Last Saturday I went to the Algarve’s International Racetrack, known here as AIA, to watch the final of the International GT Open, because life is not only made of anime, we need to diverse . Ferraris F430, Porsches 911, Aston Martins DB9 and others (I think I saw a couple Hondas S2000) were all racing against each other. The noise was amazing, really loud, it was my first time watching a live race. To bad the stages were almost empty, I think the problem was that the race was barely promoted, I only knew about it after going to the racetrack webpage. The price was really great, 10€ for the 3 days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) and it was not only GT Open, there were also classic races, Formula Renault 2.0 and others. It was really great watching the races, the racetrack is currently working really hard so that we can get the Formula 1 next year, if that happens I’ll make my reservation immediately ^_^ . This was also my first time photographing high speed moving objects, it was really tough specially with the GT cars cause they went really fast and my camera sucks at isos above 200.

Final arrangements are done, ready to start. The yellow car was really noisy XD.

There he goes.

And the Porsche follows behind.

Tough race.

Racetrack getting ready for the International GT Open.

Loads of Ferraris were in the track.

If I’m not wrong this one was a Corvette, the noise, the rear and tail lights reminded me of a Corvette.

An Aston Martin DB9.

Quite a good number of Porsches 911 were in the track as well.

I didn’t know Spider-Man had a racing car.

2 minutes to start, everybody get off the track.

Here’s a video I made with my cellphone when they took off.

Here they come ^_^ (so exciting).

Engines warmed up…ROLL OUT!!!!!

There they go at full speed.

Really hard to catch these suckers, camera and me couldn’t follow them .

Really liked the colours on this Ferrari .

There goes Spider Man.

Can you feel the sense of speed?! I sure can.

These two pictures came out really nice, wanted to capture the red Ferrari trying to overtake the blue Ferrari and got it ^_^.

After leaving the racetrack, while going to the merchandise shop to buy a nice polo, one of the racetrack racing school car (there are also BMW, Ferrari and GT-R) was waiting for me to take its picture ^_^.

It was a great afternoon after all. Can’t wait for more races, next time I’m getting the Paddock ticket as well to take even more photos ^_^. One thing I won’t forget is how cold it was there, a racetrack in the middle of nowhere, cutting cold wind drafts….brrr I’m getting cold just by remembering it.

Today I got in the mail Agarest Senki for the PS3 which I had pre-ordered some months ago in order to get a big discount. Of course after I knew there was going to a Collectors Edition for Europe with an art book, characters card and poster I had to make my order. For those that do not know Agarest Generations of War (western name), this is a strategy JRPG, with a battle grid, combination attacks, special skills and so on, the game also has some dating sim gameplay so that our generation continues as in getting married to the girl you choose (lol). When I started playing, the first thing that came into mind was Cross Edge, the menus are the same thing (the game makers are the same) but the battle system is was more simple, plus we can bring six characters into battle.

The game only has Japanese language but everything else is in English, so if you’re one of those that like Japanese games but don’t want to listen to Japanese because you won’t understand the story even having subtitles (it seems people these days are too lazy to read subtitles) than don’t buy it because this game was made to a very specific group of gamers that like these sorts of games.
If you want to get the Collectors Edition be fast because this will be the only release, Ghostlight won’t print any more of them.

The game box is quite thick and big.

Here is the entire loot, Deunan and Advanced Hazel not included XD.

The opening is the typical JRPG opening.

Here is the famous wedding scene and the reason why the game is 15+ with mature content .

For quite sometime now I’ve been searching for a lens to do close up shots because my current one, the 24-105mm doesn’t allow me to get so close to the objects but it’s a nice portrait lens for family pictures and a good walk around lens. Well at first I was interested in the Sigma 105mm F2.8 EX DG Macro, then I saw that the Sigma 70mm F.28 EX DG Macro had received the 2007-2008 EISA award for best macro lens and the 2007 TIPA award as well, so I was very inclined to this one. But then I saw the Sigma 50mm F2.8 EX DG Macro, it was more than 100€ cheaper than the 70mm one, so I went to a shop (Niobo) that I found out in a town close to my own and asked the owner if there was really such a big difference. He said that judging by their characteristics and price differences I would be best served with the 50mm one, if the price difference was like 200~250€ than it would be better to invest a bit more in the 70mm, so I stayed with the 50mm one. Of course I chose it based on seeing other people pictures, reading reviews and so on and so on. All I have to say is that I still have a lot to learn with it, but the pictures speak for themselves .

