The Adventures of Ecco the Dolphin

Alex Kidd: In The Enchanted Castle

This game has to be a joke. There’s no way anything could be this ludicrous without design. Before you even start the game, you’ll probably get to see this… Could they possibly make the character look like any more of a dork? Maybe, if they gave him buckteeth with an overbite. I’m also having a hard time believing he has a regular humanoid ear back there if we can see that much of it.

The first thing you’ll notice about this game, (even before the bad controls) is that if you get hit once you’re dead. Not only that, but everything kills you. Even things that shouldn’t kill you kill you. Even things incapable of harming you in your wildest imagination kill you. This is paradoxical because on the other hand, Alex can punch the shit out of bricks, pottery, and even trees with his bare hands. And he can completely destroy a full-sized sedan with a single kick. But if he touches a toy airplane he‘s dead meat.

Here’s a selection of the more outlandish enemies. However, I’ll try to rationalize as many of them as possible. Technically none of these enemies even attack you. They just walk around waiting for you to touch them and die.

Prairie Dog: Well obviously these are rabid mutant prairie dogs with a thirst for blood. Clearly they aren’t normal if half of one is as tall as you are.

Porcupine: Porcupines walk up to you on their hind legs and lay down with their spines sticking up, basically hoping you’ll jump on top of them and kill yourself. They seriously won’t move from that spot until you jump over them. Apparently they have nothing else on their plate today other than doing this.

Vulture: Why would you die from touching a vulture? Everyone knows they’re cowardly scavengers. And they’re scavengers because they’re incapable of hunting.

Toy Airplane: O.K. This is a product designed for children to play with but for whatever reason you aren’t intelligent enough to not slit your throat with it… or something.

Toy Soldier: They’re small and move slow as hell but periodically stop, thereby tripping you and causing you to impale your spleen on them.

Tiny Fire: It’s a fire about the size of a light bulb that’s so charismatic that you can’t help but pick it up and burn yourself with it until you have 3rd degree burns over 80% of your body.

Turtles: This is possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. When you’re swimming in the third level, sometimes turtles will just spontaneously hurl themselves spinning up at you from the bottom of the screen. Sometimes they launch clear out of the water. But that’s not even the half of it… Above the water surface are a bunch of turtles spinning around and flying, putting on an acrobatic display that makes Cirque du Soleil look like physical therapy on ice. There’s absolutely no reason or explanation for this phenomenon. Were they even thinking at all when they made this? Any three-year-old can tell you that turtles are slow and coincidentally would be the last creatures on this planet capable of flying. What the hell is they’re excuse for it?

Bee: Maybe he’s allergic.

Dung Beetle: It force-feeds you a ball of crap, making you catch hepatitis C.

Mouse: It’s carrying bubonic plague.

Old Man w/ staff: Let my people go!

Rock: Angry rock is angry.

The controls in the game suck. You can punch on command but kicking sort of just happens as you descend after a jump. Usually if you land on an enemy while kicking you can kill it but sometimes you don’t kick in time and end up dying. So basically you have to somehow coincide your randomly uncontrollable body movements with the moment of impact. Also you slide around everywhere like you’re walking on ice. Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t the character just stop moving when I stop pressing the control pad? Doesn’t that make sense? In reality I don’t wear Vasoline on the bottoms of my shoes. I don’t have to start walking backwards to keep from sliding past where I want to stop.

Within the levels there are “stores” you can walk into where there’s only ever one item for sale at a time. Instead of just handing money to the blue shirtless cueball store clerk to purchase the item, he makes you *bet* the money and then play him at rock, paper, scissors. If you lose the game, you lose the bet money and you don’t get the item, and you get a weight dropped on your head. If you win, you still lose the money, but you get the item and the store owner gets a weight dropped on *his* head. Now does that make any sense to you? Imagine if you went into Best Buy to get a laptop. As you check out, you pay full price for the laptop and then get challenged by an employee to rock, paper, scissors. You lose, the store keeps your money and the laptop. Does that sound like a good business model? Would you ever shop at Best Buy again? No you wouldn‘t. It’s a completely idiotic idea. And what's with the weight? Is it not bad enough that he already stole my fucking money?

