Paul Kuliniewicz

Even “better” than the Mega Man box art: here he has an arm cannon and a gun!

Having now completed a play-through of Mega Man 9, I can safely say that it ranks right up there with Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3.

The level design in the Dr. Wily stages is very impressive, balancing the fine line between challenging and unfair. You’ll die plenty of times — I certainly did — but each time you’ll know it’s because you screwed up, not because something came out of left field and killed you. There’s plenty of ways to meet a quick death, but never without first giving you a chance to figure out a new type of obstacle in a relatively benign environment. The level design loves to play with your expectations, with lots of twists on mechanics you’ve seen (or think you’ve seen) before. By the time you reach the screen deep in Wily Stage 3 with three 1-ups in it, you’ll know to be on your guard, even if you don’t yet know why.

A fantastic instance of challenging the player’s expectations comes in one of the screens in Wily Stage 1. I won’t spoil it for you, but if you’ve played the game, you know exactly the one I’m talking about. It took me a long time to figure out the trick needed to avoid certain death, and it’s sure to fool Mega Man veterans — heck, especially Mega Man veterans — the first time they encounter it. Whoever at Inti Creates who came up with it is a diabolical genius.

Plus, in retrospect, it’s amazing it’s taken this long for Mega Man to enter a boss’s chamber from the right side of the screen instead of the left.

The bosses in the Wily Stages are also excellent. They nicely avoid the cliche that Mega Man 4 and later fell into of a series of well-drawn but unremarkable screen-sized bosses with a single weak point. Each one here is unique, ranging from a sort of reverse tug-of-war using giant spiked balls, to a multi-screen behemoth, to a twist on a classic Mega Man boss that requires pattern memorization and/or getting into the zone to beat.

Also, Dr. Wily finally realized how effective the mandatory skull-themed robot he pilots during the final battle could be if he made the whole thing out of whatever alloy it is that deflects all of Mega Man’s weapons. And not to spoil the ending, but he even seems to have anticipated his inevitable defeat, beyond just having an escape plan.

Alas, though, the game isn’t perfect. Dr. Wily’s final form sadly follows the stale “disappearing and reappearing saucer” thing that started in Mega Man 4. I never cared much for that type of final battle, though at least the weapons available this time give you a few options for hitting the saucer when it’s well outside of jumping range. Also, even though Rush Jet works just fine underwater, I would’ve kind of liked to see the return of Rush Marine for that purpose, just because.

If I may boast for a second, I managed to get about 25% of the challenges completed on this first play-through quite by accident, including half the beat-a-robot-master-under-10-seconds ones and the one that involves never stopping in one stage (Galaxy Man’s stage for me, if you’re wondering). (I’ve also managed to beat Dr. Wily’s first two forms without taking damage, but there’s no prize for that.) I don’t know if I’ll ever pull off the harder ones like the never-miss-a-shot or never-take-damage ones, or even the tedious ones like beat-the-game-five-times-in-a-day, but I’ll definitely be playing through the game many more times.

Peeking at the downloadable content coming next month, there’ll be options for increasing the difficulty even more, and adding an option to play as Proto Man. Arguably these could’ve easily been part of the main game, but given that I would’ve gladly paid $20 for Mega Man 9 as-is instead of $10, I really can’t complain about shelling out another $8 for all the extras.

Inti Creates could’ve easily relied on exploiting old-school Mega Man nostalgia and produced a lump of 8-bit shovelware, but they took the effort to recreate the quality of those games, not just their appearance. If there is a Mega Man 10 in the offing, let’s hope they don’t start slacking off.

Mega Man 9 is shaping up to be precisely as awesome as I had hoped. If you wish to remain unspoiled in regards to this awesomeness, you best stop reading right now.

First off, they’ve nailed the old-school Mega Man look and feel and sound. One could imagine an alternate universe where this game came out after Mega Man 2. Except for being able to save your game instead of scribbling down grid passwords. And the challenges ranging from easy (kill a robot master using only the Mega Buster… yeah, that’s how you have to kill the first one) to nigh-impossible (beat the game without taking damage!). And the online leaderboard for speed-running the game. And the hooks for downloadable content. But hey, the menus for all those things are downright 8-bit.

The plot is, well, nobody plays a Mega Man game for the plot, and Mega Man 9 delivers what you’d expect, with the right amount of ridiculousness in the no-seriously-Dr.-Wily-isn’t-the-villain-this-time-honest!-ness. Eight of Dr. Light’s robots are running amok, and Dr. Wily insists that he’s finally reformed right before Dr. Light turned evil (and if you donate money to Dr. Wily’s Swiss bank account, you can fund development of something to stop Dr. Light’s robots!). Apparently everyone swallows this, and it’s up to Mega Man to blast some sense into the robot masters after Dr. Light’s arrest. (Why the police apparently have no qualms about Mega Man, clearly Dr. Light’s deadliest creation ever given his undefeated record against dozens of Dr. Wily’s robots, running free while all this is going on, has not yet been addressed.)

The level design has been pretty good, putting new and interesting spins on the classic elements. Anyone who’s ever played a Mega Man game knows that eventually they’ll come across two things: disappearing blocks over spikes and/or pits, and multi-screen drops through spike-lined corridors. I’ve played two levels so far, each fairly arbitrarily chosen, and I’ve already seen both.

Plug Man’s stage has several disappearing block sections, and manages to find new tricks with them that previous games never tried. I wonder how many players will fall to their doom when a block suddenly appears in front of the platform they were trying to jump to. Nice. (In fairness, you could very much see that coming if you bothered to watch the pattern before you started jumping around.)

Splash Woman’s stage has the spike drops. Early on, you land on a platform in the middle of the screen. The left drop has no spikes, the right one does. You get to choose which one to jump down. Choose wisely, and you can get a 1-up. Later on, you have to go up a series of spike-lined rooms, relying on platforms that slide across the screen to reach the next ladder. In a way, it’s like a block puzzle mixed with a spike drop, in reverse. I haven’t gotten past the third screen without wimping out and using Rush Coil to avoid the pair of spikes deviously placed in the dead center of the room, but I’m sure it can be done.

So far, even when there’s clearly inspiration from a previous game, there’s something new in the implementation here that keeps it from being the series of retreads that Mega Man 7 wound up as. Again in Splash Woman’s stage, the part where you have to ride bubbles to the top of the screen is straight out of Wave Man’s stage in Mega Man 5, but this time (a) it’s underwater, so you can jump really well, and (b) enemies shoot out at you from the sides of the screen.

The attention to detail is pretty nifty, too. Get hit by an octopus’s ink blob in Splash Woman’s stage, and Mega Man stays covered in ink until you switch to a different weapon. You can also buy a “book of hairstyles” from the item shop on the stage select screen to take off your helmet… until you die. There’s also a “book of costumes”, which I haven’t tried yet, but from its icon I’m assuming it dresses Mega Man up as Roll. (For the record, there are also items available which are actually useful, if you’re in to that sort of thing.)

The robot masters themselves haven’t disappointed so far. Plug Man’s shots travel along the floor, up the wall behind you, onto the ceiling, and then drop down right above you head, so you have to keep your eye both on what Plug Man is doing and the shots you’ve already dodged once. Splash Woman swims to the top of the screen while fish move across the screen, and then she drops tridents on you. The Mega Buster is much more effective against hear than Plug Man’s weapon.

Another great nostalgic thing: Splash Woman and I managed to kill each other simultaneously, just like the first time I won-for-all-intents-and-purposes-even-though-the-game-didn’t-count-it against Cut Man way back in the original Mega Man. And just like then, Mega Man 9 counted it as a death rather than a victory. On my final life. Game over.

Count yourself sort-of-lucky, Splash Woman, for your days are numbered. Specifically, numbered 1, since tomorrow night it’s go time.

Last weekend I bought Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1, and spent entirely too much time this past week playing through it.

