So when you're reading this, the first Astro Toy column of the year will be up. This week I took a reader recommendation and bought a figure of Fate Testarossa from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. This was a really big series with otaku a couple of years ago, but I had zero interest.  I like to know what I'm talking about-- at least the very basics-- when I look at a toy, so I went a little bit out of my way and watched the movie that was recently released.

I'm heard a couple of descriptions of this show say "it's like shonen fighting but with magical girls" or "it's like Sunrise mecha but with magical girls." I guess you could say that, on a surface level: this two-hour movie has little going on but flying, laser-blasting magical girl action, and the transforming, English-speaking weapons are probably the coolest thing about it.

The plot is about some magic macguffins, but the movie is really about the meeting and eventual friendship of the two main characters, Fate and Nanoha. They start as enemies, they team up, in later series they shack up. The characters are really weird in this movie, in a very otaku kind of way. They're supposed to be ten-year-old girls, but they don't act anything at all like children, or even humans, for that matter. I was talking with Ko (who also just got picked up at ANN) about it and he joked that they were "lesbian friendship robots".

Yeah, that about says it, huh? These characters stare at each other longingly, struggle and fight against a villain whose motivation is "Rarr! I'm evil!" (twenty minutes is spent on this thrilling backstory), and they cry when they're reunited at the end of the movie, but they've got zero humanity.

That said there is a lot of magic and flying and shit exploding. Looks pretty nice. In conclusion, the transformation scenes are pretty uncomfortable and if someone walked in on you watching those scenes they'd probably call the cops.

You might have noticed from the shift in subjects lately, but the only anime that I'm currently watching is the mysterious and fabulously adolescent Mawaru Penguindrum. Kunihiko Ikuhara's return to anime has not disappointed in any way. But right now I'm going to talk about some late-series stuff and I'm obligated to warn you about that. Don't even look up Penguindrum online if you're interested in seeing it and haven't jumped in yet. The show's a giant unraveling spoiler from episode one and the best thing you can do is just start watching and let it work its magic. If you seriously want me to spoil you, I'm still going to keep writing like you don't know anything, so this post will tell you what's going on in Penguindrum. Don't do it!

The main characters in this show have penguin alter-egoes who function like the cute mascot characters you see in a lot of anime. They mimic the characters' actions, they function as comic relief: in one genius scene the penguins fart their way through a long stretch of exposition at expertly timed moments. Sometimes the penguins' mimics will offer a clue as to what's going on in the story, or what the characters are actually thinking.

In episode 22, it's been revealed that the ominously profitable side job that Kanba's been working to pay little sister Himari's hospital bills is in fact planning and perpetrating terrorist bombings. Kanba's desperately in love with Himari (the show has been letting you believe there's an incestuous love triangle here from the start, but it already pulled the rug out on that one) and he'll kill as many people as it takes to keep her alive for another day. That's his deal.

The whole show is about the terminal Himari finally dying. She's fake-died four times that I can immediately recall up to this point. She's saved every time, at great cost to the characters, by some supernatural curveball. At this stage in the game Himari would really rather be dead, if only because all her friends wouldn't have to chase the Penguindrum anymore (whatever the hell it is, we still don't have any idea), and Kanba would stop killing people. She is guilty that she is so loved, and loved so desperately, by her brothers.

So Himari does the only thing she feels like she can: she goes to Kanba in his terror-bombing lair and she pours it on in hopes that he'll quit his mission. Himari's not really a directly affectionate person-- she shows her love first and foremost with her stuffed cabbage recipe-- and I can't recall seeing her like this elsewhere in the show. Kanba squirms a bit at "I love you" but he doesn't really pay this display any mind. It isn't like Himari, and you get the feeling that it isn't completely genuine.

And I think the penguins spell out what's actually happening here. As Himari-penguin worriedly flips the pages of a girlie magazine to distract Kanba-penguin with some cheap titillation, the latter (who is seen all the time reading such mags, looking up skirts and so on) is steadfastly focused on a book called THE HEART. This brief shot footnotes the conversation: it says what we're thinking without needing to say it directly. The penguins do a lot of this.

