Subatomic Brainfreeze

Gurren Lagann The Movie Gurren-hen: YOU KNOW ALL THE LINES FROM GURREN LAGANN ALREADY

It occurs to me that I haven't really talked about Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, one of the most popular anime of the last couple years and certainly one of my favorites, since I was halfway through the show. This was a long, long time ago. Remember when ADV had the rights to Gurren Lagann? It did happen! There was a time! So before we get started, I will say the things I did not say about Gurren Lagann when it ran.

If you think that popular character should have stayed alive, you are so wrong.

If you think that other popular character should have stayed alive, you are still quite wrong.

Even in a universe of galaxy-throwing guts-powered robots drilling towards the infinite, people don't always get what they want. This is what set GL apart: it was about human beings. If I wanted to read a story about how such-and-such stays alive and they're together forever and lots of babies I'd read the 8000 fanfics about same. And why would I read fanfic?

Oh right, they made a movie. Gurren-hen is the first movie and it covers, more or less, the first arc of the anime, where young Simon and big bro Kamina break out of the underground to discover a surface world full of robots, beastmen, and some fine, fine ladies. The first hour and fifteen minutes or so of this movie is basically a clip show: it opens with a bit from the GL music videos and goes all the way up to Nia's encounter with Adiane. This part moves along just fine-- GL is very rewatchable-- but aside from some arbitrary TV-style eyecatch cards there is no new material.

Thankfully, at this juncture in the movie, Gainax decides to go the extra mile and justify this movie by doing something silly. Recall that at this point in the story, the Spiral King's generals were taken down one after the other, a process which took several episodes. A typical clip show would just run these fights back-to-back, but instead, the movie just rewrites the plot. It's that classic super robot anime question: why not have all the generals attack at once? And that's exactly what they do: the last 40 minutes or so of this movie is a newly animated and gigantic battle between the Dai Gurren-Dan and the minions of the Spiral King, the highlights of which ares probably a hand-to-hand fight between Yoko and Adiane and an Itano Circus the size of God. The famous "Simon mans up" scene is the only scene that's been left essentially the same.

I really wonder about the second movie, Lagann-hen: the fight with the Spiral King has been pushed back to the second movie, further stuffing what will certainly be an overstuffed two hours for a much more complex story. The first arc of Gurren Lagann is a 70's robot cartoon, you see. Simple robot-versus-monster stuff. The first part of the second arc is an 80's robot cartoon: future politics, civil unrest, moral ambiguity. The final villain is, I guess, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and then GL finds its own ending with a little bit of all parts. The second arc is going to be a ton to shove into two hours, plus the Spiral King fight. I guess the next one will have to be pretty rushed: but then, so was this one. Not exactly a replacement for the TV series, but a reasonable summary and a ton of fun.

Charady's Daily Joke: DON'T KILL ME IF IT'S A JOKE

So as even the Pro Anime Fans (TM) at Colony Drop would agree, this anime season is really good. There are a ton of awesome shows to watch, quality hasn't dropped off yet, and life is good. But what to do when you're waiting for new Japan-cartoons to come out? Isn't the wait for Gattai to restore Shin Mazinger to its initial godlike form absolutely goddamn unbearable? Can Basquash top its own out-of-place sexual innuendo or has it already blown its load? Is "noblesse oblige" officially a nerd salute yet? Isn't Santo Claudio Paradiso the dreamiest name ever? Aren't you about to E X P L O D E? That's why you need to chill and watch Charady's Daily Joke.

Charady's Daily Joke is a student project, brought to us by the Kyoto University of Art and Design's Character Design Department. Every day, a different group of students animates a different joke from around the world. As such, the episodes actually have a huge range of different styles. This is student work, so don't expect amazing production values: in fact, in the recent batch I watched, the animation slips noticeably. But that's not what you should be here for.

The jokes themselves are old chestnuts: you've almost certainly heard a few. You know the one about the blonde contest, where the blonde can't add, so every time she gets one wrong the all-blonde crowd says "GIVE HER ONE MORE CHANCE" and at the end she has to answer 2+2, and she says 4, and the crowd says "GIVE HER ONE MORE CHANCE"? That's an episode. They're old, predictable groaners, but they still work well enough for a two-minute TV show. Jokes are bookended by a bit of CG footage of T&A mascot Charady talking to her bathtime mascot friends, usually making a really obvious point about the joke. Indeed, this did come from character designers.

