I first played this game when I was a little girl. I have always been a big fan of Mario, ever since our family first got a Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988. I played all of the Super Mario games over and over, learned all of the warp zones, and got to know the games like the back of my hand.

I saw this for rent at Video King, so I had to pick it up. It had all of the Super Mario NES games for the Super Nintendo with updated visuals, sound, and music, but it also had a game I never heard of before – “Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels”. That was first game that I played when I got home, but after dying a dozen or so times, I chose to save and quit and beat the other three Super Mario games that I knew so well.

I finally came back to The Lost Levels today. I have completed all of the Super Mario games, except for the Gameboy games and Super Mario Galaxy, so The Lost Levels seemed like a lost piece in my gaming history. It was just as hard as I remember it, but luckily my reflexes have gotten a bit better, and I’ve gotten a lot more patience since then (YouTube videos showing game play-throughs don’t hurt either :P). I found it to be much more enjoyable this time around. It was fun to see things in this game that would later make it into Super Mario Bros. 3, such as the piranha plants that pop up even if you stand on their pots, and upside down piranha plants.

The poison mushroom was also a lot less menacing now than I remembered it being. It was quite easy to avoid them, since it was easy to spot due to being purple. Super Mario Bros. was inspired by Alice in Wonderland, with Mario entering a strange world and especially with him eating mushrooms that made him grow large. The poison mushrooms here answer something that I always thought odd about Mario, and by association Alice in Wonderland. The characters go to a strange land where everything is different than anything they’ve seen before, and they has no problem putting foreign objects in their mouth. It’s just lucky Mario is given multiple lives, I doubt Alice would have had it so good.

All four games were well worth the playtime. I love the Super Mario games we got over here in the USA on the NES to death, and it was great to play them with updated visuals. The sound and music sounded great coming from my surround sound speakers. Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels was fun to play to see the direction the series was headed, and to experience the world of the first Super Mario Bros. game with different level layouts and gameplay twists. It’s great that Super Mario All-Stars has unlimited continues and let you start at the beginning of the last level you died on after a Game Over, I doubt I would have been able to complete The Lost Levels otherwise.

Dr. Mario is a very addictive puzzle game, right up there with Tetris as an enjoyable time-passer. I first played Dr. Mario when my sister and I went to the Nintendo World Championships at the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey in 1990 with our dad. They had kiosks of their upcoming games, and Dr. Mario is the only one that I remember. It was so much fun that I had a hard time pulling myself away.

When I finally got the game though, it was my mom that became the Dr. Mario addict. She would play the game way into the wee hours of the morning, beating the game on the “hi” setting, playing it after the ending until she lost, and then beating it again.

I became quite addicted to it as well, but not quite to the level of my mom. I’ll play the game on “hi”, and beat it, and usually I’ll set the game aside for another day. My favorite song out of the two is “fever”. It’s a fast, upbeat song, and for some reason faster songs get me in the groove when I’m playing puzzle games. My mom prefers “chill”, as “fever” makes her nervous.

We’ve played the 2 player game quite a bit, and it’s quite fun to throw blocks down on the other players game when you make combos. It’s quite nerve wracking when you are the one who receives the blocks. The jingle that plays when the blocks are coming sends out a ton of “oh no!”’s from all of my family who’s played it.

The cutscenes in the game are odd, but I love them (I seem to love a lot of odd things :) ). They have everything from flying pigs, to witches, to weird things like flying books (I wonder if the flying books in Super Mario 64 came from this game). The final cutscene at the end of level 20 on “hi” is by far the weirdest scene in the whole game. Needless to say, it’s also my favorite. :D

Zak McKracken is not one of my favorite games by LucasArts, but it was worth playing. There are a few things that I didn’t like about the game. It has a free-roaming atmosphere that lets you travel from airport to airport in any order that you wish. Unfortunately, this costs money, and it is possible to get yourself stuck in a dead end by doing this. I first played the game when I purchased the LucasArts Classic Adventures pack, and the copy protection used was one of the most annoying I’ve come across. You had to enter a code from the manual each time you used the terminal at the airport. Since air travel is such a huge part of this game, that quickly became a tiresome task. The game is also full of mazes. Some mazes, such as the forest mazes, were able to be navigated by blind clicking, but other mazes, such as those in Egypt and on Mars were real chores. I never liked mazes in adventure games, as they seemed to be more of a time waster than a puzzle. Those mazes and the annoying copy protection caused me to put down Zak McKracken quite a few times before I finally completed it. In fact, I never did finish the game until years later when I played it on ScummVM.

