Bruce Campbell is a B-Movie King. His unique style has brought joy to millions of dedicated fans. His blunt and witty comedy has made just about everything he’s acted in become instant comedy gold. Most likely you have heard of him through his massive cult-hit series; Evil Dead. Who hasn’t seen Army Of Darkness? If you haven’t, you must watch it right now! Your internet overlord (me) commands it!
Nerd Culture hasn’t even been online a month yet and already it’s been splogged! In case you were wondering; splogging is when another site copies your content and uses it for their own site. Often times file links are even left intact, direct linking to your own server. This is how I tracked down this one. PSPBlenderBlog.com copied my post about Dark_AleX’s 3.71 M33 firmware release for the PSP. In doing so, they linked to the firmware file I was hosting which, of course; shows up in the referer links of my blog stats. Many sites use a custom made anti-leech system for file references on the site, but I hadn’t got around to making one for Nerd Culture yet. Instead, when I spotted my files being direct linked, I changed the filename, so now anyone that clicks the download link on their site is linked to my home page. Thanks for the free traffic PSPBlenderBlog.com!
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.
Step aside Star Wars, sci-fi has a new King. This epic masterpiece from acclaimed television director, Joss Whedon, is brimming with style and attitude. A six-gun western attitude in a futuristic dystopia make this movie finale to the unfortunately failed TV show, Firefly, an extremely enjoyable adventure into rogue space. Firefly could’ve breathed some life back into the presently stagnant science fiction genre, but the show was cut before it even got a chance to build a fan base. Fox apparently felt that repeats of Star Trek were more important.
Podcast: Download (0.2KB)
For those that haven’t yet seen it, The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya is a really great show about a girl named Haruhi who seems to unknowingly have the power of God. She can do absolutely anything, however; her normal human common sense keeps her from actually doing things that, to a normal human, would be impossible. This is the only thing stopping the world from plunging into utter chaos. You see Haruhi is the type of person that is easily bored by everyday things. On her first day at her new school she introduces herself saying that she doesn’t want to talk to anyone that isn’t an alien, time traveller or esper. Because of her desire to see these strange things she has actually created these things in the guise of regular humans and forms them into a school club she refers to as the SOS Brigade. She, however; has no knowledge of what they are and they try hard to keep it that way, but the problem is that if Haruhi becomes bored the world will be consumed by darkness and Haruhi will create an entirely new world, destroying everything that remained of the current world. This is obviously a really bad thing, so they try as hard as they can to keep her entertained without actually revealing the existence of such things as aliens, time travellers and espers. If she were to encounter such things the universe would be rewritten because of her changed understanding of the world.
Podcast: Download (19.1MB)
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.
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.
Podcast: Download (19.2MB)
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;
Eternal Sonata (or Trusty Bell in Japan) is available online through our sponsor, Play-Asia.
Podcast: Download (20.9MB)
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