Needless to say, I have found a new love.

You remember ? The book about Max, the little kid in the grey monster pajamas that sails off to meet monsters and dance around ? Well, light up the new Movie Trailer and let The Arcade Fire shake your memories (and maybe a couple tears) loose. But keep in mind that this is Spike Jonze, and early screening of the flick were met with shock due to dark and mature themes. Raaaawr !!!

It certainly took a long time for VHS to finally lay down, can you believe it was invented in the 70s ? And they said Laserdisc was the wave of the future… hmph. Now, where am I gonna get a DVD copy of Mean Guns (1997)?

Then only this last Wednesday Ricardo Montalban died at age 88. The ever-suave star lent his talents to the classic TV show Fantasy Island, a couple Planet of the Apes flicks, and most famously the half-mad Nietzchian warlord Khan from the original Trek series and the  Star Trek II : The Wrath of Khan. Captain Kirk never faced a more formibable foe. KHAAAN !!! RIP.

So  here we are now, bulldozing into a new year, and I’ve come up with a resolution that I’m actually gonna try and stick too this time. It’ll be tough, and there will be blood, but the payoff is totally worth it. This year I’m going to become a Street Fighter master.

Yeah Street Fighter! You know, the old 8bit game and it’s legendary genre-creating sequel Street Fighter II ? No, not Mortal Kombat Vs. Superheroes, not Soul Caliber, Tekkan, or whatever else is out there roundhouse kicking and uppercutting these days. Just old fashioned 2D arcade throwdowns between pixelized kung-fu warriors, yoga masters, sumo wrestlers, green dudes, and whatever the hell Vega is suppose to be.

Circa 1991 brother and sisters.

I was all set to dig out my SNES and battered Super Street Fighter II cartridge, or track down an arcade machine with a left joystick that sticks just a little into the block position (just how I like it), when OCReMix.com jingled my bells again! In a good way… like, not in a weird way… ummm… That sounded better in my head… Anyway yeah, thanks to rabid fanboy demand, Capcom’s benevolence, and the magnificent talents of Overclocked ReMixers from all across the universe, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix has arrived to remind fighting gamers what a formidable force The World Warriors are. HADUKEN !!!!

“Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix’s extra bells and whistles include a complete graphical overhaul and a stellar soundtrack, and doesn’t disturb the delicate gameplay balance of the arcade classic.“ – Andrew Podolsky, Game Revolution

The OverClocked ReMix crew worked tightly with Capcom’s team to re-work the original Street Fighter II’s soundtrack so that it would simultaneously smoke eardrums and massage the nostalgia-cortex of it’s gamers. The Soundtrack is available FOR FREE over HERE !!! GO GET IT NOW !!!

Plus, all the graphics and between-bout animations were stripped and given a fresh coat of awesome! The classic fighting mechanics that made kids with thick wrists and palmfulls of quarters into legends and reduced the unworthy into tearful, gibbering wrecks are still just as fast, hard and unforgiving as I remember.

Damn you Dhalsim, and your extendo-low-kick  cheapness !!!

So I’ve got the soundtrack, I’ve got desire and the will to win, and it just so happens that I have an Xbox. A quick click to the Xbox Marketplace and a new era for Street Fighter begins. I gotta practice man. By the time that Street Fighter 5 hits my Xbox next month, I hopefully won’t completely embarrass myself. Maybe I’ll even earn myself one of MeatBun’s Street Fighter Club T-Shirts, if I say my prayers and drink my milk just like Hulk Hogan taught me. TIIIIIIIGER UPPERCUT !!!!

What if I told ya that the hideous ghost of Jean Claude Van Dame and his un-watchable  Street Fighter movie has risen from the celluloid grave ? The chic from Smallville (y’know the Superman TV Series?  No, I don’t watch it either) has joined Michael Clarke Duncan and the silent guy from the Black Eyed Peas to make a movie called Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun Li. It should Hurricane Kick theaters February 2009. God help us all.

All the best in the new year ! Much love.

Remember those X-Ray glasses you ordered from the backside of a tattered ‘ol Warlord comic when you were eleven? You paid half a buck and they didn’t even work! The Comic Vine remember well the golden age of Comic Books and their superhuman abillity to get kids to buy the weirdest stuff.  They have collected together decades of comic book advertisements into a mesmerizing gallery over HERE.

Everybody’s got a lost song…. You, me, everybody.

You heard it during a commercial, you listened to it on the radio during some stunningly bright afternoon drive when you were young and buzzing, or maybe your favourite live band played a cover of it at that concert you only kind-of remember. Whatever the circumstances of you’re first brief love-affair with the song, one thing that unites us in the love of these lost pieces of music is the simple fact that even though we all remember how amazing they are… We’ll probably never hear ‘em again.

