Evidence #30: Thanksgiving Chirashi Special

I know its been months since there was any activity on this site, that's in part of me being busy with school and work stuff since my last post. I do have something special to show up on Thanksgiving, and that is some Chirashi posters from a contributor. Doug Orlowski from OldSchoolOtaku.com forums was cool enough to scan some of these posters to use on this blog, which I have had on my hard drive for a few months now. He even did a post about them on the OSO forums for you guys to check out. So I figured I will finally make good use of them on the blog and scan them up for you guys to see. Doug has been telling me hes got more stuff to contribute to the site, which means you might see more from him in the future than me, but we'll see about that. In the meantime, enjoy what I have to offer, and give thanks to those around you.

Download .pdf HERE! (Total size: 76.4mb)

Evidence #29 - Animage Vol. 54 (December 1982)

Download PDF Here!

(Size: 376mb)

When it comes to anime magazine collecting, Animage seems to be the top tier in any anime fans collection when it comes to print media. Well, i'm here to present one of the handful of Animage issues I own from the lot of magazines I purchased from Tim Eldred last summer, and I figured with a catchy sub-title like "How to Enjoy T.V-Anime," I figured this might pertain to some anime fans out there.

This is a pretty cool issue, and set up in the same format like My Anime, with smaller booklet style pages to see fan art, manga, and interviews and articles within them. From what I saw, this has a nice write up on mecha shows from 1982 that you can enjoy with stuff on Yamato, Macross, Space Adventure Cobra, Baxinger, Dougram and many more.There is also some cool stuff on Crusher Joe, God Mars, and Urusei Yatsura. Also at the end of the issue, there is a Nausicaa manga in the back which came out 2 years before the film did, so that's a treat for any Miyazaki fan to see. So, get the file for yourself and enjoy.

In terms of a life update, i'm on summer break from school and looking forward to my final year at university (funny right, seems that as long as this blog has been going on, i've been in school the entire time). I should also mention that yours truly has an official IMDB credit, since I have been working on the Otaku no Video Kickstarter Blu-ray release starting from last summer, and I have kept my lips (mostly) sealed on that to be a surprise. I am credited for video editing, since I made a few music videos that can be seen when you try and enter in your SMOO code on the heart icon on the blu-ray menu. This post from Walk of Darkness has some of the codes listed to see mine and another video editors work in that menu, so check it out if you happen to have that blu-ray and didn't know what it was for! Things are well for the girlfriend and I, my car still runs, its stupid hot in South Carolina this time of year, and this is where things get even hotter for this election year in America. So I will part by telling you guys that I will always "give it to you" with more artifacts from the past, so see you next time!

Evidence #28 - Snatcher Sega CD Booklet (1994)

Download .pdf HERE! (Total Size: 29.5 mb)

This post is basically here to be as something to fill in some content before my next magazine scan comes out in due time. So for this time, I decided to post up my Snatcher booklet (and game) from the US Sega CD release.

Aside from collecting video game magazines and other anime merch, I also have amassed a collection of video games and console systems, most notably Sega systems and games. The one game in particular I decided to focus on for this post is my own copy of Snatcher on the Sega CD. Even when I first bought this game second hand at a local game store, it was already worth money at the time, which was roughly about $100 bucks. As of now, this game is fetching for over $500 bucks on ebay, and I am not sure if it's gonna go any higher than that or not in the next couple of years. The reason why I decided to do a blog post on this game, is the fact that I want to archive for myself and those that follow this site a very prized possession for me that i'm now ready to part with. 

I'll get to my reason for parting with this game in a minute, but I want to add in the brief history of how I got this game, which goes back to the end of February 2008 when I was getting out of one of my programming class at Wake Technical College near Raleigh N.C. I had a buddy of mine Mitch who worked at the local Play n' Trade game store, which was a franchise business that were coming about across the country for anyone wanting to "live the dream" in owning their very own gaming store. It was in a conversation while I was headed to my car that he told me the store got a huge trade in on Sega CD games, and he rambled some titles off to me. Within him talking about games I was already interested in, the world seemed to stop for a moment when he muttered from his lips "... Snatcher... ," which prompted me to lose my mind at that moment.

I had always wanted to own a copy of Snatcher since I got into collecting console gaming after I got out of high school in 2005, and especially starting to collect rare games on a Sega Saturn I bought back in 2006 from a local ma and pa game store near my house. Snatcher was starting to become a game that collectors were starting to go out and hunt around for, which for me I wouldn't know where to begin finding a good copy in the wild, other than flea market gamers that sold everything at ebay prices, before that seemed to be the common trend among independently owned games stores a few years later. 

At that moment, Mitch gave me the phone number to the store, and I hopped in my junker of a Mercury Sable to head over to the Garner N.C. Play n' Trade store. Upon calling the store, I asked what games they had left on Sega CD, and the store clerk (which I believed was one of the owner sons who worked there, the manager Joe, or some other employee) started to tell me the titles. As soon as the word "Snatcher" rang through the earpiece of my phone, I told the clerk to hold that game till I got there, which was about 10 minutes later. I was also told the price of the game, which probably made the luckiest guy in the world with a steal that no one to this day is gonna get, a price of $4.99. 

