Teenaged ______ Ninja Turtles

After taking the transforming out of the Transformers, Michael Bay has decided it’s time to take the mutant out of the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles. Much like the Transformers were predominantly aliens in his movies as opposed to robots in disguise, the Ninja Turtles will now have an alien origin. Which makes less sense than their real origin. When someone tells you the name, “Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles,” you expect them to be four things. Aliens are not one of those things. Their name leaves little room for confusion. Asking, “Well how can a turtle be a ninja?” the answer is, “They’re mutants.” Case closed. If you asked a blind man to draw a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, the scribble he would produce would likely be balls-on. A Teenaged Alien Ninja Turtle, though? That’s just fucking absurd. How can you be a ninja and an alien at the same time? It doesn’t make any fucking sense. Why would aliens pick the names of famous Renaissance artists for themselves and eat pizza in a sewer? The wouldn't. A mutant ninja turtle, teenaged or otherwise, is required to have outer-space adventures by nature of their mutant ninjosity, but an alien ninja wouldn’t necessarily come to Earth.

Why are they alien ninjas? Did aliens secretly create the ancient ninja arts and pass them on to Earthlings through a Stargate long ago? You’d think aliens would have more advanced weaponry at their disposal and abandon their ninja ways. Predators have cloaking devices which negate the need for ninja stealth. A bo staff is a poor weapon to defend one’s self from a ray gun, unless of course you’re a mutant ninja. Then it’s 100% effective. An alien ninja would be space dust in those same circumstances.

At the end of the day, a mutant ninja would beat an alien ninja every time. The 80’s cartoon was concrete proof of that. Krang was from Dimension X, which gave him the added bonus of being an inter-dimensional alien ninja brain in a giant robot suit, and he still lost daily.

Con Air

The B.C. Liberals’ latest idea is Welfare Air: a plan whereby they train welfare recipients and fly them to the remote areas of the province to work in lucrative heavy industry jobs. This is the greatest idea B.C. has had since rounding up the Japanese into concentration camps. I honestly couldn’t decide what was the most apt metaphor for this idea: concentration camps, forced labour camps, or gulags? I’m going with Gulags, because those typically made prisoners work hard labour in frozen, underdeveloped areas like Siberia. The jobs they’re looking to fill are in areas covered with snow for more than half the year, and are severely lacking in new housing. Even hotels and camp sites are unavailable. The only lucrative jobs are with gas, oil, forestry, or mining, which are all incredibly dangerous and requires workers to away from their families for weeks at a time. Applying to these jobs means you’ll be cold, homeless and risking death. In short: the Liberals are trying to kill our welfare recipients.

Sheperd’s Pie

The internet has shit itself over the ending of Mass Effect 3: Electric Boogaloo. This has led to a campaign demanding the company Bioware change the ending post-release, which is like asking them to bring a unicorn back to life with their tears. Not even the much reviled mid-sentence ending of The Sopranos had people asking for a do-over. Imagine if they really had gone ahead and changed the ending of Gone With the Wind ending from, “Quite frankly Scarlett, I don’t give a damn,” to The Simpsons’ version, “Quite frankly Scarlett… I love you, lets remarry!”

Once a product is out the door, it’s considered a done deal. There might be Director’s Cuts versions where the main character turns out to be a robot, etc, but no one takes those versions as cannon. Even George Lucas has only altered the ending of Star Wars by super-imposing another actor over the original. That’s doesn’t make it a different ending. It’s absolutely unheard of in terms of a video game, but through the miracle of paid DLC it can become a very expensive reality.

People who bitched and complained about there being on-the-disc day-one paid content for Mass Effect 3: Tokyo Drift turned around and said they’d pay good money to get a new ending. That blows what’s left of my mind. That’s the reason video games are a multi-billion dollar industry out-grossing Hollywood Box Offices: because “gamers” are goddamn ridiculous. They fought tooth-and-nail against a subscription service for Call of Duty, then paid for it.

Personally, of all I’ve read, I’ve yet to read a single article describing the actual ending due to people being terrified of dishing out Spoilers.

