For the longest time my MP3 Player was an iPod which, in all appreciation for how it changed the portable media market, is vastly inferior to some of the lesser known Portable Media Players to come out in recent years. The most significant, in my opinion, being the Cowon A3–the perfect portable media player for an anime lover such as myself. Why you ask? Format support–this thing can play just about -anything-. It can play H264 (unforunately it doesn’t yet support Main Profile) and XviD and most importantly; supports all sorts of container formats like OGM and MKV (Matroska Video). What does that all mean? Well, I’ll let you put two and two together; more than half of fansubbed anime is released in H264 format in an MKV container. Until now those have been unplayable on any form of portable media! That’s just the beginning of the A3′s awesomeness!

What makes this thing so great for an anime fan such as myself is that it has subtitle support! For now it’s not quite as comprehensive as I’d like, but Cowon appears to be working hard to make support better. As of now it doesn’t support internal subs, so they have to be extracted from MKVs with MKVExtract and it doesn’t support SubStation Alpha subtitles yet. Sadly SSA subs are the most popular among fansubbers, but fortunately many fansubbers are nice enough embed srt subs as well and for the ones that don’t there is always VobSub’s SubResync.

The A3 was designed to be an all-in-one multimedia device so it can do anything–even things you thought you’d never need. Audio and Video Recording for example; you can record lossless quality audio with the FLAC audio codec and record DVD resolution video up to 3Mbps! Expect to see lots of video captures of video games and such from this thing in the future. The recording system is quite good too; you can record audio and video from the line in, but you can also record it from the FM radio, the built-in microphone or even Wireless Television via DMB, 1SEG or DVB if you get a MobileTV tuner! It supports recurring schedules, so you can record daily or every weekday, or you could just schedule so specific date and time for a single recording.

It’s great to be able to just copy any media file over and not have to worry about converting it to something else first. The Cowon A3 doesn’t use any proprietary and confusing sorting system like most media players do; you can just copy any kind of media file anywhere on the hard drive by simply dragging and dropping files to a window on your computer. There is several default folders to sort things in, but it doesn’t actually restrict you to use of these folders. A good example of why this is good is music videos. Do you place them in the Movie folder or the Music folder? If you place them in the Music folder they will show up in the directory listing for the Movie Player, so you can place anything anywhere! What’s even greater is that it keeps track of what types of files are in each folder; if you go into the Music folder when browsing in the Movie Player you will only see folders listed that contain video files in them. It makes browsing for music videos much faster if you have a handful of music videos but have thousands of different albums from all sorts of different artists.

You’ll probably also love the Recent Files system it uses. The A3 keeps a list of the last 50 files you played without finishing them. Imagine you are on a trip somewhere and you decide to watch a movie; what if the movie is longer than the ride? You want to see how it ended don’t you? Well then, when you find the time to watch the rest, just turn on the A3 and go to Recent Files then select whatever it was you were watching and it will start back up right where you stopped it!

For audio there is full 10-band Equalization, BBE, Mach3Bass, MP Enhance and 3D Surround. As you might assume; you can get some rather fantastic audio quality out of this thing–that’s what Cowon is known for; audiophile-pleasing quality.

I also really like the Boundary setting for playback; you can set playback to restrict to all files, one folder in from Music, two folders in from Music or Playlist. If you organize your music by Album folders in Artist folders it makes this system work great; you can listen to a specific album, everything from a certain artist or everything. My only complaint is the playlist support; it uses some built-in playlist that you only have one of and it doesn’t allow saving or loading of common playlist formats used on the PC such as M3U Playlists.

The greatest thing about this device though? The screen. It sports a very high resolution 800×480 resolution in the same size as a PSP screen–that’s almost twice the resolution of the PSP’s screen! You know what else it has twice the PSP in? Brightness. The screen on this thing can be turned up so bright you can see the vibrant colors perfectly even in direct sunlight! *_*

The Cowon A3 also has a line-out for viewing on a bigger screen–and component, s-video and composite even! You can watch gorgeous 720p High Definition video on your big LCD TV from such a tiny portable unit!

Overall this is a truly amazing device that’s a simple firmware update away from being perfect. If you like having some sort of portable entertainment then go buy this device RIGHT NOW. No seriously, do it; you won’t regret it.

Sometimes you can walk into a music store and listen to an album to see if you like it, or download a demo of a game off the internet to see if the game was actually fun–sometimes being the key word there. For the most part, this simply is not the case. How can you expect someone to buy something that they don’t even know they will enjoy? And for such unreasonable prices, I might add!

You know how much it costs to have DVDs pressed? Approximately $0.50 per disk. The current generation of video games costing between $50 and $70, that’s over a 10000% profit margin! The production budget of Halo 3 was less than most major blockbuster movies like Spiderman 3, so why does Halo 3 sell for $70, while I can find Spiderman 3 DVDs all over the place for $20? Greed.

