You Found a Secret Area!

Author: beverly jane

  • Throut & Neck: A game show with some ’90s attitude.

    Throut & Neck: A game show with some ’90s attitude.

    Okay, I might be pushing it with the whole “video game blog” angle with this one. Granted, it’s video game-adjacent, and had a major game sponsor, so it counts.

    Just about anyone who was born in the late ’80s to early ’90s may remember Nick Arcade, that awful Nickelodeon game show with an annoying host, rejected Double Dare contestants, and two episodes featuring an unreleased prototype of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. (Check it out on The Cutting Room Floor if you’re curious.) If you’re older, you might remember Video Power, that weird “video game tips” show turned average game show in its second season.

    And for all the old farts out there, you probably remember Starcade when was new. Or you’re like me and remember it when G4 reran it constantly, before the network was total garbage. But I bet you don’t remember this weird video game-meets-game show entity: Throut & Neck, a Game Show Network original that briefly ran in 1999.

    Sadly I couldn’t get a gif of the intro, because it’s so ’90s it hurts.

    The late 1990s was a weird time for Game Show Network. Before they had aired bad Candid Camera knockoffs in Foul Play, before they reran The Amazing Race daily and going through the first seven seasons in a month, even before that weird “We’re not just game shows” phase where they thought giving Scrabble host Chuck Woolery a reality show was a good idea; they were on this ridiculously weird interactive TV kick. Interactive versions of The Price is Right were broadcast among other call-in and win shows based on Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. This was continuing a trend that was prevalent throughout the first few years of GSN’s life, trying to make it more than just old game shows.

    Throut & Neck is one of the last shows where GSN was experimenting with these interactive call-in shows. And it’s quite the fascinating one.

    Our “stars,” ladies and gentlemen. They have as much interactivity as an animatronic at Chuck E. Cheese.

    The titular characters, Throut (that’s not a typo for “Throat,” that’s his actual name) and Neck are computer-generated characters on a TV monitor that occasionally animate. They’re basically two bumbling idiots who try to do evil and dastardly things, because, after all, it’s the late 1990s and everything has to be extreme. Also, for some reason they both hate sheep, which is another angle for the show that’s not really explained well.

    Throut is a blue thing with a ponytail beard and weird straps on his mouth and feathers on his head. He seems to be the tough guy in this scenario, judging by his gruff dude-like voice and physique. Neck is a green monster with a weird nose and teeth, an outfit that looks like prison garb, and sounds like a cross between Zorak from Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Beavis from Beavis & Butt-Head. Sadly, neither C. Martin Croker or Mike Judge contributed to the voices of this show. Hell, I don’t even know who voiced these characters, the show credits them as “themselves,” so it’s a mystery that will likely remain unsolved.

    Let’s be honest: This is the reason people watched, not for those two dunderheads.

    Our co-host is Rebecca Grant, a person who doesn’t have much experience before or after this show. Grant’s role is basically to be the “straight woman” to Throut & Neck’s dumb insanity, as well as being the one who introduces the call-in players. In a sense, this was an early sign for GSN to try to appeal to the sex appeal market with superfluous woman co-hosts, like Cram and Lingo would do a few years later.

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  • I Bought Some Stuff! 10/2/2012: Convention finds edition.

    I Bought Some Stuff! 10/2/2012: Convention finds edition.

    Since I just got back from going to two conventions in the course of a month, it’s about time for me to show that I Bought Stuff. It’s gonna be a double-header this time around: We’re gonna be covering not only the stuff I got from last weekend’s haul at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, but also what I stumbled upon after PAX back in early September. It’s gonna be a fun one, indeed.

    A bunch of Sierra and some Pat Sajak for your Tuesday. (or any day, really.)
    • Police Quest 2: The Vengeance (DOS, $3)
    • The Colonel’s Bequest (DOS, $3)
    • Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters (PC, $3)

    I got these three games the day after PAX ended, on Monday. I had some free time to kill before I had to get to the train station to get home, so I had a doughnut at Top Pot Doughnuts — highly recommend you do so if you’re visiting Seattle — and found a Value Village several blocks away from where the main convention center was. After poking around the store that was in an old building complete with freight elevators, I found these three gems.

