Wendy’s NEW Crispy Chicken Nuggets (from 1986)

Hey, hold up– I thought these things were “NEW” when they were introduced back in the mid-90s? The Wendy’s marketing team has lied to us once again. >=(

Oh well. I never liked’em much anyway.

Choose Your Own Adventure… Greatest series of books ever?

With over 250 million Choose Your Own Adventure sold from 1978-1998, this series was an absolute phenomenon.

If you’re not familiar with the books, quite simply, you choose your own adventure by dictating the plot and pace of each book. After a page or so, there’d be a few options for what you (playing the lead character) could do next.

Example:

If you wish to grab the vine and swing across the shark, alligator and piranha-infested lava pit, turn to page 11.

If you decide to look for another way around the pit, turn to page 8.

It was all really fun. You didn’t know what was going to happen next. Sometimes the best & safest choice turned out to be the worst and the very next page would say…

“You decide to find another way around the pit, but as you turn back onto the path from which you came, a boulder rolls down the mountain crushing you. The end.”

Of course, none of this really mattered, as I usually read through every option in the book to get the full experience. Oops, did I just die? No, I didn’t mean to turn to page 5, I meant to turn to page 12… Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Some of the books were goofy, some were actually downright creepy (usually the earlier books), but they were always fun. My elementary school, middle school and church library always kept them on hand, so I was constantly checking them out. One big plus (for me, anyway) was that the books were fairly small and never too text-heavy. Perfect for a kid who doesn’t like to read all that much!

I think the golden age for the books ranges from the debut in 1978 up until the late-80s. Everything after that just seemed to talk down to us young readers. There were also a number of Choose Your Own… spinoff series (First Adventure, Super Adventure, Nightmare, Star Wars and Disney). I haven’t read the whole line, but I believe I’ve read most of the 70s & 80s output under the regular Choose Your Own Adventure title.

I always judged the books by their covers though and I usually picked up the horror and scifi stories. Sorry, but tales like You Are A Shark, Search for the Mountain Gorillas and Spy for George Washington just don’t appeal to me. I needed stories like Space Vampire, Outlaws of Sherwood Forest, The Deadly Shadow, War With the Evil Power Master (gotta love that title), Vampire Express, Escape and The House of Danger!

There were a number of copy-cat book series (Find Your Fate, What Would You Do?). I think the most notable was Which Way Books, which ran from 1982-1986, but none of them captured the charm of Choose Your Own Adventure.

The series’ original publisher was Bantam Books, but publisher Chooseco has been reissuing the books since 2005. So head over to your local bookstore and relive your youth! But remember… make good choices.

If you’re interested in learning more about Choose Your Own Adventure, or the gamebook genre in general, head on over to Demian’s Gamebook Web Page for cover art, reviews and more.

Halloween Dots

I would have taken a few pictures of these myself (because I bought all three boxes despite being on an “eating right” kick), but the old lady is out of town and has the digital camera with her, so you’ll have to settle for this stock photo instead:

Is that impressive or what ?! Everything about this is great! Ghost Dots! Bat Dots! Candy Corn Dots! More Dots than you could shake a stick at!Ghost Dots have been around for a few years, if I’m not mistaken, but Bat Dost and Candy Corn Dots are entirely new.. at least to me they are. The packaging is great. Wonderful use of vibrant colors and it all just looks so cute I could eat the box along with the Dots. Here’s the breakdown on each of these flavors:

Ghost Dots - This is my first year ever trying them and they’re pretty good because as near as I can tell, they’re the regular Dots flavors (cherry, strawberry, lemon, lime, orange) just with a neato pale green poltergeist color. It’s always a mystery as to which flavor you’re going to get! Tootsie should just go all out and make these things glow-in-the-dark too because that’s exactly what they look like they should be.

Bat Dots - My favorite of the bunch, the flavor here is “blood orange” and it reminds me some type of ’80s fruit snack. Maybe I’m thinking of orange Sunkist fruit snacks? The coloring nearly makes it look like a black licorice gumdrop, but closer inspection reveals just a hint of orange coloring.

