Things I liked as a kid having anniversary editions/merchandise makes me feel… old.

This site’ll be 10 come next winter too. :O

It’s nearing the end of the year, which means a lot of things. Incessant, horrible Christmas music that seriously never, ever EVER ends. Lots of talk of presents, either to give or writing lists of what to get. People being trampled in malls. Pointless year-end observational blog entries and web articles.

This is a post about a future post. The relevance of blogging about blogs to come is a horrifying redundancy that I feel is very well suited to a site whose very name indicates non-essentiality.

I want this years year-in-review to be something kickass, so I’m starting a draft of it early, and unlike recently I’ll actually include images. Gasp. I’ll seek to cover everything from games and movies to whatever arbitrary things I feel like dubbing “________ of the Year.” Gurren-Lagann will probably be mentioned. Constantly. Michael Bay will run a minstrel show, and Nazis will again ride dinosaurs. Bricks will be shat. And one of the site’s writers will be kicked off the island, only to realize that there is only one writer here.

Shake well before serving… Come on, wake up!

In case it was missed before, this week I’m only doing two pages due to holiday plans. And laziness. But mostly the former, and certainly not because of the last post being about Contra 4. Or wrapping up Trials and Tribulations. Or army-building in Disgaea PSP. And Heroscape. Look, the comics’ll get done sometime, and that’s what matters!
I’ve unlocked Contra and Super C on the first-mentioned game, and aside from nostalgia value, they’re pretty much redundant with the ‘feature.’ C4 cherry-picks layouts and enemies from both and tweaks them up to modern sprite detailing. The outing makes me enthusiastic about Guardian Spirits again, if nothing else- the game does to Contra what I wanted to do for The Guardian Legend. If there’s any real downfall to the game, it’s that there aren’t too many ‘set piece’ battles that really stand out on their own, just enhanced versions of bosses from previous games. That said, the enhancements are pretty impressive- the Base stages are rendered in full 3-D (characters remain 2-D of course) and as a result seem a little more impressive than the original stages. The second resurrects the Robo-Corpse boss from Contra III in 3-D however, as an exception to the sprite rule. (How many times can this guy shut doors on his head? You’d think he’d learn after the first time he severed it.)