Po po po ponnn!!

Play the above video and this one around ten times in a row, and you’ve got a pretty reasonable simulation of what watching TV on non-NHK networks in Japan is like right now.

The private TV networks in the Kanto area have all shifted back to non-emergency programming at this point — in other words, they are airing advertisements again instead of providing wall-to-wall crisis coverage and updates. However, many Japanese outfits are hesitant to air pre-quake advertising for assorted reasons, and they haven’t had the time to film new ones that talk about their charity work and contributions to the recovery effort. Therefore, a lot of ad time is being filled up by public service announcements from AC Japan, the local version of the Ad Council.

This means that if you’re a bad enough dude to watch TBS or NTV or TV Tokyo at the moment, you are seeing the above spot (devoted to the importance of using proper greetings and making friends) and the other linked one (encouraging women to get screened for breast and ovarian cancer) about fifty squillion times.

This is starting to highly annoy people who don’t have anything else to worry about at the moment. “My one-year-old son has started to sing ‘A-C!’ [the jingle at the end] around the house,” says one tweet that just passed by.

AC Japan has gotten enough complaints about this that they posted an apology for it on their website, although it’s really not their fault. Blame, you know, McDonald’s and Aflac and so on for not having suitably stoic and reserved ads on call for times like these.

Do you need 100 GameCubes?

Or 40 Famicoms? Or 20 Nintendo 64′s? 100 N64 controllers, maybe? Or how about 100 Super Famicoms, with 400 controllers and a random selection of 2000 loose SFC carts to go with it? (Presumably there are a lot of Romancing SaGas and Super Mario Worlds in that pile.)

All this and more is up on Yahoo! Auctions over in Japan at the moment from a seller based in Osaka, presumably either the owner of a used-game shop that went out of business or the repo man who wound up inheriting all of his inventory.

There was a time when the seller’s collection of 20 Famicom network adapters was worth its weight in gold in the Japanese collectors’ market, but a combination of warehouse finds and a general price depression in 8-bit games has lowered the price a great deal. It’s sort of like how the NES market is right now — a few titles are worth tons, but the majority is no more than a few hundred yen or so each.

Amusingly, he has only eight Mega Drives available in his vast flog-off, and there’s no Saturn or Dreamcast stuff whatsoever. Nintendo stuff has a tendency to clog up used-game shop shelves, I suppose.

How rich people play Super Mario Bros.

Professional violinist and music teacher Teppei Okada claims on his webpage profile that he can play any piece of video-game music by ear after one listen. He’s recently started demonstrating this talent on Nicovideo and YouTube, and it’s a remarkably impressive sight even before he starts playing sound effects alongside the music.

There’s a selection of small performances available on YouTube, including recitals for Donkey Kong, Tennis, Dragon Quest, Star Force and a few others.

Meet the 2ch’er with a complete Xbox 360 (JP) collection

(As of this writing, there are 299 Xbox 360 titles released in Japan. The original Xbox’s Japanese game library totals 222 titles.)

—

397 2010/05/03 22:41:38 ID:K1SKseTM0
I’ve completed the whole run of games released in Japan. The shelf is completely full at this point; I can’t put anything else in here. It’s packed full even after removing all of the import games, so I’ll probably push the Xbox 1 titles toward the back now that Live is offline.

398 2010/05/03 22:42:12 ID:2+yaoiQJ0
>>397
How much do you think you’d get if you sold it all at once?

399 2010/05/03 22:42:48 ID:ciCcU/1q0
>>397
Amazing as always…
I could maybe fill a single shelf with mine

412 2010/05/03 22:44:29 ID:1ksRAum50
>>397
I have about 80 of them, but a whole set would make me way too much of a perv…

425 2010/05/03 22:47:27 ID:/SSX9NM40
>>397
Wow. You have a better selection than the game shops!

413 2010/05/03(月) 22:44:37 ID:Y8b7DOr00
>>397
I’d be interested in knowing whether you bought all these as they were released or completed the collection afterward. Metal Wolf Chaos is one thing, but stuff like Fatal Frame was going for around 30,000 yen at one point, wasn’t it?

420 2010/05/03 22:46:40 ID:K1SKseTM0
>>413
I don’t actively collect Xbox 1 games, so most of those I bought when they came out, though some of them I waited until they got cheap in the used marketplace — Sneakers, for example.

484 2010/05/03 22:57:40 ID:Y8b7DOr00
>>459
By the way, how many of these games have you actually beaten?