    Police Quest 2: The Vengeance and The Colonel’s Bequest are classic Sierra-published games. This was back in Sierra’s heyday, when they made a whole bunch of adventure game titles. Granted, most of them have not aged well primarily due to their obtuse puzzle mechanics, but finding complete box copies of both games is a treat.

    The Colonel’s Bequest was the first game in a mystery series starring Laura Bow, which she returned in another Sierra game a few years later, The Dagger of Amon Ra. I have no idea where this ranks on terms of quality Sierra games, but judging how I didn’t hear of this until I bought it, I assume it’s one of the forgettable ones.

    Police Quest 2 continues the same silly stuff that other Police Quest games did where you had to follow every step of police procedure to the absolute letter. I preferred the later spinoff series SWAT, which went from being a bad FMV game to a strategy game to a solid squad FPS that rivaled Rainbow Six in its day. As an unexpected bonus, Police Quest 2 had extra 5 1/4″ copies somebody made presumably to give to a friend. Funny, considering the original disks are also inside. I guess somebody didn’t watch Don’t Copy That Floppy.

    Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters, on the other hand, was more of a gimmick purchase. It had never been opened, and one copy there had a dozen GameStop price stickers on it, going from $20, to $10, to $5, to $2 by the end of it. This is the Wheel of Fortune host’s first foray into making video games after having a weird aversion to appearing in Wheel of Fortune games for a solid two decades. At least he eventually got over that.

    This casual game is a hybrid of crossword puzzles mixed in with elements from The Joker’s Wild. Put into a sleek casual games package, it’s an interesting little game made around the time of the casual games boom. There was another game under the Pat Sajak Games label named Trivia Gems, but I don’t know if that ever got a retail package. Bet both of those games are worth looking into.

    Update: Eventually I did finally check out Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters, and it’s surprisingly alright for being a game featuring the host of Wheel of Fortune. You can read about it here.

    The rest of my PAX swag was a shitload of buttons, energy drinks, cards and promo stuff, followed by Guitar Hero: Van Halen. I mean, when Dan Amrich (then of Activision and One of Swords in 2012, currently at Ubisoft) just hands them out for just showing up at a panel, you can’t resist. Then again, I heard that lots of people got copies of that game, apparently they had excess stock.

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  • Checking out the 2012 Portland Retro Gaming Expo.

    Checking out the 2012 Portland Retro Gaming Expo.

    Last year, after PAX Prime 2011 ended, I found out there was a local retro games convention around Portland called the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Apparently it had been running for several years, and I was unaware of its existence, so I decided to head over to the event. Despite the small venue – it was at a DoubleTree convention hall not too far from the Lloyd Center mall – I had a blast buying a few games to fulfill my ever-increasing collection.

    Cut to 2012, and the Portland Retro Gaming Expo came back for its seventh year. This time, they kicked things into overdrive as they moved facilities to the much larger Oregon Convention Center just off downtown Portland. Though the ticket prices jumped due to the venue change – $20 for a day, $25 for both days – I still expected to have a lot of fun.

    The Computer Space cabinet is pretty cool only because it hits that perfect style of the 1960s: round yet angular.

    On Saturday, I grabbed a friend along for the ride. He hasn’t played much video games, but did remember messing around with the old Kaypro, Macintoshes and Commodore 64s that some of the vendors had, while occasionally talking about the classic Atari 2600 and NES eras. I’m honestly amazed he was willing to put up with me being an obnoxious nerd about some of the things.

    Naturally like any retro games convention, the place had many different vendors selling off all sorts of things: Old computers, Nintendo Power magazines — likely will increase in value since they’re shutting down — NES and SNES game reproductions, Tiger Electronics handhelds, various toys and figures, comic books and other assorted nerdy things. There was an absolute breadth of stuff there. My wallet took a hit during the whole event, which I talk about in another blog post.

