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(Even more) Comic Ads! (Plus a bonus quiz!)

Thursday, October 2nd, 2014

As often happens, I recently acquired 15 old comics from the early 1980s. They cost me only $3 in total, which is a hell of a deal for that much entertainment. I read them all. I laughed, I cheered and I wept. I won’t say what series they are from, since you’re going to guess that at the end of this post!

But first, since you love them, let’s get to the advertisements from days gone past.

The above is from 1983, and it shows a product I didn’t know existed. That was in my D&D/Gamebook heyday (actually, maybe those days are now) so I would have been all over this. I bet it looked dreadful unpainted though…

Here’s a truly awful video game ad from the same year:

Could that have really sold cartridges? I find it amusing today, since games have gotten so much easier than they once were and I imagine advertising the difficulty of your game now would be a certain way to ensure failure!

Speaking of games…

I’d love to see a word game based on Phoenix!

The above half-page ad skirts as close as possible to the Transformers appearances and trademarks without infringing. I wonder if the marketing department at Marvel had any qualms about running ads (seemingly) for bootleg merchandise?

What about ‘Spacetubes’??! Who even knew these things even had names? They are still available today, sold under all sorts of names (‘Wonder Wand’, ‘Glitter Rod’ etc.) but ‘Spacetube’ is coolest don’t you think?

Enough with the professional big-budget (?) ads. Let’s get to the weird stuff found in the classifieds. How’s this for a start:

As my only comment, I’ll direct you here.

Speaking of ads that would have appealed to 12-year-old me:

As an ex-professional breakdancer, I must admit that I didn’t even know half of the moves named in that advert even existed!

Now I’m no exobiologist, but I reckon that looks more like a helium balloon with some paper taped to it than an actual alien. I will admit though that the ‘obeys your commands’ line intrigues me. I suspect fishing line and a hook in the ceiling!

The tiny ads in these comics can be divided broadly into categories. The vast majority of them are for comic stores selling back issues, and then we have the ‘selling weird stuff’ ads, the ‘pyramid scheme’ ads (sell 20 boxes of cards and get free toys!) and the ‘selling a dream’ ads. All these next examples are from the last category…

The Dream: You buy the plans and end up with an awesome tree fort in your own backyard!
The Reality: You show the plans to your dad and he throws them away in terror.

The Dream: You become a poultry magnate, world-renowned for the quality of your guineas.
The Reality: Your dad takes you to KFC for dinner, and discards the brochure when you are asleep.

The Dream: You develop awesome powers to defend yourself against the dark arts.
The Reality: The only magic here was the speed at which you were conned.

The Dream: You get a girlfriend. Finally!
The Reality: Actually this one’s good. How could love advice obtained from a shady advert in a comic book possibly be bad?

So in what series did these ads run? Well I’m not going to tell you, but I’m going to give you the change to guess. The books span 3 years and are drawn by a range of artists. If I posted scans of the main character wearing his iconic outfit you’d know immediately what the comic was, so here’s three shots of him in civilian dress. From these, can you guess the series?

First to guess the series gets all fifteen books for Christmas 🙂

Posted in Art, Books & Comics, Otaku, Time, Toys | 3 Comments »

The RPG Critic (Shining Forth history part 2)

Thursday, September 25th, 2014

It was more than three years ago that I presented part one of the history of my game fanzine. Read it here if you missed it. At the time I suggested a followup article would be forthcoming, and here it is!

To summarize (and to bridge the gap a bit): I printed a fanzine for about two years, and had no trouble selling every copy. But it was hard work, time consuming, and in 1996 I shifted my focus to a webpage. The website was quite popular, but it lacked a forum (which were somewhat rare in those days) and I was becoming swamped with emails from my readers (I used to run a letters page).

During the years I had worked on the ‘zine I had made a couple of contacts in the industry (at Atlus, FCI and Sega particularly) but none better than Victor Ireland, the president and owner of the company Working Designs. In late 1998, wanting to drive readers to his company website, he suggested buying all my content (my reviews, basically) and hiring me to continue reviewing games for his site.

At first I was resistant since I feared I’d lose editorial control, but he assured me I wouldn’t (a promise he never broke) and given the amount of work the website had become I eventually agreed. In early 1999 the Working Designs website was spruced up, and the ‘RPG Critic’ section added. That was me 🙂

Vic had the above commissioned in 2003, and it was intended for a website revamp (he had similar pictures made of all his staff). I had red hair in those days! You’ll note the review I’m writing starts with the line “This game sucks…” because by then – some four years after I had started – I had become somewhat infamous on the site for my occasionally scathing reviews…

But I jump ahead! Let’s go back a few years. When the RPG Critic launched all my old fanzine reviews immediately went live, as well as a dozen or so I had written but withheld from my website. There was some press in magazines about this, which was notable because US-based game magazines in those days mostly ignored the RPG genre. Online review sites were almost nonexistent in those days and Working Designs almost overnight became one of the web’s foremost sites hosting reviews of console RPGs.