There are some positives about the game though. The game has quite a few references to Maniac Mansion, and since Maniac Mansion was my first taste of LucasArts adventure games, I got a huge kick out of those. The humor in the game is quite weird and funny, using Zak McKracken’s career as a tabloid reporter to full advantage. The game takes quite a few jabs at tabloid reporting in general, and also plays around with the notion that most of the tabloid news that is reported is actually real news. I love the line where Zak complains that he wants to report meaningful news instead of making up stupid stories, and the boss tells Zak to “make up stories that aren’t stupid”. The game’s theme song is also great, and it even sounded good on the old PC speaker.

All that being said, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is a hard and frustrating game. But, I don’t regret taking the time to complete it, since the strange but gripping story and the wacky humor made up for it’s shortcomings in my opinion.

I love the B-52’s! I listened to Love Shack and (Meet) The Flintstones many times when I was a young girl. Donkey Konga introduced me to Rock Lobster, which I still can’t get out of my head.

When I read that the B-52’s were releasing a new album, I knew that I had to check it out. I saw that their first single, Funplex, was available for purchase on iTunes, so I immediately downloaded iTunes just for that one song.

The song was great. It is very catchy, all three of the B-52’s vocalists perform in it, and best of all it has their trademark zaniness in it in spades.

I’m going to put this song on my next exercise CD. It’s got a great upbeat sound, and it’s catchy as all get-out. I can’t get it out of my head, at least until Rock Lobster creeps back in. :)

This is probably the first album by Weird Al where I only enjoyed a quarter of the songs on the album. The four that I enjoyed were White and Nerdy, Polkarama!, Do I creep you out, and Don’t Download this Song.

White and Nerdy was hilarious, and the music video for the song is definitely my favorite video that Weird Al has ever done. I can watch that video again and again. It’s a shame that he couldn’t get the video done in time to have it included on the DVD side of the dual disc. The videos that are on there aren’t my cup of tea. Some of them are fun to watch once, but I’m not very likely to ever watch any of them again.

Weird Al’s polkas have never disappointed me, and this one held true to that. I didn’t know some of the songs in the song at first, but the ones that I did know had me rolling in stitches as always to Weird Al’s strange polka retooling. Once I saw the video on Al-TV and recognized more songs, I began to enjoy Polkarama! even more. It’s a shame the Al-TV compilations of the polka medleys can’t be included on a video DVD, as the songs are even funnier when the videos are sped up to match them. :)

Do I creep you out is another song that is even funnier when you watch the video. The style of animation employed is to animate photographs, so it gives a kind of semi-realistic creepy vibe to the final product, which is perfect for this song. Like White and Nerdy, it’s a shame that this song wasn’t made in time to be included on the disc. As it stands, I only find the disc itself to be worth the price when I factor in the videos that can be found elsewhere.

Luckily those videos are funny enough to make me remember them even when I hear the song by itself, so I found “Straight Outta Lynwood” to be worth my purchase for the four songs I liked.

I haven’t read a play by William Shakespeare since high school, and I didn’t appreciate his work back then. So, when I saw “The Tempest” in a box from my grandmother’s book collection, I decided to read it with a fresh perspective.

When a duke named Prospero is betrayed by his own brother, he takes his step daughter on a ship to a deserted island. On the island, the Duke collects spell books and becomes a powerful sorcerer. He raises his step-daughter as his own daughter and refuses to tell her the truth about himself and herself until the right moment.

One day, Prospero’s brother, who now has taken the title of Duke for himself, is out at sea with his son, coming back home after attending the marriage of his granddaughter. Prospero uses his power to summon spirits to wash the ships and their crews on the island he fled to many years ago.