I was curious about the game for two reasons. First, I like Penny Arcade, which happens to be the very first webcomic I was introduced to, way back when I was a freshman. Second, they actually produced a Linux version of the game, which you see pretty rarely in the world of commercial games. It seems like the sort of thing I should encourage.

Since they had a free demo of the game, I was first able to see if the game would actually run on my four-year-old laptop, which meets the minimum specs, barely. It does, albeit with swapping everything else out of RAM on startup and taking a long time to switch between areas. But doing the game itself, performance is acceptable, at least one you get used to the slight amount of lag in areas where timing is important. (Most noticeable in the Vandalism minigame, where I’d need to hit the space bar when the meter was centered over the left or right stack if I wanted it to stop over the center one.) Of course, this is more the fault of my old, ill-suited-for-gaming hardware; the game is indeed entirely playable.

The demo got me hooked, and the rest of the game didn’t disappoint. The battle system is nicely done, encouraging you to do more elaborate things than just “attack enemies until they die” to get the bonuses. There’s no random encounters — in fact, enemies never respawn, period, so there’s no grindiness to be found. Plus, you get to beat up barbershop quartets, which is always fun.

Really, the game is largely devoid of the typical set of annoyances you find in games. No random battles. A “Case Log” that reminds you what needs to be done to advance the plot. Auto-saving after any significant event (including battles). Automatic healing after battles. A tutorial level (the demo) where the tutorial content is both entertaining and skippable. You can tell the game was designed by people who play a lot of games, and decided not to put in the things that make games stop being fun.

But where the game really shines, naturally, is the humor. All the cutscenes are filled with precisely the sort of dialog you’d expect from Penny Arcade. My favorite, for some reason, is when the player tries to get a reaction out of The Silent Pope by singing The Name Game for “mime”, pausing after each line to wait for a response.

The game is fairly small in scope, but the level of detail is impressive. Loads of things on each screen have a humorous description or two to be found when you click on them. It turns out there’s a lot of things you can say about trash cans, or ice cream cones dropped on the boardwalk. It’s also a nice touch to have the little robots — you know the ones — say “01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011″, which means exactly what you think it does.

And for the record, the cat is not worthless. It is possible for its attack to do non-negligible damage, and it happens with greater than the roughly 1-in-2,000,000 probability claimed in-game.

Now they just need to come out with the next episode. My character needs revenge. And a house.

[Editor's note: You knew this was coming eventually. Deal with it.]

Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone, the first movie in a four-part “Rebuild” remake of Neon Genesis Evangelion, was recently released on DVD in Japan. And while no distributors have apparently bought the rights to print money release it in the U.S. yet, a little thing like that’s not going to stop me from reviewing it.

As with any remake of something, there’s the question of how closely it will follow the original. Something has to be different about the remake, or else what’s the point of making it? (The answer: shamelessly cashing in.) There’s the opportunity to improve on the original and trim the filler. But there’s also the trap of losing what made the original good, and deviating from what fans liked about the original will lead them to declare that the remake sucks.

In other words, a good remake needs to stick to the original, but do something different, but not too different. And in this case, keep in mind that anime fandom is more, well, fanatical, than a survivor of the Kirk-Picard flamewars wearing a “Han Shot First” T-shirt. Squared. We’re talking about fans that sent the director death threats over how the series ended. Screw up the remake, and you can imagine how they’ll react.

So, does 1.0 pull it off?

Yes.

When it’s raining angel blood, you do (not) want to know what’s in the pot at the end of the rainbow.

The first half of the movie roughly corresponds with the first four episodes of the series. Well, “roughly” might not be the right word, since most of the scenes are virtually lifted directly from it. They’re redrawn and reanimated everything in much higher quality, granted, but the scenes in the movie reproduce the originals almost shot-by-shot.

Of course, squeezing four 25-minute episodes into about 50 minutes of movie means that the scenes that aren’t copied from the series pretty much get left out entirely. Given that the episodes in question didn’t have much filler to begin with, the pacing of the movie ends up being way too fast, rushing from one major plot point to another. Shinji’s relationship with his classmates, for example, is cut to the bare minimum: he gets punched; he rescues them during battle; they apologize. That’s it. If you haven’t seen the series, you’ll wind up wondering why you should even care. Likewise, Shinji running away — the bulk of episode 4 — gets reduced to a few minutes on screen.

As a result, the first half gives you prettier graphics but poorer storytelling.

Once the movie gets to episode 5’s material, however, the pacing slows to something more manageable and the movie starts realizing its potential. The basic plot of episodes 5 and 6 is mostly unchanged, but the scenes start unfolding differently, so it no longer comes across as something you’ve already seen, but rather as a different take on the same story.

Nothing can defeat the quad laser.

The first engagement with the fifth sixth angel, Ramiel, illustrates this dramatically. In the series, Unit 01 deploys, immediately gets the bejeezus lasered out of it, and is promptly (after an end-of-episode cliffhanger) lowered back underground. In the movie, the fight is much more elaborate. Ramiel is no longer merely an animation-budget-saving regular octohedron, but now shapeshifts before each attack like a cross between an evil Rubik’s cube and the Windows flower box screensaver. Now instead of having Unit 01 retreat immediately, NERV raises a blast shield to block the laser, and Ramiel responds by firing a quad laser to melt through the shield. With the launcher melted by the blast, NERV rescues Unit 01 by blowing the supports and lowering the entire city block until Unit 01 is out of sight.

Just about all the scenes building up to the sniping mission at the climax of the movie are similarly “epic’d up” and made more elaborate, which ends up working quite well. The core of the plot stays unchanged, which is good; there weren’t any problems with episode 6 story-wise, but seeing its events rendered on more than a shoestring budget is appreciated.

But given how closely the storyline follows the series, it’s particular interesting to note the ways in which it explicitly diverges from the series, and speculate how they’ll play out over the next three movies. [Spoilers ahead.]

First, as I noted in passing, the angel that attacks the city in the opening scene, Sachiel, is now designated the fourth angel, rather than the third; the other angels that appear in the movie have their enumeration similarly adjusted. (Now I get to look up their names so as to refer to them unambiguously. Yay.) So what’s the third angel going to turn out to be? Hmmmmm.

Then there’s an added scene where Shinji is stuck between mope and angst (i.e., being Shinji) before the final battle against Ramiel. As part of a pep talk, Misato takes him down to Terminal Central Dogma, shows him Lilith, and tells him that NERV is defending it because if an angel reaches it, that will cause Third Impact and wipe out mankind. In the series, everything involving Lilith is a very closely guarded secret; Misato only discovers it when Kaji shows it to her in the second half of the series (and he only found out about it by snooping around being a triple agent), and even then they mistakenly think it’s Adam. The fact that in the movie Misato apparently knows all about it already is interesting to say the least.

SEELE’s space program was funded by cutting the janitorial budget.

Finally (literally), there’s an added scene at the end, immediately following what was the final scene in episode 6, that opens up all kinds of questions. Apparently there’s some kind of secret SEELE base on the moon, where Kaworu (!) and a SEELE monolith make cryptic comments to each other, and we see a Lilith-looking thing in a pit (!) in the middle of a bloody swath across the lunar landscape (!) with Earth and its blood-red oceans (!) hanging in the background.

I mean, in a post-Second-Impact economy, how exactly does an organization, secret or otherwise, manage to construct a lunar base? Especially when that organization had already committed to constructing what are effectively giant fighting robots, and a city that retracts into the ground for them to fight in and only partially destroy with the collateral damage.

Plus, Kaworu’s totally not wearing a helmet. Or, um, anything else. Moving on….

Now that the Cylons have an Evangelion, humanity is frakked.

Then there’s the next episode movie preview after the credits, revealing even more surprises. Intermixed with events from the series (Asuka and Unit 02 deploying; Unit 04’s destruction; the fight with the thirteenth whateverth angel, Bardiel) are things without any analogue in the series: Unit 05 deploying, weird ghost-and-halo-looking things bracketed by the text “ADAMS” (!) and “LILIN+?”, Unit 06 descending from the moon (!), and a new pilot. Needless to say, Evangelion 2.0: Division is going to diverge quite a bit from episodes 7 through 18.

