For Halloween: Land Of Confusion

Halloween worthy due to rubber masks and nightmares. Cathode worthy because of Reagan wearing tights, romantic dinosaurs, a nurse joke and a 2001 reference. Seriously, was this the best music video of all time or what?

Note From Management: Around The Corner

NaNo starts soon and at most I'll do some news updates here at Cathode Tan. For the interested, you can follow the novel's update at this blog. I'll post snippets and keep the word count up to date (obviously, it's pretty blank now).

I want to get a demo of This Town Is Dead up tonight for Halloween, but I don't know if I'll have time to chug through the last scene I want to add. I'm still writing the framework itself and just got to a combat-like portion, which I haven't even really designed much less coded. This would be an insanely short rough draft in every sense of the word - so measure expectations accordingly. Think the Grue Demo in terms of scope.

Till then - enjoy Halloween.

For Halloween: Team Fortress Spy Spray

Just say, "Boo". Three Panel Soul has the inverse funny on this one.

For Halloween: Halo Costume

Via Make

For Halloween: BlackSite Commercial

BlackSite: Area 51 TV Spot

Oh man, the scaremongers are going to have fun with this if they catch it.

For Halloween: Ghost Squad Bikini Costumes

Trick or treat, and happy Halloween.

Included in tonight's update are two direct-feed videos of each of Ghost Squad's new party mode extras in action, including a hilarious look at Paradise Mode (the aforementioned bikini game), as well as the new Ninja Mode, and some screens of our favorite costumes in the game as well. Changes in both of the new Party Mode games are almost entirely cosmetic, but they end up going a lot farther than simply swapping out your lead character's costume, which was previously included in the actual Ghost Squad arcade game back in 2004. Rather than messing only with the lead characters, the Party Mode extras morph the main game, swapping out models for every enemy, boss, and most weapons, along with changing the controls around a bit for the players.

-- A Ghost Squad Halloween

Link has more images and videos, including a ninja outfit - and images of a Virtua Cop outfit. By the by, when I was saying Red Steel could be a rails shooter while keeping the swordplay - this is exactly what I think about.

TV Watch: Heroes Season Two

To say that Heroes has been backsliding a bit seems to be becoming an understatement. I was already a bit annoyed when Sylar clearly escapes the end of season one - but it's more than that. We can't escape season one.

Last season we had the pointless subplot with angst and emotion. OK, so last season it was Psychic Cop, his wife and a bunch of other stuff nobody cared about - and now it's Claire, her boyfriend and a bunch of other stuff we don't care about.

And one might think that with Nikki getting the old hospice treatment from The Company, we might be lacking in a desperate but dangerous female character looking for salvation. Except, we're not - because we've got Maria and Pablo or Estaban or whatever Aquaman's name is. They picked up Sylar after what seems to be The Company's "drop off the most dangerous people on the planet in remote locations and see what happens" plan oddly goes wrong so that he can fulfill Hiro's role from last year - the wandering superperson who can't quite seem to figure out if he has powers or not or how to use them.

And apparently Peter is just Isaac these days, without the cool loft or heroin.

Worse than any of this is Claire's dad. Remember last year when he was lying to his family while he was supposed to be holding down a real, albeit mind-numbing, job? Yet what he was really doing was wondering around the world in increasingly implausible means doing fairly evil stuff with a Haitian who can swipe minds? Sound familiar at all? Whereas Claire's dad possibly had the most development from last year - going from nemesis to hero - he seems to have completely reverted at this point. Sure, he's now doing evil stuff to destroy The Company, but considering they've gone from being controlled by the guy from Clockwork Orange to Bob The Bureaucrat, I'm really not sure they had much to be afraid of in the first place.

Course, Bob does have an ipod with every training video ever made - so ... well, they must at least have a killer IT department.

If there was ever a term for character undevelopment - Heroes would be an example right now.

Virtual Console Titles Released, Reviewed

Nintendo released a Halloween themed bunch for the VC today and vc-reviews.com is already on top of them. Always read before downloading people - friends don't let friends download Double Dungeon.

And if you're looking for something themed quite evil and have not yet download the pinball fun which is Devil's Crush - have to highly recommend. We spent a decent amount of Saturday with this one.

DVD Watch: Planet Terror

Planet Terror is one half of Grindhouse, the zombie half to be specific. There's honestly not much to say about it above that - it's a well produced, over-the-top, moderately creepy zombie flick. It's a lot of fun - but I'm also glad this was our late, late nighter because it didn't require a lot of attention. It's rather annoying they split the double feature into two, though, because you really do get only a portion of the feel they were going for with the experience.

Still, it's a lot of fun and a better zombie film than most - maybe not 28 Days Later but certainly 28 Weeks Later.

Super Smash Bros Gets Level Editor

That’s right! You can use your Wi-Fi connection to send stages you’ve made to Nintendo! (However, you can’t submit repeatedly. Maybe just once per day?)

And a stage selected from the entire daily collection will be sent from Nintendo to your Wii. A stage made by someone else will come to you over the Internet once per day!

DUN DUN DUNNNNNN! That’s the shocking truth. This means you’ll be able to experience a new stage every day—the flavor of the day, if you will. However, the plan is for that stage to vanish once one day has passed. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime encounter.

-- Stage Builder [Smash Bros Dojo]

Excellent - a great use for NiWiFi on the Wii. Link above also has screenshots and more details.

DVD Watch: Audition

Audition is an old school Japanese horror flick - and if Wikipedia has it right it has the distinction of being probably the only movie Rob Zombie thought he might walk out on. This isn't because the movie is bad - actually the movie is excellent on many points. For one thing, it's one of those older films that actually spends a good deal of time winding the story up before things get really gory.

When things get gory - they get really gory ... and not just in the usual fake exploding head kind of way. Audition is notable if anything because in this age of torture porn thrillers like Saw and Hostel - Audition manages to keep the psychological keyed in. It's not just creepy because of what's happening, like the detached scenarios of Saw, but who is doing what to whom.

I still recommend the movie, but with caution. The ending is definately not for the weak of heart.

DVD Watch: Severance

Severance is billed as one of those "black comedy horrors", but this is black as in dark, not black as in comically bleak like Shaun Of The Dead. Severance tells the tale of a corporate outing meeting up with a grisly results in the middle of the woods. It manages to be fairly scary more than a few times, but extra points go to sly metajokes about the horror genre itself - starting off with the immigrant bus driver who refuses to take the side road into the woods, but nobody understands him because he doesn't speak English.

The movie itself is English - which I only bring up because I swear there's a theme out there about urban brits being terrified of the woods. Torchwood only recently brought us an episode about a small rural town gone to hell.

It's a great movie and if you're looking to mix up Halloween with any corporate angst, there's no other choice.