494 2010/05/03 22:59:47 ID:K1SKseTM0
>>484
I didn’t count them so I don’t know.
I do beat most of the games I play. (I don’t bother with completing achievements too much)

By the way, my achievement score is a little under 40,000, so I’m pretty much a straight-on collector at this point, so, yeah.

549 2010/05/03 23:08:07 ID:Y8b7DOr00
>>494
Nah, nah, 40,000 is still pretty impressive…
The problem is, I bet that with this library, half of that score comes from playing gal-games…

585 2010/05/03 23:13:53 ID:K1SKseTM0
>>549
I don’t care for gal-games for the most part. The only one I’ve played is Steins;Gate; that was really awesome. For whatever reason, though, I can’t get myself to care about any of the others, including Chaos;Head.

Kotoba no Puzzle: Mojipittan (Namco, December 2001)

Mojipittan, released first to arcades in 2001 and still going strong on the Wii, PSP and DS today, is a unique word game that takes advantage of the Japanese language’s complex writing system. Each level in the game consists of a tile grid, a row of kana tiles on the left, and a given goal — make 20 words, fill in all the squares with valid words, make the word “I love you” eight times on a board shaped like a giant heart, etc. — to complete before time runs out. Since many Japanese words can be made with as few as one or two kana, the game has a nice, easy learning curve, allowing Japanese students of nearly any level to complete at least a smattering of puzzles.

I bring this up because there was some commentary on Japanese blogs yesterday over the recent departure of Takashi Nakamura from Namco Bandai Games. He’s the most well-known among the 168 NBGI employees who accepted severance packages this month from the company, which is trying to shed 10 percent of its workforce following major losses.

Nakamura’s main contribution to game-dom was producing the Mojipittan series, but he didn’t design it — that honor goes to Hiroyuki Gotō, a rather odd guy who broke the Guinness world record for reciting digits of pi by memory in early 1995:

“The Hanshin earthquake happened in January 1995, but I was holed up in my house right up to the day I had my second try [at the record]; I didn’t allow myself any kind of outside stimulation, so I had no idea such a huge earthquake had taken place. I didn’t have any sort of diversion during that time; all I did was concentrate on memorizing numbers. I wound up having to extend college another year because I couldn’t go to class for most of that time. I got an academic award from my college after I broke the record, though. Usually they’d give those out for some kind of serious academic achievement, but they kind of made a special exception for me.”

It takes a man with that sort of — let’s go right out and say it — OCD-ness to write a game like Mojipittan, which includes a massive dictionary of Japanese words with meanings. “I spent every night at the office staring at these huge dictionaries,” he said in the above interview, “so seeing the game get released was all the more special for me.”

Even if you know zero Japanese, you gotta like the cutesy paint job Namco’s artists did with the game, eh?

I’m an ex-employee at a porn game company; any questions?

1 2010/01/12 18:40:23.72 ID:2oLm8F690

I’m gonna be quitting my job at the end of the month.
I got no savings and no gig next, but I wanna take some time off anyway.
Probably going right back to eroge, but…

7 2010/01/12 18:43:04.87 ID:sqeFXSaR0

What was your job?

Director, planner, that sort of thing.

9 2010/01/12 18:43:31.40 ID:VwTpnoC00

How much did you get?

About 200,000 yen/month after taxes. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less.

Read the rest of this entry »

Willow Soft eliminates the middleman!

Buy the limited-edition box set (on Amazon Japan) for eroge-maker Willow Soft’s Okāsan ga Ippai!! (which means something like “Moms All Over the Place!!”), and in addition to the standard artbook, you will also get a sex toy modeled after the pocketbooks of one of the game’s seven heroines. I think this is a first.

You also get a CD with tracks of each girl groaning, which you’re meant to tune to accordingly based on whose silicone minge you’re involved with at the moment.

The game comes out Christmas Day, of course.

Click onward to see exactly what you’re getting (work safe, more or less).

Read the rest of this entry »

Things Legendary Swords Have A Lot Of

1 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:29:40.25 ID:ZbYgLYgS0
Besides being stuck in stones and only The Chosen One can pull it out, please.

