Willow loves her some Dreamcast
We honestly do have two cats, but it seems like Willow is the one who gets herself photographed more.
In this case, she’s showing off how the Sega bias transcends species.
The internet: It’s for posting pictures of your cats.
I’d like to thank, uh, I’m not really sure…
All I know is that, between 1999 and 2007, I bought a bunch of graphics cards, mostly for the purpose of making Everquest look better.
Kind of a sad statement that, but it’s more or less true.
Your average graphics card comes with a couple of CDs of bundled software. Generally it’s, you know, drivers, maybe a copy of PowerDVD, sometimes you get a game.
At least one graphics card - I have no idea which anymore - came with a copy of Deus Ex. This got shoved in a drawer, and I put the new graphics card in and went “ooh” and “ahh” about how much better Everquest looked or ran. Years later, when I decided to install it, I no longer remembered what it was bundled WITH.
So, nameless graphics card company, I thank you.
I did not appreciate your fine bundled software at the time, and I was remiss in my lack of appreciation.
To sum up: I finished Deus Ex. And it was Good.
Excluding MMOs, which are really their own little category, I have a bit of a “console mindset” when it comes to gaming - I like to have a fair bit of linearity in story-driven games, and being told something is an “open world” makes me worry, just a bit, that the story has taken a back-seat to setting up, frankly, multiplayer deathmatch arenas with a barebones single-player campaign tacked on. Unfairly or not, that’s kind of what PC gaming looks like from the viewpoint of this console snob. At least in the case of this game, I am happy to admit my mistake.
Also: Serious kudos to the designers for managing to do the “multiple endings” thing without stooping to the overused “this is the BAD ending. if you wanted the GOOD ending, you should have … way back in level 3″ Getting to, at the end, basically decide “here are the three options I have to choose from… now, what do I honestly believe is the right path?”… is there a Cult of Warren Spector? How do I sign up? Do I get to wear a cool hooded robe and chant?
Great Moments in PC Gaming
“Laputan Machine”
There really is no way to explain that without spoiling a major plot point in Deus Ex, so I recommend - if you aren’t one of the gazillion people who played through the game five years ago when it was actually a new game - that you find a copy of Deus Ex ($10 off Steam!), play through it for roughly 15-20 hours, and get to the point in the game where you get to say “Laputan Machine”
If you have already played it, I expect you have a bit of a manic grin on your face right now. I know I did, and then I reloaded my last save so I could watch it again, and then once more just for good measure.
“Laputan Machine”
Truly glorious.
“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: Lesson 12/52 finished. Starting to get into plain forms for verbs. Still mostly review so far, though there have been a couple of new grammar points. I’m realizing how halting my speech is, though - I want to pause every time I say a particle, when I should just be powering through them.
Some examples of sadness
Newest-stuff-on-top, while making it easier to find the latest additions, means that this post, which refers to things in the previous post, won’t make much sense without having read the previous post, so go ahead and skip to that if you care before coming back here.
Here are some examples of the sad lengths I - and fanboys like me - would go to in order to get that “hit” of anime merchandise that would keep us going. Also, note the level of detail of memory these command.
Exhibits 1 & 2:
Thai language manga anthologies. I didn’t read Thai then - I didn’t read Japanese, either, so I guess it really didn’t matter too much - and honestly I didn’t know what language they were in and didn’t care. I’m still only half-sure that they’re in Thai. But, damnit, they had Ranma characters on the covers, and that was more than enough for me. I think I got these at Cameron’s Books in downtown Portland. “Most Charming Magazine on Monday” is an awesome catchphrase, but it doesn’t make up for the essential sadness.
Exhibit 3:
Volume four of the Majo no Takkyubin / Kiki’s Delivery Service Film Comic. Volume FOUR. I still don’t have volumes one to three and probably won’t ever have them, but I had actually seen the movie and oh my god it’s something I recognize and it’s only 2.50! Bought this at Smith Family Books in Eugene. I used to haunt the “Japanese language” section there, which was made up largely of books that had been brought over by students studying at the local university.
Exhibit 4:
It’s a random issue of Animage!
The pathetic part about this is: I lived in Eugene. Roughly 110 miles south of Portland. One day, one of my friends comes to us with the news that they’ve heard that the Tower Records in Portland carries JAPANESE MAGAZINES. So we do a road trip. 110 miles each way because this Tower Records might carry anime magazines. It did. I think there were just enough for each of us to buy ONE magazine for our own. I had seen a picture of Noa online so I chose this issue of Animage. I hadn’t seen Patlabor yet, mind you, but it was still something I sort of recognized.
