Parfait GET
There’s an early episode of Ranma 1/2, everyone’s favorite comedy about sex-changing martial artists, in which Ranma (in his feminine form) is gorging himself on parfaits because he could never possibly order one as a man.
Having been to Japan a few times and seen the patently ridiculous parfaits you can get in cafes, I can empathize. They’re huge and look really delicious and ordering one as a man is possibly the least manly thing one could possibly do, right down there with buying a poodle.
That is, unless you’re some kind of pro-wrestler type and built like you’re made out of bricks and are buying a poodle as an ironic statement. Cause I can kind of get behind that.
Anyway.
With me in Japan at the moment are eight other students from my university, and we were discussing my desire to taste the forbidden dessert and it transpired that one of the others wanted to buy a parfait as well and she didn’t mind being my “cover” for ordering one for myself.
It was also my birthday, so I felt that I deserved to explore previously unknown vistas.
Anyway, we went to the nearby “Jonathan’s”, which is a family restaurant – think a Denny’s, for reference – and ordered us up a couple of parfaits. I may or may not have been wearing a false beard and sunglasses.
This was mine:
For the record, the list of ingredients as enumerated by the menu:
- Strawberry sauce
- Soft-serve ice cream
- Cookie
- Nectarine
- Corn Flakes (yes, there were, don’t ask me why)
- Yogurt
- Vanilla ice cream (a layer of non-soft-serve)
- Aloe (presumably the little green leaves on top)
Now, this wasn’t the most overdone parfait I’ve seen – this was a Jonathan’s, after all, not some fancy Shinjuku cafe – but it was plenty silly and I felt that I had adequately sated my hunger for girly treats, while still managing to hang on to the last shreds of my waning manhood.
McDonald’s Cheese Teri Tama
I’ve been trying to be sociable while I’m in Japan, which means that I’m trying to invite people along when I go down to the nearby station area to eat. Unfortunately, I’m learning that this comes with some necessary compromises.
For example, the other day I’d found a place that had enticing plastic window food, most of it adhering to the ”tonkatsu + sauce = love” equation, and it was my intention to go back there for dinner.
My walking companion, however, wasn’t so sure about the place, and then wasn’t terribly keen on the idea of going into an Okonomiyaki place, and so we wound up at, well…
I’m going to defend the trip to McDonald’s as another instance of me sacrificing my sanity and stomach for the benefit of the few poor souls who stumble across this blog.
Anyway, the current seasonal burger in Japan is the Teri Tama burger, available also with cheese as the cleverly named “Cheese Teri Tama” burger, and I ordered one of those. I also went for the strawberry-yogurt McFlurry, probably because I figured I wasn’t doing myself enough harm with the burger.
It has yogurt in it, it’s got to be healthy, right?
Anyway, the burger, etc:
Between a bun – that was, as an aside, woefully inadequate to withstand the assault of the various sauces – you get some mayo, lettuce, an egg, some cheese (presuming, of course, that you have selected the CHEESE Teri Tama), and a burger liberally soaked in teriyaki sauce.
The overall effect is interesting, if a little disturbing. It’s kind of in this indeterminate state between solid and liquid, and gives the impression that, if you wanted to, you could probably swallow the burger without necessarily chewing.
Needless to say, it was terribly messy to eat.
The McFlurry was, as expected, strawberryish and a little tart from the yogurt, nothing special to mention there though it was fairly good.
The true surprise of the evening? I wasn’t actually in intense intestinal pain after eating this thing. I’m going to file that under “incredibly lucky” and refrain from pushing my luck by going back for another one.
Tooth Beavers?
This is probably only funny if you watched Ren & Stimpy in the 90s.
Since I did, I cringed JUST a little at the sight of a dental office with a beaver mascot. 
Ultra Cola!
So, I’ll be in Japan until the 10th of August, which means that this is probably going to be used as a showcase for weird food and drink items for the next month and a half or so.
Mind you, those posts are what get me the most traffic, so it’s a win-win: I don’t have to do much work to write them and people come to read them anyway.
Anyway, today’s item: Ultra cola. Actually, Ultra Cola AND Ultra Lemonade, though the lemonade is more properly based on Ultraman’s enemies. I saw these in a vending machine in Mukougaoka, which is a place name I wouldn’t like to say three times quickly, and invested 200円 into the purchase of a can of each.
Of course, what I didn’t realize was that even though the cans on display represented Ultraman and Baltan, the actual cans you got were random, selected from an assortment of Ultra-family members and villians.
So I wound up with a Zoffy and a Dada, but it could have been worse. At least it wasn’t one of the weirder new Ultra-brothers.
Frames, Fatal
So about Fatal Frame, eh?
