Other Stuff Monthly #25!

 So, Tekno Comix were a short-lived publisher in the nineties comics publisher boom that happened after Image started. Tekno had their own unique selling point, though: their comics would be created (but not actually written) by famous creators. Leonard Nimoy's Primortals was the series I used to always see copies of in back issue bargain boxes back in the day, but they also had titles created the likes of Isaac Asimov, Gene Rodenberry, and, most relevant to this post, Neil Gaiman. 

 

Relevant because the subject of the post is Wheel of Worlds, a diptych of issues released a year apart, and only slightly related to each other. The first, numbered issue zero, is like an introduction to all the Gaiman-created Tekno characters. The most interesting is the Teknophage, an immortal super-inteligent humanoid dinosaur who travels the multiverse cultivating oppressive civilisations so that they produce superpowered individuals whose souls he can consume to extend his lifespan. There's also Mr. Hero, a heroic and honourable steampunk robot made of brass who speaks with a cockney accent, and Lady Justice, who in this issue is a former slave/protoge of Teknophage who has the power to plant suggestions in people's heads, which she'd also used in the past to make a lucrative living as a findom to a bunch of rich guys on her horrible dystopian homeworld.

 

I really enjoyed this issue! Most of the page count is dedicated to a storytelling contest between Teknophage and Lady Justice, in which they both choose to tell their origin stories, along with a subplot about Mr. Hero looking for his missing hand. As evil and powerful as Teknophage is, in this story, he still feels like a fleshed out and believable character, and the rest of the cast come out of it pretty well, too. If you can get ahold of a reasonably-priced copy of Wheel of Worlds #0, I recommend you do so. Wheel of Worlds #1, however, is not a comic to which I can extend the same recommendation.

 

The main star of the show here is Lady Justice, though her origin from the previous issue seems to have been discarded, and she's now some kind of cosmic force of justice, empowering women to fight against evil. Well, in this issue, she empowers two women and a little girl. Problematically, the little girl gets temporarily aged up into an adult woman, and maybe even more problematically, one of the other women who is ugly and short, is temporarily made tall and beautiful. (It makes sense that you wouldn't send a child on a deadly mission, but what's stopping you sending a non-conventionally attractive adult?)

 

The three empowered women all get sent on seemingly unrelated quests that all converge later in the story. One women goes after her ex-husband who has a penchant for putting beautiful women in his sex/torture/molecular annihilation machine. Another goes after the scientist who apparently destroyed the man of the genius she loves, and the aged-up little girl goes after a gang of bad guys who stole her babysitter's soul so she'd take dirty photos of kidnapped underage runaways for them. 

 

The three stories converge as it turns out the evil ex-husband was sending the beautiful women's bodies to another dimension, where they'd be implanted with genius intellects stolen by the scientist, and perfect souls stolen by shock twist surprise vllain: the little girl's mother! These "perfect" women would then be sold to the highest bidder in the slave markets on a world ruled over by the Teknophage. Long story short, he eats the villains in a fit of rage, and the three heroines go back to their previous lives. The vengeful ex-wife goes back to enjoy a normal life, but Lady Justice shows her visions of the future showing her that the other two are both haunted by their experiences and end up living miserable, tragic lives.

 

So that's Neil Gaiman's Wheel of Worlds! Like I said earlier, issue zero is an entertaining, engaging story with interesting characters, and issue one is boring "dark age" nineties trash that's unpleasant seemingly just for the sake of it.

Other Stuff Monthly #24!

 A dark day that I never thought would come to pass finally has: I own a product of the Funko company. It's not one of their garbage cube-headed figures, though, it's Godzilla Tokyo Clash a board game about monsters throwing trains at each other. It even has some excellent-looking miniatures, proving that some talented sculptors do apparently work there!

 

The game sees two-to-four players each picking a kaiju from a selection of Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, and unexpectedly, the one movie wonder Megalon, and having them wage turn-based combat against each other and humanity. You take turns playing cards from your hand to perform attacks against the other monsters, or discarding them to move around the city and attack buildings and vehicles. Attacking buildings and vehicles gives you the energy you need to attack the other kaiju, so you've got to perform a balancing act between the two.

