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Something to Watch: Discs

In Movies, Dracula Untold is a rather interesting variation of the Vampire legend, with Vlad Tepes portrayed as a good man doing whatever it takes to save his people and family from destruction. The twisted comedy Hector and the Search for Happiness stars Simon Pegg as a psychologist who needs to find out if happiness even exists any more. If it does, he will bring it to his patients, family, and friends. In western animation Big Hero 6 is out in Streaming format, the Blu-Ray and SD versions will not be coming out until the 24th; it would have been my favorite movie of 2014 if it hadn’t shared the year with Guardians of the Galaxy. In Documentaries we get Video Games: The Movie, with some of the most famous gamers, geeks, and nerds on the planet talking about how the industry got to this point and where it goes from here. No genre TV series to speak of this week.

In Anime, Genshiken: Second Generation is being released as a complete collection; The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture has new otaku recruits, while the graduated old guard is adjusting to life as productive members of society. While this is listed as the second season, to me it counts as the third and a half. During the first season, there was an ongoing discussion of their favorite Anime show, Kujibiki Unbalance, and they included several bonus episodes of that series on the discs. Then they released the series Kujibiki Unbalance itself, and those discs had bonus episodes of Genshiken, enough of them to make up their own OVA release. So with two full seasons and an OVA under their belts, this should really be called season 3.5.

In Golden Time: Collection 2 Banri Tada lost all his memories, and is haunted by the spirit of his former self. The two of him are fighting it out to see who gets to decide how his life will go. Leviathan: The Last Defense pits three girls and a fairy against alien monsters attacking Earth by riding in on meteors. It is not as doomed as it sounds, because the girls are half dragons.

You’re Being Summoned, Azazel is about a detective who summons demons to do his dirty work. The demons in question are lazy and depraved, and take a lot of oversight to keep them on task. Finally, One Piece – Collection Box 2 is out, compiling episodes 104 through 205 into a single package.

Haphead’s Premiere tonight

The first two episodes of Haphead go live on their web site tonight, right after they show the entire first season at the Royal Theatre in Toronto tonight. It is a cyberpunk tale about a new haptic peripheral which makes videogames so immersive that people learn skills just by playing them (yes, that is pretty much their tag line). Thanks to Cory Doctorow for the heads up on this one.

LinuxConsole 2.3

The new release of LinuxConsole 2.3 is good news for those with older computers who still want to get some entertainment or work out of them. This Live Disc build started life as a way to turn an old computer into a working games console, and it will still do that. But what it has really gotten good at is making old computers with few resources work properly. That means a box with as little as 256Meg of RAM and running an old Intel, NVIDIA, or ATI graphics cards can run just fine with a fast boot, and it also supports newer graphics cards as well. They have also built some scripts to help you update packages into local RAM while running the base Live Disc, connect to printers, and so forth. They also support installing it to a LiveUSB stick, or installing it to duel-boot with Windows. They have downloads to make both of those tasks fairly easy, so you don’t have to be a Linux guru to get them running.

Something to Watch: DVDs

In movies we get The Signal, but the description just tells you about the setup, not the plot, and the trailer is just as vague. So the only thing I can really tell you about it is it includes Laurence Fishburne, and lot of reviewers thought it was a unique movie experience. From Australia, The Rover is the sequel to Animal Planet, and is another modern western done as a Mad Max wannabe. The one that sounds most amusing to me is Danger Dolls from Japan, about 4 assassins from one universe who need to impersonate 4 Pop Idols from another universe, so they can stop the evil cult that created the portal between their universes before both are taken over. Finally, if your in the mood for youthful rebellion and music without the genre aspects, the Swedish film We are the Best! is about 3 girls from Stockholm who form a punk band in the 1980s.

In TV, Defiance: Season Two continues the groundbreaking series which takes place as much in an MMORPG as it does on the small screen. Each episode has some references to things that happened that week in the game, as the various Alien races try to peacefully coexist in the wreckage of St. Louis. Why would I mention Reign: The Complete First Season, which appears to be a historical drama? Because it has Nostradamus handing out prophecies, which pushes it into the historical fantasy realm in my book. Plus it is on CW, which has really become a home for a lot of genre shows, and so deserves support.

In Anime, Attack on Titan: Part 2 continues the story of the defense of humanity from the giant killers (or perhaps killer giants would be more accurate) who’s only purpose seems to be to wipe us out. For those who found the ending of season 1, part 2 unsatisfying, fear not, because season 2 should hit the small screen in August of 2015. Ultimate Girl are three high school girls who morph to 20 times their normal size in order to battle giant monsters rampaging across Tokyo. But they can only sustain that size for 3 minutes, so they have to win their fights fast. Kampfer: Complete Collection can be a little confusing, what with the lady killer male protagonist being turned into a Kampfer, a lady who is supposed to enter mortal combat with other ladies and kill them. Since he is only female during the actual combat he rapidly becomes the center of a whole series of rumors, including the one where he is supposed to be dating himself. As lethal as the fighting is, he probably won’t live long enough to have to worry about the rumor mill.

While not genre, I should mention that K-ON!: Season 1 Complete Collection also comes out this week, for the moe music fans. Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: Complete Series is coming out in an Anime Classics edition, which means if you shop around you can pick the whole thing up for around $25 or so. Finally, the groundbreaking Ghost in the Shell: 25th Anniversary Special Edition will be available in Blu-Ray this Tuesday. I should mention that if you have the Blu-ay version of GitS 2.0, it included a Blu-Ray version of the original 1995 masterpiece as well as the cleaned-up video with the extra 3D modeling 2.0 version, and I don’t see a lot of extras with the new one. I tend to lean to recommending you grab GitS 2.0 Blu-Ray for $11 over the new one, but be careful not to confuse it with GitS 2: Innocence, which was the sequel to the original film.

Game Creator Contest

There is an Indie Game Maker Contest that starts today and runs to the end of June, and the software to build your game is available dirt cheap this week only. The grand prize is $10,000, and the development system and the games run on Steam, for the best in online game play. To get your game development software hit the Humble Bundle site and pay what you think is fair for the package. They have tiers for those who exceed a certain minimum, with more content added as various levels are passed, but those amounts are very small. In addition, every project Humble Bundle has on offer is tied to a couple of charities, and you can select who gets what percentage of your purchase/donation. This is another variation on crowd funding, and one that I have been really impressed with, since it allows you to access some excellent stuff (including a Book selection for those of us addicted to reading) for not a lot of money. Their offerings change every week, which does put you under something of a time constraint, so you might want to consider joining their mailing list to be reminded each time new stuff comes out. I should also mention that Steam also provides the Steam Workshop, where you can learn how to create, and then upload and share your own game content for games like Duke Nukem 3D, Lords of Football, Skyrim, Legend of Grimrock, Left 4 Dead II, and a few hundred others. Any of these projects is worth checking out; all of them together? That’s a no-brainer in my book.

Sabayon Linux Live has Steam

The folks over at Sabayon have two attitudes that make me appreciate their Live Discs; they want it to “just work” right out of the box, no questions asked, and they are constantly updating to the latest and greatest versions of the software in the package. They have now released a series of variants on version 14.05. They are live DVDs, in 32 or 64 bit mode (only get 32 if you have an older computer) and come in Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and a minimalist variant that runs smaller desktops like Fluxbox or Openbox. The exciting part is the KDE and Gnome versions are optimized for Steam, meaning they are setup for some serious network gaming. If you want to you can install them to hard drive or memory stick, as well, but they do everything I want them to do booting from the disc. Like almost all Linux builds, they are a free operating system filled with tons of free, open source software programs, so you certainly can’t beat the price.