I’ve put some more things up on eBay, including a brand-new one of these. You know me, I suppose – I can’t stay out of the LE hardware game for long.

I went into Tokyo this Thursday and Friday – I had two vacation days earned from attending summer camp that I needed to burn off, so I figured I might as well try to hit the Shinyaku Seiken Densetsu launch – nobody in all of Gunma is carrying the Mana Blue units. The trip turned out to be a rollicking success; I managed to pick up two of the Mana Blue sets and a copy of the just-released Phantasy Star remake. I could participate in the weekly get-together of Tokyo expats that happens every Thursday night at a secret underground izakaya. (Don’t forget to pay before you leave!) And I could pick up an application for the aforementioned Japanese proficiency test; inexplicably, the applications are only available via specific bookstores, and there are only two bookstores in all of Gunma that carry it, neither of which is less than an hour from Kiryu.

Have I mentioned recently that I live in the middle of nowhere?

As long as I needed to go to a Tokyo bookstore, I figured I might as well go somewhere new in Tokyo and check out Yasukuni-dori, Tokyo’s used book district. (Tokyo, it would seem, has a district for everything.) I’m really glad I went – there are 133 stores crammed up and down the street, and each of them has its own specialty: art books, foreign books, comic books, adult books, mystery books, Edo-era books, children’s books, maps and charts, etc. Each bookstore is clearly the expression of its owner’s personality. These aren’t used bookstores a la Half-Price Books, functioning as mere merchandise resellers. These bookstores are the crazy kind, run by crazy people – the ones that open when the proprietor wakes up and close when he or she feels like going home; with clippings on the wall from the past thirty years of newspapers and magazines; with twice as much stock sitting loose in piles as is haphazardly “sorted” on the shelves; maybe with a cat or two, to boot. Most every college town has one of these bookstores, but Yasukuni-dori has one hundred and thirty-three of them. If you like books at all, a trip there is positively invigorating.

The last time I put a bunch of stuff up on eBay, I shockingly sold a few pieces to readers of yukihime.com. So I figure I should let you know: I put a bunch of stuff up on eBay.

The new, fantastic Xbox emulators run CD images directly off the hard drive. I just got through checking out the Turbo Duo’s Dracula X and the Sega CD’s Snatcher, and both run flawlessly. The best thing is: the emulator is so smart that it can play an ISO rip with the Redbook audio tracks stored as MP3s, so an entire early-generation CD game will fit in just about 50-100 megabytes.

A modified Xbox is truly one of life’s finer pleasures.

What happened to the Japanese gaming industry?

This is a serious question. I feel like something significant has happened in the last two years, and I’m not sure precisely what. The games are as well-made as ever, but somehow, they’ve stopped appealing to me. It started in November and December 2002, when so many high profile games came out, and I felt like I had to play them all, so I did, for weeks and weeks, and at the end of it, I didn’t have any real feeling beyond having played a bunch of well-made, pretty entertaining games. It’s not that they weren’t good, or even great. It’s just that I ended up with this feeling that I could have skipped them and my life would have been none the poorer for it. So from then on, I did! My last new Japanese game was Silent Hill 3, and before that, Made in Wario, and before that … I can’t remember. I’m not alone in this, I don’t think; though certain series stalwarts still hit (relatively) big numbers, it seems like every week a new gorgeous, expensive, well-made game comes out and sells 40,000-80,000 copies (Devil May Cry 2, ZOE 2, Viewtiful Joe, Chaos Legion, Silent Hill 3, etc.)

For whom are these titles being made? What is their target audience? Do Japanese developers even understand their audience anymore? Sometimes, I wonder if the developers know they’re not connecting with their audience anymore, but simply don’t know how to do anything beyond what they’ve always done.

Even the once reliable Nintendo is showing signs of slipping. Super Mario Sunshine and Wind Waker were both great games … but far from the watershed events that were previous series titles. Oddly, I see Majora’s Mask, the last generation “spinoff,” as somehow more developed and “canonical” than Wind Waker. For all its problems, Majora’s Mask was brave, daring, and fiercely original (some might say too much so) in its design. Wind Waker is a Zelda game … cel-shaded, yes, but otherwise precisely what one would expect. In fact, the only Gamecube title to give me that tingly-all-over “this is why I play videogames” feeling has been the Western-developed Metroid Prime.

These thoughts are prompted by some recent release date trolling; now that I’ve finished KOTOR, I’m planning on taking a gaming sabbatical until December – you in the back, stop giggling! I’ve got to get serious about studying for the Japanese language proficiency test, and I was curious about what I’d be making myself wait on. I was fairly shocked by how dire the list of upcoming Japanese releases looked.