Episodes are three minutes, including a quick opening and ending, and the show is set to run for a full year. 365 episodes. And a group is fansubbing it all. You should start catching up now or you won't have anything to talk about over the Pocky-and-Ramune watercooler or whatever it is you anime kids do these days. Jesus! Jesus! Bang boom bang boom bang!

Street Fighter 4 update is out: Championship Mode impressions

In case you have Street Fighter 4 and you didn't know, Capcom just issued a free update that adds a mode and some new features to the game. The big deal here is Championship mode: while it doesn't replace the old, broken ranking system, it does make it obsolete. It's unlikely you'll see many people on there anymore. How does it do this?

Well, as I've talked about before, the biggest problem with SF4's ranking system was the benefit and ease of simply quitting mid-match: pulling the Ethernet cable from your system in the last moments of the match, exiting the game, or just plain old turning off the system. In the previous SF4 system this was actually a rewarded behavior: you didn't lose any rank points if you disconnected, and you could actually reload your ranking from an old save if you didn't get to the cable or the power button in time. As such, it was pretty common for people to just leave, especially the higher you got in the ranks. At the higher levels it was epidemic, and the top players on the leaderboards just played each other over and over again, resetting their scores each time, until they had ridiculous, arbitrary numbers that everybody knew were faked. So the whole thing was a wreck.

Championship mode is expressly designed to counter disconnecting: first, disconnect percentage is displayed when somebody joins your game, so obviously people with high percentages are not going to be able to find games anymore. This is retroactive, so everybody who wasn't playing fair before gets screwed like they deserved. Second, you can't get anywhere in Championship by disconnecting. The game is structured like a fake tournament: if I start a game I'm in the first round, and I'm matched up with somebody else who started a first-round game. Now if I lose, I have to start from the beginning again, but if I win, the next match I will start will be a second-round game where I'll be matched up with other first-round winners. This repeats until the "tournament" reaches finals. Only at the end of the tournament-- either when you're knocked out or when you win-- do you receive any rank points. If you disconnect mid-game, you get nothing and you have to start the tournament over. Problem solved.

There have been complaints that this isn't a true tournament mode, and it certainly isn't. Hopefully Capcom will introduce a mode like the one in STHD where you can start a room, get eight people, and run a tourney. It is, on the other hand, a lot more convenient. Random people are unreliable: it takes a lot more time to get eight people in a room, they won't necessarily stick around, and one lagged player will spoil the whole thing. In this system, I can get the matches when I want them and I can kick a laggy or disconnect-happy player. On the other hand, I can choose who I play in a tourney situation, an obviously abusable idea that I don't care for. Exploiters will certainly appear (they always do), but it'll be a much bigger pain in the ass for them to work this system than it was before.

The system is also pretty addictive: I moved through almost the entire beginner rank last night. As you'd expect, you get more points for beating higher-ranked players at higher levels of the tournament, and you're only really going to get big points by winning a tourney. Competition is pretty stiff right now, since the game just came out and nearly everybody is still at the bottom. When I was playing barely anybody had made it up to the intermediate rank. I get the feeling the ranking points and subdivisions aren't going to matter terribly much, though: you can't lose them so theoretically anybody can eventually make it up there if they just play and play and play. And believe me, people can play for years without ever learning anything. I know I never did, back when I was a kid.

There's also a replay mode added, so you can download matches and see how hard people mash-- on the Xbox anyway: inexplicably, PS3 owners were screwed on this mode and got the ability to comment and vote on the match videos instead, which is pretty lousy compared to the practical features 360 owners got. If you have a PS3, cue outrage, I guess.

