Subatomic Brainfreeze

What's Goin' On With Me: THE KAWAIIKOCHANS ARE GOING TO BE IN SKULLGIRLS

Hey, guys, it's a good thing I got that post about the Skullgirls fundraiser out before this happened, because there's no longer any way I can be objective about the game anymore.

It started with someone asking who the kawaiis were voting for in the DLC character poll. As a result of that comic, the Skullgirls staff found the comic, and boy, they sure seem to like it.

@kawaiikochans ARIGATOU FOR ANSWER COMICS! IM BIKKURI THAT YOU NO WANT RIRISHII CHARA! DEMO DO YOU SUKI CLOCKWORK NEKO? 75000 YENCOINS LEFT!

— Skullgirls (@Skullgirls) March 27, 2013

So, as they say, "it's become like this." Not long after that SG went and offered us a background spot. They had sold this as an Indiegogo reward already, and everybody bought the spots instantly. I am as broke now as ever, so I definitely couldn't buy one. Still, I had been personally asked and had a spot created for me and everything. I had to try. So I put out the call for a no-notice mini-crowdfund of my own, feeling sort of embarrassed to be asking my fans for money and not really expecting enough money to possibly turn up. Also, it was the final day of the Skullgirls drive, with only about ten hours left to donate at all.

@kawaiikochans CONGRATULATIONS GOZAIMASU! WELCOME TO THE BG CHARA NO SEKAI! FAN-TACHI TOTALLY DEKIMASHITA!

— Skullgirls (@Skullgirls) March 28, 2013

We got it done in four hours. Thank you all so much: the gang at Lab Zero, the friends who helped (I owe Jeff from Colony Drop a couple drinks), and especially the total strangers who pitched in big with no notice. I'm honestly shocked and overcome by people's generosity for a silly little thing like this. Also, the whole spectacle's been the biggest bump I ever had, even if we hadn't made it into the game: readership has skyrocketed, Tumblr followers have doubled, it's lit a fire under my ass and boy am I happy about that.

I said before that having a fanbase has ensured that I can never get bored of doing this and forget about it. Well, that goes double now, or maybe quadruple. I was watching the Salty Cupcakes stream last night and when Cristina Vee came in saying "SUCH A THING, SUCH A THING", I knew that things were gonna be alright. May the comic become even more of such a thing. I'll be working at it.

TENTATIVELY: My personal goal is to at least have a self-published book ready by Otakon. Something small. Probably not a collection, because the first year would be 200 pages, Kawaiikochan obviously has to be in color, and the cost to print that is steep. Right now the thing in my head is a somewhat expanded version of the game magazine gag I submitted for that Crunchyroll contest. Don't hold me to any of this!!

Thoughts on the Skullgirls Squiggly Drive

It's been on my mind. Of course, I have to lay a few things out: I have a couple of personal friends who've done/are doing freelance animation work on Skullgirls. The Kawaiikochans are fans, and they have fans on staff. So I have a lot of reasons to love this game. I personally like the game a lot (though the only version I can play, 360, is presently out of date)... but not as much as I like VF5 Final.

Anyway, if you haven't heard, Skullgirls was planned to expand long after the original release, but that didn't really go down. Everybody was laid off immediately after release, programmer Mike Z threw out a quick balance patch for the PS3 version even though he wasn't getting paid for it (360 patches cost money, for no good reason)... and that might have been the end for Skullgirls. However, the team did something last-ditch and drastic to save the game, and it worked.

They're crowdfunding the game's continued development. $150K pays for the first new character, Squigly. The prizes are very personalized (voice actresses leaving you voice mail, your character being drawn into the game, that kind of thing!) Squiggly was paid for within the first day, if I recall. They'll almost certainly make it to $375K for the next character, Big Band, and at $600K they'd be putting a new character to a vote.

I don't think anybody expected this level of support this fast. There had been advance buzz about this campaign, and a lot of people were questioning that $150,000 was an acceptable figure to put one character in a fighting game. These people miss the difference between simply buying DLC for some game (DLC with its own budget, backed by some publisher, which may or may not make money) and actually paying to produce the content. The budget is broken down in a rare, candid way on the Indiegogo page, and I recommend you have a look even if you don't care about this sort of thing. It's interesting on its own to see the details of a budget that still qualifies as very low by game dev standards!

A lot of the objections on Neogaf etc were ignorant, sometimes willfully so, but they revealed an attitude which still persists. I specifically thought it was interesting that this title was considered inherently less deserving for being 2D and independent. Ask anybody doing a 2D, traditionally animated game and they'll tell you it's a hell of a chore, extremely expensive, extremely difficult. A 2D fighting game is even harder, because the animation-- the amount of frames, the hitboxes-- is the lifeblood of the game. And most observers, as evidenced by a lot of the internet response to this, can't really tell anyway and probably don't care. There's a reason high-end 2D went away, and there's a reason everybody doing their game that way these days does so only because they are that passionate about it. I'm not saying 3D is somehow easy, mind...

(I'm sure that if so inclined, Capcom would have been able to make a beautiful hand-drawn Street Fighter IV, something that surpassed Third Strike by a mile. But the people who buy videogames wouldn't have given a damn, and it wouldn't have sold anywhere near the millions of copies the 3D game did. I'm sure the horrendous-looking Tokitowa also cost a lot to animate.)

Anyway, the attitude is that 2D is worse, that creatives should be happy to work for scraps or free, and that professionals aren't worth what they charge. As a freelance creative, I assure you that all of these attitudes are shit. It's depressing to see that the majority opinion of consumers is that it's perfectly okay for the folks who make the product they love to live off peanuts. (See also anime fans.) That's probably not going to change any time soon.

The other interesting backlash was actually from some corners of the fighting game community, which I find even more fascinating. In the competition scene Skullgirls is a very minor game. It's a hell of a game, but sheer craftsmanship by itself doesn't guarantee any kind of tournament turn-out (see also Virtua Fighter, a game as unpopular as it is well-made). Marvel 3-- the ultimate spectator fighting game, with extreme speed, a gigantic meta-game, and the possibility for a full turnaround at any moment-- is absolutely the most popular game in SG's corner of the genre.

So some people are kind of mad that a "dead" game is getting all this money, because it's a waste, right? Don't these guys know they could be putting that money into a game people play in tournaments?

