Where hikikomori fear to tread...

Tomorrow morning I'm leaving to fly up to Queensland and spend Christmas with the family. I'll be staying in a small hired house on an isolated island a couple of hours drive from Brisbane. Even for a Western-style hikikomori (one who actually has a job and isn't so much AFRAID to leave his room as simply not bothered to) this is a daunting prospect. Lacking all the comforts of home (game consoles, gaming quality PC, high-speed internet connection, anime and manga collection) the only entertainment will be what I bring with me.

I just hope 10 volumes of manga, 2 Vampire Hunter D novels, 4 GBA games, the rest of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and She, the Ultimate Weapon: Another Love Song is enough to last me until new years...

See you then.

Bat Out Of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose

A lesser known fact about me is that I am a major fan of the rock legend Meat Loaf (much like my friend NivCorp; in fact it was I who first introduced him to the music when I loaned him the first 2 Bat Out Of Hell albums when we were in high school). As you may or may not be aware (and in case the title didn't tip you off), he recently released Bat Out Of Hell III, nearly 30 years after the original came out. This weekend just gone I picked it up.

NivCorp confessed to being somewhat disappointed with it, and I have to agree it isn't up to the incredibly high standards of the original Bat Out of Hell or Back Into Hell, but it's still a solid album. I have a few favourites already. The title track 'The Monster Is Loose' is 100% sound and fury (although possibly a little too long at 7:12) and I just fell in love with the next track, 'Blind As A Bat'. Sure, the bat connection seems a little flimsy, but the chorus! Oh, I like it!

Rather depressingly, I found the covers of 'It's All Coming Back to Me' and Jim Steinman's earlier 'Bad For Good' to be not as good as the originals. In the first case Meat Loaf's voice, while still in great form, just doesn't (in my opinion) match the feel of the song as well as Celine Dion's (even though the song was originally written for him). In 'Bad For Good' Meat Loaf clearly outdoes Steinman's original rendition vocally, but the instrumentation wasn't a patch on Steinman's far sharper, more hard-rocking version. They're still great songs, but I don't know if I wouldn't prefer to listen to the originals.

Additionally, I thought the album centrepiece song 'Seize the Night' to be quite bland, reusing varied samples from Steinman's earlier work (most notably the guitar riff from 'Good Girls Go to Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)' and the orchestral theme from 'The Storm') and featuring some truly lousy lyrics. And the album closer, 'Cry To Heaven' was nothing special, no comparison to 'Lost Boys and Golden Girls' (from Bat II) and not even close to 'For Crying Out Loud' (from Bat I).

And 'If It Ain't Broke, Break It' is outright terrible. Much like 'Do It!' from his previous album, it just isn't in Meat Loaf's style and the lyrics are awful.

But most of the other tracks ranged from pretty good to very good, especially 'Alive' and 'If God Could Talk'. Overall it's not a bad album at all, although there are a couple of patchy points, but it really has a hard time living up to the Bat Out Of Hell name.

On a related note, as an AMV maker I can't help but be excited about the possibilities for combining 'The Monster Is Loose' with Naruto, at least once Shippuuden comes out and we get more Demon Fox action.

Oh and if you've never tried salt-and-vinegar rice crackers; have a go, they're not half bad.

Gankutsuou- sweet, psychadelic revenge...

It took me a few days, but I finally found the time to finish watching possibly the best anime series I've seen all year- GANKUTSUOU. Gorgeously animated and brilliantly adapted from Alexander Dumas' 'The Count of Monte Cristo' (the greatest revenge story ever written) it is probably the most visually stylish anime I've ever seen, as well as being possibly the most genuinely mature story I've seen for many a year.

I don't intend to write a review, but I just have to say that the final volume was (for once) completely satisfying. Anime often have really bad endings -copping out, inconclusively tailing offs, or even collapsing into sheer nonsense- but Gankutsuou tied pretty much everything up in an awesome finale. Best of all, it had a dedicated epilogue episode, something I always like to see (and haven't seen since I watched Infinite Ryvius at the start of this year).

