subhumanzoids

Sorry to disappoint anyone, but this post has nothing to do with its title. I’m just listening to a song by Wolf called “Whisky Psycho Hellions” right now and that’s a hell of a name for a song.

I’ve had a Wii U for a little over a week now, so I wrote a thing about what it’s like to be a dude who’s had a Wii U for a little over a week. The short version: It’s pretty fun! It’s definitely Nintendo, but it’s some kind of new, weird Nintendo that rebels against its parents and hangs out with the wrong crowd. It gets online and looks at porn. Or, rather, I get online with it and look at porn.

Or, as this article on Gamasutra puts it, “Even Nintendo may not have fully realized what it has done. It has domesticated the wildness of the present moment in video games, consumer electronics, the internet, and home entertainment by caging them out in the open. It’s lurid and beautiful and repugnant and real, like watching Mickey Mouse smoke a joint in the alley behind Space Mountain.”

It’s a cheeky little thing, Wii U. Why, here’s the saucy little tart sitting in my living room with its screen shamelessly on display for all to see.

Sometimes I think about this blog and feel a bit guilty, since I don’t post in it nearly as often as I should. Clearly I’m attempting to rectify that, but first I had to figure out why I wasn’t using it. Well, the answer is clear: My day job is writing and blogging—I do so for a few magazines, keep up the Otaku USA site, and blog news all day at Crunchyroll—so doing it on my free time isn’t always a top priority.

However, now that I’ve found the source of the problem, I’m making a more concerted effort to post more. This is the last I’ll address it, because the only thing worse than a dead blog is one that only sparks and stutters back to life to remind everyone that it’s dead. Long live ME.

I finished playing Hitman: Absolution last night, which was an interesting experience because I’ve never played a Hitman game in my life. I can’t really say a lot about it because of embargo probably, but yea, for some reason I was compelled to draw something based on it last night.

I never just do straight up pencil and then suddenly I started going wild with charcoal, which is even more rare. Normally I would just post something like this on Twitter and Facebook—because I prefer venues that allow folks to click on buttons that make me feel better as a human being and superior to all around me—and leave it at that, but I’ll be using this blog more from now on. I SWEAR. PUT THE BOOKMARK BACK IN YOUR THING AND ACTIVATE YOUR R•S•S FEED.

My homie Joey Shieh recently moved up to NYC, which, as is custom, is currently both boosting his will to live and zapping his income into nonexistence. Before moving, however, he shot a short film for the A.V. Club’s Parameter film contest, and I lent my godly voicing talents to bring a slasher hippo puppet to life.

Dig The Trouble with Craig below. Comment on it. Give it a thumbs up. Share it with friends. Etc.

Tonight somehow ended up turning into an all-nighter, and I’d like to blame some of that on the sheer enthusiasm that beamed straight from SAGCCX’s latest translated episodes of Game Center CX.

For those who don’t know, Game Center CX is pretty much the best show ever. Comedian/host Shinya Arino, AKA The Kacho (Section Chief), is tasked with completing old games, mostly from the Famicom/NES era. When I first got into the show I was so taken by its spirit that I crafted a glowing love letter article for the Otaku USA site. The latest two-parter, available for torrent and direct download via the translators’ facebook page, is none other than the notorious Battletoads.

The best part of these episodes isn’t just watching Arino struggle through the monumental challenge of completing this beast, but watching him do so with an unwavering smile and positive attitude. Some of the challenges beat him down and leave him hoisting a white flag, but he declared Battletoads “the most fun game of 2011” and boldly called it a “must-buy” while cracking up. Even starting over from scratch countless times after every available continue had been used didn’t destroy that fighting spirit. It’s a sight to behold.

I can’t recommend the show enough if you like games at all, and strongly encourage putting down some pre-order payola on Discotek Media’s upcoming DVD box, which actually features subtitles by the SA folks in addition to the dub that played on Kotaku. It only features the game challenge sections due to rights issues—which is a shame because the other segments of the show are a blast—but it’s worth supporting.

If you ever want to feel good about your whole life situation, sit down and watch a couple dozen episodes of the Fist of the North Star TV series. That’s basically what I spent 90% of the weekend doing, and it even managed to make lying in a pool of sweat in my sweltering jungle of a bedroom seem like some kind of sweet paradise.

I finally bought all the sets, and they’ve already managed to warp my malleable mind in new ways. I think I’m on episode 43 or so now. I’ve never seen this far into the show, and I only have the first five volumes of the color manga releases. Fist of the North Star is mostly interested in taking Kenshiro’s tale of loss and rage and twisting it down a spiraling staircase of savagery. The series brazenly spits in the face of geography. There’s no way to tell how far Kenshiro has traveled, unless you just want to gauge it as “really, really far.”

That sounds about right. Every city looks roughly the same. The closest Kenshiro’s journey comes to any semblance of geography is a wide shot of the city of Cassandra, famous for its prison in which the mighty Ken Oh, AKA Raoh, has locked up all the mightiest martial arts practitioners. The wind whistles with the sound of devils crying. One can imagine there was some kind of traveling involved in going from A to B to C(assandra), where this dude runs shit.

Yea, that’s the Warden of the prison. He’s massive. Which brings me to another thing Fist of the North Star doesn’t give one rip about: Scale. In one frame a dude will tower over Kenshiro at roughly 30 feet tall, stand at 9 feet in the next, only to return to the 25-30 foot range a moment later. It’s great. Did Buronson or Tetsuo Hara ever get to the reason behind all the super-size dudes in the series? I don’t really want to know, just curious. Maybe it’s radiation, or maybe these dudes just got hella buff after the nuke dropped.

Anyone who’s seen more than a few episodes knows that Kenshiro’s shirt ripping off is a great piece of recycled animation used in almost every fight. No, really, here’s a montage someone made:

In one episode there’s this really casual shot of Kenshiro repairing one of his shoes while he pines over his recently lost love, Yuria. A quick scene of him sewing together his favorite shirt would have shut a lot of people up, but maybe I just haven’t gotten to that episode yet.