There is no way to resurrect Aeris, either in the Japanese version of the game, or the American one. If there was such a way, then the fanboys would've discovered it a long time ago.
It's true that there are a lot of artifacts of abandoned sidequests in both releases of the game (entire maps, hidden areas, etc.), but there wasn't any subtraction/alteration to the US port of the game as signifigant as what you mention.
I've had few problems buying (and selling!) collectables on eBay. However, I've recently discovered that it's worth your while to Google and/or Froogle for an item you're looking for, and try and get a better price elsewhere. I collect toys and other goods from Japan, and found that in certain instances, it can be a LOT cheaper this way. Since then, eBay has become just another place to check out:P
Ahh yes... I remember reading that in a Don Rosa interview (The Comics Journal's Carl Barks tribute, to be exact). In particular, I was thinking of the artists from said countries (like Rosa and the Gutenberghus Group from Denmark [which I meant to say in my original post instead of Holland!]):)
I agree that's unlikely to draw American females, but in Japan its a proven tactic.
I don't know. There's a pretty strong contingent of American female gamers who are into the bishounen boylove (I can direct you to numerous fansites, fanfics, and whatnot as proof). Probably not as many as there are in Japan, but still a sizable number.
In the US at least, manga's been accounting for a lot of graphic novel sales these days, and some books (like certain volumes of Chobits) have become bestsellers among paperbacks as a whole. There's been a general trend among manga publishers to skip individual issues altogether and go straight to small (and fairly inexpensive) graphic novels. Lately, I've been noticing the likes of Marvel and DC taking similar approaches to their own (non-manga) titles. Maybe this is the shot in the arm the industry needs...
I love the European Disney comics. The Duck stories that come out of Italy, Holland, and Spain are miles better than most "kids" comics that are written here (with some exceptions, of course).
Maybe someone should whap the author upside the head with copies of Comics and Sequential Art and Understanding Comics (I know he mentioned the latter in the article, but if the misspelling of Scott McCloud's name is any indication, I have to ask myself if he's really read it).
Ugh. I liked Giant Robot back when it was bound with staples, David Choe did the backpage comic (instead of that robot monkey guy whose work has that hip and annoyingly omnipresent James Kochalka look), and N8 Shimizu was on the staff (things especially seemed to go downhill once he left).
I have tried picking up the newer issues, but they don't have the same flavor-- the layouts have that whole "trendy graphic design" air about them, and the content itself is either too arty (I like Takashi Murakami as much as the next otaku, but...) or just not as interesting/appealing as in the older issues.
The only magazine I subscribe to nowadays is Wired (subscriptions to Game Informer and Macworld have since lapsed). As for picking stuff up at the newsstand, I generally limit myself to occasionally picking up Newtype USA (for anime preview DVDs and the translated Newtype content), The Comics Journal (for the damned good interviews), Protoculture Addicts, and Animation Magazine (I don't know why I still find myself occasionally buying that last one).
I used to be quite the zine connoseur back in the day, and read everything from Factsheet 5 to Beer Frame to Cometbus. I kind of fell off on that scene after many of my favorite zines either died (Animato!, I shall miss you) or got overly glossy and professional (*cough*giantrobot*cough*). Anyone got any suggestions for some good, quirky self-published magazines that are currently being produced?
Man, I sure hope not. I'm an animator, and I've sometimes toyed with the idea of moving to Baltimore specifically to work in video games. It happens with film and TV animation, too-- the industry here is tiny compared to California and Vancouver.
On the upside, most of the game dev. around here (NYC) these days has been in mobile/Java games, and there's been a lot of new studios popping up that make these kinds of games. Of course, such dev teams don't need nearly as many people, and it's a new field, so who knows what things will be like a few years down the line... *sigh*
G cups aren't exactly the norm, and I think what the original post was trying to say is that a disproportionate amount of women in games have breasts that are around that size. I'm not sure if it's true myself, and I've played a lot of games...
Noo... the sex was really late in the series, after they'd kissed a number of times! Maybe you watched the episodes out of order? That would probably be why a lot of the show didn't make sense...
There's more to it than just the voices, though. There is usually a very good use of color schemes, which of course the manga don't have, and you get to see characters develop into an emotion, rather than a snapshot of it, if you know what I mean.
I'm an animator myself, and although I recognize the power of color usage and motion, the manga medium handles such issues in different (and frequently more interesting) ways (in the case of color-- the black and white screentones and inking used in a lot of manga is fantastic-- check out X or Video Girl Ai for example).
I did watch His & Her, and I thought the ending wasn't one, but I just chalked it up to a crappy series/studio. There were a couple of things with the story that seemed weird, anyway. The whole way the sex was handled seemed odd to me.
