15 Number Fifteen: Geordi Macking on a Hologram As previously stated, My WV-15 topic is "Top 15 Worst Characters/Episodes/Games/Whatevers From A Series I Otherwise Like." What actually initially inspired me to think of this topic was Sofa's rebeak of a Star Trek Voyager episode in which 6 of 9 (teehee GET IT?) gets it on holographically with Commander Chipotle while a metronome gets all green and Borgy and OMG SYMBOLISM. To the best of my knowledge, Sofa generally likes Voyager, but obviously decided that this particular episode was a steaming turd. So it got me to thinking about my least favorite Trek episodes. I am wholly ignorant of Voyager, and what little I've seen of the Straight OG Original Series is easy pickings...too easy. And thinking about shitty DS9 episodes is painful for me. When it was in first-run syndication, it somehow became the only show everyone in my family watched, and we watched it over pizza on Saturdays and it was sort of traditional and nice and I'd look forward to it for days in advance. So it may seem pathetic, but if an episode was really dull and heavy on that Lady Pope with the Sydney Opera House Hat, I'd feel really let down and cheated and it could almost ruin the whole weekend. It wasn't until years later when chatting with Sofa and Jaseon that I realized the show actually was really quite good, and it wasn't just the pizza and the familial closeness clouding my judgment. So that leaves Star Trek, The Next Generation (Enterprise doesn't need anyone else picking on it...though if I had to pick, the entire last season that opened with aliens helping the Nazis and ended with "oops we're cancelled better hurry up and create the Federation in the second-half of the last episode" was sorta rank.) TNG has many horrible episodes to choose from, though some that were objectively awful sort of crossed through awful and came back out on the brilliant side. "A Fist Full of Datas," for example. A few episodes got rebeaked and thus became entertaining ("Spot's Magic Placenta" and...I forget, but it was funny.) But you also had anything with that horrible Riker/Troi relationship that morphed into a disgusting 3-way with Worf, anything with single father Worf (just a simple Klingon making his way in the universe) raising Alexander (who you suck worse than,) any Klingon politics episode you'd already seen that thus became sixty minutes of dialogue without surprises, etc. But the worst episodes were always character-building episodes. This brings me to Geordie. Now there are characters from the show I hate more than Geordie, but he was the worst center of attention. Riker episodes at least had action, and Troi episodes usually had her mother around to cheer things up. But Geordie is really only good for laughing lustily when Data misunderstands humans in a riotously robotic way. Give him an episode to himself, and it sucks. He was mean to Scotty when Scotty travelled back from the ancient past just to try to make the show less dreary. He was worse in that "Enemy Mine" rip-off episode where he got stranded with a Romulan than the Alabama hick engineer from Enterprise was when that show ripped off "Enemy Mine." But nothing quite matches him having sex fantasies about other engineers. If memory serves, the Enterprise's engines were fucking broken because Geordie is terrible. John Cena threw a monkey wrench in the works and then yelled "YOU CAN'T SEE ME" hahahaha Geordie is blind. So Geordie gets the holodeck to recreate the hot lady engineer who designed the engines. And she talks like Brok Leznar telling you how many pounds of muscle you gained in how many weeks, so he asks the computer to make her sexay. It does, and before you know it, holodeck slash was born. Come to think of it, this was probably the favorite episode of whoever wrote that shitty Voyager episode that inspired my whole topic. In a later TNG episode, Geordie meets the real woman whose hologram he sexed all up, and it's pretty hilarious if you remember the first one because she finds out what a total perv he is. Or maybe it wasn't hilarious, I really just remember finding the first one totally creepy. Reading back over this, it looks like I hate TNG. Not true. It was only recently that Acting Captain Riker ordering the Enterprise to fire on Locutus of Borg's big ol' cube ship stopped being my favorite cliffhanger ever. And that was only because the Doctor did a Divided...Into Three face as the TARDIS disappeared while an army of mutant biker dudes were trying to eat his face. But yeah, I really like TNG. You know, when nobody is macking on holograms. THIS JUST IN - It turns out it's spelled "Geordi" but I'm too lazy to fix it.

14 Number Fourteen: Discworld Books With Those Fucking Witches I got into the Discworld books in an odd way, having played the computer game before reading any of them. Like the author, Terry Pratchett, I initially enjoyed Rincewind the cowardly wizard, but got tired of him just running away from danger constantly and was ready to move on. Luckily, the City Watch books came into being, deepening the world and providing it with wonderful characters. The surly, grumbly Sam Vimes, who doesn't believe in heroes despite being one himself. Carrot, the human raised by dwarves who always used to wonder why he was three times as tall as his father. Angua, the lady werewolf who is a vegetarian in her human form and insists on paying for the chickens she hunts and kills when the moon is full. Lord Vetinari, the benevolent dictator who could turn really nasty in an instant given the right circumstances. All of these characters allow me to happily ignore the fact that Fred Colon and Nobby aren't nearly as funny as the author seems to think they are. But then there's the fucking witches. Between all the excellent books about the City Watch, which swing back and forth between hilarious comedy and gritty, serious allegory, we have to sit through a witch book. Granny Weatherwax is...just...she's there. There's nothing wrong with her as a protagonist, she just doesn't grab me like the protagonists in the other books. But her wacky sidekick Nanny Ogg...she just hurts. It's like Colon and Nobby turned up to 11...Terry Pratchett thinks it's hilarious that an old woman thinks and talks about sex. It isn't. It's creepy. And that's it. It's her one gag...she's old but likes sex...and she's the second-most-important character in a whole goddamned series of books. Witches always come in threes, as you should already know. If not, go see a performance of Macbeth, you philistine (ha, I should add "Henry the 4th Part 2" to this list to be really pretentious.) The third witch changes with each book. Possibly because even Pratchett doesn't care about them. So I like most of the Discworld books (which are all self-contained stories in their own right) but hate the witch ones. The solution, of course, is to just read the non-witch ones. And yes, I think I'll try that from now on, thank you.