    The Retrogames Roadshow in action. Pictured from left to right: John Hancock, Steve Lin, “Gamemaster” Howard Phillips, and Chris Kohler.

    After me and my friend roamed around the main hall and played a few arcade classics like Galaga, Robotron 2084 and that pinball/arcade hybrid Baby Pac-Man, I walked into the small auditoriums they had for the convention’s events. Chris Kohler (of Wired at the time of this article, now at Kotaku) was doing his Retrogaming Roadshow event. It’s a fairly simple thing: people bring up interesting gaming things and basically seeing if they’re worth anything.

    Later during the panel, there was a surprise guest: Howard Phillips, formerly of Nintendo during the NES glory days, now advertising himself under the “Gamemaster Howard” brand. He’s lately been posting stuff on Facebook and other social media sites, showing off most of the old stuff he had from his Nintendo days, such as a promo booklet for the Nintendo AVS — the original name for the NES — back from the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show. Honestly I was not expecting these people to make the trek to Portland, but hey, anything to talk to Chris — and have him recognize me! — and ask him how much my Japanese copy of Hot Shots Golf 2 is. (Turns out it’s worth nothing. Oh well, I only spent $5 on it.)

    I still bought a couple of things on Saturday, and bumped into Howard Phillips at the show. I asked him about why we never got the original Super Mario Bros. 2, since it was one of those apocryphal stories that he was the impetus for why the original Super Mario Bros. 2 never made it to the US until years later, and why Nintendo reskinned Doki Doki Panic into the US Super Mario Bros 2. Turns out it wasn’t nearly as clear cut as that. He gave these reasons: “It was too similar to the original, and I hated the poison mushrooms and the wind sections!” It was still neat to talk and hear stories from him about those days, as those aren’t as documented nearly as well.

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  • Modern Warfare 3: The most disappointing Call of Duty.

    Modern Warfare 3: The most disappointing Call of Duty.

    This post is particularly hard for me to write. When I wrote this originally, the game was having a free weekend on Steam, as is common for a lot of PC games these days. Since I’m not the richest person around, getting a taste of these big budget AAA games are a treat. But then there’s Modern Warfare 3, and how particularly busted it is. Modern Warfare 3 is a bad Call of Duty game, and you shouldn’t play it.

    This took me like a hundred hours in MS Paint to make.

    I should back up a bit. I’m not one of those pretentious jackasses who bemoan that “Call of Duty is killing the video gaming industry.” I mean, it’s part of a larger problem, but I’m not one of those hipsters who slam the big budget stuff and praise stuff like McPixel. (This is not to say McPixel is bad. It looks pretty fun, actually.)

    In fact, until about a few years ago, I was a Call of Duty nut. I owned practically every game in the series up to that point. I played the multiplayer a lot — perhaps not as much as the maximum level max prestige players, but enough to still have a blast playing it — and I even enjoyed the campaigns of each despite how much they’re corny action movies in disguise.

    You wanna know my dedication? I did an unboxing of Modern Warfare 2‘s Hardened Edition, at launch, in one of the last times I’d go out for a midnight launch for anything.

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8QW80hIZiA?rel=0&w=640&h=480]

    But as I kept playing Modern Warfare 2, I came to a realization. It wasn’t as great as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was. Treyarch’s World at War felt better at times.

    Modern Warfare 2 is basically Michael Bay: The Video Game, complete with homages to The Rock. They even got Bay stalwart Hans Zimmer to do the score. But the story was full of nonsensical twists, ridiculous American jingoism and cliched catchphrases of Keith David yelling at Ramirez to defend a Burger Town.

