THE ULTIMATE STREET FIGHTER REVIEW.

The two Street Fighter Ultimate Editions were books I wanted in my library immediately when I learned of them. Unfortunately I missed out on the previous editions of these two books, including a limited edition boxed set that has Gouki and M.Bison on the covers versus Ryu and Ken. There's an alternate version of the first book, too, that has Ryu in his white gi, whereas the edition I now own, off to the left of this text there, depicts the "Evil" Ryu version of the character -- or the Satsui no Hado ni Mezameta Ryu -- which suited me just fine, as I like the black versus red trade dressings.

But before I start gushing over what's between the covers, I have to issue out a huge warning to anyone who may be interested in these books: handle with care. The production value of these two editions is pretty top notch in every aspect except the binding. The binding began to fall apart the moment I opened the front cover of the first volume, and it was a relentless assault on the glue as I turned each page. This is literally a four-hundred-fifty hit combo on the books binding as each page brings it closer and closer to coming completely undone. It was very disappointing. The second book held together a bit better in the glue-and-pages department, but the cover came away from the rest of the book before I finished it. It really is a damned shame, 'cause these books are really pretty on the outside, but they don't hold up when compared to Street Fighter: Eternal Struggle or SF20: The Art of Street Fighter both are books that Udon published here in the states. It makes me a little sad on the inside.

Moving on, however, we have what's between the covers, and although it's a mixed bag in what it has to offer. On the bad side, we have some very wordy pages that ruin the art that they're covering, and they ruin the martial arts motif that Street Fighter has. I think the Udon team could've benefited themselves by watching more martial arts films than they did (and I think they watched a LOT) during the production of the Street Fighter comics. Sometimes you don't need a whole lot of words to tell a story when you have the expressions to give away the emotional context of the character. The scene that stood out for this was Sagat taking out his frustrations of losing to Ryu and monologuing the entire time. There's a few of those moments as well as some where there's too much talking while fighting. Not as bad as some comics I've read, but it's excessive. The last two complaints I have about the entire series is that the focus isn't centered around all of the characters and some are rendered as background noise only, and it instead centers around the "main" heroes of Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Guile and Cammy. It takes away from the draw that a fighting game has in that the only main character is whatever character you choose to pick, and the Street Fighter games covered in this series has a very large cast of characters. The last part is the Street Fighter II tournament itself that takes place in the second volume. It has too much build-up and the actual tournament isn't given a whole lot of time. Most of the fights are ridiculously short -- like Ken vs. Zangief -- and there's not a whole lot of drama to them until the later fights.

Now, for what I like:

The two volumes here are about nine-hundred pages of Street Fighter goodness. Unlike previous Street Fighter comics that have been done in the United States, this one devotes all its time to telling the story that is somewhat detailed in the games, and as close to the actual canon of the series as possible. The names are still changed, which isn't too big of a deal except where Gouki is concerned, but the story, the plot of it, is heavily influenced by the actual Japanese canon. Gouki isn't possessed by a demon, so on and so forth. Some of the American nuances made it into the series, like Dee Jay fighting with Capoeira and Ken and Ryu being Shotokan fighters -- he doesn't, and they're not.

The books cover the game's storyline, pretty closely at that, from the moment Ryu used the Satsui no Hado to defeat Sagat in the finals of the first Street Fighter tournament through the Street Fighter Alpha stories and ends with the Street Fighter II tournament.

We get a few short stories that appeared as back up stories in the original comics that begin to set things up with a wide variety of artists. For instance, the fight between Ryu and Sagat is drawn by Joe Madureira and it goes on from there. The main plot of the first half of the book deals with Ryu and Ken seeking out Gouki for the murder of their master, Gouken, while Chun-Li and Guile try to bring down Shadaloo, the criminal organization run by Bison. The second half deals more with Chun-Li, Guile and Cammy bringing down the rest of Shadaloo after Bison's apparent death, with Ken and Ryu somewhat caught in the middle.

It's pretty good stuff, and Udon's team of artists render the book brilliantly, which compensates on a big scale for the sometimes awkward writing. You can tell when Ken Siu-Chong hits his stride with the writing which is about the start of the second volume. He's not bad at all, but his hiccups are easy to spot. The art is something else, though, especially for the main chunk of stories. When I first started reading the monthly comics, I was a little more than weary about the action and the martial arts scenes. They were too game centric in my opinion, and by that I mean that the characters do a LOT of their moves from the games. But as the series goes on, the pacing of the action sequences puts this at the tip-top of martial arts comics. I don't think anything has been done better that I can remember reading with the exception of two Japanese comics: Lone Wolf and Cub and Hiroaki Samura's Blade of the Immortal. This stuff is really well done. Everything is well paced and plotted, and the way they angled the "camera" for each panel or frame is a delight each and every time. The two fights that really stand out in the first volume is a fight between Ken and Ryu versus Gouki, which they lose miserably, and a pretty awesome Bruce Lee styled fight between Fei Long and Chun-Li versus a whole lot of bad guys. There's also a battle royale worth mentioning at the closing of the book featuring Chun-Li, Guile, Ken, Ryu and Sakura vs. Vega, Balrog and a bunch of Shadaloo leftover cronies.