Maybe it was a remix, a one hit wonder, or worse, a radio demo designed to be difficult to research. You never caught the name of the song, hell you never even caught the name of the band, the style of music is hard to define, and everybody else on earth seems to have blotted the time period it was released from their memories. Every time you try to explain the song to someone by humming, or blushingly singing the words you only half-remember, they just nod and flash you that coddling smile reserved only for the drunk or mentally unstable… So it’s just you, all alone, with this damn catchy song stuck in your head.

This was me for eight years.

It’s been so long I don’t even remember when I first heard the song. I knew it was on the radio in the early 90s, I knew it wasn’t on for very long, and I knew it was by a band with a really obscure “arthouse” name. It had some dude half-mumbling quirky lyrics, and a sample of a blues singer howling: “I’ve been down… I’ve been down… something, something“. It was a breezy song like Bran Van 3000′s Drinking In LA, but a little more intimate. That’s all I had to go on… That and love.

The miracle of the internet is of course the best option for us starstruck lunatics to finally re-unite with our lost eardrum epiphanies. There are a couple different avenues I tried, and would suggest trying for anyone else out there hopelessly searching with nothing but a melody and a prayer:

Option 1 – Yahoo Answers

Yahoo may not be the reigning search engine anymore, but their Question and Answer forums are indispensable for finding lost songs. With bazillions of threads sorted by topic, you could very well end your search early with a little patience and a lot of scrolling.

Option 2 – Lyric Sites

Okay Yahoo was a no-go, never fear! Type the words “Lyrics” into your search engine bar and then spew what few words you remember from the song along with it. There are tons of Lyric Sites that contain databases full of albums and singles and they’re lyrics. My fav Lyric sites are Adtunes (for commercials), and Songme.com (For everything else). It doesn’t matter if the words are right or not, if they’re close enough to the real deal, they might catch the edge of a couple songs by the same artist, or even a Lyric Q&A forum.

Option 3 – Read This FAQ sheet from AllButForgottenOldies.net

You’re starting to get desperate now eh ? Try this brilliant shotgun phrase technique and you may just hit your target this time.

Option 4 – Tap the song ? Wtf ?

I can’t actually endorse this option ’cause I never used it for my own lost song search, I just ran across it while putting together this post. Apparently SongTapper works rather well, and it correctly identified Black Sabbath’s Iron Man for me (although now that I think about it, that’s a really freakin easy one). Just tap your song’s beat onto the keyboard and the magical song leprechauns will save the day… or not.

Option 5 – Last resort

Night after night of searching and still nothing but carpal tunnel and burnt eyeballs, okay then, last resort. If you follow these instructions to the letter there’s an astronomically slim chance you may yet find your song. Step one, get very drunk. Step two, start singing what little of the song you remember to yourself. Step three, type everything your singing AND thinking into Google at the same time.  The resulting gibberish may in fact lead you to some forgotten forum on the edge of the universe that contains a description or title of the song.

For Example, I Typed: “This 90s song with a mummbly guy singin and another blues guy singing maybe some kinda sample of another song in the a chorus – I been down I been down - an it’s killing me cause I’ll never find it and… etc”

On and on I typed, everything making complete sense in my alcohol-soaked mind, although in reality Google probably alerted psychiatric authorities in my area to my need for medication.

Sure enough, after eight years of fruitless searching, one drunken spew-fest and a tap of my mouse button and up popped salvation. I happened upon the same phrase used by people in This Forum, which just happened to be about… you guessed it, my lost song. Alcohol truly is the answer to all life’s problems.

So yeah, all this time, I didn’t have the correct lyrics (which is why Lyric Searches failed), plus the band name (Primitive Radio Gods), and the track title (get this: “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand“) is so freakin obscure I never would have nailed it without help. Check out the Video for this forgotten 90s masterpiece HERE. It really is a beautifully, nostalgically chill song.

What the morel of this tale is, I don’t know. What I do know is that IT IS POSSIBLE for each of us to find our lost songs, all you need is a little bit of patience, faith, and maybe a little hooch.

Much love.

“I’m very old fashioned and have never liked change. I should have been born in 1936, but wasn’t. I collect old cans, bottles, radios and alot of other stuff.” – Allen

Be sure to nibble on their 1950s Packaging Design set while you’re there.

One of my best-loved/most-linked music collectives has just decked it’s halls with glorious nostalgic lovin. 8bitpeoples.com (who you may remember from our post) has just released a Christmas Album!!! If you ever wondered what “The First Noel” would sound like played through an Atari ST system, wonder no-more… Where’s my Egg Nog?