Random bits of swag from Japan
I have an Acer laptop - I bought it because it was a) really quite inexpensive, b) had a huge (17″) widescreen display and c) had a built-in numeric keypad.
Last weekend we noticed that CompUSA had the newer model from the same line on sale, so my wife wound up with an Acer laptop as well.
The question of “how to tell them apart” came up, as the only real difference is that mine has a build-in webcam and hers doesn’t.
Fortunately, there was a booth at Comic Market selling really cool die-cut vinyl logo stickers of various types, and I bought an “Earth Defense Force” logo sticker for the princely sum of 300 yen. So, my laptop joined the EDF and now we’ve no fear of accidentally taking the wrong laptop.
Unfortunately, the clear adhesive sheet they give you to protect the logo sticker once applied kind of spoils the effect, but what the hell.
Also, a couple of things that I cannot rationally explain buying.
Let me sum up:
1) I don’t smoke.
2) I’m not really a big Evangelion fan.
3) I was really worried about bringing these on the plane.
4) I’m not sure how safe they are to store.
5) So why did I buy two Evangelion lighters from a Lawson’s combini?
Boxed:
And removed from box:
That there, that was some pretty good Dark.
I don’t know as I’d call it Perfect, but it was pretty good.
One of the absolute worst “money spent” to “games completed” ratios I’ve ever had was buying a Nintendo 64. It did have some quality games - I won’t dispute that - but I owned one for a full decade and didn’t finish a single title on the system. I finally sold it, this year, along with the 11 games I did have for it, and got a whopping 78 bucks off eBay for the package. Mind you, it still had the receipt in the box, showing that I’d paid $80 for the “Doom 64″ cartridge I bought at the same time as the system.
On the other hand, the game I came closest to finishing was a $10 game I bought near the end of the system’s life: Perfect Dark.
I actually managed to play all the way to the final boss fight, which I then lost several times in a row before getting entirely too frustrated and giving up on it. So I ALMOST finished one (ONE!) Nintendo 64 game.
It was a hell of a game, though. So, when we added an Xbox 360 to our humble geek apartment, I bought Perfect Dark Zero, the prequel-sequel.
THAT game, I just managed to finish - on the absolute lowest difficulty setting, netting me a whopping 10 points towards my Gamerscore, which now sits at a lofty 920.
It’s a lot easier game than the original, or I’ve developed l33t FPS skillz… let’s go with “it’s a lot easier”, shall we?
It’s also, well, it’s not as epic as the original, but that makes a bit of sense. If they made the prequel game all wowie and zoomie and bang, then Joanna’s reactions to events in the original game wouldn’t make sense. If they’d thrown in, say, aliens, then you would expect her to be all “like, yawn” in the original game instead of “omg! alienz!”
…so to speak.
The designers did go way over the top with the escort missions. I hate escort missions. Perfect Dark Zero has, like, seven missions that involve escorting or defending people. There are 13 levels. This ratio sucks.
At least you’re usually escorting guys with guys who can defend themselves, not random unarmed civilians who run out into the middle of firefights and get themselves shot.
But, even with far too many escort missions, it was some pretty good Dark.
Graphical overloads come in pairs.
I’ll preface this with: I am a cranky old bastard who doesn’t like the idea of buying games as download versions, because having physical media around makes me feel all secure and comfortable and safe and stuff.
On the other hand, Jeff Minter put out a game on Xbox Live Arcade. This makes me suck it up and deal with the idea of a download-only purchase.
And it (Space Giraffe) is goodness. It is shooty and musicy and all the things one wants from a Minter game. It is also bloody hard and I die a lot after about level 10. This is also kind of as expected from a Minter game.
I had to buy 1600 Microsoft points to buy this 400 Microsoft point game, so I had 1200 Microsoft points left over. I bought Geometry Wars.
Geometry Wars is also goodness. It doesn’t have the Minter touch, but it is also shooty and musicy and very much a “zone” game.
Hmm. Could “Minter” be a genre? You could stick stuff like Geometry Wars, Robotron X, maybe Rez into the “Minter” Genre and they would all go together fairly well.
It fits neatly into the standard game genres between “Fighting” and “Puzzle”. A gap which, I think everyone can agree, needs a little filler.
