Subatomic Brainfreeze

In memoriam: Digi Charat, 1998-2011

"Your own dream is more important than Y2K!"

-Masami Okui, 1999

Bad news via my dudes at welcome datacomp: the formerly renowned otaku goods empire Broccoli is ceasing retail operations. Broccoli ran the Gamers chain of stores, which as you may (or may not) recall were "staffed" by Koge-Donbo's lovable mascot character Digi Charat. As Gamers is no more, it is as though Dejiko has retired, nyo. Though this tragedy is completely fictional, it is still kind of sad to me because the first Digi Charat TV series was great.

I don't really know much about the rest of it-- I put down Panyo Panyo Digi Charat during the first episode and just kind of sat there boggled in front of my TV through the bizarrely low-key ten-years-later romance Winter Garden-- but that first series was gold. Digi Charat is a space alien who crash-lands in Akihabara and goes to work for Gamers to keep a roof over her head. The three-minute episodes-- the entire TV series is an hour long, total-- feature the lowest-budget animation possible (taking super deformity to an extreme),  rapid-fire comedy and total nonsense plots, foreshadowing what Madhouse would eventually do when they were given the Galaxy Angel character designs and told "eh, do whatever"

Like GA, the sugary-sweet appearance of the show is cut generously with a dry and quietly cynical comic perspective. Dejiko's a violent buffoon, her rival's a wannabe-idol snob, and little Puchiko is the sensible one and the only person in the room who's able to state the obvious. There are a few other one-note characters, who seem to have been included just so that there can be a straight man to bounce off of. The show feels like it's being made up as it goes along, and it's all the better for that. If there was one line of dialogue that could sum up the mood of Digi Charat, it's "Please don't worry about where or how much Gema urinated."

Unfortunately, it is not easy to legally obtain Digi Charat anymore. Broccoli's US division is long gone, and the DVD is out of print, fetching over $60 online (that's a buck a minute!). Of course, if you dig around, it's pretty easy to find for download and Youtube.

In any case, watch that damn TV show and pour one out for Dejiko's retail gig today. It's tough getting decent work these days, I hear.

Nerd Dreams: HARUHI SUZUMIYA AND THE PSYCHIC MIND BULLETS

I had this weird dream immediately before waking up that I was stuck in an even more obnoxiously meta version of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I’m not really a fan of Haruhi and I haven’t thought about it in quite some time, so it’s really strange that it came up.

So I’m walking down a hallway out of my room, and I’m approached by this very excited, very plain brunette in a school uniform. No ribbons. I’m in school now, aren’t I. She starts walking fast alongside me and I don’t slow down.

“Why are you mad at me? I shot psychic mind bullets! Aren’t you happy with psychic mind bullets? God!”

“Shit,” I think. “I’m in a cartoon-- except this isn’t a cartoon-- and this is Haruhi Suzumiya. Shit."

I grab her by the shoulders but she’s already losing it on me with this psychic mind bullet business.

“Fuckin’ take it easy! Chill!”

She stops.

“We are in a videogame, and I haven’t played it for, like, ten months. You need to tell me what is going on here.”

Haruhi accepts this readily. So she tells me what’s going on, but it’s in the form of one of those RPG cutaways that happens when a character needs to fill someone in on everything that’s happened thus far. So all that happens is that my consciousness fades out and in again, and I’m none the wiser when it’s over.

“Okay, thanks, but I didn’t actually hear anything because as soon as you started talking one of those RPG cutaways happened.”

Then we both turn slowly towards the “camera” and stare at the “viewer”. I wake up.

What's getting Dave to not get things done - Mamono Sweeper and GIRP

Hey, everyone. Lately I've got a lot on my mind-- my little bits of paid work, ambitious posts over at Colony Drop (I've made a few large posts, if you haven't been there lately, with something very special planned for this coming Friday), and panels as I-Con (and hopefully Otakon) approaches-- and I never feel like I've caught up on my ideas with the work it takes to actually get them on paper... or Internet, as the case may be.

I try to shut down the distractions around me while I work on my laptop, but we all know that if you can work and play on the same machine, you're going to find ways to play yourself out of work. And I do have favorite browser games, whose URLs I will too often find myself unconsciously typing in. Today, two of them.

Mamono Sweeper explains itself adequately on its own website. This Minesweeper RPG is about as simple and straightforward as it gets, and as such it's the quickest and most effective way to distract me ("I'll just play a minute!") and totally ruin whatever I'm up to that day. It's not exactly Desktop Dungeons, but what is? When I finally beat Huge + Extreme mode, I'll use the game's built-in Twitter functionality to tweet about it.

