Subatomic Brainfreeze

KINOKO NASU'S AMERICAN FOOTBALL

This joke came up in one of this blog's numerous secret bases, the #colonydrop channel on Espernet. Do come by. We're hoping to pitch this project to Type-Moon and EA as a Madden spinoff for the Japanese market. We're thinking multimedia franchise.

There's a football flying in the air above me.
Floating.
This ball is destined to travel, and then fall.
But at this moment, in front of my eyes, I can see a football.
An American football. 

I draw a diagram in my mind.
You throw an American football in a spiral. Like a worm crawling in a dog's intestines.
A football thrown any other way just won't go very far.
It certainly won't get to the place it was intended to be thrown.
But this American football. This American football.

It moves with unnatural accuracy.
Obscenely.
Moist with the juices of human effort, this football tumbles end over end through the air.
Blasphemously.
It's as though the place it was going will always be the place it will go.
I think of my sister.

This American football is impossible. It just can't exist.
I want to wipe it from my eyes.
I want to scream and shove my face into a prehistoric tar pit.

It.
Is.
Terrifying.

heytheoffensivelinemenaretheMURDERbiggestguysonthefield,they'rebiggerthan
everybodyelse,andthat'swhatAPOCALYPSEmakesthemthebiggestguysonthe
fieldwhenyourPUNISHMENTarmgetshittheballisnotgoingtogowhereyouwantitto
kdkfjlaINSANITYgahdfjifyouseeadefenseteamwithdirtandmudontheirbacks
they'veRAPEhadabadday.

I wake up in my bed, bleeding.
My flaxen-haired maid is here with a bowl of Campbell's Chunky soup.
I feel like a an empty pot of meat, about to be filled.

Fate/ Unlimited Codes: your moustache must be THIS THICK to ride

It's certainly been a genre renaissance for the fighting game: a couple of years back we would have prayed for a problem as sweet as "too many games coming out, can't play them all". But here we are, with a spectacular year behind us and some of the brightest spots still to come in the new year. Life is quite fine for us aficionados of digital rock-paper-scissors.

Eighting (formerly fan-favorite arcade shooter developer Raizing) has been making 3D fighting games for some time, going all the way back to the rather rough Bloody Roar series. Like Treasure, they're excellent game designers who, realizing that strong design and original IP aren't profitable these days, simply do licensed products based on established properties. And by all accounts, they do good work: I never cared for the Naruto Gamecube games, but in their day they were wildly popular and very much preferred to their PS2 competitors by Cyber Connect2.

Having put together so many fighting games, 8ing knows what they're doing, and Capcom trusted them with perhaps the developer's biggest project yet: Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom. Eighting did a fantastic ground-up revival of the Versus series with all the accessible gameplay and wacky tricks we expect of it, but also an attention to techincal detail that was lacking in Capcom's own Versus games (a let's-see-what-sticks negligence that eventually resulted in the happy accident known as Mahvel).

Fate/Unlimited Codes is the game that 8ing made just before TvC (they released to consoles the same week, though), and their approaches are very, very different. TvC is a fairly heavy fighting game, but on the surface it's very accessible, with easy moves, lenient inputs, and simple combos for every character. The game goes deeper than that, as always, but a total beginner will still at least be able to work out the basics. Fate, on the other hand, is an experts-only game where the design philosophy seems to be that Guilty Gear's famously complex combo system didn't go far enough. There is no "easy combo" in Fate: at least no easy combo worth using. Even the basics in this game are precisely timed strings along the lines of Sol's Dust Loop (seen at 1:10 here) in Guilty Gear. You don't just juggle the opponent in the air and end the combo: you're often juggling from the ground or bunny-hopping around to complete an extremely strictly timed air combo. For example, here is one for my favorite character. I can do about half of that combo, at best.

In most games with combos like this (Hokuto no Ken is perhaps the best example, and likely the most thoroughly broken, overblown combo game of all time), these ridiculous strings appear because the combined efforts of the players to win go beyond what the designer originally intended. When you first see some of even the simplest combos in Fate, you might think them exploits or glitches or something. In Fate, on the other hand, this is not the case: the game knows about these combos and it is happy to demonstrate. Be careful with the enemy AI in this game: by the end of arcade mode the game will be embarassing you with combos that take a couple hours each in training mode to learn. As you will eventually see in Mission mode, these characters were actually built to do these things. It seems to have worked out: they're playing this at Tougeki this year, which is about the greatest honor a fighting game can recieve.

