Tokyo Blog

I was beside myself with joy today when I stumbled across the PixelJam site. They make games that are ‘neo-retro’. A term that well describes their aesthetic sensibilities. The game I played just now was Gama Bros. and it’s superb! The sound FX and background music are especially 8-bit and some of the ideas they’ve put into the games are so good. They have other games on there, and also one of the guys from PixelJam had the idea of photographing the results of incorrectly inserting Atari 2600 cartridges and posted them to a microsite called sub2600.

The cool Japanese car manufacturer Scion has teamed-up with Giant Robot and Japanese paper artist Shin Tanaka to create these awesome paper models. If you can grab yourself a copy of Giant Robot magazine, you can make one of your own with scissors / scalpel and glue. I’m on the hunt for one!

If any fellow Tokyoites know where we can grab a copy of Giant Robot magazine, let everybody know in the comments thread!

Did you know there was such thing as a U.F.O Catcher expert? Well, apparently there is, and in these videos via Japan Probe, they show some special techniques in acquiring prizes from these usually frustrating video arcade attractions! I thought it would be relevant as I mentioned the U.F.O. catchers in my recent post about my hunt for Street Fighter IV in the game centres of Akihabara.

A musical interlude for you now. Usually Mùm videos aren’t much chop, and this one is no exception, but stop and listen to this song for a minute. I’ve been listening to the album Finally We Are No One on my headphones whilst moving around Tokyo. It’s a good soundtrack for winter.

Did you know you can get Hello Kitty guitars? A Fender Stratocaster no less! I don’t know why you’d want one, but, looking at the site, there’s more evidence of Hello Kitty’s rising popularity in parts of the world other than Japan. Here, Sanrio Corp.’s lead mascot is encouraging young girls to pick up the guitar.

Here’s a link to a Japanese site offering a wide selection of retro game-related fonts, mostly bitmap fonts. As you can see, they have the classic Capcom typefaces! I can never find anything to do with these fonts once I’ve downloaded them, but I’m not going to let that discourage me. I’ll install them anyway!

People reading this blog from America, or from anywhere other than the United Kingdom in fact, will probably not know who this guy is. When I was a kid I used to watch this guy on TV every week. He had an art programme which had a major influence on me at that age. He would show you how to draw and paint, and his female co-presenter would do craft pieces. He inspired millions of British kids to get into art and design, including me. Sadly, he died in the early hours of Sunday 18th January aged 83. But that’s a pretty good innings I reckon.

Before I returned home to the UK for christmas, I went shopping in my neighbourhood of Kotobuki for Christmas presents. My neighbourhood is famous for, amongst other things, toy companies and toyshops. You can see the famous Bandai HQ from my balcony. As it was, most of the presents I bought turned out to be Japanese toys. The best thing I bought turned out to be a Kendama, which is a traditional Japanese ball and string game with a body of wood shaped like a hammer on which you can balance the ball on 3 points, as well as a spike on top, which you can also get the ball onto (if you’re extremely good). You start with the ball hanging on the length of string and then you jerk it up and catch it on one of the cups on the hammer. You can then flick it up again and rotate the hammer to switch to a different cup, then the spike and so on. You can make up your own combinations, and even balance the ball on other parts of the hammer, like the angle of the cross formed by the intersecting pieces of wood. Modern kendama experts have gone even further than this, and switch between holding the ball and catching the hammer to visa versa and so on - even doing tricks where you swing the ball and hammer simultaneously like nunchaku, then catch the ball or hammer in differnet ways. So now I’m in training to become a more competent Kendama slinger. Check out the pros on YouTube.

Paul Stamets is a man on a mission. He’s extremely intelligent, extremely engaging, a lover of nature, and a great humanist, so it’s hard not to like him. In this video from the TED conference he’s championing the mushroom, and it’s application in saving the world. It’s interesting because he draws a parallel between the behaviour of fungus in the substrata and the internet! He also mentions an interesting fact that explains why, in sci-fi movies and animations, you always see giant mushrooms in radioactive, post-apocalyptic landscapes! You can also watch it in the extremely elegant surroundings of the TED website.

Thanks to Rebecca and Andy for this.

As promised, I hit the streets of Tokyo to find a video arcade that had the new Street Fighter 4. The obvious choice of starting place was Akihabara, or Electric Town as it is also known, a mecca of otaku culture bristling with pachinko parlours (パチンコ店 / パチンコ屋) and video arcades (ゲームセンター) as well as, of course, the myriad consumer electronics stores.

I first arrived at Taito Station, the most likely place to find the newly released machines.

This place has 6 floors of gaming with a different type of machine on each. On the ground floor (known as the 1st floor in Japan) they had the UFO catchers, and on the floor above they had the photo sticker machines (プリクラ / プリント倶楽部), and above that the dance and music games, and so on.

