Scott Pilgrim Takes Off; Episode #1 - #3 Impressions

Sitemaster's Log - November 20th, 2023

WARNING: THIS POST HAS SPOILERS!!!!!

Before you ask me, I genuinely really don't know shit about Scott Pilgrim. See, I got a lot of friends who really like it, mostly the Canadians because this is the best respresentation they've gotten since "Club Penguin" released in 2005. But I have never read the comics, most of my knowledge of this series comes from the game (that everyone in the early 2010s was dickriding hard) and the movie (which everyone in the early 2010s was also dickriding hard), both thanks to said friends. So my first statement was actually a lie, but at the same time I view it as the truth. But anyways, personally I thought the movie was great, lots of fun characters, and I was going to say this was the only thing I've ever seen with Michael Cera in it, until i found out that he was the brother in "The Berenstain Bears" and honestly I don't know how to feel.

But back to Scott Pilgrim, the announcement of a proper animated show was very exciting, since I think that Bryan Lee O'Malley's artwork (at least the stuff I've seen) would work great in a proper 2D animation, and it's even more exciting since it's being done by a Japanese Anime studio of all things. I don't like to be "Japanese anime is better than cartoons" but honestly, most 2D Western shows have failed to really catch my attention as of recent, especially since most are 3D animated, and also some of the clips I've seen of SScience SARU's stuff looks phenomenal! But that leads to a bigger question. Is it an Anime? I'd consider it as such, seems like a good amount of Japanese staff are working on it, and of course you have a whole Japanese animation studio working on it, but I guess places like Nyaa don't consider it since there's not a single torrent up on there. Maybe they're just racists towards Canadians. Sad! Anyways, the important thing is that this looks really fucking good & the animation is also really fucking good, they also got the original voices from the movie which I very much enjoyed there, and I'm enjoying them here.

Now going into this, I didn't know what to expect other than people comparing this to "Metal Gear Solid 2" & a clip of a very detailed & very gay lesbian kissing scene that made me really want to call my girlfriend. I was going to watch this with some buds, but I did something really fucked up to them & I believe right now I have just recieved a sign that my seasonal depression is about to start & that I should really stay away from everyone before I somehow end up dead. So in my 4am bordem, I decided to watch a few episodes of it. The first episode moved really fast like, "Crash & The Boys" weren't there, that really funny scene with Scott jumping through the window wasn't there, it basically encompassed the start of the movie all the way to the fight with the first evil-ex, Matthew Patel. I was digging the whole thing, absolutely loving every single part of it, I thought the acting for all the VAs was super good, and I was fully accepting watching a retelling of the story. That was until Scott Pilgrim exploded into $2.50 & fucking died, and at that moment I completely understood the comparison to "Metal Gear Solid 2".

This is some fucking "Dragon Ball Z" shit right here, he literally just died & second episode plays the normal opening like Scott Pilgrim is going to go fight the other exes. To be honest, I'm writing this as I watch the second episode & holy shits its his fucking funeral, in no world did I imagine this would even be a thought in someone's mind. DID THAT GIRL JUST CALL ENVY ADAMS MOMMY? I mean mood but still IT'S A FUNERAL. Bro this is so fucked up, SHE JUST CRASHED A FUNERAL??? WHO INSTALLED THIS SHIT IN THE FUNERAL??? HOW LONG WAS THIS PLANNED FOR??? Alright I'm gonna stop giving my immedieate thoughts, but Roxie Richter is hot as fuck ngl. The action in this episode is top notch, great shots & great coreography, crazy seeing what is essentialy the world 1 boss turning into the main bad guy. Also I noticed that the ending song is different every episode? Pretty cool, honestly the funeral went on for a lil' bit too long (mostly due to the concert) but that entire fight was awesome.

The third episode starts off pretty strong, lil' bit of Young Neil and his personal life, writing, not writing, sleeping, sleep paralysis n' shit, pretty typical stuff in life. I like how Ramona has a different hair color every episode it seems, it looked really good in the last one & this one's quite nice! Also all the episodes have their names in logos similar to old games, which I find to be really neat! Also apparentely Scott faked his death by being kindapped, so he didn't really fake his death just someone faked his death for him. Also WALLACE WOOOO!!! Thank you Kieran Culkin for playing the best character in the movie, and he's still great here! I love seeing more Sex Bob-Omb, they're all really fun characters. It's a nice little scene & its cute seeing Knives involved. ALSO MY GOD WHO IS THAT BADDIE AT THE FRONT DESK? Also shoutouts to the animated short, briefly mentioned here (though I'm assuming its from the comics). OH HELLO ROXIE! I'm assuming this is where the kiss is from. I didn't really care about here when i first saw the movie, other than she looked cool, that she was a lesbian & that's pretty chill. But this so far has expanded her way more than the movie ever did, and I'm enjoying her a lot more here, especially the relationship between her & Ramona. Also the kiss is hot & I would also sing Hamster Dance after kissing a girl. Which is in my plans for next January. Also nice ending bit with Gideon.

