Trypticon: Tag gaming

Day Six: Free Day: Shop, Shop, Shop Dash!

Trejkaz — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 16:29:00 +1000

Day six was the free day for the set tour, and even though there were many other options open to me, I decided to go and look for stuff to buy again.

The day went well, details are within. Actually, I’m writing this entry on the evening of day six as I’m catching up on my backlog. But you probably won’t have seen it until a day or two later, because I first need to (a) find some Internet access that doesn’t suck in a country which is allegedly well-connected, and (b) get all the previous entries checked and put up first.

I found the wifi hotspot in the hotel, but my laptop can’t connect to it so it’s as good as broken. Why can’t they just give us an ethernet jack and be done with it? I’d rather pay ¥500 per day for that than the same amount for wifi that doesn’t even connect.

…and as for what happened today…

First, off to Harajuku to properly check out a couple of places which we didn’t get time to see the other day. I got to experience rush hour trains… the pushers were doing their job of pushing people into the cars of the train. I somehow managed to get standing spot in a corner which was stable enough to play DS.

Unfortunately I arrived at 09:00, an hour before anything opens, so I had to waste time, and the only cafe which I found which was open was Starbucks… too bad. After wasting the best part of an hour drinking a coffee very slowly, I went back out to the shops.

I looked through Kiddy Land trying to find suitable plushies but didn’t find anything really good except a supreme Totoro, much bigger than the last one I’d found which was already bigger than the one I actually bought. I could only guess at the price of this biggest Totoro, as it didn’t have a price tag attached (which means it was supremely expensive… perhaps ¥50,000.)

I also checked out Book-Off for a moment but the amount of kanji was already starting to freak me out after only five minutes so I evacuated. It may have had more than books, DVDs and music, but at that point I wasn’t ready to try and find out.

Next, to Shinjuku, where I went to check out the Odakyu department store. After buying nothing at the department store I wandered around for a bit, and found more seedy DVD shops. Actually, the density of seedy shops was increasing quite steeply so I pulled out the GPS and found that I’d made it about half way from the station to the red light district. Time was starting to run out again so I forced myself to make it back to the station and besides, the day was still early (around 11:00 at this point.)

Then to Ikebukuro, which was skipped on the tour the other day due to a lack of time. I checked out the Tobu department store there too, as it is practically grafted onto the station. It looked more or less exactly like the other department store earlier in the day, and I started to wonder if all department stores look the same.

Interestingly though, Japanese department stores don’t put perfumes and cosmetics on the entry level, so it’s quite possible to make it to where you want to go without being assaulted by smelly samples. Also, and this probably goes without saying, but department stores sell alcohol. There was quite a bit of cheap sake available, although I didn’t pick any up at either location because I knew how much I would be walking around for the rest of the day.

The final step on the shopping run was Akihabara (this makes it my third visit there.) Originally I thought I would use this time to buy up doujin comics, but actually it turned out quite differently because I had remembered some other things I wanted to buy.

I spent some time looking through the various electronics shops for a portable media player which could play DIVX, and which had a video output on it. I must have searched at least eight different stores before finally giving up on that one. I found a few units which did handle DIVX, but not one of them had video out capability as well. I will just have to use a more expensive option from back home… I really thought Japan would have had these sorts of things.

Then I ran around looking for games to cross off my list. Apparently, my taste in games is quite similar to the norm, because it took some time to find what I was after. In one of the larger stores I bought a brand new copy of Jump Super Stars (¥4,180), which is still considered a current release even though it came out a very long time ago. I then discovered that both of the other games I was after were no longer current releases, so I would have to start searching second hand stores. I did search several larger second hand game stores, but had no luck. I was heading back to the station when I ran into some of the other people from our tour. We talked for a bit, and then some of them went into Club Sega while I went off to search again (why, I have no idea.) Turned out to be a good idea – on a side street I never would have seen, I found a tiny store which had both of the other titles I was after, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan (¥3,980) and Electroplankton (¥3,980). Electroplankton came with cheesy headphones, too. Good to see that second hand game stores are just as big a scam over here as they are back home, price-wise… but it wasn’t like I was able to buy the games new, let alone back home.