    The multiplayer, which is basically the major reason I played Call of Duty was not very well balanced at launch, and prone to bizarre bugs like the “Javelin glitch” — where you could prime a Semtex grenade, cancel it by switching to the javelin, and cause a massive explosion when you died. A few times I accidentally joined hacked lobbies of 16-player Rust where the only winning outcome was the game-winning Tactical Nuke. This was not long after launch, even.

    It really felt like Infinity Ward didn’t have the passion or love, throwing anything at a wall and seeing what stuck. Then the Respawn fiasco happened in 2010 where about half the team left due to creative differences between them and Activision, then it all started making sense.

    2010 was around the point when I started losing interest in Call of Duty: I didn’t pick up Black Ops until earlier this year, and as of this writing, I never bothered grabbing Modern Warfare 3. After replaying MW3‘s multiplayer again through the Steam free weekend– the third the game has had since launch — I realized why.

    Kill Confirmed is probably one of the best additions to the series yet.

    While there are a few cool new things, such as the small skirmish Face-Off mode and Kill Confirmed, it’s the same multiplayer stuff from Modern Warfare 2, just amplified to a ridiculous degree. The maximum level is now 80, and there’s a whopping 20 prestige levels! Weapons have levels now, them trying to fix a problem that was already fixed in Black Ops. You can get prestige tokens that unlock double XP bonuses. There’s new guns, new killstreaks, they added deathstreaks, there’s perks for weapons now, the whole nine yards.

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  • PAX Prime 2012: Experiencing the Final Fantasy 25th Anniversary Event.

    PAX Prime 2012: Experiencing the Final Fantasy 25th Anniversary Event.

    As I sit here in a Seattle hotel room writing this, day one of PAX Prime 2012 is over. While I met some people, got some swag to shove into my suitcase after the con, and got to enjoy a few panels like the PAX Game Show Night, there was another video game event happening around the same time. Square Enix decided to celebrate Final Fantasy‘s 25th anniversary with a small event about a block or two away away from the Washington State Trade and Convention Center, which is the central PAX Hub. Unlike PAX which required a badge, attendance was available to everyone. I met with a few friends local to the area and hightailed it to the ACT Theatre.

    I should post a disclaimer here: My experience with Final Fantasy is pretty much little to nil. Platformers and first-person shooters have always been my preferred genres, and my JRPG experience is pretty limited to about a few games such as Chrono Trigger, Kingdom Hearts and a few Pokemon games. I did play part of Final Fantasy VI on an emulator a long time ago, but I don’t think that really counts. Despite my inexperience with the famous franchise, I was curious what this little shindig would be about.

    It’s like a little fan-gathering of FF nerds meets a club atmosphere. It’s pretty nice.

    It was a celebration of Final Fantasy alright, as all the mainline titles were playable on the main stage. None of the Final Fantasy spinoff games were there, just the main 13 games plus Final Fantasy XIII-2 which came out recently as of this post. No spinoff games, so no chances of seeing Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles recreated with four Gamecubes and Game Boy Advances hooked together.

    Now, you’re probably asking, “Wait, we didn’t officially get Final Fantasy II, III and V until they came out much later, are they being represented by their American rereleases?” Actually, no. They were the original Famicom and Super Famicom releases of these games.

    Hats off to Square Enix for going the extra mile even with this.

    I am not at all fluent in Japanese language, so I didn’t attempt to play them. Despite the language barrier, this was an absolute treat to see, as it feels like a combination between both American and Japanese households. Also because I hadn’t really seen a Famicom up this close until now.

    At one point some of the TVs were glitching out and some of the older NES and Famicom games weren’t completely working, resulting in one of my friends to yell out “Blow the cartridge!” Even despite how that’s been debunked in the years since, it’s still suggested as a way to fix busted NES games. I seriously hope no one tried that.

    While the whole ordeal was more a dedication to the classics, the more recent stuff was being featured, such as a tech demo for the upcoming Final Fantasy XIV. While I was skeptical of the trailer being real time footage — this is Square-Enix after all, once the king of full motion video — it looked pretty nice. I’m not big on MMOs these days, but I bet there will be some people interested.

