State of the Union [Spray and Pray]

Let's destroy The Shagohod your mind, one piece of culture at a time.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Beta
I've gotten the Xbox 360 demo and the PC beta.
360:  Little lag.  Plays just like Bad Company 1.  Vehicle controls are better.
PC: Lags like shit.  Server browser causes CTD.  Lags like shit.  GUI is poorly-designed, uses too much abbreviation.  Lags like shit.
General: Still no prone?!  UAVs = fucking awesome.  Destruction 2.0 = the camping-killer.  New unlock system = CoD4-inspired.  I'm ambivalent.  But, it's still in the Bad Company subfranchise and so of course I'll play it.  For now, stick to the 360 demo.  Ranking is locked at Private II and all class unlocks are limited to Lvl 2.  You'll start with the AEK-791, 9A91, PKM, and M24--and unlock the XM8, SCAR-LC, M249, Type 88, and the tracer dart.  Happy hunting.

Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu
This show is the brain-melting culturally-aware show of the season.  It's pretty much pure gold to anyone who consumes the anime medium.  Let's count!

1. Zetsuboushita! A bit too early to reference the 3-season juggernaut that is Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei?
2. Hideyoshi has a magical girl transformation.  Despite being a guy.  And transforms into his own clothes again.  This trap-ism becomes a gimmick for the rest of the show, and there's already porn of him.  Yes.  He's essentially the show's mascot.
3. There's a running subtitle side conversation, in the style of Colbert's The Word.  It's new to the medium, but the content is stale.
4. I love how the SPECIAL ACE of the team is actually the most useless.
5. There's another running gag where the seme/uke relationship is consistently disgusting.
6. Usually saved for the season finale, the ultimate battle plan fails.  In episode 2.
7. Oh god, the Ranka Lee (Macross Frontier) gang sign is viral.  We'll be seeing it in the Gundam 00 movie, Christ.
8. Tons of visual gags and great design choices, which really make the most of the genre.

Watch this show.

Chuu Bra
I don't know what to make of this show.  If we were to take the narrative from a purely textual point of view, it'd be a story about female development, societal mores, and amateur couture.  If you actually watch the show, you'll find it to be what amounts to Japan's next wave of statutory rape.  Somehow, the Batman-style transitions makes me think that Adam West is going to pop out and fondle little girls.  Another thing to note is that they reference the job of an industry monitor, which, as I understand it, does not cooperate with the design house.  Those guys use fit models and the feedback stays in-house.  The previews are creative and are omake-esque.  Overall, the show is too risque for its best audience--young girls 12-16.

Dance in the Vampire Bund
I haven't followed this show much, but from what I can tell, it's weird, quirky, and different.  The character designs are detailed and a lot of care went into adapting it from the manga.  Watch the pilot all the way through and decide if you're into it then.

Durarara!!
Show of the year.  Yes, I've already called it.  It's the perfect followup to Baccano!, as the same animation studio does the work.  The original story comes from the same author and the character design comes from the same guy who did Yozakura Quartet and it shows--the show makes constant nods to Quartet, Spice and Wolf, and Baccano.  Hell, there are way too many cat ears in these shows.  Go ahead and check, I shit you not.  This blog will still be here when you come back.  Fucking boot up the Googles and look for the cat ears.  And suffer the knowledge as I do.  The plot is far less confusing than Baccano's, which had far too many timejumps for the typical viewer; this show's episodic structure deals with the narrative with thematic selection.  There's a typical white vs black conflict, but that's not fully explored so far and for some reason there's the brown man, a black Russian (what the hell), so we've got a three-way power struggle that makes no sense but is hilarious.  There's also a mystery group, the DOLLARS, whose colored visual vocabulary has only been hinted.  Why are you still reading this start fucking torrenting.






Sora no Woto
This is basically the new K-On.  5-piece band in a post-apocalyptic world.  Oh look, AMAZING GRACE IN THE FUTUUUUURE.  There's a walking tank (is there any other kind?) that serves as the retrofuturist lampshade for the premise.  I'm hoping for a little more musical emphasis (K-On had a little, but it was for a few brief moment), particularly regarding brass instruments.  Our main female lead has a terrible weakass embosure, it makes me cringe.  Anyway, the setting reminds me of the Festival de la Tomate, so it's trying to be somewhat Euro-centric.  Oh yes, the token tsundere plays the clarinet, what a big fucking surprise (I play the clarinet as well.  Does that make me a man-tsundere?).  They have a mascot, an owl, which is on their unit patches--this instantly made me think of Pumpkin Scissors, but instead of a giant killing machine they have lolis.  The OP really catches my eye because it reminds me a Elfen Lied's OP/ED, pulling from the gold leaf murals of Gustav Klimt (the only Sezessionstil artist you will ever need to know).  Drop this show unless you like K-On.




Caprica
GENTRIFICATION IN SPAAAAACE.  Only seen the pilot, missed last night's episode.  Okay, it's not terrible but the plot is very easy to mock.  Replace Cylons with golems and we've got a crappy fantasy show. The Greystones are your typical well-to-do family with a typically rebellious daughter.  Zoe is some mastermind genius religious character.  The Adamas are interesting, as the plot paints their origin as Taurons to be something of a mix between the Sicilian mafia and the Palestinians.  The mixing of technological, ethnic, and religious topics is interesting, so I'll be following this show because there's a BSG-sized vacuum in my life.


