I just received notification that the server this website is on will be undergoing emergency replacement on the 28th of this month. No indication of how long the server will be down. So if this website disappears for a while, that's why. Now, please excuse me while I go make some backups.

Street Fighter Alpha version of "Cammy" - cosplayed by Non(Summerjack):

Look at that...

I've seen better cosplay of Cammy, but I've never seen better cosplay of this specific alternate sprite coloring.

If you don't know what I'm referring to by "alternate sprite coloring"...

As far as video game graphics are concerned, the first big leap in design concept technology was the development of the "sprite". I don't want to get too technical, but the difference can be greatly simplified thus: drawing raw video means the cpu has to instruct the video output device on the activation and mode of every pixel 30 times per second. On "primitive" home computers, this would take up most of the processors cycle time. If you remember on the Atari VCS/2600, several games would have noticeable flashing and/or video drop-outs on certain screens or related to certain events. This typically occurred because the processor was being pushed past it's limit and didn't have enough time to run the code and draw everything on the screen. Sacrifices were made.

A "sprite" is a pre-drawn bitmap image, a bitmap image being a record of what every pixel in a defined area should be drawn as. You can literally imagine it as a small picture. The Super Mario Brothers "Mario" sprite is a 12x16 bit static image that looks exactly like how Mario starts out that first level: arms and legs akimbo, facing east. If you press the right arrow, three more sprites: one with the right foot in the air as if running, one with the right leg knee up, foot down, and one with the right leg knee down, foot behind, are rapidly cycled to great a running motion. There is a single sprite depicting Mario whirling around 180 degrees to face behind him. All of these sprites are flipped 180 degrees to create the same images facing left. The advantage of sprites is that all the processor has to do is issue an instruction regarding which "sprite" to display, and where; not what every pixel is doing. The action of drawing the sprite is offloaded to the video hardware. This freed up so much processing time that eventually Mario became two different sprites being drawn together as one, and then four different sprites. And you get Luigi by, depending on the game, either having a bit change that sets a different color palette, therefore rendering the Mario sprite in a different color...or by just having another palette set for sprites with the alternative coloring.

The Street Fighter series was originally a two-dimensional, bitmap sprite fighting game. I don't know about the arcade hardware, but on the home versions the characters were likely composed of nine sprites of 32x32 pixels. That's just at a quick glance...I've got the reference material but getting this perfectly right isn't the point. There were more animation sprites as well to make the action look more fluid. This is why Street Fighter 2 is considering an important development in video games.



Anyway, long story short, a staple of fighting games is having characters fight against themselves, and that requires alternate colorings. Beyond that, game developers, especially in Japan, realized that gamers developed preferences for coloring, and later outfits, and would frequently play the games more if they were able to unlock different "looks" for their favorite players. Yes, indeed, this began with "hardcore" fighting games. In the Street Fighter Vs. games (Marvel, Xmen, Capcom, SNK), a different version of Cammy was introduced with a different outfit.

White was always one of the most popular alternate colors for Cammy, and the new-version outfit in white really resonated with players. My memory is that the definitive combination appeared in one of the Street Fighter Alpha/Zero games; in fact there's a figure of it that I've talked about before:

Now is a good time to discuss Godzilla fandom. There are several ways to enjoy Godzilla films, and some fans insist on keeping these various cliques separate while others are more open-minded.

The most common type of fan embraces everything Godzilla. The omni-fan tends to excuse the silly Godzilla movies as films for children, which is absolutely correct. They've usually read fairly extensively, although you tend to find a willingness to embrace apocryphal stories, and an insistence on clinging to bits of Godzilla folklore that have been disproven or explained. These fans tend to argue against any criticism from the angle that the end product is fine as long as you understand why the movie is the way it is.

Equally common are the fans that embrace Godzilla as hero while dismissing all of his villainous turns after the original movie, and the fans who only take to the serious Godzilla movies and reject anything silly. These groups, while not technically opposed to each other, tend to find themselves arguing opposite points frequently.

There is an increasing minority of fandom that analyzes each film according to it's own merit. These fans may or may not like the silly Godzilla movies, but they can still talk about the things that make those movies interesting or important. Same with the serious movies.

