Brentnote: Notes from Brent

Metal Gear Interlude

2010-07-09T00:37:00.003-06:00

The worst part about being a gamer of particularly single player games is that there's ALWAYS more games for you to play. I've recently wrapped up Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, and while 4 is waiting for me I've also potentially got Metal Gear 1 and 2 (the originals) as options and I'm still in the middle of Phantom Hourglass. And then there's the idea that maybe I should play something between the Metal Gear games? I still haven't played Heavy Rain (maybe another interactive movie as a break isn't a great idea), Uncharted 2, I've got a bunch of Sonic games I've been wanting to replay, Spirit Trackers is waiting for me, as is the XBLA version of Banjo Kazooie, my friend lent me Wario Lan Shake it but I don't have video cables for my wii right now. I'm sure I've also got a bunch of random GBA/GC/Xbox games that have yet to be finished.

I especially find it difficult to replay old games unless there's a new one coming out or something because I feel like I'm neglecting the unplayed (I've never played) games I have.

Final Fantasy XIII - First Impressions

2010-03-14T18:50:00.003-06:00

Immediately before playing the awaited 13th installment in the main Final Fantasy series (I consider it the 12th actually, fuck XI) my brother warned me about his experience with the first couple hours: button mashing. This had me worried, I hate it when games/movies/TV shows waste my time with pointless crap. Furthermore, some of the reviews of the game aren't quite as stellar as I'd hoped.

Upon starting up the game one thing is incredibly clear: the graphics are amazing. I'm only two hours in and this is easily the best looking game I've ever seen. Hell, that's actually noticeable after the first two minutes. Not only are the graphics incredible but it has the visual style to match. All the characters, enemies and environments are absolutely breathtaking. The opening cut scene is really visually stimulating and action packed.

The game manages to pretty quickly drop you into the action and throw you into a battle sequence. And here is where the button mashing I was warned about comes in. While the battle system seems like it will eventually get quite interesting it doesn't exactly start out like that, I won't go into much detail about it but there is a lot of simply hitting X without thought. All the battles for the first couple hours are like that. The thing is though, it's not nearly as tedious as it sounds.

A huge thing that Final Fantasy XIII excels at is game mechanics, which is actually the most important aspect to a game for me at this point. Every thing is really quick and moves extremely fluidly, from the battle system to just walking around. There's almost no load times. The battles are so quick and actually look so good that I hardly even cared how repetitive they actually are. They actually show you your time at the end of the battle and you get ranked based on how quickly you win. Most battles end up being less than 20 seconds, I had a couple that were three. When you get to your first real battle two hours in, it is much more entertaining (still only took me 1:30) and it has me very excited for the rest of the game.

Obviously though it is pretty stupid that they do this. All the first battles are extremely pointless, you get completely healed at the end of each one and you gain no experience. There is no doubt that this could have been handled a lot better.

The story so far is quite intriguing and I'm pretty excited to get to the rest of this supposedly 60 hour long game.

Another thing that I'm enjoying so far about this game is its return to the roots of Final Fantasy: the babes. The first one had it's scantily clad White Mage, the fourth had its random dancers and this one has

It's not really a new addition to the Final Fantasy series, but I just can't help being amazed that despite the circumstances of the story there never seems to be a shortage of hair dressers or styling products. Don't get me wrong, it's great to play a game where the main character is a total babe, but it makes the overall story so much less believable when everyone always looks like they just had a makeover. It'll be nice when games of this cinematic quality give characters different clothing throughout the story and maybe dress them like they're in a battle to save the world instead of making them look like they're going to the bar on Friday night.

Why The Spectacular Spider -Man is so awesome

2009-10-29T01:56:00.001-06:00

Cursed

2009-09-20T16:45:00.003-06:00

That right guys, I've been cursed. I can't recall any recent encounters with crazy old women, so I'm clueless on possible causes at this point.
This curse has really put me out of commision for the past few weeks though. Straight from shocking audition failure to the pain of wisdom teeth removal directly followed by the joyful experience of tonsillitis where it too much to drink water (next time I'm going to see a doctor much, much sooner by the way) and then onto car troubles resulting in my vehicle being out of commision for at least a couple weeks. So yeah, food isn't such a problem any more, but getting too and from school suddenly is...

INFAMY OF INFAMIES!!

CAN THIS BE THE END

OF OUR BELOVED

CRUSADER??

WILL BRENT

WAX SERIOUS?

FOR THE SAKE

OF OUR HERO,

LET'S THINK POSITIVELY!!!

BUT IT LOOKS BAD,

VERY BAD!

HOW CAN WE WAIT

UNTIL NEXT TIME..

SAME BRENT-TIME...

SAME BRENT-CHANNEL!!?

Smallville, you suck.

2009-09-10T21:02:00.003-06:00

This summer I took on the challenge of catching up on the long running TV series, Smallville. I had never watched it before, but it's about Superman. SUPERMAN. He's fucking awesome. Anyway, the series started off pretty shitty but eventually got better, to what I thought was "good" but I'm starting to have second thoughts. The only way I can explain it is I'd been exposed to so many terrible episodes that by the time it got decent it seemed fantastic in comparison.

About a week ago I finished watching Justice League for probably the 7th time, and now as I'm finishing up Superman the Animated Series I've arrived on "Superman's Pal," an episode about little Jimmy Olsen and I'm reminded again of how incredibly stupid Smallville is.

Smallville Season 8 spoilers by the way. Like, season finale style spoilers.

I'm not gonna go into detail here, but at the end of the season Jimmy Olsen has relationship problems which leads to him developing a drug addiction, that he gets over a couple episodes later, and in the following episode (season finale) he ends up being murdered by a jealous super villain who is competing with him for a girl.

Let's go over this again:
Little Jimmy Olsen
develops a drug addiction
and is then MURDERED
by a super villain.

Oh, and guess who does it? Who's the jealous super villain who's fighting over a girl with little Jimmy Olsen? You wanna know, right?

DOOMSDAY

Now that the shock is residing, I should probably clear up that it wasn't technically Doomsday, but more so the Jekyll to his Hyde. See, on Smallville they feel the need to completely ruin villains for some reason, so Doomsday actually changes between two people, one who is a normal human, a paramedic in fact, and well, Doomsday. Oh, he's also the son of Zod for some fucked up reason, came to earth in the same meteor shower as Clark Kent but without a ship somehow. ANYWAY, Clark refuses to defeat Doomsday because his other half is a good guy, so he does something fancy to split them apart and the human dude is the one who kills Jimmy. Kinda smart in a way, but also pretty damn ridiculous.

I was listening to the commentary on an episode of Superman and Bruce Timm (producer, writer, artist for the DC Animated Universe) said when he told DC he wanted to kill a character in Superman and suggested Jonathan Kent they told him he could do it as long as they bring him back.
Sure, it was 10 years ago, but why the hell does the far superior show get restricted on these kinds of things? Smallville killed JIMMY OLSEN and they will not be bringing him back (oh, Jonathan Kent died in season 5 by the way).

When I think back on how terrible the first few seasons are I wonder why DC ever let this show continue. Then I remember that they are owned by a larger corporation who loves to cash in on Superman, stupid teenagers and generally anyone with horrible taste.

Bedouin Soundclash Part 2: Hippie Jam Bands are Stupid.

2009-08-10T19:45:00.001-06:00

Sunday morning at the Regina Folk Fest had a workshop called Get a move on: Fat beats and funky rhythms with Socalled (host), Bedouin Soundclash, Pacifika. I had no idea what it was going to be, but it turned out to be a bunch of members from different bands jamming for an hour. There was a couple bass players, an accordion player, fiddle, trumpet, saxophone, a couple female singers, and of course, Jay, the singer/guitarist of Bedouin Soundclash.

They turn on a drum machine and everyone kinda jams around that. It was kinda cool for a bit, but after about 40 minutes I realized how incredibly dumb it is and was reminded why my band doesn't do any live jams. It is just way too dull and unstructured to be very entertaining for anyone but the people doing it.

And then there's Jay Malinowski again. Here's the thing about Jay: he doesn't really jam out or do any crazy guitar solos. Maybe it's because he's from a band that doesn't suck, or maybe because he's not that kind of guitar player, who knows. Throughout the first jam, which lasted about 40 minutes, he mostly threw in some cool rythym guitar parts every once in a while and a couple neat vocal skats. For a good portion of it he actually sat down and had a cigarette. After that jam was over, he took over the microphone and started singing Amazing Grace (it was Sunday morning after all). The band jammed over that for a bit, then that one kinda ended and again Jay started up a song. This time it was Can't Hurry Love, and it was fantastic. Again, the whole band jammed over it and it was very well received. The audience clearly had a much better reaction to the last couple songs than anything else they did. I wish they had done that kind of thing for the whole hour instead of spending the first 40 minutes masturbating in front of a crowd.

I'm finally getting to see them in concert on Tuesday. Last time I saw them I wasn't really familiar with their songs, and it was still awesome, so I'm really excited for this concert. Expect a review of that later. Check out part 1 here.

Bedouin Soundclash Part 1

2009-08-08T23:51:00.005-06:00

Bedouin Soundclash is playing the Regina Folk Festival this weekend and while I wasn't able to catch their full performance tonight I was able to catch something else they were a part of this afternoon. First of all, I gotta say that never have I seen so many hippies. I must have seen 50 people carrying around long boards. Anyway, on one of the side stages was a "workshop" entitled Nico on the Night Train: Travel Songs Hosted by Bedouin Soundlcash. It turned out just be the singer from Bedouin, Jay Malinowski, and members of three other bands taking turns playing travel songs on acoustic guitar. Surprisingly, Nico on the Night Train was not one of the songs played.

This one hour session was, for the most part, actually quite boring. Jay's songs were clearly the highlight, and he wasn't even playing songs the audience knew. The first song he played was called Life is a Gun and I found it quite catchy. The second was called Narceritos, which is what they call the smugglers who bring drugs up from Central America to Vancouver, and it was about a friend of his in Vancouver who either uses or works at a safe house for shooting up. Both were totally new songs, and the bass player informed me they were from Jay's upcoming solo record. You can listen to demos of them on his myspace. Definitely on the top of my anticipated albums now. He finished up the set with 12:59 Lullaby, one of Bedouin's hit singles.

Tomorrow I'm off to another "workshop" called Get a move on: Fat beats and funky rhythms with Socalled (host), Bedouin Soundclash, Pacifika. Who knows what this one will turn out to be, but it better be funky. Tuesday night I will of course be seeing them in Medicine Hat. Expect blog posts about both.

Resurrection

2009-08-07T12:55:00.004-06:00

It has been brought to my attention that I haven't made a post in just about forever. The truth is I have a handfull of drafts for posts that I just didn't end up finishing. I had a post about Smallville, one where I bitched about Reel Big Fish DVD, fair rides, and other crazy topics. They were supposed to be long and detailed, but screw it. Here's two months of half assed blog posts summarized into a a paragraph each:

Smallville

Seasons 1-4 really sucked, 5 was kinda good and 6 was awesome. I have no idea how it ended up lasting so long but I'm glad it gets better. Earlier seasons mostly just deal with kryptonite mutants with stupid powers, and the episodes suffer from way too ridiculous/cheesy teen plots. Favourites include: Clark Kent runs for class president; Clark Kent uses x-ray vision to see into girl's locker room; Clark Kent has a drunken, spur of the moment wedding in Las Vegas; Clark Kent does red kryptonite, starts acting rebelious, becomes distant from his friends and spends a lot on his parents credit card; the entire cheerleading team uses kryptonite combined with their superior knowledge of chemisty to create a love potion.

The Lawrence Arms

Are back. Apparently Brendan Kelly reads my blog and I convinced him that the band should do some recording (that's the story I'm sticking with). They went into the studio and recorded a 5 song EP, to be released on a 7" vinyl record. I'm stoked.

Reel Big Fish

Quit making DVDs already. They just released their third live DVD, with their previous ones only being released in 2003 then 2006. They've only really done a half-bsides album and a cover album since the last one, and over half the song list on this one appears on the other DVDs. Some of the new songs I don't really give a damn about either, for instance most of the four cover songs on the DVD. MAKE AN ALL NEW ALBUM.

Exhibition

Did some rides, got ripped off on mini-donuts (whatever happened to 3 bags for $5?), and missed MC Hammer. I'm crazy, I know.

