Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

Talkin’ ’bout manga peeps don’t know about

Saturday, April 8, 2017 at 2:25 pm Comments (1)

I’ve been buying an obscene amount of crap from Japan the past few months. Most of it is “research material” (Bomberman books, natch), but I also pick up toys, manga, magazines and other doodads; whatever I can get away with saying “it’s for the website, honest!”
Some of the most interesting buys are magazines, if just for the sheer variety of content in them. I may have bought four issues of Gamest just for the prototype Metal Slug coverage in them, but they’re full of great arcade games I’ve never even seen before. Likewise, I picked up an 1986 edition of CoroCoro Comic just for the rare City Connection manga in it, but there’s stacks of bizarre crap in it like old toy ads, Famicom Rocky, and an short-lived manga that’s never been collected anywhere else, Solar Dog Zero (太陽犬ゼロ). I’ve been sliiiightly tempted to track down the rest of it, but I’m juggling enough foolish endeavours as it is. (a Bomberman website, really?!?)

One of my current focuses is trying to track down all the Bomberman manga, seven of which have never been collected into volumes of any sort, so I have to track them down in the original anthologies or magazines. I picked up an issue of Dengeki Nintendo DS recently (which you’ll probably know the name of if you’re in the Pokémon scene, it’s usually plundered for screens and reveals when a new game is announced) just for the Bomberman story in it, but I was surprised by the number of game-related mangas inside, most of them I’d never even known of before! Full-page A4-sized manga, too!
I thought I’d look them up and see how many are catalogued or even recognised on English fansites. Doing so only made me angry. There’s nada! Not a blip of information on most of ’em! It’s like they don’t even exist! (which is a bit understandable when only one of them got a collected edition) So just for a larf, I want to spotlight the manga in Dengeki Nintendo DS’ March 2011 issue and take note of what coverage they have online.

Hoshi no Kirby: Pupupu Hero
星のカービィプププヒーロー

A cheery bit of light-hearted Kirby fluff; in this story, Kirby teams up with Mr. Frosty against Dedede in a downhill bobsleigh race, though Lololo and Lalala block their path with an icecube maze. Kirby also makes these horrible kissy lips whenever he sucks stuff up and I hate it.
This ran from January 2008 to May 2013 [src], before reviving in Dengeki Bazooka!! as Hoshi no Kirby: Ultra Star Deluxe (星のカービィ ウルトラスーパーデラックス) for a run lasting October 2014 to April 2016. [src] It was also lucky enough to get its complete Dengeki Nintendo run collected in two volumes, though good luck finding them!

Kirby fansites have barely acknowledged this – Kirbytraum has a button for it but no link or info yet – though given how there’s eleventy-billion manga out there I can’t blame them. However, @hitotsunoneko‘s fansite Masked Knight steals the show – not only has it got scans of ten of the stories, it even has fan-translations for the first seven! This is a really good start for online recognition, but it’s gonna go downhill from here.
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ONM Remembered is OVER!!!

Sunday, March 26, 2017 at 12:31 am Comments (2)

Over five hundred entries over the course of nearly five years. I, uh, honestly wasn’t expecting this silly little column to run for that long! Somebody should probably have intervened.

Like I said all the way at the beginning, the idea to scan these came about as a first step to finally chucking the old things out… and all this time later, even after moving house, they’re still lying around. I think this column only made me more attached to the stupid things! They’re funny little relics, game magazines; a more tangible step into the past than the Wayback Machine can ever amount to, when people were hyped as hell over totally forgotten games or had no better ways of expressing their ill-conceived anger than writing it on paper and putting it in a letterbox. I could wax nonsense about “simpler times” but I’ve been putting off this epilogue for weeks – months, even! – and the last thing I need is more beating about the bush.
Official Nintendo Magazine and its ilk were a lot of fun to look back on, and I think it’s given me a complex about archiving old magazines now, so thanks for that. ONM Remembered was also a fun exercise in writing scheduled content and admittedly getting blood from a stone at times, but I tried to keep it a breezy mish-mash of content that hopefully didn’t get too by-the-numbers. Feel free to tell me how wrong I was.
On the subject of speaking your mind, what’s the verdict? Is scheduled blog content something you want to see more of, or do you prefer Random Hoo Haas when crap just shows up whenever? Not that I’m in a rush to go starting even more projects, but let’s throw the suggestion into the void, why not.

