Q: “Do credit card companies really hold payments so that they can charge you late fees and increase your APR on the grounds of missed payments?” A: Yes, they will do anything they can to not take your money including having limited hours and days in which they will process your payments. This is exacerbated by intentionally being understaffed so that it takes them longer to work through things. They also have intentionally extremely convoluted processing practices. By way of comparison, Amazon.com and its variants (amazon.fr, amazon.co.jp, amazon.co.uk etc.) process payments as close to instantly as possible using an automated system and they can and will ship your order out same day if you get it in by a certain time. My credit card company won’t even accept payment by cheque card, on the premise that they’re trying to avoid you paying one credit card with another one. As an example of all this I filed an electronic cheque payment first thing in the morning, which again various large retailers will now process instantly in store so as to avoid getting bad cheques, they did nothing with it. This is inexcusable. As evidence of my last post about how hypocrisy, double standards rather, are natural responses I always tell people not to get a credit card even though I have some myself. In fact I’ve never heard anybody but a paid salesman recommend a credit card, every time someone bitches about their card (and inevitably how rotten the company is) there will be someone around who doesn’t have one, and this person will say so, and so the bitcher will start a round of “oh then you should never get one isn’t that right everybody?” and the sentiment will be echoed. It’s like a law of the universe or something. Just to be clear on something, this isn’t even a conspiracy, it’s law. The credit industry is among the most regulated and transparent in the world. The understaffing thing is a cheap trick, but even if they did something about that they’d come up with some other stalling tactic, like performing a background or credit check every time before accepting a payment in order to curtail terrorist activity or something like that. The credit industry is extremely subversive though, looking around my house I’m not entirely certain I actually own any of my stuff. Maybe my scars, maybe.

Q:”What kind of influence has the Wii had on the gaming industry in Japan?” A: The effect of the Wii around the world has been an increase in casual gamers, thus creating a demand for casual games. Nintendo’s stock has been up pretty well behind record profits which puts pressure on other companies, I’m not sure that Nintendo has expanded that much though it might be more notable in the current games market that they haven’t decreased in size or merged (for example Square and Enix merged years ago now and Bandai and Namco merged more recently). Somehow I’m just waiting for the day when Nintendo swallows up Sega, but I’ve been waiting about 15 years for that and it hasn’t happened yet so maybe it never will. Now, personally I think that the Nintendo DS actually had a more important role in changing the game climate than the Wii, it’s just that the hole the DS opened the Wii blew open. So far though the Wii has been in the same position as the last two Nintendo systems wherein it’s had a hard time attracting the most cutting edge games, the biggest name games, and to a large extent the smallest name games. Which in japan the latter two means RPG type games (well also love adventure games, those don’t pop up in large numbers until a system has been around for a while and near its last legs, just look at what happened with the Dreamcast that became a haven for shooting and renai games long after Sega stopped making it), I don’t see that changing much either. Not least of which because a lot of developers are still content to work on the PS2 which still has the largest user base in the world. Persona 4 for instance will be on PS2, as will the “all ages” console versions of ero games that have been turned into anime like True Tears and They Are My Noble Masters. So saying though, the biggest game companies have made commitments to creating major releases on the DS and Wii because among the current generation (ps3, xbox360, wii) they have the larges user bases. The PSP has done a lot better than I ever thought it would too but that’s another story. To me the most notable early such announcement was Dragon Quest 9, but the Final Fantasy 12 sequel Revenant Wings being released on the DS was pretty major too. I would argue that the Wii’s virtual console feature has helped to reinvigorate certain defunct franchises and lapsed publishers. Various games, Baroque comes to mind, are now seeing re-release on the Wii perhaps as a result of this trend. The wii may not look as good as the ps3 but it looks better than the psone. I’m holding out for an Epica Stella remake. I do think that the trend of rpg developers jumping onto the PS3 and avoiding the Wii will continue unless the PS3 itself dies out, which seems unlikely but isn’t impossible. I’m not sure that I answered the question right so to summarize, the Wii has increased the number of casual gamers, possibly alienated the hardcore gamers from Nintendo once and for all, forced the big developers to scramble to make commitments and ports to the system, and definitely created an even bigger rift among small publishers and nintendo, as well as boosting PS2 sales and bolstering its library due to companies taking a “wait and see” approach to the PS3 and Wii.

Q: “What are the best Super Robots? Would you include Gurren Lagann and Ideon among them?” A: I am tempted to include Gurren Lagann into a list of best super robots, but the question is which version of it, or whether it should just be the Lagann, which is the integral robot that can combine with all others in its series, that should be noted. I would not include Ideon in a “best”, it deserves votes for most powerful, but it actually really sucks as far as coolness and likability goes. Would you pat someone on the back that destroyed the universe? So my personal pick for best Super Robots would be, in the order I thought of them; Shin Getter Robo 1, Gunbuster, Buster Machine 7, Genesic Gaogaigar (normal Gaogaigar looks like a gundam reject), Godanner, Dancougar (original and Nova), Gravion (yes, Gravion), Dendoh (yes, Dendoh), God Gundam (yes I’m counting God Gundam as a super robot, mostly because it kicks more ass), Braiger, Voltes V, Daitarn 3, Zinv (the mecha from Tenchi Muyo GXP that wasn’t named, it’s called Zinv in the anime series Dual! which is a parallel story to the Tenchi universe, I’m secretly a fan of the two works). Notable omissions: Mazinkaizer (I like it, I like all the Nagai robots, it’s great in the SRW series, but it’s just not that cool since it always gets its ass kicked), Grendizer, Giant Robo (you could argue that the giant robo series isn’t even really a mecha series), Raideen, Rah Xephon (though pretty super, what it measures up against isn’t impressive), Goshogun, Zeorymer (though undeniably powerful and pretty cool the show is too much of an asshole), Eva 01 (because it’s more or less a living creature), Big O (see Giant Robo, though to a lesser extent), Gaiking (the Daikuumaryu, its carrier ship, is cooler), Macross (it’s a battleship not a robot), Demonbane and other mecha from anime based on ero pc games (too ignominious to include something from a series where the emphasis is on a shady guy ravaging lolita looking girls with his gigantic penis), characters and entities from mecha series that were really cool but aren’t mecha themselves (like Betterman Lamia and Master Asia).

There is a certain emphasis in my lists on newer series, or in some cases newer versions of older robots, and older series as some might notice. These are also all mecha from anime series. For the most part that’s just my taste but I will say that if you can’t make something better after 20 years then there’s something wrong with you. Actually I think that’s part of the problem the Super Robot sub-genre of mecha has faced as there have been increasingly fewer series as the years have gone by. As to the older series, most of them have been cloned or spun off excessively and those versions weren’t great. Possibly the thing that’s really killing out super robots is that so many series now have mecha which are hard to define as either “real” or “super”. Probably the distinction lies in the show’s contents really but that’s another story. You could also say that Eva stuck a dagger in the heart of mecha anime by decreasing the role of the units in the series, but it was just the culmination of things like that, even the living units that weren’t truly or wholly mechanical had been done before. If I’m in the mood on another occasion I might run some of these and other mecha series down more. If I wasn’t 3 years behind on the Super Robot Taisen series I would run it down that way. Maybe I still will, after all I’m not sure that there have been any in the games I haven’t played that I’m not familiar with somehow.