Because even the cheapest and silliest movies are still products of the Japanese film industry, the sentiments, intentions, and practices used to create those movies are very different from the equivalent American film project. Only a few specific issues in the "bad" Godzilla movies was the product of an attitude like "We're just creating B-Movie trash. It's good enough." By the same token, some of the "good" Godzilla movies were produced with similar budgets, and frequently using the same casts and crews, as the "bad" movies. When a "bad" Godzilla movie is "bad", it mostly was NOT because the intent and effort were lacking, it was because the final product was made to be exactly what it was. It is worth noting that some of the silliest, most bizarre special effects of the Godzilla movies in the '60's and the '90's were the effects used to make Godzilla or another monster do something absolutely absurd. Showing Godzilla slowly trudge through Tokyo, using overcranking to give his movement the illusion of weight and immensity, is much easier to do having a sixty-year old man in a silicon suit with an eight foot tail do a flying bicycle kick.

Stories are a bit different. Most of the '60's movies were written by Shinichi Sekizawa, who complained early on that he had no new ideas for monster movies. Which might explain why so many of these movies really do seem to be exactly the same. And even when different writers were brought in, the movies still invariably followed the same plot. But this mostly stemmed from directives by Toho studio heads, who considered Godzilla movies to be cheap, fast, reliable profits for children's movies. To be entirely honest, as even the Heisei Gamera movies demonstrated, there isn't a lot of leeway in establishing the basic outline of a Kaiju Eiga. When the third Gamera movie strayed from the tried and true path, the popular and critical reception wasn't quite as good. Interestingly, both the 2014 Legendary Godzilla and the 2016 Shin Godzilla actually do screw with the formula in different ways, and both movies find success doing so. As a counterpoint, the 1998 Devlin/Emmerich Godzilla mixed the structure of the original Godzilla with the sensibilities of a Michael Bay movie, and campy comedy of a bad English dub of a '60's Godzilla movie. When you look at it that way, it seems kind of obvious that the movie would never hold up.

The point, in the end, is that the different components of the Godzilla fan community tend to seek out certain things in each new Godzilla movie: a lot of fans want Godzilla to be a hero; a lot of fans want Godzilla to be a villain or at least an opponent of man; some fans want an acknowledgement of the '60's camp, but probably a larger number (and increasing) want serious Godzilla movies. Note that being a quality production isn't really on the list.

This is the context within which I'll look at the Legendary Godzilla and Shin Godzilla.

I've been sitting on a review of Shin Gojira (Godzilla Resurgence) for a few weeks, now. Honestly, I haven't really wanted to write anything up, because on top of my criticism of the new Star Wars movies, anything I had to say about Shin Godzilla would inevitably come off sounding like "Get off my lawn!" Because I didn't like Shin Gojira.

Yeah. The movie that won seven Japan Academy Prizes. The screenplay that won Director/Writer Hideaki Anno a Best Screenwriter award from Kinema Junpo; Japan's oldest film magazine; which publishes annual lists that are considered as important as the Academy Prize if not more so. I didn't like it.

Japan likes it, and that's what matters; of course. I've been a bit surprised to find that American Godzilla fans really like it...or do they? Everybody says they love it, and yet it's amazing how much more commendable they are toward the Legendary Godzilla film compared to Shin Godzilla. The Legendary Godzilla was generally approved of by American Godzilla fans, although praise was usually couched with caveats. I'm not seeing that as much these days. It seems the Legendary Godzilla is now perceived as a genuinely good film. And so, of course, is Shin Godzilla...but....

I really don't feel like really breaking Shin Godzilla down, so I guess we'll see where things are at the end of this post. What really prompted me to finally write about the movie was a giant turtle...

In 1995, Daiei Film, the company that created the original Gamera movies during the giant monster craze started by the Godzilla sequels, rebooted the giant turtle series. Improbably. Impossibly. Nobody thought it would work. The creative force behind these movies where director Shusuke Kaneko, writer Kazunori Ito, and FX Director Shinji Higuchi. If you're an anime fan, you're probably familiar with Ito...he also wrote some Dirty Pair, the first and second Patlabor movies, and the original Ghost in the Shell movie, among others.

