The postman brought me a present today. Yay! The kind folks at E2046 decided to send me their latest creation, 1/6 Dark Magician, for me to review. Apparently they really liked my review of their pre-painted recast of BUBBA’s Haruhi bunny.
It’s not the kind of moé stuff that I usually review, but it’s still pretty cool. And free stuff is always good in my book (unless they are bad).
It’s somewhat NSFW so make sure no one is looking over your shoulders…
Genshiken is a manga series about an anime/manga/game club in a Japanese university. The title is short for gendai shikaku bunka kenkyuukai, or “The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture”. Basically it’s an excuse for a bunch of otaku and fujoshi to have a room to hang out after school and make funny references to Gundam and ero-games.
The second season just started airing last night and I’ve got a few bones to pick…
Prism Ark (aka Prism Hearts II) is a 2006 SRPG/ADV game from Pajamas Soft. The heroine, Priecia, is the daughter of the main characters from the original Prism Heart. She’s voiced by Yui Sakakibara, aka Haruhi from Happiness!.
The general premise of the game is turn-based strategy role-playing etc, and I sort of recall the game having a few somewhat innovative features in its battle system but I can’t remember what exactly.
I thought the game wasn’t that great despite all the hype and I didn’t think the anime adaptation would be anything special either. But Priecia is kind of cute so I gave episode one a try.
It’s the new Gundam series that’s not SEED! Gundam 00 looks like it’s missing a 7 and I still can’t figure out what it’s supposed to mean. It does look kind of weird and funny if you abbreviate the title to “G00“, so I shall refer to it as such for the rest of this entry.
The title aside, I actually enjoyed the first episode. Unlike every other Gundam series ever, no mobile suits were stolen in this episode, although for a moment it looked like one was about to be but it was just a false alarm. That’s good news.
I just caught the first episode of Da Capo II and, as a long-time fan of the game and the franchise in general, I must say, “WTF!?” The whole episode is just one huge blasphemy.
But if you have never heard of the series before or if, heaven forbids, you are a Koko fan, then it’s actually a pretty decent first episode of a series that’s clearly trying its best to differentiate itself from its source material. But I am a fanboy and I find the overall lack of Nanaka to be highly disturbing.
What is wrong with the picture below, other than its terrible camera phone picture quality?
Hint: this is as far as the door opens.
Answer lies after the break.
With the fall of Geneon USA‘s DVD sales department, are we looking at the beginning of the doom of all anime as we know it? Some people seem to think so. After all, Geneon is well-liked by fans and its releases receive positive reviews from most, there seems to be no reason why they should be in trouble now, having started operation half a decade before anyone in North America has even heard of Pikachu. It’s tempting to point fingers and, just like the Napsters of the music industry, it didn’t take long before fansubs are getting blamed for everything from the death of anime to Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.
I have uncovered the secret law of the universe. Click to find out…
If you don’t get the joke, go study calculus. I should really be revising for my exams next week. I hate chemistry.
Winamp 5.5 Beta (Build 1550) was released yesterday. The major changes in this update are album art support, a SingleUI skin and a new unified meta editor for all various file formats.
Winamp 5.5 Beta Preview 1 (Bento Skin)
I love the new skin. It’s called Bento and it looks really neat. It has a dedicated box to display the various information for the current song, unlike most other skins which display only as much as you are willing to cramp into the scrolling song ticker. The also makes use of the new album art support and displays the album cover in a little box next to the song information. I like it so much that I ended up spending nearly six hours going through music folders to resize and format my cover scans… <_<
Apparently it’s a sample of some content that Bandai is planning for Suzumiya Haruhi no Yakusoku‘s (the PSP game) homepage. It’s hard to do nice-looking cel-shaded 3D models and I think this one is pretty damn good. It uses MotionPortrait technology from a company by the same name. (I guess they don’t do much else.)
