Friday 29 January 2010

Sherlock Hound series now available in the UK on DVD

In the 1980s, there was a cartoon series that was a Japanese-Italian co-production, very loosely based on the Sherlock Holmes stories. In Japan, it was known as "Meitantei Holmes".

Like "Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds" and "Around the World with Willy Fogg", it features animals as the main characters.

The series was dubbed into English and was renamed "Sherlock Hound", and is now being released by Manga Entertainment on DVD after all these years. It's an exclusive to the shop HMV, and although the release date is the 1st of February 2010, my preorder copy arrived today.



It cost £17.99 for this 26 episode 5 DVD box set, and the series is presented as dub-only. The cast aren't so bad, they're voice actors whose names I recognise from US cartoons, not specifically as anime dub actors. There are only 4 names so they're doubling up, but it's very good considering that they are also probably from the 1980s. The British accents don't sound overdone, which was a concern I had. Well, actually Inspector Lestrade might take some getting used to, hehe.

I've only watched 2 episodes so far. The first episode seemed to be quite action oriented, but the second episode had more eagle-eyed detective work. Sherlock Hound's car seems to be as much of an assistant as Watson!

The DVD box says on the side: "Hayao Miyazaki and Kyousuke Mikuriya's Sherlock Hound The Complete Series", though it appears that Miyazaki only had involvement in a few episodes. There are typos on the back of the box. :/

I'm just interested because it looks like another Dogtanian or Willy Fogg. :)

It seems quite fun. :)

Wednesday 27 January 2010

Sherlock Holmes VS Jack The Ripper - review

The title of this game almost put me off it. "Sherlock Holmes VS Jack The Ripper" sounds too much like a "I wonder what would happen if you get these two famous names..." type simple fanfic. It was going cheap in the January sales though, and I felt like playing a detective game as a warm-up before Heavy Rain comes out. ^_^

I played the Xbox 360 version of this from start to end, gaining all 1000 achievement points in the process. It was quite a short game, and not that difficult.

It's a pure puzzle adventure game in which Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's famous fictional sleuthing duo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate the real-life case of Jack The Ripper, which was contemporary to when the stories were set.

The game is played with you playing as Holmes or Watson (whichever is appropriate to the scene), in either 3rd person fixed-camera perspective or 1st person view - switchable at the press of a button. I played in 3rd person all the way through. Most of the gameplay is walking around examining and picking up objects and talking to people, with many minigame puzzles to solve. I liked it, but if you are the type of gamer who feels like a game requires action scenes in order to be enjoyable, you probably ought to give this game a miss.

The authenticity of this game is excellent. It seems like a great deal of research went into this game. Graphically, the streets of late 19th century London have been faithfully recreated (well, from what I imagine from historical pictures and from living around English buildings of around the right age). The street furniture, the smog and filth, the prostitution, the gin-soaked population, the clothing, the prevalance of illness and medical practices of the time, and quietly negative attitudes between different people towards each other, all seem to fit well. There is a lot of detail, and it really gave the game the right atmopshere for investigating this mystery. To me, even though I had seen a documentary on Jack The Ripper in the past, it never conjured up the world and setting and hopelessness of the surroundings that this game got across.

Many of the actors seem to speak in London accents which don't seem to quite fit, or have an accent which sounds too modern, but I suppose that is hard to mask. I expect that barely anyone would notice apart from me anyway. It's really my one gripe.

I don't remember much of any Sherlock Holmes stories to know whether the representation of those characters was accurate, but there are small references to make me think that this Holmes is based on the one in the books rather than based on an actor's portrayal of the character. He speaks very quickly and is quite eccentric, loves searching for facts, hates journalists making up stories - all appears consistent with what I know about the character.

I also appreciated the ease of use of the game; it has nice little touches, like when you are examining all objects in a room, and could select from many things to look at in a small area, the game will automatically select the next thing you haven't already examined. You're not often hearing repeated dialogue as a result, and that's just nice. Holmes and Watson often announced where they needed to go next; on one hand this was useful and saved frustration, on the other hand, maybe it felt like it was holding my hand too much - in a game as linear as this, perhaps I should be working that out?

