Afro Samurai Was an amazing anime, heavily stylized and didn’t overstay its welcome. Initial impressions of the game lead me to believe the same. I’m only 3 or so levels into the game but impressed none the less.

The anime’s humor (specificly NinjaNinja) carries over well and the gamplay is the most fun I have had in a while. The games cell-shading gives it a hand drawn appearance that lends itself well to the anime’s dynamic art style and is very reminiscent of Jet set radio.Granted the gameplay is hack-and-slash, but so far simple enoughto pick up, and lets enjoy dismembering several enemy by alternating the same 3 or 4 buttons and not getting old.

the game also plays like one big cut-scene, no menus or gauges, you can gauge your health, or rather, when your going to die, based on a red aura surrounding you when you start to take too much damage

I cant for the life of me figure out how to use any specials that I have unlocked via level-up, and the pause menu has 2 options, resume and quit. I plan on spending more time with it after work, but so far it looks like a solid title, a rare thing among licensed games.

overall I think the best way to describe it is Jet set radio meets Musashi: Samurai Legend with added Devil May cry for taste

also, walking behind someone on my way from the bathroom I noticed something: The Addia Logo looks suspiciously like a pot leaf on green seekers.

Quite a few things have happened to me in the last few days, some good some bad, but though it all I realized that my largest concern is the fact that my belt broke 2 days ago and my pants are sagging.

As of earlier this week i have been put in a very strange situation that i never thought i would be in, the target of racism; my family’s race is a very complex one, my Grandmother (mothers side) is Native America and black, my grandfather (mothers side) is Panamanian and french, and my father is from Guyana, so im a mutt if nothing else. externally i look Black and a little Hispanic, but not much. A friend who i have recently developed feeling for……again……can be pretty openly racist but I just kinda ignore it because its not a constant thing, and like i said were good friends so that has to count for something right?

I’m sure she knows I like her, its obvious enough, but she always seems to avoid the subject. via word-of-mouth I found out that she thinks I’m perfect for her, but she couldn’t date a black guy, as little black as I am. That may be a bit of interpretation on my part but it still upsets me. When your my age you tend to think “that kind of thing could never happen to me”. I wanna blame the fact that I’m in the south, or her father, but I find that I’m more angry at myself for wishing that I looked white so I could date her and that’s what upsets me the most, my own racial self-loathing……..

even if the world was rid of race differences, people would still find a way to distinguish one another, its both a good and bad thing. It all reminds me of an episode of “The Fairly odd parents” Where the main character wishes everyone looked alike, the episode ended with him realizing that even if you change people on the outside, their still ugly on the inside. pretty thought provoking for a child’s
cartoon

Not to mention my current girlfriend and I separated, not that, that was not a long time coming. I’m Just really hoping that It does not make the Anime Convention (Animazement) weird for me and my friends this weekend.

Also, the cafe in the library I work in has been closed for a week or so and its starting to make me mad, I want a Muffin damn-it

As odd as the title may sound, let me explane myself. I really think that multiplayer is kinda killing video games, at least for me. Their are 2 big reasons in my book: multiplayer games being VASTLY more popular that single player and forced multiplayer

It seems like alot of games are shunned if their isn’t some sort of multiplayer for whatever reason. Ok if you want your fps to have multiplayer, fine,but leave me RPGs and platforms out of it darn it. don’t get my wrong, i dont hate multiplayer in any way, some of the most fun i have ever has has been playing a nice capture-the-bag match in T”ime splitters 2/3″ with 3 other friends and some bots. one more than one occasion i have seen kids or even adults put back a great game at the local gamestop because it didn’t have multiplayer, not even obscure games (and im calling what i play obscure) but stuff like Devil may Cray and Mario Galaxy. it really is a shame that people miss out on such great games because their too closed minded to sit alone for a while and play a game that isn’t halo or madden. games started out as single player and single player games seem to be falling into the minority. I’m not going to kid myself i don’t have alot of friends, so i spend alot of time playing single player games and as of late, I buy a game only to have extremely sub-par single player gameplay and often barely passable as a game, but the “amazing’ multiplayer experience makes up for it, or so they say, I think halo is a good example of this, in addition to gears of war.

Forced multiplayer: Most of my experience from this come from guitar hero. some of the laters guitar hero’s force you to play a multiplayer, co-op career to unlock several songs. while i appreciate the effort activision is taking to make me interact with my peers, its a wasted effort. I like playing games alone, or in some cases with my friends watching and we all providing cometary. like i said before, i don’t have many friends, and even my roommates and i share very different taste in games, I like Jrpgs, platforms, rhythm and action games, one likes fps’s, the other RTS’s and mmos, so its not like we play anything together very often. as a result of seclusion i think its a piss-poor design to mandate co-operative play in a game in order to finish it. if i wanna play alone, I should have that option.

