Homer: "So I said to him, 'Look, buddy, your car was upside down when we got here. And as for your Grandma, she shouldn't have mouthed off like that!'"

Lisa: "Dad, don't you see you're abusing your power like all vigilantes? I mean, if you're the police, who will police the police?"

Homer: "I dunno. Coast Guard?"

Image corner

NewsCenter

Sort of a progressive update thing happening at the moment. I'm far too lazy (and disorganized) to make a concerted effort, so some parts of the site will look slightly different (okay, it's been that way for months...) with maybe a few menus being different, and some other random gunk. It'll all be sorted eventually. Next month: FLCL (Furi Kuri) will be featured, anyone who hasn't seen this magnificent 6 part OVA, erm.. do. Go and see it. Yes. Oh, and has anyone else noticed that BubbleGum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 is about a million times better in Japanese? Thought so..

A nice month in terms of Anime releases, is November. We have the Aa! Megami-sama! movie (Wai!) and Card Captor Sakura Volume 6 (These are both Region 2 NTSC US releases). There's more, but these are the two I'm overly excited about. Oh, and for those who haven't seen Furi Kuri (FLCL) or Love Hina yet, do. They are absolutely tops. In gaming news, the GBA is looking like a good system for RPGs, with both Golden Sun and Breath of Fire announced for an Australian release. Mmm, old school ;)

Just a quick bit of release news. The entire series of Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 has been released on DVD in Australia (6 Volumes); Same for Neon Genesis Evangelion (8 Volumes); Martian Successor Nedisico has had it's first two volumes released; The Eva movies have been delayed.. again. April and July (in the US) 2002. D'oh!

Here's a bit of release news for your visual pleasure (ermm..): Card Captor Sakura Volume 5 has been released in the States (on the 11th of this month). Volume 6 is due out November 16th. Should be good people, should be good.

Hey, a whole month without a news posting. *Examines previous posts* *Realizes* Damn, that's the norm. Oh well, I really should merge the news into the main page. Food for thought. Anyway, as a change, coming next month is "AstralTrain's Top 5 Games of all Time". Sure to be controversial, but I like the idea of lining up 5 great games. No idea why.. possibly a lack of sleep has caused me to sink further into insanity.. or perhaps inanity. Enough! Until next time... P.S. I almost forgot: Evolution 2 for Dreamcast is due out September 30th in Oz, might be worth a look (at least as a last hurrah for your DC).

I've noticed that on a lot of the pages, I've been tacking the new info onto the bottom. Now, it's only just occurred to me, that if someone checked the page for new info, and saw the top of the page looking the same as it had the week previous, they'd just wander off again. I might need to rethink that one, yes? Must have been a subconscious decision based on the fact that Outlook Express defaults to showing mail newest at bottom. Heh.. that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Alrighty, as I'd feared, the email address and host for Astraltrain have both changed. The new email address is hypercamel@yahoo.com, and the site is (for the moment) back to be hosted at astraltrain.tripod.com. If I put some sort of effort in, I might end up hosting it somewhere else, but who knows?

Gee, I haven't updated the news section for a while.. But there have been a few changes. Firstly, the new email address for Astraltrain is astraltrain@one.net.au. The website is also moving (If One.Net's FTP server ever starts working properly) to http://web.one.net.au/~mason_james. Of course, the zip.to address will continue to work as well: http://zip.to/astraltrain. I did experiment with moving to Tripod, but the bloody pop-ups drove me nuts.

Well, the changes to the front of AstralTrain are just about done. All the previous gunk that used to occupy that space can now be found [Here]. I'm going for a more monthly magazine style, so the old format of having months lumped on top of months wasn't really working. At any rate, with Grandia II finally available in Australia there's no excuse for some serious gaming not happening.

Hmm, Lunar 2 and FFIX have satisfied my gaming needs again this month, but is anything else out there? In spite of the Dreamcast's woeful performance in Australia, Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II are supposedly still upcoming (April and March respectively). Some nice RPG action there (potentially). Not much on the PlayStation front, unfortunately, but here's hoping for Dragon Quest VII, eh? Hopefully TGS will reveal a bit more about PlayStation2 RPGs, like the third Suikoden and the 3 million Final Fantasy titles planned.

Well, Lunar 2 is officially my game of the year. Already :) Although, it did come out last year. _Just_. Which would make it my game of last year. Oh well, either way, it's fantastic. This month sees the PAL release of another big title, Final Fantasy IX, about which I shall say only this: "Hurry Up!"

Hmm, so Sega appear to have given up as a hardware manufacturer, leaving the way for such unthinkable things as Virtua Fighter 4 on PS2. What an odd world it is sometimes. I guess some sort of tribute is in order? Perhaps a gathering together of some of the finer niche titles on the Saturn and Dreamcast. I'm sure something will appear at some stage, anyway.

It's too damn warm, and the universe is melting. Or, to put it another way, keep a look out for some nice new titles soonish (For details, check out Game Info). Also, I'll be posting a Lunar 2 review shortly. It really is fantastic, BTW :)

Happy New Year, etc. I've finished converting about half the site to use CSS. Unfortunately, Netscape 4.7 doesn't render the tables quite correctly now, but Netscape 6 and all flavors of IE (that I've tried) work fine. It doesn't look too bad in 4.7 anyway, so I think I'll leave it. Until I change my mind again anyway :) On a side note, isn't the PSone a stylish little beast? Really makes the PS2 look like, well, something not fit for print <ahem>