As If You Care

I made this as a promo for Forgotten Hope 2 using the player model and some game footage. After all, what WWII game would be complete without a little Micheal Caine?

We finally got this puppy out to the public. There are some issues causing some players to CTD, but it’s being looked into.

Pirates 2 is featured on this week’s Battlefield Podcast Episode #66, where you can even hear yours truly stammer my way though a couple of responses to questions I was totally unprepared for, and follow them up with an awkward nervous laugh. There’s lots of in-game footage, although it is kind of old and doesn’t look as good as the real deal now.

BFP2 part starts at about 12:50 into the podcast.

Finishing up the 1p animations for Battlefield Pirates 2 for the first release.

This mod is a lot of fun and has quite a different feel to it. I like it because it really doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s based around teams of Pegleg Pirates and the Undead. This team put a ton of work into the mod and it shows.

Made this from assets used in the Battlefield 2 Mod, Forgotten Hope 2 on which I am a developer (more on this later).

Jerm was kind enough to set up the new AIYC in WordPress. Now just to make everything work again…

Pretty much tastes like Black Cherry Vanilla Diet Coke only without the salty, bitter darkness of all coke products. It’s still too dark for my tastes, but I guess it’s acceptable.

Given that that’s all I have to say, I would assume my days of being interested in soda are numbered. Just in time for all of Jeff’s talk of shutting down this site!!

Wait till I try the Strawberries and Cream, Jeff!!

So I am debating whether or not to come out of retirement to discuss these two new flavors of Diet Pepsi.

I mean Diet Pepsi is basically the only fluid I accept as drinkable, so… I feel the need… but look at those labels. They look like yogurt or some kind of ice cream snack for fatties. Both labels stand in stark defiance of the general cola label rule of thumb: limited color range, abstract shapes apart from cartoonish fruit, realistic water droplets.

Retirement is kind of relaxing though. Without having to type some swear words into this website once every six months, my life has really changed. My hair grew back, I got that job with the CIA detecting bombs in women’s dresses, and my car has been running GREAT.

All I can say is vanilla does not equal “cream”. I will let Scot expound on this strange and unnecessary flavor should he choose to try it.

Silent Hill

1. Puzzle solving scenes: [x] yes [ ] no

2. Boss levels: [x] yes [ ] no

3. Survival-horror soundtrack/camera pan dawning horror/obstacle cutscenes: [x] yes [ ] no

4. Konami / Contra code: [x] yes [ ] no

I would think that it would be nothing for a director to look at any of the survival-horror games that I have propping up uneven tables in my house and say “yeah I could probably tighten up some of the exposition and dialogue on this and it would be something,” but I guess I would be wrong. Instead directors look at these and say “I guess I will just have Kid Icarus jump upward for a while and I’ll hire Gary Oldman as the eggplant wizard.”

This wasn’t unwatchable. All of the Trent Reznor fantasy monsters were suitably twitchy and disturbing with unsettling sound effects and for once the industrialish soundtrack didn’t sound totally out of place… but this movie really accelerates the state of the art in two specific areas.

One is that (THERE IS A SPOILER COMING) the main character and a totally implausible HOTT COP spend a long time running from modern coal-monsters and corpses that couldn’t find work as Todd McFarlane toys only to suddenly end up in an unexpected puritan witchhunter b-movie! Maybe this is something the people who have played the video game knew all about, but not me! I thought for sure all of this twisting, writhing, veiny mess was just directionlessly supernatural, but it turns out I was wrong. So once the Monty-Python “I SAY WE BURN HER!!!” scenes started, I was on sure footing.

The other thing is that this movie is most likely going to serve as a benchmark for mainstream movie brutality for a little while. It might go unsung in this respect, but that is for the best because then I can pull it out like deep trivia in 10 years when all we are seeing is movies about butchers ripping the skin off of girls and chucking it at churches. WOW.

The main character reminds me a little bit of a real life girl that I am kind of into so I actually just spent most of the movie thinking about dates. Dates and people slowly burning. This could have been better, but I am completely surprised to find myself thinking that it also wasn’t a total waste.

Bang Rajan

This is a seriously unexpected battlefilm. Battlefilms are a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. The world isn’t cranking out as many loinclothed barbarian movies as I would prefer these days, but they sure do know how to put 100,000 people on a field and let them cave each other in with impractical weapons.

So this is about a conflict in Thailand just before they got their first computers. Most of the country is shirtless and looks up to the whichever guy has biggest moustache in town. In all honesty, they do tend to have have a pretty strong body mass index and good tans, including the women, so they can pull it off.

Apparently the Wu Tang Clan was moving in from Burma and the good moustachioed people of Bang Rajan were not having it. They made some super-sized swords and just started mowing down major rap artists about 13 at a clip until Ghostface shows up with some serious cannons and elephants and kills literally every person on screen.

If you smoke like I smoke, then you like battlefilms every day.

Domino

Keira Knightley is kind of hot and they do not stop reminding you of that for even one second of this film. She has all kinds of COOL dialogue where she displays that her character DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK. The camera let you know this by lingering on her totally nihilistic sneer for a good long while. If you saw the SNL skit where the Star Wars chick does some hardcore raps, you know that the rest of the world thinks it’s funny too. Those scenes are the only time the camera calms down from all the twitchy attempts to mimic the pill popping scenes from Snatch and Requiem for a Dream.

She says “I am a bounty hunter” about eleventy thousand times and I can’t imagine holding even a 45 second conversation with the kind of person who would see this movie and be captivated by the thick, buttery money shot of bad video game OMG SO COOL-ness that happens all over the viewers face as they accept defeat. I can’t think of an upside because I can pretty much see good looking girls baring their midriff on any number of websites that cater to the sort of person that really gets jammed up by a bare midriff.

Project Grizzly

I find most of the current trend of mullet humor to be about as funny as slashing my wrists and dying alone in a bathtub, but if wearing mullet shirts and buying mullet dvds and relentlessly pointing out mullets is your bread and butter, you need to just move to Canada because the whole damn thing is alive and well.

In this film, a Canadian with a mullet (HAHAHAHAAHHAAHA) and a full on dose of the much-lampooned Canadian accent (HAHAHAHHAHAHA ROTFL DID YOU SEE THAT SOUTH PARK TOO???) makes the rest of creation pretty much feel like less of a man because he builds an iron man suit that he hopes will allow him to just walk on up to a grizzly bear and not even give a shit.

This suit can basically be dropped out of a plane and the wearer will probably walk away. Shot after shot proves that being hit by massive falling logs and tumbling down moutainsides results in no damage to the wearer.

The downside is that if you fall over it takes a whole team of people to put you back on your feet, but I can’t see where that would have anything to do with contacting a grizzly bear.

I think this movie is supposed to be one of those newer documentaries where, for instance, the suit isn’t the real point… but I don’t really cotton to modernity. Give me Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom all day every day. This is a movie about a really good suit.