I still have 800 Microsoft Points to spend. I’m thinking that I’ll probably break down and buy the Street Fighter II HD version when it finally comes out, since I haven’t bought a new Street Fighter II game since the 3D0.
This will be a day long remembered…
It has seen the end of vinyl, and it will soon see the end of the laserdiscs.
Some background:
A bit over a year ago, I finally copied the last of our records to MiniDisc and put the turntable into a sturdy cardboard box which was then placed into storage - never to be removed, I thought.
A few months after THAT, I found the box full of 45s that I’d missed during the mass record-to-MiniDisc conversion, and I was mightily peeved. Not quite peeved enough to dig back into storage and finish the job, it was just an upsetting discovery.
About three weeks ago, my ever patient but occasionally insane wife went on a screaming nostalgia kick for the musical stylings of Shaun Cassidy, a 1970s pop star whose work, as it is, is largely unavailable on Compact Disc. So she bought some Shaun Cassidy LPs and told me, get these things into a format from which they can be copied to my Zen, and do it now.
With this powerful motivation, I was moved to de-storage, de-box, and re-connect the turntable, record the two LPs on to the PC using Audacity, break them up into tracks, burn them to CD and give them to her to be ripped and moved to her Zen.
The turntable sat idle for some weeks.
Today, the box of 45s caught the full brunt of my unstoppable organizational willpower, and now I have about 50 seperate Audacity projects that need to have some small bits of cleanup done, but that represent all the 45s made into digital audio. I am done.
I also had, at the beginning of today, one final laserdisc box set to encode to MPEG2. It consists of nine discs of “King of the Burning Desert, Gandalla” a fine series and one whose place as the final thing encoded should not be taken as a reflection of its quality.
As I look to my left, it is halfway through the first episode on disc nine, and before I go to bed tonight it will be finished.
There’s still a lot of half-way-done projects. All those LPs copied to Minidisc, for example, don’t do me much good and will need to be copied into a PC. I still have about a hundred VHS tapes. I’ll still need to do some editing of the laserdisc encodes that I’ve already done. But it’s all entered the digital realm, and now I can put the turntable and the laserdisc players into storage and hopefully leave them there.
Osu! And a quandry
You remember, back in 1992, back when you’d played the first Sonic absolutely to death and you were waiting desperately for Sonic 2 to come out, and when it did you burned through it in no time at all and were a little disappointed because you’d spent so much time playing the first game and now the second one was over already?
OK, maybe you don’t, but if you DO, or if you have a similar case where you’ve spent a lot of time playing a game and then blown through the sequel because you’d already gotten good at the gameplay in the original, you can probably understand the feeling of mild disappointment I’m having, having finished:
Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! 2.
Granted, I was playing it on easy, and I’ll go back and work through it on normal now, and I understand that there are some songs to unlock, so it’s not quite as much of a “huh. That’s it, then” feeling as Sonic 2 was.
But, since I did bring home a few more DS games, I will probably try some of those first.
My options include:
Mahjong! I can choose between Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai III Remix or Chu ~ Kana Janshi Tenho Painyan.
Either way, I get Kenichi Sonoda character designs and cute girls to play Mahjong against. Suchie Pai has bunny girls and people named after different flavors of pie, but Chu ~ Kana Janshi has catgirls who are also ninja.
Man, that’s a tough decision.
Or I could put the mahjong aside for a quick game of…
Curling!
Yes, Minna No DS Curling.
It was in the clearance bin of the Ikebukuro Toys R Us, and who am I to turn down a 1500 yen discounted DS game featuring Canada’s national sport?
(Disclaimer: I don’t think it’s actually Canada’s national sport.)
Update: Minna no DS curling is not only hard, but incomprehensible, so when I saw a mention on the Penny Arcade forums of an English-language curling game for sale in the Great Northern States, I did some googling and… totally failed to turn up anything about it.
But it did remind me that I should really give Minna no DS curling another try sometime.
A three…hour…tour…
OK, no. It’s actually about 45 minutes, not three hours, by river boat from Asakusa from Odaiba, but what really counts isn’t how long it takes but how you’re getting there.
This lovely thing is the Himiko, designed by Leiji Matsumoto, and probably the coolest looking vehicle of any type I have ever enjoyed a ride in.
