Japan: Round 2!

Hi! Geril here.

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.

Bummed.

Hi, Geril here.

This month was a mess.
We were supposed to go to Japan tomorrow. We bought and booked everything: flight tickets, hotel rooms, new backpacks, power banks, and we even won four tickets for the L'Arc concerts we targeted (they do a lottery for the tickets, so we were very lucky). But because of the coronavirus outbreak, they cancelled the concerts and closed a lot of places we wanted to visit. We are quite burnt out, because we worked overtime to get things done before we go, so we're a bit under the weather.
So because all of this, we're not going to Japan.
We lost some money because of it, but we're not gonna risk our health, especially if we can't even go to the concerts.

Both of the hotels were good sports, they understood that we cancelled our reservation because of the outbreak and they gave our money back. But we're probably not gonna get our money back for the plane tickets.





But on to some better news. We got a Gameboy Printer WiFi adapter!

This little pack of circuits acts like a Game Boy printer, so when I connect my good ol' GB Camera to it, it saves the images. It also creates a WiFi signal, and if I connect to it, I can download the saved images.





Here's what they look like:

It's got a bit of a pointillism look, that I like very much.
It can even take panorama images!

The Game Boy Camera was ahead of its time... even with only 4 colors.
Maybe one day we'll use some GB camera images as masks or textures in a game project. Or not. Anyway, it's fun to make images with an old Game Boy.

Back from Japan!

Hey, this is Lussy.

We are back from Japan, and we have brought back an unbelievable amount of used video games for very cheap! The only issue was packing them all up without breaking them during flight, but we succeeded – nothing was harmed, we were victorious, cue Final Fantasy victory music.

After successfully securing tickets to two L'Arc～en～Ciel Christmas shows (L'ArChristmas...ha), we flew to Japan for two weeks. Geril has only attended one show, and I went to both of them – they were amazing, as expected.
So it was the tickets that gave us the final push to actually travel, but we were looking forward to thrifting for and playing all sorts of video games there – we are developers after all, so there were a lot of things to check out in Tokyo.

One thing is certain, we won't be able to look at thrifting the same again. In our country, everything costs way more by default, and the 'used' condition's standards are lower as well. In Book Offs in Japan, what we found in the 'junk' section for 100 Yen was about the same as the standard 'used' section here, however, even the Japanese 'used' section wasn't as expensive as ours usually are.

If you're going to Japan, and read about places in Akihabara like Super Potato – those flashier places are good for looking and browsing and all, and you'll be able to find the rarest games there in the best condition. But if you're willing to spend a little time (okay, a LOT of time) digging around in the 'Off' chain of stores (Book Off, Hard Off, Hobby Off), you'll be able to find a lot of things for dirt cheap. And even when shopping from the untested junk section, we've only had two games refuse to load, and we're still working on cleaning those games, so they might end up working as well.

Our haul. There are some unrelated objects in the photo too, sorry about that...

As far as consoles go, we've picked up a WonderSwan, a Nintendo DS Lite and DSi, a Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation 2. The first three because we were missing them from our collection, and the second two for playing Japanese games. We've had a blast digging around for PS1, PS2 and N64 games during daytime and then going back to the hotel at night to try them out. I also had a great time looking for music CDs (which are still profitable in Japan, I've even bought a few recent ones), but since my Japanese is very patchy and I read slow, Geril often left me on the music floor and went through the whole shop by the time I was finished.

Akihabara

Aside from shopping around, we also visited all the arcades that we saw. And the rhythm game sections! Although they were very loud and very packed, a lot of thought went into them. For example, many of the games had an audio out where you could plug in your own headphones to hear the game better (the machines were placed tightly next to each other, so hearing anything properly is an issue). You could also pay with various cards instead of coins, including the subway card that the both of us have purchased, so when we ran out of coins we tapped into our transportation money.
Sadly the fighting games were almost always on the upper floors in the smoking sections, so we had to avoid those.

It was nice to see that video games weren't only purchased by the stereotypical target audience. We saw grey-haired old men browsing games, we've seen women browsing games, we saw everyone openly browsing the porn section – there was everything.

However, we made two major mistakes: not renting portable Wi-Fi and not learning Japanese in advance. While there were free Wi-Fi hotspots, we needed to register for almost all of them and their speed was very limited. In our hotel, we had a single hotspot for a 10-story building, so we were lucky if anything loaded.
And English... we're not sure if this is because people really don't speak English, or they are just too embarrassed to try, but almost nobody tried. So it would have been useful to speak the language just a little more fluently in order to have a better time.

Okay, that's it for this year. Happy New Year, everyone!