I also found more awesome model shops (one of them had extensive collections of model trains, costing immense amounts of money but looking really cool) and quite a few more porno shops. Seriously, you can’t throw a cat in Akiba without hitting a porno shop.

At this point I was nearly dead so I returned to the hotel and did some catch-up on the blogging.

Day One: Tokyo Game Show

Trejkaz — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 18:54:00 +1000

Looks like I have a bit of free time. Not enough time to post photos though, I guess that can come later. I don’t have enough time to properly hyperlink this entry right now, so if you find reference to something you’ve never heard of, JFGI.

I left the Tokyo Game Show a little early – not unexpected, since Nintendo never attend said event and most of the games I’m interested in are theirs. Square Enix and Sony both had guys walking around with signs telling people not to take photos, which was irritating because wanted to show people what Square Enix’s booth sign looked like, it was great stuff. In any case, I’m sure some news site will have a good picture of everything since official press are apparently unencumbered by stupid rules. They cut queues, too, the bastards.

Sega’s stand was fabulous. I got some videos of the booth babes playing Sonic, Bleach and Monkey Ball (Monkey Race in this particular case) for Wii, but they weren’t letting any random people try it out so as far as we know it could all have been choreographed. There wasn’t an awful lot of other Wii stuff around, though I found Elebits later. Still, you have to respect Sega for their choice in players. Where do they find all these cute women who are good at video games? Seriously… is this another Japanese thing?

I also found a booth which had almost no crowd, displaying some new force feedback technology. I’m pretty sure it was these guys. If consumers have their heads screwed on properly, their new technology should end up in every PDA and phone, if not all game controllers. Their demo system was a PDA where you press the buttons drawn on the screen, and it feels like you’re pressing a hard button – very nice stuff. They were saying that Sony had chosen to remove force feedback from the PS3 because it “interfered with the motion detector”, but actually this company also had a concept controller which had both and worked fine. They also had a demo of Jedi Knight II which was modified so that you can feel the light saber buzzing lightly when it’s idle.

Hudson were hosting a kind of multiplayer tournament where you play against gravure idols. For obvious reasons, the queues into this were enormous, so I just didn’t bother. Again, a ~~fake~~dodgily acquired press pass would have been really useful here. ;-)

There were various random tournaments for other games strewn around the various halls. I saw a guy playing some new breed of Puyo Puyo and owning all the other players, Kousaka-style.

The place was hella crowded. I overheard several people bitching that it was more crowded than E3. I got through it all in about 2-3 hours since I didn’t really find any demos that I wanted to play and that were allowed to be played. Ended up with a bag full of stuff which looks pretty but ultimately is impossible for me to read.

Bunch of us ran into each other at the exit and decided to go on a mission into the nearby shopping district. I didn’t find any awesome random stuff, but I did buy a copy of the Suzumiya Haruhi official fan book, since we happened to find a bookstore and I happened to walk into the section with the artbooks. So after that I had ended up with one more piece of pretty stuff which is impossible for me to read. ;-)

So that’s the summary of my day. And now for the random crap:

Japanese keyboards are laid out awfully. Worse than a UK one, seriously. And UK ones are already pretty awful. You simply shouldn’t put four different characters onto a single key. There is no way a new user will figure out how to type the others without losing some hair. Poor hair.

This hotel has escalators which turn on when you approach them – a nice idea that I’ve never seen before. It also has a full IMAX theatre and a bowling alley inside, but I get the feeling that the prices for both of the above will be escalated so it might be better to avoid them.

Also, the guidebooks never tell you some things… for instance, they never warn you that an iced coffee here doesn’t involve milk, or in fact any other dairy product. It’s still surprisingly good, though.

And now to actually check my mails.

I can’t check my Jabber messages from here, because the net cafe is owned by Yahoo – talk about an awful arrangement. Next time I find some place with a wifi hotspot and use my own laptop.

Over, and out.

Kirby Skillz

Trejkaz — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 19:50:00 +1000

Kirby: Canvas Curse on DS is probsbly the best game of its kind.

