So, when it comes to an samurai anime series one must ask: "why anime?" After all, there is the whole live action chanbarra thing. There's a precedence, basically. Shigurui (I think I'm spelling it right) has a really good answer.

So it can be ridiculously ultraviolent.

There is, an example, a scene where the series' protaganist, Fujuki, rips the lower jaw off an offending ronin with his bare hands. It's been awhile since I've seen an anime this violent so I found that enjoyable. The storyline was otherwise enjoyable even had a certain level of deja vu going on. Been there, done that. The only thing that annoyed me about the series was the ending seemed... incomplete. Like there's some episodes missing or there's another season of shows. You're introduced in the first episode to Fujuki as 'the one armed swordsman', but they never explain how he lost his left arm. They never conclude the match in the first episode, but it's a samurai anime. They probably kill each other simutaneously. :P

tags: anime

Roaming around a music site like say Amazon's mp3 site with a willingness to burn money is a dangerous thing. Picked up three CDs of varying awesomeness.

Dragonforce - Ultra Beatdown. Seriously, you guys fail. Why didn't somebody tell me a year ago Dragonforce dropped their fourth CD? Maybe it's just as well that I wasn't told. Not that the CD is really bad, but it sounds almost just like Inhuman Rampage. There's a couple really good songs and a bunch of other songs that just go in one ear and out the other. For the sun and the flames of hell and steel and dragons and stuff. It sounds like they're having trouble coming up with lyrics, but to be fair I've only listened to the CD once.

Muse - Integrity. One day, Muse will be more famous than the Beatles. It'll take time and a couple more CDs, but one day Muse will produce a CD so awesome that it will blind us. It's like every CD they release gets better and better. I also find it weird that as Radiohead goes further away from using the guitar and more synthy, Muse embraces their inner Queen. When the band rocks, they rock and when they're pretty, they're very very pretty. Like kittens in a meadow of sunflowers.

Alice in Chains - Black gives way to blue. Argh. I hate record companies. This is the kind of CD that makes me wish I still had newsnet access (damn you Verizon) so I could pirate CDs before I buy them. "Oh look. This song sounds pretty cool ('Check my brain'). I'll buy the CD... only to find there are like 3 good songs and the rest are all FAIL". Maybe the CD will grow on me. Oh well. Decent filler for my iPod I guess.

tags: music

Protip: if you make an anime series out of a successful manga, you should at least bother to stick with the fucking story. The anime was great until the fight with Rigaldo.... At first I thought it was gonna be a bland Berserk with chicks, but it turned out better than I thought and started reading the scanlations. Reminds me that one of these days I need to read all of Berserk.

God knows I need to read/watch something more manly. The anime version of Raki has to be one of the most annoying worthless male characters of all time. The manga version, who looks a lot younger, wasn't half as annoying. Maybe it's just the medium or the anime version's voice actor.

TLDR: manga > anime

tags: anime

For those that need an action RPG fix until Blizzard puts out Diablo III sometime before 2020, Torchlight has been pretty fun so far. And for $20, it's a pretty good buy for a single player game.

tags: games

http://penguinsattack.com/

Need to find more quality games, but this one was pretty enjoyable. You basically build turrets and missles and stuff along the path these evil penguins march upon. Not exactly hard, but still enjoyable.

tags: games

I now know what it's like to set a $50 bill on fire and watch it burn.

Part of me knows that I shouldn't do it. Knows that within a couple months the game will have free trials. Knows all about how badly NCsoft is with botting and goldsellers from reading their own forums.... but dammit, I'm bored.

tags: games

So. About a month ago I decided it was finally time to find me a new morning raid guild. So.... I did and wish I had done so sooner. The new guild is pretty cool and I like the raid leaders. I found having a raid leader that cusses and yells a surprisingly nice change of pace. A lot better than my old raid leader who coddled bad dps.... For the first time in a long time, I feel a need to improve how I play and be concerned about my general performance. It feels a lot better than sitting around having the raid leader for nthmillion freaking time explain the same old tired fights. That and now that the tourney is out, I have only set foot in ye ol' naxxaramas once in a month and that was with my weekend pally diversion.