In theory, the combo is a wholly unecessary part of most fighting games: if you land a simple jab in a game like Melty Blood or Guilty Gear or Fate, the rest of the damage is a usually foregone conclusion. The significant thing was not that the player landed the combo, but that he broke the opponent's defenses. The game could make the jab land 25% damage every time it lands (and adjust damage for other hits accordingly) and little would actually change. But at the same time, that idea isn't terribly exciting, and even if superfluous, combos are simply fun and rewarding to pull off in and of themselves. And as with anything that's fun, people... take it to extremes. I've played a lot of fighting games, and Fate/UC has some of the hardest execution I have ever seen in one, with tons of moves that are hard just for the fuck of it: one weak special move requires that you make six button taps not too fast, not too slow, but just right, without even a visual cue to let you know what the hell you're supposed to be doing. It makes me miss Battle Fantasia. Oh, Battle Fantasia. You wanted them to be concise. You wanted them to be elegant. But they just didn't want to listen.

That said, you can't say a needlessly convoluted combo-based fighting game doesn't fit Type-Moon's needlessly convoluted fantasy visual novels. Just sayin'. Yes, it took me this long to bring up that the game is based on Fate/stay night, which you might have gathered already. We should probably address what this game has for the average Type-Moon nerd, which is to say a lot. There's a lot of respect for the source material here, with many attacks mirroring the events of the game (the shot from the game here is also what happens when Gilgamesh throws Saber).

In arcade mode, the game has an original story written by ol' Nasu himself, so if you can read that, knock yourself out. From what I saw, it wasn't much you wouldn't expect. The bulk of the single-player mode here is the mission mode, though, where quite a few scenes you'll remember from the original Fate game are present. The goofy minigames (mostly involving the parts in the story where Shirou gets hurt) give me a good, long, laugh, but you're gonna have to work your ass off to get them: missions are mostly about doing combos, and combos, as we have established, are hard. Still, if you do, you can run away from BerserCAR. Don't you want to run away from BerserCar?

I can really only recommend this game to people who are either already hardcore fighting game players or people who really love Type-Moon. If you're only in the latter group, be warned of the kind of difficulty we're talking about, and do not expect to clear Mission mode: hell, I don't expect to clear Mission mode. If you're into both, then you're peculiar, you're like me and we love the game.

Urobura: IT'S DEFINITELY A VIDEOGAME

Over on Canned Dogs they were (and I was) talking about how they're trying to remake the rather awful Nitro+ Royale into a proper, professional-grade arcade fighting game, the way Melty Blood was successfully transitioned into a big arcade favorite in Japan. Unfortunately for creator Nitroplus, their game is so bad that no matter what happens, it's probably not worth saving. It's kind of like if someone had decided to have people play Rise of the Robots at Evolution. In the discussion thread, Urobura came up as a game that deserved an arcade port more than Royale, and well... I can't believe I'd never played Urobura. The joke of the title is lost on me, but it comes from the Japanese abbreviation for the popular Tsukihime fighting game Melty Blood, and the game is certainly a kind of Melty Blood.

Made by evil geniuses in ASCII's 2D Fighter Maker, the game is an intentional parody of Melty Blood featuring gimped approximations of its play mechanics, threadbare production values (including music I'd swear I've heard in other videogames), and characters reimagined as perpetually frowning, bored-looking shadows of their former selves. Character choices range from the Tsukihime cast to increasingly bizarre guest appearances ranging from Saber to the swimming Rei clones from Evangelion to a piece scribbled into a fifth-grader's notebook during a particularly boring class. The game is brilliant. Not good, mind you, just brilliant. And yes, it needs to be brought to the arcades. On April Fool's Day, in every Melty Blood: Actress Again cabinet in the world.

