Playing this game is like standing on a sinking ship.

“Write anything, solve everything” states the advertising for Scribblenauts, the much hyped puzzle game for Nintendo DS that came out last week.  I’ve been obsessed with the concept of this game since the moment I heard about it.  In Scribblenauts, you’re presented with a puzzle.  In order to solve the puzzle, you need things.  To create things, you simply write down anything you can think of.

That seems simple, right?  Unfortunately, Scribblenauts is–without a doubt–the most frustrating gameplay experience I’ve had in a long time.  The game does an amazing job of recognizing what you’ve written, but so little of it does what you want it to do.

Here’s an example.  There’s a level with a tripwire.  Somehow you need to trip this wire without falling down yourself (or at least I think that’s what you need to do.)  Mannequin?  Crash test dummy?  Caveman?  None of these work.  What does work?  I don’t have a clue; this level is unsolved.

I could say that for a lot of levels; they are unsolved.  One level requires you to get past a tornado.  God?  Wormhole?  Sun?  Tank?  Nope, none of these.  This is a game that requires you to cheat or share solutions, yet doing so makes the game completely unrewarding.

There are also levels where I can’t even figure out what’s going on.  And only a couple of hours in, I find that I don’t even care anymore.

While the designers say that there are “tens of thousands” of words, and Internet research shows the number to be close to 22,000 of them, I find myself only needing a few things:  ladder, gun, axe, jet pack.  I think I can get through 95% of the puzzles I’ve tried so far using just those items.

The most fun that can be had in the game is immediately after turning it on.  You get a little sandbox area where you can just create things and make them interact.  This is a sweet tech demo, let me tell you.  Try a teleporter, and see where it takes you.  This is my favorite thing in the entire game so far.

Scribblenauts is the kind of game you bring out at a party to show people how cool games can be, but it’s not the game you’d ever want to actually play.  Conceptually, it’s an absolute piece of genius that I want to tell the world about.  It’s great that 5th Cell is trying something completely new, and kudos to them for that.  It’s too bad the concept wasn’t applied to a better game.

Wait, I play this how?

Yesterday, Apple gave one of their big deal press conferences where they announce new products and software.  This was known to be an iPod event, and it was promoted using the tagline, “It’s only rock n’ roll, but we like it.”  So what did they spend nearly half of the time promoting?  Games.  Yes, they promoted games for the iPod Touch and the iPhone, bringing up people from Gameloft and Ubisoft to demo upcoming titles.  But here’s something they won’t tell you:  gaming on the iPhone sucks.

The first problem with gaming on the iPhone is that it’s a phone.  This means you can get a phone call or a text message in the middle of a game, and depending on the game, you may lose some progress.  This is a pain in the ass.  This is one place convergence fails.  What’s wrong with a phone in your pocket and a DS in your bag?  Nothing.

Problem two is illustrated by Madden 10, pictured above, which is a much hyped iPhone game because, well, it’s Madden.  It features all 32 teams, pretty decent graphics, some pretty annoying sound effects, and an admittedly cool feature that lets you slow down the action to make split second moves like jukes on offense or jumps on defense.  What it doesn’t come with, however, is a controller.  Have you tried using one of these iPhone virtual d pads?   They make the d pad on the XBox360 look like the d pad on the … well, the PS3.  It’s a horrible experience.  Tapping on the receivers to throw to them?  Impossible to navigate.  This was $8 wasted, because it is absolutely not fun.

Just last week, they announced a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone–now removed from the store for some weird reason, and I told people, “when they come out with Space Taxi and Archon, let me know.”  Someone told me that Archon was already on the iPhone.  Awesome!  I noticed that there was both a regular version and a lite version (why they don’t call these “demos” in the app store, I’ll never know) available.  I downloaded the lite version, and it’s absolute crap.  The game has no idea which piece you’re touching, and if you try to change, you might move the piece by mistake.  The drawings and animations are garbage.

