Hail To The King Baby! (Random Musings About A Surprise Gem)

Kuroyukihime Anime’s No. 1 Beautiful Character

Might as well have read Anime’s No. 1 heroine for 2012.  Anyway not sure of the full context of the magazine or even which one it’s from but man do some characters just kind of have it all going.  Not only do many consider this to be the most attractive character out there in 2012, but also one of the most interesting, bravest, coolest, craftiest, most cunning and most capable too meaning it was rarely a dull moment whenever she was on camera.  She’s also the flat out best at everything the show is about too but unlike Kirito in SAO she totally gets away with it and doesn’t have to face the Mary/Gary Stu accusations that Kirito got.  Is she just that above that sort of thing in viewers eyes?  Kawahara Reki’s universe just seems so unfair at times, maybe there’s need for a change of venue.  If there’s ever an Accel World appearance in Super Robot Wars (please let this happen Bamco!  You put Tekkaman Blade, Orgun, Virtual-On and even Heroman in there so I’m sure this is doable) Char Aznable can recruit her into his army (you know he’d totally want to for more than one reason 0.0) and along with Haman Khan they can go off and try to conquer the world together and she can learn how to be second best at some things.  

Dio’s Bizarre Adventure (The End of Phantom Blood)

Be it as a severed head Dio will just continue to keep coming back,  his burning ambition is that strong

I said I’d make some posts here for a bit so why not start off with something I really enjoy to wash away the unpleasantness of the last post.  Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure was always a bit of a dark horse for me though I knew the manga material was probably up my alley being from the 80’s and free of some of the modern trappings of anime that truth be told I do occasionally grow weary of.  

The Day Animesuki Decided Oppressing A Voice Was More Important Than Accomodating All Viewpoints

Well it finally happened, I’ve been permanently banned from Animesuki after all of these years for refusing to abide by what I felt was an arbitrary and unfair moderator condition and sticking to my guns of trying to be an honest, fair and progressive poster.  What exactly was the condition I refused to follow and felt it was more important to put my voice and opinion ahead of people might ask, well this is the last message I received from the moderator who has appeared to have it out for me quite some time:

[C] The Money of Possibility And Soul Control – A Cult Classic In The Making

Wow….what can I say.  I just got finished watching the final episode a rather peculiar (to put it mildly) noitaminA show that styles itself by the rather bizarre name [C] The Money of Possibility and Soul Control.

The Greatest Generation (Civilization: The Road To War – A Let’s Play Attempt)

I Kind Of Wish I Could Be Playing This On Multiplayer With Ghost or Myssa Rei as The Philippines But What Are Ya Gonna Do

Yeah well, I know I was supposed to be doing a write up of the great people feature for this installment of my Civilization IV exploits, but as everyone can probably see I struggled with how to make the idea interesting for a while.  I recall ghostlightning talking about how articles ought to be written to be as inclusive to the core readership as possible, and so I though about how to make great people a more interesting topic than just me rambling in detail about features of a game that most people likely haven’t played.  Today it hit me….the answer was to bring the game to the people, and what better way to do so then a “Let’s Play” of Civilization IV’s own controversial Road to War mod.

As one might expect there is a World War II mod for Civ IV and as I’m sure most people know World War II affected the world on a global scale with repercussions that are still affecting the world today.  Everybody no matter where they are from has seen their country influenced by the course of events of the war, and every country has it’s great people who did what they could to try and win it for their cause.   Now I said this mod is controversial, and what I mean by that I mean by that among other things is that it actually would have gotten the game banned in Germany if they had gone ahead and used the version I am planning to play which includes Hitler, Hirohito and the Nazi Germany flag.  That had to be removed from the retail version and if you play that one you will be getting Vice Chancellor Franz Von Papen and Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto for Germany and Japan respectively.  However that’s not the only controversy, because this mod is still very much a work in progress and prone to some A.I bugs, balance issues and the occasional crash as well as some very odd geographical choices.  It’s not uncommon for Road To War players to make changes to the script for the purposes of enhancing the experience for their style of WWII simulation and in fact the author has encouraged it as well.

For the purposes of this LP I have been playing as my own glorious nation, The Dominion of Canada under the difficulty setting of Chieftain with realistic events (meaning key war events take place on the day that they did in real life) on the global assault map (meaning the whole world is the stage) starting in the year 1936.  The following will catch people up to 1943 an where I am now in the conflict with all the hardship, small victories and incidental observations that came along the way.  Hope people enjoy.

Gundam Unicorn Sneak Preview Impressions (Generic Post Idea With Unexpected Results?)

5 months I’ve waited and it’s almost here.  Bandai must have known the wait has been a killer for some because a couple days ago they ended up releasing a 7-8 minute preview of the first OVA over the Bandai Channel which eventually made its way to youtube in the clip I’ll be posting below.  First though I want to say what a nice little gift this was as a prelude to Alexandre Bilodeau bringing home the first Canadian gold medal on home soil.  This has been a week of ups and downs for me, but boy did it end great.  Anyhow the embed:

The rest of the article contains spoilers and impressions so this is your chance to look away if you don’t want to watch the preview above.