The second volume really kicks into high gear as we follow Ryu on his quest to become the best martial artist he can to face Gouki, lots of Shadaloo stuff as Vega takes control of the Bison-absent organization; lots of Cammy, Guile and Chun-Li stuff. Cammy's struggling to find herself, Guile's dealing with a failing relationship, and Chun-Li wants to bring Shadaloo down completely. We also get treated to a short but sweet battle between Gen and Gouki that Street Fighter IV has rendered absolutely senseless. Gen is suffering from Lukemia, but feels that way of dying is beneath him. He wants to fight to the death, and Gouki obliges him -- which is what happens in the games (however, Gen is in Street Fighter IV and Super Street Fighter IV, which are separate games with separate plots, and SFIV takes place after the Street Fighter II tournament, and post Gen's death). Then Bison is resurrected. Upon his resurrection we learn the significance of his connection to Cammy (she's a clone of him of which he was intending on downloading his consciousness into if he needed to) and his connection to Rose (his soul resides in her). Ryu continues to struggle with his inner demon. The Satsui no Hado ni Mezameta version of Ryu is a fantastical character that exists only in Ryu's mind, his darkside, if you will. The Satsui no Hado is the true form of the martial art taught to Ken and Ryu by Gouken, although Gouken toned it down considerably and turned it into an art. The art was intended to kill, which is what Gouki uses. In the Street Fighter mythology, it's a special power-like version of the art that only a select few can use, Gouki and Ryu both have the ability to use it -- Gen uses a similar form of Chinese martial art. What this hints to, and seems to almost have always hinted to, is that Ryu is the son of Gouki, but I think Capcom has denied that time and time again. So Ryu gets in these huge fights with his evil, darker version of himself that all take place in his imagination.

Then the tournament invites are sent out. The rest of the second volume is all buildup to the tournament followed by the tournament itself. The buildup includes a series of qualifying matches that are pretty cool. These matches feature some of the characters that appear in the Street Fighter Alpha series like Sodom, Rainbow Mika, Guy and Cody, Dan Hibiki and a whole slew of others. A couple of characters, Hugo and Poison, weren't featured in a Street Fighter game until Street Fighter III, but it was nice seeing them. The Japanese qualifier is hard to follow as it seems to be a battle royale between Zangief, E. Honda, Rainbow and Sodom, but it eventually boils down to Honda and 'Gief being attacked by a bunch of "Geki" ninjas and destroying the lot of them to make it into the tournament. Geki is a character from the first Street Fighter game that has seemingly disappeared. In these two volumes we learn that there's a whole clan and they all look the same and one of them was killed by Gen. Tangent. The Hong Kong qualifier has a pretty funny fight between Dhalsim and Adon where Adon gets schooled without laying a finger on the Yoda-like Dhalsim (Dhalsim is very much written like the Yoda character that appears in Empire Strikes Back, not the prequels, but one that is a lot more curious and not afraid to get into the mix of things). Then there's two fights that happen at the same time with Fei Long and Chun-Li where the both of them have to fight a large group of characters. All of the characters are unfamiliar to me in terms of Street Fighter, but bear resemblances to other fighting game characters. Fei Long dispatches his pretty quickly, Chun-Li gets blinded a la Jean Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport and gets help from Yun and Yang. The USA qualifier is pretty funny. Balrog is in charge of it and he decides to pull a Willy Wonka and place four golden tickets in an abandoned building that's set to explode in a very short time frame. So Guile, ThunderHawk, Ryu, Ken, Rolento, Hugo, Poison, Cody and Birdie all have to scramble to get the tickets. If you've played Street Fighter II at all, you'll know who gets them, if not, I'll spoil it for you: Guile, T.Hawk, Ryu and Ken. The fight between Cody and Ryu is awesome, though. Cody is a lot like Ryu in that the fight is almost everything, except Cody's not looking to better himself. He's just looking for more fights. The tournament itself goes by way too fast with way too many fights being ridiculously short. It ends just as epic as it should have, though. The final fight of the tournament is Ryu and M.Bison, but it never happens. Gouki steps in and with some minor help from several other characters that blow up Bison's Psycho Drive machine, Gouki destroys him with the Shun Goku Satsu. Then it's Ryu versus Gouki, which is an awesome fight to read almost as much as it is to play.

The only drawback is that there's no epilogue that gives any hints to Street Fighter IV's continuation to the series, which I would have liked. A small explanation as to why a lot of characters have been resurrected (Bison, Gouken, Gen, Rose, etc.,etc.) and how Seth took over S.I.N., Shadaloo's science division.

Other than the slight drawbacks of the production quality and some iffy writing early on, these two books come highly recommended from me -- a very long time Street Fighter fan -- to anyone who enjoys the Street Fighter games. The production -- aside from the binding -- is very high-quality, the art is awesome and fits with the Street Fighter vibe of things head to kicking toe. The writing starts slow and iffy, but gets a lot better as the story progresses. There's some really great philosophical moments going on in the books all over the place that are very much a part of the Street Fighter world, martial arts movies everywhere, and from the likes of Bruce Lee, Sun Tzu and many others that have written about the combatitive arts. They're surprisingly good reads and turn out to be a great deal of fun.

The First of Many.

And So It Begins

My adventures in the self-publishing world of Amazon's Kindle begins today. It's a bit rough edged -- not the story, but the product details and the complete lack of a cover and my rusty skills in selling my own material -- but it's there. It's there for everyone to read and I really feel like I just conquered the world. A bit childish, perhaps, but I've never been one to grow up.

A Childhood Terror is the first short story in a trilogy of short stories that'll all be available before too long. The second one, Ebeneezer the Scrooge vs. Santa Claus (just humor me, okay) will be up within the next week, and Another Childhood Terror will follow shortly after that. They're short little attempts at humorous horror that I'm quite fond of (as a reader, no less!) and I hope other people are, too.

The fourth and final installment of the "Terror" series is going to be novella length and it's called The Third Terror. I hope to get it finished before December 25th of this year, so we'll see.

I have other short stories coming as well, Along for the Ride is one of them. 1 Mouse, 2 Mice, 3 Mice, 4 is in the works, but that one's only going up if I can make it something truly worth reading. Several others. The one I'm the most proud of probably won't ever be published there because of the content. I'll try though. See how long it can stay up before being taken down or something. Haha. It's Splatterpunk horror, so it pulls no punches, and is explicit in every definition of the word. I dunno!

I'm also working on the Chiliad somewhat regularly, but that's still far off. I'm gonna go back and revisit my first novel, the one without a title, and see what I can do with it and make it readable. Then I'll revisit Effin' Vampires as well. The first one shouldn't take me too long either. I hope.