15 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:33:46.73 ID:L3+9DZHPO
Sparkly

19 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:35:25.65 ID:peU8BuTGO
Bouncing around the elf village

21 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:36:12.91 ID:thLQuWCN0
Passed down over generations

25 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:40:10.59 ID:1lBxmTOZO
Made by dwarves

26 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:41:15.73 ID:8ndyR8PM0
Either really thick or really long

29 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:43:54.45 ID:hTxwVJWq0
The old guy near it is really surprised when you touch it without being shocked/blown away

39 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:45:58.05 ID:+caNLnvIO
Doesn’t look sharp

41 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:47:02.24 ID:hTxwVJWq0
Disappears after you plunge it into the final boss for the last time

45 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:51:36.35 ID:NlmVjI8i0
All rusty at first

48 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:54:07.01 ID:xVHA9OX8O
If you can sell it it’s either worth a ton of money or 1 Gil

55 ：2009/10/24(土) 09:58:54.25 ID:pTlbCYigO
Usually about the 3rd strongest by the end

59 ：2009/10/24(土) 10:04:24.90 ID:/kE0FSIq0
Based on the Holy or Light element so it’s hard to use

70 ：2009/10/24(土) 10:17:03.87 ID:oko8Efuq0
There’s an evil sword that goes with it

72 ：2009/10/24(土) 10:20:46.04 ID:NJZrzPWh0
If a villain steals it from its owner he usually bursts into flames or something like that

87 ：2009/10/24(土) 10:32:28.58 ID:RMf1mtf6O
Fires beams

97 ：2009/10/24(土) 10:41:34.50 ID:l5iyqfrz0
Nobody really knows anything about the legend behind the sword

Old man “Ahhh, the legendary sword!!!”
Hero “Uh, great”

132 ：2009/10/24(土) 11:26:42.99 ID:6OVYMpmr0
Talks

141 ：2009/10/24(土) 11:36:25.76 ID:h4EWnKLMO
Capable of killing things in one swipe during cutscenes only

Pay 1000 yen to get slapped by a maid cafe girl next month

“Play options

1. Game system rental (1000 yen for 30 minutes)
   Systems: Wii, PS3, PSP, Xbox, DS — you can bring your own games
2. Share a tender moment watching a DVD with her. You can bring your own DVD (1000 yen for 30 minutes)
3. Mini-games (800 yen for 20 minutes) — cards, The Game of Life, etc
4. I’d be happy to massage your hands (1200 yen for 20 minutes)
5. Ear cleaning while you rest your head in her lap (1500 yen for 20 minutes, 3000 yen for 40 minutes)
6. A Tsundere/deredere slap (1000 yen for a “round trip”)
7. Off to dreamland as I read a storybook (1000 yen for 20 minutes)
8. A memorial photo of the two of us (1500 yen per)
9. Handmade sweets, filled with love (2000 yen; message card included next time)
10. Get a hold of my feelings with this love letter (1000 yen per letter)
11. Read my [mobile] mail! (photo + message: 500 yen, 3 for 1200 yen)
12. You’re looking at meeee! ([mobile phone] movie, 1000 yen, 3 for 2500 yen)
13. This is who I am! (Bromide photo, 300 yen each)
14. Let’s trade presents! (reservations required; 1500 yen)

Some girls may not be able to engage in all forms of play. Please tell us about your own games.”

Usually maid cafes take measures to keep the creepiest clients away from premises, but Cute Room — opening up in Akihabara October 4 — seems to be taking the opposite approach.

The “spa-for-the-brain and relaxation shop” gives you a choice of room themes and costume for your lady companion to wear as she hangs out with you. It costs 4000 yen for 40 minutes, 5500 yen for an hour, or 7500 yen for 80 minutes; the list of “play” activities above are all options. As the website puts it, the environment allows you to enjoy a “2.7D world,” one that’s just a little bit closer to the one guests see in wacky anime love comedies.

What would you do with a girl for 40 to 80 minutes after paying for her company? Well, I can think of a few things, but in Cute Room you’ll be playing games, watching DVDs, getting massages of assorted sorts, and so on — assuming you’ve got the cash. That and you can get slapped if you’re into that Haruhi Suzumiya stuff. Presumably you could experience all of the above if you had a real girlfriend, but if you’re contemplating a visit to Cute Room, you probably don’t have a girlfriend, do you?

If you’re sticking around Tokyo post-TGS for a little sightseeing, come to the grand opening event on October 3 (Saturday), where they’ll let 30 guests in for a sneak-preview look at what 2.7D looks like in action.

The 2ch response:

Read the rest of this entry »

Memories of the original Game Boy

1 :2009/02/14 01:57:46.39 ID:Ki6Q4itCP
The pangs of panic when the batteries were about to run out

2 :2009/02/14 01:58:14.30 ID:wrXORepw0
Batteries actually being expensive

Read the rest of this entry »