Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Shmupmeet 2012: Midwest is the Best


Another successful shmupmeet with the denizens of the shmups.com forum has come and went. Another big thanks to caldwert for his hospitality, snacks and massive collection of games, cabinets, pinball machines and a billion NEC XM29 Plus monitors. Played like shit in almost every game, per usual. I guess my approach of not practicing and hoping to magically get better isn't really working. Might have to change my methods up a bit, I guess. Also, it has been further embedded into my skull that I need to purchase some sort of Japanese candy cabinet as soon as possible. And buy a bunch of arcade PCBs. Imperative.
The playfield. Near impossible to get everything in the shot. Another monitor lies behind me with a U.S. TurboDuo and an NES hooked up. On the first monitor we had a PC-Engine Duo-R hooked up, as well as a model 1 Sega Genesis. Download 2, Spriggan, Gleylancer, Magical Chase, and a handful of others were played. Never had gotten around to playing Gleylancer before. Damned good stuff. On the next monitor--an NEC XM37 I believe; correct me if I'm wrong--we had a supergun hooked up to play PCBs. Replaying Gigawing on the actually CPSII board really affirmed my love for that game, further establishing my adoration for Capcom during their CPSII run. Blackheart also made a showing, which was quite unexpected, yet I sadly got a chance to play it this time. Later in our arcade marathon vigil we experienced the lack of sleep stupor that sets in after staring at monitors for 12 hours straight, resulting in a somnambulant-like outing of bizarre arcade games from the depths of caldwert's basement. Heated Barrel, a lost title from the equally enigmatic TAD corporation, stole the show and won the hearts of all. Or whatever. What was aptly described as a "horizontal Gun.Smoke" lasted what felt like a lifetime, yet was quite joyful to watch. Playfully racist (uh...), yet brightly colorful with cowboy ghosts, pot-bellied Native Americans and pink bears as enemies; complete with an impossible last boss with almost every attack completely unavoidable and full of damage. Also played was a Japanese Gauntlet clone (the name escapes me) and Psycho-Nics Oscar, a sort of inspiration for Turrican with a Gradius-like power-up system. On the far monitor we had a Japanese Xbox 360 hooked up that primarily played all the vertical Cave release: Ketsui, Mushihimesama-Futari, Mushihimesama HD, Pink Sweets, Muchi-Muchi Pork!, DFK, etc.

The wall of rape: Raiden DX and Same! Same! Same! (lit. Shark! Shark! Shark!), known as Fire Shark in the U.S.. Both games proved that I am a sick bastard and a masochist, for I kept coming back for more. Same! literally depressed me later in the night, yet I've thought about the game for the past couple of days. It's like some nasty hooker that gave me the clap that I keep going back to. Raiden DX is almost just as brutal and I still feel the pain. Damned good stuff, though.


Lil' baby Neo cab kinda made me envious and slightly inclined to exchange such a thing for my hulking brute of a wooden cabinet with dented corners, missing paint and slightly unbalanced. Shown here is the fantastic Shock Troopers, which is easily one of my favorite games on the MVS--that I still don't own for some stupid reason. Blazing Star, Sengoku 3, Aero Fighters 2, and an MVS conversion of Ironclad were a few of the games played.

Whirlwind and Rollersgames, two of the pinball machines in the back corner. Whirlwind is a pretty neat machine. I spent some time on it later in the evening and got my ass thoroughly kicked. I think I'm starting to pick up a theme here. Whirlwind was especially neat, for at certain parts of the game the fan on the top of the machine blows a bunch of pungent air into your face and makes you feel like Bill Paxton in Twister.

Earthshaker, a game that literally rumbled the floor with its earthquake theme. A pretty frantic, neat machine that I didn't have the chance to play but a time or two. It kept scaring the shit out of me when I was playing Sengoku 3 behind it.

Diner was probably the pinball machine I spent the most time on and enjoyed the most. It gave us some grief earlier on in the day but was eventually fixed. Believe it or not, but I sucked at this, too.

Shown here is friend and user drunkninja being his photogenic self, this time with the cabs running Armed Police Batrider on the left and DoDonPachi on the right. Batrider is really a game I'd like to get better at, as well as Battle Garegga, another phenomenal game by 8ing/Raizing. I figured if anything playing DoDonPachi again on an actually PCB would boost my confidence a bit after all the rapeage, as I usually can do quite well on a credit--well, relatively speaking, that is. I don't even want to talk about how bad I did. I, uh...need some practice.

There is plenty more to be said and I wish I would have taken some more pictures, but aye, it's too late for that and I've got chicken in the oven and a fat cat in front of the computer screen. Damned good time and a great group of guys. Hope to do it again soon! Maybe I can actually practice for this next one...

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Losing Friends? Kentaro Miura


At some point in life we usually lose friends. It could be of your own volition, an argument, a love triangle (Kimagure...)  or simply from the passage of time. Sometimes it's for the best. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it pisses you off.

Enough cheese. I'm full anyway. I'll probably get some grief from this, but so be it; I should be used to it by now. Complaining about new things? Ho, hum. So is the Anachronistic Otaku.

