Time of Eve is a smart little anime series, revolving around the titular Time of Eve cafe - where they enforce the (illegal) rule that there is to be no discrimination or distinction between androids and humans. It’s also very short - only six...

Time of Eve is a smart little anime series, revolving around the titular Time of Eve cafe - where they enforce the (illegal) rule that there is to be no discrimination or distinction between androids and humans. It’s also very short - only six episodes, each of which is only fifteen minutes long. They’re all nice, self-contained stories about the characters the episodes are named after, and it all comes together in the final episode to be rather heartwarming. I kind of teared up at the end, too. There’s more I want to say about the last couple of episodes, but then I’d be spoiling everything, so just go watch it on crunchyroll! It’s essentially a film that’s forced to have good pacing thanks to the episodic format.

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        Speaking of anime, just about everything I’ve watched over the last year or so has been on crunchyroll. It’s free, it’s subtitled in english and released in a reasonable amount of time after the original airing in Japan… what more can I want? Well, ok, it would be nice if their player wasn’t so screwy and would actually work properly on my laptop. Still, it’s incredibly convenient and I definitely prefer watching shows as they come out instead of picking up an older show with a ton of episodes to catch up on.

        I hadn’t really been keeping up with anything throughout the school year, but I figured I had enough time on my hands to check out a few shows, so at the moment I’m watching:

  • The World God Only Knows season 2 promises to be as solid as the first, which I really enjoyed, though I know it’s not perfect - but it’s a solid 7 or 8 out of ten
  • Blue Exorcist stars the son of Satan and a human woman, who has been raised by an exorcist - based on the show’s title, I’m assuming he’ll become an exorcist, but the one episode I’ve watched showed promise
  • Steins;Gate is set in the same universe as Chaos;Head, another show I enjoyed from… jeez, last summer. I think it’s hilarious so far. The main character wants to be a mad scientist, although he has to try pretty hard at both. He may or may not have managed to invent a time machine microwave. He also has a hilarious “diabolical” laugh. The time travel and mystery aspect of it seems to be coming along quite nicely, based on the first three episodes.
  • Deadman Wonderland is the big surprise for me. The name was mentioned in passing in the first impressions post on Blue Exorcist, though they have yet to actually do a piece on it. I checked it out, and I really, really liked the first episode. We’ll have to see where it goes from here, but it starts off with a kid being framed for the murder of his entire middle school class. Then he’s sent to a prison for death row inmates, where they’re exploited as part of a circus/theme park and allowed to live so long as they can perform well. Definitely an interesting premise. Whether they do anything with it, or just turn it into dumb shonen, is up to them.

All of this stuff is up on crunchyroll, likely even on the front page. If it sounds good, go check it out!

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        Some quick links to stuff I’ve read recently, which I can’t possibly do enough justice to. It all comes highly recommended, I assure you, but I don’t have much to add of my own.

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        And finally, I’ve been playing the original Sly Cooper game, and I’ve really begun to resent it for its totally archaic design. Essentially, it’s a PS1 game like Spyro or Crash Bandicoot (yeah, I’m simplifying things way too much) stuck in the skin of a PS2 game. Granted, the game will soon be ten years old. That doesn’t mean I can’t tell when my time is being wasted. I’m convinced that it uses dynamic difficulty adjustment (making things harder if you do well, and easier if you don’t) in all the bad ways, making some sections impossible to complete until you’ve died a 3-5 times, and after that making them easier in the most obvious ways possible (feeding you free lives and damage protection).

        Sly Cooper has four hub areas, each with seven levels (total 28 levels) and a boss, then a final boss (total five bosses). Only about 20 of the levels seem to be actual platforming/adventure levels, with the rest being minigames that put the game’s flaws in the spotlight. Realistically, it’s only about a 4-5 hour game. You should finish most levels your first time in about ten minutes, with even less on the minigames (usually timed to last only a few minutes). In practice, you’ll fall prey to pointless and silly deaths at the worst times and have to replay certain sections of various levels repeatedly, simply wasting your time because of silly design decisions (one hit deaths, being unable to swim for half the game, long-range attacks that can’t be avoided when a guard enemy notices you). And I resent that. It makes sense to want to say “it’s got eight hours of gameplay!” but I would like the game more if it were shorter. It would be an enjoyable little romp otherwise! But instead the few bad levels have spoiled the whole thing for me.

        Also, they tried to make the bosses varied and interesting, but in practice it feels like they ran out of money and had to rush the boss levels. But that couldn’t possibly be true, because making completely new types of gameplay just for one boss fight or minigame (i.e. the rhythm game boss) probably cost them extra money, and simply made the game worse. Who really thought it would be a good idea to add these levels in? Did someone actually say “you should beat up chickens while being attacked by roosters with bombs”?

        (though I might have liked it better in 2002, at the age of ten, but that’s… bad)