The rain continued today so we hopped on the train to Tokyo Teleport and the Sega Joypolis arcade. For roughly £17.50 you get an all-day pass that allows you to play all of the full-version arcade games from your youth – things like Outrun with full-sized cars and so on – as well as some of the newest games from the company.
Halfpipe Canyon was there the last time I visited Joypolis, but it’s worth a mention since I don’t think I covered it last time. It comprises four 2-person skateboards arranged along a halfpipe. The boards swing on a pendulum arrangement and you can perform a 360 using a large rocker switch beneath your feet. The aim is to start the turn at the centre point of the halfpipe for maximum points.
Toyota Alphard
One of the new rides was ‘Spin Bullet’ which is an indoor roller-coaster cum teacups ride. The track ducks and dives around the inside of the building in a frenzy of tight corners and sudden drops, including one around the three quarter mark where I where there’s a moment of zero-g. Not recommended for people with bad backs or of a nervous disposition!
Also new is Burnout Running – a track and field sim featuring four full-sized treadmills for competitors to sprint on. We watched four girls playing this and decided it was far to energetic for old farts like us.
Partway through the day we took a walk over to Toyota Megaweb where we had a look around the latest models from Toyota’s lineup, including the Toyota Alphard and the Lexus SC430. The staff at MegaWeb are on hand to explain the features of the vehicles for as long as you want them, and you are more than welcome to sit inside to try them on for size.
Ferris Wheel
We also took a 7-minute ride in the eCom – an electric two-seater that was running around the building on a guiding track. Great stuff, and well worth the ¥200 (£1).
On the way back we noticed the huge ferris wheel that dominates the skyline was all lit up, making it even more noticable. We didn’t go on it this time since we really wanted to snap some photos of the surrounding area, but we’ll see about it next week. We returned to Joypolis for a few more games before getting something to eat and heading home.
It was never going to be a case of ‘Rain Stopped Play’ here in Tokyo, since the city doesn’t stop for anything and we pretty much thought the same, but the constant light rain from Typhoon Jangmi cast a shadow over the whole day as we trekked around the streets of Ginza – Tokyo’s leading shopping area.
The architecture around Ginza is mainly towering skyscrapers. You could argue that much the same can be said for most of Tokyo, but here they’re much newer and more modern, with glass-fenced courtyards, subterrainian shopping areas and more. Many major corporations have their own towers and the overall effect can be sterile and futuristic.
Godzilla Statue
Our intention was to hit the Sony building and find the Godzilla statue, but my bearings were off and neither of us thought to check the maps we had for directions so we ended up stumbling around Ginza an hour before anything opened. We passed the 6-story (ish) Toy Park store and made a mental note to visit it later, but promptly forgot how to get back to it. Disaster!
Never mind, the Sony building housed a great collection of current and future products, everything from camcorders to MP3 and Blu-Ray players. Despite being decidedly anti-Sony (I dislike their habit of introducing unnecessary proprietary formats) I could not help being impressed with the quality of some of the latest models and the set pieces.
After an hour of wishing for fatter wallets, we eventually went back out into the rain and made our way North West towards the Godzilla statue. Mighty Godzilla stood tall and proud (all 4ft of him) for our photos and we celebrated our pilgrimage at the nearby Starbucks.
On the way back we stopped off at a Pachinko parlour where K dutifully sacrificed a few hundred Yen to the God of Gamblers, then is was a brief train ride back to Shinagawa and our hotel. Sadly the rain has continued all day, so we’re hoping for better weather tomorrow.
Yesterday’s travelling caught up with us more that we initially though, with the maid waking us up at 11am to clean the room. We hopped out of bed sharpish and started our second day half asleep.
Since it was Sunday we decided to go a few stops along the Yamanote line to Harajuku where we saw all the young and trendy Tokyoites in their funky costumes. A few goths were there along with the ‘Free Hugs’ guys, and we took a few photos before heading into Yoyogi Park.
We posed for a quick photo at the huge Tori gate and headed into the Meiji temple where we saw a young couple getting married and possibly the world’s cutest toddler in a mini Kimono.
