UPDATE: 12/07/13 A full review of Out of This World has been added to the Super NES reviews section. Yeah, I was a lot easier on the game this time than I was in that Capsule Review from last year. I felt like once I was able to get over the fact that the ending disappointed me oh so many years ago, I was able to fully appreciate other aspects of the game. UPDATE: 12/04/13 Annnnnd the November Capsule Reviews. I hope to never get that far behind again. UPDATE: 11/30/13 I finally finished the October Capsule Reviews. I had a lot for this month, so I don't blame even the most diehard of my readers for not getting through them all in one sitting. I also now have audiobook reviews, since I've begun listening to audiobooks at work instead of just music all the time. UPDATE: 11/05/13 September Capsule Reviews are up! Coming soon...the October reviews. UPDATE: 10/19/13 August Capsule Reviews are up! I will be working on the September ones, but didn't want to overwhelm everyone with two months' worth of reviews all at once. UPDATE: 10/12/13 This is not an update, per se, I was just hoping to maybe put an end to a very persistent video game "urban legend" that seems to keep popping up every now and then. For years, I have seen various sites, blogs, and message board postings all mention that the final level of the Japanese version of Kid Icarus does not automatically scroll and you have to continually tap the A button to fly. Back in June 2010, I played through the Japanese version of the game and can report that this is absolutely false. In fact, this bit of misinformation has been so prolific, that I was surprised to find the last level is identical in all respects to its American counterpart. What I believe may have happened is that someone, somewhere in the distant past, mentioned that the final level of the Game Boy sequel, Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters does not automatically scroll and you have to tap the A button to fly, which is true of that game, and somehow this got misinterpreted or misremembered as the American version vs. Japanese version, instead of correctly as the NES game vs. the Game Boy sequel. (I actually mentioned this years ago on my Kid Icarus Shrine, and a part of me wonders if someone read that and didn't realize I was talking about the Game Boy game. Believe it or not, back then there was a plethora of sites that claimed Kid Icarus never got a sequel at all, despite that the Game Boy game was made in 1991, so it's possible someone read that under the impression that there was no sequel and thought I must have been talking about the Japanese version of the NES game instead.) I've also seen claims that the Japanese version is a lot harder than the US version. I did not find this to be true, either, as the stage layouts, enemies, and leveling-up system were all the same. At this point, I'm not sure if the rumors that you used a microphone to haggle with the Black Marketeers instead of Controller 2 are true, either, because I can't find a single post from anyone who actually tried it and got it to work. Every post I've seen from someone who tried it said it did nothing. Further questions, such as it does it only work in certain shops or do you need to say something in particular, lay unanswered. Now, I suppose it's possible I played a hacked ROM or that more than one Japanese version exists. But it seems to me that most people who report these things have not actually played the Japanese version and are only repeating what they've heard elsewhere. I have seen no evidence that a different version with a difference in the final level or a difference in difficulty exists. So, yeah, unless someone can provide evidence to the contrary, then the only differences I could find between the two versions are what I sent to Rage Quitter 87. And if this whole thing started with a misinterpretation of a reading from my site, then I think it's only fitting if my site also puts an end to it. UPDATE: 10/5/13 A note on the latest Jukebox update (see below). You might notice that Gaiares on the music page has a fancy-pants title graphic, like so: Any game in the music section that has a fancy title graphic like that is "fully" updated. In other words, it has proper tagging and album art. If the title is still in plain text, I haven't updated that game's music files yet. UPDATE: 10/1/13 I gave the same sort of facelift to my Donkey Kong 64 Bananza that I did for my Arc the Lad 4 Special. I also brought back that section's Links page. People who are either way too obsessed with my site or have very good memories may remember that section had a Links page before, but I'm not kidding, about half the links went dead and I was like, "Screw it!", and took it down. But I finally removed all the dead ones, fixed the broken ones, and added a few new ones, and put it back up. UPDATE: 9/30/13 The Kid Icarus Links page has been slightly updated. I removed all the dead links and added links to Super Kid Icarus and Divinipedia. I also changed the Forum link on the shrine's main page to point to the site feedback forum at Port Saiid. The dedicated Kid Icarus forum has been phased out. One of these days I'll