Hey! Metal Slug: Missing in Action updated! The crux of its new content is scans from old game magazines; how’s that for thematic relevance! I also finally finished off Some Games I Played in 2015 so you can read about how dismal Brilliant Bob is. I still have placeholder images in there, but I’m tired. I’ll replace them later.

Some games I played in 2016

Saturday, December 31, 2016 at 2:58 pm Comments Off on Some games I played in 2016

Wow, I’m punctual for once in my life! I admit after 2015 (which should be finished sometime soon-ish) I realised I’m running out of opinions even I could be bothered reading, so I figured a blog post with a few lines for each game would be enough. If there’s a game I really need to waffle about in detail, I’ll probably find an outlet for it, but until then, read on!
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Blast away and go, go, go!

Thursday, December 29, 2016 at 1:35 pm Comments Off on Blast away and go, go, go!

Cramming it in before the new year, it’s a new Metal Slug: Missing in Action update! The real meat and potatoes is the overhauled concept art coverage, now serving as an art gallery for each game and sporting translations for a number of pieces, revealing factoids English fans otherwise never knew about. Or at least, it’s on a website now and not some long-buried forum post. It’s also made me realise we’ve been calling Duke Koudou “Parker” because that’s what Enomosiki called him all those years ago on the Metal Slug Database, and nobody’s thought to question it. Hmph!

I’ve probably said it before, but I’d like to include more general purpose Metal Slug information in the future, like a characters page, vehicle information, mission walkthroughs and other factoids – and try my best to cite sources on everything! I’d actually wanted this to be the first baby step towards that with a characters page, but I’d rather have something presentable than another horribly unfinished page lying around. Sometime, maybe! Until then you can check out the Metal Slug Wiki and ignore like 80% of what it says. Gimlet’s hobby certainly isn’t farting, I can tell you that for free.

Can you escape from Robotnik’s island of traps?

Saturday, October 22, 2016 at 11:44 am Comments (2)

Here’s a pile of stuff – so much stuff I’m going to bust out some bulletpoints! It’s probably unnecessary, but what the heck!

• The Legend of Zelda playthrough is finally finished! Well, I completed the game last year and only wrote a conclusion this week. I’m bad at being punctual.

• Some Games I Played In 2015 is a thing. It’s still unfinished, but I figured there’s enough waffling in there to put it up early.

• I dug up some unused graphics from SegaSonic Arcade. I also have no idea where you find this page. It’s buried in General Writings somewhere, right?

• Metal Slug: Missing in Action has some odds and sods, mostly for the first game.

• And the Totally Bombastic Bomberman Shrine Place pretends it has an update because it’d feel sad if it were left out.

I feel like I’ve said this multiple times by now (I last said it only six months ago!), but ONM Remembered will be wrapping up in a few months, probably around March. Only when it’s nearing the end do I realise there was stuff I wanted to highlight or topics I wanted an excuse to talk about! Ah well. It’s not like I have a blog where I can waffle about anything whenever I want.
I admit the schedule system is a double-edged sword – it’s rewarding to know I’ve got some form of content lined up for months ahead, but the unrelenting nature of its output is probably tough for folks to keep up with; I know if I weren’t writing it I’d find it hard to keep up. I haven’t checked on GameWTFs in ages because it’s like, crap, I missed a month! That’s gonna be a lot to catch up on! So rather than just popping in now and then or working my way backwards or something, I put it off until I have time to binge-read my way from where I left off to now… which only gets more monumental with each missed update. Someday, I swear!
The thought of doing more scheduled blog content in future sounds nifty, probably just a bi-weekly ramble on some topic or another. But that also sounds like hard work so I wouldn’t count on it.

