RIP Saturn: 5/11/1995 - 11/30/1998
Today marks the 9th anniversary of the last US-released Sega Saturn game - Magic Knight Rayearth, released 11/30/1998.
It’s tempting to rant about how many mistakes Sega made, both with the Saturn and then with the Dreamcast after it.
It’s even tempting to get a little below-the-belt jab in about the current console wars.
But, there’s no way I could do the ranting any better than the folks at UK:Resistance, so I won’t try.
On a more positive note, it’s tempting to post up a bunch of photos, or to go on and on about how great the system was.
But I realized that I don’t need to do that. If you were a Sega fan at the time, then pretty much all you need is the reminder:
Something was great, and you were a part of it, and now it’s gone.
Remember.
Monster Burger!
OK, OK, photos of weird Japanese fast food aren’t that exciting. I’ll try not to do this too often.
But it snowed yesterday. It’s bloody cold. I cannot be faulted for looking through vacation photos from August in an effort to remember what summer feels like.
On this particular day, I was at the Decks shopping mall on Odaiba, looking for souvenirs for the folks back home. I’d just survived the third day of Comiket, I’d been walking a lot, and I was kind of worn down - if I was going to get any souvenir shopping accomplished, I needed food.
I saw this sign:
It says “Go to Monster Burger!”, by the way.
I looked at the sign. I said, unto myself, “Yes! I will go to Monster Burger!”
This was actually a pain in the arse to find. It turns out that they’ve turned one floor of Decks into… into… well, kind of a “fitness themed” amusement center called Muscle Park, with all kinds of activities that try to be healthy and good for you…And then they stick a massively unhealthy fast food place into the middle of it.
After you’ve enjoyed the exercise-themed fun of Muscle Park, why not relax with a Monster Burger? And maybe some soft serve ice cream? And cake?
I ordered myself a Monster Burger “Set” meal, with “Potato” and “Calpis Soda”, and took a window seat. A few minutes later, a happy Japanese fast-food employee came up to me and deposited this in front of me.
Now, Y1630 is about 15 bucks. That’s pretty expensive for fast food, and actually more expensive than some family dining places. But at a family diner, you don’t get your food in a MONSTER BOX, now do you?
As an aside, the Monster Box - and the cakes they sell - are shaped like a piece of Japanese gym equipment. Just to keep the fitness theme going, see?
All pretext of fitness goes away when you open your Monster Box:
I actually had a couple of doubts about this at this point. The thing was far too tall to pick up and eat… and for some reason it had powdered sugar on top.
It took me a minute to realize that you could take the wooden skewer out, and when you did so, it separated into:
1) Dessert. That being the bit with powdered sugar on it.
2) A chicken sandwich. That being the next layer down.
3) A salad sandwich. Yes, lettuce and so on in a hamburger bun.
4) A hamburger.
5) Another layer which was just another bottom hamburger bun.
The whole thing was actually kind of nasty to eat. I managed to finish off the three “food” burgers, but the dessert - and the inexplicable extra bun - were just beyond me.
Still, what’s a guy supposed to do when he’s faced with something called a Monster Burger? You can’t walk away. You can’t say, “No, Monster Burger! I’m afraid of you!”
You’ve got to eat that damn burger and pretend to smile.
Because that’s what a guy’s got to do.
McPork
If you’re at all wondering what it tasted like, just imagine a sausage patty with a bit of lettuce and teriyaki sauce on a McDonald’s hamburger bun.
The double cheeseburger was, well, pretty much like any McDonald’s double cheeseburger at any American McDonalds’s.
And, yeah, fries and drinks are smaller in Japan than in the US. Coincidentally, people in Japan are smaller than in the US. This is where statistics geeks say “Correlation does not imply causation!” with the kind of smug look on their faces that makes you want to smack them.
Ironically, this was in math class.
So I’m talking to a classmate last night, and he’s telling me about a job he interviewed for. Apparently the interviewer told him that there were guys with “ten years experience” applying for the same job, but the interviewer “really likes” my classmate and he’s going to “put a word in with the boss” on my classmate’s behalf.
This raised some red flags in my mind. So I ask him what he’ll be doing, and the answer is “Sales”
“Commission?”
“No, I get a salary. 20K a year!”
…it turns out that getting this 20K a year involves 50 - fifty - hour work weeks, making 150 cold calls a day to people asking them if they want to buy stuff. But he gets a 10% commission on - and I asked him about this - the net, not the gross, of any given sale, so, hey, he could make lots more than that… though he admits that they’ve told him that he probably won’t make any commissions for the first few months. And people must be making big money, because there were lots of new cars in the parking lot!
So. He would be putting in 50 hours a week, but he would be classified as “Salary”, so they won’t be paying him overtime. This deal’s looking worse all the time.
