Before I spent my days skimming pools on an exotic island resort dodging endangered baby Chinese Alligators that Sunny keeps putting in the pool I was a crime scene investigator. A blind, dumb and slow crime scene investigator that despite all physical and mental odds against me still managed to solve five mysteries.
I’m alone, belly up to the bar at Pinkie’s Tavern. A low lit place with smooth jazz and smoother drinks. I look at myself in the warm reflection of the glass behind the bar and then back down at my stiff drink. The singer – some dame with moth wings – purrs in the corner. Nick the bartender comes up quiet but stern.
“Listen, pal. I don’t know what kinda night you’ve had and I don’t wanna know. But I do know that it’s last call and I don’t want to but if I have to just know I‘ll haul ya outta here myself.”
After nights like these it’s hard to just go home. After seeing what I’ve seen for so many years I thought I had become immune to the horrors of crime. Only to be proven wrong yet again – and on this lovely island resort of all places. I will surely take the aftermath images of the Flaming S’mores Killer with me to the grave.
I pay my tab and slowly turn from the bar, adjusting my hat. I turn to look at the singer once more and notice the stage has turned into a load screen. Odd.
I go to step out the door and get hung up on a bar stool. Damn not again.
I’m guessing the bartender is now ordering me out by his body language but I can’t tell because all dialogue has muted itself.
I awake in a cold sweat. Relieved to know I am not some tortured detective in some B Noir Film but saddened that I, again, woke up on the same planet as the game developers that made CSI: Three Dimensions of Murder.
Shut up, you. Wrong CSI
CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder is based off the hugely successful original CSI television program that ran a jaw-dropping 15 years (2000-2015). Ted Danson was even in it at one point? And Elisabeth Shue?? AND Laurence Fishburne!? Where was I for all of this?
Heyyooo forget 911. Somebody call the fire department
So anyways – Ted Danson, Elisabeth Shue and Lawrence Fishburne weren’t around to save CSI: 3 Dimensions Of Murder. Not that it was the casts fault. The voice acting for its time is pretty good. I mean compared to a lot of shit I’ve played it holds up. But the game is just so damn buggy.
Developed by American developer, Telltale Incorporated (known for their licensed game efforts, The Walking Dead arguably being their most notable) and published by Ubisoft it was released for Windows in 2006. Later ported to PS2 on September 25th 2007. Which is probably why the game is so close to being good and falls short.
Telltale surprisingly went defunct in 2018Chances are if you’ve never heard of Ubisoft you could give a shit about this article in the first place
The writing is good. It has five cases (which seems a bit small but they are pretty dense stories packed with twists like your typical CSI show). The voice acting is solid. Some of the shit the suspects say is hilarious and boss like this prime example of fed-up-with-the-world-biatch:
Grrrrrrrrl power
What’s frustrating about the game is that the only reason is it takes long is the constant load screens. Even for its era – even if it was early PS2 era it would have too much load time. Let alone 2007. The “playable” crime scene areas are super small – and will have a ton of evidence all basically in one place. Which is fine. Being an older gamer I still love point and click exploration.
BUT what sucks you out of the game is that once you collect the evidence you immediately have to go to the lab to analyze your evidence. *Load Screen*. Analyze your evidence. Now you need to question your suspect again. *Load Screen*. Ask one question. Get another piece of evidence. Return to lab. *Load Screen.* Analyze Evidence. Suspicion arises. Need to question suspect more. *Load Screen.* Question suspect. They tell ya to piss off. Now you need a warrant. *Load Screen* interrogating is granted. *Load screen*
I think you get the point. For every hour I play I might actually get about 35 minutes of gameplay in. That’s like fucking college loan interest rate ratio shit. It’s a six hour campaign but with load times you’re looking at sixteen.
So… aside from that… the controls are horrible. You can see a splatter of blood but ya just can’t… nope… little to the left… shit…to the right…fuck… back to the left. Got it. Sure is hard handling a Q-TIP out in the field.
After all of that – if you can get past it – and that’s a legitimate IF – it’s still pretty fun. Just don’t expect to solve any cases in a hurry. – Periwinkle
(DEFINITELY DON’T)PEE IN THE POOL
*Crickets*
Absolutely nothing. Either:
A.) People don’t give a shit about this post (Likely)
B.) Nobody ever played this game (Less likely but still up there)
C.) Both (Most likely)
*Womp – Womp*
Periwinkle’s Lowing Hanging Fruit Punch Ingredients
Definitely not the reason I do this BUT if anything I write brings you joy and you felt like buying me a cup of coffee in return I would appreciate it wholeheartedly. https://ko-fi.com/colinsik
Thank you to The Dame With The Moth Wings for letting me pollute her space and tell Sunny that I already taught one of his precious Chinese crocodiles to play the harmonica.
As A Pool Boy, I often have to wade through pool water, when the heating is broken, or late at night to reclaim what Island Guests, have lost! As a Result I am often very cold… Ice Cold!Are You Ice Cold Counter Terrorist Special Agent Jack Bauer? Take The Quiz To Find Out!Chances are you aren’t. I had to find out that I wasn’t special agent Jack Bauer myself the hard way. The hardest way one person can find out. By playing 24: The Game.
Anyone who has ever said that life is short has never played 24: The Game. Based on the hugely successful American television program, 24 the game takes place in between the TV shows third and fourth season. Filling in plot holes, adding additional context and content for hardcore fans. That kind of thing.
For those that have never watched the show – myself included (I was well aware of the show while it was on I just didn’t have a desire to watch Keifer Sutherland bust up terrorist scum back then) the show follows special agent Jack Bauer during his work day which apparently lasts twenty four hours? Because Terrorists never clock out.
Anyways, he shoots people, interrogates and tortures them like some sort of one man Guantanamo Bay. All to save Los Angeles or the Liberty Bell or whatever. You get the idea.