(If you’re wondering how quick the pacing the movie would have to be to cover all that, keep in mind that episodes 7 through 13 have a lot of filler and you could safely cut entire episodes without too much damage to the story.)

Here’s my theory: the secret backstory from the series is the cover story used by NERV in the Rebuild continuity. Misato doesn’t actually know the truth about Lilith, because it’s a different truth this time around, thus suckering fans of the original series into thinking they know what’s going on as well. I don’t know what the truth is going to be, but a hint might lie in a comment one of the SEELE monoliths makes to Gendo about needing to fulfill a “contract with Lilith”. Whether that’s literal or metaphorical, I don’t know.

Or, as Gendo said in End of Evangelion, “The truth is, _____________.”

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot or lookin’ at a thing in a pit.

Another theory: the creature in the pit on the moon is the as-yet-unnamed third angel. Kaworu makes a cryptic comment about “the third again, huh?” while looking at it. Though “the third” could refer to Shinji (the third child), since Kaworu’s next line mentions him while looking up at Earth. If that’s the case, than the thing in the pit would be a naked Unit 06, before its armor/restraints have been put on. But why would SEELE be building Unit 06 on the moon in the first place, unless there were a very good reason for it, such as cloning it from the as-yet-unrevealed third angel, if it’s also there somewhere? We’ve seen Lilith (the second angel) under NERV headquarters, and presumably Adam (the first angel) was in Antarctica and caused the Second Impact, just as in the series.

“Presumably.” But by my first theory, the secret backstory in the movies are different, so Second Impact could’ve had some other cause, since none of the details surrounding it have been mentioned in the movie yet. Hmmmm.

Or, a less out-in-left-field theory would be that Kaworu has been designated the third angel this time around (instead of the seventeenth), but that doesn’t explain what’s on the moon, or why Unit 06 would come from there, or why NERV would know anything about Kaworu to begin with — in the series, SEELE sent him to NERV as a replacement for Asuka, and they didn’t realize he was an angel until he took over Unit 02 and took it down to Terminal Dogma in episode 24, thinking he’d find Adam there.

So, even though the movie closely follows the storyline of the first six episodes, streamlining and possibly simplifying it, there’s just enough changes and added material to launch rampant wild speculation among fans of the series to try to figure out what’s really going on. The director, Hideaki Anno, managed to figure out a way to cater both to newcomers and the existing fanbase, and did so without ruining any of the classic scenes in the first set of episodes in the series.

Well played.

The old 1960s Batman movie would, by any objective measure, be awful, if not for how awesome it is in its sheer, unmitigated ridiculousness.

Properly documenting all the examples of why this is so would end up reproducing the plot in full, so I’ll focus on a few highlights. In the first action sequence, Batman fights off a shark biting his leg while holding on to the Bat-Ladder hanging from the Bat-Copter. (Spoiler alert: Batman ultimately fends it off with Bat-Shark-Repellant, which is stored on the Bat-Copter alongside repellant sprays for other marine life.) What makes the scene great is how not only is the shark obviously made of rubber, but as Batman punches it, it makes exactly the sound you’d expect from someone punching a rubber shark.

Also, when the shark is ultimately dislodged, it falls into the sea and explodes. In case you’re wondering why the United Underworld (i.e., The Joker + The Penguin + The Riddler + Catwoman; see also: greatest team-up ever) didn’t rig the shark to explode when it bit Batman’s leg, well, obviously then the movie would only be a few minues long.

If that doesn’t convince you of my thesis, then consider the fight scene in the Bat-Cave that, in my opinion, reveals the truth behind Batman’s superpowers. To set this up, the villans have obtained an instant dehydration gun that reduces anybody to a pile of powder. The Penguin does this to five henchmen and scoops the powder into separate vials. He then disguises himself as the person the villans stole said dehydration gun from, and introduces himself to Batman and Robin.

The Dynamic Duo immediately see through his ploy — the nose and talking like Jon Stewart impersonating Dick Cheney are dead giveaways — yet for some reason see the need to scientifically prove The Penguin’s identity to The Penguin, so they take him to the Bat-Cave, which apparently has the only retinal scanner on the planet. Once there, The Penguin goes over to the Drinking Water Dispenser — like everything in the Bat-Cave, it is prominently labeled with its function — and hooks the vials up to it, thus rehydrating his henchmen.

However, while doing so, The Penguin accidentally moves the Drinking Water Dispenser’s control lever — let me remind you, this is a machine expressly for dispensing drinking water — from the “light water” setting to the “heavy water” setting. Yes, heavy water, which Batman later points out is also used in the Bat-Cave’s nuclear reactor. Obviously, this error results in the henchmen vanishing into nothingness as soon as anything hits them (something to do with antimatter, I think).

There is only one possible explanation for why anyone would ever connect a source of heavy water to what is, let’s face it, an overgrown drinking fountain. (Wow, all technology really was bigger back then.)

Batman drinks heavy water.

No wonder Batman can breathe in space.

And there’s loads more where that came from. The Joker and The Penguin wear masks across their eyes while pulling off various heists, apparently oblivious to the fact that they’re still dressed as The Joker and The Penguin. The Pentagon sells a fully armed surplus submarine to someone named P. N. Guin, and the admiral Batman talks to is oblivious to how selling something like that to someone who won’t even leave his address is not a good idea. The Riddler accidentally shoots down the Bat-Copter with a Polaris missile, but no one is hurt as the copter crash-lands on a pile of foam rubber. And, as Batman so eloquently observes, “some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!”

If I somehow still haven’t convinced you as to how awesome this movie is, how about this: Jet Pack Umbrellas.

But if strangely creepy is more your thing, try this on for size. The villans scheme to lure Batman into a fiendish trap (spoiler alert: it involves a jack-in-the-box and an exploding octopus) by kidnapping Bruce Wayne and holding him hostage. They lure him into a trap by dropping a riddle suggesting that “Kitka” (i.e., Catwoman not dressed like Catwoman) is going to be kidnapped, which leads Bruce into asking her out. Suspecting the villans will move against “Kitka” during the date, Bruce has Robin and Alfred-wearing-a-mask shadow them inconspicuously in the Batmobile and watch what’s going on on a monitor, presumably hooked up to an otherwise unmentioned Gotham-wide Bat-survillance-camera-network. (Holy 1984, Batman!)

The date ultimately leads back to Catwoman’s apartment, and it’s not hard to decode 1960s euphemisms for what Bruce is expecting to go on there. He shows no compunction, despite knowing Robin and Alfred are supposed to be watching all of this. That is, outside, in the car, in the dark, his young ward and his old manservant, one of whom is wearing tights and the other is also disguised, are supposed to be watching him “further international relations” with “Kitka”.

Fortunately, the disturbing potential of that setup is stopped by the intervention of, yes, Jet Pack Umbrellas.

In conclusion, I want a Jet Pack Umbrella, in case I ever need to escape from exploding marine life.

I recently discovered by a lucky accident that Netflix has the old (i.e., from 1981) Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV series available. It was obvious what had to be done.

Unfortunately, the disc Netflix shipped to me at first was, in topological terms, a sphere rather than a torus. I almost panicked, due to the lack of any instructions in large friendly letters on the packaging to the contrary, but instead of throwing in the towel, I reported the problem and got a structurally intact disc.

The six-episode series follows the plot of the books a lot more faithfully than the movie. (Yes, I know the TV series is based on the original radio play, which the books were also based on. Sheesh, it says so right there in the title graphic. Quit being so pedantic.) The storyline runs from the demolition of the Earth by the Vogons through to Magrathea and Milliways and up to Arthur and Ford being stranded with the Golgafrinchans on prehistoric Earth.

Without a doubt, the best part of the series are the sequences narrated by The Guide, with accompanying fake “computer” animations. Of course, this is hardly surprising, since Douglas Adams’s narrative style is a large part of what makes the books so great, and The Guide’s scenes allow that to come through with full force. The animations also supply some nice supplementary material, such as examples of the first and second worst forms of poetry in the universe that put Vogon poetry to shame.