I've been reading Kentaro Miura's Berserk for a hefty number of years now. I'm a colossal fan of all things fantasy--especially dark and low fantasy, with a heavy emphasis on sword & sorcery. It's a damned shame there isn't much of the stuff out there, really. The market is clouded with Tolkien-esque high fantasy with clearly defined morals, motives, oppositions and optimism. When I think of medieval and the dark ages--hint, dark ages--I think of depression, death, and questionable morals amongst a somber backdrop of an ever growing portentous storm, lost hope and the struggle to survive. Eh, maybe it's my cynicism jutting out through my misanthropy, but that's the way I would envision such a time, dammit. Oh, and it's not absolutely imperative, but a tinge of military fiction can also add nicely to such a tale. The genre is really lacking. It's all Robert Jordan, Fable, World of Warcraft and recently fractured fairy tales like Snow White and the Huntsman or whatever. We've got some real gems like Blizzard's Diablo and Diablo II (don't get me started on III), pre-Halo Bungie's Myth: The Fallen Lords series (R.I.P.), Glen Cook's The Black Company books and of course Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian, amongst many others. I've still yet to read Game of Thrones, but I hear good things. So I'll leave that alone. Point is: there isn't much dark fantasy out there. But then there was Berserk.

Sorry. As I was saying, Kentaro Miura's Berserk is a phenomenal example of low, dark fantasy with an emphasis on military training and strategy. The first--and considerably the best--story arc of Berserk is a tale of the aforementioned dreary, solemn world of a mercenary and his personal struggles. It's graphic, gory, depressing and yet, hopeful. Ambiguous morals and motives, angst, and the struggle to find what one yearns to obtain and make of their life haunts the cast of the Band of the White Hawk Mercenary group, told primarily through the eyes of the main character Guts.

At least it was like that. Continuing stories usually change, especially when they've been going on over a decade; I know and understand that. Change can be good. Berserk doesn't stick throughout with it's dark mercenary theme. Some characters die, or are seldom seen, but the change of pace was good and I welcomed it. I earnestly enjoyed it, if anything. A change of pace, yet not a complete departure from the initial storyline. Additional characters were original and interesting and even added an element of humor the story. In such a story I would prefer minimal humor at best, and while the newly implemented humor wasn't always congruous, it never interrupted the story and was only a minor deterrent. The humor became more and more prevalent over the years, but me, being my bitter self that I am, somehow learned to get over it--and hell, even sorta liked it sometimes. Miura was pushing me a bit but I pushed back. It was fun. Almost kinda cute. Such audacity won't always remain so innocent. Like a puppy turning into a big, nasty dog that knocks over your lamp with its tail and tears up the mail and shits in the floor. Kentaro Miura shit on my floor.

Fast forward to now--the present, or more importantly October 11th, 2011. Berserk vol. 35 is released by Dark Horse publishing. It's June 11, 2012 now. I still haven't finished it.

I can't. It's so bad. It's embarrassing; not only for Miura, but for me to read such drivel. I feel like I've stumbled into Barnes & Noble to plop my clod on the manga aisle to read the latest volume of Naruto or Bleach because I don't want to pay for it because I'm lethargic and awkard and lost my 18 hour a week job at Denny's because I didn't want to go into work. It's horrendous. The whole damn volume is tripe. I've been lying to myself over the past few volumes that it wasn't going downhill. Miura could pull ahead, right? Yeah! It's just a slump! Pretty soon Guts will go back to slaying demons and being cool and things will be evil again! Volume 34 picked up the pace a bit and almost restored a glimmer of hope for the manga. That was until Miura practically copy-and-pasted Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights as his portrait of hell. How can you go through an entire 33 volumes of manga, fabricating your own unique and immense world, only to blatantly plagiarize a world famous painting and simultaneously languish the work you created? Obviously one would assume Miura used the painting as a reference--but why? I'm obviously a fan of references shown my past posts, but such a thing should be done subtly and not at a climax of a 20 year story. I'm not giving anything away by spoiling such a thing, but yes, it's at a very pivotal part of the story. One Miura may not even finish at this pace...

Volume 35 of Berserk is nothing but comedy. Guts spouts out one-liners now. One character, an elf named Puck, is perpetually stuck in an SD (Super deformed) mode since about 8 books back or so. Sometimes he turns into Yoda from Star Wars or Napoleon Bonaparte or some other silly caricature. Another child character constantly picks on a witch character. She shoots spells at him and burns him and makes him cry with exaggerated tears and smolder marks. Her elf flirts and dances with the other elf. Everyone is children. It's a bundle of fun. Guts and his merry band of children are currently fighting silly undead pirates, complete with such golden dialogue as "shiver me timbers". It's absolutely dreadful.

I feel hurt, betrayed. It's like I've lost a great friend. I've dedicated many hours to Kentaro Miura's world. I got lost in it. I fell in love in it. Almost 35 volumes of getting attached to characters and caring for them and their struggle and anticipating what would happen next. Now I almost don't care. Berserk used to stand out for me; I trusted it. I guess people go soft in their old age. Or just senile. Whatever it is, Kentaro, please come back soon.




