In Achron you can time travel and fix that mistake.  Go back in time and build some anti-air to accompany those tanks.  Maybe instead you reroute them to avoid the enemy aircraft.  All while you're doing this, your opponent can see you meddling with the timeline and perhaps work some interference of their own.

The developer says that they've taken measures to balance the time travel so that players will have to weigh the benefits with cost.  In an interview they directly address my initial concern about games devolving in to giant battles at the start of the game's timeline.

Achron definitely has the potential to be Super Awesome!

A recent discussion amongst a few of my followed on Twitter brought this question to mind: how did the piracy of copyrighted works evolve to how it is today?  Thanks to digital reproductions of digital products, there is rarely any difference between an original licensed work and a pirated copy.  When copyright law was envisioned these circumstances can't have been imagined.

It's important to keep in mind why copyright law exists.  Wikipedia starts to define copyright as "... the set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work."  Why does an author need exclusive rights in the first place?  The same Wikipedia article quotes the World Intellectual Property Organization, saying that copyright law is there "To encourage a dynamic creative culture, while returning value to creators so that they can lead a dignified economic existence, and to provide widespread, affordable access to content for the public."  Artists need to get paid!  If anyone could just copy their stuff and have it for themselves without paying for a license then the original artist in this case would not get paid.

When it comes to physical art, reproductions are usually obvious.  There's also less intrinsic value: an original painting is vastly superior to a print or reproduction.  Original works of this nature stay naturally expensive because of their limited supply.  Creating unlicensed copies of paintings, sculptures, books, etc. are not free and this limits the market.  Things change drastically when it comes to the digital medium.  Computer software, music, and film are all distributed in digital formats.  Being digital, they can be reproduced with zero loss of data which makes them perfect copies of the original.  Now where's the motivation for purchasing a license for the material from the creator?  A consumer can have a perfect copy at virtually no cost to themselves.  That's certainly hard to turn down.

Here's the crux of the issue.  A common justification for piracy is that the pirate is not stealing anything.  Nothing is being taken from the creator in to the possession of the pirate.  Based on the justification and origin of copyright law, we can take this argument as a Straw man.  It's not the act of the pirating or downloading.  That's an outdated comparison to traditional theft.  The problem here is the lack of action.  As a pirate, an unlicensed user of copyrighted material, a person has not compensated the creator.  An answer to that argument is that the pirate would not have purchased it anyway.  That just seems disingenuous.  Why are you consuming it at all?  If it's good enough to watch, read, listen to, or play, it's good enough for you to compensate the author.

It seems like piracy should be self defeating.  If an author does not receive payment for their work, they would cease making it.  However the world is not black and white.  There will always be people conscientious enough to pay for their entertainment instead of obtaining it unlicensed.  In essence these pirates leach off the efforts of both authors and paying customers.

Copyright law exists to enforce common human decency.  This becomes more important with the anonymity of the Internet.  I imagine most people who pirate software would not walk in to the office of a software developer, copy a product on to a portable hard drive and walk out.  Being able to do so anonymously and with little effort makes it a different story.

Sometimes material isn't available as a licensed property.  This happens often in the international film industry.  Surely it can't be a problem to obtain a copy of a film that isn't available for licensing in your home country.  I'd say as long as you properly license that material if it becomes available then any possible wrongs there have been righted.

Chime in down below with your thoughts on copyright and piracy!

NIS America

With the recent losses of some anime publishers in America, it's welcome news that another company will be stepping up.  NIS America, a subsidiary of Nippon Ichi Software, is known for bringing quirky niche video game titles like Disgaea to the United States.

In a press release dated February 12, the company has announced their intention to meet the growing demand for Japanese culture in America by releasing anime series on DVD.  The "first 4 anime titles" are: "Toradora", "PERSONA -trinity soul-", "PandoraHearts", and "Our Home's Fox Deity".

These four shows seem to span the thematic spectrum.  It ranges from the darks of Persona to the high school love of Toradora.  I look forward to seeing how well NIS America's efforts do.  Their experience in the niche market of RPG and Strategy RPG video games should prepare them well for a similar experience in anime.

I'm Lovin It!