It’s a limited express boat, so it only stops at Asakusa, Daiba, and Toyosu. This is it approaching the Asakusa pier.
Apparently at night it’s all illuminated and glowey, which is possibly the only thing that could make it look cooler.
Once you’re onboard, the actual cruising down the river is pretty normal. There’s a running commentary track to tell you which of Tokyo’s bridges you’re passing under, point out interesting sights, that sort of thing. Mind you, it’s narrated by the crew of the Galaxy Express 999:
Lots of folks having their friends take pictures of them with the cardboard standees. Note that the captain of the boat, who you can see from behind at the top of the photo, not only gets to pilot the coolest boat on the river - he also gets to wear a cowboy hat while so doing.
I don’t know how many jobs rank higher than that, really.
Here’s a good view of the boat from the front, pulled into Daiba. It stops right under the “Decks” shopping mall before continuing to Toyosu, and this is as far as I went.
Ticket: About 1500 yen
Super-deformed toy version souvenir: 900 yen
Grinning like a maniac for most of an hour: Priceless.
Surviving Comiket Market / Comiket
If you are as crazy as I am, and for some reason you are a westerner who would like to go to Comic Market in Summer, I thought I would lay out a quick survival kit that you might consider throwing together before you go and stand in line for multiple hours in direct sunlight in 40 degree (that would be 104 degrees, for us in the states) weather.
Which I did, by the way, although I didn’t know it was 40 degrees out until I got back to the hotel and people were talking about it.
Stuff:
1) A small shoulder bag. You can put stuff in this. When you’re at the convention, someone will hand you a promotional bag with handles that you can use to shop with, or you can buy a bag with handles from the Comic Market supplies booth for 300 yen, but you will want something to bring your supplies with you.
I didn’t bring one with me from the US. Somehow, when I was packing, I forgot it. It’s all right, because I picked this one up at a bookstore in Shinjuku for 1000 yen and it’s actually a pretty decent bag. Several different zippered pockets and it can be made expandable by opening one long zipper that runs the length of the bag.
2) Lots of fluids. At least 1500ml of stuff to drink. 500ml of that should be water, because in addition to drinking it, you can pour it on:
3) A towel. This is not a cheesy Douglas Adams “know where your towel is” inside joke / rip off. This is deathly serious. Examine the following picture:
Do you see the happy Japanese people standing outside in 40 degree weather with wet towels on their heads? Do you want to be like the happy Japanese people and have a wet towel on your head? You NEED a towel. A combini will sell you a towel for like 200 yen. Buy one, and be happy with a wet towel on your head.
4) Painkiller. Bring some, buy some, you will need it.
5) Do you wear glasses? Do you want to be able to see through them after you’ve been outside sweating like a pig? You will want something to clean them with, and your shirt will be soaked wet and sweaty. Do not, by the way, be ashamed of being wet and sweaty, because the tiny little 40kg Japanese woman standing next to you in line will also be wet and sweaty even though she’s half your size and a native.
6) Chapstick.
7) Sunglasses.
8 ) A fan. You will not need to buy a fan. In the summer, go to any shopping center, and soon someone will hand you a promotional fan. Once you get into Comic Market, go to the “commercial” section (West halls, upstairs), put your fan in your bag, and someone will hand you a promotional fan advertising something anime related. If you want a bunch of fans, put that one in your bag, walk around a little bit, and someone else will notice your lack of fan and hand you another one. Repeat as much as you can stand, depending on how many fans you want.
9) A change purse, because you are going to wind up with a boatload of change during your time in Japan. Remember - no $1 or $5 equivalent bills. Buy something 1050 yen and pay for it in bills? You’ll get back 950 yen in change. That’s a 500, 4 100s, and a 50, and that assumes you didn’t buy something 1051 yen and wind up with some 1, 5, and 10 yen coins. Your change purse will bulk up fast.
I strongly recommend getting some 1000 yen bills and 500 and 100 yen coins before you go shopping at Comic Market. This isn’t necessary - I have bought something with a 10000 yen bill at Comiket and they’ve given me change - but it just seems polite to have some smaller stuff with you.
10) Some tissues. This is a weird thing about every general-tourist guidebook I’ve seen on Japan - they all say you’ll need tissues because public toilets don’t provide toilet paper. They also say that this isn’t a problem because if you walk around Shibuya for a few minutes, people will hand you lots of little packets of tissues.
