There once were five roommates who lived together. They all were each other’s boyfriends and girlfriends, but with a twist. They loved two people, but one of the two people they loved did not love them. Hence, “The Love Pentagram” was formed.
That was until they all blew up! Someone stole 42 dollars from the community jar for grocery shopping and someone didn’t like that, we don’t know who, but they turned on the stove and then lit a match and it went kablooey.
When all the dust settled, the remains of the five roommates were arranged in a pentagram floating above the rubble. The firefighters and police officers were astounded at the floating dead bodies and the weird laser beams pointing connecting to each other.
The firefighters blasted the five floating bodies with water, but nothing happened. The police officers blasted the bodies with bullets, and then tasers, and then rubber band balls, and then doughnuts. Water, metal, electricity, rubber, and even sugar didn’t break the demonic magic that held the five bodies in place.
Four days and three nights passed, as bureaucratic excuses and decisions were given to the cityfolk as to the new disturbance that was causing traffic on all the edges of the city of Bookhaven. This was worse than the time they were fixing the sewers. Everything was backed up then, even toilets!
That was when they called in the heavy artillery. Rhyluf Gufgilo, Civil Engineer Extraordinaire, was called in to alleviate the situation and make everything flow smoothly again as the oddly transfixed demonic Love Pentagram showed no signs of change after four days. Over the next 37 days, a large apparatus was installed underneath the city to rotate the city in such a way that no one would have to drive to get to where they wanted to go! Everyone on the east side of town would get to the western side without very much effort at all! All it took was a button press at one’s behest and they would make the city rotate.
It was only after the apparatus was installed that people realized this did very little to solve the problem. Everyone who wanted to go east now had to go west, and the people who needed to go west had to go east, and the people who had to go north had to go south, and the people who wanted to go south had to go north! It was all very confusing, and it made things even more confusing, like this sentence. Sometimes people who wanted to go west, had to go north! Sometimes people who wanted to go north, had to go north! It’s ridiculous!!!
The Love Pentagram began to change as a result of the constant rotating that had been going on. The Love Pentagram began to constantly rotate back and forth and then began to spin rapidly in an oscillating motion, like a washing machine. The citizens of Bookhaven became concerned and a large group began to gather around as people had begun to abandon their cars and started to walk wherever they needed to go in town.
Without warning, in the middle of the day, 5 days after the rotating apparatus was installed underneath the city, it began to collapse into the center of the Love Pentagram! More than just collapsing, though – it seemed like it was flushing down a toilet into the hole and all of Bookhaven was being sucked into the center of the hole. People were screaming as they tried to run away from the power of the Love Pentagram. No one could escape it when they saw it happening, and no one knew what would happen when they fell into it.
In less than three hours, the city of Bookhaven had been eradicated, leaving only the Love Pentagram left. The Ruins of Bookhaven, as the area is now called, had only a sewer system to show for it and it all lead into the center.
Where did all of Bookhaven go, you may ask? A new subterranean city was established underneath Bookhaven, called Bookhell. All of the trapped citizens of Bookhaven and their buildings, houses, and cars were there, forever.
Just what the hell is scientology? Something that breaks apart marriages, obviously (see above). That’s all I could understand from the Wikipedia article.
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Mormonism? You get your own planet? I don’t know if that’s right…
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In heaven, everyone wears these awesome fire kicks:
More Tyler Perry bashing this week. Wait, someone recorded that Madea bullshit as stage plays and thought it was good enough to make it into a movie? They couldn’t see that it was shitty before they spent money on making it?
This week we become overly insensitive assholes (moreso than usual? Or maybe not at all!) and lambast a girl over the 70+ e-mails that she has sent out in the past 6 months regarding shift covers. It is truly an art form in itself when you have TO GUILT TRIP YOUR WHOLE DEPARTMENT INTO COVERING SHIFTS FOR YOU. Not to mention it is your “second” job which only gives you at most 4 to 8 hours a week!
Summer movies are in full swing, and this time we take a look at Prometheus as well as the upcoming summer schedule of movies. Its a big year for super heroes but not much else to get excited about.
WARNING: THERE ARE SOME PROMETHEUS SPOILERS! You can skip to about a third of the way through and skip all the Prometheus stuff if you care.
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Prometheus is a film that raises more questions than answers, like: “Why would you kill Charlize Theron?” and “Why didn’t we see that scene with Charlize getting it up the butt from the big black dude?”
And there’s also all that hullabaloo about the origins of man and the beginnings of the Xenomorphs, but that’s all secondary.
Inception noise? Meet your match: PROMETHEUS NOISE!