We do some math together. 50 hours a week at an hourly job would mean 40 hours, plus 10 hours at time and a half, so working 50 hours in a week would mean getting paid for 55 hours.
52 weeks in a year means that, in an hourly job, working 50 hours a week, over a year, he’d be paid for 2860 hours worked.
A salary of 20000 a year divided by 2860 hours makes… $6.99 an hour. I’ll point out that the minimum wage in our state is $7.80 an hour.
I didn’t really want to come out and say “Look, there is nobody with ten years experience trying to get this job. They will call you in a couple of days and tell you that they’ve talked their boss into it and they’ve decided to take a chance on you. You will be chained to a headset, making less than a guy flipping burgers at the local McDonald’s, until you eventually realize you’re being screwed and leave. Those Porsches and Mustangs you saw in the parking lot? NOT YOURS.”
But I left it at “So, you’d be making seven bucks an hour… does that really seem good?”
They should fill more things with custard.
OK, I know that line is taken pretty much straight from a Penny Arcade strip, but I think it’s good words to live by.
Today I would like to tell you about things that are filled with custard.
But, first, some expository buildup.
My first trip to Japan was at the end of 2005, and back then I wasn’t really prepared for it. See, I’ve never been one of those fanboys that tries to do the whole “lifestyler” thing - so I don’t have, for instance, tatami on the floor or futons in a closet.
We do have a rice cooker, but my wife had it when I married her so I take no responsibility.
Point is, I never really turned being fanboyish about anime, games, manga, etc into being fanboyish about other things Japanese, and that included food.
Sure, I’d gone out for Japanese food a few times, but I didn’t really know anything beyond tempura and tonkatsu. People would say things like “Oh, you like Japanese stuff? You must love sushi!” and I’d have to admit that I’d never tried it.
This had embarrassing consequences when we went there. I really didn’t know what to eat, and so I spend most of our vacation steering us into such fine restaurants as, oh, McDonald’s, and TGIFridays, and Shakey’s Pizza Buffet… It was pretty shameful. I will admit this.
Anyway. I was a food wimp. Let’s move on.
We were there over the New Year, and on January 1st we decided to go and see Shinjuku because we hadn’t been there yet.
We didn’t know that, as far as shops and restaurants and so on go, January 1 is pretty much a national day off. Not much is open, so our recreational activities were limited to wandering around looking at closed shops with posters for the January 2nd sales and wandering around looking at shrines.
It was freaking cold, too, shall I mention that? It might have been below freezing, but I’m not going to swear to that.
Anyway, being New Year’s day, there are a lot of Japanese going to shrines, and so there are little carts selling food at the pedestrians.
My wife, who is much braver than I am, and who was a little annoyed throughout the entire trip by my constantly steering us into American restaurants, stops at one of these carts and buys something that looks a bit like a hockey puck. Neither of us knew what it was, but it smelled good and it was hot, which was important because we were both, as mentioned, really really cold.
She gets me one, too, and biting into it was like finding religion. It was, basically, a little pancake full of hot custard, and it was glorious.
We each had, oh, three or four before it started feeling embarrassing going back to this little cart and asking for more.
When we got back to the states, I started trying to figure out what it was we’d eaten. It wasn’t easy to find search terms without knowing what the name of I’d eaten, but eventually something like “shinjuku custard” worked to lead me to a blog talking about some guy’s favorite “Imagawayaki” stand in Shinjuku… possibly the very same stand.
I like to think so, anyway.
Furthermore, googling “Imagawayaki” lead me to images that confirmed that they were what I was looking for.
Then I found out that the local Japanese market sold frozen microwavable Imagawayaki, and now they are a winter tradition.
They are outrageously priced (a package of five is a little over seven bucks), but they are so very worth it.
I have included a picture for your benefit, and because it gave me an excuse to make two and eat them.
…they come in “red bean” flavor, too, but I’m not as much of a fan of red bean. I do like me the occasional taiyaki, but that’s about it.
Oh, and, yes, in the last two years I’ve managed to become a LITTLE more brave about Japanese food. My last trip there, I ate at McDonald’s exactly once, and then only because I really wanted to see what a “McPork” was like. 
When wiki no worky
This morning found me browsing the “worst x of all time” category on Wikipedia.
I do this from time to time when I need schadenfreude. There’s something delightfully enjoyable about seeing stuff that got hyped to high heaven getting torn down, and at the same time there’s the “Oh, come on, it wasn’t THAT bad” when you find one of your own favorites on one of these lists.
I reached a list, however, that was… well, there was the obligatory header that stated what the criteria were for inclusion in the list, but then there wasn’t, well, a list afterwards.
Fortunately wikipedia keeps article histories around, so I went digging. After spending 15 minutes or so looking at histories and talk pages and so on, I came to the following conclusions:
1) About a week ago, someone realized that one of their favorite ever X was on a list of bad Xs, and was offended that their particular sacred cow wound up on this list.
