Tag: Blog

Hatton time … but wait, you said, it’s not Hatton time. Hatton time was last week and we are unsure if we can handle this much greatness.

Well, suck it up, because tomorrow’s my birthday and I’m heisting the blog this week.  Why?  You see, your friendly neighborhood Hatton has a certain ailment that has affected him off and on since he was a child, and that is the curse of needing to write imaginary things down. Legally, I believe it is called ‘writing’. That said, when I’m in a writing rut, I have a secret that I’m going to share with you today.  That is, I have a Reddit account… I know, scandalous.

That account writes short horror stories out of nowhere – which is why, it’s called SurpriseHorrorStory

So for my birthday, here’s a gift of some creepiness from posts I’ve done in the past.

-=-=-

Mum and Papa were awoken before the sun lit their bedroom by Billy crashing into their bedroom, “THANK YOU! OH THANK YOU SO MUCH!”

Parents expected to wake up early on Christmas morning, but not so urgently. The pair exchanged glances with each other, and then to their closed closet doors. Billy’s new bike, his big gift this year, was tucked away in their closet. The rest of his gifts were wrapped, so what was he so excited about?

“He is adorable and I love him! He hasn’t told me his name yet, but he enjoyed the rest of Santa’s cookies.” The boy was vibrating with joy.

“Son? ..What are you talking about?” Papa asked, sliding out of bed and into his slippers. He then heard the crash of something downstairs. Glass shattering. The cat screaming angrily.

Billy, oblivious to the noise, said, ‘My Furby, Papa. He’s adorable!” The stairs creaked. “Oh! He’s coming up the stairs! I didn’t know they could do that!”
(Source)

-=-=-

“Look, I don’t know which one of you is doing it, but it’s starting to freak me out.”

My coworkers all shared confused glances as I sat down with my lunch. It wasn’t surprising, only one of them was likely guilty.

“The sign.. the googly eyes sign?” I asked, imploring one of them to reveal themselves, but nobody started giggling or raising their hand.

I sighed. In the ideal version of this conversation in my head, one of them admitted it was them and they could explain it to the group. With nobody owning up, I was the one that would have to tell the story and be the source of the laughter.

“Someone keeps screwing with the earthquake sign.. the stupid one with the googly eyes so that the eyes are always staring at my desk.” And the laughter came. It was contained as each of them realized I was taking this seriously, but it was most certainly going to come out more explosively when I wasn’t around.

With nobody owning up, I finished my lunch without much more discussion about it and went back to my desk, watching as the eyes followed me from the hallway to my seat.

Did they look angrier today?
(Source)

-=-=-

♫ Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Following new friends, while remaining hidden
Hiding my pistol inside of my sling
These are a few of my favorite things.

Starting off easy, then getting quite brutal,
using a knife so much that it gets too dull
Hearing the new words that my new friend sings
These are a few of my favorite things ♫
(Source)

I promised myself that I was going to try and get through more books this year. I’ve digested so many movies, I honestly find myself not watching many lately, and the ones I do watch tend to be old schlocky sci-fi movies with people making fun of them underneath. MST3k and Rifftrax really have warped my brain that way…

Anyway, I promised I was going to read more, and I gave myself the allowance of audiobooks. I realized that I had a couple Audible credits just hanging out that I hadn’t touched from years ago, so I reinstated my account and between physical titles and audiotitles, I’m actually not doing so bad with a half-dozen or so books read this year.  On that note, audiobooks get the same treatment that movies I don’t have interest in – I listen to them at 1.25x because most readers are just too slow and I get distracted way too easily.

So here’s some books that I’ve braindumped in one form or another, and what I’ve thought of them.  I’ll warn you – they’re mostly not great…

CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD – Read mostly because of the cover and the title, this is a young adult book in the Christopher Pike, RL Stein variety where a bunch of kids deal with the craziness going on around them. It isn’t great, but it definitely will remind you of some late 90’s slasher films you’ve seen.  If you want something fluffy to inject into your brain, you could go a lot worse than ‘Clown’ … hell, you could go with…

FANTASTICLAND – Let’s start with the fact that the elevator pitch of this book is great. ‘What if we did the Warriors, but at Disney?’ and the first half of the book is trying to convince you that this premise is occurring. In the style of World War Z tales from people that surrounded the incident, Fantasticland is a damned mess that, the longer you scrutinize, the less sense it makes… oh, and why does an amusement park turn into a post-apocalyptic wasteland (without an apocalypse).. because these damn kids turn to monsters without their phones, by gum.  Blech.

THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP – I really enjoy Grady Hendrix. His stories take a simple premise and go crazy with it. ‘HORRORSTOR’ is ‘What if you had a haunted Ikea’. ‘SOLD OUR SOUL’ is ‘What if a band did sell their souls for rock & roll?’.  And FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP is.. well, just what the title tells you. What if the horror we digested in the 70s and 80s weren’t fiction, but fictionalized historical accounts of actual events.  What would Laurie Strode, Nancy Thompson, and Sidney Prescott be like in group therapy? It’s fun, tells a great story, and Hendrix has a love of his source material.

THE TROOP – Finally, ok.. if you want to be skeeved the hell out. If you want a novel that will turn your stomach, feel big and creepy and icky, and completely satisfying from top to bottom? I give to you Nick Cutter’s The Troop which, elevator pitch version is: ‘Stand By Me’ but ‘OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT THING?’ …A troop of boy scouts are on a private island for an overnight trip, but they run into some problems.  I know that says nothing, really, but you really should just dive in blind and be grossed out like it wants you to be.

Hatton, do you read anything other than horror?

Yes, I go through phases… as I’m currently reading Christopher ‘Eragon’ Paolini’s new scifi book ‘To Sleep In A Sea of Stars’ ..and it’s ok.. I’ll let you know some other time how it turned out, but I’m pushing to get to the end if that helps.

So what have you been reading? You know where to tell us…

Hey all, Podcast Rob here,

One of my biggest gripes about movies is how amazingly misleading the first thing we see about them is…. The Trailer.  I feel that, over time, the movie industry has gotten more insidious with movies that, while they may publicly praise and hype up, are worried internally about siad movie’s performance… so they go out of their way to make the trailer look as tasty as possible to get ases in seats even when they know the movie won’t live up to it.  I suppose in a way it’s no different than seeing a commercial of an amazingly delicious looking burger only to open the container and see roadkill on a bun.

That said.. here’s a few of my BIGGEST issues….

Avengers : Age of Ultron.   Look, I love me some James Spader, and when I first heard him as the voice of Ultron I thought this movie was going to be a homerun.  The eerie “I’ve got no Strings” was shiver-inducing. Unfortunately, the movie left me watching itless like Thor seeing Cap almost lift the hammer, and more like Ultron watching humanity and just shaking his head…

Highlander : Endgame.  Yes, yes, yes… “There Should Have Been Only One” (they’re not wrong…).  Biggest gripe about this movie?  There’s a scene in the trailer when the silhouettes of Connor and Duncan are fighting Kell (aside : What’s with K for all the bad guy names?  Kurgan, Katana, Kane, Kell…), and Kell gets cut in half and becomes TWO Kells, each fighting one of the Highlander pair.  It was something no Highlander villain had done before, and would have been amazing to see on the screen, except that was ONLY in the trailer and never mentioned nor teased in the movie.

The Crow : City of Angels.  There’s a version of the theatrical trailer from 1996 that shows a shadow on an exterior wall of a crow landing and transforming into Ashe Corvin (not the WORST name in the movie… I still laugh that the guy who played “Judah Earl” in The Crow : CoA also played “Jubal Early” in Firefly….).  Another instance of establishing something completely new in the canon of the movies that never actually made it into the movie.

Godzilla (1998).  They shows JUST enough of Godzilla rampaging through New York City to get you really excited, and the scream at the end sent chills down your spine.. but once the whole creature was revealed, the “Uhhh… what?” was just the start of the repetition of that phrase throughout the rest of the film.

Matrix : Resurrections.  This trailer hit the nostalgia vein for sure, but not only was the movie an unnecessary and  thinly-veiled money grab by the studio… the movie was self-aware enough to TELL you it was an unnecessary and thinly-veiled money grab.

