Chihayafuru is an anime you could easily overlook, for various reasons (you don’t like how it looks, the description doesn’t sound particularly interesting, there aren’t enough cute girls doing cute things, etc).  Well now I’m here to tell you that, if you’re not watching this series, you are missing out.

What is Chihayafuru about?  It’s about high schoolers playing some Japanese game called karuta that you’ve probably never heard of before, gathering members to form a club, practicing and going through their own training camp, playing in the high school tournament, being separated from a friend and playing the game to meet up with that friend again…  Oh, no, It’s not Saki though.  It’s actually good.

The first week of the CSMAC osu! competition has begun! The current format includes 12 maps covering a wide range of difficulties, and 3 personal challenges. The competition is fierce already, with multiple 4 mod SS’s being posted already. If you’re interested in the current standings or if you are thinking of joining the competition yourself, see http://soureiyashiki.informe.com/forum/. If you don’t know what osu is, see http://osu.ppy.sh/.

Anyone like Kumikyoku? Well here’s a video I made for it, because I had a little free time (I mean, it’s not like I’m a busy grad student at a tough engineering school or anything). Kumikyoku in Garageband

Back at that time, I was nervous, excited, hopeful, worried…  I was just starting college, and countless doors to the mystical treasure known as the “rose-colored campus life” lay open before me.  And the one I chose was:

First, a few Japanese fighting games: Phantom Breaker is coming out June 2nd on Xbox 360 in Japan. It’s kind of funny that Kurisu Makise is a guest character (see 1:14 in the PV), considering that we just watched Steins;Gate. Ougon Musoukyoku (the Umineko fighting game) is also coming out on the Japanese Xbox 360 (we all have one of those, right?). Then there’s Aquapazza, featuring characters from To Heart and Utawarerumono, and other series too.

It would probably be set in this kind of world.

World Description

The Colorado School of Mines Dance Dance Revolution tournament, hosted by the Anime Club, was yesterday.  Unfortunately, we were hidden away in Ballroom E, but we still had a good turnout I think: 8 people in the Heavy division and 7 people in Light.  Not everything went as originally planned.  The song list went from DDR Supernova 2 from the PS2 to all DDR songs to DDR and ITG to almost anything (Gee and World Is Mine heh).  Also, the Heavy tournament was changed to double elimination.  Still, I think (hope) everyone had a good time.  Results after the break…

So, the anime club had a carnival booth today.  It was meant to advertise the DDR Tournament this Friday, but I’m not sure how well we did in that respect…  But let me tell you, we ran a good booth.  Continue on to see just how good of a booth we ran. 😉

Well it’s too bad that Mines no longer has Japanese classes anymore…  But, all hope is not lost!  I’m going to talk about some helpful tools if you are interested in learning on your own:

So I’ve gotten pretty good at doing the combo challenges on Blazblue Continuum Shift. Here’s three videos on it: Tager, Tsubaki, and Tsubaki no screen. To be honest, I was surprised I could do the combos without the screen on. That doesn’t mean I’m any good though; my experience playing against human players is… 3 Xbox live battles and playing my brother. Then score attack practice: I beat it with Tager fairly, then someone told me about pressing start on a 2nd controller, and I used that to beat it with Lambda and Mu.