Ladies love to dance. Even ladies who possibly shouldn’t dance, love to dance. You may meet a lady who will profess that she doesn’t dance, but deep down inside her is a disco diva just waiting to burn the house down!

Face it, guys. You’re going to have to learn how to dance.

Fortunately, there’s help. Of course, I speak of the bemani!

When it comes to dancing games, you have a few choices. There’s Dance Dance Revolution (by far the most popular, but not necessarily useful for our needs), Pump It Up (better music to actually dance to), the dreaded ParaParaParadise (which should be avoided at all costs, always. We’ll just forget that they ever made this game).

DDR sounds like it would prepare you well for any dance floor. But don’t let the “dance dance” in its name fool you. The latest versions of DDR feature songs with bpms that would better train your legs for sprint relays than booty shaking. Earlier versions of DDR had tracks that you might actually get some dancing out of. But unless you’re at the anime con rave, playing DDR is not going to help. And let’s be clear on this point. Raving is not dancing. Probably showing my age a bit here.

Pump It Up offers the widest variety of dance tracks. Sure, you tech players out there may think it’s kid stuff compared to DDR. But we’re not looking for high bpms or step counts. We’re looking for music that makes you nod your head, tap your feet, and shake that ass. From K-Pop to 80’s remixes, a few sessions of PIU even at the beginning level will, at the very least, get your body moving to a rhythm. That’s what we’re looking for. Stay away from that safety bar. The bar is a crutch. You need to learn how to balance on your own while stepping in all sorts of weird directions. You won’t have a bar at the club and hanging on to random people for balance will end your date right quick.

One of my favorite tracks is “Caution (Don’t Bother Me).” It’s got an old school hip hop beat with some pretty decent vocal work by the group Tashannie. Here’s a live version of the song. Unfortunately, I don’t think the duo is together anymore, but it’s a lot of fun. But make sure you turn up them speakers. I guarantee you’ll be nodding your head to the beat.

NOTE:  Okay, if you must go to the anime con rave, you must.  But please, please, watch for swinging glow sticks.  Them things can poke an eye out!

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Just like the Round Table of Camelot, the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history evokes images of a time when the world was simple and magical: Men were Men, Heroes were Heroes, and Great Beauties were Great Beauties.

The Three Kingdoms period has been kept fresh in the minds of the Japanese by a great many re-imaginings and retellings, from manga adaptations to the mega-popular Dynasty Warriors game series, in which Men are Great Beauties, Heroes are Men, and Great Beauties are Heroes.

So, of course, with Japan being Japan and money being money, there have been a great many Sproutifications of the Three Kingdoms characters, the most prominent being Ikki Tousen (Battle Vixens here in the states). Ikki Tousen and its constant mix of action and fan service picked up the bakunyuu (爆乳, lit. “bursting boobs”) title from Tenjo Tenge, which lost fans with its endless stream of rambling crap (no, I’m not bitter about TenTen, why do you ask?) and used characters from the Three Kingdoms era to provide an excuse for big-titted teens to rip each other’s clothes off.

But the liberties Ikki Tousen and the Dynasty Warriors series take with the seminal epic of Chinese culture pale compared to a couple of recent travesties, which have made my Chinese friends weep at how horribly their history has been raped in the name of making money. First up, you have Tsukisase! Ryofuko-chan, which turns the mighty warrior Lu Bu into a little magical girl (hey, at least Red Hare is still badass) designed to tickle the fancy of fanboys with Lolita complexes.

That one’s pretty bad, and has melted the minds of several friends of mine, but what really takes the cake is Koihime Musou, which started out as an H game (link for those who aren’t at work) and, because the Japanese have no taste, became popular enough to be converted to a PS2 game. In Koihime Musou, the main character is thrust into an alternate version of the Three Kingdoms period, where the Men are Great Beauties, the Heroes are Great Beauties, and the Great Beauties are gay men (voiced by Wakamoto Norio, which is awesome on at least six levels).

You don’t even need to know Japanese to see how wrong these are - just poke around the sites and marvel at just how far moe peddlers will go in their quest to make money. It’s pretty impressive.

By the way, don’t click on this link unless you’re secure in your sexuality and libido: here’s the Koihime Musou version of Diao Chan.

You’re welcome!

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Playing a lot of old arcade shooters in celebration of the new announcements for the XBOX360 in Japan, Dodonpachi Daioujou (”DDP: Peaceful Death”) Black Label ed. and Ketsui: Kizuna Jigoku Tachi by 5PB (a girl-get game developer?)

That’s all this blogger has to say, his mind is disrupted by danmaku patterns.

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As many sites have already mentioned, Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons passed away this morning.

He is survived by his wife and six children.

Our most sincere condolences to Mr. Gygax’s family in their time of loss.

(While this is news that has already been reported elsewhere, it would be wrong for us to not report on a man that influenced so much of geek life and culture.)

