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  • Cast aside your snarky nature, read some video game reviews written by Japanese high school students

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    I teach high school in Japan, well I entertain students under the auspices of helping them use English. I do this professionally, which means that at the moment, it is my profession, I get paid to do it. Because nobody really cares that much about what I exactly I do, I design my own lessons and projects! The most recent project we're doing is writing reviews of something, because even though I hate the concept of reviews with essentially every fiber of my being, it's important to be able to express your opinion in some way. The subjects of these reviews tend to cluster in groups around expected topics. The cute and popular girls write about cake and chocolate and parfaits. The athletic guys invariably attempt to review an entire sport or a certain player. Other, fringe groups clutch onto more abstract concepts. One girl wrote, for example, a review of "time." It was hard to encourage discussion in the group about that one. Another girl wrote a review of, I kid you not, "the Nazis." I asked her where she knew the Nazis, she said from her dictionary. One of the best ones was a boy who wrote about a live house he went to. One of his lines was "I was going to see my friend's band there. But I was rocked before seeing them." He went on to praise the band who rocked him.

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    The special ones, the ones near and dear to my heart, are the kids who write about what they love, without worrying about what the other kids in the class will think about their topic. Especially when that topic is video games. One girl began writing a review of "Emerge from the screen: The forest of animals" which I think was Animal Crossing: New Leaf (or as it's known in literal Japanese, Jump Out: Animal Forest). But she switched topics to write about a stationary store. I was sad. Most of them will never know that we are kind of the same, since I don't say much more about it than "I play games" and do not delve into the unabashed extent of what exactly this means (though I have met more than a few of my students on StreetPass, with some personal messages like "I'm in 1-7!" or "Branton!"). As a result, their reviews are quaintly honest and entertaining to me. Anyway, what follows are the honest, unedited words of a few of my students who like games. I hope they don't mind that I share them with you all.
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  • Mouth-on with New Super Mario Bros. Wii Choco Egg!

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    I am so full, I have no room for anything left in my bulging stomach. We made some spinach fettuccine, it is so good. I eat and eat it until there is only space in me for liquid. And yet, for some reason or another, I feel myself drawn to the cabinet, to that place where I keep my pouches of slug vomit and preserved dicks. I am bored, I still don't have a Wii U, what the hell am I going to do, get stickers in Paper Mario? It is time to put my mouth on something, it is time for a game snack. It is time for New Super Mario Bros. Wii Choco Egg! Why do I have this thing.

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    I crack it open, and there is a plastic buttplug inside. Inside the plug is Mario, in three pieces. I put him together while contemplating my life, and what life must be like in three pieces inside a plastic capsule, in a chocolate egg, in foil, in a box.
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  • Mouth-on with Pokemon Kids Best Wishes! Pochama Version with ramune-flavored candy disc!

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    In Japan, companies have to pay a certain amount of money, a small tax, to sell toys. For some reason, if their toy includes a kind of candy item, the item is classified as a candy instead of a toy, and the tax is either reduced or negated. It is for Precisely This Reason that the shelves of many Japanese grocery stores and supermarkets, despite lacking exotic items like "crackers," canned vegetables, and cereal, have rows and rows of their meager available space devoted to cheap plastic trinkets packaged with pathetic bits of candy and branded with attractive, sexy characters. I am weak against their charms, and stuff handfuls of them into my shopping basket every time I make one of my routine trips to the store for pickled cat ears and fish farts, only glancing cursorily at the prices or actual contents.

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    Popping the Pokemon Kids Best Wishes! Pochama Version's tiny candy disc into my mouth reminds me of my earlier years as a ruined idiot child, desperate to eat the vitamin C supplements my parents would buy en masse, as many as I could. The thin, compacted-powder slab emits a gently sweet flavor, like kissing a fresh baby deep in the mouth. I want to let it linger and seep, but can't help myself and take a small piece off the edge with my back teeth. The flavor changes to one with hints of tartness, notes of the ramune soda, like bubblegum and cream. It has already begun, now, and I let my equipment run wild. My rear finger nibblers defeat what's left of it, pulping the rest of the disintegrating disc into loose elixir which ripples through my hole, coating it, filling into the spaces. I flick my tongue over the roof of my mouth, just to remember the moment, this slickness, this mellifluous film. But as soon as it arrives it is over, and I am empty.

    Luckily, another treat lies in wait.
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  • Nintendo's special Super Famicom Box games are probably the biggest video game cartridges in history

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    If you have ever gotten your hands on a Neo-Geo cartridge and thought "mercy me, blow me down and snap off my wimpie these things are huge," wait till you get a hot load of these hushpuppies.

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    Holy shif! These are Nintendo's special cartridges for the Super Famicom Box system, a relatively rare variation of the Super Famicom that was built specifically for installation in Japanese hotels in the mid-90s. The main cartridge—with Super Mario All-Stars, Super Mario Kart, and Star Fox on it—also contains the special operating system for the unit itself. The Super Famicom Box itself can accommodate two cartridges, the first of which is always the aforementioned one, and the second of which is an option cartridge. My second cart here slides into the bottom port. This particular one has Donkey Kong Country and Tetris 2 + Bombliss, meaning you have a pretty good selection of games right there on it. A couple other cartridges exist, one with a Bomberman game and another with a mahjong and golf game on it, but I think the two cartridges I have here are probably the best two.

