Subatomic Brainfreeze

I'm FINALLY GOING TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT REDLINE

That is, I'm going to say something other than "see Redline immediately, it's great." Mind, that statement still stands.

Last weekend I invited about a lot of friends of mine out to see Redline, which is running in New York City as we speak (dub, probably projected off a Blu-Ray), go see it right now before it's gone! Everybody in attendance loved it. I don't think enjoying the movie is an "anime fan" or a "not anime fan" issue, I think it's a matter of whether you like to be entertained and you don't mind if your entertainment isn't too serious.

And I want to draw a line here. "Not too serious" doesn't mean "not too good". A lot of people have seen Redline's breezy attitude and beautiful visuals and gotten the impression that the movie's some shallow light show and that its story isn't worth telling. That couldn't be further from the truth.

The theatrical showing marks the third time I've watched this movie in its entirety. Though I wouldn't maniacally drive myself to watch Redline over and over again, it hasn't gotten old for me at all. The movie is so alive, so densely packed with character and world-building detail, and none of it is directly spelled out. Really take this movie in. Look all over the frame. You'll find things. They've built a universe here. It's a universe gone completely mad, but that's my style anyway.

It's not unusual for anime to have large amounts of backstory, but what's unusual about Redline compared to its peers is that the storytelling is almost all visual. This is an especially sharp contrast because ironically, anime does a lot of telling rather than showing. It's just always much cheaper, especially in animation, to say what happens than to show it happening. Think about it in Durarara!! when they go to those chatrooms, or anything in Fate/Zero, really. And this isn't just in novel adaptations: look at how shonen anime love to explain the mechanics of the battle taking place-- be it a battle between ninja, cars, or spinning tops-- in technical terms. We could talk about all the different examples for hours, but then we would be anime exposition characters.

What I'm saying is that Redline, contrary to many reports, has quite a complex universe and fleshed-out principal characters: it just tells us the things we need to know and quietly shows us much of the rest. It hides away points in the background at blink-and-you-miss-it moments that an anime TV series would spend two or three episodes on. This movie offers you so much in every department that you're not even going to see it all in a single viewing. In the conversations online I've seen a lot of anime fans come to Redline looking down on it, leave looking down on it, and that's their loss. Don't miss out yourself: if you can't see it in a theater, the Blu-Ray is out in a week or two. Enjoy.

So then I watched the Nanoha movie-- FOR WORK RESEARCH

So when you're reading this, the first Astro Toy column of the year will be up. This week I took a reader recommendation and bought a figure of Fate Testarossa from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. This was a really big series with otaku a couple of years ago, but I had zero interest.  I like to know what I'm talking about-- at least the very basics-- when I look at a toy, so I went a little bit out of my way and watched the movie that was recently released.

I'm heard a couple of descriptions of this show say "it's like shonen fighting but with magical girls" or "it's like Sunrise mecha but with magical girls." I guess you could say that, on a surface level: this two-hour movie has little going on but flying, laser-blasting magical girl action, and the transforming, English-speaking weapons are probably the coolest thing about it.

The plot is about some magic macguffins, but the movie is really about the meeting and eventual friendship of the two main characters, Fate and Nanoha. They start as enemies, they team up, in later series they shack up. The characters are really weird in this movie, in a very otaku kind of way. They're supposed to be ten-year-old girls, but they don't act anything at all like children, or even humans, for that matter. I was talking with Ko (who also just got picked up at ANN) about it and he joked that they were "lesbian friendship robots".

Yeah, that about says it, huh? These characters stare at each other longingly, struggle and fight against a villain whose motivation is "Rarr! I'm evil!" (twenty minutes is spent on this thrilling backstory), and they cry when they're reunited at the end of the movie, but they've got zero humanity.

That said there is a lot of magic and flying and shit exploding. Looks pretty nice. In conclusion, the transformation scenes are pretty uncomfortable and if someone walked in on you watching those scenes they'd probably call the cops.

