Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

Holy crap! Another toy review! On the block today, we've got third party custom transformer from a company called Perfect Effect. It has the very generic name "Shadow Warrior" although it's clearly supposed to be a homage/new version of the Generation 1 Decepticon cassette Rumble: Although the colors have been changed to match the Nemesis Prime/Shadow Commander color scheme. Instead of transforming into a cassette, it transforms into a dual Gatling gun, which can be held by a good chunk of transformers, or mounted on the shoulders of the Shadow Commander armor. In the latter use, it's intended to be used in pairs. Take a look at the pics, and I'll have more to say at the end. So, he's a surprisingly poseable little due. The sidearm in the last picture can be clipped to his leg to "holster" it, and it's used as the handle for when he's a hand wielded weapon, sadly there's no place to put it when he's shoulder mounted. The bac

I make no apologies about my disinterest in following any ongoing comic series, or for any of the huge crossover stories that either of the Big Two (Marvel and DC) put out, but I'd been hearing that Marvel's really been rocking their cosmic characters lately, and it's just been awesome. As a little background here, for anyone who knows even less about this stuff than I do, cosmic is the general term used to refer to any extraterrestrial titles in comics. In Marvel this means that we're talking about characters like Galactus, the devourer of worlds, his heralds, most famously the Silver Surfer, Thanos and the Titans, Adam Warlock and the other former members of the Infinity Watch, Celestials, the Beyonder, the Living Tribunal, really the list goes on quite far. From what I can gather, most of the cosmic properties had been retired for the last couple of years, and Annihilation served as a relaunch, so there's no ongoing books to read and get into, and all of the

This appears to be a time for disappointing sequels, although for awhile there, we got a lot of top tier extremely competent sequels. I guess no trend can be permanent. The first Boondock Saints was one of those rare creations that had just about the optimal amount of everything, it was balanced between being believable, ridiculous, funny, and brutal. Balanced is the last word I would use to describe the sequel. The dialogue is terrible, just about everyone in the movie talks like a middle school bully. There are honest to goodness slapstick comedy moments, such as a mafia liutenant getting smacked in the face with a salami, and then a follow up seen where he's forced to wear headgear and can't speak properly. The tone of the entire movie is just so very different from the original, that it feels like it was made with a different director/writer, with a different vision for what the movie should be. All the more sad, since it's the same writer/director, Troy Duffy,

I might be giving up on No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. Which makes me very sad, because I really liked the first game. I really enjoy the character Travis Touchdown, just because he's so against the grain of your typical videogame heroes. He's not a selfless super man, and he's not a brooding anti-hero with a dark secret. He's just a guy... with a lightsaber... who happens to be a badass. His mission to become the number one ranked assassin in the world is motivated by two things, he wants to prove that he's a badass, and he wants to get into his agents pants. That's it. Thankfully that aspect carries over into the sequel, there's still plenty of fourth wall breaking again, and they've opted to change most of the mini-games into 8Bit style arcade games, which I think is brilliant. Sadly the bosses are kind of a weak point in this one, in the first game every boss had a long conversation with Travis, which was really the high point of the g

Based on a review I read the other day, I decided to check out Better Off Ted. If you want the quick and dirty review, it's this: Why hasn't anyone I know told me about this show? It's funny, nerdy, well acted and has a ridiculous amount of just out there mad science moments. You'd think that everyone I know would be raving about this show, but they aren't. So, Ted is the manager of the R&D department for an evil corporation called Veridian Dynamic. Ted's good at his job, and just about everyone likes him, he's a single dad, and he always tries to do the right thing. You'd think that Ted would be an unbearbly perfect character, and he is a little disgusting at times, but he has just enough flaws to make him interesting, he's overly competitive, a stickler for rules, and has somehow created a rule to keep him from hooking up with the hot product tester that he knows is a perfect match for him. He also has a nasty habit of breaking the four

The title of this movie is a little misleading, it doesn't have anything to do with a dystopian future where sleep has become a commodity, that you find shady guys in back alleys pandering out of their trench coats. I probably would have liked that movie a little more. Sleep Dealer is about a near future, where all of the manual labor from the US is outsourced to Mexico through telepresence technology. Construction, janitor work, even picking oranges out of trees is all done by robots, which are controlled by people jacked into a computer on the other side of the border. I'm sure this makes sense from the angle that immigrant workers are no longer required to actually immigrate, instead they can stay in their own country and it's easier for the US government to still tax their wages, except it's no longer an income tax, but a telepresence tax of some such. My problem with the concept is that I just can't grasp a world where making and maintaining a fleet of expen