2) In response, they tried to get the article deleted, saying that there weren’t generally accepted criteria for being a bad X, the list was Original Research, and anyway the list wasn’t sourced. I didn’t see anywhere where they also said that it wasn’t notable enough, but I really didn’t look very hard.
3) Their deletion attempt was a miserable flop. Several people found corroborating criteria for being a bad X, and then sources for why X met those criteria. Sources were also provided for the entire list of bad Xs, and the point was clearly made that a list is not in itself Original Research.
4) In response, the original deeply offended party said “Ah hah! Your list of bad Xs is taken from these sources, hence it is a copyright violation!” and deleted the entire list out of the article, fulfilling his original goal of making sure that his favorite X was no longer listed with the bad Xs… and also removing all actual CONTENT from the page.
Someone needs to look up “Sense of humor”. I think it’s probably in Wikipedia.
6 days until the JLPT…
So, I took last year’s 3kyuu test tonight, after finishing up the exercises in my Grammar test book.
Score:
Kanji & Vocab : 41/55
Listening: 15/23
Grammar & Reading: 37/50
These are not great scores. They ARE passing scores, but not by much. I don’t know how much I can do on the listening portion, but I can certainly work on the other two over the next week.
These Tombs, they won’t raid themselves.
I shouldn’t be doing any gaming at the moment. I have finals coming up in two weeks and the JLPT3 in 8 days.
Still… I have been packing on a lot of stress, and there’s only so much hitting the books you can repeat before it’s just not sinking in any longer.
So: About those tombs, eh?
Way back when I started my “I’m out of work! Guess I should play through my backlog!” project, one of the games I considered tackling was the Saturn version of Tomb Raider from 1996. I remembered quite liking it, but I’d gotten to a boss fight that I just couldn’t get the hang of and eventually gave up on after several attempts.
Anyway, I was thinking about picking it up again and giving it another shot, and then found out that they were releasing a Super Cool Revamped version for the PS2 and PCs. With the prospect of an graphical overhaul imminent, I put the Saturn game back on the shelf and waited.
It came out in …June? June, I think. And I bought the PC version because, well, after playing Legend on the 360, there was no way I was going to go back to PS2 jaggies.
If I’d waited a month longer, I would have found out about the 360 release as well, but they quite cunningly held back announcing that one. Anyway, it came out at 10 bucks more than the PC version, so I saved a little bit, right? (let’s ignore the new gamepad I bought for the PC largely in anticipation) I’m pretty sure it’s also come out for the PSP and is on its way for the Wii… I can’t decide whether playing Tomb Raider with a Wiimote would be really neat or really really lame.
Anyway! A mere 5 months later, I’m giving Tomb Raider Anniversary a spin, and it’s really quite nice. It addresses both of my minor complaints about Legend - there aren’t many human enemies, which bugged me about Legend, and you spend a lot more of your time in, well, tombs, and not so much of your time at dinner parties in Tokyo.
I’m sure that someone out there has made exhaustive lists of all the differences between the remake and the original. It’s been a decade since I played the original, so I’m not qualified to do that - I’ll just say that it certainly seems to have caught the spirit of the original as I remember it. I haven’t had as many scares this time, though - but, then, I really haven’t run into many crocodiles yet. The crocodiles in the original game were pretty much the first time I ever felt actual fear while playing a video game, there was just something about being in the water with one and completely unable to defend myself in any way that freaked me out.
As an aside, I will mention now that the diving snake colossus in “Shadow of the Colossus” also tweaked my fear level in ways I really can’t express - the sensation of your spine trying to crawl out of your back is one that I think you just have to feel for yourself. I also had some issues in Kedge Keep in Everquest… I think the long and the short of things is that underwater and me are a BAD FIT, but even with how much it tweaks my lizard-brain fear instincts, it’s actually kind of nice to have something in a game that gets under your skin that well.
Oh, and old T-rex intro: OH MY GOD AHHHH WHAT IS THAT THING BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG IS IT DEAD YET?
New T-rex: Oh, hey, it’s a cutscene. Oops! need to move the joystick. Man, this boss fight is taking FOREVER.
I don’t know if it’s just because I was expecting it, but it was kind of a letdown. Probably the only part that’s been kind of “meh.”
Apart from that, excellent and recommended remake. I’m only to the “Egypt” level - and I am just going to say “God-damned bastard centaurs” and leave it at that, if you have played the game you know what I mean and if you ever pick up the game you will find out what I meant - so I think I’m about halfway through.
When I am not playing Tomb Raider at home, I have been picking up Brave Story : New Traveler for a few minutes of play time every now and again. I’m mostly trying to keep myself in touch with the story - I have lots of RPGs that won’t ever be played through because they got put aside for a couple of weeks and I forgot everything that was going on and didn’t want to start over.
