Average franchise running times

This is from an old email, but I wouldn't want to lose it. Given that Superman movies always have to be so fucking long, I was curious which of the all-time great franchises (and Batman) are most distended.

Friday the 13th: 92 minutes over 12 films
Rambo: 97 minutes over 4 films (the "epic" Rambo III clocks in at 101 minutes)
PotApes: 108 minutes over 8 films (97 for the original run, 127 for the reboot trilogy)
Star Trek: 116 minutes over 13 films
Die Hard: 121 minutes over 5 films (you'd figure these were shorter, but 3 is brokenly long and 4 & 5 are modern movies)
Alien: 125 minutes over 6 films (118 if you count the AVPs)
Star Wars: 134 minutes over 8 films (surprisingly - the prequels feel so insubstantial for their >140-minute run times)
Batman: 135 minutes over 9 films (142 if you exclude the 76-minute Mask of the Phantasm)

and the winner is, naturally...
Superman: at 137 minutes over 7 films. Although it was quite a tight contest for a moment there.

Here's a post where instead of trying to add some creative discourse to the world...

...I talk for a million years about how hard my life has been and how proud I am to reach some shred of self-awareness in my late 20s or 30s.

And I get over 300,000 hits and retweets for it. Just kidding. I prefer living here in failure world where we talk about subjects other than our personal life and no one cares because they don't want to learn, they want to say "omg so true", "that must have been SO hard for you", "i feel empowered just by reading about ur empowerment", etc. I'm just kidding again - no one cares about this blog because it's terrible! Not because the world is stacked against me.

I'm done being sick! I'll be back on Monday to start the year in style with February. You know what they say about being late to the party! It's... in style! We'll "kick things off" with a review of the Super Bowl, then I've got some real treats in store: all those things I said I would post about last time (Dynasty Warriors, Web of Shadows, Bravely Default???, Don't Starve, Larry Sanders: The Game), maybe some Chronicles of Mystara (that's what I've been playing while I've been sick!), Funky Kong, Cranky Kong, Candy Kong, Swanky Kong, Cranky Kong, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Country 3, Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong Country's Double Trouble in Panic City, etc.

One more week

As every other time after taking a planned hiatus here, I'm going to extend it one more week. See, I'd do that with my work vacation too, thing is... work. Anyway, it's better to spend my first week back getting reaccustomed to the 9-5 lifestyle than going full bore. Because, thing is, the past two weeks while I was off, I've been SLEEPING from 9am to 5pm (somehow that's my biorhythm. man college (and other post-college uh hobbies) messed me up). 

Anyway, two weeks of nocturnal gaming later, I've actually barely touched the five games I said I'd play (sorry, no Phantasy Star IV). See, I got on this huge Dynasty Warriors kick and clocked almost 35 hours between Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 and Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires, and that was an awesome thing, because I finally get that series. They're real-time strategy / fighting game hybrids, not the generic 3D melee hack-n'-slash action they're so frequently cited as. But more on that later. I was also hindered by Mark of the Ninja being way longer than I thought - where I thought I was two levels from the end, I actually still had six (increasingly difficult - and more interesting!) stages to go. I thought I was almost done a five-hour game, where in fact I was only halfway through a eight-hour one. And that back-end turned what was an interesting stealth/platforming hybrid into a terrifically memorable platformer with far more variety than I ever expected. But more on that later. I barely played Link Between Worlds because my mom gave me Journey to the West for Christmas so my handheld gaming has consisted mostly of reading. Talk about a book that's basically a video game though. But more on that vader. There was also a sale on Xbox On Demand games and Spider-man: Web of Shadows was $5, and I've wanted to play that one since it's been retroactively declared by many fans the pinnacle of Spidey-games, after being dismissed upon initial release as sloppy and half-baked at a time when there were plenty enough Spider-games to go around. It's sloppy and half-baked and has crashed on me far more times than any big-budget major publisher effort ever should, but is full of great ideas and has a faithfully Spider-man feel that elevates it beyond other adaptations. But more on that spider.

Oh right, and I got into this bad habit of trying to beat Stage 6 of Castlevania III every night. I've never been able to beat Stage 6 of Castlevania III, but it really doesn't seem that hard. So I was like, if I just keep trying, I'm sure I'll get through eventually. Around the fifth or sixth night of putting a full hour into failed attempts, I started to lose enthusiasm. 

