Anime

The Big O: Anime Review

I have some significant gaps in the classics of Toonami. I watched most (though not quite all) of Gundam Wing when it first aired. Same with Outlaw Star, and a fair amount of Dragon Ball Z (at least through the end of the Namek arc). However, I never really watched much of Yu-Yu Hakusho, and I never got around to watching any of The Big O. Maybe it was the title of the show – it certainly wasn’t the aesthetic – the retro-futuristic style grabbed my interest. However, it wasn’t until recently that I finally got the opportunity to watch The Big O in its entirety – and it’s an interesting show to unpack.

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Video games

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Video Game Review

Marvel’s Spider-Man is a game that I recall getting a lot of extremely positive reviews when it came out, and made it into contention for Game of the Year at a lot of places. On the other hand, the depiction of Peter Parker’s close relationship with the NYPD was consider somewhat problematic at the time – and time has not been kind to that aspect of the story.

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Anime

Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Anime Review

After completing Super Robot Wars V a year or so ago, I decided I wanted to watch some of the anime series from that show, particularly before moving on to X (along with wanting to watch a couple of the shows from X as well to set up the story for comparison). That, combined with the fact that I’d been watching various anime series on weekends with my parents, and that my mother had watched the original first season of Space Battleship Yamato while growing up in Hawaii, lead me to bump the reboot of that series up on my list.

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Books

Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle – Time’s Crucible Book Review

Virgin Books’ Doctor Who: New Adventures series was, back in the day, meant to provide fans of Doctor Who the thing they wanted after the show was put on indefinite hiatus after the serial Survival. Time’s Crucible is the 6th book in the series, part of a pair of thematically linked stories under the heading of “Cat’s Cradle”.

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Video games

Sakura Wars: So Long My Love Video Game Review

The Sakura Wars franchise is one which US audiences have, for most of the series run, been generally inaccessible for English speaking players. Yeah, we’ve had the anime adaptations of some of the games as TV shows, OVAs, and occasionally movies, but that’s pretty much been it. Finally, in 2001, the US received its first Sakura Wars game, Sakura Wars: So Long My Love, which was the first new game in the series on the PS2, and which also introduced a new group of characters working out of New York City.

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