I tried out the Katamari demo for the iPhone, and I felt like I was stuck in the middle of a tech demo gone awry.  I was tilting the phone to roll my Katamari, and tilting it more and more and twisting it around and I just couldn’t get the thing to go where I wanted it to!  This is one of those times I would normally get frustrated and throw my controller.  But I can’t throw this controller: it’s worth $600!  What fun is  a gaming system if I can’t break a controller or two?

There is one bright light in my iPhone gaming history:  Word Ace.  This is a “gambling” game where you play texas hold ‘em, but with letters instead of cards.  You bet each round with your two hidden letters, and after the river, whoever can make the highest scoring word wins!  It  has online play, a friend system, trophies for fun accomplishments (although I received one trophy as a bug because I hadn’t actually done what it said I did), and a nice interface.  This tells me one important thing.  It tells me that the iPhone has a great future as a gambling device.

For gaming?  Not so good.  Do you want a portable gaming system that works great, has a great selection of games, is easy to play, and won’t start ringing in the middle of a difficult level?  Get a Nintendo DS or DSi.  Heck, get a PSP.  You have two pockets for a reason.

“You should just get an R4,” she told me.

I’ve never been secretive about the fact that I download music like crazy. All I do these days is illegal downloading and buying vinyl. There’s hardly any CDs in my present, and even fewer in my future. That said, I’ve always been anti-pirating when it comes to videogames. It’s always seemed like too much work? I’ve always felt dirty about it for some reason? I can’t explain why this is so, but I’ve never pirated a game before.

Until now.

And here’s why.

I got very excited about the release of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. I was a huge fan of the original, so I bought this one without reading any reviews … before I go on, I should just include the email I sent to D3, the publisher of the game, after playing their game for an evening.

Hi,

I’ve never written to a video game publisher before with comments on a game, but I’m so disappointed by the DS version of Puzzle Quest Galactrix, I just had to say something. This game is so chock full of bugs, it’s painful to play. I really enjoyed the first Puzzle Quest game, so I bought this one without waiting for reviews, and at Best Buy where I clearly can’t return it. I feel ripped off.

These are the bugs I encountered when playing it:

1. On the screen you go into after going through a gateway, when you press a new system, the software performs an instant autosave, then brings up a loading screen. In three hours of playing, this screen froze three times. At least it knows to save first.

2. On the actual puzzle screen, five times in the same three hours, I would select two pieces to exchange, and pieces on the opposite side of the playfield would move instead.

3. When I would go to a planet’s menu, and try to click on one of the options, more than half of the time, my click would send me moving toward the corner of the screen, and not actually select my choice off of the menu.

4. The amount of loading, and length of the loading times, is ridiculous. I’m not sure this is a bug, but it seems like somewhere in development, D3 just gave up on trying to get it right.

I’m surely not going to buy any other games from your company without waiting for unanimously good reviews. And the Puzzle Quest brand is now sour to me. Feel free to call me or email me to discuss further.

Thanks for your time,
Gordon Elgart

And here’s the response they sent:

Gordon Elgart:

