James Rolfe’s “Angry Video Game Nerd” is considerably more vulgar than the usual here, so I have to give a language warning. Nonetheless, I am reposting this video for the sole reason that, upon watching it, I suddenly want to see a bad-good comedy-action movie based on the never-released Mortal Kombat ripoff game Tattoo Assassins. That thing looks hilarious.
Videos
Doom Eternal: An Addendum
This came up in my YouTube recommendations because I’d been looking at so many videos having to do with Doom Eternal.
This is a video of someone playing the latest (?) version of Project Brutality, which I have previously discussed, the over-engineered mod of the original Doom.
This not only shows some impressive gameplay (the guy must have the maps memorized) but also shows just how crazy and gigantic Project Brutality has grown.
Already, in earlier releases, it had included weapons drawn from Duke Nukem 3D and probably other places. Now it includes things from Doom Eternal as well; in particular, one of the new gadgets in Doom Eternal is the “Meat Hook,” an attachment to the Super Shotgun, which fires a grappling hook on a chain. In this video here, you can see the player repeatedly using the Meat Hook, which has now been incorporated into the mod.
A Visual Montage of Magical Girl Evolution
This video by VirgoX Flow is an unusual depiction of the history of the magical girl genre. Foregoing commentary or discussion, it simply shows excerpts of major titles from 1966 to the present day, so the viewer can easily see how the style in art, the themes, and the appearance have evolved over time.
This video also shows me just how many series I still need to see. Yeesh, so many magical girls and so little time …
A Peek at Project Brutality
As I’ve said before, I’m not a gamer, but this came to my attention because I regularly watch James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd videos.
Rolfe recently produced a review of Chex Quest, a re-skin of Doom that was put in boxes of Chex as a prize, and which was good enough to get its own cult following.
Here’s the video. For courtesy’s sake, I should probably give a language warning:
Toward the end of the video, he mentions that the game is compatible with a mod called Brutal Doom. When this mod is plugged in, it removes the nonviolent component of the Chex Quest game and instead allows you to slaughter your enemies with wild abandon.
I am old enough to remember when Doom first made its appearance. It was mind-blowing at the time, and it was also unusually hackable, producing a huge community of modders creating their own levels, weapons, enemies, and other features. Non-gamer though I am, even I screwed around with some of the mods lurking on the young internet and built a few custom levels. I may or may not have seen the original Brutal Doom—I don’t rightly remember—though I saw other mods that upped the gore or improved the arsenal. In any case, Brutal Doom is one of the most popular Doom mods of all time.
Because of Rolfe’s videos, I discovered something called Project Brutality, an ongoing effort to build on what Brutal Doom got started. Currently, Project Brutality 3.0 is in its beta phase, and videos showing it off have appeared on YouTube.
Some of these videos vary considerably in how they look. I’m not sure if the players have multiple mods going at once or if these represent different stages of this one project. Some seem to be playing through a version that combines all the levels into one continuous map, and others (such as the one below) are not.
In any case, the modified game is stunning.
Watching this player, I have to wonder just how complicated are the controls for this game, seeing all the different things he can do from throwing axes and grenades to kicking enemies in the face to pulling himself up platforms to switching to third-person.
I’m astonished at this player’s skill, but even more than that, I’m astonished at how completely the modders have modded the game. I mean, holy heck. It’s recognizably Doom, but the vast array of added features is incredible. Some of the added features are listed on the Doom Wiki.
And of course there’s the gore and the bird-flipping, but those juvenile bits are hardly noticeable amidst the attention to detail in the animations, weapons, and gameplay.
Watching this recaptures the feel Doom gave when it first came out, when we said, “I can’t believe this game!”
Smack My Witch Up
Unfortunately, I’m still so busy with work that I have had little time for anything else, which is why there hasn’t been much content here.
However, Rawle Nyanzi, who often plugs my stuff and whose stuff I often plug, has begun toying around with animation and has created an animated short entitled “Time to Smack a Witch!”
