We've decided to quit the club

Monday, August 20, 2007

If you could take a peek into my brain right now you'd see the words BIOSHOCK and PAX boldly imprinted across it like skywriting (the only way you could write inside your brain is with the help of... FAIRY GODPARENTS!!!). I haven't taken a vacation all year, and I'm once again realizing that I don't take enough time off. Expectations are high for the upcoming game and the upcoming-just-after-that-game expo. I'm going straight home after work on Tuesday to sink into Rapture. The real challenge with Bioshock will be putting it to rest early on Thursday so I can get some sleep and run to the airport by 5:00 AM on Friday.

When I got my Xbox 360 I pledged that I would not trade in a next generation game unless the game turns out to be unbearable. There are plenty of games I don't play any more, but the return prices you get at Gamestop are absurd. So far only Perfect Dark Zero and The Darkness have gone back to whence they came, both within a week of purchase. But this pact does not apply to last generation games, and some PS2 titles have been staring at me recently, begging unsuccessfully to be put in the drive. With my PS3 unable to put my dance mats and guitar peripherals to good use I've taken all my DDR and Guitar Hero games to the trade-in booth. Their charred corpses were used to spin my preorder turbines for Super Mario Galaxy and Crysis.

We're at the start of another rampant gaming season (um, and PAX), so I don't have much in the way of reviews or synopses or complaints for you yet. After Bioshock is Metroid Prime 3, then Halo 3, Eye of Judgment, Mass Effect, Call of Duty 4, Rock Band, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, and finally The Inevitable Bankruptcy. At least Rockstar pushed Grand Theft Auto 4 back a few months to give us some breathing room.

Much of the anime I've been taking in from Netflix has also been going unwatched. Basilisk, Hellsing and Gate Keepers came and went without any impact. I've been creeping along with Ergo Proxy, worried that the show will eventually jump the shark. Technically it hasn't happened yet, but some really weird stuff has been going on. Yes, weird even for Ergo Proxy. We now know what Re-l's full name is and have been given the slightest inkling into the true nature of a Proxy. I say "inkling" rather than "insight" because the explanation doesn't seem to fit the facts. Daedalus may as well have said that a Proxy is a translucent robot crocodile and it would have made as much sense.

One new show that I've found to be really funny is the Magic User's Club OVA. Perhaps the title is self explanatory, but this show is about a small club of magic users in your typical Japanese high school (if I had to rule out that setting I wouldn't be able to watch 90% of all anime). The first odd thing is that nobody seems to make a big deal out of this magic club. You would think magic would be pretty popular, but they're barely able to scrape up the five required members.

The plot, if there can said to be one, involves the club's attempts to resist the alien structure known as the Bell that has, um, invaded Tokyo. Or rather, that is sitting about five miles off the coast and occasionally sends in scouting Bells to observe humans and is otherwise benign. I have no idea why this Bell thing exists and based on what I've seen so far I'll bet the writers don't know either. I have a sneaking suspicion that the only reason it's there is to give the animators something shiny to draw.

Unlike the situation-based Cromartie High School (which I would discuss if it didn't defy discussion) Magic User's Club gets its humor from the zaniness of its characters, specifically the expressions on their faces. Our heroine is the naïve Sae Sawanoguchi, a sophomore who dreams of being a great magician like the club president, Takeo Takakura. The word for Takeo is "goofball." He's an adequate mage but spends an inordinate amount of time with his nose bleeding or with his thoughts literally written across his face. Number two in command is the even more awkwardly named Aburatsubo, who, let's be clear, is super gay. Super ultra mega gay. Since he looks more like a woman than Dolly Parton this shouldn't come as a shock, and the show gets big laughs from how he's always caressing Takeo and the resistances to his unwanted affections.

Like Ninja Nonsense, what Magic User's Club really understands is timing.