give the entire Kid Icarus shrine an overhaul to make that laughably outdated old Geocities design more readable, and to add more stuff I've been sitting on for several years now, but you know, priorities. UPDATE: 9/28/13 I thought I'd mention this here because I've gotten more than one inquiry about it. I fixed the Arizona Jack and State Troop Luke sketches in the RAU Gallery so that the old LawForKids comics are now hosted directly on the subdomain. Seems like Talon's "prophecy" on that came true and the original site changed so that some of the comics no longer exist or have been altered. I dug up the originals at archive.org. A few of the links were videos and I changed those links to point to the current web addresses for them as those still seem to exist, and I can't host those here anyway. The reason I resisted hosting the comics directly before is because I thought if someone found those sketches, but never heard of LawForKids before, they might think I made the comics myself, and it would ruin the joke if they couldn't click through the links and see that, yes, that's an actual comic on an actual website. But I think the cat's been long out of the bag on that one by now. I didn't change Talon's dialogue, even though it makes less sense now, because I want to preserve the sketches as close to their original form as possible. And yeah, people were asking me if I saved any of the original comics, so that's why I mentioned it here instead of just quietly fixing the broken links. UPDATE: 9/26/13 My Game Shrines page has been updated into the new format. Along with that, there are a few other minor changes: The Demon's Crest Item FAQ is now featured here. Even though it's more of a walkthrough than a shrine, I sometimes link my guides on this page depending on how much effort I put into them. The Drakkhen Shrine's description was updated to reflect that more of that section has been completed. I realized I had a Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Item FAQ and an Oddities page both with the same exact page design, but you had to go to the Guides page for one and the Oddities page for the other. I created a new index page, which is featured here now, that links to both sections. I also decided to feature my Might and Magic Oddities page here, too, due to the amount of work that was put into it. UPDATE: 9/25/13 Oh shoot! I forgot a photoshop when I put together the RAU Photoshops page! It's probably the best one, so I put it up (first one on the page, so you can't miss it). UPDATE: 9/22/13 The "Miscellaneous" button over at The RAU Gallery now actually links to something. It includes: Deleted Scenes - Three deleted/alternate scenes from the AT storyline. This page was already up here with the Nucleo/Image scene, but I added the alternate opening and the alternate ending to the chase sequence in the last chapter. Photoshops & LOLRAU - I collected these from the forums. I'm hoping I got all of the good ones. Q & A - I decided to put this back up. For reasons I don't want to explain, I didn't like having it on the main page, but I don't mind it so much if it's relegated to the Miscellaneous section. RAU Gallery Dreams - A link to the Dreams Archive on this site. I need to update this page eventually. RAU Tropes - Based on a post submitted to the forums from Strawberry Eggs, it's a collection of TV Tropes that apply to the RAU. Switched at Birth? - A link to that feature on this site. In case you're wondering why I didn't move that with the Scrapbooks, it's because I really want all the SAB stuff to be in one spot, even though that one's RAU-related. I also need to update this section eventually. Next update, I'll clean up this log, but it's like 1:00 am here now and I don't feel like doing it. UPDATE: 9/18/13 I finished updating my entire Game Music Downloads section into the new format. If you happen to notice that the music for The Never Ending Story and all the Tenchi Muyo! stuff is missing, that's because I took it down. I decided that I really only want that section to be for Video Game Music only. So, if you got it while it was there, consider yourself the lucky recipient of a bonus. But non-video game music will be featured here no more. UPDATE: 9/14/13 I made some changes over at The RAU Gallery, but not anything earth-shattering. Here's a rundown: The biggest change is that I combined the Cast Listing page with the Scrapbooks. The short introductions were mostly carried over from the old Cast Listing, but I rewrote them all slightly to be more up-to-date. I felt it was too redundant to have two different sections with characters and links to their scrapbooks, so that's why I made this change. This means that all the characters that are either unused, retired, non-canon, or have only been mentioned or had brief cameo appearances are on the same page as the Cast Listing, but in some ways, I think that's better. That way, when one of these characters is mentioned or has a cameo, you can go to the same place to find more info on them if you want it rather than have to go to a second section altogether. And the unused stuff...well, it's there for the heckofit. Everything has been sectioned off