It goes without saying that if you’re a fan of the books (and who isn’t?), you’ll like the series too. There’s only a few things to quibble with. One of them is Zaphod’s second head. Can you tell which one is the fake one? It’s supposed to be animatronic, but you hardly ever see it move at all, except for bouncing around on the actor’s shoulder as he moves around due to inertia. I know, I know, there’s really no good way to do the whole two-heads-side-by-side thing in live action, especially with 1980s special effects. And to be fair, at least they tried; the movie punted by making the heads one on top of the other, with the second head conveniently hidden from view most of the time, and even then they contrived a way to get rid of it entirely in very not-at-all-in-the-book subplot. So they did do about as well as anyone could expect with Zaphod. But still, it looks goofy.

There’s also one other thing. When the Heart of Gold enters orbit around Magrathea and the planet’s nuclear missiles launch, the Guide is careful to point out in advance that everyone is going to survive the attack and that no one will get hurt aside from one of them getting bruised on the upper arm (but won’t say who it is in order to preserve some level of suspense). Given that warning, why oh why does the Guide not warn the viewer about the scene where you see Douglas Adams’s man-ass on display? I mean, seriously.

(No, I’m not going to tell you when that happens in the series. Be glad you’re at least getting a heads-up.)

But needless to say, the series is worth watching, especially if you’re one of those people who thought the movie was OK but wished it didn’t diverge from the books so much. You know who you are.

Until recently, the only Metroid game I had played to any non-negligible degree was the original Metroid, which while a decent enough game, wasn’t particularly one of my favorites. After a while all the corridors start to look the same, and when you couple that with no built-in mapping function, it’s pretty easy to get completely lost. The need to randomly bomb everywhere in the dead ends to look for crucial secret passages that have no visual cues whatsoever didn’t help a lot either. While I could certainly appreciate the significance of the game, I never became much of a fan of it.

My history with first-person shooters is even less illustrious. The last one of those I ever played to any significant degree was, I believe, the shareware version of Rise of the Triad, back in the days when not only was Pluto a planet, but it was the eighth planet as far as distance from the sun goes. Of course, I’ve played Halo deathmatches, but considering my paucity of FPS skills, would usually get schooled in short order.

Furthermore, heretofore, I hate coming in to the middle of something, be it watching the sequel to a movie I haven’t seen, or starting to watch a TV show midseason, or even missing the first few minutes of a movie.

So, considering that Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a first-person shooter Metroid game which is the sequel to another first-person shooter Metroid game, I didn’t have particularly high expectations going in. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long before I got addicted.

Being a Metroid game, Echoes emphasizes exploration rather than running around shooting things. The game will mercilessly tease you with doors and items lying just out of reach, starting with the very first room, that are inaccessible until you get the right power-up. (And if you’re like me, you’ll be cursing all those yellow doors and Denzium-saturated rocks long before you finally get the Power Bombs necessary to blast them apart.) Of course, this makes each upgrade exciting, because now all sorts of areas suddenly open up to explore to find still more upgrades and missile expansions and energy tanks and whatnot.

In that respect, it’s a lot like the original Metroid, but this time around you have a map, all the rooms are visually distinctive, and your Scan Visor will highlight anything of interest in your field of view. In other words, it’s Metroid without the annoyances of the original.

As far as the plot goes, you start off by crash-landing on the planet Aether, on a mission to find out what happened to a ship full of space marines who were chasing a ship full of space pirates. It doesn’t take long to find out they’re all dead, but you’re soon recruited by the last surviving not-cryo-frozen Luminoth to save his species and the planet itself (literally) from being destroyed by the Ing, who live in a Dark World-ish parallel universe.

You’re probably supposed to assume Samus takes on the job because that’s what the good guy girl’s supposed to do, but since she never actually says anything in the game, I’ve decided the real reason is that she needs to get her good equipment back from the Ing who mugged her (how exactly do you mug a walking tank?) early in the game, and besides, her ship’s busted and its auto-repair just so happens to require exactly the same amount of time as it will take to save the world.

Now I know what you’re saying: “This game is called Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, yet you haven’t mentioned any Metroid Prime or any Echoes! What’s the deal?” Have no fear. One of the recurring enemies you face is Dark Samus, the eponymous villain from the original Metroid Prime mutated into a doppelgänger of Samus. Also, one of the upgrades you get in the game is the Echo Visor, which uses echolocation to display the room and lets you visualize any sonic emitters that might be around. Happy now?

Anyway, from what I’ve gathered of Luminoth war strategy, it’s no wonder they got so resoundingly beaten by the Ing:

• They spent too little time developing effective weapons and way too much time developing locks for their doors. Missile doors, Super Missile doors, Power Bomb doors, Seeker Missile doors, Seeker Missile doors with the targets hidden in interdimensional space, Light Beam doors, Dark Beam doors, Annihilator Beam doors, doors with sonic locking systems…. How exactly are you going to move troops from one area to another when the enemy can slip between dimensions at will but you need an entire arsenal for a keychain?
• They then hid all their good equipment. By all means, establish armories and lock the door, but stashing each individual item separately and hiding them behind elaborate obstacle courses is a bit much. I mean, you need to spend hours scouring half of the planet’s surface just to properly equip a small platoon.
• Yes, yes, I know, your three Energy Controllers on the surface of the planet fell to the Ing and were drained of all their energy. But don’t you think that after someone goes out of their way to go to a parallel universe, fight off hordes of nasty monsters, and use their very suit as a giant battery to bring that energy back, maybe you should put a guard in front of the Energy Controller so they don’t come back and swipe it again? I mean, they got to it when you were throwing everything you had into the defense; I don’t think a few wasps that nested in the room next door are going to cut it as a security system. The Luminoth were lucky the Ing never bothered to reverse engineer the Energy Transfer Module before Samus stole it back from them.
• OK, so you’ve been beaten back to your Great Temple floating in the sky with your Master Energy Controller and its last bit of energy being the only thing keeping your planet from being destroyed. How exactly is it a good idea to cryo-freeze all but one of the survivors, and have him just stand next to the Controller twiddling his thumbs? Did you not notice the Ing with the Energy Transfer Module in the room below you? What kind of strategy is this? I mean, say what you want about U.S. operations in Iraq, but at least we’re not planning to relocate all our troops to the middle of the Green Zone and have them nap until someone crash-lands her spaceship in the middle of Al Anbar province and decides to wipe out the insurgency and al-Qaeda while waiting for the galactic equivalent of AAA to tow her ship to a repair shop. … OK, I guess it did end up working for the Luminoth, but still.

So, in conclusion, 95% scans and 88% items in 28 hours 41 minutes, without a strategy guide. Longer if you count the times I died repeatedly trying to fight some of the bosses.

I don’t get it.

In our last installment, it was found that Japanese cartoons are weird, man. But being ever the scientist at heart, I was left with a question: just how weird can they get? Do they approach some weirdness asymptote as you get farther out, or is the weirdness unbounded? Does the knob only go to 11? Inquiring minds want to know!

I think I found the answer by watching Puni Puni Poemy, a spin-off of Excel Saga made by the same group of people. So right there, you know going into it that it’s going to be weird. But unlike its predecessor, Puni Puni Poemy blows right through mere Weird all the way to Seriously Messed Up, with a generous helping of Just Plain Wrong on the side.

You see, there’s nothing deep or meaningful about Puni Puni Poemy, no real story or significance behind it; it’s just two half-hour episodes’ worth of sheer, unabashed, frantic, no-holds-barred weirdness for the sake of being weird. And it does an outstanding job at doing so.

Allow me to give you a taste of what lurks within Puni Puni Poemy. I suppose what follows could be considered spoilers, but nobody in their right mind would watch it for the plot anyway. (You could also argue that nobody in their right mind would watch it, period.) Those who wish to keep their sanity may want to skip the next few paragraphs.

