Random crap.
Mikado had these pin badge buttons in their gachapon capsule toy dispensers, so I got three. One big one that says “PUSH START” (I’m not sure why it says “2006” because according to the Japanese Wikipedia, it started in 2009), and a set of buttons for the Mikado location in Ikebukuro (top) and the original in Takadanobaba (bottom). As I mentioned in the previous post, Mikado is a legendary spot for retrogaming.
I visited Mikado next to Takadanobaba Station in Tokyo. Here are some more screenshots of game screens. (I made an earlier post of closeup screenshots of arcade games in Akihabara’s Hey and Super Potato here.)
I bought these today in Shinjuku after visiting the Pac-Man 45th anniversary pop-up event in Harajuku.
I went to Shimamura today and found this lovely Pac-Man decorative pillow! It feels so soft! Here are front and back photos of it. There was another Pac-Man pillow there which featured large sprites of the characters, but I like the design of this one better. Interestingly, it features the English names of the ghosts. There were also Pac-Man bath mats there too, but I didn’t get them because I imagine my wife wants to keep the ones we already have.
Pac-Man is my all-time favorite game. In fact, I’m wearing Pac-Man boxer shorts underwear as I post this. I’m nuts for anything Pac-Man. That said, Star Wars was my #1 go-to game every time, as I mentioned in my post about the old arcade Bag-A-Tel as a kid.
I didn’t really play Defenders or Space Invaders in the arcade that much. I’d play them on my Atari at home. I preferred Galaxian over Space Invaders and I found the controls of Defender in the arcade to be too complicated with all those buttons.
And Tempest… wow. Star Wars and Tempest are the two I’d most want to play today. Playing games on an emulator and my Sega Saturn Virtua Stick is a great way to go at home, but the flight yoke of Star Wars and the analog knob of Tempest are two experiences that emulators can’t truly capture. For that matter, Centipede’s trackball is worth mentioning too, although while I liked that game, it didn’t come close.
Perhaps my least favorite of all of these games was Donkey Kong. I actually liked Popeye better, and Kangaroo even more so.
The front and back of a neat Saturn pillow I found at Shimamura this week. It was actually put in the men’s section, discounted from 1300 yen down to 300! Swanky.
It’s cool how YouTube can, out of the blue, recommend music I’ve never heard of before and when I click to listen, I become completely enamored with it. I’d never heard of Castlebeat before, but now I’m definitely a fan. The above “Change Your Mind” music video showed up in the algorithm and the cute Japanese girl caught my eye. I clicked on it and loved it. The song reminded me a bit of The Radio Dept. with the whispering vocals. The footage used to make this video was taken from some Japanese short film from the ’60s. I’ve no idea what this movie is about, but this actress is very talented at expressing emotion.
Since I liked that video, next to be recommended by Castlebeat was this video of “I Follow.” This video uses footage from the movie Career Opportunities. That movie came out in 1991. I was 15 at that time and my adolescence was really kicking into high gear about that time. I had a subscription to Muppets Magazine in the ’80s and Jennifer Connelly graced the cover when Labyrinth came out and I thought she was pretty then. But in ’91, Jennifer Connelly and her boobs were so pretty and she became my imaginary wife. She was in other movies like The Rocketeer and Dark City, but after 2000 she became so thin and gaunt-looking. The most recent movie I saw her in was Top Gun: Maverick and she still doesn’t really resemble the round-faced beauty I fell in love with back then.
Lastly, check out this video. The previous two videos were fan-made, but this is an official video by Spirit Goth Records. I love the old ’80s video game arcade footage.
Castlebeat’s music can be described in different ways. Lo-fi, dreampop, shoegaze. I’m really not an expert, but I like the effect of nostalgia I feel while listening.
I bought this game on a Steam sale the year before last because the ad for it reminded me of Super Famicom action RPGs like The Secret of Mana and Zelda: A Link to the Past. I just played the prologue and when I saw that the gameplay is far more complex than I was expecting, it proved to not be just something I can pick up and play for a bit. Since it was a bit more involved, I decided to play it later. I sort of forgot about this game until last month when I decided to give it another try.
