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Book Off in Phoenix, AZ brings a Japanese shopping experience to Arizonans

On my trip to my hometown of Phoenix, AZ during my summer vacation, I was able to visit a Book Off on Bell Road! It opened within recent years. There have been Book Off stores all along in California. When Mayu and I used to live in America, we would visit the Book Off locations in Torrance, Garden Grove, Los Angeles and other areas. But now both Book Off and Daiso stores have opened in the Phoenix area.

Here are the signs outside.

Look at all the books! The books are in English, of course. Otherwise, the experience is just like a Book Off in Japan. This makes Book Off a direct competitor with the long-standing Bookmans store locations in Arizona.

The store clerk says that so much of this stuff is imported from the Book Off locations in Japan. I guess they buy so much stuff that they just export it to the USA for sale there.

So many anime figures for sale in the display case.

So many pin buttons, keychains, and small figures. Just like a Book Off in Japan.

They have import Famicom games from Japan! Star Wars, Red Arima, Parodius, Galaga… neat stuff!

Import Famicom and Super Famicom games too.

Domestically-released modern games are sold used there as well, of course.

This is the Grave of the Fireflies movie soundtrack on vinyl record. I was surprised to find this.

Huge selection of used, English-language manga. I bought several used volumes of Spy Family.

Gunpla! There were also other model kits there too. I even saw an Eggplane Girl resin figure by Hasegawa there, and for a good price. This is so cool.

Dollar books. Very neat. I didn’t have time to look at the SF book selection there. It would’ve been nice if I had more time to spend, but I had quite a busy itinerary with my friends Kevin and Brian. (Our next destination was Andy’s Hobby HQ which I featured in my previous blog post.)

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Enjoying summer time off with my SFC Mini.

I haven’t played Super Metroid for about 15 years or more. I love this game! It’s actually the only Metroid game I’ve ever played. This wireless gamepad is a recent purchase. There was no name at all on the package. I got it on Ali Express for something like 1500 yen. It comes with a dongle to plug it into the SFC/SNES Mini or you can take out the USB WiFi receptor and use it with your PC. Ali Express claimed that it’s compatible with RetroPie, but I couldn’t get it to recognize it. Steam didn’t like it, either. Maybe because I was using the wire? The wire is for charging the controller. Maybe it’s not meant for gameplay.

My goal is to hack this Mini console to add more games to it, especially shmups since it does not come with a single shmup! Not even Gradius III! I’m making a list of games like Area 88 and Macross to add to this. I found a page saying that the program used to hack it can actually be used in Linux, so hopefully I won’t have to get out my grodie Win10 SSD.

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New buttons I got at the Mikado Game Center

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.

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It’s the ’80s, and you have only one quarter. Which game will you play?

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.

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I’ve fallen in love with Castlebeat

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.

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Puyo Puyo merchandise at Mini Stop convenience stores

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.

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Neon Inferno, a new retro-style game on Steam!

Holy crap, this game is beautiful. Featuring gorgeous pixel art with a configurable CRT shader, this game is a cross between Metal Slug and Wild Guns. This is a neo-retro game by Zenovia Interactive, who also made Steel Assault.

Here’s the title screen. So beautiful. The music at the title screen is very Vangelis’s Blade Runner-inspired synthesizer. FANTASTIC!

There are two characters, Angelo and Mariana. Mariana is so beautiful, so I always play as her. There doesn’t seem to be a difference in how these characters handle. The character animations are very well made. It took me a bit before I realized that busty Mariana’s boobs bounce as she runs. It’s a very natural bouncing and looks pretty, and not over-the-top exaggerated as many games are like. Nowadays there are so many Japanese-made games with girls featuring what I call “moon boobs” because it looks like the are nearly weightless. It looks creepy and I can’t stand it. Here Mariana’s tits bounce like they have proper weight to them.

Character designs are by Tsukasa Jun of Psikyo fame, who did the designs for games like Gunbird and Sengoku Blade. Kickass.

The Blade Runner/cyberpunk scenery is wonderful, showing New York streets covered in snow. The lighting is gorgeous, and you will see light sourcing at work. The graphics make this game more reminiscent of 24-bit Neo Geo games rather than the 16-bit Super Famicom.

The left trigger button locks the direction of your shooting while the right trigger button has you stand in one place while you can aim around you. There is a dodge roll to duck bullets like in Wild Guns and you can parry bullets and knock the bullets back where they came from, or you can hold the button down to enter “bullet time” and you can change the direction of the bullets. The parry acts as a melee attack which does stronger damage than your gun, helping you make short work of stronger enemies at close range.

At times the enemies are in the background. Use the RB button to fire at them. Here you can take cover behind the police car. In the game, you fight against the enemy gang members as well as the corrupt NYPD apparently.

You steal a racing bike and action ensues on the road. You can shoot at the background or foreground as well as behind, front, and above you. The above screenshot was taken with the CRT filter disabled.

Here is your bounty: a yakuza guy.

You have to take out this mobile weapons truck’s cannons as well as shoot at your target bounty guy who is in the open doorway shooting at you.

Finally you fight him after the truck is destroyed. He will fly into the background as well as shoot at you from the background. You have to wear down his shield until he dies.

Here’s the game over screen. I could beat the game in Medium mode, but not in Arcade mode. It’s pretty tough in Arcade mode as there are no checkpoints.

This is just the free demo of the first level. I’m really looking forward to when this game gets released! What’s more, I did not have to specify any compatibility tool version to get this to work on my Linux desktop. The game just loads without having to do anything. Nice!

EDIT: I didn’t have the same luck running the game on my laptop. I had to enter this for the boot option to get it to work: PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%