Thank you for writing to us about the game Puzzle Quest: Galactrix for the Nintendo DS. After reading your email, it seems that you are experiencing many issues with the game. I have a few suggestions that might make playing the game a little more enjoyable for you. First, the issues dealing with the gems on the opposite side of the board moving when you select a gem and your ship moving to a corner of the screen when selecting menu options may be fixed by calibrating your Touch Screen. To calibrate your Touch Screen, turn off the system and remove any game cards game paks that are inserted into the DS, then turn the system back on. After bypassing the Nintendo Health and Safety warning screen, you’ll be taken to the IPL screen. At the bottom of the IPL screen, you’ll see a little Nintendo DS icon at the bottom center of the screen. Touch that icon to go into the Nintendo DS options. In the options menu, touch the orange square on the right side of the screen that has a cross-hair in it. This will take you to the Calibration menu. Follow the instructions on-screen to calibrate your Nintendo DS’s Touch Screen. After testing the game, we’ve found that holding the stylus in the most upright position that you can, and pressing firmly, but not hard enough to do damage to the Touch Screen, was the best way to use the Touch Screen and Stylus to control the game. Also, while in any of the battle boards or mini-games, firmly touch the gem that you would like to move, make sure that it is highlighted, then drag it to where you would like to move it. This will ensure that the gem moves to where you would like it to go. As for the game freezing three times in the span of three hours, this may have been due to the amount of objects on the screen. The DS has a small amount of available memory that can be quickly used up when there are a large amount of objects on the screen. To keep this from happening in the future, I suggest clearing off any enemy ships by either battling them or by using Psi Powers gained by completing the series of “The Lost” mission that start in the Ceti system. Also, if you start to collect side missions and main storyline missions, you’ll see exclamation points, question marks, and crosshairs focusing in on certain systems. The more of these that you have on the screen, the more available memory will be used up. I suggest that once you get a mission, you complete it, to keep the number of these objects off of the system and galaxy maps. I hope this information is helpful. Thanks again for taking the time to write to us.

Sincerely,

Support Services

So I wrote back:

Hi,

I’d like to breakdown your feedback piece by piece.

1. Calibrating the touch screen won’t help. The pieces I touched were highlighted, but then OTHER pieces moved. This is a bug, not a hardware issue.

2. The game freezing cannot be blamed on the hardware either. It’s a software flaw. One that you decided not to bother fixing.

3. This information was not helpful. If the game is so bad I don’t want to play it, playing it differently is not going to help. You sold me a crap game and I can’t return it. It can’t be patched because it’s for the DS.

4. I can’t believe you blamed the user. I’ve been playing console games for near 30 years. I think I know how these things work.

-Gordon

Of course I never heard back from them, and I felt like a fool for having been taken like a sucker for $30. The reviews of this game have been pretty good, but if you look at the Amazon page for the DS version, you’ll see nothing but pure hatred for the experience.

I decided at this point that I was no longer gonna be a sucker. I would do what I do for music: download the game to sample it, and then reward quality with a purchase of some kind. And it turns out it’s remarkably easy to find games to download. I downloaded a bunch of them, then went shopping for a “homebrew” card, and soon I will be sampling DS games instead of buying them.

And if anyone in the quickly dwindling ESA happens to be reading this, and wants to know why people are moving toward piracy, it’s not always about the money. Sometimes it’s about being treated properly as a Customer. An overreaction? Probably. But once the card shows up in the mail, do you think I won’t use it?

Puzzle Quest: This one had me seeing circles for weeks! This is an RPG, but instead of fighting with swords, you fight with Bejeweled. Brilliant! The story is so bad, I was just begging for opportunities to skip past it, but the actual battles were puzzlerific! And the system to get new spells and character upgrades was fantastic. I beat this game, collected all the spells, captured all the monsters, and realized I would never play it again. So to eBay it went. But before then, I had a great time with it.

So if you read that last sentence, it says I had a great time with it before it went on eBay. Puzzle Quest Galactrix is going on eBay before having a great time with it. There’s no great time to be had here.

This game moves along so incredibly slowly. To get from one puzzle to the next takes 2-3 minutes. There’s a load time (a load time on a DS game!), the autosave, the incredibly poor navigation system, and the crap story. This is just miserable.

Then there’s the gameplay itself which is really clunky. There’s a mode where you race against time, and you have to wait for a couple of seconds after your previous move to make your next move. And the puzzle pieces break so slowly, which also counts against your time. If you’re in a battle, and you make a mistake, you lose your turn. At one point, I was trying to move a piece in the middle of my screen, and the game had some sort of bug that always made me choose a piece that was far away from where I was pointing. Finally, I chose a different piece and it moved the right one. Was this thing playtested?