What are some of your trailers that were better than the movies?

ALSO

Livestream For The Cure 6 is May 19th-21st!  9am-Midnight each day!  100% of all donations go to The Cancer Research Institute, and this year we’re shooting for $20,000.  Please come join us and a whole host of other amazing content creators from around the world to help make a world immune to cancer.

Follow at @livestream4cure on Twitter and @Livestreamforthecure on Facebook for more details.  For those looking to donate, the early donations link is currently OPEN and can be found here…   https://fundraise.cancerresearch.org/fundraiser/3744472

– PCR

Hatton here with a blog this week, and since we are starting in on the Livestream for the Cure season – I came across a charity purchase that, if you are reading this in a month or so will have less relevance, but not absolutely none.

You see, I have been a fan of Bundle sites for years. The most famous, and the center of this article, Humble Bundle, are sort of the Godfather of the ‘spend less for more’ software and gaming bundle packs. There are a few sites that due similar things nowadays: Fanatical, Epic Bundles, etc… but Humble has always felt the most legit – and as they now distribute their own line of games, there’s good reason.

To put money, and donation is 100%, to the war efforts in Ukraine, they are doing a helluva bundle right now with the Stand With Ukraine Bundle. $40 for over 100 games, some software, a few pieces of 3D terrain renders, comics, etc… it doesn’t matter that I already own some of the topline games on that list, it was an easy purchase.  So I thought I’d list a couple of the games I have tried, or already love from the set. If this little post gets another donation to a good cause, it was worth it.

SATISFACTORY – Ever play Factorio? Do you like automating coal mining so you can automate iron mining so you can automate robot generation so you can automate your automation automator? Yeah… Satisfactory is Factorio in an FPS style – and it’s gorgeous.  Great biomes, gorgeous landscapes, and giant girder structures with a good sense of humor.  I’ve spent an idiotic amount of time building my horrible factory that I am very aware is inefficient.. but damn is it fun.

SLAY THE SPIRE / RING OF PAIN – I pushed these together because they are very much cut from the same ‘Deckbuilding Roguelike’ style of game that Slay the Spire planted a flag in and games like Ring of Pain brought their own concept to.  I don’t play CCGs because I am not good enough at deckbuild strats to win enough to have fun, but I sure as hell don’t mind losing hundreds of time to the same damn knight who keeps getting in my damn way.  Very much a ‘Play for 5 minutes, realize it’s been 2 hours’ kind of game.

SUNSET OVERDRIVE – This was my big surprise out of the bundle so far. A game from Insomniac Games (Spyro, Ratchet & Clank) that looks and feels like Fortnite (but 3 years earlier), plays like Jet Set Radio or Aggressive Inline, and is an open world’y, tower defense’y, splatterfest?  How did I miss this when it came out? Now, to be fair, the reason I probably missed it is because it isn’t the greatest game. The controls are very loose, the music cuts in and out as it sees fit, and the targetting is miserable… but for the cost of .37 cents?  It’s tons of fun!

That’s just a couple – I’ve tried Corridor Z, a runner that’s obviously a port from mobile that’s ok. Necroworm, a Sokoban puzzler, Neverout, a ‘Cube’ puzzle that hurts my head, and Pop-Up Dungeon, a ‘tabletop rpg’ style strategy game… so, if you see this early enough – give to a good cause – try a bunch of games – and tell the developers thanks.

Yes, it’s true.

I’m weening myself off slowly… (slowly…)  but… it’s hard.

So, I was always a “Hey, let’s look at Steam and see what free games they have!” and, truth be told, a lot of it is the Valorant/Paladins/Apex type of games that.. I’ll be honest..   I fucking suck at.

But Epic Games… (~shakes fist at sky~ DAMN YOU EPIC GAAAAAAAAMES!) they pump out a new free game every Thursday, and, over the pandemic, there were times where it was a new one almost every 24 hours.

I JUST got in to Red Dead Redemption II (Which wasn’t free, but got on super deep sale) and.. I finally decided to sit down and dig through games I got through Epic but haven’t played yet… so, here are some of the ones out of the over 100 I have on EPIC that I haven’t played but am eager to get in to…

ABZU – I tried 5 minutes of it.. and the game is beautiful.  I get the sense it’s going to be super short… but the visuals alone are worth checking out.