The covers. I decided to go without a cover just as a test to see how well it would do. I can't do covers on this laptop, so maybe I can get a regular ass computer to be able to do them. Or maybe I'm just not trying hard enough with the laptop. I don't know. They will have covers, I promise that. Even this one.

Anyway. There it is, folks. A Childhood Terror.

Bits and Pieces 12: COMIC-CON EDITION.

DO NOT GRIEVE

Yeah, it's Comic-Con time again, and with all this griping about keeping Comic-Con comics, you'd think that comics creators and comics publishers would pull no punches in delivering things that'll get people excited for what's to come. I can say that, so far, reading the news sites -- or trying to, rather, as I've not found a site that's covering the convention in a satisfying manner at all -- all the comic book related news is on a serious meh level. The only thing I've seen worth mentioning is Marvel's Day and Date digital release services, but with that comes no announcement of Android support. You'd think Marvel would want their product in as many hands as possible, and seeing as how the Marvel Reader for iPhone is running off the same system as Comixology, Marvel's product would be readily available on Android based phones. But they're not.

Other than that, it's usual business for the big two, Marvel and DC, with their OMGEVENTS, relaunches, and other very unexciting publications. Don't get me wrong, love comics, but this is just lacking now days. I will say that there is some very pretty art going on in the DCnU Relaunch and I'll be checking out a lot of those books, but Marvel's got nothing interesting me.

That's not to say Comic-Con doesn't have some exciting news for me. It does. And it's all related to fighting games!

INSERT COIN REVISITED

Earlier this year, Capcom released a game that was literally ten years in the making. Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The vs. series of games that began with X-Men vs. Street Fighter, pits Marvel's finest superheroes, mutants, and villains against the finest martial artists, robots, and monsters from Capcom's various video game franchises. This installment was more of the same running on a new graphics engine, a beautiful one might I add, with a new assortment of characters along with a decent gathering of the classics that had appeared in the games before.

At Comic-Con earlier this week, Capcom announced Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 that will featured rebalanced gameplay, twelve new fighters, and eight new stages. Most of the additions were planned as DLC, but due to the earthquake in Japan earlier this year those plans were scrapped in favor of releasing all the DLC as one big disc-based release with a very cheap price tag. On Marvel's side they've added Dr. Strange, Ghost Rider, Hawkeye, Iron Fist, Nova and Rocket Raccoon. Capcom's new onslaught of characters are Firebrand from Ghosts'N'Goblins, Frank West from Dead Rising, Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, Phoenix Wright from Ace Attorney, Strider Hiryu from Strider, and Vergil from Devil May Cry. A very interesting selection of characters with very few returning ones from previous games. I think Strider is the only one that's appeared previously.

Still no Mega Man and the like, but I can do without re-appearances as long as the new characters are exciting and fun to play. If the videos shown are anything to go by then they certainly do look fun to play.

The Fight of the Century

Street Fighter X Tekken also got some news this week from Comic-Con. Dhalsim, Sagat, Steve Fox, and Hwoarang were confirmed for them game, even though they had character teasers a few weeks ago. Then they announced Poison and Yoshimitsu as well. Poison is from Final Fight and made an appearance as Hugo's manager from Street Fighter III. Yoshitmitsu is, well, Yoshimitsu. He's almost like Namco's Gouki character as he appears in almost every fighting game Namco develops like Tekken and Soulcalibur. Then another cinematic trailer was released featuring a wrestling contest between Marduk and King against Mike Haggar (I dunno if he'll be in the game, but he was in the trailer), then Poison comes along and unleashes Hugo on the duo. Epic fight followed up by Cody and Guy coming in a little too late.

New gameplay footage also showed all four characters being used at the same time which could hint at two on two play? We shall see!

Still no sign of Gouki and Heihachi, though. They better get on that crap!

BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL

...it's a reference to the sword... like Soulcalibur...

Anyways, Ivy and her tits are back for that game.

THE WICKED CLOWNS WILL NEVER DIE

And neither will the Darkstalkers. Apparently, Yoshinoro Ono is really trying to get another Darkstalkers game made, and I'm backing him completely with my words! I loved Darkstalkers and I want more Darkstalkers games. Although I would like one that's a little bit darker. The Darkstalkers, as awesome as they were and they were hella awesome, were very brightly colored and happy games that dealt with a lot of monsters. I'd like to see them running on the NT Framework engine and be a little bit more monstrous.

But it needs to happen!

1, 2 Freddy's Coming for You

And the last chunk of info coming out of Comic-Con that I'm really excited about is that Freddy Krueger is trying his hat (heh heh) as a martial artist as a downloadable character for the new Mortal Kombat game.

I love this idea. In fact, I had this idea almost twenty years ago while playing the original Mortal Kombat in the arcades. I love horror anything, and I'm particularly fond of slasher movies. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween (yes, even the remakes!), and I thought it would be awesome to see these characters put in the game. No, they don't have to fit into the storyline framework of Mortal Kombat, because sometimes it's great just to have characters that are fun. MK is known for this, but always tries to push them into the narrative of the MK universe. Like MOKAP, or Meat, or Blaze. Useless, not very well thoughtout characters, but fun nevertheless.

Freddy fits. This is a world, the MK universe is, where ninjas come back from the dead as vengeful spectres, people are converted into cyborgs, sorcerers can assume the shapes of anyone and anything (Kintaro morph for the win!), ninjas also come back from the dead as weird shadow creatures, other ninjas have sprinklers in their hands, a there's a 10,000 year old princess that acts like a seventeen year old valley girl -- and is twice as dumb. A dream monster, such as Freddy Krueger fits. Stop trying to argue it.

There's been a bit of a backlash about Freddy's inclusion in the game. The first part is that there are so many other worthwhile Mortal Kombat characters that could be included that are being ignored for Mr. Krueger's favor. No, there isn't. All the good MK characters (with the exception of ONE) appeared in the first three Mortal Kombat games: Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. After that, they were all filler and pretty much worthless. I've seen people wanting Tremor, a shit-brown Lin Kuei ninja that appeared in one of the horrible MK offshoot games. I've seen people wanting Tanya, the yellow female ninja introduced in Mortal Kombat 4 as a replacement for Kitana, Mileena and Jade, but sucked excrutiatingly hard. Frost, 'cause we need another freezing character. Two isn't enough. Shinnok who, while the character I've read he's based on is awesome, was little more than Shang Tsung without the morphing in all his appearances.

