No, I Did Not Watch The Super Bowl

I never watch the Super Bowl. I’m not a football fan. Never cared for football unless it was Tecmo Bowl back in the 90s and that was a brief sling before moving on and never looking back. The only reason I would consider watch would be for the commercials, but once I’ve learned that Canadian broadcasting rights and laws and whatnots prevent us from watching the commercials people actually want to watch, what was even the point?

Truth be told, Sunday was a pretty bad day for me as a whole. Wasn’t feeling all that great in the morning and then I fell asleep around six-ish, only to wake up at one in the morning… which is depressing. I did a couple quick things late at night before heading back to bed for a couple more hours before getting on with my day.

For what it’s worth, I’m feeling fine. I haven’t been feeling that much pain as of late, which is nice. I’ve gained a couple pounds, which is not so nice. Other than that… eh, I guess it could have been worse. But I’d like it to be actually better for once. Would be nice.

Review #1280 – Valis IV (PC Engine)

You know what? The last one came in late, so you get this one early. My treat… or is it a trick?

The final chronological entry in the Valis series… and I’d imagine the take in this video is going to be pretty controversial, though I honestly don’t believe that to be the case. I like to think I’ve been honest and… well, honest, at least.

Oh well… Wednesday’s video will be our last dip into Valis territory with Super Valis IV… fitting that it would be the final Valis game ever released until 2006 where…

Actually, never mind. It’s the final Valis game ever released until these collections came along. Nothing else happened before that. Ever.

OG Star Wars Returns To Theaters Next Year

Source: https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-50th-anniversary-theatrical-release

Yeah, so 2027 is supposed to see the original 1977 theatrical cut of Star Wars return to theaters for a limited run of sorts… which is actually something of a big deal considering that for decades, George Lucas had resisted the idea of showing that original cut, insisting that only his updated versions be used since they were the canonical versions of Star Wars. As a result, all people had to work with were old laserdiscs and perhaps that 2006 limited edition release.

Yeah, there were despecialized editions and fan edits… but those are still altered versions. They’re illegitimate solutions at best. The fact that Disney decided to go this route… you know what? That’s a big deal. In fact, it may be the first time in a long while that anything involving Star Wars feels like a genuine, honest-to-goodness big deal event. The last time I might have had this feel was possibly the release of The Force Awakens, before Star Wars became a content machine for Disney to gut.

No details on how this would transpire… not sure if this cut will make it to Disney Plus or any semblance of physical media… but it’s something.

Oh, and there’s a new Starfighter movie coming around that time as well… whatever floats your boat, I guess.

Speaking of Starfighter… I need to dig up that game.

PEE COCK IS ONE HUNDRED YEARS ANCIENT

100 Years Of NBC… and 26 years of pretending that Conan O’Brien never got the Tonight Show… I guess they couldn’t find two clips of Big Jaw to add to that montage.

Never letting that go, by the way…

Oh well… at least they remembered that Star Trek was a thing… that they cancelled… TWICE.

Happy birthday, NBC.

Now go fuck yourselves.

 

About That Scouts Show…

Since nobody else is going to bring it up… Star Trek Scouts.

A series of CG animated shorts aimed at pre-schoolers, Star Trek Scouts follows a trio of Starfleet kids charged with defending what they call “Starfleet Headquarters” from asteroids of various types, using comprising common household grimes. This lasted for about ten episodes before the creators decided that we need to have our scouts do more than just shoot asteroids. So now they’re going on “holodeck adventures” simulating various away missions and things of that nature.

Let’s be fair; this is aimed at pre-schoolers and nowadays, these sort of productions are often devoid of actual learning material. It doesn’t take much to figure out that tossing a shoe at an ice asteroid isn’t going to do much – even a 2-month-old toddler would be tossing their rattle at the screen. I don’t want to say that Scouts lack any educational merit because  there are plenty of other people that can tell you that, but I’d imagine that there is someone out there… somewhere… that sees something of value in using Star Trek Scouts as an educational tool of sorts… which is never a good idea. Not necessarily Scouts, but no edutainment product should be a replacement for learning how things work the old fashioned way.