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(note: to the experienced MMO players out there – I’m writing this for those folks who might not know all of the terms, so I’ll be explaining what some of them are. You have been warned.)

World of Warcraft. Everquest (1 and 2). Ragnarok Online. Eve Online. The list goes on.

These days, it’s hard to read a video gaming magazine or website and not see an article or post about MMO (massively multiplayer online) games. World of Warcraft’s huge subscription numbers are often spoken of these days, and a lot of people try to dissect why it’s done so well.

At its core, there are two primary modes of gameplay: Player versus Player (PvP) and Player versus Environment (PvE). The first pits you against other players, both of the opposing faction (in special battlegrounds) and sometimes of your own (the arena combat system). The second has you playing against the game itself – fighting computer-controlled monsters and enemies, doing quests for the various NPCs in the game, and working with other people to achieve certain goals (like defeating the dungeons).

Many people tend to prefer one type of play over the other. Some of the PvE types like to see the in-game lore that unfolds from doing quests and exploring new areas. Others like to see what kinds of cool loot they can get from doing the large-scale dungeons (known as raids) and fighting some of the super-tough bosses (aka world bosses).

On the PvP side, some people just enjoy pitting their skill (and gear) against other players, be it in “large-scale” warfare, ala the WoW battlegrounds. Others prefer to do their fighting in closer quarters, against smaller groups of enemies. For these people, there is dueling and the Arena.

Both are valid forms of gameplay, and as more MMORPGs come out, there will some games that try to balance the two types of gameplay, like WoW does, while others will try to focus on one over the other, like Pirates of the Burning Seas. I think it will be interesting to see how the landscape develops over the next few years.

So, I pose this question to you, dear reader – if you play MMOs, what do you prefer? PvE? PvP? Why? If you’ve never played an MMO, which of these two types of game play do you think you’d prefer, and why? (Me, I’m a PvE-centric player.)

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I was listening to a knitting podcast the other day (what? Cast On rocks.) and one of the host’s big concerns is the freedom of artists. Not just being free in the sense of allowed to leave the house, but free to create whatever they want, to build on their predecessors, to continue or riff off of, or improve upon the work that has come before. That could mean anything from artists sitting in a museum and copying from the work of the masters, or a knitter finding a picture of a sweater in an old magazine and updating the look to design a new sweater for today to a musician making a rock band because they are so totally into the Rolling Stones or U2. Artistic freedom in this sense means the freedom to take inspiration from wherever it comes.

Of course, there is a flip side to this freedom: intellectual property is the easiest way to refer to it. Nobody is going to be able to realistically claim the Mona Lisa as their own original work, but what about the work of artists that aren’t protected by the vast shields of history and fame? What about your favorite webcomic? There are plenty of examples of webcomics having work taken from their website and represented as the work of someone else. I know that one of my friends had art taken from his online gallery and printed in Greece on stationary notebooks- when I heard about it, I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach and it wasn’t even MY work!

When I asked Mohammad ‘Hawk’ Haque about it, he was pretty clear on where he drew the line: sometimes it’s flattering when a fan is inspired by your work to create an homage to it-as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off that homage. “If the artist admits their piece was an idea from [an]other piece… admitting it I don’t have a problem. But it comes down to… are you talking about character design, exact same pose, exact same concept, etc, or someone else’s character in a different pose… which turns out to be a fanart… selling fanart… I don’t agree.”

Garth Graham agrees: “Imitation may be the most sincere form of flattery, but sincere flattery gives credit where credit is do. Fan art is fantastic, it’s awesome, it makes us artist feel all warm and fuzzy. It’s a wonderful affirmation of “someone else likes our work.” And fan artists should be entitled to the credit of creating said works of fanart. … Artists put a lot of effort into creating characters and stories and franchises that people love and adore. And when you go take those characters who are not yours and make money off of them, you rob the artist your imitating of some of his work. We’re not even talking monetary kind of thing, but you’re leaching off of someone else’s effort. And that’s a terrible thing.”

Our very own resident graphic artist Jason points out, however, that he draws inspiration from everything that he sees, the work of other artists included. It can form a very important part of an artist’s development to imitate the work of others: “What’s fun is looking at other works and figuring out *how* they did it, and that can be inspiring — fills in the gaps to works you can’t quite execute.”

So. Where’s the line to be drawn? It’s hard to see what is legitimately an artistic inspiration and what is outright theft. Shouldn’t artists and writers be allowed to profit from their own work? Why should some stranger who finds a page on Deviant Art or a personal online gallery be allowed to print off a few posters and sets up shop selling ‘original prints’? What if they take that work and flip the colors around to negative? Would it be original art then? It’s a tough question, and as an artist and a friend to artists, even I don’t know what the answer is. All I know is that as long as there is art and creativity, there will be people who will try to profit off artistic work that isn’t theirs.

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