Christmas Break

Well I was too busy playing with all my new toys to write recently, but alot has happened in the last week or so.

For Christmas I got Hellsing and Rozen Maiden manga, Valkyria Chronicles and Left 4 Dead (pc).

Left 4 Dead is pretty awesome, played it non-stop for a whole day or so.  Played through all the campaigns, and then did Versus quite a bit.  Pretty fun.  Boomer makes funny noises.  I can’t seem to get the tongue to stick when I play as Smoker, I donno, probably just suck at it.

I think this kid was in one of my tech classes

I would say that The Witch is hot and I’d tap that, but she’s just a little too teary.  If she was laughing she would instantly be promoted to “tappable.”

Damn right I'm going to hit that

Valkyria Chronicles… I didn’t quite know what to think at first.  It has a very interesting art style, but it’s pretty fun game.  Story heavy though, so if you like run and gun this might not be for you.

I was rather disappointed, even though the game case makes it clear, but the chick at the top of the cover is a bad guy girl.  The very first time you see her in game is in a meeting with the big bads of the story, but it was pretty clear before.  All the ‘good guys’ have pretty normal hair and eye color but on the cover she has red eyes and blue hair (silverish in game) as well as being centered and the main focus of the cover.  But since she’s not the main character, obvious bad girl.  Which is kinda sad, I mean, red eyes ==  awesome.

Brown hair, Brown eyes. Red hair, hazleish eyes. Silver hair, red eyes. Guess who the bad guy is.

Hellsing is pretty awesome, read it all, left wanting more.  Luckly just a few days ago, DemonRin finished his Hellsing OVA 5 subs, so I had more to watch.  Honestly, if you like blood, vampires, awesome or cool, you should go watch Hellsing.  Not the TV series, that sucked.  Look for Hellsing Ultimate or Hellsing OVAs.  So far there are 5 50ish minute episodes.

kukuku

Haven’t started Rozen Maiden manga yet, but the anime was pretty good so we’ll see how awesome the manga is.

Non-Christmas related stuffs:

Well the fall anime season is pretty much over.  All the quarter year anime have finished.  So I watched one, Chaos;Head.   Holycrap freaking awesome.  It’s kinda like Paranoia Agent + Mai HiME.  Well, if Paranoia Agent had paranoia in it, it would be at least.  Paranoia Agent sucked, Chaos;Head is awesome.  You should watch it.

If you are God, and the delusion becomes reality...

The story of an Otaku semi-hikikomori.  He spends his time playing MMOs and watching anime.  To maximize his time in game, he’s created his minimum attendance chart, showing the least amount of time he has to spend at school in order to graduate.  However, his calm life gets interrupted when he sees one of the ‘new gen’ crimes.

That’s all the preview you get from me.  I highly recomend Chaos;Head.  And yes, the semicolon is intentional.

Finals suck and Higurashi

Freshman in college.  Finals are unfun as usual, although honestly, so far they’re not much harder than high school, so either I had a really hard high school life, really easy college experience or things just haven’t gotten hard yet.

Either way, I still had alot of stuff to do, and my game/anime time was limited.  Of course, that didn’t stop me from watching anything completely, but I didn’t write anything mostly because I felt that if I was writing something, it should be on my essay.

So anwyay, I’m writing today and I think I’ll talk about a longtime favorite series of mine, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni.  Before I get into that, I should add a note so that you know where I’m coming from.  When I was 9 years old I first saw The Ring, I think it was in 1999 or I might have been 10 and saw it in 2000, either way I wasn’t very old, and the movie creeped me out alot, pretty much ruined the horror genre for a few years after, before I slowly started getting back into it.  Even then I still got scared pretty easily and couldn’t sleep the night I saw some movies.

(tl;dr Your Mileage May Vary)

Anyway, back to Higurashi; I first watched it back in May of this year (2008), one of the first few series I watched, as I only started anime back in April of the same year.

I sought it out for one reason, this picture: (since it’s technically a spoiler the thumbnail is not the actual image)

HA HA HA indeed!