Vampyr – I loved Bloodlines from WoD, and am eagerly waiting for Bloodlines 2 to finish.. until then, this game has some great reviews and I’m hoping to relive some of the feel I got from Bloodlines to hold me over till the sequel.

Obduction – It’s from the creators of Myst, which means I’m already sold

Shadow of the Tomb Raider – I never played TR on the original PlayStation systems, but did pick up Tomb Raider (2013) on Steam and really enjoyed it.  If it’s anything like it.. I’m looking forward to finally tucking in to it.

Games I HAVE gotten to play…

Saints Row The Third : Remastered – It’s GTAV with more camp, sarcasm and gratuitous.. well.. everything, and I’m having a blast with it so far.

Control – I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about this game, and even though I’m only about 3 hours in, I am absolutely loving everything about it.

Elite Dangerous – Friends of mine introduced me to this game through VR a few years ago and.. this game is simply stunning.  It looked great on my old RX 580 gpu, it looks AMAZING on a RTX 3060.  If you check it out, be prepared to lose large chunks of your life to it.

Shadowrun Returns – Not gonna lie, I loved/hated “Shadowrun” on the Super Nintendo.  This has the same feel, but so much smoother and…just.. better overall.  I’m a sucker for the world of Shadowrun, and I really need to make time to get back in to this one.

What free games are YOU looking forward to checking out?  What have you played you enjoyed?  Let us know!

ALSO

Livestream For The Cure 6 is May 19th-21st!  9am-Midnight each day!  100% of all donations go to The Cancer Research Institute, and this year we’re shooting for $20,000.  Please come join us and a whole host of other amazing content creators from around the world to help make a world immune to cancer.

Follow at @livestream4cure on Twitter and @Livestreamforthecure on Facebook for more details.  For those looking to donate, the early donations link is currently OPEN and can be found here…   https://fundraise.cancerresearch.org/fundraiser/3744472

– PCR

♫ Superstardom overload
I need to get back on the road
Tune it all out and turn it up too loud
Do people still wave lighters in the crowd? ♫
                         – Dada: Information Undertow

I have to assume that it’s because of the pandemic.. the long hours spent in front of my computer or, at the very least, at home – where I no longer was driving 30 minutes to and fro my job, that I’ve found myself burnt out on entertainment. It’s surprising, but not shocking, if that makes sense. Between being furloughed and then working from home, I had a literal 8+ hours more of my life  that I had to find to dedicate to something. It took a few months to stop beating myself up over the fact I wasn’t creating art in some capacity… I beat a few video games… hell, even wrote a list about it. But now that we are sort of coming out the other side of things, painfully slowly, and yet I still get the chance to work from home – I find that I am less and less interested in diving in to nonstop television.

There was a great time where we had Mando and Lovecraft and Bucky and Watchmen and Wanda and… it was a buffet of high-budget entertainment that was literally catered to nerdy ol’ me – but other than my wife saying ‘hey, let’s watch a movie together’ or a few ‘I must see this’ bits, I find my desire to load up anything other than a podcast or some music to be dwindling.  Recently, in video gaming, I started to notice the same ADHD tendency my movie viewing habits had taken on… HEY NEW THING.. HEY NEW THING.. sale HEY 4 NEW THINGS.. and I’m curbing that and doing my best to not play 6 games at once, but one.. maybe two. Hell, I’ve read more books since January than I did in 2021.

My point is simply that I have been eating a lot of candy for the last three years, figuratively speaking (ok, fine, and literally) and my brain started begging for different kinds of sustenance. Eventually, I’ll get to Boba Fett.. and yeah, I’m still all about the new season of Westworld when it comes out, but I have no interest in binging Obi-Wan… I think I’d rather finish that Grady Hendrix book…

What about all of you – have you had a burnout experience during all of this?  Let us know in all the usual places.  Til then, I’m Hatton.

The announcements of WWE’s new video game are out, and I laugh and laugh every single time because at the end of the day: nothing changes. To be fair, if there is a WWE game that ever deserved an eyeball, it will be this year, but I don’t expect a lot. Why this year? Because the last WWE game was a trainwreck beyond trainwreck that damn near destroyed the studio that was building it.