This issue of Animage had OH MY GOD A FREE POSTER. A “Shurato” poster, in this case. I’d never seen Shurato. I still haven’t seen Shurato. But, you had best believe that poster was removed from the magazine and proudly hanging on the wall of my room for months, because it was Japanese and therefore cool.
Ye gods, we were sad, sick fanboys.
The world is a tiny place.
I will admit that, in the primitive times that were early 90’s anime fandom, I did occasionally buy something just because it was Japanese, or just because it featured anime characters - even ones I’d never heard of - just because actually finding anything Japanese or anime related in Eugene in the 1990-1994 timeframe was so mindbogglingly rare as to be noteworthy.
In 1994 or thereabouts, Beaverton got a Japanese bookstore, and I would make periodic pilgrimages up to shop there, so it got a little less unique, and then in 1995 I moved to Los Angeles largely to be closer to Little Tokyo. In retrospect, you shouldn’t move 2000 miles to be closer to shopping when you have self control issues…
But, asides aside, things were pretty rough for the internationally-minded fanboy back then.
By way of contrast:
My father just got back from a month in China, including some time at a panda preserve and breeding center. He bought me a t-shirt from the panda preserve, and it is an awesome t-shirt. It has pandas doing tai-chi on it. It is super cool, and I would put up a picture, but it is unnecessary, because googling “panda tai chi” results in multiple hits from people who are offering to sell the same t-shirt, in child’s or adult sizes, world-wide from China.
This is not to say that I don’t appreciate his hand-carrying this super cool T-shirt back, or that I think it’s any less cool because I could have mail-ordered one, it’s just that, wow, the world seems a much smaller place noawadays.
Also: Let’s Learn Japanese Progress: 9/52
Another fine day of manly gaming as men.
Traveling to Los Angeles and Seattle over the last two weekends had prevented me from getting together with my gaming spouse, as he is now referred to by my wife, to finish Earth Defense Force, but I’m actually home this weekend and gaming was mandatory.
First, however, the four of us - me, my wife, my gaming spouse and his wife - went out for dim sum at Wong’s King restaurant. This is a chain that has several locations in the Portland area, but with a bit of a twist. Most of their restaurants are, while very good, basically “McChinese” food. You can go in to any one and have a massive plate of Sweet and Sour Pork and Pork Fried Rice served to you.
Their Dim sum location, on the other hand, I think they’d slap you if you tried to order Sweet and Sour Pork there. It’s crazy popular (we got there before 11AM and there was already a line for lunch) and the customers seem to be 90% Chinese, or at least Asian, which is always a good sign with a Chinese restaurant. Still, feeling a little out of place is worth it when the food is good, especially because Gaming Spouse’s wife lived in Taiwan for some while and knows her Dim sum and was able to recommend us some things I wouldn’t have tried on my own.
Pigging out on dumplings aside - and I didn’t even get on the scale this morning, I’ll give myself a couple of days of eating properly before I look again - we did eventually get around to the gaming part of the day.
I will point out that most of the games we play are Xbox or Xbox 360 games, simply because we tend to get more multiplayer games for those systems and more single-player games for the other systems. I have no special console loyalties since Sega left the hardware business. At any rate, one of the more genius moves Microsoft made with the 360 was to have the “gamerscore” feature, which is a constantly running tally of significant things you’ve accomplished in your Xbox 360 games. The significant things and the points awarded for each significant thing are up to the individual publishers, of course, and not very consistent, which is why the 40 points I’ve amassed in Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 for collecting all of Kasumi and Hitomi’s swimsuits took something like 20 hours to manage whereas some other games toss 50 points at you for getting through their training missions. I’ll get to that.
Neither of us is really focused on gamerscore, though. We’re both in the sub-1000 range where competition doesn’t really matter, but I get to make fun of him for having a 500-or-so gamerscore compared to my MASSIVE 675 gamerscore.
The game of the day was intended to be Earth Defense Force 2017. We’d managed to grind through most of the game in our last session and then been stymied by the final level, and expected to be stuck there for a while.
Unexpectedly we were not stuck. Starting the level at 1PM, fueled by freshly consumed Dim sum and focused on the task at hand, we got through it on the first try and got to watch a, actually rather disappointing, ending credits scroll.
And 100 gamerscore points.
Followed by 15 points because I was showing my wife what “Hexic HD” was and accidentally got a flower to happen.
