Subatomic Brainfreeze

Friday I went to 8 On The Break: MY SKILLS HAVE DETERIORATED BY ONE THIRD

In an important personal development, I graduated from college this past Wednesday (hire me). Yes, this explains the slow pace of updates lately: I have been getting my affairs in order and preparing to make an overdue entrance into the adult world (please hire me). After suffering through a three-hour parade of insincere feel-good speeches, my contemporaries and I all needed to have a real celebration. I could have just boozed it up at another grad party, but it was at that 5-shots-for-$10 place. You know how packed that shit is on a Friday night? No thanks. Instead, I took a late suggestion: a trip to Eight on the Break, all the way out in Northern New Jersey. From my front door, the place takes me about two hours and change to get to. Worse than going to Staten Island! As a transitional ceremony, though, a night at the Break made sense.

I used to go to the Break, back when I was a more regular arcade rat. I was really into Bemani stuff, particularly Beatmania IIDX and Pop'n Music. Both of these games offered and continue to offer the absolute bleeding edge of difficulty, both in their genre and, indeed, in videogames period. I like to compare IIDX in particular to Cave's shooting games: here we have a game made specifically for people who are already genre experts, with the rest of the world dismissed as an afterthought. So of course they appealed to me. I'd already banged my head against Dodonpachi Daioujou for a month. At this point in my gaming life, just getting better was the best thing in the world to me.

I played little but IIDX and Pop'n for over two years, blowing my paychecks (hire me) on the ludicrous deluxe controllers, the sequels that came out every nine months. And then I'd spend weekends on IIDX and Pop'n machines in the basement of a Long Island strip mall, the only ones in the state, or I'd head even further out to the Break if I wanted IIDX and fighting games and a cheese steak. Eventually I reached a wall where the amount of effort it took me to get better was greater than the enjoyment I took from getting better. I've never had genre burnout before or since, but this was definitely it. This is a good time to stop on a silly pursuit like playing a videogame, unless you're a Korean Starcraft pro or something, in which case, get money get paid (hire me). I drifted away from the games, and now the giant controllers I used to be so excited about are collecting dust. The Break was an even more distant memory than the games themselves were. I couldn't escape the pull of nostalgia, so of course I agreed to go to the Break. Right after my usual Book-Off visit, of course.

The place itself is as authentic an arcade as you're ever going to see, probably more so than Chinatown Fair. You know why I say this? It's not really the games: in the back, they've got a snack bar, a couple of pool tables, wood-paneled walls. You sit at the bar-- which serves just about anything that can be dumped into a fryer, including deep-fried Oreos-- with your cheese steak and Dr. Pepper as the guy behind the bar tells you an off-color joke, and you look at the noisemakers just outside, and you're at home. For an arcade, the place is really cozy. At CF you can't even sit down, you know, unless you're one of those douchebags who lounge inside of the Sega Super GT machine.

Anyway, the first thing I did was get back to Bemani. For a double nostalgic shock, the very same Pop'n Music machine that I used to play back at the strip mall was standing here in front of me. There are a ton of reasons I never got as into Pop'n Music as I did IIDX: though I actually prefer the simpler interface, there's even less good music in Pop'n than in IIDX (ironically, the music has always been these games' weak point), and the home versions had some the most user-unfriendly unlock systems I've ever seen in a videogame. But unlike IIDX, I had never stopped having fun with Pop'n, because playing Pegasus Fantasy is never not fun. In that spirit, I played nothing but the anime theme songs on my runs at the Break, and I regret nothing.

I say my skill has deteriorated by one third because of Pop'n. The game has a difficulty system that goes from 1 on up to 40-something: I used to be able to do songs as far up as 36, but now I can only get away with 29 or less. That's not a third at all, but when I thought "from thirties to twenties" it made sense. At least on Pop'n I could still remember where the buttons were: over at Beatmania I'd found that my fingers had entirely forgotten where to go or even how to get there. I went from being able to do level 9 songs (IIDX operates on a different scale that tops out at 12) down to struggling with 7. Getting a little worse at Pop'n was fine: that game has some design safety nets where you can screw up and be okay. Screwing up in perfectionist IIDX, where you can easily lose in the final moments of a song, is just a totally demoralizing experience. Again, like a Cave game, IIDX isn't concerned with attracting players or even keeping them. If you want to play that game, you have to really want to play that game. I was on Pop'n a lot more.