I just hate this game. I hate playing it. I hate the look of it, the feel of it, and the speed of it. I am never playing this thing again.

I hate it; it hates me.

When I played Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for the OXB (Original X-Box — can we see if this acronym catches on?), I was defeated by that game’s awful camera. You’d be running across some wall, or leaping across some gap, and the camera would change angles just enough to have me fall to my death. The good news on Prince of Persia for PS3? You can’t die. The bad news? The camera changes angles just enough to have me nearly fall to my death.

This whole “you can’t die” thing supposedly makes this game easy, and yeah it really does. The combat is lame button mashing, and if you do manage to “die,” the character you’re traveling with will pull you out of death with her magic. What’s the point in that?

And the bits stolen from other games? Hello! Upon defeating a boss, you refertilize fertile lands (or something equally lame) by bringing color and flowers back to the world. The cut scene is basically a less artistic bite of Okami. What’s the point? If I want to do that, I’ll play Okami. It’s a better game.

As for the dialogue, oh goodness gracious, it hurts. If you can handle it, you can see what I mean in this video, part of a series that shows the entire game being played all the way through.

I don’t think this would be the worst game I could play right now, but I definitely don’t intend to finish it. It’s going back in the mail today.

This is always the longest thing I write every year. Comments of “tl;dr” will not be appreciated.

I also do this thing where I don’t choose my favorite album of the year until two years later. Maybe I haven’t heard it yet! I don’t have time to buy pirate every album that comes out during a year. So look for bonus content at the end, where I select my favorite album of 2006. The 2008 albums–11 of them–are listed in alphabetical order by artist.

Bloc Party – Intimacy. Another great album from Bloc Party. The lyrics on this album aren’t as personal or confessional as they were on A Weekend in the City, but whatever. It sounds great and it’s fun to drum along with. In my opinion, this album has some production issues; some of the tracks sound distorted when played on my car stereo. This is obnoxious, and cost the record some points. And yes, this is the actual CD, too.

Death Cab For Cutie – Narrow Stairs. I never buy it when a band says they are trying to work differently than they had worked previously, and that their new album will be a departure. I didn’t buy it here, but it doesn’t matter. There is one standout track that sounds different from their previous work–I Will Possess Your Heart, which is an instant inductee into the Stalker Song Hall of Fame. The rest sounds like good Death Cab For Cutie, which means I like it.

Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid. Here’s the album I listened to most often. I always champion Elbow, and tell people they should love them. I’m sure many people are sick of me talking about them. Well, this album won the Mercury Prize, an award given to the best album by a United Kingdom artist during the award year. Good for them! It’s Elbow’s best record, and the lyrics and vocals are uniformly excellent.

Foals – Antidotes. Last year, I called Battles “like King Crimson, but you can dance to it.” I should have saved that for Foals. I’ve seen this album called math rock, but it’s really just a dance record. There are spots where it delves into ska, with horns playing syncopated rhythms. There are spots where it falls into a Franz Ferdinand style groove, and then there’s some slower airy moments.

Girl Talk – Feed the Animals. The Internet is awash with blog posts about this CD. There’s nothing else I want to add to the debate right now. Let’s just say that this is one of my favorite albums to listen to and leave it at that. Is it fair use? Is it outright theft? I’ll let the lawyers sort it out, and I’ll just keep on dancing.

Helio Sequence – Keep Your Eyes Ahead. Helio Sequence is a band I thought was going to disappear, and I didn’t think I’d miss them. I had their previous album, and with the exception of Harmonica Song, I wasn’t all that fond of it. So when Pandora threw the track “The Captive Mind” at me, I was surprised at how much I liked it. I bought the album, and it turned out the whole thing was great. The singer/guitarist/songwriter dealt with some throat problems, and the incredible drummer had a short stint in Modest Mouse (listen to “The Ocean Breathes Salty”). They’ve come back stronger and better then ever.