If Gankutsuou has come out in your territory, you OWE it to yourself to watch this. You can even show it to your non-anime watching parents, because it's such a mature and well-written story that its appeal easily transcends that of common anime. And if nothing else, the eye candy is gorgeous. With Christmas coming up, this might be a good opportunity (a pity there aren't any collection boxes out yet, though).

No, I'm not being paid by the anime companies to say this.

Catching up on pop culture.

I don't like watching movies very much, especially Hollywood movies, so I don't know about a lot of things that other people my ages would commonly be expected know. So in an attempt to bring myself up to date with my contemporaries, I've been working to rectify this. Since I can't actually be bothered watching any of the movies, I've instead been spending a lot of time reading about various well known films on Wikipedia ("the One Stop Resource For Damn Near Anything!")

I've been focussing on films in the genres I have at least a vague interest in, which basically means science fiction and horror. Actually, I don't like horror films at all (although I have a fondness for horror video games like Silent Hill) but I do confess to a sort of macabre fascination with them, especially classic villains like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. So as a result I've recently read about: the Predator series, the Alien series (and Alien vs Predator), Starship Troopers, Robocop, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Exorcist series, the Hannibal Lector films, Final Destionation, the Scream trilogy and -just for the hell of it- the Scary Movie series. I also looked up The Crow movies (the first installment being one of my all-time favourite Hollywood films) and various other random things, such as H.R Geiger's night terrors and the Heavy Metal movies. I love Wikipedia.

As a result of my studies I can detail with reasonable accuracy the order in which Jason killed his victims in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (which was only the 4th film).

Unfortunately, I also feel a strange compulsion to watch endless amounts of Hello Kitty...

World of Whatcraft? Don't bother me, I have a guild to run!

MMORPGs are an evil, insidious corruption which creep into our lives and devour all our free time with adventures that have no true end. Not that that's a bad thing, of course. I love a good online RPG.

My game of choice is Guild Wars. I deliberately selected it over World of Warcraft for a number of reasons: 1- Guild Wars has much lower system requirements than WoW. 2- Guild Wars actually gets regular expansions (or to be precise, whole new campaigns) released ON TIME! 3- WoW is so notoriously addictive that it has literally ruined lives, and all I want is good game to play. 4- Guild Wars is FREE of any kind of online fees. Wonderful game. Truly wonderful. Looks pretty too.

OK, so I've been spending the last 20-odd hours of game time just saving up for a suit of 15k Kurzick armour for my warrior/necromancer. OK, so I haven't moved forward in the storyline of any of the three campaigns in ages. OK, so my guild is pretty much a hollow shell with practically no activity. Doesn't matter. I love this game, and 2 hours of 12 on 12 alliance battling this evening reminded me why.

So if you're ever online, keep an eye out for my characters, Arcane Azmadi, Kurimoto Takeshi, or Vahrshak Azh Mahdii. And if you're a Luxon, I'll kick your sorry ass on the battlefield.

And now for something completely different.

Well, it's happened. Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have sucessfully challenged Kim Beazley for leadership of the ALP.

I say it's not before time. Kim Beazley was a decent bloke (unlike John Howard, who is a spiteful, corrupt little gremlin) and I sympathize with him over the death of his brother, but he simply didn't have what it takes to win the PM's office. His much-touted "experience" doesn't count for anything when what he obviously had the most experience at is losing.

It remains to be seen if Rudd has "what it takes" to defeat Howard, but I at least expect he'll take more initiative than Beazley (and won't make stupid mistakes like confusing Rove MacManus with Karl Rove). And Julia Gillard is more than competant- she's one of the few ALP members who can be relied upon to score serious points on the Coalition in debate.

At least, that's the impression that I get. I don't generally pay much attention to politicians who I can't either despise or ridicule, but I probably should pay a bit more attention. I know I'll be voting for the ALP come next election, regardless of who's leading them, but it'd be nice to know I'm backing a winner for once. Howard HAS to go. He's shamed this country for long enough.

Wrist pain, and other rock-related injuries...

OK, so I eventually settled on Guitar Hero II for my after-work fix today. What can I say, I didn't feel in the mood for Battlefield and my brain was too fried for something as intense as SMT:DDS.

I love rhythm games like DDR, Guitar Freaks and all that, but the Guitar Hero games have something the Japanese games seem to lack- a real sense of roleplaying. Yes, you only have a 3-foot plastic guitar with buttons and a strum bar instead of strings, but you ARE a rock and roll hero while you're jamming on it. You can choose from a variety of venues, characters and guitars and the songs are real classic rock songs (OK, so they're mostly covers, but still...)

And the songs are generally pretty great. The first game has (among others) Incubus, Queen, David Bowie, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, White Zombie, Deep Purple, Bad Religion, Audioslave and FRANZ FERDINAND! Yes, 'Take Me Out' is available for you to rock out to! The sequel isn't quite as good but still has Kiss, Nirvana, The Stone Temple Pilots, The Living End, The Foo Fighters, Wolfmother and Rage Against The Machine. It's a pretty good collection of music.

Still, I can't help but feel that Guitar Hero II at least was a bit of a wasted opportunity. Where was 'Black Betty'? Where was 'Chop Suey'? Where was 'Unforgiven II', which has what it in my opinion both the best guitar riff and solo in history? And if they're going to use The Living End, then why would they choose 'Carry Me Home' instead of the far more appropriate 'All Torn Down'? They didn't even follow up on GH1's 'Take Me Out' with 'Do You Want To?' or even 'The Fallen', which is a crying shame. And there's still no AC/DC at all. I'm aware that there are licensing issues involved and that because of Guitar Hero II's new co-op mode all songs must have both a good lead guitar and rhythm/bass line, but I really feel it could have been a bit better.

On the bright side, these games are doing really well, so we can expect to see several more installments before the series runs its course. Which means a whole lot more wrist pain before I'm done rocking. Ouch. Shouldn't have had that go at 'Freebird' on Hard level. 20 guitar solo sections in a row can really take it out of you, even if I failed around the 60% mark...

Maybe I should take the game's advice and consider buying a real guitar...?

The randomness has begun... feel free to ignore me...

My good friend, the CEO of NivCorp ( http://www.nivcorp.blogspot.com/ ) recently suggested I make my own blog. So I thought "what the hell, it can't be that hard", so here I am.

What will you find on my blog? Basically me rambling on about anything that interests me. My interests mainly centre around anime and video games but I will also go on about movies, music, politics, interior decorating, funny things that happened recently, ferrets, whatever random thoughts cross my mind.


What you won't find is me angsting on about how much life sucks and I want to die. I leave that sort of thing to the professionals.


I may bore you, I may fascinate you, I may make you laugh. No-one really gives a damn anyway. So I might as well stop rambling and... well... start rambling about something else.


Anyway, I had my hair cut today. That doesn't sound like a big deal, unless you know that I haven't had my hair cut since early 2001 (OK, I had a minor trim last year). I went from having a ponytail nearly a foot long to an extremely typical close-cropped cut. To be honest, I don't like it, but my long hair was getting to be a nuisance and I think I was starting to go prematurely bald simply from the number of hairs that got snagged on my brush and yanked out every time I brushed it.


So now all I need to do I shave my stubble (something I do only when it starts to actually irritate me) and trim my beard back so it's actually shorter than the hair on my head, and I'll be one step closer to actually looking like a real human being...

Tomorrow I'll probably ramble on about Battlefield 2142, Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, or Guitar Hero 1 & 2. It just depends whether I feel like shooting people, eating them alive, or rocking out with a small plastic guitar...