Then I killed an hour at the bar with my buddy who'd invited me and his friends from work, who'd come up here from way out in Staten Island. I felt a little time warped: I hadn't sat here in a couple of years, circumstances were very different, and I had a bit less to worry about (hire me). With my hands up on the bar, I remembered another reason I was unlikely to come back to Bemani: the games were a recipe for carpal tunnel. Just after a couple of rounds, my fingers felt stretched out, twisted, and strained in a way that fingers should never have to feel. Then I went for those deep-fried Oreos. They taste how they look: kind of sickening and deadly, but anybody who says they aren't delicious is lying.

And of course, the experience just wasn't complete without waiting at a dark, empty railroad station at midnight for the last train back to New York. This is when you look at the trees and think things over. This is exactly the kind of trip I'm not going to be able to make so arbitrarily in my future, responsible-adult life (hire me). It's not like I'll never go to the Break again: it's just that coming by reminded me of a different time in my life, one that has long passed. I will just never make-- I'll never want to make-- that kind of time investment on a game again. It feels weird, knowing that.

Shin Mazinger Episode 8: Viscount Pygman GETS HYPE

Yeah, I don't think there's much competition in an episode where a man introduced himself by slashing his own eyes out with his bare hands. Man, remember in the first episode, when Tsubasa called Pygman "boy"? I wonder if that's just a cultural misunderstanding, or if she really does mean that in the Jim Crow sense. I sorta doubt that Shin Mazinger will be making any kind of thoughtful commentary on race: it's just not that kind of cartoon. Anyway, here's a Nagai-worthy logic train. The servants of Dr. Hell cannot hurt Tsubasa: as they were working together when they were taken in (or created, in Ashura's case), the biological programming that prevents them from hurting Dr. Hell also applies to her. But as we know, Tsubasa turned. So what to do? Pygman figures if he takes out his own eyes, he'll be able to fight Tsubasa because he won't recognize her anymore. Of course!

Meanwhile, the biology of Baron Ashura becomes more confusing: I looked it up, and the origin story is exactly from the original. A pair of lovers were buried, their mummified bodies each having rotted exactly half way on each side. Of course, Dr. Hell and friends-- including Tsubasa, who I guess is Ashura's mother after all-- chop the rot off and just stick the two together. What the hell is between Ashura's legs remains a mystery, the answer to which should probably never be known by mortals.

Did I mention that this week a vaguely effeminate cowboy appears and snipes a mechabeast from inside of Mazinger's head, freezing its body? Or that Sayaka and Aphrodite A are inside of the beast's stomach, or that she blows up her robot's arm to escape? Because that also happens. You can never claim that nothing happened this week on Shin Mazinger. Next week Dr. Hell is going to launch a full-scale invasion of Japan, and in the show's timeline it has only been three days.

Shin Mazinger Episode 7: Kurogane Bath House GETS HYPE

I think we knew at the end of last week's episode where the Hype Award was going, and Kurogane delivers. The big guy, Cross (cause he's got a cross-shaped scar that covers his entire face, y'see) certainly gets top honors for opening a jail cell's door by twisting the locked handle so hard that the room around it falls to rubble. Ashura must also be mentioned for apparently infiltrating and murdering the entire local police force without anyone really noticing. At first, I simply assumed that the psycho, sadistic police force who talk gleefully to each other about killing children while walking down the hallway were just the Go Nagai Department of Homeland Security or something. In any other cartoon it would have been obvious that they were the bad guys when they started telling Kouji "talk or we'll torture your little brother", but, you know, maybe that's just how cops do things in Nagai country.

Aside from that big turn, nothing was really that surprising this week: Tsubasa is an ultra badass who worked under Dr. Hell in his whole "find the ancient Greek robo-monsters" enterprise solely so that she could kill him when he did find them. The exact plane in which Dr. Hell exists is as of yet unclear: he's appeared as a spirit, but he seems to be unable to leave the hell made of gears we always see him and his henchmen inside of. We also learn that Tsubasa can choke bitches out with electricity-- and is Baron Ashura's mother what the fuck how does that even work. Next episode promises Viscount Pygman!