My final list of anticipated upcoming titles looked like this:

Western
Beyond Good and Evil
Champions of Norrath
Deus Ex 2: Invisible War
Half-Life 2
Prince of Persia

Japanese
Castlevania: Lament of Innocence
Final Fantasy X-2
Shinyaku Seiken Densetsu
Space Channel 5 Collection

It may look somewhat balanced, but honestly, Castlevania is the only new Japanese game I’m looking forward to – I’ve already played through X-2 and SC5 in Japanese long ago and am only anticipating their U.S. releases, and Shinyaku Seiken Densetsu is a remake. The scarier thing is that, long term, things aren’t much better; I’m looking forward to Kingdom Hearts 2 and Final Fantasy XII, Nico, and Mojib Ribbon … Killer 7, if that turns out at all playable. And that takes me well into 2004. I’m hoping there will be a surprise or two from key developers, but I’m not holding my breath.

Watching videos of Half-Life 2 from E3 was one of the defining moments of my life as a gamer. Seeing those was seeing what games will be like in the future. And more and more, playing Japanese games has felt like revisiting the past. The graphics change but the game remains the same. Millions and millions of dollars and art resources are being poured into titles whose gameplay is unchanged from what has come before. I’m a big fan of shiny things, but I only have so many hours per day (24). If I play the same game too many times, I start to feel burnt.

I know that there’s a lot of talk about “emergent narrative” from Western developers and what have you, but I don’t buy the hype. I didn’t like either Grand Theft Auto game too much, Bethesda games make me want to die, and I think Peter Molyneux is a total wanker and Fable is going to underdeliver in a major way. But I think that this philosophy has been influencing Western game design in positive ways, just beneath the surface. Sure, there are bad ideas – Jak II as GTA clone comes to mind. But the concepts of increased player freedom, robust AI, interactive environments, and simulation instead of pre-programmed events, can improve almost any title, whether they’re core design tenets or just things in the back of the developers’ heads. More and more these concepts are becoming the norm in Western games, but remain conspicuously absent from Japanese titles. It seems like innovation in presentation and gameplay has shifted almost entirely to the West, and Japan is too afraid – or unable – to change and catch up.

Am I being overly negative? Are there titles I should be looking forward to that have completely slipped my mind? Or are the tides of game development finally shifting inexorably westward?

If you had told me three years ago that I’d come to feel this way, I’d have laughed at you. But it doesn’t seem so funny now that it’s come to pass, really…

Let’s talk about Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. I had a chance a few weeks ago to play several hours of multiplayer with my brother and John Ricciardi. It’s completely adequate, and Gabe’s ranting notwithstanding, I’d imagine that most people will feel the same way. The game is good enough for what it is – which is a laggy Gauntlet clone that requires GBAs for multiplayer play. It’s fairly attractive looking, though I personally find the art style, much like Final Fantasy IX’s, to be rather hideous. It just doesn’t do anything particularly better or more special than other four-player dungeon-hack type games.

But given the large outlay required to play the game, it really needs to offer something better or special. Not everyone in the world owns a GBA – hell, not every gamer in the world owns a GBA. It’s easy to lose sight of this when you tend to fraternize with every-console-ever types, but many lovely normal people don’t own GBAs and, perhaps shockingly, don’t particularly want to own one.

And despite what apologists would tell you: requiring the GBA for multiplayer was a big, big mistake. It’s artificially limiting the audience for no reason but increased “connectivity”-based sales of GBAs and link cables. Let’s settle this up front: do you REALLY think that the whole point of “connectivity” is to bring the player new, never before seen modes of gameplay? Jesus Christ. It’s to make GBA owners want to buy Gamecubes and Gamecube owners want buy GBAs. Interesting gameplay is just the hook that will hopefully drive these hardware sales.

So arguments about the elegant way it lets players shop or access their inventory without slowing down others are total bullcrap. The game could easily have been designed around translucent mini-menus and using the entire GC controller. 99.8% of all players are going to share map, enemy, and treasure data, anyways, so subdividing it does very little except frustrate players and make them ask “okay, okay, who’s got the map now?” About the only thing you couldn’t recreate successfully would be the one-sentence “secret bonus” given each player at the start of an environment, but then you’d also gain a game that would be both more playable and playable by more people.

The GBA connectivity in Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is a solution in search of a problem. Specifically, Nintendo has a solution that they wanted implemented, and Square was more than happy to provide them with a problematic game. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the crutch is – most people prefer their games uncrippled. Sure, the game is fun, but then most games are, once you get three or four players in the same place. If you have two or three friends available to play through the entire game with you – and everyone already owns a GBA and link cable – then the game would be worth checking out. You could certainly do worse. Unfortunately, the quality of the game is nowhere near the hardware seller it desparately needs to be. If you can play it, and your friends can play it, and you all want to play it – then go for it! But don’t go out of your way for it – you’ll just be disappointed in the end.

