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The allure of Nadia’s sexy, white island dress

Many reviews I’ve seen of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water comment on how the middle of the series containing the episodes of the gang stranded on the island is “boring” and “pointless.” Yes, this stretch of episodes is a bit of a lull in terms of action and the main plot, but I disagree. These episodes contain character development, zany action bordering on Looney Tunes, and of course Jean and Nadia kiss for the first time. Perhaps the most memorable from these episodes is the whole “white island dress” motif for Nadia when she made a makeshift one piece dress to be sexy and use her femininity to appeal to Jean after she realizes how much he cares for her. On the island, she really starts to fall in love with Jean and she flirts with him, and makes an effort to attract him with this dress. But the allure of this white dress seems to be lost somehow to English audiences as it doesn’t seem to be commented on much or have such pictures posted on image boards. Actually, doing a Brave image search for “Nadia anime white island dress” shows most of the relevant hits from my Tumblr page. But doing a similar search in Japanese can produce plenty of results, one of which is this one. I found it at this page:
https://danbooru.donmai.us/posts/4019389

Several garage kits have been devoted to Nadia and her white island dress (I happen to own two resin and one sofubi kits of the subject). So if anyone tells you that the middle of the show when they’re on the island is boring, just remind them of Nadia’s skimpy island dress. This image exemplifies why this island dress is so popular in Japan. Here is a translation of the image above.

TOP: なでぃあ島編のカーテンワンピース：ナディアさんはいろいろとヤバイ!! / Nadia’s island white one-piece dress made from a curtain: Nadia-san is wild in many ways!

LEFT: <「言って！似合うて」”Tell me! Do you think this looks good on me?”> <Her compulsion is cute!> <無防備にもほどがあるとこがとてもGood!! / It’s so good she’s uninhibited!> (This is referring to how she is mostly uncovered while wearing this dress.)

RIGHT TOP PIC: <「おねがーい！なんか妙に甘えてくる!! / “I’m especially pampered!”> (That doesn’t really translate well into English, but it must be my lack of Japanese level.) おっぱいぜんぶ見えちゃうよ!?わざとなの!? というトコもGood! / Her entire breasts can be seen? Is this on purpose!? This point is also good!

RIGHT BOTTOM PIC: <パリーン！/ CRASH!> <-ジャンのメガネがゆれる音　/ This is the sound of Jean’s eyeglasses popping out! <いきなりのたくし上げ攻撃！/ Sudden pull-up attack!> <ヤバイ！/ WHOAH!> <ナディアはいったい何を考えて生きているのでしょうか？/ What is Nadia thinking?> If you recall, this is when Nadia hikes her dress up to show Jean the allergic reaction to something on her legs she’s had on the island.

Furthermore, unlike as depicted in this picture, in the show when she is wearing this white dress, she’s actually going commando (called nopan in Japanese slang —“no panties”) as she made this dress to wear while laundering her regular outfit. This nopan status is conveyed in the two resin garage kits of Nadia in her island dress that I own.

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Some neat Xevious promo artwork I found

Here’s the Solvalou fighter, your ship in the game.

The Andor Genesis, the boss ships you fight against. Sort of looks like the top part of a Cylon Base Star.

Speaking of Battlestar Galactica, the Terrazi looks like a Cylon Raider.

This Jara is sort of TIE Fighter shaped.

The Kapi has a sort of Millennium Falcon shape to it.

I can’t say this Grobda tank really looks like anything, except maybe a cross from the Galileo Shuttle from Star Trek and the land rover from Battlestar Galactica.

The port of Xevious on the Atari 7800 is what I put the most time into, when I was in junior high. I remember how thrilled I was when I bombed the Andor Genesis with a one bomb kill. I’ll have to give it a try on my 7800 emulator for RetroPie again sometime to refresh my memory. IIRC, it wasn’t a bad port and it even had the hidden flags you can reveal by bombing secret areas on the screen.

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Macross Regult heavy missile battlepod plamo by Arii

I started working on this old 1:100 scale Regult Heavy Missle Carrier plamo by Arii yesterday. Hasegawa is releasing 1:72 versions of Regults, with the standard and the light missile variant. I’m sure next year they will make this heavy missile variant too. I’m sure they will have a 1:72 Glaug officer’s pod eventually too. Back in the day, Arii made a 1:72 Glaug while Imai made a 1:100 one. Bandai has repopped the Imai molds, but the larger Arii kit is a thing of the past and must go for a lot of money.

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I frickin’ love Tron

In 1982, I saw the trailers for the movie on TV and wanted to see the movie so badly. My sister was 3 years older than me and had decided that since the movie was about computers, it would be too complex and I wouldn’t understand it. Yet she hadn’t seen it either, so how would she know? Older sibling syndrome, I guess.

