2016: The Year That's Not That Bad

Yeah, you read the name of this blog right, 2016, was NOT THAT BAD!  Sure we have an idiot president elect, but half of you thought we did from 2001-2009 and we seem to be alright (barring any weird Russian friendship we seem to be developing).  And half the people reading this think we have an idiot president now (I think you're wrong, but you won't admit it because he's not on your team or that he's....not the same as you...he was also born in this country so enough with that crap).

2016 will also be known as the year of celebrity deaths...but that will also be 2017, and 2018, and 2019, and so on, and so on, and so on.  Not to sound like a jerk, but there are so many celebrities, especially older ones, that it's bound to start coming in droves.

Another thing that bugged me about celeb deaths this year, all the posts!  I'll admit, I posted about Prince, because I LEGIT LISTENED TO PRINCE!  I noticed people posting who probably could name 1999 and When Doves Cry and that's it.  I saw people posting on David Bowie who I don't think even heard any of his songs.  Hell, I love music and I can only name you four Bowie songs (and shockingly, I like the Wallflowers cover more of Heroes more than his...judge, I don't care).

So many people were posting about these deaths to get attention and internet points, it was insane.  I mean, I liked Muhammad Ali as much as anyone but come on, if you're my age you didn't need to post anything, you never once saw him box.  You might have liked his appearance in Wrestlemania I, maybe?!



Enough on that tangent, let's get in to the meat and potatoes of this article.  2016...not being that bad.  A lot of good has happened in 2016 that you may have missed.  I'm going to post my personal list of why 2016 wasn't so bad.  Enjoy.

- Are you reading this?  Well you're alive!  Hooray!  That means you can still do more than complain about how bad 2016 was on the internet.  You can go outside and complain about 2016.  Or go on an adventure.  Life isn't that bad, so stop pretending that it is.  You're freaking ALIVE!

- Have you been to Burger King?  Because if you haven't it's the golden age of Burger King food.
One in particular stands out:



What a time to be alive!  Your generation may have had the moon landing, but we got Mac N Cheetos, so yeah...we win.  Add in their great work with breakfast and it's a surprise I'm not sponsored by Burger King (pleeeease, pay me a free Whopper Jr. a month guys!).

- On a personal note, even more personal than Mac N Cheetos, my wife and I bought a house this year.  And I'm sure you've done something just as cool.  Celebrate your own accomplishments this year, be positive.  We got a house I never thought I'd live in.  It's awesome, it's new, it's great.

- I grew a beard this year.  It was incredible.  It was so good, I can only count on two fingers how many people hated it.  I also have a crazy dog, but I like my crazy dog.  So here is a picture of both, conveniently in my awesome house I love:



- Let's keep this going.  My wife and I are having a kid.  This is the most important thing I've ever accomplished.  Even bigger than when I beat Super Mario RPG:



I cannot wait to become a father, considering I never had one.  I can't wait to actually be there for my kid and everything she does.  It's a great year to create a child.

- Also the majority of my friends have had kids this year, which is phenomenal.  I can count about 12 new kids names that I already can't remember (I'm bad with names)  And that happened in "the worst year ever".  No, it happened in a year like every single one...other than 2001, that year sucked.

- More personal notes, I got to see my cousin Baltimore, seeing Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and the first state in the union, Deleware!  Got to go to Wichita with my wife for a fun wedding.  Was in one of my best friends weddings in Sioux Falls.  Got to go on my first cruise in the Gulf of Mexico and see Cozumel and Progreso.  Minneapolis to see basically every store in the Mall of America.  I also received a 49'ers luchador mask...finally (the only good thing 49'ers related to happen to me in 2016)!



- I moved back to my hometown of Vermillion which isn't all that bad.  It's quiet.  I get to see my friends and some family more consistently and I can legit go to Wal-Mart and not think I'll be shanked.

- I also was lucky enough to leave a job I despised, oddly in a position I sadly was perfect for at my alma mater. Trust me, working there was far worse than anything I've ever had to endure and leaving a boss who was truly awful made me appreciate the places I had worked before .  Not many people are lucky enough to get to leave a place that makes them unhappy, I'm grateful for that.

- Let's get to sports!  2016, you brought us a Chicago Cubs World Series.  Can you believe that!?  The freaking Chicago Cubs won a World Series, handing over the longest sports drought to the Arizona Cardinals.  Amazing.

- Peyton Manning won a Super Bowl to finish his career, I'm okay with that, even though Broncos fans are a bit much sometimes.

- 2016 also brought the Cleveland Cavaliers their first championship.  Hell Cleveland in general had a good sports year.  The Cavs won the NBA Championship.  The Cleveland Indians made the World Series and will probably win one in the next few years.  And the Cleveland Browns are going to be god awful, but they may be so bad, that in about 3-4 years, if done right, they will finally be good.