For all I know, it could be awesome, and there’s nothing in the series that guarantees a certain ending. It’s not like your character is “fated” to succeed in one way or another. Mass Effect 2: Meet the Fockers starts with your character dying and can end with your friends and lovers dying, for God’s sake. Beyond that, I’d be satisfied with all the in-game gay sex you’re getting.

It does open up intriguing possibilities. What if we could go back in time and re-write terrible video game endings? Which ending is the worst, anyway?

A lot of games come to mind. For instance:

Super Mario Bros. 2: Luigi’s Revenge. This game was barely recognisable a Super Mario Bros. game, mainly because they super-imposed Mario and friends over the original sprites. It was a fun game, but the ending made people want to punch things in the dick region. SPOILER ALERT! to a decades-old game: It was all a fucking dream, or rather the game took place inside a dream. The game ends with Mario waking up. Super Mario Bros. 2 was Inception. Did I just blow your mind?

Ghosts’n’Goblins: No one ever beat this game, because it was ridiculously hard, but if you did, you’d be rewarded by having to play the entire game a second time to get the ending. Yes: the first run though the game sends you right back to the start, just to fuck with you.

Super Metroid: If you finished the game fast enough, you’d see Samus without her armour on. This revealed the then-shocking twist that Samus had a vagina where her balls should be. It also made thousands of horny teenagers obsessively play the game in the hopes that a quicker runtime would result in seeing the pixelated sprite naked. This was not to be.

Kids jacked it to this.

Final Fantasy X: I could put any Final Fantasy game in here, because all their endings are either baffling or disappointments (with the possible exception of Final Fantasy IX. The original Final Fantasy ended with your heroes being wiped out existence without anyone knowing what they accomplished. Final Fantasy X ended with Tidus being erased from existence as well, as it turns out he was just the whiny dream of a dead civilization that lives inside the body of a giant monster which is made out of essence of his own father who also doesn’t exist. In other words, a Phoinex Down wouldn’t suffice to bring him back. The sequel to the game focused solely on his girlfriend trying to bring him back to life, which is technically impossible because he was never real to begin with. Also: the man she thinks is Tidus is really just an insane organ-playing maniac. You could get a secret ending to Final Fantasy X-2 where she finally reunites with her totally made-up boyfriend, but it takes 100% completion ratio. One mess-up and you have to replay 60+ hours of gaming.

The RPG endings really tend to stick in people’s craws, because they’re not just playing for the fun of it: they’re investing dozens, if not hundreds of hours into the same game hoping to get better results.

What about game endings people liked? They’re still terrible. The #1 voted video game ending according to Guinness? Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Here it is:

I repeat: this is the greatest ending in video game history, according to voters, which proves that many gamers either haven’t beaten a lot of games, or have memories like starving squirrels. Nothing in this ending is the “big reveal” it’s hoping to be. You spend the entire game strapped in a chair and forced to live out drug-induced memories as you’ve been brainwashed by Commie Nazis. Your best friend is imaginary and you killed Kennedy. It’s not exactly the Sixth Sense in it’s subtlety.

Deep Sith

I was watching the new episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series where Darth Maul makes his reappearance and though none of what I was seeing made any sense, and yet it all made perfect sense in the context of the Star Wars universe. First off: Darth Maul died at the end of the Phantom Menace. He was bisected and left to fall into a deep pit that had no practical reason for being there, but is contractually obligated to be in every Star Wars movie. That hasn’t proved a hindrance for any other character in Star Wars. Arms and hands are cut off in practically every scene with little to no fatalities involved. Had the movies progressed chronologically in theatres, the series should have ended with the climax in Episode Three when Anakin has his legs and arm cut off and he burns to a crisp on a bed of hot magma. Instead, he gets the Six Million Dollar Man treatment and becomes Darth Vader, as opposed to Darth Skywalker, which would have made more sense. General Grievous, whose origins are never dealt with in the movies, is basically a lump of assorted organs in a robot body. My point is: pretty much any injury is survivable in the Star Wars universe, so have some hope for Bobba Fett.