    How big are they exactly? In the basic footprint of a Super Famicom Box cartridge, you could fit twenty-eight 3DS games. Some might argue that certain enclosed arcade PCBs count as "cartridges" and might actually be larger in a sense, but I think these must be the largest carts devoted to console titles and not arcade hardware.
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  • The unending joys of my shit TV in the spare room

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    Yeah, I got a 1080p set. But let me tell you about the TV I actually use to play sweet games on. I dug it out of the garbage on a Sunday morning once. The garbage, outside, down between my building and the other building, where the old ladies secretly sneak down to in the middle of the night to throw out old luggage. It looked the right size, not too big. The power cord was clipped off at the base so I had to take the cover off and split the little stump that was left and strip the ends and solder them to a hundred-yen extension cord I got at the dollar store just so I could plug it in to see if it worked. I wrapped the whole damned mess in electrical tape and powered it on, fully ready to die. It turned on. It had no remote when I dug it out so I looked up the manual online and bought one for it off Yahoo Auctions for one yen. I stuck it in my spare room and now I'm in the spare room all the time. That was about a year ago.

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    I have my Famicom and my Disk System and even the Wii now, for Virtual Console stuff, all hooked up to it. It has geometry stretching problems. The corners are blurry. On the middle brightness it's exceedingly bright and on the lowest one you can hardly see anything. Sometimes, when there's a crazy strobe effect in a game I'm playing on it, the entire screen freaks out all distorted-like and I feel like I'm gonna seize bro. When I play La-Mulana, I am never exactly sure how many of any subweapon I have cause I can't tell if it's a 3 or an 8 or a 6 or a 9 up there. When I play Castlevania, I can only check on my CORE and my name is LAYER and I monitor the health of NEMY. If a certain kind of bright solid color fills the entire top of the screen while the rest of the screen is black, the entire picture will roll vertically until I move away from it.

    This is my 14-inch, one-hundred-and-one yen CRT TV I dug out of the trash, and I love it to pieces in a way that I will never love my beautiful 42-inch Sharp Aquos.
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  • Mouth-on with Boss Coffee Drive Shot and the Mario Kart 7 Pull Back Car & Big Figure Collection!

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    Boss' new Drive Shot canned coffee isn't brown or yellow but somewhere in-between, the color of what you'd get if a Hershey bar could take a piss. As I pop the lid I notice it smells about the same, watered down, sweet, a hint of milk, the memory of coffee beans. I imagine some old man down at the local rotary club sucking it down like a babe at the teat out of a paper cup with the fold-out handles, and start to gag, even as I pour the thin swig down my gullet, dampening my cavernous gorge. The outer walls of the narrow metal can are ribbed. I drag my thumb over them as I dump the slosh in. I think of winter, and the people who have touched me.

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    There are several brands and dozens of varieties of canned coffee in Japan. But the best one is Boss, because of Tommy Lee Jones' bizarre Japanese commercials as the namesake "Boss" himself. If anyone ever tells me another kind is better, I kill that person and then play the commercials on my phone into their eyes that I hold open because they are dead and can't open them of their own will. I used to drink cans upon cans of Boss in the first few days of my life here, consistently unable to obtain restful sleep and waking at strange hours in the impossibly hot summer, craving the caffeine, Needing it! I started buying canned coffee by the case from the grocery store and developed a heartburn-agitating pseudo-addiction to it that eventually convinced me by force that I should probably switch from coffee to tea. But every now and then my hand is pulled towards the Boss section on the shelf, especially when things are like yesterday, and there is a new kind of caffeine-enhanced coffee called Drive Shot with FUCKING MARIO KART TOYS ON THEM look at these goddamned toys holy shit look at them. The toys
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  • Nintendo's Japanese website is secretly a crazy time-capsule wasteland from when Virtual Boy was the future of games

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    Have a look at Nintendo's Japanese website. Go ahead! It looks pretty nice and new and clean. But did you know that those fancy links and smooth navigational bits discretely conceal original product pages for hardware long since discontinued—some of them dating back to 1996, with what was the first version of their homepage? I've noticed these parts of the site before, but never really dug in until today, when I was looking for pictures of discontinued playing card sets. And boy howdy, I did not find any! But there was all this other crap, and then it was an hour later. As it turns out, quite contrary to the prevailing, popular belief, Nintendo not only officially acknowledges the existence of the Virtual Boy in here, but is still advertising its price and release date along with the five first-party titles they made for the thing.

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    All you need to do to bask in these weird treasures is dig around in the link on the left side that says "other products," and it won't take long after you scroll past the advertisements for their trump and hanafuda cards and shogi tables for things to start getting weird. Down toward the bottom you can find the original product pages for a variety of old Nintendo hardware, literally untouched since their final game releases, preserved as though the rest of the website never ever changed. The Nintendo 64 product page, marked as "n01" in its URL, meaning it was probably the first "Nintendo hardware" section of the site to be coded back when the things was originally laid out, hasn't been added to or altered since that system's final first-party release, Animal Crossing, in April of 2001. And from that directory of games you have what amounts to an early-days Internet time machine, still accessible and directly available, holding ancient promo pages for everything from Wave Race 64 to Shigesato Itoi's No. 1 Bass Fishing: Definitive Edition. Every page is peppered with ancient, horrible-looking GIF files roughly the resolution of my knuckle.