Non-gaming media pursuits that consumed a great deal of my time included re-watching all six seasons of Larry Sanders (so, so good - definitely a show that doesn't hit you as hard til the second time through, full as it is of tiny character moments and intricate subtext), reading some comics for the first time in years (for some reason I couldn't muster the interest for Guardians of the Galaxy, but I got back into The Amazing Spider-man in no time flat, starting with 2011's "Spider Island" crossover arc), and starting Mobile Suit Gundam, which interested me as I've never seen any '70s (or pre-Akira, really) anime. 

Amazing web find: Geddy Lee Is Slusho

Didn't have time for a post today but I found this unbelievably fantastic website from 2007, when the viral marketing for Cloverfield was in full swing. 

http://geddyleeisslusho.blogspot.com/2007/07/welcome-truthseakers.html

Aside from its inherent absurd hilarity, this is some decent satire of the viral marketing fad and the culture that developed around it. Just check out amazing lol-out-lol posts like these:

http://geddyleeisslusho.blogspot.com/2007/07/geddy-points.html

http://geddyleeisslusho.blogspot.com/2007/08/lightning-baby-last-hope-for-man.html

http://geddyleeisslusho.blogspot.com/2007/07/jj-geddy-lee-is-monster.html

http://geddyleeisslusho.blogspot.com/2007/07/rapping-skeleton-is-good-guy-in-light.html

I just found out Ogre Battle is a song

ah
ah
ah-ah
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

wait no i didn't i already knew

It's that special day: Hallowed Ween

Why not everyday?
Are you so afraid?
What will people say?

Why don't you take your social regulations and shove 'em up. your. ass.

Dead week

Heads up to all new-found fans and follicles: the blog and I are not dead, but the coming week probably will be. I'm moving house and working on a beta release candidate at work, so the odds of me finding time between twelve hour days and twelve hour nights to crank out a post are slight. We've been "hot to trot" thanks to five-posts-a-week for the month of October, and the streak will resume come November, but right now I need a break to lift some boxes and yell at some bugs. If you want to come help me move, that's cool too.

More comedy search hits

Here, culled from Bloggers traffic statistics, are a few more of the top weirdest search subjects leading to this site. Here are some older ones, too.

"yyyyyo"
Sometimes it's important to know who else is talking about "yyyyyo".

"history of the mushroom kingdom"

It makes me really happy that I could educate someone.

"cinéplat (tiger)"

While this is obviously the work of a non-English-speaker, I like the idea that in French, a cinematic platformer is the same concept as a tiger.

"ganbare goemon anachronistic"
Yes. Yes it is.

"kybernator game 240x320"
I can see how this led here, but perhaps the searcher may have been looking for the below moose-themed cell phone (?) run-and-gun. By the way, that linked Cybernator post is embarrassingly awful. I hope to God I was on drugs when I wrote that.

The Batman subcategory:

"batman with starpower"
They actually meant "batman has starpower"

"batman brownie recipe"
So are those brownies made from Batman, made by Batman, or shaped like Batman?

if my three sons looked liked that, I'd be having kitchen fun too...

"fuck injustice batman"

Angriest search ever? I was pissed at Injustice too, but how is this search supposed to accomplish anything? Maybe it's just Rule 34 at play.

Web treasure ahoy!

Everyone who knows me in real life knows (no they definitely don't because why would I ever talk about this) that I have a thing for old, dead websites. Not like I go Captain Ahabing after them by asking Google "how do I burn CD" - I'm just fascinated to find anything that's been unusually silent for many years. It becomes a historical document dissociated with any contemporary viewpoint rather than the public face of some individual. 

In particular, really old sites ('90s) are written from such a different paradigm and often with such genuine optimism and creativity that it's sad to see how mundane the three-site web (FB/Google/WikiP) has become. Internet used to be Wind Waker. Now it's an overflowing dumpster of Comedy Picture Lists and status updates. There was a time when you never knew what a website might be.