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Adam Sandler is intentionally making shitty movies. Its the only explanation. He just needs to stick with family comedies and dramatic movies, apparently.
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This summer has a list of movies it wants to murder, and its gotten a few of them already:
We have a guest this week! It’s Daniel, the guy that went to the strawberry festival last week. We put him on the grill and insult his decision for going to the strawberry festival along with his weird two-headed friend, Lucy the Two-Headed Goosey.
Get off my computer, Jamie Oliver. You’re not a chemist. You’re just an asshole.
Silly Jaime Oliver, we shouldn’t be throwing away perfectly edible food. We should at least ship it off to Africa!
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McDonalds used to be a value. Now they try to sell you everything in bulk so that there is the same perceived value as what was once known as the Dollar Menu.
The newer Dawn of the Dead introduced running zombies. Is it really that much weirder than the idea of zombies in the first place?
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[Rec] was a “demonic infestation” sort of zombie thing rather than a virus or reanimated corpses due to magic/radiation. By the way, that was a spoiler.
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Want to hire screamers with 13 dB yells or higher to make movies seem more scary than they are. Apply at the offices of William Castle.
This week we watched Chernobyl Diaries, a movie about a bunch of college kids going to Russia to dick around and take Instagrams of ruined buildings and put them in meaningless filters so that they can show off to their friends. They also bring their crazy knife-wielding soccer coach along for the lulz.
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Chernobyl Diaries has an old zombie lady masturbating in a closet in an attic of one of the buildings. Gross!
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Too much Carrie Underwood and Colbie Caillat in Chernobyl Diaries for my taste. It’s almost like a boring wedding video.
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This is the knife that the soccer coach had.
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Why does Will Smith like making sequels to movies 10 years after the fact? It’s not like he was doing anything that important in the mean time between movies. If he’s going to make a shitty movie, he might as well make it while it is still relevant.
Hologram Tupac takes the forefront in Men In Black III, don’t be fooled by the trailers. They’re pulling a Metal Gear Solid 2 on us.
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Ali 2 will be Will Smith walking around with Parkinson’s until he either cures it or dies from it, made in 2018.
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Independence Day 2 or even 3? Welcome to URF again in 10 years!
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Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith shitting on their White House and blowing up alien landmarks. How do you like that, mother fuckers!? Aliens getting shit on all the time!
Street Fighter and The Legend of Chun-Li had it right — only have a story about one character, not 35 million characters at the same time. That’s about the only thing they did right, and the rest of it was so wrong it was right.
George Lucas would probably go back into the Star Wars movies and remove Ewan MacGregor’s beauty marks just so that it is consistent through all of the movies.
Kind of something like this:
Ewan MacGregor After George Lucas Had His Way With Him
Everything is going to be made from the blood of trees now.
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The Middle East is just a big fucking desert, who cares what happens to the environment there. No one freakin lives there anyway. So let’s toss all of our unused plastic bags into it.
Whoa, did we miss another week? Sorry ya’ll, but this week we’ll take a look at The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and how they’re both kind of crappy movies. The reason why we’re even bothering? Because Billy never watched it before last week!
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The Evil Queen should have put Snow White into a sleeper hold and then shot her.
We’re back! Sorry for the no-podcast-last-week thing. Hope you didn’t miss us too much. This week, the summer blockbuster The Avengers is talked about in great detail.
Mark Ruffalo describes Bruce Banner as “a guy struggling with two sides of himself, the dark and the light; everything he does in his life is filtered through issues of control.” He furthermore describes Banner’s alter ego the Hulk as “a loose cannon – he’s the teammate none of them are sure they want, it’s like throwing a grenade into the middle of the group and hoping it turns out well!”
Great analysis of your character, now tell us something we don’t all know. He’s a loose cannon? For chrissakes can’t you think of something more interesting to say?
Warning: This review has spoilers since the game is like 5 years old at this point.
If ever a game has attempted to be Shakespearean in its story delivery, it is Odin Sphere. Odin Sphere is a side-scrolling action beat-em-up game starring five different playable characters. The story and how it is presented is very much the forefront on what is “unique” about this game, but the mechanics involved are also very robust and allows for a challenging experience whether or not you want one.
Without doing much research or knowing much about the game beforehand, if you dive right into it, you’ll probably be a little bit confused. Confused because you start out the game as a little girl in the attic of the house she presumably lives in. You’ll see a book, and then you’ll see a cat named Socrates. Nothing really happens unless you start reading the book at which case you’ll begin the story of Gwendolyn, the daughter of the Demon Lord Odin.
My personal experience with the game began 2 or so years ago. I had played the game quite a bit but never actually beaten Gwendolyn’s storyline, so when I had actually gotten through her book, it was quite intriguing to see the oh-so-dramatic events and the ending for Gwendolyn.