The pixel art in this game is beautiful. It is definitely 16-bit inspired and the in-game sprites are cute and well-detailed, but no Super Famicom could handle the cool lighting and shadow effects that this game has. This game actually comes from Germany and while the up-close character designs show that this is not a Japanese-made game, the actual in-game graphics look very much like a sprite-based, 16-bit style JRPG.
It’s taken me some time to get used to this game’s controls. You definitely need a modern controller with two analog sticks. You have two attacks: a melee slash and a projectile. Enemies vary with which weapon is more effective. Another button activates a spin that helps you dodge. There’s a lot of platforming in this game with pitfalls, but you respawn if you make a fatal fall. Jumping is conveniently automatic, so you don’t have to time jumps perfectly. You also won’t make any accidental jumps.
There are no random encounters, unless you get ambushed as part of the story. Most enemies don’t attack you until you attack them. As you level up, you can upgrade yourself by making additions to your “circuits” by spending CP. This raises your stats and enables you to learn new special attacks to dish out heavy damage. When you begin battles, your rank is at D and the more enemies you defeat, your rank goes up. When you reach rank S, the music changes and you get a disco lighting effect. The more you can defeat at higher levels, the more experience you gain and therefore the more quickly you level up.
I’m at the point now where I’ve learned fire attributes. This helps makes short work of the ice monsters in the mining cave dungeon.
Here’s the jibungous enemy robot in the ice mine. Look at the size of that thing!
Like I said, it takes a bit to get used to the controls. There is a lot of puzzle-solving that involves a lot of platforming. You’ll also have to align surfaces to bounce your projectile in a way so that it hits every surface in order to unlock a door or whatever.
So yeah, the sprites in this game are very cool. You’d think that they came from a Japanese game developer in the ’90s rather than a German indie company! But this is why I’ve come to really love Steam: companies like Konami may as well just not even exist anymore since they have completely abandoned their fans. The big name gaming companies have become pretty boring and I can’t expect Capcom to ever make another sprite-based game again. But these indie game developers are keeping the retrogaming spirit alive, and it’s why I like to talk about them on this stupid blog of mine that hardly anybody looks at.
I found these sprite animations by doing an image search. I assume that these are from the game, but if they are then I haven’t gotten to them yet. Anyhow, play this game or you suck. This game was made in HTML5, incredibly. So, it’s native in Linux, Win, and Mac. It runs fine on my laptop with its 16:9 display, but I have to use Glorious Eggroll to get it to display properly on my desktop’s 4:3 display monitor.
So Ulan and I stopped by the Mini Stop convenience store to get their Korean cheese hot dogs a few days ago. Holy crap, those are fantastic. They’ve recently begun selling them again and they are SOFA KING delicious. Japanese conbini food is fantastic. The last time I went to America was in 2016 and I was reminded of how gross the convenience store food is there.
As we arrived, Ulan spotted this Puyo Puyo display inside. I love Puyo Puyo, although being colorblind makes me suck at it. Ulan really kicks my ass in Puyo Puyo every time. I can’t beat her even once. but you can’t just buy whatever items you want; you pay 770 yen to reach inside a box. But it doesn’t burn your skin off like the box in Dune, nor is it full of roaches like the box in Temple of Doom. You reach inside and grab a raffle ticket. What you receive depends on what ticket you get.
The grand prizes are this Puyo lamp and this plush Carbunkle doll. I have to say that I much prefer the character designs by Compile that stayed with the series until the 4th game and I don’t care much for the new designs that came after Sega bought the Puyo Puyo license and released Puyo Puyo Fever on the Dreamcast. But Carbunkle pretty much has stayed the same.
More plush.
Eye masks. I’m glad I didn’t get that ticket.
Hand towels! Here is Draco (left) and Arle (right) taking naps. How cute.
One of these acrylic mascot keychains would’ve been cool, but that’s not what I won.
My raffle ticket let me choose a hand towel. I chose Draco the dragon girl who wears a Chinese cheongsam dress. I think she was one of the villains in the original Madou Monogatari games that Puyo Puyo is based on.
So nice to see one of these raffle deals that is of interest to me. I mean, you can see Evangelion stuff at 7-11 and I’d be happy to get a figure of Rei or Asuka, but I’d probably end up with some dumb robot instead. With Puyo Puyo though, I thought this was worth a try.