Something caught my eye on our weekly trip to Target this past Sunday. Nestled next to the egg nog was something unfamiliar. Something… red and velvety. Holiday milk! As soon as I saw it I knew I had to try it. My girlfriend, Megan, was gracious enough to exchange her carton of egg nog for holiday milk. I was confused. Usually holiday food is limited to things like oreos and ice cream. Not milk. Milk is a staple food. You don’t mess with milk. So how was it? Read on!

Megan and I decked the halls, put on some Christmas music and got ready to drink the most festive milk known to man. When pouring it, it was a bit thicker than I thought it would be. It looked like a mix between strawberry Quik and something you’d get in the bar on Deep Space Nine. Not really appetizing. But it smelled good at least.

Megan: “It’s really sweet.” “I’ve had worse egg nog before. But not much.

Verdict: 4/10

Matt: “It doesn’t really taste like red velvet cake”. “It’s not that bad. I didn’t spit it out.”

Verdict: 6/10

Overall: It wasn’t the worst thing on earth, but it wasn’t great by any means. I don’t think we’ll be buying this again.

Inside the secret mountain base. The window looks down to the valley below. There are some cool caves there and once everything is finished I plan on exploring them.

The sun starts to set and I have to hurry and get home.

A completed section of the skybridge at night.

Inside a lost chicken bounces around.

I get back home and decide to explore my cavern some more to try and find some construction material.

As I clear away some stone, I knock open part of the floor to reveal a huge underground cave filled with lava!

What kind of adventures await me down here?

I’ve been playing this game, Minecraft, the past few days and I am obsessed with it (pictured above is the front door to the house I built). I had seen this game before but I never really bothered with it until I realized I could play it on the Mac (or in a browser). There are two modes: Classic, which is like freeform lego mode where you build whatever you want with infinite resources and Indev which is like a survival mode where you start with nothing, have to harvest materials, build tools, mine for metals and build cool shit. Here are my experiences with the Indev mode. You can click on the pics to see bigger versions.

Here is the house I built. The wood part was my original house, to keep me safe during the night when the monsters come out. Later I built a stone expansion just for the hell of it. Around the back is the entrance to my mine.

Inside my original house. It’s really crappy. I’m thinking of tearing it down and using the wood for tools. Anyway here you can see where the magic happens. I have my chest, my crafting table and my furnace.

Behind that is the entrance to the basement. As you descend the stairs you see a door, which leads into the tunnel system.

The start of the railroad. This tunnel took me hours to build, and I had to redirect it twice due to accidentally flooding it. You’ll eventually be able to hop into the mine cart while another powered mine cart pushes you through the tunnels.

Part of the way through the tunnels is my secret base. It’s not really that secret actually. I have a treasure chest, crafting table and furnace in here cause I was tired of running back to my house.

At this point the tunnel starts going up and above ground.

Above ground, the track from this point on will be encased in glass so monsters cant get in at night. The path goes over the frozen ocean.

The current end of the sky bridge. I’m building it to the next island after this, but I can only work on it during the day because at night the monsters come out to fuck my shit up.

Gameplay wise, Zool 2 takes a lot of inspiration from the Sonic games. Zool plays a lot like Knuckles, he can scale walls. There are multiple paths in each level and in world 2 there are tubes you can get sucked into much like those in Sonic 2. There are three stages in each world followed by a boss fight, again like the sonic games.

It wasn’t a complete ripoff though. Zool could shoot bullets by pressing the space bar, and could perform a spinning attack which could break open some things in the environment. Your gun could also shoot through breakable walls and reveal secrets. The goal of each level wasn’t just to make it to the end, but to collect a certain percentage of items in each level. Items were plentiful and were found either just hanging around or could be gotten from defeating bad guys and breaking open things.

The weirdest thing in this game was the tie in with Chupa Chups, the lolipop brand. Zool’s version of the ? box from Mario and the computer monitors from Sonic was the Chupa Chups logo. You could also find lolipops which added more to your required level percentage then other items.

When I was little this game used to unnerve me a bit and I think that face right there had something to do with it. Who the hell thought that was a good idea.

Overall Zool 2 is a really good platformer. The controls are really solid (they take a minute to get used to) and while its not up there with Commander Keen, Mario and Sonic, it’s close. The graphics are all decent, your standard 16 bit graphics but there is a lot of variety which is nice. For some reason you have to pick to listen to either sound effects or music. The music is really, really good so I’d pick that. The sound effects can get kinda annoying. The game can get a little difficult at times, and I found myself stuck not being able to find the exit for the first level of World 3, much like I did when I was a kid. Despite that, it’s still worth checking out.

I’ve been noticing a trend recently. I don’t know if this is a relatively new thing but I notice a lot of people with new babies are giving them hyphenated dual last names. For example: John Wang-Johnson. I mean that’s cool and all if the wife wants to keep the last name, girl power god bless America and all that. But i’m just wondering what happens when the kid grows up and gets married and has a kid. Is the new baby named Hank Wang-Johnson-Dickens? And what about when that kid has a kid? Joseph Wang-Johnson-Dickens-Weiner?

Anyway, in my estimation you’re going to need 5 pages to fill in your last name on the SATs 40 years from now.

It was all people who haven’t signed on to Facebook in a while. This is Facebook’s clever way of getting people to sign back in. Very sneaky….