There's more to an art form than the medium itself. Some subject matter lends itself better to a particular style. I'm sure you could do a landscape of a spring meadow with a sculpture, but surely an impressionist watercolor is better suited. That's a bit of a stretch, as different painting styles really can't be segregated that way, and there's an exception to every rule. In the plastic arts (wikipedia) this may not be so clear cut. Even in literature, it becomes difficult to make divisions along the lines of content being paired with style.

Serialized illustrated work seems to have taken an interesting evolutionary path.  Compare the American comic book and  Japanese Manga industries.  While there are standouts, the American comic book is often about a costumed super hero.  Sometimes there are secret identities, but more recently they have taken a back seat to the main course: heroes vs. villains.  Crazy fights in worldy and other places with amazing powers.  All of this done in beautifully drawn and colored artwork.  These are amazing to behold.

Looking at Japanese manga, there's a change in both content and presentation.  There are books for many different market segments, with named categories: shounen, shoujo, etc.  Not only are they aimed at different people, but these aren't super heroes aimed at girls for example.  They are just stories that appeal to different people that happen to be drawn in a serial art format.  The format is also usually a small paperback size, and in black and white.

The differences here are pretty drastic.  Part of it is definitely cultural.  In our beautiful USA, cartoons and comic books are for kids.  In order for adults to be entertained by it, it has to be filmed with actors.  Just look at how successful the DC and Marvel movies have been lately.  I'll omit the bad ones, but the newer Batman movies, Spiderman, X-Men, and my favorite Iron-Man have all done very well.  They're the same stories told in the comic books which themselves have definitely matured over the years.  Meanwhile anime and manga have no problems with containing material that isn't targeted at children and reaching a market.  According to manga critic Haruyuki Nakano, the baby boomers continued reading their favorite manga in to adult-hood.

All this leads up to Americans reading Japanese manga.  I never thought I'd see the day when mainstream booksellers like Barnes & Noble have entire sections in their stores dedicated to manga and Best Buy having an anime section.  Like it or not, anime and manga have grown popular amongst America's youth.  The first anime I saw was a passed around bootleg VHS since there was no way to purchase anything, let alone with any sort of English.

Batman: Death Mask

It only makes sense that the comic book industry, which is a shadow of its former glory, would try to cash in to this growing market.  What piqued my interest in this comparison was picking up Batman: Death Mask from Charging Star Comics.  It's a manga in the comic book size format from DC's CMX imprint.  After reading it, I was surprised that the story was wrote Batman.  There's a mystery involving an unknown killer, internal Bruce Wayne/Batman strife, and a curious woman.  The black and white art works relatively well with the overall style of Batman, being dark and gothic in setting.  It is written and drawn by Yoshinori Natsume.  Not very prolific, his series Togari was well received and features a villain who slowly becomes good.  There definitely is a sharing of themes with the Dark Knight.

Although a fun read, I immediately wanted to compare it to the last Batman I had read: Hush.  The next two nights I reread parts one and two.  Gone are the understated tones and sharp lines of Death Mask.  Here we have Jim Lee's huge men and huge women (I'll let you figure out which parts are huge).  The plot is more epic, but they have more time to tell the story, being more issues in length.  Death Mask is a good effort but Hush is just more impressive.

Batman however is a good example of a cultural crossover.  He fights crime to avenge the death of his parents.  Instead of a caped crusader swinging over the night sky of Gotham, he could definitely be a masked ronin samurai ridding the country side of bandits.  It's a relatively straight forward story that transfers over well.  Batman is an honorable warrior who fights for justice with his mind and body.

Really?

Then there's a different approach to transferring properties over.  They turned X-Men in to a shoujo manga.  That means it's "for girls".  The men look all flowery and pretty.  That's all I'm going to say about that since I'm definitely not in their desired market segment.  But it's interesting that they tried to take an American comic book property and place it in one of the Japanese manga segments that X-Men definitely doesn't fit in to.  It's definitely a risk and experiment, as it would have been easy to just take X-Men and place them in a shounen manga that's all about the fight of the week.

Similar things are happening in the world of animation as well.  Saturday morning cartoons here in America have been populated with re-edited Japanese anime for many years now.  I grew up watching Robotech (rehashed Macross), Transformres, GoBots, and Voltron (mashed up GoLion).  The trend is still going strong, only now accompanied by American animators mimicking the anime style.

