Results tagged “comic books”

It used to be thought that health care reform in the United States would happen when pigs flew.  Well, this is the sound of one ham flapping.  The United States still has a long way to go before they have the level of health care that I have as a Canadian, but it's a start.  The bill itself is long, very long, and apparently getting longer (mentioned at about 4:12 into part 1 of the episode).  If the biggest complaint you have is that it's big, then that must mean that War and Peace, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Bible are the worst books ever.  Kinda kills your enthusiasm for NaNoWriMo, doesn't it, when an entire party can enter and already be over 1900 pages ahead of you?  I'm only at 13054 words for the month.  Stupid Democrats, showing off.

This week has been a week of milestones.  Sesame Street has celebrated its 40th anniversary, and at the same time, Wallace and Gromit has been around for 20 years.  In fact, if you go to the official Telltale Games web page, you can download a Wallace and Gromit PC game for free!  Hope you hurry, though, because the special offer ends very, very soon.  Within hours of this post, in fact.  Also, speaking of special days, November 5th was Flux Capacitor Day.

There is some good news for injured or crippled pets: they no longer have to fear for their future.  Just ask Andre the dog.  All it takes is one person (or team of people) to decide that something's possible, and something like this can happen.

Flash was never, in anyone's wildest imaginations, the best thing to happen to computers and the Internet.  And when Windows Vista came along, it really showed how awful such an idea was.  Well, welcome to the future.  If such an idea catches on, I hope one day that Flash will go to the same technological graveyard as the Geocities school of web design and the Zip disk.

COFEE has apparently leaked all over the Internet and despite one site's efforts to keep the mess from spreading, by now it's available for pretty much anyone to download.  What this means, of course, is that a piece of software that can break passwords and check your on-line activity has not only been given to regular users such as you and me, but it has also been in the hands of police for quite a while now.  I hope the police haven't abused the power of the software, because I'm sure the rest of the world certainly will.  But it's not like you have to be a rocket scientist to break passwords these days.  A lot of people don't bother changing the generic password they're given when they start using a service or a piece of software.  Take iPhone users, for instance.  If they jailbreak their iPhones, many of them make themselves vulnerable to attack.  iLaugh.

It's never too early to learn, as a baby's cry can tell you.  Apparently, you can cry in French and German, depending on where you were born.  I imagine this means you can cry in other languages as well.  (And no, I'm not kidding, despite the presence of this on the Internet.)  Myself, I remember recently hearing the cry of a young kid who couldn't get their way, and it sounded a lot like an ambulance.  I'm still not kidding.  But even after leaving the womb, a child doesn't stop learning.  Apparently, this is because of the presence of comic books in their lives.  I believe it.  I used to read Tintin and Asterix a lot and look at how I turned out.  But, and this is the important thing, you can't own me.  I'm sorry, but it's true.  And don't bother asking Google this, because I don't think they know either.  (Bonus material: read this.)

Sony finds itself in a lot of legal hot water, lately.  First of all, blind gamers want to enjoy games, too.  And although "visually impared" can mean a lot of things, it makes me think of all those people with no eyesight who can't enjoy games in the first place.  Unfortunately, visual media doesn't come in braille or large print editions, and this means that it's very hard for the visually impared to enjoy a game.  And increasing font size on the screen will do nothing more than overcrowd an already overcrowded menu system on most modern games.  I know I have a hard time seeing the font on some games, but that's because I'm stubborn: you can't really use a 20-year-old television to play a game like Final Fantasy Tactics without being directly in front, squinting at the horrible translation so that I can read it.

Second of all, Sony was finally sued over their firmware updates, and I have to say, it's about time.  An interesting thing to note is that one of the things they're being sued over is the fact that they require certain firmware updates to be present in order to play games you've purchased for your system.  It used to be that you could buy a game and it would run automatically, no extra stuff needed.  Not now.  For those of you who still haven't purchased a current system, here's how it works: when you purchase a PS3 or PSP game, if your system doesn't have the most up-to-date firmware, you might be prompted to update before you're allowed to play the game.  Also, you're not allowed to access certain functions of your system once the new firmware is available, which forces you to download and install it if you still want to use your system the way it was designed to be used.  It's possible, as has been demonstrated, that a system update will brick your machine.  It's worse when it's a required update and it feels like your console is being held hostage until you install it.

I'd better get back to my NaNovel before the day's completely done, but before I go, I wanted to mention that the Large Hadron Collider is still not going to destroy us.  This time, it's because a bird dropped some bread on it.

Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie isn't very good if you're judging it by the usual standards for movie critiquing. The plot is vapid and predictable and too many characters are introduced only to be dropped entirely mere minutes later. However, it's still very enjoyable because, for Street Fighter II fans, it's the biggest 100 minute piece of fan service imaginable.

The main appeal of the movie lies in not only seeing all of our favorite characters in anime form, but with the fact that it actually portrays the characters accurately, unlike Street Fighter: The Movie that released around six months before this. It was the movie we clung to and used to explain to people that the characters you saw in the live-action feature weren't the real characters, but these were the closest to the real thing. Though shortly afterward we realized it was a fans only ordeal, even despite the movie having some of the best fighting scenes ever seen in an anime. But it was still a comfort zone made popular by fans who had just witnessed the franchise violated on the big screen. Well, until the live action movie attained cult hit status in the last few years.

