tegan

So apparently Nintendo's going to be unveiling three new pieces of info by Saturday through their Pokémon Smash variety show in Japan, at least one of which will be a new Pokémon. Eeeeeeee

From what I understand, the high prices for anime in the west have always been due to sheer stubbornness on the parts of the Japanese distributors rather than the American ones. Since Japanese DVD players are all region-free and Japan shares a Blu-Ray region with America, they're worried that they'll cannibalize the market if Japanese consumers can just import the US releases (which are generally of higher quality anyway) at a reasonable cost rather than pay the exorbitant prices that Japanese DVDs cost due to the extremely low demand (I remember seeing a breakdown of anime sales figures in Japan once. Seeing that Kaiba sold something like 500 copies was the most heartbreaking thing), so they pressure American distributors into making everything far more costly than it has any right to be. They really ought to work something out, because it's just not sustainable.

US and Canada. If you buy and register a 3DS XL and either Luigi's Mansion or Pokémon Mystery Dungeon with Club Nintendo between February 14th and April 30th you get one of five free games.

I think that companies severely overcharging for anime has finally reached its logical endgame.

I traded in my old 3DS and bought Luigi's Mansion with some of the trade credit. I'm really digging it so far, plus I also got a free copy of Professor Layton through Club Nintendo! this is a good day for puzzlin'

I hate to bring up the dorkiest possible example, but if you want to see a very clear dividing line between good dialogue localization and a bad one, check out the manga Yotsuba&. It was originally published by ADV in English, who lost the license after the fifth volume. It later got picked up by a different company with a different translation team who took fewer creative liberties with translating dialogue and made everyone sound incredibly stiff and awkward, which completely destroys the exuberant tone of the whole thing. The only translated prose I've read was the original version of Battle Royale with the red cover. It too was very awkward and stilted, but I hear that the more recent version is much better.

The point is that we can never hope to top the CG helicopter from Golgo 13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJxPjUo5-cI

Right, but using CG to consistently animate complex objects in otherwise hand-drawn animation has been a regular thing since The Great Mouse Detective (you can go back nearly to the beginning if you take into consideration similar techniques like Stromboli's stupid traced stop-motion cart from Pinocchio or the rotating physical sets from seemingly every Fleischer cartoon for a few years). Making everything top to bottom as a CG polygonal model is pretty rare outside of America though.

Kojima was wearing the weird bandage helmet thing that revealed his real mouth, but the eye area was animatronic or something. He showed up to the GDC talk as Joakim Mogren, then pulled the fake face off after the trailer ended.

I went to an animation college. This kind of thing came up constantly and was consistently proven false. There's always going to be people animating by hand, it's just that most of the time it's not going to be a major release. And different people draw the line at different places. Is it no longer traditional animation if you're working with vectors in flash? If your lineart is done digitally? If you're painting cels digitally instead of by hand? Also, it's pretty frequently overlooked that CG poly model animation is pretty much an America-centric thing since so few studios outside of Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks have the budget to do it well. How much CG anime is out there?

Eleventh Colossus (Celosia) thoughts: Next time: Most obtuse colossus!

So I guess Metal Gear Solid V is actually two games? Ground Zeroes is pre-coma and Phantom Pain is post-coma. I don't think that's an excuse. I've heard of Garbage, and I'm some kind of zygote.

By the way, remember the hilarious fan theory that Joakim Mogren was actually CG? They were almost half right.

Good news for anyone who's fed up with the terrible load times for the system menu! The April update has a preview video up:

I've never played a Metal Gear game before, but that's a really eye-catching trailer. I don't know about anyone else, but I would be infinitely more interested in playing a Metal Gear game that looked like Yoji Shinkawa's artwork.

Oh man, I forgot all about that. Making such an elaborate Rhapsody parody almost completely justifies how awful the Looney Tunes reboot was.

Just go to a Gamestop. I guarantee that half the clerks will have every puzzle completed. It's like Nintendo devised the most devious possible way of getting me to go to Gamestop every week or two. I want to get Luigi's Mansion so bad. I bought the XL with the intention of getting the Luigi's Mansion/Pokémon Mystery Dungeon deal, but I'm flat broke and the amazon gift card I've been saving since Christmas is just a few dollars short of the full price.

I'm ashamed to admit knowing this, but those really are VR goggles. It's hard to find pictures of Kid Vid from his right side for some reason, but there's clearly an antenna attached to them.

...Why would they give the controller an analog stick instead of a d-pad?

Watching this clip was a little heartbreaking, because the voice actors are really starting to sound like their age has caught up with them. Notice that nobody ever raises their voice.

Apparently last year The Birthday Massacre and Metric both put out new albums without me realizing! But I haven't been listening to either of them much, because I've been too preoccupied with this: http://chipocrite.bandcamp.com/track/hotel-california

Bob Mackey hosted the show after Parish left it. He's the Mike Nelson to Parish's Joel Hodgson. I think he did a good job considering that he had far more limited resources to work with, since that was right around the time that everyone at 1up got laid off and everyone else had too much to do. He managed to get some good guests in, too, with the best being Victor Ireland solely for one amazing bit of comedic timing. Also, I think they realized that the live call-ins were a bad idea, especially after the Sonic the Hedgehog episode. Admittedly it would be pretty sweet if they could get at least one or two guest appearances from some of the old recurring guests like Chris Kohler, Scott Sharkey, or Jenn Frank. I never realized that Jenn was the voice from Super Hexagon because I don't recognize her in situations where she doesn't sound like she's had a few drinks and is going off about "releasing the balls of monster."

More good news: somebody's contacted me about doing an artistic commission! I've been trying to work out a way to get into business drawing for commission working, so I hope this guy decides to go for it.

So you guys know about Retronauts, right? Well now that 1up is dead, they want to make it independent. Kickstarter is here. They're looking for funding to put out 26 episodes over 1 year, plus expand into other media as well. Right now they're already halfway to goal, but nonetheless I highly encourage everyone to donate to continuing the existence of one of the smartest, most interesting gaming podcasts out there. If I weren't completely broke, I would seriously plop down the dough for the $150 tier and force them to finally do a Metroid episode.

why does the thread title not say "WOO-OO!"