Of course, it doesn't work. Himari chases Kanba in desperation as he walks away, begging him to let things be and to let her die. He says again that he won't abide that.

Himari-penguin's copy of Maxim or Big'uns or whatever lies in flames.

The venerable GamePro magazine is folding, effective immediately. This story has made a lot of 80s and 90s kids sad, even though GamePro hasn't had a role in most of our lives for a long time.

You see, when we read GamePro, videogames were for kids, and only kids. The magazines were written for us children, and GamePro exemplified that. The writers weren't billed by their actual names, they were gimmicky pseudonyms with cartoon faces like Scarry Larry or Bruised Lee. Every year they'd do LamePro for April Fool's Day: it was Cracked magazine but with videogames. Bubonic the Hedgehog, get it? And that's how I learned about the Plague!

See, I too was a kid when I read GamePro. A little, bitty guy. I cared about two things in the world: videogames and reading. And I never read anything good. When I was a child I devoured every word in sight. At five I was reciting the movie section of the newspaper to my parents, listings and all. I never even went to the movies when I was little. Only for Ghostbusters II. I don't really know why I did that. I was just compelled.

Of course, I did the same thing with GamePro when I discovered it at six or seven years old. I tore through every single preview and review and advertisement and accepted it all uncritically. As strange as it sounds, GamePro was one of the main ways I was taking in culture back then. It probably went a longer way than I know.

It wasn't the only game mag I was reading, of course: there was EGM and Game Players and Gamefan (practically an infomercial for the import shop that advertised in the back, this mag nevertheless opened my eyes and got me to mod my Playstation so I could play Tobal 2) and pretty much any other mag I could get my hands on. EGM was my favorite because the book was so big: it took me days to look at every little thing.

I remember very well why I stopped reading GamePro. GamePro hyped up publishers' products as much as is done today (for fun, compare Modern Warfare 3's professional Metacritic average to reviews from folks who bought it on Amazon.com) and it talked impressionable young me into playing and buying all kinds of crap, mostly from Sega's over-reaching period with the Sega CD and the 32X. I remember GamePro's perfect score for the atrocious Tomcat Alley, because I begged Mom and Dad to take me to Blockbuster to rent it. I remember the 32X because that was a Christmas for me. I nearly went for an Atari Jaguar, okay? I was really, really gullible. I was ten.

So I jumped ship to Game Players, a dumb-fun magazine that spoke to the 12-year old me by endlessly discussing bears and putting people in "The Box" (where there was often a bear), and which eventually became the IGN monster we all know so well. I stopped reading Game Players when an entire issue was just a strategy guide for Resident Evil 2. I didn't need no strategy guide for that game.

By the late 90s the internet had taken over for me anyway, and to be honest I haven't looked back. When I was a kid I was always digging for weird and interesting things. While the magazines often opened the door, the internet gave me a nearly infinite power to go hunting (eventually leading me here), and what the hell did I need a magazine for anymore? Now think of the kids who grew up in that age. The role that GamePro played for my generation is obsolete.

GamePro had a bit of a transformation and a resurgence to more of a contemporary, grown-up game magazine (a friend was freelancing for them and found out about the closure at the same time as the rest of us), but they were shut down before they got their footing. Times are tough for print everywhere, after all: I should know, I'm paid to write these days. Probably in some very small part thanks to Gamepro. And the newspaper movie listings. And TV Guide. And Sesame Street. So thanks.

As the credits rolled on my first successful clear of Otomedius Excellent, a feeling from the distant past started to creep over me. It wasn't nostalgia over shooting bubbles in Gradius III, or the game-over music from Salamander, or mid-90's videogame magazines' mystified reactions to the blockbuster sales performance of Tokimeki Memorial. 

It had just been so long since I'd felt such intense regret over buying a videogame.