Tori Gate
There was a bit of a photo scrum at this point so we went off the peruse the architecture of the shrine, only for K to get us into trouble for sitting on the steps. Can’t take him anywhere!
Now woken up, we returned to Harajuku and walked around Takeshita Street and Omotesando, stopping for a bite to eat and a can of coffee. Eventually we ended up in Shibuya very close to the huge central crossing there – a five-way traffic/pedestrian battle overlooked by giant video screens, almost like something out of Bladerunner.
The futuristic theme was continued in the arcades we found with most of the games being of the networked, multiplayer variety, everything from horse racing to the POD network games mentioned yesterday.
Shibuya Crossing
I had a quick go of Tekken 6 and got my butt kicked in High Definition. It was worth the ¥100 (50p).
Eventually we made our way back to Harajuku and rejoined the enlarged crowd at the bridge where we took more photos of the various cosplayers, including a 6ft man dressed as a woman and a shorter girl dressed as a Mortal Kombat style character. We posed with a couple of them because, hey, why wouldn’t you? K chatted to a Japanese woman from Australia who looked bemused by the proceedings and refused to have her photo taken with the performers, and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
Footsore but thoroughly entertained, we headed back to the hotel pausing at the 7-11 for something to eat, and went in to blog. We put the (HiDef) TV on just in time to catch a bizarro eating competition with people scoffing platefulls of chicken and squid, and later watched all the drama of Felipe Massa pull out of the pits with his fuel line still attached in the Singapore Grand Prix, handing his position to Hamilton. Hurrah!
Once again I’m in Tokyo for two whole weeks of geekiness. This time K as decided to tag along and we’re enjoying the sunshine, gadgets and everything else Japanese.
Arriving at 10:15 after around 14 hours of travelling, our first stop was the hotel where – true to form – I found I had left my laptop charger at home. A quick trip into Akihaara (pic, right) and I found a old guy in a back alley selling all manner of charger-related goodies. We threw a few cables together and were back on track.
We spend a couple of hours wandering around various Anime, Computer and Game stores and found an awesome networked Mecha-combat game in a Sega Arcade building. Each player had their own pod with a wraparound display and played in a 16-player deathmatch.
I took a brief (16-second) video showing the game play. The player (who you can see in the bottom left) sits inside the pod controlling the action with a couple of joysticks and an array of buttons. It looks pretty damned good.
It’s a shame we’ll never see anything like this in the UK, since the investment required will be far too high when you think about how the UKs arcades tend to end up full of chavs and all the machines covered in cigarette burns. By contrast, Akihabara’s arcades are clean and tidy, with staff distributing hand wipes and keeping the machines clean.
The lack of sleep caught up with us so we returned to the hotel where we had a beer and promptly fell asleep. More news tomorrow, possibly.
While looking round for some free entertainment I came across a great arcade racing sim called ‘Track Mania Nations’ over at TrackMania.com – free to download and play.
Imagine, if you will, the classic Stunt Car Racer from the Amiga days, but with massive updated graphics and F1-style cars instead of old bangers. Extend the race types to include acrobatics, speed races and obstacle courses and you’ve got Track Mania. The full version includes different scenes and weather conditions as well as cars, but the free version is worthy of your bandwidth.
The ‘Nations’ bit of the game title refers to the fact that there are millions of people all around the world competing. You can challenge people online or play solo, and can check your Global, Country and Regional rank. I’m currently in the top 15,000 in England, apparently, or maybe it was Britain as a whole. I don’t actually know if that’s any good.
In the solo game there are no other car on the track as such, but you do see the current Medal-winning performance running alongside you (It’s a ghost car so it can’t ram you off the track) as well as your own fastest performance, so you can see where you need to adjust your driving to win. Racing lines are very important but there’s a little bit of luck involved as well, especially on rough ground.
Most of the races are single-lap affairs that only last 30 seconds or so and they increase in difficulty as you progress, though there are a couple that seem out of place in the learning curve. Occasionally you’ll find a track where it seems impossible to meet the Gold Medal time, which brings me to the games only major fault.