It was not only a dramatically similar game to the year prior, it was a buggy mess.. and when it comes to games, like most sport-oriented games, where year to year they just slap a new coat of paint and update the year, it was shockingly funny – especially when they ask a top dollar price for these games and offer at least 6 months worth of DLC.

So, with that in mind, I thought I’d talk about a few features I would love in a wrestling game.

GM MODE
But Hatton, tons of wrestling games have had this – and they do, but never the way I want.. and I think that’s because wrestling sits in this strange ‘liminal’ sport. It isn’t a REAL sport, so it isn’t as simple as putting two teams against each other, but in a video game it isn’t entirely SCRIPTED. That means that you have this mix of an action game and The Sims, where your results are based on vague numbers like ‘Audience’ and ‘Rating’.

I want a much more story driven GM mode. Literally, the fictional GM in a fed where putting good wrestlers into nonstop bad matches gets them mad at me or creating shows of 5-star classics gets me a raise. Where I can slowly make bad wrestlers into main eventers, and I can make people thrilled with Hogan is defeated by Barry Horowitz.

HEEL / FACE MODE
There is one game that does this – and if you’ve talked to me about wrestling games, I’ve probably apologized for loving it.. and that’s Rumble Roses. Do heel stuff, you go bad guy. You save good guys, you become a good guy. Yes, in Rumble Roses, the good guy is a sexy librarian and the bad guy version is a dominatrix librarian… but the idea is still badass.

NO MERCY’S STORY – BUT A BETTER GAME
Bring on your hate. No Mercy for the N64 isn’t a good game… want proof? How did you beat the APA in a NO DQ Handicapped match? I’ll tell you how – you stood outside and threw stairs at them until one of them was knocked out because it was impossible to win by wrestling them.

No Mercy, though, has one of the greatest storylines in wrestling gamery.. the story has branches, and tells you where the branches are. If you win this match you’ll go discover THIS plot – if you lose, THIS plot. If you knock out the ref, DIFFERENT plot. It was so unique and such a great way to show the avenues wrestling can go in, I am shocked nobody has tried it since.

In the end, I just want a wrestling game that feels engaging to me, a guy who likes playing video games alone. I don’t care about online play, and I don’t want a stat-grinder.. I have Disgaea for that. I want what wrestling really is – and that’s interesting stories – albeit, interesting stories told by men in shiny underpants.

Send all your scathing disagreement about No Mercy to @RevVoice and @STSTCast, and we’ll see you next time!
– Hatton

Yes, it’s a terrible joke….

…but not as terrible as seeing between the veil and dealing with The Old Ones and the Elder Gods and non-euclidian geometry….

I love me some Lovecraft.  Yes, Howard Philip was an amazingly troubled individual whose views on politics, class, and race were questionable, but this blog isn’t here to dissect the man.. more the medium of his works.

I recently watched “Color Out Of Space” and… two things struck me…

1) Nicholas Cage will say “yes” to anything.

2) Lovecraftian movies just… aren’t that great.

The closest thing I’ve seen to a TRUE “Lovecraftian Movie” was “In the Mouth of Madness”.  It conveyed not only the weird waking-dream-slash-blurring-the-line-of-perceived-reality-and-what-really-the-fuck-might-be-going-on but the slowly seeping in horror/madness of many of Lovecraft’s works.

Unfortunately, movies like “From Beyond”, “Dagon”, and “The Void” are the usual offerings which either feel like they’re dancing around the edges of the story, or diving in with such gusto that a 5 page short story is turned into a 2 hour movie adding so much more than the original story did, that it’s just as ‘different’ but from the other side of the coin.

I think the problem with many Lovecraft translations stems from the fact that, through writings and notes… Lovecraft himself stated he wasn’t very good at writing action sequences.. so he largely avoided them… which.. makes for slow-paced movies.  Also, his descriptions were either fringe and minimal to let your imagination fill in the blanks (which oft-times can be far more horrifying) , or such a psychedelic fever-dream of description that it’s not something that translates well to film.