Maybe last year, when the online play in SNK's fighting games straight up didn't work. But those were ten, fifteen dollars. I only regretted Garou for a few hours until I deleted it and went back to playing the pirated ROM online. No great pain there.

Otomedius Excellent cost $30. That's getting into Real Videogame Prices. And it was my own damn fault I bought the stupid thing. I have a certain amount of pride in my own taste! Konami released this title so quietly that we can safely assume they're ashamed of the game, and of the otaku at their company who almost certainly pushed hard for its release: I can't imagine how else it was ever put out.

And yeah, it's an embarrassing videogame. I classify Japanese videogames in social acceptability from “a little otaku” to “full otaku”. Phoenix Wright is a little bit otaku: the art and characters are friendly to the anime/manga fan aesthetic, but the games have a much wider appeal. Something like Blazblue is well into otaku game territory: the engine is built for advanced fighting game geeks, and many of its characters are copy-pasted in from Guilty Gear and adjusted according to cliché anime stereotype.

But those games aren't all the way in there. They aren't full otaku, the kind of videogame one puts away and hopes nobody finds. The Idolm@ster, in which the player manages, raises, dresses and photoshoots their own group of singing, dancing idol girls, is full otaku. Love Plus, which is like Animal Crossing except Tom Nook is a high school girl who you've videogame-married, is full otaku.

And so is Otomedius Excellent. Just pop this game into your Xbox and bam! Tits! (Konami, use this as a pull quote.) The spaceships of Konami's classic shooters are replaced with drastically underdressed girls-- courtesy of Yoshizaki Mine, who's made his fortune over the last decade doing exactly this sort of thing-- who wear bits of the old spaceships like water wings. To give you an idea, this is the Vic Viper. There's a warning for “partial nudity” on the box, and when Konami very awkwardly ran the opening video at E3 last year, they had to put stars over all that cleavage.

Even so, I still bought this game sight unseen. In part that was because of the low price, and in part because I was surprised it came out at all. I took it as a given, for some reason, that Konami would deliver a quality example of their particular flavor of classical arcade shooting. They did not. 

This game's cardinal sin isn't that you can move a cursor to poke the girls and make them gasp and moan-- though, really, that's pretty creepy-- it's that it's a lazy bore. The biggest problem is level design: the stages are barely distinguishable and offer nothing beyond superficial homage to games that did it all better years ago. There's the cave! There's the level with two paths! There's the one that scrolls vertically forever! There are quite a few characters and a great amount of weapon customization given to every one of them... but that doesn't count for a lot when the stages you're fighting through are so bland.

The nadir of the game is the moment it goes so far as to reference the time-travel scene in Treasure's superior Gradius V, using it to take the player to a succession of bosses they've already fought before. The lack of creativity evident throughout this game is truly driven home as one trudges through a series of monotonous bosses-- nearly all of whom are simple variations on the original Core boss from Gradius-- yet again. This is certainly a callback to the classics: it's a callback to one of their most specifically hated routines. This is the first time in recent memory that I have wondered, during a 40-minute videogame, “is it over yet?”

One of the reasons that genre fans consider it acceptable for an arcade-style shooter to be only 30 or 40 minutes long is that the experience is incredibly dense. Bullet-hell games overload the senses and urge the player to make extremely dangerous trick-shot maneuvers for the highest scores, requiring lightning reflexes, trance-like concentration and a major time investment to get everything out of the game. The more Gradius-styled shooter offers puzzle-like stages that must be solved with exacting precision: likewise, the real time investment is many hours more than the length of the game.

Otomedius X doesn't really do any of that stuff. It just calls you up on the phone and says “Hey, remember Gradius?”, throws a curve in the middle with “Hey, remember Tokimeki Memorial?” (this cameo is the only Parodius-worthy laugh in the game) and charges an additional fee to say “Hey, remember Castlevania?”. Yes, I remember those videogames. Their existence does not make this videogame any more fun to play.

