I got this!

Post Date: March 3, 2010 - 3:52 PM

3" custom Dark Void Trexi made by Tony Mora of i am 8bit

And all I had to do was answer some trivia to win this...

This figurine (called a Trexi, after the company that distributes them) was given to me yesterday as a prize for a trivia question I answered on Gamespot when Dark Void was released two months ago. I don’t even remember whether I answered it correctly…The e-mail that I was sent notified me to expect my prize within two weeks. It also came as a pre-order bonus for anyone who bought the game. Since I didn’t (and probably won’t, because I wasn’t very impressed with the demo), scoring this figurine didn’t cost me a thing.

The figurine is supposed to be Will in the jetsuit that he uses throughout the game…though with the round head and stubby arms, it could easily be mistaken for a miniature Strong Bad. The head, arms, and legs can rotate, although they’re a bit too stiff to be used for advanced poses. I think these Trexis are meant to be collected rather than played with (note the “This is not a toy” warning on the bottom of the box). Figurines like it sell  for about six to eight dollars – I don’t know whether that’s in U.S. dollars or Singaporean dollars, so it probably won’t go up in value. On the bright side, it’ll go nicely with the Ryu figurine I got when I pre-ordered Street Fighter IV.

The System is Down (Extended PS3 Remix)

Post Date: March 1, 2010 - 12:51 PM

It seems Sony is having another one of those “Strongbad techno” moments. A great number of the old-model PlayStation 3 units (the ones released before the high-capacity “PS3 Slim” models) experienced an inability to connect to the PlayStation Network, and found out that a bunch of other items had been bugged (namely calendar dates and trophy data). Many suspect that it’s a date programming bug, similar to the big Y2K kerfuffle, but with a bad leap year count instead of a bad end-of-the-year count. New-model PS3 Slims and PSPs seem to be unaffected by this glitch.

Yeah, I’m aggravated by it, but I’m not getting too worked up about it. I do have a few other consoles, after all, so I’ll just keep playing with them until the smoke clears. The  SonyPlayStation Twitter is posting updates, and recommending that all users of pre-Slim PS3s (myself included) not turn on their consoles until a solution is found.

Samurai Pizza Cats: The Unsung Tatsunoko Heroes?

Post Date: February 27, 2010 - 7:53 PM

Back when I was around 9 or 10, one of the networks in my area (can’t remember whether it was channel 17 before it became part of “The WB” or channel 57 before it became part of “UPN”) used to air Samurai Pizza Cats after school. This was pretty much before anime caught on big in the U.S. (after Speed Racer and Robotech, but before the first dub of Dragon Ball Z, I think). My brother and I used to have a good laugh at the jokes on the show. Looking back on it, I find it even funnier when I found out that the English script writers had to resort to making up all of the jokes because they got the animation they needed, but not the transcripts of the original Japanese dialogue (consider that there are quite a bit of vocal anime fans who don’t like it when script writers stray too far from the source material). Arguably, it kinda worked, as even the original creators of Kyattou Ninden Teyandee prefer Pizza Cats to their original version.

The reason I bring this up is because I’m still playing through Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, and a few players have asked why these guys hadn’t appeared in the game. Heck, I didn’t even know this series was a Tatsunoko property until I looked it up on Wikipedia. It’s funny how far a little research goes.

Can we rebuild it?

Post Date: February 24, 2010 - 8:01 PM

Some intrepid soul stumbled upon an old RPG Maker 2000 game called Romancing Walker and started a liveblog of it on the TV Tropes forum. I remember playing this game…it’s got a sound concept, though it’s incredibly hard to play through. It’s not that the game’s difficult…it’s just that the translation is very, very literal and filled with both Engrish and what’s known to some as “gratuitous Japanese” (I think I noticed the translator leaving in words like “baka” and “sugoi” from place to place). I’d like to try to retool the script so that it’s a bit more accessible to most other gamers (think Final Fantasy Tactics on the PSP vs. Final Fantasy Tactics on the PS1), but I probably may wind up not releasing it at all, since almost everyone (including both the game’s original author and the translator) has moved on from RPG Maker 2000, and releasing it would be tantamount to stealing…not that anybody would want to really play a game that’s almost a decade old using an engine that’s also a decade old.

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: When video games and anime clash, everybody wins

Post Date: February 22, 2010 - 8:53 PM

So Capcom’s invaded the comic book universe with Marvel vs. Capcom, and they’ve taken on a rival video game company with the SNK vs. Capcom series, so…where do they go from here? It seems the answer to that question is “the anime world”, as they’re now butting heads with the various masked heroes from Tatsunoko’s library in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All Stars. Click to read more…