The old Popeye cartoons did the dialogue AFTER the animation.
This seems obvious in retrospect. Mark Evanier noted this last week... in a switch from the way cartoons are usually produced, those old Popeyes did the animation first and then had the voice cast do the dialogue. This allowed for ad-libbing, creating that now-classic effect of Popeye mumbling under his breath.
LEGO Batman preordered.
The latest villain reveals include Had Matter, Man-Bat and... Killer Moth! Fan service in the extreme! I'd like to see them sneak a new Question or Spectre in there.
If you preorder at Gamestop, you can get one of four LEGO Batman keychains: Batman, Robin, Joker or Catwoman. I asked the clerk and it's first-come, first-served. So this may be another day off work thing.
The Last Guy hurts my eyes.
I really like this PSN game, where you have to guide panicky civilians through Google Maps and avoid baddies. But the teeny tiny characters put you in a perpetual squint. The $10 full version drops this week.
Force Unleashed demo better than expected.
I was all set to not care about this, because I've officially hit my limit on non-canon Expanded Universe Star Wars garbage. But the demo was really nice.
Maybe I've been away from Star Wars game for too long, but everything was new to me. You Force-push doors open with a mighty warping slam, you can levitate anything that isn't nailed down, your light saber leaves convincing scorch marks on the walls, and you have that ridiculous Jedi jump where the guy goes twenty feet straight up.
You can see the line being tip-toed. They want to do a super-serious Bad Guy-driven Star Wars game, but they still want to keep it bloodless so kids can play. For example, you can saber poor innocent droids in half, but hacking at Stormtroopers just knocks them over.
Ben 10 better than expected.
We picked up Ben 10: Protector of Earth for Wii, and it is entirely serviceable. Clark loves it. Gives one hope for licensed games. More about this later.
Aeropodcast #46
On this week's episode, there's a special guest and a full house of participants. For my part...
- I say a lot of what you just read. :(
- The guest participant (a games blogger you may know) points out that some of Nintendo Power's Animal Crossing news was revealed weeks ago at E3... but I'll be damned if anybody out there covered it. Thanks, Wii Music!
I've only read so much of your blog and thus I'm not sure if you're a fan of Japanese animation despite being a fan of various Japanese games and American comics and animation. That being said it's of note that Japanese animation is usually done with animation and a basic script first with the voice actors providing the talent afterwards. They gave a rather amusing live demonstration of this with voice acting students during the opening ceremonies of Anime Expo '06. Even if they had rehearsed it before hand getting that sort of energy, timing, and entertainment out of 6 different voice actors in one take is pretty amazing. Though it is good to know the reason behind Popeye's muttering.
It is needless to say that someone will release an "R-rating" mod for the game. Regardless it's the same sort of realm as when they market action figures using 7-9 year olds in the commercials (so we're not talking about the premium ones targeted specifically towards those folks that own special editions of the films and other related media) while the movie that they're for is PG-13 or more. The fact that they're trying to go for family friendly for a good sized audience (that and the new trilogy specifically had to have a younger demographic in mind) while attempting to be interesting enough for older fans is a bit of a problem.
A lot of games attempt to solve this by having a parentally locked blood & gore setting, but I doubt that few adults pay enough attention, know ratings well enough, or even care to put the effort into knowing about these things. I mean how many folks seem to complain about game violence/gore yet don't bother to read the labels? The governing body and the game store cannot do everything for them. Anyway, attempting to have things both ways without education of the adults purchasing the games may cause more than just cosmetic issues. Ideally play mechanics shouldn't be hampered by having to stick within a certain rating—within reason at least. An example of how play mechanics that requires a higher rating would be shooting limbs to disable a soldier's ability to fight in the Metal Gear Solid series—although ideally you would avoid them all together, but it allows for a different tactic than just "being a ghost" (it's also a series that sells well as a M-rated game and without trying to sell primarily on the "sensationalism of the violence" aspect that some M-rated games do).
Yeah, obviously there's a good reason for anime to do the english dub after the animation, but the Popeye thing was (and is) fairly unique for a US production.
SWTFU (I love that acronym) seems ok. I really don't have much of a problem with the lack of dismembered Stormtroopers... I mean, you can't light saber through every wall to shortcut the level, so it's not like they're trying for a 110% "realistic" experience. It's still a video game, after all.
I still have no intention of buying it, of course.
Actually in anime they do the do it that way in the original language. I'd have to agree that it's pretty unique for Popeye to be doing it that way.
I don't mind the lack of dismemberment either. Although a nice touch would be the potential for a blade to hit more than one target through the initial target (not sure if they include that)—sort of the way certain projectile weapons in shooters will penetrate more than one target. I'm not looking for realism either since it is Star Wars—a swords and sorcery tale mixed with guns and set in space.
Anyway, the new features of the Star Wars franchise are probably due to several factors. First one is logic; the characters have a light saber that can pretty much cut through anything so they can use it to cut through walls as shown in Phantom Menace (although cutting through was a very slow affair, so I'd understand if they omitted it from a game). The second would probably be more modern influences the rise in popularity of various wire-stunt Hong Kong martial arts films and the many western works that derive a similar style to their stunts—hence you can now jump great heights with the power of The Force as well as Chow Yun Fat's character can leap and bound with his highly trained wuxia skills.