Rockmelon Soda

When I first saw Gal Metal announced back in September, I was immediately interested. Its simple manga-style art direction and campy sci-fi themes would have been enough to grab my attention, but the idea of a heavy metal rhythm game that has you playing the drummer in an all-girl garage band made it fully irresistible. I followed the news and trailers, pre-loaded it weeks before its release, and dove right in when it finally unlocked on launch day.

Since then, a little over a week now, I’ve been having an absolute blast with this game. I started looking around on the internet, as ya do, to see what other people were saying about it, and found… not much of anything. It’s a weird feeling to be having so much fun with a new game and find that nobody else is talking about it. I feel the need to do something about that.

Worse yet, the top Google result at the time of this writing is this terrible impression from TGS on Polygon, wherein the author effectively says, “I don’t immediately understand this game, which is in a language I don’t speak, and since I didn’t ask anyone present at the booth to explain it to me, I’m forced to just declare it a broken mess.” Which is shockingly unfair, and frankly, pretty goddamn irresponsible journalism. Shame on Polygon for allowing it to stand published like that, but that isn’t what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about this game, from the perspective of someone who does understand it, and has fallen in love with it.

Read More

The last half of 2014 hasn’t been the most opportune time to be into videogames. If you pay the slightest bit of attention to game “culture”, then you don’t need me to remind you of how some people saw fit to flip over the dumpster where we keep all the stupid and send a wave of it washing down the street. The stain’s still there, and I dunno if we’ll ever get the smell out, but at least we’ve still got the games, right? Luckily, all those “triple-A” titles so many people were looking forward to delivered on their promi…

…Oh.

“Nightmarishly broken trainwrecks”, you say. “Crippled heaps of unplayable garbage”, you say. “To shreds”, you say. Well then. That… yeah, that sucks. But hey, look around. There may be a blight on the garden and we do have a pretty serious case of weeds, but there are still a few flowers coming up. See? There’s a blue one. And there’s a nice yellow one. And there… oh wait, that’s a mushroom. Wearing a backpack. Read More

I thought it would be fun and easy to write up a list of the albums I enjoyed most in 2010. Only one of those adjectives applied. (Hint: “easy” was not it.) But I did it anyway, so read on after the jump if you’d like to know what they are.

Read More

Pinky swear, he says. Terrible.

Just thought I should update to let everyone know that episode 05 is indeed on the way soon. What’s taking so long? Well, there are a few reasons it’s not up yet.

Firstly, the whole “redoing the entire episode from scratch” thing, as outlined in the last update. Secondly, I’ve been working a new day job for the past few months which has been devouring a considerable amount of my time, so I don’t get to dedicate 80+ hours a week to TJS like I did for the first 4 episodes. Add to that the fact that this one is packed full of human characters that take much longer to draw and animate, and there you have it. The June episode becomes the September episode. Lateness. It’s dreadful and I’m sorry.

But the good news is that this second version of ep 05 is turning out better than the original, so it’s my hope that it will have been worth the wait. I’ve been grinding away at it every chance I get, and will have it finished for you as soon as humanly possible.

As for the front page here, it gets neglected due to a combination of my hatred for WordPress and ongoing consideration of redoing the site entirely, and the fact that – no, really – all the action around here takes place in the forums. The community here never ceases to amaze me with how awesome they are, and if you enjoy the show I invite you to come join us.

In the meantime, work continues and nears its completion on episode 05, and I hope everyone will enjoy it!

It occurred to me today that I spend so much time in the forum I forget to update the front page for my RSS friends and those of you who don’t do the whole forum thing. Whoops. I’ll be better about that from now on, pinky swear.

In any case, if you haven’t heard, I suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure last Friday in which I lost absolutely everything I had stored on it. Aside from all my music, software and 4 years’ worth of artwork, photos and personal stuff, that “everything” unfortunately also included Episode 05, which was already about half done.

Sometimes life gives you lemons. Other times it’s a fierce kick in the throat.

But the good news is, I had the first 4 episodes of TJS backed up, along with my character packs and everything I’d done up until about the first week of April. Now that I’ve picked up the pieces and gotten things relatively back to normal, I’m in the process of rebuilding the fifth episode. (Here’s a peek at the revamped show intro if you’re interested.)

So I just wanted to apologize for the hideous lateness of episode 05, and let everyone know that production is back on track. It’ll be a few weeks late, but it’s on the way. I hope you understand.

In the meantime, you can catch me on the new podcast Electric Hydra, or on Sega Addicts as per usual. And there’s still a ton of awesome stuff happening in the TJS forums, so if you dig The Journalism Show, drop in and hang out. If there’s anything else you’d like to see on Rockmelon just let me know. <3

Hi. Thanks for visiting my new site. Forgive me if things aren’t quite working yet, I’m still back here hanging drywall. Chances are you might even stumble in here late at night to find everything broken, and that’s always fun to watch. But in the meantime, feel free to browse around and see what will eventually be here.

You can also join our community forums, which have been so active already it actually scares me a little. We’ve got a bunch of awesome people hanging out in there, being awesome. There’s a collectible badge system in place, lots of fun discussion going on, a thread dedicated to pictures of pretty girls, and plenty more cool stuff on the way in the very near future. Hit the link at the top of the page and come hang out with us. You can get in on the ground floor and brag about how you were here before all the noobs showed up.

I’ll be getting things finished up around here over the next several days, so if there’s something you’d like to see that isn’t in place yet, check back soon and it’ll probably be there. If you have any questions, shoot an email to support@rockmelonsoda.com.

Thanks for visiting! <3