For the first 5 books, you will play characters who are somehow connected to the royalty of the world of Erion. The five different characters go through the events of the story from their points of view, and will occasionally fight or interact with other characters you have controlled or will control later on. Needless to say, the story itself is very non-linear and if you stick with it you will see an interestingly multifaceted story unveil before you. The only thing that detracts from this are the boss battles in which you defeat bosses in different areas or under different circumstances, but still the same fight when all is said and done. It feels kind of weird “killing” or severely debilitating the same dragon repeatedly, considering he had just been defeated or will be defeated again by another one of the characters you play in what seems like a day or two story-wise.
Besides the blatant “replay the same game 5 times” aspect of the game, which you really kind of do, they do toss in different mechanics for each of the characters you play with. The different weapons and characters all have unique and different feels, and it keeps the gameplay more-or-less fresh as you go and play through the story again. As for the mechanics itself, you will mostly be hitting the Square button over and over. Jumping and the direction of the analog stick while you press the Square button affect the type of attacks you do, and it is a pretty standard combo fighting system. There aren’t any huge combos to pull off, but most of the challenge in the game comes in the strategy in which you defeat the enemies that are laid out before you in each section. Almost every character is able to parry attacks and perform knock-backs. Gwendolyn, using a spear, can block and glide around the map. Cornelius, using a sword, can block attacks and do a spinning attack in mid-air. Mercedes, using a bow, can fly, charge her attacks, and use a unique magic spell. Oswald can activate shadow powers and make all of his normal attacks hit around twice as hard and twice as fast for a short period of time. Velvet, using chains, can attack all around her, charge an attack and swing across the map. Using each individual character’s strengths to your advantage is vital to defeating the challenges presented.
Each character has the same repertoire of magic “Psypher” attacks, but they are earned in a different order. The essential purpose of these Psypher magics are to make the game easier for you — you will need to use them to defeat tons of enemies or defeat a boss you just had enough of instead of just spamming your basic attacks. Basic attacks can also only be spammed to a certain point, as they are limited by a POW gauge. The POW gauge will decrease as you use your basic attacks and then you’ll have to run around or stop attacking for a few seconds for the gauge to fill again. If you fully deplete the POW gauge you will stun yourself for a good 4 to 5 seconds waiting for the gauge to fill to 100% again before being able to move. A lot of the strategy you employ during the harder fights in the game rely on a careful balance of your attacks and trying to be conservative in your spams. The game mechanics are fairly engaging and can be quite fun despite its simplistic approach.
What makes the game more of an Action RPG is obviously with its leveling and, to a lesser degree, alchemy system. Your Psypher and your Character each have independent levels. The main way to increase your levels is by the way you use Phozons. Phozons are magical orbs that appear after you defeat an enemy. You can choose to absorb the Phozons into your Psypher weapon or put a seed into the ground and after a certain amount of required Phozons, pick the fruit (or meat) that grows out of the ground. You also have a limited storage menu so you’ll have to constantly be managing it as you play through each section. The food that you can buy or grow in the game can also be used between levels to increase your hit points and gain more experience at a more efficient rate than just eating the food alone. When you are able to access the Pooka Village, you can visit either of the two restaurants and have them cook up something using your food and adding some permanent hit points. Using these restaurants are vital to increasing your characters stats — the natural hit point increases from leveling up are about half the amount you actually want to have by the end of each book… at least on Easy mode.
One of the things Odin Sphere has going for, or against it, is its difficulty. I started playing the game on normal, and ended up dying so many times on shitty trash (non-boss) enemies that I changed the difficulty to Easy. It was more-or-less smooth going from there, but there were still some tricky bosses that made me question whether or not I was still on Easy. The bosses at the end of the game were also quite difficult for an “Easy” setting, which makes me wonder how hard the Normal and Hard settings actually would be. It really made me question what kind of enjoyment people get out of dying over and over on games like this… it really isn’t that much fun to keep dying, but to each their own, I suppose.
The visuals are definitely one of the other unique aspects of this game. Vanillaware is known for their awesome-looking 2D hand-drawn visuals that stray from what you normally see in gaming today. They also like to draw chicks with huge boobs and sexy legs and little to nothing to cover it all. Girls with less-emphasized features also exist in the game, so it’s not that “one-sided” as far as it goes. Suffice to say, all of the chicks — even the queen of death — are all banging and who wouldn’t want to see these chicks getting ass-rammed with their boobs flopping around? There’s a lot of provocative fan-service animations and poses the female characters in the game do, as well.
