DS releases: Scribblenauts and Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

Scribblenauts is sitting on our kitchen table unopened - wow it has been a busy week. It's gotten brilliant reviews and seems like it's going to be one of those knock it out of the park DS games.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box! AWESOME! A new Professor Layton game! Yes, I got fed up with the first game because it made me feel dumb. I think I might be smarter now, maybe? Who cares? Yay! New Professor Layton game!

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 trailer

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 may not have reinvented the wheel but it sure as shit is fun.

I borrowed Marvel: Ultimate Alliance from a friend a couple of years ago and had a grand old time smashing and bashing stuff with a massive cast of Marvel superheroes. Hell, I was pretty excited about MUA2 coming out.

I've had a busy and sickly week so I haven't been able to put too much time into gameplay (only about five hours) but I'm having a grand time. The story revolves around the Marvel Universe Civil War (see trailer). Battlelines have been drawn yadda yadda yadda. Who cares? It's clobberin' time!

I have a lot of fun putting together my team of heroes and micromanaging their powers. I tend to go with brawlers/goon squad (i.e. Juggernaut, the Thing, Hulk, Wolverine) but sometimes I'll throw in Storm or Gambit.

All in all it's a solid game, enjoyable, action packed, with a decent difficulty curve. The extra training missions and ability to replay previous levels makes for extended game play, especially since you can bulk up on experience and skill points by going back to previous levels and exploring.

The one downside is the music. I turned it off after awhile, it just kind of annoyed me. Other that the game is aces.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) Dir. Gavin Hood

Let me preface this by saying:

I am not a X-Men fan, not the comics or the movies but I did like the cartoon. I like certain characters but all in all they are not my favorite bunch of superheroes.

That being said I really enjoyed 90% of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Hell, I even thought Liev Schreiber did an awesome job as Sabretooth.

Amanda and I were feeling under the weather and she wanted to watch a movie. I wanted to play Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. So we came to an agreement. I'm glad we did.

Wolverine is pretty simple, straight-forward, and moved along at a pretty good clip. I'm not familiar with Gavin Hood's movies but he's a sharp director of action. Action is what we wanted and action is what we got.

I also like how grim the movie is. Sure, it's not as bleak as the new Batman movies but Origins was darker than I was expecting.

My only problem with the movie is the absolutely wretched CG Patrick Stewart sequence. not only was it inexcusably ugly but it was also pointless. Fail.

I don't know if I'd watch Origins any time soon but I'd buy it for less than ten bucks.

Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009)

As we all know pretty much every Batman game sucked - with the exception of LEGO: Batman. Well folks, we can add Batman: Arkham Asylum to the list of Batman games that does not suck.

B:AA is, a few stealth nitpicks aside, awesome. Most of you probably know I am a big fan of the stealth action genre and B:AA hits all the right notes. This is more of a Batman sim than a Batman game. Combat is smooth as silk and looks bitchin' as Batman delivers the beatdown. Some of the combat is a bit repetitive but that didn't matter to me so much as sneaking around and Batman-ing foes from the shadows.

What really puts B:AA over the top for me - quality wise is the voice acting and writing. They rangled the crew from the animated Batman series; Mark Hamill as the Joker, Kevin Conroy as Batman, and written by Paul Dini. I was and am a huge fan of the animated Batman so having this crew on B:AA is a joy for me.

The only downside - for me - is I doubt the game has much replay value for me unless I can start the game over with all my upgrades and gadgets. There are endurance missions and timed missions that you can play apart from the storyline but I haven't gotten into them too much. I think, ultimately, B:AA is a top-notch must play game but I will be turning it in for credit to put towards Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2.

Inglourious Basterds - Second Viewing review

There will be spoilers in this review, just a heads up.

A friend and I went to see Inglourious Basterds last night - he for the first time and myself for the second. I went to see it again for the same reason I saw Kill Bill Vol 1 twice in the theater - to make sure I actually had problems with the movie and not just Tarantino. I still had problems with both.

