If you ever get the chance, read the really, really old Peanuts strips from when it was first started.

Evidently, calling the sport of ‘football’ something more literal like ‘hand egg’ makes everyone else around the world happier.

It was an exciting game, filled with drama, excitement, singing fossils at half-time and commercials. Lots and lots of commercials.

(Sorry to our non-U.S. friends who can’t view Hulu)

There you have them. The 2010 Super Bowl ads. There are a few things that pop out at me:

• With all this talk about Tim Tebow pimping for Focus on the Family why aren’t women’s groups in an uproar for him laying the smack down on his mom?
• Seriously, Tebow is a quarterback and I’ve seen him play. That must be the first decent tackle that he’s ever laid on someone. And it happens to be in a commercial. To a girl. Who happens to be his mom.
• This must have been the year of the meme rehash, much like the reanimation of the lifeless band, The Who and forcing their undead souls to perform.
• Speaking of the meme rehash, it seems like about 25% of the commercials used the ‘dramatic prairie dog’ concept. That is soooo 2006. Way to go advertising people. Way to keep up with the times.
• The GoDaddy commercials suck and they aren’t funny or controversial any more. On the contrary, they’re dragging down Danica Patrick.
• I miss the days when advertisers would just air a monkey dancing and then boast that they blew their $2M wad on 30 seconds of a dancing monkey

All in all, this was one of the few Super Bowls where I was more entertained by the game rather than the commercials. And that, in it’s own weird way, makes me a little sad. No beer commercials that made me take notice, nothing that made me sappy (ok, maybe the Google commercial) and there were no real interactive tie-ins. Here’s hoping next year’s Super Bowl has more innovative and creative thinking.

Many of you youngsters probably haven’t even heard of Space Battleship Yamato/StarBlazers. This show was absolutely AMAZING when I was a kid. It aired in the mid-1970’s, right around the time that the first Star Wars film was kicking around. We would rush home after school and try to catch it on whatever UHF station was carring it. Back in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area it was channel 33. Or maybe it was 27. I can’t remember because it was almost 30 years ago!

It turns out that this year they’ll be releasing a live action, $22M adaptation of the anime appropriately titled Space Battleship Yamato.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are so many aspects to this story/film that it is like peeling back the many layers of an onion. According to wikipedia:

Set in the year 2199, an alien race known as the “Gamilas” (“Gamilons” in the English Star Blazers dub) are raining radioactive bombs on Earth, rendering the planet’s surface dead and uninhabitable. Humanity lives in refuges built deep underground, but the radioactivity is slowly infiltrating the underground cities too. Earth’s space fleet is hopelessly outclassed by the Gamilas and all seems lost until a message capsule from a mysterious crashed spaceship is retrieved on Mars. Blueprints for a faster-than-light engine are discovered inside the capsule, and an offering of help from Queen Starsha of the planet Iscandar in the Large Magellanic Cloud, who says that she has a device, the Cosmo-Cleaner D (Cosmo DNA), which can cleanse Earth of its radiation damage.

The inhabitants of Earth secretly build a massive spaceship inside the ruins of the Japanese battleship Yamato, the Space Battleship Yamato for which the story is titled. Using Starsha’s blueprints, they equip their new ship with a space warp drive, called the “wave motion engine”, and a new, incredibly powerful weapon called the “wave motion gun” which fires from the bow.

We were in awe of the wave motion gun when we were kids. We’d draw all of our space ships in our notebooks to have the gigantic gun in the front and, when we played on the playground, we always pretended that we would fire that behemoth and we’d act out the same type of firing sequence.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Think about how our minds were blown when we found out that the Earth forces built the Andromeda class fleet and it consisted of battleships with TWO wave motion guns! Even the English version had a catchy opening theme song that made all of us kids want to run around outside and pretend we were space explorers:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The story has everything: romance, robots, an environmental message, special effects, and an homage to history. Yes, the ship was named after that Yamato. Read up on it, kids! It’s interesting stuff!

It will be interesting to see how this adaptation works. They’ve Takuya Kimura (the 37 year old idol from the ‘boy band’ SMAP) as the lead and they’ve switched the gender of a few other characters. Other than those oddities it totally looks like a fun summer/spring popcorn flick. A little bit of spit and polish, some fancy new duds and this thing looks like it could be a winner.

Now if they only made a live action Robotech…

Let’s get a few things out in the open before I talk about this film. I admit that I am going into this movie ‘blind’ because I haven’t seen the cartoon that this is based on, “Avatar: The Last Air Bender”, which aired on Nickelodeon. The fact that it aired on Nickelodeon was one of the contributing factors of why I never watched the cartoon. Don’t get me wrong! I used to enjoy watching Nick. I just happen to feel that it’s glory days were when it aired Ren & Stimpy, Doug and Rocco’s Modern Life.

The second reason that I never watched the cartoon series was because I’m an anime watcher. For whatever reason I had no desire to watch this series, possibly because I was completely turned off on American made cartoons that sucked ass (Masters of the Universe, anyoone?). Somewhat elitest, sure. But can you blame me when most of my life I’ve encountered American cartoons that were either aimed at simple comedy or pimping some simple morality play?

So, it has come to pass that I will probably try and watch the original cartoon before this movie comes out. Although I might want to do it the other way around and watch the movie first and then watch the cartoon. The reasoning is simple: Where I’ve been burned by American cartoons in the past I’ve also been punched int eh face by American live-action adaptations of popular media in the cinema. Let’s look at the disappointing track record so far:

Dragonball: Evolution Words cannot express how this movie depressed me. It was pretty horrible. Acting? Bad. Action? Bad. Plot? You guessed it – bad. In fact, I don’t know how anyone could render Goku as a wimpy white kid when the entire story of Dragonball is based on the Chinese ‘Journey to the West’. In fact, The Last Airbender was even accused of falling victim to ‘racebending’ for doing the exact same thing. Give us Asian actors a break! And, no, you can’t cast Jet Li or Chow Yun Fat as a little kid.