24: The Game picks up between the third and fourth seasons of the show but it really doesn’t matter. It’s not rocket science. It’s pretty easy to figure out what is happening upon starting the game. It’s a third person shooter, with all sorts of puzzles, driving and interrogation mini games. The “fun” police work I guess, considering that all the mini games are much more fun then the actual missions of running around screaming at people to put their hands up and killing them anyways.
24 was Developed by SCE Studio Cambridge – later restructured as Guerilla Cambridge most known for its MediEvil series (and shut down in 2017) during 2005.
Guerilla Cambridge
It was published by 2k Games for the PlayStation 2 and released February 27th 2006. Essentially the game starts as Jack Bauer and his counter terrorism unit foils a plot to assassinate the Vice President. One thing leads to another and you learn a bit more about the man behind all of these nefarious plans and his connection to Jack Bauer in the past. I won’t really go into it because I’d hate to spoil a fifteen year old video game based on a twenty year old show for you.
And besides. That’s not why you’re here! You’re here for the quiz! The one thing that unites all internet users regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality or political affiliation. We all want to know more about ourselves and I think that’s admirable. Even cute. Anyways the, “ARE YOU ICE COLD COUNTER TERRORIST SPECIAL AGENT JACK BAUER” quiz will be divided into three parts.
1.) The Basics. This is where a lot of expert quiz makers put basic questions. Yes, that was obnoxious sarcasm.
2.) Physical Fitness. This is the part of the quiz where we’ll gauge if you, the quiz taker, are as physically gifted as Special Agent Jack Bauer.
And finally my favorite section: THE QUOTES. On a scale from one to five we’ll access how much or how little you agree or disagree with a Jack Bauer quote (or a, ‘Bauerism’ as I like to refer to them by)
But before we begin the quiz I do have a new regular section to announce called, “PEE IN THE POOL”. Generally in theory it will consist of me choosing a subject – maybe asking a question about it to vast internet and everyone answering and all of us being amazed and blown away by how similar we really all are especially when sharing a love for something.
Which leads me to my current bone to pick with society as a whole. Twitter specifically. In the week leading up to and during writing this entry I canvassed the harsh terrains of Twitter and Instagram in the search for hardcore 24 fans. Feeling inadequate at fairly explaining the protagonist’s badassery I figured I’d hand the mic over to some true Jack Bauer fans and let them sound off and shut all the haters up for good.
But it never happened. Despite asking nicely, coercion, threats and begging no one would respond to my tweets. Some sympathy likes and retweets here and there but the response was clear. No one gives a shit about Perwinkle The Pool Boy and/or the world has moved on from Jack Bauer.
Desperation
But I can’t accept that.
It’s much more believable no one answered any of my Tweets because I was coming off like a weird lunatic. Which is true – I was. BUT what I find completely unbelievable is that the country would turn its back on a true American hero so callously. Today – Jack Bauer – tomorrow – George Washington??
The only two people who get any sort of recognition for interacting with my fever pitch tweeting looking for super fans is, Anthony Cox (@AJC2424) and Pinkie herself, who let me know quite proudly that she has over six billion plushed unicorns. So thank you, Anthony and Pinkie.
Welcome to the, Are You Ice Cold Counter Terrorist Special Agent Jack Bauer? QUIZ
Every “Yes” answer during the first section will add 5 Points each in your total score.
THE BASICS
Let’s get basic.
1.) Is your name Jack Bauer?
2.) Do you have a steely cold stare that can hesitate even the most volatile of criminals?
3.) Does your day start with a countdown clock?
4.) Are you a Federal Agent in any capacity?
5.) Has the Canadian actor, Keifer Sutherland ever portrayed you in a television series or movie?
Let’s get physical.
Part 2: Physical Fitness
Again, Every “Yes” answer during the first section will add 5 Points each in your total score.
1.) Are you Canada’s sexiest export?
2.) Can you sprint for an unlimited amount of time?
3.) Does your voice sound like old country road gravel in a glass jar of warm whiskey?
4.) Do you yell the word, “Dammit!” 80-90 times a day?
5.) Can you carry all of America on your back so it can sleep soundly safe from it’s almost infinite amount of enemies?
You missed a couple quotes… Bartlett.
On a sliding scale from 1-5 – choose the number based on how much you relate or, “feel” this quote. 5 being the most possible relation – you have possibly said this before or will soon. You feel this quote to the bone.
Quotes:
1.) “I’m federal agent Jack Bauer and this is the longest day of my life.”
2.) “I have killed two people since midnight, I haven’t slept in over 24 hours. So maybe… maybe you should be a little more afraid of me than you are right now.”
3.) “If you hurt my daughter I will kill you!”
4.) “You probably don’t think I could force this towel down your throat, but trust me I can. All the way. Except that I’d hold onto this little bit at the end. When your stomach starts to digest the towel, I pull it out. Taking your stomach lining with it. Most people probably take about a week to die. It’s very painful.”
5.) “Shut up, stupid! You just fired at a federal agent!”
6.) “I’m done talking with you, you understand me? You’ve read my file. The first thing I’m going to do is take out your right eye, and then I’m gonna move over and take out your left, and then I’m going to cut you. I’m gonna keep cutting you until you give me the information that I need. Do you understand me? So for the last time, where is the nerve gas?”
7.) “Our government has no integrity!”
8.) “By order of the President of The United States, PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON!”
9.) “So help me God I will kill you, and you will stay dead this time.”
10.) “By the time I’m finished with you, you’re gonna wish you felt this good again.”
SCORECARD:
0-25 Jack Bauer Points: You are basically a terrorist. You don’t believe in freedom, America or the long arm of the law. You are a criminal.