And of course this is myopic. Fighting games have always had these two really disparate fan groups, even deep at the core. There are the tourney people who care first and foremost about the competition, the tournaments, the big name players, and of course how fine-tuned the game is for these environments. Then there are the other fans, who follow just about everything else: the increasingly convoluted mythology, the stories of their favorite characters, and so on. There are people who seriously care about the story in Tekken! Smart developers lavish care on both the "story" and "versus" modes for this reason.

There is, of course, overlap-- I care more about the competitive aspects, but I have a great affection for the characters and the genre in general as well-- but these groups are often at odds.

My case in point here is Guilty Gear XX, where the chaotic, sprawling plot has moved once in ten years because GGXX is such a popular competiton game. People die in the GGXX story, and if they're dead they aren't playable anymore, right? Same thing happens in King of Fighters, where characters have had to be brought back from the dead in a story that went completely incoherent about a decade ago.

Some fans want a game to have more characters than any other: competitive players want the characters to be tightly balanced and value that balance over the number. See Marvel 2, which has a gigantic cast that is mostly useless for competition play. Opinions vary very widely on that game, perhaps more widely than any other, depending on what one values in a fighting game.

And a lot of the time competitive players will call a game dead, like Skullgirls or Blazblue, because it's no longer interesting as a competitive game (looking mostly at BB here, whose design and balance come off pretty confused), or it hasn't picked up in their scene.

The thing is... fans don't just disappear because there aren't people playing a game in a tournament. Skullgirls wasn't just liked by people who play fighting games in tournaments. It has a wider appeal than that. The people who couldn't buy $1000 "draw me into the game!" (sadly I could not put Masaka and Majide in) spots fast enough were probably not a pack of tournament fighting game players. It's not just them out there, and I think the scene often doesn't realize this. It's a much wider world out there. I'm glad the Skullgirls team were able to find the people they needed.

Shin Janryumon - ARE YOU SERIOUS, I'M NEVER GOING TO GET SANSHOKU DOUKOU, GO TO HELL

Online mahjong client Janryumon has updated to a new version as of the 15^th called Shin (True) Janryumon. As always, its aim is to deliver a fancy, flashy experience compared to more austere clients like Tenhou. Free-to-play MJ with bells, whistles, and experience grind. 

JRM 3, the previous version, was a rough transition period. Selling costume jewelry and so on for the players' hands wasn't popular, so the developers tried hard to monetize their free-to-play game with various schemes that never quite worked out.

First they introduced the league, which used special rules and required entry tickets which eventually had to be paid for. Not that many were actually interested in paying to participate in the weekly sessions, however; especially when the higher levels introduced increasingly strict and uncommon rule sets. League was removed for the new version. 

After that, the clock for players to make a move was set to an absurdly low three seconds, and players were expected to pay up for every single discard where they wanted to take a moment and think. Though I've always been much more of a Tenhou player (in fact, I gladly pay a monthly fee there), I actually quit JRM entirely after this one. It was just too desperate. Again, this idea was dropped in the current version.

As a player and occassional payer of free-to-play games, I believe there's a very thin line between fair deal and ripoff. Players will absolutely buy into the F2P model, but there's nothing that turns them away faster than the feeling they're being taken advantage of. Once you get there-- like with the clock thing-- people just turn around and walk away. 

I don't pay for Tenhou because I'm obligated: until you get to the very highest levels of play, you can use the browser client for free as much as you like. Rather, I want to reward this one-man operation for doing a great job delivering what is bar none the best online MJ client in the world. You do get a much better client for paying, of course, and I believe I get a good deal.

(I mean, if you really want to rip off a one-man operation like Tenhou, maybe you're just a terrible person?) 

So the new JRM has leveled with the players. It needs to make money like any other game does. Free-to-play wasn't really working out. So now Shin JRM is a pay-to-play service with a scheme comparable to the arcade mahjong games I played in Japan.

The pay currency translates straight across to yen, so it's 80y to play an East-only round, 150y to play East-South, and 100y to play a three-player East-South round. I assume that new signups are given an amount of pay currency to get themselves started. Items can no longer be bought with cash, but with a separate game currency that's rewarded in tiny volumes after a match. So we have: 

-PlayNC money, kaimo (buys game points)

-Game points, used to actually start a game

-Shop money, used to buy everything else.

As a previous player of Janryumon (and with a lot of unused tickets for the league, which were transferred into money), I was given about 15,000y worth of game points. I can play a hundred matches without worrying about it.

The only way to get more game points is to participate in JRM's events, which are very grindy and don't offer enough of a reward to keep a player going.

For example, every week you're given a bingo card to fill out-- with the boxes being types of hands and point values you have to try and get-- and every line you fill gives a certain amount of game money. The problem is that while many spots on the card are common, every line has at least one box that is ridiculously difficult or merely statistically improbable.

The middle box on this card is “get a yakuman”, one of the big-deal hands I've drawn maybe ten or twenty times out of tens of thousands of hands in my entire MJ career. Another box is shou sangen, which is one step down from a yakuman. I've gotten this hand five or six times. Another time I was asked to get sanshoku doukou, three triples of the same number. I have gotten this hand once in my entire time playing mahjong, and it was yesterday. And no, it was too late to count it towards my bingo card. Sit down and play all day and all night, you're still extremely unlikely to fill even one line of the bingo card.

The game is riddled with this stuff; it absolutely loves to send the player on quests, and better still if they're nearly impossible. With goals like these, it doesn't even feel like grinding towards earning a goal anymore: it's just going on JRM and hoping you hit their lottery... and the lottery prize is 100 yen. And of course, you can tell when there is someone deliberately playing to fulfill an achievement. There's also a lot of addiction design, like a bonus for logging in daily and another bonus for continually playing matches.

The poor ranking system of previous JRM titles is gone in favor of a more traditional level-up system. Like with the pay-to-play thing, I consider this re-branding with honesty. The kyu and dan rankings JRM had before implied skill, when in fact anybody could achieve 9^th dan by just playing a ton of games. The game would forgive your losses frequently, so you weren't really going any place but up. You would see total beginners at high ranks because they'd just spent a huge amount of time playing the game. (kind of like the league, I MEAN NOTHING)

Now, in the place of that, there's a numbered level (like I'm JRM Level 12 right now) and a ranked level. It takes 30 games of normal play to actually be ranked, and I'm still a ways off from that, but it's a rate number like on Tenhou. Players at certain rate levels are given rankings, like the top division for 2000R+ players is A1. I imagine that being a 1600-1700R Tenhou player I'll be in the B division.

