Hyper Japan

Hyper Japan was on over the weekend if you didn't know, at Earls Court centre. For those not in the know this is a celebration of Japanese culture and otaku pursuits, think manga, anime, gaming and Japanese and you'd be right.  I decided to have a look after mum saw the address on an ad on the tube and wrote it down for us.  So this is my rather poor round up on the whole thing.

Paying my £15 on the door to get in and its a little overwhelming as its the whole ground floor dedicated to everything.  Big stand out stalls are Namco Bandai with a bank of PS3's dedicated to showcasing Tales of Xillia 2 and some One Piece game.  Tales turned out to be OK with the demo having you explore the basement of some bastard hydroponic centre for an imprisoned goddess or something, to be honest who judges an RPG on 10 minutes of play.  Across the way Nintendo had some stalls out promoting Wii U and Tomodachi Life and Yoshi's Woolly World and actually had a go on a new Harvest Moon spin off which I believe was called Hometown Story* (didn't think much of that).

Apart from games there were about a billion more stalls ranging from weapons (no really actual Katana) to a celebration of Sake.  They had a small area for people flogging dojinshi, homely Tumblrettes with self published books and manga of varying quality, from dull western (Manglo I call it, think rubbish like Totally Spies that try too hard to look Japanese but never capture the spirit) to the real deal in all its myriad styles.

There were a load of cosplayers too, and for every bloke in shorts with hairy legs and Sailor Moon with a nose ring (no really), there were several who looked boss.  Everyone deserved a medal as it was murderously hot out, especially the furry guy.
My favourite bits were a small arcade section with a Donkey Kong, PacMan and Ikaruga.  I never got a chance to play Ikaruga as there was some old dude content to freeplay his way to the end, never switching colours, and just continuing over and over when he died (which was often).  I've probably forgotten plenty of stuff (I came home with a Disgaea Artbook and a wobbly weedle cat) more including a table flogging Godzilla toys and Hentai Manga which was awesome.

I decided to make my way down to the end of street and look around Brompton Street Cemetery, which is marvellously overgrown, and was full of bathing crows and Gothic grave architecture, this must look stunning when the weather is cold and grey.
I decided to take the train home and popped out at Woolwich to see some people wanting Biafra to be a proper state, it sounded like they were banging a saucepan and yelling about jesus which sounds about right for Woolwich.

Goldeneye and SFII on portable hell yeah.

Pac n Pal.

It was O.K. I suppose.

A excerpt from the absolutely barking wall of manga.

Carue from One Piece according to Google.

From Brompton Road Cemetery, not the newscaster.

*edit it turned out to be Fantasy Life instead, possibly another that will warrant an extended play. Also a Gamecentral reader posted his version of a trip there too, he got to play a lot more Nintendo stuff then me.

Type Zero Woes.

Looks like theres some trouble brewing via Square Enix and the PSP game Final Fantasy Type 0. Stemming from an unofficial fan translation, it looks like its caught the attention of the Squenix Lawyers who looks like have gone ballistic and sent legal action to Sky part of the Romhacking team and host of the patch.  Squenix have of course had previous for this with the notorious Crimson Shadows Chrono Trigger hack, indeed both seem to coincide with official releases (Type 0 is getting a next gen port but not crucially to handhelds, and crimson shadow came out just when Chrono trigger was ported to the DS.)

They were pretty slow off the mark this time as the patch in question had been out for a month before they caught on. Though quite why they shut this down is for some speculation, on RHDN they are saying that it could be the hard Subbed videos and the copyright that this entails which is to blame, others say that it could jeopardise rom hacking as a whole.   I'm not sure this will be the case, I mean people will always pull stuff apart to see how it runs especially if you have a technical mind to do so (hell why do you think they haven't wiped out piracy that and cost).  If it would have remained PSP only I can see this getting ignored (a two UMD PSP game even with the FF name would not have sold especially at the end of the PSP lifespan) but as it is and that there is a next gen version coming, they are going to do something about it.  I'm not bitter about it but there you go.


