some cool articles on CNET the past day or so on the upcoming movie – release the dadburn thing already!!!!

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As seen elsewhere on this blog, i’ve become a fan of anime in the past several years. I think there’s several reasons:

a) I’ve always liked animation, whether movies, TV cartoons, and in many cases, even ads;

b) the diversity of animation just keeps on getting better and more interesting, even if increasingly computer-based. Of course, just as seen in video games over the past 15-20 years, there is no substitute for actual plot, good writing and coherent themes with good character development. The best looking animation(s) can still end up boring and predictive without them (yes, Appleseed Ex Machina – I’m talking to you!);

c) I think in part anime is also interesting because so often the characters are written in a more over-the-top sensibility (certainly every Initial D episode i’ve ever seen qualifies on that score, but many others are right behind) and often have characters act as if they are in ‘life or death’ struggles (which in many cases isn’t true, but they act that way anyway).

d) Anime just has a different take on things. It’s not usually glorified sitcom situations or plots (at least not the anime I watch) and often has crazy inclusions for characters (Poipodor in Mars Daybreak comes to mind) or fantastical futures that all but make no sense (IGPX) but somehow still manage to entertain.

Which brings me to Initial D. This is an anime series about a school kid living in Gunma province in northern Japan, whose father runs a tofu shop and is an ex-street racer. The father, Bunta, subtly encourages this trait in his only son by having him deliver tofu to several accounts in the early morning over a mountain pass. The kid, Takumi Fujiwara, is fairly dense but seems to have a talent for racing and surprises older 20-somethings who race more seriously. In the first several series, we see Takumi’s talents develop until he’s the equal or better of most other racers in the area and beyond. In Stage 4, ‘Project D’ – he’s now become part of a traveling race team led by a former rival, Ryosuke Takahashi, who dreams of conquering japan’s many mountains and street racing teams with his brother Keisuke and Takumi as the two ace racers on the Project D team. They travel around Japan, challenging team after team in tough and varied races.

What’s appealing about this series is as mentioned before – the characters take themselves VERY seriously, which in some cases comes across as laughable but endearing in a way. You’d think the world would end if this kid doesn’t win a given race by the way they act in posturing against each other up to and during each race.

Also cool is simply the thought of blasting down mountain roads in souped up cars at clearly WAY illegal speeds – watching it on animation is about the only way i’d ever do THAT – I don’t like driving SLOW on cliffside roads – ask kerewin about that one when we were driving around on Crete or Santorini last fall!

Also amusing is how no matter where they go, everyone (racer-wise, anyway) knows about them and keeps putting the best racers up against them. Yet no cops ever show up to THROW THEM IN JAIL for such blatant mountain-racing at nearly every mountain pass they encounter? This was amusing in Wangan Midnight too – although in that series they are largely blasting around highways IN THE CITY at ridiculous speeds but also apparently immune to police (or at least, invisible)?

Anyway, Initial D is pretty entertaining – don’t expect detailed character development or much valid social commentary – it’s pretty focused on one thing, blasting down mountain roads in the middle of the night. But it does a good job of handling that story over and over. Hoping there will ultimately be a Stage 5, but time will tell…..

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Well, it’s over for another year. And it was a big success (again). Not only did we have more games on the video side – we had several more vendors on the pinball side, a great series of seminars, and seemingly lots more word of mouth (definitely more social media and related online promotion/podcasts/etc. too).

Here’s some of the results – take a gander!

Video from the show floor;

Additional video walk-thru’s during the show;

Review from the ‘Seattlest‘ blog;

The Stranger’s SLOG review;

Seattle Weekly slideshow;

Seattle Times article;

Seattle Times show video;

Online photo galleries: here and here;

Dave Okert’s SMAC photo gallery (mostly video side of show);

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The 3rd annual NW Pinball Show is next weekend, June 11-13, in the NW corner of The Seattle Center in Seattle, WA (by Key Arena). All machines and seminars are included with paid daily admission. All-weekend passes are available too.

Schedule and Seminars/Speakers;

Online Ticket sales available through Monday, June 7;

Recent Podcast about the show on The Mixtape;

Bottom Line? Come on out and PLAY.

