Well, let’s see. Fable. It’s not quite what I was expecting. It’s a lot more linear than I would like, especially after hearing all of the hype. I was hoping for a Morrowind type experience, which is probably why I was disappointed. The other disappointing thing is you can only play through the game as a guy. Not a terrible flaw, but it would’ve been nice to have the option to choose.

The game itself is beautiful. The graphics are well done and the changing of your character’s appearance is a very cool feature. Since I am playing as good, my character’s hair has lightened into blond and now I have a halo and ethereal butterflies hanging around. Dustin is playing as evil and his character’s complexion is turning dark and his horns are sprouting. You also acquire scars when you get hit in battle. After eight hours of play my poor guy is looking pretty sad.

I’ve heard the game is fairly short, by RPG standards, around 10-12 hours. That means I’m looking at about 2-4 more hours before the end. It seems much shorter than that. I really have a hard time believing I’ve played 8 hours already. At least the game seems like it will have high replayability (is that a word? it is now).

Should you buy it? Yes, definitely. Will you become addicted? Yes, definitely.

No, it’s not my evil plot to steal your money, although that would be good too. It’s the plot of the movie, gaming, and anime empire to suck you dry as quickly as possible. It seems that the cosmos have aligned and everyone wants an even larger chunk of your money this month.

Gaming

If you own an Xbox and you haven’t been living in a hole for the past, oh… say… couple of years, then you have heard of Fable. In fact, it’s only slightly behind Halo2 in the “uber hyped game that isn’t coming out for two years but we want you to want to buy it RIGHT NOW” category. Luckily, Fable does have some experience to back up all the hype–after all, Lionhead Studios is involved and their previous game, Black & White, incorporated some of the basic “good and evil” elements that are such a big part of Fable. Since I’ve been avoiding the hype as much as possible, I can’t actually write a “review” of the game, so you’ll just have to check it out for yourself. Fable is available September 14 and can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com or anywhere else that sells games.

Anime

Ah yes, the anime industry. While they continuously try to suck you dry by charging $25 for 3 episodes, this month is even worse. On Tuesday, September 7th, Viz is releasing the first InuYasha movie, Affections Touching Across Time. They are also releasing the first season in a box set which includes episodes 1 – 27 on five DVDs. It’s available in a normal set or a limited edition set with an “InuYasha fang necklace,” which if I see anyone wearing outside of an anime convention, will probably kill me from laughing too hard. You have been warned.

For those of you who were fans of Chrno Crusade, the first US released DVD is coming out September 21, with the name Chrono Crusade. I’m still not sure why they needed the extra “o.” It’s available as a single DVD or with an art box to hold the rest of the series. I’m not sure how many episodes are on the DVD, but with a running time of 100 minutes, it’s either three or four, which means the series is going to be about eight DVDs long. Which, of course, brings us right back to the “wow that’s a lot of money for 24 measly episodes that I already have, and have watched, fansubbed from when it was airing in Japan.”

Movies

I’m sure that there are those of you reading this post from your campsite in front of your favorite DVD retailer, just because you are that cool. Well, that and the Star Wars trilogy is coming to DVD this month. Everyone knows that anything Star Wars induces geeks everywhere to give up showering to go camp out somewhere. Well, maybe they’re not really giving up showering–you have to have something to begin with in order to give it up… *grin*  All kidding aside (yes, I was kidding), Star Wars is finally coming out on DVD on the 21st of this month. If you don’t know what Star Wars is, then slowly back away from your computer and run screaming to your nearest geek friend to get educated. If you don’t have any geek friends… well I just feel very, very sorry for you.

That about wraps it up. I’m sure there are plenty of other things coming out that I am going to want to buy, but I decided to stop looking. I mean jeez, I have student loans to pay…

*Many of the links in this post link to Amazon. Yes, I am an Amazon affiliate. Yes, I will get a small amount of money if you click the link and then buy something. Yes, you may be able to find it cheaper elsewhere. Yes, I encourage you to shop around, in fact I recommend RightStuf.com for anime (no, I am not an affiliate there). RightStuf looks a little rough, but actually they are totally legit and have pretty good prices, especially check the weekly specials.

