Hakus in video games

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I was watching a YouTube video of a speed run of Super Nintendo’s Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, often considered one of the most challenging games ever, and midway through the game, the player triggers aggro of a Red Arremer Devil, or what Capcom and Google insist was always named “Firebrand.”  The speed runner ran for it, with Red Devil continuing chase, but as soon as the player passed a stage checkpoint, they immediately turned around, and jumped to their death, committing a suicide.  They restarted the level past where the Red Devil was and resumed running the game, without having to fight the flying nuisance.

I understand that in speed runs, speed is all that matters, even if it means strategic suicides in order to save some time.  This is a common practice in Zelda runs or any action/RPGs that spawn fresh lives or load states in strategic locations.  But it always feels kind of cheap to me that suicide is necessary, because perhaps it’s just me, it’s just more impressive if one didn’t have to literally kill themselves in order to beat a clock.

Make no mistake, Red Arremer Devils are extremely pesky throughout the entire franchise, as they have very erratic and difficult to combat patterns, and can absorb a good deal of damage before actually going down.  Furthermore, they’re virtually impossible to ignore and outrun, because to my experience, they will follow you until they die, or more likely, you die.  But they are not impossible to kill, and with a little bit of luck, the ability to read patterns and most importantly, patience, they can be handled.

However, patience is the very antithesis of speed runs, and in the case of a Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts run, it makes a degree of sense to kill yourself once you pass a checkpoint, and resume playing without being hounded by a Red Devil.  The difference between this tactic and strategic suicide in like Zelda is that this speed runner does it to avoid having to engage a difficult opponent, whereas in games like Zelda, it’s done in order to avoid having to traverse an entire dungeon in reverse in order to leave.

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I feel bad for the B-Team

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If there’s ever one thing I’ve observed about the WWE throughout the decades, is that every now and then, you can tell when there’s a character or character(s) where it’s extraordinarily obvious that the Creative department has absolutely no ideas for.  However, the performers themselves are either competent in the ring and/or are personalities that are genuinely decent, therefore they are desired to be kept on television and therefore employed, as opposed to being completely taken off of TV in general and allowed to rot in obscurity.

More notable and recent examples of this would be early incarnations of The New Day, Damien Sandow and Rusev, whom were all given pretty lame duck seeds for characters, but were all pretty decent performers or supposed good locker room guys, hence the desire to keep them at all, even if their personas were lacking in effort.

The thing is, the wrestling smark culture is smarter than ever with the advent of the internet and the ability to know what’s going on the vast majority of the time, or at least be able to talk it out with other wrestling fans and come to conclusions that differed from the days when communication wasn’t quite so simple.  Subsequently, whenever the smarks have been able to identify when a wrestler or wrestlers were getting the shaft by Creative, these are precisely the wrestlers that they begin to get behind, in a defiant, contrarian manner to kind of play a chicken and egg game with the industry to put the test towards the claim that the fans make the stars and not the other way around where stars make fans.

That said, all three of my examples are cases where almost by sheer will and a relentless refusal to give up with seeds they’re sowing, got over with the fans, and to gargantuan amounts.  The New Day singlehandedly resurrected tag team wrestling in the WWE in an age where countless names in the industry have stated the company’s secondary opinion of it, and have become probably the most lucrative merchandising property in the company.  Damien Sandow became Damien Mizdow, the super-over stunt-double for The Miz, and probably spun more gold out of shit than anyone else before him, and Rusev took a dead-end partnership with Aiden English, and through forced-meme determination, gotten the Rusev Day gimmick over like crazy.

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Just when you think the NBA couldn’t get any dumber

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It was naïve of me to think that the Houston Rockets attempting a million three pointers when it was apparent that nobody had the NBA Jam fire code running was the dumbest thing to happen in the playoffs.  After all, the NBA Finals hadn’t yet occurred.  And much like tempting Murphy’s Law, something worse must occur.

Obviously, I didn’t watch the vast majority of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, but thankfully I watched the part that really mattered.  Where Cavaliers guard JR Smith corralled an offensive rebound on a missed free throw, with the score tied at 107 with five seconds left, but instead of calling for a timeout or attempting a game-winner, he dribbled it out to half court and let time expire – much to the abhorrent dismay of his teammates who clearly understood the situation better than he did.

Despite the fact that Smith alleges that he thought a timeout would be called or he was going to get fouled, the fact of the matter is that he clearly was not aware that the score was tied, and that he could have very well won the game, had he even bothered trying to get a shot up or passed it off to someone else who could.  Commentators quickly and often, pointed out claiming to have heard that immediately after the gaffe, Smith claimed to have “thought we were ahead,” which is mortifying that a guy would lose track of the score, in the NBA Finals.

This isn’t really a big deal if the Cavaliers won the game, but naturally they lost in overtime, magnifying the incident fifty times over, as the sole reason why they lost.  And this isn’t an instance where a player could politically correctly state that the team lost as a team, because LeBron James scored 51 points and JR Smith’s brain fart is what denied the Cavs a chance to even win in regulation.

Bottom line is, JR Smith is an idiot.  He’s a bonehead that somehow managed to lose track of the situation in the most critical part of the game in the most critical part of the season, in the NBA Finals.  Regardless of if he actually knew the situation and was hoping for a time out or to pass the ball off, or he did in fact forget, neither changes the fact that he’s an idiot.  His excuse that he was waiting for a timeout or that he was going to get fouled is weak, because as the ballholder, he himself could have called for a time out, several of tenths of a second faster than the coach could have, but he didn’t want to take accountability for that decision.  Or, despite the fact that when he snatched the offensive rebound, he had the ten-foot tall Kevin Durant up in the air and could very easily have gotten up a fairly uncontested shot at close range up and made a game winner, but again, no accountability assumed there either.  Neither of which are any better than simply having forgotten the score at the most juncture of the game.

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Pokémon is what makes it funny

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Newsworthy: parkour hero scales four stories in like four seconds in order to rescue child hanging off of a ledge in Paris.  French president applauds his act of heroism and immediately expedites his pursuit of French citizenship and immediately offers him a job with the Paris fire brigade.  A wonderful story of bravery and a reward fitting of a hero who deserves it.

Brogworthy: child ended up in the precarious situation because his dad left him unsupervised so he could go to the market and play Pokémon Go on the way back.  Dad faces two years in prison for child neglect.  Because of Pokémon Go.

Even before it was revealed that dad was out being an idiot, this was still a fantastic story of a legitimate hero who did something extraordinary.  It’s a happy ending for all, because the kid didn’t fall to his death, and the Malian immigrant who scaled the building like Spider-Man to rescue the kid is instantly rewarded with the French citizenship he was aspiring to gain. 

There’s not much to talk about in a situation like this, and it’s easiest to simply marvel in the incredible feats of human bravery and feel like our collective faith in people can gain a point or two for such selfless courage.

But then it comes out that the kid was left unsupervised by a deadbeat of a father who went out to the market, and then decided to leisurely take his time coming back so that he could play some Pokémon Go.  Now, it’s something to brog about.

Full disclosure: I still play Pokémon Go.  It’s literally taking me an entire year to go from level 34 to 35, and there’s a litany of life milestones that I’m fairly confident that I’ll hit before I can get to the maximum level 40, and knowing my luck, Niantic, if they’re even still around in six years, will raise the max cap to like 50, and then I’ll be fucked and proclaim I’ll stop but then probably won’t anyway.

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So bad, it’s worth a post

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I’m not even going to bother prefacing the post about how I think today’s NBA is shit, it was better in the past, yadda yadda.  But the sports fan in me was intrigued by the fact that both the eastern and the western conferences were going to game 7s, and when I had little else to do on a long holiday weekend, I figured why not tune in to see what was happening?  When the dust settled, we were left with the Golden State Warriors versus the Cleveland Cavaliers; for the fourth straight year, which is a marvel in itself, and something that if Marty McFly told me was going to happen back in 1998, I would’ve disavowed the entire Back to the Future franchise as a whole.

I mean, going into the playoffs, I would’ve bet money that it was going to turn out this way; Golden State is the modern day super team that actually is super and actually does win basketball games.  And on the other side, we have LeBron James whom with each passing year truly deserves to have his name mentioned in the same breath as Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, as a player who inexplicably has the ability to win, by almost nothing more than sheer force of will sometimes, regardless of whom the Cavaliers field around him, because he just puts the team on his back and has overcome some majorly dubious odds this particular playoffs to get to where they are now.