If you are a fan of Godzilla, or monster movies in general, or Pacific Rim, or good anime for that matter, you owe it to yourself to see the three Gamera movies that comprise the Heisei Gamera Trilogy. I had not. Despite hearing for several years that these movies, largely ignored in the U.S., were some of the finish Kaiju movies ever made. In my defense, I had seen the original Gamera movies. I can sing "Gamera is full of meat!" with the best of them, as well. To me, they glorified and typified all of the things that made many of those 60's Godzilla movies cheap and laughable. I wasn't going to give Gamera re-imagined another try. I was wrong. I won't go into how I got started, but I had the opportunity to watch the first new Gamera movie, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe. In the four years leading up to 1995, Toho had released the following Godzilla movies: Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, the 1993 Godzilla vs. Mothra, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, and Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla. While the 90's Godzilla movies featured updated special effects and better filmography, they had continued from the 60's camp movies with un-serious stories, physically bizarre fights, and highly repetitive plot points. While the final 90's Godzilla film, Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (the first film since the 1984 re-launch to take the subject seriously) was in production, Daiei Film was looking at Godzilla's dwindling success and planning a new Kaiju Eiga done right.

It's almost amazing the degree to which Daiei Film succeeded. '60's Gamera is the friend of all children. '90's Gamera is, too. Surely they didn't spell it out nearly as explicitly as the early Gamera movies did, but the message is clear that Gamera has an affinity with children. '60's Gamera flies with something like rocket engines shooting out of it's shell. So does '90's Gamera. If you ever wanted to believe a giant turtle could fly, the new Gamera movies will make you believe. The new movies are definitely a bit more mature in tone and design, but it's a bit like comparing the original Superfriends cartoon to the Justice League cartoon of the 2000's. Throw out the camp, but embrace the spirit. Take it seriously. The result is astounding.

The first movie is a fairly standard Kaiju movie done to modern sensibilities. Gamera's origin is vaguely established: the main characters hypothesize that the meaning of a prophetic marker that refers to Gamera indicates that Gamera was a "man"-made biological weapon built by...Atlanteans, maybe? Muu-ians? Some ancient civilization that played with powers they ought nought. The civilization created a weapon to use on it's enemies; the two-chromosomed, highly adaptable, nearly perfect species Gyaos. As Gyaos ravaged the Earth, the Whovians put all of their knowledge into creating a being to stop Gyaos, and project the Earth for all eternity. Ito and Kaneko manage to balance the story perfectly; plausibly creating a real-life setting in which a giant fighting turtle invented by ancient Atlanteans makes just enough sense to be acceptable.

The second movie, Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, is probably about as good as a modern kaiju movie can get. Having said that, it's also done with a formula that works for Gamera but wouldn't work for almost any other monster. More on this in a minute. Gamera 2 has all of the beats of a kaiju movie, and like the first actually has the basic elements of horror that made the first Godzilla movie so effective. G2 also has all of the beats of a superhero movie. Unlike the Godzilla hero movies, Gamera and the Earthlings he protects can be hurt, even killed. While Godzilla gets knocked down, frequently gets knocked out; Gamera is pierced and bleeds. You actually feel sympathy for the monster hero, and fear the monster villain. If Legion isn't stopped, all life on Earth will end; because this is what Legion does. Lands on a planet, absorbs all life, and then explodes millions of copies of itself into space. It is here that Gamera truly becomes the defender of the Universe, as the entire Universe is at stake.

The third movie suffers from having huge shoes to fill, and for some people because Kaneko pursued a different angle. The villain monster is at the same time the largest and most glorious creation of possibly any Kaiju movie ever, and at the same time the smallest and most personal. This movie isn't about the villain monster; it's about how people feel about Gamera. It's also built largely to bring closure to all the different storylines presented over the course of the three movies, make the film feel a bit forced at times. The intention was to close out a trilogy of movies while exploring a particular set of themes, and that's what was done...even the story doesn't necessarily lend itself to resolving these ideas. The FX are stunning; the fights are turned up to eleven, but contrasted against a more personal, somewhat rushed story, you feel almost as if maybe the director actually had two movie's worth of material crammed into one.

Compare all of that to 1994's Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla; the campiest, silliest entry of the Heisei Godzilla series. The ongoing theme of the 90's Godzilla movies was Godzilla's DNA; and thanks to events from the previous movies, some of that DNA has made it into space, where it encountered some mysterious crystals and mutated into a super-Godzilla with crystals growing out of it's body. At least one scene of actual drama was cut to keep the tone more light-hearted. The new junior Godzilla, introduced in Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla II, which actually looked like a juvenile Godzilla, was re-designed to more closely mimic the goofy "Minilla" design from the 1960's. Another staple of the 90's movies, a psychic that can communicate with Godzilla, is the human focus of the story. It's just silly. And none of it is treated seriously. Despite the improved FX, which don't hold a candle to the Gamera movies of the same era, the 90's Godzilla movies were treated like cartoons by Toho.

