Remember the LP jacket for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan? How about Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue? Or maybe the cover of all covers Abbey Road by The Beatles? What’s the most obvious thing that gets overlooked in all these classic covers? The person behind the camera.
Fortunately, there’s a woman preserving this amazing art form. Autumn de Wilde has quietly been taking some of the most striking and memorable photos of musicians in the past decade or so. Her clientele includes the likes of Elliott Smith, The Decemberists, The White Stripes, Jenny Lewis, Devandra Banhart, Built to Spill, Spoon, Death Cab For Cutie and Beck – in all cases her work is unmistakable. Take a second to follow the jump and admire some of these awesome sleeves and visit her website if you get a chance.
Today, we talk about the actor who portrayed the greatest of the Power Rangers.
Yes, I'm talking about Jason David Frank, mostly known to you and me as Tommy. Do you doubt that Tommy was the greatest of the Power Rangers? Then I shall prove it to you. There is a simple test to determine the greatest Power Ranger ever. All you have to do is ask, "Did he kick a T-Rex right in the goddamn face?" If the answer is yes, then you have found the greatest Power Ranger ever.
Jason David Frank was one of maybe 3 or 4 people in the entire (still continuing) run of all the different Ranger series who seemed like he could actually do a fair job of acting. I mean yeah, we're not talking Oscar calibur performances by any stretch of the imagination, but he was still head and shoulders well above most everyone else on the show. At any rate, the producers of the show must have liked him because he just kept coming back. He holds the record for most appearances on Power Rangers at 242.
But what's really cool about Jason is that the guy is a legitimate martial arts expert. Most of the people from the first incarnation of Power Rangers did have MA skills, while most of the later members did all their fighting via stock footage. In stark contrast to those future Rangers, The dude is currently a friggin' 6th degree black belt and even owns and runs his own martial arts school. This guy can seriously kick your ass. I still haven't decided if it would be humiliating or totally awesome to be able to say you got your ass handed to you by the Green Ranger.
The guy has so much knowledge of the martial arts world (since he got his first black belt at age 12) that he he decided to take his experience in various different disciplines and meld them together to make his own style, called Toso Kune Do.
He's even started getting into serious full contact competitions, with his current record at 2 wins and no losses. There are also rumors that he's been wanting to get into some MMA action.
Oh, and one time he won a fireplace on The Price is Right.
Truly a man for all seasons, I give you Jason David Frank.
If one thing is a given among female vocalists it’s the need, however subconsciously, to contort their voices to an acceptable tonal template. If you’re a Caucasian, you’re expected to be a withering, brooding flower, or perhaps an effigy of the 80s Punk Girl. If you’re African American, Puerto Rican, or Latina, you’re clandestine purpose is to undulate your pitch to no end, or maybe mimic the soul power of the 60s icons like Aretha Franklin. Leslie Feist obviously didn’t get that memo. If any female vocalist can command such a disparate range of emotions and styles in a single record, Feist does it with The Reminder.
posted by Chris on June 25, 2007 6:59 PM in Podcast
Chris, The Geek and Colette are just cussin' up a storm this week while discussing Real Dolls, humanoid Pokemon, the wonders of Xbox 360 achievements (and how no one will ever get all of them in Final Fantasy XI), butts, fingers poking into butts, insults from movies, magic tricks and more. Chris even invents a new word. Download it now or subscribe to the feed!
I know you all need to get your Weekly Geek fix every Monday morning and all, but in order to better accomodate the schedules of all the people involved, we have moved The Weekly Geek recording time to Monday, which means the podcast will be up on Monday Evening from now on.
posted by Chris on June 24, 2007 9:04 PM in Podcast
Chris and Caspian are back to bring you the best music this summer. This is roll-your-windows-down and sing along music, Weekly Geek style. In this quarterly music podcast, we hope to turn you on to some of our picks for the best stuff currently being released, and show you some of the other artists we are currently obsessed with. If you like our regular video game and geek-themed podcast, you'll love the music podcast. Honest! Hit the jump for full show notes and links to purchase the tracks featured in the show. Have any comments or questions? Send them to mailbag@weeklygeekshow.com.