I'm not an amazing shooter player, but I finished the game's story mode without dying on my third attempt. Over in the slightly more difficult arcade mode, the challenge Otomedius X offers the victorious player is the same as that offered by the other Gradius titles: you're taken back to the first stage on a slightly higher difficulty, and the game loops for as long as the player doesn't die.

As I wouldn't beat a good game twice in a row-- when presented with the famous turning point of Super Ghouls N' Ghosts as a child I simply pressed the off button and walked away-- this holds no appeal. Even if one wanted to high-score this game, the hitboxes are bizarre: unlike the originals and nearly every modern 2D shooter, no indication is given (except in the practice mode!) of what will and won't register as a hit on your ship.

Otomedius Excellent is constantly referencing classics and obscurities-- Axelay to Xexex to Getsu Fuuma Den-- because it sure as hell can't deliver anything that made any of them great. If you're feeling nostalgic for Gradius, that's no reason to make the mistake of buying this game. Gradius Gaiden and Gradius V are out there, after all. If you're just that desperate to see anime girls' breasts, Crunchyroll offers a variety of crappy anime series based on light novels in which an ineffectual young man is surrounded by busty girls who want to have sex with him but never quite do. If you're going to go full otaku, at least enjoy yourself while you're at it. And please, be free of Otomedius Excellent.

I wanted to give KOFXIII's netplay a couple of sessions before I made the call on it. So here's the call: it's bad.

It is not the absolutely unplayable online we saw in KOFXII and most of SNK's Xbox Live Arcade games (Neo Geo Battle Coliseum is the sole exception). However, that doesn't mean it's good. It means it's playable with a little hassle and major caveats. Note that I'm located in New York City and playing on Xbox Live: I'm told that the situation is a little worse on Playstation Network.

First off: there are not a lot of available opponents. Of course, this has a lot to do with KOFXIII's terrible choice of release date (one week after Ultimate Marvel 3, which is easily the biggest game in tourney circles right now), but the bad netcode makes the situation worse.

When you're searching for matches, players' connection speeds are listed at anywhere from 1 to 4 bars. 1-bar is effectively unplayable, and 2-bar is very laggy. These are out of the question. Unfortunately, the vast majority of players I see have 2-bar connections. This means that starting a room and simply waiting in it (like the mode where you can practice while you wait) guarantees you a match that isn't worth playing.

You should notice this right away, but the best way to test the amount of lag you're getting in a KOFXIII match is at the character select screen. Just take note of the time it takes to move the selector a single space. That's the lag of a single input. If you see a significant lag here, imagine how much fun you're not going to be having when it's taking you that long to, say, block a punch.

This is especially a problem because KOFXIII is such a fast game. A lot of combos depend on whipping out commands as fast as you possibly can, and on a 2-bar connection these combos will drop. It won't necessarily be your fault: the input just won't come in right and you won't do your damage. Needless to say, this is very, very frustrating.

3-bar is more reliably playable, though issues remain. 4-bar is much better, but I have only seen three or four players with this connection status at all. When I have checked profiles, the 4-bar players have all been in the same city as I am. I suspect that people in less populated areas will have a much harder time playing online at all.

As the arcade is a dead institution in most of the US  online play is vitally important for these games. It's not something you want to screw up if you want the game to have a thriving community. Neither SF4's nor Marvel's netplay is the best ever, but it works well enough for the highest-level players. The best C.Viper player in the world had no problem tearing me a new one on Live a couple of weeks ago.

Local scenes and private get-togethers can't keep these games alive by themselves, especially not the smaller games. The fighting game bubble is on the verge of popping (mark my words, it'll be Street Fighter X Tekken), and this is the best exposure KOF will probably ever get. The patch for online play needs to come as soon as is possible.

I did say suggestions: there are a couple of other, little things, related to finding good connections in this terrible online hellscape. You can set the connection speed you want when you start up a room, but as you'll eventually learn this serves only as a friendly suggestion to other players: people with bad connections will still turn up in your room, and you can't kick them out either. You just have to take your ball and go home. Both of those points have to be fixed: if I'm never going to have a good time playing against a 2-bar connection, then I never want to see a player with that connection speed come into my room. This is especially bad in ranked matches, where you can't back out.