These are both lies. At least, well, they are in my experience. I never went in to a public toilet that didn’t have toilet paper, and the people on the street handing out little packets of tissues will look at you, see that you’re not from around here and can’t read the advertising slogan on the packet, and not give you one. I’ve even gone up to a person who’s been trying and failing to distribute tissues and tried asking for a packet, and been rebuffed.
On the other hand, every once in a very great while, one of the people with the packets of tissue WILL be desperate enough to unload them that they WILL hand one to a foreigner. And the sheer horror-value of the thought of being in a toilet and finding out that they don’t supply paper is enough to make me say, it’s probably a good idea to keep trying until you actually have some tissues in your bag, just in case. Or you could buy some.
11) Last, and most important: A Suica. This little card puts Tokyo into EASY MODE. Instead of having to get different tickets for different transit systems or figuring out exactly what it will cost to get from point A to point C by way of transferring at point B, you just buy one of these things from a ticket vending machine for 2000 yen, which comes with a 1500 yen credit, and from then on you just swipe it past a sensor when entering a train station or getting on a bus, and then you swipe it again when you get off and it calculates how much you owe and deducts it. You can also put it back in to the same machine you bought it from and add money to it in 1000 yen increments, which is a GREAT way to get rid of all the change you pick up.
In addition, you can use it to buy stuff from train station vending machines and some shops. Even the Tokyo Pokemon Center takes Suica. I don’t know how much self control Japanese kids have, but I know that if I was 10 and I could buy toys and trading cards with MY bus pass, I would probably wind up having to walk a lot.
To sum up: Tokyo, easy mode, get a Suica and a towel and be happy.
A brief bit on taking a Cell Phone to Japan
As I mentioned a few months ago, I bought a Nokia 6630 because, among other things, it was a dual-mode phone that would work on Japanese cellular phone systems.
At the time I was fairly dubious about this, but I figured I should try it out and see what happened.
Short version: note the ever-so-important “NTT DoCoMo” operator ID:
A couple of problems:
1) YES! It worked. To a point. That point being, I couldn’t make any international calls. Whenever I tried, I got a polite message, in English, from NTT DoCoMo, telling me that I could not make this call from this phone. I was able to receive calls from the US, however, using my US phone number, which meant that my very patient and forgiving wife WAS able to get in touch with me when I forgot to call her at a reasonable time. Being able to make LOCAL phone calls wasn’t much help, because in any case where I would have wanted to make a local phone call, it would have been considerably cheaper simply to use a pay phone.
2) For 4 incoming phone calls, total talk time approximately 32 minutes, I paid 77.13 in roaming charges.
So, yeah, it worked, and to be honest, it was worth it to me just to be reachable, but I thought I’d warn people.
9 hours to go…
Well, I’m packed up and ready to hit the road. Time for a healthy five hours of sleep before getting up at 4 AM to get a cab to the airport. I’m already looking forward to finding out what I’ve forgotten to pack.
High Definition Sick Days.
Somehow I picked up a flu, and it’s had me out of work for two days.
I actually managed to make it in yesterday, and lasted about an hour before going to my boss and letting him know I was heading home.
Then I slept for 7 hours straight, got up, went to my friend’s send-off, came home, slept, felt cruddy again this morning, called in, slept a couple of hours and got up.
When I’m sick I tend to try things I really shouldn’t, but that seem like such a good idea. Today’s bright idea was, well, I have this EyeTV thing hooked up to our Mac mini, and that’s an ATSC tuner, and I have this old powered antenna sitting around that’s not really an ATSC antenna but what the hell.
After a little fiddling, I managed to get 19 digital broadcast channels. Nobody is more surprised than me. There’s still some dropout issues, to be sure, and a better antenna might help with those, but I’ve set the Mac to try to record a couple of programs off-air and on Saturday I’ll get to see what Legion of Super-Heroes looks like.
At this point, I’m wondering why - between the stuff I can get off digital broadcast, the programs I buy from iTunes and the rapidly increasing number of TV-on-DVD box sets - why I’m even getting Cable TV and contemplating telling Comcast to stuff everything but our internet service. 
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.
