Review: Apache Blood

Thought this was the main character? Nope.

For Christmas this year, I received one of those inexpensive Spaghetti Western compilations with "20 classic features." "Classic" is a debatable adjective for some of these movies, but it's awesome to get my hands on Spaghettis that I may not have otherwise picked up. A lot of fans of the genre advise people to not buy these box sets because they expect the movies to be crappy. However, I think to fully appreciate and understand the genre, one needs to embrace the good and the bad... and even the ugly.

At a Glance
"Apache Blood" (1975) is not actually a Spaghetti Western, go figure, but I guess it was put in the set because it was considered too weird by American Western standards in the 70s. It was directed by Vern Piehl and stars Ray Danton as a vengeful Apache named Yellow Shirt and Dewitt Lee as Sam Glass, a mountain man who I guess has something to do with the American cavalry. I don't know. Here's a brief synopsis brought to you by the back of the DVD tin (that's right, I got the classy set): "An Apache brave, the surviving member of his tribe, vows to avenge his people by finding and killing the soldiers responsible for their deaths."

Story and Characters
Somehow this movie is able to take a very simple concept and make it utterly confusing. First of all, the characterization of the Apaches and white men seems off; we're supposed to root for Yellow Shirt because the cavalrymen murdered his peaceful tribe, but they are portrayed as generally nice guys. What really boggles my mind, is why so much time is spent on Sam Glass and his struggle to get away from Yellow Shirt. Honestly, they should have just called the movie "Mountain Man Blood." There are also a lot of continuity errors or at least a lot of unexplained things that make the continuity lose its credibility. First off, there is some weird sequence where I swear to God Sam murders one of the cavalrymen he's with, but the dude is shown alive a few seconds later and the scene is never mentioned again. Maybe it was a dream, but I would have had no idea that it was unless someone told me. Another mystery is where Yellow Shirt's Indian posse came from. He and his wife were mentioned as the sole survivors of their tribe in the opening narration, and yet here are three other guys on the same mission. I suppose they could be from another tribe of Apaches, but it is never explained how they teamed up with Yellow Shirt if that was the case. The biggest mystery lies in why Yellow Shirt is chasing Sam in the first place. It wasn't mentioned that he was among the men who attacked the Apache tribe, and his character didn't really harbor any noticeable hatred toward the Indians. I guess Yellow Shirt may have thought he was a part of the attack when Sam was hanging around with the cavalrymen in the woods, but that would be out of character. Yellow Shirt is the kind of man who knows who he's after.

Filming and Locations
The scenery isn't particularly enthralling and the cinematography is cheap. I think the fact that a horse visibly takes a crap during one scene tells you all you need to know.

Music
There are pretty much only two songs that play during the whole 89 minutes, but the song during the last scene is surprisingly good. The theme at the end is bizarrely amusing and the music for the credits sounds like it was made for a comedy.

Overall
"Apache Blood" is pretty bad. It's not the worst movie ever*, but it's really only entertaining if you think discontinuity is funny.

Final Verdict: 1/5
 *The worst movie ever is "Wyatt Earp." Don't watch it. 

Doors, How Do They Work?

Thanks gamezone.com, Harry Tipper is my fave.

It's about time that I talk about video games on here, don't you think? I'm sure that at least Clarinet and Olovio agree with me. So, let's talk Timesplitters.

I believe I was in 5th grade when I first played a Timesplitters game with my two cousins. We played the 2nd in the series while listening to some weird playlist thing that the older of my cousins would have running on his computer. I always played as the gingerbread man because a gingerbread man carrying a dangerous weapon always equals comedy gold.

Not really.                                                   

Anyway, last year I scored a copy of what I thought was Timesplitters 2 in the bargain bin at my local Game Stop. To my surprise, the game inside the case was actually a later version of the game: Timesplitters Future Perfect. What a blessing that was (solely based on the fact that there was a disco track that we could use in the arcade mode). Well, after spending lots of time in death matches like we used to, my cousin and I decided to be daring and try the co-op story mode. We did alright for the first stage, but once we got to the second one, we couldn't get any further. Our first objective was to get into this big castle or fortress or whatever after killing a bunch of guards. We succeeded in killing the guards, but no matter what we tried, we couldn't seem to get inside the stupid fortress. We shot at it with all of our guns, threw grenades at it, shot at it with a turret gun mounted to the ground, we ran into it, punched it, and I even tried to use Cortez's (my character's) weird wristband device that lifts stuff using see through octopus arms. Nothing worked. We tried and tried until it seemed like the only reason why it didn't work was that the disc was messed up.