So, long story short, I got there, got my game in amazement, picked up a couple of others (which you will find on the last page of the .pdf file) and rubbed it in their faces on what a steal I got something like this for. Of course both the employee and the owner never bothered to check ebay and price the game off the site before I got there, which I realized that I probably shouldn't have done that in order to not get them any ideas down the road. But hey who cares, people picked up on that later. This was a store that I worked for for about a month a couple of months later, and got fired for some stupid BS reasons. All in all, that was years ago, and once in a blue moon I might stop by and say hi whenever im up in Raleigh.

So a little over 8 years since I first threw down the cash to get this piece of gaming history, I have decided that I would like to go ahead and cash in on my investment coming up at Animazement. What lead me to my decision is the fact that I don't feel the same way about holding onto the game as I used too. It took me a couple of years after buying Snatcher to sit down and play the game over a weekend through my first play through. As of a few hours ago, it was my second time beating the game, which took me about a week or so playing an hour or so at a time. The time gap between my first play through and my second might have been 5 or so years. I can say that by playing this game a second time, i'm good with my experiences with Snatcher, and I feel that it's time to let someone else have it.

The thing is, games are meant to be played, and to be played as long as possible till something happens where they cannot be played anymore. I feel that having a game like this on myself just sitting there collecting dust takes away the joy of the game from someone who would be dying to play it and to have it in their own collection. Snatcher isn't the first rare game I have sold from my collection, because I have been gradually selling games from my shelf that don't mean that much to me anymore, and I wan't someone else to to try it out. Snatcher is a great collectors item for any gamer to have, and I feel that i'm not worthy to hold onto it anymore, when someone out there will probably get more joy putting it in their collection. What lead me to this mindset of letting go was an ANNCast episode back last year, that had guest talking about giving away the things they collect that don't mean much to them the more, as they have aged and grown up as people over the years. 

There are certain things in my collection that I want to hold onto, and others I will eventually get around to letting go. The thing with collecting is that you hold onto an item that has a personal meaning for you at one point, then once you feel that you can let go of it (and make back more money than what you paid for it), that's where someone else can come in and own it for their collection. Collecting games for me was a passion at one point in my life, and it might still be there, but for now i'm ready to part with some of the things in my room. I also feel that if something happened to them, there is a loss that is too much to keep up with in case something happened to them. The more you collect to collect, the more the uniqueness and passion of collecting starts to leave you, and you are stuck with items filling to the brim and no space to put them. 

This post might come off as personal, because it does. Other than using this blog as a way to share my collection of printed anime medium, I can also use it as a means to express how I feel about the things I scan and my history behind them. In this .pdf, there are scans of the booklet with nice character illustrations, a manga that tells the beginning of the game story, and some other unique information about the game. I think by scanning it, its a documented memory of an item i'm letting go, while still keeping the details to what I owned as a record for public access for those who want to see it for themselves. To me, that means more than physically owning it, and I can be content with that. I don't write on this site much, so I figured I can do some good writing now and then to put something up on here. 

Also to add, I will put in links for the Youtube videos for people reading this site can watch my game play of the game, and my stupid commentary in it as well. Which hey, if you don't like that, go watch one of the 1000 other Snatcher Let's Play videos out there that may suit your fancy. But with that being said, I think I have written what I wanted to say about the game and what I meant to me before passing it down, in exchange for cash. I will get a anime mag post up in due time, so catcha round!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Final

Evidence #27: My Anime Magazine (1982, Vol.12)

Well, I am once again late for my own celebration...

Download .pdf HERE! (Total Size: 309 mb)

I did what I told myself last year I wouldn't do again, and that was post after February to mark the 5th anniversary of this blog. Maybe... I won't do that again, but we'll see about that. 

This time I have a treat for you guys, since we are moving away from American publications and onto actual Japanese publications of anime magazines. I got an handful of Animage and My Anime from Tim Eldred back in the summer, and I have been planning on posting one of those issues up on the site for sometime, so I figured I would make this occasion special. This issue is chock full of anime that was running in 1982, like Fang of the Sun Dougram, Future Police Urashiman, God Mars, a piece on Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, Space Runaway Ideon, Space Adventure Cobra, something on Crusher Joe, and a ton more from that time. That only makes up half of it, since the later consist of content around Space Battleship Yamato, anime staff interviews, and a whole lot more to boot. This is a true time capsule going back 34 years at this point. If you happen to like what you see and want to translate any of it for tumblr use or whatever, go right ahead. If you do, let me know since I'm curious on what it says too. So enjoy this latest treasure from the past.