Just by judging these 3 episodes at 6am, I'd say this is really good, and each episode gets better & better. I don't know if there's gonna be more than these 8 episodes, but i hope this does well enough for them to consider making more of them. I have no clue when i'm gonna watch the other ones, but I'll try & be consistent with these posts.

Physical gaming is dying & it fucking sucks

Sitemaster's Log - October 27th, 2023

Usually whenever someone talks bout how physical gaming is dying, they bring up some old tale about how they grew up just being able to put the game in & play it without any sort of downloading n' shit. Now they're right, but I'm not gonna go through that because you've heard it a million times. Now this stuff has already bothered my slightly before, but now it's really bothering the fuck out of me.

So tonight I got "Spider-Man 2". Now I'm not much of a super hero guy, but Spider-Man is the exception, he is "the shit". Growing up he was in the coolest shit like the games on Gamecube and also the Sam Raimi trilogy, and I loved it. Now I wasn't initlally interested in "Spider-Man 2" past the fact that it was a sequel to "Spider-Man" on PS4, which was a game I really enjoyed playing last year, probably one of the best games from the last generation. But then my friend was showing me a let's play & holy shit this looked incredible, it's just more "Spider-Man" PS4 with extra cool shit, Venom & the Sandman (my favorite Movie villians), and Miles Morales, who I loved from the Spiderverse movies. I had some cash & I was out late, so I decided to hop into Gamestop & pick up the game (and they gave me free Redbull, I don't drink it but my dad does, so it's like a free gift from him lol.)

So I get home, show my friends who were watching the '94 Spider-Man cartoon, and pop that shit into my PS5, and guess what? It can't play because it needs to copy itself onto my PS5 first. Sure, whatever, the PS5 has like 600GB of storage or whatever, it's fine. But then another issue arrived, my console has no space left. Right, it's a game developed on a modern generation system, the compression is ass & the file size is massive, It's almost 83GB to download the whole game, PLUS another 37GB for the update. That's 120GB just to download this one game, and even it was JUST the 83GB of main game, I'd still be the second biggest game on my system, right inbetween "Final Fantasy XVI's" 90GBs & "Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins'" almost 82GBs, and I know for a fact this game won't be anywhere near as good as "Stranger of Paradise".

So I'm thinking now, what's the point of buying physical media? They made these Blu-ray discs to be massive & easy to handle without worrying about scratches, yet they only exist now as DRM for the poor fools who dare want to own the game physically. It's worse since games now cost $70, so it really makes me rethink all my financial stuff. Should I invest in a new $70, knowing that my best bet is to download it digitally or else get fucked by a physical disc needing to be downloaded, or should I just import an older game for one of my older system, nowing that I can get it for even cheaper in comparison and, if it still works, it'll work without any bullshit (other than memory card size, which is JUST for saving.).

Anyways the next game I'm buying is "Sonic 3D Blast" for my Saturn, which is like $50 but at least I don't have to download it onto my Saturn.

bro what the fuck is this.

Phantasy Star Online - Multiplayer #2

Sitemaster's Log - October 26th, 2023

I got a chance to play more Ephinea "Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst" last night with my buddy Lan, but I also got another friend, Astoria, to play. I'm not big on MMOs but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't digging this, cuz I'm hella digging this. This session wasn't focused on doing a quest, we instead went through the entirity of the caves for levels. Turns out both Lan & Astoria were both playing solo while I wasn't, so I need to catch up with them (Astoria specifically, since I'm only a little bit behind Lan) but I think I did alright (minus forgetting to heal after revives, oops). But we got through all them caves & fought that boss me & Lan got filtered by during our first mession with the maracas, some giant worm named De Rol Le. We beat the fuck out of him & it felt great, though I only got some cash from the defeat. Though really what I wanted was levels & I got it.

It went on for a bit & we were doing it late, so Astoria dropped out so me & Lan ended up doing an extermenation mission in the second area of the Forest. We cleared that shit out cuz we were higher level than before, which felt really good since I was struggling with the first one when I started.