 

Because kaiju are generally near-indestructible (and because being eliminated from a board game is boring and dumb), you can't actually kill each other. Instead, every special move card has a points value in the bottom-right corner, and dealing damage means you take a number of cards from the top of your victim's deck and taking the most valuable one as a trophy. There's a round tracker with the oxygen destroyer moving in one direction, and the smaller buildings going the other way as they're destroyed by the players, with the game ending when the two cross over each other. I guess the in-universe explanation is that the more bildings get destroyed, the greater urgency humanity feels with regard to deploying the ocygen destroyer? (Let's be kind and ignore the fact that Ghidorah can travel through space and doesn't need to breathe oxygen, okay?)

 

The board is made up of a bunch of tiles representing the city (a different amount based on the amount of players), and even comes with a bunch of little plastic buildings of various types to populate it. Along with the excellent kaiju minis, it comes together to be a really great-looking game. I've seen some photos online from other people who own the game and have replaced the slightly generic-looking buildings with more detailed ones from other games, and the cardboard tokens representing the human vehicles with minis, and they looked amazing, too! That's something I may have to look into myself at some point.

 

Luckily, it's also a fun game to actually play, and the four kaiju all play differently, each emphasising different tactics. Though it's not the kind of game I can see myself playing every week, I do see it being a game that gets brought out semi-frequently for a long time. Especially if the rumours about planned expansions adding more kaiju turn out to be true.

Other Stuff Monthly #23!

 With a front cover that looks more like an ad you'd see on the back cover of a videogame magazine, Vortex #0 is the only publication Electrobrain Comics ever put out. Well, kind of. There are two versions of it: the full thirty-two page version, which has a comic story and a strategy guide for the game that shares its title (a Super FX-powered 3D shooting game for SNES), as well as a nine page version that only includes the comic.

 

The comic tells a prologue story for the videogame, and it's surprisingly complex, fitting a lot of stuff in its low page count. The eight planets of the Deoberon system (ruled by Emperor Deoberon) live in peace, with only one of them having any kind of military installations, just in case. Barkahn, one of the local lords, hates this arrangement, and believes the system needs more defence, which he sets out to prove by attacking one of the planets and killing a bunch of people, then trying to take over the whole system.

 

Emperor Deoberon sets his scientists to the task of coming up with a way to stop Barkahn's villainy, and they create a magic computer that sends Barkahn, his armies, nd the four planets they conquered into another dimension. When everything dies down, Deoberon and Barkahn both die, and Barkahn's best friend, Vercingetorix, vows revenge, and his scientists find a way out of the prison dimension, and they steal the magic computer that sent them there. So the game casts you as the ace pilot sent into the prison dimension to defeat Vercingetorix and retrieve the computer. Phew.

 

Then there's the walkthrough, taking the form of lots of captioned screenshots, telling you what's in each stage, and what you need to do to get through it. The way some parts are written makes Vortex seem like a game that would be a confusing bore to get through unguided: "Cany you find all of these hidden keys, bonuses, and tunnels? You can't defeat Darius without them all!", "Don not allow Xerxes to close in on you! He will fire a weapon that will destroy you immediately!", and "You must have four electro bombs to defeat Vercingetorix!", that kind of stuff, you know? Sorry to bring this concept up two posts in a row, but it sounds like the kind of advice sitcom characters give each other when they're all temporarily obsessed with some unseen videogame that's never ben mentioned before and will never be mentioned again.

 

Other than all that stuff, the other items worthy of note are two ads in the inside pages of the front and back covers. In the front, there's an ad for a game I've never heard of before: Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme Skiing and Snowboarding, while more intriguing is the ad in the back cover. It shows neither a title nor any screenshots, only a motorcross biker, and the promse od a hot newe Super FX title from Electrobrain, to be announced in the fourth quarter of 1994. I can't find any evidence of this game being released or announced, nor can I find mention of any Motorcross games from Electrobrain on lists of unreleased SNES games.

Other Stuff Monthly #22!

 Though it was unfortunately short-lived, in my opinion, Raijin Comics was the second-best of all the English-language manga magazines (the best was Pulp, obviously). It was a magazine of extremes: some of the series it printed were super-popular, some were obscure works by new creators; some of the series were incredibly violent and masculine, some were very soft slice of life or romance stories. Even shorter-lived though, was its companion magazine, Raijin Games and Anime: a slender bimonthly publication that covered the current otaku culture in Japan at the time.