Chapter One:

The Tarantino Break-Up Metaphor

I feel that I must clarify my dislike of Tarantino and his projects. I came up with this metaphor: I had to break-up with Tarantino, my first auteur boyfriend. If you can imagine: a small town nerdy weirdo who grew up on 70s thrillers, crime flicks, heist movies, action movies, Saturday afternoon Z-Grade horror movies, WWII movies, Westerns and then one day a movie was reviewed by Vincent Canby in the New York Times. The movie reviewed sounded awesome and even had a cool title, Reservoir Dogs. I, me the small town nerdy weirdo, had to see this movie Canby described as, "Though small in physical scope, "Reservoir Dogs" is immensely complicated in its structure, which for the most part works with breathtaking effect." I saw Reservoir Dogs ASAP and from the first moment I was smitten. Then came True Romance -written by QT and steeped in film geekery - and then boom Pulp Fiction. If you knew me in 1995 then you'll know how much I loved that movie. I think I saw it more than a dozen times in the theater - and I'm not exaggerating.

Tarantino was one of my main jumping off points in my film geek maturation process (along with Mike who actually owned a lot of the early HK movies Tarantino was paying homage to). After I moved to Austin in 1999 I kicked into overdrive, watching pretty much anything I could get my hands on that was classic, grindhouse, Asian, underground, Yakuza movies, Yaphet Kotto movies, giallo, sexploitation, girls in jail, and more. I read, I watched, I picked up the soundtracks and scores I could find, and I educated myself.

The beginning of the end of my Tarantino love affair began August 17-26, 2001 at QT5 - the Tarantino MC'd filmfest at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. For each night Tarantino hosted a bunch of like themed movies - i.e. "Martial Arts Epic Adventures", "Old-School Kung Fu films", etc. Some of the movies were top-notch but most were...disappointing. A week of listening to Tarantino rabbit on was exhausting. As my father used to say, "the bloom was off the rose". Two years later Kill Bill Vol 1 came out. I hated that movie and I still hate 3/4 of it. Saw it twice just to make sure.

I decided to break-up with Tarantino. I had outgrown him, his stories were repetative - what scraps of his stories were original, I was unhappy in the relationship, and frankly he annoyed me.

Death Proof was pretty fucking disappointing. That's all I have to say about that.

Now Inglourious Basterds. I give Tarantino another chance, maybe he's changed maybe I can give him yet another chance to be my auteur sweetheart. Hope against hope the magic can be rekindled. Instead, it's more of the same bullshit and I'm reminded why we had to break-up in the first place.

Hence, Tarantino Break-Up Metaphor.

Chapter Two:

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146

"Kosher Porn"

-Eli Roth

Isaac Davis: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Y'know, I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y'know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.

Party Guest: There is this devastating satirical piece on that on the Op Ed page of the Times, it is devastating.

Isaac Davis: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.

- Manhattan (1979) Dir. Woody Allen

Much has been made of Inglourious Basterds being a Jewish revenge fantasy. I have to admit that I am a touch confused by such a sentiment because people are acting like such a thing never existed before. A great majority of movies I've seen with Nazis have them being shot, set on fire, executed, put on trial for war crimes, melted by the wrath of God, machine gunned, blown up, gunned down when attempting to surrender, and pureed by airplanes. Yet people are acting like Tarantino and Roth have reinvented the matzoh ball.

Roth calling IB "kosher porn" is absurd and immature. In his interview with the Toronto Star, he has a vague explanation of the phrase, an enmity between him and Germans (more correctly Nazis):

I said, "You've got to realize, Quentin, we were enslaved. We were slaves and we let it happen again. We almost got liquidated off the planet." (The Holocaust) is still very fresh in everyone's memories. You don't buy German. I did not get into a Mercedes until I was a teenager, because when you grew up you did not support the Germans ... and then I went over (to Europe) and made this film and my parents said, "This is the greatest thing you're doing."

This sentiment leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I'm still trying to figure out why. It makes me uncomfortable, like listening to a WWII vet explaining why he won't buy anything from Japan.

Another troubling issue is the execution of Sgt. Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel) by Sgt. Donnie "The Bear Jew"Donowitz (Eli Roth). Jeffrey Wells's review at Hollywood Elsewhere really brought this issue to my mind, especially watching IB a second time. Sgt. Rachtman refuses to divulge information about other German patrols. Sgt. Donowitz gives him the business with a Louisville Slugger and afterwards rants, pretending to be a big league ball player who just won the big game. Now I'm all for moral ambiguity and twisting concepts of right and wrong in cinema but in this case Tarantino's Basterds come across as socio and psychopaths who have been given free rein to commit whatever atrocities they see fit. In a strange way it reminds me of the torture/execution scene in John Woo's Bullet in the Head.