Before I went out for the night, I also made some dumb comments in the lobby as usual. These are the perks of being me, ErectSnake. I'm hella excited to play more & now I'm hoping we can get a fourth player so we can get a full group.

Super Mario Wond- Err, actually Toonami Aftermath

Sitemaster's Log - October 25th, 2023

So originally, I was going to make a blog post about "Super Mario Bros. Wonder" since I hadn't played it in a few days, & I was in the mood to try out the game again since it was 2:30 in the morning & I had nothing to do. However, I also wanted audio in headphones to be playing, so I decided to put on the only good thing that's on at this hour, which is Toonami Aftermath. Now before I start talking about what I saw tonight, I do wanna say that Mario Wonder is an excellent game & I was actually having a lot of fun with the game's psuedo co-op feature. Some of the screenshots I took here were from those experiences, and it was fun waiting for players to get to where I was so i could clear the level with them. It's a really fun game and I wanna play more of it! But while I was playing, I kinda just didn't focus on the game because I was getting completely distracted by Toonami Aftermath.

Now one day I was looking for stuff that emulated older website looks (like old Youtube & Twitter skins) and I randomly stumbled upon "Toonami Aftermath". Now I stumbled upon this at night, the Sunday of April 23rd, while it was airing Celebrity Deathmatch. Now I thought it was cool n' all n' sent it to some friends, but I didn't see much appeal into it That's when I randomly saw "Cromartie High School" on April 25th, now this shit was iNSANE. Now when I say this show is insane, I genuinely mean this show is insane. Like I only saw the very end of an episode but I was completely entraced with what I was seeing. I was so entranced that I recorded part of it when I first saw it. I've attached it below so you all can see what I saw that exact moment. I actually loved what I saw so much that I saw the entire series, I can't reccomend it enough, it's sooo fucking funny & all the episodes are very bite sized in length, it's perfect.

I got into a handful of anime this way actually. I can now say I've seen a but of "Yu Yu Hakusho", "Ruroni Kenshin" looks super cool & I wanna see more of it, "Lupin the 3rd" is really funny & completely get why Marketable & Squishy like it so much. I also saw "FLCL" for the first time through this, and now know why so many Millennials never shut up about it whenever the sequel series gets mentioned. Right now I'm just staying up to catch "Sgt. Frog" from time to time, another really funny show that I'm absolutely certain the dub is making even funnier (always gonan be dub supremacy, but I enjoy subs as well), oh and the ending theme is super funny. I also watch Pokemon whenever it goes on, right now it just aired an episode from "Diamond & Pearl", which was the series I grew up on. It was about this museum robbery in Eterna City, it was pretty funny but the animations was super cheap in places. Honestly I really wish I got into Pokemon as a kid, but I really couldn't get into "Pokemon Yellow" or "Pokemon Diamond". Still fun.

There was another anime I saw here by accident that I ended up getting completely entrahlled by, and that was "The Vision of Escaflowne". Now, I know nothing about it, & I caught it near the end, but holy shit the drama was crazy & the fighting was magnificent. I did see the ending & really enjoyed it despite missing most of the entire series. I really need to watch that complete series because it looks soooo good. I've included two gifs because I want you guys to see how cool this anime looks.

But yea, that's the Mario Wonder post, completely hijacked by Anime. I'm gonna go back to saying I'm not a weeb despite the fact that I stayed up for like, 3 hours watching & writing about Anime. Other than "Sgt. Frog" the only other thing I'm waiting to see air is "The Slayers" because the art style fucks. Also apparently Cromartie airs tomorrow at 3am so you KNOW I gotta watch it again.

SONIC HACKING CONTEST 2023 - Day #1

Sitemaster's Log - October 23rd, 2023

So as it turns out, the Sonic Hacking Contest 2023 begun today & I had no idea until I saw a tweet about it on Twitter. Now usually I am one to watch these, I watched SomeCallMeJohnny stream a week of entries between 2013 & 2016. Afterwards I kinda just stopped watching them, and I didn't bother really touching any of the hacks (I would actually go back & download old hacks lol). This time, though, since I had some buds that I streamed SAGE to, I decided I'd play a few of the SHC entires, and I started today off with some Mega Drive / Genesis entreis. I didn't play all of them, and I didn't have any strong thoughts on all of them, so the ones I mentioned here are just the ones that interested me.

