Important milestones in language learning:
Realizing, while purchasing the following, that I can ask, in Japanese, “What flavor is maid?”
The second important milestone was that I successfully resisted the urge to do so; Japan doesn’t need my bad jokes.
These things are all over Akihabara: proof that you can take about Y200 worth of cookies, put them in a cute box and sell them for Y600.
Waking up in a strange bed is a pretty unsettling moment.
Waking up in a strange bed in Tokyo when you’re not expecting it is really quite terrifying.
My morning started like that, with a bit of sheer “where the hell am I?” panic. It’s gotten better, though.
The flight to Tokyo, now that I’m fully aware of where I am and have spent a full day roaming the city, was pretty decent. I’m getting used to the process: I get up godawful early to make a plane, spend an hour or two getting to Seattle or San Francisco, spend several hours reflecting on Douglas Adam’s “It is no coincidence that no language on earth has ever created the phrase “Pretty as an airport””, and then spend 9 to 11 hours on another plane slowly grinding its way across the Pacific.
It’s important to get on the plane and fall asleep pretty much immediately; this makes it so you’re almost on Tokyo time when you get there.
Just as I’m getting used to the flight, Japan seems to be getting used to me. The customs inspector flipped through my passport, commented on the multiple entry visas, and wished me a friendly “welcome back”, the front desk guy at the hotel thanked me for returning and didn’t even ask if I needed help finding the room.
The JR pass I bought for this trip is turning out to have been an awesome investment, by the way. It means slight delays at every station – I have to use the single manned ticket gate and can’t whip through the automatic turnstiles with my Suica – but it’s saved me Y5000 at least in train fare so far, and I got to take the Narita Express in from the airport instead of the slow train.
Getting to the hotel around 6PM last night, I had the bright idea of trying to go out and do stuff; this might have been a good idea if I hadn’t also squeezed in a much-needed bath and change of clothes. By the time I got to Ikebukuro, it was after 8PM and places were starting to shut down. I grabbed a chicken curry rice omelet and trudged back to the hotel to get some rest.
This morning started with the aforementioned moment of sheer terror, and as also aforementioned it got better.
First, I went off to Ginza to visit the Sony Building, which was full of shiny things I could not buy. The few things they DO offer for sale in their store there are all “overseas” versions – basically the same stuff I could get at a Sony store in the US. Very disappointing from a buy-stuff perspective, less disappointing from a “wow, neat shiny things” perspective. I got to watch a terribly perky saleswoman demonstrate a Rolly, and I am befuddled as to its popularity.
Then I went back to Ikebukuro, where all the stores were open, and hit up the Uniqlo for a bunch of T-shirts. Damnit, I put in an awful lot of effort to get myself down to the weight where I COULD wear a Japanese XL size, I’m going to buy some shirts. Uniqlo has a cool thing going where they have shirts based on Shonen Jump manga, so I wound up with a lot of shirts.
I thought about going into the Ikebukuro Animate, but then I walked over to the street it’s on.
The girls have taken over. That is to say, that part of town has been Otome Road for a while now, but when I was there a year ago, it was at least partially boy-themed stores mixed in with the girl-oriented stores.
It’s all BL and yaoi now, and the hordes of teenage Japanese girls crowding into the shops were, well, they were a MULTITUDE. Saturday being a school half-day, most of them were wearing their uniforms; this would have been a fantasy-fulfilling vision if it weren’t for, well, knowing what they were there to buy.
I made a quick exit. I’m all for equality in access to naughty manga, but actually seeing equality in action was more than a little intimidating.
I did get a cool sticker in Tokyu Hands. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually put it on anything, though. Nobody’s likely to be able to read it, and constantly having to explain what it says would take the humor right out of it.
So, Ginza and Ikebukuro visited, it was off to the first of Japan’s Three Holy Places: Akihabara.