13 Number Thirteen: That One Gung-Ho Gun Who Shot Spikes. You Know The One. The Gung-Ho Guns, for those not in the Gung-Ho Know, are a group of hitmen assigned to kill Vash the Stampede (aka the Humanoid Typhoon) in the second, serious half of the anime Trigun. Generally speaking, they're pretty badass, and the pacifist but incredibly powerful Vash has to find a way to defeat all of them without killing them. (Vash, it should be noted, is essentially one of two Fallen Angels [clap-clap-clapclapclap] who acts as gun-toting Jesus and tries to prove to his brother Satan that people don't suck.) Some of the Gung-Ho Guns, like Caine the Longshot, are sort of lame but have cool names. Others, like Chapel the Evergreen, have cool names and are cool in and of themselves (he's one of two characters who dresses as a priest and kills people with a machine gun shaped like a cross.) You've got the Puppetmaster guy who is directly responsible for this magnificent shot where a girl we've been led to believe loves Vash suddenly goes all dead-eyed and produces a gun and shoots round after round at him. You've got Midvalley the Hornfreak, who kills people with intense sound waves from his saxophone (kind of stupid now that I think about it, though it would be awesome if he was just some powerful warrior dude who bludgeoned people to death with musical instruments.) There's an evil little kid who controls those worms from Dune, and isn't that great but has a fantastic death where Nicholas D. Wolfwood shoots him in the fucking head as he's trying to turn face. And who can forget Legato Bluesummers, who used mind control powar to make a bunch of innocent villagers threaten Vash's friends with farm equipment? But JG, you seem to say, what about the shitty one? There's one Gung-Ho Gun who wears this gay armored suit that looks like a mine. He has a really, really stupid voice and for some reason I want to remember him having a sort of chicken nose. He kills Monev the Gail and Dominique the Cyclops (offscreen,) both of whom were way cooler than he was. Then he spends like fifteen minutes talking about how powerful he is, shooting spikes at nothing for no reason, and just being lame as Hell. Then Vash fires one shot that somehow disabled his powers (I forget how,) and then the next Gung-Ho Gun kills him for being such a disappointment. The fact that his killer is a freakin' samurai (with no apparent special powers...just a dude with a sword to allow Japan to live out its ongoing fantasy about Japanese swordsmen being a threat to gunmen) makes it all even lamer. But yeah, the spike-shooting dude runs off at the mouth for so long, you'd swear they were intentionally mocking Dragonball Z. Then there's another armored bullet/mine/whatever dude later in the series who actually is effective, just to rub in how much this guy sucked.

12 Number Twelve: Various Megaman Games Megaman was a great game. Megaman 2 was even better. Then...the whole series very gradually hit the skids. 3 was just too easy. The game went on far longer after you finished collecting new weapons than it's predecessors did, and while this should have seemed like a bonus it just made me feel like I was playing a lot of game in which I wasn't periodically getting neat new weapons. Then they brought back that Rock Monster boss from 1, but it couldn't live up to my (rather deluded) memory of how awesome the Rock Monster had once been. I must, however, give them kudos for making a final boss who could only be defeated with the retarded "Top Spin" attack. 4 was back on the right track. For whatever reason I liked Dr. Cossack. Was he in 4? I may just have inadvertently put my finger on what was really wrong with the whole series. I feel like a dupe for saying this, but I actually didn't see the shocking swerve coming when it turned out Dr. Wily was the Higher Power all along, Austin. I thought they might have just decided to switch villains. Some series actually, you know, change up as they progress. 5 was the game that really brought home how far the Megaman hand (the Megahand?) had been overplayed. They tried to pretend Protoman was a bad guy, but nothing doing. Much had I learned from the shocking twist in 4. Also, this game featured Star Man, and that pretty much told me they were out of ideas. Megaman 6's villain was (checks Wikipedia because he has no clue) "Mr. X." but it turns out Mr. X is a front for Dr. Wily, SHOCK BEYOND ALL SHOCKS. This game featured the likes of "Knight Man," "Yamato Man" and "Tomahawk Man." Are you shitting me, Capcom? Sadly, I played through and beat all of these games, thought after 3 they were weekend rentals. Megaman's legacy lived on via the Super Nintendo (and I seem to think the first Megaman X game predated Megaman 6.) I didn't care. Tried the first one, and while the graphics and stuff were improved, it didn't feel like as big a leap forward as it should have been. Besides, Zero was a gay. Now that I'm finished, I can see that I slagged off more Megaman games than I praised, meaning it really doesn't fit in with this list now. I blame Yamato Man.

11 Number Eleven: Whichever Star Trek Movie Had Them Face Laser-Eye Death God The Trek movies are, all in all, pretty good. The original motion picture was an abysmal waste of time, trying desperately and failing utterly to be as grandiose as 2001: A Space Odyssey. But then Wrath of Khan came along and kicked everyone's asses and was pretty much the best sci-fi film ever. I should be hating on Search for Spock for undoing Khan's awesome ending, but I don't really remember it well enough. And then they saved the whales in a fun, light-hearted outing (including nuclear wessels) and they fought the Klingon who quotes Shakespeare, and they did a TNG crossover with the infinitely awesome Malcolm McDowell, and so on and so on. I never really followed TNG into the movie realm, and thus know nothing about Remans. Sorry Sofa. But the straight OS Original Series generally played pretty well on the big screen. The stinker here is, less than shockingly, the only one directed by William Shatner. But the director is primarily responsible for getting the best out of the actors, and that's not really the problem here. The problem is that the story is fucking terrible. Ok, so, Spock's evil brother (oh COME ON) wants to meet God, so he hijacks the Enterprise and forces them to fly to the "center of the universe" because obviously that's where God is. And they meet an alien that indeed pretends its God, but it turns out that it isn't, because God is probably not a floating space head that shoots lasers out of its eyes to scare William Shatner. Then the Klingons appear and turn face, saving Shatner, who couldn't leave with the Enterprise for some reason. "God" is left behind to shoot lasers and yell, unless they kill it, I forget. Oh, and Spock's evil brother (I mean seriously, come the fuck on) dies. The end.

10 Number Ten: Final Fantasy IX The runt of the PS1 FF litter. The other two, briefly: I weep when forum dwellers call Sephiroth the greatest character in all of literature, but I can't deny that 7 is a good game. Sofa told me that forum folk now believe anyone who likes 7 is a n00b, so clearly we live in a rapidly-changing world. I found the whole story really confusing, but I have to admit that Aeris has the best Square-Enix death this side of Delita (who may, in fact, be the greatest character in all of literature.) I liked 8 way too much. The game isn't shy about telling us every thought Squall has, but I still like to imagine him constantly, silently wishing death on pretty much his entire party. Especially Zell. The story breaks down somewhere in disk 3, but the characters keep it going, which brings us to... Final Fantasy 9, which is about...people...doing something. The story starts out like it's going to be really interesting, I must say. Just who and what the Black Mages are is an engaging mystery, and when you find out the truth it raises some interesting questions about where the whole plot is going, but...it just peters out in Disk 2 of 4. The ingenue in this game is a pretty princess whose queendom is all evil and trying to take over the rest of the world. Her mother is depicted as evil and sort of inhuman, and the main villain is the Queen's advisor. So as Princess Love-Interest works with rebel forces against her own family, the player keeps waiting for revelations as to how this advisor villain rose to power and whether the Queen is being controlled or just what is going on. We never get them. It's a cool set-up for a story, we just never get the pay-off. There's also a sort of cool female mage/knight boss who just owns your party at the end of Disk 1. She serves the Queen out of duty but seems to disapprove of what's happening and wants to work with the good guys. She has an interesting dilemma and you find yourself wondering where she'll end up...but...after a while she just sort of gets dropped. By Disk 3, pretty much every story element from the first 2 disks is ignored as you go to some other dimension and get some weird character revelations about the hero. Turns out he didn't know it but he's some sorta construct (pretty much exactly like Sephiroth, and by exactly I mean it's exactly as vague and confusing.) And the main recurring villain guy is his brother, ugh. Eventually you kill someone named Garland who has nothing to do with the other Garland (you know, the stuff Rico calls "garlic") and return to your dimension, but now it's being destroyed for some reason. Seriously, you guys know how I obsess over plot details, but this game really just throws out "um, ok, now the world is dying" at the end of Disk 3. Disk 4 doesn't even give a shit; you go through a big dungeon with a lot of forgettable bosses, and at the end you fight "Necron" which is some evil entity that literally gets no lead-up