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Space Ace: All The Fun, Less Quarters

Dead Robot June 16, 2009 Gaming

I decided to drop money into iTunes last night in a fit of shop therapy (read: post-Disney depression) and discovered that Don Bluth’s Space Ace was available for download! Actually it came out in May but I’ve been avoiding money-draining endeavors.

Does my hair look ok to you?

For you younger readers, Space Ace is the second laserdisk game from Bluth Studios as follow up to Dragons Lair, but this time set in space! It’s the story of a dashing blond couple named Kimberly and Ace, unexplainedly menaced by a blue and leather clad, space overlord called Borf (oh Don! You scamp!) . It’s over the top cornball campy with it’s characters but it’s Ace’s “random” ability to flip back between a muscle bound hero to weed thin child due to exposure to The Infanto Ray, that makes it fun. The beginning of the game lets you choose the difficulty level and in turn, lets you see more of the game the harder you go. It was pretty innovative stuff.

Ace shows an uncanny ability...

...to change. Almost childlike, I'd say

The game play can get tedious (you watch the same video over and over, remembering which way to guide Ace to avoid obstacles to advance the story), and at $0.50 a pop when it came out, your cash would drain out of your pocket fast. The game also tries to mess you up by mirroring or flipping the video so that you don’t become complacent with Ace’s directions. A simple trick in a simpler game era. The animation was top notch and fast paced, often too fast to enjoy the artistry and fluidity Bluth put into his characters.

Ace learns the loud way that Kimberly is a bit of a princess...

I’m glad to report that there are “HEY! I FUCKING CLICKED THAT!” bugs in the game. These are either due to processor speeds of video on the iPhone or they were just there to begin with and were never cleaned out. Even the false “hints” in the way of onscreen flashes are present, resulting in no action on Ace’s part or his ultimate death, tug familiarly on my memory of originally being there, and subsequently aren’t that much of a frustration. Relax and enjoy the visuals!

Borf shows us that in space, no one can straighten your teeth.

I’m so caught up in nostalgia I don’t mind repeating it a few times.

$4.99 from the iTunes store. I give it 5 out of 5 for anyone who was old enough to play this originally in a smelly arcade. Anyone else will have been de-sensitized by high brow graphical games and won’t find this amusing at all (some user comments in the app are pretty funny!).

Disney 2009 – Dining

Dead Robot June 10, 2009 Travel

I have nothing new to report about Disney, per se. Yes it’s still the pinnacle of customer service. Yes the rides were just as fun. Yes, Stacey was the first person you saw when you turned on the hotel TV. It was all the same yet the familiarity was like going to a friend’s house who has 1000% better home electronics than you do.

Not much has changed since my last vacation there, except for a few tweaks (for the better) to their services and a couple new rides. I won’t repeat myself for the sake of old time readers. Know that while there wasn’t any bed-jumping videos of excitement, the emotion of being there was just as strong.

Collectively between three cameras (not including the Photopass service Disney provides), I estimate we took close to 2500 pictures. I’ll be posting some here but the brunt of them from my camera will be on Flickr for your perusal. Don’t expect captions for all!

Now, on to the subject at hand: Food!

Know that we had absolutely NO bad meals on any of the Disney properties (including third party chain eateries). That isn’t to say all our meals were perfect: when we discovered that Oh Boys! on Colonial Drive in Orlando had been closed for a while (update your website you dicks! That includes you, Google Earth!), we motored back to Downtown Disney and still managed to have a great meal – at twice the price, unfortunately. My only complaint is that all manner of food at Disney World is shockingly expensive. While we were eating in moderate to “classy” places like Coral Reef Restaurant at EPCOT (blackened catfish!) or The Crystal Palace (Character Breakfast with Eyore!) at Magic Kingdom, I still dreaded the bill at the end of the meal.

The only time I noticed a staff, err… Cast Member not entirely in tune with a high level of good service output was at the Beaches And Cream Ice Cream Parlour. See video below. I think this was her one thousand time serving up this kind of sundae just on this day, to screaming over-sugared children, made evident by the robotic delivery of the room-stopping announcement (but she does save herself at the end with the “young” comment, blessherheart):

The most surreal meal we had was at The Grand Floridian – Afternoon Tea in the Garden View Room. The room was Mary Poppins Perfect: vaulted ceilings, Victorian styling and proper china tea pots. No fart jokes here. I found the atmosphere a bit intimidating, like walking into a $100/plate restaurant wearing Old Navy. Actually, that’s exactly what I did. But the waitress never made me felt like I had. Her timing was infallible and her service top notch.

The other patrons made me think of bored, rich housewives having to actually socially interact with their immaculately dressed children while the husbands were off avoiding their kids playing golf and the nanny had the day off. Oh no, no rides for these tykes! They had to enjoy liver sandwiches with no crusts and were ordered to sit on their hands until the meal was finished.