My eternally suffering wife puts up with an awful lot, and her husband trotting halfway around the world to the Land of Fanboy Temptation is just one of the things she has to deal with. Her exact words were “don’t buy too many gadgets”, and my reply was “I won’t buy TOO MANY gadgets.”
I intended to buy one of the Crimson Red PSPs I saw on Kotaku a few months ago, and it turns out that this was surprisingly difficult, even in Akihabara.
Put this way: I saw multiple “Crisis Core” PSPs for sale, and that was a famously limited edition. I didn’t see a single red PSP.
The Crisis Core PSPs were in the $300 range. Presumably the red ones, if they could be found, would be that much or more. That’s a lot just to get another PSP. I was half thinking that I might be able to get out of Akihabara without breaking the bank.
Then I thought to myself “Hey, the hotel has free internet access and an ethernet jack in every room. Wouldn’t it be cool to pick up a cheap used laptop and blog from Japan?”
Used laptops are pretty available and pretty cheap in Akihabara; if you don’t mind that they have no warranty whatsoever and are probably going to have a completely dead battery, you can pick one up for under $200. It was looking like I’d had a pretty good idea.
Then I walked by a display for the Asus EEE, and, well, I was lost. I hadn’t gotten a chance to use one in person before, so I hadn’t gotten to see how cute it was and how surprisingly decent the keyboard and touchpad were.
I wound up dropping roughly $400 on the EEE. At least it runs Windows XP home and they include a USB optical mouse and 4GB SDHC card in that price, a US machine for the same amount comes with Linux and no accessories.
Oh, and they offer it in pink, but the last shreds of my manhood surfaced just in time to make me buy a white one.
I wanted to pay a return visit to Mai:lish, a maid cafe in Akihabara that’s remarkably foreigner-friendly, but they had a heck of a queue to get in.
I wound up, instead, at Cafe With Cat, the nekomimi-maid-themed restaurant in Comic Toranoana. Perv factor: very high. Food (I had beef curry): Not bad.
They serve it with your rice molded into the shape of a valentine heart, which I would call a touch over the top if it weren’t being served by a girl in a frilly maid outfit with cat ears. Really, once you’re there, there’s no more “over the top” to go to.
No pictures of the staff, sorry. You’ll just have to go there for the experience.
Oh, both Comic Toranoana AND the Akihabara Mandarake are pretty much given over to the girl themed doujinshi. So you have this male-fantasy-fulfillment cafe on the second floor of a building that mostly caters to girls now. It’s a little odd.
On the way out of Toranoana and headed back to the station, I realized that the crowd on the sidewalk was considerably heavier than normal, and then I realized that I was approaching the memorial that’s been set up for the victims of last weekend’s… I don’t know what to call it. Tragedy? That’s an over-used word. Sheer damned craziness is a better term; the whole thing is so non-Japanese that it doesn’t seem possible.
The memorial is a huge mound of bouquets and the crowd of people stopping to offer prayers is pretty intense, made the more so because the nearby shops seem to have considerably turned down the volume out of respect; it’s a small area of quiet and contemplation in the middle of the neon hurricane that is Akihabara.
I didn’t expect to walk past it and doing so shook me up a little. It’s not enough to make me feel unsafe here; this is still Japan after all, but I hope it stops here and that nobody decides to go copycat.
OK, serious moment over. Tomorrow I’m going to take full advantage of this JR pass and head off in the direction of Japan’s SECOND Holy Place: Osu in Nagoya. The shinkansen northbound is still out of service from this morning’s earthquake, but I’m assured that southbound is running just fine.
My wife’s monitor died in explosive fashion, and as the wonderful person she is, she decided that she would take MY old monitor and allow me free reign to purchase a new one for myself.
This display of generosity came at an unfortunate time, however, since she waited a few hours between her monitor dying and telling me that I could buy a better one for myself… by that time, I’d already, uh, bought a better one for myself with the intention of giving her the hand-me-down, without, you know, checking with her that it was OK.