Here’s To Us……(An Introduction To Civilization IV And Why It’s Become My Favourite Game Of All Time)

Absolute Power You Say......... 🙂

About a month ago I found myself coming into some extra money so I decided to treat myself to something and on a whim I bought the Civilization IV pack off of steam and fired it on up.  Previously I had played Civilization II during high school but was too young and inexperienced in strategy and resource management to be very good at it, and I had tried to install Civ IV on my old PC when it first came out only to watch as it chugged like my mother at bar (basically impossibly slow) and become more or less unplayable after about 30 seconds.  Now with a faster PC I felt I might get to enjoy the experience and felt that Civ IV would be able to give me the chance to do something I’ve always wanted to do…..lead an Empire to glorious victory and total dominance of the globe over an epic period of time while micromanaging EVERYTHING along the way.  It’s all here and it’s proven to be pretty much as close to the perfect game for me in just over a month, far surpassing my previous all time favourite of Fire Emblem:  Seisen No Keifu which stood in it’s place in my heart for close to a decade (I still love you Fire Emblem don’t worry).

With ghostlightning’s blessing I’ve decided to start a short series on Civilization IV and why I love the game so much, and tonight with some spare time (which will also be spent playing the game of course) I figured I’d get things started.  Truthfully I coul talk all day about the intracies of Civilization IV and in 1000’s of words still not totally sum up what it’s like to actually play and experience the game’s depth and scope, but I have other things to do tonight as well so I just want to briefly talk a bit about the things that make the game awesome to me and hopefully in the process convince a few people to give it a try.

Gundam Tribute (First You Modernize The Mecha And Then You Modernize The Music)

Modernization of Gundam…..I talked a bit about the idea yesterday in the comment section for ghostlightnings article on Gundam 00’s final battle and how I thought the show might be an attempt to update Gundam for the 21st century paradigm we live in now.  Gundam Tribute I think has much the same idea in mind, only now it is about the Gundam sound rather than the core concept itself.

First off I bet some are asking “what is Gundam Tribute exactly”?  Well simply put it’s a collaboration between Sunrise/Bandai and Lantis and some of todays most popular music artists and idols in Japan to cover some of the classic Gundam songs and make an album out of it.  This is of course part of the 30th anniversary celebration for the franchise, but as I mentioned to the ghost yesterday I think it’s also a further example of Bandai’s current strategy of branching out and trying to bring new fans into the fold.  How exactly does this work with the music?  Well when you have the likes of Jam Project, CooRie and Little Non the latter two of whom are popular in the moe and eroge branches lending their status to Gundam songs (and vice versa) it may just help to bring the fans of their music into a greater awareness of Gundam and may even legitimize it for them as well.  Idol status goes a long way in Japan and while Gundam is an established tradition it’s not popular with all.  Gundam Wing branched out to female viewers and Gundam Seed branched out to a younger generation, but I think Bandai is always looking for new opportunities, and that’s an interesting thing.  I guess we’ll see what’s what, but for now I’m kind of eager to do some cross comparisons of the song covers on this album with their originals and to go over what they did with the pieces and what I as long time Gundam fan liked and disliked about these updates.

This article is going to be a little youtube video heavy so just bear in mind when you load the rest that it might take a little bit longer than normal.

Let’s Just Get This Year Over With Already (Cause 2010 Is Going To Rock)

Gundam Unicorn 3rd Trailer (But Wait There’s More)

I’m away only a day and suddenly the last pieces start to fall into place for 2010.  At this point I’m not sure what else I can expect from what looks to be an awesome upcoming year that I think will more than make up for the lack of mecha I’ve had to suffer through in the latter half of 2009.  With the recent announcement of a new Code Geass project (Trooooolllllllllllllllllls!  Come out to plaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!)from Sunrise this now brings the number of new mecha series from Sunrise alone up to 5 with Unicorn, Votoms, Geass and the Gundam 00 and Seed (hrmmm) movies.  What a busy year and it hasn’t even started.  All that needs to happen is for ghosty to get his new Macross year and I will be ready to prematurely (gasp!) declare 2010 the best year of the century so far.  Here’s a list of some other things I’m still looking forward too:

-Final Fantasy XIII

-Eden of The East Movies

-The rest of V Season 1

– Bioshock 2

Looks like I’ll probably be returning to this blogging business full force next year.  I’m wondering if I’m even going to have any time to rest at all.  In any case time to brush up on my writing and blogging techniques because I almost forget how WordPress even works now.

Gundam Unicorn Long PV Released (I’ve Got You Covered)

It turns out the rumours were true and that there was indeed a new PV for Gundam Unicorn released on the Japanese PSN today.  Somebody was kind enough to upload it to youtube in HD and so here it is:

I wonder if when the time comes I’m going to be the only one following this