Anyway, here are three cool old websites that you won't find on Blogger, Tweeter, Instagram, or Cracked. They don't use advanced programming and quad rendering or even Java+++ scripting language. Just good old-fashioned HTML. 

The Masked Reviewer (heads up: Internet Explorer required)

Man I love this guy. He's a superhero who dons a mask to take on the hefty responsibility of... screening average movies from the early '00s. Not since Space Ghost Coast to Coast has a secret identity been so wantonly unnecessary yet comically fruitful. 

Yes, he could use a bit of editing for grammar/punct/typos (so could I), and his reviews are occasionally a bit dry (he is so desperate not to spoil the plot that I often finish a review feeling like I've learned nothing), but his self-referentiality and careful injection of the third person always comes to the rescue. From his review of V for Vendetta: "Now don't go and think that just because the film features a masked hero that the Masked Reviewer is automatically going to give it a good review. That wouldn't be right!"

Really the only failing of the Masked Reviewer is that he didn't last for very long. He reviewed about a hundred movies before the site disappeared. The site is totally worth it just to read his "Expectation from the Title" of each movie (e.g. Beyond Borders: "When Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks, and Amazon.com all run out of copies of "The Life and Times of John Favreau", a loyal fan turns to his favorite bookstore as his last hope. But when they don't have it, he must keep searching.") and his impression of what his mom would have to say (of Batman Begins: "He seems like such a troubled young man. He should see a psychologist, it might make him a happier person.")

Kill from the Heart

Here's a really great concept for a site that doesn't have as much content as its poor interface first suggests.

The idea is that it's a pre-1990 punk catalogue stocked with primary sources. You can browse through bands and their discographies like on Wikipedia or AllMusic, but the band pages are complete with historical articles and interviews, and the album pages have reviews dating to their original release (rather than Stephen P. Erlewine's opinion). Since most of us don't have a gigantic 'zine library, this is a great way to see what people thought of the movement and the music at the time (and, as the site says, to demystify the scene). The only problem is that there aren't that many articles/interviews/reviews up (at least compared to how many bands/albums are listed), and there's no way to tell which pages will have content, so you just have to sift through one album at a time hoping to find content.

And of course, it's got my favorite bittersweet deadsite trope: the final update from December 2010: "Maybe the most significant thing about this update is the fact that this is the first actual site update (aside from data entry) since 2004! Hopefully this trend will continue and the site will see some more improvements in 2011."

The Bon Larvis Band (http://www.boogiewoogiewiththethebonlarvisband.faithweb.com/index.html)

The one-stop-shop for everything related to Avenal, CA's ruling low down mean'n dirty boogie woogie blues boys, The Bon Larvis Band. Granted it's a bit hard to read (probably don't start on the Latest News page), but this site is fantastic. There's no point in even describing it. Just start with the History and the Tour Diaries and enjoy. How can you not love this "news" update:

"Sad to say there aint been so many shows lately because "The Duck" is-you-know-where. We go to visit him alot, he has got plenty cigerates and all that stuff and sends his love. Aint nothin he aint seen before cause he lives the life he lives and he lived the life he lives! Who can ask for more!?

"Seriously we love the Duckman and lookin forward to that BBQ when they turn the man loose! Start gettin ready now ladies, but this time make sure you 100% legal cause we cant afford no more crinks in the plans, when the music calls we got to be there!!! Now we now it come natural, but have a heart! We still all still be here when you hit the "MAGIC NUMBER!!!" If you got my drift and I think you do!!!"

Supposedly the Bon Larvis Band has even got a DVD out there of a 1995 show (w/ Faxed Head), so, you know. That's on the Christmas list.

Other ancient sites I've mentioned before are Wordplayer and Mark's Record Reviews. Mark Prindle's site is a great combination of life story/collage, shrieking comedy, and musical open-mindedness, but it's barely dead (1996-2011) and the concept of a record guide is hardly original. Terry Rossio's Wordplayer is a screenwriting column that ran from the mid-'90s til around 2003. What makes it stand out is that Rossio is an established Tinseltown big-shot - writer of Aladdin, The Mask of Zorro, Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean and its sequels -  and therefore fills every column with Hollywood insider info. If you ever want to know how a movie makes its way from a concept in a writer's head to a multi-million dollar production, Terry lays it out here, complete with first-hand stories of Aladdin, Godzilla '98, and Small Soldiers. Anyway, Wordplayer isn't technically dead - the forums are still alive and Terry occasionally updates the site. But to think of a day and age where a famous person would write a website instead of hiring a PR firm to post on Tweeter for them! 

