Poor Josh. It’s been so long since he’s had a drop of alcohol in his system that he doesn’t even remember what it felt like. I’m sure you remember your first experience with alcohol where everyone acted like they were completely wasted after one drink apiece. I’d say the statute of limitations on that sort of behavior is the end of your teenage years just to allow for all the late bloomers out there, but after that it isn’t cool. Not that acting sloppy drunk is cool under any circumstances, but after one drink it’s just annoying.

I finally got around to watching Grindhouse on On Demand last night. One thing about growing up and getting married is that you don’t always see every movie you’d like when its in the theaters, but this is one that I should have picked up earlier. You probably have to be a fan of Tarantino or B-cinema to get the most out of it, but Death Proof was a delightful reversal of traditional slasher films and Planet Terror was one of the better killer zombie flicks I’ve seen in recent years.

That reminds me, I still need to go see Iron Man some time this week. That one definitely seems to have come out of left field. It’s not like Iron Man is one of the big superheroes. Still, I’m always glad when someone does a comic book movie right. I’m just worried that it somehow won’t live up to all the hype when I finally see it.

It took a few comics, but someone finally caught the Commander Keen reference on Sean’s shirt. When I was young my parents wouldn’t let us have a Nintendo like the other kids. They said that we had a computer that could play games and that was good enough. At the time my brother and I hated not having an NES, but now I’m grateful that I got to be a PC gamer at a time when the genre was defining itself and churning out some of the best damned PC games ever. One of those games was the now tragically defunct sidescrolling Commander Keen.

Commander Keen was one of the best damned sidescrolling games ever made. The graphics and gameplay in the first Keen trilogy blew away anything that the Nintendo had to offer, and the second Keen trilogy easily defeated any 16-bit console offerings. Keen was a rare gem that is all but forgotten in gaming history today, most often mentioned as a footnote in id software’s history on the way to Wolfenstein and DOOM, but if you haven’t played the series you should definitely give it a try.

The shareware games, 1 and 4, can easily be found and downloaded with a quick Google search, and the full versions can be bought from 3D Realms for $10 apiece. The games are worth every penny. The 6th, and in my opinion best, Keen game can’t be purchased due to the company that owned the license for distributing the game going out of business in the early 90s, but I will say that if you’re feeling piratey some creative Googling utilizing the words Commander, Keen, VI, and download in that precise order should yield results.

These games were so awesome that I scavenged parts from a local used computer shop and rebuilt an old 486 machine just to play them in their original environment. You can play them in Windows, but you miss out on the great soundtrack unless you are willing to fiddle around with DOSBox. Either way, you need to go play those games right now.

That’s it for today’s update. I’ve been a little under the weather since Sunday and I’ve been fighting Nyquil to stay awake and type this, so I’m going to give in to the medication now and enjoy sweet drug-induced sleep. See you all on Friday!

Tags: Josh, Sean, The Pub

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 12:25 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.