That gets us to the 1998 Devlin/Emmerich Godzilla movie. The only thing important about it is that it prompted Toho to revitalize the Godzilla series yet again. 1999's Godzilla Millennium upped the ante in special effects, at least for Japanese films, and tried to adopt some of the mature tone of Kaneko's Gamera movies, the final film of which was just completing production. The final product is one of the better Godzilla efforts, with some truly excellent FX shots; but it still plays out like a light-hearted adventure. Seriousness is injected solely through lines of dialogue talking about how serious things are...we're never actually shown anything menacing. The follow-up film, Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, belongs firmly in line with the '90's films: shiny metal sci-fi miniatures, a cartoonish enemy monster, and a Godzilla fight that uses silly, out-of-place and unrealistic moves and actions. The major upgrade from the '90's movies is an increased active role for women in these solidly action-adventure movies.

This set up the third Millennium series Godzilla movie. While Toho was actively considering ending the new movies after the disappointing performance and reception of Megaguirus, they remembered a director who had come to them in 1991 with a proposal for new Godzilla movies. Toho turned him down, and Shusuke Kaneko went on to re-invent the Kaiju Eiga with the Gamera trilogy. Now, with his Gamera movies completed, Toho turned to Kaneko for the next Godzilla movie. Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack, despite an utterly preposterous title, went on to make over ten times it's budget; compared to the barely $1 million in profit returned by Megaguirus. As with the Gamera movies, people get hurt and killed. For the first time since the original movie (and Godzilla Raids Again, to a small extent), Godzilla is a true devil; a creature of evil mindlessly destroying the world. The Godzilla suit used for this movie is unique, with opaque, all white eyes and a furrowed, demonic countenance. The suit is more hunched over and bulkier, which helps remove the perpetual and obvious clue that there's a man inside a rubber suit. Godzilla kills just to kill; he targets humans intentionally. This is the only Godzilla film where the viewer feels that Godzilla is a threat to THEM specifically.

While the public loved the film and demanded more, long-time Godzilla fans of the time were decidedly mixed over this movie. There was very little camp; only the design of Baragon, a half-dog/half-dinosaur-like creature with expressive eyes and floppy ears displays the cartoon-like-vibe that had been persistent for decades. Yet even that may have been an intentional move by Kaneko; as Baragon is little more than a doormat to the new Godzilla. Still, reports of studio tampering surround the film. Kaneko's vision for the movie was, allegedly, considerably more horrific and serious-minded. But Toho refused to bow to those demands. They were furious that Kaneko had turned Godzilla into an evil monster, and were uncomfortable with the scenes of death and destruction. While the good returns prompted them to ask Kaneko back to direct a second film, the demands they put on the planned production drove Kaneko from the project; and the Godzilla films returned to retreads of the '90's movies until the delightfully campy Final Wars in 2004.

2016's Warcraft, the latest attempt to market the Warcraft/World of Warcraft games to mass audiences, made $47 million domestically on a budget of $160 million. Ouch. It did make a profit once you factor in foreign market earnings of $386 million, practically 90% of the movie's income. Looking at box office numbers, it is clear there was very little interest from the movie-going public in going to see this movie. I don't remember seeing it advertised very much; even Blizzard spent very little time promoting the movie. I saw, and still see, more advertising for Overwatch.

Now that I've seen the movie, this surprises me. To be fair, I didn't have high expectations for any Warcraft movie; and once it was clear that Blizzard wasn't promoting it, and people weren't going to see it, I felt that it must be a pretty poor movie indeed. And then I read the complaints: the historical canon was screwed with, characters were changed, events were changed...everything you expect to hear about in an adaptation.

So imagine my surprise, when I finally got around to watching the movie, that it actually does a really good job setting up and telling the Warcraft story. And I mean really good.