Johnny Foreigner - Cranes and Cranes and Cranes and Cranes



Desert Sessions - You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar But I Feel Like A Millionaire



Owl City - Strawberry Avalanche



Philip Glass - Metamorphosis (Movement I) 


T.O.K. - SHOTTAS/HOTTA


Nanquan Mama feat. MC Hotdog - Here We Go


Ultraviolet - Spin Like A DJ



New Boyz feat. Ray Z - Tie Me Down



G-Dragon - Heartbreaker



Ramona Rey vs Ayuze Kozue - Find Sundae & Take It




Fujiya & Miyagi - Knickerboxer



Hail Mary Mallon - D-Up



I'm spent.  I fucki-  Oh look, how about you stick around for some dessert?


Spice and Wolf S1 OP



Fucking give up already. (Today's pop culture count: 25)

Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal! [Bitch and Moan]

This is going to be a more srs post, but not too in-depth because I haven't had breakfast.  This week we'll discuss something Anthony Burch brought up in a Rev Rant way way back, oh look, a link.  Audiences in all media experience surprise when expectations are proven wrong.  However, the sense of betrayal is slightly different in that it causes more dramatic behaviors such as cognitive dissonance and raegquits (in the academic community known as balking).

Case 1:  My First Null Hypothesis.  Let's take a look at a genre with surprise but no breach of expectations.  Greek tragedies are an example of rituals where the endgame is already known.  Surprise comes from individual experience, such as timing and delivery.  The same can be said of one of my favorite traditions, Guy Fawkes Day.  We know exactly what we're going to do to the straw man, but the often secret selection of our Guy Fawkes reenactor offers a modicum of surprise.  Note that balking is minimal in these instances, unless you have serious objections to straw-on-fire violence.

Case 2: Breach of Expectation Without Balking.  This is best characterized by the Mystery genre.  As I mostly hate the genre since it's one of the bastions of shitty pulps that only survive because of a combination of fanatical otaku-like readership and somewhat meh gimmicks, I'll post some that are out of the mold but still fit.  Two films, Memento and Clue are great examples where escalation of surprise (albeit in different ways because....eh...just go fucking watch those two movies, you won't regret it) acclimate the audience, thus avoiding sudden and arguably inevitable betrayals.  A lesser example is anything related to Law and Order, as the plots generally dodge and weave as new evidence is revealed.  However, episodes where complete reversals of the typical ending where the villain-de-jour is brought to justice are rare, and thus repeat audiences can generally bank on a formulaic exposition.  The exception is the spinoff Criminal Intent where the criminals have their own concurrent subplot.  In any case, this type of betrayal actually increases audience engagement--usually because these pieces all exist within a historical context.  The form of betrayal changes with each medium and period as we are trained to add another dimension of comparison, so in the age of serialized novels it would have been unexpected for the detectives to be perpetrators (nowadays we have Michael C Hall plays the same asshole in everything he's in but we still love him like we love Christopher Walken) and in more modern times, having the villain played by a confederate in the audience thereby breaking the fourth wall (I seriously have no example because I don't see many stage plays and that would be impossibly expensive for a movie, not to mention the DVD although I'm sure Rocky Horror fans would beg to differ).

Case 3: Shit, It Was In Front Of Me And Nobody Said Anything.  I guess this is where Polaris comes into play.  When the mimesis offers no cues into an unknown, the audience simply projects themselves into these gaps.  However, when they are revealed, the shock can result in balking behavior.  The reveal of a gay main character is something of a shock as no cues were given as to the character's nature, and in keeping with the narrative and player's own projections of sexual normalcy, create a female.  The resulting shock is something of a cognitive dissonance, where players were fine with portraying a heterosexual female but not a homosexual male.  In KOTOR, our facelessnamelessevengordonfreemanhadaname protagonist was revealed to be Darth Revan.  Oh, yeah, spoilers.  Too late.  Whatever, get over it.  Note that this is avoided completely in its spiritual offspring, Mass Effect where backstory is chosen to player taste and Shepard's heroic destiny is chosen by literally a deus ex machina.  Back to KOTOR, the fact that our investment as players was changed because suddenly, instead of our own projections, our character was now Revan, playstyles were changed and balking may have occurred.  I guess you could say the same thing about Sixth Sense but honestly that scene was created so you'd jizz in your pants.  This effect comes from audience alienation.  When the mimesis doesn't offer sympathy, audience members look to their peers.  Individuals try to reaffirm that they are not alone in the shock by looking for signs of distress anywhere available, this includes bitching and moaning on the IMDB forums.  KOTOR had other characters note their surprise but quickly restate the mission to force us to move on.  I guess one way of recreating this effect is to watch a foreign comedy film in a theater full of native speakers, where you don't get any of the jokes but they do.  You'll likely sink in your seat or laugh alone to avoid alienation.  And somehow I just sold some copies of Rosetta Stone.

Case 4: Fixed Reward Scheduling.  This comes from mostly episodic experiences, we'll start with gaming. Because games mostly revolve around a risk/reward mechanic, and playtimes are split into consistent chunks, we have an effect where our ultimate goal is only partially met for our efforts.  In old-school Mario titles, the princess is in another castle.  We have, however, eliminated an enemy stronghold and never have to go back (doing so would dramatically result in balking).  If it were revealed that the princess was raped and murdered before our porcelain protagonist is able to produce said prodigal princess, a player would abandon his plan to procure royal poon and accept what is called sunken cost.  Yes, I used alliteration for no reason than to piss you off.  The same could be argued of Dead Space, where we're dealt two consecutive blows--first finding out that our escort mission to save Nicole was for naught, thus negating Isaac's raison de PLASMA CUTTER, and later having undead Nicole kill(?) Isaac, robbing us of our consolation goal, getting the fuck out.  This is an economic effect:  humans understand the concept of sunken cost and respond to it by abandoning the investment or escalation.

