I had a free week from student teaching and spent a decent amount of it trying to get back in shape, sleeping and of course I was going to play videogames. I just got lost odyssey in for the 360, but then I realized I havent watched a good anime in quite a while.
My favorites are Berserk, Ninja scroll, fist of the north star and Elfin Lied. So I went out and bought 100 dollars worth of anime! I have to catch up on some new ones like Basilisk, Hakkenden and old ones like gungrave, hellsing, and an intriguing one like 12 kingdoms. Of course I found a great website where I can ctach up on some older ones for free :)
Of course, buying the dvds are best
http://animes.tv/index.html Wow, that looks like a great site. I'll have to check it out. I like a lot of the Japanime but haven't really had access to a lot of the stuff, with out going out and spending a lot of money, of course.
Just a couple years ago, I discovered the funimation channel, a c-band digicipher channel that has 24/7 anime on it, but it doesn't have a whole lot I like. Some of the stuff does grow on you after awhile though.
Several years ago, I was actually importing and selling a lot of anime vcds, but after I sold most of the vcds, I had little left for myself. Some, like heroic legend of arslan, I was never able to replace. VCD anime boxsets have pretty much dried up.... Of course, with HDTVs, you probably wouldn't want to watch vcds on them.. they'd probably be way more pixelated.
With vcds, it was kind of hard to tell which ones were licensed and which were bootlegs. Just being a silver pressed disc doesn't mean anything in Malaysia, China, or Japan. I got most of mine from Malaysia though.
Yea, my experience with vcds usually was bootlegs, some were good, others were really bad quality. I stick with the dvds now. There is an interesting anime that just got released called Death Note. Having the power to kill anyone in the world at any time with a note. Looks very interesting.
The basic rules are as follows:
* The human whose name is written in this note shall die.
* This note will not take effect unless the writer has the subject's face in their mind when writing his/her name. Therefore, people sharing the same name will not be affected.
* If the cause of death is written within 40 seconds of writing the subject's name, it will happen.
* If the cause of death is not specified, the subject will simply die of a heart attack.
* After writing the cause of death, the details of the death should be written in the next 6 minutes and 40 seconds (400 seconds).
Sure, Agreed! LOL. Don't know what you guys are talking about.
Japanese animation, check it out shaggy it's great. Try ninja scroll or berserk first :ph43r:
Actually, Shaggy, you may remember the philips CD-I. It was probably the first North American VCD player. They called them cd-i movies, and you had to buy the movie cartridge for the player to be able to play the cd-i/vcd movies.
The movie player also played games which used video, like dragon's lair, space ace, mad dog mcgree, etc...
There were probably over 100 commercial vcds released in the US, but it was a popular, cheap format for a lot of Asian countries. VCDs used mpeg-1 technology, as opposed to mpeg-2 for svcds and dvds.
The quality of vcds, even real commercial ones, varied greatly. Heroic legend of arslan was actually a set I bought, watched, and sold, and the quality was almost as good as dvds, but I also bought an official/US release of slayers.. It has like the first 4-5 or so in the series, and it pixelates badly.
I even have the star wars trilogy box set which was distributed by Fox Australia for Malaysian release, and the video quality is OK, although it does have some pixelation issues, but the audio is so overdriven that it just sounds like crap. You'd think the king of audio, Lucasarts, would have been able to release a halfway decent vcd set, but they couldn't...
Sound on most cds, to the human ear, should be as good as a good quality audio cd, depending on the source material of course.
There was also a handful of commercial svcds offered for sale, although I don't remember the names. SVCDs datarate would usually be about double, making it use twice as many discs per movie than regular vcds, although pirates have come up with ways to make them variable rates and actually look good on the same amount of discs.
That brings me to their second use... For several years, before the HD revolution, people wanted to distribute and download DVDs, but they didn't want to download 4-8gb of files... They'd rather download 800-1,200 megs, and by this time, probably 1/3rd of all dvd players had vcd and svcd playback.
Now that so many people have HDTVs, vcds are pretty much a thing of the past...