Treasure Island Sports tricked me into buying an empty box AND I DON'T WANT IT TO HAPPEN TO YOU

Alright, time for a toy public service announcement. After Christmas I found what I thought was a fantastic deal on a Soul of Chogokin Gold Lightan, a figure that's long out of production. $20 for this was too good a deal not to look into for a gold-plated transforming cigarette lighter robot, and so I put in an order on the suspiciously named:

Gold Lightan GX-32 18K Plating Figure Exclusive Wooden Box

The seller was Treasure Island Sports, and not to spoil the ending of this story, but Treasure Island Sports is to be avoided. The photo on Amazon was just a black box with the Saint Seiya logo on it. I assumed it was a placeholder.

Days pass. My buddy Mike Toole decided to go in on this too, and he suggests to me for the first time the terrible idea that this could just be an empty wooden box. This is possible: the Chogokin Lightan figure comes in a display box itself, and while it doesn't make a lot of sense, maybe the seller only has that part of the item. I would consider this a ripoff, but one where the seller could at least weasel into saying "this is what you ordered".

So here's what happened.

That's right, I got that damn Saint Seiya box in the mail. Nothing to do with Gold Lightan whatsoever. So this is definitely the wrong item, but it's still pretty heavy. Maybe there's something cool in there? Maybe I still got a deal after all?

Yeah, it's an empty god damn box. This is a display box for a Saint Seiya Myth Cloth figure. I believe it's a Bandai Hong Kong product, but there is no Bandai logo on this thing and it could well be a wooden box someone made and slapped the Saint Seiya logo on. It doesn't look like official merch, that's for sure. Again, this item has nothing to do with Gold Lightan. Adding insult to injury, the Saint Seiya logo fell off the front of the box the moment I removed it from the packaging.

So now I have to go through the process of getting a refund on Amazon. Unfortunately, Treasure Island apparently has a reputation for not getting back to their buyers, so we'll see how this turns out. Worse comes to worse, I'm sure that Amazon will refund me as soon as I have to bring this story to their attention: they did it for that defective DVD of Hollywood Cop, after all!

So, as always, be aware when you're shopping online. And don't ever buy from Treasure Island Sports.

 

Comipo is just a toy, and that's okay BUT THERE ARE SOME KEY POINTS THEY'RE MISSING

So I became a webcomic author this past week. Of course, I've no artistic talent and no hope of being as good as the webcomics I like. But never mind all that. I realized I could do a webcomic, and moments after that realization came the comic itself. It's only been a week but it's drawing a tiny Tumblr audience, and these comics are easy enough to make that hey, sure, I can do this for a while. Let's see what happens, right?t The plot summary follows.

"MASAKA THE YOUNG LADY OF HIGH SPIRITS. MAJIDE THE KNOWING OF MYSTERY. THEIR ADVENTURES IN GAMING KINGDOM IT BEGINS TO MOVE WITH LAUGHTER AND E KIMOCHI"

The program I'm making this in is called Comipo, and make no mistake, it's a toy. It works for my purposes-- because I'm making an absurd 4-panel gag comic written in Bad Scanlation English-- but this program isn't going to magically crank out pro-quality work for you. That's not what it's about. That's kind of why my comic is the way it is. Play to the tool you're working with, right?

The fundamental idea of Comipo is that rather than drawing characters (which we all know is totally hard and stuff), we manipulate 3D models and 2D images into the comic we've had in mind. Really simple images like the print club-style avatar I use for the Tumblr (seen above) come out in minutes. All this one involved was picking out facial expressions from a menu, and a little tilting of the models to make it look natural. Working with the models is easy and smooth and fun: you just have to be careful with zooming and expanding the models, as the black cel-shaded lines can come out looking rough and choppy depending on how the character is posed.

You can import any image you like into the comic, but Comipo's very extensive library of premade backgrounds and sound effects actually cover quite a lot of ground. I don't use the many supplied photo backgrounds, for the most part: I think the clash between 3D models and live images is too distracting, especially when they're supposed to be directly interacting with those backgrounds. I use effects and patterns, and Comipo also has a truckload of those.

The characters I'm using for the comic are the exact same as Comipo's default characters. The thing is, you see... you really can't get very far from these defaults. Comipo uses just two base bodies, a male and a female. The two characters you see above share the same body, and there's no adjusting body type or other physical features. The second female model, meant to be a teacher, is the same girl body in a schoolteacher's outfit. The male models are the same way.