Radiohead – In Rainbows. The Internet is also awash with blog posts about this album. I paid the minimum to download it when it came out, and have bought the physical CD as well (in Tokyo, where it came with a bonus CD). I was on the fence about whether or not I liked it until I saw Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl this summer. On both nights, they played the entirety of the record, and by the end of those shows, I was a fan of the album. It’s an unfair advantage for them, I know.

Sons & Daughters – This Gift. This was the early Oscar contender that I nearly forgot about. Then I added it to my “2008 Contenders” playlist, and started running the album over and over again. I saw this band in Austin back in March, and bought this CD before I even left town. I listened to it a bunch in March, and then a bunch again this December. Admittedly, this is the one I had to add to make this list 11 albums long, but I didn’t think it fair to leave it off. I’ve said more about my process than about the album, but I’m out of room. Better listen to it yourself then.

The Ting Tings – We Started Nothing. This album features a couple of hard-to-avoid singles, “Shut Up and Let Me Go” and “That’s Not My Name.” There are people who may find these songs annoying, and they wouldn’t be wrong. If you’re not on the dance floor, these could be annoying songs. Overall, though, this record has a persistent dance groove and singable melodies. It’s not all shouting of inane lyrics. I promise.

TV on the Radio – Dear Science. I haven’t seen many top 10 lists that haven’t included this one. I’m not trying to be all different, so it’s here too. What this record offers that has been missing from TVotR’s previous output is space. It’s just easier to hear the different sounds, which makes it more pleasant to listen to, and also makes it Rock more when it wants to rock, and makes it a lot funkier when it’s trying to be funky. Just everything about this album is outstanding. In 2010, it will be a clear favorite for 2008’s album of the year.

Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend. Internet, awash, blog entries, blah blah blah. Some may feel like this record is a bit too “precious.” I tend to agree, but that’s not such a bad thing here. Precious records are good. If this band hadn’t been hyped to death, I would probably be begging people to listen to it. “Look,” I’d say, “he’s namedropping Peter Gabriel in a song that sounds like it might be a Peter Gabriel song!” OK, so maybe it is a bit too precious. I like it regardless. You will, too.

Here’s the secret text some of you have been waiting to see. As always, if you email gordon@isuckatvideogames.com with your snail mail address, I’ll send you the official Gordon’s Best of 2008 mix CD. This offer valid for the first 15 people to respond. Now, here are my choices in some specialty categories!

The “No apologies” song of the year: Miley Cyrus – See You Again (“See You Again”). I heard this song between sets at NoisePop last year. I asked Joel to use his Verizon song identification phone doohickey on it, but his battery was dead. So I jotted down the lyrics and looked it up when I got home. Miley Cyrus? Really? Hannah Montana? Whatever, this is a great pop song. Admittedly, the lyrics are a little childish. I do wonder, though. Is her best friend really named Leslie?

Live Album: Muse – HAARP. Read below for comments.

Favorite album of the Year For 2006: Muse – Black Holes and Revelations. It’s a bit unfair when a great live act like Muse releases a live album that features my favorite album of 2006. You can see me talk all about that album in my 2006 music review column. (Maybe it’s Googlable?) What’s good about it, however, is that I can use one song on my mix CD to represent both records. One of my dreams is to go to Wembley Stadium to see a Muse show. This live CD (and the accompanying DVD) have shown me that this is not some sort of crazy dream. It would be an amazing show. I particularly like when he yells out “C’mon England!” And of course, this recording features my absolute favorite thing in the world: giant crowds singing along with guitar solos. (See my coverage of Rush in Rio for more on this phenomenon.)

Only movie soundtrack I actually bought, thus my choice for soundtrack of the year: The Dark Knight by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. Every bunch of years, I buy a score album from a movie. It’s incredibly rare. In fact, it’s possible that the last one I bought was Antz. This one, though, is a bit of a dream team of film composers, and the score that came out of it is great to listen to, especially very loudly. My car shakes at parts. I feel like Batman and want to fight crime. I just don’t think the suit would fit me all that well.