Eternal Sontata

I've been putting off buying this game for such a long time and now I've finally done it. For the uninformed, Eternal Sonata is an RPG on Xbox 360 and PS3 about a dream world that exists within the pianist Chopin's head while he's on his deathbed. Graphics and sound are amazing, probably the best I've ever seen, and the battle system is pretty cool but UNFORTUNATELY it suffers from a few issues. First of all, it has these awesome dungeons that are just huge, but there's only ever two different enemies in them. The battle system is pretty cool and original, but because there's only two enemies you basically figure out one strategy for battle once you get into the dungeon and then the rest of the battles get really repetitive. There's also a lot of cheesy dialogue and directing issues. The game is still pretty good, but it bothers me when a game gets a lot going for it in some ways then really screws up in others. Only about 15 hours in, maybe expect more on this in the future.

Madworld
Is awesome

The Red Shells

Have done a lot of recording and we've got a show next week. I bought a distortion pedal yesterday and it really beefs up half our songs. I am fucking stoked.

Next week

Is gonna be ridiculous. Tuesday afternoon I go to Medicine Hat (4 hours away) for the Bedouin Soundclash concert. I was gonna see them here this weekend but I had previous plans. After that concert, we continue on to Calgary (another couple hours) for Warped Tour the next day. Many of my favourite bands are playing it this year (Less Than Jake, NOFX, Streetlight Manifesto, Westbound Train) and a few others I'd like to see (Bad Religion, Big D and the Kids Table, TAT). It's gonna be one long, tiring day and then we head back here as soon as it's over because our show is the following day at noon. Yay.

E3 Day Three: Shut Up, Square.

2009-06-03T22:23:00.005-06:00

The big press conferences are done but there's still a bunch of smaller announcements going on and games to be shown off on the show floor.

Square Enix held a press conference today for the newest entry in the main Final Fantasy series, the long awaited Final Fantasy XIV (Yeah, again, XIII isn't even out yet. They're getting way too ahead of themselves). Almost every single question was about Final Fantasy XI. Will XI be discontinued now? How will the games be similar? Will data be transferable between the two titles? I DON'T CARE!!! I really, really dislike MMOs. They're tedious, dull, and they offer little reward for the time they require.

I'm still mad at Square Enix for other things anyway. For anyone who remembers the Crimson Echoes fiasco from a few weeks ago, we've finally been updated on the subject. Apparently the creators of the fan project spoke with the legal team at Square Enix and the company agreed to issue a public statement about it. You know, like "sorry guys, we appreciate the fan's continued interest in the series but we have to protect our intellectual property" but instead Square Enix just kinda... backed out after sitting on it for a few weeks. You can read all about it at chronocompendium.com if you like. Jerks. Quit whining about fans making sequels to your games and just do it yourselves already.

And that brings me finally to Final Fantasy XIII which apparently had a four minute demo today that included some sort of lesbian shiva motorcycle thing. I don't know, I wasn't there guys. Read about it here.

In Castlevania news, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima is working on the latest title in the series. Finally, Castlevania will become the 20 hour long movie that we've always wanted it to be.

You heard/read correctly. Patrick FUCKING Stewart.

E3 Day Two: Finally Nintendo, some games to look forward to

2009-06-02T19:32:00.005-06:00

Today Sony busted out their new motion controller, which isn't nearly as ambitious as Microsoft's but rather two wands (kinda similar to the Wii's) that are tracked by a camera. I don't know if it has buttons or not, but once again I don't think it'll be integrated with the system nearly as well as the Wiimotes. It does look really precise though.
They also showed off the new PSP Go, which moves the system to a slide out form like a cell phone. The controls are on the slide out panel so the system is much smaller than the original PSP, though the screen takes a little bit of a size hit too.

Final Fantasy XIV was announced. Yeah, count those Roman numerals folks. 14. Pretty ambitious since XIII isn't even out yet. Here's the catch though: it's online. Seriously Square Enix? Screw off. The only people that are going to be playing that are the people that are playing Final Fantasy XI. For the record, I hate MMOs.
On the Nintendo side of things they announced a vitality sensor that plugs into the wiimote and you put on your finger to read your pulse and other information. Big whoop. Wii Fit 2 maybe? I dunno.

But then they also had some games to announce. FINALLY NINTENDO! Recently they've had absolutely nothing. zilch. zero. The only big title they've released for Wii in the past six months is Punch Out!!! which is essentially just a remake of sorts (12 of the 13 opponents are reused from old games). And on the horizon they have... some "new play control" versions of gamecube games that are updated to work with wii controllers. But that changed today, with the announcement of titles like Super Mario Galaxy 2, Mario& Luigi: Bowsers Inside Story, Metroid: Other M and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I've been waiting for so long to get a new Mario 2D platformer on a non-hand held console. Super Paper Mario was a huge disappointment but this one looks like it'll be sticking to the classic formula. I'm incredibly excited for this.

E3 Day One: Microsoft continues to rip off Nintendo

2009-06-01T22:46:00.003-06:00

Alright guys, it's that time of year, the Electronics Entertainment Expo. The big game event where all the big announcements happen and games get shown off. Over the next few days you can tune in here to read my thoughts on press conferences and whatnot.

The biggest announcement was probably at Microsofts press conference where they unvieled "Natal" (as in Natalia), a product clearly trying to copy and out do Nintendo. Before getting into it's details, a little bit of history.

E3 2005. Nintendo's press conference has them quickly showing their newest system code named the Revolution. No gameplay footage or anything, just the system itself. It looked like a black CD drive standing on it's side. The whole thing was kinda dull, and people were walking away from the press conference disappointed. Sony and Microsoft both first showed off their systems that week and had video footage to back it up. Killzone 2 for PS3 looked insane and seemed to steal the show that week. Nintendo came up as a big fat loser.

Fast forward a bit to the Tokyo Game Show that year and the controller is shown off. Motion control. Unreal. This got everyone talking.

E3 2006. Completely backwards from the first year. EVERYONE wanted to see the Wii in action. Motion control was ridiculous and a crazy concept. Who cares about Sony's BBQ with it's lame controller?

So the Wii came out with it's motion control and it's little "Mii" characters. Since Wii's hardware was all around inferior to the 360 and PS3, all it really had going for it was the motion control, which was pretty cool. It was only a matter of time before the other two companies would try to cash in on such a thing.

Last year Microsoft announced their first rip off of Nintendo's success with the Wii. They added Avatars to Xbox live which were basically just Miis but a lot more detailed. Because of Xbox live and it's great online set up the Avatars actually work a lot better than Miis do, but I still think they're only really cool in Mario Kart. Today Microsoft announced it's next big rip off, Natal.

Honestly, it looks like an April Fools joke from after the Wii controller was announced. From what I can gather it's basically a camera, motion sensor and microphone that sits on your TV and registers.... everything you do. It looks like it's able to respond to every little movement you make or thing you say. Basically takes motion control to the next level.

And then this thing just looks like a high tech Furby. This whole thing does look pretty cool, but I really don't think it's gonna work as well as they're promising it will. Notice when Milo repeats the "thousands of people" line, it seems like it's just programmed to repeat certain things the user says. Seems to me like they just took a text based game from the 80s and gave it a 3D character. As for the motion sensing, I find it incredibly hard to believe that the sensor would be able to identify movement as accurately as they're showing in the first video. And voice recognition? Come on. The technology behind this thing would have to be insane for it to work as well as they'd like us to think. The unit itself would probably be very expensive as well. Sorry Microsoft, I don't think I'll be spending another few hundred bucks so I can have a Tamagotchi on my TV. What do I have to support these claims? Well the guy in the Milo video is none other than Peter Molyneux, creator of games like Fable where he promised so many things that you would be able to do in it but couldn't when it finally came out.

My guess is it'll turn out like... Wii sports or something. It'll work, but not nearly as well as you'd like it to. I'm glad other companies are looking into things like motion control but I honestly don't think Microsoft can beat Nintendo on this one. Nintendo's entire system is dedicated to having motion control whereas Microsoft is going for a crazy add on. I think the time of console expansions is long gone and that companies won't want to develop for such a limited market.

Anyway, other E3 news today had a new Metal Gear Solid game for 360 (it'll most likely be multiplatform) featuring everyone's favourite bad ass hero: Raiden. EA had a conference today too, apparently they've added an MMA game to their 2010 sports lineup. I'm curious how that will go, but unfortunately I hate EA's sport franchises that are needlessly "updated" every year.

All good seasons must come to an end

2009-05-15T19:26:00.004-06:00

So as of this last episode of Supernatural all of my beloved television series are done for the season. Time for Brentnote to take a look at what I was watching this year, how I liked it and how it stacks up to previous seasons.

South Park

Not technically done for the season, but since fall the second half of season 12 has gone by along with the first half of 13. End of season 12 wasn't all too impressive. The Indiana Jones episode was quite good, and the concept behind the finale which poked fun at the presidential election was quite awesome but the rest were kind of meh in my opinion. Sure, the two part Peruvian band episode had it's moments but overall it doesn't hold up too well. For the start of season 13 I'd say I really liked 4/7 episodes, which is pretty good I guess. The queef episode was horrible. These days, for the past few seasons really, the episodes tend to be quite hit and miss. Some are fantastic, but then you end up with an episode about a vampire trend amongst kids that just isn't funny.

The Office

Last year I wasn't very happy with this show. Overall season four was a poor season to me, and at the start of this season it kind of seemed the same way. The earlier episodes had their moments and some were really good but others were difficult to watch. Luckily things picked up, and I was very pleased with the second half of the season. They finally changed things up and it worked really well, hopefully things keep going like this in season 6.

30 Rock

What can I say, it's the funniest show on TV. Every episode was awesome in my eyes it's not surprising. Some pretty cool stuff happened this year with so many guest appearances by celebrities as well as wacky TV shows and movies being incorporated into the storylines, like Night Court and Harry and the Hendersons. There wasn't as much focus placed on the other writers like Frank this season, so that kind of came as a disappointment to me. Season 2 was much better than this season though, only for one reason: Alec Baldwin's hair wasn't as good.

Lost

Okay, I'm a liar. I didn't get into Lost until quite recently but I'm all caught up now. I enjoyed that this season, like season 4 had a lot less "filler" type episodes than the earlier seasons did. Not that I hate those episodes, it just keeps things moving better when they're not around since there's so much going on in the series. The way the earlier episodes of this season were done where they'd show something at the start and then the events leading up to it was kind of weak. Lots of shows/movies/books do this kind of thing but they use it quite sparingly and Lost seemed to do it 7 episodes in a row. The season finished off with a bang though and was great.

Supernatural

This season was easily the worst, but that's not saying too much since the others were so ridiculously good. It started off really well, then went down hill a bit. They bounced back and forth between the same story line too much and it got somewhat dull, but the end of the season was fantastic so it balances out I suppose.

The Big Bang Theory

I don't know what it is about this show that I like so much, probably the insane amount of nerdy jokes. Some of the stuff is kind of lame, sometimes it seems like they're trying a little too hard, but damn is this show funny. No other comedy on TV is bold enough to feature a season finale with a trip to the magnetic north pole.

Lost Season 5 finale - thoughts and predictions. SPOILERS

2009-05-14T18:12:00.002-06:00

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!
If you've never seen Lost or aren't caught up then read no further.
Even if you don't plan on ever watching it, read no further.

The 5th season of Lost came to a close last night and it was pretty damn impressive. They did a great job of switching between the two main story lines and hitting you a big finish for both. I did think the last scene with Ben and Jacob was poorly done though, specifically from the point where Ben starts killing him to the end. Wasn't written bad or anything, just poorly executed in my opinion.

Now story thoughts on the episode... where to begin....
How about right at the start. The whole Jacob thing was kind of a shock. Theories like Jack or Locke being Jacob, or there actually not being a Jacob were all crushed when Jacob turned out to be just some guy named Jacob. As far as they are into the series they still manage to create more questions for the audience to ask. Now that we've seen Jacob, how did he get there? Who was that other dude?

From what I can tell so far, the other dude Jacob was talking to at the beginning was the same guy he was talking to at the end who looked like Locke (at the start he says he wants to kill Jacob and says he'll someday find a loophole, then at the end Jacob says to Locke something about how he's found his loophole). I can also gather from the start and the flashbacks throughout the episode that Jacob brought everyone to the island. Once again, this is seen at the start when the unknown character indicates that Jacob brought the ship they saw. He then goes on to talk about how the same thing happens every time, they fight, corrupt and destroy and that it always ends the same. My guess is Jacob has been bringing many groups in like the initial crash survivors but they'll be the first group where it doesn't end that way.

The whole Richard/weird group of crash survivors thing was weird. I think they were the same group who picked up Miles in a van during his episode a few eps back. Not really sure who they could be, but have obviously been to the island before and aren't part of the "Others."

As for the very ending, I've heard a few outlandish theories saying the bomb wipes out everyone or does some weird time travel thing. Essentially that it changed history somehow. Well here's my theory:

Whatever happened, happened.