    One last observation: Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 were feature on the Xbox 360 as opposed to the PlayStation 3, which is weird considering Square-Enix’s dedication to Sony’s platform for so long. Granted, the 360 is more popular over here in the States, so it probably made more sense. there.

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  • I Bought Stuff! 8/29/2012: Pre-PAX Edition.

    I Bought Stuff! 8/29/2012: Pre-PAX Edition.

    So PAX is coming up. That popular video game thing in Seattle that has all the cool video game and nerd-culture related things that’s right in my neck of the woods.

    But instead of packing and getting ready to hop on a train tomorrow, I decided to go check some thrift stores and hope to find some interesting stuff. And I definitely found some of that. This will be a small, but interesting haul indeed.

    Quite the bizarre combination on hand here.

    • Virtua Fighter (32X, $3)

    • Metal Head (32X, $3)

    • The LucasArts Archives Volume IV: The Star Wars Collection Volume II (PC, $5)

    Over the years I’ve amassed a fairly small collection of 32X games, that ill-fated add-on for the Sega Genesis that was pretty much the Beginning of The End for Sega. I have a fair share of the ones people remember like Doom and Virtua Racing Deluxe, but a few other games elude me primarily because of how popular they are, like Knuckles Chaotix. In hindsight I should’ve grabbed it when they were $30 for a loose cartridge, because it’s definitely much higher these days.

    Virtua Fighter really doesn’t need much explanation: A 3D fighting game in the infancy of 3D graphics in arcades. The 32X version is likely an acceptable version of that game, but probably not the most ideal version to play these days. I’m not even big on fighting games, but I consider this significant enough to own.

    Metal Head is basically a first-person shooter in a mech. While not particularly new — stuff like MechWarrior existed for years before this — it’s something unexpected for the 32X, and had some surprisingly good 3D out of it. A shame it was put onto this dying system.

    Both of the Goodwills I went to had a surprisingly influx of NES, SNES and Genesis games, but most of them were the common licensed schlock or sports games. I even saw the infamous Pit Fighter for the SNES, but I’d rather not waste my money on garbage I’d only own for the novelty value.

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  • Mods and maps: Navy Seals Quake and Special Forces Quake: A tactical Quake bonanza!

    Mods and maps: Navy Seals Quake and Special Forces Quake: A tactical Quake bonanza!

    As much as I love the mod scene for old PC games, I realized I haven’t looked much at Quake‘s mod scene compared to others. The last mods I played for Quake was stuff like Quake Done Quick with a Vengeance, which was made more as a demo of the game rather than something actually playable.

    So for today, we’re gonna tackle some Quake mods that tried their best to be a bit more tactical in their approach. Both of these were released around the same time, and share a few similarities but both have their own unique quirks.

    Sadly, Michael Biehn and Charlie Sheen don’t appear in this.

    First on our list is a mod called Navy Seals Quake. This mod features a bevvy of new weapons such as the Mark 23 SOCOM pistol, the MP5 (and its silenced variant), a Mossberg tactical shotgun, even an M16 assault rifle with grenade launcher. While those seem like fairly common things now, for when this came out in 1998, that was considered pretty impressive.

    There are three unique levels made for Navy Seals Quake, though selecting New Game oddly takes you to the default Quake start level. The levels all feature you going in and killing everything while completing objectives like destroying a jet and disarming “RADEK” bombs. You can also play through regular Quake with these new weapons, giving you a different taste of the game, but only a handful of characters were replaced, leaving you with custom marine models mixed in with default Quake enemies like Ogres and Scrags.

    YouTube player

    In a unique twist, Navy Seals Quake features weapons that reload, realistic ammo management where partial-ammo reloads remove the bullets inside, the option to use flashbang grenades, even allowing you to headshot enemies and gib their heads. This was pretty advanced for its time, and it’s quite impressive.

    Sometimes the only solution is to rip everything to shreds, Rambo style. It’s like they know me.