THE SUBATOMIC BRAINFREEZE NEW YEAR'S EXTRAVAGANZA

ENJOY THIS BACKGROUND MUSIC (and the blogging equivalent of a clip show)

Sup guys? We are all Dick Clarks reanimated by occult Botox tech-never-meant-for-man, yammering incoherently at a teleprompter and probably dying onscreen as the Clintons massage a glowing orb like they are going to make their monster groooow. Since so much grotesque imitation of humanity was stretched over the television last night, this is the perfect time to talk about anime. As we are hung over.

Japan-cartoons in 2008! Whooooa hoooooooo boy! It's not that exciting, but there's too much that went on to actually sum up in this post! Man stuff did pretty alright: Golgo, as ever, delivers exactly what you expect, every time, and that's how he rolls. Kaiji ended in a not-so-great arc and the promise of a better next season, One Outs is fantastic-- light on the baseball and heavy on the psychological shenanigans-- and it looks to stay that way. I haven't written up Astro Fighter Sunred yet, but I just want to throw out there that it's pretty good, though it perhaps gets a bit too mundane to be funny sometimes?

Rosario + Vampire is shit. It's shit, right? Shit.

Was Casshern Sins perhaps the biggest surprise of this year? It's not just an ultra-bleak reimagining of a bright and shiny Tatsunoko hero, it's actually does so with excellent results. It's a genuine hell of a show both literally and figuratively, and I really need to catch up on it.

I was watching Ryoko's Case File and I kind of dropped out in the middle: the writing was way under the level I expected from Tanaka and the show was really being carried solely by its hot, hot lead character. By the time the cliched action maids got involved, I got the hell out. I might still finish this show, but I kinda doubt it!

Sci-Fi is kind of sneaking up there after Cartoon Network decided to start sabotaging its anime lineups, and aside from the cuts for time, the intrusive advertising, and, well, okay, there's really nothing good about their airings but the fact that MD Geist is on TV.

Colony Drop: Bullshit of The Brazen Braggarts saved anime forever, and when you watch Bubblegum Crisis in 720p, I hear you can actually see God hiding between the frames.

Holy shit, Jam Project at Otakon! Holy shit, Jam Project at Otakon! Holy shit, Jam Project at Otakon! What a cool bunch of guys and a cool chick! This was the otaku event of '08 as far as I'm concerned and the best time I've ever had at an anime convention or nerd gathering of any kind. If you were not there, you were factually wrong. That's science. Is there even a point going to these anymore, now that I've experienced the highest peaks of geekdom and also become a webcomic character?

I dunno, NYAF kinda sucked except for the cosplay! I still want one of those Sega jackets that I saw the reps wearing at the con, though. Can I get hooked up with that or what, Sega? I mean, we're Twitter friends, right? You can manage this. I'll pay you by singing all the Daytona USA songs (or in money), is that okay?

I-Con is great because I get to run panels there! I hope everybody had an awesome time watching such QUALITY anime as the unfinished cut of Gundress, Musashi Gundoh, Genma Wars, and all the rest. We might not have the same level of QUALITY, but I guarantee you that we will have anime just as horrible this coming year, with some of your old favorites coming back for seconds.

And what a fighting game year, by the way! One of the best games ever got rebalanced and re-released-- albeit with nasty bugs by a known terrible developer, but HD Remix is still so good it's worth $15. And then Street Fighter IV came out, too! Good god, has Capcom been at it, and Eighting has done some killer work for them. Tatsunoko vs Capcom is ace, Fate/Unlimited Codes is undecipherable combo madness, and they've still got the home release of SFIV coming. And a Studio 4C movie to boot! Christ!

Blazblue is a fine piece of work, if a bit typical of Arc, and Guilty Gear 2 was undeservedly stillborn (I still wait for 20 minutes sometimes to get my ass handed to me by some Japanese player on Live, usually the same guy). I guess we can count Battle Fantasia as an '08 game because that's when the West got to play it, and besides that, Battle Fantasia is one of the freshest fighting games in years. If there's anything on this list you ought to buy it's that one.

Also, there was another Melty Blood revision, which was alright but nothing to flip your shit over, considering the class of genre competition the game has right now. The best thing about Actress Again was probably that I was able to make a really obnoxious Chinatown Fair regular really mad over it after playing it for two weeks.

