Sega GT Online is rubbish. Sega GT Online has cancers. Sega GT Online is the do-nothing father of my children.

I was rummaging through my game vault the other day.

Wait. Let's back up a bit for a history lesson.

I have a huge safe on a hill in the middle of Rothburg that I keep filled with all my games. Inside said safe is a diving board where I can plunge into my collection and swim around like a very uncomfortable lunatic. Please note that I have not done this. I was sitting at the end of my diving board contemplating my life when I spotted a disc I haven't spun in years: Sega GT Online. Looking back I should have just committed a lethal belly-flop into a tank full of jewel cases and HuCards.



Sega GT Online is an update to a sequel to a Dreamcast game that aimed at beating Sony at their own hundred-plus auto simulator. Judging by the number of Sega GT fanclubs and the game itself it seems they failed. I once compared the control of Pretty Fighter to that of sticking the gamepad up your ass and contracting your sphincter to press the buttons and it appears Sega succeeded in bringing that experience to the racing genre. It's not as if the controls are unresponsive, no; control problems lie squarely in the physics. Instead of giving the player the sensation of tire grip the programmers decided to simulate racing conditions if they happened underwater. If you could translate Mushmouth dialogue into physics you'd have the soupy-handling cars of Sega GT.

It doesn't stop with the wonderful driving experience either. Each car appears to be made of hardened sugar, with paint finishes that would make Willy Wonka envious. This would be truly fantastic if automobiles in real life looked edible. I've learned from experience that they are, in fact, not edible. Inside all that saccharine lies the heart of a multi-million DUI champion that I've lovingly dubbed "RAMN2U AI". Even though there's no cosmetic or functional damage there is a damage metre which, when when depleted (by hitting anything) will reduce the winnings one receives at the end of an event. Regardless of who hits whom, if two cars make contact you receive a damage penalty so using cars as barriers to assist in making turns is not the greatest idea.



Punitive damage doesn't stop the ingenious RAMN2U AI's muderous intent however. To them you don't even exist, which is just as well because you'll wish you didn't exist after an extended race on any of Sega GT's thirty or so uninspired tracks. Every course was painstakingly designed by Yu Suzuki's mentally and physically handicapped cousin to be as flat and forgettable as possible. I don't mean flat in this regard to mean lifeless though one could certainly apply it here but I intend that they are literally flat. The roads sort of meander and twist because that's what real race tracks do, I suppose, but they forgot the basic lessons learned by Columbus and his compatriots. The world is indeed curved and lumpy and if it weren't you'd kill yourself from boredom.

Sega GT's not all bad, though. It does have a Bugatti, which means this game stops just short making me feel raped by a rodeo clown and that's good enough for me.

I gave away the best surprise.

I just finished watching Re-Cycle, a Chinese horror movie known in the east as . It is the latest and greatest film out of Hong-Kong that I've seen, and watching this forced me to face the realization that I'd completely wasted my time watching The Ring and Dark Water. Perhaps it would have been more to my benefit to watch the original versions rather than the fuckups from the US.

At any rate, the first feeling one gets from the spookier bits is an air of familiarity. I couldn't help but compare what I was seeing and hearing to Silent Hill; the filmmakers decided to utilise dim lighting and dilapidated setwork seemingly inspired from that series, not to mention tense moments punctuated by a very Yamaoka-ish score. It didn't really help that they used the reprise of "Promise" from Silent Hill 2 in the deleted scenes montage.

It starts off creepily enough, but about halfway through it forgets it's a horror movie and does this sort of Taiwanese Alice in Wonderland thing as the main character tries to escape The Nothing by jumping from set to set with Exposition Girl in tow. It's not until shortly after the Hall of Fetuses that the director remembers what he's doing and reintroduces the big bad, who's apparently been on the protagonist's tail the whole time. After a stop in a field of flowers, we learn that the undead don't accept credit cards and are led to the resolution that, while a tad preachy, is still rather touching. Of course, like most good horror what haunts us never really leaves and oh my did I spoil that? You should be ashamed if you expected anything else.

I could take the movie apart further but when it comes down to it I enjoyed myself amid the fantastically-realised visuals and well-characterised lead and her phantom cohort.

Hilldale Community College

I lieu of actually having some content, here's a terrible thing I put together a month back.