We just cleared ToC25 last week so things are looking up. And now that my trial is up and I have 'member' status, I should start getting a degree of priority for loot.

Things are looking good. Maybe I will see Arthas before the next expansion.

tags: wow

You suck at putting together furniture. Hell, you suck at putting anything together that involves screws (note the Perfect Grade Wing Gundam model box sitting around collecting dust).

So basically I decided to buy a new desk. It's a nice desk and it was only $100. Has a tempered glass top and looks generally attractive for a desk. Only a couple problems. Of course being a put-together cheap desk, the instructions were rather vague and the little wrench that it came with was apparently engineered for asian midgets. That was... yeah. My fingers still ache from that little adventure. But hey three hours later I got the damn thing together.

Now I just have to get rid of the old plywood monster of a desk.

tags: life

Rented Transformers G1 Season One. I could remotely swear that this show was not quite as dumb. This show definitely has not aged well.

tags: anime

I loved Gurren Lagan. I thought the first 13 episodes was one of the best "boy becomes a man" stories ever in mecha anime history. The rest of it was just pure craziness. WHO DO YOU THINK I AM! but Gunbuster 2 was pretty cool and deserves some love. It's got the same 'wait, you can do that in mecha anime?' trend that FLCL and Gurren Lagan had going for it. I appreciated that it was a basically six episodes too like FLCL.

It's good suff. Go watch it.

tags: anime

Watched the first season on YouTube. Nothing especially new and exciting about Gundam Wing 2.0, but I did enjoy it more than I did Seed/Seed Destiny. There were a few serious "OH SHIT NO THEY DIDN'T!" moments near the end and I enjoyed the overall lack of whining and general wankery. OK, Setsuna's Gundam worship came close, but it was acceptable compared to the excessive emofabulous Kira/Athrun/Shin combo from Seed/Seed-D.

One of these days I need to actually watch Gundam Wing in its entirety.

Oh and protip: never, ever look at the comments when you watch any anime on youtube.

tags: anime

is a ret pally. Vakhar of Feathermoon.

tags: wow

This is something that I've been thinking about for a while. I'll eventually spread this whole Evolve or Die! thing into multiple posts. This one about comics in general.

I am a nerd. I live on a steady diet of comics, manga, anime, movies, and let's not forget my Warcraft addiction. But my nerd love interests are still stuck in the 80s and refuse to grow up. The dorks running the show are all retards that can't realize that this is the 21st century and the internet is all-pervading and all-powerful. MEMES ARE MY GODS! At any moment I can watch a movie, see kittens frollicking like kittens do, download music (that *gasp* I pay for! Heresy, I know), kill stuff with doods from Canada and Australia (WTF m8?), and load up my hentai and porn folders as fast as the cooldown on rapidshit expires. But comics, manga, and anime? I have to go into the grey realm of downloading those because the retards apparently don't want my money? Seriously, I have no issues with paying for a comic book or some manga chapters. Long as the price is right. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person on god's green earth that wouldn't mind paying so what's the deal? Fact of the matter is the internet is not going anywhere soon. If these media types don't get their shit together, they're going to completely die off. Maybe not today, but someday there will be a reckoning.....

