I’ve been spending the past two weeks burning my way through a long list of backlogged games I want to clear before school starts and I lose my NEET badge, including Shadow of the Colossus, Red Dead Redemption, Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 2 and L.A. Noire.

Valkyria Chronicles 3 is one of them. And this time I am actually reviewing it in an almost timely fashion and nowhere close to the release date of the next game. Go me.

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Post tags: psp, sega, valkyria chronicles, vc, vc3

Sharp is releasing an Aquos Android clamshell phone with a 16-megapixel camera running Gingerbread. This is the latest step in Android’s quiet and gradual takeover of the Japanese phone market. I believe that Japan will eventually become a strategic stronghold for Android and in turn this will serve to shore up Google’s historically weak performance against Yahoo in search and online services in Japan.

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Post tags: android, docomo, google, japan, kddi, keitai, mobile phone, sharp, softbank

A short press conference was held today for the opening of AKB48′s official merchandise store in Singapore and their first permanent theatre outside of Japan. There was also a short photography session with Misaki Iwasa, Mika Komori and Miho Miyazaki from AKB48 who were present for the opening ceremony.

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Post tags: akb48, idol, singapore

A small Japanese start-up called Neurowear is marketing what it calls “Necomimi” — head-worn fashion gadgets that move in response to brainwaves. The company calls it “Augmented Human Body”. Or to put it in simpler terms: goddamn nekomimi cat ears that you can learn to control telepathically with your mind. This is serious science at work.

Videos and more information after the break.

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Post tags: fashion, japan, nekomimi, neurowear, transhumanism

Clichés make a show boring. The more clichéd a story is, the less interesting and enjoyable it becomes. But my theory is that this relationship only holds true until you hit a certain magical event horizon where the laws of the universe break apart, one gets divided by zero and clichés become art.

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Post tags: comedy, harem, infinite stratos, osananajimi, quad drill, romance, sci-fi, tsundere, twin tail

Hollywood has its flaws. Cookie-cutter scripts and commodification of art can often ruin beautiful things. But at least Hollywood gets the cinematography right and doesn’t usually suffer from the pandemic of awkward overacting rampant in Japanese mainstream cinema. 2011′s Space Battleship Yamato live action movie is anime-comes-alive, but in a bad way that constantly reminds you how stupid the world would be if everyone behaved like manga characters.

Still, it’s not a total disaster.

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Post tags: meisa kuroki, movie, sci-fi, space, space battleship yamato, takuya kimura

So I have been clocking a few hours into Atlus’ horror puzzler Catherine on my PS3 because Rie Tanaka was tweeting about it and I am easily influenced by Twitter. Surprisingly, it is actually not a bad game, but it takes a lot of patience to overcome the rage-inducing learning curve, and ultimately at the end of the day the puzzle stages are not what people play the game for, or maybe that is just me.

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Post tags: atlus, catherine, horror, nightmare, ps3, puzzle, sheep

So, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, renowned for his awesome and unique illustration style closely associated to the Evangelion franchise and notorious for his inability to keep to a monthly serialization schedule, is bringing back Evangelion again according to an announcement in this month’s Young Ace magazine.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I loved the manga and own all of them. On the other hand, this table of his past record speaks for itself. (Source: 2ch thread)

© DarkMirage for Ramblings of DarkMirage, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: evangelion, yoshiyuki sadamoto, young ace

Moteki is a short manga series by Mitsurou Kubo about a girlfriend-less guy, Yukiyo Fujimoto, who suddenly finds himself catching the attention of three different girls from his past just as he is about to turn 30. He decides that this is his once-in-a-lifetime “moteki” (lit. period of popularity) and his last shot at finding a girlfriend and not dying alone.

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Post tags: evening, mitsurou kubo, moteki, romance, seinen

So, I got rid of my 20-dollar Logitech keyboard and bought my self a DK9008 mechanical keyboard from Taiwanese manufacturer Ducky Keyboard. Lame brand name aside, this is probably the best hardware investment I’ve ever made.

If it were possible to marry a keyboard, I…wouldn’t but the DK9008 is still a pretty darn good keyboard.

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Post tags: cherry mx, dk9008, ducky, geek, keyboard, mechanical