Case 5: You Suck At ___ FPS, GG UNINSTALL. Sometimes we just hate losing, it reminds us that we're not as good as we think we are.  Also, I hate children on Xbox Live.  It makes me want to open an abortion clinic.  Besides, I'm better than you are at ____.  You should just fucking give up.  Unless you want to play Hookerbrawl 6 (Tekken).




I'll be posting a Spray and Pray later (maybe today or tomorrow), I've got hot new music and the Q1 2010 anime season loaded on my leechbox.

Army of Three: Forced Replay Value [Nolan North Strikes Again]

In lieu of a Bitch and Moan and Spray and Pray, here is my weekly post.  Seriously, I've done thing but play this game this week.

First of all, let's just get this out of the way.  Nolan North = Elliot Salem.  FML.  People who know me in real life are aware of my well-documented meltdowns whenever Nolan North and Karen Strassman are in a game I play.  It's inevitable.  All that's left is for Nolan North to be in a Persona game and the universe will likely come to an end.

Anyway, Army of Two: The 40th Day, starring Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, is a buddy action comedy directed by Michael Bay.  Of course most literary duos do consist of an umpbridge and a loose cannon.  On a side note, we need more Steve Zahn because he performs brilliantly as the latter--his appearance on an episode of Monk is an exaggerated example of those pairing, while his role in Sahara, not so much.  I allude to Bad Boys, for multiple reasons.


1) Michael Bay jacks off to disaster porn.  Full disclosure: I am from Shanghai.  I have an attention to detail.  I bitch and moan.  The architecture is very Western-inspired, and makes me wonder if the team actually took reference photos outside of Pudong.  Let's discuss environments: the game mostly takes place in the Pudong and Hongkou districts, with the chapters starting out in a post-60s office building.  Do note that over there, construction uses far more bamboo for struts and temporary supports.  We waterslide down a mid-30s skyscraper and are treated to all sorts of falling buildings, just to show off the physics engine, and I presume, not to preload textures for the next portion of the map.  You think they'd learn to utilize the Unreal engine a little better if they have time for pointless unskippable cutscenes.  Later on you traverse the streets of Hongkou, which are admittedly sorta close to real life, though there aren't nearly that many winding alleys and the run-down places are far more run down than this disaster porn can capture.  The zoo is filled with dead animals.  Hippos, gorillas, monkeys, elephants, etc.  And optionally, a dead tiger should you choose to kill it to unlock weapon parts.  The hospital is very westernized and strangely devoid of random blood everywhere, so it felt out of place as I have actually gone to a hospital.  Google for China Hospital Lines for an example of how people actually get trampled to death waiting for medical care in China.  In real life.  The mall is actually close to what a real mall in Pudong looks like.  Except for the giant satellite receiver.  Which you blow up.  Unsurprisingly.  Next is The Bund, a faux-colonized street with plenty of German-derived architecture.  It looks quite nice and, if we were to take away all the cover, stationary guns, mandatory crates, and GIANT SHIPPING CONTAINERS, it'd resemble real life.  Except for the green tint, which I guess is a good thing since the earlier portions of the game were very red/orange and visual variety does help.  Finally, we go to the "temple" which, in real life, is just "the old city" and is a tourist trap.  There aren't stairs or anything, just lots of shopping vendors and Starbucks (Xinbake, ask for it by name or you'll get ripped off).  And the icing on the cake?  You C4 open the inner keep to confront your enemy.  If the FDI troops don't destroy something, it's you doing the destruction.


(You know what this game is missing?  Violence against Space Elevators.  See: Gundam 00, Halo ODST.)


2) Michael Bay jacks off to helicopter porn.  Again, whip out your Google Fu and you'll find that Michael Bay always has helicopters flying into a sunset in his movies.  Bad Boys.  Transformers.  The Island.  Here, we've got helicopters crashing into buildings, dropping off heavy troops, and finally UN helicopters flying back into Shanghai.  Search Youtube if you want to have a peek.  A few I couldn't identify easily but I did spot a Mi-17 and a MH-53s.  The MH-53s at the end are incredibly detailed and I just realized I've basically sold 20 copies of this game to Michael Bay fans.


3) Somewhat capable female ally.  Alice Murray was complete trash in Army of Two.  You had to carry her on your shoulder and were limited to your secondary weapon and slow move speed.  Now she's back, wielding a G36, and able to do anything your partner can: heal, pull aggro, make sandwiches.  I've also noticed she has breast physics.  Quite the upgrade, my dear.  How is this fap material for Michael Bay?  Just replace her with Tea Leoni and you've got the same thing.  Edit: How could I forget Scarlett Johannsen and Megan Fox?


Well, let's get on with a more serious look into the game.


Language - Four languages are spoken.  Bro English, Shitty English, Mandarin, and Wu.  Fake accents are fake, Nolan North is actually a convincing actor in this role, and the Chinese languages are used correctly.  News broadcasts are in English and Mandarin, and actually make sense in a Cloverfield sort of way--exposition via emotion rather than content worked, but an ability to speak Mandarin will let you actually understand two broadcasts.  I love the hostages.  They speak authentic Wu, and are whiny arrogant bitches.  A man says "I don't want to die, I have children" right before he's crushed by a bus.  A woman says "You think you're all that just because you have a gun?"  A few more "please don't kill me" and "please don't shoot your gun" and "what are you doing" scatter the dialogue. (Word of the day: polysyndeton).


