Team Rocket and Other Pokemon Related Musings

This is a collection of ranting I had when I tried to convince some people that Team Rocket are the best failures ever.  Enjoy.  I apologize for the lack of a coherent train of thought.

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Prepare for Trouble!
And make it double!
To protect the world from devestation
To unite all peoples within our nation
To denounce the evils of truth and love
To extend our reach to the stars above
Jessie!
James!
Team Rocket blasts off at the speed of light!
Surrender now or prepare to fight!
Meowth that's right!
Wobbafett!

This is for the most awesome failures ever.

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James's early voice doesn't really do it for me. He doesn't have the comically deep tone or the awesome laugh/weird noise he makes when he's scared.


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*Someone else refers to James as a faggot*

I can understand calling James a fag, but the picture you are replying to clearly shows him not acting like a fag. If it were this picture

then I wouldn't complain.
Follow up pictures to the earlier one:



James just likes it rough. If he were gay why would he spend all his time with Jessie. She's not that smart or useful, and she beats him. I figure he is just effeminate and masochistic, so Jessie being hot and beating him up is just his thing.

But I suppose when you watch hundreds of episodes you begin to overanalyze things. Like how the world of pokemon has almost no concept of marriage or good parenting. The only time marriage was ever even mentioned was when it was about James's arranged marriage to that dominatrix. Ash's father is clearly Professor Oak, but nobody ever bothered to tell Ash this, and Ash was sent out to travel the world at ten years old without any help. I say Professor Oak is clearly his dad because he and Ash's mom just happen to show up together at beach resorts and hotels at the same time all the time and nobody ever even mentions Ash's father. I don't even think Ash knows where babies come from. Not to mention Ash's mom is a slut. She let Brock shack up with her for an undetermined amount of time after Brock had some unnamed problem with staying with Professor Ivy (I assume he knocked her and her three research assisstants up) and left.

Anyway, point is that the world of Pokemon is fucked up and should not be thought about critically.

Also, Meowth is watching you masturbate.

Stay tuned for more random pokemon related dissertations.

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*Someone says that Jessie has a penis*

I just can't imagine a penis can hide that well. I mean, the animators had enough problems just avoiding pantyshots, let alone a penis.


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Then back to Team Rocket being awesome.
Meowth, he is a Char.

James is sexy.

Wobba


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I would like to take a moment to talk about what Team Rocket covets most. No, not leather and sex toys, I mean Pikachu.


He is a lazy EV trained asshole. Either Ash accidentally fought the right type of pokemon to EV train him (unlikely) or Professor Oak knew what the fuck he was doing and decided to EV train Pikachu before he gave him (is Pikachu male?) to Ash as a way to protect his mentally challenged son from the dangerous world of pokemon. Not to mention that Pikachu had Agility and Thunder pretty early on, which means he was either at least level 34 and used a TM for Thunder, or he was 45 or higher. He is also a lazy bastard. He refuses to get into his pokeball, but he also refuses to walk most of the time.


Though it is quite likely this is just a way for lazy animators to keep him in frame whenver Ash is talking, I still don't like it. He is the total opposite of the venerable Meowth, who, through only his own genius, and a little hornyness, learned to speak English and Japanese, and walk on two legs.


Pikachu is heartless and doesn't think twice about attacking the humans of Team Rocket with even the most powerful of his electric attacks. Jessie, James, and Meowth are all likely to die young of heart complications due to their frequent exposure to high voltages. Even a small child who was trying to pet (or was it rape?) Pikachu suffered his wrath.


Pikachu will one day destroy the world, and Team Rocket must capture it to protect the world from devastation. Can you imagine what would happen if Pikachu were to do whatever he pleased?


Team Rocket lives like top tier hobos to save us from this menace.


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*Someone mentions the seizure episodes and the one that had James with  inflatable tits*

I assume those are the edited versions of the seizure episode. I've seen the edited one, but it actually gave me a bit of a headache. As for the tits on James, it's a shame everybody focuses on him there, because Jessie is damned hot.
Though James isn't all that bad looking.