 

Before either of them came out, though, there was this preview issue with a front cover at both ends. From one side, you saw a preview of the first few manga series that would be running in Raijin Comics, and from the other side, a preview of the kinds of articles that would be running in the aforementioned companion magazine, which was at this point called Fujin Magazine, which is a better name than Raijin Games and Anime, in my opinion. Raijin and Fujin, they always go together, right?

 

So, what kind of stuff's in here? As the cover suggests, there's quite a bit of Sakura Wars coverage, as well as an article about the 2002 Tokyo Toy Show, and a few pages of very expensive-looking action figures. And it wouldn't be an early 00s publication aimed at anime nerds if there wasn't a mention of those overpriced lego minifig knock-offs, Kubricks (and their even worse spin-off Be@rbricks). There's also a look at upcoming games, and anime TV shows and movies. Most of these even got released in the west, eventually!

 

The most interesting article is the one covering the Radio Kaikan building in Akihabara, detailing what kinds of items are sold on each floor. The building has since been demolished and rebuilt, but I'm told it's still full of shops selling nerd stuff. I wonder if it still keeps the same layout described here? Also on these pages are two cosplayers: eighteen-year-old Wakatsuki Sena, who is attending a voice actor school (a quick internet search for her name turns up an AV star, though I don't know if they're the same person), and nineteen-year-old Kikouden Misa, who is "a player of a New Japan catfight league", the meaning of which is a mystery, though again, searching her name brings up a JAV star whose date of birth would put her as being nineteen at the time of this publication.

 

I don't want to go into too much detail on the manga previewed in the other side of the magazine, except to point out that for a few of the lesser-known titles, the few chapters printed in Raijin Comics remain the only English translations they've ever received, without even any fan translations stepping in to finish the job. These include Bow Wow Wata, a charming slice of life/veteranarian story about a teenage boy who can talk to animals, Revenge of Mouflon, a gritty story about an anti-terrorist agent, and Encounter, a series about World Health Organisation agents investigating paranormal phenomena. Encounter was created by a duo working under the pseudonym Sakuya Konohana, one half of which was Nishino Tsugumi, creator of Hanamaru Angels!

 

I still don't have a scanner, so once again, I'll apologise for the low quality photos used in this article. But I hope it was interesting and informative for you. I don't recommend picking up this preview issue specifically, but I do definitely recommend picking up any issues of Raijin Comics that cross your path, and if you're interested in turn-of-the-century otaku culture, then you probably won't regret seeking out Rajin Games and Anime, either.

Other Stuff Monthly #21!

 So, think back a couple of months to the post I wrote about Chibi-Pop Manga magazine, when I said I'd eventually get around to posting about the bilingual self-published manga Hanamaru Angels? That time is here! And, a quick search online earlier today makes me think that I might be the first person to write about this manga in English, which is nice. It's happened plenty of times for games, but it's not so easy with other stuff.

 

Anyway, Hanamaru Angels isn't anything especially original, especially in the nineties: it's a light hearted fantasy story about a trio of massively powerful (but still quite incompetent) students at a magic academy in a fantasy world. Very similar in feel to things like Ozanari Dungeon, Dragon Half, Slayers, and so on. That's not a bad thing, though, that kind of silly TTRPG-flavoured fantasy comedy isn't really around much anymore, replaced by much less appealling isekai power fantasies. The book starts with them breaking into the headteacher's office to change their grades, and quickly escalates into them having to go and save the kingdom from an unsealed demon (and the two adventures are causally linked, surprisingly enough).

 

Though the story as a whole isn't particularly original, there are little bits of originality here and there, and they really make the book and its world shine. Little details like how all the computers are shaped like little desktop dinosaurs with monitors in their bodies, psychic cannons powered by armies of meditating monks, and evil sand, each grain of which is a tiny black hole that sends anything that touches it straight to hell. They really add a lot of charm to the whole story, and it's that cretivity that makes me wish that there was more of Tsugumi Nishino's work available, since they definitely have a lot of imagination and talent. It also makes me wish that the bilingual nature of the main story extended to the two pages of design sketches and notes at the back of the book, too.