Nothing huge in terms of life updates, still with my girlfriend, still in school, still planning on going to the same anime conventions that I do (Anime Weekend Atlanta is on the radar, and I am in the process of working on panel submissions for them), that's about it. There is one thing I would like to mention, but that will have to come when the release of Otaku no Video comes out to the people who backed it, so hopefully I will remind myself to say something about that in the next upcoming post. In the meantime, Riding Bean Kickstarter got funded in 2 hours, which I'm planning on having a part in working on that. Sorry for not keeping my promise, maybe there's next year eh?

Evidence #26: Newtype USA Vol. 3 No. 2 (Feb 2004)

Download .pdf HERE! (Total size: 940mb)

I'd figure I would do a post to bring in the new year of 2016, and to also break that 3 or so month silence I usually do for content downtime. This was something I have been wanting to scan since I started this blog almost 5 years ago, and its high time some of these issues see the light of day. There is also a bit of history I can add for my first ever posting of a Newtype USA magazine, so here it goes.

Newtype USA was my second time seeing an American anime magazine, but was the first magazine I stayed with for a year and half before eventually losing interest. When I started to get into anime in 2002, Newtype magazine (especially the issues in Japan) always fascinated me to always check it out and to own, but to this day I never have acquired a single issue. But to my surprise, I heard that in America we were going to get our own Newtype magazine, so I was pretty surprised at first. So once a month, I would take part of my lawn care money and put towards getting the next monthly issue of Newtype from my local Borders bookstore in Cary, North Carolina (which today I think stands as a fitness gym of some kind in its place). I never did a subscription to Newtype because to my 16 year old understanding, it was ideal for me to get an issue every month with the money I had on hand than to pay for a year subscription I couldn't afford at the time.

Newtype USA opened my world up in giving me variety on whats out there that would interest me. The issues would do small write ups on episode synopsis of shows airing in Japan, DVD's and video games coming out, model kit and toy reviews, nice size glossy printed posters and postcards and some good write ups on studios of interest that month. It also helped that at the beginning and towards the end of Newtype USA run, sample DVD's were included in the plastic seal of each issue so that I can sample anime shows that were coming out. I still have all those DVD's in a CD spindle on one of my shelves from the early issues that I bought. Eventually, Newtype stopped doing DVD's due to people stealing them from the shrink wrap at bookstores, which ment people like me who did the honest thing of buying the magazine to get the DVD were screwed over in the end. The thought of stealing occurred to me once, but I was a pretty honest kid, and I liked getting the magazine to read at school and at home. With the DVD's not being added in the magazine for a few issues, my interested in reading Newtype slowly dwindled to the point that I stopped buying them after my junior year of high school. It seemed that I only used the issues to read a few things in there that caught my interest, while everything else was just advertising and positive write ups on harem anime shows that I had zero interest in.

This eventually came a problem for me, as I noticed that Newtype USA was just one giant catalog of the same kind of show write ups in every issue. Newtype USA was the example of having hard promotions for shows coming out in Japan as was a way of ADV saying "Oh yea, were gonna get this property one day, just you wait!!" N/USA (im just gonna abbreviate from this point on) is looked on now as the replacement to Viz Animerica magazine, and wasn't ashamed to show how it blatantly advertised itself to appeal to the popular anime trend at the time, which was harem shows. I believe David F Smith, a former freelance writer, explained on an episode of Alpha Counter how he would have to write a positive review of a movie or show that was "complete trash" in order to positively promote a product in order for it to sell. That was one thing that I remembered about N/USA was the fact that you won't see any negativity on a show that they would promote, which to be honest was again, mostly harem shows.

However, in the mist of big boobed bad anime comedy show reviews and bigger boobed terrible anime comedy shows ads, N/USA had some areas of interest that I still remember to this day when it came to some really good articles. In this issue, we have a write up about studio Sunrise, which is mostly a collective article about how and why Yoshiyuki Tomino got his start (and hate) at Sunrise, a brief monthly write up from anime historian Fred Patton who writes up his thoughts on live action anime adaptations because a rumored Tetsujin 28 movie that maybe was gonna be made, a small write up about Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and the real reason why I picked this article to scan: a write up of Robotech history. That particular write up has been on my mind for years now, so now I get to show it to the internet masses.

This issue in particular was out of my collection for a time and in my brothers hands, which is why its banged up the way it is (don't worry, my other issues are in fine condition for being in a box for a decade at this point). I plan on doing more scans of the issues I own, which were from the beginning runs of N/USA in 2003. I will say that a hand full of issues contain information about Evangelion (because that series was ADV cash cow for a number of years), including the "supposed" live action film they never made, but there's some pretty concept art to go with it.

This issue was taken from my camera, because I don't have a wide enough scanner to capture the magazine entirely. Hopefully I can get a hold of a scanner the next time I scan the next issue, but we'll see about that. Above is the download link to the file, so it's open for everyone. Hope you enjoy and see you next time, which should be on the 5th anniversary next month, but well see about that!!