Before we proceed to part two of our Dalek-making feature, here’s a Spectare review of a reprehensible film I had the displeasure of watching recently: Hip Hop Locos. You don’t have to take my word for it, as I’ve included several definitive clips of the movie in action, but it’s pretty terrible stuff. As noted towards the end of the review, however, the rest of the set may not be so bad. I rather enjoyed I Hate You, a strange little flick about an aging New York City comic whose obsession with being remembered and acknowledged for his work drives him to become a serial killer. The movie also features his actual comedy routines, which are so focused on murder that I can’t imagine anyone finding them genuinely funny… which kind of makes them unintentionally hilarious. (Heck, while I’m at it, check out this clip from the movie: 2:04 mins, 1.05 MB.) So don’t let my review of Hip Hop Locos deter you from purchasing Serial Psychos if you happen to come across it — considering that you get six films for the price of admission, it’s still entirely possible that the others will overwhelmingly redeem the set. I’ll keep you posted.

By the way — assuming that you’re brave enough to watch them — I’d be particularly interested in hearing what you think of the clips (and the general idea of including clips in Spectare reviews, for that matter), so do feel free to share here. 🙂

As promised, here’s more Dalek madness with a bona fide arts ‘n’ crafts feature — Genesis of the Homemade Daleks: Part 1! I realize this may not have a ton of appeal for readers who don’t have kids and/or can afford to drop $50 for an official Dalek (to say nothing of folks who don’t care about the things at all!), but at the very least you can read it and laugh about what a loser your 25-year-old must be to undertake such a goofy, childish project. Alrighty then. 😐

In the upcoming second part, we’ll make even more homemade Daleks based on the pattern at The Ultimate Dalek Factory. There will, however, be several really nifty upgrades to the procedure. For your money, this is the method that’ll net you the most authentic-looking Dalek for the lowest price (even cheaper than this first outing) — so unless you’d really like to try this with children or are particularly keen on the cuteness of the shuttlecock Daleks (and they are cute), you’ll want to hold out for that one.

And I meant that stuff about being interested in additional quick and cheap Dalek-making ideas, so do share if you happen to have some. I’ll probably break down and buy one of the more expensive official Daleks (or maybe one of these cool handmade ones) in the near future, but until then I’ll have to settle for increasing my army via bootleg tactics. 😉

And here’s another one for the upcoming video game section (i.e., the category page I intend to create whenever I get around to tweaking the links on the site layout) — three reviews of games featuring DALEKS. As noted in the article, there are far more than three such games, but these are some of the more notable ones for various reasons. In the case of Doctor Who: Dalek Attack, that reason is that it’s as freaking hard as Dalekanium. There are supposedly different Daleks in the game as you progress, so if you happen to be freaking awesome and actually get to them, do feel free to send me screencaps. Not that I’ll necessarily use them for future Hot Flashes (though there’s an idea) — I mostly just wanna see what the buggers look like. ‘Cause I really like ’em Daleks.

Not sure if it’ll be next time — ’cause there are tons of articles on deck — but there is definitely more Dalek madness on the way. STAY TUNED!

No, Virginia, Scary-Crayon is NOT dead! Been away for a while, I know, and that food piece that I was supposed to post weeks ago was never seen… until now. The genesis of one of the most horrific Foodstuffs concoctions to date — the MONSTROUS STRAWBERRY OMELETTE WITH CHEESE AND WHIPPED CREAM SANDWICH — has finally been documented in full for your reading displeasure. Hey, at least you didn’t have to eat the mutant abomination.

Also, lucky you if you haven’t been subjected to any conversations of this nature — especially on forums in the wake of Superman’s return to the big screen. Admittedly, some of the dialogue is fabricated based on conversations that I’ve had about other superheroes, but the general core of the nerd identity is intact — a compulsion to appear extremely knowledgeable about a certain given subject and the necessity of making a positive assertion in the face of any instance in which that knowledge is shown to be lacking. Mostly, this includes simply dismissing the material as being “ghey” or otherwise discrediting it, but at times the nerd will go so far as to reiterate your own question in the form of a statement in order to avoid admitting that he/she is unfamiliar with the product in question. At others — and I didn’t document this technique in the comic because hell if I felt like doing the research required to make an assertion along those lines — they will make a tangential connection and then begin spewing trivia about said connection in an attempt to wow you and reassert themselves as definitive nerds. For example, a nerd who has not seen X-Men: The Last Stand will note that Chris Claremont had a brief cameo in the movie and then go on to detail Claremont’s entire upbringing and career progression to date. Seriously.