Mortal Kombat. The exception for this was the first movie which proved to be a fairly entertaining jaunt through Outworld. The second movie? Crap. The cartoon series “Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm” was fairly formulaic. The television show “Mortal Kombat: Conquest” seemed like it was filmed in a Universal Studios back lot. In fact, the fight scenes in that show reminded me of another television show – the ‘World Martial Arts Council’. It was pretty bad.

D.O.A. (Dead or Alive) HEY! WHAT THE HELL DID THEY DO TO MY JIGGLEVISION?!

So, I’m awaiting this movie but with a little hesitation. Looking at the effects reminds me of Dragonball. Or, if you’re into cheesy Chinese movies, The Storm Riders. Ergo, I’m holding my breath and hoping that this singular trailer isn’t an omen of another cross-over let down.

Maybe they should have just traded off the popularity of James Cameron’s “Avatar” and hope that people get confused.

In fact, if you have any ideas for features, articles, or funky dances that we can do then please don’t hesitate to let us know!

NEWSFLASH: bBlog is dead! Long live bBlog!

After a number of years of the bBlog project, with the last couple inactive, it is time to call it a day.

bBlog is no longer activly maintained, and there are no plans to carry on with development.
There was an attempt to resurrect the project, but after a year nothing has come of it.

For this reason, it is not reccomended to carry on using bBlog, instead I suggest you try
Other Blogging Software

That was in 2005.

This led us to convert the old site from bblog to WordPress last year. Almost everything was migrated and we had smashy.net up and running for about 3 months when all hell broke lose. Our Pimp-In-Charge, Smash, ran into a bit of a quandry when his ISP had an internal bitch slapping session amongst its owner and staff which ultimately led to the company disappearing. This, in turn, stranded a lot of site owners who had no way of getting back their content. Luckily, we at least had a partial archive of the site.

So here we are. Up and running again but with a few glitches. Please be patient with us as we try to salvage as much as possible and fix what we can. Or don’t be patient. Put your big boy pants on and take a walk. Maybe when you come back we’ll have most everything fixed or new content.

In this era of next generation consoles we are able to celebrate ‘the next big thing’. For those of us who were born and raised on Atari 2600 home arcades, ColecoVision, Intellivision, the Odyssey and the Commodore 64 we can only marvel at how much detail and raw computing resources are required to produce the modern video game.  Whereas we were used to 16 color sprites sporadically moving across the screen today’s PC & console games regale us with things we only fantasized about: particle physics, bump maps and texturizing, variable light sources much less worlds which did not require linear play and environments that allowed you to interact with them.

"The Obsolete Add-on" captures the innocence of those early years of video gaming and pretty much nails the generational differences between gamers of yesteryear and today.  Whereas back in the day we relied on our imagination to pretend that we were driving the Formula 1 racers in Activision’s Grand Prix these days were drifting through corners in games like Gran Tourismo or the Need For Speed series.  We played Atari’s ‘Combat!’ and hid behind blocks on the screens which were buildings and bunkers, ricocheting our shells on certain game settings while these days we’re reliving almost every military campaign imaginable in gritty, realistic detail.  My Samus from Metroid looked like a gingerbread cookie; today she is rendered with muscle tone, flowing locks and ample boobies.

Are we spoiled these days? In a sense, yes. For a good portion of the video gaming experience we no longer have to think and players can concentrate instead on the game play. Do I regret the marvelous advancements that have been made to bring the games industry where it is? That’s a toss up. I can’t wait to see where we end up and how advanced the system and the games become.

I whole heartedly recommend reading through Arzipe’s comic for some interesting commentary on gaming.

Fast forward to today. I’ve been playing Street Fighter IV for the Sony Playstation 3 for the past week or so.  As someone who only plays video games every once in a blue moon because a) being an old adult means your priorities have radically changed and b) being an old adult means your reflexes for fighting games are similar to a sloth wrestling a tortoise, I ‘ve marvelled at how pretty the game is. However, here are a few gripes:

• Seriously? I have to UNLOCK Cammy? What the Hell is up with that? She’s like one of the only characters that I like to ogle and now I have to unlock her to play with…uh…to play her?
• Remember how I said my reflexes suck? Yeah, well, that means that in order to unlock every character I have to play the game not on "Easy", not on "Very Easy" but on "Easiest" mode. How demeaning. However, after playing the game I kept looking at the difficulty settings and looked for "Biggest Pussy" mode after "Easiest"
• I hear the XBox 360 has minimal load times. Guess what? The PS3’s load times are pretty irritating.
• The controls are a real bitch. I really haven’t played Street Fighter since, well, Street Fighter. I might have played Street Fighter II back in the day. Reading through the move commands made me lament the fact that I had to memorize all these arcane stick and button combinations.
• I can see the need to buy one of the arcade style controls from companies such as Madcat. However, do I want to shell out around another $100 for it?

Don’t get me wrong, I really do enjoy the game regardless of these shortcomings. However, playing the final boss, Seth, with a character like Vega or Viper really is an exercise in patience and self-control. For instance, I had to practice tremendous control NOT to throw my controller at my 55" flatscreen.

Keep in mind, being this inept at a fighting game still won’t stop me from buying the new King of Fighters, Tekken 6 or the next Virtua Fighter.