Chapter 2 - Page 44
In which Leonard’s hand starts running on auto-pilot.
I Wonder What I’ll Be Writing About In This Space Next Week.
I really wanted to finish this page last Tuesday night. Really and truly. It was all drawn, all scanned, all ready for color. But then the Southeast Kansas area was assaulted by a major-league tornado-dropping thunderstorm, rolling in through the power of ninety mile-per-hour straight-line winds, so I had to spend several hours in the basement of my parents’ house. Consequently, this got done Wednesday night/Thursday morning last week. Which is fine. Still ahead of schedule.It got me thinking … as we sat in the basement of my parents’ house, using a portable TV to keep information coming in, boy, during a storm, digital TV is worthless. At least with analog TV, you can still hear what the weatherman is saying through the static. But because digital TV is all ones and zeros, a series of on and off switches, when some of those switches don’t show, the whole thing is choppy and impossible to follow. Good job, federal government, deciding to sell our analog bandwidth to the highest bidder! That wouldn’t be useful for emergency messages or anything, would it? Naw. Surely not!
Also noteworthy, last Thursday I <em>finally</em> got my hands on my first Transformers Animated figures. Levi and I scoured the Wal-Marts of the Joplin, MO area searching for them, and finally, at the third such Wal-Mart (after also hitting Toys’R'Us and Target), we came across the $10 Deluxe-scale figures. He came away with Decepticon Bounty Hunter Lockdown and Decepticon Trickster Blackarachina, while I snagged a Lockdown and the Autobot Ninja Prowl. While Levi was happy with his purchases, more or less — Lockdown has a few minor flaws which seemed to get Levi down, but good lord, he’s tall — he also wound up seriously coveting my Prowl. I warned him about that, but he said to me, “Nah, I’ll wait for the later version with the sidecar that turns into armor.” (This appeared in the recent episode “A Fistful of Energon,” and was, in fact, pretty cool.) But once I got Prowl out of his package and got him into robot mode and started posing him in cool ninja poses, Levi took one look at him and immediately said to himself, “I am NOT going back in there to buy one. No. Spent too much money already. Yeah.” Or words to that effect. Man, did he ever want one.
I’m sure if he hadn’t bought two Justice League Unlimited three-packs earlier in the evening, he would have gone back. Prowl is just that cool.
Later that night I finally conquered Another Century’s Episode 2. I think at one point I had to have known that the last two stages are all Macross, all the time, but playing through it I only had an inkling that this might be the end. The main dude’s girlfriend in the evil devil/angel robot had switched sides and joined up with our forces, and ol’ Bodolza’s evil avocado fortress of doom was looming in the sky. And then as my Valkyries flew against swarms of Regults and Nousjadeul-Gers, “Do You Remember Love” began playing in the background.
Gotta say, I’m impressed that the game creators allowed Macross to kind of overshadow everything else like this — everything including their own characters’ story. Still, it kind of felt like I beat the final boss and then had another stage or two to go — Bodolza’s defeat was entirely handled in an animation sequence … one where Roy Focker got to have the center spot in front of the Minmay hologram as he took aim. These people really get it — in a world where Roy doesn’t die, he remains The Guy. Poor A.C.E. 2-universe Hikaru. He’s never gonna get to be The Guy …
–Jonathan