The line about the Legos was actually derived from a comment overheard during my brief stint at the local comic shop, by the way — in the context of a conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with Legos. I frequented Taco Bell back when they did that whole Godzilla movie promotion in 1998. Just like that, except the true nerd would also note that he/she owns every single one of the plastic collectors’ cups featuring the American bastardization of everyone’s favorite kaiju. Yes.

I’m not making any promises about things to come on the site — we see how timely this update has been — but assuming that all goes well and it’s not another two to three weeks before I write anything new, here’s a hint: EXTERMINATE!!!

How I envy you if you’ve never had to deal with this type of person — the kind that introduces a recent instance from his/her life and then proceeds to tell a long, drawn out, inane, and utterly fucking pointless story that has absolutely nothing to do with said incident until the very end, at which point the story concludes exactly where it began with absolutely no illumination whatsoever concerning the defining moment. 90% of these stories begin and end with the sighting of some woman with a “bangin'” body, but you will never hear any additional details about what this bangin’ body actually entails unless you explicitly request them at the conclusion of the story — but instead of doing that I advise you to get the hell away from this person ASAP because further exposure to the stupidity could induce irreversible brain damage. “Yo I saw this bangin’ girlie the other night” is moronspeak for “get ready to hear an extremely detailed and thoroughly uninteresting recap of how my entire fucking mundane day went.” Unbelievable.

And technically this is going up late on the night of the 26th, but I’m calling it the 27th on the content pages because I can totally do that. 😉

Food article later this week, seriously.

Hey all! I still don’t have that food piece I promised ready for you (soon, soon!), but here’s the annual Scary-Crayon Father’s Day tribute article. The 2006 honoree? Buraiking Boss — primarily as he’s depicted in the “Casshan” animes, though I do throw a nod to the more human version depicted in the 2004 live action film. You’ve probably never heard of any of this stuff, but I hope you’ll find it to be at least marginally interesting and maybe intriguing enough to give the media a look. 🙂

Considering 2005’s pick of M. Bison, I seem to have a certain affinity for these “evil” environmentalist characters with cool hats.

Wow, has it been that long since I’ve posted to the site? Ugh, sorry about that. I don’t have that food article ready, but here’s a goofy single-image Hot Flash for y’all in the meantime. And unlike most of the drawings on Scary-Crayon, it’s actually (mostly) done in crayon! w00t. 🙂

For those of you who don’t quite get what’s going on with the pic, it concerns Billie Piper, who stars in the current “Doctor Who” series but who, circa 1998-2000, was a British teen pop star. Admittedly, while the show wasn’t terrible — overall I’d say it was decent entertainment, but nothing spectacular enough to warrant its inclusion on a must-see list — it was Piper that kept me watching, since I actually remember her from way back when. Granted, I wasn’t as familiar with her musical catalogue as most British fans, but I was surprised to learn that a lot of American viewers weren’t aware that she was a former pop star at all. Seems like “She Wants You” was on the radio quite a bit back in the day.

Anyway, if you want to see some British music videos from last century, pop on over to YouTube (which has like, everything these days) and check out Billie in the following links:

“Because We Want To”
“Day & Night”
“Girlfriend”
“Something Deep Inside”
“Walk of Life”

There are some live performances on there too (search for “Billie Piper”), if you’re interested. And I’m guessing she got shot with one of those cure darts from the pretty lame X-Men: The Last Stand (it was so lame that I can’t even rant about how lame it was, sorry), seeing as how she appears to have lost her mutant ability to fashion dancing metal men from trash cans and bring goofy cartoon boys to life. 😐

I guess laundromats are popular hangouts for British youth.

No articles today; just wanted to pass along the message. Hopefully we’ll have something for you by Friday, though. In the meantime, try not to get impaled on pitchforks and buried up to the neck in excrement… 😈

In addition to an introductory commentary on the Chinatowns that I’ve visited in recent years, the latest article contains reviews of three import games that I picked up during my 2002 visit to Vancouver. I’m not exactly sure if they’re demo discs or not; with the possible exception of one, they all run for about the appropriate length of a demo before freezing. Then again they are pretty scratched, so that could be part of the problem. At any rate, while I’m not terribly sad about my inability to play further into the games, I would be pretty interested in hearing any information you have on them — particularly regarding Magnetic Power Microman: Generation 2000 — so do feel free to enlighten me. This goes for any info regarding the Microman anime as well. There’s lots of stuff on Microman Forever concerning the toys, but unfortunately little else.