Fun bonus: all the characters shown in the pictures of Dr. Kabuto and Dr. Hell's excavation team are in fact other Go Nagai characters. I won't pretend I can name or place them all, but I'd know their faces anywhere.

Christopher Handley pleads guilty: LET'S OUTRAGE

I wouldn't usually cover a story that everybody on the internet is already all over (I have a Mazinger blog to run here), but this one has worrying consequences for pretty much every American manga/anime fan. Christopher Handley has been in some very serious trouble lately. His crime was importing some manga from Japan: a package was randomly searched by the postal inspector, and they decided they did not like what they saw. They didn't like it so much, in fact, that Handley's house was raided. We don't yet know what the comic in question was, but that's not really the point. It can be the most unimaginably horrible thing ever put to print and the government still wouldn't have the right to break into a private citizen's home. Simple reason: it's not real.

Let's get to what's bubbling under the surface here: lolicon makes me sick, guys. Hell, a lot of my own comics make me sick. But it's got absolutely nothing to do with what makes us sick. Fiction contains these things. Should anybody ever be sent to jail for fiction? Why? What does that accomplish? At best, we've prevented something from happening that we had no way of knowing would actually happen, punished a theoretical crime. Good job?

Anyway, long story short, Handley's been in legal hell since '06. Jerked around and manipulated by clueless law enforcement (an ad for Gaogaigar was used against him, I kid you not), yesterday he finally put in a guilty plea, finishing the government's long work of wrecking his life. He could be put away for up to 15 years for comic books. This is insane.

As fans of anime and manga, and under the insanely strict standards applied to Handley, I wouldn't be surprised if all of us have something that could be deemed obscene by an overzealous postal inspector. I've got my Koike comics, mainstream fans have their sexualized teenagers, and the moe fans have, well.. everything. How many jails would we need to fit everybody who ever bought that Hellsing volume where the Nazi vampire takes a big ol' bite out of a baby? It's child abuse, you know! So, yeah, it's draconian madness and all, but let's stay safe. Let's all not order any comics from Japan for a while, okay? Especially if we're in Iowa. Hell, if I was in Iowa I'd be getting around to burying my comic books under the earth forever about now. Write your representative, give to the CBLDF. Listen to Neil Gaiman.

(note: I am an hour from Book-Off NYC and sacrifice nothing by this course of action)

What pisses me off is that while the government is wasting its time legislating fantasy and law enforcement is wasting its time on hunting witches, children are hurt, abused and violated in this country. Actual children. What positive goal does putting Handley away achieve for us as a society? I just don't see one. The way I see it, the people doing this are just doing it so they can feel better about themselves, so they can say they "protected the children". The children in question, of course, are imaginary: but then, we seem unable to tell the difference anymore. Mission accomplished!

ADV, you gotta fix up your streaming site: THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD

I don't want to kick ADV when it's down, but sometimes, as with Amuro Ray, people need to be hit very hard in order to set them on the right path. This is one of those times. Do you guys remember the Anime Network? Widely regarded as the downfall of ADV Films, once the biggest US anime company, it was a wildly expensive and unsuccessful attempt at an all-anime cable channel. Very few people actually got the cable channel, which is why ADV had a plea to call your cable company, demanding the Anime Network, on everything they released for years. Here in New York City, it has existed for a few years as an on-demand channel with ADV's stuff in constant rotation: it's how I watched the beginning of Clannad (and how, as a result, my eyes rolled back into my skull, never to return).

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, TV as we know it is drawing less and less viewers, and the eyes are going to online video, where the internet anime fandom has been since 2000 or so. ADV bet on the wrong horse, and as Crunchyroll (fuck Crunchyroll), Funimation, Hulu and so on take over in this field, ADV has decided to move in with its properties. And of course, it's the Anime Network. And compared to its competitors, it is, frankly, kinda pathetic.

Right out of the gate, there's a big problem that ADV has been pretty stubborn about from the start: all the Anime Network content is English-dubbed only. Now I know that ADV is very proud of their dubs, and they're alright dubs, from what I've heard of them. But I don't want to be forced to watch them, either. ADV's always sort of denied that anybody'd ever want to watch a Japanese anime in its original tongue with subtitles over one of their dubs. But then, US distributors will often claim that the easy, free availability of subtitled versions of their product, long before they could go to market, had a serious negative impact on their business. And, well, it did. So did a lot of other things, but let's have that discussion another day. But isn't part of the lesson here that people don't mind subtitles one bit, and that in fact, many people prefer them? Does it really hurt anybody that much-- aside from ADV's corporate pride-- to just allow people the choice?