Chapter Three:

Vainglourious Bastard

or

Autofellatio Tarantino Style

“I think this might just be my masterpiece.”

- Lt. Aldo Raine, final line of Inglourious Basterds

"Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque."

-David Denby The New Yorker 08/24/09

"I am not an American film maker, I make movies for the planet Earth."

-Quentin Tarantino

Inglourious Basterds - the Soundtrack (2009)

My main problem with Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is the absolute bullshit soundtrack.

Perhaps I am missing vital information but I am curious as to why Tarantino cherry picks Ennio Morricone cuts when the master is still alive and composing original scores. The same can be said for Lalo Schifrin, Charles Bernstein, and Jacques Loussier - though the latter hasn't done a film score since the late 90s. Several of the Morricone cues can be found on the A Fistful of Film Music Anthology released in 1995! IB's soundtrack is amateur, repetitive and lazy. He reuses Charles Bernstein's title track from White Lightning for chrissakes (Side note: White Lightning is my favorite Burt Reynolds movie. Check it out ASAP). He used it in Kill Bill Vol 1 and IB. From Kill Bill Vol 2 he recycles Il Mercenario (ripresa) by Ennio Morricone.

The piece de resistance of this self-derivative mess is David Bowie and Giorgio Moroder's Cat People (Putting Out Fire). This title theme from 1982's Cat People is from my least favorite era of Bowie's work. My dislike of early 80s Bowie aside the sequence when this track plays is beautifully shot and could have been one of the best scenes of the movie if not for the ham-handed use of Cat People (Putting Out Fire). Some people left the theater during this part and didn't return.

Tarantino once managed to meld music and image with a deft touch that rivalled Scorsese. Now his soundtracks are as dull and repetitive as his movies.

The Soundtrack Listing for Inglourious Basterds

The Green Leaves Of Summer by Nick Perito
The Verdict (La Condanna) by Ennio Morricone
L'incontro Con La Figlia by Ennio Morricone
White Lightning (Main Title) by Charles Bernstein
Il Mercenario (ripresa) by Ennio Morricone
Slaughter by Billy Preston
Algiers November 1, 1954 (from Battle of Algiers) by Ennio Morricone & Gillo Pontecorvo
The Surrender (La Resa) by Ennio Morricone
One Silver Dollar (Un Dollaro Bucato) by Gianni Ferrio/The Film Studio Orchestra
Hound Chase (from 'White Lightning') by Charles Bernstein
Bath Attack (from 'The Entity') by Charles Bernstein
The Fight by Jacques Loussier
Davon Geht Die Welt Nicht Unter by Zarah Leander
The Man with the Big Sombrero by Samantha Shelton And Michael Andrew
Ich Wollt Ich Wär Ein Huhn by Lilian Harvey & Willy Fritsch
Main Theme from Dark of the Sun by Jacques Loussier
Cat People (Putting Out Fire) by David Bowie
Mystic And Severe by Ennio Morricone
The Devil's Rumble by Davie Allan & The Arrows
What'd I Say by Rare Earth
Zulus by Elmer Bernstein
Tiger Tank by Lalo Schifrin
Un Amico by Ennio Morricone
Eastern Condors by Sherman Chow Gam-Cheung
Rabbia e Tarantella by Ennio Morricone

p.s. The scores that Tarantino "pays homage" to are individually excellent as well are some of the movies they accompany. I whole-heartedly recommend tracking down both.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) Dir. Quentin Tarantino

BC3 and I went to go see a matinee of Inglourious Basterds opening day and it was surprising how full the theater was and what a cross section of demographics made up the audience. Pretty cool that Tarantino can get all sorts of folks to skip work on a Friday afternoon to go see a movie.



I honestly wasn't expecting much from IB seeing as how disappointed I was by both volumes of Kill Bill and Death Proof. In fact I can honestly say that I went into the theater with a chip on my shoulder. I enjoyed IB much more than Tarantino's last ventures. It is pure alternative history fantasy in the vein of Garth Ennis's Adventures in the Rifle Brigade. Robert Richardson's cinematography was excellent, reminding me more of his early work - i.e. Salvador - than Kill Bill. There's beaucoup violence and buckets of claret tossed around but that wasn't a bad thing in my opinion. Christoph Waltz plays Col. Hans Landa and is an absolute monster on screen. You thought Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men was an evil fucker? Col. Landa has him beat, hands down. I have a new favorite cinema villian.