25-50 Jack Bauer Points: You are a well adjusted adult. Much more well adjusted then the guy that spent a week writing a blog post about 24
50-99: You are basically a walking Kid Rock song. You drink Liberty from a fountain of kick ass. You sew American flags together to make it heavier in case you need to use them as a weapon. You are Paul Revere on steroids.
100: You are Keifer Sutherland.
Make sure to post your points in the comments below or hit me up @buffaloretro on Twitter to participate in the next mind numbingly dumb Periwinkle Pool Boy post
AND – before I go: I was going to start to list a bit of ingredients as we go on in honor of the games we’ve covered. This list of ingredients should be able to make you the perfect Periwinkle’s Low Hanging Fruit Punch.
Ingredients so far
1.) A small chunk of fur from Parka (Cold Winter)
2.) A thimble of Jack Bauer’s sweat (24: The Game)
Until next time – thank you to Pinkie and all of the other writers for letting me pollute their space – I’ve read articles by everyone else on the resort staff and they are all very talented writers. I think they just felt bad for me and let me aboard. But I’ll take the sympathy. 😘 – Perwinkle
Hello again my dear islandguests. Today I am using my first Wild Card Post on Saturday.. a post that is a bit of everything.. well mostly movies and Anime. Since on Saturdays I usually talk about anime but I really wanted to do Heather’s Tag..I went above and beyond and made two versions.. all in one. So here are my unpopular opinions on Film and TV for Both anime.. and the Hollywood Scene
I was tagged by the amazing talented Heather from Just Geeking By for this tag! An very kind, community driven unifying game blogger you should definitely check out!
<Disclaimer> This post is meant to display once unpopular opinions so that is exactly what I aimed for. While all these opinions are true..these are never facts <End of Disclaimer>
Heather Already answered Game of Thrones here so saying that I did not like it would feel redundant. That being said I do agree with her that series wasn’t all that great. I sat through it..all the way up to season 7 or whatever the second to last is Mostly because everyone liked it so much.. I found it bland, needlessly edgy and unrewarding.
One thing I can’t stand that seems very popular is the show Parks and Recreation. I hate the Roy Swanson character everyone seems to love. I do not find the show one bit funny. Leslie or whatever the woman is called annoyed me quite a bit as well. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I am Dutch and can not relate to the culture but for some reason this casts really annoys me. I struggled myself through the first episode and was thinking.. why are people making the fuzz about it. When I finished the second episode I actually looked up if there were two shows called this way and if this might have been a remake of something hype or something and in the third episode I realised this was not my show. Normally I do stuff in my home, grind in Pokémon, write a blog, do some images , cut my food etc, usually with Comedy Central as my background noise. Even shows I do not particularly care for such as Modern Family can stay on in the background.. but something about Parks and Recreation rubs me the wrong way and I have to turn it off.
Animewise I really dislike Code Geass! I find it INCREDIBLY boring. I picked it up twice and dropped it twice. Even when I was deep into the second season I just could not care for it at all. Too much stuff happens for no reason other than to make the plot happen. One of the more famous death in the series that is accidentally triggered feels so poorly set up. The issue did not happen before and barely happened after so except for some minor set up it only happens to kill that character off. I dislike how LeLouche is so smart he knows exactly how a mudslide will happen showing knowledge of just about every single thing when it’s convenient and then suddenly makes simple oversights. The Mech’s feel shoehorned in as yet another means to an end to force the story in a certain direction. While I get it’s spectacular.. this feels super much like a story to me.. just a story and the characters are just characters. I find myself uninterested in their faith because it’s going to be what the writer decides no matter how much sense it would make. I get the writer is always in control but normally I feel like characters make the plot move.. Code Geass to me a great example of it being the other way around.
Ah this one is super easy for me. Star Wars Episode 1 : The Phantom Menace. Now don’t get me wrong I do not love it unconditionally but I love the experience it gave me! It was the first Star Wars movie I saw in the cinema…and the best Star Wars movie I saw in cinema. That’s right I like it better than all the sequel movies. I also liked it a lot better than attack of the clones, which I do not hate either. I’d tie it with Revenge of the Sith probably but I did not see that one in cinema. I loved the new experiences and the expansion of the world. It might have been different but I felt George Lucas hand! The Pod Racing scene is still probably one of my favourite scenes ever, Duel of the Fates is amazing, the whole prequel set up I found rather interesting. I did like that look into the politics of that world.. it made the world seem so much more alive and connected.
In terms of Anime.. my picks are more slim, I am more off the opposite where I find Ghibli overrated. Anime Movies oftenly aren’t my thing. I liked Summer Wars fine, Spirited Away is good but for the most part they do not impress. But fine I shall try to name an anime Movie I like that is quite hated. I think my answer would have to be Dragon Ball Z Broly Second Coming. It is a unpopular Dragon Ball Z movie but to me.. this story made so much more sense then the first one. Seeing Goten being mistaken for Kakarot makes so much sense.. given how Broly is Established to be bothered by that. I would have liked THIS to be the first Broly movie. No Paragus no weird Vegeta plotline. Broly was a saiyan who hated Goku.. he and his father got away from the destruction of planet Vegeta.. but when Broly found out that Kakarot the source of his “mental trauma” was alive he went to earth.. he crashed their and spend a few years covered in the ice. Goten Trunks find him and the story more or less continues as such.. that would have been amazing. This movie appealed to me because I played Legacy of Goku 3 right before and discovering this side quest was based on a movie made me enjoy this movie so much more! Also having Goten and Trunks ..who are less essential characters fight him just raised tensions! I do like this movie and it’s nice to see Videl in action as well. I quite liked I choose You Pikachu as well! That movie got a lot of hate as well.