at all. You just get to the last screen and this big, monster boss thing (I don't even remember what it looked like) appears and is all "Hey, Necron here, defeat me and you get to watch the credits!" Then you defeat him and you get to watch the credits. Now that I think about it, maybe Garland is apropos since Necron has about as much back story and character as Chaos did at the end of FF1. The ending sees the juvenile and the ingenue get married, aw. But again, good characters can carry a bad story, and again, that doesn't happen here. The hero (I wanna say his name is Zidane) is supposed to be a loveable rogue, but he's just a rogue (heh.) They couldn't do grumbly anti-hero again after Cloud and Squall, so they were stuck. The Pretty Princess is ok...basically Rinoa all over again. She might have been as successful as Yuna had this game had the advantage of voice-acting. But the supporting cast is a mess...some weird frog-eating creature, this guy who sort of looks like a chicken and uses "Flair" skills (which I should have enjoyed more than I ultimately did,) some rat woman with a tragic past and dragoon skillz, an irritating "spunky little girl" from the same mold as Relm or Chibi-Moon, Vivi the Tiny Black Mage (beloved of Sofa, though Vivi himself stops being interesting when the Black Mage plotline disappears,) and...Steiner. Steiner is a big strong guy who is also goofy. He wears plate mail instead of chain mail, narrowly avoiding being the most hilarious FF character ever. All of them have some personal motivation when first introduced, and all of them are just sort of going through the paces by the end. All of these characters could have been good with the right story, but you've got to have one or the other at least. Playing the game at the time, it seemed ok. There were little fiddly gameplay complaints I had at the time that don't bear bitching about years later (except maybe that the ultimate summon attack came with, I swear to God, two minutes or so of CGI cinematics and if you skipped them it reduced your damage...if I recall, the animation included your summoned creature flying around in space blasting your enemies from orbit.) But I'd never played a Final Fantasy game where I had so little invested in the main characters as the ending drew near, and there will probably never be a Final Fantasy game with a more pointless, random final battle as Necron. So in the end, it was a perfectly fun way to kill time, but when you won it made you really aware of what a waste of time it was. Not at all unlike...

9 Number Nine: Final Fantasy XII But JG, you just did the worst Final Fantasy game! This is the worst PS2 Final Fantasy game, so shut up. Between XII and IX, I think there's a case to be made for never buying the last Final Fantasy game to be released on any generation of Playstation because Square is saving the good ideas for the first title of the new system. Everyone knows I loved Final Fantasy X and, generally speaking, that game has been well received. Its odd spin-off sequel has not. Lots of people hate Final Fantasy X-2, the first Final Fantasy game to return to the world and characters of a previous game to see how they've been getting on since winning a big climactic boss fight with dramatic background music. That alone makes it interesting to me...we're seeing characters we spent an adventure with getting on with normal (well, sort of) lives. It turns out eventually that there's a threat to the world that has to be dealt with, but this is only uncovered as things progress. The heroes (heroines, I guess) set out on their adventure for individual, personal reasons. Yuna has reason to believe Tidus may still be alive, Rikku would do anything to help Yuna, and Payne...God bless them for this...she has reasons we don't know about at first but MAKE SENSE WHEN WE FIND OUT ABOUT THEM MUCH LATER. A character with a little mystery who doesn't just drop off the map after a while...IX could have used some of those. The gameplay in X-2 was great too...it brought back the real-time element of the PS1 games while retaining the much deeper skill tree of FFX. It seems that what everyone hates is the Dressphere System, in which the characters get to play "Pretty Princess Dress-up." But the thing is...it's the frickin' Job System from Final Fantasy Tactics! Everyone loves that, right? Your little Hummel Figure party members change clothes, and suddenly start learning an all-new skill tree and have new innate abilities. That is EXACTLY what the Dressphere System is, but with the advances in graphics Square can now put flashy, annoying CGI sequences of the girls transforming. But these sequences are no longer than (generally shorter than) the summoning sequences from previous games, and you have the option of turning them off, AND you don't even see them unless you switch jobs during a battle instead of between battles! But somehow, just knowing they're there causes people to say things like "I can't believe they put the sacred words eFinal Fantasy' on this" and start throwing controllers around. Oh well. The Dressphere System is presented in the girliest, gayest way imaginable, but I seriously believe if they just didn't call it "The Dressphere System" about 90% of the Haters wouldn't have made a peep. (Quick note to Super Asia: other than borrowing the term "Pretty Princess Dress-up" which I really rather like, the above diatribe has nothing to do with You-Know-Who. He had the good sense to decide he thought the game was dumb and ignore it. But I do know of people who came to the same conclusion about the game and decided to react by going into a Rock Howard style blood rage.) Oh yeah, umm...even I don't defend the plotline about holding a big concert in the Thunder Plains. But this write-up is about Final Fantasy XII. Which isn't the same as X-2. I think Square is trying to use Roman numeral confusion to punish us for making them develop Romaji. Let me say something positive right up front. XII has the most engrossing gameplay of any FF game. In all the previous one-player games you are walking around on a map screen, sometimes one that is quite realistic and interactive, but it is always a map. Because when it comes time for battle, the screen freezes and you get some "time for battle" sound and then switch to some in-battle view. In XII, it's all one seamless world. The map you explore is just as detailed as the "up-close" battles. You don't pause to pose and get "victory" after minor fights, because you can stretch one minor fight across a whole area if you keep moving and encounter new baddies while old foes are still following you. It's pretty neat. It makes leveling against jobbers a lot more interesting. In past games, that was always the tedious part between good bits. Except... FFXII has no good bits. Seriously, leveling against jobbers is just as interesting as the big plot battles. It's a world problem...the game is set in the same world as Final Fantasy Tactics, apparently, and that means it's a dry, humorless pseudo-Europe. Tactics pulled it off by having a story that, while very poorly translated, was followable and had sufficient twists and turns to keep you interested. It was somehow so grandiose that even chocobos couldn't make it silly, which is incredible if you think about it. From the fate of this world to whether Ramza and Delita would reconcile, you weren't sure where things were going and you really wanted to find out. But XII gives us an evil empire right up front that we know will have to be toppled (technically it just gets new babyface leadership in the end but same difference,) and a Princess (again with the Princesses!) who can't help but save her land and become Queen. The road there is long and has enough gameplay to be worth the price of admission, but there are very few twists. It turns out (spoppzors, I guess) that the Han Solo wannabe (whose Chewbacca is still a furry, albeit a female one in a thong, ugh) is the estranged son of one of the villains. But the thing is...this never really matters, it turns out not to be a motivating factor for Soloid or his father...it's just an isolated little plot fact. The disgraced knight guy who was accused of killing King Princess' Father of Whereverthehell turns out to have an evil rival who did it, but...we knew he didn't do it and was framed somehow, and when we find out how we can't help but think there must have been a more interesting option. I've gotten across the lack of surprise, but the humorlessness...it was like my rebeak of "Gridlock." Heyo! Seriously, this game is just bland as Hell. You get the impression that every time a voice actor showed a little emotion, the director screamed "cut" and asked them to tone it down. Everyone talks like zombies, half of them try Euro-accents and half of them don't, there's a foreign ambassador with Black skin and goofy hair and I don't even know what kind of accent he's going for, and blah. There was one real-world word everyone kept mispronouncing the same way to make it more otherworldly, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. There are rare attempts at humor, and they generally fall flat (Vaan asks Fran how old she is, hahaha.) The funniest moment in the whole game is simply Vaan talking, and Princess Ashe politely asking him to be quiet. I'm not even sure if it was meant to be funny. I can hardly believe I'm about to say this, but...grabbing Rikku by the scuff of the neck and dropping her into this story could only improve things. As with FFIX, this game has characters who should be good, but can't win out against...in this case the tone. Maybe it's FFX-2's fault...that game took the much-loved heroine of a really serious, moody game and flooded her world with bubble gum flavored syrup. Tonally speaking. This game is trying so hard not to do that that the characters become