Well, here we are a whole year later, and we finally figure out that all you have to do is hit "x." That's right, just "x." I'm past the point of feeling stupid and am just happy that we can actually make the story progress! What more could I want than to unlock Swinging Tipper for arcade mode?

I seem to have a penchant for overlooking simple solutions in video games. I had trouble with Lego Batman, for god's sake. Lego. Batman.

Keep frodoin' that frodo, dudes. 

Man. This post really ruins my credibility, doesn't it?

Reason Why I Love My Grandma: #1

Today my Grandma and I were talking about squirrels on our way home from the donut shop. She was saying that there weren't too many of them, and that they must not be reproducing.
"Maybe they're just not the marrying kind," she said. Then after a pause, she added, "We've got a bunch of gay squirrels running around!"
I love my Grandma. XD
~Pigeonmeister
Random pic:

The Billowing Pants Saga

Today is the day after the day after Christmas, and I would like to make a post about clothes.
I'm not the most stylish person ever. Actually, I'm currently sitting in my grandma's computer room in jeans that have almost become too small since the onset of the holidays, a shirt that used to be long-sleeved but has since shrunk to 3/4-sleeved in the wash but is still big enough to wear due to its awkward proportions, cat socks, crooked glasses, and a ponytail.
Most of the time, I wear pajamas. I sit around my basement playing Final Fantasy wearing my "bad kitty" pajama pants (which are almost a foot too short; I've had them since middle school) and perhaps a tank top. I often find myself at Skynugget's house wearing my green pajama pants with brown horses on them, whatever shirt happens to be in my closet that day (usually one of my nerdy t-shirts; my favorite of those is the one that says "you have died of dysentery"), and bunny slippers. Of course, I have many more pajamas than these, and I got more for Christmas (including some delicious owl pajamas I sort of got myself for Christmas... teehee).
Unfortunately, it is not acceptable to wear pajamas to school. Otherwise, I would do it all the time. Chelsea did manage to pull it off the day before Winter Break, though. She looked quite awesome!
On school days, I usually end up wearing dark jeans, some fancyish shirt, and a necklace of some sort. Whether I wear glasses or contacts depends on whether or not I'm going to the darkroom for Photo. I can't see with my contacts nearly as well as I can with my glasses, so I usually wear my glasses to the darkroom to get the precise focus I like.
Formal occasions are a bit different, of course. I only really have one formal outfit- brown slacks and a flowy green patterned top. Occasionally I try something else, but I usually just go back to that same outfit, only occasionally changing the necklace I wear with it. Yesterday I went to see South Pacific (a musical) at the Kennedy Center, and I wore that outfit with a small silver necklace that I have. I thought I looked pretty nice before I left, but when I got to the Kennedy Center, I felt awkward. Everyone else looked really distinguished in red and black or beige, and I stood out with my brown pants billowing in the wind. Oh well. I'm glad to have people to hang out with who don't really care what I look like. Skynugget, for example, doesn't care at all what I look like. I show up at her house in pajamas, she greets me at the door in pajamas, I say "yo" and we go play Oregon Trail.
I started a story yesterday on a whim. Unfortunately, it is not about wearing pajamas, but rather about a family falling apart. (insert emoness here). I highly doubt I will finish it, or even continue it, but it has been started.
So ends a post that was probably pretty boring, that wasn't game-related at all. Except a few references. Oh well.
Random picture of the day, from Ugliest Tattoos:

Merry almost 2011.
~Pigeonmeister

YEEHAW (echo)

So two days ago, I went to Skynugget's house to play X-Men Legends.
You're not going to get a post about X-Men Legends, because Skynugget and I are stuck and we got fed up with it.
So we played Oregon Trail II.
At first, I thought someting had happened and it wasn't going to work, because we got this:

Some shit's goin' down.

But luckily, it worked. However, in the process of getting it to work, we noticed that the symbol for it looks really weird. It's this pixelated ox skull.

Delicious.

The startup screen is pretty normal, except that the sound effect is someone yelling "YEEEHAW" really loud. It echoes. It reverberates in your soul.
So we set off. We started with the following conditions, if you care (it doesn't matter all that much):

Of course, the first thing you have to do is buy supplies. Skynugget and I were surprised to discover that we had 18 pairs of socks, but no pants. Or shirts. That'll make for an awkward trail ride.
"Hey... I like your socks."
"Thanks... I like yours too."
(awkward silence as everyone tries not to stare at each others' bodies)
Then we got to talk to this lovely specimen of manhood, who speaks for himself:

I would like to have this man narrate my life.

