Random Hoo Haasthe blog with the guff

Some comics I read in 2017

Sunday, December 24, 2017 at 12:58 am Comments Off on Some comics I read in 2017

Another year’s about to wrap up, so you know what that means – I write dumb opinions about media I barely remember! I know, I’m sorry too. I’d no intention of doing a full article, and even the abbreviated list for last year was just too boring to go through again… but I still had a whole bunch of dumb opinions on media I barely remembered that needed an outlet. So, hey, let’s talk about some comics I read! If the thought of writing more doesn’t lull me and the audience into a never-ending sleep, expect another post for games and movies too, maybe.

Star Fox (Nintendo Power)

I’d been keen to read this since my big Star Fox kick last year. My early years online drifting around tiny fansites suggested people found it more compelling than the games, portraying a darker and deeper take on Star Fox lore that, most importantly for fanfic writers, gave Fox a girlfriend, Fara Phoenix. (he can’t fuck Wolf and Falco all the time!)

It’s a breezy light-hearted space romp that paints a fun picture of the Star Fox world. I guess to a young audience it might seem slightly mature, what with Fox grieving over his lost parents and hating Andross so much he’s willing to go on a kamikaze mission, forcing Falco to pummel him senseless… but it’s just so breezy it’s hard to see it that way. The dialogue is jokey and full of dreadful puns, and Andross’ goofy schemes undermine any attempt at seriousness, including his Gundam-shaped living-battery android pig assistant, and his brilliant plan to work alongside a clone of himself is foiled when his clone gushes his love for Fox’s gal. It’s a 80-20 skew of cornball and melodrama, and I love it.
(CONTINUED)

Update #4 of 2017

Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 1:00 am Comments Off on Update #4 of 2017

Metal Slug: Missing in Action has some bits and bobs, most notably more early footage and some weird discoveries in Metal Slug 7‘s missing areas.  The Bomberman site has a pile of guff I just wanted out of the way, though Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Bakuretsu Bomberman is worth spotlighting for its sheer strangeness (also hello i’m still looking for issues of dengeki nintendo ds please hook me up), and Super Bomberman 2’s media section because we all need a bit of GamesMaster in our lives.

2017’s been a bit of a blur – so much has happened in the world and so little has happened in my life! It’s weeks away, but I’ll probably tune out for the rest of the month, so I hope everyone has a good December and wish you all have a decent new year.

Have I any plans for Random Hoo Haas next year? Pffft. I barely accomplished my plans for this year! I’d like an excuse to write more guff, be it reviews or blog content or just spewing nonsense out of my mouth that’s hopefully amusing or interesting (though no promise on both counts). As always, the best I can say is I’ll see what happens!

The Justice Pals of Komorebi

Wednesday, October 11, 2017 at 10:53 pm Comments Off on The Justice Pals of Komorebi

Just uploading stuff that should’ve been uploaded months ago!
Metal Slug: Missing in Action has more concept art courtesy of Division å…­‘s lovely scans from Neo Geo Freak. You’re best just browsing the directories to see what’s new, those thumbnails are a nightmare to navigate (and even worse to update!).
Scans & Bits also has some new content, including the City Connection manga, some Animal Crossing, plus more Peach’s Great Adventure, Go-Ketsu Wario and Sonic the Hedgehog.

I’m still writing bits and bobs on the side, though whether it’ll find a home on the site is up in the air. All this documentative gumbo scratches an itch, but I do miss a good all-purpose waffle. Sometime, hopefully!

The fifty-billionth Random Hoo Haas revamp

Monday, August 21, 2017 at 5:51 pm Comments (1)

All that waffling about gaming manga wasn’t for naught – there’s a page for scans now, starting off with some Mario, Sonic and Kirby manga as well as a big pile of research on Dengeki Nintendo DS and Fami2Comic! More cleaned-up stuff will appear in future, but until then you can browse my MEGA for the raw scans.
The Random Hoo Haas main page has also been overhauled a bit, cramming in a new logo, another sidebar and a new page to shuffle all the miscellaneous crap (or Additional Impedimenta if I’m going to stick to my branding) into instead of dumping it all under General Writings. Do people still use site maps? I’ve been real tempted to make one, if only because I’ve no idea how to navigate this site without just browsing the directories. Let me know how you cope and I’ll see if I just turn the front page into a phonebook instead.

Metal Slug: Missing in Action has some odds and sods, including lovely concept art scanned by a site reader (hats off to Division å…­!), and the Bomberman Shrine Place also got a makeover for its front page (with some light coverage on media, merch and the Jetters anime – more to come when I’m not stressing myself to death under self-imposed deadlines!), and now has a full banner on the hub. Now it won’t be taking over Random Hoo Haas’ updates log! (i’ll probably change that hub banner sometime – it was an “it’ll do” job, not one of my best collages)

There’s stuff I had to leave out of these updates that’ll probably come out soon-ish, but we’ll see what happens! Maybe I’ll finally take a break and enjoy some other pursuits instead. One of the two!

Big Guff Power Hour

Saturday, June 17, 2017 at 10:23 pm Comments Off on Big Guff Power Hour

Thanks to a reader submission, we now know there was a level select and sound test hidden inside the first Metal Slug! Now if only we could find a way of loading different objects – looking at those test stages shows some curious object behaviours I didn’t notice before. I’m also testing the waters to see if SNK really do poach my updates for Metal Slug Attack fodder. I’m not crazy, I swear.

The Bomberman site got a lot more stuff, but I couldn’t tell you if any of it is worth looking at; I just got tired of sitting on them until I had a bigger, fancier update to bundle them with.

More talkin’ ’bout manga peeps won’t care about

Sunday, May 7, 2017 at 1:39 pm Comments (2)

I don’t want to make this a routine, but you might have guessed (because I’ve become incredibly predictable ever since I exchanged my personality for nerd-ass obsessions) I bought another Japanese gaming magazine for the sole Bomberman comic in it: the August 2007 issue of Fami2Comic.

It’s kind of interesting comparing this to the Dengeki Nintendo I also acquired for the same silly reason; despite being an offshoot of Famitsu, the hot shot magazine whose reviews were taken as gospel for years until people realised, huh, they sure do like bribes, don’t they, Fami2Comic feels like the definition of “second-stringer”. You look at that other blog post and the games its manga were based off, and there wasn’t a game there that wasn’t some manner of international success. Fossil Fighters probably ranked higher than Bomberman during that period in terms of awareness and popularity! (during that comic’s run there was only ONE Bomberman game on shelves… in Japan, Europe and Australia only. welp!) There are four years between the two issues, mind – Dengeki’s lineup might’ve been trash when this one came out for all I know.
I thought it’d be amusing to do another quick looksie at the manga Fami2Comic has to offer, and it’s probably the only spotlight they’ll be getting on the English internet anytime soon, so why the heck not.
(CONTINUED)

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.
(CONTINUED)

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!
(CONTINUED)

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.