The picture just looked so awesome.. I had to find it.  And find it I did, it’s a fairly prestegious anime and wasn’t hard to find at all.  So, I started watching it, not really knowing much more than what the picture told me.  And man, it was really pretty cool.  At the start I couldn’t watch more than a few episodes at one time, not going to lie, its kind of a creepy show.  With it’s heavy paranoia themes, my naturally paranoid self looked over my shoulder more than once while watching it.

The intro of the first episode gives a clear impression of what kind of anime you are watching.  But by the time it swung back around to that, I thought I was watching some comedy slice-of-life, which just made much more fascinating.

The second season was alot more infodump than I would have liked, but it definately explained alot of what was going on..  and since it is adapted from a series of visual novels, they didn’t have much like the first season left to work with.  But still pretty decent

Anyway, I’d definately recomend Higurashi as a must see for all anime fans.

Red Alert 3 and Outlaw Star

Well, that Tuesday/Thursday plan fell apart pretty quickly.. ah well, I’ll just talk about both RA3 and Outlaw Star

What a guy

Red Alert 3 came out at the same time Fallout 3 did, so it’s been pretty overshadowed..  But it’s not by any means a bad game.  As far as the game goes, it plays much like the older games.  Campaign mode adds a co-commander that helps out a bit.  Co op with a friend is interesting, unfortunately it cannot be done over LAN yet..

A main difference between this game and the other RTS games is it’s focus on micro management.  Especially with the Japanese faction.

The women of Red Alert 3

Single player was ok, the co-commander is both helpful and annoying depending on how you use him.  Cut scenes were full of women and Tim Curry, so can’t complain too much.  The overall storyline is about the same as the others in Red Alert.  Faction has power, tries to take over the world.  Nothing we haven’t seen before.

I’ve been playing LAN skirmishes with/against a friend of mine.  We’re having quite a bit of fun with it.  Definately a fun multiplayer game, if you’ve got friends who enjoy RTS games this might be one to look into.

Anyway, on to Outlaw Star

The Crew of the Outlaw Star

Pretty good show, seemed like alot of the episodes didn’t flow very well.. but I enjoyed it.

It had a good cast of characters with many funny parts but also a good mix of serious business.  The serious business was mostly in the form of “can androids dream of electric sheep” revolving around Melfina.

I'd tap that

All in all, good show, I’d recomend it again.

Yarrr

Haven’t written in a while, there’s a high probability that few people care, but that doesn’t matter, I’m bored at the moment and feel like writing down some thoughts of mine.

First of all, quit WoW about a month ago again.  It got boring… again.  Until about two weeks ago, I hadn’t really picked up anything in it’s place.  Games in general have gotten really boring for some reason.  Not sure why. Surfed around a few games, played them for anywhere between 2 hours and 3 days..

So after playing around for about two weeks, I did something I never thought I’d do.  I watched an anime.  What was more surprising, I watched it in Japanese with English subs… and I enjoyed it.  I’m a different kid, I never watched many cartoons in my younger years (I’m 18 now), and so this was kinda a spur of the moment kinda thing.. Just bored enough to go find the episodes.

The thing that influenced me to watch this anime was an AMV I first saw a good number of years ago..

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0Fu9CZ6jyqk

I thought that the scenes in the video were pretty amusing, and I’d always been curious as to how the story went.  So I went to good old Veoh.com and watched the entire OVAs, was enthralled by it and then went on to find Tenchi Universe and the movies.

After that was done, I went on to find more.  Came across this video, which inspired me to watch Death Note.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C65oaIHsdYM

And I must say, Death Note is a pretty freaking awesome anime, the story is great, it’s pretty dark and sinister, which I enjoyed, and I was constantly looking forward to that laugh.

Now I’ve got a couple queued up that I want to watch. Serial Experiments Lain, Ergo Proxy, Elfen Lied, and Bubblegum Crisis are all ones I’ve been recommended.

Currently I’m at about episode 30 of 167 in the InuYasha series, not too sure how I feel about this one. It’s amusing enough, but I donno, It’s good enough to keep me watching.

Anyway, that’s about all I have to say today.  If anyone has any really good anime they’d recommend, comment here please!