Day: 4 October 2003

Saturday Flash

Pixel Parodies’ Rise Of The Mushroom Kingdom 2 – Luigi and the Mushroom people wage warfare on the Koopas to avenge Mario’s death.

Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – A faithful recreation of the DOS classic. Unfortunately it’s just as frustrating.

Orisinal.com’s Cats – Keep the cats following the lead cat by hovering over them with your mouse.

In the D drive currently: I’ve been content on saving a few bucks and just playing demos. Is it just me or are demos getting bigger in size but shorter in gameplay? Tron 2.0 had only one level, and it was only a boss fight with a cranky cyber-snake. Homeworld 2 was better, although I’m a bit disappointed there have been few gameplay enhancements from the original; I think the expansion Homeworld: Cataclysm in 1999 was even more innovative. Excellent story, it appears though, by putting all your struggles in a theological context.

More power

Junkyard (Mega) Wars has been kind of lackluster this season. Seems that they have scrapped the whole educational and technical angle and replaced it with a contrived “Survivor”-style reality show, complete with fast scene cuts, bickering teammates and loud music. The hosts are complete technical neophytes; the male host is in fact a former contestant on Temptation Island 2, and spends most of his time yelling “Wow!” and “Awesome!” and smashing car windows.

So I’ve turned my attention to Discovery Channel’s Monster Garage. Now in its second season, it involves one hand-picked team of car and metalworking experts building a cool transforming vehicle. Today, I saw them turn a ’96 Chevy Impala SS (you know, the black supercharged version, before it turned into the bland Lumina clone it is today) into a zamboni. The trunk actually opens and a second set of steering controls pops out, and the car lowers the scraping blade to the ground. And it was painted a tight candy apple purple with bumping purple neon floor lights, which never hurts.