I found this band called Sakanakushon on the internet not too long ago and thought their music was pretty catchy, so I wanted to share it with all of you. I have several videos to share with you, so I hope you enjoy them all–I certainly did!

I’ve actually been trying to post this for about a month, but I’ve had some serious problems with my web server and uploading files, so I’ve been unable to actually put in any content other than text, and that’s just no fun, right? As you can see though those issues are all sorted out, so back to posting awesome stuff! I have a bunch of other posts half written and needing images and such, so I’ll try and post like crazy for the next while. I’d really like to be more active on here, and I have a decent bit of free time right now, so I will try and be as active as I can. Hopefully this free time lasts.

Native Dancer

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I found a folder entitled “Star House City” sitting on an FTP server the other day and decided to download it just because the name sounded interesting. Turns out that was a good idea. Star House City is the newest album from Korean House Superstars; House Rulez.

The whole album is just fantastic and I had to have every MP3 I could find of theirs. It’s been really hard trying to find stuff from their previous album…I found 10 of the 15 tracks and all of them are labelled wrong, so I can’t even tell what track numbers they are supposed to be. >.>

Check out video for their song “Do It!” below. It’s really catchy, just like all the rest of their songs.

I made my own personal mod of FofR, a really great skin for Foobar2000, the best audio player software out there.  I liked the design of the original, but found the fonts were a bit to small at 1920×1080 resolution so I changed them…then while I was already digging through the code I added a little button to download album art for the current playing song and fixed some minor graphical glitches that FofR has when viewed at such high resolutions. I might make some more changes, but I’m not sure what else I’d want to do with it yet, so here it is; version 0.1 of FofR But Better.

I’d recommend using version 0.9.5.2 of Foobar2000, as the newer versions broke much of the PanelsUI engine used to make this skin. You can find it here.

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.

While surfing about on the Akiba Online forums I stumbled across a really fun band known as Special Others. From the YouTube video of Good Morning I can see that they very much enjoy their music. They write very jazz-inspired and very danceable music. If you are into fun, rhythic music check out the video for Good Morning I have included in this post!

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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.

Gitaroo Man is a very odd game but is, quite possibly, the best rhythm game of all time. It is so very Japanese it hurts. I’m sure the development team we’re all tripping on acid when they made this game…it certainly feels like you are when you are playing it. The game starts off with you playing as a regular kid named U-1 having troubles with school work, girls and bullies that has just arrived home after a long and arduous day at school. Suddenly your dog, Puma, speaks to you saying that you are the heir to the legendary Gitaroo-Man legacy and that you need to learn how to use the power of Gitaroo to save the universe. You are the only remaining Gitaroo-Man, so you must journey through space battling Gravillions to take back the other Gitaroos they have taken.

Gravillions vary in form and finagle, but all are undoubtedly members of an evil organization bent on collecting all the Gitaroos. They range from a skeleton trio to a mechanical hammer-head space shark to a rather obvious Micheal Jackson mockery. The characters are all very unusual and entertaining, as are their personalities–to but it bluntly; every character in this game is utterly insane. In battle against these Gravillions you use to power of Gitaroo, which is the power to play a really awesome guitar solo on your futuristic guitar known as a Gitaroo. The music in the game is very, very awesome guitar music and I could listen to the soundtrack on repeat until the day I died.

If you like rhythm games or even just music I highly recommend this game. But be warned, this is a very challenging game, it’s hard enough beating easy mode–if you ever beat Master I will worship you. I don’t mind the challenge of the game though, simply because I get to listen to the great music longer if I lose a level.

Gitaroo Man may eventually be available at Play-Asia. For now, enjoy a video of the totally awesome final stage!

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I doubt many of you have heard of Eyeshine, but some may have heard of Johnny Yong Bosch–possibly from my previous post about Eternal Sonata. Johnny is the English voice actor for Vash The Stampede from Trigun, Claus Valka from Last Exile, Gram River from Mars Daybreak, Renton Thurston from Eureka Seven and Ichigo Kurosaki from Bleach. Yeah, he’s pretty big in the anime voice acting industry. Most people don’t know him for the other part of his life though; his band Eyeshine. They sound a bit like Jimmy Eat World combined with a dash of Yellowcard and the more mellow Green Day songs from their earlier days.

They write fairly mellow Alt Rock and it’s not half bad. They’ve got a new record called “Red Stripes / White Lights” scheduled to come out in December (hopefully). Check them out on MySpace, you might like them.