The art style is also interesting because you will see giant men who have toothpick legs. Not all of the men in the game are that disproportionate, and there are a couple of different mythological races in the game such as Dwarves and Fairies. Most of the game is influenced by Norse mythology and mixes in with normal fantasy, and the art style definitely goes with what is going on, as it is essentially a “storybook” being read by the little girl in the attic every time you start up the game.
The point of the game probably won’t culminate into much of a cohesion until the end of the game, which all of the events that transpire in each individual character’s book leads to. The last phase of the game is a series of five difficult boss battles, and provided you leveled each of the characters appropriately and they have enough items to assist them in the final battle, you will choose one character to fight each boss up to the game’s ending.
The game begins to split its path when you choose the correct or “incorrect” character for a particular end boss. Each boss is to be paired against one of the characters you have played as “the prophecies state” that you collect while playing the preamble. There is a satisfying ending as long as you choose the correct characters, but there’s not a whole lot that is “plainly explained” in the context of the story. The purpose of the girl, which I believe her name is Alice, at the beginning is more-or-less justified, giving the story, which you thought as a “child’s story” to be something more of a sad, dark history of the world she lives in. When Cornelius and a Pooka-cursed Velvet appear in the attic she has been reading her books in, it affirms that the books her “grandpa loved to read so much” actually were real after all. The set of five books, including the Armageddon and Wheel of Fate books combined ends up being the “Odin Sphere” book written by an unnamed, unknown character whom we can only assume the identity of. It can be also be inferred that the writer is “you” since you were there at all of the events that had transpired.
I sort of wish that they would have added a little bit more of an explanation on certain things that were left open to interpretation in the game. The question behind who wrote the Odin Sphere book series is probably the biggest question, and how Cornelius and Velvet affect the world after they turn back into humans, and where the people of Valentine originally came from, and what the actual origin of the mechanically alien-like Cauldron is. The total rounding up of all the loose ends wouldn’t have taken much effort, considering they were more-or-less extraneous aspects of the story that were still interesting.
I spent a good 40 hours or so on this game, and I probably would have liked to spend about 10 hours less than I did, having to beat the same bosses over and over, in what seems like a forced fashion. They could have, and should have trimmed any of the “forced” boss encounters, especially considering you don’t even get any experience from those battles anyway. Once you complete a book, it’s nice being able to replay the story from the beginning, but all of the locations you opened up through your first time through should have been open as well so that people trying to grind up levels a little bit for the Armageddon didn’t have to go through the same stuff again.
The inventory UI, while having an interesting take, was probably the most frustrating thing about the normal gameplay. I wished so many times that I could open the bag view and use all my items there rather than having to use it through the swirly-circle-single-bag-at-a-time interface. I would lose items many times and just go through each of my bags not remembering or not knowing or not seeing where something went. Once all of the books opened up and I was grinding levels for the Armageddon, there is no way to change books without resetting the game entirely — that seemed like an oversight on the part of the design team.
Odin Sphere can be a real challenge to get through and see it through, but I feel like it’s worth it, since what the game set out to do is probably not going to be done again. I loved the art, I loved the way the story was told, and the game play was a good stylistic compliment.
One day there was a polar bear. He had issues. He had a sister who always overreacted about everything ever that ever happened. His mom wasn’t that much better. Unfortunately for this polar bear, he became nicknamed the Bipolar Bear due to his inherent illnesses contracted by the social oppression created by his familial situation.
When the Bipolar Bear was old enough to move out of his house, he moved to sunny California. He had to get a roommate because he didn’t have enough money for his own room, so he had to post a lot of advertisements on telephone poles and traffic signs. A couple of his signs actually caused some accidents because they flew away after the tape had eroded and flew into the open-windowed cars, causing paper cuts of a severe nature that killed almost instantly. It was a windy day.
It was the worst of times. It was the best of times. The Water Skiing Buffalo was doing so many chicks he couldn’t count them. He was soooo cool. That was until the economy fell and he couldn’t pay for his buffahoes anymore. His full-time job of being the only water skiing buffalo, hence his name, became commoditized with a sudden influx of foreign sea gulls learning how to drive boats, allowing for multitudes of different animals who have no business being on the water, on the water, resulting in a rapid loss of money. Broken, shamed, and nowhere else to go, the Water Skiing Buffalo headed to California because that’s where everyone goes when they want to feel like they’re better than they are. He thought if he could get on a couple of movie sets and show them what he’s got, they’d hire him to do some water skiing in front of a camera, since he was pretty good looking.
Anyway, to make a long, boring interlude short, the Water Skiing Buffalo and the Bipolar Bear somehow ended up living together. They became sorta good friends, but they don’t really hang out a lot. Only like three days out of the week do they even see each other, and they live together! That’s crazy! Right?!?! I don’t even KNOW what they’re doing!