The items you get from the store typically aren’t worth a damn. You can get several different things that “help” you and you can hold more than one of each. There are a few vehicles that you can ride like a self-powered helicopter that disappears for no reason when you touch something, and a motorcycle that also disappears for no reason when you touch something. On any given level that gives you roughly three seconds of ride time. What the hell’s the fricking point?!

There are a few bosses in the game. You don’t really fight them though, you have to beat them at rock, paper, scissors (go figure.) Well that sort of makes sense when you first hear it since your character is a worthless pile of chicken shit, incapable of touching everyday objects without expiring. Well that begs the question, how has he even survived for this long? Anyway, at the end of some levels there are bosses. You have to beat them at RPS or you die and have to do the level again. And then the shocking realization hit’s that beating the game is dependant to a large extent on chance. You could play the game perfectly and still lose because of a random number generator. When you lose to a boss they say something like “I can not be beat” or “you need more practice.” You need more practice?! It’s rock, paper, scissors for God’s sake! You can’t practice it any more than you can practice only hearing your favorite songs on the radio. This game scoffs at your childish notions of logic and sensibility.

The last level of the game is of course the Enchanted Castle. Actually it’s not so much enchanted as it is long and annoying. It’s like 20 times longer than any of the previous levels. It takes forever and gets boring really fast, especially with the droning music. Once you beat the boss at the end you find out that nothing was wrong in the first place and you just risked your life for absolutely no reason. Isn’t that special?

Constellations

Ever since I was little I’ve thought constellations were stupid. Yes it’s an interesting passtime, finding shapes in things like clouds and stars but only if it actually looks like something in the first place. Trying to put stuff in the sky that isn’t there is retarded. Very rarely do the constellations look anything like what they are labeled as. Why were those stars chosen to make them? And why that configuration? It just looks like some random assemblage of dots. You could pick any other star cluster in any corner of the sky for any constellation and get something just as good if not better. You can’t tell what anything is without an illustration overlay. But then that just makes you notice how terrible the constellation is when you see everything that’s missing from it. I don’t know who invented them or how but I’m pretty sure it went something like this:

Ancient Astronomer 1: Have you finished designating the constellations yet?

Ancient Astronomer 2: No, I still have to find Hercules, Orion, the entire zodiac, and some bears. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. I can’t find anything that looks like Hercules.

Ancient Astronomer 1: Wait, you’re trying to find stars that actually look like the names on the list? That’ll take forever! We need those constellations in by Monday.

Ancient Astronomer 2: Well I just thought…

Ancient Astronomer 1: You’re not getting paid to think. Just close you’re eyes, spin around and point. Think of it as assigning characters to parking lots at Disneyland.

This is Pisces, the fish constellation (and my sign.) Have you ever seen a fish this long that was bent at a 30 degree angle? Actually I guess it’s supposed to be two fish jumping out of the water. At lest you can see the path of the fish.

Here’s Cancer the crab. How anyone saw a crab in two intersecting lines is beyond me. Every time I write the letter Y I’ll think about crabs from now on.

This it Gemini, the twins. OK, this one’s acceptable. They both have heads and all of their limbs are there. And I like how it looks like the one on the left is helping his brother who apparently has a broken ankle.

This one is supposed to be Taurus the bull. I was always able to spot the V for the horns and just assumed the whole constellation was only a head. Now that I see it in it’s entirety, It looks more like Freakazoid running with his arms stretched out.

Here’s Leo the lion, (AKA a question mark grafted on to a triangle.)

I’m sure you’re already familiar with Ursa Major, (or the Big Dipper.) It’s supposed to be a bear but I can’t even tell which direction it’s going let alone that it‘s a bear. Since when do bears have spindly stilts for legs? And why only three of them? Or is that the fourth one sticking out of it’s ass? Or is that it’s head? Maybe that’s it’s tail and the pointy end is the head. But if that’s true why is the tail so damn long? Actually this looks more like a stilt strider from Morrowind or one of those big six-legged monsters from The Mist.

It’s a crown, whoop-dee-do.


Sagittarius: Wow! Doesn’t this look just like a centaur drawing his bow?! It’s so life-like it’s almost photo-realistic!