GIRP is a brand new game from the creator of QWOP, an incredibly cruel game in which the player must make a runner travel 100 meters: by taking manual control of his thigh and calf muscles. GIRP takes that basic premise and applies it to rock climbing to create a more reasonable, but still obscenely difficult and addictive experience.

You can only control your climber by directing his arm towards a spot on the mountain where he can get a grip (these are marked with any key on your keyboard) and by flexing his muscles. Like QWOP, thinking about controls in this way is very hard to get a hold on, and you will probably spend your first game or two simply falling into the water. But if you don't close the browser window, it'll start to make sense, and you'll be climbing. The motion makes sense. Reach, flex, reach, flex. Every step is hard earned, and the risk is always high: the water level is creeping up below you, and you're done after one mistake.

Because the game pays so much attention to the motion itself, you feel this really strong connection to the ragdoll player character. Because you have to press keys that could be any letter in the alphabet, and hold onto them on punishment of death, you are in your own way hanging on to the keyboard. Your fingers will get tangled, you may have problems reaching the keys. This is part of it. I've only made it up about 20 meters so far, but not for lack of trying.

GIRP is simple, punishing, and utterly brilliant. Give it a go.

Marvel 3: Sentinel was nerfed BUT WHY WAS HE TOO GOOD?

Now is as good a time as any for one of these kinds of posts, as a patch for Marvel vs. Capcom 3 just dropped that's been inspiring some debate. The game has a large number of bugs, some of it game-breaking, but the patch doesn't address any of that stuff. For a more complete rundown, consult the amazing Desk. I'll talk about one really obvious point and play Theory Fighter with it.

The first thing people noticed about this patch is that it cuts down the character Sentinel's hit points by a full third, from 1.35 million (highest in the game) to 900,000. For comparison, the "average" character HP is around a million, with smaller or more offense-oriented characters at 800,000 or 900,000.

This is a long-standing Capcom standard of character balance: it's okay if one character has a greater range of attack options than the others if that character takes the risk of having lower HP. In Street Fighter 4, when you pick Ryu over Ken or Akuma, you're picking stability. When you pick Ken, you've tilted the needle a little bit towards aggression and flash-- but Ken doesn't have less HP than Ryu does. When you pick Akuma, you get a character with many of the strong points of both characters, with his own tricks and a tremendous offense to boot. He has to have a disadvantage somewhere, so they make it in the hit point (and Ultra Combo) department.

(Also, female characters tend to have lower HP in Capcom games. Contrary to the theory I just outlined, this is probably because Capcom is just sexist.)

Going by this theory, it was actually a tremendous screwup that the big ol' mutant huntin' robot-- despite his sheer size-- had more HP than any other character, because he was clearly, until today, the strongest character in the game. The video streams of high-level play online were all packed with Sent teams, and it was looking like tournaments would be too. The character was so good that if you weren't running him in your team, you were probably just stubborn like me.

So why was Sent so strong? Well, proper game balance theory dictates that every character in a game like this ought to be good at some things, unique in one department (perhaps able to do something that nobody else in the game can), and not so good at others. The more strengths, the more weaknesses, and it should balance out, right? Well, Sentinel is great at everything and his weaknesses don't come close to outweighing that.

Sentinel can control space on the screen very effectively with an army of projectiles, including the dreaded "mouth lasers" that hit almost immediately in a straight line across the screen. A lot of characters are effectively kept at bay with his long-range keepaway game alone.

Is Sent any weaker at close range? Not by much! He's a defensive fortress: approaching challengers need to slow down and show some respect for his close-range moves, which actually push right through a would-be attacker's first hit and lead to tremendous damage. (See this lovely video's red and black boxes for more information.) This means you don't jump in on or even throw a punch at Sentinel, you just have to wait for him, hoping that he acts before you do and opens himself up to attack.

Actually approaching him usually entails working around him and getting in from above. Once you land that first shot, Sentinel's tremendous size means it's easier to get an offense going against him, and if you study up you can do big combos that only work on the character. Sent is big and strong, but his predictability is a weakness.

Finally, even when he's on the sidelines Sentinel has the amazing Sentinel Force assist, which flies along the ground very slowly, lingering on the screen for a long, long time and severely limiting the mobility of the opponent. It's the ideal assist type for the game's many close-range rush characters like the popular Wesker and Zero. Due to its team-based nature MVC3 has a rich metagame, and finding the right assists for your characters is an important part of forming the most powerful team. Some assists are great assets to the team, others not so much. Sent's assist goes with absolutely everything.