Part One: Comics

The Problem: So many problems here.... It's a wonder either Marvel or DC is still around, but somebody must be paying for those overpriced hardcover ominbuses I guess... There are a number of factors with comics today. Apparently, both Joe Quesada and Dan DiDio, the head editor/bosses for Marvel & DC, both have completely forgotten the near-death experiences of both companies back in the 90s. You know, back when every major comic release came in ten different collect em' all variant covers with OMGSHINYHOLOGRAPHICCOVERS and similar shit nobody but hardcore wanker collector fanbois would buy. Now they're doing it again. Marvel, especially is pumping out the variants left and right -- do people really care about this crap? They're still wanking to the comic shops and wondering why manga is more popular these days.... Meanwhile, most smart comic buyers are waiting for the eventual graphic novels -- the company release everything in six issue graphic novels -- but the time lag is a big problem. When you have the internet at your fingertips, it's easy to find out what happened in Invincible Iron Man Issue#14. Especially since the big comic book web pages (comics.ign or Newsarama) have six page previews for every issue. And if not the comic sites, the companies themselves. Or you can check out the sites or 4chan (/co/ is pretty active even if the noise ratio is 2:1 in favor of cartoons) and get all the important details. Meanwhile, they hold onto the whole '20 pages of comics and 10 pages of shitty ads' style single issue comics like a life preserver in the middle of a hurricane so that the specialty comic stores have something to sell. Which is good, because that's the only place you'll ever find them. Back in the 80s and early 90s, you could go to the grocery store or a bookstore for comics. Nowadays, you either go to a comic shop in the middle of nowhere run by some shady guy that looks like he's living in the 90s, buying the overpriced hardcovers at a book chain, or subscribing to the comics directly grumbling at how you get your comics two weeks later than we're they're released via the comic scanners like DCP.

Or you download scans of the comics you want when the rapidshare links go live on /co/ every Wednesday night.

There's also a factor I want to delve into that is frequently ignored anytime there's ever a discussion about digital comics: space and volume. Comics take up a LOT of space. Think about it: the average fanboi guys maybe 8-10 comics a month. Likely more. That's just a month. Spread that over about, say, five years. He's got a huge box full of comics now. Those comics have to go somewhere. Now start factoring in that he's a modern nerd (he likes manga and anime too) and that box gets reaaaally big. That's my dilemma: I have a very small amount of space where I live (with mom & dad lawls) so I don't have space for a couple thousand comics. My mother grumbles every time I buy manga or a graphic novel. And the reality is I'm going to read it once and put it in a box or on a shelf. Where as a digital comic is out of sight, out of mind. It's on my hard drive just sitting there and if I feel glossing through it again? No muss, no fuss.

The Solution: we need real digital comics preferably in a resolution that falls somewhere between "this doesn't make my eyes bleed" and "Hey there's a black mark the artist missed on Ms. Marvel's ass". It doesn't have to be ridiculous, but it needs to be relatively sharp and not fuzzy. Price needs to be reasonable -- $1 single issues no ads or free with ads. There will have to be some kind of anti-piracy system, but that's up to the companies. As long as it's not obtrusive of my reading pleasure, I'll put up with just about anything that doesn't install crap on my PC. Of course, this being the age of the gadget, the comic should be viewable on iPods etc. I'm sure there's plenty of demand for portable comics and the first one that works that out will likely mint a gold mine. I'd honestly be fine with a YouTube type interface where you can black out the rest of the browser's UI and can flip back & forth between pages at your leisure. Kinda like how manga scanlators are already doing with animated manga scans on YouTube. More on that on part II: Manga.

tags: comics

X-men/Dark Avengers: Utopia #1: Wasn't really expecting much. Wondering if the fact that Hellion & Surge are in this that they survive whatever happens in X-Force #16. For those who don't follow X-Forks (hur-hur), Hellion & Surge were administered a lethal dose of the Legacy virus. This strain turns the mutant(s) into living timebombs. Considering Yost & Young's desire to kill off every former member of New X-men, I was a bit worried. Otherwise.... stuff goes down. Bad stuff happens. Oh and Emma/Scott is basically over. Hopefully Scott on the run will do the same wonders as it did for Tony Stark. You know Invincible Iron Man is awesome right?

Green Lantern #42: Another stuff happens issue. Hal utterly pisses off Larfreeze (aka Agent Orange) by grabbing the Orange Lantern. I will, however, forever refer to him as Gonzo. Should be interesting to see what happens with the Blue Lanterns. Diplomacy, hah!

Next week looks busy. Green Lantern Corps 38, Cable 16, Uncanny X-men 513, and Iron man #15.

tags: comics

The whole stylus UI throws me off. The entire game is controlled via the stylus -- okay, there's some button functionality, but it's not much. Most of the movement and so on is done with the stylus and.... it doesn't feel right to me. This coming from playing just about every other Zelda ever released. It's like they packed every DS gimmick they could into it including using the mic for things like blowing out candles. What's so wrong with using the D-pad to move etc?