My problems with IB are personal beefs; the soundtrack (I am writing a second post about the soundtrack, including a full track listing and why it pisses me off so much) and Mr. Tarantino himself. While, thankfully, he didn't show up in IB his self-congratulatory smarm is all over the movie. Primary example, the final line of the movie. Other scenes don't come across as provocative they feel forced and frankly, cheap. To be fair, there are some excellent sequences in IB - indeed, there are more great scenes than bad. However, each scene that jolted me out of the movie watching experience was a Tarantino trick or standby. I don't want to throw out any spoilers but you'll know the scenes when you see them. Ultimately these stumbles soured my opinion of IB.

When all is said and done, I think most of you folks would enjoy IB. The problems I have with the movie are pretty nit-picky ultimately. I'd definitely be interested in your input.

Viva Pinata (2006)

Viva Pinata is a really cute game but the fun got sucked out pretty quickly for me. I found the reward system to be fairly skewed and eventually I reached a plateau where I couldn't get new pinatas. Not much a review I know, more like my two cents.

A moment of self-reflection...

A few days ago the Mrs and I were dining at a local Chinese restaurant we frequent. One our regular waitresses there is pretty chatty and we have a friendly rapport. During this last visit I asked for some spicy mustard and some chili sauce (whatever was kicking around in the kitchen). I got my spicy mustard and the now ubiquitous Sriracha and happily nommed our appetizer dinner(1).

After feeding, our waitress came up and asked if I liked the sauces. I replied yes I did. Then followed a conversation about how I knew about Sriracha and had a bottle at home among my other hot sauces and she asked how and where I had acquired a knowledge and love of all things spicy (I'm parapharasing but this was the gist of the conversation). I had a bit of trouble articulating my replies simply because I hadn't ever really thought about the topic. I had assumed that - like drinking, smoking, and profanity - my love of spicy food was something I had right out of the womb.

I don't remember the first spicy dish I ever had. I'm assuming it was something from a Chinese restaurant back in the early day when my father and first step-mother - Laura -were dating. My dad never had a taste for spicy food - though considering his stomach problems and ulcers spicy food was the cure he needed (yes spicy food is good for those ailments - look it up). I don't remember Laura being a chile head or heat junkie but she was an adventerous eater. I do have a memory of loving the red sauce at the Vietnamese restaurant near Pittsfield, MA that I think was owned or funded by Arlo Guthrie. I hope it's still open. I don't recall hot sauce (of any sort)being a cupboard or dining room staple growing up...or jalapenos...or anything hotter than tangy.

Looking back, I think the late 90s was when I truly found my love of spice. Living in DC allowed me to try endless variations on Southeast Asian, African, South & Latin American cuisine, and classic Soul. Moving to Austin in 99 allowed me to stretch my legs further as I developed my ability to cook and my love for food. I recall a long running weekly cooking experiment where I would cook a London Broil cut of steak and share it with a downstairs neighbour. One time I was overzealous with the chiles and every bite was like walking on coals. It was awesome.

I guess as time has progressed so has my ability to moderate flavour with heat, balancing flavours against one another, and experimenting with different types of heat. My love of food, chiles, and other spices had and continues to influence my love of history - even well before i returned to college. The history behind not only of the spice trade that fuelled the Age of Exploration but also the dissemination of the chile pepper from the Americas across the globe is fascinating to me.

This spring and summer also mark my first attempt to grow chiles from seeds and my second attempt to successfully grow jalapenos - hence my new tattoo.

I suppose that the underlying point or reason for my love of heat and all things spicy is good old fashioned pleasure driven curiosity. Either that or I'm just plain nuts.



(1) Appetizer Dinner. A variation on dim sum I came up with back in DC where instead of a full dinner appetizers were ordered - i.e. steamed dumplings, hot & sour soup, and a spring roll. As I went to more restaurants I tried more appetizers. Eventually is was more fun just to eat appetizers instead of entrees.

Brief movie reviews on Lost Souls, Chocolate, Shuttle, and Walled In

Shuttle (2008) Ebert wrote, "There is no release for the audience, no 'entertainment,' not even much action excitement." I have to agree. Shuttle is just kind of a straight to video drag. Not terrible or particularly...much of anything. I was pleased that it didn't wrap up the way I thought it was going to and that it didn't turn into your standard serial killer/slasher fare. I wouldn't necessarily recommend Shuttle but for a low-budget release it wasn't shabby.

