Popzara Podcast

As noted in my review for the volume one of The Liminal Zone, first published in English back in 2022, fans of Junji Ito can expect two types of collections these days: freshly translated work from his seemingly bottomless well of content, and brand-new stories. It was firmly in the latter camp, created exclusively for the LINE manga app (which is way more popular than you’d think).

The strange journey of Hudson Soft’s Ninja Five-O (or Ninja Cop, as it’s known in some areas) from obscurity to cult status is a strange one, but it makes sense when you look at the game in content. Originally released in 2003 for the Gameboy Advance, it was a game that already looked, sounded, and played like an ancient throwback even at the time.

One of the nice things about living in the modern age, at least if you're a video game fan, is that practically everything gets localized. Anything that isn't localized probably gets a fan translation.

It’s Popzara’s Movie Time! Podcast…for the year of 2024! And what a year, especially when it comes to the movies we loved, liked, and loathed. Regular hosts Ethan Brehm and Nate Evans are joined by editors Susana Bojorquez and (making his podcast debut) Brian Kwayi in a spectacular, extra-long episode overstuffed and ready to explode with everything that made this year in cinema what it was.

Did your best/worst make the list? Ours included The Wild Robot, Joker: Folie à Deux, A Different Man, Dune: Part II, The Substance, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, The Fall Guy, Anora, A Real Pain, Nosferatu, Deadpool & Wolverine, Thelma, Civil War, Blink Twice, Godzilla x Kong The New Empire, Ricky Stanicky, Saturday Night, Gladiator II, The Bikeriders, Sing Sing, Juror #2, Alien: Romulus, The Beekeeper, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Red One, Challengers, Sasquatch Sunset, Rebel Ridge, Transformers One, and many, many others. Listen now!

Countless authors have written about death, even their own, but few have been able to document their almost deaths as publicly as Salmon Rushdie, who in August 2022 survived an assassination attempt at New York's Chautauqua Institution (ironically, just as he was about to deliver a speech about the creation of safe spaces for writers in America from elsewhere). Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder gives the impression the acclaimed writer is almost disappointed by the mediocrity of his would-be assassin, a young man radicalized not so much by what Rushie had written, but what had been written about him.

Time flies, doesn’t it? As SEGA’s acclaimed Virtua Fighter series celebrates its 30th anniversary, it’s almost hard to believe that nearly 2/3 of that time has been tied to the fifth iteration back when it originally hit the arcades in 2006. At that time, Virtua Fighter 5 was lauded as a next-gen marvel and served as a glimpse of what gaming hardware and the fighting game genre could be, if technical quality alone could carry a title.

I remember some time ago back in the early 90s when I rented a book from the library about classic monster films, and seeing the famed Nosferatu creature from the 1922 movie that creeped me out and still does. We now come to the latest take on this classic tale with Robert Eggers version of Nosferatu that’s filled with an amazing and eerie atmosphere that draws viewers in, but some may turn away from the long run time and slow burn it brings.

Fans of classic shooters (or shmups, if you’re cool like that) were spoiled for choice in the late 80s and early 90s, though not equally. For US and Japanese gamers consoles ruled the roost, though in Europe the popularity of cheaper home computers helped created a world where Japanese-led productions weren’t the only game in town (pun certainly intended).

Growing up with the British Paddington shorts from the early 80s, I’ve always been a big fan of the character and his many (and often comedic) adventures. Needless to say I absolutely loved the 2014 film as it captured what fans love about the famous bear perfectly.

Orcs Must Die! is one of those unusual franchises that's stuck around for long enough to have run into multiple industry-spanning trends and survived to tell the tale. The first two games, Orcs Must Die! and its sequel, were hybrid tower-defense and third-person shooters at a time when tower defense was the thing to be.

It won’t take long, maybe a few pages, before ardent Haruki Murakami fans experience a sense of deja vu reading The City and Its Uncertain Walls, as if they’ve visited this place before. Which should be expected as his latest novel reworks not just 1985’s ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’, but also ‘The Town and Its Uncertain Wall’, a 1980 novella that remains untranslated from the original Japanese (and likely will, given Murakami’s dissatisfaction with it).

Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is the type of game where you’ll destroy a floating air fortress loaded with missile-launching robo-ninjas after sparring with your demonic arch-nemesis, then escape to safety with a scantily dressed rocket launcher-toting femme fatale while piloting a motorcycle onto a snowy tundra where you’ll face off against a gigantic meteor-spewing turtle kaiju. And that’s just halfway through the adventure.

We've seen this story before, and plenty of us love it: ancient China has entered into an age of conflict. War rages across the land, laying low peasant and noble alike, and three kingdoms vie for supremacy over the nation.

Dreo is one of those companies where I’m always looking forward to what they’re coming out with next, as they continue to make awesome products even better year after year. A perfect example is their Solaris Max Heater they sent over back in 2022 that was already a great device, then the OH310 Radiator Heater last year that was even better.

Radiation gets a bad rap. Sure, it causes cellular damage, hair loss and weird mutations, but.