Shin Mazinger Episode 3: BARON ASHURA GETS HYPE

Alright, let's talk about the first thing you're going to notice about Gattai's fansubs, starting from this episode: a lot of the footage is grainy, and music sometimes skips. There's an explanation for this! Every episode of Shin Mazinger airing on TV is missing about three minutes of footage that was intended to be in the episode. Speculation, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that TV Tokyo has the show in a weird timeslot (the ads say it airs at 11:20 PM every week) where there's just no time to run the whole thing. And so, Bandai streams the full episode on their streaming video site every week. Two problems with this:

-You can't watch the full episode unless you're in Japan or get somebody in Japan to rip it and send it to you (I was doing this for the first two eps)
-Streaming audio and video quality are far inferior to the high-resolution TV broadcast.

Most fansubbers would probably just disregard this extra footage, but you know how we super robot fans are. Gattai is pretty damn dedicated to this project, because they actually took the TV broadcast and spliced the Bandai Channel scenes back in where they're supposed to be. The transition can be jarring, especially when the music skips, but this is also the most complete version of Shin Mazinger that's currently available.

That said, let's get to the show! It's not really a surprise to anybody that Imagawa is sticking to the Giant Robo formula, but with Mazinger, but that doesn't make the proceedings any less spectacular. I was particularly impressed by the love given the simple rocket punch: it's the most essential and basic super robot trick, so done and redone that it's become an expected cliche. As such, it's really hard to be impressed by it. But Imagawa manages to impress! The show is in utter awe of the first rocket punch, with an endless procession of slow-motion replays and a raving description from the best anime narrator this season. They want you to remember how cool it was, the first time the idea entered your head that a giant robot could shoot his own damned fist at something. Absolutely beautiful.

And then Baron Ashura. God, what's to say about the Baron Ashura scenes in this episode? We've established that one of this show's goals is "make everybody awesome," no matter how ineffectual they used to be, and nothing so fully represents this as former bumbling henchman/woman Baron Ashura picking up 40-foot Mazinger Z bare-handed and kicking it in the face over and over again, bitter tears flying. Damn, has this show got soul. The story itself is wasting no time: Dr. Hell has shown his face (and his mechanical monsters), Ashura has  occupied Kouji's hometown, and that badass chick who runs Kurogane bath house is ready to go to war. Next time Kouji beats up Garada K7 and Doublas M2! Awright!

The Maoh Dante thing was a nice touch too. I'd say that this is the most representative episode of Shin Mazinger thus far: if this doesn't get you excited about it, you're never going to be and you might as well quit. Unfortunately, you're also pretty uncool.

The Great Happiness Space: I GUESS I'M EMOTIONALLY DAMAGED

Let's shift gears yet again and talk about a documentary. I watched this on Netflix streaming the other night, so if you have an account, you can really easily check it out that way. Ever since then I've been unable to stop telling my friends about it, and I guess I have to count you all from now on. The Great Happiness Space is a doc about the real host club scene in Japan, and how it and the rest of the companionship/sex industry in Japan form this endless black hole of despair. You know that cliche image of someone falling down an endless void, their arms and legs sticking up in the air and flailing as they yell? That's how I felt this entire movie. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA".

Rakkyo is the stage of of our vicious cycle, a big host club in Osaka where women pay by the hour for the false companionship of pretty boys with spiky hair. Even though all a host really does is flirt, karaoke and drink with his customers, partying as hard as five or so desperate women are willing to pay you for is still pretty tough work. Leader and club owner Issei guesstimates that he puts down ten bottles of champagne in a night, immediately noting "My liver's probably fucked". Anybody would be willing to risk their liver when they stand to pull down what these guys do, though: 10 grand a month is considered low, entry-level pay, and Issei makes 50.

It's okay to stop here and drop your jaw and say "Jesus fucking Christ", so I'm going to give you a minute.

The guys make all that money by how well they play the girls, naturally: the main trick is that they've built a small ceremony around opening and drinking a champagne bottle, the "champagne call." Order a bottle and the hosts crowd around, pour the booze into a giant novelty mug (you have to have a tissue under your chin while you drink from these things), and either customer or host-- more often host-- chugs it down while the rest of the guys dance around and give the customer the attention she's really paying for. The idea, of course, is to make the customer feel so special that she's miserable when the drink is done and the guys go to the next girl. That way she'll buy another, the hosts will come back, Girl B will be left alone, and so the process repeats itself. This sort of bidding war for love is how the hosts make the bulk of their money.

