Anime? I don't know...

I've always had mixed feeling about anime and whether or not I like it or hate it.  My new roommate, Trusty, has been watching DVDs of IGPX and Full Metal Alchemist.  I've actually found myself enjoying IGPX, which is surprising to me because it exhibits a lot of the things that I hate about anime.  IGPX is plagued by poor dialogue, action scenes with sub-par cinematography, and some really corny scenes.  However, I do enjoy the characters and the plot to some degree, and its downfalls are usually fleeting and many scenes are actually well done.

Full Metal Alchemist has much better dialogue and cinematography, but I don't think I enjoy it nearly as much as IGPX.  I think it might be because I'm not a big fan of the characters.  The story revolves around a teenage boy and his quest to change his younger brother back into a normal human, as he has been turned into a living suit of armor.  The little brother apparently was 6 when the series started and is 10 in the DVDs Trusty was watching.  I feel like they chose to have a little boy as one of the protagonists, so that they could exhibit innocence and pacifism in a character.  I don't think that was necessary and I find myself finding the little boy annoying.

So, mixed feelings about both of those series.  However, there is one anime that I enjoy a lot.  I watched every episode of Trigun over the course of two weeks about a year and a half ago.  That series really impressed me.  The protagonist is a pacifist who is wrongfully wanted for blowing up a city with a reward of 60 billion dollars.  The dialogue is good, and I think the series has many strong themes running through it.  All in all, I've always felt that Trigun overcame many of the shortcomings of anime.

I'm thinking I might drop the 50 dollars for the first half of the Trigun series.  It's just that awesome.

Making fish, but Flash on Hold

I've made a lot of head way on Manatee Quest over the past week, but I haven't had access to Flash to work on the shootorial game that I started a couple of weeks ago.  The fish have several behaviors implemented, as I can currently make them swim in circles and spirals, stare at the player, and chase after the player.  However, I hope to create a chase behavior much more refined than my current one, so that I can have the fish follow behind the manatee but not get too close or have them bump into each other.

Also, Ive been going through some websites for my Story, Sound, and Motion class, and I think this one is really cool: www.wefeelfine.org.  It tracks occurrences of the phrase "I feel" in recent blog posts around the world, and can really be interesting.

Flash Games and Research Papers

I went back to Michigan State for my second semester a couple of days ago so I'll probably be updating my blog more often from here on out.  I'm working on my first independent Flash game by following Kongregate Lab's "Shootorial" series.  I'll try to post that when I'm done.  I also plan to use violent video games as my main topic for my political science class.  If anything interesting comes out of that I'll probably throw that up too.