Toluu

Jeremy Parish

GameSpite's bilious dialectic

Book 'em, DannoYesterday

GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1 has been selling far better than I had expected or anticipated. In fact, I've already sold through what I had initially planned as the print allotment, and orders keep coming in; I'd sort of figured the numbers I threw out in my announcement post would leave me with a healthy stack to sell off over the coming months, but they're all spoken for and I'm going to have to bump up the print run. It's great to see so many people interested, but it also makes me slightly anxious, because, you know. There's people out there.

That being said, I am definitely putting a cap on the hardcover books, because they require me to break out pen and pencil and draw, and at this rate I'm going to have an RSI before year's end. That's no good at all, so the available quantities of those are limited -- to exactly five two more, to be specific. If you're interested, at least drop me a line to speak for one, because once those are gone that's it. (Paperbacks have no such limits; if people still want one even after the print allotment is spent, I can set things up to allow direct orders from the printer.) Edit: Hardbacks are gone.

In the meantime, I'll start thinking ahead to interesting bonus content for Year One, Vol. 2. And I'll also think on Year Zero possibilities, since several people ha

So: remakes and adaptationsYesterday

They've been on my mind recently. Everyone's coming to the realization the Watchmen movie is actually coming out; the gears for The Spirit's media blitz have begun churning in earnest; the latest Star Trek film might count depending on how you look at it; and...I guess there's that Chun-Li movie.

Anyway, it's not like this is a new phenomenon. Old timey Hollywood would make the same film three separate times in the space of a decade. Shakespeare was never above stealing other people's stories and based Romeo and Juliet off a poem by Arthur Brooke. Which was based on a poem by Pierre Boaistuau. Which was based on a story by Matteo Bandello. Which was based on a story by Luigi da Porto. Which was based on a story by Masuccio Salernitano.

Still, nothing gets the blood of fans boiling quite like the idea of their favorite intellectual property being thrown to the insatiable wolves of Hollywood. And it's always Hollywood. No one ever gets upset that their favorite radio play is going to be molested by the New York suits at the publishing companies by mak

Battle angel's thesisYesterday

Volume 10 of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order is finally out, and thank goodness for that.

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, Volume 10 -- Alita Goes Nova
Yukito Kishiro | Viz | Dec. 2008

For those unfamiliar, Last Order is a continuation of the excellent Battle Angel Alita manga, which Viz published from roughly 1994-1999 or thereabouts. The second volume, Tears of an Angel, was the first manga I read, and it instantly hooked me. It probably unrealistically raised my expectations for manga, too, because it was a fantastic change of pace from the hackneyed American superhero comics I'd grown so tired of. Eventually, I realized that manga's every bit as trite and hackneyed as anything from America, but I just happened to stumble into something well above the average to start me out; my first sample presented a skewed data point.

With Vol. 10, Last Order has officially run longer than the series it continues -- although actually, that happened midway through Vol. 9, since the new series retcons the second half of the ninth volume of the original story. The first Alita series ended on a pretty unsatisfying note: the original story concept began as the Ouroboros dream sequence featured across volumes eight and nine and grew from there, which made i

I hate my friendsDecember 3

The good thing about befriending someone that works for a game company is that it just proves to me how lucky I am there’s no such thing as a door-to-door videogame salesman. Every time I hang out with Atlus employees, for example, I ultimately end up buying an Atlus game as a result. Sometimes it’s simply demoing a game for me, sometimes it’s as extreme as coming to my house and walking me to a Gamestop to pick up a recent release, but the result is always the same: more money into Atlus’ pockets. Case-in-point: during my most recent visit to Southern California, I was literally driven to a Best Buy and told we weren’t leaving until I bought Dokapon Kingdom. Talk about customer "service".

The good news, though, is that Dokapon Kingdom is actually pretty fun! I hadn’t heard of it until the day I bought it, so in case you’re unaware: Dokapon Kingdom is essentially Mario Party, but without minigames and an RPG thrown in for good measure. Utilizing the one-on-one duels in Suikoden with special abilities thrown in, you fight enemies and friends to gain levels, save towns, and explore the world. The twist is that the ultimate goal isn’t to save the world; oh no, it’s far more devious than that. The main objective is to be stronger than your friends, so that you can defeat them in battle and then humiliate them, with everything from ugly haircuts to (my personal favorite) changing their name to whatever you want

Thanksgiving crawl: the sequelDecember 3

So my last post was meant with a fair bit of... uh... discussion. And this is good! I like it when my posts spur discussion on one topic or another. Of course, somewhere along the way I became Kat the Chick Who Is Too Hardcore For Smash Brothers. I think I've just been treated to a sneak preview of my ironic punishment in hell. Lucky me.

It's my own fault, of course, for making it seem as if I was waving my hand and dismissing Smash Brothers as a "viable tournament fighter." My point (which was a relatively minor point in the grand scheme of things) was pretty clear in my head, but it seemed to get lost in the jumble of words that constituted my feelings on Smash Brothers. Writing is kind of a bastard like that.

If you really want to know, I'm mostly just a frustrated Smash Brothers player who spent years trying to master all those crazy techniques floating around the Internet and ultimately failed. It seems that I'm no better at pulling off wave dashes and meteors than I am at performing aerial raves. As I've said before, I'm doomed to be forever mediocre (or worse) at games, but I keep trying to get better. I keep trying with all my little heart. Unfortunately, trying and failing to play like all those professionals on the Youtube videos just left me frustrated and bitter. And when Brawl m