Awesome Song of the Week! "Sleep on the Left Side" by Cornershop

Funky days are back again.

Don't Miss Out: GOG Goodness

Seems it's weekend promo time around these here interwebs, and while Steam tries to make the craptastic Aliens vs. Predator more appealing, GOG has graced us with a fantastic deal on two amazing adventure games: Sanitarium, and The Longest Journey. 

But don't take my word for it! Read some other dudes word! Here's a damned good site review for the wonder of Sanitarium by Chackan:

"It's premise is very simple: You control the character, talk to npc's, use items to solve puzzles. The camera is in isometric view, and the graphics are, even if dated, aging really well. Nothing easier and this review could very well be about any generic adventure game out there.

But when you start the game and realize you are in a very uncommon sanitarium, Angel statues become living, deformed children play in a city where all grownups are gone and you can become a comic book character, that's when things start to build up.

You start as an amnesiac male, waking up in one of the most weird and disturbing places i've seen in a videogame. Not knowing who you are or where you are, you start talking to other patients only to realize that there is no one sane...but yourself.

This part serves only as an introduction. The real game starts when you travel to a small town and have your first "chit-chat" with the local children. Not wanting to spoil anybody, let's just say you are in for a really insane experience."

Indeed. Sanitarium was a bit of a sleeper hit, but The Longest Journey was pretty big when it came out. Here's a review by wamu:

"The Longest Journey is a point and click adventure game from the end of the nineties. The story starts with an introduction to April Ryan's life. This 18-year-old protagonist is an art student living in a large futuristic city. After wrestling through the seemingly boring but necessary storyline of meeting her friends, visiting her school and realising they're facing with the same adulthood transition problems of present life, the story gets a lote more interesting.

Ragnar Tornquist, producer and designer, has shown through this game that he is an excellent storyteller. And although the game is set in the future, you can clearly detect references to today's world. Stark, for instance, devoted to science and technology, could easily be a reference to capitalism, while Arcadia, devoted to magic, is a place that only exists in our dreams and heart's desires. These two worlds, which were once united, are in chaos as the line between the two worlds is growing thin. April soon learns that she can shift between these worlds and that she is prophecised with the difficult task of restoring the Balance between these two worlds before it is too late.

The Longest Journey is an original game that has excellent character voices, ambient music, interesting locations and fascinating characters. It's no coincidence that this game made it in the PC Gamer UK's Top 100 games and IGN's top 10 list of point & click adventure games."

They really are both fantastic games and you can grab both of 'em now DRM-free for just the price of takeout. Plus you get the soundtrack for free. So go, buy.

Awesome Song of the Week! "The Bulblight" by Joe Meek

For this week's awesome song, we have one of the strangest pieces of music to emerge from the depths of the 1950s:

http://alextyson.tumblr.com/post/369466802/bulblight-by-joe-meek-via-songz-this-is-one-of

This song is pretty weird. But it's nothing compared to the rest of what's on the same album. This song is from a concept album (in the 1950s, way before stuff like Tommy or Sgt. Pepper) by producer Joe Meek called "I Hear A New World" where the entire sound of the album is basically what Joe Meek imagined outer space sounded like. Joe Meek was a pretty crazy dude, and he actually believed that there was intelligent life on the moon and Mars (which, if you think about it, wasn't that strange of a belief in the 1950s). Joe Meek actually was kind of crazy though. He had a really tragic personal life that I won't go into here, but if you want to hear about it just google his name.

I guess the bottom line is that this is what Joe Meek thought outer space sounded like, and I believe him. I kind of imagine outer space sounding something like this. Along with George Clinton, Sun Ra, and the Roots Radics, Joe Meek is one of the only people who has created music that actually sounds like it's from outer space.

Juxtaposed

Awesome Songs of the Week!

Since I didn't do an awesome song last week, here's two for this week!

 Candylion by Gruff Rhys

And:

"Mr. President" by Janelle Monae

For all you fans of psychedelic Britpop/Afrofuturist R&B.