It was said a bunch of time and I bet they stick with that. If time is consistent, there's nothing that can change the past. There were several clues to indicate they couldn't change anything, like when Faraday got shot we find out his mother in the future knew that she would end up doing that if he went to the island (that was really weird to explain), or when Miles' mother got yelled onto the submarine by his father. My theory is that the bomb going off temporarily stops the "incident" and gives them enough time to seal it up. If the bomb originally didn't go off there wouldn't have been anything to stop the incident from continuing, but we know something does because they finish the swan station and the doctor somehow survives (Swan orientation video).

My prediction for the next season is part of the story line shows how the survivors that were in 1977 somehow die, because Richard had previously indicated he saw it happen.

1 vs. 100 on Xbox live = hell yeah

2009-05-13T21:47:00.003-06:00

Bravo Microsoft,
but actually this time.

Recently launched to Xbox Live Canada is the Beta for 1 vs. 100. It's based on the TV show of the same name, which has one person trying to outlast a mob of 100 people in trivia. Every time someone in the mob gets a question wrong, they're eliminated from the mob and the "one" has a chance to get a bigger prize. And that's exactly what the online version is too. The show has 100 Xbox live members playing against one person, although thousands and thousands of other people play along too but aren't eligible for prizes.

Yeah, prizes.

It's really an actual gameshow. The "one" and the mob both get an opportunity to win microsoft points, and I believe there will be other bigger prizes as well. The mob and one are selected based on how often they play and how well they do.

And I haven't mentioned my favourite part yet: there's a live host. Like, an actual game show host commenting on what's going on and the players involved. Because of the host and the prizes, the show is only gonna happen at specific times. It was on last night for a couple hours and my brother and I managed to catch the last 15 minutes or so. It was a lot of fun and both of us were pretty impressed with how it's set up. Afterwards there was an "Extended" play session, which was half an hour long and was just trivia questions without the host. Even that was really fun since right now all the questions are Canadian trivia.

The extended play happened again tonight for an hour and is on again Thursday. Friday and Saturday they're doing the full show again with a host, and I'm definitely looking forward to it. This is exactly what Xbox live needs, it's a game that's interactive, has prizes, and has a live host commenting on what's going on. Oh, I forgot my other favourite part: it's FREE.

Square Enix Vs. Chrono Trigger Fans

2009-05-12T21:00:00.003-06:00

So it happened again.

In 2004 a fan project called Chrono Trigger: Resurrection was issued a cease and desist letter from Square Enix. It was essentially a 3D remake of Chrono Trigger for PC, not a complete remake but rather a small collection of sections from the original.

A couple years later it happened again with another fan made game called the Chrono Trigger Remake Project, which similarly wanted to remake the game in 3D but this time the entire thing. I have no idea how far along this one was, but Ressurection definitely had a bit of a playable game at the point it was shut down.

And then this past weekend, it happens all over. This time to ROM hack called Chrono Trigger Crimson Echoes which was slated to be released at the end of the month. This project had been worked on for years and was supposed to have about 35 hours of gameplay and it's own fanmade story. The hack would essentially modify a ROM of the original Super Nintendo version and change the game into something new that used the game engine and graphics of the original. Probably one of the most ambitious ROM hacks ever. With a ROM hack you're not actually distributing the game or the ROM, rather just something to modify it

Why are there so many fans dedicated to projects like this? Well Chrono Trigger happens to not just be one of the best Super Nintendo games ever, or one of the best RPGs ever but one of the best games ever. The game's ridiculous fan base can easily attest to that. Chrono Trigger was released in the 90s and had a sequel for the Playstation called Chrono Cross and has also been ported to Playstaion and much more recently the Nintendo DS. So it's been a few years since there's been an actual new entry into the series, or a significant enhancement to the original. And that's why there's these fan projects.

It's really easy to look at these and say "It's their intellectual property, they have every right to protect it," and yeah, they definitely do. Especially those first two projects, if it's just going to be a remake of the original to be distributed for free then that's basically someone stealing their game and all the work they've put into it.

I'm a little more iffy on this ROM hack thing though. There are tons and tons of ROM hacks out there and I've always kind of assumed that no gaming company would bother touching them. For Super Mario World hacks there's actually a huge community built around modifying just that one game. People do it because they REALLY LIKE THE GAMES. No one is going out and illegally downloading Super Mario World just to play hacks unless they own a copy on Super Nintendo. Everyone likes the game engine so it makes for really fun gaming when fans distribute their own levels for it.

To my knowledge no other ROM hacking project has ever gotten a cease and desist. Maybe it's becuase they've mostly been much smaller than Crimson Echoes, maybe it's because Square Enix has just decided not to let this kind of thing go down but who knows. Some people have been wondering why Square Enix waited this long to shut it down, being so damn close to release, but it's most likely because they can't squash every little fan project since most of them are much smaller and nothing ends up coming from them.

I'd like to say maybe they're going to be making their own sequel for it but they've expressed no plans to continue the series at this point. Not that a project like this would cause a new game to lose sales anyway, quite the contrary.

Fan projects help occupy fans of a franchise while things aren't really being done by the original creators. It's been many years since the newest game but there's still a big community around the Chrono Trigger series partly because of things like Crimson Echoes that give people something to work on or look forward to. It's definitely something that's helped hold my interest in the series for the past while.

I just really think that Square Enix is making themselves look like jerks to their fanbase. They could have gone the route Tolkien Enterprises took with the Hunt For Gollum and let the fans do what they want as long as long as they're not doing it for profit (Crimson Echoes was not for profit by the way, they don't even have ads on their website). But no, they don't really seem concerned with consumer loyalty, or maybe they think it's not enough people to matter.

When the letter was first posted over at the Chrono Compendium website there was some debate over how legitmate it was, whether it came from Square Enix or was just some random jerk. At this point it seems pretty certain that it is real, and it doesn't seem like there's anything to be done about it. The team working on the game is attempting to contact Square Enix and try to reach some sort of comprimise but I'm doubting anything will come of, still good to try though of course. A big bravo has to be handed out to the team by the way for their incredibly professional handling of the whole affair. A few gaming sites including Kotaku have reported on this, and hopefully some bigger sites like IGN will be bringing it up as well.

Star Trek was pretty frakin awesome

2009-05-11T18:35:00.002-06:00

Alright well a few days after I've seen the latest Star Trek film and I'm still in awe of its greatness.

The movie opens up right into an action sequence showing a bit of a prelude to the main plot of film. It's quite a booming opening and works well in getting in some slick special effects before pulling things back a bit and getting to the main story. The rest of the film manages to stick a decent pace and never really reaches a point of dullness.

Characters and casting: fantastic. I know in my last post I made a comment about actors John Cho of Harold and Kumar and Zachary Quinto of Heroes as being odd and hilarious choices but both actors were awesome. All the actors did quite well in my opinion and added to the great sense of characterization the movie has. A personal favourite of mine was Dr. "Bones" McCoy played by Karl Urban because of how well the character matched the original without hitting a point of being cheesy.

That's actually something that can be said about the whole cast and setting, there's lots of references and similarities to the original but the whole movie has more action than expected from the original series and never gets lame. As a fan of the original I am very pleased to say that they did a fantastic job of staying true to the source material. I went with a group of non-Trekkies and everyone still seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

All that being said, I guess I do have one complaint about the movie and that's that J. J. Abrams is a lazy ass bastard. He stuck a mini CLOVERFIELD into Star Trek! Come on man! Shockingly though it seemed much better suited as a monster to chase Captain Kirk around for two minutes than it did as a giant beast massacring New York.

Why J. J. Abrams sucks with monsters

2009-04-27T12:59:00.002-06:00

SPOILER ALERT

I should warn that this post contains a single spoiler from Lost, from the second season or something.

So last year this movie from J.J. Abrams called Cloverfield came out. It was about a monster attacking New York and was supposed to resemble a terrorist attack. It was shot as if it was all done by a single hand held camera and it kinda just sucked overall. Anyway, this movie had a huge viral marketing campaign and none of the ads show what the monster looked like, so it was getting hyped up quite a bit. Turned out that the monster wasn't that great and was somewhat generic looking. The movie sucked, the monster sucked, and I was very disappointed.

Now I'm watching Lost which is surprisingly fantastic. On the first episode and throughout the first season you hear this crazy metallic sounding monster that shakes the earth as it walks and it basically terrorizes the main characters. You don't actually get to see it for quite a while, but originally you just hear it and see trees moving around it and the whatnot, it's done really effectively. It also sounds like Mechgodzilla or something and it's one of those things that you really can't wait to finally see and have revealed. Turns out that it's just a cloud of black smoke. Yeah, sounds like you put a lot of effort in on that one there guys. I'm only on season 3, so maybe it ends up changing but it seems unlikely. The smoke doesn't even look that great, it's just generic black smoke. Wow. The rest of the series is awesome though.

With Star Trek coming up I can't help but wonder what kind of unimaginative creatures he'll be throwing at us. I'm betting all the Aliens will just be humanoids with some kind of alterations to their faces. As a Star Trek fan I am of course still looking forward to it, but due to some hilarious casting choices I'm not sure if I'll be able to take it seriously. Specifically Sylar from Heroes as Spock and Harold from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.

Zelda Games, Concert Games, Browser Games

2009-04-20T18:58:00.004-06:00

My last week of finals and what have I been spending my time doing? Studying? Reading? Practicing? Gaming? That that was actually probably your first guess. I'm currently ~12 hours into the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and I'm basically just having a blast. I completely forgot how ridiculous they made Hyrule in this game, it's just huge compared to any other version. Every area you go to just seems absolutely giant, it really makes you want to walk around and explore. This play through should be quite a bit less than last time, which clocked in over 40 hours but I beat the game 100% and got everything on my own. Already the game is going much quicker as I'm spending less time seeking out heart pieces and moreso simply going dungeon to dungeon, but that could change. I've got a few other games lined up after this one, the next of which should include a special hilarious video "review" so be on the look out for that. When Twilight Princess is over you can also expect a full review, though probably not in video form.

Next on the things listed in this posts title is Concert Games. And by that I mean Games Concert. Just a few more weeks until Video Games Live is in Regina and I'm pretty stoked. My brother and I are hopefully dressing up as Mario and Luigi so I should probably get started on those costumes. I haven't completely decided, it really depends on whether or not I can find the right clothes cheap enough.

And last but not least is the other distraction I've had going today: the internet riddle. Check it out here

http://neutralriddle.50webs.com/goon/level1.htm

It's a series of levels/riddles based on finding clues in the pages picture, title, and source code. The answer to the clue is what you need to change the URL to to get to the next level. At first the page may seem a little weird, it did to me, but you should eventually be able to get to the next level. Currently on level 13 and it is driving me crazy.

Weirdness with the Power Rangers? Pobably not.

2009-04-19T00:36:00.005-06:00

So the other day I'm watching a video by the Nostalgia Critic where he reviews the the old Power Rangers movie, and tonight I brought it up and it lead to a couple little talks about Power Rangers.

First of all, apparently some dude who was on Power Rangers is a murderer? Well the relationship between the dude and the Power Rangers is quite shocking, as according to IMDB he only played someone, who may or may not have even had lines, on one episode. Big whoop. Next.

A while ago some friends of mine brought up that the original Red Ranger, played by Austin St. John was now doing gay porn. That has got to be one of the funniest "Where are they now?" moments ever, but anyway. Upon looking at his Wikipedia article I noticed that there's no mention of such thing. Weird, since it's so DAMN HILARIOUS! And yeah yeah yeah, Wikipedia isn't the most reliable source. There's actually some discussion about it on the discussion page. I ended up googling it and came up with several links discussing the alleged switch to gay porn.

The first problem I've got here is the pictures. I am not daring enough to spend precious Brentnote space on these pictures but you can check out a comparison photo over at Pink is the New Blog and a different photo at the Wikipedia article.
The comparison photo from Pink is the New Blog is actually pretty convincing (oh, check out the star on that picture by the way. Notice anything?). This guy looks like the original Red Ranger quite a damn bit. Now look over at the Wikipedia one - THE DUDE LOOKS NOTHING LIKE THAT ANYMORE. He was born in 1975, Power Rangers started up in 1993 so he would have been 17 or 18 during the filming and probably looks a hell of a lot different so many years later.

I also kinda just doubt someone would do something like this anyway. A former star from a children's series doing gay porn? My guess is this whole thing was just a rumour started when some dude was wacking off to old episodes of Power Rangers and noticed the resemblance to an adult film he'd been watching only moments before.

Tune in next time for my long awaited review of Screeched!
or not

How could I just ignore Super Metroid?