Okay .. I am going break the tag a bit here since love triangles are complicated. In most of my examples they existed but faded away or the choice was made for a character rather by them but I’d say my answer to this must be : EVERYONE IN EVERY SINGLE VAMPIRE SHOW EVER! Elena Gilbert should have chosen Stephan, Caroline should have chosen Klaus.Damon should be with Bonny, Sooki Stackhouse from should have picked Eric, Jessica should be with Bill or Jason or someone more plot relevant than Hoyt. I mean sure they were cute together.. but I wanted Jessica to shine more Hoyt took that from her. Buffy should have ended up with Angel, Cordelia with Wesely, Willow with someone like Faith and Xander with either Winifred, Dawn .. or that very shy slayer from the final season. Vampire shows rarely end up with good couples. However I can now finally say this. I think Rachel should have picked Joey instead of Ross!
Animewise,the obvious to point out is not unpopular enough, but someone clearly overreached. I think Goku should have ended with Bulma and interest was shown but never went anywhere.. but I mostly just hate chichi and how she ruined Gohan. The best love triangle I could name is Touko, Yuu and Sayaka from Bloom into you . I think Touko should have ended up with Sayaka, realising Yuu could never lover back the same way, Sayaka who accepted who she was all along got the price and Yuu could have been their friend maybe realising then there was more, setting up for a potential sequel or just let her regret it a bit. I really like Sayaka, such a strong character.
This is the same across both anime and western media. Romance! I know Vampire Diaries has it as a sub genre and I do like Yuri shows but straight up romance, especially the straight type doesn’t do anything for me. I do not care who sleeps with who, have at it and have fun but I am never invested in that I do not mind it as a side story, but if it’s just a story if he and her will come together I do not find myself engaged. Both are mature people most of the time.. they know what is best for them, if that is each other that is neat and I am happy for them.. if they decide we do not work together I am happy as well .. if that’s how they feel they made a strong choice.
Western Media hasn’t done me wrong much lately. If I had to name a beloved character I don’t like it would be a tie between Forrest Gump and Ace Ventura. I don’t find Forrest that much of a sympathetic guy! His blindness to the world sometimes annoys me. I get he has his reasons but all events around him basically come down to the same. His story feels incredibly romanticised to a point where I just find him really fake. His lines are to artificial just to capture some magic so in the end he has nothing real to say. Ace Ventura to me is everything i hate about Jim Carrey, his Jim Carrey method of acting might not be as bad as in the cable guy .. but it’s certainly more present. While he did okay as Dr Robotnik I find him incredibly vexing. Ace Ventura is loud, obnoxious and very unfunny. He is just a disruptor and an energy leech. His line delivery only works because it’s scripted or fits the story.. I can not see him function without the confines of a story and if he was I do think the amount of energy he costs to interact with would make me physically sick.
Kirito is my answer for anime. Man dislike as a weak word for what I feel about Kirito, I find him one of the , if not THE weakest anime characters I have ever seen. Outside the virtual world I find him an incredibly obnoxious and unsympathetic person who introduces Asuna as his “friend” clearly hurting her,, after spending so much time with her in the first game. He does not feel like a guy his age at all, his family dynamic is super unhealthy and it feels like he belongs nowhere. In game I find him even worse. There are so many Deus Ex machina surrounding Kirito that he to me is the epitome of lazy writing. A duel wield skill just appearing.. Kirito in Gun Gale just concluding how the ploy worked out of absolutely nowhere. Excalibur and more.. The way he instantly adapts to Gungale and becomes a top tier player kills any form of tension because he has to be mister awesome. He is horrible to many of the women he interacts with, leading them on and on top of that he is super bland as well. I know that blandness is by design but i can still dislike that!
Strangers Things is one of these shows. While I watched and sort of liked the first season , I really could not bring myself to watch the second season. I have been trying since it came out. It’s one of those things I watched because people played D&D in it and there were some D&D monsters but it did not impact me at all. I watched it because a friend loved it, but I never was into it when that friend stopped talking about it and did it more as a thing for herself any and all motivation to watch this show dropped for me. It has nice music and I am glad it’s set in the 80’s cool that they use D&D stuff ..but It just makes me rather play D&D than watch this series.
For Anime I pretty much answered this with Code Geass and Sword Art Online.. but recently I had to add Tower of God to that list. Most people seem to really like that show but I found so many elements interchangeable, obviously telegraphed and the animation style was not appealing to me. It felt like a mishmash of better anime and much like Stranger Things it made me rather watch those instead. The intro was something I really could not get into , the names of all the characters I found super ugly. Like someone came up with these names during a coughing fit and just writing down the sounds he made.
Thirteen Reasons Why is a show that comes to mind when it comes to western media. It’s that type of show I do not really enjoy and while my mental health is going up every day, I do not want to be confronted with the theme of suicide. I have very conflicting feelings about it. From agreeing to Nietzsche to great hate of the subject it swirls inside me in a storm of conflict. Watching a show like this would not sit well with me and I personally don’t think I could get any joy from watching this show, nor that there is a way to convince me that this a story that should be told. What drives a person to this act is always very different from the one committing the act as those who are involved with that person, and yet again different to that of an outsider. When that act becomes fictional those thoughts and impacts become less meaningful and do not stem from a person but from a writer, we feel what the writer writes us to feel and I think that takes away from the subject matter.
13 REASONS WHY
For anime it has to be Vinland Saga. Nothing of that show appeals to me. I don’t like vikings, I don’t like the whole Warrior Group people thing. I do not like the art style or the colour pallete and the character designs all look very bland and background character or side character ish to me. They have that filler look. When a character is designed for filler they either look to extravagant or just a bit to boring but never really nail the mark. That is Vinland for me. The whole story doesn’t appeal to me at all and no matter how many people gush about it and tell me how good it is never ever had I felt any spark of picking it up or giving an episode a try. Nor will that ever happen.
For anime I think the Jojo Anime is vastly superior over the Manga, comedy in general is usually also something i find stronger in Anime form. Konosuba has better timing in it’s animated form than in it’s written/static form. Something just require, colour sound and motion to work better and I think Jojo is the most obvious pick for me to make clear why. It offers all that stuff so much more impactful in anime form.
