Posts Tagged ‘video’

Square Enix is re-releasing Romancing SaGa 2 for the Nintendo DS (Final Fantasy Legend II as it’s known in the west). There’s also a retrospective video on the same site. It’s a crime how little of the SaGa series was actually translated into English. Via Gametrailers.com

One more thing I forgot to mention about Tokyo: UFO catcher machines are everywhere. So much so that there’s apparently an industry event to showcase new toys. My favorite are these Gatchaman figures. There’s even a themed USB stick! Check out the rest of the 15th Prize Fair at Nekomagic.com

I’ve never finished an Armored Core game before, but they sure put out some nice model kits. Check out the full review at CollectionDX.com

Legend of Galactic Heroes. Seems like it’s the only science fiction series out there where the capital ships look built by an actual military. Via HobbyLink Japan

There is absolutely no good reason why Tekkaman Blade is not in Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom. They should’ve gotten an injunction or something and just slotted him in there. Here he is (foreground)  in Soul of Chogokin form. Via SRW Hotnews

Okay boys and girls, get your commenting caps on. I want to know what you think of this video I found via wilwheaton.net.

About 10 seconds in I was thinking to myself, “Look, just show me the logo for Axe, or Gillette fusion Gamer or whatever you’re trying to push on me. Don’t preach to me about what I am or am not.”

While agree with the video’s overall message, the presentation comes off as a little dishonest. Unlike the “I Am Canadian” commercials on which this video was based, geek stereotypes aren’t just based off the conjecture of people refusing to see beyond their overgrown lawns. I happen to fit in to some of the stereotypes that the those so-called geeks dismiss. I play D&D whenever I find a group. My wife knows that when I’m plugged into my iphone, that DOES mean I’m not listening. Most of the clarifications in the video sound derisive and condescending (“It’s pronounced MEEM not MEEMEE!”). With all of the specialization that goes on in Geek culture, I take for granted that I will have to slow down on the jargon at some point.

I’m not even sure there is a need for such a thing as a Society for Geek Advancement. Aren’t we a society for advancement, period? Aren’t we geeks all ready to wrestle with something that’s complicated and unfamiliar just because it’s there? To me, the geek life is the last bastion of the frontier spirit. In the past, if you wanted to explore the unknown, all you had to do was get a horse and keep riding over the horizon. Now, with the entire world explored, we are left to satisfy our mental wanderlust with computers, handicrafts, literature, science, and technology. We toil and struggle with whatever we’re obsessed with and more often than not we acquire more knowledge that we use to get ahead. It doesn’t even have to be a new invention,  because if you are the only person in town who knows how to string a CSS together, chances are you’ll be able to make some money from that.

While we geeks struggle to find our place in polite society, we don’t have to make any apologies for who we are. Geekiness is not a curse, it’s a blessing. The fortitude and discipline to follow your passion can sooth any swirly and weather any wedgie. If society has grown to depend on our knowledge and our inventions, we can handle a little stereotyping now and then.

One thing I simply had to do while in Japan was ride the bullet train. One of the places Sara simply had to visit was Kyoto. Fortunately, we were able to combine the two when we took a 2 and a half hour train ride to Kyoto.

We rode the Hikari train, which runs at a top speed of 285 km/h. Sara didn’t think it went too fast, but in her defense, the ride was so smooth you couldn’t really tell. I took some video out the window of us going top speed.

Kyoto wasn’t bombed in the second world war, so many of the ancient temples and older buildings were still standing. Kyoto was still a huge city, so we could only see a couple of key places. Sara and I decided to see the Kyoto Craft Center and take the Philosopher’s way to the Ginkaku-ji, or Silver Pavilion.

The Craft center was over 6 floors of traditional Japanese Crafts. There was jewelry, lacquered dishware, and even Samurai swords for sale. It was really geared toward tourists, but the salesmanship was so classy that you didn’t feel put upon to buy anything. Sara and I got a lot of souvenir shopping done nonetheless.

We made our way through the back streets to the Philosopher’s way, which is a cobble-stone path running along a small canal where there were shrines that were hundreds, if not thousands of years old. Kyoto as a whole was a lot more laid back than the slick neon head-rush of Tokyo.  The path wasn’t exactly straight, nor was it exactly winding. One could really get a good think in without any turns to interrupt you or too many straight lines to bore you.

