The Week In A Bad Education Towers #003

At this point we should just make Monday the day for the newsletter, right?

More videos posted, firstly more of the Top 100:

Nothing too crazy in there, probably the most unknown title being Mass Destruction on the Saturn. I don’t remember it being the best game, just a big load of arcade fun. Recording the footage for the video was the first time I’d played it since, and it was still a whole heap of fun which brings me on to the video from the Mean Machines Guide Audit:

This was a whole heap of fun. I did think that the isometric style of the game wouldn’t hold up but boy was I wrong. The helicopter has a great feel and momentum to it. Sweeping into a bad guy area, pulling a tight turn raining missiles down on baddies before speeding off still feels great. The setting of the game hasn’t aged well, there isn’t much nuance in the bad guy leader General Kilbaba for example. It released at the start of 1992, about a year after the end of the war, so before the real ramifications of the war could be felt. There are plenty of other places to go to get a proper historical view of the war, but if you just want to blow up bad guys this still holds up.

I did want to get another video done this week, one about my kids and film certificates but work overtime put that on hold. After ten hours or so on my laptop, spending more time on a video wasn’t that exciting a prospect.

I did do some video work though; at the weekend I was sorting out my external hard drives figuring out what to do with them. Like, I have one that needs a power adaptor to work which isn’t ideal so needs replacing. Most of the rest are old laptop hard drives in USB enclosures that need replacing with USB3.0 enclosures now that I actually have a computer that can support them.

Doing that I found the project file for the Bad Education ident, the thing that runs at the end of the videos. This was great, as the file I use isn’t in the same resolution of the projects I make now so always have to resize it. I thought I had deleted the old project file so finding it was really helpful; I resized it to a 4k size (not that my videos are 4k but why not), redid the VHS style effect which looks a bit better. I first made it like 7 years ago and since then the whole VHS aesthetic has become way more popular so the tricks to do it now are more refined which is well helpful.

All this basically means I spent ages making a new 6 second clip for the end of videos that won’t be seen for ages so totally worth while.

I did try to take my eldest to go and see Inception at the cinema but the projector broker. Or, because we’re all digital now, it wouldn’t play so they were trying to restart it. But that didn’t work at all so it ended up being no film for us.

So when we went to see Tenet this weekend we were a bit nervous but luckily everything was working and we got to see a film.

And what a great film it was, sure I saw someone somewhere saying it was like a bonkers Bond film which it kind of is; secret agent type people going around the world trying to stop a big bad guy from doing bad things to the world. Take away the time stuff and it would probably still work as a Bond film. Hell, keep in the time stuff and it’ll probably still work as a Roger Moore Bond film. It does has that Nolan aloofness with the main character not having the emotional hook of, say, DiCaprio in Inception which makes is a bit of struggle to get properly invested. Even without that, it’s still a really good action film with some really good set pieces. One I want to see again.

I know, Fortnite. What can I say, my kids love it but with the new season they’re also speaking to me.

This season is a Marvel one, but not just any old Marvel; we’re talking Galactus. Yep, Galactus, the Devourer of Worlds himself. He’s one of my first memories of Marvel Comics from when I read the UK reprint of the Secret Wars mini-series in the mid-80s. A big helmet wearing in purple and blue armour? Sold.

And he’s the big bad of this season of Fortnite which gets me excited because Fortnite does great live events. A while ago they did an event with Travis Scott that was pretty nuts:

Remember, when that happened it was fully live so you could run around him when he was giant and stuff. The scale of it was something to behold, so taking that and putting Galactus in there instead sounds really properly good.

I got invited by the lovely Michiel Kroder to join him and a few others on a stream to play some Street Fighter V, which you can catch his Twitch channel at the moment and also on his YouTube channel as well. And it was good fun! I actually won a couple of matches which was good. SFV is one of those games I’d really like to devote some time to but haven’t. Some more nights like this would be a good excuse to get the fightstick out a bit more often and maybe even learn a character other tan Ken.

Scrolling through Twitter and saw this:

Thats proper nuts. The fact that they’ve just been sat in a warehouse since the late-80s make no sense. Pretty sure I had Firefly and Meteor out of the selection they’ve found, which were great toys. I did have loads of M.A.S.K toys but left them in a box outside in the rain so they were ruined. Still one of the great mistakes of my life, not only for the monetary value they probably would have had but also the fact that my kids probably would have loved those as well.

Ah well. At least we can still find them in random warehouses in Chile.

And thats it for this week. Expect more stuff on the YouTube channel, more random chat on Twitter and…nah, thats probably it.

Phil Doyle