Cooking with John, Week of 9/28/03

Picture Book and Contest
As I mentioned yesterday, some of you wrote in recently so I'm going to answer a couple of your letters today.

Heather writes:
Congrats on the marriage! Hope everything goes well for you! What was Christine's dress like? Haha wedding dresses are so pretty... haha well you probably don't care to tell me but whatever. Congratulations!
~Heather

Well Heather, instead of trying to explain it to you, I'll just show you.

Christine looked fantastic that day. When she came around the corner and started walking down the isle I nearly shit myself.

I don't enjoy looking at other people's vacation pictures so I'll assume that you folks don't either. However, let me quickly show you the view from our room.





I'm telling you, stepping off the plane into 42 degree Minnesota weather was like a slap in the face after that week.

Steve wants to tell me what happened in my abscence:
Hey Man, Welcome back!
As soon as the GameCube price drop hit, I went out and picked up StarFox Adventures because I am too cheap to pay $50 for a Rare game. After coming home, being afraid I would have no time with work and school, I broke my ankle
and spent four hours in Urgent Care.

Now I can play StarFox Adventures for the next couple of weeks since I'm not allowed to do anything else! You know what? The game is not all that bad!

Later...
Steve

Bummer about the ankle, Steve. But you may be onto something. Perhaps I can use your method to catch up on this pile of games sitting in front of me.

To be honest, I never gave Star Fox Adventures a shot. I tend to take Joe's gaming advice to heart and after reading his review and talking to him about it, I decided to pass it up. Frankly, I was never completely sold on the Rare "magic". Sure, I enjoyed the hell out of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark and Diddy Kong Racing still is a better game than Mario Kart 64 in my eyes, but their platformers never really tripped my trigger. To be fair, I did have a good amount of fun with Banjo-Kazooie and Conker, but their games always take so freaking long to release and their quality never seems to warrant such inexplicable development times.

Anyway, I didn't mean to make this a dissertation on Rare. I'm glad you're enjoying the game. Thanks for writing in.

Well, as the title of this entry suggested, it's time for yet another Cooking With John Contest. I lost count. Is this contest seven or eight? Either way, this time around I'm playing to the Lord of the Rings freaks out there. Up for grabs is a package that includes a Lord of the Rings tote bag, a Two Towers movie photo book, and a complete set of New Line's Lord of the Rings promo buttons. Check it out:



It's pretty cool stuff that usually isn't released to the general public, so you LOTR fanatics should be pleased.

Now the catch: as you may or may not know, we've been working on redesigning and relaunching the site. In doing so, we've been brainstorming on new features, both cosmetic and content wise. We've toyed with countless ideas, some of which would even completely alter the type of content we deliver. For this contest, I'd like you to submit some ideas for what you'd like to see on this gaming site to make it unique from the 22,000 other gaming sites out there. Videos, cartoons, comics, TV style shows, etc. Anything you can come up with. My ears are open. I'll select one of you as the winner of that cool Lord of the Rings swag.

Good luck!

John




Birth of the Lowdown
I’m finding it more difficult to get into the swing of things than I had anticipated. Though the event is over, adjusting to reality seems to be taking some time.

And by “reality” I mean playing games and writing about them. The only proper game I’ve played in the past two weeks has been FFTA, and that was only during my excruciatingly long layovers. Billy Hatcher has been sitting politely in his plastic wrap for nearly a week and I haven’t even given Boktai a second glance. The long and short of it is than I am exhausted. Hell, simply writing this random train of thought column seems to be a laborious task of epic proportions in my cloudy brain.

Speaking of layovers, I officially hate Florida. It would figure that the state that brought us election scandals, terrorist flight training, and more boy bands than you can shake a rubber penis at would bring me the one single mar of the entire wedding/honeymoon experience. I spent nearly seven hours in Miami International Airport, which conveniently contains not one single proper restaurant within the gated area, missed three separate flights, and nearly lost my post vacation cool because one idiotic American Airlines Customer “Service” rep didn’t know her head from her asshole. If you live in Florida, move the hell out. The only good thing your god-forsaken state has ever brought to this world is Tom Petty. We should just sever that damn peninsula from the rest of the country and let it float to hell where it belongs.

And this is coming from a guy that grew up in Wisconsin. Yeah, that’s right.

I’d like to relay to you a little conversation I had with a cab driver in Barbados. The roads in Barbados are not exactly up to the relatively smoothly paved standards that they are here in the states. While they do seem to have blacktop upon their surface, the act of paving these roads seems to have happened haphazardly. When asked when they pave their roads in Barbados, the driver replied, “During election time.”

The cab drivers are, for the most part, very friendly and anxious to chat with their passengers. This particular driver was no different, and somehow throughout the course of the conversation, world politics came up. Barbados is as far as I’ve traveled from the U.S. in about five years, so it was really interesting to hear what people of different nationalities think of our country, and more specifically, our president. During the political conversation, the driver referred back to our chat about the condition of the roads. He said, “You know, if our Prime Minister were smart, he’d poke your president’s ribs a bit and irritate him enough to start a war. Then we’d lie down and let him rebuild our country for us like he’s doing with Iraq. Barbados could certainly use $87 billion.”

Isn’t that lovely?

I’ve received some letters from a few of you, and I’ll be posting them soon.

John



To Live and Die in Barbados
Greetings! Well, it’s October and as promised I am back, having metamorphosed into what society has termed “the Married Man.” I apologize for having inundated you with the ins and outs of engaged life and the minutia that was the planning of the big day, and I’ll try to spare you the trauma of having to deal with me rambling on and on about how said day turned out. I’ll limit it to this: the actual day of the wedding was picture perfect. 65 degrees and sunny, and not a single crisis or breakdown in the plan. The dinner and reception were surprisingly enjoyable with friends I haven’t seen in years showing up and joining the celebration.

Then there was the honeymoon. My friends, Barbados was nothing short of spectacular. We did everything, from going to the bottom of the ocean in a submarine to hiring a catamaran and sailing the Caribbean for an entire day. It will truly be one of the more memorable experiences of my entire life.

So that’s that for now. I apologize for the incredibly brief visit, but I’m still getting acclimated to what’s going on around the site. It seems a few things have changed, but hey, at least that familiar Final Fantasy Tactics Advance review is still sitting on our main page from over a week ago. So there’s some familiarity. I apologize for that, and will try to get it taken care of ASAP. It might be nice for Nintendo fans to have something fresh to read, eh?

I’ll be back later with an attempt to get us back in the swing of things with our normal ranting and raving about everything and nothing at the same time. In the meantime, drop me a line and let me know what you’ve been up to for the past two weeks.

John

Last Week

Feature by John Luedtke