There's a lot more than that in the world of Japan-cartoons and fight man game, but there's a lot more in the world than Japan-cartoons and fight man game. I hope all of you guys had an awesome holiday season, and that the new year kicks just as much ass, if not more. I'll be here, doing my thing. Maybe I'll get work this year? Maybe I'll go to AX this year? I sure hope life is that sweet!

Fate/ stay night: Fate route clear- I AM THE SO OF MY BORED

A truth for the ages. It took me 42 hours to learn this, you know, and I'm not going to act like it wasn't a tough trip. It wasn't like the time I watched LoGH, eagerly devouring hours of material every sitting. It wasn't like when I was 14 and I had the free time to consider 40 hours a medium-length game. It was a serious test of patience getting through the first third of Fate/ stay night. There's a lot you need to get past.

Obviously, the visual novel format is not for everybody in the first place: player input is minimal and you really are reading a book. It's quite removed from even something like Phoenix Wright: you read that game too, but you're also thinking critically, solving puzzles, and being involved. By contrast, Fate and its ilk are a different approach to game narrative altogether: just make the player the viewer instead of the player.

It's not really a bad idea in theory, and Fate's extremely user-friendly interface makes it easy to specify exactly how you want to read the story: I put it on auto-play, sped up the text, and shortened the pauses between lines a little bit. A custom-tailored sit back and relax situation. A lot of people argue that this isn't a videogame at all. I beg to differ. It's obviously a videogame. You have to vicariously save a fictional princess. That's a damn videogame.

"You", by the way, are Shirou Emiya, a young dumbfuck who winds up a Master in the Holy Grail War. Simply put, seven mages are chosen as Masters, summon Servants-- each of whom is the reincarnated spirit of a legendary hero-- and do battle in hopes of obtaining the Holy Grail. Shirou accidentally summons the strongest servant, Saber, and the two fight a superhero war and (genre requirement) fall in love. I rather like this part of it: there's no question that Type-Moon has built a really rich mythology for their characters. The game actually has, for example, an RPG-styled status screen that you can use at any time to read up on the particulars of the Servants, their histories, and their abilities.

As I mentioned elsewhere, the particulars of all this are explained at great length, which is fine, but writer Kinoko Nasu has a serious problem with restating himself: the line "people die when they're killed" is famous at least partially because it's emblematic of the kind of obvious statements these characters regularly make, over and over again. A lot of the time I would just put on my headphones, get up from my chair, and fix my figure shelves, looking back every so often at the dialogue as the characters repeated themselves without end.

The only time you will be thankful for this is when Shirou makes repeated, in-depth descriptions of the horrific abuse he takes in battle with Servants. This is because Shirou is a total, unbearable douchebag and by far the worst thing about this game. He's not a "I don't like him but at least he's interesting" character like you see in stuff like Eva or Macross Plus. He's just straightforward, honest, stubborn and when presented with a choice, he always makes the wrong one. He doesn't make reasonable decisions that happen to go wrong: he purposely makes the most boneheaded moves imaginable, all the way through. He's supposed to be self-sacrificing and heroic, but he just looks like an idiot with a death wish. Not a bad guy: just too fucking stupid to live. To make matters worse, the game-- and Saber's subconscious, and indeed, the universe itself-- is one hundred percent on his side.

Like, okay, let's say you're Shirou and you're protected by this ghost of a swordswoman whose abilities are miles beyond human, and the two of you have got to fight a bunch of things like her. Let's say that. Would you really be so unwilling to suck up your chauvinism as to say "Hey, listen... you're a girl. You can't fight, see. You've got a pussy." (protip: not actual game dialogue)? Would anybody? Seriously? I can accept swords that shoot god lasers and a dude who has to die twelve times, and even a spear that hits whether or not it hits, but for the life of me I can't imagine the inborn superpower that made Shirou such an imbecile. Even love is only so dumb!