and reorganized a bit, too, so there's no confusion about who is a main character, secondary/cameo character, retired, etc. Cirrus Razeena and Mandor Globber are still on the Cast Listing page, but they do not yet have scrapbooks, so their banners don't link to anything right now. I also created a new menu for the main page because I didn't want to use the same menu buttons that I used for this site because I didn't think they fit the look of that site as well. There is now a "Miscellaneous" button, but it doesn't go to anything just yet. It will eventually link to a page that has miscellaneous RAU Gallery-related articles and stuff in it. Finally, the Message Board button now links to the FlyingOmelette.com Feedback forum at Port Saiid, rather than the old RAU-specific forum at the other board since I'll be retiring most of that place soon. The other forum had a good run, but it's time to let it go now. Port Saiid will do just fine for further comments and submissions. UPDATE: 9/6/13 The Randomizer has been given a button in the Misc menu to the left. It looked stupid and out-of-place the way I had it originally on the right. I've also replaced my Extreme Tracker with StatCounter. Right now, it's only installed on the front page (but that's all Extreme Tracker recorded from, too), because it seemed like Extreme Tracker was recording nothing but hits from the forums (and that would be the second time I've had one of those break). UPDATE: 9/2/13 I know I said earlier in the year that I wouldn't be maintaining the Links page anymore, but I decided to do it anyway. Whether or not I continue to maintain it will be entirely at my discretion. I reorganized everything slightly and updated the design. I added GameWTFs.com, Arcade Quartermaster, Brainer Drainer, and VGJUNK (some of these were already on the Memory Card). If you're wondering why your site was removed, it was either because I could not access it, making me believe it no longer exists, or because I could not find a link back to my site anywhere on it. If you're wondering why your site was moved to the "Dead Sites Archive", it's because I either didn't see any updates from 2012 or later, or if the only update in 2012 or 2013 was just something saying you wouldn't have time for updating, or if you don't put dates on your updates and it looked to me like the site hadn't changed in a long time. If you think there's been an error, you can go ahead and email me, but just make sure you actually have me linked somewhere first. UPDATE: 9/1/13 I updated the design of my Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits section. While there is no new content, aside from the new article introductions, this might be a good time to revisit these pages or read them now if you never saw them before. I haven't looked at this section in years and had forgotten how funny a lot of that stuff from this game was. UPDATE: 8/26/13 The Randomizer has finally been fixed and completely updated with all FlyingOmelette.com (both main and subdomain) pages and all CodieKitty.com pages! However, the button will now take you to a separate page, and from there you can click the Star Fox Slot Machine to get random pages. Unfortunately, the days the button could be directly on the front page are gone. My original script was a Pearl code that broke in a Dreamhost update. The script I replaced it with seemed to break for no real reason and would just take me to a login page. That left me with Javascript options, but there is none I could find that allowed the URLs to be stored in a separate database. I can't have 5,000+ lines of URLs all in the coding of the main page. It would just be impossible to deal with. So, this is my best solution for now. UPDATE: 8/24/13 And I got July's Capsule Reviews finished. I don't have anything but albums for July. Even though I started The Muppet Show Season 1 in late June, I didn't manage to finish it until early August, so that will be for next month. Was still also working a lot of overtime and in the process of cleaning up my house, so I had no time for games. That will all change soon, though. UPDATE: 8/18/13 I'm several months behind on the Capsule Reviews, but I managed to get June's finished. I have made significant progress on fixing the Randomizer, and I'm continuing to work on that. UPDATE: 8/6/13 Redesign Phase One is complete! I'm not quite done yet. There will be a few more tweaks as I create some additional graphics for this page. Some notes and changes: The Randomizer is still largely broken, so I'm taking it down for now. I'm not sure if and when I'll bring it back or where I'll even put it, but I'll worry about that when I actually have time to work on it. The Memory Card has been changed slightly. I neglected to mention that sites hosted on FlyingOmelette.com wouldn't be removed, even if they haven't updated in awhile. But if the site hasn't, I may have moved its placement. I also had to change some of the icons because some of them were too big and causing the table to mess up. UPDATE: 7/27/13 This update is just a notice that I'm going to be redesigning the entire front page of this site soon. When the redesign is finished, some sites