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Picked up an old arcade game for my buddy – Wizard of Wor. This game dates back from the latter arcade classic era, 1981. It shares the same robotic speech as Gorf from the same era (both of us actually have one of those machines, although mine currently languishes in my dad’s barn in OR). Basically the game consists of either one/two people in what seem like land-going spacesuits in a maze, zapping weird creatures, some of which are invisible at times (you can see them on the radar screen below the maze, though).

Once you clear the maze, other bad guys appear you have to zap of course (e.g. Warlock) – and then the Wizard himself may or may not appear. The game also has organ-style music at the start and end of each maze-zapping session, in addition to the weird voice.

Good stuff. This is also a convenient moment to shamelessly plug the upcoming 3rd annual pinball/arcade show here in Seattle next month, weekend of June 11-13. Come one, come all!

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I’m not watching any other trailers for this. I’m just glad they made a sequel! Dec. 17 2010, welcome to Cinerama…….

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So a lifelong friend and I connected for some old-school gaming this weekend. And when i say ‘old school’ while not quite as old as say, Frisbee, Monopoly, or Go – these were still pretty old videogames. He has an extensive collection of old (mostly 70s-80s but a few are even older) videogame consoles – the same ones we used to play on the big ol’ 25″ tv in his basement back in the day. We actually had an Atari ‘flashback’ console for those – it has a ton of games built into it instead of plugging cartridges in and out all day – and it even has a few previously-unreleased and prototype Atari 2600 games as a bonus, which is pretty cool (and I’m sure doesn’t hurt sales :)).

So after some Atari, we hauled out the Bally Arcade, then sidetracked to a couple (real) arcade games – we both have several of these – a couple of mine are at his house) – then off for pizza. Then back for more Atari, followed by Colecovision (played through nearly all the cart’s he had, although the controllers on that system haven’t stood the test of time well – they were all but impossible to use) and then back to Atari with a brief sojourn in C64-land. We also surveyed several other systems he has around, but ultimately forgot to get around to hooking them up.

Then of course the required pilgrimage to Fry’s in Wilsonville, followed by a quick dinner and then to Ground Kontrol (an actual arcade in Oldtown Portland with 80s-90s videogames and about 20 pinballs – great stuff!).

We got done around 945 pm. And the good thing is, there are plenty more games for NEXT time 🙂 We need to get back to more C64 – and then some older PC and Amiga games we used to play for hours on end.

Ah, memories…..

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So finally saw Speed Racer (the 2008 live-action version, not the original 60s anime) tonight. When this movie came out, I was definitely interested in seeing it, but then many reviews were middling to bad, so I didn’t. The Wachowskis are somwhat polarizing filmmakers these days, and have a lot to live up to (and live down) after the Matrix series went from excellent (1st) to good (2nd) to somewhat mediocre (3rd). But V for Vendetta was also excellent (IMHO), so whatevs – most other filmmakers would be completely jealous to have only a *couple* of those movies in their CV, after all.

Anyway, this movie takes in a lot of the original anime’s plot devices (yes, Chim-Chim is here) and I was definitely pleased to see a scene where they go through all the Mach 5’s special devices (but they never used the Ctrl-G ‘Homing Bird’? They used to use that all the time in the anime!). Racer X of course is key to the plot, and he doesn’t disappoint, either. The look of the cars varies from ‘shiny Hot Wheels surrounded by CGI’ to semi-real looking (when the humans are in them or driving them on “normal” streets).

The movie itself owes a LOT to Pixar (Monsters, Inc and The Incredibles most notably for the factory scenes and the Racer family neighboorhood/house/school/etc.). It also definitely takes from at least two PS2 videogames I own – Kinetica (robot battle-racing) and XG3: Extreme-G Racing (hyper-powered motorcycles with weapons) – both games are played on crazy tracks that soar up/down/multiple dimensions/aerial/underwater/you name it. Props must also be given to drift racing/dirt track racing in general (given the way they drive the cars almost horizontally a lot of the time) and the old standby – Initial D, which I’m sure the Wachowskis have watched at least most of. In the big rally race mid-movie, some of those crazy mountain races look a LOT like the way Initial D shows its crazy mountain racing (the latter’s animation being far more primitive, however).