In fact, one of the best parts of the game is-- when given the chance-- making even dumber choices than Shirou would normally make, and getting him killed in gruesome fashion. Dying in Fate is not really a bad thing at all: writing about slow, nasty deaths is probably Nasu's strong point. Furthermore, you're actually rewarded with the comic-relief Tiger Dojo sections, which are a worthy goal in and of themselves. Ostensibly, minor characters Taiga and Ilya are around to tell you what you did wrong. In practice, the choices are usually pretty obvious, so when you die, you probably did it to see this comedy twosome's wacky antics. Beware of lions!

The fighting is surprisingly well-done for a game of this genre: it's still on the cheap and done in stills, but the engine at least ghettoes out some movement with a lot of visual effects that really do go a long way towards making the slideshow feel kinetic. I did have one big complaint about the fights: the reuse of artwork. Each character has five or six "fighting" illustrations used during all fight scenes, and it's extremely rare that two characters are ever shown onscreen in battle with each other. You hear them fighting, Shirou describes it, you see stock art of the flash of a blade, but you never really see what the hell is going on. The servants always look like PVC figures, no mater what condition they're in, and there's never a point where I visually feel the impact of the battle. It's a little frustrating when the verbal description of battle is so grand and the visual presentation thereof is so not.

Also, like a magical girl show or a super robot anime, Saber's big attack is always the same two drawings in sequence, all the way to the very end. Coupled with all the other reused artwork, it feels really lazy that even a special moment like this is never treated as such. I'm pretty sure they even use the same voice clip.

Speaking of action, let's use this opportunity to giggle like children about the sex scenes. There are two on this route--one as a result of a hilarious, too-convenient plot device-- and they are both written as though by aliens who are trying to figure out this "human sexuality" thing. Nasu writes his sex scenes more or less the same way he writes his horror, except the music is different. "The white flower is violating the red flower" is particularly silly. And you know, I really hesitate to call this porn. Porn is about getting what you want right now, or at least sometime today. If you wanted porn, there are much easier ways to get it than to read a videogame for twenty hours and then read it for twenty more hours when you wanted some more. Just sayin'.

In conclusion, I am curious enough to maybe trudge through the next part. So I might. In any case, look forward to my reimagining of FSN, "Fate/ Puppet Show" (tm), coming soon to a cardboard box near you.

Fate Stay/Night and the UNGODLY POWER of ZETTAI RYOUIKI

Well, with all this videogame shit done, let's talk about a weird otaku fetish and a videogame that isn't really! Zettai ryouiki (absolute territory) is the bit of exposed flesh between an overknee sock and a short skirt. As bangin explains, otaku-- the poor bastards-- see this bit of thigh, say "Man, I'll never get up there on no lady!", fetishize it, and take the fetish back into fantasyland with them. Now let's see for ourselves the real-life results of The Zettai Ryouiki Technique in otaku culture!

The visual novel I'm working very slowly through, Fate Stay/Night, is as long-winded and slow-paced as it is poorly named. It's not an altogether bad read, it just needs an editor to gently tell author Kinoko Nasu that maybe we don't need to read in detail about every breakfast that takes place in the hero's household. Maybe the discussions of the endless rules and techniques of magic-- I mean, the average RPG probably has a less complex system-- could made just a tad more concise.

In Fate, part of the hero's daily routine is attending a magic lecture from classmate/housemate/secret crush/battle mage Rin Tohsaka. Rin goes goddamn on and on about the rules and minutiae of magic that our hero totally sucks at and will never use anyway. It kinda gets to be a drag when you realize she restates all of her points two or three times for effect, and just like a real academic lecture, your attention starts to drift. Your eyes wander from the unceasing waterfall of exposition, and just when things look worst, your eyes roll downward, and let's take it to the teleprompter. Please listen to this music.

 

And the degenerate is back on target! This is a prime example of a developer working with limited resources for maximum effect. Good job to Type-Moon, you crafty sons of bitches, but I'll still never get through your hundred-hour bookgame.

Melty Blood Actress Again: THE UNFINISHED ROMANCIA IS BACK, BABY

(flyer picture stolen from good old NCS)

I've posted about Melty Blood in the past before: it's a fighting game spinoff of the hugely popular doujin visual novel Tsukihime. Remember Tsukihime? The one about the creepy stalker with the knife and Blonde Vampire-chan? I was doing okay blogging it before I realized I wanted to post about other things, too, and so never touched it again.