Finally would have put this up last week but it didn't fit in with my previous post.  Its an old Ebay ad from the year 2000.

Ebay 2000.

 

Animal Farm

Been an odd week here, have a few more weird records for the collection including a seven inch from climate change denier David "Leafy Undergwoath" Bellamy singing a song about dinosaurs and missing out on the Kia Ora record which for some reason I put back in the box of records in the charity instead of buying. Ugh.

The icing on the cake was Efukt getting hold of an old Channel 4 documentary on the notorious porno Animal farm, (incidentally I've seen surgery clips from Embarrassing bodies up there as well bit of a graveyard for Channel 4 stuff).  They're generally known for their off beat selection of porno including bloopers and camgirl breakdowns but this, this was just sad.

I never really knew the story behind this besides that it was generally known about in school (indeed we did the proper Orwell version in English class) and that it was never called Animal Farm.

Filmed as a series of short stag clips for Color Climax it was smuggled in and bootlegged like all hardcore porn was before it was legalized in the late 90's, (though not that) it starred Bodil Joensen and a series of other folk basically getting it on with a variety of animals.

Bodil herself had a really tragic life, something I never knew until I did some digging, apparently not a lot is known about her, just that she was the product of an absent father and a religious nut of a mother.  She was raped or nearly raped by a deviant at a train station and her mother badly reacted locking her in the attic.
The porn came later on and when that dried up she turned to alcohol and the farm she had (she ran her own insemination business) was raided by the authorities.  She turned to prostitution right at the end before the booze finally killed her.  She is buried with her husband somewhere in Denmark.

Like I say, a really depressing story, oh and all these links are safe for work though really the whole thing is really a read at home thing.  Color Climax have largely cleaned up their act now no more Animal Porn or Child Porn (which was legal in Denmark in the 70's before it was rightfully banned) though I believe are still going.  s

Rolf Harass (Harris) a retrospective.

Hello viewers I really didn't want to do this, but, they've arrested one of my heroes as part of the ongoing, lets wipe out the 1970's campaign.  Rolf of course did bad things, mainly touching up teens and Vanessa Felch on the Big Breakfast (If memory serves correct she did the in the bedroom bit after Paula Yates left but before Lily Savage joined, then again I'm a sad cunt who watched an awful lot of Big Breakfast back in the day).So without further ado, this is how I'll choose to remember Rolf rather than the sad paedo he is.

To be honest as a child of the eighties I grew up with Rolf on our screens in fact I have fond memories of watching Rolf's Cartoon Time on BBC in the early evening where he would draw some old Looney Tunes Characters (for arguments sake say Droopy) before explaining what they were doing and then showing the clip in question.  It was dropped around 1986 because Neighbours took its place and I couldn't really give a toss about Ramsay Street (although in a link to the above paragraph, Mark Little a.k.a Joe Mangle did go on to be a presenter on the Big Breakfast, small world huh.)

He took his Cartoon Club over to ITV in the early 90's (which was noted for him using an Amiga for all of the animating and art based stuff which was cool.  Can remember a kid making a claymation animation of a guy taking a leak in an art gallery for one of the shows (oh yes there were children on there) and wikipedia reckons that there were more cartoons and stuff but I don't remember that at all, just the art.

Rolf also did sick animals back on the BBC in the wildly popular show Animal Hospital.  To be honest, I've never liked this show at all and as a big animal fan it was always sick kittens or some sort of manky rabbit.  I hope Youtube has the Shooting Stars parody of this with Mark Lamarr as Rolf, sitting in a bath and playing a dead snake like a saxophone. (Here, but no snake sax for you, thanks to bad memories.) It was always a lot better then the show itself.

Later on he did a portrait of the Queen that had the great trait of her teeth following you around the room, and apart from the trial that was it.  He's still a hero to me, much more than Jimmy Saville ever was, due to him not being obviously creepy.