Thanks for reading! Comments are encouraged.

As reported previously, I went to a book launch party for a book called Arcade Mania, which is subtitled “The Turbo-Charged World of Japan’s Game Centers.” I’ve finished this book, and then used what I learned inside to go look around the game centers of Tokyo. I’m going to follow the format of the book, and report on my experiences with these games as a gonzo-style review of sorts of the book. As the book is sorted by game type, I’ll be sorting by the exact same format. Inside, we’ll find details on:

1. Crane Games
2. Sticker-Picture Machines
3. Rhythm Games
4. Shooting Games
5. Fighting Games
6. Games of Chance
7. Dedicated Cabinets
8. Retro Games
9. Card-Based Games

Warning: there is a lot of gaming content within. I suggest reading it anyway, even if you’re not interested, because there is also a lot of Japan content within. Now join me as I game in Japan!

Crane Games:

The most popular crane game in Japan is called UFO Catcher. You pay 100-200 yen for a chance to get a prize. And some of the prizes are pretty spectacular. Plenty of character prizes — stuffed animals, figurines, card games, and just about anything you could think of. I had played crane games before, but these are unlike anything you might see in the U.S. There is more often than not only 1 or 2 prizes actually within reach, and they are balanced on a platform in such a way where you need to get it just perfectly. I wanted to try all of the things on this list, so off I went trying to get the Bandai edamame toy. It’s pretty popular here, and runs about 600 yen. If I could get it in less than 6 tries, I come out ahead!

So I tried a few times to grab the package and flip it off of the platform, but I just couldn’t get it right. The package needed to be just a little bit farther off the edge of the platform for me to get the right leverage. At this point, the Japanese girl running the crane games comes over to the machine, opens up the side, and moves two of them within reach. One coin, one edamame toy. Two coins, two edamame toys! Awesome!

Sticker-Picture Machines:

These machines tend to be separated from the pack. These are gigantic contraptions that have professional photo booths with some photoshopping elements, and then print out the pictures on collectible stickers. I wanted to try these, but the places I saw were women only. Men can only go in when accompanied by women. So I didn’t get to try them in the good places. I found a lousy place with a couple of machines, but they were really intimidating. One seemed to have a box you could put a stuffed animal in if you wanted to do sticker pictures of your teddy bear if you wanted to. These things are crazy. Before I go home, I will definitely do some sticker pictures.

Rhythm Games:

Seeing these games in the arcades sitting all lonely in the corner makes me think that these have passed their point of popularity here. There are the classics like Beatmania or DDR; unplayed. There are some more obscure titles like Guitar Freaks and the taiko one the name of which I don’t know; unplayed. It’s sad. These games are currently the biggest thing going in the U.S., and you’ve all played Guitar Hero or Singstar at my apartment. (If you haven’t, why not?) I didn’t play any of these games here. Am I shirking my responsibility?

Shooting Games:

Remember my post a few weeks back about shooting games? (You don’t? Read it again!) The games I’ve played have NOTHING on these titles. Well maybe Ikaruga does. These things are impossible. The section in the book on shooters (called “bullet hell”) is really really good, and explains the games even better than I could, especially since the shooter genre is about 100 times more advanced in Japan than it is in the U.S. It was pretty awesome to watch some of these guys play these games. The screen is about 80% bullets and they deftly fly through the gaps and kill the enemies. I had to try my luck at game whose name I don’t remember — it was pretty complicated sounding. I should have written it down, but darn it all, sometimes I just get caught up in the moment. Did I say moment? I think I lasted all of 20 seconds. Like I was a shooting game virgin or something!

