Top 12 Scariest Nintendo Moments

Hello again, everyone! I've overcome my anger caused by last week's game, and now I realize Halloween is one week away! I'm really in the mood for some scary stuff. Thankfully, everyone's favorite video game company is here again! ...I meant Nintendo. It's up there, right in this article's title!

Like the Boos: HOW DID THEY BECOME THAT WAY?

Nintendo doesn't go very often into disturbing territory- Oh wait, yes, it frequently does. But most of the time, the disturbing part is in the implications brought forth by the situations. The scariest moments aren't necessarily the ones that are scary as soon as you see them, but they become terrifying once you think about it a little more. There's just an art behind horror, which hides behind everything, as long as you make an effort to think about what's really scary in what you just saw. Heck, something that didn't seem too creepy at first can turn out to be very frightening once you take into account the details.

The examples below are all scary moments from the franchises we grew up with, moments that might have scared us more than we thought... and only now do we see the true horror. Though, to be fair, scary moments just had to show up in a medium where characters can get killed in thousands of different ways and come back, minus one life, to see it all again. And since this list is made from what I consider scary, you might find odd some of the choices; I guess I prefer realistic fears, even those set in unrealistic universes, to the unrealistic fears that pop up in fantastic universes like those pictured in the main Nintendo series. Enough talking: Let the countdown begin!

Pop-Up Pursuit

I could live anywhere inside the great
big red circle, fopr all you know.

A bit of history: I am not originally an English speaker. I am very much a Québécois, with the French language and all. Okay, not quite French, but, well, our French dialect, with many differences with the international French you might know. Either way, I am the best English speaker in my house. If you called my mother and spoke to her in English, she'd hang up immediately; and my father knows English words, but only the names of the tools he works with. Ironically, he doesn't know the French names to those tools. He doesn't use a “cliquet”; he uses a ratchet, and the word "ratchet" appears in the middle of his French sentences like it has always belongd there.

I was also trying to introduce my parents to gaming. I tried, every once in a while; my mother loves to play bowling on Wii Sports Resort, and my father likes fishing games. I was looking for a party game that wasn't too expensive, one I could buy on the WiiWare, and which I could play with my parents and have fun with myself. Because what's the point of video games if you're not having fun? ...Anyway, this quest led me to buy a game called Pop-Up Pursuit.

I regret that purchase. You'll see why here and now.

VGFlicks: Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase, Part 2

Click here for part 1!

P.S. Thanks, everyone, for your views! This morning, the blog officially reached 40,000 views!

Hello, and welcome back to this review! When we left off, the meddling kids – oh, I mean the Scooby gang – had chased a computer virus through a university and then got sent to a virtual world where they had to go through all the levels in order to what I'm saying makes really no sense, does it? No really, it makes no sense whatsoever, after all it IS Scooby-Doo we're talking about! Yes, it's crazy, yes, it makes little sense most of the time, but did they really need to go there? Into a virtualization sttry? Whatever. Better keep reviewing this thing and see if I can stand the weirdness. Then again, I played through so many weird games, you'd think I'd have gotten used to crazy stories by now.

Still, this is a weird story about virtualization in a world where, depending on the continuity, small monsters, or famous monsters, or demonic entities (NIBIRU!) really do exist. Heck, in the line of Scooby-Doo movies that came out around the time this one did, the gang met real zombies, real cat-demonesses, a real witch's ghost (bonus: A two in one!), real aliens... and Scooby might have possibly witnessed the Loch Ness monster. Again, I know the history of Scooby-Doo too well for my own good.

And that's not the most useful information you can use in everyday life. “Can you tell me how much oil is needed for your Toyota Corolla's brakes to be sufficiently lubricated to function properly?” “No, but I can tell you that Shaggy, of Scooby-Doo fame, was once a gym teacher for a bunch of girls who happened to be the daughters of famous cinema monsters!” “...”

See? That trivia is pointless! Unless I someday participate to a big trivia quiz in which I can win money and that question pops up... But what are the odds of THAT happening?

Probably the same odds as meeting a bunch of skeletons in
gladiator attires. With a living virus leading them...
On a Friday the 13th, under a ladder, while meeting a black
cat and stepping on half a dozen sidewalk cracks at once.

Sigh... Well, let's move on. I finished last time on Level 9 of the video game the Scooby gang is trapped in. ...Nope, that sentence still doesn't make any sense to me. Oh well, guess I just gotta roll with it.

VGFlicks: Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase, Part 1

I'm going to go on a rant here: Even in science-fiction works, where authors take liberties with the “science” aspects of the story and the audience is supposed to accept it, I never believed in virtualization and materialization. This sort of plot can make some very good episodes, very good movies too – but at the end of the day, I will never believe it possible to pick apart and transform the cellular structure of any item or human being into computer data, or the other way around. It goes beyond the impossible for me.

