I’m sorry that we mis-approriated “hepcat”.

I feel that if the MST3K Movie was going to have a realistic chance of actually recouping its $2 million budget, they needed to riff a recognizable movie* or a lesser-known movie with a recognizable star. You needed something that would pique a casual consumer’s curiosity, something that would potentially attract…

I can remember reading a comment on a BBS in 1992: “Does anyone else think that the guy who sometimes shows up in the skits (MKie) would make a better host than Joel?”

I’m a little disappointed that they’re opting for the Netflix cast rather than the performers from the recent live tour (Emily, Yvonne, et al); I thought they really knocked it out of the park. The stuff they did on Twitch during the pandemic wasn’t great, but I hope they get another chance.

Ah, that “Right Back At Ya” theme song takes me right back to the fall of 2001. I loved all the weird and goofy kid anime we got in the early 2000s, like <i>Battle B-Daman</i> and <i>Fighting Foodons</i>. 

Yeah. It’s a weird contradiction when an action-RPG purposefully limits your healing options in order to force you to learn how to avoid damage (usually through dodging and/or guarding) and then gives the boss monster some huge unavoidable attack. 

One of my pet peeves as to how modern single-player RPGs seek to impose a challenge on the player is by arbitrarily limiting the amount of healing they can do. A lot of games won’t let you simply stock up on 99 x-potions; they’ll only let you carry 9 potions at once, and then have a 2-minute cooldown between each one. 

Yeah. The trend right now in video game design is “puzzle bosses” that can only be overcome with very specific builds and strategies. Whereas in the 90s and early 2000s, the design philosophy was that a casual player should be able to “brute force” their way through most bosses using a variety of character builds…

Of course, with the prevalence of mods these days, developers have now effectively delegated cheat-making to the community. 

Yeah. I always loved that the classic Final Fantasy games (particularly 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10) would allow you to build characters that could trivialize the final boss fight. And it didn’t require a lot of grinding so much as it required a thorough understanding of the game’s systems and secrets. And, on more than one…

Yeah. “Twin Peaks: The Return” was the only one of these recent revivals to achieve any real praise. Although the MST3K revival managed to produce 3-4 episodes that rank among the show’s top 40. 

“What will happen when *BLANK* discovers a secret that every other character (and the audience) already knows???” is probably my least favourite way to generate suspense in soap-style storytelling. Mostly because it’s the same thing every time: the deceived character stops speaking to the deceiver for an arbitrary…

I always liked how the Nintendo Power comic of “Link to the Past” ended with Link and Zelda drifting apart. 

No, I think Kong is less of a family name and more of a “hometown name”.

I think that the NFL asserts a lot of rights that it doesn’t actually have when it comes to its Super Bowl trademark.

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At least Star Control 2's planet lander was only in 2d.

I just got a PS5 yesterday (I bit the bullet and bought a modestly marked-up unit from a local game store), so I’ll probably fool around with that little robot game.

I’ve been re-playing 428: Shibuya Scramble lately, mapping and testing a route to the good ending without any bad endings, to see if it could viably work…

I unironically prefer the Muppet Show versions of Elton John’s songs to the original studio versions. They’re bone-chillingly great. 

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