- The Houston Rockets no longer wear these!



I mean, it's been a while, but at least they don't wear them, yuck.  Worst jersey ever.  (Oooh, another blog idea!).

- AJ Styles debuted!  If you don't know what that means then that's okay!  He rules.



- Leo DiCaprio, the most "unlucky" guy in the world finally won his Oscar (oddly for the worst movie he was nominated for....Wolf of Wall Street is phenomenal).  So that happened!

- Here is a PBS link with even more good things that happened, that I'm too lazy to write about:
Good Things to Happen.

Hey you're back from that link!  That was some good stuff!  Grad rates better, less teen birth no matter how hard Teen Mom tries.  Yay!

- Now if you've been here, you know I hate the Kardashian's, but I love Kylie Jenner, and she's done some amazing work this year!  Such as:



Kleeman/Jenner 2032.  Will she be old enough to be my vice president by then!?  WHO CARES!?

- Music has been great this year, touched on in an earlier blog which can be found here:

Best Music of 2016

These are just a few of the things I found great about 2016, did you have anything good happen?

Feel free to share, or call me an idiot for trying to show you that this year wasn't all that bad!  Next year will be even better with the arrival of my daughter (two weeks!).  Two of my good friends I grew up with are getting married next year.  More trips in store.  More things will happen good and bad.  But remember, without the bitter, the sweet just ain't as sweet.  So calm down, be happy, appreciate what you got, and keep reading my blog (I like the numbers!).

Thanks for reading.  See you next year, which is Sunday.

Jeff Kleeman

NES Review From Z - A: Part IV: Super Mario!

It has now been a week since I was going to write this blog.  Why have I taken so long?  Mario.  That and, well, life.  Kids coming, holidays are here, Shameless binge watch complete, time to get to that review of the best gaming series in history (sorry Ratchet and Clank!).

SUPER MARIO BROS!



I usually review a lot more games than just three, but these three games are so iconic, I decided to cover this because without Mario, I probably wouldn't be writing a blog that 104 people read (thanks guys!).

So I've had Mario in my life as long as I can remember.  I grew up playing Super Mario Bros. 1-3 on the original NES.  I begged my mom to get me a Super Nintendo (SNES), just so I could play Super Mario World.  In between that, Mario taught me how to drive horribly in Mario Kart.  At the tail end of the SNES, I rented my favorite game, Super Mario RPG so many times, the jerk kid at the video store told me I should just buy it.  Then that let to Super Smash Bros and even more Mario Kart in college.  I love Mario.

Now with the release of Super Mario Run on the iPhone, I've gotten in the bad habit of playing it...a lot.  I haven't splurged yet on the other levels, but you want some tips on levels 1-3, you got it, just text me.

*message to Nintendo, don't release a game for 9.99 just to have it so you can only play 3 levels.  I get the money grab aspect of this.  How about starting off with 4-8 levels, then making us pay? 

Long story short, I love Super Mario, and occasionally Luigi...oh and definitely Peach.



So with this review, I will be covering 1-3.  Not the original Mario Bros. game, which in it's own right is fun, but it's just, well, it's a whole lot of jumping, but worth adding to your collection.



So let's start, backwards as usual, with arguably the best game released on the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Super Mario Bros. 3

This game is so good it even came with it's own Fred Savage starring commercial...um....I mean movie.

*Nintendo, to appease for your mistakes of Super Mario Run, please come out with a sequel to The Wizard, title it "The Wizard: Lucas's Revenge" with complete original cast.  Please and thanks.



Back to the game.  It's pretty amazing.  Easily a top all time game, let alone all time top NES game.

The game is so in-depth, there are hidden parts of levels all over the place.  Hell, it was the first time I ever used a strategy guide as a kid, just to see what else I was missing (basically everything).  It also turned me on to the fun of gambling and guessing cards, great job NES!

The game still holds up today, it's fun as hell, and on my replay, even though I didn't want to, I warped, just to try to beat it in record time.

Did I beat it on my replay?  No, but only because I was in a hurry to get this article done...a week ago...the same article that I am just now writing.  So I'll try to beat the game before my kid is born... maybe.

For your collection, this, and spoiler alert, every game in this blog review are must own.

Super Mario Bros 2.

This is one of the most underrated games ever made.  Mario 2 started out as a game without Mario at all.

Originally called Yume Kojo, Mario was integrated in to this game after people found the original sequel to Super Mario too difficult (which if you had/have an SNES, you can play the difficult levels on Super Mario All-Stars).

The fun part about this game, you get to play as 4 playable characters: Mario, Luigi, Toad and Peach.
Each character had their own strengths, and it also led to my intense hate of anything Luigi related, simply because it's so damn hard to play with his feet always wiggling around.



It also was the first time you got to take on Birdo, quite possibly the first trans videogame character.
This was a game truly ahead of its time.



