Wii - No More Heroes

No More Heroes is Star Wars for the Akira set.

You play as Travis Touchdown, an anime/wrestling obsessed American guy, who decides to rise to the top of the assassin food chain by capping off all of the other ranked professionals Lightsaber-style (technically his weapon of choice is Beam Katana, but that's the same thing to me). And, before you ask: Yes, of course there's an international governing body that determines rankings for assassins. Without one, well, there would just be a lot of murders, and that's just wrong.

No More Heroes is on the top of my To Buy list for the Wii. Screenshots of the game clearly show a drug-induced manga-art style, and the trailers bear out that the style is well executed. What's not to love?!

Here's what you need to know:

• It's a Suda51 project, which immediately flashes this title into a Snow Crash future with a Clockwork Orange twist of violence.


• Suda51's last project, Killer7, was an edgy, cel-shaded action marvel that was tailored for hardcore gamers.


• Ubisoft (trying to score some street cred after releasing a tumult of games that were very poorly ported to the Wii from other systems (double diss)) has agreed to publish the game in North America two months after it's Japanese release. Release date for North America: Feb. 2008.


• Type of Street Cred Ubisoft Hopes to Buy in form of two sound bites from IGN's article:
  - "...we expect the game to receive an 'M' for Mature rating." Ubisoft's Vice President of Marketing, Tony Key
  - "Suda 51 himself has in the past promised that No More Heroes would be just as violent as Manhunt 2." - IGN article. For the record, Manhunt 2 cannot be legally sold in the UK. Yeah, this game is gonna be ROUGH! ROUGH!

Anime and Rap

If you haven't already heard the hit single "Stronger" by Kanye West on the radio, then you don't listen to pop radio. If you haven't seen the video yet, then you're probably normal because no one really plays music videos anymore. I saw the video a week or so ago on MTV2 (during the day when no one was watching but me) and immediately realized that it was a beat apart, then I watched it again (because I thought it was good). What did I realize? The video is a live action recreation of parts of the famous Anime Akira.

For those of you who don't know Akira, it's a animated film from Japan that came over in 1989 set in a dystopian future that centers around the exploits of a teenage biker who develops strong psionic powers and the leader of the teenage biker gang who tries to reel him back from the brink. It was the first anime that I ever loved and it's credited with ushering in the flood of Anime in the early 1990's. To sum up: Akira is a big, big deal. It was completely visionary and still looks beautiful and artistic.

And what happened to Akira? Kayne puts himself into the movie as one of the characters and produces an electric video that is hard to stop watching. Of course, Kayne has some funky 80's sunglasses on, but that's only part of the reason that you should tune in.

Check it out here.