Anyway, I think I might be getting faster.

Half Way Through 2006

Trejkaz — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 10:24:00 +1000

I haven’t posted for a while, so I thought I might owe the few readers I have, a bit of an update to give some kind of poor excuse for my lack of posting recently.

The media centre is basically complete, with the operating system installed and bits of MythTV already working. A PVR-150 card has been ordered for video capture, which comes with its own IR receiver, so I should be able to get some kind of agreement going between my universal remote and LIRC.

I ordered the PVR card some time ago, but it went on back-order so I don’t know exactly when it will be arriving. I have been putting off actually plugging things in yet though, because nothing is worse than having to disconnect and reconnect a piece of home entertainment equipment – that cabinet is just not meant to be touched, ever. I did measure things up though, and the unit fits in the cabinet with just enough space to breathe.

Gaming-wise, I have been playing through Metroid Prime: Hunters. The game isn’t exactly challenging per se (I haven’t met a hunter yet who was a problem to kill – the sniping one was the hardest so far, mainly because they kept going invisible) but finding the right direction to go is a major issue at the current point in time. I don’t want to use a walkthrough, but if I can’t get anywhere in another hour or so I’ll probably be forced to.

I’ve also been pushing through Super Monkey Ball Touch & Roll

But most of my time over the past several weeks has been sunk into a certain anime series which has crawled into my brain and stuck there, poking around to see how I will react. I think I’ve watched certain episodes eight times over now, so maybe it will burn out at some point in time. Unfortunately I don’t know which will burn out first – my brain, or my interest in the series. In the meantime, I have some t-shirts to make.

Early DS

Trejkaz — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:15:00 +1100

Well, I said I’d blog about Nintendo DS games, and it didn’t really happen except for my little email to Capcom about the “fabulous” voice acting in their latest game (I actually did send that, incidentally… it wasn’t one of those “open letters” which people put on a blog and then expect the company to run across by accident.) And you know, because I didn’t blog about DS games, people complained. So this entry should keep those people happy, or at least sedated.

Since I seem to have a little time to burn, and I don’t have a large amount of text for any of these, I’m just going to run off the first few games I bought and played on the Nintendo DS, and drop some commentary on those. You know, so that these games don’t feel left out if I initially start going on about Kirby.

Wario Ware: Touched! was really the first game I bought, the one which came bundled with the DS. The DS was actually out for a little while before I bothered to pick one up… I think that was mostly because Super Mario 64 DS and the Metroid demo were bundled with all the earlier models I found, and the cost of the unit by itself wasn’t appealing for the first few months. Mario 64 DS, of course, sucked. Its controls made it nothing like the work of art which was the original, and we shall never speak of it again. Metroid is probably going to be good, but you know, showing people a demo and then saying that they can’t buy the game is effectively giving gamers blue balls.

Touched!, though, short as it was, was quite good. It delighted, it infuriated. It was responsible for some of the damage to my DS’s screen, which I still need to get repaired. These days (I mean, it’s almost a year since the game came out, but still) it doesn’t measure up to the current selection of games, but I would still pick it up in a second hand bin if I didn’t have it already.

Polarium was the second, and still the cheapest, game I bought. The whole game revolves around flipping tiles from black to white in order to clear rows while the level tries to flood off the top of the screen, so in some senses you can consider it to be a descendent of Tetris. It used the DS’s second screen as a kind of extension of the game board. As the stylus only works on the bottom screen, though, it functioned more like Tetris’s “next block” window than an extension of the game board.

Multiplayer was supposed to be quite good, but I never found someone interested in the same game because, well, people generally just don’t like puzzle games.

Meteos, similar to Tetris but even more similar to Tetris Attack, got a lot of hype as “the Lumines of the DS” as it was by the same developer, and was very similar in concept. The game was extremely addicting while it lasted, but it didn’t last long enough. Even playing one level over and over to mine for precious metals was enjoyable, particularly when the level starts becoming really easy and the Meteo count starts skyrocketing.

