I Don't Understand The Modding Community

As the title of this post suggests, I really don't understand the modding community. Sometimes, they'll make something incredibly awesome, like mods in Skyrim that require players to seek warmth from the cold, or requires them to actually sleep and eat at regular intervals. That's really cool and it helps a player immerse themselves into the game more easily. It also sounds like Fallout New Vegas's Hardcore mode if it was actually done well. There's also mods of old games, mostly Super Mario World from what I've seen, that create an entirely new game with the engine. These mods are awesome. They make sense to me.

Then, you have a mod that makes Sonic the Hedgehog a giant erect penis. No, it doesn't give him a giant, erect penis, but I'm sure that exists too. Those are all over Bioware and Bethesda games, and Sonic porn is rampant on the internet, so it just makes sense. Except it doesn't make any sense. I hate the internet.

No, this mod turns Sonic into a giant, floating cock that runs really fast and slams itself into robots. The link is below. I don't think it would be the best of ideas to post this directly here, in the event that posting a video of male genitalia running through a city at high speeds collecting rings and stomping robots comes back to bite me in the ass at some point. But the link is there.

Click here if you dare.

And yet, here I am laughing like a little kid. Damn you, internet. Damn you.

Of course, I need to conclude this with the one line from Egoraptor's Mega Man X Sequelitis episode that I thought of immediately after I saw this. You can also take this as my review of Sonic Generations. Seriously, as a former fan of the Sonic games who'd been beaten down by the horrors of Sonic '06 and all the other terrible Sonic games in the past decade or so, it's good to finally get something as kick ass as Sonic Generations.

Trash Talking The Baldwins

I just now remembered something that happened to me a couple years back. It might not be a particularly funny story, but I sort of find it amusing. I'm guessing I can fit this into either the movie or feeble attempts at comedy section of this site's subject matter. Onto the story.

I live in Syracuse, New York, the hometown of the Baldwin family. They weren't born here - they're actually from Long Island, but they have strong ties to the community. Their mother lives here. She's sort of a hometown hero here with her breast cancer charity. She's kind of awesome. Anyway, the Baldwin brothers are frequently in town. My mother saw Stephen in a Wal-Mart and I think I saw him outside of a building in the city once. My former co-workers at the library I used to work at had Alec stop in to pick up some books for his mother. Nobody cares enough about Danny or Billy to bring up times they saw them. It's like bumping into Jim Belushi or Don Swayze. Nobody gives a shit about them.

"Oh, but Don Swayze was in a few episodes of True Blood!" Who cares. He's just an uglier version of Patrick Swayze.

"Oh, but Jim Belushi has a career!" Yeah, and he sucks and everyone knows it. His brother was a genius. Jim Belushi's just an unfunny douchebag.

"Oh, but Martin Sheen's brother, Joe Estavez is a better example of a celebrity sibling nobody cares about!" Yeah, but he doesn't even have the same name as his brother, so that joke would require more explanation that I'm willing to provide.

One time, their mother got Alec to do some commercials for a local grocery store. It's painfully obvious that Alec didn't want to be there, and he put no effort into it. Unfortunately, I can't find these ads on Youtube to show you how little Alec cares about grocery stores common folk buy their ham at.

Anyway, the story I wanted to tell is about me putting my foot firmly into my mouth. This happens to me a lot.

I was talking with my co-workers at the library I used to work at about celebrities with local ties to Syracuse. I started off by making fun of Tom Cruise (born in Syracuse) for being short and crazy, then went on to saying that I hated almost every movie with Richard Gere (his parents live here, and he has a house here) was ever in and made a crack about celebrity Buddhists who don't adhere to the teachings of Buddha when they aren't convenient. Also, a joke about how people in Syracuse probably assume that he's a Ninja or Karate master because he's a Buddhist, and Buddhism is Asian, and they all know martial arts or something. Don't let the college town status fool you, we aren't a smart city. If we were, then we wouldn't be such a shit hole, and we wouldn't worship college sports teams with cult like fervor. Anyway, I was getting some laughs from my co-workers out of this little tirade. I have to say that the librarians I know aren't stuck up prudes like the stereotype suggests. They're very fun people. But I digress. I went into a Baldwin joke. I think it was something like this...

"You know how you can tell the Baldwin's apart? Alec's a fat jerk, Stephen's a stupid jerk and nobody gives enough of a crap about Billy and Danny to even know if they're fat, stupid and/or jerkish. They probably are, though. After all, they're Baldwins."

My co-workers informed me afterwards that a regular patron who just left a minute prior to my Baldwin joke has some sort of family connection to them. I think it's that his brother is married to one of the Baldwin sisters. I narrowly avoided offending a guy's family and possibly having to apologize and act like I was sorry for calling the Baldwin brothers fat, stupid and/or jerks.

The point of this story is... I have no idea. Something about Alec Baldwin's Schweddy Balls, I guess?

"Nobody can resist Alec's Schweddy Balls."

Doom (Sega 32X) Review

The 32X. The giant, black, mushroom shaped tumor sticking out of the Sega Genesis meant to prolong it's lifespan longer than it should have been. One of the biggest commercial failures in the history of gaming. Even the ads for it made the joke that people make about it today. That it looks like the Genesis is mating with it.

They're having disgusting pig sex, Timmy.

But the thing most people tend to overlook is that the 32X had a pretty solid library of games. Star Wars, Metal Head, Tempo, Kolibri, Virtua Fighter, Cosmic Carnage, Knuckles Chaotix, and of course, excellent ports of Mortal Kombat 2 and Doom. Today, we're talking about Doom, which is probably the best home console port of the game (The N64 version is better, but it's also not really a port as much has it is its own game.)

The MKII port was just as good as the SNES version, and whether you prefer it or the one on SNES comes down to whether you prefer the SNES controller or the six button Genesis controller. The version of Doom however is a huge step above the SNES version because it's actually playable. Yeah, yeah, the soundtrack of the SNES version sounded better. By a long shot. The 32X version sounded horrible. But that's the only thing that the SNES version does better, or anywhere near as well, honestly.

The SNES version is almost unplayable. There's a delay between when you push a button and you shoot the demon in the face. The graphics are dark and muddy, making it almost impossible to see what's going on.

The 32X version is bright enough for you to see what's going on, there's no delay between pressing the button and shooting, and the controls just work really well. It takes a bit of getting used to changing the weapons, but aside from that, it works.

There are only 15 levels, but you can pick them from the title screen right off the bat, which is a huge plus.

Let's be real for a second, though. It's pointless to review Doom. Why? Because it's Doom. At this point, it's like reviewing Space Invaders. What are you going to say about that? "You shoot the UFO's and they go faster. Sound interesting? Then get it." Everything that can be said about Doom has been said. It's a simple, pick up and play FPS that's fun as hell. All you need to know is if it plays as well as the PC version, and the answer for the 32X version is that it does very well for a console version of the game.

It's also really cheap, which is a plus. It shouldn't cost you more than five dollars for a loose copy of the game, and any retro game store that has 32X games in stock at any given time probably has at least one copy of this.

So, yeah. I recommend it. But I could've just saved us all some time and said "It's Doom. Sound interesting? Do you have a 32X and five dollars to spend? Then get it."