So, for reasons I won’t go in to, I have been in Brussels for a few days. There is not much to recommend Brussels to anyone, though the Atomium was at least a decent way to kill a couple of hours immersing myself in a 1950s view of THE FUTURE.

Today, however, I took the high speed train in to Paris.

Side note: whatever else I have to say about Brussels, they have some pretty decent trains. They do not do a good job of explaining the train system to English speakers, however. Neither does Paris, for that matter. Frankly, there is more English in the Beijing transit system than in either of these two European countries, which makes about as much sense as a… a very non-sensical thing. I am not good at analogy.

Anyway. Paris. In the course of a day trip, I managed to climb the Eiffel Tower, take some pictures of the Arc Du Triumph and Notre Dame, and spend a few hours wandering through the Louvre saying “woah, I recognize that painting.”

Like, they have the ACTUAL painting from the DaVinci Code. It’s even in its own room. They must really have loved that movie.

That’s not important. What is important is that there is a street off the Place de la Republique that is basically wall to wall nerd stores and video game shops, and I had a mission.

I was going to find the Europe-only release of Fatal Frame 2 Wii Edition. Well, they call it Project Zero over there, but that’s not important. It’s one of a bunch of games that got translated by Nintendo of Europe and that NoA refused to pick up for NTSC regions because they didn’t see any point in tiny niche games while they were riding high off a hundred million people who had bought into the idea that Wii Boxing was going to slow their inexorable decline into middle age.

I allowed myself a budget of 60 Euros for this. I probably could have gone a little higher if pressed.

I was not pressed.

Brand new and half the budget I’d set myself.

It only took two game stores to find, too. Thanks go to RetroGamePlay of Paris for making it so ridiculously easy to check off the old quest log.

Even without that, Paris would have had some things to recommend. I swear! I’m pretty sure that I could make up a decent list of big, old buildings to look at while hoping you don’t get your wallet lifted.