2009-04-14T22:05:00.006-06:00

I mean it's a good game I guess, but it's nowhere near Sonic 3 or Super Mario Kart in my books. GameFAQs.com is running a contest right now, as they generally do about once a year, to vote for the Best. Game. Ever. and I may actually be somewhere in the top 1000 this time. Basically there's a series of daily polls of 4 choices each to vote on the best game, with 64 games in all going against each other in a tournament style. Top two games of each poll move on to the next round. The contest is to pick the outcome of the entire thing before it starts, right from the winners of the first round up until the final battle. 63 polls in all. Shockingly I generally do terribly right from the beginning but right now it's on the 9th day of voting and I'm tied for 6th place. Well, 3866th place but who cares. There's roughly 40 000 people in the contest so that's actually pretty decent.

Today's vote is between Gunstar Heroes, Sonic The Hedgehog 3, Super Mario Kart and Super Metroid. I've picked Mario Kart followed by Sonic 3 to win but it was probably a mistake. Mario is in second right now and while Sonic 3 is definitely doing better than any other 3rd place game has done it's not likely to be hitting second. Metroid is kicking my ass despite the fact that it's actually not the better game. I'm convinced that all the people who really enjoy Super Metroid also like searching around for 18 hours to find all the incredibly well hidden power ups and shortcuts. Sure, the game is still fun but really Metroid games just tend to be a giant maze where you need to backtrack a shitload everytime you get a new weapon. Zelda kinda does the same thing, as in new areas get unlocked when you get a new item, but it's much less tedious, not in a giant maze and just works better overall.

Something significant that I've noted after perusing the top 50 entrants each day is that none of them have picked Resident Evil 4, my choice, as the grand winner. There's a lot of Final Fantasy VIIs and Ocarina of Times going around which probably doesn't really work in my favour. I was actually ballsy enough to predict Final Fantasy VII losing in the 4th round (division finals) to Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. Take that Cloud, you spikey headed bastard! You ain't got shit on the Figaro brothers and their castle that somehow tunnels through the planet!

Going back to the GameFAQs message boards is weird these days. For years it was my stomping ground but now I've converted to a more music related forum with a much smaller community. My account was created there... 9 years ago and apparently I was the 7637th message board user to register. I just clicked on some other dude's profile and he's user 5178697. That's 5 178 697. That's over 5 fucking million. 5 million people registered on that board since I did. Holy shit.

MacDonald's Employees are jerks and here's why it bothers me:

2009-04-13T20:20:00.001-06:00

There's nothing we can do about it. MacDonald's doesn't have to follow the same kind of standards as other business we spend money at.

Couple weeks ago I'm on the way to a concert but need a quick bite to eat so I stop off at a MacDonalds close to the concert venue. I'm running late, it's 10:05 PM and there's a sign on the door that says they're close from 9:30-10 to update the system. Seems a bit weird, but sometimes that kind of stuff just happens, you know? Anyway, I get in there and the cashier who is currently in the process of doing nothing tells me the system is still down and it'll be another few minutes. As she finishes saying this, a manager walks out to the floor and starts talking to someone in the restaurant. Another customer asks about what's going on and she tells them that they shut down every night at this time to update the system.

Now I'm suspicious. How could such a huge restaurant chain be set up to shut down at such a weird time instead of, I don't know... 4 AM when there's fewer customers but still employees around? The employee keeps looking at the screen and saying "just a few more minutes" to each inquiry she gets. I wait a few more minutes and the manager walks back behind the counter from table area saying "we're open again" without looking at a screen or anything. This is obviously some sort of bull shit.

When I get to the concert I ask a friend of mine who works at another MacDonalds location and he informs me that they used to do the system update every night around 4 AM, but now it's set up so that they don't need to shut down for it at all. He also lets me know that they were just being lazy (as if I hadn't figured that out already) and that they pull that kind of stuff at his location all the time. Signs on doors saying they're closed. Signs on drivethru windows telling customers to go to the next window to order, then the next, then the next, then nothing.

What really gets to me about this whole thing is that I'm powerless to do anything about it, because it's MacDonalds and they're held to a different standard than other businesses. You can't get mad at big companies like this. If you're eating at MacDonalds then it's likely you are aware of the issues besides the lazy employees, such as how terrible the food really is, but you don't actually care because it's cheap, delicious, and their restaurants are all so well placed.

I thought about calling and complaining about it or something, but it's really pointless. All the MacDonalds employees I've ever known have never really cared about their jobs and I'm sure lots of the hire ups have the same additude towards work as they do. I'm also pretty sure now that this is common at multiple locations, so that doesn't help.

The only thing I can really do about this is the whole "power of consumer" thing and stop eating there but it's quite unlikely at this point.

The Brentnote countdown to Coaster/Frisbee continues

2009-04-05T21:27:00.006-06:00

NOFX's latest album titled Coaster (CD is titled Coaster, Vinyl LP is called Frisbee. Fucking brilliant eh?) finally comes out in just a few more weeks. I'm way too fucking stoked for this release. Their last album, Wolves in Wolves Clothing, was quite good although it had too many songs preaching against religion. It was kind of executed in a hypocritical/asshole way. Originally I thought the title of the new album was a joke about their music being worthless, but I'm calling it right now that it's about the death of music in a physical format. They'll be no way of knowing until the album comes out but when I see a song called "One Million Coasters" I think they're saying all CDs are gonna be useless. To order the album or check out a song from it, head over to the page at Fatwreck.

I just finished watching their newly released Backstage Passport DVD, which is the DVD of the TV show they did last year, and I was definitely just as pleased as I was when I first watched the series. It's about them going around to weird countries where literally no other American band will play and the craziness that ensues. Definitely buy this DVD set as it is well worth the price and will give you a lot of respect for NOFX and the people touring with them.

I managed to find the exact clip I wanted to show off the series on youtube. It's from their last episode where they go to Africa. They stay in Johannesburg, where the crime rate is ridiculous and everyone has bars over their windows and barbed wire fences. They write a special song for the people of South Africa, and this is how it turns out when they play it for them...

Movie "review" in three sentences or less

2009-03-30T23:40:00.008-06:00

I had plans for a restaurant related rant post, but I'll push that back a day or so.

Tonight I went to see I Love You, Man and was left pretty satisfied over all. It reminded me of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Role Models, mostly because I've seen both those movies in the past few months and the lead actors for each of those films star in this one, but it's probably closer to Forgetting Sarah Marshall since it was made by some of the same people. This a pretty shit review, not even a review at all actually, all I'm saying is if you liked Sarah Marshall you'll like this even though it's not as funny.

The only reason I actually wanted to make this post was to bring your attention to this movie that came up during the previews. It's called Year One, stars Jack Black and Michael Sara and looks great. I especially like the bit at the end...

I lied, there's two reasons. CRANK 2!!! Take that death! If you haven't seen #1, it is highly recommended for anyone who enjoys ridiculous action movies.

looking forward to weekend of bull shit

2009-03-27T17:33:00.007-06:00

because that's all my school work tends to be if it requires more than 100 words. I've got a 2500 word paper due Monday and another due Tuesday. I've never even attempted to write anything close to this size so I should probably be buckling down and writing but what am I doing instead?
Reading about shitty Christmas specials and blogging. Life is fucking great.

I've somehow found myself scouring through random Star Wars articles on Wikipedia and ended up on the one about their terrible Christmas special from 1978 that Lucas hates so much he won't even laugh about it. From what I'm reading on the ever so reliable Wikipedia it sounds like he thinks it ruins Star Wars or something. It does sound pretty bad (it's been listed as the worst event in television history), but damn I really want to watch it right now. Ever wonder how Harrison Ford would look like as a cartoon character?
Fucking awesome, that's how. Chewy kind of looks like a pussy but whatever. I really gotta track down a copy of this thing. The special was only aired once and doesn't have an official video release. According to an episode commentary on South Park, the bootleg version that's out there still has the original commercials in all of it's 1978 glory. For years this thing has been referenced all over the place but I've never been enough of a Star Wars fan to track it down. After reading about it though I'm probably gonna have to do it. I could go over what the special is about and the whatnot, but you'd be better to just read the Wikipedia article.

A couple random thoughts on Watchmen. SPOILER ALERT

2009-03-25T23:16:00.005-06:00

Once again

SPOILER ALERT!

Although I'm sure most of my readers are much nerdier than I am and have most likely seen it already.

So Watchmen had a bunch of CGI schlong which I knew about in advance and didn't turn out to be nearly as horrible as I expected, but it did have something else that was way too over the top and ridiculous. I am of course talking about Dr. Manhattan just starting up the whole three way thing with Silk Spectre. The writer must have thought that was fucking hilarious when he wrote it in and it definitely was but it really caught me off guard. Way to throw weird/funny sex stuff into a serious story there Mr. Moore. Another ridiculous scene was Dr. Manhattan in the Vietnam War. Did they really just show a giant monster atttacking a bunch of Asian people?

Throughout the movie I kept trying to think of where I recognized Silk Spectre from. As it turns out, she was in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle which I saw on TV only a few weeks ago. I assume they saw her breasts in that movie and decided she'd be perfect for the role of Silk Spectre. Yeah yeah, sorry for the breast link but if you're reading this blog then two breasts are nothing in the grand scheme of your porn addiction. Back on topic though, what's really great about this is in Harold and Kumar her character wanted to have a three way with them but in Watchmen she got all upset when Dr. Manhattan wanted to give it a go. That my friends is a hilarious coincedence.

I don't have much to say about the movie itself. It was pretty good, quite long but appropriately long. Didn't seem like it was dragging on and didn't involve 100 goodbyes at the end while skipping half the source material.

Life in an independent "local band" part two

2009-03-22T19:54:00.004-06:00

One thing I've learned from all the shows I've played with my band is that you should never expect people to show up. It's just something to get used to, sometimes you'll get lots of people but most of the time no one is gonna be there. That's why it's nice when you're not the main attraction at the show because people tend to like things that aren't your band. Lots of people just come for the bar, restaurant or event and you just happen to be playing at the same time.

And then there's these events where you aren't supposed to be the main attraction but you are anyway. Last night we played in the lounge of a local restaurant and we were told to play from 10 PM-1 AM. Now how many people would you expect to show up at a restaurant's lounge on a Saturday night with good weather between the hours of 9 and 1?
50?
30?
10?
4?
If you guessed four, you are correct. Last night four people came into the lounge who were there for the restaurant and not to see our band. Everyone else knew us. It was a good turn out from our friends, who have mostly seen us play many many times but that's about it.

I gotta applaud them for the effort really. Between renting sound equipment, paying a sound tech, placing ads for the show in our local newspaper and all the staff they had working I would guess they're really trying to promote their restaurant as a live music venue but for those same reasons they must have lost money. There is absolutely no way our friends bought enough drinks to cover all those costs. As for the playing until one part, the bar tender informed me they were quite happy we were about to start our last set just after 12 because she had kitchen staff that really wanted to go home.

This show also came with all the usual problems that stem from being very unorganized. Communication issues between the promoter, bar owner and sound tech make things a pain for the band, but that's just another thing you get used to. When things actually are well organized though the show overall tends to go much much better.

I was out of town for most of the day and was amazed when I returned to the combination of thick mist/fog with the mounds of snow and leftover piles of dirt from winter. I never get tired of the ridiculous weather we get in Regina. Big thanks to our friends who came out to the concert this weekend, they manage to make every show we do an absolute blast.

Paul McKenzie loves sauerkraut

2009-03-21T01:30:00.016-06:00

I just got how from seeing my third favourite live band: The Real McKenzies. They're a Scottish-Canadian punk band with emphasis on the Scottish part... and the Canadian part... and of course, the punk part. They're punk rock but draw heavily from Scottish and Canadian heritage. It's a bunch of guys ranging from ages 30 some to probably 50 some who come out wearing traditional Scottish wear with the kilt, boots, fur vests and all. And when I say kilt, I mean traditional kilt. If you stand too close to stage you're gonna get a good look at some old guy's balls. They've got two bag pipe players in their lineup to add to the whole Scottish vibe.

They started the show with a short acoustic set, which I thought was absolutely fantastic. Not enough bands do this kind of thing, so when it happens it makes it that much more awesome. This is the actual set list they played, it was so long that I had to make two separate scans to get the whole thing and it's not even including the acoustic songs they did at the start (song titles are shortened, one song per line). The energy they bring to stage is unlike any other band I've seen, it's just something about their whole style that simply makes everyone want to rock. They've got bagpipes, guys guitar soloing with their teeth, and a lead singer that's too fucking funny for how much money he's making.

On top of their awesome live show, these guys actually know how to tour our huge ass country. It was only six months ago that they did the same tour across Canada, going all the way out to the east coast and back with more stops than any other tour I've seen in Canada. They even go all the way up to White Horse, and no other band is cool enough to do that.