The cost of a better system is that PlayNC actually wiped everybody's rankings under the old system. You can't have a guy who's simultaneously 9-dan and D-rank, after all, and there had been plenty of players who would have looked like that. Anyway, wiping thousands of hours of play from the slate is a great way to lose a lot of long-time players forever, I imagine.

Having a good ranking and matching system is really important because it directly affects your quality of play, especially in mahjong. In the same sense that going to the newbie-packed 7447 is a slaughter for a seasoned player (records in the league are either abnormally good or abnormally bad; try sorting by average placement), JRM is loaded with super-casual players who only barely know what they're doing. Screenshot related.

In mahjong, if one person makes clear that they don't know what they're doing, the game becomes a mess as the competent prey on that player. If there's two or more of them, the whole game just becomes a coin toss. In fact-- I'm gonna say this-- the players on 7447 are actually stronger, on average, than the people I played against starting from the bottom of Shin JRM. That's how bad the play I saw was.

Which is fine, because as I move up (I'm at like 50% 1^st place right now, speaking of abnormal records) I'm getting matched with players who are actually in my range (1700-1800R).

Things I like about JRM:

-Use of events: this is in theory a great motivator. I'd like to be able to participate in the events and tournaments on Tenhou, but the time difference makes this prohibitively difficult.

-Audiovisual flash: Obviously this is the game's main attraction and the big reason people like it. The game looks pretty good, and the new version has noticeable improvements. The whole table is modeled in 3D, even the comfy-looking leather chairs. The in-character voice work is a nice touch: right now my character is voiced by Nobuyuki Hiyama (playing “Akiba-type”) and when I grind up enough money I want to buy the Shigeru Chiba voice really badly.

Things I don't:

-Actual implementation of events: I understand that this is just part of the free-to-play design, but sanshoku doukou? Come the fuck on. There is also the tile-collecting system, left over from JRM3, in which I haven't earned a single one of the unlockable items. It's been a year. Endless empty treasure boxes. Terrible. This is Asian MMORPG-style grind and it is not remotely fun.

Would I stick around for this when I got to the point where I had to pay? In other words, would I cancel my Tenhou premium subscription in its favor? Nope. They'd have to have exclusive tournaments or something on that level, and even then I'd just never cancel Tenhou premium!

I Went, I Went To Japan - I'M ALRIGHT, I'M ALRIGHT - Part Mahjong

I didn't get to play at a parlor (jansou) because we just didn't have four game-ready people at any one time. We had three most of the time, but three-player isn't the same. There are lots of parlors around, and given the fact that gambling is (TOTALLY NOT) going down, they're all hole-in-the-wall kind of places. Never the main floor of a building, from what I saw.

The true sanctioned gambling over there is in the form of pachinko and slots. The halls are way larger than the arcades, packed row-to-row, screaming loud. Because I wanted to play pachinko at least one time in Japan, I played a non-gambling Fist of the North Star machine at Don Quixote. 100y was 100 balls. Real pachinko joints usually have higher rates than this. (And there's one right under Donki if you want to find out.)

The scene where Ken hits Souther, and Souther asks him "How many more seconds do I have to live?" and then counts them off played. Naturally Souther did not die, just like in the comics, and I lost.

 

Though I didn't get to hit a jansou, I took the opportunity to buy a beautiful new set. It's known as the “Tenhou” and is prohibitively expensive to actually ship to the States (an English-language store sells it for $500 shipped!!) so I sent it to a friend's house via Amazon JP and picked it up once I was in the country. 15000y. I came to this set via the mjpai wiki and its original 2ch thread, which basically just says "BUY THE TENHOU." Some auto tables use these very tiles!

I thought a few people might be curious as to how the Japanese mahjong arcade games work: certainly I was. They're always out of the way, for a pretty simple reason: people smoke like chimneys at these things. A lot of regular arcade cabs have ashtrays on them too, but the MJ ones all do. (At TRY the machines are “self-service”, meaning “bring your own damn ashtray”.) A guy next to me at MJ5 Evo was puffing so hard that I was coughing until the next day! There are plastic shields between monitors but this is more for screen privacy's sake than to block the smoke. So you might want to do a “when in Rome” and wear a surgical mask like so many people all over Tokyo did.

(At HEY the mahjong section actually played old-man idol pop and everything: I heard Fly High from Gunbuster during one hand.)

I mostly played Sega's MJ5 and MJ5 Evo (the new version was location testing), but I gave Fight Club a try as well. Obviously I was drawn to MJ5 because it has the look, sound and feel of an AM2 game. The table is 3D, there are a lot of flashy effects like missile lock-ons to your tiles, lights from the skies, running TV-style commentary, and full video cutscenes for yakuman hands. It's two of my favorite tastes together.

(I had this hand where, during reach on a good hand, I dealt the very last tile-- West!!-- into someone's kokushi musou. Imagine my sadness.)

After that hand I was blown up by lasers.

AM2's name isn't on it but it's on previous versions and I'd be shocked if they didn't have guys involved in it. You know that American 80s-movie aesthetic of so many of their games? It's got that vibe. It's also got buttons even though the game has a touchscreen that can do all of these things, because these guys know that it feels good to press buttons. Especially the huge red one that says WIN. Also c'mon this music. Obviously the match is taking place on a fighter jet.

MJ5 also has the Saki license, so if you're feeling lonely, right now the game supplies a single-player mode where you play against the Achiga girls. Wasn't lonely enough to find out what this mode was like, sorry. The Saki Cup is also ongoing as I write this: sadly, I didn't play enough games to rank. This structure was the same as Tenhou's championship: you played an amount of games and the game would take your highest total score. Rather than an actual tournament or league structure it's sort of just “grind until you're extremely lucky”.

Fight Club is a little simpler with fast, crisp 2D rather than 3D, but it's an arcade game and it still has a certain level of flash. Explosions and dragons and stuff like that. Music is probably by some of the Bemani guys; it pounds. Does wonders for the tension. It's backed by the bigger pro league, so maybe you'll run into Jenn and Garthe. (Jenn had a pretty good spot on the poster, but poor Garthe was all the way in the back!)

