This is a tale of bad choices, wasted money and photos of idiots dressed as elves.

But enough about TSR, what about me?

Well I never dressed as an elf, but I did pick the wrong CCG game to play and then wasted a bunch of money on it. I would go onto to do this four more times before learning my lesson, but those are posts for another day.

Caught on the back foot by Magic: The Gathering‘s launch and subsequent success in 1993, TSR created their own CCG. With it being based on D&D one might think that they would have been onto a winner. As successful as Magic was, TSR had the grandaddy of fantasy gaming IP in their back pocket. That had to count for something? Right?

No, it did not.

The problem was they panicked.

The finished product was a mess, not unplayable, not the worst CCG in the world (we shall get to that in due time), but it was so, so sloppy and half-arsed. Rather than commissioning new original art, they just sliced up existing AD&D art into card sized shapes. Not just art, but also hex maps.

It was so devoid of detail that some of the original cards were just a name and a picture. Later on they would use photos of LARPers. I don’t know what the LARPers or the customers did to deserve that. The quality of the card stock used for the cards was pretty cheap too. The only thing it really had going for it was that you got a lot of cards in a booster.

Launched in 1994, it unfortunately coincided with my university holidays and a summer job. So I had plenty of money to spend on CDs I no longer listen to, RPGs I never played and this TSR CCG that arrived at our local games shop/club/Apple dealer. I was not alone in being tricked by the TSR & AD&D name, all our club started playing. Some bought the ridiculously over-sized rules clarification book they produced. TWICE. Some even bought their later CCG, the less rushed Blood Wars. 

I think I was into it for about a year, moving onto other CCGs in 95/96, before finally being turned off the whole CCG deal by one of the worst games I have ever attempted to get my brain around.

So, Spellfire, one more step on the road to TSR’s eventual downfall and takeover by Wizards of the Coast. It was pretty bad, and I’d have been better off without it, but at least it wasn’t Dragon Dice.

from Shameless School by Go Nagai

Over on the new Dynamite In The Brain site, we have a new episode about The Cat Returns with special guest Grace Chan. So check it out!

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The best produced, best written, bad roleplaying game ever made.

For starters, what other RPGs boast a GEOF DARROW cover? Were full colour throughout? And printed on high end glossy paper? Just as an inanimate object, Underground was better than pretty much anything else on the market.

Sorry, Ray Winninger’s Underground.

Not entirely sure why Winninger got to prefix his game. Sure, he’d written some good DC Heroes material, in particular a Watchmen adventure and the great Watchmen sourcebook. But beyond that his name didn’t mean much to me.

It came out in 1993, and it shows. I believe the original plan was for three books, each satrising a different concept of heroism, with this one taking on the American ideal, and specifically superheroes. It’s a big old allegory for the treatment of Vietnam veterans, but with super powers and big guns.

It’s Marshal Law the RPG, basically. Which is fine, as I love me some Marshal Law.

I think the other heroic ideals to be dealt with that never came to fruition were the ideal of the Teutonic Knight (there’s some sketched in background involving Germany and the Church of Scientology iirc) and some form of “Eastern Hero” (wuxia infuenced maybe?).

I can’t say for sure because I sold it a few years ago.

Despite the setting and idea of the game being right up my alley, not to mention incredibly well written, the game itself is a clunker of a rule system. I never managed to run a game, the character generation alone drove me up the wall. A friend, Barry, managed to get a few sessions out of it, before he had the PCs cross over into his D&D campaign and we forgot all about struggling with Underground.

It’s a shame, because on every other level, the writing, the art, the production, it’s a great game. Everything works together to create this game world. Except the game itself.

Over at Dynamite In The Brain’s new website, Anthony Askew and myself have a new episode where we talk about Studio 4°C’s anthology movie, Genius Party. So check it out!

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Anime’s use of CG models often attracts derision. Recently the trailer for Bodacious Space Pirates caused the assembled masses of the internet to decry its spaceships and wonder if we had really progressed much further than Lost Universe. So if I tell you that a CG animated show was one of the best looking anime of 2011 you might not believe me.

Of course, the fact the show was a series of shorts aimed at children and based on characters from a popular line of American greetings cards, may go some way to explaining your disbelief.

For that show was Suzy’s Zoo.

Based on Suzy Spafford’s characters, the show was directed by Hidekazu Ohara, who first came to my attention in his short, Professor Dan Petory’s Blues, on the Studio 4°C anthology Sweat Punch. He also worked on the Cannon Fodder segment of Memories, and oddly enough you can see some of that in Suzy’s Zoo. Particularly in how it recreates a particular hand drawn look.

It’s a technically impressive piece of work, not just in how it makes 3D models look hand drawn, it exceeds Hipira in this respect, but also the sense of weight they give the models. They aren’t just solid lumps, for example Witzy’s the duck’s feathers have a different weight to the main body of the model, leading to a much more convincing movement.

The writing is acceptable for kids animated short. It’s got some good gags, but it’s not as strong as say a Shaun the Sheep in the physical comedy department, nor as verbally funny as late period Peppa Pig (if you doubt Peppa Pig‘s strengths, I recommend the episode “Grampy Rabbit’s Lighthouse”. Brian Blessed as a shouting elderly rabbit. I think that’s all that needs to be said).

But it’s certainly better than any other greetings card character cartoons that history has spat out. I’d take Witzy and friends well animated whimsy over the wretched Getalong Gang any day of the week.

Poyopoyo is here. 

Akitaro Daichi returns with another gag manga adaptation. Which if you’ve followed his career is enough of a reason to celebrate, as he’s got a better understanding than most on how to transfer them to screen. Namely, don’t lose the gags.

