It’s official.
Haruhi season 2 is coming!
The latest issue of Newtype has the exclusive… It’s supposed to go onsale on the 10th but apparently the scans have been leaked… Not much details, though. Thanks to Kyon for informing me.
Oh great, another S$400 worth of DVDs coming my way soon. Hail Haruhi!
US Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.
It’s time for another rant that is completely unrelated to the theme of this blog because I just felt like it. Fourth of July just ended a few hours ago for the folks in the Land of the Free. While dropping in and out of consciousness during a particularly boring Maths lecture on integration and volume of a disk of revolution, my mind wandered and — by a random firing of neurons — I ended up thinking about the birthday of what is, or was, arguably the greatest nation in the world.
Warning: Long Rant Ahead.
School Days is a 2005 AVG from Overflow that featured fully voiced and animated gameplay. Thanks partly to its infamous blood-soaked “bad ends”, the game achieve cult status in otakudom and can be said to be the first and, thus far, only hit for the obscure studio. A sequel starring Setsuna Kiyoura, the most popular sub-heroine in the original game, called SummerDays was thrown together in less time than it takes for snow to melt in an August afternoon, and the result wasn’t very good. At all.
Anyway, the first episode of School Days 2007 aired this morning and I managed to obtain a copy via Bittor… Haitian black voodoo magic. The first episode is pretty much a blow-by-blow remake of the first chapter of the game with a few minute changes. So, how does it compare? Continue reading for my expert fanboy opinions.
Hot news! A PSP game based on Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu is coming our way. The publisher is Bandai Namco and the official site is supposed to come online on July 10, more than two weeks from now.
According to the place-holder page on the official site, more details will be revealled in the upcoming issues of The Sneaker (30/6), Comptiq (10/7), Newtype (10/7), Gekkan Shounen Ace Assault (10/7) and Degenki PlayStation (13/7).
[ Sources: Famitsu | Impress Watch | Kotaku ]
So… what do you think it’s gonna be? AVG? Rhythm? (i.e. Hare Hare Revoluton) Platform? Detective? Ren’ai? My bet is on a puzzler. They are easy to make and good for exploiting fanboys.
That said, I just recently sold off my import PSP. Still, being an easily-exploitable fanboy, I will probably be getting this game. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have a stack of other useless UMD games left on my shelf… One more won’t hurt. And who knows, maybe I’ll get myself a second generation PSP when it eventually arrives.
For no particular reason whatsoever, the lyrics section now has its own RSS 2.0 feed! Woohoo! The feed displays the ten latest translations and comes in either English or Japanese.
Because the whole database and PHP interface for the lyrics section were thrown together haphazardly by me some time ago, I now have absolutely zero idea what all the original code does. So instead of modifying existing functions, the PHP backend for the RSS feed is almost completely new and full of redundant code. Yay!
On another note, the latest song added was Inori～You Raise Me Up by Lena Park. I have yet to translate the song, but the romaji is done. Translation is done.
I seem to have a habit of loading up Aegisub whatever my exams draw close… I just spent a few hours subbing the PV for Uninstall for no particular reason. I didn’t use any fancy effects this time, just a bunch of \kf, \fad and \move.
( Torrent the video | Direct download )
The video gets a little desynced near the end. I encoded it five times with different settings but to no avail. I think it’s something to do with using AviSynth to load the WMV source file. Oh well.
I really like the PV. :) Continue reading for the YouTube version. (Though you can’t really make out the subtitles…)
“Uninstall” by Chiaki Ishikawa is the awesome opening of Bokurano. Chiaki is the vocal half of the popular duo See-Saw (the other half being Yuki Kajiura). Although her voice is superb, most of her songs outside of See-Saw have been at best above average. So it comes as quite a surprise that Uninstall managed to pull it off without Yuuka’s composing.
[audio:uninstall.mp3]I wanted to order the first press but both Amazon and Neowing ran out… :( You can still get the regular edition, though.
Read on for the lyrics.
Continue reading
I don’t like it when it gets used on digg to the point of being clichéd, but truly “the title says it all” is appropriate.
I would like to introduce you to Rosario + Vampire, a very enjoyable manga series which seems to fall under the radars of most people for some reason. It’s about a guy called Tsukune Aono who accidentally enrols in a school for monsters and demons and end up with a harem of supernatural beings. The heroine is Moka Akashiya, a vampire, who falls in love with Tsukune(‘s blood) at first sight. Then there’s the succubus, the witch girls and the ice girl.
Anyway, the latest issue of Shounen Jump comes with an announcement that Rosario will be made into an anime series soon! There was a drama CD that was released some time ago so I guess this doesn’t really comes as a surprised. Now assuming the cast remains the same (which is highly likely), this is what it should be:
Tsukune Aono: Daisuke Kishio
Moka Akashiya: Nana Mizuki
Kurumu Kuruno: Misato Fukuen
Yukari Sendou: Kimiko Koyama
Mizore Shirayuki: Rie Kugimiya
Shizuka Nekonome: Kikuko Inoue
Gin’ei Morioka: Tomokazu Seki
The manga is at around volume 9 now, I think. The story gets really…emo towards the later parts, but the plot is pretty interesting and surprisingly it doesn’t revolve around Tsukune’s harem. If nothing goes wrong, the anime should be worth a try.
Gundam 00 was announced with a short promo that aired at the end of a recent episode of Towards the Terra. Set in 2307 AD, the story revolves around four Gundam pilots who look damn gay and some silly organization that wants to end all wars for good, possibly by fighting one. How many times have we heard that one before?
The promo on the official site is distributed via Bandai Channel, which means those of us who are not in Japan cannot access it. Therefore I have embedded the YouTube version above.
Where are the pretty girls? :(
[ Source: Gunota Headlines ]
