yangfeili

If anything, with all of these superhero movies right now it's the perfect time for Watchmen, seeing as it really isn't so much a superhero story as it is a story about the superhero genre. Belive it or not, my first time reading the graphic novel was for a college American Literature course. Normally I would balk at that sort of thing, the efforts to try to make things "hip" or whatever, often to the detriment of the academic value of the course. But the professor had very much the same view on things, and wasn't just one of those teachers who tries to cram the course full of "alternative" voices to bury the "dead white guys" of classic literature. Most of the course was very strongly focused on the classics, but when we got up to more modern times, he included the graphic novel because he genuinely thought it had significant value as a new form of literature. And his analysis of the novel was indeed fascinating to listen to and discuss -- he's written books and articles on the history of comic books and the way they've both influenced and been influenced by cultural trends. Oh, if you're wondering why the heck he included a British graphic novel in an American course, it's because in his view, the novel falls into the category of literature about America, and I think he did a pretty good job of defending that decision.

There's a Yoshitaka Amano tarot out there which might be worth looking at. His artwork definitely seems well-suited for this sort of thing, so you might want to browse through some of his Final Fantasy illustrations.

Everyone in the theatre I was at found the Joker pretty darned funny, but maybe us Midwesterners just have a twisted sense of humor (most likely inherited from our ancestors who learned to look at the funny side of things when oxen drowned in rivers and children died from scarlet fever and you could only carry back 100 pounds of meat from that 2000 pound buffalo).

You can buy little plastic cases shaped like Famicom cartridges. I bought a few of them on clearance from a site a few years ago, and glued down some shelf-liner inside of them to use them as carrying cases for DS/GBA games. They'd make a good canvas for something like this. Of course, it almost might be easier to just buy a cheap lot of Famicom games off ebay and remove the labels.

I've seen her in other stuff, and I find that she's a weird combination of oddly attractive and utterly repugnant, and her personality is likewise strangely enticing yet god damned annoying.

Very early in the movie, I really started to stop thinking of the Joker as just "some crazy guy" and more like "a supernatural force." (And I don't mean it in a bad way.) The feeling was really driven home to me near the end where he gives his final monologue during that upside-down shot, his coat flapping around him, his arms raised above his head as he eerily drifts back and forth like some sort of malevolent spirit. Again, not so much an enemy that could be defeated as an inevitable force which had to be survived.

Couldn't they just skip the English dub, and then not even advertise the voice-acting as a feature? I guess I don't see why there had to be English voice-acting at all, unless there's some sort of requirement which publishers impose or something. Although to be honest, I even find the acting in games with allegedly "good" voice-acting to still be pretty bad or at least mediocre. I once saw someone phrase it very well: due to a combination of awkward translation and actors only learning their own lines without bothering to learn the context in the overall script, every dialogue sequence sounds like a bunch of individual people making vague tangential asides at each other rather than an actual conversation. Even most big budget JRPGs have this problem, and even stuff like the MGS series (the ending conversation of MGS2 comes to mind as a noteworthy example). I mean, I have zero experience, but I genuinely think I could at least perform on par with any voice-actors I've heard in any game you could name, and the main reason is that I would actually take the time (even if I was not required to do so by the employer) to read the whole script -- my lines, the narration, everybody else's lines -- so that I not only know what I'm supposed to say, but why I'm saying it, who I'm saying it to, and what I'm saying it in response to. Also, because I have little cousins and whenever they're around I do 90% of my talking in bizarre voices, the remaining 10% being reserved for my normal voice when I have to tell them to stop spitting on the cat or trying to lick the electrical outlet.

I usually see the reverse: the "Doki Doki Panic and radishes" SMB2 get hated on just because it's not the "real" SMB2. I actually think it's the better and more interesting game of the two by far... That's not so say that the other one doesn't have it's interesting "Whoa" moments, like seeing Bowser outside of a Bowser level. Totally blew my mind.

Grabbed Valkyrie Profile for $30. Played it, traded it (oops) for probably like $20 or something. Found Valkyrie Profile again for $20. Sold it for $140.