Sunday, June 3, 2012

The World of Nausicaa Look-alikes Pt. 1

By now it's blatantly obvious of my inordinate adoration for Nausicaa. I haven't completely worn the idea into the ground just yet, so there's plenty of time to still do that. But you could read something like that elsewhere, for I'm sure the hordes of Miyazaki zealots are plentiful. If anything, the damned tattoo is going to say it better than words, so I won't clutter this blog up with something that easily exists in droves. I like to keep it fresh. Like my vegetable bin or some fresh laundry. Or seldom talked about anime. Something like that.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was, and is, obviously influential in the otaku world, both in its original manga format and the film adaptation of the same name. Most immensely popular media goes on to to inspire and influence other works, be it in theme, character design and motivation, setting or flagrant imitation. Throughout the years I've noticed some female characters through various forms of entertainment that looked an awful lot like the red-haired Gaian beauty. Some are subtle, having few similarities but a small shoulder clinging companion; others, not so much, with more than a few "coincidental" features. I'm here only to discuss fun little bits of discernment, so don't expect much critiquing or adverse reactions towards such creations. Hell, I'm sure if I were to ever make a damned story it'd probably pay more than a slight homage. Ah, such is the draw of Nausicaa.

  • Yellow Iris, Battle Circuit
 Diana Martines, or Yellow Iris, is from the excellent Capcom Beat'em up Battle Circuit for the CPSII arcade hardware. Tons of great games on the CPSII, including Street Fighter II, Progear, Darkstalkers, Dungeons and Dragons, and loads more. Capcom easily made some of the best arcade games along with the Neo Geo in the mid-90s. That's an entirely different blog post, though, so I digress per usual and all that nonsense.

At first glance Yellow Iris doesn't have a whole lot in common with our subject lady except for her red hair, which is obviously much longer than Nausicaa's. Closer inspection, however, shows a small, furry creature nestled on her shoulder amid her hair. Teto? Pretty damn close, save for a different pattern of brown stripes on its forehead. Also, Yellow Iris herself is almost like an anthropomorphic fox-squirrel, or at least some sort of human hybrid. Just look at those ears. Anyhow, it's obvious that her companion 'Fin' was obviously inspired by Teto, but that's about all she really has in common. It's a marvelous game from Capcom's prime, and kind of a hidden gem of sorts. You should probably play it.

  • Marin, Windaria
Having recently watched Windaria and admiring Marin throughout the film prompted me to make this list in the first place. She's a fairly conspicuous nod, if not just downright blatant, really. Mutsumi Inomata at least still gives both Marin and her companion a fresh look with her unique style, regardless of the obvious similarities. I'm a sucker for those big eyes that she draws so well. Red hair and a squirrel-like shoulder mount may look a bit uninspired, but I'd be lying if she wasn't one of the cutest damned characters I've seen in quite some time. But you'll just be too depressed by the end of the film anyway to appreciate such beauty with tears in your eyes and all that.



  •  Lady Clarisse d'Cagliostro, Lupin the Third: The Castle of the Cagliostro
Hold it! Before anyone jumps down my throat: yes, I'm aware this film was made before anything Nausicaa. If anything, Lady Clarisse is a sort of proto-Nausicaa, for it's pretty obvious the route Miyazaki took when creating her, especially when looking back at his more raw, primitive concept art. Another interesting similarity between Clarisse and Nausicaa is the fact that they were both actually voiced by the same actress, Sumi Shimamoto, who would later go on to play Kyoko Otonashi of Maison Ikkoku. Nausicaa has brown eyes and a more mature look about her, but the similarities are quite obvious.

  • Tia, Balthus: Tia's Radiance
 Oh boy. I'm only putting Tia on the list for her obvious Ghibli inspired art style and the fox-squirrel companions parked on her shoulder, which never even happens outside of the cover art. If anything, Balthus: Tia's Radiance is a condensed, abridged version of Castle in the Sky with some hentai thrown in. I don't really understand why this was made. Well, I obviously know it was to cash in off the success of the film, but the film is quite the enigma, really. It's a 30 minute OVA with a little hentai at the beginning with a nameless character, with another short scene about half into the movie. Otherwise it's a few panty and cleavage shots scattered throughout. The animation, voice acting and music is all quite good, despite the obvious stolen Ghibli art. It's like they almost tried to make a legitimate anime but didn't have enough time or money, and instead resulted with a complete inane mess of insipid storytelling and lackluster sex scenes. It's quite boring, really, and nothing really happens, making it fairly hard to recommend. Damn shame and a misuse of talent.

I know there are more Nausicaa clones out there amid the mass amount of anime, manga and videogames, and I'm almost certain I had at least one more I was going to put on this list. I'll conclude this for now, and am fairly certain there will be a part two. Have YOU seen any Nausicaas lately? Let me know if you strike paydirt; I pay good money. I almost put Rall on here from Cream Lemon, but I didn't think flying on a mehve thingy and having a talking companion that occasionally rode on her shoulder should count. Til next time.