Eternal Sonata is epic beyond the magnitude any role playing game has achieved in likely a decade. From the artistry of the graphics and sound to the intricacy of the character and plot development, Eternal Sonata succeeds in far surpassing everything else. When I first played the demo on Xbox Live I knew I had to have the game, but even so; I was still, with my jaw on the floor, blown away by how amazing a game it is when I finally got a hold of my own copy. I had intended on writing this review a few days ago, but I just couldn’t pull myself away from it. That’s how good it is; so good I played through it twice before managing to pry myself away from it for long enough to write a review.

The setting of Eternal Sonata is an imaginary world inside Frederick Chopin’s last dream before he dies. One would expect that such a game would feature various works of his, which it had an excellent selection of them. I very much liked how it included the pieces too; they were used as sort of interludes from the game every once in awhile backing text telling a bit about Chopin’s troubled life, being the physically ill man he was. The game also features it’s own music that is obviously written to sound very similar to Chopin’s work, and a great job was done of these imitations. If I can find a soundtrack I will buy it as soon as I can possibly afford to.

The graphical quality of the game is also very worthy of being called next-gen. Many have criticized it as “looking like PS2 graphics” because of it’s anime style making it relatively simplistic, however; the actual texture quality and polygon count on models is far higher than a PS2 could ever hope to push through it’s now dated graphics system. Having an HDTV does very much make the graphical difference much more noticeable, but it certainly isn’t required to enjoy this game. If you are buying RPGs exclusively for their graphics you might want to rethink your future purchases a little.

All of the characters, down to the town folk you only speak to once and never see again, are brimming with personality. It’s very easy to relate to the characters’ feelings and even become attached to them as people. The character development was excellently done to keep you wanting to see more of their fictitious lives. I was quite surprised with the English voice cast–as an anime fan I am all too familiar with poor dubs, but the voice acting in Eternal Sonata was actually quite good. My favorite villian; Fugue is voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch–the voice of Vash The Stampede from Trigun, Claus Valka from Last Exile, Gram River from Mars Daybreak, Renton Thurston from Eureka Seven and Ichigo Kurosaki from Bleach. If you know much about anime you can probably guess by that list that this guy is pretty big.

I have never seen a battle system this good in an RPG before. It evolves as you progress through the game; defeating bosses will increase your ‘party level’ which, each level, will change various aspects of battle such as changing from a single light and dark special attack to two of them each. These changes keep the gameplay fresh and interesting instead of just doing the same thing over and over again until everything is dead. You actually have to think about what you are going to do. It’s also very good how quickly it enters and exits encounters; many games have the annoyance of pulling you away from the gameplay for a few seconds every encounter to watch a repetitive cut scene before the battle starts. Eternal Sonata randomly picks a single character and focuses the camera on them as it dissolves the screen from the dungeon to reveal the battle screen behind it, all of this only taking a fraction of a second. Once it stops you are put into ‘Tactical Time’, which allows you to quickly analyze your present situation and decide what to do with your turn. The actual controls are rather basic, but in a good way; you have special attacks which are used by pressing the Y button. The way you change which special attack is used is by standing in light or shade to switch between light and dark types and pressing or holding the button to switch between primary or secondary special attacks.

This is a truly excellent addition to my RPG collection and is clearly a highly polished and well thought out role playing experience. If you are a fan of RPGs you will not be disappointed by this instant classic. I’d even go so far as to say this is as much a ‘system seller’ game as Halo 3. I will be keeping a close eye on any future projects from the development team that made this and I will quite likely buy all of them. This game is pure brilliance, plain and simple. Now, enjoy more screens;

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Eternal Sonata (or Trusty Bell in Japan) is available online through our sponsor, Play-Asia.

Some may have already heard of them, some may not have. Monkey Majik consists of Takuya “tax” Kikuchi (菊池拓哉, Kikuchi Takuya) on drums, DICK on bass and rather oddly Maynard Plant and Blaise Plant; two Canadian brothers who sing in both Japanese and English and play guitar. It is very unusual for a band with foreign members and foreign languages to attain such a level of popularity in Japan as they have.

Blaise had moved from Ottawa to Aomori in 1998 to work as an English teacher on the JET program and formed a band there to play a one-time gig at an international festival. Two of the members left Japan, so Blaise decided to contact his brother Maynard who had a moderate solo career already in Canada. He decided to move from Ottawa to Sendai where Blaise soon followed. Their first EP called TIRED, only had 1,000 copies available at Tower Records in Sendai. But their first single, “fly”, in 2006 was a great success and was quickly followed by their next single, “Around the World”, which reached number 4 in the Japanese Oricon top 200 singles chart. Pretty impressive for Gaijins, eh?

Anyway, the whole reason I’m making this post is so you can all watch this really awesome video–a collaboration of Monkey Majik and the ever-so-amazing Yoshida Brothers; Change.

Their music can be purchased at Play-Asia.