Ok, we all know most banner ads are pretty dumb, right? (Except the ones on this page. Click them please!) We've all seen our fair share of super retarded ads on the ol' internets. X-10 ninja spy cams, "click before this deal expires" gifs, refinance your home by clicking your state, insanely easy trivia that doesn't matter because the whole ad takes you to the same place no matter where you click, etc. But this one just really jumped out at me. See if you can figure out why. Can you guess which thing is not like the others by the time I finish my song? Now, I'm all for education. And lots of professions require specialized training or at least some sort of 4 year degree. But one job on this list probably doesn't have the same education requirements as things like accountants or network analysts.
From their new upcoming game, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, the crew at Hothead games and Penny Arcade have released a handfull of screen shots.
The game is shaping up to look pretty slick (no pun intended), but we really don't know a whole lot about it at the moment other than Mike does the art, Jerry does the writing, and Hothead fills in the rest. Oh, and it's a kind of an adventure/rpgish type game with gameplay along the lines of classics such as Maniac Mansion and the Monkey Island series.
Take a look at some of these:
Seems like there's gonna be a fairly extensive player creation in the game.
The cel shading looks fairly nice. It's definitely the way to go for a comic-inspired game. And even though it's in 3D, it still seems to capture Mike's particular style pretty well.
Here we see what may be motivation for your character, as well as a grammatical error. The "their" is hopefully just a temporary placeholder for the correct gendered pronoun depending on which gender your character is.
The battle system looks like it could be fairly simple and intuitive.
I'm a pretty big PA fan and I'm looking forward to this game, but am remaining cautiously optimistic.
The big pre-E3 announcements have started to roll in. Sega announced today a partnership with Bioware (Baldur's Gate, Star Wars KOTOR) to make an RPG based on the Sonic franchise. No other details have been announced besides the normal press release "we are both so happy to work together" etc.
I love it when companies do out of the box kinds of things like this with their characters. One of my favorite game series of all time is the Mario RPG series. Let's hope Bioware's quality control and championship pedigree keeps this from being just another crappy Sonic spinoff.
After making my tea this morning and sitting down to check my email, I see something glorious. What is this? Konami sent me an email? I'll just open it up here. HOLY AWESOME MERCIFUL CRAPCAKES. CONTRA 4 FOR THE DS.
This isn't just a crappy Contra knockoff, this takes place right after Contra III for the SNES (known as one of the hardest games of all time). Dual screen action. 2D sidescrolling. Contra. On the DS. What is this here? It also says there is co-op. And a grappling hook? Those are like two of my favorite things ever!
When I die my tombstone will say "enjoyed co-op and grappling hooks. RIP".
I have only one real worry, and that is that it is being developed by "WayForward Technologies" who have only made stuff like Spongebob games and crap. This has the potential to be either REALLY COOL or completely lackluster.
Contra 4 for the DS is slated to release in "2007" whatever that means. Full press release after the jump. What do you guys think? Hot or not?
For while, I've been thinking to myself that I need to get a bumper sticker for my little car. I got it used from a car rental place, and so it already has a sticker on it for the rental place. I've tried to remove it once, but it is quite obviously going to take off a fair bit of paint with it.
So what I need is a sticker to cover it up. Any average sized bumper sticker will do. But I can't pick one that's just right. That's where you come in, oh loyal geek-kateer.
Send me an email of a link to a bumper sticker that you think would be great on my car. Or post in the comments of this bloggerything. Or check out the forum thread about it and post there. Whatever.
I just need something that doesn't say Dollarwi$e Rent-a-Car on it. If I like yours best, maybe I'll buy you one too.