In short, in the world of Comipo everybody is made of different parts swapped onto the same two doll bodies. And they're all moe-style highschoolers with only hairstyles and eye colors to separate them. (The guys are really half-assed: imagine a "make your own boring, nondescript lead of a harem anime" generator.) Again, there isn't a huge variety of those distinguishing factors either, and the more characters you try and make with Comipo the more obvious it is that they all look just like each other.

Poses and facial expressions are better, but here there's interface trouble as you have to slog through a long list to get close to the one you need. I've already started to make note of the numbers of useful poses (like the above). While time-intensive, a manual posing option would be nice for people who really want to work this program hard.

Your subject matter is pretty severely limited by all these factors: it's cutesy high-school comedy or go home. The more strenuous the posing you put these models through, the weirder they start to look. Obviously the biggest request by Comipo users has been the ability to import other 3D models into the program-- the vast world of Miku Miku Dance models will make this very interesting when it finally makes its way into the English version of the program.

As it stands, Comipo is absolutely not worth $50 unless you're just that curious, which I was after toying with the free demo. $25 is the absolute highest this should be going for. With a little more variety and freedom this toy could be a vast playground, but as it is it's a walled-in high school. Of course, that doesn't matter much to me: I already have more than enough here to make the Kawaiikochans go on for a decade or three. But then, I never said I was an ambitious creator!

Mawaru Penguindrum 22: BUT WHAT ARE THE PENGUINS UP TO?

You might have noticed from the shift in subjects lately, but the only anime that I'm currently watching is the mysterious and fabulously adolescent Mawaru Penguindrum. Kunihiko Ikuhara's return to anime has not disappointed in any way. But right now I'm going to talk about some late-series stuff and I'm obligated to warn you about that. Don't even look up Penguindrum online if you're interested in seeing it and haven't jumped in yet. The show's a giant unraveling spoiler from episode one and the best thing you can do is just start watching and let it work its magic. If you seriously want me to spoil you, I'm still going to keep writing like you don't know anything, so this post will tell you what's going on in Penguindrum. Don't do it!

Some words on Gamepro's passing: I REALLY READ LIKE ALL OF THE GAMEPROS WHEN I WAS A KID

The venerable GamePro magazine is folding, effective immediately. This story has made a lot of 80s and 90s kids sad, even though GamePro hasn't had a role in most of our lives for a long time.

You see, when we read GamePro, videogames were for kids, and only kids. The magazines were written for us children, and GamePro exemplified that. The writers weren't billed by their actual names, they were gimmicky pseudonyms with cartoon faces like Scarry Larry or Bruised Lee. Every year they'd do LamePro for April Fool's Day: it was Cracked magazine but with videogames. Bubonic the Hedgehog, get it? And that's how I learned about the Plague!

See, I too was a kid when I read GamePro. A little, bitty guy. I cared about two things in the world: videogames and reading. And I never read anything good. When I was a child I devoured every word in sight. At five I was reciting the movie section of the newspaper to my parents, listings and all. I never even went to the movies when I was little. Only for Ghostbusters II. I don't really know why I did that. I was just compelled.

Of course, I did the same thing with GamePro when I discovered it at six or seven years old. I tore through every single preview and review and advertisement and accepted it all uncritically. As strange as it sounds, GamePro was one of the main ways I was taking in culture back then. It probably went a longer way than I know.

It wasn't the only game mag I was reading, of course: there was EGM and Game Players and Gamefan (practically an infomercial for the import shop that advertised in the back, this mag nevertheless opened my eyes and got me to mod my Playstation so I could play Tobal 2) and pretty much any other mag I could get my hands on. EGM was my favorite because the book was so big: it took me days to look at every little thing.

I remember very well why I stopped reading GamePro. GamePro hyped up publishers' products as much as is done today (for fun, compare Modern Warfare 3's professional Metacritic average to reviews from folks who bought it on Amazon.com) and it talked impressionable young me into playing and buying all kinds of crap, mostly from Sega's over-reaching period with the Sega CD and the 32X. I remember GamePro's perfect score for the atrocious Tomcat Alley, because I begged Mom and Dad to take me to Blockbuster to rent it. I remember the 32X because that was a Christmas for me. I nearly went for an Atari Jaguar, okay? I was really, really gullible. I was ten.