as bland as everything else. The villain is more interesting than any of the heroes and he only gets about three scenes. Vaan is this happy-go-lucky, eternally plucky, irrepressible adventurer whose mouth runs ahead of his brain and is always getting into mischief but ultimately has a good heart and cannot bear injustice. At least, that's what the game tells us. From what we observe, he's just a blonde kid who sounds as bored with these proceedings as everyone else. He makes Zidane look like Tidus (who, love him or hate him, leaves an impression.) But surely as the protagonist, Vaan will flirt with the idea of true love? Will he win the lovely Penelo, whose back story is "a girl who knows Vaan?" Maybe he'll win the slightly older but still quite lovely Princess Ashe, who seems to quietly admire his spirit, even as she quietly mourns her dead husband, and quietly burns with the desire for revenge on the Empire. Will she quietly learn to quietly love again? Quietly? Will he win Fran, the oddly dignified bunny girl (though she's clearly knocking hind paws with the Han Solo wannabe?) The answer to all of these is no, the hero doesn't seem to have a libido. Oh, I'm not complaining about the lack of puppy love here. It's a nice change of pace (though ironically, despite songs about her lover and a villain whose back story is all about star-crossed luvin', the simple fact that Tidus is pushing up daisies in X-2 leaves Yuna free to carry on a remarkably romanceless adventure.) But a romantic subplot would be an example of characters having some sort of feelings or opinions about each other, and we just never seem to get that. This game is dying for a scene where we see, oh, Penelo admiring Balthier and Fran's relationship and wishing she and Vaan were more of a team. Or Ashe telling Basch how grateful she is for his service. Or Balthier taking a shine to Vaan and considering taking him on as a sort of apprentice. That last one may have actually happened, but was done so blandly that I've forgotten it. Actually, that goes for the first two as well. This game's Wikipedia article (the best source for truthiness on any topic Stephen Colbert couldn't possibly care about [and holy shit my spellchecker recognizes truthiness as a word, can you beat that?]) Um, that sentence got away from me, sorry. This game's Wikipedia entry says the problem is that there's too much travelling by foot in this game. You do walk around quite a lot in some big areas fighting monsters. But that's not the problem at all. My favorite part of FFX may be the trek down the Mi'ihen Highroad. All the character tutorials are done, the party is assembled (save one) and the main thrust of the game is finally beginning. You walk down a long, long road towards whatever the story will throw at you next, fighting monsters, leveling up, and...now this is important...chatting. Well, you aren't chatting, but the characters are. This is where Yuna says "lotta fiends today, ya?" This is where Tidus yells "watch me watch me" like a little kid and Lulu tells him to shut up and get on with it. This is where Yuna tells Auron what an honor it is to fight by his side and he manages to be gruff and embarrassed at the same time. What I'm getting at is that the characters continue to be characters even as you go through what could be dull leveling-up. X runs out of chatter after awhile, but X-2 does a fantastic job of keeping it going. It felt like no matter how far you were in the game, new random stuff would come up at the beginning of a jobber battle. Generally taking the form of *Yuna makes a bad pun about the monster. Rikku giggles and makes an even stupider follow-up pun. Yuna giggles at that. Payne says "shut the fuck up you vapid whores." That may not be an exact quote.* But as you've probably guessed, XII gives us practically none of that. You fight through a huge screen full of monsters and get...another huge screen full of monsters. Every four or five massive screens full of monsters you get a very short cinema in which one character will say something wholly expository and another character will nod. Then it's off to five more screens of monsters. Ok, so, I obviously don't like this game very much. It followed on the heels of two games I really liked (and I swear I did not expect Ashe to be exactly like Yuna and was not immediately disappointed when she wasn't.) And it was set in the world of Final Fantasy Tactics, a game I loved to death. I just really wanted this game to be good and it was like a kick in the balls when it was this bad. That might be doing the game a disservice. It's better than most non-Final Fantasy RPGs, probably. But you do tend to expect more. It's the flat entry in a great series, like Gamera vs. Zigra (a short, readable entry coming up later.) Only if in Gamera vs. Zigra, Joel and the bots were replaced by lifeless robots. Well, Joel is replaced, the bots obviously are robots. Look, this is the entry I wrote last and I'm just stalling because making banners for all of this is gonna be a bitch, ok?

8 Number Eight: Star Wars Episode I ? The Phantom Menace Well, duh, though I think my problems with the movie differ from the world's at large. People went into The Phantom Menace with expectations no film could ever meet. When the real Star Wars (the one we're supposed to call A New Hope) came out, it was like nothing that had ever happened before. By definition, no follow-up could recapture that. Most of the group reading this saw it as small kids, and it was probably an event that brought in your whole family and a night out and a huge bucket of greasy popcorn. It's not my intention to sound patronizing to my fellow nerds, but I decided on my way to the theater that I was going to judge the movie by its own merits and not expect to feel like a kid again. And so a movie others thought was completely horrible I merely judged to be quite bad. People think the problem is Jar-Jar Binks. I'm not going to tell you he isn't profoundly irritating, but he's no worse than the Wu Fanchu aliens from the Trade Federation or the flying slave-trading Jew Alien if you're on racism watch. And even Lucas basically admitted to his mistake when Jar-Jar's role in the next two movies was so close to being non-existent (and it may be an intentional joke that he, acting for Padme in her absence, is the one who calls for Palpatine's election as councilor. Or gives him emergency powers. Whichever it was.) My older sister got legitimately angry at the scene explaining "midichlorians." She got angrier still when I didn't see what the big deal was. The use of CGI instead of puppets was a huge deal for some people, but I didn't notice until it was pointed out to me. I've seen "Golgo 13: The Professional," so no shitty mix of CGI with any other format can ever make me laugh again. No, for me, the horror of this film is evident in the title. "The Phantom Menace." Think about the overarching story of the new trilogy for a minute (I know it's painful, but just try.) The first two and a half Star Wars prequels are all about how Palpatine takes power. And everything that happens in this movie, all of the action and all of the battles, are just a smokescreen while he does it. The threat to Naboo is a "Phantom Menace." Nothing that happens in this movie matters at all. "Attack of the Clones" is better simply because at least some of what happens isn't according to the Emporer's plans. And perhaps more importantly, we get the real Anakin. Heyden Christensen is incredibly disappointing, but at least he's the same guy who will turn heel and make the entire real Star Wars trilogy happen. Who the fuck cares that he raced pods as a tyke? What do we see in his relationship with the mother that wouldn't work just as well as a single line of expository dialogue he could deliver as an adult? As Mike says on the Clones rifftrack, "We went through the whole first movie without knowing her name was eSchmee?'" Speaking of rifftrax, even the rifftrack of Phantom wasn't as funny as the others, somehow. I could go on and on. The closest the prequels come to giving us a likeable new hero is Qui-Gon; and he's killed by a Sith Lord who gets no lines and no personality beyond that established by his clown makeup. Cute little Annie has a boner for a girl three times his age, and he magically gets to have her later when he ages and she doesn't. Wait, that's bitching about the next movie. Nevermind. Ultimately, watching this movie just feels like a chore while you wait for the real story to begin in Revenge of the Sith. Clones has the same problem, but to a much lesser degree. Even in the theaters without sure knowledge of how the prequels were going to get us to the beginning of "Episode 4," you could tell the good stuff was being saved for later. I hope I didn't come across as being really full of myself and how smart I am when explaining the incredibly obvious meaning of the title "The Phantom Menace." I read an article in Time or Newsweek (I forget which, but it was a legitimate news mag) right after the film came out in which a film critic congratulated himself for figuring out something even more obvious. Dude gave us a spoiler alert, then told us that Senator Palpatine was going to turn into the Emperor in the end. He said he was sure because he checked the cast list and they were being played by the same guy. He was so proud of himself it was unbearable. Oh, and one final, quick swipe at this film. Of all the things Star Wars nerds bitch about, like Boba Fett's retarded pedigree (GAME OVER? YOU'RE DAMN RIGHT HE'S OVER!) and midichlorians retroactively (or proactively? Prequels make for confusion) ruining The Force, there's one fact from this movie that never ceases to amaze me with its retardedness. DARTH VADER BUILT C-3PO. How can that not trump everything about Jar-Jar as the stupidest thing ever?