First up–job hunting. After the phone interview from Hades, I was invited to an onsite interview. The three hour interview actually turned out to be SIX technical interviews with six different people. Any of you who have experienced technical interviews know how much this sucked. Anyway, I thought I did pretty well and the interviewers seemed interested. However, about a week later I got the “you’re so talented, you’re going to have a great career–just not with us” email. Then NI called and wanted to have me in for another interview since they are hiring again. Today is my interview, from 3 to 5, so I’m just wasting time now so I don’t start to get nervous. Which is why my blog is miraculously getting updated today. :)

Second–the new Zelda. Nintendo showed some video from the new Zelda game for the GameCube at E3 and it looked AWESOME! I liked the cartoony look of Windwaker, especially since the face and eyes were so expressive, but the new game has a more realistic feel. Not to mention, Link looks hot in the new game. ;) (see what I mean) If you haven’t already, check the screenshots and the video from Nintendo’s site. I don’t think a release date has been set yet, but it should be out sometime next year.

Third–Fullmetal Alchemist has been licensed by FUNimation. This is good news and bad news. The bad news is that all the fansub sites have stopped subbing the show and taken down the torrents. The latest episode I have seen subbed is 31. You can still find alternative torrents by doing a search at DownloadAnime. The other bad news is that when it is finally released here in the US, it will be too expensive for me to buy. However, the good news is that FUNimation is planning to air the show on Cartoon Network starting in October. For those of you that don’t know what Fullmetal Alchemist is, a trailer is available at the official FUNimation site, FullmetalAlchemist.com. This is one of my favorite anime shows and well worth checking out.

Fourth and finally–I have tomatoes! Both of my plants are starting to grow tomatoes. Mr. Stripey is another story… I’m not sure why tomatoes are already growing seeing how the plant is still about six inches tall, but oh well, the sooner the better. The tomatoes are still very small, the biggest is the size of a large marble, but it’s progress and at least the plants are not dead.

Anyhow, enough ranting. The real reason I’m so happy to be back to broadband is that I can once again get up to date with the anime I missed. I am not really one of those strangely obsessed, scary, anime-is-my-life fans, but I do have a couple of shows that I like. Seeing as how I am still able to communicate with the outside world, I feel that it is my duty to enlighten you to some of the great anime showing in Japan right now.

While I don’t really have a favorite anime, there are three currently airing in Japan that I’ve been sucked into. There are, of course, many more than three actually showing but these are the ones that caught my eye. I could give you a summary of the plot, but I’ve decided I’m just too darn lazy to do it. So you can do what I do when I want to know about a new anime. Go to http://www.animenfo.com/ type the name in the handy dandy search box and voila! information. If that anime hasn’t been licensed in the U.S., it’ll even tell you some of the groups fansubbing it (more on that later). Finally, what you have all been waiting for–the list: Chrno Crusade, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Inuyasha. If any of you happened to watch Inuyasha on Cartoon Network, purge that horrible dub from your mind and download it in the original Japanese.

If you don’t speak Japanese, don’t worry. There are hundreds of groups out there that will get the anime from Japan and subtitle it so all of us English speakers can understand it. Most, if not all, do it for free. Very nice of them, huh? The following are my current three favorite fansub groups:

http://www.animeforever.org/ (Chrno Crusade, beginning of Fullmetal Alchemist)
http://www.anime-kraze.net/ (Chrno Crusade, Scrapped Princess, Last Exile, Inuyasha)
http://a.scarywater.net/sonchou/ (later episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist)

Alright, now that you know where to begin, you need to know how to actually get the anime. The easiest way is to use bittorrent. My favorite bittorent client is TorrentStorm (http://www.torrentstorm.com/). Just look around on the sites above until you find the releases section and click the bittorent links. Easy as pie. The other way, and generally faster way, especially for newer anime, is to download it from IRC. If you have no idea what IRC is, then you probably want to stick with bittorent, at least in the beginning. For those who know what it is, the three sites above all have channels on irc.rizon.net and most have really fast xdcc bots.

On a totally unrelated note, Dustin and I have been playing a new computer game called Sacred. Dustin has written up a little review and it’s well worth your time to go read it:

Every Bug is Sacred

Edit: Updated Animeforever’s links to point to the new site at Animeforever.org.