Japan Feb 2012 Part 2

Mighty Mighty Bosstones - Like a Shotgun

After waking up we checked out of the hotel we had planned to enjoy the nice day and walk down to Ueno, all of one station away.  It was windy as hell and my Texas body wasn't adapted to such piercing hurricanes.  So we caught the train and waited inside the gates for my SBro to arrive.

 

I'm still stupidly proud of how that image turned out. I should maybe actually watch 48 Hours for the first time in celebration.  The title almost proved true too ho ho!

After having time to check out an international grocery and grab a Morning Shot coffee (not pictured).  He arrived.  The plan from here was to walk 2 stations south to the fabled Akihabara.  Renfrew hadn't been yet and it was best to get it out of the way especially since he had a guide.  Also the experience of me going by myself later in the week would have been much worse (and was!)

But first I needed to clean my pixel glasses.  Then remark how I always wanted to buy a Yokosuka jacket but don't know if I could actually pull it off in either country.  Then again, I'm a guy wearing checkered finger less clothes.

My original plan was to go to an old insert credit staple, Skylark Gusto at Suihirocho, just north of the Keeeeb.  I'd open up the menu complain about how they got rid of the yamamori potato fry and then breath through my teeth and go enjoy a drink bar.  Life had to fuck it up by having the Gusto cease to exist at some point in time.

So instead I fulfilled a long held and now somewhat useless dream of going to a Saizeriya in Akiba.  That's all we wanted for years, the dude that knew each other from a web forum and got together to eat terrible food and browse video games on a Friday night.  We wanted a Saiz.  The world denied us that.  Now that everyone had left we had a Saiz in the keeb.

The current state of Saizeriya.

 The soundtrack for the rest of this entry will be the entirety of Summer Vacation's Condition.  The best punk album since Spraynard S/T.  Spraynard is slightly better, but not by much.

No actually I just didn't have any pictures of the Saiz and found that before I found pictures of a Saiz from my archives.  It was alright.  The iceberg and paramsean cheese salad was still just that (overpriced.)   The pizza was as alright as always with lots of pepper, more paramsean, and Tabasco sauce.  Renfrew had chicken he declared at least edible.  The girl had some porridge.

At 11:20 Akiba was still just barely waking up.  Amazing in a city of 20 million people and most parts of it are only open from 12PM to 8PM.  The grocery store closes at 8pm the Jeans store is 24 hours.  THE GROCERY STORE CLOSES AT 8PM THE JEANS STORE IS 24 HOURS.

First stop in this Akiba adventure was Try Arcade to give the rest of keeb time to open.  I don't have any pictures from Try apparently.  It's a great arcade for some older stuff.  Viper Phase 1 and Shooting Love 20XX are what I distinctly remember.  In 2011 this game had Demon Front a very well animated Metal Slug clone from Taiwan.  This time they had a beat em'up from Taiwan based on Journey to the West.

They also had Gals Panic 2S which is a game about naked girls that doesn't fuck around.  Renfrew got destroyed as all men that dare to play it get destroyed.  I also played some eroge that I absolutely remember nothing about outside of it being absurdly easy and I mostly just watched Renman get absolutely blasted.  Turns out it was his first time to play a Qix-like.  He redeemed himself in Viper Phase 1 and I played...some prerendered vertical shooter by Namco?  Good job me for not taking pictures or paying attention.  Guess I was having too much fun.

I did take a picture of this.  Whatever it is.  I got a game over after dying once told Renfrew to play it and came back with him telling me he got 3 lives.  The lucky bastard.  Strange game!  Should probably look up the rom.

We headed one floor down and faced our fears in head to head competition.  First up. OUTFOXIES.

I had forgotten how great Outfoxies was.  Or that limiting my playing to just MAME in 5 minute bursts years ago never let it sink in.  I was also pretty impressed with Street Fighter:The Movie:The Game.  I liked the feel of it.  Didn't stick in enough for me to pick up a Saturn copy on this trip, but maybe one day.  I'm pretty sure I was on the left for both matches.

Way up there I put a picture of a sign of a shop.  That's where we headed next.  The official game store endorsed by old insert credit dot com and by me now: Friends.  It's also in Suihirocho and not Keeb exactly but it remains my favorite.  This was probably the only time in all the times I've been to it that it wasn't playing the castlevania soundtrack.  Instead they had Japanese talk radio on.  I picked up a random anime fighting game by Konami.  And we both picked up new messhi.

So classy we don't even take off the price tags.  We show you how much are business cards cost.  Let you deal with that information.  Renfrew also picked up, after about half a second a resistance from me, SOTN for the Saturn.  "Oh, No don't."  And then he did.

What followed was a normal run through of the keeb.  We skipped both of the large Softmaps as it was starting to get ultra crowded.  We saw a mysterious Comix Zone for the GBA.  At the same store we both bought way too many junk Sega Saturn games.  He now has the complete Sakura Wars collection.  Good Luck having the time and patience to play through all of them jerk!  I bought Oracle of the Seasons for the girl.  Hopefully she'll like it!  He also got an amazing FILTHY DIRTY Dragon Slayer for the GB.  God I wish I had a picture of that now.

It looked like MAK Japan (home for arcade parts) didn't exist.  Later that week I'd find out they moved across the street.  Super Potato didn't disappoint me with a white dude with his white girlfriend and both of them wearing backpacks (I was going to be angry if we didn't see that.)  I kept thinking there was something I should be looking for their, and still don't know what it was.  I also thought it weird that they didn't have a sign in English telling them to not touch the Mario.  We passed by some gaijin maids advertising what I assume was a gaijin maid cafe.  They stopped advertising everytime we passed and looked directly into my eyes.  I still don't know what that was supposed to mean.