I know Alan Moore often complained that he wished people would stop making movies out of his works as they were intended to best be told correctly on in the medium he presented them in (I think he’s wrong…), but from what we’ve seen in movie adaptations from the works of H.P. Lovecraft…  Moore might be right.  Just.. not about his own works.

– PCR

Well dip me in chocolate and gift me on Valentine’s – one of the games that I love that nobody really mentions, Chrono Cross, is getting the Square Enix video game remake treatment. I’m elated, although that is tempered by the fact that Squeenix are notorious for giving “important” games a notable spit and polish, while only giving games like Chrono Cross – games that didn’t move the needle – a visual upgrade, but then never go back to fix the new bugs or UI issues they’ve created.

With that in mind, I thought I’d drop three more games here that I would be ecstatic over if they got an out of nowhere remake – games that I’ve sunk a dumb amount of time into that have been lost to shruggable sales figures so not as many people are willing to part with their nostalgi-bucks.

ADVENTURES OF LOLO
I’ve mentioned this game at least once before, it was a single screen puzzler where you were a little blue ball trying to collect hearts. It was 100% a game for puzzle nerds, but it was, at times, gruesomely hard. You could call it simply a revved up sokoban-style game, and it is, but there were so many wonderful additions, power-ups, monsters, and evil mechanics in that game, I’d be on line day one to get a copy of something new.

KLAX
If you know this game – you already are hearing the sound of small colorful bricks slapping against each other. Klax looks like you took Guitar Hero and made it makeout with Tetris. A match three game with colorful bricks clacking down a chute.. I don’t know why I played this every time I found it at an arcade.. I don’t know what weird itch it scratches in my brain – but Tetris Unleased shows you can take something simple and give it a fresh coat and have it be amazing. Klax deserves that very treatment.

TRON
I hear you, if you are a nerd of a certain vintage, ‘Do you mean Deadly Discs or Light Cycles’ and the answer is – yes, obviously. We live in an era of VR – of big arena games – of Battle Royale games – we live in an era where a series of Tron games, whether alone or in a Fall Guys style ‘the last 10 people don’t make the next round’ would be astounding. All I’ve asked for in this world since I was 8 was a good modern light cycles game. (There have been attempts, none have been given the Hatton seal of approval) — but why not Deadly Discs? Why not firing your disc against a spinning MCP? Why not flying a Recognizer over the Grid to escape? WHY – NOT!? ANSWER ME!?!??!

…sorry. What are some games that you think deserve some re-thinking? You know where to let us know!
– Hatton

Hey guys, Rob here….

The title basically says it all.  These are movies that.. in some way… enticed us into watching them, either by clever trailers, word of mouth, or sheer morbid curiosity… only to leave us far stupider than when we went in.

This list is FAR from all inclusive, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on YOUR entries to this list…

Let’s get to it!

Sausage Party
I mean, they let us know who and what this movie was right in the trailer right?  Anthropomorphic food trying to find the meaning of their existence, all the while filling the screen with a level of perverseness that would make the cast of Porky’s blush.  And yet…  even knowing what we were getting ourselves into..  this movie left us feeling mentally regressed.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Let’s take a beloved horror movie franchise, reboot it, and suck every last ounce of what made it great out of it!  A lot of people thought Jackie Earle Haley would make a great Freddy Krueger (myself included) but this horrible vision made me feel as if I lost 1/3 of my brain cells.

Any Adam Sandler Movie
Ok, I take that back.  Waterboy was fun as hell, and The Longest Yard, while a husk of the original, had enough cameos to make it fun to watch.  Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer can be exempt as well…but those were in “The Before Times”  Anything even REMOTELY recent?  Nah fam.  I mean.. good on him for being able to play exactly ONE type of character and building an entire career on it, but Ernest did it first.

Malignant
Ok, I came to this bandwagon late, and had ignored any and all hype about it.  That being said… JESUS this movie is not at all good.  From the forced attempt to make an ‘iconic’ weapon, to the hilariously horrible CGI of Maddy’s face in the fight in the police station, this entire movie is a spot-fest of “What the fuck am I watching… and why am I still watching it?”

What movies made YOU dumber?  Let us know!

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– PCR