At its heart, Puni Puni Poemy is a send-up of magical girl anime, though it most certainly not geared for, let alone appropriate for, kids. Its main character is Poemy Watanabe, daughter of Nabeshin and Kumi-Kumi (aka Soup Girl), both reprising their roles from Excel Saga. Poemy can transform into magical girl Puni Puni Poemy by gutting a fish (yes, with a knife), even though she prefers just punching her enemies rather than actually using magic-type stuff, but what she really wants to be is a voice actress. However, she can’t even stay in character — she always refers to Nabeshin as “Director” (which he is) and often refers to herself in the third person as Kobayashi, the name of her character’s voice actress.

Following along so far? Good, because that’s the easy part.

One day, Poemy’s family is killed by Alien 1, a jive-talking alien with, um, interesting genetalia. Poemy returns home to find Nabeshin, Kumi-Kumi, and their pet AIBO all dead, in the most comical use of crucifixion since Life of Brian (with Xenogears getting an honorable mention). Orphaned, Poemy is taken in by the seven Aasu sisters, at the urging of Poemy’s friend Futaba Aasu, who really really really likes Poemy and isn’t at all subtle about it. The Aasu sisters turn out to be their own magical girl team to defend Earth, but their superpowers make Heart look useful (unless you consider “powers” like falling over without getting hurt or having the precognitive ability to sense an enemy while you’re fighting it “useful”). They also don’t much care for Puni Puni Poemy horning in on their turf, even though they don’t realize that that’s actually Poemy, and even then only because they both call themselves Kobayashi and babble about being a voice actress.

Still with me? Well, hang on.

Besides dreaming of being a voice actress, Poemy longs for K, a boy in her class who doesn’t like Poemy in the least. K, meanwhile, is actually the mastermind of an evil alien plot to ravish the planet. You see, as it turns out, the aliens’ reconnaisance of Earth consisted entirely of watching Japanese cartoon porn, and K’s species just happen to be tentacle monsters. He sends Alien 1 to kidnap the Aasu sisters (did I mention one of them works in an S&M dungeon?) and captures Poemy when she unwittingly comes to their rescue. K, of course, had previously sent Alien 1 to kill Nabeshin, so that with the Director dead, he’d be free to have his way with the show, which means having his way with the Aasu sisters, but not Poemy, because he hates voice actresses. However, Alien 1 and Alien 2 (who has twice the unusual dangly bits as Alien 1) reveal themselves to be Nabeshin and Kumi-Kumi in disguise — you see, Kumi-Kumi used her acupuncture skills to bring the two of them back to life. Out of desperation, K tries killing the Writer, but Nabeshin is such a Great Director that he can draw storyboards even without a script, and so Futuba and Puni Puni Poemy combine their powers to bring about world peace.

Like I said, Seriously Messed Up (and that’s just the abridged vesion of the “plot”) with a side of Just Plain Wrong. I now understand what this commenter meant. Heck, if you added a few frames here and there, animated the “hidden” scene where K, um, gets to work on the Aasu sisters, and edit out a certain duck that keeps getting in the way of the bath scenes, you’d pretty much turn the second episode into porn. Heck, according to Wikipedia the show is banned in New Zealand for some of what’s in the second episode (and if it’s on Wikipedia, it must be true).

Even though Puni Puni Poemy’s a spin-off of Excel Saga, there’s no real continuity between the two of them (aside from Nabeshin and Kumi-Kumi having gotten married in final scene of Excel Saga), though there’s quite a few references between them, from the overt (whenever Poemy auditions for a part, the other voice actresses are all dressed like Hyatt), to the subtle (Poemy’s middle school and Excel’s high school are both in the Inunabe (literally, “Dog Stew”) school district), to the meta (Poemy’s voice actress also sang the opening song for Excel Saga and played wannabe pop-idol Excel Kobayashi on it), to the lazy (pretty much all of Puni Puni Poemy’s background music is lifted directly from Excel Saga).

Nevertheless, even though the premise is all messed up and the plot makes no sense, and you’ll probably be rendered incapable of rational thought after watching it, Puni Puni Poemy is surprisingly well-executed, especially for something that essentially started off as an in-joke in Excel Saga. If you can keep up with it, there’s more than enough weirdness to revel in. And even if you can’t, there’s still plenty of visual gags.

In short, as a wise man might’ve said, it’s the sort of think you’d like, if you like that sort of thing.

Just don’t let your kids watch it.

I, Koshi Rikdo, hereby give my permission to have Excel Saga turned into a blog post about Excel Saga.

– Koshi Rikdo

So you say that you’ve built up a resistance to weirdness. You find Aqua Teen Hunger Force insufferably mainstream. You consider Katamari Damacy trite and conventional. And let’s not even get you started on how linear and predictable a three-hour slog through FLCL is.

My friend, like a marijuana user upgrading to crack, or a Unitarian Universalist converting to Fundamentialist Christianity^[0], it’s time to move you up to the harder stuff.

Allow me to introduce you to Quack Experimental Anime Excel Saga. Or, Excel Saga for short.

(Oh $DIETY, you groan, another one of those rambling-about-some-random-anime posts. I promise I’ll try to keep this one interesting. Or at least thoroughly hyperlinked and with some pictures stolen liberated from Wikipedia. Oh, and I also accidentally solve the whole peace-in-the-Middle-East thing in the process.)

Excel Saga has everything but the kitchen sink fourth wall. Robots! Parodies! Aliens! Gangsters! Terrorists! Ghosts! Anemia! Self-Insertion! Dogs! Bowling! Fan Service! Immigrants! Explosions! Exclamation Marks!!

(Fun fact: “Self-insertion” sounds a lot dirtier than it actually is.)

Excel Saga, in a nutshell, counts itself a king of infinite space is an off-the-wall gag-a-second anime that parodies and satirizes anything and everything. It spoofs and subverts just about every trope in the book and gleefully genre-shifts every episode. And despite all this chaos and confusion, it still manages to tell a coherent story of love, loyalty, betrayal, and afros.

Yes, afros. Do not underestimate the power of the afro.

A cautionary tale: Nabeshin (right, top), Pedro (right, middle), and Sandora (right, bottom) fail to use the power of the afro appropriately, and as a result are about to have their butts kicked by That Man (middle), while the Great Will of the Macrocosm and Pedro’s Sexy Wife (left) watch helplessly.

The world is corrupt! The secret ideological organization ACROSS plans to sieze control of the planet from the ignorant masses. However, “global conquest” is an objective only sought directly by fools capable of grasping only the most general of concepts, so ACROSS is focusing its efforts on Japan. And furthermore, due to limited resources, ACROSS is further concentrating on the conquest of F City, F Prefecture.

And by “limited resources,” I mean “having only two officers”: the eponymously cool saga-worthy Excel (not to be confused with the spreadsheet) and the mysterious, frail Hyatt (not to be confused with the hotel, especially not one in Cincinatti). Excel and Hyatt spend most episodes trying to execute the orders of Ilpalazzo (not to be confused with the, um, palace?^[1]), ACROSS’s leader (aside from the shadowy, rarely-mentioned ACROSS HQ in Pogota (not to be confused with Bogotá)).

Even though most of Ilpalazzo’s orders wouldn’t do much to work towards city conquest in the first place, there’s little danger of success with Excel and Hyatt on the job. Hyatt has the habit of dying frequently — not in the “Oh my God, they killed Kenny!” sense, but rather in the “she has a CON of 1″ sense. And as for Excel, what she lacks in basic competence she more than makes up for in enthusiasm and fanatical devotion to Ilpalazzo, willing and eager to do anything for (or to) him. And while they’re carrying out his orders, Ilpalazzo passes the time reading magazines, playing dating sims, and practicing guitar to fulfill his secret dream of becoming a brooding pretty-boy rock star.

ACROSS. Front row, left to right: Hyatt, Excel. Back row: Ilpalazzo (not to scale). Not pictured: Hyatt coughing up blood, Excel being annoying, Ilpalazzo dropping Excel through a trap door for being annoying.