The only Post-Mortal Kombat 3 character that is even remotely interesting is Quan Chi. He's a badass, and he's already in the game. It's sad enough that Kenshi was put in the game; a character without a name, but a title. Kenshi, if you didn't know is Japanese for "swordsman," or "fencer". Not a really cool name at all, just a title. And he's not that cool. A telekinetic character has already been in the game with Ermac, adding another one but with SLASH HACK action is superflous. I dig him enough to buy him and play as him, but he's a weak character from a line of weak entries in the franchise. And then there's Rain. Really? People like this guy? His moveset in Mortal Kombat Trilogy was atrocious and here, in the new Mortal Kombat, it's just as atrocious. He even has a sprinkler in his palm this time that washes the wounds of his opponent clean. Maybe they should create a new ninja of some various color or another that could tag with Rain and use Neosporin and bandages to heal they're opponents. He does have a cool fatality, but other than that he's just as useless as he was in MKT. The rest are an uninteresting lot of misfits that need to go back into the brainpan of those that created them.

I've even seen demands for Mokap and Meat over Freddy.

Really, people? Really?

I even saw a guy saw that the announcement of Freddy was the saddest day in Mortal Kombat history. Yes, even more sad than the original movie that was directed by a guy that didn't understand the source material, let alone what an effin' martial arts tournament is. Sadder than the horrible sequel that was so nonsensical that it made the latter to Matrix films seem brilliantly written. Sadder than the animated series, sadder than the horrible comic adaptations; sadder than the bankrupcy of Midway that brought the further existence of Mortal Kombat at all into question. Sadder than Mortal Kombat vs. DC fucking Universe. Yes, adding the homicidal dream monster from A Nightmare On Elm Street -- which is entirely optional by the way -- to the game is sadder and worse for the franchise than censoring the entire concept of Mortal Kombat so they can trade punches with Superman, Batman and the rest of the Justice League.

The second complaints are coming from the Freddy fans. The fact that he's wearing two gloves is just WRONG apparently. Because it's totally inconceivable that a monster that exists in the world of dreams could wear two knife-fingered gloves. A monster that can do anything, literally ANYTHING, except wear two gloves. That's sarcasm. Freddy has done all sorts of crap from becoming a giant skybeing in Dream Warriors, to a video game character, to even a fucking superhero in the later movies. How is it so preposterous that he'd wear two gloves to fight with when taking on fuckers like Scorpion, Goro and Shao Kahn? Then there's the folks that are complaining about him looking like the Freddy from the remake instead of Robert Englund.

Blah blah blah. If I hear another complaint about the remake from someone who doesn't understand the original Nightmare on Elm Street, I'm gonna punch them in the face. I'll email it to them if I have to. Freddy has always been a pederast. It was more implied through psychological imagery in the original than it was in the remake, but it was there. In the original screen play, Freddy wasn't a child-killer at all; he was a complete pederast/pedophile. It was toned down (almost completely removed) by Wes Craven at the time of filming because of high profile cases at the time that dealt with pedophilia. People need to know that their memories of things are often better than the actual things they're remembering. The remake hit all the proper notes and despite a few CGI mishaps, was a very well done retelling of the original Freddy Krueger story all the hate it gets (along with Rob Zombie's Halloween remake) just baffles me. Especially when compared to some of the sequels of the original film.

ANYWAY. Freddy's in the game, he looks like he fits from the gameplay footage I saw, and I've no complaints about him being included at all. I'm more excited about him -- and the potential for a Jason Voorhees release -- than I was about Skarlet, Kenshi or Rain.

People're acting like they put fucking Santa Claus in the game. Sheesh.

I'd also like to see Satsui no Hado ni Mezameta Ryu (Or Evil Ryu) and Gouki added into the game at some point, 'cause they're the two Street Fighter characters that fit. Also Iori Yagami from King of Fighters and Kazuya Mishima from Tekken.

...and Santa Claus...

Bits and Pieces 11: Gorgon Rage

WUDDAFUG!?

I don't care who they get to direct a live action version of Akira, I won't be seeing it. Ever. The track record for American renditions of Japanese anythings has gone down a shitty hillside since The Magnificent Seven. And some films that come out of Japan, or novels or comic books and animated anythings, shouldn't be touched by any American film companies, because they won't get it. Two such things are Gojira and Akira. Why? Both of these works are anti-nuclear weapons and anti-nuclear warfare type stories that no one can really do other than the Japanese as they are the only ones to be on the receiving end of a nuclear weapon. It's just how it is. You cannot take something like Gojira and slap some nice CGI paint on it, throw in a few semi-name actors and come out on the end doing the original 1954 film any justice whatsoever. That's how we ended up with Godzilla in 1998 or whenever. It just doesn't work. There was NO real strong voice for the sentiment of anti-nuclear anything in that movie, and it became a silly little romance that had Matthew Broderick chasing a giant mutated iguana around New York City. And somewhere along the line it became a rejected sequel to Jurassic Park; and it all became the French's fault.

You see in the 1954 film, the original Japanese version without Raymond Burr's totally awesome performance (re: sarcasm), it was a note on how ALL mankind needs to avoid this sort of technology when it comes to warfare. In the 1998 Americanized version, it became: THE FRENCH DID IT, 'CAUSE THEY'RE WEIRD AND THEY'RE PUSSIES. It was a hollow piece of fiction with stupid jokes, lame effects, and no real statement behind it. Which a lot of the Gojira films eventually became, but not the original that this one was supposed to be "retelling."

Then you have Katsuhiro Otomo's masterpiece: Akira.