Followed by 10 points for playing through a co-op level of “Rainbow Six: Vegas”
Followed by 50 points for playing through the TRAINING mission of “Call of Duty 2″
For a total of 175 points on the day. I am like unto a gamerscore god and all other gamers with less than an 850 gamerscore must bow before my greatness.
Mind you, “all other gamers with less than an 850 gamerscore” is basically me, my gaming spouse and people who don’t have an Xbox 360.
And 50 points for playing through the training level in “Call of Duty 2″ is really silly.
Mixed in with the 360 games was a prolonged session of Counter-Strike, a game which I am given to understand is fairly popular and which I had not played before Saturday. Playing it involved:
a) buying a second copy, as it doesn’t support split screen play. Fortunately this was only $10 and meant that we got some exercise from walking to the nearby Fred Meyer’s.
b) hooking up the original Xbox to another TV. Subtasks: Hauling another TV over to near where the Xbox was.
c) hooking up the original Xbox to the router, as it wasn’t connected before. Of course, the first ethernet cable I dragged out of the cable bin turned out to be a bad cable, which caused no end of frustration, but once it was replaced all was well.
d) actually playing the game, which meant an awful lot of me dying before I got the knack of things.
It’s not 100% my cup of tea. It’s a little too fast paced for me and the constant re-equipping took some getting used to. It was good to see what everyone goes on and on about, though, and it was well worth the 10 bucks for the game and the hassle of hooking up the second system.
Then we finished up with a level of Lego Star Wars II, which is turning out to be a surprisingly difficult game and not really as fun as the original. But still, a good end to the evening of manly gaming.
It’s my birthday, and I wants it.
A couple of weekends ago, when we were in Los Angeles, we stopped at Westside Pavillion so my wife could look at the stores there for Tokidoki bags. My primary mission, of course, was to talk her out of buying any.
Side note: She didn’t buy a one. Her self-control is magnificent.
It did show that, even though I think of Portland as a pretty decent-sized city, it’s got its shortcomings. While I myself am not a fan of the bags, it was disturbing to see how, across different stores in the same chain, the Los Angeles stores got a much wider selection of styles than the Portland stores. I suppose we simply don’t rate.
That aside, there was also an anime goods store in the same mall, and they carried some of the other character goods, including the PVC Mozzarella figure I’d admitted was my one point of weakness regarding the franchise.
I am a pain to shop for, so when my wife saw it, she declared it my birthday present. Meanwhile I’d found a Saki-in-Cosplay figure from Genshiken that needed to come home with us… in the less than spacious carry-on bags we’d brought so we wouldn’t have to deal with checking luggage. It wasn’t going to happen. We asked the friendly shop owner if he could ship them to us, he agreed, forgave us the sales tax, charged us some extra for shipping, and put them aside.
We left the store, me with some misgivings, and eventually made our way back home.
A week passed with no sign of them. I called. Explained the situation. Got promised it’d be checked in to and I’d get a call back. Waited a day. Called again. Found out that, in what was I suppose a perfectly reasonably goof-up, one of the other employees at the store had seen the set-aside figures, decided they were stock that needed to be re-shelved, and shelved them. Fortunately they hadn’t been sold, especially since apparently they still had the receipt from our purchase attached to them.
Eventually they arrived, and it triggered an orgy of depackaging that extended to two figures that had been languishing in their plastic sarcophagi since their purchases in Japan back in December of 2005, and now I share pictures with you that point out (a) my rampant and horrible fanboyism and (b) my urgent need to DUST before I take pictures and put them up on the web.
Mozzarella, guarding the top of a speaker.
Saki and Nene
A “Mon-sieur BOME” Bunny-girl figure. For reasons I do not properly comprehend, the figure’s name is “densha bunny girl”, which is probably a reference to the Densha Otoko saga, and I am simply not cool enough to get the reference or some such.
I’ve really been pretty good about not buying anime-related figures recently. There are tons of them out there these days, and some very high quality ones, but I already have way too many cool figures confined to their packaging and am bad about making space to display stuff and cycling toys in and out of storage.
Translator’s Nightmare?
I watched the 2005 movie “Linda, Linda, Linda” tonight.
It’s Ouendan’s fault, by the way.
I got hooked on the Blue Hearts song in the game so I looked it up on stage6 to see if there was a video, wound up bumping into the movie trailer instead, watched that, decided I needed to see if anyone had translated it, went to google and found that it was licensed for the US… and several months later, it’s been released and I’ve seen it.