It wasn’t until later when Tron came to the Disney Channel that I finally got to see it. It was a celebration of early ’80s video game culture. Fantastic. Recently I did a search for Tron stuff on Pinterest and wanted to post some of the cooler images I found.

I’ve never seen this poster image before. Super neat.

Jean “Moebius” Giraud did a lot of the designs for Tron. His graphic novel, The Long Tomorrow, was a visual inspiration for Blade Runner.

More Moebius art.

And speaking of Blade Runner, Syd Mead also did design work for Tron, with these black & white illustrations.

I’ve never seen this poster with Flynn, either. Perhaps this is fan art?

This poster for the “Space Paranoids” arcade game featured in the movie. It’s amusing since arcade games back then did NOT look like that, unless it was supposed to be a laserdisc game. There is no way we had FPS-style games like that back then!

But we did get an actual Tron arcade game by Bally Midway in 1984.

The design of this arcade cabinet is simply captivating, complete with the blacklights and lighted joystick. While it was cool, I really enjoyed the Discs of Tron game far better.

This was a step-in, environmental cabinet. It really blew me a way the first time I saw it.

Too bad Disney is more preoccupied with sexualizing children and wrecking Marvel and Star Wars to make anything cool anymore. At least a good sequel was made before Disney went down the crapper, although that movie and its spin-off cartoon weren’t enough to sustain interest in Tron. As for me, 40 years later, Tron remains dear to me.

Here is my DVD signed by Bruce Boxleitner. I only talked to him briefly, but I could tell he is BASED.

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Imai 1:100 Armored Valkyrie plamo kits

I’m currently building Hasegawa’s 1:72 scale Armored Valkyrie Battroid kit and featuring it on my YouTube channel. Although I may not buy them, Hasegawa is already releasing variants on this kit, which is cool.

Imai did the same back in the ’80s. I have their standard VF-1J Armored Valkyrie kit in 1:100 scale, but they made others. from Macross. The artwork on these old model kits from the ’80s were fantastic and unfortunately once built, these models never really look as great as the box art. I found these box scans on the old legacy Macrossworld site.

Imai 1:100 scale Armored VF-1S Valkyrie Battroid. Macross fans will notice that an Armored VF-1S was never seen in either the TV show or the movie. This is an original design. Check out the cool “nose art” on the leg! I don’t have this kit, so I cannot confirm if it comes with a decal for that.

Another design not seen in the show or the movie: a VF-1A Armored Valkyrie. Neat stuff.

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A wild Delorean appears!

My Serbian friend Aleksandar took these pictures in Novi Sad, near his college. It had just rained.

Incidentally, I had found a Delorean in the wild once, at a shopping center in Scottsdale, AZ in 2009. This was when we still lived in America. The man was kind to let me take a picture, so he posed with his car.

But wait… there’s more! In my first year living in Japan, in 2012 Christopher Lloyd visited a movie theater in Shizuoka City for autographs. I had him sign my Back to the Future DVD. In front of the theater, a Delorean time machine replica was parked. The interior is replicated, but the exterior is a normal Delorean and it doesn’t have the big vents in the back.Here are the pics.

Complete with time circuits!

A Flux Capacitor!

There was even a Mattel Hover board.

This was inside where Mr. Lloyd was autographing.

Here he is signing my DVD box set. One of my treasures!

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Andro Dunos II, another fantastic retro-style shmup on Steam!

I’ve probably spent too much money on Steam games this past two years or more. I never liked the idea of buying games I did not have physical copies for, and I haven’t cared about gaming on the PC since the ’90s. But Steam offers a way to enjoy the console gaming experience on my computer without having to buy a new game console, so I’m happy. This past summer I wrote about how much I love Infinos Gaiden on Steam, and the same development team, Picorinne Soft, has done it again.

As far as Neo Geo shmups go, my two favorites are Blazing Star and Pulstar. I’d never actually heard of the original Andro Dunos before. So upon hearing about how great Andro Dunos II is, I played the original on RetroPie to try it out. While it isn’t a rather impressive-looking game graphically, it’s pretty solid and I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it before. It was made by a company called Visco, and that entire catalog has been purchased. Picorinne created this sequel, with improved graphics, yet keeping faithful to that 24-bit Neo Geo graphics style. I do not see any mention of Picorinne’s name in Andro Dunos II, but they are listed as being the developer in Steam, and both shmups feature great ’90s quality pixel art. (FYI, they also did a vertical shmup called Battle Crust, which feels more like a 16-bit arcade shmup.)

