Subatomic Brainfreeze

The Free-To-Play I'm Playing

I've been playing a lot of phone free-to-play stuff lately. I realize this is sacrilege or whatever, I just don't care a lot. Puzzle and Dragons was so good that I didn't mind giving other games like it a shot. What I've noticed is that there are types.

You Don't Have To Pay

I've been playing Puzzle and Dragons for over a year and I've given it a dollar. I've enjoyed the game to such an extent that I kind of feel bad and would like to give it ten bucks for its own sake, but I understand that that is a deep hole and if I pay them ten bucks, it won't just be ten bucks.

This game has pay currency (Magic Stones), and if you log in every day, there will be times when the game gives them away, one per day. Five stones every couple weeks is more than enough to fulfill basic functions that would normally cost money, namely expanding your monster inventory.

So how does the game make its money? There's a slot machine in the back. Rare monsters can only be obtained by either beating particularly challenging dungeons or by taking a 5-stone spin on the Rare Egg Machine. This comes out to 5 bucks, but if you buy in bulk the price goes down slightly.

Players understand that just playing the machine as it is is a fool's errand: the game periodically has events where the odds become much better and that is when the big spenders put down $50 or $100 or whatever. In other words, the designers understand not to ask even their whales for all their money all the time.

The game has a fair difficulty curve designed for one player, and the key to winning is patience and careful planning whether you pay or not. The rare monsters are stronger, but you're not going to find the win button to this game anywhere.

This is a pretty common model: the average player plays undisturbed and the game gets funded like crazy. Obviously this only works if you're a massive hit like PAD, and a small game can't exactly count on hundreds of whales just appearing somehow.

You Don't Have To Pay For A While

I was recommended Brave Frontier as being like PAD without the tough XP curve. I gave this some time and decided I wasn't really fond of it. It's true that the slow experience climb (not truly necessary to win levels) of PAD is out, but so is the element of skill, fundamentally.

A lot of PAD is clever use of the character skills, which can be all kinds of tricks. Beating tough levels and bosses is about putting together the skills you have in a smart way and forming a strategy; it's a very meta game going way beyond just the puzzle part. That's the part that makes it engaging, not the slot machine.

BF takes that part out, and the puzzle, too. You just click your guys to make them fight. Skills are just special attacks. Player agency is reduced to just clicking, and sometimes casting a heal spell. Everything feels pre-determined by the numbers. If you can't beat a stage you're just going to have to level up (XP is readily available, at least) till you can.

Anyway, the game is baby difficulty for a long time, and when you finish the first "world" the difficulty spikes dramatically (there's a new evil god, much worse than the last one!) and your max-level super-god guys all fall instantly. It's not a matter of planning or control; the game is just raw numbers. At the start the numbers are strongly in your favor, and as you move along the tide starts to slowly rise against you, and then you're swallowed up.

The game wants you to either start paying up for better characters or beat super-hard "you will probably have to spend a few magic rocks on continues" stages that have the evolution materials for your existing guys... or you won't really be able to advance. I dropped out after this point, wondering why on earth I'd been playing this crap to begin with.

You Actually Have To Pay

I'm really into Dragon Coins lately. I picked it up because it's a Sega game, and you know, personal bias. I wanted to see the Sega ripoff of PAD. Its gimmick is that it's based on the old coin pusher machine at the arcade, and it's actually really polished and smart and fun. I want to write a post about its more advanced mechanics, where it is clearly the aggressive reverse of PAD's stall-oriented play style.

It's one of those free-to-plays that is technically free to download and play for a little while, but you basically have to pay. If I didn't give this game $10 after the first week, I would have actually had to drop it.

The game does this with a combination of mechanics. First, you get an extremely small inventory and way too many monsters: 3-5 for every stage you play. You start with something like 30 slots. In addition to the pay slot machine there are two free slot machines, and one of them is "use it or lose it" style. If you keep playing the game, you keep getting monsters, always. Most of these are combined with other monsters for experience, but many are too rare to just throw out like that.In PAD this is not a problem because you can expand your inventory with the free Magic Stones you get from logging in.

Dragon Coins' login bonuses are pathetically stingy, like 1000 gold or maybe 50 cents' worth of pay currency. You can earn pay currency by grinding really hard on early stages, but the returns on that are also really bad. Plus it's not like you're going to get anywhere with 30 inventory slots.

So you pay. The game speaks loud and clear here. They didn't make things difficult for the free player, they built a wall, and if you don't like it then goodbye. I paid, because the game is really fun.

You Don't Have To Pay, But If You're Playing This, You Probably Want To

The LoveLive phone game is the most basic imaginable music game: in fact playing the songs probably isn't even the point. Your score doesn't even depend on player skill! You can play perfectly and still get a C rank, in fact you will. Score is determined by how leveled-up your idols are, which is done with card-combining just like in PAD and so many other of these games.