Also thank you Andrew for getting me into Gruff Rhys.

Obama Images

 Ignore this. I'll probably delete it soon. It's for a coding class.

Web Clips for 2/13/10

 

I like fancy dress...

In the spirit of valentines day: gummy bears being naughty.

Valve merch is on sale now. It's usually pretty expensive so if you're thinking of buying, now is the time. Also the fabulous Mount and Blade (which our own Bobbicus talked about here) is only five bucks until Monday.

With the release of Call of Pripyat, I've been going through the original (I didn't play Clear Sky,as my understanding is you might as well just play the original again), and boy. I can say sometimes it's just an exercise in frustration and random annoying deaths with quicksave as your only friend. And other times it's brutally immersive and fantastically atmospheric. So I hear Call of Pripyat has much less dungeon/sewer crawling, which I thought was the weakest part of the original (mostly because to me, horror attempts in video games are just plain gimmicky), so that's good. But I also hear that the side missions are basically required in it, which I'm worried will make it feel too much like a grindy RPG. Where did I hear these things, from this pretty good review.

Check out this cool, visual RSS reader.

Awesome Song of the Week! "Express Yourself" by NWA

Ready for the awesome song? Well here it is.




Really not a whole lot I can say about this one, other than that it's awesome. A classic. I know I'm being kinda lazy with my description, but, I mean, it's NWA. One of the most influential hip hop groups of the 90s. They even have their own airline. I think.

Further Moments in Unoriginality: Badasses

Finally, the AV Club gives me something to work with: favorite badasses in cinema/television (and sure, why not throw literature into the mix?). This, being some straight-up high school argument material right here, is the sort of AV Q+A that lead me to start this ill-intentioned parody column. I can't wait. So, favorite badasses? They actually managed to take two of my nominations: the question was predicated on a column about "The Wire" that, of course, mentioned one Omar Little, badass extraordinaire. You could find quite a few badasses in the "Wire" pantheon of drug dealers and cops-- Lester, Bunk, Stringer, Avon, Slim Charles, Snoop and Chris, the list goes on and on-- but Omar takes the cake. He's the perfect combination of predator and conflicted product of the streets. He robs drug dealers, but it's only because that's all he knows. And he's got a code, so it's not like he's some mindless wolf of a gun-toting stick-up boy. But most importantly? Omar's got style. From the way he whistles "The Farmer in the Dell," to his pithy one-liners that would do Sean Connery-era Bond proud, to even the scar/overcoat/bulletproof vest look, Omar is the suavest motherfucker ever to strut the streets of Baltimore. A classic. But a column predicated on Omar's status as badass can't just end with an affirmation of said badassness. The AV Club guys also managed to steal Yojimbo, from "Yojimbo," from me. Yojimbo is Toshiro Mifune in an Akira Kurosawa version of a Dashiell Hammett novel that was later turned into a spaghetti western by Segrio Leone (starring Clint Eastwood; I actually watched "Fistfull of Dollars" recently, and it would have been pretty good if only "Yojimbo" weren't so damn perfect). How's that for a pedigree? Basically, Yojimbo is a masterless samurai who wanders into a town controlled by two warring feudal clans and, with perfect battle-cunning and street knowledge, manages to pit both clans against each other for profit. Again, Yojimbo is a spectacular swordsman an all, but it's his style that sets him apart, a combination of minor nihilism and world-weariness combined with an inscrutable moral code (notice how he's destroying baddies.. but with badness... OH NO MORAL AMBIGUITY!). Basically, watch Yojimbo. It's a great movie. So those would definitely be two of my votes, but I have to come up with something original here. Having spent a good part of the day worrying about this, I will now cast my formal vote for Jules Winnfield of "Pulp Fiction" (the only current runner-up being Colonel Kilgore from "Apocalypse Now"). I mean, come on, how can any list of cinematic badasses be complete WITHOUT the man who delivered the Ezekiel 25:17 speech? Jules makes the cut for basically all of the above reasons: he's a cold-blooded motherfucker; he kills people, but not before scaring the shit out of them; but he's also got style, a way with words, a sense of infinite calm and reserve, and the gumption to put it all aside when possessed of a "moment of clarity." And I don't know about you, but I don't believe that nonsense that Jules was the organ player in "Kill Bill," Tarantinoverse or otherwise. Because Jules Winnfield doesn't die, he just fades away. Awesome, a fine day of imitative posting. And now it's time for your input: greatest badasses of all time?

