Seriously. This is what we are getting for only $65 a night (I am surprised at how much smaller it looks in these pictures compared to real life.):
Edit: Forgot to mention that the cabinets are stocked with dishes (along with pots and pans for cooking) and the fridge has drinks at no extra charge!
I have a Notepad document which contains a list of posts to eventually write; "Pets Named After Game Characters" is one of them. I know I'm not the only one out there who has named a pet after a video game character, either. So, what made me decide to write about this topic today? Well, it's because of a little guinea pig that showed up at my front door a few days ago, but we'll get to him in Part IV of "Pets Named After Game Characters".
Let's do this alphabetically, which just so happens to be chronologically as well!:
Big Boss was an easy cat to name due to his time of arrival and the color of his eyes. Belonging to my mom's former boss's stepdaughter (that was tough to write!) who was originally going to abandon him, my mom's boss took him in only to discover that he didn't get along with their other cat. So, she asked my mom if she wanted to take him in. Already having four cats in the house, taking care of Big Boss wasn't an issue, and we soon added a fifth kitty to our loving home. This all took place shortly after E3 2003, where Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater made its 10-minute debut.
A lot of speculation was abound, as is usual with a new Metal Gear reveal, and some of the crazier (and obviously wrong even then) theories were suggesting that Hideo Kojima was introducing time travel to the series and that you would continue to play as Solid Snake. People like myself knew better. We knew that the only real explanation for the game taking place in the 1960's and having a character look nearly identical to Solid Snake is that the game was going to tell the story of Big Boss himself. Being a massive Metal Gear fan, and seeing the cat's eyes matching the exact color of the man himself, I knew what to call him instantly.
Trivia:
I always enjoy people's reactions to his name at animal clinics and such. My mom always likes to point out that I'M the one who named him. He still has one of the coolest names for a cat ever.
I should really see if they make eye patches for cats...
Just kidding. I don't think he would like that very much.
Back from first trip to Akihabara. Got camera batteries and power strip so we can charge our stuff. Gonna be staying at the hotel for a few hours to get everything organized and such.
Quick Notes:
Akihabara is better than I ever expected (I had high expectations)
The batteries I had so much trouble trying to get in America were in abundance at the very first store we went in outside of Akihabara Station.
Hatsune Miku is EVERYWHERE
Bought awesome capsule toys and Famicom (NES) memorabilia that I will have pictures up of soon.
Pokémon Diamond/Pearl Macaroni and Cheese!
Went in massive arcade complex and played some weird Pokémon battle game (have some video footage of it before we were told to turn the camera off)
Most video footage will be of the outside only. I already knew they didn't like you filming indoors, but I didn't know to what extent until today.
Played this arcade game was on a system link with multiple players. I played as a lolita robot and won in the second round! (lost the others though :( I had no idea what I was doing)
Played Tekken 5. As opposed to winning the best 2 out of 3, matches go until one player gets 3 wins total. Machines are also placed back-to-back, as opposed to two players playing on the same screen or side-by-side. This makes it more fun, especially since you can't see your opponent and can focus on the game! It seems like 100 Yen (or whatever it costs) will last until you lose; I kept winning so I got to keep playing.
One entire floor of a store was devoted to Gundam.
Saw some cool Rockman (Mega Man) figurines.
Need to buy a satchel/backpack for capsule toys.
Capsule toys are ADDICTIVE. It's like Shenmue all over again.
Tried to get a Slime from Dragon Quest out of a claw machine. I failed.
Think it is funny that I speak Japanese to Japanese people but they speak English to me. Have had full conversations of each other using the opposite language that we normally speak.
Went to a Pachinko place. Pachinko is crazy! Instead of our boring slot machines with just 7's and cherries and such, they have pictures of Evangelion characters, or Resident Evil (GameCube remake) video footage where it seems like you have a little bit control over what happens on screen (saw a guy shooting a monster by pressing the buttons to stop the slots).
Might want to say, "Hello" next time I answer the phone. I said "Mushi Mushi" and the guy started talking about housekeepers in Japanese. I had to be all like, "Nihongo wa hanassemasen (forgive my Romaji. I am learning Japanese in kanji/hiragana at the moment)
OK, gonna charge stuff and get cameras ready and organize hotel room and transfer videos to external HDD etc.
Go here for pictures/video of the trip.
Oh, and I saw this awesome S.S. uniform with the swastika and everything. And air guns as you may know are super realistic over here.
I am sorry about my grammar/spelling/punctuation; these are called Quick Notes for a reason!
Proper blogs will be put up in August.
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Rest of the Quick Notes will go into my blog, but WILL NOT be posted to the forums. Follow me or go here for updates in the future.