Regular idols are total crap, stats-wise: the adored heroines from the anime this is based on-- the characters the players of this game would actually want-- are all rare cards. You can play all you want without them, of course, but if you're playing the LoveLive videogame you probably want the LoveLive characters. (When you start playing you're allowed to pick your favorite as a starter.)

Of course, you don't just get your favorite character and be done with it; the same characters are available over and over again in endless rare variants that the super-fan is going to want all of. This game expects you to drop (roughly) $50 in the slot machine in a go: it actually has a promotion running right now where you're guaranteed a super-rare card if you just spend 50 gems. You see, this game is aimed at megafans, and nobody opens their wallets quite like the idol fan. Behold the brutal statistics of the LoveLive slot machine, laid bare in-game:

-90% regular rare (even free players get a lot of these)

-9% super rare (again, you're guaranteed one of these if you just spend $50 in a shot)

-1% ultra rare (there are three different ultra-rares in the slot machine right now)

Did I mention you have to get two of each card in order to "evolve" them? $50 is just the beginning. Like I said, the system is brutal. Unlike other casual games aimed at wider demographics, it is not quiet or tricky about this.

The game also runs events during which the goal is basically to play the game more than anybody else, and since there's a stamina bar it's really who can insert coin the fastest.. it goes on forever. But you don't gotta pay! But why else would you be there?

I have beaten Galaxy Force II on one credit AND IT'S PRETTY IMPORTANT

(See also Kawaiikochans on this game.)

Galaxy Force II is a game that requires extremely clean and precise play to finish without continuing: at first I thought the game was just designed to need a continue in order to get to the end.

But it's possible! The achievement took many hours of on-and-off play, mostly a playthrough or two every time I was on the subway for a long trip. Yesterday I came back to the game after a few weeks off it, and sure enough I got my perfect run. Enough of that, though, I want to do a strategy post.

(This post will refer to “stage 1” and so on assuming you start at Megaleon, the default first stage; starting on other stages changes the level design and difficulty somewhat.)

THE ENERGY METER, AND “GOTTA GO FAST”

The energy meter is both your life meter and your time limit. It starts at 1200 and is constantly ticking down, and fast. As such, it makes sense to fly through the stages as quickly as possible. You should have the throttle at maximum for most of the game: aside from turns, braking is rarely necessary and obstacles shouldn't be too difficult to dodge at full throttle.

THE ENERGY BONUS AND “GOTTA BLOW UP EVERYTHING”

If you stop there and just race through the game avoiding all damage and enemies, you'll run out of energy and lose anyway. Not only do you have to run the game at top speed, you need to be shooting down nearly everything you see. You're given an enemy bonus for enemies shot down which is usually refilled at the midpoint of the stage, and this bonus is the only thing that's keeping you alive from stage to stage.

If you are not over 1000 energy by the final stage, you will not be able to finish the game. To be at 1000 by that point, you have to have done an excellent damn job.

MISSILE AND GUN

If you move to the area an enemy formation is in and hold still for a moment your missiles should lock on to all of them. If you don't keep steady you won't get a proper lock on and probably miss a lot of valuable hits.

Since neither missile nor gun expend energy you might as well be firing the gun at all times. Missiles do most of the work, but the guns shouldn't be neglected. You'll need them for close targets, times you're between missile volleys, and especially the big, slow targets with lots of HP.

KNOWING WHAT TO BLOW UP

Most things should be blown up. Some things must be blown up, and others are kind of wasteful and pointless to blow up.

Must: Obviously the other fighter planes. A formation of these guys will get you a lot of energy and you can't afford to let many of them pass. Move from formation to formation and take down as many as you can. Go where there are lots of them and don't waste time chasing a straggler if there's a whole formation coming up.

Should: The big targets. The ship in stage 1 (no excuse not to get this one), the lava snakes in stage 2, and other similar targets you'll see in the other stages. The lava snakes are the biggest energy point boost I know of and if you know where they are it's a breeze to take most of them out. The hopping robots in stage 4 don't seem like major targets, but they are.

Doesn't really matter, is kind of in the way: Debris. There's a lot of debris in this game thrown in to kind of throw you off the enemies you should actually be shooting down. In a lot of cases you might as well just shoot them (pollen in stage 3) but you're making 1 point per object so it doesn't really matter. In other cases your missiles will lock on to the debris when you want to take down the fighter plane that's flying among it, so you're forced to go to the gun.

There's a lot of case-by-case stuff where some background targets are worth a lot of points (the garages in stage 4), and others aren't worth jack (garage, stage 1), and you just have to feel them out case by case-by-case.

The blue bits on the floor in stage 3 look like debris but they're worth a lot of points. I didn't figure this out for the longest.

ENEMY BEHAVIOR

Speaking of knowing when things is going to happen, Galaxy Force II punishes the player who tries to play memorization style. You can't run to the place where you think an enemy is going to spawn, because the enemies will always spawn at a certain distance relative to you. You can know where the enemies are showing up, but you cannot attempt to meet them in advance. You have to know, then see the enemy come, and finally react to them.