All I will say that when I was the age of the target demographic for this thing, the stuff that I watched that catered to that pre-school age group did more to teach me about the world than anything I’ve seen of the output from modern pre-school fare.

So, yes, I don’t see the educational merit of Star Trek Scout and I think the plots are more idiotic than juvenile… but the kids are fine. They’re a likeable bunch. And this is coming from someone who generally don’t care for child characters because they’re often not that well written or portrayed… but this is fine.

There you go… something from modern on-screen Star Trek that I actually watch and… didn’t mind… how about that?

Review #1279 – Valis I (Famicom)

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here, but this Famicom version was the closest I got to experiencing voluntarily pure misery in playing one of these Valis games. This was one of the very few times where I was thankful for the implementation of save states and rapid-fire add-ons to make this thing slightly less intolerable than it would have been had I played the OG Famicom cart. Absolutely dreadful.

By the way, if you’re keen on playing this, consider using this Valis++ hack that I mentioned once or twice.
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/248/

Valis Delayed, But… If I May…

So the Valis review is delayed on account of health issues and should be up tonight at the latest, but I do have another piece of business that I’d like to share in the meantime.

Dave’s Old NES and Game Boy Reviews from 1999 – one of my earliest online web projects that actually got put on a Geocities site (people know what Geocities is, right?) has returned to the land of the living for the first time since 2000.

Well, that’s a bit of a fib. There was some version of this that was posted on the old Blogger space, but that was an incomplete version and it was soon taken down for a long time until the completed version was found. That happened a couple years ago and was one of the first major projects I’ve ventured to restore after the move to WordPress. It took a while, but now you folks can check out my earliest contributions to the Interwebs… even if it’s reduced to a single page and not an elaborate website… but it’s got screenshots and everything, so it’s not all bad.

To visit the page, click here.

Doctor Who Doesn’t Need To Be Star Wars

Source: https://bleedingcool.com/tv/doctor-who-never-going-to-be-star-wars-is-a-good-thing-mark-gatiss/

Yes, we’re going to continue using the Doctor Boo banner for whenever we need to talk about the current direction of Doctor Boo. If we ever need to touch on vintage Doctor Who, we’ll use something else. But as far as this current flux of Doctor Boo, BOOM! There you go. I ain’t even bothering with Billie Piper. Ncuti deserves some love… and also deserved some better scripts, but that TARDIS has long since flown off… but I digress.

So some time ago, veteran writer of many Doctor Who scripts Mark Gatiss opined his two pence on the failure of the Disney experiment and suggested that maybe Doctor Who doesn’t need to be another Star Wars or Marvel type franchise with its own cinematic universe or other such rubbish. It should just focus on being a good show and embrace its somewhat kitschy nature.

I’ll leave that “kitschy nature” point open for debate, but yes, Doctor Who doesn’t need another Whoniverse or whatever marketing bollocks you want to use. There’s a whole bunch of Big Finish stuff that covers the nuances and how many people actually dig through all those subseries about the companions and side characters that aren’t the Doctor themselves? I don’t need (nor want) to watch eleventy billion side series to enjoy the main show. Just give me one good show with good stories and good characters. And then if that starts to get some wheels, you can think about maybe one (and just ONE) side story here and there.

Whatever happens with Doctor Who next, hopefully it’ll recover from the past few years of the Disney malaise that inflicted it. Go back to being cheap as shit if you have to. As long as the scripts are good.

And fuck off with all the “mavity” bullshit. That was fucking stupid.

WCW Monday Nitro (Feb. 5th, 1996) – A Breeze Monumental Moment

A bit of a historical record breaking moment.

Oh, I’m not talking about Nitro, although I will say that this is probably one of the better episodes I’ve seen in a while as far as general interest goes. But with this post, we have officially surpassed the NWA-TNA run from a couple years ago, when I dropped off after 21 weeks due to the debut of “OH SHIT! IT’S VINCE RUSSO!” and that’s when I decided, “Nope. Not for me.” Fortunately, Russo isn’t anywhere to be found here in 1996, but we are a couple months away from the end of the road when Scott Hall shows up and Nitro expands to two hours. I’m still on the fence as to how to proceed beyond that, but we’ll cross that bridge eventually.

Right now, let’s talk about this Nitro show…

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