This short video looks like a cut scene from a side-scrolling beat-em-up video game from the mid-Eighties, complete with the beepy music. It has no dialogue, but it’s amusing and easy to follow. It’s only flaw, were I to offer criticism, is that is opening credits are way too long for something that looks like 8-bit Theater.
‘Sailor Moon’ in Italian and Spanish
I don’t actually know what this is, but I saw it, so now you have to see it, too:
It is at least an homage to Sailor Moon. Maybe it’s a rendition of the theme song of the Italian version, but it seems too long for that.
In any case, if that’s not to your taste, you can instead watch this Spanish version of “Moonlight Desetsu,” which is an excellent metal cover:
A Comparison of ‘Smile Pretty Cure’ and ‘Glitter Force’
Don’t you cry tonight.
A vlogger calling herself MagicalGirlStarlight produces this handy video making a comparison between the original Smile Pretty Cure and its localisation Glitter Force, which was produced by Saban and Netflix. Most of the changes she discusses I was already aware of, but one I wasn’t—Glitter Force eliminates or heavily edits the show’s more emotionally fraught scenes and removes references to death.
She ends the video by asking the haters to please show some restraint. I generally agree with the sentiment, and I’m not one of those weebs who think the English language is an abomination that besmirches all Japanese media it touches, but I will say that I find heavy-handed localisations like Glitter Force to be wrongheaded. The show tried to eliminate Japanese references and change the setting to the United States, apparently to avoid confusing American children, but everything is so obviously Japanese, the alterations only make it more confusing.
For example, there is an episode in which the characters take a school trip to Kyoto. Glitter Force changes this to an Asian expo. But to get there, they ride in a train past Mount Fuji, and then they walk through a bamboo forest. So where the hell in America are they?
Glitter Force is intended for children, not weeaboos, so some changes are understandable. For example, I like the changed title; “Glitter Force” sounds like a sparkly team of action girls (which it is), whereas, to the English speaker, “Pretty Cure” is mere nonsense. (It’s actually a pun when pronounced by a Japanese speaker, but most non-Japanese people have no way of knowing that.)
I also don’t really mind the changes to the characters’ names. Japanese names can be a mouthful to small children who don’t speak Japanese.
But they should have kept the Japanese setting simply because they had to go to absurd lengths to hide it and it was futile in the end anyway.
Also, although I refuse to enter the sub vs. dub debate, the dialogue in Glitter Force frequently makes me grit my teeth. Watch the video above and wait for the scene comparison at the end, and I think you will see what I mean. The English lines are obviously wedged into a scene that wasn’t meant for them, and this is typical of the show as a whole. If you’re going to dub, fine, but try to respect the lip flaps.
Finally, the change to the show’s emotional tenor is unnecessary and even cowardly. I mean, it’s freaking Pretty Cure. It’s not exactly edgy. Agree with it or not, I can understand why they censored half of Sailor Moon back in the nineties, but Pretty Cure? What angry phone calls from parents were they anticipating over Pretty Cure? This is the network that green-lit Big Mouth for Pete’s sakes, but they think a little crying is too much for kids to handle.
So in the warped world of Netflix, you can masturbate in front of children but weeping in front of them is totally off-limits.
Nostalgia Critic on ‘Sailor Moon’
Why?
Although I follow his close associate Jame Rolfe, whom I’ve often found insightful if vulgar, I haven’t paid much attention to the so-called Nostalgia Critic. For whatever reason, whenever I’ve started one of his videos, I’ve found it annoying.
Because I wasn’t minding him, I discovered only three years late that he produced a review of Sailor Moon. As soon as I realized this, I decided that, of course, I had to watch his review and post it.
Then, about halfway through his video, I exclaimed, “I can’t post this!”
