Month: May 2019

Housing recommendations, courtesy of Pierce Brosnan’s Taffin

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Taffin

Taffin (1988)

I had always wondered how easy or difficult it would be to make a film in Ireland. You don’t exactly have the clout or backing of Hollywood, Bollywood or even Pinewood Studios. Your backdrops are most likely going to be fields, and your extras will be cows and sheep. On your budget of zero, even Rawhead Rex won’t answer your casting manager’s calls. The typical Irish accent is going to be far too squeaky for camera, and two of our biggest acting exports are Mrs. Brown’s Boys and Fair City, which says it all. Worse than that, Glenroe is the closest we’ve gotten to a look at the gritty realism of rural Ireland.

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Being the mayor is easy when you can unleash Bowser at any time

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SimCity (SNES)

After my gig at running theme parks all ended in tears (quite literally, in the case of the nigh-on 500 children who bore the brunt of that exploding roller-coaster), I thought my days of planning and construction were over. I had managed to swerve the law on that occasion, because on the islands we operated from there wasn’t any law. But unfortunately my space-world theme park went up in flames and took my job with it, and so it was back to the dole for me. It’s tough on the dole, let me tell you, a tough plate to keep spinning. Don’t listen to the naysayers, the ones who call us scroungers. It’s a 24/7 type of affair.

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Tweety and Capcom have a lot in common – they’re incessant, yellow, and they’ll bully you all day long

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Mega Man X2

Mega Man X2 (1995)

One thing from the cartoons that I’ve always wanted to do, apart from being able to travel the world with Misty and Brock, is to float towards food. You know, the succulent smell of a pork roast wafts over to Hector the Bulldog as he rests in his kennel. Eyes closed, nose in the air, expectant smile on his mush, he levitates majestically towards the grub. He might even still be asleep while he’s doing this, a floating toasty cinnamon bun with a rumbling stomach. Then he gets to where the food is, and something terribly disappointing happens. An explosion in his face perhaps, or the house falls down or Tweety throws boiling water all over him.

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Marty McFly never had to perform as many space-time errands as Link

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Legend of Zelda, The: Oracle of Ages (2001)

I’ve already done a spiel on the changing of the seasons in my look at The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons. In it, I mentioned how Ireland pretty well has two seasons, cold and less cold, and lately we seem to be getting hit by an awful lot of storms and genuinely lethal weather. After all, picture yourself in a rural cottage, ready to sit down by the fire with a hearty mug of tea. Then suddenly the wind of the gods blows all your roof-tiles away and spits a load of asbestos in your face.

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 6)

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 6)

It’s the denouement of the Kanto leg of our quest for a world-beating Pokémon team. And get this – we’re getting so desperate at this stage that we’re looking at reviving fossils and lumping them all together into a Jurassic All-Star team. How desperate is that?! But it’s not all bad news – we’ve got all of the Legendaries of the Kanto region here, waiting for due inspection, and they’re bound to be quite powerful. It’s a bit of a scrub move to seriously use a Legendary in your team though, don’t you think? Well, be that as it may, if you didn’t put Mewtwo at the very top of your lineup back in the day, you were guaranteed trouble. You were just asking to be taken down to the basement, Pulp Fiction style, and left to wait there, bound and gagged, until the gimp came out. Mewtwo was the gimp, and frighteningly good at what he did.

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Don’t listen to your parents – teachers are tedious, and they always lose

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Sonic Battle (2003)

The steep decline and near-death experience that the Sonic the Hedgehog series went through occurred at roughly the same time that I went to school. From that period of 2003-2009, the series trajectory went a bit like that one really steep fall in Spring Yard Zone. All in that period, you had Sonic Heroes, where the rot started; Shadow the Hedgehog, which I’ve spoken about and has now become genuinely hilarious; Sonic 06, which is infamously bad and which I really must pick up one of these days; and a glut of rubbish for the Wii after that. Running concurrently with all this was the the 4Kids-poisoned Sonic X series. And somewhere amongst all of this was one of the most affronting spinoffs, Sonic Battle for Game Boy Advance.

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