The hosts are transparently cynical and manipulative by trade, simultaneously presenting the fantasy their customers seek and making sure that it's very costly. One host has a crisis of conscience, and the guys have a group talk where they ultimately agree that while too much exploitation is an awful thing, a little exploitation is just what the girls came here for. It doesn't seem to honestly satisfy anybody's conscience, though. "I love you", for example, is tossed around cheaply by both host and customer, and neither party is really stupid enough to believe it. Ultimately, the hosts are numb, distant, and a little tragic themselves: the job has completely separated them from their own ability to honestly love. Plus they puke up their own blood sometimes from all the champagne.

There's this subplot with a new guy who's real clean-cut and straight-edged, and you can tell they want to show you his gradual decline, but nothing really happens to him short of getting his hair bleached.

The customers are about as interesting as the hosts, and a lot sadder: they have no apparent regrets about the kind of money they spend, and as I mentioned, they're deeply involved in the host club fantasy. Many of these women are so involved, in fact, that they've managed to go utterly beyond reason and earnestly believe they have a chance at a serious relationship with their chosen host.

When the first half of the movie details how much people are spending, you're asking yourself throughout "Where the hell does anybody get this kind of money?" Well, sometimes the answer is simpler than I imagine: they're in the sex business too. Only other hostesses, and more often prostitutes, can actually afford the ludicrous costs of high-end host club membership. And this is what's truly baffling about it: more than anybody, you'd figure these women would know better. I can't imagine, in their heart of hearts, that they don't. But they sure as hell don't show it! Night after night, these women put down thousands upon thousands of dollars towards their mutual dream of being with Issei forever and ever. The phrase "financial worship" is used more than once.

As miserable as the hosts probably ultimately are, they've at least got tons of money out of the deal (the money trail goes john to hooker to host, it seems), even if they don't seem to have any time to do anything with it. These women are sad on a whole other level. I want to say "like otaku," but it's really a lot worse than that. Otaku aren't so beaten down by the world that they feel like selling their bodies to buy $10,000 hugpillows is the only way they will ever achieve happiness.

The movie really slams home the point when you finally get to see Issei leave his number one customer and turn to the camera in total disgust, launching into a speech he can't say to her but clearly wants her to hear about how she's crazy and manipulative, and says things to the cameras that she wants him to hear. These two might only have ever been able to honestly communicate with each other through documentary film cameras. Maybe it was a good thing, after all.

Ultimately, the whole thing is a terrible cycle of despair, and the participants are all prisoners by choice. You can't feel sorry for the guys because of the cash and the exploitation, and you can't feel bad for the women because they really crave said exploitation. There's not much to say about it, except maybe to put your hands up in front of your face, reach towards God and ask why.

Arcana Heart 2 PS2 is a hilarious trainwreck

(By the way, here's a great site that covers Japanese arcade stuff at length. Just saying.)

A little while back I was into Examu's moe fighting game Arcana Heart. I won't defend its, shall we say, uncomfortable character design and blatant otaku pandering, but the game itself was unexpectedly deep and solidly made: kept me coming back to the arcade for some time. Publisher Examu, on the other hand, has never quite acted on the level, which is ultimately why we're here tonight. When tournament season got going on the first Arcana Heart, Examu responded by tossing out a $1500 upgrade kit six months after the release of their game. With the big national tournament coming up and Arcana still very popular, arcade operators couldn't afford not to be running the new competitive standard, because their serious players couldn't afford to be playing the obsolete version. So they all got ripped off.

To nobody's surprise, Examu had a less severe bout of the same bullshit earlier this year with Arcana Heart 2, releasing Sugoi! Arcana Heart 2 (I wish I was kidding) not long after AH2's release. But the game isn't nearly so big anymore: remember that there's been an absolute flood of new fighting games in the Japanese arcades, not the least of which are Blazblue, the Tekken 6 upgrade, and Street Fighter 4 (which I should note is doing only slightly better than Third Strike, according to Arcadia rankings). This was a stupid asshole move before as it is now, but it must be working.