Most of the investigation, examination and deduction parts of the game are similarly structured (as is Holmes' methodology), but the little logic puzzles are all different, so there's a lot of welcome variety in the game.

The game is rated suitable for ages 16+, and you don't see a lot of graphic horror (thank goodness!), and a lot of what you need to investigate closely is done with cartoony drawings rather than the game's more realistic looking engine, but you do have to stomach reading reports on Jack The Ripper's deeds and other sordid goings on in the area.

There is certainly a blur between fact and fiction in this game. The murders did certainly take place in the ways they describe. If you have watched a documentary on Jack The Ripper you might have a good idea how this is all going to turn out, but... the involvement of Holmes and Watson, the exact dialogue from the suspects, some of the incidental characters, must all be fictional. I did also wonder at the end whether the authors of the story in this game told this tale in this way in order to express what attitudes were like and a small amount of a political view, but do it in such a way that it appears to be fact.

For me, just knowing that the terrible acts I was reading about were really carried out on women, that these things really did take place, made it a lot harder to get through. I'm hearing place names and looking at a map and thinking "I've been near there". It brought it all home. Some parts of this game really made me cringe and feel ill in a way that much 18 rated horror has not.

Without giving too much away, my final verdict is that this was a really good game but... not only is there absolutely no replayability in this (which I expected), and by the end, the exploits of Jack The Ripper had become so gruesome and vile that I was wishing the game to wrap up as soon as possible.

I think that it may have been the intention of the makers of this game to make me feel that way, because the feeling of characters in-game matched mine. So maybe that's actually their success. The effect it had on me was quite powerful. The conclusion of the story seems entirely plausable from the facts presented, though I don't know whether anything was left out to make it seem more definite or anything like that.

After this post, I don't really want to think about this ever again.

Tuesday 26 January 2010

Grand Theft Auto - Episodes From Liberty City - review

This is a compilation of two side-stories set in the world of Grand Theft Auto IV, exclusive to Xbox 360 even though the game is out on many platforms.

The first part - The Lost And Damned - had been available as downloadable content for GTA IV for quite a long time, but the second part - The Ballad Of Gay Tony - only became available at the same time as this compilation.

The compilation is out as a standalone game, available on discs in shops. I decided to buy my copy this way as I could find a better price this way, and because there is limited space available for DLC on my Xbox 360 hard drive.

I played it last year, before Christmas, but only decided to do a write-up today. ^_^

My opinion:

The Lost And Damned (TLAD) was horrible to play. It's all about a biker gang and its members. I didn't find the story interesting, I hated the way those big American Choppers (i.e. motorcycles) handle (it's realistic! They handle like armchairs! Armchairs with broken wheels!), I didn't like the scenario, I didn't enjoy the random abusiveness of characters, and after the main GTA IV game it was just depressing to play another protagonist whose life just gets worse and worse as you play the game. The additions to the main game are not too good, and a lot of things seemed like they were made deliberately inconvenient. By the end of the episode, 10 in-game hours had passed and I was thinking "60% done? Oh no! there's so much more to go!" :( That sums up my feeling about the game.

Tips about TLAD: the moment you get a chance, switch off the movie camera effect, and the game is far more playable - you will actually be able to see well enough to aim! Also, use handbrake turns everywhere and the bikes become a little more bearable.

The Ballad Of Gay Tony (TBoGT) however, was a lot of fun. Maybe even more fun than even the main game (GTA IV). It's got an overall more uplifting story, much much funnier side characters, and I got to like the cool music a lot more than the biker's rock station, which was a surprise to me. In TBoGT, you play as a man who works for a nightclub owner, in fact, he's more of a business partner. You're the straight man; the one who keeps Tony from going over-the-top, as his personality leads him to. That's not to say you are boring; you're his man for driving, racing, piloting, skydiving / base jumping, gunfights and other exciting action type things. Plus as pastimes you can be a cage fighter, or get drunk and dance with women and have casual sex with them... which might not be your thing but it's a lot better than what they gave you in TLAD: arm wrestling and playing a card game which I can only think of as "Play Your Cards Right" after the TV game show. ^_^;;

There's also a system in TBoGT where you can go back and replay levels after you've finished the game, in order to get a better score. I thought that was a good idea.

