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YOU’LL NEED A CIGARETTE AFTER THIS ONE

House of Horrors and the Haunted Catacombs

9/10

by Elina Vaysbeyn

“Four freakin’ houses?!” I politely inquired after arriving at House of Horrors, located at 2090 George Urban Boulevard in Depew. My reply came in the form of a promising nod. Once you enter, there is no way to escape the monsters that haunt your worst nightmares. Even as you stand in line at the ticket booth, demonic satyrs and grosteque creatures with drooping clumps of eyes stare you down harder than your austere Catholic grandmother.

The monetary contribution to the heart condition on which you have voluntarily signed for varies between $17 for all four haunted houses at House of Horrors and The Haunted Catacombs and $22 for VIP (not having to wait in line: priceless) on the weekdays, and $20 and $25 for VIP on Saturdays. House of Horrors and The Haunted Catacombs are open every day until November 3, from 6 p.m to anywhere from ten to 1 a.m.

After visiting House of Horrors and The Haunted Catacombs, those names will need no explanation. If you want to scare yourself shitless and scream until you’ve lost your voice, I can’t think of a better place do it. The four houses are called City of the Dead, which you can experience in 3D, House of Horrors, Haunted Catacombs, and Psycho Therapy. Hunched over, gripping whoever’s hands I could find, I breathlessly ran, felt, and crawled my way through these monstrosities. Strung up bodies knocked against my head and a short fat guy wearing diapers and covered in fake shit growled in my face, “Do you like poopy?” I mean, what do you say in a situation like that? “Yes, I love it. Ahhhhhhhh!” I slithered through two blow-up walls to escape the horror. “Just like entering a vagina,” exclaimed one patron about this air-tight prop.

I can recall a room of identical doors, having spent a large portion of my time trying frantically to rescue myself from its imprisonment. Among the pitch black labyrinths, I encountered countless elaborate decorations and strobe lighting that sent epileptic flashes through my synapses— way trippy, man. Bridges inside spinning tunnels, ten-foot tall mythical creatures, and relentless live actors will make sure that by the time you leave, your biggest fear is that of incontinence.

The horrific sets are gorgeously detailed. It didn’t seem that anything was overlooked, and if it was, I was definitely too scared to notice. It’s difficult to say that a haunted house is aesthetically pleasing because more than anything, it is a violent assault on all your senses, but the outdoor scenery—ponds, forests, gardens—was really impressive. It had purpose and was displayed with attention to detail. Lengthy lines of people were waiting to get inside, so get your ticket, stat and get ready for one hell of a ride.

HARD WORK AND BEER GUTS

New York Beer Pong Tour @ Mojo’s

10.16.07

4/10

by Cristiano Agostino

Beer pong is, to the average college kid, much more than a pastime for terminally boring weeknights—it is a universe in its own right, with proper jargon, customs, and cultural heroes. It’s not a hobby, it’s the reason you signed up for this thing called “college” in the first place.

If you count yourself among the followers of, well, whoever invented beer pong, good news for you—you didn’t even realize it, but you’ve been playing a legitimate sport all this time. Beer pong has a league of champions where your amazing throwing skills might earn you laurels, or even a nice lump of cash.

The crown jewel of the discipline is the New York Beer Pong Tour, sponsored by beer pong table manufacturer BJ Beer Pong, Red Eye Breaks and, last but not least, Pongstuff.com, who stormed Buffalo last Tuesday to satisfy all your basic sporting needs.

The venue was Mojo’s, the nighttime refuge of Buffalo’s hardest partiers, though it looks like little more than a standard drinking hole, enveloped in a epileptic hurricane of TV screens, lousy hip-hop beats, and smothering alcoholic vapors. The event was scheduled to start at eight, but around seven the sizeable pool of potential champions was already busy around the six beer pong tables, practicing the delicate art of shooting a ping-pong ball into a field of tightly packed, mammoth-sized glasses, filled to the brim with the cheapest watered-down beer available. Breaks in the action were spent drinking some more and kicking hopeless game with the barmaid, who was just about the only girl in the whole establishment. Either I missed something, or alcohol-fueled testosterone surges are not that attractive.

