The Rambo effect

I’ve spent the last several minutes scouring the Internet for the name of a game I played on the NES years ago, but can’t seem to locate now. I’ve not been successful, but I have noticed something – no one seems to have yet written about the enormous effect the Rambo movies had on 1980s video games. The list of classic Rambo imitators includes such classic man-vs.-army games as Commando, Contra, Ikari Warriors, Metal Gear and Rush’n Attack, to name a few. Hell, many of us even suffered through the Rambo game.

I guess there wouldn’t be much to write. The Rambo series was popular; shooter games were popular. You do the math. Like an essay outlining the influence of the Alien, Blade Runner, Predator or Star Wars movies, the thing would read like a list of attributes and game titles. Still, wouldn’t it be nice if someone wasn’t lazy like me and actually did it?

Update: I finally did find the game I was looking for. It’s called Guerrilla War. It’s basically an Ikari Warriors clone, also made by SNK, but with a strange twist. It’s set in Cuba…in the 1950s. Your heros? If you’re player 2, you only get to be Fidel Castro. But, if you’re lucky enough to pick player 1, you get to be Ernesto “Che” Guevara. This pro-commie element of the game was, of course, heavily censored by SNK before the game reached Stateside as was the original name: Guevara.

DS Haiku – Movie tie-in edition

 

Quick, think of a movie-related video game that you’ve actually liked. I’ll wait…

Yeah, none. So who keeps buying this shit? If this weeks’ new DS downloads on the Nintendo Channel are any indication, it’s got to be little kids haggling with their parents for this shovelware. Time to unleash haiku fury. But first, a little genuine old-school excitement:

Contra 4: Contra FUCKING Four!/The Code doesn’t work at all/I got my ass kicked

The Incredible Hulk: Hulk mad, Hulk smash you/Right after Hulk smash this ice/And stupid soldiers

Kung Fu Panda: Say this with me now/Stylus action controls suck/No damn exceptions

Wall-E: Wee garbage robot/Makes blocks of explosive trash/And bores me to death

the Wii bloc

Nintendo recently posted two very interesting poll questions on the Everybody Votes Channel last week, and I was elated – as a media and politics junkie – to discover that the results came out this week.

The first question asked: Are we living in the best of times or the worst of times? The results:

More than half of the Nintendo Nation thinks we’re living in the best of times? That certainly doesn’t jive with the polls that have been reporting +80% we’re-moving-in-the-wrong-direction. It’s interesting to see where the negativity lies:

Maine, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida are pissy. Puerto Rico is drawing a hard green. Lot of swing states here. So what does this mean for Obama’s message of Hope or McCain’s message of security? I’m not sure it matters at all. There’s a lot of kids on this poll, and they don’t pay bills. They don’t care about politics either:

the end of racism? Weeeeeell…

As I’ve said before, something weird is happening in the world of American race relations, and it’s only going to get weirder if Obama gets elected.

I was gratified to see a black man agree with me (without knowing it) over at The Assimilated Negro. In this post about a white boy who has etched a racial epithet into his skin and is worried about scoring with the brown ladies, TAN noted, “What’s done is done, but if he was just considering the tattoo I would tell him to wait and see if Obama gets elected. If Obama is in, there will be a lot more leeway and tolerance for ignorant ish like that.”

Yup. An Obama presidency would definitely shift the balance of racial tolerance, if not the actual power balance. But maybe the power balance is shifting too. You know something is topsy turvy when The Root is defending Don Imus against the race police. Mr. Izrael is a foward thinker, observing, “But if Imus can’t order a cup of coffee—black—without a special dispensation, without the need of some kind of interpreter or co-signer, then soon he’ll be out of business, along with a lot of other folks. Black folks. Because when you start trying to censor other people, you’re next.”

Despite the title of this, I’m not actually suggesting that any of this constitutes an end to racism, but they could be signs that this country is finally going to have to face race relations head on, in the open, without euphemistic cover.

Ho-bama

I was riding down the road last night when NPR’s On Point came on the air, asking if Barak Obama’s status as the presumptive nominee and his latest political wranglings have taken the shine off is idealistic image. That reminded me that I have not picked on The Senator from Illinois lately, and I’ve been saving up ammo:

- OK, what is up with the public financing flip flop? No, spare me, I know the strategic reasoning. He’s got so much damn money, he could buy a Hummercopter, as the Daily Show put it. $250 mil or $80 mil, which would you choose? Obama’s huge cash advantage will allow him bury McCain on all media fronts. He’ll be able to control his message without the incessant meddling of 527s. But why was he stupid enough to agree to use public money in the first place? This tells me he had no idea how much people want to throw money at him.

- His performance yesterday after the Supreme Court ruling on death for child rapists struck me as Kerry-style subdivision pandering. But it will play well in the flat and square states. These pansy stances on the death penalty irk me. Can we just knock it off and join the rest of civilization? How about adopting the metric system too? Tired of trying to remember how many pints there are in a gallon.

- Obama! Shut it! We don’t want to pay Hillary’s debts! Put the bitch on the lecture circuit and make her work it off!

the Virtual Console racket

I had $2 in my online Wii Shop Channel account. I uploaded the minimum amount of money ($10), bought Samurai Showdown ($9), and now I have $3 in my account.

This, is bullshit.

I understand that Nintendo is trying to keep the credit card charges down by limiting cash upload transactions, but they aren’t exactly making it easy for us to even out our accounts either. The smallest price on that thing is $5. It’s like they are trying to keep us on a the hook, always buying more games to cash in on that spare few dollars laying around.

