And Sometimes Why

While walking to the grocery store a couple days ago, Yuko and I stumbled across a secondhand video game store named キャンプ (Camp). Yuko was super-interested, and wouldn’t walk away without at least browsing to see what classic titles they had.

Oh wait, that was me.

	They had a bunch of stuff you’d expect, and a few surprises. Here’s a Japanese Super Famicom, brother of the Super Nintendo many of us know and love. It’s in the lower left of the case full of games, as you can see. Oh, and please excuse the image quality here, as all I had was my phone.
	No Super Nintendo display would be complete without Super Mario Kart, so they had a unit running. Yuko and I played a couple of races, and what really struck me was how primitive it looked. For a seventeen year old game though, it’s still pretty solid.
	They also had Nintendo 64 games. I wanted to snap a pic of the Japanese labels because it’s odd seeing something with which you’re very familiar changed just a little. Imagine if you went back to the house where you grew up and your bedroom door opened out, instead of in. Wouldn’t you take a picture of that? Also, I thought it was a travesty that Smash Brothers was more than twice the price of Ocarina of Time.
	In Japan, you can buy a black Wii, and associated peripherals. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they don’t sell it in America. I’m sure it would sell well. Anyway, here’s a black Wii bundled with Monster Hunter 3 and the Classic Controller Pro, also not sold in America. Also, a snap of some used black peripherals.
	Rounding out my trip down memory lane was this pair of NES machines (that would be the original Nintendo Entertainment System, for the uninitiated). On the left is Nintendo’s reissue of the original NES machine, and on the right is a recent knockoff of the console. I imagine the “original” machine is more expensive because they’re harder to come by. Anyway, if anyone really wants any of this stuff or other Japanese gaming stuff, let me know, as I pass this shop going to and from work every day.

I just finished playing through Portal. (If you’ve played it, you probably figured that out from the title of the post.) It’s a fun game, and certainly deserving of most of the hype it’s received. A friend of mine recently said that it was nice to see a good 3D engine used for something other than a First Person Shooter, and I agree.

It’s a great puzzle game that consistently reminded me of Zelda (Ocarina of Time, specifically). It has a good learning curve right up until the last two levels, each of whose difficulty easily dwarfs all previous levels combined.

Like many good puzzle games, it’s strangely addictive. I get simulator sickness from playing most 3D games, and Portal was no exception. I have a headache and an upset stomach as I write this, in fact. It was a mild effect though, unlike some other games I’ve played. Anyway, my point is that the game was good enough to play through the slight dizziness.

If you’re at all interested in Portal, go play it.

My first blog post from home!
I’m writing this from my newly set up ADSL connection. They tried to deliver the modem while I was at work Wednesday, but I was home when they came by on Thursday. Installation was just as straightforward as you’d think. The only kink was figuring out which telephone cord goes to the phone and which goes to the wall. You know, because everything inside the box was written in Japanese. I guess they’re satisfied to just have English available to place new orders. I hope I never need tech support.

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The modem is a Fujitsu all-in-one DSL modem/router unit with an expansion slot that also turns it into a wireless access point, but because I opted for the cheapest service ($21.50/month for a 12Mbps connection, how cool is that??), they didn’t give me the addon card. The fact that it’s a router is a double-edged sword, tho. Even though the unit clearly has a UPnP logo on it, it’s not responding to UPnP requests from µTorrent, which means my torrents download as though I had a way slower connection, because I can’t connect to other firewalled users. The router has an HTTP interface, but even if NTT gave me the login information for the firewall configuration, guess what language the interface is written in? I wish it was a dumb passthrough unit (and I had my beautiful LinkSys WRT54G here).
</end technobabble>

Anyway, I’ve been trading news and blog reading for sleep for the last couple of days. (Oil is really $147 a barrel? Congrats to Claudia and Brian. Carlin will be missed. Near-beer for children, anyone? Rock Band on the Wii?? Sweet! Weezer is coming to Osaka? Super-sweeet!) Hopefully, I’ll be posting more often, now that I don’t have to leave home to do so.

Unfortunately, just before I got connected, I fed my antivirus program a bad update and it ate a bunch of Windows files (and, amazingly, their backups from the XP Pro CD copy I have on my hard drive). I still have no sound from Windows, and I’ve been struggling to make Office 2007 work, as well as any program that uses a Microsoft Management Console or snap-ins (Add/Remove Programs, Device Manager, Event Viewer, half of Windows’ built-in utilities).

But at least I can get online in my underwear.