Look, kids, we need to have an intervention.

Every nerd loves Japan, it's true. It's nerd Mecca. Our subculture has gained a LOT from their culture--video games, anime, robotics, etc. It's an amazing place that I really hope I get to visit one day.

That said, stop fucking worshiping them. No more fucking over our lexicon with a bunch of fucking Japanese terms you picked up from 4Chan (no more 4Chan, while we're at it), no more "here's Harry Potter if he was drawn in an anime", no more telling me that SHOW X is so much better in Japanese than the English dub, or how their games are so fucking innovative. Just. Fucking. Stop.


Any Anime that has come over here after Cartoon Network started showing shows like Cowboy Beebop as part of Adult Swim SHOULD have good voice acting. They never do, but they should. Anime is main stream here, now. It's not the underground. If you're putting out a product in the US and you've done a shitty job localizing it, you HAVE A BAD PRODUCT!

I don't speak Japanese. Just because the Japanese voices are LOUDER and more FRANTIC then the English version does mean they're necessarily better. And, even if they are, I CAN'T UNDERSTAND JAPANESE SO IT DOES ME KNOW FUCKING GOOD TO LISTEN TO IT! We have a lot of very talented voice actors in the US. HIRE THEM! It's not my fucking fault you only hire the same 5 goddamn voice actors for Anime imports! FIX IT!

Also, I'm sure there's a lot of edits being made to the show for the US, but Dragon Ball (ANY SERIES) is not good. Never was good. Never will be good. Quit telling me that if I watched the original Japanese version unedited it would be magically wonderful. It's a aweful, AWEFUL, show. As is Naruto, Final Fantasy Advent Children (movie, I know), Ghost in the Shell (the second movie, specifically), Yu Gi Oh, Milk Chan, Pokemon (the TV show and movies...the games are good).


And for you gamers, shut the fuck up. Japanese developers, themselves, admit they aren't as innovative as their Western counterparts. They haven't progressed nearly as far as us over the years. Sorry. This isn't the 80s anymore. Mario isn't the height of gaming innovation. They haven't pushed technical boundaries in a very long time and they still struggle with their presentation of stories in their games. This doesn't mean their stories are bad by any means...just the method that they tell them in games are severely lacking.

Let's take a look at JRPGs for example. Why, in 2008, are they all just Final Fantasy 7 in a different skin? You're seriously telling me that's the only way to approach a role playing game? Let's set aside their specific stories and characters and get to presentation and gameplay. Seriously, it's the same.

Everyone still talks in those pop-up dialog boxes. A lot of the animation is that same "emotion loop while speaking" method they've had since the SNES years. A lot still use the same top down/static world style. They mostly use turn based mechanics that Final Fantasy 1 started. There's rarely any cinematic use outside of cutsceens. It's all the same!

And there's SO MUCH they could be offering us in new ideas. They have some great character designs. They can tell rich stories from a different angle then you'd see in western games (there's some very good bits of Anime that proves this). But why is the execution SO POOR? Why are these things WASTED by placing them in such bad gameplay mechanics or stale presentation?

Unlike, say, Dragon Ball Z, I UNDERSTAND why people enjoy games like Final Fantasy. There's something amazing in there. But why can't we demand more of them as GAMES? Why worship so blindly at the alter of Japan that we give them this giant PASS on never trying anything really new?


We should embrace Japan's culture. That's not the problem. The problem is "fanboy-ism". It's blind worship because you like something and never demanding more and defending that false idol until your last virtual breath. When you do that NOTHING gets to move forward. Nintedo won't ever innovate again because every time they do ANYTHING we buy it up like saps and tell them how amazing they are. Square won't ever move past they're Final Fantasy template because each release we snap it up and tell them that it's perfect just the way it is. Bad anime will still be brought over because we'll all come in droves to watch it and buy all of the associated card games and merchandise attached (then fill up DeviantArt will aweful fanart and slash). These things will keep happening because the companies that produce them and/or localize them have no incentive for change.

Last night I finally picked up a copy of Super Smash Brothers Brawl (and Wii Play)--which I'll post a review of as soon as I've spent more time with the product. However, it's been a long while since I've touched that Wii so I wanted to talk about my experience coming back to the console.

People wonder why I'm so hard on the Wii. There's indeed a LONG answer to the question, but the short answer is because it's frequently talked about as the second coming of gaming Christ and is often used in the same breathe to describe how the game industry is some bastion of staleness that's lost it's soul (which offends me as a person that takes the industry seriously).

So the "Revolution" is released and we're presented with a vast majority of "Shovel-ware". The motion controls tend to not be accurate enough, the interface and presentation tends to not be slick enough, and the community features are severely mis-managed and it's still the best selling console and its fans shrug it off to a simple "you don't get it". In fact, some even present Nintendo with a DESIGN AWARD for it. Being a detractor, it tends to make me feel as if I must be seen as some sort of crazed bum standing at the corner screaming out "Solent Green is PEOPLE!"

The "faithless" believe that gaming is dead. They're a growing sector of the Wii fanbase that honestly think that once things went 3D it became too complex and lost its way. They saw the growing pains of the transition from the 2D gamespace to the 3D gamespace and figured this is all it'll ever be. They think First Person Shooters will never be anything more then Doom and they see nothing but "Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll".

They're wrong.

[Full article after the jump]

As I browsed through my news feeds this morning, one story kept popping up on every site: Ziff Davis Media has filed for Chapter 11. For those not in the nerdy know, Ziff Davis is the parent company for EGM, Games for Windows, PC Magazine, and most importantly 1Up.com--and them filing for bankruptcy makes me very nervous that a weekly source of entertainment (1Up Show/1Up Yours) and the only gaming site I can respect (1up.com) will go the way of TechTV.

They've crushed my heart in the past. TechTV was an amazing network that brought us a lot of our current internet superstars (Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, etc) and was once a child of Ziff Davis. I personally watched as ZDTV became TechTV and then "merged" into G4/TechTV and now it's just G4. The Screen Savers became Attack of the Show (spit), and X-Play--the only show that "survived"--became a skit show with questionable reviews. On the bones of the first great geek network, they build a condensed version of everything we hate about MTV.


I know that some properties, such as DL.TV will probably be dismantled and moved to Revision3 (it basically has already) in some fashion...but I'd hate to see things like the 1Up Network becoming some "3XTR3M3" husk of something that was once great. So, please, nerd powers-that-be, don't let 1Up.com die.

Lawrence Lessig isn't just a Standford Law Professor or the founder of the Creative Commons--he's my hero. His 2005 book, Free Culture (which you can get online for free, BTW), changed my life and made me into a full blown fanboy. It's not just the message but the way he presents the message. It's unique and inspiring.

After the jump is a video of his last planned presentation about "Free Culture" and goes into the dangers of our current copyright system. I know it SOUNDS boring and the video isn't short, but I strongly encourage you to take some time to watch it.

Thanks to Presentation Zen--one of my favorite blogs--for pointing me to the video.

We've all several search engines that use Google's search engine, with just a few visual tweaks -- such as a customized banner, or color schemes for the page itself (see Blackle).

Taking this to a whole new level is Codefund, a seemingly harmless Google engine emulator.. except that they claim to be better than Google. Note the Engrish at the bottom of the page. Any searches are actually forwarded to Google.

Also, the Java essentials section of their website is a clone of the Java forums at Sun.

... except that the usernames have an 'a' appended to the end.