In conclusion, my color edit for King is Panty, my color edit for Yuri is Stocking, and it's going to be pretty much impossible to make Kim into Garterbelt.

The fighting games I'd been playing were SF4 and Marvel, just like everybody else in the fighting game scene right now. SF4 is a good enough game: it's the easiest to get matches for online, it's the game with the highest level of competition, and until Yun and Yang showed up there was nothing glaringly wrong with its balance. The most offputting flaw of the game was its insistence on anal execution requirements for simple, basic combos. Marvel was a funhouse of characters and ideas, but most of them didn't really make a lot of sense to use compared to other, vastly stronger option. Also, I often didn't feel like wins were earned because the benefits of level 3 X-Factor were so ridiculous.

I eventually dropped Blazblue because the game changed so drastically every six months: I tried to pick it up again with Noel last week but then I realized the gme would be changing again in December and I'd just have to buy a $40 upgrade disc and do all that combo learning (hours and hours!) over again.

So King of Fighters XIII has been very welcome. It's a completely different style of game, and quite frankly it doesn't have any stupid bullshit like I just described.

I personally theorize that the poorly-recieved KOFXII was the beta for this one, released to the market unfinished. Most players agreed that XII was clearly not done, and this game really cements that. More than just "better" than XII, XIII is the complete product. It feels right where XII didn't, and it completes the thoughts that game was starting to work on.

People not intimate with the genre might wonder what the hell the big difference between King of Fighters and Street Fighter is, anyway. Street Fighter is a game about spacing, first and foremost. The movement options are basic. Defense is typically favored over offense. Ryu's basic MO is to pressure from afar with fireballs, after all. In KOF characters like this exist (Athena) but they go about their business very differently.

King of Fighters is about rushing. The characters have a huge amount of movement options, and they are all fast. There's running, there are four different jumps, there's a roll move that goes through almost everything. (See the Beginner's Incomplete Guide for more on this!) It's about getting close to or even around the opponent, finding the opening and killing.

Being so rush-oriented, the game also has a really complex combo system. Basic combos are as easy as Street Fighter, but it gets a lot deeper than that. Depending on how much super move meter you have, you can typically do anywhere from 20 to 80 percent damage off just about any single hit. Of course, mastering all these strings is difficult: there's a complicated network of cancels and links and juggles. The game's tutorial does an okay job of explaining the basics, but in the mission mode you'll get a much better idea of exactly how the combo system is practically used in a match.

The combo system in this game is definitely hard-- the toughest part is the extreme speed required for many of the cancels-- but it's not anal like SF4 and the combos follow a more straightforward kind of logic that I can't honestly say applies to Arc's games. Characters will really need to be worked on in this game, and in the first couple days I've spent a lot more time in training mode than anywhere else. I am going to have to earn my damage.

And that's the nice thing about this game for a genre fan: that you have to earn it. SF4 has the Ultra mechanic for comebacks, which wasn't so bad. Then Marvel has X-Factor, which I don't think any Marvel player actually likes or thinks is fair. XIII, though, is very simple: your super meter, if you know how to use it, measures your potential to kill. I like this.

The rest of the home port is pretty nice: netplay is at about SF4's level, so not great but doable. Color edit is extensive, which is refreshing because everybody likes to charge money for costumes and leave out this feature these days. There's a story mode that I haven't been through yet, but it seems to just be a straight line with talking heads: definitely no Blazblue.

So of course you should buy KOFXIII. It's a beautiful-looking game: like all these HD 2D games, online video doesn't do it full justice. It's flashy and it's fast, and yet it's got nothing that makes me throw up my arms and yell "bullshit!".  The game is just right.

Yes, another one. Yes, I am writing real blog posts too. No, this is not necessarily a regular feature like the time I blogged Shin Mazinger, and no, I definitely won't be episode blogging anything this long. I really like this show, though.