    There is one interesting thing about Navy Seals Quake – it was made by a guy named Minh “Gooseman” Le. He would later go on to help make Action Quake II and a little fun multiplayer FPS you might’ve heard of called Counter-Strike. Le was one of the co-creators of Counter-Strike, who later worked with Valve up until Counter-Strike: Source. Le would later go on to make a CS successor called Tactical Intervention, which had some of the same features as Counter-Strike but with some new twists. While it wasn’t particularly outstanding, it did leave for some dumb moments.

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  • Yakiniku Bugyou: An import game that’s unabashedly Japanese.

    Yakiniku Bugyou: An import game that’s unabashedly Japanese.

    Since I started this blog, I’ve been covering mostly stuff made in the US or Europe. I didn’t realize this until a few months in that there hadn’t covered Japanese games on this site. For the most part, it’s because I don’t really play a lot of games from Japan these days. They’ve made a fair share of good stuff over the years, and stuff like Nintendo is untouchable.

    So let’s change that by playing a game that I had recently gotten from a promotion. Bonus: It’s a PlayStation game so it’ll be nice and nostalgic, compared to the last time I got a game from a promotion: The eurojanky StoneLoops! of Jurassica.

    For context: There was this website called Raptr, a social networking site for gamers where you can track achievements and keep up with friends and stuff. I kept forgetting I was on the service until I had gotten an email from them, saying I have fulfilled a requirement for Raptr Rewards, which was their obligatory “gain points by playing games and redeem them for things” service.

    They were doing one in collaboration with publisher MonkeyPaw Games, who released a bunch of import PlayStation games on digital storefronts, most notably the Tomba! series of games. I was hoping for something cool like Tomba!, or Arc the Lad, or even Alundra. Sadly, I got the short end of the stick and got something else entirely.

    Oh, this looks *very* Japanese…

    Yakiniku Bugyou is an import game for the PS1. Published and developed by Media Entertainment, this game is one of the selections Monkey Paw offered on selection, and while it wasn’t what I wanted, I was hoping I’d be able to make something interesting out of this.

    There’s one big problem: It’s entirely in Japanese. This has very little English in it. I know a total of about three words in Japanese, so I knew I was in for a rough time.

    Admittedly I have only a vague idea of what I’m doing here.
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  • I Bought Stuff! 7/31/2012: Video game… comic books?

    I Bought Stuff! 7/31/2012: Video game… comic books?

    I really should be getting prepared for a camping trip (as I originally wrote this). Instead I went to some thrift stores and found some interesting finds. But first, some GameStop finds.

    Surprising no one, finding interesting stuff at GameStop is a crapshoot. While I did find Perfect Dark Zero for a ridiculous $2, Boom Blox was considerably less ridiculous at $13. I’m trying to burn off the excess store credit I have with GameStop so I don’t have to do much business with them anymore, especially with some of their terrible business practices.

    Since I bought games on the Steam Summer sale from a few weeks back, I suddenly had games on systems I didn’t need. Such as a shrinkwrapped copy of Saints Row: The Third for Xbox 360. GameStop wanted $18 credit for it, so I opted to try my luck with my reliable Video Game Wizards, a local Portland game store I’ve talked about in the past.

    Since it was unopened, they offered me $14 in cash or $21 in store credit. I opted for the store credit, which was more than GS was gonna give me. I then rebought 007: Agent Under Fire, 007: Everything or Nothing and 007: Nightfire all on the PlayStation 2 for a total of $8. I’m trying to replace my multiplatform released games from the GameCube with PS2 or Xbox equivalents, mainly because most of the multiplatform ports on the GC suck control-wise or for other reasons.

    2020 update: As time goes on I realized that this wasn’t necessary for some games, and I ended up selling most of these back years later. I still follow this rule for some multiplatform games, but only on ones I don’t already have elsewhere.