will have been removed from the "Memory Card". Now, the only reason I don't just remove the dead sites and not say anything is because a couple of years ago I actually did just remove the dead sites without saying anything and someone complained that they wanted them all back. Well, this time I'm afraid if I remove something it's gone for good, and you have this warning, so please don't try to convince me to put anything back. I will also more clearly explain why something will end up being removed: If the site has not updated since before 2012. So, if the last update I see on the log is 2011 or earlier, I'm removing it. I'm of the mind that good sites should last forever, so even if they stop updating, it's nice if they stay around as an archive to revisit sometime or use as a resource. However, that's what the Links page is for. The Memory Card is more for me to have convenient links to active sites so that I can quickly get to them either when I come home from work or wake up in the morning and want to read the new updates. But if I've been checking those links for over a year and there's nothing new, it gets tiring. IMPORTANT: If you don't want your site removed, just update it. You'll have plenty of time because it's going to take me at least a week (or more if I have to work overtime again) to create the graphics I need for the redesign project. If the site's content and purpose has strayed too far from what it was originally intended for, I'm removing it. Now, obviously, being a multi-faceted site myself, I am very lenient with this so don't panic if you're a video game site who posted an article about weightlifting, or something. What I'm talking about is, oh say for example, a site that started as a comedic game review site suddenly turning into a tour-de-force for radical feminism. Look, there are problems with humor sites like mine linking to serious political sites. The userbases for such sites often have far different expectations and behaviors that the other site will find inappropriate. For example, a humor site reader may go to a political site expecting comedy and make jokes that the site's community and admin(s) will find offensive. Likewise, a politically minded person might come here and create friction on the forums, or with me personally, because not everyone adheres to their beliefs. Generally, the type of content I prefer to link to is Video Games, Cartoons (which can include Anime of course), Movie Reviews, or Humor/Comedy of some kind. But if all I ever see you posting are political, religious, or feminist articles, then no matter what my personal feelings on those subjects are, the best I can do is wish you luck with your causes, but I cannot be part of them. If the site is what I deem to be a "Link Farm", then it must link to something on this domain or any of its subdomains at least once in a great while. Even if the site has some of its own content, if that content is never or rarely updated, and the wealth of new content is just linking to other websites, then I'm 100% dead serious when I say it is really not too much to ask that you feature something from here once in awhile. I wouldn't say this except that some of the crap these sites have asked me to look at over the past few years have elicited little response from me other than, "Now, why did you want to waste 10 minutes of my life with that, again?" There is a lot more advice I would love to spew onto some of these sites, but that's getting beside the point. Just throw us a bone once in awhile, we're part of the internet, too. Okay, so that's it. If your favorite site is removed, it's because it fell into one of these three categories. If you want me to put them back, then tell the admin(s) what I said here. If it hasn't updated in awhile, tell them to update. If it's a Link Farm, tell them to link to an article here. Unfortunately, if it's too politically-leaning, them's the breaks. UPDATE: 7/20/13 Second update for today: Cartoon Corner has been updated to the new format. Other than that the sections were properly alphabetized, there's no change to content. I also finally got rid of the Zanac background on this main page. While the background I chose is just a "placeholder" until I find something I like better, the Zanac background looked really funky on my android phone's browser. As I would scroll the page around, the lines would jump around and give me a headache, so I had to get rid of it. I've tested this one and it doesn't have any problems. That drawing of Nucleo and Image could stand some touch-up, but I probably won't have time for it right now. In fact, overtime starts up at my workplace again next week, so the maintenance will have to be suspended for awhile. When I have time again, the Randomizer will be my #1 priority. Some of the other older, crappier-looking pages will eventually get overhauls, too, and I especially think the music section will look a lot better once it's updated, but there are a lot of pages and not enough time to dedicate to all of them right now. Oh, and just as an FYI, I'm going to be phasing out most of the boards at the FlyingOmelette.com Forums. I'll need to keep the Site Updates and Video