The Gamesoft Robo Fun Club (Page 2)

Hypnosis Mic: The Movie is a multi-path anime rap battle concert movie driven by audience voting, so how could I miss that?

YOU NEED HEART TO PLAY THIS GAME 気持ちがレイムじゃモノホンプレイヤーになれねえ

The Annotated Cipher: The Video (2/2)

I’m not sure I can really call it a criticism that these guys don’t act like any guys I’ve ever met, gay or straight. But I also suspect that this is one of those things you can file under “feature, not flaw” for the actual target reader.

The annotated Cipher: The Video (1/2)

It’s pure mood and style, with no interest whatsoever in explaining to the viewer what the hell is supposed to be happening as the characters dance and mope and play football.

Games of the Year? No, just Games I played this Year in the Year Of 2025

I've been a niche guy since the Playstation 2; I hardly play anything Relevant anymore, so I'm not the dude to ask for Game of the Year. Which is why I know what the game of the year was. The Gamesoft Robo Fun Club is a

Bonus: The boys and I were Big Friends in a New Jersey shopping mall at Ultraman Live

I can’t deny that Ultraman Live was a pretend superhero show for little tiny babies. It was also the coolest shit I ever saw in my life.

Here’s what it’s like to run the Ridge Racer course for 20 hours

(My Switch says it's been 10+ hours, but I feel like it's been 40+. This could just be the time dilation of practice.) Like I've said, I’ve been really stuck on this year’s release of Ridge Racer in the Arcade Archives series.

The anime convention of the 2000s is alive at Anime NJ++, plus Keita Amemiya was there

I kind of forget that things are coming up, or that they happened two weeks ago, or indeed my position in space and time. So it was a last-minute thing when I asked my buddies if I could tag along with them to Anime NJ++, a very small convention run

Yasuomi Umetsu's Virgin Punk: Clockwork Girl packs 35 minutes tight with exquisite, artisanal violence

Legendary animator Yasuomi Umetsu (Kite, Mezzo Forte) dreams of girl assassins blasting their way through massive, bloody action movie set-pieces. A craftsman and a perfectionist, he looks to create the platonic ideal of a popcorn form, flawless in every detail from the fluttering of a jacket, to the precise shape

Road to Empress deftly uses the movie-game format to place you in Tang China and kill you, over and over again

If you’re of a certain age, games using live-action movie footage snap your brain to the “full motion video” fad of the 90s and the middling games that resulted from it. (Or Dragon's Lair, if you're a Gen-Xer.) I had a Sega CD as a

The English version of VTuber Kurono Senba's riichi mahjong hint book feeds a growing, but starved, niche

As evidenced by the tears of so many Like a Dragon series players, it’s kind of tough to learn riichi mahjong. In video game terms, riichi is a tutorial-required game. A few strict, inflexible, and complex rules shape the game’s strategy at its core; everything grows out from

The Weekly: 10/27/25

It is good of the developer to let us imagine what “catlike reflexes” would really be like.

The Weekly 10/13/25: Virtua Fighter at TGS, Ridge Racer On Switch 2 - Friends, it's 1994 again

This has actually been nearly in the can from a while ago, but I took an actual nice long break– the real kind, where you don't look at anything, even if you finally got a good idea for a Kawaiikochans comic– last week. Also, the thing I came

anime

Spoiler Space: Turkey’s opening-credits shock had me speculating all season. Now that it’s over, I have an answer

(One of the things I really like about Turkey! is the way it doesn’t shy away from the “nasty, brutish and short” of ancient life, even though it’s at heart a “cute girls have fun” anime.)

The Weekly: Sept. 18th, 2025

This morning I watched Japan Railway Journal and thought about the impermanence of our social order. The Gamesoft Robo Fun Club is a solo labor of love that depends entirely on paid subscriptions from readers to exist. If you enjoyed this piece and you'd like to see more,

Sonic Racing Crossworlds beta is Mario Kart 8, not World, but for arcade sickos

It’s messed up that just a couple of newsletters ago I was tricked into referring to Mario Kart 8 as “perfect”, because I spent hours this past weekend playing an arcade racer that seems set on nitpicking Mario Kart 8 (not World!) and improving on its all of its

video games

The Weekly, Sep. 10, 2025

I’m going to try something new today. I find I don’t always get around to talking about the stuff that I enjoy— which would be fine, except at this newsletter it is kind of my job— without writing a very long piece that usually spends a lot of

In Animal Kaiser, the Circle of Life is when a polar bear shoulder-checks a lion directly through a mountain

I spent a bit of Labor Day over at the Brooklyn Bandai-Namco showroom. When I first visited, I wrote it off as a tourist trap I didn’t really need to visit again: Bandai toys and model kits were on sale for market prices, but gashapon toys and arcade games

mahjong

Bonus: Tournament Report - Riichi Nomi Open 2025 but mostly it's about how 1500 point honba are a stupid rule

"I'm not worried about winning stuff from two opposing business rivals. That just means I'm decorated."

A Virtua Fighter nerd explains the New Virtua Fighter EVO teaser at length

After months of buildup, the Virtua Fighter staff came up on stage at Evo this weekend, dropped about a minute of actual gameplay footage, updated us on continued support for VF5 Revo, and went on their way. This is a clever way of handling things; we’ve started to expect

The thing where you watch a bunch of first anime episodes and talk about them - Summer 2025

I haven’t done one of these in a long time, and I don’t want to commit myself to it on a regular basis because it often takes time I could be talking about more interesting stuff— like actual finished series which I could give a proper review to—

What, specifically, looks so bad about the new Fist of the North Star TV series?

I had been quietly excited about the upcoming TV series revival of one of my all-time favorites, the post-apocalyptic kung-fu melodrama Fist of the North Star (Hokuto no Ken). It’s certainly been long enough— the original Toei TV series is over 40 years old!— and with a high-end production

Mario Kart World is new and messy. That's okay and, ultimately, it's necessary

Nobody wants to have to follow up perfection, and Mario Kart 8 nailed it. Ten years and two consoles ago, the game refined the arcade kart racer into the very best version of itself. Rather than bothering with a sequel, Nintendo simply kept adding content to it until it was