At the end of the path was the Ginkaku-ji. The Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa built the temple in the 15th century as a place of rest and relaxation. I’d say he succeeded. This is what world-class serenity looks like.

Once we finished at the Ginkaku-ji, we headed back to the Heian Shrine. It was built in 1895 on the 1,100th anniversary of the city. It wasn’t as old as the other temples, but it was certainly the largest that we had seen yet.

We spent the whole day trying to cover the city, but by the time we were finished at the Heian Shrine, it was already time to go home. With so much more of Kyoto to see, we’ll definitely spend more time here when we come back to Japan.

There was an article on esquire.com recently about how the US Republican Party cannot survive in it’s current form. The author posted this video of RNC chairman Tom Price as evidence.

In that shaky, distorted video, Price derides the Democratic party for making “shady back-room” deals by daring to write their bills behind closed doors like every other political party in the free world. Now, the tone and format of that video sound familiar. Where have I seen it before?

If there is a sign of a party on the run these days, it’s the shaky video confessional. (To be fair, Stephan Dion’s video had higher production value. It just goes to show you what kind of shape the Republican Party is in.) In institutions where the flow of ideas is key, the muddying of communications is a sin of the worst kind. No matter what their stances on the issues are, I hope the Republicans and the Liberals both clean up their act in delivering their ideas to their respective countries. If they fail, their ruling government parties get a mandate to make laws that fit an ideology rather than reality. Debate is the lifeblood of Democracy, and it is just as bad for one side to cede control as it is for the other to dominate the discourse.

The world felt a little poorer yesterday when Ziff Davis announced the cancellation of Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine. It’s been years since I bought an issue, but I still vividly remember it as one of the joys promised by my weekly allowance in the early 90’s. The issues back then were monstrous, chock full of reviews, previews and curious looking ads. Large sections of the magazine were dedicated to Japanese games. They were primitive by today’s standards, but by 1993’s standards, they were all but magical. Some of them even offered a glimpse of this advanced form of cartoons known as “anime”, which at the time was mostly found on Nth generation VHS tapes in the back rooms of specialty comic book stores.

The passing of EGM makes sense. Over the internet I can get printed columns, talk radio, and even entire television shows dedicated to video games. Why bother with a magazine that’s going to be stuffing a closet within a month? Still, no one likes to see a piece of their youth dry up and blow away. Now that we have this recession on our hands, we can expect more of this sort of thing.

Everyone has a little corner of happiness that just isn’t economically viable anymore. It might be a favourite shop that’s closed down, a cancelled television show, or sports team that’s folded. We rationalize by telling ourselves that we’ve grown out of the things that we like, but when you’re fighting through the daily commute, getting yelled at at work, and paying your taxes, what’s so grown up about dealing with all that and gradually abandoning your happiness options?

In 2001, I attended Sakuracon, my first anime convention. It was a reward I gave myself after a university co-op, but it was really an excuse just to leave town for a while. It was apparent that I wasn’t going to graduate that year, and my social life was going nowhere. Thinking anime was still a rapidly shrinking niche genre, I was expecting a few card tables of merchandise in the dealers room and maybe a video room. I could not have been more wrong. There were at least a half dozen video rooms, a full dealers room, cosplayers, and riveting panel seminars. I also made friends that are still with me today.

What I’m trying to say is, don’t let go of those things you cherish, even if they seem silly. Following your passion can lead you to good places, even if that place is in an easy chair listening to a favorite album or reading a favorite book. It doesn’t matter that what you like isn’t economically viable at the time. Anime was on the rise when I went to that convention, but now most of the companies that translate and sell it in the west are scaling back like most companies these days. There’s a cycle to these things. Even as trends ebb and flow, we can always find new ways to experience what we like.

Ah, New Year’s. With Santa’s footprints still fresh in the snow, we start making demands on another magical being: Our future selves. Diet! Lose weight! Exercise! Quit smoking! Quit Nail-biting! Quit watching TV! Quit slouching! We make veritable laundry lists of goals for next year, but very little in the way of strategies to achieve them. A British Mental Health charity called “Mind” even posits that New Year’s resolutions are bad for you, as your failure to live up to them simply magnifies your human foibles and inadequacies. It’s enough to make you swear off the whole resolution thing all together.

