Posts by Brandon Daiker

I beat Yakuza 4 a couple weeks ago. It took me 41 hours, though I spent a little time fiddling around with a dojo-building minigame and mindlessly watching pachinko balls drain. The percentage of game completion that the game gave me when I finished was 14.24%. 14.24 percent!! 14 percent of the way into Star Wars, Luke and Uncle Owen are buying C3P0 and R2-D2 off the goddamned Jawas. How much is left of this game that I'll never see?

A picture of my 3DS software management page after adding a shiny new 32GB SD card, in preparation for retail game releases on the eShop. Even with all the ambassador games and an assortment of videos and software, that's a heck of a lot of blocks free.

One of the complaints I hear most often about the AR cards for Kid Icarus Uprising (other than that their in-game use is pretty limited) is that the damn things are just so hard to find. Until now, the only real ways to get them have consisted of buying the game and getting the six card pack inside, attending promotional events, buying Japanese rat poison, or grabbing some from Club Nintendo at random.

Only a fool would sink their teeth directly into a Kid Icarus Uprising Choco Snack, packages of which now adorn the shelves of various grocery marts peppering the cities of Japan. Yes, to recklessly crunch right into one of the blackened Medusa droppings is not unlike biting into a gigantic piece of Cocoa Puffs cereal, which I have not eaten in years because Japan does not believe in cereal. You see, a true connoisseur of these gastrointestinal reset bombs foregoes the immediate pleasures of instant gratification, instead opting to let the discolored balls simmer in their mouth as though dropped into their own personal Fiend's Cauldron.

As soon as I saw the weird, tendril-like metal coils, the large, molded handgrip, and the suction-cup button covers, I knew I had to have it. How could something so grotesque seem so exciting at the same time? Not something you play with on its own, the Ultech 3 requires you to bring your own equipment to the party, and this fits right on top of it. That equipment is one standard Family Computer control pad, and that party is about to get frisky.

Ever wonder what kind of connection the classic Japanese animation series Neon Genesis Evangelion has to EarthBound for the Super Nintendo? No? Who cares! I've found a bone-shatteringly amazing connection between them that probably suggests a couple people on the animation team for Evangelion (which aired beginning in October 1995 on Japanese television) were playing EarthBound (known in Japan as Mother 2) while they worked on the famous cartoon. Mother 2 was released in Japan in August of 1994, meaning that it would be more than likely that animators of the geekier persuasions would have had more than ample opportunities to play the game.

As I'm grinding out a season of Tecmo Super Bowl on my Famicom (which, ironically, plays host to a Japanese version of the game that is literally identical, text and all, to the U.S. release), I concretely decide on my literal future. I plan it out right there, as I blip video Phil Simms around on the screen. This is the power Tecmo Super Bowl has over me now, these ancient players, my perpetual heroes, and I find myself being mentally sucked away to 1991.

I don't know about you, but when I find myself here in Japan where I have somehow been for the last three years, and I am desperately scanning the shelves for a drink, oh god anything will do. That's why I naturally gravitate toward the bottles of stinkwater that have free toys latched onto the tops. This method has ensured the adorning of my various man bags, murses, European carry-alls, bropouches, and fanny packs with a variety of mind-numbing baubles running the gamut from tiny rubber sushi to a bear dressed like a chef to the plastic likeness of a brown-suited salaryman literally on his hands and knees begging for forgiveness.

Though all we got out of Nintendo regarding karaoke during their preshow was the distinctly western-centric Sing, it's not at all hard to believe that a more Japanese-oriented implementation of karaoke could be just the ticket to trojan horse the Wii U into homes across Japan. One needs do little more than enter a karaoke box in any number of the massive buildings peppering Japanese city streets to see the resemblance between commercial karaoke gear and what the Wii U will—very shortly—be ushering into homes.