On the ground floor though, they also had a floor guide at the foot of the escalator.

So it wasn’t difficult to find (thankfully I knew the location of this flagship game centre because I had been here before). I made my way through the building via two escalators and an elevator from the 3rd floor to reach the 5th, which is easily my favourite floor because it has all the beat-em-ups.

So here they were. A bank of 8 newly released SFIV cabinets.

It wasn’t busy because it was in business hours, but there were a few guys in suits on the far side and a couple of guys on my side. The Japanese cabinets only accommodate 1 player per machine, but if a player starts a game on the machine opposite yours, you have to fight against each other in 2 player versus mode! This is a great idea as you can have way more 2 player battles, and against complete strangers. I gave someone the Ken treatment and I could see him out of the corner of my eye afterwards, peering around the machines to get a look at who beat him. This adds a new kind of dynamic to the whole idea of arcade games, and I like it! 2 player bouts are always more enjoyable than fighting the CPU.

The characters were cleared easily, but the end of game boss, Seth, ate a couple of credits. I gave up after that and went home. I wasn’t about to waste any more money, so I made my way back downstairs to the front of the arcade.

Outside, I found this interesting machine facing out onto the street.

This is Taito’s Space Invaders 30th anniversary novelty called ‘The Happy Button’. The idea comes from the playing style adopted by most players of space invaders, one of the few games to feature backing music consisting of only 3 notes, which is to pound the fire button constantly in the hope of hitting an invader. All you have to do is press start and you get the countdown 3,2,1 before you have 10 seconds to hit the button as often as possible. I gave it my best Track n’ Field vibro-arm and got a pretty poor 81 presses. Such a simple idea, but it’s hearing the legendary missile sound FX again that makes it all worth while. After two worse attempts, I cycled home.

OMG. Look at what Adidas are introducing for their spring 2009 consortium collection. A big difference from their usual approach to colourways: lots of stripes and bright colours adorning their classic models. In my opinion, these are way better than previous collections so I’ll be looking out for them from March.

When I was in England over Christmas, I saw some old photographs that reminded me of a computer my parents bought me when I was younger. It was the mid to late 80’s and I was probably around 9 or 10 years old when I got my first computer, this Oric 1 you can see above the text. Compared to all the breeze-block fashioned personal computers of the time, I think this was a design icon. Smaller and thinner than its counterparts and packing the same sound card as the one found in the Atari ST.

The computer used to be kept on a drawer that slid out from the video cabinet beneath the TV. In order to use it you had to squat or kneel in front of it. I used to play Hunchback or Zorgon’s Revenge when no-one was using the TV, or try to program it by guessing at the syntax. Zorgon’s Revenge used to give me the creeps in much the same way as Quo Vadis and Jet Set Willy. The games themselves were very surreal, and when you mixed this with the garish graphics and garbled, contorted sound there was something disturbing about it. A bit like the old Vectrex at my nan’s house.

I experimented with many of the early personal computers during the 80’s. My friends all had a different one: an Acorn Electron, a VIC 20, an Acorn BBC, a Dragon 64, an Amstrad, Commodore 64. They all sucked, but without them I probably wouldn’t be where I am now, so I have a right to be sentimental.

Personally, I like The Wonderful! Design Works - I own a couple of their T-shirts from previous collections. This lot and more besides are available in Beams-T and selected Beams stores now!

Imagine this: An enormous bowl filled with a garlicky butter miso soup, into which is dumped a huge serving of ramen noodles, some flambéd beansprouts, thick dark bamboo shoots, and sea weed. On top of that they pile up stir-fried pork, crack a raw egg into the soup on one side, sea weed on the other, then place a large knob of butter onto the hot pork (which subsequently melts). What you end up with is a Butter Miso Special from one of my favourite Ramen joints which is located in Okachimachi (opposite Matsuzakaya and just down from KFC). It will set you back ¥1180 and you’ll pay for it dearly in later life, but here in the now, you’ll taste a very indulgent twist on a classic Hokkaido style ramen recipe. You can then use the complimentary garlic cloves and clove crush to taste. Pictured Top: The front of the restaurant.

In other game news, the release date for the XBox 360, PS3 and PC version of the newest installment of Capcom’s Street Fighter franchise looms very close indeed. If you want to get a copy in the US and the UK, you should visit your local retailer on the 17th February - just over 1 month away!

As for the arcade release, this definitely won’t happen in the US, and I don’t think it will happen in the UK. By my calculations, it should be out in Japanese game arcades already, but only just. Don’t worry, I’m off to Akihabara as soon as I finish my work for the day - I’ll let you know what it’s like (Akihabara is a short bike ride from my apartment in Taito).