I would like more RPGs to copy Brave Story’s combat system. It’s turn-based but it moves really quickly - there’s no sense of “oh, no, not ANOTHER random encounter”, at least not yet, and little things like mid-fight leveling and mana regen (that for once isn’t “You used mana potion! +50MP!”) are the kinds of things that make me kind of dread going back to more traditional “Welcome to the Sphere Grid!” style RPGs.
Here I will close a mention of Brave Story without mentioning how dang cute Yuno is.
Damn. Almost managed it.
Speaking of pandering…
I think I’ve made my position very clear on just how I feel about being pandered to: I’m in favor of it.
From the searches that bring people to this site - I’m not alone here. People come here looking for anime girls with cat ears, or ninjas, or ninja girls, or anime ninja girls with cat ears. If you’ve been brought here by a similar search, well, you are in good company.
Oddly enough, though, after you filter through the list of moe traits, the next most popular thing that brings people here is “Shadow of the Colossus”. All I can say to that is that people have excellent taste in games.
In the spirit of pandering, I wanted to show off a character good that I bought at Nakano Broadway back in August, and then we can count all the groups it panders to together.
So, let’s see:
You’ve got your Haruhi fans. And WE ARE LEGION. This caters to us pretty well. It’s got Haruhi, Mikuru, Yuki, AND Tsuruya-san, so it’s not like anyone’s favorite character is being left out… Well, unless your favorite character isn’t one of those four. Hmm. It’s got a good chance of not leaving anyone’s favorite character out, anyway.
You’ve got your nekomimi fans covered here, too, and your cosplay fans.
Unfortunately, it’s the post-glasses Nagato Yuki, so no pandering to us meganeko-lovers. They missed a chance there.
And I suppose it also caters to anyone who just likes putting together jigsaw puzzles. Who doesn’t like to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon putting together a jigsaw puzzle? This doesn’t even look like a terribly difficult one. The orange background might be a little dicey, I guess.
So this gets a solid B+ on the pandering scale and still manages to stay on the good side of decency. You could have this half-completed on a card table and have people over without fear of more than a raised eyebrow.
All that, and it was marked down to 800 Yen.
A wedding story.
So.
A couple of years ago, I’m working in an office building called Montgomery Park, in Portland. The reason it’s called Montgomery Park is that it used to be a Montgomery Ward’s warehouse, and by not changing the name much, they got to keep the huge lighted sign on top and just change a couple of letters.
This is not your average ex-warehouse.
It used to be a massive concrete cube nine stories high. It’s still nine stories high and looks like a concrete cube from the outside, but the inside… they did some pretty impressive stuff with it.
They knocked out the center portion of floors three through nine, leaving office space all around, and installed lots and lots of glass, so it has this massive open atrium in the middle, a largely open floor on the second floor, and then conference rooms and exits on the bottom floor. There are four glass elevators that look out on to the atrium… it actually hits everyone with a touch of vertigo the first couple of weeks you work there but it is really pretty.
Here’s a couple of tiny pictures.
The first is looking down onto the second floor from the glass elevators, the second is a view from the front of the building with the glass elevators in the background.
Now, the first and second floors get used for a lot of events after business hours and on weekends, so when I went in to work one Saturday and saw people setting up tables and chairs on the second floor, it didn’t really register with me. Honestly, I was kind of cross about going in to work on a Saturday anyway and just kind of focused on getting up to my desk on the ninth floor and getting stuff done and then trying to get out and save what little of my weekend I could.
I worked for a few hours and headed out.
I get to the elevator lobby on the ninth floor. There is a Montgomery Park employee holding an elevator door open, which is not service normally provided to random office workers. I process that, and then I process the older gentleman in the tuxedo and the young woman in the really elaborate white wedding gown.
I kind of stare at them a bit. It’s Saturday, I’m a bit worn out from staying up too late the night before. The only thing that comes to mind is “With the guy holding one elevator open, am I going to be able to get another elevator to come up to this floor?”
The Montgomery Park employee, displaying uncommon levels of understanding, interprets my look of absolute confusion correctly and pushes the call button. Another elevator immediately opens. I get in, push the first floor button, and walk to the back of the elevator so I can look down.
There’s an awful lot of people on the second floor, and an altar, and a minister.
The elevator door closes. As it starts descending, I hear music… the wedding march, in fact, and that is when everyone on the second floor looks up at me.
At this point, the confusion clears for me. I realize that the whole point of the bride being on the ninth floor is that she was supposed to be the person descending majestically into the wedding. Everyone looking up is expecting a young woman in white and her father, not a 30-something geek in slacks and a t-shirt.
I don’t know what the established custom is for this particular situation, but I managed a little half-hearted wave. I’m sure the videographer cut it out of the official wedding video.
I’m just really glad that I was going to the first floor, not getting off on the second floor in the middle of everything.
I left the building through the back doors.
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.