John (Florian) from the always awesome Table of Malcontents directs us to this fabulous LEGO Xenomorph today. I have always been completely fascinated with people who make LEGO sculptures, and this is one of the best I've seen in a while. Oozing with style.
posted by Chris on June 18, 2007 8:31 AM in Podcast
The Geek and Chris yap it up this week about Pixar, online game rental services, Spamalot coming to town, Geeky Vacations, bonding with your dad via killing people, soda and board games like Carcassone. Also, there's a new contest! Listen to the podcast to find out the details. Movies, video games, cartoons and fun conversation. What more can you ask for in a podcast? I challenge you to find more to ask for!
Before you start in on calling the innuendo, the Carrot Flute is a viable instrument. Just ask the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra (VVO). For the last 10 years they have been crafting instruments out of vegetables and performing live in concert with their unique cultivated apparatuses. Some of it sounds like a blaring, dissonant foghorn chorus, but the percussive portion leads me to believe that Bjork will be calling upon the VVO to work on her next record:
"Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly re-stewed listening habits, putting its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens."
I love robots, but my love of the mechanical man-automatons will never surpass the Japanese. Toy maker Take-G has this stunning gallery of wooden robot toys on their website, they all look hand-carved and quite impressive. They are so adorable! I wish I read Japanese better. Where's the dang add to cart button?!
Overview: Ok this one's gonna be fairly short because there's not a whole lot to this game. Nintendo's trying to take its success with casual gaming and thinking puzzles from the DS over to the Wii. Casual gaming is shaping up to be the Wii's bread and butter, so taking Big Brain Academy to it is fairly appropriate. The jist is pretty simple. You register your Mii in the Academy and then do some quick paced brain teasers.
Shininess: Meh, I almost don't even feel the need to bother with this category for this game. It's bright and colorful and has some sounds. Whoopee. It uses the Wiimote's internal speaker a bit more than the average game, but not much. It is kinda quirky, though. You're not doing anything significant with little brain teaser mini-games, so there doesn't even need to be a focus on graphics. They don't look like crap, and that's really all you need.
Funness: This game was fun for me the first time through, but that's it. Once you've got yourself set up with your Mii in the game, there's only a few things you can do. You can do the test, which gives you a brain weight rating and grade based on your performance in the mini-games. The mini-games are in groups of three, categorized as Identify, Memorize, Visualize, Analyze, and Compute. For example: In the Memorize group, you'll be shown a sequence of numbers or sounds or pictures, and then you have to list them back in reverse order. In the Compute group, you will see a group of numbered baloons, and you have to pop them in ascending order. Pretty basic, right? Yup.
If you get bored with the test, you can do the group games, which are just the mini-games arranged in different ways. The Mind Sprint has you race through a set number of challenges, either against another team or against the clock. The Mental Marathon has you do as many challenges as possible in a limited time without missing one. And the Brain Quiz has teams take turns picking challenges from a game board on random difficulties and then you get points on how many you completed.
And that's it. Nothing else to it. That's the entire game.
Worthiness: For people like myself, this game is not worth the money at all. We'll get bored of it very quickly and never pick it up again. The only demographic I can see this being successful with at all would be families with young kids. It's probably a great game for parents to sit down with their grade school children and play a silly thinking game together. If you're really concerned about the games your kids play, this is a good one for them. But they might get bored of it pretty quickly unless you turn it into a family fun night type thing.
Even if you're a part of that demographic, this game should be a budget title, and it's not. 50 clams for Big Brain Academy Wii Degree is very, very stiff. I predict very few people are going to get their money's worth out of this game.
posted by Chris on June 12, 2007 6:28 PM in Podcast
Making up new words for the English lexicon just for you, The Weekly Geek listener. This week features Chris, The Geek and Colette running up an ever increasing ramp of offensiveness. We hear a fantastic short version of all of the pent up angry from the last show, Halo 3's beta ending was also discussed, which produced much anger. Then it's on to anger focused at used game stores, and a little bit of anger towards television networks towards the end. But it's not all cantankerous podcastery this week, no! The Star Wars TV series may actually be good, Rock Band rocks (inside sources say) and Cthulhu finally meets his match. Download the show now or subscribe in iTunes!