My arrangement with Vic was simple: I would be reimbursed the cost of any game I reviewed for his site. This ended up essentially meaning I could get the sorts of games I liked for free, but very quickly I developed a near-obsession with reviewing anything that was an RPG and my game collection ballooned. Vic was occasionally slow with payment, but it always came eventually, and in addition I received a good amount of freebies from his company. In time I started testing games for them as well (not bug testing, more like system testing). The pinnacle of this was probably the extensive suggestions I gave him about endgame content in the Arc The Lad collection which led to my name in the credits 🙂

My reviews were out of 11, and as I mentioned Vic very rarely had any sort of comment on them. I’d write them, send them to him, and they’d be posted without edits. The only request he had was that I detail why I didn’t like games I gave bad reviews to, which was probably a reference to my sometimes too-short dismissals of bad games in the fanzine. I reviewed games from his company as well, and he never once suggested I change my scores (which was once as low as a 3). He was good to his word that the content of the reviews was 100% up to me.

That’s a shot of the site (obtained via the Wayback Machine) from 2003. By then it had become quite popular, and you can see Vic ran contests, posted fanart and had a very busy forum as well. The forum was particularly interesting, since everyone has an opinion, and often those opinions included critiques of my reviews. I recall Vic loved this, because it meant readers! During the five years I wrote for the site I very rarely posted to the forums except to answer direct questions, and I was amused to see that a sort of ‘supporter base’ had built for me, and whenever anyone would pop in to criticize one of my reviews (or me in general) they’d all chime in on my behalf!

Even my detractors though were impressed by the sheer content of my work, since by the time I ended writing for the site I had personally reviewed over 250 games (which meant I had played them all) and had become a sort of walking encyclopedia/expert on localized console RPGs. I recall most of the forum posts I ever made were to give information about particular rare or unknown games that people had questions about.

Here’s the first 11 I ever gave, to a game I still consider one of the greatest ever made:

And yes, I still own all those games…

One unusual issue that arose during my years writing reviews was people plagiarizing my work. I was usually informed about this via a forum post, and i can recall in particular the website rpgamer.com (which still exists today) ‘lifting’ the text from a few of my reviews and posting them under a different name. I contacted them and the reviews were taken down, but some time afterwards they went right back up! Even worse, a magazine (published by Viz communications) devoted to anime/manga/games stole one of my reviews as well and printed it essentially verbatim. I was actually a subscriber (!), and wrote them a letter to which I never received a reply…

Working Designs was very successful for many years, but ran into trouble during the transition into the PS3/X360 generation. I ended my association with them in late 2003. While I was still enjoying the work, I knew I had to devote more time to my graduate school work and couldn’t keep playing (essentially) every RPG released. Rather than pick-and-choose games to review, my intention was to pass the mantle onto a new ‘RPG Critic’. As it turns out, none eventuated, and with my departure the reviews simply stopped. The website stopped updating in early 2005 (no new reviews being posted for almost 18 months) and Working Designs themselves went out of business later that year.

By those days – some 6 years after I started writing for the site and 11 years after I printed my first fanzine – the internet had matured and game review sites were (too!) common. The niche that the WD website had once filled didn’t exist any more, and the RPG Critic was needed no longer. I remain proud of the work I did in those days – and the fact I played and beat so many, many games, but not for a second do I still wish I was doing it now 🙂

Posted in Blog, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Time | 2 Comments »

My Very Own Opera House

Tuesday, September 16th, 2014

That’s the Sydney Opera House. It’s world famous. You all know it. Everyone knows it!

Thanks to the support of JBF and JAF, it was time to build my own. Here’s what it looked like in the box:

And what was inside:

The real Opera House is constructed of millions of kilograms of steel and glass and concrete, not to mention (exactly) 1,056,006 ceramic tiles. My version is a bit smaller, composed of only 2989 pieces of plastic. It won’t be less grand though!

The original Opera House was built in three distinct stages: The base/podium, then the roof, then the interiors. My version was build in four stages: Stage 1, 2, 3 and 4. Here’s a shot of the beginning of construction of Stage 1:

Here’s what Stage 1 looked like upon completion:

It may look simple enough, but there is some radical and unprecedented construction innovations in that piece of the podium, much like in the version in Sydney.

Here’s some in-progress shots:

Construction of the real Opera House took 15 years and ended up horribly behind schedule (by ten years in fact) and over budget (by more than 14x the original estimate of $7 million). Construction of my opera house had it’s ups and downs as well, not the least of which being a lack of necessary parts. A quick call to a supplier (otherwise known as ‘LEGO customer service’) remedied that problem but resulted in a delay of over two weeks inserted into the middle of construction. All told, I’d estimate about 20-25 hours were needed to finish it.

The original Opera House is 180 meters long and 65 meters high. My version is about 60 cm long and 25 cm high! In fact, it’s about as long and tall as Yossie and weighs about as much as well!

I loved making this kit, probably the most of any Lego kit I have ever made. Given my love for the original building, I can’t imagine how Lego may top this one. Unless they make the Sydney Harbour Bridge!

