It’s been pretty hectic lately in college and besides we’ve gotten a new zombie-filled Xbox game called Left For Dead and I’ve learned that I’m great at headshots. After my craze of Street Fighter a few weeks ago, I wanted to buy Street Fighter II on DVD but alas my local record store didn’t have it and I ended up coming out Paprika, Tales of Earthsea and Resident Evil: Degeneration.

More to come soon!

I’m a great fan of the Street Fighter franchise and it was the first interaction I ever had with both anime and manga, until I unmercifully butchered my sibling’s Street Fighter comics since I liked the pictures. I was caught off guard when it was advertised on television and you be able to estimate my happiness with the release of the latest game. I was going to wait for a few months until it dropped in price but on Mother’s Day when my brother was buying fragrant bouquets of flowers for mom, he picked up a second Xbox controller, Street Fighter IV and the latest Silent Hill game. I can say wholeheartedly it was a FTW moment.

Opening sequence is fantastic and it gave me shivers but I had to fiddle around with the second controller trying to get it connect with the console. One bad thing is the difficulty levels on the game, ranging from easiest, very easy, easy, medium, medium hard, hard to very hard. I highly recommend that if you want to unlock all the characters quickly, set the difficulty mode to easiest with a one round thirty second match.

I would think that my brother and I would be pretty proficient with regards to the characters special moves and the like but we had set the time limit to infinity with a two round match, needless to say we got the unmerciful crap beat out of us on the easy difficulty. Taking turns against the final boss called Seth, we spent at least an hour as Crimson Viper who unlocks Cammy, the former brainwashed agent of Shadaloo but we eventually we gave up, since Lost was starting and it was quite late in the evening. When Lost finished, I tried again and discovered the easiest difficulty. I unlocked Cammy and then I unlocked Sakura via Ryu and finally unlocked Dan by playing as Sakura. Out of all the characters I used, Sakura was the only one to defeat Seth in battle as the rest of the I won by default due to the time limit.

It’s worth watching in high quality. 

For some reason or another I always seem to get informed about Japanese related events from the same person. The IFI is holding a Japanese Anime Weekend next weekend on 28th and 29th of March. I had my entire weekend mapped out as I planned to attend ‘A Dubliner’s Collection of Asian Art: The Albert Bender Exhibition’ at Collins Barracks and eventually weaving my way into the city to attend the festival. I’ve decided not to attend since there’s only one movie that I haven’t seen but being realistic I have to save for my Erasmus, it’s studying in a foreign University for a period of six months. I know that the UL’s Anime and Manga Society is attending the festival and that the society had started to hold free anime screenings at the University on Tuesday evenings but I’m not part of it and I blogged the reasons over here.  

The list of movies helped me to decide to stay at home and not attend the IFI Japanese Anime Festival.

Saturday 28th March

13.10 Naruto

15.00 (Talk) A Brief History of Post-War Japanese Animation

18.15 Sword of the Stranger

Sunday 29 March

13.45 Metropolis

15.45 (Talk) Japanese Animation for Adults

16.45 Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Firstly, I despise Naruto. It’s genre of anime I like to call ‘never ending’, One Piece, Bleach, Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball are part of this too. I vaguely recall that Naruto was in the top ten of global search engine at some stage so I guess even though I dislike it, it has to be doing something right in promoting anime worldwide. The link for the talk on the Saturday is wrong so I can’t be too critical of it then. Sword of the Stranger is the only anime in the line-up that I haven’t seen. I’m quite intrigued about it and I think I’ll buy the DVD since it’ll be a lot cheaper than the price of a weekend in Dublin.

Sunday’s movies are a bit more retro with mechanical chicks kicking ass being the main themes of the movies. I saw Metropolis on the good channel of RTE Two several years ago at two o’clock in the morning. I think I would have enjoyed it if I was more alert and paid proper attention. Looking back on it now, I can’t recall much but I’m unsure whether I thought it was worth it or not. I did watch it all so I guess it stands as engaging to say the least. I don’t think I’d bother too much with the talk unless I was hanging around to catch the last movie, although I have no idea who anyone would hang around for it. I had to watch the first Ghost in the Shell three times before I could be really grasped by the storyline. I made the mistake of buying Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, watched only once and I have no intention it view it ever again. I’ll go on an Escaflowne marathon followed by a couple of Studio Ghibli’s about a dozen times before I even consider picking it up again.

As far as I can see, all the movies are subtitled but I wonder if they’d be a decent similarity to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time on the silver screen.   

The post for the Blog Awards is over at An Introspective Outlook.

Photo owned by G. McFly (cc)

As you should know, the Irish version of Dragons’ Den is premiering tonight at 22.15 on RTE One, featuring a cash register cleaning system. I’ve only seen a few episodes of the UK version of Dragons’ Den but I managed to catch the end of one episode but when the credits rolled something caught my eye before I switched channels. 

Original concept by Nippon TV

Nippon TV is a Japanese television station that originally created the premise of Dragons’ Den by inviting investor’s and inventor’s who normally wouldn’t have the chance to meet. Even I was unaware that Dragons’ Den was a Japanese concept which has been copied in several countries since I always heard about the British version. Typing ‘Dragons’ Den’ into a search engine will usually give the BBC’s version top priority with a Wikipedia page listed after it.

Although it’s pleasing to see that on the BBC page of Dragons’ Den they can at least acknowledge, however brief, a credit to the original concept whilst if you take a look around the Irish page near the top of the post no credit is given. However when I search terms ‘Japan’+'Dragons’+'Den’ on the RTE website a listing does come up as a result but it just seems to direct to the ‘About the Show’ page which again doesn’t acknowledge the concept.

Poor investigation by the Irish Times and IFTN.

Somebody obviously didn’t read up on the premise of Dragons’ Den.

This time last week, I bought the Xbox and I’ll say this from the get go that I adore the Xbox. This is the first Microsoft console I partly own but previous to this I never played the Xbox. 

I have no intention of using the Xbox Live software, it lures you in with a forty eight hour free trial to Gold Membership or something, eh…no thanks, I much play on my own thank you very much. If I need to use the internet I’ll use my laptop.

I’ll start with the positive aspects first and work through the list of annoyances for the Xbox.

Positive

• Layout of the controller is slightly unexpected. The movement joystick is at the top right but the other joystick is used for camera angles in games and the like but I was surprised at how smooth the design and usability of the controller.
• Turn off the Xbox by the controller, extra lazy but a big plus.
• Works under a duvet, I was wondering if the wireless would work since any hardcore gamer knows that after a few hours hands can be icy cold whilst the rest of you is snug.
• Graphic, I’m graphics lover. 
• The selection of games for the Xbox 360 platform is pretty good.

Negative

Photo owned by I’m Fantastic (cc)

• I wasn’t expecting the console to be so heavy, it’s heavier than an electrical transformer, no not the action figures. 
• It sounds like an engine about to take off but for some reason it only really gears up when I play Fable 2.
• I can even hear it vibrating in the sitting room downstairs which is almost under my room so any late night gaming can be heard. Big minus, it’s no fun if I get caught waking up people too early in the morning.
• Whatever way the games are configured for European usage, it just doesn’t seem to quite work right on my television. When I play Fable 2 the energy bar of the character which is obviously only slightly important in battles and killing sprees, gets cut off from the top of my view. I managed to fix this a bit since I can set my tv to widescreen mode but trying to read the font size becomes quite difficult.

That’s it!