That’s another thing – I meant to take a break from the site this year! I though it’d do me good to just focus on new projects and not worry about deadlines or pleasing an invisible audience… but then working on new projects was just too weird and stressful when farting about with Bomberman research is so much easier. I have bizarre comfort zones.
I always have stuff I’d like to be working on for the site: there’s plenty of Bomberman stuff I want to cover, which would also give me fodder for Random Action Hour. There’s some games I’d love to gush about; I’d like a hub for my game playthrough videos; I’m itching to give the place another makeover… but I’d also like to make time for other crap I wanna do.
I’m pretty sure I said the exact same thing last year and nothing came of that, but I like the illusion of giving myself options.

Until the next update!

All I know is my own existence.

Saturday, July 16, 2016 at 10:48 pm Comments Off on All I know is my own existence.

There’s a few small pokey updates for the Bomberman Shrine and Metal Slug: Missing in Action. Don’t mind me, I’m just chucking up updates when I feel I’ve noodled long enough on something. I’m still otherwise farting about like I usually do!

Please consume my wares.

Saturday, May 21, 2016 at 9:30 pm Comments Off on Please consume my wares.

Chucking up some game reviews because it’s been a while since I’ve used the blog for bloggin’! That and I forgot how bare some of the ONM Remembered entries were. I finally began to highlight images without commentary to spare myself the trouble and hope it’d give the image some time to be appreciated… but it just looks like lazy content. Welp! The next couple of weeks are a bit wordier, talking about topics that are probably only interesting to me and nobody else. That’s what you come here for, right?
… anyway, here’s a rambly review.

A few years ago my brother was raving about Treasure Adventure Game, a freeware indie 2D platform game that just ticked all his boxes: it had a huge world to explore, all sorts of little details and activities to appreciate, a day-night system that dictated each NPC’s daily routine, and the simple thrill of just riding around in a boat. It was darn-near his favourite game! I didn’t get into it at the time (because jeez, unskippable intros, what a bore!), but I picked it up earlier this year to give it a look-see.
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“Well he’s had his ups, he’s had his downs, he’s had his smiles, he’s had his frowns…”

Sunday, May 1, 2016 at 11:23 am Comments Off on “Well he’s had his ups, he’s had his downs, he’s had his smiles, he’s had his frowns…”

ONM Remembered’s up and running and will run on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Updates will come when I’ve got something to update with! I usually post something about potentially upcoming whatnots on Twitter, which is currently more Bomberman guff, animated Bomberman guff, old anime flicks and usually a botched joke I’ll delete in ten minutes because that stuff’s easier to live with when it’s on a website nobody looks at.

… in the meantime, who wants to read a dozen paragraphs about Limbo?
(CONTINUED)

Indy Bomber and the Ring of Wishes

Thursday, April 14, 2016 at 8:29 pm Comments Off on Indy Bomber and the Ring of Wishes

Splurge! Metal Slug: Missing in Action’s got some relics from the first game’s development, plus some unfinished areas from Metal Slug 7. The Bomberman shrine has coverage for GB 2 and the DS game. As for Random Hoo Haas, there’s the penultimate chapter of the Zelda playthrough, and some waffling about the rest of the guff I watched in 2014.

ONM Remembered will also resume by the end of the month, updating Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, so I’ll probably use that as an opportunity to take a hike. I’m pretty sure this run will be the final leg for ONM, but I might unearth more stuff that just needs colour commentary, who the heck knows! I hope it remains enjoyable to read and not a horrible stopgap measure between updates!

Give a squid a home

Monday, March 7, 2016 at 11:06 pm Comments (7)

No cash prize to hand out, I’m afraid – I went and found the unused Metal Slug Advance areas myself. There’s still a debug menu and a Slug Mariner to find, though, so if anyone in the audience has the hacking chops to find them, what are you waiting for?!

The past couple of weeks have been rough, full of work, stress and regrets. Still, it’s good to find the time to bust open MS Paint and make some fresh garbage. Thanks for sticking around, folks.