Awesome Song of the Week! "Moon is Mine" by The Pillows

You know what it's time for.



If any of you are at all familiar with Japanese rock, you probably know The Pillows. They're probably the most influential J-Rock band of all time. (Must resist temptation to make a Kanye joke.) It's easy to listen to The Pillows and think that their music is really straightforward, so it's sometimes hard to really understand what a profound influence the Pillows have had on the Japanese music scene, but if you listen to nearly any J-Rock band from the 90s onward, you can hear traces of the Pillows' music.

This particular song is one of my favorites by them. The melody is epic, soaring, and really energetic, but at the same time just a little melancholy. And then there's the obligatory one English lyric about outer space. Seriously, just about every Pillows song has one bizarre English lyric in it (such as "I wanna be a gentleman" or "I won't call you scarecrow"), and a lot of the time that one lyric is about outer space (such as in "Ride on Shooting Star"). This also leads me to one of my favorite things about the Pillows: a lot of their lyrics make absolutely no sense. Some bands are known for writing lyrics strictly for their sound, rather than their meaning, and the Pillows are one of those bands. Which means that their lyrics always sound awesome.

Anyway, yeah, that's pretty much it.

Web clips for 1/31/10 iPad™ Edition!!!!!

Meet the iPad™. It's a magical and revolutionary device. Magical....really? is it really magical?

It's certainly popular.

Everything is certainly abuzz. Even Pee-Wee's got one. MadTV predicted it.

But it's probably not magical. Yea, not magical. What I notice is that it's priced at $500 for the base model, with just 16GB of storage. The 64GB model brings it up to $700. You can buy 2 fairly powerful netbooks for that price. And at least they'll have USB, Flash, and a 160GB hard drive. 

And no flash. Looks like Apple hurt Adobe's feelings. To the extent that they supposedly "played the porn card." Though that turned out to be just an employee making a joke.

Yup, it's pretty restrictive, much like a game console.

It seems it's a bit like Obama.

People certainly have great expectations for it. They say it's going to kill the Kindle. The accessory market is gonna explode. Google had better watch out. It'll jump-start the job market. And it's even going to change the way kids grow up. Really. it's just that cool. I hear it'll also give you a blowjob if you buy the app.

But seriously people, where are our priorities?

With all of this controversy flying around, I'm reminded of just one thing.

Awesome Song of the Week! "Garden Botanum" by These Trails

Hey! I'm back, and for my first awesome song of the year I have a song so obscure that not even Yogurt-Pooh can hold a candle to it.

http://ponytone.com/streams/Garden%20Botanum.mp3

This song comes from the awkwardly-titled Hawaiian psych-folk band These Trails. Like many awesome psych bands of the 60s, These Trails only made one album, and it went absolutely nowhere. But recently some music nerd discovered it and it's been making its way around the internet. I haven't heard any word of a CD re-issue or anything, so These Trails haven't experienced the same kind of revival that some of their contemporaries have (such as The Zombies). But that just makes you cooler for knowing about them.

Now, admittedly, These Trails is not a band for everyone (see how awkward that sentence was? What an awkward band name). The very quivery vocals might be a little difficult to get used to, along with the very all-over-the-place song structures. And if you're not down with just synths and acoustic guitars, you won't like anything they've ever recorded. But if you're willing to give it a chance, I promise it will grow on you, and soon you'll realize that These Trails are (is?) without a doubt the most awesome overlooked Hawaiian acoustic psych folk band of all time. Of all time!

Anyway, enjoy this song. I think I picked the most accessible song from the album, so if you're into it, listen to the whole thing and expect lots of spaced-out psychedelic goodness.