But the point of this post isn’t about how great the Warriors are or how amazing LeBron James is, but more about how the Houston Rockets basically gifted the Warriors the west, and how they weren’t so much a team that was beat by the superior team as much as they were the squad of fucking idiots that simply didn’t understand how to change plans when it was abundantly clear that their Plan A was just not working.

The eye test when watching the game notices that the Rockets are jacking up an inordinate amount of three point shots.  The Warriors too, but the difference is that the Warriors were making a few of them here and there, while the Rockets were flinging enough bricks to build a village in Zaire.  The Rockets’ 11-point lead at the half was quickly whittled away and when Durant, Curry and Thompson started burying some practically half court shots to start taking the lead and begin their usual pulling away from the opponent spiel, the Rockets simply did not pivot and change up their plans accordingly.  Instead, they threw up bad three pointer after bad three pointer, and I’m thinking to myself, does this team know how to play basketball inside the key?

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Thoughts on Solo: A Star Wars Story

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*SPOILER FREE* If there’s any more indication to how I felt about Solo: A Star Wars Story, is the fact that it’s been just a day since I watched it, and I’ve already forgotten that I’d seen it.

This isn’t to say that it was a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but at the same time, it’s hardly a film that’s remotely memorable in any real fashion.  On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being bad and ten being excellent, I would rate Solo at a 5, for average, solid mediocrity.  It was far from the excessively fatalistic and pessimistic expectations of the film that the cesspool of the internet and the cancers of social media would lead people to believe, but it was nowhere near the level of quality that was Rogue One, the other Star Wars Story film.  I would still rank it above Episodes 1-3 of the canonical storyline; although that doesn’t say that much, it at least shows that it’s still better than other films and therefore not the worst movie in the history of film.

It’s just not a particularly memorable film that has any sticking power in my opinion.  One of the only sentiments of the film prior to its release that I agree with, is that I questioned the necessity of a standalone Han Solo film in the first place.  I don’t disagree that it’s in all likelihood a money grab, trying to cash in on the familiarity of existing intellectual properties, but after Rogue One, I had hoped that future Star Wars Stories films would be similar, in the sense that they would be widely original characters and storylines independent from the reset of the main canon plot, while existing in the same universe.  But instead, two editions in, and we’re getting an origin story that kind of floats almost independently in the timeline of the canon, that would require some creative shoe-horning in order to make fit adequately in the stream of the story, because they’ve used primary characters.

To me, this implies that there will be a future necessity for Luke and Leia, since the childhoods of either would probably be way too boring to sustain their own films, and from what I understand, there’s a lot of scuttlebutt about a film about Boba Fett, to which I’ll never understand the mass astonishment for a character that really had a total of maybe 7-14 minutes of total screen time within the original trilogy, to have such a devout following, not to mention that his origins were already somewhat explored in the abysmal episodes 1-3.

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Danny’s latest television binges, May 2018

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Sometimes, a show isn’t great enough to warrant its own post, but still good enough to be worth mentioning, when combined in the same breath as several other like-quality shows.  And when we have enough of them, it becomes worthy of a composite binge topic to where I can list off some of the shows I’ve seen recently that weren’t groundbreaking or mind blowing, but still worth something enough in usually time or effort to mention.

Ugly Delicious (pictured above, Netflix) – At first blush, I’ve never really been a fan of restauranteur, David Chang.  Part of it was the fact that I found his opinion of his New York restaurants versus the world to be pretentious and arrogant, but mostly the fact that David Chang really reminds me of myself, that is if I were successful in my field and world renown.  But he grew up in Northern Virginia, is only a little bit older than me, and based on a lot of his monologues throughout the show, thinks in ways that I feel is very similar to my own lines of thinking.

However, Ugly Delicious, as much of a celebrity circle-jerk it tends to turn into repeatedly, was still a really quality series that I enjoyed a good deal.  It’s thought-provoking, definitely conversation worthy, and there’s a lot of laughs to be had from it.  It’s a definite good show for anyone who either likes food, is interested in classism, racism and cultural appropriation, is Asian, or frankly, all of the above.  It changes my opinion of Chang to be a little more favorable, but at the same time I’m skeptical that a lot of the soul in the show is still staged for the sake of show creation, but when it was all done with, I still enjoyed the series and would recommend it to others.

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