While I do not play to talk about all the mods I played in chronological order, I do want to start off with the first one I played, which was called "CrazySonic: Super Ultra Cool Bodacious Radical Mega CD Remastered Edition!!!" by Ralakimus, which is a remaster of "CrazySonic" from 2015's Hacking Contest, gloriously ported to the SEGA CD. In this you play as Bus, and you must drive around all the zones to get to the end. This version has a lot of notable additions, such as CD Quality music, a proper health & system alongside a tire air meter, and brand new Special Stages made to mimic "Crazy Taxi". That's gotta be the coolest thing added, and I found later that it plays the Offsprings during these stages (I loaded the ROM incorrectly so no music was playing originally.) Also, "Hong Kong '97" is there as an extra game, remade to be a Touhou-styled game with a cutscene before the boss, which is absolutely incredible.

Speaking of Touhou & ports to Genesis addons, "Bad Apple!! in Sonic 1 (32X)" again by Ralakimus is weird as hell. Basically, it uses the 32X to overlay the entirety of "BAD APPLE", the Touhou song, onto "Sonic the Hedgehog" (including streamings its music. It's too smooth & it basically just covers the entirity of the game, which isn't much of an issue at first since Green Hill Zone is the easiet zone in the world. This level of experimentation is flat out sick as hell, I hope this leads to a full hack that takes advantage of these possibilities.

In what's probably the nicest looking hack I played this competition, "Sonic the Hedgehog: Save The Moon Demo" by Super_Sonic_321 is a short n' simple hack that I played a bit of before I got stuck. It's neat, though I was told that some stage graphics were taken from different games, and the second zone did remind me of "World of Illusion; Starring Mickey Mouse", so that's probably right. It's obvious that this is incomplete but I enjoyed it. Hopefully Super_Sonic_321 continues to improve from this because I can see a good amount of potential.

I have a soft spot for beta recreation hacks, and I've always had since I was a kid. I partially blame Sonic for that, since hacks like "Sonic 1 Beta Hoax" & "Sonic the Hedgehog - The Lost Worlds" were just easily downloadable from Sonic Retro's romhacking page. Nowadays, there's an abundance of Beta-style hacks out there, so it's hard to really stick out with one that's pure quality, which I believe "Sonic Iku" by HighHog does well! At the moment it's a simple n' short rom hack that only covers about 4 acts, but the art in each zone is phenomenal & all the new sprites also look really good, like Sonic's and the bubbles that repalce the monitors. I did get stuck slightly halfway through Labyrinth Zone, but I did eventually get past it. There's also a secret Zone if you enter the level select, based off the Golden Zone from the concept art, which looks really nice as well! Another hack I'm excited to see fleshed out, and hopefully will make an appearence in next year's hacking contest.

And for what is currently my favorite entry in the "Retro" catagory, "Sonic 2: Archives" by Team Conquest & Team Technical might be what's shaping up to be the modern version of "Sonic the Hedgehog - The Lost Worlds", and it's doing it way better. It's goal is recreation that aims to make the game closer to it's conceptual phase, taking basis from Concept Art, prototypes, and unused content. Everything from Music, art, layouts, & more are overhauled here, almost as if you're playing a version of Sonic 2 straight from an alternate universe. There's also this super cool world map that I was genuinely shocked to see, haven't seen one of those since like, "Sonic the Hedgehog Brother Trouble" back in 2010. It's really cool to see, and I like the way everything is presented here. My only complaint is that I'm not a fan of Sonic's weird walk cycle, and the Special Stages have no modifications. But other than that I'm super impressed by this hack, and I'm really hoping out of all the ones I played today that this one actually gets finished.

That about does it for now, but tomorrow I do plan on playing some of the hacks for the Adventure titles, and if I do, I'm gonna write about it right here.

Sonic X-treme

Sitemaster's Log - October 22nd, 2023

If there's any game that I'm thankful that post got cancelled but also existed, then that game would be "Sonic X-treme". Honestly, with the direction the game was going for most of it's production, I'm pretty certain this could've killed the entire franchise. None of the main game looked appealing, the pre-rendered sprites look horrendous, the level design seemed so small and compact, and a lot of the ideas they came up with are honestly horrible in hindsight. But at the same time, this is also why it's so interesting. It was such an important title in not only the franchise's history, but also the for the Saturn as a whole, and I would be lying if I said I wasn't interested in it. So tonight, while I had my Saturn set up for the Sonic Team shrine, I decided to play some X-treme prototypes & remakes I had on some burnt discs.