At eight sharp, with at least half the crowd already drunk to boot, the commencement of the competition was announced. The future superstars of the athletic world alternated at the tables, which were by this time literally floating over a slimy alcohol swamp. Eyes focused on the ping-pong ball, they channeled all their energy and concentration on the immense task of shooting into a hole even a blind man could nail.

It might not be that challenging a sport, but still it’s good, no-strings-attached entertainment, right? Wrong. If the alcoholic fumes didn’t poison every last person in Mojo’s, the true motives behind this night of “sports and fun” would have become suddenly clear.

The event turned into nothing more than an advertising scam, with shameless pushing of useless products from BJ’s Peer Pong, Red Eye Breaks, and an opportunity for Mojo’s to spice up its appeal.

Well, props to you, Beer Pong Tour cartel: your circus tricks worked wonders. All I will dare to say is that, as long as college kids fall for such thinly-veiled marketing swindles, they’re just asking to be duped. Honestly, if you’re going to play, do it in your dorm rooms, apartments, or off-campus houses, instead of giving in to the corporate motives of these greedy companies.

STICK A FOLK IN IT

Folklore for PS3

8/10

by Jason Polansky

At this point, a lot of Playstation 3 owners are asking themselves why they even bought a system that is completely devoid of any sort of original and interesting games. Folklore, for some, may help answer that question, with its beautifully immersive environments and seamless blend of two gaming genres.

Folklore, is a ghost story that follows the paths of two protagonists, Keats and Ellen. Keats works for a paranormal magazine and is trying to get a good story after getting a distressed call from a woman in the town of Doolin. Ellen, on the other hand, gets a letter from her mother who has supposedly been dead for seventeen years, requesting that she comes to the same spooky town. The story plays out in a variety of styles, including gorgeous pre-rendered, cut scenes, intense comic book-inspired still frames, and the dry animation style of two bodies on each side of the screen exchanging dialogue boxes.

In addition to the storytelling techniques, Folklore also boasts detailed environments that make you feel like you’re playing in a dream. All of this is wrapped up with a fantastic soundtrack that never fails to set the right mood.

When it comes to breaking down the gameplay of Folklore, it is best described in two parts. Each chapter starts off as more of a classic adventure-style game such as Syberia or Shenmue when you are given the task of talking to people and gathering mementos of the dead so you can travel to the Netherworld. Once there, the gameplay takes a turn towards a more action RPG (role-playing game) style of play not far removed from Rune or Lost Kingdom. The adventures never get too repetative and are generally entertaining as you continuously meet new and interesting characters. Similarly, the action stays fresh as you can suck the souls out of enemies to use their attacks as your own.

Folklore doesn’t avoid redundancy entirely, however, and this is indeed one of the weakest aspects of the game. Though you are two different characters, their relationship plays out like a chase most of the time. As a result, you will find yourself running through every environment twice with not nearly enough variety of different enemies to make it feel like a new experience the second time through. The other issue is a strange hiccup in the flow, when mapping attacks with the controller face buttons. A three-second pause may not sound like a big deal, but in the heat of battle, it can really distract from the absorbing nature of the rest of the game.

Overall, Folklore does a great job of blending two solid game mechanics to make one fantastic experience. Despite the issues previously mentioned, I recommend this game to anyone looking for an intriguing PS3 experience that is not a sequel or an Xbox 360 port.

DETOX SHMEETOX

The Detox Diet

8/10

by Victoria Burhans

If you’re like me, you’ve spent four years treating your body as a disposable shell—boozing every weekend (or every night), smoking cigarettes like they’re going out of style, and exceeding all rational caffeine intake levels. Though vices are great, they wear your body down and erode your insides. By the start of my senior year, I felt run down and beaten up, as if college had suddenly caught up with me. I began to look for a cheap and easy way to release the toxins from my body without shelling out the big bucks for a colonic.