Magnolia

I watched Magnolia because it’s supposedly a good movie but it turned out to be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s convoluted. It’s annoying. It’s a waste of time. In fact it took me three days to watch it because it was so disengaging. The opening sequence with the three urban legends is interesting but it takes too long and doesn’t really do much for the plot… not that there is one. After that, it’s character introductions. Lots and lots of character introductions with fragmented back stories all in different scenarios and times shown in rapid sequence. This was the first time I stopped watching the movie. It was going for so long that I was starting to think that the whole thing was going to be like this, and I decided that I didn’t have patience for that shit. When multiple characters doing separate things are depicted in a movie you can always fall back on the formula that says everything will unify into one story eventually. The problem with this movie is that it never actually does this. It sort of does, on and off. But ultimately it’s just alternating between five or six stories the whole time. Why do they have to do this? It’s just exhausting and upsetting to have to keep up with that many developing stories mixed together. It’s like some kind of endurance test. It’s such a twisted knot of circumstances that you immediately stop caring about anything happening. I’d have a more satisfying experience turning on five random movies I’ve never seen before and watching them all simultaneously.

The whole point of the movie is that all of these people either know each other or incidentally have tangent meetings before continuing onward, creating an ever-expanding circuitous network of bullshit. And what does it all accomplish in the end? Absolutely nothing. They might as well all have nothing in common. They spend the entire movie drifting around and then nothing is gained by it. There’s no payoff. What it should have been leading up to is some kind of chain-reaction or series of events spawning a catastrophe that only occurred because each of the people somehow contributed a small part to it. I could see a good short film based on that but this movie is three hours long. Three excruciating hours of nothing.

What really makes this movie bad is the characters. Every single person in it is either a humongous asshole or a whiny dumbass that won’t shut the hell up. Every last one of them is ready to fly off the handle and throw an epic tantrum of biblical proportions at even the slightest inkling of opposition. Hell, Julianne Moore’s character is ready to curse you blind for making eye contact with her. My point is that they’re all terrible people with no redeeming qualities. Now one of the most important elements in any movie is to have a character that the viewer can latch on to, to experience the story through. While watching this movie I kept thinking, *if a nuclear bomb went off and the entire town was leveled would there be a single person I would feel remotely sad for.* The answer was always no. *None* of these people fit the bill. If the town *was* nuked, the world would just be a better place.

Then, for whatever reason, frogs fall from the sky on top of cars and buildings and all over the town. (Yes I know it’s an urban legend.) This is actually a pretty cool scene; too bad it’s too little, too late. The movie still sucks. My recommendation for watching it is skip to the frog part and turn it off when it‘s over. For those of you who’d like to experience Magnolia without having to see Tom Cruise, do this; clone the most despicable, irritating, loathsome person you’ve ever met 10 times. Now lock yourself in a white room with the clones for three hours. And that’s Magnolia.

More Banner Ads

Because there is no limit to their numbers or how retarded they can get.

Blue sky.

Damn, this is like the worst graphic design I’ve ever seen on a crappy ad. Would it have killed them to put in just a simple background. The pictures also look like they were screen captured off of some camwhore’s live feed.

Wow that’s weird, some IM service I’ve never heard of has somehow sent me messages, (over a public medium), from some of my “buddies” that are apparently on it. What the hell is a “crush request?” A crush isn’t something you can request to have. It’s something that happens without your control, whether you like it or not. Even if someone has a crush on me it’s a moot point. I’m engaged.

God forbid someone gets scared. This seems like such a childish gimmick (pun not intended.) And at the bottom it says “subscription required” implying that you have to do tedious paperwork before you can be scared. If I want a cheap thrill I’ll look inside the soup pot in the cafeteria. Still, I have to be sure. So what really happens if you click on it. Well you get this…

What the hell is this now? I wanted to be scared, not have my palm read. Are they just hoping you’ll forget about the scary thing and get distracted by *this.* Still, I have to give them credit. Someone obviously spent a lot of time on this. Compositionally it’s boring though. They made it so damn symmetrical that it has the same writing on both sides of the picture. Giesel huh? Why does that remind me of The Sound of Music? Oh yeah Liesl… I mean I never watched that. Gisele can predict UR destiny? What is “UR?” Is it an acronym for something or is it the shortened form of “your” capitalized for no apparent reason? And how am I to believe that she can predict anything if she can’t even tell my gender?