Also this is one of the few Mario games where Bowser isn't the main enemy, it's a villain named Wart.



Which naming him Wart seemingly follows the trend of naming NES characters after deformities, looking at you Battletoads characters!



* Nintendo, can someone, anyone, get a Battletoads remake in motion?!  ANYBODY!?

Super Mario 2 is great, another must own.  That now leads us to the game that started it all.

Super Mario Bros.

I have the classic Mario Bros/Duck Hunt double cartridge.  (I won't talk much of Duck Hunt, we all know Duck Hunt is great, but I can't play it as my NES gun doesn't reflect off of these new fangled TV's.... so my review of Duck Hunt, it's really fun...for 10 minutes...there).

I have played Super Mario so much, I can beat the first level with my eyes closed (thanks college, and to one of my best chums Eric "Ras" Rasmussen for that idea).  We played Mario so much we came up with our own challenges.  Playing the first level without powering up while intoxicated (tasks, tasks, all these tasks!), we also tried to speed beat it, trying to emulate this:

Incredible.  Even more incredible that it still holds up today.  When I replayed this, I decided to go through some levels, and really take my time to enjoy how fun it was, even taking the time to find this coin box on my first try:

Still got it.  I would've done the middle finger trick, but I didn't do it that day, sorry.

I didn't defeat this quite as quick as the speedy guy, but I did still defeat it.  It's one of those games you put in if you want to feel dominant in this age of insanely hard and insanely time consuming video games.  It's great.  It's probably why Mario Run is comparable to this game, for the simplicity of it.

So yes, you have an NES collection, you obviously own these.  Now a couple of fun observations about the Mario series, in no particular order.

- clearly the first issue, is it Mario Mario and Luigi Mario?  The Mario Bros?  Or is Mario the man with no name.  Or is there some Fight Club thing going on with Luigi?
- how does Peach always get kidnapped?  She seems like she can hold her own, just judging from Smash Bros.  So maybe in a sequel it'll be revealed she's in to these kinda things?  Likes being captured.  Maybe she's in to Bowser...speaking of which.
- I have somehow made it this entire blog without talking about the main villain of the Mario series, but why does he keep going after Mario?  Isn't he just gonna give up after the 6th or 7th time of losing?  Also, Mario has literally murdered all of Bower's kids...so who is the real hero, huh!?
- Do you think Luigi has a complex?  Mario gets all the attention, he gets Peach.  No wonder there's a rumor about the game Luigi's Mansion where he killed himself.  Poor guy.



- This thought is for later games, but I gotta touch on Yoshi here.  Is Yoshi a species?  It's not one particular pet or dinosaur or whatever the hell Yoshi is, main reason for that?  This video about sums it up:

Well that's all you're gonna get out of me today for Mario related things, I've already been away from Super Mario Run for much too long.  I hope you enjoyed this blog as much as I had writing it.

Next week will have a recap of the year 2016, and why it wasn't so bad.  I mean, there's gotta be some reasons right!?  Right!?!?!

Thanks for reading as always you beautiful people.

Jeff Kleeman

Best Songs of 2016 - Top 5

2016 will go down as one of the most...interesting years in quite sometime.  I think that's safe to say right!?  So while I round up some facts for my next blog (coming in a few days, I swear!) about why 2016 wasn't completely horrible, I got a message from my buddy Ras last night.  This is Ras!

Ras: Top songs of 2016?
Jeff: Blog idea?
Ras: Of sorts.

And then it begun.  Compiling the top 5 songs we each liked in 2016.  It was a very tough list, for multiple reasons.  We are both avid music loves, Ras more so than me.  In the past year we have discovered hundreds of songs, but most didn't even come out in 2016.  Also, there is a lot of really good music!  A ton.  So it was hard to whittle it down.  But we did it.

So why wait any longer, let's get started, first up, is Ras's list.

5.  Blacklite District - We Are the Danger

4.  Bleeker - Highway

3.  Thrice - Black Honey

2.  Red Sun Rising - Emotionless

1.  Highly Suspect - My Name Is Human

That list is fantastic.  I'll admit, my favorite out of those 5 is Bleeker, but you should give all of them a listen, great songs all around.  Ras, thank you as always, here are some words to live by, by Ras himself.

My top 5?  Well....

5.  M83 - Go!

4.  Rae Sremmurd - Black Beatles

3.  Anderson .Paak - Am I Wrong?

2.  Miike Snow - Genghis Khan

1.  The Weeknd Ft. Daft Punk - Star Boy

And there you have it!  Feel free to add your own here if you wish.  By the end of the week, as previously stated, there will be a "Why 2016 wasn't so bad" article, and if you're lucky, you may even get the newest NES one by tomorrow morning with the release of Super Mario Run!

As always, thank you for reading.

Jeff Kleeman

PS With Alan Thicke passing yesterday, listen to this timeless song!