So I feel a bit like a heel, but at the same time I have a cool monitor now, so I’m a heel with a cool monitor anyway.
This being a Gateway FHD2400, which is a lovely shiny 24″ 1920×1200 monitor. Not that those stats are, in themselves, anything especially crazy, but this thing also goes way beyond the norm in terms of inputs – it’s got the standard DVI and VGA, of course, but also has S-video, Component, Composite, and HDMI inputs. For a guy with far too many old video game consoles around, this thing is just about perfect.
No picture because my desk is a horrific mess right now. It’s, uh, a big shiny monitor with chrome trim. I’ll let you envision that.
Filed under “organization” because it’s going to let me get rid of a 24″ Toshiba CRT TV that has the most annoying shadow mask in the history of CRT displays. It’s something I managed not to notice for a very long time, but once it was pointed out it became something I couldn’t unsee.
I hate that.
Obviously I didn’t update the site much in May, for a few reasons.
1) With the term coming to an end, work at a bit of a high point, and a trip to Japan coming up later this month, “crazy busy” is a good description of May.
2) There’s been a bit of a return to the EQ addiction in the household. This is a bad thing, and will probably all end in tears.
3) I normally post something whenever I finish a game, and after abandoning Princess Peach, starting Yoshi’s Island DS, and giving up on that as a bad cause, I hadn’t finished anything until today.
I’ve spent the last two weeks in the enjoyable company of a certain young ninja girl. That being the titular character of “Izuna, Legend of the Unemployed Ninja.”
Honestly, if you’re my kind of person, you’ve probably already played it. Failing that, if you haven’t played it, hearing that there IS a game called “Izuna, Legend of the Unemployed Ninja” has probably made you decide to play it. If at this point you still need to hear me say anything more, I’m questioning whether you’re really my sort of person.
I’ll mention one more point: The banker NPC, who you have frequent occasion to visit, is a cute shrine maiden with glasses.
If you’re not already checking eBay for a used copy, I’m done with you.
But I’ll continue.
Izuna is often described in terms of being old school and uncompromisingly difficult and in general people say bad things about how it’s nasty and unforgiving.
This is true, to a point. See, it’s basically a graphically spiffed-up version of the old Unix game “Rogue”, and that game is crazy nasty and unforgiving: you’re thrown into a dungeon, you have to survive against heavy odds, and you’re probably going to starve to death if the monsters don’t kill you first, after which you start over again at level 1 with no stuff.
Izuna, on the other hand, doesn’t need to eat, and if you die in a dungeon you don’t go back to level 1. It’s practically easy!
Yeah, you lose all your stuff and all your money, but after you finish the first dungeon, you have access to the aforementioned incredibly cute banker who is happy to keep your spare gear and cash on hand for the next time you slink back to town, naked and bankrupt.
So it’s hard, yeah, and the game does tend to pick the worst possible moments to throw vicious chains of enemies at you, but you’re always able to pick up and head back down into the dungeon for another round. This time around, you’re probably a couple-three levels higher and it’ll be easier; you might even get down to the boss – and if you’ve fought all the way down to the boss, you probably won’t have any trouble with them. I only had to fight one boss more than twice.
The dungeons are randomly generated, but all the normal things you’d expect apply: as you get lower, enemies get harder, treasure better, traps more frequent. You have seven dungeons to get through to finish the story, with an optional 8th dungeon that actually IS just as nasty and unforgiving as Rogue – which is, I assume, why it’s optional. If you’re crazy, it’s there to give you a challenge.
Getting through the seven not-optional dungeons and seeing the extent of the story was really challenge enough for me, so I’ve stopped there. I understand there’s a sequel coming out, which will probably be more of the same.
If that “more of the same” includes more cute girls in glasses, consider it a day one purchase.
A weird little memorium today.
Back in the early 90s, there was no such thing as cheap public internet access. If you were a student, or worked at one of a very few large corporations, you could get access, otherwise you were generally out of luck.