These games all have their ways of pulling you in, it's part of the trade. If you play either game on 100y, it'll LET you play, but circumstances will kind of suck. On Sega MJ, you have a bank of time you use to make your discard, and if you run out of time you can't continue playing unless you put in another 100y. You can bypass this by just putting in 200y at the start. (Most machines will give you 3 credits for 200y: when you've leveled up enough and are allowed to play full east/south games, they will cost 3 credits.) 

Fight Club has a meaner version of this: for 100y you start with a “life bar” of 5000 points, and if you lose more than that you've got to pay up to continue. 5000 points is very little to lose. I'm not sure if you then continue with another life bar or what. If you don't pay up you lose instantly, and the other players have to deal with your replacement by a CPU drone. Obviously you can bypass this crap with 200y. It's completely possible to start MFC with 100y, have another guy pull a really good hand immediately, and just lose the money. Both of these games train you fast to either pay 200y or not play at all. Being as you play for 20-40 minutes in one shot, I can't really blame them.

Winners play again for free on both games. I was lucky and much more skilled than my opponents on MFC and was able to play three full matches on 100y. Obviously you are paying a whole hell of a lot more to play on these machines than you would on Tenhou, where the least you can pay is zero and the most you can pay is 525y/month. You'll also need to buy a card to keep your records: this costs 300y.

Next time I'll let you know how the parlors are. Of course, in the meantime I've been right back to Tenhou. The league's started again, so I should at least grind up to 30 games...

I Went, I Went To Japan - I'M ALRIGHT, I'M ALRIGHT - Part 2

NEW YEAR:

The New Year is the biggest Japanese holiday. Being in Japan for this would probably suck in most parts of the country, because everything closes... but Akiba doesn't. Nothing is sacred in Akiba.

My hatsumode (first shrine visit) was perhaps the fondest memory of my entire visit to Japan. I walked with all my new drinking friends from our regular bar to the local temple... and I had my mind blown. I understood that the new year was a big deal in Japan, but here in this temple at midnight stood thousands of locals lined up to make their first offering. The place was enormous and naturally beautiful, which are two things that impress you even more when you're very drunk.

On account of the line being so long, we opted to just stand around and enjoy new year's snacks (Yakitori! Takoyaki! New Year's Sake! Asahi!) as we hobbled around the shrine. See a shrine. They are beautiful. You will not regret it. Just don't show up drunk, I figure that's gotta be a cultural faux pas when it's not New Year's Day.

COMIKET:

I actually was only at Comic Market for maybe an hour and a half. I know, I know, this is the biggest comics gathering in the world. But I simply didn't have any plans to buy anything, and I especially didn't want to end up with something that would give me trouble at the border... and you don't know what's going to be in those doujinshi unless you check every page! We saw some friends with books to sell-- including one person we met at the hotel breakfast!-- checked out the cosplay and got going to the life-size Odaiba Gundam. 

You still have to see Comiket, if you're in the area at the time. It is an overwhelming spectacle of otaku crowding. The pictures you've seen cannot prepare you for the actual scale of the thing. It is bigger than the anime convention you are thinking about: lines for a single circle will exceed the lines at a big US convention, with the poor schlub at the back of the line forced to hold a big cardboard sign featuring terrible things being done to Nanoha.

That said, you can just walk on in pretty easily if you don't have to be there as Comiket opens on account of some book that's in short supply. (I heard of a Sword Art Online book that went to 30,000y the day after it was on sale!) We showed up around 2: the crowds were still insane, but it was pretty easy to get around. Again, you should definitely not miss it, if only to understand the sheer size of the event. It is the biggest otaku thing you'll ever see in your life, guaranteed.

OTAKU STORES:

5-foot Great Mazinger outside a figure shop in Akiba.

I actually didn't do a ton of otaku shopping because I knew my budget would only allow so much loot straight-up dropped on toys and such. Also, one floor at Kotobukiya really did me in.

If you're buying anything, go to Nakano Broadway. Damn right I'm taking you out of Akiba. This is the home base for Mandarake, the biggest otaku goods chain. Press through what appears to be a normal, bustling shopping mall for a little while, and you'll start to notice something: there is no end to this place. To call the complex merely massive is a criminal understatement. Nakano Broadway is a black hole of commerce. Get all the way back, and you'll see Mandarake outlets for every otaku and fujoshi niche that it is possible to sell products to. If you were blown away by the shops in Akiba, your head is going to come flying clean off in this place. Everything you were thinking of, from new to extreme vintage, is here and it is reasonably priced. Make it to the top and behold the ultimate vintage robot moonbase, complete with shrine gates, atmospheric noise, and the enbalmed body of an alien. One of the robots was a million yen! The cashiers I bought stuff from were dressed like Quattro and Red Buster. 

There are apartments here, people live here. What a life! They don't have to go far from home unless they get lonely, I presume.

I didn't run through a lot of the stores but I did check out Kotobukiya's entire store. This never comes up on Astro Toy, because we don't do PVC, but I actually really like Koto's stuff: they pride themselves on their quality and it is indeed consistently high. Their store, like so many others, is divided by audience. The bottom floor has merchandise from the major current hits like Eva, Fate/Zero, imas, and others. The next floor up (don't quote me on exactly what the layout was) was definitely girl-ota-oriented, with a general mountain of pretty boys, cute mascots, and JRPGs. The next floor up was the one after my own heart, with robots and tokusatsu stuff. After that I believe there was a misc floor, and the top floor was a temporary exhibit on Sword Art Online. 

Yo, guys, little etiquette. I know SAO sucked-- trustworthy sources told me so emphatically-- but do not leave asshole messages in English like “NOVEL WAS WAY BETTER” (but you've left this message in English!) or “ANIMATE SUCHANDSUCH INSTEAD” on these people's Post-It wall. This makes you unbearablel. People pretend to listen to you in conversation, but they only do so out of politeness.

Anyway, I bought:

Akibaranger DX Moe Moe Z-Cune: this is the gun that the Akibarangers use to transform. There is also a large-scale PVC figure inside! Surprisingly the gun was on half-off sale at 6000y (about $80), but I haven't noticed any serious problems. The insane design of the item demands that you be pretty careful with it, which means don't wave the gun around too much... but what did anybody expect from a toy gun holding a PVC figure inside of it? 