That Sentinel did more damage and had more HP than anyone else in the game was just the last kick in the balls. While this character was absolutely stronger than everybody else, he's very beatable if you play it smart and out-think the other player: I and many other players have compared Sentinel to Sagat in the first version of Street Fighter IV (though really, he was even better than that).

I don't play Sent myself, but my prediction is that with this change, Sentinel players are going to have to go to a more keepaway-centric play style. His armored close-range attacks will become closer to a last resort than rushdown insurance, because with that low HP and that big hit box, he's going to be very easy to kill once you're in on him. Sent players are not going to afford to take a hit anymore, which was the most frustrating thing about fighting him: even if you finally got in and landed your best combo, unless you took drastic (X-Factor) measures he'd be getting right back up again.

Is this one change better for the game? I believe so, yes, but it's still only a month young. It's fun to talk about big, glaring issues, but it's the little things that make for a great, long-lasting game. I'm really looking forward to what the game looks like in a year or so.

The Fuccons: THE ULTIMATE METHOD OF WHOOPING IT UP

I want to take you back into time (as I tend to do) a couple years to the early-00's days when AD Vision was still the biggest US anime distributor around. DVD had been good to the anime business, and ADV reaped more of the benefits than anybody else.

ADV always acted like fans, for better and for worse, and they were often overly ambitious in a way that only really devoted (and stubborn) fans could be. In their heyday, ADV dumped all the money they made into projects that nobody could have possibly believed were viable. ADV's brief and disastrous run in manga (they licensed thousands of titles in the thick of a completely saturated market, never released very many, and completed very, very few), and their ten-year stillborn effort at getting a widely available cable network (as, today, cable TV shrinks into irrelevance), were probably major money sinks.

But the company did things on a smaller scale that made me scratch my head, and The Fuccons is certainly one of them. Originally Oh! Mikey, a series of sketches on the Vermillion Pleasure Night variety show (also released by ADV), The Fuccons is a three-minute sitcom about an American family in Japan and their interactions with other wacky foreigners. By the way, the characters are all mannequins and the show consists almost entirely of voiced-over shots of their forever posed and frozen plastic bodies.

At the end of most episodes they laugh. Ahahahahahahaha. It's kind of creepy.

It takes a certain taste and a high level of tolerance to watch this show at all. It was apparently a big hit in Japan and elsewhere in the world (though apparently ADV lied about exactly how popular), but despite the "GET READY, AMERICA" marketing talk all over the DVD boxes I don't think the show has a lot of American appeal. The comedy is dry enough to remind me of what British sitcoms I've watched: the obliviously cheerful Mikey stumbles through a world of people who are either awful human beings, severely mentally deranged, or both. No matter whether he's beat up or humiliated or defaced, everybody has a nice, hard, forced laugh at the end of the day. Ahahahahahahaha.

The show doesn't really play up or call attention to its inherent absurdity, even as stranger and stranger situations get involved (Mikey's neighbor Time Boy probably takes the cake). If you watch one of these episodes and you don't throw out the DVD, you're probably going to watch the rest.

So The Fuccons is already a really strange little thing, and the DVD release is also strange. ADV only put out three Fuccons discs (during the days when people bought single discs of anime series, so of course it would work with this live-action mannequin sitcom), each priced at $20 and under an hour long with 17 three-minute episodes. The show is both presented in the original Japanese and dubbed in English.

The reason the DVD is so short is that rather than one long video with dubs in two languages, the Japanese and English versions of The Fuccons are completely different videos. It isn't that the English version is cut for content in any way, but most of the English episodes are a little shorter or longer by a few seconds, likely as a result of shaving quarter-seconds off here and there for comic timing reasons. The dub, done with the direct involvement of the series creator, is pretty impressive. I mostly watched the show in Japanese anyway (force of habit), but the voices are dead on.

If you watch the Japanese side, it becomes clear that the episodes are being presented out of order from their original airing.The episodes don't really depend on being watched in chronological order, but like most sitcoms there's a certain continuity that isn't really paid any mind here. Early episodes with character introductions are just run in the middle (so that they can now do a bunch of episodes with that character), and the flow of it can be strange.

You can get the DVDs for really cheap online, and you should probably give it a look if that Time Boy picture does anything for you. I mean, why wouldn't it?

Higurashi: When They Cry impressions

For some context, this is after reading the first sound novel and a getting couple of hours into the second. I may do a proper, full review over at Colony Drop, but I've already said here most of what I would say in a full review.

