Calling me a Neptunia fan might be swinging a touch on the strong side. Not to say that I’ve not played the Neptunia games, or at least some of them. I’ve finished the first, which, honestly, was a badly designed mess of a game. I’ve finished Neptunia mk2 as well, after having suffered a great deal of hassle trying to track down a UK copy of it (it’s been re-issued over here in the mean time, thankfully, so it’s now pretty cheap), and that was much better experience all-around. I have started on the third game in the series, Victory, as well at this point, but whilst that seems polished further again, that’s kind-of been sidelined by other things. I really must get back to that.

Anyway, they released a new Neptunia game for the Vita in Japan this week, and whilst I was going to ignore it, I did discover I was only about 900 yen short of buying it on my Japanese PSN account, and I did have getting drugs pumped right next to my sciatic nerve to recover from, so I figured what the heck.

Particularly given it’s an idol game. My bailiwick and all that.
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Insert joke about “blog updates” here.

I watched the first couple of episodes of old OAV series Mad Bull 34 earlier in the week. I don’t really have much to say about it’s actual content right now – it’s pretty much the kind of thing that I suspect most of the people who actually read his blog would hate anyway, being the incredibly violent and misogynistic adventures of the straight-laced, American-born Japanese cop Daizaburo “Eddie” Ban and his man-mountain pimp of a partner John “Sleepy” Estes (the man so imposing he has two nick-names, the other being the titular “Mad Bull”). I find pretty much everything about it to be pretty damn hilarious, but it’s not exactly high-brow or socially enlightened viewing material.

Of all the random things to jump out at me as being interesting in the show, though, the scene in above screenshot amused me. It’s a scene where Daizaburo is waiting in the car whilst, unbeknownst to him, Sleepy is collecting money from (and doing other things with) the prostitutes under his protection (when I said he was a pimp, I meant it in the literal sense). What I find kind of curious is the debris littering the car – fairly genuine looking Coke, Pepsi and 7-Up cans, and even a McDonalds cup!
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Hmm, my steadily dropping page impression stats are essentially informing me that I’ve made not a single post in the last month. Whoops.

It’s not like I’ve not been watching anything – contrary to my expectations coming into this anime season, I’ve actually been watching a fair bit. It’s more that none of the shows I’ve been watching have hit that sweet spot between dumb and entertaining that I find amusing to write about – not even Valvrave, which is certainly dumb, and is certainly entertaining, but it wears it so much on it’s sleeve that there’s little to say about it other than, well, “This is duuuuuuuuumb“.

Unfortunately, this has left me in somewhat of a quandary in regards to posting blog content, in so much as there’s really not been much else going on that’s been worthy of lengthy comment. I suppose there’s plenty worthy of shorter commentary, though…
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Not that I’ve been able to play it, since BaNam haven’t seen fit to grace these good shores with it’s availability – some joke referencing “The World Is All One” and telling them to stuff their “Unity Mind” would likely be appropriate here, were I feeling up to the necessary level of witticism. I’d be curious to know if there’s any specific reason for it’s lack of local availability, but I wouldn’t like to speculate on that specific point.

Anyway, the Internet exploded with a whole load of annoyed shouting and a whole boatload of misinformation when the games surfaced in the US AppStore yesterday. This, mostly, comes down to the fact that it’s three games priced at $55 a piece, which even I admit is a little on the steep side.
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Just because this amused me, more than me having anything particularly interesting to say.

So apparently the thing I do when having been away over the first couple of days of the new anime season, faced with an every increasing number of first episodes that I should really probably check out, is to pull something that’s languished on my shelf for months now to watch instead. I suppose it’s at least the prior season of something that’s restarting this season, but that’s not exactly helping the situation.

In any case, when watching OreImo, I couldn’t help but be amused by the establishing shot they used for Kirino’s first visit to Akihabara in the shows second episode.
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