Month: March 2011

Random musings, part III…

D'Arque Bishop

Hey, no macking on the fiancée!

Last night, Jennifer and I went and met some of her coworkers for dinner. On the way back, she needed to stop for gas. While I waited by her car, she went in to pay. When she stepped out, she had an odd expression on her face. When I asked her what was wrong, she looked at me and told me that when she walked in and asked to put money on the pump, the cashier replied with, “You are very beautiful.” She was thrown and didn’t expect that, and asked him to repeat it as she wasn’t sure she heard him right. He repeated what he said, and asked, “When will we be having dinner?” Jennifer just looked at him, and said, “Well, I’m not sure that’ll be cool with my fiancé, who’s right outside…” He replied, “Tell him he is a very lucky man.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, after she had pumped her gas and we had left, she called me (we were in separate cars) and told me that as she was telling me the story, she looked into the store and the cashier was looking at her and making motions implying she should call him. What the hell?

Listen, folks. If someone says she’s unavailable, she’s unavailable. Don’t annoy them or their significant others.

How do you like your barbecue? TOASTY!

TeeFury’s shirt design for today (and only available today) is just awesome. I’m definitely planning on wearing it next time we have a cookout at the house. I’ll let the design speak for itself. :-)

Broken phone? You have a cheap option.

I was talking to Scott Howell earlier, and he mentioned that he had broken the touch screen on his cell phone. Worse, he isn’t eligible for an upgrade until July. Fortunately, though, he uses AT&T, which is a GSM provider. I had originally planned on asking my dad to send a spare phone to him to tide him over, but my dad had a much better idea: buy a cheap prepaid phone and use that. Scott researched it, and ended up buying a cheap GoPhone at Walmart for $11. I guess the GoPhones are unlocked; he put his AT&T SIM card in it, and it worked fine. Now he has a phone to tide him over until July, when he can get a nice phone.

So, if you’re on a GSM provider (AT&T or T-Mobile, for example) and need a replacement cheap phone, just get yourself a GoPhone and you should be fine. :-)

Sometimes the bar isn’t what you expect.

D'Arque Bishop

Jennifer and I had decided that tonight, we were going to cool off after work by going to a bar a coworker had told me about last Friday. The bar is called Barcadia, and its claim to fame was that it had a number of classic arcade machines in it. The machines looked like a decent selection on the website, including the original Mortal Kombat. It sounded like fun, so we decided to give it a try. We stopped off at District 7 first to have some dinner, and then made our way over for dessert and drinks. Jennifer in particular was looking forward to their fried oreos.

Were we impressed? Well… no.

When we drove up, we noticed right away that the only parking at the place was valet parking, which we wanted to avoid. After looking around for a minute or two, we parked on the street near the bar and walked over. As we approached, we noticed that the crowd was significantly younger than us. We went in, ordered our drinks, and I walked over to play some games. I ended up playing a few games of Mortal Kombat, plus other games like Star Wars, Robotron:2084, and Popeye. The machines weren’t in great condition; several had monitor issues and the controls on some weren’t very responsive. Star Wars in particular had nonfunctional buttons and was out of alignment. In addition, it wasn’t clear whether or not the machines were supposed to be on free play. I had asked for quarters at one point and was directed to a change machine, but when I walked around several machines had numerous credits in them. As I was closing my tab, I heard the bartender who directed me earlier tell someone the machines were supposed to be on free play.

As for the fried oreos we got? We were not impressed at all. The vanilla ice cream that came with them was a generic single serve vanilla ice cream cup that would be at home at a Chinese buffet or school cafeteria. The oreos themselves were, well, fried oreos, but were okay at best.

As we were leaving, Jennifer looked around at the crowd, and commented that it was “douchebag central”. I couldn’t help but agree; the place was pretentious and the average person there was ten years younger than us, looking to hook up. It really was not the kind of place we liked, and if it wasn’t for the arcade machines, we wouldn’t go in at all. We shrugged our shoulders, and decided that it was not some place we would go back to.

Ah, well. It’s a shame, but it was worth a try. We figure that from now on, if we want classic gaming and drinks, we’ll go to Joystix for their “Pac-Man Fever Fridays”, where we can have drinks in their nice little lounge and have the run of the entire showroom of games. :-)

A tentative step in the realm of writing fiction.

D'Arque Bishop

I had mentioned something called “Project DK” on my Twitter a couple of times. I guess now I can finally say what it was… not that it was anything important, mind.

A while ago, I had decided to get back into writing fiction. Mind you, I haven’t really done any since high school and was a bit out of practice. I had a couple of stories knocking about in my head, but didn’t know where to start. That problem was solved when out of nowhere, a story came to my head, waving its arms, and going, “Me first! Me first!” My only concern was that it was a fanfic, and I really didn’t want to get started working on someone else’s characters. Still, the idea wanted to be told, so I sat down and wrote it.

The end result was a Mortal Kombat fanfic called “Dracula Killer”. I knocked it out in a couple of hours, with Jennifer giving me advice and editing. Once I was done, I sent it on to Crow and ]{0MBAT for their thoughts. They, plus Jennifer, had pretty much the same opinion.

“It’s great. What happens next?”

Well, crap. I honestly had thought the story would end there, but they wanted to see more.