It's the same with the nasty, huge obstacles in stages 3 and 4: let them appear and immediately move the hell out of their range without neglecting to shoot down what you can. Don't try to get around them early, they're programmed to pop up in your face and force you to deal with them. Assuming you start at 1 (Megaleon), 3 and 4 are probably the most annoying stages.

Anyway, you're on your own from there, best of luck. It's very doable, and there is wiggle room if you get hit a couple times, just not a lot. Here is a one-credit play video from the PS2 version that helped me a bit with some of the finer points.

Explaining Tekken Revolution

In short, the free-to-play PS3 Tekken Revolution is a depressing preview of things that just might happen in the fighting game genre. In long, keep reading.

(I don't know the entire Tekken series and didn't really play Tekken Tag 2 for any length, only watched tourney matches and read about it, so I might get some technical stuff wrong here.)

Revolution is a free copy of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 with the tag part (along with other more advanced, overwhelming game systems) removed and with far fewer characters. Its target, boldly, greedily, is the perceived "casual market". The game design screams "Scrubs and cell phones!"

When we look at fighting games, the scene, the people who come out to tournaments, we have to really keep in mind that these are the most dedicated and diehard genre lovers around. They like fighting games so much they're willing to get on a plane and spend a weekend on it. And games following Street Fighter IV, a game designed around (MOSTLY) exactly what the scene wants, have followed its example. Even the boring games, like KI or Injustice, are sophisticated, balanced, and tournament-ready. An idea like RPG stat-leveling-- around which Revolution is based-- is rightfully considered treason against good fighting game design.

But this mindset forgets that the majority of players really doesn't give a shit about that kind of thing and would be perfectly happy to level up their fighter's stats and grind until the game does the work of winning for them. That's what Tekken Revolution is about: a fundamentally unfair and deeply cynical system where the house is selling the advantage.

There are two separate ladders in this game's system: you can win matches or you can keep playing.If you win matches against players at your approximate level, you'll quickly rise in the ranks like in any other competitive game. Whether you win or not, on the other hand, you will always rise in the experience ladder.

Gaining XP, levels, and stats is actually a very clever handicap system; if you lose a lot, the game will have you face players in the same rank but with much lower stats. If you win a lot, you'll see things from the other end as your low-stat character goes up against characters with huge advantages in raw stats, but who are played by people who aren't skilled enough to make anything of them.

No matter how bad you are at the game, the game will keep leveling you up, and somewhere in there your overpowered character has got to start winning already and break out of "Grand Master" rank -- note that in this game a weakling rank is GRAND MASTER.

(The stats are attack power, HP, and the nebulous "vigor", offering miniscule bonuses in each category.)
And you can level faster if you pay for it. The free-to-play bite in the ass comes immediately: Namco will allow you to play five ranked matches and two arcade mode runs in the space of about two hours, but after that you'll have to wait.

What Namco wants you to do is to pay for each individual play, like you would at the arcade, by buying their Premium Coins. $1 for 4 plays, $2 for 10 plays, $5 for 30 plays so obviously that's the only one you'd pick. Benefits? That's easy: you get the coin back if you win (so it's really $5 for 30 losses, incentivizing the strong player), and your prize money and XP are tripled over free play. That's right, not doubled, tripled. So this is the roundabout moment at which we reach "pay to win." Buy Namco Quarters and you'll get an unfair competitive advantage over the plebes in return. At least practice mode is free.

You can't tell whether a player has paid for their stats. You'd be easily able to suss it out if you could see total matches played versus level, but in service to the player's ego, Revolution only shows number of wins. Like I said, it's very clever. Nobody has to know you're paying them for a leg up.

Because this isn't enough, Revolution actually has even more pay items, like the Namco Bandai bosses heard about every possible monetization scheme and decided to put them all in one game. Costumes from TTT2 are $2, hell, hit effects from TTT2 are $2. Additional characters might be unlocked or might cost $7: it depends on how far back in the order they are. If you're a Tekken head and "your character" isn't in the first few to unlock, welp that'll be seven bucks.One day there's going to be a fighting game that works like DOTA 2 or League of Legends; free and supported entirely by purchasing characters, expensive hats, or whatever. It solves the genre's perpetual problem of getting people to pay for game upgrades in a single stroke. It's just a matter of the consoles supporting that infrastructure, and some developer being smart enough to get there. We'd be dumb not to assume everybody is already working on it. It'll probably be Street Fighter V, because from my extensive experience with fighting games I can tell you that most people won't play any game where they can't pick Ryu/Ken and do Shoryukens over and over again.

(Did I mention that Tekken Revolution adds Shoryukens, by the way? To fucking Tekken? Because it makes a complete mess of the game!)Anyway, Tekken Revolution is unlikely to be that game, the one that wins over the tourney people as well as the scrubs, because it's made firmly for the latter group. But you should look at it-- if not play it-- and think about it, because it is one place the future can go.

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.