Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

Lately I haven't been watching as much anime as I would like. It just seems that with all of the current shows, movies, books, and comic books that I've been reading, anime just fell to the sidelines. No more! I'm almost completely through Claymore, and it's been a very unusual experience. The premise in a nutshell is that there are shapechanging monsters called Yoma, that have an insatiable hunger for human flesh. This is an anime though, so surely some spunky kid with crazy hair will show up and pummel them all to death whilst jumping ridiculously high. Not quite, this isn't that type of anime. There are problems with Yoma, they can regenerate superficial damage without slowing, they're strong, they're fast, and they can take on the shape, personality, and memories of someone after eating their brain. Often a Yoma will come into town, kill someone, eat them and assume their place, and then slowly whittle the population down one at a time. During th...

Super Robot Wars is a videogame series that has been going on for a very long time in Japan, but due to licensing problems, very few of the games have ever been localized for North America. I think it's fairly obvious that the games are pretty much about giant robots smacking the ever loving snot out of each other. Typically the games are in the form of turn based tactical RPGs, although there have been a couple of fighting games, and some other genres represented throughout the series. The licensing issue that I mentioned are all because of the various games' cast of robots. Instead of creating a cast of entirely original robots, the SRW series has traditionally pulled a lot of robots from various animes, with permission of course. This becomes an issue when they try to import the games because while they've secured the rights from the appropriate holders in Japan, the North American rights to those same properties are often held by different companies, who also want t...