I also still don't know what store is Messe Sanno or if I've ever even been in the sucker.

One last stop before we met back up with the girl for more arcading in a special arcade was a special arcade in Keeb.  Hidden behind Yodobashi camera and across a highway and down an alley with a Sunkus.  I still regret not stopping by again that week.  I also didn't get to stop at Mikado on the other side of town.  In honor of Persona-Sama we stood up at a 4 player cabinet for Quartet.  I expected it to be fucking hard.  It turned out to be extremely easy and generous with our life.  Long after we had felt we had performed a 100 yen worth of action we continue to play and started to feel the pressures of time upon us.  Some of that other stuff in there looked cool as hell.  But we didn't have time.

(As we were leaving Natsuge I snapped this.  Across the street was a Hostess Club.)

We had to meet back up with the girl who had stored my suitcase in Akiba station and gone to Ginza because she hates Akiba (so do I!)  As we started to leave Akiba had started to fill with people and the experience got exponentially worse.  We ran out of that place and got on the train. 

From Toyosu station we walked south.  I again complained how I hadn't gotten used to the horrible wind.  We all doubted we were going the right way.  Then it was there.  Warehouse Shinonome (東雲) (The kanji for that place blows my head apart.) is advertised as an adults arcade.  Each one has a different theme.  I discovered this chain from Game Center CX.  They went to the one in Kawasaki that's themed like Kowloon (!!!) and had Space Harrier and Afterburner and Hang On (when Arino visited it.)  It still looked like Kowloon when I went, but Yu Suzuki's master works were nowhere to be found.  Then a youtube of the Shinonome location made me scream.

The theme of Shinonome is "A casino"  It certainly sounds like one!  It doesn't have hideously disgusting carpet.  Then we went up stairs and rode Space Harrier like the mechanical bull it should be.

It really did destroy every other version of Space Harrier for me.  The only way to play Space Harrier is if you are also on a mechanical bull.  After Burner II was also excellent.  After Space Harrier and the reasonable standards for child safety in 1986, After Burner Climax seemed tame.

There was also cocktail cabinet Final Fight with screw up cutscenes.  It was pretty interesting trying to play Final Fight UPSIDE DOWN.  Street Fighter with punch buttons could have also been called TAKE YOUR LUNCH MONEY JERK given how fast Renfrew lost.  A UFO catcher absolutely refused to give me Jojo and R got a stand that neither of us could identify.  I did win a pretty great gift for a friend and the girl won a little over infinite packaged donuts.

AOU 2012 actually was this same day.  I considered for about 5 seconds going to it.  Then I thought about how I got to play about 3 things the one time I went to it.   One of those things was Street Fighter IV before release against TR but still.  I saw Action Deka then.  A game about white cops fighting stereotypical black gangsters.  I thought there was no way in hell it would get released.

I thought wrong.  We played it.  It's kind of like The Punisher arcade game by Capcom except a whole lot more racist.  I mean really really racist.  You have white guy and slightly effeminate white guy (it was really loud in the casino arcade okay) punching the absolute shit out of early 90s black gangsters.  Then this red eyed coveralls black dude shows up.  At some point you have guns to shoot but then say, "We don't need THESE anymore."  I'm sure somewhere on youtube there's an amazing video of it. Yeah let's go with the demo display version at AOU 2008.

Fuck Yeah Warehouse Shinonome you made all my non-Jojo related dreams come true. I have played Space Harrier in a full arcade set up and it was amazing.

We then ran into a problem that I had left my rental cellphone charger in my suitcase.  We booked it over to Akiba, opened the locker with my suitcase in it and grabbed the charger.  I honestly can't remember if we took the suitcase with us or not.

I had so much fun with Renfrew that I convinced him to stay another day after telling him before we met to go home I had lady time to attend to.  The lady said she didn't mind.  We changed his ticket and headed to good ole Ogikubo for ramen and to arrange for R to sleep somewhere not horrible.  Not just any ramen.  Tomato Ramen.  Also Ogikubo has a pretty amazing Book Off check it out sometime.  The only problem is the grocery store closes at 8pm and the Jeansmate is 24 hours.  THE GROCERY STORE CLOSES AT 8PM AND THE JEANSMATE IS 24 HOURS.

GOD DAMN Tomato Ramen is amazing.  The green vegetable doesn't even have an English word for it.  Only grown in a small part of Japan.  It is the perfect balance of bitter and crisp combined with an amazing tomato broth (not soup).  After wasting time on a far too cold night we got R into the backup internet cafe (the one I had stayed at was full.)  Then on the way to the station I ran back to give him my charger.  The girl and I then jumped on the train for Shinjuku, home to Kabukicho the most famous red light district in Japan and home to the Yakuza and the Yakuza series of video games.

Next time: The Broadway, where we stayed that night, Renfrew's experience with an internet cafe and fantastic mexican food in Tokyo (what?!)

Zen Koan to close.  At the Ogikubo Bookoff we spied the complete Columbo DVD Box.  This is not a common site.  Above that we have every indidivual volume of Columbo on DVD.  It takes only a little bit of reasoning to conclude the same person that sold back every volume of Columbo also sold back the box.  What led them to purchasing the box?  What led them to selling them all off?

to Part 3