Akira is pure Japanese fiction, even to the point where it addresses that frustration of the Japanese people during US occupancy post WWII. It's not a very American friendly book in the United States sense of the term. Trying to retell this story with American sensibilities in mind won't ever work, because it will, again, fall flat and become a completely hollow thing with lots of CGI. Setting it in Neo New York and centering it around the 9/11 disaster, as I've heard it was intending to do, doesn't work because no matter how you look at it, the September 11th tragedy, while being awful, does not compare in any way, shape or form to what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Altering the relationship of the two characters, Tetsuo and Kaneda, from being friendly to familial lessens to meaning of those characters' relationship. Hiring all white actors to portray something that is uniquely Japanese also weakens the material, regardless of who they are or how talented they may be.

The only way I'd watch a live action version of this story is if it was told from an entirely Japanese perspective. Japanese director, like Ryuhei Kitamura or Takashi Miike or even Katsuhiro Otomo himself for instance, with an all Japanese cast (save the few American characters that appear in the massive comic book), and so on and so forth. Watching an Americanized version of this picture would be like watching a Japanese movie about our Civil War, or the Declaration of Independence even, with an all Japanese cast while being refitted to fit in Japanese society. It wouldn't work. Just stay away from it.

I don't have a decent closing to this blog. I'm too tired.

Bits and Pieces 10: The Current Status!

The Blog

I'm kinda shocked by the "success" or whatever of this blog recently. No comments or anything, but I've been getting around 300 views in the past two months and June isn't exactly over yet. Not bad for a blog of random nothings that are merely here to fuel my own enjoyment of them.

That being said, I think I'm going to amp it up a bit and post more frequently, especially since my posting has died off a bit since I started it in September of last year. Which means I'm going to include a lot more writing orientated stuff than normal. So, that should be fun.

The Games

Since this started as, primarily, a blog dedicated to fighting games and the like, I'm definitely going to continue that theme throughout. I've not been playing too many fighting games as of late, though I did have a spat with the PSP not too long ago playing Street Fighter Alpha 3, Tekken 6, and SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny quite a bit. I've dabbled with Mortal Kombat here and there after beating it with every available character and I'm working through the entire cast of Super Street Fighter IV to do the same thing. After losing my save file for that game twice over since its release, that has become quite the daunting task.

That being said, though, I did download the Arcade Edition DLC expansion for the game and it was so worth it. I can see a lot of differences they made to the game aside from the four new characters (Yun, Yang, Oni, and Evil Ryu) like the Ultra combos not doing nearly as much damage as they did unless the meter is full and the like. I'm a huge fan of fighting games, but I am by no means an expert, especially when it comes to online play. I cannot adjust to the input delay and any lag that pops up and I get my ass handed to me a thousandfold. I do enjoy playing as Evil Ryu and Oni, though. My favorite Street Fighter character ever is Gouki so playing an even more amped up version of him is always fun for me. And Evil Ryu is always nice simply for the fantastical aspect of it; it's like watching an alternate version of Star Wars where Luke became a Sith instead of a Jedi.

Mostly I've been playing a lot of Warriors: Legends of Troy, inFAMOUS, inFAMOUS 2 and L.A. Noire. Since I play so many games, I'm gonna broaden my game postings to include non-fighting games. I might do reviews, I dunno.

Non-Game Stuff

I'm still gonna review non-game game related things, if that makes sense. I've got two books that collect UDON's Street Fighter comic series and I'm gonna review them relatively soon, and we'll see anything else I can find. Maybe that Tekken movie, some other comics I can get a hold of, but I might start doing reviews of other books and movies and whatnot, too. I'm just throwing it out there.

Writing Stuff

I'm working on two books right now, off and on, and I'm gearing up to take the writing thing full time and self-publishing stuff on Amazon's Kindle. e-books and all that. The first book is titled The Last Tournament: A Tale of The Chiliad, which is heavily influenced by the fighting games I've played over the past twenty years since I first plunked some quarters into a Street Fighter II arcade cabinet. It's basically my version of a fighting game without the game aspect. It's a sixteen fighter tournament with a lot of those crazy story aspects one can only find in a fighting game. Like Bison cloning a female version of himself that he hopes to one day download himself into. Yeah, I don't get that either, and it won't be QUITE that crazy, but it certainly doesn't operate in a really-real world setting. It's a different kind of fantasy that I've never read outside of the fighting game world, or anything based on a fighting game that ultimately fails to do the games justice. This is something I've been working on for a very long time and all the details are just now falling into place in a very wonderful sort of way. And yes, you can totally expect fireball projectiles, electricity dancing from fingertips, teleportations, giant monsters, boss battles, and probably a lot of things that just don't make sense. At least not right away. Gotta leave room for potential sequels, right?

The second book I'm working on is called Effin' Vampires, which is straight on horror for the Call of Duty generation. It started as a joke, really, that I wanted to write a story about a thugged out gangsta sort of character that hunted vampires down and punched them in their pompous faces 'cause I was absolutely sick of the romanticization and wussification of the vampire from horrible monster of our nightmares to glittery clusterfuck of a thing that young women want to hump rabidly. Now it's somewhere along the lines of Call of Duty meets Predator meets Near Dark meets Darkstalkers. It needs a lot of refinement, but yes there is a thugged out gangsta character that punches vampires in the face.

I'll update on them regularly without giving too much info away, and I'll post links when I actually get them finished (which may or may not be a long while from now).

Anyway, that's the current status of things as far as blogging goes. Yeah!

Bits and Pieces 9: Authentic Blend

The Random Section

There really needs to be a section of every book store, entertainment store, video game store, movie store, library or any other collection of things called the Random Section. I think it would be a blissful thing, myself.