Then we talked to a bunch more people, and went to buy food.

Who the hell needs 451 pounds of bacon?!
Of course our wagon tipped over in the river.

The following picture is of a man who actually offended me a lot. I'm not Mexican, but this dude was so stereotypical and had such a bad voice that I cringed.

Also, you see what he's saying? "Well, I figure we're seeing the elephant for sure now!" Skynugget and I have no clue what that means, but four separate people said it to us four separate times. Did they know about elephants back then? And even if they did, what on earth does an elephant have to do with a tipped wagon?!

Skynugget got cholera, we got the elephant message again, and we met this guy:

Howdy-do! Whee doggies! Hot diggity dog!

Dutch Optimo freaking shot himself. How do you even do that? This was on a day when we didn't even get anything from our hunting trip. Then it got worse. 

At this point we had a bit of a dry spell, if you will. A bunch of people died of thirst. 

Then: salvation! Unfortunately, we couldn't buy the man. Or water.

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHH

We sort of ran out of meat. Now let me explain something to y'all. I love cute fluffy things. Bunnies especially. So I refuse to shoot the bunnies that crop up in this game. Of course, they kept running past me, and there was just about nothing else. Skynugget got really furious with all this and yelled "BUNNAYYYYYYY" every time one appeared. Hehe

BUNNAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

We settled in Salt Lake City. Even though we had been journeying to Oregon. Sigh.

We started another game. One of our men died, and we got this picture:

That's definitely a woman. Was Casper a crossdresser?!

We got okayishly far. Then, we crossed a river and got completely stuck. We made no progress whatsoever. And worst of all, our wagon parts kept breaking (even though we weren't moving), and we had to trade for replacements. This is normally fine. However, the only thing these people would accept in exchange for their parts (hehe) was a mule! And when we tried to haggle, all the people would do was say "Screw this. 2 mules then!" And so we ran out of mules. We tried lightening the wagon load, eventually dumping literally everything in the wagon. It was no use. We sat there for about a year, eating the last of our mules and starving to death.

We played again, and the following unusual things happened: Buddy got attacked by a mountain lion (I didn't even know that was possible in this game), Skynugget got water poisoning, and we kept finding abandoned wagons. 

Thanks, grandma.

At one point, we found a pitchfork in one of the wagons. Just a pitchfork. Skynugget said, "Oh gee, we got us a pitchfork. Now if we want to start a riot or something..."

Then we found a hope chest, and she said, "I got me a mobile home now!"

I think she'd been affected by the trailfolks' way of speaking. Either way, she stopped being funny after that. (XD jk. She's always pretty funny. Except this morning when she gave me a crappy gift D< )

Anyway, here ends what is quite possibly the longest post ever. As usual, here is the picture of the day, brought to you by Picture is Unrelated:

Have a great-tastic holiday.

Also, happy Atheist Day, aka today, December 23. Just because I said so. Let's make it a tradition.

Peace be upon the ninjas.