Candy Corn Dots - They look like candy corn and they kinda taste like candy corn. But it seems to taste like cheap frosting or icing that you might find on a cookie from a bakery. It’s not bad, just odd.

Overall, I consider these Halloween-themed Dots to be a success! Here’s hoping they’ve got some good ideas for Christmas.

And yes, let’s call this the first entry for Halloween Scream 2009 (don’t worry, the official kickoff won’t be until October 1st)!

TurboGrafx-16 turns 20

The TurboGrafx-16 at 20 – Another great read from the gang at IGN Retro Games. I love all of their retrospectives, I just wish they would do features like this more often!

Seeing as how IGN has just killed the need for me do a History of the Video Game Console entry (check out my NES and Jaguar entries though), I’ll just post my thoughts on the system here.

I never owned a NEC’s TurboGrafx-16, but it was commercials like these that made me want to:

Oh, who am I kidding? Virtually any new console that came along had me interested. It wasn’t that I had no loyalty to the NES, it’s just that I felt the need to stay cutting edge and on top of the latest games and graphics. I also remember pretty much every comic book back in the day running Bonk’s Adventure ad nonstop.

Bonk may have tried to go head-to-head (get it?) with Mario back in the day, but who’s game is on the competition’s download service now, HUH ?! In fact, the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console has two-thirds of the entire TG16′s library available at only $6 a game and ALL of the system’s Bonk games.

I’ve downloaded a handful of the TG16′s games on the Wii and researched all of them in my quest for fun retro games and despite the six-year run the system had in the United States, there’s a good reason the system never really caught on — the games just weren’t that good. It takes a lot more than pretty graphics (grafx?) to win the day.

Though the system is somewhat fondly remembered for their shooters, the Bonk series and Ys I & II (which I’ve yet to play), I think it’s still kind of an overrated console. If you like shooters, this is the system for you, but I’ve always hated them. Though, I must admit I did download Blazing Lazers and found it to be enjoyable thanks to it not being as hard as most shooters. As for the Bonk games, I think those are overrated as well. I admit there’s a certain charm to them, but they don’t compare to the main Mario or Sonic games. Maybe it’s because I keep having trouble with Bonk’s Adventure that I’m not really big on it. And is Bonk Charlie Brown’s ancestor? I was pretty excited when I downloaded Splatterhouse, but besides the gore, that game doesn’t work for me either.

But you have to remember I’m coming into this cold. Outside of wanting to play these games as a kid, I have no nostalgia to guide me through the TurboGrafx experience and compensate for what may appear to be lower-quality when compared the gaming of today (or even a decade ago).

So yeah, my final take on NEC TurboGrafx-16? Eh.

Laserblast: “It will blow your mind.”

Ah, some solid goofy fun from this movie poster.

I’d never heard of this movie until watching it on one of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVDs that I’m endlessly renting from Netflix. It’s a MST3K movie for crying out loud, so that should tell you it’s not very good, but it’s actually one of the better movies they’ve shown (Leonard Maltin gave it two and a half stars!). Of course, that’s not much consolation with movies like Red Zone Cuba and The Killer Shrews in the show’s arsenal.

There’s an obvious Star Wars influence/cash-in vibe going on here, albeit with nothing but a few stop-motion aliens and bunch of stupid teenagers. Kim Milford, who starred in stage productions of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and at one point played Jesus in the touring version of Jesus Christ Superstar (quite a gig, if you can get it) is a serviceable Luke Skywalker stand-in as Billy Duncan.

He isn’t the only actor of note though, Roddy McDowall makes an extremely brief cameo and longtime movie “nerd” Eddie Deezen appears as a bully, of all stereotypes.

The actual, er, “laser blasts” were pretty nice for such a low-budget late 70s movie. I really enjoyed the stop-motion sequences involving the aliens and their ship too. Stop-motion animation was done by a young David Allen, who would later go on to use stop-motion/special effects for movies like Q, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Howling and Twilight Zone: The Movie.

Even this movie’s trailer is half-way decent: