Kicking and screaming

Well, it’s all over: I now have an Xbox Live account. I even have one of those online monikers — I think they call them “gamer tags” or something like that. Mine is “ToastyFrog.” I realize that’s terribly unpredictable, but life on the edge is really pretty much all I’m about these days. That would make this ToastyFrog Xtreme in the parlance of today’s youth demographic (12-18, male, enjoys skateboarding, Cartoon Network and of course… Xbox games).

And this… this will definitely be an unusually edgy week. Even for me. The tone was irrevocably set with an email from TOLLMASTER, who emerged from the primordial ooze of Insert Credit’s forums long enough to plaster me with this:

Keiji Inafune would NOT approve of seeing Mega Man drawn in menstrual blood, I think.

Mega Man! Hoorah, friend to man and beast and robot. Drawn in… uh… menstrual blood. Boo. So very, very boo.

Yeah, I don’t think this week is going anywhere good. So let’s travel back in time to a sunny and inviting place known as Last Week, where our dear friend Nadia’s delicious Metroid 20th anniversary feature went live. And but a few short days after that, Kohler’s Donkey Kong 25-year retrospective went up as well. What is with 1UP and the Nintendo anniversary pieces, you might ask? Beats me, and I’m the one who planned them. Nintendo seems to come up with its most lasting ideas during the summer every five years. It’s really very odd. The temporal traffic jam is over, though; now we can go about looking back at other companies’ creations, too.

Anyway! Please do read these pieces if you’ve somehow missed them. We’ve published a lot of excellent retrospectives over the years, but these may well be the best. Take notes, because the quality is in the approach. Nadia, for instance, tackled her work from the Samus Aran angle, crafting a piece that frames the series’ history in terms of the heroine’s role and evolution. This is interesting, because it is not the same old OMG LOL ALIENS RIP-OFF crap that everyone else (myself included) writes. And Chris took a far more straightforward approach and did it to perfection, with ample research and a clearly argued case for DK’s importance in gaming history.

“But Parish!” you sputter. This was pretty much just a rehash of what Kohler wrote in his book Power-Up!” And to you I say: of course it is. That’s why I hired him for the job. This is known as “hedging your bets.”

50 thoughts on “Kicking and screaming”

  1. Ah! I missed the Donkey kong retrospective, I knew I forgot to read something on 1UP. I’ve been playing too much starfox for my own good.

  4. Hey, with a brand new interview with Don James! Plus, none of that fiddle-faddle about DK’s legal troubles, breakfast cereal, or Donkey Kong’s Fun With Music was in Power-Up. Ya jerk.

    But yeah.

  5. I just can’t help but point out the vast amounts of typos here. They’re everywhere!
    .
    But really, I’m just hoping that the blood thing is a joke.

  7. “I wonder how much money there’d be in making tampons that double as paintbrushes.”

    Assuming a conservative estimate of $1 for every pervert on the internet? Billions.

  8. not to take things off track, but any impressions of Rocket Slime you’d like to give out parish?

  9. Speaking of DK, I really liked your piece on the series in the newest EGM. It literally made me “LOL” a couple times! ^_^

  10. So that’d make him, what, the Blood Bomber? …Ew. Lyke, omg, Parish, wanna play Uno wif me sumtime lolz? You know, even Uno’s not safe, though. I was in a game a few weeks ago where two of the players spent about fifteen minutes cussing each other out and tossing racial slurs back and forth. It was baffling. Did they forget that they were playing Uno? There are no badasses in Uno. Well, except for my grandmother, who is terrifying in her ability to call forth Draw Four cards at the least opportune time.

  11. Huh, that was a typo-ridden entry. Weird. Musta been too busy retching from the Mega Man pic.
    .
    I can’t really say anything about the U.S. version of Rocket Slime since it’s under online embargo for the time being. I will, as the saying goes, save my venom for the 1UP review.

  15. “save my venom for the 1UP review”
    .
    Noooooooo! :-( It seemed so fun when I tried it at E3. You and your venom, I swear!

  16. Yes, Rocket Slime is terrible. That’s why I played the import version to completion — I love suffering. And you can be sure that with a localization directed by Richard Honeywood of DQ8 fame the English version is even worse.

  18. I never played DQ8, so I can’t tell if Parish is being sarcastic or not. I mean, it sounds like he’s being sarcastic, but he does it so often it’s sort of become the standard tone, regardless of actual content.