Game Music forums because I use those to generate RSS feeds on this site. The rest of the forums will be phased out depending on how used and/or useful they are. I'm thinking that anything that's been posted that's on my "To Do List" of things to add to the site or change will probably be moved to one general "Site Submissions" forum, but I'll go over the details of the changes when it happens. UPDATE: 7/20/13 I mentioned last night that the Oddities page still needed tweaking and that's been done. No new content was added, but the following changes were made: - Finished formatting the redesign. - The articles were alphabetized within each section. Previously, only the In-Depth Features were alphabetized. I did this straight across the board in the name of consistency. - The Drakkhen Oddities link was changed to point to the new page on the Drakkhen Shrine. The new article completely obsoleted the old Oddities article. Also, this article was moved to the In-Depth Features section due to it having been expanded. - The Misadventures of P0rn Sigma was removed because CodieKitty has it hosted at her own site now and I'm trying to eliminate redundancy here. Wow. A lot of those Oddities articles are in serious need of being updated. The problem is finding time and figuring out where to start. UPDATE: 7/19/13 EDIT: Final Update for Today: The Oddities and Switched at Birth? pages have both been upgraded to the new format. I did far more work on the SAB page. Before now, the articles didn't have descriptions. Now they do. Oddities needs a bit more tweaking, but I'm not sure I'll do that anytime soon. It still looks better than it did before the change. Second update for today: All of the Game Review listing pages, the main one and the ones for the individual consoles, have been given a complete overhaul. Note that this will look best on Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. In IE, the gradient effect doesn't work and will show a solid grey background instead, and the rounded edges on the tables doesn't work in IE, either. But I've tested it in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera and it seems to work just fine there. While none of this does anything to actually improve the quality of any of my really old, crappy reviews, at least the road to them looks much better now. Heck, this has made me want to start writing full reviews again, but I'm still too busy for that. By the way, in the interest of consistency, I converted all scores on the listing pages to 5-scale format, even if the score on the actual review page is still in 10-point format. I tried to keep as close as possible to how the 5-scale score would interpret on a 10-point scale and to what I think I would score the game if reviewing it today. So, nothing crazy like a 2/10 becoming a 4/5 or such. Someday, I'd like to fix all those old reviews, but I just don't have time for that right now. UPDATE: 7/19/13 I fancied up my menu system here a bit. You can click the main buttons to go to the different sections, but some of them have mouseover drop-down menus that allow you to pick from and jump right to some of the most popular and my personal favorite articles within those sections. For example: With the Game Reviews button, you can either go to the main page that lists all of them, or choose a specific console from the menu. For now, I only included consoles on the list that have 3 or more games reviewed for them. There might be a few more updates throughout the day... UPDATE: 7/18/13 Maintenance continues. I suspended the work on the Randomizer until both DHN and I get everything where it belongs. First of all, both the Caption Contest and the Game Ideas are gone for good from this site. You can find them, plus a lot more similar stuff, at DHN now. No new material, but I made some major changes to the RAU Gallery layout. - Instead of text links, there is now a fancy menu. - The RAU Q&A has been removed. I felt it was pointless and whatever purpose I created it for has long since been served. - The content warning has been removed. The only reason it was there is because I got some complaints about the language and violence in the early days, but I think by now people know what to expect from it. - All the RAU Character Scrapbooks have been moved off of this site and over to there. On the menu, you can click the main Character Scrapbooks button to go to the listing for all of them. But if you hover the mouse on the button, a drop-down list of all the most prominent cast members will appear so you can choose to go directly to one of them. So, say you want to go directly to Honen's Scrapbook. Instead of going to the main listing page and scrolling down, you can just choose his name off the drop-down list and there you go! - The RAU Cast page was updated slightly so that the Scrapbook links now go to the new locations, and also I added a little info under each character portrait that explains their job/role at the Grimmora University. - This is a minor thing, but on the Friends of the RAU links page, three of the sites were missing their buttons. They all have a button now. - There was an RAU Gallery signpost page on this site that