For books and movies.. I am going to have to say. The Lord of the Rings! I bet that will be unpopular with a lot of purists. The Movie is SOOOOO much better than the movie. The books are to long, to convoluted and to old fashioned written to be a fun read. Maybe it is because my native language isn’t English but reading the books in English makes my head hurt. It drags in so many places. The songs written in there don’t work as I can not imagine the rhythm. When I try to read it in Dutch.. it is even worse because suddenly it doesn’t flow! Translations do modernise the language a bit which is welcome, but the books don’t always pace out that nicely. I would not call the English in the books to difficult just to archaic. It hasn’t aged that well. The movies are more modern and while flawed in their own way I think they have more of chance to appeal to an audience in the future.
Now I hope I ruffled some feathers and made a few people gulp.. because I tried hard to have an unpopular opinion. Yet that is all this is. My feelings towards these products are just that.. A pink geek blogger’s opinion! She wrote bardic verse around an egg! No need to take it all that seriously! That being said all these answers are completely sincere and not enlarged, this is how I feel. If you do not like it you will just have to deal with it. I actually think this tag is super important as we might be able to train our tolerance here a bit! I am not shallow, I do not misunderstand. These are my interpretations and I am entitled to them… just as much as you are to yours! Whatever the majority thinks has zero impact on how true these feelings are.. but speaking about your emotions…..
Time for some nominees! Do note that unlike me you do not have to do this for both movies and you can choose to go for either anime or whatever type of movies series you’d like.
I nominated Irina because I really like to see her talk about her dislikes as well! Those are a big mystery to me! Will we find out?!
I want to nominate Lyn the Otaku Author whom I haven’t visited in a while as I have been struggling to keep up on my reading due to how low my energy has been!
I would like to Nominate Iridium Eye who I know can make a very special post about this!
I also like to nominate Fred from Au Natural, he always introduces me to all sorts of new things! So maybe I can learn something from his posts again.
Finally I’d like to nominate K from K at the Movies. As I think this is the most likely one of all to create an interesting hybrid of series!
I also nominated Mari from Starting Life from Zero! She definitely got nominated first and has been here the whole time! You must have read over it if you missed it!
This nomination might have seemed camouflaged at first but it was totally there all along. Celestial Sparkles did a lot of fun things with the last tag I gave her so I totally nominated her for this!
Wooderon is also nominated because everyone using the Pokémon font on their banner must be a cool person! Much cooler than me! In order to compete I must make them speak unpopular opinions! Also if anyone asks! They were nominated all the time!
If you are not nominated but would like to be.. just tell me in the comments and trough time travel magic within a day or so you will find out you have been nominated in this post all along. People who have become Coconuts by supporting my KoFi are automatically nominated as well though I do keep the right to nominate them still! So if you like my content, would like to be nominated for all my tags by default.. please consider supporting my Kofi! Thanks for reading and I hope you all have a pleasant day.
It was the age that Dutch people massively saved their heads bald, put on track suits and spasmed to the beat of music like they were controlled by some unskilled puppeteer. It was the golden age for quiz shows and making people do weird stuff for money. Like there was a show where people had to do like a challenge like.. pee in your pants for a 1000 bucks you have 10 minutes to do so or find 11 people to slep in the face. It was the age where the adults did not wonder about YouTuber X tweeted or which , vaguely half assed celebrity cheated on their spouse and now they had to be destroyed for it.. no they sat on the couch ate some crisps and wondered if Ross and Rachel would ever get back together. I was a kid.. from the age of 4 up until 13. I did not know about those things, I just hoped that Shredder would not harm April O’Neil or that the Biker Mice from Mars would find their way home! Today we take a look at my 90’s!
I want to to thank Winst0lf Portal for tagging me for this one! I am going to have some fun with this one! Also a note, due to it requiring many clips from YouTube this post is not WordPress-Reader friendly.. please use the actual website to enjoy this post!
There are several answers to this question. What would be my favorite 90’s show in hindsight. That would probably be Friends! I still enjoy watching that so much! While it carried on into the 2000’s most of it was 90’s as heck. Back then I think I would have either said DuckTales or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but those are cartoons so I am no sure if the count. But in the end.. all things considered I am going to have to say the one that shaped me most and the one that I really went all out on was Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It is the perfect amalgamation of 90’s and what basically is anime! Kids with superpowers and giant combiner robots including multiple transformations and monsters of the week! I wrote Tommy Oliver if he wanted to be my boyfriend after Kim dumped him… I was young but I’d make a great pink ranger! I went to a life show in our concert halls! It was the best thing i had ever seen. While in truth it was not a lot better than the Turtles coming out of their shell tour! .. You really should watch that! Luckily you an right here! (If you are not reading this on WordPress Reader)
Power Rangers stuck with me until this day! I still like it! Ducktales I see got outdated and the new DuckTales series is soooo friggin good it ruined the old show for me. However while I have seen a lot of Power Rangers series and kept updated with more of them even if I could not watch, nothing beats that time capsule feeling of the original. Don’t get me wrong. Power Rangers in Space is like the absolute best series but MMPR is the closest thing to live changing. It introduced me to the concept of soap opera acting and I to this day think there has been no better Blue Ranger than Billy Cranston. Portrayed by David Yost. While Amy Jo Johnson’s Kimberly Hart always has a warm place in my heart I have to admit that my favorite Pink Ranger is Kendrix Morgan played by Valerie Vernon but now is not the time for that! It’s about the 90’s and yo do not get more 90’s than MMPR. The way we have socially grown since then, the outfits, the visual effects, the lessons and what ever kept our minds back then.. there is just so much in this show to remind me of those good old days! I also hate like a treasure chest full of Power Ranger toys so I must have really liked this show.