I never really thought the best part of EarthBound was the events of the actual story (which I found to be fairly standard JRPG material), or even the New Age Retro Hippies and finding hamburgers in trash cans and all that stuff that people always bring up. No, the best stuff was things like the message which pops up if you try to use the Insignificant Item (a jab at completionist gamers), the literal "pixel hunt" in the desert, the "buy a house" subquest which ends badly thanks to the limitations of 2D perspective... the jokes which were more about the mechanics of RPGs and less about just being all wacky and different from the standard themes of most RPGs. It seems like I rarely see people bring that aspect of the humor up, and I wonder if it tends to get missed or there's an issue with a disconnect between the game's target audience (people familiar with the conventions of Dragon Warrior-era RPGs) and people who are more recently playing the game for the first time (who might be more familiar with the conventions of post-FF7 RPGs. Really, I wish someone would make a game which does for the post-FF7 era what EarthBound did for the Dragon Warrior era. I always picture a fight where the boss starts up some huge elaborate excessively long Ultimate Doomsday Spell animation, and you get sick of watching it and just walk up and kick him in the nuts.

What I always thought would be really crazy is a Chrono Trigger remake with Secret of Mana style combat (with the double and triple techs worked in somehow) and multiplayer.

That's pretty much what I've been thinking, not just about this, but about a lot of rereleases of old games. Nintendo did it with all the Mario Advance games, or even worse, the GBA rereleases of individual old NES games. I don't quite understand why this stuff isn't going onto compilation packs, where you get the whole set of games for $20 - $30 instead of just one of them. Final Fantasy I through VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu III, a few others on a disc. No reason why they couldn't do it. Well, I mean, I do understand why they don't do it -- part of it being that we let them get away with it since we've allowed ourselves to be convinced that these games are holy mystical treasures locked away in a secret vault rather than a few megs of data which can be plopped onto a compilation disc at any time. Just because the original Chrono Trigger cart is rare doesn't mean that the game data itself is somehow more expensive to put back into production. (Unless the game has acquired an inflated ego which causes it to take up more disc space or something, I dunno.) I mean, my god, Konami just gave us a compilation of the three main Metal Gear Solid games at budget price, and those are much more recent games. Capcom regularly does it, with stuff like the Mega Man collections. I'm willing to bet they could easily get away with pulling a Nintendo/Square-Enix with their old games, but they have the decency to choose not to. Oh well, I'll probably still end up buying it anyway. (I offer no solutions to the problem, I just point it out.) :\

I picked mine up back in 2001 or thereabouts for $50, and have enjoyed it well enough even if I haven't played a ton of games on it (I need to get out there and find out more about what's good). One game I can recommend: Toy Commander. It looks like some cheap bargain bin game at first glance, but it's actually surprisingly fun and challenging, one of those games that manages to do a lot with just a little.

I'm not quite sure where I stand on it, I tend to waver back and forth a bit. I don't think these are the things that would really make a game art, but rather are just attempts by videogames to imitate other art forms (mainly film), and they usually come off as a bit amateurish in that regard, like they're being made by guys who wanted to do movies but didn't have what it takes (in fact, I think that's exactly how Ken Levine has described himself in an interview -- and I find that bit of self-deprecation far more respectable than the guys who genuinely believe their anime fanfiction-esque plots are literary masterpieces). To me, if there's any "art" in videogames, it lies in the design of the elements which are unique to videogames themselves and not just "me too" borrowings from other art forms. Good level design, clever gameplay mechanics, the tricks and techniques used to overcome resolution and palette limitations to create effective visuals... In fact, if there's one element of videogames which has achieved "art" status, it's the spritework. Pixel art has become a recognized artistic genre in its own right, originally derived from videogames but now taking on a life of its own.

Great. So now excessive non-interactive cutscenes have invaded fighting games. Well, no, I guess Brawl did it first.

I think the last time I checked in on the "I, Mario" project, it looked like it was starting to suffer from a severe case of bloat. I mean, there was still a lot of cool stuff and artwork that had been put out, but with regards to the story and the insertion of a lot of seemingly unnecessary characters, it was starting to show signs of "design by committee," and perhaps even more horrifying, it was starting to slightly resemble the Super Mario Bros. movie. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think there's room for alternate takes on the concept, rather than just trying to cram them all together into a single entity. I like what you've described here, and my guess is that if you continued to flesh it out, it would have more of a sense of strength and coherency thanks to having been the work of a single writer/designer. Good luck with it.