I give you this short history because Examu has now moved from the lucrative business of ripping off arcade operators to the possibly more lucrative business of ripping off the players directly. The PS2 port of the first Arcana Heart was an entirely faithful port of the arcade game. It's a rare case that a fighting game port isn't exactly the same, as this would negate much of its usefulness as a practice tool and a means to play at home that doesn't cost a dollar a go. We're past the days of scaled-down Street Fighter ports or SNK games that took an hour to load up. When people buy a PS2 port of a fighting game, they expect to have the damn game.

So nobody really expected, when they opened up their new PS2 copies of Sugoi! Arcana Heart 2, that the game would be a fucking atrocity. I don't really play Arcana anymore, so I wasn't following this closely, but I heard quite a bit about it anyway. Things sounded dire, and you probably already know how attracted I am to trainwrecks. There was only one thing I could do:

Pirate Sugoi! Arcana Heart 2.

What? These guys definitely don't deserve to be paid for this game, and you're about to find out why. Examu did not use real screenshots of the game when promoting it: they used screens from the arcade game. We know this for sure because the PS2 port's graphics are, for lack of a better word, busted-ass ugly. The effect varies from one character to the next, but you're going to notice constant pixelation, as most animation frames have been stripped of all detail. What used to be sharp is now fuzzy and goopy, as if they ported this game to a Super NES, or even a Game Gear or something. The bigger the character, the worse the effect is: the biggest sufferers are usually the heavy characters, like Catherine the girl in a robot, or Kira, the girl who rides inside of a giant Dragon Quest slime.This isn't to say that you can play the other characters and it'll be just fine: the worst is actually Petra the gun girl, an average-sized character whose every action is pixelated and blurred beyond recognition. The huge backgrounds have taken similar hits: they used to be impressive, but as unrecognizable masses of pixels... not so much. The screen is also constantly shaking and shimmering, particularly when the big characters appear.

Speaking of Petra, this game can't handle too much going on on the screen at once. Petra's guns in particular slow the game to a halt. 3D effects and fast, successive hits cause the game's framerate to take a major hit. Obviously, there are a lot of 3D effects and fast hits in this game: seasoned players say that just doing basic combos for many characters will cause giant slowdown. Slowdown is fatal for any fighting game because fighting games are about timing: matches can literally be won or lost in a sixtieth of a second. Slowdown like this wrecks the natural rhythm of the game and disorients both players. We want our home fighting game to be consistent with our arcade fighting game: a game with added slowdown is actually going to mess up players who play it and then go to the arcade, where the feel is a little different. In this case, the arcade game is a lot different.

But hell, it's not even the arcade game in the first place. Examu ported a version that was out of date in the first place: the current version is 2.6, only in the JP arcades. So even if the port had been done right, it'd still be out of date. As it is, it's just out of date and, more importantly, the port is irredeemable shit that never should have made it out of testing, much less sold to unsuspecting nerds for $60. A theory that immediately comes to mind is that Examu wanted to make some side money off an arcade release, but didn't want the home release to hurt their arcade business, so they tossed off this shitty port to sell a couple of copies and keep the arcade players in the arcade. It's likely!

Some of the Western players are trying to play this game, as it's the only way they can right now, (and a fast PC can emulate the game without the speed problems) but as far as I'm concerned Examu can fuck off. There's a pretty good fighting game buried under all this crap, but I'll be damned if I'm going to put up with this gigantic, hysterical insult just to find out. Even my DVD-R is ashamed.

Shin Mazinger Episode 2: Are you still HYPE?

I was thinking that this show might be important enough to episode-blog: after all, I'm going to be jumping on every episode the moment it's released anyway. And I don't want you guys to forget about it or anything! So I make no guarantees, and I certainly don't intend to become an episode-blog, but here goes.

Man. The opening animation is just made up out of existing footage. It kind of bums me out, because this OP song is so killer that it really deserves a superfluous 90-second animation of Mazinger kicking ass for the camera. Maybe the real opening just isn't ready yet? It's an Imagawa show, after all. I hear he's not so great at making his deadlines. Even the fansubbers make note about the OP in the chapter title. Man, how many people are singing here, seven? I can pick out a couple of familiar JAM voices, faintly, for about two seconds at a time. Imagawa's name is huuuge. Dude wants you to know.