Then again, that would be jumping from one extreme to another. Setting goals and achieving them is the ultimate expression of free will. Sharing these goals one day out of the year brings people together and allows us to enlist help in making them a reality. Still, it’s easy to go crazy with them. I, for one, would like to write a novel, cook french cuisine, speak Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin, run a Marathon, learn to draw, Hack windows vista, and complete an open source video game project. I’m pretty sure most of that is not going to happen next year (I am, however, going to Japan in March).

I asked my wife Sara what her resolutions were and she gave me an interesting answer. She has one resolution, and that is to paint her nails more in 2009. I was a little puzzled, since her work rarely leaves her time for such high maintenance activities. She told me that was the whole point. Sara likes having painted nails because they make her feel more stylish and confident. Painting her nails also forces her to relax, as she needs to wait and do nothing while the nail polish dries. Painting nails seems like such a small goal, but achieving it gives her benefits well outside her pretty fingers.

I decided to follow suit and pick one and only one resolution. In 2009, I will entertain at my house more. I hope to have people over at least once a month, or 12 times this year. When Sara and I got married last year, we got gifts of fine china, linens, and kitchen gadgets, like most couples. This Christmas Sara’s sister and her fiancee got us Rock Band for the Nintendo Wii. Our basement suite is loaded for bear when it comes to entertaining guests, so why shouldn’t we take advantage of it? It’ll give me motivation to keep the house clean, as well as work on the art of interesting conversation. What’s more, I will spend less time messing with google maps trying to find people’s homes.

New Year’s Resolutions don’t have to be these grand achievements of self-control. Like the day they’re named for, they’re a way to mark change and progression in our lives. When we make resolutions and keep them, they remind us that life is fluid and dynamic, and change is one of the ways to make it truly worth living.

According to some I should have turned in my geek card the minute I got married. Then again, there are many married geeks, and even my wedding wasn’t completely Star Wars free. However, just as Superman gave up his powers to be with Lois Lane in Superman II, I find I am losing components of my geekiness to the mists of time, such as:

-The ability to be personally offended by following: the Wii’s game line-up, Anime voice acting, Live-action adaptations of comic-books, novels or video games

-The ability to discern anime character designers

-The ability to participate in the eternal Star Destroyer v. Enterprise debate.

-The ability to stomach any Expanded universe Star Wars

-The ability to watch anime all night

-The idea that Freelancing is a romantic occupation of freedom and bad-assery as opposed to paper-work and shaking down clients for money

-The idea that spoilers will ruin any and all enjoyment of a book, movie or TV show

Does this mean that I’m just growing up? Hardly. I still watch Doctor Who and Macross Frontier. I check io9.com about twice a day and I often peruse Hobbylink Japan the way many people would peruse a Jaguar dealership. I still think professional sports is like paying to watch other people have fun. What has changed is how I perceive my free time. As I get older, time seems to move faster. It feels like high school lasted longer than my 20s. I no longer have the luxury of indulging my interests to completion. Delayed gratification has its merit, but not when you’re trying to be entertained. Slogging through a 52 episode series when 26 of those are filler is no way to go through life. In fact, it’s no way to enjoy a series. The same goes for relationships. Make an effort to enjoy yourself and those around you.

Now, it’s been years since I’ve been anywhere near the video games industry, but I still like to keep up with it in an armchair capacity. One of my favorite sites by which to do this is a blog called gamesetwatch, a collection of essays and links to articles by many industry leaders. One article they had recently was a retrospective on “Time Gal”, one of those old laser disc arcade games that had animated cutscenes that you control via pressing the correct button or moving the joystick in the right way. The author, Todd Ciolek, (who also writes X-button, a fine column at the Anime News Network) pointed out that Time Gal was the first game to have a non-licensed character that players could recognize as human. He goes on to praise the game for having a heroine that was so cute and chirpy, but then there was one line that just made my head spin.

“Misogyny creeps in, of course: Time Gal’s already skimpy clothes get ripped away by T-Rexes and Fist of the North Star mutants alike, and she’ll scream about being struck on the chest or getting bitten on her partially exposed rear. Pioneers are not always proud.”

