I found a home video tape buried with other crap inside a gaylord that nobody would care about. This one was labeled "DBZ + Adult Swim" in fine-point blue ink on an expectedly worn, generic white label. Out of curiosity, I fired up a recovered VHS player in the item processing area I work in (I'm a "production associate"), popped the tape in, it wasn't what I expected. Lacking the time and luxury to watch all two hours of the tape (time is money and I'm not paid to do that), I decided to chance buying it to watch what I thought would be some Dragon Ball Z goodness. So the next day, I slipped the bastard in a Tomorrow Never Dies VHS box cover, bought it for $0.99 and went home.
I popped the thing into my Panasonic player. It wasn't DBZ or anything Adult Swim related. In fact, apparently what did actually exist on it was three seconds of Inuyasha at the start of the tape and suddenly there's a really boring, over-glorified TV show ─ from fucking G4 of all things ─ about race cars and their douchebag drivers; presumably recording over what was labeled on the tape. Yeah, remember G4? That one channel were Icons aired on and all those bullshit EB Games ads that aired every 15 minutes, and later a bunch of other shows aired that weren't even video game related? Yeah, that channel. They sucked. Just like this tape I blew 99 cents on. What didn't suck though was seeing TV commercials of certain games that I didn't see archived in decent-enough resolution online.
One was for the 2005 Xbox port of the high-profile, smash-hit Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which by the time this particular commercial aired, the Hot Coffee scandal had just hit public consciousness, inducing lots of congressional shit that era and giving owners of the original release something to giggle about. It's a hot read.
Another was Psychonauts, a fan-favorite game released that same year for every major platform minus the Nintendo GameCube, just like so many multiplatform-bounded games that era. GCN missed out on a lot of good games. Believe it or not, I haven't even touched this game once. Heard about it throughout the years, but I haven't cared to try it. However, the long awaited sequel was recently announced and I know what it's like to have a favorite game series return after a decade-long absence, so here's my unsolicited gift to those fans. I just hope their game doesn't end up in smoke like mine did.
So there you have it, maybe I'll have more articles and YouTube stuff to put up soon. I've got a lot to catch up on so stay tuned.
