Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan

Some 6 years ago I was in Japan, marvelling at a world where I definitely didn't belong. When the time came to return to the hotel for the second or third shower of the day (you've never experienced summer until you experience a tropical summer) I'd lie in bed with my jaw slacked in awe, eyes gaping at the television screen. It was a parade of odities: weird gameshows, lots of people getting wet and to this day I wish western TV was more like that.

This one commercial caught my eye.

'I must have this!' I yelled, as I shook my boyfriend at the time by the collars. I don't much remember what happened during the next chunk of the trip right until the moment when we found ourselves in Akihabara mimicing and gesturing to people so they would point us in the direction of this my Holy Grail.

It was the early days of the Nintendo DS and I was yet to see any game that really... reeled me in. But I saw in this the potential for greatness, the addictiveness that would follow. Japan was personified in this game and, so help me God, I wasn't leaving Japan without it!

We finally found it and the game was everything I was hoping for and more. Sure, I had no idea what it was spewing out at me but the beauty of it is, I didn't need to. I knew how to recognise the words "YES" and "NO" so I knew enough to press retry when I lost a level.

And what magnificent levels! I spent around two or three years completely finishing this game and its sequel: Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii (or Osu 2 as I always called it). The sequel is the same game with different songs and that is more than enough for me.

Unfortunately the trend stuck and they were quick to create a version for us Western folk and thus was born Elite Beat Agents. I'm not a big fan of this third installment of the series. It's a bit cheesy. Sure it had more songs, most of them i knew, some of them I wish I never had. But it didn't hold a candle to the previous ones. Playing with disco MIB just doesn't do it for me.

Every now and then you'll see me going back to these two games I worked so hard for; these two games that cost me the screen of two NDSs and about 3 styluseseses. Totally worth it.

Gorgeous Katamari

A few years back one of my friends introduced me to a life-changing game: Katamari Damacy. It's fucking brilliant. Yesterday, while I was surfing around Xbox Marketplace desperately searching for something new to entertain me, I found myself torn between spending €30,00 on either Beautiful Katamari or Army of Two. I already had a history (a good one) with Katamari soooooo...

In case you've never heard of it, Katamari games are all about rolling shit up in a big ball. Granted, it doesn't sound very interesting, especially when you start the size of a golf ball and set about rolling up pennies and candy and the odd small rodent. But pretty soon you start engulfing household pets and babies and, before you know it, you're gobbling up small children and motorcycles. The game really comes to life when you cross the threshold into buildings and blimps.

Yes, you can start off rolling up pens scattered across the bedroom floor and end up amalgamating the Big Wall of China and Mount Rushmore. I think that at the end of a game I once rolled up the entire Milky Way. Which was nothing short of awesome and filled my heart with a sense of achievement few games ever did. All the while you go about your business cheered on by intensely joyful japanese anime-style songs which can be incredibly addictive. Katamari is a very happy-go-lucky game. Unless you fail at making a big enough ball of crap. Then the King gets angry. You won't like him when he's angry. Well, actually you probably will.

The setting of the game, however meaningless it might be, is... novel. You're the son of a narcisistic God that has the power to create and destroy everything and always refers to himself as a plural entity. Possibly because he made everything and can be thus considered to be everything. Or something. His favorite past time is belittling your attempts at creating big enough Katamaris for him to turn into planets. He knows you'll fail and he makes it a point to tell you just how bad you suck. I love him.

Don't be fooled by all the different Katamari games out there. They're always the same. Nothing ever changes in Katamari because nothing ever has to. You have a ball and you have to roll shit up with it until you're big/hot/pretty enough to make the King satisfied. That's it. The controls are a bit counter-intuitive but you get used to them after a bit of failing. Learning to dash is a big step forward towards rolling up the world.

There's only one down-side to Katamari, for me. I get physically ill whenever I play it. The constant rolling about and shifting views make me nauseous and I need a break after a while lest I vomit all over myself.

But it's totally worth it.

The Meaning of "Arcade"

I had very little contact with arcades growing up but, from what little I did, I must say I don't much like the use of the word for these console "Arcade" games. The feel just isn't there.

Let me explain.

According to Wiktionary:

arcade (plural arcades)

1. (architecture) A row of arches.
2. (architecture) A covered passage, usually with shops on both sides.
3. Establishment running coin-operated games.

But, to me, the meaning is simpler because to me there were ever only two arcades in the world, the one near my high school and that other one on the second floor of an inconspicuous building lost in the less walked streets of Tokyo. This will be a long one.



One is the loneliest number

 When I visited Japan a few years back I got to visit the afore mentioned salon(salon as in "a gathering of people for a social or intellectual meeting"). Me and my boyfriend at the time were touring the country with some japanese friends we'd made. Once we got to Tokyo we both immediately started pestering them to take us to an arcade, any arcade. Contrary to popular belief, or maybe just our own, not every japanese teenager is into that kind of thing. So they took us wandering about town for a while, trying to look like they knew where they were going. Eventually they found a gaming arcade running in the top floor of a small comercial building. They herded us inside and our eyes twinkled with excitement as they tried to explain that this wasn't really a good example of an arcade, this was just a small place to extort money from the neighbourhood kids. But we didn't care. To us, it was the holy grail.