Web clips for 1/26/09

Yes, I've returned. It's been a while, I know. I don't really have an excuse either. I suppose everyone falls into a rut somewhere... or something like that. Anyway I'm going to start off again with these web clips to get myself back on track, and then we'll see if I can't puke up anything that resembles an article or two.

This mod sticks the old Half-life 2 on the new, updated source engine (used in The Orange Box). It's a little hard to nab (copyright and all. try) but totally worth it. It also adds some achievements to grind for.

It kinda scares me how Facebook doesn't want you to delete your profile, to the extent that they're willing to fight for it. I mean FFS Facebook, I thought it was MY profile.

GameRanger is a seriously awesome game management and online client (think Gamespy replacement) that you can use to easily play multiplayer on games where it isn't supported very well (the recent Borderlands comes to mind).

I've recently moved a bunch of different machines to Windows 7, and have found Ninite to be super-awesome.  I'll probably rant about it later.

Good article on humor in games, why it's often not funny, and how it might be.

Speaking of humor, here's an Open Letter to the Parents in Starbucks. Pretty funny stuff.

Continuing Moments In Unoriginality: AVQ&A

Oh hey guys. Remember way back when, in the glory days of summer, I had the not-so-genius idea to parrot whatever question those professional folks over at the AV Club were debating in their Q&A for the week? Well, after a little Bali hiatus and forgetting that project, I'm back, and still don't know any better than to foist my own opinions upon the Tartar Sauce's innocent and unsuspecting readers. The project still smells a little of gimpitude, especially with a question like today's, but that's not going to stop me. Yet. Self-disparaging moments aside, today they're talking about what pop-culture thing(s) they find themselves being completist about, which is to say possessing all elements of a specific band, author, director, actor, genre, label, or what have you. Kind of a chance to show off the AV Cluber's knowledge and good taste, but I'm going to use this as a forum for defending one of the reviled elements of my childhood: the Redwall books. Up until the very end of highs school, I was a completist for nearly everything Brian Jacques penned, and still have all of the Redwall books (minus the first two installments) arranged chronologically on one really big shelf. And I've read most at least twice, the better ones probably somewhere in the neighborhood of five times. And I'm completely unapologetic. Why so? Because, despite the hate that Redwall gets for being derivative, repetitive, racist, morally absolute, and a Lord of the Rings knockoff, those books are written with such an outpouring of joy and spirit that it's just kind of a dick move to knock them, because that would be like knocking fucking Mother Goose for being a communist. Or some other application of abstract intellectual theory to something that doesn't need that kind of analysis. Because, let's face it, Redwall is for kids. It's a story written about talking animals that borrows from the same rich pantheon of knights and chivalry and other European shit like that that Tolkien doubtless borrowed from himself in creating his myth (which, I might add, has its own not-so-subtle racist overtones). There are songs and lengthy descriptions of food and a fond reliance on the pincer move as advanced battle tactics. As a little kid, reading these books, all this stuff is awesome, from the action to the funny accents to the good/evil struggle that's not too scary, but interesting enough to remind young minds of that fickle concept, "morality." So yeah, I understand that they're not the most original books, but the stories are pure and lighthearted, told with a warmth that should hopefully dispel the jaded criticism of childhood relics. Bottom line: not cool to hate, so don't fuck with Redwall. Well, that got kind of angry. So, um, yeah, not much else I'm completist about. I think that's because it's really hard to be completist, unless it's something for real obscure that there's not a lot of, and then the accomplishment is a bit less impressive. My problem with completism is that I can't overlook (except in the case of sacred cows, like Redwall, where hearing the same story slightly retold several times delights me and doubtless prepared my young mind to comprehend the intense backstory of, say, The Wire-- and yes, I just linked Redwall and The Wire) shitty quality from artists that I like. That's why I don't own the Pogues albums from after Shane McGowan left-- not as good. I hope you've enjoyed being yelled at for something you haven't done today, and that you possibly tune in next week to hear what I have to say about things that don't really matter.