Anyway, Melty Blood was successful enough already as a indie title: it got an upgrade and everything. That's exceedingly rare for doujin soft, which are usually disposable one-off "let's make an existing game but with moe characters" affairs. A lot of people were noting that-- especially at the time, when Capcom was abandoning the genre and nobody was left to pick up the pieces-- Melty Blood was a piece of work strong enough to hold its own among its professionally developed contemporaries. And it happened: Melty Blood Act Cadenza (AC for arcade) was a huge hit in Japanese arcades. Recently, the last and most improbably named Melty Blood, Actress Again, has come to Japanese arcades and, well, Chinatown Fair.

I am pleased to see it, but I am not pleased that Guilty Gear XX Accent Core was taken out in its favor. Come on, CF, take out the Soul Calibur II or something. It's not even turned on. The game has been in for a couple weeks: I've just had so many fighting games to play at home that I haven't bothered coming to CF in forever. On top of that, I only really played it when I had my ass handed to me in Street Fighter 4, which I haven't bothered learning at all. I didn't figure it was going to be anything too impressive. Thankfully, I was wrong.

What's cool about Actress Again is that each character has three different play modes, and the modes are actually different. Example: I play Arcueid, the aforementioned blonde. Arc has always been a rush-em-down character: that's just how MB is. You get in and you low jab the guy: that's like 75 percent of the game. When I put on Full Moon Mode, the "power" style, nearly all of Arc's moves changed. Some of the moves were completely new: others were pulled from back when MB was a doujin game.The end result was that Arc became pretty simple and pretty high damage. I did a lot better against the other two players (MB players who clearly actually knew the game, combos, and so on) than I expected to. If the two other modes play this differently, and especially if characters are a bit simplified in the alternate modes, I think MB is going to get a lot of new life in it. Mana restoration. Heh heh. Heh heh.

One dollar a play when SF4 is sitting across the room for the same price, on the other hand, is not so bright. Like SF4 and Arcana Heart 2, Actress Again will not be appearing on console for a while: probably a year or so in AA's case. But a buck for a game that isn't Street Fighter 4 in this place isn't such a great idea. Meanwhile, in another genre entirety the $1.50 Initial D Version 4 (down from $2) sits unplayed every single time I've seen it: they don't even have new cards for people to buy, invalidating, well, the entire point of playing Initial D. CF seriously missed the wave for that game: a couple of years ago kids were putting thousands of singles into Initial D in this area, and they didn't buy in until the extremely expensive version that nobody seems to like much came out.

Also, they already found two infinites and a freeze glitch in this game. Just sayin'. Patch that, guys.

Kara no Kyoukai: FROM THE DIRECTOR OF GIRLS BRAVO

Not making that up: I looked up the director of this film, Ei Aoki, and it turned out his only other major work was noted dreck Girls Bravo. You'd never guess it from his work on this episode of Kara no Kyoukai. You see, Kara no Kyoukai is an experiment: a theatrical anime serial. The film I just watched was only about ffity minutes long, and just like a TV or direct-to-video anime episode it even has a next episode preview. And the next episode is a two-parter! Vicious! The theatrical run and the adorable stop-motion-- animation studio ufotable loves stop-motion-- "turn off your cellphone" warning are the only things that separate this from a big-budget OVA.This episode came out in Japanese theaters back in December, and the fourth film in the series is out tomorrow in Japan. Meanwhile, we get to watch live-action Death Note dubbed weirdly into English. THANKS, VIZ, I GUESS.

Kara no Kyoukai is an adaptation of an early novel by TYPE-MOON's Kinoko Nasu. You guys remember when I was blogging Tsukihime? Aside from the implausiblity of ever finishing the task I had made for myself-- I was maybe a tenth of the way through one of six routes when I stopped blogging-- even when playing the game for my own enjoyment, I ran into Nasu's desperate need for an editor one too many times. Eventually I quit halfway through Ciel's story, from simple boredom. So with this, I am happy to be plunging back into my love-disgust relationship with T-M.

