Friday “Nice” (or Rule 5 Sunday)

A bumper crop of beauties this week, w/ an extra-serving of cute ‘n’ cuddly:

First up, Friday WTF:

I *LOVE* Spanish guitar so someone needs to get me that cat!

Next, Friday Cute (for the ladies and easily-offended PC/beta males):

Daww, I wuv u, 2!

ECM is jealous!

And now for the pole-raising ceremony (ladies and beta males might want to debark at this point):

Friday Mai

Bang, Bang Goes My ‘Gun’

LUMinescent or Does the Carpet Match the Drapes?

Rei of Light

Huge News*

WARNING: **LINKS/ENTIRE POST MAY BE NSFW!!**

The Joke(r) of Fighters

KOFXII had some rather massive problems:

• Lousy roster both in quantity and quality.
• Generic movelists that saw far too much sharing between, allegedly, different fighters.
• A chopped down home version that, for reasons still not entirely understood, lacked even the rudiments of an arcade-to-console port.
• Severe lag in the online component.
• A shocking, some would say unforgivable, lack of spheroid modified sudoriferous glands.

But with today’s news, all that is about to become (unpleasant) history as Mai Shiranui (and the twins) is making her triumphant return to champion weightlifting street fighting in The King of Fighters XIII:

Mai is back!

SNK Playmore had been teasing a preview for the latest KOF for a little while now and today was the day they finally showed the game off in Japan. Fans who missed Mai last time will be happy to know that she is back (she’s on the main page for the KOFXIII site which is where the image above came from¹) and the game is already confirmed to be showing up at the next Arcadia Cup Tournament in Japan. AM-Net has a number of pics but at the moment it seems that their server is being overwhelmed so you may or may not see the pics. I was able to get a couple of them which you can see below, click to enlarge².

Want more? Click through to Arcade Heroes to keep abreast of the situation:

UPDATE: The Arch-Nerd says: “I think you like Asian girls dressed up as Mai, more than Mai as a character.” Not true! I do not discriminate based on race/ethnicity:

Note: the only reason there aren’t pics of a black or hispanic or Martian Mai is that I can’t find any, so if you got ‘em, share!

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*Or maybe it’s just a really slow day.
1 No, not that image–click-through to get the correct context.
2 Enlarge? I’m not sure my monitor is that big.

私今聞くことができます?

Japanese for “Blind and Deaf“¹

Exhibit A, in all the proof you’ll ever need, that the Japanese parent companies of their Western subsidiaries² are completely out of touch with reality:

I don’t know personally about any project underway regarding Kid Icarus, but if so many of those people are interested in it and really want to see it on the Wii they should really speak up.

–Yoshio Sakamoto, Again

I bet you, the reader, didn’t know that there wasn’t any demand at all for a new Kid Icarus. For the past decade. And beyond. (The game was in Nintendo Power’s³ Top Ten most wanted sequels, essentially, forever.) It’s not like it was once so popular that key elements of it were featured in a super-popular Saturday morning cartoon. Or that it was so popular Nintendo kept re-releasing it, again and again, because there was, clearly, no demand for it at all. Even when it wasn’t called Kid Icarus.

So what does NCL want? For us to take up bow and arrow, paper mache wings and toga, cosplay-style⁴, and storm their HQ, holding Sakamoto et al at arrowpoint until they accede to our demands:“No Kid Icarus, No Peace!”, “No Blood for Kid Icarus!”, “Give Me Kid Icarus or Give Me the Cosplayers Death!” (We can work out a deal on the last item where you eliminate the morbidly-obese/males dressed as females cosplayers (especially the hybrids), keep the game, and we’ll call it even.)

Anyway, to sum up:

DO WANT (STILL)                                             DO NOT WANT (EVER)

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1 Yes, nerd, I know that’s the old logo.
2 It’s thinking like this that, in part, led to Sega’s death, e.g. no proper Sonic at Saturn launch (or, really, ever); nixing Streets of Rage 4 because Sega’s own, Western, staff didn’t know its pedigree; and letting countless other, super-popular, Genesis franchises wither on the vine in order to shovel money into interactive movies and botched hardware designs.
3 Which, for about 20 years, was the internal, house magazine, of Nintendo of America with the president of NOA as its publisher! Who also just happened to be the son-in-law of the madman that ran NCL for centuries!
4 Somewhere there’s a (grossly overweight) cosplayer getting a chubby over the mere thought of this.