Haruhi Suzumiya has managed to stay on my desktop for a couple of months now, so I figured it was time for a change. I’m watching K-ON! at the moment and managed to find this great iPod-commercial-inspired wallpaper of Yui Hirasawa. The original had a pink colour scheme which I wasn’t too fond of, but that was easily adjusted. There’s no new iPhone wallpaper this time as I still quite like the Haruhi one, and it can sometimes be hard to find a picture with the right shape and composition to really shine on the iPhone’s unlock screen. Anyway, here’s Yui. Click through for download links.
In early November last year, Sega released the first two figures in a set of arcade prizes called Evangelion Vignette Centre of Tokyo-3 based on poster artwork from the Rebuild of Evangelion. Following that release of Rei and Kaworu (check them out here) comes the next pair: Asuka and Mari. The four figures come with bases that line up with each other to form the titular vignette, and combined they form quite a nice display. While it unfortunately seems like Sega has no plans to release a Shinji figure to complete the core teen cast of Evangelion with this set, the characters that are here are, thankfully, well represented with sculpts and paintwork of a standard that belies the figures’ incredibly affordable price tags.
I loved the first set of Death Note Nendoroid Puchis, so ordering Case File #02 was a must for me. They’ve arrived, and they’re just as adorable and well-detailed as their Case File #01 comrades. This set expands the Puchi Death Note collection to include characters from later in the series such as Near, Mello and Mikami as well as offering new versions of the core trio (Light, L and Misa). It’s a somewhat more lighthearted set with tennis outfits and some great facial expressions, so I think it may appeal to Nendoroid collectors who aren’t fans of Death Note a little more than Case File #01 did, but Death Note fans certainly won’t be disappointed either as it rounds out the character selection nicely.
Mass Effect was one of the first games I played on Xbox 360 and remains, in my opinion, one of the finest reasons to own the console. The sequel – the middle of a planned trilogy – has finally arrived, and this morning I picked up the collector’s edition. It is somewhat more modest in content than other recent collector’s editions (such as the impressive Assassin’s Creed II Black Edition), but more than makes up for that with its exceptional presentation.
You may remember that a bit over a month ago I showed you the results of my room redecoration (check it out here if you missed it). Well, I’ve made a few more changes since then that I’m very pleased with. Some are pretty obvious, but one may be a little harder to spot at first. As you can see I’ve added a third Ljusdal shelf from Ikea – getting it to sit in line with the one to the right of it was a pain – to spread my figures out and accomodate for more, and I’ve also set up some LED lights (also from Ikea, called Dioder) which I think give the room a much nicer atmosphere. I do still use the ceiling light, but the LEDs compliment it nicely with a much whiter light over the desk and from behind the TV. At night or when watching/playing something on the TV, I use just the LEDs alone which gives the room a comfortable, relaxed amount of light.
Last night I had the pleasure of seeing a seven-piece ensemble from Eminence Symphony Orchestra perform live as part of Wai-Con, one of Perth’s major anime conventions. Most gamers and anime fans will probably be familiar with Eminence, if not by name then through their body of work. They are a Sydney-based group that mostly plays music from anime and video games, founded in 2003 with the aim of re-connecting young people with orchestral music in a live setting. They’ve played many successful concerts both in Australia and across the globe, and after forging a high reputation for themselves have also been asked to record a number of soundtracks. You may have heard their work in games such as Valkyria Chronicles and Soul Calibur IV or anime such as Romeo x Juliet and The Tower of Druaga: The Aegis of Uruk, and they will also be featured in two very high-profile upcoming releases: Diablo III and The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya.
Bayonetta is an action game from Platinum Games helmed by Hideki Kamiya. If you’ve not heard of Platinum Games before, it’s because they’re a fairly new developer. In the West, they’ve only released one game – the stylish and well-received Madworld for Wii – but don’t mistake that for inexperience. Prior to forming Platinum many of the developers were members of Clover Studios at Capcom. In their tenure at Capcom, Platinum’s head honchos were instrumental in the creation and development of games like the Resident Evil franchise, Okami, Killer7, Viewtiful Joe and many more. Most relevant, however, is that Hideki Kamiya was the director of Devil May Cry, with which Bayonetta shares many similarities. With all this in mind, you might adjust your expectations of Bayonetta accordingly.
The Place Promised In Our Early Days is a film by Makoto Shinkai, most recently of 5 Centimetres Per Second fame. Following his debut Voices of a Distant Star (of which you can read my review here) this is Shinkai’s first full feature-length film and was a full scale production, unlike the mostly self-made Voices. As such, it not only maintains but further develops Shinkai’s now-distinctive visual style as it tells the story of two teenage boys – Hiroki and Takuya – who are repairing a crashed plane in hopes of flying it to a distant tower, their friendship with a girl named Sayuri, and the promise the three friends make to each other to someday reach the tower. As so often happens, their childhood plans are interrupted as circumstances separate the three friends, but still the promise they made to each other is not forgotten.
Taking a friend’s advice, I’ve decided to register a domain for this blog. It is, of course, autaku.com. The old address will still work by redirection, but using the new domain cuts ten characters off what you have to type. That’s precious nanoseconds of your life that you’re saving! Anyway, if you’d like to update your links or bookmarks, please do. Technically you don’t have to at the moment, but why not be future-proof? Everything is still running on wordpress.com rather than on my own space, so this is a fairly superficial change to you. What it does represent, however, is that I feel like I’m starting to establish something worthwhile here and that I intend to see it continue to develop for some time. This is the first of hopefully many steps towards a better blog in 2010!
As always, thanks for reading.
Bayonetta has been out in Japan for over a month now, but it’s only just making its way West with release dates for this week in the US, EU and here in Australia. The standard collector’s edition – or “∞ Climax Edition”, as Sega’s marketing department would have you call it – includes a fairly modest set of extras, with only an art book and soundtrack CD, but in some countries Sega has also offered a replica of one of Bayonetta’s own Scarborough Fair guns as a pre-order bonus. I’m yet to fire up the game (I had a lot of fun with the demo, so I’m looking forward to it) but I have had a good look at the collector’s edition extras.
The cover on the outer packaging is really nice. The cover on the actual game case is pretty cool, but lacks the subtlety and style of the collector's edition cover. It carries through to the book and CD slip, so it would've been nice to see it on the game case in the collector's edition as well.