Customization - This is what made the prequel very fun.  Now, you're just purchasing parts and mixing them with receivers for....weird and ugly combinations.  I suppose it's why we have paintjobs and camo now, to cover up the ugliness of our guns.  I was turned off by this since the demo, but I've discovered that only on the 1st playthrough is this an issue--you gain more parts and eventually there isn't much motivation to keep that ugly part because a more visually symmetrical part does the job almost as good.  I've found out that if your gun looks good, it actually functions quite well for its role (I've recreated a Special Operations SCAR, turned the AK-47 into a 74 paratrooper carbine, and the FAMAS into what I've seen in the FELIN project vision).  So, try to keep your guns visually similar (by using a floating rail on your M416 and keeping AKM barrels on your AK-47) and they'll perform well.  You can actually tune your guns to perform to any stat level with this system, so I guess it all comes down to preference.  Some guns are incapable of headshots and some can receive exclusive part upgrades, so keep this in mind before you try to turn an AK into a marksmanship rifle.  We now have bayonets.  They give us satisfying animations that don't necessarily kill enemies faster.  I'd recommend not using them, as they only go on shotguns and rifles.  SMGs and pistols allow you run faster, which is ideal with a bayonet, but cannot equip them.  We now have ghetto mods, which are ultimately pointless unless you badly, and I mean BADLY, need a silencer or a bayonet.  I will note that the Rusty Stock part is actually very useful.  Slap it on the MP5 and, with the right suppressors and camo, will generate no aggro.

Mile High Club - Remember the end of MHC where you have to save the hostage?  This happens all the time in hostage situations (which has caused many quickloads because my partner is a little bitch), as well as twice with your partner (forcing us to quickload out of failure to form bromance).  It's a stolen gimmick but in the former scenario, is quite fun.  Blatantly stolen and frustrating because...

Completionists and OCD - The game takes a mandatory 2 playthroughs to unlock all the parts and see all the comic book cutscenes.  That's about 12 hours commitment.  Extraction Mode plays nothing like Gears 2's Horde or Halo ODST's Firefight.  Various enemy types from the campaign return, but with different weapons (the flamethrower heavy now uses a SCAR, the grenade launcher heavy uses an RPG) and are far more aggressive--they'll run around and give you a much harder time. To survive this game mode, you'll need to memorize spawn patterns on top of managing 4-man aggro to finish off the easy ones first, and then gang up on heavies, one at a time (as sometimes 2 will spawn at once).  There's no way to get around this, it's something like Firefight in that knowing spawn patterns let you finish off the mass cannon fodder.

Removed features - Overkill mode was a great way to let your partner go stealth and rack up some kills, but that's gone now.  It's actually part of the design by default, but there's no more bullet time and damage multiplier involved.  Co-op snipe is now built-in, and can be done at any time.  Certainly makes more sense than sniping a propane tank.  Weapon swap is now absent, but that makes sense as we now have anytime weapon customization and public co-op.  I miss this feature the most as it lets new players get a taste for more powerful weapons.  Feign Death is now changed so we can't use it as an aggro-cleanser, and lets one partner go full stealth for a rushdown.  This can all be overlooked because new features, such as mock surrender and the ability to equip a primary weapon to the special weapon slot, are vast improvements on the design.

Mandatory capture level - Yeah, get caught, get your weapons taken away.  It's a freaking staple of the FPS genre.  Half-Life did the best because right before you're captured, you fight backflipping latex spies.  The room going dark right as you approach the door is just so fitting.  Half-Life 2 does it even better by replacing your arsenal with the most fun weapon in all of video games, a messed up gravity gun.  In 40th Day, it's somewhat fun since throughout the game, you're allowed to temporarily take dropped weapons and add to your arsenal.  This level isn't as disruptive to the game design and really captures the procure-on-site feel.  One note is that there are two weapons, the flamethrower and the gatling gun, which are exclusive to this feature.  I'd suggest using it as your high-aggro weapon or your main rifle, as those are the most common weapons (Remington 870, M4, SCAR-L, G36).


Extra party members - For some parts of the game, you get a 3rd or even 4th party member.  Alice and Breznev are very combat capable, and working with Breznev just feels awesome--he's got similar gear, his own personality mask, and a machete.  He's like Clyde from Army of Two but foreign and on your side.  Why isn't he playable in multiplayer?  Qin, the little boy, is cute and all but he doesn't do much.  A zookeeper just gets in the way and soaks up bullets.  In the final level, if you were in positive morality, will have 2 random Chinese guys sent from Dr. Wu to help you out for 2 arenas.  They're pretty useless, don't cooperate with you (just sorta go off and shoot stuff), and are completely unrealistic because it's established fact that Chinese people can't shoot.  Still, it is interesting to have more than 2 party members in this style of game--and should possibly be explored in future titles in this franchise.  But when it's a decision to choose between money + weapon parts (evil) vs allies + weapon parts (good), I'd go with the evil route for the first playthrough.  The only real draw of good morality is that Dr. Wu will unlock the automatic Glock 18 for you--which is essentially a poor man's SMG and great for low-aggro rushdown, but not essential if you're playing on Casual or Normal.