On top of that, the selection is pretty limited: I don't mean just that it's limited to ADV's own titles, which it obviously is, but that one's access to these shows is limited. The quality of the streaming video is quite low, definitely worse than Youtube and at a glance about half the resolution of the video on Funimation's site: ironically, an ad that loads up before your episodes makes fun of downloaded anime that's "the size of a postage stamp". Access to the episodes is based on what level member you are. Guests can only view one episode, tops, of any show, registered users only a few more, and monthly ($7) subscribers get to watch everything on the site. Certain-- and seemingly random-- shows can't be watched at all unless you're a subscriber. I'm sorry, but this does not fly in a world where I can go next door to Funi's site and watch Fist of the North Star in its 152-episode entirety without even thinking about a user account. Even Crunchyroll (fuck Crunchyroll) offers higher-quality video in exchange for subscriptions. This site isn't even trying to compete!

So ADV, you gotta do better than this if you want to remain relevant. Good job with getting MD Geist, though. Don't bother trying to top that dub.

Raiden Fighters Aces: MISSION WAS SUCCEEDED GREATLY BY THEIR ACTIVITIES

You know what I like doing? I like telling you to buy videogames. Buy Raiden Fighters Aces! Do it now! Twenty bucks! Do it! Do it!

Well then. You might not know that in Japan, the Xbox 360 has become an unlikely haven for traditional, arcade-style 2D shooting games. Of course, this isn't to say that there aren't a ton of shooting games available on Live Arcade, because there are, and many are quite good. (Strangely, nearly all of them are listed under "action/adventure" rather than "shooter": why are XBLA's games so genre-mislabeled? Pop'n Music is under "action/adventure" too, for chrissake!) But a lot of the top-shelf ports of recent Japanese arcade shooters-- most notably the only existing home ports of Cave's recent work-- are stuck in Japan.

And when I say "stuck in Japan," I really, really mean it. Unlike the Wii, for which importing is a matter of installing some software, or the PS3, which is region-free, Microsoft chose to give developers the option to lock or not to lock. While many Western and Asian 360 releases are region-free, there is not a single region-free Japanese 360 game. Of course, there's very little Japanese-exclusive content on the 360: mostly just visual novels, some RPGs, Idolm@ster and a pile of arcade shooter ports. But still, you're missing them. I'm missing a Super Robot Wars game, and that always pisses me off. The only recourse for many hardcore shooter fans and people who really, really want to play Idolm@ster has been to actually buy Japanese 360 units, for which they must put up with a tremendous amount of bullshit just to play their legitimately purchased videogames. As usual, pirates have to do less. So let's all blame Japan and their irrational fear of importers for this situation!

Thankfully, small publisher Valcon has seen fit to get one of these arcade shooter ports out in the West, and it's Raiden Fighters Aces. The Raiden Fighters series has existed for years without ever having been released for a home console, even in Japan, and last year's release for the Japanese 360 was expected to stay there. I'd heard a rumor a while back that a lot of these arcade shooter ports had originally been made for Xbox Live Arcade, and that MS had turned the companies down, saying that Xbox Live Arcade didn't need all these ports of... arcade games. I know, I know.

Raiden Fighters is perhaps the best of these arcade games to release to the larger gamer market: it's simple to pick up, it's not choked with bullets or built for experts only, the way Cave's games are, and yet getting a high score is still a very difficult and complex business. And it's not moe, thank god. You get to fly airplanes, and the enemies actually shoot at where you are. You can change every detail of the game, so if it's too hard, just put it on Easy and give yourself infinite continues, if that's what you want to do. By contrast, score attackers will want to go for the online mode, where the game will test how far you can get on three lives. The leaderboards (there seem to be separate leaderboards for the US and JP versions, oddly) are already pretty damn serious, and everybody uploads their replay videos so you can see exactly how these people are getting their insane scores. RF is a really enjoyable game on all levels, from beginner to expert, so I highly recommend it for anybody with a 360 and $20. Even if you don't take to the game, watching these superplays is in and of itself a performance worth paying to see.

