Today is a sad day for all fans of anime from the eighties. Toyoo Ashida, who has worked as a director, character designer, and animator on many anime series and movies, has passed away this past Saturday at the age of 67.
He was most well-known for directing Fist of the North Star and the original Vampire Hunter D movie.
Today, Electronic Arts ships NCAA Football 12 for XBox 360 and Playstation 3. This marks the first time a videogame I worked on as a professional developer has been released.
It looks like social networking is undergoing a new direction and being the networking beast that I am, I have decided to partake in Google+
Hey Orlandians, have you ever been to A Geek Easy? No? Are you familiar with A Comic Shop, voted as the #1 comic shop in Orlando as voted by the readers of Orlando Weekly every year? Well, A Comic Shop has a sweet hangout space and they are cool enough to let me and the superstars of Propeller Anime Club hold an anime night there every month!
It’s that time of the year again, isn’t it? During the summer, everyone and in their mother is trying to put on a show almost every weekend to celebrate or promote something in the realm of geekdom. The biggest ones in the nation are going to be Anime Expo, San Diego Comic Con, Otakon, and PAX Prime.
I’d like to go to any of those shows someday, but for now, I’ll stick with what’s “big” in this region of the country.
On this day in 1991, the original Sonic the Hedgehog was released for the Sega Genesis. Anyone who wasn’t playing videogames back then should know that this was a significant event. At the time, it was typical for popular videogames to star “mascot” characters and Super Mario was the most well-known off them all.
When Sonic was introduced to the world he was fast, cool and everything Super Mario wasn’t. With games very different than Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World, Sonic was viewed as a strong alternative to what Nintendo was offering and the legendary 16-bit would erupt between the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo.
For several years, the saga of Orlandia has been an unique interactive convention experience like no other. Almost five years ago, it started as a simple event to reward AFO attendees for going to panels and contests in addition to providing something cool to see at several of the convention’s main events.
Since then, it has become a fully interactive game with an involving storyline and somehow along the way I got put in charge of overseeing the whole thing. How the hell did that happen?
Oh pro wrestling, you glorious ballet of violence! I grew up on you, wanted to be a part of you when I was a kid, and I have returned to enjoying you once again this year. For better and for worse you have changed, but you will always be fun to watch regardless of any the baggage and silliness you carry.
But today is not about that. No, today is about which company puts on a better show. Will it be the highly established WWE or the somewhat new and relatively unknown TNA?
Happy Cinco de Mayo! Viva Mexico! Today, we celebrate Mexico beating France in a war. (Do those guys EVER win?) How do we celebrate? With three easy steps, you and your buddies will enjoy an awesome night!
Step 1: Buy Tequila
Step 2: Make or buy Tacos
Step 3: Watch Trejo in Machete
You can make a drinking game if you want and take a shot every time Machete kills someone with his Mexican machismo. With these mighty ingredients, you and everyone else are bound to have a good time!
Here’s Epic Meal Time with a next level Cinco de Mayo celebration technique:
Those guys are my heroes.
You can follow Kent Ward on Twitter @FistoftheMFK.
This morning, I asked my followers on Twitter what their childhood dream was. I was hoping to get some good responses and I did get a few – someone wanted to be a dinosaur – and now it’s time to share mine, as promised.
Get ready, everyone!
MegaCon has come and gone, and this year shall remain one of my favorites! A new episode of “It’s MANIME! The Manly Anime Panel!” headlined Friday night’s events, and Shawn Wilson and I were primed to introduce fans to a brave new frontier of MANIME!
For those joining us or wanting a recap, we’ll share some of our highlights with you. We did a brief recap the core elements of MANIME and along with the God Tier of MANIME. We decide to keep things simple in our explanation and with the help of Brock Samson we did.
I told our audience that if an anime or manga is truly manly, then many of the characters of that series should be able to go to a bar and have a beer with Brock Samson. Otherwise, they aren’t. Nobody asked about Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann anymore after that!
Fans of the panel that weren’t able to make it should be happy to know that The Twelve Laws of True Man were a part of the excitement again! It’s easily one of the greatest contributions to both men and anime fan culture in the last decade.
We had some news to announce at the panel. A Berserk movie series is in the works and many people are excited to see what will happen including your manly hosts. We also talked about last year’s release of Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage and how there is not a single game journalist man enough to give the game a proper review.
Other news included the debut of Tetsuo Hara’s manly samurai manga series Ikusa no Ko: Oda Saburo Nobunaga Den along with Discotek Media releasing the rest of Fist of the North Star TV, Crying Freeman, and a remastered Golgo 13: the Professional! And last but not least, we were saddened by last fall’s passing of Nachi Nozawa, the voice of Space Adventure Cobra.
We decided to go deep into four series that we never talked about before at any edition of “It’s MANIME! The Manly Anime Panel!” This includes Blaster Knuckle, Fist of the Blue Sky, Sakigake!! Otokojuku, and newcomer Toriko! I wish to give these series their own separate articles in the future, but for now check them out yourself!
If you missed the panel, fellow members of Propeller Anime Club did film it, so I hope it can be uploaded for viewing later. I would to thank Jared Stokes for doing our panel art and Zak Wilson for helping us get videos and inspiring me to create the video intro for the panel that you can watch below. I never edited a video before but it was a lot of fun to make!
The next episode “It’s MANIME! The Manly Anime Panel!” will most likely be at Anime Festival Orlando and hopefully we will be welcomed back to Anime Weekend Atlanta again. Reserve your tickets now!
We aren’t planning on doing any other conventions this year unless they want to cover our travel and lodging. (A solid investment, by the way.) With that said, we are the real deal and don’t accept any cheap imitations from those who don’t live their lives as men as well as Shawn and I do.
You can follow us on twitter @FistoftheMFK and @zashu. Until then, make sure you get some headbutts in!
MegaCon is this weekend and it’s looking pretty good. There’s a solid lineup of events and guests that I actually want to meet. Moreover, I’m going to be hosting some of the convention’s best events that you, the fan, should check out!
For everyone else who is wondering “What is this MegaCon?”, it’s a giant nerd convention that takes place in Orlando every spring. It will be at the Orange County Convention Center and will be filled with fans of comic books, sci-fi, anime, and gaming.
This year, Stan Lee and William Shatner will be there so it’s a big deal. MegaCon is expected to surpass 40,000 attendees this year.
As some of you know, I work behind the scenes on the anime events track with many other fine people. What we are doing this year is bring a mini-anime convention within MegaCon that has a full lineup of events that includes industry panels, contests, panels, and showings along with a huge costume contest, late-night dance, and an AMV contest.
In addition, there will interactive events such as the Ninja Olympics, Plants vs Zombies: Gameshow, Whose Line Is It Anime, and the inaugural Anime Debate Tournament.
What’s the Anime Debate Tournament? Teams of three will compete against other teams in a bracket tournament. Each match will have a topic and one side will form an argument for the topic and the other team will form an argument against it. After constructive speeches, each side will give a rebuttal and judges(and the audience) decide the winner.
There will be prizes give out for the tournament but the REAL prize will be the satisfaction of always being right!
Oh, and I’m one of the judges.
What else am I doing, you ask? In addition to running contests, I am co-hosting three panels over the weekend. What are they and why should you go?