If there’s one thing that lets Track Mania down it’s the fact that the Gold Medal times – the runs you have to beat to get gold – are frustratingly difficult. Touch the wall once, even the gentlest of kisses, and your ‘opponent’ will disappear off into the distance.
That said, perseverance pays dividends and can propel you up the Global Rankings 10,000 places at a time for every medal you win.
The graphics are simply stunning and very quick. 1600×1200 on an nVidia 6600 and a 2GHz AMD CPU looks absolutely gorgeous with no slowdown. The only thing missing from the game is crash damage when you inevitably get too excited and slam into a wall, pillar or miss the track completely – though the water effects make up for the latter.
If I can convince others to get it installed and give it a whirl I’ll give the multiplayer a try as well – it can only get better!
Every now and again you come across an idea you wish you’d thought of first. Swoopo Auctions (here) is just such an idea.
An expensive electronic item is put up for ‘Auction’ – it could be a Nintendo Wii, an iMac, whatever – and people bid for it. Every time you bid, the price of the item goes up by 7p and the remaining time is incremented to give other people a chance to outbid you, just like a real world auction. There’s a final end date/time as well, just to stop people bidding forever.
The genius bit is that Swoopo charges you 50p for each bid.
Let’s have a current Swoopo example: At the time of writing there’s an 80GB PS3 console up for grabs, and the current price is £59.15. It started at 7p, which means 844 bids have been placed to get it up to its current price.
844 bids has earned Swoopo £422.50 in bidding fees, and if the current high bidder wins, he’ll have to pay £59.15 on top of however many bids he’s made, so this £299.00 item has sold for a minimum of £481.65 – nice work if you can get it!
Update:
They’re taking the mick now – an auction for £40 cash has brought in £80+ so far. As someone here said: “Well that’s one way of laundering money.”
As part of the preparations for our upcoming trip to Tokyo we obviously need some cash, so I’ve been keeping one eye on the value of ¥200,000 – roughly £1,000 – in the run up to departure.
When I initially started watching it was £980 which wasn’t too different from the last time time I went in 2006, but I checked a week ago and was surprised to find it had stealthily climbed to £1,045, prompting me to buy my currency before it got any worse.
Good job I did, too. K bought his a few days later and paid £20 more. I decided to keep one eye on the cost of ¥200,000 via the Post Office’s currency site and this is what happened:
Graph shown a gradual rise in the cost of the Yen
One week later the cost has risen 6%! So what’s causing this? Obviously the Pound is falling in value at the moment due to the Credit Crunch, but there has to be another reason – is the Japanese economy having a boom time at the moment?
I may update the graph at the end of next week if the cost continues to rise. I’m sure it will, but this rate is pretty unsustainable.
Update:
As of Monday, the price has actually come down a little. ¥200,000 now costs £1,076.54.
Everyone and his dog seems to be banging on about Google Chrome today, just a couple of days after launch, so this post will undoubtedly be lost in the sea of rants and raves on the subject. In the few hours I’ve been using it, I’ve found a few bugs:
The ‘Most Visited Pages’ front page only adds non-local-language pages if you visit the root domain name first. If you visit, for example, http://blah.jp/english/ then it won’t be added.
Disk access is horrendously excessive, bring smaller machines to a halt.
SELECT/OPTION elements with “background-color:transparent;”, or with a background image, appear black.
So I’m slowly pulling out of a parking space at Staples when a silver 4×4 rounds the corner and flashes past without slowing. I pip the driver to sign my annoyance presence, and the car stops, window comes down and I get a foul tirade of abuse from the woman driving.
I got out of my car, walked over to her and she opens the door. I notice there are three kids aged around 10 in the car, and the conversation goes:
Her: What the f-ck are you doing? Piss off!
Me : Hey, hey, calm down.
Her: F-ck off! Who had right of way eh?
Me : I did, I was pulling out bef-
Her: F-ck off! You wanna get some glasses! P-ss off!
My sarcasm chooses that moment to kick in:
Me : Do you kiss your kids with that mouth?
Her: [ STUNNED SILENCE ]
It was one of those rare occasions where one says exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. She drove off with a face like thunder, and not a peep more was heard.
