Ooku: The Inner Chambers - This is Fumi Yoshinaga's latest, published as part of Viz's high-quality Signature line. Yoshinaga is best-known for her slice-of-life-with-a-hint-of-boys-love series Antique Bakery, which is a little disjointed, but outstanding, with delicate, detailed, and expressive artwork. Ooku is a different type of story, and just ( Read more... )

Like I said in my previous post, I decided not to go with a Beatles box set. Instead, I picked up three albums as a birthday gift for a certain special Beatles fan, as well as another copy of one of those albums for myself.

Abbey Road is, with little doubt, my favorite Beatles album. It was made in the twilight days of the group along with the ( Read more... )

Spoilers for both ahead; minor ones in the case of Yotsuba&!.

( Yotsuba&! vol. 6 )

We finished watching Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann last night. The ending was a little anticlimactic in the grand GAINAX tradition, but not jarringly so.

This is the first GAINAX show in some time to get significant attention from anime fans with good reason. While stylistically it differs heavily from the Hideaki Anno/Kazuya Tsurumaki trifecta of ( Read more... )

I wrapped up Dragon Quest IV yesterday, with my total time clocked in at around 38 hours. It was a good game in the traditional Dragon Quest mould, though a little bit too freeform in the fifth chapter for my tastes (there were also no Golems, Sabrecats, or Giganteses, to name a few *sniff*). After beating the game, I went and read the piece about ( Read more... )

I finished Earthbound yesterday afternoon, after a lengthy (for various reasons) battle against the final boss. Afterwards, I listened to the Earthbound/Mother series episode of Retronauts (#63), and now, I'm going to talk about my experience with it ( Read more... )

I mentioned in my last entry that I finished Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, a game I first heard about via a post by the incomparable JEKKI on the CAG forums. It took me awhile to finally get around to playing this most unlikely of RPG Maker-made games (released by the brain-breakingly named "Tales of Game's"), but I finally did so last week. ( Read more... )

Beat Cave Story today. Thank you so, so much for the rec, namatawhatsits; it was a great little game. Loved the music, too! This was my first Metroidvania; I wouldn't mind more games of this sort, so if anyone has any recommendations ( Read more... )

Yesterday I played through Portal again, then started up Portal: The Flash Version Mappack. Based on the original Flash game, this is a set of five massive Portal maps encompassing all 40 of the original puzzles. There's a little bit of story incorporated in it as well, though I'm not sure if they drew on the Flash game for those elements ( Read more... )

I started de Blob this evening.

My hands hurt from all the Wiimote action, but there isn't much more I need to say than this: it is one of those rarities - joy in video game form.

Also, I need the soundtrack.