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Good evening, devoted fans and more devoted enemies. My name is Tim Rogers, and you are reading the 2004 edition of the insertcredit.com fukubukuro. It is being typed up at nine-twelve in the PM on a night late in December of the year 2004 A.D., by me, Tim Rogers, as I sit on a maroon-colored sofa in the town of Ukimafunado, on the Saikyou Line, in the Itabashi Ward of Tokyo, Japan. It is raining heavily outside, and that rain is rumored to turn into snow. My three former roommates -- I say former because this is no longer my house, actually -- are either out of the country getting fed with Taco Bell or out on the town with girls, getting rained on. I'm sitting in with a pair of Sony Eggo headphones on my head. The headphones are plugged into a really, really terrible little stereo system, which is connected to a PlayStation2 that does not belong to me. The disc inside the PlayStation2 is disc one of the "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" extended edition, which I've yet to see for reasons that are really too sad to explain. My sponsors for the evening are Coca-Cola, Sapporo Potato Vegetable Snacks, and Yamazaki Usukawa Choco-Pan chocolate-filled bread puffs. The bread puffs are good. When you pull them out of their little plastic tray, there's always this little waffle-looking pattern sunk into the side of the bread. Let it sit in the palm of your hand for a second, and the criss-crossing lines disappear.
Two years ago, I wrote an article like this. It was merely called "gaming moments." It was a collection of unfinished article scraps that I'd thrown into a fourteen-page feature just because I couldn't bear the thought of not doing anything with them. The next year, I did the same thing, only I wrote all of the articles in one night, and I made them purposely as scattered as they were, so I could call the article a "fukubukuro." As this fine website has been only gaining in popularity in the past set of years, this of course meant that the article was slammed and flamed and beat to smithereens on various websites I never read and/or have never heard of. There was one guy whose name I don't remember who had an issue with my freely admitting to my killing off of my ex-girlfriend's hardcore Diablo II sorceress. I never got a chance to clear the air on that one -- you see, her password was my name. It was my name because she always made her password my name. Even after we broke up, she and I freely used one another's characters. So there. It was a case of one of us trusting the other, or even both of us trusting each other.
The biggest problem people had with the 2003 fukubukuro was, oddly enough to me, the name. Some people emailed me long, scathing flames for including my own name in the article. Oh, come on. Do you not know the meaning of the word "cheeky"? Another beef was with the idea that I used the name of the city I currently occupied at the moment -- Seoul. To that, I say -- come on. I'm that kind of guy. The final complaint was the word "fukubukuro" itself. This is not excusable, because I'm pretty sure I explained it in there. I'll explain it again, either way:
A "fukubukuro" is a paper shopping bag sealed up with staples and set in a wire tray in front of a Tokyo department store on New Year's Day and sold for low prices to customers oblivious of their contents while men in multicolored bathrobes stand on folding chairs screaming about great values into megaphones.
Is that so hard to understand?
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. The most important thing to note is that, sometimes, a fukubukuro (the word is made up of the two Chinese characters "lucky" and "bag") contains something like a new CD-player, an iPod, or a gold bar. I've heard that at Bic Camera in Ikebukuro, one of the cheaper fukubukuros you can get -- I think it's 4000 yen -- has a brand new copy of Gran Turismo 4 inside. The bag probably also contains some Gokiburi Hoi-hoi cockroach traps and a single used blank CD. In the end, though, hey, you still get that Gran Turismo 4.
So yes. I'm going to start writing this thing, now. I'm going to do it, however, as a kind of log. The original idea I had, back when I wrote last year's fukubukuro, was that I'd make this year's fukubukuro into some sort of sweeping composition -- some epic piece of writing -- about the free games readers sent me during 2004. In the end, I decided to not do that -- at least, not do it directly. This is because, in the end, though readers did indeed send me a hell of a lot of games (a garbage-bag-full of Gameboy Advance games, alone), the games I played through different means were, sadly, much more interesting. Still, if, in the writing of this, I think of a particular game a reader sent me, I'll be sure to mention it.
As for why readers were sending me games -- the story goes something like this: my roommate Kasugi Kimoto met a man name Fujimoto Roommateyarou on the internet and took him in as our other roommate. The guy ended up locking himself in the living room and shooting up his protein supplements while watching stolen VHS tapes, until he eventually got arrested for insurance fraud. Not twelve hours after he was arrested, a MasterCard bill came for Kasugi. This was a surprise, because Kasugi didn't have a MasterCard.
It turned out that, thanks to the Japanese small-time crooks' favorite hobby of using stolen credit cards to buy ten-time-use bullet-train passes and then sell them for half their $1000 value at a pawn shop, Kasugi and I now possessed negative money with which to pay the very positive rent. We did many things to eventually get that many together, including being recommended a great ramen place by some hard-hitting police officers at a headquarters in Takashimadaira, one of whom looked a hell of a lot like Beat Takeshi. In the end, we were left squatting and angry, yet blest with that arrested bastard's television and all those VHS tapes he'd rented and never returned. We took his ratty little miniature dauschaund back to his mom's place, aired the living room out, and borrowed my friend Chuck Franklin's PlayStation2 so that we could play assorted games, starting with Gran Turismo 4 Prologue, which I only played because I had to write something about it.