However, after further consideration, I have decided that, though his methods are crass, I think he discusses things that are worth discussing. So I have decided to post his video here even though some of his humor violates my vaguely defined rules for acceptable content. Viewer discretion is therefore advised:
He mostly discusses the DiC English dub of Sailor Moon, and he appears to be familiar only with part of the first season, though his discussion does, curiously, range for a moment into the third season, which he compares against the Japanese version even though he otherwise leaves the Japanese version unaddressed.
A few comments of my own: First, though his methods are tongue-in-cheek and crude, I think he is right to address the sexualized obsession with young girls that characterizes much of Japanese pop culture, even if I think he over-interprets this particular franchise and uses it as an excuse to make ribald jokes.
Second, I think he needs to watch the Japanese original in order to appreciate the franchise. He spends much time complaining about Sailor Moon’s unlikable personality, which is not unreasonable, but I think he should see the character as played by Kotono Mitsuishi, whose fantastic voice performance makes the whiny, lazy, and cowardly heroine remarkably endearing.
Third, his complaints about the show’s sexual elements, if not exactly misplaced, are at least too facetious and improperly contextualized. I don’t entirely disagree with him, but it is worth pointing out that Sailor Moon and her compatriots wear miniskirts and go-go boots for the same reason that female Star Trek officers in the original series wore them: Because these were at one time emblems of women’s liberation. That may be hard to appreciate in an age where the burka is a symbol of feminism, but it is a fact nonetheless, though such a symbol was arguably anachronistic already by the time Sailor Moon made its appearance.
Also worth noting, the animated version of the franchise, which is the only one the Nostalgia Critic discusses, varies considerably from the manga version. Both certainly have sexual content, but of a markedly different character. The upskirt shots, the emphases on the characters’ legs, and the panty peekaboo are exclusive to the anime, apparently because most of the people working on the anime were men and because they wanted to appeal to a male audience.
History of Magical Girl Transformation Sequences
This video from Get in the Robot, although alleging to focus on the rationale for transformation sequences in magical girl anime, is actually a history of the genre with some critical interpretation thrown in. And it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen, so you should watch it. It mentions a lot of the major milestones in the genre, but smartly avoids getting sidetracked by rabbit trails or minor titles while at the same time pointing out some influences that others often miss.
My only small quibble with this video would be in its claim that the genre has shifted away from an early focus on coming-of-age stories. I think that’s something that’s been muted by the infusion of superhero tropes, but by no means eliminated.
These Live-Action Adaptations Need to Stop
Seriously, it’s gone too far now. First there was live-action Alita, then a live-action Pokémon, then a live-action Sonic the Hedgehog, then a new live-action Masters of the Universe with some femmy pretty boy standing in for He-Man, and now this, this little slap at my industrial complex.
There it is, a live-action Dora the Explorer movie. You thought before that Hollywood was out of ideas? Brother, you don’t even know what out-of-ideas looks like.
Let’s get the inevitable jokes out of the way first: yes, Dora turned out nice and all that. But much more important is that this trailer is almost identical to a parody that College Humor created some years back with Ariel Winter:
The similarities are so striking, it’s as if someone at Nickelodeon watched this parody sketch and said, “Hey, we could actually do this.” Notice Dora’s reunification with Diego: the real movie’s version is just like the parody’s … except not funny.
The concept in both the parody and the real film is that Dora is like a miniature Lara Croft, though I can’t help but think that the parody version, while obviously lower-budget, is both funnier and closer to the spirit of the original cartoon, featuring the talking backpack, fourth-wall breakage, and bilingualism.
This parody enjoyed a popularity of its own, and in fact they went on to create a three-part miniseries. It’s pretty damn funny, probably funnier than the big-budget movie is going to be, considering that, according to the preview, most of the movie’s jokes consist of people hitting their heads on things.
I can’t claim to be terribly familiar with Dora the Explorer. I attempted to watch it once, but gave up: I like to think my endurance for children’s cartoons is pretty high, but that one was was too annoying even for me. Nonetheless … there’s a good chance I’ll watch this movie.