Bleh, morality - This game is all about escalation.  Fights get more intense, bosses are more in number (up to 3 on the last arena), the hostage situations get harder, and the morality choices get more interesting.  It's interesting because the last two involve violence against children--but mostly because they have moments of irony, culminating in a classic Dead Man's Switch scenario with an expectedly reversal.  These cutscenes might as well be an advertisement for the upcoming comic.  This is part of a larger problem, as free will is just another gaming gimmick.


Collectibles - meh.  Japanese cats?  How does that make sense?  Cute and all, but really?  Well, it does make some sense because this game is more and more converging on Metal Gear Solid.  (MGS3 had the cute frogs, so I guess cats are close on the cuteness).  The radio transmissions, wow, it's a stolen concept from System Shock 2, Doom 3, Bioshock, Halo ODST, et al.  But these transmissions are played only in menu, so in essence this is a step BACK in technology.  It does ultimately make sense since the other games have long lags of loneliness, and the Army of Two series is much faster paced.  This makes me question the very need for these collectibles--the cats are cute and placed in weird places, but the radio transmissions just have newscasts, one is just a 3-second long scream, and the others are just Jonah preaching to China.


Jonah - I hate Jonah.  He mixes patches from Army and USAF.  He talks about modern society from some weird Biblical perspective and aims that message at China.  He clearly doesn't know much about China, even after we make an allowance for the Bystander Effect (we're callous, yes, but we're all about connections).  He's only seen in menu screens until the final cutscene.  He's the worst villain in literature, ever.  No attempt was made to develop his personality and his hypocritical doublecross is easily expected.  Are we going to get DLC where we actually get to fight him like we did for Dalton in Army of Two?  The Biblical allegory finally comes into play in the final cutscene for only one of the 3 endings, refering to the legend of Minerva's 40 days to repent.  And how do cruise missiles and running over civilians accomplish Jonah's goals of making humans reconnect?  Or is he so arrogant that he believe himself to be God's device?  Haet.


I fucking give up.  Buy this game when it drops down to $40 after the rest of you get Extraction unlocked, and download any DLC that comes down the pipe because it'll likely be good.  Online versus is brutal (makes playing Gears look easy).


Bonus:  My singleplayer setups:


Balanced:
Primary: Vector Kriss-V with 50rd mag, RDS - this is great for anti-heavy ops.
Secondary: Glock 18 with 33rd mag, silencer - great for rushdowns against cannon fodder, also pretty accurate so you can sharpshoot
Special: Milkor MGL with 10rd mag, Masterkey undersling - cannon fodder, high-aggro ops


Sniper / High-Aggro
Primary: H&K M416 customized for damage + precision - just remove the scope and you've got a medium range weapon.
Secondary: IMI Desert Eagle - if you're low on ammo (you shouldn't ever be), a great backup weapon
Special: Barret .50 - doesn't matter how you customize it, a chestshot will kill cannon fodder


Rushdown / Low-Aggro
Primary: MP5 customized for low aggro, Eotech reflex sight - does blindfire well, and can plink.
Secondary: Type 77 customized for low aggro - seriously this gun gets no aggro at all.
Special: FSB Shotgun with a silencer - just press X and it'll equip to special slot.

If you've got a setup you like, post em in the comments.

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOSAGAN [Spray and Pray]

Original joke by Matt P via GRS.


[01:55:17] Shawn: That is incredibly scary
[01:55:39] Bryan: hypnosagan?
[01:55:42] Shawn: Yes
[01:55:53] Bryan: did you forget he saved the free world from communism?
[01:56:12] Shawn: I must've missed that part in my cold war studies
[01:57:36] Bryan: yeah, he was in talks about a movie deal with vin diesel but vin backed down out of respect



Needless

Jesus fucking another Jesus. This show is a complete wash if you can't appreciate the meta. First if all, Eve is an expy for, ugh, Eve from Black Cat and Yami from To Love Ru. There. I watched both of those shows, and fuck you you watched them too. An underdeveloped teenage girl with the power of shapeshifting, only in a male-driven audience would that character not be the main lead, and serve only as comic relief and an odd fundoshi fetish object (yeah I don't quite understand that either). Well Needless is good if only for its own genre awareness. With callbacks, running self-referencials, and about half the show dedicated to "SETSUMEI SHIRO" moments, it's painfully cognizant of its media peers and manages to eke out some slapstick comedy. I hear the manga has more guro and fewer pantyshots (a fact the anime actually acknowledges) but I plan to finish the season and never watch it again. Unless it's for a drinking game, then it's, you know, ironic.

Some additional meta for you to chew on: Adam Blade is played by the same man who was Sasuke in Sengoku Basara, Zastin in To Love Ru (because fail comes full circle), and Luck Gandor of Baccano! (the man has done many other roles you'll recognize but that's what AnimeNFO is for), Eve is Arwarwarwarwagi Karen (who was Tsukihi then?) from Bakemonogatari, Saya from Blood+, and Ami from Toradora!. Cruz is Sheryl Nome from Macross Frontier (there, I just ruined both shows at the same time), Matsu from Sekirei (Sekirei is like the Kevin Bacon of shitty anime), and Kinue Crossroad from Gundam 00 (FALCON...).