    Thanks for the DK reminder, though. Really good article!

  19. Was Richard Honeywood the localization director that, though a series of comedic mishaps, got mixed up with a Colombian cocaine cartel? Oh wait, that was Tomm.

  20. “I never played DQ8, so I can’t tell if Parish is being sarcastic or not.”
    So it *is* the Eddie Brock Venom. I could never keep track of when he was and wasn’t a good guy in the comics.

  22. jparish: Hey, DQ8’s localization was awesome. The Japanese didn’t even *get* voice actors in their version of the game.

  26. There is a difference between sarcasm and irony! Damn kids these days with your Alanis Morissette-warped vocabularies. Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say:
    .
    “Sarcasm and irony are often confused for each other in popular discourse. Irony generally refers to the literal meaning and the intended meaning of the words uttered being different (for example: saying “Smart move!” after a friend has done something stupid); while sarcasm refers to the mocking intent of the utterance.
    .
    “It is possible to be ironic without being sarcastic, and to be sarcastic without being ironic. Sarcasm and irony are also regularly confused with cynicism, which in common use is seen as a fundamental nihilistic attitude toward other people and life in general, whereas sarcasm can also be used to express positive ideas or sentiments.”
    .
    So yeah.

  27. first of all – that article clearly points out that if anything, you’re nihilistic.
    .
    and please tell me you realized I was being sarcastic? If not – how ironic…

  30. I never played DQ8, so I can’t tell if Parish is being ironic or not. I mean, it sounds like he’s being ironic, but he does it so often it’s sort of become the standard tone, regardless of actual content.

    Sorry about the grammatical conflict. Just a bit curious about DQ8.

  34. Hey, ToastyFrog isn’t a bad gamertag. It’s something you can call your own (Gosh, not that there’s anything wrong with a gamertag like MasterChief69!), but it’s also still creative. What more could you want?

  35. so how much do 360s cost in the states these days, anyway? i’m sorely tempted as my arrival home draws ever nearer. mass effect, you know.

  36. Locit: DQ8 is fun but it can be unbearably hard at times…like when I had to level up for over four hours before fighting the boss in the Dark Ruins. But the overworld is incredibly cool so I forgive Level 5 and Square Enix for letting enemies rape me horribly.

  38. I’m morbidly curious Greliz – do the enemies have tentacles?
    Also, my sarcasm detector doesn’t work due to high background levels.

  41. Parish: is it a good thing that you mentioning my name leaves me speechless?

    Luckily I could still type, so I could go back into my primordial ooze and brag about it. They’ll probably just argue about how much cooler Tim Rogers is than you, though :-(

    Uneducated swine, I tell you! If Tim Rogers was so NSJ he would have a talking frog mascot too.

  42. “God, we’re pathetic”
    .
    See, that’s not sarcastic or ironic, just nihilistic.

    Or realisitc.

  44. “it can be unbearably hard at times…like when I had to level up for over four hours before fighting the boss in the Dark Ruins”
    .
    Is that truly hard, or just stupid? Last time I checked there was nothing particularly difficult about grinding levels.

  45. except in DQ8, the smarter you were the faster ALL battles went, and the sooner you could defeat difficult bosses. So, I’d vote for Hard over Stupid.

  46. You know that whole “irony/sarcasm/nihilism” thing?

    I think that was what the Patriots were talking about near the end of MGS2, when they were going on about the need to regulate information. Oh, well. I need scissors.

  48. ShaperTGQ here. Somehow, I could not recover my ShaperMC account, so I just said screw-it and made a new one. Anyways, I just lost my Gold free trial and would have to pay for gold… which I can’t right now because I am broke, but if you find a good reason for me to get a gold account I would love to be convinced.

  49. compared to 7, dq8 is a freaking cakewalk. an incredibly enjoyable and beautiful cakewalk, but still a cakewalk.

  50. A cakewalk is easy. Finding a cake large enough to walk on is the difficult part. It’s much like how the final boss of every Gradius is simple to defeat. The entire game leading up to him has been the real battle. And so you see, it’s just as J.R.R. Tolkien would have said: it’s not the cakewalk, but the journey to the cake. Sorry. I’m all zen today. Been watching a lot of Kung Fu.

Comments are closed.