There’s also another special thing that they’re doing for this sale- something called the Great Gift Pile. Basically, for performing certain Steam-related tasks or doing achievements for games on Steam, you can get stuff like free games or coupons for games after the sale, which is kinda neat. It’s semi-unlikely that you’ll actually get a game of worth, but I ended up picking up a free copy of Portal 2, which is pretty neat, as well as having a couple friends give me their extra copies of games they already had- specifically Psychonauts and Dungeon Defenders. It’s definitely worth checking out, even if the chances are slim. They’ve got some pretty great games in the pile, and it’s pretty easy to get a bunch of entries for free or super cheap (since some are for little 3-dollar games that are a ton of fun, like Dungeons of Dredmore).

Still waiting on the rest of the sale, and it should be pretty awesome. Until next time!

P.S.: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3446288&pagenumber=38#post398937143

I did a thing with Yapo for the Blood Bowl LP, go check it out if you’re interested.

The next gathering should be on February 26th, the first one of 2012. We might try to get it together to go to Hakone Gardens for that one and make it a picnic/potluck kind of thing, but nothing’s decided. We did have another new face show up to this one, which was nice, and we’re always hoping for new people. If you’re in the Bay Area and a Touhou fan, come check out our Tumblr page for all the details for the gatherings, and we’d love to see you there!

1. Continuum Shift (BlazBlue – Continuum Shift Arcade Intro)
2. Rebellion (BlazBlue – Ragna Theme)
3. Gluttony Fang (BlazBlue – Hazama Theme)
4. Noontide (Guilty Gear – Ky vs Sol Theme)
5. Suck a Saga (Guilty Gear – Chipp Theme)
6. Rubble Song (BlazBlue – Continuum Shift Arcade Credits)
7. “Stardust memory ~The Promised Place~” (BlazBlue – Continuum Shift Console Image Song)
8. “Love so Blue ~Blue Heartbeats~” (BlazBlue – Noel Theme vocal ver.)
9. Gale (BlazBlue – Bang Theme vocal ver.)
10. Bang The Nail With Your Hammer! (BlazBlue – Fu-Rin-Ka-Zan vocal ver.)
11. Still in the Dark (Guilty Gear – Zato-01 vs Millia Theme)
12. Lust SIN (BlazBlue – Jin Theme)
13. Get Down To Business (Guilty Gear – Order Sol Theme)
14. Condemnation Wings (BlazBlue – Tsubaki Theme)
15. Holy Orders III (Be Just or Be Dead) (Guilty Gear – Ky Theme)
16. Awakening The Chaos (BlazBlue – v-13 theme)
17. The Cat Attached to Rust (Guilty Gear Isuka Credits Theme)

One neat thing is that they actually got Noel and Bang’s VAs to do the vocals for their respective characters’ themes, which is an interesting touch. The album as a whole is pretty great, and is tons of fun to listen to.

Here’s a video of the performance of Awakening the Chaos, Lambda’s theme from Blazblue: Continuum Shift. You can also listen to the whole album here on Youtube. The set is available on Amazon’s Japanese site for ~6100 yen as well. It’s a hell of an album, and quite a show as well.

As a result, I was pretty hyped to hear about the latest iteration of BlazBlue, an expansion of Continuum Shift 2 called Extend. Extend includes a new character: Relius Clover, Carl’s father, and one of the “big bads” of the series. His puppet, Ignis, makes him play like a character from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, an old-school fighting game that’s nice to see represented somewhat. There are also tons of balance tweaks that make the game more even and more balanced across the board, including possibly making Tager not a bottom tier character for the first time in the entire series! (fun aside: watching some arcade tournaments, I came across one where top players were present and the finals was a Tager mirror- that never happened in the old versions) This latest iteration is lots of fun to watch, and I can’t wait to see it come stateside. It’s already in arcades all over Japan, and is slated to come out on December 17th in Japan (with release TBA in the US, but there’s no way it won’t come out stateside). If you’re interested in watching footage, jourdal and pktazn1213 consistently upload Japanese matches and tournaments played in arcades, and there’s lots of good stuff to be had there.

Urijah Faber vs Brian Bowles (Bantamweight, 135 lbs)
Wanderlei Silva vs. Cung Le (Middleweight, 185 lbs)
Dan Henderson vs. Mauricio “Shogun” Rua (Light Heavyweight, 205 lbs)

In addition, this was the first of the new 5-round main events to actually go the entire 5 rounds, and it was an incredible fight from start to finish. There were also tons of exciting matches, even including the seven undercard fights, each of which was excellent.

We got plenty of photos too, which was awesome. Here’s some of them.

Me at the HP Pavillion, with the ring in the background. The view was remarkably good.

Martin Kampmann during his fight with Rick Story. He proceeded to win the fight by unanimous decision.

Urijah Faber, during the choke that finished the fight against Brian Bowles.

My reaction to Urijah Faber's win over Brian Bowles. He is the California Kid, after all!

Dan Henderson on the offensive against Mauricio "Shogun" Rua. He would later go on to win the match via unanimous decision.

Mauricio "Shogun" Rua during his offensive in the last two rounds. While valiant, it wasn't enough to earn him the win against Dan Henderson, who took the first three rounds handily.

Me after the show, sporting my new UFC 139 T-shirt. If you look closely, the promo for the event is up in the background, on the screen above my hat.

All in all, I couldn’t have hoped for a better event to go to. The whole thing was incredible, and it was a once in a lifetime experience that I definitely won’t forget.