A final piece of advice: the game is fairly boring and unplayable in the single-player mode. You have a bucket-carrying Moogle helper who’s slow and dumb and all the the game fairly loses its entire point. If you don’t have the friends to accompany you to the end, then pass on this one for sure.

I finished Knights of the Old Republic yesterday (Light Side, for the curious). I’m not as fanatical about it as a lot of folks seem to be; at its heart, it’s a well-done Bioware RPG with some slight nods to console design and a license slightly less unattractive than D&D. Other Bioware and Black Isle games have done better: Planescape: Torment has an infinitely better story – though Torment’s story and writing are preternaturally good by the standards of any medium, let alone videogames. The Icewind Dale series has a more refined combat system; KOTOR’s three-person party and the ridiculous uberness of lightsabers means that the best strategy is almost always to tank through with a party of three Force-buffed, Cure-casting Jedi. Fallout 1 and 2 give you more freedom in how you play your character. KOTOR’s graphics are sometimes wonky and occasionally outright broken. Besides your party there are like six other people in the entire universe. The game has flaws.

Flaws that are easily ignored, fortunately. I stayed up until literally 3:00 AM every night for a week as I polished the game off. (My final time was just 35 hours, and I completed every sidequest I could find.) The game just clicks in some fundamental way, much like those other aformentioned PC RPGs. Though the overall story of KOTOR doesn’t live up to Torment, it’s perfectly serviceable – occasionally good – and the straightforward plot is bolstered by some great writing and characterizations. HK-47, the chipper protocol droid retrofitted with a killjoy assassination protocol, could be one of my favorite characters in any RPG. The battles, though not overly complex, can still be fun – the wide variety of Feats, Jedi Powers, and equipment available lets you customize your characters to a vast degree, and the depth of the battles comes not so much from what you choose to do during battle but from how you have created your character – what you make yourself able to do.

This freedom to shape your own character and destiny is definitely the game’s greatest strength. It’s common to have eight or so sidequests opened up at a single time, and most of these manage to be more interesting than simply FedExing packages from one side of the galaxy to another. The game also has a nice mixture of battle-based, puzzle-based, and dialogue-based solutions to puzzles. I tried the dialogue-path whenever possible; with a high charisma statistic, a maxed out “Persuade” skill, and the Dominate Mind Force Power, talking to people could be a LOT of fun.

There are also a large number of Light Side and Dark Side based solutions to puzzles. This is perhaps the best design decision, as it brings out a moral aspect of the two sides of the Force completely missing from the movies. In KOTOR, being nice to people is hard. Even the most dedicated Light Side player will find themselves sorely tempted by the simplicity and straightforwardness of Dark Side solutions. “Simple and straightforward” doesn’t always equal kliling, either. For example, a Light Side character could have to do some serious pleading, errand running, and credential gathering to convince a guard to let them pass, while a Dark Side character could just select “[Force Persuade] You want to let me pass” and waltz on through. Almost every Light Side player is certain to slip once or twice during the game – and that’s the beauty of it. The Dark Side isn’t just evil and powerful. It’s seductive in a way it never was in the films, and once you start seeing how much easier the evil path is, it’s a fast and slippery slope to the bottom.

The way KOTOR does things isn’t “better” than a traditional Japanese console RPG, no matter what some whiny message board denizens might tell you. But given the tepid fare coming out of Japan recently, it’s safe to say that KOTOR is a better game than most Japanese console RPGs. Iit’s by far the best Xbox game I’ve played, and I’m looking forward to replaying it on the Dark Side path at some point in the future. KOTOR is a flawed gem, but even a flawed gem is immensely valuable.

I spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of last week at summer camp … English summer camp, in the airy heights of Mt. Akagi! 21 JETs, a dozen JTEs (Japanese Teachers of English), and 110 students (103 female, 7 male – boys, as a rule, don’t take to English) gathered at Akagi Youth House (motto: “Akagi Youth House is not a hotel” (no, really)) for three days of English-related games and fun. Well, games. This is my third time to do the camp, and Akagi gets less like a hotel and more like a correctional facility every year. The big thrill, as usual, was our bonfire … though this year it was more of a teeny cookfire. Still, the new JETs are a nice bunch, and the kids were fun. One of the Kirijo students looked and acted eerily like my friend Anna, who in turn is often told she looks like Shelley Duvall. I’m not sure what this means.

In any case, my commentary backlog for yukihime is large enough that I’m worried it will collapse inward on itself and form a black hole, which would likely demagnetize the hard drive I so recently restored. So I’m going to try to buckle down and write 10,000 words or so over the next few days; moreover, I’m going to be posting a lot of these updates as separately themed entries, so those of you who follow me via LiveJournal feed, consider yourself forewarned.