You may have noticed recently a lack of posts on my part. I am going through some weird times in my life right now, and for some odd reason they have caused me to be completely abysmally bored of video games.
I have a huge stack of them to play, games that people have recommended to me or games that somehow piqued my interest - even games that I need to review in order to continue receiving free crap from companies. Gurumin (PSP), Dragon Quest VIII, God of War II, Pokemon Pearl, Planet Puzzle League, Psychonauts... tons of stuff. Every time I put in a game I just get severely bored and depressed while the game loads.
Take, for example, Gurumin for the PSP. This is supposed to be a great Zelda-style action RPG with pretty PSP graphics and everything. When I put it in to play, I am assaulted with long load times, really shoddy music, sub-par graphics and a completely horrible immature poorly-written generic anime storyline. Have I mentioned how much I loathe anime? I can appreciate good stuff like Cowboy Bebop or whatever, shows that break the mold, but if I see one more person pretend to be Naruto at a con I will punch them in the throat. Being a fan is one thing, but rabidly consuming a crappy product because you think you will be cooler is another entirely.
But I digress. Gurumin has been pretty well rated as a game, but I just completely lack the patience for it. Even putting in Pokemon Pearl I start getting all ADD. I've spent hundreds of hours in Pokemon games before, searching every nook and cranny for all the items and "collecting them all" so to speak, and this time something is different.
I remember playing Secret of Mana as a kid. I reveled in everything about this game. The music was perfect. I would just sit and absorb the music, marveling at the art style, the detail in the characters and enemies, the epic storyline, the fantastic combat system. I'd spend hours and hours and hours just letting that game take over. Is it that I just don't have time anymore as an adult to throw myself so fully into games? Then why don't I like the Wii and the multitude of mini-game-games on that system?
Truly the Wii bores me. The Wii sucks and is overhyped. There, I said it. It's boring. IT'S BORING. Nintendo has made it loud and clear that they don't care about us gamers anymore, they just want to sell systems to your grandma. And that's fine, that's their choice. Every time I pick up a Wii remote I sigh and die a little bit inside. I don't want to constantly be in motion when I play a game. Just because you can make a game where you are ACTUALLY SWINGING A SWORD doesn't mean you should. It's like the transition between 2D and 3D in the Playstation/N64 era. Many crappy 3d platformer games were made because they could be made. The technology was there, and developers felt pressured to use it. 3D became a crutch and produced a slew of completely horrible looking lazy titles.
But why now? Why am I so bored of games now? I think it's a mix of things. One, it's the load times. Why did we ever allow developers to get away with showing us a screen that says "loading..." so often? They aren't required in games. They could be clever and use a system like Metroid Prime. The loading is all in the background, no waiting required. It's also the lame storylines that they force you to watch. Anime is just plain not good, people. I need something deeper, something I haven't seen before. I need genuine humor, not this pedestrian overdone crap. Unlikely hero saves the day from dark forces. Hooray. Gimme some substance, people. My tastes have changed as I have grown up.
Now I know game companies aren't catering solely to me, but my point is that they need to start trying harder. I am becoming increasingly more and more jaded as I get older, and a lot of that stems around the fact that developers are just shoveling the same shit at us over and over again.
Usually the Xbox Live Arcade gets me out of my funk. Too bad I was red ringed the other day. Sigh. End rant. Go about your business.
The PSP is starting to offer more and more reasons for purchase, but still no "killer app". Crush, from Sega, is a brand new puzzle/platform game that just adds to the multitude of unique and compelling titles for Sony's maligned handheld. Similar to Super Paper Mario, Crush features a 2d-to-3d style of game play that is so unique and refreshing (yes, unique even being so similar to Super Paper Mario) you'd be crazy not to pick it up. That is, if you had a PSP. The storyline is superficial but endearing, you are an insomniac seeking help and get plugged into a crazy dream machine called Crush. The atmosphere is eerie, like something out of Psychonauts or Invader ZIM, and the point is to collect enough marbles hidden around a level in order to advance to the next. You rotate the screen in order to get a better angle and "crush" back to 2d to access areas you wouldn't normally be able to access. It almost feels like a compilation of puzzles found in a dungeon in any given Zelda game - which is a good thing. No, it's a GREAT thing.