    Sometimes when I’m in downtown Portland, I poke my head inside a couple thrift stores in the area, as I’ve gotten a few interesting things from them in the past. Like one time I found a Japanese copy of Hot Shots Golf 2 for the PlayStation.

    My usual thrift store haunts in downtown Portland were a bust, except in one store. This thrift store had a comic book I saw, which I decided to snatch up immediately. While I was there, I decided to thumb through their surprisingly vast comics section. I then walked out with about $2.40 of comic books. I’m no comic book nerd, the last comic I bought was Archie Comics’ Sonic the Hedgehog many years ago, but I couldn’t pass these up.

    Hellgate, Timecop and Mass Effect… what a combination.

     

    $2.40 for seven comics:

    • Mass Effect: Redemption issue 1

    • Mass Effect: Invasion issue 3

    • Mass Effect: Evolution issue 4

    • Hellgate: London issue 0

    • Star Wars: The Old Republic – The Lost Suns issue 5

    • Timecop issues 1 and 2


    It was the Mass Effect: Invasion issue that caught my eye and made me thumb through their comics. With the exception of Timecop — that’s based off the cornball Jean-Claude Van Damme film of the same name — they were all video game tie-ins.

    The Hellgate: London one was especially interesting, considering that game was an absolute bust at this point, only living on through a Korean acquisition.

    It also seems these were done as special editions, as my 5 minutes of Google searching revealed that every comic series here was a 4-5 issue special edition rather than a regular series. Two of the comics were a mere quarter, while the rest were 50 cents each. Coupled with the thrift store doing an end-of-month drawing where they cut a random percentage off the sale — mine was 20% — meant that I spent $2.40 for all seven.

    Coincidentally all the comics I bought are published by Dark Horse Comics. Hell, about a good 95% of the comics on sale there were Dark Horse-published. This is an amusing coincidence, as Dark Horse Comics’ main office is in nearby Milwaukie, Oregon. I’ve gone past there a few times, and I didn’t know they were the king of licensed comics. Well, with the exception of Timecop, they can’t all be winners.

    I should eventually see how cheap it would be to complete the set, or at least find these online to read. While I may not be big on Mass Effect or Star Wars: The Old Republic, I’m down for reading some interesting video game stories. Sure beats reading the Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog stuff again.

  • Trying some Angry Birds Fruit Gummies: Space edition.

    Trying some Angry Birds Fruit Gummies: Space edition.

    Hi. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Forgive me, I’ve been swamped with many ideas and no time to publish them. I’ll have some more stuff up real soon. Instead, here’s a fluff post about video game candy.

    Heard of Angry Birds? It’s hard not to, they’ve permeated the public conscious about as much as Call of Duty and Madden NFL in terms of video games. A goofy game where you fling birds at buildings to destroy enemy pigs, it has appeared on every system that could possibly play it, and is apparently really addicting. I played the Google Chrome browser version (no longer available as of 2020) and didn’t quite get the appeal.

    Doesn’t mean it’s not a multi-million dollar success for Finnish developer Rovio. There’s Angry Birds T-Shirts, Angry Birds toys, Angry Birds board games, there’s probably Angry Birds whack-a-mole if I looked around hard enough.

    Now they’ve invaded the food space with Angry Birds Fruit Gummies.

    Love the sci-fi motif they decided to go with their silly bird game.

    I was in a Wal-Mart, getting a few things here and there, when I saw these in a bargain section for 98 cents. I thought, sure, why the hell not. I remember fruit snacks from my youth. Plus I’m reminded of Matt of X-Entertainment (now of Dinosaur Dracula) buying all the Shrek 2 related foods for his site, so I couldn’t resist giving them a try.

    The box tells me to “Collect all four” box covers. Each of the boxes featured art of the respective characters, but I opted for the red bird as that’s the most well-known and iconic besides the pig.

    These seem to be based on the most recent Angry Birds game, Angry Birds Space, which is probably the same as the original game except now IN SPAAAAAAACE! With low gravity!

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