I give up.

I’ve always laughed at people who have large, unsustainable crushes on celebrities. But then those celebrities weren’t Tommy february⁶. She’s so dreamy! And so talented – she heads not one, but two delightful Japanese bands – the rockin’ Brilliant Green and the cheesy synthpop Tommy february⁶. (Her real name is Kawase Tomoko – the moniker and band name come from her first name and birthday.) I guess what I’m trying to say is: super cute!! I’m thinking of ways to notify her of my existence right now.

(Excuse the silliness of this post … her new album just came out, so she’s been nigh unavoidable in the Japanese media for the past few weeks. And her music really is good!)

I was hoping to have a productive afternoon. Really I was. But I made the mistake of reading Pitchfork Media reviews, and one of the new discs mentioned was Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush: The American Song-Poem Anthology. The tracks on the record sound almost impossibly surreal, but even after reading the review, I wasn’t sure what a song-poem was. So I visited the American Song-Poem Music Archives and learnt more than I had ever possible about this quasi-industry. “Song-poems,” you see, are lyrics – a word too difficult for the industry’s target audience. Lulled by dreams of fame and fortune, gullible people send their words in to music factories, who then quickly and efficiently compose a melody in the style and tempo chosen by the author (“Rock,” “Soul,” “Blues,” “Middle of the Road”). The mark then sends in $100-400 as “seed money” as a “sign of good faith,” and gets a handful of pressed records back. I need hardly mention that the music factory doesn’t promote the record as extensively as might have been promised. It’s a weird, weird, industry, and I really want to try and track some of these songs down. The songs aren’t any good, for the most part, but they can be pathetic, funny, mildly schiztoid, completely nonsensical, or heartbreakingly, embarassingly personal. Which has to be worth something, I think.

My brother and I went to Shibuya last Sunday afternoon, just in time to see the last hurrah of a month-long Space Invaders 25th anniversary retrospective. There were Taito employees roaming the streets handing out paper fans, banners strewn above streetways, and a number of kiosks set up where you could try out the 2-player mode of the new PS2 budget remake. Of course, some kiosks were more equal than others.

I wonder if you can rent that out for parties?

I just made burritos.

It may not sound like much, but I consider it a much greater accomplishment than, say, climbing Mt. Fuji. After all, hundred of people climb Mt. Fuji every day, but decent Mexican food? That’s a rarity worth noticing.

I didn’t make them alone, though; I expressed my wishes to my parents before they came to visit, and they provided the two ingredients from the family recipe not available in this country: cans of Rotel tomatoes and tortilla flour. It’s probably possible to make a fresh tomato and chili substitute, if you try – and I will, as I’d like to perfect the recipe with Japan-only ingredients – but the tortillas are an absolute necessity. Japanese people are still working on understanding bread products … the sliced stuff comes in loaves of six pieces of Texas toast, and the idea of a sandwich with the crusts on is unfathomable. Tortillas? Maybe in another 20 years.

The rest of the ingredients are mostly fakable with good Japanese substitutes: the pound and a half of ground beef becomes three 250g packages (the largest) of beef/pork mix; the single large baking potato becomes three small new potatoes; the monterey jack cheese becomes the amusingly generic pre-shredded “pizza cheese”; the wooden toothpicks become hyper-Japanese battle toothpicks.

The filling turned out swell; the potatoes on the bottom got slightly singed at the end, but it’s hardly noticeable. The tortillas were a bit of a muckup, though. I couldn’t find a rolling pin – no one in this country has an oven, so why would they bake? – so I made do with a mochi-mashing stick, a bit like a cross-section of broomstick handle with rounded edges. Like a dual-wielding wooden pestle … did I just say “dual-wielding”? I’ve been playing too much KOTOR … someone please shoot me through the Internet. In any case, the moshi-masher worked well enough, but as my kitchen has no counter space to speak of (that is, no counter space at all), it was hard to find a place to get enough leverage to flatten things properly. The dough kept sticking to the mochi-masher. Also, the recipe on the tortilla flour bag lies like a rug: a minute and a half per side is perfect, if you like your tortillas blackened cajun-style. Otherwise, 30 seconds will more than suffice. My ones that turned out unburnt more closely resembled nan flatbread than tortillas … I could pretend I’m trying some brave new Indian-Mexican fusion cuisine, but I doubt folks would buy that.

I did some searching on the Net afterwards and was relieved to hear that tortilla cooking is not as straightforward as one might assume. Fortunately, the filling outnumbers the tortillas I made by about 700 to 1, so I’ll have plenty of chances to perfect my technique. And once I get them just right, I’ll have all the Kiryuites over for a burrito fiesta. !Ole! (I am too lazy to look up the correct escape code, so please turn your head upside down while reading the first exclamation point)