I think next time we’ll have another food article. ‘Till then, ja! 🙂

I started writing this as a response to some of the comments on the previous article and post, but it got so long I decided it should be its own post. Included are a general mini review of some popular EN sites today, more trivia concerning the origins of Scary-Crayon and stuff, and an apology to the readers who’ve sent me e-mails but to whom I’ve neglected to reply. Good times. 😛

So in response to agustinaldo’s suggestion, I think reviewing other EN sites in depth would be pretty pointless. They’ve all got articles I like and articles I don’t — and though some have more hits than misses, it’s really as simple as that. I also largely dislike most of the larger sites these days because of what they’ve become. I can’t even view X-E on my desktop without the numerous Flash ads slowing it to a crawl and the last time I visited I-Mock it was a mess of popups and stupid “wait 30 seconds” pages featuring javascript balloons telling me I was the 8,283,712th visitor to the page or something and had won some random shit. I-Mock also seems more like a super vanity project to me than anything else these days. It’s cool to see a photo of the article’s author engaged in using the product during a given review (especially when the author is female and attractive or is wearing zombie makeup for no significant reason), but when you’ve got 2+ MB animated gifs with Photoshopped effects in almost every article, you’re just being a vainglorious asshole. I remember one pic of RoG that was zoomed in so close you could see his fucking nose hairs. I’ve got no problems with Seanbaby’s page, but does he even update anymore? (more…)

It’s been a loooong while since we’ve had one of these, but my sister happened to leave the February 2002 issue of Cosmopolitan on the floor during her last visit and I took it as a sign that it was time for another of our magazine cover reviews. I actually ended up reading and/or skimming most of the cover material, but eh, a little brain damage never hurt anyyyyahsijdaokdas I’m okay really so ignore the thin trickle of blood running down my philtrum. And maybe it’s my other writing project influencing my style this time around, but something made me want to see how many strange references and analogies I could pack into this review without it detracting from the discussion at hand. I think I did okay in that respect. Please to enjoy article, thanks!

And then we’ve got A Crayon Haiku #51. I know some of my readers out there know Japanese (or whatever these characters are), so feel free to comment or send an e-mail to let me know what the heck this says. I’m counting on you guys! There was no text in the body of the e-mail, so I’m not sure what to make of it. Part of me wants to believe that the Japanese Conky was sending me that day’s secret word so I’d know when to scream. I guess in Japan the screaming would be accompanied by a complete color change to blue with an optional sweatdrop and/or backwards collapse to the floor. See, references. Don’t you wish you had a crazy helmet with a Madball in it?

Until next time, minna-san!

P.S. The blog has finally been upgraded to WordPress 2.02. Excelsior!

By special request, I’ve updated yesterday’s examination of the early PC versions of Street Fighter II with three videos of Dhalsim doing what he does best — KILLING YOU! Note also that Dhalsim is one of the few characters who can actually juggle opponents off of his throw (Blanka being the other notable one). If you’re good, you can even follow it up with a Yoga fire. Not that any of this finesse is necessary, though. On anything except the very highest difficulty levels, you can beat the whole game as Dhalsim by just jamming on the kick button. You’d take the occasional fireball in the face (the sick damage factor on the upper levels is what makes playing them a little tougher), but that’s about it.

Dhalsim vs. Chun-Li (674 KB)
Dhalsim vs. Balrog (859 KB)
Dhalsim vs. Sagat (589 KB)

The reason I didn’t have Dhalsim videos before: I hate playing as him. In this game, Dhalsim’s the guy that you pick because you have to, not because you want to. If his regular attacks weren’t so cheap, he’d be a terrible character. His jumps are the lowest of any character in the game and almost all of his airborne attacks hit at a distance — and because you can only be hit once by a jumping opponent, this gives your opponent plenty of time to set up a vicious counterattack. Projectile attacks aren’t terribly useful in this game, making the Yoga Fire not so great, and the Yoga Flame is absolutely worthless. (Actually, special moves in general kinda suck in this game.) But you pick him because if you don’t pick him, you have to fight him — and given his ridiculous cheapness, beating him can sometimes prove all but impossible.

I don’t like Dhalsim
he’s so goddamned fucking cheap
he’ll kick you to death

Until next time!

You wouldn’t believe how much time I spent playing and screencapping these damned games and writing this review, but here you are: a somewhat detailed look at the early PC versions of Street Fighter II. Note that I stopped italicizing the title’s abbreviated acronym form fairly early in this article, which I think is going to be ASCN (accepted Scary-Crayon notation) from here on out. As much as I like italics, I get sick of typing <-i->-W-O-R-D-<-/-i-> every time I want to mention something by title. I’m guessing I’ll keep the italics for one-word movie title abbreviations, though.