Before the show started my friend and I got to have a bit of a conversation with Paul McKenzie, lead singer and front man of the band. He was totally trashed and had tons of great stories to tell us. I gotta say, I fucking love it when bands tell me ridiculous tour stories. Most bands have them, if they don't then they're just fucking lame, but I can never say the right thing to get the stories out. Paul was happy to tell us a bunch of tour stories, though we never specifically asked for them they kind of came up from something else we'd ask about. The best part of the conversation though was when he started talking about food. Among other things, we had a particularly long chat about sauerkraut. I'm now compeletely familiar with the health benefits of sauerkraut, along with good ways of preparing it and Paul also decided to throw in a funny tour story about sauerkraut.

When buying merch I picked up this random CD they had for sale. According to one of their guitar players, when they played in Russia a fews weeks ago they were paid with 600 bootleg CDs the promoter pressed of their first album. The album is 15 years old and the only band member still left from it is the singer, however the booklet that accompanies the CD is filled with pictures of the current band bacause that's all they had to work with. The picture on the back cover is directly stolen from their newest album. In addition, the lyrics printed seem like they were transcribed by someone listening to it. The lead singer has a Scottish accent so all the words are written the way he sings them, "and they a hae taen their father's seed" for example. The CD itself is printed on some sort of "flexidisc" which is basically a normal CD that's a lot flimsier/cheaper than usual. It doesn't include a jewel case or anything, just the CD and booklet. Man bootlegs are great...

If you're looking to check out the Real McKenzies, go get their latest album Off The Leash from the Fat Wreck website (www.fatwreck.com) or at a local record store near you.

Strung up for the weekend

2009-03-19T21:32:00.004-06:00

My band has another gig this weekend, and I've finally changed my bass strings after about a year of needing new ones. They sound fantastic and have me extremely excited for the show this weekend. Our opening band dropped out yesterday, so that kinda sucks, but we're looking for another act to fill in and if we can't find one we'll just play way longer so it should be a good show regardless.

The other day my guitar player and I were talking about a new band that he's in and how they only have two songs so practice is really dull. It got me thinking of how our band practices used to be. Right now we've got 30 some songs ready to play (originals) and there's probably another 15-20 that we've decided are terrible and completely cast aside.

Some of our early stuff was just bad. Our third song was called.... get ready for it.... Godzilla Vs. Life. Yeah, I meant to type that. I wanted to post the song so you could have a listen but it is just so horrendous that I couldn't bring myself to do it. When we originally recorded it my guitar player wanted a ridiculously long solo section of probably 3 or 4 minutes where it just sounded like thrash the whole time. I forced him to cut most of that out but that was the least of the song's problems. Take this excerpt from the verse for instance:

Well you may be real strong,
and bigger than King Kong,
but do you feel
like you belong?

Yeah, we went there. That's my favourite lyric from the song, but the chorus was pretty bitchin too:

Godzilla versus life,
Godzilla versus the world,
Godzilla it's alright
if you can't get the girl.

Of course I knew at the time that this song was pure garbage, but I was the only one in the band who thought so. I was outnumbered three to one (we still had our original singer at the time). Luckily we got better, a lot better. Still, it's weird to think back to when we only played this and two other songs. Nowadays we always get way too tired to play through all of our material and back then it only took 12 minutes. Ah, when we were young...

Resident Evil 5 - full impressions, or maybe just a rant

2009-03-16T21:10:00.004-06:00

Almost four years ago now I played a little game for the Gamecube called Resident Evil 4. I beat it once, then again, then a few months later again and again, then a few more times over the years that followed. It wasn't my first venture into the series, I had previously played and enjoyed Resident Evil remake for gamecube and it's sequels, but this one just hit harder than the others. The controls were finally comfortable, the gameplay wasn't ridiculously frustrating and difficult, and the game just begged for you to finish it multiple times. It was action packed and a total blast, I put tons of hours into it and still I wanted more. Ever since the first playthrough I've been excited for the release of it's sequel, and three days ago it finally happened.

Now that I've beaten the game and had a great time doing so, I find my self reflecting on the experience and facing disappointment. Awesome as the game is, I can't help but compare it to the others in the series and notice all the things that are missing. The gameplay is basically the same as Resident Evil 4 but it doesn't feel like they've actually improved on anything other than adding a great multiplayer mode that's totally hindered the single player.

The co-op is loads of fun and moves along pretty well but carrying the same game over into single player really screws it up. Managing your partner's inventory in addition to your own can only be described as being tedious. Just picking things up is a hassle because of the time it takes to either call your partner over or hand things to her, and it can be especially bad during combat situations. The game isn't ruined by this issue, but it still gets annoying after a while.

Another thing they've changed is that it doesn't have the same "survival horror" aspect that the others in the series. The first Resident Evil (Gamecube version that is, you should play it, it's fantastic) takes place in a dark, creepy mansion with zombies surprising you everywhere. I swear I almost shat my pants the first time a zombie which I previously thought to be dead HOURS of gameplay before got up and charged at me with incredible speed (if you don't burn them when you first kill them, they come back to life later as some sort of super zombie). #5 doesn't have anything crazy like that. Most (almost all) of the game takes place in well lit areas. Sure, there's one or two parts that are a bit surprising, but it's nothing compared to the other games in the series. Resident Evil basically established the survival horror genre over 10 years ago and now it seems completely gone. Okay, okay, they took the action direction with number four, I know, but it still had lots of good scary qualities to it. There was a decent amount of darkness, a castle, crazy monsters shouting at you in Spanish...

And then there was the adventure aspect of the game. You were in a giant area, sometimes you had to go through areas you'd already been to, sometimes rooms connected in a maze like fashion. In favour of the co-op mode though, there's no overall map in 5. Everything has been switched over to straight forward levels. It still works fine, it's probably not something most people would miss, but it's just another step away from survival horror and towards a first person shooter.

Story? Story is a little too similar to four for my taste, with a little bit more Metal Gear Solid thrown in. It sheds some more light on the Umbrella Corporation (company behind the whole zombie virus thing) and returns to the characters from Resident Evil 1, Chris and Jill (four was about Leon, who was from two). Overall, everything is pretty expected though. "Big plot twists" are figured out way in advance. Not much of an ending either, probably less than 1 minute after the final boss.

One thing I must applaud the game for is the soundtrack. Very well done, it was actually recorded by a professional symphony. Every boss fight sounded fabulous.

And last but not least, replayability. There's plenty of crap to unlock, additional costumes and even screen filters, extra mercenaries mode which is a two minute timed mode based on scoring, and a higher difficulty. I've yet to play on the higher difficulty but from what I hear it's ridiculously tough, which is good because the previous highest difficulty wasn't that tough at all. Should have been normal.

Done. That's a lie, I'm not done complaining, I'm sure I'll do more later but that's all for now. Once again, it is STILL a great game and I'm sure most people would enjoy it, especially if they've never played a Resident Evil game before, or did but didn't like it (with the exception of four).

first Resident Evil 5 impressions

2009-03-14T17:07:00.006-06:00

As all my faithful readers know, I've been pretty excited for the release of Resident Evil 5 and yesterday I finally got to play the full version of the game. Before getting it, I had been checking some reviews scores on metacritic (but not reading full reviews, I hate spoilers) and was shocked to find that at the time of this writing it only has an average score of 85 with scores ranging from 100 all the way down to 60. Surely the sequel to Resident Evil 4, often considered one of the greatest games of all time, couldn't be bad enough to receive a 60?

Well upon booting it up, my brother and I played through the first chapter on co-op and it was a blast. The end of the chapter is one of the levels from the demo, so I had already played it, but this time we didn't have shotguns or rifles, just handguns. My brother was worried because we're playing it on the highest difficulty, but it turned out fine. It was tons of fun, running around yelling at each other about where to go and trying to horde items reminded me of the good old days of Gauntlet Legends.
The only complaint I have about the co-op is the split screen is kinda dumb. Usually when you do split screen in a game the entire screen is used, it's divided in half and each player gets a side. Here though, the entire screen isn't used. Each player has a window that keeps the original aspect ratio of the screen instead of stretching it to fill the whole half. There's a lot of wasted space on the sides, and they still have your meters and stuff covering your view instead of moving them to the blank space. It was like this in the demo too but I was hoping they would have put put an option or something in to change it by the time the final release came around. This doesn't ruin the game by any means, it's just something that really should have been changed.
Today I fired up the single player mode and it didn't take me long to figure out why anyone would give it a low score. In the game you always have a partner with you, which is why co-op works so well, but in single player.... not so much. Your partner is dumber than a sack of bricks. I try dividing the ammo up evenly but she just keeps wasting it. If we go into an area with 40 bullets each, sometimes she'll completely run out of bullets by the time I have 35 left. One of the earlier bosses in the game requires you to trap him in an incinerator type room and burn him up using a machine, and from what I could tell shooting at him did nothing but your partner keeps doing it anyway! I eventually had to take all her ammo away so she wouldn't shoot it anymore.
The way she just sticks by you sometimes is annoying too. In co-op, if you enter a room with two bookshelves to block windows or doors you can each take one and seal it up quickly, then start searching for ammo and what not. In single player though your partner just stands around watching while you do all that, and then when you find some ammo that you want her to take you have call her over before finally telling her to take it. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't so difficult to give your partner ammo during combat, but you'll often get separated and she isn't able to go out and search for ammo on her own unless it's right in front of her. So she'll stumble around with no bullets until you're able to stop, slowly open up the menu, select the bullets, and then "give," meanwhile you're getting your ass kicked by enemies. And of course, she quickly wastes all the ammo on a single enemy. Ugh.

I'm probably making the game sound worse than it is, it's ridiculously fun still. I just caught up in disappointment sometimes. Other than those couple things, and the ancient, awkward controls, the game is great and plays like Resident Evil 4 with a little bit more annoyance from your partner. I recommend playing it in co-op mode for the best gameplay experience.

Lawrence Arms, what the fuck are you doing?

2009-03-11T23:01:00.006-06:00

Shit all, that's what. Maybe if Brennan Kelly got off his skinny ass and stopped blogging, Neil Hennessy stopped drumming for some other band and Chris McCaughan woke up from his nap then maybe they could actually get to what they should be doing: WRITING A NEW FUCKING ALBUM AND TOURING.

It's been three years and the fans want a new album. Much as a I enjoy reading badsandwichchronicles (the bass player's blog) it sometimes pains me to read about the life of a part time bartender/baby father when it could be about what's going on with one of my favourite bands. Between those two things and his 10 hours of blogging per day, the guy does sound pretty busy I guess, but I have no idea what his guitar playing counter part does with his time. He has a solo act that sometimes has shows, but they've been few and far between. From what I can gather he doesn't have a kid or a blog so what the fuck could he possibly be doing?.

Ugh, I should probably make a brief mention of the band's music I guess. It's punk rock with tons of references to famous or obscure literature combined with Simpsons references. For instance, the back of the lyric book for The Greatest Story Ever Told simply says

"Who met thou then?"
"Part of that Power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good."
Goethe - Faust

"Everything was fine until dickless here cut off the power grid."
"Is this true?"
"Yes your honor, this man has no dick."
Bill Murry - Ghostbusters

Seriously, who else is cool enough to do that? Anyway, they have two singers, one's voice is incredibly raspy while the other's is incredibly clean sounding.
Recommended Listening:
The Greatest Story Ever Told - Amazing concept album
Cocktails & Dreams - Collection of b-sides

The sad state of video game consoles in my home

2009-03-05T22:10:00.004-06:00

After my post about Pier Solar yesterday I decided to bust out the old Sega Genesis and CD and play some Sonic CD, but guess what? The lousy cord that connects to the TV (the RF switch) is fucked, so I can't play it. So now I'm all desperate for some sweet old school gaming and try hooking up the Super Nintendo, but oh wait, THE POWER CORD IS BROKEN. Most of my old systems are apparently fucked:

-my NES seems to have vanished
-the reset button on my 64 is stuck because my brother spilled something on it
-the 64 is gone, because my brother randomly took it somewhere
-open button is stuck on the Gamecube I need to rest something on it to keep it closed. Again, my brother. Not that this one matters so much, but I still use it for the gameboy player.
-Atari has all the cables, but it connects to the TV using those weird screws. No idea what I'm talking about? That's because they aren't on any TV made in the last 25 years, including mine.
-Genesis is missing RF switch
-Sega Saturn sucks
-Super Nintendo is missing the power cord.

The missing cables aren't that huge of a deal, they are easily replaceable online for less than $10, but then the shipping usually ends up costing another $10 bucks and all of a sudden I'm paying $20 USD for just the cord when a used Genesis only costs $30 CDN.
So what old school gaming system in my house still works? The good old virtual boy of course, which I'm sure has received less than an hour of game time per year it's existed.

