Not too long ago, I had a conversation with my wife about how infuriating I find young girls posing for photos by opening their eyes wide, pouting their lips, tilting their heads at an angle and flashing the V-sign with their fingers. I find them so repulsive and ridiculous that I assiduously avoid sites like Myspace and Facebook which seem to be infected by them.
Well, guess what, now they’ll get to be even more infuriating thanks to the ever-inventive Japanese. Someone had the bright idea of making extra-wide contact lenses, so that girls can now have the huge, insect-like eyes of anime characters. Can someone please tell these girls already that no, all this does not make them look cute and attractive?
As much as I’ve always liked the concept of fighting games, my reflexes and finger dexterity generally aren’t good enough for me to do well at them beyond beginner-level difficulty. Still, I’m a pretty big fan of Bleach, and I was genuinely curious enough about how the different character powers would work in a fighting game, so I decided to give the newest installment of the Heat the Soul series a try. This is actually easier said than done since this game exists only in a Japanese version, which means there are no English instructions. Since I don’t speak or read Japanese, learning my way through the game was mainly a question of trial and error. Luckily, the menu items are in English, but I had to guess what the instructions wanted me to do.
This latest installment covers the Hueco Mundo storyline in the Bleach series, which means that it features all of the Arrancar from that storyline and de-emphasizes the shinigami characters. Virtually all of the characters who were present in previous games are still here, but some of them can only be unlocked by importing a savegame from a previous version of the game. This is a shame, because those characters include such colorful ones as Kisuke Urahara, Mayuri Kurotschi and Shunsui Kyoraku. The new arrancar includes some genuinely interesting ones like Ulquiorra Schiffer and the fully released form of Grimmjow Jeagerjaques, but unfortunately also the rather silly Privaron Espada.
Continue reading A Game: Bleach Heat the Soul 5 (PSP) →
While we’re waiting for Heroes season 2 to be completed before we start watching it, we wife and I have been hunting for something interesting to watch on a regular basis. We tried an episode of CSI: Miami at first, but it was so atrociously bad that I refused to watch any more of it. Slow-motion scenes which serve to do nothing but show how cool the main characters look? Pointlessly violent and unrealistic gunfights? Super-technical solutions that are improbably illustrated with pretty 3D graphics? Please no. As I recall series star David Caruso first made a name for himself in the highly regarded NYPD Blue, which was a well-written police drama that focused on character development. CSI: Miami is simply inane and shallow in comparison.
Continue reading What I’m Watching: Bleach →
The unexamined life is a life not worth living