It wasn’t just what he said, it’s how he said it. Misogyny. You know, creeping in like that. Here you are, pushing through the glass ceiling, but let one of those things on your chest slip out and BOOM! There’s misogyny. The word here is written with such complacency, such blasé, that it’s almost as if the author was describing the sky as blue. To use such a powerful word as misogyny in that way tells me that he doesn’t even believe in what he says. And why should he have to? He’s only preaching the gospel truth. You can see it repeated all over the ‘net. To show women as sexual in any capacity is misogynist. That’s it. Finito. End of discussion.

When there’s an idea that becomes sacrosanct and, dare I say, unexamined, it bothers me. Untested truth is what keeps us from moving forward, making connections and seeing the greater scheme of things. This is part of a pattern I keep seeing again and again in video game criticism. Why is a scantily clad girl in a video game defined as misogyny? “How is that not misogyny!?” is not a valid answer.

Despite being male, I think I can put my liberal arts hat back on and take a crack at this one. Misogyny is the hatred of women. If a woman getting her clothes torn suggestively in a fight is misogyny, then there are a couple of assumptions at work here. The first is that this is sexual objectification, where a woman is judged by her physical attributes independent of her personality and intelligence. This is demeaning to women, and that makes it misogyny.

I have a problem with this. This also assumes that the way a woman looks and how she presents herself has nothing to do with her personal taste, her habits or the culture she comes from. It would seem that this imagery is only defined by how I see it. Big, white male me. Now this tells me that if I look at something and get a rise out of it, it immediately becomes misogynist. I am indirectly dictating what can and cannot be depicted in regards to women. It doesn’t matter if anyone else finds the game cute or funny. Is that feminist? Hell, is that even humanist?

So now that we’ve found out what misogyny is, what’s feminism? What images do game companies produce if they want to be forward-thinking and catch that ever-elusive female audience? Many would point to a game called Portal. It’s about a battle between a sarcastic computer and Chell, a barely seen female protagonist in a formless jumpsuit with no dialog, no expression, and no personality. She is seen as the perfect feminist archetype, as opposed to blond-haired traitors like Super Mario’s Princess Peach. Of course, this can’t explain why Peach herself has female fans all over the world and why her own game, Super Princess Peach, has sold over a million copies.

That, my friends, is why we can’t have compelling video game characters. This is why we live in a video game world populated by bald space marines and sullen amazonian axe-murderers. When we intentionally wall off a part of human nature, we blind ourselves to potential avenues of creativity. A specific, easily recognizable character can make the difference between millions of dollars in revenue and billions.

For the first few months of our marriage, my wife Sara would ask me how I could possibly spend so much time surfing on the internet. Recently I found out this wasn’t a complaint, but an actual question about how to find good stuff to read on the web. I told her that I frequent sites like Digg.com and Fark.com to receive the latest news about technology, video games and STAR WARS! In other words, sites that would not interest Sara in the slightest.

The state of affairs continued until I found an article on Digg called “Top Five Reasons Why I Want Digg for Girls”. It basically outlined what I had thought when I had tried to introduce Sara to news aggregate sites. Most of them are sausage parties, populated by nerds who try to break the site for no other than a surplus of time on their hands. You’re unlikely to find articles about non-geeky arts and crafts, parenting or anything else relevant to women. Considering how much of the publishing sector is created by and for women, having web software like Digg and making it completely male oriented is like building a Saturn V Rocket and using it as a Christmas tree. It seemed like the author had pointed out ripe territory for revolution, but many commentors pointed out that the revolution had already happened at www.kirtsy.com.

Intrigued I headed down there and was taken by surprise by how nice the interface is. It’s just 9 self-explanatory categories, and you don’t even have to join to give a “kirtsy” since the site measures the click-through count, not just votes from registered users. What’s more, the users don’t seem to use misleading headlines like “Bike Seat Cuts Off the Nose to Save the Penis!” in order to garner votes.