So, one day, as the Water Skiing Buffalo and the Bipolar Bear hiked down Sunset Avenue, they met a lady with a booming voice who was talking about a lot of religious malarkey. She was shouting about how she repented and used to be a sinner and used to be the enemy of God. How this witch of a lady could go around and just yell random nonsense without anyone telling her to shut up because of her uncanny ability to make her voice travel through the dimensions of space, time, and jelly, was beyond them.
The Enemy of God, who really was a witch, had a sick obsession with jelly, and to a higher exponential form, preserves. She saw the water buffalo and the polar bear and conceived a diabolical plot to acquire all of their jelly! The two roommates just moved in like three months ago and they don’t usually eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so they had like two jars of unopened jelly just waiting to have the life sucked out of them by The Enemy of God.
The Enemy of God called her rich friend President Hagen. He was in charge of a local college and was going to be ousted soon due to an impeachment process. He was being impeached because he ordered 600 computers and drove them to Alaska. He wasn’t even USING them for the school! He was going to build a large server house and sell Canadian money to Americans over the Internet, and make a 50% profit. Depending on when you read this story, it might make sense or it might not make sense. This story was written future-proof, just in case American money becomes more expensive than Canadian money again.
President Hagen picked up the phone and he was in the Jacuzzi. He was throwing darts at the staff members who reported him to his bosses. He kept like a bushel of these pictures in random places so that he can always do something lewd toward them, like wipe his arm pit sweat, waft his fart, or blow his burp at them. Once he bought a Thank You card, and wrote a derogatory word that did not actually describe said person after “Thank You” inside the card. Needless to say, he did not put a return address on there. This man was as rude as they came. How he greased the palms of everyone during his road to the presidency is an undocumented and probably illegal ordeal, on account of him being a grade A number 1 doodoo rag.
President Hagen, holed up in his Alaskan server complex had his 600 Computers working in tandem to serve his needs and his online business. He had one computer just to control his Jacuzzi, that’s how many computers he had. He got a call over the popular internet voice calling program TalkToMyFaceCauseTheHandsAin’tTypin or THAT for short from his friend, The Enemy of God. The Enemy of God yelled through her phone and conveyed to President Hagen her plans. Not that it mattered too much since he wasn’t even listening and was playing minesweeper on his computer.
After he hung up with The Enemy of God, President Hagen got out of the Jacuzzi and put a towel on. He walked into his quarter million dollar bathroom with heated AND cooling toilet seats (also managed by a computer) and began typing on a pull out computer while he was doing his doo-dy on the toilet. His secondary server complex located in Nevada, the aptly named Hagen Dessert Server Complex (the Alaskan one was named the Hagen Iced Latte Server Complex) was running a little hot, and he adjusted the air conditioner.
“No melting ice cream, today, Nevada…” The President said in between farts.
The President finished up, and wiped his ass with a picture of Juniper Rodriguez, a senior staff member at Hoodywoody College.
“You like the taste of that, Juniper?”
The President got up and put his towel back on. He then grabbed a picture of Daniel Torres, another senior staff member, lit it on fire and dropped it in the toilet.
“BURN, DANIEL, BURN!!”
An hour or two later, President Hagen was passed out on his couch and snoring very loudly. Oliver 6800, the boy robot slave President Hagen constructed from the innards of five computers, trembled in front of his master, as he wanted to ask him for more hard drive space.
“Please, sir, may I have some more?” Oliver 6800 chirped.
President Hagen awoke and yelled, “MOOOOOORREEEEEEEEE??????”
President Hagen then beat Oliver 6800… at Hearts.
The next day…
“Have you seen my mommy??” Oliver 6800 asked President Hagen.
“Mommy????????????????????????” President Hagen threw his hands into the air.
President Hagen then beat Oliver 6800… at Monopoly. It was a five hour ordeal and pretty gruesome.
Then child services came and acquired Oliver 6800 from President Hagen because he was abusing his robotic child.
Back to the Enemy of God, she was arrested later that evening for knowingly aiding a child abuser, even though the child abuser himself would not be charged and would be allowed to continue in his weird abuse of technology for some time to come. She was also arrested for stealing a pallet of jelly from a grocery store that kept tens of thousands of dollars of jelly in their store room.
As for the oddly paired Bipolar Bear and Water Skiing Buffalo, they lived together for 7 years, decided it was in their best interests to apply for Common Law Marriage for the tax breaks and then cheated the system out of food stamps for years to come. Those stamps sure did taste good, the glue was flavored!
