LASER GHOST

You shoot lasers at ghosts.

You can play with three players in the arcade version. Each player has their own laser gun with which they can use to shoot lasers at the ghosts that pop up. There's nothing sweeter than that.

There really doesn't seem to be any story to it, you're just kinda some chick who gets lost and then ghosts attack you. You counter them by shooting lasers at them. Laser Ghost.

I'd give it a three but it's severely lacking in narrative.

GHOSTBUSTERS FOR THE MASTER SYSTEM

In honor of the next-gen Ghostbusters video game being delayed indefinitely, I thought I'd take you all for a trip down memory lane and review a game I'm sure all of you have played: Ghostbusters for the Sega Master System.

I'll go ahead and spoil this one for you right now: this game really bites. Hard. You're given some money to buy weapons and car parts, and then you ride around town finding buildings infected with ghosts. You use a capture device, which looks like a shitty trampoline, and then you suck up some ghosts.

It switches from overhead view to side-scrolling view frequently, just like the movie. Also, sometimes you go to your headquarters to pick up more parts or an extra character. I believe all of the characters are white, of course, which means Ernie Hudson's character never existed since this game is perfectly canon.

There's a better ghost-zapping game on the Master System and it's called Laser Ghost. Seriously, all you do is shoot ghosts with lasers.

THE COVER OF DRACULA

You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can still judge the cover. Which is what I'm going to do. Booyah.

Tonight we're judging this cover of Dracula, the Back Bay Books edition with a foreword by Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian, which is a different book. This cover is quite literally a close-up photograph of a "velvet pattern", probably one of the publishing staffers' great aunt's tablecloths.

Also featured is a girl, probably. Who is she? All I know about Dracula is that some angry dude wants to kill a vampire and I figured I'd save myself the bother of actually reading the book and just watching that one episode of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror where Homer drives a stake through Count Burns's heart. What does it matter? I already know how it ends anyway.

Normally, artistry of such low caliber would score nothing higher than a perfect zero; however, avid readers of my blog will remember how this is the very same book that was caressed by a cute girl who rang me up at Barnes & Noble. Considering the circumstances, I will award it a two, as I too one day hope to be held by a beautiful woman.

MY NEW OLD SUV

Yes. Yes. (trumpets)

So what should I name it? Also, this is me:

SNAKE PLISSKIN

Snake Plisskin is a real man's man.

Dude doesn't care about the President, the American government, or the will of thousands of oppressed people. He's looking out for number one (himself).

So the free world sends all of its convicts to a quartered off New York City in the not-too-distant future. The president is held up in a terrorist attack on an airplane, but manages to escape. Of course, he falls right into the heart of Manhattan and is kidnapped by renegade hooligans. Snake Plisskin is a fresh convict and a war hero. He agrees to rescue the president so that he may be wiped of all charges and also spared death at the hands of a deadly inhibitor that is set to kill him within 24 hours. If he can't complete the mission before that, he and the president are as good as dead and nobody will care.

Not one to go out silently, Snake goes commando on a bunch of hungry lunatics and befriends a cast of colorful characters including Ernest Borgnine and Isaac Hayes in the process. Eventually, the president is saved, but Snake does a little switcharoo on an important plot point which I forgot to reveal and gets the last laugh indeed. By the way, the name of the movie is Escape from New York.

I would have given Snake a perfect score, but I have to knock him down two points for being a blatant rip-off of Solid Snake, a character created by Hideo Kojima for Metal Gear Solid. Comparison below:

Shameful. Look at that. They both have mustaches and eye patches.