I thought way too much about working a Sparta crack into the last panel. So I did it here, instead.

The local used/half-off book shop had the Transformers Ultimate Guidea paperback edition a while back, and it’s aggravating me to no end that the ‘updated material’ covers Armada, Energon, then the Classics line, with no mention of Cybertron/Galaxy Force whatsoever. It’s almost conspiratorial, considering how hard they tried to CRAM the stand-alone GF storyline into the Armada-Energon mishmash, resulting in one of the least accurate localizations since Casey& Friends. Names were changed, GENDERS were changed, and the discrepancies were explained away by a black hole that apparently causes amnesia too.

I’ve started into Luminous Arc, and my ‘try it before I buy it’ policy for iffy DS games is yielding a dilemma- I’m pretty far in the game, since it turned out to be essentially FFTA with voices (and an anime intro featuring a prodigious “Gainax Bounce”) and worth buying; yet it would require me to start from scratch. Which really wouldn’t be all bad; the localization is pretty articulate. The touchscreen-only controls are poison, though, disable them immediately. I’d probably do well to spend more time leveling in between story battles as well since I keep surviving with one guy left.

I’ve also been picking at a second play of Super Robot Wars: OG2 since I doubt we’re going to see the PS2 Original Generations here, which is a bloody shame. I went into OG expecting a mere ‘fix’ with generic characters and mechs, and now I’m hooked on the OGverse, looking at the more canonical Alphas as a side story to it, and was pretty disappointed by the lack of the SRX Team in W. (The Ardygun family was okay, but getting the Valcazard in the final stages disabled your ability to split up and recombine the component machines.)