I thought the series was brilliant, and probably the most manga-like anime ever produced (one can certainly see how it influenced works that came after it, like GTO). I'm also a huge fan of GAINAX (though I admit that for awhile, endings were not their strong point, at least until FLCL). And the handling of the sex was very shoujo, and fit in with the overall tone of the series. Anything else would've been jarring.
I much prefer manga-- it's portable, requires no additional equipment, plus I can instantly go back and reread passages if I want to. It's also tends to be cheaper for the same amount of story, and in the case of downloads, scanlations are much quicker to obtain than DivX fansubs (though I hardly download either...).
Since most anime is based on manga, the original stories tend to have a richness to them that frequently gets watered down in the anime. There's also the rare case of an anime series being cancelled before the manga ends (such as what occurred with His and Her Circumstances), in which case the manga version is clearly the way to go.
Well, a lot of manga is about gay men! Ever see any BL (boys' love), shounen-ai, or yaoi books? I'm actually kind of shocked that the hard stuff in this genre is finally making it over here ^_^; Chalk one up for the fangirls!
Well, technically, Chobits is a boys manga too (even though it was originally drawn by CLAMP, a popular girls' manga circle). And Maison Ikkoku is a seinen manga, originally written for young men...
Not to say that these works don't appeal to girls as well, since they do-- they just aren't shoujo, or even partly-shoujo.
No, they won't disappear entirely, but just be sucked up into a niche market, like what happened with U.S. comic books in the '50s. Granted, those were somewhat different circumstances, but...
There's been a good number of these published. The best multiple-FF books I've seen are the three Final Fantasy Complete Works volumes. There's also numerous art books for individual installments, Yoshitaka Amano illustrations (check out Amano: The Complete Prints), etc.
I agree that one single artbook on the entire series would kick-ass, but it would also be huge (not to mention prohibitively expensive).
Based on the complaints by Wiki owners it's a fact that at either Wiki software is not up to handle these things or Wiki owners aren't.
It's the format of wiki that's partially to blame-- most wiki owners want to keep the things open to the public at large. This is assuming that the best way to control the content of a wiki (including the Sandbox) is to regulate its users, and require registration/passwords.
The Nigritude spam is a nuisance, one that I shouldn't have to deal with. It's not that I'm not up to it, as it doesn't take very long to revert pages to their previous versions and/or edit the source itself (I do this latter bit of business to avoid having the previous pages show up in Google-- not giving 'em the pleasure, in other words). It's that I feel that I shouldn't have to close off huge chunks of the site to users, nor should I have to make my site invisible to Googlebots, just because of a bunch of spammers.
Much wiki software is revised and modded constantly. The defenses that you hint at may figure more in the future-- but I hope it doesn't do so at the expense of keeping wikis open.
(nods) I get it for about $25... through Verizon, no less. I got the discounted rate because I signed on to one of their phone packages, but it's still cheaper than what I used to pay (for both DSL and long-distance). It didn't require a contract renewal on my end; just had one DSL feature I didn't use removed.
Without the package deal, the DSL's still about $30 a month... certainly better than the $40 I was paying last year.
Ironically enough, the first-placer that you mentioned has been the one group that has been spamming my wiki's sandbox the most in recent days (see sig)... methinks its a group effort on the part of the messageboard community -_-
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way to resurrect Aeris, either in the Japanese version of the game, or the American one. If there was such a way, then the fanboys would've discovered it a long time ago.
It's true that there are a lot of artifacts of abandoned sidequests in both releases of the game (entire maps, hidden areas, etc.), but there wasn't any subtraction/alteration to the US port of the game as signifigant as what you mention.
I've had few problems buying (and selling!) collectables on eBay. However, I've recently discovered that it's worth your while to Google and/or Froogle for an item you're looking for, and try and get a better price elsewhere. I collect toys and other goods from Japan, and found that in certain instances, it can be a LOT cheaper this way. Since then, eBay has become just another place to check out :P
Ahh yes... I remember reading that in a Don Rosa interview (The Comics Journal's Carl Barks tribute, to be exact). In particular, I was thinking of the artists from said countries (like Rosa and the Gutenberghus Group from Denmark [which I meant to say in my original post instead of Holland!]) :)
I don't know. There's a pretty strong contingent of American female gamers who are into the bishounen boylove (I can direct you to numerous fansites, fanfics, and whatnot as proof). Probably not as many as there are in Japan, but still a sizable number.
In the US at least, manga's been accounting for a lot of graphic novel sales these days, and some books (like certain volumes of Chobits) have become bestsellers among paperbacks as a whole. There's been a general trend among manga publishers to skip individual issues altogether and go straight to small (and fairly inexpensive) graphic novels. Lately, I've been noticing the likes of Marvel and DC taking similar approaches to their own (non-manga) titles. Maybe this is the shot in the arm the industry needs...