Oh well, I’m a patient man. I only buy what I really want and haven’t already stolen. It’ll even out…eventually.

Arkanoid haiku

If you are reading my blog for the first time and understood that title unaided, immediately seek help for your geekiness…or keep reading, my valued advertising target demo.

In honor of the appearance of the Arkanoid DS demo appearing on the Nintendo Channel, a poem:

Classic coin muncher
Made all the better with style
And stylus control

Thank you, thank you. No, really, you’re too kind!

could we interest you in…?

NPR reported yesterday that Charter Communications, an internet service provider, is planning to start monitoring its users internet activity in order to push targeted ads to its customers. In case you are wondering, yes, this is scary as all hell.

Corporations and the government have long been disturbed by the altruistic and open structure of the net, and they’re having a hard time locking it down to make gobs of cash. Their halting and half-hearted attempts to bring the Internet back under the warm feathers of capitalism and the police state are enumerated here on Infowars.com in a shrill and ill-informed article about how the bastards are going to shut it all down by 2012. Fat chance.

Still, companies have gotten pretty good at coming up with tons of ways to get us to fork over our personal information for ad targeting – Facebook, MySpace, G-mail, etc. I’ve decided to radically alter my Facebook page with random interests, just to see what ads they’re going to throw at me. Stay tuned.

LOIC and other useful acronyms

OOOOOOOO, I done pissed ‘em off now.

Apparently, despite the fact that they have spawned several pop culture memes (LOLcats, Rickrolling, etc.)and launched Net-wide attacks on Scientology and Ashley Tisdale (of all people), no one has bothered to walk into the wide-open door that is 4chan and document this weirdness. This weekend, my little posts on this blog became the Number 1 search on Google for “4chan” plus “Tisdale.”

This is funny for two reasons: First, I’m pretty sure it was /b/ itself who made that happen when someone found my blog and posted it to the site. In one day, my pageviews jumped 60 percent. Impressive-sounding, no? Until you realize that /b/ raised my viewership by, like, 40 people. The second reason this is funny is that /b/ gave me a rough idea of the size of “Anonymous,” which appears to be several orders of magnitude smaller than they would have us all believe … about 40 people. Oh, another funny thing was the threat attempt some little turd left in my comment queue, ordering me not to “talk about /b/.”

Despite their Fight Club mentality, /b/’s “raid” tactics were fitful and hamfisted. While there were some talented people attempting to game Google and Digg into giving life to their phony Tisdale-has-AIDS story, the majority were spamming Tisdale fan boards with pornographic images and launching DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on Tisdale sites. Their weapon of choice for this latter tactic was LOIC, an acronym that took me a few minutes to track down. Called Low Orbit Ion Cannon, it’s essentially a piece of software that acts as a sort of DDoS for Dummies. Using LOIC’s handy point-and-click interface, the teenage wasteland of /b/ can overwhelm web servers by pinging the hell out of them with useless requests for information. True hackers infect scores of computers with worms and use these zombie networks to launch DDoS attacks. However, LOIC is good enough for /b/tards with too much time on their hands.

tisdale raid update

Despite a rough start and a few “newfag” missteps, 4chan’s Anonymous /b/ mob continues their assault on Ashley Tisdale’s health with a chorus of fake accusations. So far, they’ve managed to get an official denial on Us Magazine’s web site. Not too shabby.

There’s now a new thread on /b/ coordinating the raid. I won’t bother to link it, because it will be gone as soon as the Tisdale camp’s lawyers force 4chan to remove it, but here’s a few choice quotes:

- “we could make an ashley tisdale aids fund. and then use the money ashley fags donate to do background check on her”
- “wikipedia has locked her profile until tomorrow. Boss N_____ is displeased.”
- “Is /b/ really that pathetic that nobody has a credit card?”
- “These past few days, I’ve really realized how pathetic Ashley Tisdale fans are.”
- “You seriously think her agent and her handlers and shit like that would allow personal information like that to be available to the public for three fucking dollars? Celebrities deal with stalkers and shit all the time and are usually pretty tough to find. Especially lower profile C-listers like this whore.”
- “so, because i have been afk for a few days lemmie just be clear here….. my /b/ has the entire free world thinking this dumb bitch has the hivvy, and im hoping its because she trying to ride the rickroll train to fame?!?! i really love you guys ;)”
- “We had a decent run, got some denials in a few newspapers, but /b/ doesn’t have the focus to really make this work. We should have concentrated on either attacking/ddos’ing fan sites/youtube or spreading rumours, but we’re too big, too bloated.”
- “Am I the only one who thought Hannah Montana was a porn star the first time I heard the name?”
- “Sorry sir, you are wrong. Ashley Tisdale has AIDS. ALLOFTHEM!”

This is both hillarious and scary all at once. These punks have even cooked up a new blog post to counter the Disney denials, claiming a coverup. They are busy creating fake blogs and posting the article to them in order to get Digg to pick them up. At the time of this writing, the first three results of a Google News search for “Ashley Tisdale” are denials of the AIDS story. This is some bizarre shit.

So far, the /b/ mob has managed to game the robo-editors at Digg and Google, but they are facing much difficulty getting human editors to take the bait. Even Dlisted, which revels in hammering Tisdale, hasn’t risen to the lure. The attention span at /b/ is waning. It looks like this raid as reached its apex.