I've been doing a lot of random odds and ends lately as I've been out of work with a bad back injury -- I pissed off a previous injury by doing something completely mundane --hence the title of this portion of the blog. The first thing that stands out is a lot of brain storming going into the book that no one'll prolly read but me (which I'm perfectly fine with at the moment) and a lot of headway being made on it. I'm almost ready to start writing the actual thing. Almost. I've also been thinking about a lot of things that I would never be able to write, but have some pretty nifty ideas for. I may start up a sub-set of blog entries about things you'll never read written by me. We'll see. I've done it before. Did a bit of reading here and there. A couple zombie short stories, one by Richard Matheson and his son, Richard Christian Matheson, that was hella cool. Loved it. But I am hella biased about that 'cause the Matheson collective of father and son are two of my favorite authors.

I also tried reading The Essential X-Men Volume 2 again for what feels like the fiftieth goddamned time. And here's where the ranting begins. I can't do it. I'm gonna try it again, I'm sure, but I really cannot do it. I'm at a complete loss at how Chris Claremont and the various artists he worked with over the twenty year span of his run on Uncanny X-Men made them so effin' popular. I just don't get it. The guy is not a good comic book writer. I've never read one of his novels, but I'm sure his style of writing works more in favor of direct prose fiction than comic book scripting. And -- I could be wrong about this -- I think these books were written in the old Marvel Way of writing comic books. I'll get to that in a second.

This book collects issues 120 to 144 of the main X-Men comic book that went from being just X-Men to Uncanny X-Men somewhere down the line. And the reason I bring that up is because this big book reprints two of the most essential X-Men stories of all time: The Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past. I have read these stories and I remember liking them. But that was back in the late 1980s when they were being reprinted in a book called Classic X-Men, and I skipped over any and all chunks of text that wasn't dialog. At that age, I loved reading comics, but I hated reading. That's pretty odd, ain't it? Somehow I loved these comics, especially Days of Future Past.

Getting back to the point: Chris Claremont is not a good comic book writer. And if these were novels, I'd say they were pretty well written. But comics are a mixture of words and pictures combining together to make a single thing. When there's too much art, it doesn't work. When there's too many words, it doesn't work. And in Claremont's X-Men work, there are always too many words. So much so that they render the art completely moot at times. There's a scene early on in this collection where a character called Sasquatch throws a plane -- don't ask, it's superhero comics, people. The art does a pretty good job showing you the Sasquatch character grabbing the plane and then chucking it into a hanger and destroying pretty much everything. But at some point in Claremont's life he thought it would be good to fill up the page with huge caption boxes with copious amounts of text describing the character throwing the plane in overabundant detail. It's not a good idea. It's like watching a movie with someone who has already seen it and telling you everything that's happening as it's happening, which is actually worse than someone seeing a movie then telling you everything that happens before you get a chance to see it yourself. A lot worse. Maybe I should not read the caption boxes when I try to read it again?

Now, here's the bad part -- at least bad if I'm correct, this section is purely speculation based on my fallible memory, so take it with a grain of sugar: the Marvel Way of writing comic books was created by Stan Lee during the early days of Marvel's superhero publishing days. The early 1960s and the like. Stan was writing pretty much everything Marvel was publishing at that time, and working with several different artists, so he would give them the basic plot of the comic's issue, or discuss it with them in a meeting or on the phone, all that sort of thing. The artists, like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko just to name a couple, would then draw the comic how they saw fit, then Stan would write the dialog and whathaveyou after the art was completed. So, if these books were done after the Stan Lee fashion of writing comic book stories, then there was a point when Claremont said to himself, "It's a very good idea to cover up so much art with these giant boxes of unnecessary text."

And that's bad comic book writing. And it makes it very hard for that book to be readable to me. I didn't make it through two issues before I just started thumbing through it and looking at how bad an idea it is to keep comic book characters ageless. What's really amusing is reading the dialog from the White Queen, Emma Frost, in this book and then jumping into Grant Morrison's run and reading her dialog there. In Claremont's and John Byrne's run here, she's written as though she's intended to be a bit older than most of the X-Men characters themselves and she's drawn a bit more mature as well. In the face, not in her choice in dressing herself. Flash-forward to Morrison's run which was written twenty-one years later or so, and she's a much different character. She's a snobby, stuck up sort of character that's very high upon herself, and declares that's she's only twenty-seven years old. She's been twenty-seven for twenty-one years. That's pretty neat.

Moving on past that stuff. I played a lot of Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Tekken 6 the past few days as well. I picked up my PSP and refamiliarized myself with the little gadget and reminded myself of why I bought it in the first place. Such a charming piece of technology, that.

One of the better things about getting lost inside the world of a fighting game is that... it's always just about the fight. Regardless of the individual characters' justifications for their actions, it's ALWAYS about the fight. You can pick Ryu in Street Fighter who's fighting to perfect his own martial arts discipline, or you can pick Kazuya Mishima from Tekken who wants to murder his whole family and uses his martial art to get the job done. It's great stuff.

Speaking of fighting games...

Eee Three!

E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is going on this weekend. Which means gamernerds, such as myself, and technophiles are going to be either geeking out, or flailing about spastically in fits of nerdrage at all the announcements that'll be going on.

And I've already got my geek on pretty hardcore. Even in my cyclobenzaprine induced state of constant sleepiness. I just like writing that word. Cyclobenzaprine. It sounds like some kinda Cyclopean disorder. Like when their one big eye gets all infected and stuff and they have to go to a Cyclopean doctor and he says, "Damn, son, your eye has the Cyclobenzaprine!" I'm on the crap because I'm two steps away from being a cripple. Or handicapped. I prefer cripple, but I'm also as politically correct as a Bill Hicks bit.

Moving on.

I've got my geek on pretty bad, and the Expo hasn't even started yet. WHY?! you ask in all caps as though you're shouting at me through some digital interface or another? Well, that's simple. First, I saw that KONAMI used their own code on their own heads (UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT BEE AYE BEE AYE SELECT SELECT START, FOOLS!) and are whipping out a Metal Gear Solid HD Collection for me to have in my very own home! The collection is slated to come out this November, and yeah, I already have all three games that are in the package, but I don't have them in HD! Or with Trophy support! In this collection are Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Peace Walker was a PSP exclusive title that was on par with even the most recent MGS game, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. I'm not too sure why the first MGS game isn't in the package, but I'll take it anyway. For those of you reading this and don't know, Metal Gear is a SUPERSECRETSPY sort of game where you sneak around and try not to kill everyone to battle giant robots at the end, all told with a Japanese sensibility so everyone has some weird superability or another. Except you. You're just Snake and you've got pretty much nothing but a pack of smokes. You gotta collect all your gear as you go. And it's my favorite non-fighting game series out there. Yup.

