Category: Otaku

Crossing Items Off My List

June 5, 2013

There is an origami ‘museum’ not too far from where we are staying. Naturally, since Bernard is an origamist, we visited yesterday.

The museum, which is in the building of a company that makes traditional washi paper, consists of a small gallery, an impressive store, the area where the paper is made and died, and rooms for instruction. It is all very impressive, and the staff were very friendly and helpful.

As we were leaving, a friendly old fellow intercepted us at the lift and told us he would give us a demonstration. This was none other than the chairman, and we were treated to a private demonstration of his skills (and his English!) for the next 20 minutes or so. It was wonderful!

If you’re ever in Japan, this place is worth a look.

The above is a random sketch in one of many sketchbooks in one of many arcades (‘game centers’) in Akihabara, where we spent the rest of the day. I didn’t take a great deal of photos throughout many hours of shopping, eating, UFO Catching and gaming, but I’m quite pleased to say many of the items on my shopping list were found in that several hour period. The rate at which my wallet bled cash was amazing!

Notable pickups included;
– The two DS Wizardry games that were never translated
– Musha Gundam 2
– Vast amounts of monster hunter figurines
– the new Yamashita art book
– certain souvenir items for friends that I was after

The latest and unquestionably greatest of the current crop of UFO figures is a magical girl Kirino from Ore no Imouto. Here’s a picture of an advert for it outside of one of the mega-arcades:

Bernard and I both won one 🙂

The monster hunter cat mascots (‘airou’) are a very big deal here, with vast amount of available merchandise. Twice now KLS has joked (?) about buying one of the big guys seen above!

Game Center highlights included the dozens of classic game posters on display at a Sega arcade, a punching game which nearly broke my hand, and Y200 for what seemed like an hour of darts 🙂

It was another very long and active day, and I fear Bernard may be at the apex of ruination. Even I am in an advanced state of decrepitude, and as I lay here early the next morning writing this the question of how to even rise from the futon is a challenging one!

But I’ll soldier on. As I always say on vacation, I can rest when I get home 😉

A Bridge Too Far

June 3, 2013

Predictably, we couldn’t sleep much our first night, and took advantage of this to plan a trip to the famous Tsujiki fish markets. We left the ryokan around 5:30 am and headed over…

…only to find it closed to tourists until 9 am! So, at about 6:30 am we were loose in a city that wouldn’t wake for about 3 hours 🙂

That was taken at a fox shrine near Tsujiki, as we debated our next move. Eventually we decided to stroll over to the imperial gardens before heading to another attraction around 9. The walking had begun!

Bernard’s camera is stupid-impressive, but also stupid-heavy! Here he is self-portraiting during a break we took after finding the imperial gardens closed! Asakusa here we come!

That’s a look back along Nakamise-dori from within the famous Senso-ji temple. It was about 11 am by now; the day had barely started yet we’d been gallivanting for hours already. Senso-ji was great though, with lots of people and the tourist shops selling everything a man could want…

Our first lunch (Burger King!) over, it was time for Odaiba. While no Alihabara or Nagano, it was here that Bernard would be introduced to the wonder of the Japanese arcade 🙂

This photo was taken while I was still in the late stages of shock after just coming across a Monster Hunter shop in Decks mall. Since I believe in supporting the economy, I made some modest purchases and was awarded with a special bag, Airu (the cat mascot) hat and even a sticker!

That’s a real scale Gundam outside Diver City mall at Odaiba. Note KLS for scale. This was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen!

It was about 2 pm when we found the first of 3 major arcades in Odaiba. Oodles would be spent UFO catching and redemption machining, and a great time was had by all! Among other things Bernard won himself an AKB48 mouse and mousepad set:

I won, from a single Y500 (~$5) credit, three super cute Airu’s from the same machine:

But alas, the wonderful Rilakkuma hand puppets were cursed with a ‘weak claw’ machine and were unwinnable:

We eventually left Odaiba around 6 pm, all in a state of advanced ruination. We’d been going strong for about 13 hours, and my pedometer registered over 40,000 steps. We had bags of loot and dying feet when we got back. Delirious, I even ate a convenience store hot dog for dinner…

…before collapsing – corpselike – onto the bed! What a first day 🙂

Sorin vs Tibalt review

May 8, 2013

The latest MTG duel deck to be released is Sorin vs Tibalt. I purchased it and have played the two decks against each other to see how they match up. Here’s my results…

Sorin’s deck uses the Sorin, Lord of Innistrad card from the Innistrad set, and the theme of the deck seems to be ‘tokens, vampires and lifelink’. As played, it was a fast deck with quite a bit of evasion (fliers, mostly) and some strong removal.

Tibalt’s deck uses his only appearance so far, Tibalt the Fiend-Blooded as the Planeswalker, and the deck utilizes hosted creatures, sacrifice effects and strong but optional direct damage (such as Browbeat.

In the four games I played, Sorin won handily every time. In two of the games, he won 20-0! This is as close to a mismatch as any duel deck I’ve played in the last few years, with Tibalt lacking both the speed and the removal to deal with Sorin’s creatures even if Sorin didn’t have lifelink!

In many of the games, Sorin had 2 or more flying spirit tokens out very quickly and Tibalt had little defense. A card like Lingering Souls could turn the game if drawn early, and often did.

Sometimes Tibalt gave a good fight (notable cards strong in this matchup: Vithian Stinger, Sulfuric Vortex), but usually Sorin managed to cast some evading lifelinker and turn things around very quickly.

As far as a well matched pair of decks therefore, this product gets a thumbs down!

However, as a product I’ll give this one a definite thumbs up. Personally, I owned neither Planeswalker, so it was nice to be able to get them both in one product. Secondly, a few of the other cards in the decks are nifty and I’m glad I now own copies. I’ll give a specific mention here to Phantom General, which had been notably absent from my white soldier token deck!

And of course, from my perspective, I had to get this anyway for the basic land 🙂

Robot Claw