had a big picture of Honen and Cirrus and links to all the RAU Gallery sections. Well, since the Scrapbooks have been moved, that page was superfluous and has been deleted. Now the links in the header and table go straight to the RAU's subdomain. As far the Scrapbooks are concerned, I moved everything over "as is", and hopefully everything went well and there are no broken links or images. If you find any, let me know. EDIT: One more small change: While the purpose of the RAU Gallery Music page is to be functional and not eye-popping, I still brightened it up a bit. Couldn't stand how dull it looked before. Next up: Gotta do something about that Switched at Birth? main index... UPDATE: 7/16/13 Today's Maintenace: I removed "Caramel the Calico Kitty" from the Kitchen Sink because I didn't realize until I looked at it just now that all the pictures were from the first month we had Mel. She was very scrawny, dirty, and emaciated from living outside, and now looks nothing like that anymore, so I didn't want those photos being her main representation here. I will eventually create a few pages dedicated to all of our cats with more recent and updated photos. I also removed the Caption Contest archive because I was in talks to move it to DHN and the webmaster James agreed to it. For those who don't know, DHN (yellow smiley in the top row of the Memory Card) is an offshoot of this site that is much more focused on archiving stuff from the community that has surrounded it since 1995 (as opposed to just being mostly my own writing). It's maintained by five of the longest-running community members and I just felt that the Caption Contest we used to host on the forums was much more of a community thing and fit better with their content than mine. Finally, I removed the Game Ideas Archive from the Museum for the same basic reason. A lot of the content was duplicated on DHN because they already had a huge archive of Game Ideas from the forums over the years, and the rest that was unique to this site will be merged with their existing content soon. I am currently working on two big maintenance projects: The first is fixing the Randomizer. It fell into neglect because of last year's home project and needs to have a lot of missing links added and broken links removed. (And with all this moving around of site sections, it will need to be updated even more now.) The second is that I will be moving the RAU Gallery Scrapbooks over to the RAU Gallery subdomain. Some of the scrapbooks have been updated into a more modernized format, however, I will not be doing that with any of the others at this time. I'm just going to move them all "as is" just to get them over there and out of the way. RAU content belongs on the RAU Gallery and it's easier to fix what needs to be fixed later if it's already where it's supposed to be. UPDATE: 7/15/13 More site maintenance. I got rid of "About FO" until I have a chance to completely rewrite and fix it up. It seemed to be a long string of pictures of me from various years in a completely random order with absolutely nothing actually written about myself. So, yeah. Pointless, and I can do better than that now, but I'll need some time to make a better one. I also fixed the Drakkhen Index page so that only the working site sections are clickable. I had no idea that I somehow activated links to every section, so a bunch of them were broken. I have a thing against broken links, so I don't want them active until I get the sections for them done (which I will eventually work on when I have time). Finally, I got rid of the YouTube Videos section in the Museum. It was completely pointless and took forever to load because of how many embedded videos there were. I didn't feel like fixing all the broken Google Videos and if you want to see my videos, you can just go to my YouTube page. There's a link right above this update log. While a lot of site sections are in desperate need of being updated, like my Top 100 for example, don't worry that I'm going to take everything down. I'm just trying to eliminate the most useless and pointless sections, especially if they're like that Videos page that had missing content. UPDATE: 7/14/13 FlyingOmelette.com maintenance continues. I removed a bunch of dead links from the Links page. Aside from removing links when they die off like that, I'm officially annoucing that I will no longer be maintaining that page. Any sites that continue to exist will remain on it, but I will not be adding any new ones. Any new, active sites that link to this one will probably just have to wait until a spot opens up on the Memory Card. For better or for worse, times change. Sites disappear or stop updating far too frequently for it to be worth it to me to maintain both a Links page and the Memory Card. Also, The Music of the RAU Gallery was updated because Daryn (Minerva K Red on the forums) reminded me that there was another hidden page with a midi of "When the Saints Go Marching In" that I had forgotten about. It always amazes me when people remember things about my site that I don't. UPDATE: 7/11/13 While I don't have anything new to announce, I do want to make note of a few changes around the