KONAMI also announced a Zone of Enders HD collection, a Silent Hill HD collection, and they teased that they're bringing back Contra, one of the games that featured the KONAMI Code quite prominently.

Sony was also showing of the NGP, which needs a new name, although the thing is a work of technological beauty. It's Sony's new handheld gaming platform, a sequel of sorts to my favorite handheld of all time, the PlayStation Portable (I don't like Nintendo, sorry), and it looks fantastic.

Just a few short hours ago, I saw the first footage-slash-trailer of Soul Calibur V, and that got me all sorts of stoked. It looks really pretty, and I hope its better than the last three installments. My favorite of the series is still plain ol' Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast. Which makes me the odd man out, I think, 'cause everyone else that plays the kinda games I do says that Soul Calibur II is the best of the series and I didn't care for it all that much. During that same time frame I watched a teaser trailer for Aliens: Colonial Marines, which I hope is a good game 'cause there needs to be a good Aliens game for once, and a newish trailer for ICO and Shadow of the Colossus in their HD presentations for the PlayStation 3.

And just a couple of seconds ago, I watched a killer trailer for Spider-Man: Edge of Time, the new Spider-Man game from Activision and Beenox. It's a follow up to my favorite Spider-Man game I've ever played, Shattered Dimensions, and I'm a geek for good games made out of comic book properties. I'm still waiting for someone to make badass games out of Erik Larsen's The Savage Dragon and a book called WetWorks, though I don't think either of those things are ever going to happen.

I'd provide you links to these things, but I am too busy clacking at the keyboard making words to be bothered with copypasta.

REBOOT, REVAMP, RELAUNCH, REINCARNATION

Maybe there was some sort of Apocalypse that happened at the turn of the Mielelenerennenium. You know what I mean. Everything needs to be rebooted, repackaged, relaunched, reincarnated into something it isn't, and regurgitated to audiences everywhere! And I really don't know what to think about it, and I'm not so sure I even care. They could reboot something I'm literally quite fond of right now, and I don't think it would bother me one bit.

But the most recent reboot that's making headlines all over the nerdosphere is the relaunch of the entire DC Universe that's happening in September. I ain't gonna lie, 'cause I never tell no lies, it has me quite curious. Of course there's the conspiracy theories that are raging about concerning why DC as the collective whole are going this route, but I don't pay them no mind much either. There's at least one monthly comic coming out of this that I'm interested in and that's Justice League. Why? 'Cause it's written by Geoff Johns, who's pretty good, and Jim Lee, who is one of my favorite comic artists ever and has been since... 1989? 1990? I dunno, whenver it was that I saw that awesome cover of Uncanny X-Men drawn by him that had Wolverine crucified on a giant wooden X. That left a visual imprint on my brain meat that's rather tattoo-like in concept. ...whatever that means...

The entire universe is getting the reset button switched on it, and that's perfectly okay with me. Why? 'cause that's what people fuckin' do!

Every time you retell a story that you've already told someone before, you're rebooting the fucking story. Did you know that? Prolly not. Why are you rebooting it? 'Cause you never tell the same story the exact same way. Never. I know this 'cause I'm quite the observant one, and I pay attention to people when they tell the same stories. I don't even interrupt them most of the time when they're telling me a story they've already told me.

The reboot, relaunch, reimagining ranting and raving from the cool kids in the corner should just launch itself off the highest cliff in the world and land right into a very spikey and pointy bottom, 'cause you're constant squaking is hurting my ears and it's making my eyes bleed like a rabid anime flick.

I'm just hoping that WildC.A.T.s (which is a fucking pain in the ass to type, just so you know!) and StormWatch get thrown in the mix somewhere. Not so much the Authority, 'cause to me, the Authority died when Jim sold WildStorm to DC in the first place, and we really don't need TWO effin' Justice Leagues in one superhero universe. Oh, yeah, I'm talking nerd shit.

I've read that Grifter is being thrown into the relaunch stuff, which is interesting, so I'm hoping that a lot of my other favorite WildStorm characters appear somewhere as well. yeah, I just repeated myself. Don't care. Boom.

Now I segue into something different: digital comics are too expensive. Especially since alongside the DC Relaunch of Everything (Crisis of Multiple Relaunches?) they're doing day-and-date digital releases... which means that the same day the physical comic comes out, the digital comic will also be released out into the digital world of... I got nothin'. But for the same price. It irks me that companies, corporations, publishers, all them sorts somehow can justify to themselves that a physical copy and a digital copy are worth the same amount of money. Physical copies are harder to make and take more people involved, thus they are usually worth the money you pay for them. A digital copy? It doesn't take a whole lot of work other than taking the digital files provided by the folks that made the comic physically, having someone upload them, and me downloading them. Cutting out those pesky middle men like publishers, paper folks, staple machines, distributers, Diamond Comics, comic book shop people, UPS, FedEx, and so on and so forth.

Not to mention the fact that it feels weird to pay three bucks or so for something on my phone that's going to give me between five and fifteen minutes of entertainmental joy, when I can download Angry Birds for free and that's got entertainment for DAYS. Maybe even WEEKS. In the epic battle between comics and video games, video games always win. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I don't think anyone really knows how to use digital distribution correctly. Ninety-nine cents for a song sounds a bit much. And that's a good place to end this.

A Small Ranting # 1: Based on a True Story.