So how do I display such a massive piece? Well for now, like this:

Posted in Blog, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Tech, Toys | 5 Comments »

(Long Live) The Playstation Vita (Is Dead)

Monday, August 11th, 2014

Earlier this year I purchased one of these:

It’s the Playstation Vita, which is their followup game system to the PSP. It actually came out quite some time ago (December 2011), but I held off buying one simply because there was nothing on it that tickled my fancy. The game that eventually lured me enough was TKX by Jeff Minter:

There’s a lot to like about the Vita. It’s solidly built, has very nice controls (especially the dual sticks), is solid state only (which means no silly discs like the PSP) and has a beautiful screen. And when I say beautiful, I mean beautiful. To save costs Sony has actually downgraded the screen in newer models to an LED, but the first version (and the one I have) includes an OLED screen which is simply the brightest and highest resolution screen on anything I own. Yes it means the battery life is abysmal (maybe 2 hours) and the unit is quite heavy but I’d say the tradeoff is worth it for the great screen.

The problem with the Vita is, well it’s that it’s pretty much a dead system.

What does that mean? It means that here in America retail support for the system has floundered, and interest amongst consumers is at an all-time low. Few games are released for the system and those that are don’t have any sort of wide appeal. Furthermore, there are no games at all scheduled after November this year and Sony themselves have said they will release no games themselves. By this time next year I very much doubt this system will be in stores, if produced at all.

And yet these past few weeks I’ve been having more fun with my Vita than any of my other game systems! These ‘no wide appeal’ games infrequently coming out are mostly niche Japanese RPGs which mean they’re my game of choice and I’ve been snapping them up! Games like…

Demon Gaze, an awesome Wizardry clone featuring a complex game system and fabulous graphics…

Toukiden, the closest game every to capture the magic of Monster Hunter. The screenshot above shows how impressive the graphics of the Vita can be in an AAA game…

Persona 4 Golden which I haven’t played yet (it’s next on my list) but if it’s anywhere near as good as Persona 3 on the PSP will be a gem!

There’s many more, and most of the remaining games are of this genre as well. Even if nothing else is released after November, I’ll still have a library that will take me a year or more to finish (assuming I ever stop playing Toukiden). For a dead system, that’s not so bad!

So what killed the Vita? It was an also-ran outside of Japan, where it seemed to immediately inherit the niche market from the PSP. Western exclusives were nonexistent and ports from PS3 games (such as Borderlands 2) were flawed. Obviously competition from the 3DS (especially Capcom’s choice to move Monster Hunter to 3DS) and tablets/phones hurt as well. But ultimately the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of Sony, who for many many years now have demonstrated they have no idea how to market a handheld outside of Japan.

Rest in Peace Vita. You may be a dead system and simply not know it yet, but I’m going to be playing you for a long time yet!

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Tech, Toys | Comments Closed

Busy Day

Wednesday, July 30th, 2014

Wendy’s serves the full menu all day did you know? That’s how I had a spicy chicken sandwich at 7:30 am! This was my breakfast of course, and we had woken early since we had a busy day planned. On our way to our second Vegas hotel we had two stops to make. The first was this place, about an hour from the Grand Canyon:

Bearizona is a wildlife park with a three mile drive-through section and a more traditional zoo for smaller beasts. The focus is on wildlife of Arizona and it’s a very impressive park.

That’s a goat and a white bison. They also had buffalo, wolves, burros and other goats. The star attraction of course is these guys:

Look at that show off bear being cute in the water tub! The large bears roam free in 14 acres, not caring at all about the cars and people within! There are many of them wandering around, and in the zoo portion of the park there are many more in two enclosures divided by age. Here’s a shot of the cubs:

They look peaceful enough there, but 99% of the time they were play-fighting with each other like little fuzzy wrestlers! The little buggers were so cute!

In addition to bears the zoo has foxes, porcupines, otters, an American badger and a few other beasts. It’s laid out very well and we both enjoyed Bearizona quite a bit. If you’re ever in the area, it’s worth a visit 🙂

A few hours later and we were back in Vegas. Only a few blocks from our next hotel was today’s second attraction: the Pinball Hall of Fame.

This is essentially a warehouse containing hundreds of pinball machines, almost all working and playable. They range from old EM games from the 1950s through to the last pinball made (so far) from 2013. They also have retro arcade games and a few other odds and ends.

It’s a pinball fans dreamworld, and I scurried around playing as many as I could. This included some landmark games like Black Knight, Fireball, Haunted House and Pinbot.

One of the appeals of pinball for me is the art. Many of the games on display were beautiful, especially restored as they are and lit up like they would have been when manufactured.

All the games had historical information on them. Impacto (look at that art!) was an oddity since the guy that owns the museum in 40 years of looking has found no info on the game or the (Spanish) company that created it.

Needless to say I loved this place. If I lived nearby I’d visit all the time 🙂

And then we arrived at our second Vegas hotel, Caesar’s Palace. It’s a bit posh and a bit expensive and a bit luxurious. Should be fun!

Posted in Animals, Family, Games, Otaku, Trip | 1 Comment »

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