The point im trying to get across is that multiplayer is good in a game, IF and only if, its a supplement to the single player game not a hindrance, or its a strictly multiplayer game (see Counter Strike and Left 4 Dead)

even though it may seem this way, I don’t hate FPS’s, or xbox games. no really, Half life 2 (pc) and Time Splitters are 2 of my favorite games, hands down and i bought a 360 a few years ago. I just really hate halo, and I think gears of war is nothing but $60 worth of muscle- bound men and Bloom.

with that i give you this:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/525-Gears-of-War-2

First of all, if somethings are typed funny, its because I’m using the Mac at work today and I’m not quite used to the keyboard and shortcut keys. also, the delete key on this damn thing is full of nothing but lies and deception, its deletes nothing, NOTHING I tell you!!

on to more pressing matters. I have been playing alot of crossover games lately and they have keft me with quite an impression

the issue with crossover games is how to get multiple characters form diffrent universes into one without it seeming like thrown together corpret fanfiction. Namco x capcom is a fine example of such. The gameplay is amazing and alot of fun, being able to go from a tactical-rpg gird system to a button-based combo system keeps things interesting, and reminds me in part of a simplified version of the Valkyrie Profile battle sytem.

while the story is interesting and quaky, the process of the characters coming together is rather inconsistent in quality. for example, klona, tales of eternia and tower of duraga all mesh together lore and story wise well enough that when characters from those series meet up, it doesn’t seem stretched, same thing for Resident evil and Dino Crisis. a counter example would be Xenosaga, and well anything. While Xenosaga is one of my favorite series, the only way the writers could get KOS-MOS, Shion and MOMO into the game was to drop them from the sky via plot hole. Not to mention the random paring of King (tekken) and Falica (Dark Stalkers) for no reason other than the fact that their both dressed like animals (felines at that)

like i said, the game play and homages to a wide range of series more than makes of for any story fax pus.

I have also been enjoying “Dissidia: Final Fantasy” the past few days, while the battle system and puzzle like stage system is unlike most other FF’s, the item and skill management is nothing new. although it can be rather tedious to equip skills and figure out their effects or how to preform them, but this is more than likely because I’m playing the darn game in Japaneses.

since i cant really understand the cut-scenes and in-game text that well (apart from the repeated mention of some sort of crystal every 30 second in spoken dialog) the character interaction seems kinda random. from what i can gather, Chaos (read: Super-evil asshole god) and cosmos(read: meta-physical manifestation of all things good) gathered all the main characters from ff 1-11 and all the main villains from ff 1-10 and 12 (no one liked the main character in 12, not even square apparently) and dumped them into some big battle for the universe or something. once again it seems a little thrown together although it might make a bit more since if i ever play the game in English

the only cross-over game that i have played that has combined characters in a well written way was Kingdom Hearts. The reason being because the characters histories were re-written and are more of a representation of the characters as opposed to a perfect copy. KH gets a lot of grief for this but i think thats why it works so well.

i kinda also wanted to talk about how games that i like that are always unique or different (ex: okami, mirrors edge, beyond good and evil), sell poorly, and are marked down to like $25-$30 a month or 2 after their release, and i was the only person who bought it on its release date and shelled out $50-$60. and Halo 6456334 is still selling for $50.

god I fucking hate Halo……

I spent the better part of my weekend and week up until today (Tuesday) proving that some higher power has a grudge against me.

Zeus, Buddha, Shiva, God, I’m on to you

Ill start with Saturday and work my way to today

Saturday:
-get ready to give my dog (named Momo) a bath, somehow between my room and the bath room, she manages to get a hold of a large brownie (like still in a baking pan large) that my roommate had left on the coffee table. i go to pet her head and check her, since chocolate can be deadly to dogs, she bites me and leaves me bleeding

-car ran out of gas on the way to a gas station, several frat boys had to help me push it out of the middle of a busy intersection

-got a lift to gas station and my card wouldn’t work in the pump, went inside, cashier (a friend from a class) tells me to try credit instead of debit, i do, it still refuses to work, I pay inside and get 5 bucks of gas, the gas can i have only holds 2.50 worth of gas, good buy money

-get back to car and it starts to rain on me

-go to get money my girlfriend owes me but her bank account is frozen, my bank account has $0.38, so long food

Sunday:
-woke up and then harassed my girlfriend, my dog then precedes to hop onto my bed, pee on both of us and then walk away, what the hell dog