She solves problems… *Sexual* problems. If you heard this in your head the same way I do, there would be no way you could read it without laughing.


THIS IS NOT A JOKE - YOU ARE THE 10,000TH BANNER AD TO TELL ME THIS!


Congratulations won a free prize eh? Good for him. Why is the A the only thing not capitalized in that sentence? That kind of bothers me. Also, if I was making a banner ad I wouldn’t use numbers for words like “Click 2 claim.” Using loose semantics like that just lessens it’s believability. Though I guess it doesn’t really matter because morons are their target audience anyway.

This ad doesn’t make any sense. Who’s to say which dinosaurs are good and bad. They’re all so cute. Why can’t they *all* be excellent?

I love it when they put fake buttons and drop-down lists on banners when in reality the whole ad is a single button. I’ve never heard of this dating service. I know they mean mate as in find a mate but I seriously can’t stop thinking about mate the verb.


Click release… what?! I don’t want to release my winnings. Are there no English-speaking people that make these ads? It’s not like it’s rocket science. All you need is one coherent sentence and no one seems to be able to do it right.

Well this is certainly creative. Three totally unrelated things making a banner. Only on the internet can one win such lavish prizes by performing the most menial of tasks. Why does this never happen to me when I walk into stores or look through the newspaper? You have to draw on the mug shot but drawing is the same as clicking so what’s the point? Obviously I had to click on something to even view the ad. What’s so special about drawing? And why on O. J. Simpson? There’s an asterisk next to the word “free” indicating a footnote that says “See terms and gift rules.” So I’m guessing that when they use the “term” “free” it doesn’t actually mean free in the way everyone uses the word. But then what the hell *does* it mean? Maybe the Xbox is *free* of internal hardware. Or it was *free* from restraint inside the delivery truck, causing it to become crushed and *free* from functioning. Also, according to the measurement scale in the background, OJ’s head is about one-and-a-half feet tall. Proportionally that makes him roughly 12 feet tall.

You succeed to make for happy fun time prize! Please use click to magic claim button!!!

People You Can't Stand

Are there people in your life that you’re forced to interact with that can’t seem to say anything to you that doesn’t constitute bitching about something you do? Well I have two of them and unfortunately I have to see at least one of them almost every day. One is this guy that works at the cafeteria where I eat. He’s relatively new there so that might be the only reason he is the way he is. He’s been bothering me about not signing in every time I get something from the cafeteria. The way the food system at the school works is that you purchase a meal plan at the beginning of the semester that has X number of meals you get per week. I think I have 19 or something per week. Anyway, you’re supposed to go up to the counter in front of the grill and give the person there your name which they check off on a computer. It’s basically to make sure they know when they can charge you money for exceeding your meal plan which has never happened and will never happen to me. After that, you can order something from the grill or get something lying out on the opposite wall like pizza or salad bar. That’s the way you’re “supposed” to do it. The way it’s actually done, (over the two years I’ve been there), is you go order/get what you want and eat it. The person at the computer either sees you or doesn’t see you doing this and signs you in… or not. Its not Arma-fucking-geddon if you aren’t signed in. Since there’s food that’s already out why not just get it and eat it instead of walking past it to go wait in a line just to say your name and then go back to get a slice of pizza or a drink? That just waste’s *everyone’s* time. I always saw it as a method of regulating gridlock at the grill.

So he came up to me on several occasions while I was eating and told me I needed to sign in. He knows my damn name. In the time it took him to accost me he could have signed me in himself like everyone else does. It takes more time and energy to leave the kitchen, harass me, and return then it does to press two buttons on a touch screen monitor. So what… he wants me to go with him back to where he was just standing and watching me from to get signed in? If he knows my name and he knows I’m eating, what more information does he need? He doesn’t need me to wait in line at the grill and *prompt* him to sign me in so that I can go get a cup of juice.

I actually failed to sign in so many times, (3-4), that he wrote me up for it. I don’t know what that means for me but for him I’m pretty sure it means he’s anal-retentive. He’s the only one that gives a shit about what I do in the cafeteria and if he wants to fill out papers to uphold his subscribed bureaucratic protocol then that’s his prerogative. I just don’t know why anyone would expend so much time and energy to be a pain in the ass ultimately. Recently he’s been bothering me about how much salad I put on my plate and I can’t decide if it’s more or equally as trivial.

