In the world of 3-D fighting, three franchises come to mind: Virtua Fighter, Tekken, and Soul Calibur. The first game pioneered the genre, the third introduced complex weapon-based fighting to the tried and true conventions. Tekken may not have had the impact on the genre that the other two did, but it still deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. After 4 solid entries (including Tag Tournament), the series took a step back with Tekken 4, when a frustrating wall fighting system and the attempted insertion of more Soul Calibur-like foot movement turned many players off. Last year, with Tekken 5, Namco revitalized the franchise in a major way. A handful of new characters were added to the Tekken mythos, and the moveset of every returning character recieved a major overhaul. Speaking of returning characters, nearly every character from the past Tekken games shows up. The graphics are some of the best seen on Playstation 2, and there are lots of extras in the game. As an added bonus, the arcade versions of Tekken 1, 2, and 3 have been included for players who want to see how far the series has come.

Somebody call Robert Stack.

While Lost is on summer hiatus, fans have no way of getting answers to the mysteries that populate the island and its inhabitants’ pasts. So why not mull over all the unanswered questions?

Lost Mysteries compiles 161 strange events, questionable actions, and bizarre appearances. I thought I’d been pretty attentive to minor background things, but to see that the same car has appeared over and over in flashbacks with car accidents, I see we have a long way to go with settling this. Theres mysteries we don’t even know to solve!

Here’s a quick run down on the Liam Lynch directed concert film of comedian Sarah Silverman.

Sarah enthusiatically sets up a premise.

Then she dead-pans a punchline about AIDS or racism.  You feel uncomfortable.
But she smiles and its OK to laugh!

Then theres some musical numbers of questionable quality interspersed throughout.

A solid, if slightly boring formula, as her infamous “Joe Franklin raped me” bit in The Aristocrats probably already prepared you for her “awwshucks” presentation of extremely filthy material, so the shock value is lost.
Jesus Is Magic is currently available on DVD, so that means you can probably download it or borrow it from a friend.

Good news for French Canadian Anime fans! We could be seeing the return of some of our favourite old school Anime shows.

Le journal de Montréal has this article discussing plans for 2 new Canadian TV stations “Teletoon Retro” to debut in English in Spring 2007 and “Télétoon Rétro”, the French equivalent, in French in Fall 2007.

The channel will be featuring animation dating from 10 years back and older. It’s mentioned that they are attempting to secure the rights to old classic Anime such as Albator and Goldorak.

Albator is the French dub of Leiji Matsumoto’s Captain Harlock (or Herlock as the Japanese insist on calling him). It came in 2 series. Albator 78 is a 42 episode series translated from the 1978 series “Space Pirate Captain Harlock”. “Albator 84” is a 22 episode series translated from “Endless Orbit SSX” from 1983. The numbers denote the year of their French dub rather than their Japanese release.

Goldorak is the French version of Grandizer (Grendizer to the Japanese) and aired starting in 1975.

Both shows were wildly popular among French Canadians in the late 70s and early 80s.

It needs to be mentioned that Teletoon in both it’s English and French incarnations is notorious for horrible programming due mainly to the fact that they’re incapable of affording to pay for anything the least bit desireable. They generally get the scraps that better channels like Comedy and YTV don’t want. Whether or not this goes through really depends on the financial feasability of securing the rights to these shows.

Anime News Network mentioned this story on Friday but claimed the rights to the series had already been optained. This confusion was probably just lost in translation.

Thanks to Powet antagonist Dave aka Soundowaivu for finding this article.

Game Trailers has posted a video in their Top 10 series detailing Top 10 Video Game Weapons, and its hard to argue with the results.
Although, I’m disappointed how many FPS games there are on the list. Doom’s chainsaw defines the game, and Half Life 2’s Gravity Gun innovates beyond anything else on the list, but did we really need anything from Turok on there? Still, covering Metroid’s Ice beam and Mario Kart’s red shell makes the list a pretty well balanced one, if not for the oddball #10.

If you need a brush up on Superman before he Returns, enjoy Superman the Movie in 30 Seconds. With Bunnies. Voices are even provided by Returns writer Michael Dougherty and director Bryan Singer.
Angery Alien productions has many, many more shorts like this on their website.

Buffy and Firefly creator Joss Whedon answers the question “Why do you create strong women characters?” for Equality Now, his favorite charity, and the benefactor of Can’t Stop The Serenity, a theatrical charity re-release of the big screen continuation of Firefly.
After watching this, is it any wonder he’s one of the most popular writers/creators in movies, tv, and comics?

Al Gore has more news about our climate crisis, but he’s been interrupted in this video by an obnoxious heckler.