LPs, Galient OST and Orguss drama record. Yeah, that's right, records. Vinyl. Bought for beautiful covers.

The middle poster of this Ideon set. 

Charge Man Ken mug. There was a whole display case full of Charge Man Ken stuff, including stuff commemmorating great episodes like "Dynamite in the Brain!!" and the special "Charging Go!" PVC.

Generic towel with Japanese “Dododododo” sound effect printed all over it, hiding in the Jojo section (fooled me!), Garo bandanna featuring the Horror inscriptions from the show, Zaruba clear sticker to put on my next computer/tablet.

I put away a lot of things that I wished I could afford. I am still sad over Hot Toys Ryo Saeba (10,000y on sale!!), Soul of Chogokin Leopardon (Spider-Man's robot), and a huge, very ugly 600y figure of Guy Shishio from back when Gaogaigar was on TV. Again: when I come back it will be with twice the time and three times the money.

THE GUNDAM:

So the Odaiba Gundam is a mall ornament. This isn't to say it isn't astonishing: it will pull the breath right out from your lungs. But you need to know that it is a mall ornament.

Diver City is a typical and boring mall that would really like you to check it out! That's why they have this “Gundam” thing in the back. They make it really hard for you to actually find the Gundam: it's not even on some of the maps! Facing the main entrance, go left where it looks like there's nothing around. Just keep going that way. You will eventually come upon it, even though nothing really indicates that you will. As a tourist, it's probably a total waste for you to hang out in Diver City-- see the H&M! The Lacoste!!-- though we did have food court udon superior to most I've eaten here.

The Gundam is actual size. Go ahead and gawk, that's what everybody else is here for. Oh my God, holy shit. Wow.

A family chuckled at us as we made fools of ourselves in front of it. The dad was complaining that the Gundam didn't hold a beam saber.

They sell Haro meatbuns and Gundam taiyaki here, and also at a little stand outside the full-fledged Gundam Cafe in Akiba. Both were decent. The girl who took my order there was wearing a Celestial Being uniform. We didn't eat at the actual Gundam Cafe because I heard from a lot of people that it's actually pretty lame, and I'm willing to believe that. Don't waste good meals when you're on vacation!

JOYPOLIS:

If you're in the area of the Gundam you're also right by Tokyo Joypolis, one of Sega's amusement parks. Again, I wish I'd had a couple hours to spend there. We thought it'd be lame, but it's a full-scale amusement park. There's a high degree of interactivity, since it's Sega and all, and nearly all the rides are also games to some degree. We saw a huge amount of “awesome!!-- oh no the line is an hour” attractions and rode none because we had somewhere to be. For gamers and Sega nerds, there's a version of Initial D that lets you ride in full-scale models of the cars from the series, and alternate versions of House of the Dead 4 and Let's Go Jungle that take place in movie-theater-size chambers. And of course there's a Sonic Land. It's definitely a place to spend a day: day passes are 3000y, if I recall.

ARCADES: 

 

This is still a surviving institution in Japan, unlike most places on the earth! When the guys and I were not actually seeing people and doing things, we were probably having fun in the arcades around home base: the three Club Sega locations, HEY, TRY Tower, and Taito Station.

They're all basically laid out like this: UFO catchers and kids' arcade games on the bottom floor, and then progressively more “gamer” things as you go up. Music games, then shooters, then fighters, and after that the really hardcore stuff like card games, Derby Owner's Club, and others of that ilk. Mahjong is usually around there too.

Pretty much any of the places I hung out in in Akiba-- but especially these places!-- would make an arcade game geek from anywhere else in the world weep. The difference is that vast. Games that would be impossible treasures elsewhere in the world (like, say, complete histories of Cave, including footnotes like Batsugun and DDP2) were just sitting around in these joints.

If you only go to one it has to be HEY (Hirose Entertainment Yard). Their centerpiece, a custom-made Darius II featuring two screens the size of a grown man, forced me to reconsider art and life themselves. I grinned really hard when the line “I ALWAYS WANTED A THING CALLED TUNA SASHIMI” came booming in. Don't take pictures, it's not allowed. Be nice.

Coming down from the station, the third Club Sega (presently it has Virtua Fighter and Border Break signs way up on the building) has a museum floor at the top where techs in Sega jumpsuits keep watch over a historical archive of massive deluxe cabinets. Present is the super-rare F-Zero AX, an Afterburner Climax doubles cab, Ferarri F355, and others, including the humble Super Hang-On sitdown. No Sega fan should miss this floor. On F-Zero and Afterburner, make sure you buckle the seatbelt to activate the machine's motion features. Climax in particular is an exhilarating ride.

The staff got my bag when I lost it playing MJ5 and presumed it lost forever. Nice bunch of guys. I think that by the last day or so they recognized me (you know I couldn't go a day without Afterburner). Thanks.

The most popular game overall is easily Gundam Extreme Vs. (FULL BOOST). The game that started back at Federation Vs. Zeon on the Dreamcast has grown tremendously over the years and I don't think anyone who watched it could question it as a solid versus shooter. Every place has an enbankment of at least eight of these machines, and usually they have two such units.

However, like any arcade fighting game, it's really hard to actually learn anything: multiplayer cabinets will throw you into deathmatches with highly skilled strangers who will combo you into dust without pity.

No joke, I was actually Gundam-bullied. Some guy saw me playing, sat down on the other row, picked Wing Zero, and mercilessly chased me and only me for as many games as it took for me to get up and walk away. What a dick! 

The only other game that was really occupied all that much that weekend was the new Blazblue version, and a little SF4 at HEY. Under-Night was there, for example, but I didn't see a single person play it but me. These didn't really seem like fighter hotspots. Plus, in my experience, people were straight up scared to play with the foreigner. I got through an entire game of Garou on the only free machine in that arcade (TRF) and nothing! 

Fans of “poverty” (lesser-loved) fighting games will want to go to TRF at the top of Nakano Broadway, where guys laugh their way through the incredibly difficult “basketball combos” of Hokuto no Ken and play stuff like Breakers and Chaos Code on the side. This was the arcade most like the American fighting game scene with which I'm familiar. TRF used to have a maid.