When we find Darth Maul, he’s half-man, half-robot, half-spider. He’s Manrobospider, which is awesome. Why is he half-a-robot-spider when there’s clearly an abundance of human-shaped robot parts in Star Wars? That’s the question a Commie might ask, Ivan. The C.I.A. will be in touch with you soon. As ridiculously awesome as that is, he gets human-robot-legs almost immediately when the show decides that magic is real. They don’t simply build him robot legs, they magic-them-up out of some junk lying around. Possibly the Force was involved, but if the Force can build you robot legs out of nothing in three minutes flat, why couldn’t it just make you real-live legs as easily? Again, these are question for Communists.

Of course, Darth Maul is hell-bent on revenge against Obi Wan, which is odd because I don’t think the two were ever formally introduced aside from having a light sabre battle. The two have never exchanged words. So how does he know Obi Wan’s name, especially since he’s had amnesia for 10+ years? Commie question. His quest for revenge sets the stage for the darkest scenes in all the Star War movies combined, in what’s designed to be a cartoon show for eight-year-olds. He kills a bunch of innocent people on a remote planet and challenges Obi Wan to go after him. Obi Wan wants to go it alone, and Samuel L. Mother-Fuckin’ Jackson explains to him how that’s a retarded idea. Yoda tells Obi Wan to go for it, because Yoda is full of terrible advice. Yoda senses something in the Force telling him he’ll have one other person for back-up, which is very unspecific and not helpful at all. Also: last time two Jedi took on Darth Maul and one Jedi walked away, so two isn’t the minimum number of people you’d want going into that fight. It turns out as well as you’d expect given the circumstances, and Obi has his ass beaten like a pinata.

Also: Darth Maul had more dialogue in these episodes than his movie, where he played the lead non-shadowy figure bad-guy. Everything the audience knows about Darth Maul going into this show is that he has bitchin’ horns and natural war-paint, and he like his light sabres like his dildos: double-ended.

Skyrim Afterlife

I realized that even though I haven’t officially beaten Skyrim after hundreds of hours of play, my character’s afterlife is in question. Firstly, he’s trapped as a werewolf, meaning he’ll be expected to join the Wild Hunt. He’s become the Listener for the Night Mother, meaning he’s expected to come back as a Spectral Assassin. He’s a Nightengale, and expected to become a part of the shadows themselves as a patron for thieves. This will spark an all out war between Gods that will likely rip the fabric of reality apart, which is sort of the opposite of what he wants to do. The main villain in the game is a dragon who can fly into the afterlife and eat ghosts, or some shit, and he’ll tell you as much to your fucking face if you try to fuck with him. A part of me imagines him killing my hero and then waiting and waiting and waiting in the wrong afterlife for him to show up so he can eat him. It’d be like that episode of Futurama where Fry’s dog waits for him until it becomes fossilized.

For a game that’s pretty much 90% script, the writing and logistical problems are pretty jarring. I know it’s a game about a guy (or girl, or lizard-man) fighting talking dragons by shouting magic words at them, but still. For instance I tried to get Ebsen to help me kill some dragons. He told me to fuck off until I kill the only dragon who’s not actively trying to kill me, and incidentally is more help to me than Ebsen himself. Ebsen is the co-leader of the Blades, an organization devoted to wiping out dragons, which is all I basically do, or exist for in the game. I’m essentially I’m their chosen one like Neo, and the only reason they should exist at all is to back me up while I do all the work. Yet, he tells me to my face (or rather the wall he was facing at the time), that he won’t lift a finger to help me until I kill the dragon that’s helping me, even though he knows better than anyone that if I fail in any of my quests, then the entire world is going to end. He says it’s part of his oath, which I’ve heard, and it contained nothing in regards to Bros before Dovun. So he’s hell-set and ready to die, and watch the whole world go down in flames, and he’s giving me ultimatums because he wants to serve out justice a few millennia after an alleged crime was committed, with nothing to collaborate the truth except a few dusty old books. He also won’t get up off his ass and do it himself. I’m the one who passed the trials of the Greybeards and went to the Throat of the World and learnt the secret about the dragon who lived there. Ebsen wouldn’t even know he existed if I hadn’t blabbed about it. Now: he won’t kill dragons with me unless I kill a dragon for him. He’s also useless, as my character is the only person in his entire universe that’s capable of permanently killing dragons, who can endlessly resurrect without using my special abilities. All he or anyone else in his group can do is wave their swords around and give a dragon a beating. The dragon dies, turns to a skeleton and comes back a few days later good as new. Do you know where I found this guy? In a sewer beneath a sewer, where the rejects of the rejects go. I even saved his miserable life in the process. Now, he has demands, an unreasonable ones at that. You know what, Ebsen? FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU IN YOUR STUPID BEARDED FACE!