A brand new game for Sega Genesis? WTF?

2009-03-04T15:11:00.003-06:00

Looking back on my last few posts, Brentnote appears to quickly be turning into a retro gaming blog. I don't know how that happened, but I've got some none retro gaming posts coming up such as a series of posts about cartoons. Ah shit, those are gonna be retro gaming related too.

But getting back to the title, let me introduce you to Pier Solar, an upcoming game for Sega Genesis and Sega CD. It's a Japanese style RPG (think Final Fantasy, or for you Sega nerds, Phantasy Star) built totally for scratch. There's clearly several things that are incredibly weird about this project.

First of all, it's been over a decade since the last Genesis game was released. Genesis is long dead and there's not much of a point to releasing anything, other than to promote retro gaming. I'm no programmer, but I assume a project like this would easier to release as a stand alone game on PC or something. Another way to go would be emulation. For years it's been the front for projects like this, although I suppose they wanted this game to be completely original and not based on graphics or code from another game. But no, not a PC game or a ROM, they're going all the way for this thing. They are actually producing cartridges and a CD for Sega CD. That is fucking bold. To my knowledge it's the only homebrew type game to do this kind of thing. There should probably be some sort of licensing issue if they're actually making cartridges, but I'm sure Sega is smart enough to not give a shit.

Needless to say, I'm crazy enough to order a copy. Old school 2D Japanese RPGs are some of my favourite games and I'm excited to bust out the old genesis and get into a completely new game with a classic 90s feel. By the sounds of things, it could be done and off to the factory for production sometime in the next few months, but could easily be later as these projects tend to take forever.

A Special Harvest Moon Edition of Brentnote

2009-03-02T19:15:00.013-06:00

So today I'm covering one of my favourite video game series, Harvest Moon. I'll just talk about what it is a bit for all you n00bs and do some reviewing.

Harvest Moon tends to be one of those gaming series that you either love or hate, and I tend to fall into the former category. There's a huge library of games in the series but they're all based around the same thing: farming. You play as either a young man or woman who either inherits a farm or moves to the farm for some other reason. Your goal is to do develop the basically empty farm into a successful business and in many of the games to start a family. You get to raise cows, chickens, sheep and other animals depending on the version, as well as get married, expand your house and farm as well as other activities. A typical day in Harvest Moon goes like this:
-You wake up
-take care of animals, this includes brushing them, talking to them and feeding them.
-water or harvest crops
-you go to town to finish any business you may have talking to people
-hit up the mountain area or mine to gather wood/minerals to earn extra income
-get home.
That's just a typical day. There's also lots of festivals and other events that occur, and some days (most days) you won't be able to get everything done. But that's basically what happens EVERY DAY. 30 days a season, 4 seasons a year, and it'll probably take you a few years to beat.

Sounds boring, and in a way it is, but in another way it's awesome. It can be ridiculously addictive for some strange reason. There's something about the game that draws you in. Eventually the game is going to get kind of dull, but up until that point it's a blast.

So now for some reviews on the titles I'm familiar with. I'll go in chronological order to make this easier, and they'll be judged on a 10 point "HM" scale, basically just rating how good of a Harvest Moon game they are. None of them have 10 because none of them are quite perfect in my opinion.

Harvest Moon for SNES (1996)

The first game in the series, and quite a good one at that. They did a really good job of establishing the basic formula for the series, they don't try for anything fancy and it works out quite well. In this version the only animals are cows and chickens, and your farm land is just a giant square with your buildings in the middle. There's a decent size town and a bit of a mountain area. You can get married and expand your house but the two house upgrades are the only ones available. Overall it's a great game, and one of the better ones in the series, but since there's less stuff to do than in other versions it can get boring much sooner than it should. You get two and a half years to finish, but if you play your cards right you can be pretty much set to go about halfway through the second year, although a newcomer may not perform as well. 8/10

Harvest Moon GB (1997)

What's that? The screen shot looks familiar? I know. The Gameboy version of the game was basically just a dumbed down port of the super nintendo version. Your farm basically looks the same, it has the same sort of principles with the whole animal raising thing but in this one you only get 4 cows and chickens (SNES version had 8) and there's a town but you don't walk around in it, you really just select which store to go to. There's no mountain area of any kind, so that's kind of lame. You do have a cavern beneath your tool shed with some harvest sprites in it, but there's really nothing to do down there. No marriage in this game. After the first year you get an additional plot of land but to me it's kind of pointless. In most of the games the amount of land they give you is way too much and it just becomes a hassle to clean all the time. Props goes to this game for judging you after one year, but if you succeed you get additional stuff which happens to be useless since you've essentially beaten the game already. There's not nearly as much to do in this game as the other versions, it's still fun and great for an original gameboy game but it's definitely one of the weaker titles in the series. 6/10

Harvest Moon 64 (1999)

Ah, the 64 version. My favourite, and many other people's favourite. This one takes the same formula as the super nintendo version again, and explands on it greatly. This time there's more stuff to do, more areas, more towns people who all have bigger schedules, more bulding options and you can now raise sheep! Graphics are really cool in my opinion. They give off a really simple and lighthearted feeling. Everything is pretty much perfect. You have two and half years again to beat it, and this time the game keeps going afterwards if you like. My only issue with this game is that now I know the secret of great success after playing through it a few times. I'm basically about to ruin the game for anyone who hasn't played it, but if you haven't played it by now you're probably more likely to play the more easily accessible titles. Anyway, the trick is to buy a greenhouse ASAP. Once you have the greenhouse you can buy crops from any season (usually you can only buy certain ones at certain times) and just fill up the building with crops that don't need to be reseeded before harvesting again. This will get you a constant cash flow without putting anything into it. Usually if you have too many crops it takes way too long to water them and you just waste away your day watering without getting anything else done, but indoors time doesn't move so you can do as much watering as your stamina will allow before 7 AM. This is all great and fun, but the game ends up becoming so repetitive and the challenge is gone. But if you stay away from that ridiculous strategy you should be fine.
Overall, the game is still my favourite in the series because it does such a good job of following the initial forumla established by the series. 9/10

Harvest Moon GBC 2 (2000)

#2 happens to be a big improvement on the first one. This time there's a town that you can actually walk around in, and a bit of a mountain area. There's a river that goes through your farm and you can do quite a bit of fishing there. You've got sheep, a hot house to grow flowers and each animal has their own pasture behind the house. Pretty good for GB at the time, but still no marriage, so that's kind of lame. In this one you get three years to finish. 7/10

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town (2003)

This the Gameboy Advance version, it's actually sort of a remake of the Playstation one, Harvest Moon: Back To Nature. Same sort of thing as the 64 version, but there's quite a few more building options and things like that. While it is quite comparable to the 64 version, there are a few things that I don't like. First of all, NO ENDING. The credits just roll when you get married, big fucking whoop. It keeps going after that. There's more stuff to get, like a Vacation House but it costs an atrocious amount of money (more than everything else you'll buy put together) and a house your wife gives you after 50 years. That's fucking crazy. The layout, controls and overall navigation aren't as nice as the 64 version either. Music and graphics are worse too, but that's more of a system difference. Still, it doesn't give off the same lighthearted feeling as SNES or 64 in my opinion. 8/10

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (2004)

They tried to do something different with this one, and in my opinion it doesn't really work well. There's more of a focus on building a family and forming friendships in this one, and less of a focus on farming. What is there for farming seems kind of awkward and just isn't as entertaining as other incarnations. The thing I don't like about the friendship aspect is that it's as simple as talking to people every day. Raising a child is also a big deal in this one, usually it just stays as a baby forever. Here though, you go through different chapters and in each one after you have the child he gets older and it's your goal to try and make him want to be a farmer or something. I dunno, I guess it's kind of cool, just isn't as fun for me. The town changes throughout the chapters, so that's kind of cool too I suppose. The game is just kind of... boring. 6/10. That's right, like the first Gameboy one.

I guess those reviews turned out kinda lame. Mostly just listing features and junk. There's lots of other games in the series that I've either only played briefly or just didn't buy because they looked kinda bad. The first DS one was basically the same as the GBA one with a couple added things, but still basically the same. The second DS forces you to use lame touch controls to move around and I hate those kinds of games. The newest Wii one has a bunch of ridiculous load times, Save The Homeland for PS2 just kind of looked bad. They've also released a bunch that are just remakes where you're a girl instead of a boy. I've yet to play the Rune Factory series, which is basically Harvest Moon mixed with monster battles, I'll be sure to check that out in the future I guess, but up next is Magical Melody which was released on Gamecube in 2006. From what I've read it seems quite good so that's pretty exciting. Expect another crappy review of that one once I'm done with it.

Zelda and the Gameboy Color

2009-02-26T17:50:00.005-06:00

Yeah, I said "color" instead of colour. It's the name of the fucking system so give me a break.

Anyway, I had last week off school so I decided to indulge myself with some good old fashioned gaming and play a really solid title. I don't know how to explain it, but for some reason I just get the desire to play specific games at weird times. Upon waking up on the last day of class before the break I had a strong desire to play Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Zelda: Oracle of Seasons on Gameboy Color. So that day I busted out the Gameboy Advance (DS won't play GBC games) and started up on Oracle of Ages.The two games are kind of unique in that they were released at the same time but you can play them as one continuous story... in any order. Yeah, I know, it sounds fucking weird. Basically after you're done one of them you get a password to use for the next game. Each game has it's own setting and villain, but you discover that there's another villain working behind the scenes and that's the story that carries over. At the end of the second game you get an additional little dungeon and a boss. There's more differences than that though. Characters from the first game show up in certain places in the second and give you passwords that you carry back to the first game, where you'll recieve another password to bring back and unlock additional items like the third level sword, shield and extra heart containers (gives you higher total health). This aspect of the game is actually really fun because sometimes just finding the right character to talk to in the first game is a little difficult and they make you do a mini game to get the password. There's also a bunch of other little things that carry over as well as an extra dungeon that's much more difficult than the other dungeons.

As far as the gameplay itself goes it's fucking great. The older 2D Zelda games are cool because they seem to have perfected the formula for how the game should work. Everything is so well balanced and just seems to make sense. You may be asking how different these games could be if they were released at the same time so let me tell that they're quite different. First of all, in Ages you travel through time where everything is much different in the past compared to present, and in Seasons you change the seasons to alter the landscape on the overworld. Can't get onto that hill? Well in Summer the vines grow and you can climb up. Can't get around that giant pile of snow? Change over to spring and melt that bitch. The levels, characters and world are much different in both games. It's like they game the games to different sets of designers. The only thing that really carries over is the game mechanics, but in each game you get different special items to use so even some of those are different.

Overall the games are quite incredible and definitely 10/10s. Very highly recommended.

Now that the games are done I've found myself in a Harvest Moon mood. In trying to pick out which one to play I realized that I've actually got a lot in my house already to chose from but I finally decided to purchase the last one released for Gamecube, Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, and hopefully that should be here sometime in the next week. I've wanted to get it since it's release back in 2006 but every time I've thought about it I've come up with a reason not to. Expect a special Harvest Moon edition of Brentnote in the next week where I'll briefly review all the Harvest Moon titles that I'm already familiar with.

New Fucking NOFX album!

2009-02-24T13:53:00.004-06:00

NOFX, probably the greatest punk band of all time, has finally announced their 12th studio album entitled Coaster to be released on April 28th. I saw NOFX twice last year and they're definitely my favourite live band. You can see me in this picture at the Edmonton show, I'm the black shirt between the green and white shirts in the top left corner. I also happened to be front row center out of 7000 people in what was by far the rowdiest show I've ever been to. I wasn't even standing on the ground, my feet were on top of some other dude's feet.
For anyone who's unfamiliar with the kind of antics NOFX do, they should check out the preview for their upcoming DVD of NOFX - Backstage Passport. It was a show that aired on Fuse last year that documented NOFX's tour of all the sketchy ass countries they've never been to.

Yet another 3D update- Galaxy Cinemas slaps me in the face yet again

2009-02-23T12:38:00.004-06:00

And I'm pissed. Apparently they've been reading my blog and understand my demands but want to be dicks anyway. After My Bloody Valentine 3D, quite possibly the 3D event of the year, has left theatres they bring 3D projection technology to our theatre. This gets me thinking "DAMN, Coraline in 3D would still be sweet," but guess what? It's not at that particular theatre anymore. What are they gonna be showing in 3D you ask? The Jonas Brothers: 3D Concert Experience. That's right, instead of a kick ass slasher film featuring a naked chick running or a classy stop motion movie we get the fucking Jonas Brothers. I'm gonna try to organize a group to go see this, but I don't think it's gonna fly.