    The Diddy Kong Racing page even still hosts a promotional QuickTime video, which the site is kind enough to point out is 14.18 seconds long and 581kb in size. It is so old and outdated that none of the modern players or codecs I have installed even play it, I had to upload it to YouTube just to see if it worked. Check out the quality on this thing!
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  • You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike

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    I get lost in places like this, arcades with rows of games, multiple floors, each one a bizarre wonder I only ever knew from pictures in magazines. It feels like I could be anywhere when I stumble into one of them, only passively aware of where here actually is, up winding sets of stairs in nowhere buildings filled with smoke and a hundred digital characters screaming all at once. Here on the third floor of Magical, literally across the street from another game center called SANX, for some Street Fighter IV, I feel like if it weren't for the machines with the HD screens, I could be back in 1998. I shoot off a few rounds of IV, I mainly play as Ibuki. She's got all these kinda tricks, which is pretty handy, because due to my shit execution, when I miss throwing a knife or something it's just adding to the mixup factor, the other guy doesn't know where it's coming from, keeps him off balance. He thinks he knows where he is, where I am, but then everything around him changes! It seems relevant.

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    As a couple of other people go at it I sashay down the aisle lookin' for another fix, past a row of Persona 4: Arena machines totally packed, the bank of cursory Astro City machines loaded up with old mahjong games and Bomberman, to the other couple fighters in this place that I know—the first available one being a Street Fighter Zero 3. I got this stick in my hand as Cammy for some reason, cannon drilling my way into a Sagat sitting on the other side from me, and I feel that weird pull of muscle memory, of nostalgia, the days I spent in my tiny bedroom in high school, a five buck clearance stick and a burned copy of Alpha 3 for my mod-cart disc-swap spring-lid PS1. And yet here I am, somehow in an arcade in Japan, surrounded by noise, covered in smoke. I can feel it in my hair. The guy comes by with an ashtray since I am missing one, sets it down, and I wonder if it would be appropriate to smoke, just to resonate, and how I can still remember these moves.
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  • Awareness means not noticing if you're actually in a dungeon

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    In a couple months like clockwork clickin' it will happen, the double-language sheet will magically appear on my desk to ask me if I'm sticking with My Life, if I wanna choose to stay here in for my last eligible year as a high-school teacher in this program, to become more of a Japanese citizen than I was a Pittsburgher, longer than I was a college student, longer than I've lived in any one place since I was eleven. I've been going back and forth about it a lot, weighted down and lifted up by all the reasons people ponder as they consider just when exactly to change their lives completely.

    As a person but also a writer I tend to cherish my credo, my mantra, "never get comfortable." The trick of it, as perhaps the trick is with all good mantras, is that in its simplicity it is complex, in seeming easy it becomes difficult. It's an impossibility, at that—how comfortable is comfortable? The problem I have with comfort is that it makes me shitty, complacent, tamps down my observational skill, dumbs my brains all up. Useless. But as humans we're obsessed with comfort—we only make ourselves uncomfortable in its pursuit. So which answer fits? Do I choose to stay or do I choose to go? Let's talk about video games.

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    I'm playing Darksiders, it's my second attempt. A couple years ago I tried for the first time, went through the introduction. And then, you kinda get told "this is a game." They send you to the surface, you're so pointy and angry, you are War itself! And they're like, you gotta go find this thing, here take this sidekick, here have your sword, it's been depowered though lol, and I was like "yep here is the game," and for whatever reason, I entered the portal, found the game in front of me, and quit for two years. But then the other day you know I started over, Mario 2 isn't out for a little while and I feel like a game. So I start it up, get through the intro, get to the game. But this time I keep going, I tell myself hey, I don't really know what's gonna happen. And once I start to believe that, it comes true. I realize I don't know, I don't know what is going to happen.
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  • Mouth-on with New Super Mario Bros. Wii Stage Set Gum!

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    What's more fun than a plastic packet full of cardboard? A plastic packet full of cardboard with Mario pictures printed on it! Yes, New Super Mario Bros. Wii Stage Set Gum is simultaneously the worst and most awesome candy-related product I have ever savagely grabbed from the shelf with my teeth and spat into the shopping cart with a walrus-like emission of sound. This thing hearkens back to a time when we had to use our imaginations for entertainment, when we had to have fun with spartan paper products. A time before New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a video game.

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    What can you do with New Super Mario Bros. Wii Stage Set? Well, one piece is the background. You set it up in the back. The other piece is a bunch of punch-outable cardboard characters that you fold together. The package contains suggested playing instructions. You can launch them off the little cardboard launcher into other things to knock those things down. Whoa mama! It's fun when things knock other things down. Almost as much fun as New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Ahaha, no. Hey, it comes with gum though!
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