Detox diets have gained mucho notoriety because of the Hollywood trend machine. Big stars have compromised their waistline to lose weight fast for movie roles, kick-starting the detoxification of America. The maple syrup diet, lemonade diet, and raw diet have been gracing the pages of tabloids for months. After investigating my options, I settled on a detox diet as the most logical and natural way to kick my bad habits, which was validated by my limited nutritional knowledge.

Consisting of water, diluted fruit juice, pureed fruit (apple, pineapple, peaches, plums, mango, and sweet melon), and antioxidant tea without sweetener, this diet allows slim pickings for dinner. The list of what I couldn’t have was much longer than what I could, much to my dismay. No caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, or solid food was allowed during my detox. The diet instructions also advised me to take time off from my daily activities in order to relax and focus my energy on cleansing my body of the toxins I’ve accrued. This diet plan is about equal to voluntary starvation, which also makes the body ultra-weak and apparently crabby. Blowing off the warnings, I started my journey into detox-ville on a Wednesday so I could celebrate my healthy body with a few parties I had planned for the weekend.

The first effect I experienced was extreme exhaustion. Without caffeine in my body, I am barely human. I went through caffeine withdrawal—shakes, brain-splitting headaches, and cold flashes, which distracted me from thinking about how fucking hungry I was. Dining on blended apples and peaches is no way to survive. On the second day of my journey I found it easier to handle. Though my sluggishness persisted, my hunger became manageable and it seemed like I could glide all the way to the end without falling off the wagon.

Though I did survive my detox diet, I wouldn’t recommend this radical regimen. Within a few days, I felt as if I was back to all my old tricks and my body still responded the same way. The weight loss, though not any part of my original goal, was fleeting as well. The two days I spent focusing on revitalizing my body didn’t end up being a total waste of time, though, since it gave me multiple reasons to pig out and party it up later.

SO BAD, YOU’LL BE BEGGING FOR SNAKES

Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane

4/10

by Roger Chao

On October 31, most trick-or-treaters go door-to-door dressed as ghosts, goblins, pirates, and the works. The parties and bars are packed with drunken ghouls of all sorts, and finding a lady without a “sexy” costume is quite a feat. Though finding the perfect Halloween costume is one of the most conventional practices on this frightful day, getting your hands on a Halloween sneaker pack is one of the newest.

The Halloween sneaker is fairly new to mainstream buyers. Over the years, Nike has continually released holiday sneakers, one of the most notable being the Valentine’s Day Air Force One and Dunk. In recent years, shoe companies have stepped up their games, pulling new tricks and treats out of their sleeves, or soles.

With the Nike 2007 Halloween Pack, released this month, Nike took a couple of its most favored styles and painted them black, white, yellow, and of course, orange. In previous years, some of the Halloween designs had buyers putting their kicks into retirement early, due to the time-sensitive Halloween theme. This year, the Nike Air Max 95 x 360 is a definite classic, with insoles that, when put next to each other, create a skull image. The Nike Court Force Premium is sheer beauty to a sneaker collector’s eyes, with black-and-white safari skin print and gold lining. The Nike 2007 Halloween Pack is definitely a hot pick, but with releases only in Hong Kong, buyers must hit up their computers to get their online shopping on.

A Bathing Ape or Bape also released their Halloween Pack this month, bringing forth a classic Bapesque style of shoe. The originators of the Halloween Pack, Bape is releasing three different styles: the black and orange “Dracula,” the black and green “Frankenstein,” and the black and white “Mummy.” In each specific style, the Bape logo (an ape head) is dressed up to match the theme. Now, if you’re a Bape fan, the vibrant colors come as no surprise and everyday wear is a definite possibility.