At least that’s what I imagined going on at the table beside us.

At one point Sharkboy decided to let loose with a bawdy, off colour joke and proceeded to laugh heartily. Suddenly he stops and says in his best educated voice: “Pardon me. Ha. Ha. Ha.” We all snickered like kids in school.

Our last meal was a pizza on our hotel bed, tired out of our minds from 9 days of walking, riding, laughing and just having fun. It was the perfect last meal for all the sensory overloading.

Fallen Out

Dead Robot March 25, 2009 Distractions, Gaming

KABOOM!

This weekend I finished Fallout 3 finally, after something like 40 hours of running around and killing Radroaches and listening to Three Dog howl “Thanks for liiistening… people!” And yes, I managed to get minor plasma TV burn in from the Hit Points meter. Nice!

I have to admit that using Liam Neeson as the voice of your father throughout the game skeeved me a bit. Okay a lot. He’s got a great voice and all, but I got this “pervy dad” vibe every time I heard his voice. Thing is, you have to suffer through the first half of the game while he coddles you and encourages you to grow up smart and strong. Stranger danger!

However, using Malcolm McDowell as the voice of the Enclave President was a stroke of genius. I suggest that for Fallout 4, they please use Hugo Weaving? That man is my favorite villain right now.

I originally didn’t want to play this game because the characters looked too much like “Thunderbirds” puppetry, but thanks to SharkBoy’s love of the commercial (the long slow pull out while using The Inkspots I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire), he made me get it during the Xmas sales. I was hooked after an hour of game play. Not as artistically intrinsic as Bioshock, but intriguing and engaging in it’s multi-layered storytelling.

Now we’re on to playing LEGO Indiana Jones, which are a ton of fun for two people (except the co-op can get a bit frustrating if you decide to go off and do your own thing and wind up yelling at each other for not being on your side of the screen). It’s amazing they can recreate the three movies in 99.99% pantomime. Or maybe that’s testament to the crappiness of the movies? Regardless, the game is a lot of fun with nods to Star Wars all the way through it.

I of course, can’t wait until they make the Lego version of this movie:

(video inspired from G4’s Attack of the Show)

Last Minute Shopping

Dead Robot December 23, 2008 Tech, Toronto

My co-worker turned me onto the TTC/police Ebay pages where you can find a bevvy of unclaimed lost and found items, like sunglasses, jewelery and Hindu god icons (?).

I love how the person challenged with setting up these auctions uses a disembodied mannequin hand to show relative sizes:

Waxy Hand from the depths

It’s also nice to see people refusing crap merchandise when they see it:

Uh, thanks. I'll pass

Reconnecting

Dead Robot November 10, 2008 Distractions, Personal Bits

Here Be Dave

In the fall of 1981 I met Dave while doing props for a community youth theatre show. A few of us went over to his house for lunch on a break between rehearsals and while I was chewing away on a sandwich, Dave concocted a 2-second blood pack of ketchup and a ziplock bag, behind an open fridge door. He tried to throw at me as a joke and it didn’t work so he resorted to exploding it across his chest. Dave was obsessed with horror movies, you see. Not sure what happened, but when the prank failed miserably, I thought his cunning was a thing to be reckoned with.

Dave was one of two friends I did acid with for the first time. And was the reason I will never be 100% welcome back into his house by his mother. She’s convinced I shoved the tab into Dave’s pure and vestal mouth, when it was Dave who upped the ante with pot and a few drinks at his sister’s house while we waited for the drug to kick in. And kick in it did. When the acid refused to recede from our reality, Dave called his Dad to come get him before he “died”. What ensued was a comedy of sorts, seen through the fog of teenage drama, heightened by LSD: Police were going to be called; one friend’s career in the RCMP was going to be ruined; my mom would find out and I would cease to exist with one glare.

Things sorted themselves out when Dave’s older sister stepped in and told his mom that time will bring Dave down (he had tread a groove in his bedroom carpet walking off the acid) and that everyone should just calm down.

As you’ve probably guessed, Dave was the fearless one in our circle of friends. He would try anything if it meant getting a reaction from anyone.

And fearless he is. He has a wife and two kids and a house in the Beaches and is now sporting a huge CSI/Grisham-style beard because “it pisses everyone off”. Glad we were able to reconnect!

Rogers Steals My Traffic (And Yours Too!)

Dead Robot July 22, 2008 Tech, You Stupid Dick

Looked at my stats since Sunday and wondered what I did to piss off my readers. Then I remembered that was when Rogers started their search page redirects. Before, a lot of people were viewing and/or hitting my site through searches.

Now, as you can see, I’ve dropped by nearly 50%

Rogers Hijacks my views

I wonder if I can get a slice of that lost revenue pie…?

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