If booting up your PSP doesn't depress you like it does me, read on for the full review and find out exactly why you should pick up this gem.
May was a little bit of a lull in terms of new releases, so both Chris and I took the time to mine for new band gold. I decided to check out Sufjan Stevens' cronies Danielson and the young, melodramatic Patrick Wolf just today and boy, was I sure surprised. Meanwhile, Furniss dug up the chillingly Eastern European-sounding Beirut and the introspective vocals of Feist. Give them a listen and let us know what you think.
Oh man. I love our community. Weekly Geek listener Quizro posted this extremely excellent short version of last week's podcast, cut down to only the angry parts.
It is the thing of legend. The saga of how Nintendo spurned Sony into creating it's biggest competitor - the Playstation. Never before have we seen the fruits of this horrid marriage, but Game Rave has unearthed a prototype that will blow your mind.
Amidst all the RIAA legal action, could it be that they're waging war against themselves? A few trends emerging in the last five years indicate that the artists, perhaps even those that feared their music seeing early release, are discovering that internet leaks are beneficial to them. After the jump, I'll outline three pieces of evidence to support this controversial claim.
Overview: Today's review is of a quirky new racing game on the Xbox Live Arcade called Mad Tracks. It's a fun little party game where you drive around spring-powered little toy cars. It's got standard races, but also has a variety of other games such as pool and darts that you play with your vehicle. The game was first released in 2006 for the PC, but seems to have found a better home in the Arcade.
Shininess: The graphics in Mad Tracks aren't anything spectacular, but they are spiffy enough for a quick'n'dirty little XBLA game. Everything seems to flow well and looks nice enough for a game that takes all of 10 seconds to download.
The music is also pretty minimal, but the few mellow lounge-ish, jazz-ish numbers play in the background help make it nice and relaxing.
Funness: Mad Tracks is actually quite fun, for a while. The format of toy cars racing and also doing odd missions or bar games is a nice departure from both the standard race car games and party mini-game games. The single player has a good variety of games with different objectives and goals to get gold, silver, or bronze medals on different difficulty levels. It gives the game a nice collectables aspect. You've got basic races, but there are also games where you have to push a golf ball around a mini-golf course to get into the hole first, drive around on a foosball table to score goals, or just try to push the other cars off a dining room table. The variety will keep you entertained and the Achievements will make you want to go back and try to better your score on each game. Oh, there are also various wacky power-up items like rockets, freeze rays, and EMPs.
There is also an online multi-player aspect, but it's fairly lacking for two reasons. First, you can't stay with the same group of people in a random quick match and just play differenet games over and over. You have to back out to the menu and start a new quick match. Granted, this takes just a couple seconds, but it's kind of annoying and you have to wait for other people to show up in the game again. And that brings us to the second con of the online play. Not a lot of people seem to have this game so it can sometimes take a while to get a match going.
Worthiness: At 800 points (10 bucks in real dollars), Mad Tracks could be a good deal, depending on how much you think you'll play it. Test it out on the demo first to see if you think you'll want to play it over and over. You probably won't. The single player missions will only get you so far, and there isn't a huge online community for it. Maybe everyone's off playing the Halo 3 beta. But if you and a few friends plan on all buying the game, you can have some good party game nights online in a dedicated room to play lots of different mini-games.