Isn't the new Scrander ace? Mechanical designer Tsuyoshi Nonaka (who, conveniently, also designs for Bandai's toy division) had this to say:

"About those "all new attacks and weapons," they're still under wraps so I can't say anything just yet. I will share this: Takenobu Terada, producer of the Super Robot Wars game series, always said to me "Mazinger needs a full-screen clearing weapon of his own!" The time has come for his dream to become a reality."

 Turning Mazinger into a giant, golden, screaming rocket punch was a stroke of true genius: hopefully Nonaka has more tricks up his sleeve to bring Z a little more in line with the progressively more over-the-top robots that have succeeded him.

So after the apocalyptic first episode, which was admittedly a big crazy (awesome) mess, we're slowing down and going back in time to the origin story. I don't know how it was in the comics, but already it's showing that Shin Mazinger cares more about its characters than perhaps the entire animated franchise before it. Certainly the most screentime Grandpa Kabuto's ever gotten. Meanwhile Sayaka's become a secret agent, Boss is actually a boss, and Kouji shows a dark side. The Mazinger anime cast has always been a pretty blank pack of archetypes, so it'll be really interesting to see where Imagawa goes with them. There's also an awesome callback to the Mazinger Z theme song at the end of the episode that cements the Shin Mazinger narrator's status as Narrator of the Season.

 
Some things, on the other hand, never change. Sorry, Aphrodai.

Outrun Arcade Online impressions and problems

Outrun Arcade Online, out today, is a straight-across port of Outrun 2SP, one of the better arcade racing games of the past generation. There aren't a lot of the frills that racing games often define themselves by: the selection of cars and courses is pretty meager, but the play itself is airtight. Outrun 2 is a game that cares about being a videogame, you see. It's not a simulation, it's a videogame. You drive your Ferrari very, very fast through pretty places, and if a corner comes up you drift around it at 180mph with the gentle tap of a button. It's not "real", it's not packed with features and modes and things that keep you from returning the game to the store early, but it feels good. If you've forgotten joy in videogames, I recommend you try the game out and hopefully have some kind of restoration of faith.

That said, the best existing home release of Outrun 2 came out a couple of years ago. Outrun 2: Coast 2 Coast was a double port of Outrun 2 and the arcade upgrade Outrun 2SP with a lot of additional material, including extra music, tweaked cars, painstaking recreations of tracks from other Sega arcade games, and a long mission mode that I never even got halfway done with. The game was released for $30 on the PS2, original Xbox, and PC, and can be found for less ($10 on Steam: probably the best choice if you have the controller for it) without much trouble. I don't know much about the PC version, but the Xbox one has been considered the definitive port by a lot of people, as Outrun 2 originally ran on an Xbox-based arcade board.

In a perfect world, we'd be able to play the old Xbox Coast 2 Coast on our 360s and be done with it. Unfortunately, the 360 emulates C2C with some problems, so it's still not quite as good as playing it on your old Xbox. Seeing a niche opportunity, Sumo Digital, who have ported Outrun 2 all those other times, did a 360 version.

Unfortunately for all of us, it's not even as good as Coast 2 Coast. Only the tracks from Outrun 2SP are included (some logos and such from the arcade version with the original title are even left in by accident) and the extra modes and music are all out, leaving the game feeling pretty spare compared to what I played a couple of years ago. I recommend bringing your own Outrun soundtrack this time.

The game also feels rushed. The multiplayer lobbies are pretty poor: lacking even a "Ready" button, the room owner can start the game at any time-- even if you haven't finished selecting your car. On top of that, load times in multiplayer are a little crazy. The first few times I joined games, the game just hung on the load screen for minutes, showing no sign that it hadn't crashed outright (which it has done on me a couple times). The game leader left after five minutes of waiting, and that was that.

And now, some nitpicks. Surprisingly, performance problems still exist, with the framerate dropping here and there. They didn't bother upscaling any of the 2D graphics to HD resolution, so your onscreen display, the menus, and the girl that pops up at the end of the races all look kinda ass. Sumo usually puts a lot of work into their ports, so I'm kinda bummed that they turned out a rushed product like this that's actually not as good as something that came out for a last-gen system years ago. Even for ten bucks. Only buy this if you really, really want to compete on the leaderboards. Otherwise, there's no reason not to get Coast 2 Coast instead.

