Posts Filed Under: wtf

Die Antwoord is blowing up. First Boing Boing, then Vice Magazine, now The New Yorker?!

If you don’t know about Die Antwoord, your inner zef is in need of some serious refreshing. Waddy Jones (a.k.a Ninja) and Yo-landi Vi$$er (the pixie crack-baby with the space mullet pictured below) can take care of that in a heart beat-boy.

Oh, and they just landed in LA. Enter the Ninja!

It’s worse than I could have possibly imagined.

I think the comments say it all:

I just died a little when Kurt Cobain said “YEAH BOYYYYY”

Courtney I’d expect… but Dave? Dave I used to like you… how could you sign off on this?

i’m pretty sure Kurt, in a freebase-induced dream state, saw into the future and watched this video. then he wrote his suicide note.

What is so upsetting is that while Harmonix was “terrified” with getting the Beatles right, it appears Activison couldn’t give a flying fuck.  Imagine Paul McCartney in the clip above, then imagine the shit storm he would rain down with his legal team.

But I guess that’s what happens when your estate is left in such competent and capable hands.  At least the executors of my estate know I am to be represented digitally as a female wood elf druid upon my passing.

Actually, he wasn’t.  Wesley Willis only said that because it rhymed.  He also said suck a male camel’s dick with Hoisen sauce.  And he headbutted me.  Mike was there, and can confirm this is 100% true.  But I’m getting off topic.

Kurt Cobain is in Guitar Hero 5.  Think about that for a second.  Here’s a guy who had trouble buying himself a “fancy” new car  (it was a Lexus if you’re wondering, and he returned it two days later when his friends made fun of it) after he became rich, and now he’s fronting Activision’s 5th installment of their dying cash cow they milked one too many times.

If Kurt knew he’d be polygonally immortalized wearing a cardigan and a shirt drawn by Daniel Johnston,  I’m pretty sure he would have never touched either ever in his life.  Maybe it would have been something a little less ESRB friendly.

So who’s really behind this commercial betrayal of everything Kurt?  Frances Bean?  I doubt it.  I’m looking at you, Courtney.

The word “extreme” has forever been tainted in my mind.  Instead of the excitement marketing departments hope to conjure up by its usage, I prepare myself for an experience devoid of any subtlety.

While not actually using the term “extreme” yet, Dragon Age: Origins might as well.  BioWare is definitely aiming its sites firmly on the “Xtreme” crowd.   But at the same time, they are trying to call it the ’spiritual successor’ to the Baldur’s Gate series.  That’s hard to swallow.  I’ve played Baldur’s Gate, and Baldur’s Gate II, and have just finished Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the the Betrayer.  That’s days of game play right there.  All excellent.  Never once did I hear anything remotely Marilyn Mason-like in any of the sound tracks.  Nor was I exposed to the extreme levels of gore I witnessed in the trailer or on the dragonage.bioware.com website.

But, alas, this is the new shit!  Prepare for tribal tattoos and plate mail-clad warriors with corn rows!   From the trailer, it’s looking like Dragon Age is more a spiritual successor to Doom 3 than anything else.  But instead of everyone’s favorite puffy space marines, you get outcasts from The Witcher.  And like The Witcher, its been revealed this week that DA:O is working the titillation angle as well.  Yay.

I want subtlety reintroduced into game development, especially in D&D style games.  I want to fumble with lock-picking and learning cantrips.  I want to feel like I stepped into carefully crafted sets like those of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  I want there to be a visual difference between a first level spell and a ninth.  And I want care in the story telling and character development like NWN2:MotB did with Kaelyn the Dove, or Oblivion did with the Dark Brotherhood line of quests.  Then we can start passing around the title of spiritual successor.  Until then, hold the Marilyn Manson and the Extreme Chilli Heatwave flavoring.  I’m feeling a little sick.

We have seen some blatant rip-offs in our time (like when Sony Bravia pilfered directly from our friends Kozy-n-Dan), but this is right up there.  It appears Nine West and New Balance have teamed up to shamelessly steal from one of our favorite Japanese artists, Takashi Murakami.  Not only do they pluck his signature eyeball, there’s a sub-par animation explaining the birth of their new mascot, NWBI.

But it gets better, Nine West and New Balance even go so far as to create a video of the “designers” thinking up the concept, and then name the shoe the same name as one of Murakami’s most famous characters, Kiki!

Oh, the shame.  But Murakami is still untouchable.  There is nothing that could water down his art.  Seeing this piece up close at the MOCA was a sight I won’t soon forget.

It’s “super cuts” like Street Fighter Stupidity HD Remix that make me so pleased that I wasn’t emotionally invested in Street Fighter II and knew that USA was running a cartoon based on the series. I’d watched (and loved) some loathsome half-hour toy commercial cartoons in the eighties (MASK, Silverhawks, C.O.P.S., G.I. Joe, etc.) but I’d also watched a lot of Robotech, making me a young animation snob. In hindsight, most of what I liked was pretty rotten stuff.

But this…