Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and enjoy whatever other holidays you enjoy around now! More on the characters in the picture in coming days–it’s a great show called Toradora, for those pre-emptive enough to have a look before I write my review.
Tekkonkinkreet – A fresh new experience in anime.
December 15th, 2008
No Comments
From the same people that brought us The Animatrix (oddly enough), Studio 4°C brings us this new animated wonder. It’s unique style and tremendously detailed animation net this movie countless awards, and it certainly deserves them. Following the lives of the two orphans Kuro and Shiro, or Black and White in English, the story dips in and out of the underlying corruption of Treasure Town; a bustling city puppeteered by Yakuza.
Kuro and Shiro live on the streets–comrades in the daily adventures of staying alive. With Yakuza threatening the peace of life in the ever-decaying Treasure Town, the two get wound up in a conflict when a foreign investor seeks Yakuza assistance to build an amusement park at the core of the city. Kuro, being the wildcat of the Treasure Town streets, rushes of to save the city from plunging further into chaos, but Shiro is the only one who can save Kuro from plunging into that same chaos himself.
The art is really quite amazing and is like nothing I have seen before in an animated feature. The art design’s uniqueness fits well with Studio 4°C’s unconventional story writing, creating a modern masterpiece of animated story-telling. A great degree of detail was put into the backgrounds used in the movie–the clock tower near the start is a great example of High Definition video put to good use. It’s quite obvious Studio 4°C put a great deal of effort into making sure this movie perfectly matched the vision that director Michael Arias had for the movie.
The soundtrack matched brilliantly and was something very fresh and new for anime. Written by Plaid, a well-known British electronic duo, the soundtrack is beautifully subtle, with emphasis in all the right places. My favorite track being the closing song; White’s Dream, is minimal and earthy yet a powerful close to this brilliantly unique movie.
If you are into artsy anime, Tekkonkinkreet comes highly recommended from me! It’s truly a feast for the eyes, the ears and even the mind–a worthy addition to my budding collection of anime Blu-Rays.
MORUZEE! MOURUZEEEEEE!!!
December 9th, 2008
5 Comments
Can’t stop listening…so…addicting…why can’t I stop listening…The voices just don’t ever stop. Curse you Minorin and your utterly moe randomness.
On a side note; the girl ‘singing’ is Minorin from the new series Toradora, which I dare say is the greatest Tsundere Harem I have ever seen. Much hysterical laughter ensued. Stay tuned for my upcoming review of Toradora.
New layout, new start.
November 23rd, 2008
No Comments
The old layout was getting old and falling apart–the site wasn’t even working properly, so I’m trying out something new and will be reapplying the plugins to get the functionality back to what it was (minus the glitches >.>) over the next few days. Hopefully I can get the site running reasonable stable, then I can get back to delivering the usual quality content.
Michiko To Hatchin – The trailer doesn’t show much, but I’m still excited.
April 3rd, 2008
3 Comments
A short trailer was just put online for Michiko To Hatchin–the story of Michiko; a free-willed “sexy diva” who destroys a supposedly inescapable prison fortress and Hatchin; a girl fleeing her strict foster parents. The two join forces on an improbable escape to freedom. The trailer itself doesn’t seem to show any of the actual scenes from the show, probably an OP clip, but the music and animation were both excellent.
With the production staff Michiko To Hatchin has got, I’m really excited to check this show out. Shinichiro Watanabe, the brains behind Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo will be involved, but not as a lead director this time; he will be involved in music direction. While Hiroshi Shimizu, who has worked in animation for FLCL, Fullmetal Alchemist, Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, will be contributing as a character designer this time around. Also Sayo Yamamoto, an experienced storyboard writer from Death Note, Ergo Proxy, Eureka Seven, Rozen Maiden: Traumend, Samurai Champloo and Texhnolyze will be directing the show.
As you can see, the crew has some big names under their belt, but they are all trying new areas they haven’t done much in, so it should be interesting to see how well they do at it.
Here’s the trailer;
Podcast: Download (6.7MB)
No more forum?
April 2nd, 2008
2 Comments
Yeah, I turned it off. It wasn’t exactly all that active (see: no posts at all), so I decided to disable it for now. On the bright side; I finally finished Mass Effect and it was awesome. I might write a post about it soon when I can find the time.
Zombie Fluxx – What’s a few flesh-eating undead between friends?
March 31st, 2008
No Comments
I was hanging out with a friend of mine and he showed me a new card game he got recently called Zombie Fluxx. I had quite a bit of fun playing it and it’s a very cool idea for a card game. Most card games have some set goals and rules that you follow, leaving you shaking in your boots when you look at your cards and see you have nothing of any use. Not Zombie Fluxx–in this game the goals and rules can be completely turned around in a single round, but don’t let yourself think that makes it confusing. It certainly makes you think a bit, but it’s a very ingenious way of doing things.
There is just a single deck of cards that everything is mixed into, at the start of the game each player draws three cards–if any of them are zombies you lay them infront of you and keep drawing until you have 3 cards in your hand. From the start of the game there is actually no condition upon which a player can win, the players actually have to introduce a goal themselves by using a Goal card which can be drawn from the deck, just like anything else. On your first turn you draw one card from the deck and then you can play one card from your hand if you want. The turn doesn’t necessarily end there though. Say, for example, you use a Play 5 Rule card; you can now play more 4 more cards. If you are lucky you might now be able to play a Draw 5 card or something of the like, allowing you to draw a few more cards than what you already drew at the beginning of the turn. There is also event cards that allow you to do nasty things like taking another turn or sending your zombies to another player. As you can probably guess; it’s bad to have lots of Zombies…mostly. There is a few Goal cards you can play that can completely turn the game around for the seemingly hopeless; some goal cards require you to have many zombies, like Zombie baseball…some even require that you have ALL the zombies in play! There is also mean things you can do, like play a Goal card that requires you to have Zombies to win when another player has the Zombie Repellent card.
It’s very enjoyable because there is literally no way to know when another player is about to win the game. If you like Zombies and you don’t hate fun I highly recommend you give this game a try! It’s only about $10 on ebay, how could you go wrong?
Firefox – Two brackets and a number from being perfect.
March 13th, 2008
No Comments
I’ve always been an avid supporter of web standards, so I was glad to here that Gecko 1.9, the layout engine used in the Firefox 3 beta, passes the Acid2 test, but I found the future version of Firefox is still lacking one single thing that I feel holds it back rather significantly from being what it could be. That features is the RSS Updates counter that Safari has had for pretty much ever. How long will it take before Mozilla catches on that Firefox’s lack of this simple feature is a deal-breaker for many people? I guess I’ll have to continue using two browsers until Mozilla catches up.