Fighting Games:

The one game I was most looking forward to was Street Fighter IV. I think I mentioned this in an earlier post. I finally did find a stand-alone machine so I could fight against the CPU. I picked Chun Li and beat up on Zangief, getting a perfect on the second round. And then I did it again against Dhalsim. One problem, though: I cannot pull off the super. There are “instructions” on how to do this, but I simply cannot take the necessary joystick and button combinations as written and turn them into motions with my hands and fingers. So even though I have enough power saved up to the Ultra Super Mega Hard Hit Blast Combo, I just get my ass handed to me by Balrog (the one who’s called Vega in the U.S.) as I flail desperately to pull off the combo.

Games of Chance:

My aunt had a pachinko machine in her basement on Long Island. I would play that thing for hours and hours and hours and hours. I loved it. So I was really looking forward to trying pachinko here in Japan. But wow, is pachinko in Tokyo 2008 different from Pachinko on Shelter Rock Road in 1978!

Pachinko and slot parlors are all over the place. And they all advertise the newest games and their release dates. Most of the modern games have a video slot in the center that shows clips from anime. The most popular, seemingly, are the Neon Genesis Evangelion machines. These only have a few pegs and drops, and are taken up mainly by a video slot center showing clips from Eva. Simply looking at gives me a headache. I had to try it, anyway. I put some money in, nothing happened. I pushed some buttons and some balls fell out. Then a card spat out of the machine. Then some other numbers started flipping through and I spun the dial that shoots the ball. I did this a few times, and a few times I got the video slots to spin. I don’t think I hit any winning combinations because nothing else really happened. Then I pushed some more buttons and some more balls came out. And there were some more numbers, and lots of buttons in Japanese, and I pushed some more and some sound effects happened. In the end, I ran out of metal balls. Maybe I had won? The numbers, do they mean something? Was there something I was supposed to do with this card? I looked around at the Japanese men smoking their cigarettes with thousands of metal balls at their feet, and realized that gambling in Tokyo is completely out of my league.

Wait, did I say gambling? Gambling is illegal! Besides, you just trade these balls in for prizes, right? Here’s the cool part. I heard this, and then watched it happen. I followed this guy as he finished playing so I could see for myself. You trade the balls in for a voucher that shows your points. You then trade this in at the counter for some candy. Then you bring the candy to this nondescript counter on the corner, and trade it for money. It all just seems so shady. It’s awesome. Too bad I didn’t get to try this myself; of course, I may have done it wrong and ended up with a $100 box of pocky.

Dedicated Cabinets:

This refers to the type of game that you get inside of and it’s like you’re really there! Think old Pole Position or sit-down Star Wars back in the day. Or that game where you actually got to ride the motorcycle. Anyway, these have gotten a lot more fancy, and if you go to an arcade like Sega Gameworks or whatever they’re calling the one in the Metreon these days, you can see the best of what’s available in the U.S. These have nothing on the Gundam one that is popular here in Japan. For 500 yen, you get inside of a pod that has a screen that takes up your entire field of vision. Then you pilot a Gundam in a little first-person combat game. It’s amazing. I wish I were better at it, but even so, it is incredibly cool. The arcades have sign up sheets for the game so you can reserve a time. I didn’t know how to do this, so I had to wait until I found a small out-of-the-way arcade to try it. Jeepers, it was awesome.

Another type of dedicated cabinet is the light-gun game. I like a good light gun game, but I always die before I think I should. For example, the newest biggest shooting game around these parts is Rambo. Rambo is freakin’ cool. It mixes up scenes from Rambo 3 with video game action! (SPOILER ALERT) The Afghan army comes to save you! You have to shoot the bad guys but not the Afghan army people or you lose points, I think. It’s hard to figure out; all of the instructions are in Japanese. I had a lot of fun with this game, but I died really fast. And it’s 200 yen to play. Goodness. This game needs to come out in the U.S. And be cheaper.

