seiberwing

Movies this time:

From "The Spoony Experiment" comes the Let's Play of Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh. The game itself is nonsensical and banal (no joke: you spend the first hour getting ready to go out and then ambling around your workspace talking to your coworkers and trying to finish your files), although I will give it kudos for a vaguely mature treatment of bisexuality. Spoony, however, overlays the game with his own amusing dialogue and makes it actually entertaining! Warnings for graphic sexual content, gore, and child abuse--not something you want to watch with your mum. Unless your mum is cool like that.

For comics-related hijinks, there is I'm a Marvel...and I'm a DC, which starts out as a parody of the old Mac/PC commercials and eventually descends into something with plot, drama, and action-related humor. It's something that should be fail but is instead win, and I'm not sure how they do it.

It's link dump time once more, because I should be working.

First off, several Let's Play threads of interest.

Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath (video format with commentary). It starts out as a sort of steampunk/technopunk Western setting with bounty hunting and flips to something entirely different about two thirds of the way through. Very nice.

Kaizo Mario World (video with commentary). The game is an insanely hard Mario rom hack, apparently created by the same minds behind the creators of Call of Cthulu. It is played by and narrated by several people, and it's very entertaining to hear their descents into madness.

Animal Crossing (screenshot and artistic format, recontextualized commentary). This LP takes the peaceful game of Animal Crossing and develops it into the terrifying tale of young Billy and the many horrors he encounters during his forced vacation in a seemingly innocent summer camp. I would not recommend reading this one right before bed.

Now, for webcomics. I highly recommend The Adventures of Dr. McNinja. It is the story of a doctor who is also a ninja and the complete and utter madness that occurs in his world, with just the right touch of actual drama and serious content to make it more than silly martial arts wankery. Seriously, just read it, it's awesome.

Pepper's made a companion piece to my "The 10th Sex", and I consider it to be quite win. Go read it.

Also, time for a Let's Play link dump!

Grim Fandango (episodic video format) is a bizarre and enthralling story about a travel agent named Manny Calavera, who works in the Land of the Dead in an attempt to pay off his debt and get a ticket to the next world. The setting is weird, sure, but it's a very good story and I was pretty much hooked on it by the end. Also it's recommended by Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw, which should tell you something.

Sanitarium (screenshot with cutscene videos format) is a point-and-click psychological thriller initially set in an insane asylum. However, it spans out into even weirder settings until your character, stricken with amnesia and uncertain of his own sanity, is left desperately trying to figure out what the hell is going on and also trying not to die. I found it quite amusing, although it caters to my personal tastes in setting and topic.

American McGee's Alice (video with commentary format) is the story of Lewis Caroll's Alice after her parents die in a house fire. Alice goes near-catatonic with survivor's grief, is put in an asylum, and mentally retreats into Wonderland. Since Wonderland is largely a creation of her own subconscious, it has also become horribly twisted, and Alice must save Wonderland in order to save herself. Admittedly I fast-forwarded through the duller parts of gameplay, but the cutscenes are worth sticking around for and the reviewer has a sexy voice, all right?.

To continue with the insanity trend, we also have Silent Hill One, Two, Three, and Four, done in screenshot style with amusing commentary by the player. This was invaluable when I wrote my Freudian/Jungian analysis of James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2, as I haven't actually played the game. Stayed up until two in the morning looking through just for the fun of it.

Any one of these should take up your morning if you're bored.