This month, we visited Japan for the second time since our first trip five years ago. This time, we spent a week in Osaka, then the rest of our stay in Tokyo, and Lussy ended up going to six concerts!
We went to a bunch of BookOffs and HardOffs, and bought a classic 2DS, a PC Engine and a PS1 Classic - and, of course, tons of video games and some accessories. Sightseeing and being a tourist in general is not really something that we enjoy. What we did was more in line with thrifting and urban exploring. People were a bit threatened by my looks, but Lussy blends in quite well, and Japan is the country where she can buy clothes that actually fit her without much hassle.
So far our biggest surprise when it comes to the games we bought is Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, or River City Ransom/Street Gangs as it is called in the US and Europe. We'd never played the series and when we put the cartridge into our Twin Famicom, we were blown away by how complex and impressive the game is. It's quite inspiring.
We also bought Metal Slug: 2nd Mission for the NeoGeo Pocket Color. It's so much fun, they really made the visuals and gameplay work on this tiny handheld. I love it.
Lussy found a Kanji drilling software for the DS and now she "plays" it on her 2DS. In the meantime I am trying to unlock the PS1 Classic.
We also got the first four Princess Maker games for several different game systems: the first one for the PC Engine and PS2, the second one for the PC Engine, the third one for the Sega Saturn and the fourth one for the PS2 and PSP. We're working on a pet project that is similar to the Princess Maker series, so these games serve as inspiration.
Translating Japanese text is a pain, and our only way of doing it (other than Lussy's translation skills) is Google image translate. It's far from perfect, but it works enough to get the gist of lines and helps us learn the language.
While I was mostly browsing the video game categories, Lussy managed to thrift so many new music CDs, DVDs and Blurays that we're definitely going to have to buy new shelves now. She also bought a lot of band scores, band merch and even managed to find me a Cowboy Bebop OST.
On our way back, we had to buy two additional small suitcases to fit everything in. This is the pile we ended up bringing back, although this is not everything we got, but most of the video games and other physical media are on it:
In other news, I am going to Thailand in September for work, and I needed a laptop for that, so we bought one. And because running motion capture software and UE4/UE5 at the same time requires a pretty powerful PC, we bought the best laptop available, the ROG Strix SCAR 16 G634 with a 4090 RTX GPU and 64GBs of RAM.
So far it works fine, except for the operating system. Win11 is a pain, and we don't like it.
Sadly, after we came back we got sick, which made working a lot harder; but at least now we're full of memories and stories of Japan. Let's just hope we won't have to wait 5 more years to visit again.