7 Number Seven: Gamera vs. Zigra This one is hard to explain. I love MST3K, and the Joel subset of the greater set of MST3K is generally preferable. And the Sandy Frank subset of the Joel set are my very favorites, and the Gamera films practically define that set. But even Gamera can let you down sometimes. The MST3K treatments of Gamera seemed to get better with every film. The first black and white one is hilarious, but the next one gives us COLOR and TWO MONSTERS! Then the next one gives us those bonuses and brings back the irritating kid sidekick character I so love to hear mocked by Joel and the Bots. Not to mention a plot to kill a monster by making a spinning fountain of blood. Then we get Gamera vs. Guiron, which just may be my favorite episode of my favorite TV show ever. Somehow, almost impossibly, the dubbing is noticeably worse than in the other Gamera films. We get the little White kid who looks like Richard Burton and the fantastically bizarre evil space babes with the horrible accents (It's a calamity!) And who can forget Cornjob? But then Gamera vs. Zigra comes along, and it's just...there. On paper it's excellent: a fish alien from outer space invades Earth, but it turns out to be intelligent and it demands the surrender of the humans rather than just growling and knocking over Tokyo Tower. He delivers several pretentious speeches about how we should all be tree-hugging hippies. The world does surrender when Zigra threatens to kill two scientists and their kids. But then Gamera saves us all and does a gymnastics routine. But somehow this MST treatment just isn't as much fun as the others. For whatever reason, it has fewer moments I remember. To be fair, the Gamera movies all blend together and this may be the one where Crow does an awesome Sammy Davis Jr. impression and Super Asia has to keep pointing out that the character they're riffing on really looks nothing like Sammy Davis Jr. But that might be from Gamera vs. Gaos. As Joel says, "we've been subjected to what amounts to watching the same movie six times." I know this is the one where Crow takes a line about "I was on the moon! I was in a moon jeep!" and says "I was eating a moon-pie; I mooned a passing moon jeep." But somehow, that astronaut lady mooning a moon jeep isn't enough. Even if she is sorta hot. What's the problem? I just don't know. There's nothing wrong with it, it just doesn't stand up to its superior peers. (Is that where the word "superior" comes from? Fascinating.) If Gamera movies were Team Canada, it wouldn't be A-1 so much as Bobby Rude, if that means anything.

6 Number Six: Sylvester McCoy As Doctor Who The seventh and final TV Doctor of the "Classic Series" is generally well-remembered. His years on the show were thought to be a return to the series' roots and a great step away from the early 80's obsession with pleasing hardcore fans with obsessive continuity references. The show was cancelled on his watch, but fans blame his predecessor. Everyone loves the McCoy years. Except me. Through the magic of YouTube, I've watched two of what were supposed to his very best stories, two "typical" stories and one story that is reputed to be his worst. And while the "worst" one was noticeably bad, none of the other stories did that much for me. They seemed really cartoony. I mean, cartoony even for Doctor Who. But that's not inherently a problem. I just found myself not caring, and anyone still reading this far in will know me well enough to know you could put the name "Doctor Who" on just about anything and I'll give it a shot. It's not really Sylvester's fault. He's a good actor, though I think he tries too hard to be Patrick Troughton (the official fan line is that he "echoes Troughton's whimsical approach.") The fault lies with his companies, who are easily the most irritating girls in the entire series. First up is Mel. Fans have all sorts of debates about unpopular companions. Some fans think Adric was just awful, others claim that the fact that he dies dramatically instead of just leaving eventually undoes how bad he was when he was around. Some fans hate Peri, others say those fans just hate anyone American. But the nicest thing anyone ever says about Mel is that the actress who played her was good in other things. She's the only character never to get a normal introduction, so we never see what she was like before she met the Doctor and everything she says and does with the Doctor feels completely artificial. She banters with Colin Baker's Doctor at the end of "Terror of the Vervoids" and it was only then that I realized Nichola Bryant was much more than just a pretty face. She could convincingly chat with a man who dressed like a TV test pattern. This actress can't. At this point in the writing of this WV-15, my thoughts went on a tangent that was relevant to Mel but ultimately led to that one episode of Jeopardy where contestants kept answering clues about the original Star Trek with "Who is Data?" So to cut to the chase, Mel is in a very distant way related to a picture of DeForest Kelley being shown on a screen and Alex Trebek asking the last name of Kirk's medical officer "Bones," and someone ringing in to say "Who is Data?" Bones Data. Then there's Ace. Ace is really, really popular for some reason. People have written essays, seriously, on Ace as a feminist archetype. Undeniably, she is a female sidekick who rarely screams in terror at monsters and never faints in a rescuer's arms. She uses weapons as skillfully as any male companion from the old days when a strapping male sidekick was required for action scenes. She has a will of her own and she can fend for herself. However, she is still EXTREMELY annoying. She yells "ace" a lot. I guess its 80's British slang. She ends up yelling silly things like "ace" and "bang" and "whizzer" and "jorry goodu day, guvanoru" to prove how spirited and British she is. She does a lot of PC swearing. And the way she's all liberated "sistas be doin' it for themselves" is really ham-fisted and forced. There's a scene where she overpowers Daleks, the most powerful baddies of them all, with a goddamned baseball bat. This is from the infamous season with one token Black guy in every story, where efforts to be progressive became embarrassingly patronizing. Watching, you'd expect that at any minute the Doctor was going to spontaneously apologize for "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" daring to have a Chinese villain a decade earlier. To sum up, for me, the Sylvester McCoy era was sort of like going back to Patrick Troughton, but Jamie can't say two words without sounding like he's reading a cue card and Zoe is now repeatedly hitting Krotons on the head with a whack-a-mole mallet while screaming "THAT'LL BE TOUGH TO EXPLAIN TO THE OLD TROUBLE AND STRIFE EH WOT!?!?"