I-Con 09's TRANSFORMATION OF ARMAMENT: or a con report (the rest)

On Saturday I went to the dealer's room and I bought all that Patlabor, and then Otokojuku and Blazing Transfer Student pencilboards from the usual retro anime dealer. This year he had an impressive folder of Japanese promo posters for Hollywood films, the most interesting of which was for The World Is Not Enough: it was just Pierce Brosnan in some kind of wacky locks-around-your-neck contraption with an "oh my" look on his face.

The next panel, Saturday night, was our Cosplay Haters panel. I, as expected, played the all-purpose hater, ice burning my fellow panelists rapid-fire, as we went around the room telling con stories. As always for this sort of panel, the crowd has something to say that's at least as interesting as you do. Except for my buddy Joe's "Man gets arm sliced open by the sword he just bought because a dude claiming to be a EUROPEAN SWORD MASTER wanted to look at it" story. That kind of thing is one of a kind.

Cosplay Haters ran right into MD Anime: I tried to segue by running the end of Ninja Terminator (the greatest five minutes in the history of the Ninja Empire), but we had tech problems and I snuck it in the middle of the panel just because I could. Two of my three featured anime have pretty amazing dubs, so I let everybody know that we were watching the glorious English dubs of these anime. When I got some booing from the crowd I ran that Youtube video of the Black Lion dub. Shut the room right up.

I went through MD Geist and Crystal Triangle really fast to give myself room to run Baoh-- which I only watched recently myself-- in its entirety: I was still able to nail all the good parts of Crystal Triangle, but I probably should have given Geist a little more time. At least the knife-grenade scene. You know, when you remove all the nonsense exposition from Crystal Triangle and just tell your crowd what's going on as fast as you can, there's maybe only half an hour worth of onscreen crazy left to watch. This was a fun one to put a crowd through: the movie just gets more and more amazing as it goes on, and by the end everybody was blank with "what?".

Baoh, on the other hand. When I watched Baoh, I realized I couldn't possibly skip through like I could with Geist or Crystal Triangle. You know why? Baoh has no bad scenes. In any other anime, the scene where the hero and the little psychic girl exchange backgrounds at a bus stop would be totally boring, but in Baoh the little girl draws a picture that turns into blood that turns into a man that screams "BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH", and then the worst assassin ever shows up in the middle of the conversation! The dub is what really raises Baoh to excellence, though: the voice of evil scientist Dr. Kasumi Nome seriously deserves some kind of medal for his insane Cobra Commander overacting. By the end of the show people were yelling "BURRRN IIIIT" over and over again.

Overall, the panel was a huge success. The panel was packed all the way back to standing room, the crowd was laughing their asses off, and I am pretty sure that everybody had an awesome time. It is very likely that next year, I will be running both Most Dangerous Anime and Most Dangerous Anime For Grownups, an 18+ panel where I can run stuff with tits in it. Look forward to that!

Then we went to a cosplay burlesque show, because hey, late night programming! Man, that was kinda awkward. I've never gotten the dude rite where you go with all your buddies to see a strip show: in particular I don't get being tightly packed into a room and left to crane your head around all the other horndogs so that maybe you can actually see the half-naked chick who was a few moments ago dressed like Starbuck or Chii (the latter was creepy, but then the whole idea of Chii is inherently creepy) Ladies, stand on a damn box or something. I will here reprint my Twitter review of the show: "review score: neither my guwange nor my gigawang".

Then, my buddies had something to handle so I did what anybody would do: I drank myself a couple beers and went to play Street Fighter in the game room. This was the first time I'd had to play SF4 on pad, since I have a Virtua Stick at home. Man, how do you people put up with that shit? The FightPad wasn't so terrible, but oh my god, the default 360 pad. My thumb hurt. And then the hours passed. Around 2 or so our guest Kira Buckland showed up and started an impromptu Brawl tourney. Damn, guys. I'm too chill by that time of night to get caught up in some serious fighting game action. Hell, I was playing Fuerte.