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Just like Infinos Gaiden, this game also supports a 4:3 aspect ratio! I am so grateful for this. It irritates me when I play a vertical shmup that is formatted for 16:9 only, which makes the playing screen even smaller on my 4:3 monitor. This is of course a horizontal shmup, but nevertheless it’s good that I don’t have to bother with wasted borders to either side of the screen.

The first level starts you out inside of what seems to be an underground city, then you break out into a desert wasteland. Nothing but sand and desolation. Apparently this is what happens when we let the cows fart one too many times. If only we had listened to Bill Gates back in the 21st century and ate bugs and drank soymilk instead… we wouldn’t be pelted with sand storms and living underground, eating bugs and drinking soymilk! So anyhow, this is the first level boss, a giant mecha with a big shoulder cannon, a chest cannon, and the blue sensor weak spot to shoot at. Pretty cool.

Next you fly into outer space to look for jerks to shoot at. Oh look, a space colony.

Gameplay is improved over the original. There is now an autofire, a button to cycle the weapons, and a button for the power attack. The original only had two buttons, which required button mashing for the regular shot and to charge up for the power attack.

Like Hellfire on the PC Engine and Megadrive, each of the weapons has its purpose, and you can switch between them using the trigger buttons. You can power up the shots individually by collecting powerups, and your weapons will lose power when you take damage.

Here’s the second level boss. Shoot the core!

Now you’re on the moon.

Now you’re underwater. Games like this and Infinos Gaiden are cool because each level is distinct. People praise Eschatos, but that game is just the same thing over and over again, it seems. Very little variety.

There’s always a strong Darius vibe whenever giant, mechanical fish are involved.

Then you fly over a space city. The boss of this level was taken from the original Andro Dunos game.

So you can’t go wrong with Andro Dunos II. Very fun, retro shmup action with beautiful sprite work, and it’s an improvement on the original. For my Linux desktop, I just had to set the launch option: gamemoderun %command% and the Proton compatibility tool runs the game just fine in Linux.

Top it all off, the music to this game is excellent synthwave by Allister Brimble. I bought the the soundtrack here at Bandcamp.

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My missed opportunity to own Magical Chase on the Gameboy Color

It was the summer of 2002. My first stint of living in Japan was coming to a close after 2 years, and I was in the process of packing up my belongings to move back to the USA. I happened to see Magical Chase for the GBC for only 3,000 yen. At the time, I had no way of playing the game, so I passed. It was only a few years later that this game’s value skyrocketed, and now I dare not look up to see its current value. I’ve kicked myself for passing on that opportunity. I figured that although it would be nice, I did not have a GBC, nor was I sure that I’d ever buy one. If I had only known, I could have at least bought it as an investment.

Well, I still don’t have a GBA, but I am able to play it on my Gamecube. Or Retropie, which I am using here for these screenshots. In 2002, this legendary cute-em-up was already rare and expensive for the PC Engine, and I figured that this GBC version would also go up in price. I wish I could somehow go back in time to snatch some of these games as I have become priced out of the market, thanks to hipsters.

So cute.

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I finally made it to Saturn in Gyruss today!

I pigged out on Korean BBQ (yakiniku) with the female spouse unit (the female offspring unit doesn’t eat much) while watching The Last Crusade (she likes Indy Jones movies, but not so much Star Wars, but that’s alright) and then Message from Space. Played some Gyruss and booze doesn’t work so well to enhance reflexes, so I gave up trying to beat my high score tonight. Still, thanks to the weekend challenge on the Retro Palace group on Gab, I finally made it to Saturn for the first time in my life today! As for the Famicom/NES version, I can’t figure out how to get past that ball & chain boss.

As a kid, playing Gyruss for the first time, I think that may have been the first time I ever had played an arcade game with an actual soundtrack. I’m talking besides Atari’s Star Wars… a game with a continuous soundtrack! Space Invaders has that great bass tune, but that only half counts. I’m talking Johann Sebastian BACH! As a kid, I was like, “DUDE, CAPTAIN NEMO MUSIC.” Before I found out he was Nadia’s father… No, I mean the Disney movie I watched over and over again on the Disney Channel whenever it was on because there was nothing else to do, which gave me a passion for sea monsters and stuff. Hearing this in the game, with a sped-up tempo, really blew my mind. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor! Classy.

I’m playing Gyruss, chasing alien starfighters in warp tunnels as they speed towards planet Earth, destroying them before they can approach my homeworld. And when I got that shot powerup for the first time, when it gave a real deeper, bass to the sound to the shots, I really felt like I had serious firepower at my fingertips. Oh man.

How many times have I told you kids to get off my lawn? I’m playing Gyruss.