Mongo Nation

Why watch the Watchmen when you can play them instead?

By Jeremy Azevedo

Pics from the new Watchmen game are beginning to leak on the internet, along with more detailed info as to what kind of game it’s even going to be.

Surprisingly, it’s being developed for Warner Bros Interactive by Danish developer “Deadline Games”, a relatively unproven studio that up until now has specialized in making action games about shooting Mexicans (Total Overdose, Chili Con Carnage… yeah I haven’t really heard of those either). Even more surprisingly, it’s being released as digitally downloadable only, episodic content, a first for the industry when it comes to high profile movie tie-ins. Not at all surprisingly (again, it is a movie tie-in after all) Watchmen appears to be primarily a beat-em-up rather than the story-driven, detective adventure game one might expect from this particular franchise. We’ll reserve judgment until we see the final product for ourselves, but until then, check out these new pics:

Nite Owl getting his ass beat by a gang of Top-Knots Read the rest of this entry →

Casting begins for a live action Aqua Teen episode

A Helpful Guide To Self-Identification

By Moses Amadeus

You may have noticed, while perusing the interwebs of late, that much is being made of this whole “hipster” fad that is sweeping the nation…

To some, this is a shocking revelation. To others, it’s old news. But for young people on either side of that fence, one glaring question rears it’s stylishly keffiyah’d head:

Am I a hipster?

Fact: To a hipster, the actual word “hipster” is as offensive as the “N-word” is to a black person (though like black people, they are allowed to use the word as a reference to one another). This makes it difficult to identify hipsters, as they are about as likely to self-identify as they are to wear a Members Only jacket without the requisite irony that comes along with it. So in order to know whether or not you are a hipster, you must first try and understand what a hipster actually is.

Are any of these guys hipsters? Not if you ask them they’re not. And yet…

In a recent article in AdBusters, Douglas Haddow (who I suspect is himself a closet hipster; he writes on anti-consumerist blog after all. Hipsters love to pretend to hate corporations!) described hipsters as:

“An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.”

Essentially, what Doug is saying is that hipsters are the cancer that is killing “Cool”… That they are cannibals of fashion and culture with no discernible socio-political agenda, and that they are incapable or giving birth to anything new or original. But how did they get this way, and how does this help us to identify them?

Hipster fashion is quite broad, and yet you still know one when you see one.

Haddow goes on to say:

“Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.”

Ok. So basically, a hipster is an agent of the man, an unwitting accomplice of a runaway capitalist system that sells them the very things that they believe make them a part of the “counterculture”, an enemy of the “faceless corporate empires” that are enslaving the rest of humanity (Like Apple, a hipster favorite). This would explain how they are duped into buying Pabst Blue Ribbon and V-neck shirts, longtime symbols of the working class. The working class enjoys these things because a 6-pack of Pabst generally costs around five dollars, and V-neck shirts, the less popular cousin to the crew-neck shirt, are sold in packs of 4 or 5 for around 13-25 dollars. This fact will be used for our first litmus test: Read the rest of this entry →

Is Xbox Live positioning itself to become the next Showtime?

By Jeremy Azevedo

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Xbox “Night at the Movies” event at the Zune House in Hollywood. I showed up a little early so that I would have time to mess around with the two new casual party games that were being featured that night, “You’re in the Movies” and “Scene-It”.

We began with a few rounds of “You’re in the Movies”, which tasks you with playing mini games in front of a small camera, similarly to Sony’s “EyeToy”. It feels kind of like the home version of that old Nickelodeon game show, “Nick Arcade”, where kids pretended to be in a video game, jumping over pterodactyls and stuff in front of a green screen to win prizes. The game was pretty fun, especially with lots of people… but what really made it great was that, at the end of the game, all the footage from the various mini games is cut and pasted into a short film that makes comical usage of all the movements made in the previous events. The end result was never short of hilarious, and I could really see this being the sort of thing that finally cuts into the Wii’s stranglehold on the casual market. The only thing more fun than playing and watching other people play this game was watching the demonstrators feign manic enthusiasm, non-stop, for like four hours straight. Great job, smiling guy!

Do you think anyone will refer to it as “Urine the Movies”?

A couple of delicious scotch and sodas later, we played “Scene-It”, which I quite honestly didn’t expect to be all that different than the DVD board game I’d already played a million times. And yet I was wrong. Before long, my guest and I were jumping and flailing our excellently designed, game show-like remotes around, trash talking and mocking one another to such widely disparate films as “The Brady Bunch Movie” and “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”. The game even allows other contestants to drop in and out at will, a very nice feature for longer games. I was impressed by the inclusion of some very cultish stuff, mixed in with the more modern, mainstream films. This version was an excellent mix of movie trivia, and a fun new approach to another classic party game. Read the rest of this entry →

Trippin’ balls or just tastes like ‘em?

