Thursday, January 22, 2009

My Christmas Haul 2008

I'm almost done talking about last year, but before that I figured I'd focus on a particularly awesome part of 2008: Christmas!

Pretty much every present I got this year had the theme of "Man Daniel you are a freaking nerd, here is a present reflecting that." I didn't get any practical gifts or old socks or anything! This is pretty great. So I figured I'd make a post detailing the gifts I got at the end of last year, and why they all rule. You also get to see actual pictures of them because I'm a showoff like that.

Magical gifty goodness after the jump!

*jump*

Freakazoid Season 1


Now not many people know this, but Freakazoid is one of the best cartoons ever. This has been proven by SCIENCE, and also by having storylines involving Freakazoid drawing a face on his right hand, then drawing a girl face on his left hand, and having them make out. In most cartoons this would be a ten second gag. In Freakazoid it happens for five minutes. I think that's actually one of the show's extraordinary abilities. It has the talent of dragging out a joke until it's no longer funny, and then for some reason dragging it out longer than that, and suddenly this dumb joke is elaborated on for SO UNFATHOMABLY LONG that suddenly it is HILARIOUS again. This unorthodox formula has made me curl up into the fetal position from laughing so hard that it hurt to breathe, more than once.

And that one type of gag is not all there is to it. It's just crazy silly and random and very funny things happen on a regular basis. It's weird, cause initially it was going to be a straight up superhero action comic headed by Bruce Timm, the guy responsible for the oldschool Batman animated series. But apparently after the hero was designed, Steven Spielberg was like "Hey make this funny!" and the designers were like "Okay" and Bruce Timm was like "WHAT" and then it became a completely different show. I think this was a great decision because the old idea would have been pretty generic and unmemorable, the show that actually happened is one of the most unique and entertaining things I've seen pretty much ever.

Whenever you watch it and go "What the FUCK is happening", and this WILL happen at least once per episode, the show has succeeded in its goal. Freakazoid is basically trying to make your brain cry in confusion, and it frequently succeeds, and that is why I love this show so much. My buddy Max got me this for Christmas and it was an excellent gift. Thanks, buddy!

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog


Dr. Horrible is sort of like TV Geek porn. It's a musical about superheroes made by Joss Motherfucking Firefly Whedon, and starring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. See if you haven't already creamed your pants reading that then what are you doing on my website, I don't want to talk to you anymore, go away. Haha, I'm kidding! No, seriously! Wait! I'm sorry! Come baaack!

Those of you in the know might be going "What, Daniel, you can watch this for free on the internet. In this case you can actually LEGALLY watch this for free on the internet, what do you need a DVD for", and for one thing, my computer is terrible. It is seriously pretty awful for any purpose besides basic internet browsing purposes. It can barely stream video half the time, which is why in most cases I'd rather not bother and get whatever I want to watch in a format where I can easily watch it on my Xbox 360, which is also my DVD player. And even if that wasn't the case, the extras are pretty neat!

There's a commentary track called "Commentary! The Musical" and it is basically ANOTHER musical that you get to watch, or uh, listen to I guess. It's pretty amusing, it could have been better if the cast and crew spent more time singing about the movie they were watching instead of singing about themselves... oh wait, I guess it's an authentic DVD commentary experience after all! Also, fan-made videos from people trying to get into the Evil League of Evil. There's some pretty clever and funny stuff there, even though there are a couple that make you go "What seriously why did this get included, I want to die right now, I am watching this and it makes me want to die." Overall though, awesome gift.

Superman T-shirt


Dude isn't that awesome? He's heating up a TV dinner with his heat vision because he broke his microwave! That is adorable and hilarious. I have already worn it like twelve times. Yes, EXACTLY TWELVE I COUNT HOW MANY TIMES I WEAR SHIRTS

A Shitload of Capsules That Turn Into Foam Animals And Stuff When You Put Them In Water


Alright, this one probably requires a bit of backstory.

A lot of the time when I go shopping, I have a tendency to make dumb little impulse purchases. I know right, who saw THAT one coming? So one time my little sister Lindsay and I are going grocery shopping, or rather she was getting groceries and I was getting Oreo Cakesters, and I see a "Mystery Egg" that would emerge as a Duck or Dragon or something after being submerged in water for a few days. I get it and I got something lame like a snake, but that is irrelevant you can ignore that part.

