Time to Blow Doors Down, or My Belated New Year's Post

- Fantastic New Year's. It really was fun seeing A Patch of Black play and back together again. Quite a rocking show. It was also good to see Lucas and Erin and laugh and have fun with friends I haven't seen for a while.

- New Year's Day was a combination of long needed apartment cleaning and diving headfirst into the bounty of games I bought on Steam. Valve had a huge holiday sale, and I couldn't help but snap up pretty much every game on there I wanted. Some highlights include:

• Psychonauts - This fantastic 3rd person platformer plays like you'd expect a Ratchet and Clank/Sly Cooper/Spyro, etc. game should, but where it really shines is in the art direction and the wacky style. The humor is playful and dark, the whole world looks mishapen and eerily colorful, and the characters are all grossly exaggerated. It feels exactly like if Tim Burton made a platformer, which I love.
• Darwinia - This one surprised me. An RTS-lite that takes place inside a virtual world, where you have to guide and protect sentient AI creatures from virii in a hostile environment, with 80s wireframe graphics. I wasn't expecting that much from it, as I was looking at the Infogames pack mainly for Uplink, but there's something seductively fun about its tone and world.
• Geometry Wars - Another big surprise. A simple spin on classic arcade games like Asteroids and Centipede, you pilot a ship around and fire in eight directions to destroy increasing numbers of differently colored geometric shapes which fly at you in strange patterns. The draw is the fun difficulty, ooh-and-aah colors and explosions, and chill music.
• Jagged Alliance 2 - A throw-back to my high school gaming days. This 1999 overhead turn-based squad shooter has you organizing and controlling a team of mercenaries, each with RPG-like increaseable skills, while micromanaging your mercenary roster, their supplies, and town militias, all to overthrow an island-nation dictator. Pretty fun, but may be due to the nostalgia factor.
  

- I've been getting back into anime lately, and I'm enjoying it. There were a number of good hits this past season that I had to take a second look at before I noticed how awesome they were:

• Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei - Itoshiki is a teacher who despairs at life and the world around him, and is constantly trying to commit suicide. His students "help" by berating him constantly and have their own problems to deal with. The harem-esque cast is composed entirely of deranged girls: one never leaves the school and is found hiding in different cupboards and closets each episode; another was stalking her boyfriend until Itoshiki told her true love is commiting suicide together and she begins to stalk him; yet another student is an exchange student from the U.S. and tries to sue everyone she can, including the teacher when he accidentally sees a flash of her panties; etc. The show spends each episode dealing with either the problem student of the week or Itoshiki's despair and outrage at some minute part of human behavior. The show is both a hilarious parody of harem anime, and a riff on all different sorts of cynicism. Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei was really the gem of this season and I can't wait for the sequel this spring.
• Ghost Hound - In a small town in the mountains of Kyushu, three boys who have had traumatic encounters in their childhood become friends and learn to transfer their souls into a parallel world known as the "Unseen World". The Unseen World is however undergoing a change, with its ghosts starting to appear in the real world. From the director and scriptwriter of Serial Experiments Lain, this fills my weird-tranquil show of the season quotient. It's one of those anime where meticulous attention to detail and well-used space and silence make for an amazing experience. Although I've only seen three episodes of this so far, it really is a fantastic series.
• Dragonaut - Humanoid, laboratory raised beings with magical powers transform into dragon robots and are piloted by spiky, multi-color-haired pilots who are trying to defend the Earth from a malevolent, alien planet which has destroyed Pluto and now rests in its orbit, sending its own dragon robots to attack Earth every couple of years. Completely cheesy and over-the-top but well done, I geeked out on this series and lived up cheesy-anime days of yore before I noticed how 2-D it was (no pun intended). I'll definitely watch the last episode when it comes out, as this was a fun little diversion.
• Claymore - Half-demon, half-human, emotionless blonde women roam the countryside with giant broadswords and hunt down demons preying on human beings. I didn't mean to make it sound as flimsy as Dragonaut with that description, as this is actually a very quality show. Real emotions, and real tragedy, as the Claymores defend humans from this demon menace which claims hundreds of lives, but are despised by humans for their unnatural powers and being half-demons themselves. I'm currently hooked on this series, and nearly talked myself into marathoning all 26 episodes last night until my logic got the better of me and convinced me it was 11 pm and I needed some sleep.

Crap, I know I had more to write about, but my memory has faded over the week it's taken me to get out this inaugural New Year's post. Ah, well, I'll leave it there for now.

Happy New Year!