[powered by orphans]

The Legend of Zelda

November 29, 2004 - 12am

I just bought The Legend of Zelda for my Gameboy Advance. The GBA I purchased through entirely legal means, and did not steal from Kmart as revenge for getting screwed out of a week of paid vacation. Nor did I steal Super Mario Advance 4 and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That would have been wrong.

It’s almost identical to the original version for the Nintendo, with one major exception… the Engrish has been corrected! This is the storyline explanation taken verbatim from the original version for the Nintendo.

Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? And that was the fun of it. Back in the day, when video games weren’t a multi-billion dollar industry, programmers did a lot of the translation. And they weren’t good at it. Occasionally the game would tell you things like “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US,” and you’d stare at the TV, shake your head in wonder and think, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Anyway, they fixed the into in the version for the GBA, much to my disappointment. The intro now reads:

If they were going to change things, they may as well have made a couple gameplay improvements as well. It’s still a pain in the ass to change between items. Would it have been hard to make the L and R buttons switch between items? I don’t think so. In the original, you were limited to a maximum of 255 rupees because of extremely limited memory on the cartridge. A single byte was allocated to store this information, making the maximum storable value 255. (If you were a programmer, you’d understand. It has to do with binary. I won’t bore you any further with it.)

Memory concerns are no longer an issue with the GBA. And yet they didn’t change this. It’s annoying.

I haven’t found any other major changes in the game. I’ll keep you updated, though. Because I’m sure you were enthralled by this entry.  Incidentally, Mike, we were both wrong. It’s not a warp whistle, and it’s not an ocarina. It’s a recorder.

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Nonsense

November 8, 2004 - 12am

Let’s see… hungry, hungry, hungry…

Can’t afford delivery pizza, and I’m not in the mood for it anyway…

Nothing in the fridge…

Nothing in the pantry…

Checking the cabinets…

Here we go. Box mix potatoes au gratin. That should be decent. But is there anything I can add to make it more like dinner? I hate eating a side dish for four and calling it a meal.

Alright, an onion. I can dice some of that up and put it in. That’ll be good. What else have I got…

Canned mushrooms. I hate canned mushrooms. They taste like crap. Oh well. Maybe they’ll be better when taken with everything else.

Searching through the cans… and we have… canned… spinach? Yeah, why not. Plenty of iron in spinach. It’ll be good for me.

What else, what else, what else. What? Canned roast beef and gravy? Who would can roast beef? Where the hell did I even get this? Let’s see… it’s from Aldi’s. Yeah, thanks Mom. Made in BRAZIL?! Who gets canned goods from BRAZIL?! Man, now I’m really reaching. I don’t think this is going to work.

Ah, hell. In it goes.

Mixing, mixing… god, this looks disgusting. The spinach was definitely a bad idea. Oh well. Into the oven it goes. Maybe once it has time to cook it won’t look so… repulsive.

Time for some TV.

[ eighteen minutes pass ]

Let’s see, the box said to check it at twenty minutes. Better check it to be safe.

Oh god.

I’m going to have to eat that?

Why is the whole thing a shade of green that looks like leprechaun vomit?

Um… maybe it will magically be better when I check it in another ten minutes.

[ ten minutes later ]

Damn.

Alright, ten more minutes.

[ the tension builds ]

What? It looks worse?!

Maybe once it sits and cools for a bit. Yeah.

[ still building! ]

Oooh…. maybe not.

This has to be one of the most wretched culinary abominations shat into existence.

:: sigh ::

I hope this tastes better than it looks. Although I don’t know how it could taste worse.

Spinach. It tastes like canned spinach and nothing else.

Damn.

[ yeah, I wasn't really going anywhere with this. ]

Hope Is Not Lost

November 4, 2004 - 12am

Well, by now, I’m sure everyone has heard the news. Bush has been reelected. Four more years with an incompetent arrogant failure in charge of the country.

Obviously, I had really been hoping that Kerry would win. Was he the ideal man for the job? No. Was he a damn sight better than Bush? Absolutely.

But this election has shown something about America: After September 11, Bush had an eighty-eight percent approval rating. This should have been a massive blowout for Bush. But it wasn’t. He only won by three percent of the popular vote, with the largest voter turnout since the 1960s.

This means that a lot of Americans have woken up to the fact that George W. Bush is not the man for the job. Yes, Kerry lost, but we can’t give up now. There’s even more at stake now than before the election. We have to use this momentum to carry us through the next four years. If everyone just gives up and turns their backs in disgust, like I was ready to do early Wednesday morning, there will be no dissenting voices left.

Are you ready to give Bush and his political junta free reign? Do you want America to invade another country and kill another one hundred thousand innocent civilians? Are you willing to let the polluters continue running the very organizations that are supposed to protect us from them? Do you really think that by wiping out entire families, places of worship, and schools while waging a poorly planned and ill conceived “crusade” that we will create fewer terrorists?
Is the world that Bush is building the world that you want your children to grow up in?
Don’t give up. We can’t give up. Now, more than ever before, we must do everything we can to constrain Bush’s horrible and destructive agendas. If you don’t like what is going on, write your congressman and your senator. Go to rallies and protest. Circulate petitions fighting for what you believe in.

Because if you don’t, no one else will.

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