Ghost Rider 2007

If you ever get a chance to use a free movie pass for a movie that you're not allowed to use it for, I suggest that you use it for Ghost Rider, potentially the worst movie in theatres right now. The funny thing 'bout it, was that there were three other movies we cross off a list to go see. Call it the worst best evil.

Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the movie was watching it with a bunch of like minded Bozemanites, who all shudder to think that Peter Fonda lives in the next valley over and likes to make the trek into town every Roctober for HatcH Fest, the locals answer to bastardizing this town to resemble a Northern Inbread Cousin of Sundance.
Many a comment were made during the movie about ol' Pete.

My favorite insult, and it's regrettably easy to do in any movie with Nicholas Cage, was when someone said some plot exposing dialogue and first mentioned the term ghost rider, I quipped, "Ghost Rider? More like Ghost written by Mad Libs!"

I've heard some bad dialogue:
Star Wars' "I killed them; not just the men, but the women and children."
R. Hood: Prince o' Thieves' "Then by God we take it back."

Welcome Ghost Rider to the fray: "Forgive me father for I have sinned. I have sinned a lot."
And Cage didn't even say it.
All in all if you want to pay $7 bucks for a movie, you should try and dig up a free pass and then spend the $7 on beer before hand.
Should I be surprised at the abysmal quality of the movie coming from the same director as Electra and Daredevil? The only reason I've seen either is because my roommate bought them... I was bored... drunk... lonely... looking for something that would put me in nap mode... no real good excuse.

If ever I'm glad I didn't read more comics (graphic novels), I'm happy that I didn't pick up GR because it would have been ruined by the movie... again.

Earthbound Zero (1989 Japan, no US release)

It's a great time to be alive. Okay, most of the world pretty much sucks and a lot of us don't really know what to do, but having widely available fan translations of Famicom and Super Famicom RPGs almost makes up for it.

I was there in real time when console emulation and fan translation first blew up. This was around the late 1990s, when I was spending my summers grinding (new-to-me slang for "leveling up," or taking your characters from being weaklings to supermen, which most often involved long afternoons wandering this forest or that patch of ice where the monsters that gave the most experience were programmed to appear). I had beaten the two Final Fantasies for the Super Nintendo, and was jonesing for more. A whole grassroots movement had sprung up around campaigning for Squaresoft to translate or port Final Fantasy II, III (both NES), and V (SNES) to the US, and when Square apparently didn't seem willing, the fans took it into their own hands.

In contrast to the paucity of that time, nowadays there's a glut of official translations and ports. Final Fantasy V finally saw release in the US when it was bundled with FFVI as part of the Final Fantasy Anthology for the Playstation; Final Fantasy II was bundled with FFI and released as Final Fantasy Chronicles, also for PS1; and just last year, Final Fantasy III was remade for the Nintendo DS. The FFs are also slowly seeing their way to the Game Boy Advance (FF I, II, IV, and VI have made it so far).

All of the above is slightly off my main topic, which is a review of Earthbound Zero, because E0's origins are different. This game was not a fan job, but an official Nintendo translation / port of the Famicom RPG Mother that was completed and then shelved due to market conditions and the imminent release of the Super Nintendo. Before the project was cancelled, prototype cartridges of the English translation were made; one of these found its way onto eBay, at which point it found its way into hackers' hands. Said hackers then dumped the ROM (i.e., copied the game from the cartridge onto a PC) and threw it up on the Internet to be played on an emulator.

But Earthbound Zero and the fan translation scene are related for me because, as a lapsed RPG gamer now finding myself accepting that part of me will always enjoy equipping my Paladin with a Masamune and seeing his attack power double, I am very happy to be able to play "new" RPGs that are just like the ones I used to play when I was a kid, with the added control that emulators give the player over the game -- namely, the ability to save at any moment, which is essential for on-the-go gaming. At some point I'll graduate beyond all this old stuff...maybe when the new stuff becomes old and cheap/free.

Now I'm all written out...sigh. But E0 is good. :)