Month: September 2011

If you ever wanted to read what a 30-year-old dude thinks of the Sailor Moon manga, here’s your chance. It’s your lucky day! I’m pretty sure my flirtations with shoujo material are well documented, at least among certain friends. I used to own the out-of-print ADV collection 1 of the subbed Sailor Moon anime, but I ended up selling it for beaucoup bux.

Thanks to my job I’ve probably consumed more comics aimed at young Japanese boys and girls over the years than is even remotely healthy. It’s kind of interesting to note the differences between the two once you become intimately familiar with their gimmicks. Shoujo manga is, by its very nature, super flowery and ornate. There’s so much going on from panel to panel that would otherwise be seen as superfluous.

For a more purely visual take on the genre, I highly recommend this tumblr.

Here’s a good example. Sorry it’s from some stupid fan-translated pirate version or whatever but I didn’t feel like scanning anything and just grabbed it from Google image search:

The borders. The word bubbles. The stamped patterns. It’s like the manga equivalent of bedazzling a pair of jeans. Naoko Takeuchi’s style of storytelling is pretty briskly paced and fun to read, though, and Sailor Moon holds at its core a pretty typical monster/villain of the week formula.

There, I’ve only had this new blog for maybe a week and I’ve already jumped into a frilly pink outfit that I may never be able to pry off my body. Stay tuned for some more manly stuff. Maybe.

I just got back from seeing the pillows in NYC, thus scratching another one of my favorite bands off my “need to see ’em live” list. I’ll just say the show was muy perfecto and leave some pictures I took to do the rest.

noodles

the pillows

I’ve yet to be disappointed by a Vertical Inc. release of Osamu Tezuka manga, and the same can be said for Peter Mendelsund’s design. This just came in the mail today.

I like the inside under the jacket even more.

I recently wrote a review of Rock of Ages for Crunchyroll. This game was a really odd experience for me, because, as I mentioned in the review, I’ve never been a fan of tower defense games. They both more me to tears and give me an odd kind of anxiety. I don’t know what it is, but for the most part they suck and should be relegated to freeware titles or 99¢ apps.

Rock of Ages—developed by ACE Team, who made the almost off-puttingly weird but fun first-person action game Zeno Clash—is a different story all together. I think a lot of it has to do with the more action-centric, Marble Madness/Monkey Ball gameplay, but I had just as much fun setting up defenses prior to each roll of the boulder.

Ultimately, though, its simplicity lies in the fact that it’s all a race against time. Once you realize it’s more a matter of getting shit done quicker than whoever’s on the business end of your boulder, it becomes a game of figuring out the best way to navigate increasingly ridiculous courses. So yea, Marble Madness. I played through it in a single sitting with my man Napplejax, qualifying Rock of Ages as a certifiable DAY GAME. (Yea, I just referenced a blog post from 2006. Whatcha-whatcha gon’ do about it?)

The fact that they bothered to make some weird stop-motion style Red Arremer for this 15-second TV spot is rad.