A couple of things: last year I did the Two Way Roads End of Summer Wrapup, but this summer, it was more spread out on other blogs.
On Carbonizer, I had movie reviews through the summer (this post included) and a collection of scans, which altogether isn't all that fun. There was the first of the Ex-Fanboy, however.
But on In, Around, and About the Brazos Valley, there was a lot of material posted.
Two new blogs came onto the scene, Blue Skies and Nintendo (actually a revival of a project from two years ago), and comp/mag, the computer-oriented companion. Neither got many updates, but they're there, and I plan to expand them.
One blog didn't make the transition, Pseudo3D's SimCity 4 completely dried up, and will not be updated again. However, I did work more on the BAT.
I played a LOT of games this summer, including indie favorites I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game, Eversion, Braid, Atom Zombie Smasher, And Yet It Moves, VVVVVV, Crayon Physics Deluxe, and Machinarium (just beat that stupid green circle puzzle, thanks to this hint from YouTube:
The triangle is pretty easy once you get into the right mindset. For me, I focused not on getting the green dots to make a triangle, but instead on getting the red dots OFF the triangle. Seeing as how once you get two red dots next to each other and move them off the triangle, they will no longer move (unless you move the circle they're on), it becomes a fairly simple puzzle from there.
My SNES emulator featured Chrono Trigger and Tetris Attack, and the PC side got some time with SimCity 4 Deluxe, Plants vs. Zombies: Game of the Year Edition (I re-beat it after the Cloud Disaster), and a bit of Portal.
There was another game I bought and played and am too ashamed to talk about it. Angry Birds.
Two movies I watched recently were both western-type movies, True Grit and Rango (the latter sorta counts, right?). True Grit is my favorite of the two: there's wonderfully bizarre side characters, strong main characters, the lead heroine does not look like a Justin Bieber twin (as in, the original). It IS a gritty movie, admittedly: lots of drinking, plenty of blood, and one of the content warnings, "Disturbing images" becomes quite apparent when it turns out that hanged/hanging bodies are the least of said imagery. The ending is a downer. Well, it turns out okay at first: neither of the main male characters die, the girl shoots the man who killed her father herself instead of the other ideas (such as Matt Damon's character taking him back to Waco, TX to hang for the shooting of a senator. But then the heroine (Mattie) falls into a snake pit, a rattlesnake bites her, Jeff Bridges' character ("Rooster") is forced to shoot Mattie's beloved horse, Mattie loses her entire arm due to the gangrene, and the ending is set 25 years later, as Mattie, now a bitter, one-armed old woman who never married, stands near Rooster's grave.
Rango, not so much. Granted, the voices are excellent, Ned Beatty voices the mayor turtle (who turns out to be the main villain, and look up on IMDB Ned Beatty: you'll find he voiced another similar character in a much better film), but it has so many problems: there's some quasi-religion that the main characters are searching for (along with some really cliché themes), more language then is typical for a PG-rated family film fare, and a few other glaring problems. That being said, it really does have some good moments, and even has a few neat visual gags as well (the titular lizard hides in a Jarritos bottle toward the beginning).
But enough on that. This fall will be rough for certain, but things are once again cooking up in the back rooms that will make Carbonizer! more than a blog. And do check my Brazos Valley-centered site with history and commentary.