The coolest game you'll never play was Gunslinger Stratos, by the Gundam Vs. developers. It's controlled by a 9mm and Magnum (concept by Gen Urobuchi, natch) with thumbsticks on them to move the player. Gunkata motions as seen in Equilibrium are required of the player. Seriously, the guns are magnetic and you have to pose. It's an insane game and according to a friend who's quite skilled himself, “I think you have to be a genius to play it”.

The "variety" order at Baird in Harajuku, which brews its own beer. So does TY Harbor, actually. Don't get the impression that that's common, those are just the kinds of places we drank!

Next post is all mahjong stuff, pictures of the beautiful new set I bought, thoughts on the MJ arcade games. They're pretty sweet!

AM2 FIGHTING BONANZA: Impressions

Alright, I finally have occassion to talk about games on my own blog! I think this stuff is under the radar enough.

A couple of weeks ago Sega released the first few titles in their Model 2 Collection on PSN/XBLA: Virtua Fighter 2, Fighting Vipers, and Sonic the Fighters. I will reiterate my statement made on Twitter:

Virtua Fighter 2 is an essential title, the first step in 3D fighting games beyond the mere proof of concept that the original VF and Tekken represent. Though it is not really in the Western genre canon, it is a videogame with equivalent impact to Street Fighter 2.

Fighting Vipers is an early experiment with that formula, a game that borrows the basic framework of VF2 and goes crazy with it. Wacky character designs, wacky game design ideas: the game is just weird. A lot of the ideas come from 2D games, like air recovery (effectively eliminating the scripted juggle combo and changing the air situation into another guessing game) and attacks with auto-guard. A lot of the ideas worked their way into VF, like the interactive walls and Jane becoming Vanessa. The armor gimmick, on the other hand, never seen again. Fighting Vipers 2 badly needs a home port.

If Fighting Vipers is a crazy-mode version of VF2 then Sonic The Fighters is a crazy-mode version of Fighting Vipers. This is a rarely-seen game, only having been released for a console one time in the past, buried in a Sonic collection. It's a cute game for people to pick up and mash, but as a fighter, well..

It's practically an anti-fighting-game, in that the ideas you're used to from playing 3D games don't exist or just don't work. Blocking is heavily penalized, dodging doesn't really work, there's no defense. It's trying to construct a new game out of these elements, but I couldn't find it for the life of me. I played this online for a while and just did not have fun, despite wanting to like it. Just doing a single jab over and over again seemed to be the move of the game.

All of these ports are simple emulations of the original arcade games, and not the inferior Sega Saturn ports. I am fine with this-- the core original game is what is important to me-- but stuff like videos are out. The games are pure and accurate, but aside from online play and a command list, they lack any of the trimmings of a home port. Where is the training mode? I shouldn't have to set up an inactive Player 2 just to practice moves in this day and age.

Also, the online community for these games disappeared fast: I already have a very hard time getting a Fighting Vipers or VF2 match. Sonic is packed, of course.

Each game is $5: the collection will complete with Virtual On and Virtua Striker later.

FOR SALE: HOUSECLEANING WITH YOUR FRIEND DAVE

Hi, guys. If everything goes the way it is going now, I'll be taking a week-long vacation to Tokyo in the future. The perfect opportunity has come up, and I feel like if I don't do this now, that it's never going to happen.

I also have a ridiculous geek stash, the vast majority of which I haven't touched in years and which I realize I will never look at again in my life. The plane and lodging are all taken care of, but I'm trying to get together spending money.

(I ALREADY WENT TO JAPAN. IT WAS GREAT.)

I want to bypass the huge cuts Amazon and Ebay take if at all possible, so I'm listing things here first. Please contact me at dave (shift-2) colonydrop (period) com. The more folks buy, the more fun I have! Of course, if you just want to give me free money for my Japanese vacation, I'm not above that.

This post will change as I put more items in the pile.

First come first serve but I will not tell a lie: my personal friends have dibs.

Games:

-PS1-

Original Black Label releases only: I don't do ugly boxes.

Final Fantasy 7: $50

Xenogears: $50

Soukyugurentai aka Terra Diver (great 2D shooter by Raizing): $60

-Nintendo-

Gamecube Zelda: Ocarina of Time + Master Quest, 25 shipped.

-PS2-

Ar Tonelico Limited Edition: Box has some scuffs, however this comes with a soundtrack CD that was only ever made available to preorders and which I can't even find records of anybody selling online. The CD is sealed. I will give you the game + book for $20, CD for $50.

Dodonpachi Dai-Ou-Jou: This is probably the hardest videogame Cave ever made or will make, which is saying something. PS2 version by Arika has exclusive modes and a superplay DVD included. $100.

My Bemani PS2 collection:

I have Beatmania IIDX -

3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th, from the years I was really into the game.

Major caveat about the Bemani games: these titles were all made before HDTVs were widespread, and the timing does not get along with HDTVs due to lag. I only ever played these games on a CRT TV. I no longer have a PS2 hooked up to my current TV, but I was able to play the games emulated on my laptop without issue.

I want $25 for 3, 5, and 7, $40 for 4th, $30 for 8th, 9th and 10th.

I also have Pop'n Music 7, 8, and 10. I assume the games have similar problems with HDTVs, but I don't know for sure. $30 for each.

Finally, a Pop'n Music Arcade Style Controller. Not easy to part with; it's probably the single most beautiful videogame item I own... but I must admit I haven't seen or touched it in a few years. Unlike the IIDX ASC (which I already offloaded to a friend) this one is the exact same panel as on the arcade game. This is well-used, as you can imagine. Very noisy. Comes with the original box, which is the same plain brown box that Konami shipped it in. This box is beat up, but I've been saving it all these years. I will not let this go for anything less than $300.

Bangaioh, US Dreamcast: I have the JP version and can't justify owning two copies despite the game's great sentimental value to me. Barely played, I put all that time into the JP version. $70 shipped.

Ikaruga, JP Dreamcast. No obi. Has big ol' scratch on the front. Easily replaceable but I'm not going to rip you off by doing that myself. $60 shipped.

Fire Pro D, JP Dreamcast: Is Fire Pro. $20 shipped.