~Pigeonmeister

Our Oregon Trail Tale

So I'm sure I've mentioned about Oregon Trail sometime ago. However, I never went into great detail about the previous adventures that happened about two or three days ago. Oh yes. It was three days.
Now my counterpart complainer Eagle will be writing a post about this, with colorful pictures provided. However, I will not. Because I can't lol. My phone won't let me do such things. So you will have to depend on my vivid words and imagine the tale of Oregon Trail I am about to tell you.
It was on Friday that She came over, and originally we were just going to play X-men Legends. However, and oh my god this will be one of the only times I'll complain as well, THAT GAME IS BEING DIFFICULT! Not only have we died three-five times in one day, but no matter how we start over, it ends the same! We die, we die, WE DIEEEEEEEEEEE. We're on a boat, and we have to save the citizens (Go figure) and the boat is springing leaks like a boat going down. Which is what was happening. the boat we were on was going down, and we had to save thos freakin citizens, plus a hundred and one weirdos coming at us like no tomorrow. so seriously. we were screwed beyond belief. And there was a frodo-ing TIME LIMIT FOR GOD'S SAKE! we were all like "No! I think we missed that crewman! NO. there's a sprung leak we have to patch up! OH GEEZ. Storm just jumped into the deathly water AGAIN.
The end of this story was that we stared at each other and chose to turn the tv off, and we turned offer in our agony and complained.
But then. Oh then! Eagle said the magic words. "Wanna play Oregon Trail II?" and I was a little indifferent due to the horrible way we ended that game. so I only replied "Sure. Why not." That was how Our Oregon Trail Tale began. Gather round again kids, and listen to my story. This is a tale for the ages kiddies.
I, along with Eagle, surrounded my computer as we inserted the game. There was some problem however with the disc, and an awkward problem box popped up, asking some stupid question about restarting or something. Eagle was puzzled, I didn't care, and while she pondered on this, I just clicked it close and went onto settings to find the disc on my computer. Just wait kids, this gets better.
Suddenly, I saw the disc picture I had to click on in order for the game to work, and OHMYGOD, you wouldn't believe what it was! It was a pixelated bull/cow/animal, looking to the side, totally creepy and awkard but also awesome all the same. It was hilariously odd, and Eagle took a picture of it with her phone, because she always does that XD LOL. anyhow, we clicked on it, and of course this journey began with a great "YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW" as the opening screen displayed. I love that Yeehaw. It's the beloved Yeehaw of this generation, coming forth from the ashes of a god known as a tiki head, that suddenly starts walking because a man jumped inside.
ANYWAY.
The first game was against my religion.
LOL.
No, but the first game was pretty special. Me and eagle took controls intermediately, sharing and whatnot, and of course it seemed kinda normal. We started out at a great time, and OHMYGOD, we managed to make it to SALT WATER CITY! (Lol Salt lake City) where we settled and lived our days as bankers or something. I forget what happened in that bio of our life story. But i'm pretty sure somebody shot the president XD Well, of course we wanted to play again, hoping to get to Oregon this time, so Eagle automatically assumed she should take the lead. That was cuz I ran to the bathroom and suddenly she just started and i couldn't stop her because I was in the bathroom XD
This is the greatest story ever, kids. It's the story about Eagle getting herself into some hilarious trouble.
First of all, she frodo-ing used up all of her money at the start. FRODO. The only amount of money we had left was like five buck. BARELY FIVE BUCKS! She giggled while I banged my head on the desk, screaming about our money problems, because I'm a cheapskate and wanted at least a hundred bucks before we left for the frodo-ing trail! But nooooooooooo, she haaaaaaaad to buy like mules and food, and oh geez, clothes! CLOTHES?! who wears clothes on the Oregon Trail?! Lol, in our starter set before we bought anything, we had like twelve pairs of socks but no shirts or pants or anything. Maybe that's why we kept freezing in previous games. . . .
Oh well. Luckily we didn't freeze in this game. Except for me I think. I died like first thing. It only took a hundred miles for me and mia to die. Mia's my cat, but in the game she was a living humaN! And the reason why we died was because we had no medicine, or anything like that!!! SHe bought like three cases of bullets and gunpowder, but geez no we don't need no veggies or meds!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.
Soon after our deaths, people started dropping like flies before even getting to 300 miles. Suddenly, the last two were left. The leader, frodo-ing Eagle, and Casper, our friendly living ghost-albino man friend. mrmrmrmr. How the fudge they didn't die like the rest of us, I will never know. But somehow, they did, and that's when things started going. They past by like a million different landmarks, going, going, so far as a thousand miles, and the moraLE WAS HIGH. pun! She went hunting, got us some bears, and lols even a few pigeons (I'm kidding XD)
Here's the Hit hons, she got stuck.
I'm serious.
She didn't move at all XD
Let me explain. There was a point just where she pasted this river, and it was getting to Winter, so it was cold. It was also slightly rainy, but the two remaining travelers were doing good. But that's when it happened. THE WAGON STOPPED MOVING. As in, the status we had was " No Progress." or something like that. Our mile count was stopped at like a thousand and something miles, not going anywhere. We thought this was a glitch for a second, but no, time kept passing, days were going by. As if that weren't weird enough, suddenly THE WAGON WHEELS KEPT BREAKING. OHMYGOD HOW THE FRODO DID IT KEEP BREAKING IF WE WEREN'T GOING ANYWHERE?! were we stuck in the mud or something??? All I know is that they kept breaking, and we had to use our supplies to fix them, until we ran out. and so we had to trade with strangers for fixing supplies. Ugh. Those stupid strangers just knew we were desperate, so of course they ask for our mules. We need those mules. They are the only way we could ever get out of that spot. So we kept asking to hassle, and suddenly, oh hey!, they ask for TWO MULES. So we finally settled on one mule, and it kept happening. I'M SERIOUS. WE RAN OUT OF MULES HERE FOLKS. nO MULES, NO TRAVEL. NO HEART, NO FRIENDS. THAT'S WHY WE ALL DIED. But oh no, not before we kept trying to throw stuff out of our wagon, hoping it'll move if we ligthen the load. We threw out food, clothes, rum, etc. We had to trade our gun for fixing supplies. Slowly, and I do mean slowly, Casper took a turn for the worst. He was starving, duh, cuz we had no meat or clothes or ANYTHING. and finally, he died. He was the only one with a proper burial, because clearly he needed it since he lived the longest XD But wait. We have one person left. Eagle. Eagle wouldn't die!!!! SHE JUST WOULDN'T DIE! and i was waiting, and she had given up, begging this game to just let her die. but no. she kept living. For like a week she kept living. When she did die, I was so happy I would've kissed the goat, but we had no goat, and plus I was dead. So instead i just laughed. because we finally noticed that we were stuck in the same spot for a year. A whole year, trying to move from that one area where we never left. and so was our tragic ending, for our tragic tale of Oregon.
But wait. There's a sequel. A ray of light for this horrible ending. The true ending of this post. But since this post is too long, kids, I'm just going to have to do it in another post. Wow. I told a long story kids, so be proud of me. I haven't posted in awhile. It's pretty nice to get back into it. I'm sad Eagle had a bad week, but happy that it will become good again soon. Tm in school i'll be handing out little gifts for christmas. Until I post again, fair thee well my lovely internet people who read this tale.