Meanwhile, Street Fighter II V was pretty successful for somewhat different reasons. It was a 29 episode TV anime series that, in a way, completely ignores the game's established canon; though it does establish one eventually that bears a number of similarities to the storyline of Street Fighter II. Sure, while it shares some of the same aforementioned problems that the anime movie has (with the addition of some low budget animation), it's all mindless-yet-entertaining fun.

Following the success of those two is Street Fighter Alpha: The Movie, which is actually a combination of two OVA episodes made into a 90 minute feature for US audiences. It's no surprise that Capcom wanted to capitalize on the success of the previous anime iterations. You can tell that they tried to break from the formula a little, but Alpha unfortunately lacks a few of the elements that made the Street Fighter II anime memorable.

Not to say it isn't still fun to watch. It definitely is, as it tries to do something different with its plot, this time centering on Ryu and his supposedly long lost brother, Shun. Instead, it just ends up an awkward mess with the characters ending up the same way they started, the exception being Ruy who's a little better off at the end of the conflict. Also, the main villain has nowhere near the same level of charisma any of the game's villains have. It also manages to exacerbate the problem of introducing characters and subsequently dropping them by leaving them on-screen for seconds at a time instead of minutes. The fighting scenes also lack the sense of finesse that helped make the other anime fun to watch. It's still an enjoyable movie (or OVA, whichever), but it also barely manages to make a significant mention in the other post.

Lastly, it wasn't until recently that a good Street Fighter comic series surfaced. To avoid the messy ordeal (figuratively and literally) that happened with Malibu comics, Capcom decided to handle production and distribution of a new comic series themselves. They also hired UDON, a group of artists whose work is influenced by the aesthetics of Asian animation and comics, to do the artwork for the series. UDON also recently did the designs for Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.

These comics are basically everything you'd expect from a Street Fighter comic. The level of entertainment and fan service manages to dissuade any fans reading it from lambasting it because of its predictability. It follows the philosophy established by the Street Fighter II anime, in that its main itinerary involves creating a fun product with engaging characters. It's nothing particularly deep, but do you really need that in Street Fighter. Of course not.

There's a pretty even amount of good and bad Street Fighter material in other media. Overall, that's a good thing, considering that usually when a franchise expands into other forms of media, it will net disastrous results. With the reinvigoration of excitement in the franchise, there will undoubtedly be more comics and animation in the near future. Well, along with that movie.

I happened to catch a viewing of Batman Forever when it aired on Encore Action Channel Saturday night, a movie that I swear gets worse every time I see it. Though the good thing about that it "gets worse" in a way that it becomes more hilarious; that's thanks to the over-the-top and out-of-place performances, ridiculous stunts that would be pushing it even for a cartoon, and some hammy acting from usually good actors (though that's mostly thanks to an abysmal script). It's an awful movie, sure, but I can't get enough of it.

It's from watching movies like this that we start to form the perception that the Hollywoodification of comic book franchises will appease people initially, but eventually downgrade into egregious tripe that makes a mockery of the pre-established canon. But I have a question to every person who concludes that: how long has it been since you've read a comic book? Surely they don't realize how the medium has transformed in the last decade.

Batman R.I.P. was announced not too long ago; a comic whose itinerary was to give the venerable caped crusader a fitting end. You know, theoretically. Thanks to numerous news organizations, we've learned how Bruce Wayne meets his fate: via gunshot. He was apparently killed by a mysterious man, who is apparently his father that was originally shot dead when Bruce was only a child. No, I kid you freaking not. Personally, I don't know whether to lament or laugh incessantly, so I proceeded to do the latter.

Who really knows how they can justify a move like this. It seriously looks as if the comic book industry, at least as far as most super hero comics are concerned, has completely moved into "oh, god we're desperate! we just need some attention!" category. In this sense, the cynics among us are actually completely correct: the undoing of comic book franchises is the result of the comic industry itself.

We can criticize a movie like Spider-Man 3 for being lame and ruining the continuity and pacing of the comics, but the reality of the situation is that comics are actually doing that themselves in spades nowadays. Sure, Spider-Man 3 had its fare share of problems, but did it have the Peter Parker existing in the movie being a clone of the real one that just happened to show up at the end of the movie as a ridiculous and contrived deus ex machina device? Thankfully no, though the utter ridiculousness of that didn't stop the comic series from doing the exact same thing for years.

Though you can probably attribute it to pure coincidence, the comic book industry really was  ravaged when Jack Kirby unfortunately passed. The industry tried to take steps to recover, but failed because of sheer arrogance and the blatant disregard of a wide audience. So it's a shame that DC Comics and Grant Morrison have decided to go through with the "oh no he's dead!" route. With it being done to death before, fans are less moved by his "passing" and more concerned with placing bets on how long it will take for DC to revive Bruce. This is why the now-popular internet name exists: Batman B.R.B. Though all of this would serve as a great allegory for the comic book industry if it was actually run on competency these days.