Man I keep calling it "Tweeter" like that's a joke but it's actually me forgetting that it's not called that. Who uses that site again?

So there you go. The web can be a fun place beyond just stupid Flash games and stupid forums for stupid MMOs and stupid updates about stupid things that happened in the stupid lives of stupid people and stupid blogs about stupid old websites about stupid things in the first place. So don't kill yourself yet! Maybe tomorrow!

A filmic tribute to the only true hero I've ever known

Scenes taken the 1988 movie Peaches.

Aw man the final boss music in KID is the New World Symphony!

just plain cool.

for contrast, the other final (credits) music I heard last night was this :(

Weird Google searches that lead here, answered

A pretty reliable source for a quick laugh is Blogger's list of top Search Keywords that have led to this blog. We aren't exactly highly indexed by Google, so some really weird stuff gets through, along with a few very specific keyword combinations. Some persistent hits over the ages have come from:

"is lawrence of arabia on netflix"

Nope, but I have it on DVD if you want to drop by for a watch.

"la-mulana original"

I did provide a link to that

"video game movies on netflix"

I can see why that leads here, though I have no thoughts on the subject.

"best trpg" or "best srpg"

That makes sense, I did a classic little top ten.

And, naturally:

"brother sister sex incest"

I assume this came up because of the Sister Sonic post, but who, in their search for incest porn, is clicking on that link? It's not like Google doesn't give the page title and an excerpt.

Last week we had some real winners among the regulars:

"mario's ugly"

What kind of asshole searches for that? Give the poor guy a break. Of course, the ugliest Mario is Baby.

"blob fish"

Sigh, I just can't even begin to guess how that led here. The post about Space Manbow?

And, drum-roll please, perhaps the best anonymous Google search I've ever seen:

"what does jumped the sharpedo mean"

I guess it just means this:

So I just beat Sonic Adventure and, um...

One bell chimes today for the Anniversary of Blog

Technically the GNG Holy Video Game Batman! Blog of Time was born around 7/25/12 (it would take less time to look that up than it would to write this sentence but I don't care) but since that's so close to my IRL birthday (today!) we may as well call them the same. Here's a little song dedicated to my first and only son or daughter.

I know this sounds kinda like I'm wishing myself a happy birthday but I swear it's not that. Wait a minute, more importantly: if this blog is my son or daughter, does that mean I had sex with co-bloggers Ezio, Greg L, and Andrew M? We'll just say yes and let them sort out the details. I doubt their defamation lawyer is better than mine.

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

It feels awfully strange to say, but having such a weak blog week last week so week so weak so weakkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

It feels awfully strange to say, but having a weak blog week kinda gets me down. Maybe I was just down all 'aroun' last week, due to whatever shit was keeping me so goddamned busy. But maybe, also, my heart needed to express itself using the poetry of video game theory. Whichever one. The two posts that I did manage to get up had been written the previous weekend, so it was a WHOLE MILLION DAYS of non-productivity. Interesting that this stupid site has become my personal metric for creative merit. It's not that bad though. I mean it's bad, but it's not like the worst thing ever. 'Cept when I title posts like I did today....

But don't worry - there's good news too! First, Sting's got a new album on the horizon, and these days appears to fancy himself a supervillain!

And that's just the tip of the wild and weird iceberg that is this week! Oh yes, you'll be taken on an emotional rollercoaster as I'm: dumbfounded by Super Mario Land, intrigued by Wily's Revenge's fuzzy block puzzles, challenged to develop some kind of franchise-review feature, and blown away by [to be determined]. 

Enjoy some good old-fashioned American Music on this holiest of holy days!

"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream": http://vimeo.com/35540786

Congratulations to Josh!

No post today, as I was busy attending my brother's dental school graduation and eating expensive food. I don't know of any games based on dentistry, but maybe it would make a good 3D rail shmup in the vein of Panorama Cotton. Gingivitis airplanes and stuff. You know.