*Someone mentions they prefer some of Pokemon's many lolis*



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So, Maddie Blaustein, the English voice of Meowth throughout the 4kids production of the show (which was everything up until the latest season), regularly answers fan questions on the serebii forums. She said
"Behind the scenes stuff can get very funny because we do all do dirty ad-libs as jokes for the other voiceover talent."

The show makes sooo much more sense now.

Oh geez
"3. Here's one that I want to hear your opinion on. Do you think anything has happened between Jessie and James (romantically) that we don't know about that Meowth has seen?

3) Yes"
Meowth has witnessed Jessie raping James, it's the only explanation.

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I would like to take a moment to talk about Brock. This gym leader seems like a nice guy.


But actually Brock is a dangerous sex offender. When Ash says he wants to be the greatest pokemon master, Brock usually introduces himself saying that he wants to be the greatest breeder. He rarely mentions pokemon at all when talking about being a breeder.


Brock would probably breed with anything he can get his hands on. His main foes in the series change as the supporting cast does. In the beginning Ash and Misty would just let him hit on whoever all the time, but after he was replaced and then took his place back in the group, he has constantly been cock blocked. First it was Misty, then it was Max, and now it's his own Croagunk who gets in the way of his neverending quest for vagina.

It seems to me that Brock continues to travel with Ash is because he needs to constantly be on the run from the women he gets pregnant. He originally left his hometown to get away from taking care of his "little brothers and sisters," and since then he has been on a neverending quest to avoid child support.

A sequence of images that are quite disturbing.




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So there you have it.
It looks like Team Rocket is blasting off again.

Why Should I Upgrade My Phone?

With the recent (and rapid) improvements in smartphone related technology, I've been thinking about getting something to replace my (zomg) over a year old Palm Pre. I think about all the possibilities of having a phone with some high-res amoled screen and a fast new processor. But then I think about the things that I've gotten used to that is just so damn convenient.

The most obvious thing is the touchstone charger. You mean, if I get a new phone I'll have to plug it in every night like some fucking caveman? No thank you. Plus there is the fact that, though Android has gotten nicer, it is still relatively ugly and unintuitive. What are all those buttons on the front of every Android phone? A home button? A menu button? A back button? A search button? C'mon.

Why is that you gotta go through some shit and root an android phone and get hacked firmware and all that? I want to do some crazy shit with my Pre, I put in the Konami code, I connect it to my PC once, and then I can do any crazy patches, overclocking, and changes I want from my phone. I don't need to wipe my phone, I don't lose a single thing. If I have to replace my phone, all I do is type in my name and password and it gets all of my apps and settings (all the official stuff and even some of the unofficial) back.

If I'm going to class and I forget to silence my phone, no worries, my phone sees that I've got class in my calendar and automatically goes into airplane mode and mutes itself. If I set my phone on the charging dock, the screen goes to minimum brightness and the ringer to about half of my default level. Maybe there is a way to do this with Android phones, I dunno. But I wonder, why should I abandon the functionality of my phone just to get a prettier screen and a couple hundred extra mhz?

In short: hey HP/Palm, WebOS 2.0 looks nice, but how about some new hardware, eh?

You Can't Escape!

As someone who plays low-tier characters in 3rd Strike, I sometimes wonder about ways they could be better. I know it will never happen not only because 3rd Strike is 12 years old and Capcom is more than likely not going to do an HD Remix style rebalancing for the newly announced online edition of the game, but a man can dream. I don't want the world. I'm not asking for Q and Alex to get 1/3 screen fierce punches with no recovery that somehow go under high sonic booms. Here are some changes that I think would help Alex:

I know Alex is not a combo character. He has one comboable attack: close MK. I wouldn't want to try to turn him into Yun or something, but the fact you can only combo out of his close MK means he can only really get it on punish or after a meaty jump in HP. So, I'd like to see him be able to cancel his crouch MP. It is already a good poke, but being able to do a qcf + LP or a charge b f K would allow him to add a little extra damage (or a lot with something like cr. MP, db f K, qcfqcf P) after a good poke or keep up pressure on block. This would be good, but since crouch MP is slower than similarly used attacks by other characters (Ken and Chun cr. MK) it wouldn't be broke. Maybe make it so that you can combo into a qcf MP from close MK, but not from crouch MP, therefore giving a benefit to using the close MK on punish.