Special thanks goes to my friend Donovan for bringing this to my attention. He's always dishing out great blogging idea.

A note on independent recording

2009-02-20T00:06:00.002-06:00

It's that time of year again. My band has decided to finally go all the way and attempt to record an entire album. In the past we've done single recordings of random songs we were playing at the time and last year we recorded a 5 song demo called the This Cold EP. This time is gonna be a bit different though, we're sitting down and recording around 15 songs. Quite a bit of a project.

For anyone (most people) who hasn't had to do a GOOD recording of a song let me tell you something: it fucking sucks. You record a take. Listen. Record another take. Listen. You get the idea. No, we're not doing this in a professional studio or anything but our set up is much better than most people doing independent recording in their houses. We've got all the right equipment to make it sound great but the issue is the time we're putting into this. Remember what I just said about the record, listen, record thing? Well that's probably just the way we do it. On the bonus DVD for Less Than Jake's In With The Out Crowd album they talk about the way they record things: Roger explains that to record the guitars first they do a take with a certain kind of guitar and amp to come up with a clean track, then they do it again with a different combination of amps and guitars, then again and again until they have 6 or 8 tracks to work with. For each of those combinations they probably do many different takes. On the DVD they also talk about separating each note in the drum recordings into it's own individual piece to remove ghost notes and extra noise. THAT SHIT IS NUTS! It's also unreasonable for us to do and probably not worth it in the end. So we record kinda lazily in comparison but at the end of the day I'm sure this whole things is gonna sound fucking awesome anyway.

The other issue we've got with this recording is that our original plan was to do the whole thing this week since we didn't have school but it's Thursday night and we are much less than half done. At least we've got things off to a good start.

Sonic Ultimate Collection follow-up

2009-02-10T22:44:00.002-06:00

As it turns out, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, the one game I was super stoked for in Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection, is not actually on the collection. Seriously, fuck you Sega. You put 40 Genesis games in a collection including most of the best games that the company owns but you don't include in the best one. What's worse is that Sonic 3 as well as Sonic & Knuckles are both in there but the two games combined are not. For those who don't remember, when you lock the two cartridges together it combines the games and makes one long adventure with a bunch of extra features. Give me a fucking break here Sega. You've included it in every other Sonic collection, why not this one? Obviously I'm not buying it now.

goodbye accordion or selling online?

2009-02-02T16:27:00.005-06:00

So about 8 months ago my friend and I were at a pawn shop and I see this ratty looking box that turned out to have an accordion inside. The thing looked incredible and was clearly a steal so I made a total impulse buy at the price of $150 with hopes of learning to play it. Obviously I got lazy and never did, so it had been sitting in my closet this whole time until I decided to put it up for sale on Saturday for $125, taking a $25 loss since I just wanted to get rid of it. It goes up for sale on usedregina.com around 6:30 PM and I get an e-mail about it at 6:59PM, another at 7:09 PM and a third at 7:49 PM. The next day I get two more. One of the people I contacted back about it decides to come take a look today and about 2 minutes after entering my house decides to buy it. Easiest sale I've ever made, but god damn I think I should have asked for more. Anyway, as this girl is leaving we chat it up a bit and in the middle of the conversation my dog starts furiously humping his dinosaur pillow that he sleeps on. I've made a quick doodle in paint to show where we were standing in relation to my dog's brand of masturbation:

I was trying really hard not to laugh, look at it or draw attention to it in anyway but since I was actually facing this girl and I somehow managed to see it, I think it's safe to assume that she did too. HOWEVER, if she did see it she would have had to laugh because it is quite simply one of the most ridiculous things anyone could ever see BUT she didn't.

On another note, on Saturday night I was planning on posting a review of an episode of Masters of Horror called Chocolate but after reading it I realized that it makes me sound like a total homophobe.

Who's excited for Resident Evil 5?

2009-01-29T19:41:00.004-06:00

I am. Obviously. There was a demo for it up on the Xbox Marketplace this week and I was happy to find out that the gameplay is basically the same as Resident Evil 4 (one of my favourite games of all time) except now you've got a partner so it's perfect for TWO PLAYER COOP. I played through the demo with my brother and it was quite funny because he's never played #4 so he wasn't used to the only good method for dealing with sub-bosses: run like fuck. This is the one game I've been waiting years for and I'm so excited that it's finally coming out in 6 weeks.

There's one more game coming up that I'm fairly excited for and that's Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection. I've beaten Sonic 3 & Knuckles (one of my favourite games of all time) probably 50 times but it's been a couple years since I've played through it and now I can finally enjoy it in a remastered 720p format. Yes, Sega is just dicking me around with another rerelease and yes, I do already own this game in two collections (Sonic and Knuckles Collection for PC and Sonic Mega Collection for GC) but... 720p!!!

3D follow-up

2009-01-23T00:19:00.004-06:00

I just had to make a post about this after seeing the commercial. Apparently on February 2nd, the TV series Chuck will be airing an episode in 3D. I've never seen it before but I think my friend Donovan may or may not like it. I'm super effing stoked about this and am glad to have something else to fulfill my 3D desires because my eyes are getting sore from all this red light.

3 Dimensional Update

2009-01-21T22:47:00.003-06:00

So in order to satisfy my 3D needs after the fiasco of Friday night I've managed to track down the best 3D experience that Saskatchewan has to offer: The Virtual Boy. That's right, located deep in the depths of my basement is more 3D viewing technology than in any of our theatres. Lots of people like to complain about the Virtual Boy for various reasons but I kinda like it. Sure, I had to stack 10" of text books underneath so the system would be at a comfortable playing level, and I could only stand to play for 30 minutes before my eyes were too sore to go on, but the games I have for it are mildly entertaining. Tonight's game of choice was Warioland. It's an old school sidescroller where you play as Wario. Lots of cool 3D effects and lots of stages have you playing on two different layers (the front and background). I'm pretty sure it's actually the only really good game for the system. I also have Mario Tennis, which gets old fast and Teleroboxer, which is the sequel to Punch-Out!!! and Super Punch-Out!!! Kinda cool but pretty difficult. That reminds me, Punch Out is this huge iconic game but no one has played Super Punch-Out even though it's the same game just 1000 times better. Play it!

WHAT THE FUCK!?!?

2009-01-16T21:49:00.007-06:00

All I wanted was to see a sweet movie in 3D, is that really so much to ask? Tonight a friend and I went to see My Bloody Valentine 3D but were let down when our local cinema didn't support 3D movies, but instead had the regular, shitty ass 2D viewing instead. Who the fuck wants to see the 2D version of a movie that's main selling point is seeing it in 3D? Galaxy Cinemas are going to be getting a very angry letter about this. We went to see Gran Torino instead and it was great. It's about Clint Eastwood as a racist old man who may or may not have attempted a human transmutation at some point in his life. Highly recommended. Good as it was though, it doesn't make up for the disappointment from earlier. Maybe the latest episode of Supernatural will cheer me up...

For more about the movie we originally wanted to see, check out:
www.mybloodyvalentinein3D.com/

Post-show update and why does cement have to taste so bad?

2009-01-13T11:17:00.003-06:00

So the show went great, there were a few minor issues but that happens over the course of 36 songs. As we were finishing our last set, one of the guys who was working at the bar came up to us and told us that the Trailer Park Boys were coming (they did their own show in Regina that night) and they had told them there would be live music so they were wondering if we'd like to play more. We agreed to do it and start up again when they got there but after about 45 minutes we found out they weren't coming so we took everything down and sure enough, as soon as we were done they came in.

Now onto my hatred of cement. A few weeks ago (Christmas Eve) one of my fake teeth (tooth #11) fell out and had to be glued back in. When it first comes loose you get a nice days worth of cement taste from beneath the crown, it's pretty awful. Anyway, It was loose for about 5 days before finally coming out and got glued back in the next day, but not at my usual dentists office because it was closed . That was two weeks ago but today as I was eating cereal it came out again, so I went back to my actual dentists office and he cemented it back in. Now I've got the cement taste in my mouth and I eat anything to get rid of it because I fear the tooth is temporarily weak.

Pre-show update

2009-01-08T14:41:00.003-06:00

Today has been an awesome day already. I woke up to find a message about another gig on my band's horizon, which reminded me of yet another show that I think we can get this summer, then after class I was given a replacement B string for free (This particular string retails for 10 US on string sites which usually sell far below suggested retail price) and then I discovered that I won two whole dollars on a lottery ticket! Those two dollars went into purchasing another lottery ticket of course, so I'll keep you updated on the results of that one. I'm guessing that all these good events either means:

a) The rest of my day (show included) is gonna be awesome.

b) The rest of my day (show included) is gonna be terrible.

AH! I just realized that I have to miss 30 Rock tonight! It begins....

All set for our biggest show yet

2009-01-06T11:57:00.004-06:00

So this Thursday my band is playing a local bar and while it's not our ever first paid gig, it's definitely our biggest. One of our members recently turned 19 and up until that point playing in bars was a little sketchy (some would let us play, others wouldn't). That being the case, we've played a lot of smaller concert venues.

Our first "paid gig" was in a church basement. Some girl contaced us on a Monday about it and we played 5 days later. It's still probably my favourite show we've done so far. We didn't have to do any work for it so we just showed up and played. The venue was really cool with a bunch of couches and both the people that played and the whole audience were just really nice people. The picture below shows me and my guitar player along with a dog that showed up to the concert.

Last year we did a couple shows in a building called The Exchange. We rented out the smaller half of the building which has a capacity of around 80 people. The concerts were great, but a lot of work. For the first concert we only had about 3 weeks to prepare for it so finding bands was a little difficult. We decided to book the second show a little further in advance to avoid this the next time, but it ended up being equally as bad. Putting up posters took us a whole night the first time, and about 3 hours the next. Nothing like driving around the city at one am taping posters to street lamps! I'm still really proud of these shows as they were quite successful for being completely organized by me and my guitar player.

This show is different though. We're playing at a bar doing the full bar gig thing. 35 songs, three different sets, from 8:30 until around midnight. No work for us other than how ridiculous it was to come up with that much material. Usually we play from somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes, so filling up over three hours (with breaks) was a little daunting. We're busting out oldies that we haven't played for a while and for the first time in almost three years we're playing some covers. I think it breaks down to about 25 originals and 10 covers.

And now for a good laugh, here's the video of The Red Shells almost three years ago with our old singer. It's funny looking at this video and realizing how much better we've gotten. Thomas and I are basically standing still the whole time. We play "I Wanna Make it Wit Chu" six months after the Queens live album was released but a full year before Era Vulgaris came out and the song became a hit single. Yes, it was on Desert Sessions already, but nobody has heard those.

The Red Shells live at Battle of The Bands Terry Fox Fundraiser 2006. The first song it kind of jumps into the middle of is "Be Funky", followed by "Doctors Orders" and a cover of "I Wanna Make it Wit Chu"

bravo microsoft, bravo

2008-11-19T23:01:00.004-06:00

Yes, bravo indeed. Way to make the X-Box dashboard more cumbersome and difficult to use. For those who haven't noticed yet, Microsoft released their fall update for the 360 and it completely changed the menu. What was wrong with the other menu you ask? Well, first of all it didn't have Mii's. Welcome to 2006, Microsoft! Everything needs a fucking Mii these days, but why? The only really cool thing about them is driving as yourself in Mario Kart and seeing Hitler dancing with Jesus on bilboards. So now Xbox live has Miis. In addition to that, the menu has been changed from a nice, simple, easy to use list style menu to some piece of shit wear you need to flip through every individual option. Bravo.

5 days since release

2008-11-11T17:10:00.003-06:00

and I'm pretty sure my brother still hasn't stopped. The guy got it Thursday evening at midnight and I haven't had a decent night sleep since. Not only does he like playing too loud but I'm pretty sure he only plays on X-Box live so at four in the morning I get to hear him girlishly screaming to his buddies about how awesome that last chainsaw battle was.

Meanwhile I've been over at my friend's house playing Mario Super Sluggers enjoying video games the way they were meant to played: in the company of actual people screaming about how fucking unfair it is that after the ape batted the ball with a surfboard he managed to get a bomb and knock out my giant piranha plant before he could catch the ball, resulting in a dead turtle and a wizard each scoring runs before I could pass the ball back to the blond haired chick in short-shorts and end the play.

The show, not the album... or song.

2008-11-01T17:37:00.004-06:00

In the wake of my three month stint as a rabid X-Files fan, I've found myself in a bit of an obsession with David Duchovny. What can I say, the guy is a great actor and looks fabulous in a suit. To continue with his work I've started watching the Showtime series Californication. The best part about it so far is that David Duchovny's character has a crazy obsession with the one thing that seperates us from the animals: blogging. That's right, his character is a writer and he blogs. I suppose it may be less of an obsession and more of a job, one that he barely even wanted, but you get my point. Oh, he also has a lot of crazy sexual things going on. So far the series seems to be a bit more shocking and over the top than good, but it's still good none the less.

