The Design Brilliance of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

Halloween is approaching.  Everyone is getting out their costumes, setting up the spooky decorations and watching classic horror movies.  It’s also the time some gamers take to play their favorite scary games, as well as October-themed specials going on for games like Killing Floor and Team Fortress 2.

But for a lot of us, the scares are what we’re looking for.  Now’s the time to play the classics like Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, Silent Hill 2, System Shock 2 or Amnesia.

This year I have a recommendation on another horror game.  I’ve already gone over how Clock Tower is the scariest game ever made, but this year I’m taking a moment to appreciate the aspects of a classic horror game that don’t contribute to the horror.

The 100-Post Milestone

2 years ago I created the Shonen Otaku Corner as a way to share my writing and love of fictional media.  Starting with my very first post ever on the second season of Yu Yu Hakusho I've written many game and anime (mostly game) feature stories that have given me excellent practice, strong examples of my skills and at least some recognition.  With over 50,000 page views and some posts shared on official and fan Facebook pages, I'm modestly proud at how this blog has turned out.

I wasn't sure what I could do for something as special as my 100th post.  Different online personalities have done them in different ways (Linkara's rant on Spider Man: One More Day for his 200th comes to mind).  But my reviews and articles come on a case-by-case basis, and I didn't have anything planned for my 100th post.

So instead of a new review or the second part of the Mortal Kombat post, I thought I'd make this 100th post special by making it about the thoughts and processes that go into my writing instead of the end result.  Specifically, the three big projects you can see in the tabs at the top of the page and how they came into being.

The Day the Fun Ended: The End of Saturday Morning Broadcasting

It is with an extremely heavy heart that I write this.

At noon today, The Vortexx, the very last Saturday Morning children's broadcasted programming block, will air its very last show ever with Yu-Gi-Oh Zexal, and the very last Saturday morning kid's block will be gone.

Ever since I was a kid up to this day I watched Saturday morning shows religiously.  I've seen every incarnation of the two channels over the years: Kids WB, Fox Kids, the Fox Box, 4KidsTV, the CW4Kids, Toonzai and the Vortexx were all some of the biggest things I looked forward to for the weekend.  I even watched the Vortexx from my apartment complex every morning when I went to college.  Said complex even held an event where everyone got together to eat breakfast and watch the Vortexx.

Fighting Game Camps: Mortal Kombat: Part 1

You may have noticed that the fighting games I’ve looked over thus far have all been from Japan.  The truth is, Japan has the heaviest focus in making fighting games nowadays.  There have been a few more western-made fighting games in recent years, like the new Killer Instinct and Skullgirls, but the only western fighting game franchise that has managed to stick around consistently is one of the first: Mortal Kombat.

The King of Fighters-i 2012 Review

Back in my retrospective of The King of Fighters 13 I briefly touched on The King of Fighters-i 2012. At the time I only knew some of the details about it from associates who owned it, but having gotten an iPhone of my own I’ve gotten much deeper into it to allow for a full review.

[Note that The King of Fighters-i is the name of the iPhone version of the game.  The Android version is titled The King of Fighters Android, and as far as I can tell it is the same exact game.]

An update from their previous app game simply titled The King of Fighters-i, KOFi 2012 is a portable app version of the core of KOF 13, the installment tied with 11 as my favorite in the series.  Even though I was looking forward to playing a portable KOF 13, I set my expectations a little low.  I had difficulty playing KOF ‘97 back when I played it on my sister’s iPhone, and porting a multi-gigabyte HD game to an app without cutting a good amount of content seemed like wishful thinking.

To my surprise, even though compromises were indeed made, KOFi 2012 is an extremely impressive replication of the KOF 13 experience that’s fun regardless of whether or not you’ve played the console edition.