Meanwhile, while all that’s going on, Kabapu (not to be confused with whatever the hell could be confused with Kabapu) is establishing the Department of City Security to defend F City from the forces he imagines are threatening it. (Let’s face it, ACROSS isn’t much of a threat, and Kabapu seems surprised when he discovers there just might be a secret ideological organization out there.) Establishing a team drawn largely from other people living in Excel and Hyatt’s apartment complex, Kabapu turns them from mere civil servants into his dream municipal defense force, whether they like it or not.

Meanwhile, Pedro (not to be confused with a running gag that’s starting to run out of steam), an immigrant worker killed in a fire caused by Excel’s negligence as a part-time traffic cop, wanders the afterlife. After seeing his family quickly replace him with Gomez, Pedro’s former friend, Pedro is seduced by the Great Will of the Macrocosm (a personified reset button). Things get worse when That Man (not to be confused with That Guy), the Great Will’s lover, catches Pedro with her and tries to kill him. Um, again.

Meanwhile, Nabeshin (definitely to be confused with director Shinichi Watanabe, who is in turn not to be confused with Shinichiro Watanabe), runs around with an afro, alternately saving the day or wooing the ladies. Hey, if you’re going to self-insert, why not go all the way? (Yep, still sounds dirty.)

And if all that’s not enough for you, each episode is done in a different genre. Before the opening credits, a fictionalized Koshi Rikdo, creator of the manga Excel Saga is based on, grants his “authorization” to turn Excel Saga into the genre du jour, be it sci-fi (see Episode 2: The Woman from Mars), horror (see Episode 7: Melody of the Underground Passage), romance (see Episode 4: Love Puny^[2]), high school (see Episode 11: Butt Out, Youth!), blatant fan service (see Episode 8: Increase Ratings Week), or even a parody of the porn Koshi Rikdo drew in which Excel and several other characters first appeared (see Episode 18: Municipal Force Daitenzin).

(That’s right, in Japan it’s not uncommon for non-pornographic adaptations to be made out of pornography. Oh Japan, it’s like you’re the bizarro United States. What next, cars that don’t suck?)

F City Department of City Security Municipal Force Daitenzin. (Remind you of anyone?) Blue: Toru Watanabe. Green: Misaki Matsuya. Yellow: Daimaru Sumiyoshi. Red: Norikuni Iwata. Purple: Ropponmatsu Unit 1. Pink: Ropponmatsu Unit 2. I’d tell you which four are Excel’s neighbors and which two are robots designed by borderline pedophile Gojo Shiouji, but this caption is long enough already.

Believe it or not, all this and more does come together somehow in the end.

So, as you can see, Excel Saga is a little weird (in much the same way as Fred Phelps is “a little homophobic“). However, the strangest episode of all is surely Episode 24: For You, I Could Die, as it is played completely straight. That’s right, an entire episode of a gag-centric show is devoid of gags, instead focusing on character development and building up to the big confrontations in the would-be “final” episode.

Though, to be honest, this sudden stretch of seriousness starts at the end of (the otherwise mediocre) Episode 23: Legend of the End of the Century Conqueror, which closes with a surprisingly effective and depressing scene where (spoiler alert) Ilpalazzo shoots Excel. Which is impressive to see pulled off, considering how frequently Ilpalazzo shooting Excel is played for laughs in the first couple of episodes.

Anyway, there are two other episodes in particular that stand out from the rest by virtue of being sheer awesome. If for some reason you decide to watch exactly two episodes, these are the two you want:

In Episode 9: Bowling Girls, Ilpalazzo sends Excel and Hyatt to investigate what sports are popular among the ignorant masses, so as to better woo them into following ACROSS. Excel and Hyatt decide to work part-time in a bowling alley, which (surprise!) is completely empty, save for a local-as-you-can-get TV show filming wannabe pop idols trying to bowl. But then a bowling terrorist group — that’s right, a bowling terrorist group — takes over the alley and hijacks the TV crew to create propaganda to increase interest in bowling by introducing the world to Human Bowling, using their hostages as pins. Excel escapes and hides in the restroom, where she encounters Nabeshin in the next stall over, who mentors her in the ways of bowling (except for the actual sports training montage). She then takes on the terrorists in a combination bowling match / fight to the death to rescue Hyatt and the other hostages.

Maybe I just like this episode because I bowled for three years back in high school. Or maybe I like it because this episode is hilarious. Either way, bowling is definitely the optimal way of fighting terrorists. Hmmm…. Memo to Hezbollah: take advantage of the cease-fire, change your name to Hezbowlah, and challenge the Israelis to a three-game no-handicap match at Golan Lanes. Man, if this takes off, we could bring peace to the Middle East and give new meaning to the Arab League!

But what does everyone^[3] want even more than peace in the Middle East? That’s right: gratuitous sex and violence! And Episode 26: Going Too Far is happy to oblige. This episode was made specifically so that it can’t be shown on TV, with nearly every scene (including the opening credits!) packed with something to make the Family Research Council foam at the mouth, including but not limited to nudity, decapitation, soaplands, hot mannequin-on-mannequin action, hourly-rate hotels (wink wink nudge nudge), hot rabbit-on-rabbit action, dogs pooping, hot robot-on-girl action, gushers of blood, and hot girl-on-girl action. (All of which, for the record, is played for comedy, not prurient interest; got that, Justice Stewart?) Plus it ties up the loose ends left over from the preceeding “last” episode, and it even opens with a musical number!

Yeah, I don’t think my server’s AUP would appreciate a screen capture from Episode 26. But Wikipedia might have a little something for you….

A word of advice to anyone whose appetite has been sufficiently whetted: you’ll probably want to check out the translation notes on each DVD, which will pop up explanations of the various cultural references or inscrutable Japanese puns Excel will babble while you watch. Though since these explanations can sometimes cover the entire screen, you may want to watch the episodes without it first, at least so you can always see what’s going on.

So, as you can see, Excel Saga is hardcore weird. And entertaining. But mostly weird. And entertaining.

It’s just like one of our era’s great philosophers once observed, “Japanese cartoons are weird, man.”

Post 552

Quack Experimental Blog Post

Today’s Experiment…………Failed

– Footnotes –

[0] Both examples with no supporting evidence, and one of which I pretty much just made up on the spot, but I won’t let that stop me from using them anyway.

[1] Yes, I know Excel, Hyatt, and Ilpalazzo are all actually named after hotels in Japan.

[2] I’m told it’s a pun in Japanese.

[3] OK, almost everyone.

As you may recall, not too long ago I watched Gunbuster in preparation to watch its sequel: Gunbuster 2: Diebuster. If you’re wondering what would possess me to want to watch a sequel to something I hadn’t seen the original of, well, you clearly didn’t read that earlier post. It’s because Gunbuster 2 is being directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki, the lunatic/genius responsible for FLCL.

Well, now that I’ve watched the first five (out of six) episodes of Gunbuster 2, how is it? Does it live up to its predecessors? How does it stand on its own? When will Gainax release the final episode? Read on, as I will expound on 75% of those questions below.

At first, the connections between Gunbuster 2 and its predecessor are unclear. While they both involve people piloting Buster Machines to fight enigmatic space monsters, for the first few episodes the plot similarities end there. Gunbuster 2 takes place hundreds, if not thousands, of years after the original Gunbuster. The breakneck pace of technological advancement seen in the original series seems to have abated, and mankind has resigned itself to staying within the confines of the solar system. Nevertheless, space monsters have infiltrated the solar system and continue to threaten mankind. And the only people capable of repelling the alien menace are topless.

Wait, it’s not that kind of show. Let me explain.