The main characters of this story are clear prototypes of Tsukihime's protagonist Shiki Tohno, the heroine being named Shiki herself, and the hero looking just like him. Shiki is a quiet, creepy, intense girl with big dead grey eyes and similar knife-wielding abilities to Shiki's. She talks like a man. The guy, on the other hand, spends most of the movie as a comatose damsel in distress who isn't terribly interesting when he's finally awake, either. It is made clear that they luuuuv each other, but Shiki is one of those overdone, grating tsundere characters who says "shut up I do what I want" and immediately blushes into her sheets in the film's last scene. I bet the audience was all "UOOOOOOO" as the credits rolled.

The two of them work at, uh... actually, I don't think they ever tell you what the hell this place is where they work. It must be assumed that the viewer read the book and knows what this place is. I certainly never figured it out. Either a newspaper or a detective agency? Checking Wikipedia on this point would betray the fact that the movie doesn't get to this point itself, nor does it supply any background or context on the characters at all. Their boss is Touko Aozaki, sister of Tsukihime's Aoko, who you might remember. Touko makes dolls in the back room. Anyway, it seems that a chain of suicides has something to do with some mysterious building, and that this mysterious building has something to do with the days-long unconsciousness of the hero (which, bizarrely, is treated with a shrug by his co-workers until halfway through the damn movie). Since Shiki luuuuuuvs this guy, she sets out to investigate. In between, people talk about suicide and floating and flying.

A plot summary of this movie makes it sound terribly boring and generic, I'm realizing, but I have to say that I was transfixed while actually watching it. It's really a sight to see, especially when Shiki gets to the fluid, elegant movements involved in slicing up everything around her. You know what? I'm just going to show you things that are in this movie. Here are Shiki's rainbow eyes, an outtake from Silent Hill, Kiri Komori, and doll parts. There is also a painstakingly animated sequence of Shiki opening a Haagen-Dasz that impressed the shit out of me. Scoops.

Sorry, by the way, but while this is in fact a widescreen movie, the aspect ratio on my screenshots comes out all wrong. I didn't want to go back and fix the billion screenshots I made, so I'll just blame Media Player Classic.

SUDDENLY, TOUGEKI FINALS

There's this cool dude on Youtube, actually, who took the time to video capture most of the live Tougeki feed (the one that reached capacity and kicked me off moments after I posted about it), and from his labor, all of us can watch most of the matches from pretty much everything. I'm going to embed all the final matches, because I love you.

Here's the Hyper SF2 final: it's something of a miracle that this game worked out, as it's one of Capcom's classic "let's see if this sticks" experiments, alongside Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, the other game that works despite itself. Super SF2 Turbo, in particular was the kind of deceptively simple, elegantly constructed game that you can still play ten years later and learn new things. Instead of killing ST, Hyper SF2 has only made it stronger. This match is Super Turbo (X) version Chun-Li vs. Champion Edition (Dash) Bison. Though they are older versions of the characters, little technical details that I frankly don't know much about can change the characters for the better or the worse. Just check Bison's throw range. Is that shit normal?

It hasn't been ten years since King of Fighters '98 but it has been nine. Here's another game that came together just right. Unfortunately, we only have the latter half of this match. Orochi Chris dominates much of this match: this is something I can talk about, because when I was a KOF98 player, I was a Chris player. Do you see that hop kick he does? That's his jump CD (heavy punch and kick at the same time), and my advice for playing Chris is that when in doubt, use jump CD. Freeze frame and take a look at Chris' shape when he does that kick. He's diagonal: legs-- the part that hits-- are stretched down and body-- the part that's vulnerable-- is stretched back. As such, it's very hard to hit Chris out of it, so if he does it over and over again, he's actually somewhat safe. When it hits, Chris gets a knockdown, and from there he can set up the opponent with all kinds of sneaky stuff. But that would be beyond our scope.

Note, also, that 2P has a very unusual team: Mai, Chizuru, and Mature. These characters aren't particularly regarded as among the powerhouses of the game (1P's team certainly is, however), so it's impressive to see someone like that get to the finals of a huge national tourney like Tougeki.

