Have you heard of the Cho Aniki shoot-em-up game series? I never did. But with the release of the first game in the series (Cho Aniki for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16 CD) yesterday on the US Wii Virtual Console I was pleasantly exposed to this surreal Japanified gaming series.

Cho Aniki is a slightly creepy/funny game where you fly around as a regular looking dude or girl shooting stuff. It's kind of like Gradius or Life Force but you're controlling a shooting person instead of a shooting spaceship. Beyond the atypical visuals and music, the game is through and through a traditional shoot-em-up. About the weirdest thing is a powerup where you have two musclebound dudes with lasers shooting from their heads helping you kill enemies.

Those musclebound dudes were popular enough that they became the focal point of a sequel called Ai Cho Aniki. That's where things got fascinatingly weird. As you control one of the 2 muscle dudes, he does muscle flexing poses that shoot sparkles at enemies over some of the intentionally cheesiest J-Pop tracks you could ever imagine. Subsequent sequels became weirder and crazier with many half naked baddies shooting strange things like pee pee rays and bulgy-eyed fish with flexed biceps.

Since us Americans just got the first game on the Wii Virtual Console, I'm crossing my fingers that we'll get the wackier second one. I can only hope!

For a nice detailed history of this wacky game series check out this nice article on Hardcore Gaming.

Ai Cho Aniki (The Musclebound sequel):

Sega Saturn Version (Japan Only):

The Less Interesting Original (Available via Wii Virtual Console in EU, US, and JP):

Kanye West closed out the MTV VMA's with a solid performance of his first single from his new album called "Love Lockdown". MTV VMA's sucked. It showed how generic Pop mainstream music is going. Britney Spears 3 awards made it look like MTV is kissing her butt for the
embarrassing debacle of 2007.

I guess MTV realizes that Spears and K.West are going to have hype and interest no matter what MTV does. So they might as well start to become their media bitches. Mad respect for Kanye. Britney Spears is the "nastier" precursor to the Disney-Pop that has become the dominant look and sound of MTV. But, to her credit, Spears is looking mighty hot once again. Kanye is just... Kanye. He's doing what he wants when he wants... and MTV's decided they'd be stupid to not go along for the ride.

"Love Lockdown" is dope. Kanye singing?! Damn... that should suck... but I'm really feeling it. Also the Nihon-jin in me (that's Japanese dude... for you non-Japanese speakers/readers) was really feeling the Taiko drums on back up. When I'd see Taiko performances at my Japanese American community center I was baffled that no one integrated them into a hip-hop peformance. They look dope and they sound POWERFUL. Yet again, Kanye wisely borrows this element from Japanese culture and fashionably brings it to the Pop Mainstream.

More Pics can be found on K.Wests BLOG.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW A VIDEO OF THE PERFORMANCE ON MTV.COM.

Jerry is super inspired by this Photo cover. It freaks me out because Shazam looks like my Dad! I'm sure this comic will morph into some kick ass idea in Jerry's crazy brain. I'll keep you posted...

Jerry showed me this awesome hilarous spoof on McCain asking Sarah Palin's to run as his Republican VP. Absolutely brilliant! I keep wanting to go back and rewatch it.

Is McCain Palin's Bitch?:

Wow. Dragonball Trailer Screen Captures have been revealled and boy, that movie looks UGLY. Akira Toriyama may be happy with his Hollywood money... but I don't think he's happy with what they did to his wonderful Piccolo character design.

If it's bad, let's just hope it's b-movie cheeseball like that first Mortal Kombat film!

More screen captures can be found HERE.

To celebrate the near release of our Oban Star Racer Molly figurine, Muttpop is collaborating with VinylPulse.com for an Molly Original Giveaway contest. CLICK HERE to enter.