It’s been awhile since I’ve sat down and watched an Anime series from the first episode to the last, and even longer since I’ve blogged about it. I just finished watching Bamboo Blade. It’s a 26 episode series about 5 high school girls and their kendo club. The 5 characters, the instructor, and the other club members all go through their own personal dilemmas and challenges, and they are made into better people by way of the sport of kendo. Kendo is sort of like Japanese fencing. As the characters learn about kendo, the audience does too, so it’s an interesting look into the cultural aspect. All of this, in and of itself, is decently entertaining while typical of the sports anime genre. What really makes this show fun is that the lead character, who is the most skilled yet the most reserved personality on the team, loves anime and is crazy about a tokusatsu super hero show called “Blade Braver“. While the viewer only gets brief glimpses of this show-within-a-show as the main character watches it, it’s clear that there is a history to it and there are parallels between the heroes fighting their rivals and the actual kendo matches she’s in. The girls even assign themselves colours like a sentai team!

It’s pretty appropriate that a show about kendo would have references to anime and tokusatsu. Now that I know a little bit about kendo through watching Bamboo Blade, I can see how much influence the sport has had on Japanese pop culture. The visual similarities between kendo practitioners in full gear and masked heroes like Kamen Rider are pretty obvious, whether they were intentional or not. Koji Kabuto yelling “ROCKETO PUNCH!” while piloting Mazinger Z and other anime characters who call out their attacks is much like kendo, where the two fighters yell certain words depending on what part of the opponent’s body they are striking at. Actually, there’s a lot of yelling in kendo in general, which reminds me of a “powering up” sequence in any given fighting anime.

Anyway, Bamboo Blade is a fun and enlightening show. Apparently the original manga is being released into English. The anime adaptation is unlikely to be licensed in North America, but the fansubs are out there. I hope there’s a sequel. I’ll watch it. But I’m probably not going to take up kendo anytime soon, because I don’t think my brittle wrist could handle it!

Of course, what I’d really like if for “Blade Braver” to become a real show, because that would be awesome!

Sayonara.

I had been working on this for a long, long time. And now it is done. It is my newest artwork, born out of love for the classic characters of anime. It is my masterpiece.

It is THE JUSTICE LEAGUE OF ANIME.

THE JUSTICE LEAGUE OF ANIME by ninjatron on DeviantArt

Inspired by the animated tv series and based off of a famous piece of art by Bruce Timm, I replaced Superman, Batman, and the rest of the League members with famous anime characters from throughout history.

So far it’s gotten 12 +favs and 10 comments within the past 7 hours. Pretty good, but we can do better! Check it out, read the artist’s comments, and if you like what you see and have a deviantART account, you know what to do.

Sayonara.

Full story here and here.

Looks like a good time to me!

Sayonara.

I just recently got a copy of Tetris for Nintendo DS. I’ve always loved Tetris, ever since I first played it on the PC shortly after it became available internationally. The DS version has been around for awhile but I hadn’t gotten around to picking up a copy. Now it’s getting harder to find so I decided I should get it while I still could.

While I can say that I am a Tetris veteran with years of experience, this DS edition is no walk in the park! It’s incredibly intense. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sore after playing a video game. The “marathon” mode just absorbs your entire body into the game to the point where you have no idea how hard you are gripping onto the machine or how much your thumb hurts from pressing the A button to rotate the falling pieces. Even though there are several changes to the core Tetris formula that make it easier, including being able to see the next several pieces to fall, the difficulty becomes extraordinarily high as you continue to play. I have yet to reach the goal of 200 lines, with my highest count falling short at around 175 before the screen fills up. It’s fun but I can’t play it for too long, otherwise I’ll hurt myself. Luckily there are other modes in the game that add some variety, including a nice relaxing “Touch” mode where you arrange blocks using the stylus, but it’s the classic mode that I always come back to.

I think Tetris is pretty much the greatest video game of all time. Even after all these years, there are no first person shooters or MMORPGs that can possibly deliver the kind of white-knuckle experience as a round of Tetris. And yet it’s so completely accessible and easy to understand that even grandma can play. It’s the universal video game.

So now I have a craving. I need to play Tetris again right now.

Sayonara.

UPDATE: 200 LINES BABY! OH YEAH!
Writing this post must have been good luck!
Final score: 277976 points.

This past weekend I was in London. No, not London, England. Fake London. Ghetto London. London, Ontario. I have a cousin from there who’s getting married this summer and so his parents held a big party and invited pretty much everyone. It was held at a place called “Palisad“, which is a restaurant with arcade games and bowling. Kind of a like a Chuck E. Cheese, but for grownups. There were general racing and shooting video games along with games where you win tickets that you can trade in exchange for various useless trinkets. But I didn’t really care about any of those. I spent the majority of the time there playing a game called Stack Up.

Stack up, for those who are unfamiliar, is an electronic game involving a grid with squares that light up and scroll back and forth. You press a button to make the squares stop moving, then more squares appear on the row above it. You have to line them up to create a stack going up to the top, and the game gets harder with each new row. It doesn’t particularly sound all that exciting from that description, but when there are big prizes on the line, it definitely gets the blood pumping. There are major prizes and minor prizes, with the minor prizes being lame keychains and stuff like that. If you get up to a certain point, you can either choose a minor prize or give that up and continue towards a major prize. The major prizes in the unit I was playing on included some GPS systems, iPods, and a cobalt blue Nintendo DS Lite, which is what I was after. I witnessed someone winning a PSP before I started playing, so I knew it was possible to win. Alas, it was not to be for me.

I have to say, I was pretty good! I got the hang of the game pretty quickly. I probably got up to the final row at least 8 times, but came up short. At one point I had a big crowd of people gathered around me who all sighed with disappointment when I lost on the final row. I played it so much that I badly hurt my wrist from leaning on the machine with my right hand the whole time. People were asking me all night if I won yet, confident that I could do it. But by the time the party was over, I was empty handed. I could have won about 200 Care Bear Keychains, but of course I had my eyes on the big prize and I got greedy.

I played it enough to come to the conclusion that the times I lost before reaching the top were my own fault, but I have my doubts about that last row. Since I had the skill to reach the top multiple times, how could I not win in the end at least once? There had to be more to this game than meets the eye. In my opinion, there must be a certain degree of luck involved on that final row. I will do my research, figure out the secret, and I will try again. Somewhere, some day, I will be victorious in Stack Up.

Stack Up, you are mine!!!

Anyway, the rest of the weekend was fun family stuff. But you don’t care about that.

Sayonara.