-drove to grandmothers house, drive home, meet my moms new puppy, play with puppy and hour or so. since it was a puppy, it spent alot of time licking my face. Monday i find out that the dog has hook worms and some intestinal infection, both transferable to humans

- my girl friend bought “twilight” on DVD, bleh, I think I might burn it when she is not looking

Monday:
-go to java class and the teacher gives back a test, a test I didn’t know existed. I asked him about it after class. Turns out the test was given while i was out of school for 2 weeks because of surgery

-the aforementioned teacher wont excuse me from the test, despite my doctors note, unless i have a note from the “Dean of student services”

- I went to the Dean of student services and they told me that they don’t handle medical absences. -sigh-

- My Ex-girlfriend got mad with me while we were hanging out because i was looking at another girls butt, I repeat EX-girlfriend

- I realized I had lost my expensive Skull candy headphones

- My roommates decided to cook some “herbs” of the less than legal variety in my pan and let it slow simmer, the smell has now filled the house and caused me to vomit twice

Tuesday (today):
-dog wakes up, as I’m grabbing its leash to walk it, she starts to pee’

-late to math class because i was cleaning up after dog

-ran into a fence while parking my car to walk to work

-my computer chair at work sinks a little when i sit in it. just enough for my finger to fit between the chair arm and desk. i know this because i went to stand, the chain rose up and smashed my finger between my desk and chair

- the office right behind my cubical has termites so their using high powered drills or something to get into the wall, and its VERY LOUD!

- the resulting drilling has netted me a headache

- my roommate Steven has not been hit by a car (yes this is a bad thing)

that was my weekend, pretty bad in retrospect. i didn’t mope around or anything, i had some fun, but it seems like an unusually large number of bad things happened to me for no real reason. maybe I picked up some bad Karma last week.

Last night me and several friends went to the watchmen midnight showing, and in all honesty i think it was one of the best movies i have seen in a long time. I wont go into specific plot details or analyze it, I’m not much of a movie buff, but i know what i like, and watchmen was certinley something I would watch several times again. that might not sound like much of a recommendation, but I am one of those people who wont watch a movie more than once unless it confused me or i thoroughly enjoyed it, in most cases both.

I’m sure some people would shun me because I opted to see the movie before reading the comic. This was a personal choice based on the fact that; in most cases if i read a book, play a game or read a comic book a movie is based on, i enjoy the movie so much less than if I had not, in order to prevent that, if i know a movie i want to see has some sort of source material i have not read/played, i try and take a step back from it so i can enjoy the movie for what I think it is: an interpretation of its source material.

To be honest, apart from Batman, I never really got into DC comics, marvel and Sonic the hedgehog got to me first. plus DeadPool is the shit. But i think Watchmen peeked my interest in DC again

In totally unrelated new, I brought some Ramen to eat for lunch at work and I forgot one of my chopsticks. I have learned that my hands seem to get retarded when I use a fork for pasta, and i make a mess all over my shirt so I’m currently looking for office supplies to make a make-shift chop stick, ill post pictures later if it works at all. To be honest, the primary reason I even care if I use a fork or not is because I’m trying to impress a Japanese co-worker of mine, is that silly of me?

and lastly, I need to get around to making a new banner for this place, that tree one is gettin old fast, perhaps something Gurren lagann related? I’m also gonna make some images to go in my actual post, smiles and other random things. Suffice to say i have a lot of free time, I’m copying 3 full dvd’s (12+ gigs) of magazine scans onto the office server for a grant project, and all i have to do is sit here and watch the damn windows progress bar move slowly

For those who don’t know what Otaku is, it is (in America at least) a fan off all things Japaneses, video games, Anime, Manga, models, figures, posters, everything really.

Needless to say I’m a self-proclaimed otaku.

I hope this blog can be a testament to my nerdyness in the far future, as well as just a place to express my views and vent on some occasions.

as to what the title means, well I’m a broke college student living off of financial aid and my part time job, needless to say that models and video games should be the last thing on my mind, but alas, my hobbies are a bit like heroin, and its rather hard to kick the habit

A little about myself:

Name: Chris Cossiah (pronounced – ko sy uh)
Age: as of now, 18
Occupation: student, computer programmer/document scanner
Likes: Anime, manga, video games, all types of music (sans country), women lol, animals, Arizona tea, Sci-fi, zombies, David Tennant
Dislikes: none really, well except my roommates best friend kyle, I hate that guy

and a note to all: I’M A TERRIBLE SPELLER, but hopefully the power of firefox can save you all from some of my more miner spelling faux pas

hope you enjoy your time here ^_^