At least I didn't buy it like I did FFXII: Revenant Wings.

tags: games

Gundam Seed Destiny movies: These things deserve a subtitle: NOW WITH 80% LESS RECYCLED FOOTAGE! Then again, we get to see Shinn's sister dying about x10 times still. But it's better than 50 times! Much like the original MS gundam movies, these movies manage to can 50 episodes worth of Gundam into (in this case) four 90 minute movies. Hits all the major plot points just fine. I'm starting to think every anime series needs to come out like this.

One Piece: I <3 Funimation. Even if it doesn't let me skip the logo crap and their own logo flash is a million times louder than it needs to be. Totally ignored the dub track like Case Closed and was gloriously treated to an unbutchered translation. They even kept Zoro as Zoro. Or was it Zorro? Nevermind, but I hate name changes made for stupid reasons. Fuck you, copyrights!

Strain: Dear god, this is the worst anime I've seen in like 5 years. It's baaaaaad. Utterly generic plot. Absolutely terrible characters (OK, the lesbian who has a crush on the main character is hawt). Bleah. I'd rather watch the original Streamline dub of Outlanders. At least that was terrible to the point of amusing.

tags: anime

I've known this was coming, but I didn't think it would be a numbered FF game.

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/

FFXIV will kill WoW!

Looks like I get to play a tarutaru again. <3

tags: games

So I'm trying out this new F2P MMO called Dragonica. It's your basic asian grinder MMO except that it's mostly a side-scrolling game like the old days of Ninja Gaiden and Final Fight. So there is an emphasis on poundng buttons like a maniac. Works great with my ol' PS2 dualshock. It's a pretty far cry from WoW, which I find attractive. That and the game designs are super cute. And it's free so it makes a great weekend or Tuesday downtime game.

There are no less that three different versions running around run by three different companies: thq-ice, qpotato.uk, and IAH. They cover North America, Europe, and SEA/Australia respectively. The thq version is about to enter CBT next week, but the other two are supposed to go into open beta soon. The gpotato one opens June 10th.

tags: games

Seriously. They come out with a new PSP model every six months that's worse than the last one. The Magic Box (http://the-magicbox.com) has photos of the new PSP Go and I have to scratch my head and go WHY? No UMD support at all. Smaller screen than the PSP-2000. They just released the PSP-3000 maybe six months ago (and it was barely an upgrade over the PSP-2000). And to rub salt in the wounds.... there is no psp games. Seriously, I think the PS2 gets more games. There's like... nothing on the PSP coming out aside from a handful of games.

I don't get why the handheld companies think it's so cool to push out a new handheld with brand new features every six months (nintendo DSi counts too). Why can't they put this shit in one console when they launch and stop fucking over their fanbase. Especially when you know that the target market for handhelds are kids. They get a shiny new DS only to find a new and shinier version of the system just came out with new and exciting features!

Somewhere there executives swimming in the tears of babies. And that ain't right.

tags: games

Ages ago back in the dark ages (like 10 years ago) when anime was distributed via fansubs on video tapes, I picked up like the first 20 or so episodes of an anime series called Detective Conan. Later, a couple years ago I noticed that Funimation put out Detective Conan under the americanized name Case Closed. I figured with a bunch of shitty name changes that it wouldn't really be worth looking into. So I decided to take a gamble and rent the second season on DVD since it was listed as having a Japanese audio track. Surely, they had to keep the original names in the subtitled version -- my understanding of the Japanese language is pretty terrible, but even I can pick out character names.

I was pleasantly surprised that they did. And will probably rent whatever else Funimation has put out of the series.

Detective Conan is one of those series that, while utterly predictable, you watch anyway. It's a mystery show and pretty much every last episode goes like this: somebody dies (usually horribly), stuff happens, Conan/Shinichi figures who did the crime, and then he tells who did it. And yet while it is generally obvious almost every time, you come back for more. It's like the fast food of anime. Sure, you know it's probably going to make your chest explode eventually/rot your brain, but at least it fills you up. There's even the rare bit of character development for the main cast.

8/10.

tags: anime