5 Number Five: Sailor Neptune Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon finally sneaks onto the list. Watch as much of the show as I have and you will come to like all of the Inners eventually. I can make all the humorous webpages attacking Sailor Moon in the world, but I still felt bad for her when Darien died (don't worry, it didn't stick.) The Outers are a different matter. Pluto is pointless, Uranus just steals Jupiter's gimmick of being tough and manly, and Saturn is too confusing (her back story is a continuity nightmare that the anime and manga don't even agree on) to really judge fairly. But Sailor Neptune is more irritating than any of them. It's unusual to even consider Neptune outside of the frame of "Uranus and Neptune." That's because they're a lesbian couple (or "cousins" in the dub) and are consistently treated as such. I've got no issue with lesbians. I don't think they're intrinsically HOTT as some guys do, but I recognize their right to do whatever makes them happy with a consenting partner. But the thing is, Neptune drags everyone (consenting or not) into their sexay lezbo world by insisting on flirting with everyone she meets. Man, woman, animal, certain especially sexy minerals, she'll flirt with anything. The subtext is that when she flirts with someone other than Uranus, Uranus gets jealous and that turns Neptune on. Ok, that's (part 2 of) kinda weird, but whatever floats your little man in a boat. But it gets old FAST, and it happens at some point in pretty much every episode that features them prominently. The last season has a sort of prologue not based on material from the manga. It's the second time outside writers had to develop a mini-plotline to last a few episodes while Naoko Takeuchi got her ass in gear and finished a story. As a result, there's a scenario where the Scouts are paired-off in unusual new teams and have to interact with characters they normally wouldn't. (The last time non-Moon inners got to interact with unusual characters as anything but a group was, not coincidentally, the last time outside writers had to produce some filler while the manga caught up.) There comes a point in this where Sailor Mars (whom you may remember for having a Grandpa and knowing a chap named Chad) ends up facing mysterious monsters with Sailor Neptune. Mars kicks their evil monstrous asses, and Neptune compliments her. Mars' immediate (and rather adorable) reaction is to get extremely awkward as she tries to work out whether another woman is hitting on her or not. Because really, it's almost out of character for Neptune to say anything platonic in the Japanese version of the show. That whole scene never got dubbed, but it would have been a tough one, seeing as Mars' reaction would need to be reexplained. Because of course, the English-sub version of Neptune can't go around sexing everyone. All of her "hey sailor" dialogue gets turned into bland expository dialogue and she ends up almost as pointless as Pluto. Near the end of the undubbed final season Uranus and Neptune turn heel and it's actually the most interesting character twist of the whole series, probably. But it was all a con and only lasted a few episodes anyway. Even then, Uranus was far more convincing. So yeah, Sailor Neptune. By far the most likely Sailor Scout to say, "Hello, you don't know me, but would you like to get your finger wet?"

4 Number Four: When The Four Horsemen Had Mongo You probably already know that I liked the Horsemen, even if you can't possibly fathom why, so let's jump straight into why Mongo was even worse than Paul Roma. Before he joined the Horsemen, "Mongo" Steve McMichaels he had a little dog named "Pepe" and it was supposed to be hilarious that some ex-football loser who was big and tough and whatever had a dog named "Pepe" that he dressed in little outfits. He was a blowhard tough guy commentator, sort of like JBL except JBL actually says interesting things sometimes. And while I don't remember "Tire-Iron Arn," I do remember that the angle in which Mongo joined the Horsemen involved a lot of money in a "Halliburton briefcase" that continued to be his foreign object of choice until he eventually died or got kidnapped or whatever happened to him. Mongo was in a ton of tag-team jobber squashes partnered with Benoit. You get three guesses as to who handled most of the in-ring work. The only significant match he was in (other than some angle with "Mean" Kevin Green that I mercifully can't remember) was the big War Games (The Match Beyond) where Curt Hennig joined the nWo and was promptly forgotten about. Benoit and Mongo ended up handcuffed inside the cage while some nWoer or other kept slamming the cage door on Flair's head and Kevin Nash kept demanding the Horsemen's surrender. Because remember, "submission or surrender" was the only way to win War Games (The Return of Robocop...wait, I mean The Match Beyond.) Benoit just spit in Nash's face (further cementing his status as "Hero to all Smarks") but Mongo chose to submit rather than see Flair essentially murdered on payperview. If Mongo hadn't been in the Horsemen, Fall Brawl 97 would still be going on today, with a thoroughly dehydrated Chris Benoit trying to hock loogies as a very hoarse Kevin Nash keeps asking him to surrender. I guess what I'm saying is that Mongo is directly responsible for freeing Benoit up to kill his family.

