February 16, 2008

China never ceases to make me laugh. First it was Olympic Haruhi and now it’s the prospect of gaming as an Olympic sport. The ancient Greek Olympians must be rolling in their graves by now. Check out this article over at CNN. To make a long story short, a video game competition will apparently be an unofficial part of the 2008 Olympics. China even considers gaming a recognized sport.

If you’ve seen televised video game competitions before, then you already know what a travesty it is. It’s just an awful idea, because gaming as a spectator sport is a joke. Oh goodie, let’s go watch a bunch of geeks play video games! To quote the article, “…video gaming is serious business”. I like games as much as the next guy, but gaming =/= sport. Competitive eating is higher on my list of potential Olympic sports than gaming.

Source: Fortune at CNN

This is a tentative weekly section devoted to critiques of the most recent anime I’ve seen; Usually the newest episodes that I want to talk about without going too in depth, but I may focus on older anime as well.

Clannad episode 18: Woo-hoo. Nagisa is back baby. Kyou and Ryou just got served. Well technically, Nagisa was the one that got served… In the face with a tennis ball. Ouch. It still goes without saying that all the other girls pretty much know that they lost the game to Nagisa. I especially liked the girls ganging up on Okazaki to eat their food. Tomoyo’s arc has been lackluster compared to the other girls, but I still like her character as a whole.

Shakugan no Shana II episodes 14-15: Still catching up after missing episodes for more than a month. At least the plot is finally starting to go somewhere now. It was getting really stale with all the early episodes being slice-of-life.

That about does it for this post since that’s all I had time to watch. Have any of the winter shows gotten better in the meantime? Some of them are starting to show promise and some opinions would be nice.