I spotted a funky looking playlist on my friend's MySpace profile the other day- a slick flash widget with full album art, 40 song streaming capacity, and links to buy the music directly from Amazon and/or iTunes. My interest was bagged. So I spent an hour handpicking cuts for my spiffy new FineTune gadget and threw it up on my various pages. I didn't unearth the real benefit of this thing until I fired it up on my next-gen Nintendo Console. Turns out my new FineTune player not only detected my browser, but it launched a version designed especially for the Wii. For a test drive, punch in my user name "Caspian" (duh) and scope my set. Next time you get sick of plungering deranged bunnies on Rayman, this might come in handy.
posted by Chris on June 4, 2007 5:55 AM in Podcast
Surprisingly, for all the talk of Mr. Rogers, this episode of The Weekly Geek contains massive amounts of profanity! Because both White Mage and Colette were out sick this week, you get to hear Chris and The Geek yell at people for liking Shrek, yell at people for not liking Mr. Rogers, and yell at Pirates for being so awesome. Or something. We've got movie news, a couple video game overviews, and some red rings of death sadness. Check it!
So I'd seen on the ol' internet a while ago about this wacky bag of chips from Doritos that had only an odd product number instead of a name. Apparently, they've got a new flavor and want us to come up with a name for it. If you win, you get free Doritos for a year. Whatever.
So anyway, whilst grocery shopping at my local Albertson's, I happened to come across a bag of these things and decided to pick it up to see what they were like. Wanna know what mystery chips taste like? Well click the jump and find out.
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Yes, I'm talking about Jason David Frank, mostly known to you and me as Tommy. Do you doubt that Tommy was the greatest of the Power Rangers? Then I shall prove it to you. There is a simple test to determine the greatest Power Ranger ever. All you have to do is ask, "Did he kick a T-Rex right in the goddamn face?" If the answer is yes, then you have found the greatest Power Ranger ever.
But what's really cool about Jason is that the guy is a legitimate martial arts expert. Most of the people from the first incarnation of Power Rangers did have MA skills, while most of the later members did all their fighting via stock footage. In stark contrast to those future Rangers, The dude is currently a friggin' 6th degree black belt and even owns and runs his own 
Ok, we all know most banner ads are pretty dumb, right? (Except the ones on this page. Click them please!) We've all seen our fair share of super retarded ads on the ol' internets. X-10 ninja spy cams, "click before this deal expires" gifs, refinance your home by clicking your state, insanely easy trivia that doesn't matter because the whole ad takes you to the same place no matter where you click, etc. But this one just really jumped out at me. See if you can figure out why. Can you guess which thing is not like the others by the time I finish my song? Now, I'm all for education. And lots of professions require specialized training or at least some sort of 4 year degree. But one job on this list probably doesn't have the same education requirements as things like accountants or network analysts.
The big pre-E3 announcements have started to roll in. Sega announced today a partnership with Bioware (Baldur's Gate, Star Wars KOTOR) to make an RPG based on the Sonic franchise. No other details have been announced besides the normal press release "we are both so happy to work together" etc. 
After making my tea this morning and sitting down to check my email, I see something glorious. What is this? Konami sent me an email? I'll just open it up here. HOLY AWESOME MERCIFUL CRAPCAKES. CONTRA 4 FOR THE DS. 
You may have noticed recently a lack of posts on my part. I am going through some weird times in my life right now, and for some odd reason they have caused me to be completely abysmally bored of video games. 
The PSP is starting to offer more and more reasons for purchase, but still no "killer app". Crush, from Sega, is a brand new puzzle/platform game that just adds to the multitude of unique and compelling titles for Sony's maligned handheld. Similar to Super Paper Mario, Crush features a 2d-to-3d style of game play that is so unique and refreshing (yes, unique even being so similar to Super Paper Mario) you'd be crazy not to pick it up. That is, if you had a PSP. The storyline is superficial but endearing, you are an insomniac seeking help and get plugged into a crazy dream machine called Crush. The atmosphere is eerie, like something out of Psychonauts or Invader ZIM, and the point is to collect enough marbles hidden around a level in order to advance to the next. You rotate the screen in order to get a better angle and "crush" back to 2d to access areas you wouldn't normally be able to access. It almost feels like a compilation of puzzles found in a dungeon in any given Zelda game - which is a good thing. No, it's a GREAT thing.
Oh man. 
