Friends are important, nothing is greater than hanging out with a good friend. So this week in celebration of this, I asked my friends for review suggestions and i'm going to give you two reviews, suggested by my friends. They are both about two great friends and perfect for you and your greatest friend to hang out together and enjoy.

Instead of the normal 4 micro reviews this week, your going to get 2 reviews, mostly because I feel like talking more in depth about them, but also because this weeks post picture took way longer than normal.

ToeJam & Earl – Mega drive

Toejam & Earl is a strange game to explain to someone, you essentially play either a orange blog thing that kind of looks like Patrick from Spongebob or a 3 legged weirdly shaped.. thing. They are very nineties aliens stranded on earth and in search of the parts of their crashed spaceship.

The only help you have along the way are the presents you find and the quite frankly random power ups they give you. The power ups range from the awesome, (Icarus wings) the dangerous (rocket shoes) and the broken controller inducing (lose a life) it does not help that you don't know what is in a present till you open it. True you can find ways to identify what presents give what power up, but pretty soon you will get another present that randomises them all again for you.

The gameplay itself takes a top down view on a 2D randomly generated series of floating islands. on each island you will find, presents, “earthlings” that mostly want to kill you, an elevator to the next island and if your really lucky you might find one of the spaceship parts your looking for. If you fall off the edge of the island, you find yourself on the island below and must again find the elevator to get back up to the level above.

So far I'm sure your not feeling particularly sold on Toejam & Earl, but trust me when I say what makes it awesome, is the surreal humour and the pure joy that comes from grabbing a friend and trying its co-op mode.

While playing co-op you share the same screen, unless one of you wonders away from the other, then it changes to a split screen view, like the single player mode, presents are just as random but with the added joy of a present effecting both players if they are close together when they are opened. You also get a bunch of fun interactions between Toejam and Earl when they are together, thats a lot of humour that is lost in the single player mode.

I would not recommend its single player for a first time player, but if you can grab a friend to play with. Make sure you check it out, its now available on the Wii virtual console, so you have no excuse not to check it out.

Also, check out the second game its interesting, its a side scroller rather than a top down game but stay wayyyy away from Toejam & Earl 3

3.5 out of 5 brains. (but 5 out of 5 if you have a friend to play with)

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Imagine if you would, what would you do if a man from the future literally dropped out of the sky and handed you your very own time machine.

What would you do?

If you said “use it to work on your history homework” this is the film for you.

The film stars Alex Winter as Bill s. Preston, Esq and Keanu Reeves as Ted Theodore Logan. As two seemingly stupid members of the garage band “wyld stallyns” that happen to be flunking history.

*spoilers from here if you have never seen it*

There is one small complication, The perfect utopian future that awaits the human race depends on the music of wyld stallyns, and if they fail an upcoming history presentation the band will be forced to split up and the perfect future will be lost to us all.

So the rulers of the future do what any of us would do, they make a glowing crystal into a time travailing phone box, and send it back to the past to help them pass.

Bill and Ted then use this phone booth to round up a bunch of historical figures, pick up some historical babes and generally have an excellent adventure.

Its no understatement to say that this is Keanu Reeves best acted role of his career (he actually shows some emotion) and no matter how hard it is to believe the destiny of the two unlikely protagonists you are rooting for them all the way, you really want them to succeed and its hard not to cheer along in the final act of the film.

Apart from the two main characters, the side characters really take the cake. (or in this case, the ice cream) from Napoleons visit to Waterloo, (the waterpark) Joan of arc taking over a workout class and Beethoven's solo in the music store this is a film that never lets up and amuses throughout.

The sequal is also worth a watch, its maybe not as good as the first, but the new characters introduced are well worth it and it still stands up on its own as a great film.

*spoilers end here*

All in all Bill and Ted is a film well worth your time, if you have not seen it, go out and get it.

Do it now, this post is pretty much over anyway.

5 out of 5 brains