After loving Fatal Frame II to pieces, which is an odd emotion to attach to a horror game, I was not too surprised that I thoroughly enjoyed the original Fatal Frame, with the exception of one notable segment very close to the end where you have to fight four, well, rather tough ghosts – though I hesitate to call them bosses – which came right at a point where I happened to be almost completely out of healing items.
So it was really rough and I had to do it over a few times before I got it.
On the other hand, the final fight of the game was done really well. The game recognizes that, well, it’s the last bit of the game and you might be running a LITTLE low on resources as you come to the end of the game, so it actually takes pity on you and hands you just enough film and health to fight the last fight, even if you’re otherwise running dry.
I did have to do it over once, but I won’t blame the game for that.
I tried for a bit of a change of pace after that and started Lego Indiana Jones, and it really wasn’t grabbing me. Unfortunately, while I liked Lego Star Wars an awful lot, I find that I’ve fallen into the trap of buying progressively less enjoyable sequels. I own Lego Star Wars I & II, Lego Batman, and Lego Indy, and honestly I’m kind of dreading trying to play through all of Lego Indy and haven’t been able to even get through the first level of Lego Batman.
Oh well.
So I started Fatal Frame III instead and will let you know how that goes. I’ve played about an hour so far and I’m noticing a few things:
1) I still miss the FPS mode from the Xbox version of Crimson Butterfly, BUT at least the game’s controls are very customizable – so I can always have movement on the left stick and look on the right stick.
2) I’m also really seeing the difference between PS2 visuals and Xbox visuals. I mean, the PS2 graphics are certainly adequate, but there’s a… it’s hard to describe. It’s like the Xbox versions did shadows better, which means a lot in an atmospheric game.
3) I’m really glad I played through FF 1 & 2 before starting this. I played through FF2 without ever having played the first game, and that wasn’t a problem. FF3 is, so far, full of references to both older games.
4) Speaking of which, both older FF games DID have happy endings, if you played through them at higher difficulty levels, but in the world of FF3, those happy endings are ignored.
5) The game goes back and forth between the real world and a dream world and it’s a big change. I’m used to being stuck in crumbling ruined mansions from beginning to end, so the bits where you are running around your tastefully furnished house (with cat!) and not being chased by ghosts are a little odd.
6) On the other hand, there’s a lot more backstory for the assorted ghosts you run into, which can be interesting to read and which wouldn’t make sense if you weren’t occasionally popping back to reality.
Scary done right proper.
After playing several games recently that flirted with the tame edge of the “horror game” genre, I’ve decided to give myself some real scares. I started Fatal Frame last night, and damn if it isn’t a fine way to freak yourself out, especially played in the dark with headphones on.
I’m having a little trouble adapting to the controls, I’ll admit. I really appreciate the FPS mode from Fatal Frame II now, because the constant shifting between first and third person in this game is a bit tricky to manage. I’ve already died once, and it was to a fairly early boss fight and I’m going to blame it squarely on not being able to spatially orient properly when switching perspectives.
Still, I’ll get the hang of it. It’s a lot of fun so far and definitely seems worth the effort to recalibrate my brain a bit.
So, I have a couple of movies to watch.
So here’s the thing:
I own, on DVD, “Parasite Eve: The Movie”, and I bought “Silent Hill: The Movie” off iTunes a few months ago when it was a $4.99 movie.
I haven’t watched either yet, mind you, because I didn’t want to have the games ruined for me.
Now I can.
See, I finished Parasite Eve a couple of nights ago – and, by the way, serious thumbs up to the game overall, though I did have to use a walkthrough to get through a really awful sewer maze level and the final boss is five kinds of bastard – and the next game off the to-play stack was the recent “re-envisioning” of Silent Hill, which took a little under eight hours to play through.
Apparently I’ve been in a creepy-games mood of late.
Silent Hill : Shattered Memories, to give it its full title, is a big departure from, well, the sorts of things I normally expect from a survival horror game. There’s no miserly hoarding of scarce ammo and checking every last cabinet for healing items, because there’s no weapons and no fighting. There aren’t even many puzzles, though one particular one involving using shadows to spell out a message was memorable. It’s pretty much an atmosphere game, and what you get out of it is going to be directly proportional to how much you let yourself absorb the mood the game tries to set.
I’m torn between praising its use of the Wii hardware and reviling it. On the one hand, you use the Wiimote to point your flashlight around and to answer calls on your cell phone, you hear scratching from the speaker and throbbing as you check the environment for hidden secrets… it really lends to the immersion.
On the other hand, it has some godawful flailing around moves that you need to do in order to shake your enemies off you when they grab you, since you have no way to fight back.
So it’s kind of a toss-up, really. I kind of wish I’d played the PS2 version so I would have a real controller, but I don’t think it would have been as interesting of a game.
A Night at the Opera, Square style.
So, full disclosure here, I don’t know much about opera.
