Sunday, March 25, 2012

TEXT PLAY: Legend of Mana (PlayStation; 2000): Issue #03: Getting Fruity


There are some weird-ass fruits and vegetables in this game, but there's still a couple things we've gotta do before we get to see any of it.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Monday, March 12, 2012

From The Old Floppies: Issue #3: Unfinished MiSTing of "Adventure of Jesse and Nick"

Here's something else I'm going to have to explain a little bit before I put in a jump and the actual item.

As quite a few readers may know, I'm a fan of a show called Mystery Science Theater 3000, or MST3K for short.  I didn't really get into it until college, but I'd seen the show on a few occasions in high school.  I didn't really "get it" until my local FOX affiliate picked up the syndicated "Mystery Science Theater Hour" version of the show, which ran slightly abridged episodes as two-parters instead of one, two-hour long block, with special bumpers at the start and end of each hour.

During my last year or so of full-time undergraduate study and the few years immediately after, I wrote quite a few fan fiction pieces based on the series.  In general, these were referred to as "MiSTings"  At first, I wrote using the characters from the last three seasons of the show, the Sci-Fi Channel era, as that was what I was most familiar with, having watched those first-run while in college.  Later on, I started a self-insertion series along the lines MST3K.  Eventually, I had to stop altogether as a result of the combination of lack of time, the fact that subjectively good material to work with had become exceedingly difficult to find, as of 2004, more or less, and, at about the same time, the most major archive for this genre of fanfiction went dark.

The general format of these fan fiction pieces has a lot of what is known as "script style" writing for the host segments, where the characters making fun of a particular item are interacting outside of the item itself.  Within the material being joked about, the character jokes will be in script style and the source material, usually prose of some sort, will have ">" at the start of each new line.  I'll say right now, this is one of the more complex types of writing I've ever done, and I'm sure it takes some time to get used to reading as well.  What I'm about to present will certainly be more of a challenge to read, as I hadn't yet developed a more practical way of setting things up.

What you are about to see, in this case, is an unfinished version of one of the last "true" MiSTings I ever wrote before I transitioned from using the characters from the TV show to using myself and whatever seemed like funny guests for me to have on a particular piece.  This is Mike Nelson and the season ten cast riffing on a story I originally wrote for a language arts class in ninth grade called "The Adventure of Jesse and Nick".

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Sunday, March 11, 2012

From The Old Floppies: Issue #02: Review of Sonic SatAM Episode "Cry Of The Wolf"

Much of what I said when I posted the previous review in this series is true of this entry as well.

These two posts were part of three I wrote for the Sonic Tenth Anniversary thing I mentioned last time.  I don't think I'm going to be able to post the third one of these I've got because everything I've got that I thought might have been able to open it with says it's either not compatible with the file type or that the file is corrupted.  The worst part of that is that it's actually the first of the three in the miniseries and would have explained a few things that happened in the "Sonic Conversion" review and this one.

But even if I can't post all three of these, there's still plenty of other old stuff I'll try to get posted here as soon as I can, almost certainly interspersed with Text Play issues and other items.

In the meantime, grab up some goodies and get ready for more unintentional laughs for all the wrong reasons that I know I've only brought upon myself.  We've got Retro Review Sign!
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Saturday, March 10, 2012

From The Old Floppies: Issue #01: Review of Sonic SatAM Episode "Sonic Conversion"

There's gonna be a bit more before the jump here, folks, but there's a good reason for that.  I kind of need to explain this before I get into the actual post.

As some of you might know, I'm something of a fan of SEGA's Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, especially the cartoon series, though my opinions on each of the four does vary.  About ten years ago, when the franchise was having its tenth anniversary, I was contacted by an old AOL contact and fellow Sonic fan, who had gotten a group together to build a fan site to celebrate the event.  This fellow, Alex Weitzman, if I recall his name correctly, asked me if I wanted to contribute to said site in some way, as I had some fan fiction that could have gone up.  There was also to be a section for fan reviews of various episodes of the Saturday Morning cartoon series.  Since I had a few episodes recorded to VHS available, I volunteered to do reviews of those episodes as well.

What follows below the jump is the first of two such reviews I have ready access to, for the episode entitled "Sonic Conversion".  Originally written in fall or winter of 2001, at a time when I was still an active part of the Mystery Science Theater fan community, the overall review series takes its title from my self-insertion fan series based on MST.

Be warned, though, at the time, I was only just beginning to really develop as a writer, so expect the spelling to be a little off in a few places and the attempts at humor to be markedly less than stellar overall.

With that, we've got review sign, folks!  Get your snacks and beverages now and prepare to laugh yourselves silly for all the wrong reasons!

Things I Don't Get: Herd Feeding


Knowingly or not, even I've done it.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012