-PC ENGINE-

PC-Engine Duo-R and additional parts: Okay, I have a PCE Duo-R here. Last version of the hardware. I know I'm never going to buy anything for it ever again. My loss is your gain. Caveat with this one is that the controller port is rather finicky. Wiggle it around for a bit and you're alright for the rest of the time the system is on, but it's really annoying. I still have the box, if you want it, but I lost the manual a long time back. If you want them, I will throw in the Battle Tap and Battle Pads. These have no problems but the plastic has seriously yellowed. $200.

All PC Engine stuff is Japanese version. HuCards will not play on US Turbo-Grafx 16s and CDs are region-free.

Devil Crash (aka Devil's Crush) - JP version, brilliant pinball game from Naxat, greatest box art you ever saw. $65.

Rayxanber II (CD) - shooty game, heavily memorization oriented (even more so than say R-Type), not my cup of tea. $30.

Gradius II (CD) - one of the all-time classics, has an animated intro not in any other version. Looking around I hear there is an exclusive extra stage on some print runs of this game. I have no idea whether or not it's in this copy. $50.

R-Type Complete CD: Port of the original. The HuCard version of this game was split into two, the CD has the whole game with cutscenes and CD audio. $40.

Super Raiden (CD): Similar port of the classic arcade game, with CD audio and two new levels. $40.

Tennokoe Bank II: save HuCard for CD games, I'm pretty sure. Never really needed it. $10.

-END OF PC ENGINE-

Megamari, doujin soft: A very literal combination of Touhou and Megaman in which the player is Marisa. By Tasogare Frontier, a storied doujin developer who have gone on to make official entries in the Touhou series (the fighting games). Doujin soft, never to be released again, I want $60.

-360-

Marvel Vs Capcom 3, Special Edition: Sealed with preorder size L T-shirt from the lovely guys at Meat Bun. The T features a Lovecraftian illustration of Shuma Gorath and a Servbot and basically doesn't exist in the universe anymore. There's plenty of this game out there but the T-shirt is the only reason I want... $70.

Anime:

Gundam Unicorn Blu-Ray 1 - a few years back I had the naive good will to seriously think I was going to buy this entire thing on BD as it came out. Never happening, and I know it. $35 shipped.

Serial Experiments Lain DVD - I have the BD/DVD set coming in so these will be redundant. $25 for the lot.

Armored Trooper Votoms Box: Good lord. I had no idea what this was worth and now that I've looked it up there's no way I can justify continuing to own it. You can get most of this series for nothing, but the final box set is impossible to come by, driving up the cost of this complete box. Furthermore, I believe the lunchbox and additional extras in this set were never released in any other way. Well, guess who preordered them as they came out? The company that put this show out is bankrupt, it's a really popular show in Japan, it's extremely unlikely to come out again in English. I want $250. If you're actually interested in paying that, you probably already know what a good show Votoms is.

Figures/Models:

This section is mostly there for people who are local to me (NYC) because I really don't want to go to the trouble and expense of shipping these huge things out. As per my agreement with ANN, nothing from the Astro Toy treasure trove is for sale, so please don't ask.

Perfect Grade Char Zaku II: Sealed. Ten years on it's the most spectacular Zaku you can buy... aside from that five-foot one. $120.

Revoltech Danboard, first printing. One of the few rare Revoltechs, in my understanding. Used but fully intact and boxed. The watch batteries for the light-up eyes are long dead and will have to be replaced. $80.

Mahjong Hime - LET'S CORNER THE CRUCIAL "SAKI MARKET"

I am, of course, obligated to tell you about every online mahjong client I experiment with, even though Tenhou is of such quality that you really need nothing else.

The current experiment is Mahjong Hime, a client that opened just a few weeks ago. It is nearly the same game as the Japanese Momoiro Taisen Pairon (Peach-Colored Wars Pairon). A title like that could only belong to a moe game, and so it is here. The game is mahjong, but the otaku hook is cute girl characters played by famous Japanese voice actresses.

Janryumon has been going this route as well: charging the player to use the voices of famous Japanese VAs, items to make your player character look like one of the schoolgirls from Saki. Pairon just brings otaku interest to the fore, as the player chooses a moe avatar (starting out with a catgirl) and pays game currency or cash to get new characters.

Mahjong Hime is just an English-localized version of this, with Taiwanese and Singaporean styles (both are kind of bonkers rulesets) added as a nice extra touch.

Unfortunately, the English localization is only really halfway: vital info like the scoring screens and yaku are completely untranslated and left as a mystery to the player who doesn't already understand them. Nobody's going to learn how to play using this thing, that's for sure.

Since it's an online game, you're amassing currency to unlock things for the character: you either put game money into unlocking voice clips (which will make her very noticeably chattier) or risque illustrations that don't actually have much to do with anything. The typical "grind faster!" and gacha money traps are, of course, present. Due to the fancier interface, matches (and players) are a little slower here than on Tenhou.

Because it's new, and because it's mahjong, there are very few players online. The players who are there tend to prefer playing against AI bots all by themselves, perhaps because they are more interested in grinding game money than actually playing mahjong. (But playing other people gets you more game money...)

If I start a room, people will come in and expect me to just start a game with two AIs, and get upset and leave because I won't. They don't know why you wouldn't want to play AIs. What's the point of playing online mahjong against a dummy computer? You're online to play against people! But hey, people here seem to like it.

Likewise, I don't think there's a quitting penalty, and I haven't had a 4P match yet where at least one of the players didn't quit before the match was through. Sometimes this is a result of quits, sometimes this is a result of the system's very shaky connectivity.

The competition is very low-level, as in just figuring out the rules of the game, so when I go there I tend to slaughter. If you know what you're doing, you'll probably slaughter too. It's kind of mahjong stress relief compared to the more serious Tenhou.

So Mahjong Hime isn't too great, but it is an Engish MJ client and it does feature moe waifus. If that's what it takes, well then dammit, otaku...

My ID on there is TRIPLE BREAK.

Bonus screenshot! There was one of the 5-pin dora left and none of my other wait-- a hell wait, as it's called-- and the table wasn't playing any defense at all, making the most dangerous and reckless deals imaginable no matter what. But they weren't dealing into ME, was the problem: North was as reckless as the others and was lucking out on that. My other option was bad, but not as bad as this wait was. Frustrated with it, I threw down this reach, saying "If one of these guys has the dora, and it doesn't fit in his hand, he will just throw it at me without a moment's thought." I was absolutely correct.