I would think that if you dug around a bit, there'd be some sort of site full of "official" US military music, most likely all public domain stuff. I found one a while back which had all kinds of WWII German and Soviet military music (probabably not quite what you're looking for...).

Yeah, he pretty much gets it right on Oblivion... or at least on the vanilla out-of-the-box game. It's really the user-created mods that saved both Morrowind and Oblivion. Actually, I remember how I discovered the modding scene for Morrowind. The first thing I did when I got off the boat was enter the nearest store to buy a hat... only to discover that there are no hats in Morrowind!!

I think it could be kind of interesting to see a game with 8-bit visuals but with Mega Man Zero-esque gameplay. I've come to regard 8-bit visuals at their best not so much as an "inferior" step towards 16-bit visuals, but rather as a distinctive visual style in their own right, in the same way that an artist might intentionally work with a monochromatic color palette or other limitations to achieve a particular visual effect. If these rumors are true, it seems like Capcom might be thinking along those same lines: to stop thinking about 8-bit visuals as an obstacle and instead as a style.

One band that I'm surprised hasn't hit the US is Oceanlane. They open for a lot of Western bands when they tour Japan, so maybe someone will invite them over one of these days. http://youtube.com/watch?v=L5h9Kn05KK8 Dir en grey actually made it over (saw them in Kansas City), although it's always seemed to me like the fans of the whole psychotic screaming bizarre music tend to be somewhat more open to foreign stuff. Yeah, I like a lot of Japanese music, but I totally know what you mean about all the lovey mushy stuff. Although again that might be why Dir en grey has successfully made the jump, since 90% of their songs seem to be about raping and dismembering schoolgirls.

I'm not exactly a lurker, but nor do I post very often. Regardless, I hadn't picked an avatar, so I went ahead and grabbed Sayo-chan/Pocky here. The reason: When most people think of the SNES, they think of Super Mario World, Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, etc. But I always find that when I'm in the mood to play the SNES for a bit, Pocky & Rocky tends to be the game I grab the most often. It's like the pure distilled essence of the 16-bit era. Great sprites, fun gameplay, decent challenge, two-player mode. Also, because there aren't any Ys avatars.

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=3&cId=3152540

There are tons of sounds that were used in Daggerfall which I hear all the time in stuff on TV, particularly on the sci-fi channel. The magic casting sound, the door opening sound, the skeleton scream...

I think Secret of Monkey Island might have been the first PC game I really ever played (having been mostly a console gamer). I played it at a friend's house up to the point where you have to shoot yourself out of the cannon on the ship, and for some reason I couldn't figure it out. I was damned sure that I knew what you had to do, but I was apparently clicking things in the wrong order or something. Years later I picked up the bundle pack of the first three games, and finally got to beat it. And yes, I did the same thing I tried to do back then, except this time it worked. Oh damn, (mild spoilers) I also remember crashing the game on the part where you have to melt the lock with the grog. I got it down to where I could make it all the way to the jail on one mug and even click the command to use the grog on the lock. But the mug would finish melting and disappear in that short 2 seconds it took Guybrush to actually walk over to the lock, and when he reached out to use it, the game would crash. I thought there was something wrong with the game, but then I figured out what you had to do.

I somewhat surprisingly don't care for manga much (surprising in light of slight weeaboo tendencies earlier in my life), but my brother got me reading BLAME! by Tsutomo Nihei, and I actually liked it quite a bit. Although, "reading" probably isn't the right word for BLAME!, since it tends to be heavily reliant on atmosphere and mood rather than dialogue and exposition, to the extent that there are often large swaths of pages with absolutely no text whatsoever. In fact, I'd say the majority of the pages are purely visual, with the visuals being a weird blend of H.R. Giger and M.C. Escher with a bit of modern Japanese flair. It's probably not for everyone, but I found its consistent tone of grim isolation a welcome change from the schizophrenically inconsistent tone of most Japanese productions ("Now we're fighting an epic battle now we're making silly faces with sweat drops over our heads now everything's all romantic now crazy slapstick stuff is happening now a guy's head just got ripped off aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh ^________^ !!!!!!"). EDIT: Tsutomu Nihei also did a short Wolverine series called Snikt!. Reviews I've read didn't have much to say for the story, but the art looks pretty cool. I've been trying to find it for my brother, but it seems to be out of print.