Before I start, I do wanna say that I only looked at 3 that I had burnt already from last year. I didn't look at the main "Sonic Z-treme" project since I never burnt it onto a CD. I didn't look at the first known POV prototype of X-treme for that same reason. I tried to get the latest known POV prototype running on my Saturn, but unfortuntely it didn't want to work, bummer.

Alright the first one I wanna talk about is the first leaked prototype of the game, "Project Condor" from July 18th, 1996. Now whenever you see this game in action or in mention, it's always about the main level engine by Chris Senn & Ofer Alon. Now it's all fine &A dandy, except for the fact that it honestly sucks. Now the reason it sucks is because they developed that engine for PCs, believing that they could just port what they had done onto the Saturn easily. Not only the game, the game looks like ass to control, and we actually know this to be true because old source code leaks allow us to play it, and it sucks. But this isn't Chris & Ofer's engine, this is Christina Coffin's boss engine. See, while X-treme is mostly known for being a buggy & unstable game, the boss engine by Ms. Coffin was so good that it became the main engine for the last part of the game's development. The build you see is above is a taste of her engine being moved to the main engine, in a period referred to as "Project Condor". It's fun to play, it runs at a smooth & stable 60fps at all times, and it runs on real hardware, since Ms. Coffin was developing directly on Saturn. See, she kinda like a wizard with the system, and stayed at SEGA for a few years as part of R&D, working with all SEGA development branches to use the discoveries made while developing her boss engine to other titles (like "Burning Rangers", she claims). Playing this really made feel, just for a moment, that X-treme had potential, and honestly this is the only part that really had any.

As far as I'm aware, Voxel's "Sonic X-treme" recreation from 2022's SAGE is the latest in "X-treme on Saturn recreation"-type games. SAGE stands for "Sonic Amateur Games Expo", and I've been on & off on them since 2017's, lot of good & lot of bad (and also masterpieces like "Isekai Mario, ain't that right Retro?). Anyways, Voxel's X-treme project is definitally on the good side of things. In comparison to Z-treme, this one is far more accurate, striving for accurate graphics & overall feeling (down to having the fish-eye lens). Unfortuntely, it's Sonic X-treme, the level design is a rather poor excuse for 3D (like honestly "Bug!" has better level design than this.) and its very slippery. But it's accurate, so I'll let it slide like Sonic does in this. Pretty cool to hear the lesser used X-treme temp. music, most people just use "Space Queens" but I forgot how... alright the music was overall. Some good tracks though, like "Crystal Valley" for Crystal Frost, and the "Options" music has always been a favorite of mine. It's got a few negatives though, and it overall ruins the experience. The first is that it's short, only two levels, two test stages, and a boss. The menu sounds use sounds from the post-Adventure games and they throw me off, liek they suck me out of the experience. The third is related to the boss fight between Fang, which is a good fight, lil' hard & weird, but seems realistic for his boss fight (which we don't know much off), but this is the only time you can change character models (which can be cahnged in the options) and hoo-boy do they not look pretty. The models are fine, but the animations are horrible. I understand one guy worked on this project, but his Fang animations are top notch, I don't understand how this Sonic turned out like this. But yea it's solid, I'd play it again if it was longer.

One again, for the last X-treme project I played, we return to the Boss Engine, this time a replica of it. First off, fuck CD-Rs, because I tried for an hour trying to load this with no dice until it suddently worked for no fucking reason. In the time span of like thirty minutes, my Girlfriend woke up, called me, went to drink water out the sink like a dog, and then went back to bed, and the fucking thing didn't even work until she woke up, AGAIN. Anyways, on to the actual demo itself, which is the "Z-Treme BOSS" recreation, this has to be some of the best of X-treme I've ever played. The controls are solid, they feel just like they did in the leaked prototype sans the Spindash which is like kinda broken. The Metal Sonic fight itself is cool, with two-sorta semi phases and a bunch of attacks, and its playing "Lost Boss", one of my favorite temp tracks (note the other game did this too, it was just cooler here). Honestly I would love to play a whole project that expands on Ms. Coffin's "Project Condor"/Boss engine, I know why everyone does the Senn/Alon engine (more publicity + leaked files) but honest to god, Coffin's part of the game is like the only part I can see as salvagable. Anyways yea I really liked this one, hopefully more people try to make stuff like this, kinda sick of most of these project focusing on the other, not as good half.

Anyways, I'm gonna work on the Sonic Team shrine, good games are calling me & for once, I don't wanna torture myself.