Revival

I've been watching a ton of anime recently. Captain Harlock(hulu), Gundam(original story arc stuff on DVD), Dougram, Votoms(DVD), Ideon(DVD) and the revised Full Metal Alchemist series is in my NetFlix cue. I loved the original FMA, other than the epilogue at the end of the series and the movie...it felt cheap after the intense drama of the series.

That didn't change the fact that FMA and Gurren Laggan were the stand out TV series of the 1st decade stretch of century double 0 for me ^_^

So much of anime and Japanese art has become saccharin in the past few years...I wonder if the quakes will change that? No people can go through such a catastrophe without some kind of catharsis. I know for myself, after 9/11, my work changed quite a bit. Actually, I didn't even know what to make after 9/11...that took a few years to figure out.

Pre 9/11 I was writing a series of short stories called "Sawtooth". After 9/11...I paused those stories and that's when BPRE was born. In the past few months, I've had a few ideas for a robot "war film" style anime. Maybe once I finish this next book in the BPRE universe, I'll finally be able to work on some science fiction stuff again.

Was I expecting too much?

I just watched a game demo of Deus Ex Human Revolution on Gamespot and apparently they've spent the past 3 years remaking the gameplay from the first Metal Gear Solid game at higher resolution. Yes, it's first person versus third, but MGS Integral and MGS4 played almost the exact same way from what I could see.

I'm sure there will be "trans-human" perks and buffs that are not in MGS but, honestly, those are just more weapons/items. Will they effect how I can interact with that world? Sure, but it's just another gun at the end of the day. Maybe the story will carry it. A good cyberpunk thriller isn't exactly common so they may hit that on the head.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was more than this. It might be a totally amazing game but after all the hype, teasers and interviews, I really was thinking this would be more than MGS 1.5. OK, back to the pixel mines.

Keeping busy

Quick update.

Graphic novel is up to page 30 with pencils and looking good. Seeing how my written pages convert to finished pages, I need to go back and revise issues 2-4 though or this thing would be well over 300 pages.

The novel. Act 1 is together as a rough. Taking my second pass through to add more depth and do rewrites as needed. It's 6 chapters. About 30k words, give or take. I'm debating posting pieces to the blog. Anyone interested in my work in progress?

Board game/RTS. Well I have one map cranked out and I am working on another. The funny thing is this started as the baseline for an FPS game, but considering our current resources, an FPS is probably a few years away still :(

Legos are by far my favorite way to prototype general flow of a map though. So fast to work with and it keeps you on a grid :-D