Kimi no Todoke

Been catching up on this series, which recently got picked up for a live action pilot. The visual gags that staccatto the anime should really work well in live action, so my main concern is their picking a male lead for Kazehaya--he needs to be convincingly embarassed, which is pretty hard to feign (unless he did all the scenes with no pants on, which would be impressive). He's played by the same guy who did Rock in Black Lagoon and Michael Trinity in Gundam 00 (...PUUUUUNCH) --and in an obvious troll to make Nathan hate himself, is also the BANCHOU from Persona 4--so if you've at all watched anime or cutscenes in the past few years, you've probably heard his work and probably dismissed it as lackluster in delivery.  This may not fly in live action since part of establishing a believable two-way romance in media is successfully forming mancrushes in the male viewership.  For those of you keeping score at home, our ugly duckling female lead is voiced by Mamiko Fucking Noto (she's like, one of Japan's national treasures). I'm mostly looking forward to Kurumi's character, mostly because the anime and manga show her to be an obvious frenemy (wow, spellcheck didn't explode on that word) in the mimesis using staple anime emotes (veiled shock and aggression towards Sawako's naivette). If we were to consume it as a dialogue-only piece, it would come off as a display of self-sabotage and completely retool Kurumi from a heel-face-turn character to a reluctant confidant. I'm not convinced an adaptation show would have the budget to pull the talent for this to really work, so I'm expecting a rewrite for several critical scenes. Now that we're in the midseason, Ryu is shaping up to be some sort of midboss-esque frenemy (sorta like H2 but minus the baseball and minus Satomi Ishihara). I call it, A Midseason Night's Facepalm. 


KnT Drinking Game:

• Sawako scares normal people: 1 shot
• Kazehaya blushes: 1 shot
• Background art fades away because pastel bubbles are more important: chug a beer
• Morally uplifting reaffirmation of group friendship: chug a beer
• You feel inspired to be more inclusive and a better person: get the hell out, we're not drinking with you anymore

Bloc Party - Mercury

This song is on the Midnight Club: LA soundtrack.  It's one of the songs that had staying power for me, and I'll be honest, it's mostly because it's Bloc Party.  The sound is slowly converging on Prodigy's Slap My Bitch Up (Prodigy is like Outkast--you'll eventually sound like them so just fucking give up).  Shit, I just thought up of a mashup.  MAKE IT SO.  Anyway, the phrase "Mercury's in retrograde" in astrology is a indicator of events having a nature interpretable as a loss of agency--so we're going to interpret the video as some sort of narrative possessing an external locus of control, but ultimately fail because the video constructs a different narrative.  So these damn dirty apes create a clawed moose thing (like Megaman or Zoidberg, both equally awesome) in what we presume to be a reference to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and like Adam, Smith goes out into the world attempting to find completion of his soul in a deli, which, as you may recall, is Mecca for bacon lovers and thus is a hamfisted caricature of Hajj.  But this is where we encounter a departure--Smith is intentionally under control of the apes, fulfilling the role of the Manchurian Candidate whereas Adam is motivated by internal forces.  But we have a co-co-combo breaker because the original Manchurian Candidate was an attempt by Warsaw Pact intelligence to subvert Western military strength, and so this narrative is more consistent with the Denzel-infused remake, where the puppeteers are an American PMC.  The ultimate goal seems to be a jingoistic power play on Brazil (seriously?) to acquire bananas and I can only presume their hot hot sambo music (google for Marcio Local). Oh look, a commentary on American expansionism.  How original.  Yeah, that was just a really long way of saying the lyrics and video have nothing to do with each other.


Bonus:  Watch this video:
Aesop Rock ft. John Darnielle - Coffee

Similar visual vocabulary  (I wouldn't be surprised if they had the same director).  Eh, let's not talk about the plot.  I have no idea what's going on but John Romero's probably getting a parsh.

The Qemists - S.W.A.G.

Wow, so all your pandoran box does is make your entire band dance like a bunch of scenesters? Really fucking impressed. But D&B makes everything better--hell just hire Dieselboy to remix Evanescence and we'll have this music video.  I get the feeling this music video was shot in one day in someone's loft.  Plus, why the hell do you need a 4-piece band when you're a D&B act?  I mean, the frontman is pretty hot and all, and I bet their concerts are awesome, but trying to mimic a Daughtry aesthetic probably is a little misleading as to the act's style.  And it's not even an ironic mismatch, so I'm sort of disappointed.


Castle

You know the rule about never talking to an ex if things fell apart spectacularly? That's what happened to Drive. I'd all but accepted that we should shoot Nathan Fillion into space so he'd always be remembered for a role that didn't suck, and then revive him again in some Futurama episode. Well, the fact that I don't have a rocket capable of orbital insertion (yet) worked out for the better because Castle is a great show. It's essentially a personality vehicle for Fillion and practically written to cure our Firefly withdrawl symptoms. That said, the plots are subpar for the police procedural genre but it more than makes up for it with humorous character interaction. Whereas a similar show NCIS requires dedicated watching to understand all the jokes (as well as get movie suggestions, thanks Eyes Only (go watch Angel if you haven't seen Michael Weatherly not being a smug bastard for once)), Castle is better for casual viewing but offers a similar value proposition. 


Recommended Reading:  Duga-3 + Pirate Radio

Way to get complete tools to represent the legal side. They practically oozed smug superiority. Look, there are legal reasons for restricting radio bandwidth. But once it becomes a matter of national security, things like the Duga-3 get a virtually unlimited operating license. Duga-3, for the more astute and masochistic of you, was the Brain Scorcher in STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Video link if you want to hear how it worked:


In-game:

One of my favorite FPS moments by the way.  I didn't know the ghosts couldn't hurt you a la The Pain boss fight from Metal Gear Solid 3 but the game does such a great job training you to avoid psychic entities and mutants much less the unholy union of the two.  I recommend STALKER Classic, as I call it, to anyone who thought Fallout 3 was too much charisma and wanted a less forgiving environment.