Lots of fun, very slow paced in parts but definitely worth seeing. Nice mix of a buddy movie, a nostalgic high school movie, and a band movie.
Anyone watching this who can’t tell when the speech switches to Korean, which it does a couple of times during the movie, is going to miss part of the experience. The subtitles don’t mention it when it occurs, and you wind up not really “getting” a couple of the funnier bits.
That said, I have no clue how they COULD have made it work so I will cut them slack.
I’m not really a person that follows actresses, well, except for a quite understandable fixation on Drew Barrymore, but when I saw on the back of this that Maeda Aki had also been the heroine in Battle Royale I went looking to imdb and found that somehow, without trying, I’d wound up owning five of her movies. One of those weird coincidences…
“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 2/52
Goals for the summer
The big goal for the summer before school begins in September is to be good and ready for Japanese 201. Unfortunately I have the problem that, while I have a pretty decent vocabulary built up, a heck of a lot of it is “anime Japanese” which is… overly dramatic, at best, and flat-out rude at worst. I can filter out the rudeness pretty well, but toning down the drama level and beefing up the grammar are my priorities.
To that end, I’ve decided to try to, if nothing else, finish the entire Japan Foundation “Let’s Learn Japanese” video series and get through at least one first-year Japanese textbook. If I manage to do an episode a day of “Let’s Learn Japanese”, I shouldn’t have any problem hitting that part of the goal by September. I’ll be tracking them here to help shame me into not skipping days.
Current progress: 1/52.
An unfortunate pattern.
When something happens only once, it’s possible that it’s a unique event.
When something happens more than once, it starts looking like a pattern.
That’s about as “deep” as I get in the morning.
At any rate, the pattern in this case seems to be: My wife suggests we go to an outlet mall. I grouse about the inconvenience, the crowds, the lack of parking, the sheer banality that the very concept of outlet malls embody. Eventually I break down and we go to the outlet mall, wherein somehow I wind up walking out with a shopping bag of my very own.
In this case, she wanted to go to the “LeSportsac” company store in Tulalip, WA. Since we also have a good friend who lives in Seattle, we had two reasons to drive up north (about 220 miles, each way, a bit rough for a day trip but doable)
I groused, I kvetched, I tried to get the “outlet mall” portion of the trip canceled in favor of spending more time hanging out in Seattle. I did not prevail.
The LeSportsac store was a scary place, but I have to admit that the prices there were only mildly insane as compared to the full-on-insane prices that Tokidoki products command at regular retail establishments. My wife wound up with two bags, and since I do not remember the names other than that they were italian sounding and started with a “C” and a “T” I will name them after pasta. If you are, like her, a twisted Tokidoki fan, you will know what I am trying to say when I say she bought a “Cannelloni” and an “Tortellini”, in “Paradiso” and “Inferno” respectively. If you are not, then the actual product names won’t matter and the only effect this should have on you is to possibly make you a little hungry.
Moving right along…
I have an unfortunate attraction to the combination of “black” and “shiny” objects and as a result I have been lusting after a Movado watch since I first became aware of their existence. This is something of a sad comment on the effects of advertising on the weak masculine mind.
The downside of course is that, since the Movado people are apparently well aware of the effects of “black” and “shiny” on the weak masculine mind, they charge a bloody fortune for their watches. I am not going to say they’re overpriced or anything, because that’s a judgment call I don’t have the authority to make, but they’re well outside my price range.
On the other hand, when your wife takes you by the hand and drags you into the Movado company store at the same time as they’re having a 70% off sale on watches…
Look, even 30% of the regular price of one of these is 3 times as much as I’ve ever spent on a watch. Since I’ve bought one other watch in the last 15 years, that means that this one has to last me 45 years:
But it’s …black AND shiny…
After putting that on the Visa bill - and I’ve already logged on to my bank account and sent Visa the payment, first thing I did after having a nice cup of yogurt this morning - we finally drove back to Seattle to meet our friend and check out her new house, which is a really amazing 1920s era house that she’s turned into half living quarters for her / half a day care / preschool center. Both sides are really impressive - The amount of space she has gave us some serious apartment-dweller-envy and the school looked like the best parts of every kindergarten classroom carefully cut out and assembled into one space.
We hung out for a while, I did my best to break her computer in the name of being “helpful”, we went out for some rather nice sushi at “Blue C” sushi near UW, then we drove home, arrived at 2AM, and crashed in the manner of hard crashing things. Good times.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