Multiplayer for Meteos was supposed to be awesome too, but again, puzzle game… no interest. The only way I’m getting opponents for this one is by buying a second DS and thrusting it in people’s faces. Anyone who owns their own would already have something better to do.

Battle Network 5 DS Voice Acting

Trejkaz — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:34:00 +1100

From: Trejkaz <trejkaz@trypticon.org>
To: Capcom <megamail@capcom.com>
Subject: Battle Network 5 DS Voice Acting

I don’t know if feedback like this ever really has an effect, but I have to say something or maybe nobody will.

Lan/Netto is a 12-year old kid (or thereabouts.) MegaMan.exe/Rockman.exe is based on Lan’s brother, Hub/Saito, who we are led to believe is of a similar age.

Why, then, is the voice acting done to sound like an 18-year-old? The Japanese version of the game at least sounded right, and I wasn’t put off because the voices were tastefully done. But I bought the US release, and then found out that the voice acting was completely unacceptable, and I would go so far as to say that it makes me cringe every time any character talks. It’s so bad that I have to wear headphones so that other people don’t think I’m playing a lame game.

So that you don’t make the same kind of mistake again, perhaps it would help in the future to take into account things like the age of characters in the game, and to hire voice actors capable of sounding the part. I’m sure there are plenty of qualified voice actors out there who can mimic voices in other languages, so you could even make it sound like the original game if you wanted.

In the meantime, perhaps for the European release you might like to take the couple of months you have to add in an option to disable the voice in the game, so that users at least have a workaround.

A Breath of Air

Trejkaz — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:58:00 +1100

It seems forever since I made my last weblog entry, so I feel like I’m under some kind of obligation to make one now. Today we’ll talk about gaming.

Despite what my blog might suggest, I am really a gamer before a developer. I find it somewhat surprising that I don’t blog about the subject constantly, considering that I tend to spend more time gaming than writing code. Perhaps the problem is that, when games are on my mind, I would rather be sitting down and playing them than talking about it.

But it’s true, I’ve been playing games since around the time of Commander Keen and Wolfenstein3D, and later was a big fanatic of Doom and Doom II. I continued being a first-person shooter fanatic until around the time of Quake 2 and Unreal.

Commander Keen was, in my opinion, the best 2D platformer ever (certainly for its time, but it even stands up by today’s standards) and would look great if someone ever revived it with nice 3D side-scrolling. Wolf3D got its swanky remake but Keen has been more or less forgotten since id Software moved on and focused themselves purely on first-person shooter titles.

Amongst all that, I somehow never owned a NES, SNES, Sega Master System or Sega MegaDrive, although I spent an awful lot of time playing on friends’ versions of said consoles. I was even late on the N64 boat, but eventually did end up owning one of those and playing various games on that (and was particularly fond of Mario 64)

University became the time of Quake and Quake 2, and a lot of time in particular was wasted on Action Quake 2. I bought Half-Life on prerelease and that was the very last time I was interested in first-person shooters. Half-Life was good, but it was eventually destroyed by Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike was good for a while, perhaps up to beta 4 or 5, before all the good weapons were nerfed, and that completely destroyed my interest in the genre until much later with Doom 3.

Getting bored of the whole PC gaming thing was what prompted us into buying a second-hand Nintendo 64. We played things like Mario 64 and also Super Smash Bros., the latter of which probably ate more of our time overall, particularly when friends were around to beat the crap out of us. Eventually we did move onto buying a GameCube, and played a number of marvellous titles on that, but eventually the good titles simply stopped coming, so the console slowly became less useful.

These days, I prefer to go handheld. I bought two GBAs on launch with the intent of playing multiplayer, which never happened. However, I eventually found myself playing dozens of games on that console and thus I bought a GBA-SP about half a year after it came out, to get rid of the problems with getting a bright enough screen on the GBA. Lately, I’ve been playing the Nintendo DS a lot more than anything else, and I think that instead of blogging about coding for a while, I’m going to fill in some space in the weblog over the next few weeks blogging about Nintendo DS games.

For now though, I suspect this is already too much text for a single entry. I’d better cut it in half, huh?