The other guy that won’t stop harassing me works in the IDS shop. Huh, both of them stand behind counters; weird. Well it’s not like there’s a specific thing he gets on me about, it’s anything and everything. It’s something new every time. Actually it’s often about cleaning something. Any time he’s in the room I feel like I need to stop whatever I’m doing or else I’ll be provoking him in some unknown way. Most of the stuff he says is small but he hounds you about things so constantly that it wares down your resistance and after a certain point everything he says just seems to set you off. Clean these tools off. Put a clamp on that. You’re going to clean this up right? Don’t use that. Why aren’t you cleaning? Turn on the dust collector. It’s nice that they have a sign on the band saw and a shop-tec to yell at you to turn on the dust collector but that still doesn’t tell me how to turn it on. Assuming you know what a dust collector is, the switch is still behind another machine. I saw a guy using a chop saw and he yelled at him to turn on the dust collector. Of course he had to ask where the switch was because it’s not at all apparent. He told him and then he asked “which one, there’s like four.” After all of the oblivious students they’ve had asking about the switch you’d think they’d make it a little less ambiguous. Or maybe it’s just too much fun haranguing them about it.

Another time he pontificated on this girl and I about not doing our part in clean-up time. At random intervals during the day a shop-tec gets on a megaphone and informs everyone in the shop that it’s time to clean up. If you’re unlucky enough to drift in during clean-up time, you get unjustly burdened with it like we did. We never heard the announcement but that doesn’t make us immune to being scolded for not doing what it said.

Yet another time, (after I had switched from using one lathe to the one next to it because the speed controls wouldn't stay where I put them); he came up and asked if I was going to clean up the other lathe. Would it be OK if I finished making the mess before I start cleaning it up? Son of a bitch! Just leave me alone. I hadn't even done anything wrong yet.

The time he pissed me off the most was when I lost the needle to my paint gun inside the gun washer. I usually take my gun apart and put it in the washer and it’s fine. There is a mesh metal sheet at the bottom of the washer to let thinner drain through and keep your gun from falling down. There are a few holes that are larger than the rest on the mesh and can allow the passage of a loose needle. On this occasion was when it happened. My first thought was to just remove the mesh and fish out the needle. The mesh isn’t secured in place at all. It’s just sitting on some pegs. Then I thought I should get a shop-tec to get it out because I don’t want to mess around with the washer. I should have just ignored that thought. When I went up to the counter the only tec there was… that guy. Oh goodie. I can’t wait to hear this one. I reluctantly went up and explained to him that I lost a gun part in the washer. As soon as I mentioned that my gun was disassembled while in the washer, it seemed to activate his big fat lecture mouth. He starts *complaining* (he never actually sounds like he's just requesting or advising), about how you're not supposed to put a disassembled gun in the washer. That's just stupid in my opinion. The inside, (AKA the important part of the gun), will not get cleaned at all unless it's disassembled and cleaning the outside of the gun is unnecessary. If I don't put the gun in the washer while it's disassembled there's no point in putting it in the washer at all. Anyway, he starts acting skeptical that he can get the needle back. He opened a panel on the side of the washer and confirmed his own suspicions by briefly glancing at the internals of the machine. Then He basically said that he couldn't get it out and to go ask so-and-so if they could do anything about it. I knew I should have just gone with my first instinct and done it myself or at least left *him* out of it. I waited for him to leave, removed the mesh in the washer and retrieved the needle. After reassembling my gun, I walked out of the room and passed the shop counter where he was. He asked if so-and-so got it out. I lied and said he did. Then he gives me this look and says, (emphasizing the word don't), "don't do it again." If there was ever a conversation in my life that required a crass rebuttal, that was probably it. A nice *go fuck yourself* or a *shove it up your ass* would have been most efficacious. I know it's never a good idea to have verbal altercations with someone I'm going to have to interact with several times from now until I graduate so I just walked away. I just wish I could have let him know that I managed to do the task that he couldn't, in less than 30 seconds.

Movie Soundtrash

In hell, this is all you get to listen to.