Lost Souls (2000) Rule of thumb, if Winona Ryder has long hair in a movie then it's not very good (and yes I include Edward Scissorhands). In this clunker it's Winona Ryder versus the Anti-Christ. I think I kept watching it simply because I wanted to see if anything interesting was going to happen. Lost Souls was the big budget version of a crappy Made-for-TV Dean Koontz movie.

Walled In (2008) Went in a different direction than I thought it was going to and that was not a bad thing. Walled In is not necessarily a horror movie but it is pretty creepy but mostly because you don't know what the hell is going on most of the time. I would rate this a good Saturday afternoon time killer when there's nothing on TV and you don't feel like really thinking about what you're putting in your eyes.

Chocolate (2008) Director Prachya Pinkaew of Ong Bak and The Protector made this awesome martial arts actioner. Personally I think it's the best out the three. The protagonist, played by JeeJa Yanin - a twenty five year old "newcomer" - is an autistic Thai-Japanese gangster love-child. Her savant skill is martial arts, she absorbs and mimics what she sees. This makes for some entertaining moments when she mimics Bruce Lee or Tony Jaa. JeeJa's martial arts skills are bad-ass. There are some moments she out Tony Jaas Tony Jaa - particularly in the insane flying elbow to the crown of the skull or leaping double knees to the sternum attacks. There are a few moments where she doesn't have a clean recovery or flawless landing but I wondered if that was part of the character and not JeeJa's lacking in martial arts. Some of her choreography is ferocious though, the strikes she lands actually look like they hurt.

Chocolate also is a better story/movie than Ong Bak or The Protector. Definitely worth watching.

Basic Instinct (1992) Dir. Paul Verhoeven

I couldn't believe that of all of Verhoeven's movies - including the European releases - I have seen I had not seen Basic Instinct. Neither had Amanda so we downloaded it last night.

I love Verhoeven movies -yes, even Show Girls - and while Basic Instinct is not my favorite it was pretty decent soft core Verhoeven sleaze. Nudity, check. Violence, check. Gore, check. More nudity, check. I think part of the reason I dig Verhoeven so much is because in some ways his movies are like European erotic comics come to life (not all but most of them).

I was reading some of the old reviews of the movie and reviewers were split between fans of sleaze/exploitation/psuedo "Grindhouse" qualities of Basic Instinct and the reviewers who thought it was garbage. A common gripe was that Verhoeven rendered "erotic" dull or unsexy. Personally, I like that Verhoeven kind of makes sex unappealling and unpleasant or rather, doesn't try to make some soft focus, "Take My Breath Away" bullshit. In Basic Instinct both Douglas and Stone aren't making sweet sweet Luther Vandross love, they are fucking for purely selfish reasons. Like Sharon Stone's character Catherine Trammel says, "I didn't say I loved him, I said I loved fucking him." Now there's a femme fatale.

An added bonus was a Jerry Goldsmith score. The theme is great but during action sequences Goldsmith brasses all the place and it's kind of a distraction.

Worth rewatching if you haven't seen it in awhile or if you're a Verhoeven fan.

Many, many, many thanks to BC3 for this!

Step Brothers (2009) Dir. Adam McKay

Please allow me to preface this review by stating - I do not enjoy Will Farrell movies nor his SNL characters. Not a single one. I can barely tolerate him, only a little more than Dane Cook or Carlos Mencia.

That being said...

Step Brothers was fucking funny. Rather, the first half is awesome and the second half has to dick around with a plot. The first half is so funny I nearly threw up. Amanda had to check on me several times.

Farrell and Riley act like psychotic man-boys and it makes me laugh. There are two sequences in particular that make me laugh just thinking about them - the sleep walking scene in particular.

I think the high point for me though is Mary Steenburgen swearing.

The Unborn (2009) Dir. David Goyer

Wow, the majority of critics on metacritic.com did not like The Unborn. Personally I liked it, hell I liked it more than most of the Hollywood horror releases lately.

I have to say that The Unborn actually startled me in several parts. Okay, startled is an understatement. In one part the chick in the movie screamed, the monster screamed, I screamed, this in turn startled Amanda as she was coming out of the bathroom so she screamed then the cats were freaked out.

Is The Unborn top notch horror? No. It's Rogue Pictures which is barely a notch above Dimension Films or Lions Gate. Is it good for a Wednesday night during the summer? Hell's yes.