The flip side of this is that, if you did have access, you had something quite unusual and rather special. Even back then, before the growth of the web, internet access meant that you had access to ftp sites and USENET newsgroups and gopher and a great many things that you couldn’t get through local BBSes or pay services like Compuserve.
I was just a high school student at the time, so I shouldn’t have been able to tap in to any of this and probably shouldn’t even have known it was out there.
On the other hand, I had unofficial access to an account at the local university, and that’s where I got my first exposure to the net. It was pretty intoxicating, and I spent far too many hours sucked into the comp.sys.* newsgroups. It’s no exaggeration to say that my career so far is owed to having early internet access and being able to tap into so much information that wasn’t otherwise available.
That ended when the Vax I had access to an account on got shut down in 1991. It was a pretty harsh separation – not as crippling, to be sure, as being netless would be today, but… I’d had, for a few months, a window into a much larger world, one which was still out there, and now it was closed, blinds pulled, and boards nailed across.
Then, a few months later, I ran into someone with the virtual equivalent of a claw hammer.
That gentleman’s name was David Casti, a student at the local college, and he wasin charge of a machine there called VECTOR. He also didn’t mind creating accountsfor people who, well, weren’t necessarily students. Life was good again, and although it didn’t last, it wasn’t too much longer before Delphi started offering reasonably inexpensive internet access, and not too much longer after that before the growth of freenets, and really not too much longer at all before the thought of not having access to the internet was actually unthinkable.
I probably wouldn’t remember any of this, except that while I was doing a searchfor something completely unrelated on my machine today, I ran across the following message from June 2, 1992:
SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE
OK, so the end is really here. I cannot guarantee that VECTOR will be
on the network after 5:00 p.m. June 5. I expect that it will remain
until the afternoon of June 10, but I make no guarantees and I don’t
want any misunderstandings about this. If you have any questions,
contact me.
Many of you have asked about access through other UO machines. Much to
my surprise (and your dismay) I have FAILED to find anyone who will
allow me to transfer my users to their system. I was surprised to find
such close-mindedness on the part of the university, especially because
the reasons they give are so lame: not enough time or money &c.
So, feel free to leech the network away these last few days. Please be
mindful of disk space. Currently there are 20 free megabytes. If they
fill up, no one will be able to log on except me, and I will be forced
to delete (what may appear to you to be random) files. A good guideline
would be to keep your off-line storage down to 5M. While you’re logged
on, feel free to use the disk, but before you log off prune your user
space.
Please keep in mind that I’m not falling off the edge of the Earth, and
although I won’t be able to help with network access right away, I may
be able to at some future point. Also, I will be happy to help anyone
who may find other ways to get network access. My account on OREGON will
probably remain active for a term or two, so I can receive mail at
dise@oregon.uoregon.edu.
Thank you all for treating me so well. I was happy to have provided
access — I’m just sorry it couldn’t have been for longer than a few months.
This service was provided (albeit unwittingly) by NeXT Computer and
the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at the University of Oregon.
Without their support, none of this would have been possible.
INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERRUPTION * SERVICE INTERR
16 years later, I’m going to bet that VECTOR is long since scrap, and that David has long since graduated and is hopefully doing well in whatever endeavours he’s decided to pursue. This whole thing, in fact, seems a bit quaint – these days, net access is universal, nearly free, and as impersonal as paying your water bill.
That’s what memoriums are for, though, for remembering things that – while they may not seem all that significant today – made a difference at the time.
A foreword:
If you grew up with a NES, if some of your fondest gaming memories revolve around the frustrating-but-satisfying 8-bit classics, if you think “Nintendo hard” is a compliment:
Skip this post. You won’t like it, and you’ll add a snarky comment detailing why you didn’t like it. It’s even odds whether your comment will be from the OMG SAMUS ARAN IS TOTALLY A GURL DIDN’T YOU KNOW? camp or the LEARN 2 PLAY NOOB camp, but you’re unlikely to change my thoughts on the topic.