Real life:

Okay, the conspiracy nut is just another quack, but lemme give you a little background: The Duga-3 was a series of multistatic over-the-horizon frequency-hopping radars that scanned from Chernobyl all the way to Maryland with a resolution of 150 feet by sending 31-bit pseudorandom chirps at 10Hz (what this guy extracted is likely the binary chirp). It was intended as an early warning system but ended up jamming radio, television, radio telescopes, and generally pissing EVERYONE off, the Russians themselves included. Point is, pirate radios transmit on usually unused bands and get prosecuted, whereas a wartime radar that makes legitimate broadcasts unsuable gets A SECOND ONE BUILT?


"In Soviet Russia, radar jams you!" just popped into my head, shit. 


Bonus video:
So Solid Crew - 21 Seconds

So Solid Crew is fucking awesome. Sorta like Ruff Riders with shittier special effects. (How cute, matching uniforms!) 


IFGU.

Entertainment, Maybe Endorsement [Double-Tapping]

And now for something much much shorter. Two (maybe run-on) sentences that review random, unrelated entertainment pieces (books, anime, movies, game, TV).

Assassin's Creed 2: A scifi "memory" drama that contains lots of quick-bursts of city guard depopulation and some epic fourth-wall destruction. Even better, finishing the main side question collection quest grants you a cloak that draws in guards like flies to your deadly, bug-zapper of a protagonist.

Borderlands: A role-playing-shooter taking you across various wastelands and trash heaps, depopulating the lands of bandits, animals, and guns. It's mindnumbingly fun when you play it with 3 other players over a local network, even if it goes kill-loot-move-kill-loot-die-rinse-repeat.

Zeno Clash: A well-realized world filled with enough animal-human crossovers that you may feel that it's Jeff Noon done in a more early-human setting as opposed to a post-human setting. And you get lots of hand-to-hand combat in first-person perspective that tends to be quite enjoyable.

Terminator Salvation: The robot apocalypse from the 1980's James Cameron given life with Christian Bale and an extremely predictable plot. Oh, and it ends with a sacrifice, like all the other Terminator movies.

Tales of Monkey Island: A Monkey Island story chopped up in five episodes of varying quality that somehow justified its purchase with me at its conclusion. Also, the first instance of character development for the typically static "sage" character.

Needless: Your typical shounen mess with an insane lolicon priest main character and everyone screaming the names of their secrets moves like they were going out of style. The show is saved by its ridiculous-factor, laughably unpredictable shifts in animation quality, and the presence of a conclusion.

Darker Than Black - Gemini of the Meteor: Hei is back for another season with a list of one-shot and two-shot (and the mythical three-shot) character meeting violent deaths. Also returning from the first season are irrelevant characters and a not-ending that leaves you angry that you expected a conclusion from anything DtB.

Sora No Otoshimono: An ecchi-comedy that stays entertaining throughout its season and has a new ED every episode. Watch this to balance out the craptacularity of Kampher.

Altered Carbon: The first part of a tech-noir trilogy by Richard K. Morgan that is set in a future where technology allows for the backup of human personas upon or near death, actualizing the concept of the body really just being a meat puppet/sleeve. The concept is integral to the setting, so the story focuses on its government-super-trained sociopath of a main character and his unwilling employment as a private investigator for a 300-something year-old man/persona as opposed to the tech that supports the setting.

Umineko No Naku Koro Ni: Why the hell did I watch this disorganized snuff-anime poorly disguised as a murder-mystery show? Oh yeah, to see it try to conclude everything in the last 10 minutes of its run, then cut away to the two characters with the least amount of screen time in the whole twenty-six episode run.

Eh...I fucking give up.

Sloths of War [Bitch and Moan]

I'm not making any promises to post EVERY Wednesday, but today's a good day to start with an analysis feature.

It's no secret that WW2 games have been a source of bitching and moaning among the intelligamesia, but we should take a step back and look at the major problem:  the medium hasn't moved past the "Big War" mentality with any success.  Now, one might say that the Delta Force series breaks out of that, and yes, it does, but only in that you're not always in for the long haul battles.  I'm asserting that the concept of two (or three) uniformed armed forces conducting large maneuvers still dominates the majority of game design.  Let's take a look at titles where design choices are disjoint from the intended aesthetic of so-called modern warfare.