This is a fixed zoom lens, perhaps one day when I have more money I’ll invest in a bigger one. Unlike Sony, Canon, Nikon, Pentax…whatever brand you may use, the focusing barrel on this one extends (there are some from the previous brands I mentioned that extend as well). Not many people like this feature and they spend a bit more in one that doesn’t extend, well it doesn’t bother me. The max magnification is 1:1 which is great, most likely I won’t be using it.

Here are a couple pictures I took with it. Still have much to learn with it.

The next ones were to test the Aperture with 1:1 magnification.
F2.8

F10

F16

There’s not much difference from F10 to F16 apart from the amount of light, of course the Aperture can go higher, but didn’t try that one. So currently my gears are the Sony AF DT 18-70mm F3.5-5.6 (standard lens), Sony AF 24-105mm F3.5-4.5 and now the Sigma 50mm F2.8 EX DG Macro, and of course the body Sony Alpha 100. Currently thinking about upgrading the body to a Alpha 350 or another one, I’d love the A700 or the A900 but those are way out of my pocket, perhaps with a bit of money saving I could get to those one day.

About two weeks ago I got Cross Edge for the PS3, still hasn’t been released in PAL territory so this is the American version (yeah I’m naughty). Didn’t pay to much attention to it at first, was to busy shooting zombies/ganados on Resi 5 but now I’m playing it with full attention. This game is targeted at a very specific audience and its not those that are all for JRPGs because some of these JRPG fans will not enjoy this game, I see it almost like a Gundam game which is target specifically at Gundam fans, so this is targeted at those that like titles like Disgaea. You won’t see great graphics here because this looks like a PS2 title and the price itself does not lie, its 10 to 20€/$ cheaper than your average game, the story is a bit weird but the amount of known characters and the conversations between them are hilarious at some points. The menus are complex, the fights can be a bit hard but if you play it on easy its really a “walk in the park”. The strongest point in the game for me is definitely the soundtrack, I’m a sucker for soundtracks like this ^_^ , the anime designs are amazing, and again the characters from Darkstalkers interacting with the ones from nippon ichi Disgaea is funny (search for the scene when Etna meets Morrigan). Again be very careful when you purchase this game, unless you are a fan of turn base SRPGs stay away from this.

And of course this game presents us with the original voices in Japanese which is amazing, listening to Etna arguing with Prinny is a must. As I mentioned in the past I normally can identify pretty quickly known Japanese voice actors and so I managed to pinpoint Rina Satou on the character Mikoto Aiba (original character), she’s known for her role of Haruka on the Minami-ke series and of course Etna wouldn’t be possible without Tomoe Hanba.
The opening is not as “animeish” like Atelier Iris, Ar tonelico, Persona and other known games, but the music stays on your mind.

So far this is my favorite theme from the game, the battle theme.

One funny thing about this game is that the developers were kind enough to put costumes on it so that we can dress the characters in various forms, its not only fan service but these costumes give nice attributes (not on appealing physical ones), these are not the only costumes, there are way way more because of the “buttload” of characters, unfortunately thats one of the points I don’t like on these sort of games, loads of characters to develop and train.

There is no other video game company in the world like Blizzard, not Square, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, you name it, Blizzard has legions of fans because of the quality in their games. People may call me Sony fanboy, computer nerd, video game freak but of one thing I’m sure… I’m a full Blizzard fanboy and am proud of it. I grew up playing Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and then it was Starcraft back in 98 which I love amongst all the three universes, Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft. Currently I am impatiently waiting for Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, I still remember waiting 3 frickin long years for Warcraft 3 when it was announced in 99, we all (fans) hope that Starcraft 2 will be launched in this year, we’re hoping for a date to be announced at BlizzCon in August. I’m also a fan of game novels especially if the universe of those games is good so I have a good quantity of books, would like to get more but its quite hard to get them so I have always to buy them through Amazon UK or purchase them in the States. Here’s my current collecting, still waiting for Starcraft second “manga” volume which should had arrived yesterday or today, still hoping for tomorrow’s arrival.

Bought my first three volumes Warcraft: The Demon Soul, Warcraft: The Sundering and Warcraft: Day of the Dragon back in 2003 on my first trip to the US, after that I managed to get the first volume of the saga War of the Ancients through Amazon. It’s very rare to see these books in bookstores here especially the novels (which I think don’t even exist here), the “mangas” of The Sunwell Trilogy are sold here translated to Portuguese but mine are all in English because of buying them at Amazon . The Starcraft Archive is not an archive of the game but its a “compilation” of the first four books that were released. Halo…well I like Halo’s universe but I don’t own a 360, only the first X-Box .