Hmm, that was kinda technical (I just know you found it to be terribly interesting, though), so here’s something decidedly less so — a wav file that I accidentally recorded while screencapping SFIBM 1.98. Sounds like the kind of thing that would set a class of sixth graders giggling to me.

And let us not forget Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #81, which features screencaps from the new TMNT toon with modified subtitles from yours truly. The comic is named for the episode: “Rogue in the House”.

Finally, again, I apologize about the length of time it’s taken me to update. Hopefully playing these games will keep you busy until I get around to posting another article (send me Sagat screencaps, damnit! pleeease ;_;), but in the event that you’re looking for more reading material, Greg recently posted an interesting article about his hometown of Fairfield, CA, on Pop Arena. Molly posts weekly TV movie recaps and other fun pieces on Alligator Juice. And I can’t vouch for the other stuff on SydLexia.com, but I came across this review of the arcade SF1 while searching for the PC version download. Distractions can be amusing.

All for now, minna-san. Until next time, remember: DISCIPLINE, JUSTICE, COMMITMENT!!! 😀

Again, apologies for the lack of updates as of late. Hope y’all are finding other reading material and stuff to keep you entertained. No Street Fightery goodness yet for you (patience, grasshoppers), but here’s a new Hot Flash based upon — holy fuck a cat just ran past my second-floor window. That’s crazy! — the Silent Hill film currently in theaters.

My SPOILER ALERT review: I kinda liked it, but this is not a good film. In fact, parts of it — including the beginning and the conclusion — are downright stupid. Now, I’m not familiar with the games, so I’ll grant that there may be additional backstory and such required to actually make sense of the story, but as a standalone film the critics are right to pan this movie. Mind you, it’s certainly not without its cool and freaky points. In fact, they make the film somewhat frustrating in that one can view them and imagine how they might have been utilized in a better film — a film that lacked the pointless and even more confusing subplot with Sean Bean or a scene that included a better rationale for a woman dragging her daughter to a haunted town that’s been closed off because of poisonous fumes rising from underneath it (DUMB). I mean, just a simple scene with a psychiatrist recommending taking the daughter to the town might’ve sufficed; at least then we could shift the blame from the principal character to this unnamed crackpot. The movie also plays out a little too much like a video game. At first it’s kind of cool to see the survival horror game framing and the camera panning about the stages and the way the characters follow the simple clues, but after a while it just gets boring.

And while I understand that some of the stupidity in the film is part of the games’ mythology, I really could’ve done without the fanatical townspeople and the witch burnings. That part could’ve played out better if there had been more emphasis on just how their actions had backfired — say, some rite involving the seal was misperformed, thereby opening the gateway to HELL — but I just wasn’t too keen on the whole thing being the result of some little girl’s nightmare fantasy. What the fuck was that little girl smoking to imagine shit like that? I guess having your flesh cooked will put extreme horror in your head. Not that Silent Hill was scary, mind you, because it wasn’t. At all. Certain characters were creepy, but any Clive Barker film has this film totally licked in that department.

Overall, I’d give Silent Hill a C/C-. On a scale of 1-10 stars, I’d give it 4 or 5. I didn’t hate it, but reading these orgasmic reviews on IMDb still makes me want to smack the shit out of the people that totally loved it. It may be the best video game adaptation to date (that’s gotten a U.S. theatrical release, anyway; tons of neat animes have been produced) — until a second viewing convinces me otherwise, however, I’m still giving that honor to Mortal Kombat — but that really isn’t saying much.

Pyramid Head is a really cool guy, though. 🙂

Hello there, children! Still not ready with the Street Fightery goodness for you, but here’s an uncharacteristic something to hold you over in the meantime: a short story entitled “Hazel Wheatkettle’s Dying Wish”. It’s not part of the current project that’s been demanding my attention as of late, but they’re both fiction pieces and this was just kinda sitting there so I figured I’d post it. The piece is kind of serious and pretty sad (an old lady dies, hence the title), so don’t read it if you’re feeling down or if your pet mousey just got eaten by a rogue snake or something. Same goes if you’re in the mood for graphical splendor, as I didn’t even bother to include unrelated photographs with this one. It’s a totally textual experience.

On a lighter note, who’s been watching “Saved by the Bell” on Cartoon Network? I’ve always gotten a kick out of the show, but the caption and the wacky slowed down advertisements make it even funnier for some reason. Since then, Elizabeth Berkeley has gone on to star in the hilariously awful Showgirls and several not so hilarious but still quite awful direct-to-video films. Mario Lopez became one of the neutered men in the terrible “male” answer to “The View”. Tiffani-Amber Thiessen got all chunky with chipmunk cheeks and then locked herself in a closet after starring on “90210” during its shark-jumping years. Dustin Diamond beat up an old man on national television and then fell off the face of the earth. Aside from that short-lived WB series with Zack, I don’t even remotely know what happened to everyone else.