But like I said, it makes for some pretty damn good episodes. I loved Code Lyoko – I even binge watched the whole series on Youtube between June and August this year. The infamous Johnny Test cartoon even used a virtualization story to make a few jabs at the Pokémon series. Those episodes were very funny, even though the show is not exactly great. Sadly, not every version of this story is good. A lot of movies based around video games have this as their main plot (Off the top of my head, I can name a few more), so there's got to be a few duds in the bunch. But the one we're going to look at today is particularly strange...

And when I mean strange, I mean it's mind-bogglingly weird. Not godawful, but weeiirrd. And it's brought to you by the world's most infamous Batman impersonator, the Dooby himself: Scooby-Doo.

Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase came out in 2001, so it's not exactly new. We can see that technology has evolved a lot since, but we still can't send someone into a computer. What happened for such an odd thing to occur in this film? We all know Scooby-Doo chases fakes monsters all the time – except the (admittedly fewer) times the monsters were real, but that's beside the point – so how did the not-so-courageous dog and his group of meddling kids wind up in a story about virtualization?

Slower updates

Hello everyone.

Since April, I've kept a very strict schedule when it came to posting reviews on Planned All Along. I posted every Friday, and I posted every Monday for reviews that were two or three posts long. I've been very consistent, in fact; and while I applaud myself for it (Me, keeping a schedule? It's like asking Bowser to slow down on kidnapping Peach!), this is not the reason for tis post.

The title may have already clued you in. If you've followed this blog since the start of 2013, you probably know I slowed my updates down while I was doing my internship at my university's news blog. I stopped posting on Mondays, kept all my updates to Fridays, and used the full weeks to write during my free time.

Making articles for my blog has become a lot more complicated. While looking for ways to ameliorate it, I found it much better to use footage from the games. Yes, I am using the footage from Youtube videos that aren't mine. But I always acknowledge it when it's the case. You might have noticed that I used footage from the Subspace Emissary mode while talking about it during my big review of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I also used footage from all three Drawn To Life games in the past month. Picking pictures out of a video is not an easy task, as I have to pause constantly and find the most interesting pictures. Or, well... at least, pictures that are linked to what I'm saying. Or maybe pictures I can join a joke to. I also used this for my review of the godawful movie Gamer - though, for that one, I owned the DVD. Yeah, I'm not too proud of that. But in my defense, I had never cared about it till I watched it for the review. Man, this sucked... Either way, point is that gathering pictures for my reviews has become a much longer and arduous process, at least for the reviews that I care more about. Picking pictures can take me more than a hour, and maybe even two or three, while the writing is still done rather quickly, and so is the editing; once I have the pictures and the text, the actual editing is done pretty fast.

Don't even get me started on the videos. The videos are long to make, even though they're really not that long actually... But I have a lot less free time for me these days.

As some of you may know, I've found a job. A real job. Yes, I,m taking customers' orders behind the cash register at McDonald's, but it's a job, and a job will always be better than no job. Especially if it's a job like we've got at McDonald's. There are easier tasks, there are harder tasks, but you get a paycheck every two weeks, so there's that. I have more money, but I now spend over thirty hours of my time there per week. Therefore, I have a lot less time to write. Cue the same speech about reviews being longer to make now I fed you earlier.

My personal life has been pretty hectic too. I won't get on the details, but a member of my family greatly worried me, and I didn't have the spirit to write much. Then there's the procrastination Then there's more and more stuff going on... Final word, less time to write and get some good material out. Therefore, I (finally) announce that I will slow down on my publishing schedule. Starting this week, I will only publish reviews on Friday. This will give me more time to write - the entire weekends, that's already something - and more time to get good pictures to use in the reviews. Heck, I might have more time to make videos now.

Final words: I'm sorry I have to resort to that again. But when you have less time to spend doing what you like, you decrease the amount of time you spend doing said thing. On a side-note, I can promise this, though: I will never forget to publish a review on a Friday. I usually have a few reviews written ahead of time, but as I said, too many things happened at once and I got caught in this tight schedule. I intend to use the next weeks, most likely all of October and maybe all of November, to get a lot of reviews written. I intend to write more than one review per week, maybe one and a half, so that I can get ahead and have some time to write stuff again despite my schedule.

I hope you don't mind this. It's not the most important anouncement ever, but still something I wanted to tell everyone. See you in the next weeks. I hope you get to enjoy Planned All Along despite that.

P.S. Yes, I waited for the end of Drawn To Life Month before making this announcement. I wanted Drawn To Life Month to end on September, so you can tell I painted myself in the corner with numerous ambitious reviews on the same month. Still, I want Planned All Along to keep the standard of quality I gave it. See you this Friday for Part 1 of a VGFlicks review.