Geek vs Life

The following is the official press release announcing Sakura-Con’s musical guests.

Seattle, WA1-23-2008 Sakura-Con hosts US debut of Ali Project and welcomes musical guests SCANDAL

Sakura-Con 2008, March 28-30th at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center will host the Japanese band Ali Project for their first ever US appearance. Also confirmed for Sakura-Con 2008 is the Japanese, all girl band SCANDAL. Both are presented with special thanks to NEU BAUHAUS.

Ali Project is a highly accomplished Japanese band with 19 albums to their credit and songs on over 14 anime soundtracks-including series beloved in the US- such as: .hack//Roots, Clamp School, Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, Noir, Rozen Maiden (TV, Ouvertüre, Träumend), Wish.

So I was trying to come up with a witty excuse for why this is too late. The best of them being something along the lines of “I fell into a time warp, so really I will have been putting this up as soon as PAX was over, but the time machine only works on forward, and I misread the decimal, so this unfortunately will not have been the case.” Morally, and well, grammatically, reprehensible overall. Life’s just been crazy. But our friends at Obscura Labs have put together yet another wonderful piece regarding our time at PAX. Check it out!

This trend is really starting to bother me. There are perfectly good Japanese films getting remade for American audiences. Unfortunately, these remakes are of movies that were made, in some instances, a couple years ago and are just word for word remakes with an “American” audience.

The leading theory behind why this is happening is sheer racism. Hollywood believes that American audiences do not like all-Asian casts. If such is the case, why have movies like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, “House of Flying Daggers”, “Hero”, and “Memoirs of a Geisha” done so well in the box office. However, this is a thinly veiled excuse. Hollywood is just incapable of saying they have no new ideas, so they have to pull them from other countries, hoping that they can draw audiences in that are ignorant of the original movies.

Greeting and salutations, folks. Sorry for the lack of content from me, but the GVL Lair has been put on hiatus until I find a more permanent place to live, but this has given me an odd amount of free time to actually sit down and play a ton of games, some of which guerrilla style (which I’ll get to in a near future post).

With 2007 down the drain (thankfully in some regards), looking back seems appropriate. The year was absolutely amazing for games, and far too expensive to try to get to all of the good stuff. But, alas, I’ve sacrificed and/or sleep to try to get through everything in one form or another. Thus, without further ado, here are my picks for the top 10 games of 2007.

Bandai Visual announced yesterday that they had licensed the popular “Harukanaru Toki no Naka de ~Hachiyou Shou~” anime (press release here). Now, most people probably won’t care too much (after all, it is a rather “girly” series), but it is my favorite series. And what will impact many people is the pricing structure.

9 DVDs, 2-3 episodes each, subtitled only… $29.99 each.

Yeah… Basically, $10-15 per episode. I don’t like this idea. And no, it’s not the only series Bandai Visual has done this with. The Galaxy Angel Rune DVDs are 3 episodes, subtitled only, and retail for $49.99. I don’t get this. They’re cutting back on costs by not having to hire scriptwriters to convert translations into dub dialogue, nor having to hire actors. So why are their prices so much higher than everyone else?