But I said that piracy even helps the economy didn’t I? Well, yes; I did. If it weren’t for piracy I never would’ve found Serenity or Casshern, two of my favorite movies, I never would’ve found about 90% of the music I listen to, I never would’ve found out Gitaroo Man was such a fun game.

Would you deprive me of my enjoyment in hopes that I buy your product? That doesn’t exactly seem like a very effective marketing strategy to me…

Open Source is the future, in all respects. You will never get anything back if you never give in there first place. I’m not saying we should all turn commie and live in identical mud huts, but we should have the freedom to support what we want to and only IF we decide we want to. We should be given the chance to experience it for ourselves before deciding if we want to fork over $50+ for it, these things should not be concealed. You know what my greatest regret is? That I actually paid for Beyond The Beyond. That game was so horrible I snapped it into little pieces and melted it, so no one else would make the mistake of inserting that cancerous disk into their poor defenseless Playstation.

I have plenty of pirated stuff, yet I, on more than one occasion, have donated up to $100 to some random programmer on the internet for programming fun games independently. They released the games for free to anyone, but I felt it was deserving enough of my support, so am I still a thief for downloading a game I never would have paid for anyway? Tell me that.

So why is piracy so much more rampant now than way back in the olden days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth? It’s not. There is a greater number of people involved in the piracy scene, but there is also a greater number of people in general. The ratio has actually decreased rather significantly. How many of you couldn’t dig through your house and find an old mix tape lying around somewhere? That was piracy. Everyone had mix tapes back in the day, piracy is not a new thing at all. It just got easier because that’s what time does; it improves things. If, in several decades, the efficiency of piracy had not improved it would be nothing short of an miracle.

Piracy isn’t a bad thing though; sure, it adds a bit of unbalance to the equation, but more often than not, it gets you more attention. Everyone likes free stuff, even if it’s not ‘technically’ legal.

That having been said there is one simple reason why piracy still exists even when it shouldn’t; everything sucks. That is the first expectation anyone has until proven otherwise these days, because that is quite often the case. The market has been flooded with so much mediocrity that it becomes nigh impossible to sift through it all to find those rare, hidden treasures. Thus is the dark side of the technology age. But with the technology age many of these hidden gems wouldn’t even exist because even the companies producing all this mediocrity follow the mindset that everything sucks until proven otherwise. You can’t go to a game company and say, “Hey! I’ve got this cool idea for a game!”, because they’ll just tell you to buzz off. That certainly doesn’t help to promote creativity. I don’t know about you, but I’m not really looking forward to Burnout 17.

I’m sure you anime fans know piracy all too well. Fansubs are treading on mighty thin ice, and could quite easily be interpreted as an immoral practice. They continue to be released because someone loves the shows so much that they feel others deserve to see the show too–even need to see the show too. We’re it not for piracy, I would never have experienced the greatness of Makoto Shinkai’s or Hayao Miyaaki’s works, I never would have experience anime at all. This blog would not exist. The several thousand people that read this blog would likely be in the same position. It is unfair to conceal such a powerful art from such an expansive audience.

Art is to be shared, not locked away for only a privileged few to experience.

Anyway, enough of my ranting. If you know any employees of the entertainment industry send them the link to this post. This is a message that needs to be seen, before the entire entertainment industry simply collapses into itself from such anti-creative methods.

In the heart of downtown Vancouver, right on Granville St. you can find the Nerd Nirvana known as Golden Age Collectables. These guys carry more manga, anime, graphics novels and figures than you’d ever care to know existed. When I was in Vancouver on business recently I picked up a copy of NextWave here and blogged about how awesome it is. This place is jam-packed full of awesomeness of such magnitude as NextWave. They also had probably everything Neil Gaiman has ever written, including more obscure stuff like the edition of Sandman with art from Yoshitaka Amano. For those that don’t know; Mr. Amano was the concept artist for all the Final Fantasy games up until X. His brilliant artistry and unique style is well known in Otakudom.

Look at that wall of Manga! Where in Canada can you find a collection like that on sale for such great prices? If I had more money I would’ve bought that whole wall, or atleast the Initial D mangas at the bottom–I really need to take the time to give that one a look some time. I haven’t seen the animeof it either; I still haven’t entirely caught up on older series’.

One side of the store is occupied entirely by comics, manga and books; the other by everything else. Mostly figures and other miscellaneous merchandise. While browsing through their vast collection of merchandise I happened upon a whole bunch of Serenity/Firefly stuff; several PVC statues, a roleplaying sourcebook, playing cards–remind me again; why did Space Channel cancel Firefly? There was also several Frank Miller graphic novels, obviously includng 300 and Sin City.

