Category: Comics

The youngest boy finally got his mail-order Rambo survival knife from the postman. After running inside with it, the wicked Aunt Tess proclaims that she “will not have a weapon of that caliber in this house!”

When all is said and done, there’s no way I’m going to be able to convey the essence of this movie in words. I’ll give you all a big ol’ picture parade, but I’m going to go ahead and refuse to write up this incredible specimen of shot-on-video, Casio scored glory. It’s like Bigwig Productions whisked The Artist Formerly Known as Kojiro Abe back in time and gave him a grand and too many light stands to make his magnum opus.

I’m about to explode. This has seriously been running in my DVD player for all of 13 seconds and I’m already dying to write about it. In fact, there haven’t even been any HUMAN BEINGS or CAMERA SHOTS on screen yet, but here I am.

The movie opens with some amazing VCR-quality teleprompter text that relays the following crucial message:

This year over 75,000 people were killed by family members in the United States. One in ten of these murders are never solved and written off as unexplained disappearances, due to the fact that bodies are never found and disposed of in most ingenious ways.

This is one such story.

Let that soak in for a bit while I press play and power through 90 minutes of a titillating 1989 classic.

It’s deadline crunch time, which, naturally, means I’m drinking Red Bull and making retarded Miis on my Wii in between sporadic bouts of mad writing. I wish there was some way for me to capture them off of the screen properly, because I made a pretty keen Mega Man and a decent Stacey Keach.

In other news, it’s now June, which means the new mag, Otaku USA, drops in a few days. I believe I mentioned it here before, but in case you guys forgot, you should go pick it up at your closest scummy book shop and read the words that flow from the pristine golden mind of myself and my compadres.

Expect more “JLR Exclusives” later today after I pass out and wake up from a slumber that will no doubt be filtered through the cut-out eyehole lenses of Kikaida and his closest friends.

A magical, tiny Japanese man dropped this game off at my house yesterday and I’ve played about an hour of it so far. I’m on the second chapter or so, which means I at least got a chance to fight the first boss.

Wow, the visuals alone are worth digging into it for, even if the combat seems like it could get sort of repetitive. Still, just when I thought I would get sick of the desert backgrounds, I get thrown into a gorgeous and lush forest in the next set of levels.

For those that don’t know, the game’s combat takes place on circular planes. Since it’s 2D, picture an old game like Defender and you can probably get a clearer picture. Once you clear one ring, you can diverge off into other paths until you eventually reach a boss. There’s lots of beating people up, but the enemies don’t have any fall-back reaction animations, so you really need to keep your distance and stay on your toes since they can strike right back at you.

The first boss, after you fight two really cool Horse-head-like (Zelda II) mini-bosses, is a massive dragon that takes up a good portion of the screen. The artwork on this and everything else doesn’t really register with my brain properly. To me, it’s so clean and crisp that my mind reads it as some cleverly manipulated 3D trickery! Then I try to digest the fact that it’s all hand-drawn or whatever and my mind snaps again.

These are just first impressions and all, but is anyone else tired as hell of alchemy? I’ve never been a huge fan of it, but it seems like game developers feel obligated now to slip it into every moderately RPG-like game structure. Boring and tedious.