site. First of all, Q&A has been officially discontinued. The link on the main page and the epost email address have been removed. The section has been added to The Kitchen Sink as an archive only. I thank everyone who participated, but not only have I not gotten anything in months, I don't really have time for it anymore. Use the forums or my regular email to contact me about the site. Secondly, I went through my entire site and removed as much old, expired (and annoying) ad code as I could find. Last year, I had a home repair crisis that forced me to pimp out my website and plaster it with ads to help fund the repair job. The ads all expired several months ago, but I've been too busy to do anything about them. I thank everyone who kept emailing me about them and I do so apologize for that. Hopefully, I will never, ever have to do anything like that ever again, but I didn't want to lose my home or go bankrupt. I'm also trying to get rid of the old AdBrite code as I find it, but I don't remember every place it is, so I'll keep my eyes open for it. (AdBrite went out of business, and I'm not replacing them this time. It's too much work for too little payout.) Thirdly, the Final Fantasy airship in the Memory Card now links to Brainer Drainer because the person who ran Ark Full of Sorrow contacted me a few days ago to inform me he is taking his site down. Finally, if you requested lately to have your name changed or removed from this site, it's been done, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I feel slightly annoyed that I specifically requested everyone to email me the exact URLs and nobody did. Next time, if you don't do that, you won't be so lucky. UPDATE: 7/4/13 May 2013 Capsule Reviews are done. A lot more digital albums, a few CDs, and movies, that's about it for this month. I'll have June's up soon, but probably not until next week at the very earliest. In addition to these new reviews, I also went back and revised my reviews for Speaking in Tongues, What's Going On, and Revolver. A combination of listening to these albums a few more times and comparing them to some of the crap I've borrowed from the digital service (thankfully they're finally getting more recognizable artists as they prepare to move out of the beta phase) gave me a better appreciation of them. In all three of these cases, I had either too high or the wrong expectations going into them. Finally, I also fixed that bit about the fireflies in the 2011 review of The Princess and the Frog. UPDATE: 6/30/13 Well, I know it's been a long time coming, but I finally decided to release the final chapter of the RAU Gallery Archaeology Sketch. Before I provide the link, however, I want to warn you that I ended up having to release it without the pictures. Instead, the placeholder text that describes the missing scenes is where the drawings would have been plugged into it. Unfortunately, I've faced too many setbacks trying to get this done. To explain them all here and now would take up far too much space on this log. I'll condense it down to this: Some of the drawings are done, but after the home construction catastrophe of last year, they got put away somewhere and lost. I am sure that someday I will find them, but I don't know how long that will be, and I felt that releasing it unfinished at least allows everyone to see how the story ended, and it lifts a huge burden off my shoulders. Here it is: RAU Gallery AT7: The Final Hour Originally, I did not want to make this public. Instead, I posted a riddle on the DHN Forums, and it took only three days for someone to figure it out. The reason I didn't come out and say it directly was because I was expecting the general consensus to be, "Eh, you really should've finished the drawings first", but I actually got an enormously and overwhelmingly positive response to it. While I can't expect everyone will feel the same way, it at least made me feel less uneasy about just getting it over with. And while I am sorely disappointed that I just wasn't up to the task at hand, at the very least the story itself turned out the way I wanted it. I guess I feel the way a director might feel if his/her movie doesn't turn out the way they want because of budget and/or time constraints, but at least I didn't suffer the disappointment of executives turning the script into something else entirely, like what happened to Ralph Bakshi with Cool World. On a related note, I sometimes get requests or questions about the midis used on various RAU Gallery pages. I didn't organize where I keep the midis into folders very well, so I often have a hard time locating them to send them in an email. As a response to this, I created: The Music of the RAU Gallery ...which is a simple page that has every midi ever used in a sketch, along with a brief explanation of what the song is, who wrote it, what album it came from, and what sketch it was used in. Since they are linked (as opposed to embedded) on that page, you should be able to download them by clicking or right-clicking on the links. So, if you hear a midi you like in a sketch and don't know what it is, or want a copy of it for yourself, just head to that page and look it