Additional Notes:
I also
- beat the NES version of this game on co-op with my brother.
Originally an arcade game developed and published by Sega in 1987, an NES version of the game was published by Tengen in 1989. Alien Syndrome was a two-player game in which you took control of either Ricky or Mary as they attempted to rescue their captured comrades from the alien threat. Rescuing a certain amount of hostages would open the exit to the boss, which would allow you to proceed to the next level after being defeated. With an isometric viewpoint, the basic gameplay involved shooting various aliens as you tried to find your buddies. A map (showing the location of everyone needing rescue) and better weapons could be found to assist in the mission.
I think it was the box art that always drew me to load up the game more than anything as it stood out from my collection. I found the simplistic tunes and sound effects endearing, and really liked the design of the various bosses. I was so young when I played the game that I don't remember much else, though I have faint memories of playing co-op with my brother.
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Here is a ten minute YouTube video showing the beginning of the game:
Anyone else here play this game? What are your memories of it? I want them to release it on the Virtual Console!
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This is the 1st entry into the Games I've Beaten series.
2nd Entry - Rez HD ----->
Games I've Beaten - The Full List
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If there was a fire, I would do whatever was necessary to save the following:
People
Pets
and Hard Drives.
To someone who plays games, no item is more important than their save device. Disc gets broken? No big deal. Get a new one and it will be like nothing ever happened. Console dies? Again, no big deal. Get it fixed/get a new one and it will be like nothing ever happened. Saves get erased/corrupted? Well, then you're screwed. Barring a miraculous recovery of the files, all you can do is accept the fact you lost all your data and will have to start over on every game. The more you play games, the worse of a fate this is. Thankfully, I have never experienced loss on a large scale, and I hope I never do. I have had a few small instances occur though, some of which changed my game-playing habits forever.
The first time I ever experienced the loss of save files didn't even happen to me. It happened to one of my best friends at the time, James. Back in elementary school, I would occasionally head over to James's house to play games. On one of those days, James discovered that he had lost his Tomb Raider save files due to his third-party PlayStation memory card. It was one of those memory cards that boasted about having larger storage space than the official ones, even though they weren't as reliable.
I have never, ever, used a third-party memory card, and never will.
The second time I ever experienced the loss of save files was the first time it directly happened to me. Apparently, one day when I was out of my house for a while, my brother and Jeremiah (who I was not friends with at the time, but am now) decided to go into my room and play Cruis'n USA on the N64. Now, I have mentioned Cruis'n USA on here before, and about how I recently discovered that it received a lot of hate, but I LOVED that game. Dozens of hours were devoted to that game, often with friends, and I did absolutely everything a person can do in it. I basically 100 percented that game, and was very satisfied with myself. You can imagine how I felt when I discovered that my brother and Jeremiah somehow inexplicably erased all of my data. When I confronted my brother about it, he was very confused and didn't understand how they did it. I am grateful that it happened after I had completed it, as opposed to being in the middle of it, because I felt no desire to play the game again after that.
The lesson I learned from that? Be wary of who is using your stuff. Ever since that day, people have either had to be supervised, or straight up not allowed to play my games or consoles. After the Cruis'n USA incident, we moved. For a little period there, my brother would bring large groups of people in which he barely knew some of them, and I would hide my consoles. Some people would call me an asshole, but you know what? My shit was protected. Whenever my brother would say anything about it, I would say: "Cruis'n USA."
The third time I ever experienced the loss of save files was actually kind of my fault. For a long period, me, my brother, Jeremiah, and Jarvis were all heavily into The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for the Xbox. Now, for anyone that knows anything about Morrowind, you know that game is huuuuuge, and therefore could get pretty long. Super-duper long, even. You might also know that the game had an auto-save feature. I am one of those people that likes to have as few save files as possible. I feel good when my save devices are clean and organized (every couple of weeks I like to scan through my 360's hard drive to see what I can delete). Because of this, I foolishly decided to have the auto-save as my only save, without thinking that next time someone played the game, everything I'd done would be erased. So, next time I loaded up Morrowind and went to load my game, I quickly became confused. Continuously scrolling through every save, wondering how my file could have been lost, I remembered that my brother was the only one who had played it since I last did. "First Cruis'n USA, and now this. My brother needs to be taught a lesson."
One button press away from erasing all of his data, my mind raced. I went through every scenario I could as to how this could have happened, and whether or not I should get my revenge. Eventually, I decided that erasing his saves in retaliation was the wrong thing to do (though I don't remember if this was before or after I realized it was my fault). But honestly, I restarted Morrowind so damn much anyways that losing the save file was something I quickly got over. The lesson I learned from this was to always have a separate save file from the auto-save. With the way today's consoles work and the use of individual profiles though, it isn't something I ever really have to worry about again.
