Zephyrus of the Anemoi

It sounds like some of you were actually fans of the enhanced version of the podcast tonight. I will see if I can’t figure out a way to get the future versions to properly feed into iTunes to make it easier to get them. I believe the issues are ironed out and should work great from now on. As promised, I’ve gathered the photos from the enhanced podcast and put them here in a gallery, just for you.

And you, and you, and yes… even you.

Also, I wanted to give this moment give a shout out to Aaron Stimpson for being awesome and creating the intro for tonight’s episode. He’s awesome, and though I’ve never met him before, he gets my eternal thanks.

Here it is! The long-awaited return of Two Assholes Watch a Movie! Today we’re going to take you on a journey to the fantastic world of Sharks in Venice. I am not even joking. This movie stars none other than Stephen Baldwin, and uses every last ounce of public domain shark footage they could find.

This time, we’re trying something a little different. I’ve created an enhanced podcast in the AAC format, however, I can’t seem to make it work with iTunes and you can subscribe via iTunes below or download it manually here.

To listen in your browser, click play below.

Lastly, to subscribe via RSS feed or download in MP3 format, visit this link.

EDIT: Attempting to get the Enhanced version of the podcast working with WordPress was one of the most painfully frustrating things I’ve ever done. I’m probably never going to bother with it again unless someone can show me an easier way. I’m going to go punch myself repeatedly in my Baldwin, now. That being said, I will do my best to get the pictures that are on the enhanced podcast uploaded for you to see soon.

EDITEDIT: I’ve figured out how to put .m4a files in properly. For those of you watching this unbearable train wreck as I update and re-update to make AAC files embeddable and iTunes-ified, I do apologize. I believe I’ve got it all ironed out, now.

Beware the wold, the gimble in the wabe. For midnight comes and nocturnal desires thrash in the pitch. Knowledge is deadly, but death is cheap. Cut its purse and flee, for the raven and the mockingbird seek refuge.

All is not yet lost… yet you are.

Amazon’s Kindle 2 has arrived. It looks great, and if you want a device for just eBook reading, you probably won’t find better in the current generation. It seems Amazon is serious about this market. And, it seems there may be a possibility that Amazon will make KindleBooks available to iPhone owners in the future.

While the Kindle itself sold less than Microsoft’s Zune by a 2-1 margin, that doesn’t seem to make it a failure in Amazon’s eyes. To be fair, eBook readers are still an emerging market. Either that, or there’s no market at all and no one has told Amazon, Sony, or a handful of other companies yet, either. Personally, I still love to read, and a dedicated eBook reader would go a long way toward making reading fiction something I do daily again.

However, since I still can’t justify spending this kind of money on a device just for reading eBooks and then pay the hardcover price for a DRM’ed digital copy, I’ll stick with Stanza on the iPhone for now. Or, if I’m looking for a good price on a large selection of classics with a gorgeous interface, I’ll go with Classics, instead. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Your skin shines in the firelight
And I can feel your heart beat against my chest
Waiting
Ever so impatiently for my embrace
A simple caress
Soft lips on smooth skin
Trembling
Your eyes sparkle and dance as the light plays around the room
Shadows flicker
Watching hungrily
Waiting to devour you
As I devour you
Your lips part in ecstasy and your eyes roll back
A soft cry escapes your lips before it is stifled
Your lack of breath makes it so
As does my kiss
Warmth pulsing, throbbing, draining
Until you go cold
Ecstasy gone as if life itself
I move on
Searching and hungry for more

Thanks to Felicia Day, I learned about Cornify.com and Ninjafy.com, two of the goofiest websites I’ve ever seen. As a result, I’ve added a Ninjafy button to the column on the left-most column on the right so you can check it out. Enjoy!

Got a chance for a Guy’s Gaming Day this weekend, because my wife is awesome and loves me. Starting shortly after noon, my cousin Andrew, friend Jeff, and I all sat down to play Shadows Over Camelot.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of playing this game before, I highly recommend it. There have been a number of great board games that pit players not against each other, but against the game itself: Warhammer Quest, Lord of the Rings, and The Omega Virus. However, what makes Shadows Over Camelot unique is the potential that one of the players may be a traitor, secretly trying to undermine the various quests that the knights set out to achieve. Worse, once accused, the traitor loses some abilities and gains others, making the timing of his accusation a delicate proposition. Worse, since there may be no traitor at all, mere mistrust of one another can make some quests more difficult to defeat.

The game was exciting. Andrew turned out to be a traitor and Jeff and I barely won the game from him. It was an incredible first-time play. Jeff told me that the gameplay ideas in Shadows Over Camelot had been taken to the next level in the Battlestar Galactica board game. I’m looking forward to picking it up soon.

The second game that we played was Pandemic, a game about a global outbreak of four different diseases and the research team fighting to stop them. The game is brilliant in its design, due to the fact that the Epidemic card can cause all cities that have already been infected get placed back on the top of the deck to become infected again. This can lead to outbreaks that spread diseases quickly. Worse, the 9th outbreak ends the game, as does the depletion of the deck. This keeps the game a desperate race to keep the diseases under control long enough to find the cures. It gets hectic as the number of outbreaks climb and the cards in the deck dwindle.