I just couldn't get enough.

2008-10-29T23:57:00.004-06:00

X-Files is done. 150 hours of my life have gone down the drain in the past 2 and a half months and yet I regret nothing. To celebrate me finishing the series I wanted to do something involving my favourite episodes, but I couldn't even decide on any favourites since they're all so good. It's also difficult because it's hard to remember what happened in which episode for the grand story arc ones. Therefor, here in no particular order are 10 episodes that stand out but may or may not be my favourites (they're mostly my favourites):

417/418 - Tempus Fugit/Max
This one is a two part episode and is pretty much just quality TV. They really play out like a movie and stand very independently of the grand X-Files story line so they're very watchable.

505 - The Post-Modern Prometheus
This one is no doubt a fan favourite, even though I don't know any other fans I just expect that it is. It's a less serious episode involving a mutant raping a town full of woman. Full of laughs and done completely in black and white, it's very Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

804 - Roadrunners
That's right, I picked an episode from the end of the series. Take that X-Files fans! A great episode that's pretty much just an awesome version of the Hills Have Eyes.

304 - Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose
Guest starring the dude who plays Raymond's Dad as an unwilling psychic detective. Somewhat funny, but moreso awesome.

312 - War of the Coprophages
Another silly episode, but this one is only really funny in the context of the series (so you need to have seen a bunch of other episodes to really get it). It's about a town being attacked by killer cockroaches. Kinda.

606 - How the Ghosts Stole Christmas
Best ghost or christmas episode of any sci-fi series. It's probably even better than A Christmas Carol, but definitely not better than The Muppet Christmas Carol.

614 - Monday
Groundhog Day done X-Files style. Pretty bitchin if you ask me.

610 - Tithonus
Yet another episode from season 6, probably my favourite season. Scully is investigating a photographer who's out to catch a photo of Death himself.

512 - Bad Blood
This episode starts out with Mulder murdering a teenager. Lots of silliness and vampires, and Brent Butt makes a brief appearance. Probably also only funny in the context of the series.

519 - Folie a Deux
Mulder and Scully investigate a dude who thinks his boss is at a telemarketing company is a giant monster, but he's the only one who can see it. Awesomeness ensues.

Okay, so I picked a lot of funny ones and an episode from season 8. Clearly not the best list ever. Anyway, X-Files is mostly serious and is fucking awesome 99% of the time.

35 Days of my life in 223 words or less.

2008-10-22T15:23:00.003-06:00

Alright, I haven't posted in a while. I've been meaning to do some large posts about stuff that's happened in the past few weeks but now I've decided to just say "fuck it," and for now briefly sum up the last 35 days of my existence. Maybe some extra detail on a few of these later

-September 20th (Calgary), 21st (Edmonton) and 22nd (Regina) - Less Than Jake, Reel Big Fish and Flatliners in concert. Not ONE each night, but all three. And a Less Than Jake acoustic set. I'll no doubt be talking about these more, but for just know that the first concert involves an incident partially, but not really, caused by Less Than Jake where some dude busted his junk out on stage and started playing with it. Good times.

-October 1st to 6th - wedding maddness. I played bass while people entered for the ceremony.

-October 13th - Flogging Molly in Calgary, fuck yeah.

and then some midterms and other really meaningless junk. Oh, I watched my friend eat 4 hotdogs in 12 bites. It was somewhat impressive. Southpark has kicked off once again and has thus far been excellent, 30 Rock starts up again at the end of the month and I've only got about 10 episodes left in the X-Files.

33 Rows From Greatness

2008-09-17T15:15:00.004-06:00

This week Regina is home to not one, but TWO Elton John concerts. I went to the first one last night and I gotta say that Elton John is fucking awesome. That and I've never seen so many crazy middle aged women in one place ever. I swear there was a haze of old lady perfume. Other than that though, it was fucking awesome. One of the best live performances I've ever seen. It feels weird saying that because I'm not usually into such popular acts but damn was it good. One of the cool things about seeing such big artists is that their bands are usually filled with absolute chop monsters and Elton John was no exception. All the band members were nothing short of fantastic. Easily worth the $100 price of admission for the almost three hour set.

song gets cut short but it's the best version I could find

Ridiculous Mom Story #1 and Too Much Food

2008-09-16T00:09:00.006-06:00

Tonight at the supper table when everyone was pretty much finished, my dad started scooping out some more mashed potatoes only to be interrupted by my mother. Apparently she didn't want him to take any more because she had made extra to be eaten at supper tomorrow night. It was pretty absurd since the scoop my dad was taking happened to be the very last scoop. There was barely enough for one meal, how could she expect it to last for two? Anyway, this gets her pretty pissed off. She threatened to stop cooking for us at all, a threat to which we couldn't help but to laugh at. She was getting mad because we ATE the food. It's not like we let it go to waste or that we're in such a poor financial state that we need to ration mashed potatoes. She eventually dropped the idea of never cooking for us again and replaced it with not cooking for us for the next couple of days. Her last statement on the subject was that my dad (eater of remaining potatoes) was eating too much and proclaimed that I was "starving to death." She's convinced that I have an eating disorder because I've gradually lost weight in the past year or so. Always brings up that I don't eat enough, which brings me to my next subject:

Eating too much for MMA events

For every UFC pay per view I have some friends over to watch and we usually get some pizza to go along with the event. We've had some pretty misrable pizza in the past little while so this time we wanted to go a bit crazy. The night started off at KFC with a big order of pop corn chicken, followed by 3 pizzas and finally a blizzard cake from Dairy Queen. All three pizzas were of course eaten, and the cake was split into 4 equal sections, one for each of us. I can only speak for myself on this, but I felt absolutely disgusting afterwards.

2008-09-08T22:39:00.002-06:00

Evan Tanner
February 11 ,1971-September 8, 2008

RIP

It's not so bad being trendy

2008-09-06T23:07:00.005-06:00

The other day I was out shopping with my friend Thomas (guitarist of The Red Shells) and we ended up in West 49 looking for shirts. I was looking at a plaid jacket and just as I took it off the rack, Thomas says "Hey, what do you think of this?" We simultaneously turned our heads to find each other both holding up ridiculous looking plaid shirts. It must of looked so gay. I always find myself in weird situations like that when I go shopping with Thomas. Whether we're both going in on a "Buy one get one free" or buying the exact same shirt, it just never looks normal. On top of our strange purchasing habits, due to recent weight loss I now have the same t-shirt size as Thomas even though he's 6 inches shorter than me. That's just weird. Our strange shopping experiences aside, is it even possible for two men to go shopping together and still look heterosexual? Perhaps men should stick to shopping alone in order to keep up their manly personas.

It's a dead man's party, who could ask for more?

2008-08-18T12:56:00.003-06:00

Prepare to have every single weird music video you have ever seen put to shame, for here is the video for Oingo Boingo's song, Little Girls.

Does the lead singer look familiar at all? No? What about the name Danny Elfman? Simpsons theme song? Batman soundtrack? Yeah, that guy. He's the guy you just saw dancing with midgets and having a pillow fight with teenage girls. Oingo Boingo was a new wave band that started in the early 70s and went on until about 1995. They did lots of music that's just generally weird yet awesome at the same time. You might recognize some of their otherwork, like the Weird Science theme and Dead Man's Party from the Back To School soundtrack. Elfman eventually started doing film scores for Tim Burton (he did the scores for almost all of his movies) and a lot of other major franchises like Spider Man, Men In Black, Hellboy and Batman. Oingo Boingo's last album "Boingo" was released in 1994 and it's pretty much 73 minutes of a film soundtrack with really messed up lyrics. I've been listening to some of their stuff recently and I gotta say it's really unusual to sit down and listen to a New Wave 80's band for an hour. It's been kind of cool though. Their influence on one of my favourite bands, Reel Big Fish, has become kind of obvious. All their messed up/weird songs fit right in with the Oingo Boingo style of weirdness.

now that's coreography

I really used to like the TV series

Live video of "Insanity" from their final performance. The best part about this one is that while there's people dressed in creepy clown costumes, eerie dolls singing and the song itself is just totally fucked up, Danny Elfman is wearing plain shorts and a t-shirt making him craziest looking of all.

How's My Driving, Doug Hastings?

2008-08-12T11:53:00.002-06:00

I've sworn a million times never to be left again with that feeling

2008-08-09T23:10:00.001-06:00

So today I finally had my long awaited audition for the University of Regina music program. Going into it I was 99.9% sure I was getting in (they don't turn very many people away) but it's still pretty weird walking into a giant room with some people you've never met just watching you play for 10 minutes. I screwed up, started getting embarrassed and my face turned red so then I was trying to stop that but it just made things worse and I got distracted so I just made more mistakes. There was quite a bit of jittery legs going on for a bit too but by the end I managed to calm down and despite the fact that was sweaty as hell I probably didn't look nervous anymore. The point I'm trying to make here is not to get distracted by blushing or nervousness because it'll just make things worse.

My next point of business is to inform everyone of something they should already know:

Brock Lesnar is terrible.

Or at least he was tonight. Not even terrible really, he did win his match after all, but he just tried taking the match in a direction where he clearly has no idea what's going on. Just like his last match he opened up with some huge punches but then took the match to the ground where he climbed around for 14 minutes like a giant gorilla on a tree. Not trying to accomplish anything, he's just hanging around. Last time this approach landed him in a knee bar that lost him the match. It doesn't need to be like this Brock, try to stick to the stand up until you've actually got some jujitsu down. He could of easily finished Heath Herring much earlier in the match if he tried standing up more.

Against Me! Reinvented Axl Rose

2008-07-30T22:37:00.001-06:00

Forget New Wave and rewind a few albums to Against Me!'s first full length record, Reinventing Axl Rose (or RAR for short). Much different than their fourth album, RAR is as punk as it gets and considered by many older Against Me! fans as one the best punk albums of all time. Put out by good old No Idea Records who have pressed the record on vinyl upwards of twenty times on about a billion different colours. Don't really know what that means? Check out this photo and look at the records in the top left. Yeah, all those, they are indeed multiple copies of the same record (photo credit to Impact!, for more about him and his collection read his interview at punknews). That's what a typical Against Me! record nerd can dream of having for LPs. Oh by the way, that's not all the variations of RAR there are, I think he was missing a few at the time and now it's out of date by a few pressings.

The ridiculous number of variations for that record is often a topic of debate amongst record nerds these days. If someone wants to collect all the variations, not only is it a major pain to track down all the old pressings but they gotta keep dishing out the cash to No Idea to keep buying each new pressing. Stuff gets expensive and eventually you've ended up with 50 copies of the same album, which you'll probably never listen to anyway because you've got the mp3s on your PC. blah blah blah blah blah. Whatever.

Why am I bringing this up? Today No Idea Records put up 100 copies of RAR on 180 gram vinyl (it's thicker and supposed to sound better than the standard 120 gram) and the record nerds over at the Vinyl Collective forum freaked out. Not the usual "oh my god, more No Idea shenanigans" kind of freaked out but the "oh my god, I need this" kind. All the crazies sat at their computers all day waiting for this to go up for sale and it sold out in about 3 hours (fear not, they're making more). I was one of those crazies and I ordered a copy, at $8.50 it's pretty much a steal as 180 gram vinyl is usually a lot more expensive than normal records but $8.50 is still cheaper than any other label is selling any LPs for these days.

But back to the album itself. It fucking rocks. From start to finish it's a great representation of the punk rock ethic (see the title track) and should not be overlooked by any fans of the genre or anyone with a curiosity for it. Furthermore, anyone who likes Against Me!'s newer material should check it out so they can see what the band was like long before they signed to a major label and started working for the man.

A Brief Yet Triumphant Introduction

2008-07-21T22:13:00.000-06:00

My name is Brent and I'm from a city in the middle of Saskatchewan, Canada. I'm an aspiring musician, I play in a band called The Red Shells and will soon be studying music in university. My interests include:

Music - I mostly listen to ska and punk. I collect records and have a strange obsession with a band called Less Than Jake.
Cartoons - particularly 90s cartoons, when people had the balls to make quality programming
MMA ( mixed martial arts) - the ultimate sport
Video Games - mostly classic action style games like Mario and Sonic titles as well as RPGs like Final Fantasy. Not a big fan of first person shooters and World of Warcraft just sucks.

I'm starting this blog to get out all the random crap I always have to say. There's always some new album or game that I can't get my mind off of so this is where I'll be talking about it and where you'll be reading it.