The final time (hopefully) I ever experienced the loss of save files was also my fault. It also marked the last time I ever used codes in a game (there was also another incident that contributed to this, but that is for another post). After completing Grand Theft Auto III and still yearning for something to do, I decided to stack as many insane codes as I could. Codes that would transform normal pedestrians into crazy violent people full of hate. Some might remember that saving with some these codes could corrupt the data on your memory card. That is exactly what I did. Thankfully, all I lost was some Metal Gear Solid 2 stuff (mostly photos I had taken). Either way, it was a lesson learned that will save me worse grief in the future.
Left 4 Dead is one of the greatest zombie games ever made. This isn't due to the awesome and addictive cooperative gameplay, but due to DEAD ZOMBIE BUTT. No Mercy - Chapter 4 is the best level out of the whole game for this simple reason.
It's silly to think that everybody will be fully-dressed when they become infected, so why don't more zombie-themed games feature dead zombie butt? Is it because developers are too scared to feature nudity in their games? If so, that shouldn't be an issue. The following is a scanned image of the ESRB rating for Left 4 Dead:
Playing games since the age of four (or maybe earlier, who knows?!), a 21 year old is likely to have beaten a lot of games. Going through the entire Giant Bomb database, I made a list titled "Games I've Beaten", which consists of exactly what you would think. After finishing, I was surprised by my results. The following is a list of the number of games I have beaten per platform:
Arcade - 4
Game Boy - 3
Game Boy Color - 3
NES - 10
Nintendo 64 - 12
Nintendo DS - 9
Nintendo GameCube - 6
Nintendo Wii - 7
PC - 7
PlayStation - 21
PlayStation 2 - 30
PlayStation 3 - 16
PSP - 5
Sega Dreamcast - 5
Sega Genesis - 18
Sega CD - 2
Xbox - 22
Xbox 360 - 69
This all comes to a total of 249 games. The reason I was surprised by my results? I figured the number would be a lot higher. I was also shocked to see how many Xbox 360 games I've beaten compared to every other platform. Thinking back to my past though, these numbers started to seem less crazy.
Over the years, I have played A LOT of games. If I were to make a list of games that I've played but never necessarily beat, that 249 would turn into a much larger number. When I was younger, I owned several more games at once than what I do now. I would often get new games without first beating the ones I already had, and eventually the number of games amassed to such a large amount that I would never have enough time to play through them all. The new games became old, I would lose interest, and then I would get something newer. This continued until around the time of the Xbox 360.
Another factor that plays into the low amount of games beaten is local multiplayer. When I was younger, all of my best friends were my next door neighbors or people that lived on the same street as me. A game that a single person would play through once or twice and put down became a game that lasted several months amongst a group of friends. Games like Cruis'n USA (which I have discovered recently a lot of people hate), Super Smash Bros. (99 lives for all!), Mario Party, and various Sega Genesis games would be played for several hours a day. Even games without a multiplayer component, like Mega Man Legends or Pokémon Snap would rarely be played alone. Then of course, you had Pokémon Red/Blue, in which everyone had their own Game Boy and would sit outside playing through their own adventure, occasionally trading (and later came the actual trading card game, which also lasted us all a while).
So, I have decided to start a series of posts titled "Games I've Beaten", in which I dedicate a post to each game on my list. Going through the list alphabetically, I will write as much as I can about each game, so depending on the game and how long ago I beat it, the amount I write could be miniscule, or it could be quite long. I will stray from the alphabetical format for every new game I have beaten as well, after there has been enough time since its completion. This is to ensure I have had enough time to actually think about the game and the after effects of hype have worn off.
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I love it! There is nothing more satisfying for myself than sneaking up on an enemy player, taking them out, and escaping to safety without alerting anyone else. It's even better when I successfully take out the person who comes looking for them. This is why Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is one of the best multiplayer experiences I have ever had to date. Released in 2004, Pandora Tomorrow introduced a unique multiplayer mode that has yet to be matched by another series. Titled "Spies Vs. Mercs", the gameplay style was drastically different based on who you were playing as. Playing as a Merc, you were placed into a first-person view with a fully-automated machine gun and were given various pieces of additional equipment like grenades and mines. As a Spy, you played from a third-person perspective with a Taser gun and had equipment like flashbangs and sticky cameras. Each team consisted of only two players, and every player had limited lives. Mercs had three each, and Spies had four. Once you ran out of lives, you were done until the next match.