Original post follows:
I am relatively new to the Mario franchise.
I played Donkey Kong, of course, and Mario Bros and Super Mario Bros in the arcade, but, as I didn’t own a NES during its heyday, I never really joined the Cult of Mario. I did own a SNES, but I bought the core system that didn’t have a bundled cartridge.
Later, when I bought a N64, I did pick up Super Mario 64, mostly on the hype – which actually explains most of the games I bought for that system – and didn’t really get it. I ran around a bit and collected a few stars, got rather tired of it, and went back to Doom64 and F-Zero X.
Super Mario Sunshine likewise failed to hook me.
I don’t honestly know why I kept buying Mario games, except, well, I kept buying the hype.
Then I bought a DS, and once again bought into the hype, this time for New Super Mario Brothers, and suddenly I got where all the hype was coming from. It was actually a really good game, albeit with a bit of an annoying save system, and I played through it and even went back to it to unlock a couple of worlds I hadn’t gotten to the first time around.
Following that, I played through the original Super Mario World on the GBA, and even branched out into the Mario RPG lineup with Partners in Time.
I was starting to become a Mario convert.
Then they released Super Princess Peach, which had a neat twist on the whole Mario-saves-Peach thing and got lots of good reviews that pretty much all said “It’s Mario, but, you know, for girls.”
Having played it, I can confirm that it is, in fact, Mario, but, you know, for girls, and also that Nintendo hates girls.
Let me explain how I’ve come to this conclusion.
Every Mario game has more or less the same premise. Bowser needs to be stopped, Peach rescued, kingdom saved, that sort of thing. This is accomplished by running from left to right across the screen, stomping turtles and mushrooms as you go. Eventually you reach Bowser, defeat him, life is good again.
Pretty much every Mario game also includes a side quest where you collect Stuff. Yoshi coins, stars, shines, blah blah blah, there’s some Big Shiny Things that you will naturally get a few of in the course of playing the game but REAL completists will get them all.
I’m not a real completist. I want to beat Bowser and enjoy the good life until the next time. So far, me and Mario have had a pretty good understanding about this. I don’t collect all the stars and he doesn’t give me any grief as long as Bowser gets what’s coming.
Super Princess Peach, being Mario, but, you know, for girls, also has a collection side quest. It involves freeing Toads. There are three hidden in each level, but freeing them isn’t a condition of completing the level. You can progress just fine without finding them, until you get to the last level. That’s where your sentient umbrella pops up and says:
“Oh my goodness! I can feel a powerful force from within! Before the final battle, you need to rescue all the Toads from past stages.”
To expand upon my annoyance with this: By this time, you’ve jumped, swum, and umbrella-bashed your way through every level of the game. Your name is spoken in hushed and fearful tones wherever sentient mushrooms gather to speak legends of the Destroyer, She Who Walks In Fire, The Pinkish Abomination, El Diablo Melocotón. You are knocking on Bowser’s door, ready to show him that you’re standing by your man, damnit, and that you would like him back.
However, you’re not going to take that final step through the last threshold until you go back to Every Goddamn Level You’ve Already Beaten, and collect Every Goddamn Toad you may have missed.
In my Own Private Version of the Marioverse, this is the point where Peach points to Luigi, who she rescued in the previous world, and says to him “He’s your brother. Let me know how it goes.” and goes home to catch up on her sleep.
This level of being an absolute jerk to the player isn’t present in any Mario games, you know, for boys, and so I come to my original conclusion.
Finished “Lego Star Wars II” last weekend, an experience that was, well, a bit of a downer. The first game may be been based on the lesser movies, but it was a lot more fun.
I reached an important, nay, critical moment in PS3 ownership this week.
Our local “Fred Meyer’s” had the collector’s edition of “Stranglehold” on clearance for $24.95, with all clearance items being discounted an additional 20%.
So now I own my first PS3 game, and after only four months of console ownership!