Instead of video game insight, spend an hour today enjoying these famous videos.

OHHHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOOooOodoOOo

As the current events correspondent here at GNG I feel it necessary to bring this to our readership's attention.  Watch the video and read the first comment.  God save us all.

Ow, dear God ouch - post-tonsil bleeding emergency

Tuesday night around here was not a pretty siiiiight (/Genie). When you get your tonsils out, they tell you there's about a 3% risk of bleeding about a week post-surgery, if one of your scabs comes off in a weird way or something. For some people the bleeding stops after a gargle with ice water, for others it requires another trip under the knife. I had my tonsils out last week, and am proud to say I'm part of the 3%. The rest of this story isn't really for the soft of stomach.

I woke up around 3 AM for a quick piss. It was one of those late-night zombie walks to the bathroom, the kind you don't even remember happens. As I finished up, I noticed the telltale taste and feel of a trickle of blood down the back of my throat. I thought, fuck me, last thing I need to do is drive to the hospital in the middle of the night. I crossed my fingers in hopes it would die down and got back in bed. With too much blood in my mouth to simply swallow, I turned to the bedside trashcan. A single mouthful blackened that entire heap of tissues - that was about the moment I started to get nervous. I headed back to the bathroom, leaned over the toilet, and watched in distress as my mouth became a running blood faucet. That, of course, was the easy part.

Bleeding from the throat is a piece of cake. A bloody mess, sure, but that's what flushing the toilet is for. It's stopping the bleeding that causes the trouble. Your body, ever helpful, kinda wants to form a blood clot. Now, I say "kinda", because the body is also determined to fight against this. See, when a hunk of coagulated blood starts to form at the back of my tongue, in the exact location where my gag reflex is triggered, I'm gonna have a tendency to gag. As a matter of fact, I can't not gag; my course of action is hardwired, designed to keep my breathing passage clear. So in a horrific situation like Tuesday night, I have two automatic functions battling each other: my blood trying to clot in a lump at the back of my throat, and my throat trying to remain clear of breathing obstructions. The result is an approximately 30-second cycle in which blood spews from my mouth until a clot slowly forms, I choke and gag on the clot until I vomit it forth, I reach back into my throat to drag forth the remaining slimy tendrils of the clot causing me to further gag, and blood begins to spew again. The largest clot I choked out was nearly golf-ball-sized.

In a nutshell, this^

While I was struggling to manage THAT (and struggling not to swallow any more blood than I had to), I also had to get to the bedroom, grab my phone, and call the doctor. They tell you not to call 911 if you have bleeding, but to call the ENT on duty (the E[ar] N[ose] T[throat] is the doc who does tonsillectomies). Of course, they never describe that this is what throat-bleeding entails - I may have been a severe case. I managed to put in a call to the operating service so they could page my doctor, and after about a half hour, he finally got back to me - the operator made some screw up with phone numbers. Aside: massive credit to my ENT, that guy is fantastic. He woke up at 3:30 AM to personally talk me through this, then showed up two hours early at the hospital to fit me in for surgery before his normal full day of surgery began at 9. But I'm jumping ahead.

By the time I had the doc on the phone, the intensity of the bleeding had died down a bit. I was only gagging out clots every two or three minutes. He instructed me to proceed by gargling hydrogen peroxide. If you're lucky, you've never had to put peroxide in your mouth - this is mostly because it's toxic and tastes like pencil lead. I had to pour a full glass of it (mixed with ice water) and gargle through it one mouthful at a time. It turns out that gargling (an activity I already hate with a passion) is even harder when your throat is bearing open wounds and actively bleeding. It also turns out that hydrogen peroxide forms a kind of soapy foam when bubbled, making it completely impossible to avoid tasting, which of course caused further gagging. Between the blood and foam dripping from my lips, I'm sure I was bearing the countenance of one with rabies.

The gargling slowed the bleeding to a manageable level, but I ended up in the ER anyway, where a torturous session of clot suctioning (dragging one of those suction tubes - like the dentist has - across my wounds) thankfully led to sedation, stomach pumping, and emergency cauterization surgery. Again, I can't express enough appreciation to my surgeon for showing up for that, and to my dad too, for coming to pick me up at 5AM to spend his day with me at the hospital.