 

Anyway, despite the obscure nature of its existence, it's surprisingly easy and inexpensive to get a copy of Hanamaru Angels, and if you're a fan of those many two-to-four episode fantasy OAVs that were so numerous in the nineties, I think it's definitely the kind of thing you'll enjoy. The back cover promises "Action! Suspense! And fun!", and the comic inside delivers on that. Definitely worth seeking out.

Other Stuff Monthly #20!

 Another game from the big boardgame backlog I mentioned in my review of Red Outpost, this time it's Ars Alchimia. It's a translation of a Japanese board game, which is kind of interesting, since it seems like  this doesn't happen as often as I'd like. The same goes for Japanese TTRPGs, too, but that situation is slowly changing (though there are still many many TTRPGs from the 90s and 00s with cool-looking art, and cool-sounding concepts that I don't think we'll ever see in English).

 

Anyway, Ars Alchimia is a worker placement game that follows the players through their four years at alchemy school. Each year, you need to gather ingredients and recipes, employ assistants, and finally use forges to make magical items using alchemy. The big gimmick is that each player has a lot of workers (the exact amount varies based on turn order, the number of players, and some other choices that happen in-game). You see, when you send workers to a location, if there are already workers there, you have to send a larger group of workers there to take it over. Furthermore, you can also send more workers than you need, with the twin benefits of making it more difficult for following players to use the location, and adding to your own dice roll (for getting extra ingredients when gathering, etc.).

 

So, once the players get a hang of it, there is a lot of opportunities for some pretty spiteful play:  for example, if you know that a player that comes after you needs a specific ingredient, you can force them to make a choice between getting that ingredient and having enough workers left over to do other things elsewhere on the board). I think offering these cruel choices is a little more interesting than the dynamic in a lot of worker placement games, where you can just straight up block your opponents from using certain facilities.

 

I don't really have anything negative to say about this game. It's a lot of fun, the inter-player interaction is cool, it moves really fast, even with four players, and there's a lot of very cute and cool artwork on the board and cards. I think it's out of print now (and maybe even the English publisher might have gone out of business), but if you can find a copy of Ars Alchimia, I definitely recommend picking it up. I've only played it a few times at the time of writing, but I think with time, it might come to stand among the likes of Dominion and Istanbul and other all-time favourites!

Other Stuff Monthly #19!

 Around the turn of the century, there was a sudden boom in English translated manga. Fuelled partially by the popularity of various dubbed anime series that were being shown on TV in the UK and US, and partially by a company called Tokyopop pumping out tons and tons of low-priced volumes of series in every genre, it was a time that saw translated manga go from being a niche part of the English comics to the biggest part of it by a long way. Alongside the cheap volumes, there was also a mini-boom of Japan-style manga anthology magazines.

 

It's a shame that there aren't any of these magazines left today, because they were a really nice format, and each magazine had its own identity formed from the kinds of series they'd print, along with the general aesthetic and house style. My favourites were Pulp, which printed a lot of gritty and slightly artsy comics aimed at adults, and Raijin Comics, which stuck most closely to the visual style of Japanese magazines, and had a strange mix of series from well-known creators and stuff by people who'd never been printed in English before. But today, I'm going to talk about a short-lived magazine that I only discovered a few years ago, and seemed to last only a year or two circa 1999-2000: Chibi-Pop Manga.

 

As far as I can tell, this magazine was published by an American comic shop owner, and he took on a business model that I've actually wondered about many times: licensing works from up-and-coming, lesser-known creators, and translating it as cheaply as possible. The most amazing bit of cost-cutting is the way in which one of the series is printed: four shrunken manga pages on each magazine page, fitting a fifteen-page story into five! As well as the manga, the issue I have (vol. 2 #3) also has an error-laden article on the 1999 Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo, and a few pages of cosplay photos, presumably from the same event. Unfortunately, the cosplay photos are printed in black and white and the contrast is terrible, so you can barely see anything in them.

