I like Fancy Pants Adventure World 1 Remix

After I graduated from high school (I'm not feeling the nostalgia at all), I have a lot more free time now.  However I don't plan to waste it all on the Internet... I've been planning to really make more online content this summer (whatever that means) than just looking at other's work.

I've really enjoyed the Fancy Pants Adventures flash games.  I've played Worlds 1-3.  Yep, I've been one of those players from the beginning.

Not too long ago, when I logged onto BourneGames.com, I noticed that FPA: World 1 Remix was up.  I decided to play it, since I was wondering if World 1 Remix was going to be a World 3 stylized version of the original World 1.

To my surprise, World 1 Remix was more like a rethinking of World 1 rather than a refurbishing of the original.  I finished the game in about less than 1 hour.  (Hopefully) I did find almost all the extras (pants colors, patterns, and hats) except for the aviator goggles and hat.  I did get those after a second play-through to make sure I didn't miss anything.

The only things that disappointed me were that you couldn't do wall runs, Fancy Pants Man could only do forward slashes and couldn't kill enemies, and the Angry Penguin didn't make a return.  After thinking for a bit, these choices made sense because wall running was only introduced into World 3.  The pencil sword was kind of a surprise bonus and wouldn't be required in World 1, so the limited ability it has actually makes sense.  Finally the Angry Penguin would have been way too easy to beat if the World 1 Remix stayed true to the original.  The Pencil Boss was really challenging at first.  This was mostly because in World 3 the pencil was required to beat the boss, Captain Rainbow Beard.  The Remix boss was more like a challenging Rabbit boss of World 2... which is kind of a throwback to the original FPA games before World 3.

I also realized that cliff hanging wasn't available... this caused me to fall off into bottomless pits many times (and unnecessarily) lose bits of health.  It wouldn't be so bad if the power slide (which was another bonus goodie) wasn't brought into World 1 Remix in places where you could fall off easily.  (You know the areas I'm talking about if you've played the Remix.)  In World 2, I could slide away on any flat surface and not worry about falling off any cliffs because of the cliff hangs... then again the cliff hang wasn't in the original World 1, either.

Anyways, those things were actually super minor and I could care less because it seems like the game mechanics of every iteration of FPA is slightly different ant unique (kind of like snowflakes).

So in the end I'm glad I played World 1 Remix.  I didn't miss out on any new story but I've got an idea of how World 4 could be like, since the animations of Fancy Pants Man were so detailed and so much better than in World 3.  By the way, I would love to do some videos or screencasts of FPA but I just don't know how I would sync the audio with it.  I'm excited for World 4... although that might take a while.

And, oh, some screenshots of the World 1 Remix after I beat it.  Fancy Pants Man briefly holds the pencil sword in the World 1 Remix menu.

And this is the glorious moment Fancy Pants Man obtains the pencil sword after beating the Pencil Boss.  (I think this was the fifth or sixth time I beat the boss.)  I thought it was funny how the Pencil Boss and the pencil were just photos instead of drawn out ones like in World 3.  I guess it makes World 1 Remix unique.

An interesting Tumblr picture I found...

So I was thinking about this Tumblr picture that I reblogged some time ago.  It shows famous people (mostly famous philosophers before Lil Jon) and how they have reduced the first iteration of Aristotle's "What does it mean to be a good person?" to Lil Jon's "What?"

I gathered that this a pretty popular meme-eque picture.  You'll find it if you search "philosophy losing its essence" on Google.

I suppose this is an argument that as time passes on, people become less intellectual.  I think that's pretty invalid until Lil Jon.  However I think whoever made this was pretty funny and clever about it.
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Image credit: http://favoritesoftheartistasian.tumblr.com/post/67707341628/the-degeneration-of-human-thinking-during

Transcendence - Movie Review

I know it's been a long time since I wrote on my blog.  A whole three months worth of inactivity.  I guess I was busy because I procrastinated and had to finish work.  Plus I was studying for some AP Exams.  So I guess that's a lesson to not procrastinate and such.  I do have a lot more time now that I'm not in high school.

During April vacation, I watched Transcendence at the movies with three friends.  I guess we all liked it.  I also watched this a while ago so I don't remember all the details that well.  Also don't expect this to be spoiler free because this is a movie review done by someone who already watched it.  I also wanted to complete this a long time ago but I didn't get to until now.

Although I've never done a movie review before, I don't be giving those numerical scores to movies because it's kind of silly to me.  I mean, if you have a number scale it should be universal but this kind of material is subjective - so scores are also out of the question here.

What I really liked about Transcendence was that it was very though provoking.  It wasn't like a I am Robot, saying that technology will be the bane of human existence.  Its message was more like, "If you get too focused on fixing the world with technology, you miss out on a lot in life."  This was evident because technology was very prevalent and was used throughout the beginning of the movie.  When Dr.Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is uploaded into the computer, he eventually makes amazing advances in technology.  It seems like Caster is altruistic and things should be fine until the other characters realize that the healed people basically have Caster uploaded into their brains.  Apparently others cannot think for themselves or it is inefficient to do something like that if "advances" are to be made.  However these "advances" were in name only because the healed people, who controlled by Caster, were not conscious that they were healed.  In the somewhat tragic downfall of the uploaded Caster, Caster makes himself a body so he could be with Evelyn, his wife but he is finally shut off by the virus nanobots that Evelyn has.  All of the movie events Caster was in seemed like a waste when he was trying to make Evelyn happy but in almost all the wrong ways possible ways.

There was one thing I didn't get: why Dr. Will Caster had to look like a hipster.  Well, that was when Caster had his glasses on.  That probably bugged the frick out of my friend (since he made an incensed comment about how horrible Peter Parker looked in The Amazing Spider Man 2 with a hipster hairdo).  If they think that the hipster look made Caster smart, the movie people were wrong.  Hipsters are known to have vanity issues or identity complexes ... now that I'm thinking about it, the hipster look does fit Caster because of that.

I just looked at the ratings for Transcendence and there were pretty low... 3/5 star rating low.  I could see why - it did have a lot of logical problems.  For instance, Caster at one point in the movie knew that the anti-tech people were trying to implant a computer virus.  Yet at the end, Caster lets Evelyn into the super computer place and heals her, which lets the virus inside Evelyn into Caster and end him.  (I just realized that angry critics could use this as a STD joke.)  There was that kind of little things that would make this movie perfect for counting "movie sins" in another YouTube episode of "Everything Wrong with Transcendence."

An interesting not is that this movie is difficult for those religiously conservative people, especially of a monotheistic religion, to get very upset about the movie's content.  The movie, in my perspective, didn't encourage people to value technology over personal worth or anything like that.  I thought the movie had more of an attitude of: "You can have as much technology as you want but feel very empty inside of yourself."

Despite all of this, this was a good movie that would have lots of good discussion topics dealing with advances in technology vs. human nature and things like that.
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Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transcendence2014Poster.jpg

That #Selfie song...

Last night I heard "#Selfie" and today I finally got to watching it.  Not that I really liked it - I just wanted to see if there was really anything great about it.

A YouTube video of it is here:

I think it was only popular because it featured a pop culture phenomenon that catered to the viral video attention span of a lot of Internet or smart device users.  Other than that the song had standard dance music fanfare.  I didn't appreciate the snobby, Mean Girls-esque gossip girl speaking in a bratty voice in the song.

I usually don't do music reviews and I know I'm talking about "old" stuff here.

Oh, and by the way, that'll only be the few times I actually use a hashtag... unless I make a joke about hashtags.