that your life sucks and you want to be someone else, but please don’t go around telling other people that someone “insulted your honor”. You’re sitting in front of your computer on a Friday night playing a videogame, and you’re not having sex. Anything that anyone says to you, you probably deserve. I can’t really blame you though. It’s far more interesting to be ‘Cabados, the warrior of Stormwind” than “Greg, Manager of 711″.

But to all the Gregs out there, listen to me. When we’re having our imaginary characters fight a pretend dragon in a fantasy world, it is NOT the time to RP. I highly doubt that in Feudal times, if they were fighting a Dragon they would have used a phrase like “Tis a fine fireball hurtling towards you me lady. Would you care to step out of the way?”. More than likely they would have said something along the lines of “Get out of the way! FUCKING FIREBAAAAALLL!!”.

Where are people getting some of these accents and language from? In any given sentence from any Greg, there’s usually a bit of Olde English, a few modern English words, Scottish word or two, or some French mixed in. You don’t sound like a Medieval warrior, you sound like some backwoods British retard. Take an Olde English literature class, then try to play along. As it stands, there’s not a single European from any century that would have a fucking clue what you’re saying.

AC: 30% If they’re not pestering you to take off your clothes, then they’re harassing you to duel them. If they’re not doing either of those, then they’re either trying to get you to join their guild, or get you to quit your guild and join theirs. There are of course, some that are just plain assholes.

LLA: 70%-80% No one in WOW could type a complete sentence if they were reading out of the manual and they received electrical shocks to their groin every time they hit a wrong key. I think that this is partly due to the fact that almost everyone who plays WOW is 13.

LSR: “Horny Uncle Jim” The only reason to play WOW for longer than a month is if you like hanging around little kids. There’s only three types of people that like to hang out with children: Other children, serial killers, and child molesters. If you’re over 16 and you haven’t killed anyone, then my advice to you would be to stay the hell away.

My Character: I played a female Night Elf primarily, among many others. My favorite race were the Jamaican Trolls. Being a Troll is about as close as most people will ever come to being cool.

Conclusion

By the time you’ve played WOW enough to get your character to a level that isn’t laughable, you’ve effectively dropped two years off your maturity. To compensate you’ll try to talk like your from the 1300s, but you’ll just end up sounding like you learned European English from reading the copyright information in fantasy novels. I want to leave you with this thought: If you are not part of a class that is designed to fill a certain role in a party, please don’t try, and whatever you do, don’t talk like you’re from Feudal Times. You’ll just make yourself look like a fool, and even the Gregs will laugh at you.