They released us into the establishment, dividing their forces so they could have one of them translating (and more importantly, watching out) for each of us gaijins. No matter how awestruck we were, we still tried to keep a low profile because we were the foreign party here, me looking a bit more exotic than most. Pretty soon my boyfriend found a machine to play Guilty Gear on but I wasn't (and still am not) interested in that particular game. So I sat (yes sat; you wouldn't believe what a shock it was to actually sit down when playing something other than Daytona) next to him and, as fate would have it, it was a Soul Calibur 2 thingy. 

The proverbial "Kill you with a stick" move

Oh, I love Soul Calibur. I could have counted the ways but I chose not to. Pretty soon after I started dabbling with it lo and behold, a challenger appeared. I was pretty self-conscious already, being the only girl in there actually playing and not just escorting (in the most innocent sense of the word) and I was the only one of african descent. I gulped down hard but decided to pretend there was actually no one there. This is why japanese arcades were so alien for us. You could actually play a game against someone and not have to look at their face, not have to deal with the fact that they were a real person that you'd never met. So the embarrassement of losing or the cockiness of winning didn't ever have to be shared with this element so alien to your private life.

Wouldn't you know it? I won; Kilik never disappoints. I let out an excited girly giggle because that's what I do and I saw a face looking down at me from above the bench/machine thing. He was clearly amazed but he was japanese enough to not say anything even though he assumed I wouldn't get it if he did.

One other thing I found fascinating about it was a job I had never known existed. There was this young man, his back already hunched by the weight of his lot in life that was going around just emptying ashtrays and wiping down an arcade machine immediately after it was done being used. This was beyond everything I know and soon you'll get why.


My only other term for comparison was MC (wittingly spelled Émecê because that's how you actually say it), an arcade near the school I went to and, strangely, even closer to the maternity hospital where I was born. To a layman, MC was just a small hole in a wall that led straight down to a dark hole in the ground. It's a place that gets all its business from word of mouth but, if I'm not mistaken, its still open for business.

It was a dark place with little lighting and no windows which, in retrospect, isn't surprising because it was underground. At the bottom of the stairs the space opened up to a be a low-ceilinged jobbie with 3 pool tables and 2 table football ones to one side, watched closely by the dubious owner behind his counter where he supplied dubious candy and smokes. To the other side, behind the stairs, sat the dusty arcades with games that weren't upgraded in years. These were scarred by cigarette burns and the buttons had faded after countless years of mashing by grimy fingers. The centre piece of the establishment was, at least for us, the Daytona USA machine. Sporting two pseudo racing car seats and big yet-untarnished screens, it was where we the girls (all two of us) retreated to eat our dubious candy when the boys went to massacre the foosball. It must be noted that our foosball tables are made of sturdy wood, the dummies of solid iron and the rods are covered in an eye-sorish black grease. It's a manly game where boys become men and we would rather stay clear of it.

 

We would pop in a few coins from time to time, always resorting to the same cars and the same track. To this day she still nags me about that one time when she was winning and, at the last minute, I rammed her into the pit stop and came in first.



"Let's go away!"



This was a magic place. The smoke-filled cave to where we retreated when going to class was simply out of the question and we had no joints to smoke. We would lose ourselves there, hours we would never get back but would never regret because magical things happened there. Impossible shots in the pool table where you hadn't enough space to even place the queue and had to sit up on the green and worn cloth; bouncing, murderous balls from the feet of the iron foosball players. One of these magical events involved a hole in the far wall near a derelict pool table.

Me and a friend of mine were chasing a rogue ball and, once we found it and straightened our backs, we noticed a hole in the wall right at eye level. He looked at me and I looked at him. I'm squeamish about strange holes that may contain strange bugs so he went ahead and looked inside. He smiled back at me and placed his hand inside the wall. When it came back out he was holding a pack of cigarettes. It was full. For the longest time we were lost in debate about whether or not to smoke them. We were active smokers, quite professional at it and the prospect of free smokes was tempting. But what if they were spiked with something? Well, I was never one to believe people would waste drugs on random objects they would then deploy into the world without any certaitny where they would end up or sticking around to find out. What would be the point? Someone must've just stashed them there to smoke them later.

So that's the story of how I ended up smoking the most suspicious carton of smokes I ever came across.

And that, my friends, is why I take offense on all these variants of "arcade" games. Where's the japanese man wiping my controller when I'm done using it? Where's the hole in the wall with a pack of cigarettes? There's little arcade in them, except for the fact that you waste money on something not very deep. Which is not to say I don't like these types of games. But that's a story for another day.