Also, there are some serious bells and whistles here. The ports of Raiden Fighters 1, 2, and Jet are loving, pixel-perfect translations, and this is nowhere more evident than the sheer amount of options you have for playing these games. Take a look at the graphics settings, if you will: you can smooth out the picture for your fancy HD screen, or, more likely, you can make it look progressively older. This doesn't just stop at displaying the pixels in all their blocky glory, or running the game in the original 54 frames per second. You can also slap scanlines up on the screen to simulate an old CRT monitor or, better yet, try the eye-piercing filter that makes the game look as though it's being displayed on an ancient, color-bleeding projector! Seriously old-school, here.

Hopefully, if this goes well, Valcon will get their hands on some other Japan-only 360 shooters, like Raiden IV, or those Cave games or even Konami's Otomedius (yes, moe Gradius) but I'm not exactly holding my breath. It's enough of a surprise that we have this one.

Shin Mazinger Episode 6: Photon Beam GETS HYPE

This week is a recap episode about events that we hadn't actually seen yet anyway. Again, if you're not familiar with Mazinger you probably don't realize that the Photon Beam has been bumped up on the old Mazinger weapon heirarchy. In the old Mazinger Z episodes, the eye laser was always a bit player: Kouji would either take care of one of his weaker enemies with it in passing, or he'd fire it at something formidable and watch the beam bounce harmlessly off them. "What? Photon Beam had no effect?!" In Super Robot Wars, where the attacks are ranked by strength, it was always the second or third worst of Mazinger's attacks, losing out only to the tiny missiles that Mazinger packs in his elbows and stomach in case of emergency. Now, of course, it is the big gun.

It should also be noted-- because I left it out last week-- that the robot bomb that Mazinger fires the beam at is actually Nagai's least-loved robot hero, Groizer X. I've never watched Groizer, but the show must be well-hated for the robot to be brought so low: turned into a giant bomb by the bad guys and detonated mid-air by Mazinger. Groizer X was animated by consistently awful Knack Studio, which gave us a lot of cheap, half-assed projects like the life-changing Charge Man Ken. It's hard to say this, but Groizer probably deserved what he got.

Anyway, all these events are remembered in bits by the cast as they, like us, attempt to sort out just what the hell happened last night. Kouji is in jail for blowing a bunch of shit up while riding around in some giant mechanical thing that nobody knows what the hell it is. Worse yet, Kouji's Pilder has disappeared, so even if he was out, he can't turn on said giant machine. It's cool though, guys. Don't worry. Tsubasa has her boys ready, and it looks like there's gonna be a jailbreak. I'm going to go ahead and assume that she's the one who jacked the Pilder in the first place. Also that she's Kouji's mom. What a badass. Next episode looks to be a flashback on the history between Juuzou, Dr. Hell, and Tsubasa, but mechanical beasts are also promised. I'm pretty sure that something will awesome will happen next time, too. This show has been delivering in that department.

In Defense of the Stupid Tough Guy

This is purely in gaming-- no Studio 4C cartoons or Hajime Katoki robots or anything like that-- so those of you uninterested in that can safely skip this post. I don't usually make comments on the wider game industry here, but this article was so unbearable that I had to. If you didn't know, Duke Nukem Forever has been a running game industry joke for years: in development for 12 years with next to no material shown publicly, everybody but the developer and really die-hard fans of the formerly successful franchise had given up on it. The bankruptcy of developer 3D Realms and the apparent death of the game came less as a surprise than a sad inevitability. It's unlikely that a franchise that did so well in its day won't be picked up by somebody, but for now, 3D Realms and the Duke are dead.

And as always happens at these things, there's somebody who had to ruin the proceedings by masturbating all over the grave. About everything in this article is wrong, but I'll take it from the basic premise: that the death of the game Duke Nukem Forever has been shrugged off by the gamer community because "we" have suddenly come to loathe the character Duke Nukem. If you're not familiar with Duke, he's a deliberately over-the-top action hero parody and always was: a hulking, cigar-chomping cartoon character who stole all his lines from Bruce Campbell, king of the campy badasses. And the royal we are tired of this archetype. We demand emotional depth of our action heroes. So when we heard about Duke Nukem Forever, since none of us could ever possibly enjoy such a philistine entertainment, we shrugged and resumed playing The Path.