So, a couple of nights later, Jennifer and I were at dinner, and with her help I brainstormed an expanded storyline for the story. I thought it through, and then began working on the expanded story. Over time, I had gotten the page count doubled and wasn’t even anywhere near halfway through. Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a creative stumbling block: the new game.

I apologize if this is a spoiler, but a big part of the setting/tone of the story depended on the Outworld invasion of Earthrealm (from Mortal Kombat 3) being rather sudden and mystical. As the story for MK3 explained, Kahn opened a portal over an unnamed city and used his magic to claim everyone’s souls, except for the chosen warriors. However, screens from the new game showed that it was, in fact, a full-on military invasion. The thing that ended up killing it was watching a video today, where kombatants were fighting on a rooftop, while the city burned around them and a dragon and a helicopter had a dogfight.

Based on that, the premise I had wouldn’t work anymore. The only way I could see it working is if the method Kahn uses to invade Earthrealm was changed in the new timeline, as this story takes place in the old timeline. (Mortal Kombat is starting a new continuity the same way Star Trek did: time travel changing the past.) Otherwise… no. It won’t work. So, I decided to bite the bullet and submit the original version of the story on MK Online.

If you want to read it, you can do so here.

Comments and criticisms are welcome. Just keep in mind that it’s written under the assumption that the person reading it will be familiar with Mortal Kombat. :-)

Random musings, part II…

D'Arque Bishop

Honesty is the best policy.

Jennifer and I had dinner at TGI Friday’s tonight. After dinner, we each ordered our own dessert. After we were done…

Jennifer: “That was delicious. And I was NOT sharing. … just kidding.”
Me: “No, you weren’t.”
Jennifer: “No, I really wasn’t.”

Poe’s Law, anyone?

Sometimes, on Twitter, I’ve been known to take something the official Mortal Kombat Twitter account says and make a wild unfounded rumor joke about it. Well, apparently in God of War, Kratos has something called “Quicktime moves” that he can use. A new gameplayer for Mortal Kombat featuring Kratos was released today, and @MK_MortalKombat retweeted someone noticing the Quicktime moves were in there. My response?

“Quicktime moves? OMG MK IS COMING OUT FOR MAC.”

I thought it was funny, until @MK_MortalKombat retweeted it, commenting, “No. :p” Well, crap. Now I have to wonder how many people out there actually thought I was being serious…

Why not remake Braveheart with Arabs while you’re at it?

http://www.racebending.com/v4/blog/akira-adaptation-courts-white-actors/

I don’t even know where to go with that, other than what I said above. Really. It just seems like an incredibly stupid move. I mean… will they even be called Kaneda and Tetsuo anymore? What about Akira himself? What’s the damn point, other than to make it interesting to American audiences who won’t want to see the foreigners or subtitles… oh, right.

Never mind. After all, they’ve done the same thing with Let the Right One In and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

A nostalgia for gaming days gone by.

D'Arque Bishop

I have to give Jennifer a lot of credit.

She’s been very supportive of the fact that I’m into gaming. She’s been willing to come out to Dave & Buster’s with me whenever I’ve had an itch to go, for example. Then again, it gives her an excuse to play some Time Crisis 4, which is her favorite arcade game. She also lets me know when she hears about arcade conventions coming into town, and comes out with me.

Yesterday was another example of that. She received an email alerting her that Stern was having a release party for their new The Rolling Stones pinball machine, and the Houston one would be at Joystix. Seeing as we had nothing else going last night, we decided to go out there. While on their normal “Pac-Man Fever Fridays” the whole showroom was available to play, only the middle showroom was available this time around. I entered the tournament they had for The Rolling Stones; the objective in the first round was to hit twelve million points in as few balls as possible, and you had three tries to do it in. On my first try I did it in four; it would have been three had my third ball not gone into the right drain almost immediately. Unfortunately, by the time I got to my second try, enough people had done it in three that I had to do it in three balls or I would be eliminated. I didn’t manage it. It was fine, though; considering the other people in the tourney played a lot and I don’t get to play pinball too often outside of emulators, I was happy I did as well as I did. :-)

The thing is, for various reasons, I’ve been getting a nostalgia for old arcade games. My home office is an extension of my geekiness, so to speak, as I have framed posters and other memorabilia set up around it. For example, I have two Mortal Kombat II posters in my office. A couple of weeks ago, though, I was browsing around on the net and found a movie type poster for the game Dragon’s Lair (as seen on the right). I went ahead and picked one up, and this weekend I will be seeing if I can get a 27″x40″ frame for it. It’ll be replacing one of the two Mortal Kombat II posters.

However, what I would really like to have is an arcade machine or pinball machine in the house. I admit I’m a little jealous of my friend Eric, who not only has Ms. Pac-Man and Scramble machines, he has an old Pinball Wizard pinball machine. The problem, though, is that I almost literally have no place to put a machine. As it stands, about the only kind of machine I could reasonably put in the house is a cocktail table machine, as it could double as actual furniture. If it were available, too, I’d love to get one of the pseudo-arcade cabinets NetherRealm Studios made for the new Mortal Kombat game. Unfortunately, I don’t have the money available for it, and if I did I wouldn’t have a place to put it.

Ah, well. It’s a nice thought to have an arcade machine or a pinball machine (preferably Doctor Who or Bram Stoker’s Dracula), but we have more important expenses to worry about right now. For now, I’ll content myself with Pac-Man Fever Fridays, Dave & Busters, and the occasional Game Night at Eric’s house. :-)