We're also starting to get American based properties, animated in Japan, not aimed at children. The Animatrix kicked it all off with their compilation of shorts done by notable Japanese anime studios.  More recently Batman: Gotham Knight was produced in a similar fashion to help promote the 2nd new Batman movie: Dark Knight.  And arguably targetted at a slightly younger audience is the yet to be released: Halo Legends.  All three of these titles feature prominent Japanese studios creating anime shorts utilizing American properties for an adult American audience.  Unlike the earlier mentioned Batman manga, these feature anime sensibilities in their story telling, the American producers having given their contracted studios some freedom to tell their stories.  These three works do well since they are well conceived and preserve their source material.

There are two upcoming Marvel releases that don't hold as much promise.  Both Iron Man and Wolverine have "anime" releases coming.  These are more like anime re imaginings of their source material, with Iron Man looking more like kaiju giant robots with over the top villains and Wolverine  a girly, angsty samurai.  I hope they're good and do well, but it's not looking very promising.

I hope that these industries continue to innovate and experiment with properties, although I'm not sure I like the trend of Hollywood deciding to make live action movies of anime.  We've yet to see one make it to release and I'm eagerly waiting to either cheer or rip them to shreds!

What do you think of this phenomena? Leave a comment and chime in!

Cliff Chiang made this great poster for a Star Wars trading card set.

Star Trek Online

The Open Beta for Star Trek Online is finished.  Here are a few collections of screen shots I've taken while playing.  To end the Open Beta, Cryptic invaded Federation Space with a bunch of Borg!  Lot's of fun.

I'm very excited for the upcoming Head Start that begins at 1PM EST on Friday, January 29, 2010.

I'm thinking about going Tactical Officer for my captain in an escort class ship.  Full DPS at first.  I did Science Officer in an escort in Open Beta and it was a lot of fun.  Having the extra DPS in away missions when I'm in a full team of players might be good though!

The End of Open Beta Event

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This is the second day of the promotion and they've started out strong.  The first day was Rope'n'Fly which was pretty popular for a while and today Zombie Pizza.  Both are games I've wanted to try in the past but that didn't rank high up enough in my interest to warrant a purchase.

Go take a look at freeappaday.com every day to see what gift is waiting for you!

Crunchyroll

Wow.  Thankfully I was checking out Anime 3000 while listening to my friends over at Reverse Thieves.  A3K happens to be hosting their new podcast.  Go give it a listen!

Anyway, this is an amazing development and I can't believe I hadn't heard about it till now.  For those who don't know, Crunchyroll is a a legal streaming site for anime and live action drama from Asia(Japan and I think Korea).  Before Netflix had their streaming, I used Crunchyroll a lot.

Now they've made it even easier to watch!  Crunchyroll is free for a good number of shows.  If you want exclusive content access as well as more current,  as they release in Japan, shows you can pay a fee.  If you pay a fee you also don't have to watch commercials.

The app itself is nothing too crazy.  You can sign in to your Crunchyroll profile to view your account and guestbook.  As for viewing content, you can tilt the phone sideways to see featured titles as well as using buttons along the bottom to Browse and Search.

I tested on wifi and 3G.  The wifi works great and it appears to use the built-in Quicktime viewer which allows you to scrub around to view the part you want as well as zoom in a little so the picture takes up the whole screen.

Unfortunately, probably because of Apple and ATT, the app will not let you stream anime over the 3G network.

For a free app this is great and it may actually turn me in to a paying customer of Crunchyroll!

Crunchyroll for iPhone rates Super Awesome!

Why is this good? Creative differences between Raimi and Sony is why we ended up with Spiderman 3.  *bleh*  This also means that he's freed up to work on his next project.  One of two planned projects for Raimi is the World of Warcraft movie.  Another benefit?  The empty space in the release schedule means that the Thor movie is being moved up earlier in the release calendar.  Look to see Thor in theaters May 6, 2011.

Charging Star!

My friend Ryan Fuerstenburg, the owner of Charging Star Comics, will be joining the blogging "staff" here at SANO. The plan is for a monthly post about the comics of the past month. Look forward to the inaugural Charging Star Comics Update! in the first week of February.

CHARGING STAR!