The Crappiest Week

So yeah, I've had a crappy week. I won't go into detail, but let's just say that I'm exhausted by life.
I have two half-finished posts in the works, but my computer is crapping out (I'm on the old brokenish one upstairs; also, the crap count in this post is up to 3.) Oh Kamina, it just started playing Age of Empires. I don't want to play Age of Empires, dammit. The one day I don't want to conquer surrounding nations would be the day my computer decides to just sort of randomly start playing the game.
You know, I think I'll talk about it. I actually really, seriously did not intend to do a legit post here, but I guess I will since I have half an hour to kill. No pics, though. Freewheelin' it!
(I'm not sure what that means.)
Age of Empires is a game o' the naughts (the 2000's; it was copyrighted in 2002). It's pixelated, awkward, and lovely, and it has bird sound effects as background music. My mom always used to become mildly angered when I would go to bed in the middle of a paused game because the bird effects would keep going and make her think there were weird things afoot.
(By the way, I'm talking about Age of Empires II, with the Conquerors expansion. Cause that's what I have. You know.)
Basically, it's a strategic conquest game. You are a civilization. You exist to crush other civilizations with your civilized might.
I like to be the Huns because they have a really great special unit, the Tarkan. It's a mounted unit that uses some kind of weird slingshot/bag of rocks type weapon, from the looks of it. I love me my cavalry. I used to only use cavalry for my conquests, but recently I've been seeing the importance of a solid infantry and archer units as well. Siege weapons go without saying. It's extremely difficult to raze a castle without siege weapons.
The castle is the most bad-aardvark building in this game. It takes 650 stone to build and shoots arrows at any enemy who has the misfortune of passing by. Since the enemy AI tends to be pretty dumb and send one enemy at a time into the line of fire, the castle can do a lot of killing.
Speaking of AI, when I say it's dumb, I'm talking about Standard mode. There are three harder modes (and one easier), which I find difficult to beat. To be honest, I'm not the greatest strategy person. I just like to raze all the enemy's buildings, even the walls, and leave nothing but scorch marks upon the earth. And then take over their farms. Cause that's how I roll.
The most fun part of this game, in my opinion, is not the games whose variables (like enemy civilization, number of units, etc.) you can control, but the campaigns. Campaigns put you into the shoes of a great historical war leader and allow you to fight ancient battles and decide the fate of nations. You usually have very specific goals and enemies, and there's an actual plot, with even a bit of dialogue thrown in! Ooh, the intrigue!
This is interesting. I'm looking at the back of the case, and apparently the original actually came out in the late 90's. The critical reviews are from '99 and 2000. It was originally built for Windows 95, 98, ME, or NT. I have XP on this machine. It's pretty cool that it works. The game was actually built by Microsoft. Fancy that.
There's a really big picture of Johnny Depp staring at me from my printer. I feel awkward. I'm going to go finish putting this spirit box (er, bag) together.
Great ending, huh?
~Pigeonmeister
Btw, I forgot a picture of the day last time! Le gasp! This time, I have one. Credits are on the pic itself.

Looks kind of like a messed-up brain. Would you like to eat this fish?