800 Taming Of The Shrewd.

I haven’t had time to check out all the sites you guys suggested yet.  I’ve looked over a couple, and while not what I wanted exactly they were still interesting. I hear the 3DS just announced a price drop and early adopters are pretty angry.  I can hardly blame them.  The 3D gimmick is hardly enough to warrant the price they wanted combined with no games worth owning.  At least as far as I was concerned.

As I’ve essentially said before Mario Kart is enough to sell me on the system without even playing it, but I know I won’t have as much fun with it as I had with Mario Kart DS.  Unless the online modes are as good as they are for the Wii.  It may come close in that instance.  I’ve never played a game that was as much fun as Mario Kart DS if you had a group of people who all owned the game, or worked at a game store with several used copies and systems.  >:3  Being able to play a stripped down mode if you only had one copy of the game was a nice touch too.  If Nintendo can ever get past the friend code obsession they might be able to create a decent multiplayer experience.  My breath is not held.

A friend of mine started talking about Megaman the other day and that led to me getting out Megaman Powered Up for the PSP.  That game has a huge amount of replay options.  It’s kind of a shame that they didn’t release it for other systems.  (Or maybe they have and I never heard about it.)  Anyway, it’s great if you can get hold of it and a PSP that plays UMD.  I think I heard they’re going back to using UMD on PSPs going forward.  Or at least getting rid of the PSP Go. The last DCL was released for Megaman Powered Up in 2007.  I stopped playing it the first time long before that, but all the options were still available, so I got all the stuff I wanted.  It’s all free so no reason to to. I really like the style of the art in that game.  Very colorful and saturated.  It shouldn’t surprise any of you that my eye is drawn to that sort of thing.  XD

All of this megamanning eventually led me to Amazon to look up stuff about the new comic they’re doing.  By my reckoning it’s way overpriced.  I suspect it reads like fanfic too, but I have no data to back that up.  The upside of researching that travesty is that I became aware of a manga version of the Megaman story.  220 pages for $11 versus 14 for $3.  My choice is clear.  I can put the colors in with my imagination and I’ll enjoy the black and white manga.  When I get some extra money at any rate.  XD  I guess it behooves me to push commissions.

The other day I had a flash of memory about a Muppets toy I used to have.  Actually I had more than one.  The one that started the whole thing was Scooter.  He was the nephew of the guy who owned the Muppet theater in the old show.  He might have also been the stage manager.  Anyway, there used to be these action figures, for lack of a better term, that you could get that had holes in their backs so you could stick these white handles into.  As a kid I had no idea what they were for, but apparently it was so you could use them like puppets on a tiny stage.

I remember having several Kermits over the years, at least 2 Scooters, Piggy, Gonzo, Fozzy, and Rolf.  Most of them were barely articulated.  Kermit, Fozzy, & rolf had a hinged waist, so they could bow.  Because that’s really all any toy needs to do…  Piggy was just a hollow tube of pig shaped rubber.  She wasn’t even made of the same stuff as the male toys.  For whatever reason Scooter and Gonzo were actually action figues in the traditional sense.  They had posable arms and legs.  They tended to get limber really fast though.  After a pretty short time they would just flop around.  Scooter also had glasses for eyes, and they sat on his face in a little plug spot.  They were glued in but the plastic they used was harder, so they could get broken off, and they did.  Which pretty much ruined the toy forever.  At that time there weren’t a lot of glues you could use to try and fix something like that.  You just had to have a blind Scooter.

Those toys are rare in that I don’t know what became of them.   I kept almost every toy I had as a kid with the exception of some of the stuff I had when I moved to Garden.  In retrospect I probably should have kept that stuff too, since several of the items are very rare now.  I was oddly obsessed with money at the time for some reason so I wanted to sell them if I remember correctly.  I have no idea now what my goal was anymore.  I suspect it was some other toy I was fixated on.

Playing with all those toys as a kid was certainly a huge part of why I can write stories now.  Even as a kid playing with toys it wasn’t all action.  There was a lot of drama.  The personalities and dialogue of each character was important to me.  I tried to stay true to the characterizations from whatever show the toys came from.  Essentially I was acting out fanfic on the carpet every day.  The most epic crossovers the world will never see.  Like when the Ninja Turtles helped He Man take Skeletor down.  Because that guy was a dick.

I didn’t have Shredder, so Baxter Stockman had to find someone else to toady around for.  Of course he double crossed Krang and allied with Skeletor because Krang is a shitty brain in a jar.  (The Krang I had came with a chicken walker looking suit that had arms that always fell off.  Not the big robot body like in the show.)  Skeletor had awesome minions plus some dudes that betrayed Hordak and joined him, so he was the better choice.  He also hated turtles.

He man wouldn’t stand for that shit, of course, and he knows the value of friendship, so he was all for teaming up when he ran into the turtles.  Splinter trained him  breifly in the martial arts so he would have the upper hand against Skeletor if it came to fisticuffs.  (I only had He Man & Roboto so he regularly won against incredible odds.  I also had several foot solders I got at a garage sale so there was a sizable army of evil when they combined forces.) Eventually an epic battle took place.

Leonardo had to hold of Skeletor for a while since He Ma had to take care of the the Grizzlor Beastman connection, and they had a rubber dragon, so that was hard.  He was nearly defeated, but  Leo held Skeletor at bay long enough for He Man to sort everything out.  Donatello had to stop Baxter Stockman’s evil war machine with a combination of brains and beating it to death with a stick.  Raph took on wave upon wave of lesser minions commanded by Cobra Kahn, while Mike took down Merman with the aid of Ray Fillet.  There was alos a duck with a gun who contributed in some way.  I forget his name.

Usagi Yojimbo  helped  fight Skeletor briefly until it looked like Raph was running out of strength. Eventually the bad guys were driven off, since to one ever got killed outright.

I still think this would be a badass crossover.