For some inexplicable reason, I’ve also been watching “Kingdom Hospital” on SciFi. Not religiously or anything — this show is fucking terrible — but it airs on Tuesday nights during a time when I’m not particularly doing anything so I’ve tuned in. And I don’t get it. It’s this incredibly long miniseries during which almost absolutely nothing happens, making you wonder why the hell they made it so long to begin with (and it’s worth noting that the original series on which it is based, “Riget”, is much, much shorter). But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, given that Stephen King handled its adaptation for American audiences. I like the guy, but he did write Sleepwalkers. UGH. I’ve been looking forward to the Silent Hill film, but knowing that the actress who played the horrible cat mother is in the movie makes me have second thoughts about it.

But like I was saying, the amount of pointless shit in “Kingdom Hospital” is exasperating. One of last night’s episodes (it airs in four hour blocks of four hour-long episodes each) kept cutting to a headless corpse dancing around in the shower while its head sat under a blow dryer. What? One such scene might’ve been mildly amusing (though still pointless and pretty stupid), but this was just ridiculous. There’s also this talking anteater thing that sometimes opens its mouth really wide to reveal freaky sharp teeth, which aside from my general boredom is about the only reason I keep watching because I want to know just what the hell it is. Well, that and the fact that one of the doctors looks a lot like Bud Bundy.

All for now. Ja!

Apologies for the lack of updates last week — despite licking battery acid, I am alive and well. Well, alive, anyway. I’ve been working on some rather time-consuming projects as of late, but Scary-Crayon is still a go! As evidenced by today’s updates. In addition to A Crayon Haiku #50, we’ve got another foray into horrific holiday greetings with The 4+1 SCARIEST 39¢ Easter Cards. Pickings seemed slim at first, but once I got into it I found that these cards far surpass the subjects of our prior Halloween and Christmas outings in the fear factor department. But Easter and its Jewish coincident are by far the most fucked up holidays we’ve examined thus far, so I guess that’s to be expected.

In other news, here are a few videos that’ll be accompanying our next video game review. Natch, they’ll be included along with the article (along with other vids and even downloads of the full games themselves, which are incidentally about as big as these videos), but blog readers get the special sneak preview. Enjoy…

E. Honda vs. M. Bison (859 KB)
Zangief vs. Chun-Li (1.14 MB)
Ryu vs. Sagat (762 KB)

All for now, minna-san. Happy Easter! Take care of yourselves until next time. And remember: discipline, justice, commitment! 🙂

Today we’ve got another game review for you — a blast from the past known as Street Fighter Jenn, complete with a link for you to download the game yourself! You’ll need DOSBox to run it, though. (And hmmm, it looks like there’s a new version… gotta get me summa that!)

Also, many thanks to Jenn Dolari for making this awesome game waaay back when and all of her subsequent info about it (to say nothing of some other stuff that I’ll write about in later articles). If you download the game, you may notice that the characters are a little less likely to murder you with their super moves than I suggested in the review — that’s ’cause Jenn actually updated the game and made it so the CPU opponents are, well, less likely to murder you with their super moves. She’s also included a graphic that’ll give you a point of reference for changing the game options, which may come in handy. See? She cares. She’s also got a couple of webcomics (A Wish for Wings and Closetspace), so do read them if you get the chance. They might be filled with yummy candy. 🙂

Until next time, minna-san!

FINALLY, Scary-Crayon is back to normal — or at least as normal as it ever gets around these parts. Here’s hoping y’all enjoyed this weekend’s April Foolery! 🙂 As promised, I’ve linked the layout in the content pages so you can always revisit the horrific Disney-Crayon if you feel the need. And speaking of April Fool’s Day layouts, here’s the one we did in ’05. It’s absolutely terrifying.

That said, today we take an in-depth look at the 2003- TMNT series. I admit that I wasn’t initially all that keen on the series — things started off kind of boring and there have always been far too many filler episodes for my tastes — but things have picked up in recent weeks to the point where I really can’t wait to see what happens next. I could do without the gimmicky 4Kids theme days and the cool contests that I’m sadly too old to enter (no fair; I want to win G.I. Joe figures and Winx Club dolls too!), but still. TURTLE POWAAA!!!! 😀

Until next time, minna-san. Ja!