In Gunbuster 2, “topless” (a noun) refers to someone with the innate ability to pilot a Buster Machine to its full potential. The unusual name is a twist on the original Gunbuster’s “Top Division.” It’s not fully explained what toplessness consists of, but there are a few clues offered. Toplessness fades with age, it emanates from the forehead, and can be blocked by wearing a seal on said forehead. Topless abilities include perfoming “exotic maneuvers” with a Buster Machine (your typical called attacks) and the ability open a portal and warp your Buster Machine to your present location. Toplessness and one’s state of undress are orthogonal, despite one character’s initial confusion.

At this point, fans of FLCL will find this brand of toplessness familiar. One of the many unusual plot points in FLCL was using people’s heads to open up interstellar portals that robots or guitars could emerge from, and one of the characters tried to prevent this by wearing obviously fake eyebrows at all times. While forehead portals aren’t the only FLCLism to appear in Gunbuster 2, their appearance, along with other fanciful elements and designs, drops off sharply after the first episode. For example, cats being used as communications devices and main character Nono’s ability to accidentally break almost anything in half (from dinner plates to industrial refrigerators) both get left on the cutting room floor after the first episode. There’s still creative and unusual designs to be found, of course, but it’s toned down considerably. One wonders if the creators thought the first episode’s strangeness was too deliberate and forced, and scaled it back afterwards. You could even say that it becomes less FLCL and more Gunbuster as the series progresses. This is Gunbuster 2, not FLCL 2, after all.

And being Gunbuster 2, while the storyline connections to the original series aren’t elaborated on until several episodes in, there are plenty of nods and references to Gunbuster to be found throughout, the aforementioned use of “topless” being just one example. Besides passing references, there are several scenes that parallel ones in Gunbuster, though frequently they end up playing out quite differently. The plot does tie in to the original eventually, and like Gunbuster takes a turn for the darker about halfway through, though the details are definitely spoilers I shan’t divulge here. And despite taking place long after the events in Gunbuster, there is continuity to be found; for example, Jupiter has been replaced by a massive space station built out of an old spaceship, and there’s a small trans-Plutonian black hole named Exelio in the outer reaches of the solar system. Despite initial appearances, this isn’t just a giant-robots-versus-monsters show with the Gunbuster name bolted on as an afterthought.

Back to the plot, which I got sidetracked from talking about toplesses. The story follows Nono, a naïve, starry-eyed (both literally and figuratively) girl who runs away from home with dreams of piloting a Buster Machine and fighting the space monsters. Of course, she’s lacking in everything that Fraternity is looking for (namely, toplessness), and she ends up cleaning dishes at a nearby diner. There, Nono crosses paths with Lark, the lead topless, who saves her from being harassed by some grunt mech operators. Nono sees Lark as her role model, despite Lark’s not caring and seeing Nono as a nuisance at best. Nevertheless, Nono manages to help Lark defeat a space monster discovered on the Martian surface, and as a result finds a place in Fraternity doing, well, janitorial work. After that, Nono keeps trying to become a Buster Machine pilot so she can be a Nonoriri, something which nobody has any idea what she’s babbling about (and not until episode 5 are any hints presented). To avoid dropping any spoilers, that’s all the plot summary you’re getting.

So, in the penultimate analysis, Gunbuster 2 is entertaining in its own right. The visuals look great, the music’s pretty good (complete with an annoyingly catchy opening theme), and the story, once it gets into gear, is pretty decent. You don’t really need to have seen Gunbuster to enjoy it, though it’d help you at least catch the numerous references to it. It’s certainly no FLCL (but then, what else is?) and, especially considering the initial confusion as to what it’s trying to be, doesn’t top the original Gunbuster (whether or not that’s its aim^[1]). Nevertheless, it’s a good series in its own right.

Now I just have to wait however many months it takes for Gainax to release the final episode (late August, apparently) and for it to get fansubbed to see how it all ends.

[1] You see, because the Japanese title of the original series is “Aim for the Top: Gunbuster”, and I said that if it aimed to top Gunbuster, it… oh, forget it.

[Editor's note: Let this post be a lesson to anyone who complains I haven't been posting enough lately. You know who you are.]

Not too long ago while doing some idle web surfing, I stumbled across the name Gunbuster 2. In itself, that wouldn’t have much meaning for me. However, things changed once I noticed who was directing: Kazuya Tsurumaki. And if that name doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s quite unfortunate, for Kazuya Tsurumaki is the genius behind FLCL, regarded by anyone with taste as one of the greatest things ever.

So, needless to say, I found myself very interested in what Tsurumaki’s newest creation is like, in much the same way as seeing Brazil made me want to check out Terry Gilliam’s other work. (Fun fact: Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen are pretty much the same movie.)

But there was one problem. I mean, besides the fact that Gunbuster 2 isn’t even finished yet, let alone released here, thus requiring locating fansubs, but the Internet makes that pretty easy. Rather, even though anime titles are often inscrutable, the “2″ at the end does indeed indicate that it is a sequel to — hold your breath — Gunbuster. And since I’m one of those people who has to see things in order, the course of action was clear: give up watch Gunbuster first.

[Editor's note: Spoiler alert from here on out, probably. But you should've figured that out by now.]

Is Gunbuster a “classic” anime? I have no idea, as that sort of things isn’t something I typically follow closely, or at all. But it was created back in 1988 by Hideaki “Evangelion” Anno, if that means anything.

Gunbuster is a six-episode giant robot show. In 2015, mankind encountered giant (as in, “bigger than a huge spaceship”) insect-looking aliens who seemed none too pleased about our existence. Protagonist Noriko’s father died fighting them, so now she’s training to battle them too and defend Earth. Of course, since these creatures live in space, the obvious weapon of choice are humanoid mechs. (Why do my plot summaries always come off sounding snarky? Stupid Internet.)

Pretty much every sci-fi TV show or movie I’ve ever seen that incorporates space travel — I can’t readily think of any counterexamples — ignores the time dilation effects of near-light-speed travel and strong gravitational fields. They always assume a constant universal temporal reference frame. Not so with Gunbuster; not only does it acknowledge time dilation, but it even serves as a prominent plot point. Although only about a year passes during the series from Noriko’s perspective, decades pass back on Earth. As a result, part of the cost of fighting the aliens far off in space is leaving behind everyone and everything you know back home.

So, Gunbuster gets major bonus points for reasonably realistic use of general relativity. I’ll even overlook how a sub-light-speed ship can catch up to a FTL rocket (yes, rocket) from Earth to Neptune in a matter of minutes.

And this may sound weird, but there’s another thing the series does that I really liked. The eponymous Gunbuster, the ridiculously huge two-pilot mech that dwarfs the merely several-story-tall mechs in the earlier episodes, is composed of two transforming spaceships creatively named Buster Machine 1 and Buster Machine 2. However, a non-negligible amount of time during battles is spent as the two separate ships instead of always joining together into Gunbuster. It always buggged me in cheesy Power Rangers-type shows how they always team up their robots immediately instead of ganging up five-on-one against the monster. Yes, of course you’d want to be able to spread out when fighting a massive alien fleet. That just seems like common sense.

Of course, it also seems like common sense to arm all of Earth’s spaceships with powerful weapons instead of putting them all on the single Gunbuster, but hey.

And speaking of things that are cheesy, Gunbuster also has its moments here. Some of the names used in the series are painfully bad. For example, the Soviet pilot (hey, it was made in 1988) is named Jung Freud, and one of the trans-Plutonian planets is named Jupiter 2. (Fortunately, the other trans-Plutonian planets do have better names, but they’re foolish enough to have a syzygy going on when the good guys open up a mini black hole near Jupiter 2 to swallow an alien fleet.) Pilots have a habit of calling their attacks, especially in the big fight scene at the end of episode 5. And there’s more Gainaxing than you can shake a… well, you can finish that joke yourself.

One of the remarkable things about watching the series about 20 years after it was created is how ridiculously optimistic pace of technological advancement is. You have the invention of warp drive by 2015 (less than a decade from now!), the ability to build and rebuild huge fleets of interstellar warships after that, a laser cannon on Gunbuster that can bisect an alien twenty times the size of one of those ships at one go, and so on.