In The Late Fujimoto Roommateyarou's closet were three garbage bags of rice and a plastic bin full of newspapers. The newspapers were Yomiuri Shinbun; Fujimoto had subscribed to it, whether he could read or not, because one of the door-to-door saleswomen had been too pushy and he was too eager to try Kasugi's credit card. Kasugi and I, on the day Fujimoto was arrested, had been set to buy a used washing-machine. We ended up unable to do this. So at the end of the day, it was maybe kind of ironic that we transported the plastic, newspaper-filled bulk to the space where the washing-machine should have gone.
A few weeks later, I'd made several pleas on my old blog that people send Kasugi and I whatever they can. My readers, ever-vigilant, bright, intelligent, sarcastic, and fucking assholes, sent me a plethora of items as useful as Canadian tire gift certificates, a business envelope full of vinyl balloons, and a plastic bag full of fifty US Dollars in 1976 (Bicentennial) quarters. Come to think of it, those quarters are a real shame. You can't exchange foreign coins in any Japanese bank -- and Bicentennial quarters look so different from other quarters that it . . . well. It's a problem. A real heartbreaker. If I could change those quarters right now, I'd go buy me a three-day hooker in West Ikebukuro. Hell, now that I think about it, she'd probably be happy enough with the coins themselves.
Early in 2004, some hope came. A Mr. John Overton swept in with a generous package full of Archway sugar-free chocolate-chip cookies. Just three pointed days later, out of the depths of nowhere, a folded-over, taped-up business envelope arrived in my mailbox. It was postmarked from some dark land. Inside the envelope, when I managed to knife the tape off well enough, I found a raw Sonic Battle Gameboy Advance. I looked over the cartridge, puzzling. Why this game? (I had previously slammed its beta build quite viciously in my E3 2003 report) Why a Gameboy game at all? Surely, I write about videogames sometimes on the internet, and I sometimes beg for money on the internet. Why, however, would someone who found my address on the internet send me a videogame? I thought about it for long enough that I decided to stop thinking about it and just play the game. Then I remembered that dark night back in October when, after a run-in with the yakuza in a Philippine hostess bar I didn't even want to be in in the first place, I had to escape from the city of Urayasu, Chiba by selling my Gameboy Advance at a game shop. I had some Gusto Yamamori Potato Fries after that. They were tasty. Then, again, I remembered November -- on that day we found the newspapers in the closet, we also found a Gameboy Advance -- a black one without a battery lid. I went and reclaimed this Gameboy Advance for my own. I walked to the "Famicom Yoshi" shop down on the Naka-Itabashi shop-street, and bought a white battery lid for the black Gameboy, thus making it the Official Gameboy Advance of InsertCredit.com. I went back home, and looked for games -- the arrested son of a bitch only had one, and it was the Game of Life, which is portable enough, anyway, on its other platforms. I figured this burgling bastard would have had other games elsewhere. I was, for the most part, wrong. He had none. I was just about fed up when I remembered the bin of newspapers. I opened it up, and searched. I squeezed every day's newspaper until I came to Tuesday, October 22nd, 2003. When I squeezed it, I found something squishy.
It was a blue rubber mask. We made a lot of fun of the mask. We had a lot of fun with it.
I ended up having to ask a girl what the mask was used for. She was the Okinawan girl who worked at the discount supermarket near Itabashi-Honchou Station. I'd spent New Year's Eve quite nakedly with her, the living room full of all the futons Kasugi and I had ever found on the side of the road, air warm with heat and swirling with incense, watching Bob Sapp beat the blood out of former sumo champion Akebono, who shouldn't have ever stepped into the K-1 ring. She told me her ex-boyfriend, back in Okinawa, had been into stuff like that. "Stuff like what?" I had been compelled to ask. "Bodybuilding and stuff. Juicing."
The mask was a "Kaoyase." A face-slimming mask. I carry it still, more than a year later, pretty much everywhere I go, in my Nokia N-Gage Pathway to Glory duffel bag, like a lucky charm. It was on that day I found it that I realized, spiritually, the Kaoyase Mask was something I would carry, like a videogame inventory item, until that one day it was useful.
Here, I get an idea for a future fukubukuro -- if Insert Credit were a magazine, I would do a clever kind of layout, do a quick, thirty-word description of what a "fukubukuro" is, and then make the twelve-page feature not unlike a sequence of page-long Wired Magazine gadget profiles, detailing the "items" within the bag. Of course, the bag itself would be -- hmm, let's think . . . one of the backpacks I received at E3 that year? Sure, why not?
Thinking now . . . what would go in this year's "fukubukuro", if I had to give every entry that metaphorical context? Maybe I can do this idea this year, without the clever graphic design?
Item number one: Metal Gear Solid 3's "Revival Pill."
Item number two: Dragon Quest VIII Hori Slime controller.
Item number three: . . .
Fuck this. I'm just going to do month-by-month.
So yes. Welcome. Let's begin with January 2004. This is your final warning that the following articles contain both my opinion and recountings of my personal experiences throughout this year in videogames, so if you're allergic to human personality, you might drop dead with your forehead on your keyboard. And if you're not, well, there's some journalism-like stuff in here, too, baby, so be careful with that.
(Final note: you know, this can, kind of, be read as simply a "Top-Twelve Games of the Year" feature, if you're that kind of person. The games themselves will be entirely out of order, though, so be careful.)
[next: january 2004]
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