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I arrived back in Japan on my birthday, more or less, in the first week of June, feeling not quite myself. I ate at Skylark Gusto in Suehirocho with Don Marco, before departing for Shinjuku, where I met some punker friends of mine before meeting a woman, who took me to a hotel. On the next morning, I woke up in Shinjuku, realizing that I was homeless for the fourth time in my life. Looking at Kabukicho on a morning when you wake up to a realization of homelessness is like eating a box of crayons.
I didn't play many videogames in June. The month is lost to time as far as games are concerned. The closest I came to "gaming" would involve my hopping aboard the Gmail train. I can be reached there at this address. I asked readers of my livejournal, soon after Legal Step gave me the Gmail account, to send me mp3s. They answered the call, resulting, after a few days, in the creation of a secret, underground file-sharing list between all the readers of this fair website. I'd tell you how to get on it; however, doing so would be risking death.
Gmail is great because it understands that Hotmail is a pile of shit. Hotmail, with its flash-y ad banners (why, oh why, does a Microsoft website have these flashing green advertisements promising me an opportunity to download 100 free fucking "smilies"?), tried, recently, to bump their storage space up to 250 megabytes -- or two gigabytes, if you have one of the old super-huge ten megabyte accounts -- though in doing so they missed the same thing that everyone was missing back in the mid-1990s when they tried to make a search engine better than Google. Their interface is bullshit. Gmail is brilliant because it has no bullshit. And, oddity of oddities, by the end of 2004, yeah, I was starting to actually click on the text ads in Gmail.
Gmail makes my list of . . . I don't know what to call them now, what, "fukubukuro items of 2004"? It's not exactly a videogame, yeah, though I do reckon determining which mp3s you've already listened to and deleting them before one of the thousands of crazed fans of your weblog can send you another mp3s you might like more is a hell of a lot more exciting than Lumines on PSP.
IN OTHER NEWS
On June 1st, 2004, I was nearly dead. I'd just survived a plane flight from Chicago to Los Angeles. Boarding that plane had involved running away from someone to whom I owe a large amount of money. Our good friend Persona picked me up at the airport; in his car with a peat-moss-stained passenger's seat, I slept, dreaming of Doug Jones' house, his shiny, blessed Xbox, the fun I had playing an emulated Wonderboy VI, which I hadn't even known existed, and how shocked I'd been at how damned good Ninja Gaiden was. Yeah, Ninja Gaiden. Go ahead and put that on the list. I had a hell of an afternoon with that game, and I'd like to have a hell of a few more. We'd also, as a part of Project FFDog, the Webby-winning online documentary series that has been called "hard-hitting," "off-the-cuff," and "edgy" by the likes of Slashdot, played Final Fantasy XI for twelve hours whilst brandishing death wishes like +2 Broadswords. A combination of these memories of the place I'd escaped -- these memories savage and these memories pleasant, swirled together and sent me to a troubled sleep beneath the sun as it baked into the cockpit of Persona's Toyota. So I slept. And while I slept, Persona's damned meddling little Parappa the Rapper plush came out of the glove compartment, scrounged through my bag, and . . . found my digital camera. He then turned it on and ordered Persona to drive him to the Del Amo Fashion Center Mall, climactic scene of Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" (let's call Tarantino's "Kill Bill Volume Two" film of the year while we're at it, and then not mention it again; well, number two would be "Casshern," and number three would be "Koi no mon" -- the end).
So yeah, Parappa the Rapper hijacked my digital camera and filmed several tens of minutes of inanity in Torrance, California. I'm as scared as you are. I present to you the video files. Please exercise caution in viewing them. This is Project FFDog Sidequest #2: Parappa the Rapper Visits Hyper Game Action (brought to you by Thomas Kemper's Root Beer). Click the pictures for videos.
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Damn. I have too many movies and not enough pictures to represent them. So here's video #6, here's video #7, and and here's the thrilling conclusion.
AND HELL, YOU KNOW WHAT?
While we're on the subject of "Project FFDog Sidequests" and rare beverages, here's Project FFDog Sidequest #1: Doug Jones and Tim Rogers Drink Moxie While Playing Final Fantasy IV (brought to you by Moxie and Eric-Jon Waugh).
Actually, hell. Those videos are really damned big. We'll find a way to fit them into something else. Maybe that "FFDog Perfect Collection" DVD . . . ?
HELL, I HAVE MORE TO SAY HERE!!
There's this aloe-drink. By Nang-Yam. It's sold in Korea only. It tastes like watermelon Jell-O, complete with healthy chunks. It turned my urine a kind of pink-yellow, and my normal urinary tract inflammation (a long-standing condition that dictates I use the bathroom some two or three times an hour) vanished for the week I spent drinking it. It was gorgeous. Here's a picture of the stuff, as seen in an internet cafe in Seoul:
That's a Lotte "Atlas" almond-chocolate bar in the picture. Dig that blue lighting while you're at it. The chocolate bar set me back about thirty American cents. It tasted like seventy-five. God bless it. In Japan the cheapest candy bar is a Snickers the size of a rabbit turd; costs about a buck fifty. Korea is cheap like that. Except for the aloe drink -- one small bottle is roughly the size of two liters of Coke. Which is interesting, because two liters of Coke in Korea is about as much as three hundred and fifty milliliters of spring water in Japan. So I guess you're saving money either way.
That aloe drink, come to think of it, was drunk while playing Counterstrike: Condition Zero with a friend. What hell that was. I used to actually enjoy that game in its earlier incarnations. Now I get shot twenty-six times before I can even buy guns. That's Korea for you, in a sense; and in another sense, that's the first-person shooter. When Chuck Franklin asked me why I was so enthralled by Halo 2, which is "just like any other FPS," I couldn't get my words straight. Well, now I think I have them -- my Korean internet cafe experience with Counterstrike taught me what, exactly, I think of PC games. They're jargon. They're games you either involve yourself in hopelessly until you can kill everyone or just never play. Certainly not for casual play by a guy with an almond chocolate bar and an aloe beverage. My Condition Zero play session ignited the fires of frustration and struck me as wholly stupid. I was not enjoying myself. It is a game that, to some people, is a videogame, and to others is no more than annoying images on a computer screen that could be used to have cybersex with schoolgirls. I was reminded of the notion that parents, more often than not, hate their children's favorite music because they only hear that music through walls, walls that remove treble from music, rendering that music no more than thumping, bass-rich noise. Yet, even if the children sat the parents down and told them to listen to the music with deep concern and a pair of good headphones, would the parents arrive at any other decision than "it's hopeless noise"? Most likely not. Would any self-respecting, with-system-fucking youngster sit his parents down and ask this much of them? Hell no. So we end up with the world as we have it.
Oh, also, I played Doom 3 extensively in a Korean internet cafe in September, on a computer bold and ballsy enough to handle it at pretty much maximum settings, and have this to say: Wow, this game would sure be fun if it was fun.
Yeah, that's a full review.
Alright, on to July. I've been waiting to write this one.
[next: july]
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