Let's get this "we" stuff out of the way. Obviously people felt this way about Duke Nukem Forever, and they're fully entitled to it: I doubt I would have cared too much about the game if it had, by some miracle, been completed and published. But just because I wouldn't have bought Duke Nukem Forever doesn't mean I go around saying "Nobody would have bought Duke Nukem Forever." I dare say that any old middling action game with Duke Nukem's name on the box would have sold quite well. And that's what I take exception with here: what is clearly the author's opinion has been extended to everybody. I didn't ask to be spoken for, and I certainly don't want to be congratulated for your assumption that I feel the way you do.

That we have shunned the stupid, fun action hero in favor of emotional depth is not actually why we disregarded Duke's passing. That's a Serious, Sensitive Game Journalist (TM) fantasy. We disregarded it because Duke Nukem Forever had been a running joke for years, and all the death of DNF really symbolized was the death of that joke. Duke himself had already passed, and he passed because 3D Realms couldn't finish the videogame they wanted to make, instead choosing to rebuild it from the ground up over and over again, each time deciding that the product wasn't good enough. It was a cycle of despair for developer and fan alike. This was all pretty clear to anybody who looked at 3D Realms' process with a critical eye, and it had nothing to do with the one-dimensional sunglasses-and-flat-top action hero.

And then there's the proof given: the author hasn't made a conclusion from facts, he's just decided on a conclusion and then sought out facts (from another medium entirely, no less!) that, when arranged just so, kiiinda fit that. Bizarrely, the success of the Fast and Furious reboot-- a stupid, one-dimensional Vin Diesel action movie that I assume people had some fun at-- is used as proof that... people don't want stupid, one-dimensional action movies? This isn't an action film, mind you, but wasn't Paul Blart, Mall Cop the first really huge hit of this year? Because that movie looked pretty damn stupid! Hell, we are entering stupid movie season. The big highlights are movies based on action figures by Michael Bay and the guy who did the Mummy. These movies are going to make a ton of money, and people are going to have a great time at them.

One of the biggest-selling games from a couple months ago about a pack of cartoonish ethnic stereotypes hitting each other in spectacular fashion. The story and narrative are afterthoughts. People don't return Street Fighter IV to the store because the storytelling is poor: they want to do some damn street fighting, and the game does what it says on the box. For the next couple of months, it was Resident Evil 5, that game with the notoriously convoluted and terrible B-movie storyline where a roided-up, one-dimensional badass kills zombies nonstop. Wii Sports, a game with no narrative whatsoever and gameplay so thin it's less than one-dimensional, is the biggest-selling videogame of all time. It is outright false to claim that the larger gaming market isn't buying or doesn't want one-dimensional, stupid, fun videogames. Just because you want something to be true doesn't make it so!

There's room for all of our personal preferences in gaming: this is a big, big medium. There is room for the games that deftly fuse narrative and action, there is room for the games that excise action or even gameplay in service of their storytelling, and vice versa. There is room for Duke, too. And no matter what videogame goes to market and sells a zillion copies, we can all go to the store and play the videogames that we like. What I really find so unbearable about this article is the haughty, condescending, self-congratulatory attitude that decides that not only is a certain type of entertainment not one's thing, but also useless, antiquated, and worthy of death.

Cool Guy Bonus Activity: Substitute God Hand for Duke Nukem and Clover for 3D Realms in this article and note how unhip it becomes.

(Also, insulting Commando is an automatic fuck-off)

BROTIPS for Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram

Hi, guys! Back when AICN linked both my last post about Virtual On and my post about Training with Hinako, the Hinako post got about a hundred times more traffic. So I'm following the numbers-- the Cool Guy numbers-- and I'm making another post about VOOT. I can get away with it, I figure, because it bridges the game and anime cultures I write about here. We can just say "HAJIME KATOKI" if anybody opposes. (Plus it's all I play lately.)

Mostly, I wanted to link you guys to this post, which is the best basic VOOT guide you are likely to find. This game doesn't come with a movelist, so most players don't know about the range of attacks that exist in the game, particularly not the special stuff that requires the use of the Back button. At the right time, some of that stuff is really useful, and a Specineff player must know about Death Mode.

