Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai (Haganai) Review
The setting is a fairly typical one, a high school transfer student, Kodaka, is trying to make friends. While being a transfer student is enough of a problem, that is overshadowed by the fact that he is believed to be a delinquent due to his blonde hair, which apparently is a big deal in Japan. Mulling through the monotony of his school life, he happens upon another character, Yozora, who appears to be talking to herself. Kodaka finds that rather than talking to herself, she is talking to her imaginary friend. Upon deliberating their situation, Yozora decides that the best solution to their dilemma is to start their own club for people who don't have many friends.
Having hair that looks like a tasty treat is a bad thing.
From here on, they amass several more members, all of which are female... well most of them. Each member fits a stereotypical female anime role, tsundere, pervert, otaku, etc. This leads to some comical interactions between them, and of course some of the best moments are during the obligatory beach, pool, and festival episodes.
IT'S A TRAP!
Haganai's animation quality is quite good as is the design of the characters. The OP in terms of musical quality is about average, it is filled with fanservice, but isn't noteworthy otherwise. The ED is about on par with the OP's music, that being about normal.
Haganai takes the tried and true ideas from anime and does a relatively good job at doing so. A somewhat interesting and comical story is to be had. What it falls short on is actually coming up with anything unique. It is a mess of tropes and and otaku fanfare.
Harem type anime isn't really everyone's cup of tea, but if it is, you will not be disappointed by Haganai.
Verdict = Try
Could there seriously be a person named Soap?
Images taken from Nichijou (Episode 5), minus Soap Mactavish.
Osu! The crazy clicking rhythm game
Not too long ago I came across a rather odd, Japanese-style rhythm game called Osu! I could explain the premise of the game myself, but an excerpt from their site should suffice.
osu! gameplay is based on a variety of popular commercial rhythm games. While keeping some authentic elements, osu! adds huge customisation via skins/beatmaps/storyboarding, online rankings, multiplayer and boasts a community with over 100,000 active users! Play the way you want to play, with your own music, and share your creations with others.
Source
It's a bit like audiosurf in that all you are using is the mouse; however, the game plays completely different. It is based around "beatmaps", which contain the audio as well as some sort of visual element (pictures or video). I myself still can't really get past playing the easy and normal difficulty beatmaps, and they get much more challenging than that.
I found the game to be quite entertaining and would recommend it to anyone looking for a "different" kind of rhythm game. Also it's completely free, so you have nothing to lose in trying it out.
The site has been redone again (for the nth time)
So yeah... I highly doubt that anybody has been visting this website as of late anyways, but in the rare case that someone has noticed, I have moved servers (again). Things will be broken for a period of time as I actually muster up enough motivation to do something at least relatively useful with the site. For now, it's a personal site/blog thing with (hopefully) more posts and content to come.