Yelling From the Mountain Top: A reason to blog

It has occurred to me on several occasions since my mates and I decided to create this esteemed blog that there was a reason for it in the first place. I am not getting on this particular soapbox to opine how we have strayed from our once noble goals to bitch about video games and the shit around us (although that second one is fairly close to our original idea) but instead to bitch about something we were actually fairly knowledgeable and snobbish about, restaurants. Now you may be asking yourself what in the name of Poseidon's engorged blue crank could possible qualify these nerds to talk about the relative quality of restaurants in any credible capacity. Well myself and Typhus both went to Johnson and Wales University for Culinary arts. I graduated last year and while my esteemed colleague did not graduate per se, he is bitter and highly opinionated and on the internet what more do you need, really?

All that being said, this is the event that caused us to actually go and make this blog happen. Typhus and myself were at his local mall and were waiting for our showing of the Watchmen movie to come about and we were hungry. not content with the selection offered to us by the food court and frankly feeling a bit too lazy to drive to one of the surrounding restaurants, we settled on a Pizzeria Uno in the mall. Nothing outstanding, this is the sort of chain restaurant you find peppering the country, formulaic restaurants that serve food that is generally acceptable, but far from notable. Anyhow, Typhus and I took our table and place our drink orders with our server, some 20-something guy named Chris, and sat back for our usual sort of discussion, drinks came and we looked over our menus. Now I will say up front that when it comes to ordering at this sort of place I am spoiled. I have working in kitchens for almost 7 years now and been cooking for 6 of those years. I have also taken a good amount of courses that discuss the principles of menu writing and so reading a menu from this sort of place is kind of disappointing, in the way that insiders can see through the surface and read the subtext. Anyway, after a bit of perusing the menu trying to decide what I felt like eating I settled on a pasta dish involving Jalapenos, chicken, and a cream sauce. Now as I said I don't expect much from this place, but what I got still managed to let me down. It was bland, barely appealing and there was no really effort put into it. I ate about half of it and Typhus didn't fare much better with his own dish.

This is more or less the point where the story begins, the rest is just background and context. When we had decided we'd had enough of of our respective dishes we began to look around for our server and low and behold he was no where to be found. Now Typhus and I consider ourselves to be polite and civil people when regarding professional workers. We both hate rude customers, I have seen more than my share in restaurants and Typhus in the bookstore he works at. So we decided that since we still have some time before our movie, we would just sit, converse and wait for our server to show up again, no doubt he was occupied, despite the fact we appeared to be his only table.

Twenty minutes later, there was still no sign of Chris and we were becoming quite annoyed at this point. The topic of our conversation at this point had moved to complaining about the things that bug us about mediocre restaurants such as this one and talking about starting a blog based off that topic, sort of as amateur food critics. After a few more minutes where we basically decided that Chris wasn't coming back we headed to the front of the restaurant where a manager was at the main station. We asked where our server was and were informed, that basically his shift had ended and he had left...in the middle of serving us. Either he had switched us over to another server (as is standard in this industry) and they had forgotten about us. Or he had ignored or forgotten about us altogether. Either way were were mildly insulted and this obviously did nothing to our dining experience. We decided to take the obvious route and return insult with insult. We paid our bill and left a tip of 25 cents, sure it was unlikely that this would ever come back to our original server in any meaningful way, but that didn't matter. To us the point had been made.

Ninja Gaiden 2

I get the feeling I'm a little late to the party playing this game. Ah well. So, constant pestering from a co-worker finally caused me to dust this game off and put it in my 360 and I have to say, it certainly re-affirmed my hatred of the japs AND gave me new faith in Yahtzee's reviews. Hell you can skip everything I'm about to say and go watch his review (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/175-Ninja-Gaiden-2). It's spot on.

In the interests of full disclosure, my co-worker is a goddamn moron and I only played through the first level of the game. I was all set to bash my way as far as I could get into the game (in say, 4 hours) when the single most retarded thing I've seen all day happened. At the start of the second level I was attacked by a rabid dog. Fine, whatever, I'm a ninja. Dead dog. I turn about the corner and there are seven or eight dogs. Only these dogs are black, have harnesses with throwing knives, and carry Katanas... In their mouths. They actually fought me with those damn swords. I paused the game, quit to the dashboard while swearing about goddamn japs and their weeaboo fans, and took the game out of my console to NEVER return.

It's not that the game is too hard (which it is), that the level design is shit (oh yeah), or even that the camera adds a whole new level of difficulty (what's up assholes with ranged attacks who are off screen). It's that I am very much not the intended audience which is obvious from the start. And I'm not even talking about my hatred for everything japanese here! This is a game set in the fucking future where everyone still fights with swords, exploding shurieken, bows, and magic. Let me get this straight, a bow with exploding arrows or flaming arrows is somehow better than an assault rifle? Bullshit. I am in fact calling bullshit on the entire premise. If the setting had been, oh I don't know, ancient magical never existed japan I'd be happy. But it's not.

In fact, I figured out a way to change the plot and not only have the game make sense but still be fun. Instead of playing the stupid goddamn ninja you play the CIA woman. The first level is you picking out suitable clothes and changing out of the wannabe dominatrix gear. The second level is you trading in the bullshit desert eagle knockoffs for a single suitable .45 cal sidearm and a silenced SMG or if you don't care about starting an international war, an assault rifle. The third level is the fun one, giant fuckoff interactive dialog tree where you call the US and summon up a team of Delta Force Operators to come provide backup. The entire rest of the game is you raping the fuck out of ninnies with swords, claws, other impractical weapons (a fucking scythe?! Points for looking cool but that's just stupid) and sniping the idiots with bows from a good 500 meters beyond their maximum range.

Or alternatively the game is changed to one (short) level where you fly a stealth bomber with a couple of extremely high yield nukes and start turning Japan into glass. Becuase, if they summon the big bad daemon the world ends. Seems like that's an acceptable sacrifice to me. In fact, let's make sure these sorts of games never get made again, nuke japan.