The hours were really passing here, so I called up my staffer buddy Joe and it turned out the gang was up above me having a staff gripe-and-drink session. Off I went. On our way out of the Holiday Inn, I really wanted to get an SF match in: you know, now that my drunk points were up. So of course I got in, I managed to get a turn, and as soon as I'd picked Fuerte there was a beeping sound. "Oh man. I hope that's not what I think it is". At least not for the next three minutes. I need to do a Flying Gigabuster here. At Round One Fight, staff came in and told us (and the Brawl tournament) that yes, that was a fire alarm. Everybody out.

So Joe and the gang and I were juuust on our way out, and now there was a fire alarm in the building. Nobody was really concerned about any kind of actual danger: it seemed a lot more probable that somebody had, accidentally or not, set off the damn fire alarm themselves. This turned out to be the case, as far as I know. In any case, the population of the Holiday Inn was now, at three in the morning, cold out front. One dude (drunker than I, mind you) was in an undershirt, and he was hopping all over the place for warmth, doing pushups and jumping jacks and stuff. Ah. I love cons.

So everybody very seriously proceeds to the hotel room and I very seriously head for the last Guinness and forgot that I shook up the case on the way from the car, so I very seriously ran with my exploding Guinness to the bathroom-- which was occupied, it turned out-- and then very, very seriously ran into the other room, and then, when the bottle was in the sink and the situation was averted, triple-seriously cleaned the floor. I'm very nearly sorry that you guys had to see me like that. And at a time like that!

Sunday, nothing really important happened unless you count a TGI Friday's victory dinner. I helped Joe with his last panel, which was more like the "I'm sorry we've got nothing but how did you like I-Con?" panel.

Come to think of it, I did very little event stuff at the con that I wasn't personally involved in. I totally passed Sean Astin in the hallway on the way out, though! I only realized it was him after I'd passed. You know how these things are.

I-Con 09's TRANSFORMATION OF ARMAMENT: or a con report (Friday)

Hey guys! I was indeed at I-Con this past weekend and things went pretty well. As usual for this con, I spent more time following my staff friends around than anything, but that's usually interesting in its way.

I-Con is an all-purpose geek con that had, for many years, been held in various buildings around the SUNY Stony Brook campus. The biggest problem this year was that Stony Brook was unavailable this year due to construction. The con had to move out to another locale, and this is a pretty big con, so it had to move out to three locales: this year I-Con took place between a community college and two hotels, each of which was about twenty minutes from the other by car. You can see how this got messy! You know how, at a con, you'll drop by the game room to kill some time? You can't really do that when the designated "gaming" building is a 20 minute drive.

As such, I mostly stuck around the dealer's room, killing time, for the duration of the con. I already knew what I wanted: the same dealer was here and at other area cons, every year, selling dead Central Park Media stock. I wanted Patlabor. All of it. I went straight for that table and then decided not to buy it for another day. That's just how I roll. A popular stop for me was the table displaying the Retro Duo SNES/NES clone, where I did some serious combo practice in the old Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters. What a class game. The Retro Duo has messed-up sound, though. Wouldn't buy.

Friday night I ended up someplace very interesting: I was notified that the "Tentacles Don't Know When No Means No" panelists were, uh, they, uh... they didn't have any material. Anything. Thought the panel was Saturday. I had kind of wanted an 18+ spot in the schedule if I could get it, so this was a great opportunity to swoop in. I eagerly offered to run the Wounded Man anime, and so it was that the tentacle panel became the Wounded Man panel. I was a little nervous to start with-- I mean, how do you tell an unhappy crowd that they're not going to get to see the tentacle sex they came here for-- but it's easy to get comfortable when Wounded Man is horribly offending the sensibilities of everyone around you.

For the guys, it was one thing: Wounded Man is insane but it's not actually insulting to anything other than the logical faculties of the male viewer. They were chuckling without any particular regrets. The women, on the other hand, quite another expression. Disbelief mixed with offense mixed with horror. You have to understand, Wounded Man is ridiculously, insanely misogynist. A woman is raped by the protagonist (to protect her, it is explained), and falls in love with her rapist, promising to follow him anywhere, in the first episode. If Dave Sim were a big ol' bucket full of misogyny, Wounded Man would be the Hoover Dam. Misogyny is the core of its being. A PC edit of Wounded Man would just read "The End." In any case, everybody applauded when I was done, and when the tentacle panel still didn't really have any material I did an encore.