Anyway, the season of giving rolls around and Lindsay asks me what I want for Christmas. I tell her "Get me something that's either awesome or hilarious, otherwise surprise me!", and well, mission accomplished, because I wasn't expecting this:




A bunch of dunk-em-in-water-and-out-comes-a-thing capsules! Like, a ridiculous amount of them!

It was a very silly and thoughtful gift, and I plan on dunking them all into a full bathtub at the same time and surprising her with it, so I hope she doesn't read this blog.

Naruto: The Broken Bond


So, I'm not really a Naruto fan. I read a bit of the manga back when I still subscribed to Shonen Jump, but other than that I've paid zero attention to the series other than vaguely hearing about the story skipping two years into the future or something. So it was kind of neat that my Dad bought this game for me, since I never would have bought it on my own, and it turned out to be not that bad a game.

The battles in this game use are basically straight up fighting game, and it's really neat. The fights are always pretty fun and chaotic, and although it already seems like the character roster is insanely unbalanced, the fighting is almost as fun to watch as it is to play. Basically really solid Japanese fighting game, right up there on the pointless-but-fun scale with the Dragon Ball Z Budokai series, which I have an unhealthy addiction to.

The single player portion, however, splits up the fighting with an action-adventure game format where you traverse the woods and whatnot in 3D, and that's not so well executed. It could have been, and gets some things right like solving puzzles with the characters' various special powers, too bad 90% of the missions are fetch quests. I did have fun with it, though, and sometimes Naruto turds himself when he fails a special move so BEST GAME EVER.

Rogue Galaxy


This was actually a pretty genius gift idea from my friend Sean. See, I've been crazy behind the times, since I didn't have a PS2 until just last month. I'd wanted one for quite a while, but I never actually buckled down and bought one until this last December. So I had a LOT of old PS2 games to catch up on, obviously. On top of that, Level-5 is one of my favorite game developers ever, since everything they develop (this includes Dragon Quest VIII and the Dark Cloud series) is a frigging blast to play. So this is a game that I've wanted to play for a while, and now I finally could.

And... it's a lot of fun. The gameplay basically has every feature that I love in an Action JRPG. The battle system kicked ass, fusing items is always pretty neat, and there's great little touches like your character model actually looking different depending on what item s/he has equipped. Unfortunately, I think Sony of America has some sort of rule within their localization team that goes something like this: "Before hiring voice actors and writing the dialogue, everyone on the team must fall head first down a flight of stairs. Twice."

This game takes place in the distant future, in the far reaches of space. So why does the Space Ram thing have a frigging scottish accent!? On top of that, why is there then a tribe of jungle amazons with no accent at all!?!? I had to stop playing for a while due to the controller shaped dent in my forehead. It's a shame that such a brilliantly designed game had to be muddled up by so much retard. Still, my complaints regarding the game are definitely far outweighed by the amount of fun I've had with it so far.

iPhone


First off: You're welcome, ladies!

So yeah, my mom got me an iPhone for Christmas, and it's what I used to take all these pictures. And it's really great! It has been my dream since age 12 to carry the internet around with me in my pants, and now I can finally do that almost 10 years later. It really is so dang awesome.

I guess that also means that my statement about getting no practical gifts isn't really true, since this is hella practical, but I've been having a lot of fun with it as well. I've already sampled a bunch of the system's various games, and while the vast majority of them are underwhelming so far, they've already got support from a few big game companies like Konami, Hudson, and Square-Enix, so I can't wait for the real games to start flowing in once they figure out the system's strengths and weaknesses as a gaming platform. I'm sure it'll happen, since that same learning process took place for the Nintendo DS, and it's taking place right now for the Wii.

The iPhone has also made me discover a love for podcasts I didn't know I had, and it also increased my addiction to things like Facebook and Wikipedia thanks to having dedicated iPhone apps for those things. It's really a blessing and a curse since now everytime I go to the bathroom I'm there for like half an hour. I mean, everything I need is right there! An internet for internetting, and a toilet for pooping! Move a fridge in there and that's where I could LIVE.

Overall, I enjoyed every single gift I got. I got a fantastic Christmas Haul in 2008, and it's helped me start my 2009 off fantastically.

Merry Middle of January, everybody!

1 comment:

Chief said...

A genius gift idea from your friend Sean who has this totally sweet blog that all the people who read your blog should also read.

Also, my word verification for this comment was "metamat," which sounds like a terrible name for some kind of processed food.