Christ, what's to even say about these Third Strike matches? Incredible. The beginning and end are pretty routine beatdowns, but RX (the Urien player) alone deserves a medal for managing to hold it down the way he did. Another unusual team on the 2P side: Necro, Urien and Yang are decidedly not the Third Strike Big Three, Ken, Chun-Li and Yun. For a game with balance as lopsided as Third Strike's, it's amazing these guys even made it to the finals in the first place.

I've been away from Guilty Gear since Slash-- we're on Accent Core now-- and I'll proudly admit I have no idea what the hell is going on in these matches anymore. I consider this a good thing. While previous XX upgrades have done nothing but tweak balance, Accent Core apparently throws the hardcore players for a loop by completely changing the way many characters work, especially with regards to the combo system. I have to reiterate: I have no idea how any of this shit is done anymore. I feel like an amnesiac when I play this game. In any case, Mike's-- he's the one who looks like Captain Jack Sparrow-- Jam is a total whirling dervish and a joy to watch in action. I would say it's too bad that Ogawa won with his terrifying Eddie lockdown-- cause, you know, dude always wins-- but according to the Youtube comments he's overcome epilepsy, through sheer force of will, just to play more videogames. That is some otaku Lance Armstrong shit right there. Respect.

And here's Melty Blood Act Cadenza Ver. B. While I like the game, I never got too hardcore into competitive Melty Blood because it seems like it's a game where you just low jab a lot until you win. This video doesn't do much to dispel that impression, but I admit that there are some nice setups and mixups going on in the ground game in these matches. Thankfully, we are at least rid of the non-fatal 200-hit Sion combos that went on forever and ever last year on Version A. On top of that, you have to admire a game that started in the doujin world working its way all the way up to this stature: most pro fighting games don't hold up as well as Melty Blood has.

Finally, the looptastic Arcana Heart finals. You guys know why I love this game: it's got mobility, it's got options. The more choices you have, the more creative and unpredictable the play. You're never really locked down in Arcana and there are loads of ways to deal with any different situation. Unless you already used your burst and you got caught in one of those loop combos, man. Then you just gotta wait it out. Grab a soda, come back in a minute. It'll be waiting for you. Anyway, I was pleased to see a fairly wide character variety in the finals. The game is young, but it's holding up really well.

BONUS MATCH: Here's the USA finalist, Chinatown Fair's own Arturo Sanchez. He very nearly took out the Lieselotte who eventually won the tourney. The crowd don't seem to like him much, though. Probably because he's playing Kamui with Gier. And, uh, not Japanese.

WHAT WHAT'D I SAY

Tsukihime - Arcueid Route - Day 3 - I Was Not Worrying About You, Nii-San

We don't really need any recap at this point so I'm not going to give any. We're
up early and Hisui is being awfully nice. She's brought Shiki's school uniform and she's going to get the bath ready right now. Just like at the maid cafe. Anyway, in the bath we think about things some more and deny them some more. Shiki notices that his neck is really red and sore, almost as though he'd been-- throwing up repeatedly. I mean. If he did it. If he did it that's how it would have happened.

Kohaku hits on us and forces us to eat breakfast, because we're looking so sickly we're gonna die. Just like at the maid cafe! And we're not even paying ten bucks for a hamburger! Even tough bitch Akiha's gone kind of softy, but not soft enough not to bicker with us about this whole passing out in a park business. You can't really blame her. It is a pretty flimsy excuse, you know.

I have a choice to either talk about Akiha, Kohaku, or the mansion, and we can't give the ladies too much attention, so we're going with the mansion. It's kind of a big place to keep four people in; Akiha lets us know that the rest of the rooms are closed. She also lets us know, ominously, that their dead father's room is still open, but the secret archives are closed due to bad rumors. And that she totally wasn't worried about us, so shut up. According to the handbooks of moe, Akiha is the "tsundere" type, and denying that you're worried about someone is a classic tsundere move. Just like at the maid cafe! I'm serious, there's a place that will give you this specific treatment.

Nobody but nobody actually believes this whole thing about the park; quiet, reserved Hisui even tries to pull the info out of us before we leave. By now, though, Shiki's really got that lie burnt into his head, so he tells her "yeah nothing yeah uh yeah nothing," and leaves. Then it's off to school; we'll leave that for later.