Honorable Mention to Buffy the Vampire Slayer by the way! I discovered it late.. which isn’t uncommon for us Dutch to get something fairly late but that is another thing that had me hooked and one of the first times I had a girl crush! Season one is from 1997 so I’d say it does count.. though the majority of it happend in the 2000’s But hey.. the winner still is MMPR! Another honourable mention is there for Pokémon, the anime aired here really soon and like Power Ranger it changed my live. Yet like with Buffy , the majoirty of it’s lifespan happend in the 2000’s so just a mention!
That time has come again for me to talk about THAT song! But before we do I am going to show you guys a few other songs. You see as I lived in the Netherlands.. back then we did a lot more “our own thing” rather than dub your shows or post all of america’s top hit songs in our charts.So while doing my tag I am showing you a bit of the dutch 90’s as well! The first song I am going to pick here is a bit more international. Of course I wanted to pick something some of you guys might have forgotten so no Barbie Girl from me! I love how much pink is in that clip though! Not even Toy Box with Best friend.. no instead we go with Bewitched with C’est La Vie!
Okay that one was not my favourite song. I mostly listened to dutch music as it was a lot easier for the by then still mono lingual me. When three Soap Opera Stars formed a girl group using character name to become the Netherlands most desired girl group , I was playbacking and singing along with this song! A song about the breathlessness after sex, but back then I did not know that. I just repeated the words and took it in the most innocent way possible.
I am sure that one was not very interesting to your guys though! It’s a bland clip and the words would make no sense. The other dutch song I am putting up here is something about a dutch group called Gabber’s. A variant of Ravers who would shave their heads, put on a lot of golden chains and would go do a dance named Hakkuh! Which basically would translate to something as Chopping. This got parodied by a dutch comedian and a group named Hakkuhbar and it resulted in this weirdness that I do hold dear. It is a pretty good representation of the “Gabber” Lifestyle.. though the music doesn’t reflect it that well, the Gabbers are still a thing today.. though a lot less of them! This is a real life style to people.. and this clip.. shows it’s quirks very well.
As for my favorite piece of 90’s music! Well in 1990’s a certain video game dropped here in the Netherlands and Japan. It was in America Early..but hey 1989 counts! My love for this song has been mentioned in many tag post and will continue to be mentioned so here it is!
While I don’t know many international adds from back in the time, again the Netherlands did a lot more of their own thing back then so here is a dutch commercial. This is a great commercial for an insurance company that .. despite the “victim” being outdated, would work today, just replace this man with anyone relevant of your choosing! I hope you enjoy this one!
Spice Girls! Girl Power and all! But if I had to choose between the two it would definitely be Back Street Boys! I never liked boy bands all that much but Backstreet’s Back was one of the better songs. I really never liked Justin Timberlake, like ever! Though in the 90’s he had some seriously Giorno Giovanna hair! But yeah Boy Bands always were aimed to make girls dream about boyfriends and make them feel a weird form of ticklish! I never got that so this appeal was lost on me! Not the biggest music fan either! I preferred the Smurfs cover famous music!… or video game music.
I guess Spice Girls here then? Maybe the smurfs?! I honestly do not really idolise music artists at all, Bon Jovi was alright! Robbie Williams had some nice songs.. but yeah I was not really a fan of anyone. I always had a thing for one trick ponies like Eiffel 65 and to lesser extend Lou Bega and of course Los Del Rio. A song captures me not an artist. I am going to with the Spice Girls! I think they would make an awesome anime.. maybe even a JoJo series with them as the main cast! Then again.. a Jojo with Los Del Rio Might even be better! They even already pose!
I was an avid Flippo collector, I am not sure if those existed overseas or if they were exclusively a dutch thing but they were super hype here. I think I saw some with other language prints.. but back then the world was a lot smaller so who knows! Little disks with Looney Tunes characters on it that you played a sort of slamming game with. You threw your Flippo on a stack of your opponents Flippo and everything that fell of the stack face up was yours to collect everything face down including the one you slammed with ..would belong to your opponent.
No one did that though it was just a trading commodity! We send our mothers to buy us the folders in which we could collect them and they came in bag of crisps so we ate like 2 bags a day and begged old ladies for their flippos. They spawned many incarnations including Pokémon spin offs, heavier variants in special flavor of chips and flying flippo’s which you could launch and something called topshots which were flippo’s but of soccer players. I even collected those even though I hate soccer. I once got two air packs of crisps in a row with tose as they really got poorly packaged and they just send met the entire set as an apology! I was so mad they ruined the fun of collecting for me now as well!
If we count the official ones not a lot, if we count the brandless ones about five. Not five different ones though, me and my sister would get one at the same time, and she would always end up abandoning them and I would try to save hers as well. So we got one of those things that grow up from blob into dino things, though I had a more chicken like creature. I lost that one on a vacation and then I had my sisters dino for a while ..but that one could no longer be silenced anymore after one of the buttons broke and one day it disappeared from my room never to be found again ..weirdly enough.. I guess it went to go live on a farm. The third and fourth one was a really weird dog like thing with a hat.. me and my sister got the same thing. That one did not die if you left it alone either, it would take a little handkerchief and tie it to a stick and just walk out of the tamagotchi, it would abandon you. The problem was that thing was super fickle! Like even if you took the best care of it in the world it could still decide to walk out on you for no reason at all. So my sister quickly gave up on hers and I tried to maintain two! Eventually their batteries ran out and that was the end of them.
Sorry for the Stock Image! Try finding the image of a bootleg Tamagotchi!
The final one was a birthday gift my sister had gotten.. it was a dog that could talk and it had a lot more functions.. but the twist was.. it did not walk around on your screen.. it was the device the screen was just it’ face. So instead of playing games you had to wipe crummies off it’s face and do a sort of Simon Says with it. That one I loved the most but eventually that one ran out of batteries as well and I could not be stuffed to begin all over with it all again. Not that long after that Pokémon would come out anyway so I had now virtual pets that were just as cute but a lot less stressful to maintain.