Fallout 3 - Mothership Zeta (2009) XBOX 360 DLC

The Lone Wanderer in space! Fighting aliens!

That's the long and short of the new DLC for Fallout 3. I polished it off pretty neatly in a few hours. I used the Chinese Stealth Suit and ghosted through the ship, picking off the little grey bastards. If I had attempted to storm through the aliens would have presented a greater threat.

I think I preferred Point Lookout as far as Fallout 3 DLC goes. Zeta is kind of a one trick pony that doesn't really have any impact - as far as I can tell on Earth or your karma. Meh.

The new weapons are alien tech and would have been helpful at an earlier point in the game but at this juncture they won't replace my stand-by weapons. There isn't any armor - that I could find.

I can't 100% rec this download. It's only 800 MS points so the cost ain't bad but you might want to wait until Bethesda releases a single volume set and you begin a new character.

"Not Your Bubbie's Chicken Soup" : Chicken meals Pt. II

After eating your BBQ Chicken Nachos and putting away the leftovers (I suggest leaving them in whatever you cooked them in - no you won't get food poisoning) relax.

The next day or two take out your pot of leftovers. Skim off the layer of goop, don't be squeemish just do it. Throw that crap out. Now the rest that's left put it on the stove on a medium heat, when it starts to get warmed up add corn and a whole bunch of whatever the hell you want. Heat and eat. Whatever is left you can freeze, store for lunch, etc.

There you go, spicy chicken soup. It's kind of tortilla soup but not really. It's good.

I also suggest adding cilantro to the end result, as well as some more hotness.

Three meals from one (or two) chicken(s)? Tell me more!

Yes Virginia, you can get three (or more)meals from one (or more) chicken.

1. Spicy braised chicken.
2. BBQ Chicken Nachos.
3. Not your bubbie's chicken soup.

This is easy folks, and we all know I like easy. All you really need is:

• Chicken, either whole, quartered, boneless, frozen, whatever the hell you want. I would say about 2-3 lbs. If you don't want to screw around with bones just buy thighs, chop them up and there you go.
• 1 lg can of diced tomatoes or two small cans. Whatever.
• Two heaping tablespoons of my spice mix. Now available for order.
• 1 large onion, chopped.
• 1 bulb garlic, mashed cloves. I used to mash the cloves with the edge of my knife like the folks on the TV. Now I just smash them with my fist. My fists are then hammers with which to destroy the living dead and mosquitos.
• About 2 cups of chicken stock, I think that's a cans worth.

Put everything into one pot. Cover cook either in the oven at about 300 for a couple of hours (I'd say two or three) or on the stove top for awhile.

Take out all the chicken. Shred it or chop it or dice it whatever you feel like doing. I'm a shredded chicken fan. Keep about a third out and put the rest back in the pot. Leave the oven, you'll see why...

Now with the shredded chicken you have kept out:

• Place chicken in bowl - preferably one large enough to mix in.
• Pour a healthy amount of your favorite bbq sauce over the chicken.
• pour about a cup of the liquid the chicken cooked in to the bowl.
• Add some hot sauce or chili flakes if you want.
• Mix it up.
• Place tortilla chips on a pan. Add cheese and whatever you want. Now place the chicken on the chips. BBQ-Chicken nachos.

More to follow soon.

Yet another blog...

Mr. Joe R. Lansdale has himself a blog. This makes me very happy. Check it out and share in my happiness.

Saints Row 2 (2008) Second review

I have to admit that Zero Punctuation's review of Saints Row 2 made me go out and buy it.

I traded in Prototype and Dead Space for the simple reason that I got bored with those games and wanted something fun to play. Saints Row 2 is fun, fun the way GTA used to be. I am still a fan of the GTA series and will always be but something is missing these days. GTA is more like a crime sim (sort of - I still wish it was more empire building like Syndicate or SimCity) and SR2 brings back the psychotic mayhem that GTA III and GTA: VC were rife with. SR2 actually wants you to perform acts of total anarchy and builds side missions out of the premise. The "Fuzz" missions have you dress up as a cop and commit violence for the sake of the tagalong camera man. One mission was, "Break up a family dispute" and the camera man suggested I use a chainsaw for higher ratings. Well, gee...okay...run through a crowd with a chainsaw...if I have to I guess I will...

So far I have only played through two story missions but they were satisfying. I will post again if any spectacular missions appear.

Part II of review to appear very soon.