 

So, you're probably wondering by now what series were printed in here, right? Here's the list:
The Twilight Files (Fujiwara & Atsu) - A Twilight Zone-esque weird tales anthology type series, hosted by a nameless person who's been interergrated into an information-gathering computer who tells us in this chapter, two stories of scientists experimenting on humans to try and cheat death.
Nagi: Coastguard 2 (Denjiro) - Appears to be a post-apocalyptic action series? There's a girl with metal manipulation powers fighting a giant robot in a ruined city, at least. There's only a few pages of this, and i'd like to see more.
Artifacts Breaker (Ataru Cagiva) - A shonen action series about marital artists with unique special powers, which I think are the result of human experimentation? Like Nagi, the small taste I have here makes me curious to read more.
Fubuki The Female Ninja (Tsugumi) - A very nineties action comedy about a ninja going to a modern day high school.
Adventures of Tokyo Kid (Tetsu Suzuki) - I have no idea what this is about. Most of the chapter is taken up by a young man and a young woman speaking in his apartment, where he reveals himself to be an inventor.
Trout Burger (Syuntaro Masuki) - This is the series printed in the weird shrunken format, and it's a silly comedy where a fast food restaurant employee foils a pair of bank robbers using a can of disgusting vegetable juice and a giant anti-tank cannon.

 

I admire the amateur enthusiast charm that Chibi-Pop Manga exudes, both in the production of the magazine itself, and in the series printed within, and as mentioned, I am genuinely curious about several of them, and I'd like to see more. Unfortunately, I can find almost no information on the series or the creators. Ataru Cagiva is an exception, and seems to have done a few manga adaptations of videogame RPGs. Tsugumi is the other exception, their full name being Nishino Tsugumi, and their most notable work being a single volume story called Hanamaru Angels, which I think was self-published, and even more interestingly, was a bilingual release! I actually managed to track a copy of Hanamaru Angels down, so I'll review it here at some point in the future.

 

So yeah, that's Chibi-Pop Manga: a clear labour of love for all concerned that unfortunately seems to have been totally forgotten. I enjoyed it, though, and if anyone can offer more information on any of the series listed in this post, please contact me! Also, I apologise for the phone photos, but my ancient scanner has no drivers for Windows 10. Forced Absolecence!

Other Stuff Monthly #18!

 Wow, what a long month it's been! Feels more like eight of them, doesn't it? Anyway, I'm finally able to start getting though the backlog of board games that's built up from Kickstarters and cheap online sales over the past year or so, and as such, I've regained the motivation to make these posts (though having said that, there isn't going to be a sudden string of monthly board game posts. I've got other stuff to cover, too). First up is a game that sat on my shelf for months, the communist-themed worker placement game Red Outpost!

 

Set in an alternate (better?) world where the USSR never ended and ventually made its way to the stars, the players take the role of the people in charge of a newly founded Soviet space colony, telling which workers to go where and at what time. It creates an interesting dynamic, as while you are competing for victory points, resources that might be in seperate player pools in other games, like workers, and the resources they produce, are instead communal. During the game, you get points for instructing workers to produce efficiently, but the big scoring happens after each day (there are two days in a game, and each day is broken down into five phases), when the mood of each worker is assessed, and each player who moved that worker during the day scores points based on both the worker's mood and how many times they moved them.

 

You can improve a worker's mood by sending them to do a job at which they're skilled (send the fisherman to fish, the shepherd to the pasture, and so on), or by giving them time off. Conversely, if you think one player stands to rake in a lot of points from a certain worker, there are also ways to decrease their mood, like sending them to do an ill-fitting job, framing them for stealing from the warehouse, or even having them spend some time in the gulag. So you can try and risk putting all your eggs in one basket for a big payoff at the end, or try and keep a few workers at slightly above-average levels of happiness, or you can concentrate on sabotaging the other players and making their favoured workers unhappy.

 

It took a few turns to really get into the swing of Red Outpost, but once we did, it was a really fun game. I think the Soviet theme really comes through in the game mechanics, and it's also a game with a lot of player interaction and opportunities for aggressive or sneaky play. I'm not sure if they're in the retail version, or if they're Kickstarter only, but the components are also really high quality: differently-shaped wooden meeples and tokens for the workers and resources, player counters with little hammer-and-sickles printed on them, and beautiful painted artwork on the board, too. Altogether, Red Outpost is a really fun game with great theming, and I definitely recommend at least giving it a try if you get the chance.