One of the most creative, yet basic packs for this year is the Reebok Halloween Pack. Designed with a horror movie theme, Reebok is releasing a red, white, and blue “Chucky,” which matches the doll’s movie attire and a “Bride of Chucky” in black, white, yellow, and pink in their Ventilator model. “Jason” comes in the ERS 2000 model shoe in black, red, and white, with red streaks along the sides and nice hockey mask back-paneling. Reebok plans to release a Freddy Krueger this month also, but hasn’t posted any information.

Other Halloween shoes include Nike’s grade school-sized Halloween Pack featuring two pairs of Dunks, one high-top glow-in-the-dark green and black pair, and the other a low-top black, white and orange pair.

With the help of Reebok, Nike and Bape, Halloween is no longer a day reserved solely for candy and costumes, but a day to get fresh as well.

KICKS OR TREAT

Nike, Bape, Reebok Halloween Pack

9/10

by Rayshon Higgins

With the help of Reebok, Nike and Bape, Halloween is no longer a day reserved solely for candy and costumes, but a day to get fresh as well.

BATTY FOR BATTY

Batty, the Halloween toy

10/10

by Matt Kosloski

It’s a plastic bat. It’s tied to a string. It flies around in circles and costs five dollars. End of review? Well, perhaps, but to simply stop there would be to belittle the rich history that is Batty. It was October of 2004 the first time I laid eyes on Batty. Boy, was he a catch. Sparkling and shiny inside that bright orange box printed with enticing come-ons like “It really flies,” “Light up action” and “Batteries not included.” I don’t know a soul in the world who could have looked in those little plastic, LED-filled eyes and not have just had their heart melt right away. So I took him home, ready to embark on a wondrous journey wherever the fates might take us.

Incidentally for Batty, fate took him to the ceiling in the middle of my dorm, slightly to the left of the sprinkler. There, he had just enough room to fly free but wasn’t so far away as to feel lonely. He liked it there, you could tell by the way he flashed his eyes and flapped his wings. Either that, or he was really pissed. Sometimes it was hard to tell from that half-smile, half-frown he always had painted on his face. He was always so reserved. Not everyone appreciated Batty the way I did. My friends would always yell, “Turn off the fucking bat,” or “Matt, seriously is that necessary?” but they just didn’t understand our love.

Halloween came and went, but Batty stayed. I always knew he would. Batty was no fair-weather friend. After a long day of class he was always there to cheer me up. If I felt sad, he’d fly around in circles for hours just trying to cheer me up. As the days passed, our bond grew stronger. I always kept a drawer full of batteries for when he got tired and even made him a little Santa hat for Christmas. I don’t know what Heaven is like but I bet there are lots of plastic bats.

It was around March when it happened. That awful day. My roommate came home drunk one night and thought Batty was mocking him. In truth he probably was, Batty could be pretty cynical sometimes. My roommate had to show him who the boss was. It was a pretty quick fight considering Batty was outclassed by 180 pounds. In the skirmish, he had his wings ripped right off. He was just hanging there, like a black plastic turd. I tried to nurse him back to health. Some super glue here, a little tape there, but he just wasn’t the same. It was with a heavy heart that I retired him to the trash, but I knew he was going to a better place. He left an emptiness that I just couldn’t fill—at least not until a few months later when Halloween rolled around again.

I bought another one, christening it Batty II. The same thing happened again. We laughed, we loved, my roommate got drunk and broke him. The year after came Batty III, destined to repeat the vicious cycle. Despite all the hard times, I wouldn’t trade our experiences for the world. This year marks the induction of Batty IV into our household. This time things are going to be different. That’s not to say my roommate won’t get drunk and break him, but this time I bought about a dozen of them. The legacy of Batty will live on.

IT ISN’T SO CORNY AFTER ALL

Corn Maize - Wheatfield, NY

9/10

by Adam Silkworth

My favorite time of the year has finally arrived. We all know that Halloween brings candy, costumes, inexplicable jolliness, and plain ol’ spookiness, but for a change of pace, check out the Corn Maize at 3901 Niagara Falls Boulevard in Wheatfield. It won’t make you jump out of your shoes or scream your face off, but it does provide an alternative to the predictability of ghosts and goblins.