The performance form, anyway. Not the web browser. Actually, I don’t know much about the web browser other than that Opera fanatics tend to have that extra level of crazy that goes above and beyond Linux evangelists.
Not that crazy is necessarily a bad thing; progress demands crazy people.
Anyway. Opera, in the classic sense. I don’t have a lot of experience with it. The last time I went to see an opera was with my family, who bought a nice set of cheap seats in the nosebleed section of the local concert hall to see, uh, I forget what the opera was but the chick in it dies of consumption.
I realize that’s like trying to narrow down a Gilligan’s Island episode by saying that it’s the one where they almost get off the island but Gilligan screws it up.
Anyway, one thing I didn’t realize about myself before that incident was that I am apparently prone to vertigo. One thing I didn’t realize about opera houses is that, if they find a customer sitting out in the lobby having turned a pale shade of gray and trying not to lose his dinner all over the lobby, they will stick you in a seat that’s less prone to giving you the screaming heebie jeebies.
So I actually wound up with a really good seat while the rest of my family was stuck up in the bleachers.
Not that they were actually bleachers. In fact, they differed from bleachers in two important ways: First, they consisted of individual seats rather than benches. Second, there was absolutely no chance of catching a foul ball.
It occurs to me that opera could be considerably improved if they added the possibility of catching foul balls.
But I digress.
Oh, and about halfway through the second act of whatever opera it was, the supertitles cut out, which was apparently not intended. Since I’d never been to an opera with supertitles before, I kind of assumed that this was normal, that you were only supposed to understand the first bits of an opera and that everything afterwards was supposed to be incomprehensible.
The titles DID eventually come back on.
It was still pretty incomprehensible.
Anyway, wow, this post really wasn’t about opera, even though it has an opera in it.
See, Parasite Eve, which I started tonight after finishing Koudelka last night (and spending a little time with Red Alert 3 : Uprising), starts with an opera gone Horribly Wrong, with an audience full of people bursting into flames. I’m pretty sure that’s not normal behavior for an opera.
Like, oh, 95% sure.
I figured I’d take another journey into the PS1 vaults since I was already kind of used to 1990s graphic quality and wanted another good creepy game after Koudelka. Having played for an hour so far, I think I made the right choice. I’m a little worried that there won’t be enough healing items around to keep me upright, but I guess I’ll find that out as I find it out.
At least there seems to be lots of ammo.
I am given to understand that it’s a pretty short game, that the story is pretty good, and that the third game in the series was only released on Japanese cell phones, which drives some people stark raving mad. I figure I’ll play the first game, but not the sequel, because then I won’t ever have to rant about not being able to play the third.
Mac Logo Madness
I’m actually surprised I didn’t put a photo of this up before, since I’ve had the Macbook Pro for almost a year, but I looked around and can’t find it.
Anyway. So, I bought a Macbook Pro about a year ago, and I had some proper Apple stickers lying around from an Apple //c, and one thing led to another and the boring white logo on the MBP now looks much more proper.
Something that I didn’t realize at the time but that I’ve come to realize since:
Someone out there desperately needs to make a replacement case for the white plastic Macbooks. It should involve transplanting the guts of a Macbook into a new case, and it should be modeled after the 1980s Apple Aesthetic. It would be wicked cool.
Koudelka: Finishing thoughts.
I wound up staying up until 1:30 last night to push through the final disc of Koudelka. All told, my playtime was on the order of 17 hours and I was hopelessly overlevelled for the final boss by the time I got to it. I probably made things harder for myself just because I insisted on prolonging fights to do stuff like build up Koudelka’s weapons skills, which I then never used.
I didn’t manage to take down the optional boss, mind you. There’s this point where you get chased out of a building by a Big Nasty, and if you go back and kill him you get the best sword in the game… but since the only reason to have the best sword in the game is to use it against the final boss, and the final boss is easier than the Big Nasty, the only reason to kill the optional boss is, well, to say you’ve done it.
I quite like the way the game plays with some conventions of RPGs. There is one boss, for example, that you can choose to fight and kill in traditional RPG fashion, but if you do a little bit of backtracking and complete a side quest, you don’t need to fight them at all – you just give them an item and they depart in peace. You also don’t need to actually beat the last boss to finish the game – in fact, if the last boss kills YOU, you get an ending that is arguably considerably more upbeat than the ending you get for “winning”.
I did have a weird realization when playing Koudelka, though. See, it really is a pretty limited game in a lot of ways. It takes place in a sequence of tiny connected rooms, the graphics are, well, not what you’d call amazing, and the gameplay, if you strip away the atmosphere and story, boils down to hunting for the red keycard to open the red door while occasionally fighting off random encounters.
At the point this was released (2000), I was spending every possible waking moment in Everquest, which was a massive world with huge zones and thousands of things to do. It’s easy to look back at it now and talk about it as dated by comparison to modern MMOs, but compared to everything else that was out at the time…