Command and Conquer: Generals
We played this recently at a LAN, so getting tank rushed (despite the fact that I played the Chinese tank general) is still fresh on my mind.  I do give it credit for the attempt to portray caricature versions of US and Chinese military organizations.  We won't get technical about the egregious abuse of weapon systems and doctrine, but rather the attempts to include NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) agents into gameplay.  The faux-Chinese forces employ incendiary agent from a cavalry unit--which is analogous to a flamethrower tank in real life.  Flame tanks saw popularity in WW2 as a method of clearing caves and bunkers, where mobility was not an issue as the target was mostly standing and fortified.  The US used this concept with Sherman and Patton tanks, but abandoned the idea as technology improved.  Today, destruction of caves and heavy fortifications has been relegated to kinetic penetration (see: the BLU-109 warhead), or thermobaric ordinance (see: fuel air explosives).  Now, the faux-US has a large FAEB, but even this concept is behind.  This is more closely resembling the fuel-air ordinance of yore, drawing back to Vietnam and as recent as Desert Storm.  In a post-911 battlespace, we've moved onto smaller thermobaric warheads.  Then we have their large-scale WMDs for both the PLA and GLA--these are not affected by windage, and are intended to be reusable assets--they do not incur a maintenance cost, don't have a per-unit-delivered cost, and, oh yeah, are used more than once.  Even during the Cold War, a heavy emphasis was placed on first-strike capability, with a focus on what was termed a "decapitation strike."  Instead, WMDs are treated as a repeated time-sensitive threat instead of a strategic blitzkrieg standoff.  Who did it better?  World in Conflict, but not by much.  But in its defense, a kinetic exchange had already kicked off, and nuclear deployment (at least in the single player) was on home turf.  The payload did not need to pass through inter-theater defenses, and it was used as a way of defending the illusion of an operational SDI.

Call of Duty: Subtitle Anything
Jesus, this is why I'm not posting under my full name.  The fanbase is less than cerebral and it's an admitted guilty pleasure of mine.  We fight the faux-Russians, the faux-Syrians, and basically any politically hot adversary in the media.  While yes, cinematic, the majority of action is a mix of "going silent" and "going loud" kinetic operations.  Enemies are commonly uniformed, immediately aggressive, and well-armed.  Don't think I've seen a single SKS in a proportedly modern shooter.  Anyway, while this paradigm of conflict (engage on contact) may have been relevant before the advent of standoff-range weaponry, we now work with weapons that have lethality at ranges beyond our capability to conduct IFF.  In the MW1 gunship sequence, IR strobes were simply handwaved as a simple method of IFF--and this may not work in real life since there needs to be some measure of interrogation.  Coupled with joint forces and allied forces issues, modern militaries are forced to spend more time and resources to communicate through chain-of-command and liason officers.  In this sense, the franchise manages to cut straight to the juicy fire-and-maneuver action.  Who does it better?  ArmA2, I guess.  You've got noncooperative civilians, poorly armed adversaries, and a potential IFF nightmare were it not for your NPC squadmates.  Sadly, this game sucks because of dealbreaker bugs, and a first-person camera that makes Cloverfield look tame.


Homeworld series
Well, it's a space-based game, so I'm going to ignore a few big violations--mostly that of logistics.  The biggest thing I've got gripes about is ship capturing.  Yeah, it's a huge ego boost to capture a flotilla's heaviest ship, but this goes so far as to revert to pre-ironclad naval warfare.  Ship capturing is, in modern doctrine, done for the intent of rescue, recovery, or apprehension.  Captured technology is sent to reverse engineers for evaluation.  If you'll recall, this is done extensively in HW1 (assault frigate), HWC (your wave motion cannon trope), and HW2 (movers) at certain plot points to unlock tech trees.  However, the ability to utilize war prizes is limited in modern warfare.  It does happen, like when the British exchanged their semiautomatic FN FALs for the Argentinian full automatic FN FALs.  But my cheap tactic of capturing capital ships to serve as an immediate counterattack rarely happens.  U-571 (the eponymous submarine) and Space: Above and Beyond (damaged bomber) are examples where a prize crew operates an enemy vessel with a level of competence, but this is unlikely to occur without months of research and reverse engineering.  Even worse is Independence Day where a playboy cop from Miami (Bad Boys) and an eccentric cop from New York (Law and Order CI) team up to pilot an alien spacecraft under short notice.  As survivability tech improves (since the advent of armored ships), it's more practical to score a destruction of target than capture and control.  How long was NATO in the dark about the MiG-25's capabilities until a defector willingly surrendered the craft?  Why didn't the US Navy use the captured Prinz Eugens in its regular navy?  (Well, that's a logistical problem more than sailing experience, though they did keep the German crew for quite a while until it was outfitted with sail-by-wire and stripped of weaponry).  Who does it better?  Your mother.

There's a reason these games sell.  They offer the player a sense of accomplishment, which is why Vietnam-based games don't do so well (see: Shellshocked).  This sentiment is shared in the cinema, where two prominent war films, Apocalypse Now and Doctor Strangelove are cynical views of big war mentality.  It was a period of anxiety and doubt more than victory and survival.  Cinema has grown, with countless works such as Over There and The Hurt Locker giving audiences a look into the intricacies of contemporary asymmetric warfare.

Interesting notes:  Warfare and cinema have a lot of interplay.  Anyone who has watched Inglorious Basterds will recall the importance of propaganda during wartime, but postwar attitudes also color themes.  There's a distinction between the historical masturbation Band of Brothers and the antiwar overtures of Grave of the Fireflies.  Compare the nuclear sequences of Terminator 2 and Barefoot Gen--Western interpretations involve the destruction of civilization as a projection of the American dream (expected since Americans have never had to experience the long term effects of the weapon), whereas the Japanese interpretation is focused on human misery and by extension survivor's guilt.  I'll also note that Chinese cinema regarding WW2 has a completely different tone, ranging from victory pieces such as Tunnel War to sobering documentaries like the recent Nanking.

Ultimately, I feel that war in this country's media is categorized into two categories--big war blockbusters and contemporary war art pieces.  This makes me all the more cynical about the Medal of Honor reboot.  We'll probably never talk about it years down the road as having broke ground with a complex or symbolic narrative.  We'll be talking about Cowboy and his sweet beard.

I fucking give up.

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