The Maize, the world’s largest corn maze company, offers eight acres of twisting, winding terrain covering over three miles of trails, bridges and decision points. To keep things interesting, the maze is divided into three phases. The first phase takes roughly 15 minutes, the second 20 minutes, and the third about 30 minutes to navigate. During the first portion of the maze, you will come across five different-colored stations where you color the tip of each of five fingers (finger paint fun, hooray!). At the end, you have to find your combination of colors and the fortune that goes along with it—apparently, according to the maze, money will come easy to me. The second phase has you fill out a mad-lib type sheet for an amusing story at the end and during the third part, you must answer trivia questions about the Buffalo Sabres or the Buffalo Bandits to figure out the correct path.

General admission for just the maze is $7 but the combo pack ($10) includes admission, a 20 oz. beverage, a small kettle corn, and three activity tickets. The maze is open daily, from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday through Thursday. On Friday and Saturday nights, it’s open until 11 p.m. for “flashlight nights,” when you can journey through the maze in the darkness of the night.

Other attractions include a corn cannon, farm animals, a pumpkin patch, and a hayride on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m. You can also purchase goodies from the bakery and farm stand to cap off your day.

Make sure you go with plenty of time to spare because you will get lost, guaranteed. I found myself walking in circles on more than one occasion and did not have time to take advantage of the rest of the activities. With all the fun adventures that the maze has to offer, you will certainly find the enjoyment in eating candy corn and petting some cute little pigs.

Flippin’ Out

Samsung UpStage

6/10

by Tara Sullivan

With the emergence of the highly hyped iPhone, cell phone companies were left scrambling to push products just as innovative, or at the very least, enticing. Verizon has their new second generation Razor and T-Mobile has their Sidekick LX, but what about Sprint? To match the sleek design and numerous features of its rivals, Samsung has recently released the UpStage, a tiny phone that packs a big, yet sometimes frustrating punch.

The UpStage, billed as a music and media phone, is one of the most uniquely designed mobiles on the today’s market. It’s super small; the matte black body only measures roughly four by one-and-a-half inches, yet despite its miniscule mass, it feels solid enough to survive an inevitable fall once in a while. The phone also comes with a handy leather jacket that doubles as an extended charger, so your phone will be safe from scratches and there’s no worrying about it dying on you. What is so different about the little phone, however, isn’t the size, weight or even the handy charge extension, but its double-sided functionality.

On one side is a typical candy bar cell phone face complete with a miniscule half-inch display. Flip the phone over and the UpStage boasts a crystal clear, full-color screen, controlled by an iPod-like touch pad, suitable for sifting through the Sprint Music Store, playing your own stored music via Bluetooth, or utilizing one of the many web options—yes this baby goes online, too.

Confused yet? You should be. Using separate sides of the phone for different tasks (keypad side for calls and texts, touch-sensitive controls for multimedia) via a “flip” button on the side of the phone will leave any user, well, flipping mad. For instance, looking for a specific song to download from the music store? You have to hit the button, switch to the touchpad side to type in the name, and then flip back to the larger screen to download the song. Putting one large screen with a keypad, or allowing the touchpad to control calls would have been infinitely more effective and less headache-inducing.

Aside from the crazy controls and annoying touchpad (it is extremely hard to manage, even for my tiny fingers), the UpStage makes up for its mistakes with static-free reception and a vast array of entertainment options. There’s a news station that gives up-to-the-minute headlines and weather (kind of like Moviefone options), streaming music videos, and even exclusive Sprint television shows. The phone also has a Mini SD memory card slot, allowing as much storage as your card can fit, which is great for filling up the phone’s MP3 player.

The UpStage comes ridden with kinks, so unless you’re uber tech-savvy and really patient, this might not be the model for you. But if Samsung manages to clean up the mistakes and release a second version—it would blow the competition away.