But the climactic final battle outdoes even those. The aliens’ home is in the center of the galaxy, so in episode 6 Earth takes the fight to them with Buster Machine 3: a.k.a. the supermassive Black Hole Bomb. The core of the bomb is Jupiter — yes, the planet — which gets flown to the center of the galaxy with the intention of collapsing it into a black hole that will destroy the center of the Milky Way. This all happens in the mid-21^st century, mind you. And the plan works. Well, not at first, so Gunbuster has to go down into the Jovian core and jump-start the black hole with one of its reactors, and the time dilation its pilots experience results in them not getting back to Earth until the year 12,000 or so. (And no, I won’t spoil what they find when they get back.)

You can also tell Anno’s directing, because the series shifts gears from being playful and somewhat stereotypical to being serious and character-driven about halfway through, even so far as dropping the intro and ending sequences after episode 3 and making the final episode black-and-white. But at least this ending didn’t get him death threats.

So, the overall verdict? Gunbuster’s not bad at all, as long as you don’t think too hard about the science underlying things. (Memo to Michelson and Morley: you guys were wrong.) But I suppose that goes for most science fiction. Of course, considering the roughly 20-year gap between Gunbuster and its sequel, I doubt watching this was even necessary to follow Gunbuster 2. But if you’re going to only watch things that are necessary to watch, you may as well sell your TV now.

Except for FLCL, of course.

Unless you’re either (a) living under a rock or (b) not a hopeless dork, you’re probably aware of Square Enix’s recent efforts to exploit the rabid fanbase of revive the Final Fantasy VII franchise. Along with a handful of video games that tie in to FF7, they also created another computer-animated movie: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

But wait, you say, didn’t Square’s last attempt at a Final Fantasy-derived movie, The Spirits Within, utterly bomb and do enough damage to Square’s bottom line that they got acquired by rival Enix? (Or maybe you’re saying, “stop putting words in my mouth.”) Pretty much, yeah.

So, the big question: did Square learn from the earlier experience in filmmaking and create something that’s actually good, or is it just a forgettable effort to exploit the presumed FF7 cash cow?

Simply put, this movie is bad. Really bad.

For starters, unless you’ve played FF7, don’t even waste your time. The movie makes no effort to explain any of the backstory; it just assumes you’re intimately familiar with the characters and the storyline. And even with that knowledge, things don’t make a whole lot of sense.

To briefly summarize FF7, angsty amnesiac Cloud and company are trying to stop crazy white-haired pretty-boy Sephiroth from merging with mysterious alien creature Jenova and summoning a meteor to destroy the planet. You see, Cloud and Sephiroth were both members of a militia creatively named SOLDIER and were experimented on by being injected with Jenova cells. Apparently side-effects of the treatment can include angst and wanting to destroy the planet. There’s other stuff going on too. Oh, and Aeris dies.

I’ll also now try to summarize the plot of Advent Children, which only really serves as a loose way to segue from one fight scene to another (I’ll get to that later). (I’d say “spoiler alert,” but you can’t really spoil a movie this bad.) Apparently killing Sephiroth in the final battle just spilled those pesky Jenova cells all other the place, because now a bunch of eponymous children are infected with them and well on the road to being detached and angsty. Meanwhile, a trio of Sephiroth wanna-bes are going around to round those kids up so the Jenova cells can reunite. But more importantly, the Sephiroth Imposter Trio are looking for Jenova’s head, which I guess was left over after FF7’s pre-penultimate battle. Rufus and the Turks (from the aforementioned “other stuff going on”) are somehow involved with that, though it’s not explained why or how, especially when you find out that Rufus’s whole wheelchair-bound thing is an act and he’s got Jenova’s head in a box on his lap under his blanket the whole time.

So that’s what’s going on. See how the plot centers around getting those Jenova cells? Yeah, none of that’s actually explained in the movie; you just have to know what Jenova cells do from FF7. Not that it really makes the storyline make more sense, but there you are.

What’s truly amazing about Advent Children is how brazenly cynical an attempt it is to shovel fan service into the mouths of drooling FF7 fanboys. (”Fan service” in the broad sense of the term; unlike in FF7, Tifa’s actually wearing clothes this time around.) You’ve got fight sequences (wait for it…) every 12 minutes. You’ve got the entire FF7 party show up for one of them, despite the fact that most of them appear nowhere else in the plot, and their sudden arrival in time to fight a summoned monster tearing up the town square isn’t explained at all. A cell phone ringtone is the FF7 victory theme (and it rings right after Tifa finishes fighting one third of the Sephiroth Memorial Posse. Speaking of which, one of them suddenly turns into Sephiroth when he gets Jenova’s-head-in-a-box, because, um, then Sephiroth and Cloud can have a big extended fight scene set to a metal remix of One-Winged Angel. Plus, there’s regular glimpses of fanboy favorite Aeris, who shows up in full in the last scene.

There’s not really any rhyme nor reason to why anything happens. It feels like Square Enix rounded up a bunch of FF7 fanboys, asked them what they wanted to see in a FF7 movie, and threw together a rough plot to try to tie everything together.

And then there’s the battle scenes. You’d think anything with more fight scenes than an American action movie has got to be exciting, right? Hardly. Remember that big long fight on the highway in The Matrix Reloaded that you thought was going to be cool but turned out to be drawn-out and tedious and even the characters in it seemed bored the whole way through? (You don’t? Lucky.) The fight scenes in Advent Children are worse.

Most video games aren’t known for particularly realistic depictions of violence. For example, in FF7 you can get shot by machine guns and stabbed by ridiculously huge swords and only suffer a few HP worth of damage. That literally happens in Advent Children, and it works about as well as you think. People get thrown through thick stone columns and don’t even seem to notice. People can jump hundreds of feet into the air — thousands if other people jumping in midair at the time grab their hand and throw them upwards even more. Several times. In a row. The stuff going on in the fight scenes is so ludicrously over-the-top it’s painful to watch.

So, combine a seemingly endless sequence of unbelievable battle sequences, chain them together with an unexplained plot that doesn’t make sense even if you know the backstory, and add a heaping helping of fan service, and you get Advent Children.

Needless to say, if you’re not a foaming-at-the-mouth FF7 fanboy, avoid this movie like H5N1. And if you are a foaming-at-the-mouth FF7 fanboy, not only do you probably think all of the above makes the movie good, but you probably didn’t bother to read all the way to the end before flaming me in the comments anyway.

If Advent Children is typical of Square Enix’s other FF7-related efforts, at least now I know I have absolutely no interest in any of them.

(Also, memo to Square Enix: next time you want to cash in on FF7’s US fanbase, don’t release your films in Japan several months before in the states. I don’t think I’d ever seen a torrent with five digits’ worth of people connected to it before.)

I just watched Steamboy with some of the improv crew. Which was a good idea, because being able to give the movie the MST3K treatment made it enjoyable.

The animation looks pretty good, but the dialogue is mediocre at best and the plot is brain-damage-inducing. The story’s set in an industrial revolution-era-ish Britain, and the plot revolves around this “steam ball” invention that seems to be a Zero Point Module for steam. It’s Icelandic, apparently. Various groups are after it so they can use it to power their steampunk war machines they’re going to show off at a vaguely-defined tech expo in London that’s largely a front to sell arms to a bunch of international stereotypes.

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It’s amazing what you can find if you look through one of those lists that purports to be of all NES games ever. Not only will you be reminded of games you used to love, and games you played once and found they were terrible, but you’ll also find a bunch of Japanese games that never made it to the United States. Some of them you might be aware of, and can be pretty good. There’s also plenty that you’ve never heard of, probably for good reason.

And then there’s some whose title takes you by surprise. Such as a game whose title translates to “Wily & Light’s RockBoard: That’s Paradise.” As in Dr. Wily and Dr. Light, you wonder? Could it be, a “new” (to you, at least) Mega Man game? But what does the rest of that title mean? And more importantly, where did I put that emulator?

Read on, and all most some will be revealed. With pictures. Lots of pictures.

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