By Jeremy Azevedo

So a few friends and I thought it would be fun to go to an absinthe tasting party Friday night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

If you don’t already know the story behind absinthe, it’s liquor that has been illegal in the United States for almost 100 years because of a chemical contained within it, thujone (from the wormwood plant), largely thought to be a dangerous and addictive psychoactive compound. This is partly due to the fact that famous weirdos like Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway and Aleister Crowley went about saying that they were seeing green fairies and shit whenever they drank the stuff. I’m sure that the absinthe itself had less to do with these hallucinations than the fact that all these men were batshit crazy and probably would’ve seen green fairies regardless of what they drank.

Some fairies that, sadly, we did not see.

Anyway, the reasons why going to this event seemed like a good idea were twofold:

1. Absinthe has been largely illegal in the our part of the world for so long that it has achieved legendary status as sort of the holy grail of alcoholism. Any drinker worth a goddamn knows this to be true.

2. Every drinker worth a goddamn also knows that the psychoactive properties of wormwood (an essential additive of authentic absinthe) are largely exaggerated.

Question: Who doesn’t know this?

Answer: All the noobs that are sure to be falling all over the place, imagining that they are having hallucinations and stuff, providing endless lulz to those of us that can hold our liquor.

So the flier told us to dress semi-formal, which we all did. But what it failed to mention was that the dress code was actually semi-formal 1920s. This place was a freak show. Not since the early 90s, when the first Hot Topics started appearing in the suburbs, have I ever seen so much velvet, so many inventive piercings, smelled so much patchouli and mothball. Further exacerbating this horrible realization was the discovery that A.) There are no restrooms in a mausoleum (I had to go to the bathroom like a motherf**ker) and B.) There are four seemingly inexperienced bartenders serving an army of dorks in this place. We’re talking about one bartender per fifty nerds here, people.

A long-ass, sweaty line of freaks waiting on one lousy bartender.

Somehow we managed to wade through a sea of clove smoke and hats with peacock feathers and got ourselves a drink. We got a few, actually, so that I could review them for you here. This way you will not have to endure an exploration into faux-Victorian trust fund extreme-vintage fashion necro-culture as we had to. You’re welcome. Read the rest of this entry →

Check out the year’s best how-to videos!

By Jeremy Azevedo

CraveOnline affiliate WonderHowTo is celebrating a successful year of bringing you the best and most informative how-to videos in the world by letting you vote on your favorites!

Categories include Hacks, Sex (SFW for the most part, don’t get too excited), Pranks, Weird Science and many more. All of the finalist videos are really cool and definitely warrant a look… For example, this is one of my personal favorites:

“How-to videos are great because there’s an agreement between the viewer and the creator— that one is trying to learn and the other is trying to teach. Of course this agreement is often broken, or done poorly or needlessly– hypnotize a chicken? But these awards are great because they show the odd, interesting and funny side of our index of over 200,000 how-to videos. A nice primer” Andy Fox, VP Marketing

Go to WonderHowTo right now and vote on the 2008 Best How-To Videos in the Universe!

Also, don’t forget to snag a free t-shirt courtesy of Stephen Chao and Johnny Knoxville!

The hype machine has to stop somewhere, right?

By Jeremy Azevedo

Due to the success of Transformers and the overwhelming hype surrounding the upcoming G.I. Joe movie, producers are no doubt snapping up licenses to 80s cartoons at an alarming rate…

But for every Thundercats or He-Man, there’s another franchise that has absolutely no business ever being made into a movie. Here’s a look at the bottom 5:

Bravestarr:

Yes, he does ride that horse, and yes, it is awkward.

Bravestarr essentially combines science fiction, westerns, racial stereotypes and Satanism into one tidy package. The plot revolves around a planet known as “New Texas” (naturally) upon which some valuable mineral known as “Kerium” is being mined by meek “prarie people” who seem to receive no visible benefit for their slave labor. Despite this fact, an alcoholic Native American sheriff known as Marshall Bravestarr is called into action to combat an evil menace (the antichrist, furries, prarie people who want a piece of the action, gay robots) over the fate of New Texas and it’s precious resources, armed with his shamanistic spirit animal powers and a sweet cowboy hat. This show also features a talking horse that stands on two legs and can shoot a rifle, which sort of defeats the purpose of being a horse in the first place. Additionally, this also makes everyone feel weird about it when Bravestarr rides on his back.

Likelihood of being adapted into a film: 1/1,000

Silverhawks/Tigersharks/Sectaurs/Dinosaucers

Piss-poor Thundercats clones: This is why we can’t have nice things.

As a result of the overwhelming popularity of Thundercats, everybody and their mother was scrambling to develop their own anamorphic superteam of humanimals to delight bloodthirsty warmongering children and also give furries something to fap to. The bastard spawn of this shameless cash-in resulted in militaristic teams of bird–people, sea creature-people, insect-people and dinosaur-people, all of which were comparatively short lived. I can’t remember a goddamn thing about any of them, really, other than that the only African American Silverhawk was named “Hotwing”, which is pretty funny by today’s standard for being borderline offensive.