I'd like to see EX moves that are useful outside of adding an extra hit for a little bit more damage. EX slaps are fine, as well as EX stomps. EX dp + K is worthless. Sure it comes out fast and pull people off the ground, but there just isn't any real use for it. Instead of pulling people off the ground it should change from a hit attack (that can be blocked/parried, which never made much sense to me) to a grab type attack. This would make it much more useful, and because it would be an EX, it wouldn't be abusable. It would still get stopped by well timed air attacks (or claws) but it would win in more situations and would catch people jumping in and trying to parry anti-air attempts.

Power bombs are just too slow to be used in most situations. I think he should have an EX powerbomb that comes out instantly. It wouldn't need huge range (shorter than a Hugo 360 would be okay), but just the ability to do an instant powerbomb would be a great asset. And while we are at it, if we could just make it so that you can't jump out of hyperbomb on super flash, that would be great. Thanks.

His hcb + K. Such a weirdly situational move. I wouldn't take away the fact you can duck it, but maybe it could be given a longer active hitbox, so that it can land throughout the second half of the movement instead of at just the exact landing point. And maybe an EX version that has a really long horizontal range or will catch throughout the entire move's animation.

The EX dash elbow already pops the opponent into the air, so why not allow you to get a free attack after it, like a HK or a dp + K or something.

I don't know. Maybe with the extra combos his damage would have to be scaled to a greater degree. It's not like I'm KSK or anything, and all of my changes could completely break the character/game. It's fun to imagine though. And maybe one of these days Alex will show up again in a game that I actually give a damn about.

Art Design in Video Games

Your game is ugly. This is something I want to tell so many game developers lately.

I know video games come from a world where process and rules are usually thought of first, but I hate seeing games that look like the art design was handled by a programmer who is socially inept and generally doesn't understand the world. The comedy of it is that generally the most “mature” games are the most childish. The prime example of this is Gears of War. It looks like it was designed by a 13-year-old boy who just bought his first metal album. But I guess that is their target demographic.

I can imagine the development meetings. “Well, killing stuff with chainsaws is fucking badass, but killing stuff with guns is also badass. We need to come up with a way to do both without confusing the player with switching weapons.” “Hey, you know how guns used to have those knives on the front of them back in the day? No? Whatever. We could totally have a gun with a chainsaw on front!” “The gun part would be all PEW PEW and the guy he shot would be all AAAAHH and then chainsaw part would be all RRRRRRR and the blood be all SHHHKLSH.”

This is nothing new of course. In the 90's every other game had a male lead that looked suspiciously like Jean-Claude Van Damme or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Of course, games back then were a much more modest affair. 10 people gathered in a garage and made Arnold Van Damme capable of walking from left to right and punching a ninja and everything was fine, but with the increased capability for art in games comes increased expectations.

When I was young I sketched hundreds of pictures of Megaman in my notebooks. I did this because Megaman has an interesting design. He looks like nothing that I had seen and nothing I could ever come up with. Of course it helps that Megaman has a simple design that is easy for a kid to draw, but don't confuse simplicity with good art design. There are tons of games with generic simple anime designs, which are just as boring as your typical space marine.

The game that put me on this whole train of thought was Darksiders. There is nothing wrong with the game graphically, but it is insanely ugly. The art design fits perfectly with the clusterfuck that is the game. The fact that a bunch of people spent a large amount of time to put together this Frankenstein's monster is mind boggling. There is the big debate over whether or not games are art. The fact that Darksiders is generally referred to as a good game that is completely derivative is proof that games themselves are not art. At the very least, games contain art, and that art should be good. I can't imagine how nobody during development just stood back and said, “wait a second, this is totally retarded.”