I recently hit a bit of a rough patch on my regular online mahjong grind, the ranked ladder on Riichi City. Stuck at 8th dan (out of 10, and then Legend rank after that), unable to get back up to 9th dan for over a year since I last demoted,
(I use a tiny bit of numpad notation in this piece. You can google it.) I have never really burned out on Virtua Fighter 5 in the decades since it first released, and one of the reasons for that is that I like to switch up my character. When VF5
You will fight a kraken bare-handed in the depths of a cruise ship.
If your otaku culture feels like idol stuff, but you’re not sure it’s idol stuff, look again, because it’s probably idol stuff.
"And it is of course ironic that fans of a show about a main character learning to embrace her free will and reject social expectations are furious that said character did not do exactly what they wanted her to do."
So throughout, Venus Returns is kind of shocking. Not at all in terms of its sexual content— which is again quite tame— but in terms of the level of detail, the pains taken, the way you can actually hear buttons unfastening. Turns out video games are art, after all.
Otakon’s my home convention; I rarely miss a year. Despite its very large size, a raw spirit of grassroots fan enthusiasm seems to fuel the event, even after its decades of operation. Today anime/manga has completely settled into the culture, and we get events here in New York
As mentioned before, we want to win any hand possible, as fast as possible. There is no reason to score high, nor to play defense as you would in the standard four-player game. This will be a brute force method.
(I have an Otakon 2026 writeup coming, but I did a lot that weekend and it got kind of massive. However, on Anime NYC weekend I only did a couple of things because I wasn’t actually at the con. So I’m going to write up those things relatively
I’m passionate about the classic battle manga/anime Fist of the North Star (Hokuto no Ken). I’ve been mesmerized by its perfect blend of post-apocalyptic grime, absurd violence, and sweeping kung-fu melodrama since I discovered it as a kid, and my love for it has never
As promised way back at the pro meet– where I played a round with one of these authors and was complimented by the other, by the way, ohoho– I’m going to review the strategy books I picked up. (Both of these books (Uchikawa, Matsumoto) have been made available on
There’s a lot of talk about the rising cost of mainstream video games right now, led of course by Grand Theft Auto 6 being priced at, effectively, $100. But taking inflation into account, video games used to be a lot more expensive than they are now: going by some