3 Number Three: Metal Gear Solid 2: Warriors Orochi "What the fuck," you may ask. Well the deal is that I started writing up "Warriors Orochi" for this list but it went too long and I decided it might make an ok standalone column. And then I remembered how stupid Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was. So Raiden now, Orochi later. To sum up Orochi Warriors for the purposes of this list: Koei finally came up with a way to use their colorful cast of historical characters in an exciting new story where they could be totally creative because their source material didn't limit what they could do anymore. But they didn't end up doing that. When Metal Gear Solid came out for the PS1, it was a blast and a half. For many of us, it brought back fond memories of Metal Gear and Snake's Revenge for NES. As it turns out, Snake's Revenge didn't involve video game auteur Hideo Kojima in any way, and is now treated by purists with the kind of contempt once reserved only for the Lucas-free Star Wars Holiday Special. But Snake's Revenge wasn't that bad at all, really. The story made a lot more sense than Metal Gear's because it wasn't horribly translated from Japanese. And it was better than the Star Wars Holiday Special it didn't feature Harvey Korman being possessed by Satan. And so Metal Gear Solid had nostalgia helping it even as a new game. But it hardly needed it, because the plot and characters were all cool too. It was the first console game I played that saw conspiracy in everything. Solid Snake's evil brother Liquid was the villain, and while evil twin brothers are hardly new (see Spock's evil brother, OH COME ON) they did it well. There were little bits of intentional comedy that worked to keep you going through the bleak world of characters who were never going to get happy endings. It was exciting. Just generally, you know, good. But not good enough for Kojima, oh no. When it came time to do the PS2 sequel, he decided to crank everything up to 11. The result? Sheer stupidity. Snake doesn't have an evil twin now, he has TWO evil brothers, one of whom is inexplicably old enough to be his father. This brother (who is NOT named Gaseous despite that being the only name Solid and Liquid's brother could possibly have) wears a powered armor suit with Doctor Octopus tentacles. Oh yeah, and he's a FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Just picture George Bush Sr. rocketing around shooting machine pistols at a bunch of dinosaur robots. And don't forget the rockin' techno music. While it's never made clear, it is also possible to interpret certain dialogue as saying that while serving as President, this guy was also actively fighting in an elite Navy SEALS unit. President Ventura. The game also gives us two heroes, so you spend a little time early on playing as Solid Snake and a long, long time playing as the impossibly fey Raiden. Well...that's a bit harsh...he's sort of whiny but not too bad...mostly people hate him because they signed up to play as Snake and that's not what they got. Raiden isn't nearly as irritating as his girlfriend Rose. She's like the flirty transceiver background women from the previous games, but MORE. Rose saves your game data, so you have to talk to her a lot. She calls you "Jack," completely undermining your cool badass codename, and just refuses to shut the fuck up about couple stuff. In the real world, guys have reasons to deal with this. I don't mean to sound like a caveman here, as guys sometimes want to talk about that stuff too, but when you don't and your girl does you just have to deal. But I'm playing a blood and guts political action thriller here, and lengthy discussions of what these two did on their first date, what restaurant is "their" restaurant, "you don't let me in enough blah blah blah" are not required. All of this is almost, not quite, but almost made up for near the end of the game. As part of a subplot involving Raiden losing touch with reality and finding out that some of the people advising him over the transceiver aren't even real, he starts having a breakdown and hears a scary, altered-voiced Rose saying "J-A-C-K---I-M---P-R-E-G-----N----A----N-----T..." Though even this isn't as cool as "The Colonel" telling you to "mind the gap." The villains are the only thing we don't get more of here. Well, in the insanely over-the-top ending you fight 25 METAL GEARS but they're not villains so much as things. But the elite evil guys unit in this game has fewer members than in previous games. Though one of them is a frickin' vampire you're meant to take seriously, so maybe this game gives us more. More goofy. The conspiracy element also hit new heights here. For all the needling I gave Assassin's Creed and their evil Templar Corporation, they're just a pale simulation of...THE PATRIOTS! In Metal Gear Solid, the plot presupposes that the US government engages routinely in experiments on unwitting soldiers. They created an entire army of genetic clones (but not of Jango Fett) and hid them in Alaska. And I was fine with that. But in Metal Gear Solid 2, the top-secret force running all American life is named "The Patriots" and manipulates everything. And brother, I mean everything. It's not just that Bush beat Gore because it was the will of the Patriots, that's ok, because Clinton beat Bush because of the Patriots, Bush beat Dukakis because of the Patriots, Reagan beat Carter because of the Patriots, etc. By the end of the game, it's seriously implied that Andrew Jackson probably beat John Quincy Adams because of the Patriots. Patriots control the price of gas, the popularity of Doctor Phil, and the way your shit smells. All joking aside, the game says the American government engineered a terrorist attack against itself so it could use rebuilding afterwards as a cover for building an enormous nuclear death fortress that was, itself, a cover for something else. And this was years before 9/11, when rumors that Israel worked with Zionists in Washington to frame Al Qaeda became tragically popular in some circles. At the end, Vince Russo takes over the booking as it turns out the blonde-haired, white-skinned Raiden was a child soldier in Africa with repressed memories. There's a scene even I have to admit is fun (the conspiracy is now so convoluted as to be laughable) where Revolver Ocelot breaks into mock applause for no reason and then tells everyone in the entire game that they have no clue what's going on. And it's revealed that everything Snake and Raiden have done has been scripted for them and the bad guys have already won and by the way, player at home, you are a big patsy too. Then there's a hollow, talky ending which suggests maybe they can do something to stop the Patriots in the sequel (EXACTLY like in Assassin's Creed, and not too far removed from my issues with The Phantom Menace) so so sorry for making you play this game as the NEXT game will matter. Snake all but apologizes to Raiden for getting such a lame game to star in since he ain't coming back (or is he DUNH DUNH DUNH!) There was, of course, fan backlash. Hideo Kojima proved he was aware of the backlash by making lots of anti-Raiden jokes in the next game. But he basically proved he missed the point by giving us a follow-up which again gave us an ending that was all "haha loser you were being used all along, we tricked you into killing the best person ever, you suck." At least it was a prequel, so stupid made-up nanotechnology couldn't give a disembodied arm mind-control power (in another subplot I didn't mention.) The Patriots will finally be dealt with (no, really, Konami swears) in the newest Metal Gear game. It's PS3 exclusive, so I may never get to play it. I've made my peace with that. Wow...and this was the replacement for something that went too long.

2 Number Two: EVIL/NOBLE ROSE The shittiest character in the Rumble Roses series (not counting Lady X or any of her variants who aren't really worth considering at all.) Some of the Roses are simply wonderful, but others only have one or two things to recommend them. Rowdy Reiko is a hilarious, "COBRA GANG" shrieking nutberger who would fit in perfectly in goofy Hong Kong action flick "The Heroic Trio" or any other title from the "hot chicks fighting post-apocalyptic baddies" genre. The Black Belt Demon comes surprisingly close to my feminine ideal, and would be perfect if she were older (she's one of those J-Pop women who could conceivably be anywhere from 30 to 10) and if she knew how pants work. Miss Spencer is irritating, but her alter-ego has unbelievable ass-cleavage and a hilariously pointless eye patch. Even the ridiculous nurse who wants to rule the world is, well, a ridiculous nurse who wants to rule the world. But then along comes Rose, and she just sucks. In her default "Evil Rose" form, she's supposed to be Reiko's older sister who has somehow been brainwashed by the evil nurse (an evil gal who wants to rule the world but who does not, sadly, force Mike and the Bots to watch bad movies.) Evil Rose traipses about America (or wherever the game is set) in a latex cat suit. Now...the cat suit is one of those fetishes you're either really into or not into at all, and I'm not into it. I admit, there's weird stuff I go in for that I couldn't discuss with my Mother or the Pope, but cat suits aren't amongst them. I'd rather watch Michelle Pfeiffer in business casual getting murdered by Christopher Walken than trying to seduce to seduce Danny DeVito by licking her wrist and then rubbing it into her forehead. Evil Rose also has oddly bedecked breasteses. Her buzooms are huge (she'd be big for a woman of African descent and she's supposed to be from Japan, the land of few curves.) They'd probably look fine just covered in skin-tight latex, but her costume figures we need to see more flesh and has strategic openings for skin and leather straps and buckles and all sorts of bondage freakyness. Somehow, they make her big old boobs really unappealing. (I have no rational explanation for this...I guess maybe the outfits that are revealing but might possibly be worn by a woman in a non-porn situation just work better for me.) So Evil Rose starts with a stupid look and has to try to win me over with personality, but...she really does think she's a cat. In the PS2 version, she'll occasionally deliver some cryptic dialogue to Reiko while trying to overcome Nursie's brainwashing, but in the Xbox360 version she just roar-yells a lot in her hateful dude-voice. Still, Rumble Roses' worst characters often redeem themselves in their alternate forms. The aforementioned Black Belt Demon, who is basically BUDDHIST~!! with shorter hair, is the alternate form of one of the game's blandest babyfaces. But Evil Rose's alternate form is almost as boring as her original form. Noble Rose is supposed to be a swashbuckling Musketeer type. A homage/rip-off of the same manga character Charlotte from Samurai Shodown is homage/rip-off off. This is undermined by her outfit, which consists of biker-shorts (sort of) and a top that, again, insists on showing us somehow disturbing amounts of skin on her huge boobies. Her "superstar" form finally gets it pretty much right, dressing her as a more feminine (but only slightly) George de Sand. Her boobs are finally mostly covered, and not being able to see every non-nipple inch of them somehow makes them appealing at last. But it's too little, too late (well, I shouldn't say too little. If her boobs were any bigger she'd have to somehow attach unicycles to her nipples so she could sort of lean forward and wheel herself around.) Oh, and her swimsuit is actually one of the hotter ones, but the fact that all the girls must have a unique swimsuit is particularly detrimental to "dignified warrior-hero" Noble Rose. After using her awful dude-voice to shout something like "the Thorns of Justice overcome all evil!" you always sort of expert her to add "and so will my fun bags!" Haha, I can't believe how close I came to forgetting the worst part. She's got a heel form in a cat suit, a face form in biker shorts and a superstar face form that looks like it should be jobbing with Chibodee Crocket in a two-on-one fight with DG Celled-up Gentle Chapman. But her superstar heel form? A FUCKING LIZARD. Seriously, she's dressed in a slutty, skanky LIZARD COSTUME. Were the game designers taking the piss, or is there a popular lizard fetish in Japan I don't want to know anything about? Wow, got through that whole thing without mention the Metal Gear Rose or the Doctor Who Rose, go figure.