Hopefully it will wipe the horrible painful memories of trying to get the PC version to work out of my head.
Another way to look at it: I’ve now purchased the movie “Hard Boiled” for the third time.
This last week also saw the purchases of Kingdom Hearts II, because, well, I’d like to see the rest of the story even if I’ve heard horror stories about the Atlantea level in this one, Patapon for the PSP because everyone is raving about it and the poor PSP has been somewhat neglected lately, Persona 3 FES because I needed another 70 hr RPG to not play and to feel guilty about, and Heavenly Guardian because it looked cute and I liked the Pocky & Rocky games on the SNES.
I’m really not good at clearing out a backlog.
I can’t figure out how to unlock Miyuri in the free battle mode in Suchie Pai III Remix for the DS.
Apart from that, I’ve beaten the game with every character and gotten their “good” ending, so I think I can consider this game finished.
As far as mahjong games go, the Suchie Pai series have always been very forgiving of people who aren’t very good at mahjong. It’s actually very easy to win matches without running your opponent out of points, because they usually have a little concentration game that you can play after you win a hand. You make matches to get power ups. If you clear the board in the concentration game, you win the match no matter how many points your opponent has, so you’re usually going into the next opponent with a handful of power ups collected.
Suchie Pai III remix makes the concentration game a little more essential. See, you play six matches, and in the concentration game for each match are hidden two pieces of a medallion.
If you complete five medallions throughout the first six matches, you get to fight the secret boss, and then you get the character’s best ending, whoever you’re playing as.
If you manage to run your opponent out of points before you find the medallions, or if you get lucky and hit a “panel clear” (instant win) power up, you wind up not getting the medallions for the match. So if you win TOO quickly, you wind up not getting the best endings.
This leads to some situations where you need to take a deliberate loss in order to let your opponent build up their points a little bit more so you have more time at the concentration game. It’s an interesting bit of strategy.
The over-the-top power up-based story mode is nicely supplanted by a free battle mode where you can pick various characters from earlier Suchie Pai games and play one-on-one mahjong with them. No power ups, no concentration game, just a straight-up mahjong game where both sides start with 30000 points and you go back and forth until one of you wins.
Oh, and being a DS game, there’s no nudity, so you don’t have to feel too ashamed playing this one. You’re still a bit of a perv, but at least you can justify it as “It’s just mahjong! Look! No jubblies!”
I finished Kingdom Hearts yesterday, and it was quite an enjoyable ride. There was no Psychonauts-style Insane Difficulty Jump at the end, the Disney-themed villain in the last world was a really nice surprise, and even the Patented Square Multi Stage Final Boss Fight wasn’t too painful. Like pretty much every other encounter in the game, it boiled down to “How well can you heal?”
Not having the story, well, finish or anything is a minor quibble and one barely worth mentioning.
That’s a little harsh; you do get some closure and sense of accomplishment. You’ve thwarted a nasty villain and saved lots of innocent people, reunited friends, restored hope, so on and so forth. You’ve Done Good. It’s just that all that is stuff you’ve done along the way, as kind of side benefits of your actual goal, and in the end you’re not really all that much closer to the goal your character started the game with.
The Super Secret Ending, while a little hard to understand, gets some significant Cool Points. It was worth doing a little dog hunting to see.
A final word on the hated Gummi ship:
I went into the game knowing that something called a “Gummi ship” was going to be painful, which prepared me a bit for it when it happened. I didn’t know that it meant that there was a jammed-in 3rd person shooting game every once in a while. I also didn’t know that there was a whole meta-game revolving around collecting parts for new Gummi ships and building and customizing Gummi ships. I went into the Gummi ship garage a total of ONCE, got trapped in a godawful tutorial, and turned off the console in order to escape.
When I rebooted, I stayed the heck out of the Gummi ship building section, pretended it didn’t exist, and finished the game using the same Gummi ship I started with, no customization needed. If you are thinking about playing this game, I strongly recommend you do the same.