Today, Friday, I'm feeling back to normal (that is, pre-throat-bleeding normal, which is still post-tonsillectomy normal, which is crappy), so I thought it would be fun to share my nasty little story. Next week is probably gonna be quiet here, because I don't have any posts at the ready - I was expecting to be healthy again. But when I do get back to it, I'll regale you with tales of all the games I've finished while I've been out of work! Check out this list: Sleeping Dogs, SMB3: Warioland, Mutant Mudds, and Darksiders. Hm, I actually thought it was more than that. Oh well, still a lot!

Super Mario War: A history of The Mushroom Kingdom

I love this because of how much everyone else hates it. Anyway, let me fill you in on some Mario canon that may be unfamiliar to you, which will hopefully help you come to understand the strange ongoing relationship between Mario, Peach, Bowser, and friends. Everything I say here is taken straight from the games. I'm not relying on supplemental material like instruction booklets or spinoffs like Turtles in Time.

The first game allowing playable Koopas

For the sake of sanity, we're going to say that Super Mario Bros. is the first Mario game. It's the first one with any sense of a plot, the first clearly set in the Mushroom Kingdom, the first appearance of Toadstool/Peach, King Koopa/Bowser, so forth. It's the first non-Donkey Kong Mario that you can really give a skiff about. This first chapter of the story I'm about to relate pertains to Super Mario Bros. and its first true follow-up, Super Mario Bros. 3. I can't even say I remember where things go from there, but I'm sure it gets pretty hairy. Some sort of Jurassic Park situation IIRC.

So here's the deal. Super Mario Bros. is clearly set during a war, presumably between the Mushroom Kingdom and whatever Kingdom Bowser is in charge of (remember, his name at the time was King Koopa). We'll call it the Koopa Kingdom. Mario might be a Mushroom soldier, but his uniform certainly isn't regulation. Most likely he's a commando on a one-man crusade to rescue the princess and topple Bowser's reign. That said, it could also be interpreted that Mario is a revolutionary, trying to end a cruel monarchy, and that the entire game is set in only one kingdom - that is, Bowser is the King of the same country where Toadstool is Princess. It remains unclear, but I prefer the latter theory, if only because there is no apparent delineation between levels supposedly set in different kingdoms.

A particular narrative delight is 6-3, which gives us a glimpse at the pre-war Mushroom Kingdom. You may remember 6-3 as the black-and-white level, at the opening of which Mario softly utters "I remember now...". The black-and-white imagery is a common visual trope, indicating that this scene takes place years in the past. 6-3 is idiosyncratic in that it is the only one of the 32 stages that is completely devoid of the standard Koopa armies. No Koopers, Goombas, or even Fishy-Bloos, just a few solitary Bullet Bills foreshadowing the onslaught to come. Some have suggested that this is the first day of the Koopa invasion, a D-Day of sorts, which Mario is now recalling, remembering how far he's come.

The game is spread over the course of eight "worlds", each culminating in a castle infiltration. It seems clear from this that Mario is embarking on eight different military campaigns, each targeted at one of Bowser's strongholds. The post-boss dialogue - "our princess is in another castle" - makes explicit that Mario takes down each of these fortresses with the expectation that the princess is held within. Considering the span of his conquest and the effort it would realistically take for one man to overcome an army, it seems natural that each of these "worlds" may take place over a span of time closer to a year than the few minutes it takes to play through in the game.

This is where things get controversial. As I see it, it seems a surety based on Mario's extensive spy/informant network that he does indeed have the correct castle each time, but King Koopa manages to evacuate the princess just in time to move to his next stronghold and leave Mario fighting a Replicant and rescuing a Toad.  This explains how Toadstool was able to give birth to eight Koopa children in the span of the first game (the third being an immediate sequel). She was trapped in each castle for a year and had no choice but to... well, you've been to the Internet, I don't need to explain it to you. As Koopa has never had another romantic interest (nor do there appear to be adult females of his species), this is the only provable origin on the Koopa Kids. Also, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 pretty heavy-handedly hints that's what happened. Plus Peach is openly Bowser Jr.'s mother, so it's not like the two are... strangers to intimacy.