Overall: I really like the way that a lot of the stories in the main game and these episodes are interlinked and woven together. However, I could honestly have done without TLAD. TBoGT is definitely a star game though, and I think it made up for the price of the compilation (NB: I got it half price!)

Fatal Frame 4 / Project Zero 4 fanmade English translation patch out

If you happen to be a person who really liked playing the Fatal Frame / Project Zero games in English, and were disappointed that the 4th game out on Wii was not going to be officially released in English, so decided to buy a copy of the game in Japanese anyway, just in case...

...chances are you already know about this fan-translation project!

But here's a link to it anyway: http://zero4.higashinoeden.com/

It's pretty cool in that even though the wii is region restricted, you don't have to modify your console in order to use it. You just put their patch onto an SD card, put a copy of the Japanese game and the SD card into the wii, and it will play the game and add subtitles on-the-fly direct from the SD card.

Sakura Wars: So Long My Love - language options

A while ago, I blogged that Nippon Ichi America are taking Sakura Taisen V to the US.

Well, it's now due out in March 2010, and will be released in North America on PS2 and Wii (which we already knew), and is also coming out in Europe on Wii only.

Preorders are up in various online retailers, and I've placed my order for the American PS2 version with my favourite and most trusted Canadian videogame shop: VG+. I already own an imported USA PS2 and now I own an American PS3 that plays PS2 games as well, you see. ^_^

Then, a few months after my preorder, the Nippon Ichi America shop - aptly named Rosenqueen - put the game up for preorder, including a special edition. The PS2 special edition mentioned a Japanese language option, but the others didn't. They also changed the release date from January to March 2010.

I didn't want to cancel my existing order because I like VG+ and Rosenqueen's international shipping charges are awful - often more expensive than the items you order.

So I sent an email to Nippon Ichi America to ask about language options - BTW this is partly because even though it's set in America, I prefer to experience something close "the original", and partly because I watched the official trailer and decided there and then I never ever in my life want to play "SOCCERWARS" (as she pronounces it). Hehehe, really - the accent is totally overdone, I suspect it might be the same actress that is the replacement dub Etna in the recent Disgaea games. It would be too irritating to play the game with her, haha!

A few days after I contacted them, they emailed me back to say that ALL retail copies of the PS2 game will come with two discs: one is the English language version, the other is a Japanese sub version. So I stuck with my existing preorder. :)

Official site: www.sakurawars.us

Free Tea!

Do you know what my favourite drink is in the whole wide world? It's a cup of tea on a Sunday morning. Tea always tastes nicest on Sundays, and I don't know why.

I prefer Tetley tea, made with fresh boiling water, with milk. ^__^

However, free tea is also good. :)

Twinings have a promotion on at the moment where they send you 2 teabags and a 20p off voucher, if you just give them your name and address so they can send it to you! I signed up a few weeks ago and got a bag of Ceylon and a bag of Lady Grey, then they sent me an email for this current promotion and I've asked for some varieties of green tea - though they are offering fruit infusions as well.

Website: http://www.twinings.co.uk/free-tea/

Go now! It's free tea! *_*

Thursday 21 January 2010

My SD Sazabi model kit

I just put together my first ever mecha model kit! It's from SD Gundam G Generation-0 (SD Gundam G Zero), and it's Mobile Suit MSN-04 Sazabi. A shrunken version of the mecha Char used in the Gundam film Char's Counterattack.

Of all the model kits in the world, why a SD Gundam series kit, and why Char's Sazabi, you ask? I know, I know, I haven't even seen that.

Well it was cheap, I thought it was cute and I wanted to start small. ;)

SD MSN-04 Sazabi

It's so dinky! It's only about 7cm tall and 7cm wide (and a lot of that is the crest of the helmet!)

SD MSN-04 Sazabi

Aw, it's so cute! *_*

There's a little spring in the gun so it can fire whatever is loaded into it, too. It came with a range of weapons. :)