Retro Games:

The suggested arcade for checking out retro games was Shibuya Kaikan, which is a goju arcade. Goju means “50,” because the games here are 50 yen. They are older games, but from walking around here, most of the games were ones I had never seen before. There were a crapload of obscure fighting games and a slightly smaller crapload of crazy-ass shooters. There was not a Super Puzzle Fighter cabinet, at least not that I could see. I had this dream of coming to Japan and kicking everyone’s ass at Puzzle Fighter, but I have yet to see it. Perhaps it will continue to be a dream. Maybe it’s just that any game that gets a following in the U.S. becomes immediately uncool in Japan. I really have no idea.

The retro gaming I’d like to focus on was the crazy shops in Akihabara that sell Nintendo Famicoms and thousands of carts for it. I was seriously considering whether I should buy one of these and some carts and bring them home. What a nerdy thing to do! The machines themselves are pretty cheap, but any game I’d heard of, and could therefore figure out how to play, was not in what I consider a reasonable price range. I wore my Mario shirt to Akihabara — the one with the pipe — and no one pointed at it or said anything. I’m very disappointed by this. Very.

Card-Based Games:

I am so glad that these games aren’t available like this in the U.S. I would be really into them. They combine card collecting and video games. Let me try to explain. Take Magic the Gathering. You buy a starter set and then booster packs to make the best possible hand you can. Now imagine if you had a special play area that was hooked up to giant video screens and the way you picked your cards and moved them around the screen controlled the action. That is what these card-based games are like.

The ones I spotted were some Gundam game (Gundam is huge here), a Square Enix (the Final Fantasy guys) title called Lord of Vermillion, a soccer title which takes up an enormous amount of space and seems to be remarkably popular, and finally, the one that would be the end of me, a baseball one. You buy packs of baseball cards to build the best team and then you make management decisions. The actual swinging of the bat, you don’t do. This is perfect! There was a baseball game a few years back that did this was cards and die-rolling, but this would be amazing! I don’t know if I can do these games justice — the cabinets are phenomenal. I’ll show you one below:

Well, that’s my review of the Japanese Game Centers. Thanks for making it to the end. As a special present for those who have, the first five people to email gordon@isuckatvideogames.com with the subject line “Edamame Me!” with your address if you’re not local (to Oakland, that is) will get an amazing Bandai edamame toy.

Joel gave me a great idea. He said I should write a mailbag column where I answer people’s questions about Japan. This is a great idea. Now I just need some darned questions. Comment them below, please, and I will answer them in a future post.

Here’s some questions I’ve already received:

Gordon from Oakland asks, “How can the streets be so clean when it’s impossible to find a trash can?” That’s a great question, Gordon! I have absolutely no idea. There’s no litter, yet if I have something to throw away, I need to carry it around with me for an hour until I find a place to toss it. That’s the trick, apparently. Japanese people simply cart their trash around with them until they have an opportunity to throw it away.

Gordon from Oakland asks, “How crazy are the vending machines anyway?” Not really that crazy, Gordon, at least not that I’ve seen. There are certainly a lot of them, both for drinks and cigarettes, and the number of brands and varieties of water-based drinks and coffee drinks is staggering. Also, some of the machines have both hot and cold drinks, which is really neat. My favorite thing to buy out of a vending machine is plain old bottled water. Got to keep myself hydrated with all of the walking I’ve been doing.

OK, now let’s get some questions from someone other than Gordon!

Today I went to the Tokyo National Museum, which was a very nice museum, but I was pretty bored pretty quickly. The coolest stuff in there was the Kofun burial sculptures. When I get my camera hooked up to my Mac, I may add a photo if one came out. They keep it awfully dark in the museum, and no flash photography is allowed, natch.

I’m at the Apple Store in Ginza right now, and I am using a Japanese keyboard. What this means is that a lot of the punctuation is in the wrong place, if I type an incorrect key I switch the keyboard to Japanese, and worst of all, the space bar is REALLY tiny. It makes it difficult to type. So that’s going to be the whole post.