Here's the True Story

When I first saw trailers for The Haunting in Connecticut I swore that I would never see that movie. I hate movies that are based on "true stories" or "true events" because when they're turned into movies, they always lean much more to the fictional side of the events that are being declared true, thus rendering all factual points being made moot. Not just in horror, but in any genre. I hate them. They're not workings of the human imagination, they don't do dick for us aside from show us how sometimes we can be genuinely good creatures to one another, but most of the time show us how fucking right awful we are to each other. The trailers looked ridiculous, another flash in the pan ghost story about some family moving into a fuckered house and experiencing all sorts of fuckery from every shade in the fuckered rainbow. Which is a lot of colors, let me tell you. These kinds of movies go back to fiction from a long year ago. About a hundred years last Thursday to be exact, or to be exaggerated, you pick. Books like Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, and my personal favorite, Richard Matheson's 1971 novel, Hell House. Just to name a couple.

But back to the TRUTH. I had no interest in this movie, for obvious reasons. A co-worker of mine got onto the subject of horror pictures, and I said there hasn't been one in a very, very long time that's even unnerved me a little bit. At least from the American side of the cinematic ocean. Martyrs was a bit unnerving, but it is a beautiful piece of horror cinema, as is Takashi Miike's Audition. Neither has anything to do with anything supernatural, but they imply supernatural goings on occasionally, but there's nothing supernatural about them. Sometimes, real world horror applied in fictional settings is much more effective than monsters or ghosts or ghouls. True story. Moving on. This co-worker said that The Haunting in Connecticut scared him, so for some reason my logic detector went out the window and I said, "I'll have to watch it then." I don't know why I said that, or why I made that sort of decision. What scares me is a massive contrast to what'll scare other people on any given day. I mean, there's a reason why people come out of horror movies all scared, or they'll turn their eyes away from the screen, or jump and scream; and why I laugh through 99.9 percent of them.

So, then I watched it. And I hated it. It was ridiculous Hollywood horror cinema at its finest, far too reliant on jump scares, and never daring to go to the edge of what's acceptable in order to jar your minds or your imaginations. Before the movie ended, however, I started doing research on the supposed "true story" that this movie was based on.

Yup.

Thanks to the modern era that we live in and the simple fact that information of all kinds and every sort is available at our finger tips, this bullshit marketing scheme of "based on a true story" falls entirely flat. Like The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror before it, The Haunting of Connecticut hasn't an ounce to truth to it whatsoever it. What it is is the vulgar fictions of two demented "paranormal investigators," Ed and Lorraine Warren.

First, The Exorcist. I know there's a lot of Catholics out there. I know that there are a lot of Christians out there. Both of which manage to let their belief systems interrupt the parts of their brain that process logic and reason. That's not an insult, or at least it's not meant to be one, I promise. What it is is evidence that these filmmakers are preying on you because of your belief system to sell their fucking movies. And I'm a FAN of The Exorcist, I was even named after it. The Exorcist movie, and the novel before it, was based on a "real life demon possession!" That of a still unidentified young boy where all the supernatural happenings either happened when no one else was in the room but the boy, or can be logically explained. The boy was also a known prankster before he began his little fits that led to him being declared as possessed by a demon and eventually exorcised by Catholic Priests and the like on numerous occasions. This went on for a while until the boy was hospitalized, then POOF. Miraculously cured of all demons inside him. An elaborate hoax to get out of going to school? That's the cleanest explanation, and it just so happens to follow Occam's razor. William Peter Blatty heard of the incident while in college and that lead him to write his novel, The Exorcist, which I still haven't ever really read. William Friedkin's filmed version of the story does a brilliant job of blending the supernatural and real world stuff to the point where you almost never know if Regan is possessed or not. At least until the end of the film. But it's entirely fiction.

Just as The Amityville Horror, which just so happens to have had the Warrens, Ed and Lorraine, and their declaration of it being a demonic possession of an entire house. The Warrens used to be Ghost Chasers, but that all ended when The Exorcist film was released and saw an enormous amount of success, so they began to chase demonic possessions instead; trying to capitalize on the success of the infamous horror movie. Amityville followed The Exorcists path and had a book written about the events that has been edited and re-edited time and time again because, as with all these stories, no one can get their stories straight. OJ Simpson's defense team did a better job getting his story straight than these families can. The book was followed by a great deal of movies based on the supposed event, including a remake in 2005, starring that Ryan Reynolds guy, that further pushed the event into ludicrous fictional areas.

Then we get to The Haunting in Connecticut. If this movie scared you, you're a pussy. That's all there is to it. None of this happened, in fact, the co-author of the book that this is based on disowned it and has said that he's glad the thing is out of print. He was told by the Warrens, Ed and Lorraine (I like writing it like that, it makes me sound sophisticated, or even journalistic!), to just make shit up and make it scary to fill in the gaps between the stories being told by the family that lived in this supposed haunted house. A family that was going involved in drug abuse and alcoholism and none of them could get the story right whatsoever.

The movie itself is an elaborate joke made on me to get me somewhat interested in a film that riffs on several basic plots from the books I mentioned in the first few paragraphs of this blog. There's a seance, there's ectoplasm, there's all sorts of weird stuff going on; all of it eeriely similar to Hell House and The Haunting of Hill House.

Based on a true story my ass.

Here's something to think about, in reflection of this trite film and how somehow "based on a true story" is some killer marketing ploy that a whole lot of folk believe in. There's a film out there, a horror picture, from 1984 that involves several teenagers having sleeping issues. They have a shared dream and they refuse to sleep that leads to their eventual deaths. The film was based on a series of articles in the LA Times in the 1970s about Hmong refugees that were suffering from horrible nightmares, they refused to sleep, that lead to some eventually dying because of it.

The movie is A Nightmare on Elm Street, it's influenced by true events with graphically fictionalized elaborations on what those dreams entailed; it was immensely successful, and never once was it touted as being based on a true story. It didn't need to be. Elm Street was art, the by product of real world information being processed through the human imagination so that we may understand it better, or come to terms with it happening. Anything and everything that's "based on true events" is just a load of bullshit being sold to you for being gullable.