Yes, some characters don't look the way some people wanted them to look. This is hardly surprising, however; Blizzard has retconned many characters throughout the years. In fact, most of the character designs in Warcraft were simply brought up to the design decisions made for the then-current World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor. Garona was originally depicted and described as half-orc/half-human, until The Burning Crusade expansion changed her background and appearance to half-orc/half-draenei. Khadgar the wizard, a central character in the Warcraft games, was depicted as an aged man with a flowing white beard in World of Warcraft; until he was re-introduced in The Burning Crusade and aged down quite a bit. And of course, almost everything is different from how it was originally presented in 1994's Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. EXCEPT for the basic story, which has never really changed.

Let's look at the movie another way. I'm hardly the foremost expert, but let me tell you my own understanding of the events surrounding the first Warcraft game. Keep in mind this is the distilled and retconned history, not the original history.

The Orcs of Draenor, led by Guldan and corrupted by his Fel Magic, used a dimensional portal built by Guldan and fueled by the souls of the Orcs' victims to cross to a new world, known as Azeroth. The Human kingdom of Stormwind, led by King Llane Wrynn and his Champion Anduin Lothar, take it upon themselves to repel the Orcish Horde and defeat Guldan and his Warchief, Blackhand. With the aid of the Guardian of Azeroth, the Magus Medivh, and his apprentice/observer Kadghar, King Wrynn attacks the Horde. (Note that in the first game, you could "win" the game as either Orc or Human; elements of both campaigns were chosen to create the canonical history. The Orcs won the first war, by the way.) Unfortunately for the humans, Khadgar and Lothar discover that Medivh himself opened the Dark Portal, inviting Guldan and the Horde to Azeroth. Medivh has long been corrupted by Fel Magic, and is under control of the demon Sargeras, leader of the Burning Legion. Medivh is killed in his tower at Karazhan by Kadghar and Lothar, but the humans fail to end the orcish invasion of Azeroth. King Llane Wrynn is killed by Garona Halforcen. Blackhand is defeated by Lothar, leaving Anduin Lothar as regent of the kingdom of Stormwind in place of Llane's young son, Varian. The Horde is taken over by Orgrim Doomhammer, still under the overall control of Guldan.

Now, I can do just a bit of googling on Wowpedia and tell you that I'm leaving some things out; but that really is the basic story. And that's the story presented in the Warcraft movie. There are some changes, and additions...Lothar gains a family in order to make him more likable to the audience, and Garona is given an even more expanded role than her current retconned story, but it all makes for good storytelling.

The tone for where Blizzard is coming from with this movie is set right at the beginning, by telling the Orc side of the story through the eyes of Durotan, chieftain of the Frostwolf Clan. Durotan has certainly been a part of the lore for a long time, but only as a distant background character. However, he is in the forefront of the expansion Warlords of Draenor. In lore, Durotan and his Frostwolves rejected the gift of Fel Magic, even while maintaining their allegiance to the Orc Horde under nominal leadership of Blackhand. In the original continuity, the Orcs were cursed by drinking the blood of the Pit Lord Mannoroth at the urging of Guldan. In the movie, Mannoroth is not mentioned an Sargeras the Demon is only hinted at. Guldan is able to infuse Fel Energy into an Orc by a simple magic attack. This is the one big failure of the story, as Durotan sacrifices his life in a challenge for leadership of the Orcs verses Guldan; in an attempt to show the Orcs what the Fel Magic does and causes. Not that Guldan has been hiding anything from anyone. Durotan's attempt fails, and yet twenty minutes later Orgrim Doomhammer and Garona successfully use the same tactic, too a less impressive degree, and it works.

Warcraft the movie is very much a product of World of Warcraft. I hope its foreign success will empower Blizzard to make Warcraft 2; but I suspect the poor domestic box office may have killed any future efforts.

Audrey Hepburn - 1920x1080 by xinem on DeviantArt

Remembering Friedrich Hayek:

This has never, ever, ever happened to me before:



It's obviously a glitch...this is 15 turns into the game, I think?

Estonia is preparing for an invasion that seemed silly a decade ago.

The Obama administration insisted on treating all Russian aggression against former Soviet satellites and states as independent acts. The Trump administration has been a bit unclear about overall relations, while strongly condemning some of Russia's actions. But while President Trump continues to diminish NATO, even as his administration builds it up, American troops and equipment took part in Estonia's Independence Day parade as a NATO display of cooperation. That's a good thing. Something like our cooperation with China while continuing to support Taiwan's military.

Incidentally, if you come across hi-res copies of any of these, let me know...these are the best I can find: