A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog about a Bravoman cartoon. Bravoman was an old and obscure 2-D platformer by Namco about a super hero who could stretch his limbs. Shifty Look, a Web comic site, made some comics about Bravoman and other Namco characters, and they even made a high quality Web cartoon about Bravoman! I wanted to update you all on that and talk about their new Web cartoon about Mappy, too!

Last week, Shifty Look announced an app for iOS devices, and it’s a new Bravoman game! It’s called Bravoman: Binja Bash, and it’s a continuously running platformer where you can tap anywhere on screen to punch bad guys with Bravoman’s stretchy limbs. It’s based on the new Web comic and cartoon, but unfortunately, it’s not very good. Play control is awful and the loading times are atrocious. In fact, when you first start the game, the loading is so long that they give you a bunch of Bravoman Web comics to read. The loading times were so bad there that I could’ve read the comics three times frontward and backward! Plus it has nearly all my pet peeves about free-to-play games. You can only play a few times before having to wait another hour, plus power-ups and secret characters have to be bought. You can collect robot parts in the game to unlock the characters, but you have to collect so much that you’d be playing the game for a long time. And why would you want to do that? It’s a shame that the game is so bad since the Web cartoon and comic are pretty good. You can check out a trailer for the game here.

So we won’t see new Bravoman cartoons until this winter, which is OK since it’s such a high quality show that it probably takes a while to produce. But in the meantime, Shifty Look is doing another Web cartoon instead. This one stars Mappy, a police mouse from an old Namco arcade game (I won’t talk about it here, but you can look it up, it’s really fun). In the new cartoon, Mappy is now a security guard working for the company owned by his nemesis, the cat gangster Goro (Nyamco in the Japanese version of the game). Re-occurring characters appear in each episode, like Dig Dug and Sky Kid. But most episodes feature a new character from a different Namco game, like the guys from Muscle March, Albatross from Rolling Thunder, the guys from Time Crisis, the Katamari Prince, and more.

Unlike the Bravoman cartoon, the animation in Mappy is VERY limited. Really more of what I would imagine a Web cartoon would be like. But since I’m such a crazy classic Namco fan, I still like it somewhat anyway. Kind of reminds me of a mix of The Office and Regular Show, but written by a fellow crazed classic Namco fanboy. One thing to note is that it’s a little bit less family friendly than the Bravoman cartoon was. But it’s not too bad. Usually just one curse word in an episode. While I’d give a TV rating of Y7 to the Bravoman cartoon, Mappy would probably get a PG rating. Here is the first episode, to kind of get you started.

They have other episodes, too, but I’m only going to show you just one more, because it’s my favorite one so far.

Anyway, that’s all for now! In the comments section, tell me what Namco characters you’d like to see in the Mappy cartoon? I’d like to see Klonoa or Mr. Driller (Susumu Hori), or maybe Reiko Nagase or Valkyrie. Later! –Cary

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