Carnival Phantasm

The property Type Moon teased back in February finally has its own website.

It’s an OVA, and the first disc will be out in the middle of August.

From the cast list, it’s a mashup of Fate/stay night and Melty Blood (and I say that because it’s got characters Tsukihime lacked but Melty Blood did not; it also doesn’t have Avenger, so it’s not drawing from Fate/hollow ataraxia); the character designs look like they drew heavily from those Eri Takenashi (famous for her manga/anime series Kannagi) did for Take-Moon.

A closer look at the staff and cast page says that the source material are the games Tsukihime, Kagetsu Tohya (the sequel to Tsukihime), Fate/stay night, Fate/hollow ataraxia, Melty Blood, and the Take-Moon anthology comics. So Avenger might show up, after all.

The characters all look to be played by the voice actors who’ve portrayed them in the past, so no new surprises there (I only skimmed the list, though).

And now if you don’t know anything about visual novels, anime, or the absolutely bizarre method Japanese game producers use to name their products (there’s no rhyme or reason that I can tell; if it sounds cool and foreign, they’ll use it, whether it makes sense or not), you should be completely confused.

Winds of Madness

Resident Evil 5, the most recent entry in the long-running survival horror series, is more of an action game than a strict survival horror title. For the most part, ammo isn’t in short supply, and Chris Redfield (our hero™) isn’t alone; he’s got a sidekick.

I didn’t play any of the other games, but when I heard that RE5 would have a co-op mode, I bought it and played through the whole thing online with one of my friends.

The action was pretty good; the zombies weren’t too plentiful (not until you jacked the difficulty level up, at least), and it wasn’t nearly as racist as critics made it out to be.

Sure, you play a lily-white commando guy sent to Africa to clean up the after-effects of a zombie-creating supervirus. Sure, most of the infected guys are black (hey, it’s in Africa). But a zombie game (or film) set in Africa that didn’t feature black zombies would have been bizarre.

Redfield isn’t slaughtering indiscriminately; he’s killing ZOMBIES. He doesn’t care that they’re black; in RE4, hordes of Spanish-speaking European zombies were slain, and that didn’t raise allegations of racism. No one cared when hundreds of white zombies (no, not that one) were killed in the other games.

They’re ZOMBIES. Who cares if they’re scientists, or commandos, or Raccoon City residents, or Europeans, or spear-chucking Africans…

Okay, maybe it’s just a little bit racist.

Defining ‘violent felony’ down

At the Supreme Court.

Yes, running from the cops is now a violent felony. Does this mean that they’ll send SWAT teams on chases? Or to kick in the doors of people who evade capture?

The NYT says, “The law defines violent felonies as including burglary, arson and other ‘conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.'”

That seems vague and overbroad, ripe for exploitation by that bane of the rule of law, prosecutorial discretion.

Quote of the Indeterminate Time Interval – Robert M. Gates

Speaking to NATO, the Defense Secretary said (H/T Althouse),

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.

Hear, hear!