Now, I’m still going to use sites like Digg and Fark for most of my link hunting needs, but it’s really nice to know that a site like this exists. For one thing, it proves that lines of code and a server don’t make a software package any more than a truckload of hamburger meat and a suitcase full of money makes a McDonald’s. It’s amazing that you can create a news aggregate site that functions like Digg and have it come off as being completely different. It’s a tribute to the human element in software design. And what does Sara think of Kirtsy? Let’s just say she curses my name now that she knows how to waste time on the internet!

Sara and I got a membership to the Vancouver Art Gallery as a wedding present so last Friday we opted to go see an exhibition called “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art”. The isn’t the first anime/comic themed exhibit at the art gallery. In 2002 there was “The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture” which took a lot of Astroboy, Iron Man, and Ghost in the Shell comics and called it cyborg culture. The link between all of the works was a little tenuous. I found this exhibit to be much more interesting.

On display were the last three Krazy Kat drawings ever made, lots of (very good) independent comic artists like Seth and Daniel Clowes, as well as some Manga Artists that aren’t as well known in the west, like Junko Mizuno and Mamoru Nagano. The animation exhibit displayed clips from Macross, Patlabor, and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. There was also a display on the history of animation, from Gertie the Dinosaur to Toy Story. The video game exhibit was compiled by Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Spore. It traced the progress of video games throughout the years, starting with Pac-man, going through Super Mario and leading up to Grand Theft Auto and Quake. This was followed by a pop art exhibit containing modern art about comics, animation and video games.

Now, I’ve blogged about the art gallery before, and I wasn’t too happy about how free expression had completely overthrown the idea that you need the talent and craft necessary to communicate the ideas. It’s kind of impossible to do anything in animation or video games without some level of craft but I still had this nagging thought that the exhibitors at the art gallery viewed the abandonment of rules as progress. Works that made less and less sense were being touted as the future of their respective media. Even in the video games, the procedural generation of random worlds was held up as being superior to scripted stories and artistic control. As I walked through the pop art exhibit, I came across a series of works called “No Ghost Just A Shell”, and I had realized that I stepped into the dimension of arrogant intellectuals who had completely missed the point.

“No Ghost, Just a Shell” is the work of two “artists” named Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe. They bought the rights to a character they called “Annlee” from a Japanese character development studio. She was kind of a sad girl with elf ears who probably wouldn’t be able to carry on her own series. They decided to create an exhibit around her. Now, this would have been a good thing if she was in the care of people who could communicate like human beings. Instead she was at the mercy of cold, logical modern artists whose penchant for ambiguity is only outpaced by their arrogance. In kinder life Annlee would’ve been given a backstory, a few doujinshi, maybe someone would even cosplay as her. She would be, you know, loved. Here, in a perversion of the Velveteen Rabbit story, she gets dissected and deconstructed by bunch of euro-trash hipsters who put her in looping video installations speaking gibberish and repetitive pop art posters. The so-called triumph of the work was that the artists got a legally binding agreement that all rights to make works based on Annlee revert back to Annlee herself. However, since no one else can draw her now, she is effectively dead because some self-aggrandizing academic wanted to explore the “idea” of copyright.

The whole thing reminded me of Gulliver’s journey to Balnibarbi, where he found scientists who were so obsessed with analyzing the natural order of things that the land had turned barren from all their absurd experiments. These artists are doing the same thing with the realm of ideas. Slavish devotion to the new and the unique has created a culture where art is irrelevant. The modern art movement was started because the world of art was so detached from people’s lives, but the resulting trend ended up making art today more detached than ever. Soon they will have even lost the ability to shock.

Sara and I left the Annlee installation feeling confused and a little sad for the elf-girl that had gotten mixed up in all this. We passed another video installation called “Cosplayers” by someone named Cao Fei. It was a video of young chinese men and women exploring, fighting, and running through the streets of Guangzhou, China in anime costumes. The plaque near the installation said that the youths in the video were fighting against a society that had disdain for the imaginary, and threatened them with stifling homogeneity. It was a little obtuse, but unlike the Annlee it was actually trying to express something. The costumes were well done, and the contrast to the oppressive buildings in the background was quite neat. It reminded me of how seeing cosplayers at conventions kind of took you out of the mindset of the real world. The work was relatable and I could experience it, instead of just staring at it and trying to fashion Emperor’s clothes for it in my head. If there are more artists out there like Cao Fei, perhaps all is not lost.