So I jumped ship to Game Players, a dumb-fun magazine that spoke to the 12-year old me by endlessly discussing bears and putting people in "The Box" (where there was often a bear), and which eventually became the IGN monster we all know so well. I stopped reading Game Players when an entire issue was just a strategy guide for Resident Evil 2. I didn't need no strategy guide for that game.

By the late 90s the internet had taken over for me anyway, and to be honest I haven't looked back. When I was a kid I was always digging for weird and interesting things. While the magazines often opened the door, the internet gave me a nearly infinite power to go hunting (eventually leading me here), and what the hell did I need a magazine for anymore? Now think of the kids who grew up in that age. The role that GamePro played for my generation is obsolete.

GamePro had a bit of a transformation and a resurgence to more of a contemporary, grown-up game magazine (a friend was freelancing for them and found out about the closure at the same time as the rest of us), but they were shut down before they got their footing. Times are tough for print everywhere, after all: I should know, I'm paid to write these days. Probably in some very small part thanks to Gamepro. And the newspaper movie listings. And TV Guide. And Sesame Street. So thanks.

Otomedius Excellent ISN'T VERY GOOD AT ANYTHING, QUITE FRANKLY

As the credits rolled on my first successful clear of Otomedius Excellent, a feeling from the distant past started to creep over me. It wasn't nostalgia over shooting bubbles in Gradius III, or the game-over music from Salamander, or mid-90's videogame magazines' mystified reactions to the blockbuster sales performance of Tokimeki Memorial. 

It had just been so long since I'd felt such intense regret over buying a videogame.

Suggestions for King of Fighters XIII's online modes-- CAUSE RIGHT NOW IT KINDA SUCKS

I wanted to give KOFXIII's netplay a couple of sessions before I made the call on it. So here's the call: it's bad.

It is not the absolutely unplayable online we saw in KOFXII and most of SNK's Xbox Live Arcade games (Neo Geo Battle Coliseum is the sole exception). However, that doesn't mean it's good. It means it's playable with a little hassle and major caveats. Note that I'm located in New York City and playing on Xbox Live: I'm told that the situation is a little worse on Playstation Network.

First off: there are not a lot of available opponents. Of course, this has a lot to do with KOFXIII's terrible choice of release date (one week after Ultimate Marvel 3, which is easily the biggest game in tourney circles right now), but the bad netcode makes the situation worse.

When you're searching for matches, players' connection speeds are listed at anywhere from 1 to 4 bars. 1-bar is effectively unplayable, and 2-bar is very laggy. These are out of the question. Unfortunately, the vast majority of players I see have 2-bar connections. This means that starting a room and simply waiting in it (like the mode where you can practice while you wait) guarantees you a match that isn't worth playing.

You should notice this right away, but the best way to test the amount of lag you're getting in a KOFXIII match is at the character select screen. Just take note of the time it takes to move the selector a single space. That's the lag of a single input. If you see a significant lag here, imagine how much fun you're not going to be having when it's taking you that long to, say, block a punch.

This is especially a problem because KOFXIII is such a fast game. A lot of combos depend on whipping out commands as fast as you possibly can, and on a 2-bar connection these combos will drop. It won't necessarily be your fault: the input just won't come in right and you won't do your damage. Needless to say, this is very, very frustrating.

3-bar is more reliably playable, though issues remain. 4-bar is much better, but I have only seen three or four players with this connection status at all. When I have checked profiles, the 4-bar players have all been in the same city as I am. I suspect that people in less populated areas will have a much harder time playing online at all.

As the arcade is a dead institution in most of the US  online play is vitally important for these games. It's not something you want to screw up if you want the game to have a thriving community. Neither SF4's nor Marvel's netplay is the best ever, but it works well enough for the highest-level players. The best C.Viper player in the world had no problem tearing me a new one on Live a couple of weeks ago.

Local scenes and private get-togethers can't keep these games alive by themselves, especially not the smaller games. The fighting game bubble is on the verge of popping (mark my words, it'll be Street Fighter X Tekken), and this is the best exposure KOF will probably ever get. The patch for online play needs to come as soon as is possible.

I did say suggestions: there are a couple of other, little things, related to finding good connections in this terrible online hellscape. You can set the connection speed you want when you start up a room, but as you'll eventually learn this serves only as a friendly suggestion to other players: people with bad connections will still turn up in your room, and you can't kick them out either. You just have to take your ball and go home. Both of those points have to be fixed: if I'm never going to have a good time playing against a 2-bar connection, then I never want to see a player with that connection speed come into my room. This is especially bad in ranked matches, where you can't back out.

