End of an era: Fangamer Officecam concludes

Published by Fawkes on February 18, 2012 in earthbound and games. 1 Comment

It’s strange how a weekly special from a small video games merchandise company in Arizona can change your life. Fangamer Officecam is a show that broadcasts from the office of Fangamer every Friday, hosted by the staff of the office. Fangamer is a branch off of Starmen.net, the world’s largest community of EarthBound fans. Every week, they have a face-to-face chat with the internet, answer questions made over Twitter, and their resident artist Camille makes little clay figures based on suggestions submitted from the broadcast’s chat room. This past Friday, they announced that the next week’s show will be their last.

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Story of a Lost Sky Release 0.7.0 and the Roadmap to 0.7.1

Published by Fawkes on February 10, 2012 in games and touhou. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Story of a Lost Sky Title Art

We’ve recently released version 0.7.0 of our Touhou SRPG, Story of a Lost Sky. Check it out here. We’ve received some good feedback already, but we’d appreciate any comments as to how best to improve our project.

New Features

  • New missions: Chapter 3 (6 events total)
  • New portraits: Mokou, Reimu
  • New battle animation sprites: Fuzzball, Fairy
  • New playable character: Aya
  • New map sprites
  • New music: Big crisis theme and victory theme.
  • A few characters have been rebalanced. Work is still in progress.

This documents the programming and game design objectives that we are aiming to complete for 0.7.1 and we’ll be pursuing over the next few months. The objectives for the art and music components haven’t been assembled yet as we’ll need to consult with our staff to figure out where things stand. We’ll be working on three major branches.

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Youyou Kengeki Musou – First Impression

Published by Fawkes on December 27, 2011 in games and touhou. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Youyou Kengeki Musou is a doujin game from the doujin circle Annkake-Spa. They’ve recently released a demo of their game that demonstrates the central mechanics of the game. What follows is a first impression of the two-stage demo that they released a few days ago. The scope of the game and how well polished it feels is something that is to be commended for a doujin work from both the gameplay, music, and quality of the visuals.

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[12 days] Day 12: SCCSAV – My “other” anime club.

Published by Fawkes on December 25, 2011 in anime and sccsav. 6 Comments

The Standing Committee for the Coordination of Simultaneous Anime Viewing (SCCSAV) was a gathering of friends from all around the world to watch anime together. It was started primarily by @vuc_ and exploded over the past year. Because of all the fun times we’ve had together, I choose SCCSAV as my most memorable anime moment of 2011.

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[12 days] Day 11: Tamayura ~hitotose~ is ARIA’s successor

Published by Fawkes on December 24, 2011 in anime and sccsav. 1 Comment

A year ago, I wrote about the Tamayura OVA, wishing for a longer series. Our wishes were granted with Tamayura ~hitotose~, with most of the staff and even most of the voice actors from ARIA working on the new Fall 2011 anime. Tamayura joins the prestigious ranks of my ARIA and Sketchbook ~full colors~ as top tier iyashikei anime.

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[12 days] Day 10: Peace in post-apocalyptic Yokohama

Published by Fawkes on December 23, 2011 in anime and sccsav. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is a four episode OVA that we watched with the SCCSAV Iyashikei Viewing group. A lot like ARIA, it’s devoid of a central plot line.

What stands out the most about YKK is the unique world that the characters live in. Post-apocalyptic settings are typically ones of despair and a struggle to survive. In YKK, despite the ecological disaster that has wiped out most of the world, life continues peacefully. Alpha is a robot who runs a small cafe and there are little stories like meeting another robot from a neighboring town and taking a long trip far away from home. All of it is surrounded by a peaceful, easy lifestyle of everyone we meet.

It’s sad that YKK was only a four episode OVA. I read through the manga a few years back, and through all the 140 chapters, we really got to know the characters. The two kids especially who make a brief appearance in the OVA are characters that we see grow up throughout the many years that elapse in the manga.

One wish I have for the future is that we’ll get a complete length YKK anime. It’s a world I would really love to visit again.

[12 days] Day 9: A girl becomes a god and life goes on.

Published by Fawkes on December 22, 2011 in anime and sccsav. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Ka---- Mi---- Chu~!

Early this year, we had just launched Iyashikei Mondays with SCCSAV. We had been watching Sketchbook ~Full Colors~ and ARIA the Animation when @vuc_ joined us and suggested that we watched Kamichu!. I have to thank him for introducing it to us, because it was something I missed back when it was airing in 2005 and I really loved it.

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[12 days] Day 8: Idolm@ster is just a lot of fun and Chihaya is the best idol.

Published by Fawkes on December 21, 2011 in anime. 1 Comment Tags: , .

In the spirit of Steam sales... (Source)

I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started watching Idolm@ster. All I knew about it was that it was ridiculously popular as a game and the music was great. In my usual manner of “Hey, this looks cute, let’s check it out,” I dove right in. Oh yeah. This post contains spoilers.

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[12 Days] Day 7: Nekogami Yaoyorozu needs more love.

Published by Fawkes on December 20, 2011 in anime and touhou. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Nekogami Yaoyorozu was an anime that flew under the radar for most. It was airing at the same time as Steins;Gate and Nichijou, so it’s not surprising that it didn’t get as much attention as it deserved. What attracted me to it was that this was an adaptation of an original manga by FLIPFLOPs, the Touhou doujin artist that I wrote about earlier this month.

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[12 days] Day 6: Kino no Tabi

Published by Fawkes on December 19, 2011 in anime and sccsav. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

The whole post-a-week thing for Kino fell through, so here’s my end of the series retrospective.

We watched Kino no Tabi as part of the first group on SCCSAV that I started that didn’t spawn out of Iyashikei Mondays. I’m going to do a full post with my experiences with the SCCSAV group since that was one of the highlights of my year, but for now let’s focus on Kino no Tabi.

Kino no Tabi is a highly episodic series that follows the journey of Kino and her talking motorcycle Hermes. Each episode was an exciting visit to a new location. It excels at taking things that we’re familiar with in our lives and putting a strange otherworldly twist on them. A few examples come to mind. Episode 8 is called “The Land of Wizards” is an uplifting story where Kino helps a girl to build a flying machine against the opposition of the townspeople who believe that she’s better off doing something more productive. Episode 5 contains the story about what happens when mob rule is allowed to run amok, resulting in everyone in the country being killed over disagreements until there’s only one person left. Episode 12 is probably the most memorable. In every episode leading up to this point, Kino has demonstrated that her skills with her guns can get her out of any situation, but in this episode she’s can’t do anything as she watches two countries carry out a genocidal action. Kino no Tabi invoked every emotion from happiness and a longing for adventure to fear and hopelessness.

By telling stories filled with the entire spectrum of emotions of the human experience, Kino no Tabi succeeds in capturing its central message:

The world is not beautiful; and that, in a way, lends it a sort of beauty