up. UPDATE: 6/13/13 Changed the SMB2 Flurry link in the Memory Card to VGJunk. While I'll continue to update the Capsule Reviews and the Game Music Downloads sections, the future of the rest of this site is up in the air at this point. BTW, if you email me about something on this site, please include the entire URL of the page you're referring to in the email. This site has grown quite large and is quite old. There is a lot of stuff here and I no longer remember exactly where everything is and everything I've ever said or done here. The two requests I seem to get quite frequently are along the lines of: 1. I submitted something awhile ago, but there was an error. Can you correct it? 2. I submitted something awhile ago, but want to change the name I sent you. Can you change it? I can fulfill these requests if you send me the actual URL of the page. I can't comb through 30 pages of oddities, Switched at Birth, Cameos, or what-have-you looking for what you're talking about. It helps to have the URL even if you name a a specific section because some sections are several pages deep. For example: The Secret of Mana Oddities. UPDATE: 5/11/13 The Capsule Reviews for March and April are now up. I only had one thing for March and most of April is album reviews. Just thought I'd give that head's up before you jump in expecting something different. UPDATE: 3/03/13 We have 2013 Capsule Reviews for January and February! Also, our Superstorm Sandy Victim Fundraiser is ending in a few days. If you scroll down this page far enough, it's still down there. I'd like to once again implore anyone who can donate, no matter how big or how small, to do it now if you can because the time to do so is running out. UPDATE: 2/14/13 Mystery of the book is solved! It's a 1970s MacMillan School Reader called "Enchanted Gates": Randomly found it on Etsy by searching "red storybook", which is probably the most generic search I tried for this thing and was the only one that was successful. As you can see, my memory wasn't entirely accurate, but pretty darn close. It is red, has wrought iron gates, a solid blue pond and solid white swan, and it is a school reader, as I suspected. I didn't mention it below because I didn't want to provide false leads, but I thought the title had "Enchanted" in it and was above the gates, but I wasn't sure. Thanks to everyone who helped with suggestions! UPDATE: 2/10/13 I am going to attempt to use this website to solve a mystery that's been bugging me lately. I'm trying to identify a book I had when I was a kid. The only thing I remember about this book is what the cover looked like, but it was very distinct. It was a red hardcover book. On the front was artwork of a pair of black wrought iron gates, a blue pond (or lake), and a white swan swimming in the pond. Everything I seem to remember being in solid colors. The swan was solid white with no features, like a silhouette. I threw this together in MS Paint, so it's not accurate, but the cover vaguely looked like this: As for the book's contents, I believe it was a collection of short stories (possibly poetry, too, but I'm not sure on that), but I have no idea what stories it actually contained. I'm thinking it was meant to be a school reader (you know those types of textbooks they use in English/literature classes that contain dozens of short stories), but I'm not 100% sure of that, either. On the real cover art, it's possible the gates were open, there may have been a twisty pathway or a twisty stream leading to the pond, and there may have been a castle in the background. These three things I'm not real sure about, though, just that the gates, the pond, and the swan existed, and the cover was red. There could have been more than one swan, but I don't remember. If you know of a book that looks anything at all like this, please email me and let me know me what it is. I don't know why exactly I've been so obsessed with finding this lately, especially since I don't know what the book contained, except that I just remember this book being around the house when I was a kid and I really want to know what it was. UPDATE: 2/2/13 The very first Nintendo DS game review at FlyingOmelette.com is for Retro Game Challenge, brought to you by the $5 FO Challenge. On a smaller note, I corrected all the release years on all of my reviews in which they were in error. Some were missing release years, many (especially in the NES section) were off by a year or two because they reflected the Japanese release dates. But I'm kind of a stickler for keeping the information accurate to the version I played, due to how things can change between regions. Also be sure to check out the Jukebox down below for some music updates. UPDATE: 1/1/13 And now the December 2012 Capsule Reviews + 2012 Year in Review. If you're wondering why so many album reviews in December, I got sick with bronchitis for over two weeks (and am still recovering from it) and during that time there were quite literally times when I felt too sick to do much of anything, except sit around and listen to music. So, I listened to a bunch of albums all the way through and decided to review them. BACK TO UPDATE LOG INDEX BACK TO MAIN PAGE