Other Stuff Monthly #17

 So, I recently remembered a promotional pack of some weird cards that came with a comic I bought as a kid. The cards had awesome fantasy artwork, and a whole bunch of scratch off panels. After a small amount of investigation, I found the thing for which I was looking: Steve Jackson's Battle Cards, a trading card game that had the incredible bad luck to launch a few months before Magic The Gathering came along and pretty much redefined what a trading card game was. Though Battle Cards did have some strange properties that meant it probably wouldn't have lasted long even without that apocalyptic event.

 

The big problem is that it's a trading card game in which each card can only be used once. It's those scratch-off panels, you see: the ones along the bottom of the card and down the sides represent parts of the character's body. To play, two players each take a character card from their collection, and take turns declaring which of their opponent's body parts they're attacking. The opponent scratches off the panel representing that part, and reveals either nothing (showing that the attack missed) or a drop of blood (showing that it hit). After receiving their second wound, and every wound after that, a player must scratch off one of the life panels along the top of the card. There's three of them, and one of them hides a skull and crossbones, which, when revealed indicates death.

 

Having bought a bunch of packs of Battle Cards from ebay, I played a few rounds with my Dungeons and Dragons group. Despite the mechanics of the game relying entirely on luck, we had a pretty fun time. I think it really relies on the atmosphere; as a silly thing to unwind after a D&D session, it's a lot of fun, but it's not something you could ever play seriously. Especially when you take into account that the actual point of the game has been inaccessible since 1994.

 

The point of the game was to collect the special foil treasure cards. You see, these cards weren't available in the packs themselves. When you defeat another player, you actually take their defeated card, and scratch off the "purse" panel in the top right corner of the card. Then, you have to get a trading post card, and scratch off two of the panels on that card, of your choice. If you revealed a number and the name of the treasure, you could then send the trading post card, along with a bunch of other cards whos purses added up to the number shown on the trading post, and they'd send you the treasure you reveald on the trading post.

 

I can see where the designers were coming from with this gimmick: Pogs were very popular, and that was a game often played for keeps. What Battle Cards did was provide an endgame to aim for when playing for keeps, as opposed to just amassing a gigantic stack of cards. On the other hand, I can't see the scratch-off element as being anything other than a cynical attempt at forcing people to endlessly buy cards by making each one single use. It didn't work, of course, the game was such a massive flop that there's still plenty of unopened booster packs for sale online for next-to-nothing. And like I said, if you pick up a few packs, it's a fun and silly way to pass a few minutes with your friends. Plus, the art on all the cards is great, and each one also has a massive wall of lore text on the back!

Other Stuff Monthly #16

 Back in early 2018, I backed a game on Kickstarter called Crypt. It was a fun little dice game about a bunch of scheming princes and princess who want the king's treasure, despite all being left out of his will. When the same people had another campaign in mid-2019 to fund their next game, Afternova, I naturally backed that one, too. Unfortunately, my copy arrived literally the day the Covid-19 lockdown started in the UK, so it sat unplayed on a shelf for a few months. But now I've had a couple of games of it, and it definitely lives up to its predecessor!

 

The game sees the players recruiting various space-faring engineers, to mine planets for different coloured minerals, which in turn are used to build spaceship parts. Some of the spaceship parts add new abilities, like more storage space to store minerals, or getting to draw extra cards at certain times,  while others are just worth victory points at the end of the game. 

 

The real hook of the game is that it can be difficult to recruit  all the engineers you need to mine the planet you want, so you can negotiate with other players, agreeing how to divvy up the planet's yield in exchange for the use of their engineers. So you have to balance out getting the minerals you need, while trying to keep your opponentsaway from all the ones they need. It obviously gets harder to negotiate towards the end of the game, as the game ends when one player finishes six spaceship parts, leaving everyone else one last turn to do score what they can.

 

Playtime is about half an hour, and it goes by pretty quickly. The whole game is a combination of negotiation and resource management (not just the literal resources of the negineers and minerals, but also the space needed to keep them, as you can only hold eight cards and four minerals at a time), and there's very little reliance on luck, so winning or losing does depend on who was the better player that game.

 

I've enjoyed every game I've played so far of Afternova, and it's pretty cheap as far as decent board games go, so I definitely recommend picking it up, as long as you have at least two other people with whom to play it. It's also got a ton of silly animal puns on the engineer cards, which is a nice bonus!