The Mocking Dead

Despite the show being tailor-made to appeal to someone of my demographic, I just can’t get into The Walking Dead. I’ve only watched two full episodes and some snippets from others, and it never really bagged me. I know it’s based on an ongoing comic book series, but then so is Naruto. The difference is Naruto is a cartoon and doesn’t have to worry about budget cutbacks and if they’re going to have enough money to dress up the extras. Also: ninjas.

To me, my main problem is with suspension of belief. If you’re watching a zombie movie, you only have to put up with their gaping plot holes for an hour and twenty-two minutes. Every zombie movie is littered with moments where you feel the urge to shout at the screen, “You idiot!” when someone goes off on their own down a dark hallway, or the motley crue of survivors overlook the fact there’s an infected in their group. With Walking Dead, you have to do that every week.

The biggest plot hole of course is how the zombies took over the world to begin with. Of course during the first 48 hours there’s going to be a few losses, but not 99% of the world’s population. I’m basing that on the fact that any zombie can easily be defeated by a chain link fence, or a locked door. That’s all it takes. They’re too weak to break through most barriers, and they have no climbing skills aside from going up the stairs. I was watching one episode where the dude who banged his best friend’s wife and some fat guy were holding off a horde of zombies by standing on top of some lockers, just barely out of reach. Seriously, they were basically just cookie jars on top of the cupboard, and the zombies couldn’t get them. Even a five year old could have got them. Your cat could have got them. The zombies were helpless. Then, the fat guy jumps off and tries to make a break for it, and breaks his ankle, because he’s fat. He’s 300lbs and has a broken ankle, and he still manages to escape despite all logic. Then, at the end of the episode, they both hide behind a cage being held in place by a single loose bolt on a thread. The cliff-hanger was them cowering in fear hoping that the bolt wouldn’t rattle out of the lock. The fact it held for more than a millisecond is phenomenal. The fact that none of the zombies posses the intelligence or coordination to push that bolt out with their thumbs is embarrassing for everyone involved. It’s like watching a senior citizen try to open a childproof bottle.

The sad fact is that zombies in this series are less threatening than wild animals. Being cornered by a pack of zombies is totally survivable. Being cornered by a pack of wild dogs? Not so much.

How did it get so bad to begin with? No one turns into a zombie instantly and there’s plenty of time to diagnose a victim before they turn full zombie. Lets say there’s a zombie attack at a baseball game, or a rally. The zombie might bite one or two people before someone steps up and stops him. Whoever’s bitten has hours before turning. Obviously, they’re going to be treated and hospitalized. If they die, they’re taken to the morgue at the hospital and laid out on a slab, or put into one of those drawers where they’d never be able to escape. Hospitals are chock full of locked doors, alarms, sharp implements, and they have their own security. It’s almost ideal for fending off a zombie wave.

Another thing: Take any real-life situation where someone opened fire on a crowd at random. The highest death toll for a single shooter is around fifteen. Most times, the shooter is taken down after the first three shots. Those are real statistics for people armed with deadly weapons. A shuffling monstrosity with only his hands and his teeth as weapons isn’t going to get as far as that. There’s no way that can balloon into billions of casualties.

What about graveyards? What if the dead actually rose up and started killing? Ever see a graveyard without a fence? The zombies are screwed.