My brother-in-law, David, joined us for this game. We played two rounds. The first one was a Beginner-level game (which places four Epidemic cards in the deck) and we were slaughtered. Absolutely devestated. All four Epidemic cards came up in the first half of the deck. Gonoherpesyphillaids wiped out all of Asia and North America in minutes. It was an excellent learning experience and made the second round much easier.

In the second round, we got extremely lucky. We raised the difficulty by adding a fifth Epidemic card, but they were so well spaced that we were able to prevent outbreaks. With only two cards left in the deck, Jeff cured the final disease and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Later that evening, we played several rounds of Munchkin: Impossible (one of the 7 billion variations of the card game Munchkin, this one with a spy theme) sans Jeff. We were up until 3 am playing and had a blast.

Jeff and Andrew have been known to play lots of board games, so I knew they’d have a good time. But David is generally uneasy to try the various games we like to play. The fact that he enjoyed them as much as he did made me feel optimistic that he might play with us again in the future.

If you have any interest in checking out these games for yourself, I’ve linked to them on Amazon above (where available), but you can find much more info at BoardGameGeek, as well.

Inspired by a recent list on episode 73 of Retroforce GO!, I decided to make a quick list of games that I’m waiting for on Virtual Console. Some are games that most everyone has heard of, but some are relatively unknown to a great many people, and that is a shame. So, without further ado, I present you with my Virtual Console wish list.

∞ ∞ ∞

Bionic Commando – This one is a no-brainer. You play as a soldier trying to take down Master-D and the Badds (Hitler and the Nazis in the Japanese release). Your character cannot jump, but instead has a bionic arm that lets him swing, climb, even smack around bad guys. Plus, the levels don’t have a specific order to be completed in. While some levels contain items that must be found before progressing, the order isn’t set in stone.

After its recent re-imagining into Bionic Commando: Rearmed, the Wii is the only system that can’t play Bionic Commando. While it’d be nice for Nintendo to get their “storage solution” into our hands in time for Capcom to feel that releasing Rearmed as a WiiWare title is a worthy proposal. However, in the meantime, the least that Capcom could do is release the original title on the Virtual Console. Easily one of the most amazing video games ever released for the original NES.

Blaster Master – No NES game had a more detailed world than this side-scrolling-birds-eye action-platformer. Similar in style to the Metroid series as areas of the game must be backtracked to access hidden items, new areas, and additional levels. What makes this game so much fun is you drive around a tank that can receive a variety of upgrades as the game progresses. But, in order to defeat the bosses that litter the world, you must exit your tank and use your very vulnerable driver to venture deeper into the underbelly of the world to face them. Plus, the story is about rescuing your frog from the clutches of the mutants that live under your hometown. How awesome is that?

Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers – Capcom made a number of great games using Disney’s licenses and this is one of the most popular. Two-player cooperative, smooth gameplay mechanics, and incredible level design (making the world around the characters huge was done here first and never better on the NES). Unfortunately, it seems that Disney doesn’t know how to capitalize on the greatness that is the Virtual Console, as none of their titles have hit the service, yet.

Clash at Demonhead – This is my personal favorite from this list. I assume that I got this game as a gift from my parents for some holiday or another. It’s possible that they even just picked it up at random one day because they love me. Anyway, the important thing is that the game is incredible. You play as Bang, a special operative on a mission to stop some terrorists from detonating a doomsday device that will destroy the world. Like Bionic Commando, the game has a fair amount of non-linearity to it. You start at the bottom of the mountain and have to make choices about which paths to take to reach the top. Not every path is required to complete the game, but many contain important items or objectives. This is likely to show up in a future edition of Classic Gaming Sporadically, so I’ll give more info to you then.

Double Dragon II – While the Interwebs is filled with people fawning all over the original Double Dragon, I was always disappointed in the lack of two-player coop in the NES release. Double Dragon II, on the other hand, did not make such an oversight and was one of the most entertaining gameplay experiences of my childhood. My brother and I spent countless hours working together to reach the final boss and get our collective asses kicked again and again. But it was always fun, even when it felt like work.

Duck Tales – Yet another Capcom game, and another Disney title at that. In this one, Scrooge McDuck’s fortune has been stolen and with the help of his nephews and friends, he’s on a quest to get it back. With some of the most unique gameplay elements of any licensed game, as well as incredible music and level design, this game should be at the top of many gamers’ wish lists. Perhaps one day, Capcom and Disney can get together with Nintendo and make those wishes come true.

The Goonies II – The Goonies was incredible and Konami was quick to cash in with a game loosely based on the movie. The game was pretty great, but the sequel was one of the most amazing platformers of all time. You play as Mikey on a quest to rescue the rest of his friends. They’ve been captured by the Fratelli family, freshly escaped from prison. Armed with a yo-yo and your wits, you set out to find them. The game world is one of the most complex I’ve ever seen, with doors everywhere: some which take you into to rooms full of items, secrets, and hidden pathways; others that lead directly to alternate areas of the game. It’s easy to get lost, but that’s part of the appeal. The world feels huge for an NES game, and indeed for many games made today. With a music soundtrack inspired by The Goonies theme from the movie and spot-on gameplay mechanics, I can’t wait to see this hit the Virtual Console.