I found this story very enjoyable. It displayed all of the basic human emotions in the characters: greed, desire, lust, love, revenge, and compassion. After reading this play, I’m going to be sure to check out more of Shakespeare’s work in the future.

“Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii” is a fun book. With this book, Lee Goldberg takes Monk to an exotic locale that would not be possible to do on the television show. Natalie has to go to Hawaii to a wedding, and Mr. Monk tags along since he feels he can not handle himself at home alone without her. To avoid a situation like “Mr. Monk and the Airplane”, Adrian Monk once again takes the medicine that makes him less worried about phobias but, in the words of Dr. Kroger, “makes him a lousy detective”. It was fun to once again see Monk on medication, something he has not done since “Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine”. Monk acts like a completely different person when on the medicine. Once the medicine wears off though, that is where the fun begins. Monk stumbles onto an accident that he feels is a murder. He has to deal with his phobias in an environment to which he is not accustomed, and solve the case in the process. I laughed out loud when Monk is confronted with lizards in a restaurant. My sister lived in Guam for a while, and through her I know that those little green guys are everywhere over there. It was amusing to see how Monk handled himself in that situation, which suffice to say, was not very well. Mr. Goldberg is still coming to terms with the characters as this is only his second book in the series. So, there are some instances where Mr. Monk does things that he would not do in the show. Still, those instances are few and far between and it did not spoil my enjoyment of this book.

“Mr. Monk in Outer Space” is another great entry in the series of books by Lee Goldberg based on the television show, “Monk”. This book has Monk discovering who murdered the creator of a popular science fiction show. In doing so, he must face the fans of the show, people who are more obsessive than even he is. He also must get help from the one person in the world who knows more about the show than anyone else: his brother Ambrose. It’s great to see Ambrose again. Ambrose has only shown up in the television show two times previously, so it’s great to see the Monks together again. My favorite part of this book though, has to be it’s depiction of Lieutenant Randy Disher. He is depicted here with much more respect than he is ever given in the series. He is shown to be a competent detective, although he is over-zealous in his work. I always felt that there was more to Randy’s character than shown on the show, and Mr. Goldberg’s books prove that this assumption is true.

“Mr. Monk and the two Assistants” is my favorite of the Monk books by Lee Goldberg, so far. In fact, it is one of the best stories to ever feature Mr. Monk, televised or in print. In this book, as he did with “Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii”, Mr. Goldberg puts Monk in a situation that could not be done on the television series. This time, Natalie’s daughter Julie breaks her arm and Natalie has to take her to the hospital, with Monk in tow. There she meets a nurse who seems to know a lot about Monk. Monk stands speechless as soon as he hears her voice, since it turns out the nurse is Monk’s former nurse and assistant Sherona Fleming. It is great to be able to see the two assistants together. Sherona’s husband was arrested for murder. He claims he’s innocent, but due to his shady past Sherona does not believe him and leaves for San Francisco with her son Benjy. Natalie wants Monk to take on the case so that Sherona will move back to New Jersey, and Monk wants to let him stay in prison so Sherona will stay in San Francisco. The characters are portrayed brilliantly in this book. Each line of dialog is written in such a way that you can hear the voices of the actors from the show in your head as you read them. It’s great to see Sherona again. I liked her character a lot, but I have grown to like Natalie as well as the show has progressed. It’s great to see how the two women feel about each other. They have a lot of differences, but they have a lot of similarities as well, and it’s not just that they care for Mr. Monk.

“Mr. Monk and The Blue Flu” is my second favorite book in the series after “Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants”. In this book, most of the San Francisco police department calls in sick due to poor pay and the fact that police officers can not go on strike. The mayor is left without most of the city’s police force and is forced to rehire some of the officers that the city has had to let go in the past. Due to the high amount of cases that Monk has solved for the city as a private consultant, Monk is hired on as the acting captain of homicide, temporarily taking over Leland Stottlemeyer’s position. It’s great to see Monk back under the employ of the SFPD again. I would love to see this book adapted into an episode of the series, as “Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse” was adapted into “Mr. Monk Can’t See a Thing”. The book really does feel like a long episode of the television series.