Playing as a Merc was scary. The first-person view naturally limited what you could see around you, and there was always this constant fear that a spy was about to grab you from behind and break your neck. Thankfully, some of this fear was negated due to the greater firepower you had, but greater firepower doesn't mean shit when in a chokehold.
Playing as a Spy, however, was where the game really shined for me. As a Spy, you always felt in control. Any good stealth player knows the key to being successful is by staying hidden but always knowing where your enemies are. I was always filled with glee as I watched my enemies scurry about trying to locate me, knowing that they will fail and that in a few seconds, they'll be dead. When switching sides though, it was always unnerving knowing that somewhere, anywhere, someone was watching everything I do, just waiting for that opportune moment to strike.
Thankfully, I don't have to wait until February to get my fix. While not strictly stealth games, there are some titles out there that satisfy my need with a friend. Modern Warfare 2 is the most obvious one at the moment. Replicating scenarios from the campaign, there are a few Spec Ops missions in which stealth in the primary focus. Playing these on Veteran with a friend is a ton of fun, and if we mess up, we still have a chance to survive without having to start over. The real fun, though, comes from not getting caught. Situations often play out like this:
"Stop! You see those four guys over there?"
"No, where?"
"Look to your right a little more."
"Ah ok, yeah, I see them."
"Ok, I'll take the two on the left, you take the two on the right, good?"
"Gotcha."
"Ok, on three. One...two...three!"
*All four enemies drop simultaneously. None of the surrounding enemies are alerted.*
"Beautiful."
It's immensely satisfying successfully pulling something like this off. You just feel so goddamn cool.
This can apply to a variety of games, but I am speaking mainly about World of Warcraft as it is the only MMORPG I ever got into.
A discussion I have had on multiple occasions with my friend Jeremiah, I have always been perplexed by his desire to constantly create new characters in World of Warcraft. I understand why those who reach the level cap do so, but he never has. He has never even come close, because instead of continuing with his character that he has barely achieved level 30 with, he abandons him and creates a whole new character to repeat the same repetitive process all over again. For a while, he would get a character to level 20 or 30, and then restart on the same faction. These characters wouldn't differ too greatly from each other, and he ended up going through a lot of the same quests over and over again. Now, World of Warcraft is a fun game and all, one that I sunk over 400 hours into over a few years before quitting months ago, but "kill 10 of random creature" gets repetitive and boring through normal playthrough, so I can't imagine the tediousness of doing the same exact quest multiple times.
I wouldn't care about all this if it didn't directly affect me. I don't remember how many years ago it was exactly (around two or three), but some of my friends and I decided to start World of Warcraft together. It was great when we would all actually play together, but as time passed, the reliability of everyone questing together began to fade, and I slowly started to surpass everyone in level. So what happens when one friend is a higher level than everyone else? That's right! You spend your time repeating all those quests you had already done with your friends who couldn't find time to play before. Of course, this act was purely self-serving, as I merely wanted to get my friends up to my level so I would have an easier time with MY quests. Playing with randoms in any form of gaming can be tricky, and the experience is always more fun and secure when playing with close friends (well, I would hope so). The problem was, my friends would always play just enough so as to only be able to help me with a quest or two before stopping play for a while. Then I would level past them again, and repeat the same quests with them...again. I reached level 60 in early 2009 (maybe 61, don't remember), and playing by myself was just not very fun anymore. If the time spent playing with my friends was done more with us doing new quests in new areas together, as opposed to quests I had already completed in areas I had left long ago, then I probably wouldn't have canceled my subscription. I would probably be level 80 right now!
"Um, what? You are going to continue your other character still, right? Oh good, okay. Oh wait, you're not? YOU DELETED HIM?!"
This occurred multiple times. I understand the need to try out different characters and classes to get a feel for what you want, but how far do you need to level before deciding to delete a character and start a new one over and over, especially after one of your higher level friends (who was under the impression that you were sticking with this character and would be helping them in the future) just spent a bunch of time helping you out with something immensely boring?
When I told him of my quitting World of Warcraft because I got tired of it and had no one to play with, he suggested I create a new character.
"No," I said.
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because I hate creating new characters in games like this. I have already invested over 400 hours into this character, and I am not going to throw that away to start a new character so I can go through the same bullshit again!"
In all likelihood, even if I were to create a new character, he would only stick with me for so long before abandoning his current character for something new.
He still doesn't get why I'm so against it. But, at least he has finally went with another faction in his latest character. It is the first time he has ever played Horde. Now THAT is something I might be able to get into some day. Playing the opposite side in a game is something I can understand, and is something I often do. While the basic quest structure may remain the same, everything else would feel so fresh and new.
Thankfully, his habit doesn't really work with Spec Ops on Modern Warfare 2. Only 31 more stars to go!
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