Finally, there is a lot of IGPX here too (a recent anime from 2005) in the look and feel of the racetracks, especially the Fuji race – and the battling between the cars during the race.

As you’d expect, the races themselves are very well done and crazy to watch, and the movie doesn’t try to oversell the characters, either – unlike the mostly cheesy Racer family seen in the anime. I would say the Racers are as appropriate for the story as The Matrix’ characters – without the speechmaking every 15 minutes by Morpheus of course :). What was a bit sad was that actor Emile Hirsch (who plays Speed) was BORN the same year I graduated from high school – DOH! I guess you can’t win them all. The usual anime ‘challenges’ confront Speed and the rest to varying degrees – *almost* insurmountable odds, increasingly maniacal opponents, crisis-whew-bigger-crisis-whew, etc. – But it moves along fairly well and has a bit of fun even with camera asides in a few tiny scenes.

In summary, I was far more entertained by this movie than say, Avatar – even though the latter is of course way more advanced effects-wise. Even having seen some of the SR anime before as a kid (probably 30+ years ago) didn’t really spoil anything. This is a great movie, and i’d definitely see it again on the big screen (Cinerama or midnight movie at The Egyptian, anyone?) I watched it this time at home on my computer……

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So in anticipating the new Clash of the Titans movie about to come out – I got the old one (1981 vintage) from the library. The last (and only) time I saw this movie was around 1984 while staying with friends in Nicoya, Costa Rica – the town had a small theater and we saw the movie there one night (with english subtitles).

So….on the one hand, this probably was an impressive movie for its time (given the varied Ray Harryhausen animation throughout if for no other reason) – I was about 15-16 at the time and remember there being sound issues in that theater, don’t really remember much of the movie. I think I remember the Kraken, who is essentially a cross between Godzilla (size), Creature from the Black Lagoon (appearance) and the silly big multi-armed Goro from the also ridiculous Mortal Kombat movie (multiple arms). And yes, I saw at least half of THAT movie, and let’s just say it doesn’t merit its own review – play the video game instead.

Rumbling forth to modern times, ‘COTT 1981’ looks pretty dated. Like other journey + monster(s) + hero/heroine movies, there are several tedious sequences where they are just riding around. This was my main complaint about the The Two Towers (theatrical version, anyway – the extended Two Towers DVD version is much better on that score). Too much running around with obviously a camera plane tracking them from above (thankfully never saw a shadow – an Orc probably got the camera plane with a flaming arrow at some point – that’ll learn ’em!).

Neither hero nor heroine are very good actors – Harry Hamlin (Perseus) does a lot of staring into space with a half-frown and his mouth hanging open and the heroine isn’t given many lines or much to do at all. Burgess Meredith (Perseus’ helper guy Ammon) isn’t bad, but he was better playing a flightless bird earlier in life (or when he trained Italians). Zeus gets all the best lines (but considering the actor playing him, pretty unsurprising).

As to other silliness – most of the men run around in non-existent pants that would even embarass Richard Simmons – and I don’t want to know how it is to ride horses (flying or no) in effectively a medieval jockstrap for miles on end – there is a reason they invented chariots and rickshaws, guys!

Perseus’ sword is pretty cheesy – I think i’ve either seen that thing before at Brookstone or that nerd store in The Market. The matte painting backgrounds are a bit too easily spotted as such. and as for Bubo, the mechanical owl given to Perseus by Athena – I didn’t mind him but at least they open with him breaking a dead tree branch by landing on it (because as a metal owl, he’s too f’ing heavy? :))

Let’s sum up by saying there was a lot of fast-forwarding (the magic of DVDs!) and hope that the new version is decent – although if the story is the same, i’ll wait to see reviews before getting in line. Hopefully The Kraken will get a shot at eating Liam Neeson or something cool 🙂

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Happy Turkey Day!  it’s high time this blog got (back) off the ground again.  So…how about a few fun things for the holiday:

1) Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody (not holiday music – that’s why it’s GOOD :))

2) What I’m reading at the moment – not bad so far, about mid-second book in the first trilogy (there are two more)

3) How the kids ‘drifted’ back in 1979, Vectorbeam style….

go easy on the trytophan, young jedis……and enjoy your holiday!

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