Likelihood of being adapted into a film: 1/10,000 Read the rest of this entry →

1. An unidentified monster approaches! Do you:

A. Try to run away, but trip and fall at least a half-dozen times?

B. Aim for the head?

C. Break out the holy water and or/call an exorcist?

D. Slip and fall into a trap door, which leads to a small chamber filled with buzz saws and electric drills that are slowly closing in on you.

2. You come from work one day to find blood dripping down the walls of your house. The source of this phenomenon appears to be:

A. A decapitated babysitter.

B. A half eaten corpse.

C. The house itself!

D. The victim of a rusty, man-sized mousetrap made of razor blades and barbed wire.

3. While making out with your fellow camp counselor, you are startled by a strange noise from outside your cabin… You cautiously peek around the corner to investigate and are greeted with:

A. An axe in your face.

B. An infectious bite to the neck.

C. A g-g-g-g-ghost!

D. A detonator to the bomb that was secretly implanted in your girlfriend’s heart. If you don’t activate it within 60 seconds, your own heart will explode instead.

4. Your are unable to start your car! How come?

A. Duh, because there’s a robed hitchhiker clawing at your window, so of course you dropped your keys on the floor.

B. Duh, because there are so goddamn many of those things clawing at you through the windows that you can’t get the key into the ignition.

C. Duh, because your steering wheel just magically turned into a poisonous snake.

D. Duh, because it’s underwater, and you have two minutes to solve a riddle before you drown in it.

5. You are home alone late at night when your phone rings. Who is on the other line?

A. Not sure, but the call appears to be coming from inside your own home!

B. Not sure, but they keep groaning and talking about brains or something…

C. Your dead father, and he sounds good and pissed.

D. An unidentified voice that informs you that if you don’t eat your own face, you’re going to be torn apart by thousands of rabid bobcats.

QUIZ RESULTS AFTER THE JUMP! Read the rest of this entry →

Feminism? In my video game tapes?

More often than not, female protagonists in video games tend to exist as little more than a shameless attempt to rope in young male audiences looking for cheap thrills (Much like the banner image I used above for this article).But what about those female heroines that transcend the basic law of jiggly tits=$$$? No really, I’m being serious… I’ve even gone so far as to compile a list of the top 10 gaming heroines that are more famous for their contribution to the artform than they are for their propensity for up-skirt cinematography.

Ms. Pac-Man (Ms. Pac-Man)

You may have thought that Ms. Pac-Man was nothing more than regular Pac-Man with a bow on his head meant to rope female gamers into playing arcade games, but you would be very wrong sir (or madam). Whatever Pac-Man could do, Ms. Pac-Man could do faster and better. Most old school arcade enthusiasts will tell you that Ms. Pac-Man is just quite simply a smoother and more enjoyable experience than her male predecessor.

Jade (Beyond Good And Evil)

Not many video games star a female journalist struggling to uncover a worldwide military conspiracy using stealth and photography. Jade is probably the best example of a female protagonist being treated with the same respect as a male lead, in one of the best and most under-rated games of all time. Her uncle is a humanoid pig, which is kind of a turnoff, but they’re technically not blood relatives so at least there probably wasn’t any pig-lovin’ in her direct line of lineage. Read the rest of this entry →

Except for, like, most of them actually were…

By Jeremy Azevedo

It took me ages to get around to finishing this book, which has physically been through hell in a remarkable parallel to the stories contained within…

…This book has been lost, found, forgotten (due to the recent purchase of an Xbox 360), dropped into a toilet at a cabin in Big Bear, left outside to dry, been run over, gone camping, been sexually harassed by an older book on MySpace, and found out that it was adopted. Nevertheless, I proudly soldiered on so that I could pass along my opinion to the three or four of you out there that actually still read books. So without further ado, please enjoy the long awaited review of “The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies never Made”!

Originally published in 2002, David Hughes’ recently revised book, “The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made” is an exhaustively researched and immensely fascinating look into just how inept the studio system really is. Even when handed over an incredible story that really require very little embellishment, every single one of these films quickly spirals out of control, with numerous screenwriters pushing the story further and further out of context, budgets spiraling out of control, and a revolving door of star directors and actors collecting paychecks to talk about what could have been in interviews. The title of the book is a little misleading because most of these movies actually have been made by now. But it’s more about what the movies could have been than it is about incomplete projects.

A page from Kevin Smith’s lost Superman script (lovingly rendered in crayon), in which Superman saves NASCAR from a diabolical monkey and says the word “feltch” a lot.

What’s truly fascinating about some of these stories, each of which plays out like it’s own individual little spy novel, is how some of the scripts that fail have their carcasses stripped and re-purposed for other films. “Men in Black” was essentially all the best parts of “The Tourist”, minus the dark drama elements. Spielberg’s horror picture “Night Skies” became “E.T.”, of all things. “EL Topo” director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Dune” became David Lynch’s “Dune”. It becomes apparent to the reader how important and universal some of the themes in science fiction really are (as well as how difficult it can be to protect one’s intellectual property). Read the rest of this entry →