But more importantly than that, don't turn, jump cancel! It's a simple movement that holds the game together and keeps you alive: I also think it's the most confusing element for a new player. At the outset, you might be under the assumption that you've got to keep the other guy in your sights by turning towards them: unfortunately, while you can do this, you're also a sitting duck for attack, and a player who knows what they're doing and sees you turning is going to kill you in the space of five seconds. Jump cancelling is a pretty easy thing to do: just tap Y on your pad to jump and A immediately to come back down. This is going to leave you momentarily open, but turning will have you open for a lot longer.

Anyway, if you have VOOT and you're playing online (I command you to do both of these things), then do yourself the favor of reading that guide and just giving everything a shot in Practice mode. VOOT is a very unconventional game and it takes some time to get used to, but once you get a handle of your weapons and especially the ways you can move in this game, you'll get this whole zipping-around-the-stage thing under control and maybe even kick some ass.

As for myself, I'm many, many matches in and still feeling that I've only scratched the surface. As I run through the roster, I'm feeling like Fei-Yen is my best choice: she's all speed, and very tricky in the right hands. Along those lines, Specineff and Angelan have been my other choices: next I really want to try a heavy robot like Raiden or the Vok series. I'd make the same beginner recommendations as anybody else though: Temjin will show you how the basics work, and once you're over that, Raiden has a lot of simple, powerful weapons. I'm just stubborn and I like to do things the hard way.

Lag for online play is minimal, perhaps given the nature of the game: the player pool is overwhelmingly Japanese and even on speeds as low as one connection bar, play is smooth. With the amount of people around, you probably don't need to worry about a lack of competition like on Senkou no Ronde (Wartech) or Guilty Gear 2. So buy it already, jeez. You like robots? Buy it. You like fighting games? Buy it. You like both, you probably already have the thing.

Shin Mazinger Episode 5: Super Alloy Z GETS HYPE

By the way, since I haven't made note of it yet, these writeups will contain spoilers for the series. If you don't want to know, then please don't read them before you watch the show.

We should note, here, that Imagawa has spent three and a half episodes on the same fateful night. We're not on Namek or anything, but everybody is in agreement that the show is moving slowly. I will offer a defense: as long as the important points are being handled with this degree of love, it doesn't matter to me how gradually we get to them. Every episode is still monstrously entertaining, and remember, this is the approach that made a Rocket Punch beautiful again.

Speaking of which, Super Alloy Z receives the same treatment this week: we stop in the middle of the action for the narrator to yell ZEEEEEEEETTO and then expound upon the omnipotent protective wonders of the material of which Mazinger is made. It is by far the highlight of the episode: once again narrator Tessho Genda earns his paycheck and should probably be way in the front of the credits. I have to wonder how well this practice is working for people who don't already like super robots or Mazinger (of course, I don't think many of those people are still watching), because it's fanservice in its purest form.

Once more, let's call it out! That alloy's name is Super Alloy ZEEEEEEEEEEEEETTO!!

And of course, if Rocket Punch and Super Alloy Z were joyous celebrations, the traditional Mazinger big gun, Breast Fire, was more than a little bittersweet. Nothing kills the mood like somebody dying during your special move.

Shall we bid farewell to Grandpa Juuzou Kabuto? He's given us so much hype. I'm not sure we even need to mourn: dude didn't even notice he was dead before taking up residence in Kouji's brain. He's that tough. I wouldn't be surprised, considering the first episode, if Juuzou became a permanent imaginary friend for Kouji. And yes, that would be really weird.

We've caught hints of it, but evil Kouji sure was a sight to see: Mazinger has always had that running bit about choosing whether to become a god or a demon, but aside from the catchphrase itself, none of the Mazinger anime ever really bothered addressing that. And finally, Aphrodite A was good for something this episode.

Another general note about the show: a buddy and I were talking, and he brought up the point that this show is likely both the best-directed and lowest-budgeted show running this season. It doesn't even have a real OP, you know! Can't afford it! It's clear that everybody involved really believes in this project, but from the budget (and the TV Tokyo scheduling silliness) I'm going to assume that the sponsors don't. What a bunch of losers. Kageyama believed, so why wouldn't you want to be like Kageyama?