This was your screen on the final one.. minus the colour and the sleep at night.
Ducktales for NES is one of the contenders of favorite video games but my favorite console definitely was the SNES! My glory days of gaming! While I loved all Nintendo Consoles to bit up until the Wii , which almost made me renounce Nintendo for a while, the SNES is always my highlight.
While Nowadays I’d arguable say Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VI/III are my favorite games in quality I am going to have to say Donkey Kong Country takes the cake for my favorite 90’s gaming experience. I was so proud when I finally beat it! The music the graphics and the overall gameplay was so amazing for it! I vastly preferred it’s platforming over Mario’s. Beating an enemy felt so much more satisfying and the level design back then to me was unparalleled. While there are games I acknowledge are better this is one of the games I could always be asked to play and I will always enjoy myself with even if it’s just to look at it!
I can’t remember if we ever had cereal toys, I do remember that for quite a while though I was really into the rice based cereal. Like Coco Puffs or Rice Crispies but I really alternated. One of the best cereal memories I have though is that of Kellogs Frosties. Back in the 90’s I would stay over and my grandparents , who lived in the same town, a lot. It would often be a break from my sister. I was always a kid that really thrived on some alone time. While Grandma was always overly caring she would often let me wander her big garden or the big house alone! I could play hours finding some old board games she had trying to understand the rules, or wandering on the 7 meter sound wall her garden was edges off with, I would always be up fairly early because she woke up very early and she would make me a soft boiled egg and I would get this beautiful little crystal bowl with super cold milk we got in a very special supermarket in Belgium where I could eat my Frosties from.. after the soft boiled egg was finished. We always made our egg super salty so the milky and sugary stuff afterwards were really good! I would come back home so relaxed and thoroughly overfed.
I was 13 when the 90’s ended! I wasn’t very feminine and mostly into geek stuff. Like Power Rangers but also Dark Wing Duck and I had a big thing for classic monsters. Horror books but also pseudo-scientific books on how Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies worked. I wasn’t to busy with a crush back in the days. So no one really. Maybe Really late in the 90’s I began picking up Buffy the Vampire slayer and I realised much much later that it might have actually been a crush I felt towards Buffy.. and later when I became more self aware for Willow.. though as the series progressed into the fifth season and beyond I’d lose those crushes on both of them. Phoebe Buffay is another 90’s character I ended up having a bit of a thing for but again .. not in the 90’s !… They are 90’s characters though so you can decide if they count. I never got into that Backstreet boy love thing though! Nor did I ever had a Celebrity crush aside from Deborah Ann Woll.
Ducktales the movie! We did not have the Disney Channel but I am pretty sure that one would count right? The one with the magic lamp? The scorpions! It once aired belgian tv and we videotapes it and I watched the heck out of that! Those wishes, that ending.. I loved it so much! The villain scared me for a bit but I watched this movie until the video began breaking. The sound began to go off key and more and more wear began to show on the tape from rewinding it so much! I loved it more than the show and that already was very dear to me! Not my favorite show back then because some episodes weren’t all that good but this movie made me happy every single time!
Now this one is tricky, we had none of those networks in the actual 90’s they all came to us much later, or required some expensive additional package for tv to access. The shows that did reliable air where the Disney shows that usually aired on the Belgian public access channel that me as a kid living near the border could view without any trouble. I loved Gummi Bears, Rescue Rangers and Duck Tales but I guess I have to say my favorite one was Darkwing Duck! It was so funny and zany! I really liked that almost “fake” hero thing he had going on for him. It was cool to see a hero who is often plagued by bad luck. His analogies stuck with me for a long time as well! Darkwing Duck is the reason why I hate Talespin..as it was the show that replaced it. Back than I was really fickle and just replacing my favorite shows was enough reason for me to hate you with a passion!
Velcro shoes! I know that isn’t as zany but I was hardly going to shave my head and put on a track suit now was I?! I was bullied for a large part of the 90’s as well, (like from 1994 onwards) so my clothing was usually to be as stealth as possible , also something that would not be to bad to ruin when kids threw their juice boxes at me or squished worms all over…so I wore very casual stuff with shoes I could not trip over.. It was not enough to run away as I had a weird motor dysfunction that made me slow and clunky.. but at least I managed to run away a few times when I was absolutely terrified..so a good practical trend. Poor worms that died to bully me! Of course shoes back then had to have light in them so you had to turn that on before you ran away! So that is kinda weird?!
Power Rangers…with barbie/ mini clothes on! I never liked playing with barbies or something like that to much. She always felt like a shallow girl to me! Kimberly and Trini were much more interesting people! I would play the wedding between Tommy Oliver and Kimberly heart a million times dressing them up in barbie clothes which either were way to large or we had adapted. It would not always be a happy wedding though.. Lord Zed would come over and turn their wedding cake into a monster or send Pudgey Pig to eat their wedding buffet. Or they would go to a movie date together and I would just sit them next to me and watch a movie! …Most of the time that Ducktales one.. Sometimes my stories would also be a bit more messed up.. like when Kimberly got stung to death by Grumble Bee which was actually a Bee on a bouquet given to her by Tommy. Tommy who caused her death killed himself from guilt but also in the hope he can find her in the after life. But he gets send to hell and now has to use his ranger powers to battle an army of demons..which were the small soldiers from that terrible movie! I had all those as toys as well.
None of the above we did not have them as channels here! We did get Fox Kids though! Which would be by choice! I remember on wednesdays they had this block of action cartoons named Power Rock which had shows such as Spiderman TAS and X-men TAS. The Tick was also part of that solid line up. During the day there was amazing stuff like Eek the Cat! It also had Power Rangers and Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog!
