Stuff We Like This Week: November 13 Edition

Stuff We Like This Week: November 13 Edition

Nov 13

In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.

Matt: I like One Con Glory this week, of course!

Also, “The Naked Time.” Unable to sleep the other night, I returned to my long, LONG dormant project to watch all of the original series Trek episodes again. “Naked Time” is only the fourth episode aired, and damn if it isn’t already kinda perfect Trek. There’s the mysterious malady, the ticking countdown to doom, the “Scotty we need more power,” a Vulcan nerve pinch, and classic relationship-building scenes between Kirk and Spock and Spock and McCoy. The concept of a virus that releases inhibitions was so perfect as a way of revealing character early in a series run that Trek would steal it again years later for the Next Gen episode “The Naked Now.” I like the original better.

Jeff: On the real, this is the busiest holiday gaming season I’ve seen in years, at least in terms of games coming out that I feel like I need to buy. I’ve got Brutal Legend, Borderlands and Dragon Age in varying stages of completion, DJ Hero on its way to me, and I’m picking up MW2 sometime next week, Assassin’s Creed 2 next week, and so on and so on and so on. But the games that I’ve been playing the most over the past few weeks have been Persona 3 and Devil Summoner. I have an abiding soft spot in my heart for the type of dungeon crawling sadism gameplay that all of the Shin Megami Tensei games flaunt. As someone whose first real formative gaming experience was Final Fantasy (despite a heavy diet of Combat, Defender, Tron, E.T. and Thexder prior to that), it shouldn’t be a surprise that the ‘WTF Japan’ genre of RPG has been a closet favorite of mine. SMT epitomizes that, with its shoot-yourself-in-the-head-to-use-your-superpowers thing and its absolutely messed up monster design (including but not limited to – I shit you not – a giant wang driving a chariot) and warped plot (Persona 2 involved the resurrection of Hitler).

I’d been PlayStationless for awhile, and am just now delving back into the backlog of JRPGs that I’ve missed in the past few years, at the cost of accumulating a backlog of brand new games.

I have a video game problem.

Sarah: This week, I like — no, I love — my friends Darlene and Paul for introducing me to Rocket Fizz. This is a truly awesome olde thymey soda and candy shop that stocks every kind of fizzy, sugary beverage ever created. You’ll spend at least 15 minutes just wandering around, taking in all the pretty colors. (And then another 15 going into a diabetic coma from the amazingness of it all.) My favorite acquisition thus far is Empire Bottling Works “Real Cola,” which is cane sugary and non-chemicaly and just really fucking delicious. And this is coming from a total Coca-Cola fiend. I also tried the Leninade, which was tasty, but nothing special. Buy for the packaging, I guess.

Darlene and Paul also took me to House of Secrets — one of the best shops in LA, hands down — where I proceed to spend about a million dollars. Sweet, sweet comics.

Chris: This week, I like that NECA has bought Wizkids. Topps, as much as I love their Wacky Packages cards, had no fucking clue what to do with the blind-box, no assembly or painting required, miniature gaming company. A company that was basically king, and a hard act to follow, with a killer license with all the major comic companies, and they’re plan was;

– Make a sports line. Because guys who really love sports will want to be nerds, and guys who are nerds really want to love sports. Idiots.

– Make a kids line. Not the craziest idea, but a hard sell to parents, who ultimately had to pay. To them, whatever the latest CCG was, it was cheaper to buy and easier for kids to clean up – this miniature thing was too much of everything they didn’t like about buying stuff for their kids. Idiots.

– Make a Halo line. Yes, because guys who can play at 30 frames a second, complete with explosions n shit, will really want to slow it down to three hours at the kitchen table. And paying Microsoft a bazillion dollars to the license made it an even better idea! Idiots.

In the end, HeroClix held, MechWarrior was killed, and HorroClix was so-so (but it made an amazing Cthulhu figure, which I now make my magic-based super heroes fight. Just because I can.) Once the media blew the lid off of the more poisonous corners cut by Chinese manufacturers, it looked like even HeroClix was dead.

But not so – NECA has stepped in, and this Wednesday, it’s THE HAMMER OF FRICKIN’ THOR!

Bye bye money. Wave bye bye.