Birdy the Mighty: Decode

For the longest time Netflix kept telling me that Birdy the Mighty: Decode was in my top 10 selection for things I should watch. Along side things like a documentary called Battle for Haiti and some B movie called Today's Special, I was rather skeptical, especially since it looked like some sort of ecchi fan service show. Eventually, though, I gave in since I've been a fan of anime for quite awhile, and I figured "Why not? I can always watch something else if it turns out to be lame."

The first few episodes weren't anything particularly special, running after random space criminals with alien ice skate boots. Seemed like a corny show that I probably wouldn't get into. Nonetheless, I kept watching, and slowly but surely the show took off and bloomed into something I didn't expect. Smiles, tears, fun, and drama - this show really has a lot to offer. Not only that, but the further into the show you get the more complexity they add to the storyline. Little things are shown here and there that don't seem to mean too much other than adding a dash of color to the pasts of characters, but this show takes it one step further and decides to take that color to a massive canvas spanning the entire series.

It was a pleasant surprise I didn't expect from something that started out so corny and predictable with some random tentacle alien that probably belonged in a crappy hentai meant more for eye candy than anything else. This show is definitely an interesting grab bag of a story that will get you to fall in love with the characters the more you get to know them. On top of that, the show seems to have multiple climaxes throughout to keep it fresh and interesting.

Not a Death Note level complex anime to be sure, but most certainly worth the time to watch it. I'd give it an A- overall. Go check it out!

Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day all. The day invented to sell more candy and make couples feel like jerks when they forget to get something (or be sleazy for whatever reason). Actually, though, Valentine's Day... or Saint Valentine's Day wasn't meant to be a day about lovey dovey stuff. In fact, it didn't become one until almost 2000 years later during the middle ages with the help of poets fluffing the time up in general.

The holiday was actually meant to be a feast honoring a saint or group of saints with the name Valentinus. So little was known about who or what was being celebrated that the Pope in 1969 decided to strike the entire honorary feast off the calendar all together. Now the person or group isn't even sainted anymore, just "proposed" to be sainted. So basically, some random guy might have been one of the holiest dude of all time, but let's just say he's no longer a saint because hell if I knew who he was. While we're at it, let's say the holocaust never happened, because hell if I was there. Wait long enough and important events or people don't matter anymore.

History is a strange mistress. Sometimes we hold it up on a pedestal claiming that we need to respect history, or we are doomed to repeat it. Other times we don't believe history has any baring on reality whatsoever, which is a load of hooey if you ask me. If history never happened, I wouldn't have this computer that I'm typing at right now, nor the games I play, the TV I watch, the mass produced food I eat, or the car I drive. We twist history to what suits us whenever it suits us no matter what is being twisted. Of course, humanity does that for just about everything including business numbers like Enron, global warming (hey, it was global freezing in the 70s, it'll be again eventually), and just about everything else.

As they say, history is written by the victor, or in this case, the people still alive to deny you were worth a damn a few thousand years ago. Now then, what else can we ruin today? Let's do it!

Vincent and the Doctor

Have you ever seen Doctor Who? Is it something you enjoy? Honestly, I didn't get into it until the new 2005 series started. I liked the older 1963 show off and on, but something about the reboot just drew me in that didn't happen with the older one. Today I was watching some reruns of the show because it's really the kind of series that you can "experience" far more than one time with it still feeling fresh a year later.

Today's episode was called Vincent and the Doctor, the Vincent referred to in the title being Vincent van Gogh. This episode reminded me of something that I really like about Doctor Who - the show can make you laugh, feel happy, feel anger, feel sadness, and in my case, even make me cry. It details why the Doctor goes back to meet Vincent as well as a short look into how Vincent may have acted and viewed the world around him. Quite a beautiful episode out of the many intense story driven ones, only touching ever so slightly on what happened in the previous episode since that one had some very heavy material in it.

If you've never watched Doctor Who before, or you have watched the original in the past but weren't quite so interested; I highly recommend giving the 2005 version a first or second chance. Given enough time to get into the show and feel for the characters it can take you on an emotional roller coaster of beauty, intense story, and fantastic whimsy characters throughout that you won't soon forget the joy of.

Jamestown

Recently I've been playing a lot of this Jamestown game co-op with my girlfriend, and I must say this game is a blast in co-op mode. If you enjoy the old games like Galaga and want to take it up a massive notch, Jamestown might just be for you. My friend, TheShadowCookie, enjoys the game quite a bit and has mentioned that he has trouble with its difficulty level, which is saying something since he is an avid Touhou player. I recently managed to beat the final level of the game, not including the DLC, and boy was it a painful level to work my way through.