I felt like some fresh subway reading, and I noticed that the first four arcs of Higurashi were available for iOS devices. The first one is free, even! While the iOS pricing is high by App Store standards, it's well into impulse buy territory by any other measure. Hell, the PC releases are twice as expensive. I won't read Higurashi Kai until it's ported to iOS. So obviously I decided to go for it, and so far the results are very mixed.

If you don't know, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni-- literally "When the Cicadas Cry"-- is a series of sound novels by Ryukishi07 that went big in Japanese otaku circles and were eventually animated, catching the attention of the rest of the otaku world when they did. Its successor Umineko ("When the Seagulls Cry" this time) is ongoing. We call them "sound novels" because they rely almost entirely on audio atmosphere to aid the text, with extremely minimal art assets. It's unusual that original novels like these get translated, but here they are courtesy of MangaGamer (where they are presently awaiting the conclusion of my live-Twittered review of Soul Link).

The recent port to iOS was what really sold me on this: reading the story on a portable device during the donwtime in my life just fits in with my schedule a lot better, as it probably does for most folks. I will mention here that the DS version of Higurashi costs twice as much as the PS2 version. Think about it!

In any case, pacing problems, pacing problems, pacing problems. Higurashi appears divided into two distinct segments: a horror/mystery story wherein teenage transplant Keiichi Maebara learns that all is not as it seems in the tiny rural village of Hinamizawa, and laid-back school-life comedy wherein everything is in fact completely as it seems.

In theory, this isn't a bad thing. I'm very happy to spend some time getting to know the characters, but Higurashi likes to keep us with them for long stretches. It took hours for the plot to start moving at all in the first arc. Once the introductions are through, Keiichi and his all-girl posse simply hang out for long, long stretches. These segments rarely shed any light on the characters' personalities, affect their relationships, or push the story forward. They're just there: "cute girls behaving in exactly the way you already expect them to" fluff. If you don't mind total stasis in your stories, this won't bug you.

It's been years since I watched the first arc of the anime, but I'm pretty sure this was the first material to hit the chopping block in adaptation. The loss of, say, a cooking contest doesn't have me hurting too bad, but if my memory is correct, the anime also leaves out a lot of plot detail and moves around the chronological order of events in an attempt to make the downtime a little less dull. I can't say I completely blame them: it gets really dull around Hinamizawa. It often feels like the author knows this and is putting you through long stretches of nothing on purpose. But then, visual novels in general often feel like the authors are being paid by the word.

When it hits the fan in this story, things start to get good. Without directly spoiling anything, gruesome murders take place Hinamizawa which may or may not have supernatural origins, and we have just as much reason to believe one as the other. Higurashi asks questions and does not supply answers (indeed, these arcs are called the "question" arcs and the "answer" arcs are a long way off). You just sit there and watch as people start to die, circumstances get suspicious, and everybody in the story starts to fall apart from the paranoia of it all. Ryukishi calls it a "game" only in that the player is left in the wreckage to speculate as to what the hell just happened.

As Higurashi was originally a very small, independent product, the production values are not high. For example, the game doesn't have the kind of detailed, full-screen art we see in visual novels, nor any voice acting. Backgrounds are actual photos taken by the creators, and the character art is notoriously simplistic, with hands that look more like mittens, and perhaps three expressions for any given character. This suits me just fine, but when the game was ported to the PS2 and DS by a commercial games company, the whole thing was completely redrawn and rescored to look and sound like a "normal" Japanese VN. In so doing, I believe it loses a bit of its character.

(Except for the music. Higurashi desperately needs more than three pieces of background music.)

There is one other catch: this script is kind of wooden. I'm talking about localization here. The translation just doesn't read very well: the speech is often uncessarily clunky, often making the translation come off as too strictly literal. The characters don't really feel like they have distinct voices. Recently I've been reading some of Viz's Haikasoru line of translated Japanese sci-fi novels, and the first thing that struck me reading Higurashi was how much more natural, say, Mardock Scramble felt.

I can deal with the often-choppy way that anime characters always seem to talk (not that I'm crazy about it) in a more visual medium, but reading full-length prose in fansub English can be a little rough. Editing also gets spotty. According to reviews on the iTunes store, parts of Episode 3 aren't even translated! What the hell is that about?

So, with a free first chapter and the rest priced at $6, is Higurashi worth it? It's a tough sell, and I'm not sure whether or not I'll even continue past this second arc. On the one hand, it's a really interesting story, but only when it wants to be, plus it doesn't read very well. I had a good, long pause when I finished that first free chapter (very long, mind) and deliberated whether or not to get the next one. Ultimately I decided "what the hell, six bucks".