I went to Golden Age once about a year ago when I still lived in Vancouver and picked up the first edition of Robot; that is an excellent project. For those that don’t know; Robot is a project started by Last Exile artist, Range Murata, as a collaborative manga series alongside about 20 of the biggest manga artists in Japan! The art is absolutely beautiful and I only wish I could get my hands on more of it. It’s 8 issues long, last I checked, but I’ve only ever managed to find the first issue. Golden Age apparently carries it, but they always seem to be sold out. :’(

I apologize for the lack of updates the last few days, I had business out of town and was too busy to get anything new on the site. I’m back now though, and with lots of cool things to talk about. I had went to a business conference type thing in Vancouver so, while I was there, I stopped by Golden Age Collectibles on Granville St. to peruse their impressive collection of nerd swag when I stumbled upon a copy of NextWave. I had -coughpiratedcough- a copy of this off the internet awhile back and very much enjoyed it, but it’s so hard to find things like these, so I never managed to actually buy a copy. But when I saw it sitting on that shelf there it emanated a holy grail-esque aura that I just couldn’t help but be entranced by–though my credit card balance would disagree at this point. I bought it and decided I would talk about it on here for anyone that might care to know about it.

An excerpt from Wikipedia describes the plot as;

The Nextwave series features a collection of minor Marvel superheroes, including Monica Rambeau, the former Captain Marvel; Tabitha Smith, formerly of X-Force; Aaron Stack, the Machine Man; monster hunter Elsa Bloodstone; and new character The Captain, previously called Captain ☠☠☠☠ (The obscured words being so horrible that Captain America allegedly “beat four shades of it out of [him]” and left him in a dumpster with a bar of soap in his mouth.). These individuals are assembled by H.A.T.E., the Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort, to fight Unusual Weapons of Mass Destruction (U.W.M.D.s). The Nextwave team learns that H.A.T.E. is funded by the Beyond Corporation©, an organization run by H.A.T.E.’s terrorist enemy S.I.L.E.N.T.; as a result, the heroes leave H.A.T.E., stealing a vehicle called the Shockwave Rider. They destroy the U.W.M.D.s that the Beyond Corporation and H.A.T.E. have hidden around the United States, while pursued by H.A.T.E. Director Dirk Anger, a parody of Nick Fury. The U.W.M.D.s include Fin Fang Foom, Broccoli Men, Ultra Samurai and the Mindless Ones. Using the Shockwave Rider as a mobile base of operations (the vehicle is larger on the inside than without, much like the TARDIS of Doctor Who), Nextwave is able to rapidly mount missions in widely separated locations including central Illinois, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Nevada.

The plot summary doesn’t really cover just how hilarious this comic is though. It’s basically a bunch of barely has-been heroes that have become jaded and cynical over time and are fighting against the rather insane, dress-wearing Dirk Anger. The art is great, the story is hilarious and it’s got a lot of style to it. If you have any interest at all in anything super hero related I recommend looking this up on your favorite bit torrent site and maybe even buying a copy if you enjoy it as much as I did.

Final Fantasy: Spirits Within bombed pretty bad at the box office and I understand why, but it deserved better. Yes, I know that it wasn’t anything like the video games or anything from Square Enix really. However, in it’s own it is a very good movie. I think that if they had not included the Final Fantasy title at all and just called it The Spirits Within it would have been much more successful. It would have been viewed as it’s own stand-alone entity in the Square Enix lineup rather than constantly being compared with all the Final Fantasy video games.

Oh, why is Cid a bad guy? Why is there no Chocobos? Why is there no swords? It’s nothing like Final Fantasy at all. The only similarities are a few passing references in names and such. I’d say it more so resembles Halo; the story has a rather dystopian warzone atmosphere to it but it is very engaging and truly epic.

I found that the dream sequences were a clever way of creating suspense while at the same time building an attachment to the Phantoms. I also liked how the characters spirits were visible and still ‘alive’ in a sense after they were pulled from their bodies. It gave me the impression that they weren’t killed by the spirits, but rather; they joined with the spirits to create a stronger energy. Hironobu Sakaguchi’s flare for bringing out characters’ strengths and weaknesses certainly shined through in this movie; Aki was the hot-headed hero–always getting in trouble but never giving up, while General Hein was the coward–hiding behind his big gun out in space where the “invaders” couldn’t reach him and Gray is the level-headed knight–protecting his princess from the many perils of the world.

If you have avoided seeing this movie because of all the bad press and fanboys whining “ZOMG WHARZ TEH CHOCOBOS?!?!?!” I would very much sugegst you see it for yourself. Atleast give it a rent; if you don’t like it you don’t have to ever watch it again, but atleast you will have formed your own opinion on it. Everyone has different tastes, don’t let someone else tell you what to like and what not to.

Spirits Within likely isn’t available at Play-Asia, as it is somewhat old now–it might be out of print–but you can check if you like.