Now, if you're looking for an amazing story with thick plot and twists that make you want to hear more at every turn... well... this sure as hell isn't the game to find it in. The story is crazy and strange. I barely was able to make a lick of sense out of it other than apparently the Spanish have joined forces with Martians and Jamestown is on Mars instead of in the United States. It gets weirder from there. The game made me think I was about to play a strange RPG with the opening, and to be honest, I think that kind of a game would have made more sense with the crazy story telling job that was done in this game. You can easily skip through the story without missing much of anything at all as the gameplay is the shining point this title has to offer.

The music played during levels is fantastic. It matches the intense atmosphere with projectiles flying every which way to a T. It's quite nice to do your best to let your weapons run silent just to listen to the music as much as possible. I've been impressed lately by the music appearing in indie titles. They really have been doing a magnificent job there even in a game where the story is so disjointed and weird that it doesn't make much sense logically. Still, the story is better than some games I've seen, so I won't dwell on the weirdness any further.

Overall I would have to give this game a 7/10 for great gameplay, a fantastic music score, and some rather pretty graphics to look at with projectiles floating all about the screen. The points that strike it down to 7 are the story and the steep difficulty curve. Anyone who can play Touhou as well as TheShadowCookie saying a projectile game is hard means the game is excruciatingly difficult for most casual players and even some hardcore ones. You'll probably manage to make it to the final level after a good bit of playing if you can keep at it, but the final level is bound to stop many players in their tracks as it takes the difficulty curve from a 45 degree angle to a 90 degree straight up death trap. I'd recommend it for a fun bit of gameplay on your own, but especially for a lot of enjoyment playing co-op with friends.

My Review of Roku 2 XD Streaming Player

Originally submitted at Roku

Features the highest-quality HD streaming available.

Roku 2 XD Streaming Player

Much Faster Than My Blu-ray Player

By FrozenFoxy from Westminster, CO on 12/26/2011

 

4out of 5

Pros: Built in Wi-Fi, Easy to use, Compact, Reliability, Great value, High quality picture, Easy to set up

Cons: Sometimes can'tplay video, Sometimes boxart is gone

Best Uses: Primary TV, Living room

Describe Yourself: Technophile, Netflix fan

The product is pretty good overall from what I bought it for - Netflix. It runs much faster than my Blu-Ray player was able to with Netflix and doesn't have anywhere near the level of issues I experienced when trying that player. However, every so often boxart for movies will go missing for awhile, and I can't play a movie I'm interested in. I imagine this has to do with downloading it from the Internet, but with a 20Mb download speed and not doing anything in the rest of the house... you'd think it would be almost instantaneous. Sometimes I end up waiting a good 15 minutes for more than 30-50 titles to be playable. Perhaps I have too many titles queued at once, but it doesn't seem like it should take 15 minutes to load the rest.

Overall, though, I don't regret my purchase of the Roku at all. It works quite well, it's amazingly compact, and I get to enjoy all the Netflix I could want from anywhere without running a wire all the way to my modem in another room.

(legalese)

Stream and Halloween Special 2

Stream seems to have gone pretty well. Managed to stay there the entire 24 hours, and thanks to everyone we also managed to raise $742 this year with Extra Life for the Children's Miracle Network! Great work everyone! We played quite a few games and even some multiplayer games during the stream as well as beating Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter and Mass Effect.

In other news, special 2 for Halloween has started and is American McGee's Alice. This special will wrap up the Halloween month and bring us into November where we will start to see Dead Island, Dead Space 2, and other games brought back into action. Hope you'll all enjoy that.

Halloween and Extra Life

I update this thing a whole lot, don't I? Hah. Never been that avid of a blogger I guess.

In any case, we've got a Halloween special going on right now if you're interested to check it out - Penumbra: Black Plague. I honestly like it a lot more than the first one. I believe we're nearing about the halfway point of the game right now, and later this Halloween month we will be seeing a secondary Halloween special to fill all 31 days of Halloween.

We're also going to be doing an Extra Life stream on October 15th at 8AM PST/PDT to support the Children's Miracle Network. We've already reached our $500 goal, but further contributions to help out the kids are always awesome. Feel free to check out the donation page at http://www.tiny.cc/frozenfoxy2011 or come to the stream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/frozenfoxy-s-gamez

Hope to see you all at the stream and that you continue to enjoy what's coming out.

In other news, I finally got through Mass Effect for the first time. The game is, as expected, quite amazing in its entirety. Anyone who hasn't managed to complete it yet like I hadn't will definitely want to sit down and soak in the experience. I think it was fantastic. The other game I recently finished was Driver San Francisco. Story is crappy, driving is flaky, and it's overall kind of boring. I think the best part was going out of your own body to crash into people you're racing against. Even that gets tedious after awhile though. Oh well. Not a game I'd recommend all that highly unless you're really into driving games or not into them at all. I've heard that people who don't like driving games enjoyed this one, interestingly enough. Hm.

Anyway, signing out till next time.