FEBRUARY 11, 2004 >> conics >> Pita-Ten Tokyopop 2003 ~ By Stephanie Morgan Pita-Ten is one of Tokyopop’s newest mangas. This insidiously cute story is made by none other than the manga-ka Koge Donboe who made Di-Gi-Charat (also coming out at this time). For those of you who don’t know, Di-Gi-Charat is one of the cra- ziest animes to ever have been creat- ed, and started as a commercial seg- ment. Koge-Donho is one of the most notorious writers of completely bizarre story lines in the anime world. I digress. Pita-Ten is an adorable story following the latch key, middle- school, kid Kotarou. Kotarou spends a great deal of his time in solitude, his father works and his mother has recently passed away. Thus enters Misha, an angel who has yet to claim her “status” (in a conipletely not- Clarency way) in Heaven and seems ontrol-Alt-Delete Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna Microsoft 2003 Grade: B Microsoft, in their ongoing tradition of improving upon things which don’t really need improving upon has produced an expansion for Dungeon Siege. Dungeon Siege is a third person role playing game (think Diablo I}, which has been set in a massive 3D environment. By the way, for those of you who want to play this game but don’t have the original Dungeon Siege, the expansion with the original game. The graphics in this game are amazing. With 360 degrees of camera control and zoom features, you can easily view the huge environment that has been cre- ated. The designers of this game went to great lengths to add specific details. Almost every item your character equips has its own unique appearance on the character. If the character were to drink a potion, the character drinks a potion on the screen. In addition to this, there are absolutely no loading times between areas and everything is connected. Unfortunately, the graphics are the best feature this game has. The plot of this game is insignificant. Although it starts off ok, it essentially turns into start at point A, go to point B, then to point C.and so on and so forth. .This game gets redundant after a couple of hours of playing it, especially since there are no shortcuts, traveling from town. to town usually takes around an:hout of: real time and.monsters do not respawn. Dungeon Siege summe to be a complete bubble headed idiot. Misha is full of good intentions but just manages to distract Kotarou and make it more difficult for him to study. Misha also manages to seem like stalking the younger boy even ‘though she technically is a few years older and should be nowhere near him (she’s already in the high school). Add Shia to the mix and things get terribly confused. Shia is following Koiarou around almost as much as Misha does, except that she doesn’t seem to have the zeal that Misha does. This may be because she needs blood to survive. Though the story is full of com- pletely adorable characters, the manga is still rated Teen. While the “younger” look of the characters may seem young there is bound to be some radically odd hijinks in the rest of the book as it is there’s already an angel and a demon living together. d up: Exquisite graphics, _aoluclynoloadames Grade: A In Sim City 4 you are the mayor of a _ newly incorporated city which is being constructed in the untamed wilds. You lay out streets, zone land, set tax rates, and provide services in a bid to create a bustling metropolis. The graphics in Sim City 4 are very detailed. At night, street- lights light up streets in your city, and cars driving around have their headlights on. The game also uses visual clues to give you information relating to areas of your city. If there is a lot of crime in an area, you might see chalk outlines: appearing on sidewalks in that area. Wealthy Sims will have large houses with well-tended green lawns, poor Sims will have trailers surrounded by mottled yellowy-greenish lawns. All of this detail requires quite the beastly computer if you have large popu- lous cities. The sound is also very good. There is light jazzy background music accompanied by various sounds related to happenings in the city. The music and sounds are al] well done. Another interesting addition to Sim City 4 is the My Sims mode. In this mode, you can import your Sims from The Sims into your city. They will pro- ceed to.get a job at the level of the house you have decided to place them in. You : can use them to get information about an next to no plot and =—_area of your city. For example, if a Sim t, they will com- The bitter old man’s movie review >> Suicide Club By Kathleen De Verge and Ryan Cunningham Grade: D+ The history of mankind can be doc- umented by its greatest achievements, such as nuclear power and the War on Terror. It can also be documented by its greatest failures such as nuclear war, the War on Terror and Suicide Club. Suicide Club, is a pseudo mys- tery/avant garde/ social political comnientary/horror flick, directed by Shion Sono, who also directs gay porn in his spare time. This becomes apparent when you discover his seem- ing disregard for the importance of plouines. In its defence, the basic con- cept behind Suicide Club is a very rel- evant and contemporary topic, direct- ly attacking the social dynamics of Japanese society. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be able to tell that by watch- ing the movie. Suicide Club opens with a bang. The bang made when 34 Japanese schoolgirls throw themselves in front of the Tokyo bound train at Shinjuku sta- tion in a bizarre suicide pact. The special effects are spectacular, the floors literally run red with grape juice, and you get to see a head getting smooshed, Suicide Club quickly turns into thrilling mystery, where there are plen- ty of red herrings and copycat suicides to go along with the legitimate ones, and rolls of stitched together pieces of human flesh from the victims are found in bowling bags at the scenes of the legitimate suicides. A handful of mostly irrelevant detectives struggle to solve the mystery, with the aid of sev- eral other equally irrelevant and bare- ly explained and/or developed char- acters. All this is set to the annoying, ever-present J-pop band Dessert (although alternately spelled in the movie Desert, Dessart, and our favourite Desret). This might have been a commentary on the redundan- cy of J-pop, or a whole lot of mistakes. Who can tell. More importantly, who cares. The movie has the directorial equivalent of a stroke about halfway through, where another irrelevant antagonist is introduced and prompt- ly breaks into song. Then it starts get- ting weird. Yeah. From there, stuff happens that is so totally confusing and irrelevant, that Tve subconsciously blocked them from my memory. Realistically all this movie did was make us appreciate the coherency of David Lynch filns. The ending of Suicide Club is not very surprising, yet still manages to evade any semblance of logic, narra- tive, or make any “sensey-ness”. After deep discussion, we arrived at the con- clusion that symbolism may have been involved. In conclusion; we conclude that Suicide Club was a perfect example of a fairly interesting idea performed in an abysmally horrible and pretentious way. David Lynch is rolling in his grave. Oh wait, David Lynch isn’t dead... yet... 16 CULTURE Sim City 4 and Sim City4: Rush Hour Grade: B Rush Hour adds various new fea- tures relating to the transportation systems of your city, as well as allow- ing you to take control of individual vehicles. The new transportation options give you many new choices for laying out how your constituent Sims get around your city. You can now build wide avenues, ground level highways, elevated rail lines, monorails, ferries, etc. The other core part of Rush Hour is the U-Drive-It mode, in which you can take direct control of various vehicles on the streets of you city. Each of the driveable vehicles have 2 opposite missions, good and evil. The cars are driven using the keyboard direction keys, in the nor- mal city view. Making this more challenging is that while your car is silhouetted behind buildings, other cars aren't. The way cars are imple- mented in the game, they appear and disappear on the roads, instead of turning on and off the roads. What these both mean is that you often, won't see the car you -crash into, because it;was either hidden or did not previously exist. Overall, Rush Hour adds: some great new options, and tnes some- _ thing new and different. I give ita B. a. A Poet s Corner The Cure e:- human race is in fora all organism alive and ecosystems struggle to survive with viruses as their immunity. For all diseases are the Earth’s defense and plagues will keep becoming more intense the deeper chain saws chew and fires roar until our deadly race can race no more and Earth again will heal its precious crust. We turned on Nature, it will turn on US | Scribble Poetry is for losers; And you are better Battered girl Beautiful girl As you walk across the classroom Better than my words, Caffeine b/c you're tired As I sit here and try and describe you in my notebook.