Month: January 2017

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Haruki Murakami: the video game

Behold Memoranda, a point-and-click adventure game that claims to be a magical realist experience in the vein of a Haruki Murakami novel:

Memoranda is a game about forgetting and being forgotten!

A point and click adventure game with magic realism elements that tells the story of a young lady who gradually realizes she is forgetting her own name. Is she really losing her memory or is there something else that could explain the strange circumstances? The story happens in a quiet little town where a few ordinary and strange characters live together. Including a World War II surviving soldier to an elephant taking shelter in a man’s cottage hoping to become a human. There is one thing all these characters have in common: they are losing something. It could be a name, a husband or even someone’s sanity!

I dunno, it seems rather annoyingly twee. I’d say it’s hard to translate the quiet strangeness of Murakami’s novels into the visual medium, but I rather think the Norwegian Wood movie pulled it off. I’m curious, but not enough to pay $17 and change. I’ll probably buy this if the price drops below $5 since I have an abiding lust for point-and-click adventures, but right now I think I’ll hold off.

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You damn kids

I watch a lot of anime. I mention this because a lot of anime series revolve around the teenage experience (which mostly means the high school experience). I had been unfairly characterizing this deficiency as a malignancy especial to anime, but I had not considered that I’m not as catholic in my viewing of English-language TV shows.

Which is to say that I’ve been avoiding a lot of teen-oriented shows from the Anglosphere. However, The 100 has mucho recommendations as being an engaging piece of science fiction.

However, it’s also an adaptation of a Young Adult series of novels, which means that most of the time the protagonists are either dumb, horny, or both. How could I have criticized anime for having insipid romantic drama when stories like this exist on this side of the Pacific? Stories where I feel like strangling someone whenever a teenager starts talking?

I’m not sure how much more of this I can take. I’ve seen online joking references to the home network, CW, and its formula of crafting shows around beautiful people getting into relationship drama with each other, but I’d never really experienced the full brunt of such a perfect package of cliches and nonsensical actions.

Hoo boy. Perhaps it gets better. I hope so, as I’m not sure I might survive if this show actually gets worse.

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Happy 2017, have a giant robot anime

You know, Netflix needs to do a better job advertising their shows, since the image that pops up when you pause on Kuromukuro is a rather generic one of teenagers standing around in their school uniforms. I’d rather spend an afternoon drifting in and out of a nap as Cosmos plays on screen than watch something that looks so very uninspired.

But in the opening ten seconds of the show you see two giant robots fencing with laser swords while surrounded by an army of dead samurai. Much later you get a loudmouthed fighter pilot guy shooting a hole in an enemy giant robot then stabbing the hole with a massive knife while shouting crude sexual come-ons at his dead foe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O83JLO5lR1o

So far I’ve only seen this first episode, but I’m thinking this’ll be some relaxing giant robot military porn like Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse or Schwarzesmarken. The biggest difference is that this show is missing the large jiggly tits. In other words, it’s exactly what I like in my military porn (and I believe I’ve mentioned before how much I like giant robots when they’re done right). I think I shall be binge watching this show.