In conclusion, my color edit for King is Panty, my color edit for Yuri is Stocking, and it's going to be pretty much impossible to make Kim into Garterbelt.

King of Fighters XIII first impressions: AAAAAH THIS GAME IS THE BEST

The fighting games I'd been playing were SF4 and Marvel, just like everybody else in the fighting game scene right now. SF4 is a good enough game: it's the easiest to get matches for online, it's the game with the highest level of competition, and until Yun and Yang showed up there was nothing glaringly wrong with its balance. The most offputting flaw of the game was its insistence on anal execution requirements for simple, basic combos. Marvel was a funhouse of characters and ideas, but most of them didn't really make a lot of sense to use compared to other, vastly stronger option. Also, I often didn't feel like wins were earned because the benefits of level 3 X-Factor were so ridiculous.

I eventually dropped Blazblue because the game changed so drastically every six months: I tried to pick it up again with Noel last week but then I realized the gme would be changing again in December and I'd just have to buy a $40 upgrade disc and do all that combo learning (hours and hours!) over again.

So King of Fighters XIII has been very welcome. It's a completely different style of game, and quite frankly it doesn't have any stupid bullshit like I just described.

I personally theorize that the poorly-recieved KOFXII was the beta for this one, released to the market unfinished. Most players agreed that XII was clearly not done, and this game really cements that. More than just "better" than XII, XIII is the complete product. It feels right where XII didn't, and it completes the thoughts that game was starting to work on.

People not intimate with the genre might wonder what the hell the big difference between King of Fighters and Street Fighter is, anyway. Street Fighter is a game about spacing, first and foremost. The movement options are basic. Defense is typically favored over offense. Ryu's basic MO is to pressure from afar with fireballs, after all. In KOF characters like this exist (Athena) but they go about their business very differently.

King of Fighters is about rushing. The characters have a huge amount of movement options, and they are all fast. There's running, there are four different jumps, there's a roll move that goes through almost everything. (See the Beginner's Incomplete Guide for more on this!) It's about getting close to or even around the opponent, finding the opening and killing.

Being so rush-oriented, the game also has a really complex combo system. Basic combos are as easy as Street Fighter, but it gets a lot deeper than that. Depending on how much super move meter you have, you can typically do anywhere from 20 to 80 percent damage off just about any single hit. Of course, mastering all these strings is difficult: there's a complicated network of cancels and links and juggles. The game's tutorial does an okay job of explaining the basics, but in the mission mode you'll get a much better idea of exactly how the combo system is practically used in a match.

The combo system in this game is definitely hard-- the toughest part is the extreme speed required for many of the cancels-- but it's not anal like SF4 and the combos follow a more straightforward kind of logic that I can't honestly say applies to Arc's games. Characters will really need to be worked on in this game, and in the first couple days I've spent a lot more time in training mode than anywhere else. I am going to have to earn my damage.

And that's the nice thing about this game for a genre fan: that you have to earn it. SF4 has the Ultra mechanic for comebacks, which wasn't so bad. Then Marvel has X-Factor, which I don't think any Marvel player actually likes or thinks is fair. XIII, though, is very simple: your super meter, if you know how to use it, measures your potential to kill. I like this.

The rest of the home port is pretty nice: netplay is at about SF4's level, so not great but doable. Color edit is extensive, which is refreshing because everybody likes to charge money for costumes and leave out this feature these days. There's a story mode that I haven't been through yet, but it seems to just be a straight line with talking heads: definitely no Blazblue.

So of course you should buy KOFXIII. It's a beautiful-looking game: like all these HD 2D games, online video doesn't do it full justice. It's flashy and it's fast, and yet it's got nothing that makes me throw up my arms and yell "bullshit!".  The game is just right.

November 20th, 2011: HOW DID KAMEN RIDER FOURZE OWN TODAY?

Yes, another one. Yes, I am writing real blog posts too. No, this is not necessarily a regular feature like the time I blogged Shin Mazinger, and no, I definitely won't be episode blogging anything this long. I really like this show, though.