I love the European Disney comics. The Duck stories that come out of Italy, Holland, and Spain are miles better than most "kids" comics that are written here (with some exceptions, of course).
Maybe someone should whap the author upside the head with copies of Comics and Sequential Art and Understanding Comics (I know he mentioned the latter in the article, but if the misspelling of Scott McCloud's name is any indication, I have to ask myself if he's really read it).
I have tried picking up the newer issues, but they don't have the same flavor-- the layouts have that whole "trendy graphic design" air about them, and the content itself is either too arty (I like Takashi Murakami as much as the next otaku, but...) or just not as interesting/appealing as in the older issues.
To each his own, I guess (shrug)
I used to be quite the zine connoseur back in the day, and read everything from Factsheet 5 to Beer Frame to Cometbus. I kind of fell off on that scene after many of my favorite zines either died (Animato!, I shall miss you) or got overly glossy and professional (*cough*giantrobot*cough*). Anyone got any suggestions for some good, quirky self-published magazines that are currently being produced?
On the upside, most of the game dev. around here (NYC) these days has been in mobile/Java games, and there's been a lot of new studios popping up that make these kinds of games. Of course, such dev teams don't need nearly as many people, and it's a new field, so who knows what things will be like a few years down the line... *sigh*
G cups aren't exactly the norm, and I think what the original post was trying to say is that a disproportionate amount of women in games have breasts that are around that size. I'm not sure if it's true myself, and I've played a lot of games...
Done!: Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side
Noo... the sex was really late in the series, after they'd kissed a number of times! Maybe you watched the episodes out of order? That would probably be why a lot of the show didn't make sense...
I'm an animator myself, and although I recognize the power of color usage and motion, the manga medium handles such issues in different (and frequently more interesting) ways (in the case of color-- the black and white screentones and inking used in a lot of manga is fantastic-- check out X or Video Girl Ai for example).
I did watch His & Her, and I thought the ending wasn't one, but I just chalked it up to a crappy series/studio. There were a couple of things with the story that seemed weird, anyway. The whole way the sex was handled seemed odd to me.
I thought the series was brilliant, and probably the most manga-like anime ever produced (one can certainly see how it influenced works that came after it, like GTO). I'm also a huge fan of GAINAX (though I admit that for awhile, endings were not their strong point, at least until FLCL). And the handling of the sex was very shoujo, and fit in with the overall tone of the series. Anything else would've been jarring.
I much prefer manga-- it's portable, requires no additional equipment, plus I can instantly go back and reread passages if I want to. It's also tends to be cheaper for the same amount of story, and in the case of downloads, scanlations are much quicker to obtain than DivX fansubs (though I hardly download either...).
Since most anime is based on manga, the original stories tend to have a richness to them that frequently gets watered down in the anime. There's also the rare case of an anime series being cancelled before the manga ends (such as what occurred with His and Her Circumstances), in which case the manga version is clearly the way to go.
Well, a lot of manga is about gay men! Ever see any BL (boys' love), shounen-ai, or yaoi books? I'm actually kind of shocked that the hard stuff in this genre is finally making it over here ^_^; Chalk one up for the fangirls!
Not to say that these works don't appeal to girls as well, since they do-- they just aren't shoujo, or even partly-shoujo.
No, they won't disappear entirely, but just be sucked up into a niche market, like what happened with U.S. comic books in the '50s. Granted, those were somewhat different circumstances, but...
Sure, translated manga nowadays is still not as cheap as Japanese tankoubon, but I really don't mind the price drop :)
I was thinking 7th Guest as well. A quick search on Google brought up the date 1992 as its year of release. Myst was released in 1993...
A book containing illustrations done for the Crash, Jak, and Spyro games would be pretty cool...
I agree that one single artbook on the entire series would kick-ass, but it would also be huge (not to mention prohibitively expensive).
It's the format of wiki that's partially to blame-- most wiki owners want to keep the things open to the public at large. This is assuming that the best way to control the content of a wiki (including the Sandbox) is to regulate its users, and require registration/passwords.
The Nigritude spam is a nuisance, one that I shouldn't have to deal with. It's not that I'm not up to it, as it doesn't take very long to revert pages to their previous versions and/or edit the source itself (I do this latter bit of business to avoid having the previous pages show up in Google-- not giving 'em the pleasure, in other words). It's that I feel that I shouldn't have to close off huge chunks of the site to users, nor should I have to make my site invisible to Googlebots, just because of a bunch of spammers.
Much wiki software is revised and modded constantly. The defenses that you hint at may figure more in the future-- but I hope it doesn't do so at the expense of keeping wikis open.
Without the package deal, the DSL's still about $30 a month... certainly better than the $40 I was paying last year.
Ironically enough, the first-placer that you mentioned has been the one group that has been spamming my wiki's sandbox the most in recent days (see sig)... methinks its a group effort on the part of the messageboard community -_-