Kawaiikochan STATUS NO REPORT

About nine months ago I took five minutes out of my life and made my first comic with the demo of Comipo: it was just a simple jab at a generic, popular style of nerd humor and at the time I intended it to go no further. But then Comipo turned out to be a fun toy to play with despite its very limited range, and I did a couple more. I think I did all of these in the same day, or really close together.

I started to realize that this could probably actually be a thing. And that I could be the guy to do it. How novel! After all, how hard could it possibly be to do moe 4-koma comics about videogames written in the deformed English of a bad translation? So that's where Kawaiikochan Gaming no Korner started from.

"More Love..." was the first comic after I bought Comipo: my reasoning was that buying this wildly overpriced program would force me to put work into the comic for at least a few months. Even so, I figured back then that I would have stopped having fun and quit by now, but right now I don't feel like that's going to happen any time soon. Readers are starting to ask about a book, even... and to my shock, I find that I've done enough work on the comic that I could do that.

I'm grateful and very surprised that there's turned out to be an audience for this. By its nature, the jokes running through this comic are things that only a very niche audience will understand. Really, the audience has come to this by themselves: the comic's had very little exposure outside of people passing it around on Twitter and Tumblr. The followers are seriously hardcore people too, just look at the list. Thank you, guys: a couple hundred readers is more than I ever imagined this would pick up. You have all guaranteed that I can no longer get tired of this project and walk away from it.

I'm considering buying an ad for a day or two on a big webcomic and seeing how that goes...

Important notes for Kawaiikochan readers:

-The Kawaiikochans are pure of heart.

-In the Kawaiikochans' universe, everybody talks like they do. If you call attention to their speech, they just won't understand what you're talking about.

Persona 4 Arena: Thoughts on Elizabeth

(I'm already booked to write a proper review of this game in a place that is not my blog. That'll come.)

I like to learn a character by just losing and losing and losing, which is why my Elizabeth has a horrendous record and is at 600 PSR (the ranked "how good are you?" metric: elite players are 800+). She is a very confusing and dangerous character to start out with, so I thought I would make some notes about playing this most moe of P4A characters.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that this is an expert-level, high-risk, high-reward character. She has a lot of tools for offense at mid to long range, very little for defense, and a severely low 7000 HP. Liz gets hit by two big combos and she is dead. She is considered a low-tier character, but in P4A the tiers have one character at mega-good, half the cast at very good, and the other half at pretty good. SO IT'S NOT SUPER IMPORTANT.

With no HP and strong long-range weapons, you would think that she was a character like Nu or Lambda in Blazblue... but that's not exactly the case. Liz can pretty easily keep the opponent across the screen all day if she wants to with her huge Maziodyne beams (and against, say, Kanji she will want to), but at that rate she's chipping away the life bar for a small gain or merely stalling. It's something she's very good at, but it's not where her damage comes from. That's mid-range.

Let's talk about the beam. It's very useful, but it's not as good as it looks. It's predictable, it's very slow to recover, and if it's blocked at a reasonable range the opponent just gets the initiative to come in and attack.

You want to mix up your timing with this. Sometimes it's a good idea to hit them as they stand up with it. Sometimes it's not. When they try to dash in from a long distance, give them that beam. Mostly use the A, but mix in the B version when they're waiting around for you. They will start to jump up in anticipation, so mix that up too. Hop backwards and sometimes fire the beam in mid-air, or right as you land. You want your opponent not to know when or where the beam is coming, and ideally to be frustrated into running into it over and over again.

When the opponent starts to move in, that's what you have the B button for. Liz throws out one of her cards like a frisbee, and the move has extremely long range. At medium range, if the beam is blocked you're going to get hit. Not so with standing B. A hit with standing B is a combo starter, which usually leads to huge damage.

Go learn your combos. The AAA string has its uses, but auto combo isn't going to cut it, especially not with this character. You need the real ultimate combos to do real ultimate damage, which is the reason you're playing this character in the first place. Look the stuff up on Dustloop.

If B is blocked, then you can either try the sweep (also a combo starter with SB Garudyne) or start to go for the risky stuff with the Persona attacks from Thanatos. The standing C is a double sword slice. If this counter hits you have a combo with either the D throw or low C depending on distance. And it's gonna hurt like hell.

If you are blocked, you still have options. D makes Thanatos charge in with a slow throw that starts a combo. Low C is a slow move that pops out a bubble around Thanatos. A hit will put them into Fear mode, which increases your damage. It's an important move in all of Liz's combos and it's especially scary in the corner and as the opponent is recovering. After the first attack with C, you can also press C again for two more slashes.

Players will start to know to jump away from all this, because that's the situation you don't have a lot of answers for. After the initial strike with C, if you jump up and press C again, the Persona will also jump up and do its attack. You can often catch escaping opponents with this and slam them down.

The thing is, if they do just jump back and escape... it's time to keep them out with beams again. If they jump towards you, go for that low C.

Now when they're in on you is just a scary situation. You have the BD move, Shuffle Time, which is a very slow grab that walks (prances?) through attacks. The enemy gets a random status ailment when they're hit with the move; for your purposes the most useful are Charm (drains their SP, fills yours fast, crippling their offense), Poison, and good old Fear. Charm and Poison both lend themselves to just stalling the opponent at long range and hurting them in a small way.

But opponents are going to start seeing through this move (and your grab super) pretty fast. If they keep above you and just keep hopping, you're in trouble. When an opponent gets in on me I tend to jump back with A or B to range them out. If B hits there's a small combo there.

I find the grab super move is best used when the opponent is going through some predictable attack string that you're blocking: just find the gap in their attacks and pull them out of it. The range is longer than you think... but not as long as Kanji's throw range.

If you actually find yourself at advantage in a close-range situation, like after a knockdown, don't forget the old classics low jab and throw. If they aren't thinking about you playing the close range game, they might get tagged, and then you've got a combo. In the corner Liz's throw leads to deadly combo damage on counter.

To sum it up, Elizabeth has to make the opponent play her game. This is true in any fighting game, but controlling the rhythm of the fight is especially important for Liz because once your opponent gets their offense going, she has a hell of a bad time overturning that. And all the best characters in this game have amazing Shoryuken-style moves.. so it's going to be tough. Stay pushing, but be careful and don't go running headlong.