I also have a couple figures of World of Warcraft, you already know Benedrom from a previous post, still haven’t managed to finish the photo shoot because its very hard to shoot in the dark without a tripod, the other figure is of a Draenei mage called Tamuura, I have a character similar to that in WoW xD, there are more figures from WoW but not as pretty as these ones.

Earlier this week I got a package from HLJ, it was my first purchase of an AppleSeed action figure of Deunan Knute, the normal price is 8800 yen but I got her for 4400 because it was promotion time celebrating a year of HLJ japanese version store but the figure I really wanted was the one of Deunan from Hot Toys, unfortunately even with their promotion the fig was expensive as hell. Eventually will have to do a photo shoot of her.

This was my first Armored Core kit, I must say that its gorgeous, it’s more realistic than a Gundam in my opinion but I had more problems building this than the Perfect Grade. Why?! Well because some pieces are so small you can hardly fit them in their places and they need glue (some of them). I recommend this kit to those builders who have experience building plamo kits, if you’re still new to plamos than avoid the Armored Core series at all costs or you’ll go nuts stressing out so much because of some pieces not fitting in their places. Had some problems photographing it in a dark environment, mostly because I don’t have anything dark enough (besides clothes…yeah I dress lots of black for years and it wasn’t by influence of anyone), no tripod (at least mine sucks like hell) and only had one light, if I had a dark reflector than we’d be in business, so I had to mess up lots and lots on photoshop. Be advised that I “abused” on photoshop by purpose.

To bad this one didn’t became as focused as the others -_-

Sorry that the rifles became so dark, they’re quite good looking.

My favorite picture of the bunch ^_^

The back view of course and again it was made this dark on purpose.

Hope you enjoyed the shoot and a quick question, is this color the real one or was it also made on photoshop ?

I’ve lost my head definitely, last week Hayate and Saber Maid enter my house and now the big and mean Playstation 3 O.o. Well yeah it was about damn time to get this baby since more and more good games have been coming out, some may wonder why PS3 and not XBox360?! Well I have nothing against the 360 I actually love some its games like Halo 3, Gears of War 1&2 and Mass Effect, but lets face it most of these games are on or will be on PC which I’ll need to buy a new one as well (Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3) so why buy a 360 if most of the games I like are on PS3 and PC, another reason that lead me to buy the PS3 is the Blu-Ray, DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, region free games and many other reasons. I bought the bundle of PS3+GT5 Prologue+GTAIV, the other bundles were not of my taste except the one that only came with Killzone 2 and was 10€ cheaper but two games is always better than one (already had Folklore with me and I love it). Who better to greet PS3 the girls and Strike of AnimeStuff .

“I’ll keep it cleaner than the shiniest of diamonds”, “Why thank you Saber ^_^, hope your other self doesn’t tear it to shreds”.

What a lovely couple ^_^

“Shiny shiny” “You’re the best Saber” “~blushing~Stop teasing me teehee ~punches my face~ Master you ok?!” Out cold

It’s been two years since the creation of Animestuff, nothing extraordinary happened this year in terms of blog related stuff apart from getting more figures and my first PG. Special thanks to Nakano who keeps draining my wallet, and lots of thanks to the avid people that normal comment here, won’t say any names because they know who I’m talking about ^_^. Last year I had the project of creating a mascot, well the idea is still on the table but this time I’ll most likely be creating her by computer, which means I’ll make a 3D one from an already existing model and will clothe her the way I see more fitting .

Don’t have much to talk about really, been feeling a bit down lately but no need to worry about it, everything will work out (I hope).
Here is a goodie I made, hope you enjoy it (as always the background wasn’t made by me)

This is a late post which was supposed to come up on Christmas day but with visitors, World of Warcraft and more visits I couldn’t take the pictures earlier . This year I got three unexpected Christmas presents, I was completely caught out in surprise by the gifts ^_^ . Hope you had a wonderful Christmas day. What did I got… Chua Churam was waiting for me since November and my father offered to pay for another one of my choice and I chose Reinforce Zwei (yeah she was still available at Jikai), the next three completely blew me away… my good friend offered me a poster of my favourite anime girl Kan’U Unchou, my parents got me the limited edition of Rayleonard 03-AALIYAH KPACHAR from Armored Core and my sister got me the beautiful Blanc Neige , everything supplied with the courtesy of Jikai

Simply beautiful poster of Kan’U this is

Never built an Armored Core kit but I’ve built a small Super Robot Wars kit by Kotobukiya so I won’t be caught by complete surprise

Chua Churam and Reinforce Zwei (only missing Hayate, which is schedule to arrive at Jikai next month), what a good pair of figures ^_^, one good thing (and bad in a certain way) about Jikai is that you can most likely find figures that are sold out everywhere, why does this happen you may ask. Well one of the reasons is that the Portuguese consumer in this kind of areas doesn’t have enough money to spend on figures or kits, so they spend most of it on trading figs and manga, which making the correct math would put the amount spent on manga the same price as a figure. The other reason is that most these so called “anime fans” don’t have a wide range view of anime series, limiting themselves to the series of masses or the so called hype series of the moment or they simply can’t appreciate a figure besides if it is beautiful or not, they only care if they know the series, I like to buy figures even if I don’t know where they’re from (series) because I enjoy a good piece of art even if it is mass produced.

And here’s the figure my sister got me, I never thought someone would get me a figure and especially one of the few I really like launched this year and never thought I would get her. Normally people give me money on my birthday or Christmas so that I can buy the things I like, it’s an ok thought but sometimes we like to be surprised by these “small” gestures of someone offering you something you really like.

Going away from the Christmas gifts now… I had a scheduled trip to Lisbon on the 20th of this month not only to go pick Chua Churam and Reinforce but on the night of that day I had tickets to go see the Gotan Project at the Campo Pequeno arena (bull fighting arena), it was an awesome show indeed, here’s a video of my favorite music.
A couple days before the trip I was talking with the Jikai owner over the Internet and he told me that he wasn’t going to be on the store on the day I was going because he had to attend a convention, both me and him started to panic especially me because I tend to avoid these so called conventions  and I had no frickin idea where it was, but after finding out where it was I decided to meet him there.
Why do I avoid these so called conventions?! Because there’s nothing of interest happening in there, just a bunch of guys doing cosplay, screaming like little kids, tight place which you can barely breath, and so on and so on… The only good part of this was that I was able to stay with my friend for quite a while since we only see each other when I go to the store and we talk most of the time on the Internet. I have no intentions of attenting another one of these things because they’re boring, the trip is expensive and tiresome, so I’ll probably only go again if my friends go there the next one.

Here’s a shot of my friend’s booth, sry you can’t see his face because I don’t want him to kill me XD

Can you imagine that he has THAT on the shop for some months now, yes he has the Figma of Fate and no one buys it, don’t look at me because I’m not a Figma collector, and I say this again people here only buy Konata, Haruhi and C.C (not figma) they don’t give a crap about the rest.

Well this was interesting, I had heard about some girls making doujinshi but never expected to see it. I was amazed by the details and quality of it and the girls drawings.

There were some funny cosplay but I decided not to take many pictures because that place was so tight I couldn’t use my camera freely

Some girls were dancing to the sound of some weird songs which I had no idea from what series they were. If I remember correctly the girl in the middle was cosplaying Sakura from the Card Captor Sakura series.

And so this is it, if the weather gets any better before the end of the year I hope to make a photoshoot of one of the recentely acquired figures, until then BYE-BEE XD

Last week I received on the mail the art book of ChuxChu Idol now I’m only missing the figure which is waiting for me to pick her up at Jikai (gomenasai Nakano-san). The book was gift after doing some promo pictures work of anime figures, I’ve been doing this lately just for fun and trying to see if someone wants to use them on their web stores, of course I’ve only been doing this when I have free time and lately it’s been tough, my main problem besides time is sometimes inspiration which I lack and only comes when I less expect . I need to take some Christmas pictures and create a section for Christmas anime wallpapers can’t forget about those ^_^

Beyond this point there maybe some NSFW material, there are also the pictures I made.

These are some of the pictures I made, Signum, Figma Miku and Shiki Ryougi, yeah they look like they are from HobbyStock, well I had to get the inspiration somewhere.

On to the book

The book is amazing, the art is superb, 160 pages of pure color and art, there are some pictures in it I had never seen on the web. The first pages are completely amazing, moe and nosebleed everywhere, then you turn red, fumes start to come out of your head and you wish no one ever opens that book…Why’s that?! Well because almost the rest of the book has hentai pictures all over the place, censored of course, but still really strong, which you’ll not see here and have to get the book for yourself.
As you open the book this is what you get.

A couple pages after some nosebleed and more moe moe

Chua Churam in school uniform with pantsu shot (drool drool)

Stepping away from the dirty pages we get the sketches

Going a couple pages back and we have some profiles, there are more (sry bout the black shadow below the pictures, they were taken at late night and it’s probably my shadow)

And this is how Chua Churam says goodbye to us after we had 5 blood transfusions

My love for ChuxChu art work is so great I decided to create a theme for my new mobile phone, still a noob using that program, my next one will be of Gundam 00 and of course…Kan’U Unchou ^^

Stay tuned because I’m ready to upload Chou’un Shiryuu, most likely tomorrow.