That really depended on my mood, we had three major cartoon sources. We had Kindernet, which had awesome shows like Earthworm Jim, Bouli de Sneeuwpop (Bouli the Snowman) Maple Town and Star Street. While some are actually 80’s show they ran until deep into the 90’s. I could not get rid of Nils Holgersson even if I tried!
Telekids had stuff Animaniacs but also a lot of ecological stuff like Seabert the Seal , WNF Ranger kids, and of course Captain Planet. Their sunday would be a bit “nature” themed. While on Saturday they would hold a big live show filled with skits, and games , it was super fun. For example there was this segment where kids had to ride derpy cowbot-hatted horse named Harry. Just before afternoon the hosts would do a skit show of our most famous soap opera!
Fox Kids finally would hold the cartoons that one might identify most with Saturday Morning Cartoons, shows like Kidd Video, Biker Mice from Mars, Street Sharks and Inspector Gadget. Fox Kids was usually my go-to but it all depended on my mood.
I actually never really liked McDonalds, I did not like the food and I never really got the toys I wanted. One I remember very vividly was a Flounder from The Little Mermaid that was like a squirt gun! I wanted that as a Bath toy but all I got was stupid Prince Eric! One I did kinda like was those disney figures of Beauty and the Beast and most of their disney stuff. I loved the dress changing Belle Toy a lot! I was upset though there was no Lumiere toy! He was my favourite character! I liked show people and the singing and dancing.. perhaps that’s why I like Idol Girl shows this much nowadays?! I also loved those Disney Characters in a car or train thing.. but those were hard to make a nice story to play with!
Back then it was definitely horror , I was a big collector of those Goosebumps books by RL Stein my favorite one was Horrorland which got sold so short in the tv series adaptation the book was so much better. Yet my favorite book would definitely be “De Griezelbus 2 or 3” Griezelbus was a dutch book series written by Paul van Loon, in which a writer by the name of P Onnoval would lure kids into a trap to eat them. In the first part he is werewolf and by telling them horror stories he tries to wait for the full moon to eat them.
He travels around in a bus that holds props that each tell a story but secretly he is trying to isolated these kids. Part 2 is set in a car graveyard, kids stumble upon the bus as a radio voice begins to tell them stories to stall them until Onnoval now a vampire can rise from his grave and feast on them. In Part 3 he is even further destroyed and is now a virtual presence.. the bus now has become a museum piece and as a special the museum hosts a fake story telling by the dead writer.. and all the kids experience horror stories in virtual reality. In each story a character dies or nearly dies.. but what the kids do not know is that one kid.. experiences the story they see first person.. they are tricked into thinking they are dead. Once weakened Onnoval can choose the body he wants to possess and dispose of the others without resistance.
This book came out in 1997 and while Book 4 had my absolute favorite short story I think the virtual reality and forcing children to experience their own death trough horror experiences was the strongest book to me!
Like I mentioned earlier Power Rock on Wednesday was my jam. Power Rangers, Mystic Knights of Tir na Nog! I loved that stuff, but I think it was on Tuesdays but I can not remember there was this show called the Droom Show on our public access channels. In this show kids would compete in about an eightish number of settings.. each episode had another set.. like Medieval, Undersea or Candy Factory and Horror, each “dream” had its own games where kids could compete for the highest score and in the end they could participate in a price game. Which could win them gameboys, tv’s but also stuff like a day to a theme park or new pyjamas and cool notebooks. Tests of agility , intellect and strength would come into play in one of the best children game shows I saw and I was completely silent when watching this after school! Sure nowadays this would not fly anymore but to a kid this was amazing!
I miss a lot of things, some I can’t even say without trouble. I guess the best way to summarise it is I miss the inconvenience of the 90’s in some cases. How hard it was to get a copy of a game. You had to go out to the store to buy a game, you could only multiplayer by having friends over.. there were only so many screens people in house could watch so you had to make compromises. Video games weren’t always good but if you made a bad buy you just had to suck it up and try again. Nowadays we don’t have to put any effort into anything anymore. A bad video game can be so burned to the ground because you have a new video game within seconds. People who play Fortnite are often so insanely toxic to another because it no longer is hard to see what exactly happened, people have access to how they humiliate you, in slow mode and normal as well in high quality, they can stream it online with the push of a button and there are millions of others who play that shitstain of a game with them so if you suck.. they can just bully you out of there and only have a penalty for like a second. In the 90’s .. matchmaking was a hassle non existent if it was .. it’s a huge hassle. You could not ridicule your opponent because if they left.. you had no one to play with. Even if they picked Oddjob in Golden Eye!
To rent a video or a game you needed to go to a store, talk to people learn about other cool games.. now you can just type the name in a search bar tab a button on your phone and your playing exactly what you want.. this has resulted into a lot of people having a super small world. An anime is only good if it scores a certain MAL rating right now, a movie with a Rotten Tomato score below 50% isn’t worth watching.. back then we did not have that we had to experiment as a result we would be much more grateful to the good stuff. I really wish that we had the social-cultural understanding of today mixed with the gratefulness for any shape or form of content of back then.. only then I think people can be really open minded..
This had SOOOO Many questions! This took me a lot time! I was afraid the next 90’s might have come! But it was very fun to do! So time to tag some people!
First of all I would like to tag my Blogging Bestie Foovay! Who I am sure will have a different look in this than me!
Second I wouild like to Tag Geek Girl Joy. I am curious to see what her childhood is like!
Thirdly I would like to tag Lita Kino, who I know is a Pokémon and Power Ranger loser like me! So I am eager to find what else we have in common!
If you want to participate you can answer this question! What is Pinkie’s Power Ranger? Of course all my Coconuts are automatically tagged so check out if you are a Coconut or become one by supporting my Kofi! I will see you in the next blog! Now I I can finally get out of this ridiculous outfit!
Pinkie's Paradise 