Even better though, is he’s brought with him Rie Ooshima. She worked with him on the Kuruneko adaptation. And very few other people. This interview with Daichi discusses how they approached that series. In particular he mentions not using storyboards (instead just using the strips) and pre-scoring both it and Gag Manga Biyori.

On Poyopoyo, Ooshima is working as Animation Director, and it’s certainly a fuller world than Kuruneko’s. The look is more in the spirit of Daichi’s work on Legendz and Grrl Power. And while the spherical cat is consistent with the manga’s design, the human characters have been given some spit and polish to make them more charming.

Noted animal voice actress Ikue Ohtani (Merle, Pikachu, Tony Tony Chopper) voices Poyo, the cat. And vocal legend Akira Kamiya plays the father of the family who adopt the cat. And apparently the grandmother too!

While Poyopoyo isn’t Kuruneko, I’ve been waiting so long for a Daichi gag show to get picked up by someone I’m unduly excited to see it on Crunchyroll. And who knows, maybe it will foster some interest in the superior Kuruneko and Gag Manga Biyori? (SPOILER: It won’t).

from The Abashiri Family by Go Nagai

Hey gang, remember this? Posts where I talk about every RPG/Wargame/Boardgame I’ve played? Well it’s back.

And what better place to pick it up again, than R Talsorian Game’s mecha-themed roleplaying game, Mekton. Running on the same system as their Cyberpunk RPG, I picked up Mekton II second hand while at university. Then never got round to playing it. This is a recurring theme in my RPG purchases.

That didn’t stop me purchasing their next edition of the game Mekton Zeta, and its supplement Mekton Zeta Plus. While Mekton II, like earlier editions of Teenagers From Outer Space, didn’t really wear its influences on it’s sleeves, Zeta was clearly shouting I AM AN ANIME RPG. The cover had upgraded from Ben Dunn’s pastiche on Mekton II, to having the real thing in a painted Yuji Kaida cover. Inside you had a chapter called “Running Anime” that addressed how to get an anime tone to your games.

As good as the basic game was, once you added the Mekton Zeta Plus supplement, it really became the anally retentive mecha fan gamer’s dream. Not only would it let you create stats for pretty much any mecha you might want to imagine, the level of detail meant if had “official stats” for mecha (like weight/height etc) you could effectively reverse engineer a mecha into the game stats.

RTG eventually were involved in the second volume of the anime magazine V-Max, leading to anime gaming articles where you could see the power of that reverse engineering in practice. Do you want to pilot Giant Robo in a RPG? Well volume 2 issue 2 of V-Max gave you that chance.

Not that I did. Instead I ran a couple of heavily derivative campaigns of the my own design. The first was MYSTERY HUNTER ROBO. Which was basically X-Files with giant robots. Including one based on Ninjzz from The Bots Master. This is what happens when you players make their own robots. The problem I ran into was that only about half my RPG group liked anime. So after I put that on hold, we formed a splinter rpg & anime watching group and ran a sequel campaign called HADES EXPLORER Q. Or HEQ for short.

In that campaign the heroes travelled in the titular ship to another dimension called Hades where the villains of Mystery Hunter Robo (a terrorist organisation made up of dragons) had come from. They then got mixed up in the politics of that world while trying to prevent an invasion of Earth.

A third campaign, BONE MACHINE, never got off the ground and instead I returned to the campaign years later using a different anime themed RPG, but that’s another post.

Other campaigns I had sketched out but never ran included GIGA INFINITUS: THE BIGGEST ROBOT IN THE UNIVERSE and I.D.O.L. FORCE. The latter involved David Bowie forming a team of new robot piloting pop stars to battle his former team mates, the now evil Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. In the 70s the three had piloted a Getter Robo style combining mecha together.

If you are interested in finding out more about the game, check out MektonZeta.com

はじめて OP ED 2 by anitokuoped

So, people have been asking if we were going to do a live Dynamite In The Brain at a future convention. I’m not sure that’s really option given the conversational nature of the podcast, but the format of Xmas Special definitely lends itself to a panel.

Mainly because it has been done before. In fact, an Anime Song Jukebox Jury may have been the first anime con panels I attended back during one of the Shinnenkai conventions in the late 90s. One of the songs played then was the misjudged rap song by the You’re Under Arrest spin off band, Tokyo Policewoman Duo.

If we were going to invoke that old panel, I wanted to play that song in homage. I tracked it down, and… there’s not much rapping, and it’s hardly as embarrassing as I remember. So I wondered if there were more anime songs with characters rapping. Obviously themes featuring rap have grown in popularity in the last decade, but there’s a lot of fun to be had with the actual characters rapping.

The problem is searching for “anime rap” leads you to people rapping about anime, rather than rap from anime.

Then I remembered the abbreviation “anison” (for Anime Song), and sure enough “Anison Rap” leads you to this awesome wiki about the history of rap in anime songs.

Most shocking of all, was the mention of the second theme tume to Manga Hajimete Monogatari that debuted in December 1979. That’s only a month after The Sugar Hill Gang’s Rappers Delight was released. While there’s obvious Disco influences, there’s an undeniable rap element to it that either speaks to how quickly rap’s popularity spread into the mainstream or puts a lie to the idea that Rappers Delight or King Tim III “broke” rap to the masses. Either way, it was a fascinating discovery, and the wiki is full of many more. Did you know Arale-chan put out a rap record? Or that Shigeru Chiba cut a rap track? I didn’t, but I do now. And that knowledge makes me feel great!