Wars Not Make One Geek

Not a complicated day yesterday. I worked on my comic until around 6pm, then I went to Tim's where he and I figured out how to download Yoda for the Playstation 3 version of Soul Calibur 4--Yoda was a character previously only available to X-Box users. So now Darth Vader and Yoda can fight each other, which is chicken soup for the nerd soul.

Yoda seems to be immune to throw moves because he's so short. He bounds around and summersaults the way he does in the prequel movies, and he seems very happy. He looks almost as good as he does in those movies, too. In fact, all the Star Wars characters look better in Soul Calibur 4 than they do in any of the Star Wars games--and the Clone Wars cgi series, for that matter. Even The Apprentice, the character from Star Wars: The Force Unleashed who wields a lightsabre quite ridiculously like a tonfa, looks and fights better in Soul Calibur 4 than in his native game.

I haven't played The Force Unleashed, though, so maybe I shouldn't judge, except it looks like all of its best features are borrowed from Jedi Academy. And at least in that game you didn't have to hold your lightsabre backwards. Seriously, what the hell?

I actually quite liked the tenth episode of Battlestar Galactica's second season, which I watched last night. The tension between the crews of the Pegasus and the Galactica is by far one of the best things to happen on the show. Both sides are being motivated by feelings neither quite understands yet. This shit's gold. If they just forget about the Tomb of Athena and finding Earth, I totally won't mind. The only thing that could make it better would be Sean Bean guest starring. No-one does virtuous inner torment like Sean Bean.

I watch Battlestar Galactica while eating dinner, and I've been watching Revolutionary Girl Utena while eating breakfast. I watched the eighteenth episode of that series to-day, and like many good anime series, Utena starts off as something conforming to a lot of peoples' preconceptions of anime and then gets really fucking weird. I'm on a story arc now called "The Black Rose Duellists" which concerns some seemingly half dream-like story of 44 male students who killed themselves and people who are hypnotically drawn to the dormitory of the dead students when they have one-sided or somewhat perverse sexual designs on another character (so far it's been incest, misplaced jealousy, and a ten year-old's desire to have sex with a sixteen year old). The people going to the dormitory are shown sitting in an elevator going down and explaining their problems and desires like job applicants. They're given black rose rings which allow them to draw swords from the chests of their objects of desire, an action which all the characters rather unambiguously regard as sexual. And then, of course, they have to fight Utena. All this from a former director of Sailor Moon.