One of the striking things about the Hulu collection is that they even tend to have some things before they really come out in the U.S. When I first investigated it and watched Brotherhood, it wasn’t dubbed, and it wasn’t really available in the US, but Hulu was making things available with subtitles on a regular basis. Many of the releases are dubbed, but some of them have subtitles instead. Unfortunately, there isn’t an option to swap between the two, which would be nice, but hopefully they’ll get that in the future.

So for the forseeable future, instead of watching random junk on TV, as I tend to do when there’s nothing really interesting on, I’ll tune into some of these shows. Might be nice to get back into the swing of things.

Instead, it pretty much blew me away.

Trigun: Badlands Rumble is a side story of the main series, and presumably takes place somewhere about halfway through the series (Wolfwood and Vash are already acquainted, which is a big tipoff). 20 years ago, Vash is an unwitting victim in a bank robbery executed by the legendary bandit Gasback. However, when Gasback’s crew turns on him and things get violent, Vash steps in in his own weird way, saving Gasback’s life while also preventing Gasback from taking revenge on his crew. Fast forward 20 years, and Gasback’s old “crew” have really made some major steps up in the world. One of them, Cain, has even established Macca City, a flourishing town complete with its own Plant and everything. But now Gasback’s back, with a 100 million double dollar bounty on his head, and he’s looking to tear Cain’s hard work down right in front of his eyes. With a horde of bounty hunters camping in the city, the Bernardelli Insurance Company potentially on the hook for a 5 billion double dollar payout on Cain’s gaudy bronze statue, and Wolfwood showing up as Gasback’s personal bodyguard, things are about to explode in this desert outpost.

I know I expressed dismay at the replacement of 3 notable voices, but the difference was so minute that if I wasn’t told it was the case, I wouldn’t have noticed it AT ALL. The movie was also filled with the same kind of light-hearted humor and fun that made the original so great, but at the same time wasn’t afraid to take things seriously from time to time, and actually felt like it could have been a series of 3-4 episodes in the middle of the series rather than its own movie. And of course, this is exactly what I was looking for in this movie. It didn’t try to “solve the big questions” or “expand the characters” or try and create some big huge epiphany that would change the way you looked at the series. It was just 90 minutes of good fun, and anyone interested in reviving an old series would do well to take a page from this movie’s playbook.

Badlands Rumble is available on DVD now, so if you were a fan of the original series, I definitely sugest you check it out. I wasn’t disappointed, and I’m sure you won’t be either.

The amount of content in this single flash is so huge that it took basically the equivalent of four essays on Hussie’s new tumblr account to explain all the references, details, and potential ramifications of what went on. It’s rare to see that level of detail in any work, let alone something that’s essentially a labor of love by one very talented artist. Of course, given the fanbase that it’s generated, I’m sure he’s more than able to provide for himself with it- their merchandise site, What Pumpkin, just hired a couple new people to move merchandise, which can only mean good things.

I’m greatly looking forward to when Homestuck continues (on 11/11/11). If it continues to remain half as detailed and involved as it has in the past year or so, I have full faith that it will be nothing short of amazing.

There was an interesting story that came out of the whole thing, though. Shortly after leaving Southtown Arcade (with three passengers in my car), my radio cut out. Unfortunately, this was a symptom of an issue I’ve had before, and sure enough, after about 2 blocks, my battery unceremoniously died, with my car rendered immobile at an intersection. Luckily, the street had 2 lanes, so it was easy enough for people to get around me. I called my roadside service, who told me that it would be “less than an hour” until help arrived, and that they had also informed the police that there was a traffic situation that needed handling. While most of the drivers around were incredibly rude, making profanity-laced demands that I push my car out of the way, one man actually had the decency to pull up next to me in his beat up white truck and ask what the problem was. When I told him that my battery was dead, he offered to give me a jump, and pulled his car around so that my battery was in jumper cable range of his. Turns out the guy was a mechanic, and when the car cut out shortly after we disconnected the battery cables, he did some tinkering around under the hood, and discovered that the wire of my negative battery cable had worked itself loose from the clamp that connects it to the battery. Five minutes later, with the help of a screwdriver and some pliers, we’d gotten the wire back into the connector, and the car ran beautifully. Of course, the cops never showed up, and the tow truck showed up… as soon as we’d gotten the car running again. The guy asked for 20 bucks for gas, and we happily obliged. Every once in a while, there’s an event that restores my faith in humanity, and that was definitely one of them. Huzzah for random acts of kindness from strangers.

All in all, the whole thing went great, and while it wasn’t perfect, things turned out fine. Everyone had fun, and we even saw some new faces, which we consider a success. The next one’s planned for December 17th, and as always, we’ll have updates on our Tumblr page. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you’re looking to hang out with some cool people, be sure to stop by. It’s always a blast!

Labyrinthstuck.

After a bit of thought about a set of 12 completely unrelated characters, I figured out that a neat idea would be to replace my team of 12 with the trolls from Homestuck. So after some tweaking, some portrait hunting, and a lot of annoying hacking, I had successfully and seamlessly integrated the Homestuck trolls into the game. Now I’m recording all of the boss battles in the game for the unique NG+ perspective on a standard playthrough, to show just how different it is from a normal playthrough.

You can read/watch the entire LP, including my contributions, in the Something Awful thread. It’s a ton of fun doing this, and not nearly as much work as I expected. I hope you enjoy it!