VIDEOCRAB: March 2006

Videocrabs

Cheesy audio aside, this really is an amazing video. Two words: CRAB INVASION. (embedded WMV; direct link to video file)

Oh! I feel it!

You can never have too many homemade katamaris.

There's a theory going around that Michael Jackson actually composed a few songs for Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and this YouTube video compiles the evidence. It's not at all conclusive, but it is intriguing, especially if you can recognize chord progressions, or (like me) you are somehow quite familiar with the music of both Sonic 3 and early-'90s Michael Jackson.

Al Gore: Human After All

This is an interesting no-frills 13-minute documentary, shot by Spike Jonze, depicting Al Gore just before the 2000 presidential election. Highly recommended, especially for those of you who didn't vote in 2000 because you were unsure on where the candidates stood on the issue of pausing videos when somebody goes to the bathroom. (Google video)

In conclusion, SPORE!

Here's a pretty good article by Will Wright about the creative side of games; near the end it morphs into the sort of pie-in-the-sky future game prediction that only people like Will Wright seem to really believe, and it seems to relate a bit too perfectly to the specific game he's currently developing... nonetheless, I applaud the sentiment.

LOL The Hedgehog

There are some things I cannot look at without giggling uncontrollably. This is one of those things.

Snooze Grenade

I have a really hard time getting out of bed. This isn't helped by the fact that my cell phone, which I've been using for an alarm clock ever since I got it, has recently decided that sometimes the "Snooze" button is the "Forget To Go Off Again, But Still Say 'Snoozing' When I Get Turned Back On Manually" button. So how much do I appreciate this list of annoying alarm clocks? Very, very much.

Spyro Slaughter 2

One rule about articles about video games in mainstream news sources is that they always get at least one thing wrong. USA Today, reporting a treatment for ADHD that involves video games, went to print with this:

"Whether speeding down a virtual street in Sony's Gran Turismo or
slaying Spyro the Dragon..."

Hm, what's wrong with that?*

(Spotted by my eagle-eyed defender of video game justice friend Ely)

*What's wrong with it, in case you don't know, is that Spyro the Dragon is the cutesy, childlike playable star character in the Spyro series of games. And although I have lost track of the series over the years I am fairly sure that there is no game in which you slay him. It may seem nitpicky, but this lack of even basic research in reports about video games happens consistently in major media outlets. When filing stories about how "gee whiz, these crazy computertron games take in more money than the movies" (a dubious claim to begin with) they don't bother to give the games the same respect. Imagine an article referencing "Stephen Speelburg's 'Killing Private Ryan'" and you'll see what I'm getting at here. This lets people like Jack Thompson get away with convincing America that Grand Theft Auto is a game about killing hookers to get "points," which features a graphic sex minigame as part of its normal gameplay. Very often the authors of the article don't even do the most basic of Googling, and report on nonexistant games like Mortal Combat, Shadow Heart and Gunslinger Girls 2.

Furry Lobster Buddy

Man, I love the Internet. Scientists announce their discovery of a new species of furry lobster, and somebody creates a cuddly plush version of it before Popular Science magazine even gets the first press release.

"MULTIBALL!"

I respect a person who can build their own custom pinball machine. I respect them even more if they build it with a Futurama theme!

Smoke & Mirrors

You may or may not have heard by now about the unreleased Penn & Teller game for the Sega CD. A copy of it made its way around the Internet recently, and bloggers everywhere had a fun time describing the game's "Desert Bus" mode. (Basically: as a reaction to Janet Reno's crusade against violent video games, Desert Bus was a completely nonviolent game, simulating the unbearably dull drive from Phoenix to Las Vegas in realtime, in a virtual bus that can't go faster than 45 MPH. After eight hours, when you make it to Vegas, you get one point.) But I think it's worth noting that the game's main adventure game mode, which I've spent way too much time playing, was completely insane and made no sense. I have a high tolerance for pointless adventure games, but this is when I stopped playing: when I got a slot machine token from a wood chipper after accidentally dropping a brown rabbit into it. The wood chipper was activated when I threw a deck of cards at it, and the brown rabbit I got from a street magician. He was pulling white rabbits out of a hat, trying to get rid of all my cockroaches, and every once in a while he'd throw out a brown rabbit, which I figured out I could pick up when I was pushing buttons trying to pull my own arm off. Like I said: makes no sense!

"Waltopia"

You may or may not know that the EPCOT area of Walt Disney World in Florida is just a mere sliver of Walt Disney's grand original concept for a working, planned model "prototype" community. This is a 24-minute Quicktime video of a presentation of the original EPCOT plans. It's fascinating, and it also happens to be the last thing Walt Disney recorded before his death. I have my doubts as to how the original idea would have actually worked out in reality, but as a person who's still bummed out about how non-futuristic this future we're in actually is, I have to respect the guts and imagination it took to even plan such a thing. If I can't have my flying car or meal-in-a-pill, I at least want to go to work in a PeopleMover.