1 Number One: The Abzorbaloff Episode The most loathsome episode of Doctor Who, ever. In its record-breaking run full of wonderful sci-fi adventures, the classic series also gave us plenty of stinkers. I rebeaked the one where the Doctor and Peri battle an evil mind-control slug. Later they must rescue a planet made up entirely of tinfoil sets on which a rubber-masked-villain is secretly trying to provoke a war with interstellar sock puppets. The Doctor and Romana once played a very disinterested role in a war between the Daleks and some disco androids. The Doctor and Jo once battled the Master and his evil teleporting blender (in what was actually a pretty good story despite the teleporting blender looking so much like a...well...a teleporting blender.) The Doctor, Tegan and Turlough once caught the Master playing dress-up in Ye Olde England and stopped his evil plan to...hang around. Even the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe weren't immune from stumbling into five episodes worth of old men arguing about nothing while the worst R2-D2 rip-offs ever (despite predating R2-D2 by several years) menaced people by pantomiming "we want to hug you." But the new series' biggest turd topped them all. The new series has an inflated budget, advanced CGI techniques, modern dramatic sensibilities, and access to every celebrity in Britain (any of whom would murder to have a guest spot on the show that was so central to their childhoods.) Yet somehow, near the end of season 2, we got the Abzorbaloff episode. The new series has a habit of throwing a "special" episode in every season right before the multi-part finale. Season 1 took a break from serious themes to do an episode which was almost entirely comedy and featured only a token threat. Season 3 took a break from the cast to do a serious, scary episode with almost no mention of the Doctor or Martha. But season 2 tried to take a break from serious themes and from the cast, and ended up taking a break from not being horrible. The story (whose actual real official title is "Love and Monsters") opens with a ludicrous, Scooby Doo style chase with the Doctor, Rose, some guy and an unnamed monster. What's going on is never explained. The plot concerns a slightly awkward but not overtly nerdy guy (the some guy from the chase) who, as a small child, had a chance encounter with the mysterious "Doctor." Now he's in his 20s or 30s and is an obsessive fan. He visits all the online conspiracy sites where photographs of the Doctor are sort of like photos of the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot. He finds out about Rose, goes to meet her mother, and narrowly avoids creepy sex. He meets other obsessive fans in his area, of all ages and races and creeds and colors, and they form a club. The club forms its own band (?!?!?) and we get a musical montage of a bunch of lonely people opening up and having fun and whatnot. He meets a girl through the club (from the classic TV/movie archetype of women who are really hot but they dress them nerdily and pretend they're not prettier than 90% of women from the real, non-actress/model world.) Meanwhile, the episode is halfway over, and we haven't even gotten a "Larry helps Balki open a checking account but Balki overspends" level of complication/threat yet. Eventually the villain appears, an evil member of the fan club. He's actually sort of amusing at first...he's a foppish fat guy, basically a less obese version of that villain Tim Curry plays on Monk. He takes over and makes them get all serious and ruins the fun, so if you're of the opinion that I ruined Weekly Visitor then he's basically me, though I don't recall putting a stop to any Weekly Visitor band that played generic pop. Members of the club start disappearing because it turns out the fat guy is an alien who eats them. Everyone except the main character guy gets eaten, including his girl. When the alien's true alien form is revealed, the faces of his victims can still be seen in his enormous gut. That's actually a pretty neat idea, but the Doctor Who crew get no credit because the monster is actually the winning entry from a kiddie contest to make a Doctor Who monster. Right before the end the Doctor and Rose appear. And having no knowledge that there's a monster eating people, but solely because Rose found out this guy went to her Mom looking for her and that pisses her off. (By the way, my grammar checker wants "there's a monster eating people" to be changed to either "there are a monster eating people" or "there's monster eating person." My choice.) The Doctor waves the Sonic Screwdriver around and says some crap, and the monster (oh yeah, he's called "The Abzorbaloff") turns to stone and breaks apart. Oh, and there's some resolution to the really pretentious subplot about the main character having met the Doctor as a kid, but all I remember about it was that it was really pretentious. Also, for some reason the girlfriend character is still alive, but now she's a stone face with no body. Since the whole story has been narrated by the main nerd as a flashback, we can jump to the present where he lives with the stone girl head and it is directly implied that they maintain a sexual relationship. I watched this episode with my Dad, and I apologized to him for it. Sofa and I were still meeting on AIM to discuss Battlestar Galactica at this point, and I'd asked him to watch Doctor Who that week so we could discuss it too and I ended up apologizing to him. The problem here is that I cannot find a point. I think the alien may have had an evil plan that was revealed in the story, but if so it was at least 45 minutes into an hour-long show. The musical montage in the middle goes on for forever. Every single line is delivered like it's a major laugh line, so either the comedy doesn't translate from Limey to Yank or (and this is what's really going on, I suspect) the only person in the world who thinks this thing is funny is the producer, who I believe also wrote it. Even though I don't understand any of the humor even I can tell that this is meant to be making fun of the fans. I'm not sure that making fun of your fans is a good idea (and before anyone points a finger at me remember that I'm not making a living with my writing.) You also have to consider that this episode had a bunch of pretentious stuff about the Doctor touching someone's life as a child and changing everything about that person, but it sits on the shelf right next to the joking implication of some guy being fellated by a statue. I decided while writing this up to check around and see what fandom in general thinks of this episode. Unsurprisingly, some hate it but it also has ardent supporters who think it's the best episode ever made because it's so "clever" and, and this is key, the rest of us "don't get it." It's Doctor Who's answer to FLCL. I should have made FLCL number one for causing me to seriously rethink anime as being something I even want to be even remotely associated with. And having mentioned FLCL, I can think of no better way to end a discussion of horrible things that ruin everything. Good evening.